Catherine of Alexandria

Life and Ministry

Catherine was a young woman of a noble Alexandrian family — by the late tradition the daughter of King Costus, by the more sober reading the daughter of an aristocratic Greek house with access to the philosophical schools of the city. Educated in rhetoric and philosophy, she was, by the time the Diocletian persecution reached Egypt, perhaps eighteen years old. The historical existence of Catherine has been debated since the Counter-Reformation: there is no fourth-century notice; the earliest extant passio is ninth-century and Greek; her cult arrives in the West only in the eleventh century with the discovery of relics on Mount Sinai. The story we have is medieval Greek and was received in the West with great force.

Circumstances of Death

The narrative as preserved: Catherine appeared at court when the emperor Maxentius (or Maximinus Daia in later versions) was presiding over a sacrifice and rebuked him publicly for ordering the persecution. He summoned fifty pagan philosophers to refute her in debate; Catherine, by the tradition, defeated all fifty, and many of them converted on the spot and were burned. Maxentius offered her his hand in marriage; she refused. He ordered her broken on a spiked wheel; the wheel shattered at her touch, killing the executioners and bystanders. She was finally beheaded. Angels carried her body to Mount Sinai, where the monastery built around her relics still stands.

Legacy

Catherine became, in the medieval West, the patron of philosophers, of scholars, of unmarried women, and of the wheelwrights' guild. She was one of the four great virgin martyrs invoked as a Heavenly Helper. Joan of Arc reported hearing Catherine's voice among those that counseled her. Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, which possesses the oldest continuously operating Christian library in the world and one of the earliest extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, takes its name and its tradition from her. The catherine-wheel firework preserves her name into modern English.