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

And so I arrived at this conclusion: Teresa’s ecstasy is no more or less than a writerly effect! Spinning-weaving the fiction of these ecstasies to transmute her ill-being into a new being-in-the-world, Teresa seeks to “convey,” to “give to understand” the link with the Other-Being as one between two living entities: a tactile link, about contact and touching, by which the divine gifts itself to the sensitive soul of a woman, rather than to the metaphysical mind of a theologian or philosopher. To sense the sense, to render meaning sensible: in Castilian, Teresa’s writing and her ecstasy overlap.

Perceived by the mouth and the skin, essentially gustative and tactile, water is the fiction par excellence of a body thought-touched by the Other, thinking-touching the Other. It is the privileged element of an unsymmetrical reciprocity that realizes the contact between outer environment and inner depths. Water also reveals that the praying body is an orifice-body, a skin-body, that operates through proximity and is perpetually in vibration with everything that affects it.

Normally, sight and hearing tend not to be invaded by what is seen or heard. In the case of mystics and artists, however, the senses may be so overwhelmed by perceptions that they all work like the sense of touch. With Teresa, this incessant exposure is no bar to lucidity, but rather a royal road, the divine road to a more nuanced apprehension of that Self reborn in the link to the Other.

In Greek (aisthesis) as in German (Gefühl), the same term designates both touch and sensitivity, as though to insist that touch—understood as the generic for all the senses—transcends the senses; it founds them and exceeds them. That is why touch is not confined to any particular organ; it is not exclusive to the skin, or the mouth, or the hand, or the flesh.

Teresa seeks in vain, all through her body, for this enigmatic agent of contact and sensibility. After journeying through the multiple dwelling places piled up in her castle, she finally withdraws to the deepest retreat of inner space, a provisional, elusive place of shifting levels that liquefies at the very instant when the writer—and with her the reader—tries to stabilize it within fixed contours. Is it some cavity (vaginal, gastric, pulmonary)? A ceaselessly pulsating cardiac muscle? Where should the nameless site of self-perception of one’s own insides be located, when a touch from outside filters through into one’s heart of hearts? Teresian theology, echoing the Aristotelian idea that intelligence becomes intelligible “by contact with the intelligible,” “for “thought does think itself,”¹ is a psychosomatic intelligence engaged in a permanent act of deconstruction–reconstruction; it perceives and traverses itself by constantly destabilizing and restabilizing the contact between contingency and the intelligible: to-ing and fro-ing, crossings, ripples.

Hunting for the mots justes, for an exact image of the touching-touched body thrown open to the plenitude of the Other-Being, Teresa adds to the water fiction of the Life and later works the fiction of overlapping dwelling places inside a castle: heaped, penetrable, ostensibly numbering seven but consisting of a host of doorless rooms and cellars, porous spaces separated as if by stretches of translucent film. Is it an allusion to the Sheva Hekhalot, the seven palaces of Jewish mysticism?² Or to the parable of the palace in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed?³ No testimony survives, whether from Teresa, her associates, or her exegetists, to settle the question. At any rate the echoes are striking.

From the very beginning of the Dwelling Places, Teresa admits to her lack of a “basis” for what she is preparing to write. “While beseeching our Lord to speak for me because I wasn’t able to think of anything to say nor did I know how to begin to carry out this obedience,” it occurs to her to ground her account in a vision of frozen water, a diamond: “We consider our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” The castle of the soul or the palace of the Lord? Both, of course, for however wide the gap between them, the creature is in the image of the Creator. Here we have it: interpreted in masterly fashion by Saint Augustine,⁴ the image experienced by Teresa, in which she experiences herself, is consubstantial with the Creator, and, again, she will apply herself to conjuring “visions” (representations) in order to cast light on how “the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place.”⁵

Straightaway the image-visions start proliferating, contaminating one another, changing places, blurring together, always touching-touched: a castle, but made of glass; a stone building, but transparent; an earthly work, and yet celestial; a single castle, but many rooms. The habitat thus designed is not out of bounds, barred and fortified against trespassers; on the contrary, it can be entered at will: “I think it will be a consolation for you to delight in this inner castle, since without permission from the prioress you can enter and take a walk through it at any time.”⁶

