Of Holy Virgins
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #20, November 1996
Well, St. Catherine's Day (November 25) is upon us once more. Not so long ago it was still an important and joyful festival. In college, it was a special day for those studying philosophy, because Catherine was the patron of students and in particular of philosophers. In grammar school, we got the afternoon off to watch Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy movies - though we had to sit first through terrifying documentaries about forest fires and household accidents - the movies were courtesy of the Lands and Forest Department, through the village barber's brother who worked there as a prevention officer. The comedy films were actually enticements to come and see the documentaries about... families dying of monoxide poisoning because of an improper stoking of a coal furnace,.. a fat man choking on a fish bone in a restaurant,... a man electrocuted when his radio fell into the bathtub... and a grease fire on the kitchen stove reducing a house to cinders. But the greatest privilege of all was the permission to eat taffy ("tire de la Ste Catherine") at will all through the day even during classes.
The "tire" was a concoction made by boiling together brown sugar, molasses and butter and prepared ahead of time; it needed to be stretched out repeatedly till the right consistency was obtained and the bite-size pieces were then wrapped in waxed paper. It had nothing to do with the mastic-like commercial variety that is now sold for Halloween. Taffy-pulling was an elaborate ritual, but my mother never missed it... And to this day, my daughter Catherine comes home for it on her name-day.
The tradition apparently goes back to the earliest times of the colony, if the old second-grade Reader can be trusted. Mother Marguerite Bourgeoys one day ran out of French candies to reward the children and to attract young Indians. She imagined making substitute sweets with molasses, that staple of Old Quebec, still recalled in our "Faubourg à la m'lasse" district in Montreal. I remember that at my grandparents', the table was always set and an old whisky bottle filled with molasses (or should I call it treacle, because the word my grandfather used cannot be used now,... and indeed should not have been used then) dominated the setting. And molasses was poured on all food, including the meat.
St. Catherine was also the patron of young unmarried girls and eventually also of spinsters. At puberty a girl would become a Catherine ("être Catherine"), but the pivotal age was 25, when any girl still unclaimed would "coiffer la Catherine" (= crown St. Catherine's statue) and become a "catherinette" (typically a spinster working in a characteristic trade in millinery, haberdashery or needlework). The expression had to do with the custom of unmarried girls to assemble on the saint's feastday and to crown her statue with a garland of flowers; since only a virgin could perform this rite, a confirmed spinster was at 25 admitted among those who were entitled to this honour. Actually, the only people to hold the feast these days is the local lesbian community, as the secular "fête des vielles filles - the spinsters' day". In Québécois idiom, a catherine is also a fancy sled with which young men went courting... and also a large chamber-pot (!). As well, low-bush blackberries are called catherinettes.
The devotion to St. Catherine arose in the Middle Ages and her story was endlessly retold. She was part of the celebrated 14 Helper-Saints, whose efficiency in answering prayers was legendary. Her name refers to her purity (catharos = pure). Of royal birth, she lived in Alexandria where she studied the liberal arts in which she surpassed all her contemporaries. She was very beautiful. In c. 310 she confronted the Emperor Maximianus for his persecution of Christians. The emperor assembled the 50 wisest philosophers of his realm to convince her to renounce her faith, but she converted them all and even won the empress to Christ. She was condemned to suffer on the wheel-rack (or on four spiked wheels), but the instrument broke (by the hand of an angel) and she was finally beheaded (milk flowed from the wound). Her attributes are a crown (her origin), a book (her learning), a broken spiked wheel and a sword (her martyrdom).
As the Collect for the day recalls, her body was carried by angels onto Mount Sinai ("O God who on Mount Sinai didst give the law to Moses and afterwards through the ministry of Holy Angels didst mystically give rest thereon to the body of Blessed Catherine... grant that... we may be brought unto that mountain which is Christ"). In the 9th c. the presence of her remains on Jebel Katherin, the companion peak of Sinai, was revealed to a monk of the nearby Monastery of the Burning Bush. The bones exuded oil which the monks collected for the pilgrims. One day while a monk was collecting the oil, three finger-bones became detached which the monk took with him. The bones were eventually given to Robert Duke of Normandy, the father of the Conqueror, and were enshrined in the Abbey of the Trinity in Rouen.
