Chapter 35 Chapter 24 The Nun

Chapter 24 The Nun Love is a woman's highest vocation, and when she directs her love toward a man, she is seeking God through him; if circumstances do not give her human love, if she falls out of love or is too demanding, she may decide to worship God himself divinity.It is true that there were men who kindled the fire, but they were few in number, and their passions were of a highly refined intellectual quality; while women who indulged in the joy of the heavenly wedding were in droves, and they experience has a special emotional quality.Woman is accustomed to live on her knees; she usually expects her salvation to come from heaven, where man holds the highest place.They will also be surrounded by colorful clouds, because their dignity will come from the unknown world after their bodies disappear.The beloved is always more or less ethereal; he communicates with his admirer by vague symbols; she can understand his heart only through the action of faith; the more he seems superior to her, the more his behavior The more it seems unfathomable.We have seen that this belief resists all contradictions in the satyr.A woman can feel that the presence is at her side without touching or looking at it.Whether this supreme being is a doctor, a priest, or God, she will feel the same unquestionable certainty that as handmaiden she will receive in her heart the love pouring down from above.The reason why human love and divine love are mixed is not because the latter is the sublimation of the former, but because the former is an extension to transcendence, the absolute.In both cases it is a question of saving the woman in love from her contingent existence through her union with the whole embodied in the Supreme Person (aSpremePerson).

This ambiguity is striking in many morbid and normal situations, when either the lover is deified or the god takes on human qualities.I will just cite one example, which is reported by Phaedier in his work on Sagittarius.The female patient said: In 1923 I corresponded with a contributor to News magazine; I read between the lines of his articles, he seemed to be answering my questions and giving me advice... I wrote him many love letters... In 1924, I suddenly felt that God wanted a woman, and he wanted to come and talk to me; I felt that he had given me a mission, and decided to let me build a temple; there must be a center for doctors to take care of women... just like this When I was sent to Clermont Mental Asylum... There were many doctors who wanted to change the world. I felt them kissing my fingers in my small dark room; I felt their genitals in my hands; once They said to me, "You're not sensitive, but you're sexy; turn over"; I turned over and felt them on top of me; it was pleasant.

…The Chief Physician, Dr. Yi, is really like a god; when he approached my bed, I felt that there was something wrong with him; when he looked at me, he seemed to say: "I belong to you." He really loved me...One day he His green eyes turned blue like the sky and opened so wide it was amazing...he was talking to another patient seeing what they did to me and he smiled...I was drawn to him... Although I have lovers (I have fifteen or sixteen), I cannot leave him; he is to blame... Whenever I try to forget him, he comes back to my mind... He will say wryly: " Don't worry, you can love people, but you'll come back to me" I used to write to him and make appointments, and I kept my appointments; he was pretty standoffish;

I felt stupid and left...I heard he was married but he will always love me...he is my husband but that decisive act never happened...he would say, " Leave everything and be with me and you'll climb forever, you'll be no more." You see, that's it; every time I look for God, I find a man; and now I don't know how Which religion to turn to. Here we are talking about a morbid instance.But we still meet this tangled confusion between man and God in many devotees.The confessor especially has an ambiguous place between earth and heaven.When the confessor bared her heart, he listened with a moral ear, but his gaze shrouded her in supernatural light; he was a man of God, and he was God in human form.This is how Madame Guillon described her meeting with Father La Conch:

