Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  “What I’m saying seems like gibberish, but certainly the experience takes place in this way, for the joy is so excessive the soul wouldn’t want to enjoy it alone but wants to tell everyone about it so that they might help this soul praise our Lord. All its activity is directed to this praise.”31

  The journey, interior or through the outside world, is here a synonym of serenity, as prodigal sons and daughters reconcile to a world made safe at last. Revolts have been shelved, self-denials forgotten, frustrations transcended. To want to “put to work” and even pacify one’s irksome desires by the grace of loving oneself in the Other is perhaps madness, as Teresa is aware; but a blessed madness. And surely preferable to grim truth, belligerent folly, or deceptive, gloomy nihilism.

  Today, as I am reading you and speaking to you, your “activity” is being widely publicized, everyone is being “told about it.” You are being rediscovered. Everybody has his or her Teresa. Tutti a cavallo. You seem to be intriguing the world all over again, beginning with me, Sylvia Leclercq, to speak only of my own headlong race.

  1574. En route to Segovia, you are escorted by just four stalwarts: John of the Cross, Julián de Ávila, Isabel de Jesús (whose fine voice you discovered in Salamanca), and a layman, Antonio Gaytán: a widower whose enthusiasm for your work led him to entrust his home and daughters to a governess while he goes on the road with you. You assign to him the daunting task of spiriting fourteen nuns out of the Pastrana convent, where your fearsome friend Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda, princess of Eboli, is holding sway. Donning the habit after her husband’s death, this pretentious woman seems obsessed with aping you. The noble lady climbed into a “cloistered” carriage and took herself off to Pastrana, where she lives secluded under the name Ana de la Madre de Dios. Eaten up by envy, she has lost all proportion: everybody is to obey her, never mind the constitutions, and especially yours. The Rule is what she says it is!

  Out of kindness to the unfortunate nuns left at the mercies of this capricious aristocrat—or maybe out of a desire to get even with one of your bugbears, the epitome of “artificial displays” of lordship and authority—you arrange for the fourteen sisters to be kidnapped by Julián de Ávila and Antonio Gaytán. You ought to be ashamed, Teresa, you female pícaro, you pícara of faith! After that you go ahead and make a foundation without an order from the bishop, merely with his verbal approval.

  The princess turned Ana de la Madre de Dios lets you get away with it, busy preparing an exquisite revenge of her own. Have you forgotten how in 1569, when you were founding Pastrana, you gave in to her pleas and lent her the copy of the book of your Life that had just been authorized by some saintly men? Eboli left the manuscript lying around, and the servants took a peep at it. People began jeering at your visions, comparing your ecstasies to the impostures of Magdalena de la Cruz, who’d pretended to be a holy woman as well—some heretic she was! They burned her at the stake for faking, and serve her right! One-eyed Eboli has got you now. You snatched her girls, she’ll denounce you to the Inquisition!

  Without the slightest inkling of these schemes, you buy a house in Segovia and move in the fourteen nuns you acquired in a less than Catholic way, perhaps, but too bad, here goes another foundation:

  E E E E G E C

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  C G G G G G G C G G G G G

  C G G G G G

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  John, your “little Seneca,” is lost in rapture in front of a Cross he perceives floating against the lime-washed wall of the cloister. You are writing your Meditations on the Song of Songs. The sisters all worship you, without the least discretion. It’s too good to last. Squalls and storms are about to catch up with you again.

  Your confessor, Fr. Yanguas, quotes Saint Paul’s words commanding women to keep quiet in church, as a way of telling you that women should know their place; he is no fan of the alumbrados toward whom he feels you incline. The Inquisition begins to rummage through your past and scrutinize everything you ever wrote. Father Domingo Báñez is the only one with the finesse and the forcefulness to defend you—but not before making alterations here and there, and prefacing your works with a beautifully wrought screed of scholarly approval.