The body was later carried down from the mountain to the monastery where it still lies and since the Middle Ages has been the focus of a celebrated pilgrimage. It is in a marble sarcophagus, though the head and one hand are kept in separate precious reliquaries, also containing various jewels, including a gold sovereign (!). So much so that the monastery is better known as St. Catherine's. "And every woman in the world who bears the beautiful name of Catherine owes something to this remote monastery of Mount Sinai, which sent the name of St. Catherine of Alexandria spinning like a fire-wheel over the Christian world."
From Normandy, the devotion spread to England, where Queen Mathilda founded a hospital and church of St. Catherine by the Tower, and to the rest of the Continent, and particularly into the Low Countries. There, the devotion made great strides and flourished in the late Middle Ages in the golden age of the Beguines and the Sisters of Common Life. This calling to a life of prayer and chastity was very popular with young women in search of the "good life" and desirous to get away from their domineering family and unwilling to face the tyranny of a husband, but ready to support themselves by their industry. In the 1300s Liège was said to harbour some 1500 béguines. Contrary to regular monasteries, the vows were of chastity, of piety and sometimes of obedience (rarely of poverty!) and they were only for the duration of the stay; there was no enclosure; the women were under the loose direction of a "Grande Demoiselle" but quite free from male ecclesiastical authority (hence they were frowned upon by church leaders). Some beguine-houses (Begijnhof) still survive, though they are put to secular use (as in Amsterdam), associated with a monastery (as in Bruges), and only occasionally used as originally intended (Ghent). Typically, there is a large garden (beluik) with a chapel surrounded by quaint little row-houses. The beguines followed a spirituality based on the "Imitation of Christ".
Among the images the beguines used in literature and art was that of the closed garden, the "hortus conclusus" or that of the sealed fountain, "fons signatus" of the Song of Solomon, which were the symbols of their virginity. In painting, this was depicted as the Blessed Virgin holding the Child Jesus amid a beautiful flower garden (paradise), the flowers representing the virtues, joys and sorrows of Our Lady, as well as those that the beguines bring to the Christ in their souls (of which the garden is also an image); a fountain often flows in its midst.
An important variation was to represent the Holy Mother and Child accompanied by two or more virgin saints, such as St. Catherine and St. Barbara. She was thus the Virgin among virgins ("Virgo inter virgines"). The saints add nothing to the picture, but enjoy the paradise in godly company. They are engaged in a so-called "sacra conversazione" or "conversatio mystica" which is not a conversation at all, since nothing actually occurs and the personages generally pay no attention to one another. It is essentially a symbolic world in a timeless environment.
In their life of faith and chastity, these women aimed to establish a more intimate relationship with their divine Saviour, much like that of our Lady, who is paradoxically both the mother and the bride of Christ. This divine betrothal was achieved through contemplation and the mystical union. This was particularly exemplified by St. Catherine, who is often represented offering a flower to the Child Jesus while He puts a ring on her finger as she becomes His mystical Bride, a "Sponsa Christi". Catherine was therefore a model for all consecrated virgins, as the order for their consecration recalls: "Receive the ring of faith, the seal of the Holy Ghost, so that from henceforth thou shalt be called the faithful spouse of Christ and that you never have any other spouse."
St John Altarpiece, c. 1479, oil on oak panel, 173.6 × 173.7 cm (central panel), 176 × 78.9 cm (each wing), Memlingmuseum, Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges
The most famous of such paintings is undoubtedly the triptych made by Hans Memling in 1479 for the high altar of St. John's Hospital at Bruges in Flanders. The hospital was run by both brothers and sisters, and two of each commissioned the altarpiece and are represented together with their patron-saints (James, Anthony, Agnes and Clara) on the outer panels. The inner panels show Our Lady reading a book held by an angel, with the Holy Child on her knees, and next to her St. Catherine and St. Barbara. St. Catherine (shown with wheel and sword) symbolises the contemplative side of the life of the brothers and sisters, and St. Barbara (reading a book next to her symbolic tower) represents the active side, St. Catherine receives on her finger the ring of her "mystic marriage" from the Child Jesus. On each side stand the patrons of the hospital, St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. The painting ranks among the most beautiful and touching I have ever seen and in itself is worth the trip to Bruges. It has an air of outerworldliness that surely must approximate that of paradise, as much as it is possible on this side of the veil.
All this is very nice, but none of it is true. Indeed, in 1969, the Roman Church deleted the feast from the calendar because there was no historical evidence that Catherine ever existed at all. The feast is in brackets in our own calendar and has disappeared from the BAS. The story is said to be the fanciful creation of a Carolingian writer.
