Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  All I know is that what I’ve written has no importance in itself. Change the letters, the handwriting, whatever you like, but preserve that relationship to time which I have founded for myself and for those who may wish to follow me. The point is to open up the course of time to a return of that Time in which we lose any care for our needs, in which we lose ourselves, merging with the infinite Time of His Majesty, or again with the outside-time of my desire, when I coincide with His Majesty the ideal Father, with the ideal tradition.

  During the two years it took to found Saint Joseph’s, I lived at the intersection of ordinary time and the outside time in which my will merges with the Ideal. I succeeded in implanting His Majesty, a Third Person, my outside-time chimera, my ideal, in the worldly time of human relationships. The world’s time already registers this graft: my scandalous innovation is being combated, denounced, or approved. As for me, I fearfully observe my own folly, but I also triumph over it. I can see that I have embedded a new Time in time, bent the flight of time into multiple spaces that lodge in people’s souls, to enhance them and make them live. In these tragic times of religious war—but isn’t every worldly time rent by religious wars?—what is there to do but to let His Majesty live, that ideal Other who dwells in our soul, who is our soul? Please keep, Father, the meaning of this fiction, the account of this adventure; I care little about the text itself, you may tear up the rest (romper lo demás que aquí va escrito).

  What “rest,” Teresa? Do you mean whatever does not concern the small Carmelite house of Saint Joseph? There is no surplus to your excesses. Everything forms part of the adventure, writing included, and García de Toledo (like your later publishers) understood this very well. They jealously preserved the “account,” word for word, even if they made certain deletions or alterations here and there where your more audacious formulations made you an emulator of the Lord, not to say an advocate of gender parity; after all, somebody had to save you from the claws of the more zealous witnesses at the court of the Inquisition!

  The second event of this new beginning in your life was the visit you paid to the Basilica of San Vicente, after leaving the Incarnation on your way to perpetual seclusion in Saint Joseph’s.

  Halfway between the two, outside the city walls, Saint Vincent’s is a commemorative shrine on the spot where in the year 306, three Christian siblings, Vicente, Christeta, and Sabina, were martyred. Perhaps you knew the legend, Teresa: they say that a snake came to guard the bleeding, tortured bodies from wild beasts. Such devotion on the part of so repulsive a reptile was clearly implausible. But there’s more: a wealthy Jew who hiked up there, intending to desecrate the corpses, was himself stopped by the snake coiling itself around him. Deeply shaken, he converted to Christianity there and then, causing the frightful snake, or phallic monster, to release him. This converted Jew built the first temple on the crime scene dedicated to the three martyrs. In the seventeenth century, when Raymond of Burgundy was beginning the reconstruction of the dragon wall that encircles Avila, the Basilica of San Vicente was erected on the site of the old temple, following a design inspired by the architect Giral Fruchel, who had built Avila’s cathedral.

  At this pivotal moment of your life, it wasn’t the majestic and highly official cathedral that drew you; you headed instead for the basilica. You went down into the crypt, took off your shoes, and prostrated yourself before the Virgin of Soterraña. This statue is supposed to have been brought to Spain by Saint Peter as an offering for San Segundo, then bishop of Avila. It is a Romanesque sculpture carved in walnut, housed in the central baroque chapel of the crypt. A side chapel exhibits the stone on which the three early saints were put to death.

  The Book of Her Life often evokes the white veil worn by the Virgin Mary, something many commentators associate with this “subterranean” Virgin, Virgen de la Soterraña. But they seldom mention the converted Jew, the first founder. I picture you kneeling before Mary, your holy patroness inseparable from Saint Joseph, and I can’t imagine you not sparing a thought for the builder of the first temple, the Jew of the snake.

  Today, you’re the founder. Not you alone, mind you, His Majesty is still within, but you have just said farewell to Teresa de Ahumada along with her Toledan ancestors, her father, and her mother. You are outside yourself, Teresa, in the conjugation of ecstasy and will: no longer Teresa de Ahumada, you are Teresa de Jesús.

