Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  The one thing lacking in this refashioned Carmel is a good confessor, and you know just the man. Summoned from the college in Alcalá where he was teaching the prince of Eboli’s novices, John of the Cross takes the post. The ideal circumstance for conversing with this holy man: among mutual ecstasies and levitating chairs (phenomena certified by the nuns who keep an awed eye upon the sayings and doings of the two protagonists), the pair of you advance together and yet on different tracks toward your respective sainthoods, divergent but forever convergent.…The sort of love you share, lucid and remote, is only possible this way.

  The moment of spiritual marriage has arrived at last. We are in November 1572. The holy humanity of Jesus inflicts wounds on you that match His own, and lavishes immeasurable joy upon you, since you’ve succeeded in pleasing Him by your prayers as by your deeds, in ficción as in obras:

  While at the Incarnation in the second year I was prioress, on the octave of the feast of St. Martin.…His Majesty…appeared to me in an imaginative vision, as at other times, very interiorly, and He gave me His right hand and said: “Behold this nail; it is a sign you will be My bride from today on. Until now you have not merited this; from now on not only will you look after My honor as being the honor of your Creator, King, and God, but you will look after it as My true bride. My honor is yours, and yours Mine.” This favor produced such an effect in me I couldn’t contain myself, and I remained as though entranced. I asked the Lord either to raise me from my lowliness or not grant me such a favor; for it didn’t seem my nature could bear it. Throughout the whole day I remained thus very absorbed.14

  Throughout all this you make an excellent prioress, ergo your mission has been accomplished. But Avila does not suit you, the climate is icy, you’re surprised you could ever have been born here. It’s time to go on the road again.

  New foundations await you.

  Fussier than a Lutheran, more illuminated than an alumbrada, you are a magnet for condemnation but also for hope, hopes of all kinds. You are a pioneer of the Counter-Reformation and a saint; they don’t know that yet, but they will after your death. But there are some who suspect it and go out of their way to smooth yours. People like the duchess of Alba, who obtains permission in February 1573 for you to leave the Incarnation for a few days and go stay with her. Shortly afterward you receive authorization from Pedro Fernández, the apostolic commissary, to establish a house in Segovia.

  1573. One of Teresa’s confessors, Fr. Jerónimo Ripalda, comes to Salamanca as La Madre is passing through, in the course of her three years at the Incarnation; he instructs her to write down the story of her foundations. Following on your autobiography, now tell us about your work. How impatiently you had waited for this! The text had been flowing ever since the final chapters of the Life. The Voice had suggested you write the book in 1570, and nothing had come of it. Now, you feel founded enough to be able to pass on the art of founding.

  Ten years ago, after all, the act of writing had spurred you to make foundations. Conversely, now, the creation of your godly houses redirects you to writing, a different writing in which psychological subtlety, a hardheaded sense of reality, and the lucidity of rapture are intermingled. You begin work on August 24 and compose the first nine chapters of the Foundations. One certainty bolsters you: having managed to flesh out your visions in the real world, you are confident they don’t come from the devil. “So after the foundations were begun, the fears I previously had in thinking I was deceived left me. I grew certain the work was God’s.”15

