Teresa, my Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

It’s Christmas. People are buying trees, foie gras, oysters, gifts. Some will go to midnight Mass, millions are already clogging the freeways, apparently London is paralyzed by the weather (shame that the one destination that could tempt me is off limits due to global warming); there’s been a deadly pile-up in Gironde, three young people carjacked by a drunk in the 13th arrondissement, two dead, one critically injured. I’m staying put. The MPH ladies are of one mind for the vacation: they are trooping off for some thalassotherapy in Ouarzazate. For some unfathomable reason Morocco at Xmas is a magnet for the political class (“Of a right-wing bent,” my friend Dr. Marianne Baruch points out) and for women of a certain age.

Marianne is going as well, not looking forward to it much—but the alternative is “Not been there, not done that,” already the favorite expression of this Prozac-popping chronic depressive and proud of it. Ouarzazate wins: “Cheaper than Biarritz or Quiberon, and sure to be sunny, you know?” I do.

“So I guess Mme Leclercq will be staying put, as is her wont?” Our psychiatrist’s intent sympathy is trained on me. I must be looking even more oblivious than is my wont; Marianne is fishing for a smile.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

“I’m not the kind who says, ‘it’s nothing, just a woman drowning.’”

She doesn’t miss a trick, that one. When Dr. Baruch wants to please me, she fires off one of those Exocets I myself taught her to use, in this case a line from La Fontaine. We are supposed to chortle together. Not me so much, because I don’t agree with her in the slightest. For the moment Teresa is my entertainment, she’s a great deal more engaging than anything else, including thalassotherapy, and since my one vice is curiosity I’m currently devouring all I can get hold of that has to do with my saint in particular and mystics in general. I feel well within my rights to fire back: “I’m not drowning, darling, I’m allowing myself to be seduced!”

But I’ve underestimated her again.

“Not Bruno, is it?” she says, with a censorious sniff.

Well I never! Has she overheard a phone call, or gone into my e-mails? Unlikely, it’s not her style. Did she spot that old exhibition catalog of works by the Beguines, which Zonabend found in an antique bookshop and gave to me the other day?¹ “For company on your journey toward Teresa. Love, Bruno.” That surplus word “love” did not escape my notice. But Marianne can’t have seen the catalog or its inscription; I keep it at home, where I consult it religiously.

Got it: Bruno had Freud’s complete works delivered to me at the MPH address. The standard edition in English, twenty-four volumes accompanied by an “affectionate” note. A generous if somewhat ostentatious gift, and a peculiar one, because not only do I read English poorly, the MPH is also growing increasingly cognitivist, in line with the rest of our globalized planet, and disdainful of psychoanalysis. Zonabend decided to defy the international trend, he claimed, simply to “please me.”

Point noted. I got the message, and couldn’t help feeling a consequent twinge. My colleagues rapidly forgot about the anachronistic offering, except, as I now realize, for Dr. Baruch. In love and therefore jealous, my friend saw the whole thing in a flash, well before I woke up to the pickle I was in with my funny old publisher. Who has, sure enough, become rather more than that in recent days.

“Oh, stop fantasizing!” I stand up, to cut the conversation short. “Happy Christmas, happy hydrotherapy, happy New Year! Send me a card I might get before Easter!” I give her a warm, close hug, but I can sense that she’s not fooled.

For he did not stop at “love” and efforts “to please me” with gifts of books. We were at the dinner-date stage. I accepted the invitation, just to see what he was after. Never in our long and intermittent history had I thought of him in any but a professional capacity, but pieces of his story started coming back to me as I sat opposite him, nursing my drink, in the Café Marly overlooking the sculpture courtyard at the Louvre. The erstwhile handsome rogue and shameless philanderer had been kicked out by his wife—what, five years ago?—because she couldn’t stand any more of his Monster Baby scenes. To the surprise of tout-Paris, that microcosm of media-savvy glitterati, his wife went and married a great but obscure biologist at the INSERM medical research institute, without either celebrity status or private income—not much of a playboy either, at best a boat in the marina of La Rochelle, thanks to which I numbered him among my summer acquaintances. As expected, the diffident scientist had found safe haven in the arms of Stéphanie formerly Zonabend, henceforth Coblence. He has found happiness, actually, if the beaming face of their little girl, nearly three, is anything to go by. She skips along the strand at the Île de Ré under the frankly spiteful glances of the readers—mostly women—who feign an interest in the output of Zone Books.

So Bruno found himself alone, not really noticing, rapidly swamped by feminine attentions as calculating as they were tiresome. At length, having escaped this enterprising harem “for the sake of liberty and the Enlightenment,” as he put it, he settled into a comfortable, carefree celibacy. His only ambition now, his great priority, was to consolidate his position as a tough businessman. “The only publisher who doesn’t lose money by reading books”: quite a feat, I must say, in our times of runaway illiteracy. It won him respect across the board in the trade. Meanwhile he kept a proud eye from afar on the education of his twin sons, students at a prestigious business school across the Atlantic.

I thought he seemed shy, for once. His soulful eyes, like those of a romantic youth, slid surreptitiously from my lips to my cleavage and back, but sought more often to plumb my own gaze in search of goodness knows what depths. He had not, however, shed his old go-getting energy, his knack for knowing when to push. On this occasion he made bold to tell me about his boys, signaling intimacy. They had jointly won the sought-after Humboldt Prize, involving a training course in India related to the famous microcredits system that had earned its deviser a Nobel Prize. At the same time (“and this, Sylvia, is what matters!”) the experience had led the pair to discover Buddhism.