It would be no good trying to delineate this topography, although many still attempt to do so, for the chief property of imaginary vision is to baffle our eyesight. We catch barely a glimpse of the jewel’s brilliance, only a rapid “streak of lightning” is left “engraved on the imagination” should we try to open the reliquary, that hiding-place of the Other in the Self. If any sort of image transpires, it’s not so much a painting as a bedazzlement, always sensory and implicitly tactile: like a “sun covered by something transparent,” the Beloved’s body is nothing but a draped form, in a garment like “a fine Dutch linen.”

Bernardino de Laredo, whom Teresa had read, expresses the closeness to God in tactile terms: “Thus was God’s will touched…without the mediation of reason or thought.”⁷ The “application of the senses,” for Luis de la Palma among other Jesuits, was after all a higher method of prayer than verbal orisons.⁸ The beginning of contemplation? The prerogative of perfect men? Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, whose coincidences with Teresa’s practice cannot be overstated, urge the meditator to “realize and relish things interiorly” (el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente), in imitation of Christ.⁹ The ecclesiastical authorities jumped at that: did he mean imagined or spiritual senses? There loomed the danger of heresy, the specter of an excessive fleshliness: such lack of rigor could open the door to those Illuminati, already in the Church’s sights, or to the misplaced fervor of overemotional women. Aristotelo-Thomism was always on its guard, and rightly so. The Jesuits’ riposte showed them to be more knowledgeable and prudent than Teresa. Are not sense impressions, they argued, always-already molded by the spiritual virtues, at least among the faithful? Theological reason was saved, and Fr. Jerónimo Nadal, who had great insight into the founder of the Society of Jesus, could proclaim, in a sublime prayer: “From the conviction of faith comes hearing, and from its intelligence comes sight. From hope comes the sense of smell. From the bond of charity comes touch; and from the joy of charity comes taste.”¹⁰

A cascade of sensible and ephemeral images, in fluid movement: the partitions between the dwelling places seem as yielding as hymens, and to pass through them unleashes such an intensity of emotion that these “intellectual visions” obliterate ordinary cares and feelings. Is this to say they petrify the woman as she prays? Make her into a fortress? No, they turn her rather into a crystal hive whose cells enclose the invisible, the searing flash, the imprint…God’s touch is forever diffracted into warmth, flavor, fragrance, and sound, and sometimes it whips up a storm: a babble of parables orchestrates the polyphony of sensations around this unfindable sense, the most human and sublime of all. Not to touch, while yet touching: isn’t that the definition of tact?

What Teresa sets out is a delicately mobile approach to God. First He is “this sun that gives warmth to our works”;¹¹ he is also the “center” toward which all eyes turn, likened to the tender heart of a “palmetto” whose outer bark is “covering the tasty part.”¹² This mystical desert does not prevent the writer from gulping in the divine “touch” with a great longing of the soul to enjoy that “spiritual delight in God [pleasures, in Spanish the same word as tastes: gustos de Dios].”¹³

Taste, that olfactory contact that ensures our survival and inspires the refinements of cooking, seals the Teresian link to the divine in what she calls “the prayer of quiet.” In the Fourth Dwelling Places, “two founts” overflow “through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body,” for “the delight…begins in God and ends in ourselves.”¹⁴ But the union of the Lover to the lover can just as easily smolder away like a “brazier giving off sweet-smelling perfumes,” and this “swells and expands our whole interior being.”¹⁵ Not forgetting the eardrums, tickled by a “whistle so gentle that they themselves [the senses and the faculties] almost fail to hear it.”¹⁶ A flurry of parables relates the lover’s metamorphoses: Teresa calls them comparisons, again, and blushes for them: “I am laughing to myself over these comparisons for they do not satisfy me, but I don’t know any others. You may think what you want; what I have said is true.”¹⁷ What is truth? A cataract of metamorphic fictions telling of the perceptions anchored in the touched and touching body, which thrill the flesh like a “delightful tempest” (tempestad sabrosa).¹⁸