  From 1573 to 1582, the Foundations relate the loving and warlike adventures of Teresa the politician. They are the visible face of another adventure, the one that invented the depths of intimacy, as related in The Interior Castle. In 1577, at the request of Fr. Gratian and the order of Fr. Velázquez, her current confessor, the Carmelite penned the latter text, which would “found,” effectively, dwelling places that appear, with hindsight and against the background of the Foundations, to be the antithesis of the worldly business of the militant traveler. Or were they instead the ultimate condition for the success of those pragmatic endeavors? Perhaps it is a case of a foundation of the foundations, since at this point—halfway through the time it will take to reform the Carmel and at the very heart of Teresa’s personal experience—the demons confronted and trounced on the outside had not disappeared altogether. In her private and most intimate depths they teemed, in the form of numberless mental and emotional resistances to be overcome, walls of the soul to be broken through, an inner mobility to be made suppler. The exterior war was sustained by interior analysis. She had no shield, it was simply the elucidation of the inner self, made fluid and habitable, that enabled Teresa to live in the present, past, and future time and world. “To live” henceforth meant to overcome the fear of hatefatuations that cannot be other than diabolical, and the agony of obstinately morbid symptoms, in order to be continually reborn inside, while tirelessly forging ahead outside. At the sunset of the Golden Age, the foundress’s constant peregrinations across the arid lands of Spain, her conflicts with Church institutions, all of which were pretty well obsolete and derelict, and her wrangles with their convoluted administrations drew strength from that interior journey, which achieved the construction of a space of wholesale serenity: “a jewel,” she calls it in a letter to Fr. Salazar.16 And The Interior Castle closes upon Jesus alone, among enamels more delicate than ever, gold and precious stones—mystical graces unseen, hidden in anonymity, and yet flashing forth. Tensions and charms of the…baroque: barroco, an irregularly shaped pearl.

  Once again it was in writing that Teresa erected her ultimate habitat, entered into so it might be publicly revealed. Here is an irregular space if ever there was one, made of antitheses, strong images targeting the senses and aiming to dazzle, to unbalance, to set in motion, to celebrate the inconstancy of feeling in a perpetual mobility that can only be appeased by profusion and the eternity of the ephemeral. The recesses in the cut of these precious stones, these luminous diamonds studding the fabric of Teresa’s text, render them surely more decorous, less boldly ostentatious than the institutional work of reform? More private, allegorical, and polyphonic than the very real epic of the foundational race?

  That’s not how Teresa saw it. From early on in the Life, by dint of prayer, she was always struggling to extricate herself from “the teeth of the terrifying dragon,”17 the devil, so as to sing the praises of God’s goodness and mercy; “that I may sing them without end”!18 By the time of the Interior Castle, secure in the knowledge of being the loving and loved spouse, she builds an interior space of impregnable riches that, opening up room by room in parallel to her race, is capable of withstanding real setbacks in as much as it challenges Hell itself—that placeless place, that gash in the soul, that unrepresentable trauma that makes you die of fear and diffuse excitement, whose horrors La Madre once described at length to her sisters at the Incarnation.

  Today, as her race through the world crosses with her surge toward the Beloved within, at the intersection of Foundations and Dwelling Places, Teresa has just made a “baroque” discovery—as we will understand later—which enchants her: bliss beats torment if, and only if, the soul manages to inhabit itself in such a way as to perceive itself as a generous polytope, a kaleidoscopic mobility sustained by the Other’s love. Thus at ease in her spacious interior, she can defy the cramped Gehenna as well as the demonic alleyways of worry in which the couples and groups of creatures confront one another. With its dwelling places thus equipped and made good for enjoyment, the soul can endow itself with a new imagination, fertile in strong and serene ramifications within and without. The antics of the devils, by comparison, appear as what they are: deadly substitutes spawned by another imagination, the kind Teresa calls “weak,” illusory because constrained, intimidated, frozen by the fear of external or internal aggression, wearisome and worn out, defeatist—in a word, melancholic. The soul in love with the Other and loved by Him at the core of itself well knows
that the Enemy, that is, the devil, has no reality beyond this wretched counterfeit imagination. But rather than exhaust itself in sterile wrestling, the fortified soul in its dwelling places transmutes that cringing imagination into a triumphal one, deft at assimilating the infinite facets of the logics of love.