“You see, Thomas and Michaël are staunch rationalists, like their father, whose agnosticism you can rely on.” He took a long sip of Château-Lagune, closing his eyes beatifically. “But then they get to visit all kinds of holy places, temples, and monasteries. They talk to gurus, how about that? They even met up with one of their Israeli cousins, the son of my aunt in Haifa. The guy’s living in an ashram in Pondicherry, for goodness sakes! Mind you, what with those violent God-squad crazies in the Middle East not to mention our precious ally Bush and his neocons, I don’t blame the Israelis for getting hung up on Eastern spirituality, do you? First India, then Japan, it’ll be China next…Not your field, you say? Sure, it’s not mine either, but I’ve started learning Sanskrit, did I tell you? Absolutely, been doing it for a while now. No, I didn’t rediscover my faith, the future belongs to ecumenism, it’s just a matter of intellectual curiosity. At the same time I’m keeping up my Hebrew, in order to follow the teaching of a spiritual master who looks at the great currents within Judaism and knows how to put them across to people like me…So when I hear you talk about mysticism…Do you know that book by Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism?² Absolutely essential, my dear…Of course you have, but allow me to suggest you read it again, you know how these things mature with every reading, however many, in my experience…How about his Zohar? No? But that’s the very pinnacle, the ne plus ultra, you absolutely must, it’s all in there…Excuse me? I’m being ridiculous? But I thought you were letting me know that…well, that all that was important to you, and so I thought to myself I wasn’t so alone after all.” It was my turn to drain another glass of wine. Bruno wasn’t alluding merely to an exchange of spiritual intimations. “Of course, I mean, you approach the issue from a Christian perspective, and that interests me too…You must agree that Agamben’s book on Saint Paul is his best by far? I should have published that, don’t you think?…Oh, I can’t tell you anything, you’re so much more knowledgeable than I am, with your training and your female sensibility, goes without saying. And yet, how can I put this, a complicity between you and me is worth saying…I think so. A new alliance, if you like, in Hebrew they call it akeda, sacrificial alliance, or berit, over circumcision…Now you mustn’t feel that I’m trying to influence you, far from it, you write it your way, like you always have. For me it’s the diversity of approaches that counts, you know me, Mister Multi-pronged Attack…”

He floundered and flailed, absurdly and endearingly, and I felt he was being genuine. Was this really the same Bruno I had known ever since my Duras book? The cynical big shot with his marketing jargon, the wizard of publishing scoops with an air of the soixante-huitard recycled into a credible CEO? He wanted to talk and talk, certainly not to listen to me; his outpourings were rambling rather than erudite. I liked him better that way; I let him ramble on. When finally he got around to his Charolais steak I managed to slip in edgewise some details of Teresa’s life. Her Marrano grandfather, the court case over her father and uncles’ right to call themselves hidalgos, her ambiguous friendship with John of the Cross, her dalliance with Fr. Gratian. I’d unplugged my “Sigmund” antenna, it seemed more appropriate to bolster his male yearning for complicity.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” he nodded absently, as if in a dream, “that’s it, our subject. You don’t mind me calling it ours? But look here: what exactly did ‘love’ mean, to these people? We don’t know anymore, do we? And that’s the problem. The ‘Hiroshima of love,’ you said the other day, if I remember rightly? There you are: we don’t know the first thing about it, we’ve lost the taste for it…I hope you’re enjoying your fish?”

We had gone out into the Tuileries court. A biting wind drove snow against the steep glass of Pei’s Pyramid, blew white flakes into my hair, my shoes, in a giddy vortex of lights. Bruno drew me close to shield me from the blizzard breaking over Paris. Then he slowly turned my face toward his, found my lips, and I lost consciousness of all but the taste of his mouth. Fragrance of blond tobacco, enveloping saliva that dilates me. A burning sap creeps through my chest, flows into my belly, floods my sex, my thighs. My legs have gone. I want to gulp down everything, this man, the wind, the wine, the museum and its auspicious scars, I am pleasure open wide. Bruno feels it, feels me, comes closer still, his face vanishes, now the whirlwind of memory that raked it vaporizes it into a mist of sleet. His tongue is still inhabiting me, I am fluid, I will not cry out, I will not fall, I strain, I melt, he licks the roof of my mouth, my cheeks, he holds me back, we start again. Not me, not him, it isn’t us, this kiss belongs to nobody; someone or something beyond ourselves courses through it. Who is kissing whom? The Louvre itself participates in this exorbitant desire, and Notre Dame as well perhaps, and the Bernini sculpture of Louis XIV on horseback nearby, and the Pyramid, and definitely the Carrousel mall, and why not the Great Architect while we’re about it; and then there’s the Ganges, and my readings of La Madre, and the complete Freud, and Gershom Scholem, and Agamben, and the installations crafted by the Beguines—everything and nothing, in this snowstorm that’s painting the city white.

