“You’re a shrewd psychologist, Sylvia, and one might also spot a streak of theology in that apocalypse of yours,” remarked my publisher, Bruno Zonabend. This was hardly a compliment to the literary type I thought myself to be. Theology meant nothing to me in those days. I ditched my thesis and went back to school, this time to study psychology, and here I am: Sylvia Leclercq, clinical psychologist. Practicing part-time at the MPH, the rest with private patients. And, more lately, sharing my nights with Teresa of Avila.
On March 28, 1515, in the province of Avila, a third child was born to don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and his wife, doña Beatriz de Ahumada. It was a girl. Don Alonso was the son of Juan Sánchez, a “reconciled” convert from Judaism also known as Juan de Toledo, a wealthy tax collector and draper, and of doña Inés de Cepeda, from an Old Christian family of minor aristocratic rank. At her christening on April 4 in Avila, the infant was given the name of Teresa after her maternal grandmother, doña Teresa de las Cuevas, and her paternal great-grandmother, Teresa Sánchez. Her family name was a composite of her parents’ surnames: de Cepeda y Ahumada. The patronym Sánchez, perceived as Jewish, was gradually dropped in favor of the stalwart Catholicism of the Cepeda stock. Thus Teresa bore just one first name plus the last names of her only Catholic forbears (the Cepedas and the Ahumadas), all on the female side. Such an onomastic apparatus strikes me as perfectly tailored to the person in question.
But what of the Marrano status of her father’s line, the forced conversion to Catholicism? Had it become diluted, or did it, on the contrary, persist like an invisible magnet attracting Teresa’s faith to the inner, exploratory life, rather than to the facile schemas of established religion? Some scholars make much of the humiliation suffered by her merchant grandfather Juan Sánchez, condemned to wear the sambenito—the infamous yellow ruff that denoted a converted “swine” (Marrano) who had secretly relapsed into the old faith—for seven Fridays in a row, jeered by the Toledans who were not so fastidious when it came to using his financial services. Others cite the incident as evidence that Teresa’s ancestor could not have been a serious backslider, let alone a heretic, because the penance assigned by the Inquisition to obtain his “reconciliation” was distinctly moderate for a period when death sentences were handed out by the thousand. Besides, Alonso, Teresa’s father, regarded himself simply as a good Catholic. Could it be that this dissolution of Judaism into the intimacy of a new, ardent faith, rebelling against the exhaustion of tradition, provides a key to Teresa’s uncompromising, reforming spirit?
This view is taken by Michel de Certeau, who finds that a “strange alliance joins the ‘mystic’ spoken word to ‘impure blood.’”13 The crossing of two religious traditions, one repressed and hidden in the private realm, the other triumphant but “corrupt,” undoubtedly helped the “New Christians” to create a new discourse, freed from dogmatic reiteration and structured—like a spiritual marranismo—by the opposition of internal “purity” and external “falsehood.”
If on the one hand Teresa inherited, albeit unconsciously, this spiritual marranismo, it merged on the other hand with a sensibility dominated by Catholicism…in the feminine. For better or worse, for suffering or pleasure. Did that alone persuade the future saint that God was more generous to women, that women “make much more progress along this path [of mystical experience] than men do”?14
Teresa was four years old when the municipal authorities brought a fiscal suit against the Sánchez de Cepeda family, requiring them to prove in court that they possessed the rank of hidalgos, without fiefs or titles perhaps, but exempt from tax. In fact, they already enjoyed this privilege. Juan Sánchez and then his sons had earned it by their social success; they lived like nobles and served the king. Formal hidalgo status was legally granted four years later. Was this how Teresa learned that she was the granddaughter of a converso? Her writings give no indication of it. Nevertheless, the suspicion of a lack of honra, “honor,” tormented the future saint all her life. She harps tirelessly on this “point of honor,” this obligation to “sustentar la honra,” uphold the burden of honor and preserve one’s rank. It was a constant worry for the Sánchez de Cepeda family, as much when they were rich as when they were poor: could it be due to their marranismo? Most theologians and other interpreters of Teresa have studiously ignored the sociohistorical and political dimensions of this particular obsession.
