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

This renovation, launched in part by La Madre’s exemplary experience, makes me see that Christianity did not come to a halt in the Middle Ages; it was not killed off by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and humanism, contrary to what is often said. Mingling the message of the Song of Songs with the Passion on the Cross and infusing them through the bodies of the Renaissance and right into the entrepreneurial pragmatism of modern times, strongly marking the artistic sensibilities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but stuck in the tribunal of moral values, Christianity let itself be cowed by the libertarian energies of the Enlightenment and sidelined by the technical and multicultural acceleration of history. It flourished, however, under unexpected forms that might not always welcome the association: in your novels, Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau’s Nephew; in Mozart’s Magic Flute, for instance; even in the care for human uniqueness professed by the European Union today. Does that surprise you? Good, I’m flattered! To issues of love, the Bible, and the Gospels I would attach everything that, without sinking into modern nihilism, patiently breaks down and recomposes the desire to believe with all one’s body and soul. Everything that stays close to myths and rituals, monotheistic or otherwise, and revisits those bold condensations that restore humanity — disoriented by the threat of global disaster — to its own “monumental” history: a history made of the self-transcendence speaking beings have labeled the “divine,” the “unconscious,” “being,” and “time,” not to say “lost time.”

Less than two centuries after Teresa’s death you could not have perceived, dear Denis Diderot, this renovation within continuity achieved by a strange nun living at the very heart of the ontotheological continent you were determined to blow up, with swimming eyes. As an impatient, libertarian protester, committed to the efficiency that would benefit the humble and the wronged, you proceeded in plebeian fashion by dint of “epistemological breaks.” Was that how it had to be in order for me, Sylvia Leclercq, beyond any real, imaginary, or symbolic guillotine, to find my way back to Teresa? After you, yet upstream from you? I don’t know, but that’s how it is.

Others, in ever greater numbers, would align themselves with what they took to be your fight against obscurantism, and continued the desecration with the help of a cudgel: this, those poor unprotected believers believed, was indispensable for lancing the boil of superstition and subjection. But they had overlooked the fertile twists, the vicious benefits, the ineffable traps of the desire for meaning: morbid fancies, instinctual eruptions, hopes and despairs, physical and psychic manipulations.

You’ve got it, Mister Philosopher: being the person I am, my cohabitation with that roommate is the paradoxical, but inevitable, result of your Nun. I began by rebelling, in step with you, against the physical and psychic oppressions effected by religions and ideologies, the latter being more or less secretly modeled on the former; I shared your revulsion at monastic claustration; I felt the empathy that made you weep over the fate of the victims of so many enforced, but often voluntary, delusions.

Over time, however, I found myself parting ways with you. Or rather I attempted to shine your light, in my own way, into the murky chambers of the female soul that intrigued you so much in Marie-Suzanne Simonin. Into what Freud called the “psychic apparatus,” of both sexes: the recondite places where torture is distilled into secondary benefits, into a “surplus” of jouissance, and where the need to believe constitutes the foundations of a culture, with or without apparent malaise.

I wonder if you’d ever accept — as Freudians do, like me, who cannot share your enlightened optimism on this point — that delusion, with all its dangers, is a constitutive part or the now immersed face of a civilization seemingly melting away under the overheated blast of technology.