Unplanned and futureless, that strange, long embrace, outside of time, outside of place, had the tang of impossibility, and we both knew it. All the more reason not to let go, to cling on, with bodies on fire and bellies throbbing, in a weightless suspense that was neither erotic nor antierotic: more than perfect, pluperfect. As the pluperfect tense indicates an action completed before another action in the past, so must our ancient histories, Bruno’s and mine, have crossed in the far distant past, around follies and temerities that had been lived and left behind by others long before us. For a quick moment this past made as if to snatch us out of our skins before bringing us back, inevitably but undramatically, for once, to those pleasures we still call physical—according to Mother, Colette, or Sagan, I’m not sure which. All of a sudden our bodies felt pneumatic, impalpably light, drained of passion. Just a smile and a swarm of symbols and memories, a trail of exploding grenades.

Silence, taxi, “Take care of yourself,” “Work well,” “I’ll call you,” “I’m going away tomorrow.” Serenity.

He’s going away, I don’t know where or with whom, and I don’t care. Attempting to decipher Teresa’s experiences is pride and exhilaration enough. Now Bruno’s effervescent kiss makes me think that the headiness of it might be shared, like lonelinesses are shared that do not communicate but walk side by side into infinity. And it reminds me, if need be, that the most ideal quests keep me enthralled only insofar as they are wedded to the body. Alright, it’s my job to know that, I knew that. The extraordinary thing is that it took that silly, infuriating Bruno to remind me of it!

Build up a little database gleaned from the history of mysticism—now there’s an idea. After the Café Marly kiss plus the sensual details provided by my Teresa and avidly drunk in by me, I’ve lost my ability to classify, systemize, and synthesize. The useful oddments I come across in the works of theologians and other religious historians keep breaking up and scattering, before adhering like magnets to one another at the whim of my moods and fancies. I rearrange, I draw my Carte de Tendre,* my topography of feeling, in Teresa country. [*La Carte de Tendre: map of the emotions engraved in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie, 1655–1661.—Trans.] Did I say country? “Continent” is a better word for that mystical universe that Teresa may not necessarily have understood or truly explored, but which precedes her, surrounds her, and nourishes her unawares. Yesterday it made her more intelligible to me; today, however, I feel it muddying her singular, boundless, scandalous trail.

Whereas in canonical faith all souls are divine and by the same token immortal, I use the word “mystical” to denote a psychosomatic experience that reveals the erotic secrets of that faith in a parlance that it either constructs or silently refuses. In the mystical experience an extraordinary union comes about—while the speaker is in life—between the soul and his or her God, the finite cleaving to the infinite in order to consummate its true eternity, “alone with God” in the most immediate, intimate sense of a successful incarnation and indwelling. The body wounded by desire experiences and signifies its unspeakable union with the “fundamental principle of being” (Lalande),³ with the Other (Lacan),⁴ with “Christ’s humanity” (Saint Teresa of Avila). The figures of this hierogamy, this sexual and sublimated osmosis with the absent Beloved may vary, but each inscribes a fracture in the sacral community to which they pertain, and by derivation often touch upon the social and political pact itself. Maximal singularity, rupture of links, recasting of the religious, or of the a-theological quest: mysticism is regarded by “ordinary people” as a form of inner, albeit extravagant, wisdom at odds with the official knowledge, whether ecclesiastic or secular, that so readily reveres it when unable to recuperate it retrospectively.

The impossible desire for a lacking love object is exaltation and pain that are hidden, reticent, at once thrilling and morbid. Excess or emptiness? Or both? The word mystery, from the Greek μυω, “to conceal,” to be closed up (like lips or eyes or sores) goes back to the Sanskrit mukham, “face,” “mouth,” “entrance.” But the mystics, nurturers of this most inner of interiorities inhabited by the All-Other (le Tout Autre), transmute it to the outside—and hiddenness becomes a path. Life bursts into fullness, absence into genuine presence, suffering into bliss, mortification into delight, Nothingness into ecstasy, and vice versa. Religious space is thus transformed into a stage for love, while the search for truth becomes a matter of body-to-body, spirit-to-spirit, body-to-spirit encounters. Mysticism, without distinction of “categories,” embarks on a genuine recasting of metaphysics.

And yet, far predating this lexical appearance, hints of “mysticism” abound throughout the Bible. Moses finding God in the midst of the burning bush,⁸ Ezekiel with a vision of God’s chariot, receiving a scroll he must eat in order to deliver its message;⁹ these are scenes in which reason is overturned in the clearest light of day. Indeed, mysticism filters into the apocalyptic scriptures (the books of Enoch and Esdras), into Essenian convents, the Pharisee world, and the thought of the Jewish Mishnah masters—all these being focused on the knowledge and contemplation of God and his throne (Merkabah), goal of the mystical progress through the heavenly palaces. Various aspects of the Torah (oral revelation) and the Talmud contain mystical tendencies. Thus the subtle reasonings, like “mountains hanging from a hair,” of the Torah’s inspired scribes; the thirty-two logical rules defining the ways of acceding to Talmudic wisdom and developing the dialectics of reason, aim to elicit visions with the supreme goal of man’s identification with God. Then, from the first century B.C.E. to the tenth C.E., the Kabbalah comes to swell this biblical and Talmudic initiation. It calls the earthly world into being through the operation of twenty-two originary letters in the air, creative entities whose permutations express every idea and every thing. Pharisees, Essenians, the journey through the Hekhalot—palaces of Heaven, which Teresa will call moradas, the seven dwelling places of her Castle—the mystical impulse reemerges in thirteenth-century Spain and Germany. Contemplation, based on a scriptorial combination and practiced by means of techniques recalling those of yoga (breathing, positions of the body, musical notes), culminates in prophetic ecstasy, supernatural illumination, identifying man with the Torah, with the Word, and with God. Cross-fertilization with Islam and Christianity enriches these mystical currents, while Islam and Christianity in turn absorb the wisdom of visionary Kabbalists, despite and throughout the vicious persecutions, expulsions, and exterminations suffered by the Jews.

