Davis - The Quest of Michel de Certeau

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06/01/14 The Quest of Michel de Certeau by Natalie Zemon Davis | The New York Review of Books

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May 15, 2008 Issue

T he Quest of Michel de CerteauNatalie Zemon Davis

The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writingstranslated from the French and with an afterword by Tom Conley, edited andwith an introduction by LuceGiardUniversity of Minnesota Press, 219 pp. (1998)

The Certeau Reader edited by Graham WardBlackwell, 259 pp., $106.95

Cu lture in the Plural translated from the French and with an afterword by Tom Conley, edited andwith an introduction by Luce GiardUniversity of Minnesota Press, 180 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Heterologies: Discourse on the Other translated from the French by Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad GodzichUniversity of Minnesota Press, 276 pp., $20.00 (paper)

The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenthand SeventeenthCenturiestranslated from the French by Michael B. SmithUniversity of Chicago Press, 374 pp., $35.00 (paper)

The Possession at Louduntranslated from the French by Michael B. Smith, with a foreword by StephenGreenblattUniversity of Chicago Press, 251 pp., $23.00 (paper)

The Practice of Everyday Lifetranslated fromthe French by Steven F. RendallUniversity of California Press, 229 pp., $19.95 (paper)

The Writing of Historytranslated from the French by Tom ConleyColumbia University Press, 367 pp., $25.95 (paper)

Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other by Jeremy AhearneStanford University Press, 227 pp., $20.95 (paper)

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1.Though in North America Michel de Certeau is known only in the university world, inFrance he was a celebrity, viewed as a major cultural critic, an innovative historian of earlymodern religion, and a religious thinker who in his life and work pursued a particularlyengaged, open, and generous form of Catholicism. At his funeral in Paris in 1986, thestrains of Edith Piafs Non, je ne regrette rienNo, I regret nothingwafted over the pews in the Jesuit Church of Saint Ignatius in Paris, and through loudspeakers to thehundreds of mourners crowded in the square outside. The song followed a reading of ICorinthians, where Paul says that God hath chosen the foolish things of the world toconfound the wise, and a poem by a seventeenth-century mystic about a vagabond soulseeking divine love throughout the world. These verses, requested by Michel de Certeauhimself, suggest the unorthodoxy of his spiritual and scholarly vision.

Whether writing about madness and mysticism in the seventeenth century, SouthAmerican resistance movements in the past and present, or the practice of everyday life inthe twentieth century, Certeau developed a distinctive way of interpreting social and personal relations. In contrast to those who described societies by evoking what he calledtheir homogeneities and hegemonieswhat unified and controlled themCerteau wantedto identify the creative and disruptive presence of the otherthe outsider, the stranger,the alien, the subversive, the radically differentin systems of power and thought. Hefound it not only in the ways people imagined figures distant from themselves (as inMichel de Montaignes famous essay on the Cannibals of the Amazon), but also in behaviors and groups close to home, in the ever-present tensions at the heart of all sociallife, whether in schools, religious institutions, or the mass media.

To be sure, notions of otherness were cropping up in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s, when Certeau was gaining prominence, but he wasoriginal in the multiple ways he conceived figures of the other and how they functionedin many settings. He coined the term heterologies to describe disciplines in which weexamine ourselves in relation to otherness; history and ethnography, for instance, could be

sciences of the other if they confront the often disfiguring assumptions we bring to our understanding of different times and places. He wrote about centralizing institutions of the past so as to show how they defined themselves either by excluding divergent voicesand beliefs or by swallowing them up.

And yet the state and church were never the sole source of power and authority inmedieval and modern times. Certeau always saw vital alternatives to their rule, as inreligious movements like mysticism or in stubborn popular knowledge born of localexperience. His heroes are often wanderers, pilgrims, missionaries, and nomads, such as

the seventeenth-century visionary Jean de Labadie, who began as a Jesuit, then preachedhis radical brand of Reformed religion across France and Switzerland, and ended upfounding a Protestant community of saints in the Netherlands.


