The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  Among the crowd of friars, confessors, prioresses, nuns, princes, and ladies who pullulate with such actuality through the records of Teresa’s life, St. John for all his elusiveness shines with a light of his own. We never seize him; he possessed more than any man the pudeur of suppressing his own personality. He is an essence, volatile, imponderable, floating in a rarefied atmosphere difficult for us to breathe, his one desire to pass unnoticed, the better to lose himself in the only preoccupation which held any significance for him. Like the ideal soul of which he writes, he is “free, perfect, solitary, and pure.” Free indeed; for he had divorced himself from all attachments, “such as to individuals, to a book or a call, to a particular food, to certain society, to the satisfaction of one’s taste for science, news, and such things.” Does it make any difference, he asks, whether a bird be held by a slender thread or a rope since it is bound and cannot fly until the cord that holds it be broken? the solitary bird which can endure no companionship, even of its own kind. He himself had broken all bonds :

  Forth unobserved I went

  In darkness and security,

  By the secret ladder, in disguise,

  In secret, seen of none,

  Oh night more lovely than the dawn!

  Lost to all things and myself,

  And, amid the lilies forgotten,

  Threw all my cares away.

  This poet, this mystic, this wholly unpractical being, emptied into a sublime lack of interest in anything topical or transitory, was sometimes obliged to strike the wall with his fist, to bring himself back through that small sharp pain to reality.

  Teresa, of course, with her quick perception of character, realised that she could make no use of him as she could make of her other friars; he could not be sent on errands or charged with the execution of anything regarding organisation. She may have tried, without success; for although she does not enlarge on the reason for her vexation, she does remark that she was “vexed with him at times.” Nor does she, who was nevertheless observant and capable of giving such vivid descriptions as, say, her description of St. Peter of Alcantara who resembled the roots of trees, ever attempt to bring the physical presence of St. John before the eyes of her readers. Her reticence suggests an intuitive recognition of the unimportance of corporal clothing to such a spirit. She notes only that he was very small, “small in stature but great in God’s sight,” and one of her favourite jokes was to say that she had got a friar and a half—the other being a man of particularly imposing stature. But she also realised, and at first sight, that here was a man she needed to attach to herself and her Reform. At their very first meeting, in fact, which she had contrived with some difficulty owing to his reluctance to speak with women, she argued him out of his intention to desert the Carmelite Order in favour of the Carthusians. She knew him at once for what he was, as he, no doubt, was equally impressed by her own quality at this coming together of the two great mystics of Spain, whose names can never be divided.

  It would be misleading to suggest that she made no use of him at all, for she did install him as confessor and spiritual director at the Encarnacion when she was made Prioress of that convent. But this was an employment for which his spiritual qualifications, in which she had great faith, especially suited him—a very different matter from the tasks she was apt to exact of her other adherents. It would be misleading also to suggest that St. John played no part in active life, since he did hold certain offices at various times and even became Vicar for Andalusia, a position he cannot have relished since his dislike of the people of that province equalled Teresa’s own—“he cannot,” she writes, “bear the Andalusians.” Yet, in spite of these responsibilities imposed upon him by exterior circumstances, in spite even of the “solid judgment” with which Teresa credited him, one cannot feel that St. John’s association with affairs was anything but fortuitous.

  Austere and ascetic, St. John “amid the lilies forgotten,” is far too delicate, exquisite, and poetical a wisp ever to be associated with the intrigues of men, nor, blessedly, with the frequent grimness of religion. Neither he nor Teresa was grim, but for her part this welcome lack may be attributed to her humour, humanity, and robustness of outlook; for his, to a certain fragrance and diaphaneity which seem to envelope his whole slight being. “The first of the passions of the soul and the will,” he writes, “is joy”; and he might be writing of himself when he goes on to depict one who, pure in heart, has found in all things that knowledge of God which is delicious, sweet, chaste, pure, spiritual, joyous, and loving (gozosa, gustosa, casta, pura, espiritual, ale gre y amorosa). It comes with no surprise to find him singing to himself along the road, or sitting by night in a meadow near a running brook, gently discoursing—for this time he had a companion—on the beauty of the sky, the moon and the stars (la hermosura del cielo, luna y estrellas) and the sweet harmony in the movements of the heavens (la dulce harmonia que hacen los cielos con sus movimientos). There was even an element of pantheism in him, which led him to practise his orisons in the closest touch with nature, spending the whole night in a wood or kneeling among the reeds by a stream. Water he loved, especially running water, as Teresa loved it; water, and rocks, and trees, with a fervour more compatible with the poet in him than with the saint who was the supreme preacher of detachment from everything but God.