During the Middle Ages, a full-blown “medieval Jewish philosophy” flourishes in counterpoint to Arab philosophy. Unacquainted with Greek metaphysics, Talmudic thought that could be described as a monism of thought and action nonetheless developed a rich ambivalence between abstract speculation and mystical experience. Theological ignorance of God, who is undefinable by definition, does not rule out a loving knowledge of Him based on the Alliance: through the concept of shekhinah, God accompanies the exiled Jew on earth. The medieval gaon—a spiritual master such as Saadia Gaon, the political leader of the eastern diaspora—links rationalistic interpretation with enthusiasm for revelation; the commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah,¹⁰ that germ of the Kabbalah, with the moderate religious philosophy followed by the Muslim Kalâm. As part of the same opening toward philosophical reflection, Jewish mysticism evolves with Judah Halevi¹¹ and Maimonides,¹² preceded by Ben Joseph of Fayum,¹³ Solomon Ibn Gabirol,¹⁴ who looks deep into his affinities with Plato,¹⁵ Philo of Alexandria,¹⁶ and Gnosticism. Not forgetting Bahya Ibn Paquda,¹⁷ who stands at the intersection of these tendencies, or Abraham Abulafia,¹⁸ who takes up the theory of the mystical power of the alphabet to explore the “unknotting of the soul” by means of musical experiments with arpeggios, transpositions, canons, and fugues. At last comes the surpassing step that is the Zohar, in the second half of the thirteenth century: the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, whose presumed author, Moisés de León, insisted on attributing it to a second-century Mishnah scholar.¹⁹ Reprising the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar drops the distinction between “spirit” and “letter,” condensing them instead into an indivisible unit. And gathering the diverse components of Jewish mysticism into one harmonious structure, it graces the exile of Israel with the ultimate meaning of releasing the “divine sparks” and completing the work of redemption.²⁰ Translated into French by Jean de Pauly,²¹ the Zohar went on to influence no less a figure than Marcel Proust!²²

Such a wealth of tendencies, however, can never overshadow the Torah and the Talmud, writings that destined the Jewish people—committed to biblical exegesis and free of major mystical interferences—to a ceaseless study of the texts, so as to imbue themselves with the spirit of God’s Law and put it into practice, thus assuring the salvation of the chosen community.

Bruno is far away, it would be untrue to say I ever think about him, and yet I feel him alongside me, inside me, for example when I’m leafing through the Beguines catalog. My readings of the past few weeks are arranged in my mind like the surrealist collages of those bygone pious women who piled bits of string and handfuls of rose petals around the figure of Baby Jesus. The Sovereign Infant was liable to disappear altogether under the cumulative passion of those tender sisters. He merged with the huge heart they embroidered for him in cross-stitch or molded out of crushed, colorful butterfly wings, a heart that was the real theme and focus of the work. Was it Jesus’s heart, or was it theirs?

It would be wrong to assume that contemporary artists have transcended this kind of reiterative, magpie accumulation. I see a lot of it in the galleries, and most often the artist is a woman. One, Annette B., trusted me enough to lie down on my couch. Her wary, piercing eyes seem cloned from Picasso’s. As a rule her words do not get past her lips, or only in spurts of dulled, futile complaint, abruptly doused. A long, frozen silence ensues. When the artist can no longer bear her own speechlessness, she brings me some “beguinesques,” as she calls her confections of twisted threads, mounted letters, screws of paper, beads, buttons, leaves, and a series of tiny cut-up photographs, skillfully embedded in the vortices of this kaleidoscope of mega-significant nothings. Photographs of her dead children. Impossible icons of impossible loves. Annette’s “beguinesques” succeed in making such impossibilities visible. At least to people who enjoy looking. And who’ve been through a vortex like hers.

I cut out my data, I sort, I glue, I amass. My canvas is taking shape. No, it’s lost me. Later on I will set Teresa into it and she will resorb the picture, all that will be left is her very own heart, her style, her beat.

Might it be because Muslim mysticism slumbers in the form of “Koranic seeds” within the values, if not the formulations, of the dogma? Or is it down to the Neoplatonic influence? In any case, the first mystics appeared in eighth-century Iraq, as bands of ascetics who cultivated trust in God (tawakkol). They “repeated” God’s name and began to believe in a prior communication between God and His creature. A little later, clad in white woolen garments (suf), the Sufis gathered into spiritual circles and concerts, bent on a loving union with God. Schools sprang up in the cities of Basora and Baghdad, then across Afghanistan, India, and Egypt, until the advent of the Master, al-Hallaj, a mystic who was martyred in 922 C.E.²³ The Hellenic origins of this mystical experience, which took the form of a poetic quest, are not in doubt. It was a “science of the heart” that sought to transform the sensible body into pure “spirit” (in philosophical terminology) through the burning love that consumes the saint, disposed to “isolate himself before the One.” “Legal war” thus mutates into “inner war,” and the Seal of Saints embodied by Jesus is set against Muhammad’s Seal of Prophets; God is henceforth to be sought within, and the mystic, rather than overthrow the Law, transcends it. “I have become the One I love and the One I love has become me. We are two spirits infused in a single body,” wrote al-Hallaj.

