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

Teresa deals with it differently from us. Or rather she doesn’t deal with it, she throws herself in, she plummets to the bottom, but she is then reborn by writing about it: writing the adventure of abandonment and exile for us. Inverting the fear of divine judgment into a mystical marriage, her “banishment” places her inside an oblatory Other, loving/loved; henceforth she becomes this Other. This bears no resemblance to the relationship between the lover and the Beloved in preceding prayers, for there they would simply and easily decant into each other, to the point of merging like twin fountains into a single stream. Here, in the fourth degree, there is no longer any “work” involved, only “rejoicing.” “In this fourth water the soul isn’t in possession of its senses, but it rejoices without understanding what it is rejoicing in [Acá no hay sentir, sino gozar sin entender lo que se goza].”²

There is a good that fills her with joy, but she does not know what it consists of. All of the senses are involved but without a precise object, interior or exterior. Intensity and self-perdition: no border, no identity can withstand this transport. And now the metaphor-metamorphosis of fire comes to join that of water to signify the blissful annihilation of the person at prayer: “the soul sometimes goes forth from itself…comparable to what happens when a fire is burning and flaming,”³ “for at the time one is receiving [these favors] there’s no power to do anything.”⁴ Deprived of “sensory consciousness,” the faculties “remaining for several hours as though bewildered,” the “bothersome little moth, which is the memory,” getting its wings burnt—the soul is lost to itself.⁵ Yet this annihilation is the source of “heroic promises, of resolutions and of ardent desires; it is the beginning of contempt for the world because of a clear perception of the world’s vanity.”⁶

The writer does not address the origin of this reversal conducting the soul from desiccation to water and fire. Modern neurologists are inclined to think that the trigger is an electric or hormonal dysfunction of the brain. Psychologists talk of hypomaniacal feedback from the fantasy of marriage to the ideal Father, turning depression into feelings of paranoid omnipotence. But one cannot reduce to scientific buzzwords the rhetorical power of the biblical and evangelical tradition from which Teresa drew the necessary authority to legitimize and reinforce her “states.” And were such medical concepts genuinely to designate the neuronal and psychological conditions of her experience—and as a psychologist myself, I wouldn’t argue with that—they still fail to explain the verbal re-creation achieved by the saint: What have they to say about the exactness and intensity of these metaphor-metamorphoses in perpetual reversal?

Teresa didn’t wait for Andrew and me to come along before indicating, with her usual clear-sightedness, the incommensurable hiatus separating the state of prayer (“very edgy, very borderline,” quips Jérôme Tristan) from the writing of it. Another state must arise to mediate between the two: “inspiration.” Not the same thing as prayer, then. You are not very prolix on this point, my secretive Teresa; you are content to say that you have God’s pattern before you and are following it, like an embroiderer does with needle and yarn.

I know you’re always delving into the books that are your faithful companions in solitude—the Bible, the Gospels, the writings of saints and churchmen. You never forget that your identification with Jesus relies on your remaining immersed in the intertextuality of canonical sources. Since these have become your vital environment, your prime reality, you are able to recast their rhetoric as though I were He. Your “inspiration” is thus an inhaling of the Other, a loving rewrite of His body—through the rewriting of His word in your imaginary, receiving it as something that sprang from an exterior seed. It is written in you, by you, foreign and penetrating without, private and bereft within. It was also essential to possess the genius of your language in order to pin it down, for failing this, prayer would remain a foreign language, like Arabic, say:

I write without the time and calm for it, and bit by bit. I should like to have time, because when the Lord gives the spirit [da el espíritu], things are put down with ease and in a much better way. Putting them down then is like copying a model [sewing: sacando aquella labor, a pattern, sampler: dechado] you have before your eyes. But if the spirit is lacking, it is more difficult to speak about these things than to speak Arabic, as the saying goes, even though many years have been spent in prayer. As a result, it seems to me most advantageous to have this experience while I am writing, because I see clearly that it is not I who say what I write; for neither do I plan it with the intellect nor do I know afterward how I managed to say it. This often happens to me.⁷

“Whatever. It’s her grand mal that interests me.” Andrew is very keen on the work of Dr. Vercelletto, that’s as far as he’ll go.

But still, from all the psychosomatic conditions propitious to prayer, Teresa did take a “magic recipe” unrelated to the temporal lobe, which looks simple, once the writer has formulated its application: He is an all-powerful lover, and their union introduces His omnipotent presence into her. We’re a long way from encephalograms, aren’t we, and much closer to the Song of Songs as rewritten by Teresa, right? “Serve Me and don’t bother about such things,” He tells her soothingly.⁸ Andrew’s not listening, he’s had enough of the Incarnation, of me, and of everything; he goes out for a smoke. I carry on with my monologue in silence, much better.

