Lovesickness and The Therapy of Desire: Aquinas, Cancionero Poetry, and Teresa of Avila's Muero Porque No Muero'

Lovesickness and the Therapy of Desire:
Aquinas, cancionero Poetry, and Teresa of

Avila’s ‘Muero porque no muero’
ELENA CARRERA
Queen Mary, University of London
It would seem that love is a harmful emotion. For languor is a kind of sickness, and
1
love causes languor.
Modern readers of the poetry of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross are often
struck by their use of the language of desire and of courtly love themes also
found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cancioneros. In an article published
over a decade and a half ago, Terence O’Reilly (1992) examined some of the
most crucial similarities between cancionero and mystical poetry in the light of
Alexander Parker’s earlier claims (1985) about the use of the language of religion
and the moral value attributed to suffering within the courtly love tradition.
As Parker had suggested, cancionero poetry tended to present human love in
terms of ‘desire without fulfilment’, and even if this love might be linked to
sexual desire, the focus was generally not on bodily pleasure but on desire (1985:
20–21). In explaining this emphasis on desire, Parker made the provocative claim
that ‘fifteenth-century poets found satisfaction in posing as suffering martyrs of
love’ (17). O’Reilly demonstrates that, in the context of Christian ideas about
redemption and of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century emphasis on the imita-
tion of Christ, the notion of suffering love was linked to merit and hope. He
then turns to the theme of desire as ‘longing’ in John of the Cross, addressing
the controversial question: ‘what kind of human love is mystical longing being
compared to?’ (66).
In this paper, I return to the question of desire, and discuss its function in
relation to love. In contrast with Parker’s emphasis on the pain and anguish
caused by unfulfilled desire and on the constraints of sensory experience as
themes found both in mystical and non-mystical love poetry from sixteenth-
century Spain, I will look at the notion of wilful desire in cancionero poetry and
in Teresa’s poem ‘Muero porque no muero’, against the background of Thomas
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (2006: 19, 103 (1a.2ae. 28.5)).
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730 Elena Carrera bhs, 86 (2009)
Aquinas’s influential discussion of love, desire and hope as motivating passions

