Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

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Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Spanish mystic and monastic reformer, influential writer on spirituality, founder of the Discalced Carmelite order of Roman Catholic nuns, and canonized saint, who was the first woman to be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. Name variations: Teresa de Jesús; Santa Teresa; Teresa of Jesus; Teresa of Ávila; Theresa de Jesus des Carmes-Dechausses; Santa Teresa de Avila. Pronunciation: teh-REH-sah of AH-beelah. Born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada on March 28, 1515, at Avila, Spain; died on October 4, 1582, at Alba de Tormes, Spain; daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and Beatriz de Ahumada; never married; no children.

Professed as a Carmelite sister (1537); experienced the Transverberation (1559); founded reformed convent of St. Joseph at Avila (1562); founded 16 additional reformed convents in other Spanish cities (1567–82); beatified (1614); canonized (1622); proclaimed Doctor of the Church (1970).

Works:

El camino de la perfección (The Way of Perfection); El libro de su vida (autobiography); Las moradas, o el castillo interior (The Dwelling Places, or the Interior Castle); El libro de las fundaciones (The Foundations); Cuentas de conciencia (Spiritual Testimonies).

The woman whom Roman Catholics the world over would one day venerate as St. Teresa of Avila was born on March 28, 1515, the daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and his second wife Beatriz de Ahumada . Traditionally, Teresa's birthplace is given as Avila, a walled city high on Spain's central plateau to the northwest of Madrid, but there is evidence that it was really the nearby village of Gotarrendura, location of the Ahumada family estate. In any case, it was in Avila that Teresa grew to womanhood and it was there that she spent most of her life, although during her later years she traveled extensively throughout Spain directing the work of her religious reform movement.

Founded in the 11th century, Avila was originally a fortress on the frontier between the Christian-controlled northern part of the Iberian peninsula and the Muslim-controlled southern part. As such, it played an important role in the Reconquista, the centuries-long war to restore all of Spain to Christian rule. The city's imposing system of defensive walls stands today as a reminder of its former strategic importance, but long before Teresa's time Avila was already in decline as a military center. By 1300, most of the south had been reconquered and incorporated into the two major Christian kingdoms, Castile and Aragon. The marriage in 1469 of Isabella I , queen of Castile (r. 1474–1504), and Ferdinand II, king of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), known to history as the Catholic Monarchs, opened the way to the eventual political unification of Spain. Unification promised an era of internal peace, as did the completion in 1492 of the process of territorial consolidation when Ferdinand and Isabella captured the last remaining Muslim stronghold at Granada.

By the early 16th century, Avila's importance was no longer military but economic. The city's location in a principal sheep-raising area assured it a major role in the rapidly expanding woolens industry. Once a sleepy provincial town, Avila quickly emerged as a bustling center of trade and manufacture, attracting newcomers from less prosperous regions of the country. Many of these immigrant artisans and merchants were known at the time as conversos, or New Christians, meaning that they were former Jews who had converted to Christianity. Frequently, such conversions were made only for reasons of convenience, especially after 1492 when the Catholic Monarchs ordered the expulsion of Spain's Jewish population. Many conversos were sincerely devoted to their adoptive faith, but many more continued to practice Judaism in the privacy of their homes. All New Christians were subject to prejudice and legal disabilities, and all were vulnerable to accusations of apostasy, an offense which lay under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 to impose religious unity on Spain's diverse population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

I look down upon the world as from above and care very little what people say or what is known about me.
—Teresa of Avila

One of the industrious New Christians attracted to Avila during the woolens boom was Teresa's father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, who relocated from Toledo following a humiliating episode in 1485 when he and his father were convicted as secret Jews by the Inquisition and sentenced to perform a public penance. Sánchez de Cepeda was financially well off, but being a converso put him at a social and political disadvantage, even in the relatively forgiving atmosphere of worldly Avila. Many privileges in society, such as the holding of public office and entry into religious orders, were legally open only to Old Christians, whose blood was supposedly free of the "impurity" of Jewish or Muslim descent. Money had the power to cleanse, however, and, like many other wealthy conversos, Teresa's father purchased his way to acceptance and respectability. Recruiting witnesses to testify on his behalf, Sánchez de Cepeda won a suit to have himself declared a hidalgo, or noble, a legal status which entitled him to exemption from taxation and to be addressed by the honorific title "don." Also, by supplying generous dowries he took two wives in succession from noble Old Christian families, first Catalina del Peso , then after her death her cousin Beatriz de Ahumada, who became Teresa's mother.

