The capacity for introspection that Teresa seems to have displayed since childhood was blunted by the practice of prayer in Osuna’s mode; perhaps she sought to elude the vigilance of that merciless night watchman, the judging conscience, always discoursing, dissecting, condemning, making her miserable. The drawbacks of such a retreat did not escape her, however. For eighteen years, she remarked lucidly, silent prayer was the occasion of undergoing “this trial, and in that great dryness”: the ordeal of “being unable as I say to reflect discursively” (por no poder, como digo, discurrir)22 But any trials were gladly accepted, since they came from the Lord, and Teresa readily recognized the advantages of such regressive pleasures; the benefits of narcissistic jouissance (as Jérôme and I refer to it) in the masculine-feminine bosom of the combined parents whom she projected by exiling herself, powerless and speechless, in the Other. And yet in the same stroke of writing, the nun also indicated the advantages she expected from Confession. Shared speaking and listening offered far more than a “shield” against importunate thoughts; they put her through a veritable initiation process, which paved the way for writing. That need to “reflect discursively,” satisfied by Confession, throws light on the inexhaustible eagerness with which the future saint was always seeking guides (who were for their part conquered by her paroxysms and verve), confessors whom she hassled, subjugated, and cast aside. Reading, confession, and writing fell gradually into place to mobilize rapture, to provoke it and push it to the limits of endurance. And to provide her with the optimum framework for surviving and sharing.
Family tradition, Augustinian schooling, personal culture and flair, all helped her to find in books the concrete reality of the grace she awaited from the Beloved: armed with a book,
which was like a partner or a shield by which to sustain the blows of my many thoughts, I went about consoled. For the dryness was not [invariably] felt, but it always was felt when I was without a book. Then my soul was thrown into confusion and my thoughts ran wild. With a book I began to collect them, and my soul was drawn to recollection. And many times just opening the book was enough; at other times I read a little, and at others a great deal, according to the favor the Lord granted me.23
When this love of books came to feed the writing of Teresa’s own works, her pitiless self-analysis reached a peak of rigor, grace, and wit. The solitary reader, the frustrated talker, would begin to hone sharp insights—often connected with utterance itself, the secret object of her desire—that anticipated Madame de Sévigné by a hundred years: “So often do we say we have this virtue that we end up believing we have it.”24 I cannot decide, my voluble Teresa, what I envy more: your aptitude for transfixion, or your skill at converting your discurrir into chiseled maxims.
However much the writer stigmatized the “faculties” of intellect, imagination, and will that were not propitious for “mystical theology,” she made use of them for getting to her own personal truth. It was a truth that only emerged, for her as for us, gradually, through the process of committing herself to paper.
For the first time, a person—a woman, what’s more—describes with clinical lucidity the states of depersonalization caused or aggravated by epilepsy, along with their transcendence through faith in, and love for, the Other. It is generally agreed that Moses (maybe), Saint Paul, Mohammed, and Dostoyevsky (certainly), had similar experiences. But with how much more discretion and abstraction they reported them! Going well beyond the restitution of symptoms, basing herself on Judeo-Christian passions, Teresa exacerbates the melancholic moods attendant on the seizures and traces the successive stages whereby she has managed to turn them into exaltations of subjective omnipotence. The fact that the latter never hardens into delusions of grandeur, a paranoid structure, or harmful enactments in the real world is not the least mark of Teresa’s genius. She took care to soften that triumphant self-affirmation into a concern for better relations with others, through the moral, sensorial, and intellectual perfecting of herself—without being blind to her own tendencies toward père-version.
This alchemy took shape here, at the Incarnation, in a very intense fashion from 1554 to 1562, until an inspired confessor (the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez) asked the nun to write down this folly, this heresy, this novelty. Predecessors like Francisco de Osuna, Luis de Granada (with his Treatise on Prayer), Bernabé de Palma (Via spiritus), Juan de Ávila, and Pedro de Alcántara had already challenged the split between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” the created and the uncreated, on grounds that in faith, dualism merges back into one: only through faith could visions and prophecies operate, only through faith could divine illumination be received.
