Justified True Belief

(●) A dyer’s daughter who held no office in the church, and who told two popes to their faces what she believed God required of them. + Imagine a young woman in a working-class quarter of a walled Italian city, in a house that smelled of wet wool and dye, one of a great crowd of children, with no schooling, no money, no family name that counted for anything beyond her own street. Now imagine her dictating a letter that begins "Most holy father" and goes on to tell the head of Western Christendom that he is being a coward. She did that, repeatedly, and then said the same thing to his face in Avignon. Catherine Benincasa belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for two reasons. The first is that she is a standing difficulty for anyone who thinks serious theology is the property of the schools: she never attended one, she dictated her book aloud while her secretaries scrambled to keep up, and the Roman Catholic Church eventually ranked her among the small company of teachers whose doctrine it calls eminent. The second is that she lived through the ugliest institutional crisis the medieval church ever produced, a papacy parked in France for seventy years and then two rival popes at once, and her response was neither to leave nor to pretend that nothing was wrong. She stayed, and she shouted. Two dates make the point better than any summary can. In 1970, five hundred and ninety years after her death, Pope Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church, a title the Roman Catholic Church gives to the small number of writers whose teaching it holds up for everyone to learn from, and she was one of the first two women ever given it. And she could not write her own name until the last three years of her life.

(●) 1347 AD: Born in a dyer’s house in Siena, one year before the plague emptied the city. + Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa was born on 25 March 1347, in a steep lane of dyers’ houses above the Fontebranda fountain, in the quarter the Sienese still call the Oca, where the wool trade did its washing. Her father Jacopo was a cloth dyer with his own workshop; her mother Lapa was the daughter of a local poet and a formidable woman in her own right, who outlived her daughter. Raymond of Capua, who knew Catherine for the last six years of her life and wrote the long biography on which everything later depends, says Lapa bore twenty-five children. Catherine was the second youngest, born with a twin sister, Giovanna, who died almost at once. The following year the Black Death reached Siena. Modern estimates of the dead run from a third to two thirds of the city, and the physical evidence is still standing: Siena had begun building an enormous new cathedral, and the half-finished side wall of it stops in mid-air over the piazza, abandoned in 1348 and never resumed. That unfinished wall is the world Catherine grew up under. A generation that had buried half its neighbours did not need to be told that life is short, and the religion she absorbed as a child had a hard edge on it that ours does not.

(●) 1363 AD: She cut off her hair rather than be married, and at about sixteen joined an order of laywomen who kept its rule at home. + Raymond reports that when she was six she saw Christ enthroned in priestly robes above the Dominican church of San Domenico, blessing her, and that at seven she privately vowed herself to God. Stories of that kind are exactly what a medieval biographer was expected to supply, and a careful reader will hold them loosely. What is not in doubt is the fight that followed, because Catherine described it herself and her family remembered it. Her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth in about 1362, and the household decided that Catherine should marry the widower. She refused. When pressing did not work, she cut off her hair, which in fourteenth-century Siena was roughly equivalent to burning her own dowry in the street. Her family took away her room, made her the household servant, and left her no privacy at all. She replied that they could have the room, since she would keep a cell inside herself where nobody could follow her, and that idea of an interior cell stayed with her for the rest of her life (T1). In the end her father gave way. At about sixteen she was admitted, unusually young, to the Mantellate. They were not nuns. They were Dominican tertiaries, which is the old name for lay members attached to a religious order, a third order alongside the friars and the enclosed sisters, and in Siena they were mostly widows: women who wore the black and white habit of the Dominicans, kept the order’s rule, and went on living in their own houses. A girl of sixteen who had never been married was not the sort of member they were used to. For roughly three years after that she stayed in a small room in her father’s house, speaking to almost nobody but her confessor, the priest who heard her confessions and directed her. She learned to read during those years. She did not learn to write.

