Saint Peter of Alcantara (1499-1562)

A birth in Extremadura (1499)

Peter was born in 1499 at Alcántara, a small town in Extremadura, in western Spain, near the Portuguese border.^[7][8] His father, Pedro Alonso Garavito, trained as a lawyer, was regidor (municipal magistrate) of the town; his mother, María Vilela de Sanabria, belonged to a noble and well-to-do family.^[9] The child received the name of Peter at baptism; he would later take the name of his birthplace, as was the custom among the religious of his time.

His father's death, around 1507, when Peter was still a child, obliged his mother to remarry. It was this stepfather who, noticing the child's gifts, would send him on to study at the university.^[10][11]

Studies at Salamanca

After learning grammar in his native town, Peter was sent to Salamanca, then one of the greatest universities in Europe. Between about 1511 and 1515, he studied in turn the liberal arts, philosophy and canon law.^[12] This solid intellectual formation, rare among ascetics of his kind, would later explain the doctrinal clarity of his spiritual teaching and the authority of his counsel.

But learning did not extinguish the call of God in him: very young, he sensed he was not made for the world. Barely sixteen years old, he left everything behind.

Entry among the Friars Minor (1515)

In 1515, aged about sixteen, Peter entered the Friars Minor, in the reformed custody of the Santo Evangelio, founded in 1502 by Juan de Guadalupe — a current of strict Franciscan observance already turned towards the most radical poverty.^[13][14] He made his novitiate in a secluded convent and embraced from the outset a life of extreme austerity.

"There were, I believe, but forty years that he had observed the rule of his order in all its primitive rigour." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[15]

Ordained subdeacon in 1522 and deacon in 1523, he received the priesthood in 1524.^[16] The following year, in 1525, he was appointed guardian of the convent of Saint Mary of the Angels at Robredillo, and already stood out as a preacher, especially among the poor.^[17] From these early years, his superiors recognised in him a religious of exceptional mettle, and soon entrusted him with offices of government despite his desire for solitude.

A Spanish Catholic Reform

Sixteenth-century Spain was the hearth of an extraordinary spiritual renewal. While the Protestant Reformation tore northern Europe apart, the Iberian peninsula saw a generation of reforming saints flourish: Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus, Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross for Carmel, Saint John of God for the sick.^[18] Peter of Alcantara embodies, for the Franciscan family, that same impulse to return to the primitive purity of the rule.

Provincial in spite of himself, then solitude

Peter's reputation for holiness and prudence earned him election as provincial of the province of Saint Gabriel of Extremadura in 1538.^[19][20] At the chapter of Plasencia, in 1540, he drew up constitutions of unprecedented rigour for his brethren; but meeting with resistance, he preferred to resign his office rather than impose by force what grace alone can obtain.^[21][22]

He then withdrew, with a few companions, into the solitude of the mountains of Arrábida, in Portugal, where he led an almost eremitical life of prayer and penance.^[23] From this retreat his great reforming project would be born.

The convent of El Pedroso and the primitive rule

Around the middle of the century, Peter obtained permission to found convents of radical poverty, peopled by small communities of eight religious at most. The first and most famous was that of El Pedroso de Acim, in Extremadura.^[24][25] His cell there was so small — Teresa gives its dimensions — that one could not lie down in it:

"His cell, I was told, was but four and a half feet long. [...] There, in that narrow space, however weary he might be, he never lay down except in the posture he had chosen; he slept sitting, his head resting against a piece of wood fixed to the wall." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[26]

The religious of this reform went barefoot (hence the name Discalced), owned nothing of their own, wore a single patched habit, observed an almost perpetual fast and long hours of prayer. They would soon be called Alcantarines, after their founder.^[27]

Pontifical approval (1555-1561)

In 1555, Pope Julius III authorised Peter to found these convents of strict observance.^[28][29] The reform took shape: a custody, then, in 1561, a true religious province, the province of Saint Joseph, erected under the pontificate of Pius IV, with constitutions of unequalled exactingness.^[30][31]

The Order properly so called of the Alcantarines (Discalced Friars Minor), which would soon spread from Spain and Portugal to Italy, Germany and France,^[32] then to Mexico, the East Indies, the Philippines and Brazil,^[33] and which would later be linked to the movement of the Recollects, will not be redone here: it is the subject of its own development. What matters for understanding the saint is that he reformed not by decree, but by the example of a life pushed to the extreme of evangelical stripping.

