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

Notes

1. PRESENT BY DEFAULT

1. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), The Transverberation, in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

2. Mary of Magdala has already foreshadowed the loss, absence, and reinvention of the body of love in the mystical experience: “I know not where they have laid him.” She says to Jesus, mistaking him for a gardener, “If thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus says to her, “Mary”; she answers, “Rabboni,” meaning “master” (John 20:13–16).

3. Life, 29:11–14, CW 1:251–3.

4. VI D, 2:4, CW 2:368.

5. IV D, 2:2, CW 2:323.

6. Jacques Lacan, Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. B. Fink, book 20, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973 (London: Norton, 1999).

7. Stendhal, A Roman Journal, trans. and ed. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Orion, 1957), 133: “St Teresa is represented in the ecstasy of divine love. It is the most vivid and the most natural expression.…What divine artistry! What delight!”

8. Life, 6:4, CW 1:78–9.

9. Colette, The Vagabond, trans. Enid McLeod (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), 158: “Femelle j’étais et femelle je me retrouve, pour en souffrir et pour en jouir.”

10. Francisco de Osuna: ca. 1492–ca. 1540.

11. Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber (New York: Penguin, 2003).

12. Life, 16:1–6, CW 1:147–50.

13. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.

14. Life, 40:8, CW 1:357.

15. Life, 26:5, CW 1:226.

16. Bernardino de Laredo: 1492–1540.

17. Life, 23:15, CW 1:207.

18. Pedro de Alcántara: 1499–1562.

19. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, part 3, section 1, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns & Oates, 1983), 21.

20. Council of Trent, 1545–1563.

21. IV D, 1:7–14, CW 2:319–22.

22. IV D, 1:11, CW 2:321.

23. Letter 237, to María de San José, March 28, 1578, CL 2:46.

24. Critique, CW 3:357.

25. Socrates: 460–399 B.C.E.

26. Plato: ca. 428–ca. 347 B.C.E.

27. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2004), book 2:12, 590: “I find it unacceptable that the power of God should be limited in this way by the rules of human language.”

28. René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).

29. Arthur Rimbaud: 1854–1891.

30. Baruch Spinoza: 1633–1677.

31. G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Related Writings, ed. and trans. R. N. D. Martin and Stuart Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 77.

32. Letter from Leibniz to André Morell (1696), translated from French by Lloyd Strickland (2007), www.leibniz-translations.com/morell1696.htm. [It quotes as its source the following: G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche schriften und briefe series I, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 13:398. This book seems to be in German, with only excerpts translated.] Cf. M. Leroy, Discours de métaphysique et correspondance avec Arnaud de G. W. Leibniz, (Paris: Grua/Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 103.

33. Cf. J. K. Huysmans, En Route (Sawtry, U.K.: Dedalus, 2002), 221: “the virile soul of a monk.”

34. John of the Cross: 1542–1591.

2. MYSTICAL SEDUCTION

1. Julia Kristeva, “Le bonheur des Béguines,” in Le jardin clos de l’âme. L’imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud depuis le XIII^e siècle, ed. Paul Vanderbroeck (Brussels: Société des expositions, Palais des Beaux-Arts, February — May 1994).

2. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1995); Zohar: The Book of Splendor (New York: Schocken, 1995).

3. See Émile Boutroux, “Le mysticisme,” Bulletin de l’institut général psychologique, 31 (1902); André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, ed. Félix Alcan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1926), 496.

4. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006).

5. Denys the Areopagite (or Pseudo-Dionysius), Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1987).

6. Plotinus: 204/5–270.

7. Aristotle: 384–322 B.C.E.

8. Exod. 3:1–6.

9. Ezek. 10:1–22.

10. Sefer Yetzirah, short treatise of some 1,600 words, third to twelfth century.

11. Judah Halevi: 1075–1141.

12. Moses Maimonides: 1135–1204.

13. Saadia ben Joseph of Fayum: 882–942. Author of Commentary on Sefer Yetzira, ca. 931.

14. Solomon Ibn Gabirol: 1020–1058.

15. Plato: 428–348 B.C.E.

16. Philo of Alexandria: ca. 10–45 B.C.E.

17. Bahya Ibn Paquda: tenth or eleventh century.

18. Abraham Abulafia: 1240–1291.

19. Moisés de León: second half of the thirteenth century.

20. Cf. André Néher, “La philosophie juive médiévale,” in Histoire de la philosophie, ed. Y. Belaval (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade Collection, 1969).

21. Le Zohar, trans. Jean de Pauly (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908); The Zohar, ed. H. Sperling and M. Simon, 5 vols. (London: Soncino, 1949).

22. Cf. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 148–9, 325.

23. Louis Massignon, Al Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr, trans. Herbert Mason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Anne-Marie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

24. Ibn al-Arabi: d. 1240 in Damascus.

25. Ibn al-Farid: d. 1235.

26. Jalal al-Din Rumi: d. 1273.

27. Al-Ghazali: 1058–1111.

28. Al-Hallaj: 857–922.

29. Cf. Noël J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964).

30. Al-Kindi: 800–873.

31. Albert the Great: 1200–1280.

32. Origen: 185–253.

33. Gregory of Nyssa: 335–394.

34. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable: “Since the thirteenth century (courtly love, etc.), a gradual religious demythification seems to be accompanied by a progressive mythification of love. The One has changed its site. It is no longer God but the other, and in a masculine literature, woman” (4); “for reasons that need clarifying, the woman’s experience held up better against the cluttered ruins of symbolic systems, which were theological and masculine, and which thought of presence as the coming of a Logos” (6).

35. Thomas Aquinas: 1225–1274.

36. Jan van Ruysbroek: 1293–1381.

37. Hadewijch of Antwerp: ca. 1200–1260.

38. Ps. 42:7: “Deep calleth unto deep.”

39. Homo quidam nobilis: “A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return” (Luke 19:12), commented on by Meister Eckhart, Von dem edeln Menschen. See The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 544; for the short quotations, 422–4, 543–4.

40. Angelus Silesius: 1624–1677.

41. Henry Suso: ca. 1296–1365.

42. Johannes Tauler: ca. 1300–1361.

43. Nicholas Krebs of Cusa: 1401–1464.

44. Jakob Böhme: 1575–1624.

45. G. W. F. Hegel: 1770–1831.

46. Angelus Silesius, Selections from The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1978), 148: “The Mystical Abandonment. Abandonment ensnareth God: / But the Abandonment supreme, / Which few there can comprehend, / Is to abandon even Him.”

47. Hildegarde of Bingen: 1098–1179.

48. Angela of Foligno: 1248–1309.

49. Catherine of Siena: 1347–1380.

50. Francis of Assisi: 1182–1226.

51. Martin Luther: 1483–1546.

52. Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds et al. (London: SCM, 2006), 256: “Of the three terms: historical body, sacramental body and ecclesial body that it was a case of putting into order amongst each other, the caesura was originally placed between the first and second, whereas it subsequently came to be placed between the second and the third.”

53. Cf. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: “After the middle of the twelfth century, the expression [corpus mysticum] no longer designated the Eucharist, as it had previously, but the Church. Conversely, ‘corpus verum’ no longer designated the Church but the Eucharist.…The Church, the social ‘body’ of Christ, is henceforth the (hidden) signified of a sacramental ‘body’ held to be a visible signifier…the showing of a presence beneath the ‘species’ (or appearances) of the consecrated bread and wine.…The sacrament (‘sumere Christum’) and the Church (‘sumi a Christo’) were joined…in the mode of the Church-Eucharist pair…of a visible community…and a secret action (ergon) or ‘mystery’…” (82–3). “The mystical term is therefore a mediating one between the historical ‘body’ that becomes ‘similar to a Code that is the law’ and the ‘mystery,’ the sacramental body…recast in the philosophical formality…as one ‘thing’ which is visible, designating another, which is invisible. The visibility of that object replaces the communal celebration, which is a community operation.…The mystical third is no more than the object of an intention. It is something that needs to be made manifest…constructed, on the basis of two clear, authoritative ‘documents’: the scriptural corpus and the Eucharistic ostension.” “A mystical Church body would have to be ‘invented,’ in the same sense in which there was to be an invention of the New World. That endeavor was the Reformation. It was gradually divided into two tendencies: one (Protestant) giving a privileged status to the scriptural corpus, the other (Catholic) to the sacrament” (84). “Furthermore, despite the ups and downs of the papal states, from the Lateran Council until the reformism following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), that pastoral (centered on the only body that could symbolize and sustain the restoration/institution of a visible Church) would have great stability.…One trait is of special interest in the question of the apparition of mystical science: the progressive concentration of these debates around seeing” (87–9).

54. Lateran Council III: 1179.

55. Lateran Council IV: 1215.

56. Council of Trent: 1545–1563.

57. Antonio Vivaldi: 1678–1741.

58. Jacopo Robusti, Il Tintoretto: 1519–1594.

59. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, rev. and expanded ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 108.

60. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, part second, I, 3, Canon of Pure Reason (1781; London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1945), 458–9.

3. DREAMING, MUSIC, OCEAN

1. Koran, Sura LVII.

2. Alfred Rosenberg:1893–1946. See The Myth of the Twentieth Century, trans. V. Biro (1931; Torrance, Calif.: Noontide, 1983).

3. Marcel Duchamp: 1887–1968.

4. David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Dover, 2005).

5. Letter to R. Rolland, July 20, 1929, in Ernst L. Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–1939 (London: Hogarth, 1970), 389.

6. Wilhelm Fliess: 1858–1928.

7. Letter to W. Fliess, in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, trans. and ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1985), 398.

8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002), 10.

9. Letter from Romain Rolland to Freud, December 5, 1927, in Francis Doré and Marie-Laurie Prévost, eds., Selected Letters of Romain Rolland (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Oxford University Press, 1990), 87.

10. “Black mud”: Quoted in Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Waukegan: Fontana, 1992, p. 150.

11. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey (London: Pelican, 1977), 60.

12. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. J. A. Underwood and Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), 71–2.

