Scott Alexander (author/host)

When he deprived her of food, she was fed by a dove.

When he had her tortured, her wounds miraculously healed.

When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted, and the emperor had to have her killed too.

So since the slot was empty, he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine.

She told him she had a better husband, Christ, and at that insult he condemned her to death.

The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch.

The second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck, true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.

Except that this story is almost certainly fiction.

Our oldest source is 600 years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact.

These stories grow in the telling.

More and more miracles added with every retelling to the point where some people question whether St Catherine even existed.

When our sources are good, they look like the venerable Bede's Life of St Cuthbert, chronicling how he saw visions of angels, prophesied the future, and also controlled the weather, which Bede based on a single chronicle written down within 20 years of the death of St Cuthbert.

This is to say that if we are lucky, we got it third-hand.

We are rarely lucky.

A saintly teenage girl who out-argues a room full of philosophers with no training, merely divine inspiration, is absurd.

There's no chance at all that such a saint might have existed, let alone been interviewed by a team of experts under oath about her entire life.

And of course, if this team of experts did interview her, they would no doubt end up concluding she was a fraud, though of course we can't expect them to mail copies of the interview to every monarch in Europe to prove it.

Footnote, very, very redacted copies.

Back to the text.

And definitely nobody would ever, ever be so angry at irregularities in the first interview that they would try to themselves interview everyone she'd ever met about her, still under oath, and mail a copy of the updated and revised edition to every monarch in Europe to prove that all her miracles actually happened.