SOURCE: Introduction to Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, by St. Catherine of Siena, translated by Suzanne Noffke, Paulist Press, 1980, pp. 1-22.

[In the following excerpt, Noffke examines Catherine of Siena's ecstatic experiences as they are articulated in her writings and recorded by her contemporaries.]

… What, in terms of human inheritance, were the springs of Catherine's knowledge and teaching? She had no formal schooling. Just how extensively she read is not certain, but she was a tireless conversationalist. She never wrote what could be called theology reduced to a system; in fact, it is her lack of an established system that lends her writings their marvelous if sometimes frustrating and tiring style of layer on layer of interwoven development: No thread is ever let go of or left unrelated to every other thread. Yet critics continue to debate her academic pedigree: Her teaching is clearly scholastic and Thomistic (e.g., Cordovani, Taurisano, Paris, Oddasso-Cartotti). Her teaching is clearly not Thomistic (e.g., Foster). Her teaching is predominantly Augustinian (e.g., Canet, Hackett). She was most influenced by Ubertino da Casale (Grion). The writings of the Dominicans Jacopo da Voragine and Cavalca exercised the more primary influence on her (D'Urso). This list is certainly not exhaustive. I would lean, however, toward the position of those (e.g., Getto) who are content to recognize multiple influences in Catherine's writings: Augustine, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Bernard, Francis, Thomas, Ubertino, Passavanti, Cavalca, Colombini. Like everything that came her way she absorbed them all and integrated them into her whole knowledge. Theologically there is nothing new or original. Catherine is completely immersed in the main current of Catholic teaching, and she is impeccably orthodox even in subtle distinctions where one might expect her, untrained as she was in formal theology, to have slipped up at least occasionally.

What is original in Catherine is her capacity for fresh and vivid expression of the tradition. The scholars taught and wrote still in Latin. Yet all that she wrote and dictated was in her own Sienese dialect, nel suo volgare. True, Passavanti and Cavalca before her had used the vernacular to write of things religious, but they were popularizers. Catherine, though she addressed herself to every imaginable class of people—popes and cardinals; monarchs, princes, and governors; priests, nuns, and pious laity; mercenaries, prisoners, and prostitutes—was not a popularizer. In her own apparently systemless yet close-knit system she developed her arguments and themes in great detail. Her pages are studded with metaphors and compounded metaphors. She repeats, yet always with some new layer of relationship. She explodes into ecstatic prayer. She teaches. Always she teaches.

The Scriptures she heard and read presumably only in Latin are at home in her works, in her own dialect, with a natural sort of familiarity that is strongly reminiscent of the long savoring and fondling of the old Jewish masters. These are no mere recited "proof-texts." They flow in and out of her sentences with such ease and integration that it is more often than not difficult to set them off with quotation marks. She so rearranges and combines passages around a single stream of thought that her own message and that of the Scriptures fuse into one.

Remarkable also, and especially noticeable in the Dialogue because of its somewhat secondary nature in relation to some of her earlier letters, is Catherine's handling of her own mystical experiences. What she has "heard" in these encounters with God is not her own to tamper with. She may rephrase stories she repeats from the Lives of the Fathers or incidents she has related in other contexts, but whenever she lifts the "words of God" from her own first accounting of them she leaves the original wording intact. If clarification is needed she expands with parenthetical inserts, but seldom touches that original wording. In a way not unlike the Scriptures, these words are hers to use but not to change.¹⁷

While Catherine's letters are the better window to her personality, growth, and relationships with others, the Dialogue is her crowning work, her bequest of all her teaching to her followers. She called it simply "my book," and in her last letter to Raymond¹⁸ she entrusted its destiny to him: "I ask you also—you and brother Bartolomeo [de' Dominici] and brother Tommaso [della Fonte] and the maestro [Giovanni Tantucci]—to take in hand the book and any of my writings that you find. Together with master Tommaso [Pietra] do with them what you see would be most for the honor of God. I found some recreation in them."

Certain twists in the path by which the tradition has come into English have ended in a rather common belief that Catherine dictated the Dialogue entirely in the space of a single five-day ecstasy.¹⁹ The total composite of references to the work by Catherine herself and a number of her contemporaries, however, makes it clear that a much longer time was involved, probably close to a year.

Both Raymond and Caffarini set the beginning and immediate motive of the work in a particularly significant mystical experience. Raymond writes:

So about two years before her death, such a clarity of Truth was revealed to her from heaven that Catherine was constrained to spread it abroad by means of writing, asking her secretaries to stand ready to take down whatever came from her mouth as soon as they noticed that she had gone into ecstasy. Thus in a short time was composed a certain book that contains a dialogue between a soul who asks the Lord four questions, and the Lord himself who replies to the soul, enlightening her with many useful truths.²⁰

Caffarini further specifies that she "composed her book and set it in order."²¹

The experience referred to is without a doubt the one Catherine elaborates in a long letter to Raymond, written from Rocca d'Orcia in early October 1377, the letter that was to form the framework and basic content of her book. She tells of having offered four petitions to God (for the reform of the Church, for the whole world, for Raymond's spiritual welfare, and for a certain unnamed sinner), to each of which, in her ecstasy, God had responded with specific teachings.²²

Catherine probably began the work then and there, while still at Rocca d'Orcia. In the same letter to Raymond she relates how she had suddenly learned to write, and in another to Monna Alessa she tells of God's having given her a diversion from her pains in her writing.²³ In any case, the book must have taken some shape by the time she left on her second peace-making mission to Florence, for in May or June of 1378 she writes to Stefano Maconi back in Siena:

