Teresa's Tropological Commentary on the Song of Songs

Teresa's most extended application of her feminist hermeneutic appears in her Meditations on the Song of Songs , a commentary written between 1566 and 1571 on several verses of the Song. Teresa's division of the tropological sense serves to demonstrate that the Church confines women's experience to the spiritual realm, denying them a history in any other sphere,

and that her own fulfillment of the moral imperative of Scripture depends on an additional promise from God in mystical experience.

Of all Teresa's works, the Meditations on the Song of Songs provoked the most hostile reaction from the Inquisition. Although Domingo Báñez signed one of the manuscripts of the Meditations to indicate his approval on 10 June 1575, in 1580, Diego de Yanguas, another of Teresa's confessors and a theologian of the Inquisition, ordered her to destroy the manuscript and all copies. Jerónimo Gracián, who published the first edition of the work in 1611 in Brussels, maintains in the introduction that Yanguas condemned the work because reading Scripture defied the limitations Paul had placed on women's participation in the Church, not because he found any heretical statements.

But one of her confessors, thinking it a new and dangerous thing that a woman should write on the Song, ordered this book to be burned, moved with zeal for Saint Paul's instruction that women should keep silence in the Church of God. This meant that they should not preach in churches, nor give lectures nor print books. And because at the time she wrote the Lutheran heresy was doing great damage, opening the door for women and the ignorant to read and explicate the divine Word ... it seemed to him that the work should be burnt.^[30]

Teresa is said to have burned the manuscript in his presence, but some of the numerous copies already made by her nuns survived in convent libraries. Luis de León left the Meditations out of his 1588 edition of her works, possibly because having spent nearly five years (1572-1577) in prison for translating the Song of Songs from the Hebrew, he did not wish to risk his truce with the Inquisition.^[31] Gracián divided the work into chapters and supplied the chapter descriptions and epigraphs, and he gave the work a title, Conceptions of the Love of God (Conceptos del amor de Dios). Within the text, Teresa refers to the work as her "meditations," a label used to create the modern title, Meditations on the Song of Songs (Meditaciones sobre los Cantares).

The tradition of mystical commentary on the Song of Songs, in which Teresa's Meditations belongs, begins with Origen's Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs (In Canticum Canticorum), circa 240-244. Origen elaborated three senses of

the Song, which, in accordance with his view of Scripture as an Incarnation constructed according to the Platonic tripartite image of the human being, he denominated body, soul , and spirit , or in the standard exegetical terms, the literal, allegorical, and tropological. For Origen, the body represents the historical meaning, which he considers a marriage song in dramatic form; the soul, the nuptials of Christ and the Church; and the spirit, the union of God and the individual soul.^[32] The numerous mystical exegetes of the twelfth century devote attention principally to Origen's tropological sense. In his Sermons on the Song of Songs (Sermones supra Cantica Canticorum, 1135-1153), Bernard of Clairvaux encourages his audience of Cistercian monks to identify imaginatively, first, with the sensual experience of the male Bridegroom, then, in the feminine role of Bride, with the spiritual passions.^[33] Bernard's equation of the affective movements of the soul with tropological reading serves to reconcretize the literal level, which had previously been spiritualized with allegorical interpretation. In mystical commentaries such as Bernard's, Ann W. Astell explains in The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages , "the allegory is literalized, joined again to the letter from which it was derived, and ascent turns into descent."^[34] While Origen's commentaries have principally an exegetical purpose, then, Bernard's sermons also serve the rhetorical end of guiding his monks to cultivate the ascetic life.

