ABSTRACT
Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614) achieves, in the sonnet "De inmenso amor,"1 one of the most stunning images in baroque poetry, yet by the simplest means: depicting herself at the moment of taking communion, she offers not her own thoughts or affections; rather, we grasp her experience through hearing the voice of Christ address her; and this verbal mirror, so to speak, presents not the literal scene of Luisa opening her mouth to receive the bread, but instead the crucified Christ-the visible God invisibly present within the host-his arms open to embrace her, inviting this soul he calls "little dove" to enter the door that is the open wound of his breast, where she will find a sacred bed of flowers and flame (w. 1-6). While the mutual embrace is of course a spiritual event, it is figured in the most intensely corporeal terms: a reciprocalabsorption, a communion that is a commingling of inmost flesh and utmost spirit. "See how I surrender to you," Christ tells her, "my whole being and exalted sublimity" (w . 9-10). Within his arms she will be granted the "delight that no one deserves" (w . 13-14). The poem culminates, then, in the gift of grace, especially appropriate when we recall that Eucharist (efcharisto) is precisely gracias, "Thanks," in Greek.What I find initially striking us here is the strange beauty of this image: Luisa not simply being called a dove but changed into one and invited into the wound, so that the figure clearly derived from the Song of Songs is intensified through baroque admiratio. by combining the dove with both the Passion and the Sacrament, the amatory figure of two lovers becoming one flesh is 1 Tras el espejo la musa escribe: lirica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, ed. Julian
amalgamated with the idea of the communicant eating the flesh of God and thereby becoming a member of his body. It is in terms of grace freely given, and of the transformation of death into life through Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection that we need to view Carvajal's images of suffering and a desire for martyrdom that might be facilely dismissed as morbid. I intend first to explore some of these concrete images and second to show how they constellate to reveal an implicit mystical theology that is both particularly Jesuit in nature and at the same time of universal spiritual significance, since we find in many of the great traditions an emphasis on the divine body, the manifestation or avatar of God as the means of bridging the worlds of spirit and flesh, cosmos and individual.These themes are made clear in a variety of images of flight, death, and union that recur frequently in Luisa's work. Another sonnet, "En el siniestro brazo recostada,"2 presents her as a "Phoenix enflamed" (v. 13), a symbol expanded in the romance "Teniendose en la memoria,"3 where the wound in Christ's side is the door to the Royal Palace of his body: love grants her wings, and she flies into his breast, dying in the flames, a Phoenix renewed (w. 27-34). Another romance, "Sintiendo Silva de amor,"4 offers satirical passages worthy of Erasmus, as she leaves a will in verse bequeathing all the vanities, follies, lies, empty pomp, and chimerical illusions to her beneficiary, the world, which esteems such things (w. 21-4). In the final verses, the Shepherd places her in the "glorious sepulcher" within his breast (w. 76-7), where she lies hidden from the perfidious world, enfolded like the Phoenix in a thousand flames, blessed and happy (w. 87-90).The cumulative effect is emphatically not on death, but on the felicity that comes from transcendence of self, a transformation preceding union and rebirth, as evinced by the Phoenix, a Near Eastern symbol that appears in Christianity as early as Tertullian in the second century and Lactantius in the fourth. According to the mystical zoology of the influential Physiologus (ca. 200), the Phoenix that immolates itself on a pyre, only to appear as a worm among the ashes, becoming feathered on the second day and flying away on the third, is a figure of Christ's Resurrection.5In the Lira "A1 alma que te adora,"6 love itself is winged and after stealing her willing heart, with which it soars aloft, conceals it within Christ's eyes, leaving her breast an altar where a fire bums in homage to divine love (w. 61-70). Is this meant as a pentecostal flame, an image of the Holy Spirit? This
