Abstract
Mother Teresa’s spirituality has been under scrutiny following the revelation that she suffered from the dark night of the soul. This three-part study initially covers the Church's reactions to her aridity from 1999 to 2007. The second part focuses on three main approaches—theological, psychological, and medical—in academic writings to her emptiness, interpreting it as indicative of holiness and a mental health condition. Having acknowledged sporadic attempts to see Teresa’s ministry and spiritual dryness as being interrelated, employing both the “sociological imagination” and a biographical approach, the final part highlights the significance of exploring this relationship as a causality in the context of an array of interrelated personal, familial, and ethno-spiritual milieus. The study contends that Teresa’s desolation was a lifelong condition which determined her choice of vocation and every decision thereafter, including the charism of the Missionaries of Charity and the stages of her ministry.
Keywords
Initial reactions to Teresa’s dark night of the soul from the Roman Catholic Church from 1999 to 2007
Mother Teresa’s complex spirituality became apparent a decade after her death in 1997 when she hit the headlines for a reason that took her supporters and detractors by surprise. The revelation in, to paraphrase James Martin (2007), the rather misleadingly piously titled Come Be My Light (2007), an edited collection of carefully selected excerpts from her personal writings from the 1929-1994 period, that she suffered from the dark night of the soul was received with shock and dismay by people across the world, including those who were close to her (Van Biema 2007).
The phrase “the dark night of the soul” comes from a literal translation of the title of the poem La noche oscura del alma by the sixteenth century Spanish mystic John of the Cross (2008). In Roman Catholic spiritual theology, the concept of “the dark night” refers to a period of extreme spiritual agony that eventually leads to a complete mystical union with God. Notwithstanding some similarities between Teresa’s and other mystics’ darkness, this study contends that her interior trial is unique in its origin, length, intensity and outcome.
Teresa confided about her unyielding spiritual turmoil only to few trusted colleagues. Some of the confidantes who died before her, handed over her letters on the topic for safekeeping to the church. Her writings came to the attention of a few individuals other than the original recipients when the case for her beatification began shortly after her death.
Pope John Paul II made Teresa’s beatification his priority. He had witnessed her work in Calcutta in 1986 and highly valued her contribution to the Church. He was especially grateful to her for supporting his renewed mission ad gentes (Latin for “preach Christ to the nations”). His praise for Teresa in New Delhi in 1999 clearly indicated that his ultimate goal was to canonise her. While Teresa’s admirers were keen for her to become “the first person to attain sainthood in the new millennium” (Ganguly 1999), to the pontiff, her canonisation would be the perfect start to the “the third Christian millennium” which he hoped would “witness a great harvest of faith” in Asia (Goldenberg 1999).
The length and intensity of Teresa’s spiritual crisis inevitably resulted in a debate within the Church from the start of the diocesan stage in 1999. CNN’s coverage of this issue two years later meant that this sensitive aspect of Teresa’s spirituality was no longer an “internal matter.” Further research will reveal why, notwithstanding the firm belief shared by Teresa’s close friends in May 2001, that “within months” she would “become a saint in the fastest time in history” (Petre and Berry 2001), John Paul II put her canonisation on hold. By then the pope had already beatified and canonised several controversial figures like Josemaría Escrivá, Alojzije Stepinac, and Pius IX. Under these circumstances, canonising someone like Teresa whose views could well be considered “heretical” by her detractors within and outside the Church was a step even this strong-willed pontiff was unwilling to take. 1
To familiarise myself with reactions towards Teresa’s darkness within the Church during the 1999-2003 period, I conducted semi-structured telephone and email interviews between 2010 and 2023 with members of the beatification committee of the diocesan and positio stages, 2 reporters covering her beatification process, and some of her colleagues. The interviews reveal that during the diocesan stage the members of the beatification committee adopted two different attitudes towards Teresa’s desolation. Some remained reticent, partly because of embarrassment, loyalty to a friend’s memory, and a predisposition to respect her private writings, especially shortly after her death. A few were against this hush-hush policy. Their attitude is in keeping with the historical Catholic tradition that overall has known no clear-cut division between faith and unbelief and draws coherently upon the existing grammar of the Church which has always approached saints’ spirituality through the apophatic theology (Teresa, 2010).
In Christianity, this tradition springs from Jesus’s cry on the cross “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). Since then, the sense of abandonment and spiritual desert are subjects of a rich mystical literature including: the works of late antiquity mystics Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius; Saint Francis of Assisi in the twelfth century; The Cloud of Unknowing, attributed to a fourteenth century anonymous priest; and the writings of sainted mystics like Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, Jane Frances de Chantal in the seventeenth century, Paul of the Cross in the eighteenth century, and Bernadette and Thérèse of Lisieux in the nineteenth century.
These select mystics did not have the same experiences of spiritual darkness. Indeed, Denys Turner (1999, 2) highlights the need to determine what constitutes “mystical experience” and if “the ‘mystical’ had something to do with the having of very uncommon, privileged ‘experiences.’” After all, as Turner observes, early mystics did not mention any such experiences; those who did, “attached little or no importance to them and certainly did not think the having of them to be definitive of ‘the mystical.’”
