A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [212]
Behind the trances were extreme austerities of fasting and deprivations of sleep and comfort. The more extreme in such practices, the more a person was removing himself from material life. (According to La Tour Landry, “To eat once a day is the life of an angel; twice a day the right life of men and women; more than that the life of a beast”). Catherine was reported to have lived on hardly more than a little raw lettuce, and if forced to eat, to turn her head away and spit out what she had chewed or cause herself to vomit lest any food or liquid remain in her stomach. She had practiced asceticism since the age of seven, when she saw her first visions, perhaps not unconnected with being the youngest of 23 children. Thereafter she stubbornly secluded herself from the worldly commotion of a large family in a dyer’s household, and dedicated her virginity to Christ.
The ecstasies of the union were very real to Catherine, as they were to many women who escaped the marital bond by entering religious life. Christ confirmed her betrothal, Catherine wrote, “not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy flesh, for when he was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his holy body.” Taught to read at the age of twenty by a Dominican sister of noble family, Catherine read the Song of Songs over and over, repeating in her prayers the sigh of the bride, “May he kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” and was rewarded when Jesus appeared to her and bestowed upon her “a kiss which filled her with unutterable sweetness.” After her prolonged prayers to be fixed in “perfect faith” and to become an instrument for the salvation of erring souls, Jesus took her for his bride in a ceremony performed by his Holy Mother and attended by St. John, St. Paul, and St. Dominic, with music from David’s harp.
As a tertiary or non-cloistered member of the Dominicans, Catherine threw herself into the care of humanity, seeking out prisoners, the poor, and the sick, tending the plague victims of 1374 among whom two of her siblings and eight nieces and nephews died. In an extreme episode she sucked pus from the cancerous sore of a hospital patient as if acting out the mystics’ insistence on direct contact with the wounds of Christ as the source of spiritual experience.
In the words of the German mystic Johannes Tauler, Catherine’s contemporary, it was necessary “to press one’s mouth to the wounds of the crucified.” The blood that flowed from the wounds, from the thorns, from the flagellation, obsessed religious fanatics. It was a sacred bath to cleanse sin. To drink it, to wash the soul with it was salvation. Tauler dwelt on the subject for so long in his thoughts that he felt he must have been present at the source. He calculated the number of lashes and knew that Jesus had been tied so tightly to the column that the blood spurted from his nails; that he had been whipped on the back and then on the chest until he was one great wound. St. Brigitta in her revelations saw his bloody footsteps when he walked and how, when crowned with thorns, “his eyes, his ears, his beard ran with blood; his jaw distended, his mouth open, his tongue swollen with blood. His stomach was pulled in so that it touched his spine as if he had no more intestines.”
Catherine herself hardly ever spoke of Christ, her bridegroom, without mentioning blood—“blood of the Lamb,” “the keys of the blood,” “blood filled with eternal divinity,” “drinking the blood of the heart of Jesus.” Sangue was in every sentence; sangue and dolce (blood and sweet) were her favorite words. Words poured from