Customer Reviews

Catherine of Siena : The Dialogue (Classics of Western Spirituality)

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I highly recommend this book to any person seeking to be inspired to improve their lives, not through fear of chatisement, but due to being motivated by love. This is the first book that I have ever read, where I wanted to write the author, or in this case it would be the interpretor, and to thank her for the wisdom and insight that her work gave me. Just reflecting on the book gives me a warm feeling.

Catherine of Siena was a mystic who claimed to receive advice from God, and who also worked miracles in her time. This book relates the advice in an incredibly accessiblt tone. She writes about issues related to every aspect of life, our association with one another, and how to please God. Her advice is helpful to people from all walks of life, the lay person and religious as well.

Central to her message is the great love that God has for us all. That God loved us before we knew and loved Him, and the onyl way to give likewise such love to strangers who know not and possibly will not love us. She writes too about one of the greatest ways that we can offend God is by not believing that he has sufficient mercy to forgive us our sins, if we are contrite and ask him for forgiveness, because this belief contradicts the notion that God's mercy and love for us is great. She writes that sin is horrible becuase it ofends God's goodness, and it harms our neighbor.

She cites many biblical sources that reflect the advice that she has recieved. It seems cliche to hail a book as life-changing but this book greatly transformed me and my relationship with God for the better. It is an inspiring and uplifting read, and may be particularly useful to those experiencing spiritual dryness.

This is one of the most important volumes in the Classics of Western Spirituality series. More is commonly known of the life of this young saint than her writings; she is the patron of many American parishes. Her example and directions to high churchmen were an important corrective in a pivotal moment of Church history. But one feels that the importance of her writings is only now becoming clear. Few are familiar enough with them.

Be warned: this twenty-something seer was austere. The transcriptions of her locutions, done by her confreres, are not prettied up, as they should not be. They convey a plain authenticity. Sentences and paragraphs run on and are often difficult to untangle. It can be very slow going; any of these dialogues can make for a wearying sitting. And the claim is absolute: God talking directly to Catherine in her ecstatic state, she as the mere transmitter, the confreres getting it down as best they can.

Of all the mysteries explicated here, however, the pinnacle and the unique aspect is the discussion of the mechanism of the Mystical Body of Christ. While a key and unique aspect of Catholicism that was there from the beginning, only in century 20 was it beginning to be more fully explicated by the likes of Bishop Sheen and Pius 12. The closest thing in Protestantism to it is the concept of Christian fellowship, but the Mystical Body is both more active and more exact than that. Many, including surprisingly Catholics, will reject this teaching in the radical and awesome form stated here. Of course, the writings and visions of saints are not matters of faith, except to the extent they track definitive dogmatic statements. But one would be challenged to explain how an untutored youth outside any formal religious house could have uttered a theology of this loftiness, depth, and sophistication. One thing is guaranteed: the Mystical Body theology set out in Catherine's locutions will never leave you -- the Divine Plan working itself out through the multiplicity of human gifts, randomly distributed, by a God who is most pleased when individual faithful share and exchange them toward Divine ends.

Many persons in and out of the Church are seeking spiritual experience of one sort or another, as if pinching themselves to know that they are real. They would be better off reading Dialogues nos. 6, 7, and 8, and meditating on them for a year to the exclusion of anything else.