13. William McGuire, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Picador, 1979), 146.

14. Letter to Anon., in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–1939, 435.

15. Cf. Paul-Laurent Assoun, “Résurgences et dérives de la mystique,” in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, no. 22 (Fall 1980).

16. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 112.

4. HOMO VIATOR

1. See Marcelle Auclair, Thérèse d’Avila, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964); Thérèse d’Avila, Œuvres complètes, (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995).

2. Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 422, 424.

3. “Yearning” or “craving” are attempts to render the Freudian term Sehnsucht: “nostalgia,” “longing,” “ardent desire,” not necessarily addressing the past, but rather the absence of the love object.

4. Life, 3:5, CW 1:63.

5. Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1924; Éditions Salvator, 1999).

6. Teresa of Avila, Poems, “Aspirations Toward Eternal Life,” CW 3:375.

7. Testimonies, 58:4, CW 1:418.

8. VI D, 9:2, CW 2:411–12.

9. Letter 177, to don Lorenzo de Cepeda, January 17, 1577, CL 1:476–77.

5. PRAYER, WRITING, POLITICS

1. Life, 10:7, CW 1:108.

2. Soliloquies, 15:3, CW 1:459.

3. Ibid., 17:2, CW 1:461.

4. Letter 219, to Gaspar de Salazar, December 7, 1577, CL 1:583.

5. Theopathy: from “pathon ta theia” (cf. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names 2 n, 9), or “to suffer God” as the supreme perfection.

6. Chrétien de Troyes: poet and troubadour, late twelfth century.

7. Life, 11:5, CW 1:112.

8. Life, 10:7, CW 1:108.

9. V D, 2:7, 2:343.

10. Donald W. Winnicott, “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma” (1949), in Collected Papers, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, (London: Tavistock, 1958), 243–54.

11. Life, 20:9 CW 1:176.

12. Testimonies, 3:1, CW 1:382.

13. Letter 24, to don Lorenzo de Cepeda, January 17, 1570, CL 1:83.

14. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. H. L. Mencken (1920; Tucson: Sharp, 1999).

15. Life, 20:9–10, CW 1:176.

16. Testimonies, 3:5–6, CW 1:383.

17. “Mantener la tela”: “It was the custom at the joust for one group of supporters to hold up a banner bearing the colors of the group’s favorite knight.” Notes to the Life, CW, 1:474. Cf. M. Alonso, Enciclopedia del idioma (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), 3: 3909.

18. Life, 18:10–13, CW 1:161–2.

19. Life, 18:14, CW 1:163.

20. “¡Ay, qué vida tan amarga / Do no se goza el Señor!” These two lines at the start of verse 5 in this poem reminds us of Plotinus’s “Leave everything!” (aphele panta), associated with Aristotle’s contemplation (theoria) and understood as a “denuding” or detachment, as well as a surpassing of all representation (aphairesis), and Gelassenheit (abandonment) in Angelus Silesius’s sense; see Selections from The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1978), 1, 22.

21. Poems, “Aspirations Toward Eternal Life,” CW 3:375.

22. Life, 20–21, CW 1:172–90.

6. HOW TO WRITE SENSIBLE EXPERIENCE

1. The Spanish title Libro de la Vida (Book of the Life), was given by the Augustinian friar Luis de León: “The book of the life of Mother Teresa of Jesus and account of some of the graces she received from God, written by her own hand by order of her confessor for whom it was intended.” The autograph manuscript is stored in the library of the Escorial Palace, at the original request of Philip II. It goes by the title: “Book of Mother Teresa of Jesus written in her own hand with the approval of Fr. Domingo Báñez, her confessor, the Prime Chair at Salamanca.”

2. The first draft of The Way of Perfection was completed in 1564 and reworked in subsequent years. Teresa revised the text in 1569, and it was ready for publication by 1579 under this title, chosen by her. However it was not to appear until 1583, after her death, in a highly “corrected” version. It was republished by Fr. Gratian in 1585. In 1588, at last, Luis de León oversaw the release of the original as revised by Teresa.

3. Chapters 1–20 of the Foundations were written in 1573; the next, 21–27, date from 1580; and 28–31 were completed in 1583. Ana de Jesús and Jerome Gratian were responsible for the first publication, in 1610, of the “Book of the Foundations of the Discalced Carmelite sisters, written by the Mother Foundress Teresa of Jesus.”

4. Life, 13:15, CW 1:129–30.

5. VI D, 5:3, CW 2:387.

6. Life, 11:9–10, CW 1:114–15.

7. Life, 11:16, CW 1:118.

8. Way, 19:4, CW 2:108.

9. Life, 11:6, CW 1:112–13.

10. Life, 11:7, CW 1:113.

11. Dominique de Courcelles, Langage mystique et avènement de la modernité (Paris: Champion, 2003), 189–294.

12. Estéban García-Albea, Teresa de Jesús, una ilustre epiléptica o una explicación epilogenética de los éxtasis de la Santa (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2002); Pierre Vercelletto, Expérience et état mystique. La maladie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Éditions La Bruyère, 2000).

13. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, § 70, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 201.

14. Life, 20:2–4, CW 1:173–74.

15. Life, 16:4, CW 1:149.

16. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (1860; New York: Citadel, 1998): “You endow the tree with your passions and desires; its capriciously swaying limbs become your own, so that soon you yourself are the tree” (51); “cause and effect, subject and object, mesmerizer and somnambulist” (25).

17. J.-L. Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992), 125.

18. Way, 19:3–5, CW 2:107–9.

19. Way, 19:4, CW 2:108.

20. Way, 19:6–7, CW 2:110.

21. Way, 19:8, CW 2:111.

22. Way, 19:13, CW 2:113.

23. Way, 19:9–10, CW 2:111.

24. Way, 19:10–12, CW 2:112.

25. IV D, 2:2, CW 2:323.

26. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Henry Whinfield, 1883; http://therubaiyat.com/whinfield (accessed May 14, 2011).

27. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry W. Longfellow, Paradiso, canto 19 (London: Capella, 2006), 337.

28. Pierre Ronsard, “To His Mistress,” trans. A. S. Kline, 2004; http://poetryintranslation.com (accessed May 14, 2011).

29. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 2, scene 1.

30. Charles Baudelaire, “To Her Who Is Too Gay,” in Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Geoffrey Wagner (New York: Grove, 1974).

31. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Epitaph,” trans. Erik Bendix, http://movingmoment.com/poetry/Rilke'sEpitaph.htm (May 14, 2011).

32. Philippe Sollers, Fleurs. Le grand roman de l’érotisme floral (Paris: Hermann Littérature, 2006).

7. THE IMAGINARY OF AN UNFINDABLE SENSE

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. and trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1956), 346: “Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one.”

2. In Jewish mysticism, the contemplation of God’s Throne-Chariot (Merkabah) is the goal of a long journey through the Hekhalot or celestial palaces/temples (cf. the treatises on the Great Hekhalot, or Hekhalot Rabbati, the Small or Hekhalot Zutarti, etc.). This ascent toward the seven heavenly abodes forms part of the synagogal liturgy and features in a more secret scholarly language, the Shi’ur Qomah.

3. See Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlaender (New York: Dutton, 1904).

4. Cf. St. Augustine, De Trinitate [The Trinity] (399–419), trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991).

5. I D, 1–3, CW 2:283–4.

6. D, Epilogue: JHS, CW 2:451.

7. Bernardino de Laredo: 1482–1540.

8. Luis de la Palma: 1560–1641.

9. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Second Annotation: “For it is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly [mas el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente], that contents and satisfies the soul.”

10. Jerónimo Nadal: 1507–1581. See his “Oraison pour ceux de la compagnie Mon. N. 4,” quoted in Victoriano Larrañaga, Sainte Thérèse d’Avila, Saint Ignace de Loyola: Convergences (Paris: Pierre Téqui Éditeur, 1998), 125.

11. I D, 2:5, CW 2:290.

12. I D, 2:8, CW 2:291.

13. IV D, 2:1–2, CW 2:323.

14. IV D, 2:2–4, CW 2:323–24.

15. IV D, 2:6, CW 2:324.

16. IV D, 3:2, CW 2:328.

17. VII D, 2:11, CW 2:438.

18. VI D, 2:6, CW 2:369.

19. Cf. Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. and with an introduction by Mary E. Giles (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1981).

20. IV D, 3:2, CW 2:327–28.

21. VI D, 4:4, CW 2:380.

22. VI D, 6:10, CW 2:395.

23. VII D, 1:3, CW 2:428.

24. VI D, 2:6, CW 2:369.

25. I D, 2:7, CW 2:290.

26. Testimonies, 26, CW 1:399.

27. V D, 2:2–5, CW 2:341–3. Compare with the reading of this passage by Michel de Goedt, “La prière de l’école de Thérèse d’Avila aujourd’hui,” in Recherches et expériences spirituelles, Conférences (Paris: Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, 1982).

28. Letter 237, to María de San José, March 28, 1578, CL 2:46.

29. VI D, 5:1, CW 2:386.

30. VII D, 2:1–3, CW 2:432–33.

31. The practice of “fiction” in Teresa can be approached in the light of Jean Ladrière’s interpretations of “the language of the spirituals,” or mystics, marked by the linguistic theories of D. D. Evans and J. L. Austin (Jean Ladrière, “Le langage des spirituels” [1975], in L’Articulation du sens [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984]). Descriptive at the same time as engaging the affective and sensory experience of both speaker and hearer, the language of such spirituals is posited as a “self-implicating act,” consisting in “rendering what is uttered actually the case in it; in this sense, one can say that the act of faith is the effectuation of its content” (79). Further, “there is a genuine continuity between the language of the spirituals and their experience; experience is prolonged in and by the word [parole], while the latter enriches experience by endowing it with structure and intelligibility” (80). Therefore if any truth is contained in this powerfully analogical, allegorical, and symbolic language, its credibility “can only be established by means of a detour, regardless of the language in which it is proposed.” This “detour” being defined as “a genuine affinity with the person speaking,” the “spiritual language consequently becomes a “language of affinity” (82–83) (my translation — LSF).

