TERESA OF ÁVILA

TERESA OF ÁVILA (1515–1582), epithet of Teresa de Ahumeda y Cepeda, Christian saint, Spanish mystic, religious reformer, and author of religious classics. Teresa was born at Ávila in the Castilian region of Spain on March 28, 1515, the third child of Don Alonso Cepeda, a moderately wealthy merchant. She was a spirited child, and early in life she began to manifest deep religious feelings. When she was seven she and her eleven-year-old brother ran away from home, intending to go to the country of the Moors and offer themselves for martyrdom. Later, writing about the episode in her Life, she said that she had done this because she "wanted to see God." However, the adventure ended abruptly a few meters outside the walled city of Ávila when the two children met their uncle, who promptly took them home.

In her early teens Teresa took a great interest in clothes, read romantic stories, and apparently had a romance with a cousin. When she was fifteen her mother died at the age of thirty-three, having produced nine children, and her father sent Teresa to board at Our Lady of Grace Convent, a kind of finishing school for girls from comfortable families. She remained there for a year and a half, and during that period her contact with the Augustinian nuns prompted her to start thinking about a religious vocation.

Illness forced Teresa to leave the school, and she went to live with a sister to recuperate. She began to visit the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Ávila to talk about becoming a nun. One of the nuns later recalled the charm and beauty of the nineteen-year-old Teresa. In 1535, at the age of twenty, Teresa entered the Convent of the Incarnation, where she remained for twenty-eight years until she left to found her own reformed Carmelite convent. At the time of Teresa's entrance the convent had 140 nuns, and although the reform movement was to emanate from it, there was nothing scandalous about life there; it was simply a comfortable and not particularly demanding existence. The nuns, especially those from affluent families, lived in a suite of rooms, often attended by a servant. They were able to visit freely outside the convent, and they spent long hours each day in the parlor visiting with outsiders. Teresa lived this type of life until she was about forty, when she experienced what she called her "conversion" while reading the Confessions of Augustine. From that point until the end of her life, she followed a rigorous personal program of discipline and prayer that culminated in frequent religious experiences in which she saw the Lord and heard him speak. Teresa herself described these experiences as "intellectual visions and locutions."

For seven years after her "conversion" Teresa continued to live at the Incarnation, but she began to plan the establishment of a small Carmelite convent that would follow the original Carmelite rule of 1209, which had been mitigated by Eugenius IV in 1435. She claimed that she had been encouraged to do this in her visions, but at first, there was much opposition from the nuns in the convent and other ecclesiastics. She finally obtained permission from Rome, and on August 24, 1562, along with four other nuns, she established in Ávila a convent of discalced Carmelite nuns. The word discalced (lit., "without shoes") referred, in the religious parlance of the time, to a reformed group that usually went barefoot or in sandals. Teresa's reformed convent in Ávila was dedicated to Saint Joseph, and the nuns who lived there followed the original Carmelite rule, rather than the mitigated one observed at the Incarnation. This meant a much stricter observance of such conventual disciplines as fasting, silence, and restriction of contact with outsiders.

Teresa, who now called herself of Teresa of Jesus, remained at that first convent for just over four years, a time later described as "the most restful years of my life." Her original intention had been to establish only that single reformed convent, but in 1567 the Carmelite general, Giovanni Rossi, on a visitation from Rome, approved Teresa's work and commanded her to establish other convents. During the next fifteen years she would personally found about one convent per year in Spain, and after her death similar reformed Carmelite convents were established all over the world.

While she was still a nun at the Incarnation, Teresa began writing an account of her life, a task she completed during the first years of her reform. She always called it her libro grande, but it was only the first effort in an impressive body of Christian literature. These works, never originally intended for general publication, were written at odd moments during a busy career of religious administration. She wrote four major prose works, a series of shorter works, poems, and numerous letters, of which 445 are extant. Principal among these works are Foundations, which describes her adventures in founding convents, Way of Perfection, which explains prayer, and Interior Mansions, which describes the dimensions of spiritual and mystical growth. Her works are considered Christian masterpieces, and she is undoubtedly one of history's great authorities on mysticism.

Teresa also developed the idea of establishing religious houses of reformed Carmelite men. She obtained permission from the general in Rome and in 1568 opened the first monastery of reformed Carmelite friars at Duruelo, twenty-five miles from Ávila. One of those original friars was Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, who was to be known to history as John of the Cross. Soon there were reformed Carmelite monasteries all over Spain, and eventually they spread around the world.

In 1582 Teresa founded the last of her fifteen convents, at Burgos. On her return trip to Ávila she was taken ill and stopped at her convent at Alba de Tormes. At sixty-seven, suffering from uterine cancer, she died there on October 4, 1582. Paul V beatified her in 1614; Gregory XV canonized her in 1622; and Paul VI, who called her "the light of the universal church," declared her a doctor of the church in 1970.

Bibliography

Teresa's own writings constitute the fundamental source for her life and doctrine. The standard editions are The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 3 vols. (New York, 1946), and The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus (Westminster, Md., 1949), both translated and edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical Spanish edition of Silverio of Saint Teresa. Saint Teresa of Ávila (Milwaukee, 1943), by William T. Walsh, is a full and standard biography of her life, while Marcelle Auclair's Saint Teresa of Avila (New York, 1953) combines splendid scholarship with excellent literary style. John Beevers's Saint Teresa of Avila (Garden City, N. Y., 1961) is a fine and insightful short study of her life. E. Allison Peers's Handbook to the Life and Times of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross (Westminster, Md., 1954) provides invaluable information about the social and religious milieu in which Teresa lived.

Peter T. Rohrbach (1987)