Although she was a great friend and accomplice of Saint John of the Cross (they met in 1567, when he was twenty-five and she was fifty-two) in both the Carmelite reformation and the life of the soul, Teresa eschewed the purgative asceticism of her “little Seneca”; she shared neither his endurance under flagellation nor his “privation of every kind of pleasure which belongs to the desire” (Ascent of Mount Carmel).19 The author of the Living Flame of Love would ultimately burn every single letter addressed to him by the sensual reformer.
After her death on October 4, 1582, in Alba de Tormes, Teresa was interred in the chapel of the dukes of Alba, under a heap of soil, stones, and lime. When her body was exhumed in 1586, its wondrously preserved state naturally encouraged the publication of the books. While she was alive, successive popes were at the very least wary of her: Paul IV, Pius V, and Gregory XIII (who recast the calendar) had no time for febrile mystics, especially female ones. La Madre was beatified a century after her birth, in 1614, in a festive Madrid of serpents, ships, and blazing castles. King Philip IV, the ambassadors, and the nobles paid homage to her in the cathedral adorned with her portrait: this depicted her holding a palm frond in one hand, the symbol of virginity, and a quill in the other, to represent literary genius. Lope de Vega himself presided over the poetic joust of sonnets composed in her honor. The Blessed Teresa was canonized by Gregory XV in 1622, in recognition of her “divine wisdom.” The Jesuits had supported her in life: Francisco Borgia, Baltasar Álvarez, Ripalda…The Council of Trent, inaugurating a new epoch for the Catholic faith, had need of someone like Teresa, whose experience fitted so well with the new outlook without being reducible to it.20 For La Madre had patently prefigured, indeed embodied, the baroque. She had led the way in balancing ascetic rigor, rehabilitated by the Carmelite reformation, with the wonders of supernatural spiritual contemplation, legitimized by her genius. It was in this spirit that Luis de León and Jerome Gratian posthumously published and commented upon her works, to consecrate Teresa of Avila as the saint of the Counter-Reformation.
Why do I feel so sure that this Carmelite nun has slipped the leash of her time and her world, and stands beside us in the third millennium? Is Teresa the diarist a modern sensibility, revealing that the secrets of baroque civilization are female? Or is she a novelist who weaves romantic plots, the necessary love interest, around the mystical subject — man or woman, man and woman? Or perhaps the maverick thinker of the Self outside the Self? A Montaigne of extreme, borderline states? The first person to theorize the imaginary with the aid of its own specific tools?
Master of triumphant narcissism inasmuch as she was loving/loved, Teresa was not content to develop the Christ-centered revolution introduced into Judaism by a God-man of love, whose madness—lately called sadomasochistic passion — had touched Mary Magdalene, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and been passed on. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ is simply the cinematographic mise-en-scène of these rejoicings, these shades of pleasure and pain that glimmer throughout the Bible and, for anyone still unenlightened, through Christ’s Calvary. But the ecstatic Madre was no less possessed of a rational mind, capable of paring down her extravagant but therapeutic “visions” and coupling the convulsions of the body with the shifting infinity of thought. Ten years after The Book of Her Life (whose definitive version was completed in 1565), The Dwelling Places of the Soul (1577) feels its way toward a “spiritual marriage” that is not so much a hallucinatory “vision” as a carnal thought, a pure joy of the mind inseparable from the body. It allows her to assess with considerable philosophical precision the difference between thought in motion, a turmoil of the imaginary, and the intellect loosed from the body:
The important thing is not to think much but to love much…I have been very afflicted at times in the midst of this turmoil of mind. A little more than four years ago I came to understand through experience that the mind [pensamiento] (or imagination, to put it more clearly) is not the intellect. I asked a learned man and he told me that this was so; which brought me no small consolation. For since the intellect is one of the soul’s faculties, it was an arduous thing for me that it should be so restless at times. Ordinarily the mind flies about quickly, for only God can hold it fast in such a way as to make it seem that we are somehow loosed from this body. I have seen, I think, that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…It seems I myself wanted to take vengeance on myself.…And since our reading and the counsels we receive (that is, to pay no attention to these thoughts) don’t suffice, I don’t think that the time spent in explaining these things for those of you with little knowledge and consoling you in this matter is time lost.…Yet, it is necessary and His Majesty wishes us to take the means and understand ourselves; and let’s not blame the soul for what a weak imagination, human nature, and the devil cause.21
On the one hand, moral judgment, on the other, the imagination of the Bride, desirous without fear of being judged for it: “I would kiss thee, yea, I should not be despised” (Song of Songs 8:1). Teresa recognizes the legitimacy and advantage of the former, but nothing could induce her to give up the harrowing desires without which there is no path to the Beloved: “It isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned”; “the pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer. When suspension does accompany prayer, no pain is felt until the suspension passes.”22
The point is neither to submit to the intellect, nor to substitute it with restless thought and imagination, but to construct a new expression that constitutes the Teresian discourse: suspension of the intellect, while also eluding that illusory, misleading, mystificatory imagination. A different imagination — let’s call it the imaginary—is ready to “fly about,” to soar free of Teresa, to free her in turn, to deliver her even from God; since God is in “the very deep and intimate part” of her, and it’s this that she seeks to liberate and be liberated from.