by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Kristeva on Teresa: Love So As to Act

I confess, I don’t have the attention span – the devotion span – to work through a six-hundred-page biography of St. Teresa of Avila by the French psychoanalyst and literary critic Julie Kristeva, not even if it is called “a kind of wisdom literature for what Ms. Kristeva likes to call the third millennium” in the Times.

That’s what Carlene Bauer, guest-reviewing for the daily Arts section, calls it. Bauer, the author of a novel rooted in the friendship between Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor, knows some things about wisdom literature.  And she knows some things about book reviewing – such as the truth universally acknowledged that in certain cases the review, done right, can be more interesting than the book.

I suspect that this is one of one of those cases, and Bauer finds the most in Kristeva’s best bits through adroit quotation and paraphrase.  Here in a stroke is the revisionist thrust of the book:

Teresa did not imprison herself in an interior castle of mysticism but reformed an order and founded 17 monasteries, traveling all over Spain. In Ms. Kristeva’s interpretation, Teresa isn’t “the patron saint of hysteria,” as Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer called her, but the patron saint of passionate pragmatics.

Here’s the answer to the presumed, and obvious, question: Why Teresa and why now?

“What’s left of that universe of faith and love, what’s left of the windmills?” Sylvia Leclercq asks. “Chimeras, TV soap operas for avid women and their partners. Or God’s madmen, the suicide bombers, who pretend not to realize that he (the Almighty, the Master, the One and Only, the True, the Beyond) has mutated into pure spectacle, and twist their alleged faith into murderous nihilism.” Teresa’s life and her writings could be one antidote to this malaise, because, according to Sylvia/Ms. Kristeva, she “ventures as far as possible along the route that beckons the person who doesn’t give up on believing, the person who talks as a way of sharing, and who loves in order to act.”

And here’s the anwer to the less obvious question: What’s love got to do with it?

Through reconsidering the life of this saint, she is calling those of us “trapped between secularism and fundamentalism” to reconsider what we think we know about love. More specifically, she asks us to rethink our Western resistance to the idealism and loss of self that love involves …

At a moment when many seem to think desire is at its most liberated when it’s at its most emotionally detached, we may need a radically simple reminder that the body can be conversant with the soul.

Carlene Bauer and I were in conversation about Flannery O'Connor’s Prayer Journal last fall.  A link to our conversation is here.

The photograph is of a street mural in Preston, England, fashioned after Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa.   

  1. etr-gu posted this