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

TERESA’S VOICE. “The King is in His palace,” just as the soul is. The King, the soul, it-you-I? It’s all the same. Interchangeable, permutable, reversible. “In those other dwelling places there is much tumult and there are many poisonous creatures and the noise is heard”—all this being the drives, as Dr. Freud will tell us. And yet “no one enters that center dwelling place and makes the soul leave.…The passions are now conquered.” This is sublimation. “Our entire body may ache; but if the head is sound, the head will not ache just because the body aches.”⁸⁰ The mind and the word “must have amounted to much more than is apparent from [their] sound.”⁸¹ (Turns head leftward, with calm face.) It is not an imaginative vision, even if the soul, unable to express it in words, perceives it here by means of sight. And yet the sight is neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul.…The three Persons of the Trinity are perceived in an intellectual, yes, intellectual vision, like a certainty of truth in the midst of fiery brightness, like a magnificent splendor coming straight to the mind.⁸² I am a point inhabited by infinity, the infinite contracted into a dot, a dot dilated to infinity. Infinitesimal Teresa: a curious phenomenon, don’t you think? (She opens her eyes again, unseeing eyes, as when she bent them on the portrait of Velázquez. La Madre is listening to herself.)

(Silence.)

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “To me, infinities are not totalities and infinitely small values are not magnitudes. My metaphysics banishes them. I regard infinitesimal quantities as useful unities.” “My fundamental meditations turn on two things, namely, on unity and on infinity.” “Each monad is a living mirror, or a mirror endowed with an internal action, and that it represents the universe according to its point of view and is regulated as completely as is the universe itself.” “Everything is taken account of, even idle words…the just will be like suns…neither our senses nor our mind has ever tasted anything approaching the happiness that God prepares for those who love him.” “Imaginary numbers have the following admirable property, that in calculus they enclose nothing absurd or contradictory and yet by the nature of things they cannot be represented seu in concretis.”⁸³ The same goes for the infinitesimal: it is a fiction, and not a true difference. God is “the realm of possible realities.”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “The infinity-point obeys the laws of transition and continuity: nothing is equivalent to anything else, and apparent coincidences really conceal an infinitely small distance. Thus the infinity-point does not form a structure but instead posits functions and relationships that proceed by approximation. A difference, never to be made good, persists between the number marked π and the set of terms able to express it:

The unit has been dislocated. The sign-number, a unifying mirror, shatters, and notation resumes beyond its scope. The resulting differential, equivalent to the sixteenth-century nominalists’ syncategorical (in fieri) infinite smallness, is not a unity that can be added to other unities to form a whole, but rather the slippage of infinity itself within the closed enunciation.”⁸⁴

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “Teresa of Avila had this fine thought, that the soul ought to conceive things as if there were only God and itself in the world.” How this limpid, fecund insight gives us to understand immortality! “This thought gives rise to an idea which is significant even in philosophy, and I have made good use of it in one of my hypotheses.”⁸⁵

TERESA’S VOICE. Might I be a soul, then, a woman co-present ad infinitum? Might I be an ancestor of infinitesimal calculus?⁸⁶ Little me?

SPINOZA, in the voice of the anonymous man. “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.”⁸⁷

TERESA’S VOICE. God loves Himself? Himself, myself, yourself? I are the Trinity. I was writing the sensual mathematics of sacred humanity!

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Paradise and its plenitude of grace, the Trinity in person, are unveiled in the Intellection of love. The more I love, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more pleasure I feel, and the more I love.” Not my words, but those of Philippe Sollers in his introduction to Dante’s Paradiso.⁸⁸