belonging both to the body and the sensory soul.
Teresa’s ‘Muero porque no muero’ shares with much of cancionero poetry a
concept of love which cannot be understood simply in connection with Neopla-
2
tonism and its emphasis on the separation of body and soul. Her lines ‘y causa
en mí tanta pasión / ver a Dios mi prisionero’3 point to the notion of love as a
passion (emotion) caused by an agent perceived as good or beautiful. This notion
was found in Aristotle and in the Aristotelian faculty psychology of medieval
Arabic philosophical and medical writers, and expounded by Thomas Aquinas.4
When Whinnom refers to medieval psychology as being largely developed by
scholastic theologians, he offers an oversimplified account of Aquinas’s discus-
sion of love and other passions: ‘para los teólogos, el amor, la pasión amorosa, no
se distingue de la concupiscencia, la lujuria’ (1983: 9). He reduces Aquinas’s refe-
rences to concupiscentia to the theological meaning of this word, simply because
this is the usage which has prevailed in the Christian Church. In contrast, the
most authoritative English translation of the Summa renders concupiscentia as
‘sensory desire’, stressing that Aquinas’s use is clearly distinct from the theolo-
gical notion of ‘concupiscence’, associated with sin.5 Distinguishing two types of
pleasure (delectatio) – one is experienced in relation to the good things of the inte-
llect and reason, and thus belongs only to the soul, while the other is related to
the good things of the senses, and thus belongs to both soul and body –, Aquinas
notes that desire strictly speaking is related only to this second type of pleasure
and that the Latin term concupiscentia, from con-cupere, makes it clear that the
body and the soul are involved together in desire (Aquinas 2006: 1a.2ae, 30.2).
For Aquinas, love is an inclination or sense of affinity towards something
perceived to be good, desire is an actual movement towards the loved good when
it is not present, or has not yet been attained, and pleasure (or joy) is ‘repose in
its possession’ (23.4). Hope and despair presuppose love and desire, but arise
when there is some difficulty in attaining the desired good (23.4; 25.1). Hope
causes or increases love, sometimes by arousing pleasure, and sometimes by
2 The links between the poetry of the Spanish mystics, courtly love and Neoplatonism were
stressed by Parker (1985: 73–84). Guillermo Serés (1996: 69–74) has sought to reconcile
the Neoplatonic concept of love he sees as dominating the courtly love tradition with the
Aristotelian account of perception which runs through its poetry.
3 All my references to Teresa’s writings are to Santa Teresa 1986. I have used the conven-
tional abbreviations: CC (for ‘Cuentas de Conciencia’), Vida, Meditaciones, Moradas, Exclama-
ciones, followed by the chapter and section number, instead of page numbers, to facilitate
consultation of other editions. The only poem I refer to is ‘Muero porque no muero’, also
known as ‘Vivo sin vivir en mí’.
4 See Aristotle, On the Soul, 428a; Nichomachean Ethics, bk. VII, ch. 3, 1147a7–8. On the impact
in the Latin West of Constantine’s Viaticum (a free Latin version of an Arabic medical
source), and its late twelfth-century commentaries by Gerard of Berry and Peter of Spain,
see Wack 1990.
5 As D’Arcy explains, the theological term ‘concupiscentia’ as sin refers to the reaction of
the will to something perceived as good before the free will is exercised; see his transla-
tor’s note in Aquinas 2006: 126–27.
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bhs, 86 (2009) Lovesickness and the Therapy of Desire 731
intensifying desire (27.4). As Aquinas puts it, ‘we cannot desire intensely that
which we have no hope to attain’ (27.4).
Desire (or longing) and sadness (or languor) are the passions which arise in the
lover when the beloved is absent: ‘if the object of love is actually possessed, the
result is pleasure and enjoyment. If it is not, two emotions result: first, sadness
over its absence, which is often called languor (thus Cicero [De Tusculanis Questio-
nibus III.II] applies the term ‘ailment’ above all to sadness); and second, intense
desire for its possession: and this is often called fever’ (Aquinas 2006: 1a.2ae,
28.6). But, of course, the meanings of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ will depend on
how union is understood. For Aquinas, there are two types of union, two ways in
which a person may be united to the object of his love: one is ‘union in reality’
(‘secundum rem’), in which the loved thing or person is present with the lover;
6
the other is ‘affective union’. In the first, love acts as a cause, by moving the
lover to seek the presence of the loved thing or person; in the second, love is the
tie, the union itself (28.1).
One of the effects of love, according to Aquinas, is that it makes the mind of
the lover turn to thinking about the beloved (‘scilicet facit meditari de amato’),
and as a result of this intense preoccupation, the mind withdraws from other
concerns (‘intensa autem meditatio unius abstrahit ab aliis’) (28.3). This model
explains a number of crucial themes related to the concept of love in medieval
and sixteenth-century Spain: lovesickness as a mental fixation which can lead to
mental and physical illness, the cancionero notion of love and desire as a prison,
and the cultivation of love of God as a way of turning one’s mind from worldly
concerns.
Parker suggests that ‘on the purely human level’ the cancioneros’ ‘cult of
suffering, this equation of love with death and the longing for death, represent
the abdication of all rationality, the subordination of reason to passion’ (1985:
18). But, as I will show in the next few pages, phrases such as ‘muero porque no
muero’ could be wilfully used on both human and spiritual levels to cultivate
passion as a means to attain affective and cognitive union with the beloved. In
emphasizing love and desire as affective ties between lover and beloved, mystical
and cancionero poets used seemingly repetitive formulations such as the ‘wound
of love’ and ‘languishing with love’, which drew not only on the Song of Songs
and its exegeses, but also on other (often conflicting) inherited interpretations of
love as sickness, to which I now turn.
Lovesickness and Desire
The notion of love as sickness, as a disease of the soul which could lead to
madness, was shared by a number of philosophical traditions. For Aristotle,
6 I use the term ‘affective’ to translate Aquinas’s ‘alia vero secundum affectum’ (28.1) and
‘appetitiva’, bearing in mind the context of medieval ‘affective spirituality’. D’Arcy renders
‘appetitus’ and ‘appetitiva’ as ‘orexis’ and ‘orectic’, terms also used in modern psychology;
see his introduction to Aquinas 2006: xxiv.
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sexual desire, caused by the perception of a beautiful ‘object’, would alter the
body’s temperature and physiological balance, and could lead to madness.7
Aristotle, nonetheless, also acknowledged that the appearance of a beautiful
person might produce sexual arousal without necessarily producing the kind of
emotion that would lead to action, and that the perception of an ‘object’ as beau-
tiful would often also produce joy or pleasure, as moving forces irradiating from
the heart.8 It follows from this that it is possible to cultivate joy and pleasure by
thinking of the beloved as ‘beautiful’.
The Epicurean materialist Lucretius separated love from erotic passion, seeing
9
the latter as the cause of perturbation, tribulation and madness. He noted how,
in the context of popular views of erotic passion as a disease and as a source of
weakness and instability, a lover would form the ‘false belief’ that sex could put
an end to the longing which constrained him. Longing and desire would also
lead to false beliefs about the beloved’s worth: ‘men, blind with desire, attribute
to women excellences that are not really theirs. And thus, we see women who
are in many ways misshapen and ugly being the objects of great delight, and
of highest honor’.10 Arguing that desire influences perception, Lucretius ques-
tioned the lover’s belief that his desire is aroused by the sight of the beloved
(Lucretius 1963: 735–822). He suggested that the wounds of erotic love could
be cured through promiscuity (which would help counteract the belief that the
beloved held the key to the satisfaction of one’s desires), by avoiding looking at
the beloved, or by turning one’s thoughts in some other direction. More impor-
tantly, he also warned against the vain longing and obsessiveness of the ‘religion
of love’, in which the beloved was seen as an embodied divinity.
Among the medieval Latin psychological accounts of lovesickness, one of the
clearest is that of the Paris physician Gerard of Berry (c. 1237), who describes
it as the ‘fixation’ with the image of a particular woman as more beautiful or
desirable than other women, a fixed idea caused by an impaired judgement
(‘estimative power’) and an overheated, dry imagination (‘imaginative power’);
since the imagination commands the passions, this mental fixation is accompa-
11
nied by desire and excessive worry (sollicitudo). In medieval faculty psychology,
the imagination was the power which transformed sense impressions into new
images by drawing on previous experience and on the evaluations of the ‘esti-
mative power’ (also known as ‘cogitative power’). As the instrument of passions,
7 Nichomachean Ethics, bk. VII, ch. 3, 1147a7–8. Nonetheless, even though he saw sexual desire
as a passion originating in the body (a bodily appetite, based on the instinctual desire for
reproduction), he did not explain it as an instinct, but as a response to the perception of
a sexual object as a ‘premise of the good’, amenable to reasoning and instruction; Aris-
totle, On the Movement of Animals, bk. VI, 700b23–24; On the Soul, bk III, ch. 10, 433a15–16,
433b17–18, 433a21 and 433a31b; Nichomachean Ethics, 1102b28–1103a1.
8 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. IX, ch. 5, 1166ae–1167ac.
9 On the Nature of Things, I, iv, 1061–72; cited in Beecher and Ciavolella, Introduction to
Ferrand 1990: 52.
10 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 1153–55; cited Nussbaum 1994: 142–65.
11 Cited Beecher and Ciavolella, Introduction to Ferrand 1990: 71.
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the imagination was the amplifying power which transformed the lovers’ ‘atta-
chment’ to their beloved into intense, destructive sorrow which sickened their
minds and bodies.
The Galenic medical writings circulating in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century Spain also interpreted lovesickness as a mental fixation upon an object
of desire, based on wrong beliefs or false apprehensions. Gordonio dedicates a
whole chapter of his Lilio de medicina to amor hereos.12 The main point he makes
is that the lovesick lover believes not only that his lady is superior to all other
ladies but also that by attaining her he will be able to attain the happiness he
desires:
[…] que quando algund enamorado esta en amor de alguna muger e assy concibe
la forma e la figura e el modo, que cree e tiene opinion que aquella es la mejor e la
mas fermosa e la mas casta e la mas honrrada e la mas especiosa e la mejor enseñada
enlas cosas naturales e morales que alguna otra, e por esso muy ardiente mente la
cobdicia sin modo e sin medida, teniendo opinion que sy la pudiesse alcançar, que
ella seria su felicidad e su bien auenturança. (1993: 1, 520)
This mental fixation might become so obsessive that it might lead to mental
alienation: ‘e tanto esta corrompido el iuyzio e la razon, que continua mente
piensa enella e dexa todas sus obras, en tal manera que sy alguna fabla conel
non lo entiende, porque es en continuo pensamiento’ (520–21). The impaired
judgement of those sick with love makes them believe that sorrow and suffering
are enjoyable: ‘e le semeja que el tristable sea delectable’ (522).
Gordonio stresses the importance of curing the lovesick because their obses-
sive cogitation led them to neglect all other activity, including eating and
sleeping, thus causing them to waste away, to go mad, or to die (522–23). Sugges-
ting that persuasion is the best method for curing lovesickness, he recommends
arguments such as the dangers of the world, the Last Judgement and the joys
of heaven (524). These were not simply theological concepts but were part of a
recognizable, widespread belief system, linked to ideas about contemptus mundi.
If ideas about eternal suffering in hell or eternal joy in heaven made their way
into the imagination of the lovesick, they would excite the passions of fear or
hope, thus displacing the image of the beloved as the object of desire and hope.
Gordonio acknowledges that such persuasive methods were not always effec-
tive with young men suffering from lovesickness, and thus recommends other
methods, from flogging, and sad or happy news, to calling in an old woman who
would slander the beloved, thus altering the positive image imprinted in the
lover’s imagination (524–26).
These methods stress the role of the imagination in commanding the passions,
and the role played by belief in the workings of the estimative power (judge-
ment) on the imagination. As Gordonio puts it: ‘la virtud estimatiua, que es la
12 The Lilium medicinae was a hugely popular practical textbook based on Arabic-Galenic
medical views. Written by Bernardus de Gordonio in 1305, it was first published in Latin
in Lyons in 1491, and had at least three Spanish editions (1495, 1513 and 1697); I cite from
the parallel-text critical edition (Gordonio 1993: I, 520–28).
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mas alta entre todas las virtudes sensibles, manda a la ymaginatiua e la ymagi-
natiua manda ala cobdiciable e la cobdiciable manda ala virtud ayrada e la virtud
ayrada manda a la mouedora delos lacertos [muscles]’ (521). Gordonio’s explana-
tion is based on the distinction made in medieval faculty psychology between
the intellectual soul and the sensory soul, and, within the latter, between the
cognitive function (pars animae apprehensiva) with its outer senses and its inner
wits (imaginatio, estimativa and memoria), and the affective function (pars animae
appetitiva), with its concupiscible (appetitus concupiscibilis) and irascible (appetitus
irascibilis) functions.13
Such distinctions are crucial in understanding Aquinas’s definition in the
Summa Theologiae of the passions as ‘appetitive acts of the sensitive soul’ (2006:
1a.2ae, 22.2; 24.2) caused by external objects through the particular evaluations
of the cogitative power, or ratio particularis, which judges the object’s particular
intentions, ‘just as intellective reason considers universal intentions’ (1a, 78.4).
Attributed to the cogitative power, located by physicians in the middle part of
the head, was the function of grasping emotionally relevant aspects of objects
and arousing appropriate passions to deal with them.14 As Aquinas stresses, the
pre-rational evaluations of the cogitative power which activate the passions
could also be assisted and reassessed by the judgements of the intellect in deter-
mining the choices of the will (the ‘free will’, voluntas ut ratio).
Aquinas argues that even though the passions are experienced passively, in
the sense that they always affect the body, increasing or decreasing the heart
rate, and making the heart contract or dilate, ‘there is no reason for thinking
that passivity always implies some failure by natural or rational standards’
(24.3). Criticizing the Stoics’ view of the passions as ailments, and their failure
to recognize that passions can be ‘subsequent to rational judgement’, he main-
tains that passion can have moral value. If passion results from determination
(i.e. when the higher part of the soul is ‘so strongly bent upon some object that
the lower part follows it’), it acts as ‘a sign of the will’s intensity, and hence an
index of greater moral worth’; other times, passion may be embraced because
it is motivating (i.e. ‘a man may make a deliberate decision to be affected by an
emotion so that he will act more promptly, thanks to the stimulus of the sensory
orexis [appetitus sensitivus]’), and thus ‘adds to the action’s worth’ (24.4).
In contrast with Aquinas’s emphasis on the role of the will in directing the
passions, medical writings suggested that lovesickness affects the will: ‘los
enamorados tienen ajena la imaginacion, y la voluntad con ella’ (Villalobos 1950:
488–89). An example of how such conflicting views inform cancionero poetry is
the recurrent theme of love as a prison, which may in some cases be read as a
denial of the lover’s free will, while in other cases it may be used to stress the
13 Medieval philosophers tended to refer to three inner wits, while medical writers distin-
guished between five inner senses: ‘sentido común, fantasia, ymaginatiua, extimativa, y
memoratiua’ (see Montaña de Monserrate 1551: fol. 122v).
14 As Mary Carruthers suggests, the ‘cogitativa’ can be defined in modern terms as ‘cons-
cious, though pre-rational activity’ (2008: 53).
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lover’s wilful submission to passions which were useful because they helped
him feel connected to the beloved:
La que tengo no es prission,
vos soys prission verdadera,
que me teneys de manera
tan preso que defension
15
no la quiero aun que la ouiera. (Quirós, in Castillo 1511: fol. 211r)
The desire or the sorrow caused by the lover’s absence or rejection would not
be easily given up because these passions might provide a pleasurable, gratifying
experience of connectedness:
La tristeza dellamor
tenella es tanto plazer
como sentilla es dolor. (Lope de Sosa, in Castillo 1511: fol. 123r.)
As Aquinas noted, pleasure is not simply the consequence of attaining or obtai-

