The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  Rapture, she said—and how readily one can believe her—left behind it a strange detachment which she would never be able to describe; a singular estrangement from the things of earth, which made life much more distressing, God so stripping the soul of everything that there was nothing left on earth which could be its companion. The fact of rapture was undeniable, but its details were baffling and demanded constant examination. Thus although when contemplating the beauty of Christ she much desired to examine the colour of His eyes or to determine His exact stature, she never could do so, for, as she endeavoured to gaze, she lost the vision altogether. Whenever she tried to concentrate on a particular part of the vision, the whole vision vanished. This confession of failure, this radical honesty, this conscientiousness in never pretending to see or hear more than she actually believed she saw and heard, is extremely convincing, and rules out any suggestion that she could delude herself into imagining something which was not “there.” Far otherwise. “There are no means of bringing it [the vision] about; there is no possibility of taking anything away from it or of adding to it; nor is there any way of effecting it whatever we may do, nor of seeing it when we like, nor of abstaining from seeing it.” She “never knew before that such a thing was possible,” and is at pains to understand exactly whence her conviction of the Presence comes. “If I say that I see Him neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul, how is it that I can understand and maintain that He stands beside me and be more certain of it than if I saw Him? I amfn8 like a person who feels that another is close beside her, but because I am in the dark I see him not, yet am certain that he is there present. Still, this comparison is not exact; for he who is in the dark, in some way or other, through hearing a noise or having seen that person before, knows he is there; but here there is nothing of the kind, for without a word inward or outward, the soul clearly perceives who it is, where He is, and occasionally what He means. He renders Himself present to the soul by a certain knowledge of Himself which is more clear than the sun. I do not mean that we now see either a sun or any brightness, only that there is a light not seen, which illumines the understanding.—All that is written in this paper is the simple truth.”

  The same applied to locutions, or hearing of the words spoken to her by Christ, whether harsh, comforting, or advisory. “A person commending a matter to God with great earnestness may think that he hears in some way or other whether his prayer will be granted or not, and this is quite possible; but he who has heard the divine locution will see clearly enough the great difference between the two. If it be anything which the understanding has fashioned, however cunningly it may have done so, he sees that it is the understanding which has arranged that locution and that it is speaking of itself. It has not been listening only, but also forming the words. In the locution of God there is no escape. I know this much by experience, for my resistance lasted nearly two years because of the great fear I was in, and even now I resist occasionally; but it is no use.”

  She was not even sure whether she heard the words or not. “I learnt at times by means of words uttered; at other times I learnt some things without the help of words, and that more clearly than those other things which were told me in words. I understood exceedingly deep truths concerning the Truth.… The truth of which I am speaking, and which I was given to see, is truth itself, in itself. It has neither beginning nor end. I understand it all, not withstanding that my words are obscure in comparison with that distinctness.”

