The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  Her women lamented at the grating; the grandmother arrived, an uncle arrived, the bridegroom himself arrived, but nothing could move her. She would say only that she must work out her own salvation, adding for the consolation of the poor distraught man that she was leaving him only for God, and that he had no reason to complain of that, but “when she saw that he was not satisfied she arose and left him.” It took an order from the King to remove her by force from that retreat. But, undefeated, she again gave her mother the slip one day when they had gone to Mass together and she had seen her mother safely into the confessional. Taking off her clogs,fn7 putting them in her sleeve, and picking up her long skirts, Casilda ran in all haste back to the monastery pursued by her dueña who seeing herself outdistanced, called out to a man to stop her. The will of God, however, was such that the man found himself unable to move and Casilda shut the door behind her, when the nuns immediately gave her the habit. Thus, for ever after rewarded with spiritual graces, she exchanged her “must rich and costly garments for the poor robe of serge.”

  If such urgency could be felt even by a girl in love, a girl to whom all the tenderest promises of the world were opening, a girl to whom renouncement meant not only the sacrifice of all sweet and tempting things,—love, children, home, riches, honour,—but also the painful obligation of wounding the heart of the man to whom she had given her own, how far more comprehensible becomes the determination of a heart-free Thérèse to seek the refuge of the cloister. The only person who could possibly be hurt was her old father; and, closely though she loved him, his claim upon her (had he chosen to make it) could not be allowed to stand between her and the reverberating call she heard from Christ. All other potential claims, of service to people she did not even know, were unformulated and, from her point of view, non-existent. The enclosed life gave the opportunity for complete absorption, for the total gift of self, for the fusion she must experience if she was to fulfil her destiny at all. Like Casilda, only with fewer obstacles, she must work out her own salvation.

  IX

  ACTIVE THOUGH IT was in some ways and not lacking in occupations, the life of Carmel was the contemplative life, and, as such, provided the perfect rounding-off for her philosophy. In order to amplify and clarify this point, it is necessary to expound something of the aims at Carmel and to show how they fitted in with her double intention of living the ultimate spiritual life and the faultless Christian life of daily contact. A manuscript of the thirteenth century declares that the life of Carmel has a double aim. The first, which may be attained by God’s grace through our labours and the practice of virtue, brings to God a heart free from actual taint of sin, and is dependent upon the charity which covers all errors. The second aim is a gift of God, and consists in experiencing here on earth the forces of the divine presence. It will thus be seen that although the first aim may be achieved by the exercise of our mortal will, the second is beyond our control and our only contribution can be a constant orientation of our desire towards the consummation. The rest must be left to God. Teresa of Avila herself had been well aware that not all her disciples would receive the final revelation but in spite of sacrifices and orisons would remain for ever on the secondary plane. She taught that the road to the true contemplation lay through the exercise of a giving and self-immolating love, but that the mystic union lay only in the background as a possible, miraculous, and infinite reward. St. John of the Cross put the same idea a little differently:

  Para venir a gustarlo todo

  no quieras tener gusto en nada.

  Para venir a poseerlo todo

  no quieras poseer algo en nada.

  (In order to enjoy everything

  you require to find enjoyment in nothing.

  In order to possess everything

  you require to possess nothing.)

  He had enlarged also on the ideals which the soul should pursue:

  Not the most easy but the most difficult.

  Not the most savoury but the most insipid.

  Not that which pleases but that which displeases.

  Not to desire the greatest but the least.

  Not to desire anything but to desire nothing.

  To arrive at that which one ignores, one must follow the road where one ignores.

  To arrive at that which one has not, one must follow the road where one has not.

  To arrive at that which one is not, one must follow the road where one is not.

  To obtain the All, one must abandon all,

  And when you come to possess the All, hold it without wanting anything at all.

  The premise of these ultimate values once accepted, there can be no escape from the logic of such an argument. The waters of mysticism are deep, and the peaks in its range of ambition high; confronted with such depth and such height, all else becomes insignificant. It is perhaps the most difficult of all subjects to discuss or interpret in words, since the essential privity eludes, the one thing needful is lacking, and words at best are only symbols of little meaning unless experience supplies the necessary element of recognition. In other and less abstruse fields even visual description can do no more than evoke a suggestion of the thing seen, yet in visual description some helpful element of familiarity is already present—a landscape, an effect of light, a flower, human features—but how far, even so, is the description removed from the reality! And if this be true, as it is undeniably true, then how incomparably harder to convey through the token-coinage of words any impression of a privity accorded to so few. The bank-note suggests little of the bars of gold buried in the cellars, or of the immense complication of weaving wealth in commerce and industry. As well attempt to explain the value of his penny to a beggar, or colours to a man born blind.

