So I think you write a madness you have faced up to and yet worked through, in the jouissance of devotion, in a masochism precisely sublimated by writing, and in the realities of foundation, the cherry on the cake.
And since for you the jewel is the “sacred humanity of Christ,” His desiring and desirable body, tortured and glorified, it’s understandable that the contact with Him in visions—as you journey through the permeable dwelling places of your interior castle—no longer kindles fear in you, but only an unbridled ecstasy.
When the Other forbids you from acceding to Him, He is telling you: “Suffer!” and you instantly become melancholic and driven to penitence. When you permit yourself to love Him as a Bride loves her Spouse, you are threatened by delirium: “I am the Other” is an exalting temptation…sent by the devil, perhaps? You step back from the manic extremes of both anguish and excitement, Teresa, shielded from them by that refraction of hallucination—the a-thought of writing—that operates as a self-analysis. Bedazzlement curves back into inscription, ecstasy meets reflection, and the exile outside oneself returns to the reasonable self so that the latter may chart its path.
Only thus can the sublimation of the Passion for the Beloved into sensible, appeased intelligence take over from sex and fear. The quailing of the child before the father’s seductive authority and its terror before the idealized Father, the indomitable proprietor of the enviable, painful maternal destiny, arouse fear and trembling in the eternal infants we are—that Christian believers acknowledge themselves to be. And yet all it takes is to stop living as a beaten child, or even as a beaten father, and recast one’s familial role into that of the receptive wife—so receptive, indeed, that she manages to “transform herself” into Him through their “union.” All it takes is for a delicate intelligence to accompany the desire thus authorized, so that in place of wrath there descends the peace of the elect, the sovereignty of the kingdom. All this occurs within and beyond the strictness of the Primitive Rule that you have no intention of relaxing; in fact you would like to reform it into something stricter still, wouldn’t you, Teresa? And you don’t forget that one must still fear the Father, in view of the Last Judgment; for when He comes “with so much friendliness” to speak with His Bride, it fills her with “such fear”: a fear tamed by writing it.
I say “frightening” because although the Lord’s presence is the most beautiful and delightful a person could imagine even were he to live and labor a thousand years thinking about it (for it far surpasses the limitations of our imagination or intellect), this presence bears such extraordinary majesty that it causes the soul extreme fright.…
O Lord, how we Christians fail to know you! What will that day be when You come to judge, for even when You come here with so much friendliness to speak with your bride, she experiences such fear when she looks at You? Oh daughters, what will it be like when He says in so severe a voice, depart ye who are cursed by My Father? (Matt. 25:41: “Depart from me, ye cursed.”)14
Fear is not relinquished altogether, but increasingly overlaid with the self-assurance brought by contact with the Other to the point of dissolving into Him, becoming impregnated by Him; and thus you have become, Teresa, someone else. I is another. A Mother.
Is Teresa, body and soul, like a small jewelry box in which the humanity of the Spouse, that desired and desiring body, is secretly lodged? Does she emit sunbeams, the visceral heat of His Majesty within, only separated from her by a scrap of gauze? Or is she perhaps the texture itself, a homemade hymen softly linked to Him? And finally, the diamond: Is it the Other’s precious humanity? Or the indestructible glint of that ecstatic and most intimate inner core, as Teresa is transformed by Communion into Him?
“Once after receiving Communion I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ…There are deep inner secrets revealed when one takes communion. It is a pity that these bodies of ours do not let us enjoy them.”15
You are evading the issue, Teresa. Allow me to remind you that, contrary to what you claim above, “this body of yours” was right there with you when you communed so blissfully with the Other. Everybody knows that now, thanks to Bernini. I’m willing to admit that “deep inside your soul,” which precedes and entails the metamorphosis of your body—or possibly the other way around—you equated yourself with the nuptials joining Father to Son (since you had “transformed” into Him!). Might you be the Father who contains within Him the Child Jesus, His Majesty pregnant with the God-man, or are you only (if that’s the word) the receptacle of their reconciliation? Here is a curious but ravishing fitting together of forms, a nesting that leaves many of us pensive. Might you embody all by yourself the mystery of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose ins and outs you once discussed in such rarefied fashion with John of the Cross that the pair of you were seen to levitate in your seats, according to the nuns of the Incarnation, all agog at this communion between future saints! And, more miraculously still, the mystery that lifts you above the ground is played out in your woman’s soul-body, no more, no less! The way “that body of yours” never kept you from jouissance is proof enough; your prayerful revelry in Him simply endowed you with a new body, capable of incorporating fantasy and molding itself as it pleased.
The old body has not disappeared, though. All your life you’d have done anything to get rid of it, enduring everything from the slightest mortification to the agony of abrasive hair shirts. The inventive range of punishments you relentlessly inflicted on yourself would be the dark underside of rapture: “A fault this body has is that the more comfort we try to give it the more needs it discovers.…The poor soul is deceived [by these demands] and doesn’t grow.”16 You are reminded of “many women who are married,” and imagine one who—like your own mother?—“suffers much adversity without being able to receive comfort from anyone lest her husband know that she speaks and complains about it.” “Indeed, we have not come here to receive more comfort than they!”17 Being married to Jesus, do you atone for the sins of all married women?
