Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset, 2nd Read, Post #1

This is the second read of this great biography of my beloved patron saint and patron saint of this blog.  Indeed it was this book that made me aware of St. Catherine of Siena in the first place.  It was in my first year of this blog that I read Catherine of Siena written by the great Nobel winning author, Sigrid Undset.  That was in 2013, and between March and April of that year I wrote four posts on the book. I called them “Book Excerpts” back then but they are essentially the same type of posts I have been writing on books that you see now.  To my surprise the Catholic Thought Book Club and Goodreads selected Undset’s book for a recent read and I happily participated.  In this and several following posts I will post my thoughts and comments from the second read.  I don’t know if I’ve had a book read twice while I’ve been blogging.  I think this is the first.  I don’t know if I’m repeating myself, contradicting myself, or adding new observations that reflect a more devout person from seven years ago.  Someday I may compare. But I have no intention now.  I want this to be fresh, as if I had not written on my St. Catherine before.  First let me start with an introduction to the saint.

Introduction to St. Catherine of Siena

Bishop Baron in the first group of his Pivotal Players series had only six men and women who he considered important enough to be considered pivotal to Catholicism, and included in those six was St. Catherine of Siena, the only woman I may add.  Why did he include St. Catherine with Saints Thomas Aquinas and St. Frances of Assisi?  Well, you probably have to watch his video of her life and teachings to hear his answer, but I think by reading this book you will come to a similar conclusion: St. Catherine of Siena incorporates into her being every element of sainthood possible.  She lived a life of uncompromising holiness.  You may be surprised to learn she was not a consecrated religious, but a Third Order Dominican.  Prayer was the foundation of her life, which then led to an active ministry of taking care of the sick and the poor.  She was a mystic who had who supernatural experiences on an almost daily basis but was involved in the issues and politics of her day.  Though uneducated, she learned Catholic theology so well she was correcting theologians, and she went on to write—at some point she learned to read and write either mystically or through perseverance—one of the great Catholic theological classics, her Dialogue.  I marvel at her writings—mostly her letters—for her intense prose and wonderful imagery.  She was a natural poet.  She was a little woman from a non-aristocratic family who became so influential she was offering advice to kings and queens, and her greatest accomplishment was in persuading Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome after almost a century in Avignon. 

I once put together for my Lay Dominican chapter an outline of her life.  I’ll share it with you here.  I broke it down to four parts: her biography, her mysticism, her ministry, and her writings and theology.  And then for good measure I ended it with a number of her quotes.  Perhaps this will be useful as you read her biography.

 

1)      Biography

a)     Born March 25, 1347 with a twin sister (Giovanna) as the 23^rd and 24^th children of Jacopo di Benincasa and Lapa di Puccio Piagenti.

b)      She has a vision of Christ at the age of six and at seven vows to virginity. 

c)      At the age of fifteen she cuts off her hair to prevent being married.

d)     At the age of sixteen she joins the Dominican Sisters of Penance, otherwise known as the Mantellate. 

e)      From the age of seventeen to twenty she is confined to a small room, ostensibly as punishment for not willing to marry.  This is her “cell” in which she performed many performed many austerities and penances.  This is when she started her extreme fasting.

f)       Throughout her life she went around performing many acts of mercy but especially from the age of twenty, when she symbolically comes out of her cell, through age twenty-eight when the most recent plague ends.  It is the activities in this period that led her to be the patron saint of nurses.

g)      At the age of 29 at the behest of the Florentines she travels to the Pope in Avignon to resolve a dispute between the Papacy and Florence.  There she urges the Pope to return the Papacy back to Rome.

h)      Her fasting led her not keep any food down; she lived for a number of years entirely on the Eucharist. 

i)        At the age of 33 dies in Rome on April 29, 1380.  She is buried in Rome (Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva) except for her head and thumb which were sent to Siena and reside at the Basilica of San Domenico.

j)        She was canonized in 1461 and made a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

 

2)      Mysticism

a)      Vision of Christ in papal garb at the while walking in Siena (age 6).

b)      Mystical marriage with Christ (age 20?).

c)      Vision and conversation with Christ who forces her to come out of her cell (age 20).

d)     Mystical exchange of hearts with Christ (age 23).

e)      Mystical death (age 23).

f)       Receives the Invisible Stigmata (age 28).

g)      Soul separation from her body (age 32).

h)      Whenever at Mass the experience would be so intense that she would faint and go into a trance.

i)        Whenever in that trance state, she would babble off her conversations with Christ.  Her followers would jot down whatever they could gather from her mumblings.  It is in this state that we get her prayers and her theological book called The Dialogue.

