Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  And what has this to do with us? A lot!

  The current crisis of religion, and by extension of the priesthood, affects more than just the various churches and their congregations. Over and above the differences between the faiths espoused by the world’s populations early in the third millennium, regardless of bellicosities here or internecine quarrels there, it’s the very function of the ideal Father that is in jeopardy, and this can be observed even in the “neutral religions” constituted by the legal, pedagogical, and moral codes of the advanced democracies. The crisis is most patent at the everyday level: we need look no further than the oft-lamented “absent father,” now that men neglect their ideal role of head of the family in favor of professional success or the frantic pursuit of women—when they’re not risking their lives by having gay sex, or courting jail with an online pedophilia habit.

  Such perversions have always existed, but today they impair the fantasy of the ideal Father while undermining the foundations of our societies, magnified by the joint effects of biotechnological progress and social permissiveness. There are reports from every quarter of this multiple collapse of the ideal Father along with his unconscious double, the dead Father. My own position at the MPH forces me to note how, in every single case study, we invariably come up against the same fateful “collapse of the paternal function.” Not even my Teresa, I suspect, was altogether untouched by this phenomenon: the “Fathers” often strike her as inadequate to their task! Her solution was to look to her Spouse. And I presently feel great admiration to see how my wanderer relied on the One who did preserve the function of the ideal Father, by restricting Himself to the sublimated version of paternal desire.

  When Jesus was born, miraculously, from a virgin womb, when He performed miracles by the sole power of His Word, when He died only to be resurrected by the intercession of the Spirit in order to sit at His Father’s right hand, what was He saying? There is but one desire that counts, the desire for the name, for the representation of meaning. The intensity of this desire can and must be such that it merges with itself by renaming and representing itself: to desire will be to name, to represent. That is enough to revive us body and soul, or I should say for us to be reborn or resurrected, since our carnal appetites are not sacrificed so much as relayed by their representations. Are they thus mastered, or empowered? Mysterium fidei, from which the Church draws its strength. Writers know this: they experience it every time a new poem or novel endows them with a new body. I can’t convey this insight to Marianne, too great a leap for her.

  Reading Teresa, I perceive Christianity—particularly in its apotheosis of Catholic monastic life—as the stimulation and simultaneous thwarting of infantile desires for the father, which must be compensated by being displaced, but to where? Marianne is definitely listening now. Teresa herself would back me up here, since throughout her writings she practices her faith as a source of anguish, ordained, continually fueled, and indefinitely allayed.

  The neurotic can only bear this chiasmus between desire and sublimated creativity by escaping into the symptom: the chasuble of faith hides a host of psychosomatic disorders. Is there any way out? There may be, for the mystic of either sex who strives to identify with the supposed jouissance of the ideal Father, rather than with his function; a jouissance that fantasy locates at the junction of flesh and word. Mystics intuit that the same jouissance is universally accessible if—and only if—we experience it as the desire for representation-verbalization-sublimation. They are ready to mortify their bodies with artful refinements of masochism in hopes of deadening the sexual drive and attaining the purity of the ideal Father, while unconsciously (and with experience, increasingly consciously) aware that the more they try to deaden it the more the drive flares up, and the greater is the resulting jouissance. For their torture places them at the crux where the ideal Father stands, between here and the Beyond, body and spirit, desire and meaning.

  It’s true, Marianne, I promise, Teresa soon realized that mortification doesn’t still the flesh: the excess of penitence is demonic. She wound it down, though without stopping completely, and warned her sisters away from it, as well as John of the Cross; I’ll tell you about that later.

