08/13/2026
Saint Catherine of Siena Exchanging Her Heart with Christ
Giovanni de Paolo di Grazia
ca. 1460
tempera and gold on wood
28.9 x 22,5 cm
credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Bequest of Lore Heinemann, in memory of her husband, Dr. Rudolf J. Heinemann, 1996
MYSTICS
This panel is one of three that originally formed the predella of an altarpiece painted for the hospital church of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena by Giovanni de Paolo di Grazia (ca. 1403–1482). It dramatizes an event during which, according to Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), Jesus physically removed her heart from her body. Raymond of Capua (ca. 1330–1399), her confessor and biographer, left this account.
Once, when she was praying to the Lord with utmost fervor, saying to Him as the Prophet had done, “Create a clean heart within me, O God, and renew a right spirit within my bowels,” and asking Him again and again to take her own heart and will from her, He comforted her with this vision. It appeared to her that her Heavenly Bridegroom came to her as usual, opened her left side, took out her heart, and then went away. This vision was so effective and agreed so well with what she felt inside herself that in confession she told her confessor that she no longer had a heart in her breast. He shook his head a little at this way of putting it, and in a joking way reproved her; but she repeated it and insisted that she meant what she said. “Truly, Father,” she said, “in so far as I feel anything at all, it seems to me that my heart has been taken away altogether. The Lord did indeed appear to me, opened my left side, took my heart out and went away.” Her confessor then pointed out that it is impossible to live without a heart, but the virgin replied that nothing is impossible to God, and that she was convinced that she no longer had a heart. And for some time she went on repeating this, that she was living without a heart.
Except during physical exertion or an irregular palpitation, moment-to-moment awareness of our hearts lies just below conscious experience. It only requires, however, slight reflection to become aware of our heart beating. It’s hard to imagine what it would feel like to experience a void where before a fist-size muscle rhythmically throbbed within our chest.
Hers is in a long line of analogous visions reported by women stretching from the early days of Christianity to the present, including Perpetua (ca. 181–202), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416). Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647–1690), and Mary Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938). Certainly men such as Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327), and John of the Cross (1542–1591) have reported mystical visions, but theirs by-in-large seem more abstract and lack the visceral quality of those claimed by women mystics.
Modern neurobiologists have described a dynamic feedback loop between external environmental stimuli and visual images originating within the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, to explain visions. Phantom limb syndrome describes a phenomenon the opposite of Catherine of Siena’s by which persons suffering loss of limb feel sensations, sometimes acute, in a non-existent hand, foot, or leg. In his A Leg to Stand On neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933– ) recounts a rare mental condition, similar to Catherine of Siena’s and one which he himself endured, in which a person not only experiences no sensation in an existing limb, but is totally convinced that the limb is not his or hers and on occasion demands its amputation.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw visions as the expression of unconsciously repressed desires and anxieties. Carl Jung (1875–1961) understood visions to be antique reminisces of archetypal themes buried in the collective unconscious. William James attempted to sidestep the questions of the source and reality of visions by focusing on their pragmatic value. Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) parsed Marguerite Marie Alacoque’s visions into those which were prophetic, i.e., enhancing Christian theology, and those which were imaginative, i.e, not corporeal, thus in his typical illusive way also sidestepped the question of their reality.
Whether the source of Alacoque’s visions was heavenly or hallucinogenic is immaterial in this sense. The Sacred Heart of Jesus that she described has been translated into Christianity’s most mystical symbol. For some its bloody visage is abhorrent. For devotees, at once it echoes their own tragic sense of life and challenges them to reveal their own Sacred Heart, both portals to possible finite redemption.
Copyright © 2026, Peter N. Nevraumont. All Rights Reserved.
