Marie Martin (1873-1897),
known to the world as the Carmelite nun, Thérèse of Lisieux as well as Thérèse
of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was a mystic who centered her devotional
love on Jesus. Pope Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times”[1]
and Pope John Paul Il made her a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless,
it is worth investigating whether her devotional love sublimated (i.e., looking
upward) with Jesus as the object of the love was in fact humble, and thus more
like divine than human love. Although psychological analyses of Thérèse exist
in the secondary literature on her, we can both acknowledge her psychological
challenges and put psychological couch aside as it is exogenous to the domain
of religion, which has its own criteria; I will focus on and critique from a
religious standpoing the distinctly religious meaning that Thérèse
continues to provide in the West during the twenty-first century even though the
wider secular culture in the West saturates modernity under the supervision of
the tall, steel, and bewindowed edifices to wealth and worldly power.
Although her mother’s death
when Thérèse was four was deeply felt by the little girl, and she may have suffered
from mental illness at least as a child, the religious meaning that can be
grasped from her mystical devotion to Jesus is nonetheless valid in
religious terms. This is not to say that the trauma of losing her mother
did not leave an imprint on her religious faith. She wrote, for example, of a
dream in which she sees the “glance and smile [which are] FILLED with LOVE” of Venerable
Anne of Jesus, the Foundress of Carmel in France, whom Thérèse refers to as
“Mother” both in the dream and in writing about it later.[2]
Thérèse also refers to the Church as “my Mother.”[3]
The other side of the mother-equation is of course the child. Writing to her
Prioress at the convent, Thérèse states, “I am acting with you as a child
because you do not act with me as a Prioress but a Mother.”[4]
The instinctual need for a mother was doubtlessly very much in play. The
mother-daughter leitmotif is also salient in the following: “You have told me,
my dear Mother, of your desire that I . . . . I began this sweet song
with your dear daughter, Agnes of Jesus, who was the mother
entrusted by God with guiding me in the days of my childhood.”[5]
Thérèse is not referring to her literal childhood, even though she entered the
convent when she was a teenager; rather, she has sublimated from her unmet
psychological need to describing and inhabiting a spiritual relation
that is a microcosm of the relationship between a creature, such as Man, and
the Creator, which is God. Thérèse refers to heaven in the dream being “peopled
with souls who actually love me, who consider me their child.”[6]
She obviously did not mean this in the sense of being a corporeal daughter. She
also wrote, “O Blessed Inhabitants of heaven, I beg you to ADOPT ME AS YOUR
CHILD.”[7]
That she uses capital letters to highlight being adopted spiritually as a child
in heaven leaves no doubt both as to the salience of the child motif in her
mind, and of the distinctly spiritual meaning that she applied to the word.
Rather than psychoanalyze the
young adult who lost her mother so early, I want to draw on her book to explore the unique
connotations that the child motif has in Christianity, which is in opposition to the values in the earthly city. “The heart of a child does not seek
riches and glory (even the glory of heaven),” she wrote.[8] To be sure, her focus in applying the child motif was not on differentiating Augustine’s
two cities. Rather, she was describing what a creature is like relative to God. Distinctively and valid religious meaning is possible even amid disturbing psychological issues; the former is not invalidated by the presence of the latter. “I
am only a child, powerless and weak,” she wrote.[9]
Elsewhere in her text, she highlights that she is a “poor little weak creature.”[10]
This is of course relative to God. From creatures being little and weak,
Christianity goes on to postulate certain qualities. On July 17, 1897, Thérèse
wrote, “I feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission to make God loved
as I love Him, to teach souls my little way.”[11]
Of that way, she adds, “It is the way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust
and absolute surrender.”[12]
There is a certain innocence and willingness to trust in a childlike nature
that is innately suited to entering the Kingdom of God. Writing of children
whom she had known, Thérèse refers to “the souls of little children” as
already having “the theological virtues” and being “innocent.”[13]
Speaking on Thérèse in 1921,
Pope Benedict XV said, “In spiritual childhood is the secret of sanctity for
all the faithful of the Catholic world” so as to “enter wholeheartedly into the
Little Way which led Sister Thérèse to the summit of heroic virtue.”[14]
The pope made reference to the Christian scriptures, such as in the Gospel of
Matthew (18:3-4), where Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, unless you be
converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom
of heaven. Whoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, will
be greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” In the Gospel of Mark (10:14-5), Jesus
says, “Allow the little ones to come to me and forbid them not, for such is the
kingdom of heaven. Amen, I say to you, whoever shall not receive the kingdom of
God as a little child shall never enter into it.”[15]
In teaching her “little way,” however, Thérèse had drawn instead on text from
the Old Testament, including, “Whoever is a little one, let him come to me”
(Proverbs 9:4), “For to him that is little, mercy will be shown” (Wisdom 6:7),
and “As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried
at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall fondle you” (Isaiah 66:12-3).[16]
Thérèse did not mean childhood
in the sense of being selfish and not assuming responsibility. It is in this sordid
sense that Thérèse wrote, “It was December 25, 1886, that I received the grace
of leaving my childhood, in a word, the grace of my complete conversion”
because “Jesus desired to show me that I was to give up the defects of my
childhood and so He withdrew my innocent pleasures.”[17]
Referring to one such defect, she wrote, “My excuse is that I am a child,
and children do not reflect on the meaning of their words.”[18]
Paradoxically, Jesus made her as like a child in another way: “I felt charity
enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others,”
she later wrote.[19]
Rather than selfish childishness, losing oneself in pleasing others—in Thérèse’s
case, converting grave sinners—rendered her anew as a child of God. From
selfishness to losing oneself is not, however, something I would associate with
children. Moreover, although pleasing others is better than selfishness, the
distinctly theological love (i.e., agape) that Jesus exemplifies (and
ultimately is) can hardly be characterized as people-pleasing.
Thérèse applied the positive
qualities of a child to denote her inferiority in her love-relation with Jesus,
and more to the point, that she was a mere creature whereas he is God. It is in
coming from a subordinate position that, when “Jesus saw that the time had come
for me to be loved, He entered into a covenant with me and I became His
own.”[20]
She even draws in the mother motif: “To be Your Spouse, to be a Carmelite,
and by my union with You to be the Mother of souls, should not this
suffice me?”[21] She
even brings in the child motif, for she also viewed herself as “the Child of
the Church and the Church is a Queen since she is Your Spouse, O divine
King of Kings.”[22]
Rather than intimating incest, she was using possession to denote the extent of
difference between a creature and its Creator. “O Jesus, Your little bird is
happy to be weak and little,” she wrote.[23]
Thérèse is also implying that
Jesus’ love is superior to her own even in her capacity as a devotee of Jesus
rather than of wealth or earthly power. She broadly sketches the distinctive
nature of Christian divine love in writing, “Because I was little and
weak He lowered Himself to me, and He instructed me secretly in the things of
His love.”[24] Him
lowering, or humbling himself, rather than being all high and mighty to someone
who is weaker, constitutes the things of his love, and thus can be construed,
moreover, as the self-emptying, agape love that God evinces in the
Incarnation—that is, in God lowering itself to become joined (but not mixed)
with earthly flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. The nature of God, which is
divine love, gets poured into a human vessel without mixing with it. The theme
of God’s love as humble rather than self-exalting carries through to how it is
revealed. In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I thank thee, Father, that thou hast
hidden these things from the wise and the prudent and revealed them to babes.”[25]
Thérèse saw herself as such a babe. But did she love as Jesus loves or as
people typically love? Was she really a child spiritually?
I contend that her piety was
belied to a considerable, but not complete, extent by the epistemological
arrogance of a creature presuming to know God and see God as it really is. In
this way, Thérèse did not evince the innocence of a spiritual child and did not
love as Jesus loves, for spiritual arrogance and agape love are
antipodal. I submit that a mystic’s devotional love (i.e, caritas) is
susceptible to the sin of pride because of the infusion and thus inclusion of eros and the likeness of the beloved to our world even in anthropomorphic terms. Beloved masks of eternity can thus be the final obstacle to further transcendence. If enough people master this insight in thoughts and worship, humanity would see a leap in the development of humaniry with respect to religion in the world comparable to the leap from animal sacrifice to the realization that religion has an interior aspect that antiquates the prior belief that gods demand animal sacrifices as a means of atonement for the sins of humans.
