FALL/WINTER 2025
Light Enough to Ascend
“‘What do I care for food? I have a kind of food unknown to those you order me to go to. Does a man live by bread alone?’”
—Saint Catherine of Siena, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena
Violetta Balkoff
God visited Catherine of Siena in romantic, erotic visions.1 She took a vow of virginity. They were to be married in the Kingdom of Heaven. While God would reach down to Catherine, blessing her with promises and His presence, Catherine’s flesh tethered her to Earth. She begged Him to kill her.2 Christ told Catherine that she must wait. But Catherine was impatient. Instead of waiting, she spent her entire life chipping away at her body. Eating nothing but the eucharist,3 flogging herself with chains until blood ran,4 Catherine practiced a slow suicide. As Catherine’s body weakened from extensive starvation, her soul ate deliciously.5 Self-destruction of the flesh increased her heavenly crown.6 It was an imitation of the cross (imitatio Christi) and a ritual of purification.7 Catherine starved herself the same way she remained a virgin, by refusing to let anything unholy (and sinfully pleasurable) enter her.8
Catherine was a walking, decomposing, living miracle.9 Doctors marveled at her survival.10 Raymond of Capua, her confessor and hagiographer, asserted that nothing but divine will could’ve enabled Catherine to endure such extreme hunger.11 Starving herself was her act of love.12 For her love, she wanted to die.13 In the end, God granted his mortal bride’s wish.14 Catherine starved herself to death in 1380. In 1461, Pope Pius II made Catherine of Siena a saint for her martyrdom. Her severed head remains as a relic in her hometown, Siena. The rest of her fragmented body—her finger, right foot, rib, shoulder blade, etc—is scattered across Europe. For the last 700 years, Catherine of Siena’s cult has venerated the body she once fought so hard to destroy. Saint Catherine of Siena is still revered today.
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In recent years, alongside the increased discussion of restrictive eating disorders, historians and psychologists have grappled with St. Catherine of Siena’s anorexia (or lack-thereof). Some have claimed that St. Catherine of Siena’s hagiography is one of the first documented cases of anorexia. In his seminal work, Rudolph Bell proposes a diagnosis of “Holy Anorexia,” which slightly deviates from the modern diagnosis of “anorexia nervosa” due to its differing cultural context. In cases of holy anorexia, “The suppression of physical urges and basic feelings—fatigue, sexual drive, hunger, pain—frees the body to achieve heroic feats and the soul to commune with God.” But ultimately, “Each [anorexic, holy or nervous,] pursues her externally different but psychologically analogous, culturally approved objective with fanatical, compulsive devotion.”15 Integral to Bell’s analysis is the “psychologically analogous” nature of holy anorexia and anorexia nervosa. This claim is contentious, highly controversial, and often disputed.
Other medievalists have fervently rejected this claim of anorexia as attached to figures like St. Catherine, despite the shared practice of self-starvation. In the epilogue to Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Bynum states “the notion of anorexia nervosa… should not be wrenched from its modern context and applied to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, so I would argue that medieval symbols, behaviors, and doctrines have no direct lessons for [today].” This is because, according to Bynum, “they were produced by a world that has vanished.” But the medieval world has not “vanished.”16 However cannibalized and distorted, residue from the past will forever stick to the present.
Regardless of whether St. Catherine of Siena qualifies for a modern diagnosis of anorexia, contemporary media poses self-starvation with similar religious rhetoric and contemporary anorexics starve themselves in parallel ways. The language of purity, obedience, and devotion has long been used by advertisers to connect weight loss commodities with their audiences' religious sensibilities. A 2003 study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition analyzed advertisers’ frequent use of specific words—including “temptation,” “heaven,” “purity,” and “sin”—to advance a connection between eating (or not eating) and moral, religious values. The conclusion of the study found: “Such messages identifying eating with guilt or reward could precipitate ‘atypical’ eating disorders in vulnerable subjects, invoking the historical associations with extreme religiosity and anorexia.”17
Since 2003, this rhetoric has proliferated in pop-culture. In particular, online spaces for eating disorders have dramatically increased in number, size, and influence. First there were web forums, then proana18 Tumblr, and now edtwt19 X reigns supreme. These are not isolated communities; content posted for a disordered audience frequently spreads elsewhere. While not all intended to promote their condition, the regurgitation of moralizing rhetoric undoubtedly impacts viewers. As stated in the Journal’s 2003 study, this proves particularly significant for vulnerable and impressionable individuals—for example, a teenage girl.
