l og os 20 : 4 fa ll 2017

Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, OP

Hunger and ThirstSuffering with Christ in Sts. Catherine

of Siena and Teresa of Kolkatta

Sts. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Kolkatta were both women mystics who had great desire to cooperate with Christ in the salvation of others. Catherine talked about her “hunger for souls,” while Teresa spoke of “satisfying the thirst of Christ.” As they grew in union with Christ, both came to see the suffering in their lives as a sharing in Christ’s suffering. Despite these similarities, the spiritual experiences of Catherine and Teresa are profoundly different. Since they are from different countries and centuries, one would expect to find some differences in their experiences, but what is fascinat-ing is that their differences deepen the closer they grow to the same crucified God. As Catherine matured spiritually, her suffering came to flow directly out of a compassionate vision of the world—thus from light and not darkness. In contrast, Teresa endured a prolonged “dark night” until the end of her life.1 Both identified with Christ on the cross, seeing their sufferings as a participation in his. Their dif-fering experiences raise questions about mystical experience in its relationship to Christology. Does mystical experience, particularly that of the dark night, follow a characteristic path? To what extent is this path a deepening identification with Christ? If so, was Christ’s experience one of clear knowledge or of darkness?

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Catherine is a doctor of the church in her own right, with a pre-cise teaching on the path of spiritual growth. Her way is compatible with that of St. John of the Cross, but emphasizes God’s freedom in shaping his relationship with every soul. Although Teresa’s experi-ence is a significant variation on the path that Catherine describes, several principles Catherine offers suggest points of reconciliation. With the help of Aquinas’s Christology, it can be shown that both women share in different aspects of Christ’s sufferings in accord with their differing missions.

1. Catherine of Siena’s Life and Vocation

Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary, pos-sessed a passionate and energetic nature. She was a Dominican through and through who spoke and lived the primacy of wisdom over will. One of Catherine’s most characteristic statements is “upon knowledge follows love.” She experienced her deepest sufferings and joys as flowing from mystical knowledge of God.

Catherine dedicated her life to Christ around the age of seven after receiving a vision of Christ. At the age of sixteen, having re-fused all offers of marriage, Catherine received the habit of the third order Dominican Sisters of Penance. This meant that she became a member of the Dominican family, but did not take public vows or live a strict community life.2 Catherine spent the next three years in intense prayer and penance, rarely leaving her room in her parents’ house except to attend Mass.3 During this time, Catherine experi-enced periods of extraordinary closeness to Christ as well as periods of spiritual dryness and temptation.

This time in Catherine’s life culminated with a mystical betrothal, in which Christ gave her a ring that remained visible to her through-out her entire life. Bl. Raymond of Capua, Catherine’s spiritual di-rector and biographer, reports that when Christ gave Catherine the ring, he exhorted her to faith and promised her strength to over-come her enemies.4 The presence and significance of this ring pre-

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cluded any further experience of spiritual darkness for Catherine. As a miraculous token of God’s loving support, it signified and ensured that she would never be without some tangible experience of God.5

It soon became clear that Christ had given Catherine this token as a promise to support her in the mission to which he was calling her. Catherine was sent to bring the love and wisdom of God first to her family, then to Siena, Italy, and eventually to the papal court in Avignon. Catherine feared a loss of intimacy with Christ when she was sent out to her family. Raymond records Catherine “crying bit-terly” when first told to leave her room. She asked Christ to spare her from “the harsh punishment of being separated from you, my most loving Bridegroom.”6 Christ replied to her by assuring her that service to her neighbor would not separate them, but unite her to him more closely.7

2. Darkness in Catherine’s Life

Catherine experienced spiritual darkness or dryness early in her life during her three years of solitude. She was actively seeking purifi-cation by acts of penance during this time; God assisted her with the purification of spiritual darkness. Raymond recounts one period of spiritual dryness in which Catherine experienced assaults by de-mons. Her chief temptations were lustful thoughts, the idea that her way of life was meaningless, and the feeling of being abandoned by God. The apparent abandonment by Christ was the bitterest part of her suffering. Catherine’s first conversation with Christ afterward is the famous exchange: “My Lord, where were you when my heart was disturbed by all those temptations?” to which he replied, “I was in your heart.”8 While this is the only instance of darkness during this period of Catherine’s life recorded by Raymond, it was likely not the only one. From this time until her spiritual betrothal, Raymond notes that “Catherine’s soul increased in grace daily,” without de-scribing the precise means used to attain this increase.9