Not so, pretend others, Catherine did indeed exist, but she was not even a Christian. According to this view, she was the last of the pagan wise women. She was a beautiful and famous pagan philosopher and mathematician in Alexandria by the name of Hypathia. Born c. 370, the daughter of Theon, a teacher at the famous Museum where she herself would later teach. She was killed by stoning in 415 by an angry Christian mob, excited by fanatic monks with the approval and perhaps complicity of St. Cyril of Alexandria. This Hypathia is known from the 7 surviving letters Bishop Synesios of Cyrene, who once studied under her, wrote to her. A local writer, Jean Marcel (Paquette) has produced a book on the subject entitled "Hypathie ou la fin des dieux" (Montréal: Leméac, 1989).
Other saints venerated in the same context were:
St. Barbara, an equally fictitious compatriot of St. Catherine, was kept locked in a tower by her father to protect her great beauty from unsuitable suitors. She passed her time in devotional reading and became a Christian. She had three windows set in the tower in honour of the Trinity instead of the two her father Dioscorus had planned. He tried to get her to renounce her faith and executed her with his own hands. He was immediately struck by lightning (as he well should!). Barbara is therefore invoked as patron of gunners, miners, artificers and by extension of knights and soldiers. She is represented reading besides her tower.
St. Dorothy of Cappadocia was arrested for her faith; in prison she resisted the sexual advances of women who wanted to defile her and converted them. During her trial, lawyer Theophilus taunted her, asking her to return after her death (by beheading) to bring back for him some of the eternal flowers and fruits of paradise - which she did, and so he converted and he too died a martyr. She is usually represented carrying a basket laden with apples and roses.
St. Agnes, a genuine Roman child martyr, was sent by her father to a brothel because she would not marry as her father required. There her hair grew to hide her nakedness. She was killed by being stabbed in the throat. Her emblem is a lamb, symbol of her purity and tender age and also a pun on her name (Agnes - Agnus).
Another celebrated triptych also at Bruges, that of the Deploration of Christ, also painted by Memling (for Brother Adrian) represents St. Wilberfortis and St. Mary the Egyptian as the companion saints: St. Wilberfortis was a beautiful maiden who "grew a beard" to discourage suitors and preserve her virginity; she was ultimately crucified by her irate father. St. Mary the Egyptian, on the other hand, was no virgin, but rather an Alexandrian prostitute who bought her way to the Holy Land by sleeping with a ship captain; she converted in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and retired to the desert where she lived a life of penance for 60 years; she is represented naked (her clothes eventually wore off in the desert sun) partly covered by her long hair, holding the three loaves of bread which were her only food during all that time.
All these women died to maintain their chastity (or atoned for its loss) and would therefore be "natural" examples for nuns and beguines. As virginity and chastity lost their appeal with the beginning of modern times when the likes of Erasmus disparaged consecrated life by telling stories, such as that of Catherine (again!) the "virgo mysogamos" (the marriage-hating virgin) who, after experiencing in a religious house the abuse of lecherous clergy and sapphic co-religious, became a "virgo poenitens" (a regretful virgin). And Luther reminded women of their God-determined fate: "Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence... (Women) have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon, keep house and bear and raise children". The beguines were persecuted by the male clergy and corralled into convents and cloisters, "to live their chastity behind bars rather than in the world". The devotion to the "holy lay virgins" lost its original intensity. And all these saints are now nearly completely forgotten, except in name.
One wonders why these stories from Voragine's Golden Legend, mostly fanciful, captivated the imagination of so many generations of Christians and helped them along in their spiritual lives. I cannot but see in them Fairy Tales for the Soul. Just think of the story of St. Barbara. Does it not recall a similar tale by the Brothers Grimm? Is not Barbara in a way a spiritual Rapunzel? A Rapunzel who is imprisoned in the tower of paganism and idolatry and finds through her own industry and studies (cf. Rapunzel letting her hair grow?) her liberation by discovering Christ her prince and lover who, after many trials and eventually martyrdom, brings her to His Kingdom where they live happily together ever after?
One can only hope that one day someone will read the Golden Legend with the same eyes with which psychologist Bruno Bettelheim ("The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales." New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) and priest-psychoanalyst-rebel Eugen Drewermann ("Grimms Märchen tiefenpsychologisch gedeutet." Olten, 1985) re-read the fairy tales and that they will decode their inner meanings for us. I am sure it will be like discovering fabulous (no pun intended!) lost treasures!