The story of Teresa's Jewish ancestry has been known for some time. Traditional Catholic writers generally omit it, but it is important to any understanding of this remarkable woman, who, although endowed with great talent and intelligence, was born into a world in which she was doubly marginal. Teresa was a female in a male-dominated society, but she was also a social upstart in a city whose civil and ecclesiastical establishments were still dominated by an Old Christian aristocracy which traced its origin to the early days of the Reconquista. Her father's money and connections guaranteed Teresa access to the prestigious circles of Avila's high society, but as a young woman she must always have been aware of the precarious nature of her claim to social standing. Later, a rejection of snobbery and aristocratic pretense would become a central feature of Teresa's monastic reform program.

As a girl, Teresa was bright, impetuous, and strong-willed, and she was much influenced by tales of chivalry and the lives of saints, both of which were in her day common intellectual fare in conventional households. In her autobiography, Teresa tells us that the stories of holy martyrs so captivated her that, at the age of seven, she and her favorite brother Rodrigo dreamed of running away from home to invite beheading at the hands of imaginary Muslims in some unspecified neighboring province. According to some accounts, the children did actually depart on their gruesome errand but were intercepted on the road out of Avila by a relative, who returned them safely to the care of their parents.

In 1528, when Teresa was 13, Beatriz de Ahumada died, leaving her husband with ten children from two different marriages. In her autobiography, Teresa describes the loss of her mother with great emotion, telling us that she fell to her knees before an image of Mary the Virgin to beseech the Mother of God to become her mother as well. Teresa is candid in her admission that this was no more than a routine response to personal tragedy, in keeping with the pious conventions of the day. In fact, as she matured into womanhood, the spiritual life was the furthest thing from her mind. By all accounts attractive and flirtatious, Teresa enjoyed the worldly company of other young people, especially some cousins of hers who lived nearby. At the age of 16, she began a clandestine romance with a man whose identity we do not know. Some writers state that during this period she lost her virginity, but the evidence is inconclusive. Teresa herself deals with the episode so circumspectly that it is clear only that her behavior, had it become public knowledge, would have been an embarrassment to her and her family.

Moving decisively to contain the scandal, Don Alonso placed his lively daughter in the care of some Augustinian sisters who boarded the female children of noble families in their convent of Nuestra Señora de la Gracia just outside the city walls. Although Teresa tells us frankly that "at that time I had the greatest possible aversion from being a nun," she eventually settled into the monastic routine, remaining in the cloister for some 18 months until she became ill and was forced to return home for treatment. It is not clear at what point Teresa began to consider taking the religious state for life. Certainly her experience among the Augustinians had some influence, but it is also possible that becoming a nun seemed to her simply a fate preferable to spinsterhood, or to marriage to the kind of husband her father's money would be able to buy. With both her ancestry and her virginity open to question, and herself at 18 already past the customary age of matrimony, Teresa's stock would not have been high on Avila's marriage market.

Because her father initially opposed the idea, Teresa delayed taking the veil for some years, but in 1536 she finally became a novice at Avila's Carmelite convent of La Encarnación, where she made her final vows the following year. Rather typical of its time, La Encarnación was a loosely run community of approximately 100 sisters, most of whom were of aristocratic birth. The nuns were not cloistered and they were not expected to keep the rule of poverty, so they were free to come and go as they pleased and to enjoy private incomes and luxurious personal belongings. Rather than a genuine spiritual community, such a convent was in reality a genteel place of retirement for unmarried women of a certain social class and economic standing. Membership required not only an acceptable family tree, if only a partially fictive one as in Teresa's case, but also a dowry to provide for the new sister's maintenance. Religious life in the convent was limited largely to group vocal prayer for the souls of noble benefactors. These aristocrats provided generous endowments in return for the perpetuation of their proud family names through privileged places of burial in the convent chapel, ostentatious displays of their likenesses and armorial bearings, and the regular repetition of masses in their memory.

The Carmelite convent of La Encarnación was, in fact, a worldly, comfortable, and undemanding place to live. At first, Teresa appeared to thrive there. Known at this time as Doña

Teresa de Ahumada, because the aristocratic nuns she lived among preferred to retain their secular titles and identities rather than adopt religious names, she had a large, well-furnished apartment, and she enjoyed the company of a number of her female friends and relatives who were also sisters at La Encarnación. Allowing for frequent absences for various reasons, Teresa resided at the Carmelite convent off and on for about 20 years. During this period, however, she became increasingly dissatisfied with her surroundings. The mid-life transformation of Doña Teresa, contented aristocratic nun, into Teresa of Avila, gifted mystic and driven religious reformer, was not a sudden occurrence. Rather, it took place over a number of years and was marked by several crucial events, encounters, and conversion experiences.

In 1538, during a prolonged absence from the convent due to illness, Teresa received from a devout relative a copy of Francis of Osuna's Abecedario espiritual (Spiritual Alphabet, 1527). This book provided her introduction to the so-called Devotio Moderna, a movement for spiritual renewal within the Church which had its roots in Christian humanism. Associated with the figures of Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) and Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), and, more radically, with Martin Luther (1483–1546), the new devotional style was particularly strong in Northern Europe, but in Teresa's time it also enjoyed widespread acceptance in Spain. Advocates of the Devotio Moderna criticized the empty formality of ritual observances, such as rote vocal prayer, which were the staple of Western religious life. Instead, they urged private reflection and mental prayer with the purpose of achieving a mystical union between the individual worshiper and God.

