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The Passion According to Teresa of Avila
Julia Kristeva
Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) experienced and wrote about what we call mysti- cism at a time when Spain’s glory and power – that of the Conquistadors
and the Golden Age – began its decline. Moreover, Erasmus and Luther were shaking up traditional beliefs; new Catholics such as the alumbrados at- tracted Jews and women, the Inqui- sition banned books in Castilian and trials to determine the limpieza de sangre multiplied. The daughter of a cristiana vieja and a converso, Teresa, in her childhood, witnessed the case brought against her father’s family in which they had to prove they were truly Christian and not Jewish. Teresa’s own ‘case’ as a nun practicing orison, the mental prayer of amorous fusion with God through which she experi- enced ecstasy, would be investigated by the Inquisition. Yet this was before the Counter-Reformation discovered the extraordinary complexity of her experience as well as its usefulness to the Church which sought to marry as- ceticism (demanded by the Protestants) to the intensity of the supernatural (propitious to popular faith). Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda was beatified in 1614 (thirty-two years after her death), canonized in 1622 (forty years after her death), and would become in 1970, in the wake of Vatican II, the first
woman Doctor of the church, along- side Catherine of Siena.
The Catholic mystic (in its two apo- gees: the twelfth century with the mystic Rhineland, and following the Council of Trent and the Counter- Reformation with, in particular, the Spanish saints, Teresa of Avila and her friend, John of the Cross) is situated in internal exclusion to Catholicism:
in its margins and yet at its heart. In this paradoxical position, the mystic is a bearer of in-depth anthropological knowledge, which a psychoanaly- tical reading can transform into clini- cal and semiological truth (by which
I mean relative to sexual and linguistic economy). I shall focus on three elem- ents of this knowledge-ignorance, which Teresa’s experience pushes to
a paroxysm and a clarity never before reached. Intrinsic to Christianity is an unshakable faith in the existence of
an Ideal Father and an absolute love for this loving Father, who would be, sim- ply put, the foundation of the speaking subject. In turn, the speaking subject is none other than the subject of amo- rous discourse. This is the Father of Agape and Amor, but who is not Eros.
‘I love because I am loved/ therefore
I am’ could be the syllogism of the believer, which Teresa acts out in her visions and ecstasies. Freud is far from rejecting the existence of this ‘loving father’: he alludes to him in The Ego and the Id when he discovers the ‘pri- mary identification’ with the ‘father
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