The castle curves in on itself, and its partitions give way when the soul’s love touches the mercy of the King. Just as the hedgehog and the tortoise retract into themselves (according to Francisco de Osuna in the Third Spiritual Alphabet, which Teresa knows by heart), so the soul pulls the Other inside before rising to float above itself.¹⁹ Should its senses and faculties “have gone outside and have walked for days and years with strangers—enemies of the well-being of the castle,” they need only to have “seen their perdition” and, abashed but “not traitors,” “begun to approach the castle,” for the Monarch to call out to them, like the shepherd he is, “with a whistle so gentle that even they themselves almost fail to hear it,” before they “enter the castle” once more.²⁰ They enter it differently, for the ever-malleable doors are absorbed into the state of “suspension” that overtakes the soul: there is no closed door between the Sixth and Seventh Dwelling Places.²¹ Only thus can the ductility of the dwelling places touched by the supreme Good deal with “enemies,” wretchedness, and every “symptom.”

Was Teresa anorexic, bulimic, or both? That cluster of disorders being so fashionable just now, my friend Dr. Baruch and even Bruno has asked me about it, all agog. I dodge the question: “Read her and see!” But I have my suspicions. Teresa, anorexic? Maybe, at times, not always. She was certainly keen on “experiences that are both painful and delightful [delicious: sabrosas]”,²² and strove to defend herself against her own hearty appetite for tasting, feeling, knowing, listening, seeing: against the blooming of all the senses together in aiesthesis-Gefühl. As a novice it disturbed her, and she’d make herself vomit, empty herself out in order to meet the high standards of her heart’s Elect. Later, she learned to convey conaesthesia in words. Desire, experienced as a delectation of all the senses triggered by suffering, would then become equal to its object, and ultimately be assuaged in the “spiritual marriage” of the Seventh Dwelling Places. With the strange, asymmetrical parity that obtains between the Bridegroom and his Bride, this spiritual soaring also finds expression in sensible or sensory terms—metamorphic terms, in Baudelaire’s sense: “When our Lord is pleased to have pity on this soul that He has already taken spiritually as His Spouse because of what it suffers and has suffered through its desires, He brings it, before the spiritual marriage is consummated, into His dwelling place which is this seventh.…Let us call it another heaven.”²³ On reaching this point, the writer ceases to defend herself. For speaking and writing for the Spouse about their mutual truth, touching and touched, is proof in itself for Teresa that the divine, not the devil, has entered into her.²⁴

But can we be so sure? No appeasement of Teresa’s spirit can be read in her account, no matter how serene she tries to sound: the story goes in circles, and the comparison—yes, that again—links Jesus and the one who prays, sets off again, contradicts itself, asserts itself by dint of repetition. Teresa is aware of it, she scolds herself: “Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton [idiota], for I don’t know what to say or how to begin.”²⁵ Or is this perhaps a scrupulous loyalty of the pen to the psyche-soma that will be transmitted—drowning the visible in the sensible—by tracing the very loss of intellectual understanding in ek-stasy, where the conscientious silkworm is annulled and there is only the dancing butterfly of the imaginary incarnate?

Teresa’s visions dictating her experience of the divine have nothing in common with a painting, as I’ve already said. For by sensorializing to extremes her contact with the All-Other via the fiction of water and its multiple conaesthetic transformations, La Madre inscribes it into the cosmos. But in the fiction of the castle, whose walls turn into nets, her experience relates to the constructions of men—oppressive fortresses in contrast to her own crystalline mansions—which can only be justified by being perpetually rewritten. In so doing, Teresa of Avila is not content with humanizing the Creator. Against Lutheranism, she rehabilitates images…and becomes a Counter-Reformation saint.