ning what one desires, it requires the perception of oneself as doing so; this also
means that love and desire may be accompanied by pleasure if this attainment
is anticipated (2006: 1a.2ae, 33.1). While medical writers like Gordonio argued
that the lover’s experience of sorrow as enjoyable should be read as a symptom
of impaired judgement, it would be difficult to apply this argument to the delec-
table sorrows with which the cancioneros so obsessively deal, as we will now see.
Affective and Cognitive Union with the Beloved in cancionero Poetry
The cancionero poets who sang about suffering love may have simply chosen this
theme because it was popular with audiences, they might have been addressing
the object of their love, claiming to be suffering (and even feigning it) as a way
of requesting a ‘gualardón’, or they might have been expressing a state of mind
with which they identified because it provided a focus for their own passions
as a source of motivation. In all these cases the poet was in a different position
from that of the alienated lovesick lover who might not be able to step back
to look at his or her condition. For instance, Don Juan Manuel writes from the
position of the lover who, holding the image of the beloved in his imagination,
experiences intense sadness:
La vuestra forma excelente,
Que mi memoria retiene,
Ante mis ojos se viene
Como si fuese presente:
Y con esto mi sentido
A mi triste entendimiento
Deja triste y afligido,
Tan cercano de tormento.
(Menéndez y Pelayo (ed.) 1890–1908: III, 330)
15 All my references to the Cancionero General are to the Hernando del Castillo edition (see
Castillo 1511).
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Sadness and sorrow have two functions here: they are the relevant passions to
experience in the absence of the beloved, and thus are in themselves proof of
love, while they also reinforce the cognitive and affective connection between
lover and beloved.
Aquinas refers to this kind of cognitive and affective connection when explai-
ning mutual indwelling (‘mutua inhaesio’) as the effect of love. Cognitively
(‘quantum ad vim apprehensivam’), the beloved dwells in the lover by being
constantly present in the lover’s thoughts (as suggested in St Paul’s phrase ‘I
hold you in my heart’, Phil. 1:7), while the lover is present in the beloved by
striving to know him or her deeply (‘non est contentus superficiali apprehen-
sione amati […] ad interiora ejus ingreditur’ (2006: 1a.2ae, 28.2)). Affectively
(‘quantum ad vim appetitivam’), the beloved is present in the lover as a result of
the affection aroused when thinking about the beloved, whether it is pleasure in
the beloved’s presence or desire in the beloved’s absence (28.2).
When Cartagena writes of a kind of love which does not need a reward, he
stresses how the lover can find satisfaction in the belief that the beloved ‘wants’
his passion:
Que pago de mi aficion
No lo pido ni se espera
Pues me muestra la razon
Que en querer que por vos muera
Me days pago y gualardon. (Cartagena, in Castillo 1511: fol. 123r)
The love described in this stanza may not be as selfless as the claim ‘no lo pido’
suggests. The lover appears to be self-centred, rather than striving to understand
the beloved or consider what is best for her. The beloved mainly provides a focus
for the thoughts and passions of the lover, who believes her to be the worthiest
possible object of his love:
[…] y si no me gradesceys
el mal que por vos me viene
digo que muy bien hazeys
pues mas que todas valeys
que mas que todos yo pene. (fol. 123r)
Here we are not dealing with lovesickness as a disease, as described by Lucre-

