Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Catholic nun and reformer.

The Protestant Reformation of the early and mid-16th century provoked a crisis for those Christians who remained loyal to the Catholic Church. Aware that it was in many ways corrupt and that spiritual life had become diluted by secular concerns, Catholic reformers tried to recover the integrity of primitive Christianity without violating Catholic tradition and the religious authorities. The effort at an internal Catholic reformation was particularly intense in Spain, where Saint Ignatius Loyola, Saint John of the Cross, and an influential group of Christian humanists created new religious orders and a new form of spirituality. None of these Catholic reformers was more successful than Saint Teresa of Avila, creator of the Discalced Carmelites and an influential spiritual writer.

Spain in the 16th century was an aristocratic society obsessed by the idea of blood purity (limpieza de sangre) which in our eyes seems no better than a form of fanatical racism. Recently reunited by the "Catholic Kings"—Ferdinand and Isabella—after a long era of fragmentation and partial Muslim occupation, Spain had a large population of Moors and Jews who had converted to Christianity under threat of expulsion or death. The Spanish Inquisition, doubting the sincerity of some of these conversions, launched periodic investigations of conversos; among them, in 1485, was Juan Sanchez, a rich textile trader of Jewish descent and Teresa's grandfather. After a hearing where he confessed to "many grave crimes and offences against our Holy Catholic Faith," he was publicly humiliated in the Inquisition's auto de fe, a procession of backsliders bearing extinguished candles in the streets of Toledo (to show that the light of salvation had gone out in their souls). Despite his confession, his "crimes" cannot have been very grave or he would have been put to death.

Surviving the ordeal and working to expunge its memory by dynastic alliances with older Catholic families, Juan Sanchez moved to the nearby city of Avila in Castile; there, his son Alonso, a taxgatherer and financier, lived an ostentatious life, fathering Teresa de Ahumada by his second wife. Teresa grew up in the protected environment of an honor-conscious society and faced the prospect of either marriage or taking the veil; no other alternatives presented themselves to high-born women of her age. As a child, she enjoyed romantic fiction, of the kind which Cervantes later lampooned in Don Quixote, and she seems to have had a brief flirtation with a young man connected with her family. They responded by placing her in a nunnery, where—after an early shock at this comparatively spartan life—she came to believe that she had a lifetime's vocation.

The convent of the Incarnation in Avila was centrally placed in the city and, although the nuns were supposed to be cloistered, there was in fact a good deal of contact between the nuns and the other citizens of the town. The Carmelite nuns had for two centuries deviated from the austere ideals of their founders, and within the convent, social distinctions from the outside were still observed. Wealthier nuns, such as Teresa herself, had to bring a "dowry" to the convent, just as they would have had to take one to a husband; by this means, and by promises of payment from novices' parents, the convent was sure of a steady income. The more privileged and high-born nuns had private rooms rather than sleeping in the dormitory shared by poor nuns; they had their own servants (even slaves in a few cases); and they continued to enjoy the honorific name "Doña" inside the convent just as they had outside.

A custom had also developed that if a woman in one of the major families in Avila needed a female companion in times of bereavement or stress she could summon one from the convent to spend time with her; on several occasions, Teresa was thus called away from the Incarnation for periods of months at a time. Thus, she spent two years with Doña Guiomar de Ulloa, an influential widow who became one of Teresa's principal benefactors in her later experiments in reforming the Carmelite order. In the same way, she would return to her family in times of sickness. During one such sickness, when she was in her early 20s, Teresa was so near death that her family had dropped wax onto her eyes, a local custom with the dead, before she surprised them by reviving. The episodic nature of convent life, along with the free access of outsiders to the residents, made the Carmelite existence a relatively relaxed affair in Teresa's youth.

