Catherine of Alexandria

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine, is said to have died in the early 4th century, yet the oldest surviving account of her life was compiled in 976. That document is the Menologium, prepared for the Emperor Basil II, and it appears roughly 600 years after the date tradition gives for her martyrdom. According to that tradition, she was a Christian virgin who suffered at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. Today the Eastern Orthodox Church honors her as a great martyr, and the Catholic tradition counts her among the Fourteen Holy Helpers. So who was the woman at the center of all this devotion? What did the legend claim she did? Did she ever live at all? And why do a firework, a lunar crater and several islands still carry her name?

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• 2. The Scholar Princess

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  Constus, sometimes spelled Costus, governed Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Maximian, who ruled from 286 to 305. His wife was Sabinella, and their daughter Catherine is described as Greco-Egyptian. From childhood she gave herself to study. Around the age of 14, according to her hagiography, a vision of the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus persuaded her to become a Christian. The same tradition says she went on to bring hundreds of people to the faith. Then the persecutions began under the Emperor Maxentius, and Catherine went to him in person to rebuke him for his cruelty. Maxentius answered with a trap built from talent. He summoned 50 of the best pagan philosophers and orators, hoping they would tear apart her arguments. Catherine won the debate instead. Several of her opponents, overcome by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians, and the emperor had them put to death at once. Her victory had made an enemy of a man who could now simply order her silenced.

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• 3. Prison and the Wheel

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  A dove from heaven fed Catherine every day in her cell, if the legend is to be believed. The emperor had ordered terrible tortures and then prison. Inside, Christ was said to visit her, urging her to fight bravely and promising a crown of everlasting glory. Angels dressed her wounds with salve. Visitors came as well. More than 200 people made their way to see her, among them the emperor's own wife, Valeria Maximilla. All of them converted, and all were later martyred. Torture had failed, so Maxentius tried persuasion and offered to marry her. Catherine refused, answering that her spouse was Jesus Christ, to whom she had consecrated her virginity. In his fury the emperor condemned her to die on a spiked breaking wheel. At her touch, the wheel shattered. Maxentius then ordered her beheaded, and Catherine herself told the executioner to begin. When the blow fell, the legend says, a milk-like substance flowed from her neck instead of blood. In most versions, her last words asked Christ to answer the prayers of anyone who remembers her martyrdom and calls on her name.

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• 4. Doubtful Origins

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  Around 320, the historian Eusebius wrote about a young Christian woman whom the ruler Maximinus summoned to his palace to be his mistress. She refused. Maximinus punished her by banishing her and confiscating her estates. Eusebius never named her, but Rufinus of Aquileia, in his translation of that work, called her Dorothea. Some have long suspected her to be the seed of the Catherine legend. In the sixteenth century, the Italian historian Caesar Baronius, who lived from about 1538 to 1607, went further. He proposed that the two women were one person. Catherine, or Hecaterina, would have been her pagan name, and Dorothea, meaning gift of God, the name she took at baptism. Other writers are far harsher. The Encyclopædia Britannica notes that no surviving written mention of Catherine is known before the 9th century and calls her historicity doubtful. Donald Attwater saw no positive evidence that she existed outside the mind of a Greek writer composing what he called an edifying romance. Harold Davis wrote that "assiduous research has failed to identify Catherine with any historical personage." The Catholic Encyclopedia takes a middle path. It does not deny that she lived, but it rejects most of the embellishing detail, including her long speeches, as later inventions. Its author Leon Clugnet insisted that doubt about the texts casts no shadow on the saint's existence. Then there is Hypatia. Anna Brownell Jameson was the first to argue that Catherine's story had been tangled up with the life of this later philosopher of Alexandria. Hypatia was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. She was murdered by the Parabalani after being accused of worsening a quarrel between the governor Orestes and the bishop Cyril. Her death came 110 years after Catherine's supposed one, and the roles would be reversed, a pagan neoplatonist in place of a Christian. Many modern scholars have found the idea attractive. Christine Walsh accepts the many parallels but says there is no evidence for or against the theory. In her own study of the cult, Walsh suggests it probably grew from oral traditions about the Diocletianic persecutions in Alexandria, and that Catherine "may well have been a composite" of persecuted women. Many features of her passion story, she adds, follow familiar patterns of saints' legends.

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• 5. Sinai and Its Pilgrims

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  In the 6th century, the Eastern Emperor Justinian established the monastery now called Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, built around the spot said to hold the burning bush that Moses saw. Catherine was not yet attached to its name. That came later, after her body was said to have been rediscovered at Mount Sinai around the year 800. The tale went that her hair was still growing and a steady stream of healing oil flowed from her body. The discovery presumably points to a cult that already existed by then. Travelers wrote about the journey. The best known pilgrimage narratives are those of John Mandeville and Friar Felix Fabri. Sinai was the most famous Catherine site, but it was also the hardest to reach. In the West, the most prominent shrine was a monastery in Rouen that claimed to hold her fingers. Shrines and altars dotted France and England. Canterbury and Westminster claimed a phial of her oil, said to have been carried back from Sinai by Edward the Confessor. Others, like St. Catherine's Hill in Hampshire, drew mostly local visitors, and many are known only through brief mentions in old texts rather than physical remains. Travel has since grown easier, and pilgrimages to the monastery on Mount Sinai have increased. Countless visitors go in hope of miraculous healing.