tius, Gerard of Berry and Gordonio. It is not a case of excessive passion caused
by a ‘false apprehension’ of the beloved’s worth, but a deliberate decision (‘me
muestra la razón’) to connect with her through intense desire and sorrow: ‘por
vos muera’. If (feeling, cultivating, or simply claiming) intense love and desire
for the beloved gives the lover a purpose, thinking of her may also sustain him
affectively, giving him a sense of coherence and moral worth.
The recurrent references in cancionero poetry to the notion of ‘morir’ were
so charged with meaning that it is often difficult to interpret them linearly,
but it is nonetheless possible to agree that they are all expressions of intense
emotion, intense passion. On the most literal level, phrases such as ‘que por ti
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muera’ might refer to the slow process of ‘dying’, as the effect of languishing
with desire in the beloved’s absence, perhaps even foregoing food and sleep.
They could also refer to the unrequited lover’s declared intention of committing
suicide, used as a threat to provoke a change of heart in the beloved.
A less literal but equally powerful use of the notion of ‘morir’ to mark intense
desire is found in poems such as Juan del Encina’s ‘¡no te tardes, que me muero
/ carcelero!’, in which the beloved is urged to provide a long-term cure for the
lover’s desire through reciprocated love: ‘porque no pierda la vida / […] / prome-
tiendo no olvidarme’ (1496: fol. 95r). The lover here aspires to both affective and
cognitive union, to ‘mutual indwelling’.
Associated with the idea of languishing with desire was the use of parodoxes
about living death, or living yet dying, which accentuated the pain, or even
despair, of loving without reward, as in Meneses and Duarte de Britho:
[…] porque es tormento tan fiero
la vida de mí, cabtivo,
que no vivo porque vivo,
y muero porque no muero.
(Resende, Cancioneiro General; cited in García de la Concha 1978: 341–42)
Y con tanto mal crescido,

