I've discussed one such depiction--the statue "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa"--in an earlier answer, if you're interested. In fact, the topics she discussed in her Life were the opposite of taboo within the medieval and early modern Christian tradition! Violence and bridal mysticism has a long history--you might not know Richard of St. Victor or my girl Mechthild of Magdeburg, but maybe you've read John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"?

• What do you think about the ecstasy of St. Theresa? Deliberately sexualized orgasmic account or a failure of modern interpretation?

So the Ecstasy of St. Teresa is a sculpture of 16th-century reformer and mystic Teresa of Avila inspired by an excerpt from her autobiographical Life:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God.

Teresa's language of ecstasy, piercing, pain/pleasure, body/spirit, and sweetness has a long history in Christian spiritual writing (and even a future--you may be familiar with John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"). Medievalists sometimes use the term "bridal mysticism" reflecting its theological roots in the biblical Song of Songs (a.k.a. Song of Solomon or Canticle) and the incredibly common medieval topos of nuns/holy women/"the soul" as the sponsa Christi--the bride of Christ.

By the twelfth century, an allegorical interpretation of the poem where the Lover is Christ and the Beloved is the soul (anima in Latin is female) becomes prominent, although earlier allegories of Christ and his Church, and Christ and Mary (yes, his virgin mother) remain active. VIP Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs popularize the Christ/soul allegory as a model for how a Christian should seek to grow into mystical union with God. There are two things going on here. One is the “feeling it” that we might describe today, or that Teresa describes in the excerpt above. But it also—and for later women writers as well—has a deeper theological meaning of bringing one’s will into allegience with God’s. You don’t want what you want, you want what God wants.

But it’s Augustinian canon Richard of St. Victor whose treatise “The Four Degrees of Violent Love” really takes the allegory into the mystical and the erotic. Latin has several words for love, which medieval monks found helpful. “Caritas” was divine or pure love, utterly non-sexual, so Christ and Mary could share caritas if not diligo or amor. Richard switches back and forth between the different words, minimizing or erasing the difference. He describes the stages of love as:

In the first degree, the soul thirsts for God. In the second it thrists toward God. In the third the soul thirsts into God. In the fourth it thirsts in accordance with God.

or

In the first degree a betrothal is made, in the second a marriage, in the third sexual union, and in the fourth childbirth.

The real flowering of bridal mysticism, however, comes in the thirteenth century from the pens of some of our earliest writers of religious texts in the vernacular: religious women. Nuns and quasi-religious women (who live religious lives, but do not take formal vows in an order) had long been described as “brides of Christ”; these writers found new meaning in that term. They’re aided by the vernaculars’ usual single word for “love”. They blended topoi from Bernard and Richard on one hand, and secular romance literature on the other, in some of the most gorgeous, disturbing, passionate, erotic texts that the Middle Ages have to author. Thus beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1292) in German:

Lord, now I am a naked soul, and you in yourself are a well-adorned God.

Our shared lot is eternal life without death.

Then a blessed stillness that both desire comes over them.

He surrenders himself to her, and she surrenders herself to him.

What happens to her then—she knows—

And that is all right with me.

and Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268) in Dutch:

When love acts in the heart so vehemently and riotously...the soul thinks that its veins are opened and its blood is boiling out, its marrow is withered and its legs are weak…And the soul thus feel loves acting, sparing nothing, seizing and consuming everything within the soul like a devouring fire.

The writers are discussing spiritual ecstasy and spiritual pain: the process of subsuming themselves and their desires into God. To stress the all-consuming nature of this, they use very concrete, embodied language to describe it. When does a metaphor stop being a metaphor?

In the hands of male clergy, of course.

The same clerics who sought to rescue Mechthild’s text from charges of heresy by translating it into Latin and toning down her criticism of the Church—the same clerics who sought to secure Beatrice’s sainthood by writing a hagiography and promoting her cultus--these clerics who were very much on the side of our writers nevertheless saw a danger in women writing theology in the vernacular (…read mostly by women). The way Mechthild, Beatrice, and other women writers used ecstatic erotic union to describe alignment of the will with God as just one stage on the way to greater, settled, more comfortable, dissolving of the will into God was a deep threat. If one were so conformed to God in this life, she would have no need of the Church on Earth, they thought. Marguerite Porete died at the stake for this interpretation of her text.

So the Latin edition of Mechthild’s text focuses on the bridal, erotic themes, not even including the final book where she has advanced beyond that metaphor. Beatrice’s spiritual ecstasy/agony is rewritten as her actual, physical practices of self-flagellation. The theological danger—but also the deeper theological meaning—perhaps fades away.

So if you think of bridal mysticism as a triangle or trinity of spiritual-theological-physical, you can say that Mecthild and Beatrice have spiritual and theological at the top dipping down to physical below, whereas the late Middle Ages turned the triangle so theological points down and spiritual-physical are on top. Teresa inherits both of these traditions. The ambivalence of spiritual versus physical ecstasy, I think, is captured very well in both the passage from her Vida and in Bernini’s sculpture.

~~

If you're interested--I've discussed on AH and quoted a few related passages from 13th century women mystics Hadewijch (writing in Dutch) and Mechthild (in German) that I can dig up for you as well.