Saint Catherine of Alexandria (martyr, feast on 25 November)

A learned princess converted to Christ

The legend presents Catherine as the daughter of King Costus (Kônstos), governor or king of Alexandria. Gifted in study, she is said to have mastered many languages and the sciences of her time; some accounts speak of seventy-two languages. Still young, she converted to Christianity and refused to marry the emperor Maxentius, who summoned her together with the rhetoricians and philosophers of the city.^[4][5]

Before the emperor, Catherine upheld the truth of the Christian faith. The fifty rhetoricians sent to confound her were, according to the Passion, converted by her speech; they later died with her. The episode of the learned disputation became one of the major themes of her iconography.^[6]

The wheel, the martyrdom and Mount Sinai

To punish her, Maxentius had a spiked wheel built. At Catherine's prayer, the wheel broke and killed pagans who approached it; hence the attribute of the “Catherine wheel”. The emperor then ordered her beheading. According to tradition, milk flowed instead of blood, and angels carried her body to Mount Sinai.^[7][8]

The Sinai monastery, built under Justinian in the 6th century, received the name of Saint Catherine after the presumed discovery of relics around 800. This place remains today one of the great centres of her cult, with manuscripts and icons that are not, for the most part, earlier than the 10th century.^[9]

The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine

In the 13th century, Jacobus de Voragine wrote the Golden Legend (around 1260-1290). The chapter devoted to Saint Catherine (BHL 1667) takes up the late Passion, including the episode of the monk of Rouen who is said to have obtained a phalanx of the saint. The standard English translation, that of William Granger Ryan (Princeton University Press, 1995), gives the text on pages 334-341.^[10]

The Golden Legend is not a contemporary source of the 4th century: it is a late link in the textual chain. In Ignispedia, one does not quote phrases from Voragine as if they were an ancient act of martyrdom; one notes that the medieval account fixed for the West the figure of Catherine, rhetorician, disputant, martyr of the wheel.^[11][12]

Absence from ancient sources

The ancient martyrologies, calendars and ecclesiastical historians know no Alexandrian martyr named Catherine. No iconography nor clear trace of cult appears before about 800. The incipit of the Passion places the martyrdom in the “35th year of Maxentius”: the emperor Maxentius reigned only six years (306-312) and never governed Egypt; the incoherence is manifest.^[13][14]

The historian of saints Hippolyte Delehaye called this kind of text an “epic Passion”: a pious literary composition, not a court record. He held the historicity of Catherine to be impossible to establish with the available documents.^[15]

The hypothesis of Dorothea or Hypatia

Some scholars have sought a “historical kernel” behind the legend. Eusebius of Caesarea, around 320, reports that an emperor (Maximin) brought a young Christian woman before him, threatened her, then banished her and confiscated her goods; he does not name her. Rufinus of Aquileia later gives her the name Dorothea. Another hypothesis links Catherine to the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, killed at Alexandria in 415, although the role is then inverted (pagan against Christians) and the date is later by about eleven decades. These parallels remain hypotheses, not established identifications.^[16][17]

What the Church made of it

In 1969, the reform of the general Roman calendar removed the feast of Saint Catherine, citing grave historical difficulties. In 2002, Pope Saint John Paul II restored it as an optional memorial, invoking enduring popular devotion, in the same way he had acted for Saint Cecilia. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on 25 November; certain Eastern and Anglican traditions keep 24 November.^[18]

A Catholic faithful is therefore not bound to believe that every detail of the Passion is historical in the modern sense. He is bound, if he honours Catherine, to do so in the communion of the Church, which judged her memory spiritually fruitful, and with the historical prudence already recommended by learned hagiography since Delehaye.

From Mount Sinai to the Fourteen Holy Helpers

The cult spreads in the West from about 800 (passionary of Benediktbeuern), then at Byzantium in the mid-10th century. A 9th-century fresco shows her at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, in Rome. In the 11th century, the Sinai monastery bears her name; the Crusades accelerate its diffusion.^[19]

In the 13th-15th centuries, the peak is reached: Catherine figures among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, she is invoked by students of philosophy, young girls, millers, barbers, philosophers; guilds and cities take her as patron. She is also co-patron of Valais.^[20]

Relics and pilgrimages

Relics are venerated at Mount Sinai and at Rouen: the monk Symeon (died 1035) is said to have brought back a phalanx of the saint, an episode the Golden Legend takes up. Other fragments were scattered across Europe in the Middle Ages. None of these translations has been the object of modern archaeological validation: they belong to the history of devotion, not to material proof of the 4th century.^[21][22]

Living local traditions

The devotion produced customs still readable today: the catherinettes of Paris (rue de Cléry, since the 1920s), the fairs of Saint Catherine (Vesoul from 1295, Salernes from 1296, Hirson in 1766), the tire de la Sainte-Catherine in Quebec. These popular festivals prove nothing about the 4th century; they bear witness to the social anchoring of a saint who became one of the most beloved figures of the calendar.^[23]

The classic attributes of Saint Catherine are the broken wheel, the sword, the palm of martyrdom, the ring of the mystical marriage, the book, the royal garments, sometimes the crown at her feet. She is also depicted as a disputant before the philosophers, as the spouse of Christ (mystical marriage), as a beheaded martyr.^[24]

The painting by Caravaggio (National Gallery, London) shows a recollected Catherine, near the Child Jesus who offers her the ring: the image of the bride of Christ rather than that of the triumphant scholar. Greek icons, Gothic miniatures and Northern prints often prefer the wheel, the palm and the book, in reminder of the martyrdom and of the attributed learning.^[25]

• Saint Cecilia: another virgin martyr whose memory was restored in the general calendar in 2002 for reasons of popular devotion.
• Saint Menas of Egypt: another martyr of Egypt, celebrated on 11 November, whose cult likewise spread far beyond Egypt.
• Saint Ursula and her companions: another group of martyrs whose historical dossier blends faith, legend and devotion.