Catherine of Siena
Social Mystic (1347-1380)

Catherine Benincasa, born on the cusp of the Renaissance to a prosperous family, was a joyous child, who from the tender age of six felt a strong spiritual calling that only intensified during her lifetime.  After years of solitude, fasting, and prayer, she turned herself outward to work tirelessly for those suffering in body and spirit.  She became adept at settling disputes and old feuds, even becoming counsel to two popes.   With her acts of mercy, letter-writing crusades, and mediation skills that effectively influenced those in power towards peace, she was an extraordinary woman in her day, and she remains an inspiration still.
- Margaret Wakeley

Saint Catherine, born in Siena, was the twenty-fourth child in her bustling family.  She lived during a tumultuous time which included the schism within the Roman Church, in which she became an exemplary peacemaker, and the outbreak of the bubonic plague, which killed many among her family and friends.

Although Catherine was formed by the insecurities of her day, her own transformative path was two-fold.  As the title of Mary O’Driscoll’s biography Catherine of Siena:  Passion for Truth, Companion for Humanity indicates, Catherine emphasized truth and love as the mainstays of growth and recentering in wholeness and holiness.  “One of Catherine’s emphases in her writings,” O’Driscoll notes, “is that love follows knowledge, meaning that we need to know in order to love.” (1)  God tells Catherine in her Dialogues, “From the knowledge of me to the knowledge of oneself, from love of me to love of one’s neighbors.”  Interestingly, “while knowledge leads to love, love, in its turn, leads to greater knowledge.” (2)  For Catherine, therefore, the yin of love is balance by the yang of truth.  Wholeness in the complementarity of opposites is an ongoing process and learning through discernment.

Loving Neighbor

In Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching, we read the following:

              The Tao person dwells in peace:
              Reaching out
              In a community of heart,
              Regarding all that lives
              As one family. (3)

For Catherine, this community of heart has to do with staying centered in truth and love.  Truth is the “cell of self within yourself.” (4) Therefore, in reaching toward one’s neighbor, one will not be afraid to risk loving:

Come confidently…  For if you do as you should, God will be on your side and no one will be against you.  Up…courageously! I tell you, you have no need to fear. (5)

From F.C. Happold, we know that Catherine was “correspondent and advisor of popes, emperors, and kings.” (6) The enormity of her message and strength came from the integration within her inner cell of continually “living in God’s hold and tender love.” (7) Along with the tender opening, through tears, to God’s healing love came her remarkable ability to speak the truth to the leaders of her day.

Hence, we see once again the transformative bridge for Catherine between love and truth.  Being a peacemaker was not possible for someone who was not grounded and “engrafted into the word who is love.” (8) Love is like a tree:  “All of you are trees of love:  You cannot live without love because I made you for love.” (9)  Once we are able to love ourselves, we become capable of practicing love, peace, and truth-speaking in the world around us.

The Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, has put this spiritual reality of the inner forming the outer thus:

Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way…Love, compassion, altruism are the fundamental basis for peace.  Once these qualities are developed within an individual, he or she will create an atmosphere of peace and harmony.  This atmosphere can be expanded and extended from the individual to the family, from the family to the community, and eventually to the whole world. (10)

Catherine the Peacemaker 

Suzanne Noffke, one of the foremost scholars on Catherine, has aptly called Catherine a “social mystic” (11) because her prayer life and her truthful activism infused one another.  Because Catherine realized through her own mystical experience the “sacramentality of all life in Christ,” she treated issues of injustice as causes that denied the relationship of God’s presence within all people. Therefore, she tried, with every fiber of her being, to awaken people to the truth of particular situations in order that they might wake up God’s goodness present in all life.  Noffke states that one of Catherine’s favorite concepts is the mystery of God’s love and relationship to all people.  That mystery reveals, through mystical experience, the Christ-filled sacramentality alive all around us. (12)

“Mystical rapture in God always gave her certitude for quick action, “ according to Alois Maria Haas, and Catherine projected her internal ecstasies into “instruction and preaching about…the necessity of an uncompromising knowledge of self and of God.”(13) One could not go deeper into an awareness of God without stating the truth concerning the political and personal ill present in one’s world.

For Catherine, transformation always included improving the world around her as part of her own coming into wholeness.  Catherine was known both for her great love and for her tremendous strength and charity.

The tales that have come down to us from these years of “social work" in Siena are full of the warmly human side of Catherine.  She served as a nurse in homes and hospitals, looked out for the destitute, buried her father.  Yet this sudden shift to the outside did not end the silence and contemplation she still found in solitude.  Her public activities gained her notoriety, but those who began to gather round her looked for her most of all at home in her room, where in hours of conversation she both learned and taught — learned the subtleties of theological argument and biblical interpretation, and taught what she knew from experience of the way of God. (14)

Here was a woman who had not even been taught to read as a child evolving through her own motivation and inspiration by God into one trained to understand biblical and theological expositions.  Eventually Catherine’s subtle knowledge would influence many leading figures of her day.

Catherine’s own presence must have been a remarkable confirmation of opposites.  It is reminiscent of Hinduism’s teaching of Satchitananda. 

