THE BOOK OF HER LIFE

INTRODUCTION

Early Years

SPAIN, SEPARATED FROM the continent of Europe by the Pyrenees, has a high central tableland both dividing the country within itself and stretching from the northern mountains to the southern coast. Without a natural center and without easy routes, this land was in the Middle Ages a disparate region, a complex of different races, languages, and civilizations. But at the end of the fifteenth century and the opening years of the sixteenth, all the natural disadvantages were somehow overcome. Spain, with ten per cent of its soil bare rock and only ten per cent of it rich, became in the sixteenth century the greatest power on earth; this previously remote peninsula was now ruler of the largest empire the world had yet seen, and all but master of Europe. During those exhilarating years of outward glory, Teresa of Ávila lived and witnessed ironically to another, inward glory, to the sacred truth that becomes the rich possession of every genuine mystic, that a person’s greatest good is within and “won by giving up everything” (Life 20.27).

Born during the reign of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, Teresa saw, under Charles V, Castile’s high moment of prosperity. Under Philip II, she saw her king’s struggles against Protestant and Morisco rebels, against the Netherlanders in the north and the Turks in the Mediterranean not to mention Philip’s many other activities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World.

Teresa’s grandfather, a Toledan merchant, a Jewish converso (Christianized Jew), victim of the use of religion for the sake of political unity, had to accuse himself before the Inquisition for judaizing and as a penance was compelled to wear in procession for seven Fridays the humiliating sanbenito. After his reconciliation, out of necessity, he moved with his family to Ávila where he was able to continue in his profession as a cloth merchant. One of his sons, Teresa’s father Alonso, was about fourteen when the family arrived in Ávila. In 1505 Alonso married; but two years later his wife died, leaving him two children. Alonso, after four years, married again, this time Doña Beatriz de Ahumada, who on March 28, 1515, gave birth to a daughter and future saint who received her grandmother’s name—Teresa de Ahumada. Doña Beatriz died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind from her marriage ten children.

Biographers have given posterity a detailed description of Teresa de Ahumada. She was medium in height and tended to be more plump than thin. Her unusual face could not be described as either round or aquiline; the skin was white and the cheeks flesh-colored. Her forehead was broad, her eyebrows somewhat thick, their dark brown color having a reddish tinge. Her eyes were black, lively, and round, not very large but well placed and protruding a little. The nose was small; the mouth medium in size and delicately shaped, and her chin was well proportioned. The white teeth sparkled and were equal in size. Three tiny moles, considered highly ornamental in those days, added further grace to her appearance; one below the center of the nose, the second over the left side of her mouth, the third beneath the mouth on the same side. Her hair was a shining black and gently curled.

In many ways an extrovert, she was cheerful and friendly, a happy conversationalist, whom people found pleasing to hear as well as look at. Besides her talent as a writer, she was also gifted in the use of the needle and in household tasks.

Her undaunted spirit first began to show signs of itself when she was only seven and decided to set off with her brother Rodrigo for the land of the Moors to have her head cut off for Christ. With much the same ardor she enjoyed playing hermit life with other children—praying, giving alms, and doing penances. While she was growing up in this quiet atmosphere of piety, the revolt of the Comuneros took place, shaking all Castile. This was a movement of angry reaction to a long period in which royal government had eroded many of the traditional powers and prerogatives of the Castilian towns. During this period, too—in 1525 to be precise—the Imperialist army, largely through Spanish troops, won the greatest victory of the age at Pavia. Two years later Charles V’s armies broke from control and put Rome to the most terrible sack it had ever endured.

It was at about the time of this latter incident that the piety of the now adolescent Teresa began to grow cold. She became over eager to read romantic tales of chivalry, began to cultivate her feminine charms, and to plan a possible marriage. The absorption of her fantasy with chivalrous themes along with her facility for writing stirred her at this time to try, together with her brother, writing a book, of the kind she liked to read. In the judgment of her early Jesuit biographer, Francisco de Ribera, it contained “much that could be said for it.”