I read in a book that it was an imperfection to have ornate paintings.…And…I heard the following: that what I wanted to do was not a good mortification (what was better, poverty or charity?); that since love was the better, I shouldn’t renounce anything that awakened my love, not should I take such a thing away from my nuns; that the book was talking about the many carvings and adornments surrounding the picture and not about the picture itself; that what the devil did among the Lutherans was take away all the means for awakening love, and so they went astray. “My Christians, daughter, must now more than ever do the opposite of what they do.”²⁶

Suspected at one time of Illuminism, then anointed a Catholic saint, perhaps Teresa is inviting us to temper our resistance and raise the portcullis of our defenses. Her apologia for an interior body and soul fully exposed to the Other, inhaling the Other, is certainly not given to everyone. But what a demonstration of the therapeutic powers of the imaginary! What openness toward the possible metamorphoses of the divine itself, under the impact of the fiction Teresa managed to found upon…an unfindable sense!

The water parable and the permeable castle lay the groundwork for the recurrent fable of the silkworm that evolves into a butterfly, which to my mind marks the climax of Teresa’s metamorphic fiction.

You must have already heard about His marvels manifested in the way silk originates, for only He could have invented something like that. The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper. (I have never seen this but only heard of it…) When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live…The worms nourish themselves on mulberry leaves until, having grown to full size, they settle on some twigs. There with their little mouths they…go about spinning the silk [out of their own selves: van de sí mismos hilando la seda] and making some very thick little cocoons in which they enclose themselves. The silkworm, which is fat and ugly, then dies, and a little white butterfly, which is very pretty, comes forth from the cocoon.…The silkworm, then, starts to live when by the heat of the Holy Spirit it begins to benefit through the general help given to us all by God and through the remedies left by Him to His Church…It then begins to live and to sustain itself by these things…

Well, once this silkworm is grown…it begins to spin the silk and build the house wherein it will die.…This house is Christ.…It seems I’m saying that we can build up God and take Him away, since I say that He is the dwelling place and we ourselves can build it so as to place ourselves in it.…Not that we can take God away or build Him up, but we can take away from ourselves and build up, as do these little silkworms.²⁷

Where the hysteric fails—in defying the Master, in seducing Him, in being unable to dispense with Him—the metamorphic soul (seed, silkworm, silk, butterfly, and seed once more, and silkworm…eternal return) succeeds, by merging into oneness with Him. He, the “intellectual vision,” the “flight of the spirit,” the “Giant” with “milky breasts.” A feminine sensibility, with typically extravagant, immoderate drives? Absolutely. Accompanied by a terrific superconsciousness, it sets off an unexpected biblical and Hellenic return to shake up the austere, Albertino-Thomist interpretation of the Areopagite corpus.

Touching and touched, this fiction is still, of course, an act that requires the full vigilance of her own judgment, according to La Madre. Nothing “automatic” about Teresa’s writing: laxness and torrential fancies, keep out! Stiffened by her experience as founder, she was critical of postulants whom she felt did “not have good judgment.” Not only would such girls not be accepted by the Discalced Order, they must be discouraged from writing about prayer: “Even though doing this amounts to nothing but a waste of time, it impedes freedom of soul and allows one to imagine all kinds of things.…and if something could do them harm, it would be for them to give importance to what they see and hear.…I understand the trouble they will run into from thinking about what they should write.”²⁸ For cloistered little Bovarys like these—a breed Teresa disliked—it was quite sufficient to talk to their confessor. In the same dismissive vein she calls one overschooled woman a letrera, rather than letrada, or “lettered”: she is a mere bluestocking, more at home with facts than with experience. And the rapture goes on…in writing.