What Teresa added to the service of faith thus understood by this earlier current of mystical theology was her neuropsychic pathology and her feminine sensuality, her melancholy and her hysterical passions, her literary artistry and psychological acuity coiled around bodily agony. Thus she affirmed in a wholly new way—humanly forceful, as well as politically necessary by the end of the sixteenth century—that to take the love of the Other to its logical extremes constitutes the bedrock of Christianity and, even more intensely, of Tridentine Catholicism. And it casts light well beyond that moment of the Church, onto the various monotheisms fighting today over our globalized planet.
Chapter 16
THE MINX AND THE SAGE
May it please the Lord that I be not one of these but that His Majesty favor me…and a fig for all the devils, because they shall fear me.
Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life
“Intellect, Sister, what have you done with the intellect?” (Her confessor, Fr. Vicente Barrón, treading carefully.)
Bruno is not altogether in error, I’m making progress. This trip to Spain with Andrew and Juan has helped me gather up the threads of Teresa’s story, which continues to haunt my reading and my dreaming. Her encounters are fleshed out before my eyes, I can feel her living her life.
Teresa has need of the spiritual direction of Fr. Barrón, on condition of diluting it with the more amicable advice of Francisco de Salcedo, who picked up the relay of her young soul from Uncle Pedro. Salcedo also assures a constant supply of aloja, a magic potion made from honey and spices, that soothes the fevers to which Teresa is so often prey. This “blessed and holy man, with his diligence, it seems to me, was the principal means by which my soul was saved”;1 not only does he practice prayer, like Uncle Pedro, but prior to his ordination in 1570, he was romantically involved with the same Pedro’s wife’s cousin. No, Salcedo is not one to drone on about intellect. The mercurial Teresa nonetheless proves a handful, far exceeding his capacities. Maybe he should pass her on to Maestro Gaspar Daza, a close friend he had already told her about? Maybe not. She’s more up the street of Diego de Cetina. Sure enough, this twenty-five-year-old Jesuit makes her very happy: here at last is someone who understands! She determines to follow Cetina “in all things.” He finally persuades her to concentrate on Christ’s Passion, and to set her face against unsuitably personal mystic graces…This judicious young man is destined to go far, all the way to the chair of theology in Toledo.
“Poor intellect, it has gone strangely astray in me!” (Teresa loves to discurrir in the confession booth. Her respect for the young padre does not inhibit her from blurting out all the truths that pop into her mind. “I want to tell, tell, tell, tell all I know, all I think, all I guess, all that enchants me, and hurts, and surprises me,” sings the nightingale in Colette’s memoir.2) “This intellect is so wild that it doesn’t seem to be anything but a frantic madman no one can tie down. Nor am I master of it long enough to keep it calm for the space of a Creed. Sometimes I laugh at myself and know my misery, and I look at this madman and leave him alone to see what he does; and—glory to God—surprisingly enough he never turns to evil but to indifferent things: to whether there is anything to do here or there or over yonder. I then know the tremendous favor the Lord grants me when He holds this madman bound in perfect contemplation.”3
/> “You must be sorely tried…” The confessor is doing his best to slip in a word edgewise, to show this woman the right path, to fulfill a most difficult duty.
“Sometimes I am sunken in a foolishness of soul.”
“Hmm!”
“Yes, I think my soul then is like a little donkey eating grass, almost without perceiving that it does so.”
“No movement or effects by which you might perceive this?”