It is a mistake to assume that having an interior spirituality renders the divine within our grasp as creatures. Thérèse made this mistake. She wrote,
“As the Imitation says, God communicates Himself at times in the midst of great
splendor or ‘gently veiled, under shadows and figures.’[26]
It was in this way He deigned to manifest Himself to our souls, but how light
and transparent the veil was that hid Jesus from our gaze!”[27]
In describing a vision she had of Anne, the founder of the order, Thérèse wrote,
“The Carmelite raised her veil or rather she raised it and covered me with
it.”[28]
I submit that Paul and Augustine had been more accurate and less presumptuous,
given the inherent limitations of finite, mortal creatures as qualitatively distinct
from their Creator, which is wholly other, in characterizing the veil as more
like a window darked by smoke, such as we can imagine from incense and candles
in a Church. “Doubt was impossible, faith and hope were unnecessary,” Thérèse
continues, “and Love made us find on earth the One whom we were
seeking.”[29]
Although Paul had written that without love, faith is for naught, to relinquish
faith and doubt regarding that of God is to make a category mistake regarding
belief and knowledge in regard to that which goes beyond the limits of human
reason, perspective, and emotions. In writing, “Yes, Jesus did all this for
me,” Thérèse demonstrates epistemological (i.e., about knowledge, and the
reaches thereof) arrogance.[30]
Hyperextended epistemological
certainty of divine matters runs throughout Thérèse’s book. One instance is
especially revealing. After her Christmas conversion, when she prayed for
Pranzini, a prisoner on death’s row, she was certain that God would show
her a sign of Pranzini’s last-minute piety, because she “was absolutely
confident in the mercy of Jesus.[31]
Reading of Pranzini kissing a crucifix while he was on the scaffold to be
hanged, Thérèse was certain that Jesus had answered her prayer. David Hume
would retort that Thérèse had actually committed the naturalistic fallacy,
wherein an instance of positive correlation, such as two things occurring in a
temporal relation, is erroneously assumed to involve causation (i.e., that one
thing caused the other).
Another implication is in line
with William James’ criticism of a thirteenth-century nun, Gertrud of Helfta.
James wrote of that mystic’s view of God as being “full of partiality for his
individual favorites,” including Gertrud.[32]
Although I have argued that criticism is not applicable to Gertrud, it is ripe by
the time we get to Thérèse. Writing both of when she walked down the stairs like
a queen on Christmas, having just been transformed by Jesus from fear to
joy, and later, when Jesus mystically made her his own: “Then I became
beautiful in His eyes and He made me a mighty queen,” Thérèse depicts herself
as among Jesus’s favorites.[33]
Humility belied by religious superiority over other people is evident in her
statement regarding what Jesus did for her: “Because I was little and weak He
lowered Himself to me, and He instructed me secretly in the things of
his love. Ah! had the learned who spent their life in study come to me,
undoubtedly they would have been astonished to see a child of fourteen
understand perfection’s secrets . . .”[34]
To understand perfection esoterically can be likened to having the divine
attribute of omniscience, or perfect knowledge. Even the learned would indeed
come to such a person, though in the Gospels the learned Jews generally are
averse to Jesus and his message.
Even though Thérèse admits
that she was little and weak (and thus unworthy), the scent of arrogance wafts
over her assumptions of being a queen and of superiority over older, learned
Christians. She even extends the value (i.e., superiority) to include her
“spiritual sister,” Céline, destined by Jesus “as the privileged one of His
love!”[35] In
writing to another nun, Thérèse observes, “How fortunate we are, dear sister,
to understand the intimate secrets of our Spouse,” which is Jesus.[36]
She makes the esoteric knowledge of the Gnostics look like front-page material
of a well-circulated newspaper. Also, the exclusiveness of being married to
Jesus is evident, as if that extent of union with the divine would not apply to
anyone who loves distinctively in line with benevolentia universalis
extended even and especially to one’s detractors and those who one
regards as low, or outside. In the Gospel of Mark, the strangers catch
on to Jesus’ message while his disciples don’t, and, moreover, Jesus says in
Matthew (19:30; 20:16), Mark (10:31), and Luke (13:30) that the first are last
and the last are first, and it is the meek whom Jesus says in his Sermon on the
Mount will inherit the earth.[37]
Thérèse may have been in
denial regarding the current undercutting her own intent to be humble. Rather
than attribute this psychologically to the “nervous” illness that Thérèse had as
a child or even the fact that her father referred to her as his “little Queen,”[38]
it is more efficacious when in the domain of religion (rather than science) to
focus on the distinctly religious meaning of divine, self-emptying love
(agape) as it runs up against the sin of pride in a spiritual dynamic
that does not reduce to psychology. Unlike all other domains, that of religion
includes the belief and experiential yearning for a reference point that
transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and, yes Augustine, even
emotion, as Pseudo-Dionysius argued in the sixth century. Similarly, Thérèse
wrote, “I feel it is quite impossible for the human tongue to express things
that the human heart can hardly understand.”[39]
Even though the religious meaning
in Thérèse’s statement, “I wanted to love, to love Jesus with a passion, giving
Him a thousand proofs of my love while it was possible,”[40]
is laudatory, Jesus as Thérèse’s favorite mask of eternity may have
paradoxically been the most intractable obstacle facing her to a more
transcendent mystical experience of the divine as wholly other—as including mysterium.
