As for the provincial who had promised to support you, he was now backpedaling, cowed by the animosities and rancors you aroused. You, somewhat fed up by now, have the nerve to remind him that it’s not Teresa talking, but His Majesty. How can he not realize?
“Consider, Father, that we are resisting against the Holy Spirit!”
Who can resist a majesty like yours? It was the big bazooka. Your biographers are keen to highlight this, and I’m happy to go along.
After the rain, here comes the sun. Spring 1563. With official permission to leave the Incarnation, you move to Saint Joseph’s in the company of four more discalced postulants eager to follow you: Ana de los Ángeles, María Isabel, your cousin Isabel de San Pablo, and Ana de San Juan, daughter of the marchioness of Velada.
You have prevailed, Teresa, but this is only the beginning. Sixteen more battles of this kind remain to be fought and won, all different and yet similar, an extravagant amalgam of foundations and persecutions.
The representation of Saint Joseph will stay with you for good. His image will preside over all your creations, like a prototype of the ideal Father you always strive to see in your spiritual fathers on earth (an effort of faith leading to much fervor and disappointment)—those confessors and other ecclesiastics whose approval and support you seek.
Inseparable from Joseph, the portrait of the Virgin your mother left you is another permanent companion. On the day of the Assumption 1561, in the church of a Dominican monastery, you prayed to a “very young” Mother of God for her help, whereas you “didn’t see the glorious St. Joseph so clearly.”19
Now that you have founded Saint Joseph’s, in August 1562, Jesus Himself crowns you as a reward for what you did for His Mother:
Christ…seemed to be receiving me with great love and placing a crown on my head and thanking me for what I did for His Mother.
Another time while all were at prayer in choir after compline, I saw Our Lady in the greatest glory clothed in a white mantle; it seemed she was sheltering us all under it. I understood how high a degree of glory the Lord would give to those living in this house.20
In this homage of yours to the Mother of God I discern the supreme elevation of your own maternity: the promotion of your personal fervor hoisting you up to the rank of Mother. Don’t you experience the glory of Mary’s virginal, royal Assumption as though it could be yours, provided you suffer enough?
One day, the feast of the Assumption of our Lady, Queen of Angels, the Lord desired to grant me the following favor: in a rapture He showed me her ascent to heaven, the happiness and solemnity with which she was received, and the place where she is. I wouldn’t be able to describe how this happened. The glory my spirit experienced in seeing so much glory was magnificent. The effects of this favor were great. I was helped in having a deeper desire to undergo difficult trials, and I was left with a longing to serve our Lady since she deserved this so much.21
When in the next paragraph you evoke the vision of “a very richly made pallium” hanging over the heads of the Jesuit Brothers at the College of Saint Giles in Avila, is this not a vision of the pallium formed by Mary’s robe, as it is often represented in painting, like a protective canopy over the servants of the Church? The “longing to serve our Lady” makes you feel her “glory” and “trials” in lieu and place of the Mother of God herself.
Henceforth you are in no doubt: you, the Lord’s spouse, His beloved lover, are also the Mother of the Man of Dolors, as much as of the divine Child. That infant appears to you in the penumbra of the convent, and your idolaters were quick to immortalize the vision in stucco—in order to “plaster” maternal piety into place for ever and ever?
The circle has closed: you are a daughter, wife, and mother. The Other within you is a son, husband, and father. But He can just as easily take on the attributes of His Virgin Mother, since He showers you, you don’t know how, not with His sperm (you have a horror of toads, but you don’t mind lizards; in time, you will let them dart under your habit!), but with the mother’s milk overflowing His bountiful breast:
And notice carefully this comparison; it seems to me very appropriate: the soul is like an infant that still nurses when at its mother’s breast, and the mother without her babe’s effort to suckle puts the milk in its mouth in order to give it delight. So it is here; for without effort of the intellect the will is loving, and the Lord desires that the will, without thinking about the matter, understand that it is with Him and that it does no more than swallow the milk His Majesty puts in its mouth, and enjoy that sweetness. For the will knows that it is the Lord who is granting that favor. And the will rejoices in its enjoyment. It doesn’t desire to understand how it enjoys the favor or what it enjoys; but it forgets itself during that time, for the One who is near it will not forget to observe what is fitting for it. If the will goes out to fight with the intellect so as to give a share of the experience, by drawing the intellect after itself, it cannot do so at all; it will be forced to let the milk fall from its mouth and lose that divine nourishment.
This is the way this prayer of quiet is different from that prayer in which the entire soul is united with God, for then the soul doesn’t even go through the process of swallowing this divine food. Without its understanding how, the Lord places the milk within it.22
Nevertheless, in this blissful kaleidoscope of the soul’s permutations of attributes, your chief role will be the maternal role. You will perfect it over the course of the twenty years you still have to live before meeting the Other face to face: death, so dreaded by unbelievers, is for you the absolute event.