 

3)      Ministry

a)      Corporal works of mercy as part of the Montellate, especially taking care of the sick and dying. 

b)      Tirelessly helped in care of those inflamed with the Black Death plague of the mid fourteenth century.

c)      She attracted a band of followers which she called her spiritual family who went around and helped and fulfilled her acts of mercy.  The group included religious and secular, poor and rich, peasantry and nobility.  It was through her personality, gregarious and upbeat, that so many people listened and followed her.

d)     Through her letters and preaching, she led many people to return and enrich their faith.

e)      She intervened to resolve disputes between various Italian City States, including the Papal State.

f)       She was instrumental in convincing Pope Gregory XI.  She even had the chutzpa to tell the Pope to “be a man” when he was wavering in fear.

g)      She tried to resolve The Great Schism that broke out after Pope Gregory XI’s death, where ultimately three different Popes claimed the papal title.  She was unsuccessful and perhaps contributed to her loss of strength and subsequent death.

 

4)      Writings and Theology

a)      It should be noted that she was uneducated and either through miracle or through self-teaching, learned to read and write.  I don’t know for sure if she physically wrote down things herself.  From what we know she had scribes that wrote her words down.

b)      She wrote elaborate prayers of which 26 survive, many of which seem like poems.

c)      She wrote hundreds of letters to all strata of people, the Pope, religious, secular, soldiers, rulers, and aristocracy, both men and women, either imploring them to do some good action or preaching some theological point.  380 letters survive.

d)     She dictated The Dialogue, a series of conversations she had in a trance with God the Father which consolidated her theological ideas.  Among these ideas is the notion of the Christ Bridge—Christ crucified as a bridge between earth and heaven.

e)      Her writing is filled with intense imagery, almost like that of a poet.

Famous Quotes:

"You know...that to join two things together there must be nothing between them or there cannot be a perfect fusion. Now realize that this is how God wants our soul to be, without any selfish love of ourselves or of others in between, just as God loves us without anything in between."  Letter T164

"The human heart is always drawn by love." Dialogue 26

"In your nature, eternal Godhead, I shall come to know my nature. And what is my nature, boundless Love? It is fire, because you are nothing but a fire of love. And you have given humankind a share in this nature for by the fire of love you created us." Prayer 12

"It is the nature of love to love as much as we feel we are loved and to love whatever the one we love loves." Letter T299

You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea. The more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you." Dialogue 167.

"You are a fire always burning but never consuming; you are a fire consuming in your heat all the soul's selfish love; you are a fire lifting all chill and giving light." Dialogue 167.

"This [painful thing] happens to me with the permission of God, according to His providence, as in all things that befall me, all tribulation that He sends me He wills only one single thing: my sanctification." Spiritual Document (William of Flete's account of a meeting with St. Catherine at which she briefly summarized her doctrine).

"O God eternal, Oh boundless Love! Your creatures have been wholly kneaded into you and you into us--through creation, through the will's strength, through the fire with which you created us, and through the natural life you gave us."  Prayer 14

"Love follows knowledge." Dialogue 1

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To get a feel for her writing, let me give you a sample, this from one of her letters.  It’s in my personal notes and unfortunately I didn’t write down which letter this came from.  this little passage outlines one of her most profound theological ideas, Christ crucified as a ladder to holiness, a ladder to God.  She would go on to develop this further in her great work, The Dialogue.

 

And if you ask, “What is the way?” I will tell you it is the way Christ chose, the way of disgrace, suffering, torment, and scourging.  “And how?”  Through genuine humility and blazing charity, an indescribable love by which we renounce all worldly riches and ambition.  And from humility we progress to obedience, as I have said.  Upon such obedience follows peace, since obedience frees us from all suffering and gives us every joy—for the selfish will, the source of suffering, has been done away with.

 

To make it possible to climb to this perfection, Christ actually made for us a staircase of his body.

 

If you look at his feet, you see that they are nailed fast to the cross to form the first stair.  This is because we have first to rid ourselves of all selfish will.  For just as the feet carry the body, desire carries the soul.  Reflect that we can never have any virtue at all if we don’t climb this first stair.  Once you have climbed it, you arrive at deep and genuine humility.

 

Climb the next stair without delay and you come to the open side of God’s Son.  There you find the fiery abyss of divine charity.  At this second stair, his open side, you find a storehouse filled with fragrant spices.  There you find the God-Man.  There your soul is so sated and drunk that you lose all self-consciousness, just like a drunkard intoxicated with wine; you see nothing but his blood, shed with such blazing love. 

 

Then, aflame with desire, you get up and climb to the next stair, his mouth.  There you find rest in quiet calm; there you taste the peace of obedience.  A person who is really completely drunk, good and full, falls asleep, and in that sleep feels neither pleasure nor pain.  So too the spouse of Christ, sated with love, falls asleep in the peace of her Bridegroom.  Her feelings too are asleep so that, even if all sorts of troubles befall her, they don’t disturb her at all.  If she is materially well off she feels no disproportionate pleasure, because she has already stripped herself of all that is at the first stair.  This, then, is where she finds herself conformed with Christ crucified, united with him.

 

Now mind you, this is a woman with no formal education.  Notice how vivid the imagery and how the imagery develops into abstract ideas.  So much there in just a handful of words.