But I know that it can only be gained by abandoning everything.
—St. Teresa of Avila
When Michel de Certeau writes, “[i]t is ways of acting that guide the creation of a body of mystical writings,” he asserts the corporeal authority inherent in a language that speaks an ab-solute (un-bound) “only by erasing itself.”
1Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech” in Heterologies, Discourse on the Other (trans. Brian Massumi; Theory and History of Literature 17; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 80–100, at 81. De Certeau elaborates a view of sixteenth and seventeenth century mysticism in Europe as being “characterized by a set of procedures allowing a new treatment of language—of all contemporarylanguage, not only the area delimited bytheologicalknowledge orthe corpus of patristic and scriptural works.” Studying the “field of mysticism at the height of its formalization—from Saint Teresa (1515–1582) to Angelus Silesius (the pseudonym of Johann Scheffler, 1624–1677),” because “its modes of functioning are more legible, allowing us to define its place” (ibid., 81), de Certeau offers a historical and linguistic examination of this luminous form of Christianity through its literature—writings which, he suggests, reinterpreted the Christian tradition “against the backdrop of decadence and ‘corruption’ in a world falling apart and in need of repair” (ibid., 80). Following de Certeau's emphasis on language, my essay approaches segments of St. Teresa's Interior Castle (1577) through an aesthetic and theological lens, in dialogue with his thought in “Mystic Speech.” Given these parameters, the essay does not represent an exhaustive study of the Teresian corpus and its extensive secondary literature, or a comprehensive view of Teresa's theology across her œuvre. It does, however, offer an in-depth reading of select passages of her spiritual masterpiece, which are exemplary of her mature thought and Christology. Throughout the essay, I note relation to earlier works by St. Teresa and contemporary Teresian scholarship, in order to extend and contextualize her thought and my own, and for the reader's further reference. For an incisive introduction to, and analysis of, Michel de Certeau's corpus see Arthur Bradley, “Certeau's ‘Yes, in a foreign land,’” in Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); and Wlad Godzich, “The Further Possibility of Knowledge,” introduction to Heterologies, Discourse on the Other, by Michel de Certeau (trans. Brian Massumi; Theory and History of Literature 17;Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) vii–xxi. For de Certeau's comprehensive study of sixteenth and seventeenth century mysticism (in which “Mystic Speech” serves as an introduction) see The Mystic Fable (trans. Michael B. Smith; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992;trans. of La Fable Mystique [Paris: Gallimard, 1982]). For critical and sympathetic companions to the life, theology and writings of St. Teresa see Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1991); E. W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Entering Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle: A Reader's Companion (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2005). All biblical citations in this essay are drawn from the NRSV.
St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle (ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers; New York, N.Y.: Double-day, 1961). I chose to work with the Peers translation; though older and based on the P. Silverio edition (Obras de s. Teresa de Jesús [ed. Silverio of Saint Teresa; 9 vols.; Biblioteca mistica carmelitana 1–9; Burgos: Tip. de “El Monte Carmelo,” 1915–1924], it sustains a particular aesthetic and theological clarity in the English. I have used the Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation (The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila [trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriquez, O.C.D.; Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980])—from the more recent edition of the complete works prepared by Fr. Tomás de la Cruz (Alvarez) (Obras [ed. Tomás de la Cruz;Archivo silveriano de historia y espiritualidad carmelitana 1; Burgos: Editorial El Monte Carmelo, 1971]), and which Rowan Williams characterizes as “preferable to Peers in terms of liveliness and readability” (Teresa of Avila [London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1991] xi)—as a secondary reference. I include its helpful paragraph divisions in parentheses following each Peers citation.
I understand the formation of the human as subject as a Christological event, for which St. Teresa's “Prayer of Union” offers generous representation. I intend a theological and aesthetic approach to St. Teresa's text, one that is both interpretive and constructive, and focusing on the Christological import of her poetic imagery. A sustained treatment of Christology and the formation of human subjectivity, crossing patristics, aesthetics, and continental phenomenology is currentlyin progress in my doctoral dissertation.
I translate “moradas” as “Dwellings” in order to recall the existential temporality of prayer and its interiority. In this light, I emphasize the inter of interiority as a site of intercession (Lat. intercessio, “an intervention, a becoming surety;” ptc. of intercedere, “to intercede”). Interiority and intercession are here characterized by both mediation and interruption, a being situated between, as a threshold, with a view toward reconciling/interceding perceived opposites. Peers comments that the Spanish “moradas” is derived from the intransitive verb “morar,” “to dwell,” and is not absolutely identical in sense with his choice of “Mansions.” Although “mansions” does yield a strong sense of capaciousness, it becomes a somewhat static architectural trope in contrast to the active, present sense of “Dwellings,” a choice which concurs with Richard Perceval's (1550 1620) translation of “moráda” as “a lodging, a dwelling, a place” (A Dictionary in Spanish and English [London: John Haviland for Edward Blount, 1623] 172; online: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.82003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:25568:87). In modern usage “morada” has the multiple meanings of “abode, habitation, dwelling mansion, stay, sojourn” (Cassell's Spanish Dictionary [New York: Macmillan, 1978] 428). Kavanaugh and Rodriquez translate “moradas” as “Dwelling Places.”
