On rereading, I find myself thinking that you wept over the novel you were attempting to synthesize from your prank, not only out of compassion for the unhappy victims of the “folly of the cross,” as you call it in your role as encyclopedist and man of the Enlightenment, but also because the fine novelist you are was so stricken by the transference of your feelings upon those of your heroine Marie-Suzanne Simonin that, parallel to your indignation before her ordeals at the hands of religion, you succumbed to the blessings—sorry, the snares—of this magical thing, faith. Here are the words you put into her mouth:
It was then that I came to feel that Christianity was superior to all the other religions in the world. What profound wisdom there was in what benighted philosophy calls the folly of the cross! In the state I was in, how would the image of a happy and glorious lawgiver have helped me? I saw that innocent man, his side pierced, his head crowned with thorns, his hands and feet pierced with nails, and dying in agony, and I said to myself: “This is my God, and yet I dare to feel sorry for myself!”…I clung to this idea and felt a renewed sense of consolation in my heart.9
Such were, too, your own last words, according to posterity or wicked tongues. Distinctly over-the-top for an atheist!
Here’s the nub: you, who taught me that “the first step toward philosophy is incredulity,”10 didn’t hesitate to make a character sing the praises of the Christian faith, even though she had been ill-treated by it! Is this another ironical pirouette, should it be taken with a pinch of salt, are you teasing us? Or are you rehearsing, slyly, vicariously, what it would be like to feel enthralled by that “profound wisdom,” to submit to its attachments, to practice its dialectics? To comprehend its logic while condemning its abuses?
Maybe this was not more than a “strumpet thought” among others, one you discarded, before capsizing at the end. There was more urgent business to attend to in those effervescent days, after all. But I wonder: by limiting yourself to diagnosing how religion oppresses “good nature,” didn’t you deny yourself the chance to deploy the complexities of your discernment, to plumb the “mysteries” of that mystification after having denounced its aberrations?
You did, however, in your correspondence with Sophie Volland, undertake to plumb a different mystery—that of the Apocalypse whose name is “Woman.” And still another after that, the enigma of the asocial individual, the eccentric parasite, the nephew of the great Rameau. Religion, seduction, hysteria, art…As mystifications and delusions go, you are not exempt: by rewriting your mocking farce in the form of a narrative, you stepped right into that region of mystification that could not fail to “clash” with your personal continent, that further illusion of which you are the master: literature. The imaginary, the fantasized, the written. How does it connect with religion? What links are there between religion, literature, the female body, and the artistic body? Between desire, seduction, and manipulation? Between feminine and masculine? Between art and parasitism? Truth and falsehood? Such are the abysses of philosophy. And how about between dominion over others, elevation of others, abuse of others? Between the powers of language, rhetoric, faith, and the Word? Such are the abysses of culture, of freedom, of the Enlightenment.
In a bid to cast light on your tale, scholars have pored over the original “correspondence” with the pious, deceived Monsieur de Croismare; but there is another, missing correspondence that remains unwritten and whose absence drove you to tears: that of the canon you once were with the philosopher you became. Is it because the ill-being of others—or your own?—wounds you so much that you prefer to act rather than to delve into its labyrinth of impasses and delights? “I would rather dry the tears of those who are unhappy than share the joy of the rest,” you wrote to Sophie Volland. And to Madame d’Épinay: “I belong to the unhappy; it would seem fate sends them into my path; I cannot fail a single one of them, I haven’t the strength; they rob me of my time, my talent, my fortune, my very friends…”11
How I understand! Barring the talent and the fortune, I could write the very same words—why else would I be so attached to the MPH? But I’m not with you all the way. The Diderot who bursts into tears, undone by his Nun, makes me doubt his luminous encyclopedist’s certainties elsewhere.
