Catherine of Siena offers considerable wisdom regarding continuous prayer. However, this wisdom in not well known because it is scattered among her texts, including over 373 letters, and is expressed in images and metaphors, the product of oral communication by a 14th-century woman with no formal education. Through a literary analysis of original texts, I will show the interconnection among the meanings of her symbolic communications, offering a narrative about continuous prayer. I will explore the meaning of inner cell and time spent in this cell for knowledge of self and God. I will show how this dual knowledge results in transformation of the deepest motivation at the core of the person. Living consciously and for God’s kingdom out of this transformed core of the self constitutes continuous prayer.
Catherine of Siena, a 14th-century laywoman with no formal education, offers profound wisdom regarding continuous prayer, wisdom that is valuable and applicable in the 21st century. However, this wisdom is not well known because it cannot be easily culled by a straightforward reading of her texts, which are full of images and metaphors. Further, the fullness and complexity of her wisdom is scattered among her texts and requires interpretation. One of her images is the cell of self-knowledge, a metaphor for an inner experience or place of consciousness. This image and those that overlap and intersect offer a key to the most significant themes of Catherine’s wisdom regarding the spiritual journey and unlock her wisdom regarding continuous prayer. I will examine the image of cell and the images, metaphors and language related to spending time in the cell. Through a literary analysis, I will show the interconnection among the meanings of her symbolic communications so that scattered texts can be woven into a narrative about continuous prayer.
Catherine’s teaching on continuous prayer is both original and congruent with a long Christian tradition. Volumes have been written on prayer and on the related terms mysticism and contemplative prayer, both of which are related to the concept of continuous prayer; these terms all have multiple connotations depending on the tradition and/or historical period to which they refer.
Prayer is most essentially a conscious, intentional opening of oneself to one’s capacity for transcendence in an act of hope and faith that God is present in that transcendence and responds in a saving manner (Rahner
Continuous prayer is referenced in Scripture (Lk 18:1; 1 Thess 5:17) and has existed since the earliest days of Christianity. Augustine referred to ‘remembering God’ as turning to consciousness of God’s presence and he taught that the depth of desire for God was the basis for developing such consciousness in a continuous manner (Gilson
The state of prayer could and had to be habitual and continuous. It was constituted by an enduring attitude of meditation and attentiveness to God,
The spirituality of Eastern monasticism from its earliest days also understood continuous prayer as a way of life, the fruit of transformation rather than as a particular practice:
Prayer is to be not merely one activity among others but the activity of our entire existence, a dimension present in everything else that we undertake … It should constitute not so much something that we do from time to time as something that we are all the time. (Ware
As in Western monasticism, withdrawal from the world and the practice of spiritual exercises were to assist the monk or hermit to confront his inner self, surrender this to God and thus be transformed by this form of encounter.
Particularly through the Eastern Monastic tradition, contemporary spiritual seekers have been exposed to a practice associated in our time with continuous prayer, namely the Jesus Prayer.
This brief historical summary highlights that continuous prayer has referred to living life in such a way that we enter easily into conscious connection with God throughout the day. This ability is the fruit of a long-term journey of spiritual exercises that have allowed God to transform our consciousness and way of living. Traditionally, then, continuous prayer is not primarily a set of practices or practice such as the Jesus Prayer, but a way of life, ‘something that we are all the time’ (see Ware
As context for exploration of Catherine’s images for prayer and continuous prayer, it is important to understand the nature of her texts and the source of her wisdom. Her works consist of a book-length work,
Catherine’s wisdom is not the product of formal education, so her mind was not formed to ponder with any form of logic. Thus, her reflections about life, spirituality and theology are the product of an intuitive process combining the mostly oral formation she received with the depth of her relationship with God or mystical experience. She absorbed spirituality and doctrine listening to the Divine Office, mostly psalms and Scripture readings. She listened to the readings at Mass and the preaching of the Dominican priests at her local church and eventually she learned through personal discussions with various spiritual directors and guides. She spent a great deal of time pondering this oral wisdom, internally chewing on it and allowed it to intertwine with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. From this inner process came the images and metaphors in which she communicated her wisdom to those who took down her dictation.
The meaning of her images and metaphors can vary from text to text and a given image or metaphor can have more than one meaning, rendering the presentation and organisation of any theme in her work a great challenge. In the end, however, the kernels of wisdom found in an exploration of each image and metaphor when added together leave us with quite a coherent and profound teaching about continuous prayer.
I will present the different meanings of cell and the dynamics of spending time in the cell to know self and God. I will discuss Catherine’s perspective and language on transformation, especially her teaching about conversion through the dual knowledge of God and self. Through further analysis of her images and language, we will see that this transformation makes one able to easily attune one’s consciousness to God, enabling one to act materially and spiritually out of capacity for love, which for Catherine is continuous prayer.
