Catherine of Sienna was an Italian laywoman of the 14th century who died in her early 30s.
Though unschooled, she was a writer whose elegant prose would not only alter the course of Italian literature, but who, many years later, would became one of a very small number of Christian theologians (and the very first woman in the course of history) to be recognized by the Catholic Church as a “Doctor of the Church” – an honorific reserved only for those few whose writings are judged to be of perennial value to all the Church, for all times and places.
Not only a brilliant writer and thinker, she also happened to be a highly sought after peacemaker. She was frequently called in to conciliate between feuding families and warring Italian states, and later she was summoned by the rulers in Florence to go to Avignon, to make peace in the papacy itself in one of the Church’s darkest hours of division. Extraordinary, for all of their intractable conflict, that a group of male church leaders had enough self-awareness to call in a single woman, a young woman at that, to help them.
Never married, she was admired by her friends for her warm and affectionate nature, her personalized letters, her constant care of others, and her deep friendship with Jesus, with whom she was said to speak frequently “as one friend to another.”
Catherine lived in a time of tremendous political, social, and religious upheaval and change, which is to say, a time very much like our own.
Historians have drawn striking parallels between that century and our own day. It was a time of many wars, natural calamities, and terrifying sickness. The Black Death, the bubonic plague, was decimating Europe, killing between 30 and 50 percent of the entire population, with no known remedy or even knowledge of its cause. Can you imagine those percentages transposed to our day and the devastating effect? People were terrified.
And, like today, the church of the 14th century was one in which many were losing faith, as the church was marred by scandals, corruption, and very public division. There was a loss of trust in the institutions that had held society together.
Catherine’s collected writings are not extensive. But her central theme was love, the love of God in Christ crucified and the expression of that bleeding love in our relationships. Each of her letters begins and ends in the same way:
“In the name of Jesus Christ crucified,…”
“…Remain in the holy, gentle love of God. Gentle Jesus, Jesus love,”
One of her best modern students, Mary O’Driscoll, says the context in which Catherine developed her theology was a “quest for self-knowledge,” not in a self-absorbed, navel-gazing kind of way, but in the sense that we can never understood ourselves without seeing ourselves through God’s eyes, or as she puts it, without gazing at ourselves in the “gentle mirror of Jesus.”
More than 200 years before Calvin said it, it was Catherine who claimed that knowledge of God and knowledge of self are inseparably entwined. “As the soul comes to know herself, she also knows God better, for she sees how good he has been to her.”
This self-knowledge humbles and grounds us, but it grounds in God’s love, which Catherine likens to a well of living water in the floor underneath the cell of our personal withdrawing in prayer to be present to Christ’s presence. Here’s how Catherine puts it:
“If most merciful Father, we were to ask your gentle loving Son about [the way to discover your will] he would answer as follows: ‘Dearest children, if you want to discover and know the fruit of my will, dwell always in the cell of your soul.’ This cell is a well containing soil as our own poverty, knowing that of ourselves we are nothing. In this knowledge we appreciate that our very existence comes to us from God.
“O indescribable and blazing charity, I see that when we have found the soil, we also discover the living water, namely true knowledge of his sweet and holy will….Let us then plunge into this deep well. When we are there, we shall know ourselves, and we shall also know God’s goodness.
“Recognizing that we are nothing of ourselves, we are humbled, and so we are able to enter into the blazing, fiery, open heart [of Christ], which like an unfastened window is never closed…Love, sweet love, open, open our memory to receive and hold God’s tremendous goodness, and to understand it.”
“This is my desire,” she goes on to write, “to see you in this home, fully transformed.”
Her turns of phrase will be shocking and off-putting to some modern readers. Like any poet and mystic, she draws on image after image to express the inexpressible, this light, this depth of love, this affective knowledge.
But is it so surprising that this young woman who had so much to say to her own day, who was so sought-after as a wise counselor – in a time when almost no women were taught to read and write – that she might have something to contribute to our time and place as well?
Consider keeping Catherine of Sienna: Passion for the Truth and Compassion for Humanity, a selection of her writings by Mary O’Driscoll at your bedside or in your car between appointments. Plunge into this deep well and receive God’s goodness.