(●) 1368 AD: The silent years ended, her father died, and she went out into the hospitals. + Those three quiet years in the little room came to an end, as Raymond of Capua tells it, with what he calls her espousal to Christ: a vision in which she understood herself to be betrothed to Christ the way a bride is betrothed to a husband, and to belong to him from then on. It happened, Raymond says, on the last day of Carnival in 1367 or 1368 (he does not make the year certain), which means the noise of the city eating and dancing its way to the start of Lent was going on in the streets outside while it happened. What matters for the rest of the story is what Raymond says came next. She was not told to stay in the room. She was told to go out, on the ground that the two great commandments, to love God and to love your neighbour, are two feet, and nobody walks on one of them. So she went out, and the timing was cruel. Her father died in 1368; the same year a revolution in Siena swept away the government under which the family business had prospered, and the Benincasa household broke apart. Catherine took charge of her mother, and spent the next several years in the hospitals of Siena, at Santa Maria della Scala and the Misericordia, and in the houses of the poor. Two things from those years are worth holding on to, because both of them come back later. The first is a patient. She nursed a woman named Andrea who had an open cancer, and who repaid her by spreading stories about her morals around the neighbourhood; Catherine went on nursing her, and went on nursing her, and the slander did not change the arrangement. The second is a crowd. She attracted a following, an odd mixed company of friars, notaries, painters, poets and noblewomen who called themselves her famiglia, her family, and who called her, though several of them were twice her age, "Mamma." When plague came back to Siena in 1374 she and that company buried a good part of her own extended family.

(●) 1375 AD: She kept a condemned man company to the block, and at Pisa said the wounds of Christ had come into her body. + A young Perugian nobleman named Niccolò di Toldo had been condemned to death in Siena for speaking too freely against the city’s government. He was, by every account, wild with terror and rage. Catherine visited him in the cell, stayed with him through the night, walked him to Mass in the morning, and promised to be waiting at the execution ground. She kept the promise. She was there before him, and she wrote that she laid herself down and stretched her own neck out on the block while she waited; when he came she held him as the axe fell. The letter she dictated to Raymond of Capua afterward is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Middle Ages, and it will unsettle a modern reader, because the letter is not written in the key you expect. There is no horror in it and very little pity. She is not describing a tragedy at all. She is describing a wedding, and she means it in earnest rather than as a figure of speech (T4). It ends with her saying that when it was over she could not bear to wash his blood off her clothes. That same year, in the church of Santa Cristina at Pisa on 1 April, she said she received the stigmata: the five wounds of the crucified Christ, the nails through the hands and feet, the spear in the side, appearing in a living person’s own body. Reports of it were not unheard of in her century (Francis of Assisi was said to have received the wounds visibly a hundred and fifty years earlier), but Catherine’s case had a peculiarity. She said she had asked for the marks to stay invisible to everyone else, and they did. Invisible marks cannot be examined, and anyone is free to weigh that as they see fit. What can be checked is the effect: from this point Catherine talked and wrote about the blood of Christ constantly, as the one price at which a human being is valued (T4), and she talked about it with the authority of someone reporting rather than theorizing.

(●) 1376 AD: She travelled to Avignon to tell the pope to go back to Rome, and that autumn he went. + For nearly seventy years the popes had lived not in Rome but at Avignon, in the south of France, under heavy French influence. By the end of 1375 the papal territories in Italy were in open revolt and Florence was leading the league of cities against Gregory XI, and in March 1376 the pope laid Florence under an interdict. An interdict was a penalty aimed at a whole community rather than at a person: the churches shut their doors, public worship stopped, and an entire city was cut off from the ordinary life of the church, Mass included, until its rulers gave way. In a place where every guild and every family measured the year by the church calendar, the pressure was enormous, and it was meant to be. Florence, wanting peace and knowing Catherine’s reputation, sent her to Avignon. She arrived on 18 June 1376. The embassy went badly in the way embassies do. The Florentine ambassadors arrived late, and when they did arrive they refused to confirm the powers the city had given her, which left her sitting in the papal court speaking for a government that had quietly cut her loose and would not say out loud that she spoke for it. So she turned her whole effort on the one thing she had been demanding by letter for a year already: that the pope go home to Rome. Gregory left Avignon on 13 September 1376 and entered Rome on 17 January 1377. One qualification belongs here, and it is the one she is most often denied. Gregory had wanted the return from the beginning of his pontificate, his reign as pope, years before Catherine ever wrote to him, and historians now read her as pressing in public for a policy already settled rather than as the mind that settled it; the churchmen and the Florentine factions who put a holy woman forward had their own reasons for doing it. What is beyond dispute is what she actually wrote, in letter after letter, to the most powerful man in Europe, in the idiom of a daughter scolding a father she loved. She called him "Babbo," which is Italian for Daddy. And she told him that the rot in the church ran through the men he had appointed (T5).

