Teresa, My Love
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2008 Librairie Arthème Fayard
Translation copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-52046-1
This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kristeva, Julia, 1941– author.
[Thérèse mon amour. English]
Teresa, my love : an imagined life of the saint of Avila / Julia Kristeva;
translated by Lorna Scott Fox.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-14960-0 (cloth : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-52046-1 (ebook)
1. Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515-1582. 2. Christian saints—Spain—Avila—Biography. I. Fox, Lorna Scott, translator. II. Title.
BX4700.T4K7513 2014
282.092—dc23
[B]
2014007011
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover image: Teresa of Ávila (detail), 1827, Françoise Gerard/
Infirmerie Marie-Thérèse, Paris
Cover design: Jennifer Heuer
Book design: Lisa Hamm
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
DeAgostini/Leemage.
akg-images/Pirozzi.
For my father
Contents
Abbreviations and Chronology
Part 1: The Nothingness of All Things
1. Present by Default
2. Mystical Seduction
3. Dreaming, Music, Ocean
4. Homo Viator
Part 2: Understanding Through Fiction
5. Prayer, Writing, Politics
6. How to Write Sensible Experience, or, of Water as the Fiction of Touch
7. The Imaginary of an Unfindable Sense Curled Into a God Findable in Me
Part 3: The Wanderer
8. Everything So Constrained Me
9. Her Lovesickness
10. The Ideal Father and the Host
Part 4: Extreme Letters, Extremes of Being
11. Bombs and Ramparts
12. “Cristo como hombre”
13. Image, Vision, and Rapture
14. “The soul isn’t in possession of its senses, but it rejoices”
15. A Clinical Lucidity
16. The Minx and the Sage
17. Better to Hide…?
18. “…Or ‘to do what lies within my power’”?
19. From Hell to Foundation
Part 5: From Ecstasy to Action
20. The Great Tide
21. Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and His Majesty
22. The Maternal Vocation
23. Constituting Time
24. Tutti a cavallo
Part 6: Foundation–Persecution
25. The Mystic and the Jester
26. A Father Is Beaten to Death
27. A Runaway Girl
28. “Give me trials, Lord; give me persecutions”
29. “With the ears of the soul”
Part 7: Dialogues from Beyond the Grave
30. Act I. Her Women
Act I, Scene 1
Act I, Scene 2
Act I, Scene 3
31. Act II. Her Eliseus
Act II, Scene 1
Act II, Scene 2
32. Act III: Her “Little Seneca”
Act III, Scene 1
Act III, Scene 2
Act III, Scene 3
33. Act IV. The Analyst’s Farewell
Part 8: Postscript
34. Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun
Notes
Sources
Abbreviations and Chronology
ABBREVIATIONS
The Book of Her Foundations: Found., followed by number and paragraph
The Book of Her Life: Life, followed by chapter and paragraph
The Constitutions: Const., followed by the paragraph number
Letters: Letter, followed by letter number
Meditations on the Song of Songs: Medit., followed by chapter and paragraph
On Making the Visitation: Visitation, followed by number and paragraph
Poems: Poems, followed by title
A Satirical Critique (Vejamen): Critique
Soliloquies (Exclamations): Sol., followed by number and paragraph
Spiritual Testimonies (Relations): Testimonies, followed by number and paragraph
The Interior Castle: Roman numeral, followed by D (Dwelling Places), chapter, and paragraph
The Way of Perfection: Way, followed by chapter and paragraph
CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS
1560–1563 Testimonies 1–3
1562 First draft of The Book of Her Life
1563 First draft of the Constitutions
1565 The Book of Her Life
1566–1567 The Way of Perfection
1567 The Constitutions of the Discalced Nuns
1569 New series of lesser Testimonies: 8–27
1573 The Book of Her Foundations, chaps. 1–26
1575–1576 Testimonies 4–5
1576 Manner of Visiting Monasteries; continuation of Foundations, chaps. 21–27
1577 The Interior Castle
1577–1580 Letters (almost 200)
1581 Testimonies 6
1580–1582 Completion of Foundations (chaps. 28–31)
1581–1582 Final letters (around 100)
The Soliloquies, the Meditations on the Song of Songs (predating The Interior Castle), and the Poems are difficult to date with accuracy.
REFERENCES
The English translations used for all quotations from Teresa of Avila come from the following sources.
The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1976–1985.
The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 2001–2007.
Any italics in quotations have been added by Julia Kristeva.
Part 1
The Nothingness of All Things
Chapter 1
PRESENT BY DEFAULT
We are not angels, but we have a body.
Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life
Or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater.
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
The flung-back face of a woman asleep, or perhaps she has already died of pleasure, her open mouth the avid door to an empty body that fills before our eyes with a boiling of marble folds…You must recall that sculpture by Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa?1 The artist’s inspiration was Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515–1582), whose religious name was Teresa of Jesus, better known as Saint Teresa of Avila. At the height of the Renaissance, her love of God quivered with the intensity
of the beatus venter that Meister Eckhart knew so well. Her ecstatic convulsions made her into a sumptuous icon of the Counter-Reformation. Though she was, in Dostoyevsky’s sense, possessed, she was bathed in the waters of desire rather than, like Mary Magdalene, in tears—for her body and soul were fused with the absent body of the Other. “Where is He, where have they taken Him?” fretted the holy women at Golgotha.2
Teresa loved to read; they made her write. In a style quick with emotion, yet firm and precise, she portrayed the blend of pain and jubilation she felt with an emphasis on the deft agent of her undoing: Eros, armed with a spear, the iron tip of God Himself. “Prudentia carnis inimica Deo” (Prudence of the flesh is inimical to the Lord), so the Church Fathers taught. In this spiritual, illusory marriage to the Other, the unreachable Father is relayed in the praying woman’s fantasy by a heavenly stripling, an undefiled brother, a male mirage of Teresa herself, whose voluptuous pride will never pierce her hymen.
Oh, how many times when I am in this state do I recall that verse of David: Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum [As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Ps. 42:2)]…When this thirst is not too severe, it seems it can be appeased somewhat; at least the soul seeks some remedy.…At other times the pain becomes so severe that the soul can do neither penance nor anything else, for the whole body is paralyzed. One is unable to stir with either the feet or the arms. Rather, if one is standing, one sits down, like a person being carried from one place to another, unable even to breathe.…The Lord wanted me while in this state to see sometimes the following vision: I saw close to me toward my left side an angel in bodily form.…the angel was not large but small; he was very beautiful, and his face was so aflame that he seemed to be one of those very sublime angels that appear to be all afire. They must belong to those they call the cherubim.…I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me that this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away; nor is the soul content with less than God. The pain is not bodily but spiritual, although the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal.…But when this pain I’m now speaking of begins, it seems the Lord carries the soul away and places it in ecstasy; thus there is no room for pain or suffering, because joy soon enters in [así no hay lugar de tener pena ni de padecer, porque viene luego el gozar].3
Desire existed before she did, and this woman knows it. Nevertheless she is consumed: a burning wound, a delightful pain. In the key of the Song of Songs, but by the hand for the first time of a European woman, pleasure unto death is conveyed with a sensual exactitude that defies decorum. Make no mistake: the fire that “carries off” the deepest part of her suggests that rather than capture the potency of the “large dart,” as in the male fantasy of the castrating female, Teresa gifts it to the angel. It is in dispossession and exile that she joins with the Other and becomes divine. In the same vein, at once a shooting star and a clap of thunder, she resumes her account in the “Sixth Dwelling Places” of The Interior Castle, her spiritual testament:
The soul dissolves with desire, and yet it doesn’t know what to ask for since clearly it thinks that its God is with it.
You will ask me: Well, if it knows this, what does it desire or what pains it? What greater good does it want? I don’t know. I do know that it seems this pain reaches to the soul’s very depths and that when He who wounds it draws out the arrow, it indeed seems, in accord with the deep love the soul feels, that God is drawing these very depths after Him. I was thinking now that it’s as though, from this fire enkindled in the brazier that is my God, a spark leapt forth and so struck the soul that the flaming fire was felt by it. And since the spark was not enough to set the soul on fire, and the fire is so delightful, the soul is left with that pain; but the spark merely by touching the soul produces that effect. It seems to me this is the best comparison I have come up with. This delightful pain—and it is not pain—is not continuous, although sometimes it lasts a long while; at other times it goes away quickly. This depends on the way the Lord wishes to communicate it, for it is not something that can be procured in any human way. But even though it sometimes lasts for a long while, it comes and goes. To sum up, it is never permanent. For this reason it doesn’t set the soul on fire; but just as the fire is about to start, the spark goes out and the soul is left with the desire to suffer again that loving pain the spark causes.4
Teresa’s body—as passionate and amorous as David’s or Esther’s, or that of the Sulamitess in the Song of Songs—falls back upon the Word. A gem of European memory, her text is steeped in Scripture, while her fiery verve rhythms a great movement in Catholic history: the baroque revolution. Might she also, unlikely as it may seem, be our contemporary?
