Thus from birth Thérèse was protected from all risk of intellectual conflict, and surrounded by harmonious contributory suggestions all tending to press her emotional life into one mould. Such a nurture could hardly fail to create either the disposition of a rebel or that of a saint: but there was in Thérèse no tendency to revolt. Her temperament—ardent, imaginative, abnormally sensitive, and psychically unstable—inclined her to the enthusiastic acceptance of religious ideas, and even in childhood she showed a fervour and devotion exceeding that of her sisters. When she was still a little girl, the two eldest left home one after the other, in order to become nuns in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. The departure of the first, Pauline, was a crushing grief to Thérèse, at that time about nine years old; and was apparently the beginning of her own desire to be a nun. She told the Superior of the convent that she, too, intended to be a Carmelite, and wished to take the veil at once. The Reverend Mother, a woman of kindness and good sense, did not laugh; but advised her to wait until she was sixteen, and then to try her vocation. There is less absurdity than at first appears in this childish craving; for the religious type is often strangely precocious. As the tendency to music or painting may appear in earliest childhood, so the sense of vocation may awaken, long before the implications of this mysterious impulse are fully understood. Thus Elizabeth Catez, afterwards Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité, determined to be a nun when she was seven years old, and began at this age to govern her inner life. She and Thérèse help us to understand the stories and the visions and self-dedication of the little St. Catherine of Siena; or those of St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon, who both wished at twelve years old to enter a religious order. We are faced in all such cases by the strange phenomenon of accelerated development: strongly marked in the case of Thérèse, who undoubtedly had, in spite of the great simplicity of her nature, a real genius for the spiritual life.
She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive psychic organization which is observed in many of the historic mystics. A long and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s departure for the cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion for which many parallels can be found in the history of adult religious experience; though few in that of children of her age. This incident Thérèse has described in her memoirs with great clearness and honesty. At a crisis of the sickness, when she was reduced to utter misery and weakness and tormented by hallucinations and fears, her three sisters came to her room and knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her cure. The sick child, praying too as well as she could, suddenly saw the statue take life and advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the prayer was answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was cured. The “vision” being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged soul. It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility, comparable with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar incident in the life of Julian of Norwich, and was not without importance for her future development.
The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its most intense form. It was initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness, apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious directors as “scrupulosity”—and it was from this period that she afterwards dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The childish determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in strength, and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own violent consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could shake. Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was not a prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her autobiography is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth and wisdom, when we remember the age of the child who thought and said them. By the constant practice of small renunciations, self-denial was now habitual to her; for it was by that which she called the “little pathway” of incessant but inconspicuous sacrifices and kind deeds, and not by any abnormal austerities or devotions, that her character was formed. Though perfectly free from all spiritual pride, she was, moreover, quite certain of her own communion with the Divine order, and of the authority of the impressions which she received from it.
“En ce temps-là, je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que pour moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait directement.”
These are bold words for a young girl who had been reared in the most rigid provincial piety, and had been taught to distrust private judgment and regard her director as the representative of God. In them we see the action of that strong will, power of initiative and clear conception of her own needs and duties, which redeem her often emotional religious fervour from insipidity. It is true that she can and does express that fervour in the sentimental language which is the least attractive element in French piety. The sense of a special relationship and special destiny which more and more possessed her, far exceeded her powers either of realization or of expression; and unfortunately impelled her to describe herself as the “fleurette,” the “petite fiancée,” even the “jouet” of Jesus, and to note in too many casual happenings evidence of “les delicatesses du bon Dieu pour moi.” Yet we cannot forget that similar declarations, equally offensive to modern taste, abound in some of the greatest historical mystics, and that their full unpleasantness is only mitigated to us by the quaint and archaic phrases in which they are expressed. Whilst no doubt these declarations represent the invasion of human desires and instincts into the field of spiritual experience, its natural craving for protection and personal love; they also witness to the mystic’s intense personal consciousness of close communion, a consciousness which far transcends the poor vocabulary and commonplace symbols through which it must be told.
Therefore we cannot dismiss Thérèse Martin as a mere victim of religious emotionalism, because her mental equipment is inadequate to her spiritual experience. When, moreover, we remember the amazing vigour and tenacity of purpose with which, when barely fifteen, this gentle and home-loving child, driven by her strong sense of vocation, planned and carried through a lifelong separation from the father she adored and the world of nature she loved, we are bound to acknowledge in her an element of greatness, a strong and an adventurous soul. With a certitude of her own duty which nothing could shake, Thérèse interviewed on her own behalf the Superior of the order, who snubbed her, and the Bishop of the diocese, who was kind but prevaricated with her; demanding from them permission to take the veil at once, instead of waiting till the usual age of twenty-one. Further, being taken by her father to Rome with a party of French pilgrims, when they were all received by the Pope she had the courage to address him directly—although the priest in charge of the pilgrimage forbade it—and asked for his support. The end of it was that she at last convinced the authorities of her special vocation, and was allowed to become a postulant in the most austere of all religious orders at the unheard-of age of fifteen.