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uch a perspective and Certeaus life itself make interesting comparisons with two of his exact contemporaries, Michel Foucault and Joseph Ratzinger, whose work and

thought have also been concerned with evaluating power and institutional boundaries.Foucaults intellectual daring was rewarded in 1970 by his election to a prestigious professorship at the Collge de France; in France Certeau had only short-term teaching posts until the last year and a half of his life, when he was invited to be a professor at the

cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Ratzinger, after his ordination anddoctoral studies, rose through distinguished posts in theology faculties in Germany to become archbishop of Munich-Freising and cardinal in 1977, a few years later prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and since 2005 Pope Benedict XVI.Certeau pursued his wide-ranging Christian life as a Jesuit brother, holding no office inhis order and sometimes wearing the clothes of a layman.

All three men were affected by the protests of 1968. Foucault and Certeau became morecommitted as men of the left, albeit in different ways. Power was the key concept inFoucaults understanding of social relations and communication; power inhered in centralauthoritiesmonarchs, medical experts, priestsand it reproduced its message in theindividual mind and conscience. The process was unrelenting, enhancing discipline,control, and punishment, and meeting little resistance over time. Foucaults accounthelped people understand the institutions and practices that distributed power throughoutsocieties, but gave little insight into how they might be eased or changed.

For Ratzinger, the 1968 student movements put a limit to his support for the liberalizingefforts in the Catholic Church associated with the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II(19621965), and made him embrace the established Church hierarchy. In his view, thedoctrine of the Church must not give way to the false influences of secularism, relativism,religious pluralism, subjectivism, and economic radicalism. Interpretation must rest in thehands of the master theologians of the Church, founded by Christ and guaranteed byapostolic succession. As Ratzinger wrote in Dominus Iesus , an encyclical he drafted in2000 as Prefect of the Faith, there exists a single Church of Christ, which subsists in theCatholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communionwith him. Whatever gifts possessed by other Christian communities or churches, anyconversation with them is conditioned by this absolute claim to authority. Certeaus questfor connection with the other and his belief that boundaries between differentcommunities and ways of thinking should be open were an alternative to Foucaultssomber vision of power and domination and Ratzingers certitudes.

erteaus views emerged out of decades of struggle, experiment, and writing. He was born in 1925 in the Savoy, whose mountain trails he climbed as a teenager bringing

messages to the Resistance fighters against the German occupation. In 1944 he began hisstudies for the priesthood; in 1950 he joined the Jesuit order, writing to a friend, I think God is calling me to China. The famous Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had earlier written his books of geology and theology from China; that country had been taken over bythe Communists in 1949 and the Jesuits were being ordered to leave. This difficulty may

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have made going to China all the more appealing to Certeau, but he never did get there.

As it was, his studies brought him into the explosion of theological renewal led by Henride Lubac, a hero of the Catholic Resistance, and Certeau became one of his favoredstudents at Lyon. (In Germany Ratzinger was also inspired by Lubacs writing.) Lubac wasshaking up rigid assumptions and challenging conventional boundaries at every turn. TheChurchs teaching was not fixed for eternity, he argued, but had changed over time; assentto its doctrine must come from a new historical study of Christian texts. Non-Catholicsources had something to teach as well: Lubac devoted a book to Buddhism, in which hedrew an interesting comparison between Christ and Buddha. In a 1946 study tracing thechanging meanings of the word supernatural from Augustine on, Lubac challenged thesharp distinction made by theologians close to the pope since the nineteenth century between, on the one hand, the realm of human nature and the natural world and, on theother, the supernatural order and the divine. The desire for God was natural in human beings, he wrote, but it was there because God put it there, a divine requirement.

Accommodating as this view may seem for Catholics, important members of the Vaticanhierarchy feared it weakened the distinction between the spiritual Church and the worldlyconcerns of everyday life. In 1950, Pius XII ordered Lubac to stop public teaching andcensured his book on the supernatural, but this did not stop Lubac from affirmingin a phrase that Certeau never forgotthat the Church must always leave all its doors openthrough which people of different mind can arrive at the truth.

Certeau began to write in his seminary days, and his early publications show him makinghis first steps toward his science of the other. He put experience at the heart of religious life, but noted a deep gap between experience and spiritual desire: believersyearned to approach God, but often felt God was absent. Such alienation was inevitable. InCerteaus conception, Gods presence could only be imperfect and ephemeralbut itcould be recognized if one understood how human feelings shifted from minute to minuteand human beings had to struggle for words to capture experience fully. Further, allreligious experience, no matter how solitary, is suffused with the presence of others,whether in the history one has absorbed or in the language in which one thinks and prays.

erteau found that this quest was lived out in the spiritual diary of the early JesuitPierre Favre, written as he traveled around Europe preaching in the 1540s and seeking

signs of Gods love within himself. Translated from Latin and Spanish into French andedited by Certeau for his doctoral dissertation, Favres interior pilgrimage exemplifiedfor Certeau the feeling of mystery which emerges in experience. But the mystery didnot go far enough for Certeau. He was drawn to the wild mystics, themystiques

sauvages , of the seventeenth century, especially the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin, who became, said Certeau, his companion, the ghost who haunted his life.

