The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  We’ll see Him take a private seat

  And make His mansion in the mild

  And milky soul of a soft child.

  Crashaw wrote this of Teresa, but how far more applicable it is to Thérèse.

  The fiancée and the bride are usually treated by her in equally tender terms. She is invariably the little fiancée, and the bridal day when she finally takes the veil evokes a veritable rhapsody of italicised littleness . It was “the little Holy Virgin presenting her little flower to the little Jesus. Everything was little on that day,” she says, but adds “except the graces that I received, except my peace and my joy in contemplating the beautiful stars of the firmament that evening, in the knowledge that I should soon take flight to heaven to unite myself to my divine Husband in eternal happiness.”

  It would be but a shallow spirit, however, which peered exclusively and with a dismissive irritation at Th6rese’s mannerisms, for the tough core of heroism is there, even if it must be disinterred from under layers and layers of cotton wool. The heroism of course consisted in apparently little things, but little things in such multitude, in such accumulation, that they finally fitted her for the physical martyrdom she was later called on to endure. Long since, she had trained herself in the habit of never complaining, of never explaining when unjustly accused, of never giving way to impatience if she found her possessions appropriated by others, of choosing always the irksome task and persuading herself that it was pleasurable. Was she unfairly reproached for leaving a vase in a dangerous position? she made no reply, except to promise to be less careless in future. Was there an aged, infirm, and querulous nun? she would take her under her charge, and with instinted patience would end by pleasing her when all the others had failed. Was she harshly treated by the Mother Superior and the Mistress of the novices? she accepted their severities without a murmur. Scolded for overlooking a spider’s web in the cloisters, scolded for pulling up weeds in the garden, which nevertheless she was doing by order, her sensitive nature suffered but she would not allow herself to protest. Was she tempted to seek the company of her own two sisters among the nuns? she denied herself this indulgence, she to whom the affection of her family had meant so much. One of her worst trials came from the proximity at prayers of the fidgety nun who never stopped rattling her rosary or rustling something or other; Thdrese, who was endowed with exceptionally keen hearing, thought that probably no one but herself noticed it, but to her it was a distraction and a torture she could not express in words. She longed to turn her head with a reproachful look—a sufficiently mild rebuke, one would imagine, administered by one who was literally bathed in sweat from annoyance—but instead of this, and instead of trying to ignore the sounds, which would in fact have been impossible, or so she says, she set herself to listen attentively “as though the disagreeable little noise had been a ravishing concert.” In the same way she overcame her very comprehensible dislike of having dirty water splashed into her face at the laundry wash-tub, and, instead of wiping it away, pretended to herself that she enjoyed it, with such goodwill that at the end of half-an-hour she really believed that she had acquired a taste for “this novel form of aspersion.”

  She had always liked pretty objects, or, at any rate, objects which she considered pretty; but she persuaded herself into a liking for objects which were not only ugly but also inconvenient in use. Thus, the water-jug in her cell had pleased her by its comeliness, but so well had she trained herself that she could actually rejoice when it was removed and replaced by one that was both coarse and chipped. Perhaps unconsciously, she was living up to Teresa’s regulation that if a nun should be observed to like one thing better than another, it should at once be taken away from her.

  It seems that she extended her rule of forbearance in a mysterious manner even to those beyond her immediate reach. On hearing one day that her sister Céline, who was still ‘in the world,’ proposed to attend a party with her cousins, Thérèse entered into a state of terrible distress and with many tears besought our Lord to prevent Céline from dancing. It fell out as she desired. Céline, habitually a graceful dancer, found herself unable to execute a single step; and, more remarkable still, her partner was likewise incapacitated from doing anything but walk, “most religiously with mademoiselle, to the great surprise of the entire company, after which the poor gentleman stole away (ce pauvre monsieur s’esquiva) in shame without daring to reappear during the rest of the evening.” Teresa, on the other hand, had often spent the recreation hour dancing to her own tambourine in the cool of the Spanish evening, accompanied by the castanets of her nuns.

