Catherine of Siena has been proclaimed a Doctor of the
Church, which is an honor based on a saint’s extensive writings that promote
the doctrine or explain theology or reflect great sanctity. In her short life Catherine wrote almost four
hundred letters (381 to be exact, taking up four volumes in collection) known
to have survived, a book of prayers, and a book on her mysticism and spirituality
simply called Dialogue. I’d like this excerpt to give a sample Catherine’s
writings, both to display her theology and her writing style, as showcased in
Undset’s biography.
Catherine always wrote in Tuscan,
her native tongue. It is impossible to
give any proper idea of her style in translation—she has complete mastery over
the music of the Italian peasant language, whether she is tenderly admonishing
a soul whose welfare means just as much to her as her own, describing her
heavenly visions, or threatening with the wrath of God; whether she is advising
powerful lords or ordinary people, laymen or monks in cases concerning the fate
if people and countries, or private people’s everyday difficulties. But because her soul was filled with the love
of Christ and belief in Him, her interest for everything human was bathed in
faith; to use her own analogy, as the swimmer under the water only sees what is
in the water, or what can be seen through the water, so she sees everything
through her faith. But in our time and
the language of our time the expressions we use for religious emotions and
religious experience have become worn out and meaningless; words which in
Catherine’s language are as shining as new-minted gold, become, when repeated
by us, worn-out coins, which have gone out of circulation. Catherine speaks of Virtù, and for her the
word retains its full weight; it means a vital and powerful pursuit of high
ideals. “Virtue in English has no
connection in the popular mind with capacity, capacity for goodness; we think
of virtue as something slightly sour, weak and boring. Catherine’s eternal cri du coeur, “Gesù Dolce—Gesù Amore,” is filled with very
different associations from those which occur to us when we read “Sweet Jesus,
Jesus Love.” A sweet Jesus, a lady
Jesus; Jesus-Love—a substitute or sublimation of sexual love. In Catherine’s language and when she lived,
sweetness was also a name for strength, for all that is good and at the same
time gentle and merciful. That goodness
must also at times be hard and aggressive, no one knew better than
Catherine. For her and her
contemporaries, even for the hosts of people who in practice tried to forget it
or deny it, it was acknowledged that “Amore” love, is fundamentally an
expression for the connection between God and the soul of man. [p.190-1]
As usual she begins her letter in
the name of Jesus Christ and gentle Mary, and addresses herself to the Pope as
her dearest and most worthy father in Jesus Christ. For herself she has chosen the title of God’s
servants’ servant and bondswoman—it is reminiscent of the Pope’s traditional
signature, “the servant of the servants of God.” She describes her longing to see him standing
as a fruitful tree, loaded with noble fruit because it is planted in good
earth. But if the tree is not planted in
this good earth, which is self-knowledge—the knowledge that we are nothing,
existing only in Him Who Is—the tree will wither. The worm of egoism will eat up the roots, for
he who loves himself feeds his soul with mortal pride, the principle and origin
of evil in all men, in those who rule and those who must obey. A man who has become the victim of self-love
becomes indifferent to sins and faults among his subordinates, for he is afraid
to annoy them and make them his enemies.
Either he attempts to punish them so halfheartedly that it is useless,
or else he does not punish them at all. In
other words Catherine tells the Pope that in the last resort it is he who
carries the whole responsibility for the terrible abuses which are draining the
life of the Church, even though according to human reckoning he may be a fine person
with many good qualities…”If the blind leads the blind both fall into the
abyss; doctor and patient hurry to hell together.” The kind of mercy which is due to self-love
and the love of friends, relations, and temporal peace is in fact the worst cruelty,
for if a wound is not cleansed when necessary with the red-hot iron and the
surgeon’s knife, it festers and finally causes death. To apply salves to it may be pleasant for the
patient, but it does not heal him. Love
your neighbor for Jesus’ sake, and for the honor and glory of His sweet
name. “Yes, I could wish you were a good and
faithful shepherd who was willing to give a thousand lives if you had them, for
the glory of God and the salvation of His creatures. Oh, my beloved father, you who are Christ on
earth, imitate the Blessed St. Gregory.
You can do what he did, for he was a man as you are, and God is always
the same as He was. The only thing we
lack is hunger for the salvation of our neighbor, and courage. But to arouse this hunger in ourselves, who
are nothing more than barren trees, we must graft ourselves to the fruitful
tree of the cross. The Lamb who was
slaughtered for the sake of our salvation still thirst—His desire for our
salvation is greater than could be shown by His suffering—for His suffering is
without end, as is His love.
“…Have courage Holy Father, no more
indecision, raise the banner of the holy cross, the fragrance of the cross is
what will bring you peace.” “Forgive me,
Father, for all I have said to you. The
tongue speaks of that which fills the heart”…
Finally she talks of the
forthcoming nomination of cardinals, and warns him he must choose those men who
are most worthy, otherwise he need not be surprise if God punishes him. For the Dominican order, which is to have a
new Master General, she begs him to chose a pious and virtuous man, “for that
is what our order needs.” She ends by
asking humbly for his blessing and forgiveness for all she has dared to write. “Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love.” [p.187-9]
I love her use of what would today be called folksy maxims:
the blind following the blind into the abyss, a wound that is not cauterized
and cut clean will lead to death, applying salves may be pleasant but it will
not heal. Her language is very vivid,
charged with simile (the Pope needs to be a fruitful tree) and then extends the
simile almost in the manner of Homer (the tree needs to be planted in good
earth or the worm of egoism will destroy the roots). And of course her outspoken is at the very
core of her identity. Who has the
audacity to tell the Pope to have “courage”?
Finally her great work, Dialogue,
should be described and sampled, and Undset does that in a whole chapter. I can’t copy an entire chapter, but I’ll try
to give a taste of it.