Mother Teresa’s published personal writings indicate her darkness was not the outcome of, what Bonaventure (1978) calls, “the soul’s journey into God.” Further research will reveal if Teresa ever achieved the kind of union with God for which she desperately longed. What is known is that what she went through in 1922, 1946, and 1958 were not “visions,” “locutions,” or “trances” (see Spink 1998, 8; Teresa 2007, 40, 174) of the kind experienced and recorded by John of the Cross (2008), Teresa of Ávila (1957), and Thérèse of Lisieux (2006). This means that Mother Teresa’s darkness is different from that experienced by some Neoplatonist and modern mystics whose “profound darkness,” to rephrase Turner (1999, 3), results from the ascending soul’s inability to cope with God’s blindingly bright light.
The first articles about Teresa’s dark night were by two priests—Albert Huart and Joseph Neuner—in 2000 3 and 2001, respectively. Not being a beatification committee member, Huart was not bound by any confidentiality restrictions. Nonetheless, before publishing his article, he secured approval from Brian Kolodiejchuk, 4 postulator of the beatification cause.
Although Huart (2001, 494) was not one of her “close spiritual confidantes,” Teresa had “confided” to him “the pain and bewilderment that enveloped her” once, perhaps in 1965. 5 Huart realized better the significance of her comments about the “darkness” within her “own heart” (495) when gaining access in 1999 to the letters she sent to her spiritual guide Lawrence Picachy, mostly “from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s” (500).
Acknowledging that anyone can read about the “nights” in the writings of great mystics, Huart asks rhetorically: “Yet, is it not encouraging to realize that darkness had been daily bread for a most joy-giving little woman of our days?” (501). Moreover, he contends her letters may give “courage and hope” to “[m]any people who go through similar trials.”
Having “rather limited” “original material,” 6 Huart inevitably drew some wrong conclusions. For instance, he deduced that while some letters “may give the impression of a litany of gloom,” “[i]n fact such cries of distress only come up in flashes” (496). Come Be My Light reveals that Teresa’s darkness was anything but a passing stage, whereas its 2010 sequel Where There is Love, There is God (Teresa, 2010) offers no solid proof to the contrary. The keepers of her personal writings have yet to produce evidence that she was cured of her doubts.
Unlike other committee members, Neuner knew of Teresa’s spiritual desolation before the start of the beatification process. This and other credentials explain why this Second Vatican Council advisor and one of Asia’s leading theologians was put in charge of presenting “a coherent report to John Paul II” (Ireland 2007) regarding Teresa’s dark night. Neuner’s task was to find out if her writings “contained theoretical anomalies with regard to the Christian doctrine, and present her personality and spirituality in a coherent manner” (ibid.).
Neuner’s 2001 article on Teresa’s darkness was not his first publication on her. He had initially published a piece in the German mission magazine Die Katholischen Missionen in 1957, which triggered their initial correspondence. They became friends soon after meeting in Calcutta in 1959 and wrote to each other until 1980. Teresa informed Neuner of her dark night when he replaced Picachy as spiritual director in 1961. Although they discussed this topic for almost twenty years, Neuner only realized the full extent of her ordeal when he had unlimited access to her personal writings in 1999. This explains why Neuner provides a more nuanced understanding than Huart of Teresa’s troubled faith.
One of Neuner’s (2001, 482) insightful claims is that her desolation did not begin just before leaving Loreto in 1948 or shortly after setting up the Missionaries of Charity a year later but “in her earlier years.” Teresa’s doubts before and after 1948 were not completely unconnected or dissimilar. Neuner also contends “it may be difficult to find a parallel” amongst other mystics “to the lifelong night which enwrapped” her (484).
Some of Neuner’s conclusions seem rather speculative. He claims her spiritual crisis was both the “price” she paid for her order’s speedy success and a “safeguard” against her “ever growing” popularity and admiration (485). Teresa’s spiritual darkness in the 1950s may have been partly related to her achievements. Yet it does not illustrate the case described by Sigmund Freud (1957, 316) of someone “fall[ing] ill precisely when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment.” Neuner (2001, 482) also contends that her spiritual doubts “were passing experiences” and that longlife night “wrapped” her in the late 1940s when experiencing the “material poverty,” “helplessness,” and “abandonment” of the people she looked after (484). Similar claims have been made in other studies (Hadryś 2012; Williams 2014; Walters 2016; Davies 2019).
Like Huart, Neuner employs a non-polemical tone, although in conversations with people who were close to him, he occasionally runs out of patience with “hardliners.” “We have no hesitation about discussing the inner world of people who lived a long time ago,” he told reporter Michael Gonsalves on October 18, 2003, but are reluctant “to enter into the inner world of people who are close to us and whom we have known” (cited in Ireland 2007). Gonsalves holds that Neuner’s words should be read as a reaction to the criticism Teresa’s dark night had invoked by then amongst some Church officials in India. 7 Concerned as he was about hasty conclusions drawn by members of the Indian Church regarding her spiritual aridity, given his official role in the beatification proceedings, Neuner did not and could not take issue openly with them. Nor did he feel that was the time to voice his opposition to those equating Teresa’s darkness with the purification of the soul process described by John of the Cross. 8
Neuner’s role in the beatification process did not stop him from writing about Teresa’s desolation in 2001. He was convinced that he was doing the right thing, while admitting that offering a theological analysis of her darkness was not easy. He hoped to present through his however “inadequate” attempt, her “inner sphere, God’s work in her heart, which bore so much fruit in her life” (Neuner 2001, 479).