Did you really believe in that benign “nature without artifice” touted by the Enlightenment? At the time of writing those mischievous letters to Croismare, you were also beginning work on the Nephew. And in that book, over and above its notoriously baroque, corrosive, seething critique of buffoons and braggarts, musical feuds and anarchic enthusiasms, what is it but good old “human nature” that gets blown to smithereens in the convulsion of passions, mimeses, unbearable truths, impossible filiations, tempests of the senses and sensations, in short, in the absence of any point of reference amid the strange, the infinite comedy of language and languages? All of this—the crucible of persiflage, of the literary laboratory, of imaginative power, of the hatefatuation of the sexes—surrounds The Nun, shattering the hypocrisy of sanctimonious God-botherers, beyond the control of the very institution of faith. You make no effort to contain it. You simply make it exist, in laughter, in tears, in style.
Do not think I am turning my back on your Nun. Your writing, lightened or indeed denatured by the silliness of the prank that brought her into being (you revel in those sorts of ambiguities, you cultivate them in all of your works), gradually pulls free from that “self-delusion…ruled by…instincts” that Nietzsche thought was characteristic of Christianity and, I might add, of its repressed substitutes.12 Epistolary satire (or persiflage) and the novel that attempts to reason through it (The Nun) seem to me to have been engendered by the selfsame “clash” between nature and meaning that you sought to demystify in faith itself, overshooting your immediate target, the abusive enclosure of young women. As though at the very moment your work was engaged in extirpating the religious, it became apparent to you that it was “inoperable” of that religion. Thus the esthete Swann, that inoperable “celibate of art,” as Proust wrote in the voice of the Christlike narrator of In Search of Lost Time;13 thus too the Sade– Pascal duo, encompassing a peculiarly French genius, according to Philippe Sollers.14 The need to believe is inoperable of desire, desire for meaning, whirlwind of the thinking flesh: that is what flew into your face, Mister Philosopher, and reduced you to tears, just when you were hoping to wind up The Nun in a hurry.
THE MISSING LINK OF EUROPEAN CULTURE
Your libertarian verve, the incisive violence of the French body and sense of humor, the upheavals of a history that was preparing to guillotine the king and overthrow the Church, all these impelled you to strike a ringing, well-aimed blow against obscurantism. After you, and largely thanks to you, religion (especially Catholicism) lost much of its aura of absolute revelation and institutional impregnability. This happened first in France—often accompanied by “revolutionary” atrocities whose tragic balance sheet not been fully reckoned yet—and little by little spread elsewhere in the world by means of the awesome, unstoppable march of secularization. Here I include religious pluralisms of every stripe, spiritualist mystifications, sectarian outpourings, and the “black tide of occultism” that so revolted Freud.
Is Christianity irrevocably discredited?
Many people are worried about this. Some question secularism, others dread the comeback of clericalism and its twin, anticlericalism. I know of some who try to deal with the problem by going back to the source, such as biblical inspiration, obviously: these read the alliance of the crucified Jesus with His Father as the accomplishment of the Jewish Akedah, not so much an “imperfect” to be “voided” as a truth forever present in the evangelical pronouncement, in the truth and presence of its accomplishment. As an epochal gesture this re-sourcing claimed to settle the old intra-Hebraic quarrel between Old and New Testaments, by re-founding the Pauline separation into a fresh unity of Jews and Christians. Is it a response to the tragedy of the Shoah and to the current threats posed by the “clash of religion
s”? Some people content themselves with a return to Latin. Others begin to listen to their contemporaries…And so on.
The atheist that I am holds her breath while asking herself these questions. And I dream that Teresa’s experience could add to the movement for a salutary re-foundation a new reading of this revitalization of European culture that was ushered in by the much-maligned Counter-Reformation, of which Teresa was the more or less clandestine inspiration—alongside Ignatius Loyola and John of the Cross, but very differently from them.