  All the same, we should not suppose that Thérèse’s convent life was wholly without its innocent pleasures. There was a sweetness in her nature which had always made her turn to birds and flowers, and one of her greatest renunciations on entering Carmel had been the thought that she would no longer be free to run in the meadows gathering her nosegays. To her great delight she was not called upon wholly to bear this privation, but was given the charge of an altar which she might decorate with the cornflowers, poppies, and marguerites supplied in sheaves by the faithful. They were the wild flowers of the countryside, and had always had her preference. As for the birds, with memories of her canary and her linnet in her mind, she made it her business to collect any dead one she found lying on the ground and to give it gentle burial in a tiny cemetery in a corner of the garden. It does not sound a very cheerful occupation, perhaps, but it appears to have afforded her great satisfaction. The snow was another pleasure of which the enclosed life could not deprive her. Despite her dread of the cold, she had always loved snow even as a child : perhaps, as she remarks, because of her birthday being in January, she was herself a “little flower of winter.” But now her joy in it was doubled, for she could reflect that no mortal lover had the power of releasing a single snowflake from Heaven in order to charm his beloved.

  On three occasions in the year, too, the convent rule was relaxed in order to give its inhabitants, especially the young novices, an opportunity for the outlet of their repressed high spirits. After all, they were but of the age of schoolgirls, and moreover it may be true to say that in such communities, deprived of all natural contacts with life, forced into what is, humanly speaking, an unnatural mode of existence, privy indeed to an enlightenment and a concentration of purpose unknown to those living in the jostle of a confusing world, but singularly unacquainted with the releasing activities of human energy, there exists an atmosphere of innocent and immature fun, readily satisfied by elementary jokes and accompanied by ripples of guileless laughter. Teresa, who knew her daughters inside out and had no illusions about their frailties innocuous or otherwise, had recognised in her wisdom that a little diversion was desirable to relieve the tension of high-minded living. We remember that when she had retired to her cell intending to devote herself for the rest of the evening to prayer and meditation, she had good-humouredly laid aside her books in response to a gay and somewhat imperious summons to come down and entertain the sisters with her conversation; and, as we know, far from pulling a long face at dancing, she even joined in it herself, standing on no dignity, for, with all her severity, she was the least glum or pompous of Prioresses. It was thus the custom of Carmel to allow three annual days of relaxation, once on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28th), once on the feast of the Holy Name, a few days later, and once on the feast of St. Martha (July 29th). The feast of the Innocents, appropriately enough, is given up to the novices who become the star-turn (vedette) of the day. From morning onwards, the constitution of authority is turned upside down; in all matters except those relating to the holy offices, the heads of the community, Prioress, Sub-prioress, and Mistress of the novices, lay down their rank and are replaced by playful young substitutes who make the most of their brief reign. What matter though their election be slightly faked in order to fall on those who can best be trusted not to abuse their responsibility? Considerable licence is allowed, and the superiors take it in good part
when, according to custom, a little harmless fun is indulged in at their expense. Laughter goes unchecked, the fresh laughter of young girls over all the muddles and upsets which they deliberately provoke; work is abandoned; no one darns, no one scrubs floors, stands over the steam of the wash-tub, or sweeps the dust out of the cloister. The crowning festivity comes in the evening, and has been surreptitiously prepared on the previous day. It is a kind of charade, full of references to the life of Carmel, performed by the novices for the benefit of their elders; they have been allowed to ransack cupboards and wardrobes for any scrap of material they can find—and in that establishment vowed to poverty the haul is pitiable enough: a few tatters stitched on to the brown habit, but the spirit is what counts, and to their restricted standard of jollity the entertainment seems as rollicking as a carnival.

  The next celebration, in honour of the Holy Name, is more soberly conducted and consists principally in a profound concentration on the aspect of Christ as a baby; the only treat, in the mundane sense of the word, is a certain suspension of the rule of silence.