Huart and Neuner’s articles did not attract much attention because they appeared in small-circulation journals and their readers were inclined to sympathize with the authors’ views. Few excerpts from Teresa’s letters quoted by Huart were initially published by CNN when it broke the news in September 2001 that, according to the then Archbishop of Calcutta Henry D’Souza, Teresa had undergone an exorcism in 1996. This was picked up by various media outlets, including Time magazine describing it as “a story that’s sure to leave heads spinning” (Reaves 2001).
Following the exorcism revelation, some beatification committee members began a damage-control campaign. On March 7, 2002, the Catholic news agency Zenit quoted Michael Van der Peet that Teresa’s doubts were due to her “great identification with the poor” and implied clearly that by then D’Souza no longer stood by the original claim regarding exorcism. Likewise, Kolodiejchuk commented cautiously about Teresa’s interior trial to Zenit in 2002 and 2003 revealing as little as possible about its length and intensity. 9 Such efforts led to the media approaching Teresa’s darkness as another proof of saintliness (Ostling 2003). Moreover, since then accessing her private writings became increasingly difficult. The ongoing strict gatekeeping continues to undermine Mother Teresa scholarship, affecting especially scholars deemed “outsiders.” 10
Being the only public sources of information on Teresa’s darkness for seven years, Huart and Neuner’s articles were instrumental in setting the tone of the debate before the publication of Come Be My Light. Their treatment of the topic has served as a template for her admiring writers since 2007. As for Teresa’s detractors, they employ her desolation to trivialize further her image and legacy, calling her a “closet atheist,” “pretender,” “liar,” and “faux saint” (cited in Martin 2008; Durà-Vilà and Dein 2009; Walters 2018). Predictably, Hitchens opined in 2007 that the Church should not invoke Teresa’s “long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe.”
Since then, Teresa’s darkness has been covered in a growing number of publications intended for popular and academic audiences (Watts 2009; Murray 2010; Graham 2016; Garrity 2018; Gruver 2020; McCauley and Graham 2020; Sweeney 2022). The second part of this study focuses on academic writings approaching her desolation mainly from theological, psychological, and medical perspectives.
Theological, psychological and medical model approaches to Teresa’s spiritual darkness
Teresa’s spiritual darkness has been explored by experts affiliated with various fields like theology (Frohlich 2008; Hadryś 2012; Garrity 2018; Davies 2019; Ritchie 2021), religious studies (Bungum 2016), philosophy (Walters 2016; McKaughan 2018), sociology (Alpion 2020a), psychoanalysis (Mahmood 2015), psychiatry (Durà-Vilà and Dein 2009; Williams 2014), psychology (Mahr 2013; Sundararajan and Kim 2014), and celebrity studies (Alpion 2020b). Most of the studies on her aridity approach it primarily from a theological or a mental health studies perspective.
While controversies surrounded Teresa throughout her ministry, she became more contentious following the revelation about her dark night. To Rachel Davies, while this made her theological life a matter of public interest, “the limited attention given to [her] writings and speeches among academic theologians has been striking” (2019, 968). The issue is not so much that theologians are not paying due attention to Teresa’s darkness. As mentioned earlier, theologians were the first to write about this topic from the early 2000s, and their numbers have increased ever since.
Overall, theologians, religious studies scholars, and philosophers are sympathetic to Teresa which explains their conventional take on the topic (Frohlich 2008; Zagano and Gillespie 2010; Hadryś 2012; Smith Jr. 2013; Walters 2016; Sweeney 2022). The theology of spiritual darkness is essential to understanding and interpreting Teresa’s desolation. Notwithstanding its specific nature, this aspect of her spirituality is comparable to what some of the aforementioned classical mystics went through (Teresa 2007, 164).
Influences of a conventional theological approach are apparent also in studies carried out by psychologists. Phyllis Zagano and C. Kevin Gillespie (2010) see Teresa’s desolation as a modern example of classical mystics’ experiences. Louise Sundararajan and Chulmin Kim (2014, 194) employ her and two medieval German mystics’ linguistic profiling to explore “unique approaches to negative emotions” in mysticism. Overall, however, psychologists approach Teresa’s dark night mainly from a mental health perspective.
Not all scholars of religion look at Teresa’s spiritual anguish mainly from a conventional theological viewpoint. Donald J. Bungum (2016, 195) explores a link between the dark night, suffering, and charity, arguing that a person’s “right” response to aridity is bound to result in a positive feedback system by which God increases their degree of charity. Viewing Teresa as a perfect example of this scenario, Bungum contends she grew in charity having accepted her sufferings out of love for God while the increase in charity “caused her to suffer even more intensely at God’s absence.”
Approaching Teresa’s practice of poverty from the perspective of Western mendicant traditions, Davies (2019, 984) contends her combination of the evangelical and interior poverty by establishing “existential communion” with the poor to emulate and be close to Christ through self-denial and solidarity, constitutes a “substantial development” of both mendicant theology and experience. Different from past mendicant theologians imitating Christ’s material poverty to facilitate detachment and spiritual growth, Teresa imitated his poverty of the inner sufferings to console him in the disguise of the alienated poor. Such affective tensions facilitating this process left Teresa susceptible to feelings of spiritual aridity.