St. Teresa's Prayer of Union in the Fifth Dwellings represents the first union “of the whole soul with God” (IC 102; [5.1.11]). It is characterized by a full alignment of the soul's will to God's will and is differentiated from the partial union of earlier Dwellings, the intense or ecstatic union that it precedes (spiritual betrothal; Sixth Dwellings), and the perfect, complete or transforming union (spiritual marriage; Seventh Dwellings). The Prayer of Union may also be seen to correspond to aspects of both the third and the fourth degrees of prayer in the Life, chs. 16–17, 18–21 (St. Teresa of Avila The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila [ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers; Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1960]), though St. Teresa's analogy of the Four Waters in the Life and that of the Seven Dwellings in the Interior Castle teach two resonant yet distinct paths to prayerful union. Fr. Ermanno, O.D.C. writes of the Prayer of Union as “simple” and “infused,” correlating it to the Fourth Water in the Life (in contrast to Peers who aligns it with the Third Water) and to ch. 33 of the Way of Perfection (The Way of Perfection [ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers; Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1964]). He distinguishes it from the prayer of quiet, describing it as “so deep that it totally absorbs the interior faculties of the soul, which begins to experience a transformation within itself which causes it to live a divine life” (“The Degrees of Teresian Prayer,” in St. Teresa of Avila: Studies in her Life, Doctrine and Times [ed. Fr. Thomas, O.D.C., and Fr. Gabriel, O.D.C.; Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds Ltd., 1963] 77–103, at 93. This aspect of beginning is critical to my understanding of the Prayer of Union, as it affords view into the beginning of creation and the birth of the soul created in the image of God. See also Fr. Laurian O.D.C., “The Doctrine of St. Teresa on Spiritual Betrothal,” in ibid., 154–90.
“
” (Definition of Chalcedon [451 C.E.]). Alternative translations: “acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union” (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils [ed. Norman P. Tanner, S. J.; Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990] 1:86); “to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union” (John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought [2d ed.;Crestwood, N. Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987] 26); “that we apprehend [gnōridzomenon]this one and only Christ-Son, Lord, only-begotten—in two natures [duo physesin]; [and we do this] without confusing the two natures [asunkutōs], without transmuting one nature into the other [atreptōs], without dividing them into two separate categories [adiairetōs], without contrasting them according to area or function [achoristōs]. The distinctiveness of each nature is not nullified by the union” (Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine, From the Bible to the Present [ed. John H. Leith; 3d ed.; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982] 36).
)and one hypostasis.”
7“
” (Definition of Chalcedon). One may also read “concurring in a single person” with “hypostasis” translated as “subsistence” or “a single subsistent being.”
Throughout the essay, the act of contemplative prayer will be held as a form of utterance, one that intercedes,8
See above, n. 4, on “inter” and below, n. 89.
This split within the human as subject may be viewed through theological and psychoanalytic lenses. Jacques Lacan's theory of the splitting of the subject is a resource for my thought, though my emphasis on the Christological nature of the formation of human subjectivity admits both the value and the limitations of Lacanian theory for theological inquiry. The Lacanian “subject” (always an open term, not closed, fixed or fully achieved) comes to itself in and through language; entry into the domain of symbolic discourse marks the splitting of the subject and the advent of desire, continually deferred. Significantly, Lacan views the rise of self-consciousness as a reformulation of the mirror stage; see below, n. 30. See Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits (trans. Alan Sheridan; New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1977) 1–7. See also “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan [New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978]) 67–78; Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 108. For varied introductions to Lacan's work and influence, see also Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (London: Macmillian, 1982); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1990); Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1996) esp. 30–34; Lacan & Theological Discourse (ed. Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield, and Carl A. Raschke; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989). For a comparative theological understanding of “the problem of the division in the soul” see Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York, N.Y.: Crossroad, 2002). Howells addresses the problem as “the ontological division between the soul and God” which “enters into the soul, dividing the two parts—not to the same degree that the soul and God are naturally divided, but enough to dislocate the soul severely.” He traces this division to the Pauline distinction between the spirit and the flesh, and proposes its Trinitarian solution in the final union of the soul with God (ibid., 2–4). See also Ahlgren's integrated analysis of Howells’ thought throughout Entering Teresa, and specifically on the issue of division at 73 n. 19.
Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 89. De Certeau conceives this phrase, “thy Word, in me” from his reading of a couplet by Angelus Silesius/Johann Scheffler: “Die Schrift ist Schrift, sonst nichts. Mein Trost/ist Wesenheit, /Und das Gott in mir spricht das Wort der Ewigheit”(“The (Divine) Writing is writing, nothing more. My consolation is essentiality, and that God speaks in me the Word of Eternity;” “Mystic Speech,” 89 n. 40). For a French translation of this couplet, see Le pèlerin chérubique (trans. Eugène Susini; Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Paris: Textes et documents 4–5; Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964) 170. De Certeau writes of the mystic's need “to restore a dialogue” to a world ruptured by ambiguity and plurality (ibid., 88): “In the work of Angelus Silesius, this corresponds to the “‘invocating drive’ which casts aside the opaque positivity of the Holy Writ as a ‘nothing’, and reclaims the ‘essential’—thy Word, in me” (ibid., 89). While this essential utterance has multiple significance, it may be read in light of the Lacanian split subject, in that it represents the division or interruption of speech, which separates the subject of the enunciation from the subject of the statement. I refer here to the splitting of an utterance into a positionality and a propositionality as Emile Benveniste elucidates in “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign,” Problems in General Linguistics (trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek; Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971) 43–48.
The word “to cleave” has both a transitive meaning, “to part or divide by force, to split or rive,” and an intransitive meaning, “to adhere closely, to hold fast, to cling.” I intend to hold both meanings at once, such that one grasps the ambivalent (and, I offer, Christological) significance of the soul's simultaneous union with, and separation from, God. In this sense, the word “cleave” may perform, linguistically, a homonymic coincidence of opposites. See Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam and Sons, 1909) 264.
