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

After following you as best I could through your life and death, through the firmament of ideas where you hover with the opus that is your jewel, that last question remains open.

Is it because you were a woman, or because you were Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, then Teresa of Jesus, then Saint Teresa of Avila — who I watched being born, vibrating, and passing away, with your epoch and against it — that you built yourself a soul, as it used to be called, that matched your body but did not fit the Aristotelo-Thomist model of the interior man and the exterior man? That equally contradicted the rationalist, sensualist model mounted by Fénelon and Madame Guyon?

The history of Christianity is actually littered with sophisticated anatomies of the soul, vertiginous palaces of the inner life. Might I run through some of them with you, Mister Philosopher, as a way of clarifying my disagreement? I’ll use the bits and pieces to enhance my Teresian “installation,” like the Beguines decorating their offerings to the Sacred Heart with shreds of grass and scraps of floral fabric. Or like contemporary female artists who eschew synthesis and prefer to pile up the fragments of their untenable identities. A nod at the scholastics, a glance at the Rhenish philosophers, an allusion to quietism, all to be submitted for your inspection. It’s my patchwork sampler, my polychrome canvas, my MoMA-worthy “mobile.” So that the dwelling places of my saint are sure to stand out while remaining connected, I tighten my gestures, quicken my paint drippings, gather time into the space of a condensation. Teresa of Avila’s revolution can only be assessed in relation to that mutation of mystical subjectivity, those variations on the “kingdom” of which modernity knows nothing, but in which I tried to steep myself while traveling through the works of the woman from Castile.

As you know, my dear Philosopher, after Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, scholasticism came up with a topology of inner space in which the higher part comprised man’s rational faculties, and the lower part the sensitive faculties.

The Rheno-Flemish mystics modified the structure established by Aristotle and Aquinas by adding to this bilevel schema a new “higher part”: the locus of mysticism itself, the site of the “essence” of the soul, above the median level of rationality and the base level of the sensitive. Transcending the operative powers (intellect, will, imagination), irreducible to the actual capabilities of any given subject, the indivisible essence of the soul is deployed in a rigorously ontological context. This summit of man’s interiority is described by Meister Eckhart as the “innermost source” in which “I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work.”¹⁶

The soul sits at rest on this crowning point to “merit” an “interior nativity,” in other words an overcoming of the “self” by means of the rebirth of the “subject” as Other, in the modern interpretation. “Be quiet, let God speak and work within”: this is the method advocated by Johannes Tauler, Eckhart’s disciple, to enable the soul within which the (re)birth occurs to become “a child of God.”¹⁷ An essential, noetic, abstract, imperceptible union, “without images or instruments,” “a learned ignorance,” ignota cognitio, this “depth”—or rather pinnacle — of the soul in Rheno-Flemish mysticism is thus an ontological reality, the transcendence of being over doing.

And yet the consciousness of the feeling and thinking subject is by no means abolished here. Meister Eckhart’s experience is more like a “flickering” between the three hierarchically separated levels of essence, reason, and sense.¹⁸ Mysticism only sacralizes the noblest part of the soul, the essence, and this can only be attained in the seclusion of silence, causing the rebirth of subjectivity through its immersion in Being; its power is none other than the pure silence of noetic alteration. The “vain pursuit” of faith in Saint John of the Cross has affinities with this noetic alteration described by Tauler: “There is no doubt that Almighty God has appointed a special place for Himself in the soul which is the very essence itself, or Mens, whence the higher powers emerge. This spirit or Mens is of such great dignity that no creature has or ever could rise to the height necessary to understand it.”

Teresa was not unaware of this noetic ambition, for her whole reformation of the Carmel, with its stress on austere enclosure, silence, and purity, alluded and adhered to it. But my roommate went further: her life, her writings, and her deeds embody and testify to a different mystical model.