Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

Spain at the time of the Catholic Reformation

Teresa was born in 1515, two years before Luther posted his theses at Wittenberg. Her whole life therefore unfolded in the midst of the storm of the Protestant Reformation — which she felt keenly as a wound inflicted on Christ — and at the height of the Spanish Catholic Reformation. It was the age of Emperor Charles V, of the great universities of Salamanca and Alcalá, of missionary expansion to the Americas, but also of a vigilant Inquisition, suspicious of anything resembling alumbradismo — those currents of spiritual illuminism suspected of heresy.^[10][11]

In this ardent and mistrustful Spain, a nun who described visions and ecstasies walked a ridge line. Teresa knew it, and it is partly for this reason that she wrote so much: to give an account of her experience before her confessors and before the Church.^[12]

The Cepeda y Ahumada family

Teresa was baptized Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, third of the ten children of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and his second wife Beatriz de Ahumada. The family was noble and well-off, but carried a secret that modern historiography has brought to light: her paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a wealthy converted Jew (converso), publicly reconciled by the Inquisition of Toledo in 1485 for hidden Judaism.^[13]

Far from anecdotal, this ancestry illuminates Teresa's subtlety on the question of "honor" and "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre), the obsession of Castilian society which she would combat by demanding that her convents take no account of it. For her, the only nobility is that of the soul united to God.^[14][15]

The flight toward martyrdom

The child Teresa was precocious in her desire for God. The Bull of canonization itself reports the famous episode: at about the age of seven, inflamed by reading the lives of saints, she ran away with her brother Rodrigo intending to reach the land of the Moors to be beheaded there and "see God" as soon as possible. An uncle brought them back at the city gates.^[16][17]

"Teresa was born at Ávila, in the kingdom of Castile, in the year of our salvation 1515, of parents noble in race and virtue […] and as she read the deeds and exploits of the holy martyrs, her heart was so pierced by the fire of the Holy Spirit that she fled from her parents' house with her brother, who was still a child, to go to Africa and there shed her blood for the faith of Jesus Christ." — Gregory XV, Bull of canonization of Saint Teresa, 1622^[18]

At twelve, she lost her mother. Overwhelmed, she turned, as she would say, to the Virgin Mary to take her mother's place. Adolescence then brought a lukewarm, worldly and frivolous period, of which she would later speak with a severity that historians judge excessive.^[19][20]

Entering Carmel (1535)

After a period spent as a boarder with the Augustinian nuns, and against her father's will, Teresa entered the monastery of the Incarnation at Ávila in 1535, a large convent of Carmelites following the mitigated rule. She made her profession there the following year. The house then counted nearly two hundred nuns; life there was honest, but without the strict enclosure or the poverty Teresa would later call for.^[21][22]

Villefore recounts this entrance into the monastery: Teresa, having fled her father's house, which opposed her plan, chose this religious house where one of her friends lived and took the habit there, her fears vanishing at once.^[23]

The great illness and Saint Joseph

Shortly after her entrance, Teresa fell gravely ill. She describes fainting fits, an almost total paralysis, years of acute suffering that brought her to death's door — to the point that her grave was dug. She attributed her recovery to the intercession of Saint Joseph, of whom she became one of the great propagators in the Church: most of her foundations would be placed under his patronage.^[24][25]

The "second conversion"

For nearly twenty years, Teresa led an honest but divided religious life, without total surrender. The turning point came around 1554, before a statue of Christ covered with wounds (an Ecce Homo). Seized with compunction, she threw herself to the ground and begged the Lord to strengthen her once and for all. From this "second conversion" dates her mystical life properly speaking.^[26]

At the same time, reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine marked her deeply: she recognized in them her own journey, that of a soul long held back which at last surrenders without reserve.^[27]

Prayer as friendship

It is here that the Teresian definition of prayer must be placed, one of the most quoted in all Christian spirituality. For Teresa, to pray is neither to recite nor to reason: it is to keep company with God as with a friend whom one knows loves us.

"Mental prayer is, in my opinion, nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him who, we know, loves us." — Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, ch. VIII^[28]

"Between God and the soul there is so sweet an exchange of love that I beg His goodness to let whoever thinks that what I report is but imagination taste its delights." — Teresa of Jesus, quoted in the Life by Villefore^[29]

Why reform?