An Inquisitor's judgment notwithstanding, Teresa's Meditations resembles biblical exegesis only in superficial ways.^[35] Teresa takes her translations of the Song from the Daily Office of the Virgin, which Carmelite nuns recited daily except on feast days, rather than from a text of the Bible.^[36] The exegetical format, with quotation of and commentary on five verses from the Song (1.1, 1.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5) as well as brief reference to several other verses (2.16, 4.7, 6.3, 6.10, 8.5), was imposed on the work by Gracián. Teresa does acknowledge the existence of an exegetical tradition, but she places her work outside it by pleading a weak memory and citing God as her only source: "His Majesty knows well that even though at times—and these were few—I have heard explanations of some of these words and have been told their meaning when I asked, I don't remember the explanations at all, for I have a very poor memory. Thus, I shall be able to say only what the Lord teaches me and what serves my purpose" (Meditations 1.9).^[37] Besides, she complains, the

explications by "doctors of the Church," probably a reference to Bernard, have not satisfied her desire for the true meaning of the Song (Meditations 1.8).^[38] Teresa remarks two philological problems that had been addressed by many commentators (the shift in person of the possessive pronoun in Song 1:1 from third person to second person, a characteristic of Hebrew poetry sometimes construed as the presence of a third speaker,^[39] and the repetition of the word kiss and the apparent redundancy of the word mouth in the first line), but she declines to solve these issues by rational means: "I don't understand why this [use of pronouns in two different persons] is; and that I don't understand gives me great delight" (Meditations 1.1).^[40] Rather than for explication of the Song of Songs, Teresa uses her Meditations principally for self-interpretation.

Like Bernard, Teresa reliteralizes the tropological sense of the Song—but to the end of narrating her spiritual history. Teresa's tropological reading of the Song establishes a connection between two events she describes as concrete, if not historical in the ordinary sense: the marriage of the Bride in the Song of Songs and her own mystical marriage with God. She states this allegorical equation straightforwardly: "a soul in love with its Spouse" can "experience all these favors, swoons, deaths, afflictions, delights, and joys [narrated in the Song] in relation to Him" (Meditations 1.6).^[41] With this literalized tropological sense, Teresa shows that the only history allowed her by the Church is spiritual, the first part of the tropological meaning, and she argues that she be allowed to undertake the ethical subfulfillment that a full tropological reading of Scripture mandates.

As a corollary to her concretization of the tropological sense, Teresa values the purely verbal aspect of the literal level of the Song more than either Origen or Bernard. Probably because the Song so aroused his sexual desire Origen prohibited reading it to all but the most spiritually advanced: "I advise and counsel everyone who is not yet rid of the vexations of flesh and book and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature, to refrain completely from reading this little book."^[42] Teresa seems to know the tradition of restricting readership of the Song, but possibly because for her the Song releases passions more various than specifically libidinal, she gives the words of the Song a role in creating her spiritual interpretation of it:

People will say that I am a fool, that the words [of the first line of the Song] don't mean this, that they have many meanings, that obviously we must not speak such words to God, that for this reason it is good that simple people do not read these things. I confess that the passage has many meanings. But the soul that is enkindled with a love that makes it mad desires nothing else than to say these words. Indeed, the Lord does not forbid her to say them. (Meditations 1.10)^[43]

The Song itself has a materiality for her, as she implies by comparing it to a king's brocade robe.

And I interpret the passage in my own way, even though my understanding of it may not be in accord with what is meant.... I hold it as certain that we do not offend Him when we find delight and consolation in His words and works. A king would be happy and pleased if he saw a little shepherd he loved looking spellbound at the royal brocade and wondering what it is and how it was made. (Meditations 1.8)^[44]

Like the king's gown, the words of the Song cloak profound mysteries (Meditations 7.1) and tremendous secrets (Meditations 4.1), the allegorical or spiritual senses. Against those who argue that the Song "could have been said in another style," presumably without the similitude of human love, Teresa defends God's choice of medium as well as message: "What more was necessary than this language in order to enkindle us in His love and make us realize that not without good reason did He choose this style" (Meditations 1.4)^[45] Reading the text of the Song, in which Teresa considers that God "humbled" Himself as in the Incarnation, provides her a sensory pleasure equivalent to meditating on the body of Christ.

