Bernini made me stop in my tracks. He made me see a part of myself that I didn't even know and he said what no one is willing to admit.
He was the first to show me that my seeking of physical transcendence and mental contentedness was only an arm of the place that, not my body and mind wished to be, but my very spirit and soul.
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The last couple weeks I was abroad in Europe and the last leg of our journey was in Rome.
Rome, the holy city, yet that, once upon a time, was the pagan center of the Roman empire.
Filled with churches on almost every block. Churches that now are more of museums for the trampling, loud, disrespectful tourist rather that places of worship. Small as a church might be next to the towering figure of the great St. Peter's, they house some of the greatest pieces in art history.
Such a church is Santa Maria della Vittoria. A very small church indeed, known only for its great masterpiece: "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Commissioned by Cardinal Fredrico Cornaro for his family burial chapel, Bernini took the job because of his bitter failure attempting to build the a set of bell towers for St. Peters in 1639. His bell towers, ill designed, began to crack and shift only four months after they were constructed. This misstep caused the loss of his papal patronage, leaving him accessible by the Cornaro for their humble chapel, dedicated to the recently canonized St. Teresa of Avila.
St. Teresa's reputation was infamous and her candidacy for sainthood had been a rocky one. Its no wonder a chapel hadn't yet been dedicated to her. There were many reasons, not least among them her raptures.
"A rapture came over me so suddenly it almost lifted me out of myself. I heard these words, 'Now I want you to speak with not men but angels'"
"Bernini would have certainly known about St. Teresa. Her auto biography was a best seller in Catholic Rome. Like everyone else, he would've been startled by the earthly directness of her story. But above all he would have been electrified by those moments in which Teresa, in the most graphic words imaginable, describes what happens to her." (Schama, The Power of Art)
"I saw a long gold spear in his hand and there seemed to be a little flame at the tip of it. This he seemed to plunge into my heart repeatedly, until it reached into my very entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was draw them out with it, and it left me utterly afire with a great love for God. The pain was so great that it made me moan over and over, and the sweet delight into which the pain threw me was was so intense that one could not want it to stop; or the soul to be contented with anything but God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body does not cease to share in it somewhat -- even very much so"
"It is an astonishing passage that the post-Freudian reader cannot help sniggering at -- doesn't the nun realize she is describing mainly sexual longings? Indeed, a few lines later she recognizes that it is like bodily seduction, but only as an opening or avenue for another kind of experience. Human sexuality or even the senses cannot have the primacy for Teresa or Bernini which they do for us. The shocking reciprocal movement with grab our attention so forcibly is not intended as sensational; it aims to jar us into another place entirely." (Harbison, Reflections on Baroque)
"Now, if there was one thing that Bernini was not, it was crude. He understood perfectly well that when Teresa wrote of her raptures, she meant the longing of her soul for a consummated union with God.
But it was the way she wrote about it that made it seems as if her soul and her body were the same thing." (Schama, The Power of Art)
You can feel the longing through Bernini's unexpected interpretation of this supposedly spiritual experience..
Just as you can feel the longing in St. Teresa through her early life... at least by 1500's standards. In her youth, she had only two options, to marry or to become a nun. The fact that becoming an "old maid" came with only being 25 and that her early indiscretions, like sneaking off in the middle of the night to meet young men, had already given her a reputation.. convinced her that the life of the nun was the only thing that would keep her out of the fires of hell and give her soul eternal bliss. Her desire to be good, to be godly despite herself drove her to this fate. A cold sexless life of a marriage to Christ in isolation.
But even as a convented nun she fell in love with her confessor.
"although what she felt for him was indeed what she called "a love in Christ"it was also wholly unlike anything she ever felt for a woman. This she knew -- and still tried not to know-- when her three years as his penitent were ended..." (Lincoln, Teresa, A Woman)
An utterly accepting attitude of her solitude.. yet laced with her human desires. Desires she had full self knowledge of.. desires that had driven her to the convent in the first place. Driven her there not to deny herself spiritual or emotional satisfaction, but in the hope she could transform her shallow bodily desires into something on a higher playing field.
"Its no good pretending that ecstasy isn't a physical as well as a spiritual experience. The passion doesn't work through the body as well as the soul."(Schama, The Power of Art)
This simple statement stopped me in my tracks.
If art breeds tolerance, I am a key example.