In the “Sixth Dwelling Places,” “another kind of rapture” appears, which she calls “flight of the spirit.” Here it is no “small disturbance for a person to be very much in his senses and see his soul carried off (and…even the body with the soul).”²⁹ And so on to the Seventh Dwelling Places, where the “spiritual marriage” comes to pass, “not in an imaginative vision but in an intellectual one, although more delicate than those mentioned” before; “I don’t know what to compare it to,” and yet there will be no shortage of metamorphic comparisons.³⁰ The more high-minded are gratified here to see Teresa revert to the “core experience” of the likes of John of the Cross, purged of “imaginative visions.” However, I invite them to read the lines that surround the moment, finally regarded as authentic, of Teresa’s elevation.³¹ In this text the “flight of the spirit” mutates into a “straw” being snatched up by a “great and powerful Giant,” then into a “little bark” being lifted high by a “huge wave” (the waters, again) let loose by “this great God.”³² As for the “spiritual marriage” whose glory is revealed “in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste,” is it really quite relieved of imaginative comparisons when God can appear as “divine breasts” from which “flow streams of milk bringing comfort to all the people of the castle”?³³

Consistently and to the end, Teresa stages an intimacy that is secret and yet without secrecy, in a continuous state of budding emergence, alluring and infectious: in a word, baroque. Devoid of sensation, it seems, during the final ecstatic trance, and yet always supraconscious of what makes her swoon with pleasure, the writing of rapture “touches” the theopathic state to the point of “divine touch.” At this point too, dispossession and destitution can only be described in a flow that is more denuded than ever, admittedly, and yet still incandescent with metaphors and metamorphoses.

The fiction produced by this paradoxical theologian, at the intersection of flesh and spirit, of subconscious drives and conscious meanings, triggered a theological revolution. Not only did Teresa fully earn her title of “Doctor of the Universal Church,” she also bequeathed us a mission that would otherwise be impossible to fulfill: to solve the enigma of that embodied imaginary—of sublimation, Freud would say—as the prerequisite for going further, or indeed in a different direction.

“If I didn’t dream, I wouldn’t exist. I dream, so I’m alive.”

Eventually I figure out that the source is our director, Dr. Toutbon. Paul had just told him that he wasn’t planning to join in with any more MPH activities until Ghislaine came back. Ghislaine, his best friend, the one he used to kiss the most, left the home over a year ago when she moved with her parents to the United States. Paul knows perfectly well she’s not coming back. Toutbon, for some reason that escapes me and must relate to his personal hang-ups, decided that our young in-patient needed bringing down to earth. “He shall place his finger on the borderline between the real and the imaginary!” Our dear director loves to talk in such terms.

“Well, you see, Dad’s gone back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Our ancestors lived in Cuenca, right in the middle of Castilla-La Mancha. He’s set his heart on going there, to find out something or other important in the local archives. Looking for himself, I guess. So, seeing as he’s not exactly young or fit any more, I felt I couldn’t let him do it on his own. That’s why I’m going along.”

Marianne’s father (whom I’ve seen a couple of times at her house: faint smile, elaborate politeness) is the youngest son of wealthy Jewish parents. Haïm Baruch was born by the Danube, in Ruse, Bulgaria. His family spoke Ladino and Bulgarian at home, but could communicate in every European language. They held the faith of their forebears in moderate respect, its observances reduced over time to a few culinary traditions and keeping of holidays. The sons were packed off to universities abroad—one to Austria, one to Germany, one to Russia, one to France. Haïm, the mother’s favorite, was sent to live with some cousins of hers in Nancy. He entered law school under the innocuous French name of Aimé, “Beloved”—a whim Marianne had not forgiven him. “Just because the French pronounce it ‘Em’ instead of Haïm, dropping the aspirated aitch and the diaeresis, Dad couldn’t find anything stupider than to call himself Aimé!”

As luck would have it, Aimé was on vacation in Bulgaria when Vichy ordered the first roundups of Jews. Since Bulgaria was the only country besides Holland to oppose the Nazis’ deportation drives (or that’s what they say), he escaped the Holocaust. During the war years he married Maria, a Bulgarian childhood friend, and took her back to Nancy, where she would give birth to Marianne.

I still couldn’t see the Teresa connection, but Marianne said it was coming. Firstly, my psychiatrist chum had always been at odds with her “Beloved” progenitor, aware of his disappointment at getting a girl when he’d wanted a boy. He had named her Marianne in honor of the Republic, despite the darkness of the Occupation years. Secondly, this great Francophile, who had wept for the German destruction of Oradour but was forgiving of collaboration, felt increasingly less beloved in his adopted land as he grew older. Though a staunch secularist, he began to study Hebrew, and on retirement he decided to reconstruct the family tree.