To suffer is a woman’s fate, that’s well known, and to die is human, naturally. You seem to bow to this, Teresa, but you don’t really: for you, subjecting the body to “heavy trials” can only serve to prevail over it when the goal is to purify suffering and even to abolish it in order to “enjoy repose.” Repose after Calvary, masochistic joy, is that it?
Or is it rather a question of reaching that “other region” of jubilation disconnected from suffering, pure père-version, exquisite mère-version? You reach it, it seems. Because you write it. I am prepared to believe you. Well, almost. We obviously won’t breathe a word of this to Andrew or Jérôme or Marianne, will we?
You are torn with indecision again, Teresa; sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other, or presumably both at once. Indecision? Or should I say sinuousness, playfulness? Because the ambiguity that plagued you all your life between suffering and sublimation finds an exact designation, an uncanny synthesis, in the verb “to mock.” This word falls abruptly from your nib, to suggest not so much a cruel denial of ill-being as a kind of jaded detachment or mild irony: “So what if we die? If our body has mocked us so often, shouldn’t we mock it at least once?” (“De cuantas veces nos ha burlado el cuerpo, ¿no burlaríamos alguna de él?”).18
Your body, that cumbersome object, was a burden; now it is a toy. Instead of putting it to death, you dedicate it to the saints, to Jesus, to God—to “our God the Logos,” as old Freud used to say. And here you are, not only rid of your fleshly envelope but delighted to play tricks on it the more it taunts you, what am I saying, the more it tries to knock you out for the count! For example, you think you’ve earned the Other’s love and your sisters’ admiration by performing so many penances. You make yourself vomit in order to have something to offer God (“the Lord is served by something”),19 for you reckon that He expects treasures from you: “In this life there could be no greater good than the practice of prayer.” Prayer will
constitute the exercise that helps you skirt anorexia, and with it the body, but by raising frustration to the rank of a pleasure shared…with the Father-Son. And with your own father, don Alonso Sánchez himself, as we have seen.20
My reading is as follows: so as to resist the impulse to offer your life (your body) to your father, you begin by offering your death (your vomiting body) to the Lord, but you marry your father indirectly, coming together in the Lord: a pretty tortuous defense, admit it! You keep fanning the faith of your father Alonso, so as to lead him to the supreme Good, of course, and to have done with la honra…
After all, none other than Jesus is showing you the way in this. Since he is a man, the Son of Mary gives you “understanding through experience,”21 in other words the union with the Beloved is corporeal: Is this your way of disavowing the “spiritual books” your father valued, he who placed God’s immaterial divinity far above the bodily presence that doña Beatriz, like most women, hankered for in novels of courtly love? But you, praying over the Passion and the Resurrection, don’t dissociate God from the flesh. It is clear that the “most sacred humanity of Christ” does not count among the “corporeal things” from which we must “turn aside.” “It is clear that the Creator must be sought through his creatures.” (“Está claro, se ha de buscar al Criador por las criaturas.”)22 How could you possibly dispense with your body, since His is always present for you—contacted, contagious, penetrating, or enveloping?
A daughter of the Renaissance, a woman of zestful vitality, you never forget for a moment that your Lover is “human.” And it is that understanding through experience (por experiencia me lo daba a entender) of the mystery of the Incarnation you are so sure of sharing with Jesus—“incarnate fantasies,” in psychoanalytical terms—that led you to revolutionize the Catholic faith at the end of the sixteenth century.
You interpret Christ’s Passion, with its descent into Hell and ascension into Heaven, as an invitation to acknowledge the violence of human desire, with the ultimate goal of tempering it so as to have a firmer dominion over the world. If the majority of human beings are “scattered” souls, skittish as “wild horses no one can stop,” you consider that the saints, by contrast, could do “whatever they wanted” with God’s help, merely to gain “dominion over all worldly things.”23 This course is surely the way of perfection you aim to follow.
By uniting with the Other until it becomes Him, the soul goes beyond humility; in its very abandonment, it transcends suffering and acquires “power and authority” (“poderío y señorío”)24 as well as a “great quiet,” a “devout and peaceful recollection.”25 We gather that ideal Fatherhood is no longer punitive for you, but instantly pleasurable and nourishing; it satisfies the person, affirms the advantages of being alive, brings joy. In consequence the task now is to make your word live up to that, to become agreeable so as to be like Him—to be Him? “Think, daughter, of how after it is finished you will not be able to serve Me in ways you can now. Eat for Me and sleep for Me, and let everything you do be for Me, as though you no longer lived but I.”26
To be agreeable to the Third Person, to the nonperson in you; maybe that’s the definition of happiness.
