Chapter XVIII: Catherine and Niccolo

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
Chapter XVIII

After the usual bit of meandering that Undset does, this chapter turned to the story of a determinedly unrepentant young man sentenced to death for a crime he felt trifling - speaking poorly of the citizenry during the recent political unrest is what my illness-addled mind got out of it.

Like many earlier stories, Catherine devoted herself to saving the soul, to bringing him to repentance, and he became dependent on her in his conversion.  Niccolo seems to have understood most acutely how much she strengthened him for resolve and to have begged her not to leave him and said that he would die happy and strong if she stayed with him.  And she did.  In fact, she cleared away the hair from his neck and knelt beside him at the block and caught his head when the executioner's axe severed it from his body.

That image, of the saint kneeling to catch the fallen head of the sinner/traitor/young man who sought comfort of a very different kind in her breast.  I cannot put into words all of the things that it evokes.  It makes me want to stage it to do it justice.

Catherine writes of God's enduring love to have become man, then died, then breathed His Spirit into us all that we may live in her letter describing the even to Fra Raimondo, still in Rome while she has at last returned to the unruly Siena.

What glorious transformations God can make of our sordid human actions.  How many executions have a young woman screaming and crying at the death of a young man whom she has gathered to her breast to attempt to comfort, for whom she has pleaded and with whom she has pleaded, all ending in a terrible, bloody spectacle of human suffering.  Now, we have a calm and beautiful saint to make a man stand strong with God in his final moments, calmly catching his head in her hands and able to make them both glad that the soul will fly all the sooner to their heavenly Father.

I do not have words for everything the image evokes.  There are not enough or the right kind of words for everything the image evokes.