de todo ya desespero;
que por vos, triste cabtivo,
ya no vivo porque vivo
y muero porque no muero. (Cited in García de la Concha 1978: 342)
In such paradoxes, ‘muero’ does not simply refer to suffering love, but also to
desiring death as a release (Parker 1985: 17). Of course, the desire underlying
them is also paradoxical, since the more one desires, the more alive one feels.
Ultimately, by writing ‘muero’ the poet is not letting himself die of sorrow, but is
giving sorrow and desire an aesthetic form, which can in turn produce pleasure.
Besides the aesthetic pleasure produced by the rhythm, the rhyme and the
sounds of cancionero poems and songs, their poetic elaborations of the theme of
suffering love may have also had a therapeutic function in creating some form
of catharsis for writer or listener. In the Discalced Carmelite convents founded
by Teresa of Avila letrillas and coplas were used for recreation and as means to
16
encourage love for God. Further evidence suggesting that the nuns might have
believed in the therapeutic effect of love songs is found in the hagiographic
account of how the nuns in the convent sang about love-suffering to uplift John
of the Cross’s spirits after he had escaped from his confinement:
16 ‘Gustava la Madre que sus monjas anduvieran alegres y que cantasen en las fiestas de los
santos e hiciesen coplas. Mas como gustaba de dar ejemplo en todo, hacíalos ella misma
y los cantaba en unión de sus hijas sin instrumento ninguno de música, sino acompañán-
dose con la mano, dando ligeras plamadas para llevar el compás y hacer cierta armoniosa
cadencia. Pero aun los mismos villancicos rebosaban de amor divino’ (Rivera, Vida de la
Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús, I, 4, ch. 24; cited in Vega 1972: 37). Teresa, for instance, asked
her brother Lorenzo to send coplas for the nuns to sing (letter 168, 2 Jan. 1577, Santa Teresa
1986: 1063–67 (1066)).
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Quien no sabe de penas