Surin was not a quiet companion. A wandering preacher and director of souls, seekingsigns of God among the humble, Surin was called to Loudun in 1634 to exorcise theUrsuline prioress Jeanne des Anges of the devils that possessed her. He succeeded in

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curing her, but at the cost, willingly offered, of his own fragile emotional balance. For almost twenty years, he suffered and remained silent in a Jesuit sickroom. In 1654 heemerged and became an impassioned writer on the mystic quest: I would like the voice of a trumpet, a pen of bronze, I would like flames to flow from my pen, he said. Certeauscoured libraries to find manuscripts of Surins writings and his letters of personalconfession and spiritual guidance, publishing them in 1963 and 1966, with extensive

commentary and reflection.The 1960s brought other discoveries to Certeau. Hoping to link theology and psychology,Certeau turned with a few other Jesuits to the study of psychoanalysis; in 1964, he becameone of the founding members of Jacques Lacans cole freudienne de Paris. In his denserhetoric Lacan elaborated the formal language of the subject, or self, and the other. Hewrote of the infants perception of itself as other when it first sees itself in a mirror andof the consequent emergence of the idea of otherness as something absent from or lacking in the self. He discussed the childs entry into the symbolic realm of language,which, he argued, gives structure to otherness, and the unending but impossible desire toclose the gap between the self and the other.

Certeau used some of these ideas, especially in interpreting the yearnings of his wildmystics for God. But as Jeremy Ahearne shows in his insightful book Michel deCerteau: Interpretation and Its Other , Certeau developed his own social and historicalconcepts of others that went well beyond Lacans rigid categories and examples. AtLacans death in 1981, Certeau described him as one of the extravagant wanderers, at his best when expressing his ideas and practicing psychoanalysis, but a failure when caught inthe angry feuds of the institutions he set up.

specially important in the 1960s were the changes instituted by Vatican II. The once- proscribed Henri de Lubac was summoned by Pope John XXIII to have a leading part

in the council; Joseph Ratzinger attended the sessions and wrote approvingly of theChurchs new openness to the laity and even to elements of sanctification outside theChurch itself (to quote the phrase from the councils text Lumen gentium ). From Paris,Certeau responded more radically. For him the reforms endorsed by the council were a

creative rupture with the unbending hierarchical patterns of the past. They called for multiple languages of faith to express peoples experience instead of remote clericallanguage. In his view, Vatican II should lead the Church to immerse itself fully in all theissues of the modern world and to recognize how much it still had to learn about theseissuesabout war and violence, about birth control, and what went on in the city streetsand in the press and television.

This should be the Churchs task not just in Europe, whose priests dominated the council, but elsewhere in the world. Such, he thought, had been the spirit of Ignatius Loyola and hisfellow Jesuits in the early sixteenth century. And such would be Certeaus goal between1966 and 1968 and for years afterward, as he went frequently to Latin America, especiallyto Brazil and Mexico, drawn to the liberation theology priests who were active in theneighborhoods of the poor and who believed the Church must fight against social misery

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as well as try to save souls. He was impressed with the forms of popular spirituality heobserved during his travels, seeing in these messianic and ecstatic movements not aberrant behavior that had to be stamped out by the Church but the inner voice of a continent stillculturally Catholic. He also wrote condemning the torture under the military dictatorshipin Brazil.

In 1968, Certeau interpreted the student movement as another creative rupture. LastMay, he wrote in a Jesuit periodical in the summer of 1968,

speech was taken the way, in 1789, the Bastille was taken. The stronghold that wasassailed is a knowledge held by the dispensers of culture, a knowledge meant tointegrate or enclose student workers and wage earners in a system of assignedduties.

