☩ Catherine of Siena took eight weeks to die. They weren’t easy weeks. Her last two months in the waking world were spent in extreme suffering. Her scribe described Catherine paralysed, unable to move her head; "full of intolerable pains,” he wrote, “from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head". At the time of her passing, Catherine Benincasa’s body was bruised all over: her bones were out of joint. It was, in the language of the Church, a perfect end.
Every night, I ask God for a good death: a perfect end, as Catherine once did. A good death for a Christian means a whole range of things. Ars bene moriendi is a genre, not a checklist. But it doesn’t preclude suffering. There’s a stoic aspect there which even now seems sensible: sometimes, death does come as a friend. Not always. Quite often, it arrives like the end of the world.
I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering recently, and so thinking about one of Catholicism’s weirder doctrines: redemptive suffering. Saint Paul sums it up -
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.
- but doesn’t actually explain it. In spite of twenty centuries of doctrine-wrangling (or because of it) suffering is still somewhat under-theologised and often-misunderstood, even by practicing Catholics. Take Catherine: she of the aesetic life and gruesome death.
We conquer the evil one, Catherine said in her last letter, "not by the suffering itself borne by our bodies, but by virtue of that fire which is extreme and exceeding ardent and inestimable love.” Pain isn’t purpose. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. Nihil, Catherine says: Void.
Whatever suffering is, whatever spiritual quality it retains or acquires or transforms, it’s not ever the point. The real action is always taking place somewhere else: distant, distinct, directed by movements undisclosed, unknowable; spark spreading to fire, wind twisting in air.
Sometimes grace is legible as an inversion of the values of the world, but that’s not what it is. Christ promised a peace that passes understanding, not a peace that entirely escapes it.
Those are details lost on a certain kind of Christian culture warrior, immured in a reactionary dreamtime where toughness in se has world-historic import. Softbellied, weak-souled pinkos, hooked on the therapeutic, defy the natural order, deny suffering, and so reject greatness. The sand being impelled towards the faces of said decadents by the feet of virile - or at least virile-thinking - hommes d'action bears with it the moral imprimatur of the universe. Life is suffering; those who don’t suffer aren’t really alive.
As a worldview it has a certain malign glamour and an illimitable pool of (plausibly self-loathing) recruits. It just lacks any Christian basis. If there’s a Christ that anoints the natural order, blesses hierarchy, and chooses power over principle, it’s not the same Christ who died on the cross. If Aquinas was the first Whig, the first Tory was the Great God Pan.
Inevitably some croyants conclude the opposite: that there’s no substantive distinction between what Christians call flourishing and what the world calls happiness. God wants what’s good for us, and what is good for us is what we think good - which makes suffering and unhappiness unjustifiable.
This makes sense to me, which is itself sufficient to make the whole argument suspect. Suffering might always be a failure, a defect, not something to praise. It might also be necessary. Look at the lives of the saints; look at their deaths. Look at the eight days Catherine Benincasa took to die. Look at the cross.
The cross is the final proof, says McCabe, that the weakness of Christ is real weakness; that his suffering is real suffering, and that it’s in this real and not only apparent failure and futility that resurrection unfolds.
“The cross does not show us some temporary weakness of God that is cancelled out by the resurrection. It says something permanent about God: not that God eternally suffers but that the eternal power of God is love; and this as expressed in history must be suffering.”
It’s for this reason, I think - what McCabe glosses as the “real foolishness of God”; what Paul calls the "power made perfect in weakness" - that suffering, whatever else it is, is not accidental. The cross is a sign of victory because it is a place of defeat. Failure is not optional.
And so the reign of Christ in human history is visible, I think, more in apparent defeat than in obvious victory. A funeral march over a triumph; a ‘sign of contradiction’ over In Hoc Signo Vinces. One proof of this can be found in Catherine of Siena’s abortive political career.
