The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  When she caught influenza, as she did during the epidemic of 1580, she very nearly died. Doctors had told her that she was consumptive; it has been suggested also that she was epileptic. It will be remembered that the detailed description of her personal appearance states that her eyes were swollen and the front of her throat thickened, which seems to point to the probability of her being thyrodic. It is stated by a contemporary writer that she had an open wound in her throat, which bled whenever she ate. The reason is not given, but is it possible that some operation had been performed?

  In this connexion, we should remember the account given by the Venerable Anna who accompanied St. Teresa on her last journey and described her death: “Her throat was already badly inflamed … so that she began to vomit blood … her throat trouble was so bad that she could only take liquid food.… Whenever she ate, blood would come from the place in her throat.”

  She remarks also that she was affected by the moon. “My throat is better and I have not felt so well for some time, for I can eat almost without pain, and as the moon is full I consider this a great boon.” And again, “The moon is full: I passed a very bad night and am suffering severely with my head to-day. I have been better until now; to-morrow, when the moon begins to wane, my health will improve.” It is, of course, no old wives’ tale, but a fact, that some persons are thus affected.

  Such, then, without touching here on the physical effects observed during her trances, common to all visionaries, was the troublesome constitution of St. Teresa. Obviously the majority of her afflictions arose from what we should call neuropathic causes. But the major mystery still remains unsolved: what is mysticism? what makes the mystic? It is easy to understand the intense desire for union with God; the passionate longing for the submergence of self in the infinite; the wish to enter that state of pure receptivity where such union, such absorption, such loss of self, become possible; that “fierce ardour,” as Jan van Ruysbroeck called it, “by which some men are at times caught into the spirit, above the senses.” But however consuming the desire, its fulfilment is not to be attained through deliberate effort. “Let the will,” said Teresa, “quietly and wisely understand that it is not by dint of labour on our part that we can converse to any good purpose with God, and that our own efforts are only great logs of wood, laid on without discretion to quench this little spark.” Something which cannot be commanded must come from without; must come from those unfathomable regions which may contain the august and comprehensive answer to every question. The majority of writers on this subject naturally take as their point of departure the assumption that all such revelations proceed from God (providing, of course, that they do not proceed from the Devil), a demonstrably incorrect hypothesis, since the fixation of the visionary is not necessarily associated with either the divine or its converse, and still less necessarily with the doctrine of Christianity or such usual preoccupations as the passion of Christ or the actuality of the Holy Trinity. Mysticism was known to the Greeks; the word itself has a Greek root; and all that has happened is that a confusion has arisen by which, especially in the minds of theologians, mysticism is now connected almost to a synonymous degree with the revelation of the divine. We are not, however, concerned here with any form of mysticism save that which takes its being from the “religious” impulse in general and the Christian conception of religion in particular. In one sense it is a field of enormous mystery and removedness; but in another sense it holds the simplicity of all great things; the maximum simplicity, even, since its concern is with the greatest of all. Life represents itself under other aspects, important, urgent, immediate, but however momentous, however instant, they are temporal and temporary and of a nature to vanish in a flash under any cosmic catastrophe while the other would still remain. By the other we touch something which is quite different from anything else; we touch nothing less than the absolute, the ultimate reality with no boundary beyond which we can further probe. Even science, in all its forms, is presumably finite; but this other is transcendental and all-embracing in a sense denied to all other expression.

  To the detached and objective observer, unaffected by similar convictions, “religion” may often appear strangely dissociated from applied Christianity, if by applied Christianity we mean practical unselfishness, moral charity, and active ministration-extended to our neighbour according to, our different abilities. In the higher stages of religion, it may even appear that an absorption in personal advancement (in the spiritual sense of course) is the main object which even the theory of expiation for the sins of others can do little in the human sense to justify. St. Ignatius Loyola had definitely laid down in the Constitutions of his Society that nothing so much qualified a minister of God to save others as the sanctification of his own soul in the first place. To the ordinary person, such pursuit may involve a charge of incomprehensible egotism. Life, such persons will argue, is a strenuous and painful business; duty demands that each shall play his part and pull his weight; any form of escape is an evasion, a refusal, glorify it by whatever name you will. Such arguments are as idle as the argument of the Philistine against the aesthetic and we may well believe that the condition of the artist in moments of creative inspiration, the “fine frenzy,” is closely comparable to the rapture of the mystic; that the two experiences, in fact, are similar in their nature though perhaps not consciously in their aim. It is no more possible to explain or define beauty, whether aesthetic or natural, to the man without response in his being, than it is possible to blow a flame of inward comprehension of spiritual perception where no spark exists. As little would avail the most careful diagram of a violin, to one who had never heard the sound.