en este valle de dolores,
no sabe de cosas buenas,
ni ha gustado de amores,
pues penas es el traje de amadores. (Cited in Parker 1985: 19–20)
John of the Cross was reported to have been so moved by the singing that he
experienced a mystical rapture, ecstasy. This would suggest that affective union
with the beloved can be cultivated through a deliberate use of the imagination,
by feeding it images about how best to love.
Defining extasis as ‘being carried outside of oneself’ as an effect of love, Aquinas
explained that it can take place through the cognitive faculties (‘secundum
vim apprehensivam’) or through the affective faculties (‘secundum vim appeti-
tivam’, 2006: 1a.2ae, 28.3). Cognitively, a lover may experience extasis by being
‘elevated above his normal powers’, ‘raised to an understanding of things above
the range of reason and the senses’, being ‘carried beyond the natural limita-
tions of rational and sensory knowledge’, although it is also possible for a lover
to fall below his normal state, into an ecstasy of violent passion or madness
(‘cum aliquis in furiam vel amentiam cadit dicitur extasim passus’, 28.3). Affec-
tively, ‘the lover is carried outside of himself in so far as he wants and works
for his friend’s good. However, he does not want his friend’s good more than his
own’ (28.3). Even though Aquinas’s extasis, translated into English as ‘transport’,
has a wider range of meanings than the term ecstasy, his definition stresses the
continuity between human love and spiritual love.
Teresa’s ‘Muero porque no muero’

The following letrilla, glossed in Teresa’s ‘Muero’ poem, might have been among
the cancionero-type songs of human love used in Teresa’s convents as means of
cultivating love and affective union with God:
Vivo sin vivir en mí,
y de tal manera espero,
que muero porque no muero. (Santa Teresa 1986)
Its first line can be seen to refer to the kind of extasis described by Aquinas as the
effect of love, while it also evokes St Paul’s claim about the effect of God’s love
for him: ‘it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life
I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave
himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20). Teresa, indeed, had referred to how she remembered
St Paul’s words when she felt God dwelling in her: ‘que ni me parece que yo vivo,
ni hablo ni tengo querer, sino que está en mí quien me govierna y da fuerza, y
ando como casi fuera de mí, y ansí es grandísima pena la vida’ (1986: CC 3.1).
By changing the second line of the traditional letrilla, Teresa appears to stress
less the intensity of her desire and expectation (‘y de tal manera espero’) than
the high aspirations which underpin her desire (‘y tan alta vida espero’). Among
her polysemic references to ‘dying’, the phrase ‘muero de amor’ can refer to
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three levels of experience which can take place simultaneously: the human
‘languishing with love’, the ascetic ‘dying to the world to dwell more in God’
and the mystical suspension of all sensory and intellectual faculties (cogitative
power, memory, reason). As she notes in the Moradas, all three forms of ‘dying’
were part of her experience of mystical prayer:
No hay mejor prueva para entender si llega a unión, u si no, nuestra oración. No
penséis que es cosa soñada, como la pasada; digo soñada, porque ansí parece está
el alma como adormizada, que ni bien parece está dormida, ni se siente despierta.
Aquí, con estar todas dormidas, y bien dormidas a las cosas del mundo y a nosotras
mesmas (porque en hecho de verdad se queda como sin sentido aquello poco que
dura, que ni hay poder pensar anque quieran), aquí no es menester con artificio
suspender el pensamiento; hasta el amar, si lo hace, no entiende cómo, ni qué es
lo que ama, ni qué querría, en fin, como quien de todo punto ha muerto al mundo
para vivir más en Dios; que ansí es una muerte sabrosa, un arrancamiento del alma
de todas las operaciones que puede tener, estando en el cuerpo; deleitosa, porque
anque de verdad parece se aparta el alma de él para mejor estar en Dios, de manera
que aun no sé yo si le queda vida para resolgar (ahora lo estava pensando y paréceme
que no; al menos, si lo hace, no se entiende si lo hace); todo su entendimiento se
querría emplear en entender algo de lo que siente, y como no llegan sus fuerzas a
esto, quédase espantado de manera que, si no se pierde del todo, no menea pie ni
mano, como acá decimos de una persona que está tan desmayada que nos parece
está muerta. (1986: 5 Moradas 1.4)
Teresa’s reference to dying to worldly concerns as a way of better dwelling in

