Love in Heaven and on Earth:

St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross (Part One)

The Art and Poetry of St. John of the Cross

Until the age of about thirty, the great Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) was a painfully introverted man of few words.  Yet Fray Juan (Friar Juan), as he was known during his lifetime, was to become a great artist able to depict the world from the perspective of others in a totally persuasively and deeply moving way. 

A famous example is the vision that granted him access to the perspective of God himself, which he then depicted in this drawing:

Source: Wikicommons

Without any hint other than our visual perspective, we sense God’s anguished predicament as a loving father looking down on his suffering son Jesus Christ in agony on the cross.  Four centuries later, Fray Juan’s act of sympathetic imagination inspired this famous painting by Salvador Dalí:

© CIC CSG Glasgow Museums Collection

Juan Yepes y Álvarez was born in 1540 in the Castilian town of Fontiveros into a Converso (Convert) family. This meant young Juan was ethnically Jewish in a deeply anti-Semitic time and place.  His wealthy and influential family had been forced to convert to Catholicism generations earlier. 

Perhaps the account of the Offering of Isaac in the Hebrew Tanakh (the Old Testament), in which the anguished father Abraham is prepared to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac on an altar, had special resonance for Fray Juan.  Fray Juan’s father was disinherited by the Yepes y Álvarez family before Juan’s birth, however, and it will never be known how much Fray Juan’s Converso origins influenced his sensibility or religious outlook.

Certainly his gift for sympathetic imagination confounds any simple explanation. Fray Juan’s drive to fuse truth and beauty was also expressed by writing poetry.  The ten poems he wrote in middle age are considered classics of mysticism, and are also the greatest lyric poems in the Spanish language.

The word “mystic” means “secret” or “hidden”, but its accidental association in English with the words “mist” and “misty” suggests a vague and nebulous human experience—and there is nothing vague or nebulous about the sensual details in Fray Juan’s poetry, about his convincing depiction of a woman’s perspective, or about his theme of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman as the model for the human relationship with God.

The Erotics of Mystical Poetry

Mystical erotic poetry has been a Judeo-Christian tradition since the Bronze Age wedding hymn “Song of Solomon” in the Old Testament.  The first two poems Fray Juan wrote were “El Cántico Espiritual” (The Spiritual Hymn) and “En una Noche Oscura” (On a Dark Night).  The poems are not difficult to translate into English, but doing so hides their mystical truth, which is that Fray Juan’s perspective is the woman making love with God who appears to her in the form of a man.

This is my translation of a stanza from his great poem “The Spiritual Hymn”:

He embraced me to his chest,
There he taught me the sweetest knowledge,
And I gave myself to him
Completely, holding back nothing,
And there I promised to be his wife.

Photo 53044864 / Lovers © Nadezhda Chizhova | Dreamstime.com

These stanzas from his next greatest poem “On a Dark Night” are full of suggestive details about as explicit as any poet, subject or not to the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition, would have dared to be:

On my flushed chest,
Reserved only for him,
There he lingered sleeping
And I caressed him,
As the cedars breathed their fragrance on us.

The breezes around the tower
Scatter the hair of my beloved,
While with a serene hand
He wounds my throat
And my senses are suspended.

If it ever was, it’s certainly no longer obvious why a celibate man in his mid-thirties imagined himself as a woman having sexual intercourse (or performing fellatio?) with her male lover.  And yet Fray Juan was a deeply religious man (who became a saint, after all), and he himself made the highest claims for his poetry:  he was convinced his verses revealed ultimate truths about the path a human being must follow on the way to union with God.

Extended passages in the “Song of Solomon” are also written in the voice of the Bride.  Was Fray Juan simply inspired by the “Song of Solomon”, just as he was inspired by his vision to draw the crucifixion from God’s perspective?  His poems, according to Fray Juan himself, are mystical allegories for ascetic religious practices involving many austerities and penances, including self-flagellation, a near-starvation diet, voluntary exposure to cold and heat, and sleep deprivation.

Today, it’s hard not to wonder whether the religious interpretation was simply a disguise for something else, and more skeptical explanations appear easily in our minds.  Were his poems an excuse for Fray Juan to write libidinous poetry, similar to the way European religious art functioned for centuries as an opportunity to create and enjoy attractive representations of the nude?

