Introduction

Saint Catherine of Genoa (Caterinetta Fieschi Adorno, 1447-1510) has so often been studied for her teachings on purgatory that she has become known as "the great theorist of purgatory" (Bynum, Fragmentation 69). Purgatory, however, was more than a doctrine for Catherine; it was also a metaphor for her daily life. As described in her vita, "She saw the condition of the souls in purgatory in the mirror of her humanity and of her mind, and therefore spoke of it so clearly. She seemed to stand on a wall separating this life from the other, that she might relate in one what she saw suffered in the other" (ch.37). Yet this description does not fully capture the nature of her experience of purgatory, since it does not mention the way God, according to the vita, made a purgatory out of her body (ch.38). In Catherine's life, purgatory manifested itself in an unusually strong antagonism between spirit and flesh, an antagonism so great that it made her physically ill. As the vita explains, "When the spirit found itself obliged to yield somewhat to humanity, if it had not been restrained by a divine power, it would have reduced that body to dust, to obtain the liberty to be entirely occupied with itself; and the body, on its side, would rather have endured a thousand deaths than suffer so much oppression of the spirit" (ch.38). It is not inappropriate therefore to say that Catherine underwent her purgation in this life, rather than in the next.

I suggest that the purgatorial metaphor of her life can be usefully read as a borderlands metaphor. I take my inspiration for this reading from two well-known textual sources. First is the work of Latina theorist Gloria Anzaldua. In her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she writes, "the psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands...are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other" (preface). Of special interest to her is the way people living within a border region maintain their "shifting and multiple identity and integrity" in the face of a culture that longs "to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd" (preface). For Anzaldua, the presence of "confluent streams" in the borderlands creates a unique experience not only of life, but also of consciousness itself. Thus, the border resident is truly a new kind of human being.

My second starting point comes from the Christian scriptures, namely, Peter's metaphor of the church as a holy nation (1 Peter 2.9). This metaphor comes from the Hebrew tradition (Exodus 19.6) and is similar to Jesus' teachings that those who believe in him are a city set on a hill (Matthew 5.14) and are therefore no longer "of" the world (John 15.19). This metaphor implies that every believer lives within two kingdoms simultaneously: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. (In this paper, these kingdoms will also be referred to as those of heaven and of earth.) Using Anzaldua's definition, Christian faith becomes a borderland in which the kingdoms of God and of the world edge each other within the life of the individual.

My aim in this paper is not necessarily to explicate Catherine's life in terms of Anzaldua's theories. Although Catherine's experiences reveal the borderlands to be both psychological, sexual, and spiritual, I will not attempt to make them "fit" into Anzaldua's framework. In part, this decision is due to the obvious fact that religious identity and ethnic identity play out differently in the world. For instance, Anzaldua refers to the borderlands as being the place "where people of different races occupy the same territory [and] where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (preface). In the religious borderlands, however, one of the "races" exists only in the ideal form; although the Christian community functions as the heavenly "race," the individual believers are members of that race by conversion. That is to say, one of the two cultures forming the borderland has not fully formed and exists only insofar as it actively turns away from the other culture. Therefore, I intend merely to search for a way of reading Christianity as a borderlands culture, to see how this metaphor can be usefully applied to religious life.

For this project, I will look not at Catherine's teachings (as presented in the Treatise on Purgatory and Spiritual Dialogue), but at the descriptions of her religious experiences given in her vita. I am less interested in the speculative aspects of the Christian tradition than in the lived experiences of Christian faith and in the ways these experiences carry out the metaphor of the holy nation. Therefore, I want to show how Catherine's religious experiences create this borderlands situation in her life and, if possible, to apply these observations to religious experience in general. Catherine is useful in this regard precisely because her experiences are not necessarily unique; in fact, many of her religious experiences were common to women in the late-Medieval/early Renaissance period. At the same time, she is one of the most influential spiritual figures from the period immediately preceding the Reformation. Her life and teachings have influenced such important writers as Juan de la Cruz, Francois de Sales, Francois Fenelon, Frederick von Schlegel, Phoebe Palmer, Cardinal Newman, Evelyn Underhill and Richard Foster, as well as a diverse array of Christian groups--Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Anglicans, the Oxford Movement, the Perfectionist Movement, etc.--and women's rights groups (Groeschel 38-42). This combination of representativeness and influence makes Catherine a useful case study for examining the nature of the spiritual borderlands.

(Section I provides an overview of the salient experiences of Catherine's life. Secton II examines them in the context of Caroline Walker Bynum's work on 13th-century female mystics.)