Already in the first paragraph of
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This sentence gives us the key to the reason I use the image of cell as a path into the whole complex of Catherine’s teaching on prayer. Continuous prayer is grounded in knowledge of self and of God. In turn, these intertwined forms of knowledge are acquired in the cell or inner dwelling. Spending time in the cell or inner dwelling in order to be transformed through connection to God and self before God is ‘the mother of prayer’, and issues in living continuous prayer. ‘Go into the dwelling of the cell where you taste the mother of prayer; this prayer keeps you living and growing in virtue’ (Letter 104),
Catherine’s creative use of ‘cell’ as a symbol refers to an interior experience, an interior locus of consciousness where God is encountered as we encounter ourselves before God, and through time in the cell the spiritual journey unfolds. Before we explore in detail Catherine’s teaching about the cell and the spiritual journey, it is important to keep in mind what she means by knowledge of self,
In one of her letters, Catherine literally says that the person is the cell. She exhorts a Benedictine Nun as follows:
This is what you must do. Go to the room, the cell of self-knowledge.
… Go into the cell and go to bed, in which bed you will find God’s goodness, which is within you, [
Note she literally addresses the person as ’cell.’ If one is the cell, then this place of consciousness is a central dimension of one’s identity. Or, put another way, the place of quiet where one can know oneself and God is the depth of one’s consciousness. In order to enter into this depth of consciousness, the person is exhorted to ‘go to bed’, an image for slowing down, resting and closing one’s eyes. In other words, the cell as space of consciousness is a place of inner quiet and restfulness where God is found and the ‘location’ of this space is the core of one’s identity.
Cell of self-knowledge is the most frequently used term for this inner dwelling,
When combined with knowledge of self, ‘house’ is an alternative term for cell. Catherine speaks of going into the house of self-knowledge as equivalent to entering within oneself. She tells a monk, ‘He who wants to follow [
In various letters Catherine refers to the ‘cell of the soul’, adding nuance to the meaning of cell. In one of her earliest letters to Tommaso della Fonte, a cousin and Dominican, she writes, ‘dwell within the cell of your soul’ (Letter 41). Soul suggests the core of the self, the centre of one’s transcendental identity so that going into the cell of the soul implies turning one’s consciousness to the place where our transcendent identity encounters the presence of God. In this sense, this metaphor is similar to the one stating that the person is the cell.
In another passage, Catherine states that the soul is heaven (Letter 353).
The cell of the side of Christ is an image that evokes the blood and water poured out on the Cross (Jn 19:34), and therefore points to God’s redemptive love. Catherine urges a group of novices:
[
Here entering the cell involves turning one’s consciousness to contemplation of or resting in the image of Christ’s side, allowing such contemplation to reach the depth of one’s being thus infusing understanding of the central Christian belief that Jesus gave himself for us out of love; from such contemplation follows transformation.
Catherine’s wisdom here and elsewhere suggests that we are likely to deceive ourselves less if we face ourselves while deeply in touch with the meaning of God’s giving of God’s life for us in Christ. God’s self-giving love shines an inner light that protects from self-deception, but it is a truth that must be experienced in the core places of the self; it is not a matter of intellectual knowledge or an assent of faith that has not passed through knowledge of our need for God.
From Catherine’s perspective, spending time in the quiet necessary to connect to the place of consciousness at the core of one’s identity is so central to the spiritual journey that in a majority of her letters she urges and even orders her correspondents to enter into the cell and spend time there. For instance, she writes to one of her nieces, a nun, ‘I order you, dearest daughter that you always dwell in the house of self-knowledge where we find the angelic food of Gods tremendous desire for us’ (Letter 26). To the mother of one of her favourite male disciples, she writes ‘with desire to see you make a dwelling in the cell of knowledge of self, so that you may reach perfect love … This love is found by the soul who knows herself’ (Letter 241).
In order to spend time in the inner cell, the person must also spend time in the actual or physical cell, ‘cella attuale’,
Why is staying away from your material cell so unwholesome? Because before you abandon your material cell, you have already abandoned the spiritual cell of self-knowledge. If this weren’t so, you would have known how weak you are, and that weakness would have been a signal for you to stay in your cell [
She warns that avoiding times of quiet is a sign that commitment is lacking to the all-important focus on consciousness of one’s need for God and the related presence to God’s love. If we are not in touch with our woundedness and sinfulness, we lose track of the necessity of spending time in quiet in order to allow God’s love and mercy to act with our conscious cooperation; we also lose the desire to reach out to God present within. And because Catherine’s wisdom is seldom linear, she points out that some experience of God’s desire for us is necessary to develop a ‘love for’ or felt desire to spend time in the inner cell, that is, a desire for time in quiet. ‘If the person had not first spent time in the spiritual cell, he would not have developed a desire for the actual cell nor would he love this cell’ (Letter 37). In other words, there is an interrelated dynamic between having an experience of God’s love and an encounter with our need for God.