As he saw seventeenth-century mystics struggling for a language to express their

experience, and as he urged the Church to develop multiple forms of expression to givevoice to modern spirituality, so now he heard students trying to enlarge the right to speak,some of them putting the whole system into question. Speech was soon recaptured bygovernmental and academic institutions, which, said Certeau, restored a hierarchical order rather than creating a more pluralistic structure called for by the [May] events. Still, heargued, the historian could keep hope for change alive by giving a lucid account of relations between the existing institutions and student others.

By the end of the 1960s, Certeaus teacher Henri de Lubac no longer sought further changes in the Church: for him the era of reform had come to a close. In 1970 JosephRatzinger published a book in which he decried the arrogance of those calling for extremedemocratization of the Church, including elections and synods where laypeople would participate along with ordained clergy. The Church, he wrote, had democracy enoughwith its collegial structure of priests and bishops, and the pope at its head. Reflecting later on the Sixties, Ratzinger said that many Catholics moved from a narrow, inward-fixedChristianity to an uncritical openness to the world.

penness to the world was at the heart of Certeaus position as a Christian. After 1970,his writings widened in scope and audience; his critical use of heterologies todescribe religious and cultural practices won him support in France and abroad, and alsoadversaries. To start with, his theology shocked Lubac. Certeau was asked in 1971 tosubmit materials to the Institut catholique in Paris for a proper doctorate of theology (hisexisting doctorate was in religious studies); his essay on the meaning of Christianity wasrejected, and rather than revising it to satisfy the institutes faculty, Certeau published it as

La Rupture Instauratrice The Founding Rupture, or Christianity in the ContemporaryWorld. Other essays followed and even a radio debate with the Catholic socialistintellectual Jean-Marie Domenach.

Jesus Christ, Certeau argued, is the central figure, the Other, present but also absent; hiscoming and death founded Christianity, but the signifying event is not the crucifixion but

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the empty tomb; the follow me [of Jesus] comes from a voice which has been effaced,forever irrecoverable. Still the Christian wants to believe, Certeau said; wants to take therisk and follows a way to Christ; but the character of the Christian life must be understoodaccording to historical circumstances. In the secularized world of the late twentiethcentury, with nonreligious structures dominating everywhere, Certeau argued, Churchinstitutions alone could not be the site for Christian intervention in the world. In fact,

Christian belief and practices could no longer be associated with a place, or even with asingle social milieu like the poor, but could be only an uncharted path, a wandering,without power: the person, armed with the weakness of faith, tries always to make spacefor others and to open closed systems to difference and plurality. One printed version of his radio debate with Domenach quotes Certeau as exclaiming, Christianity is something particular in the totality of history. It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe.

Lubac responded with a ferocious condemnation of Certeaus views and a defense of theuniversal Church and its hierarchy. He attacked his former student as a Joachimite,seeking, as had that medieval visionary, a golden age of pure spirituality without Churchinstitutions or disciplinary institutions of any kind. In fact, Certeau did not desire afuture without institutions. They were part of human life, as essential as the practices of others that diverged from their rules, though he regretted when, as with the postVaticanII Church, institutions abandoned the chance for deep reform. Still, when Lubac was madea cardinal in 1983, Certeau wrote his teacher that he owed his own Christian calling to himand was glad his work had received the seal of the Church.

In Certeaus case, however, being a Christian meant transcending membership. He wouldremain a Jesuit willingly, but would not validate his views by his position in his order or church, or claim to be their spokesman. Rather he would stand on their margins, askingunorthodox questions and confronting the corpus of Christian rites and texts withcontemporary practices.

is LInvention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life ) of 1980 applied thisquestioning to the world beyond the Church, writing of the ways that ordinary human

behavior resisted institutional control. Here he was taking issue with Michel Foucault.

Certeau wrote appreciatively of Foucaults close analysis of discipline in his influential Discipline and Punish , where the philosopher tracked the shift from the old regime, inwhich torture was used as a public spectacle, to the modern prison, in which coercion wasused behind closed doors to control the body. But Certeau commented:

If it is true that the grid of discipline is everywhere becoming clearer and moreextensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists beingreduced to it, what popular proceduresmanipulate the mechanisms of disciplineand conform to them only in order to evade them.