I sent a request to the countess [Benedetta de' Salimbeni, with whom she had lived at Rocca d'Orcia] for my book. I have waited several days for it and it hasn't come. So if you go there, tell her to send it at once, and tell anyone who might go there to tell her this.²⁴

Almost certainly she spent some time on the manuscript between acts during those tumultuous months in Florence. She left it behind at her quick departure, and on her return to Siena wrote to the man who had probably been her host there: "Give the book to Francesco … for I want to write something in it."²⁵ And Raymond records, significantly, that "when the peace [between Florence and the Papacy] had been proclaimed, she returned home and attended more diligently to the composition of a certain book, which she dictated in her own dialect, inspired by the supernal Spirit."²⁶

The book must have been in a form Catherine considered finished before the schism had fully erupted, for there is no allusion to schism in it, though there is much about corruption in the Church and the need for reform. Also, Caffarini states that she had finished the book before she was called to Rome in November of 1378²⁷

The testimony of Catherine's contemporaries is unanimous that the book involved a great deal of dictation on her part while she was in ecstasy.²⁸ And Caffarini in his testimony in the Processus of Venice adds some fascinating details:

I say also that I have very often seen the virgin in Siena, especially after her return from Avignon, rapt beyond her senses, except for speech, by which she dictated to various writers in succession sometimes letters and sometimes the book, in different times and in different places, as circumstances allowed. Sometimes she did this with her hands crossed on her breast as she walked about the room; sometimes she was on her knees or in other postures; but always her face was lifted toward heaven. Concerning the composition of her book, then: This among other marvels occurred in the virgin: When emergencies would cause several days to pass in which she was kept from pursuing her dictation, as soon as she could take it up again she would begin at the point where she had left off as if there had been no interruption or space of time. Moreover, as is evident in the course of her book, sometimes after she had dictated several pages, she would summarize or recapitulate the main content as if the things she had dictated were (and in fact they were) actually present to her mind.²⁹

But the style of the Dialogue betrays not only such "ecstatic dictation," but also a great deal of painstaking (sometimes awkward) expanding and drawing in of passages written earlier. There is every reason to believe that Catherine herself did this editing. First of all, it is not an editing in the direction of more polished style, which it probably would have been had it been the work of any of her secretaries, for they were men whose own style reflected their learning. And if Raymond's attitude is typical, they considered the saint's writings too sacred to tamper with.³⁰ Furthermore, besides his reference to Catherine's setting her book in order, Caffarini records having been told by Stefano Maconi that the latter had seen Catherine writing with her own hand "several pages of the book which she herself composed in her own dialect."³¹

It has already been noted how the Dialogue owes much of its content and structure to the experience Catherine related to Raymond in her letter of October 1377.³² Dupre-Theseider, in the article already referred to, elaborates further direct parallels between letter 64/65 and chapters 98 to 104 of the Dialogue. Numerous less spectacular instances of carryover must await further study, but no one can read both letters and Dialogue without noticing the recurrence of certain themes and images.…

Notes

¹⁷. Cf. E. Dupre-Theseider, "Sulla composizione del 'Dialogo' di Santa Caterina da Siena," Giornale storica della letteratura italiana 117 (1941): 161-202.

¹⁸ Let. 373, written February 15, 1380.

¹⁹ Cf. especially J. Hurtaud in the Introduction to his French translation of the Dialogue (Paris: Lethellieux, 1931) and J. Jorgensen, Saint Catherine of Siena (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939), p. 311. The latter, however, takes a broader view in note 8, p. 428.

²⁰ [Legenda Major. S. Caterina da Siena. Tr. Giuseppe Tinagli (Siena: Cantagalli, 1934),] 111, iii. It is to references such as this that we owe the book's present title. Catherine's early disciples variously called it The Book of Divine Providence, The Book of Divine Teaching, The Dialogue, The Dialogue of Divine Providence.

²¹Legenda Minor [di S. Caterina da Siena. Ed. Francesco Grottanelli (Bologne: Presso Geetano Romagnoli, 1868)], III, iii.

²² Let. 272. For a detailed presentation of parallels between this letter and the Dialogue, see Dupre-Theseider, "Sulla composizione.…"

²³ Let. 119.

²⁴ Let. 365.

²⁵ Addendum to Let. 179, published by R. Fawtier in Mélanges d'archeologie et d'histoire 34 (1914): 7.

²⁶Leg. Maj. III, i.

²⁷Leg. Min. III, i.

²⁸Leg. Maj. III, i; Cristofano di Gan o Guidini, Memorie, ed. Milanesi, p. 37; testimonies of Stefano Maconi, Francesco Malavolti, Bartolomeo de' Dominici, in Processus, cited in Grion, [Aluaro.] Santa Caterina [da Siena. dottrine efonti (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1953)], p. 318; Caffarini, Libellus de Supplemento, [Ed. Guiliana Cavallini and Imelda Foralosso (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1974),] III, vi, 6.

²⁹Processus, cited in Grion, Santa Caterina, p. 318.

³⁰Leg. Maj. III, iii, Lamb, p. 321: "Meanwhile, so that no one will imagine that … I have added anything of my own, I call upon first Truth itself to be my judge and witness.… On the contrary, I have tried to keep the same order of words, and have made every effort, insofar as is allowed by the Latin syntax, to translate word for word, though strictly speaking this cannot always be done without adding some kind of interpolation, a conjunction or an adverb for instance, that is not in the original. But this does not mean that I have tried to change the meaning or add anything; it simply means that I have tried to achieve a certain elegance and clarity of utterance."

³¹Supp. I, i, 9.

³² Let. 272.…