A very short reflection on Saint Catherine of Siena

Today, April 29, is the feast of Catherine of Siena. And in Roman Catholic circles, she is an important saint: one of the doctors of that church, a patron saint of Italy and Europe and of medical workers and the sick. Her story is weird enough, speaking as a Protestant, to include invisible stigmata, visions, severe asceticism, Jesus's foreskin, and a treatise on prayer, the Dialogues, dictated while in ecstasy but edited in normal time—and there is a mini lesson on creativity there. So what is a Protestant to do?

Her time, 14th century Italy, was far worse than our own: rolling plagues (she was born during the Black Plague), people resigned to unseen death, deeply troubled and angry politics, and a church that was far more compromised than it appears today. There was little good, little hope, and little time.

Using the tools she had, which was mostly her own body in ascetic devotion, she argued for and practiced peace-seeking, compassion, and actually doing something for other people.[1] Mother Teresa didn’t get her model in Calcutta from nowhere. Catherine wrote letters to people in power. She did medical work with deeply sick people. She ministered to condemned prisoners. And it goes on.

In other words, she resolved to begin addressing her world’s problems with herself. And, in so doing, she became "a fragrant flower in the mystic body of the holy church."[2]

But hers wasn’t a bootstraps thing. She, in her weird medieval way, got her vision and hope in prayer and acted accordingly. She acted in love for Jesus and, consequently, loved what Jesus loves: the church and cast-aside kinds of people. She didn’t see her circumstances, she reinterpreted them in the light of the resurrection.[3] Not a bad idea. But this is no eighties-movie montage: she also worked very hard and suffered a great deal physically and socially.

So, yes, with Catherine of Siena, a Protestant has to wade through a great deal of difficult material. But what comes out is something very recognizable: a Christian intent on personal and social reform through personal holiness, social compassion, and political advocacy. In our own day, that is a figure our time could use more of.

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[1] Catherine appears at a time after the anchorites and before the Italian Renaissance, which would inevitably lead to greater and greater lay-leadership in the church. Also, not to be tautologous, she is woman. These two facts, put together, make her solution quite innovative. She practiced her ministry outside of the convent, though as part of a religious community. She lived at home, but in a cell. And her ascesis was such (read more-than-severe by modern standards), that she transformed her body from that of a woman to that of an icon. This allowed her to write popes and other powerful people; to do papal business; and to minister in contexts, such as prisons, where a woman may not have been as welcome. I'm sure there is a good deal of work in feminist or queer theology about this sort of thing, e.g. "the queering of her body."

[2] Quoting her description of priests working in the Italian churches.

[3] from her Dialogues, in the Treatise on Prayer (20):

"When therefore the soul has arrived at seeing, knowing, and tasting, in its full sweetness, this light, she runs, as one enamored and inflamed with love, to the table of holy desire; she does not see herself in herself, seeking her own consolation either spiritual or temporal, but, like one who has placed his all in this light and knowledge, and has destroyed his own will, she shuns no labor from whatever source it comes, but rather enduring the troubles, the insults, the temptations of the Devil, and the murmurings of men, eats at the table of the most holy Cross, the food of the honor of Me, the Eternal God, and of the salvation of souls; seeking no reward, either from Me or from creatures, because she is stripped of mercenary love, that is of love for Me based on interested motives, and is clothed in perfect light, loving Me in perfect purity, with no other regard than for the praise and glory of My Name, serving neither Me for her own delight, nor her neighbor for her own profit, but purely through love alone."

Theologians in Blogs Getting Coffee: Theologie der Hoffnung

Good morning, friends. Today, I get to talk to you about a fundamental idea in one of those most important books in my life, Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope. Moltmann wrote Theologie der Hoffnung in the mid sixties. He himself is a biographical theologian because he has an interesting biography. He was conscripted into the German army at 15. Surrendered eagerly to the American army soon after. And he spent the next few years in various POW. He was converted in camp. Became a pastor after the war. And, from his work as a pastor, started thinking a lot about a subject we think about a lot: hope.

It was, oddly enough, during his honeymoon that he read a book called the Principle of Hope (Prinzip Hoffnung) by a neo-Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch. The book gripped his imagination. And he often said to his new bride: "Christians have more reason to hope than anyone. Why aren't we thinking like this?" Moltmann decided to begin thinking about the category of Christian hope. By then, he had begun lecturing at university, and he began using his lectures as a method to work through these questions.

Let me give you a taste of what Moltmann sounds like. This is from the preface in his paperback edition. Recall that Western theology in the sixties is trying to come to terms with the aftermath of WW2 + Auschwitz, and people are asking, "What now?" The Existentialism of Sartre and Marxist atheism were attempting to answer people's questions. So, Moltmann says,

"Why has Christian theology allowed [the category of] hope to escape it, when this is its very own special theme? . . . What has happened to the early Christian spirit of active hope today? . . . For [Marxists], atheism was the presupposition of active hope; for Jean-Paul Sartre, atheism was the presupposition of human freedom. But for me, the God of promise and exodus, the God who has raised Christ and who lets the power of the resurrection dwell in us, is the ground for active and for passive hope."

Moltmann quickly realized that the category of hope falls under the theological category of eschatology, which is the doctrine of last things: the end of the world, the coming of Jesus, the judgment, etc.

It was a category that presented some problems. From the perspective of a table of contents, eschatology always comes last. (Oh, I apologize: eschatology = eschatos (last) + logos (Eng. suffix: -ology) = word about x or study of last things.) Whenever theologians wrote theology or address catechetical lectures, eschatology was simply stuck to the end. It was the runt. Not only, but eschatology is often treated as an escape category irrelevant to the lived world. Moltmann saw from Ernst Bloch's book, Prinzip Hoffnung, that this didn't have to be the case. The future, he saw, may just have everything to do with the present (and even more than you'd expect). So, as I say, he got to thinking about it in his lectures, and they became his book Theologie der Hoffnung in 1965.

I can't help but mention that eschatology wasn't limited to Bloch. New Testament theology had been in an argument for a hundred years about aspects of Jesus's person and teaching. The Jesus that emerged was a teacher who was a thoroughgoing eschatological prophet and who cannot be understood apart from eschatological categories.

Last thing today. I know this is taking some time. I'm putting a little here and there so you guys can kind of touch in. Let me leave you with a bit from Moltmann, from his introduction. He is talking about how eschatology has been denigrated as being irrelevant etc. So he says--and the big moves he is making are there to see in this:

"In actual fact, eschatology means the doctrine of the Christian hope, which embraces both the object hoped for and also the hope inspired by it. From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. . . . For Christian faith lives from the raising of the crucified Christ, and strains after the promises of the universal future of Christ. . . . Hence eschatology cannot be only a part of Christian doctrine. Rather, the eschatological outlook is characteristic of all Christian proclamation, of every Christian existence and of the whole Church. . . [God] encounters us in his promises of the future. [Therefore] eschatology should not be [the end of theology], but its beginning."

Tomorrow I will talk about how he takes Luther's simil anthropology and makes eschatology its context, now that eschatology is the very bath in which theology bathes and not some forgotten chapter or wishful thought.