Certeau examined commonplace activities over which control could in principle bemaintained by the institutional organization of space and language and suggested how infact control was ignored or bypassed. People walk their own way through the grid of city

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streets, zigzagging, slowing down, preferring streets with certain names, making turns anddetours, their own walking rhetoric. People read in ways that escape the social hierarchyand imposed system of written texts: they read in all kinds of places from libraries totoilets. They read with their own rhythms and interruptions, thinking or daydreaming; theyread making gestures and sounds, stretching, a wild orchestration of the body, and end upwith their own ideas about the book. These procedures and rusescompose the network

of an antidiscipline.The Practice of Everyday Life appeared in English in 1984, the first of Certeaus book-length studies to be published in this language. Since 1978 Certeau had been teaching atthe University of California at San Diego, and both recent American publications onpopular cultures and the collaboration of historians and anthropologists created agrowing interest in his work in the United States, where it did not arouse the samecontroversies as in France. During the next fifteen years seven more books were published in English.

His translators faced a challenge. By 1970, Certeaus ways of thinking about the world had become increasingly elaborate and he sought a new style to accommodate them, but theexpression of his thought in his later writing is sometimes opaque. Introducing his owninner dialogue about how to validate his religious belief other than through Churchauthority, Certeau says:

Feeling the Christian ground on which I thought I was walking disappear, seeing themessengers of an ending, long time under way, approach, recognizing in this my

relation to history as a death with no proper future of its own, and a belief strippedof any secure site, I discover the violence of an instant.

Tom Conley, translator of three of Certeaus books, writes that he now heard in Certeauswork the rhythms of mystic speech, now psychoanalytic dialogue, and now Renaissance prose. It will help readers that Conley, Luce Giard, and other editors of these works haveaccompanied them with commentaries.

2.Though writing on many subjects, Certeau always identified himself primarily as ahistorian. As a practitioner of that craft myself, I find especially rewarding his work onseventeenth-century spiritual life, its agonies and achievements, of whichThe Possessionat Loudun can serve here as an example. In the 1630s, the town of Loudunsome 170miles southwest of Parisbore the marks of the religious wars; Protestants were still inthe majority there, but the Catholic reform was making strong headway, with the newly

established teaching order of the Ursuline nuns one of its main forces. In 1632, in thewake of a devastating plague, the prioress, Jeanne des Anges, and several members of thecongregation were found to be possessed by devils: they twisted and writhed indecently,tried to vomit up the eucharistic wafer, and, when questioned, uttered blasphemies using


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the voices and names of devils.

Physicians, priestly exorcists, and theologians were summoned from near and far, to be joined by judges and royal officials. Rites of exorcism were performed publicly by the priests before an ever-growing number of visitors from France and abroad. The devilssoon named the eloquent, elegant, and womanizing priest Urbain Grandier as the sorcerer behind the possession. He was tried, convicted, and finally executed late in August 1634,maintaining his innocence, even under torture, to the very end.

And still the possessions continued. At the end of 1634, a team of Jesuits arrived,including the mystic Jean-Joseph Surin. Much preferring private discussion to publicexorcism, Surin devoted himself to turning the soul of Jeanne des Anges toward God. Twoand half years later, the last devil left the body of the prioress, while a devil had enteredthe body of Surin and started a war within his soul that drove him to insanity, from whichhe recovered years later. Jeanne des Anges promptly became known as a miraculous

figure, receiving angelic oracles and offering spiritual advice.Certeau is at his most engaging telling this tale, his language well translated by Michael B.Smith. With all their ambiguities, the possessed women of Loudun illustrated perfectlyCerteaus belief that history is never sure. The sources were abundantletters, courtrecords, pamphlets, memoirsand since Certeaus original French edition was part of aseries of primary documents, he could prepare a book with different voices and therebycapture a heterological perspective: his own from the present, and those from the past,each of [the] halves say[ing] what is missing from the other.

Certeau placed the Loudun events against a background of major shifts in the location of power in seventeenth-century France and the uncertainties produced by these changes. AsCerteau saw it, power in regard to the sacredpower to define truth about God and humanlifewas passing from the various religious institutions that had been at the heart of medieval society to the political institutions of the monarchy, with Cardinal Richelieuappointed as Louis XIIIs chief minister. The Church still carried on its traditionalfunctions and ceremonies, but its clerics were increasingly drawn upon for roles in sociallife and royal politics. Meanwhile the French monarchy was taking ever more initiativeand acting decisively in regard to sacred matters. Genuine religious experience andspiritual struggle were carried on, then, in a more personal way, underneath liturgicalceremonies and behind the institutional structures of the Church and the monarchy. Attheir most experimental, they took the forms of possession, on one hand, and mysticismon the other.