This book has been important to me. From it, I learned that loving the LORD, my GOD, is manifested by the love which I exercise in the intercourse with my neighbour. This was already a well-known idea by the time of Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). It is articulated in the first epistle, chapter 4, from John. Catherine puts this virtue into action in her role as a diplomat for Pope Gregory XI. She was a determined woman of great spiritual fortitude, and is an inspiration to me. Catherine joins the acts of loving God with loving our neighbour. She does this by setting the will to love our neighbor as an attribute of the love which we have for God. Her argument to support this premise is profoundly logical. In brief, we cannot love God as God loves us because she loved us before we loved her. We manifest the will of God by loving our neighbor, even before our neighbour loves us. Since this goes against our natural instincts as humans, it must be the love of God which is at work. In this way, we are loving God as he loves us, and in this way, his love is glorified. In Catherine's own words, as she relates a conversation she received, "And I, [the LORD, our GOD,] would have thee know that just as every imperfection and perfection is acquired from Me, so is it manifested by means of the neighbour...I require that you should love Me with the same love with which I love you. This indeed you cannot do, because I loved you without being loved...Therefore to Me, in person you cannot repay the love which I require of you and I have placed you in the midst of your fellows, that you may do to them that which you cannot do to Me, that is to say, that you may love your neighbour of free grace, without expecting any return from him, and what you do to him, I count as done to Me, which My Truth [the Christ, Jesus] showed forth when He said to Paul, My persecutor == Saul, Saul, why persecutes thou Me?"

This logic appeals to me, and has given me strength in my spiritual relationship. It is not easy to love the LORD, and even more difficult, sometimes, to love those we see everyday. Catherine of Siena has provided me with some tools that help me to make that happen. If you are interested in a deeper spiritual relationship, in the spiritual thoughts of a politically powerful woman, or in mysticism as it was practiced in 14th century Italy, this book will be interesting to you.

A true inspiration to really live the Catholic Faith and to Listen to the Established Law God has set forth forever.
For the book may seem for the time written but in truth,
this is Eternity speaking ! Forever, speaking.
This Book so moved me that I changed my life and have such a deep respect for God our Father and his established Laws put forth for ever.

Thanks !

The visions of Catherine of Sienna are powerful; they offer the reader lots of spiritual insights. But Catherine's visions were recorded by other as they occurred, so the progression is not easy to follow. Ideas are mentioned several times and sometimes several analogies are used to apply to different ideas. It feels circular at times.

HOWEVER, there is much here that is worth reflection. Just take it slow.

This classic of Catholic spirituality is for all sorts of people. There are many gems in the pages of this book just waiting to be discovered. I found it to be a beautiful book.

Like a beautiful woman, the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena is a montage of purity, epiphany, and contradictions.

There is considerable preoccupation with sin - much more so than you find in John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent. Indeed, the Dialogue might be crudely characterized as a not-ineffective Wagnerian jeremiad of moral shaming. In this, it resembles the excesses of St. Jerome and might be argued to veer dangerously close to raising purity to the level of an obsessive-compulsive vice, the net effect being to dull the joy of the affections with relentless self-questioning. "In other words, the soul in the purity of her conscience sees guilt even where there was no guilt" (p. 136). In other words, you will not find the spirit of St. Augustine's "Sin boldly" here. There also is a strong prudish aversion to the physical body and the physical world that borders Gnostic heresy.

The Dialogue, then, labors under medieval moral extremism but also ontological dreariness: God's mercy is infinite but He will "torture forever" those who sin against him; God on the one hand has (is) limitless love, but on the other hand his anger toward the workers in His garden could only be mollified by sending his son to the garden so the workers could kill him. By letting them kill His son His anger toward His workers was assuaged. This Kafkaesque explanation, which really explains nothing read literally, is of course mainstream orthodoxy; however other Catholic divines have offered more trenchant and compelling explanations for the vicarious atonement and crucifixion.

Catherine dictated the lion's share of this work. So, as with Aristotle's writings, what we have here is a second-hand report - subsequent and unknown editorial alterations are known to have occurred "apparently in an attempt to bring Catherine's theology back into line" (p. 207). This I find fascinating. It might explain tension between mystic affirmations and orthodox affirmations throughout. (After all, part of the fun of mystics is their heterodoxy.) For example, Catherine relates that God has told her that Christ *already has* returned:

"He said he would return and he *did* return. For the Holy Spirit did not come alone, but with the power from me the Father and with the wisdom of the Son and with his own mercy. So you see, he returned, not in the flesh but in his power, to firm up the road of his teaching" (p. 70). On the next page following this theological bombshell, however, it is affirmed Christ *will* return in the flesh in line with Mark 13. So, while "Catherine is profoundly orthodox," there are sufficient couplings of such mystical heterodoxy with hard-line orthodoxy to give the reader pause - what did Catherine really think?