Impressed by her discovery, in the years that followed Teresa read heavily in the classics of Christian spiritual literature, but the atmosphere at La Encarnación was not congenial to her new interests. The other nuns were preoccupied with mundane daily concerns, and Teresa found it difficult to resist being caught up in them herself. What was worse, attempts to discuss her own spiritual growth with her confessors met with neither understanding nor sympathy. Teresa's sense of personal frustration must have been overwhelming. Sometime in the 1540s, she began to experience visions which she took at first to be divine revelations, although they sometimes frightened her, causing her to question whether they might not be the work of the devil instead. About 1555, these disquieting doubts led Teresa to entrust her spiritual welfare to two well-respected Avila clerics, Fathers Gaspar Daza and Francisco Salcedo, the latter of whom was related to her family by marriage.

Initially convinced that the troubled nun's case was indeed one of demonic possession, Daza and Salcedo turned for guidance to the fathers of the Society of Jesus, a decision which proved crucial for Teresa's future career. Founded in 1540 by the Spaniard Ignatius de Loyola (1491–1556), himself an enthusiast of the Devotio Moderna, the Jesuit order was a major force for spiritual renewal and reform within the Church. In Jesuit confessors such as Diego de Cetina and Baltasar Alvarez, Teresa at last found spiritual directors who were capable of helping her. Not only did they assure her that her gifts were of God, rather than of the devil, but also they encouraged her to continue her exploration of the life of the soul. Through them she was able to meet like-minded individuals, including two reformist clerics who became her defenders, the Franciscan Peter of Alcántara (1499–1562, canonized 1669) and the Jesuit Francis Borgia (1510–1572, canonized 1671).

Reassured by her new advisors, Teresa no longer resisted her mystical experiences. Recurring now more frequently, they were also increasingly dramatic, culminating about 1559 in the famous Transverberation, a powerful vision in which Teresa believed that an angel had pierced her through the heart with a fiery arrow. This episode is the subject of the most celebrated depiction of Teresa, Lorenzo Bernini's masterpiece in Rome's church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, in which the baroque sculptor blurs the distinction between erotic and religious experience.

In 1560 or 1561, Teresa became convinced that God was calling her to undertake a divine mission which transcended her own individual spiritual development. The result was her movement to reform the Carmelite order, which began in 1562 when she withdrew from La Encarnación with four young followers to found a separate house in Avila, that came to be known as the convent of San José, or St. Joseph. Teresa's monastic reform was part of the broader historical process known as the Counter Reformation, or Catholic Reformation, which was inspired by the contemporary spread of Protestantism in northern Europe. Convinced that the impoverishment of the individual soul in Catholic Europe had weakened the Church in the face of the Protestant threat, Teresa hoped to refortify the faithful spiritually, while at the same time contributing prayer in support of Rome's struggle for ascendancy over Western Christendom.

What Teresa disliked about aristocratic convents such as La Encarnación was the lax atmosphere which she traced to the abandonment in the late Middle Ages of the original ideals and rules of the Carmelite order. At San José, therefore, she sought to return to a purer and more primitive regime, which she modeled on Peter of Alcántara's so-called discalced (or barefoot) reform movement in the Franciscan order. Teresa's Discalced Carmelites did not literally go barefoot, but, as a sign of humility, they wore sandals without stockings. Their lives were to be devoted to silent prayer and spiritual discipline and growth, as well as to the performance of the daily menial chores necessary to sustain the community. Unlike the traditional, unreformed convents, there would be no servants or slaves for this purpose. Also, in order to ensure the community's freedom from worldly distractions and control by powerful patrons, Teresa insisted upon founding her new convent in complete poverty, that is, without an endowment. The nuns of the reform would live off the alms they collected from the general populace. No dowry would be required from entering novices and there would be no genealogical test for admission. Applicants would be judged on their aptitude for the rigorous spiritual life of the community, rather than on the economic status, nobility, or purity of blood of their families.

The Discalced Carmelite reform begun by Teresa had some powerful supporters, including Spain's King Philip II (1556–1598), but it also encountered a good deal of opposition. For example, the municipal authorities of Avila filed a lawsuit in an unsuccessful attempt to block the founding of San José without an endowment, because they feared that a convent which lacked its own independent financial base would become too great a burden on public charity. Other complaints came from Carmelite and other ecclesiastical authorities who feared the reform's implications for their own jurisdiction and prerogatives, from social conservatives who were alarmed by the movement's anti-aristocratic nature and by the enthusiasm shown for it by New Christians, and from theological conservatives who suspected affinities between Teresa's teachings and those of the Protestants, which shared common roots in the Devotio Moderna.