would bring us full circle to the poem we first considered, in which Christ calls Luisa "little dove," the established symbol of the Holy Spirit, which is of course theologically the love that binds God the Father and the Son, as well as the love uniting God to Creation.7 But to burn with the Spirit is not to be the Spirit, as becoming a dove might subversively suggest. Yet these symbols are exquisitely ambiguous: for the dove is not only an image of the Spirit but of Christ himself, and the turtledove in particular, like the Phoenix, is also a symbol of renewal.8 According to the Physiologus, Christ is the "flame-colored dove" of the Song, whose eyes the Bride compares to doves, saying, "My beloved is fair and ruddy."9 The Physiologus further affirms that doves dwelling in the tree Peridexion, the tree of life, are symbols of Christ: the dragon or serpent fears the tree where doves dwell.10But it is not unprecedented or audacious for Luisa to refer to herself with the same image used for both Christ and the Holy Spirit. Many of the early symbols are of course elaborated in the mystical traditions that precede and shape Luisa's era. It is said that when St. Polycarp {circa AD 156) was stabbed by his executioner with a dagger, a dove emerged from the wound.11 But long before this, a sublime passage from the Song of Songs 2:10, "Surge . . . columba mea," includes the terms arnica, columba, and formosa-"friend," "dove," and "beautiful." St. Bernard, in his 57th Sermon on the Song, regards these as three aspects of the soul. The soul as "friend" is the role of Martha:12 preaching, advising, serving; the soul as "dove" weeps and prays for forgiveness of sins, as does Lazarus; and finally the soul as "beautiful" is Mary, clothed in "the beauty of heavenly contemplation."13 The soul, however, in whom all three aspects come together is deemed perfect, and in his 23rd Sermon, Bernard has told us that the "perfect dove" of Song 6:8 is the Bride of Christ.14 Given
THE MYSTICAL GESTURE the combination of the soul as dove, the perfect embrace, and the sacral bed, we can safely conclude that Luisa aligns with this Bernardine interpretation, whether or not she is directly influenced by it, as we know her to have been by Fray Luis de Granada, St. John Climacus, and others.15But there can be no doubt that the poems reflect the two pillars of her spiritual and mystical life-the Passion and the Eucharist, those two most bodily mysteries. From early youth the Passion was the favored object of her mental prayer and meditation, and she mentions in particular that she never missed taking communion on the feast of Corpus Christi.16 In Madrid, at the age of 26, she withdrew from her family and the court where she had been a lady in waiting, to fulfill her yearning to imitate Christ; of the paths that offered themselves to her, she felt she must follow only that one where could be found "the footsteps of Christ our Lord."17 Despite spells of spiritual aridity, her practice of prayer and meditation upon images of Christ resulted in her feeling in the depth of her soul "a terrible love" and a desire "to follow his rough road unto death."18 Wounded by the arrow of his love, she longs to embrace his poverty and humiliation, those treasures in which he lies wrapped up.19 For many months, she experienced during interior prayer the grace of encountering in the depths of her soul "a most delicate and sovereign presence of the Incarnate Word"; there she embraces him and finds her heart both enlarged and illumined.20 Sometimes, after communion, the torments of his Passion would appear to her, such as one Friday in February of 1599, when she had a vision of the open wounds of his head and of his pierced hands; when her soul clings to his agonized body, the joys of eternal life, of which she had been reading, seemed to her altogether bereft of delight, and she deemed a torment all that was not sharing in the Passion: " . . . and I should choose, for my sole and supreme glory, to see myself transformed into that sovereign Person . . . my soul raised up on his cross and run through with those very nails and thorns." Yet his suffering does not cause her anguish; rather it confers "a gently
penetrating love.” His close embrace alone can satisfy her, and there can be no other heaven than suffering his torments.21This is the "locura de la cruz," the folly of the Cross, of which Ignatius of Loyola speaks, echoing St. Paul.22 Although she never became a nun, Luisa's association with the Jesuits was intimate: the house where she lived in Madrid belonged to the Order, her vows of poverty, obedience, perfection, and martyrdom were presented to the Rector of the Jesuit Imperial College, and her entire period in England during the persecution was spent in association with the Jesuits there.23 When we consider Jesuit spiritual practice and theology, it becomes clear that Luisa's skill as a poet, a maker of images, accords perfectly with Jesuit orientation. Her focus on dramatic details is not limited to the Crucifixion: in the redondilla "jNo encubras, Silva, tu gloria!"24 she gives us a loving description of Jesus' appearance; his eyes rob diamonds of their splendor (w. 54-6), the sun receives its very light from the glints of his chestnut hair (w. 57-60), his brows are rainbows of peace following the Deluge (w. 65-8). The appeal to the senses intensifies as she takes us into his "eternal interior" (v. I l l ) , the source of life that is given for all on the Cross: again, we are told, "he opened, for me to enter, a door I saw slashed in his right side" (w. 118-20); at the sound of his voice, her soul dissolves (w. 125-8); he takes her by the hand and enters into her garden (w . 133-6), where the flowers of her soul spill forth a "scent transcendent" (w. 137-40, 169-70), and nearly barren trees bear fruit (w . 161-4), making her desert a heaven (w. 171-2) (my emphases). Every sense is appealed to: this is at once consummate baroque poetry and areflection of Jesuit meditational practice.Ignatius's spirituality is deeply trinitarian,25 yet the Spiritual Exercises evince an unsurpassed devotion to the Incarnation as revelation: through the mediation of the human-divine Christ, the world is drawn back to God; the center of that mediation is the Eucharist, the active presence of Christ in bread and wine. But the wider sphere-to borrow Jill Raitt's metaphor-includes not