In matters of religion, Catherine was possessed of a singular heroism. In the realm of politics, Vida Scudder wrote, she cut, by contrast, a pathetic figure. Catherine’s magnetic spirituality struggled to find mooring in the dense, carnal world of medieval politics; high principles dubiously applied. Every footing was unfirm; all the circles vicious. Her political correspondence is “tense, nervous, virile,” Scudder says: “It breathes a vibrating passion, a solemn force, that is the index of a breaking heart.”
Jean Gerson, one of Europe’s leading theologians, had a darker view. Catherine didn’t just let her goals - the reform of the Church, the purification of the Papacy, the healing of schism - slip out of reach. She pushed them further away. No women mystics, no western schism. Sancte Catherine, destructor ecclesiae.
He had a point. Without Catherine whispering in his ear, Pope Gregory might never have returned to Rome. Don’t listen to perfidious advisors who say you’ll die if you leave prosperous Avignon for half-ruined Rome, she told Gregory: they’re lying. They weren’t; he died. But not before announcing he would remit Peter’s chair to France.
Every conclave, the papal curia mounts a political circus nonpareil. Imagine the following: Gregory had two. Catherine and the Romans pick Urban VI, a white-faced, heavy-handed fanatic who denounces his most powerful supporters as corrupt as soon as he’s in the chair. He’s rude, irrational, cruel, and - a dangerous trait for any Pope - he actually believes in God. Catherine backs him to the hilt.
Avignon’s hierophants, squinting at their rival across the Mediterranean, don’t. Clement VII, experienced diocesan administrator and competent mass murderer, is duly elected supreme pontiff on 30 September 1378. “In a time of peace,” a later historian wrote, “Clement's personal qualities would have made him a Pope worthy of praise”. It was not a time of peace.
Decisions are made; the shock of their making fractures Christendom, breaks brother from brother, opening a century of war and unrest and animosity. One hundred years since Catherine’s death in Rome, a boy is born in Saxony. Martin Luther grows up in a Christianity united, but, contrary to rose-tinting mythographers, not secure. Patched up and stitched together, indulgenced and edicted, La Navicella sails on, stronger than she was, weaker than she looks. Quick-witted, sharp-eyed: Martin Luther can see the winds turn.
Leszek Kolakowski:
St. Augustine wrote in The City of God that God “enriches the course of the world history by the kind of antithesis which gives the beauty to a poem . . . there is beauty in the composition of the world’s history arising from the antitheses of contraries—a kind of eloquence in events, instead of words.” After what we have been witnesses to in our century, we rather tend to think, with Kierkegaard, that to find this sort of aesthetic and intellectual delectation in the grandiose historical panorama is like enjoying the charm of the music emitted by the bull of Phalaris.
All of which is not to deny the efficacy of grace, the rectitude of Catherine’s aims, or creation’s final, definitive coherence in the reign of God. History is the shadow cast by eternity entering time. But shadows, even if they lack final substance, are encountered as real. Sin and sanctity, nature and grace, the new man and the old, indurate Adam, can be transcended but not escaped, in politics and history as in life. That which joins and that which divides are one and the same.
The image we have of Catherine - of the Christian life - is the kind of image we have, or would like to have, of ourselves: contained, assured, complete, victorious. It’s not a false image, but, for the time being, it’s not accurate either. Think about those eight weeks: the struggle, the lack; desires unfulfilled, talents wasted. Death swallowed up in victory, but a life burnt away by defeat. Zelus domus tuae comedit me.
And, in defeat or victory, the real action is elsewhere: wind moving on wind, and then on water, and then on nothing at all. Sometimes doing the right thing looks like the right thing to do.
Sometimes it looks like the end of the world.
Here is a woodcut of Catherine by Desmond Chute; Ditchling-er, artist, author, friend of Pound, Beerbohm, Jones, etc.
Here is a poem about Catherine by Rita Dove.
Catherine of Siena
“You walked the length of Italy
to find someone to talk to.
You struck the boulder at the roadside
since fate has doors everywhere.Under the star-washed dome
of heaven, warm and dark
as the woolens stacked on cedar
shelves back home in your
father’s shop, you prayed
until tears streaked the sky.
No one stumbled across your path.
No one unpried your fists as you slept.”
Thanks for reading. Wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end. ☩