The interrelationship between the encounter with self at the core of our being and the encounter with God’s love is a central dynamic of Catherine’s wisdom. The importance of this interrelationship is seen through the apparently paradoxical image that knowledge of self is one cell, knowledge of God another, yet the two together are one cell. With this symbolic image, Catherine highlights that while separate forms of inner experience, knowledge of self and God must be experienced together in order to be fruitful and life giving. We see this wisdom in a letter to Alessa, one of her spiritual daughters:
Then make a spiritual dwelling place which you can carry with you at all times. This is the cell of true knowledge of yourself, where you find the knowledge of God’s goodness towards you. So these [
And in order to make herself this spiritual dwelling with to two cells in one, Alessa is advised to spend time in the actual cell.
Catherine explains to Alessa that experiencing God’s love alone can lead to pride, a form of self-centredness. That is, without the balance of knowing our need for God, we might conclude we have reached a spiritual superiority, or have achieved a holy end. We could become self-satisfied in experiencing the consolation of God’s love without the recognition of how this love is meant to transform and flower into care for the good of the other. On the other hand, we would suffer inner darkness and confusion if we only acquired consciousness of our need and sinfulness.
Catherine offers this same wisdom to Costanza, a nun:
I would like you to see that you are not, that you are neglectful and lacking in knowledge. However, I do not want you to see this through the darkness of confusion. Rather I want you to see this through the light of God’s infinite goodness, which is within yourself. (Letter 73)
Catherine’s spirituality highlights the merciful, gentle, forgiving love of God that desires our transformation through love. In this case, God’s goodness is a light which with goodness illuminates that which is dark within us. Catherine would never advise to go within the self to know our need and sinfulness without the balance of mercy and unconditional love. Thus, in the above letter, she helps her correspondent understand that in order to experience what God’s goodness is like, she must pass through knowledge of her sinfulness.
Another nuance of the dynamic between knowledge of self and of God can be gleaned from another creative image, that of the cell as a well. In a letter to Tommaso, her cousin and a Dominican priest Catherine teaches that:
the cell is like a well in which there is earth as well as water. In the earth we can recognize our own poverty: we see that we are not. For we
The intimate relationship between knowledge of God and self involves
Through this layered image, Catherine highlights a significant aspect of knowledge of self, namely, that ‘we are not’, meaning that we depend on God for our very being, our very existence; we depend on God to actualise our deepest identity. This need for God in order to actualise the best of who we are is a foundational reality that we can only learn in the inner cell but it must be balanced by knowledge of God’s goodness.
Catherine, then, teaches that the interrelated knowledge of self before God and knowledge of God’s love transforms. At the same time she emphasises that the transforming force is God’s love itself, an important distinction. This distinction is evident in some of the symbolic language she uses for God’s love.
Most often, Catherine refers to God’s love as
the knowledge that the person acquired knowing herself and my goodness within her where she experienced herself loved in an inexpressible and indescribable manner … because I [
In some texts,
In the knowledge of God you will find the fire of divine charity. Where will you delight in his charity? On the cross, with the Immaculate Lamb, seeking his love and the good of souls. (Letter 49)
The transforming quality of
God’s love is also a sweet mercy, which though a consoling image nevertheless effects change and growth such that the person is made capable of accomplishing God’s will:
in knowledge of yourself you will encounter the sweet mercy of the Holy Spirit, who is love itself and gives love … in the cell of the soul you will find
While the images are completely different in connotation than those of fire, or burning, the theme of God’s love as transforming emerges again. Experiencing merciful love implies that the person has come to know her need for such mercy and in this need has known God’s sweet, consoling and refreshing love, which heals her wounds and gently transforms her self-centredness. The experience of mercy is so important that the person comes to know
Also central to understanding Catherine’s view of transformation is what she calls
The progressive transformation of desire/
Catherine teaches that continuous prayer is our desire/
One [
Through her symbolic communication, Catherine offers various nuances to this teaching. In this passage, a
The first [
In this case, ‘desire’ characterised as continual
In a letter to the abbess of a Florentine monastery, Catherine teaches that the transformation that blossoms into continuous prayer is progressive, as we grow in humility, which in Catherine means the knowledge of our need for God (already described in detail) and the experience of God’s unfathomable love. At the same time, she reminds the abbess that such love is learned in the ‘breast of Christ crucified’, that is, by learning to live in a self-giving way and allowing suffering to be transformative:
[
We see again in this passage that desire leading to action, when rooted in transformation is continuous prayer. The wisdom in this passage also points to the interior watchfulness or attentiveness (i.e., spending time in the cell) that is necessary for continuous prayer.
