Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  “I order you to go plant this in the ground.”

  The sarky girl musters up a last show of sham obsequiousness, which does her case no good at all:

  “Shall it go upright, or sideways?”

  “Sideways!” And with that the superior turns on her heel in disgust. Teresa de Jesús has better things to do than to linger where it stinks of women.10

  You are implacable, Madre, when it comes to the frailties of young nuns. Such as those who seek permission to leave one Carmel for another, right after taking their vows of enclosure: the very idea! General Juan Bautista Rubeo himself authorized one sister to move to a different convent, because she didn’t like the climate! Whatever next? “The devil doesn’t want anything else except to foster the opinion that something like a transfer is possible.”11 You warn Fr. Gratian against such lax indulgence, for you understand “women’s nature” better than he. Is it that self-knowledge you have, of yourself as a woman, that drives you to be so callous? You add, “It is better that some die than that all be harmed.”12

  You surprise yourself by thinking such thoughts aloud, but the sisters don’t appear alarmed. You’ve drummed it into them, after all, that there’s no better life than to die for the sake of the Lord.

  Sadism? Masochism? An urge to raise yourself to the level of the humiliated Phallus, suffering/rejoicing in that humiliation? Words are inadequate to describe the ever-praised sacrifice that enables you to dream of being at one with the Other’s Passion, and yet to find yourself forever wanting, forever falling short of Him.

  You have a horror of the weak, the crippled, and the mad (“melancholics,” manic-depressives). You don’t let them in, there’s no place in your convents for them. But what if a woman succumbs to ill-being when she’s already inside? What would happen if an elite nun, the kind you welcome, lost her reason? There’s a grievous trial for you! Why? You’re not upset for that person’s sake, my prideful Teresa. That sort of modern, humanistic, bourgeois notion is still a long way off, even if your blissful osmosis with the Other is preparing the ground, along tortuous and unsuspected paths, for its emergence. No, you are sorry because mental illness in a nun is liable to unsettle all the others, as you write to Mother María de San José in Seville. The order takes precedence over all else: your compassion is simply a form of perfectionism. For that matter, compassion is not the right word: “Perhaps a thrashing will get her to stop screaming. This wouldn’t do her any harm.”13 You’ve said it. With melancholics, “use punishment; if light punishment is not enough, try heavy; if one month in the prison cell is not enough, try four months.”14

  Your severity becomes legendary, and while your followers are all for it, your enemies brand you a criminal. Rumor has it you’re an ogre, a bully who enjoys abusing her flock, more a witch than a mother! Well, people are notoriously quick to speak ill of nuns, but watch out, the Inquisition pricks up its ears at this sort of talk.

  “The reformed Carmelites tie each other up by the wrists and ankles and flog each other! That’s what people are saying, Mother. The woman who left the Seville convent, María del Corro, is accusing Isabel de San Jerónimo and you, too, Mother, of such practices.” Your daughters wonder, whispering, whether the gossip could be true. Little Teresita is dismayed: What if it were? Tell us it’s not so, Auntie, unless…

  “Please God they’re saying nothing worse!” You kick it into the long grass, rather than deny it outright. The compulsion to domination over yourself (“lord of all the elements and of the world”)15 and others must inevitably lead to some gratuitous nastiness toward your “daughters,” and they don’t spare you either, as we’ve seen. The cruelty of female passion!

  In fact, your line on religious suffering is not fixed. In this as in other dwelling places, you are never buoyed by certainty, you waver, groping toward the right path, slipping between the walls of the translucent diamond of your soul. Suffering is the way, agreed. But not absolutely, not always, not to the end. The Constitutions enshrine certain rules, of course, while allowing some leeway for initiative and indulgence:

  Work with a time limit should never be given to the Sisters. Each one should strive to work so that the others might have food to eat. They should take into careful account what the rule ordains (that whoever wants to eat must work) and what St. Paul did. If someone should volunteer to take on a fixed daily amount of work, she may do so but ought not to be given a penance if she fails to finish it.16

  The rules limit some penances:

  “Should the Lord give a Sister the desire to perform mortification, she should ask permission. This good, devotional practice should not be lost, for some benefits are drawn from it. Let it be done quickly so as not to interfere with the reading.”17

  If punishments are designed to conduct the body toward the Christly ideal, reading could perform the same job, if wisely directed. Would you instate reading in place of penitence?

