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

“‘Neither whores nor submissives*’!” cried the woman on my left, incensed, and I clapped. [*Ni putes ni soumises: women’s rights movement founded by French Muslim women in 2002.—Trans.]

“She wears her veil like Saint Teresa wore a habit, she’ll get over it in a few hundred years,” snickered the man on my right.

“But that’s completely different!” Reproving stares pierced me from every side. Trapped, I said meekly: “Well, I think it is, anyway.” It was no time to be splitting hairs.

The spontaneity of my outburst surprised me. As if Teresa had just installed herself inside me, suddenly, by default , as the software manuals call it: from now on, automatically, as soon as your mental programs are booted up, before you’ve thought to modify this ineluctable presence by recustomizing your habits or traditions of thought, there something or someone is . In my case, there was Teresa, finally turning me away from a pointless, pretentious debate whose speakers were simply regurgitating the usual arguments and counterarguments as heard on TV. Should have expected it.

I fell into a kind of stupor, sucked into the abyss that separates the IT jihadi — protected from everything and then some by a scarf that strangles her worse than a convict’s neck iron — from the Golden Age visionary attempting to reconcile the faith of her desires with her loquacious reason. Was it really such an abyss? Sure. Not sure. Let’s see.

Teresa, as I read her, was able, by entering into ecstasy and writing down her raptures, not only to feel suffering and joy in both body and soul, but also to heal herself — almost — of her most salient symptoms: anorexia, fatigue, insomnia, fainting fits ( desmayos ), epilepsy ( gota coral and mal de corazón ), paralysis, strange bleedings, and terrible migraines. What is more, she succeeded in imposing her policies on the Church by reforming the Carmelite order. She founded seventeen monasteries in twenty years: Avila, Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladolid, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Beas, Seville, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Palencia, Soria, Granada, and Burgos. In addition she wrote prolifically (her Collected Works run to nine volumes in the Spanish critical edition by Fr. Silverio de Santa Teresa); showed herself to be a most skillful metapsychologist, well before Freud, obviously; and emerged as a canny “businesswoman” within a Church that hadn’t asked for it. Unrepentantly carnal, she was moved by an insatiable desire for men and women, and naturally for the God-man Jesus Christ, never troubling to conceal her passions, even though she had taken vows, gone into seclusion, and hidden herself in a prickly woolen robe. Teresa used on the contrary to stoke her ecstasies to the limit, the better to savor their delights — sadomasochistic, of course — while analyzing them. And she bequeathed to us a masterpiece of self-observation and baroque rhetoric, not so much a Castle of the Soul , as it may be too hastily translated, but rather a kaleidoscope of “dwelling places,” moradas in Spanish: a “psychic apparatus” composed of multiple facets, plural transitions, in which the writer’s identity slips its moorings, is lost, is freed…with apologies to the head-scarfed engineer. Enough to make my colleagues, were they to go out of their way to visit this unlikely “castle,” turn green with envy.

Ever since she surfaced in the vagrancy of my submarine nights and imposed herself “by default” upon my discourse, Teresa hasn’t left me alone for a moment. This can be irritating, especially during the psychotherapy sessions with my analysands. For they are, male and female, one and all, sick with love, like Teresa, like Marguerite Duras, like the IT engineer, and plenty more. Like me, except that I have spent so many years analyzing myself and others that I lost the capacity for passion and it’s no longer that simple. Teresa wasn’t fooled either, in a way; at any rate she was far less gullible than some of my patients of either sex who revel in lovesickness and close their ears to my interpretations, no doubt because they love me too much.

But Teresa had no qualms about delving to the “root” of her “sins,” of her “boiling desires,” those “galloping horses” as she called them, nor about attacking the incompetence of her confessors, who did not understand her.

The whole trouble lay in not getting at the root of the occasions and with my confessors who were of little help. For had they told me of the danger I was in and that I had the obligation to avoid those friendships, without a doubt I believe that I would have remedied the matter.…

All these signs of fear of God came to me during prayer; and the greatest sign was that they were enveloped in love , for punishment did not enter my mind. This carefulness of conscience with respect to mortal sins lasted all during my illness. Oh, God help me, how I desired my health so as to serve Him more, and this health was the cause of all my harm. 8

I take it that Teresa was implicating certain “friendships” and more precisely “prayer,” the practice of mental prayer for fusion with God: both of these presumably lay behind her “sins” and her indispositions. But I also see her as decomposing the internal shifts of her way of believing in God. If she, Teresa, loves God so much, it’s because she fears Him — punishment being the solidary inverse of love. Can love be a ruthless demand that punishes one to the point of illness? “These signs of fear of God…were enveloped in love.” Teresa points to the central knot of her malaise, a pernicious knot that the lovely engineer, fixed to her identity along with so many lovesick analysands, will take years to unpick. The earthly “punishment,” her symptoms but also her penances, derive from a mixture of love and fear, sex and terror . This weave that constitutes desire itself — desire for the Creator, as well as for His creatures — had hitherto eluded her, insightful though she was. In the sentence I am now reading, Teresa expresses herself like an analyst, or at least that is how I translate her. I feared, she says, that loving would be either meaningless or forbidden, and hence always culpable; and I contented myself with mobilizing all of my “conscience” (my moral sense, my superego). I remained “careful of conscience” so as to combat those unworthy desires, those sins. My very illnesses were punishments that I inflicted on myself out of fear of the Beloved, fear of not measuring up to Love. But by the time of writing these lines, she concludes, I’ve gone beyond that point: I have understood that such a conscientious longing for “health” in order to “serve,” were it even to serve God, can only cause me “harm.”

The future saint has just discovered what the superego enjoins: “Delight in suffering!” What to do? Without relinquishing that feminine stance—“A female I was and, for better or worse [ pour en souffrir et pour en jouir ], a female I find myself to be,” as Colette put it 9—the Carmelite nun transforms it into a different position, for which she finds plenty of justifications in Scripture: as a garden lets itself be watered, so Teresa lets herself be loved, abandoning herself to the mingled waters of pleasure, sublimation, and a kind of self-analysis that she discovers as she writes. With no resistance or dread — no tyrannical superego, as my colleagues of the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society would interpret it.

Offered up, passive, defenseless, Teresa embraced the rite of prayer as preached by the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna 10in his Third Spiritual Alphabet , and passed down to her by her paternal uncle, Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda: silent rather than spoken prayer, submersion of the self in an infinite longing for the other, the absolute Other, the divine, as penetrating as a Spouse. This amorous state, heightened by the nun’s very account of it, engulfs its author and infects the reader with an imaginary pleasure so potent it makes itself felt and is embodied in each of the senses (mouth, skin, ears, eyes, guts). Teresa is a well, a Persian wheel, an underground stream, a downpour, the beloved Being impregnates her with His grace.