This momentous shift fractured coherent belief systems, according to Certeau, and thefight about truth at Loudun expressed the anguish of uncertainty. Were these women

really possessed by devils? Some physicians said their behavior could be explained simply by melancholy humors. Other observers thought the women were just lovesick or thattheir imagination had led them astray and their errors were confirmed by misguidedconfessors. Against such doubts, the presence and power of the devil were affirmed.


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Certeau describes the public exorcisms as a theater in which the priests could commandthe devils to speak before the people; the priests would thus demonstrate their ecclesiastical control over truth, even though that control was in fact slipping away fromthem.

y itself, this spectacle could not silence a troubling worry: the devil was the fount of lies, and yet the accusation against Grandier came exclusively from devils. The judges

of Louis XIIIs royal courts had to step in with their own procedures to establish the truth,and the principal judge in the case was happy to target a priest whose local supportersstood in the way of Cardinal Richelieus plans for royal expansion. One of the exorcists,himself soon to become possessed, finally admitted his limits: The demons can only bedriven out by the power of the [kings] scepter andthe [bishops] crosier would notsuffice.

Certeau also interprets the story from the inside, that is, from the point of view of the

women. He does not see them as mere victims, either of devils or of priests andauthorities around them, even though they were sometimes treated quite brutally in the public exorcisms. Rather he talks about the gapor tensionbetween the ordered ruleof the Ursuline convent, with its teaching activities and other works, and a wild inner lifeof desire and hidden malice. In such a situation, the nuns had doubts about the religiouslife, and the theological language of the time supplied them possession by devils as ameans to express their despair. The public exorcism allowed them both to declare to theworld what they secretly were and yet be assured by priests that they were something else.

Further, says Certeau, in that century of upper-class women performing as Amazonsinconvents, at court, in politics, in salons, in the vernacular pressthe public exorcismoffered further occasion for female rebellion. Go carry your beggars bag back to your Limoges, snaps the voice of one devil speaking through a nun to a mendicant friar, and tothe kings own representative, You have till now fooled so many people, but now youve been exposed.

Of course, the public exorcisms ultimately did not dispel the demons, and the executionof Grandier did not achieve the cohesion of a cosmos that the ecclesiastical activitiessought through sacrificing the deviant other. Certeau ends his account by showing thelimits of institutional power and the inexhaustibility of human inventiveness, no matter how ironclad the restrictions. On the one hand, the Kings men could now readilydemolish Louduns fortifications, leaving the town and its Protestants more vulnerable toroyal control. On the other hand, Grandiers death left a void, one of those gaps or absences that for Certeau invites response. An enormous literature about the caseemerged in the next years, some of it fostering opposition to royal and ecclesiastical policies that seemed to have triumphed in 1634.

In Jeanne des Angess relation with Jean-Joseph Surin, Certeau sees a model of spiritualconversation that both serves as a psychoanalytic talking cure and prepares a believer toembrace mysticism. Surin prays for her and with her incessantly, expressing willingness


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to take on her suffering and her devils and urging her gently to reveal to him and to Godthe depths of her heart. Jeanne des Anges does spiritual exercises under his direction; sheis patiently urged to look inward, and comes to see that she has long got her way throughlittle dodges, that she has thought more about the impression she was making on othersthan on her inner life and Gods intentions for herand that she herself has given someopenings to the devils to take possession of her. Both of them tell this story in writing,

she in an autobiography, he in letters. After his years of madness, they correspondfrequently, Surin remarking toward the end of his life that she was the only person withwhom he feels the confidence to say[his] deepest thoughts.

erteaus account of the links between madness and mysticism modifies MichelFoucaults earlier argument in Madness and Civilization , which assumed that

insanity was given an exclusively negative cast in the seventeenth century, with preachersdescribing it as a descent into animality. But Certeaus own vision of long-term historicalchange has its limits. His schemacenturies of a coherent cosmos, with religious power at its center, losing unity in the early modern period with the ascension of political power becomes untenable when we recall the place of political power and religious conflict inmedieval times and how new religious institutions, including Protestant ones, acquiredlegitimacy in early modern times. A remarkable new book on possession and mysticismthroughout Europe, Moshe Sluhovskys Believe Not Every Spirit , revises and deepens our understanding of these phenomena and the role of women in them. But Certeaus Loudunstands as a pioneering ethnography of human relations and spiritual practices in theseventeenth century.