Teresa did not first seek to revolutionize an order, but to live the Gospel integrally. The relaxation of observance, worldly visits, the coming and going of the great convent of the Incarnation seemed to her incompatible with continual prayer. Faced with the ravages of the Protestant Reformation, she wanted above all to offer the Church small communities of prayer sustaining priests and missionaries by their intercession — a militia of love turned toward the salvation of the world.^[30][31]

San José of Ávila (1562)

On 24 August 1562, after much opposition, Teresa opened at Ávila a small poor monastery placed under the invocation of Saint Joseph: it was the first convent of the reformed Carmel, or Discalced Carmel (descalzo, "barefoot", as a sign of poverty). There she restored strict enclosure, silence, manual labor, absolute poverty and a limited number of nuns.^[32][33]

"At last, on 24 August of the year 1562, Teresa, accompanied by two nuns of the Incarnation, her relatives, who were then outside their convent, had the habit given to these four girls […] Thus was made the first monastery of the reformed Carmelites, which was consecrated under the invocation of Saint Joseph, whose name no other church yet bore." — Villefore, Life of Saint Teresa^[34]

The foundations across Spain

From San José, Teresa travelled across Spain on difficult roads, by cart, sick and aging, to found convent after convent. In twenty years she established seventeen monasteries of Carmelite nuns, which she recounts with spirit and humor in her Book of the Foundations.

Here are the principal stages of this founding epic:

John of the Cross and the Discalced friars

In 1567, at Medina del Campo, Teresa met a young Carmelite of twenty-five, frail and burning, who was hesitating to join the Carthusians to find greater solitude: John of the Cross. She convinced him to remain in Carmel and to carry the reform to the men there. On 28 November 1568, at Duruelo, the first convent of Discalced friars was born. From this collaboration between the great foundress and the future mystical doctor would come the golden age of Carmel.^[35][36]

Persecution and the calvary of the reform

The reform aroused violent resistance within the order itself. Teresa was denounced, her letters examined by the Inquisition, her foundations obstructed. In 1575-1577, the conflict between mitigated and discalced Carmelites reached its height: John of the Cross was seized and imprisoned for nine months at Toledo, and Teresa herself was confined to residence. She went through these trials with a firmness and obedience that struck her contemporaries: never did she break with the hierarchy of the Church.^[37][38]

"She was accustomed to say that she could be mistaken in discerning visions and revelations, but not in rendering obedience to superiors." — Gregory XV, Bull of canonization, 1622^[39]

The four degrees of prayer

In the Book of Her Life, Teresa compares the life of prayer to the watering of a garden, in four ways of bringing the water of grace that become ever easier. This image of the "four waters" is one of her most famous pedagogical finds: it tells of the passage from human effort to the pure gratuity of God.

What characterizes Teresa is that she never separates these extraordinary graces from humility and concrete charity: the sign of true prayer is not ecstasy, but the transformation of life.^[40]

The transverberation of the heart

The most famous episode of Teresa's mystical life is the transverberation: the vision of an angel — a seraph — piercing her heart with a golden dart of fire. The experience, which she describes with striking precision, mingles pain and joy to the point of becoming the very symbol of mystical love. It would inspire Bernini's masterpiece at Rome, and the Church has made it a proper feast of Carmel, on 26 August.

"This angel held in his hand a long golden dart, whose iron point seemed to carry a little fire. He seemed to plunge it several times into my heart and to drive it into my very entrails: when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out with it, and left me wholly inflamed with a great love of God. The pain was so keen that it drew these moans from me; and so sweet the excessive sweetness caused me by this immense pain, that I could not wish for it to end." — Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, ch. XXIX^[41]

The Bull of 1622 goes further and reports a tradition according to which Teresa died not of exhaustion, but of the very violence of divine love.

