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

Are convents so essential to the constitution of a state? Did Jesus Christ institute monks and nuns? Can the Church really not do without them?…Can these vows, which fly in the face of our natural inclinations, ever be properly observed by anyone other than a few abnormal creatures in whom the seeds of passion have withered and whom we should rightly consider as monsters, if the current state of our knowledge allowed us to understand the internal structure of man as easily and as well as we understand his external form?…Where does nature, revolted by a constraint for which it is not intended, smash the obstacles put in its way, become enraged, and throw the whole animal system into incurable disarray?…Where is the dwelling place of coercion, disgust, and hysteria? Where is the home of servitude and despotism? Where is undying hatred? Where are the passions nurtured in silence?…“To make a vow of poverty is to swear to be an idler and a thief. To make a vow of chastity is to swear to God constantly to break the wisest and most important of His laws. To make a vow of obedience is to renounce man’s inalienable prerogative: freedom. If you keep these vows, you are a criminal; if you do not keep them, you are guilty of perjury before God. To live the cloistered life, you have to be either a fanatic or a hypocrite.”⁶

As you write this — understandable — indictment, you are in tears. Diderot, in tears? It’s hardly posterity’s vision of him. We prefer to picture the philosopher patting Catherine the Great on the thigh, she who would later purchase his library…Are you weeping for your little sister, Marie-Angélique, who died a lunatic at the age of twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent, whom you haven’t forgotten, since you named your beloved daughter after her? Or are they tears of outrage, like the way I feel about fundamentalism, before the religious obscurantism that oppresses “our natural inclinations”? Or are your tears even more a surprise to you because you are so well aware that in the human animal, a speaking being, the capacity to make meaning has long ago “flown in the face” of any “natural inclination,” for there is a specific — hence natural — human capacity to clash with nature by dint of language, of thought?

You are discovering that this clash breeds delusions, in which wonders rub shoulders with follies; an inextricable jumble, a merry-go-round of bodies and souls whose perils and charms you brilliantly expose in the character of He, Rameau’s nephew, for example (to the delight of the gloomy Hegel), ten years after The Nun. Here follies cohabit with thought, sure enough; they make this noncharacter live, create, and decline, this literally polyphonous third person, He, the spasmodic artist, the Nephew. But they don’t spare his interlocutor either, I, which is to say you, the philosopher. The humans who lived before you or the Enlightenment ascribed such inconceivable oddities to either the devil or God: “God, through whom we discern that certain things we had deemed essential to ourselves are truly foreign to us, while those we had deemed foreign to us are essential,” wrote Saint Augustine.⁷ But what if the demonic and the divine were the same thing? What if your “tale” of The Nun led you to locate them, not in the Beyond but in “human nature” itself, which has become so dreadfully foreign? These possibilities are hinted at in your dialogue with that Nephew into whom you poured so much of yourself…

In the tragic story of Mademoiselle Simonin, the impulse that will lead you to the Nephew is still incipient; libertarian revolt prevails throughout. While following the martyrdom of your heroine the reader cannot help distinguishing the bright light of thought, championed by free spirits, from the cringing delirium propagated by fanatics, and the goodness of nature from the evil loosed against it — even though your artful love of masks can’t resist confusing the issue. Matters will be harder and often impossible to sort out when you venture into the subtler crannies of culture, where flesh overlaps with word, and vice versa, as they do in the character of Rameau’s nephew.