Life and Tradition
According to the traditional account, Catherine was the daughter of Constus, governor of Alexandria, and was raised to learning from her youth. She is described as Greco-Egyptian, educated in Hellenistic philosophy and ancient texts, and renowned alike for her intellect and her beauty.
Numerous noble suitors are said to have sought her hand, but she refused them all, declaring that she would marry only one who surpassed her in nobility, wealth, beauty, and wisdom. Guided by her Christian mother to a hermit elder, she was instructed in the faith. The tradition relates a pair of visions: in the first, the Christ Child rejected her as unbaptized; after her baptism, a second vision followed in which Christ accepted her and placed a ring upon her finger, taking her as His own.
When the emperor came to Alexandria for pagan festivals, Catherine confronted him publicly, upbraiding him for the persecution of Christians and arguing against the worship of idols. The emperor summoned a body of about fifty of the most learned philosophers and rhetoricians to debate her. By the tradition's account she bested them, so that several came to believe in Christ themselves and were put to death for their confession.
Imprisoned and tortured, she is said to have been sustained in confinement—one account relating that a dove fed her, that Christ appeared to encourage her, and that angels tended her wounds. The Empress Augusta, the commander Porphyry, and a company of some two hundred soldiers visited her, were converted, and became martyrs. The emperor is said to have offered her marriage, which she refused, declaring Christ her spouse.
Martyrdom
Catherine was condemned to be broken upon a spiked wheel. By tradition the wheel was miraculously destroyed before it could be used, an angel shattering the instrument. She was then beheaded; some accounts add that milk rather than blood flowed from her neck.
Tradition holds that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai. The traditional dating places her death about the year 305, when she was approximately seventeen or eighteen years old.
Relics & Shrines
By tradition Catherine's body was borne by angels to Mount Sinai. In the ninth or tenth century her incorrupt remains—including her head and her left hand—were said to have been discovered there, with accounts describing hair still growing and a healing oil issuing from the body.
The relics were placed in the monastery church on Sinai, built in the sixth century under the emperor Justinian around the site traditionally identified as the burning bush. The monastery came to bear her name, and her head and left hand remain there as objects of veneration. Pilgrims to the monastery are given commemorative rings that recall the tradition of her heavenly betrothal.
Veneration and Feast
Catherine is venerated across both Eastern and Western Christianity. Byzantine and Greek Orthodox churches commemorate her on November 25, a date that coincides with the leavetaking of the Presentation of the Theotokos; some Slavic churches observe November 24, the date under which the Orthodox Church in America places her life. In the Latin tradition her feast likewise falls on November 25.
She is invoked among other things for assistance in difficult childbirth.
Historicity
The historical foundation of Catherine's life is regarded by modern scholarship as uncertain. The earliest surviving narrative account dates to roughly six hundred years after her purported death, in a tenth-century Menologium, and modern hagiographers have judged the authenticity of the texts to be more than doubtful.
Ancient pilgrim accounts of Sinai contain no allusion to the miraculous translation of her body there; by the eighteenth century the scholar Dom Deforis declared much of the tradition to be in great measure false, and her feast was eventually removed from the Paris Breviary. Some scholars have suggested the legend may draw on figures such as Saint Dorothea of Alexandria or the philosopher Hypatia, though Hypatia died in 415, more than a century after Catherine's purported martyrdom about 305.