Daniel J. McKaughan (2018, 199) favors a more nuanced understanding of “faith” and “belief” when approaching Teresa’s darkness arguing her condition did not concur with the widely held view of faith, he calls “the Belief Plus,” characterizing the community she was immersed in: “whatever else faith involves, faith requires belief.” Rather, Teresa had “Relational Faith,” which “does not assume that faith requires belief and allows wide room for honestly wrestling with doubt from within the Judeo-Christian tradition” (195). This, McKaughan concludes, is illustrated by Teresa’s (2007, 248) phrase “to live by faith and yet not to believe.”
Following the publication of Come Be My Light, Teresa’s spiritual suffering would soon be approached also from a mental health viewpoint. The interest in her desolation reinvigorated a debate that has been going on for over a century. The emergence of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century and its attention to spiritual matters eroded further theology’s monopoly on religion, resulting in ongoing frictions. Defending his interest in and attention to patients’ faith-related problems, Carl Jung (2014, 163) was frustrated “coming up against the misunderstanding that a psychological treatment or explanation reduces God to ‘nothing but psychology.’” To him, this was not “a question of God at all, but of man’s ideas of God,” and looking after such patients is “the proper study of psychology.”
Overall, Teresa’s defenders are averse to the idea that her darkness was symptomatic of depression. While some avoid discussing this issue (Zaleski 2003), the majority rule out any connection between her religious doubts and depression. Martin (2008) opines that, in Teresa’s case, some people “conflate” temporary darkness with disbelief and “occasional doubt” with momentary “despair.” Greg Mahr (2013, 72) holds that, notwithstanding Teresa’s despair, “our simple medical categories do not fit; she was not depressed.” Robert M. Garrity (2018, 156) argues that Teresa’s “dry prayer, loneliness, and emptiness” sound somewhat like but are not “clinical depression.” Despite finding her sojourn in the wilderness “disconcerting,” Kerry Walters (2018) insists: ‘to conclude that the darkness was the result of depression, much less loss of faith, is to overlook its spiritual significance.”
A few Catholic scholars admit that Teresa displays symptoms of a depressed person. Having compared Teresa’s writings on spiritual darkness to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently in its fifth edition) (American Psychiatric Association, 2022) on symptoms of depression, Mary Frohlich acknowledges she “could be said to have several of them” (2008, 74). Referring to the manual, Zagano and Gillespie (2010, 58) conclude that while Teresa “clearly suffered” and arguably exhibited two of the nine symptoms, she did not display any of them for an extended period and never five or more concurrently. Nonetheless, both studies concur that in Teresa’s case, “a diagnosis of clinical depression does not seem appropriate” (Frohlich 2008, 75) because of “no real evidence” (Zagano and Gillespie 2010, 71).
Jessica Coblentz (2023, 232) cautions that mental health need not be addressed in every Teresa study. Equally valid is the point that the prevailing “collective silence” on this topic and “academic theology’s almost exclusive interest in mystical readings” of Teresa’s suffering constitute “a troubling evasion of the possibility” that she “might have experienced depression.”
Several scholars have queried spiritual directors’ handling of Teresa’s crisis of faith (Durà-Vilà and Dein 2009; Williams 2014; Mahmood 2015). When Teresa was desperate for answers, “public understanding of mental illness was quite limited” (Williams 2014, 295). This does not apply to her spiritual mentors. As graduates of renowned Catholic universities, they were familiar with psychoanalysis and its approaches to mental health, including faith-related depression. Nonetheless, they saw her condition as a textbook case of the dark night and as such did not advise her to seek advice from psychoanalysts or recommend medical treatment.
Theologians’ ongoing failure to acknowledge a link between dark night and depression and reluctance to engage with the latter point to a long-established bias against mental health. Focusing mainly on writings on Teresa’s darkness, intended for popular audiences, and mainly some studies in the US, Coblentz (2023, 227) holds that this bias illustrates a “narrow subset of mental health discourse” reflecting and propagating “mental health stigma” associated with Catholic and other Christian communities.
Since the 1980s the Church has developed better mental health awareness with several pontiffs addressing mental health stigma. “Whoever suffers from mental illness always bears God’s image and likeness in themselves,” John Paul II advised mental health workers on November 30, 1994, (John Paul II, 1994), stressing a decade later that “depression is always a spiritual trial” (John Paul II 2003). Referring to Come Be My Light, Benedict XVI remarked on September 1, 2007 that even Teresa, “with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God” (Reuters 2007). On March 19, 2018, Francis drew attention to the lives of depressed people as examples of holiness (Francis, 2018).
Notwithstanding such positive signs from the Vatican, Catholic writers covering Teresa’s desolation for popular and scholarly audiences, to quote Coblentz (2023, 8), continue to “communicate that depression and the ideal of Christian holiness are incompatible.” Different from Coblentz, I contend they are hardly communicating this “inadvertently.”
Catholic authors presenting a depression-proof account of Teresa’s darkness are not the only ones trivializing this important aspect of her spirituality. Those who see her desolation as clinical depression also make light of her complex mysticism, reflecting a conventional psychoanalytical perspective often “skeptical of the spiritual” (Mahmood 2015, 647).
