This ambiguity is flagrant in many cases—pathological or normal—where the lover is deified, where God has human traits. I will only cite this one reported by Ferdière in his work on erotomania. It is the patient who is speaking:
In 1923, I corresponded with a journalist from La Presse; every day I read his articles about morality. I read between the lines; it seemed to me that he was answering me, giving me advice; I wrote him love letters; I wrote to him a lot … In 1924, it suddenly came to me: it seemed to me that God was looking for a woman, that he was going to come and speak to me; I had the impression he had given me a mission, chosen me to found a temple; I believed myself to be the center of a big complex where doctors would take care of women … It was then that … I was transferred to the Clermont mental institution … There were young doctors who wanted to change the world: in my cabin, I felt their kisses on my fingers, I felt their sex organs in my hands; once, they told me: “You are not sensitive, but sensual; turn over”; I turned over and I felt them in me: it was very pleasant … The head doctor, Dr. D.…, was like a god; I really felt there was something when he came near my bed; he looked at me as if to say: I am all yours. He really loved me: one day, he looked at me insistently in a truly extraordinary way … his green eyes became blue as the sky; they widened intensely in an incredible way … he saw the effect that produced all the while speaking to another woman patient and he smiled … and I thus remained fixated, fixated on Dr. D.… one nail does not replace another and in spite of all my lovers (I have had fifteen or sixteen), I could not separate myself from him; that’s why he’s guilty … For more than twelve years, I have been having mental conversations with him … when I wanted to forget him, he reappeared … he was sometimes a bit mocking … “You see, I frighten you,” he said again, “you can love others, but you will always come back to me …” I often wrote him letters, even making appointments I would keep. Last year, I went to see him; he was remote; there was no warmth; I felt so silly and I left … People tell me he married another woman, but he will always love me … he is my husband, and yet the act has never taken place, the act that would make the fusion …“Abandon everything,” he sometimes says, “with me you will always rise upward, you will not be like a being of the earth.” You see: each time I look for God, I find a man; now I don’t know what religion I should turn to.*
This is a pathological case. But there is this inextricable confusion in many devotees between man and God. In particular, the confessor occupies an ambiguous place between heaven and earth. He listens with carnal ears to the penitent who bares her soul, but it is a supernatural light that shines in the gaze with which he enfolds her; he is a divine man, he is God in the appearance of a man. Mme Guyon describes her meeting with Father La Combe in these terms: “It seemed to me that an effect of grace came from him to me by the most intimate soul and returned from me to him so that he felt the same thing.” The priest’s intercession pulled her out of the drought she had been suffering from for years and inflamed her soul once again with ardor. She lived by his side during her entire great mystical period. And she admits: “There was nothing but one whole unity, so that I could no longer tell him apart from God.” It would be too simple to say she was really in love with a man and she feigned to love God: she also loved this man because he was something other than himself in her eyes. Like Ferdière’s patient, she was groping for the supreme source of values. That is what every mystic is aiming for. The male intermediary is sometimes useful for her to launch herself toward heaven’s desert; but he is not indispensable. Having difficulty separating reality from play, the act from magical behavior, the object from imagination, woman is singularly likely to presentify through her body an absence. What is much less humorous is confusing mysticism with erotomania, as has sometimes been done: the erotomaniac feels glorified by the love of a sovereign being; he is the one who takes the initiative in the love relationship, he loves more passionately than he is loved; he makes his feelings known by clear but secret signs; he is jealous and irritated by the chosen woman’s lack of fervor: he does not hesitate then to punish her; he almost never manifests himself in a carnal and concrete form. All these characteristics are found in mystics; in particular, God cherishes for all eternity the soul he inflames with his love, he shed his blood for her, he prepares splendid apotheoses for her; the only thing she can do is abandon herself to his flames without resistance.
It is accepted today that erotomania takes a sometimes platonic and sometimes sexual form. Likewise, the body has a greater or lesser role in the feelings the mystic devotes to God. Her effusions are modeled on those that earthly lovers experience. While Angela of Foligno contemplates an image of Christ holding Saint Francis in his arms, he tells her: “This is how I will hold you tight and much more than can be seen by the body’s eyes … I will never leave you if you love me.” Mme Guyon writes: “Love gave me no respite. I said to him: Oh my love, enough, leave me.” “I want the love that thrills my soul with ineffable tremors, the love that makes me swoon.” “Oh my God! If you made the most sensual of women feel what I feel, they would soon quit their false pleasures to partake of such true riches.” Saint Teresa’s vision is well-known:
In [an angel’s] hands I saw a great golden spear … This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. What I am certain of is that the pain penetrates the depths of my entrails and it seems to me that they are torn when my spiritual spouse withdraws the arrow he uses to enter them.
