Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  A fresh, clear morning in October 1535. Avila is still asleep. A few shopkeepers setting out their wares; a few maidservants selecting fruit and vegetables. The plazuela Santo Domingo is almost deserted. Nobody notices the two young people. The breeze that cooled the summer air now seems a cold herald of fall. Teresa’s legs are numb; she strides through the hilly streets of the fortified town, under the Carmel Gate and north, toward the Convent of the Incarnation.…

  When I left my father’s house I felt that separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered. Since there was no love of God to take away my love for my father and relatives, everything so constrained me [I was doing all this with such violence to myself: era todo haciéndome una fuerza tan grande].23

  How could I not bring this moment of weakness to bear on my profane reading of your way of perfection, my vagabond Teresa? Being at home with Father pushed you toward worldly pleasures, despite or because of his efforts to protect you from your own wayward impulses and infatuations, so as to keep you immaculate, all to himself and for a better future. That much is clear. Uncle Pedro came to the rescue, being at once a Marrano and a cristiano viejo, a sensual father and a spiritual uplifter, a man of the flesh and a connoisseur of perfection, representing the flawed, fallen world as well as the innocent world associated with Mother and the Beyond. You would no longer be the prodigal child who had suffered in “strange houses”—but did you feel like a stranger in your own land, Teresa, my love? And what about this swine-feed you refuse to eat, as you say forty years later in the “Second Dwelling Places”? Is this an allusion to Luke 15:16, where the prodigal son is denied even the “husks that the swine did eat”—or an unexpected reminder of the dietary prohibitions secretly observed by the Marranos? Perhaps “taking the habit,” the vocation that was being decided, was your intuitive, unconscious choice of a double allegiance, Jewish and Christian, whose unlikely and inimitable alchemy would be primed by your own mystical plunge into their depths.

  You don’t actually say so, but the book of your Life hints that at the moment of decision, you were already at the bottom of yourself, outside yourself: you thought of nothing but the Other-world as suggested to you by that fatherly, motherly Pedro de Cepeda. Or more exactly, you suddenly saw the possibility of reconciling that Other-world with your father’s will: “For in this final decision I was determined to go where I thought I could serve God more or where my father desired,” as you put it so prettily three decades later. You elected to break with the father in the name of the Father, to leave Alonso in order to read Saint Jerome with Pedro, or ultimately to read by yourself. To overcome, to transcend yourself so as to content the ideals of men and women over and above their earthly needs. You hoist yourself up to Alonso’s superego, whose injunctions (to be a proper Catholic) he could not himself follow, then you espouse the ambiguities and metamorphoses of a Pedro who hardly suspected them (being an erudite, a humanist, attracted by Francisco de Osuna), and thus you will merit the love of the Lord whom your mother (a cristiana vieja) has gone to join. Your decision to be cloistered is at once a bid to unite the mother’s uterus (claustro materno) with the father’s ideals, and a total, hyperbolic, consummation of your Jewish ancestor’s conversion. By reuniting you with both parents, your adoption of the veil also reunites, in a paroxystic destiny, the Old and New Testaments.

  Your kid brother Juan was stopped in time. He didn’t become a Dominican; Alonso dissuaded him.

  Witnesses say that at the end, feeling death’s approach, you proclaimed firmly and proudly: “Lord, I am a daughter of the Church.” These words, unremarkable from a nun, have more traction when coming from you. Were there doubters to convince, even now? You are not the product of your origins, neither the Marrano nor the Old Christian strand. You constructed yourself with and against the Church, while keeping faith with your idea of its perfection, and that idea could only come to fruition by reforming the Carmelite order in a way that accented the intimacy of contemplation and the visionary approach to theopathy, or “undergoing God.” Because, in Hortigosa, at that crossroads of ascendancies and influences where the decisive days with Uncle Pedro had placed you, you realized that your terrible, your ravishing singularity could only blossom in that tradition, that institution: the Catholic, Roman, and Apostolic Church integrated by the New Christians. The fortuitousness of biography met the weight of history. Perhaps, too, it was an existential choice—one worthy of consideration, even today?

  Neither tepid ecumenism, nor the domination of one group by another, your inner experience—at the heart of the Catholic Church—would enable you to translate your highly personal appropriation of both the secretive reserve of Marrano life and the feverish affects of the alumbrados. It enabled you to yoke a passionate monotheism, at odds with established institutions, to emergent rationalism and pragmatic humanism, by way of an unprecedented analysis of the amorous sentiment that lies at the root of our bonds with others and constitutes the secret of faith. Always faithful and yet unfaithful to the canon and to dogma, you were set to embark on a personal adventure that meant far more than a novation in the Catholic tradition. For while the sainthood bestowed on you did much to safeguard and lionize your oeuvre in the eyes of Catholics, the polyphony of your writing demands to be interpreted today as a universal legacy. You never pay the least tribute to your tacit Jewish background, but you don’t deny it either, while you express stout opposition to the exclusions prescribed by the concern for limpieza de sangre. Likewise you don’t espouse the dogmas of Catholic institutionality so much as humbly observe them, the better to get around them, with mischievous brio. Your inside-outside position, which proves to be one of irreducible vigilance, in other words, of a singular writing, is surely the best riposte to “the clash of religions.” This is not to hail it as a route map for the inevitably contentious communities of the future. It’s merely an invitation to experience, which is a boundless utopia.