That prayer is continuous only as the fruit of transformation is emphasised in a text where she tells Francesco, the Carthusian that:
continuous humble prayer [
In telling us that continuous prayer is fruitful only when made in the house of self-knowledge and knowledge of God, Catherine is telling us, through her symbolic communication, that continuous prayer is not authentic unless it arises from a place within us that is rooted in a connection with God that has resulted over time in our transformation. Or put in different words, without transformation through time in the cell, one’s spiritual and physical actions are unlikely to be congruent with God’s will and there would not be continuous prayer. In other words, Catherine tells us again that continuous prayer is operative when out of the core of transformed desire/
Intercessory prayer is one of the actions directed towards God’s glory that is particularly effective when the fruit of continuous prayer. In a letter to a hermit, Niccolo, she urges him to work for the good of others ‘our fellow human beings, whom we must love’ through intercessory prayer ‘offering humble tears and continuous prayer before God for the salvation of all’ (Letter 78). At the conclusion of
Catherine’s wisdom teaches that continuous prayer is a way of perceiving and acting, a way of living consciously out of a desire to follow God and bring about God’s Kingdom. This becomes possible as one acquires a facility for turning one’s consciousness to God and to respond to God’s guidance in living a life of self-giving and care for the good of the world, the environment, our fellow human beings, our families and ourselves. Continuous prayer is the fruit of a progressive transformation resulting from an encounter with the God of love as we confront our need for God. That continuous prayer involves such transformation is a particularly important point to highlight for us contemporary seekers who might be inclined to focus on achievement of proficiency in prayer methods, or on the attainment of certain experiences or levels of consciousness.
Catherine’s wisdom teaches a spirituality of continuous prayer that can be adapted to contemporary life. As we saw, she advocated continuous prayer for all persons (not just monks, priests or nuns), and she told her correspondents that continuous prayer should occur wherever we are and in whatever we are doing. How is this possible? Through commitment to a discipline of time spent in attentiveness to God’s presence within us and to allowing this presence to transform us. The spiritual exercise par excellence that Catherine would recommend can best be illustrated by a contemporary analogy. If we imagine God’s love and light as radio waves that are always reaching us, we can similarly imagine that we need to turn the radio on in order to hear these waves, God’s Word. Turning on the radio once a day to listen to God would be equivalent to spending time in the inner cell as described by Catherine. She does not give particular guidelines or exercises in order to tune in to the radio (though she always recommends the recitation of the Divine Office and the Psalms). Rather, she encourages frequent time spent in quiet. We contemporary seekers can learn from exercises of centering prayer, repetitive prayer (such as the Jesus Prayer) or
Catherine’s wisdom is congruent with the tradition of continuous prayer in that it involves Augustine’s ‘remembering God’, it involves acquiring the inner quiet sought by the Eastern and Western hermits and monks. Further, her wisdom is congruent with the monastic ideal of continuous prayer as a way of life for following the Gospel. Perhaps, because she was a laywoman, she was innovative in her assertion that continuous prayer was not only possible for all persons, but she insisted that all persons were
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.
The history of Christian spirituality has included debates regarding levels of prayer and contemplation and how these are related to holiness (see summary in Villegas
See Ware’s full article for a more detailed discussion of Eastern Monasticism, continuous prayer and a discussion of the Jesus Prayer. Also, see Noble (
The spirituality of monastic hesychasm comes to us through
Research for this essay is based on the original texts available in digital form (Catherine of Siena
For a historical literary analysis of Catherine’s works, see Tylus (
Citations to
Translations of the Letters are mine unless reference is made to Suzanne Noffke’s translation, which includes four volumes (Catherine of Siena
In a Ph.D. dissertation, Patricia Fresen studied the development of Catherine’s wisdom regarding self-knowledge (
The precise metaphor ‘going into the cell of self-knowledge’ first appears in 1376 and becomes common after 1377 when most of Catherine’s letters and
Catherine uses soul with the commonly understood meaning in her day, namely the core transcendent dimension of the person’s identity.
See also Letters 37 and 76.
While Catherine most often uses the term
Her correspondents included Popes, cardinals; kings and queens; noblemen and women; doctors and judges; ordinary, married and unmarried lay men and women; as well, of course, monks and nuns, priests, hermits and other celibates committed to the service of God.
On the balance of knowledge of God and self in
Related words,
See Catherine of Siena (
Noffke (
I have translated this passage as literally as possible to preserve Catherine’s unique form of expression regarding a topic central to this essay. Noffke’s translation reads, ‘Such desire is constantly praying; I mean, the movement of charity in what we do is praying continually before our Creator no matter where we are or when’ (Catherine of Siena
The limits of space in this essay have not made it possible to develop the theme of the transformative power of suffering lived in union with God, a significant theme in Catherine’s texts.
Her call to continuous prayer for all persons is innovative for Western spirituality. Ware points out that Eastern monastic writers asserted that continuous prayer should be for all persons (Ware