  Her words are obscure perhaps, but only because she was forced into trying to express the inexpressible. Her actual phrasing is always clear and energetic, even homely, as when she compares her revelations to food received into the stomach which had not first been eaten, without our knowing how it had entered though we know well enough that it is there. St. Teresa provided the oddest mixture between the most abstruse mystical life and rough common sense in trying to deal with it. It was typical of her to cling to iron railings to prevent herself from being supernaturally lifted into the air. Temperamentally, she preferred the ground. Her analogies, even when dealing with matters of high spirituality, are usually drawn from the most realistic sources: if fish are taken from the river in a net they cannot live, and so it is with souls drawn out of the heavenly water; slowness in spiritual progress resembles the pace of a hen; men are like branches of dried rosemary, so brittle that they break when leaned on; she herself is like a parrot which has learned to talk; the soul is like a little ass, which feeds and thrives because it accepts the food given it; those souls who overload themselves with mortifications are like a child loaded with two bushels of corn, who not only cannot carry them but breaks down under the burden and falls. (The precision here is characteristic: Teresa who had spent a good deal of her time on country estates knew that although a child might carry one bushel, it could not carry two.) At times her comparisons have almost the ring of a proverb: those who watch the bull-fight from behind the barrier do not run the same risk as those who expose themselves to the horns; and poverty is strikingly suggested by the phrase “not even a withered leaf to dress a pilchard with.” Chess comes in usefully for illustrative purposes, and here again she knew what she was talking about, for a board and men figured in the inventory of her father’s possessions; she was rather dubious about taking a game as a simile in religious matters for her nuns, but passed it off with a laugh, “This will show you what a Mother God has given you, skilled even in such vanities as this!” But in addition to this factual, often of-the-soil vividness of expression, she possessed also something of the poet’s vision, when her imagery flamed more splendid; and then, God became like to a burning furnace, or to a most brilliant diamond much larger than the whole world, in which all our actions were reflected, or the soul suddenly became bright as a mirror, clear behind, sideways, upwards, and downwards, a sculptured mirror, with Christ in the centre, and the lustre dimmed only as by a vapour when the soul was in mortal sin. Light and water, and all the qualities attendant on them, possessed a great fascination for Teresa. Child of a dry land, she was peculiarly sensitive to water; a stream, a fountain, or even a well from which water might be drawn by a windlass to refresh the thirsty garden, held for her a lovely and allegorical significance; the element, she said, which she loved so much that she had studied it more attentively than other things. The poet in her responded to the play of light on ripples; the practical Castilian in her responded to the usefulness of irrigation. She could write of “most pellucid water running in a bed of crystal, reflecting the rays of the sun,” and she could write also of the four ways in which a garden may be watered, by water taken out of a well which is very laborious, or by water raised in buckets by means of a windlass—she has drawn it thus herself, and finds it less troublesome, also it gives a more copious supply—or by a stream or brook, which is better still for the soil is more thoroughly saturated, there is no necessity to water so often, and the labour of the gardener is less, or by showers of rain which is best of all. However she treats it, the result upon her writings is to produce a strange luminosity which glints over the homespun of her realism and her rough Castilian style. Both The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection, apart from their own qualities of profundity, enlightenment, and sagacity both human and spiritual, possess a kind of shimmering beauty made up of water and of light. They are as nacreous as oyster shells, with a prismatic transparency surely reflected from the incandescent certainty at the centre of her soul.fn9

  X

  ALTHOUGH TERESA HAD struggled so painfully, one-half of her energy taken up with resistance and the other half with arguments and self-persuasions against her own inclinations, convent life before she came to interfere with it was not necessarily a thing to be dreaded. Spain at that time was a most curious mixture of laxness on the one hand and of intense bigotry and fanaticism on the other. On the side of fanaticism, the Lutheran heresy had aroused both the apprehension and the conscience of the Catholic Church. Teresa’s Spain was the Spain of the In
quisition; one of its first and most ghastly persecution cases had originated in her own city of Avila, and Torquemada himself had found burial there in San Tomás seventeen years before her birth (1498). The Inquisition with its appalling record of cruelty has probably done more than anything else to damage the reputation of the Roman Church in the eyes of non-Catholic communities, more even than the sometimes abused and misused influence exerted by her ministers over ignorant and gullible people. In order to understand the Inquisition at all, though God knows that is difficult enough, it is necessary always to remember two things; first that the Spaniards, according to English standards, are a merciless and violent race to whom physical suffering means very little though physical courage a great deal; and in the second place that the devotion to the salvation of the soul entirely outweighed all considerations of the torment of the body. This is putting it crudely and stating only a twentieth part of what might be said either in condemnation or mitigation. Nor is this the place to dwell in any detail upon the abhorrent persecutions instituted in the name of the Christian faith—the system of informers and secret denunciations, conducted in such an atmosphere of terror that no man could feel safe from his nearest friend, a system morally disastrous even if productive of immediate results in the hunting down of heresy; the scandalous system of bribery by which the Vatican itself could be induced to remit the sentence already passed by the Inquisitors; or to do more than suggest the analogy between the “racial purity” slogan of Nazi Germany and the laws of pure blood (limpia sangre) framed in such remarkable anticipation by the courts of the Inquisition. Jews, as well as heretics, were subject to the same outrages; by the edict of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 not a Jew was to be left alive in Spain; two hundred thousand of them, perhaps more, stripped of their homes and property, were given four months in which to make good their escape to some other country, but the road to escape was not so easy; to plunder the fugitives was a lucrative virtue, and on the crowded roads leading to the coast or the frontier many a Jew was intercepted and knifed open to discover whether before his departure he had swallowed the remnant of his gold pieces or precious stones.