Teresa leaps over the allegorical or ecclesiastical sense, which traditionally intervenes between the literal sense and the spiritual senses, to the tropological.^[46] The ideal reader of Teresa's tropological sense, in both of its aspects, is the Virgin Mary. Rather than reason or curiosity, the approaches Teresa finds characteristic of male interpreters, Mary uses feeling as an instrument of reading. Employing the double meaning of the word sentir , which signifies both to mean and to feel , Teresa equates feeling with reading and vice versa: "What deep secrets there are in these words! May the Lord give us experience of them, for they are very difficult to explain" (Meditations 4.1; also see 3.1).^[47]

Accordingly, the Virgin refrained from conducting rational inquiry into the mystery that the angel Gabriel announced to her.

She did not act as do some learned men (whom the Lord does not lead by this mode of prayer and who haven't begun a life of prayer), for they want to be so rational about things and so precise in their understanding that it doesn't seem anyone else but they with their learning can understand the grandeurs of God. (Meditations 6.7)^[48]

In still more exemplary fashion, the Virgin accepted her role in the Incarnation, improbable though it initially seemed. While she followed her first instinct and asked Gabriel, "How can this be?" after he answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you; the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (Luke 1:34-35), she did not pursue her inquiry: "As one who had such great faith and wisdom, she understood at once that if these two intervened, there was nothing more to know or doubt" (Meditations 6.7).^[49] In agreeing to become mother of Christ, the Virgin undertakes the ethical subfulfillment of her tropological reading.

Teresa begins the sections on Song 1:1 by phrasing the request for His kiss, which she interprets as a sign of His friendship and peace, with a direct command ("'Kiss me with the kiss of your mouth'" [Meditations 1.10]) rather than with the indirect command ("Let Him kiss me ...") that more literally translates the verse. The boldness of the request startles her into a realization of her unworthiness for this reading of the Song, and she vows to undertake spiritual development, which coincides with refinement and enlargement of the capacity to feel, that is, to read. Her path begins with the purgative process, which she defines as learning to feel spiritual pain. Using third-person narrative, she tells her history of learning to read the Song tropologically. The first step is rejecting the sins she calls the "kiss of Judas," or the kinds of false peace that anesthetize and atrophy the soul. In the sense that Dante's sins in the Inferno can be said to converge in treachery, Teresa's catalog of sins centers on failure of feeling: insensitivity to one's own sinfulness, indicated by relaxation of discipline and disobedience of superiors; fascination with worldly rewards such as material wealth, honor, and praise; indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh, including eating well, sleeping long, and seeking entertainment. Teresa then turns to the positive feelings the soul must develop to merit

the true kiss: developing contempt for earthly things; spending time only with those who love God; and desiring to give one's life in martyrdom (Meditations 3.3; 3.4, 5; 3.8). When the soul at last desires this kind of sacrifice, it has earned the right to request God's kiss, as Teresa herself does in a passionate restatement of the verse that merges her own voice with that of the Bride: "I repeat, my God, and beg You through the blood of your Son that You grant me this favor: 'Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth,' for without You, what am I, Lord?" (Meditations 4.8).^[50]

Teresa devotes her discussion of the next several verses of the Song to explaining the stages leading toward mystical union, the point at which she must begin to carry out the ethical subfulfillment. (See chap. 4 for a discussion of all the terms Teresa uses to describe the progression toward mystical union.) Drawing on a tradition of describing God with maternal imagery that was prominent in the affective spirituality of the late Middle Ages, Teresa portrays God as mother, sole source of joy and nourishment to the infant soul. Suckling the divine breast, the soul experiences enjoyment equivalent to all earthly pleasures combined as well as understanding of this verse of the Song through enjoyment: "May our Lord give us understanding or, to put it better, a taste—for there is no other way of being able to understand—of what the soul's joy is in this state" (Meditations 4.7).^[51] Once having understood God's gift, Teresa returns to her plea for a way to acknowledge the moral imperative inherent in Christ's suffering: "'What can I do for my Spouse?' ... Truly, sisters, I know not how to resolve this difficulty" (Meditations 4.10, 11; Peers's translation).