Whether focused on reciprocal love (al-Nuri), private inspiration (Ibn Karram), or union with God (al-Hallaj), Sufism borrowed the spiritual methods of Christian monachism while influencing that movement in return. It also appropriated Hindu and Persian techniques.

Accused of heresy and impiety, stigmatized for its incompatibility with the Law of Islam, Sufism finally found a direction: the compromise between juridical authority and ecstasy paved the way for its esoteric brotherhoods. Notwithstanding some serious deviations that degenerated into opium clubs and sham whirling dervishes with dodgy morals, in the eighteenth century, philosophical Sufism became an “existential monism,” with the Andalusian Ibn al-Arabi: no distinction between the soul and God any longer subsists in the mystical union.²⁴ Committed to immanentism, eschewing neither literal meaning (anathema to the Shi’a) nor sacred meaning, this current believed that the Absolute cannot become conscious of itself other than through Man in the image of God. In Sufi thought, then, immanence and transcendence are not mutually exclusive, and opposite meanings (as in the “primitive words” studied by Freud) coincide, since the Unique is manifest in the All. “I mean that you absolutely do not exist, and never will exist by yourself alone, any more than by Him, in Him or with Him. You cannot cease to exist, because you do not exist. You are Him and He is you, without dependence or causality. If you accept that quality of your existence (which is to say, Nothingness), then you shall know Allah. Otherwise you shall not.” As a result, “the prayers of lovers are blasphemous.” There are five steps leading to this revelation of Being at the same time as the impossibility of Being: “there is of him only Him”; “there is of you only You”; “there is of me only Me”; “I-ness, you-ness, he-ness, all these are viewpoints that add to the eternal essence of the One.” Set in motion by God, the experience soars into the “limitless,” where it is vividly clear that only “he who is not in love sees his own face in a pool.”

Meanwhile, as of the eleventh century, mystical poetry had put down roots and thrived, feeding off profane, erotic, and bacchic poetry. The “sultan of lovers,” Ibn al-Farid was one such,²⁵ along with the Persian mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi, founder of the whirling dervishes brotherhood,²⁶ and the Turkish poets Nesimi and Niyazi.

This adogmatic Muslim mysticism resisted integration into the Islamic mainstream, until the Sufi theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali proposed a “mystical orthodoxy” that would complete traditional knowledge with a “taste” or realization of God: an intimate knowledge that was gained through tempered asceticism.²⁷ Sufism went on to spread the cult of thaumaturgical saints—including al-Hallaj,²⁸ the most revered of all despite his excommunication—and became a “popular religion,” treating the Muslim faithful to that “taste” the jurists had denied them and so reinvigorating the moderate morality of that faith.²⁹

“Hello? Can you hear me, Sylvia? Where am I, I’m in Thailand! Told you, didn’t I? Okay, my mistake. The Phuket beaches, crawling with tourists…Fantastic. No sign of the tsunami…at least not around here…Me, scared?…Of course people have short memories, what do you expect, that’s life…Oh, the usual, swimming and sleeping. And I’ve been going to this Buddhist temple…Sylvia, please, the Muslims are in Indonesia…Actually no, I haven’t converted, or not yet. But I’m great chums with one of the bonzes. I’m approaching the Void. Go ahead, laugh! If you’re not wise to Nothingness, my dear, you may as well give up the mysticism game. Even your baroque saint must have known that…The Void is at the bottom of everything, you dig?…How do you mean, compatible with my lifestyle? These Buddhists are highly pragmatic fellows…Tomorrow I go to Banda Aceh with this NGO, old friends of mine, they’re building boats for the fishermen who lost everything in 2004, you know. We’re going to walk the sandbank in Lhoong…really beautiful…So you’re surprised to see me doing something humanitarian? That’s right, it’s got a lot to do with the boys and their gurus…They’re fine, thanks…And so’s Stéphanie, why do you ask. You know it’s finished…Just a stop-off in India…Yes, of course we’ll do a book, with photographs, it’s the trend, and besides it’s my job…That’s right, everything is connected. I don’t have to explain that to you of all people…Ciao, take care…kisses and all that, you know.”

Do I know or am I forgetting? Inimitable Bruno! He’s far away, and he’s who he is. Let him make his own discoveries in his own way. He can sort out his syncretism however he wants, I’m all for the great leap from Paris glitz to global compassion, but I’d rather he went into analysis, it would save so much time…Oh well. I guess I don’t always take the shortcuts either, I follow my own detours. With Teresa, for instance.

Are the mystical currents that flow through the three monotheisms the result of interferences, contaminations, influences, or structural coincidences? Did the Hassidim sway Meister Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler after introducing the thought of Maimonides into the ghetto of Worms? Or was it the other way around? Did the Arab peripatetics in the wake of al-Kindi³⁰ transmit the symphony of the two great philosophies of antiquity, Platonism and Aristotelianism, via Albert the Great³¹ to Eckhart himself? And in particular the theory of analogia entis that posits the paradoxical nature of creation as at once Being and Nothingness? The ebullience of Being as the negation of negation? Nobility as humility and detachment?