32. VI D, 5:2–3, CW 2:386–87.

33. VII D, 2: 3–6, CW 2:434–35.

34. Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos. Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); The Mystic and the Wanderer: Conversos in the Culture of Golden Age Spain, forthcoming (in Hebrew).

8. EVERYTHING SO CONSTRAINED ME

1. Teresa is reported to have said to Juan de la Miseria: “Dios te perdone, fray Juan, que ya que me pintaste, me has pintado fea y legañosa.” Esteban García-Albea, “La epilepsia extática de Teresa de Jesús,” Revista de neurología 37, no. 9 (2003): 880.

2. Found., 17:6, CW 3:180–81.

3. Marcelle Auclair, La vie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Seuil, 1950); Rosa Rossi, Esperienza interiore e storia nell’autobiografia di Teresa d’Avila (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1977); Dominique de Courcelles, Thérèse d’Avila, femme d’écriture et de pouvoir dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or (Grenoble: J. Million, 1993); Mercedes Allende salazar, Thérèse d’Avila, l’image au feminine (Paris: Seuil, 2002); Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Entering Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (New York: Paulist, 2005); Mary Frohlich, The Intersubjectivity of the Mystic: A Study of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994); Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, op. cit.; Denis Vasse, L’Autre du désir et le Dieu de la foi (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Le Dieu des femmes (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1989); Américo Castro, Teresa la santa y otros ensayos (Madrid: Alianza, 1982); and De la edad conflictiva. Crisis de la cultura española en el siglo XVII (1961; repr. Madrid: Taurus, 1972); Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados (Madrid: Taurus, 1972); Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne (Geneva: Droz, 1998).

4. Joseph Pérez, Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Fayard, 2007), esp. 155, on the incorruption of the corpse.

5. Life, 3:2, CW 1:61.

6. Life, 2:6, CW 1:59.

7. Life, Prologue, CW 1:53.

8. Life, 1:1–3, CW 1:54–55.

9. Found., 31:46, CW 3:306.

10. See Bartolomé Bennassar, Le Siècle d’Or de l’Espagne (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982).

11. Jorge Manrique: 1440–1479. See “Coplas on the Death of His Father,” trans. Thomas Walsh, in Hispanic Anthology (New York: Putnam’s, 1920).

12. Life, 3:4, CW 1:62.

13. St. Jerome, Letter 22, “To Eustochium,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W. G. Martley, Second Series, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature, 1893); http://newadvent.org (accessed November 15, 2012).

14. Francisco Goya: 1746–1828. Found in Album C.88.

15. Way, 36:6–7, CW 2:179–80.

16. Way, 36:4, CW 2:179.

17. Way, 36:6, CW 2:180.

18. Life, 2:3, CW 1:58.

19. Life, 2:3–5, CW 1:58–59.

20. Life, 3:7, CW 1:63.

21. Life, 31:20, CW 1:273.

22. Way, 12:7, CW 2:84.

23. Life, 4:1, CW 1:64.

24. Life, 31:23, 25, CW 1:274–75.

9. HER LOVESICKNESS

1. Life, 4:2, CW 1:65.

2. Life, 4:9, CW 1:69.

3. Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. and with an introduction by Mary E. Giles (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1981), 165, 562, 356, 359.

4. Ibid., 356–59.

5. Life, 8:3, CW 1:95.

6. Life, 7:1, CW 1:82.

7. Life, 4:9, CW 1:69.

8. Life, 5:7, CW 1:74.

9. Life, 5:8, CW 1:74.

10. Jean-Martin Charcot, “The Faith-Cure,” New Review, 7 (January 1893): 73–108: “It is striking to find that several of these thaumaturges suffered from the very malady whose manifestations they would henceforth cure: St. Francis of Assisi and St. Teresa, whose shrines are among those where miracles most frequently occur, were undeniable hysterics themselves” (unfindable: LSF trans.).

11. Life, 5:9, CW 1:75.

12. Josef Breuer (Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 2000], 232): “Among hysterics may be found people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character and highest critical power. No amount of genuine, solid mental endowment is excluded by hysteria, although actual achievements are often made impossible by the illness. After all, the patron saint of hysterics, St. Theresa, was a woman of genius with great practical capacity.” On the subject of female sexuality, sainthood, and hysteria, see also Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

13. García-Albea, Teresa de Jesús.

14. Pierre Vercelletto, Expérience et état mystique. La maladie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Editions La Bruyère, 2000).

15. Life, 6:1–2, CW 1:76–77.

16. Life, 5:10–11, CW 1:75–76.

17. Life, 7:10, CW 1:87.

18. Life, 7:1, CW 1:82.

19. Life, 7:5, CW 1:85.

20. Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas: 1580–1645.

21. Life, 7:2, CW 1:83.

22. Life, 7:13, CW 1:88–89.

23. Life, 1:3, CW 1:55.

24. Life, 7:14, CW 1:89.

25. Ibid.

26. Life, 5:3, CW 1:71.

27. Life, 5:6, CW 1:73.

28. Ibid.

29. Life, 31:20–22, CW 1:274.

30. Way, 12:7, CW 2:84.

31. Meditations, 2:23–24, CW 2:232–33.

32. Life, 2:2, CW 1:57.

33. Life, 2:3–4, CW 1:58.

34. Life, 7:6–7, CW 1:85–86.

35. Life, 7:6, CW 1:85–86.

36. Life, 7:8, CW 1:86.

37. Life, 6:6–8, CW 1:80–81.

10. THE IDEAL FATHER AND THE HOST

1. Life, 7:12, CW 1:89.

2. Life, 15:10, CW 1:144.

3. Life, 25:21, CW 1:222–23.

4. VI D, 2:6–7, CW 2:369.

5. VI D, 3:1, CW 2:370–71.

6. See Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

7. Life, 29:4, CW 1:247.

8. VII D, 2:6, CW 2:435.

9. Medit., 5:4, CW 2:249.

10. Medit., 5:5, CW 2:249.

11. Medit., 1:9–10, CW 2:220–21.

12. Way, 7:8, CW 2:70.

13. Testimonies, 31, CW 1:402.

14. Ibid.

11. BOMBS AND RAMPARTS

1. Élisabeth Reynaud, Thérèse d’Avila ou le divin plaisir (Paris: Fayard, 1997).

2. Miguel de Unamuno: 1864–1936.

3. Piero della Francesca: 1415/1420–1492.

4. “Low Food” is a translation of Madeleine Ferrières’s title: Nourritures canailles (Paris: Seuil, 2007).

5. Francisco de Borja: 1510–1572.

6. Life, 8:12, CW 1:100.

7. Ibid.

8. Life, 8:3, CW 1:95.

12. “CRISTO COMO HOMBRE”

1. Life, 9:1, CW 1:100–1.

2. Life, 9:4, CW 1:101.

3. Life, 9:6, CW 1:102.

4. Matthias Grünewald: 1475–1528.

5. Life, 10:1, CW 1:105.

6. Life, 9:9, CW 1:104.

7. St. Augustine, Confessions 11.27.

8. Life, 9:8, CW 1:103.

9. Life, 9:6, CW 1:102.

10. Way, 26:9, CW 2:136: “Lo que podéis hacer para ayuda de esto, procurad traer una imagen o retrato de este Señor que sea a vuestro gusto; no para traerle en el seno y nunca le mirar, sino para hablar muchas veces con Él, que Él os dará qué le decir. Como habláis con otras personas, ¿por qué os han más de faltar palabras para hablar con Dios?”

11. Plato, The Banquet, ca. 375 B.C.E.

12. Life, 10:2, CW 1:105.

13. Life, 27:2, CW 1:228.

14. Life, 29:7, CW 1:249.

15. Life, 10:1, CW 1:105.

16. Ibid.

13. IMAGE, VISION, AND RAPTURE

1. Life, 4:7, CW 1:67.

2. Life, 29:9, CW 1:250.

3. Life, 20:3, CW 1:173.

4. Way, 22:3, CW 2:123.

5. Life, 29:13–14, CW 1:252–53.

6. Testimonies, 14, CW 1:392–93.

7. VI D, 4:5–6, CW 2:380.

8. VI D, 4:6, CW 2:381.

9. VI D, 4:7, CW 2:381.

10. VI D, 4:8, CW 2:382.

11. VI D, 4:9, CW 2:382.

12. Life, 26:5, CW 1:226.

13. VI D, 4:8, CW 2:381–82.

14. VI D, 8:2, CW 2:405.

15. VI D, 8:3, CW 2:406–7.

16. VI D, 9:4, CW 2:411–12.

17. Life, 4:7, CW 1:68.

18. Ibid.

19. VII D, 2:4, CW 2:434.

20. IV D, 1:8, CW 2:319.

21. Mercedes Allendesalazar, Thérèse d’Avila, l’image au féminin (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

14. “THE SOUL ISN’T IN POSSESSION OF ITS SENSES…”

1. Life, 18:2, CW 1:158.

2. Life, 18:1, CW 1:157.

3. Life, 18:2, CW 1:158.

4. Life, 18:4, CW 1:158.

5. Life, 18:12–14, CW 1:162–63.

6. Life, 19:2, CW 1:164.

7. Life, 14:8, CW 1:137.

8. Life, 19:9, CW 1:168.

9. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: 1696–1770.

10. Life, 20:24, CW 1:182–83.

11. Life, 20:25, CW 1:183.

12. Life, 20:24, CW 1:183.

13. Life, 20:15, CW 1:178–79.

14. Life, 20:12, CW 1:177.

15. Ibid.

16. Life, 18:1, CW 1:157–58.

17. Life, 18:12–13, CW 1:162.

18. Life, 18:10, CW 1:161.

19. Life, 20:3–4, CW 1:173.

20. Life, 20:5, CW 1:174.

21. Life, 20:7–8, CW 1:175.

22. Life, 20:9, CW 1:176.

23. Life, 20:12, CW 1:177.

15. A CLINICAL LUCIDITY

1. Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), 61. The first part of the quote was mistranslated by Ellenbogen.