I use coincidentia oppositorum here to denote two apparently opposite events, e.g., union and separation, occurring at once in the soul, and understand this coincidence Christologically. Although the idea of a coincidence of opposites is variously inscribed throughout the Christian contemplative tradition—e.g., in Gregory of Nyssa's “seeing that consists in not seeing” (The Life of Moses 2.163; The Life of Moses [trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson; Mahwah, N.J.:Paulist Press, 1978] 98) or Dionysius the Areopagite's citing Phil 2:9, “ ‘the name which is above every name’ and is therefore without a name” (De divinis nominibus 4.12–13; Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works [trans. Colm Luibheid; New York, N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1987] 81–82)—it is Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) who most notably uses the phrase coincidentia oppositorum, first in De docta ignoran-tia/On Learned Ignorance, where he develops an understanding of Christ as enfolding the union of opposites or of the union of opposites as unfolding from Christ. Jesus Christ is “simultaneously the maximum in the universe united with the absolute, the perfection of the universe, and the center and circumference of all intellectual nature.” This understanding rests upon true knowledge—that of one's own ignorance. As the God-human, Jesus Christ is the ultimate coincidence, a distinct “unity of substance without mingling and without obliteration of either party or substance.” Cusa further develops his understanding of coincidentia oppositorum in De visione Dei/On the Vision of God (9.37) where he writes “O Lord, … I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled is girded about with the coincidence of contradictories. This is the wall of paradise, and it is there in paradise that you reside” (Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings [trans. H. Lawrence Bond;New York: Paulist Press, 1977] 24; see also 19, 28, 251–52). Bond offers an excellent introduction to Cusa's thought; Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), and Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (4 vols.; New York, N.Y.: Crossroad, 1991) provide substantive historical and theological background to the Christian mystical and contemplative traditions.
By “the human as subject” I mean to address the process of subjectification as intersubjective and Christocentric in nature (see Phil 2:5–8) and to advance a Christological understanding of the human subject with respect to the formative processes of decentering, splitting, incorporating alterity, and being called into question (Levinas), over and against the idea of a unitary, sovereign or autonomous “I.” While I do not take it up explicitly in this paper, my correlation of subjectivity formation and Christology, seen here through St. Teresa's “Prayer of Union,” raises the question of sexual difference and its representation in language, particularly given contemporary critiques of Freud, Lacan, and “the human subject.” My effort here makes an initial claim, attending to an exegesis of imagery found in St. Teresa's language for union with God. This question, however, requires further attention, particularly with regard to the representation of sexual difference and gendered subjectivity in the writings of female and male “mystics.” For further references on intersubjectivity, see Jessica Benjamin, “The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory,” Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1998) 79–108; Mary Frohlich, The Intersubjectivity of the Mystic: A Study of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle (American Academy of Religion Academy Series 83; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1993).
An Essential Interiority
At the very outset of Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila envisions a crystalline castle as an analogy for the human soul in the context of inspired prayer: “While beseeching Our Lord to-day that He would speak through me,” she begins, “ … I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.”14
Interior Castle, 28 (1.1.1).
“The invocatio has long been the first moment of religious knowledge. It is the initial step in St. Anselm's Proslogion, and the field in which a noetic, then a rationality of faith, develop” (De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 89).
Throughout this essay, the apophatic and its signification in language will be understood dialectically, as encompassing the cataphatic and thereby conveying both a sense of denial, unsaying, or erasure as well as one of assertion or declaration; it thus references the two possible etymologies of the Greek word apophasis (
a denial, negation, and
a sentence, decision; see Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997] 96). Michael A. Sells presents a clear introduction to apophasis as “unsaying” in Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1994); for a deconstructive reading of apophasis, see Jacques Derrida “Sauf le nom (Post-scriptum),” On the Name (ed. Thomas Dutoit; trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) 34–85.
Interior Castle, 28 (1.1.1). Luce López-Baralt writes of St. Teresa's conception of the seven concentric circles of the interior castle, bringing to light literary precedents within Islamic and Hebraic mystical traditions (“Santa Teresa and Islamic Mysticism: The Symbol of the Seven Castles of the Soul,” Islam in Spanish Literature: From the Middles Ages to the Present ([trans. Andrew Hurley;Leiden: Brill; San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1992] 91–142). My thanks to Luis Girón-Negrón for this introduction to López-Baralt's work. See also Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) 98–99. Weber describes the spatiality of the castle as “elusive,” noting “attempts by Teresa's exegetes to produce a pictorial representation of its seven dwelling places have proved curiously inconsistent.” While Weber recognizes that these “inconsistencies” may reflect St. Teresa's frustration with the inevitable tension between “systematized theology and affective spirituality,” she argues St. Teresa's resistance “to the unity allegory demanded” as “a response to external sources of pressure.” I suggest that St. Teresa's language and imagery may also reflect the ambivalent field of representation, of which the human subject is a part, and the sustained effort required to bring into the ambiguous parameters of language that which resides in the domain of experience and in/corporeality.
St. Teresa draws upon the clarity of the castle and its capacity for reflecting and refracting light within its coinciding spatial domains of interior and exterior. Her soul as crystalline castle emerges as a dialectical image that holds, at once, inside and outside, singularity and multiplicity, materiality and ethereality. As she casts doubt upon the ability for any known thing to circumscribe or comprehend this beauty of the soul, St. Teresa's language touches upon the paradoxical nature of her effort, acknowledging in her choice of the castle metaphor both the necessity for preserving the wordless beauty of the soul and the sheer impossibility of doing so. Human attention, she writes, “is centred in the rough setting of the diamond, and in the outer wall of the castle—that is to say, in these bodies of ours.”18
Interior Castle, 29 (1.1.2).
Ibid., 31 (1.1.7).
I allude here to Michel de Certeau's assertion that the “I is an other,” (“Mystic Speech,” 96;see pages 351–53 below), and draw relation to Michael A. Sells's understanding of this dialectic of immanence and transcendence within a semantic context: “The effort to express and affirm transcendence leads to an affirmation of radical immanence. That which is beyond is within. That which is other, is the non-other” (Mystical Languages, 207).
Heralding a spherical, circumferential space,21
Luce López-Baralt comments on this spherical quality, making comparison with the Islamic imagery of Semnani's “seven ‘orbs’ of light” and the Persian Kubra's sense of the soul “in quietude, like a transparent orb or circle of light.” López-Baralt writes of “the image of a circle or sphere [as] a universal symbol of perfection and of God” (“Santa Teresa and Islamic Mysticism,” Islam in Spanish Literature, 121). I would add that the specific context of this spherical image has a corporeal referent, that of the body in prayer.
Interior Castle, 29 (1.1.3).
Ibid., 29–30 (1.1.3).
