Mystics

~ Clarissa

You know what annoys me a lot? When some repressed (not to be confused with oppressed) grad school geek gleefully insists that St. Teresa of Avila’s visions had nothing to do with her religious feelings but were a product of her lack of sexual fulfillment.

“Well, just read her writings,” they tell me.

I have. And I see no evidence that St. Teresa did not, in fact, have genuine mystic experiences.

“Look at the Bernini statue, then!” they suggest.

I have. And I believe Bernini is as entitled as I am to have his vision of the mystics and a lot less entitled than I am to have an opinion on female sexuality.

These cheap attempts at psychoanalyzing people whose reality and depth of religious feeling we cannot even begin to understand bug me.

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Published by Clarissa

7 thoughts on “Mystics”

  1. Big fan of St. Teresa as well. 🙂

    This attitude can be blamed on Freud, though to be fair to Freud he had something a bit more complex in mind then just dismissing everything as sex. C. S. Lewis had a response to Freud going through his work (including Narnia) where he turns the tables on Freudians and asks why it cannot be the other way around: are we naturally mystics who turn to sex because it reminds of a mystical experience.

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    1. I am even a greater fan of psychoanalysis than of St. Teresa, which is why it pains me to see it completely misunderstood and used for such purposes.

      Thanks for the C. S. Lewis quote! I didn’t know he said this.

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  3. Mystical experiences are common to many cultures and have been associated with everything from ingestion of toxins to hunger due to fasting to mass hysteria (whatever that is). For the past 100 years visions in the “more sophisticated” parts of the US and western Europe have generally been treated as hallucinations. Look at how few visions of “the Virgin” have been accepted by the Catholic Church in the 20th Century. I think that anyone who spends day after day seeking a vision will eventually experience one. Whether that is physiogenic, neurogenic, psychogenic, or a visitation of a deity or quasi-deity is only relevant to the explanation chosen by a particular narrator. Choosing “sexual repression” as an explanation probably indicates more about the person making that choice than it does about the visionary. I am very suspicious of attempts to provide an explanation for events about which the narrator has no first hand knowledge. Why is the explanation of the person who had the experience less acceptable than that of someone with no direct knowledge?

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  4. One of my favorite books from my college experience is Kenneth Patchen’s “Journal of Albion Moonlight”. About 15 or 20 pages in, if I recall correctly, the narrator is being questioned by a “reader” about the various symbols. The “reader” states, “_____ is obviously Hitler.” At this point the narrator loses his composure and says something like, “Why must everything be a symbol for something else. When Hitler appears in this book, he will appear as Hitler.” This is one of my favorite statements and I need to order a new copy of the book so I can quote it properly.

    The attempt to twist a narrative into something different from the original, whether it is an alternative explanation or by declaring it symbolic of something different, is one of the most pretentious and outrageous characteristics of pseudo-intellectuals. I have read so many comments that Ofelia in “Laberinto del fauno” is a symbol of Christ that I may scream the next time I see it. Why cannot Ofelia be Ofelia?

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    1. This is precisely the kind of criticism I don’t like. I call it “soviet-style literary criticism.” We used to hear things like “Maria’s red handkerchief symbolizes the blood of the proletariat spilled in the battles against capitalism.” This is why I hated literature more than any other subject at school. 🙂

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