Marie Martin (1873-1897),
known to the world as the Carmelite nun, Thérèse of Lisieux as well as Thérèse
of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was a mystic who centered her devotional
love on Jesus. Pope Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times”[1]
and Pope John Paul Il made her a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless,
it is worth investigating whether her devotional love sublimated (i.e., looking
upward) with Jesus as the object of the love was in fact humble, and thus more
like divine than human love. Although psychological analyses of Thérèse exist
in the secondary literature on her, we can both acknowledge her psychological
challenges and put psychological couch aside as it is exogenous to the domain
of religion, which has its own criteria; I will focus on and critique from a
religious standpoing the distinctly religious meaning that Thérèse
continues to provide in the West during the twenty-first century even though the
wider secular culture in the West saturates modernity under the supervision of
the tall, steel, and bewindowed edifices to wealth and worldly power.
1. Pierre Descouvemont, Therese and Lisieux (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996).