  We are moving here upon a plane disconnected from earthly life. Possibly the nearest approach to it is shared by the artist in his moments loosely called “of inspiration,”

  When the light of sense

  Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world.…

  for there is a greater resemblance between the creative artist and the mystic than between any other brands of human beings. It may be true of him that he walks then upon a tight-rope stretched between mundane and extra-mundane things; the comparison has often been drawn; but it must never be forgotten that although the inward sensation may be similar—that sense of being lifted out of self, exalted, filled with power, filled with a perception not blinding but revealing—it must never be forgotten that the aim is not consciously similar, not similar even in retrospect; unless, indeed, the pursuit of beauty runs a parallel path to the pursuit of God. As well it may. It is, at any rate, a desire for completion, a desire to resolve the confused and kaleidoscopic fragments into the entire pattern which must somewhere exist; the desire to which some souls have given up their earthly lives. There is no such thing as an inherent mystery; there is only the mystery of a thing we but brokenly understand.

  “There are moments, brief and unpredictable, when man has the sense of entering into immediate contact with an infinite Goodness … a semi-experimental perception of God, in very varying degrees of intensity and clarity…. No terms are of any use to render so new, so special, and so powerful an impression … an assurance given, a beam of light falling upon a living reality and illuminating it right down into its depths.”

  It has already been pointed out that in the higher mysticism the subject, one might almost say the victim, of ecstatic raptures accompanied by physical phenomena preserves a cautious and mistrustful attitude: the sweats, the fevers, the pains, the tremblings, the loss of consciousness, the lightening of the body, are not manifestations to be proud of as signifying a divine grace, but rather to be evaded, regarded with suspicion, and if possible concealed. Curious, and even impressive in their departure from natural laws, though they may appear to the casual inquirer, to the initiated they appear as the secondary and inconsiderable phenomena of a lower plane of spirituality. The true and utterly purified communion of th
e spirit with God should be unaffected by bodily consequences, once it has passed beyond the first stage where the consciousness and even the senses are involved. In the Wisdom of Solomon, “The corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things.” St. John of the Cross, moving in his rarefied air, dismissed such manifestations quickly and almost with a flick of contempt: the infirmities, sufferings, dislocation of the bones and other physical derangements were to him merely the result of ecstasies and raptures where the communications were not purely spiritual, for the sensual part of the soul is weak, without capacity for the strong things of the spirit. Basing themselves on this argument, it would be possible for the devotees of Thérèse of Lisieux to contend that her spirituality was of a higher order from the start than that of Teresa of Avila, since in her simplicity and openness of soul, her clear perceptivity, she had taken the short-cut to the goal where St. John’s “ray of high contemplation” may strike the soul with its blinding, illuminating light. She had never been called upon to suffer the “physical derangements” as Teresa had suffered them. They were not wholly unknown to her, but it seems clear from her own account that they were neither frequent nor excessive. Teresa of Avila had been flung about by the Devil; he had crashed her against a wall; thrown her downstairs and broken her arm; her limbs had become frozen and rigid; she had felt herself lifted into the air “as though by an enormous eagle.” Thérèse of Lisieux never underwent any trial approximating to this. How moderate, in comparison, is her narrative of one such incident, “I felt myself suddenly wounded by a shaft of fire so ardent that I thought to die of it … it seemed that an invisible force was plunging me wholly into fire. Ah, what a fire, what sweetness…. I seemed to be moving with a borrowed body, as though a veil had been thrown over all earthly things. But I was not burnt by a real flame.” She refrained even from the temptation of indulging in physical mortifications and penances other than those already imposed upon her by the rule of her Order, preferring the mortifications which she could constantly impose upon her spirit, and it comes almost as a surprise to find that she once made herself ill by wearing a metal cross whose sharp points dug into her flesh. Gratuitous external heroism was of no value to her whose life was made up of another kind of oblation. To all ecstasies, she wrote, she preferred the monotony of an obscure sacrifice. Her piety, if such an expression may be permitted, kept its feet more firmly on the ground, and even in her intense sense of union with her Creator it is noteworthy that she seeks always to express her emotion in the terms which will bring herself and her audience down to the nearest possible approach of the human parallel. Using the word in its nicest sense, one might say that she sought always to belittle. It is Jesus who is her intimate; Jesus the intermediary; Jesus the tender, the compassionate; Jesus the link between our frailty and the too-august conception of God the Almighty. Teresa de Ahumada referred with a grand simplicity to “His Majesty,” as one who is in the habit of frequenting Kings; Thérèse Martin prefers le petit Jésus, the Christ-child, the blond lover. Had not the Spaniard become, barely, “Teresa de Jesus,” whereas the little French nun softened herself into “Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus”?