Now, having traced the itinerary of his ancestors, he wanted to look into the sources. Aimé Baruch knew too much about the history of his people, and history in general, to expect to find reliable archive material this side of 1492 relating to such a modest merchant household. He did, however, hope to glean some earlier data about a family that had, from the twelfth century, been well-integrated and indeed respected in Cuenca—until finding itself summarily expelled by the Inquisition. Cuenca appeared to him now as the golden age of integration, the diaspora’s Eden in Europe. But was it? This is what he sought to know.

The first effect of the research undertaken by Baruch senior was to make him re-adopt his old name, Haïm; before long the good jurist had become a fount of expertise on Spanish Jewry before the expulsion and their survival after it. He was particularly interested in the diaspora of southern Europe, where his family ended up: Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria—not forgetting the conversos, the Marranos who stayed in Spain.

“Well, that’s the trouble. Some Jews were expelled and went elsewhere, like our ancestors. Others were collaborators, basically. Or pretended they were, but even so! Teresa betrayed her people, just as her forebears did by converting. Except she went further still by becoming a Catholic saint. Do you see what I’m getting at? She betrayed her father to side with her mother, didn’t she?”

“Anyhow, Haïm wonders whether all those mystics Spain claims such credit for weren’t simply the craziest among the Jews who stayed behind. People who could come up with nothing better than to annoy the Church, then in the pits of decadence, with the exaltation of their constricted little souls. He calls it ‘delirium,’ he doesn’t mince words, unlike some…You know he calls himself a rationalist. Or used to…Can you see it?”

“Guess what? My dad now knows as much as you do about your blessed saint! He’s just read a book, a study or something, by a Professor Yovel, do you know him? A Spinoza specialist who’s into Marrano mystics, very original!³⁴ So, Haïm is impressed by Teresa’s hallucinations, of course he is. But of course he doesn’t believe in them either. He’s a man of reason, he doesn’t make the allowances you do, right?” Or wrong; I wait. “So, he says that the more she tried to integrate, the more Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was humiliated by all those Spanish grandees and prelates around her. The more she played at being the crafty diplomat, the more they used her raptures for their own ends, if they didn’t just make fun of her. Even when they saved her from the Inquisition and let her start her gang of barefoot Carmelites, they went on undermining her to the end.”

How should I know? Her father, her mother…a Jew, a Christian…Is Christianity a refutation or a continuation of the biblical message? Was Teresa an alumbrada recruited by the Counter-Reformation to close down the Christian faith, or on the contrary to open it up? And open it up to what? True enough, she was marked by inquisitorial Spain. And rehabilitated by the Council of Trent, that’s true, too. Maybe she did profit from the decline of royal power in the wake of the conquests, which only benefited the Golden Age—a flamboyant moniker and a fair description of the era’s arts and letters. But what if Teresa’s experience had rendered Marianne’s claims downright obsolete all the same? Obsolete at the time, and more so today, even when such claims about identity are making themselves heard again in the context of the Middle Eastern conflict or 9/11? Teresa was far from dealing with such issues, simply displacing them in the mad intensity of her singular quest. But surely there’s no other way of moving beyond identity politics, which are necessarily conflictive, than by displacement—toward this amazing, unprecedented singularity that somehow succeeded (but how?) in living in an open, shareable, foundational way. How did she do it? That’s what I want to find out: concretely, step by step, how did she know, how did she manage? With what gains and what losses?

I spend the vacation alone in Paris, as is my wont, with my roommate. I gaze at the city lights through the great window my father loved so much, et cetera. And I haven’t forgotten Paul, who still resents me, I know, for putting Marianne before him the other day, but he’ll wait for me. “If you don’t dream, you don’t exist. I dream, therefore I’m alive.” Certain journeys are dreams. Certain readings, too.