The Pactional Model of Salvation and Its Undoing in St. Catherine of Siena

A symbolic economy based on a system of merits and demerits that determines the salvation or damnation of the believer is at the root of Western theology. Even in its most sophisticated formulations, this form of moral bookkeeping (or pactional structure) produces paradoxes that stem from the unresolved relation between divine transcendence and earthly immanence. Contextualizing her work in relation to dominant Patristic and Scholastic theories of salvation, this essay illustrates how St. Catherine of Siena resolves the ontological opposition between the infinite (transcendence) and the finite (immanence) through the notion of infinite desire for the other. As she undoes much of the structure of debt of the moral economy, she moves away from a system of accountability toward one of relationality.