2. Marguerite Duras, Destroy, She Said, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove, 1994).

3. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour and Une aussi longue absence, trans. Richard Seaver and Barbara Wright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1966), 65: “All I could see were the similarities between this dead body and mine…screaming at me.”

4. Marcel Proust, “The Prisoner,” in In Search of Lost Time, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Peter Collier, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002), 5:357.

5. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Stephen Hudson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), chap. 2: “A material of its own, a new one, of a special transparency and sonority, compact, fresh and pink” (215); “Ideas are substitutes for sorrows” (260).

6. Maurice Barrès: 1862–1923.

7. See Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 106–8, 245.

8. Way, 28:10, CW 2:144.

9. Colette, Le pur et l’impur, in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 3:565: “Ce qui me manque, je m’en passe.”

10. Colette, Mes apprentissages, in Œuvres, 3:1053: “Ce bon gros amour…”

11. Colette, Retreat from Love, trans. and with an introduction by Margaret Crosland (London: Peter Owen, 1974), 27.

12. Colette, La naissance du jour, in Œuvres, 3:290: “On possède dans l’abstention, et seulement dans l’abstention…pûreté de ceux qui se prodiguent.”

13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils, trans. and with an introduction by David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1971), 586–87.

14. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, letter to A. N. Maikov, Florence, May 15/27, 1869, in Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, eds., Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 311: “The main reason [for not writing] was despondency.”

15. Gérard Labrunie (Gérard de Nerval), “El desdichado,” trans. Richmond Lattimore, in The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Anchor, 2000), 9: “Twice have I forced the crossing of the Acheron / and played on Orpheus’s lyre in alternate complaint / Mélusine’s cries against the moaning of the Saint.”

16. Life, 20:18, CW 1:180.

17. Life, 20:19, CW 1:180.

18. Life, 20:22, CW 1:181.

19. Life, 29:11, CW 1:251.

20. Life, 10:1, CW 1:105.

21. Life, 29:8, CW 1:250.

22. Life, 4:9, CW 1:68.

23. Life, 4:9, CW 1:68–69.

24. Way, 38:9, CW 2:188.

16. THE MINX AND THE SAGE

1. Life, 23:7, CW 1:203.

2. Colette, Les Vrilles de la vigne, in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 1:961: “Je voudrais dire, dire, dire, tout ce que je sais, tout ce que je pense, tout ce que je devine, tout ce qui m’enchante, et me blesse, et m’étonne” (my translation — LSF).

3. Life, 30:16, CW 1:261.

4. Life, 30:19, CW 1:262.

5. Life, 29:4, CW 1:247.

6. Life, 31:12, CW 1:269.

7. Life, 31:13, CW 1:269.

8. Life, 31:16, CW 1:270.

9. Way, 12:1, CW 2:81.

10. Way, 40:9, CW 2:195.

17. BETTER TO HIDE…?

1. Cf. Joseph Pérez, L’Espagne de Philippe II (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 140 et seq.

2. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1885; Project Gutenberg) first part, chap. 1, trans. John Ormsby, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996.html. Release date July 27, 2004. Accessed November 11, 2012.

3. Juan de Ávila: 1499–1569.

4. Luis de Granada: 1504–1588.

5. Fernando de Valdés: 1483–1568.

6. Melchor Cano: 1509–1560.

7. Martin Luther: 1483–1546.

8. Juan de Valdés: 1498 (?).

9. Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros: 1436–1517.

10. Benito Arias Montano: 1527–1598.

11. Christophe Plantin: 1520–1589.

12. Life, 24:2, CW 1:209.

13. Life, 19:4, CW 1:166.

14. Life, 18:4, CW 1:159.

15. Life, 40:8, CW 1:357.

16. Life, 18:4, CW 1:159.

17. Life, 9:2, CW 1:101.

18. Life, 27:2, CW 1:228.

19. Life, 27:3, CW 1:228–29.

20. Life, 27:5, 7, CW 1:229–30 (adapted).

21. Life, 27:8–10, CW 1:230–32.

22. Life, 28:1, CW 1:237.

23. Life, 28:3, CW 1:237–38.

24. Life, 28:4–5, CW 1:238–39.

25. Rosa Rossi, Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Cerf, 1989), 67: “S’unir, se transformer en Dieu [to be united, to be transformed into God].”

26. V D, 1:12, CW 2:340.

27. VI D, 4:4, CW 2:380.

28. I D, 1:3, CW 2:284.

29. VII D, 2:3, CW 2:434.

30. Life, 28:9, CW 1:241.

31. Life, 29:3, CW 1:247.

32. Life, 28:8, CW 1:240.

33. Life, 40:1, CW 1:354.

18. …or “TO DO WHAT LIES WITHIN MY POWER”?

1. Letter 5, to padre García de Toledo, 1565, CL 1:41.

2. Way, 7:8, CW 2:70 (amended).

3. VII D, 2:10, CW 2:437.

4. Life, 10:7, CW 1:108.

5. Life, 23:1, CW 1:200–1.

6. Life, 23:3, CW 1:201.

7. Letter 269, to padre Pablo Hernández, S.J., October 4, 1578, CL 2:122.

8. Way, 19:8–10, CW 2:111.

9. Way, 19:10, CW 2:111–12.

10. Phil. 1:23–24.

11. Way, 19:12, CW 2:112.

12. Life, 24:5, CW 1:211.

13. Life, 24:6, CW 1:211–12.

14. Life, 26:3, CW 1:225.

15. Life, 28:14, CW 1:244.

16. Life, 38:14, CW 1:334–35.

17. On St. Teresa’s relationship with the Jesuits, see Victoriano Larrañaga, La espiritualidad de San Ignacio de Loyola. Estudio comparativo con la de Santa Teresa de Jesús (Madrid: A.C.N. de P. Casa de San Pablo, 1944). For the French translation, see Sainte Thérèse d’Avila, Saint Ignace de Loyola: Convergences (Paris: SJ Pierre Téqui, 1998).

18. Letter 336, to Isabel Osorio, April 8, 1580, CL 2:295.

19. Letter 378, to doña Ana Enríquez, March 4, 1581, CL 2:401.

20. Way, 31:5, CW 2:155.

21. Ibid.

22. VI D, 9:2, CW 2:411.

23. Way, 19:15, CW 2:113.

24. Ibid.

25. VI D, 9:2, CW 2:411.

19. FROM HELL TO FOUNDATION

1. Life, 32:3, CW 1:277.

2. V D, 3:10, CW 2:352.

3. Way, Prologue, CW 2:40.

4. Life, 22:10, CW 1:195.

5. Letter 402, to Jerome Gratian, July 14, 1581, CL 2:445.

6. Life, 32:1–3, CW 1:276–77.

7. On Paul Claudel’s attitude to St. Teresa, see Paul Claudel, Journal, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 306–11.

21. SAINT JOSEPH, THE VIRGIN MARY, AND HIS MAJESTY

1. The deewan of the Persian mystic and teacher Mansur al-Hallaj (858–922) have not been translated into English in their entirety. This fragment is my rendering of Louis Massignon’s 1955 translation in Husayn Mansür Hallaj, Dîwân (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 114 (LSF).

2. Life, 40:1, CW 1:354.

3. Life, 32:11, CW 1:280–81.

4. Life, 33:2, CW 1:285.

5. I D, 1:5, CW 2:285.

6. Life, 39:8, CW 1:345–46.

7. Testimonies, 3:10, CW 1:384.

8. Life, 37:7, CW 1:326.

9. Life, 40:4, CW 1:355–56.

10. Letter 24, to Lorenzo de Cepeda, January 17, 1570, CL 1:83.

11. Life, 33:5, CW 1:286–87.

12. Life, 33:7–8, CW 1:288.

13. Life, 33:9, CW 1:288–89.

14. Life, 33:10, CW 1:289.

15. Life, 38:15, CW 1:335.

16. Life, 40:13–14, CW 1:359.

17. Life, 33:11, CW 1:289–90 (sentence order rearranged to comply with original).

18. Life, 33:12, CW 1:290.

19. Life, 33:14–15, CW 1:291–92.

20. Ibid.

22. THE MATERNAL VOCATION

1. Quoted by Marcelle Auclair, Thérèse d’Avila, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964), 111.

2. Letter 41, to María de Mendoza, March 7, 1572, CL 1:119.

3. Testimonies, 3:6, CW 1:383.

4. Letter 2, to Lorenzo de Cepeda, Quito, December 23, 1561, CW 1:32–33.

5. Life, 34:1–4, CW 1:293–95.

6. Life, 38:4, CW 1:331.

7. Life, 34:4, CW 1:295.

8. Testimonies, 2:4, CW 1:381.

9. Life, 34:7, CW 1:296.

10. Life, 37:5, CW 1:325.

11. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1885; Project Gutenberg), second part, chap. 54, trans. John Ormsby, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996.html. Release date July 27, 2004. Accessed November 11, 2012.

12. Life, 36:18, CW 1:317.

13. Life, 36:6–7, CW 1:311–12.

14. Life, 36:11–13, CW 1:314–15.

15. Life, 36:14, CW 1:316.

16. Life, 36:15, CW 1:316.

17. Life, 36:16, CW 1:317.

18. Life, 36:22, CW 1:319–20.

19. Life, 33:15, CW 1:292.

20. Life, 36:24, CW 1:320.

21. Life, 39:26, CW 1:353.

22. Way, 31:9–10, CW 2:156–57.

23. Testimonies, 15, CW 1:393.

24. Ibid.

25. The verb entrañar in Spanish connotes intimacy, love, affection; it means to “embrace with passionate strength.” It also has a very “visceral” dimension, as entrañas are “entrails,” and the verb entrañarse suggests a total, intimate union with a person. The Spanish mystics used this term to describe union with Christ. Thus fray Luis de León: “Nomb. de Crist. en el del Hijo. Entonces entra en nuestra alma su mismo espíritu, que entrando se entraña en ella y produce en ella luego su gracia.”