  In response to other infringements, however, you gave yourself free rein—with considerable and undisguised glee:

  She should likewise be punished who says something falsely about another. And she should also be obliged to restore, in so far as possible, the good name of the one whose reputation was harmed. And the one who is accused should not respond unless ordered to do so, and then should do so humbly, saying “Benedicite.” And if she answers impatiently, she should receive a heavier penalty, according to the discretion of the presider.18

  You are even wise enough to acknowledge the existence of desires that “offer something good,” as distinct from the egregiousness of “violent thirst.” What’s the difference? Unacceptable desires are those whose pain is so “sweet and delightful” that we, being “indiscreet,” “never think we can have enough of this pain.”19 You suspect this melancholy masochism of being fomented by the devil, who “tempts one to perform indiscreet penances” purely to wreck one’s health, “take away one’s reason,” and render one finally “deranged.”20 You are certainly the last person who would ever encourage such deviations! We are guilty enough at birth, aren’t we? No need for the devil’s “stratagems”! Your successors, when they completed the regulations, classified potential “faults” in five chapters appended to your section entitled “On the Chapter of Grave Faults.” They were numbered in ascending order, from light faults (49), medium faults (50), and grave faults (51), to “graver faults” (52), culminating in the “gravest faults” (53). You personally counsel prudence in the management of passions, showing your consummate proficiency at settling human scores: “the punishment should be given after the anger has subsided.”21 It’s always sensible to postpone the reckoning, my subtle Teresa; what is to be done with passionate love and hate, joy and suffering, except give them time to percolate into the senses, to attach to words, and with any luck, to be illuminated in thoughts? Always postpone: Sea el castigo después de la pasión aplacada. No vindictiveness, no sanctions in the heat of the moment.

  All in all, you are for punishment with a cool head, never in anger. Because raw emotion, whether painful or pleasurable, is a jouissance that summons another; it leaves little room for judicious decisions. You, on the contrary, are lucid in passion, my moderate Teresa. You don’t trust your moments of incontinence, your penchant for punishing yourself and others is quite objective. Is this to appease the expert torture-mistress in you, Teresa? Good luck with that!

  You go as far as calling yourself “not very penitential,” and I guess you’re right in comparison to other paragons, like Antonio de Jesús or Catalina de Cardona, to name a couple. In 1576, the more moderate flagellant you had lately become wrote to Fr. Mariano:

  I have to laugh that Fray Padre Juan de Jesús [Roca] says I want you all to go barefoot, for I am the one who always opposed this to Padre Fray Antonio. He would have found out that he was mistaken had he asked me. My intention was to attract people of talent, for they would be frightened away by a lot of austerity. What was set down was only so as to distinguish ourselves from the other Carme
lites.…What I have insisted on with him is that the friars be given good meals.…The other thing I urged that he impose is manual work…Understand, padre, that I am fond of strictness in the practice of virtue but not of austerity, as you see in our houses of nuns. This is perhaps so because I am not very penitential.22

  In your view, then, suffering is not the one and only “true way,” but a means among others—a secondary means?—for attaining the spiritual ideal. In any case it is subordinate to joy, which takes precedence in your experience of faith understood as a wholly fulfilled love. But pain is not entirely discarded, either; how could it be, when your ideal Father is a “beaten Father,” like Jesus, or like don Alonso Sánchez? But you still prefer its sublimation in reading, and even more in writing, which became your “true way” after 1560.