It is sometimes piously claimed that the poverty of language makes it necessary for the mystic to borrow this erotic vocabulary; but she also has only one body, and she borrows from earthly love not only words but also physical attitudes; she has the same behavior when offering herself to God as offering herself to a man. This, however, does not at all diminish the validity of her feelings. When Angela of Foligno becomes “pale and dry” or then “full and flushed,” according to the rhythm of her heart, when she breaks down in deluges of tears,1 when she comes back to earth, it is hardly possible to consider these phenomena as purely “spiritual”; but to explain them by her excessive “emotivity” alone is to invoke the poppy’s “sleep-inducing virtue”; the body is never the cause of subjective experiences, since it is the subject himself in his objective form: the subject experiences his attitudes in the unity of his existence. Both adversaries and admirers of mystics think that giving a sexual content to Saint Teresa’s ecstasies is to reduce her to the rank of a hysteric. But what diminishes the hysterical subject is not the fact that his body actively expresses his obsessions: it is that he is obsessed, that his freedom is subjugated and annulled; the mastery a fakir acquires over his body does not make him its slave; bodily gestures can be part of the expression of a freedom. Saint Teresa’s texts are not at all ambiguous, and they justify Bernini’s statue showing us the swooning saint in thrall to a stunning sensuality; it would be no less false to interpret her emotions as simple “sexual sublimation”; there is not first an unavowed sexual desire that takes the form of divine love; the woman in love herself is not first the prey of a desire without object that then fixes itself on an individual; it is the presence of the lover that arouses an excitement in her immediately intended to him; thus, in one movement, Saint Teresa seeks to unite with God and experiences this union in her body; she is not slave to her nerves and hormones: rather, she should be admired for the intensity of a faith that penetrates to the most intimate regions of her flesh. In truth, as Saint Teresa herself understood, the value of a mystical experience is measured not by how it has been subjectively experienced but by its objective scope. The phenomena of ecstasy are approximately the same for Saint Teresa and Marie Alacoque: the interest of their message is very different. Saint Teresa situates the dramatic problem of the relationship between the individual and the transce
ndent Being in a highly intellectual way; she lived an experience as a woman whose meaning extends beyond any sexual specification; it has to be classified along with that of Saint John of the Cross. But it is a striking exception. What her minor sisters provide is an essentially feminine vision of the world and of salvation; it is not transcendence they are aiming for: it is the redemption of their femininity.2
The woman first seeks in divine love what the woman asks for in man’s love: the apotheosis of her narcissism; this sovereign gaze fixed on her attentively and lovingly is a miraculous chance for her. Throughout her life as a girl and young woman, Mme Guyon had always been tormented by the desire to be loved and admired. A modern Protestant mystic, Mlle V’, writes: “Nothing makes me unhappier than having no one interested in me in a special and sympathetic way, in what is taking place in me.” Mme Krüdener imagined that God was constantly occupied with her, to such an extent that, says Sainte-Beuve, “in the most decisive moments with her lover she moaned: ‘My God, how happy I am! I ask you to forgive my extreme happiness!’ ” One can understand the intoxication that permeates the heart of the narcissist when all of heaven becomes her mirror; her deified image is infinite like God himself, it will never disappear; and at the same time she feels in her burning, palpitating, and love-drowned breast her soul created, redeemed, and cherished by the adoring Father; it is her double, it is she herself she is embracing, infinitely magnified by God’s mediation. These texts of Saint Angela of Foligno are particularly significant. This is how Jesus speaks to her:
My daughter, sweeter to me than I am to you, my temple, my delight. My daughter, my beloved, love me because you are very much loved by me; much more than you could love me. Your whole life, your eating, drinking, your sleeping, and all that you do are pleasing to me. I will do great things in you in the sight of the nations. Through you, I shall be known and my name will be praised by many nations. My daughter and my sweet spouse, I love you so much more than any other women.
And again:
My daughter, sweeter to me than I am to you,… my delight, the heart of God almighty is now upon your heart … God almighty has deposited much love in you, more than in any woman of this city. He takes delight in you.
And once more:
Such is the love I have for you that I am totally unable to remember your faults and my eyes no longer see them. In you I have deposited a great treasure.
The chosen woman cannot fail to respond passionately to such ardent declarations falling from such a lofty place. She tries to connect with the lover using the usual technique of the woman in love: annihilation. “I have only one concern, which is to love, to forget myself, and to annihilate myself,” writes Marie Alacoque. Ecstasy bodily mimics this abolition of self; the subject no longer sees or feels, he forgets his body, disavows it. The blinding and sovereign Presence is indirectly indicated by the intensity of this abandon, by the hopeless acceptance of passivity. Mme Guyon’s quietism erected this passivity into a system: as for her, she spent a great deal of her time in a kind of catalepsy; she slept wide awake.
Most women mystics are not satisfied with abandoning themselves passively to God: they actively apply themselves to self-annihilation by the destruction of their flesh. Of course, asceticism was also practiced by monks and brothers. But woman’s relentlessness in violating her flesh has specific characteristics. We have seen how ambiguous the woman’s attitude to her body is: it is through humiliation and suffering that she metamorphoses it into glory. Given over to a lover as a thing of pleasure, she becomes a temple, an idol; torn by the pain of childbirth, she creates heroes. The mystic will torture her flesh to have the right to claim it; reducing it to abjection, she exalts it as the instrument of her salvation. This accounts for the strange excesses of some women saints. Saint Angela of Foligno recounts her delectation in drinking the water in which she had just washed the lepers’ hands and feet:
This concoction filled us with such sweetness that joy followed us and brought it home with us. Never had I drunk with such delight. A piece of scaly skin from one of the lepers’ wounds had stuck in my throat. Rather than spitting it out, I tried very had to swallow it and I succeeded. It seemed to me that I had just received communion. Never will I be able to express the delights that flooded over me.
