Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See by Mary Dunn;

Author:Mary Dunn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

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Within the cultural context of an early modern Catholicism suspicious of visionaries and alive to the dangers of the devil’s play, Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s extraordinary embodied experience as the double victim of both demonic obsession and divine justice was a problem. And Ragueneau’s Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin was the solution. Leaning on analytical tools borrowed from Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, I have argued that Catherine’s embattled body enables, like a prosthesis, the progress of Ragueneau’s hagiographic narrative toward its Christological end and that Ragueneau’s hagiographic narrative, in turn, functions prosthetically as a medium for returning Catherine to “an acceptable degree of difference.”104 An extended illness narrative, the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin makes embodied difference meaningful as an index of sanctity. The hermeneutic key that underwrites Ragueneau’s inscription of Catherine at once in imitatio Christi and at the same time in imitatio sanctorum, her embodied difference functions within the context of the Vie to integrate Catherine both socially and spiritually within the double horizon of the gospel story and the hagiographic tradition. Like a master craftsman, Ragueneau molds Catherine, carving here and shaping there, until she emerges at the end of the Vie as both alter Christus and alter sanctus, a suffering savior dedicated to the salvation of a sinful Canada in the model of Christ and his saints.

There are reasons to wonder, however, whether Ragueneau’s Vie really did solve the problem posed by Catherine’s ambiguous, anomalous (and deeply embodied) spiritual extravagance. Although Ragueneau’s intention had been to “edify the public and console good souls by the example of a life and a death … pure and … precious before God,” evidence suggests that the Vie was received unevenly upon its publication in France in 1671.105 Some readers, to be sure, did “find something to admire … and something to imitate” in the Vie, as Ragueneau had hoped.106 The “idle young man” whose chance encounter with the Vie is described in the Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Quebec was moved, for instance, to join the Jesuits in New France after reading about “the excessive suffering that [Catherine] endured and the great crosses that she bore in Canada.”107 Others, however, scoffed at the baroque excesses of the Vie. As early as 1691, the Recollect missionary and historian Chrestien Le Clercq lampooned Ragueneau (albeit indirectly) for introducing “hyperbole and … similar fictions” into Catherine’s vita. Florid descriptions of “visions, apparitions, revelations, raptures, and ecstasies … miracles and prodigies … fasts … alms … prayers … fervors … [and other] holy follies,” Le Clercq opined, are forgivable when the subject is a secular one, but not when the subject is sacred, for “they tend to undermine belief in true historical facts.”108 While some writers would go so far as to “place seven devils in a girl’s tooth to prove her sanctity,” Le Clercq himself preferred “truth and the fidelity of the historian.”109 Nearly two hundred years later, the editor of the Annuaire du Département de

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