  Language is not the only ruse you deploy against rampant masochism. I like to imagine, Teresa, my love, that your dolorism lessened in the same proportion as you became more aware of the eroticized (and preconscious?—no, highly conscious) link with your confessors.

  A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since your very first visions and trances, since the sighting of Jesus’s severe countenance or of that horrid swollen toad. You don’t suppress your desire for the Other or for others any more than anyone else, indeed rather less, as we have seen over and over. Aged sixty-one, on June 15, 1576, you embark on a perilous idyll with your confessor Jerome Gratian; it must surely have an erotic side, no matter how platonic in practice. It’s you I choose to believe on this point, rather than the slanders passed on to the Inquisition. Cloistered, clad in shapeless rough wool, full of repentance as you are, this romantic friendship authorized and reciprocated by Gratian himself channels desire and redirects its turbulence away from the ever-lurking temptations of self-harm. How restful!

  “Although…I reflected that this suffering would be very beneficial to my soul, all these actions helped me little. For the fear didn’t go away, and what I felt was a vexing war. I chanced upon a letter in which my good Father [Gratian] refers to what St. Paul says, that God does not permit us to be tempted beyond what we can suffer.”23

  After meeting Gratian, the flesh would no longer be an obstacle. Present or absent, the close friend’s body was more than a dream: it became another incarnate, guilt-free fantasy.

  “One night I was very distressed because it had been a long time since I had heard from my Father [Gratian].…He suddenly appeared to me…coming along the road, happy and with a white countenance.…And I wondered if all the light and brilliance that comes from our Lord makes [people in Heaven] white. I heard: ‘Tell him to begin at once, without fear…’ It couldn’t have been my imagination.”24

  This was reassurance. If Gratian shared in the “holy humanity” of Jesus—and your love was so strong that you amalgamated the priestly father with the ideal Father—then there was no reason to feel guilty or to literally beat yourself up!

  And you went further, Teresa. You invited the gaze of your correspondent Jerome Gratian to creep under your habit, to crawl over your bare skin, and not by itself: a toad—no, a lizard this time, anyway a critter, was there too:

  Oh, mi padre, what a terrible thing happened to me! While we were sitting on a haystack considering ourselves lucky to have found it, next to an inn that we were unable to enter, a large salamander or lizard got in between my tunic and my bare arm, and it was the mercy of God that it didn’t get in somewhere else, for I think I would have died, judging from what I felt.25

  You are a wicked flirt, Teresa, a perverse little girl, an irresistible seductress armed with a diamantine pen. You submerge the sorrow of lovelessness into the four waters of prayer, you wash it clean and dissolve it in the trust you have in the infinite sublimation within you, that jewel of your carnal being. In short, you drown “all things” and their “nothingness” in that magical charm of yours, which priests and nuns alike have fallen for, hooked by your compelling, seductive motherliness.

  By allowing yourself these “friendships”—though you’re not deceived about them, thank God—suffering and passivity in the mind are experienced better than ever with detachment, dejamiento. You are “altered” in the Other (as I call your “exile” toward the Beloved), but since this “alteration” slips between your tunic and your bare skin, but gets no farther, you turn into placidity what some would have felt as alienation. You are altered, not alienated. The symptoms and other penances are converted into a kind of effortless cooperation with His Majesty’s Voice, and this sustains you through the other cooperations you might be involved in, including with “distracted” or “corrupt” people:

  “I understood well that these effects didn’t come from me, nor did I gain them through my diligence, for there wasn’t even time for that.…I do hardly anything on my part…it is the Lord who does everything.…souls upon whom the Lord bestows these favors…could be placed in the company of any kind of people. Even if these people are distracted and corrupt.”26

  This kind of detachment, without efforts or judgments, does not require any physical punishment. Preached by Osuna, explored from the very beginning of your monastic life, dejamiento becomes—together with writing, and the bonds formed by dint of making foundations—a cheerful serenity tinged with moral masochism, accepted as a chastening deserved, and meekly consented to: “It calls for great humility to be silent at seeing oneself condemned without fault.”27