  Nonetheless, rarely and discreetly, the past seeps through:

  One night, being so ill that I wanted to excuse myself from mental prayer, I took my rosary in order to occupy myself in vocal prayer. I tried not to recollect my intellect, even though externally I was recollected in the oratory. When the Lord desires, these devices are of little avail. I was doing this for only a short while when a spiritual rapture came upon me so forcefully that I had no power to resist it. It seemed to me that I was brought into heaven, and the first persons I saw there were my father and my mother. I saw things so marvelous—in as short a time as it takes to recite a Hail Mary—that I indeed remained outside myself; the experience seemed to me too great a favor.29

  You went to San Vicente because here, in this Romanesque basilica, the memory of a virgin awaited, a cristiana vieja. And the echo of a converted Jew of whom you never spoke. You could not have done otherwise than to visit this crypt. Without a word. Pure rapture.

  Chapter 23

  CONSTITUTING TIME

  This twofold immersion in the fathomless depths of the divinity.

  Angela of Foligno, The Book of Visions and Instructions

  To make foundations, to constitute, to write a constitution: but how? In the event, your reform of the Carmelite order would rest on two pillars: constitution and fictions. On one side, the strict regulation and jurisdiction whose great purpose was to guarantee the right conditions for the outside-time of contemplation in worldly time. On the other, the “account” or narrative of inner experience, linking the journey toward the infinity of the Other with the humdrum trials of dealing with the passions of women and the history of men.

  On completing the Constitutions by writing (yes, that again!),1 The Way of Perfection,2 then the Foundations,3 you imbued your sequestered sisters—whom your tongue often did not spare—with a psychic and indeed political life that was utterly without precedent, not only in the religious world but in any community of women, and perhaps of men, at that time. The story of your interior experience, resonating with the experience of your sisters and the other protagonists of the foundations, helped to literally unlock these cloistered souls. The narrative tenor of your writing (labeled “account” or “fiction”), which falls outside “genre” by mixing them all, appeals to the freedom of the spirit with an audacity, humanity, and distinct mastery of the moderns that contrast with the searingly rigorous texts of Ignatius Loyola, your senior by twenty years,4 as much as with the skepticism of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, your junior.5 And it’s precisely this theological and philosophical “ignorance,” this “unlettered” freshness that would turn The Way of Perfection and the Foundations into a breviary and a chronicle at once, mingling sensual delicacy and pragmatic intrepidity in a thought whose universal historic range and scope have still not been fully fathomed.

  Just now, however, in 1566, you are contemplating the idea of constituting with María de Jesús Yepes, drawing on her knowledge and borrowing from her experience. It is to all appearances a bid to bring the Carmelites back to stricter standards. Is this to combat the laxity and drift of the Mitigated Rule and the whole epoch itself? To stand up more effectively to Lutheran rigor? Your implacable severity signals a far grander ambition, Teresa, my love, than any feebly moralistic design: you are intent upon inscribing into the accelerating time of history the outside-time of your understanding with the Other. Enclosure, poverty, and austerity are but three ways to convey the love of war and to acknowledge the war on love.

  So now, along with María de Jesús Yepes, do you seek to return to the Primitive, ascetic Rule, the way
she observed it at the Carmelite convent in Mantua where the nuns are, it is said, “walled up”? In a way; but it is rather more a matter of returning to that point in order to rethink, to recommence anew. “Constitution,” for you, will contribute to inaugurating that other time that inhabits you already, the one I have read and seen taking shape in you.

  The cornerstone will be enclosure, a shield against the levities and licenses you observed at the Incarnation, which it is high time were abolished, now that France has fallen prey to calamity, thanks to the “havoc” wrought by that sect of “miserable” Lutherans, as you put it.6 María de Jesús wants to add on another cornerstone that is just as necessary for embarking on the way of perfection: absolute poverty.