  “For even though it may seem that good desires are given [by the devil], they are not strong ones.”19

  It is in the imagination that the devil produces his wiles and deceits. And with women or unlearned people he can produce a great number, for we don’t know how the faculties differ from one another and from the imagination, nor do we know about a thousand other things there are in regard to interior matters. Oh, Sisters, how clearly one sees the degree to which love of neighbor is present in some of you, and how clearly one sees the deficiency in those who lack such perfection!20

  How can we identify the souls with a high degree of “love of neighbor”? The judgment of the inside-outside traveler is instant: those incapable of true love are those she observes as “earnest” and “sullen,” who “don’t dare let their minds move or stir.” “No, Sisters, absolutely not; works are what the Lord wants!”21

  Bestir yourselves, then, get moving, body and soul, send your thoughts on a journey: tutti a cavallo, inside and out! Be swift, don’t ever stop, don’t fasten on anything, neither on yourselves nor on the one you love, for the Other is always elsewhere, a bit further on, a step ahead, go on, keep going! Do something not for the love of this or that person, but because that’s how it is, a given, given by the good Being himself, it’s the will of our Master, if you like, for the Good runs through us. “It” is beyond our ken because it loves us. That is why, if we are truly to participate in the will of the good Being, it is important to seek, always and above all, that delicious and peaceful gladness that disconcerts our exterior being and thwarts all those chicanes, which can only be external, minor, and thus deceptive. There is a great difference in the ways one may be, the infinitely good Being desires its own bounteousness and appropriates itself indefinitely, penetrates and travels its own being, like the time of the characters in Proust; the time of its racing extends into space, reversible dwelling places hatch and stack up ad infinitum, evidently.

  It’s clear from inside the plural and delectably amorous intimacy of my moradas that “the devil never gives delightful pain like this.” Oh, I know Satan is capable of affording us tidbits and pleasures that can seem spiritual, but it is beyond his power to join great suffering with quiet and gladness of the soul; the devil does not unite, his work is always a scattering. Likewise “the pains he causes are never…delightful or peaceful but disturbing and contentious,” whereas the “delightful tempest comes from a region other than those regions of which he can be lord.”22 Thus Teresian interiority effects a masterly transformation of Saint Augustine’s regio dissimilitudinis, created by original sin, for which the Protestants were developing such an appetite. No doubt about it, the muy muy interior is nothing less than Heaven down here on earth.

  But then, if the questing soul is certain of its reciprocated love for the Other, what pains it? What greater good does it want? Another discovery, as baroque as the last, comes to resolve this dilemma in your writing, my blissful Teresa. As with the inconstancy of the Divine Archer who, like the Spouse of the Sulamitess, comes and goes in His nevertheless absolute goodness, and whose wounding “reaches to the soul’s very depths” before He “draws out the arrow,” the pain, like the soul, “is never permanent.” It’s as though a spark leaping out from “the brazier that is my God” so struck the soul that “the flaming fire was felt by it,” but “not enough to set the soul on fire,” so leaving it with elusive pain; the “spark merely by touching the soul produces that effect [al tocar hace aquella operación].” An arousal the more exciting for being unsatisfied, a pleasure forever unconsummated, the “delightful pain” remains nameless, fluid, without identity. It is “pain” and “not pain,” and this uncertainty—baroque in itself—means that it is fluctuating, “not continuous,” mutable and tantalizing to the end. “Sometimes it lasts a long while, at other times it goes away quickly”; the soul in search of loving interiority is not master of itself, it always depends on the Other…although the Other is within it, like a blinding flare. The insatiable seeker, never quite ablaze, begs for more, for as soon as the spark makes contact it goes out, and the desire for pain—or is it pleasure? No term seems right for this erratic, multiple state (porque este dolor sabroso—y no es dolor—no está en un ser)—once more stokes up “that loving pain [He] causes.”23

  Frigidity? Masochism? Voluntary servitude compensated by a runaway imagination? Good old Jérôme Tristan, beating us over the head with his diagnostics, my mercurial Teresa. He’s right, no doubt, but it’s more than that. If that were all, it’d be the devil’s work. On the contrary, in your penetration-appropriation of the good Being by itself, this operation “is something so manifest that it can in no way be fancied. I mean, one cannot think it is imagined, when it is not.”24 The test of the imagination by the senses emerges as the ultimate proof of the truth of the experience, unmistakably stamped with the Other’s trademark, not that of the devil. Kinetic, sensitive, bittersweet, the endlessly relaunched imagination (“again!”) with its exorbitant intensity and rosary of metaphors, creates the geometry of an authorized serenity, authorized because shared with the ideal of the Self, the ideal Father. Touching, sparks, braziers, extinctions, pains…and again…and again…and again! “Lack,” “frigidity,” “masochism,” you say? All that is nothing but trials sent by the devil, fit to be reversed into an infinite winging toward the space packed with obstacles overcome, toward the capacity for love proper to the Beloved incorporated in me. Toward the Other who is Love, inaccessible and yet so present that He can be possessed to the infinity that He is, an infinity I too am becoming.