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According to John of the Cross, there are typically two periods of spiritual darkness that serve to purify the soul of imperfections: the night of the senses and the night of faith. These punctuate the three spiritual stages of purgation, illumination, and union, serving as tran-sitional experiences between the stages. John connects both nights to the infused contemplation of God. God is present to the soul in a way beyond its capacity to grasp, thus causing darkness. As the one being purified grows in love of God, her capacity to perceive God’s pres-ence increases, ending the darkness. The night of the senses begins the experience of infused contemplation. It orders and purifies the soul.10 It subjects the senses to the human spirit, showing the emptiness of earthly things and the inadequacy of human concepts and emotions to express God, opening the soul to the loving but obscure contempla-tion of God—an awareness of his presence to the soul through the activation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially wisdom.11

The night of the spirit is a deeper darkness, showing the soul the infinite distance between her and God and bringing about an incred-ible sense of unworthiness in which remaining disordered desires are purified in the soul.12 The desires ordered at this time are not those of the physical appetites, but those of the will—such as an inordinate desire for praise and notice, or for one’s advice on spiritual matters to be sought. John describes a change in the soul’s habitual way of understanding that comes about during this time.13 As a divine light, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the connaturality of charity supple-ment natural understanding in a fuller and more consistent way than before.

Catherine’s experience includes characteristics of both nights. The temptation of lustful thoughts belongs to the night of the senses. Yet by the time Catherine had entered into her solitary life of prayer, she was already experiencing intimacy with Christ in prayer, as well as many of the mystical phenomena associated with the stage of spiri-tual growth after the first night. Her experience of abandonment and meaninglessness, which can only be met by faith, is more typical of

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the night of the soul.14 Catherine may have experienced an unusu-ally intense purgation, combining the two nights—or Raymond may have conflated the two for his didactic purposes.15

3. Darkness in Catherine’s Teaching

Catherine’s teaching on spiritual development is found in its mature form in her Dialogue, dictated between 1377 and 1378, just two years before her death in 1380. In this work, Catherine describes the stages of the spiritual life according to the traditional threefold schema of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways, although she prefers to speak of them as three stairs or steps that the Christian must climb on the bridge of Christ’s cross in order to reach heaven. In Catherine’s imagery, the Christian climbs along the body of Christ, first reaching Christ’s feet as a servant, then drinking from his side as a friend, and finally reaching his mouth as a true child of God.”16 In the first stage, “desire is stripped of selfish love”; in the second, God gives, “enlight-enment of the mind”; and in the third, the soul drinks living water “in the sea of peace.” The first stage is that of putting off habits of sin, the second of growing in virtue under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the third of union with the will with God. Sometimes Catherine expands her schema to include a preliminary stage of serious sin be-fore one actually climbs on to the Christ-bridge, and sometimes she extends the third stage into a fourth of even deeper union.17

Placing the experience of spiritual darkness within the first and second stages of her bridge imagery, Catherine rarely uses the lan-guage of darkness, preferring to speak of the withdrawal of the ex-perience of God’s presence.18 Nevertheless, this withdrawal is an intense experience, so painful that Catherine compares it to being in hell.19 In the transition between the love of a servant and the love of a friend, Catherine notes that the soul needs to recognize its own imperfection when it loves consolations (or emotional experiences in prayer) more than God. In the voice of the Father, she writes, “To lift them out of their imperfections, I take back my spiritual comfort

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and let them experience struggles and vexations.”20 To those who re-main steadfast in this trial the experience of infused contemplation is given, described by Catherine as God’s “showing himself ” to the soul through various insights into his action in the world, experiences of his presence, and growth in virtue.21

