Catherine of Siena was a medieval mystic. She had a vision of God when she was six and from that point, spent much of her life in prayer and devotion to God. She had numerous visions, prayed and fasted, eating little more than Eucharistic bread. She worked hard to bring unity to a church divided, writing tirelessly to kings and popes alike. She wrote many letters, and dictated a ‘dialogue’, a mystical work created during an ‘ecstasy’. She is remembered for her bold speech, not common among women during her time.
At the risk of heresy, I’m going to say that as I was reading about Catherine and her feats, it sounded strikingly similar to the symptoms of hebephrenia, also known as disorganized schizophrenia. She had visions, which the Diagnostical and Statistical Model of Mental Disorders (DSM) calls hallucinations. She heard God’s voices, which the DSM calls auditory hallucinations. She had a stigmata, where her hands bled where Christ’s hands were pierced. Except she was the only one who could see the stigmata. The DSM calls this delusions.
She wrote a lot, believing she could influence popes and kings alike. Also known as delusions. She believed Christ’s circumcised foreskin was for her wedding ring. Also sounds delusional, or like a word salad – a symptom where words are thrown together and once tossed like a salad, don’t make as much sense to the hearer, as they do to the speaker.
Given my world these days, I’m not surprised I saw this diagnosis in reading about Catherine of Sienna. I was surprised when I did a little research, that I’m not the first to have spotted this. Church resources go as far as to reveal that ‘Opinion was deeply divided about whether she was a saint or a fanatic’. They did not have the DSM at the time, to look at a cluster of symptoms and deduce a diagnosis from them.
To be clear, I am not dismissing Catherine of Sienna as a woman of God, or that it wasn’t God who was speaking to her, or that she didn’t have a stigmata visible only to her. I am wondering, however where the line is between mysticism and visions, and hallucinations and delusions. I’m also wondering why it even matters.
One book I read on the topic of schizophrenia discussed that in other cultures and other times, the minds and visions and thoughts of people exhibiting symptoms of what we know as schizophrenia are revered. Shaman, medicine men, mystics. In some cultures today, people with a different way of relating (again, people we’d likely diagnose as schizophrenia) are allowed to live in their world, without pressures to normalize or medicate. As long as someone isn’t dangerous, who are we to decide what’s ‘normal’? My perceptions are truly nothing more than solely mine. Who am I to say that Catherine didn’t have a stigmata visible only to her?
When you read Scripture from a DSM perspective there’s a lot that sounds like lunacy. I’ve heard people say things like I don’t need to worry about food, or covid, or housing, because Jesus said ask and ye shall receive. I’m protected by Jesus. It sounds crazy. And still I believe.
This morning, I’m thinking about our desire to diagnose and categorize and ‘normalize’. Catherine of Sienna wrote wonderful pieces about God’s love, and her deep faith. Does it matter whether she had a diagnosable illness? More importantly, why would it matter, even if she did? Maybe she was both a lunatic and a mystic. Why does the existence of any disorder like that seem to invalidate the other beautiful parts of people? Today, I want to think hard about diagnoses, and where they help, and where they get in the way of a person’s beauty.
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