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

Lambasting the unnatural life of Christian religion, you denounce the hypocrisy that goes on to infiltrate lay culture as well. Marie-Suzanne’s “inflexible” parents, for instance, invoke among others the “knowledge” of the Abbé Blin (a doctor at the Sorbonne) and the authority of the bishop of Aleppo, who receives the poor girl into the Church on a day that is “one of the saddest ever.” Family conformity and spiritual dogma are for you the twin aspects of a social code that forces the young girl to take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience in order to expiate her mother’s adultery, of which she is the product. To cap it all, her legal father is a lawyer! This “morality tale” would have made for hilarious vaudeville, had it not continued with the punitive enclosure of the girl and then, inside a supposedly liberating convent, with the lewd embraces forced on the novice by a mother superior with a contorted face and a warped, disjointed mind.

On the one hand, Longchamp:

A rope was placed around my neck, and with one hand I was made to hold a flaming torch, with the other a scourge. One of the nuns took hold of the other end of the rope and pulled me along between the two lines, and the procession made its way towards a little inner oratory dedicated to St. Mary. They had come singing softly; now they walked in silence. When I had reached the oratory, lit by two lamps, I was ordered to ask both God and the community to forgive me for the scandal I had caused. The nun who had led me there said the words I had to repeat, and I repeated them all. Then the rope was removed, I was stripped down to the waist, they took my hair, which was hanging down over my shoulders, and pulled it to one side of my neck, they placed in my right hand the scourge I had been carrying in my left, and they started reciting the Miserere.⁴

On the other, Arpajon:

At such times, if a nun does the slightest thing wrong, the Mother Superior summons her to her cell, deals with her harshly, and orders her to get undressed and to give herself twenty strokes with her scourge; the nun obeys, gets undressed, picks up her scourge, and mortifies her flesh, but no sooner has she given herself a few strokes than the Mother Superior, overwhelmed with pity, snatches the instrument of penitence from her and starts crying; how dreadful it is for her to have to punish people! She kisses her on the forehead, eyes, mouth, and shoulders, caresses her, and sings her praises…She kisses her again, lifts her up, puts her clothes back on for her, says the sweetest things to her, gives her permission not to attend the services, and sends her back to her cell. It is very difficult being with women like that, as you never know what they are going to like or dislike, what you need to avoid doing or what you need to do.…I went inside with her; she accompanied me with her arm round my waist.…“I utterly adore you, and once these bores have all left, I shall gather together the sisters and you’ll sing a little tune for us, won’t you?”⁵

Here are the two sides of a single madness, “the folly of the cross,” as you write, which “flies in the face of our natural inclinations” by inciting human beings to “hide away,” even though “God made man sociable”; locking them up into “madhouses” and giving free rein in fine to “animal functions” through the very savagery by which these are supposed to be curbed.

Your indictment, Mister Philosopher, is earnest, detailed, and uncompromising: you are up in arms, a militant.