Teresa’s trajectory is a descent into the doloristic depths of the religion of salvation to uncover its intrapsychical operations. But she also transcends these, as no one had done before, by opening body and soul to the joys of the love of the Other and reasserting His presence on earth with the creation of an innovative religious institution: “I have become so adept at bargaining and managing business affairs.”13 Is she adumbrating an exit from voluntary servitude? Or locking it into a new and exalted impasse?
For the early Christians, as for Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in the sixteenth century, Jesus and His powers were in no sense the “fantasy” the coming humanism would label them as (shortly echoed by psychoanalysts, including myself). Christ was convincing. He imposed himself as an absolute truth because He managed to project everybody’s pain into His own “masochism,” to inscribe our grief into His Passion, if only we believe that this loving sacrifice on the Cross will also open the Heaven of resurrection to us. Thus Jesus Christ became a subtle antidepressant for abandoned, unhappy humanity.
The black sun of melancholia that weighs on “separated” humanity then split into its parts. On one side, the sun: the God-man, the Light, the Word, Who loves and saves us; the exultant denial of separation, sorrow, violence, death. On the other, the black shadow that overhangs believers in the grip of solitude: the body of the tortured Christ, in which men and women can immerse their own. Either side, heads or tails, when through prayer the osmosis with the crucified-resurrected Christ is realized, it can only be paroxystic—annihilation and rebirth—and, on that condition, gratifying. The consolation that results does not suspend sorrow, let alone get through it. It is content to maintain or stoke it up, the better to reward it.
Is this a reparation, or a stimulation of the “pleasure unto death” diagnosed by Nietzsche well before the Freudians got hold of it?14 Teresa is sharply aware of the issue, enticingly so for future analysts. In this properly vicious circle, the melancholic pain of separation from one’s loved ones becomes vastly more poignant when the Beloved is God Himself, as she points out:
It seems to me that God is then exceedingly far away.…This communication is given not to console but to show the reason the soul has for becoming weary in the absence of a blessing that in itself contains all blessings.
With this communication the desire increases and also the extreme sense of solitude in which, even though the soul is in that desert, it sees with a pain so delicate and penetrating that it can, I think, literally say: Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto [I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop. Ps. 102:7].15
By identifying with the wounds of Christ, who is God, desolation compressed becomes a glorious pain, absolute doloristic bliss in lieu of the absolute Body: unhappiness cries out, but in flight, over the housetop and far away.
“I LIVE WITHOUT LIVING IN MYSELF”
Before long, the descent into the underworld is qualified by the inordinate gratification of being Him: inhabiting a man’s body, of course, which is far preferable to a woman’s, let alone that of a pretty, cloistered girl without a dowry! In addition the man on the Cross is a God-man, the Son of God, and a potential lover of the praying woman, as the Song of Songs joyfully proclaims. The Bride undertakes penances, but her desire for the imaginary Object–absolute Subject is so overwhelming that the pain—“little felt” as such, however intensely mentalized and interiorized—is on the contrary a “special favor,” because it is mingled with His pain, shared with Him.
Exhibiting a rare gift for psychological self-observation, introspection, and retrospection, Teresa depicts the initial stages of prayer in terms of anorexia: her worship of the ideal Man obliterates elementary desires, beginning with the appetite for food. She wants to annihilate herself the better to deserve Him, in the suspension of every sensation. She will let the tears flow, she’s good at that, but almost without noticing; above all she will not complain, for that is a female trait. The praying woman, unable to eat, feverishly cleaving to her ideal Object, is lifted up by fasting and hovers beside Him, beyond the scope of sexual difference:
The impulses to do penance that come upon me sometimes, and have come upon me, are great. And if I do penance, I feel it so little on account of that strong desire that sometimes it seems to me—or almost always—that penance is a very special favor.…
It is the greatest pain for me sometimes, and now more extreme, to have to go to eat, especially when I’m in prayer. This pain must be great because it makes me weep a good deal and utter words of distress, almost without being aware of it, which I usually do not do. However great the trials I have experienced in this life, I don’t recall having said these words. I am not at all like a woman in such matters, for I have a robust spirit.16
Here Teresa’s account adopts, as it often does, the precision of a clinical description. She reconstitutes in writing the body paralyzed by cold acceptance of her separation from the One who, nevertheless, remains present in mind by the strength of the union she has thought and felt. This rigid body will be succeeded by a body blown on the air, carried away in a whirlwind of energetic release. The radiant phase climaxes in a feeling of hollowing out, weightlessness, elevation, levitation—so many states of grace that are recaptured by the racing pen and brim over in abundance of writing. And then, a final reversal: the nocturnal phase returns. She plummets into revulsion and refusal: refusal to eat, denial of pain, intense pleasure of self-dominion that harshly abrogates the gendered experience: “I am not at all like a woman in such matters, for I have a robust spirit.” The merciless precision of this clinical semiology cannot, beneath its ironic scalpel, conceal the writer’s pride at escaping the feminine condition.