Was Fray Juan, like two of his greatest Spanish admirers, the poet Federico García Lorca and the painter Salvador Dalí (who were lovers during their university days) also gay?  Did he strategically write poetry in a woman’s voice to channel into an acceptable form emotions and behaviour that were severely punished in his day?  Beginning in 1540—two years before Fray Juan was born—and 1700, more than 1,600 people were prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition for sodomy and were subject to being stoned, castrated, hanged or burned.

It’s possible to attempt to discern Fray Juan’s intentions in deeply religious 16^th century Spain by applying the perspective of our post-modern secular age.  Gender is increasingly asserted to be a free-floating construct of a person’s consciousness not anchored to the physical sexed body.  In the sense that our gender is an immaterial avatar of our most private self-conception, the concept of gender might be a proxy for what Fray Juan would have understood as his own “soul”. 

Given the intensity with which Fray Juan imaginatively inhabited an explicitly sexualized feminine body and consciousness, could it be that Fray Juan was poetically depicting his experience of proto-gender dysphoria, and that St. John of the Cross deserves to be recognized, at last, as the patron saint of trans people?

The deepest mystery with which we must come to terms is how Fray Juan’s erotic depictions of spiritual love between human and God appeared at all in the midst of deeply repressive, fanatically Roman Catholic 16^th century Spain.  

The brief Spanish Renaissance was waning when Fray Juan was born, and by the time he came of age, expressions of sexuality were under permanent suspicion by the Spanish Inquisition and subjected to being heavily surveilled, censored—and punished, if the Spanish Inquisition was able to detect any hint of heresy. 

Understanding how Fray Juan’s joyous, sensual and erotic vision of human – divine love appeared in this forbidding religious and cultural context will open the door to fully appreciating the genius of Fray Juan and his celebration of beautiful truths.

St. Teresa of Avila

The mystical vision of sexuality as the model for the relationship between humans and God is a common symbol in world religions and is much older than the Bronze Age wedding hymn “Song of Solomon.”  It seems to be a recurring, universal human insight.  And yet, even though we now live in a time when “Love is love”, the relationship between sexuality and religion remains a continuing challenge in many, if not most, people’s lives.

Religion often creates a direct conflict with the expression of human sexuality.  In Fray Juan’s time, when religion was the foundation of society and backed by the enforcement apparatus of the Spanish Inquisition, squelching or disguising one’s sexuality was the prudent choice.  Religion and sexuality both reflect dynamic, constantly surprising aspects of human nature, and their relationship is inherently unpredictable.  Fray Juan disciplined his own sexuality by squelching it under severe penances for the first twenty years of his career as a monk, before he met St. Teresa de Avila—and five years later he was writing great erotic poetry from the perspective of a woman!

St. Teresa of Avila, or Teresa de Jesus as she was known in her lifetime, is one of the greatest examples of the power of sexual and erotic energy to transform an individual’s life. It was the bold genius of Teresa de Jesus, who was Fray Juan’s mentor and champion, and her indefatigable struggle to reconcile the two great passions of her life—religion and sexuality—that showed her how to transcend the intractable conflict so many people experience even today between religion and sexuality, and to achieve a luminous synthesis in her own personal life. 

Without the monumental achievement of Teresa de Jesus, which required exceptional courage, intellectual genius and sincere religious commitment, Fray Juan would almost certainly have remained a reclusive, introverted friar secluded in his monastic cell.  In a sense, Teresa de Jesus invented Fray Juan.  It was the erotic spirituality of Teresa de Jesus which probably inspired Fray Juan’s poetry—and certainly made it possible.

L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (“The Ecstasy of St. Teresa”)

I first encountered St. Teresa of Avila as a college Freshman in art history class when I studied Bernini’s sculpture “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa”.  Our professor was discussing the Baroque period, and he didn’t make it clear that Bernini created his statue in the sensual Italy of the High Baroque, a century after St. Teresa’s life time.  I had no idea St. Teresa had actually expressed her spirituality in an austere and authoritarian Spain profoundly hostile to her experiences:

Source: Fine Art America

Without understanding the shift in time and place between the circumstances in which Teresa de Jesus experienced her ecstatic vision—and wrote about it—and the sophisticated, tolerant atmosphere in which Bernini created his statue, we have no way of understanding the extraordinary threats that surrounded Teresa de Jesus while she wrote about her intense mystical experiences.

