The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  The actual physical inconvenience she suffered when writing was perhaps the thing that troubled her least of all. Yet many people would find it a considerable interference with the flow of thought. The Way of Perfection was composed in a cell with no table and no chair; she had either to kneel or sit on the floor. It is not surprising that she should have begun a chapter of The Way with the exclamation “How I do let myself wander !” Her paper lay on a ledge under the window; but that window had no glass, it had only canvas stretched on a frame to keep out the bitter winds of Avila, and thus, to all intents and purposes, was permanently open, numbing a scribbler who was painfully sensitive to cold. The composition of The Interior Castle was hampered in a manner perhaps even more troublesome. This exquisitely iridescent book provides a supreme instance of inspirational writing, though, unfortunately for the author, she was not privileged to indulge in an orgy of concentration such as Handel could allow himself during the bringing forth of his Messiah. Inspirational indeed it was, and that we know, partly from the account of those who saw her at work, partly from the extraordinary rapidity with which she wrote it. It was said that, on returning from an ecstasy, she sometimes found written pages which she thought were not her own; yet the manuscript shows no difference in the handwriting. “I know not what I am saying,” she wrote once, “for I am writing this as if the words were not mine.” Those who saw her at work, nuns of the Segovia convent, whether posted at her door or coming to interrupt her with messages, deposed that she wrote without stopping to erase or correct, her face irradiated by a light that faded when she laid her pen aside, so that in comparison it seemed like darkness; or so absorbed that she failed to observe the entry of a messenger into her cell. “Sit down, my child,” she said when at last her attention had been attracted, “and let me write what our Lord has told me before I forget it.” It must have been alarming to be sent on an errand to the Foundress on such occasions. Not that she ever gave way to irritability, enduring always with patience. But Mother Mary of the Nativity, at the convent of Toledo, coming in with a message just as Teresa was starting on a new sheet, was terrified to see that the saint, after removing her spectacles to listen to the message, was then seized in a trance lasting several hours. The nun dared not move or go away, but remained staring at Teresa until she finally came to her senses. The blank sheet of paper by this time was covered with writing, and Teresa, noticing this herself and aware that the nun also had noticed it, put the paper away without comment into a box. It had never been her practice to advertise her peculiar seizures, but rather to pass them over as though they had not occurred.

  As for the rapidity of her composition, she wrote The Interior Castle, a work of two hundred and sixty printed pages, or about the length of the average novel, in four weeks. This in itself would be an unusual feat, even for a work of fiction where the pen has only to run as fast as it can in pursuit of the invention and no hard processes of thought are necessary, but a theological treatise involving a symbolical exposition of the progressive states of the soul in prayer is a different matter. Add to this, that the period was included in one of the most uphill times Teresa ever passed through; she was ill, everything was going against her Reform, she was worried by opposition and busy with urgent affairs; and, as though that were not enough, her election as Prioress to the Encarnacion, with its attendant tumult, coincided also. The writing of the book, in consequence, was interrupted for five months; that is to say, she gave a fortnight to the execution of the first half and a fortnight to the execution of the second—a disturbing break which will arouse the sympathy of any author. Her power of concentration must have been amazing. She must have had the gift of devoting herself absorbedly to whatever she was doing, whether it was the foundation of a new convent or the examination of the most abstruse spiritual problems, to the momentary exclusion of everything else—a respect in which she evidently did not resemble a fellow-theologian and saint, Thomas Aquinas, who could become so lost in irrelevant thoughts that when dining with the King of France he heard nothing of the conversation going on around him, but suddenly thumped the table with his fist, exclaiming, “Ha! that settles the Manichees!”

  Teresa was not like that. Yet she was familiar with the jangle of the nerves resultant on the broken spell, the precious mood destroyed, so delicate to create, so laborious to recapture. Coleridge, for ever losing the completion of “Kubla Khan” through the intrusion of the person who came on business from Porlock, was under the influence of a drug, it is true; but Teresa was under the influence of a supernatural drug more potent than any delusions or imaginations of laudanum.

  Interesting also is her remark upon resuming the work that her head was too weak to read over what she had already written and that no doubt it will be very disconnected and full of repetitions as a result; adding, not very politely, that as it is only for her sisters, it will matter little. It must be rare that authorship should be undertaken in so casual, even negligent a spirit; but the subject was in fact so intrinsic a part of Teresa’s mind, that she had only to place her paper over her mind as it were, and make a tracing of the inspired script she found already engraved there. God Himself had supplied the basic image around which she built her Castle. He had shown her, in one of the loveliest and most lyrical visions she ever had, exactly how she should construct this habitation of the soul, from the precincts crawling with the reptiles of evil to the central hall where the Source of Light sat gloriously enthroned. The precincts were horrible indeed, and must have struck very forcibly into the imagination of Spanish nuns familiar with such poisonous creatures as salamanders, tarantulas, and other creeping darting dangers of daily life; “a mass of darkness and impurity, full of toads and vipers and other venomous animals”; but, once the infested entrance had been passed, God showed her “a most beautiful globe of crystal in the shape of a castle, with seven rooms, the seventh, situated in the centre, being occupied by the King of Glory, resplendent with the most exquisite brilliancy which shone through and adorned the adjoining rooms. The nearer these lay to the centre, the more did they partake of that wondrous light.” She was still admiring this beauty which by the grace of God dwells in the soul, when the light suddenly disappeared and the crystal became opaque and dark as coal, emitting an intolerable stench, and the venomous animals, formerly held in check outside, obtained admittance into the castle. Teresa thought that everyone should share in this vision, for in her opinion no one having once beheld such splendour and grace, forfeited by sin and replaced by such repulsive misery, would ever again dare to offend God.