"She also saw an angel piercing her entrails with a burning dart […] after her death, in a vision, she declared to a nun that she had died not by the force of illness, but by the excess of a burning of divine love." — Gregory XV, Bull of canonization, 1622^[42]

Spiritual marriage and discernment

At the summit of her journey, Teresa describes the transforming union or spiritual marriage: a stable state in which the soul lives permanently in the presence of the Trinity. But she shows extreme prudence in discerning these graces. She fears illusion, melancholy mistaken for contemplation, imagination mistaken for God. Her golden rule: always submit to the judgment of the Church and prefer obedience to any private revelation.^[43][44]

"I count among the greatest graces God has done me that of no longer fearing demons. Since this sovereign King whom we serve is so powerful that nothing in heaven or on earth resists Him, what reason have we to fear, provided we walk in the way of truth, with a pure conscience?" — Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, ch. XXV^[45]

It is through her books, as much as through her reform, that Teresa became a Doctor of the Church. She wrote out of obedience, on the orders of her confessors, in a spoken, lively, witty language, with no scholarly pretension whatever — and yet reached the summits of spiritual theology.

The Book of Her Life

Completed around 1565, the Libro de la vida is both an autobiography and a treatise on prayer. In it Teresa recounts her conversion, her graces, her visions, and develops the famous comparison of the four waters. Examined by the Inquisition, the book would only be published after her death.^[46][47]

The Way of Perfection

Written around 1566 for her first Carmelites of San José, the Camino de perfección is a concrete manual of spiritual life: it teaches humility, detachment, fraternal love and above all prayer, with a great commentary on the Our Father. It is Teresa's most accessible work.^[48]

The Interior Castle

Composed in 1577 in a few months, the Castillo interior — The Interior Castle or The Mansions — is her masterpiece. In it Teresa compares the soul to a diamond castle comprising seven mansions in succession, up to the central chamber where God dwells and celebrates the spiritual marriage.

"I pictured the soul as a castle made of a single diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many mansions, as there are many mansions in heaven. For, if we consider it, the soul of the just is nothing else than a paradise in which the Lord takes His delight." — Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, First Mansions^[49]

The Book of the Foundations

Written at intervals from 1573 to 1582, the Libro de las Fundaciones recounts, with savory realism, the adventure of each convent: the journeys, the inns, the lawsuits, the benefactors, the setbacks. In it we see the mystic doubled with a businesswoman of redoubtable good sense.^[50]

"Let nothing disturb you"

Found tucked in her breviary after her death, a short poem became one of the best-known spiritual texts in the world, the Nada te turbe:

"Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things pass; God does not change. Patience obtains all; whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices." — Teresa of Jesus, Nada te turbe^[51]

Humility, or walking in truth

For Teresa, humility is neither mawkishness nor a sickly contempt of self: it is truth. To know one's nothingness before God and the greatness of the grace received is to stand in reality.

"As God is supreme Truth, and humility is nothing else than walking in truth, it is a great virtue not only to have no good opinion of ourselves, but to know our nothingness and our misery." — Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, Sixth Mansions^[52]

Love proved by works

Against all sentimental spirituality, Teresa repeats that love of God is measured not by tears or consolations, but by service and virtues.

"The love of God does not consist in shedding tears, nor in that satisfaction and tenderness which we ordinarily desire; it consists in serving God with courage, in practicing justice and in being humble." — Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, ch. XI^[53]

"To suffer or to die"

Teresa's love for Christ is summed up in a formula that became her motto: "either to suffer or to die".^[54] A desire not to be done with life, but to join the Beloved, and to unite her own suffering with His. Teresa writes it herself in the last chapter of The Book of Her Life:

"Lord, either to die or to suffer. That is the only thing I ask of You. And I never hear the clock strike without feeling joy at it, because it seems to me that this past hour of my life brings me a little nearer to that happy time when, I hope, God will grant me the grace to see Him without ever being able to be separated from Him again." — Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, ch. XL^[55]

The refusal of false mysticism

A major feature of her doctrine, often underlined: Teresa never abandons the humanity of Christ. Against certain currents that claimed to rise toward an abstract divinity while leaving aside the historical Jesus, she affirms that one enters the highest mysteries only through Christ the man, through His Passion, His Eucharist and His sacraments. Such is the teaching of the Interior Castle: it is through the door of Christ's humanity that one enters, and through it that all graces come. It is also what made her beyond suspicion in the eyes of the Inquisition: her mysticism is entirely ecclesial and incarnate.^[56][57]

