The extravagance of this embrace is not only justified by the experiences of illustrious predecessors. Teresa is thinking about Mary Magdalene’s conversion, of course, as she weeps before the statue, but she laments the way “the tears I shed were womanish and without strength since I did not obtain by them what I desired.”6 She would retreat from female role models, and it was not until discovering Saint Augustine’s account of his conversion that she felt she recognized herself: “I saw myself in [the Confessions].”7 By the start of 1554 the Confessions were finally available—in Catalan—to the former boarder at the Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Grace, who responded to their content as to a clarion call from God.
As I began to read the Confessions…I began to commend myself very much to this glorious saint. When I came to the passage where he speaks about his conversion and read how he heard that voice in the garden, it only seemed to me, according to what I felt in my heart, that it was I the Lord called.8
Thanks to her identifications, first with Mary Magdalene and then, even more strongly, with Saint Augustine, Teresa’s transference onto Jesus was doubly validated and reinforced. Meanwhile the naive freshness of her effusions, as bookish as they were spiritual, did not preclude an analysis of her relationship with what can only be called a fantasy incarnate, apprehended through images, mental constructs, and imaginary representations. And, on top of all this, through something more: a genuine revelry of the senses, a feast for the flesh. The paroxysm of Communion.
Not as “immersed” (engolfada) as all that, the writer lays out, with peerless probity, the many facets of her experience.
She shares her love of images with us first, firing a sly shot at the reformed Church in passing: “Unfortunate are those who through their own fault lose this great good. It indeed appears that they do not love the Lord.”9 This leads to the admission that for her (and, perhaps, for most of us) the visual thrill of a likeness, be it of the Lord or of any cherished person, lies at the bottom of the feeling of love itself. The cells in hermitages, those secluded outdoor cabins or the retreat rooms in Carmelite monasteries, ought to be decorated with holy pictures, according to the foundress. Further, “try to carry about an image or painting of this Lord that is to your liking, not so as to carry it about on your hearts and never look at it but so as to speak often with Him; for He will inspire you with what to say.”10 To love seeing and to love were synonymous for Teresa in her process of re-conversion. Thus did a Carmelite of the Incarnation rediscover Plato’s Banquet!11 Only to reconfigure it in her own, Catholic way, charging the images with love, before passing, with love, to the other side of the images, like Alice through the looking glass.
The vision of the suffering Man is thus an “amorous” one, leaving her “distressed” to a degree that corresponds to what is far more than a visual gratification. It is a sensation that, though linked to sight, at once kindles Teresa’s every sense and triggers an avalanche of ideas. More than merely seeing, the “vision” of the Beloved Other becomes a “tenderness” felt as a gift, but “neither entirely of the senses nor entirely spiritual” (un regalo que ni bien es todo sensual, ni bien es espiritual).12
Ideal and desire, both the one and the other, as that which is experienced by way of sight gathers the flesh back into the spirit. The amorous gaze transports the lover into her Beloved and vice versa, body-and-soul, inside-and-outside, presence-and-immersion. On this day in Lent, 1554, more than ever before, after the reproving Holy Countenance and on the heels of the outsized toad, the vision of the suffering Man would initiate a period of auras, levitations, and other transverberations.
Far from the macabre expressionism of Grünewald, the future Counter-Reformation saint only contemplated the Calvary so as to turn it inside out like a glove. If at first, admittedly, she tended to wallow in masochism, she cast this off bit by bit and her experience rapidly ascended its radiant beam of pure pleasure, climaxing in the exultation of the elect.
In Teresa’s work, Christ’s wounds appear free of the carnal abjection that attracted Grünewald. At one point they actually metamorphose into jewels. The Carmelite “sees” Christ take the crucifix from her hand, and when He gives it back, the presence of the Beloved so often sensed by her side (“It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always present at my side; but since this wasn’t an imaginative vision, I didn’t see any form”13) has transformed the wounds into gems:
It was made of four large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds—there is no appropriate comparison with supernatural things. A diamond seems to be something counterfeit and imperfect when compared with the precious stones that are seen there. The representation of the five wounds was of very delicate workmanship. He told me that from then on I would see the cross in that way; and so it happened, for I didn’t see the wood of which it was made but these stones. No one, however, saw this except me.14
We know that the epileptic aura is prone to such extreme states of perception and imagination, and to their inversion, but even so Teresa seems to transform them into an unprecedented sensual intelligence. She links them to the glorious tradition of Mary Magdalene and Augustine, the better to appropriate them for her personal gallery of images, within the religious culture of her time, in a soft yet punctilious idiom, while subjecting them to the most honest introspection her levels of knowledge at the time would permit.
