As you know, my dear Philosopher, after Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, scholasticism came up with a topology of inner space in which the higher part comprised man’s rational faculties, and the lower part the sensitive faculties.
The Rheno-Flemish mystics modified the structure established by Aristotle and Aquinas by adding to this bilevel schema a new “higher part”: the locus of mysticism itself, the site of the “essence” of the soul, above the median level of rationality and the base level of the sensitive. Transcending the operative powers (intellect, will, imagination), irreducible to the actual capabilities of any given subject, the indivisible essence of the soul is deployed in a rigorously ontological context. This summit of man’s interiority is described by Meister Eckhart as the “innermost source” in which “I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work.”16
The soul sits at rest on this crowning point to “merit” an “interior nativity,” in other words an overcoming of the “self” by means of the rebirth of the “subject” as Other, in the modern interpretation. “Be quiet, let God speak and work within”: this is the method advocated by Johannes Tauler, Eckhart’s disciple, to enable the soul within which the (re)birth occurs to become “a child of God.”17 An essential, noetic, abstract, imperceptible union, “without images or instruments,” “a learned ignorance,” ignota cognitio, this “depth”—or rather pinnacle—of the soul in Rheno-Flemish mysticism is thus an ontological reality, the transcendence of being over doing.
And yet the consciousness of the feeling and thinking subject is by no means abolished here. Meister Eckhart’s experience is more like a “flickering” between the three hierarchically separated levels of essence, reason, and sense.18 Mysticism only sacralizes the noblest part of the soul, the essence, and this can only be attained in the seclusion of silence, causing the rebirth of subjectivity through its immersion in Being; its power is none other than the pure silence of noetic alteration. The “vain pursuit” of faith in Saint John of the Cross has affinities with this noetic alteration described by Tauler: “There is no doubt that Almighty God has appointed a special place for Himself in the soul which is the very essence itself, or Mens, whence the higher powers emerge. This spirit or Mens is of such great dignity that no creature has or ever could rise to the height necessary to understand it.”
Teresa was not unaware of this noetic ambition, for her whole reformation of the Carmel, with its stress on austere enclosure, silence, and purity, alluded and adhered to it. But my roommate went further: her life, her writings, and her deeds embody and testify to a different mystical model.
If more evidence is needed of the impossibility of reducing Teresa’s procedure to the Rheno-Flemish model, suffice it to say that the sensualist-rationalist tendency, opposed to the mystics of the North, acknowledged a debt to the saint’s experience. This current, launched by Francis de Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God,19 hit the zenith with Fénelon20 and Madame Guyon.21
In one of your marvelously intransigent fugues, my dear Philosopher, you yourself conflated “la Guyon,” her verbose Spiritual Torrents, and Fénelon, with…Teresa! You begin by expounding rapturously on the fickle female of the species. Then, having immortalized Jeanne Guyon, you automatically associate her with my saint. So La Guyon writes with unrivaled eloquence in her book Torrents? You go on to declare: “Saint Theresa has said of devils, ‘How luckless they are: they do not love!’ Quietism is the hypocrisy of the perverse man, the true religion of the tender woman.”22 Indeed. But Teresa a “tender woman”? Never! Next, carried away by enthusiasm, unless it’s persiflage again, you commend Fénelon as a “safe” man: “There was, however, a man of such honesty of character and such rare simplicity of morals that a gentlewoman could safely forget herself beside him and melt into God. But this man was unique and called Fénelon.” Right! Enough of that, let’s get back to the female genius. “Women are subject to epidemic attacks of ferocity.” Although: “Oh, women, what extraordinary children you are!”
With that, were you edging nearer to Teresa? Not in my opinion. Dare I say that the philosopher lacks something indispensable for following the Carmelite in her cruelty, her infantilism, her raptures, her foundations? You don’t know what to do with those exaltations in which the soul becomes one with the Other, because the atheist in you is condemned to diminish the singularity of innerness and to lock himself out from the mansions of the soul by his refusal to countenance the Other’s very existence. I’m not asking you to believe in it, to subscribe to it, or even to make use of it. I’m asking you to make your object of incredulity—God—into an object of interpretation.
It was impossible: you were blocked by the same rationalistic sensualism that had already produced a new mystical model, itself sense-based and psychologistic, with which you rather sympathized. It made you “shiver” in the company of Guyon-Fénelon, and you redressed it on the reason side or tilted it toward the side of emancipation to castigate the iniquities of an oppressive obscurantism. But it debarred you from the subtle paths of perceptible—and imperceptible—perfection that are opened up by the experience of faith.
What if your Nun were not only the fruit of a revolt against the abuses of religious institutions but also and equally an ultimate consequence of the rationalistic sensualism that abrogates, along with the “God question,” the true complexity of the “castle of the soul”? First by belittling it, then by ignoring its intrinsic logic, and finally by annulling it? You perceive the threat, Mister Philosopher, and fight it by creating the polyphonic and carnivalesque characters of your novels, you entrust the imagination with the job of musiquer (setting to music, the term used by He in the Nephew) the psychic life.23 But you’re not sure that all this is enough, and you have no desire to finish the novel of The Nun now that you’ve released her from religion. The “benighted philosophy” of the “folly of the cross,” as Suzanne puts it in her letters to the marquis, is, I suspect, somewhat yours as well—for haven’t you elected to remain blind to the voyage of souls toward the God question?
