For Clara

It is an unbending law of the universe—as necessary as gravity, and as obdurate as diamond—that, the more real a thing becomes, the more it reflects a light not its own. Call it the Law of the Mirror. A mirror works to the effect that it captures light; a broken, clouded mirror produces a poor reflection. Thus the paradox: the more perfect the mirror, the better it signifies that which is not itself. It must become fully itself to reflect what is other.

This is true for all creatures.

The Law of the Mirror is not exactly self-evident. Most of us—bird, flower, and human being alike—don’t mimic faces, but refract light. Like the moon, the substance we capture and pass onto others is not the image of the reflected, but its radiance. Although, it is perhaps no accident that the natural substances which do reflect images are of inestimable worth, like water and gemstones. Water is precious because it is necessary, while jewels are because of their rarity. In either case, these most cherished of substances share the capacity to reflect their admirers. The rest of us, however, aspire not to mimicry, but refulgence. We have been burdened with opacity, but that does not mean we are relieved of the duty to shine. It simply means that reflection is, as the Germans say, both Gabe und Aufgabe, gift and task, a law inscribed within our tendons and a vocation to which we are summoned. This brings me to St. Clare of Assisi.

I’ve often thought that clara is one of the most beautiful words in the Latin tongue. It can mean bright, distinct, clear, illustrious, or radiant. English has a seemingly unending catalogue of words to describe what light does: it dazzles, gleams, shines, illuminates, glows, sparkles, flashes, lusters, shimmers, twinkles, and, my personal favorite, coruscates. Latin doesn’t have quite so many words for the task, so clara or clarificare encompasses a lot of these. St. Clare of Assisi was so named because of a promise made to her mother while in the pains of labor. While praying before a crucifix, Hortulana (which means “garden-like”) heard a voice say: “Do not be afraid, woman, for you will safely give birth to a light that will shine more clearly than light itself.”¹ Prophecy became a name, and that name became reality. For “the little Clare had hardly been brought into the light before she began to shine.”²

(Our Lord seems to enjoy making promises in a garden: the Messiah was first pledged in Eden, and the church in Gethsemane. Did Hortulana know the company she kept?)

Like her spiritual father, St. Francis, Clare wrote little. Well, little that has been preserved. Almost all that has survived are four letters written to St. Agnes of Prague. Agnes was the niece of King Andrew II of Hungary, which means that St. Elizabeth of Hungary was her first cousin. Agnes and Elizabeth were both princesses who—because of the Franciscan witness—preferred a life of poverty and love to the wealth which was their birthright. The Franciscans and Poor Clares wanted nothing except conformity to our poor, crucified Savior. And in clinging to his poverty, their love shook kingdoms. Agnes and Elizabeth are evidence of that.

The traces of St. Clare on history are therefore more felt than verified, like an earthquake known by its tremors. Nevertheless, we have a few such traces, and the little we do have is worth attention. In her fourth letter to St. Agnes, Clare explains the joys of those wedded to Christ:

Happy, indeed, is the one permitted to share in this sacred banquet and be joined with every heart’s feeling to him whose beauty the heavenly hosts unceasingly admire, whose affection moves, whose contemplation invigorates, whose generosity fills, whose sweetness replenishes, whose remembrance brings light, whose fragrance revives the dead, and whose glorious vision will bless the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, because the vision of him is the splendor of everlasting glory, the radiance of everlasting light, and a mirror without tarnish.³

The Bridegroom’s beauty elicits wonder, his affection moves, his image enlivens, his tenderness vivifies, whose very sight wakes the dead and makes one blessed. In Christ, we behold the face of him who gives meaning and content to all that we mean by “life.” Why? Because, Clare suggests, he is a “mirror without tarnish.” She continues:

Look into this mirror every day, O queen, spouse of Jesus Christ, and continually examine your face in it, so that in this way you may adorn yourself completely, inwardly and outwardly, clothed and covered in multicolored apparel, adorned in the same manner with flowers and garments made of all the virtues as is proper, dearest daughter and spouse of the Most High King. In this mirror shine blessed poverty, holy humility, and charity beyond words, as you will be able, with God’s grace, to contemplate throughout the entire mirror.⁴

