Today and tomorrow, depending on the tradition, mark the feast days of Saint Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century nun and ascetic. Although less famous than her Alexandrian namesake (she of the wheel), Catherine’s obsessive practices and extremes of fervour have made her a figure of awe, if not always for positive reasons. She is a Doctor of the Church and the patron saint of people ridiculed for their piety, patroness of Rome and prime example of the shocking lengths to which holy figures would go in order to feel close to God. I also firmly believe that Catherine, as remarkable as she may have been, is one of the clearest examples of the hysteria, the excess-by-negation, of the medieval Catholic Church. Despite my better intentions, the words ‘bat’ and ‘shit’ tend to coalesce in my mind when thinking of Catherine.
On a serious note, I heard a very interesting paper last year about medieval female ascetics in the context of mental illness. The speaker described how a variety of later-canonised women, including Mary of Oignies and Yvette of Huy, exhibited obsessively violent behaviours towards themselves, from prolonged food deprivation, to self-mutilation, even to attempting to relive the Crucifixion. On the list of practices, Catherine of Siena appeared in the overwhelming majority of categories. In her Life, written shortly after her death, it was recorded that she used to scald herself, would attempt to stay awake for days on end, occasionally self-flagellated, and fasted so often and so vigorously that some contemporaries thought she was possessed by Satan. Her death aged 33, from a stroke, cannot have been a coincidence.
There were two chief reasons for her doing so: rejection of worldliness, and intervention on the behalf of others. Mary Jeremy Finnegan has pointed out that Catherine and her companions believed that they did not need food because they were ‘consuming devils’ and ‘savouring souls’. Much as Bach kills a kitten every time you write parallel fifths, or as every time you say ‘There’s no such thing as fairies’, a fairy drops down dead, every time Catherine rejected a meal in favour of prayer, or consumed only communion wafer, she saved someone else from the devil. Or so she held it.
‘I do believe in fairies.’
In the last few decades, some botanists have reasoned that numerous outbreaks of hysteria in the early modern period – notably witch-hunts – may have been sparked by mass food-poisoning from hallucinogenic moulds growing on cereal crops. Though subject to academic debate, I suppose it is quite amusing that the extraordinary visions of Hildegard von Bingen may have been triggered by mouldy bread. But Hildegard and Catherine are worlds apart. Though Catherine experienced visions, she also forced herself to drink the pus of a woman she was nursing, and while her biographer claims that she then experienced a vision where Christ directed her to drink from his wounded side, the visceral horror of the image alone reminds one that this was recognised as indulgently harmful, even in a period where charismatic ascetics were expected to suffer outlandishly. The fact that Catherine believed that her actions were of benefit to others reinforces the feeling that they were not simply pious, but pathological.
Of course, it is neither possible nor desirable retroactively to diagnose someone who died over 600 years ago with a set of conditions whose diagnostic boundaries are always shifting. We may in this century identify Catherine’s self-confessed ‘inability’ to eat as a form of anorexia, but a culture of extreme monastic self-denial in the period makes it very difficult to separate illness from perceived holiness.
The particular problem that I have, and something on which I disagreed with the speaker last year, is in the reading of these behaviours as somehow freeing. Caroline Walker Bynum has very persuasively argued that the rejection of food in particular signified that female ascetics were viewing their bodies as instruments through which to access Christ, but I cannot help but be horrified at the means that the end justifies. While on the one hand, asceticism was one of the few areas where women achieved a sort of autonomy in the field of medieval Catholicism, even (as we see from Catherine et al) becoming venerated for their extremity of devotion, on the other hand this was achieved through practices that, if observed today, would call for medical intervention. The perceived victory of the soul through the rejection of the body may have made sense to a mind that saw devils everywhere – even, infamously, on a piece of lettuce – but the desire of Gertrude of Helfta to experience vicarious punishment, or of Yvette of Huy deliberately to contract leprosy, speaks of a warped sense of self, regarding both the importance of health and one’s insignificance to the operation of a society.
Catherine’s self-inflicted starvation began, according to her biographer, after her sister died in childbirth and it was proposed that she marry the widower. Again, while one ought to avoid analysing the intentions of people long-dead, the rejection of the food that allows a woman to menstruate and thus to procreate, seems a not disproportionate reaction to this situation. People have argued variously that the desire to starve beyond amenorrhoea relates to the rejection of sexual productivity as a symbol of sin and the Fall, to the destruction of sexual desirability in order more safely to emulate the Virgin Mary, or to an intention to become more like Christ. But this aspect of Imitatio Christi related not to Christ-as-human, but to Christ-as-male.
So my problem is this: I can recognise the desire for transcendence, the desire for bodily autonomy outside the strictures of marriage, and the desire to express an aspect of oneself by any means possible. But if one ascribes to the notion that extreme physical suffering ought to be aspired to and, even more, that perfection can only be reached through this extremity, one seems to justify the societal concept against which these women lived: no one is perfect, but half of us will always be less perfect than the other.
There is no punchline, and only a vague resolution, but I feel one can both celebrate and warn against a doubtless remarkable woman who stood out above her contemporaries by embodying the very desires that make the medieval Church so difficult to approve of.
noon auctoritee 