I am not suggesting that you personally, Maître, closed the God question in favor of another question, not entirely divorced from it but not to be reduced to it either: the question of subjection and how to get rid of it. I am only saying that this closure has a history, which involves you, and that the history of mysticism itself participates in it. But since my wager is to reopen the God question in the thinking that crystallized in the enlightened Encyclopedia and culminated, as I see it, with Freud, I can only do this by way of your good self, replaying your revolts and querying your silences.
It’s well known that you found Christianity a doleful affair, compared with the zest for life, sensual gaiety, and civic pugnacity you valued so highly in pagan antiquity and transposed to the dimension of mankind. And yet I hear you tell your Maréchale that all deities, including pagan ones, belong in the madhouse: grist to my psychologist’s mill, as you can imagine.
“In no century and with no nation have religious opinions been the basis of national morals. The gods adored by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the most virtuous of people, were the merest scum: a Jupiter who should have been burnt alive: a Venus fit for a reformatory: a Mercury who ought to be in a jail.”
But while you shared Freud’s abrasive unbelief, you feared that delusion could not be so easily eradicated. “Do you think man can get along without superstition?” asks the Maréchale de—. “I do not entertain this hope, because desire for it has not blinded me to its hollowness: but I take it away from no one else.” At the same time you doubted that the Christian message had been heard: “But are there any Christians? I have never seen one.”24 Echoing Hobbes, you rightly contended that religion is a superstition that is allowed, and superstition a religion that is not allowed.25 Being a reasonable fellow, more influenced by your English contemporaries than by the Hebrews of yore, you felt that religious abuses are best remedied by sound legislation, devised in the public in
terest. It is impossible, you tell the Maréchale, to subject
a nation to a rule which suits only a few melancholiacs, who have imposed it on their characters. It is with religious as with monastic institutions; they relax with time. They are lunacies which cannot hold out against the constant impulse of nature, which brings us back under her law. See to it that private good be so closely united to public good that a citizen can hardly harm society without harming himself. Promise virtue its reward, as you have promised wickedness its punishment. Let virtue lead to high offices of state, without distinction of faith, wherever virtue is to be found. Then you need only count on a small number of wicked men, who are involved in vice by a perversity of nature which nothing can correct. No. Temptation is too near: hell too far off. Look for nothing worth the attention of a wise law-giver.26
But your affinity with religious—and with Freud’s—experience is never more glaring than when you equate the Creator and His Laws with the good father and his selective authority. With feigned ingenuousness you remind the Maréchale of the story of the young Mexican and the old man. The Mexican (yourself, perhaps?) doesn’t believe that anybody lives across the sea, until one day, blown by a storm, he lands there and finds to his relief a venerable old man on the beach. He falls to his knees. “‘Get up,’ said the old man; ‘you have denied my existence?’” Of course, he pardons the Mexican for his ignorance. This allows you to make a point to the Maréchale to the effect that fatherly forgiveness trumps the punishment that “real” religion metes out—according to her (surely un-Christian) preconceptions.
Law or mercy? To this intra-Hebraic crossroads where the God question leads, you will return very analytically, dear Denis Diderot, with regard to yourself and your father. We know that as an impudent thirty-something you went to your father’s house to ask for his permission to marry Anne-Toinette Champion, a modest lace vendor. He refused and had you locked up in a monastery, you escaped, laid low in Paris and married your sweetheart—only to find her a bore. Well, it was in that same family home at Place Chambeau, in Langres, that the prodigal son, having disobeyed the paternal injunction to become a churchman, mused with his father over the need for a Law and how to become free of it. You attributed to this father, the underwriter of the Law, not so much the authorization to defy it as the shrewdness to be wisely unconventional. I am thinking of your “Conversation of a Father with His Children”: “When it was my turn to bid him goodnight, I embraced him and said into his ear: ‘Strictly speaking, Father, there is no law for the wise.’ ‘Pray keep your voice down.’ ‘All laws being subject to exceptions, it is for the sage to judge in which cases to bow to them and in which to ignore them.’ ‘I should not mind,’ said he, ‘if there were one or two citizens like yourself in the town; but I should not live there were they all to think likewise.’”27
I rather fear, Sage of the ideal polis whose citizens do not all think likewise, that your philosophy has not been followed to the letter. I’m afraid your unconditional fans tend not to know or to forget about your writings and your tears, this time at the death of the cutler, a paragon of piety and justice: “I feel an infinite sadness,” wrote the inconsolable son who was not by his father’s side when the time came.
All in all you are a tolerant atheist, Mister Philosopher, and it doesn’t come amiss to repeat it, even if your oh-so-reasonable sensibility makes Teresian interiority a closed book to you. I like to think that if I met you today, more than two hundred years after your demise, you would have persevered with your nun’s story, and our paths might have crossed. Personally, I’m sure of it.