Ibid., 31 (1.1.5).
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 95.
St. Teresa explains. Just as there are myriad Dwellings in the soul, so too there are myriad “ways of ‘being’ in a place.”26
Interior Castle, 31 (1.1.5).
Ibid., 33 (1.2.1). C. G. Jung writes of the mother archetype in a similar manner. The “archetype is often associated with things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness…. It can be attached to a rock, a cave, a tree, a spring, a deep well, or to various vessels such as the baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped flowers like the rose or the lotus” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [trans. R. F. C. Hull; New York, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1968] 81).
John 4:10–14. See St. Teresa's description of the four degrees of prayer via the Four Waters, or the four methods of watering the garden (Life, chs. 11–22). See also St. Augustine's descriptions of God as “fount of life” (fons vitae) to whom one returns along the path of humility (itaque pietate humili reditur in te [Confessions 3.8.16]), as “spring” (fontem) to which Augustine returns saying, “Let me drink this and live by it. May I not be my own life” (ibid., 12.10.10), as the “fount of life” (fontis vitae), the waters drunk by “the mouth of the heart” (ore cordis) “flowing from your spring on high (in superna fluenta fontis tui, … qui est apud te) ‘the spring of life’ which is with you” (ibid., 9.10.23). While St. Teresa makes a direct reference to the Confessions (Interior Castle, 174 [6.7.9]), I do not intend here to note influence so much as to highlight similarity in their theological emphasis on humility, in the allusion to the primeval waters of creation (Gen 1:1–13), and in the baptismal significance of water. Though both works reside within confessional, contemplative and autobiographical frames, St. Teresa's work is differentiated by its taking contemplative prayer as its specific subject matter.
In her mention of “the tree of life,” St. Teresa's language for the soul implies a relation between the processes of contemplative prayer and a return to the virgin earth of the Garden of Eden. The Marian character of this relation is textually rooted in early patristic homiletics that address the Eve/Mary parallel, or the Virgin Mary as Second Eve. Justin Martyr (100–165 C.E.; Dialogue with Trypho 100; PG 6, 709–12) offers the first documented reference to Mary as Second Eve, with Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–200 C.E.; On The Apostolic Preaching, 33) establishing it as a thematic variant on St. Paul's Christ as Second Adam (1 Cor 15:20–23; 45–49). “And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck and, falling, died, so also by means of a virgin, who obeyed the word of God, man, being revivified (
), received life…. For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ, that ‘mortality might be swallowed up in immortality;’ and Eve in Mary, that a virgin, become an advocate for a virgin, might undo and destroy the virginal disobedience by virginal obedience” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching (trans. John Behr;Crestwood, N. Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997) 61). For a brief survey of the topic, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996)39–52. Nicholas Constas gives a detailed treatment to the theme of the pearl as an incarnational symbol in patristic literature (“Mother of Pearl,” in Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity [(Leiden: Brill, 2003]) 290–94). C. G. Jung references Matthew 13:46 (“on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it”) alongside the Apocryphal New Testament story of “a son sent forth by his parents to seek the pearl that fell from the King's crown.” Jung describes the pearl as an instance of “the treasure hard to attain” motif in the psychology of the child archetype (Archetypes, 18, 160; Jung refers to the Syriac “Hymn of the Soul” in Acts of Thomas; see The Apocryphal New Testament [trans. Montague Rhodes James;Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924] 411–15).
Interior Castle, 35 (1.2.5). Teresa writes of a favor granted by God that she found to be “a mirror of humility, for it had made her realize that any good thing we do has its source, not in ourselves but rather in that spring where this tree, which is the soul, is planted, and in that sun which sheds its radiance on our works.” A relation can be drawn to Jacques Lacan's mirror-stage in which the child sees and identifies with its specular image. Lacan writes of such identification as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image,” noting its relation to the ancient term imago and its indicating the “I in a primordial form before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (“Mirror Stage,” 2). Lacan concludes that the mirror-stage is a “particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (“Mirror Stage,” 4).
Ibid., 35–36 (1.2.5). St. Teresa's emphasis on the necessity and virtue of humility and the created subject's utter dependence on God, finds notable relation to St. Augustine's Confessions, 7.18.24: “To possess my God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough. I did not know what weakness was meant to teach. / Your Word, eternal truth, higher than the superior parts of your creation, raises those submissive to him to himself…. By this he detaches from themselves those who are willing to be made his subjects and carries them across to himself…. They are no longer to place confidence in themselves, but rather to become weak. They see at their feet divinity become weak by his sharing in our ‘coat of skin’ (Gen. 3:21)” (Confessions [trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998] 128). Here, humility functions as a portal to recognition of human createdness in the light of God, thus, perhaps, offering a theological reason for St. Teresa's language of humility, which includes confessing her sinfulness, wretchedness, and incapacities—oftenin catechetic or paradoxicallanguage(i.e., alinguistic coincidentia oppositorum). For critical feminist analyses of St. Teresa's language and the “double-bind” which characterized her life and writing, see Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren “The Right to Write: Authority and Rhetorical Strategy in Teresa's Works,” Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996) 67–84.
Interior Castle, 38 (1.2.9).
De Certeau writes: “‘Communications’ (communications from God or those established among the saints) is everywhere a void to be filled, and forms the focal point of mystical accounts and treatises. They are writings produced from this lack” (“Mystic Speech,” 88).
