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

We are in 1560, and Teresa, despite being taken out of herself in raptures and overwhelmed by the love of the Lord, is not at peace: she frets about whether she is truly fulfilling her vocation. The Convent of the Incarnation seems awfully big, despite its cramped conditions, and far too agreeable: the Mitigated Rule, that governs the Carmelite order following the papal bull of 1247, is downright lax. And yet some find the regime too frugal: meat no more than three times a week, a single meal on other days, fasting during Lent and Advent—to hear them complain, you’d think it was draconian. But why? Can this really be called a life of abstinence, abstention, and poverty? What about the day trips, and the callers, and the semi-authorized socializing? Only the ordeal of Calvary is worthy of God, and by that standard, there’s certainly nothing Christly about the Incarnation! Why was the Primitive Rule ever relaxed? Are they so wrong, the men and women who practice a more austere and demanding spiritual code, abroad and in Spain too, and call for an end to the laxity of this modern, rather too modern, Catholicism? Laxity, who said laxity? The sisters are all for it. Here’s one now, returning from the parlor, her mouth full of cake—yes, didn’t you know, there are splendid refreshments to be enjoyed at the Carmelites’ place, along with good talk!

“Small fry compared with your outings, Sister,” comes the swift retort. (These nuns can be nasty. Ill feeling reigns until nightfall, when there is singing and dancing after dinner between prayers. Even then, some persist in resentment against the Ahumada woman, who thinks she’s a saint.) “Everyone knows that certain high-ranking persons, whose requests and alms no mother superior can refuse, apply to have you stay with them? Tee-hee…”

Teresa swallows back her anger. The girl is cheeky, but not completely wrong. Ahumada has an intimate circle of her own: her cousins Ana and Inés de Tapia, for example, and, at the moment, the young widow, daughter of a first cousin, who has become a lay sister and faithful companion, María de Ocampo. All these women admire her, and love to hear her tell the lives of the saints; sometimes she confides her own torments and the parts played in them by God and the devil.

Last night, for instance, Teresa had a vision she plans to share with her friends. They will surely understand, for the Lord often sends such terrifying images to women in particular, so as to deflect them from the temptations that are legion even here, in this mitigated convent where outings are allowed.

“I saw before my eyes, before falling asleep—and so it was not a dream, but truly a vision, of those that God grants not to our eyes but to the visceral depths of the soul—I saw, Sisters, the frightful punishment of some vices (de algunos vicios el castigo).¹ Yes, vices. Oh, no, I can’t name them, they are so iniquitous that the words would burn my lips. I saw, I tell you, with the eyes of the soul, the terrible spectacle of those sinful creatures chastised. God did me the favor of sending me that vision with the sole intention of frightening me.”

“No, María, for the Hell to which one may be conveyed by means of prayer, as I have been, is impossible to describe: nothing but excruciating agony and nothing to see. But in this vision of the vices, the images seemed even more frightening than the tortures of Hell. I saw the pincers the demons use upon the damned, and other Dantesque horrors. There are plenty of descriptions in our good books, I have often read them to you, and altarpieces have been painted on the subject. Is it not strange, Sisters, that I experienced neither fear nor pain at the sight of such torments? Is it because those vices and their punishments did not concern me? But I felt a great revulsion, as I used to when I was a novice. Ah, Satan is a wondrous painter, my dears, he plays his tricks and sets his traps in the imagination, and we know that he does so the more with women.² Everything can be harmful to those as weak as we women are.”³

“But Teresa, you have no cause to undergo the pain of such punishments. There are many here who would deserve them more! God forgive me for presuming to give Him ideas! After all, the Mitigated Rule itself ushers us into the path of temptation.” Like many young widows, María de Ocampo struggles against depravity with an almost excessively high moral sense.

But today, she is not in the mood for pleasantries. The jibes from the greedy sister, plus this conversation about vice and temptation, have plunged her back into the unspeakable Hell that God was good enough to let her glimpse, in order to set her free. She was not there for long, just long enough to understand that the Spouse wanted to show her the inconceivable place the devils had prepared for her, the fate she had earned by her sins.

Hell has no images because it is without space. That’s what Hell is, first and foremost: no space, no location, no extension. You yourself hardly exist, either. You are present, fully inhabiting time, but deprived of space. Can one conceive of a place without space?

That impossibility is called Hell. A kind of unthinkable, nameless hollow, scooped out of a filthy wall. Only Christ has known this, as the psalmist foretold long before, and Theresa can’t but follow her Spouse: “He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made” (Ps. 7:15). Not for the first time, however, the Bride outdoes the Groom. In her vision, there is no measure at all; Teresa’s Hell is pure constriction.