Carefully, tenderly, the writer probed her emotional state, dissociating this love from any hackneyed daydream or vision in the common acceptation of the word, and labeling her experience—for the first time—one of “mystical theology.”15
This did not occur after the manner of a vision. I believe they call the experience “mystical theology.” The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, it seems to me, is almost lost. For, as I say, the intellect does not work, though in my opinion it is not lost; it is as though amazed by all it understands because God desires that it understand, with regard to the things His Majesty represents to it, that it understands nothing.16
Chapter 13
IMAGE, VISION, AND RAPTURE
Although I say “image” let it be understood that, in the opinion of the one who sees it, it is not a painting but truly alive…Almost every time God grants this favor the soul is in rapture [arrobamiento], for in its lowliness it cannot suffer so frightening [espantosa] a sight.
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
Loving recollection cuts loose from the gaze that prompted it, to excite all of the senses: from now on the Carmelite will be engulfed by an all-inclusive sensibility, in the fusion of touch and sight. “I tried as hard as I could to keep Jesus Christ, our God and our Lord, present within me.”1 The efforts she had made from the beginning of her monastic life were finally crowned with success. Now she beholds Him, but not as an image; she alone sees Him thus, and her solitude curves ever more inward, toward that interiority where He dwells for her, immovable, inoperable, inseparable from her inner being; she is as though pregnant with Him, hollowed out inside where He unfolds: “The spirit may be shown how to work interiorly. One should strive earnestly to avoid exterior feelings.”2 Teresa only formulated that assimilation of the Other, that led her to feel that she was the sacramental body, when she came to write The Interior Castle (1577); but the experience was already in progress, especially since her re-conversion in 1555.
In The Book of Her Life, the degrees of prayer (the prayer of quiet; ecstatic contemplation; spiritual marriage) would be catalogued with a care for self-analytical precision, but also with a view to instructing her “daughters,” like the ambitious reformer she was. In its untended garden, irrigated by the four waters, the soul first labors like a gardener toward mystical union. Humbly suspending the intellect the better to surrender to the Spouse, it nonetheless still strives to live out its fantasy while submerged in prayer. Next come the prayer of quiet and the prayer of union, until finally, with no more need of a gardener or the least
“labor,” it reaches the fourth prayer, which is rapture. The union is henceforth sealed, as lover and Beloved merge into each other like water poured into the sea.
For thirty years, within the sheltering walls of the Incarnation, Teresa exhibited states of paroxysm at which some marveled, while others feared the devil’s doing; she was scrupulous enough to suspect them herself, veering between the possibilities and applying to both the scalpel of introspection and retrospection.
Thus she extols the perfection of prayer that is “union” with the Beloved while observing that here the soul, melting into Him, is still “upon our earth”;3 union, as opposed to rapture, remains always the liaison between two distinct identities, Him and me.
In the Way, warning against the separation of mental from vocal prayer, Teresa continues to advocate a “union” of differences: it is right “to consider whom we are going to speak with, and who we are.”4 Only in “rapture” can prayer reach the heights, and the dispossession of self be consummated in wholesale transformation: at that eleventh hour the osmosis with the Other causes one to be torn from oneself in excruciating pain, which blissfully abates into relief. Unendurable desire is thus transmuted into the ineffable jouissance of the transfixion5 immortalized by Bernini’s sculpture. The joy of mutual penetration spawns metaphor upon metaphor, she is a sponge soaked in the sacred liquid of the Trinity, which is impossible to contain, for it is He who captures and incorporates her into His sovereign presence:
There came the thought of how a sponge absorbs and is saturated with water; so, I thought, was my soul which was overflowing with that divinity and in a certain way rejoicing within itself and possessing the three Persons [gozaba en sí y tenía las tres Personas]. I also heard the words: “Don’t try to hold Me within yourself, but try to hold yourself within Me [no trabajes tú de tenerme a Mí encerrado en ti, sino de encerrarte tú en Mí].”6
The description and interpretation of such visions vary somewhat in the course of Teresa’s oeuvre, but there is no radical departure from the accounts given in the Life. The Dwelling Places make more of the “intellectual” character of these “images,” which are no longer either “sensible” or “imaginary.” Nevertheless, while that distinction is a feature of the raptures evoked in the Life, the moment the writer tries to express it in words the difference she finds between her “spiritual” visions and those that imbue the senses imposes a style that is helplessly sensible, metaphorical, metamorphic. Not even the purest contact with the Other can be written other than in image-laden fiction.
I prowl beneath the low ceilings of the mythic Carmel of the Incarnation, thinking about a woman happily in thrall to her visions. The Interior Castle was not written until 1577, far from here, in Toledo, and then revised in Segovia in 1580. The very last accounts of the future saint’s mystical trances testify to the maturity of her experience, inseparable from that of her artistry with the language of vehemence and lucidity alike. In the meantime Teresa has read much, learned much, and founded a great deal. Her theological knowledge has outgrown the Spiritual Alphabet of her early mentor, Osuna. And yet the original “tempest” of love is still there, whether in the practice of quiet, of union, or of rapture.
I like to think about her final virtuosity, here in the corridors of the Incarnation that saw her first steps. Time condenses for me, too, as through Teresa’s work I inhabit the dilated instant of thought. Before, now, and afterward no longer flow by but soar upward in a vertical eternity, suddenly lifting the vaulted ceilings, enlarging them, spinning them into the moradas of a fabulous interior castle. Hers and ours, in words, in text.
