There are moments in human experience that defy easy explanation, moments so profound they seem to pull us out of ourselves. For Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century mystic and Carmelite reformer, one such moment was the 'ecstasy' or 'transverberation' – a mystical encounter she described with a piercing, yet exquisitely painful, divine love.
It's a concept that has captivated minds for centuries, prompting various interpretations. When we talk about 'translation' in the context of her experience, it's not just about changing languages. As Mieke Bal suggests, it's about 'conducting through, passing beyond, to the other side of a division or difference.' It's a process of liberation, transformation, and renewal, a way of bringing something new into being rather than just faithfully reproducing the old.
Teresa herself wrestled with how to articulate this event. She used terms like 'union,' 'rapture,' 'transport,' and 'flight of spirit,' often acknowledging they were all just different names for the same thing: ecstasy. She described it as a state of pure enjoyment, where the senses are so overwhelmed by divine joy that they are incapable of outward or inward action. In her Autobiography, she referred to the piercing of her heart as a 'true impulse' and a 'vision.' Yet, in her Spiritual Relations, she likened it to a specific type of prayer, a 'wound' inflicted by an arrow that caused a pain so delightful, so deeply felt in the soul's interior, that she never wished it to cease.
This profound, almost paradoxical, experience has resonated through art and thought. Consider Gianlorenzo Bernini, the master of Roman Baroque sculpture. His interpretation, often seen in his dramatic and emotionally charged works, captures the intensity and theatricality of such mystical encounters. The Baroque style itself, with its exaggeration, movement, and strong contrasts, seems perfectly suited to conveying the overwhelming nature of Teresa's ecstasy.
Centuries later, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, approaching from a structuralist perspective, might have viewed this experience through the lens of language and the symbolic order. For Lacan, the human subject is shaped by language, and moments of profound spiritual experience can be seen as attempts to articulate the ineffable, to push the boundaries of what can be expressed within existing linguistic structures.
And then there's Louise Bourgeois, the contemporary artist whose work often delves into themes of the body, trauma, and the subconscious. Her artistic explorations of intense emotional states, often raw and visceral, offer another way to 'translate' the visceral impact of Teresa's ecstatic visions. Bourgeois might have found in Teresa's account a resonance with the body's capacity to hold and express extreme psychological and spiritual states.
What's fascinating is how these different perspectives – the mystic's own words, the sculptor's visual drama, the psychoanalyst's theoretical framework, and the artist's visceral expression – all attempt to grapple with an experience that, by its very nature, transcends ordinary understanding. Teresa's ecstasy, this 'standing outside oneself' as Grace Jantzen describes it, remains a powerful testament to the human capacity for profound, ineffable connection, a reminder that some truths are felt more than they are understood, experienced more than they are explained.