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At thirteen, Tumblr taught me how to be anorexic. It was proana’s waning prime. I was sucked in all the same. My life was marked by rituals of self-destruction. I fasted and purged with earnest devotion. I strove for thinness (and thus beauty and thus acceptance and thus love). I fantasized about the day I would reach my ultimate goal weight. Life would be heavenly; I would have crossed the threshold to paradise.
My labor’s fruit was miraculous, intoxicating, and fundamentally impossible to achieve. After years of slow suicide, I eventually deleted my account. It was a symbol of recovery and abandonment of the anorexic fantasy. But unlearning what you’ve been taught is easier said than done.
Many years later, as a stressed college student, I relapsed. Like my early teenage self, I indulged in starvation-centric social media, this time on X’s edtwt. At the time, it seemed like the natural continuation of my personal trajectory—a return to my true self. It was my best kept secret. My thoughts20 were too embarrassing to write in ink. Instead, I posted them for an audience that held the same delusions as me.
Of course I understood the absurdity and hypocrisy of it all. I listened when well-informed and well-meaning people said that both patriarchy and capitalism21 wanted me small. I remembered my therapist telling me that “there is nothing more feminist than refusing to diminish yourself.” Girls I admired chose recovery as a radical act. I did not.
In a class called “Sex, Power, and God,” I became fixated on repeated hagiographical descriptions of female saints starving for salvation. Reading St. Catherine of Siena’s hagiography (as well as that of Angela of Foligno, Marie D’Oignies, Christina Mirabilis, among others) was eerily familiar. Centuries separated us (anorexics) from them, and yet malnutrition, ritual, diction, and devotion bridged the gap between us.
I found the parallel language and logic to be particularly striking. For these saints, self-starvation was—in part—an act of purification. Like the saints, many edtwt users claim that self-starvation cleanses them.22 They firmly hold onto the belief that only through this process of purification can they finally achieve bliss, both personally and socially. I’d be lying if I said that I never understood what they meant. Especially after having existed in a categorically obese body for most of my early life, I learned what was to be gained through self-starvation. With time, I learned what was to be lost. I saw myself destroyed, as all who keep going eventually do.
St. Catherine of Siena, resisting treatment for her diminished state, exclaimed, “‘What do I care for food? I have a kind of food unknown to those you order me to go to. Does a man live by bread alone?’”23 The final question is rhetorical: a man does not live by bread alone. Food may feed his body, but faith feeds his soul.
For many (primarily women) from Medieval Christendom24 to the present,25 the purpose of self-starvation—ascension to heaven—has remained intact, despite obvious variations on the definition of “heaven.” While anorexics are not a monolith in pathology nor ideology, this branch of anorexic rationalization has its roots in the Medieval. St. Catherine of Siena and her like were seeking entrance into Christian heaven and unity with Jesus Christ. Contemporary anorexics seek a seemingly non-religious heaven on earth: life in a thin body. For both groups, self-starvation is their key to the golden gates. In this way, both contemporary anorexics and medieval “holy anorexics” have sacrificed their body, health, and life for a promise. For many, the only promise that this sacrifice clearly fulfills is that of their death.
1 “‘I want the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ,’ and lo, as so often happened, the Lord Himself appeared to her, determined to satisfy her, and, drawing her mouth towards the wound in His side, made a sign to her to sate herself to her heart’s content on His body and blood. She did not need to be invited twice, and drank long from the rivers of life at their source in the holy side; and such sweetness ascended into her soul that she thought she must die of love” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 170-171).
2 “‘Why, O most beloved Lord, do you allow this contemptible body of mine to keep me away from your embraces? In this wretched life I find nothing that attracts me. I seek no other but you, I love nothing but you, for if I love anything it is for your sake that I love it. Why, then, by a worthless body must I be prevented from enjoying you? O, my most merciful Lord, release my soul from this prison and free me from this mortal body!’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 185-186)
3 “‘I feel so satisfied by the Lord when I receive His most adorable Sacrament that I could not possibly feel any desire for any other kind of food’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 156); “‘What do I care for food? I have a kind of food unknown to those you order me to go to. Does a man live by bread alone?’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 107).
4 “Catherine rose gaily up against herself, against her own flesh and blood, lacerating her body with an iron chain until the blood flowed” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 90); “Just think, reader, what degree of perfection this soul must have reached if she was prepared to draw blood from herself three times a day to render to the Lord ‘blood for blood’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 55).
5 “She gradually reached a state of total abstinence almost unheard of in our times. But if her body took nothing, her spirit fed most sumptuously in its stead” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 156); “[Catherine was] satisfied, though fasting, empty without but full within, dry to look at but inwardly watered by the rivers of living water and at all times full of life and happiness” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 157).
6 “‘It is through suffering that I shall enjoy a more sublime version of God’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 192).