As David Hume claims in The Natural History of Religion, the human brain
has difficulty holding onto divine simplicity, not to mention that which is
utterly mysterious, for long without lapsing back to the familiarity of anthropomorphic
masks. Her ultimate mask was Jesus, whose underlying paradigm is, “the heaven
of our soul, made to His image, the living temple of the adorable Trinity!”[41]
Rendering the divine in such familiar terms as a deity to whom a devotee can
apply marital connotations to the relationship runs the risk of rendering the
divine in human, all too human terms. Doing so unintentionally elevates the human
being (and our realm) in religious terms, and thus may be partly why Thérèse
unintentionally succumbed to spiritual arrogance.
This is not to say that no
viable role exists in a person’s religiosity for divine form or religious ideas
about God; much comfort can be had in devotion to a deity that has an
easily-relatable form similar to those that inhabit our daily lives. Feeling
love and directing the feeling to a personified ideal, as if to a tableau writ
large, not only counts as extant love, but also puts the focus on the love
itself, whether directly in being conscious of loving or indirectly in focusing
on Jesus as essentially love. Ideally, however, the focus could be on
theological love itself, unembodied and thus without distractions that are too
familiar to be resisted by the mind.
My claim is that reality, and especially the source of
reality, transcends even such masks of eternity because those masks compromise
on the divine’s wholly other quality, which is to say that God, in not being bound
by Creation, is qualitatively different, even in how being an "entity" applies. In short, devotional love is itself laudable, even though it is
not the limit of religious experience. The mystic who stops at one’s favorite
mask under the illusion that it is solid rather than a semi-permeable membrane can
be seen as stopping needlessly short in yearning for the divine, which in
Christianity is agape love itself. That is the ultimate value, and the
real presence felt internally and yet still sought after in Christianity.
Perhaps—just maybe—Thérèse unconsciously sensed on some level that even
devotionally loving Jesus can be surpassed in spiritual terms: “Ah! Jesus,
pardon me if I am unreasonable in wishing to express my desires and longings
which reach even unto infinity,” she wrote.[42]
Longing is a good word for yearning, and applied infinitely, the
yearning for must itself be beyond the limits of human cognition,
perception, and emotion. Interestingly, Thérèse wrote of her “measureless
desires” (for God) in conjunction with raising the question of whether there is
“PURE LOVE in my heart?”[43]
Such love can be construed as self-emptying, wholly other divine agape rather
than eros-related, anthropomorphic caritas love.
The instinctual-urge of
the human brain to construe things in familiar terms, such as a deity being
embodied in a familiar form, must contend with the distinctly spiritual instinct
of the brain to transcend even its own limits in experiencing yearning for a
distinctly religious object that is immanent yet transcendent and thus
wholly other. The strength of the latter instinct doubtlessly varies, perhaps
in part genetically. Even in those people in whom the gene is salient, it tends
to be undercut by the former instinct of the brain to hang anthropomorphic
ornaments on the tree of divine simplicity. Thérèse can be interpreted as
illustrating that this undercurrent can be strong even under a strong riptide
of water on the surface pulling her off-shore into the beyond. She is
galvanized by her urge to love her Spouse, and yet her yearning is infinite and
thus can go beyond even the face of God to its very nature, which, unlike the
content of a mystical vision, is without limit. The questions I would ask Thérèse
are: What of God lies beyond the contents of your visions and dreams and thus
is not captured in them? How is theological love distinct from the various ways
in which humans love? For she asks, “How
can I realize the desires of my poor little soul?”[44]
She then unwittingly answers her own question. “To satisfy me I need all.”
On the one hand, this sounds utterly human, all too human; on the other hand,
it could intimate the urge in yearning as that of transcending ad infinitum,
and thus beyond the alluring, familiar masks of eternity that may say more
about us than God. Thérèse wanted a vicarious mother because her actual mother
died of breast cancer so early. Deeper still, in spite of having a loving
father, she desperately wanted to be loved, and Jesus fit that bill.
