Colette of Corbie

Click the link in the title for a brief biography of my dear patron Colette (my religious name being Elizabeth Colette, the former name for Elizabeth of Hungary). I'm afraid nothing I could think of to write in the blog today, the anniversary of Colette's death, to match this wonderful paragraph from the Poor Clare site to which I have linked:

Colette lived in, what some have called, the most hideous selection of time and space in history: the Hundred Year War in France. The English came, robbing, pillaging and taking hostages, needing to be bought off. The French came to drive out the English; they, too, lived off the land. The Strippers of the Wheat: the marauding private war bands came, fighting their own vendettas, torturing, burning, raping; indiscriminately hiring themselves to either side and exacting tribute. The crops failed, the plague came. So many died there were none left to bury the dead. The Church was in fragments; it was the age of the "Babylonian Captivity." There was one Pope in Avignon and one in Italy. Yet the well-nigh atheistic illuminators of the millionaire Duc de Berry's Books of Hours mainly depict rose gardens, hunting dogs and banquets, all under the signs of the Zodiac in a fallacious chivalric bubble.

My passion for the Middle Ages is by no means to be taken as a sign that I would have cared to live then! Yet I particularly love the quote above, because too many people later (particularly Victorians, including the fathers of the Oxford Movement... when they were not to busy disappearing into the romances of chivalry) had a quaint, picturesque image of the period as a time of romance. Though I would agree with Eamon Duffy that devotion was very high at the time, and join the liturgical scholars in shaking their heads at how the liturgy excluded people from communion and such, it is amusing that a time of such tumult is depicted as nearly a storybook period.

Yet there is a part of the 14th century that touches my heart deeply (besides, of course, the writings of the mystics whom I mention on my site.) It was the last age of true 'pluralism' in Catholicism. For all the benefits which, however indirectly, would come in wake of the Reformation, Trent would close the door on debate, inquiry, and the like - the church had been shattered, and all that could keep it from breaking into pieces entirely was canon law. In the 14th century, amongst those with the slightest pretense to orthodoxy, :) everyone agreed that the Eucharist was essential, and was the Body and Blood of Christ - but it was all right to say one had no idea how that was so.

Colette was a strong woman - in an Order where, from the time of Francis and Clare, strength in the women was not only common but often saved the men from excess. (Francis was many wonderful things... stable or strong not being among them. Had he not consulted Clare - and Leo - he well may have cut short the magnificent birth of the Order by retiring to a hermitage.) Mediaeval saints are orthodox indeed, but they happily were of the last time when obedience was not the "be-all and end-all" of religious existence. It is fortunate that they did not invariably defer to bishops... considering the quality of some of the hierarchy (the more in an era where there were at least two, sometimes three, popes).

When I chose Colette for a patron (heavens, was it over a quarter century ago?!), I knew little about her save that she had reformed the Poor Clares. Little did I know, then, that both her religious path and mine would hardly be 'textbook.' Like myself, Colette had an unconventional life. She received approval for the (still strong!) Poor Clare Colettines from a false pope, and, at the time, was the only member of the new congregation.

Do pray me for, dear readers - that I can possess one tenth of Colette's sanctity. (I'm afraid I already have her tenacity and tendency to 'go my own way' as a very enthusiastic lover of Christ... but that gets one into all sorts of messes when one does not have the holiness to match. Nor was the 20th century the best time for religious dedication that could be interpreted, wrongly, as obsession.)