Whatever the channels and facets of this convergent experience, all of whose manifestations are regarded as “mystical,” it has to be acknowledged that the true “deification of the Christian,” or “theogenesis,” was the doing of Greek patristics and its thinkers such as Origen,³² Gregory of Nyssa,³³ and Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite. What Saint Augustine called abditum mentis, the “hidden place” of the soul, and its sequence of conversio/reformatio/conformatio, became tools for attaining ecstasy. Thus began a complex history during which the Church would bestow two complementary meanings on the expression corpus mysticum, the union with impossible, indispensable Love.

On the one hand the Eucharist invites each believer to incorporate the Body of God, for Christ is the one true love object: “This is my body, this is my blood.” Eat me, I am in you, and you can form part of the body of this ideal Subject, this single being who redeemed every member of humanity. A modest event during the early years, the Mass grew ever more sumptuous, performing its osmosis under cupolas ringing with music and naves lined with sculptures and frescoes: an erotic, purified, intense osmosis whereby men and women alike identified with the Body of Christ and its mortifications, death and resurrection. In Communion I swallow the bread and wine, Jesus’s flesh and blood, I introject the Christ, I am Him and He is me, we fuse in hierogamic union. I do not participate in, I partake of His Passion and resurrection, of Hell and Heaven, of Nothingness and bliss.

On the other hand and at the same time, the community of the faithful, which is to say the Church, is born of this sacramental communion and assures its continued social and political relevance.

Faced with those Christians who still take communion—scarcer in the West than on other continents—I follow Freud in wondering whether the Eucharist does not perhaps constitute a necessary psychodrama, one which allows participants to experience in a “closed space,” in the recondite security of the service, the ravages of desire in order to quench them and as far as possible preserve the community from them. I would like to think so. Or perhaps on the contrary, this sacrament slyly authorizes, if not brutally imposes, the sadomasochistic truth of human passions at the very heart of community and intercommunity relations. Persecutions, pogroms, purges, roundups of heretics, inquisitorial trials, all were unfailingly sealed by the sacrament of Communion…Christianity’s two thousand years of history bear witness to the vertiginous effects of this pendulum. Today, at last, we are surely justified in hoping that the time for stillness has arrived. Pope Benedict XVI plays Mozart, after all, while certain other faith leaders trumpet holy war. Not that this defuses the tensions of identity politics, or prevents the reaction against real or supposed aggressors from poisoning the very discourses that most flaunt their commitment to helping the less fortunate, or to defending human rights. Murderous violence answers violence, intolerance combats intolerance, and mindless fundamentalists, both Muslim and Christian, plan massacres bloodier than the Saint Bartholomew of Voltaire’s nightmares.

Throughout these vicissitudes, it is none other than the bodies of the mystics of both sexes, delivered through their writings, that offer themselves as the secret laboratory in which human beings have been able to reach maximum lucidity about the physical and psychic excesses of their fantasy-induced transports. In the wake of this solitary, perilous experimentation, reforms, foundations, and schisms arose to ensure, over the long term, the vitality of illusions and the renewal of both doctrine and institutions.³⁴

From the middle of the twelfth century on, the phrase corpus mysticum no longer denoted the Eucharist but simply the Church, and corpus verum was used for the osmosis with Jesus through Communion. The adjectives mysticum (“hidden”) and verum (“knowably real”) changed places, and a chiasmus appeared: from now on it was the Church, the social body of Christ, that would enclose the “hidden meaning” of the sacramental “true body,” rendered visible in the form of consecrated bread and wine. This meant that nothing in Catholicism was now hidden! With the Church presenting itself as ever more universal and inclusive, the mystery it celebrated and enshrined could no longer be a secret for anyone. It follows that the transubstantiation of the God-man into bread and wine was no longer a mystery properly speaking, but a “knowable reality” that invites communicants to immerse themselves in it, body and soul, desire and reason; to each his or her own journey within a truth susceptible of being universally acknowledged. The appeal to extreme individual experience was henceforth coupled to a wholesale communitarian, not to say pragmatic, concern.

The revolution undergone by the corpus mysticum entailed momentous consequences. Before, the body of Christ signified by the hidden sacrament (the mysterious, mystic Eucharist) linked apostolic history to the present Church. Now, the Church was the hidden signified of the visible signifier that is Christ’s body. Christian history and the sacrament stood connected to, yet separate from, the Church, which was entirely their extension: mysterious, mystical, and yet open to all. This curious topology could not but inscribe itself within the subjects who shared in it, for it was in the social and political reality of the present Church that the mystical third (the union) must be produced. The Church was therefore summoned to reform itself, its mystical body had to be constructed as a fusion of community and communion, of the social bond and the bond of desire for the Other. At that point two movements became possible: the Reformation, with its social imperatives, which was already underway (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries); but also, in a parallel counterpoint, the supernatural excesses, the fervid amorous transports, the ever more bizarre extremes that enacted the risks of subjective freedom and prefigured from afar the baroque faith of the Counter-Reformation (late sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries).

It was during the thirteenth century, then, that the peculiar profile of Christian mysticism took shape. Just as Thomas Aquinas³⁵ was applying Aristotelian philosophy to biblical and evangelical revelation in order to show that the unity of God was accessible to reason, a galaxy of mystics prepared to sound out and diffract this same reason. They infiltrated it with the logics of love and Nothingness, giving the Greek Logos a pre-Socratic slant, and, rather than seek to prove God’s existence philosophically, they anticipated the contemporary investigation into the very need to believe in the form of a polymorphous experience of love, excessive and inescapable.

