Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  In the lives of the saints, she found an early love of martyrdom, and when she was seven, she and her brother ran away from home to be martyred at the hands of the Moors, only to be returned home by her uncle. Perhaps her father was right: Reading was dangerous, at least for someone like Teresa, under the thrall of her emotions; a love of books went hand in hand with a love of death.

  At the time, Teresa found no fault with her reading: "It did not seem wicked to me," she wrote many years later in her autobiography, "to waste many hours of the day and the night on this vain occupation, even though I had to keep it secret from my father." Even as an adult writing of those times, she saw in retrospect the vices of reading, how it "began to chill my desires and lead me astray in other respects as well."

  What to make of a book that begins with the perils of reading? Should we put it down, go no further? To keep reading, it seems, is to implicate ourselves— it is our little fault that drives us on, our vain occupation, our addiction. We may read, but to read Teresa's autobiography is already to be an interloper, to trespass into a world you've been warned against. She doesn't want us here, even as she beckons us to come in. Teresa's is a strange book, a book with no place for a reader.

  Her mother died when Teresa was twelve, and Teresa fell even further under the sway of her romances. When she was fifteen, her father placed her in a convent. There she found her calling, despite being plagued in her early years by serious health problems. Under the direction of a Franciscan, Peter of Alcantara, she set out in 1560 to found a Carmelite convent in Avila. Her convent brought back the old order, reinstating flagellation and discalcation (the forbidding of the wearing of shoes), and from

  1567 to 1576, Teresa set up convents of discalced Carmelites throughout Spain.

  Around the same time, she was asked by her confessor, Pedro Ibáñez, to record the events of her conversion, a record that became her autobiography. In the centuries since, it has become the most widely read book in Spanish after Don Quixote, which first appeared only thirty-five years after Teresa wrote her autobiography. Like Cervantes's masterpiece, Teresa's autobiography is about the dangers of reading. Cervantes's Quixote is poisoned by the same chivalric romances that Teresa read as a child. He sells his estate to buy more and more books until they finally drive him mad and he begins a quest not unlike that attempted by Teresa when she was seven.

  Teresa's story caught like wildfire. It may have been about the dangers of reading, written for a private audience, but that hasn't stopped the thousands who have flocked to it. After all, we want to eavesdrop. We want to read what is forbidden in the dim coolness of private rooms. We want to be affected by the wickedness of the book, to share in Teresa's little addiction, to succumb to Quixote's madness.

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  Teresa's life is proof that she finally triumphed over this vice, reformed her ways, and followed Christ. But traces of her love of reading remain all over her autobiography. In a book that opens with a scene of reading, she recalls with bitterness how her confessor removed all the books in Spanish from the convent— "I felt it deeply because some of them gave me recreation and I could not go on reading them, since now I only had them in Latin." Later she calls Christ Himself "a veritable book in which I have read the truth." Hers may be a story about God, but it is told as an allegory of the reader and the writer.

  Her writing is often chaotic; she asks permission before speaking, she loses herself on tangents before returning to a half-remembered topic, and she's at times repetitive. "I seem to have wandered from my subject," she says more than a few times. At times she supplicates herself abjectly before her confessor; at other times she reprimands him for a dim understanding of Christ. Through all this, she seems to acknowledge that the book will have no editor and that she will never look back on what she's written. And she's not bothered by this. Like that of a nineteenth-century spirit medium, Teresa's is an automatic writing.

  We have long since lost the ability to see the art in this; in the twenty-first century, we are too used to the idea that the work of art must have a holistic and unified effect, that it must be perfect. Even contemporary writers who might emulate such chaos— Nabokov in Pale Fire, for example— do so deliberately, with extreme calculation. The better corollary to Teresa would be writers like Gerard de Nerval and Antonin Artaud. Like Artaud's works, Teresa's autobiography comes alive in its madness, though madness is not the right word for many of these writers. Ecstatic is better— writing that doesn't tell a story or impress an idea so much as it records the simple alchemy of putting pen to paper.

  Ultimately Teresa's autobiography is a book about the act of writing itself. "I see so much perdition in this world," she writes, "that even if my writing has no other effect than to weary this hand that wields the pen, it brings me some comfort." Teresa's autobiography is a strange mixture in which she writes of the dangers of reading and the pleasures of writing. Like Gregory's or Radegund's, Teresa's work comes alive when it breaks against itself, when its sutures rupture and break, when something unintended shows through.

  This kind of writing is always vulnerable, and readers and commentators always want to reduce it to something it's not. The danger is in making her sane, in reading the work as a holistic piece of art. The error would be to read it as complete, a masterpiece; doing so, as many have, is to read her ecstasy in the most banal of ways.

