Deeper Than the Entrails is That Great Love! A Phenomenological Approach to ‘Spiritual Sensuality’ in Teresa of Ávila
2011; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00703.x
ISSN1468-2265
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoThe Heythrop JournalVolume 55, Issue 2 p. 216-229 ARTICLE Deeper Than the Entrails is That Great Love! A Phenomenological Approach to ‘Spiritual Sensuality’ in Teresa of Ávila Michelle Rebidoux, Michelle Rebidoux Memorial University, Newfoundland, CanadaSearch for more papers by this author Michelle Rebidoux, Michelle Rebidoux Memorial University, Newfoundland, CanadaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 September 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00703.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Notes 1 The Catholic Church has afforded the honour to Teresa of Ávila (1970), Catherine of Siena (1970), and Thérèse de Lisieux (1997); the Anglican Church recognizes only the first two as Doctors. 2 Ecstasy of St. Teresa , 1647–1652, by Gianlorenzo Bernini, Cornaro chapel, Santa Maria Della Vittoria church in Rome. 3 St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle (trans. E. Allison Peers). Dover Publications, Inc., 1946, p. 94. 4 St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle (trans. E. Allison Peers). Dover Publications, Inc., 1946 p. 141. 5 As quoted in Georgios I. Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man: Saint Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition (trans. Liadain Sherrard). St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984, p. 100. 6 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience , in which the 16th and 17th lectures deal with mysticism and mystical experience. He begins these lectures by identifying four main characteristics of mystical states: that they are ineffable, that they have a noetic quality to them, that they are transient, and that they are characterized by the passivity of the mystic undergoing the experience. 7 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness (trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky). Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 231. 8 Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991. 9 Phénoménology et théologie (co-authors Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Paul Ricoeur). Paris: Criterion, 1992. 10 New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. – The volume is divided into two parts. Part I comprises the English translation of (with translator Bernard G. Prusak's introduction to) Janicaud's work, entitled The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. Part II comprises the collective response to Janicaud, Phenomenology and Theology, consisting of individual articles by Ricoeur, Chrétien, Marion, and Henry, an introduction by Courtine, and a preface by the translator of Part II, Jeffrey L. Kosky. 11 Marion, ‘ The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, p. 177. The quotation is taken by Marion from Husserl's Ideen I, §24, Hua. III, p. 52. Translation slightly modified. 12 Marion, ‘ The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, footnote, p. 185. The quotation is taken by Marion from Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, V, §2 (ed. Niemeyer). Tübingen, 1901, p. 349. 13 Marion, ‘ The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, p. 186. 14 See Marion's Being Given, §23, which elaborates in more detail the argument begun in direct response to Janicaud in Marion's essay ‘ The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, pp. 176–216. 15 Marion, Being Given, p. 226. 16 Marion, Being Given p. 227. Italics are mine. 17 Marion, Being Given p. 227. 18 Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (trans. Thomas A. Carlson). Northwestern University Press, 1998. – French original: Réduction et donation: recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. 19 Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky). Stanford University Press, 2002. – French original: Étant donné: Essai d'une phénoménologie de la donation. Presse Universitaires de France, 1997. 20 Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud). Fordham University Press, 2002. – French original: De Surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. 21 Marion, Being Given, p. 229. 22 See Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (trans. Douglas Brick). Stanford University Press, 1993. – Henry distinguishes between what he calls ‘beginning’ and ‘constituted’ Cartesianism. The latter Henry charges with promoting as its basic insight the idea that ‘I represent myself, therefore I am’, the (immaterial) ego supposedly being shown as such in an ekstatic light. This, of course, is the Descartes which Heidegger, too, critiques. But actually, Henry takes Heidegger to task for reading him exclusively in this way. For Henry argues that, in fact, rather a different Descartes – the one of ‘beginning Cartesianism’ – is the more essential thinker to be encountered, one which privileges seeming over seeing (videor over videre), and confesses (rather than representing), in the pure stuff, as it were, of self-seeming, ‘a primal upwelling of phenomenality’ (p. 26), ‘the mute immanence of its first being-to-self, in the affectivity of pure self-sensing’ (p. 33). 23 Marion, In Excess, pp. 100–101. 24 Marion, In Excess, p. 100. 25 Marion, In Excess p. 102. 26 Marion, In Excess, p. 102. Marion's reference for the quote is: Descartes, À Elizabeth , June 28, 1643, AT III, p. 692, 4. 27 For that matter, Marion, too, in places, meditates on Christ as a figure of the icon (see Being Given, §24), as well as on the phenomenon of birth (see Marion, ‘ The Final Appeal of the Subject’, in Deconstructive Subjectivities (eds. Simon Critchley and Peter Dews). State University of New York Press, 1996. 28 ‘For she saw plainly that it was a great help to her to be habitually thinking of God wherever she went and to be taking such care to do nothing which would displease Him because she felt that He was always looking at her.’ Interior Castle, p. 128. 29 Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (trans. Annette Aronowicz). Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 167. 