  The mystics themselves have dwelt on the hopelessness of the attempt to translate their experiences into intelligible words. Like the poet, they must take refuge in symbol and metaphor, more potent than dry affirmation, more evocative than statement; “I shall have to make use of a comparison,” writes St. Teresa; “I should like to avoid it, but this language of spirituality is so difficult of utterance.” The language of mystical theology is in fact largely and inevitably metaphorical, since in order to convey any sense of an experience so entirely outside normal life it is necessary to employ the nearest possible illustration which comes within the normal range, or, as a modern writer has indicated, symbolism “attempts to convey a supernatural experience in the language of visible things … used not for its common purpose but for the associations which it evokes of a reality beyond the senses.” Only by such devices may some dim reflection of the reality, as in a mirror, be obtained. Hence, the Church is the bride of Christ; the soul is the bride of Christ; the soul is a castle with many rooms; the state of rapture is a flight, “a sweet flight, a delicious flight—a flight without noise”; the mystery of Godhead is a cloud, “The Cloud of Unknowing”; the withdrawal of God plunges the soul into night, the “Dark Night” of St. John of the Cross. The use of such symbols certainly storms the understanding more energetically than the definitions compiled by learned bodies such as the Societé française de Philosophie or the Teresian Congress of Madrid. Yet definitions have been found helpful in establishing the confused phraseology in current use. Mysticism appears as “Belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union between the human spirit and the fundamental principle of the being, a union which constitutes at one and the same time a mode of existence and a method of knowledge foreign and superior to normal existence and normal knowledge;” or, alternately, as “any interior state which, in the eyes of the subject, appears as a contact (not through the senses, but ‘immediate’ and ‘intuitive’) or as a union of self with something greater than self, which may be called the soul of the world, God, or the Absolute according to choice.”

  The answer, then, to the question what is mysticism? what makes the mystic? would seem to be either that it is a matter of temperament, as inexplicable as the temperament of the creative artist; or, as believers will prefer to put it, a direct intervention of God inspiring the
spirit with the revelation of truth. Such intervention, such revelation, may have nothing to do with the conscious desire of the chosen instrument. Vessels of grace are, apparently, arbitrarily chosen; in some cases, indeed, surprised and reluctant. Beyond this we cannot go. But it may be worth noting, since we have already mentioned the word hysteria in connexion with St. Teresa, that this word is popularly employed in a loose and misleading sense, to suggest the ranting excitability of uncontrolled emotion. In a truer sense it should be employed to denote a most variable form of neurosis, capable of producing either a complete disintegration of personality, or a schizophrenic condition of personality, or a psychological disposition inclining the subject towards involuntary auto-suggestion which may take a base and deplorable form or a form most spiritual and lofty. In parenthesis, and still with a reverent acknowledgment of the theory that mystical experience originates with the intervention of God, it is tempting to speculate on the inherent probability of this belief as opposed to the equally possible subjectivity of supernatural manifestations. In other words, is it or is it not conceivable that in the hypothetical case of a person who had never heard of God, Christ, the Communion of Saints, the Devil, or any of the accepted appurtenances of religion, the phenomenon of divine visions or locutions should occur? It is a pregnant though perhaps subversive question. Is it possible to imagine a stigmatist to whom the story of the Crucifixion should be totally unknown? Is it possible to imagine our Lady appearing to one who was unacquainted with the story of Christ’s nativity? If such cases exist, proven beyond suspicion, they would seem to settle the matter once and for all; but in their absence it would seem logical to conclude that the phenomena of mystical theology must take their origin from some image already in the mind.

  This conclusion, of course, does not affect either the sincerity of the subject or the verity of some great mystery, veiled from most eyes, but accessible in moments of revelation to the few. It affects only the form in which such revelations are enwrapped.fn5

  VII

  TERESA AT ANY rate was innocent of fraudulence or of conscious self-suggestion. She was more than innocent, she was sceptical and alarmed, and her doubts were increased by the incapacity of her earlier confessors and advisers who sometimes cautioned her and sometimes encouraged her, so that she did not know what to believe, and was in great fear and could not refrain from tears. What distressed her most of all was the command always to make the sign of the cross when she had a vision of heavenly nature—for these occurred even more frequently than the frankly satanic visions—to be persuaded of its diabolic origin, and to point her finger at it in scorn. “To point the finger,” a recognised method for averting evil, is done by doubling the fist and allowing the tip of the thumb to protrude between the index and the middle finger, or the gesture may be made by means of a charm, such as fill the coral and tortoiseshell shops at Naples. One such object, traditionally said to have been used by Teresa, is preserved at the convent of Medina del Campo, a little horn of flint, an inch and a half long, mounted in silver. Teresa, under her vow of obedience and in her Catholic acceptance of the dictum that priests and confessors spoke with the authority of God and knew better than she, did as she was bidden, though it was a fearful thing for her to do, as she could not believe that the vision did not come from God, and it was most painful for her to make a show of contempt whenever she saw our Lord: it reminded her of the insults the Jews had heaped upon Him. In fact, she could not always bring herself continually to the gesture, so evaded the command at times by the expedient of holding a crucifix in her hand. This crucifix, and the rosary to which it was attached, our Lord took once from her, and returned it, no longer made of ebony, but of four large stones more beautiful than diamonds. “They were seen, however, by no one else—only by myself.”