"The power of influence seemed to go from him to me and from me back to him, as if along the most secret path in the depths of the soul, so he felt the same effect." A monk's intervention could heal what she had long endured. The emptiness in her heart fills her soul with a new passion.She lived with him through the important periods of her mysticism.And she declares, "It's not just a whole; I can't tell him from God." It's an oversimplification to say that she actually loves a man, and that God is an act; she loves God, the man , because in her mind he was someone other than himself.Like Phaidier's patient, she wanted to reach the highest source of value.This is indeed the goal of any mystic.The male intermediary is sometimes useful to her as she begins to soar into the empty skies, but he is not indispensable.Woman can't tell the difference between reality and pretense, action and magic, objectivity and imagination, so she's especially prone to objectify the unreal in her own body.Distinguishing between mysticism and satyrism is a more secure problem, as it is sometimes done.The satyr feels that by falling in love with a sovereign she can become valuable; he is active in erotic relations, his love is more passionate than his love; his emotions are knowable by means of visible but mysterious signs he is envious, irritated by any lack of enthusiasm in God's chosen people, and does not hesitate to punish; he never expresses himself in concrete physical form.All this will be met with the nun; above all, God is always full of love for those who love him, for whom he has dedicated himself, for whom he has prepared many mansions, and is always ready to honor her apotheosis .All she had to do was wallow in his enthusiasm without resistance.

Today it is believed that nymphomania can take on platonic or sexual forms.Because of this, the body plays a greater or lesser role in the nun's affection for God. The way she shows her affection is similar to that of a worldly lover.When Angela of Foligno was contemplating Christ embracing St. Francis, he said to her: "So I will embrace you too, but also from the eyes of morality... If you love me, I will never leave you." Madame Guillon wrote: "Love does not give me a moment's peace. I said to him: 'Oh, my dear, that's enough, let me go'... I long for love to be Sending unspeakable shudders to the soul longing for love to drive me crazy... oh my god if you could make the most slutty women feel what I feel they'd give up their false pretense Be happy, and enjoy real happiness.” Let us recall St. Teresa’s famous hallucination:

The angel held a long golden spear in both hands, piercing my heart from time to time, and entering my internal organs forcefully.When he pulled out the golden spear, it was as if he wanted to pull out my internal organs, and left me with everything filled with God's love... I did feel the pain when it pierced the deepest part of my internal organs, When my spiritual spouse pulled out the arrow that pierced his innards, the innards seemed to be ripped apart It is sometimes piously insisted that the poverty of language compelled the nun to borrow the words of erotic love; but she, too, had only one body at her disposal, and so she borrowed not only words from worldly love, but carnal attitudes as well.She behaved in the presence of God the same way she behaved in her consecration to a man.This in no way diminishes the value of her sentiment, however.When Foligno's Angela turns "pale and haggard" and "full and rosy" according to her mood, when her tears are so hot that she has to pour cold water (as her biographer tells us), When she passed out, it was difficult to think of these phenomena as purely "spiritual"; but to explain them by saying that she was too "emotional" would be to invoke the "narcotic effect" of opium; the body is not a subjective experience at all because it is the objective form of the subject itself: the subject expresses his attitude entirely in accordance with the overall needs of his existence.

Adherents and opponents of the nun would consider that attributing sexual gratification to Saint Teresa's ecstasy would be tantamount to relegating her to the status of a hysteria.But what devalues ​​the hysteric is not the fact that her body actively expresses her ecstasy, but the fact that she is entangled in it, that her freedom is spellbound and thus nullified.The mastery of his body which the Indian ascetic acquires does not make him its slave; bodily imitation can be an element of a conscious method [impulse] which is lucid and free.The works of St. Teresa leave little room for doubt, and they justify Bernini's statue, which shows us the saint captivated by the sensuality of the Supreme.It would be equally wrong to interpret her affections as simply "sexual sublimation"; no desire that was initially secret could later take the form of divine love. Nor is [the adulterous woman] herself the prey of a desire that is initially objectless and then gradually fixed on a man;Likewise, Saint Teresa sincerely asked for union with God, and achieved it in her body; she was not enslaved by her nerves and hormones: one would have to admire that strong faith could wear into the most intimate regions of her flesh.In fact, even she understood that the value of a mystical experience cannot be measured in terms of how it is felt subjectively, but in terms of its objective impact.The phenomena of ecstasy are almost the same in Santa Teresa as they are in Marie Arraqueque, but their messages are of very different importance.Saint Teresa very wisely raised the question of the relationship between the individual and the transcendent;