26. Soliloquies, 17:3–5, CW 1:462–63.

27. V D, 2:5, CW 2:343.

28. Life, 36:29, CW 1:321–22.

29. Life, 38:1, CW 1:329–30.

23. CONSTITUTING TIME

1. The Constitutions: 1567.

2. The Way of Perfection: 1566–1567.

3. The Book of Her Foundations: 1568–1582.

4. Ignatius Loyola: 1491–1556.

5. Michel de Montaigne: 1533–1592.

6. Way, 1:2, CW 2:41.

7. Life, 35:2, CW 1:303.

8. Const., 1, CW 3:319.

9. Const., 3, CW 3:319.

10. Const., 15, CW 3:323.

11. Const., 10, CW 3:321–22.

12. Const., 11–14, CW 3:322–23.

13. Way, 9:2, CW 2:74.

14. Way, 4:7, CW 2:55.

15. Const., 28, CW 3:328.

16. Way, 7:4, CW 2:67.

17. Const., 26, CW 3:327.

18. Const., 26–7, CW 3:327–28.

19. Const., 8, CW 3:321.

20. Const., 22, CW 3:326.

21. Way, 4:4, CW 2:54.

22. Way, 6:1–7, CW 2:62–64.

23. Way, 4:2, CW 2:53.

24. Way, 24:4, CW 2:129.

25. Ibid.

26. Way, 24:5–6, CW 2:130.

27. Way, 24:2, CW 2:129.

28. Way, 31:10, CW 2:157.

29. Way, 36:9, CW 2:181.

30. Life, 25:3, CW 1:214.

31. Way, 31:10, CW 2:157.

32. Way, 19:2, CW 2:107.

33. Way, 19:3–4, CW 2:108.

34. Ibid.

35. Way, 12:1, CW 2:81–82.

36. Way, 11:5, CW 2:81.

37. Life, 25:14, CW 1:220.

38. Life, 25:10, CW 1:217.

39. Letters 124 and 155, CL 1:333, 154.

40. VI D, 4:4–5, CW 2:380.

41. Life, 25:15, CW 1:220.

42. Life, 25:20, CW 1:222.

43. Life, 39:17–18, CW 1:349–50.

44. Critique, “Búscate en mí,” CW 3:359.

45. Found., 1:1, CW 3:99.

46. Monteverdi: 1567–1643.

47. Petrarch: 1304–1374.

48. Giulio Strozzi: 1583–ca. 1660.

24. TUTTI A CAVALLO

1. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1885; Project Gutenberg), second part, chap. 4, trans. John Ormsby, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996.html. Release date July 27, 2004. Accessed November 11, 2012.

2. Testimonies, 5, CW 1:386.

3. Letter from Juan de Ávila, April 2, 1568; see Rosa Rossi, Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Cerf, 1989), 76.

4. Letter 8, to Luisa de la Cerda, May 27, 1568, CL 1:49.

5. Letter 9, to Luisa de la Cerda, June 9, 1568, CL 1:52.

6. Letter 10, to Luisa de la Cerda, June 23, 1568, CL 1:53.

7. Letter 14, to Luisa de la Cerda, November 2, 1568, CL 1:62.

8. Letter 13, to Francisco de Salcedo, late September 1658, CL 1:60.

9. Life, 37:5, CW 1:325.

10. Life, 20:27, CW 1:183.

11. Found., 18:1, CW 2:3:185–86.

12. Testimonies, 12:4, CW 1:390.

13. Letter 38, to Luisa de la Cerda, November 7, 1571, CL 1:110.

14. Testimonies, 31, CW 1:402.

15. Testimonies, 30, CW 1:401.

16. Letter 219, to Gaspar de Salazar, December 7, 1577, CL 1:583.

17. Life, 14:11, CW 1:138.

18. Ibid.

19. Life, 25:13, CW 1:219.

20. V D, 3:10, CW 2:352.

21. Ibid., 3:11.

22. VI D, 2:6, CW 2:369.

23. VI D, 2:4, CW 2:368.

24. VI D, 2:7, CW 2:369.

25. VI D, 6:6, CW 2:393.

26. Ibid.

27. VI D, 6:9, CW II 395.

28. VI D, 6:8, CW 2:394.

29. VI D, 6:10–11, CW 2:395–96.

30. VI D, 6:10, CW 2:395.

31. Ibid.; see also the reference to “algarabía” in Life, 14:8, CW 1:137: “It is more difficult to speak about these things than to speak Arabic.”

32. Testimonies, 33, CW 1:404.

33. Testimonies, 36:1–2, CW 1:405–6.

34. Testimonies, 36:3, CW 1:406.

35. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry W. Longfellow, Paradiso, canto 33 (London: Capella, 2006), 381.

36. Way, 19:9–10, CW 2:111–12.

37. Letter 88, to María Bautista, August 28, 1575, CL 1:221 et seq.

38. Letter 105, to María Bautista, April 29, 1576, CL 1:268.

39. Letter 104, to María Bautista, February 19, 1576, CL 1:263–64.

40. Letter 106, to Ambrosio Mariano, May 9, 1576, CL 1:272–75.

41. Visitation, 2, CW 3:337.

42. Visitation, 3, CW 3:337.

43. Visitation, 1, CW 3:337.

44. Critique, CW 3:359.

45. Letter 219, to Gaspar de Salazar, December 7, 1577, CL 1:582.

46. Letter 218, to King Philip II, December 4, 1577, CL 1:580.

47. Letter 226, to Teutonio de Braganza, January 16, 1578, CL 2:15.

48. Letter 247, to Jerome Gratian, May 22, 1578, CL 2:75.

49. Letter 258, to Jerome Gratian, August 19, 1578, CL 2:103.

50. See Rossi, Thérèse d’Avila, 168, concerning the attacks on Baltasar Alvarez.

51. Letter 228, to Juan Suárez, February 10, 1578, CL 2:21–22.

52. Letter 261, to Jerome Gratian, end of August 1578, CL 2:108.

53. Letter 283, to Hernando de Pantoja, and Letter 284, to the Discalced Carmelite nuns, both January 31, 1579, CL 2:153–60.

54. Cf. Joseph Pérez, Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 283, letter to Teresa of Avila from the “Great Angel.”

55. Letter 408, to Jerome Gratian, September 17, 1581, CL 2:457.

56. Letter 410, to Jerome Gratian, October 26, 1581, CL 2:464.

57. Letter 426, to Jerome Gratian, early December, 1581, CL 2:500.

58. Letter 465, to Jerome Gratian, September 1, 1582, CL 2:582.

25. THE MYSTIC AND THE JESTER

1. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1885; Project Gutenberg), first part, chap. 1, trans. John Ormsby, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996.html. Release date July 27, 2004. Accessed November 11, 2012.

2. Dominique Barbier, Don Quichottisme et psychiatrie (Toulouse: Privat, 1987).

26. A FATHER IS BEATEN TO DEATH

1. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10, On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1993), 159–94.

2. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999), 1912.

3. “Urfantasien.” Cf. “Un cas de paranoïa qui contredisait la théorie psychanalytique de cette affection” (1915), in Revue Française de Psychanalyse 8, no. 1 (1935): 2–11.

4. John 14:7–12.

5. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. H. L. Mencken, (1920; Tucson: Sharp, 1999).

6. Testimonies, 52, CW 1:414.

7. Testimonies, 29, CW 1:401.

8. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Charles Stivale (New York: Zone, 1989).

9. Cf. Julia Kristeva, “The Two-Faced Oedipus,” in Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 408–19.

10. Charles Baudelaire, “Recueillements,” in Les fleurs du mal. “Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci” is rendered most literally in William Aggeler’s translation (The Flowers of Evil, Fresno, Calif.: Academy Library Guild, 1954): “under the scourge / Of Pleasure, that merciless torturer.”

11. John of the Cross, “Spiritual Canticle” and “More Stanzas Applied to Spiritual Things on Christ and the Soul,” in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 712, 723.

12. Pierre Klossowski, Such a Deathly Desire, trans. Russell Ford (State University of New York Press, 2007), 67: “a transgression of language by language”; see also Roberte ce soir and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Urbana, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002).

13. Mark 15:34.

14. Paul of Tarsus: “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3).

15. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 116.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter Hodgson (Oxford: 2006), 3:219.

17. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, 5.

18. Cf. “Le hiatus comme ultime Parole de Dieu,” in André-Marie Ponnou-Delaffon, La théologie de Baltasar (Les Plans sur Bex, Switzerland: Parole et Silence, 2005), 129–32; and Urs von Balthasar, La gloire et la croix, vol. 3, part 2, La Nouvelle Alliance (Paris: Aubier, 1975).

19. Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 424.

20. Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics (1677), part V, proposition 35, translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes, projectgutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm. Released February 1, 2003. Accessed April 3, 2012.

21. Philippe Sollers, Guerres secrètes (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2007): “D’après la révolution opérée par la Contre-Réforme…”

27. A RUNAWAY GIRL

1. Louise Bourgeois, “Entretien entre Louise Bourgeois, Suzanne Pagé, Béatrice Parent,” in Louise Bourgeois, Sculptures, environnements, dessins, 1938–1995, catalog of Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1995 (my translation — LSF); various quotations also taken from Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Marie-Laure Bernadac (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).

2. Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, I, 167–68, in Complete Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 2:435.

3. Julia Kristeva, The Female Genius, II: Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

4. Julia Kristeva, Murder in Byzantium, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

5. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 2, chap. 31, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (Tunbridge Wells, U.K.: Burns & Oates, 1983), 205: “It is as if Our Lord were to say formally to the soul: ‘Be thou good’; it would then substantially be good.”

6. Life, 15:8, CW 1:143–44.

7. William Blake, Complete Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 71: “To Nobodaddy.”

8. Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), 24.

9. Cf. Marcel Proust, “Time Regained,” in In Search of Lost Time, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Peter Collier, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002), 6:292–321.