Among the figures who illustrated these various currents and left a profound mark on European culture, I would underline—as does Teresa, my guide in this research—the “modern” devotion of the Flemish school, especially the lovelorn Jan van Ruysbroek³⁶ and the great poetess Hadewijch of Antwerp;³⁷ but above all the Rhenish mystics, first among them Meister Eckhart, the “unborn” (ungeboren), who begged God to leave him “free of God.” A “deep calling unto deep,”³⁸ “free of all things,” “creating emptiness,” the soul “begets God from within itself, where it has the color of God; there is the image of God.” The soul of the “nobleman” is, according to Eckhart, negative as much as unitive; a supreme Intellect, but also a superessential Nothingness.³⁹ It reaches the mystical state in Gelassenheit, the “abandonment” sung by Angelus Silesius in his The Cherubic Pilgrim,⁴⁰ after Henry Suso⁴¹ and John Tauler,⁴² Eckhart’s direct continuators, had managed to smuggle his message as far as Nicholas Krebs of Cusa⁴³ and into the stream of “speculative” mysticism that culminates in Jakob Böhme.⁴⁴

The mystical theology thus created, having fertilized Christianity with late classical thought and Neoplatonic techniques of spiritual purification, would furnish the whole vocabulary of German philosophy. “Here is what we were looking for!” exclaims Hegel⁴⁵ upon reading parts of Eckhart’s sermons 12 and 52, while Schopenhauer writes that Buddha, Eckhart, and himself “teach substantially the same thing.” Heidegger, for his part, constantly abandoning himself to the “abandonment” of Silesius,⁴⁶ modulates the analogia entis that enables the conception of Being and Nothingness.

Fanned by the Salamanca student, John of the Cross, did the Rheno-Flemish wind blow as far as Teresa of Avila? It takes nothing away from La Madre’s originality to admit that the answer is yes.

Indeed, women are the foremost architects of this new dwelling-place of the soul we call mystical experience: an erotic, lethal escalation propels them to the summit of excessus. In Hildegarde of Bingen, this takes the form of a fabulous anatomical perception of her own body.⁴⁷ It is enfeebled but sovereign in the cult of “nothing,” the apophatic thinking expressed by the “severed, immobile tongue” of Angela of Foligno.⁴⁸ It inflames the anorexic Catherine of Siena with sacrificial devotion when she licks the pus from a cancerous breast:⁴⁹ this fervent Dominican became the patron saint of Italy alongside Saint Francis of Assisi⁵⁰ and Saint Thomas Aquinas. She was made a doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI, at the same time as Teresa of Avila.

Why is there such a female infatuation with mysticism? Modern scholars have outdone one another in fascinated hypotheses. Is it because a woman’s whole body is a sexual organ, because desire scorches her skin, her eyes, her ears, her tongue, her clitoris, her vagina, and her anus alike, and all her senses sweep her toward the object of her desire while he, like the Beloved in the Song of Songs, is always eluding her, a fleeing spouse or hidden God, absent, invisible, imaginary, unimaginable? If a woman’s whole body is a sexual organ, it can just as thoroughly repress desire to the point of sickness or vacate it into daydreams, words, sublimity.

The reasoned Protestant faith was quick to pour scorn on such deviations: “Visionen will ich nicht!” declared Luther.⁵¹ But the Golden Age Spanish Illuminati did not hesitate to draw on reformed humanism, and the Counter-Reformation seeded in its turn a new flowering of mysticism.

While reformed congregations put the accent on Scripture and the charitable vocation of a Christian community whose moral rigor was intended to quell and resorb the excesses of the desiring body, the Catholics, whose resistance to this formula was empowered by the Counter-Reformation, strove to make the secluded meanders of faith plain to see within the actual space of the Church—to infiltrate the corpus mysticum via the corpus verum.⁵² From then on, the more modulated meaning of the word mystic exhibited itself with forceful brilliance: it no longer denoted an inaccessible concealment, but beckoned what is concealed to come forth; it summoned the torments of flesh and spirit to emerge into the light and to seduce us. The corpus verum—Christ’s Passion, of which the subject partakes—was no longer a protected secret. By the grace of the mystics and of the Church that consecrated them, the seduction became universal.⁵³ Such was the context of Teresa’s experience.

This mutation would unfold through a long and patient labor of theology, ritual, and aesthetics, tending to invent an ecclesial mystical body to link the present of the ecclesial institution (the hierarchy) to its history (textual, scriptural), but also to couple the boundless intimacy of mystical experiences to the visibility of religious society. The hearing of confession had already broken down some social opaqueness. The elevation of the Host accompanied by its observed consumption made a spectacle of the sacramental body itself, exhibiting the mystery in public. All this contributed to manufacturing the paradox of a transparent intimate body. Private life was “individualized” by highly customized “spiritual guidance” and other “confidential” dialogues, leading to the dissemination of “Exemplary Lives” or “Exercises” for the edification of a fascinated populace. A radical transformation took place via this process of visualization of the sacred, which today we might call the mediatization of the sacred, in and through the new conception of the Church promoted by the third⁵⁴ and fourth Lateran councils⁵⁵ and given a radical twist by the Council of Trent⁵⁶ and the ensuing Counter-Reformation. Even prior to that, however, as the hidden became progressively “mediatized,” so the new mysticism became “epiphanic”: the corpus mysticum would be a placing in common, a transparent solidarity with the wretchedness of the “exiled” creatures that we are, and beyond: “Omnes…habebant omnia communia” (All the faithful together place everything in common).