  The experience reconstructed by Teresa’s works amounts to a laboratory of masochism and sadism, of which the nun herself became rapidly aware. Might the devil not have a hand in these thrilling blends of arousal and pain? The answer is found as early as The Book of Her Life. Provided one maintains the humility of the link with God, demonic delights (by which are meant sexual or worldly ones) devolve back to Him:

  If the quiet is from the devil, I think an experienced soul will recognize this because it results in disturbance…And if it is a humble soul and not inquisitive or concerned about delights, even though they be spiritual, but a friend of the Cross, it will pay little attention to the consolation given by the devil.…Anything the devil gives is like himself; a total lie. When the devil sees that in this consolation the soul humbles itself (for in this experience it must have much humility, as in all matters of prayer), he will not return often, because he sees his loss.2

  If we don’t give them weapons against us, do devils truly exist? Demonic desires lurk within: “How frightened these devils make us because we want to be frightened through other attachments to honors, property, and delights!…For we make them fight against us with our very own weapons, handing over to them what we need for our own defense. This is a great pity”;3 for it is considerably harder to project the light of the Spouse into the interior castle. Pain must be “delightful” when sent by God, hateful and “melancholy” when it’s the devil’s work. But how do we distinguish? God’s “favor” brings a sense of joy and repose, emanating from a “region other” than the “outside” of our being, the devil’s domain. It is furthermore girded with “determination” and impressed with certainty, poles apart from any illusory “fancies.”

  You may wonder why greater security is present in this favor [the gift of “delightful pain”] than in other things. In my opinion, these are the reasons: First, the devil never gives delightful pain like this. He can give the savor and delight that seem to be spiritual, but he doesn’t have the power to join pain—and so much of it—to the spiritual quiet and delight of the soul [mas juntar pena, y tanta, con quietud y gusto del alma, no es de su facultad]. For all of his powers are on the outside, and the pains he causes are never, in my opinion, delightful or peaceful, but disturbing and contentious. Second, this delightful tempest comes from a region other than those regions of which he can be lord. Third, the favor brings wonderful benefits to the soul…

  That this favor is no fancy is very clear. Although at other times the soul may strive to experience this favor, it will not be able to counterfeit one.…There’s no basis for thinking it is caused by melancholy, because melancholy does not produce or fabricate its fancies save in the imagination. This favor proceeds from the interior part of the soul.4

  However, it is not always easy to tell the gifts of God from the tricks of the devil. Albeit divine grace appears greater, “it can be more dangerous, and therefore I shall pause a little to consider it.” For God’s word is multiform: “There are many kinds of locutions given to the soul. Some seem to come from outside oneself; others, from deep within the interior part of the soul; others, from the superior part; and some are so exterior that they come through the sense of hearing, for it seems there is a spoken word.”5

  How patiently you dissect yourself, Teresa, my love, along the road undertaken in the name of the Father!

  Marianne has administered an injection to the patient in crisis; he’s asleep now, and she’s back in my office. She settles quietly into the easy chair, lighting a cigarette, a habit she knows I hate. She just wants my company, and lets me read in peace. I look up, leave her in her anxiety, pick up my own train of thought.

  “The thing is, Marianne, Teresa gets as far as saying that only God is able to link the greatest suffering with the greatest joy
and restfulness of the soul! She says that that can only come from God, not from the devil, because—and I’ll try to keep this short, but it’s major, just you wait—it is restful and does one good, in other words, it’s true to the teaching of the ideal Father. I mean, you wouldn’t expect such beneficial results from the devil, would you? This splendid reasoning, along with the experience you and I have had with our residents and other patients, authorizes me, in turn, to affirm that Christian mysticism feeds on perversion.* [*Spelled in the original as père-version, father-version.—Trans.] Calm down, bear with me, I know I’m repeating myself but I want to be clear. What I mean is that Christian mysticism is hard-wired for perversion, it depends on it, colluding with the father’s arousal as well as with his frustration of the child. Hardly exclusive to mysticism, did you say? Absolutely not, that’s why I find it so interesting. So we’re on the same wavelength after all! Now, mysticism pretty well exhausts the perversion or father-version by elevating it into an entirely imaginatory-meditatory-elucidatory pleasure. The ‘way of perfection’—a perfect image in itself, isn’t it?—when it leaves the fantasy of the ideal Father behind, can lead to the borders of atheism. Meister Eckhart asked God to make him ‘free of God,’ and Teresa says ‘My Sisters, you have the power to checkmate God.’ On the way to perfection, the mystic is the custodian both of the ideal Father and of the possibility of representing the father-version. Conversely, any thought that has broken with its fantastic foundations and their prototype, the fantasy of the ideal Father as a dead Father, is devoid of imagination, right? It’s been severed from its roots in the pleasure of words and the turmoil of desire. You know what? Such a de-imaginarized thinking may be fine for managing basic needs, but useless for desire. Mysticism testifies to the strenuous efforts of our civilization to keep hold of the ability to think, even if that way lies madness. Just look at Teresa’s amazing journey from Alonso to Pedro to Osuna, right up to that fabulous ‘checkmate’! She wrote that, you know, but she cut it from the authorized version in the end.”