28. “GIVE ME TRIALS, LORD; GIVE ME PERSECUTIONS”

1. Letter 253, to Juana de Ahumada, August 8, 1578, CL 2:89.

2. Way, 12:1, CW 2:81.

3. Medit., 7:8, CW 2:259.

4. Ibid.

5. Testimonies, 46, CW 1:412; Seville, second half of 1575. Michel de Goedt writes: “Christ treated her as a spouse and a sovereign, and granted her the freedom to make use of his own property, the most precious good of all, his Passion” (“La prière de l’école de Thérèse d’Avila aujourd’hui,” in Recherches et expériences spirituelles, lectures edited by the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, 1982). Note that in Spanish, the terms chosen by the writer are laden with sensuality. Thus señorío means “mastery over something,” as though one were a seigneur, lord or owner. “Power,” “conquest,” “taming,”—señorío is the “dominion” I exercise over you as much as the “demesne belonging to a feudal lord.” Likewise, alivio denotes “the relief or cure for an illness,” the “alleviation of fatigue, of bodily sickness, of spiritual affliction”; the result of an “elimination of a burden or trouble.” Alivio conveys “easing,” “abatement,” “solace.”

6. Medit., 7:1, CW 2:256.

7. For the testimonies gathered as evidence for the beatification and canonization of St. Teresa, see Gillian Alghren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 154 et seq.

8. Way, 7:8, CW 2:70: “I would not want you to be like women.”

9. Way, 38:8, CW 2:181 (paraphrased): “And so as to reign more sublimely it understands that the above-mentioned way [suffering] is the true way.”

10. For the cucumber anecdote, see Marcelle Auclair, La vie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Seuil, 1950), 140.

11. Letter 92, to Jerome Gratian, October 1575, CL 1:233.

12. Ibid., 234.

13. Letter 248, to Mother María de San José, June 4, 1578, CL 2:80.

14. Found., 7:4, CW 3:135–36. The original passage in its entirety runs as follows: “Si no bastaren palabras, sean castigos; si no bastaren pequeños, sean grandes; si no bastare un mes de tenerlas encarceladas, sean cuatro: que no pueden hacer mayor bien a sus almas. Porque, como queda dicho y lo torno a decir (porque importa para las mismas entenderlo, aunque alguna vez, o veces, no puedan más consigo), como no es locura confirmada de suerte que disculpe para la culpa, aunque algunas veces lo sea, no es siempre, y queda el alma en mucho peligro; sino estando — como digo — la razón tan quitada que la haga fuerza, hace lo que, cuando no podía más, hacía o decía. Gran misericordia es de Dios a los que da este mal, sujetarse a quien los gobierne, porque aquí está todo su bien, por este peligro que he dicho. Y, por amor de Dios, si alguna leyere esto, mire que le importa por ventura la salvación.”

15. Way, 19:4, CW 2:108.

16. Const., 24, CW 3:327.

17. Const., 26, CW 3:327.

18. Const., 44, CW 3:448.

19. Way, 19:9, CW 2:111.

20. Way, 19: 9–11, CW 2:111–12.

21. Const., 44, CW 3:448.

22. Letter 161, to Mariano de San Benito, December 12, 1576, CL 1:430–31.

23. Testimonies, 53:1, CW 1:415.

24. Testimonies, 54, CW 1:416.

25. Letter 108, to Jerome Gratian, June 15, 1576, CL 1:280.

26. Life, 21:11, CW 1:190.

27. Way, 15:1, CW 2:91.

28. Letter 182, to Lorenzo de Cepeda, February 10, 1577, CL 1:494.

29. Life, 13:4, CW 1:124.

30. Life, 13:7, CW 1:126.

31. Life, 13:5, CW 1:125.

32. Way, 39:3, CW 2:190.

33. Found., 28:21–34, CW 3:258–63.

34. Testimonies, 19, CW 1:394.

35. Testimonies, 17, CW 1:394.

36. Life, 22:15, CW 1:199.

37. Life, 22:16, CW 1:199.

38. Life, 22:10, CW 1:195.

29. “WITH THE EARS OF THE SOUL”

1. See Julia Kristeva, “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 19–106.

2. Testimonies, 58, CW 1:423.

3. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999), 153.

4. VI D, 2:6, CW 2:369.

5. VI D, 2:7, CW 2:369.

6. VI D, 3:12, CW 2:375.

7. Life, 20:12–14, CW 1:177–78.

8. Melanie Klein, Collected Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 1, Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth, 1975); Julia Kristeva, The Female Genius, II: Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

9. Life, 20:16. English version, CW 1:179: “In this pain the soul is purified and fashioned or purged like gold in the crucible so that the enameled gifts might be placed there in a better way, and in this prayer it is purged of what otherwise it would have to be purged of in purgatory.”

10. Life, 20:18, CW 1:180.

11. VI D, 9:4, CW 2:412.

12. VI D, 3:5, CW 2:372.

13. VI D, 3:7, CW 2:373.

14. VI D, 9:5–7, CW 2:412.

15. Testimonies, 52, CW 1:414–15.

16. Way, 11:2, CW 2:80.

17. Way, 11:3, CW 2:80.

18. Way, 11:4, CW 2:81.

19. Life, 7:11, CW 1:88.

20. Life, 7:10, CW 1:87. For Teresa’s encouragement of her father’s faith and growing closeness to him at the end of his life, see Life, 7:10–16.

21. Life, 22:3, CW 1:192.

22. Life, 22:6, 8, CW 1:193–95.

23. Way, 19:2, 4, CW 2:107, 108.

24. VI D, 3:5, CW 2:372.

25. VI D, 3:6, CW 2:373.

26. Testimonies, 51, CW 1:414.

27. Denis Diderot, Elements of Physiology, from “Notes for Elements of Physiology, probably in preparation for a larger work on the nature of man,” quoted in Jim Herrick, Against the Faith (New York: Prometheus, 1985), 84. (Passage from the “Conclusion” not included in Diderot, Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings, ed. J. Kemp [New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1963], the only place that seems to contain the Elements in English.)

28. Way, 31:9, CW 2:157.

29. Way, 24:4, CW 2:129.

30. Life, 14:5, CW 1:135.

31. VII D, 2:7, CW 2:435–36.

32. VII D, 2:9–10, CW 2:436–37. (Translation modified.)

33. I D, 1:5, CW 2:285.

30. ACT 1: HER WOMEN

1. V D, 1:4, CW 2:336–37.

2. I D, 2:7, CW 2:290.

3. Way, 28:10, CW 2:144.

4. IV D, 2:2, CW 2:323.

5. Testimonies, 58, CW 1:424.

6. VII D, 3:2, CW 2:438.

7. Found., 12, CW 3:156–60.

8. Found., 12:6, CW 3:158–59.

9. Found., 5:10, CW 3:120.

10. Life, 40:8, CW 1:357.

11. Life, 24:4, CW 1:211.

12. Life, 30:3, CW 1:254.

13. Cf. Rosa Rossi, Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Cerf, 1989), 177: Teresa and Ana de San Bartolomé.

14. Way, 7:7, CW 2:69.

15. Way, 10:5, CW 2:69.

16. Life, 10:8, CW 1:109.

17. Letter 135, to Ambrosio Mariano, October 21, 1576, CL 1:361.

18. Way, 4:13, CW 2:57.

19. Way, 7:8, CW 2:70.

20. Found., 17, CW 3:179–85.

21. Letter 58, to Domingo Báñez, January 1574, CL 1:148.

22. Letter 109, to María de San José, June 16, 1576, CL 1:285.

23. Letter 112, to María de San José, July 2, 1576, CL 1:291.

24. Letter 126, to María de San José, September 22, 1576, CL 1:337.

25. Letter 132, to María de San José, October 13, 1576, CL 1:351.

26. Letter 137, to María de San José, October 1576, CL 1:373.

27. Letter 146, to María de San José, November 8, 1576, CL 1:392.

28. Letter 152, to María de San José, November 26, 1576, CL 1:409.

29. Letter 152, to María de San José, November 26, 1576, CL 1:411.

30. Letter 198, to María de San José, June 28, 1577, CL 1:542.

31. Letter 331, to María de San José, February 8–9, 1580, CL 2:282.

32. Letter 173, to María de San José, January 3, 1577, CL 1:460.

33. Letter 186, to María de San José, February 28, 1577, CL 1:511.

34. Letter 330, to María de San José, February 1, 1580, CL 2:273.

35. Letter 311, to Jerome Gratian, October 14, 1579, CL 2:226.

36. Ibid.

37. Letter 88, to María Bautista, August 28, 1575, CL 1:224.

38. Ibid., CL 1:223.

39. Dante, rhyme 67: “Però nol fan che non san quel che sono; camera di perdon sano uom non serra, ché’l perdonare e bel vincer di guerra.” The envoi of his canzone of exile, beginning “Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute” (1304). Trans. Barbara Reynolds, in Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: IB Tauris, 2006), 96.

40. Letter 307, to Jerome Gratian, July 25, 1579, CL 2:218.

41. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays (London: Grove Press, 1994).

42. I D, 1:5, CW 2:285.

43. Foundations, 10:14, CW 3:150.

44. Way, 4:16, CW 2:58.

45. Letter 177, to Lorenzo de Cepeda, January 17, 1577, CL 1:474–75.

46. Sol., 14:4, CW 1:458.

47. Life, 21:6, CW 1:187.

48. Found., 20:4, CW 3:198.

49. Found., 20:3, CW 3:198.

50. Letter 342, to duchess of Alba, May 8, 1580, CL 2:310.

51. Letter 94, to Inés Nieto, October 31, 1575, CL 1:237.

52. Letter 278, to the duchess of Alba, December 2, 1578, CL 2:147.

53. Exod. 5:1; 6:8. See also Exod. 9:1: “Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, so they may serve me.”

54. Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily (1772–1807) was the last Holy Roman Empress and first empress of Austria, wife of Francis I of Habsburg-Lorraine, first emperor of Austria. Granddaughter of Habsburg ruler Maria Theresa of Austria, who was the mother of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II.

