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

Do not think I am turning my back on your Nun. Your writing, lightened or indeed denatured by the silliness of the prank that brought her into being (you revel in those sorts of ambiguities, you cultivate them in all of your works), gradually pulls free from that “self-delusion…ruled by…instincts” that Nietzsche thought was characteristic of Christianity and, I might add, of its repressed substitutes.¹² Epistolary satire (or persiflage) and the novel that attempts to reason through it (The Nun) seem to me to have been engendered by the selfsame “clash” between nature and meaning that you sought to demystify in faith itself, overshooting your immediate target, the abusive enclosure of young women. As though at the very moment your work was engaged in extirpating the religious, it became apparent to you that it was “inoperable” of that religion. Thus the esthete Swann, that inoperable “celibate of art,” as Proust wrote in the voice of the Christlike narrator of In Search of Lost Time;¹³ thus too the Sade— Pascal duo, encompassing a peculiarly French genius, according to Philippe Sollers.¹⁴ The need to believe is inoperable of desire, desire for meaning, whirlwind of the thinking flesh: that is what flew into your face, Mister Philosopher, and reduced you to tears, just when you were hoping to wind up The Nun in a hurry.

THE MISSING LINK OF EUROPEAN CULTURE

Your libertarian verve, the incisive violence of the French body and sense of humor, the upheavals of a history that was preparing to guillotine the king and overthrow the Church, all these impelled you to strike a ringing, well-aimed blow against obscurantism. After you, and largely thanks to you, religion (especially Catholicism) lost much of its aura of absolute revelation and institutional impregnability. This happened first in France — often accompanied by “revolutionary” atrocities whose tragic balance sheet not been fully reckoned yet — and little by little spread elsewhere in the world by means of the awesome, unstoppable march of secularization. Here I include religious pluralisms of every stripe, spiritualist mystifications, sectarian outpourings, and the “black tide of occultism” that so revolted Freud.

Is Christianity irrevocably discredited?

Many people are worried about this. Some question secularism, others dread the comeback of clericalism and its twin, anticlericalism. I know of some who try to deal with the problem by going back to the source, such as biblical inspiration, obviously: these read the alliance of the crucified Jesus with His Father as the accomplishment of the Jewish Akedah, not so much an “imperfect” to be “voided” as a truth forever present in the evangelical pronouncement, in the truth and presence of its accomplishment. As an epochal gesture this re-sourcing claimed to settle the old intra-Hebraic quarrel between Old and New Testaments, by re-founding the Pauline separation into a fresh unity of Jews and Christians. Is it a response to the tragedy of the Shoah and to the current threats posed by the “clash of religions”? Some people content themselves with a return to Latin. Others begin to listen to their contemporaries…And so on.

The atheist that I am holds her breath while asking herself these questions. And I dream that Teresa’s experience could add to the movement for a salutary re-foundation a new reading of this revitalization of European culture that was ushered in by the much-maligned Counter-Reformation, of which Teresa was the more or less clandestine inspiration — alongside Ignatius Loyola and John of the Cross, but very differently from them.