In her commentary on Song 2.3, 4, Teresa takes the maturing soul through its increasing enjoyment of God's pleasures to mystical union. God now prepares a kind of baby food for the weaned soul: "The Lord gives from the apple tree, ... the fruit already cut, cooked, and even chewed. So that she says 'His fruit is sweet to her taste'" (Meditations 5.4). To the more developed soul God becomes a vintner with a fully stocked cellar of fine wines, each supplying devotion, fortitude, or virtue as the individual soul requires. In mystical union, where following the Latin translation of Song 2.4, which emphasizes the humanitarian over the erotic aspects of the Hebrew word for love, Teresa relates with the Bride that "'He set charity (caridad ) in order

within me.'" Yet Teresa goes on to specify that the Bride actually means love (amor ): "How well ordered love [amor ] is in this soul!" (Meditations 6.11). To the soul, for whom mystical experience has worked its metal and adorned it with jewels and pearls, God speaks the words of Song 4:7: "'You are all beautiful, my love'" (Meditations 6.9).

Ordered in both charity and love and armed with their opposite, disregard (desamor ) for the rewards and comforts of this world, the soul now desires acts of charity and courage. Teresa interprets the flowers requested by the Bride in Song 2:5 as charitable works for God and the apples as persecutions for Christ: "I understand by these words ['Stay me with flowers and surround me with apples'] that the soul is asking to perform great works in the service of our Lord and of its neighbor. For this purpose it is happy to lose that delight and satisfaction" (Meditations 7.3).^[52] When a woman attempts to undertake such heroic deeds, however, she finds herself thwarted by the prohibitions on women's activity in the Church. Hindered by these obstacles, she comes to the end of an unfolding history in the world.

Teresa projects an imaginary historical trajectory for the Bride by linking her figurally to the Samaritan woman of John 4:7-42 who talked with Christ at the well. Christ's words to the Samaritan woman produce both the desire and the capacity for heroic works on His behalf. As in most of His dialogues in the Johannine Gospel, Christ attempts to lead the Samaritan woman to a spiritual understanding of physical phenomena, beginning with water and leading to Himself. He presents the possibility that well water she has drawn could give her insight into God's gift of eternal life: "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water that I shall give him will never suffer thirst any more" (John 4:14). When she continues to understand the water in material terms, He proves His prophetic power by telling her that contrary to the impression she gives when she says that she has no husband, she has been married five times and lives with yet another man. Now ready to listen, she concurs with his statement that "those who are real worshippets will worship the Father in spirit and in truth" and affirms her belief in the coming Messiah. Christ then gives her a revelation that Teresa considers analogous to her own vi-

sion of Christ, the "living book": "I am he, I who am speaking with you" (John 4:26). Using imagery she often applies to the mystical encounter, piercing of the heart and wounding by a celestial herb, Teresa describes the Samaritan woman as transformed by these words from Christ.

I recall now what I have often thought concerning that holy Samaritan woman, for she must have been wounded by this herb. How well she must have taken into her heart the words of the Lord, since she left the Lord for the gain and profit of the people of her village. This explains well what I am saying. And in payment for her great charity, she merited to be believed and to see the wonderful good our Lord did in that village.... This holy woman, in that divine intoxication, went shouting through the streets. What amazes me is to see how the people believed her—a woman. And she must not have been well-off since she went to draw water. Indeed she was very humble because when the Lord told her faults to her she didn't become offended ... but she told Him that He must be a prophet. In sum, the people believed her; and a large crowd, on her word alone, went out of the city to meet the Lord. (Meditations 7.6)^[53]

The imagery of intoxication here makes the analogy between the Samaritan woman and the Bride, whose mystical communication with God Teresa considers to give her also the capacity for heroic works. After this meeting with Christ, the Samaritan woman undertook the mission of preaching the arrival of the Messiah: "Many Samaritans of that town came to believe in him because of the woman's testimony: 'He told me everything I ever did'" (John 4:39). Teresa takes the words of Song 8:5, "'Under the apple tree I raised you up'" (Meditations 7.8), as God's promise that He will intervene in the world to permit His mystical Bride to undertake the works appropriate for her ethical subfulfillment of the tropological sense.