Catherine of Siena

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In the dyers’ quarter of Siena, below the Dominican basilica of San Domenico that crowns the hill of Camporegio, a wool-dyer named Jacopo Benincasa kept a household crowded with children. The twenty-third or twenty-fourth of them, Caterina, was born there on 25 March 1347, the year before the Black Death emptied half the city. She would die in Rome thirty-three years later having neither held office, taken vows of the cloister, nor learned to write with a steady hand — and having, in those same years, lectured cardinals, scolded queens, brokered between warring republics, and pressed a pope to leave Avignon for Rome. The paradox is the whole of her: a contemplative whose union with God was, in her own account, an instruction to descend into the world’s quarrels, not a release from them. The voice that comes down in some three hundred and eighty letters is unmistakable — peremptory, tender, scalding, certain — and it issues from a layperson who never stopped calling herself the least of God’s servants.

The lifetime portrait of Catherine by her disciple Andrea Vanni (c. 1380s), in the Cappella delle Volte of San Domenico, Siena — long held to be her “vera imago.” — Andrea Vanni, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The dyer’s daughter

Catherine Benincasa grew up the youngest surviving child of a large artisan family; her mother Lapa di Puccio Piagenti is remembered as voluble and exhausted, her father as mild. A twin sister, Giovanna, died in infancy. The household lay within the contrada that still bears the trade, and the family’s modest prosperity put Catherine within sight, daily, of the great preaching church above. Her first reported vision came when she was about six: above San Domenico she saw Christ enthroned in the robes of a pope, the tiara on his head, flanked by Peter, Paul, and John the Evangelist — an image already bent, in retrospect, toward the ecclesial preoccupations of her later life. By seven she had, on her own account, vowed her virginity to Christ.

Adolescence brought the ordinary collision: a family that wanted her married, and a girl who would not be. She cut off her hair to spoil her marriageability and, when the household punished her by stripping her of privacy and setting her to drudgery, she answered by constructing, as Raymond of Capua would later report, an interior cell within herself that no one could take away. The resistance worked. Around the age of sixteen she received the black-and-white habit of the Mantellate — the Dominican Sisters of Penance of Saint Dominic, a confraternity of laywomen, mostly widows, who lived not in a convent but in their own homes under a rule of penance and prayer. Their admitting of a young unmarried girl was unusual and grudging. Catherine then withdrew into a near-total seclusion in a small room of the family house: roughly three years of silence, fasting, vigil, and prayer, broken only for Mass. The room survives as a shrine; the period furnished the raw material of everything after.

That seclusion closed with the experience the tradition calls her mystical marriage — the espousal of the soul to Christ. In the vision, transmitted through Raymond’s biography, the Virgin took Catherine’s hand and presented her to her Son, who wedded her to himself with a ring that remained, ever after, visible to Catherine alone. The motif belongs to a long bridal lineage in Christian mysticism running back through the Song of Songs and the sermons on it by Bernard of Clairvaux; what is distinctive in Catherine is the immediate consequence she drew from it. The marriage was not a withdrawal into private sweetness. It was, in the words she ascribed to Christ, the order to leave the cell and go out to her neighbor — to serve God in the bodies and quarrels of the world. The contemplative summit issued directly in action.

Out of the cell

So she emerged. The 1360s and early 1370s find her nursing in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and in the lazarets, tending plague victims when the contagion returned, washing the sores of the cancerous and the leprous — labors the hagiography dwells on precisely because they sit so strangely beside the ecstasies. Around her gathered a circle of disciples, the bella brigata or famiglia: Dominican friars, well-born Sienese, poets, and notaries who called her mamma though many were older than she. Among them were Tommaso della Fonte, her first confessor; the Sienese gentleman Stefano Maconi; the poet Neri di Landoccio Pagliaresi; and the young Barduccio Canigiani, who would die soon after her. To these secretaries she dictated, often three or four letters at once and, by report, while in ecstasy.

The “Swooning” and “Ecstasy” of Catherine, frescoed by Sodoma (1526) on the altar wall of the Cappella di Santa Caterina, San Domenico, Siena. — Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Her growing fame and her unlicensed authority — a laywoman teaching, rebuking clergy, drawing crowds — drew suspicion. In 1374 she was summoned before the general chapter of the Dominican order at Florence, an examination that, whatever its precise terms, did not condemn her. It produced instead the decisive appointment of her life: the friar Raymond of Capua, a learned and well-connected Dominican who became her confessor, her diplomatic envoy, eventually Master General of the order, and the author of the Legenda Maior, the major Life that shaped every later portrait of her. The relationship of penitent and director inverted itself in practice; Raymond’s own account makes plain that he was the one led.