  “Until I had spoken to her, it hadn’t been brought to my attention that our rule—before it was mitigated—ordered that we own nothing.” This was something that “I, after having read over our constitutions so often, didn’t know.”7 A descendant of wealthy merchants like you, Teresa, can’t do less than begin to “constitute” by renouncing, firmly and finally, the chattels of this world! Before, “my intention had been that we have no worries about our needs; I hadn’t considered the many cares ownership of property brings with it.” So far so natural, and so Christlike. To cap it all, María nudges you toward the third principle of your reform: the discalced nuns are to live from their labor alone, and forgo all private income and allowances. Nothing but alms and personal effort!

  Saying Mass, preaching, teaching, even tending the sick—these are tasks for men; your “daughters” will be encouraged to spin at the wheel, weave, sew, embroider. As a purist, you ban the more elaborate forms of needlework. Spinning and weaving are fine, but beware of lacy fripperies, guipures, and tapestries, for too much sophistication (labor curiosa) leads minds to stray from God! And no working with gold or silver, that’s forbidden above all.

  Between the Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar, who disapproved of such austere, impoverished convents; Bishop Álvaro de Mendoza, who took you under his wing; the Dominican Domingo Báñez, who supported you; and the Franciscan Pedro de Alcántara, who inspired you, slowly but surely you drew up the future constitution. In 1567, with the approval of the Carmelite general, the Italian-born Juan Bautista Rubeo, the new rules were written out with the assistance of María de Jesús, before she went off to found the Imagen convent at Alcalá de Henares. The text was then passed on to John of the Cross for him to use as a template for the discalced male regime. As the original has been lost, the only version we have has been reconstituted from the Alcalá copy and the rules for the Carmelite friars. To my mind, this short text (twelve sixteen-page chapters, of which you authored only the first six), regulating solitude within group life by dint of a wise balance of asceticism and tenderness, is the very condensation of your art of founding time.

  After all, can anything be regulated without regulating time? How to make best use of time has always been a concern for monastic orders. Hence chapter 1, rule 1:

  Matins are to be said after nine, not before, but not so long after nine that the nuns would be unable, when finished, to remain for a quarter of an hour examining their consciences as to how they have spent the day. The bell should be rung for this examen, and the one designated by the Mother prioress should read a short passage from some book in the vernacular on the mystery that will serve as a subject for reflection the following day. The time spent in these exercises should be so arranged that at eleven o’clock the bell may be rung to signal the hour for retirement and sleep. The nuns should spend this time of examen and prayer together in the choir. Once the Office has begun, no Sister should leave the choir without permission.8

  Matins at nine, “examen” for fifteen minutes with meditation in Spanish upon a particular mystery, all “together in the choir.” Alone and together, meditation and work; the hours of the day are planned in such a way that time does not elapse but stands up straight, vertical, the frozen present of the contemplation of the Other. There are no distractions: your authorization of the vernacular tongue is not a license, it merely helps familiarize each nun with her Spouse and assimilate Him to whatever is most “her own,” both infantile and maternal. Likewise with chanting: to forestall possible backsliding, you prohibit the seductive runs of Gregorian notation, stipulating “a monotone and with uniform voices.” As for the rest of the rite, even Mass will be “recited,” to save time, “so that the Sisters may earn their livelihood.”9

  Thus set up, the absolute present of contemplation will be paced according to the rhythms of the seasons and the movement of the sun. The bell rings out the calls to prayer, morning, noon, and night, and organizes the space of solitude with others: indoors or out, chapel or cell, garden or kitchen. The hours of the divine office (matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, lauds) and the milestones of the Catholic calendar (Christmas, Lent, Easter, saints’ days) divert the quantitative flow of “passing time” into the outside-time of contemplative suspension.