Satchitananda 

Sat is the truth, chit is being, and ananda is the bliss we experience when realizing that the closer we come to the truth, the closer we come to God.  In the final unity of Catherine’s life and “in the heart of Satchitananda, there is no divisiveness, nothing withheld or concealed from the whole.” (15) The result of such an enlightenment is that “the richness of Satchitananda consists precisely in the communication of its richness; its glory is the communication of glory.  This glory is given to each one and also given by each one.” (16) The job of Stachintananda consists in going beyond the ego, identifying with other people and creatures as Thou’s as well, and sharing one’s awareness freely “in communication, in giving and receiving.” (17)

This is why Gandhi’s nonviolent warriors were called Satyagrahi, followers of the truth.  For Gandhi, truth brought one away from violence and gave one the courage, again through identification with the thou of another, to fight the fight with “peace in one’s soul.” (18)

Gene Sharp, Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Albert Einstein Institute, has done a tremendous amount of research on viable nonviolent alternatives.  We see a new trend in diplomatic circles, the work of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, for example, in learning how to mediate and to reach the ends both sides desire through nonviolent means.  Sharp mentions several forms of non-cooperation in undertaking nonviolent protest and persuasion “through verbal and symbolic expressions of a position or a grievance.”  Among these are letters, petitions, leaflets, teach-ins, lobbying, picketing, mock awards, vigils, marches, religious processions, demonstrative funerals, and silence. (19)

Sharp believes that if citizens come to the realization that “it is conceivable that whole societies can be trained to carry out this kind of resistance in defense crises, then civilian-based defense would be possible as a policy that utilizes nonviolent civilian action to protect society against internal usurpations and external invasions.” (20)

During Catherine’s life and at that time in history, mostly because of Catherine’s personal religious convictions and experiences, she indeed practiced much of what Sharp describes.  In fact, Catherine’s indefatigable letter writing foreshadows the successful work of Amnesty International in freeing political prisoners and victims of injustice, largely through the practice of its dedicated letter-writing members.

In applying and relating Catherine’s contemplative action, her social mysticism today, I quote Sharp:  “the basic principles of the great religions, applied strategically to the world’s pressing conflicts, will recall themselves also as the basis of the highest pragmatism.” (21)

Each of us has a mystical social gift gained through our prayer life.  It is vital to have social commitments, whatever form those commitments may take for each of us.  Someone may picket to protest an unfair law; another might be a Western-trained anesthesiologist who decides to learn about Chinese acupuncture so as not to administer as much anesthesia during surgery, someone else may become involved in hospice work to counter our culture’s inability to cope with the reality of dying.  Social action that lasts, according to the Bhagavad Gita, and does not become uninspired, is directed from within as an integral part of our total human development:  “Great is the person who, free from attachments, and with a mind ruling its powers in harmony, works on the path of consecrated action.” (22)

New Possibilities 

As new possibilities emerge through prayer and healing, social mysticism becomes not a duty but a spontaneous garden of interior flowers.  The flowers’ scents, colors, and living crystalline shapes can further joy and healing in the world.  In the Taoist Chuang Tzu’s words:

              Make it be Spring with everything;
              mingling with all and
              creating the moment in your own mind –
              this is what I call being whole in power,
              this is what I call being whole in power. (23)

The masters Chuang Tzu and Catherine call us into an alternate definition of power, a power that is not dominating or damaging, but rather a meditative, calm power, bursting with multidimensional healing.

Sincere thanks to Maria Jaoudi
for permission to use this chapter from her book Christian Mysticism East and West: What the Masters Teach Us.

1.  Catherine of Siena (Hyde Park, N.Y.:  New city Tress, 1993), p. 15.
2.  Ibid.
3.   Dreher, The Tao of Inner Peace, bases her quotation on Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of Laotse: “The people of the world are brought into a community of heart/and the sage regards them all as his children” (p.231).
4.   Catherine of Siena, The Letters, Vol. I, translated by Suzanne Noffke, O.P, (Binghamton, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1988) Letter 73, p. 227
5.  Ibid., Letter 76, to Pope Gregory SI in Avignon, p. 234.
6.  F.C. Happold, Musticism:  A Study ans Anthology (London:  Penguin Books, 1990), p.101.
7.  Catherine, The Letters, Letter 76, p. 235.
8.  Ibid., Letter 88, p. 266.
9.  Catherine, The Dialogue, p.171.
10.  Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, from the foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (New York:  Bantam, 1991), n.p.
11.  Noffke, Introduction, in Catherine, The Dialogue, p.9.
12.  Catherine, Letters, Noffke’s comment on Letter 60, p. 33, n. 14.
13.  Alois Maria Haas, “Schools of Late Medieval Mysticism, “ in Christian Spirituality:  High Middle Ages and Reformation, p. 167, edited by Jill Raitt (New York:  Crossroad, 1987)
14.  Noffke, Introduction, in Catherine, The Dialogue, p. 4.
15.  Swami Abhishiktananda (Dom Henri le Saux), Saccidananda:  A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience (New Delhi:  I.S.P.C.K., 1984), p. 176
16.  Ibid., p. 177.
17.  Ibid., p. 176.
18.  Juan Mascaro, trans., The Bhagavad Gita (New York:  Penguin, 1982), 2:38, p. 51.
19.  Gene Sharp, “Nonviolent Struggle:  And Effective Alternative,” in Inner Peace, World Peace:  Essays on Buddhism and Nonviolence, edited by Kenneth Kraft (New York:  State University of New York, 1992), p. 116.
20.  Ibid., p. 122.  For a diverse selection of reading, including religious writers and texts, and a more extensive list of Sharp’s alternatives to violence, “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” see also  A Peace Reader:  Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence, and World Order,  edited by J. Fahey and R. Armstrong (New York:  Paulist Press, 1992).
21.  Ibid., p. 123.  Or as Mahatma Gandhi put it, “I do believe that the most spiritual act is the most practical in the true sense of the term” (chp.2, n.40).
22. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Mascaro, 3:7, p. 56.
23.  Chuang Tzu:  Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 70.