Sexuality

Abstract

How should we interpret Teresa of Avila’s (1515–82) visceral description of being pierced by an angel’s arrow? “In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to 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. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.” Punctured, consumed by love, moaning with a sweet pain, oblivious to all other sensations, Teresa insists that readers attend to her physical pleasure. This is the moment of ecstasy captured in Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa, which portrays her swooning under an angel, her hand splayed out to the side, a bare foot flung out from beneath her robes, her face twisted upward with her mouth falling open, her eyelids half-closed, and her pupils rolled back. The twentieth-century psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, bluntly proclaims that we’re looking at an orgasmic woman (“she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it”). This is a conclusion many modern readers find inescapable, if also somehow unseemly. “It got embarrassing,” a student of mine recently confessed after reading this passage, “as soon as she started moaning.” This embarrassment implies two things: that there is something sexual about this saint and that a saint’s sexuality makes us uncomfortable. It should also convey that our understanding of sexuality does not match Teresa’s. Note that Teresa presented this experience as painful and pleasurable but not shameful. Although Teresa lived in a time of rampant fears about women’s sexual susceptibility and several of her contemporaries who claimed divine inspiration were indicted for licentious behavior, the authorities who carefully vetted Teresa’s visions and writings did not object to or excise this one.

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