Teresa Experiences Revelations, Visions. Without ever complaining about the convent life, she began to draw attention to herself by an exceptional form of spirituality. Sometimes while praying, she would receive messages from Christ, usually in the form of sudden convictions sown in her mind as she meditated. As her life continued, they became more intense and insistent, giving her at times the radiant assurance that she was in direct contact with God. Fearing nevertheless that she might somehow be under the influence of the devil, like some recently denounced spiritual charlatans, she treated her own revelations guardedly and consulted a succession of confessors about how to proceed. Most of them, similarly afraid of a demonic visitation, and responding to the defensive Spanish religious mood of the times which regarded any novelty as a possible sign of "Lutheranism," discouraged her. But then a meeting at Doña Guiomar de Ulloa's house with Peter of Alcantara, a reformer who believed in reviving the early Christian life of heroic austerity, led her to recover confidence. Peter of Alcantara assured her that her visions came from God and that she should heed them.

Her religious development continued through her 20s and 30s and became progressively more intense; at times, she would enter a trancelike state, which local people sought to oversee out of fascination. Particularly embarrassing to her were episodes of involuntary levitation during prayer, which had induced weightlessness, widely reported and seemingly well authenticated at the time.

Whatever our judgment of Teresa's reports of divine visitation it is certain that she was a woman of courage, integrity, and resolve. In response to one confessor's request, she wrote her life history, which now constitutes our best source of information about her experiences; written in a form influenced by Saint Augustine's Confessions, which she had read and admired, it speaks of her as a dreadful sinner and attributes all her merits to God.

She Works to Reform Convent. As she advanced into middle age at the Incarnation convent, her sense of dissatisfaction with life there, coupled with the promoting of her visions, led her to attempt a reform of the convent; in this project several of her relatives, also young nuns, were eager to cooperate. Hoping to revive the old simplicity of Carmelite life, she arranged to acquire a house in another part of Avila and to live there with a handful of like-minded disciples. It seemed to her that the only way she as a woman could help to prevent the spread of heresy throughout Europe was to pray more fervently and to live a more devout life, and in its way she saw her reform as a missionary activity, even though it did not require leaving home ground.

The experiment faced many obstacles. First, Teresa wanted to live without the financial security which was enjoyed by the other monastic houses of Avila, but to trust entirely to alms, like Jesus. She would accept "dowries" if they were offered but would not make them a condition of admission; a novice's character alone would be decisive. She would make no distinction between the rich and poor, noble and plebeian, within the house; all titles would be dropped and the nuns would call one another "sister." It may be that as the descendant of conversos, even rich ones, she remained sensitive to the disadvantages of those without the coveted degrees of blood purity. In her book The Way of Perfection, Teresa explained that this dramatic contrast with the outside world was a way of reminding the sisters that "it is the Lord who provides for all in common" and that they were freed from trying to please their relatives outside the walls.

The city authorities, the local bishop, and many noble families protested against the plan, on the grounds that it would disrupt a convenient way of life (in which convent and city interacted to the convenience of the city) and that it would deny their daughters the honors and dignity they had previously preserved as nuns. Besides, with the way things stood, the twice-yearly payments the families made to a convent guaranteed its continued association with, even dependence on, them, a dependence which was now threatened. They also feared that a convent without regular means of support could easily become a burden on the finances of the city. As the gilt was already peeling off the facade of Spain's "golden age," in the form of bad harvests, inflation, and urban discontent, these were grave matters.

Teresa had sufficient supporters among the clergy and lay nobility, however, that she was able to persist, and she was steadied by a vision of Peter of Alcantara, recently deceased, who urged her not to falter. On the day that her convent opened, it was surrounded by a chanting mob of angry townsmen who tried to break down the door. Teresa's diplomatic gifts, and her capacity to win over once-intractable opponents, ultimately secured for her the right of the Convent of St. Joseph to exist in Avila and a law suit against it was resolved. The small but well-educated and influential religious reform party in Avila was pleased to see this example of discipline and religious humility in the heart of the city as a form of living sermon to the other residents. For Teresa, the simple life of this new convent was much superior to the luxuries of the old; most of her supporters, many of them cousins, agreed, but a few were unable to endure it and returned to the Incarnation with her consent. Sleeping on straw mattresses, without servants, wearing harsh sackcloth robes, the sisters at St. Joseph were soon afflicted by a plague of lice in their clothes and hair, but after intercessory prayers by Teresa she reported that the lice departed once and for all.