  But in high summer towards the end of July the novices again have things all their own way. It is the feast of St. Martha, that pleasant homely character who, with a large bunch of keys hanging at her girdle and a ladle in her hand, bustles forward as the patroness of all good housewives. (It is a little surprising to find her accompanied also by a captive dragon, which she is said to have acquired at Marseilles.) This day very suitably is devoted to the sole annual holiday of the sæurs converses, lay-sisters, of whom there are three or four in a Carmelite convent, and whose normal duties include all the cooking, the care of the garden and the poultry-yard, as well as the stitching of the alpargates; in short, always bent over some labour, on July 29th they may stand upright, stretch their backs, and take a day’s rest while younger hands perform their duties for them. They are made the heroines of the occasion; especially composed verses are recited in their honour; flowers are set before their places at the dinner-table; they are assiduously waited on, and the improvised young cooks vie with one another in the preparation of dishes which, without infringing the rules of abstinence or depleting too extravagantly the convent’s meagre stocks, shall yet bring some treat and variation into the monotonous bill of fare. Humble sceurs converses! throughout the year they have risen an hour earlier than the rest of the convent, they have toiled unceasingly, murmuring their prayers as they laboured; they have been orderly and frugal; it is fitting that the good St. Martha should remember them once a year and bring them repose.

  Thérèse does not refer to these recreations, though there can be no doubt that whether as a novice, a nun, or as Mistress of the novices (for, in spite of her youth, she rose to this position) she fully enjoyed this authorised pleasure, entering into the fun as gaily as ever she had played her own games at Les Buissonnets. She had not been very successful at joining in the games of her school-fellows, but then they had teased her and laughed at her; here, within the walls of Carmel, it was different, it was like a family despite the rubs and injustices, and underneath it all lay the common centralisation on the same great purpose. That could never be lost sight of, even in the midst of a frivolity which the Superiors in their wisdom had ordained. But there can be equally little doubt that, after her compliance, she returned with thankfulness to the silence and solitude of her cell, where she might pursue undisturbed the trains of thought and meditation which so continue to occupy her mind. They were dreadful enough, some of those hours, for it must not be supposed that the life of “the little saint” was made up entirely of the little things, whether onerous or agreeable. Like all of her kind, she was familiar with the terrible spiritual crises described by that beautiful phrase, “the dark night of the soul.” It seems strange, and a truly great mystery, that those who have so clearly heard a call to the reversal of the worldly order of things, who have been so intensely persuaded of the omnipresence and demands of God, who have so rapturously basked in the warmth of divine love as they understand it, should yet be subjected to those periods of doubt, aridity, and despair when the entire significance of their discovery seems withdrawn from them. Since the Christian mystics are so prone to make use of the imagery and even the phraseology of human love when speaking of the love of the soul, it may be permitted to reverse the simile and to consider for a moment how improbable would be a comparable occurrence in the love of the heart. Jealousy, quarrels, and suspension, those human failings, we may disregard since they have no counterpart in man’s striving towards God; but is it conceivable that a happy love, a love fulfilled and reciprocated, a love which is the finding of the perfect complement, should undergo such intervals of utter blank, when the thought or presence of the beloved should bring no stirring, no excitement, no transport, no response, no glow? It is not conceivable. A sense of unworthiness possibly, but never a total deadness of the fibres, an inability to blow a spark from the apparently extinguished fire. The reply may be that God is not always manifest even to the most ardent seeker; not manifest in the sense that the hand may be clasped, the body embraced, and the voice heard in its accents of reassurance. Theologians hold that this periodic drying-up of the spirit is sent as a test from God in order to show it that nothing but a desolation remains, a vacuum, once God is absent; that the spirit in itself and by itself is nothing. Teresa, herself a doctor of theology, had declared that God often temporarily withdrew His favours and that no more was needed to prove to us in a very short time what we really are. A salutary spiritual chastisement at the hand of God would seem indeed the only way for the worshipper to explain the discrepancy between the benevolence of the God of love and the obduracy of the God of wrath. The affliction of temporal misfortune, with its lesson not to set store on false values, may be understood; but this bereavement in the well-intentioned soul, desirous only of the utmost closeness with its Creator, is one of the major mysteries. Why should He who wishes to draw souls closer to Himself, elect to punish so cruelly those very ones who ask no better than to dwell constantly in the light of His presence and to sacrifice themselves utterly to His service? Why this hideous forfeiture, reducing St. Francis de Sales to the cry “although He should kill me, I will trust Him”? The lover of God has to take much on trust; the conviction and the conflagration must come from within the soul; and at times the soul flags; the effort is too great; it demands a respite; but during that respite what torments arise, what fearfulness, lest the treasure should be lost for ever, what sense of guilt and betrayal, what anguish of deprivation, what extinction of the vital light! Teresa said that the mind felt then as if it never had thought of God nor ever would be able to do so, and that when men spoke of Him, they seemed to be talking of some person heard of long ago. Strangest of all, perhaps, is the persistence which, despite the deadness of spirit, the abysmal blank, the inability to pray save with the lips, nay, sometimes even the positive disinclination to prayer, still holds the unfeeling soul fast in its determination not to relinquish the thing it paradoxically no longer apprehends.