In approaching God with
erotic-sourced love, or caritas, as Augustine did (drawing on the
sublimated eros in Plato’s Symposium) and nuns such as Gertrud of Helfta
and Thérèse of Lisieux also did as mystical devotees of Jesus, the distinctive,
qualitatively different sort of love that is theological in type may go
unrecognized. Like a garden’s native fauna long hidden by the overgrowth of
exogenous weeds from other gardens, the distinctly theological love can easily
be overlooked ironically in the garden of religion. Even devout mystics could
stand to do some weeding.
To be sure, Thérèse was definitely
onto something transcending her devotion to Jesus in understanding “that LOVE
COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES
AND PLACES. . . . IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL!”[45]
Quoting from “Words of Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary,” which is in the book, Little
Breviary of the Sacred Heart, Thérèse agreed that the “science of love,”
which is in the book of life, is the key thing.[46]
In so writing, she was going beyond, or, put in more distinctly religious
terms, transcending her favorite mask to focus on the theological ether
behind the mask that gives it its form and goes beyond even doing that. The
mix of contending instincts, informed by her own psychological history without
being reducible to that domain, is clear in what she wrote next: “Then, in the
excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love . . . MY VOCATION IS
LOVE! Yes, I have found my place in the Church and it is You, O my God . . . ;
in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love.”[47]
In this statement, she reverts back to her devotional love (i.e., caritas)
directed to Jesus—a love that is somehow related to her emotional need for a
vicarious mother—then she makes the move again transcending all that in yearning
to be love itself (i.e., agape).
To be full, the distinctly
theological sort of love in Christianity must, Thérèse wrote, “lower Itself,
and that It lower Itself to nothingness and transform this nothingness into fire.”[48]
Whereas devotional love is informed (or fueled) by garden-variety eros even
when such love is sublimated in being directed toward a high object, according
to Plato and Augustine, distinctly theological love whose source is the divine
is directed to the powerless, weak, and imperfect creatures via universal
benevolence. It is not clear to me that loving Jesus ever more intensely while
in a convent satisfies this kind of love, for Jesus is not powerless, weak, or
imperfect, and, as a god-man and God’s eternal Logos, Jesus is not a mere
creature, even though, as a mask of eternity, Jesus has been interpreted by
David Hume (albeit quietly, through analyzing Mary) as well as by Jews and
Muslims as the epitome of anthropomorphized divinity.
1. Pierre Descouvemont, Therese and Lisieux (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996).
2. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of
Lisieux, Third edition, trans. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications,
1996), p. 191.
3. Ibid., p. 197.
4. Ibid., p. 206.
5. Ibid., p. 205, italics added.
6. Ibid., p. 191.
7. Ibid., p. 196.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 195.
10. Ibid., p. 198.
11. John Clarke, “Introduction to the First Edition,” in Thérèse
de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux,
Third edition, trans. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996),
p. xi.
12. Ibid., p. xii.
13. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, pp. 112-13.
14. John Clarke, “Introduction to the First Edition,”, p. xii.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 98.
18. Ibid., p. 196.
19. Ibid., p. 99.
20. Ibid., p. 101.
21. Ibid., p. 192.
22. Ibid., p. 196.
23. Ibid., p. 199.
24. Ibid., p. 105.
25. Matthew 11:25, quoted in Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 105.
26. The Imitation of Christ, III, 43:4.
27. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 104.
28. Ibid., p. 190.
29. Ibid., p. 104.
30. Ibid., p. 102.
31. Ibid., p. 100.
32. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human
Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
33. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 102.
34. Ibid., p. 105.
35. Ibid., p. 107.
36. Ibid., p. 189.
37. Matthew 5:5.
38. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 107.
39. Ibid., p. 187.
40. Ibid., p. 102.
41. Ibid., p. 104.
42. Ibid., p. 192, italics added.
43. Ibid., p. 197.
44. Ibid., p. 192.
45. Ibid., p. 194. The ALL-CAPS is in the original.
46. Ibid., p. 187.
47. Ibid., p. 194.
48. Ibid., p. 195. Elsewhere (p. 199), Thérèse refers to “the Eternal Fire of the
Blessed Trinity,” which she then associates with “the Inaccessible Light.” So
it can be concluded that it is in the nature of divine (agape) love
ultimately to bring nothingness, or perhaps only apparent nothingness as it is
in darkness and thus cannot be seen, into the light. To raise (or literally
enlighten) the meek and the pure of heart, while humbling the proud; to bring
in the outcasted to be placed even closer than self-declared inner circles; and
to show compassion even (and especially) for one’s detractors and enemies when
they need or could use some help: these are ways of operationalizing divine
love by humans. Without this, faith is for naught, according to Paul.