(●) 1378 AD: A mob came for her in Florence, the peace was signed, and then the church split in two. + Gregory sent her to Florence to finish the peace, and she was there in the summer of 1378 when the city erupted in the rising of the wool workers. A crowd hunting for the pope’s people came after her into a garden outside the walls with weapons drawn. She walked toward them and told them who she was. She wrote afterward that her words, "I am she. Take me, and let this family be," went through the man who meant to kill her like a sword, and that his hands seemed bound. She was not touched, and here is where she stops behaving like anybody else in the story. She was bitterly disappointed. She had wanted to be killed, and she wrote to Raymond that the Eternal Bridegroom, which is one of her names for Christ, had played a great joke on her. The peace between Florence and the papacy was concluded that summer, and it was the last good news she would have. Gregory XI had died in March. The cardinals, under a Roman crowd shouting for an Italian, elected Urban VI in April; within months the same cardinals declared that election void and elected a rival, and Europe divided its allegiance between two men each claiming to be pope. The Great Schism had begun, and it would last thirty-nine years. Urban summoned Catherine to Rome in November 1378, and she went, with her whole company, to live on alms and write letters to the courts of Europe on his behalf.

(●) 1380 AD: She died in Rome at thirty-three, praying for a church with two popes in it. + Her last year is a short and painful record. She had eaten almost nothing for years and by now could keep down neither food nor water. She described to Raymond a collapse in which she felt the whole weight of the church come down on her shoulders, and she told him what her days had become. Medieval Christians told the time by the church’s hours of prayer rather than by a clock face, and two of them mark out her day: terce, said in mid-morning, at about nine, and vespers, said toward sunset. At terce she would rise from Mass, and then, as she put it, you would see a dead woman go to St Peter’s, where she stayed until near vespers labouring in the ship of Holy Church. So the account she is giving is of a woman who spent the better part of every daylight hour in prayer at St Peter’s, walking there and back across Rome, on no food. On 26 February 1380 she lost the use of her legs. She died on 29 April, aged thirty-three. Her body was buried in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, where it remains. Her head was later taken back to Siena and is kept in the church of San Domenico, a few hundred yards uphill from the house where she was born. A modern reader is entitled to find that gruesome; her own century found it entirely natural, and the Sienese wanted her back. Pope Pius II, who was himself Sienese, canonized her on 29 June 1461, eighty-one years after her death. To canonize is to declare formally, after an investigation of the person’s life and of the miracles claimed at the tomb, that a dead Christian is with God and may be publicly honoured as a saint. Getting it done took the surviving members of her famiglia the rest of their lives.

What She Taught

(T1) You are the one who is not, and God is the one who is. + Think of the picture a projector throws on a living room wall. It is perfectly real while it is there. You can see the faces in it, you can point at them, you can walk across the room and put your hand in the middle of them. It is also entirely borrowed, every scrap of it, and the borrowing never stops: switch off the lamp behind the lens and there is no faded version left on the wall, there is just wall. That is close to what Catherine meant by the difference between a creature and its Creator. God does not have existence the way a wealthy man has money, as a large amount of something he could in principle run out of. God simply is, and everything else is on loan, this second and the next one. She built her whole spiritual teaching out of that one distinction, and she had a name for the place where you learn it: the cell of self-knowledge. The phrase sounds like introspection and it is not. It is the small room she was given when her family took her real room away, turned into a habit of mind she carried into hospitals, prisons, and papal audiences. Two things are seen in that cell at once, never one without the other: what you are, which is a borrowed and badly misused existence, and what God is, which is the goodness lending it. Catherine is emphatic that self-knowledge alone is poison. A person who looks only at his own emptiness despairs; a person who looks at his emptiness and at the goodness holding him up becomes free. In her Dialogue God tells her to beware of ever leaving that cell. And Scripture had put the same distinction into four words long before she was born, at the burning bush, where the God of Israel is asked for his name and answers by sheer existence and by nothing else (Exodus 3:14).

