Julia Kristeva - Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

DeAgostini/Leemage.

akg-images/Pirozzi.

ABBREVIATIONS

The Book of Her Foundations: Found., followed by number and paragraph

The Book of Her Life: Life, followed by chapter and paragraph

The Constitutions: Const., followed by the paragraph number

Letters: Letter, followed by letter number

Meditations on the Song of Songs: Medit., followed by chapter and paragraph

On Making the Visitation: Visitation, followed by number and paragraph

Poems: Poems, followed by title

A Satirical Critique (Vejamen): Critique

Soliloquies (Exclamations): Sol., followed by number and paragraph

Spiritual Testimonies (Relations): Testimonies, followed by number and paragraph

The Interior Castle: Roman numeral, followed by D (Dwelling Places), chapter, and paragraph

The Way of Perfection: Way, followed by chapter and paragraph

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

15601563

Testimonies

13

1562

First draft of

The Book of Her Life

1563

First draft of the

Constitutions

1565

The Book of Her Life

15661567

The Way of Perfection

1567

The Constitutions

of the Discalced Nuns

1569

New series of lesser

Testimonies

: 827

1573

The Book of Her Foundations

, chaps. 126

15751576

Testimonies

45

1576

Manner of Visiting Monasteries

; continuation of

Foundations

, chaps. 2127

1577

The Interior Castle

15771580

Letters

(almost 200)

1581

Testimonies

6

15801582

Completion of

Foundations

(chaps. 2831)

15811582

Final letters (around 100)

The Soliloquies, the Meditations on the Song of Songs (predating The Interior Castle), and the Poems are difficult to date with accuracy.

REFERENCES

The English translations used for all quotations from Teresa of Avil a come from the following sources.

The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodrguez. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 19761985.

The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 20012007.

Any italics in quotations have been added by Julia Kristeva.

The flung-back face of a woman asleep, or perhaps she has already died of pleasure, her open mouth the avid door to an empty body that fills before our eyes with a boiling of marble foldsYou must recall that sculpture by Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa?1 The artists inspiration was Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (15151582), whose religious name was Teresa of Jesus, better known as Saint Teresa of Avila. At the height of the Renaissance, her love of God quivered with the intensity of the beatus venter that Meister Eckhart knew so well. Her ecstatic convulsions made her into a sumptuous icon of the Counter-Reformation. Though she was, in Dostoyevskys sense, possessed, she was bathed in the waters of desire rather than, like Mary Magdalene, in tears for her body and soul were fused with the absent body of the Other. Where is He, where have they taken Him? fretted the holy women at Golgotha.2

Teresa loved to read; they made her write. In a style quick with emotion, yet firm and precise, she portrayed the blend of pain and jubilation she felt with an emphasis on the deft agent of her undoing: Eros, armed with a spear, the iron tip of God Himself. Prudentia carnis inimica Deo (Prudence of the flesh is inimical to the Lord), so the Church Fathers taught. In this spiritual, illusory marriage to the Other, the unreachable Father is relayed in the praying womans fantasy by a heavenly stripling, an undefiled brother, a male mirage of Teresa herself, whose voluptuous pride will never pierce her hymen.

Oh, how many times when I am in this state do I recall that verse of David: Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum [As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Ps. 42:2)]When this thirst is not too severe, it seems it can be appeased somewhat; at least the soul seeks some remedy.At other times the pain becomes so severe that the soul can do neither penance nor anything else, for the whole body is paralyzed. One is unable to stir with either the feet or the arms. Rather, if one is standing, one sits down, like a person being carried from one place to another, unable even to breathe.The Lord wanted me while in this state to see sometimes the following vision: I saw close to me toward my left side an angel in bodily form.the angel was not large but small; he was very beautiful, and his face was so aflame that he seemed to be one of those very sublime angels that appear to be all afire. They must belong to those they call the cherubim.I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me that this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away; nor is the soul content with less than God. The pain is not bodily but spiritual, although the body doesnt fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal.But when this pain Im now speaking of begins, it seems the Lord carries the soul away and places it in ecstasy; thus there is no room for pain or suffering, because joy soon enters in [as no hay lugar de tener pena ni de padecer, porque viene luego el gozar].3

Desire existed before she did, and this woman knows it. Nevertheless she is consumed: a burning wound, a delightful pain. In the key of the Song of Songs, but by the hand for the first time of a European woman, pleasure unto death is conveyed with a sensual exactitude that defies decorum. Make no mistake: the fire that carries off the deepest part of her suggests that rather than capture the potency of the large dart, as in the male fantasy of the castrating female, Teresa gifts it to the angel. It is in dispossession and exile that she joins with the Other and becomes divine. In the same vein, at once a shooting star and a clap of thunder, she resumes her account in the Sixth Dwelling Places of The Interior Castle, her spiritual testament:

The soul dissolves with desire, and yet it doesnt know what to ask for since clearly it thinks that its God is with it.