You prefigure the seventeenth-century moralists, Teresa, my love, with that obligation of happiness that you think comes from the Other. “There is…only one duty, to be happy,” Diderot wrote. I wonder whether the inspired encyclopedist ever suspected that one of those nuns whose fanaticism so infuriated him had preceded him along that path?27
With no strain, the soul becomes a babe in arms that “nurses” and comprehends “without effort of the intellect.”28 No more “frenzy”;29 Teresa is through with suffering and punishing, she is all consent and contentment, she says yes. “During the time of this prayer, everything is ‘yes.’ The ‘no’ comes afterward upon seeing that the delight is ended and that one cannot recover it.”30
Negativity, ill-being, angst, discontentment, and criticism only arise “afterward,” as a temporary eclipse of the yes. More than a subjective choice, Teresa’s yes, emanating from the Other, presents itself as an ontological yes she appropriates by appropriating “the sacred humanity of Christ”; perhaps, too, as an unconscious spur to gratitude? The no, on the other hand, along with every species of negativity, mortification, penance, or active realization of sadomasochistic impulses, is only apprehended as a cessation of the essential yes.
Jérôme Tristan keeps looking over my shoulder; I can feel him breathing down my neck as I write. Certainly, my friend, one can interpret this masterly reversal of depression and sophrology into manic exaltation as the paranoid temptation to ensure absolute dominion and control. But you can’t overlook the fact that while this temptation exists, it is both checked by the framework of the Catholic institution with its many rituals and hierarchies and continually deconstructed by the self-analytical discipline of a writing undertaken for the long haul.
I spend my sleepless nights dissecting, with the aid of the magnifying glass and scalpel of my daytime clinical duties, the psychic metamorphoses that make the Teresian castle into a work of art that’s more unusual and differently admirable than the great cathedrals of the Christian West. Has time wiped out these pneumatic dwelling places? Or do they survive beneath various disguises and renovations, like the walls of Avila loom before the handful of tourists who still appreciate their splendor—or rather, their pasteboard-scenery quality?
Teresa the writer who turns to making foundations is no longer the punished child or the beaten Father-Son. The thought-sensation of her tremendous introjection of the loving-loved Other is turned into action, into works. Although the “faculties” (understanding, will, and imagination) may persist in fretful agitation, and there may be no end to struggles, trials, and sufferings, nothing will prevent the soul from joining, not the “sound of the Voice,” but the “work” of the Spirit—the soul’s spirit, or mind:
“This greeting of the Lord must have amounted to much more than is apparent from its sound.…His words are effected in us as deeds.…For it is very certain that in emptying ourselves of all that is creature and detaching ourselves from it for the love of God, the same Lord will fill us with Himself.”31 For “the Lord puts the soul in this dwelling of His, which is the center of the soul itself”:
This center of our soul, or this spirit, is something so difficult to explain, and even believe in, that I think, Sisters, I’ll not give you the temptation to disbelieve what I say.…To speak of pain and suffering and say at the same time that the soul is at peace is a difficult thing to explain. I want to make one or more comparisons for you. Please God, I may be saying something through them; but if not, I know that I’m speaking the truth.32
Does this mean He is the soul? The soul is Him? Pain is peace? Peace is pain?
What is the meaning of the verb to be, here?
“Mas habéis de entender que va mucho de estar a estar”: there is a great difference in the ways one may be.33 Teresian “ontology,” succeeding to her raptus sublimated into gratitude, does not, however, fall back on quietism. The movement that appropriates be-ing conjugates the verb in the plural: I is an amassment of others. Identity must be porous, presence must be penetrated, and the feeling-thinking subject engaged in a cascading chain of reciprocities with other feeling-thinking subjects. The consent to incest with the ideal Father-Son restores the world as a place of grace and joy: Yes to requited desires and reconciled alterities. Yes to the affirmation of co-presence, to the acceptance of otherness that founds the subject of desire, yes to the infinity of being.
Could this message I have gleaned from Teresa’s words be a universal truth? It is certainly not a call to solidarity with the host of wronged humanity, “the humiliated and insulted,” even if this humanist commitment is embedded in many modern branches of Christianity. Via Teresa’s experiences, a prodigious subjective space is being built before our eyes, one that makes an impression upon the European mentality, even where it does not impose upon it. Unle
ss it be just a grandiose illusion, the crowning glory of the aesthetic religion now fading into globalized virtuality?
The existential joy of Teresa of Avila was (ontologically, unconsciously) founded on the delegation of the Self into the Other—a delegation that had to negotiate any amount of frustrations, separations, travails, punishments, and penances before adhering to the alterities in the self that are manifest in the insatiable activity of representation, that is, the narrative I am capable of producing for, and with, another. This entails a constant translation of the estranged inside oneself, the assumption, body and soul, of I into Him; and this elation reshapes depressive angst into energetic pragmatism. Words thus become not things, but affirmative deeds: yeses, works. The Creator is succeeded, not perhaps by a Creatress, but certainly by a re-foundress.
“Yes,” says Teresa, while writing and founding. And even while dying—especially then. Her “amen” to the Other-Being defies time: that yes falls outside time.
Today, in Alba de Tormes, she is leaving this world to meet her Beloved face to face.
Part 7
Teresa, My Love Page 54