(His Voice remains silent. Here Teresa believes she can hear it smiling at her.)
LA MADRE, surer than ever of His Voice. Jesus was not an angel…(shrewd smile)…so far as I know! (Reading.) We are not angels either, we have a body.55 I always go back to that.…Is that called an obsession, you psychologist over there? Laurencia and Angela under the habit of Teresa of Avila, Pablo beneath the appearance of Fr. Gratian.…(In a frankly serene voice, still reading.) Being human, it is very beneficial for us to consider God in human form, suffering because desiring, for as long as we are in this life.…(Voice breaks, blood trickles from right corner of mouth.) To desire to be angels while we are on earth—and as much on earth as I was—is foolishness. (Pause.) Ordinarily, thought needs to have some support.…(Pause.) Jesus Christ is an excellent friend, in His sacred humanity.56 (Broad smile.)
(La Madre has finished her plea.)
TERESITA. She’s going to sleep.
ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. She has seen the Lord.
(Teresa’s visage radiates complete peace. Is there nothing left to wait for?)
LA MADRE. What’s that I hear? His Voice again? No, it’s not the same carnal timbre, the voice that guides me tentatively, caressingly, upliftingly.…(Pause.) So it’s not the Lord, not yet. Who, then? Could it be you, my little Seneca? I miss you so much! Even though we don’t agree on everything, you and I. What did you say? That you personally don’t need support? You push on to the end of the night? (In a greedy voice.) Me too, I try in my own way, in my own night…No, don’t take that for an exaggeration, Father, I pray you, in reality my words fall short because the experience is unexplainable.57 You know that better than anyone.…It seems to be like gibberish, algarabía.58…A taste in the mouth…I know, we never finished discussing it; we were both of us rather against it, though, weren’t we, my big Seneca? (Imploringly.) And what if that were Paradise? An adjustment of just souls? We never stopped trying to be just, did we? You less than me, perhaps, or vice versa.…(Reading.) For “the soul of a just person is nothing else but a paradise where the Lord says He finds His delight.”59 So what happens when in addition to this, two souls strive to offer delights to the Lord.…What do you think? Speak up, won’t you, John dear? Come on, force that thin adolescent voice of yours.…(Pause.) I daresay you’ve scorched your vocal cords as well, then, today.…(Short laugh.) All I can hear is an ashen sound, I’m dying, you know. (Cheerful laugh.)
Saint John of the Cross. Spanish school, seventeenth century. Toledo, Museo de Santa Cruz. © Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
Chapter 32
ACT 3
Her “Little Seneca”
A great fear and tumult…and in a moment…all remains calm, and this soul…has no need of any other master.
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
TERESA OF AVILA, with her carers
JOHN OF THE CROSS
MOTHER MARIE
BLANCHE DE LA FORCE
THE CARMELITES OF COMPIÈGNE
BOSSUET, writer, prelate, bishop of Meaux
SYLVIA LECLERCQ, psychologist
VOICE OF LEIBNIZ
VOICE OF SPINOZA
ACT 3, SCENE 1
JOHN OF THE CROSS
TERESA OF AVILA
MOTHER MARIE
BLANCHE DE LA FORCE
THE CARMELITES OF COMPIÈGNE
The scene takes place in the ground-floor parlor of the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila. This is where, according to legend, the levitation of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross occurred. The two future saints are seated in the very chairs concerned (today on display to the public). Instead of the bluish light of preceding scenes, a fiery glow bathes the room.
JOHN OF THE CROSS. Without support and with support,
Living without light, in darkness,
I am wholly being consumed.1
TERESA OF AVILA, after a pause. “We belong to the party of the Crucified One.” Somos de la banda del Crucificado.2 Your paternity employs the same language as I, but not with the same meaning. To you, everything is wound and oblivion; to me, everything is union and delight. Is that too perfunctory, or exaggerated?
