Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  On second thoughts, better not. The chief inquisitor, Fernando de Valdés,5 and his right-hand man, the Dominican Melchor Cano,6 were on the warpath. In 1551 they drew up an Index of Prohibited Books, revising it in 1554, ahead of the Index vaticanus promulgated by the pope in 1559. It had become imperative to eradicate crypto-Jewish and Muslim practices, to repel the advance of Lutheran propaganda on the wings of the new technology of printing (already in 1517, the Ninety-five Theses pinned up in Wittenberg by Martin Luther were printed),7 and to censor both the production and the possession—the reading—of heterodox works. “They” banned all spiritual treatises in the vernacular and any complete editions of the Bible that were not buffered with duly authorized commentaries.

  Teresa’s new friends the Jesuits were also targeted, due to their links with Rheno-Flemish mysticism. It was whispered that “they” had attempted to arrest the archbishop of Toledo himself, Bartolomé de Carranza, an ally of the Jesuits and a friend to the champion of inspired faith, Juan de Valdés, who had died in 1541.8 These controversies were a great topic of conversation among the best of the Carmelites, and Teresa drank in knowledge, steeped herself in it, constructed herself with it. A new Bible had been circulating since 1522, published by the recently founded University of Alcalá, which had retranslated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the New Testament from the Greek, after Chief Inquisitor Cisneros had embraced the humanist point of view.9 As a matter of fact, Friar Luis de León—your posthumous editor, my audacious Teresa—went further still. He stood up for Arias Montano, the scholar protected by Philip II who directed the literal translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, and an interlinear Latin translation of the New Testament from the Greek.10 One thousand two hundred copies (far more than those issued by Alcalá) of the eight-volume Bible rolled off the Antwerp presses of the king’s typographer, Christophe Plantin, in 1573.11 Luis de León had the gall to maintain that the Vulgate and the Septuagint texts were not always faithful to the original Hebrew; he translated the Song of Songs into Castilian and was jailed for four years. “They” were well aware, besides, that the future philosopher-poet was of Jewish ancestry: his great-great-great grandmother on his father’s side, Elvira, was a conversa. Undaunted, on his release, he wrote The Names of Christ, a work that delved into the literal meanings of the Hebrew texts and attacked the statutes on purity of blood.

  You, too, would be in “their” sights. An early charge of Illuminism was refuted by your confessor, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez, in 1560. Posthumously, the scourge of the alumbrados in Extremadura and inquisitor in Llerena, the Dominican Alonso de la Fuente, denounced you as a “mistress of Illuminism” before the Council of the Inquisition in 1589. Thanks to God, there are no passages of yours that genuinely challenge religious discipline or dogma, and the affair petered out. Later, another Dominican, Juan de Lorenzana, denounced you to the Holy Office, as did the Augustinian Antonio de Sosa and, in 1598, Canon Francisco de Pisa, the historian of Toledo. None of these accusations were followed up.

  How were you supposed to handle all this, as the ignorant woman you pretended to be—which of course you were, but one endowed with high intelligence and a sense of history? Fierce arguments opposed grammarians and humanists to some (but not all) theologians: the Jesuit Mariana advocated a return to the literal meaning of the Bible, directly based on the Hebrew, while a number of Thomist Dominicans appointed themselves the guardians of dogma.

  You would hardly have been eager to draw down on your head the lightning bolts of any sort of “trial,” in view of your family history. Undoubtedly passionate, you were also shrewd. You cited the innovators with diffident humility; when the innovation was yours, you presented it bravely or diplomatically, depending on the circumstances. The Council of Trent, launched in 1545, was still in full swing, and its lengthy debates would give rise to new ways of confronting heresy, Protestant or any other kind. Since the Church was a corpus mysticum, a notion the unfolding Counter-Reformation took very seriously, it would have to provide the populace with saints: these were to fortify the sacrament of Communion, facilitating a suprasensible union with Christ while inspiring a communal solidarity able to compete with that of the Protestants or the humanists, strong enough indeed to outdo them. Meanwhile, all things considered, people in Avila were not cut off from such issues. Your services will be needed, Teresa. Just not yet....

  Meanwhile, there’s good reason to fear lest the spiritual favors you report be seen as demonic temptations, or heresy, or insanity…How reassuring to have a trustworthy confidant in Diego de Cetina, a man who understands you, and knows his Juan de Ávila as thoroughly as his Francisco de Osuna!

  “Father, I have been released from my captivity on earth.” Teresa wants to shout it out, but warnings have been “raining down on her” in these troubled times; she’d rather be reasonable.

  “That is not the humblest of sentiments, Sister, as they must have told you already.”

  “I only wish to explain myself to those I love! Truly, the transport lifts me up, as the clouds or the sun draw up the vapors of a stone.”

  Diego de Cetina is doubtful, he doesn’t trust your double spirals. Evidently this Carmelite is no hoaxer, though Lord knows there are enough of those in these dark times, especially in women’s convents. Is she like the beatas with whom rustics and aristocrats alike, rightly or wrongly, are so besotted? She says what she feels, with beautiful precision. But there are limits.