In 1528 Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda was left with twelve children on his hands—two from a first marriage (María and Juan), ten from the second (Fernando, Rodrigo, Teresa, Juan, Lorenzo, Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, Agustín, and Juana)—when Teresa’s mother Beatriz de Ahumada died, possibly in the course of her tenth and final delivery. In July 1531, aged sixteen, Teresa entered the small Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Grace in Avila. All of her brothers became soldiers, except for Juan. They emigrated: Fernando was the first to sail for the Indies (America), and the favorite, Rodrigo, embarked for the Plate estuary in 1535. Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, Lorenzo, and Agustín followed in their wake between 1540 and 1543, eager to acquire wealth and honors in the New World now that their father’s money had almost run out. Living exclusively off the land as a hidalgo was less profitable than selling silks or collecting taxes, and before long the Cepeda y Ahumada family was ruined.
On November 2, 1535, Teresa ran away from her father’s home to join the Carmel of the Incarnation. There she took her vows, after spending a year as a postulant. She was twenty years old. Her father died in December 1543, leaving considerable debts, over which some of his heirs would quarrel for two decades.
Teresa’s “conversion,” the beginning of her deep surrender to religion, dates from 1555. Her contemplative life intensified. A devotee of the orisons of the alumbrados, Teresa nonetheless strove to understand and elucidate them. Two years later she heard her first heavenly “words.”
In 1559, the Inquisition placed on its Index of Prohibited Books many of the spiritual books and chivalrous novels in Castilian that Teresa’s mother had taught her to enjoy. Christ appeared and reassured her: “Don’t be sad, for I shall give you a living book.”15 A vision of Christ in 1559, a vision of Hell the following year. First raptures. Disillusioned by the worldliness of the “calced” Carmelite order, she planned to found, with her fellow nuns, a convent that would reinstate the order’s original rule, the “discalced” Carmel. She would replace shoes with canvas sandals.
At the request of her confessor, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez, in 1560–1561 she undertook to write her life story. Already in 1554, following the advice of her confessors Gaspar Daza and Francisco de Salcedo, she had embarked on an autobiographical work, marking in her copy of Ascent of Mount Zion, by Bernardino de Laredo, the passages that mirrored her experience.16 The confessors, somewhat skeptical, suggested she make confession to the Jesuit Diego de Cetina. It was for him that Teresa set down “as clear an account of my life as I knew how to give, without leaving anything out.”17 But no trace remains of that early text; Teresa or her confessors must have destroyed it. In 1562 Teresa finished the first version of the Book of Her Life, delivered to the Dominican García de Toledo and subsequently lost, and founded the first reformed Carmelite convent, Saint Joseph of Avila, thanks to, amongst other donations, 200 ducats sent from Peru by her younger brother, Lorenzo. She took the name Teresa of Jesus. García de Toledo and the inquisitor Francisco de Soto Salazar asked her to resume and complete her account, which she did between 1563 and 1565: this is the version that has come down to us. It testifies to the way in which Teresa’s experience was influenced by the spiritual teachers of her time: Juan de Ávila, the “Andalusian apostle” acknowledged by Ignatius Loyola as his sole spiritual father; and in the lineage of the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, Bernabé de Palma; but also Bernardino de Laredo and Alonso de Madrid (The Art of Serving God). These practiced the mysticism of recollection and were regarded as recogidos, or contemplatives, but they were not ignorant of scholasticism. Such readings calmed the anguish provoked
by the silent prayer of Francisco de Osuna and guided the nun toward a vocal prayer that began with reading, before turning into ecstatic meditation. Teresa met numerous Church dignitaries of various orders (Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carthusians) who supported or challenged her, criticized or guided her. Her mysticism gained authority under the notable influence of the Franciscan and future saint Pedro de Alcántara, whose kindliness toward women and special trust in her she commends in a 1576 letter to her brother Lorenzo.18
Teresa of Jesus wrote The Book of Her Life at the age of fifty: a sum of familial and amorous memories that bares, without the least coyness, a body sick with desire and exultant in its affliction. If Teresa’s faith asserts itself as an expression of love, the coiling of this lover’s discourse upon itself would infuse her writing with devastating lucidity, continually redoubling the lover’s illusion without ever breaking away from it altogether. Doubtful, skeptical, frequently hostile, at last won over, her confessors instructed her to record the strange raptures she spoke of, those half mad, half rational states that so fascinated the letrados, learned churchmen of rank. Under their supervision the ecstatic seer became a writer: theologians pored over her notebooks, revising and correcting, while the ardent author, whose humility veiled a certain astuteness, soon got into her stride and, while never less than self-deprecating, poured out more and more onto the page. Self-analyses, constitutions, counsels, letters, poems: syncopated, in spurts and gusts, Teresa’s writing grew mentally and physically incessant. This scriptorial therapy deepened the confessional analysis of raptures and agonies—sensations that were appeased, if not effaced, beneath the torrent of texts and monastic foundations. Teresa founded herself in writing at the same time as she founded the Discalced Carmelite order.
