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 it9—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 Osuna10 in 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.
Delirium? Inebriation? That may well be, she doesn’t care, she prefers that to the love-fear that hounded her before. How dismal it is, that anxiety in which melancholics love to wallow! Their black bile can be left to the Lutherans, because La Madre wants no part of it, ever again! Unknown to herself Teresa is preparing a miracle, and she succeeds where Judge Schreber will fail. This celebrated jurist believed himself to be persecuted by a God who cared little for the living, the instigator of a plot to turn him into a woman who would redeem the human race. Fit to haunt the body and soul of any self-respecting psychology student! You know the case I mean? That’s right. Even outside psychology circles, it’s well known that the “Schreber Case” prompted the first psychoanalytic investigation into psychosis.11 Teresa’s God, by contrast, has managed to split off from the vengeful Creator God of judgment and damnation, and His rays, notwithstanding their omnipotence, are wholly beneficiaclass="underline" He cannot do other than love and be loved, even when He is not responding. Over a few decades of monastic experience Teresa rewrote, after her fashion, the thousand-year-old story of God the Father, which Jesus had already done much to transfigure; but now the Spaniard will die of bliss in Him without dying. In her visions, through her pen, the tyrannical Beloved, the stern Father, Père-sévère, softens into a Father so tender as to become an ideal alter ego, kind and rewarding, who draws the ego out of itself: ek-static. Does He put her to the test? Teresa knows that He adores her, because He speaks to her, assures her of His unfailing presence by her side. What’s more, He is in her, He is her as she is Him. God, God-man, his body marked by five wounds, who suffered and rose again, whom Teresa embraces as he hangs on the Cross. An angel’s body, too, equipped with a long dart that can penetrate you, inflame you, then slake your thirst with water and sometimes, indeed, with mother’s milk:
Let us come now to speak of the third water by which this garden is irrigated, that is, the water flowing from a river or spring. By this means the garden is irrigated with much less labor, although some labor is required to direct the flow of the water. The Lord so desires to help the gardener here that He Himself becomes practically the gardener and the one who does everything.
This prayer is a sleep of the faculties; the faculties neither fail entirely to function nor understand how they function. The consolation, the sweetness, and the delight are incomparably greater than that experienced in the previous prayer. The water of grace rises up to the throat of this soul since such a soul can no longer move forward; nor does it know how; nor can it move backward. It would desire to enjoy this greatest glory [to revel in it: querría gozar de esta grandísima gloria]. It is like a person who is already holding the candle and for whom little is left before dying the death that is desired: such a one rejoices in that agony with the greatest delight describable. This experience doesn’t seem to me anything else than an almost complete death to all earthly things and an enjoyment of God [estar gozando de Dios].
I don’t know any other terms for describing it or how to explain it. Nor does the soul then know what to do because it doesn’t know whether to speak or to be silent, whether to laugh or to weep. This prayer is a glorious foolishness, a heavenly madness [Es un glorioso desatino, una celestial locura] where the true wisdom is learned; and it is for the soul a most delightful way of enjoying.
Often I had been as though bewildered and inebriated in this love, and never was I able to understand its nature.…
The soul would desire to cry out praises, and it is beside itself — a delightful disquiet. Now the flowers are blossoming; they are beginning to spread their fragrance. The soul would desire here that everyone could see and understand and understand its glory.…
It would want to be all tongues so as to praise the Lord.…
While I write this I am not freed from such holy, heavenly madness.…
Since [this soul] desires to live no longer in itself but in You, it seems that its life is unnatural.
…There is no reason sufficient to prevent me from this excess when the Lord carries me out of myself — nor since this morning when I received Communion do I think it is I who am speaking. It seems that what I see is a dream, and I would desire to see no other persons than those who are sick with this sickness I now have. I beg your Reverence that we may all be mad for love of Him who for love of us was called mad.12
My parents are dead, my partner left me, I don’t have children: I don’t have anyone. Nature is beautiful; the world situation is beyond help; life makes me laugh, because I never could do tears. My colleagues at the MPH (for the uninitiated, the Medical-Psychological House, my official base where I practice as a psychologist) think well of me: “Everything works out for Sylvia Leclercq, what a dynamo!” Not particularly discerning, as assessments go, but I’ll settle for it. What the ladies mean by that (and I say “ladies,” because in such an institution, the staff is invariably 99 percent female) is that they don’t resent me, that I do my job well enough. I socialize with them just as often as it takes to maintain my image, for I don’t look for truth in human contacts, apart from those undefinable relations that attach me to our inpatients and my own cases. Whether or not they can be called “bonds,” these are my greatest weakness, at any rate.