It was at Pisa, in the spring of 1375 — by Raymond’s testimony on the fourth Sunday of Lent, before a crucifix in the church of Santa Cristina — that Catherine received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. At her own prayer, the account runs, the marks remained invisible during her life, blazing as rays of light into her hands, feet, and side rather than as open wounds. This claim of an invisible stigmatization became, after her death, a point of long contention: the Franciscans guarded the visible stigmata of Francis of Assisi as a singular grace, and a series of papal rulings restricted the public depiction of Catherine with the marks. The dispute is documentary as much as devotional — a question of which claims a living church will license and depict, settled not by the experience but by centuries of jurisdiction over it.

Catherine receiving the stigmata, as rays from the crucifix, in Domenico Beccafumi’s panel (c. 1513-15). — Domenico Beccafumi, J. Paul Getty Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The pope and the popes

Pisa was not only a station of grace. Catherine had gone there, at the invitation of Pietro Gambacorti, to keep the city and Lucca from joining the anti-papal league of Tuscan communes — and so her mysticism and her statecraft enter the record in the same breath. The years from 1375 are dominated by the long crisis of the Avignon papacy: since 1309 the popes had resided not in Rome but at Avignon on the Rhône, under the lengthening shadow of the French crown, and the resulting estrangement of the Papal States had broken, by 1375, into open war. The conflict between Florence and Pope Gregory XI — the War of the Eight Saints, named for the Florentine magistracy that prosecuted it — saw the city placed under interdict and a wide swath of central Italy in revolt.

Into this Catherine threw herself with a directness that still astonishes. Her letters of these years run to the magistrates of Italian cities, to mercenary captains, to cardinals, to the queen of Naples, and above all to the pope, whom she addressed as babbo — daddy — even as she ordered him to act. Two demands recur: the reform of a corrupt clergy and the launching of a crusade to reunite Christendom; and, more urgently, the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome. In 1376 she traveled to Avignon herself, ostensibly as part of a Florentine peace embassy, though the Florentines disowned her terms. Her meetings with Gregory XI belong to one of the more remarkable scenes of the medieval church: an unlettered Sienese tertiary in her thirties pressing the supreme pontiff, in person and by letter, to overcome his own fear and the resistance of his French cardinals. In January 1377 Gregory re-entered Rome. The decision was his and overdetermined by many pressures, but the tradition has never doubted that her voice was among the loudest, and she never doubted it either.

The triumph curdled within a year. Gregory died in 1378; the conclave, under the eyes of a Roman mob demanding an Italian pope, elected Urban VI, who turned so abrasive and erratic that a faction of cardinals declared the election void and chose a rival, Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. The Western Schism — two popes, two curias, two obediences splitting the Latin church — had begun, and it would outlast Catherine by decades. She judged the matter at once and without hesitation: Urban was the rightful pope, and she spent her remaining strength defending him, writing to him to temper his rages, and writing to the rebel cardinals in fury at their treason. Late in 1378 Urban summoned her to Rome, where she lived out her last months in prayer and unrelenting correspondence, offering herself, as her letters put it, for the church’s wounds.

The Dialogue, the Letters, the Prayers

Catherine’s spirituality is not a system extracted by later hands; she set it down, or dictated it, in three bodies of work, all in the Tuscan volgare rather than Latin. The greatest is the Libro della divina dottrina, known as Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza — The Dialogue — composed in 1377-78 and, by the witnesses around her, largely dictated in a state of ecstasy across a handful of days at Rocca d’Orcia and afterward. Its form is a sustained exchange between a soul and God the Father, structured around four petitions the soul raises — for herself, for the reform of the church, for the whole world, and for divine providence in a particular case — to which God answers in extended doctrine.

The book’s governing images are concrete and have stayed famous. Christ is the bridge flung across the flood of sin between earth and heaven, his pierced body the very roadway, climbed in three stages corresponding to the feet, the wounded side, and the mouth — a stairway of fear, love, and filial union. Self-knowledge is the cell one never leaves even while walking in the world: the soul must dwell in the knowledge of its own nothingness and, within that, of God’s love, the two truths held together so that humility never tips into despair. Truth itself, la dolce verità, is the thing the whole work circles. The tone is at once tender and severe, and the theology, though Catherine read little, is recognizably the Dominican and Augustinian inheritance she absorbed by ear — the priority of grace, the order of charity, the discernment of spirits — rendered in the speech of a woman who claimed to have heard it from God directly.

The Letters — some three hundred and eighty surviving, dictated to her secretaries between roughly 1370 and 1380 — are the other half of her achievement and, to many readers, the more astonishing. They are addressed to the whole social order of fourteenth-century Italy and beyond: popes and prisoners, soldiers of fortune and enclosed nuns, her own mother and the great of Europe. The register shifts without warning from a melting tenderness to a flat command; the recurring salutation places the whole letter in the precious blood of the Son of God, the blood being for Catherine the sign and substance of a love that pours itself out without measure. One of the most celebrated describes her accompanying a young Perugian, Niccolò di Toldo, to his execution, holding his head as the blade fell — a letter of terrible intimacy that fuses her devotion to Christ’s blood with the literal blood on her hands.