Catherine describes darkness in the second spiritual stage as hav-ing the purpose of deepening knowledge and virtue in the soul. Her language and treatment of suffering at this stage in the spiritual life is very similar to her description of it earlier. The main difference is that now the soul does not need to be weaned from the consola-tions of God, but from a certain pride that would want to control and dictate how she should encounter God. God withdraws from the soul “in feeling but not in grace.” The soul further recognizes her weakness, growing in humility and self-knowledge, waiting with “lively faith.”22 Darkness in this stage is intermittent, a part of a series of experiences in which the soul gradually comes to know and trust God more fully.23 Coming through these periods gives the soul an opportunity to “experience divine providence.”24 Once the soul has thoroughly learned her lesson, God returns to her “with even greater light and knowledge.”25 Catherine emphasizes growth in virtue more than purification. The spirit of Catherine’s trust in God’s loving edu-cation of the soul is captured when she calls it a “lover’s game” in which God gently educates the soul in love.26

4. Catherine on Suffering in the Unitive Way

Those who have reached the third stage have attained a certain full-ness of knowledge. Catherine says of the soul, “She has come to know herself, and in herself she has come to know my affectionate char-ity.”27 The suffering in the final stages of the spiritual life will come from knowledge and not from darkness.

To such as these it is granted never to feel my absence. I told you how I go away from the other (in feeling only, not in grace)

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and then return. I do not act thus with these most perfect ones who have attained great perfection and are completely dead to every selfish impulse. No, I am always at rest in their souls both by grace and by feeling . . . For through loving affection their desire has reached such union that nothing can separate it [from me] . . . They have shed every earthly affection and sensual selfishness.28

The souls at this stage are no longer in need of the withdrawal of the sense of God’s presence in order to purify them. Nevertheless, they can still grow in love and do still suffer. Catherine writes, “There is no one in this life, no matter how perfect, who cannot grow to greater perfection.”29 Catherine’s own tearful reluctance to leave her cell in the service of God is evidence of the further growth that hap-pens at this stage. This is the stage of great apostolic effectiveness. The soul has reached the “mouth of holy desire” in which the Chris-tian prays inwardly, speaks the truth outwardly, and experiences a great hunger for the salvation of souls.30 Catherine describes these as conformed to Christ crucified in his desire and his suffering. With Christ, they are willing to endure physical pain as well as ill-treat-ment from others.

The most characteristic suffering at this stage comes from knowl-edge of God and the sin by which others offend God and hurt them-selves. Catherine speaks over and over again of this pain born from loving knowledge. She calls it “an anguished love,” a “stinging hun-ger,” and a “crucifying sorrow at the offense done to me [God] and the harm done to their neighbors.”31 It is the depth of the knowledge of God that is the source of this pain. Catherine writes, “In their lov-ing union with me [God] they have contemplated and known how ineffably I love my creatures, seeing how they reflect my likeness, and they have fallen in love with my creature’s beauty for love of me. Therefore they feel unbearable sorrow when they see them straying from my goodness. The sufferings are so great that they make every other suffering diminish in them.”32 Insight into God’s greatness and the horror of sin causes the greatest possible suffering. Knowing the

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truth of the full beauty of God and seeing the terribly disfigured beauty of his image in creatures causes the great pain that torments Catherine during the mature part of her life.

The Dialogue bears witness to this desire in the deep longing evi-denced throughout the work. The Dialogue is a testimony to Cath-erine’s experience in the last spiritual stage. In it, she perfectly de-scribes herself, the protagonist, in terms of this suffering love. The first sentence of the Dialogue explains, “A soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls.”33 The Dialogue itself is framed around four petitions that Catherine makes of the Father: For herself, for the reform of the Church, for the whole world, and for divine providence, particularly in one unspeci-fied case.34 Throughout the work, the Dialogue is interspersed with Catherine’s responses to the Father’s words. In many of these, the strength of her desire is seen.

Let that fire burst the seed of my body and bring forth blood; then with that blood, given for love of your blood and with the key of obedience, let me unlock heaven’s gate. . . . You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: The more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you. . . . Clothe, clothe me with yourself, eternal Truth, so that I may run the course of this mortal life.35

The positive aspects of the loving knowledge that Catherine at-tributes to the soul in the third stage parallels the love with which Catherine describes God the Father in his creation and redemption of the world. Describing the Father, she writes, “With unimaginable love you looked upon your creatures within your very self, and you fell in love with us . . . But stirred with the same fire that made you create us, you decided to give this warring human race a way to reconcili-ation.”36 God’s knowledge of his own goodness, which he desires to share, is his motive for creation, and his desire to restore the beauty of his creation is the motive for its redemption. Of course, there is no pain in the perfect love of the Father—only his active power by which

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he reaches out to do good to his creatures. When the soul experiences great desire for God’s glory and the salvation of others, she shares in this first divine love, but in the painful way of one who does not yet fully possess God and who is in solidarity with the sinful world.

