continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:
People argue even today about Teresa of Avila and whether her ecstasies, which she enjoyed five centuries ago, were of a truly divine nature or if they were simply the mistaken result of transposed sexuality. But must it necessarily be so clear cut? Couldn’t her ecstasies have involved something of both spheres?
There is no reason to my mind why a spiritual transport should not be venereal too, and vice versa. If that were allowed then perhaps these high ecstasies, which are so troublesome to fit within the categories we have devised, might be rendered a little more understandable. Rather than polarize the religious impulse and the erotic urge, surely we should be allowed to have both, and at the same time.
Many have been quick to dismiss Teresa’s ecstasies as being “merely” misunderstood sexual orgasms; but even assuming that they were orgasms, they were plainly not just any old orgasms. When Teresa says that “a great force, for which I can find no comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet”, or that “the soul is utterly blinded, absorbed, amazed, and dazzled by the wonders that it sees”, then those are momentous things to report, regardless of what really brought them on. Until Teresa’s detractors have themselves achieved orgasms of comparable magnitude they are really in no position to say anything. Teresa has the high ground with her superior experiences and may feel entitled to call them whatever she wants.
But in actual fact, Teresa, in her own writings, placed increasingly little value on the raptures and ecstatic transports she received. Like her friend St. John of the Cross, she repeatedly stressed that the “spiritual consolations” were really only peripheral to the central business of obedience to god, that the receipt of such favours was not to be taken as any sort of index of holiness, and that they could even be spiritually harmful if handled wrongly.
This, though, is where I part company with Teresa. Reading her ‘Life’ was, for me, unashamedly a case of wading through the good Christian teachings to get to the exciting rapturous bits. I regard those as being her most valuable pages, pertinent for believers and non-believers alike (believers in god, in obedience, in ecstasy, in excess…) Teresa does say some very interesting things in playing down the importance of her ecstasies; but there seems little doubt to me as to what her greatest achievements were, and Bernini did not misrepresent her when he sculpted that notoriously sensualized statue in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
