Defending Divinity: A Teresian Carmelite Responds to Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus

This article takes as its object the literary response of the cloistered Carmelite nun Marie-Aimée de Jésus (née Dorothea Quoniam, 1839-1874) to Ernest Renan’s 1863 Vie de Jésus. The reaction of Marie-Aimée de Jésus to Renan’s portrayal of Jesus as admirable man—but not divine, and not the Son of God—came in two forms, and bore the particular stamp of the founder of the Reformed Carmelite Order, Teresa of Avila. In her lengthy prose response to Renan, Jésus-Christ est le Fils de Dieu, and also in a manuscript poem, presented for the first time in this study, Marie-Aimée imitated Teresa of Avila in both form and content, drawing upon the parallel literary forms Teresa herself used and employing Teresian literary motifs. Following the presentation and analysis of Marie-Aimée’s texts, the broader implications of her literary reaction to Renan are considered, and include the need for re-reading of the poetry of Teresa of Avila, and the status of “unpublished” writings by cloistered nuns. It is hoped that this study will help to further bring the literary production of French cloistered nuns to light, just as scholarship on the production of Spanish cloistered nuns has done so effectively in recent years.