This renovation, launched in part by La Madre’s exemplary experience, makes me see that Christianity did not come to a halt in the Middle Ages; it was not killed off by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and humanism, contrary to what is often said. Mingling the message of the Song of Songs with the Passion on the Cross and infusing them through the bodies of the Renaissance and right into the entrepreneurial pragmatism of modern times, strongly marking the artistic sensibilities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but stuck in the tribunal of moral values, Christianity let itself be cowed by the libertarian energies of the Enlightenment and sidelined by the technical and multicultural acceleration of history. It flourished, however, under unexpected forms that might not always welcome the association: in your novels, Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau’s Nephew; in Mozart’s Magic Flute, for instance; even in the care for human uniqueness professed by the European Union today. Does that surprise you? Good, I’m flattered! To issues of love, the Bible, and the Gospels I would attach everything that, without sinking into modern nihilism, patiently breaks down and recomposes the desire to believe with all one’s body and soul. Everything that stays close to myths and rituals, monotheistic or otherwise, and revisits those bold condensations that restore humanity—disoriented by the threat of global disaster—to its own “monumental” history: a history made of the self-transcendence speaking beings have labeled the “divine,” the “unconscious,” “being,” and “time,” not to say “lost time.”
Less than two centuries after Teresa’s death you could not have perceived, dear Denis Diderot, this renovation within continuity achieved by a strange nun living at the very heart of the ontotheological continent you were determined to blow up, with swimming eyes. As an impatient, libertarian protester, committed to the efficiency that would benefit the humble and the wronged, you proceeded in plebeian fashion by dint of “epistemological breaks.” Was that how it had to be in order for me, Sylvia Leclercq, beyond any real, imaginary, or symbolic guillotine, to find my way back to Teresa? After you, yet upstream from you? I don’t know, but that’s how it is.
Others, in ever greater numbers, would align themselves with what they took to be your fight against obscurantism, and continued the desecration with the help of a cudgel: this, those poor unprotected believers believed, was indispensable for lancing the boil of superstition and subjection. But they had overlooked the fertile twists, the vicious benefits, the ineffable traps of the desire for meaning: morbid fancies, instinctual eruptions, hopes and despairs, physical and psychic manipulations.
You’ve got it, Mister Philosopher: being the person I am, my cohabitation with that roommate is the paradoxical, but inevitable, result of your Nun. I began by rebelling, in step with you, against the physical and psychic oppressions effected by religions and ideologies, the latter being more or less secretly modeled on the former; I shared your revulsion at monastic claustration; I felt the empathy that made you weep over the fate of the victims of so many enforced, but often voluntary, delusions.
Over time, however, I found myself parting ways with you. Or rather I attempted to shine your light, in my own way, into the murky chambers of the female soul that intrigued you so much in Marie-Suzanne Simonin. Into what Freud called the “psychic apparatus,” of both sexes: the recondite places where torture is distilled into secondary benefits, into a “surplus” of jouissance, and where the need to believe constitutes the foundations of a culture, with or without apparent malaise.
I wonder if you’d ever accept—as Freudians do, like me, who cannot share your enlightened optimism on this point—that delusion, with all its dangers, is a constitutive part or the now immersed face of a civilization seemingly melting away under the overheated blast of technology.
I have tried to channel your imagination, passion, and empathetic compassion for your nun in another direction in my own exploration of the interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila. My heroine was not spared the woes of the good sister of Longchamp and Arpajon, but she forged ahead right through them, first toward ecstasy, then into writing and action, and finally into sainthood. I spoke of the “interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila,” but they are not only hers. They do not harbor only the pioneering audacity of an elite soul of the sixteenth century, or the ravings of certain Catholic women in any century; perhaps (following Leibniz, with deficient humility once more) Teresa’s inner mansions could be relevant to all kinds of passionate souls? Not because they share the same faith, but because such souls speak and think and are in time in a particular way. “There is a great difference in the ways one may be,” the Carmelite wrote.
To get to the bottom of religious experience a slow, interminable effort remained and remains to be made, and it always will. Your Nun initiated the process with an almighty thwack at pious hypocrisy, but it was received with bland applause, reducing your text to an institutional operation: you were not seen to be interested in religion itself, let alone in God, you were merely attacking religious “power” in relation to personal and private life. There was a reaction of denial, a refusal to dig further! And yet your polyphonous adventure, your polymorphous oeuvre meant so much more. Is it by chance that you are the only Enlightenment philosopher cited by Freud? Your Nun pulled open the secret drawers of faith. Pieces like “First Satire,” Rameau’s Nephew (my own favorite), “Conversation of a Father with His Children,” and “Conversation of a Philosopher with the Maréchale of—,” attempted to explore religion’s links with the law, filiation, and parenthood. Delving into the exquisite refinements and treasures of perversity lodged within bodies and souls with, around, and despite the realities of servitude and despotism, you continued to construct the bridge that leaps from Teresa’s ecstasies (via Bernini, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo) to the passions of those modern monsters, the men and women of today, balanced aloft on the stilts of incorporated time, à la Proust, or dispersed into kaleidoscopic shards à la Picasso.