“It seems not, Father. On the contrary, in the other states I have told you of, my desires are restless and impossible to satisfy. And then great impulses of love make the soul like those little springs I’ve seen, which never cease to move the sand upward. ‘This is a good example of, or comparison to, souls that reach this state; love is always stirring and thinking about what it will do. It cannot contain itself, just as that water doesn’t seem to fit in the earth; but the earth casts it out of itself. So is the soul very habitually, for by reason of the love it has it doesn’t rest in or contain itself.’”4
She makes his head spin, this loquacious nun, in ceaseless motion! She shows distinct promise, but still…After racking his brains, Diego de Cetina advises her to meet Francisco de Borja next time he comes through Avila.
You are a minx, Teresa, for the more you act the sage, the more you aim your seductress’s beam at the objects of your love, the more your confessors—and your readers—want. Some take fright, naturally, and there was even a move to have you exorcised.5 But your spells deceive others, not yourself, and while keeping a low profile as befits those inquisitorial times, you dose your feverish outbursts with bitter bouts of soul-searching. How well I understand you!
“The soul must strive above all to represent to itself that there is nothing else on earth but God and itself.” Diego de Cetina is slightly taken aback, but does not argue. After all, you are no more “united” with your Master than the Sulamitess was with her Spouse, in the Song of Solomon! So what’s the problem?
The good fathers wish earnestly to believe you. But you move too fast for them. Diego de Cetina and Gaspar Daza have time only to wonder whether it is really seemly for a charitable soul to shrink from the world as much as you do. Beware the sin of pride, the fault of disrespect…Is this behavior licensed by the canon? You’ve gone beyond that already, you’re in a rush.
You are well aware, for that matter, that the presence of the Lord both inside and around you is pure grist to your ego. Your raptures often take place, as if accidentally, in public,6 and you worry far too much about what people think. Some disapprove in whispers, others praise the Lord for granting you the favors that you claim. Either way “would be advantageous to me” (que entrambas cosas eran ganancia para mí).7 There’s no avoiding narcissism if you’re set to be the Other’s great love, and you know it, my perceptive Teresa. Your harshest critic will always be yourself, isn’t that so, my implacable one? For much as you profess humility and devoutness, temptations assail you and, shamefaced, you feel “I was deceiving everyone.”8 Fair enough! “Such a subtle self-dissection is not without benefits on the side,” smirks Dr. Tristan. “Your roommate got more than her share of ganancias, did she not!”
Next, by a fresh and by no means final twist of watchful lucidity, you realize that the “appearance of humility came from serious imperfection and from not being mortified.” Because if you had truly surrendered to your Spouse, you wouldn’t care what people said about you, good or bad. You would have been ready for any amount of persecution. Talking of persecution, you expected it! You foresaw it, and it did not spare you, right to the end. Isn’t that always the best gift for a…persecutee? You don’t need telling, Teresa, all’s fair in this cohabitation with the Almighty that you created for yourself with so much pain and rapture!
And all is for the best in this best of all possible out-of-the-worlds. There is no outlet for zealousness, vanity, or simulated seduction. You knew, long before we did—we of the Parisian Psychoanalytical Society—that there’s no outlet for narcissism. Negative or positive, narcissism is understood, foreseen, and justified by the love between the two of you, the Beloved and the woman who prays, the Lord and His Bride. “Everything seems to be a heavy burden, and rightly so, because it involves a war against ourselves. But once we begin to work, God does so much in the soul and grants it so many favors that all that one can do in this life seems little.”9
I like your quip about the world down here being like a “bad inn.” Your triumphant narcissism thus spares you from both the utter disconsolation of earthly life and from the suicidal urge that can tempt the depressed to think that there is only safety in the Beyond. Nothing of the sort afflicts you, Teresa, my love: a temporary visitor to our squalid hostel, you couldn’t care less for the conditions, since He is waiting for you.
“Let us not desire delights, daughters; we are well-off here; the bad inn lasts for only a night [Bien estamos aquí; todo es una noche la mala posada].”10
Fond though he is of you, Diego de Cetina frowns at this. You notice.