  For with St. John of the Cross, even more than with St. Teresa, we are moving on planes of the most complete abstraction. He is striving, through the inadequate medium of language, to express something which he knows to be essentially unexpressible. No one is to be surprised, he says, on finding his book somewhat obscure, for only he who has passed through the trials of the soul can know them, but even then he cannot explain them. But, far more of a poet than she, he employs symbolism to an even greater extent; it seems, indeed, that his use of this device is not so much deliberate, as natural to him; it is the very idiom and mould of his mind. Above all things the poet of night, he discriminates to a hair-splitting nicety between the varying degrees of darkness. To be in obscurity (estar a oscuras) is for instance different in degree from being in utter darkness (estar en tinieblas), and the fading of night into dawn is for him a fine dividing thread of change to be recorded with the utmost delicacy (como lo noche junto ya a los levantes de la mañana). So great and instinctive is his power of identification between the thought and the symbol, that the one slides by a natural transition into becoming the other; thus, speaking of fire in the night, it is the night itself which becomes the fire, not the fire which is added to the night—the kind of image which constantly haunted St. John, to whom, by a curious reversal of ordinary notions, the profoundest darkness could grow luminous by virtue of its own obscurity. In the same spirit he could write of lovers in a lovely strophe,

  !Oh noche che guiaste,

  Oh noche amable mas que la alborada,

  Oh noche que juntaste

  Amado con amada,

  Amada en el amado transformada!

  (Oh night which teaches,

  Oh night more delightful than dawn,

  Oh night which joins

  The lover to the beloved,

  The beloved into the lover transformed!)

  It is logical, it is inferential, that “the All contained in the Nothing,” which is the summing up of his philosophy, should appear as a perfectly easy concept to a metaphysician whose mind worked innately in such a way.

  XV

  TERESA WAS GROWING old; she was stout now; her speech had become indistinct, and she walked leaning always on the crooked ebony staff her brother had brought her from the Indies. Her skin was “the colour of earth”; her teeth black with decay; and stiff hairs now sprouted from the three moles which had once been thought to add piquancy to her face. Her left arm, which the Devil had broken by throwing her down a flight of stairs one Christmas-eve, and which had had to be re-broken and re-set most painfully several times, was almost useless to her, since although she could lift it to her head and could move the hand, she was
quite unable to dress or undress herself or even to adjust her veil. Before she was sixty she was already describing herself as old and worn out, but by the time she is sixty-seven, and not far off her death, she is “aged and feeble, good for little now, very old and weary, though my desires are still vigorous.” But at least she had lived to witness a great belated triumph: the granting of a decree which after all those years of struggle recognised the Reform and allowed its members to serve God unmolested according to their lights. Philip II had always been favourable to Teresa and her associates, and this was his crowning effort on their behalf. “None but He alone who knows the labours that have been suffered,” wrote Teresa; “the twenty-five years of trials and persecutions and afflictions I have passed through, can understand the joy that came to my heart.” She had much to be thankful for in her reward. Her reputation stood high among her countrymen, and the crowd of those anxious to receive her blessing sometimes made it difficult for her to descend from her cart. Still, gratifying though all this might be, there was to be no rest for the old woman, much as she longed for it. She was, as usual, on her travels when news reached her at Medina del Campo that the Duchess of Alba urgently desired her presence during the confinement of her young daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Huescar, and had, in fact, sent her own coach to fetch her. Teresa’s last journey was thus not made in a waggon, but in one of the few coaches then existent in Spain,—there were not more than four or five in the whole country,—resplendent with the armorial bearings of the great house of Alba. A faithful and much-tried companion went with her. Anna of St. Bartholomew, she who had miraculously learned to write in order to serve Teresa as her secretary as well as her infirmarian, and who has left a most detailed and moving account of this their last expedition together. Teresa set out from Medina in sad circumstances: having had occasion to rebuke the Prioress for some trifling lapse, she was answered in a manner which she considered to be insubordinate and undutiful; this so distressed her that she could eat nothing and was unable to sleep all night. They had taken nothing with them to eat on the road, surely a reprehensible omission on the part of Anna, nor could they buy anything on the way, not even in a poor village, Peñaranda de Bracamonte, where they were compelled to spend the night. Teresa by now was exceedingly weak and suffering from fever; “Daughter,” she said, “give me something for I am fainting,” but Anna had only some dried figs, and although she offered four reals for some eggs, not caring what they might cost, the money was brought back to her as there was nothing to be had in the village. She never could describe, she said, what affliction she was in then; it seemed to her as if her heart were broken, and she could not look at the saint without weeping, for her face seemed half dead. Teresa with her true kindness tried to comfort her, saying that the figs were very good and that there were many poor people who did not get such a treat.

  A Letter from St Teresa

  El Greco: Toledo in a Storm

  By courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum, New York

  The next day, in another village, they managed to get some herbs boiled with onions, and that was all they had until they reached Alba de Tormes in the evening. Ironically enough, after their haste and privations, a messenger met them with the information that the young duchess had been safely delivered. “Thank God,” said Teresa, whose humour never deserted her, “this saint will no longer be needed.”

  She did not lodge in the ducal castle where she had noticed the room piled with such a jumble of knick-knacks, but in her own convent in the heart of the town, overlooking the river and the plain beyond. Here she received treatment very different from Medina del Campo. The loving welcome and solicitude of her daughters touched her deeply. She seems to have been softened by illness and exhaustion, for she allowed them to kiss her hand, a thing she generally discouraged; used endearments to them as she blessed them; and, as they put her to bed, said, “Oh God help me, my daughters, how tired I feel! it is more than twenty years since I went to bed so early.”

