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St. Christina, "without hesitation" answered she "wanted to return under the conditions which were proposed to me."
St. Christina's physical suffering will cure the spirits of the suffering sinners, and thus her suffering is a gift and a blessing, not something to be rejected in her cultural terms, although in our own conception of mental health, to actively seek out illness and self-harm is pathological. The fact that St. Christina can endure crawling into fiery ovens and remain unharmed is evidence that God is with her, and her physical endurance in the face of cold and other sensations people might call bodily misery is testimony to her lightness of spirit.
The life of St. Catherine of Siena, who practiced physical austerities upon herself, perhaps most explicitly challenges modern conceptions of illness. St. Catherine denied herself sustenance in a way that might be diagnosed as anorexia nervosa, or active self-harm. The medievals saw the triumph of the will over the appetite, and that Catherine's starvation was a triumph of her God-given will over her body (perhaps her presumably even weaker and more fallen female body). Her body's apparent rejection of food and her distaste and even pain upon eating anything of sustenance but the Host showed the incompatibility...
Psychological rubrics today emphasize self-care, independence, and health, while medievals valorized the saintly ability to ignore basic needs such as relief from pain, need for food, and tending to one's own basic needs over the needs of others.
Works Cited
Kearnes, Conleth O.P. ed. Raymond of Capua. The Life of Catherine of Siena.
Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980.
Korte, Anne-Marie. "Women and Miracle Stories: An Introduction." In Anne-Marie
Korte, ed. Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration. Boston: Brill, 2001, 1-15.
The Life of Christina of St. Trond." In Elizabeth Petroff, ed. And trans. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 184-189.
Anne-Marie Korte, "Women and Miracle Stories: An Introduction," in Anne-Marie Korte, ed., Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration (Boston: Brill, 2001),9
Korte, 12
The Life of Christina of St. Trond," in Elizabeth Petroff, ed. And trans. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 185
Works Cited
Kearnes, Conleth O.P. ed. Raymond of Capua. The Life of Catherine of Siena.
Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980.
Korte, Anne-Marie. "Women and Miracle Stories: An Introduction." In Anne-Marie
Korte, ed. Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration. Boston: Brill, 2001, 1-15.
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