It is known that Marie Alacoque cleaned a sick person’s vomit with her tongue; she describes in her autobiography her happiness when she had filled her mouth with the excrement of a man with diarrhea; Jesus rewarded her by keeping her lips glued to his Sacred Heart for three hours. Devotion has a carnal coloration in countries of ardent sensuality like Italy and Spain: in a village in Abruzzo, even today women tear their tongues by licking the rocks on the ground along the stations of the cross. In all these practices they are only imitating the Redeemer, who saved flesh by the abasement of his own flesh: women show their sensitivity to this great mystery in a much more concrete way than males.
God appears to woman more readily in the figure of the husband; sometimes he reveals himself in his glory, dazzlingly white and beautiful, and dominating; he clothes her in a wedding dress, he crowns her, takes her by the hand, and promises her a celestial apotheosis. But most often he is a being of flesh: the wedding ring Jesus had given to Saint Catherine and that she wore, invisible, on her finger, was this “ring of flesh” that circumcision had cut off. Above all, he is a mistreated and bloody body: it is in the contemplation of the Crucified that she drowns herself the most fervently; she identifies with the Virgin Mary holding the corpse of her Son in her arms, or with Magdalene standing at the foot of the cross and being sprinkled with the Beloved’s blood. Thus does she satisfy her sadomasochistic fantasies. In the humiliation of God, she admires Man’s fall: inert, passive, covered with sores, the crucified is the inverted image of the white and red martyr offered to wild beasts, to the knife, to males, and with whom the little girl has so often identified: she is thrown into confusion seeing that Man, Man-God, has assumed his role. It is she who is placed on the wood, promised the splendor of the Resurrection. It is she: she proves it; her forehead bleeds under the crown of thorns; her hands, her feet, her side, are transpierced by an invisible iron. Out of the 321 people with stigmata recognized by the Catholic Church, only 47 are men; the others—including Helen of Hungary, Joan of the Cross, G. van Oosten, Osanna of Mantua, and Clare of Montefalco—are women, who are, on average, past the age of menopause. Catherine Emmerich, the most famous, was marked prematurely. At the age of twenty-four, having desired the sufferings of the crown of thorns, she saw coming toward her a dazzling young man who pushed this crown onto her head. The next day, her temples and forehead swelled and blood began to flow. Four years later, in ecstasy, she saw Christ with rays pointed like fine blades coming from his wounds, and drops of blood then sprang from the saint’s hands, feet, and side. She sweated blood, she spat blood. Still today, every Good Friday, Therese Neumann turns a face dripping with Christ’s blood toward her visitors. The mysterious alchemy that changes flesh into glory ends in the stigmata since, in the form of a bloody pain, they are the presence of divine love itself. It is quite understandable why women particularly are attached to the metamorphosis of the red flow into pure golden flame. They have a horror of this blood that runs out of the side of the King of men. Saint Catherine of Siena speaks of it in almost all her letters. Angela of Foligno lost herself in the contemplation of the heart of Jesus and the gaping wound in his side. Catherine Emmerich put on a red shirt so as to resemble Jesus when he was like “a cloth soaked in blood”; she saw all things “through Jesus’s blood.” We have seen in which circumstances Marie Alacoque quenched her thirst for three hours from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was she who offered the enormous red clot surrounded by flamboyant darts of love to the adoration of the faithful. That is the emblem symbolizing the great feminine dream: from blood to glory through love.
Ecstasies, visions, and dialogues with God, this interior experience is sufficient for some women. Others feel the need
to communicate it to the world through acts. The connection between action and contemplation takes two very different forms. There are women of action like Saint Catherine, Saint Teresa, and Joan of Arc who are well aware of the goals they set themselves and who lucidly invent the means to reach them: their revelations merely give an objective form to their certainties; they encourage them to take the paths they have carefully planned. There are women narcissists like Mme Guyon and Mme Krüdener who, at the limit of silent fervor, feel suddenly “in an apostolic state.”3 They are not very precise concerning their tasks; and—like patronesses seeking excitement—they do not care too much what they do as long as it is something. Thus after displaying herself as ambassador and novelist, Mme Krüdener interiorized the conception she had of her own worth: it was not to see definite ideas triumph but to see herself confirmed in her role as God’s inspired one that she took the destiny of Alexander I in hand. If a little beauty and intelligence are often enough for a woman to feel endowed with a holy character, it is even more so when she knows she is God’s chosen; she feels filled with a mission: she preaches dubious doctrines, she eagerly founds sects, and this allows her to effectuate, through the members of the group she inspires, a thrilling multiplication of her personality.