Catherine of Genoa as Guide
O Lover,
In the genre of Renaissance Christian mystics Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) is distinguished from most others: she was the first married Christian woman to leave a mystical paper trail; engaged in all aspects of Genoa’s Pammatone Hospital during the plague, she integrated the contemplative and the active as few others have; her asceticism, including both inédia (“fasting”) and scatóphagy, could be severe; her traditional devotions involving the saints (including the Holy Mother), formulaic prayers (e.g., the Rosary), and relics were minimal; her references to Jesus were rare, particularly regarding the passion, cites of the Trinity near nil in the writings of her circle.
So what did characterize the mysticism of Catherine of Genoa? While kneeling before her confessor during the Lent of 1473, she was irrevocably wounded by the awareness of Your essence as “Pure and Supreme Love.” This theme would be dominant in Catherine’s subsequent life and would shape her contribution to Christian mysticism in several specific ways.
First, Catherine sought to eschew all self-interest, whether consolations, rewards, contentment, or other benefits. “I do not want, O Sweet Love, what comes from [Y]ou, but [Y]ou alone, Love.” She was content solely with You as Love Itself, allowing no thing to be the means to that Télos (“Goal”). This stark clarity thus had her joining other mystics like Eckhart in the phrase “loving [You] without a why.”
Second, with the exception of the Eucharist which she received daily, Catherine was impatient with mediations of You. The following is attributed to her: “I do not want a love that is FOR God, or IN God, because these things signify to me that something can be between the one and the other, something that love cannot abide in its purity . . . .” Rather than some depiction, dogma or devotion, all of which fall far short, she wanted You Yourself directly in Your nakedness, Your apophatic strippedness. Like her Sienese namesake, she longed to be “inebriated” in You. Living amid sundry mediational way stations, kataphatic and penultimate all, patricentric Catherine was ever eager for the destination última: You, O Lover.
Third, Catherine and her circle repeatedly wrote of union with You in terms of “annihilation” of self-love and even the faculty of will itself. A passage bordering on the very destruction of personhood is the following: “My being is the being of God, not through participation, but the transformation and annihilation of its own being.” Although her writings might not employ the term unítus indistinctiónis (“union sans differentiation”) as did the Eckhartians and some of the 13th-14th C Beguines, her proximity to their edge-walking is evidenced by quotes attributed to her like the following: “My ‘me’ is God: I do not know another ‘me’ that is not my God.” A key component of the tragic magisterial suppression of what would be dubbed “quietism” in the late 17th C would be anathematization of the annihilation of the will.
Catherine is central to this prayer post, O Lover, because her mystical profile increasingly seems to parallel my own in this my octogenarity. An incarnationist for the duration, I am nevertheless diminishingly moved by, or interested in, mediations. Being among those who have glimpsed You within, beneath, and beyond all things, my destination too is You alone (Tu sólus), The One whom I hope to take bare. Like Catherine I am episodically aware of a “paring down,” a segueing into deeper simplicity. Amid a growing awareness of affinity with Catherine, the “homestretch” season of my “bucket list” is being reduced to singularity: becoming totally lost (“abyssed,” “drowned”) in You.
Catherine is thus an increasingly poignant member of that engaged “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) via whom You are inexorably and deifyingly drawing all of us finite beloveds into You who are Pure and Supreme Love.
