The Beautiful Death of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Sufferings of the Tubercular Self

Extract

For those familiar with the themes of traditional female spirituality in the Christian West, the dreary saga of Thérèse Martin and her death at the age of twenty-four in 1897 can only come as a grim reminder of the symbolic burden by which women have carried in their persons the dualistic designation of the spirit at war against the flesh. In the past the story of Thérèse has divided the Catholic faithful between traditional adherents of her cult, and those who opposed it in the name of a more virile postVatican II spirituality. More recently interest in her has extended beyond its traditional bounds. Monica Furlong’s biography, written from outside the Catholic community, provided a long overdue reappraisal of the young woman’s ambiguous character, from a frankly feminist perspective. Furlong concluded that the vitality and strength of determination typical of the young adult Thérèse has often been hidden from view by the sickly cult of weakness and submission that sprang up after her death.

Thérèse’s asceticism, which has come to be known as the Little Way, is an asceticism which reaches its apogee in her uncomplaining spirituality of suffering and death. By the time Thérèse died, a few months short of her twenty-fifth birthday, she had developed a spirituality of the body which stood over against a theology of considerable insight.The orthodoxy of her assertion of the gratuity of divine love, and of her conclusion that God cannot be pleased by heroic effort, but accepts the imperfect human being without question of merit, is expressed with all the clarity and conviction of so distant a figure from her in time, if not altogether in temperament, as Martin Luther. But the profundity of her basic theological insight is not the subject of this article.