I, too, was having some trouble trying to figure out Teresa's relationship with the Church, especially when placed beside her experiences with God that she figures as outside the realm of symbolic understanding. So, as far as I understand it, there are moments when she seems entirely committed to the Church and the tenets it proposes, and, especially, its representatives as they are manifested through her many confessors. Evelyn's post provides one example of this loyalty or here's another from p. 213, speaking of holy water, specifically, "I consider everything ordained by the Church to be important, and I rejoice to see the power of those words recited over the water so that its difference from unblessed water becomes so great." Or elsewhere, she fears appearing to defy the Church’s authority in any way: “If anyone were to see that I went against the slightest ceremony of the Church in a matter of faith, I myself knew well that I would die a thousand deaths for the faith or for any truth of Sacred Scripture” (234-35). Examples like these, along with her devotion to her confessors and the judgments that they give to her tends to make it seem as though Teresa truly is committed to the (male authority of the) Church and to the symbolic order it seems to perpetuate – by making her translate her experiences into textual form as a defense of her actions.
And yet, alongside such admissions of devotion to Church and confessors’ commands, Teresa describes her experiences that directly connect her with God, outside of language or even direct sensory perception. She is reflecting upon her unworthiness of favor from God and on her lack of understanding, and writes,
While I was reflecting on this, a great impulse came upon me without my understanding the reason. It seemed my soul wanted to leave my body because it didn’t fit there nor could it wait for so great a good. The impulse was so extreme I couldn’t help myself, and it was, in my opinion, different from previous impulses; nor did my soul know what had happened, nor what it wanted, so stirred up was it. Although I was seated, I tried to lean against the wall because my natural power was completely gone. (281)
After this experience that she has such a difficult time translating into words, she describes how she was “stunned” into a state of sensory deprivation: “I neither heard nor saw, so to speak, but experienced wonderful interior joy” (282).
So, on one hand, she has this obedience to the Church and (as I would read it) the symbolic order that places the confessors and Church officials over her. On the other, she has these experiences that firmly place her outside of the symbolic, as perceiving not through senses or intellect but through the soul. In this second kind of experience, I’m thinking that she occupies the position of the “not-all” as Reinhard uses it. He discusses how “The not-all [. . .] operates at the level of the real, rather than the symbolic, as the impossibility of saying something or, better, the impossibility of writing (that is, formalizing) the sexual relationship” (59). I understand this to relate to our discussion where we worked through how the feminine position can, at times, step outside of the symbolic order or, at least, can refuse to comply with it entirely. In her experiences with rapture and direct communication with God, it seems that Teresa steps outside of the symbolic order and is able to receive communication without reliance on words or symbols as she is when she talks with her confessors or other religious people. This version of God does, then, really seem to fit with the idea of sovereign prime that Patty and Evelyn discuss below.
So, and here’s where I really am trying to understand the situation, it seems that she is alternating in her position between the feminine in thrall to the phallus and the feminine in discord with it. And what I’m wondering is if this alternation is necessarily contradictory. Does she undercut her devotion to Church with her experiences and greater knowledge from God? Or is it necessary that the feminine position be in a difficult space of moving back and forth, toward and away from the symbolic order? Could we even understand this oscillation as the connection between the separate pulls of sovereign and neighbor? It would seem impossible for her to get entirely outside of this connection with the Church, even as she recognizes that her confessors give her bad advice and tell her to act against God’s will, as he has revealed it to her.
This has turned out much longer than I intended, but I’m hoping that others might have thoughts on what this moving back and forth may reveal in terms of neighbor love.
Wow. What a cogently written, and brilliant post! This is a great question for us to consider in class--I'm particularly taken by the way this situates the feminine position in a kind of doubled space--both inside and outside the symbolic order. In this regard it is very much worth considering the degree to which one might, in fact, WANT to be located inside the symbolic order--that is, to be intelligible, to have access to language, to be positioned so as to be relevant to culture.
ReplyDeleteWhat I really appreciate about your way of thinking here, Beth, is the degree to which it makes clear that the position of Not-All is linked to the position of the Both-And.
Thanks for getting us started!
Perhaps we're all sick of this terminology, but could we call this the "feminine prime"? I think what Beth said is a really excellent depiction of what's going on in Teresa's text as she seems to be loyal to the church but also in relationship to this God who's above and beyond the church. The oscillation seems to recognize some level of fealty to the church--some sort of need for there to be an authority, a requirement to submit to the "sovereign"--but also the fact that there's a "sovereign prime" who's outside that order. It seems to me that this complicates the position of the "boy band" who might argue that any loyalty to the sovereign whatsoever is necessarily "wrong"? Perhaps I'm misreading them, so feel free to correct that interpretation!
ReplyDeleteJust quickly: I actually don't think we need the notion of the "feminine prime," because of the notion of the feminine as (already) the Not-All. What I would say is that this oscillation, as Evelyn nicely puts it, helps us gloss the "both/and" nature of the Not-All.
ReplyDelete