  On the way to Avila, you can’t help stopping off at the grotto where Saint Dominic used to pray. Prostrating yourself for a long time before the saint’s apparition, you will not depart until he promises to stay by your side in your work of foundation. You are in sore need of him—but of Saint Dominic, or of Domingo Báñez?

  You write: “I saw a great tempest of trials and that just as the children of Israel were persecuted by the Egyptians, so we would be persecuted; but that God would bring us through dry-shod, and our enemies would be swallowed up by the waves.”32

  The Egyptians are not through with you yet, Teresa. And you, the “child of Israel,” will help whip up the tempest.

  1575. Springtime at Beas de Segura, at the border of Castile and Andalusia. In the warm climate of the slopes of the Sierra Morena, almond and orange and pomegranate trees are covered in blossom. Two highborn ladies, the Godínez sisters, have donated a house worth six thousand ducats and invited La Madre to make a foundation there. The eldest, Catalina, handsome and wealthy, always refused to get married; to spite her parents, who wouldn’t hear of her going into religion, she ruined her complexion in the sun, a proper Donkey Skin. Miserable and ill, finally released by the death of her parents, she summons Teresa: the only salvation for the two orphans is a discalced convent. Saint Joseph of the Saviour at Beas thus saw the light of day on February 24, 1575. But it’s not because Beas will be a breeding-ground for saints that it stands out in Teresa’s story; it’s because this is where she meets “the man of her life.”

  Such a corny cliché is not unwarranted at this point in the holy gallop. In her own words:

  In 1575, during the month of April, while I was at the foundation in Beas, it happened that the Master Friar Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God came there. I had gone to confession to him at times, but I hadn’t held him in the place I had other confessors, by letting myself be completely guided by him. One day while I was eating, without any interior recollection, my soul began to be suspended and recollected in such a way that I thought some rapture was trying to come upon me; and a vision appeared with the usual quickness, like a flash of lightning.

  It seemed to me our Lord Jesus Christ was next to me in the form in which He usually appears, and at His right side stood Master Gratian himself, and I at His left. The Lord took our right hands and joined them and told me He desired that I take this master to represent Him as long as I live, and that we both agree to everything because it was thus fitting.33

  Teresa hesitates only for a second. Recalling her affection for other confessors, she feels guilty, attempts to rein back her desires—putting up a momentary “strong resistance,” she tells us. But twice more the Voice of the Other encourages her: there can be no mistake, her orders are “for the rest of my life, to follow Father Gratian’s opinion in everything.”34

  Thunderbolt of love, amour fou, spirit made flesh. A young man of thirty, the son of a secretary of Charles V, the apostolic visitator for Andalusia, finally slakes the desire of this sixty-year-old woman. He is a son to her, obviously, but this Mother who could have been his mother is also his daughter, since he is her father confessor. Flesh and spirit at one, Teresa revels in a different ecstasy, of a kind she had never known at prayer. It resembles the paradox of the Virgin Mother as seen by Dante: “Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,…The limit fixed of the eternal counsel” in the Paradise!35 Is this Paradise on earth, perhaps? Here is the last missing link in the chain that resorbs the immemorial incest prohibition in Teresa’s experience: the daughter of her father, who became the heavenly Father’s Bride, has now become a mother in love with her son who is at the same time her father. The fantasy of incest, purified by the theological canon, has now become embodied in earthly affects, bonds that are as r
eal as can be.

  The new water in which the ecstatic Carmelite will bathe flows precisely from this transport, in which the little girl merges with the mother. Joys of symbolic motherhood, folded into a child’s imagination; joys of infant innocence, conjugated with the omnipotence of masterly maturity. More than hysterical excitability, it is female paranoia that Mary satisfies and appeases when, from being a mother, she moves to being the daughter of her son/father, and only thus a fiancée and a wife, in the suspended time of the eternal design. Teresa does the same. She has never been so sure of herself, so triumphal in the passion of her faith: nor has she ever been as fragile, more exposed to the trials of reality, more attentive to the violent thirst of desire,36 than to the Voices of His Majesty. But the latter is bound to smile upon these new transports with a young father-brother-son-husband; there are no worries on that score.