Was Teresa’s ecstasy a narcissistic triumph over depression, probably over postcomatose exhaustion as well? Was it achieved by means of manic exaltation, itself induced in her by the intromission of her ideal Father endowed with the strength of absolute love?

Certainly it was, but not only that. The Carmelite herself retraces this movement of the psyche with a psychological precision rich in sexual allusions. The rare libertines who venture into Teresa country are soon clamoring for more; the pilgrims, if ever they read her, discern only allegories. But Teresa holds out for both at once, honesty oblige!

You mustn’t think (this is for Andrew, outside in his smoky fug) that I’ve been dazzled by the sheer sensual perspicacity of a sick woman with a genius for self-analysis. My grand Teresa offers something more: the artistry with which she stages the fantasy penetration of her inwardness by the Other, and conveys it in a narrative as capacious as it is concise—in a word, convincing. Proof of this, do you agree, is her notorious jouissance at being run through by an angel disguised as a debauched aristo or Little Lord Fauntleroy, at least in Santa Maria della Vittoria. Those fabulous passages, the only texts of hers familiar to the educated public at large, make her into much more than a precursor of baroque art. My contention is that she invented it—before Bernini, before virginal Assumptions, before the whimsical undulations of Tiepolo!⁹

At the heart of the sixteenth century, from behind the iron grilles of the Convent of the Incarnation, this woman knew that the repression of desire can gnaw your flesh and snap your nerves, to the point of falling into coma. She came up with a stunning, because postmodern, analysis of the lethal nature of desire, and of jouissance as a firewall against lust. The frigidity of repressed women, the compulsive discharges paraded by their uninhibited sisters—together they spin the wheel of female hysteria into madness. Did Teresa know that from experience? Or did her restless vigilance spy the danger from afar? Did she find the solution?

The Carmelite naturally didn’t reveal the sexual sources of her distress, but nor did she content herself with a rational, reasonable censorship of such ill-being. At once true and untrue to monotheism, Teresa devised a “third way.” By the blending of the mind and senses into nothing but touch, the touch of the Other, she sought to “divert” desire, nothing more! She would put it down to that ideal of the self constituted by the ideal Father, the loving, loved magnetism* [*The author makes a play on the proximity in French of “lover,” amant, and “magnet,” aimant: “A(i)mant.”—Trans.] that penetrates her. The resulting jouissance is termed “elevation.”

Andrew advises me to save it for my publisher, Zonabend, who doubtless adores this kind of waffle. He’s off for a breath of air on the ramparts. If he knew how little I care for Bruno these days! Men spend more time thinking about other men than do the women allegedly concerned. I don’t say a word. Everything in my life conspires to leave me alone with my roommate, in our very own mystical marriage. That’s fine by me for now.

“And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away, and be at rest” (Ps. 55:6). Teresa goes back to her Bible, taming it into a wondrous tale: “The flight is given to the spirit so that it may be elevated above every creature—and above itself first of all. The flight is an easy flight [vuelo suave], a delightful one [vuelo deleitoso], a flight without noise [vuelo sin ruido].”¹⁰

Unlike the psalmist, who implores the Other to give him wings, I note that Teresa already possesses them: secure in her status as the Bride, she is already aloft. The writer juxtaposes the New Testament to the Old in the image of the dove of the Holy Spirit, and she herself embodies the resulting amalgam. The experience Teresa describes is lived as a “spirit,” for the nun-dove seems to overlook the flying “body”: Is this the prudish evasion of a woman conscious of her religious vows? Or is it rather the sign of the intellectual probity with which she wants to be clear that this elevation is only a mental act, a “spirit’s-eye view,” a sublimation? Then again, perhaps spirit and body are all one to her? This last hypothesis is the strongest. Teresa’s experience differs as much from metaphysical dualism, which segregates spirit from flesh, as it does from the Spaltung of psychosis, which impedes the contact of the symbolic act with the instinctual energies and leads to delirium. Constantly revolving around dualism and desymbolization, steeped in metaphysics and a connoisseur of “borderline states,” Teresa (like other mystics) invents a different, incarnate psyche and a different body entirely devoted to the love object.