Here, with a biblical, scriptural sense of the unrepresentable vision, Teresa painstakingly expounds the way “imaginative visions” differ from “intellectual visions”:7 how the first “remain so impressed on the memory that they are never forgotten,” “inscribed in the very interior part of the soul,” whereas the second are “so sublime that it’s not fitting for those who live on this earth to have the further understanding necessary to explain them” (que no las convienen entender los que viven en la tierra para poderlas decir). These “intellectual visions” can only be spoken of “when the soul is again in possession of its senses.” Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12–16) and Moses’ burning bush (Exod. 3:2–6) serve as examples, for even “if there is no image and the faculties do not understand,” it is possible to remember by the power of faith:
I do understand that some truths about the grandeur of God remain so fixed in this soul, that even if faith were not to tell it who God is and of its obligation to believe that He is God, from that very moment it would adore Him as God, as did Jacob when he saw the ladder.8
And further:
Nor did Moses know how to describe all that he saw in the bush, but only what God wished him to describe. But if God had not shown secrets to his soul along with a certitude that made him recognize and believe that they were from God, Moses could not have entered into so many severe trials. But he must have understood such deep things among the thorns of that bush that the vision gave him the courage to do what he did for the people of Israel. So, sisters, we don’t have to look for reasons to understand the hidden things of God.9
Now, no sooner has Teresa reserved for her ultimate union with the Beloved all these “hidden things,” which cannot be named and baffle reason, than she returns to her passion for explication and tries afresh to explain by means of some comparison. (Deseando estoy acertar a poner una comparación para si pudiese dar a entender algo de esto que estoy diciendo.) She begins by pointing out that, when the soul is in ecstasy, it “cannot describe any of [the grandeurs it saw].”10 But in order to make this experience intelligible (Is it “imaginative”? Is it “intellectual”?), the writer takes refuge, modestly, in her lack of “learning” and her “dullness” in order to avoid making the choice.11 Unnameable as it may be, the vision is still fixed, impressed, or inscribed on the memory—like writing? Like a graven image? La Madre has already mentioned elsewhere the true, the living book His Majesty had so vividly impressed upon her: “His Majesty had become the true book in which I saw the truths. Blessed be such a book that leaves what must be read and done so impressed that you cannot forget!” (Su Majestad ha sido el libro verdadero adonde he visto las verdades. ¡Bendito sea tal libro, que deja imprimido lo que se ha de leer y hacer, de manera que no se puede olvidar!”)12 Suddenly, in a startling flash of insight, the writer associates the unforgettable inscription with a proliferation of riches. The word camarín or “treasure chamber” around which her comparison revolves can also mean boudoir, or a closet for a holy statue’s accoutrements.
You enter into the room of a king or great lord, or I believe they call it the treasure chamber, where there are countless kinds of glass and earthen vessels and other things so arranged that almost all these objects are seen on entering. Once I was brought to a room like this…and I saw that one could praise the Lord at seeing so many different kinds of objects…I soon forgot it all.…Clearly, the soul has some of these dwelling places since God abides within it.…The Lord must not want the soul to see these secrets every time it is in this ecstasy.…After it returns to itself, the soul is left with that representation of the grandeurs it saw; but it cannot describe any of them, nor do its natural powers attain to any more than what God wished that it see supernaturally.13
Do you hold deep inside, Teresa, my love, a dwelling place of such a kind, a camarín crammed with treasures and other curiosities? Camarín: an alcove, an actor’s dressing room, a washroom, a study? A swarm of objects, elements, bodies in evolution, preparation, defenseless gestation? A chaotic emotional boudoir you will be compelled to inhabit, sort out, and move on from.
Quite explicitly, Teresa introduces the sensible into the intellectual in order to weave a third space, that of those “intellectual visions” whose task it is to rename and rewrite the felt experience of an invisible overcoming and dispossession: “[The soul] will feel Jesus Christ, our Lord, beside it. Ye
t, it does not see Him, either with the eyes of the body or with those of the soul.…Since she didn’t see anything she couldn’t understand the nature of this vision.”14 Moreover it is the very force of the sensation, “impressed” rather than figured, but distilled by the delicacy of the formulation itself, that constantly attests to the divine rather than demonic origin of such “sightless,” “suprasensible” visions. And the flesh becomes Word.
She felt He was walking at her right side, but she didn’t experience this with those senses by which we can know that a person is beside us. This vision comes in another unexplainable, more delicate way. But it is so certain and leaves much certitude; even much more than the other visions do, because in the visions that come through the senses one can be deceived [one might fancy it so: ya se podría antojar], but not in the intellectual vision. For this latter brings great interior benefits and effects that couldn’t be present if the experience were caused by melancholy; nor would the devil produce so much good; nor would the soul go about with such peace and desires to please God, and with so much contempt for everything that does not bring it to Him. Afterward she understood clearly that the vision was not caused by the devil, which became more and more clear as time went on.15
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