  Loving and being loved by Gratian reassures, stabilizes, and makes her feel secure, far more than did the protection of the sound and prudent Domingo Báñez. But this new connection also makes her more vulnerable than ever as she hunts for new, efficacious “fatherhoods,” both spiritual (angling for the support of the great Dominican writer Luis de Granada, she writes him a markedly humble letter on the advice of their mutual friend Teutonio de Braganza) and institutional (she doesn’t shrink from appealing to Philip II for help when her darling Eliseus—one of Gratian’s many code names—gets into trouble).

  Your passion for Jerome Gratian, infantile and pragmatic at once, cannot be compared—although some have done so—to the vaporous swoons of Madame Guyon’s “pure love” for Fénelon. The more in love you are with your cherished son-father—at last, an hombre of flesh and blood by your side, a physical replica of the Lord, would you have settled for less?—the more realistic, militant, astute, and active you become, a businesswoman all over. Besides, for all that you may be the “daughter” of your son-father-partner, you are the boss in this couple, my headstrong Teresa, from the start, and increasingly as you pursue those business affairs at your usual furious pace:

  tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

  tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

  tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

  tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

  tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

  I try to keep up with that pace, I pant and struggle, unlike you. I count with you the foundations you continue to make until your last breath, always against the backdrop of your love for Gratian, naturally, as he “replaces” the Lord: “Y díjome que éste quería tomase en su lugar mientras viviese”! Isn’t that something? Have you thought about what such a replacement could possibly mean? No? Is it that you don’t do much thinking anymore, carried away by your passion for that man? Of course not, that’s not it at all. Actually the intoxication doesn’t last long, you soon perceive the limits of the man and of the thing, but you cling to the game, believing without completely believing in it; we’ll take a closer look at this later, you and me. For the moment let me ride with you, come on, everyone to horse:

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  So your Eliseus wants you to found a house in Seville? Seville it is! In fact, by this move the apostolic visitator Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God was disobeying—again!—the general prior of the Carmelite order, Juan Bautista Rubeo. A tricky predicament that soon proved untenable when Gratian found himself trapped between the pincers of Philip II’s wish to accelerate the Teresian reform and the obduracy of the order, reluctant to be reformed. You use your Pablo-Eliseus-Paul and he uses you, bestowing little pet names like Laurencia or Angela…All in the cause of reform, as we have said, but one can’t dig in the spurs without incensing the laggards and drawing persecution down. The next five years will be a perfect tempest of trials and thunderbolts.

  Seville is a long way from Avila, and Andalusia is a sly country; it scares you. The local churchmen don’t even respect the authority of the general, Fr. Rubeo: they actually condemned a disciple of Juan de Ávila to burn at the stake! No matter, you are at the height of your fusion with Gratian, you pledge him your “total obedience” for “as long as you live,” and you hurtle on, keener than ever.

  Father Ambrosio Mariano lends a hand, but he gets ahead of himself: he persuades you that Archbishop Cristóbal de Rojas has given his permission, when he has done no such thing. Worse, Mariano thinks nothing of leaving you all by yourself in Seville in a frightful situation: comprehensive hostility to discalcement and not a cent in donations! Those giddy Sevilleans only care about having fun. It’s a port city, where whores count more than nuns, but this trite pleasantry doesn’t make you laugh. The things you learn, on the road! The calced community are outraged, your program is seen as meddling, as “interference”! But you get your way: on May 29, 1575, a convent for discalced nuns is founded in Seville, once more under the patronage of Saint Joseph.