  Marianne is dumbfounded by this avalanche of assertion, which has surprised me not a little myself. She doesn’t say anything, so I go on.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” She loathes that expression but I can’t help it, I’m getting carried away. “You’re wondering, and you’re right, about the equivalent mother-version that must shadow this journey toward the Father. You think I’m keeping mum about the mother-version perversion, because there’s a problem with it? Hold your horses. The furrows of that backcountry are even more hidden, more pungent, more dangerously authoritative and also, as it happens, more cheerful.”

  Marianne crushes her cigarette in the saucer of my teacup (that really annoys me), lightly kisses the top of my head, and walks out. She’s done for the day; I, on the other hand, am staying all night on call at the home. Alone at last, with Teresa!

  The Host is the one thing that can soothe the Carmelite’s commotions. The thin flake of unleavened bread is bland and tasteless, without nourishment, like a film placed between tongue and appetite. It tantalizes as if to trigger famished dreams of invisible presences, stealthy caresses, a feathery touch deep inside. Teresa likes her wafers large, the better to bait her hunger, to tease and subdue it. She parts her lips with glee to feel the brittle disc dissolve on her tongue without sticking to the dome of the palate. There’s nothing plump or maternal about it, nothing that smacks of nipple. Nothing feminine or pampered, no resemblance to meat or cake or cherries. A presence of nothing. The host is a sliver on the way to being a spirit, a substance that fades away to regale you with the taste of absence…no, to make you swallow the presence of an immaterial reality made of words, images, dreams. It produces the gustatory certainty (that most intimate and singular of certainties) of the way this world of voracious bodies and coarse gobbling creatures is in contact with a different place: an invisible, frustrating world and the more exciting for it, abuzz with daydreams, thoughts, silences, nothings. A far-off world where you are free to roam, not dependent like an infant on its mother, not oppressed by the species’ need to eat. This spiritual, eternal world is also the body of a man who was crucified and came back to life. You enter it by way of a wafer, a membrane, a substance that loses all consistency in contact with your tongue.

  Teresa swallows this intangible world, gulps it down and takes possession of it. The stranger is inside her now, filling her. Swallowing gives her a clearer sense of what she often confusedly feels, and the wafer now underlines this at the back of her mouth and throat and then in the pit of her stomach. A glorious antibody is housed inside her body. Could it be that one’s heart of hearts is nothing but an elusive, fugitive presence? Whether grief or overflowing joy, image or thought, unquiet company. Could this be the Word that refuses to be uttered? A tasty Word at all events, pleasure incurved, incarnate. Is she savoring the source, the unnameable wellspring of every word and fear and wish?

  “Corpus Christi,” murmurs the priest as he places the wafer on her tongue. All of a sudden the cloudy intuition that I is an other, that burning frontier Teresa has always sensed without being able to put a name to it, the summit where her flesh is elevated into meaning and where meaning rejoins the flesh, acquires the flavor of a cannibalistic feast: so it’s the heavenly Father, the Savior whom she is cradling in her mouth! “Whatever you do, don’t chew.” Teresa is filled by a man’s body while holding her appetite in check. If gluttony is a vice, restraint only intensifies the pleasure in her mouth. So long, mother’s breast, adieu the cookery of women! The Host links me to the substance of the ideal Man. I absorb a splinter of his hardness, his bones, his suffering, his impregnable Calvary. Do not say “of his sex”: I reject such devilish fancies. I consume the anatomy of Absence. I eat my fill of desire for the Impossible. No more absence, no more impossibility, we are together.