This love also parallels Christ’s love. Catherine herself compares the mixed experience of the soul in the unitive way to Christ’s ex-perience on the cross, saying that on the cross he experienced the vision of God in the highest part of his intellect although experi-encing pain in his body and passions and soul.37 Catherine does not claim, however, that the soul in the third stage has this vision of God. Rather, that soul is like Christ in its mixture of happiness and deep sorrow. Just as Christ, even while suffering on the cross, knew that he was the Divine Son, so this soul, through some experience of God through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, senses the grace of God within it even while in great pain over the evil in the world. Although the soul does not see God directly, its knowledge is not merely the dark knowledge of faith that is present even in the night. The soul main-tains a stable joy from its loving knowledge of God “because the de-light of charity can never be taken away from them,” even as deeper knowledge and love is the cause of deeper pain.38 To make this claim, it is likely that Catherine draws on Aquinas’s theology, mediated for her by Dominicans.

5. Teresa of Kolkatta’s Darkness

Several questions arise when turning to the experience and thought of Teresa after reading Catherine. These involve the place of darkness in the spiritual life and its Christological significance. For Catherine, there is no darkness in the unitive way. The Christian cooperates with Jesus through loving knowledge. On the contrary, Teresa saw her re-demptive suffering with Christ as consisting of her darkness. She un-derstood it as the spiritual side of her work and not simply a stage to pass through.39 It seems that she reached this understanding with the help of her spiritual director because she remained in the experience

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of darkness for almost all of the time between her founding of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 and her death in 1997.40

There are two approaches to whether Teresa’s darkness should be considered a manifestation of John’s “dark night of the spirit” in its normal place in spiritual development—as a prelude to the unitive way—or as something different. Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, editor of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Cal-cutta, argues that Teresa had reached the unitive way before enter-ing into her long darkness. Kolodiejchuk understands the period of darkness or spiritual dryness that Teresa experienced as a temporary professed sister around 1937 to be the night of the spirit.41 In the year 1942, after she had made final vows as a religious, Teresa made a further vow never to refuse God anything. This vow expressed the depth of the unitive way that she was already experiencing, and posi-tioned her to willingly accept a further call from God.

Kolodiejchuk records instances when those who worked with Teresa during her later years as a Loretto sister remarked on her un-usually deep love of God.42 He quotes a sister saying, “She is an utter-ly selfless creature. She is extraordinary in her sacrifice. She can do anything for the love of God, endure any humiliation or suffering.”43 Teresa herself admitted that at this point, she “had not been seeking self for some time now.”44 This does echo Catherine’s description (in the voice of God) of the soul at the third stage who is “completely dead to every selfish impulse . . . For through loving affection their desire has reached such union that nothing can separate it [from me] . . . They have shed every earthly affection and sensual selfishness.”45

As evidence that Teresa was firmly in the unitive stage as a prepa-ration for her call to found the Missionaries of Charity, Kolodiejchuk further cites the visions and “near ecstasy” she experienced at the time of the founding. Insofar as he is convinced by the form of these experiences that Teresa is in the unitive way, he is mistaken, for vi-sions and ecstasy can belong to the illuminative way.46 Catherine’s visions began during her childhood. She characterizes the stage in which the soul is at the side of Christ as a time of “showings.”47 How-

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ever, the content of Teresa’s visions does support Kolodiejchuk’s in-terpretation. In these visions, Jesus called Teresa to a deeper share in his mission, suggesting that she was already experiencing deep union with him. Her central vision was that of September 10, 1946, which she called her “Inspiration Day.” Her “call within a call” was the mission “to satiate the thirst of Jesus by serving Him in the poorest of the poor.”48 She says that the Missionaries of Charity begins “in the depths of God’s longing to love and to be loved.”49 The call to enter most deeply into Christ’s redemptive mission by satiating his thirst echoes Catherine’s description of the unitive state as one of anguished desire for the salvation of souls.50