It’s not easy, it’s impossible to step into the role of symbolic Mother. Modern women are just beginning to realize this fact. Perhaps they are getting wise to how after more than a century of assorted feminisms, the mystery of maternal passion remains more obscure than that of gestation—pretty well mastered by science—or that of in vitro fertilization, or cloning, or artificial wombs. Nothing in contemporary culture prepares them for the mystery of motherhood—no more than anything prepared you for it, Teresa, back in the heyday of the Church Fathers during the Spanish Renaissance. The books you wrote after the Life are continually tackling the question: How to be a mother? How to conduct another person, man or woman, toward self-transcendence in affective bonds that are both strict and open, and all the while affirming your own transcendence, because that is what confers the most credible authority: the authority of the ability to start again?
You know from experience that suffering is an inescapable part of our bond with others, even more, and otherwise, than in the transcendence of the bond with the self-as-other. But you deny the exaggerations of that suffering, to which your friends are more prone than you—not that this prevents you from overdoing your mortifications (pardon me for bringing that up again) while attempting to invert them into joys, and succeeding! There is no miracle recipe for being a good mother, as you will discover over the course of your foundations. However, from the moment you shoulder the new role of Mother on top of the role of the Spouse’s beloved lover, you grasp that the essence of the maternal vocation lies in the balance to be found between jouissance and will. You will enjoy the ideal more than ever, but without abandoning yourself to it, for it falls to you now to accomplish the ideal with a well-tempered will, deferred away from self into the “third person”—into His will. Could this be a path to self-forgetfulness, a way of “depsychologizing” oneself, as my colleague Jérôme Tristan puts it, of effectively thinking from another person’s point of view?
Thus the exile of jouissance outside oneself is compounded by the exile of the will as exerted on behalf of self and of others, upon self and upon others. The first exile transports you into the Other, the second gathers His Majesty into the fluidity of an acting soul. Forever in an altered state, reassured or preoccupied, transparent and decisive, the mother lives off the other and acts for him or her. To the prayer of abandonment, to the fetus or baby bathed in the waters of ecstasy, the
fabulous dynamism of the businesswoman is now added, my disappropriated Teresa. Motherhood appropriates nothing, it delegates itself through the Other to engender new life. The will to abandon oneself to the Other’s will in order to found a new creation just as if it were one’s own, while knowing it is not: that is maternal.
A few days after the experiences mentioned above, while thinking about whether they who thought it was wrong for me to go out to found monasteries might be right, and thinking that I would do better to be always occupied in prayer, I heard the words: “While one is alive, progress doesn’t come from trying to enjoy Me more but by trying to do My will.”23
Autoeroticism is no longer enough for you, any more than the words that force women into the background. The Mother is one who is “considerate of others”: she thereby becomes the equal of the Lord, and nobody can “tie her hands.”
“The Lord said to me: ‘Tell them they shouldn’t follow just one part of Scripture’ [1 Cor. 14:34: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law’] but that they should look at other parts, and ask them if they can by chance tie my hands.’”24
This point in your thinking helps me to divine the meaning of your reform: you, Mother, Madre, are not content to be a woman in ecstasy. You become a gangway between that singular jouissance acquired in the love for and of the Other and the possible transmission of that jouissance to others. It begins with an amorous dialogue with the Spouse who creates for you an imaginary incarnate, relieved of your will: I (man or woman) am nothing but the spouse of the loving Beloved who wants me. It goes on with the sensorial identification with the Other, of an intensity such that I want to and can assume His will—the will that by being no longer outside of me, or judging me, but invested and thus agreeable, speaks through me. Our ideal Father who art in Heaven, Thou art henceforth in Me divest of myself who am transfused into Thee in the love of Thee.
“Another I,” “God naturalized,” the nun proclaims, here enjoys an extraordinary “sharing” or participative freedom. Integrated with the Other because penetrated by Him (cuando te entrañares con este sumo bien), this “other I” protects itself from the risks inherent in “free will” with its threat of sin and hence of “enslavement,” preferring to be “fastened” [nailed: enclavado] to the exploration of love and fear toward the Other: a jouissance that for Teresa seems to be the only truth worth knowing.
May this “I” die, and may another live in me greater than I and better for me than I, so that I may serve Him [Muera ya este yo, y viva en mí otro que es más que yo, y para mí mejor que yo, para que yo le pueda servir]. May He live and give me life. May He reign, and may I be captive, for my soul doesn’t want any other liberty.…
O free will, so much the slave of your freedom if you don’t live fastened with fear and love of your Creator [O libre albedrío tan esclavo de tu libertad, si no vives enclavado con el temor y amor de quien te crió]! Oh, when will that happy day arrive when you will see yourself drowned in the infinite sea of supreme truth, where you will no longer be free to sin! Nor will you want to sin, for you will be safe from every misery, naturalized [naturalizado] by the life of your God!
He is blessed, because He knows, loves, and rejoices in Himself without any other thing being possible. He neither has nor can have—nor would He be a perfect God if He did have—the freedom to forget Himself or cease loving Himself. Then, my soul, you will enter into your rest when you become intimate with this supreme Good [entrarás en tu descanso cuando te entrañares con este sumo bien],25 understand what He understands, and rejoice in what gives Him joy. Now, you will find you’ve lost your changeable will; now, there shall be no more change! For God’s grace will have done so much that by it you will be…a sharer in His divine nature [particionera de su divina naturaleza].26
Have you become a…creator, on a par with God himself?