  After she had been commanded to put her visions to such tests and to resist them with all her power, they only increased in convincingness and frequency. It was in vain that she tried to distract herself and made piteous complaints to our Lord, telling Him that she could bear no more; her prayers were disregarded and she continued to experience the ineffable sweetness and excessive pain, so great that it made her moan, so sweet that she could not wish to be rid of it. Somewhere in her soul, though it was an insubordination greatly to be deprecated, persisted the conviction that she was better advised than her confessors. She took the problem to our Lord, who reassured her, for although He would not release her from her obedience, He helped her in another way by teaching her what she was to say, and gave her reasons so sufficient that she began to feel herself to be perfectly safe. Moreover, He sent her a practical comfort in the shape of St. Peter of Alcantara, who, although he lived in a cell only four and a half feet in length, trained himself not to sleep more than an hour and a half out of the twenty-four, ate but once in three days (a mere nothing, compared with St. Simeon Stylites who passed the whole forty days of Lent without touching food), never raised his eyes from the ground or looked on a woman’s face, and wore continually a girdle of pointed wire, still “with all his sanctity, he was very agreeable.” He listened gravely to Teresa’s account of her troubles, which she gave him, she says, as briefly as she could, though, knowing her volubility both in speech and on paper, we may doubt if it was very brief; comforted her greatly, threw light on many dark matters, and paid her the supreme compliment of returning her confidence. They parted fast friends, with the understanding that she should write to him and that they should pray for one another. He predeceased her by twenty years, but the change-over into another world was negligible, for he frequently appeared to her and she found that she received more help and consolation from him after his entrance into the heavenly city than when he was on earth.

  This terror lest supernatural visions should be a delusion of the Devil is common to all sincere persons thus affected, and to their spiritual directors, but none ever suffered more keenly than Teresa of Avila. A long section of her autobiography, and many passages in her other works, are devoted to an anguished effort to disentangle truth from possible falsehood and also—once the fact of divine revelation has been accepted—to distinguish between the various mental and spiritual states in which manifestations occur. It is at this point that the lay reader begins to marvel at the infinite elaboration of mystical writing. The fundamental idea seems so simple in plain statement, difficult though it may be of attainment; but even as the amateur inevitably grows impatient with what he regards as the superfluous discriminations of the expert, exclaiming that the connoisseur has lost his “sense of beauty” through an excessive interest in the variations and niceties of technique, so does the ordinary reader clasp his head in bewilderment, introduced to a region of theological metaphysics which appears only to confuse and not to clarify, as it should, the original issue. Led through successive stages of contemplation and of prayer; thinking that he is last nearing the peak, only to find himself back somewhere among the foothills, he may be forgiven for beginning to wonder whether there will always be something beyond; whether, when he thinks he is beginning to understand, to grasp the hindermost meaning, he will always be pulled back and humbled into a fresh set of complexities. Alas, if he wishes to persevere with his researches, the sooner he resigns himself to this idea the better. There is apparently no easy road, no short cut; and, like wading out into the sea, the further he wades the deeper will become the water. His only hope is that he may at last learn to swim.

  Teresa, true and great mystic though she was, is not quite so baffling as some. Her symbolism is neither so subtle and involved as that of St. John of the Cross, nor her teaching so profound as that of St. Thomas Aquinas. She was not a learned woman. She confessed to knowing nothing of mystical theology and to being ill-grounded in the art of orison. Unlike her male contemporaries she had, of course, attended no school or university; it was sufficiently remarkable that, for a woman of her period and race, she should easily read and write at all. She knew Latin so little that she always had to get it translate
d for her;fn6 her reading was not very extensive, though she is known to have read The Imitation of Christ, the letters of St. Jerome, the Moralia of St. Gregory, and probably The Confessions of St. Augustine; reading indeed, although she had always been fond of it, was difficult for her, for she found that whenever she took up a book she became “recollected” through it and her pleasure was turned to prayer. By nature an intellectual, as Crashaw so rightly indicated, she had for various reasons been denied the advantages which every intellectual should enjoy. Those large draughts of illumination to which he referred were the outcome not so much of education, as of her own analytical mind. Here was a woman surprised by her own experiences, endeavouring to set them down for her own enlightenment, for the information of her confessors, or for the guidance of her nuns. Working out her own explanation in this way, she frequently grew confused and repetitive, and was apologetically conscious of the fault, but a glance at the difficult conditions under which she composed her works must greatly soften the impatience of the reader. Teresa, in fact, was trying to live two different lives at the same time: the life of action and the life of contemplation. Only a very muscular personality such as hers could force the two into any compatability at all. Her writing was perpetually interrupted by the demands of her duties; her duties were perpetually disturbed by the onslaught of her mystical experience. “Such a book requires leisure,” she wrote of the Way of Perfection; “as you know, I have so little that I have been unable to go on with it for a week, and I forget both what I have written and how I intended to continue.”