Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and: Thérèse of Lisieux: God's Gentle Warrior, and: Le poème de septembre: Lecture du Manuscrit B de Thérèse de Lisieux (review)

Being named a Doctor of the Church in 1997 is bringing Thérèse a much broader range of attention. Previously those who wrote about Thérèse were usually her devotees, and as such they had a vested interest in presenting and defending her sanctity. Most such studies fundamentally used a theological method, exploring Thérèse's life and writings in light of classical ascetical and doctrinal themes. These three books represent the newer wave of Thérèse studies: sophisticated, interdisciplinary, iconoclastic, and sparkling with fresh insight. These boundary-crossing reflections are sometimes offensive to the devotees, for the Thérèse they sketch is often more gritty than (conventionally) saintly. Yet in the end, each writer clearly arrives at a profound admiration for this very human young woman.

Each of these authors came to Thérèse as if by surprise, in the midst of a mature career occupied with quite other things. Kathryn Harrison is a New York novelist and memoirist who acknowledges having an on-again, off-again relationship with faith in God and being in an "endless, slow-mo, spiritual crisis that's never resolved."² She is best known for enjoying writing about "taboo" subjects such as incest (her own, with her father) and priestly sex (in her novel, Poison ).

Thomas R. Nevin teaches Latin and Greek literature at John Carroll University and has previously published books on Irving Babbit, Simone Weil, and Ernst Jünger. Claude Langlois is a well-published French historian and emeritus director of studies for the Institut Européen en Sciences des Religions. His turn to Thérèse is a bit less out of character, since his area of specialization is nineteenth-century French religious history. Nonetheless, he appears to have waited until retirement before writing three books on Thérèse, of which this is the first.

Kathryn Harrison's biography of Thérèse is part of the Penguin Lives series, for which the editors intentionally make outside-the-box matches between accomplished authors and famous subjects. Indeed, the world of an urbane New York novelist with a husband, three children, and a weekly trip to the psychiatrist could hardly seem more distant from that of the cloistered Thérèse. Although she is not a scholar in the academic sense, Harrison's eye for the striking detail often enables her to bring a fresh perspective on what one thought one knew well. Her interpretation is permeated with a post-Freudian hermeneutic of suspicion that can be disturbing for those expecting a more pious view. She presents Thérèse as a deeply lonely young woman, ravenous to be seen and loved yet incapable of making real friends (41). Unsurprisingly, she makes much of any imagery that could have a sexual connotation; for example, she glosses a line of Thérèse's poetry as representing Jesus as "a phallic flower who, crucified, bleeds milk" (116).

The book reaches a turning point, however, when it confronts the "night of faith" that descended upon Thérèse eighteen months before her death. Harrison is clearly impressed. She writes:

At last she has taken her place among us, not so much revealing herself as human as given birth to her naked self, plummeting to earth, wet and new and terrified. If we allow her to become a saint, if we believe in her, it's because here, finally, she has achieved mortality (146).

Thus, she concludes, Thérèse has "earned her place among the moderns." Harrison writes for those moderns for...