only Mary and the angels but all of creation.26 The Christocentric life is the aim of the exercise of daily examination of self: to achieve an ever more perfect following of Christ, so that one becomes not only an object of redemption but also a mediator.27 It is precisely through Jesus’ humanity that Ignatius grasps his divine nature and through this the twofold nature of Christ that he glimpses the life of the Trinity.28 Ignatius's fervent prayer was that Jesus make him "conform to the will of the Most Holy Trinity."29 In her prose writings, Luisa uses images from the Apocalypse of the precious stones of the Heavenly Jerusalem to suggest that spiritual work is an alchemical transformation of the soul's will, through the crucible of tribulations, into perfect conformity with divine will, the fulfillment of which is the "treasure."30The epiphanaic emphasis on the divine presence shining through the visible is a constant motif of Jesuit thought, including that of perhaps the greatest modern theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who writes. "The incarnate Word is . . . the universale concretum et personate, God's universal truth and love in concrete form." And this concrete form reaches its fullest expression in the Cross: "To say Incarnation is to say Cross."31 But this is not simply a modern or Tridentine innovation, for early Greek Fathers like Athanasius as well as for the West, "the final goal of the Incarnation is the Cross."32 Rooted in the Gospel of John, it reflects the Johannine paradox: as God's supreme glory is expressed in serving his creatures and washing their feet, so, to quote John Saward, "in the hour of his humiliation and obedience unto death . . . the Redeemer-Son draws all creation to himself," and the glory of the Father’s love is "supremely manifested in the human form of the Son broken and obedient unto death. . . . "33 Incarnation is not so much the changing of God into man, but rather the taking up of humanity into God, as Luisa is drawn up into Christ; it thus reveals the innermost life of the Trinity, which is one of "absolute self-surrender" of the three persons to each other,34 most perfectly and paradoxically articulating divine omnipotence: God'salmightiness, Balthasar affirms, "blazes forth in the powerlessness of the incarnate and crucified Son."35 This goes all the way back to Gregory of Nyssa: God's "capacity to descend to the lowliness of the human condition is a far
greater proof of power than the miracles of an imposing and supernatural kind . . . . The humiliation of God shows the superabundance of his power. . . ,"36Unfortunately, it is precisely the concrete focus on the Word Incarnate that has often led to the parody of Jesuit spiritual method as an image-bound, mechanical approach, at best "non-spiritual," and at worst an "anti-spiritual" obstacle to genuine mysticism.37 This is rooted in the prejudice that real spirituality is somehow dematerialized, that it disdains or even shuns creation. But this is a Platonizing, Reformation perspective that runs counter to the tradition that Thomas Aquinas articulates with such lucid beauty: the true form of human being is not simply a spirit using a body; rather, human nature is essentially a mysterious conjunction or composite of spirit and flesh.38 Ignatius’s Christology is congruent: emphasizing the twofold, divine and human nature of Christ; as Harvey Egan puts it, "The Ignatian Christ is always the Son of the Virgin Mary according to the flesh and the Son of the eternal Father."39This emphasizes and elaborates an ancient tradition, which finds perhaps its most radiant cultural expression in the Gothic cathedral, conceived by medieval theorists like William Durandus and Abbot Suger as a arhcitectonic allegory of the Heavenly City, which Apocalypse 21 identifies with Jesus' body.40 This is a late medieval elaboration of an idea expressed a thousand years earlier: the cruciform plan of churches dates back to Old St. Peter's in Rome, in AD 326, and St. Ambrose's assertion that his cross plan for the Church of the Holy Apostles at Milan symbolized the victory of Christ and his Cross.41 While the Gothic ribbed vaults coincide with increasing human anatomical investigation, the translucent windows symbolize Mary's virginity, intact even as the Light of the World has passed through her; moreover, Fingesten argues, the deeply splayed porches "certainly have [female] anatomical connotations."42 When one enters a cathedral, then, one is entering at once the womb of the Virgin, the crucified body of Christ, and the Heavenly City. The cathedral is thus a Vierge Ouvrante, the popular thirteenth-fourteenth-century carved wooden image of Mary which opens to reveal Christ within.43
