How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume II we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the middle ages through the early renaissance. Today’s session is on Catherine of Siena’s The Dialogue.

In a time of Roman Catholic decline, Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) arose as one of the greatest spiritual forces of renewal. The leadership of Christendom in temporal affairs was passing from the papacy towards the new nations of western Europe. The conflict between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, reflected in the dynamic that resulted in Dante’s exile, belongs to this process. As papal rule waned, it entered into a period of prolonged crisis at the beginning of the 14th century. From 1309 to 1376, the papacy relocated from Rome to Avignon in modern-day France due to a conflict with the French crown. Catherine was decisive in restoring the papacy to Rome, and thereafter carried out missions for the Pope. Teresa of Ávila and Catherine were the first two women declared Doctors of the Church.

Like Aquinas, Catherine joined the Dominicans, and like Saint Francis, she received the stigmata (albeit visible only to her). The Dialogue of Divine Providence was dictated while she was in ecstasy probably between October 1377 and November 1378, though probably re-edited by her later. It is a dialogue between a soul and God, burning with the solidary love that made Catherine such a consequential mystic activist.