JOHN OF THE CROSS. Surely our first care is to devote ourselves to the dark night of the senses. To detach the exterior senses and pare the natural exuberance of the appetites.3
TERESA. Since our first meeting in Medina in 1567—when you, Father, were still a young student in Salamanca—I recognized in you the spiritual authority we needed, by God’s grace. (Shifting her chair away from his.) I also realized straight away that your paternity would not be easy to deal with. You wanted to become a Carthusian, but I quickly made you see that you could be one, to perfection, with me. Do you remember what you replied? “I give you my word, on condition I don’t have to wait too long.”
JOHN OF THE CROSS, after a silence. “For, the farther the soul progresses in spirituality, the more it ceases from the operation of the faculties in particular acts, since it becomes more and more occupied in one act that is general and pure.”4 “The soul no longer enjoys that food of sense, as we have said; it needs not this but another food, which is more delicate, more interior, and partaking less of the nature of sense,”5 full of “peace and rest of interior quiet.” (He is motionless, eyes fixed not on her but on the glowing red space.)
TERESA. I expounded on these delicate matters long before you did, my little Seneca. Recall that by 1567 I had already written the book of my Life and The Way of Perfection. (No longer at death’s door, voice calm and authoritative.) It’s true that God accorded me the spiritual marriage in November 1572, and your arrival six months earlier did have something to do with it; still, I was already prepared, I had been ready ever since my re-conversion. I know you don’t dispute it, but I’d rather set the record straight once more before I die, seeing how absorbed you are by that flame…(Gazing at the brazier herself.) You didn’t write anything before my Interior Castle, and that’s a fact. (Shifting her chair back nearer to his.) The life of the spirit—which I taught you—arises from the most intimate part of the soul. It burns, and how! I am a connoisseur of fire, contrary to what you might expect from the voluble female you suspect me to be. Water is my element, I can’t help that, but it doesn’t prevent me from acceding to the soaring of the flame. You have often witnessed it yourself. For the spark that suddenly begins to blaze and shoots up like something extremely delicate to the higher plane that pleases the Lord is of the same nature as the fire that remains beneath. “It seems to be a flight, for I don’t know what else to compare it to.”6
JOHN OF THE CROSS. “Withdrawn from pleasure and contentment.”7 (Pause.) Nothing! Nothing! I would give up all I am for the sake of Christ! “Love is begotten in a heart that has no love.”8
O living flame of love
That tenderly wounds my soul
In its deepest center! Since
Now You are not oppressive,
Now Consummate! If it be Your will:
Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!
O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!9
(Silence.)
TERESA, in a soft voice, eyes turned inward. Expiation, are you summoning me to expiation? I know…I’ve tried everything…it’ll never be enough.…But I insist on it right up to the final pages of the Castle: “What I conclude with, Sisters, is that we shouldn’t build castles in the air,” or towers without a foundation; and remember that there is no foundation during this short life other than to “offer the Lord interiorly and exteriorly the sacrifice we can.”10 What generations to come will retain of our experience as Carmelites is the acerbic taste of a noble atonement, isn’t that right, Father? Are you thinking, like me, of the Carmelites of Compiègne, in the Dialogues screenplay by Bernanos?
(John remains silent. La Madre glimpses the shadow of Mother Marie sweeping over the walls of Avila.)
MOTHER MARIE. There is no horror but in crime, and in the sacrifice of innocent lives the h
orror is expunged, and the crime itself restored to the order of divine charity.…11
JOHN OF THE CROSS. O sweet cautery!
The two friends hear the court pronounce the death sentence on sixteen Carmelites for holding counterrevolutionary meetings. Then they watch the nuns climb down from the tumbril at the foot of the guillotine in the place de la Révolution. Young Blanche de la Force advances calmly, her face shows no fear. Suddenly she breaks into song: “Deo Patri sit Gloria, et Filio, qui a mortuis surrexit, ac Paraclito, in saeculorum saecula.” Blanche becomes lost among the crowd, along with the rest of the sisters.
JOHN OF THE CROSS. Solus soli.
