The Monastery of Sinai

The Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai — built by Justinian, dedicated to the Theotokos and the Transfiguration, and only later associated with Catherine through the tradition that angels translated her body to the neighboring peak. This file sets the firm institutional history against the late and constructed relic-translation tradition per METHODOLOGY §3.5, and follows the monastery’s role as the cradle and engine of the cult.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

The Monastery Before Catherine

The great monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai is one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries in the world, and its early history has nothing to do with St Catherine. It was built by the Emperor Justinian I between roughly 548 and 565, enclosing the much older chapel at the traditional site of the Burning Bush, and it was dedicated to the Theotokos; its great church, the catholicon, is the Church of the Transfiguration, which remains its formal patronal dedication to this day (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Catherine’s Monastery”; OrthodoxWiki, “St. Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai)”). For its first centuries it was “the monastery of the Theotokos” or simply the monastery of Sinai — the goal of pilgrims drawn by the Bush, by Moses and the giving of the Law, and by the holy mountain itself. The association with Catherine, and the name by which the monastery is now known throughout the world, is a later acquisition.

This is the firm history, and it is the indispensable backdrop to the source-critical reading of the relic tradition: the house that became “St Catherine’s” was founded, dedicated, and famous as a center of pilgrimage long before any body of Catherine was said to lie there.

The Translation Tradition

The link between Catherine and Sinai is supplied by the legend itself, in its developed Passio: after her beheading at Alexandria, angels took up her body and carried it across the desert to the summit of the highest peak of the Sinai massif — the mountain that came to bear her name, Jebel Katherina (Mount Catherine) — where it lay hidden until, centuries later, monks of the monastery were led by a vision to discover it and to translate it down to the catholicon (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, c. 1260; OCA, Lives of the Saints, November 24; see The Beheading and the Milk). The legend adds that the body was found incorrupt, the hair still growing, and a fragrant healing oil streaming from it.

The collection reports this as the content of the tradition, and marks plainly that it is late and constructed.

[Disputed: the tradition that angels translated Catherine’s body to Mount Sinai and that monks later discovered it has no early attestation. The monastery was founded under Justinian (c. 548–565) and dedicated to the Theotokos / Transfiguration, not to Catherine; the early pilgrim itineraries to Sinai “do not contain the slightest allusion” to any body of Catherine there (Clugnet, Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908; Walsh, The Cult of St Katherine, 2007). The “discovery” of the relics is dated traditionally to c. 800 but by scholarship (Walsh) to c. 1000 — after the Life was written by Symeon Metaphrastes; by the twelfth century the remains had been placed in the main monastery. David Hugh Farmer notes the suggestion that the “angels” who carried the body may be a misreading of “monks” (Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, s.v. “Catherine”). The whole association is a medieval development.]

When Sinai Became “St Catherine’s”

The documentary record confirms how late the renaming was. As Christine Walsh shows, the monastery is still called “the monastery of St Mary” in papal letters of 1217 (Honorius III) and again in 1317; it is first called “St Katherine’s” in a document of Pope John XXII in 1328 — the first Western reference under that name (Walsh, The Cult of St Katherine, 2007; reported in Lifshitz’s review, The Medieval Review 08.11.09). The sequence is clear: a Justinianic foundation to the Theotokos (548–565); relics of Catherine “discovered” on the massif (tradition c. 800, scholarship c. 1000); the remains brought into the catholicon by the twelfth century; and the renaming to “St Catherine’s” completed in the West by 1328. The world-famous name is the last stage of a long process, not the monastery’s original identity.

[Disputed: the date of the “discovery” of Catherine’s relics on Sinai is given traditionally as c. 800 (so the devotional accounts and the monastery’s own tradition) but is placed by Christine Walsh c. 1000, on the grounds that the cult “is still quite minor” as late as the tenth century and that the relic tradition postdates Metaphrastes’ Life (Walsh, The Cult of St Katherine, 2007, pp. 27, 39). The collection reports both dates, attributing each.]

The Relics and the Pilgrimage Today

Whatever the date of their origin, the relics became, from the eleventh century onward, the engine of one of the great pilgrimages of the medieval world. The monastery displays in its catholicon a marble reliquary holding two vessels — a gift of the Russian Empire — containing Catherine’s skull and her left hand; pilgrims who venerate the relics receive a silver ring bearing the saint’s monogram, in memory of the mystical betrothal (Holy Monastery of Sinai; see Feast and Relics). The tradition of the streaming healing oil — the myrrh said to flow from the relics — is of a piece with the milk of the martyrdom: signs that the saint’s body, in death, became a source of life (see The Beheading and the Milk).

It was the relics, above all, that drew the West to Catherine. Christine Walsh’s central thesis is that the cult was relic-driven: the Passio’s claim that angels had buried her on Sinai “created the expectation” of relics there, and once relics could be venerated — on the mountain and, in fragments, in the West — the cult exploded (Walsh, The Cult of St Katherine, 2007, pp. 39–40). The mechanism by which fragments and pilgrims carried the cult from Sinai across Europe is the subject of the next file (see The Spread of the Cult).

Sinai and the Sinaite Tradition

The monastery’s identification with Catherine also bound her name to one of the most distinctive strands of Orthodox monasticism. Sinai was the home of a contemplative and ascetic tradition reaching back to the desert Fathers and crowned by St John Climacus, abbot of Sinai, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent takes its title and its imagery from the mountain (see St John Climacus). When the monastery became “St Catherine’s,” the learned virgin-martyr of Alexandria became, in a sense, the patron of the Sinaite contemplative life — a fitting union of the two faces of Christian Alexandria and Egypt, the school and the desert. The monastery remains an autonomous Orthodox house under its own archbishop, and the living center of Catherine’s Eastern cult.

References

Walsh, Christine. The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007, esp. pp. 27, 39–40. (The relic-driven cult; the discovery dated c. 1000; the “St Mary” papal letters of 1217 and 1317 and the “St Katherine’s” of 1328; the cult “still quite minor” in the tenth century.)
“Saint Catherine’s Monastery.” Encyclopædia Britannica. (Justinianic foundation 548–565; the Transfiguration dedication.)
“St. Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai).” OrthodoxWiki. (The original dedication to the Theotokos; the later renaming.)
Clugnet, Léon. “St. Catherine of Alexandria.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton, 1908 (New Advent). (Early pilgrims’ silence on any body of Catherine.)
Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, s.v. “Catherine of Alexandria.” (The “angels”/“monks” suggestion; the ninth-century beginning of the cult at Sinai.)
Holy Monastery of Sinai (official accounts). (The skull and left-hand relics; the silver ring given to pilgrims; the streaming oil.)
“Great-Martyr Catherine of Alexandria.” Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, November 24. (The angelic translation.)