  One must ask oneself, though the question may horrify the devotees of St. Thérèse, was she a true mystic in the sense that Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were true mystics? I think not. Not quite. It is true that she saw our Lady move and smile (though even in this case it must be taken into account that she lay at the time in a high fever and had a suggestive statue before her eyes); that she uttered prophecies, worked miracles, and felt the inner consciousness of Christ’s presence within her. But was her experience of this grace not deliberate rather than supernatural? It was what she had always consciously desired; it had not assailed her inescapably and, as it were, from without as well as from within. It is easy to persuade oneself when all the heart and will are thrown into the striving. In saying this, we must not lose sight of the general agreement that union—the ‘feeling’ of presence—cannot be obtained by intentional effort, and it may be an apparent contradiction to suggest that Thérèse received the divine guest simply by opening the gates of her soul for His admission. Yet it must also be remembered that hysteria, which is closely associated with mysticism, in some cases takes the form of a transference of the love instinct, common to all but in some temperaments more urgent and consuming than in others. Psychologists go so far as to use the word erotomania. Not that this word must be taken in the defamatory sense. It may on the contrary be regarded as the purest possible desire for devotion to an ideal image, where “the soul is nothing but ardour and love,” combined with a human longing for dependence, guidance, and protection which it naturally seeks in the most powerful conception known to it, the conception of the overwhelming God. Such a control relieves the fearful soul of vacillation and even of responsibility; problems are handed over into a stronger keeping; the mystery of existence is solved once and for ever; there is no conflict left save the conflict involved in the lively retention of the discovered truth; the answer to all questions is found. If this is the explanation of Thérèse’s piety, even though like all explanations it may be only partially satisfying, it is not surprising that she should have evolved her own Little Way as her “first aim” through which she might hope eventually for an occasional visit snatched up into that region which is bathed in light. In its very smallness it was in a sense the natural outcome of her upbringing and her circumstances, though not of her temperament. Therein lay her heroism. She had not started on the Little Way equipped with a nature adapted to its exigencies. Had unselfishness and self-effacement come quite naturally to her, as to some rare souls in the very air they breathe, there would have been less need to talk about it; it simply would not have occurred to her as anything unusual; and the Little Way might never have been so explicitly codified. But she was born self-willed, strong-headed, excitable, enthusiastic, spirited; it was not her instinct to give up to others or to give in. Asked once to give a definition of God’s omnipotence, she had replied “It means that He does whatever He likes”—evidently an enviable status in her childish mind. On another occasion when she and her sister Céline were offered their choice out of a basketful of dolls’ clothes and pieces of material and trimmings, all very desirable to the heart of a small girl, Céline modestly chose a roll of braid, but Thérèse grabbed and carried off the whole lot saying “I choose everything!” To us it is the natural reaction of the normal, avid child, but Thérèse saw it more symbolically. She observes that this incident of her childhood summarises her whole life, and that only later did the understanding come to her that in order to become a saint it was necessary to suffer much, to search always for perfection, and to forget oneself entirely; to choose everything, in fact, which God might send her. When the moment arrived for the Little Way to be put to the test, it would be seen how the patient training, the countless tiny inurements, the accumulation of resistance against the temptations of human weakness, would serve in the hour of trial like a well-disciplined army reliable in each of its component parts.

  Thérèse Martin, before she became Thérèse de l’Enfant Jesus, had been groping towards the realisation of her ideal. There had been the incident of the shoes on Christmas-eve; there had been the sudden illumination of her personal interpretation of the Epistle to the Corinthians. Each one of us has known comparable moments of significance in other fields of life, not recognised perhaps at the time, but seen as an upstanding peak in a later and more distant survey of our hilly range. The curious thing is that Thérèse practically re-invented the doctrine of Carmel for herself. It is inconceivable that as a child she should have read the works of either St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross; their lives she surely read, or had read to her, but their deep and difficult metaphysical idiom would have been utterly beyond her understanding; she even remarks that “visible angels,” by which she means her elder sisters, had been careful to choose books for he
r suited to the limited grasp of her years. It is probable that she had read The Interior Castle or had heard it read aloud in the convent refectory, since that was a work composed especially for the guidance of nuns in the difficult matter of prayer, and the same might apply to The Way of Perfection which of all St. Teresa’s writings comes nearest to a statement of Thérèse’s own principles; but, if so, she never mentions either of these works, and in any case she had evolved the basis of her own tenets before she ever reached the convent; yet she was only thirteen when she began to set herself a rule of life entirely consonant with St. John’s and St. Teresa’s precepts of love and abnegation leading to divine union, the nada and the todo, the nothing and the all. Even in minor matters Teresa had thrown off phrases very closely related to the Little Way : “in this most important matter (i.e. charity for our neighbours rooted in the love of God), we should be most vigilant in little things…. The Lord expects works from us. If you see a sick sister whom you can relieve, never fear losing your devotion; compassionate her; if she is in pain, feel for it as if it were your own…. This is the true union of our will with the will of God. If someone else is well spoken of, be more pleased than if it were yourself…. It is amusing to see souls who, while they are at prayers, fancy they are willing to be despised and publicly insulted, yet… if anyone unjustly accuses them of a fault, God deliver us from their outcries! Let those who cannot bear such things take no notice of the splendid plans they made when alone.” Ever human, she had also written in a vein specially applicable to Thérèse, “Sometimes a trifling matter gives as much pain to one person as a heavy cross would cause another. Sensitive natures feel very keenly slight troubles.” Yet at no time did Teresa become one of Thérèse’s favourite authors. As a matter of fact she speaks but seldom of anything she read, and, since with our detailed knowledge of her it is fair to suppose that any strong literary influence would certainly have been recorded in her autobiography, it is fair also to suppose that no such influence came her way. It is therefore perhaps unjust to deny her any originality of thought, since unaided she arrived at her conclusions, not knowing that they had been reached before.