  Many of us outside of Spain know her through Bernini's famous sculpture— her head thrown back, mouth agape, eyes closed, as a cherub hovers above her with an arrow. Bernini's sculpture depicts perhaps the most famous moment in Teresa's autobiography, a description of an ecstatic vision that comes late in the book:

  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. This is not a physical pain, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it— even a considerable share.

  Whatever was happening in Teresa's mind and in her body as this experience was taking place, most modern commentators have seen only one possible explanation. Marie Bonaparte— a practicing psychoanalyst and a friend of Freud who was at the time measuring the distance between the clitoris and vagina in

  250 women— spoke for many readers when she declared, unequivocally, that Teresa's revelation was nothing more than a "violent venereal orgasm."

  Bonaparte was something of a literalist, to be sure, but she makes plain the problem, the danger in reading Teresa. To read

  F I G U R E 3 : The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa ( 1647– 1652), Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini SANTA MARIA DELLA VITTORIA, ROME, ITALY/ALINARI/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  her and see only sex, as we have been conditioned to do, is the same error as reading her and ignoring sexuality altogether.

  One understands why Teresa tells us how she "earnestly begged the Lord to grant me no more favors if they must have outward and visible signs." To see a saint in rapture is to misunderstand, and to read her ecstasy is to misread. Perhaps there was some divine accession to her request when she died in October 1582, just as Catholic countries were switching from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, a realignment that necessitated the loss of October 5– 14. Thus, she left this earth sometime between the night of October 4 and the morning of October 15, in those strange, invisible days of history.

  Bernini's genius is in the massive cloak that covers Teresa so that only her face and hands are visible. Everything else lies below the surface, lost in those endless folds. In there somewhere is the ecstasy of writing, the relationship of reader and writer. You may guess at its contours, but you will never know its shape. It is under the folds of such a cloak that the p
erfect book, and the perfect library, lie. Hidden, shapeless, but somehow moving, somehow alive.

  Part Two: Visions of Torture and Longing

  ·six·

  Trickster Laughs: Lawrence of the Gridirons

  Back in Jesuit high school, every day in chemistry, our teacher would begin class with a reading of the day's saint. He had a small book of feast days that he kept in his breast pocket— one of those cheap, staple-bound books you used to be able to buy in grocery-store checkout lines— and would read in his stilted Texas accent of the martyrs and persecutions of the early church.

  To this day, I remember his voice quite clearly, but from a year of feast days, the only saint I remember is Lawrence. A deacon under Pope Sixtus II in the third century, Lawrence was martyred during the Roman emperor Valerian's persecutions in 258 and, according to legend, was executed on a gridiron over an open flame. As he was being burned alive, so the story goes, he cried out to his tormentors, "This side's done; turn me over and have a bite."

  At this, the whole class burst into laughter, and I remember our teacher's grim face as he looked up at us, quietly apoplectic at our sacrilege, and said drily, "You don't laugh at that. We're talking about a man dying here. That's not funny."

  But of course, it is funny. It's not for nothing that Lawrence is recognized now as the patron saint of comedians. Lawrence is the trickster saint, the buffoon, the clown. After Pope Sixtus was executed, Valerian demanded that Lawrence turn over the treasury of the church; Lawrence instead gave away all of the church's property and then brought Valerian a group of blind, crippled, and homeless men, telling the Roman emperor that these were the true treasures of the Church. Sure, this isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but still.

  My chemistry teacher snapped at us because he, like so many believers, conflated the sacred and the solemn. Patriarchal religions like Christianity tend to be like this. The French philosopher and atheist Georges Bataille points out that no one ever laughs in the Gospels— the good news may be joyous, but it's not funny.

  But in other religions, laughter is integral. The anthropologist Byrd Gibbens writes, "Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth."

  Because of this, Lawrence seems to me a saint imported from another religion, closer to Coyote or Raven than to Stephen or Catherine. At the moment of his death is this sudden reversal; with one joke, he takes the power back from his torturers, and the moment breaks open. In our laughter, we understand a little more about life and death. Georges Bataille also writes that uncontrolled laughter brings us to the edge of an abyss, a "stage of rupture, of letting go of things." And if Bataille reminds us that behind laughter lies death, Lawrence reminds us that to go willingly to your own execution is to laugh at death, and to laugh at death is also to laugh.

  Like most martyrs, Lawrence has multiple patronages. He protects not just comedians but also students as well as Rome and Rotterdam, Canada and Sri Lanka. Perhaps most bizarre, perhaps even disturbing: He is the patron saint of barbecues.