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• 6. Patron of Scholars and Maidens

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  On the 25th of November 1473, Robert Woodlark, provost of King's College, Cambridge, founded St. Catharine's College on her feast day. He wanted a small community of scholars who would study only theology and philosophy. He may have chosen the name to honor Catherine of Valois, mother of Henry VI of England. More likely, the name belonged to the Renaissance cult of the saint as patron of learning. Across the river system of English academia, St Catherine's College, Oxford, grew out of the Delegacy for Unattached Students, formed in 1868. In the late Middle Ages Catherine ranked among the most important saints of religious life, and arguably the most important of the virgin martyrs. That group included Agnes of Rome, Margaret of Antioch, Barbara, Lucia of Syracuse and Valerie of Limoges. Her fame as an intercessor was well established. Many women followed her too, though they were less likely to show devotion through pilgrimage. The writers Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey de la Tour Landry held her up as a model for young women, praising her virginity and what they called wifely chastity. Some families named daughters for her. One example is Catalina Tomas, whose name is the Catalan form of Catherine and whose family had a special devotion to her. From the early 14th century, a new episode, her mystic marriage, began to appear in saints' literature, and soon after in art. In the Western church, her cult began to fade in the 18th century.

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• 7. Feast Days and Calendars

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  In several French dioceses, her feast was a Holy Day of Obligation until the start of the 17th century. Its ceremonial splendor outshone the feasts of some apostles. Work was suppressed and great crowds attended. Her principal symbol was the spiked wheel, which gave the Catherine wheel its name, and nearly every church had a statue of her holding it. Most denominations keep her feast on the 25th of November. The Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches observe the 24th, and nobody knows why. Kievan Rus celebrated on the 25th in the 11th century. In 1689, Dimitry of Rostov, in his book of the lives of the saints, placed it on the 24th. A popular story says Catherine the Great moved the date so she would not share her patronal feast with another celebration. There is no historical evidence for it. The empress was still tied to the saint, since one of the first Catholic churches built in Russia, the Catholic Church of St. Catherine, took its name from her patron. A footnote by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra offers another account. It says that until the 16th century the memory was kept on the 24th, and that the Fathers of Sinai moved it to the 25th for greater solemnity. In Catholicism she is revered as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and is listed in the Roman Martyrology on the 25th. Her feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 and restored in 2002 as an optional memorial. The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia says she was unceasingly praised by preachers and sung by poets. It believed that Jacques-Benigne Bossuet wrote one of his finest panegyrics for her, and that Adam of St. Victor composed the poem Vox Sonora nostri chori in her honor. The Church of England remembers her on the 25th. In 2022, the Episcopal Church added her to its liturgical calendar on the 24th of November, sharing the day with Barbara of Nicomedia and Margaret of Antioch.

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• 8. Names, Places, Portraits

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  Her name appears in Greek as Aikaterine or Ekaterine, and no one agrees where it comes from. It may derive from a word meaning each of two, or from the goddess Hecate. It may relate to a Greek word for insult, outrage or torture. Or it may come from a Coptic name meaning my consecration of your name. In the early Christian era people linked it to the Greek word for pure, and the Latin spelling shifted from Katerina to Katharina. Her name has traveled far. The firework called the Catherine wheel, which spins and throws sparks in all directions, borrows the saint's wheel. A lunar impact crater called Catharina honors her. So do Santa Catarina Island in Brazil and the Brazilian State of Santa Catarina. Santa Catalina Island off California was named by Sebastian Vizcaino, who arrived on her feast day, and the Gulf of Santa Catalina and the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona share the name. Kaarina, in Finland, is also named for her. She is the patron saint of Katerini in Greece and of St. Catharines, Ontario, though a source on the latter says no definitive documentation shows why the founders chose that spelling. Schools carry her name too. St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, was founded in 1905 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. The University of Saint Katherine in San Marcos, California, is the first Eastern Orthodox Christian university in the United States and the English-speaking world. In Abingdon, St Helen and St Katharine school marks her day each year on the final Thursday of November. A French nun, Soeur de La Chapelle, wrote a tragedy about her martyrdom. Painters made her instantly recognizable. She is richly dressed and crowned, as a princess should be, and usually carries a martyr's palm or the sword used to behead her. Her long hair hangs loose, in blonde or reddish tones, because she was unmarried. In the vision of her mystic marriage, the Infant Christ, held by the Virgin, slips a ring onto her finger. In the Golden Legend version he appears as an adult, and a great crowd of angels and the celestial court look on. She often attends the Virgin and Child, and she is prominent in scenes of the Virgo inter Virgines, where virgin saints surround Mary. Raphael painted a single figure of her now in the National Gallery, and Caravaggio painted another that hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

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