You can find part 1 of my blogs on this biography
here, part 2
here, and part 3
here.
One last excerpt from the biography, this time with the
focus on the author. I’ve mentioned that
Sigrid Undset went from an agnostic at best to a Roman Catholic convert in mid
life. She experienced the full
catastrophe of the Second World War, losing her home and her son’s life. There are a number of places in her biography
of this saint from the middle ages she personally speaks from a perspective of
one who has lived through the first half of the twentieth century, suggesting
that we here in the modern world have much to learn from Catherine. I found those passages interesting and worth
noting.
Here is a most moving passage where Undset, starting from
Catherine’s vision of drinking blood from the actual side of Christ,
contemplates the remedy Catherine would proscribe to horrific life of the
modern condition.
In our own lifetime we have learned
to know the smell of rotting corpses on battlefields and in bombed towns; we
know of the stinking sores and boils of prisoners from concentration camps,
where dead and dying were made to lie on beds as wretched as the one Catherine
had chosen for herself. We have poured
out oceans of blood and tears, both of the guilty and the guiltless, while we
hoped against hope that this blood and these tears could help to save a world
reeling under the weight of its miseries.
And how little have we achieved of the great things we dreamed! Yet we ascribe it to the confused ideas of
the time she lived in and her own dark vision of Christianity, when Catherine
intoxicated herself on the blood of Christ—that blood which would put an end to
human bloodshed, if only we could agree to receive it as redemption from our
bloodthirsty passions, our insatiable lust for imagined gain for ourselves
projected onto other nations or classes.
Indeed, many Catholics think in this way. The strong-willed, brave and strangely
optimistic girl who handled the powerful men of her time so masterfully, who
had an unusual understanding of the characters of the men and women among who
she lived, who succeeded in making peace between many of her unruly townsmen,
who in fact on one or two occasions prevented war, and on many put an end to
bloody feuds—she would answer us as she answered her contemporaries in her
letters and conversations and in the Dialogue:
that the blood of Christ was the only source of her own courage and strength
and wisdom, of her amazing and indomitable joy of living. She would say to us, Drink of it with the
lips of your souls, as the saints in their visions seemed to drink it with
their lips of flesh; assuage your thirst in the love which streams from God’s
holy Heart—then there will be an end to the vain shedding of man’s blood by the
hand of man. In her visions Catherine
saw God’s fire fall from heaven, like a rain of blazing light and burning
warmth: can we really understand anything of her experience, we who have seen
the fire of hate falling from the clouds, who fear in our hearts for the day
when an even more destructive fire, invented by an even more bitter hatred and
more violent passions, shall rain down over us and our children? For us, Catherine would have only the same
message which she brought to her contemporaries, she would know only of the
same remedy for our misery—the blood of Christ, the fire of God’s love, which
burns up self-love and self-will, and lets the soul appear, beautiful and full
of grace, as it was meant to be when God created it. [p.83-5]
For Undset, the remedy that Catherine would offer is the
remedy that all the saints taken in their comprehensive whole offer this age. It is in our bond of a common humanity that
they serve as guide posts for us. The
wars and devastation of our age have shown us that suffering is part of our
condition. It is in our response to
suffering that distinguishes people, but our Catholic faith tells us that
suffering is not to be shunned.
The fact that the saints have been
so willing to suffer, that they often in fact seemed to be in love with
suffering and chose it as their inheritance on earth, is often looked upon by
non-Catholics—that is to say non-Catholic Christians—as incomprehensible, and,
in the eyes of many, extremely unsavory.
If God is goodness, if Christ died on the cross to save us from our
sins, why should Christians have to suffer—and suffer not only merely ordinary
opposition, which may have an educational value for the sufferer, but, though
innocent, suffer for other’s sins? One
thing is certain, that all the saints have maintained that they suffer for
their own sins, although we cannot see it otherwise than that they suffered for
the sins of others. It is only among the
saints that we find any who have the right to say, “Nothing human is foreign to
me.” Nevertheless, we may all, at any
given moment, find that we have to suffer for what in our eyes are exclusively
the sins of others. Two world wars, and
their aftermath, spread over almost the whole of the world, should have made
this truth understandable—emphatically understandable—even for the simplest and
most self-satisfied of souls. [p.331]
What the saints show us is that through suffering and a holy
life we can achieve wholeness, “unity with the Origin of life.” Suffering is not wasted; a holy life will
find its reward.
The saints have always known the
power of good is something quite incalculable.
When they renounce even pure and harmless happiness on earth, that they
might have none of the hindrances interposed by care for their own or another’s
material needs, in their struggle to achieve unity with the Origin of life,
they knew if He filled them with His grace and mercy, His superfluous
gifts—gifts bringing health and life—would overflow into the lives of other
men—even to people outside the range of their knowledge, beyond their sight and
the field of their activity. St.
Catherine must have felt discouraged when she saw no concrete results of her
efforts for certain individuals, both men and women, through prayer and
attempts at persuasion. But she never
wavered; she gave of herself until her physical life was used up, in a fight
whose final results she was as sure of, as she was sure that she would not see
many victories on the battlefield of this world. But in fact Our Lord has never made any
promises regarding the triumph of Christianity on earth—on the contrary. If we expect to see His triumph here, His own
words should warn us: “The Son of Man, when He cometh, shall he find, think you
faith on earth?” He did not tell us the
answer. [p. 334]
Finally what the saints and Catherine offer us is wisdom, a
wisdom achieved by seeing beyond the material, beyond human constructions,
beyond the human ego.
It is not given to us to know what
Christendom’s final fate on earth will be.
The gates of hell shall not overpower His Church, but those who wish to
break out of it have full freedom to do so.
The real question is: when the conditional reality which we call the
material world withers away, who will have won real life in all eternity in the
land of the living? Even the people of
our times, who have magnified mankind’s ineradicable trust in the things which
we can see, touch, and enjoy with our senses, and made their articles of faith
out of materialism, self-aggrandizing humanism, collectivism, or whatever one
likes to call it—even they have caught a glimpse of how utterly worthless all
material things are. In light of the
split atoms, solid objects become as it were transparent, evanescent. But who can say how mankind will react to the
new discoveries it makes? We sorely need
the wisdom of the saints.
Has the world changed much since Undset wrote that in the
late 1940’s, post World War II and at the onset of the Cold War? Those wars of devastation have passed, and perhaps
we can breathe a sigh of relief. But the
culture, if anything has deteriorated even further. Nihilism has taken root; self-doubt in our
heritage, in the existence of God, in noble values, in the dignity of the human
person has only expanded. Nazi and Soviet
holocausts may be over but in our very democracies that stand on the ideal of
human rights the slaughter of the unborn go on at holocaust proportions. Undset showed us how Catherine of Siena
emptied her ego into that of Christ crucified.
That forgoing of one’s ego is what is sorely lacking today. I don’t know if Undset would be surprised
(probably not) but I’m sure she would have been saddened.
Not sure how old Undset was here, but it’s obviously in
middle age. I particularly like this
photo since it shows her proudly displaying her cross pendent. She was a lovely woman.
If you wish to find more on St. Catherine of Siena, these
links are most interesting:
I’ve mentioned this all encompassing St. Catherine of Siena site, Drawn By Love.
Tomorrow, April 29th is St. Catherine’s feast
day. Let us appeal to her for her prayers.