It was a few years later, after Teresa began her new work, that she entered into a new darkness, the one for which she is best known. Kolodiejchuk understands this darkness to be like the classic night of the spirit in some ways. It was a painful period of spiritual darkness lived in faith, while nevertheless being supported by God’s grace.51 Although Kolodiejchuk does mention that the period of darkness helped make Teresa kinder and more compassionate, he emphasizes that in essence it was different from John’s dark night because its main purpose was not purifying but reparative.52 He describes it as “identification with those she served” and a sharing in Christ’s pain, two aspects under which Teresa also came to see it.53

A contrasting understanding of Teresa’s spiritual path would be to maintain that this suffering was the dark night of the spirit described by John in its regular place in the spiritual life—the movement from the illuminate to unitive stage. This understanding would focus on the similarities of John’s description of the night of the spirit and Teresa’s darkness. It would be based on the fact that Teresa continued to be purged of her faults, becoming more humble, loving, and kind during her years of darkness, despite her elevated public profile.

Both viewpoints agree on what is essential: 1) Teresa’s darkness needs to be understood as a mystical suffering with Christ, not de-pression or lack of faith; and 2) it was fruitful for her mission. In the second reading, which gives Teresa an “extended” period of darkness

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rather than an “extra” one, this emphasis on fruitfulness is what dis-tinguishes her experience: because of the fruitfulness, the darkness is transformed from a stage to be passed through as quickly as possible to a place of abiding with Christ.

6. Teresa in Light of Catherine

Catherine’s insight into the personal way in which God deals with each soul (as a “lover’s game”) illuminates Teresa’s experience. The dark night, according to John, will have its duration as long as impu-rities in the soul’s faith render the infused contemplation of the mys-tery of God an experience of darkness. A person will come out of the dark night when purified. Catherine’s emphasis on the freedom of God in this “lover’s game” suggests that God might choose to keep even a purified soul in the darkness if he had reason to do so. Be-cause God’s being is always infinitely greater than any creature, there would be no untruth in a soul’s experience of God as darkness at any spiritual stage in this life, no matter how pure her faith and love. God could always be present to the soul as surpassing and ungraspable. This insight is compatible with John’s theology, made plausible by Catherine’s language, and verified by Teresa’s experience.

Although Catherine speaks of “knowing” and Teresa of “darkness,” what is of value to both of them is the faithful love that underlies their suffering. Catherine’s knowledge bears fruit because of the love that it brings forth in her. In a parallel way, Teresa describes the deep rootedness of her will in God during the darkness, despite the ab-sence of glowing feelings and mystical insights. She writes, “I have His darkness—I have His pain . . . I know I have Jesus—in that un-broken union—for my mind is fixed on Him and in Him alone, in my will.”54 Her mind is fixed on him as a result of the supernatural charity burning within her heart, her darkness only increasing this deep charity in her life.

As quoted above, Catherine notes that even those in the uni-tive way can grow in love: “There is no one in this life, no matter

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how perfect, who cannot grow to greater perfection.”55 While, in Catherine’s experience, this growth in love after purification took place through a deeper knowledge of God, it is compatible with her thought that God could ask further growth of someone by leading her into darkness. Again, Catherine’s emphasis on growth in vir-tue during darkness complements John’s emphasis on purification. Her emphasis on growth in virtue suggests that a return to darkness could be something fruitful.

7. Christology

Now let us turn to the question of Christology. As mentioned, Cath-erine understood the suffering of the souls in the unitive way to mir-ror that of Christ on the cross. Following the teaching of her spiritual director Fr. Neuner, Teresa also came to understand her suffering as “a small part of Jesus’ darkness & pain on earth.”56 She even came to teach her sisters the link between darkness and Christ’s experience. She wrote to them, “Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. All that He has taken upon Himself and has carried it in the darkest night.”57 One could ask, does Teresa’s emphasis on darkness require a Christology different from that of Catherine?

One answer would be in the affirmative, suggesting that Christ called to Catherine out of light in deference to the Dominican for-mation that had led her to believe that Christ had the beatific vision even on the cross. He spoke to Teresa out of darkness in affirmation of more modern Christologies that suggest that Christ’s experience of abandonment by the Father was central to the redemption of human-ity.58 A difficulty with this approach is its implicit separation between ontology and experience. It implies that mystical experience changes in response to changing theology rather than being grounded in an experience of the realities that theology describes.59 It is of course true that mystical experience is subjective in that it is experienced by a human subject and interpreted according to her own background.