55. VI D, 6:3, CW 2:392 (adapted).

56. John of the Cross, “The Dark Night,” in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 712.

31. ACT 2: HER ELISEUS

1. Testimonies, 34, CW 1:404.

2. Letter 159, to Jerome Gratian, December 7, 1576, CL 1:423.

3. Ibid.

4. Letter 162, to Jerome Gratian, December 13, 1576, CL 1:436.

5. Letter 170, to Jerome Gratian, late December 1576, CL 1:450.

6. Letter 242, to Jerome Gratian, April 26, 1578, CL 2:62–63.

7. Letter 297, to Jerome Gratian, June 10, 1579, CL 2:195.

8. IV D, 1:7, CW 2:319.

9. Found., 23:13, CW 3:222.

10. Letter 141, November 1576, CL 1:379.

11. Letter 81, to Isabel de Santo Domingo, May 12, 1575, CL 1:202.

12. Letter 246, to Jerome Gratian, May 14, 1578, CL 2:72.

13. Letter 145, to Jerome Gratian, November 4, 1576, CL 1:390.

14. Letter 124, to Jerome Gratian, September 20, 1576, CL 1:328.

15. Ibid., CL 1:328–29.

16. Ibid., CL 1:333.

17. Letter 147, to Jerome Gratian, November 11, 1576, CL 1:394.

18. Letter 141, to Jerome Gratian, November 1546(?), CL 1:378.

19. Letter 92, to Jerome Gratian, October 1575, CL 1:233–34.

20. Letter 149, to Jerome Gratian, November 1576, CL 1:400.

21. Letter 261, to Jerome Gratian, late August 1578, CL 2:108.

22. Letter 196, to María de San José, May 28, 1577, CL 1:538.

23. Letter 108, to Jerome Gratian, June 15, 1576, CL 1:279.

24. Letter 311, to Jerome Gratian, October 14, 1579, CL 2:225.

25. Life, 18:8, CW 1:160.

26. Jérôme Gratien, Glanes, Quelques brèves additions de la main du père Jérôme Gratien à la première biographie de Thérèse d’Avila par le père Francisco de Ribera, presented by Fr. Pierre Sérouet (Laval: Carmel de Laval, 1998).

27. Letter 98, to María Bautista, December 30, 1575, CL 1:245.

28. Testimonies, 22:2, CW 1:397.

29. Life, 22:6, CW 1:194.

30. Way, 24:3, 5, CW 2:129, 130.

31. Exod. 4:30.

32. John 1:23.

33. Medit., 1:1, CW 2:216.

34. Medit., 1:8, CW 2:219 (adapted).

35. Life, 25:11, CW 1:217.

36. See Mino Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme: De François de Sales à Fénelon (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1997), 135 sq: “essential foundation,” “fond essentiel.”

37. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), vol. 2, chap. 2, § 57, p. 253: “The caller, too, remains in a striking indefiniteness…leaves not the slightest possibility of making the call familiar.”

38. Heidegger, Being and Time, vol. 2, chap. 2, § 55, p. 251: “Vocal utterance is not essential to discourse…a ‘voice’ of conscience,…which can factically never be found, but ‘voice’ is understood as giving-to-understand.”

39. Life, 22:8, CW 1:194–95.

40. Life, 22:1, CW 1:191 (adapted).

41. Life, 22:16, CW 1:199.

42. VII D, 3:13, CW 2:442.

43. Testimonies, 5, CW 1:386.

44. Ps. 119:32: “Dilatasti…”

45. IV D, 2:5, CW 2:324.

46. Testimonies, 39, CW 1:409.

47. Heidegger, Being and Time, vol. 2, chap. 2, § 56, p. 252: “The call [like the babbling voice] does not say anything…has nothing to tell.” Cf. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).

48. VI D, 9:6, CW 2:412.

49. Way, 7:8, CW 2:70.

50. Way, 17:5, CW 2:100.

51. Life, 22:15, CW 1:199.

52. Life, 22:8, CW 1:195.

53. Life, 22:7–10, CW 1:194–96.

54. VI D, 6:3, CW 2:392.

55. Life, 22:10, CW 1:195.

56. Ibid.

57. VI D, 11:3, CW 2:422.

58. VI D, 6:10, CW 2:395.

59. I D, 1:1, CW 2:283.

32. ACT 3: HER “LITTLE SENECA”

1. John of the Cross, “Commentary Applied to Spiritual Things,” in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 734.

2. Letter 194, to Ambrosio Mariano, May 9, 1577, CL 1:33.

3. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 12, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns & Oates, 1983), 103: “all the detachment of the exterior senses…”

4. Ibid., 106.

5. Ibid.

6. Testimonies, 59:11, CW 1:428–29.

7. John of the Cross, “More Stanzas Applied to Spiritual Things on Christ and the Soul,” in Collected Works, 722.

8. John of the Cross, Letter 33, October — November 1591, in Collected Works, 706.

9. John of the Cross, “The Living Flame of Love,” in Collected Works, 717.

10. VII D, 4:15, CW 2:450.

11. Francis Poulenc, Dialogues of the Carmelites, libretto, original text and English translation (Melville, N.Y.: Ricordi and Belwin Mills, 1957, 1959). (This cannot be consulted; trans. LSF.)

12. Sacra congregatio pro causis sanctorum, Positio super causae introductione servae Dei Teresiae Benedictae a Cruce (in saeculo Edith Stein) monialis professae ordinis carmelitarum discalceatorum (1891–1942), Rome, 1983, 322.

13. Isa. 53:5.

14. Edith Stein, Getsamtausgabe, 3 (1933–1942) (Freiburg: Herder, 2000–2001), 373, quoted by Cécile Rastouin, Edith Stein. Enquête sur la source (Paris: Cerf, 2007). Edith Stein’s Collected Works have been issued by the Institute of Carmelite Studies (Washington D.C.: ICS, 1992/2003) in an eleven-volume series involving various translators and editors.

15. Stein, The Hidden Life, in Collected Works, vol. 4, 92.

16. VII D, 4:14, CW 2:450.

17. Allusion to Edith Stein’s works, The Science of the Cross (Collected Works, vol. 6), dealing with John of the Cross, and The Hidden Life (Collected Works, vol. 4), hagiographic meditations and spiritual texts.

18. VII D, 3:13, CW 2:442.

19. VII D, 3:12, CW 2:442.

20. John of the Cross, “Song of the Soul that Rejoices in Knowing God Through Faith,” stanza 8, in Collected Works, 724.

21. John of the Cross, “More Stanzas Applied to Spiritual Things on Christ and the Soul,” in Collected Works, 722.

22. Testimonies, 42, CW 1:410–11.

23. John of the Cross, “First Romance: On the Gospel. Regarding the Most Blessed Trinity,” in Collected Works, 724–25.

24. Letter 297, to Jerome Gratian, June 10, 1579, CL 2:195.

25. John of the Cross, “Romance 2,” in Collected Works, 726.

26. Testimonies, 52, CW 1:414.

27. Life, 38:9–11, CW 1:333–34.

28. Testimonies, 14, CW 1:392.

29. VII D, 2:7, CW 2:435–36.

30. John of the Cross, “Spiritual Canticle,” in Collected Works, 712. With regard to John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, see the work of Fr. Michel de Goedt: Le Christ de Thérèse de Jésus (Paris: Desclée-Fleurus, 1993), 169–82; and Le Christ de Jean de la Croix, (Paris: Desclée, 1993).

31. Testimonies, 52, CW 1:414.

32. Ibid.

33. Testimonies, 49, CW 1:413.

34. Thomas Aquinas, “Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur,” Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 75, a. 5; 3a, q. 5.

35. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, book i:4.

36. Testimonies, 31, CW 1:402.

37. Colette, Mes apprentissages, in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 3:1039: “la règle qui guérit de tout.”

38. John of the Cross, “The Dark Night,” in Collected Works, 712.

39. Marcelle Auclair, La vie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Seuil, 1950), 188.

40. John of the Cross, “A Gloss,” in Collected Works, 736: “Like a fevered man’s / Who loathes any food he sees.”

41. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 13, 58.

42. “Naked faith”: John of the Cross, ibid., book 1, chapter 2: “Luego entra el alma en la segunda Noche, quedándose sola en desnuda fe.” The English version drops the adjective: “The soul at once enters into the second night, and abides alone in faith.” (John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 2, 20).

43. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, in Collected Works, 6:228: “The actual reality…”

44. Testimonies, 65 (Spanish Relaciones, 6): 9, CW 1:438.

45. Song of Solomon 1:4.

46. Testimonies, 65 (Spanish 6): 9, CW 1:438: “This surrender to the will of God is so powerful that the soul wants neither death nor life, unless for a short time when it longs to die to see God.”

47. Ibid.: “And if through my intercession I could play a part in getting a soul to love and praise God more, even if it be just for a short time, I think that would matter to me more than being in glory.”

48. Song of Sol. 1:3; 1:2.

49. Medit., Prologue, CW 2:215.

50. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 12, 103–4.

51. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2004), book 2:1, 131.

52. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), 933.

53. Critique, “On Father Fray John of the Cross’s Reply,” CW 3:361.

54. Letter 260, to Jerome Gratian, August 1578, CL 2:107.

55. VI D, 9:17, CW 2:4.

56. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 3, 21.

57. VII D, 4:9, CW 2:447.

58. Life, 38:17, CW 1:336.

59. Testimonies, 53:3, CW 1:416.

60. Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 1:409.

61. Marcel Proust, “Time Regained,” in In Search of Lost Time, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Peter Collier, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002), 141.

62. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 2: “Porque no el mucho saber harta y satisface al ánima, mas el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente.” See also the final prayer of the person doing the retreat, called “Application of the Senses,” in Victoriano Larrañaga, Sainte Thérèse d’Avila, Saint Ignace de Loyola: Convergences (Paris: Pierre Téqui Éditeur, 1998), 121.

63. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, chapters 28:2 and 31:1 (regarding the sensorial conversion of the word/call), 195, 205: “Substantial words are others which also come to the spirit formally…these cause in the substance of the soul that substance and virtue which they signify.…It is as if Our Lord were to say formally to the soul: ‘Be thou good’; it would then substantially be good.…Or as if it feared greatly and He said to it: ‘Fear thou not’; it would at once feel within itself great fortitude and tranquility.”