Teresa leads me through that labyrinth where the present has no meaning unless it recollects the inaugural moment and re-engenders it; where the now is only of interest insofar as it continually re-founds what came before, like Teresa does when she places Solomon’s Bride inside the body of a woman praying to Jesus. This woman passes the baton to Bernini, who passes it on to Molly Bloom. Let us walk a little further in La Madre’s company. I am trying to work through the tangled mazes you abhorred with a patience I hope to make as incisive as your own sardonic passion. Wounding or tiresome I may be, and yet somewhat appeased, I hope. And if so, it will be thanks to your preparatory spadework.
NEITHER RHENO-FLEMISH, NOR A QUIETIST
Did I say patience? Am I not rather caught, with this great Teresa, in the turmoil of a transference—that again, always that!—which I am trying to assume with whatever vigilance I still have? Behind my curiosity about this saint, what really fascinates me is the dynamic of the loving bond itself. It preexists this or that individual along with whatever objects of transference may present themselves in the course of the person’s lifetime, for it is by the grace of the transference upon my parents, which founded my psychic life, that I think and therefore I am. “I have found out that you were less dear to me than my passion,” wrote the Portuguese nun to the French officer who had forsaken her.15 You will understand, Mister Philosopher, that if I am not content with thinking up equations but ask myself: “What causes me to think?” then I am still preoccupied by that foundational passion. So I am not about to clo
se down my dialogue with my roommate, Maître, and now you know why you are its last witness here. How could I interrogate the original transference without moving backward through the battles you fought on behalf of the freedom of bodies and souls, the struggles you bequeathed to us, which are now mine? Who am I? Who is she? What is she looking for?
Who are you, Teresa? A garden irrigated by four waters, a fluid castle open to infinity with seven permeable “dwelling places,” an inexhaustible writer, a dauntless warrior, a languid lover sighing for “more!” under Bernini’s caress? A pitiful epileptic or a woman of power? A Carmelite cloistered in hopeless delusion or a modern, more than modern, subject? Do I really have an answer, at the end of this long sojourn side by side?
After following you as best I could through your life and death, through the firmament of ideas where you hover with the opus that is your jewel, that last question remains open.
Is it because you were a woman, or because you were Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, then Teresa of Jesus, then Saint Teresa of Avila—who I watched being born, vibrating, and passing away, with your epoch and against it—that you built yourself a soul, as it used to be called, that matched your body but did not fit the Aristotelo-Thomist model of the interior man and the exterior man? That equally contradicted the rationalist, sensualist model mounted by Fénelon and Madame Guyon?
The history of Christianity is actually littered with sophisticated anatomies of the soul, vertiginous palaces of the inner life. Might I run through some of them with you, Mister Philosopher, as a way of clarifying my disagreement? I’ll use the bits and pieces to enhance my Teresian “installation,” like the Beguines decorating their offerings to the Sacred Heart with shreds of grass and scraps of floral fabric. Or like contemporary female artists who eschew synthesis and prefer to pile up the fragments of their untenable identities. A nod at the scholastics, a glance at the Rhenish philosophers, an allusion to quietism, all to be submitted for your inspection. It’s my patchwork sampler, my polychrome canvas, my MoMA-worthy “mobile.” So that the dwelling places of my saint are sure to stand out while remaining connected, I tighten my gestures, quicken my paint drippings, gather time into the space of a condensation. Teresa of Avila’s revolution can only be assessed in relation to that mutation of mystical subjectivity, those variations on the “kingdom” of which modernity knows nothing, but in which I tried to steep myself while traveling through the works of the woman from Castile.
Teresa, My Love Page 69