In the work of art that is the speaking subject thus recast, the “exiled soul” cannot suffer from isolation, hindrance, abandonment, division, or delirium, for is it not governed by the conviction of possessing the Other’s love? Were any of these misfortunes to befall her, she would only attribute them to her Guest, and thus set in motion the dialectical spiral of repentance and salvation: eternal promise of an eternal recurrence of the same elevation, the same inextinguishable jouissance.

An amphibious creation, an almighty alloy, ecstatic rapture is a sense of soaring above every creature, and “above itself first of all.” Ecstasy is like a doublet spiraling up: one (spirit-and-body) becomes detached from a part of oneself (also spirit-and-body), which remains earthbound, in order to “rise upward” (para levantarse). La Madre has a clear understanding (entiéndese claro) of the motion of this liftoff, in which the body-spirit helix coils around itself, manifests itself to the faculty of reason, is understood and is thought: “Entiéndese claro es vuelo que da el espíritu para levantarse de todo lo criado.” The soul, Teresa goes on to say, from up there both “beholds everything without being ensnared,” and at the same time is given “dominion,” being “brought here by the Lord.” Endowed with memory, the spirit-flesh doublet also surveys its own past, and as it contemplates from above its erstwhile distress, it/she marvels at its “blindness” at the time “when it was ensnared.”¹¹

No sign now of convulsions or vomiting. From now on it glides in the pure pleasure of touch and hearing: ecstasy is soft (es vuelo suave, es vuelo deleitoso) and noiseless, rapt in the silence of the spheres. Away from the world of the senses, the soul is more sensual still.¹²

Could Teresa’s rapture be a way to lift depression? Not in the sense of throwing off the weight of melancholy, but acting as a corkscrew auscultation-palpation, a highly charged annihilation? Against depression Teresa invents not an antidepressant but a “sur-pressant” that annuls her—not because she lacks the love object to the point of madness, as is the case with melancholics, but because He overwhelms her with His superabundant presence; body-and-soul together, over and above the absence of all the hes and shes who can possibly be imagined.

The saint’s celebrated beatitude may cause the hasty reader or the superficial lover of baroque art to forget that there are two aspects to this magical rapture. It is an excruciating bliss that transports the soul, for “it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives,”¹³ while the body is left racked and dislocated by pain: “Sometimes my pulse almost stops, according to what a number of the Sisters say who at times are near me and know more, and my arms are straight and my hands so stiff that occasionally I cannot join them. Even the next day I feel pain in the pulse and in the body, as if the bones were disjoined.”¹⁴

Seized by “anxious longings for death,” fearful “that it will not die,”¹⁵ the soul yet comes to take pleasure in the process. The love of the Lord means eternity, after all. More prosaically, Teresa has survived other epileptic fits and awakened from comas at death’s door. She has since arrived at the certainty that enjoyment is possible: the soul experiences itself as a construct dependent on this Love, just as much as on the comas that herald it. Teresa does not say it in so many words, but with that intellectual integrity that spares us nothing of her mental and physical states, she clearly implies it. The suggestion is indeed that pleasure is felt against the sick body, for at this stage the soul communicates only its torment to the body, keeping all the pleasure for itself: “The body shares only in the pain, and it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives.” It is the soul, in short, that makes the body sick by shifting anguish onto it, communicating torment to it, and loading it with ill-being. And if it, too, suffers in its way and for good, the soul is just as capable, in the same movement, of enjoying its suffering unburdened from fear of death. Is it always so lonely in bliss, detached from the tortured body, radiant and victorious without it? The transfixion causes us to doubt it, as do the metaphors-metamorphoses describing the exile of the soul in the Beloved by means of a cascade of sensations. As always it is your writing that speaks truth, Teresa. Your self-analysis told you that the soul alone, provided it be magnetized by the love Object, can reverse suffering into joy (in the name of the Other)—even if it means that this blessed reversal takes it out on the body, whether plunging it into a coma, as neurologists have observed, or exalting it to the point of orgasm, as shown by the baroque sculptor.

When you wrote, you did not say everything at once. Sometimes, too, you were writing under the eye of your fathers and counselors. Bernini himself must have grasped this double scene, for he displayed the Transfixion that dispossessed you of body and soul right in front of the cardinals of the Cornaro family, the patrons of the chapel where you recline. Their eyes are on you, and it must have been from the gazes of such fathers, rather than from ours, that you sought to remove yourself, to banish yourself. Who knows, perhaps the paternal and paternalistic surveillance you were under pushed you, even more powerfully than your own personal history would have done, toward that inversion of pain into pleasure that ravished you and took you out of yourself?