  The Duchess of Alba came frequently to visit her, much concerned for her old friend, whom she insisted on feeding with her own hand. She would sit down and embrace Teresa and draw the bed-clothes over her, but Teresa was worried lest an unpleasant smell from a bottle of oils that had accidentally been upset over the bed should annoy the duchess, whom she wished had not chosen to come at that time. The duchess, however, and the nuns also, assured her that far from detecting an evil smell, they believed the bed to have been sprinkled with water-of-angels,the name of a scent then in use,—the duchess tactfully adding that she had been vexed to think scent should have been thrown on the clothes, as it might do harm to the invalid. The invalid was, in point of fact, far beyond either remedies or harm. Violent haemorrhages of the lungs hastened her end. Not long after she had received the Sacraments, imploring God over and over again not to despise the offering of a humble and contrite heart, she sank into unconsciousness for fourteen hours, murmuring inaudible words, and died in the arms of Anna of St. Bartholomew on October 4th, 1582. She who had been born at dawn died during the late evening.fn13

  XVI

  THEY HAD ASKED her where she wished to be buried; did she wish her body to be taken to Avila? but she replied “Will they not give me a little earth here?” Accordingly, the coffin was placed in a hole cut in the masonry of the church at Alba, and heavily blocked in with bricks, stones, earth, lime and rubble, the nuns themselves assisting the workmen, for it seems that they already regarded her as a saint and were fearful lest the body should be stolen from them and removed to Avila. Her funeral had taken place in a strange mixture between the humility of the simple nun,—for officially she was nothing else,—and the honour voluntarily paid to one whom her contemporaries recognised as something far more. The Bishop of Salamanca and the Duke of Huescar had hurried to attend it, together with many monks and gentlemen of Salamanca and Alba. In conformity with custom, she had of course to be buried in her plain habit and veil,—and we know that her habit was patched and shabby, her veil often threadbare and worn inside out,—but they had done their best to counteract these signs of her chosen poverty by covering her bier with cloth of gold.

  Supernatural graces had already preceded this temporal deference, during the hours between death and burial. Fragrance so strong had emanated from the body as the weeping nuns rendered it their last services, that they had been compelled to open the windows, not to be overcome. Miracles had also occurred, in the restoration of health and failing senses, as those pious women kissed the feet of their dead Foundress or pressed her hand against their brows. It was small wonder that they should regard the presence of her body in their church as their particular treasure and possession, to be protected from any marauder’s hand.

  But it so happened that the nuns of Alba were themselves the first to violate the grave. For nine months Teresa the traveller lay quietly at rest, entombed, her daughters coming frequently to pray beside the bricked-up scar in the wall; but little by little this solace ceased to suffice them and the desire grew upon them to look once more upon the lineaments that they had known. This desire, difficult and even grotesque as it may appear to our understanding, at length became irresistible. It was intensified, if not suggested, by the strange happenings they observed beside the grave: the scent of lilies, jasmine, and violets pervading the choir, and sometimes a scent to which they could give no name; moreover, should a nun drop off to sleep during her devotions, she would be recalled by sounds issuing from within the tomb. They awaited with growing impatience the arrival of their Father Provincial, now due to visit them, and immediately set about him, relating all that had taken place, and beseeching him to consent to a secret disinterment.

  The scenes which followed should have been immortalised by El Greco, whose extraordinary vision alone could have done them justice. As a counterpart to the Burial of the Count Orgaz we should have gained, but far more fantastic and far more terrible, the Exhumation of St. Teresa. He was alive and active, painting at Toledo not so ve
ry far away; he should have been at Alba instead. He should have been making sketches from a corner of the dark church while others worked by candlelight. There in this masterpiece, for ever lost to us, lit by a violent chiaroscuro, would have moved the figures of the Father Provincial himself, with one other man, assisted by the nuns in their white habits and black veils, tremulously and industriously removing and setting aside the heavy stones on a heap of straw, and all the while in fear lest their proceeding should come to the ears of the redoubtable Duke of Alba. The elongated faces would have lost nothing of their expression of mingled guilt, agitation, and terror; the hands nothing of their carved muscularity as they tautened to grasp the stones; the robes nothing of their ample folds, falling forward and impeding the workers as they stooped. No opportunity here for his usual splendour of colour, for his greens, his sapphire-blues, his blood-red draperies, unless, indeed, he had opened the roof of the church to disclose, floating in Heaven, God the Father surrounded by a shoal of angels in a drift of rose-red banners and golden wings. But the illumination of amber and saffron should have sufficed him, turning the white cloaks to a yellowness of old ivory among the shadowed columns and the habits of the friars to bistre under the central brightness of the torches. What incident would the unseen sketcher have chosen? He had plenty of time to make a whole series of studies, for the labour took four days. Would he have been content to depict the two men shovelling rubble away while the women cleared? or would he have waited for the ghastly and hallowed moment when the broken lid of the coffin, finally lifted from the cavern, revealed the earth-stained features of the saint nine months dead?