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This legitimate variation, however, must be centered in the realities revealed. If revelation is true, there must be some unvarying essential content.

Distinct as they are, both Catherine and Teresa’s mystical experi-ences of suffering with Christ fit within a unified Christology. A first shared insight is that all human suffering can be understood legiti-mately as a sharing in Christ’s suffering. This is true no matter exactly what Christ’s experience was on the cross. He died to take away the sins of the world and ultimately to heal all of the effects of this sin, whether experienced as darkness or as pained insight into the dam-age that sin has wrought on creation.

A further solution would identify precisely how the suffering of both women participates in the suffering of Christ on the cross. Let us begin with Catherine.

8. Aquinas and Catherine

Aquinas’s teaching on the knowledge and sufferings of Christ helps to give insight into Catherine’s understanding that a great suffering can come from loving knowledge rather than from darkness. In the third part of his Summa theologiae, question 46, article 6, Aquinas asks whether Christ’s sufferings were the greatest sufferings ever endured. The objections that Aquinas poses include questions about whether the virtuous order of Christ’s emotions would have miti-gated his pain (objection 2) and whether the fact that Christ lost only bodily life would have made him sorrow less than a sinner who lost the life of God’s grace (objection 4).

Most helpful for understanding Catherine is Aquinas’s discussion of the role of Christ’s knowledge in increasing his suffering. Aquinas taught not only that Christ had the vision of God during his earthly life, but that he had infused knowledge of all those things pertaining to his mission.60 Aquinas refers to this knowledge in his reply to the second and fourth objections. In his reply to the second objection, Aquinas notes that virtue would not have lessened Christ’s suffering,

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since moral virtue orders the passions so that they are in proper pro-portion to their object. Since Christ was sorrowing over all the sins ever committed, it was appropriate that his sorrow be surpassingly great. Aquinas says that Christ, to satisfy for sins, “took on a sadness absolutely greatest in quantity, but nevertheless not exceeding the rule of reason.”61 For Christ’s sorrow to be proportioned to the rule of reason, he would have to possess knowledge of the sins he was bearing. Sadness would result from Christ’s infused knowledge of sin, his union with sinners through his shared human nature and vo-cation as Redeemer, and his rightly ordered will, in which he would detest all sins as a terrible evil.

In his reply to the fourth objection, Aquinas explains, “Christ sor-rowed not only over the loss of his own bodily life, but also for the sins of all others. This sorrow in Christ surpassed the sorrow of any other grief, because it came forth from a greater wisdom and love, both of which increase the sorrow of grief, and also because he at once sorrowed for all sins.”62 Thus, Christ’s suffering was brought about by his knowledge of the sins of humanity; by his wisdom, by which he judged them rightly; and by his charity, in which his will detested them both out of love of the Father and love of sinners. Since Christ’s knowledge and love surpassed that of all others, so did his suffering.

Catherine’s thought and experience follow the same pattern. She did at times seem to have a prophetic insight into the evil of sin. Her love and openness to the Holy Spirit made her acutely sensitive to the daily evils she encountered. Her purified emotions and will en-dured great sadness and sorrow at the recognition of the evil of sin and the damage it does to the human person. Catherine’s suffering thus parallels Christ’s and is a sharing in his suffering.

9. Aquinas and Teresa

Teresa’s darkness, when viewed through Aquinas’s Christology, shows a complementary sharing in Christ’s experience. According

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to Aquinas, Christ on the cross never lost the direct vision of God. In it, he knew himself to be the beloved Son of the Father and knew that his death was a meaningful offering for the sins of the world.63 This knowledge provided the grounding for his obedient love, which pleased the Father and made his sacrifice meritorious.64 Neverthe-less, Christ’s direct knowledge of God did not overwhelm his higher faculties in such a way as to diminish either his physical pain or his sorrow at the insults offered to him. Aquinas suggests that Christ’s interior suffering surpassed all others in part because he was able to stop all the considerations of his higher reason from lessening his pain—something that is not possible for others to choose.65 This would mean that Christ took no emotional comfort in his knowl-edge of God—a severance of knowledge and emotion that was not present in Catherine. Teresa shared Christ’s lack of emotional com-fort, not because of a similar “block” between clear knowledge and emotion, but because of the darkness of her faith. She shared Christ’s feeling of desolation on the cross in a way that Catherine could not.