The catatonia that accompanies manic-depressive psychosis or states of comatose epilepsy, as diagnosed by modern neurology, assuredly overtakes this soul as it strains for fusion with the imaginary Object with all the verve of its psyche-soma, aspiring only to “rise” toward the All-Other, the “exterior agent” of her “interior castle,” the missing second person, the thou of love. And the abolishment of the self in the suffering-delighting body remains the goal, if one is to attain the grace of dissolution into the fervors of medieval faith that transcend the life of all mystical practitioners.
But what distinguishes Teresa from other adepts of prayer is the way she couples this suspension of reason to an astonishing clear-sightedness, which notes, if transiently, its own befuddlement:
Everything is almost fading away through a kind of swoon in which breathing and all the bodily energies gradually fail…one cannot even stir the hands without a lot of effort.…[The persons in this state] see the letter; but since the intellect gives no help, they don’t know how to read it, even though they may desire to do so.…In vain do they try to speak, because they don’t succeed in forming a word, nor if they do succeed is there the strength left to be able to pronounce it.…The exterior delight that is felt is great and very distinct.
It is true that in the beginning this prayer passes so quickly…that neither these exterior signs nor the failure of the senses are very noticeable.…The longest space of time in my opinion in which the soul remains in this suspension of all the faculties [esta suspensión de todas las potencias] is very short; should it remain suspended for a half hour, this would be a very long time.…It is true that since there is no sensory consciousness one finds it hard to know what is happening.…It is the will that holds high the banner [as one side in a joust: mantiene la tela];17 the other two faculties quickly go back to being a bother.…
But I say this loss of them all and suspension of the imagination…lasts only a short while; yet these faculties don’t return to themselves so completely that they are incapable of remaining for several hours as though bewildered [confused, befuddled: como desatinadas], while God gradually gathers them again to Himself.18
Sensory regression, exile from self, installation of Him within me in the fourth prayer; the intellect and the ego are
abolished for the sake of the contact, shortly to become capture, of the psyche-soma and the Being-Other:
The Lord spoke these words to me: “It detaches itself from everything, daughter, so as to abide more in me. It is no longer the soul that lives but I. Since it cannot comprehend what it understands, there is an understanding by not understanding.…”
If a person is reflecting upon some scriptural event, it becomes as lost to the memory.…If the person reads, there is no remembrance of what was read; nor is there any remembrance if one prays vocally. Thus this bothersome little moth, which is the memory, gets its wings burnt here; it can no longer move. The will is fully occupied in loving, but it doesn’t understand how it loves. The intellect, if it understands, doesn’t understand how it understands; at least it can’t comprehend anything of what it understands. It doesn’t seem to me that it understands, because, as I say, it doesn’t understand—I really can’t understand this!19
Even more incisively, Teresa describes the paradoxical “joust” of this deconstruction as if it were another life, one consisting of an uninterrupted death of the self exiled beyond the frontiers of identity: “I live without living in myself”; “I already live outside myself” (vivo ya fuera de mí). One must enter a continual state of “dying of love,” in which “sensitive betterment” is felt as infinitely preferable to being locked into conscious, self-protective life. For “dying of love” is an alternative way of living, in opposition to that biological life, which represses the risk of regression and stubbornly wants “not to die.” Only thus, only on condition of dying of love, can Teresa’s soul make “her God her captive.” But in a further paradox of apophatic thought, shutting oneself away with one’s God in the prison of the living body here below might come down to a tedious wait, a postponement of the plenitude of bliss in Him, the Pauline face to face in the Beyond after death. Therefore, it is crucial that, in the meantime, the passion for the “captive God” is soothed in sweet abandon to the Lord:
I live without living in myself,
And in such a way I hope,
I die because I do not die.
Since I die of love,
Living apart from love,
I live now in the Lord
Who has desired me for Himself.
He inscribed on my heart
When I gave it to Him:
I die because I do not die.
Within this divine prison
Of love in which I live,
My God my captive is.
My heart is free
To behold my prisoner-God,
Passion welling in my heart,
I die because I do not die.
Ah, how weary this life!
These exiles so hard!
This jail and these shackles
By which the soul is fettered!
Longing only to go forth
Brings such terrible sorrow,
I die because I do not die.
Ah, how bitter a life
When the Lord is not enjoyed!20
While love is sweet,
Long awaiting is not.
Oh God, take away this burden
Heavier than steel,
I die because I do not die.21
This poem, the most successful of Teresa’s verse pieces, sums up the states of rapture described in The Book of Her Life.22 However, it is in her fiction—itself inherently poetic and meditative—that the saint’s writing comes into its own.
Chapter 6
HOW TO WRITE SENSIBLE EXPERIENCE, OR, OF WATER AS THE FICTION OF TOUCH
[The soul] will feel Jesus Christ.…Yet, it does not see Him, either with the eyes of the body or with those of the soul.