  The reform of time imposed by your Constitutions, Teresa, does not create a new calendar. Obviously not, since you are consciously aware of not founding a new religion. To take refuge in Catholic time as it exists (your Spouse’s calendar, the holy feasts and liturgies) enables you to better hollow out this time in which you recognize yourself, and of which you demand that it recognize you—the better to shoot it like an arrow deep inside toward the amorous intensity, carried to extremes, that will help you to detach from the world in order to cleave to the Other until “participating” in Him. Recognition and exile: never one without the other. Your genius lies in this paradox, which conformists (traditionalist and modernist alike) refused to accept, and could only be admitted by bolder dialectical minds in the wake of the Council of Trent.

  This headlong rush into the worlds of business, diplomacy, funding, this accumulation of ruses, affinities, seductions, and humiliations—what were they for? To hollow out places beyond place, enclosures harboring an outside-time, protecting the Infinite. The discalced universe founded by your Constitutions is your last oedipal assault, a cold disavowal of the world of families, wealth, secular honor. Could it be in veiled resonance with the secrets of the Marranos disclaimed by your father and uncle, though they “participated” in them? Silent prayer welded a secret world inside you, which the Carmelite reform will institutionalize. In that world, the parents’ world, you make a kingdom that is not of this world. At the gate of the discalced houses you leave the Cepeda y Ahumadas and everything to do with them behind. Because from now on, you’re plain Teresa of Jesus.

  Taking your vows thirty-five years ago at the Incarnation, with the secret complicity of Uncle Pedro and the support of your readings of Osuna, had not been, after all, enough of a break with the order of families, of family, the law of management-gestation-generation. From now on, there’s no ambiguity: at the cost of the sadomasochism that your joyous lucidity ceaselessly modulates into willpower or serenity, you are free. But at what a cost! It’s another paradox, my baroque Teresa, and it won’t be the last.

  Before throwing yourself into the race that will keep you busy for the next fifteen years, the time of Infinity thus negotiated with ephemeral, worldly time nudges you to etch a thousand meticulous details into your regulations. The most essential are as follows.

  Enclosure, you say That means solitude, silence, and detachment from the world.

  No nun should be seen with her face unveiled unless she is with her father, mother, brothers, or sisters, or has some reason that would make it seem as appropriate as in the cases mentioned. And her dealings should be with persons who are an edification and help for the life of prayer and who provide spiritual consolation rather than recreation. Another nun should always be present unless one is dealing with conscience matters. The prioress must keep the key to both the parlor and the main entrance. When the doctor, barber-surgeon, confessor, or other necessary persons enter the enclosure, they should always be accompanied by two nuns. When som
e sick nun goes to confession, another nun must always be standing there at a distance so that she sees the confessor. She should not speak to him, unless a word or two, only the sick nun may do so.10

  Outside-time in time demands total dispossession from the outset: nothing for oneself. The sisters cannot own anything, not even a book:

  In no way should the Sisters have any particular possessions, nor should such permission be granted; nothing in the line of food or clothing; nor should they have any coffer or small chest, or box, or cupboard, unless someone have an office in the community. But everything must be held in common.…the prioress should be very careful. If she sees that a Sister is attached to anything, be it a book, or a cell, or anything else, she should take it from her.11

  You who were once such a stylish young thing, you now bear down on every sign of caring about appearance or comfort. Attire will be austere, with rope-soled sandals made of hemp, habits of coarse cloth or rough brown wool, hair chopped short under the wimple; no colors, no mirrors, Spartan cells, and straw pallets.

  A fast is observed from the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is in September, until Easter, with the exception of Sundays. Meat must never be eaten unless out of necessity, as the rule prescribes.

  The habit should be made of coarse cloth or black, rough wool, and only as much wool is necessary should be used.…Straw-filled sacks will be used for mattresses, for it has been shown that these can be tolerated even by persons with weak health.…Colored clothing or bedding must never be used, not even something as small as a ribbon. Sheepskins should never be worn. If someone is sick, she may wear an extra garment made of the same rough wool as the habit.