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Hi Hannibal, What you say about Saint Teresa is remarkable to me! I am currently working on a book (titled "I Face My Love") that I intend as a "successor" to medieval and renaissance love sonnet sequences, wherein my organizational "template" (somewhat as Joyce's template for Ulysses was the Odyssey) is "Interior Castle". I myself don't find St. Teresa hard to take seriously... Kevin ---------------------- On Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:26:24 -0500 HANNIBAL HAMLIN <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > In the Ecstacy of St. Teresa, we see this the other way > around: her description of her spiritual experience is so obviously > erotic we find it hard to take seriously (especially if we throw in > Bernini's sculpture). Yet it's not really surprising that people > seek to describe the experiences of spiritual and sexual ecstacy in > terms of each other. They both represent experiences so intense that > we find them describable only by analogy or metaphor. But of course > certain religious positions (though not all, and not easily > categorized into, eg., Catholic and Protestant) find sexual love > problematic, hence the tensions. > > Back to Petrarchism and Christianity, mightn't it be more useful to > think not of a systematic conflict but of a fairly typical > Renaissance/Reformation syncretism? I note also (surprise, surprise) > that Petrarch wrote Psalms (sort of -- really pastiches of Psalm > bits, later translated by Chapman) as well as the Rime, and that he > writes glowingly of Augustine's Commentaries on the Psalms as well as > books by Dante and Homer. > > Hannibal > >