Let us return then to that other mystical model, distinct from the Rheno-Flemish school. This developed through the rationalist-sensualists, aiming to integrate the Cartesian subject while adapting it to lived experience, and bewitching the French—or rather, French women. To my mind, this model was not in keeping with Teresa’s project either. Descartes’ ego cogito gradually infiltrated Christian mysticism to eclipse the ego amo and ego affectus est of the Christian subject; it was Julia Kristeva and her Tales of Love that made me understand this long ago, when, disappointed in my unfinished thesis on Duras, I attended her classes at Jussieu. Briefly, faith ordered by reason is accompanied in Francis de Sales by a mutation of love that finds peace in knowledge. Pascal himself insists, in his Discourse on the Passion of Love, on the role of reason in love, and presents the latter as a clear-sighted vision of truth rather than a form of blindness.
Paradoxically, the desacralization of mystical experience begins with this second would-be mystical current or “model,” with its inflexion of being toward doing. The desacralization is lasting, even or especially when the praying person resists doing with all his or her might in order to find refuge in non-action. How can this be? The faculties (intellect, will, imagination) are henceforth located on the higher planes of both the Rheno-Flemish trichotomy and the Aristotelo-Thomist dichotomy; as a result, the mind is split from the senses, that is from feeling or sentiment, relegated to the lower plane of human reason. The two activities nonetheless overlap and encroach to produce an amazingly complicated map of the soul, a jumble of components, degrees, and postures, but this “vertiginous carousel with its proliferating subdivisions” has nothing in common with Teresa’s dwelling places, as we will see.28
Among the rational sensualists, my dear Denis Diderot, the essential soul of Rheno-Flemish thought is invoked only to be redistributed through a rational and sensitive topography. This entails a psychologization of experience that in turn leads Fénelon, the Swan of Cambrai, in his Explication of the Maxims of the Saints, to define the “supreme peak” of the loving union of the soul with God in negative, sentimental fashion as the absence of any intellectual discourse or inclinations of the will based on the exercise of reason.29 The concept of Being remains, of course, but only as a posited reference (henceforth separate from the “subject,” or more exactly of the psychological “self,” which becomes merely the sign of it) in a supradiscursive regime of rational faculties. In fact, this attempt to make mystical doctrines compatible with scholastic theology signals the impossibility of preserving any mysticism of the essence within rational and sensualist parameters.
For the subject of the Cartesian cogito wrecked the ontological ambition of the Rheno-Flemish mystics,30 which now became inaccessible to such anti-mystics as Bossuet, who devoted himself to “tempering by means of holy interpretations” the notions of the “great exaggerators,” mystics who have no idea of what they’re talking about.31 This did not prevent the Eagle of Meaux from standing up for Teresa in his own terms, as we’ve seen, and he also had kind words for Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Catherine, and a few others. Nothing is simple in this area, Maître: I can’t keep up myself, which is saying something. Let’s press on. The ontological ambition would also be inaccessible, in a different way, to Pierre Poitiers and to Fénelon, even though these claimed to be the greatest defenders of mysticism in all the seventeenth century. The first declared that the union of the human soul with the divine essence should be understood as merely a “metaphor,” while the second depicted the essential mystical union in terms of a simple affective bond whereby the soul unites with God in pure, disinterested love. Thus the way was paved for sensualist materialism to sound the knell of the mysticism of Being in favor of the mystique of the psychological ego.
May I put more clearly, in light of this, the objection I raised before with regard to Jeanne and Teresa? When, with touching quietist “abandonment” and in the dignified perfection of “pure love,” Jeanne Guyon seeks to identify with Teresa of Avila, a serious misunderstanding has occurred. “Not being able to find in [myself] anything that can be named.…”32 You well know, Maître, as a declared admirer of Spiritual Torrents, that Jeanne’s encounter with nothing failed to stem her outpourings on the vicissitudes of her sensory ego. The saint of the Counter-Reformation, for her part, was equally conversant with the psychological maze of earthly affection
s, their frustrations and glories, somatic consequences, narcissistic or depressive recesses, and manic excitements—all taking turns to cram or vacate the psyche of Madame Guyon, according to her torrential text. The main difference between the two women was that Teresa’s “abandonment” of herself to the infantile was merely a transition, to be elucidated and then situated in the co-presence of emptiness and infinity.
With La Madre we find none of the apotheosis of “Nothingness” so central to Guyon’s approach, which betrays an obvious narcissistic regression to the infant’s impotence / omnipotence binomial. Teresa would never say, “I suffer as gaily as a child.” She would never offer an apology of the “abjection” that advocates “pollution” and presupposes the abolition of sin by the quietists. Where Jeanne Guyon annihilates herself in an Other reduced to an unnameable Nothing—symmetrical counterpart of the mercilessly judgmental paternal divinity—Teresa exults at being the infinitesimal presence of the Other, an atom forming part of infinite Love itself: the infinitely present, rewarding Love that embraces her viscerally (entrañarse)33 and allows itself to be checkmated, no less, in a game she plays to infinity and with energy to match.
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