The brilliant novelty of the Counter-Reformation, whose signature saint Teresa became, was its way of placing the turbulence of desire in full view and in common, thanks to the transparency at work since the twelfth century: a turbulence that was sacred inasmuch as it was representable, secret inasmuch as sensual, and, not least, rhetorical. Erotic, tortured carnality would be magnified by composers and painters, Vivaldi⁵⁷ and Tintoretto.⁵⁸ And the city of Venice turned corpus mysticum in its entirety would deploy its perpetual therapy, the real presence of the desiring body indefinitely reborn, a renaissance in every painting and at every concert. It has been labeled an aesthetic religion. But it’s more than that: the “mystical body” and the “real body” come together in the art of the Counter-Reformation into an unprecedented blossoming of representation alive to the infinity of bodies. Inside-outside bodies, supple, mobile, baroque, transitive, contagious, the very bodies conjured up by Teresa of Avila; a sacred apprehension of God’s presence in that part of the soul where the sensible melds with the highest spirit. The mystical experience (Teresa’s experience, the one that intrigues me here), whether it lets itself be influenced by the mutations of the corpus mysticum while influencing them, or whether it is also subject to the course of secular history, never fails to cultivate, steadily and tirelessly, that third place, that mystical third consistent in union with the divine, hic et nunc.

Imperceptibly, however, the content of this mystical union also mutated, in such a way that its protagonists (for me, here, Teresa) appear to us as the inventors of brand-new psychic spaces. Mysticism is the crucible of subjective diversities produced by the history of Christianity. With hindsight, several types of “interior castles” can be glimpsed, among which Teresa’s construction stands out for its extravagant originality: an unprecedented combination of total exile from self in the love match with the Other, acute lucidity, rhetorical exuberance, and staggering levels of social activity. This was before seventeenth-century medicine and investigative reason had neutered those firebrand negativists, those insurgents of the concept, those oxymoronic maniacs, the mystics, in order to install the empire of the cogito. Before eighteenth-century libertinism had cynically desecrated the innocent erotomania of nuns. Before today’s calculating mentality had stopped it up and shrunk it down, in benefit of the new maladies of the soul and the antipsychotics industry.

Turned into a laughingstock, jeered at on church squares during medieval carnivals, mysticism retreated for good as soon as Renaissance and Enlightenment eroticism prised the sexual body away from its secret enclave in the shadow of cathedrals and let it loose to gambol in drawing rooms and boudoirs, in paintings, music, and books. The libertine consciousness definitively silenced the mystics who had opened the gates of desire. By dint of overrefining physical delights alongside those of words, colors, and sounds, the incipient sexual liberation whose apogee was reached in the French eighteenth century was impatient to cut free from the polychromatic journeys Otherward of the soul, and soon began to shut the numberless doors of the interior castle.

Nowadays we might read the mystics much as we sniff the opium waft of moldy parchments, for they are merely the vestiges of a vanished humanity, fit to inspire some atavistic poet or a man like Heidegger,⁵⁹ that deconstructor of metaphysics who saw himself reflected in Meister Eckhart: “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.” But in that case, why is it mysticism that attracts me, that attracts us, when we attempt to break free of instrumental rationality, or to loosen the vise of fundamentalist manipulation and analyze the insane logic of the terrorist’s ecstatic drive?

As he was finishing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant hoped for, and glimpsed in a flash, the possibility of a world in compliance with moral law.⁶⁰ But the proclaimed universality of the rights of man has still not given our global village an exemplary code of ethics, and the rolling news of the postmodern age brings home the persistence of barbarity more cruelly than ever. Perhaps this is because the Kantian promise was not to be imagined as the fruit of some inconceivable “intelligible intuition”; it could only be that of the “world of sense” linked to “practical reason,” and more precisely, of the “corpus mysticum of rational beings in it.” By corpus mysticum Kant understood a universal “systematic unity” (that “unity-union” again!) informing “the liber arbitrum of the individual…under and by virtue of moral laws”; a systematic unity “both with itself, and with the freedom of all others.” “This is the answer to the first of the two questions of pure reason which relate to its practical interest:—Do that which will render thee worthy of happiness.”

There is nothing to connect Kant with Teresa of Avila. And yet, notwithstanding the gulf between their times, cultures, vocabularies, and projects, this corpus mysticum appearing in the last pages of the Critique of Pure Reason doesn’t strike me as foreign to the saint’s experience, or even to my submarine nights. Where does this resonance come from?

If Kant’s ultimate aspiration to “reunite” morality and freedom speaks so strongly to me, it’s because the final metaphor of unity—the union with the self and with all others, the All-Other—cannot be understood merely in the present trite and bankrupt sense of solidarity, or even fraternity. Such a diminishment not only clips the wings of the adventure; too many heads have also rolled along the way. If freedom is synonymous with desire, how can I enter into union with the centrifugal, centripetal forces of my own desires, let alone with those of others? This question is still searching for an answer. “Seek yourself in Me,” said the Other to Teresa, and they never ceased answering each other. How? On the analyst’s couch? At a meeting of the UN Security Council? At a rock concert? At the Beijing Olympics? At a Gay Pride march? By playing Mozart operas at Ground Zero, in Tel Aviv, in Baghdad? Contrary to all rational expectation, Kant invites us to update an ancient European experience, the theology of the corpus mysticum. Is this possible? What if it were?