(Q) "I am she who is not, and if I spoke as being anything of myself, I should be lying by my own head, and should be a lying daughter of the Devil, who is the father of lies, because Thou alone art He who is." + Source: Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, A Treatise of Prayer (Thorold translation, 1907). The soul is thanking God and runs into the problem that she has nothing of her own to thank him with. Notice that this is not self-hatred. She is not saying that she is worthless; she is saying that she is not self-supporting, which is a different and much more cheerful claim (T1).

(T2) Christ crucified is a bridge over a flood, and a bridge saves nobody who will not walk on it. + The central image of her book is one any fourteenth-century Italian would have seen with her own eyes. A river comes up, the ford is gone, and the road on the far bank might as well be on the moon. Somebody builds a bridge. In Catherine’s telling the road from earth to heaven was broken in Adam, meaning it was washed out at the beginning, in the first man’s fall, and has been out ever since; the flood underneath is this world with everything in it that drowns people; and God’s answer was not to shout instructions from the far bank but to lay his own Son across the gap. The bridge reaches all the way down because the one who is God took on the earth of our humanity, and all the way up because he never stopped being God. She then does something with the image that is easy to miss. The bridge has three steps, and they are the wounded body of Christ: the pierced feet, which she reads as the soul’s affection turning away from what it used to want; the opened side, where the soul discovers how much it is loved; and the mouth, where it finally tastes peace. That is not decoration. It is her way of saying that the stages of the Christian life are not techniques but places on a person. And then the sting, which is the whole reason she is telling a pope about bridges at all. A bridge you admire from the riverbank, and praise the engineering of, and recommend warmly to your friends, has done nothing whatever for you. You are still on this side of the water. The only use a bridge has is being walked on. Christian readers across the traditions will recognize the doctrine underneath it. There is one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), and he described himself as the road rather than the mapmaker (John 14:6).

(Q) "And observe, that it is not enough, in order that you should have life, that My Son should have made you this Bridge, unless you walk thereon." + Source: Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, A Treatise of Discretion (Thorold translation, 1907). God the Father is speaking, as he does through most of the book, and has just finished explaining why human nature had to be joined to the height of his own before there was anything there to walk on (T2).

(T3) God cannot be paid back, so the debt is paid to the neighbour instead. + Anyone who has been carried through a bad year by an old friend knows the peculiar frustration of owing a debt that cannot be repaid. You would do something for them if there were anything they needed, and there is nothing. Catherine takes that ordinary experience and makes it the hinge of Christian ethics. God has done everything for you and needs nothing from you, so the love you owe him has to be spent somewhere else, and he has arranged the world so that there is always somewhere else standing right in front of you. This is why she is not a mystic in the sense the word usually carries, of somebody who withdraws from people in order to be alone with God. Her highest passages about union with God arrive, every time, at a sick person in a bed. Love of God and love of neighbour are not two duties to be balanced; in her account they are one act seen from two sides, which is why she could say that every virtue and every sin alike is worked out through the neighbour. It also explains the strangest thing about her hospital years. She went on nursing Andrea, the woman with the open cancer who was busy telling the neighbourhood that Catherine was no better than she should be, and she went on nursing her without ever needing the slander to stop first. On this understanding the slander was beside the point. The debt was not owed to Andrea. Jesus said the same thing in the plainest possible terms, and made himself the recipient: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). John put the negative version of it just as bluntly (1 John 4:20).

(Q) "And it cannot be otherwise, because love of Me and of her neighbour are one and the same thing, and, so far as the soul loves Me, she loves her neighbour, because love towards him issues from Me." + Source: Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, A Treatise of Divine Providence (Thorold translation, 1907). A few lines further on in the same passage comes the clause that gives the teaching its edge: "inasmuch as you can do Me no profit, you should do it to your neighbour" (T3).

