Teresa of Avila

Juan Sanchez, after his humiliating run-in with the Inquisition, added "de Cepeda" to his name, bought himself a knighthood, and moved from Toledo to Avila in an attempt to start over. A few years later, he died of the plague, as did the wife of his son Alonso. Alonso married again, to a fourteen-year-old farmer's daughter named Beatriz de Ahumada. She would bear nine children before dying in childbirth at the age of thirty- three. Her third child, born in 1515, was Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada. Teresa was about fourteen at the time of her mother's death; it was time to determine her future.

For young women of Teresa's world, there were two possibilities, namely marriage or the convent. Teresa's value in the marriage market was dimmed by her converso background, and she dimmed it further herself by having a love affair. She denied it to her father, and at first he believed her, "because he loved me so much and I lied to him so much." But eventually even her father's forbearance started to wear thin. Thus she entered the convent (as a boarder) for the first time at the age of eighteen, "through the total loss of my honour and the suspicion of my father." She was not happy to be there. After eighteen months ill-health forced her to leave.

Back at home, Teresa was once again faced with the choice: marriage to whoever could be found (and with each passing year her marriageability was lessening), or the convent? She finally decided on the convent, out of the certainty that otherwise she was bound to go to hell. Her father, though, was opposed. "He would only say that when he was dead I might do as I pleased." Finally she ran away at night to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation.

The convent of the Incarnation was then living under the Mitigated Rule. The richer nuns kept servants and lap-dogs, wore jewellery, colorful sashes and perfume, and lived in private suites, while their poorer sisters slept in a dormitory. There was a parlour where they could meet friends and relatives, and the nuns could have "devotos", men who would visit them regularly, in theory for spiritual guidance. The nuns could travel freely outside the convent.

After about a year Teresa's health began to fail; she suffered fevers and fainting spells and was believed to have tuberculosis. The convent released her to her family. She stayed briefly with an uncle who introduced her to mental prayer through Francisco de Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet. "The greater our love the fewer words we use." Teresa's writings show how wordy she could be, and she suffered from "noise in the head"; the prayer of quiet was just what she needed.

Teresa was so attractive to men that while she was in Becedas for medical treatment, her confessor not only fell in love with her but wound up confessing his own sins. He had kept a mistress for the last seven years; she had enslaved him by means of a copper medal she gave him to wear around his neck. "Most of the time I talked to him about God, and this ought to have done him good -- though I believe it's more to the point that he loved me so much; for, to please me, he gave me the idol, which I had thrown into a river right away." This broke the spell. "I am sure he is on the way to salvation. He died very well, and free of the earlier occasion [of sin]. It seems as if the Lord wanted to save him by these means."

The medical treatment, however, failed miserably. Her father finally brought her home to die. Her grave was dug at the Incarnation, and she would have been buried in it except that her father insisted she was not yet dead. Several days later she awoke. She was unable to open her eyes because they had been sealed shut with wax in preparation for her burial.

"My tongue was bitten to pieces; nothing had passed my lips: and because of this and of my great weakness my throat was choking me so that I could not even take water. All my bones seemed to be out of joint and there was a terrible confusion in my head. As a result of the torments I had suffered during these days, I was all doubled up, like a ball, and no more able to move arm, foot, hand or head than if I had been dead, unless others moved them for me. I could move, I think, only one finger of my right hand."

She insisted on being taken back to the Incarnation, where she remained in the infirmary for several years. She recovered in time to nurse her father through his final illness. "I felt as if my own soul was being torn out of me, for I loved him much ... He died like an angel."

Over time, the passionate love that she had previously turned towards various men in her life became focussed on Christ. When she was almost forty she began a series of remarkable visions, seen "not with the eyes of the body but the eyes of the soul."

