In a recent email, concerning the elevation of the 19th century
French mystic St. Theresa of Lisieux to the status of "Doctor
of the Church", Luis T. Gutierrez wrote:
I wonder what might be the significance of this for the ordination
of women in the RCC, since Therese expressed a desire for the
ministerial priesthood. Would the RCC name "doctor of the
church" a person who has written what Cardinal Ratzinger
recently described as a "grave doctrinal error"?
Prof. Guiterrez did not specify the passage he referred to, but
it was posted by Gerald Bugge, with an accusation:
Here's the entire (beautiful) passage you refer to, claiming
that Therese "expresses a desire for the ministerial priesthood."
How could you so twist these magnificent words to further your
own ends and attempt to disparage Josef Ratzinger. See her desire
in its context! And maybe we can all deepen our love for the Church
through this great saint, truly deserving to be a Doctor of the
Church:
In fact, although Gerald sees the passage as "magnificent",
he overlooks, as indeed he must in a certain Catholic tradition
of reading, the source of the power of the passage.
What Theresa does here is combine a saccharine language of sentimentality
with intense sexual and gendered imagery which places her own
self outside human norms. She claims and names both male and female
desires, and presents Jesus as both a lover and a beloved. Some
of her language derives the commonplaces of nineteenth-century
French Catholic piety, but, as whenever we have use of common
tropes, we cannot ignore that the writer used these tropes and
not others.
The power of Theresa's words derives not only from their fervor
- which is the traditional Catholic reading of such prose - but
from her willingness to approach liminality. By this I mean her
use of words and concepts which destabilize her gender, and the
gender of her God, but depend on the reader to overlook such meanings.
The complicity between writer and reader is exciting and powerful.
Theresa writes:
I SHALL BE LOVE
From St Therese of Lisieux: Story of A Soul
O my Beloved! this grace was only the prelude to the greatest
graces You wished to bestow upon me. Allow me, my only Love, to
recall them to You today, today which is the sixth anniversary
of our union. Ah! my Jesus, pardon me if I am unreasonable in
wishing to express my desires and longings which reach even unto
infinity. Pardon me and heal my soul by giving her what she longs
for so much! To be Your Spouse, to be a Carmelite, and by my union
with You to be the Mother of souls, should not this suffice me?
And yet it is not so. No doubt, these three privileges sum up
my true vocation: Carmelite, Spouse, Mother, and yet I feel within
me other vocations.
The language here is nuptial. Theresa is the bride, Christ the
bridegroom. The language is so common its outrageousness might
be overlooked. But here Theresa is the receiver from Christ, her spouse, of union. This union is explicitly
procreative - Theresa wants to be penetrated and impregnated by
Christ so that see can be the "mother" of souls. Again,
this is common language among mystical writers [both male and
female as it happens.]
But now, Theresa performs a gender reversal upon herself:
I feel the vocation of the WARRIOR, THE PRIEST, THE APOSTLE,
THE DOCTOR, THE MARTYR. Finally, I feel the need and the desire
of carrying out the most heroic deeds for You, O Jesus. I feel
within my soul the courage of the Crusader, the Papal Guard, and
I would want to die on the field of battle in defense of the Church.
I feel in me the vocation of the PRIEST. With what love, O Jesus,
I would take You in my hands when, at my voice, You would come
down from heaven. And with what love would I give You to souls!
It is quite common for female saints to be ascribed masculinity
[see Gregory of Nyssa on Macrina], or even to state that they
feel male [See Perpetua in the arena]. But here Theresa goes further.
She proclaims her active desire for essentially male roles
(in usually cultural conceptions). She not only wants to be the
receiver of Jesus, a conventionally female role, but to be a male
hero for Jesus - to defend him, to present him to others, to actively take him within [her] hands. Theresa wants to be Jesus'
husband as well as his wife. She proclaims her desire to fulfill
typically masculine roles for him. In masculinizing herself but
retaining gendered roles, she implicitly feminizes Jesus. [Again,
something that is rather common]. These are intense, and erotically
charged, desires she is expressing, so:
But alas! while desiring to be a Priest, I admire and envy
the humility of St. Francis of Assisi and I feel the vocation
of imitating him in refusing the sublime dignity of the Priesthood.
Theresa invokes the humility topos, but in an odd way. It is common
for female religious writers, and in fact female writer's in the
past in general, to proclaim their own unworthiness. The topos
works to disarm criticism. Theresa'a humility, here, however,
is rather different. Her humility is not the expression of unworthiness
but a claim to emulation of the greatest of medieval saints. Hers
is not a humble humility: it is the greatest of all humilities.
O Jesus, my Love, my Life, how can I combine, these contrasts?
How can I realize the desires of my poor little soul? Ah! in spite
of my littleness, I would like to enlighten souls as did the Prophets
and the Doctors. I have the vocation of the Apostle. I would like
to travel over the whole earth to preach Your Name and to plant
Your glorious Cross on infidel soil. But O my Beloved, one mission
alone would not be sufficient for me, I would want to preach the
Gospel on all the five continents simultaneously and even to the
most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years
only but from the beginning of creation until the consummation
of the ages. But above all, O my Beloved Savior, I would shed
my blood for You even to the very last drop.