CerteausThe Mystic Fable continues this exploration of creative life on the margins. Insome of his richest but most difficult writing, he develops the idea of mystics, referringhere not to a group of people but to a science of spiritual experience and language (asphysics is a science of nature). Certeau also makes his argument through stories, such asthat of Surins meeting with an unlettered lad, a bakers son from Normandy, during athree-day coach trip in 1630, when Surin was in the third year of his Jesuit novitiate. Surindescribed it in a letter that was later to be widely circulated:

[The young man] had never been instructed by anyone but God in the spiritual life,and yet he spoke to me about it with such sublimity and solidity that all I have reador heard is nothing compared to what he told me.

Surin went on to detail the marvelous secrets that God had communicated to this man of great simplicity.

Certeau also responded to unexpected encounters. In 1979, Le Nouvel Observateur published a ten-part series on the life of Saint Teresa by the graphic novelist ClaireBretcher, whose irreverent but affectionate portrait of Teresaefficient money-raiser for her convents, possessed writer who wants to sell her books at a good price, addressingGod with love but sometimes with irritationaroused a storm of correspondence. Somereaders were indignant at the vulgarity of this hysterical virago; others, including

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Christians, applauded Teresas dynamism and said that she herself would have laughed.

The editors asked Michel de Certeau to comment and he obliged, siding with those whothought Teresa would laugh. Theology did not just belong to theologians; its deepquestions were for everyone to ponder. As much as Claire Bretcher, he saw Teresa as theCarmelite Amazon, great hunter of dreams and desires. His lyrical portrait of Teresadraws from his favorite themes: she is a wanderer, creating convents across Spain for lovers of God; immersed in daily affairs, she can pass in an instant to ecstaticconnection with the beloved Other; she accepts the reality of institutions, but her books,with the dialogues they open, run counter to the lies institutions impose. Certeausgenerous legacy of books is an invitation to continue dialogue in every direction.

Ratzinger's evolution and views are discussed by Anthony Grafton in "Reading Ratzinger,"The New Yorker , July 25, 2005, andin "A 'Dictatorship of Relativism?' Symposium in Response to Cardinal Ratzinger's Last Homily,"Common Knowledge , No. 13(2007), pp. 337455.

In his huge book Michel de Certeau: Le marcheur bless (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2002), Franois Dosse follows Certeau in hismany itineraries in Europe and the Americasfriendships, scholarship, religious exploration, and political inquiry.

Quoted by Certeau in an app reciation of Lubac written shortly before his own death and published several years later in Le Monde ("La Mort du cardinal de Lubac," September 5, 1991).

"L'Exprience religieuse, 'connaissance vcue' dans l'glise" (1956), edited by Luce Giard, in Le voyage mystique: Michel deCerteau (Paris: Recherches de Science Religieuse, 1988), pp. 2751; Pierre Favre, Mmorial , translated and edited by Michel deCerteau (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1960).

Jean-Joseph Surin,Guide spirituel , edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1963), p. 60;Correspondance ,edited by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1966).

Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction , edited by Luce Giard (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), Chapter 8,"Lacan: une thique de la parole."

Certeau's reactions to Vatican II were published in the Jesuit periodicalChristus , Nos. 12 (1965), pp. 147163, and 13 (1966), pp . 101119; summary in Franois Dosse, Michel de Certeau: le marcheur bless (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2002), Ch. 8.

Joseph Ratzinger, "Demokratisierung der Kirche?," in Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Maier, Demokratie in der Kirche:

Mglichkeiten, Grenzen, Gefahren (Limburg: Lahn-Verlag, 1970), pp. 7 46. Later quotation given in Grafton, "ReadingRatzinger."

Several of Certeau's major publications on Christian belief are reprinted in a posthumous book, La Faiblesse de croire , edited byLuce Giard (Paris: Seuil, 1987). A translation from this collection is found inThe Certeau Reader , "The Weakness of Believing.From the Body to Writing, a Christian Transit."

Henri de Lubac, La Posterit spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (Paris, 1978 1980), Vol. 2, pp. 447449.

Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Universityof Chicago Press, 2007).

"Thrse d'Avila, ou le chemin pour se perdre," Le Nouvel Observateur , No. 771 (August 2026, 1979).

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Documents

Davis - The Quest of Michel de Certeau