See 1 Cor 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.” The mirror image appears throughout Neoplatonic, Christian, and Islamic contemplative traditions, notably in Plotinus's Enneads (see 6.9 with respect to beauty), in Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses (see 2.157–58 for the metaphor of the mountain for the knowledge of God, and 2.219–240 for eternal progress), and in Augustine's corpus (particularly in his treatment of the imago and visio Dei in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, and in Confessions 7–10, 12). In Sufism, the image of a mirror is central to Ibn Arabi's thought (d. 1240 C.E./a.h. 638). He writes in his Fusûs al-Hikam (lit. “the settings of Wisdom”) of God's creating the world “as something amorphous and without grace comparable to a mirror not yet polished…. So then the Divine Order required the clarification of the mirror of the world; and Adam became the light itself of this mirror and the spirit of this form.” (“Of the Divine Wisdom [al-hikmat al-ilâhiyah] in the Word of Adam,” The Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam) (trans. Titus Burckhardt [Arabic to French]; trans. Angela Culme-Seymour [French to English]; Gloucestershire: Beshara Publications, 1975) 9–10. See also Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York, N.Y.: Crossroad, 1991), particularly vol. 1: The Foundations of Mysticism; Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Margaret R. Miles, “Image,” Critical Terms for Religious Studies (ed. Mark C. Taylor; Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1998) 160–72; David Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael A. Sells, “Ibn Arabi's Polished Mirror: Identity Shift and Meaning Event,” Mystical Languages, 63–89. St. Teresa's use of the mirror image also emphasizes a dialectical understanding of interiority: a phenomenon wherein interior and exterior coinhere, as in a liminal space “between,” a “taking place” in which center and exteriority coincide. See above, n. 4.
On this subjective turn, compare St. Augustine, Confessions 10.27 (38): “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there…. You were with me, and I was not with you.“ (sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam…. mecum eras, et tecum non eram). On Augustine's inward turning and upward ascent of the soul in contemplation, see Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, 1:232–43. See also Jacques Derrida's description of the Phaedo, 80e: “a sort of subjectivizing interiorization, the movement of the soul's gathering of itself, a fleeing of the body toward its interior where it withdraws into itself in order to recall itself to itself, in order to be next to itself, in order to keep itself in this gesture of remembering. This conversion turns the soul around and amasses it upon itself” (The Gift of Death [trans. David Wills; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995] 13).
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 94.
As St. Teresa elaborates her view of the many Dwellings of the soul, she warns that they are not set in a linear progression, “in a row, one behind the other,” and guides instead to concentrate on the center wherein the King abides.37
Interior Castle, 37 (1.2.8).
Ibid.
Recall de Certeau's reading of the ab-solute as the un-bound, as in “a language that can say the ab-solute (un-bound), endlessly, only by erasing itself” (“Mystic Speech,” 81).
Rowan Williams writes insightfully on St. Teresa's understanding of self-knowledge in contrast to self-interest, stating that the Interior Castle is “an attack on interiority as an ideal in itself, and this opening emphasis on self-knowledge should alert us to this fact.” He continues, describing the first Dwellings as “the place where we are struggling to break free from obsessive and defensive concern with self: where we have begun, however ineptly, to turn our attention to God in thought and prayer” (Teresa of Avila, 116, see also 115–16).
Interior Castle, 37 (1.2.8).
See Porphyry(c. 232–c. 305), On the Cave ofthe Nymphs (trans. Robert Lamberton; Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1983) 30–32, for his treatment of “bees” as “souls entering into
,” [Od. 13, 102–12], “specifically those that were to live just lives and return after performing acts pleasing to the gods, for bees love to return to their source and are remarkably even-tempered and sober…. Thus honeycombs and bees would constitute appropriate symbols … for souls becoming ‘brides’ as they enter
.” C. G. Jung also writes of a connection between bees, as an allegory, and the Virgin Mary, making reference to its liturgical instantiation in the text for the consecration of the Easter candle (Archetypes, 185 n. 5).
Here, St. Teresa's language extends beyond itself, setting into relation both bee and Queen, soul and King. The soul, which she likens to a bee “constantly flying about from flower to flower,” is the soul unbounded, “emerg[ing] from self-knowledge and soar[ing] aloft in meditation upon the greatness and the majesty of its God.”43
Interior Castle, 37–38 (1.2.8).
Ibid., 37–38 (1.2.9).
Ibid., 103 (5.2).
On Certainty
The prologue to the Prayer of Union comes by way of a “very material” certainty of the soul.46
Ibid., 101 (5.1.9). Compare Peers: “This certainty of the soul is very material,” and Kavanaugh and Rodriguez: “This certitude is what matters now.”
Ibid., (5.1.10). This certainty is not present in a partial union, such as in those of earlier Dwellings (see above, n. 5).
Interior Castle, 101 (5.1.9).
Recall the dual or ambi-valent meaning in apophasis and its referential embrace of the cataphatic. In this sense, apophasis holds two meanings that seem to contradict yet coexist in the one word. See n. 16.
Ibid. See also 1 Cor 1:20–25. This lack of comprehension is also endemic to the fourth degree of prayer which St. Teresa writes of in her Life, ch. 18: “if there is union of all the faculties, the soul cannot communicate the fact, even if it so desires (when actually experiencing it, I mean): if it can communicate it, then it is not union” (The Life of Teresa of Jesus [ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers; New York, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1960] 174).
See the poem “The Ascent of Mount Carmel” by St. John of the Cross, and his commentary on “the privation of the appetite in all things” (The Collected Words of St. John of the Cross, [trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.; Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991]; see 113–14 for the poem and 115–53 for the commentary, esp. 121).
Interior Castle, 101 (5.1.9).
Ibid.
Ibid.
St. Teresa emphasizes this event of relation as one which impregns the soul with the certainty of God's presence such that “when [the soul] returns to itself” it sees with this certainty, “not because it is a vision … but because of a certainty which remains in the soul, which can be put there only by God.”55
Interior Castle, 101 (5.1.10).
In her discussion of deception in the works of St. Teresa of Avila, Susan Schreiner writes that certainty is “the most commonly cited proof for the authenticity of spiritual experience” in St. Teresa's writings. Although the devil can mime a “false humility” and create “a false quiet, consolation and vision,” certainty provides a test that surpasses doubt; it leaves an assurance that “literally triumphs over doubt” (“Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Problem of Deception in Martin Luther and Teresa of Avila,” in Mystics, Presence and Aporia (ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003] 118–37).
See n. 7.
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 91.
Interior Castle, 101 (5.1.9).
Ibid., 102 (5.1.11).