Forty years without sleep

The most astounding feature of Peter of Alcantara's life is his renunciation of sleep. Teresa of Avila, who knew him well and gathered his confidences, reports a fact that defies understanding:

"For forty years, he told me, he had slept but an hour and a half each night." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[34][35]

Even this meagre sleep was taken sitting, in an uncomfortable posture, his head against a piece of wood. This unbroken privation, joined to prayer by night, made each of his nights an almost uninterrupted vigil.

Fasts and absolute poverty

Added to the privation of sleep was an abstinence of extreme harshness. According to Teresa, eating only once every three days was habitual to him, and he would sometimes go several days without taking anything:

"To eat every three days was very usual with him; and he told me there was nothing surprising in that, because one grows used to it." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[36]

He walked barefoot in all weathers, wore but a single tunic of coarse cloth against his skin, and refused every comfort. On his deathbed, he was offered a glass of water: he refused it.^[37] This asceticism was no morbid performance, but the expression of a total love, the desire to sacrifice everything to God and to unite himself with the sufferings of Christ.

The portrait by Teresa of Avila

The testimony of Saint Teresa, written shortly after the saint's death, is one of the most famous pages of Spanish spiritual literature. She describes a man so emaciated that he no longer seemed quite of this world:

"He had grown so thin that he seemed made of the roots of trees. With all this holiness, he was very affable, though he spoke little, unless he were questioned." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[38][39]

She added, speaking to her Carmelite sisters, that famous word which sums up her rapt admiration:

"Blessed follies, my Sisters! Would to God we were all seized with them." — Saint Teresa of Avila, on Peter of Alcantara^[40]

Ecstasies, levitation and supernatural gifts

This life wholly turned towards God was accompanied by extraordinary mystical graces. Witnesses report frequent ecstasies and levitations: rapt in God during prayer or at the elevation of Mass, he was sometimes seen raised from the ground.^[41][42] Healings are also attributed to him, and a discernment of hearts that was almost unerring.

The Church, in her prudence, never canonises a saint on phenomena alone; but these gifts, soberly attested by serious witnesses such as Teresa herself, belong to the great supernatural tradition of Catholic mystics, without illuminism or credulity.

The decisive meeting (c. 1560)

Around 1560, at a crucial moment of her life, Teresa of Avila — then beset by doubt over the origin of her mystical graces and over her project of reform — came to know Peter of Alcantara, at the house of Doña Guiomar de Ulloa.^[43][44] The meeting, which came shortly after the episode of the transverberation, would prove decisive for all that followed in her work.

The discernment of graces

Many directors had frightened Teresa by suggesting that her visions might come from the devil. Peter, strong in his own mystical experience, fully reassured her: he recognised God's work in her soul and restored her peace. Teresa kept an immense gratitude for this, and made of him, in her autobiography, one of the great witnesses to the truth of her interior life.^[45][46]

"He understood me by experience, which was everything to me." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself^[47]

Support for the reform of Carmel

Peter did not stop at reassuring Teresa: he actively encouraged her to found her first monastery of Discalced Carmelites. A letter dated 14 April 1562 bears witness to this support; on 24 August 1562, the first reformed Carmel, Saint Joseph of Ávila, opened its doors.^[48] The Franciscan saint died a few weeks later, having seen the dawn rise over the immense Teresian reform. His spiritual fatherhood thus extends, through Teresa, to the whole Discalced Carmel and to Saint John of the Cross.

The Treatise on Prayer and Meditation

Peter of Alcantara did not only live prayer: he taught it. His short but dense Treatise on Prayer and Meditation became a classic of Catholic spirituality, translated throughout Europe. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Teresa of Avila and Louis of Granada held it to be a masterpiece.^[49][50] The work, intended for "beginners", offers a structured method of mental prayer, with meditations for each day of the week. Peter also kept up a spiritual correspondence with Saint Francis Borgia and with Louis of Granada, other great figures of the Spanish Catholic Reform.^[51] So successful was the little treatise that it saw, over the centuries, more than a hundred and seventy-five editions and many translations; some modern critics have discussed the authenticity of a few passages in the received edition, without calling into question the saint's substantial authorship of the work.^[52]

Devotion, "promptness in doing good"

The treatise opens with a luminous definition of devotion, borrowed from Saint Thomas Aquinas: not a passing emotion, but a stable disposition of the heart to do good without difficulty.