(T4) The price of one soul is the blood of Christ, and a soul that knows its price stops being afraid. + Almost every letter Catherine dictated opens the same way, in Scudder’s English: "I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His Precious Blood." It reads at first like a formula, the medieval equivalent of a printed letterhead, and it is not one. The blood is the load-bearing idea in everything she says, and she uses it to do a specific job. The job is to fix what a human life is worth. In a century that killed people cheaply, for plague, for politics, for being on the wrong street when a faction rose, Catherine kept insisting that the going rate for a single soul had already been set, in public, at the cost of God’s own life. Prices work that way. Whatever you privately think a thing is worth, once somebody has paid for it in front of witnesses the argument is over, and Catherine treats Calvary as that kind of public transaction. Once the price is fixed, several things follow at once. Despair over your own sin becomes a kind of arithmetic error, because you are valuing yourself below what was actually paid. Contempt for somebody else becomes the same error made about them. And fear of dying loses its grip, because the worst thing that can happen to a body has already happened to Christ and turned out not to be the end of the story. You can watch that theology doing its work in a prison cell in Siena. She had one night to get a terrified young man ready to be beheaded, and what she gave him was not comfort in the modern sense, nothing about his feelings and nothing about his record. She gave him a price tag. He was worth the blood of the Son of God, which meant that the thing waiting for him in the morning was not the end of him, and so the scaffold was a wedding. He walked out and put his head down saying two names, and one of them was hers. The New Testament says the same thing in the language of the slave market and the temple: ransomed not with silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18-19; Ephesians 1:7).

(Q) "Comfort thee, sweet my brother; since we shall soon arrive at the Wedding Feast. Thou shalt go there bathed in the sweet Blood of the Son of God, with the sweet Name of Jesus, which I will never to leave thy memory." + Source: Letter to Raymond of Capua on the execution of Niccolò di Toldo, 1375 (Scudder translation, 1905). The slightly broken English of the last clause is the translator following Catherine’s Italian closely rather than smoothing it. She is speaking to Niccolò di Toldo on the morning of his execution, and reporting the scene afterward to her confessor (T4).

(T5) The church’s wounds are her own shepherds’ work, and a mercy that leaves them alone is cruelty. + A parent who cannot bear to correct a child is not being kind, and everyone can see it except the parent. Catherine applied that ordinary piece of household wisdom to the government of the church and drew blood with it. Gregory XI was a decent and religious man whose besetting sin was softness: he shrank from confrontation, he over-promoted his relatives, and he let scandalous appointments stand rather than face the quarrel. Catherine told him, in writing, that this was not mercy but the worst cruelty available to him, because the people it spared were the ones ruining the church and the people it cost were everybody else. Two things keep this from being mere denunciation. The first is that she never proposed leaving. She had no theory of a purer church elsewhere, and no interest in acquiring one; the church she described as filthy with the sins of her ministers is the same one she called the garden, and the Bride of Christ, which is the New Testament’s own picture of the church as the wife Christ gave himself up for. You scrub what belongs to you. She wanted it scrubbed, not replaced. The second is where she located the cure. Reform, in her letters, does not begin with a policy. It begins with the reformer, in the cell of self-knowledge (T1), which is why her letters to a pope spend their first pages on his own soul and only then get anywhere near his appointments. Christians have never agreed about the office she was writing to, and they are not about to. What can be read off her own record, whatever a reader makes of the papacy, is a laywoman with no rank at all telling the most powerful churchman in Europe that his kindness was killing people, and doing it out of loyalty rather than contempt. There is apostolic precedent for that: Paul opposed Peter to his face, and said so in writing, for the good of the church rather than at its expense (Galatians 2:11).

(Q) "A strong justice is needed to correct them, for too great pity is the greatest cruelty." + Source: Letter to Gerard du Puy, a kinsman of Gregory XI and one of the papal legates in Italy (a legate is a churchman sent to govern and negotiate in the pope’s own name), quoted in Vida D. Scudder, Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (1905). Writing to a man close enough to the pope for the message to be passed on, she names three vices as reigning in the Bride of Christ (impurity, avarice and swollen pride), and begs him to do what he can to be rid of "the wolfish shepherds who care for nothing but eating and fine palaces and big horses" (T5).