  How happy it makes you! New novices, charming Andalusian girls, join up. They intrigue you, too: the confirmed Madre fundadora starts to explore a new country, the landscape of the female soul. The text of the Foundations begins to sound as though the chronicle of your works were also, or chiefly, the novel of these sorely tested and often castigated lives. Take the chapter on Beatriz de Chávez, aka Beatriz de la Madre de Dios, the spiritual daughter of your dear Eliseus. What a handful, that girl! You try to understand her, in writing. We’ll come back to it at the end of our ride.

  One thing has never been plainer than it is here, in Seville: the world threatens to gag you, Teresa, my love, it may end up by burning you alive. What do you expect when you move from pure ecstasy to the work of founding, when you aspire to found pure ecstasy in the world, against the world, but with the world? Tensions between the women are rising, too; nothing new about that, but it’s getting more dangerous. Your own niece, María Bautista, feels licensed to disobey you and speak ill of you, she even finds fault with Gratian. She receives a wrathful letter from you, dated August 28, 1575;37 but will this tongue-lashing suffice to bring her to heel?

  It gets worse. Copies of the Life are circulating, the princess of Eboli has filed a complaint against you, and the book is submitted to the court of the Inquisition; even Fr. Báñez is growing peevish. And María Bautista makes a point of seeing the influential Dominican every day—emphatically not for your or Gratian’s benefit.

  But Domingo Báñez is an honest man in the end, thanks be to God. He rescues your book in exchange for a modicum of censorship, emendations which of course you accept. It’s better than being burned. You’ve won, but be prudent!

  Another piece of good news: your brother Lorenzo is back from Peru with a fortune, money that will help reflate the beggarly convent in Seville. He will be “consigned” for his pains, since your enemies are alert, they will do anything to sabotage you; it’s lucky they didn’t put La Madre’s brother behind bars! This pitiful imbroglio does not stop you giving him a good telling-off. It is ridiculous, nay, unacceptable, to call oneself “don” on grounds of one’s fiefdoms in Indian country! Now that you are sure of yourself and of him, there’s no need to be flattering him with titles. You can dress him down as he deserves, beginning with the matter of honra, the good old family vice. Well, you had bones to pick with the new and fervently discalced brother, and you like being the only captain on board; family take note: you’ll make foundations as you see fit!

  This claim to autonomy doesn’t stop you requisitioning Lorenzo’s nine-year-old daughter, Teresita, for the convent. Gratian is against it; but she won’t take vows just yet, of course, you only want her for “her education.” And also to spread a little merriment in halls that often lack it, truth to tell. You established asceticism for it to be sublimated in joy, Teresa, you established joy to be elucidated by asceticism; Teresita will be your great weapon in this debate, because the little one is an “imp” and highly
“entertaining.” People should know that Teresa de Jesús’s holy houses are not disdained by merry little imps, quite the contrary.

  Meanwhile the persecutions continue, and it’s your job to face up to them, to think of everything, to tie down everything that can be, and when the storms blow too hard, simply to hang on. Gratian helps out, but not always, and not really. You already know how impulsive he is, always too harsh or too lenient, clumsy with some people and ingratiating with others: “Difficulties rain down on him like hail.”

  Now for the latest dirty trick: Gratian is packed off to a monastery of the Observation. How appalling, he must be rescued, I’ll write letters, pull every string I can…Right, it’s over, he’s back. But in early 1575, the general chapter of the order at Plasencia resolves to dismantle the convents Gratian founded in Andalusia without permission from Fr. Rubeo. And again it falls to Teresa to intervene. She writes to the general of the order, Rubeo, pleading for his continued support.

  December 1575. An anonymous Carmelite nun denounces Teresa to the Inquisition. “And nonsense also was what she said of us, that we tied the hands and feet of the nuns and flogged them—would to God all the accusations had been of that sort.”38

  But it’s the last straw for Provincial Ángel de Salazar. Finally out of patience, he commands Teresa to repair to a convent in Castile: “[He] said that I was an apostate and excommunicated.” It seems the bell is tolling for Teresa’s enterprise.