Christ’s direct knowledge of God also played a role in his con-sciousness parallel to that of Teresa’s unshaken faith—foundational both for love and for grounding identity. As quoted above, she writes, “I have His darkness—I have His pain . . . I know I have Jesus—in that unbroken union—for my mind is fixed on Him and in Him alone, in my will.”66 Even in her darkness, Teresa’s faith gave her certainty that Christ was with her. She experienced his upholding her as the cause of her anguished desire for him. Her faith rendered her able to understand the value of the immolation of her life and her service as a Missionary of Charity. Although different in mode, Teresa’s faith was like Christ’s knowledge in that, although grounding her will in heroic love, it did not enliven her emotions.

Aquinas understood the unmitigated emotional pain of Christ as bearing of the sorrow of all men. He writes that Christ experienced all the types of suffering that it is possible to endure, at least in their general categories. Thus, Christ recapitulated, suffered through, and overcame all human suffering.67 Teresa also understood her darkness

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as a sharing in the suffering of those whom she served. Her identi-fication with the poor began in her way of living; God ratified and deepened it by giving her their darkness. She writes, “Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. All that He has taken upon Himself, and has carried it in the dark-est night. Only by being one with us He has redeemed us. We are allowed to do the same: All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution must be redeemed, and we must have our share in it.”68 Teresa’s suffering imi-tated Christ’s in her bearing the sufferings of those to whom she was sent.

St. John Paul II’s Mariology supports the description of darkness as participation in the suffering of Christ, who knows the Father. Al-though consistently following the Thomistic teaching that Christ had the direct vision of God even on the cross, John Paul speaks of Mary as sharing in Christ’s suffering through a type of darkness.69 In his en-cyclical Redemptoris Mater, he describes her night of faith. He writes about Mary’s “particular heaviness of heart, linked with a sort of ‘night of faith’—to use the words of John—a kind of ‘veil’ through which one has to draw near to the Invisible One and to live in intimacy with the mystery.”70 This darkness of Mary’s faith culminates at Calvary. “At the foot of the cross, Mary experienced the ‘complete negation’ of the words the angel had spoken to her . . . Through this faith Mary is perfectly united with Christ in his self-emptying . . . This is perhaps the deepest ‘kenosis’ of faith in human history.”71

These words of John Paul shed light on Teresa’s darkness. First, they describe Mary as sharing in Christ’s self-emptying even though her sharing is through the suffering of faith and Christ’s is linked to his vision. Second, they describe an experience of darkness that was not purifying. Although Mary could grow in love throughout her life, as one immaculately conceived, she had no sinful defects of soul from which to be purged. Her suffering was that of the New Eve, offering the fruits of her love, sorrowing in union with Christ for the re-demption of the world. John Paul’s description of Mary is mirrored

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in the life of Teresa. She herself identified her vocation as Marian, saying, “Let us always remain with Mary our mother on Calvary near the crucified Jesus, with the chalice made of the four vows, and fill it with the love of self-sacrifice, of pure love, always held up close to His suffering Heart, so that He may be pleased to accept our love.”72

10. Conclusion

The key to understanding the Christology underlying the mystical suffering of Catherine and Teresa involves careful distinction be-tween Christ’s uniqueness as the God-Man and the way in which Christians share in his redemption. Although the experience of no believer, not even that of his mother, reproduces Christ’s experience exactly, every believer is nevertheless able to share in the love and suffering of a God who takes on all human misery.

The wider question of mystical experience in general directs our attention to the flexibility with which God interacts with each soul. Although there are characteristic stages to spiritual growth, and knowing them can equip and encourage us for the journey, God re-veals to each person a unique path—a path ordered to reflect not only the characteristics of the individual, but also the age in which he or she lives, the age to which (in the case of the saints given to the Church as exemplars) the saint’s life is meant to speak. Catherine’s luminous desire perfectly fit the age of faith in which she lived—a time in which God’s truths were known to those around her but often ignored in practice. Her thirst reflects the state of the Church during her life: a mother yearning for her believing but unfaithful children. Perhaps Teresa’s darkness better fits our age, so enveloped by unbelief and in which, for many, the darkness of suffering ob-scures the face of God.