A writer? She demurred, waved it away, forgot about it. Her confessors were the ones who got her started, after all; they supervised her output, they edited it, and now and then they censored it. Only one work was to be formally signed and authenticated by her, The Way of Perfection (1573).
A woman possessed by the devil? More than once Teresa doubted her visions, and took care to obtain endorsement from her spiritual guides. When she was suspected of Illuminism during the 1560s, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez came to her defense with a highly favorable report. But matters were not always so simple. In February 1575, Teresa was the happiest of women: she had just met her “angel,” her “Elysium,” her “darling son,” Fr. Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God,* [*I have used the English version of Jerónimo Gracián’s name, as I have done with John of the Cross. Elsewhere I have kept the Spanish names.—Trans.] the apostolic visitor for Andalusia. He was thirty, she was sixty. They made up coded names for each other and loved under the Inquisition’s very nose: “I will never have better days than those I had there with my Paul.” As it happened, the Inquisition got onto La Madre’s case in 1575–1576. Thanks to the support of her confessor and spiritual director, the Dominican Domingo Báñez, doctor of theology and advisor to the Inquisition in Valladolid, they left Teresa alone but placed The Book of Her Life under lock and key: it could not be allowed to circulate among the populace. Recovering it in 1580, the next year she titled it, with wry humor, The Book of God’s Mercies. She no doubt held laughter to be next to love, and radiated both.
Although she was a great friend and accomplice of Saint John of the Cross (they met in 1567, when he was twenty-five and she was fifty-two) in both the Carmelite reformation and the life of the soul, Teresa eschewed the purgative asceticism of her “little Seneca”; she shared neither his endurance under flagellation nor his “privation of every kind of pleasure which belongs to the desire” (Ascent of Mount Carmel).19 The author of the Living Flame of Love would ultimately burn every single letter addressed to him by the sensual reformer.
After her death on October 4, 1582, in Alba de Tormes, Teresa was interred in the chapel of the dukes of Alba, under a heap of soil, stones, and lime. When her body was exhumed in 1586, its wondrously preserved state naturally encouraged the publication of the books. While she was alive, successive popes were at the very least wary of her: Paul IV, Pius V, and Gregory XIII (who recast the calendar) had no time for febrile mystics, especially female ones. La Madre was beatified a century after her birth, in 1614, in a festive Madrid of serpents, ships, and blazing castles. King Philip IV, the ambassadors, and the nobles paid homage to her in the cathedral adorned with her portrait: this depicted her holding a palm frond in one hand, the symbol of virginity, and a quill in the other, to represent literary genius. Lope de Vega himself presided over the poetic joust of sonnets composed in her honor. The Blessed Teresa was canonized by Gregory XV in 1622, in recognition of her “divine wisdom.” The Jesuits had supported her in life: Francisco Borgia, Baltasar Álvarez, Ripalda…The Council of Trent, inaugurating a new epoch for the Catholic faith, had need of someone like Teresa, whose experience fitted so well with the new outlook without being reducible to it.20 For La Madre had patently prefigured, indeed embodied, the baroque. She had led the way in balancing ascetic rigor, rehabilitated by the Carmelite reformation, with the wonders of supernatural spiritual contemplation, legitimized by her genius. It was in this spirit that Luis de León and Jerome Gratian posthumously published and commented upon her works, to consecrate Teresa of Avila as the saint of the Counter-Reformation.
Why do I feel so sure that this Carmelite nun has slipped the leash of her time and her world, and stands beside us in the third millennium? Is Teresa the diarist a modern sensibility, revealing that the secrets of baroque civilization are female? Or is she a novelist who weaves romantic plots, the necessary love interest, around the mystical subject—man or woman, man and woman? Or perhaps the maverick thinker of the Self outside the Self? A Montaigne of extreme, borderline states? The first person to theorize the imaginary with the aid of its own specific tools?