(Q) "Come, come, and resist no more the will of God that calls you; and the hungry sheep await your coming to hold and possess the place of your predecessor and champion, Apostle Peter." + Source: Letter to Gregory XI calling him back to Rome (Scudder translation, 1905). This is the letter that gave her legend its shape. By the time she reaches these lines she has spent several pages on the love of God shown in the cross, and has offered to take onto herself any punishment due to the rebellious Florentines; and then, in the space of one sentence, the theologian turns into a daughter hauling her father up out of his chair.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) The disciples who buried her spent the rest of their lives getting her canonized. + The famiglia did not disperse. Raymond of Capua became Master General of the Dominicans and led a reform of the order; Stefano Maconi, a young Sienese nobleman she had pulled out of a family feud, became head of the Carthusians; Neri di Landoccio and Barduccio Canigiani copied and circulated her letters; Tommaso Caffarini spent decades in Venice assembling the case for her sanctity. Raymond’s biography, the Legenda Maior, was finished about fifteen years after her death and is the source of nearly everything later writers know. Consider what that campaign was up against. A woman with no office had corrected popes, negotiated between states, and produced a book of theology, and the ordinary machinery of the church had no category to put her in. It succeeded anyway: Pius II canonized her in 1461. What her disciples had to argue for then, the church has since been content to take for granted.

(†) Her book was in print within a century of her death, and in 1970 the Roman Catholic Church ranked her among its teachers. + The Dialogue was printed at Bologna in 1472, among the earliest books printed in Italian, less than twenty years after Gutenberg’s Bible and while printing was still a novelty, and it has not been out of print since. A collection of her letters followed from the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1500. Her Italian, rough and headlong and full of the dye-shop, is counted among the monuments of fourteenth-century Tuscan prose, and Italians still put her in the same century’s company as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The theology travelled further than the politics did, which is usually how it goes. Readers who wanted nothing to do with fourteenth-century papal quarrels kept the cell of self-knowledge (T1), the bridge (T2), and the insistence that love of God is proved on the neighbour (T3). In 1970 Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, which is the formal recognition that a writer’s work teaches the faith rather than merely warming the heart of somebody who already has it, and in 1999 John Paul II named her one of the patron saints of Europe. Six centuries after a dyer’s daughter dictated a book she could not have written down with her own hand, it sits on the same shelf as Augustine and Aquinas.

(†) Where her own record tells against her: the fasting she would not stop, the crusade she preached, and a certainty with no room in it for doubt. + Admiration is not the same as agreement, and three things in her record were disputed in her own century by people who loved her. - The fasting. For years she ate almost nothing, and in the end she could not eat at all. Her mother begged her, her confessors ordered her to eat under obedience, which for a tertiary meant a direct command she had promised to obey, and she could not or would not comply; she read her body’s refusal of food as a gift rather than an illness. Whatever the cause, the result is not in dispute. It ended a life the church needed, at thirty-three, in the middle of the worst crisis of the age. Scripture is more suspicious of that kind of severity than her century was: harsh treatment of the body has "an appearance of wisdom" and no power at all against the thing it claims to be fighting (Colossians 2:23). - The crusade. Her letters press Gregory XI again and again to raise the banner and turn Europe’s wars outward against the Muslim powers, and she describes it as the remedy for Italy’s own bloodshed: the mercenary companies then ruining the Italian countryside would have something better to do. It is not a stupid proposal about Italy. It is an impossible one about the gospel, and it does not survive contact with the night its founder was arrested, when the one disciple who drew a sword in his defence was told to put it away (Matthew 26:52), or with Paul’s flat statement that the weapons of this particular war are not of the flesh (2 Corinthians 10:4). - The certainty. Catherine reported her convictions as messages received, and she did not distinguish between her own political judgement and the will of God. Against the cardinals who had abandoned Urban VI she wrote in language of unrelieved ferocity, and she never entertained the possibility that a sincere person could read the situation differently. Christians have never agreed about the office at the centre of that quarrel, and the habit of mind is open to judgement whatever a reader concludes about the office: the same absence of doubt that made her fearless in front of a pope left her with nothing to say to anyone who was not already persuaded. None of that cancels the rest. A woman who spent her thirties in plague wards, prisons and papal antechambers, and who died asking for a church she could not save, is allowed to have been wrong about some of it.