Julia Kristeva’s vigorous, rambling Teresa, My Love is a very personal reaction to the life and writings of Teresa of Avila. Kristeva, a noted feminist cultural theorist, doesn’t share St. Teresa’s faith. Still, she gets to the heart of Teresa’s mysticism in this quotation:
“After the dialogical Socrates, before the doubting Montaigne and the cogitating Descartes, this woman had the idea— a biblical idea? baroque? psychoanalytical?—to invent a self-knowledge that can only be realized on condition of an inherent duplication: ‘you in me’ and ‘me in you.’ Her castle is interior inasmuch as it is infiltrated by the exterior Other, irreducible and yet included, body and soul; sensible and signifiable. This double knowing is a long way, too, from Rimbaud’s ‘illumination’ (‘I is another), and more an intuition of something close to Freudian transference: a clarified passion for seeking a self that is grounded in the bond with another, inevitably poignant and definitively jubilant. Does Teresa posit this ‘third kind of knowledge’ in muffled resonance with Spinoza the Marrano? Maybe, but from there to celebrating her as a scholar in theology was quite a step—one finally taken in 1970, in the aftermath of Vatican Council II, almost five centuries after she was born. Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena were proclaimed by Pope Paul VI the first women ‘Doctors of the Universal Church.’”
Kristeva is able to capture some of the reasons theologians are devoting theological attention to mystics these days.
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