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

If more evidence is needed of the impossibility of reducing Teresa’s procedure to the Rheno-Flemish model, suffice it to say that the sensualist-rationalist tendency, opposed to the mystics of the North, acknowledged a debt to the saint’s experience. This current, launched by Francis de Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God,¹⁹ hit the zenith with Fénelon²⁰ and Madame Guyon.²¹

In one of your marvelously intransigent fugues, my dear Philosopher, you yourself conflated “la Guyon,” her verbose Spiritual Torrents, and Fénelon, with…Teresa! You begin by expounding rapturously on the fickle female of the species. Then, having immortalized Jeanne Guyon, you automatically associate her with my saint. So La Guyon writes with unrivaled eloquence in her book Torrents? You go on to declare: “Saint Theresa has said of devils, ‘How luckless they are: they do not love!’ Quietism is the hypocrisy of the perverse man, the true religion of the tender woman.”²² Indeed. But Teresa a “tender woman”? Never! Next, carried away by enthusiasm, unless it’s persiflage again, you commend Fénelon as a “safe” man: “There was, however, a man of such honesty of character and such rare simplicity of morals that a gentlewoman could safely forget herself beside him and melt into God. But this man was unique and called Fénelon.” Right! Enough of that, let’s get back to the female genius. “Women are subject to epidemic attacks of ferocity.” Although: “Oh, women, what extraordinary children you are!”

With that, were you edging nearer to Teresa? Not in my opinion. Dare I say that the philosopher lacks something indispensable for following the Carmelite in her cruelty, her infantilism, her raptures, her foundations? You don’t know what to do with those exaltations in which the soul becomes one with the Other, because the atheist in you is condemned to diminish the singularity of innerness and to lock himself out from the mansions of the soul by his refusal to countenance the Other’s very existence. I’m not asking you to believe in it, to subscribe to it, or even to make use of it. I’m asking you to make your object of incredulity — God — into an object of interpretation.

It was impossible: you were blocked by the same rationalistic sensualism that had already produced a new mystical model, itself sense-based and psychologistic, with which you rather sympathized. It made you “shiver” in the company of Guyon-Fénelon, and you redressed it on the reason side or tilted it toward the side of emancipation to castigate the iniquities of an oppressive obscurantism. But it debarred you from the subtle paths of perceptible — and imperceptible — perfection that are opened up by the experience of faith.

What if your Nun were not only the fruit of a revolt against the abuses of religious institutions but also and equally an ultimate consequence of the rationalistic sensualism that abrogates, along with the “God question,” the true complexity of the “castle of the soul”? First by belittling it, then by ignoring its intrinsic logic, and finally by annulling it? You perceive the threat, Mister Philosopher, and fight it by creating the polyphonic and carnivalesque characters of your novels, you entrust the imagination with the job of musiquer (setting to music, the term used by He in the Nephew) the psychic life.²³ But you’re not sure that all this is enough, and you have no desire to finish the novel of The Nun now that you’ve released her from religion. The “benighted philosophy” of the “folly of the cross,” as Suzanne puts it in her letters to the marquis, is, I suspect, somewhat yours as well — for haven’t you elected to remain blind to the voyage of souls toward the God question?

I am not suggesting that you personally, Maître, closed the God question in favor of another question, not entirely divorced from it but not to be reduced to it either: the question of subjection and how to get rid of it. I am only saying that this closure has a history, which involves you, and that the history of mysticism itself participates in it. But since my wager is to reopen the God question in the thinking that crystallized in the enlightened Encyclopedia and culminated, as I see it, with Freud, I can only do this by way of your good self, replaying your revolts and querying your silences.

It’s well known that you found Christianity a doleful affair, compared with the zest for life, sensual gaiety, and civic pugnacity you valued so highly in pagan antiquity and transposed to the dimension of mankind. And yet I hear you tell your Maréchale that all deities, including pagan ones, belong in the madhouse: grist to my psychologist’s mill, as you can imagine.