Source: Russian Art and Culture

As a college student the erotic charge animating St. Teresa’s religious ecstasy in Bernini’s statue was very apparent to me, and I imagined that the people of St. Teresa’s time were so dim and stunted by their religion that they were unaware of the sensual and erotic details so obvious to me at eighteen.  What a self-important young fool I was! In fact, the Spanish Inquisition was all too aware of every one of these elements, and for decades had been ruthlessly arresting, torturing and burning to death lay people for believing that sexual love was a celebration of God’s creative power and his love for humanity. 

About the time Teresa de Jesus became a nun, the Spanish Inquisition arrested a woman named María de Cazalla, another Converso, and accused her of saying “she was closer to God having sex with her husband than if she had been performing the most high-minded prayer in the world.”  She was lucky to be released after several years in prison and only fined, instead of being burned at the stake.

People who know what little they do about St. Teresa from Bernini’s statue, are highly unlikely to know that Teresa de Jesus, like Fray Juan, was born into an ethnically Jewish family and was therefore a special target of the Spanish Inquisition. In the classical Greek sense the word eros refers to the powerful energy that motivates humans to distinguish themselves by acts of exceptional achievement, including great bravery and self-sacrifice.

Bernini’s statue expresses only one aspect of the erotic energy of Teresa de Jesus. While viewing it we assume she was behaving in a manner socially approved by the religious society of her day.  Nothing could be further from the truth. What we miss is the heroic, self-sacrificing quality of erotic energy that Teresa de Jesus exemplifies.

It was a miracle Teresa de Jesus survived the consequences of writing a passage like this:

“I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form . . . . He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful--his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim . . . . I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God . . . . During the days that this lasted, I went about as if beside myself. I wished to see, or speak with, no one, but only to cherish my pain, which was to me a greater bliss than all created things could give me.”

— The Autobiography of St. Teresa Of Avila (Annotated) by Teresa of Ávila

https://a.co/hl66ynG

Teresa de Jesus experienced this famous vision, which in the words of one of her biographers was “almost comically sexual” on a number of occasions during the middle period of her spiritual evolution. From the perspective of her subsequent spiritual maturity, this period during which she experienced these visions and ecstasies was still a spiritual transition from her originally guilt-burdened and fear-driven motivations for entering the convent to the incandescent spiritual life through which she was to introduce her luminous theology of love to the world.

Few of us who have wrestled with the painfully conflicting demands of religion and sexuality have achieved the tumultuous, unrelenting commitment Teresa de Jesus applied to her own struggle for decades. She was never a detached, other-worldly figure—that’s one aspect of her personality Bernini gets right. Erotic energy was the engine that powered Teresa de Jesus’s life and career from her earliest beginnings as a novice nun to the full maturity she expressed in The Interior Castle, which she wrote at age 62, less than five years before her death.

The St. Teresa of Avila brand (in the simplified and instantly recognizable modern sense) is defined by ‘L'Estasi di Santa Teresa” and by her fascinating Autobiography, in which she recorded the vision immortalized by Bernini and many other dramatic religious visions, trances and ecstasies she experienced during this middle period of her spiritual evolution, when she had just broken through decades of dry, perfunctory Roman Catholic religious observance to her sensational new level of personal union with the divine.

Teresa’s Autobiography is the second most-read Spanish prose classic after Don Quixote. Both masterpieces are obsessed with the relationship between truth and delusion, which also happened to be the focus of the terrifying surveillance apparatus and torture and execution procedures of the Spanish Inquisition.  Teresa, in fact, wrote her Autobiography at the command of the Inquisition, and she was acutely aware she was playing with her life as she wrote every sentence.

If we move from “logo” to “Logos”, as it were, and sincerely engage with the mature fruit of Teresa de Jesus’s irrepressible erotic energy fused with her passionate spirituality, we will be led to her greatest achievement, The Interior Castle, where both impulses are sublimated and distilled to their harmonious essence in her theology of love.

By doing so, we may not evolve as dramatically as Fray Juan did—from introverted recluse to poetic genius—but we will certainly find many extraordinary riches, and much to be inspired by, in the spiritual heroism of Teresa de Jesus.

Next week in Part Two we will discuss the spiritual journey of Teresa de Jesus and her wonderful theology of love.