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
TACTILE VISIONS
Teresa began writing for the first time between 1560 and 1562. The Relations or Spiritual Testimonies (1–3) date from 1560–1563; the first draft of The Book of Her Life, now lost, is from 1562.1 By now, aged between thirty-five and thirty-seven, her second “conversion” (1555) was behind her, and the silent and vocal praying that accompanied her early monastic life had become very intense. She meditated on Francisco de Osuna and Juan de Ávila, and in 1562 she met Pedro de Alcántara; her vision of Hell (1560) came to her at much the same time as her decision to found a convent based on the Primitive Rule. As a spiritual, physical, and political activity, writing was a necessity for her. The act of writing was the element that allowed her to keep contact with regression in prayer (itself induced and spurred on by theological and evangelical texts: Teresa was an avid reader), while at the same time elucidating it and making it shareable—by tying it to her own memory, culture, and will, as well as to the judgment of her confessors and, beyond the domain of the Church, to the social and political life of Renaissance Spain.
The writings of La Madre (first published in 1588 thanks to the offices of Luis de León and Ana de Jesús, and completed later) bear witness to her itinerary and to the many strands of her personality. As we have seen, The Book of Her Life (final draft, 1565) braids autobiography into the meticulous description of the constant self-deconstruction inherent in spiritual experience and essential to its clarification. The Way of Perfection, the one text Teresa was minded to publish, stresses the exactions of monastic life with a view to fortifying her fellow nuns and ushering them along the path of prayer.2 The Foundations record the foundress’s social experiences, intermixed with her spiritual life.3 Finally, The Interior Castle, also known as the Mansions or Dwelling Places of the Interior Castle (Moradas del castillo interior, 1577), recomposes the plural space that had constituted and sustained the complex movements of Teresa’s love for Jesus, internalizing into a single but shifting emplacement—the “castle” of many abodes—her three aspects: prayer, writing, and foundation.
Across the range of themes and intentions, secret aims, and foundational ambitions, Teresa’s style is stamped with an indelible seal: it works to translate the psyche-soma into imagery, images that in turn are designed to convey visions that are not a function of sight (at least, not of eyesight alone), but indwell the whole body. They make themselves felt first and foremost in terms of touch, taste, or hearing, only afterward involving the gaze. The psychical or physiological descriptions of her states, cumulatively presented, are thus products of a sensorial imaginary rather than of any imagery, imagination, or images in the visual sense. This sensorial, or sensible, imaginary in writing demands to be read by the psyche-soma as much as by the intellect. Are contemporary readers capable of adjusting to this requirement? If so, they may have access to this experience, in which the words on the page render sensual perceptions, the author’s sentience. Again, for La Madre it was not a question of creating an oeuvre but of calling into play (into the jousting lists?) the felt experience of her addressees, from the confessors who requested and approved her texts, the sisters who looked up to her, and the believers who followed her, to the readers of today and tomorrow.
Metaphors, similes, or metamorphoses in words? How did Teresa take possession of the Castilian language to say that the love bond between a secluded nun and the other-being—both the other in oneself, and the Other outside oneself—is a tournament of the senses? How did she express so recognizably the otherness impressed on her in the experience of separation magnetized by rapturous union? A separation, which albeit radical, is bridgeable by words, by a certain utterance; a separation that does not set itself up as an abstract law, or goad itself into a spiritual vocation, or fret over metaphysical conundrums. Instead it finds a balm in the reciprocal, if not symmetrical, calls and responses between two living bodies in desirous contact with each other; two infectious desires gently appeased in the moradas, the mansions of writing.
What guided the flow of Teresa’s silent prayers? Was it her deep intuition, or the resurgence of the evangelical theme of baptism, or again her devotion to Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet? Osuna’s text, which proved seminal for her development, abounds with im
ages of water and oil to suggest the state of abandonment (dejamiento) cherished by the Illuminati or alumbrados, and compares this to the infant suckling at its mother’s breast. Likewise Teresa wrote: “This path of self-knowledge must never be abandoned, nor is there on this journey a soul so much a giant that it has no need to return often to the stage of an infant and a suckling [tornar a ser niño y a mamar].”4 La Madre was also prone to regressing, more consciously than not, to the state of an embryo touched-bathed-fed by the amniotic fluid. For the hydraulic technique narrated by Teresa is intended to gratify the skin, that first, constant frontier of the self, rather than the eyes. Moreover it “easily and gently” carries away the trusting, abandoned soul, like a “straw” or “little bark” in a “trough of water” fed by springs—before “with a powerful impulse, a huge wave rises up.”5
And yet the bather, for all her blissful abandon, is well acquainted with the “dryness” that necessitates the “tedious work” of the gardeners. These “need to get accustomed to caring nothing at all about seeing or hearing,” and “to solitude and withdrawal”; sometimes they will feel “very little desire to come and draw water,” frequently “they will be unable even to lift their arms for this work.” A case of boredom or distaste? Open your eyes, water is everywhere. “Here by ‘water’ I am referring to tears and when there are no tears to interior tenderness and feelings of devotion.”6 It’s enough to lighten the yoke of God himself (“For my yoke is easy” [Matt. 11:30]; “suave es su yugo”),7 amid surprise at “obtaining this liberty.”8
Teresa, My Love Page 11