"One day, when I was at prayer, the Lord was pleased to reveal to me nothing but His hands, the beauty of which was so great as to be indescribable ... A few days later I also saw that Divine face, which seemed to leave me completely absorbed." And finally: "There stood before me the most sacred Humanity in the full beauty and majesty of His resurrected body ... " The visions were lit by an unearthly light: "It is a light so different from what we know here below that the sun's brightness seems dim by comparison ... It is like looking upon very clear water running over a bed of crystal and reflecting the sun, compared with a very muddy stream running over the earth beneath a cloudy sky. It seems rather to be natural light, whereas the other is artificial."

And her most famous vision, the subject of the statue by Bernini:

"I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form ... He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire ... In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God."

While the visions are today the most famous part of her spiritual experience, she considered them inferior to the quiet sense of union with God that she was to achieve later in life. The visions were disorienting and an embarrassment, although she did her best to hide them from her sisters. They were also dangerous. It was not unusual for visionaries to wind up at the stake. Teresa's autobiography was already being examined by the Inquisition for signs of heresy; and as a woman and the descendant of Jews, she was especially suspect. Increasingly, those around Teresa tried to disassociate themselves from her. At the same time, Teresa felt drawn to a more strict life of poverty and self-denial.

In 1562 she began a reform of the Carmelite order (later known as the "Discalced" or barefoot, Carmelites) with a small convent, St. Joseph's, in Avila. Here she lived for four years; "the most restful years of my life". The convent had no endowment and subsisted on alms. One day Teresa went into a trance while holding a frying pan with a little oil in it, which worried her sisters. They weren't concerned about the trance, which they were used to, but were afraid that she might spill the oil. It was all they had. Here she wrote a treatise, The Way of Perfection, as a guide to the monastic life. Her cell did not have a table or chair so she wrote kneeling on the floor at a ledge under a window, with no re-reading or editing.

In spite of her desire for poverty, silence, and solitude, Teresa spent the last years of her life traveling all over Spain, becoming a celebrity, and wielding power over her fledgling reform. In addition to the convents for women, she began a Discalced Carmelite order for men, beginning with a small foundation for two hermits, one of them the famous mystical poet John of the Cross. She was especially impressed by the chapel they had built. "There were so many crosses and so many skulls!" She would later appoint John of the Cross confessor to the nuns of the Incarnation.

In 1571 the Carmelite Provincial ordered Teresa to go back to the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila and become its Prioress. This decision was popular with no-one; not the nuns, who were accustomed to electing their Prioress, and not to Teresa, who was more interested in continuing her reforms. Yet she would be effective and well-liked. She straightened out the convent's finances so the nuns once again had enough to eat and tightened up their lax practices.

She sent her brother Lorenzo a hair-shirt, with instructions: "It can be worn on any part of the body, and put on in any way so long as it feels uncomfortable."

As Teresa's reform gathered strength, the unreformed ("Calced") Carmelites began a backlash. At one point the Provincial of the Calced was sent to Avila to prevent Teresa's re-election as Prioress.

"Fifty-five of the nuns voted for me just as though he had said no such thing. And as each of them handed the Provincial her vote he excommunicated her, and abused her, and pounded the voting papers with his fist and struck them and burned them. And for exactly a fortnight he has left these nuns without Communion and forbidden them to hear Mass or enter the choir even when the Divine Office is not being said. And nobody is allowed to speak to them, not even their confessor or their own parents. And the most amusing thing is that, on the day after this election by poundings, the Provincial summoned these nuns to a fresh election; to which they replied that there was no need to hold another as they had held one already. On hearing this, he excommunicated them again, and summoned the rest of the nuns, forty-four of them, and declared another Prioress elected."

Teresa would never again be Prioress of the Incarnation. Eventually the Pope recognized the Discalced Carmelites as a separate province from the Calced, and Teresa's reforms continued.

Teresa died in 1582. Her body was exhumed several times after her death, and each time found sweet-smelling, firm, and incorrupt. Her heart, hands, right foot, right arm, left eye and part of her jaw are on display in various sites around the world. She was canonised by Gregory XV in 1622, and in 1969 proclaimed a Doctor of the Church for her writings.

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