"Devotion, says Saint Thomas, is nothing else but a certain promptness and a certain facility in doing good." — Peter of Alcantara, Treatise on Prayer and Meditation, ch. I^[53]

For Peter, it is prayer that begets this devotion, and devotion that makes all virtues easy. He quotes Saint Bonaventure in support, in a passage he makes his own:

"If you wish to bear with patience the adversities and miseries of this life, be a man of prayer. If you wish to acquire virtue and strength to overcome the temptations of the enemy, be a man of prayer." — Saint Bonaventure, quoted by Peter of Alcantara, Treatise, ch. I^[54]

Self-knowledge and humility

The Monday meditation, devoted to self-knowledge, is a summit of spiritual realism. Peter teaches there that the soul owns nothing of its own but "nothingness and sin", and that all good comes from God — the foundation of true humility, which he calls "mother of all virtues".^[55]

"Let your thought rest on the sight of both: this nothingness, this sin, take them to your own account, and all the rest, put it to God's account." — Peter of Alcantara, Treatise, Monday meditation^[56]

This doctrine of humility as truth — seeing God as He is rich and oneself as one is poor — closely foreshadows the teaching of Teresa of Avila, for whom humility is nothing else but "walking in truth".

Contemplation of the Passion

Like all great Spanish mysticism, Peter makes the Passion of Christ the centre of prayer. He recommends feeding the soul, morning and evening, on the mysteries of the faith and above all on the life and death of the Saviour:

"As we give each day two meals to our body, let us likewise give two to our soul, whose food is the meditation and consideration of divine things." — Peter of Alcantara, Treatise, ch. II^[57]

For him, meditation is no intellectual exercise but a hearth where "holy fervours and vigorous resolutions to do good" are kindled, and from which the soul comes forth "wholly renewed in its good purposes".^[58]

Death standing (18 October 1562)

Worn out by forty years of apostolic labour and asceticism, Peter of Alcantara died at Arenas de San Pedro, near Ávila, on 18 October 1562, at the very hour, it is said, which he had foretold.^[59][60] Tradition reports that he died on his knees or upright, in the posture of prayer that had been his throughout his life, murmuring the verse of the psalm: "I rejoiced at what was said to me: We shall go into the house of the Lord."^[61]

The apparition to Teresa of Avila

Shortly after his death, the saint appeared to Teresa, surrounded by immense glory. She confided that he was one of the souls she saw enter heaven directly, spared purgatory. And she reported this word, the seal of a whole life of penance:

"O happy penance, which has earned me such glory!" — Word of Peter of Alcantara appearing to Saint Teresa of Avila^[62][63]

Beatification and canonization

The saint's cause advanced swiftly. Peter of Alcantara was beatified on 18 April 1622 by Pope Gregory XV — the same year as the canonization of Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Teresa of Avila — then canonized in 1669 by Pope Clement IX.^[64][65] (Liturgical sources generally give the canonization as 28 April 1669; a few give 4 May. His feast, long fixed on 19 October, is kept on 18 October in several calendars.)^[66][67]

Patronages and legacy

Peter of Alcantara was proclaimed patron of Brazil in 1826 and patron of Extremadura in 1962, for the fourth centenary of his death.^[68] Because of his sleepless nights, he is also invoked as patron of night watchmen and of nocturnal adoration.^[69] His remains are venerated in a sanctuary built at royal expense at Arenas de San Pedro, and his statue stands today among those of the founders of religious orders in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, where he is sometimes called the "restorer of the Franciscan Order".^[70]

But his most lasting legacy is neither a patronage nor an order: it is a lesson of evangelical radicality. At an age tempted by lukewarmness, this little emaciated man recalled that the love of God can ask everything, and that no penance is too hard for "such glory". Through Teresa of Avila, whose confessor and guarantor he was, his influence shaped all Carmelite mysticism and, through it, the prayer of the whole Church.

• Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) — the great reformer of Carmel, whom he reassured, encouraged, and whose confessor he was.
• Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) — co-reformer of Carmel with Teresa, spiritual heir of the current he supported.
• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) — contemporary and another great master of methodical prayer in the Spanish Catholic Reform.
• Saint John of God (1495-1550) — another figure of the Spanish holiness of the Golden Age, turned towards charity for the sick.