She called her reformed sisterhood the "Discalced Carmelites." Discalced means that they did not wear shoes but went barefoot, again in tribute to Jesus' simplicity and suffering.

When St. Joseph's was established, Teresa, again prompted by divine visitation, moved to establish another convent, at the market town of Medina del Campo. This and her other houses were usually in market centers (including Toledo, Segovia, and Seville) because urban centers alone seemed likely to be able to provide the money in occasional benefactions which her new rule specified. Later, when rural houses were established, some kind of regular financing became imperative or they would have foundered quickly. The cities also possessed large converso populations, and the merchants and professionals who sympathized with the new spirituality of Catholic reform, rather than the older legalistic form of faith, looked more favorably on Teresa's reforms.

Teresa Establishes More Convents. Despite recurrent illnesses, Teresa lived into her late 60s, the last year being the most active, as she moved from place to place in Spain establishing new convents of the Discalced Carmelites—a total of 17 in her last 20 years. Inspired by her example, Carmelite friars as well as nuns began to organize reforms, the most distinguished of whom was Friar (ultimately Saint) John of the Cross, who for a time was Teresa's confessor. He was many years her junior and admired her greatly but could still rebuke her when necessary. "When you make your confession, Mother," he told her on one occasion, "you have a way of finding the prettiest excuses." Around him gathered many stories of supernatural events and stern dealings with demonic interventions; one of the nuns of St. Joseph's was "lifted bodily from her feet and left suspended upside down in the air until ordered back to her stall by St. John of the Cross" while another was "glued so firmly to the ground that no one could make her budge until she was released by a mere glance from the friar."

As the Discalced Carmelites established themselves, however, the older "Calced" branch became increasingly suspicious and resentful; they used their influence with the authorities to prevent new houses—even when guaranteed an income by wealthy enthusiasts—from being established, so that some of Teresa's long and difficult journeys across Spain were made in vain. They also arranged for the imprisonment of John of the Cross in Toledo where he was flogged and ordered to abandon the Reformers; although he steadfastly refused.

John of the Cross's sufferings ended after eight months when he managed to escape, but he was so sick that Teresa thought he would die in any case.

A papal nuncio to whom Teresa appealed that the Calced and Discalced Carmelites might be officially divided into two separate congregations (the only way she could see to end the conflict) was not at first disposed to listen sympathetically. His attack in turn, however, aroused Teresa's growing body of friends and supporters within Spain who sent reassuring messages to Rome about her good qualities (and those of John of the Cross). Finally, in June 1580, she managed to get a brief from the Pope officially dividing the Carmelites into two distinct provinces and settling most of the points of conflict between the branches.

Teresa traveled extensively right up to the end of her life and endured a long coach ride during her final illness. Neither did death bring an end to her peregrinations. The nuns who attended her in her final illness reported that her sickroom was filled with a delicious aroma, and those who laid her to rest discovered that her body was immune to decay, another sign, in their view, of her exceptional sanctity. Far from decomposing, her body emitted a sweet aroma ("the odor of sanctity") not only at first but for years thereafter as it was repeatedly dug up and examined. Not only was it inspected; the body was also moved from place to place as rival convents and cities vied to get their hands on what was now a holy relic. And with each exhumation parts of the miraculously preserved body were hacked off to be used as relics: first a finger, next an arm, later the heart (which was said to bear signs of the angels piercing spear) until by the next century the incorruptible body was scarcely more than a fragment. Forty years after her death, in 1622, Teresa of Jesus was named a saint while the order she had founded continued to endure, though it had been forced early to accept permanent endowments as the only viable way of surviving the economic austerities of a Spain which was now entering a long period of decline and senescence.

HWL