Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582)

TERESA OF ÁVILA (1515–1582)

TERESA OF ÁVILA (1515–1582), founder of the Discalced Carmelites and a patron saint of Spain. Teresa of Ávila was born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in Ávila, Spain, to Beatriz de Ahumada and Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda. Her mother came from an Old Christian family with a small estate in Gotarrendura, a village near Ávila. Her paternal grandfather, once a prosperous textile merchant in Toledo, moved to Ávila after the Inquisition convicted him of Judaizing, or practicing the Jewish religion or customs after having converted to Christianity, and sentenced him to a humiliating public ritual of penitence that usually resulted in loss of social reputation and business failure. In Ávila, Teresa's grandfather and his sons employed legal and financial routes to establish their right to the privileges of gentlemen, including a tacit agreement to overlook their genealogy. Teresa's contemporaries would have known of her converso heritage, but it was not publicly acknowledged until 1946. Teresa was the third child and first daughter born to Alonso and Beatriz, whose ten children joined two surviving offspring from Alonso's first marriage.

Teresa came to her career as a religious reformer relatively late in life. She joined the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation just outside Ávila in 1535 and took vows in 1536 as Teresa of Jesus. In the Book of Her Life (1562–1565) she wrote that she withheld her wholehearted consent to the vocation until 1556, when she had two spiritual experiences that definitively turned her away from secular life. For these twenty years of irresolution, during which she suffered serious illnesses and experienced frightening visions that some confessors attributed to the devil, Teresa blamed the mitigated or relaxed rule in Carmelite convents, which among other liberties permitted nuns to come and go freely and to receive unlimited visitors. In condemning such lapses in monastic enclosure, Teresa participated in sixteenth-century movements to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within, or the Counter-Reformation. In 1560 Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) called on Spanish monasteries to contribute to his war against the Protestant Reformation by intensifying religious discipline.

On 24 August 1562 a house in Ávila was consecrated as the Convent of Saint Joseph under a constitution Teresa based on the 1247 formulation of Carmelite rule requiring strict asceticism and complete poverty. For the austere dress Teresa designed—habits of coarse fabrics and straw sandals—initiates were labeled Discalced (Barefoot) Carmelites. The new convent faced immediate threats to its existence. Some church officials considered that Teresa, known to practice a spirituality based on contemplation, might lead her nuns to abandon vocal prayer for mental prayer, which threatened both ecclesiastical authority and ecclesiastical income. Municipal officials of Ávila brought a lawsuit that was probably motivated by concern that a convent without an endowment could become dependent on civic financial resources.

Teresa's project of religious reform brought her allies as well as enemies in the church, monastic orders, and aristocracy. Giovanni Battista Rossi (1507–1578), the Carmelite prior general from Rome, found Saint Joseph's so impressive on his 1567 supervisory visit that he gave Teresa permission to found monasteries throughout Spain, with the explicit exception of Andalusia. Having secured this credential, Teresa began her travels around Spain in horse-drawn wagons. She eventually founded fifteen convents and monasteries herself and authorized other Discalced Carmelites to found two more. Teresa garnered much of her financial support and numerous recruits from converso families, who found most monastic orders, including the Carmelites after 1566, closed to them.

Teresa also continued to provoke controversy. Rossi eventually had to reprimand her for making foundations in Andalusia at Beas and Seville. By late 1575 the Inquisition was investigating her on several charges, and Carmelite officials had divested her of all leadership roles and had ordered her to stay in a Castilian convent. She probably owed permission to make more foundations, which came with the 1580 recognition of the Discalced as a separate province, to aristocratic friends holding high church and state positions.

Around 1562, Teresa began writing prolifically, both at the command of confessors and for her own purposes: first, the autobiographical Book of Her Life (composed 1562–1565; published 1588), followed by the devotional instruction in Way of Perfection (composed 1566–1569; published 1588), descriptions of her mystical experiences in The Interior Castle (composed 1577; published 1588), a chronicle of the origins of the Discalced Carmelites in The Foundations (composed 1582; published 1610), and several short works and numerous letters.

Teresa probably would be remembered only as a charismatic reformer but for reports that her body, when exhumed nine months after her death, had not deteriorated. Stories of other miracles accumulated, and in 1591 the bishop of Salamanca initiated the process that in 1622 made her a saint. In 1970 she became the first female doctor of the church.

See also Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism ; Conversos ; Reformation, Catholic ; Religious Orders .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Teresa, of Ávila, Saint. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Ávila. Edited and translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. 3 vols. Washington, D.C., 1976–1985.

——. The Complete Works of Teresa of Jesus. Edited and translated by E. Allison Peers. 3 vols. London, 1944–1946.

——. Santa Teresa de Jesús: Obras completas. Edited by Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. Madrid, 1951–1959.

Secondary Sources

Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca, N.Y., 1989.

Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. Tiempo y vida de Santa Teresa. 2nd ed. Madrid, 1977.

Slade, Carole. St. Teresa of Ávila: Author of a Heroic Life. Berkeley, 1995.

Weber, Alison. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton, 1990.

Carole Slade