Sodoma’s fresco (1526) of the beheading of Niccolò di Toldo, the scene of Catherine’s most famous letter, in the Cappella di Santa Caterina, San Domenico, Siena. — Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Prayers (Orazioni), some twenty-six in number, were transcribed by her companions as she prayed aloud in ecstasy, mostly in her last Roman months; they are less composed than overheard, and they preserve the cadence of her address to the God she called the sea in which the more one enters the more one finds.

Death and elevation

Worn by fasting that had become near-total — she had for years taken almost no food beyond the Eucharist, a fact her contemporaries read as miracle and modern readers have read variously — Catherine collapsed in the spring of 1380 and died in Rome on 29 April, aged thirty-three. Her body was buried in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where it remains; her head was later translated to Siena and is venerated in San Domenico, the basilica beneath which she was born.

The afterlife of her cause was swift by the standards of the time. Her fellow Sienese Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, as Pope Pius II, canonized her on 29 June 1461. The modern church has raised her higher in stages: in 1939 Pius XII named her, with Francis of Assisi, principal patron of Italy; on 4 October 1970 Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church — the second woman so named, days after Teresa of Ávila became the first — recognizing the doctrinal authority of writings produced by a woman who could barely write; and in 1999 John Paul II proclaimed her one of the co-patrons of Europe. That a layperson, a woman, and an autodidact should be ranked among the church’s authoritative teachers is the institutional measure of how far the dyer’s daughter traveled.

The shape of the spirituality

What distinguishes Catherine in the company of the great mystics is the refusal of the choice the tradition so often forces. Contemplation and action, in her, are not alternatives between which a soul must elect; the higher the union, the deeper the descent into service. Her contemporaries on the visionary path mapped other terrain — the cosmic optimism of Julian of Norwich and her certainty that all shall be well, the speculative apophasis of Meister Eckhart, the radical self-annihilation that carried the beguine Marguerite Porete to the stake in Paris seventy years before Catherine’s birth, the encyclopedic visions of Hildegard of Bingen. Catherine shares with the affective and bridal current its erotic vocabulary of union, much of it inherited through the Cistercian reading of the Song of Songs; she shares with the apophatic strain, traceable to Pseudo-Dionysius, the conviction that God exceeds every concept. But she bends all of it outward. The bridge is for crossing; the cell is for carrying into the streets; the blood is for pouring. Where Teresa would later chart the soul’s interior castle inward through its seven mansions, Catherine’s map runs the other way — through the self’s nothingness and into the body of a church she found broken and would not let alone.

Her asceticism was extreme even by the standards of her age, and the historical-critical eye has its readings of the inedia, the sleeplessness, the visions — the language of pathology stands ready beside the language of grace, and the two registers describe the same thin, ardent woman without resolving each other. What is not in dispute is the documentary residue: a corpus in the vernacular, dictated by someone who had to be taught her letters late and imperfectly, that entered the canon of Italian prose and the doctrinal canon of the church alike. The voice in the Letters does not ask to be believed about its visions; it commands, in the plainest Tuscan, that its readers love more and fear less.

Texts and transmission

Catherine wrote nothing for the printing press; her works survive because her secretaries and disciples gathered them, and the textual history is correspondingly tangled. The Italian originals are long in the public domain. The standard nineteenth-century edition of the correspondence is Niccolò Tommaseo’s Le lettere di S. Caterina da Siena, ridotte a miglior lezione, four volumes (Florence: Barbèra, 1860), later revised and expanded in six volumes by Piero Misciattelli (Siena, 1913-22). The critical modern editing of the whole corpus — the Dialogo, the Lettere, and the Orazioni — has been carried forward by Italian scholars across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with Suzanne Noffke’s English translations (the Paulist Dialogue of 1980, the four-volume Letters of 2000-08, and the Prayers of 1983) now the standard scholarly access in English.

For the English reader the foundational public-domain renderings are three, and between them they cover all three genres. The Dialogue came into English through Algar Thorold’s The Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin Catherine of Siena (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896, unabridged; abridged revision 1907) — for a century the only book-length English Dialogue in print. The letters were opened to English readers by Vida D. Scudder’s Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (Dent/Dutton, 1905), a selection with connecting narrative that remains a graceful introduction to the woman through her own correspondence. And the historical frame was set by Edmund G. Gardner’s Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in the Religion, Literature and History of the Fourteenth Century in Italy (Dent/Dutton, 1907), still the most substantial English study of its era and a translator of unpublished letters in its appendices. The earlier biographical bedrock beneath all of these is Raymond of Capua’s Legenda Maior, written within a generation of her death, and its abridgment by Tommaso Caffarini — hagiography in the strict sense, shaping the saint as much as recording the woman, and to be read as both at once.

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