Moving to persuade by way of the invisible, the unseen, and the incomprehensible, St. Teresa underscores the aporia of the soul's experience of God, an experience in which proximity and loss, erasure and renewal, coincide. Writing that she does not know how one “can become so convinced of what we have not seen,” but that she knows “it is the work of God,”61
Ibid.
Ibid., 101 (5.1.11).
The division of the capacities of the soul and those of human understanding is central to St. Teresa's understanding of the structure of the soul; this division splits interior and exterior faculties, i.e., the spiritual senses and the external or worldly senses. For a clear analysis of this aspect of the division of the soul and the senses in St. Teresa's works, see Edward Howells, “The Structure of the Soul According to Teresa of Avila,” in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, 70–92.
Interior Castle, 103(5.1.12). There is a profound resonance here with Dionysius the Areopagite's explicit description of the ecstatic nature of the divine eros in which St. Paul participates (De divinis nominibus 4.13). Citing Gal 2:20 (“I live no longer but Christ lives in me”), Dionysius describes a movement into a radical passivity where the “I” no longer lives but is instead converted into the “me” in which Christ abides. Grammatically, this manifests itself as a movement from the nominative subject “I” to the accusative direct object of the preposition “in,” pointing to the splitting of the “I,” or its doubling as both a propositional and positional signifier. N.B. I do not suggest that Dionysius influenced St. Teresa, but that St. Teresa's words represent this same phenomenon of the divine eros within the human soul, a soul in union with Christ through contemplative prayer. See above, nn. 10–11.
Ibid., 103 (5.1.12).
Desiring a complete surrender accomplished in the suspension and return of the soul, St. Teresa's language choreographs a dialectic of absence and presence, both within the soul and within the soul's relation to God, such that “it is His pleasure that our will … should have no part in this.”66
Ibid.
Ibid.
The Prayer of Union
In the second chapter of the Fifth Dwellings, St. Teresa compares the Prayer of Union to the “wonderful way in which silk is made—a way which no one could invent but God.”68
Ibid., 104 (5.2.2).
Ibid.
Ibid., 105 (5.2.4).
Christological resonance permeates the humble activity of the silkworm; its spinning enswathes the weaving of a life in the heart of humanity, in the Word made flesh (John 1:14). Confluent with the imagery in Orthodox icons of the Annunciation wherein the Virgin Mary holds a spindle in her left hand, St. Teresa's silkworm spinning its cocoon evokes the procreativity of the virgin womb, the generative sphere of enclosure, gestation and birth.71
See Luke 1:35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” For details on the iconography of the Annunciation, see Constantine Carnavos, Guide to Byzantine Iconography (2 vols.; Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1993) 1:125–30. For an extended excursus on symbols of weaving in the Byzantine religious imagination, see Nicholas Constas, “The Purple Thread and the Veil of Flesh: Symbols of Weaving in the Sermons of Proclus,” in Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 66; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 315–58.
See below, n. 84.
Interior Castle, 105 (5.2.5).
Recognizing enclosure as the boundless space of both virtue and purgation, St. Teresa's words illumine the humble reality of the soul's “tiny achievement” when seen in proportion to Christ's greatness which unites with it and “give[s] it such worth that its reward will be the Lord Himself.”74
Ibid.
De Certeau writes of three conventions to be established, which are elements in mystic texts related to utterance. “They concern the precondition of discourse (a division that establishes contractual relations), the status of discourse (a locus where the Spirit speaks), and the figuration of discourse as a content (an image of the ‘I’)” (“Mystic Speech,” 90).
“Let us renounce our self-love and self-will, and our attachment to earthlythings,” St. Teresa exhorts, her words instructing an aesthetic of detachment through ways of acting—“penance, prayer, mortification, obedience”—advising a renunciation of all that is not holy, all that is not God.76
Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.6).
Ibid., 106 (5.2.5).
See Plotinus, First Ennead 6.9: “Act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work” (The Six Enneads [trans. Stephen MacKenna and Bertram S. Page;Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952] 25). Gregory of Nyssa reiterates this idea in The Life of Moses 2.231, “where the ardent lover of beauty, constantly receiving an image (eikon), as it were, of what he longs for, wants to be filled with the very impression of the archetype” (From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings [ed. Jean Daniélou and Herbert Musurillo, S.J.; trans. Herbert Musurillo, S.J.; New York, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001] 146). Musurillo notes “what [Jean] Daniélou has called the doctrine of the epectasis, or the indefinite progression of the soul in its movement towards God” (From Glory to Glory, 292 n. 30). Gregory of Nazianzus also uses this image of a statue in his discussion of “the theologian” in Oration 27.7: “to take a look at ourselves and to smooth the theologian in us, like a statue, into beauty” (On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius [trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel R. Williams; Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002] 30). See above, n. 34.
Cf. the “emptying” and “nakedness” inherent in St. John of the Cross's dark night of the spirit (The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 395–412). St. John describes the purgation of the soul as producing “certain needs, aridities, darknesses, and conflicts,” 395 (2.1).
Acting as a threshold situated between two states, the soul's enclosure in Christ performs a coincidence of opposites, providing both armature and mold for the relinquishing of self, self-love, and self-will. When St. Teresa states explicitly that “[t]his house may be understood here to mean Christ,”80
Interior Castle, 105 (5.2.4).
I mean to highlight the sense of division or splitting which is endemic to the formation of human subjectivity, and to understand this split or division Christologically, as taking place in Christ, through Christ, and with Christ. The requisite division for signification to take place here occurs within the soul, within the formation of the human as subject, such that the subject becomes signification, emerging from union and death as an ethical subject who embodies the cross and lives its union and separation of the human and divine. See above, nn. 9–10, on the splitting of an utterance into a positionality and a propositionality (Benveniste) in relation to Lacan's splitting of the subject in the mirror stage.
Col 3:3; Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.6).