  She related this vision to her confessor the very day that it occurred to her, but characteristically regretted her impulsive indiscretion as soon as she had slept on it. “How I forgot myself yesterday!” she said to him next morning. “I cannot think how it could have happened. Those high aspirations of mine and the affection I have for you must have caused me to go beyond all reasonable limits.” He promised her faithfully to say nothing about it during her lifetime, though after her death he felt impelled to make it known to all men.

  VIII

  IT WILL BECOME apparent from all this that another side to the picture existed, very different from those bloodshot and appalling visions of Satan and his Hell. There was the ineffably radiant vision of Christ and His Heaven. Christ stood before her, “stern and grave,” admonishing her; sometimes He showed her nothing but His hands, the beauty of which was so great that no language could describe it; when He showed her the wound in that beautiful hand, and drew out the great nail that was in it, so that it seemed to her He also tore the flesh, she was naturally much distressed, but understood that any suffering she might be called upon to endure was a trifle compared with the pain that He had borne. Sometimes it was the whole Sacred Humanity that she saw, but this she could not bear to describe without doing great violence to herself, and confined herself to saying that He seemed then as the painters represent Him after the Resurrection in beauty and majesty. Often He spoke to her, now wi
th reproach and now with encouragement, filling her with “exceeding strength and earnestness of purpose,” so that she thought she could rise above every possible hindrance put in her way, and leaving her also with the understanding of what it was for a soul to be walking in the truth, in the presence of Truth itself.

  These visions and locutions were to Teresa a source of mingled worry and joy. At long last she came to accept them as the true appearance of the divine presence, but even then her analytical mind continued to ferret after the explanation of their exact nature. Painstakingly, in page after page, paragraph after paragraph, she tries to define. Is it a bodily or an intellectual vision? She thinks she does not see with her bodily eyes, not even with the eyes of the soul. Even this is too crude a differentiation to satisfy her, and she must split it again: it seems that there are three kinds of visions, the bodily, the imaginary, and the intellectual, of which the bodily is the lowest, the intellectual the highest, and the imaginary half-way between the two. In this, despite her avowed ignorance of theological science, she had arrived perhaps unwittingly at the same conclusion as the scholastics, who placed the imagination between the senses and the intellect, receiving impressions from the former and transmitting them to the latter. Corporal visions and locutions are dangerous enough, but less so than imaginary visions and locutions, for these are so closely associated with the memory that the seer can never be sure that they do not derive merely from things once seen or heard; and deception, perhaps unintentional, may easily arise. St. Thomas Aquinas had distinguished very severely: the vision of Isaiah, and the apocalyptic revelation of St. John, were all imaginary; and as for the appearances of Christ to the women and the apostles after the resurrection, those were apparitions and not visions at all. It was important, nevertheless, to make yet another distinction between visions, apparitions and hallucinations, for hallucinations were the product of a morbid state in which a physical condition threw the memory into disorder, causing it to reproduce in a valueless way things which it already contained. The intellectual vision was the purest and loftiest of all, for no part was played by either the imagination or the memory, and certainly not by the senses, the bodily eyes not seeing, the bodily ears not hearing, but the whole spirit infused by what Teresa called the feeling of the presence of God, when the soul was suspended in such a way that it seemed to be utterly beside itself; the memory lost; the understanding not lost, but not at work, making no reflections, merely standing as if amazed at the greatness of the things it understands. This is almost the same as saying that intuition is superior to reason, the spiritual opposed to the human; thoughts, as Teresa put it, obviously setting thoughts on the lower plane, not being the same thing as the understanding. Not the same thing, and not so fine, so rarefied a thing.