I have longed like St. Teresa for years. I have sometimes felt solitude in a way that I didn't think was quite fair. But seeing and hearing the story of St. Teresa, made clearer by the over-intensity of her spirit and desires made connections in my mind that I never had the perspective to see. This exciting unabashed juxtaposition of bodily rapture used to communicate spiritual transcendence was creepily relatable to me.
I realized two things from Bernini's ecstasy in stone.
A. Passions of the body are not always tactile, meant purely for physical pleasure or emotional relief. Some that use drugs, or sex, or cut themselves are merely seeking to feel something "spiritual". They only wish, like St. Teresa, to transcend what they are experiencing in flesh to find, they hope, a kind of ecstasy or spiritual connection.
Though centuries apart, I could uncannily relate to St. Teresa's intensity. What is the higher thing? Life is hard, though harder for some rather than others.. For me it is more intense, definitely more angsty.. but I feel that we each have our "crutch". Our way of accessing some sort of spiritual satisfaction. Not spiritual as in a religious experience but "spiritual" as in the state of our spirit. For me, I realized that my method for searching for that "thing", that ecstasy of the spirit, was similar to most anybody's.
For me, fortunately, I didn't peripherally become an addict, commit suicide.. etc... because that happened not be my route, but still I was in pursuit of the same thing that some of the people who have become addicts, committed suicide, objectified others, hurt loved ones and damaged their own self esteem have done. All in the name of the "Ecstasy of St. Teresa", our own version of pure bliss.
Which leads me to the second thing I learned from St. Teresa of Avila.
B. Passion doesn't work through the body .. or I would like to add, the mind.. as well as the soul.
To make that ultimate contentedness for yourself, then, you need to engaged in experiences that don't just satisfy the body.. the mind.. your ego .. but satisfy the soul. You might have to stop trying to access things of the spirit through the finicky facade of the flesh to actually find that real thing you were trying to get to all along..
For me, real transcendence has come in inspiration from constantly exploring and learning.. sacred knowledge!! .. seeing new things, experiencing and learning new things. This, when channeled with the intensity of my personality.. creates a point of view that strangely.. is enough.
It doesn't have to come to you like St. Teresa, in a bodily rapture, a masochistic and painfully intense vision.. although it illustrates the point quite strongly..
It becomes about how you see life and understand it so you can hone what comes your way towards all that is truly spiritual for you within it.
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Finally getting enough perspective to champion my own ineffective desires, I actually come away from St. Teresa with more tolerance and understanding than I did before.
It seems my false pride was in believing I had been victorious over those desires by outwardly appearing to abstain while still painfully wasting away consumed by its thoughts.
All my objections to others' addictions and "sins" were all based on my insecurity and weakness that I knew was lurking there somewhere.. knowing clairvoyantly in my bones and unconsciously protesting by pointing out everyone else's weaknesses.
So now, this new understanding has taught me to change my focus all together. I can feel a kind of identification (on a smaller and less intense level) in St. Teresa to someone who longed for meaning and transformed that, not to deny herself, but to seek the bigger picture of what she really and truly needed. In this new light, of what spirituality actually means, I don't blame anyone for their version seeking what St. Teresa herself seemed to find through God, if that is what they seeking.. because it is clear that what she found was not as pure and holy a satisfaction, at least in our society's eyes, as one would think for a spiritual leader.. a canonized saint, yet it was something special and sacred none the less.
"... he (Bernini) has managed to make visible, tangible, actually, something we all, if we're honest know we hunger for ... the most intense convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience between life and death. Which is not to say that what were looking at is just a spasm of erotic chemistry.
Its precisely because it isn't just that. Because it is somehow a fusion of physical craving and, choose your word, spiritual or emotional transcendence, that Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" is a sculpture that possesses the beholder completely the longer we stare"
"So perhaps, when that 18th-century French connoisseur looked at Teresa and said
"If that is divine love, I know it well."
he wasn't making a sly joke at all, but doffing his hat at Bernini for using the power of art to make the most difficult, the most desireable thing in the world: the visualization of pure bliss.."(Schama, The Power of Art)
And I would add, he was probably congratulating Bernini for instilling in his art something they percieved as so honest that it had the weight and power to inspire others to not only try attain it, but desire to attain it.
Not some nebulous, ethereal sort of satisfaction neither a shallow imitation..
but something real.
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