Understanding this double formation of the soul—in union and division—as a reinscription of the Chalcedonian affirmation of both difference and union “coming together in one person and one hypostasis,”83
Again, recall the Definition of Chalcedon: “With the difference of the natures not at all removed for the sake of the union but rather what is proper to each nature preserved and coming together in one person [a single person] and one hypostasis [a single subsistent being].”
This conflation of the imagery of death and crucifixion with that of birth and incarnation is given visual representation in Greek Orthodox two-sided icons that depict the Virgin Mother and Child on one side (often the Hodegetria as a variant of the Virgin of the Passion) and the Crucifixion or Man of Sorrows on the other. In such icons, the Virgin holds the Christ Child who is clothed in a gold-embroidered loros (band) that represents “the Child's swaddling clothes, a feature connected both with the Nativity and with the Entombment of Christ”“ (Chrysanthe Baltoyianni, Icons: Mother of God [Athens: Adam Editions, 1994] 211; her description of the icon continues through page 216). See also Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (ed. Maria Vassilaki;Athens: Benaki Museum; Milan: Skira, 2000) 484–87.
Here, the self-emptying of the silkworm mirrors the Christological hymn of Phil 2:5–8, showing the cocoon of Christ to be a transformative crucible and a cross immured into the soul “uniting our small trials with the great trials which He suffered, and mak[ing] both of them into one.”85
Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.5).
Ibid. Earlier St. Teresa writes that “we shall see God.” See Exod 33:22, “and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by,” and Ps 17:8, “Guard me as the apple of the eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.”
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 92.
See St. Teresa's description in the Seventh Dwellings of a feeling “that her soul was divided” (Interior Castle, 211 [7.1.10]), as well as her differentiation of soul and spirit: “So subtle is the division perceptible between them that sometimes the operation of the one seems as different from that of the other as are the respective joys that the Lord is pleased to give them. It seems to me, too, that the soul is a different thing from the faculties and that they are not all one and the same” (Interior Castle, 212 [7.1.11]). See also Howells, “The Interior and Exterior Faculties and Senses,” in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, 74–80.
See de Certeau's understanding of mystic speech as a double cleavage: “The initial division separates the said (what has been or is stated) from the saying (the act of speaking …). The second, produced by ‘spiritual’ labor, cuts into the density of the world to make of it a dialogic discourse: I and thou seeking one another in the thickness of the same language … I and thou: two terms whose difference, regained and maintained, will be lost in the relation that posits them” (“Mystic Speech,” 90; see above, nn. 10, 81).
“Utterance” in its archaic sense means “the last extremity; the end; death; outrance [Obs.]” (Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam and Sons, 1909) 1589. Note the etymology: “ME < OF outrance, oultrance = oultre(er) (to) pass beyond (< L ultra beyond) + -ance –ANCE” (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition [New York, N. Y.: Random House, 1968] 1449).
De Certeau's thought enfolds these dual senses of union and retreat, emptiness and plenitude, in a discourse on desire.91
Compare de Certeau's discourse on desire and this coincidence of empty and full, both to Diotima's speech on Love [Eros] as the child of Poverty and Plenty (Plato, Symp. §202d–204c) and to Dionysius the Areopagite's description of the divine eros as having powers of unifying and binding. In Dionysius, desire for God, or the divine eros, “binds the things of the same order in a mutually regarding union. It moves the superior to provide for the subordinate, and it stirs the subordinate in a return toward the superior. This divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved…. This is why the great Paul, swept along by his yearning for God and seized of its ecstatic power, had this inspired word to say: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’” (De divinis nominibus 4.709D–712A. I take this translation from Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works [trans. Colm Luibheid; New York, N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1987] 81–82).
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 92.
Ibid., my hyphenation.
I refer here to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, which posits the unconscious functioning as does a language. Lacan aligns desire to the metonymic displacement of one signifier leading to another in an endless chain of signifiers. He addresses this “nothing” not as an eschatological promise but as the Real; we open onto the Real, “Nothing,” where the truth lies and which never enters into the symbolic—when it does, it is always already interpreted. See The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (trans. Alan Sheridan; London: Hogarth Press, 1977) 20–21, 56–60, 67–78, 278 (Desire), 279–280 (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real).
As de Certeau describes it: “The ‘I’ is ‘formed’—by its act of willing nothing or by (forever)being capable of doing what it wills—as a ‘desire’ bound only to the supposed desire of a Deity. It is created by the state of being nothing but the affirmation of a will” (“Mystic Speech,” 92).
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 97; St. John of the Cross, “The Ascent of Mount Carmel,” Collected Works, 358–59.
Beckoning the infinite beauty of reconciliation in Christ, St. Teresa's image of the silkworm embodies a discourse on veiling and revealing light, one that conflates opacity and transparency, night and dawn, oscillating on the threshold between interiority and exteriority. The silkworm's cocoon charts a space in language that intertwines the imagery of a visible, external geography with that of an inner landscape; it heralds a vital space of liminality as it articulates the land, the light, the dark, existing without and within the soul. The cocoon that the soul has spun around itself becomes an enclosure wherein an eclipse of the self takes place in the soul surrendering in union with God. Demarcating a site “‘empty of world’ where the other speaks,” St. Teresa's silken cocoon is indeed, as de Certeau writes, “a space one must ‘enter when one is in it already,’ a place where one dwells without dwelling there—and whose center is also exteriority (God).”98
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 95.
Ibid., 94, 89; Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.5).
In this event of union that reconciles opposites and displaces nothing, there is room to ponder the activity of the silkworm as a process of building from the inside out. Resounding the appeal to build wisely upon rock and not sand (Matt 7:24–27), St. Teresa's organic and architectural metaphor instructs a durative spinning of desire into a shielding shelter of silk. The repetitive labor of its making acts as a sign of humble service, a self-emptying wrought in the soul's union through prayer, which “we ourselves spin.”100
Ibid., 105 (5.2.5).
Ibid., 104 (5.2.2).
Ibid.; Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 96, 100.
