In this closely argued follow-up to his highly regarded Therese of Lisieux: God's Gentle Warrior, Thomas Nevins gives us a detailed account of the last two years of the saint's life (1895–1897). More precisely, his central theme is the achingly beautiful lines of “Manuscript C,” written by the dying nun, as she entered fully into a life of darkness as the tuberculosis that would kill her marched on inexorably and she wondered if there was a merciful God, if there was indeed salvation and if Jesus Christ, her chosen spouse, loved her in fact. She was so overwhelmed by her illness and the quandaries the illness brought upon her that in her writing she felt compelled to stop lest, as she wrote, she would start to blaspheme.

Therese was a Carmelite and Carmelite spirituality understands darkness. John of the Cross, while never using the term “the dark night of the soul,” did write compellingly and thoroughly, of both the “dark night of the senses” (that long loss of any sensible consolation in the life of prayer) and “the dark night of faith” that never bleeds over into despair as meaninglessness intrudes into human consciousness. It is that profound darkness which Nevins sees as the hermeneutical key to grasping what the young nun expressed in the last months of her life in the now famous metaphor of the “fog surrounding me . . . becoming thicker, penetrating my soul.”

To analyze this darkness, Nevin makes, in my estimation, some very smart, sophisticated moves. First, he looks at the Carmelite sources available to Therese: Teresa of Jesus to be sure but not in any systematic fashion; and John of the Cross, especially The Living Flame of Love, which seems to have been her favorite Carmelite text. Next, he carefully traces out her use of scripture to focus on her “canon within a canon.” For Therese this meant more of the gospels than of Saint Paul; more attention to the words of Jesus than his deeds; the suffering servant songs of Isaiah (and, of course the psalms) as a lens through which she gained understanding of the passion of Christ.

Nevin's careful examination of the sources served two purposes, first, to guard against any psychological reductionism so common in studies of this sort and, more importantly, to grasp both her vocabulary and her linguistic imagination to make sense of her writings. Using such resources as well as setting out the context of her social relationships provided a matrix for interpretation: living in a convent with her (blood) sisters; her relationship whether epistolary or real with those outside the cloister; the spiritual direction she received (one thinks of John of the Cross railing against bad spiritual guides!) and the rigorous demands of life in a nineteenth-century French cloistered monastery. While it is tempting—Nevin never falls into the temptation—to view Therese as just another tragic young nineteenth century woman dying of consumption (think of Mimi, the heroine of La Boheme), his view is that of a realist who had a real horror of evil and a powerful sense of her own calling as a Christian contemplative. Nevin is too close a reader of texts and too tough-minded a critic to take pious language at face value. He sees Therese with all her faults and shortcomings. His picture of the saint is a far cry from the sanitized version crafted by those who carefully edited the saint's writings after her death before we got authentic versions of her text.

Towards the end of his study Nevin makes a parallel with the Commedia of Dante that is not as farfetched as it might seem at first glance. Both writers had to work their way out of darkness. Both had suffered human misfortune. Both, in the final analysis, perceived that it was divine love that governed all. After all the Commedia begins in a “dark wood” and ends with a vision of the love that “moves the sun and the other stars.” Finally, both came to a singular (Nevin calls it “heterodox”) view of the Christian life in which it is love (not light) that finally dispels the darkness; a conviction with which John of the Cross would approve. At the same time, Nevin goes on to say, Therese was an anti-Dante in one final respect: Dante sees in God's justice the damned in hierarchical finality while Therese saw that her task was to raise up through love everyone even those who were militantly anti-God.

This book is a very fine historical study reflecting both a sophisticated close reading of texts and a mastery of the sources. The two volumes Nevin has given us are indispensable for anyone who wishes to engage the life and thought of this young woman who has been honored by the Catholic Church as a “Doctor of the Church.” This work is further enhanced with a detailed annotated bibliography of secondary sources and illuminating endnotes. My only small regret is that the author did not find space to compare his work on Therese's passage through the dark night with the striking revelations recently made public with the publication of the notebooks of similar travails experienced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I say “small” regret since I am asking the author to take up matters which he did not advertise to undertake.