TERESA, after a silence. The feminist philosopher Edith Stein, who became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, remembered them too, inevitably, as she offered herself up for God. “Come, we go for our people,” she told her sister Rosa, on August 2, 1942, as the Gestapo hustled them out of the Carmel of Echt, in Holland, where they had taken refuge.12 She refused all privileges, unwilling to be an exception to her people’s fate or take advantage of having been baptized.…Like the Carmelites of Compiègne, she was thinking of you, Father, when she chose this self-sacrifice.…I’m sure of it…more of you than of me, anyway. There will be periods like that, in the history of men and women, when chastisement will be salutary. “With his stripes we are healed,” the prophet Isaiah said.13 The concentration of evil will be such that martyrs will be needed to testify that the relationship between Heaven and earth has broken down.…Had I lived then, and had they sewn a yellow star onto my sleeve, I would have behaved exactly like Sister Teresa Benedicta, don’t you think?…I hope I would have taken that decision, or done something similar like joining the Resistance or the maquis.…Not really the Carmelite style, I grant. But who knows? I’m asking you, as an expert in martyrdoms.…
(A large photograph of Edith Stein floats above the walls of Avila.)
TERESA, voice breaks, then steadies. Look at that smile.…The strength, the steadfastness that supported her along the road to Auschwitz.…She must have known she’d enlisted in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist. Why, on Palm Sunday 1939, she gave her prioress a note requesting to be given up as an offering. (Reads.) “Dear Mother, permit me to offer myself up to the sacred heart of Jesus as the expiatory victim for true peace, so that the reign of the Antichrist might collapse if possible without another world war, and a new order may be established. I would like to do it today, for we are at the eleventh hour. I know I am nothing, but Jesus wishes it, and He will surely call many others in these days.”14 All for the love of God, indeed…“the love that gives itself unstintingly,” as she wrote in a little biography of me, Love for Love’s Sake, while she was still only a postulant at the Carmel of Cologne, so you see…I could have written those words, couldn’t I?…I feel fulfilled, dear John, I can say this to you, at having been the inspiration for such a soul, who harbors divine grace within her so absolutely.…Do you think I’m committing the sin of pride, out of stupid vanity—that this is too much honra for the wretched creature that I am? (Sidelong glance at the photograph of Edith Stein as a young philosophy student, passing swiftly over the Avilan fortress.)
(Silence from John.)
TERESA, in a melancholic and then assured voice. I think so too, you know I do, my sweet Seneca, I have often atoned, for far more than you can imagine, although it doesn’t stop me sensing the Guest inside of me, that’s just how it is.…Must one offer oneself up as a holocaust to appease the wrath of God, as Bernanos has the Carmelite prioress decide, during the Terror of 1794? Did the Lamb of God want Sister Teresa Benedicta to become another mystic Lamb, to be immolated by the Nazis, so that the profound joy and inner gaiety with which she submitted to His will at the blackest moment of that black night could burst back over the world to save even the most hardened sinner, and perhaps redeem the criminal himself? Do you know? She will write that “the mania for suffering caused by a perverse lust for pain differs completely from the desire to suffer in expiation,”15 and I believe her, of course. Although my path was a different one, and different also to yours, dear friend, for all your clear complicities. Sacrifice, suffering, obedience, and profound humility, of course…the fact of sin demands them.…But martyrdom?…Hombre como Cristo? What do you say? God loved me as something other than a Lamb, He loved me as a Bride and was content to demand works, works, and more works from me.…He bathed me and inflamed me and I wanted to enkindle you all with celestial fire…I wanted to become a perpetual spur to virtue…I mean, to love.…16 You can be Stein’s Science of the Cross, and I, the Hidden Spring.…17 Don’t pull that face.…All right, it’s not so simple! We are converging, though. Saint Teresa Benedicta will experience our reunion in herself.…We’ll come together in her, do you see? It diverts me to argue with you today, my good friend, just for the pleasure of getting closer to you, I know you understand.…In a nutshell, you’ll be most read in times of war, and I in times of peace…if such a thing exists.…(Moves her chair nearer, he doesn’t budge, doesn’t look at her.) In the Love of the Other, it does. (Tranquil face, pensive smile.)