It is an articulate beginning, drawn between word and creation, kenosis and incarnation. The silkworm's process enacts in metaphor the emergence of the soul, the birth of the human subject, as the emergence of speech—an annunciative authority spun in silk and inscribing the “I” in the midst of the other, an intersubjectivity conceived in and through the interceding Word (Rom 8:34).103
De Certeau asks: “Is the ‘I’ a fiction of the other, which offers itself in its place? … ‘I is an other’—that is the secret told by the mystic long before the poetic experience of Rimbaud, Rilke, or Nietzsche…. At the heart of mystic writing, there is something other that comes without reason: the poem and, secondarily, the dream. A ‘there is’—‘es gibt’, it gives (Heidegger)—is the beginning” (Ibid., 96–97).
Ibid., 97, quoting Christiane Rabant-Lacôte, “L’enfer des musiciens,” Musique en jeu 9 (1972) 30, full article 22–32. Earlier, in describing the poet as “the utterer of this founding act of nomination,” de Certeau cites Heidegger's conception of the poet as making “way for the ‘event of the advent’ of which time is robbed” (“Mystic Speech,” 97; Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951]).
In her chapter “The Body/Soul Relationship and the Significance of Body,” Caroline Walker Bynum speaks of the theory of “material continuity” in the resurrection of the body and writes: the “concept of person as soul and body (or, in modern parlance, a psychosomatic unity) undergirds scholastic discussions of such topics as bodily resurrection, miracles, embryology, asceticism, Christology and the Immaculate Conception” (Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion [New York, N.Y.: Zone Books, 1992] 222–29, at 228 and 223).
Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.6).
“Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
I as Other
“And now,” St. Teresa writes, “let us see what becomes of this silkworm, for all that I have been saying about it is leading up to this.”108
Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.7).
Ibid., 104 (5.2.2).
“One may legitimately ask whether the psychological person, far from expressing itself in the personal pronoun, is not rather ‘an effect of utterance.’ However that may be, it remains to be known who or what says ‘I’. Is the ‘I’ a fiction of the other, which offers itself in its place? … ‘I is an other’— …” (De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 96).
Interior Castle, 106 (5.2.7).
Ibid., 108 (5.2.10).
Ibid., 109 (5.2.12).
De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 92.
In closing chapter 2 of the Fifth Dwellings, St. Teresa employs the analogy of a wax seal, soft and completely receptive to God's touch.115
The image of the seal provides one final parallel between St. Teresa and Dionysius the Areo pagite, De divinis nominibus 2.5–6 (644A–C). Dionysius uses the example of a seal (
) and its capacity to share in the archetype of the seal, in order to describe creaturely receptivity and participation in God: “The substances which receive a share of the seal are different. Hence the impressions of the one entire identical archetype are different. If the substances are soft, easily shaped, and smooth, if no impression have been made on them already, if they are not hard and resistant, if they are not excessively soft and melting, the imprint on them will be clear, plain, and long-lasting. But if the material is lacking in this receptivity, this would be the cause of its mistaken or unclear imprint or of whatever else results from the unreceptivity of its participation” (Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 63). On the subject of “touch,” de Certeau describes St. John of the Cross's “canciones” as being “of such ‘breadth and plenty’ (archura y copia) that they ‘touch (toca: burn and penetrate) everything.’” He asserts that “this abundancia is best guaranteed and most readable in the Scriptures, but it is not more real or efficient there than it is in the poem. The same abundance ‘touches’ the poet today as touched the inspired writers of antiquity.” (“Mystic Speech,” 98). See also Matt 3:11: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire.”
Visual analogy may be drawn to the inverted perspective pictorially constructed within an icon, a perspective which aims to give “the onlooker a vision of the spiritual, rather than of the material realm” (Cavarnos, Guide to Byzantine Iconography, 37). N.B. the similarity of the seal to the cocoon, as both are dialectical images/forms constructed from the inside out.
“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
Reconciling the Subject
St. Teresa's analogies ofthe silkworm and of the sealin the Prayer ofUnion formallyrepresent the soulas a new creation, one thatlives the revelatory dialectic expressed by St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). As the soul moves from the state of interior hiddenness and lack of recognition of self, to self-knowledge and an exterior witness that testifies to the other and to a will beyond one's own (1 Cor 9:2), its metamorphosis and incipient union with God both incorporate and re-present the birth, death and resurrection of Christ (see Phil 2:5–8; Rom 6:4). St. Teresa's Prayer of Union offers representation for the Christological nature of the soul's first union with God, a union that inscribes the act of creation intrinsic to the formation of the human as subject, a subject created in God's image and through God's word. Through the double-sealing of the soul to God, God to the soul—a union and differentiation in which the Chalcedonian union of two natures in Christ resounds: “with the difference of the natures not at all removed for the sake of the union”—St. Teresa's white butterfly receives the gift of suffering God's will, of “fulfilling the obligation of obedience to Him and showing His love for His neighbor.”118
Interior Castle, 110 (5.2.14). St. Teresa expresses this as a question in relation to Jesus Christ: “What, then, would His majesty feel when He found Himself able to prove so amply to His Father how completely He was fulfilling the obligation of obedience to Him and showing His love for His neighbor?”
In light of this apostolic witness, St. Teresa's Prayer of Union circumscribes an island of intercession and interlocution, one that orients the immanent and the transcendent along anincarnate horizon—the horizon of a human personhood—created in a union that separates, forged in the cross of a double alignment to God and to neighbor (see Phil 2:8). This horizon of personhood in which aesthetic and ethical spheres coalesce is envisioned here as a cleavage of subjectivity, one that seals the soul in the heart of a sacred humanity eternally subject to the other. It is a double cleavage constituted in a living dialectic of erasure and response, in the passion of proximity and loss, reconciling perceived opposites in a beauty that “can only be gained by abandoning everything” (see Phil 2:8; Gal 3:27–28).119
St. Teresa of Avila, The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, By Herself (London: Penguin Books, 1957) 145.
St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection (trans. E. Allison Peters; New York: Image Books, 1964) 160 (my emphasis).
