This Incredible Need to Believe by Julia Kristeva

Author:Julia Kristeva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Philosophy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

“WRITE THIS FICTION SO PEOPLE CAN UNDERSTAND”

Shall I close with a few aspects of her visions and her writing?

The only girl in a family of seven boys (until the birth of two little latecomers, a girl and boy), very attached to her mother and father, to her brother Rodrigo, to her paternal uncle Pedro, and to her cousin the son of Francisco, her other paternal uncle, in a family with incestuous overtones that, though comfortably off, was growing poorer, Teresa lost her mother at the age of thirteen. When she decided to become a Carmelite and took the habit in the Convent of the Incarnation on November 2, 1536, she was twenty-one years old, and her body was a battlefield: between the guilty desires that she only hints at in her Life, saying that her confessors forbade her to enlarge on them, and the idealizing exaltation as seen in her intense cult for Mary (the virgin mother) and Joseph (the symbolic father). In her autobiography, with peerless lucidity, she confides that her torments led to convulsions and losses of consciousness, sometimes followed by comas of up to four days: after the Spaniard E. Garcia-Albea, Dr Pierre Vercelletto, the French epilepsy specialist, was to diagnose a “temporal epilepsy.”

These crises, however, went hand in hand with the extraordinary “visions” the nun described as auras: not “views” by the “eyes of the body,” but what I would be tempted to call incarnate phantasms; that is, perceptions by all the senses together, of the enveloping, reassuring, loving presence of the Spouse. The ideal, and therefore cruel Father, who persecuted her by hurting her right to the bone, is transformed into a loving Father: Theresa was successful where President Schreber (recall how in 1911 Freud interpreted the testimony of this magistrate who thought himself persecuted by a fierce and divine father) failed: God no longer judged her, or at any rate less and less, because He loved her.

The sequencing of some of the “visions” Teresa was to reconstruct in her Life conveys the logic of this saving alchemy. To begin with, the “vision”—an “image” that is not received by the eyes of the body—brings her into the presence of a “stern face” that disapproves of the young nun’s overly casual “visitors.” Next the “vision” becomes a “toad” that grows and grows: a hallucination of the sexual organ of the visitor? Finally, the suffering Man himself appears in the form of a statue of Christ Teresa had seen in the monastery courtyard: a martyred man whose suffering she is ravished to identify with, to expiate her torments.

Ravished is the word: at last Teresa is united with “Christ as man” (Cristo como hombre); she appropriates him—“certain that the Lord was within me” (dentro de mí). “After that I could not for an instant doubt that he was in me or that I myself was engulfed in him” (yo todo engolfada en él) (Life 10:1). At the height of her exaltation all her senses suddenly veer toward utter

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