As a woman, she lived through an experience whose meaning lay far beyond the fact of her sex; she must be equal with Suso and St. John of the Cross.But she's also a striking exception.What her little nuns give us is mainly women's views on the world and salvation; what they seek is not transcendence, but compensation for femininity. It is the admiration of her narcissism that woman seeks in the love of God what [the adulterous woman] seeks in the love of man; the sovereign gaze upon her is a marvelous Godsend.Like girls and young women, Madame Guillon was tortured throughout her early years by the desire to be loved and admired.Mademoiselle Weill, a modern Protestant, wrote: "The most unfortunate thing for me is that no one is particularly interested in me, and no one sympathizes with what is happening here." She said at the time that she thought God was constantly caring for her, so intensely that she would groan in moments of crisis for herself and her lover: "My God, how happy I am! I beg you to forgive me for being too happy." !” We can understand how intoxicated she is when all of Heaven becomes the narcissist’s mirror; her apotheosis is as eternal as God himself, and will never fade.At the same time, in her burning, throbbing, loving chest, she also felt her soul created, forgiven, and cherished by the venerable Father; The agency of God is infinitely enlarged.These verses of St. Angela of Foligno are especially significant in this respect.Jesus said this to her:

My sweet child, my daughter, my love, my temple.My daughter, my love, love me, for I love you far more than you can possibly give me.Your whole life: your eating, your drinking, your questions, your whole life will be my favorite.Through you I will perform great deeds in the eyes of the apostate; through you I will become famous; through you my name will be praised by many.My daughter, my sweet wife, I love you so much.He also said: My daughter, you are more precious to me than I am to you, you are my joy, Almighty God is on your heart at this moment... Almighty God has given you more love than any woman in this city. Love much more; he has made you his joy.and also:

I love you so much that I no longer notice your failures, my eyes can no longer see them.I have brought you great wealth. It is impossible for God's chosen people not to respond to such an ardent confession of such a high principle.She wanted to unite with his lover by means of the usual trick of a woman in love, by means of self-destruction."I am concerned only with one thing," writes Marie Arakque, "to love, to forget myself, to annihilate myself." Ecstasy physically imitates that annulment of the self; the subject no longer sees, nor Feeling again, the body has been forgotten and denied.The dazzling sovereign presence, by that extreme indulgence, by that wildly accepted passivity, is expressed in the intaglio.This passivity was established as a system in the quietism of Madame Guillon: as for her, she lived most of her life in catalepsy and lethargy; It's a waking sleep. Most nuns are not content to passively indulge God, so they actively adapt to self-destruction by destroying their own bodies.Asceticism was no doubt practiced by monks and priests, but the mad rage with which women disdain their own flesh has a peculiar and strange form.We have already mentioned a woman's ambiguous attitude towards her own body: through humiliation and torture she transforms it into glory.In giving to her lover as an object of pleasure, she becomes a temple, an idol; in the torment of childbirth she creates a hero.The nun tortures her own body for the right to claim it; she degrades it in order to exalt it as a means of salvation.In this way the excesses to which some saints indulged can be understood.St. Angela of Foligno tells us that she gleefully drank the water she had just used to wash the hands and feet of the lepers: This water fills us with infinite sweetness, so that we are utterly happy.I've never had such a good drink.I still have a piece of scaly skin from a leper's ulcer in my throat.Instead of spitting it out, I swallowed it with great effort, and I succeeded.To me, it was as if I had just had a Holy Communion.I will never be able to express the joy that fills my heart. We know that Marie Arakque used her tongue to lick up the vomit of patients; she described in her autobiography how she felt when her mouth was filled with the diarrheal feces of a male patient. Joy; Jesus rewarded her when she pressed her lips to the Sacred Heart for 3 hours.In countries as sensual as Spain and Italy, devotion is especially sensual: even today a woman in a village in Abruzzi still licks the stones at the crossroads, even if she cuts her tongue.By all these means, woman is only trying to imitate the savior who saves the flesh by humiliating his flesh.Women feel this great mystery more concretely than men. God very often appears to a woman in the form of her husband; sometimes he appears in his halo, the lord of all things, displaying his beauty in dazzling white robes; he asks her to wear her wedding dress , placed the crown on her head, led her by the hand, and promised to raise her to heaven.But often he is a man of the flesh: the invisible ring that Jesus gave St. Catherine on her finger was the "flesh ring" that he cut off when he was circumcised.Above all, he was a mutilated, bleeding body: she absorbed herself in contemplation of this crucified saint with a passion above all else; she identified herself with the Virgin. Mary, with the body of the Son in her arms, or Mary identified with the Magdalene, stands at the foot of the cross, sprinkled with the blood of her most beloved.In this way she satisfies her sadomasochistic fantasies. She marveled at the dethroning of man in God's shame; the crucified saint was inert, passive, bruised, he had a pale, bloodstained body exposed to beasts, daggers, The reversed image of the victim before the male, with which the little girl is often forced to identify; she is deeply moved to see that this man, God of men, plays her part.She was the one who was crucified, and she was promised the glory of Jesus' resurrection.This is her: She testified; her forehead was bleeding under a crown of thorns, and her hands, her feet, her side, had been pierced by invisible irons. Of the 321 stigmata recognized by the Catholic Church, only 47 were men; others - including some as famous as Jeannin de la Croix - were Women are generally past menopause.The most famous is Katherine Emmerich, who is obviously precocious.When she was 24 she longed to suffer the crown of thorns; she saw a dazzled young man come up to him and place the crown of thorns on her head.The next day the sides of her head and forehead were swollen and began to bleed. Four years later, she was ecstatic to see Christ with his wounds, from which shone like a knife, sucking the blood from the saint's hands, feet and sides.She was bleeding and spitting up blood frequently.And to this day, on Good Friday, Teresa Newman shows visitors her face dripping with the blood of Christ. The mystical alchemy that rejuvenates the flesh can be obtained from the stigmata, for the stigmata express divine love in the form of bloodshed.We can easily understand why women are particularly concerned with the transformation of bright red blood into golden flames.They were fascinated by the blood that flowed from the side of the king of men.St. Caterine of Siena mentions this in most of his letters. Angela of Foligno humbly contemplates the heart of Jesus and the open wound on his side.Catherine Emmerich wears a red shirt to resemble Jesus who appears to be wearing "clothes soaked in blood"; she sees everything "through the blood of Jesus". case), spent 3 hours quenching her thirst with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She expresses the adoration of believers with huge blood clots, surrounded by passionate arrows of love. This symbol concentrates great female dreams : Through love, from bloodshed to glory. Ecstasy, hallucinations, talking to God—this inner experience is enough for some women.Other women feel compelled to take that experience out into the world through action.The connection between action and meditation takes two quite different forms.There are women of action, St. Catherine, St. Teresa, Jean Duc, who know very well what they want to achieve and formulate the measures to achieve it: their illusions are only for them. The unshakable conviction provided the objective imagery that encouraged these women to persevere on the path they had set for themselves.There are also narcissistic women, such as Madame Guillon and Madame Krydenner, who, after a period of silent enthusiasm, suddenly feel themselves in what Madame Guillon calls "the position of the apostle."They are less sure of their tasks; and, like the thrill-seeking ladies in social service agencies, they care as little about what they will do if something is to be done.Such was the case with Frau Krydenner, who, having presented herself as ambassador and novelist, internalized a perception of her own merits: she was responsible for the fate of Alexander I, not to guarantee the triumph of some definite idea, It's to further validate through her character that she's a God-inspired person.If a little beauty and a little intelligence are often enough to make a woman feel worthy of her allegiance, she has more reason to think that when she knows she is God's elect, she has a mission; she preaches vague doctrines , she often forms cults, so this allows her to achieve her exciting personality richness through the group members she inspires. Like love and even narcissism, the nun's passion can be combined with an active and independent life.But these attempts at their own salvation must fail; either every woman is related to some unreality (her twin, or God); or she creates an unreal relationship to a real being.In both cases she fails to grasp the world; she does not escape her subjectivity; her freedom remains thwarted.The only way of being is to make real use of her freedom, that is, to design it through active action in human society.