  The similarity with Hitler’s Germany is striking, with the only difference that Spain based her persecutions on fanatically religious instead of fanatically nationalist and political grounds. Wherever men feel passionately, the explosion of aggression must ensue; and since there is no subject on which men have felt more passionately than the way in which they shall worship their God and shall compel the compliance of the unwilling, the jealous and enormous power of the Church, directed in this case by a naturally fierce nation, and with the incentive of cupidity added in, was set in motion with all the terrible apparatus of torture both physical and mental against the possible threat to her supreme authority.

  At the centre of the web lurked the King in the fastness of the Escorial. The character of Philip II epitomises the more sombre aspects of his own intransigent people. God and Spain shone as the jewels in the dark mind of Philip, who, bracketed with the Pope, knew himself to be the most puissant man in Europe. Seated at his desk, working on the orderly piles of papers, minuting them with his own hand, he brought his tidy, relentless, though hesitating mind to bear both upon policy and detail. Amongst those papers he would sometimes come across a letter signed “Teresa de Jesus, Carmelita.” Although these letters were always respectful in tone, usually praying for some favour, the sterner note was not always absent. “Remember, Sire, that Saul was anointed and yet he was rejected.…”

  The prevailing spirit of religious enthusiasm spread outwards in widening circles, taking less corrupt though equally excessive forms among strange characters up and down the country. While the silken prelates grew fat on their disgraceful booty, obscure men and women in a state of exaltation adopted the most mortifying modes of life to satisfy their craving for self-immolation and, sometimes, for publicity. Tattered figures lay in an ecstasy of prayer in the side-chapels of the churches, sometimes misleading the charitable into a rush to give help; hermits abounded; the daughter of a peasant near Avila lived in such close touch with our Lady that she would always pause on the threshold of a door, with gesture of politeness inviting her to go first. Royalty, the Court, and the nobility were likewise affected; Catalina of the Dukes of Cardona, the governess of Don Carlos and Don John of Austria, disappeared from Court and was found living in a wild beast’s den, dressed in sackcloth, sustaining herself on grass and roots; scourging herself frequently for two hours on end with a heavy chain, so that her sackcloth was full of blood; proceeding a quarter of a league to Mass on her knees; and calling herself only la Pecadora, the prostitute. Don John himself, though less tempted to extremes, toyed with the idea of entering a monastery; the Princess of Brazil, regent of Spain during the King’s absence, shut herself up in her palace and would give audience only veiled from head to foot in black; the young captain Ignatius Loyola hung up his arms in the shrine of our Lady of Monserrat and kept vigil all night before her altar; a young knight of Navarre, Francisco de Xavier, joined forces with him and carried the message of the Church into furthest Asia. The churches were crowded, even in bitter weather, when the devout came carrying the bolilla, a little metal ball filled with hot water, to warm their hands. Sorcery was rampant; potions and charms were forthcoming for every requirement; Teresa herself in the endeavour to rescue a priest from the spell his mistress had cast over him, was obliged to lure from him the little copper image he wore and throw it into a river, and, although “as to this matter of enchantment, I do not believe it to be wholly true,” yet she was not above hanging the gallstone of an animal round the neck of her confessor to keep him from the harm of his enemies. In this world of superstition and religious excitation, the inhabitants of the overcrowded convents were not always above reproach, whether from a genuine self-delusion (inspired, of course, by the Arch-tempter) or from deliberate imposture. The temptation to impose not only on the credulous but also on priests, confessors, and on the other members of the community, was great and very gratifying in its results, until, as sometimes happened, the Inquisition looked into the matter and sent the culprit to the scaffold or the dungeon. Thus, the oracular Magdalena de la Cruz, a Poor Clare of Cor, doba, deceived even the Inquisitor-General to the extent that he begged her prayers on his behalf, and at the humble request of the Empress Isabel she worked with her own hands the christening-robes of the unborn child who was to become Philip II. It was a shock for all when she suddenly announced that from the age of five she had been subject to delusions and that all her prophecies and revelations were, in fact, the fruit of a pact with the Devil. Like her, a Prioress of Lisbon repented in time, after years of painting her hands and feet with red ochre to simulate the stigmata.