  In the ardor of her ascesis, Teresa exhibits an ambiguity that gives rise to the second path her dolorism would follow before being quieted at last. She often writes to criticize too much intemperance in pain, warning her brother Lorenzo, for instance: “Don’t take the discipline any more than is mentioned [in my letter], in no way should it be taken more than twice a week.”28 Already in the Life, Teresa had argued that to “long to be martyrs”29 often indicates a demonically inspired failure of humility. With insistent ambiguity, though, she delivers her body to the very martyrdom she has just advised against:

  Since I am so sickly, I was always tied down without being worth anything until I determined to pay no attention to the body or to my health. Now what I do doesn’t amount to much; but since God desired that I understand this trick of the devil, who put the thought in my head that I would lose my health, I said: What difference does it make if I die; or at the thought of rest, I answered: I no longer need rest but the cross.30

  But she is still seeking some precious balance. “It seems to me now that this kind of procedure is a desire to reconcile body and soul so as to preserve one’s rest here below and enjoy God up above. And if we walk in justice and cling to virtue, this will come about.”31 Extreme austerity being the devil’s gain, the temptation to look “more penitential than anyone” must be resisted and the supreme challenge faced: to obey her confessors or the mother superior, “since the greatest perfection lies in obedience.”32

  Teresa couldn’t fail to be impressed by the spectacular mortifications performed by Catalina de Cardona at Pastrana. This highborn lady had left the court to spend eight years living in a cave, with only beasts for company, eating roots, and inflicting ghastly tortures on herself.33 Then she came to the reformed Carmel, in somewhat mannish garb, and continued with her extreme program of penitence. Half wanting to outdo the amazing Catalina, Teresa was goaded to rivalry until the day His Voice—His Majesty’s—rescued her from the command of the Père sévère to harm herself without restraint. It was a good Voice: it saved La Madre from her deadly père-version and reconciled her with an ideal Father who is content with mere filial docility.

  “The Lord told me: ‘You are walking on a good and safe path. Do you see all the penance [Catalina de Cardona] does? I value your obedience more.’”34

  Whence came this bifurcation, this appeasement? How could you, my fervent Teresa, renounce pain unto death in exchange for “obedience,” choosing that active passivity you constructed in view of the recommencement of time? How were you able to replace “jouissance unto death” w
ith that hyperactive passivity, your symbolic maternity? In opposition to Catalina de Cardona and her vehement masochism, you chose life.

  “The desires and impulses for death, which were so strong, have left me, especially since the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene; for I resolved to live very willingly in order to render much service to God. There is the exception sometimes when no matter how much I try to reject the desire to see Him, I cannot.”35

  Instead of being penetrated to death by the Other, you make yourself receptive. You replace oral-anal-muscular violence, the kind that swallows-excretes, bites-vomits, that is spasmodic and paralyzing, with an overflowing pragmatism backed up by a real or feigned detachment—“obedience” treated as a mental genitality under the sign of acquiescence and receptiveness, interleaved at times (rarely, but still) with lucid interrogation. “Humility?” you say; your infectious complicity with the Beloved, your tender reliance on Him, emboldens you. In the final analysis, obedience is inflected into a continual mutual nesting of the transcended into the transcendent, the nun into His Voice, the feminine into the masculine…I challenge anybody to separate container from contents!

  In the meanders of this movement, with regard to the senses the raptus itself, the forcible usurpation, the abduction of your own body by the Other, who debars you from any other creaturely love object, become transformed into replete orality. You feed on the Voice and Word of the Other that satiates you to the extent of imparting “manly strength” (fuerza de varón). No more anorexia, no more vomiting as you greedily ingest the God who, you do not doubt it, “even in this life…gives the hundredfold.”36