God is one of the main themes propounded in Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.17 In
line with the emphasis which Kempis places on subjecting one’s will to God’s,
Teresa writes of how her passions and her will (‘el corazón’) are united affecti-
vely with the will of God, who, as she believes, had ‘wanted’ her to be his:
Vivo ya fuera de mí
después que muero de amor;
porque vivo en el Señor,
que me quiso para sí;
cuando el corazón le di
puse en él este letrero:
que muero porque no muero.
Her line ‘muero porque no muero’ might be read as referring to the suffering
caused by separation: ‘I am dying because I cannot die and be with God’ (O’Reilly
1992: 66). Nonetheless, her desire for permanent union with God coexists with
her willingness to remain alive, and continue to suffer, as a way of demonstra-
ting her love for God: ‘y la mayor cosa que yo ofrezco a Dios por gran servicio, es
cómo, siéndome tan penoso estar apartada de El, por su amor quiero vivir’ (1986:
CC 3.10). This is not simply sensory desire, produced by sensory perceptions of
images of Christ’s Passion or sorrowful songs about love. It is an aspiration of
the rational soul (reason and the will) affecting bodily and sensory experience:
17 For the passages in Kempis which deal with this notion as a crucial background in under-
standing the cancionero and mystical paradoxes of dying yet living, see O’Reilly 1992: 57.
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‘determinarse a padecer por Dios y desear tener muchos trabajos y quedar muy
más determinada a apartarse de los contentos y conversaciones de la tierra’ (6
Moradas 2.6). Her dying to the world, her withdrawal from concerns unrelated
to her love for God, seems to illustrate Aquinas’s account of the effects of love
and the intense preoccupation which comes with it (2006: 1a.2ae, 28.3). It differs
from the withdrawal from the world described in Gordonio’s account of lovesic-
kness in that Teresa does not abandon all activity to spend all her time thinking
of and pining for her beloved. Instead, she gets on with the challenging and
physically demanding tasks of founding convents and writing numerous prac-
tical and pastoral letters. In embracing such challenges, she identifies with the
Passion of Christ, encouraged by the belief that he has inscribed in her heart the
line ‘muero porque no muero’ as a reminder that he died for love (‘muero’) to
show the way to eternal life (‘porque no muero’).
In the second stanza Teresa reverses the courtly love and cancionero conven-
tion of placing the first-person lyrical voice in the position of the prisoner, or
captive, and the lover, Love, or God in that of the jailer. Thus, where Juan del
Encina appeals to his jailer, in a song that can be read in terms of human or
divine love (see above), Teresa is unambiguous in claiming:
Esta divina prisión
del amor con que yo vivo
ha hecho a Dios mi cautivo,
y libre mi corazón;
y causa en mí tal pasión
ver a Dios mi prisionero,
Teresa’s perception of God as ‘mi cautivo’ is not a frightening realization, as