  “I would advise you to concentrate on the Passion of Christ, preferably on a single aspect, without haste. Follow The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, it will teach you discipline. I sometimes feel that you undertake too much at a time.”

  “I am willing to do everything you say, Father. But it’s stronger than I am. ‘The more I strove to distract myself, the more the Lord enveloped me in that sweetness and glory, which seemed to surround me so completely that there was no place to escape.’”12

  “Resist, Sister, resist. Willpower too comes from God, and He has given you a great deal of it. Stand fast against these mystical graces, humility must be preserved.”

  Even this young, modern priest, a member of Loyola’s Society of Jesus, even he tries to hold her back. He’s not wrong, certainly, and Teresa vows to do her best.

  She abandons prayer for a year, with the sole result of “putting myself right in hell.”13 “In sum, she is a woman; and not a good but a wretched one” (En fin, mujer y no buena, sino ruin).14

  She tells him so, because she thinks it’s true, and because she thinks he thinks so, too. Teresa thinks that more women than men are blessed by grace. She has noticed this independently, and Pedro de Alcántara will confirm it to her: women do progress more rapidly along the spiritual path.15 A holy man who mortifies his body to the point of death, Alcántara is so knowledgeable about the female soul that he reckons it preferable for a woman to marry again, below her social rank if necessary, than for her to take the veil without a genuine vocation to serve God. There are excellent reasons for this, according to Alcántara, and also according to Teresa, who is not as erudite as the Franciscan but feels it in her heart.16 Let it go for now; all will be addressed in good time.

  Five years have gone by since that memorable, and incontestably genital, communion with Jesus, when standing in front of a carved effigy of the Suffering Man and sobbing harder than the Magdalene, Teresa knew that “the Lord was certainly present there within me” (como sabía estaba allí cierto el Señor dentro de mí).17

  On June 29, 1559, a quite different vision comes to her: more disturbing, more incisive, more decisive in fact, given the absence of any form of pictorial, sculptural, or textual support. She hears the One she seems to see:

  I saw that it was He, in my opinion, who was speaking to me. Since I was completely unaware that there could be a vision like this one, it greatly frightened me in the beginning; I did nothing but weep. However, by speaking one word alone to reassure me, the Lord left me feeling as I usually did:
quiet, favored, and without any fear. 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. Yet I felt very clearly that He was always present at my right side and that He was the witness of everything I did. At no time in which I was a little recollected, or not greatly distracted, was I able to ignore that He was present at my side.18

  Later, Pedro de Alcántara assures her that this kind of vision is “among the most sublime.”

  For if I say that I see it with the eyes neither of the body nor of the soul, because it is not an imaginative vision, how do I know and affirm that He is more certainly at my side than if I saw Him?…The vision is represented through knowledge given to the soul that is clearer than sunlight. I don’t mean that you see the sun or brightness, but that a light, without your seeing light, illumines the intellect so that the soul may enjoy such a great good.19

  “Without being seen, [this vision] is impressed with such clear knowledge that I don’t think it can be doubted.” It is not so much “visible” as “impressed,” that is, already inscribed, carved, sculpted, and she also compares the Holy Presence to effortless sustenance: “as though the food were already placed in the stomach without our eating it or knowing how it got there.”

  What’s more, it is as though she was pregnant with a child that is her own internal composition, that has no need to enter from outside, and that is “there,” regardless of her awareness of or desire for it. An unconscious creation? “It is clearly known to be there, although we don’t know what food it is or who put it there. But in this case I do know, yet not how it got there; nothing is seen or understood, nor was the soul ever moved to desire it—nor had I been informed that this was possible [entiende bien que está, aunque aquí no se entiende el manjar que es, ni quién le puso. Acá sí; mas cómo se puso no lo sé, que ni se vio, ni se entiende, ni jamás se había movido a desearlo, ni había venido a mi noticia podía ser].”20

  Whenever she tears herself away from her inner being in order to envisage an external agent of love, it is aurally—as for the Mary of the Visitation—that the nourishing inscription enters in.

  God makes the intellect become aware—even though it may not wish to do so—and understand what is said; in that experience the soul seemingly has other ears with which it hears, and God makes it listen, and it is not distracted.…It finds everything prepared and eaten. There is nothing more to do than to enjoy, as in the example of someone who without having learned or done any work to know how to read, and without having studied anything, would find that all knowledge was possessed inwardly, without knowing how or where it was gotten since no studying had been done.…The soul sees that in an instant it is wise.…It is left full of amazement.…Even without signs, just by a glance, it seems, [God and the soul] understand each other.21

  Like a book, engraved and heard by the soul—that other inside her—thanks to Him? The book has still to be written.