If seeing were possible in this nonexistent space, Teresa would have seen nothing but ghastly walls crushing her under their weight. In the absence of all light, she senses or feels what would have appalled her sight. A long, narrow alleyway enclosing her on every side, its floor muddy and foul smelling, swarming with putrid vermin; this pipe is a sewer. At the end of the stinking bowel, a cupboard in which the Carmelite finds herself confined. No reality can give the least notion of what she endures, her soul consumed in a furnace, while a thousand miseries harrow her cramped body.

Devoid of space and representation, is this journey to the underworld, this Sheol, a tearing apart? On one side anguish, oppression, the flesh stabbed through and through; on the other boundless desolation and despair, a terrible grief, impossible to convey. That your soul is being torn out of you would be an understatement; it splits of its own accord, while somebody else takes your life away. Thus cut in two, the writhing spirit converges with the body’s frightful pain. Suffocated, cramped, damned, she is on fire, dislocated into pieces. Long alleys, pitch darkness, an entrance like the smoking mouth of an oven, a foul and slimy cul-de-sac, a crawling heap of maggots. Oh, my distraught Teresa, at the far side of night.

Did you dream your own birth? Does this body and this soul, squeezed almost to death, reenact the irrevocable expulsion from the womb, that one-time haven turned foul cloaca? “I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room,” “unable to hope for any consolation.”

Or again, perhaps this infernal vision dramatizes the painful coming-to after a comitial cataclysm, recalled only as experiences of asphyxiation, discharge of stinking matter, glutinous sphincters, feverish larval teemings? It could well be the aftermath of exhaustion, prostration, the memory of desperate gagging that is no longer a torrent of woeful tears, but rather the epileptic strangulation of “a fire in the soul that I don’t know how to describe…I don’t know how to give a sufficiently powerful description of that interior fire and that despair.”⁶

This truth branded on your whole being, my martyred Teresa, cannot be laid at Satan’s door. Paul Claudel trembles with you when you are reduced to being a worm in this Hell; for all his precious rhetoric, he is one of your secret admirers.⁷ Between tapeworm and turd, neither male nor female, neither beast nor monster, a paltry, stubborn abjection, you are ground down to the degree zero of life in this spaceless Gehenna: merely a lump of horribly compacted flesh. So terrible a trial could only have been imposed on you by God, in order to make you see with the eyes of your whole body the hideous abode from which His mercy will, without a doubt, deliver you. Isn’t this a sovereign gift, the ultimate sign of His concern for you?

But perhaps you are guilty, as much as the sinners who were atrociously punished for their vices in that vision you shared with your friends. Let’s see. Temptations, like the ones in that nightmare, are not unknown to you: you mention them often enough. But the toad thoughts you beat out of your body with the help of bunches of nettles, preferably lashing the sores inflicted by a hair shirt—can they really be called vices? Possibilities, perils, certainly. But vices? As basely vulgar as that?

Not you. You deserve more, you deserve better: you are worthy of a far worse punishment than any God reserves for ordinary reprobates. You merit nothing less than the Truth of Hell, in its total, crushing, absolute version. Because God loves you more, He cares more about your fate than about that of common sinners, and so He strikes fear into you with a condensed season in His worst Hell. Conclusion: He loves you the best!

By one of those blessed reversals you are so deft with, you, the unworthiest of all, deem yourself to be the favorite; you are the most tested and rejected, because the most cherished. It’s a maneuver of genius, my unsinkable Teresa, informed by the impregnable logic of the Catholicism that precedes and sustains you, anchored in the extravagant belief that the Other exists, whose name is Love. Whatever else may happen. But a love that is inseparable from the twin that fuels it: suffering. Or perhaps this twin is hate?

The little group around Teresa continues their discussion. At some point the sisters notice that Ahumada is abstracted: engaged in prayer or meditation, who can tell? That’s how she is—a holy woman, whatever her detractors say. They respect and love her. She’ll come back to earth when she’s ready.

“And what if we became discalced?” says María de Ocampo suddenly. “Like Saint Francis, or the Poor Clares? They had no truck with the worldly pleasures we Carmelites indulge in.” She seems agitated by the very idea, unless it is the thought of the infernal compressor that’s upsetting her.

The others are surprised and a little disconcerted. What does Teresa think? A silence falls. A silence from Hell. Does it cause her to waft up from the abyss or to descend from glorious summits? Immortalized by Velázquez, or perhaps by a pupil of his, her holy gaze is lifted upward, the better to plumb her own depths. A double interiority. The small company holds its breath.

Andrew has quit teasing me. Oh, I know he’s a long way from coming around to Teresa’s virtues, and his sardonic asides will always be the best way of proving he exists while loving me. But he’s now prepared to continue the trip—a change of plan on his part.

“So we just follow the trail of your saint’s foundations, okay? We start with Saint Joseph of Avila. What’s next, remind me, Medina del Campo? Malagón? Valladolid? Toledo? Pastrana? Salamanca? And then Granada? I’ll drive, Juan can twiddle the radio. What’s the latest on the human bombs?”