Letters of Catherine Benincasa

by Saint of Siena Catherine

This my soul desires, that you may be a true daughter, and a bride consecrated to Christ, and a fruitful field, not sterile, but full of the sweet fruits of true virtues. Hasten, hasten, for time is short and the road is long. And if you gave all you have in the world, time would not pause for you from running its course. I say no more. Remain in the holy and sweet grace of God. Pardon me if I have said too many words, for the love and zeal that I have for your salvation have made me say them. Know that I would far rather do something for you than merely talk. May God fill you with His most sweet Favour. Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love.

TO BROTHER RAIMONDO OF CAPUA OF THE ORDER OF THE PREACHERS

The following is one of the famous letters of the world. The record in art and literature of the scene which it depicts has carried knowledge of Catherine to many who otherwise would have but the vaguest idea of her personality. The letter has been frequently translated, but most of the translators have avoided the opening and closing paragraphs, with their amazing, confused, and to our modern taste almost shocking metaphors. Surely, however, we want the whole just as Catherine poured it out; full of intense excitement, her emotions clearer than her ideas, lifted into a region where taste and logic have no meaning, and using, to convey the inexpressible feelings quickened by the events she describes, homeliest figures of speech, such as her commercial surroundings naturally suggest to her. For the matter of that, modern congregations sing with no distress:

"Jesus let me still abide
In Thy heart and Wounded Side."

The reiteration of the figure of the Blood is here psychologically inevitable. Catherine writes still quivering from close contact with the victim of a mediaeval execution.

A young gentleman from Perugia, Niccolo Tuldo by name, had been condemned to death for speaking critically of the Sienese Government. It does not appear that he was a serious political conspirator, but simply a young man whose aristocratic sympathies led him thoughtlessly to the use of haughty or bitter speech. But a parvenu Government is always sensitive. We hear of a man at this time being condemned and executed because he had not invited one of the Riformatori to a feast!

Death was lightly inflicted in those days: probably it was no more lightly suffered than in our own. We have vivid accounts of the incredulity with which Niccolo Tuldo received his sentence—incredulity leading to horror, to rage, to rebellion, to black despair. Then Catherine went to him; her own words tell the rest. As one reads of the wonderful effect of her soothing presence, as one sees the terrified youth becoming quiet and subdued, clinging wistfully to the spiritual strength of this frail woman, and catching at the end not only her spirit of calm submission, but even something of her exaltation, one is irresistibly reminded of another scene—George Eliot's marvellous description in "Adam Bede" of Dinah's ministry to Hetty in the prison. But this scene is real, that only imagined; and here no third person, but the consoler herself, reveals the meaning of the experience to her own spirit.

In bringing Niccolo Tuldo to so illumined an end that he recognized the judgment-place as holy, and died in full accord with the will of God, Catherine achieved a great marvel which only Christianity can compass: she lifted one of those seemingly purposeless and cruel accidents of destiny which stagger faith, into unity with the organic work of the world's redemption.

In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary:

Most beloved and dearest father and dear my son in Christ Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you, commending myself to you in the precious Blood of the Son of God; with desire to see you inflamed and drowned in that His sweetest Blood, which is blended with the fire of His most ardent charity. This my soul desires, to see you therein, you and Nanni and Jacopo my son. I see no other remedy by which we may reach those chief virtues which are necessary to us. Sweetest father, your soul, which has made itself food for me—(and no moment of time passes that I do not receive this food at the table of the sweet Lamb slain with such ardent love)—your soul, I say, would not attain the little virtue, true humility, were it not drowned in the Blood. This virtue shall be born from hate, and hate from love. Thus the soul is born with very perfect purity, as iron issues purified from the furnace.