But Teresa of Jesus, as she now called herself, was neither a rebel nor a heretic. Always careful to proclaim her obedience and her orthodoxy, she was as opposed to Protestantism as were her conservative detractors. Through the force of her own strong personality, and taking advantage of her considerable rhetorical skills as well as the support of powerful friends, Teresa gradually won over or outmaneuvered the skeptics who tried to block her reform. In 1567, she won authorization to found more discalced convents in Spain and, between that year and her death in 1582, she would establish an additional 16, mostly in significant urban centers which had the population and the economic vitality to support communities of nuns who depended upon alms for their livelihood. During the same period, Teresa was active in promoting her reform in the male branch of the Carmelites as well. The first monastery of discalced friars was established in 1568 at Duruelo, and during Teresa's lifetime 13 more such houses would be founded. Teresa's collaborator in this effort was the renowned mystic and ascetic John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes, 1542–1591), who became her spiritual director and who, like Teresa, would be canonized after his death.

The rapid spread of reformed convents and monasteries is a tribute to Teresa of Avila's considerable gifts of leadership and organization. She was also a talented writer and, during her career, she found time to produce a number of works which have become classics of Western spiritual literature. The most important source on her own life and spiritual development, up to the establishment of the first discalced convent, is the Libro de su vida, or autobiography, composed at Avila between 1562 and 1565. Teresa's El camino de la perfección (The Way of Perfection), begun in 1565, was a practical manual of spiritual development through self-denial and prayer intended initially for the sisters at her new convent of San José. A work which occupied much of the rest of her life, being finished only shortly before her death in 1582, was the Libro de las fundaciones (Book of Foundations), in which Teresa recounted the history of the discalced reform.

By most accounts, Teresa of Avila's masterpiece is Las moradas (The Dwelling Places), also called El castillo interior (The Interior Castle). Begun in Toledo in 1577 at the order of her current confessor Jerónimo Gracián, Las moradas was intended to present a systematic exposition of Teresa's method of spiritual development through disciplined prayer. The book's title comes from the author's brilliant central metaphor, in which spiritual progress is conceived of as a series of seven rooms, or dwelling places, arrayed in concentric circles. Each room represents a different degree of prayer, and the goal of all prayer, union with God, lies at the center.

In 1580, Teresa's monastic reform, which had always enjoyed papal support, became fully institutionalized when Pope Gregory XIII decreed the formal separation of the Calced and Discalced Carmelite provinces in Spain. By this time, the years of work and struggle were beginning to show their effect on Teresa, a frail woman who had suffered poor health throughout her life, but who had stubbornly recovered from one serious illness after another. The same year as Pope Gregory's decree, Teresa, now 65 years of age, survived a severe bout with influenza, despite the fact that those around her had given her up for dead. Two years later, while on the road at Burgos, she fell ill again, but this time there would be no recovery. Refusing to abandon her travels on behalf of the order, she continued on to the discalced convent at Alba de Tormes and it was there, on October 4, 1582, that death overcame her.

By the time of her death, Teresa of Avila had developed a large popular following throughout Spain, and there was immediate talk of her being proposed for sainthood. Despite the stringent new requirements for canonization established recently by the Council of Trent, Teresa's case was rushed through the process. Beatified in 1614, she was declared a saint in 1622, only eight years later. More recently, in 1970, Pope Paul VI added another posthumous distinction to those already awarded to Teresa by Rome when he recognized her officially as a Doctor of the Church, a title reserved for saints of distinguished learning, whose ideas and writings have been particularly influential in the teaching of the faith. Teresa is the first female saint to be so honored. The tardiness of her formal acceptance, despite the power and appeal of her writings, is a reminder of the marginal role of women in the Church. Although for years Catholics referred to Teresa unofficially as a "doctor," Church authorities once held that she was unsuited to the dignity on grounds of gender, because the status of Doctor of the Church seemed closely related to the priesthood, which was open exclusively to males.

In the years since Teresa's time, there has been so much distortion of the facts of her life and career for both political and religious reasons that it is now difficult to discern the real woman behind the saint. Even so, her record of achievement as a reformer, builder, thinker, and teacher establishes her as one of the outstanding personalities of her time, and as a major presence in the history both of Spain and of Roman Catholicism.

sources:

Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Avila of St. Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Lincoln, Victoria. Teresa: A Woman: A Biography of Teresa of Avila. Ed. by Elias Rivers and Antonio T. de Nicolás. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Peers, E. Allison. Mother of Carmel: A Portrait of St. Teresa of Jesus. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1944.

Teresa of Ávila. The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Trans. and ed. by E. Allison Peers. Image Books ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960.