Her career as a Carmelite was far from being the succession of mystical enjoyments, the basking in divine sunshine, which some imagine the contemplative life to be. She now experienced the common lot of the “proficient” in the mystic way; paying for her religious exaltation by reactions, long periods of aridity, which were doubtless due in part to psychic exhaustion. Then, in addition to the perpetual little sacrifices, self-deprivations, and penances which she imposed on herself, she seemed, as she says, to be plunged in a “terrible desert,” a “profound night” of darkness and solitude; and prayer itself became dreary and unreal. “Tout a disparu ... ce n’est plus un voile, c’est un mur qui s’éleve jusqu’aux cieux et couvre le firmament étoilé.” But an inner life which was nourished on the robust doctrine of St. John of the Cross could bear this deprivation with fortitude, and make of inward poverty itself a gain. Outwardly, too, her life was difficult. Her superiors seem at once to have perceived in her that peculiar quality of soul which is capable of sanctity; and since it is the ambition of every community to produce a saint, they addressed themselves with vigour to the stern task of educating Thérèse for her destiny. Still a child, sensitive and physically delicate, she was spared no opportunity of self-denial and mortification. Her most trifling deficiencies were remarked, her most reasonable desires thwarted, her good points ignored. When her health began to fail under a rule of life far beyond her strength, and the first signs of tuberculosis—that scourge of the cloister—appeared in her, the Prioress, in her ferocious zeal for souls, even refused to dispense the ailing girl from attendance at the night-office. “Une âme de cette trempe, disait-elle, ne doit pas être traité comme une enfant, les dispenses ne sont pas faites pour elle. Laissez-la. Dieu la soutient.”
This drastic training did its work. Thérèse had a heroic soul, though her courage and generosity found expression for the most part in small and obscure ways. She has said that she felt in herself the longing to be a soldier, an apostle, a martyr; and within the limits of the cloister, she found means of satisfying these desires. “Elle accomplissait simplement des actes héroïques,” said the Superior after her death. Determined, in her own metaphor, to be a “victime d’amour,” her brave spirit never faltered in its willing acceptance of pain. She hid her mental and physical sufferings, fought her increasing weakness, ate without hesitation the rough food which made her ill, refused every comfort and amelioration. By this hard yet humble way she rose in a few years to the heights of perfect self-conquest and moral perfection: passing through suffering to a state in which love, and total self-giving for love, was realized by her as the central secret of the spiritual life. “La charité me donna la clef de ma vocation.... Enfin, je l’ai trouvée. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour.”
In this completed love, stretching from the smallest acts of service to the most secret experiences of the soul, she found—as every mystic has done—that unifying principle of action which alone gives meaning to life. In its light all problems were solved, and the meaning of all experiences was disclosed. So Julian of Norwich, fifteen years after her first revelation, was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldest thou wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well, Love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt wit and know more in the same; but thou shalt never know nor wit therein other thing without end.” To live in this supernatural charity is to introduce into the world of succession the steadfast values of eternity; hence this quality, so simple yet so difficult of attainment, is the one essential character of the saints. “Pour atteindre à la vie idéale de l’âme,” said Elizabeth Catez, who so greatly exceeded her fellow-Carmelite in philosophic grasp, though not in moral beauty, “je crois qu’il faut vivre dans le surnaturel, prendre conscience que Dieu est au plus intime de nous, et aller à tout avec lui: alors on n’est jamais banal, même en faisant les actions les plus ordinaires, car on ne vit pas en ces choses, on les dépasse. Une âme surnaturelle ne traite pas avec les causes secondes, mais avec Dieu seulement ... pour elle, tout se reduite à l’unité.”
Thérese de l’Enfant-Jésus came to this consummation by way of a total and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.” She took as her favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply, and only did ordinary things.” This was the “little pathway” to the heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.” Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces” and special contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement les yeux et le cœur.” Her spiritual practice became simplified as she grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un simple regard jeté vers le ciel.” Yet the love thus expressed was no mere “divine duet.” She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her religion was of a distinctly social type. “Le zêle d’une Carmelite doit embrasser le monde,” she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in September 1897, at the age of twenty-four.