Sexuality

doi:10.1017/CCO9781139020886.025

21 - Sexuality

from Part III - Contemporary Questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Constance M. Furey

Edited by

Amy Hollywood and

Patricia Z. Beckman

Show author details

Amy Hollywood: Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
Patricia Z. Beckman: Affiliation:
St Olaf College, Minnesota

Book contents

Get access

Summary

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.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism , pp. 328 - 340

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139020886.025 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Teresa of Avila, The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Doubleday, 1991)

Giles, Mary, “Francisca Hernández and the Sexuality of Religious Dissent,” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Giles (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)

Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990)

Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Random House, 1984)

Davidson, Arnold I., The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

Constructing Medieval Sexuality: Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996)

Dinshaw, Caroline, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

Lochrie, Karma, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)

Burrus, Virginia, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)

Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974)

Astell, Ann, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)

Beatrice of Nazareth, “Seven Manners of Loving,” in Mediaeval Netherlands Religious Literature, trans. and intro. E. Colledge (Leiden, The Netherlands: Sythoff, 1965)

Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist Press, 1993)

Foligno, Angela, The Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993)

James of Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot King (Saskatoon, SK: Peregrina Publishing, 1987)

Teresa of Avila, “Conceptions of the Love of God,” in The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1982)

Elliott, Dyan, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1997)

Das Litaneye-Büchlein nach der bey den Brüdern dermalen hauptsächlich gewöhnlichen Singe-Weise von neuem revidirt, und in dieser bequemen Form ausgegeben von dem Cantore Fratrum Ordinario, 4th ed. (Barby, 1757)

The Litany-book, According to the Manner of Singing At present mostly in Use among the BRETHREN, Again revised, translated from the 4th German ed. (London, 1759)

Atwood, Craig, “Sleeping in the Arms of Christ: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church,”Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 1 (1997)Google Scholar

Fogleman, Aaron, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)

Hollywood, Amy, “‘That Glorious Slit’: Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ’s Side Wound,” in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Theresa Krier (New York: Routledge, 2005)

Erb, Peter C., ed., Pietists: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1983)

Zinzendorf, “Berlin Reden,” foreword to the sermons to the men, in Hauptschriften in sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Beyreuther and Gerhard Meyer, 6 vols. (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1962)

Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee (Hancock, MA, 1816)

Humez, Jean, ed., Mother’s First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)

Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985)

Bloch, Ruth, “Changing Conceptions of Sexuality and Romance in Eighteenth-century America,”William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2003)Google Scholar