  As soon as the Eucharist spread through medieval Christendom, the churches began teeming with women. Were they reveling in being fed at last, those women whose life was spent in feeding others? Did the nurturers find their own nurturing mother in the Church? A replacement for the mother they had lost forever, for whom every woman pined with a lifelong nostalgia when she married, or was forced to marry, in order to reproduce; the mother nobody wanted to know about?

  The Church is a good mother, Teresa subscribes to that. The Virgin, always in tandem with Saint Joseph, remained a constant patron of the convents she founded. The Lord’s male breasts spurt “streams of milk,” a fat dry white drop lands on Teresa’s tongue: at that moment the thought of doña Beatriz flashes through her mind, and her soul empties out with a curious loneliness.

  But already it is not the mother who lies upon the tongue that tastes the spirit of God. What this cannibal appropriates is the gaunt, drained, translucid body of Jesus; He is the one she ingests, the one she digests, who runs through her veins and pierces every cranny of her body like a white-hot spear.6 That’s it: the Host frees Teresa from her mother at last. She doesn’t depend on Mama any more, she has no need of maternal sustenance; she only pines for Him. “The Lord almost always showed Himself to me as risen, also when He appeared in the Host.”7 A man’s body for sure, a fountain of sperm-milk, an androgynous being equipped with the bountiful breast of the Virgin Mother when the praying woman reaches the holy of holies: “for from those divine breasts…flow streams of milk bringing comfort to all the people of the castle.”8

  In her Meditations on the Song of Songs, La Madre addresses the sisters in her recently founded institutions. She imparts to these women the oral side of the love Catholics harbor for the Lord, evoking the succulent imagery of the Song with epicurean relish. Like an anti-Eve blithely biting into the apple and every other fruit, Teresa feels licensed to enjoy them: “All the soul does is taste, without any work on the part of the faculties [aquí todo es gustar sin ningún trabajo de las potencias].”9 Fully cognizant of the essential orality of the union with this maternally endowed Spouse, the writer celebrates it, and moves
with disarming breeziness from the pleasures of suckling to the pleasures of utterance. “Previously, the soul says, it enjoyed sustenance from His divine breasts.”10 Teresa cites the famous first verse, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and goes on: “I confess that the passage has many meanings [interpretations: entendimientos]. But the soul…desires nothing else than to say these words [desires none of them, but only: el alma no quiere ninguno, sino decir estas palabras].”11 Pleasure of sucking, pleasure of saying: where’s the difference? Isn’t it one and the same jouissance? Teresa is on the path to perfection. Unless it leads rather to…psychoanalysis?

  She’s not there yet; the symbolic assumption of the praying woman implies a strong identification with virility and a denial of the genital phase that replaces the joy of rebirth through the mouth. A veritable parthenogenesis occurs in this oral and verbal self-engendering—through the Eucharist and through the word, never one without the other.

  What overflowing jouissance it is for the soul to receive this communion! It makes Teresa both a breast-feeding infant and a woman penetrated by the male iron, and what’s more it makes her a man, the same as all men! La Madre dislikes any whiff of femaleness, though it might be inescapable in a convent; she would rather see her charges transcend womanhood, doing away with those bleeding or infected wombs that haunted her own life as a novice. “Nor would I want you to be like women but like strong men.12 For if [women do what lies within: que si ellas hacen lo que es en sí], the Lord will make [them] so strong that [they] will astonish men.”13 By the grace of Communion, what lies within is the presence of the Lord, who espouses our entrails. Further, if we in turn are faithful to Him to the point of espousing His Calvary, He will render us so manly that men will be amazed. And why not? If the Lord created us from nothing and bore us into the world of the Spirit like a mother, why should eating His body not turn us into men like Him?