  If the devil is no more than a puny, death-dealing imagination—a “melancholic” one, Sisters, I should have warned you—the only way to defeat him is via the baroque kaleidoscope of a psychic space erected against the nonplace of Hell, but also against the headlong rush to the uninhabited outside, from which the soul should remain apart. Only when the plastic mobility of this interiority is in place (or rather, in motion) and unhealthy impotence is transmuted into fresh ramifications, an eternal nativity, will the world itself be available for conquests without end and interminable re-foundations. Tutti a cavallo, yes, on condition of retaining the malleable castle of the soul, laminated into degrees of love.

  As Teresa travels Spain on donkey-back and in carriages, and the writer’s pen establishes her home base in a polyvalent space, the vagabond desires instigated by the devil and stirring in the soul “some passion, as happens when we suffer over worldly things [things of the age: cosas del siglo]”25 give way to another, more dominant movement. Instead of taking one’s worldly hankerings for “something great,” resulting in “serious harm” to health,26 and instead of condemning them, what matters is to put them to work. Should they become excessive, these impulses must be “fooled.” What else can we do, faced by the wiles of the malevolent genie inside us intent on preventing us from entering the interior space where the soul moves in the certainty of meeting its Other? Watch out, illusion and error are recognizable because they do harm; logically, harm cannot be anything but illusion and error in the good Being and the castle I am building to its scale!

  Tears themselves are only beneficial for watering the desiccated soul when they come from God; then they will be “a great help in producing fruit. The less attention we pay to them the more there are”;27 but in tears, too, “there can be deception.”28

  Fragmented and restless, forever tempted by the devil, the soul (again this third party, probingly observed as it endlessly unfurls within her) is not hopelessly in thrall to demonic falsehoods all the same. However infinite the way of perfection, union lies at the end of it—that is, at the “center,” right here, in the labyrinth of dwelling places. The wr
iter already senses a premonitory excitement, “feelings of jubilation and a strange prayer,” an “impulse of happiness” comparable to those experienced by Saint Francis and Pedro de Alcántara, carried away by “blessed madness.”29 What could this be?

  By a further twist of alert lucidity, Teresa analyzes the phenomenon as a “deep union of the faculties”; an osmosis of the intellect, memory, and will into the good Being of the Lover/Beloved. A flexible osmosis, though, since the Lord “leaves [the faculties] free that they might enjoy this joy—and the same goes for the senses—without understanding what it is.”30

  And so you arrive, Teresa, with full freedom to enjoy, at the faceted jewel of your writing, which condenses your union with the Beloved and your freedom vis-à-vis Him into a cascade of metaphors-metamorphoses. Clinging proximity mixed with flighty expansiveness, brief touches, darting escapes. Centripetal and centrifugal, your jouissance is a nameless exile, a fascinating and yet appalling estrangement. What? How? Our souls cannot know. But it’s a disturbing ignorance all the same, reviving the memory of another escapade, equally both real and symbolic, which was supposed to take you and brother Rodrigo to the land of the Moors with a view to getting beheaded, thus winning martyrdom and sainthood.

  In a burst of writing that soars high over the “somersaults” of the devils, you depict a soul, your soul, rushing toward the dangerous, bewitching strangeness that is so hard to express (it might sound “like gibberish” or Arabic, algarabía). It recollects itself, but without losing the élan of its euphoric activity (que aquí va todo su movimiento). At the very heart of this compacted, stony intimacy—diamond or castle—the soul is driven to making expansive proclamations.