Who am I, then? Not merely a lover, not really the ideal Father Himself, I am the Mother. Obviously, I surround myself with scholarly fathers whose counsels I follow and to whose authority I submit, and yet it is I, Teresa of Jesus, alone with His Majesty, who take the initiative of realizing His Truth in and by an “I” empty of me. The rebirth, the re-foundation of His new houses in me will unfold in the dwelling place that I am—that is, in Him—but I can build the place and dwell there, indeed I “will not have finished doing all that [I] can” when “to the little [I] do [mi trabajillo], which is nothing, God will unite Himself, with His greatness.”27 The world will understand that truth is newness, and that newness is a rehabilitation of tradition at the auspicious moment I have just now seized. And that this reorganization of Time is simply my way of hearing the Other’s Voice: I, the foundress, the Mother. To be a mother is to found; or rather, to re-found. Indefinitely.
Has your depression flipped into erotomania? Has the paranoid fear of other people drained away in love suffering, in loving suffering, in warlike dominance? Of course. And yet, all the facets of your new way of being—“there is a great difference in the ways one may be”—are defused in the detachment from others and from self, in relinquishment and dispossession: the more I abandon myself before the inanity of power, money, honors, the sharper grows my will to shatter or circumvent all obstacles by means of cunning, stubbornness, or sweetness, and reach my goal. Which is not my goal, you understand, but the Other’s…of Him who resides in me empty of me!
We are at the heart of the alchemy that constitutes the speaking subject: the alchemy of amorous alteration. The contrary of alienation, or its other side. The entrepreneurial singularity of the individual shaped by monotheism—especially the Catholic version—highlights and hardens its universal logic. But it is Teresa who unabashedly explores it in the paroxysm of her extravagant passion for the Other.
Teresa, my love, I cannot leave you in that year of 1563 without mentioning two events that, by revealing the seriousness of the first foundation, vouchsafed it a fabulous destiny.
First, as I have already pointed out to anyone who has come with us this far, the striking coincidence between the completion of your first book, the Life, and the achievement of your first foundation. You founded because you wrote, and you wrote because you founded. We find a staggering overlap between, on the one hand, the dangerous and delightful dispossession of yourself in Him, the wretchedness and rapture of writing, and, on the other, your lucid pragmatism, astute charm, and skillful toughness. This high-wire balancing act did not make you the first modern female writer, if we understand by modernity the valorization of a text or a written oeuvre becoming a value in itself. Nor do I consider that the test you set yourself, to restore the Carmelite order to its Primitive Rule, was the mark of an archaic age, the symptom of a masochistic renunciation of modernity in favor of a purity derived from the higher spiritual authority with which you identified.
But what if you were the precursor of a way of being, already obscurely sought in those days and still being sought—through writing among other means—between self and non-self, self and other, self with others? Neither art nor politics, neither religion nor social activism, but something through, with, and against all of that? The everything which is nothing, as you so well put it; sought for with the (feigned or genuine) unconcern you expressed to your mentor and “editor” (if you’ll forgive the anachronism), Fr. García de Toledo, shortly before completing your text:
I believe your Reverence will be annoyed by the long account I’ve given of this monastery, but it is very short in comparison with the many trials we suffered and the wonders the Lord has worked for it. There are many witnesses who are able to swear to these marvels, and so I beg your Reverence for the love of God that if you think you should tear up what else is written here [romper lo demás que aquí va escrito] you preserve whatever pertains to this monastery. And when I’m dead, give it to the Sisters who live here that when those who are to come see the many things His Majesty arrange
d for its establishment by means of so wretched and dreadful a thing as myself, they might be greatly encouraged to serve God and strive that what has been begun may not collapse but always flourish.28
Myself is wretched, but His Majesty—whose will is henceforth mine, His Majesty that I am here below by virtue of my works of writing and foundation—is only attached in a special way to this piece of writing; feel free to destroy what you like of it, except the trace of the “account” I have provided of all that “His Majesty arranged” to establish “this monastery,” that I founded. Speaking, writing, working through me and in me, His Majesty broke new ground. For after my death, for those who will come after us, preserve if you please the trace of that innovation.
All that interests me is to reverse Time. By writing and/or by founding, I place myself in the infinity of Time, as the Other’s Bride, in order for His presence to begin afresh. Since under the Primitive Rule the Other’s presence is more desirable than it is, by now, under the Mitigated Rule, more stimulating than it is among those who let it wither, then my innovation, infinitesimal as it may be, suffices to spark the Other all over again. So will my reformation be, minuscule and magnificent—in response to the Erasmists whose humanism brings me to appreciate Christ’s humanity all the more, and in response to the Lutherans whose harshness fills me with holy rigor against the laxity of my side. By restoring to the present the infinity of the past I am doing far more, for that matter, than to combat or crush my enemies: I am inviting them to welcome into themselves the infinity of the Passion in the infinity of time. Such is my reformation: a counter-reformation. The Counter-Reformation will eventually recognize the intentions that drive me, although as I write these lines to Fr. García, I cannot be certain of it. We shall see.
Teresa, My Love Page 37