The Breaking Wheel

The episode that gave Catherine her most famous emblem: the spiked wheel prepared for her torture, which shatters at her touch or is broken by an angel, killing the watching pagans — the “Catherine wheel.” This file also treats the scourging and imprisonment and the conversion of the empress and the soldier Porphyrius with his company, reporting each as the developed Passio attests it and noting, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, that the wheel is a later accretion absent from the earliest layer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

A Later Accretion, the Most Famous Emblem

The breaking wheel is the single most recognizable feature of the Catherine legend — the attribute by which she is identified in a thousand paintings and stained-glass windows, the instrument whose name passed to a firework and to the torture-device of later centuries. It is also, and this must be stated at the outset, a later accretion. The wheel is absent from the spare Menologion of Basil II (c. 976–1000), the earliest datable narrative, which knows only the debate and the beheading; it belongs to the developed Passio of Symeon Metaphrastes and to the Golden Legend that fixed it for the West (see The Source Problem). The emblem that defines Catherine is thus one of the legend’s secondary growths — which makes its triumph in the medieval imagination all the more remarkable.

Scourging and Imprisonment

Before the wheel, the legend sets the scourging and imprisonment. The emperor, enraged that his fifty philosophers have been confounded and converted (see The Debate with the Philosophers), turns to force: Catherine is beaten with scourges and shut up in a dark prison without food, to break her body and her resolve. Instead the legend has her sustained miraculously — fed by a dove from heaven and visited by Christ, who promises her His help, in the developed tellings (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, c. 1260; the Orthodox synaxarion at oca.org). The scourging and imprisonment, unlike the wheel, belong to the outline shared with the older layer; the dove and the heavenly visitations are part of the developed elaboration.

The Conversion of the Empress and Porphyrius

It is during this imprisonment that the legend places two of its most striking conversions, both belonging to the developed Passio rather than the original.

The emperor’s own wife — titled the Augusta or empress, and named Faustina in some Western versions — comes secretly to the prison, drawn by what she has heard of Catherine, together with the captain of the guard, the soldier Porphyrius, and a company of two hundred soldiers. Catherine’s witness converts them all. The empress confesses Christ; Porphyrius and his two hundred men are baptized in heart; and when their faith is discovered, all are put to death — the empress cruelly tortured and beheaded, Porphyrius and his soldiers executed (Symeon Metaphrastes, Passio, PG 116; Golden Legend, c. 1260; the Orthodox account at oca.org). Çetinbaş notes that in Metaphrastes’ Passion typology the converted empress answers to Pilate’s wife Procula and Porphyrius the commander to the centurion Longinus — the developed legend mapping the cast of Catherine’s martyrdom onto the cast of Christ’s (Çetinbaş, Comparative Saints’ Cults, CEU, 2020).

[Disputed: the converted empress, the soldier Porphyrius, and the two hundred soldiers are features of the developed Passio (Metaphrastes, 10th c., and the Western tradition after), absent from the earliest datable narrative (the Menologion of Basil II, c. 976–1000). The empress is titled Augusta in the Eastern tradition and named Faustina in parts of the Western tradition; the number two hundred is the standard figure for Porphyrius’ company. All are reported as the content of the legend, not as documented persons or events.]

These conversions extend the legend’s structural pattern: each person the emperor sends against Catherine, or who stands closest to him, is instead won by her — the philosophers, then his own wife, then his own guard. The pattern is the signature of a constructed hagiographic drama (see The Narrative).

The Wheel That Shatters

The wheel itself comes near the climax. The emperor, having failed by argument, by scourging, and by imprisonment, and (in the developed legend) having offered Catherine marriage and been refused, orders a fearsome engine of torture built to destroy her. The Golden Legend describes it most fully: four wheels of iron, set about with sharp saws and razors and studded with spikes, two turning one way and two the other, to tear her body to pieces between them (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, c. 1260). Catherine prays, and the engine is destroyed before it can touch her.

The tradition divides on the mechanism, and the collection reports the division.

[Disputed: the manner of the wheel’s destruction varies by recension. In the Orthodox tradition (e.g., the OCA synaxarion) an angel of the Lord smashes the four spiked wheels; in the Western popular form, deriving from the Golden Legend, the wheel shatters at Catherine’s touch or by her prayer. The Golden Legend adds that the flying fragments killed four thousand of the watching pagans. The wheel episode in any form is absent from the earliest datable narrative (the Menologion of Basil II) and belongs to the developed Passio (OCA, Lives of the Saints; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, c. 1260).]

The detail of the four thousand slain bystanders is a flourish of the Western legend, the kind of escalating wonder that the Golden Legend favored. What survived into universal memory was the simpler image: the spiked wheel breaking, harmless, before the praying virgin. From it Catherine took the wheel as her attribute, the torture-wheel of later European justice took the name “breaking on the wheel,” and the spinning pinwheel firework took the name “Catherine wheel” (on the emblem and its afterlife, see Patron of Philosophers and Students and Iconography).

Toward the Beheading

The wheel having failed, the emperor falls back on the simplest of executions, and the legend moves to its conclusion: Catherine is sentenced to be beheaded, with the tradition that milk flowed from her body in place of blood and that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai (see The Beheading and the Milk and The Monastery of Sinai). The wheel that could not kill her yields to the sword that does — but the wheel, not the sword, is what the tradition remembered.

See Also

References

  • Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), c. 1260. Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The four iron wheels set with razors; the engine broken by Catherine’s prayer; the four thousand slain; the conversion of the empress and Porphyrius.)
  • Symeon Metaphrastes, Passio S. Catharinae (BHG 32), in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 116. (The developed Passio; the empress and Porphyrius.)
  • Menologion of Basil II (Synaxarion), Vat. gr. 1613, c. 976–1000. (The earliest narrative, lacking the wheel, the empress, and Porphyrius.)
  • Çetinbaş, Eylül. Comparative Saints’ Cults of St Catherine of Alexandria. MA thesis, Central European University, 2020. (The Passion-typology mapping of empress and Porphyrius.)
  • “Great-Martyr Catherine of Alexandria.” Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, November 24. (The angel breaking the wheels; the conversion and martyrdom of the empress Augusta and Porphyrius with his soldiers.)