Jesus is a spotless mirror, perfectly reflecting the light he receives. He tells us as much in the gospels: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). God from God, light from light, Christ is real enough to perfectly image him whose face he reflects. But he is, just as really, human. This means he shows us our face too, or rather, our face as it is supposed to be. This is how Clare can instruct Agnes to “examine your face in [this mirror],” the same mirror that shows “blessed poverty, holy humility, and charity beyond words.” When we behold the face of Christ, we see what it would mean to be most truly ourselves.

Certain theologians have observed that a thing becomes more real as it becomes more individuated. This is why the concept of the “person” is so central to Christian theology. To use an example, shadows aren’t exactly identical, but telling the difference between shadows is much harder than differentiating between the persons who cast them. The more real object is the more particular and singular one. But the Law of the Mirror allows us to go further. In becoming more oneself, more perfectly, particularly, and individually what one is, a person grows in her capacity to reflect. This means that singularity and universality grow in proportion to each other. Jesus can reflect all humanity because he is the realest, most singular person to have ever lived. He is just as really God and can thus reflect the Father, too. He is the realest of beings, and therefore the most capacious of all mirrors. Whoever looks upon his face finds their own, but perfected, luminous, purged of the shadows which cloud their existence. In other words, Jesus is more like our enemies in their goodness and virtues than we usually want to admit, more like St. Clare than even she, and more like yourself than you can possibly know. Although one day you will.

I should add that seeing one’s reflection can be frightening, or at least discomforting; what we want to see and what we actually do see are often quite distinct. St. Clare knew this as well as anyone. Her final reference to Christ the mirror makes this point:

That mirror suspended upon the wood of the cross urged those passing by saying: ‘O all you who pass by, look and see if there is any suffering like my suffering!’ In response, let us with one voice and in one spirit answer him who cries and laments: ‘I will remember this over and over, and my soul will sink within me!’ Therefore, O Queen of the heavenly King, when you see this, you must burn ever more strongly with charity’s fire.⁵

When we look at Christ crucified, bloodied, wasted by love for a people who hated his mercies, does our reflection look—at all—like his? To see our face in that of Mary’s Son is a frightful, terrible thing. It shows the distance between what we are and ought be. It also implies that bridging the gap will require something like a death, if not rejection and sorrow. After all, is this not what it would take to become mirrors of the crucified? If we are not merely to look at, but to reflect the form of his life, could anything less than sheer prodigality, an almost reckless self-gift, suffice?

Here more than anywhere, the witness of St. Clare—of claritas—is a precious jewel, a pledge that death is not the final word. Recall that mirrors require light to function; the most perfect mirror is useless in the dark. This means that reflecting the image of sorrow and poverty is itself the work not of darkness, but of radiance. Becoming mirrors of the crucified is therefore a work of dazzling clarity, a coruscant gem disclosing the refulgence of love, suffused as it is with a fire feared by the darkness itself. In other words, only that which is poor can be clara. Darkness is poverty’s poorer mimic.

Through Clare, the Law of the Mirror became the heartbeat of the Franciscan genius. The Order’s most illustrious theologian and minister general, St. Bonaventure, uses the image in his own thought to great effect. What’s more, he seems to have connected it particularly to St. Clare. In a letter to the Poor Clares of Assisi, he writes:

I now wish through this letter to offer every encouragement to this devotion of yours, so that you might follow earnestly the virtuous footprints of your holy Mother, who was instructed by the Holy Spirit through that little poor man, St. Francis. May you never wish to have anything under heaven except what your Mother taught, namely Jesus Christ, and him crucified. Following her example, dear daughters, hasten after the fragrance of his blood. Boldly take hold of the mirror of poverty...enkindled by the fire of divine love, give your heart totally to the one who on the cross offered himself to the Father for us. For insofar as you are clothed in the light of your Mother’s example, on fire with those perpetual flames, redolent of virtue’s scent, you will become the aroma of Christ...for he is the reflection of eternal light, the flawless mirror of the majesty of God, and the image of his goodness.⁶