JOHN OF THE CROSS, immobile in his love and as if absent, surrendered to his dark night. O delightful wound!
(Silence.)
TERESA, shrinks back, straightens up and presses her head against the back of her chair. Here it comes again, that feeling I always had in your company, Father: dare I tell you aloud, by now? I am frightened by the spell you cast. How grateful I was to your paternity for founding the first discalced male monastery in Valladolid in 1568! But I know you felt snubbed when I wrote more about Prior Antonio de Jesús than about you, in relation to the foundation at Medina del Campo, and didn’t even mention you in connection with Granada. And yet you are everywhere in my pages: that wounded deer, for instance, slaking her thirst in the living waters;18 or that poor little butterfly so full of apprehension that everything alarms it and makes it take flight before the Lord has a chance to fortify it, enlarge it, and render it capable.19 It’s partly me, but very much you: you’ll be recognized in those figures one day. Excuse me for prophesying, I do it sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s embarrassing, you know how your Madre is.…But how can I refer to you but through secret analogies, when the sweet perfection of your suffering body often impressed upon my soul your own lovely pains and froze me with fright: you can understand my trepidation, can’t you, dear John? Oh, and those death’s-heads, those skulls in Pastrana! When all’s said and done it’s the Trinity that separates us, Father. I don’t feel it in quite the way you do, and your paternity doesn’t die of it the way I do.
JOHN OF THE CROSS. “I know that the stream proceeding from these two
Is preceded by neither of them
Although it is night.”20
(Pause.)
“A lone young shepherd lived in pain21
Withdrawn from pleasure and contentment.”
(Pause.)
Even in darkest night.
(Silence.)
TERESA. Look here, my brother! Although I am a woman and haven’t studied Latin, I try to comprehend the Mystery you describe so well. (Reads.) “I was reflecting today upon how, since they were so united, the Son alone could have taken human flesh…these are grandeurs which make the soul again desire to be free from this body that hinders their enjoyment.”22 That’s what you’re saying, too, yes or no?
JOHN OF THE CROSS. “In the beginning the Word
Was; He lived in God…
The Word is called Son;
He was born of the Beginning…
As the lover in the beloved
Each lived in the other…
And the Love that unites them
Is one with them,
Their equal, excellent as
The One and the Other:
Three Persons, and one Beloved
Among all three.
One love in them all
Makes them one Lover…
Thus it is a boundless
L
ove that unites them…
And the more love is one
The more it is love.”23
TERESA, fast. Father and Son, united in equality and excellence: I see that. The more love is one, the more infinite it is; I’m with you there, too. But what equality, what excellence? And how does this infinity become concretely plural among the Three Persons, and then in our souls? (Pause.) Oh, Father, please don’t scold me for splitting hairs; unworthy woman I am, and fleshly with it, I don’t want to make a mistake. As you know, I would go “to the ends of the earth as long as it were out of obedience.”24
JOHN OF THE CROSS. “They were meant for the Son
And He alone rejoiced in them.…
My Son, only your
Company contents Me.”25
TERESA, settling back into her chair, which will not levitate. Well said! Gospel truth! And yet it would seem that I took the opposite path to yours. One day, “I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ.”26 Have you tried it, my great Seneca? (Thoughtfully.) Your vision is pure and intellectual, I know, you refrain from detailing ecstasies and raptures, you prefer only to explain the words, or rather your own stanzas, as befits a learned man. (Knowing smile.) You have no time for physical apprehensions and manifestations. (Pause.) Whereas me, I am a scruffy sparrow rather than a golden eagle.…I try to be inseparable from Jesus’s humanity, inside my flesh and its retinue of visions, revelations, words.…Your unsullied way is one of darkness, death, and desolation. A wholesale negation that peters out exhausted in a purified tranquility, a terrible, pitch-black peace. Like you I started off with pain, loss and separation. (Pause.) In my banishment as I moved toward the Spouse, ecstasy emptied me of myself. (Long pause.)
Teresa, My Love Page 62