There were times when Teresa felt the union with the divine as an annihilation, a brush with death. I picture her pacing under these low ceilings, beside herself, down the corridors and narrow stairways of this modest Convent of the Incarnation with its burden of temptations and hostilities; body and soul on a knife-edge, shaking with epilepsy, hopelessly sad. Writing after the event, she feels able to say that it was the prayer of union with the Spouse that led to such a loss of all her “faculties.” Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe it was the seizures, the neurological dysfunction, that first put her vigilance into abeyance and melted the borders between herself and the Other? No understanding, no will, no memory; no communication, no words. This abandonment, which to her is beatitude, cannot possibly be conveyed. A senseless beatitude?

Here…the soul rejoices incomparably more; but it can show much less since no power remains in the body, nor does the soul have any power to communicate its joy. At such a time, everything would be a great obstacle and a torment and hindrance to its repose. And I say that if this prayer is the union of all the faculties, the soul is unable to communicate its joy even though it may desire to do so—I mean while being in the prayer. And if it were able, then this wouldn’t be union.¹⁶

This may be the description of a swoon induced by a comitial crisis; we are reminded of time standing still for Mohammed’s pitcher, in the epileptic euphoria evoked by Dostoyevsky in The Devils. Although “this suspension of all the faculties is very short” (half an hour “would be a very long time”), and it is difficult to know what is happening, since “there is no sensory consciousness,” even so, “these faculties don’t return to themselves so completely that they are incapable of remaining for several hours as though bewildered.”¹⁷

This is where the strength of the love union comes in. Thanks to this construct (an embodied fantasy, as I see it four centuries later), it is not I who speaks, but Him; I is Another, *[*“Je est un autre”: in a letter by Arthur Rimbaud.—Trans.] I is God, a Voice that makes me hear things, reassuring explanations—for God is a protective rationality in Teresa’s Catholicism. Unable to speak or to read, the soul (when united with the Other to the point of fusion) is nevertheless flooded with “the most marvelous and gentlest delight” in the most sensitive part of itself.¹⁸

In these raptures it seems that the soul is not animating the body.…one understands and sees oneself carried away and does not know where. Although this experience is delightful, our natural weakness causes fear in the beginning. It is necessary that the soul be resolute and courageous—much more so than in the prayer already described—in order to risk all, come what may, and abandon itself into the hands of God and go willingly wherever it is brought since, like it or not, one is taken away.…At times I was able to accomplish something, but with a great loss of energy, as when someone fights with a giant and is worn out. At other times it was impossible for me to resist, it carried off my soul and usually, too, my head along with it, without my being able to hold back—and sometimes the whole body until it was raised from the ground.¹⁹

These brutal forces that “carry her away” suggest the violence of the electric discharges neurologists speak of, and only the divine “cloud” that conveys the lover to her ideal Father bestows mystic value upon the trauma. The sacred comes to the rescue of ill-being.

Embarrassed by these prodigies, Teresa forbade the other nuns to talk about the “carrying-off” effect when it happened to take place in public. Sometimes, feeling it coming on, she stretched out flat and asked the nuns to hold her down; “nonetheless, this was seen.”²⁰ At such times she is “greatly frightened,” then comes a “rare detachment.”²¹ Although playing no “active role” in the pain, Teresa feels stranded in a “desert so distant from all things” that she “doesn’t find a creature on earth that might accompany [her].”²² Union or no union, God then seems achingly distant from the soul; the dereliction is total. Mental pain coupled with physical pain provokes a catatonia compounded by an insuperable melancholy: “Usually when unoccupied [my soul] is placed in the midst of these anxious longings for death; and when it sees [the pains] are beginning, it fears that it will not die.”²³

Throughout these “clinical” descriptions, we can clearly make out a sequence: the detonator is anguish, accompanied by fits, followed by a neuronal disconnection, and ending in the physical relief that succeeds to fatigue. I shall not fail to deliver my novel interpretation of Teresa’s raptures to my colleague Jérôme Tristan. I am out to impress him, of course, by encroaching upon his professional terrain as a neuropsychiatrist, but I also plan to mention that my way goes further than science. I’m trying. So is he, but the poor fool holds back, with his cramped little life as a specialist in who knows what. With Teresa, the prodigious amorous construct of the lover penetrated by the Beloved is what downshifts the postcomitial distension. A micro-fiction of eroticism in fits and states that would have interested Andrew, if he weren’t acting the sniffy Voltairean, purely to annoy me.