  With such an atmosphere, or, rather, miasma, floating over the entire country, a smoke shot red in places by the flames of the Inquisition, it was not surprising that the doors of the convents should be besieged by the daughters of both noble and humble houses. But here in the convent parlours a different temper prevailed. In many cases it was neither a desire for the religious life with all its implications nor a desire to obtain a transitory fame that urged the women of Spain towards the cloister. All too often, the convent was a comfortable refuge and a convenient social resort. Carmel has a stern name to-day, but Teresa trying to make up her mind to enter the Encarnacion had little real reason to dread a discipline too irksome for her pleasure-loving nature. She knew well enough that some came “solely to find a home.” The Encarnacion was not a rich convent, but although the nuns had sometimes not enough to eat and could obtain leave to visit their relations in order to get a good meal, it was not grim at all, with its pleasant garden and its hospitable parlour (locutorio), warm red-bricked floors, and furniture of polished wood and leather. Worldly considerations were not entirely relinquished within its walls. Every nun was entitled to her private oratory in addition to her own cell, and if her fortune permitted was able to decorate it as she pleased, wi
th paintings if her taste lay that way; she might also organise special celebrations nominally dedicated to the saint of her choice, but which in practice turned into little parties and concerts, giving the sisters an opportunity to show off their pretty voices. There was no obligation for a well-born girl to drop her worldly style and title; thus Teresa in the Encarnacion remained Doña Teresa de Ahumada as she had been in her father’s palace. Personal bedizenment was not forbidden either; the nuns ornamented themselves with necklaces, bracelets, and rings, so incongruous with their habit that a contemporary writer exclaimed, “They adorn their persons like high-born ladies, forgetting that they are dead, that the cloister is a tomb, and that jewels are unbecoming to a corpse.” The locutorio was the centre of social life. Friends and relations, both feminine and masculine, might be received there, and since everybody in the upper classes of a small city like Avila (its population numbered only about fourteen thousand souls all told), was related by a cat’s cradle of inter-familial marriages to everybody else, there was no lack of gay young men to lounge in and out of the parlour under the convenient pretext of brotherhood or cousinship to some attractive inmate. Little presents changed hands, sweetmeats and oranges, jam, scent; and above all the novel produce of the New World, sweet potatoes, coffee, and even a drug from the Indies, reputed to possess medicinal properties of an unspecified nature. Many a sister had her little private store of provisions in reserve, to supplement the regulamentary diet. Gossip and the latest news circulated freely in that agreeable circle, called by Teresa “words of news and fribbles” (vocablos de novedades y melingras), and the fashionable topics of culture, philosophy, music, literature, and even, more dangerously, Platonic love, came under lively discussion during the long afternoons. Whether the freedom of life went further than mere talk must remain an open question; Teresa certainly thought it did, and she had every opportunity of judging it from the inside. Her own monastery was not very reprehensible, she said, and as for taking any liberty for herself, such as conversing through the door, or in secret, or by night, she did not think she could have brought herself to it and never did. But the phrase implies that others did, and she adds darkly that in other convents she had “seen and known.”