  In Christian iconography, saints are usually depicted with the instruments of their torture, as with Catherine and her wheel or Sebastian impaled by arrows. And so Lawrence is often seen holding a grill, sometimes balanced on his shoulder, the instrument of his death used to distinguish images of him from the other martyrs.

  But over the centuries, this grill has gone from being Lawrence's mode of death to his primary hobby: There's Lawrence, the guy with the grill, always up for a backyard get-together, always there to bless your Super Bowl party.

  How does this happen? How do torture and recreation get so casually commingled? It turns out to be somewhat common among Christian martyrs, and Lawrence is not the only saint who's suffered such a bizarre distortion. Agatha's torture included having her breasts cut off, and she is commonly depicted as holding those breasts on a tray before her. But the laity didn't always recognize these tan lumps as breasts. They were misread often enough both as bells and as loaves of bread that she has become the patron saint of bell-forgers and bakers. And then there's Bartholomew, flayed alive, who holds, in addition to his own skin, the tool used to cut that skin off, a tool that looks sort of like a cheese cutter, so Florentine cheese merchants took Bartholomew as their patron.

  These corruptions happen from the bottom up, from the uneducated and working classes, adrift in a world of subsistence and hardship, searching for patrons to aid them. In search of solace, they find these bizarre images of disembodied torture and do their best to make sense of them.

  It's not that the image of Lawrence with the gridiron doesn't tell a story, but you have to already know that story in order to recognize it. Seeing a painting of an otherwise healthy-looking man holding a grill means nothing without some context.

  The image of the saint works like a parable: It doesn't tell a story so much as hide it. When asked about the parables by his disciples, Jesus tells them bluntly, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them," meaning the unbelievers. He goes on, "Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: Though looking, they do not see; though hearing, they do not understand."

  Or, as Kafka put it, "all these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already."

  The image of Lawrence and his gridiron is a parable in the sense that only the self-selecting few who already know his story recognize it in such an incomprehensible image. It is those who don't know the story of Lawrence who misread it as barbecue rather than torture, doing their best to make sense of a visual parable. They look but do not see.

  It is perhaps because of this inherent ambiguity that images were always distrusted in the early church. Inheriting a legacy of the Hebraic tradition and its second commandment forbidding graven images, early Christians thought pictures inherently untrustworthy, lacking the rock-solid truth of words, and banned them accordingly.

  It wasn't until 600, several hundred years after Lawrence's death, that this changed with Serenius the Iconoclast (literally, "breaker of images"). The bishop of Marseilles, Serenius, had found his recently converted flock making images of Jesus, and he destroyed them. When Pope Gregory the Great got word of this, he sent a long letter praising Serenius's zeal but telling him to leave the images alone since "those who do not know letters may at least read by seeing on the walls what they are unable to read in books." With that stroke, a centuries-old ban on image-making was ended, and the floodgates opened.

  For Gregory, images are books for the illiterate, but if so, they are a curious kind of book, one whose meaning is strangely open to interpretation, in which the poor and the illiterate have been free to adapt the ambiguous images adorning churches in whatever manner might give them solace or hope. It is here, in these misinterpretations, in the odd patronages of the saints, that Catholicism reveals its folk aspect, its native traditions and local customs. And it is here that Saint Lawrence reigns, his trickster laughter stretching the world beyond the humorlessness of the gospel truth and fundamentalism. On the other side of orthodoxy lies this legacy of distortion and expansion, where we look and do not see, yet see something new, something else entirely.

  ·seven·

  Anatomical Annihi at ons: Bar holomew

  Ican think of no saint whose torture was more dramatic than Bartholomew's. I'll never forget the first time I saw Marco d'Agrate's sculpture of him in the Milan cathedral; from a distance, he looked like some emaciated, bald hermit wrapped in a sash. Only when I got close did I see that he wasn't emaciated: That was his bare muscle I
was looking at. What I had thought was a sash was in fact his own skin, peeled off his body and draped around his shoulders.

  Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles, but in the Gospels, he has none of the importance of Peter, Thomas, or Judas Iscariot. Somewhat on the fringe, he seems to be there mostly to round out the twelve. It's not until after Jesus's death that Bar tholomew's story begins to take on life. After the events of the New Testament, according to most accounts, Bartholomew traveled to India to spread the gospel. There he converted the king, Polimius, by healing him from an incurable disease, though whatever goodwill he may have engendered was quickly squandered when he began destroying the various pagan statues in the palace. Under pressure from incensed priests, the king's brother responded to Bartholomew's disruption first by crucifying him upside down, then by flaying him alive, and finally by beheading him. Among these tortures, it is the flaying that became the mode of punishment iconically associated with Bartholomew. Thus, popular depictions of the saint show him carrying his own skin— often he holds his flayed skin toward the viewer, as if presenting a gift.