Sainte Thérèse et le désir triangulaire

Annaléa Vincent

Final paper

December 2008

“Malheur à qui n’a plus rien à désirer”,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse,

 6ème partie, Lettre VIII (1761)

Saint Teresa of Avila and the “triangular desire”

A brief interpretation of The Dwellings (1577)

Teresa de Ahumada de Cepeda (1515-1582), in religion Teresa de Jesús and also known as Saint Teresa of Avila is a Catholic Saint. She was moreover, one of the greatest reformers of the Catholic Church of the 16th Century, proclaimed doctor of the Church in 1970.

She first was sent to the convent when she was 16 and after her initial reluctance had passed, she took her vows three years later in 1534. From 1537 on she fell ill and throughout her whole life she experienced different and almost constant turmoil: loss of consciousness, catalepsy, heart troubles, paralysis and other symptoms. She suffered her entire life and her physical suffering would have had no interest but for the impact it had on her writings. In 1542 Jesus appeared to her for the first time as she was 27 years old, during one of her cataleptic fits. In her autobiography written from 1562 to 1565 and entitled Vida de Santa Teresa de Jesús (translated as The book of her Life), she mentioned how scared she was and how the terror became even stronger afterwards. From then on she experienced several visions and when they became known to other religious people, her supervisors forbid her to indulge in such visions. Indeed, no one else could see what she pretended to see and it became by then the real issue she had to face with the Catholic order, ensured at the time by the Inquisition. In 1574, the Inquisition asked her to justify her faith. It thus lead her to write “an internal path towards union with God”, The Dwellings, during the day of the Holy Trinity in the Carmel of Toledo, June 2nd, 1577.  Later on, the work took the title of The Interior Castle.

Thinking about her élan of writing, it came to my mind that one could try to read The Dwellings through the theory of desire in the narrative and especially the question of the triangular desire as enunciated by René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Self and Other in Literary Structure. Even though Girard mentioned the question of God only briefly in the external mediation, it can be interesting to go further and to consider the respective place of God and the Inquisition in Saint Teresa’s narrative. Furthermore, by exploring Saint Teresa’s work, it is interesting to question the nature of the link with the mediator as Girard refers to both an external and an internal mediation.

The French philosopher states that when the model is God for those who try to imitate Christ, - which may have been Saint Teresa’s case – the question of rivalry does not arise since the imitator – the narrator who in this case is the writer – cannot compete with the desired object. If Saint Teresa does not compete she however may try to resemble God. The question of the narration here has to be considered from an unusual perspective. Indeed, the work of Saint Teresa d’Avila, The Dwellings, is not a spontaneous one. The question then that comes to mind is how can we talk about “desire in narrative” when the author of the narration had no choice but to write about her faith? How could the Saint combine duty and desire?

The conception of René Girard’s theory though seems to hold perfectly with the triangular scheme contained in and around Saint Teresa’s narrative. There is God, the spiritual lover as an object of desire. There is a mediator, the Inquisition and there is a subject, the Saint herself. As a mystic lead by the desire of God, Saint Teresa offers a fascinating view of the question of the writer’s position in the narrative. With a brilliant mastery of writing, she perfectly justifies her intentions and the content of what she writes, trying to thread a fine line between what she deeply feels and corporally experiences and the Inquisitors’ expectations. Moreover, she offers a sublime interpretation of her own desire, qualified as “post-modern” by Julia Kristeva. According to Kristeva, the Saint knows that “le refoulement du désir peut vous pourrir la chair et vous casser les nerfs jusqu’au coma” (263). Thus Saint Teresa has no choice but to use her own desire as a “coupe-feu de l’excitation” (263).

However it seems to be that the triangular scheme – and Girard himself asserts it – can be displaced. “The triangle is not Gestalt. The real structures are inter-subjective. They cannot be localized anywhere […]. Because changes in size and in shape do not destroy the identity of this figure […], the diversity as well as the unity of the works can be simultaneously illustrated.” (Girard, 2). Knowing that in the case of Saint Teresa, the mediator could be displaced from the Inquisition to God (and it is the main interpretation of the text from a psychoanalysis perspective; God, the “imperious third person”, becomes the mediator); the object could be displaced from God to the Saint, nevertheless in the present paper, I chose to describe a construction of the triangular desire as it mainly appears.

The paper will be organized as follows: after considering the conditions of writing and considering the Inquisition as one of the possible mediators, we will then view Saint Teresa as a writer and as the subject of desire. Finally, we will see how God is the object of the Saint’s desire.

I The conditions of writing. Saint Theresa and the Inquisition as a mediator.

At the beginning of The Dwellings, Saint Teresa warns the reader : “ L'obéissance m'a ordonné peu de choses qui m'aient semblé plus difficiles que celle d'écrire maintenant sur l'oraison : en premier lieu, parce qu'il ne me semble pas que le Seigneur m'ait donné ni l'inspiration, ni le désir de le faire”. She thus affirms that nothing but obedience made her write the work. From the moment she entered the convent, the Saint has been advised by counselors such as one of her confessors the Jesuit father Baltasar Alvarez, or the Dominican father Pedro Ibanez. She thus has been followed in her doings and thoughts by official representatives of the Church.

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