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

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

For my father

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DeAgostini/Leemage.

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akg-images/Pirozzi.

Abbreviations and Chronology

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

1560–1563

Testimonies

1–3

1562

First draft of

The Book of Her Life

1563

First draft of the

Constitutions

1565

The Book of Her Life

1566–1567

The Way of Perfection

1567

The Constitutions

of the Discalced Nuns

1569

New series of lesser

Testimonies

: 8–27

1573

The Book of Her Foundations

, chaps. 1–26

1575–1576

Testimonies

4–5

1576

Manner of Visiting Monasteries

; continuation of

Foundations

, chaps. 21–27

1577

The Interior Castle

1577–1580

Letters

(almost 200)

1581

Testimonies

6

1580–1582

Completion of

Foundations

(chaps. 28–31)

1581–1582

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 Rodríguez. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1976–1985.

The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. trans. Kieran Kavanaugh. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 2001–2007.

Any italics in quotations have been added by Julia Kristeva.

Part 1. The Nothingness of All Things

Chapter 1. PRESENT BY DEFAULT

We are not angels, but we have a body.

Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life

Or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater.

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

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 folds…You must recall that sculpture by Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa?¹ The artist’s inspiration was Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515–1582), 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 Dostoyevsky’s 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