Teresa’s “torment” is “beatific,” she experiences its ambivalence as “spiritual joy.” Such a fabulous autoeroticism, strained through Old Testament passions and sublimated by New Testament ideals, does not eschew “corporeal form.” “Christ’s humanity” was a theme of sixteenth-century piety; Erasmists, alumbrados (Spanish Illuminati), Jewish converts, and plenty of believing women embraced it. Thus Teresa’s ecstasies were immediately and indiscriminately formed of words, images, and physical sensations pertaining to both the spirit and the flesh: “the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal,” she admitted. The experience, too, is a double one straightaway: while being the passive “object” of her transports, the nun is also the penetrating “subject,” who approaches “graces” and “raptures” with an astounding, unprecedented lucidity. Lost and found, inside and out and vice versa, this woman was a flux, a constant stream, and water would be the undulating metaphor of her thought: “I…am so fond of this element that I have observed it more attentively than other things.”5
I ran into her again on the cover of a Lacan Seminar, while doing my MA in psychology.6 I’d already admired Bernini’s sculpture, whose voluptuousness so stirred the susceptible Stendhal,7 in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome—long before this learned publication promised to tell us everything about female jouissance and its insatiable cry for “More!” Every summer, docile cultural tourists that we were, my small family spent vacations plowing up and down the Italian peninsula. I didn’t know very much in those days about the illustrious Carmelite nun, but at the La Procure bookshop, opposite the church of Saint-Sulpice, I had purchased her Collected Works—two onion-leafed volumes fat with unreadable prose. The kind of impulse buy you commit on the eve of a solitary weekend, instantly banished to the top of the bookcase and as soon forgotten.
I may as well tell you right away, I’m not a believer. I was christened as a matter of course, but Jesus was never a dinner-table topic at our house. My father was a general practitioner in the 13th arrondissement, and my mother taught literature at the lycée in Sceaux. Everyone worked too hard to see much of one another or to talk; it was a standard secular family of a kind very common in France, efficient and rational. Any discussions revolved, on Mother’s side, around literary prizes and the horrors of the world—much the same thing, perhaps. Whereas my father, who purported to be a left-leaning Gaullist, was forever grumbling about how France would never recover from the Algerian war, or how beggars were ruining the city center, or how some people believed in nothing but their doctor: a big mistake, as he was in a position to know. Anxious to spare Mother and me the “trials of life,” he’d made sure to give us “nothing but the best, my darlings.” That was his hobbyhorse, being more of an elitist than a republican, to put it mildly; he was proud of his success at providing for us, as he saw it. Meanwhile Mother, a fan of Colette and Françoise Sagan,
was forever feeling let down by the latest Goncourt, Renaudot, or Femina book prizes, whose standards were so “dreadfully mediocre,” and pushing for the three of us to travel abroad, preferably to Italy, which was not a common destination in those days. I would listen with half an ear. I was pretty independent for an only child. It was May 1968, and my mind was elsewhere.
I love the night. I’m not an insomniac, but I’ve been regularly waking up around 2 A.M. ever since my father passed away, ten years ago this September. My mother faded away barely fifteen months after that, that’s apparently how it is when people love each other—not that love had been particularly noticeable in their case. I had never found them terribly interesting; you don’t when you’re a child, so it hadn’t occurred to me they might seem interesting to each other. Nowadays I listen to France Info and Jazz 89.9 or 88.2 as a cuddly toy substitute. Rocked by the sounds of the world, I doze without really dropping off, until the alarm clock rings.
I love the night, its furtive, underwater life of news flashes and rhythmic beats snagging memories at random, or semidreams, because a no-body opens up to nothing, and I only feel good when I’m rid of myself. Was my brain saturated by the latest dreary debate on the clash of civilizations, secularism versus head scarves? Or was it some dream that still escapes me? Anyhow, one night I fished up a word from my chance dives into the murky depths, the word “mystical,” which gave me such a stomach cramp that I rolled out of bed at first light. Where had that popped up from? I was hardly likely to have heard the word “mystical” on France Info, or Jazz point something.
I drank my tea over the first volume of the saint’s works, which I retrieved like a sleepwalker from the top of the bookcase, where I couldn’t remember having put it. It was quite an encounter. The kind of thing that gets under your skin and no one can figure out why. Teresa of what? Sylvia Leclercq reading Teresa of Avila, you’re kidding! After that sharp little book on Duras? No way! Maybe the silly goose thinks mysticism’s due for a revival, like she’s happened on a money-spinner!
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