Drawing parallels between Teresa’s writings and those of writers’ illness narratives focusing on depression, S. Taylor Williams (2014, 290) explores her experiences within a psychiatric paradigm—Major Depressive Disorder—in comparison with and contrast to the dark night’s spiritual paradigm. A modern medicine concept, illness narrative is deemed “one of our most powerful forms for expressing suffering and experiences related to suffering” (Hydén 1997, 49). As the “remedies” recommended by spiritual advisers to get rid of darkness—writing about it, praying, and keeping busy—produced no results in Teresa’s case, Williams intimates her condition was tantamount to medical depression. Williams (2014, 294) also contends that because of efforts to put her suffering into spiritual context and being a prospective saint, “a biological consideration may have been overlooked” although her “dark night was a mental illness, and her confessions were an illness narrative.” As such, Williams postulates, Teresa “may have suffered needlessly when psychiatric treatment could have restored her mood” (294-295).
Such one-sided interpretations indicate that just as conventional theologians would benefit from a medical perspective of mental illness, health professionals, including psychiatrists, also need religious training. Employing Teresa’s life as a case study, Mahmood (2015, 638) holds religious counsellors would benefit from a psychoanalytic perspective which “may enrich the inner lives of those living by a religious worldview” without diluting it. To Glòria Durà-Vilà and Simon Dein (2009, 257), training enables psychiatrists not to dismiss religious interpretations by people experiencing “an eruption of the supernatural in their life” as depression thus ensuring that spiritual darkness is perceived not as an irremediable biogenetic “brain disease” but as a “curable spiritual illness.”
Drawing on psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature, Tasia Scrutton (2021) contends that it is not “unlikely” that Teresa had both a dark night and a mental illness. Given Teresa’s admission that writing about her desolation gave her “a short relief” (Teresa 2007, 186), Scrutton postulates that she could have benefited from “talking therapy” and medication.
Notwithstanding the differences between the above-mentioned perspectives, they also have something in common. So far, no theologian or psychologist covering Teresa’s darkness has made any serious attempt to approach it in light of her experiences in Skopje, apart from some haphazard and speculative remarks (Zagano and Gillespie 2010; Williams 2014; Mahmood 2015; Scrutton 2021), and their impact thereafter. This explains why, overall, Teresa scholarship on darkness is often out of keeping with her personal experiences before and after joining Loreto. To address this issue, the final part of this article calls for more multidisciplinary collaboration, in which a sociological perspective can play a key role.
Teresa’s dark night, the sociological imagination, and a biographical approach
The “wholly dedicated” like Teresa, Muggeridge claimed in 1971, “do not have biographies” because, biographically speaking “nothing happens to them” (2009, 16). To him, the moment Albanian-born Gonxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu, Teresa’s birth name, left her native Skopje to become a religious sister, marked “the end of her biography and the beginning of her life” (17). Muggeridge’s disregard for Teresa’s personal life and background started a trend still prevalent in popular and academic writings about her.
Being consistently tight-lipped about her life means Teresa is partly responsible for this situation. The reasons for her reticence include reluctance to talk about her father’s death or to draw attention to her maternal grandfather’s involvement in a blood feud, her brother’s enlistment in Mussolini’s army, and her mother and sister’s presence in communist-ruled Albania (Alpion 2020a). Occasionally, she was economical with the truth and even painted an unrealistic picture of what went on in her life. She claimed in 1969 that she and her family in Skopje were “very happy,” she was “very happy” at Loreto (Muggeridge 2009, 81), and as a nun she had “never” had “a doubt” or felt “any unhappiness” (82). Studies applying the biographical approach since the early 2000s (Alpion 2004, 2007, 2014, 2020a, 2020b) reveal that Teresa was mostly unhappy in Skopje, often frustrated at Loreto, and gnawed by darkness throughout her life.
This study contends that the biographical perspective facilitates the application of George L. Engel’s (1977) biopsychosocial model which allows for a consideration of multiple factors—biological, psychological, and social—to explore more effectively Teresa’s chronic aridity. As I argue elsewhere (Alpion 2014), the biographical approach is particularly helpful when exploring Teresa’s inner life through, what Charles Wright Mills calls, “the sociological imagination.” To Mills (1999, 3), “[n]either the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” Scholars interested in Teresa have largely failed to grasp the significance Mills attaches to the intersection of biography and history, central to “the sociological imagination,” and essential for any social study to complete “its intellectual journey” (6). Exploring this intersection reveals a close link between Teresa’s private life and calling and a more subtle connection between her ethno-spiritual background and troubled faith (Alpion 2020a). Her biography also illustrates Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000, 78-79) contention on the link between experiences “lived through as thoroughly personal and subjective” and “problems fit to be inscribed into the public agenda and become matters of public policy.” In Teresa’s case this set of complex interconnections becomes apparent when exploring the circumstances leading to two “calls” from God she claimed to have received in 1922 (to become a nun) and in 1946 (to leave Loreto), respectively.
I do not preclude that there is such a thing as “religious call.” Teresa’s above-mentioned prescient moments, however, cannot and should not be seen exclusively as otherworldly experiences. After all, she herself was emphatic she “never had a vision” (Spink 1998, 8). As mentioned earlier, Teresa also did not attribute her spiritual darkness to visions, trances, or ecstatic states. Her two epiphanic experiences, one could argue, were largely outcomes of what went on in her life towards the end of her childhood and in middle adulthood.
