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

May I put more clearly, in light of this, the objection I raised before with regard to Jeanne and Teresa? When, with touching quietist “abandonment” and in the dignified perfection of “pure love,” Jeanne Guyon seeks to identify with Teresa of Avila, a serious misunderstanding has occurred. “Not being able to find in [myself] anything that can be named.…”³² You well know, Maître, as a declared admirer of Spiritual Torrents, that Jeanne’s encounter with nothing failed to stem her outpourings on the vicissitudes of her sensory ego. The saint of the Counter-Reformation, for her part, was equally conversant with the psychological maze of earthly affections, their frustrations and glories, somatic consequences, narcissistic or depressive recesses, and manic excitements — all taking turns to cram or vacate the psyche of Madame Guyon, according to her torrential text. The main difference between the two women was that Teresa’s “abandonment” of herself to the infantile was merely a transition, to be elucidated and then situated in the co-presence of emptiness and infinity.

With La Madre we find none of the apotheosis of “Nothingness” so central to Guyon’s approach, which betrays an obvious narcissistic regression to the infant’s impotence / omnipotence binomial. Teresa would never say, “I suffer as gaily as a child.” She would never offer an apology of the “abjection” that advocates “pollution” and presupposes the abolition of sin by the quietists. Where Jeanne Guyon annihilates herself in an Other reduced to an unnameable Nothing — symmetrical counterpart of the mercilessly judgmental paternal divinity — Teresa exults at being the infinitesimal presence of the Other, an atom forming part of infinite Love itself: the infinitely present, rewarding Love that embraces her viscerally (entrañarse)³³ and allows itself to be checkmated, no less, in a game she plays to infinity and with energy to match.

Teresa, contrary to La Guyon, as you call her, merges with the divine placed at the luminous center of her dwelling places, whose depiction she refines by way of savors (gustos), ways, and foundations that forever lead her to new encounters. Outside the self or inside it, nothing but intrepid alterations of her emptied-out identity, which is, by the same token, not so much verbose as polymorphous, plural, pragmatic. Her manner of inhabiting her dwelling places, her multiple interior-exterior topologies, lead into a rebirth of the subject who writes “fictions,” which I receive as strings of alterations of the new Self into the Other: wars on the self, or transcendences of the self, through the deepening of elucidated desires and at the same time through the amplification of historical action. This nonsymmetrical reversibility between the “other Self” and the Other (Teresa and her Voices), just as between the Subject and the World, which characterizes Teresa’s experience, was for a long time misunderstood, indeed persecuted, before it was recognized and recommended by the Tridentine revolution. In reaction to the narrowness of both Protestantism and humanism, the Jesuits encouraged Teresa’s oscillation (which was also theirs) between interiority and spirituality, seclusion and the world, Being and Subject, religion and politics. Having cast themselves as the soldiers of a new logic, they quickly recognized themselves in the ecstatic foundress as she recognized herself in them, amid suspicions, tensions, and conflicts — for the blessings of dialectics are infinite.

So you see, dear Maître, why I am so interested in a nun who might have been like yours but did not merely resemble her, or rather, resembled her not at all. Neither Rheno-Flemish nor a Fénelonian, Teresa operated a change in the mystic soul whose enigmas we, would-be modern subjects trapped between secularism and fundamentalism, have barely begun to plumb.

When she raised the erotic body into the sphere of essential union with the Other-Being, she was not merely revaluing the flesh (which so tormented Marie-Suzanne Simonin) as the ultimate site of the experience of the divine. Rheno-Flemish mystics like Meister Eckhart had already done this, albeit intermittently. Fénelon and Guyon were to bring the desiring body back to the quiet of a child in its mother’s lap — mistaking narcissistic exaltation for serenity.

Likewise Teresa did more than just ennoble “lust” by defensively making the Spouse into its sole object, and dispensing her personal seductiveness to a number of His servants of both sexes along the way.