Death at Alba de Tormes (1582)

Exhausted by a final journey, Teresa died at Alba de Tormes, in the arms of her faithful nurse Anne of Saint Bartholomew, in the night of 4 to 15 October 1582. This double date is no error: it was precisely that night that the Gregorian calendar came into force, suppressing ten days (5 to 14 October). Hence the fixing of her feast on 15 October.^[58][59]

Her last words, reported by witnesses, sum up her whole life: a burning desire for God and total fidelity to the Church.

"Come, Lord, come, dear Spouse: at last the hour has come, and I am going to leave this exile. […] She never tired of repeating: At last, Lord, I am a daughter of the Church, and found in this thought a sensible consolation." — last words of Saint Teresa, reported by Villefore^[60]

The incorruptibility of the body

Exhumed nine months after her death, Teresa's body was found incorrupt and exhaling a fragrance held to be supernatural — a fact abundantly attested in the canonization processes. Her body remains today one of the great cases of incorrupt bodies of saints venerated by the Church.^[61][62]

The dispersal of the relics

Very early on, popular devotion and great families disputed the saint's relics, to the point that her body was fragmented. The principal relics are today dispersed as follows:

The heart, kept at Alba de Tormes, shows a cleft which tradition connects with the transverberation — the object of great Carmelite veneration.^[63] The arm kept at Alba with the heart is the right arm.^[64] As for the left hand, formerly kept at Lisbon, it is that very hand which the Carmel of Ronda venerates today: brought back to Spain (Ávila) in 1910, during the expulsion of the religious orders from Portugal, it was then entrusted to the community re-established at Ronda.^[65]

Beatification (1614) and canonization (1622)

Teresa was beatified on 24 April 1614 by Paul V, barely thirty years after her death. Then, on 12 March 1622, Gregory XV canonized her in a ceremony that remained famous: on the same day five of the greatest saints of the Catholic Reformation were raised to the altars, including Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Philip Neri. The Bull hails in Teresa a "new Deborah" raised up by God for the victory of His Church.^[66][67]

"But in our days, He has wrought a signal salvation by the hands of a woman, by raising up in His Church, as a new Deborah, the virgin Teresa, who, having won an admirable victory in taming her flesh by perpetual virginity, triumphing over the world by a wonderful humility, and crushing all the snares of the devil by a great number of eminent virtues […]" — Gregory XV, Bull of canonization, 1622^[68]

In 1627, Urban VIII proclaimed her patroness of Spain alongside Saint James — a distinction which moreover aroused lively debates in the peninsula.^[69]

First woman Doctor of the Church (1970)

The crowning came four centuries later. On 27 September 1970, Paul VI proclaimed Teresa of Avila Doctor of the Church: for the first time in history, this title was conferred on a woman. A week later, Saint Catherine of Siena received the same dignity. The pope hailed in Teresa the "mistress of prayer" whose teaching retains all its fruitfulness for the modern Church.^[70][71]

"The title of Doctor of the Church — said Paul VI — implies eminence of doctrine […]. Now this most eminent charism was never lacking to Saint Teresa of Jesus: mistress of an admirable depth in the science of the things of God." — Paul VI, homily for the doctorate of Saint Teresa, 27 September 1970^[72]

Today, Saint Teresa of Avila remains one of the greatest spiritual doctors of the Church: a witness that the highest contemplation and the most practical sense of reality, far from opposing each other, meet in the love of God and neighbor.

• Read Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591): the companion in reform and the other great mystical doctor of the Discalced Carmel.
• Read Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556): canonized the same day as she was, founder of the Jesuits and master of the Spiritual Exercises.
• Read Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595): her exact contemporary, the "apostle of Rome", canonized in 1622 with her.
• Read The incorrupt bodies of the saints: the dossier of saints' bodies preserved from corruption, including Teresa's.
• The essentials: Carmelite and reformer, mystic and writer, Saint Teresa of Avila gave the Church the science of prayer; first woman Doctor of the Church, she teaches that "God alone suffices".