Master of triumphant narcissism inasmuch as she was loving/loved, Teresa was not content to develop the Christ-centered revolution introduced into Judaism by a God-man of love, whose madness—lately called sadomasochistic passion—had touched Mary Magdalene, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and been passed on. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ is simply the cinematographic mise-en-scène of these rejoicings, these shades of pleasure and pain that glimmer throughout the Bible and, for anyone still unenlightened, through Christ’s Calvary. But the ecstatic Madre was no less possessed of a rational mind, capable of paring down her extravagant but therapeutic “visions” and coupling the convulsions of the body with the shifting infinity of thought. Ten years after The Book of Her Life (whose definitive version was completed in 1565), The Dwelling Places of the Soul (1577) feels its way toward a “spiritual marriage” that is not so much a hallucinatory “vision” as a carnal thought, a pure joy of the mind inseparable from the body. It allows her to assess with considerable philosophical precision the difference between thought in motion, a turmoil of the imaginary, and the intellect loosed from the body:
The important thing is not to think much but to love much…I have been very afflicted at times in the midst of this turmoil of mind. A little more than four years ago I came to understand through experience that the mind [pensamiento] (or imagination, to put it more clearly) is not the intellect. I asked a learned man and he told me that this was so; which brought me no small consolation. For since the intellect is one of the soul’s faculties, it was an arduous thing for me that it should be so restless at times. Ordinarily the mind flies about quickly, for only God can hold it fast in such a way as to make it seem that we are somehow loosed from this body. I have seen, I think, that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…It seems I myself wanted to take vengeance on myself.…And since our reading and the counsels we receive (that is, to pay no attention to these thoughts) don’t suffice, I don’t think that the time spent in explaining these things for those of you with little knowledge and consol
ing you in this matter is time lost.…Yet, it is necessary and His Majesty wishes us to take the means and understand ourselves; and let’s not blame the soul for what a weak imagination, human nature, and the devil cause.21
On the one hand, moral judgment, on the other, the imagination of the Bride, desirous without fear of being judged for it: “I would kiss thee, yea, I should not be despised” (Song of Songs 8:1). Teresa recognizes the legitimacy and advantage of the former, but nothing could induce her to give up the harrowing desires without which there is no path to the Beloved: “It isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned”; “the pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer. When suspension does accompany prayer, no pain is felt until the suspension passes.”22
The point is neither to submit to the intellect, nor to substitute it with restless thought and imagination, but to construct a new expression that constitutes the Teresian discourse: suspension of the intellect, while also eluding that illusory, misleading, mystificatory imagination. A different imagination—let’s call it the imaginary—is ready to “fly about,” to soar free of Teresa, to free her in turn, to deliver her even from God; since God is in “the very deep and intimate part” of her, and it’s this that she seeks to liberate and be liberated from.
My sandal-wearer, who claimed to be so unschooled as not to “know who the Assyrians are,”23 didn’t feel at all inferior to the learned doctors who guided her soul; she even took them down a peg in a burlesque homage of a type called vejamen, a comic-satirical critique penned in response to a solemn symposium (that’s right!) held in 1577.24 The perplexing title of her riposte, “Seek Yourself in Me”—words the Other once addressed to her as she prayed—would have left Socrates,25 Montaigne, and Descartes confounded. For Teresa’s formula has nothing to do with the Socratic “Know yourself,” that injunction to “Be wise!” that could have been engraved on the Delphic pediment like a greeting from Apollo to his devotees, which Plato examines in the Phaedrus and the Critias.26 Nor must it be confused with the motto of her contemporary, Montaigne: “What do I know?” Because, although he did not lose his Christian faith, even while suspecting it of bounding “the power of God…by the rules of human language,” the sage of Bordeaux was happier rehabilitating the Pyrrhonian skeptics and replacing every affirmative proposition by doubts.27 He chose the symbol of a pair of scales to represent this doubting Self, poles apart from Teresa’s ravished transports. Lastly, having arisen in dialogue and being derived from transference to the Other, Teresa’s phrase is equally unrelated to the “I think, therefore I am” reached by Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, because the latter is based on solipsistic certainty.28
Teresa, My Love Page 3
