The theurgic image: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and the institutional praxis of the Counter-Reformation

This dissertation reconsiders the place of the ascetical and mystical discourses on the image in the emergence of a Counter-Reformation institutional praxis. It argues that the contemplative works of Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila support a reading of Christ's death and resurrection as an allegory of the image's awakening in a scenario of damage, and that Catholicism's response to the Protestant rejection of the soteriological efficacy of works rests on the hermeneutic possibilities inscribed in it. The image's awakening is shown to disclose a limit whose overcoming acts as a foundation of the salutary action of institutions, particularly that of religious orders like the Jesuit and the Discalced Carmelite orders.;Focusing on the Jesuit construction of the institution as a tool gripped by the hand of God, the first half of the dissertation proposes to think of efficacy in terms of the discovery of an apostolic mandate in the void opened by the image's dissipation. I explore the performance of this dissipation (an echo of Christ's disappearance from the world in the Ascension) in the prescriptions for the election of a new leader laid out in the order's Constitutions and in the schema for the Election that the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius' manual of contemplation, lodge at their core. The second half, an extended reading of The Interior Castle, juxtaposes the Jesuit performance of this dissipation with Teresa's efforts to secure the image's persistence. The delay that afflicts the image's dissipation, as well as the passage to efficacy, is referred to Teresa's statements on the "inconvenience" of Christ's disappearance, and then linked to the growing relevance of the category of beauty in the praxis of the Discalced Carmelite order.;Shifting the focus away from the iconoclastic polemic, The Theurgic Image considers the relation between image and institution to revolve around the possibility of a praxis which, resisting the autonomization of action implicit in the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, would be endowed with a transcendental foundation. In its movement towards a consideration of beauty, it argues for the problematization of this praxis and of the institutions that embody it as the site of a prophetic articulation of the distinctly modern differentiation between technics and art.