“Never think, Father, that I am not pained by the sins of our fellow men. Of course I am! And yet I ask myself: what if it was another temptation?” (Intelligence tells you that it would be a good thing to step back from the exclusivity, so prized by you, of the bonds between you and the Lord, and take an interest in other people. So many sinners, after all!) “But then again—might it not be another kind of vacuous hankering for honor, when one tries to do too much for others?” (You switch directions in a flash, like a will-o’-the-wisp; the young Jesuit is getting dizzy, he’s not sure whether to breathe deeply or try once more to bring you back to earth. He sighs.)
“Are you quite well, Father? Now, doesn’t this bid to save our neighbors, like every other effort of the kind, betray an excess of zeal? It’s a sin of pride, perhaps? A want of humility? I would have done better to open my eyes to myself, I should have been more circumspect.” You have an answer for everything, vigilant Teresa. Fortunate confessors!
“Very good, carry on with your prayers and penances.”
Did Cetina get you to study the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola? Nobody knows.
Chapter 17
BETTER TO HIDE…?
For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
Jeremiah 8:11
Teresa is agitated, sure, she’s into splitting hairs, that’s clear; at the moment, however, the excesses of body and soul are far from being the chief cause of her unhappiness. In 1547, the chapter of the Cathedral of Toledo, soon followed by other powerful authorities, had decreed the estatuto de limpieza de sangre, the Statutes of Purity of Blood, which banned the descendants of converted Jews from holding ecclesiastical office.1 Anybody might suddenly be required to prove the limpieza of their ancestry and their soul! But who is truly pure, sin mancha, “without stain”? An Old Christian? Don Quixote, the creation of a man with converso roots, described himself mischievously as a Christian from the land of the stain: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quero acordarme…”2 “In a village of La Mancha, whose name I have no desire to call to mind…” One can guess why.
Among the Illuminati or alumbrados were many converts from Judaism, and many women. Shunned by official institutions, they were positively welcomed by more unorthodox congregations in search of spiritual renewal. For some ten years, from 1550 to 1560, Teresa too had been influenced by new spiritual masters, in addition to Osuna. She had engaged in an intense dialogue with herself so as to adjust her experience to their teachings; but for all her commitment to honesty and truth, she could not confide in anybody about this development.
The first of these masters was Juan de Ávila, the “Apostle of Andalusia,” born, like Teresa, to a converso father and an Old Christian mother, and the author of a book about and for women, Avisos y reglas cristianas sobre aquel verso de David: “Audi, Filia.”3 Teresa had of course devoured the first edition, in 1556. Audi, filia! For her, this
title would always be associated with the Epistles of Saint Jerome and his commentary on Psalm 45: “Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear: forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house; so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty.” These were the words she read out loud to Uncle Pedro, the words that were so important in her decision to take the veil. But the preacher Juan de Ávila was suspected of Illuminism, something the inquisitors tended to confuse with interior spirituality and the whiff of Protestantism; Teresa had to tread carefully. Audi, Filia was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.
The Inquisition also prosecuted the Franciscan friar Pedro de Alcántara, because that holy man took it for granted that God could reveal himself to the weaker sex. He had gone as far as teaching that Heaven was for the poor and the rich could never be saved; he called the victims of the Inquisition “martyrs” and disapproved of the term “dogs” to describe converts from Judaism or Islam. Dangerous, again. The Book of Prayer and Meditation—signed by Luis de Granada4 but a vehicle for Alcántara’s ideas—was also placed on the Index in 1559. Pedro de Alcántara himself was acquitted, with a warning to moderate his tone.
Bernardino de Laredo was also a Franciscan, and a personal physician to João III of Portugal. Although he had no scholastic training he went further than his master Osuna in the Ascent of Mount Zion, a work that fascinated Teresa—but she balked at Laredo’s rejection of any human representation of Christ. After all, she could never dispense with the humanity of the Crucified One. So, let’s thrash it out! What a splendid time to be discurriendo!
Teresa, My Love Page 29