Just as Christ is the mirror of the Father, and Clare a mirror of Christ, Bonaventure exhorts the sisters to be mirrors of Clare, and to do so by gazing upon the mirror of poverty. It is unlikely that Bonaventure ever read Clare’s letters to Agnes, so how he knew to associate the imagery with her is a tale for another time.⁷ But through whatever pathways the Law of the Mirror reached the Seraphic Doctor, it was foundational to his vision.

The image of the mirror most famously appears in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “The Mind’s Journey into God.” There, he guides the reader on a pilgrimage toward the crucified Christ. There are three stages, each divided into two steps: contemplation in and through creatures beneath the soul; contemplation in and through the soul itself; contemplation in and through realities which are above the soul. Notice the repeated prepositions “in and through.” Bonaventure says that we can contemplate God either “through a mirror or in a mirror,” by which he means that creatures can either point us toward God (and away from themselves), or we can see the face of God inscribed within their very being.⁸ He also says that one way is more sublime than the other. Can you guess which is which?

I imagine most of us naturally assume that contemplating God “through” creatures is better than doing so “in” them. It’s better, we might reason, to marvel at the Beloved himself rather than tarry with lesser suitors. But Bonaventure doesn’t say that. He says that contemplating “in” is higher than “through,” and that because the love of God is perfected in us when all things become a reflection of his face.⁹ Our love is weaker, not stronger, if we must turn from creation to adore her Creator. In his wonderful book on St. Francis, G.K. Chesterton captures the idea:

The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady.¹⁰

Opacity—not transparency—is the dignity of the creature. It is true of course that we were made to glorify Another, but we do so as mirrors, not windows. No mirror worth its salt can be looked through. Like the burning bush, if ever we blaze, then it is as those unconsumed by the Eternal Flame.

All this is just another way of insisting that creation is real and can therefore be called things like true, good, and beautiful. Moreover, it is to insist that we praise and glorify the Lord best by preserving this very point. No artist gets jealous over the praises bestowed upon their art. Then again, it would be equally odd to praise the art as though it painted itself, but this is what we mean by the word “idolatry,” and we are often guilty of it. To see creatures as real, yet reflective all the same – this is the balance of praise, the kind we see in the canticles of St. Francis and the poetry of Hopkins.¹¹

With this in mind, it seems rather fitting (conveniens, even) that we owe the theology of the immaculate conception to Blessed Duns Scotus. Is there any Catholic doctrine more thoroughly Franciscan than the communion of saints, any greater testament to the Law of the Mirror than she whose face is unmistakable for its intimacy with that of Christ?

This is the legacy of St. Clare, the recurring witness to her claritas: she teaches that the human person was created to shine with the light of the Morning Star, and in so doing become most fully itself. By inviting his disciples daily to take up the cross (Lk. 9:23), and to see his face inscribed in those of the poor (Matt.25:31-46), Christ invites his members into the radiance whence he dwelled all eternity. Remember that our Lord asked his Father not that his church would be given misery, but glory (John 17:22-24). Sadness would come anyway; Christ need not have asked his Father for that. But to dazzle from within the darkness—that is the gift given the church. Most objects lose their form when trampled: by being broken, they are impoverished of being. But the Law of the Mirror demands this not be absolute. When our brokenness mirrors that of Christ, when poverty and hiddenness are caste after his mold, it is then, and not before, that we are given authentic form, beauty, a luster beyond compare. As St. Augustine tells us: “For your sake, Christ became deformed yet remains beautiful…We are formed by his deformity. His deformity was our beauty.”¹² His shadow is our brilliance, his obscurity our clarity. This is what it means to be clara.

This is the Law of the Mirror.

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