30 I have often thought that the philosophical and even spiritual desire to accomplish oneself in one's ground is the ultimate form of concupiscence of the flesh. The would-be mystic, for example, on his meditative journey ‘inward’ – that is, on the first stage of the spiritual path of purgation, before supernatural illumination begins to dawn (i.e. before the flesh is pierced by the gaze of the icon) – does not so much overcome the concupiscence of his flesh (although he withdraws his attention from the world) as turn that concupiscence inward, towards an ‘interior absolute’ which would ‘forgive’ the flesh its (sinful) finitude. But as an interior absolute which ‘appears’ not by way of an illumination from an ‘Other’ as much as by the flesh's own negation of its finitude and through its intentional positing of an ideal, it is still an idol – only now bedazzling by its absence alone, a sort of black sun, perhaps even an ‘anti-Christ’. Translated into Buddhist terms, one could equally say that such an interior grasping is the ultimate expression of tanha (‘thirst’, or ‘anxious grasping’) which, even though attempting (paradoxically) to achieve nirvana (‘extinguishing’), does so by trying to grasp after it and possess it as though it were a constituteable and masterable object of some ultimate sort – as though, one might say, it consisted in the accomplishment of an eternal permanent self with svabhava (‘own-being’), rather than in the extinguishing of individual selfhood and in the realization of sunyata (the ‘emptiness’ of Being). It is not for nothing that there have been penetrating inter-faith insights between Christians and Buddhists phenomenologically comparing the Buddhist concept of sunyata with the Christian concept of Christ's kenosis (‘self-empyting’) in the crucifixion, and in the Christian command to ‘take up the cross’ and follow Christ in that self-emptying. See especially Masao Abe, ‘ Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata’, in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (eds. John B. Cobb and Christopher Ives). Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005. The volume includes also a number of excellent responses to Abe's analysis from both Christian and Jewish perspectives. 31 Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, p. 14. 32 Exodus 3:14; also, Jesus’ ‘I am’ sayings in John's Gospel. 33 See Martin Buber, I and Thou (trans. Ronald Gregor Smith). Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958. 34 See Marion, ‘ The Final Appeal of the Subject’, in Deconstructive Subjectivities. – The quote is taken from Augustine's Confessions (II, 6, 11): ‘But You were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element in me.’ – Marion himself, though, is ultimately far more phenomenologically rigorous in his own discussion of the call than in my application of the call's personalizing influence to Teresa's experience – which never ceases to be grounded in theological faith – as well as more rigorous, for that matter, than Levinas in his thinking on the face. For Marion, the truly interesting thing about the call – the ‘pure call’, as he names it – is that, since it comes, in its ‘otherness’ of modality, from ‘outside’ the realm of (constituteable) Being, it therefore does not, in its strictest purity, insist upon a response to that call within Being. The self, in other words, existentially speaking, does not have to be (and, therefore, can have no binding responsibility). The solipsistic self-as-flesh, heretofore crushed upon itself in the third degree of saturation, is, when penetrated by the pure call of the icon, rendered as radically absolved from Being (and not just beings), and thus it is absolved, too, from its own being – without yet ceasing to appear. For this reason, the experience of the call, for Marion, takes place in a radical intimacy, and yet the ‘Source’ of the call cannot be named within Being. Marion writes: ‘Who or what claims the interloqué [i.e. the one called, or “interlocuted”]? If we mention here God, the other, moral conscience, auto-affection, figures of difference, Being itself, etc., this only enables us to name the difficulty, not to solve it: as a matter of fact the interloqué would become in all cases a derivative and regional agency …’ Marion, ‘L'Interloqué’ , in Who Comes After the Subject? (eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy). Routledge, 1991, p. 244. 35 One might usefully think here of the work of Michel Henry on the extended body, related to the self which is given to itself in the flesh in a sort of ‘double revelation’ or double givenness. The self, in its livingness, receives itself in its pure passivity in the givenness of itself to itself in the flesh. The self is always given to itself first as a ‘me’, in an upwelling of life in and as an ipseity. The second givenness, then, concerns the very possibility for this ‘me’ to be a distinct self: namely, in the appropriative structure in which it is given to itself to surpass itself in its passivity towards its self-possession as an ‘I’. Yet insofar as the very movement of surpassing is by definition an action which the self in its pure passivity cannot undertake, the givenness which reveals the possibility of such a movement must necessarily be itself also the accomplishment of it. In other words, it is given to itself to be a self, and that ‘being a self’ has already been effectively ontologically accomplished for it and given over to it. Such an appropriative accomplishment, then, constitutes the self as a centre of orientation for itself; for Henry, it is a situated self, an organic self, a self whose ‘organs’ are its appropriative powers, a self defined as capacity, as ‘I can’. In other words, a self capable of world. The spatial localization of the organic powers within the ekstatic horizon upon which it opens as that world is, then, what allows it to distinguish and to claim for itself an ‘objective’ body. That is, the organic powers find their own terminus in the objective spatiality to which they are limited by their contact with and resistance by things. In this way it distinguishes itself in its objective body from other human bodies and other objects in the ekstatic horizon, since its objective body is precisely the outermost terminus of the continuous movement and self-expression of life which begins originarily in the self's self-surpassing in its passivity by way of the appropriative structure given in the double givenness. See M. Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (trans. Girard Etzkorn). Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. 36 This is a common description in Levinas’ writing, used in many places. 37 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 108. 38 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 107. 39 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 155. 40 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 152. 41 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 152. 42 ‘… such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it …’ St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle p. 152. 43 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, pp. 153–154. 44 St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, p. 153. 45 Augustine, Confessions (XIII, 9, 10). 46 1 John 4:19. 47 Teresa quotes Paul: ‘ For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain’ [Philippians 1:21] – and comments: ‘because Christ is now its life.’ 1 John 4:19, p. 153. Citing Literature Volume55, Issue2March 2014Pages 216-229 ReferencesRelatedInformation
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