  Teresa was very certain that her experiences were neither bodily nor hallucinatory; she does not seem to have been so sure that they were not imaginary as opposed to intellectual. (By “imaginary” she, of course, did not mean delusive, or invented, but was using the word in its theologically technical sense.) But her humility was always extreme, and to others it may appear that they were of the highest order; the point is scarcely worth arguing about. It is of greater interest to examine what Teresa has to say of this extraordinary interior life which doubled her active and practical existence. She was utterly convinced of the reality of her experiences for two reasons, which she constantly emphasises in the most vigorous language at her command—and the driving force of her language could be very vigorous indeed. The first reason is that her visions were not sought by her; she dia not seek to provoke them, and in fact knew from experience that any such attempt was idle. She had tried it in the days when fear ruled her and she longed only for the healing love of God to sustain her, but although she laboured with all her might to imagine Jesus Christ present within her, and to picture His Humanity, she never could do it. Later, when she had ceased to try, the intensity of the Presence repeatedly overwhelmed her, often causing her acute embarrassment. Far from endeavouring deliberately to think herself into a state of spirituality, she now sought only to safeguard herself, but “these little precautions are of no use when our Lord will have it otherwise.” No amount of quotation can convey any suggestion of how constant was this worry in her mind, or of how pitifully she tried to appear as a normal person in her outward life. It is as though she regarded her transports as a solecism, an offence against polite and well-bred manners. “These ecstasies come upon me with great violence and in such a way as to be outwardly visible, I having no power to resist them, even when I am with others, or they come in such a way as admits of no disguising them unless it be by letting people suppose that, as I am subject to disease of the heart, they are fainting fits. I take great pains to resist them when they are coming on—sometimes I cannot do it.” And again, “I was so unwell that I thought I might be excused making my prayer, but … I was rapt in spirit with such violence that I could make no resistance whatsoever.” She wrote to her brother that she felt so utterly ashamed, she wanted to hide herself, no matter where; and, being a practical woman, added that if this spiritual state, which.has already lasted a week, continues, it will cause her ill success with her many business affairs. She has prayed earnestly that she may no longer have raptures in public, and asks her brother to pray about it too, “for these are many disadvantages.” Occasionally she has been able, by great efforts, to make a slight resistance; but afterwards she has felt worn out like a person who has been contending with a strong giant.

  The physical effects of these transports were often exceedingly troublesome, especially to a person who in no way wanted to make an exhibition of herself. There were occasions when, unaware of what was taking place, frightened people tried to use force on the rigid body. The sister-sacristan at Toledo found her leaning against a wall after receiving Holy Communion, stiff and hard as stone, and exerted all her strength to make her sit down, dragging at her by both hands, but until Teresa came to herself there was no budging her. The nuns at Avila had likewise had difficulty in removing her from the grille after communicating. Sisters in various convents recorded their alarm at the state in which they found her. Sometimes her pulse had ceased to beat at all, her bones were racked, and her hands so rigid that she could not join them. Sometimes she used such force to prevent herself from entering into this condition that she felt afterwards as though all her bones had been broken, and at other times she would shut herself into her cell at the signal for prayer, making no reply if anyone knocked at the door. In whatever position she was when the rapture overcame her, in that position did she continue until she regained command of her senses, sitting, standing, or kneeling; the body lost its natural warmth; and the hands became as hard as pieces of wood. One of her nuns, finding her alone in this condition in the garden of the convent, remonstrated with her for endangering her life by undergoing such trials, only to be met with the tart rejoinder, “Hold your peace, child; do you think that this depends upon myself?” Indeed it did not. Nor did that strange phenomenon known as levitation. to which she was most liable and which seems to have alarmed her more than anything else. Her body would then become buoyant, as if all weight had departed from it; a great force beneath her feet lifted her up, and she could clearly be seen to leave the ground. She would do everything in her power to prevent this from happening, for she thought it “a most extraordinary thing, which would occasion much talk,” and cornmanded her nuns never to speak of it, but conceal it from them she could not. Sometimes she threw herself on the ground to avert the happening and they would cluster round her to hold her down; at other times she would clutch with both hands at an iron grating. It was bad enough when it occurred in the presence of her own community, but when strangers were witnesses she was not to be comforted; and would speak of her weak heart, or ask for a little water or some food in the attempt to make everything appear natural. Levitation is no uncommon prodigy,fn7 and is ascribed on good evidence to over two hundred saints and other persons, so
that the Bishop of Avila was probably not much surprised when he saw Teresa lifted into the air during Mass, but to Teresa herself it was one of the greatest shames and inconveniences she had to suffer. It seems curious, considering how subject she was to these various physical phenomena, that she should never have completed them by receiving the stigmata.

  IX

  TROUBLED BEHOLDER THOUGH she was, Teresa naturally derived an unspeakable inner joy from this constant communion with a region which to her was of such crowning importance. It is unnecessary and perhaps also impossible to suggest what the privilege of such access must mean to the believer. To know oneself for one of the elect despite the humbling sense of unworthiness that goes with such knowledge; despite the humility that in face of such a light abases one, dazzled, to the ground; to know that for oneself, inexplicably, in one’s lowliness, a corner of the curtain is drawn aside; to perceive for oneself the presentation of such recondite mysteries; to touch the ultimate secret; to account, through a revealed faith, for the unaccountable; to hear intelligibly the voice of the unintelligible God; to see the bodily semblance of the hidden God; to be privy to that which is concealed from all men, and which may yet comprise the answer to all science, all philosophy, all art, all searching—this, no less, is the possession of the mystic. “Oh my God,” said Teresa, “how different from merely hearing these words is it to realise their truth in this way! How different are spiritual matters from anything that can be seen or heard in this world!”