  There ensues a series of repetitions of that experience, with precise physical and spiritual variations that merely assure the Carmelite of her visual, tactile, aural, and gustatory interpenetration with the Beloved’s presence. The hands of the Lord appear to her, then His “divine face,”22 then the lovely whiteness of the whole person. Will she be ravished by this, or fall to fear and trembling? On June 29, the feast of Saint Paul, “this most sacred humanity in its risen form was represented to me completely, as it is in paintings, with such wonderful beauty and majesty.”23 Teresa is exultant:

  If I should have spent many years trying to imagine how to depict something so beautiful, I couldn’t have, nor would I have known how to; it surpasses everything imaginable here on earth, even in just its whiteness and splendor.…God gives it so suddenly that there wouldn’t even be time to open your eyes, if it were necessary to open them. For when the Lord desires to give the vision, it makes no more difference if they are opened than if they are closed; even if we do not desire to see the vision, it is seen.24

  A resplendent whiteness, a vision without form, Jesus has impressed himself indelibly on her; the Spouse has become her embodied phantasm, on the way to becoming…her double.

  Conscious of this absolute identification with the object of her worship, the praying woman at the peak of her mystical experience described herself as “transformed into God”; the censors—whose job it was to protect her from her own heretical leanings and so assure the publication of her testimony with the imprimatur of the Church—struck out this phrase and replaced it with “united in God.” The attentive reader will gather, however, that, more than a “union” between two distinct beings, Teresa’s raptures enact a veritable assimilation of the divine into the praying woman.25 Needless to say, she never enters the castle without being impelled to do so by the Other: “I understand this union to be the wine cellar where the Lord wishes to place us when He desires and as He desires. But however great the effort we make to do so, we cannot enter. His Majesty must place us there and enter Himself into the center of our soul.”26 And yet, since “there is no closed door”27 between the Fifth and Sixth Dwelling Places, the soul at last reaches its “center” where “the main dwelling place” is found,28 and becomes “one with God” (una cosa con Dios).29 Dispossession of the self, transport into the Other, absorption of the Other into the self, in the infinite round between dwelling places.

  Teresa sometimes implied, misleadingly, that she had cut down on paroxystic prayer; on the contrary, it remained essential for the molding of La Madre’s position with respect to her faith. What did change over time and with the benefit of maturity was that her undeniable Illuminism, continually revisited, questioned, and imparted by her writing, ceased to be a source of confusion and distress and evolved into the fantastical support of a matchless entrepreneurial realism, the impulse that led her to found a string of reformed Carmelite religious houses. The Book of Her Life and the Foundations retrace the meticulous elaboration of this cleavage and this equilibrium.

  The most extreme consequence of the identification underway—of the beloved turning into her Beloved—will be that “in the enjoyment of that divine presence the vision of it is lost. Is it true that it is forgotten afterward? That majesty and beauty remain so impressed that they are unforgettable.”30 “Our effort can neither do nor undo anything when it comes to seeing more or seeing less.…The Lord desires us to be very clearly aware that this is not our work but His Majesty’s work.”31 Teresa takes leave of herself in the living image of the Other whom she carries inside. After having seen, the time comes for hearing. At the junction of these two perceptions, truth is written.

  Although her raptures made Teresa one of the elect, La Madre was anxious to disclaim any of the “pride” that lesser souls might feel to possess such a gift. She only felt the indignity of it, especially when her confessors hinted at that aspect. As time went by, penitence changed into a delightful restoration of triumphant pride; manic emotionality was calmed by the omnipotence of the Resurrected Lord, if not by the authority of a spiritual Father; in the last instance she bowed, serenely, to therapeutic necessity. And so she received that plenitude as a “truth,” her truth, and advanced two reasons for the “certainty” she felt.

  First, the Jesus who surrounds her and delights her is no longer a “comparison” but a “living image,” because He radiates the majesty of the risen Lord, which faith dictates to the believer and which dissolves her being:

  I don’t say this example is a comparison—for comparisons are never so exact—but the truth. The difference lies in that which there is between living persons and paintings of them, no more nor less. For if what is seen is an image, it is a living image—not a dead man, but the living Christ. And He makes it known that He is both man and God, not as He was in the tomb but as He was when He came out of the tomb after His resurrection.…Especially after receiving Communion…He reveals Himself as so much the lord of this dwelling that it seems the soul is completely dissolved, and it sees
itself consumed in Christ.32

  And then, since it is to Him that she owes her spark of certainty, hers cannot possibly be a subjective truth but only the Truth:

  Within this majesty I was given knowledge of a truth that is the fulfillment of all truths. I don’t know how to explain this because I didn’t see anything. I was told without seeing anyone, but I clearly understood that it was Truth itself telling me…“Do you know what it is to love Me truthfully? It is to understand that everything that is displeasing to me is a lie. By the beneficial effects this understanding will cause in your soul you shall see clearly what you now do not understand.”33

  Strangely but logically, Teresa perceives this truth as an inscription etched into her physical and psychic being, like an “indescribable” trace that remains to be translated, uttered, retranscribed ad infinitum. Far from “dissolving” her, indeed, the Truth that invades her by virtue of Love for the Other invites her to make It known, by setting down her truth. Confessors did not suffice: the writer needed to ask a spiritual master who was himself suspect in those dark times—the author of the reflections on Audi, filia—to approve her decision to translate the “inscribed” or “impressed” into “fiction.” She sent the manuscript of her autobiography to Juan de Ávila, whose letter of April 14, 1560, was already highly encouraging: hearken to Christ’s words, the master told her in a nutshell, for He did not offer His counsel to men sooner than to women.