Читать книгу Santa Teresa - Группа авторов - Страница 22

The rediscovery of Teresa’s affiliation to new Christians resulted in speculations about her possible knowledge of Jewish traditions, especially the esoteric ones. Initial ideas as to how this saint’s work indicates such inspiration developed through analysis of her meaningful use of divine names, which may reflect the sensible attitude of conversos in this matter.1 In particular, her explicit addresses to God as “majestad” hints at this, according to Nicole Pélisson, possibly also (but doubtful, in my opinion) that she uses “Cristo” more often than the name “Jesus”, despite her monastic name “Teresa de Jesús” or her empathy for Jesus’s suffering and his lonely prayer in the garden of Gethsemane.2 The question of whether Teresa indeed followed the assumed preference of the conversos for ‘regal’ images of Christ will be taken up at the end of this chapter.

There is some evidence that a “social unease” can be read between the lines of Teresa’s “open but closed style” of writing, as Peter Tyler puts it,3 but detecting the wondrous paths of Jewish mysticism within her visions, confessions, and teachings seems to be a rather arbitrary task. Nevertheless, two different ways of contextualizing Teresa’s work within the Jewish mystical tradition have been tried so far. First and foremost, scholars link the apparently attractive comparison of her colorful metaphors to the symbolic language of Kabbalistic literature; but this issue is generally based on unlikely suppositions in regard to a possible transmission of Jewish traditions within her family.4 Furthermore, the alleged similarities cannot disclaim their artificial character.5 For example, the frequently invoked imagery of the “castle”, which figures prominently in the title of Teresa’s seminal work Moradas del Castillo Interior, represents a universal symbol in the history of spirituality and particularly so within Catholic theology. There is no evidence of first-hand knowledge of specific Jewish sources here, but rather of a widespread Islamic tradition in which the soul is comprised of “seven concentric castles”6. This seems to correspond with Teresa’s seven moradas (‘dwelling-places’) – in fact seven layers, each equipped with many chambers, compared with coverings (“coberturas”, 1 Moradas 2,8), which together form the diamantine or crystalline soul called “Castillo”.7 The latter detail deviates from Islamic tradition which knows of different materials for the seven concentric castles, as described in Abū-l-Hasan al-Nūrī’s Maqāmāt al-qulūb (“Dwellings of the Hearts”, 9^th century).8 Yet al-Nūrī’s innermost castle is made of “yāqūt”9, which medieval treatises of mineralogy describe as “the true diamond, ruby, corundum, zircon, and hyacinth.”10 On the other hand, Teresa was obviously inspired by the biblical contexts regarding “diamond” or “crystal”, such as the “crystal sea” (Revelation 4:6), the crystal-clear light of the heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21:11), the crystal-like vault above the four “living creatures” (Ezekiel 1:22), and the appearance of the throne as sapphire-stone (Ezekiel 1:26; 10:1; cf. also Exodus 24:10). The prophetic vision in the Book of Ezekiel started a long history of mystical speech from the Old Testament pseudepigrapha (e.g. the crystal-built structure in the heaven of heavens [1 Enoch 71:5]) to medieval mysticism (e.g. “the sapphirine radiance of a precious stone” in the first of the seven heavenly palaces [Zohar 1:41b]).11 This concept of mystical speech – a topos in Teresa’s world – developed from early Jewish mysticism and late midrashic literature (addressing the “seven chambers of the Garden of Eden”),12 probably also reverberating in Islamic tradition before entering the more remote stage of the sophisticated Kabbalistic literature.13

The second way of discovering Teresa’s interreligious boundaries follows a phenomenological approach, like Joseph Dan’s discussion of Teresa’s Camino de Perfección. According to Dan, Teresa’s contemplative prayer corresponds not only to the mystical attitude of the Jewish philosopher Baḥya ibn Paquda (11^th century), but also to his Islamic contemporary Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī.14 All three of them concord in their appreciation of the spiritual dimension which is not articulated but experienced in silence. Ibn Paquda compares the words of prayer to the body and their meaning to the soul. He emphasizes that only by preventing the thoughts from being preoccupied with worldly matters can one reach the highest degree of prayer. The inner devotion culminates in a condition, in which the believer “sees without his eyes and hears without his ears; he talks without his tongue, senses things without his senses and perceives with no need of logic. […] He has tied his own satisfaction to that of God and connected his love to God’s love, so that he loves what God loves and hates what is hateful to Him.”15 Dan highlights the similarity to Teresa’s “Prayer of Quiet”: “The soul, in a way which has nothing to do with the outward senses, realizes that it is now very close to God, and that, if it were but a little closer, it would become one with Him through union.”16 Furthermore, Dan observes that the Sufi attitude towards “Ritual Worship and Inner Worship” wholly abstracts the sensual aspects of prayer:

The time for inner worship is timeless and endless, for the whole life here and in the hereafter. The mosque for this prayer is the heart. The congregation is the inner faculties, which remember and recite the Names of the unity of Allah in the language of the inner world. […] The direction of prayer is toward the oneness of Allah – which is everywhere – and His eternal nature and His beauty. […] There is no longer the sound of recitation, nor standing, bowing, prostrating or sitting. His guide, the leader of his prayer, is the Prophet himself. He speaks with Allah, Most High. […] These divine words are interpreted as a sign of the state of the perfect man, who passes from being nothing, being lost to material things, into a state of oneness. […] When the ritual worship of the material being and the inner worship of the heart unite, the prayer is complete.17

However, the analogy of these approaches does not imply a specific affinity to the Jewish tradition. On the contrary, Joseph Dan emphasizes that Ibn Paquda’s reference to mystical experience (which was influenced by Sufism) differs from the Kabbalist concept of prayer and ritual because of the Kabbalist conviction that Hebrew is the divine language that constitutes reality.18 Significantly, no specific terminology directly related to the Kabbalah, let alone Hebrew terms, can be found in Teresa’s Spanish texts.19

Having said this, I prefer to consider a third way of viewing Teresa of Ávila’s interreligious work by envisioning Jewish motifs, including the mystical perspective. Particularly within the context of her poetry, she may offer, inter alia, an even greater degree of freedom and intimacy than shown in her other major compositions, since her songs and lyrics belong to those short texts that probably have been less jeopardized by the omnipresent censorship and dangerous threat of the Spanish inquisition. The genre of poetry counteracts literal readings that could have implicated the author for what she expressed in a figurative sense. In addition, her imagery encapsulates hermeneutic dynamics, further inviting the reader to a deeper understanding. Therefore, taking into account a Jewish – or converso – perspective in poetry analysis whenever figurative speech is used in a demonstrably subversive way seems only natural.

At first, however, I will give a very brief sketch of what is understood by the term ‘Kabbalah’, which simply means “tradition” in Hebrew, but has been used for esoteric and mystical speculation since medieval times. Then I will analyze two poems, so-called “villancicos”20, (artfully arranged Christmas-carols), in order to shed light on a Jewish perspective in Teresa’s spiritual world. Finally, I will suggest a new explanation for the possibility of Jewish motifs in Teresa de Ávila’s work.