Contrary to her claim that “between twelve and eighteen” she “didn’t want to become a nun” (Muggeridge 2009, 81), Teresa always insisted she experienced the first “call” at the age of twelve. By her own admission, the first call “was not a vision” (Spink 1998, 8), referring to it cryptically as “a private matter.” Thanks to new biographical information, this “private matter” is no longer shrouded in mystery. Moreover, rather than being related to a single cause, it was the outcome of a set of complex factors. Teresa’s most traumatic event, apparently, was witnessing at the age of nine her father Nikollë’s painful death. An influential civic figure and successful entrepreneur, he was poisoned, probably by Slavic ultra-nationalists, for supporting the Albanian national cause. This was a loss that Teresa never came to terms with to the end of her life (Alpion 2007; Alpion 2020a). 11
Teresa’s parents loved their three children dearly. Yet Nikollë was closer to his eldest daughter Age while his wife Roza, also known as Drane, was more attached to her son Lazar. This contributed to the emotional limbo in which their sensitive middle child Teresa found herself (Alpion 2007).
Feeling ignored, Teresa started taking a keen interest in Jesus. She grew more attached to him following her father’s passing, which she experienced as a form of “abandonment.” This is when Jesus, also “abandoned” by his father, became a spiritual sibling of sorts. Teresa’s writings show that she saw Jesus as a kindred spirit all her life, eager to stand by and emulate him even before becoming a nun (Teresa 2007, 25).
Following her father’s death, Teresa was “desperate” to replace him (Alpion 2007, 169) with a paternal figure who “would never leave her” (170). This reliable “surrogate” father (168) was not God but Jesus who played several roles during Teresa’s life. Hence Jesus the spiritual “sibling” turned in time into a “heavenly spouse” and a divine father figure.
Irrespective of this range of “relationships,” Teresa always felt she had a “personal” connection with Jesus. This bond became stronger in the wake of her father’s death because of more traumatic events that followed. Three months later she lost her only uncle and six members of his family to causes ranging from the Spanish flu (1918-1920), meningitis, and “heartbreak” (Alpion 2020a). Following these bereavements, Teresa’s family went through some difficult economic times. By then Teresa had lived through two Balkan wars and World War I, witnessed occupation of Skopje by three armies (Van Biema 2022), and seen evidence of atrocities by Serbian forces against her countrymen, including the mass-scale deportation of those affiliated with Islam to Turkey to cleanse Kosova and Macedonia of ethnic Albanians. Her maternal grandmother’s death in 1922 was the last straw for Teresa. This latest bereavement apparently acted as a catalyst for the traumatized child to express the initial wish to become a religious sister. The first call was thus an indication of her alienation from her family and country which became stronger in the next six years (Alpion 2020a).
The new biographical information I catalogue in Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation (2020) indicates that her years in Skopje (1910-1928) both strengthened and challenged her faith. Referring to my contention that this period constitutes “the crucible in which the saint was formed,” David Van Biema (2022, 77) argues that this kind of causality seems “misplaced” given our familiarity with the enduring impact of childhood traumas and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Where they remain a bit unusual,” he concludes, “is in saints’ stories, where God, and not Freudian theory or the grinding forces of impersonal history, must remain the ultimate mover.”
The Vatican, Kenneth L. Woodward (1996, 118) notes, “has traditionally regarded sociological studies of sainthood as profane exercises.” This reflects this organization’s view that “saints are made by God, not the church, and any suggestion that human motives or institutions play a decisive role is unwelcome.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s aforementioned acknowledgement of Teresa’s darkness and his predecessor and successor’s attempts to address long-standing mental health stigma within the Church will hopefully encourage more scholars, including theologians, to approach the nun’s desolation from the PTSD perspective. Given the wealth of studies addressing post-traumatic stress reactions in children since the early 1980s (Yule and Williams 1990; Bergman, Axberg, and Hanson 2017), exploring the impact of disturbing childhood experiences on Teresa’s spirituality from a trauma-informed lens is long overdue. The new evidence about Teresa’s formative years has further eroded the claim that hers was “a life of extreme simplicity as far as questions of motivation are concerned” and “full of areas which do not admit to rational inquiry” (Spink 1998, xii). The difficulties Teresa experienced at the age of twelve pulled her in different directions. The “call” marked the inception of her dark night the world would learn about after almost a century. It also indicated that, subconsciously, she was eager to attain God through service for the poor. As such, contrary to her above-mentioned claim that she decided to become a nun at eighteen all of a sudden (Muggeridge 2009), all indications are that this was the natural outcome of her 1922 “call.”
Teresa realized when she arrived in Calcutta in 1929 that she had joined the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM), as Sisters of Loreto are commonly known, under false expectations (Alpion 2007). The initial vision of Mary Ward, who founded the IBVM in 1609, and Frances Teresa Ball, who established the Dublin branch in 1821, was for the sisters to serve the poor. Since arriving in Calcutta in 1841, however, the Loreto order’s main purpose has been educating the daughters of the great and the good.
Misguided Loreto superiors looked down upon Teresa as an “outsider” (Alpion 2020a). That is why she was based at Loreto Entally, a location mainly for non-European members, which has two schools on its compound. Teresa was the sole European assigned to St Mary’s, the only Loreto school admitting girls from lower middle class and poor backgrounds.
Teaching at St Mary’s and one of its feeder primary schools enabled Teresa to have contacts with poor students and witness the poverty of Calcutta more than other Loreto European nuns. This level of contact with the poor was not enough for her though, which made her increasingly frustrated. A sign of this frustration was taking a fourth vow in 1942 in addition to the three public vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience taken by 1937. The extra vow was her promise not to refuse God anything (Teresa 2007, 28).