  Such considerations are far from your mind as you leave home, and yet your resolve appears to be unshakable. Nobody would suspect the battle being waged inside you and with your loved ones. Nobody but you, plus curious onlookers like myself, Sylvia Leclercq, who reads you almost five centuries later, intent on reconstructing your wanderings by way of your writings.

  It took a year for don Alonso’s wrath to subside. On October 31, 1536, he undertook before a notary public to endow his favorite daughter with a supply of best-quality habits—nothing less would do—and religious books. He also would furnish her with bedding, and gift the Incarnation convent with twenty-five fanegas of grain per year, half wheat and half barley, or failing that, 200 gold ducats. On her side, Teresa gave up all rights to an inheritance.

  She took the habit on November 2, 1536: All Souls, the Day of the Dead. She was in floods of tears, but we know how easily she welled up, like Saint Ignatius Loyola, whom she hadn’t yet encountered. The new novice was named Teresa de Ahumada, using her mother’s patronym. “I suffered greatly at first, and later came to enjoy it.”

  The eternal issue of honor and pride kept her going to the point of pain, a pleasurable pain. Everything she did was “enveloped in a thousand miseries,” but wasn’t it all about being worthy of the Other? She liked to serve with trifling things, for the sake of it, like a “grain of sand” not yet lifted up by the waters of grace.

  I didn’t know how to sing well. I was so worried when I hadn’t studied what they had entrusted to me (not because I wanted to avoid committing a fault before the Lord, since being bothered about that would have been virtuous, but because of the many that were listening to me), that just out of a sheer cult of honor I was so disturbed that I said much less than I knew.…I felt this very much in the beginning, but afterward I enjoyed it. [And so] I recited much better, and in the effort to get rid of the accursed honor, I came to know how to do what I considered an honor, which, incidentally, each one understands in his own way.24


  Meanwhile, miracles were being performed by a fellow sister of the Incarnation: the candles this fortunate one lit to the Virgin were not consumed. Could it be a sign from God? Another, though wealthier than Teresa, slept in the paupers’ dormitory. Ahumada felt very humble compared to them: but once she had left her cell, in 1543, she would not give up her two superposed rooms, an “oratory” and a chamber, where she received her numerous nieces and cousins while slapping her flesh with nettles!

  One day, poor thing, you actually crawled on all fours into the refectory with a mule’s packsaddle full of stones on your back and a halter around your neck, led by a sister, like a beast of burden. What wouldn’t one do to humble oneself, to be worthy of Jesus’s Passion! After professing full vows, it was not until 1562 that you took the name Teresa de Jesús. A heavy patronym indeed. Jesus’s daughter, and also his spouse? At any rate, a fine promise of tortures and raptures, as we will see.

  Your agonized, lacerated soul began to pass its malaise, again, to the body. Again you fell sick, more seriously than before: the time had come to mortify yourself to the point of bliss, of jouissance unto death.

  Chapter 9

  HER LOVESICKNESS

  I hold that love…cannot possibly be content to remain always the same.

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

  It began with a terror that literally broke you. You knew your health must suffer from this complete change of lifestyle, you remember losing your appetite. You were still a young woman who loved clothes and good food, but you went without. You threw yourself with gusto into all of the convent rituals. The practice of devotion brought contentment to replace the inner aridity of the unloved being you were, or thought you were. It opened you up to another life, the higher life of the true Christian, a full life much beyond what laypersons took to be plenitude—for as we know, their all, to you, was nothing. But with tenderness came fear; furtive rewards, dread of never being up to scratch. Courage and tears, tears and blood; your body became broken by pain.

  You were brokenness itself, reduced to being nothing but the fault line that split you in two. Your heart pains (mal de corazón) grew worse, you kept passing out, and these fainting spells grew more frequent day by day.

  By the fall of 1538, after three years of nunnery life with the Carmelites at the Convent of the Incarnation, you were in a pitiful state. The Mitigated Rule, which did not prescribe enclosure, left the door open to various sorts of “company” and, as a result, the life of the convent seculars blew hot and cold on impressionable souls. This could only aggravate your plight, torn as you were between the appetites of your thwarted body and the obedience demanded by a full life. The laxness of the calced order—preaching purity but inciting to the contrary, praying to God by day and smuggling the devil into the parlor by night—put you through months of excruciating pain.

  The remedy? A stay with your half-sister María de Cepeda in the hamlet of Castellanos, the winter of 1538. You were carried there in a litter, and on the way you once more made a halt at Uncle Pedro’s, in Hortigosa.

