What you invented, Teresa, my love, was neither censure nor sublimation, but a transfiguration of desire and its mutation into jouissance. The future saint Francisco de Borja must have been somewhat startled, but I think that he listened and heard you. His benevolent presence was enough for you to pursue your train of thought. The pair of you met at least twice, and this “great contemplative” helped you to tie Martha and Mary, the monastic and the active life, together.20 Later he became general of the Society of Jesus and you wrote to each other for eighteen years, a fact that was taken into account during the process of your beatification. Those letters have unfortunately not survived; what a testimony they must have contained! The former nobleman’s encouragement, you let it be known, reinforced your conviction that it was possible to modulate desire between action and contemplation in the way you did, since “he answered…that it had happened to him.”21 Good gracious!
Today, listening to your nun stories, Borja holds his peace. Silence is as much part of the father’s role as of the analyst’s.
“Do you remember the hermit that Cassian speaks of?” (You like to impress the good fathers, my strategical Teresa, and that includes Borja. I can see why: they love it!) “The one who threw himself into a well, in order to see God sooner.” Like a suicide bomber in Baghdad, Tel Aviv, or London? Or like one of the “consumed” whom Colette dwelt upon, those men and women who are even more numerous today, junkies of desire unto death by way of hard sex? “Well, if that hermit’s desire had been faithful to God, he would not have put himself forward like that. For everything that comes from God is discreet and measured, I mean, luminous. Therefore we must be on our guard, always on the lookout! And we must curtail the time of prayer, no matter how enjoyable we find it. For otherwise our bodily strength will falter and our head will start to throb, trust me. I’m sure that moderation is necessary in all things, Father. And I dare to hope Your Honor will pardon me for thus advancing my humble opinion.”
A father, still more a father of the Church, cannot but approve of such sensible opinions, Teresa. Which neither add nor detract, of course, from your intimate conviction of harboring the Lord at the center of your castle—like a precious jewel, you say later.22 Your written ecstasy is a syncope that soothes you so as to link you to everybody, for “the Lord invites all [convida el Señor a todos].”23 Your precious, blissful solitude is kept intact by weaving a net in the external world, like the “circumference” around your “center.” Is this what you are telling your learned, blue-blooded Jesuit? He hardly needs to be told, surely, that any excess is always a fault! But “perinde ac cadaver” and “AMDG—Ad majorem Dei gloriam”!
Borja knows that you reprise Matthew (“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden” [11:28]) in your own way. The divine feast you enjoy is obviously not intended for you alone: “If the invitation were not a general one, the Lord wouldn’t have called us all.”24 Indeed, the more inclusive the invitation, the greater your jouissance. How so? Because the spiral of narcissism is so constructed that it sweeps the beloved toward grandiosity the moment he or she sets foot on it: we have touched on this already. It is in order to spread out this feast for everybody that you make yourself a writer in your castle-laboratory, at the same time as you set forth on the highways and byways of Spain, bringing reform to the Carmelite order.
“You of all people should understand, Andrew, as someone who’s only interested in politics in order to get out of it! Teresa’s grandiose perversion, her père-version, demands far more of her than the conventional charity that’s enough for the average neurotic nun, trying to do good left and right so as to merit the sufferings of Christ. Politics as a form of connection has always been a magnet to paranoiacs, as you’ve often said yourself, and when it does not breed tyrants, it offers vast building sites to reformers and benefactors of humanity. Today’s tyrants have dwindled into virtual clowns of the generalized spectacle. So what? They’re still running after power and glory, aren’t they? Going back to Teresa, her transports of ecstasy are just one side of a coin whose other side commands her to act politically. Ravished by the heights of her elevation in the Spouse, dazzled by union with Him at the heart of her castle, her only concern now is to grasp hold of the religious link that subtends the power of Church institutions, in this case the Carmelite order, and adapt it to her very own style of jouissance. After all, she is the Truth of the Other! Luckily this wild certainty only possesses her on and off. Not letting it hold her up, she manages to domesticate the incommensurable desire for the Other—paranoia, if you like—and exhibits her appeasement in institutionalized form, as an example to the whole world. She’s saying: have a go, and then we’ll talk! By founding a new monastic order, the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa proclaims to all and sundry that it’s possible to infinitely transmute the meaning of the bond with others, and that this is what life, properly lived, is about! In all humility, needless to say. That’s her ambition, don’t you think? Stop harping on her pathology, this is a patient who has intuited your clinics already. She says in the “Sixth Dwelling Places”: ‘Through experience we have seen that it’—the jewel, or vision of Our Lord—‘has cured us of some illnesses for which it is suited.’25 Her faith is her therapy, and she spells it out.…Come on now, quit grumbling and let’s read some more.”
Chapter 19
FROM HELL TO FOUNDATION
But it seems to me that love is like an arrow sent forth by the will.
Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs
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!
“Beware the vice of gluttony, Sister!” Teresa rebukes her with a smile, not sure of being immune to that temptation herself.
“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…”
“I only go when I am ordered to do so.”
“Oh, of course, but go you do. You go all steeped in God, they say, unless the devil’s hand is in it!”
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 he
r 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.”
“A vision of Hell!” exclaims María de Ocampo.
“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.
“We can’t be angels down here, María. On the contrary, we have a body.”4 Does Teresa want to appear less intransigent toward human vices than her cousin?
“I’m very scared of the devil!” says Ana de Tapia, who is apt to be hard on herself. And yet she goes out less than many other young nuns, and her daydreams can hardly be very salacious.
“Are you, indeed! I fear a discontented nun more than many devils.”5 She hasn’t the heart to chide her companions; she would always rather make them laugh.
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.
Hell. It cannot be compared to the agonies Teresa has already been through, racked by nervous crises whose ferocity every doctor had recognized, nor to the torments visited on her by her demons.
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 is this perhaps a disgusted perception of your own body, a fetid prison from which you are “unable to hope for any pleasure,” from which the only thing to do is escape, fleeing away from yourself into the Paradise of the ideal Father?
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.
Teresa, My Love Page 32