Kolodiejchuk claims the additional vow indicated “the depth of her love for God” (29). One wonders if the vow also indicated she felt she was refusing God something or feared this could happen. That the vow was a “precaution” cannot be ruled out given her confession in 1937 that, far from her “spiritual life” being “strewn with roses,” she had darkness “more often” as her “companion” (20).
The fourth vow was one of Teresa’s “greatest secrets” (29). The fact that she mentioned this vow two decades later in correspondence about her dark night indicates that the two could be related. Further research will show if the vow was an act of desperation serving two purposes: convince herself that joining Loreto in 1928 was the right decision and renew her determination to continue searching for God.
The timing of the vow is also significant. Following India’s involvement in World War II, St Mary’s turned into a military hospital resulting in religious sisters and boarders leaving Calcutta for a few months. When they returned, classes were taught in rented quarters until 1946. In addition to the devastation wrought by the war, Teresa witnessed also the tragic consequences of the Bengal famine from 1943-1944. The dire situation was a painful reminder of the suffering she had seen in Skopje.
Under these circumstances, Teresa started taking stock of her life. Her largely sheltered existence at Loreto had hardly helped to get rid of her darkness. With the war coming to an end, she would soon return to her previous comfortable life. As this prospect was unacceptable to her, she felt the urgency to act. She needed a moment to make a life-changing decision. This came when she witnessed in Calcutta on August 16, 1946 the communal violence and bloodshed, known as the Day of the Great Killing (Alpion 2007).
Falling ill soon afterwards, Teresa went to recuperate at the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling. She claimed to have received the second “call” during the train journey to Darjeeling on September 10. To her, this was a “call” from Jesus, urging her to “follow him into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor” (Muggeridge 2009, 83).
As the 1922 call, the second one also was not as a result of a vision. This explains why she said she had “no proof” (Teresa 2007, 61). Nonetheless, Kolodiejchuk speculates “it is highly probable” Teresa experienced the mystical state of ecstasy although he admits “there is no record” of this (83). A similar claim is made also by Mahr (2013, 71) who holds that Teresa “experienced God as an external presence that spoke to her.”
In Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation, I posit that her urgency to act in 1946 can be approached also from the Jungian concept of “individuation” (Jung 1978). Career experts associate the “individuation” process with “mid-life transition,” a stage when people approaching forty review their lives and career fulfilment (Levinson 1978). In Teresa’s case, “individuation” as a developmental process was neither career-changing nor epiphanic. To her, what she experienced twenty-four years after 1922 was “a call within my vocation” (Muggeridge 2009, 82). To achieve her goals, she was prepared to ask the Vatican to be granted the indult of secularization (painful as this was for her), turning her from a vowed nun into a laywoman, and not the indult of exclaustration, enabling her to live by her vows while working for the poor (Alpion 2020a).
Teresa (2007, 197) felt that her darkness was occasionally less intense in the 1950s. During that time, she was busy establishing the Missionaries of Charity and putting up with the “persecution” she suffered from some Loreto superiors (143) who spared no efforts to break her. They even accused her of having “an unhealthy relationship” with her spiritual director (63).
Hurtful as all this was, Teresa was not distracted. She finally succeeded in erecting a religious order whose charism was in keeping with the support she always wanted to provide. Teresa did not become a nun to teach. Nursing the sick also was not her vacation. If anything, she apparently had a deep distrust of medicine. Having witnessed doctors’ unsuccessful attempts to save her poisoned father and Spanish influenza victims, one wonders if as early as 1922 she envisaged herself as a missionary providing mainly spiritual comfort to people in their final hours. No wonder thirty years later she set up in Calcutta the Home for the Dying Destitutes.
Some of the concerns raised regarding poor medical care offered by Teresa’s order are serious (Whitman 1984; Fox 1994; Hitchens 1995; Chatterjee 2016). Notwithstanding some changes, overall the principles on which she built and ran her order remain largely the same to this day, reflecting her philosophy of charity.
Although Teresa’s order grew, her darkness persisted. In 1953 this had become so “terrible” that she felt “as if everything” within her was “dead” (Teresa 2007, 149). From then onwards, her decisions to expand her work across India in the 1950s and overseas from the 1960s were geared towards easing her pain.
Notwithstanding her achievements, towards the end of the 1950s, Teresa seemed resigned that darkness would never leave her. This explains why from then onwards she was keen to retrieve her letters, sometimes pleading with her spiritual directors to destroy them (186). She became increasingly reticent about her darkness from the 1970s onwards hoping it would become less intense. By then, she ventured into communist countries, including her native Albania in 1989. The “godless” world was “her last hope to get rid of her doubts in God” (Alpion 2020a, 199).
Teresa’s exorcism a year before her death shows that, unlike most classical mystics she has been compared to, she could never get rid of darkness. This does not constitute nor should it be approached as a failure on her part. Teresa’s spiritual conundrum becomes less of a riddle if, in addition to theological and psychological lenses, it is approached also in the context of her ethno-spiritual heritage, and from an “enculturation” perspective. Promulgated by Melville J. Herskovits in 1948, “enculturation” is the process by which one learns a culture’s traditional content and assimilates its practices and values. To understand what may have shaped Teresa’s inner life, Mahmood (2015) draws on Erik H. Erikson’s concept of “originology” and his theory of ritual. Erikson (1962, 18) defines “originology” as “a habit of thinking which reduces every human situation to an analogy with an earlier one, and most of all to that earliest, simplest, and most infantile precursor which is assumed to be its ‘origin.’’’ Referring to the significance of rituals in understanding a human life, Erikson (1996, 578) sees adulthood and childhood rituals as interconnected and “parts of a functional whole, namely, of a cultural version of human existence.”
