Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth.…I confess that the passage has many meanings. But the soul that is enkindled with a love that makes it mad [que la desatina] desires nothing else than to say those words.…God help me! Why are we surprised? [¿Qué nos espanta?] Isn’t the deed more admirable?
Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs
One day entering the oratory I saw a statue [una imagen] they had borrowed for a certain feast to be celebrated in the house. It represented the much wounded Christ and was very devotional, so that beholding it I was utterly distressed in seeing Him that way, for it well represented what He suffered for us. I felt so keenly aware of how poorly I thanked Him for those wounds that, it seems to me, my heart broke. Beseeching Him to strengthen me once and for all that I might not offend Him, I threw myself down before Him with the greatest outpouring of tears.1
This was not yet a vision; it was a carved image, a work representing the Beloved—“In this very place, Juan! You see, Andrew?”—which the approaching feast day caused to be placed in the oratory of the Incarnation, where it caught the nun’s eye. The sight of Jesus moves her, distresses her utterly [toda me turbó de verle tal]. What perturbs her so? His “wounds” and His weals, of course, His sweat and His grief. Teresa interiorizes this bleeding, hurting, body of a man: “Since I could not reflect discursively with the intellect, I strove to represent Christ within me [procuraba representar a Cristo dentro de mí]…it seemed to me that being alone and afflicted, as a person in need, He had to accept me.”2
It was not enough for Teresa to identify with a man in pain, underwriting her own feminine anguish. “I could only think about Christ as He was as man (Yo sólo podía pensar en Cristo como hombre).”3 She must bring him literally inside, and the man of the statue—far less tortured, incidentally, than a Christ by Matthias Grünewald—now dwells in the Carmelite’s entrails.4 But the God-man is also all around her, and His presence contains her “so that I could in no way doubt He was within me or I totally immersed in Him” [yo toda engolfada en Él]5.
The extravagance of this embrace is not only justified by the experiences of illustrious predecessors. Teresa is thinking about Mary Magdalene’s conversion, of course, as she weeps before the statue, but she laments the way “the tears I shed were womanish and without strength since I did not obtain by them what I desired.”6 She would retreat from female role models, and it was not until discovering Saint Augustine’s account of his conversion that she felt she recognized herself: “I saw myself in [the Confessions].”7 By the start of 1554 the Confessions were finally available—in Catalan—to the former boarder at the Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Grace, who responded to their content as to a clarion call from God.
As I began to read the Confessions…I began to commend myself very much to this glorious saint. When I came to the passage where he speaks about his conversion and read how he heard that voice in the garden, it only seemed to me, according to what I felt in my heart, that it was I the Lord called.8
Thanks to her identifications, first with Mary Magdalene and then, even more strongly, with Saint Augustine, Teresa’s transference onto Jesus was doubly validated and reinforced. Meanwhile the naive freshness of her effusions, as bookish as they were spiritual, did not preclude an analysis of her relationship with what can only be called a fantasy incarnate, apprehended through images, mental constructs, and imaginary representations. And, on top of all this, through something more: a genuine revelry of the senses, a feast for the flesh. The paroxysm of Communion.
Not as “immersed” (engolfada) as all that, the writer lays out, with peerless probity, the many facets of her experience.
She shares her love of images with us first, firing a sly shot at the reformed Church in passing: “Unfortunate are those who through their own fault lose this great good. It indeed appears that they do not love the Lord.”9 This leads to the admission that for her (and, perhaps, for most of us) the visual thrill of a likeness, be it of the Lord or of any cherished person, lies at the bottom of the feeling of love itself. The cells in hermitages, those secluded outdoor cabins or the retreat rooms in Carmelite monasteries, ought to be decorated with holy pictures, according to the foundress. Further, “try to carry about an image or painting of this Lord that is to your liking, not so as to carry it about on your hearts and never look at it but so as to speak often with Him; for He will inspire you with what to say.”10 To love seeing and to love were synonymous for Teresa in her process of re-conversion. Thus did a Carmelite of the Incarnation rediscover Plato’s Banquet!11 Only to reconfigure it in her own, Catholic way, charging the images with love, before passing, with love, to the other side of the images, like Alice through the looking glass.
The vision of the suffering Man is thus an “amorous” one, leaving her “distressed” to a degree that corresponds to what is far more than a visual gratification. It is a sensation that, though linked to sight, at once kindles Teresa’s every sense and triggers an avalanche of ideas. More than merely seeing, the “vision” of the Beloved Other becomes a “tenderness” felt as a gift, but “neither entirely of the senses nor entirely spiritual” (un regalo que ni bien es todo sensual, ni bien es espiritual).12
Ideal and desire, both the one and the other, as that which is experienced by way of sight gathers the flesh back into the spirit. The amorous gaze transports the lover into her Beloved and vice versa, body-and-soul, inside-and-outside, presence-and-immersion. On this day in Lent, 1554, more than ever before, after the reproving Holy Countenance and on the heels of the outsized toad, the vision of the suffering Man would initiate a period of auras, levitations, and other transverberations.
Far from the macabre expressionism of Grünewald, the future Counter-Reformation saint only contemplated the Calvary so as to turn it inside out like a glove. If at first, admittedly, she tended to wallow in masochism, she cast this off bit by bit and her experience rapidly ascended its radiant beam of pure pleasure, climaxing in the exultation of the elect.
In Teresa’s work, Christ’s wounds appear free of the carnal abjection that attracted Grünewald. At one point they actually metamorphose into jewels. The Carmelite “sees” Christ take the crucifix from her hand, and when He gives it back, the presence of the Beloved so often sensed by her side (“It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always present at my side; but since this wasn’t an imaginative vision, I didn’t see any form”13) has transformed the wounds into gems:
It was made of four large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds—there is no appropriate comparison with supernatural things. A diamond seems to be something counterfeit and imperfect when compared with the precious stones that are seen there. The representation of the five wounds was of very delicate workmanship. He told me that from then on I would see the cross in that way; and so it happened, for I didn’t see the wood of which it was made but these stones. No one, however, saw this except me.14
We know that the epileptic aura is prone to such extreme states of perception and imagination, and to their inversion, but even so Teresa seems to transform them into an unprecedented sensual intelligence. She links them to the glorious tradition of Mary Magdalene and Augustine, the better to appropriate them for her personal gallery of images, within the religious culture of her time, in a soft yet punctilious idiom, while subjecting them to the most honest introspection her levels of knowledge at the time would permit.
Carefully, tenderly, the writer probed her emotional state, dissociating this love from any hackneyed daydream or vision in the common acceptation of the word, and labeling her experience—for the first time—one of “mystical theology.”15
This did not occur after the manner of a vision. I believe they call the experience “mystical theology.” The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, it seems to me, is almost lost. For, as I say, the intellect does not work, though in my opinion it is not lost; it is as though amazed by all it understands because God desires that it understand, with regard to the things His Majesty represents to it, that it understands nothing.16