Having made her text safe, by the expression of her humility,
Theresa now riffs on a series of contrasts She apparently understood
well that her initial lines were a series of exciting, one may
say titillating, oppositions, and here she continues to play:
"poor little soul" and "littleness" are immediately
confronted with massive triumphalist desires, not just to be active
in the world, but to achieve massive success "on all five
continents", and for all time. This is sheer literary bravado
- the claims of humility scarcely cover the massive ambition.
But Theresa knows that such occlusion is precisely what a pious
Catholic reading will do.
Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown
with me within Carmel's cloisters. But here again, I feel that
my dream is a folly, for I cannot confine myself to desiring one
kind of martyrdom. To satisfy me I need all. Like You, my Adorable
Spouse, I would be scourged and crucified. I would die flayed
like St. Bartholomew. I would be plunged into boiling oil like
St. John; I would undergo all the tortures inflicted upon the
martyrs. With St. Agnes and St. Cecelia, I would present my neck
to the sword, and like Joan of Arc, my dear sister, I would whisper
at the stake Your Name, O JESUS.
Having expressed her desire for supremacy in the status of Apostle,
Theresa moves on to the next category of Christian sanctity -
martyr. Again these desires are quite commonplace. The desire
here is frankly masochistic. Freely invoking nuptiality again,
Theresa expresses a desire for pain and suffering to be mixed
with love. [Literature like this should probably be kept from
impressionable children.] Her models are of both genders. And
the acme of her desire - the figure represented as Theresa's sister
- is the most flamboyantly transgendered of all Christian heroines,
Joan of Arc. Universally Joan was known for her masculine clothing
[which she retained even rather than being allowed to receive
communion]. And of all famous women in the European past, it was
Joan who lived the most conventionally heroic life. At the time
Theresa was writing Joan was not even a canonized saint, and yet
she is the acme of Theresa's models.
When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians
at the time of Anti-Christ, I feel my heart leap with joy and
I would that these torments be reserved for me. Jesus, Jesus,
if I wanted to write all my desires, I would have to borrow Your
Book of Life, for in it are reported all the actions of all the
saints, and I would accomplish all of them for You.
Theresa continues in this passage to combine the masochist [what
else can one call the continual equation of pain with joy?] and
the supremacist language of the earlier paragraphs.
O my Jesus! what is your answer to all my follies? Is there
a soul more little, more powerless than mine? Nevertheless even
because of my weakness, it has pleased You, O Lord, to grant my
little childish desires and You desire, today, to grant other
desires that are greater than the universe.
Again we have the poetic pattern of decline and rise :folly, weakness,
desire, greater than the universe....
During my meditation, my desires caused me a veritable martyrdom,
and I opened the Epistles of St. Paul to find some kind of answer.
Chapters 12 and 13 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians fell
under my eyes. I read there, in the first of these chapters, that
all cannot be apostles, prophets, doctors, etc., that the Church
is composed of different members, and that the eye cannot be the
hand at one and the same time. The answer was clear, but it did
not fulfill my desires and gave me no peace. But just as Mary
Magdalene found what she was seeking by always stooping down and
looking into the empty tomb, so 1, abasing myself to the very
depths of my nothingness, raised myself so high that I was able
to attain my end. Without becoming discouraged, I continued my
reading, and this sentence consoled me: "Yet strive after
the better gifts, and I point out to you a yet more excellent
way." And the Apostle explains how all the most perfect gifts
are nothing without love. That Charity is the excellent way that
leads most surely to God.
Here is the resolution of Theresa's immense masochism and overweening
desires. She will sublimate all in her role as a nun.
I finally had rest. Considering the mystical body of the Church,
I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by
St. Paul, or rather I desired to see myself in them all. Charity
gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church
had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and
most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood
that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with
love. I understood it was Love alone that made the Church's members
act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach
the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood
that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that
it embraced all times and places...in a word, that it was eternal!
Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus,
my Love, my vocation, at last I have found it ... my vocation
is Love! Yes, I have found my place in the Church and it is You,
O my God. who have given me this place; in the heart of the Church,
my Mother, I SHALL BE LOVE.
What Theresa does is succeed in expressing the sexuality, masochism
and massive desire of her mysticism, and yet also succeed in proposing
a resolution with her humdrum and rather common life as a nun
[hardly a rare occupation in Catholic France in her time]. She
does this by seeing her life as nun in itself as martyrdom and
apostleship, as, in fact, a triumphalistic vocation. This realization
is orgasmic ["excess of delirious joy...cried out...O Jesus,
my Love"]. Desire, Life and sexuality are all combined. The
passage is pious and sweet, but it works by evoking the most intense
considerations of sexuality and gender, and by transgressing them.
Source.
From: © Paul Halsall: August, 1997
This text is part of the Internet
History Sourcebooks Project. The Sourcebooks are collections of public domain and
copy-permitted texts related to all aspects of history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational
purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No
permission is granted for commercial use.
© Paul Halsall, 1997, 2023