Vega suggests, restricting his reading of this stanza to the realm of emotion:
‘hete aquí a Dios hecho prisionero o cautivo del alma, pensamiento que asusta y
acongoja a la Santa sobremanera, y la mete en tal confusión y dolor que no sabe
qué hacer ni qué partido tomar’ (1972: 65). On the contrary, it shows her aware-
ness of theological ideas about the effect of incarnation and redemption. By
thinking of (and connecting affectively with) Christ’s sorrow, she becomes able
to direct her own passions (‘ha hecho a Dios mi cautivo / y libre mi corazón’). In
meditating on Christ’s Passion, believing in it as the supreme gesture of God’s
love for each individual, she uses her imagination to see him (in terms perhaps
drawn from the cancioneros) as her prisoner. By dwelling on such images, she
cultivates sorrow (the meaning of ‘pasión’ in this context) as a means of culti-
vating love. This sorrow is then expressed with the term ‘muero’: suffering in
imitation of Christ’s passion becomes the obvious way for the individual to
attain eternal life, ‘porque no muero’.
Some twelve years earlier Teresa had written in the Vida about how she had
felt constrained by bodily pain and illness until she realized that what was cons-
training her was not the pain itself, but the fear of becoming more ill, the fear
of death:
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que no nos matarán estos negros cuerpos que tan concertados se quieren llevar para
desconcertar el alma […] hasta tener lágrimas nos hace temer de cegar.
Como soy tan enferma, hasta que me determiné en no hacer caso del cuerpo ni de
la salud, siempre estuve atada, sin hacer nada; y ahora hago bien poco, mas como
quiso Dios entendiese ese ardid de el demonio, y cómo me ponía delante el perder
la salud, decía yo: ‘poco va en que me muera’; si el descanso: ‘no he ya menester
descanso, sino cruz’; ansí otras cosas. Vi claro que en muy muchas, aunque yo
de hecho soy harto enferma, que era tentación del demonio o flojedad mía; que
después que no estoy tan mirada y regalada, tengo mucha más salud. (1986: Vida
13.7)
In this passage Teresa uses the first person plural to encourage her readers to
overcome the fear of pain: ‘hasta tener lágrimas nos hace temer de cegar’. She
stresses how she replaced the belief that she needed rest with the belief that
this pain would enable her to connect affectively with Christ’s Passion: ‘no he
ya menester descanso, sino cruz’. By identifying with Christ’s suffering, she was
able to give some purpose to her bodily pain, and also look beyond it, thus losing
the fear of pain and the fear of death: ‘poco va en que me muera’. Paradoxically,
her detachment from her pain made her health improve. Her testimony illus-
trates in practical terms the link between health and salvation contained in the
term ‘salud’, as used by Juan of Avila in his translation of Kempis: ‘en la cruz es
la salud y la vida […] en la cruz está el gozo del espíritu’ (cited in O’Reilly 1992:
57).
As the fourth stanza of the ‘Muero’ poem stresses, human suffering is greater,
bitterer, when it is not experienced as an act of love. As an act of reciprocated
love focused on the sorrowful humanity of Christ, suffering can bring sweet-
ness, the pleasure of affective union with Christ’s divinity:
¡Ay, qué vida tan amarga
do no se goza el Señor!
Porque si es dulce el amor,
no lo es la esperanza larga.
Quíteme Dios esta carga,
más pesada que el acero,
Here, as elsewhere, Teresa emphasizes that the joy and pleasure of union with
God can be already experienced on earth: ‘despertemos ya, por amor del Señor,
de este sueño, y miremos que aun no nos guarda para la otra vida el premio de
amarle, que en ésta comienza ya’ (Meditaciones 3.1). As is suggested in Kempis, it
is possible to find heaven on earth: ‘que es posible que aun estando en esta vida
mortal se pueda gozar de Vos con tan particular amistad […] deshacernos todas
y convertirnos en Vos!’ (Meditaciones 3.10).18 It is thus possible to argue that the
‘alta vida’ referred to at the beginning of the ‘Muero’ poem is not simply that of
eternal union of the soul with God after the body’s death, but it is also the spiri-
tual life of feeling connected with God on earth through love, sorrow and joy,
18 On Kempis’s reference to heaven on earth, see O’Reilly 1992: 57.
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through desire, through hope: ‘Valgan mis deseos, Dios mío, delante de vuestro
divino acatamiento y no miréis mi poco merecer’ (Exclamaciones 15.3).
While a number of philosophical traditions (notably Stoicism and Epicur
ianism) had seen ‘desire’ as a moral disease and as a source of erroneous judge-
ment, Aquinas convincingly argued that desire could be motivating and, if
rightly directed, a source of moral worth. This can be seen in some cancionero
poetry, in which the lover’s often ambiguous desire, directed to an unattainable
or barely attainable object, intensifies the experience of love as sorrow, despair
or hope, thus providing a strong affective attachment to (the image of) the
beloved. Drawing on cancionero formulations of desire, Teresa’s ‘Muero porque
no muero’ suggests that the experience of reciprocated love can also be inten-
sified by wilful desire, and that desire can help the lover move towards, and
become transformed into, the beloved.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas, 2006. Summa Theologiae, XIX (1a.2ae. 22–30), The Emotions, ed. and tr. E. D’Arcy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Carruthers, Mary, 2008. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Castillo, Hernando del (ed.), 1511. Cancionero general (Valencia: Cristóbal Cofman).
Encina, Juan del, 1496. Cancionero de las obras de Juan del Enzina (Salamanca: [printer of
Nebrissensis’s Gramática]).
Ferrand, Jacques, 1990. A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and tr. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo
Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press).
García de la Concha, Víctor, 1978. El arte literario de Santa Teresa (Barcelona: Ariel).
Gordonio, Bernardus de, 1993. Bernardo de Gordonio, Lilio de medicina, ed. Brian Dutton and M.a
Nieves Sánchez. 2 vols. (Madrid: Arco/Libros).
Lucretius Caro, T., 1963. On the Nature of Things, ed. C. Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon).
Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino (ed.), 1890–1908. Antología de los poetas líricos castellanos. 13 vols., III
(Madrid: Vda de Hernando).
Montaña de Monserrate, Bernardino, 1551. Libro de Anathomía del hombre (Valladolid: Sebastián
Martínez).
Nussbaum, Martha C., 1994. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
O’Reilly, Terence, 1992. ‘Courtly Love and Mysticism’, Journal of Hispanic Research, 1: 53–76.
Parker, Alexander A., 1985. The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, ed. Terence O’Reilly (Edin-
burgh: University of Edinburgh Press).
Serés, Guillermo, 1996. La transformación de los amantes (Barcelona: Crítica).
Santa Teresa, 1986. Obras completas, ed. E. de la Madre de Dios and O. Steggink. Biblioteca de
Autores Cristianos, 212 (Madrid: Editorial Católica).
Vega, Ángel Custodio, 1972. La poesía de Santa Teresa. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, serie
minor, 28 (Madrid: Editorial Católica).
Villalobos. Francisco de, 1950. ‘Sentencias’, in Curiosidades bibliográficas. Biblioteca de Autores
Españoles, 36 (Madrid: Atlas).
Wack, Mary Frances, 1990. Lovesickess in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
Whinnom, Keith, 1983. ‘Introduction’, Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor (Madrid: Castalia).
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Lovesickness and The Therapy of Desire: Aquinas, Cancionero Poetry, and Teresa of Avila's Muero Porque No Muero'

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Lovesickness and the Therapy of Desire:

Aquinas, cancionero Poetry, and Teresa of

1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (2006: 19, 103 (1a.2ae. 28.5)).

Aquinas’s influential discussion of love, desire and hope as motivating passions

Lovesickness and Desire

As Aquinas noted, pleasure is not simply the consequence of attaining or obtai-

Affective and Cognitive Union with the Beloved in cancionero Poetry

Here we are not dealing with lovesickness as a disease, as described by Lucre-

Y con tanto mal crescido,

Quien no sabe de penas

Teresa’s ‘Muero porque no muero’

Teresa’s reference to dying to worldly concerns as a way of better dwelling in

Teresa’s perception of God as ‘mi cautivo’ is not a frightening realization, as

18 On Kempis’s reference to heaven on earth, see O’Reilly 1992: 57.

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