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

All in all you are a tolerant atheist, Mister Philosopher, and it doesn’t come amiss to repeat it, even if your oh-so-reasonable sensibility makes Teresian interiority a closed book to you. I like to think that if I met you today, more than two hundred years after your demise, you would have persevered with your nun’s story, and our paths might have crossed. Personally, I’m sure of it.

Let us return then to that other mystical model, distinct from the Rheno-Flemish school. This developed through the rationalist-sensualists, aiming to integrate the Cartesian subject while adapting it to lived experience, and bewitching the French — or rather, French women. To my mind, this model was not in keeping with Teresa’s project either. Descartes’ ego cogito gradually infiltrated Christian mysticism to eclipse the ego amo and ego affectus est of the Christian subject; it was Julia Kristeva and her Tales of Love that made me understand this long ago, when, disappointed in my unfinished thesis on Duras, I attended her classes at Jussieu. Briefly, faith ordered by reason is accompanied in Francis de Sales by a mutation of love that finds peace in knowledge. Pascal himself insists, in his Discourse on the Passion of Love, on the role of reason in love, and presents the latter as a clear-sighted vision of truth rather than a form of blindness.

Paradoxically, the desacralization of mystical experience begins with this second would-be mystical current or “model,” with its inflexion of being toward doing. The desacralization is lasting, even or especially when the praying person resists doing with all his or her might in order to find refuge in non-action. How can this be? The faculties (intellect, will, imagination) are henceforth located on the higher planes of both the Rheno-Flemish trichotomy and the Aristotelo-Thomist dichotomy; as a result, the mind is split from the senses, that is from feeling or sentiment, relegated to the lower plane of human reason. The two activities nonetheless overlap and encroach to produce an amazingly complicated map of the soul, a jumble of components, degrees, and postures, but this “vertiginous carousel with its proliferating subdivisions” has nothing in common with Teresa’s dwelling places, as we will see.²⁸

Among the rational sensualists, my dear Denis Diderot, the essential soul of Rheno-Flemish thought is invoked only to be redistributed through a rational and sensitive topography. This entails a psychologization of experience that in turn leads Fénelon, the Swan of Cambrai, in his Explication of the Maxims of the Saints, to define the “supreme peak” of the loving union of the soul with God in negative, sentimental fashion as the absence of any intellectual discourse or inclinations of the will based on the exercise of reason.²⁹ The concept of Being remains, of course, but only as a posited reference (henceforth separate from the “subject,” or more exactly of the psychological “self,” which becomes merely the sign of it) in a supradiscursive regime of rational faculties. In fact, this attempt to make mystical doctrines compatible with scholastic theology signals the impossibility of preserving any mysticism of the essence within rational and sensualist parameters.

For the subject of the Cartesian cogito wrecked the ontological ambition of the Rheno-Flemish mystics,³⁰ which now became inaccessible to such anti-mystics as Bossuet, who devoted himself to “tempering by means of holy interpretations” the notions of the “great exaggerators,” mystics who have no idea of what they’re talking about.³¹ This did not prevent the Eagle of Meaux from standing up for Teresa in his own terms, as we’ve seen, and he also had kind words for Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Catherine, and a few others. Nothing is simple in this area, Maître: I can’t keep up myself, which is saying something. Let’s press on. The ontological ambition would also be inaccessible, in a different way, to Pierre Poitiers and to Fénelon, even though these claimed to be the greatest defenders of mysticism in all the seventeenth century. The first declared that the union of the human soul with the divine essence should be understood as merely a “metaphor,” while the second depicted the essential mystical union in terms of a simple affective bond whereby the soul unites with God in pure, disinterested love. Thus the way was paved for sensualist materialism to sound the knell of the mysticism of Being in favor of the mystique of the psychological ego.