There can be little doubt what Catherine would have thought of the late Pope John Paul II and his subsequent beatification, when rather than disciplining thousands (at last count) of child-raping Roman Catholic priests he instead oversaw their being posted to new dioceses; (eg, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who engaged in a vast cover-up of sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests while Archbishop of Boston, far from being disciplined by John Paul II retained his post as a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family):

"No rank, whether of civil or divine law, can be held in grace without holy justice. For those who are not corrected and those who do not correct are like members beginning to rot... So it is with prelates or with anyone else in authority.... But [those who are in authority] today do not do this. In fact, they pretend not to see. And do you know why? Because the root of selfish love is alive in them... They do not correct people for fear of losing their rank and position.... Another reason they will not correct others is that they themselves are living in the same or greater sins (p. 224).... And sometimes when they recognize that these religious are incarnate devils, they send them from one monastery to the next to those who are incarnate devils like themselves (p. 241).... But if my Son's vicar becomes aware of their sin he ought to punish them. He should relieve those of office who will not repent and change their evil way of living... If Christ on earth [ie, the Pope] does this, he is doing his duty. If he does not, his sin will not go unpunished when it is his turn to give me an account of his little sheep" (p. 249).

If you believe this work was truly revealed to Catherine by God, then you too can have little doubt how God would view the late Pope.

This book reminds me of the truism that relatively uneducated people knowing only their native tongue can achieve remarkable purity of expression by the ironic strength of that very limitation. There is undeniably a salutary effect from reading this book, a resplendent Zen-like spirit of purity hovering over its pages. It's a marvelous (though at times surely tedious) work. St. Catherine was obviously an impressive woman, a beautiful woman, and I'm happy to have read her Dialogue. I will no doubt often return to it.

Each page of this book is packed with profound wisdom. Highly recommended.

It is indeed an honor to give a review of "Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue". Catherine was able to ask questions of Almighty God and receive answers for the betterment of mankind. Very few people are able to do this. Being that I also have a prophetic ministry, my ministers and I are accustomed to being able to receive information from Heaven. But, many people are not so fortunate. Catherine walked in the presence of Almighty God and lived a life of purity. She was, indeed, a mighty and humble servant of God. Her obedience to Almighty God enables us somewhat today to receive wisdom, comprehension and understanding as to why we, as mere mortals, suffer many of the hardships, etc. in daily life which we are experiencing. This book was a "breath of fresh air" and extremely enlightening, as to why we suffer while on the earth, and what pupose that suffering accomplishes. The book totally changed my personal perspective as to why we suffer and for what purpose. Therefore, my personal ministry has been somewhat changed because of this wonderful, wonderful book. I would personally recommend this book to everyone, particularly during the current times in which we are living.

Catherine has a lot to say, and at times I find her writing overwhelming. Though, perhaps if I give myself a few years to read and re-read this work, I will appreciate it almost as much as she does.

I felt obliged to comment, though I apologize my review isn't that good. Once I've finished reading The Dialouge, I'll return and author a proper review.

Catherine of Siena would recieve revelations from God and enter ecstatic trances. In those transes she would have "dialogues" with God which her sisters recorded, thus the title. Catherine was used by the Pope to be peacemaker between warring cities and as such she was a Papal apologist, meeting with nobles and dignitaries throughout Europe, a different role for a woman of that time. As mystic she would dialogue with God about the church, the pope, priests and recieve counsel that are recorded in the "Dialogues". The prose is instructional, not exhortive in nature. It is not a book that one reads expecting to come away uplifted and enthused, rather you will recieve sound direction.