Catherine calls the manuscript “the
book” or “my book.” It was Raimondo who
first gave it a title and called it the Dialogue. The first Latin translation, by Critofano di
Gano Guidini and Stefano Maconi, had been called by the translators the Book of Divine Learning. Since then the various translations and
unprinted editions in several different languages have gone under several
names…The undercurrent beneath the waves of shifting ideas in these
conversations between the Eternal Father and her whom He calls His very dear
daughter, and His much loved child, is the belief in God’s mercy. With her heart crushed by compassion
Catherine begs for mercy—for all this world which sin has laid waste, for all
Christians and heathens and the infidel too.
And finally, when the Eternal father compresses all He has taught His
daughter into a few sentences, He says: “I have told you that I will show the
world mercy so that you can see that mercy is the sign by which I am known”…
In the Dialogue the Lord repeats for Catherine all that he has taught her
before of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of one’s own ego and the way
to perfection: “Your service of no use to Me, it is by serving your neighbor
that you can serve Me.” The soul which
has once experienced the bliss of being united with God in love, which has
reached the point where it only loves itself in God, will expand and embrace
the whole world with its love. Once it
has won for itself the virtue which brings a life of grace it will work with
the utmost zeal to help its neighbor.
But this is an inner virtue; outward action, physical work, diligent
penitence, self-chastisement and all kinds of self-denial are nothing more than
the tools of virtue—God is not interested in them for themselves. On the contrary—they can be an obstacle on
the way to perfection if the soul begins to love penitential exercises for
their own sake. One must do penitence
from love, with true humility and perfect patience. And it must be done with understanding, that
is to say with a true knowledge of God and one’s own self… .
[p.262-4]
It seems that Catherine is taking us on a journey, and the
journey is inward toward her mystic visions.
She seems to be suggesting the notion of Divine Mercy centuries before
St. Faustina. The visions rely on a
complex imagery and symbolism, such as one of her favorite images, the
swallowing sea.
When she saw that she had been
given a new and deeper understanding of the love which caused the redemption by
Christ Crucified, Catherine was filled with holy joy and prayed again for the
whole world—although if the Holy Church should regain the outward beauty which
is an expression of its eternal inner beauty, the whole world would be saved…So
when mankind had rebelled against God it immediately rebelled against itself;
the flesh rebelled against the spirit and mankind drowned in the dark and
bitter waters of sin…Man thinks it is the things he loves which float, but in
reality it is he himself who is swept by the stream towards the end of his
life. He would like to stop, to keep his
hold of this life and the things he loves, so that they are not washed out of his
reach. He reaches out blindly to
whatever he happens to touch, but cannot tell the difference between valuable
and the valueless. Then comes death and
takes him from all he loves…
God made a bridge over this abyss
when He gave the world His Son. For God,
who created us without our having anything to do with it, demands of us that we
should work with Him for our salvation…
. [p.264-5]
The symbol of the bridge (God’s grace) becomes further
complicated as it intertwines with the symbol of light as the path to God.
But because it is through the grace
which God gives us that we are able to work with Him for our salvation,
Catherine prays for light. This too she
is given, and then she sees how one can receive and increase the grace God
gives freely. It is the old teaching of
the mystics on the Via Purificativa,
the way to cleanse the soul, the Via
Illuminativa, the way to enlightenment of eternal truths, and the Via Unitiva, the way to unification with
God in love. [p.266]
Does the bridge become transformed into a bridge of
light? I’ve perused the Dialogue itself (here, free on the Internet),
and I have to admit it is hard to follow.
Her imagery shifts fluidly, too fluidly, and her symbols seem to be
built on top of each other. She violates
several rules of rhetorical clarity, but what she loses in clarity she gains in
poetic vision. She writes (actually
mutters while in mystic transcendence and someone else is writing it down) like
a complex modern poet, symbols morphing into symbols.
She develops the bridge symbol in
several ways. The soul steps onto the
bridge by three steps. Sometimes,
according to her, the steps mean the three grades of intimacy with Christ,
which are also expressed by the kiss on His feet, the kiss on the wound in His
side, and the kiss on His mouth. Then
she lets the three steps mean three stages toward perfect union with God:
slavish fear of God’s punishment is what leads most souls to the bridge. The next step is the faithfulness of a
servant who follows his kind lord through love, even though this love is still
imperfect, because the servant of his reward—the blessedness which God gives
His faithful servants. This leads to the
third step, where the soul loves God with the love of a son—for what He is, not
for His gifts. At another time, the
three steps become a symbol for the qualities of the soul—memory, intelligence,
and will. With an interpretation,
entirely her own, of a phrase in the Bible, Catherine declares that when these
three qualities of the soul run together in the desire for unity with God,
Christ will fulfill His promise: “When two or three are gathered in my name, I
am among them.” [p.266]
Undset describes that the structure of the work is not
linear in progress, but rhythmic, as the sea. The book was written in four or five days,
the divisions into chapters and sections by others subsequent to the
transcription.
The contents of the book came from
Catherine’s lips during a series of visions and take the form of thoughts which
are often repeated or which reappear constantly in new forms. Her mind is like the waves of the sea which
break inwards over the same problems and then wash back again, then break
again. The comparisons and symbols, some
of them old favorites from earlier visions and letters, are repeated or given
new meaning. No translation can do
justice to the beauty, tenderness, and pathos she expresses in her lovely
Tuscan dialect, and which have made the Dialogue
one of the masterpieces of Italian literature as well as a milestone in
Catholic thinking. [p.267-8]
Finally if you want to hear Fr. Thomas McDermott speak about Catherine's writings, you can watch his interview on EWTN's Bookmark.