Abstract
This translation of Brouillette’s revised French dissertation makes an important contribution in three fields: Teresian studies, pneumatology, and soteriology. The topic of Teresa’s understanding of the Holy Spirit has been little studied, mainly because explicit references to the Spirit are so rare in her writings. Teresa, as is well known, is strongly christocentric, offering very frequent, detailed, and affectively intense descriptions of her relationship with Christ, especially his sacred humanity. B.’s methodological innovation is that, rather than looking for Teresa’s concepts of the Holy Spirit, he analyzes her narrative exposition of how the Spirit (usually unnamed) actually works in and through her own life.
This simple yet effective method that B. develops to tease out the hidden movement of the Spirit in Teresa’s works begins with a close reading of chapters 32–36, and 38 of The Book of Her Life. These texts move from her terrifying vision of being shown her place in hell, through a detailed account of everything that happened as she felt called to, and then actually did, found St. Joseph’s (the first Discalced Carmelite monastery), to a subsequent confirming vision of heaven. B. discovers in this narrative a threefold movement of the Holy Spirit: first a displacement or decentering by a force from beyond the self; then an unmaking and emptying of the self; and, finally, a refilling of the empty space with an inspiration to apostolic action. Other sections of his book locate this same threefold dynamic in additional parts of Teresa’s opus, especially the Foundations and the Spiritual Testimonies.
Soteriology is another theological field that is not usually associated with Teresa since, again, she did not say much about it directly. Using the same method, B. argues that Teresa was deeply concerned about salvation—her own, that of others known to her, and ultimately that of all people. He finds that, for Teresa, salvation is the indwelling of God in the human person. This saving indwelling is never static, but is strongly oriented toward concretization and exteriorization—that is, toward good deeds and apostolic action after the model of Christ. Once again, he finds a basic threefold dynamic: a person sees what God reveals; God incarnates by inhabiting the person; the person is moved to tell others the good news. In Teresa’s case, “seeing” was very literal since God repeatedly communicated with her in visions. For others, no doubt, this seeing takes less dramatic forms. The “incarnating” movement was also very concrete for her, as she was moved to found a physical place—St. Joseph’s Monastery—where God would dwell in intimacy with her and her sisters. Later, that incarnating movement expanded even further as she founded many more discalced monasteries. Finally, Teresa’s “telling” took the concrete form of her writings, which have subsequently helped to guide millions of people around the world toward sharing something of her experience of salvation.
B. finds that for Teresa, salvation, like the incarnation itself, is not so much a finished product as like a seed that is planted in fleshly soil that then grows. He writes, “Salvation as incarnation, then, carries with it a dynamic of growth. Salvation is not a simple disjunctive reality, as if there were a strict alternative between ‘saved’ and ‘damned.’ Rather, it opens a space for development. Salvation grows, deepens, because it is fundamentally relational, of a relationship between human beings and God” (205). He traces how Teresa herself grew from initial resistance to God’s “unmaking” of herself, to her maturity when she longed for, and did her best to work on behalf of, the salvation of people throughout the world.
Like Teresa herself, B. does not focus much on deep explanations of the relations of the Trinity, the mechanics of the incarnation, or the many other knotty theological questions that the topics being discussed could raise. His explanatory comments are lucid but spare as he keeps the main focus on “what happens” (as the Spirit works and salvation happens) rather than on theoretical digressions. In the last few pages of the book he makes a few welcome comments on how the “displacement–unmaking–inspiration” dynamic of the Holy Spirit can operate anthropologically, even beyond an explicitly christocentric milieu. The distinction that he makes between the “faceless and potentially universal” movement of the Spirit and Christ as “the face of God acting as revealer of the movement of salvation” (226) offers intriguing possibilities. This important theme, however, is not well developed in this monograph. The book is, nonetheless, highly recommended for its fresh approach to bringing the gifted insights of one of our first female doctors of the church more fully into the heart of theological conversation, past and present.