"Not for Time but for Eternity": Family, Friendship and Fidelity in the Poor Clare Monastery of Reformation Nürnberg

255 Franciscan Studies 64 (2006) “Not for Time but for Eternity”: FAMILY, FRIENDSHIP AND FIDELITY IN THE POOR CLARE MONASTERY OF REFORMATION NÜRNBERG Introduction Many have made the historian’s journey to the monastery of St. Clare in sixteenth century Nürnberg with great frequency during the last forty years. Most of this journey centered on an encounter with Caritas Pirckheimer who served as Abbess of St. Clare from 1503-1532. Caritas’s significance came both from her family background and from the many writings attributed to her that have provided the main body of primary source material concerning the experience of the Nürnberg Clares during the difficult years of 1524-1525. The presumption of Caritas’s authorship of this material was unquestioned until recently when Ulrike Strasser argued for the expansion of the authorship of the primary sources, especially the collection of memoirs entitled the Denkwürdigkeiten. Strasser maintains that the collection was a community effort and not just the singular work of Caritas.1 Joanne Grafe numbers the authors as five of the sisters at St. Clare.2 Strasser’s and Grafe’s arguments expand the possibilities of a broader insight into the whole community of Clares and one not restricted to the singular vision of the Abbess. The purpose of this essay is to pursue that broader insight into the life of the monastery by asking questions about the impact of family ties and those of friendship. It is also the purpose of the essay to try and 1 Ulrike Strasser, “Brides of Christ, Daughters of Men: Nuremberg Poor Clares in Defense of Their Identity (1524-1529),” Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History (Winter), 1995. 2 Joanne King Grafe, Caritas Pirckheimer: Sixteenth Century Chronicler (New York: Fordham University Ph.D. Dissertation, 1997). 256 FRANK P. LANE understand how the spiritual insights of the sisters provided them the means to incorporate their relationships with the outside world, themselves and God into a powerful commitment to the evangelical life despite tremendous pressure to adapt to the religious changes that were taking place in Nürnberg in the mid-1520’s. There were early stirrings of approaching difficulties but the storm broke upon St. Clare in 1525 when the City Council formally accepted the reform and mandated the city’s religious institutions to conform or be dissolved. How they sustained their compelling grasp on a vision of eternity throughout the challenges they experienced in the religious turmoil that confronted them is an important question for the historian and must be creatively and responsibly pursued. The question involves an historical investigation of profoundly human experiences which left locked in a sort of “still life” in an isolated time and place has little enduring value beyond, perhaps, a peculiar type of antiquarian curiosity. In an article on the historical work of Hugo Rahner, Andreas Batlogg observed “just as theology cannot stand alone, it follows that history remains dead if it is only factually known and its theological implications unacknowledged.”3 This insight is especially important for those Catholic scholars who have accepted the notion of the essential presence of Tradition in the unfolding of revelation. Tradition affirms human experience as an inner element of revelation, for what else is Tradition but the human reception of revelation within the communal life experience of the Church? As such, history as the opening up of human experience, becomes a part of revelation and a living hermeneutic for theological reflection. In a sense, each event and person recovered from written, oral or archeological sources is presented as a painting or image that reveals some deeper underlying living reality the historian seeks to discover.4 Behind the silent portraits of people and places, the historian as artist becomes the historian as theologian 3 Andreas Batlogg, SJ, “Hugo Rahner als Mensch und Theologe,” in Korrespondenzblatt des Canisianums, Heft 1, Jahrgang 134 (Innsbruck: Collegium Canisianum, 2000-2001), 7. 4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von Letzten Haltungen, Band I (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1998), 79-90. Von Balthasar discusses Herder’s exploration of the relationship between language and thought. He continued with Herder’s explanation of the role...