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Notes

1. Benedict Groeschel, CFR, “Mother Teresa Remembered,” First Things, Sept. 11, 2007, http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2007/09/mother-teresa-remembered.

2. For more about this way of life, see Dominican Penitent Women, ed. Meiju Lehmijoke-Gardner (New York: Paulist, 2005), “Introduction,” 1–36.

3. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena (London: Harvill Press, 1960), 71. 4. Ibid., 100. 5. Thomas McDermott suggests this grace was specifically given to strengthen Cath-

erine for her work, a unique and difficult work for a woman at the time. See Catherine

of Siena: Spiritual Development in her Life and Teaching (New York: Paulist, 2008), 33. 6. Raymond, Life, 107. 7. Ibid., 108. 8. Ibid., 94. 9. Ibid., 99. 10. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Alison Peers (New York: Image

Book, 1990) 65, 72, 87–89; Jordan Aumann, Spiritual Theology (London: Continuum: 2006), 199.

11. Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite: Or, the Degrees of Knowledge (New York: Scribner, 1959), 361; John Gonzalez Arintero, The Mystical Evolution in the Development and

Vitality of the Church (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1949), 2:222. 12. Maritain, Knowledge, 362. 13. See John of the Cross, Dark Night, 121; Arintero, Mystical Evolution, 223. 14. Aumann, Spiritual Theology, 204; Arintero, Mystical Evolution, 194–5. 15. McDermott speaks about this time as one of penance and illumination in Catherine’s

life. McDermott, Development, 28, 29. 16. Ibid., 54. 17. Ibid., 60–83. 18. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press,

1980), 144. Catherine speaks about “darkness” and its mitigation as “light.” 19. Ibid., 144. 20. Ibid., 60. 21. Ibid., 61.

22. Ibid., 63. 23. Ibid., 64. 24. Ibid., 144. 25. Ibid., 64.

26. Ibid., 78. 27. Ibid., 74. 28. Ibid., 78. 29. Ibid.,144–45. 30. Ibid., 76.

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31. Ibid., 78, 145. 32. Ibid., 145. 33. Ibid., 1. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Ibid., 167. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Ibid., 78; this teaching is found in Aquinas: Summa theologiae III, q. 10, a. 2; III, q. 46,

a. 7. 38. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 78. 39. Teresa of Kolkatta, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of

Calcutta, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 214. 40. Ibid., 149. 41. Ibid., 20–23. 42. Ibid., 35–37. 43. Ibid., 37. 44. Ibid., 216. 45. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 78. Parentheses added by Noffke. 46. Aumann, Spiritual Theology, 203. 47. Dialogue, 61. 48. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 40. 49. Ibid., 40. 50. Dialogue, 78, 145. 51. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 177. 52. Ibid., 215. 53. Ibid., 216. 54. Ibid., 223. 55. Dialogue, 144, 145. 56. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 214. 57. Ibid., 220. 58. For example, in the thought of Luther and Von Balthasar. 59. Another option would be that Catherine radically misunderstood her experience. 60. ST III, q. 11, a. 1. 61. ST III, q. 46, a. 6 ad 2. “. . . assumpsit tristitiam maximam quantitate absoluta, non tamen

excedentem regulam rationis.” 62. ST III q. 46, a. 6 ad 4. “Christus non solum doluit pro amissione vitae corporalis propriae,

sed etiam pro peccatis omnium aliorum. Qui dolor in Christo excessit omnem dolorem cuius-

libet contriti. Tum quia ex maiori sapientia et caritate processit, ex quibus dolor contritionis

augetur.” 63. ST III, q. 46, a. 7. 64. ST III, q. 49, a. 1. 65. ST III, q. 46, a. 6. 66. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 223.

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67. ST III, q. 46, a. 4. 68. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 220. 69. John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte: Apostolic Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to the

Bishops, Clergy and Lay Faithful at the Close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2001), 26.

70. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater (United States Catholic Conference: Office of Publish-ing and Promotion Services, 1987), 16.

71. Ibid., 17. 72. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 42.