The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 9

NOTES ON THE LIFE OF ST. TERESA. 1812. [1]

Pref. Part I. p. 51. Letter of Father Avila to Mother Teresa de Jesu.

Persons ought to beseech our Lord not to conduct them by the way of seeing; but that the happy sight of him and of his saints be reserved for heaven; and that, here he would conduct them in the plain, beaten road, &c. * * But if, doing all this, the visions continue, and the soul reaps profit thereby, &c.

In what other language could a young woman check while she soothed her espoused lover, in his too eager demonstrations of his pa.s.sion? And yet the art of the Roman priests,--to keep up the delusion as serviceable, yet keep off those forms of it most liable to detection, by medical commentary!

Life, Part I. Chap. IV. p. 15.

But our Lord began to regale me so much by this way, that he vouchsafed me the favor to give me quiet prayer; and sometimes it came so far as to arrive at union; though I understood neither the one nor the other, nor how much they both deserve to be prized. But I believe it would have been a great deal of happiness for me to have understood them. True it is, that this union rested with me for so short a time, that perhaps it might arrive to be but as of an 'Ave Maria'; yet I remained with so very great effects thereof, that with not being then so much as twenty years old, methought I found the whole world under my feet.

Dreams, the soul herself forsaking; Fearful raptures; childlike mirth.

Silent adorations, making A blessed shadow of this earth!

Ib. Chap. V. p. 24.

I received also the blessed Sacrament with many tears; though yet, in my opinion, they were not shed with that sense and grief, for only my having offended G.o.d, which might have served to save my soul; if the error into which I was brought by them who told me that some things were not mortal sins, (which afterward I saw plainly that they were) might not somewhat bestead me. *** Methinks, that without doubt my soul might have run a hazard of not being saved, if I had died then.

Can we wonder that some poor hypochondriasts and epileptics have believed themselves possessed by, or rather to be the Devil himself, and so spoke in this imagined character, when this poor afflicted spotless innocent could be so pierced through with fanatic pre-conceptions, as to talk in this manner of her mortal sins, and their probable eternal punishment;--and this too, under the most fervent sense of G.o.d's love and mercy!

Ib. p. 43.

True it is, that I am both the most weak, and the most wicked of any living.

What is the meaning of these words, that occur so often in the works of great saints? Do they believe them literally? Or is it a specific suspension of the comparing power and the memory, vouchsafed them as a gift of grace?--a gift of telling a lie without breach of veracity--a gift of humility indemnifying pride.

Ib. Chap. VIII. p. 44.

I have not without cause been considering and reflecting upon this life of mine so long, for I discern well enough that n.o.body will have gust to look upon a thing so very wicked.

Again! Can this first sentence be other than madness or a lie? For observe, the question is not, whether Teresa was or was not positively very wicked; but whether according to her own scale of virtue she was most and very wicked comparatively. See post Chap. X. p. 57-8.

That relatively to the command 'Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect', and before the eye of his own pure reason, the best of men may deem himself mere folly and imperfection, I can easily conceive; but this is not the case in question. It is here a comparison of one man with all others of whom he has known or heard;--'ergo', a matter of experience; and in this sense it is impossible, without loss of memory and judgment on the one hand, or of veracity and simplicity on the other. Besides, of what use is it? To draw off our conscience from the relation between ourselves and the perfect ideal appointed for our imitation, to the vain comparison of one individual self with other men!

Will their sins lessen mine, though they were greater? Does not every man stand or fall to his own Maker according to his own being?

Ib. p. 45.

I see not what one thing there is of so many as are to be found in the whole world, wherein there is need of a greater courage than to treat of committing treason against a king, and to know that he knows it well, and yet never to go out of his presence. For howsoever it be very true that we are always in the presence of G.o.d; yet methinks that they who converse with him in prayer are in his presence after a more particular manner; for they are seeing then that he sees them; whereas others may, perhaps, remain some days in his presence, yet without remembering that he looks upon them.

A very pretty and sweet remark: truth in new feminine beauty!

'In fine'.

How incomparably educated was Teresa for a mystic saint, a mother of transports and fusions of spirit!

1. A woman;

2. Of rank, and reared delicately;

3. A Spanish lady;

4. With very pious parents and sisters;

5. Accustomed in early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the Moors;

6. In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superst.i.tious Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to herself.

7. Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates style--and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love;

8. A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and 'deliquia':

9. Frightened at her Uncle's, by reading to him Dante's books of h.e.l.l and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory--and that purgatory here was a cheap expiation for h.e.l.l for ever;

10. Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame, often pleasurable approaches to 'deliquium' for divine raptures; and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain?

11. One source it is almost criminal to have forgotten, and which p. 12.

of the first Part brought back to my recollection; I mean, the effects--so super-sensual that they may easily and most venially pa.s.s for supernatural, so very glorious to human nature that, though in truth they are humanity itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united in one person with this one n.o.bler nature we attribute them to a divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its misapplication of s.p.a.ce and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, for it is verily [Greek: ho thes en haemin ho oikeios theos],) the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the will has preserved its perfect freedom by a vehement energy of perfect obedience to the pure or practical reason, or conscience. Thence flows in upon and fills the soul 'that peace which pa.s.seth understanding', a state affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion, and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state (known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human nature! Under all forms of positive or philosophic religion, it has developed itself, too glorious an attribute of man to be confined to any name or sect; but which, it is but truth and historical fact to say, is more especially fostered and favoured by Christianity; and its frequent appearance even under the most selfish and unchristian forms of Christianity is a stronger evidence of the divinity of that religion, than all the miracles of Brahma and Veeshnou could afford, even though they were supported with tenfold the judicial evidence of the Gospel miracles. [2]

[Footnote 1: The works of the Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus Foundress of the Reformation of the Discalced Carmelites. Divided into two parts.

Translated into English. MDCLXXV. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: London 1685.]

NOTES ON BURNET'S LIFE OF BISHOP BEDELL. [1]