  Something of this unexaggeratable anguish breaks from time to time through the rambling and almost chatty pages of the Histoire d’une âme. The prattle ceases, and in its place comes a cry as poignant as the cry of an animal trapped in the night. It is the echo of “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” “One must pass through this martyrdom in order to fully understand it…. It was night, deep night, complete desertion, a veritable death…. Bitterness filled my soul to the brim…. I passed through the most furious tempest of my whole life….” The practical difficulties put in the way of her admission to Carmel were as nothing compared with “this terrible disease of scruples,” this doubt lest for all her struggles she might after all have been mistaken in her vocation. Nature itself, she said, seemed to accord with her sorrow : the sun was hidden, rain fell in torrents; she had noticed it always at those times. She could sympathise with the agonised anxiety of St. Joseph and the Holy Virgin as they sought throughout the streets of Jerusale
m for the missing Child. She knew that Jesus was there somewhere, peacefully asleep, but how could He be seen through such obscurity? If only a thunderstorm would break, to cut the clouds with a shaft of lightning! That sense that there somewhere, just round the corner, but beyond reach, veiled, inaccessible, lay all comfort, all refreshment, was more deathly than death itself, for it carried with it the devilish suggestion of one’s own mistake.

  No amount of recurrent personal experience, nor the recorded and similar experience of other people, can alleviate the soul in such accesses of despair.

  XI

  OBEDIENCE OF COURSE was the prime and absolute rule, in small things as in great. Teresa sometimes had amused herself by testing the obedience of her nuns with ludicrous orders to see how far she could go without her authority being questioned. Thus one day in the refectory she was given a cucumber for her portion, very small and rotten within. Pretending not to notice, she called a sister to her and bade her go plant it in the garden. “She asked me whether it was to be planted endways or sideways. I told her sideways. She went and planted it, without thinking that it could not possibly fail to die.” This was harmless enough, but Teresa realised that under such acceptance of discipline it was not always wise to speak in jest. She had seen her own Prioresses get themselves into awkward situations in such a way. The Prioress at Toledo, looking at a pond in the garden, wondered out loud what would happen if she told a certain sister to throw herself in; the sister overhearing this, was immediately in the water, and so much wetted that she had to be sent to change her habit. This same Prioress, reproving a nun, told her she had better put her head in the well and there think of her sins, and such was the haste of the culprit to obey that, had they not gone quickly after her, she would have jumped right in and been drowned. It was very necessary, as Teresa said, for Prioresses to be cautious in dealing with souls whom they already knew to be obedient, otherwise they might find themselves in the position of the Prioress who, on being shown a very large worm by one of her daughters, replied “Go and eat it.” Only through the surprise of the cook on seeing a nun frying a worm, was the consummation prevented.