64. Ignatius Loyola, The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius, ed. J. F. X. O’Conor (New York: Benziger, 1900), 54: original Spanish “en tres teclas,” three clavecin keys. See also Larrañaga, Convergences, 56.

65. VI D, 1:1, CW 2:359.

66. John of the Cross, “Without a Place and With a Place,” in The Poems of John of the Cross, trans. and ed. Willis Barnstone (New York: Norton, new edition, 1972), 83.

67. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1, chapter 13:11, 59.

68. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), prelate, author, and preacher, Bishop of Meaux.

69. Extracts from Bossuet’s “Sermon on Death,” trans. Christopher O. Blum, available online: thomasmorecollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bossuet-Sermon-on-Death.pdf, accessed February 2014; from Bossuet’s Œuvres Oratoires, ed. Abbé J. Lebarq, IV (Paris: Desclée, 1926), 262–81. The quotations from the “Panegyric of St. Teresa” (declaimed before Anne of Austria in Metz, October 15, 1657) are translated by LSF.

70. See also Julia Kristeva, “A pure silence: The perfection of Jeanne Guyon,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 297–318.

71. G. W. Leibniz: 1646–1716.

72. Baruch Spinoza.

73. VII D, 2:6, CW 2:435.

74. Montaigne, Essays, book 2:1, 131.

75. I D, 2:7, CW 2:290.

76. VII D, 2:10, CW 2:437.

77. I D, 2:8, CW 2:291.

78. IV D, 2:1–4, CW 2:322–24.

79. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry W. Longfellow, Paradiso, canto 1, 70–72 (London: Capella, 2006), 289.

80. VII D, 2:11, CW 2:437.

81. VII D, 2:7, CW 2:435.

82. VII D, 1:6, CW 2:430.

83. G. W. Leibniz, letter to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, 1704 (my translation — LSF): “To me, infinities are not totalities…”; Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, ed. and trans. Lloyd Strickland (Toronto: Iter/Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 151: “My fundamental meditations…”; Philosophical Papers and Letters, A Selection, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, vol. 2, The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason (1714; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1035: “Each monad is a living mirror…”; Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. D. Garber and R. Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 41: “Everything is taken account of…”; Leibnizens Mathematische Schriften, ed.C. I. Gerhardt (Halle 1855–1863), (my translation — LSF): “Imaginary numbers…”

84. Julia Kristeva, “L’engendrement de la formule,” in Semiotike (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 296–300: “L’infini-point obéit aux lois de transition et de continuité: rien n’équivaut à rien, et toute coïncidence cache en fait une distance infiniment petite. L’infini-point ne forme donc pas de structure, il pose des fonctions, des relations qui procèdent par approximation. Jamais comblée, une différence reste entre le nombre marqué ainsi π et l’ensemble des termes susceptibles de l’exprimer. L’unité est disloquée. Le nombre-signe, miroir unifiant, se brise, et la notation s’engage au-delà de lui. La différentielle qui en résulte, et qui équivaut à l’infiniment petit syncatégorique (in fieri) des nominalistes du XIV^e siècle, n’est pas une unité qui s’ajouterait à d’autres pour faire un tout, mais le glissement même de l’infini dans l’énoncé clos.”

85. Leibniz, letter to Morell, December 10, 1696. Cf. M. Leroy, Discours de métaphysique et correspondance avec Arnaud de G. W. Leibniz, (Paris: Grua/Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 103. See also Michel Serres, Le Système de Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

86. Alain Badiou, “La subversion infinitésimale,” in Cahiers pour l’analyse 9 (1968).

87. Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics (Project Gutenberg), part V, proposition 35, translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes, projectgutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm, released February 1, 2003, accessed April 3, 2012.

88. Philippe Sollers, “Le temps de Dante,” in La Divine Comédie (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 13.

89. Way, 28:10, CW 2:144.

90. IV D, 2:4, CW 2:324.

91. Way, 19:2, CW 2:107.

92. Life, 9:7, CW 1:103.

93. VI D, 2:6, CW 2:369.

94. VII D, 3:12, CW 2:442.

95. VII D, 1:9, CW 2:431.

96. IV D, 1:8, 11, CW 2:319–20, 321.

97. IV D, 1:8.

98. IV D, 1:9–13, CW 2:320–21.

99. Dante, The Divine Comedy (Paradiso), canto 1, 7–9.

100. IV D, 1:10, CW 2:321.

101. Way, 16:1–4, CW 2:94–95. Cf. Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Avila, chap. 24, 557–58.

33. ACT 4: THE ANALYST’s FAREWELL

1. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sentensiis, Prologue, 1.5: “Oportet…quod modus istius scientiae sit narrativus signorum, quae ad confirmationem fidei faciunt.”

2. Way, 26:9, CW 2:136.

3. Life, 9:6, CW 1:102.

4. Ibid.

5. VII D, 1:7, CW 2:430.

6. VI D, 3:1, CW 2:370–71.

7. II D, 11, CW 2:303.

8. VI D, 3:8, CW 2:374.

9. Angelus Silesius, Selections from The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1978), 178.

10. Life, 25:22, CW 1:223. The “fig for all the devils” is an allusion to the female sex.

11. Ibid.

12. II D, 4, CW 2:299–300.

13. Sigmund Freud, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1912), 178: “Per via di levare” (as in sculpture and psychoanalysis) is opposed to “per via di porre” (as in painting).

14. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, trans. and ed. P. Remnant and J. Bennett, book 1, “Of Innate Notions,” chapter 3, § 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xc [102].

15. On the “double alliance,” see Antoine Guggenheim, Jésus-Christ, grand prêtre de l’ancienne et la nouvelle alliance: Étude du commentaire de saint Thomas d’Aquin sur l’“Épître aux Hébreux” (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2004).

16. Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London; Vintage 2001), 31: “His identification with the father in his own personal prehistory.” See also Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. B. Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

17. The “baroque poet,” Annibal de Lortigue (1570–1640): “Toute chose est muable au monde. Il faut aimer à la volée…”

18. VI D, 6:8–9, CW 2:394–95.

19. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry W. Longfellow, Paradiso, canto 1 (London: Capella, 2006), 61–63, 70–71, 85, 106–7; and canto 32, 142–45, 289, 383.

34. LETTER TO DENIS DIDEROT

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Same,” in Divagations, trans. with an introduction by Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2007), 251.

2. Denis Diderot, “On Women,” trans. Edgar Feuchtwanger, www.keele.ac.uk. Accessed August 2012.

3. Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6, 14. The text was originally circulated in handwritten copies of La correspondance littéraire, exclusively read by a handful of enlightened North European royals. The novel appeared posthumously in 1796. The philosopher’s previous convictions deterred him from publishing it during his lifetime.

4. Ibid., 81.

5. Ibid., 92–93.

6. Ibid., 74–75.

7. Augustine, Soliloquies.

8. For M. d’Alainville’s visit, see Diderot, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 1385 (my translation — LSF).

9. Diderot, The Nun, 65.

10. For the last words attributed to Diderot (“The first step towards philosophy is incredulity”), see Jim Herrick, Against the Faith (New York: Prometheus, 1985), 84.

11. Diderot to Sophie Volland, August 8, 1762 (my translation — LSF). This is not among the letters featured in Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland: A Selection, trans. and selected by Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Letter to Mme d’Epinay, 1767 (my translation — LSF). See Correspondance de Diderot, ed. G. Roth and J. Varloot (Paris: Minuit, 1955–1970), vol. 7, 156.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. H. L. Mencken, (1920; Tucson: Sharp, 1999), 113.

13. Marcel Proust, “Time Regained,” in In Search of Lost Time, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Peter Collier, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002), 6:157: “sterile celibates of art.”

14. Philippe Sollers, “Ma France,” Revue des deux mondes, April 2006. Cf. “Pascal et Sade.”

15. Mariana Alcoforado, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, trans. Edgar Prestage (London: David Nutt, 1893), letter 5, p. 93.

16. Meister Eckhart: 1260–1327. See “German Sermon 6,” in The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist,1981), 187.

17. Tauler: 1300–1361.

18. Mino Bergamo, “La topologie mystique,” in L’anatomie de l’âme: De François de Sales à Fénelon (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1997), 149 sq., 166 sq., 193 et seq.

19. Francis de Sales: 1567–1622.

20. Fénelon (François Salignac de la Mothe): 1651–1715.

21. Jeanne Guyon: 1648–1717.

22. Diderot, “On Women.”

23. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. with introduction by Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 105: “set to music.”

24. Diderot, Dialogues, “Conversation of a Philosopher with the Maréchale de—,” trans. Francis Birrell (London: Routledge, 1927), 172, 177–78, 173, 175–76.

25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011), chap. 6, p. 30: “Publiquely allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, superstition.”

26. Diderot, Dialogues, 183.

27. Diderot, “Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants, ou du danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois,” in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 5, 2 (Paris: Édition Assézat-Tourneux, Garnier Frères, 1875–1877), 308 (trans. — LSF).

28. Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme, 67: “carrousel vertigineux et proliférant de subdivisions.”

29. Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, was nicknamed the Swan of Cambrai in allusion to his disagreements with Bossuet, known as the Eagle of Meaux.

30. Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme, 160 et seq.

31. J. B. Bossuet, Correspondance, ed. C. Urbain and E. Levesque (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 6: 424: the mystics as “great exaggerators” (October 10, 1694).

32. Jeanne Guyon, Spiritual Torrents, trans. A. W. Marston (1875), online at passtheword.org/DIALOGS-FROM-THE-PAST/spiritualtorrents.htm. Accessed January 12, 2013.

33. See chap. 22, note 25 on entrañarse.

34. Letter to Sophie Volland, August 10, 1769. Correspondance de Diderot, ed. R. Versini (Paris: Laffont, 1999), 960.

35. Diderot, On Women.

36. Diderot, The Nun, 152.

37. Diderot, On Women.

38. Rosemary Lloyd, trans. and ed., Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 176: “Is there, can one say, any one more Catholic than the devil?”

39. Way, 16:1, 4, CW 2:94, 95.