7 “From the cross He called down to the holy virgin, ‘Catherine, my daughter, you see how much I suffered for you? Do not be sad, then, that you must suffer for me’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 94).
8 “Her purity and abstinence, which destroyed all the pleasures of the flesh as being unlawful” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 360).
9 “Her poor body, now weighed down with every kind of infirmary, was reduced to mere skin and bone and seemed not to be alive but already devoured by the grave; nevertheless she went on walking about, praying and working, seeming to everyone a walking miracle rather than a creature of nature” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 318).
10 “It always seemed to me that her whole life was a miracle, for what was visible before our eyes was something that could not possibly have taken place as the result of a natural process, as I was told plainly by the doctors I took to see her” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 52).
11 “In the end it was given her, not as a result of habit or natural disposition, but as I hope, God willing, to explain more fully later, through a divine miracle, to reach such a point that though her wasted body was plagued by complaints and subject to labours that others would never have been able to endure, nevertheless the vital juices were not consumed within her” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 52).
12 “‘With joy I have chosen the way of suffering and shall endure these and any other persecutions in the name of the Saviour for as long as it shall please Him to send them, in fact I shall enjoy them.’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 93-94).
13 “‘For the honour of your Name and your holy Church I will gladly drink the chalice of passion and death—which, as you yourself know, I have always desired to drink, ever since with the help of your grace I began to love you with all my mind and heart’” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 317).
14 “And now we come to the last act of patience, in the course of which, enduring for the love of Christ and His Holy Church a hard and bitter death, she equalled and surpassed the merits of the martyrs… Catherine has gained the double crown, of martyrdom by desire and martyrdom by blood” (Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 383)
15 Bell, Holy Anorexia, p. 13, 20-21.
16 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, p. 299.
17 Griffin and Berry. 2003. "A Modern Day Holy Anorexia? Religious Language in Advertising and Anorexia Nervosa in the West”.
18 Meaning “pro-anorexia,” though many users, including myself, would claim that they were searching for community more than attempting to promote anything.
19 Meaning “eating disorder Twitter.” The platform formerly known as Twitter is now Elon Musk’s X, but the original community name stuck regardless.
20 “I feel like I’ve sacrificed everything for my eating disorder. My relationships, my education, my career, my health, my time. And yet I’m still so far”; “It’ll all be worth it. One day I will be skinny.”; “I would be lovable if I was skinny.”; “All I’ve ever wanted was to be pretty. And if I die trying, then so be it.” Even at the time, I knew these sentiments were insane. That did not stop me from living by them as if they were divine truth.
21 Deeply intertwined but often argumentatively separated.
22 “Starving is just cleansing and purifying your body when you really think about it everyone on edtwt is on an enlightenment journey”; “Eating is weakness. Eating is dirty. Starving is strength. Starving is clean.”; “I wanna starve until there is nothing left of me I wanna starve until I am pure.”
23 Raymond, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, p. 107.
24 Within the lives of religious men and women, fasting existed in the intersection between food and penitential asceticism—both of which were more heavily associated with women than men. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell’s study of 864 saints from 1000 to 1700 found that all types of penitential asceticism (including fasting) were significantly more common among women than men. Further, preachers in the Middle Ages advised fasting disproportionately to women than to men. This follows a greater trend of medieval preachers associating women with food practices—such as food charity, fasting, and eucharistic favor. Analyzing the vitae of religious men and women indicates that fasting in particular was more prominent among women than men, especially throughout the high and late Middle Ages. But this must be taken with a grain of salt. Almost all of our information on medieval women was penned by male biographers, creating a problem of perspective and objectivity. It’s possible, if not likely, that male biographers’ stories about women often better reflect what they admired or abhorred than what the women actually did. That being said, if we were to ignore all sources that were tainted with bias, we would have no female vitae to work with. Therefore, just one grain of salt is necessary—not the whole ocean (Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women).
25 The Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders at Harvard University found the lifetime prevalence of eating disorders to be 4.07% among men and 8.6% among women. (Deloitte Access Economics. 2020. The Social and Economic Cost of Eating Disorders in the United States of America: A Report for the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders and the Academy for Eating Disorders. June). But this evidence necessitates two disclaimers: (1) all eating disorders are considered in this statistic, not just anorexia, and (2) men, non-binary individuals, and non-white individuals have been historically under-represented in studies relating to eating disorders. The general belief that eating disorders are gendered feminine overlaps with both social and sampling bias. While the best evidence we have points to higher rates of anorexia among women than men, more research (particularly on men, non-binary, and non-white people) is needed to properly understand the connection between gender and anorexia.