  It was probably he, and not your less persuasive mother, who taught you that “if one proceeds with detachment for God alone, there is no reason to fear that the effort will turn out badly.”1 Artfully he centered you on the weakness that was rapture, the agony that was a choice. Having helped you to take the decision to join the Carmelites (though doubtless unaware of the part he played that day, when he made you read Saint Jerome), Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda was once more to be your guide. He gave you a book to keep: The Third Spiritual Alphabet, by the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna. This text taught you prayer and recollection, unleashing floods of tears, of course, and would remain a spiritual authority for you. For twenty years you practiced mental prayer in solitude, using the Alphabet and other “good books,” as you were an insatiable reader. It was a long time before any confessor was able to understand you, leaving Osuna’s work as your sole trustworthy compass: you read him against the Nothingness of the world.

  Don Alonso was always there for you, too—but increasingly in the background, because you were trying to detach yourself, as you saw it: another cruel decision, but a firm one. Nobody would be allowed to question your will, you didn’t need company, you didn’t need a father or any man, you had made that crystal clear already. You weren’t even interested in making friends within the convent. Some sisters were offended by this aloofness, and registered complaints. But all you needed was the Spiritual Alphabet, your prayer book, your one, irreplaceable, and constant companion. Whenever you were without it, your soul “was thrown into confusion and [your] thoughts ran wild.”2

  Naturally, I got hold of the famous Alphabet. It taught you the “art of love” as an exercise in yielding to the darkness of the sensible soul, which, unmoored from language and knowledge, and only on that extreme condition, may have a chance of fusing with the divine. Osuna’s “mental prayer,” as opposed to the vocal version prized by the Church, helped you to annihilate yourself, escape from yourself, cease at last to be an I or a she. You gave yourself up utterly to that new prayer in which personal pronouns and all forms of naming lose their outlines and surrender to the flux of affect: water of perceptions, oil of desires, tidal wave of feelings. Can this still be called prayer? Osuna writes: “This exercise is known as profundity with respect to the depth and darkness of the devotion, for it originates in the depths of man’s heart, which are dark because human understanding has been deprived of light. Seeing the heart plunged into shadows, the spirit of God comes over the heart on the waters of desire to proclaim his divine light.”3

  To the understanding cherished by scholastics, Osuna opposes pure apprehension—not an all-engulfing affect, but an intelligence he calls immediate, a pure seeing “without looking,” granted to the person in prayer who succeeds in identifying with the object of love, the object of faith. His injunction is not “to quiet the intelligence but the understanding. According to Richard [of Saint Victor], the comprehension of invisible things belongs to pure intelligence; the intelligence is said to be pure when the understanding is fixed on a supreme truth without the intervention of the imagination.”

  The shift from judgmental reason to the capture by immediate intelligence of every object as if it were an object of love was a thrilling game, at first, to our chess player: What could be more exciting for the mind? Very soon, however, these slippages began to chafe the inner wound: once more loneliness, weeping, nothingness of all things. Very soon Teresa let herself sink, abandoned herself. Did she pray with Osuna in the way that others sleep? She seems to have sought God as one seeks the comforts of sleep and was overcome with desire to nurse at the mother’s breast, to suckle in the arms of the beloved—no: of the Beloved, the supreme Being who combines the attributes of both parents. Her copy of the Spiritual Alphabet can be seen at the Carmel of Saint Joseph. It bears the marks of numberless perusals, revealing a particular liking for this passage:

  Be especially careful of the time after matins, for that sleep is more for the soul than for the body, and never go to bed sleepy, but wide awake in desire for the Lord. Emulating the bride, look for God by night in your bed.…

  Blessed are those who pray for a long time before sleeping and on waking up immediately begin to pray again, for they emulate Elias in eating a little, then sleeping, eating a little more, then sleeping again, and in this way they pass their time reclining, as it were, on the Lord’s breast after their meal, as children rest against their mother’s breast where they sleep after having sucked, wake up, nurse again, and then fall back to sleep. In this manner they spend the time for sleeping in these glorious intervals so that the time is more for prayer than for sleep because their primary intention was to pray. And they use the majority of time others spend for sleep in prayer, and even during sleep they realize as soon as they awake that the soul slept in the arms of their beloved.4

  Who invented dreams as the royal road to childhood memory, archaic, loving me
mory? Was it Teresa of Avila, Francisco de Osuna, or Sigmund Freud? Taking over from Pedro de Cepeda, the Franciscan friar introduced the Carmelite nun to a Godhead who could be tasted and suckled, whom she could look for by night in her bed, or after matins, when she wasn’t sleepy. She ached all over with desire for love, hunger to be loved and to cuddle up like a child, like a bride, to dream…

  Osuna leads Teresa to that white-hot spot where the “frivolous pleasures” that torment her intersect with the “thought of God” that reassures her: “For more than eighteen of the twenty-eight years since I began prayer, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world.”5 Indeed, when she was young, “as the sins increased I began to lose joy in virtuous things and my taste for them.”6 But her new spiritual master does not choose between the lusts of the body and the soarings of the soul, and neither does she. What his teaching achieves instead is to positively deepen the fault line the young novice had hoped to conceal in the convent. It immerses her in the unthinkable, and by instituting a prayer stripped of speech, it impells her to the prayer of abandonment (dejamiento) practiced by the alumbrados or Illuminati. What’s more, this spirituality makes room for visions and supernatural revelations. After all, wasn’t the Alphabet dedicated to the duke of Escalona, one of the foremost protectors of the alumbrados of Castile?