Sociology has an advantage over other fields of study because it explains human behavior both at individual and group levels through the study of a special “DNA” at its disposal—the so-called “sociological fossils.” Such “fossils,” which serve as transmitters of a collective depository, perpetually passed on from one generation to another, are one of the reasons why the validity of the “blank slate” doctrine in the social sciences has been called into question (Alpion 2020a, 2).
Recent research has indicated that in Teresa’s case, the tabula rasa perspective can be challenged by looking at her national spiritual tradition including: the relaxed belief systems of Albanians’ Illyrian predecessors and how this facilitated their embrace of apostolic Christianity; the Illyrian Churches’ role in formulating Christian dogma and mediating compromises at moments of crisis for the Church; Albanians’ innate pragmatism apparent in their religious choices and “ability to take in, embrace and apply new creeds with the kind of liberal ingenuity,” characteristic especially of ancient nations preventing “any orthodoxy to claim absolute control over their lives” (207).
In Teresa’s case, “sociological fossils” are helpful to explain her devotion to charity, entrepreneurial skills, and rebellion at Loreto. She learned charity first-hand from her parents and Jesuit mentors in Skopje. She initially acquired enterprise skills from her parents and grandmother. The option she considered in the late 1940s to turn into a “secular” nun, had she not been allowed to start her own order, does not sound that “drastic” if one considers the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity amongst Albanians (Alpion 2020a).
More studies into these and other “sociological fossils” will enable scholars affiliated with various fields of study to explain how remnants of ancient collective outlooks are sedimented in the subconscious of a particular group where they lay dormant. They will also reveal more about the capacity of exceptional personalities like Teresa to “activate” residues of ancient spiritual traditions that laid the foundations of human civilization. Further research into Teresa’s complex spirituality will also uncover how her interior trials resonate with and differ from understandings of, what Turner (1999, 1) calls, theological metaphors of “interiority,” “ascent,” “light and darkness,” and “oneness with God” in late Patristic and medieval traditions and modern times.
Conclusion
It is not within this study’s remit to explore the intricate phenomenon of the dark night of the soul as a whole. Focusing on Teresa’s lifelong darkness of the soul, the article acknowledges praiseworthy efforts to date by authors affiliated with various academic fields interested in her spirituality, engages with studies tending to equate it readily with other mystics’ crisis of faith, and highlights the need for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Jean-Paul Sartre (2004, 225) postulates that the human condition “requires us to choose in ignorance” and that many of our choices are determined by a “hunger for the absolute” in our hearts (224). Teresa made the biggest decision of her life when she was a child. That decision was linked exclusively with the most mysterious of all absolutes: the urge to connect with the otherworldly.
A psychiatrist once remarked: “[W]e all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them” (cited in Postman 2005, 77). Teresa fantasized about her own ethereal citadel from an early age and began to build it gradually following her formal departure from Loreto on August 16, 1948. Soon afterwards, the human resources involved in the project she oversaw for almost fifty years would increase exponentially. Nonetheless, her private writings indicate clearly that although she was constantly surrounded by a growing number of adoring followers, throughout this time she often experienced loneliness.
Contrary to claims made by admiring writers (Mahr 2013; Bungum 2016), the length and intensity of Teresa’s spiritual aridity indicate that she was involved all her life in a titanic effort not to reconnect with but to find God in a world she saw as being dominated by pain, suffering, and loss. To accomplish this goal she employed numerous “helpers”: the poor, former pupils, nuns, brothers, volunteers, co-workers, and biographers. She admitted on one occasion that she was helping the poor primarily “for the sake of her soul” (Datta-Ray Sunanda, 1997).
Teresa’s writings reveal she was uncomfortable about “deceiving” those working for and trusting her (Huart 2001, 498). Nonetheless, such was the appeal of her charisma that, with a few exceptions (Whitman 1984), they did not inquire into her motives nor challenged her openly during her lifetime.
Teresa’s extraordinary thirst for the transcendental epitomizes our perennial quest for the meaning of life, drive to link our earthly existence to some outwardly design unfathomable to us, and urge to convince ourselves that life does not end with death. What makes her search even more extraordinary is her determination to keep trying even when she had lost hope.
According to Teresa’s conservative and more liberal religious-minded supporters, as “an autobiography of spiritual ascent” her writings on desolation constitute “a written ministry” of her interior life “just as important as her ministry to the poor” (cited in Van Biema 2007), and “place her along with the great contemplative apostles of the world” (Huart 2001, 502). Teresa (2007, 1) wrote oxymoronically at the height of her spiritual crisis in 1962: “If I ever become a Saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” That is a tall order for someone unable to dispel her own darkness. If Teresa achieved anything, it is her ability to raise awareness, unlike any other spiritual or lay charismatic personality, of the sacred dignity of human life. This is no small feat for an incurably tormented soul.
ORCID iD
Gëzim Alpion https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7879-1752