As time went on, after her mother’s death in November 1528, Teresa began to meet with opposition at home because of her affection for her cousins, sons of her aunt Doña Elvira de Cepeda, and her friendship with a frivolous, unidentified relative whose influence was not of the kind that strengthened Teresa’s piety. Teresa was later to look back with much distaste upon this whole period in which she lost the fervor of her early years. On the watch for an excuse to free his daughter from the vain company and enticements she was experiencing, Don Alonso found one, in 1531, when his oldest daughter married. At the age of sixteen Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns of Our Lady of Grace in Ávila.

Since there was no public education system in Spain at the time, Don Alonso’s daughter probably learned how to read and write at home. Nor could one compare what was offered to her in the way of education at Our Lady of Grace to any modern boarding school. The nuns did little more, we now conjecture, than prepare the young girls for their future life in marriage, teaching them the usual household tasks: cooking, sewing, embroidery, and other things of that sort. Undoubtedly the girls also received some basic religious instructions. The gentle, friendly nun, Doña María Briceño, who had charge of the girls and carefully watched over them, was a woman of deep prayer. As things turned out she began to mean more to Teresa than all former friends. Doña María loved to talk about prayer, and her high spiritual ideals made Don Alonso’s daughter begin to think about a vocation to the religious life and feel more favorable to the idea. But it seems the strain caused by the inner struggle over the pros and cons of the life of a nun harmed Teresa’s health so that she had to leave the school.

When her health improved, she was brought to her sister’s house in Castellanos de la Cañada, but with a stop along the way for a visit with her uncle Don Pedro de Cepeda, who lived as a hermit in Hortigosa. He introduced her to spiritual books, which helped her in the struggles she was experiencing over her vocation. The Letters of St. Jerome, finally, became the occasion of her courage to make a definite decision. But then, unable to bear the thought of separation, her father refused to give his consent to her becoming a nun. On November 2, 1535, at the age of twenty, she once again stole away from her father’s house, this time not to go off to the land of the Moors but to give her life to God as a nun in the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation. Yet the action was not the result of so cold or indifferent an attitude to her father’s feelings as it may seem to have been. She later was to write: “When I left my father’s house I felt the separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered” (ch. 4, 1). Don Alonso, in fact, accepted it all with resignation, gave her a dowry that was more than substantial, and acquired for his daughter a private room of her own in the monastery.

Life at the Incarnation

Recent studies have shown that at the time of Teresa’s entry the Incarnation numbered among eleven Carmelite monasteries for nuns in Spain. Its canonical status lay midway between that of the sanctimoniales, those with the obligation to choir office and enclosure, and that of the beaterios, where the life resembled tertiary life. The nuns were required to recite the Divine Office but not to observe enclosure. They engaged in no outside forms of service. Some two hundred persons, including servants and nuns’ relatives, were living together at the Incarnation in Teresa’s days there.

Contrary to common belief, religious life at the Incarnation was austere. Days each week were set aside for fasting and abstinence; silence was carefully maintained so as to encourage the spirit of continual prayer. With many kinds of detailed, minute rubrics, the Divine Office was celebrated in solemnity and splendor. No time, however, was designated in the legislation for mental prayer—a deficiency not without its drawbacks in what must have been a crowded monastery. Novices received instructions about the Carmelite order, its eremitical origins, its devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to the prophets Elijah and Elisha. They were also trained in the practice of the intricate ceremonies used in the chanting of the Divine Office.

Oddly enough and irrespective of the Carmelite rule’s exhortation to continual prayer, Teresa states that until reading Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet, given to her later by her uncle, she didn’t know how to go about praying or being recollected. The spiritual books she mentions were by Franciscan not Carmelite authors, and she offers no clear indication of receiving instruction about mental prayer during her novitiate training.

Although Teresa’s decision about her vocation had been costly, once she was inside the monastery she threw herself into the life with zest and found that it, in fact, delighted her. But shortly after her profession, which took place two years later, her health gave way once more. Authors can only speculate about the nature of this illness. Teresa herself attributes it to the food and lifestyle at the Incarnation. After the doctors admitted they could find no cure for her sickness, her worried father decided to bring her to Becedas for treatment by a quack, famous there for many cures. The harsh, painful methods of cure, lasting three months, only aggravated Teresa’s poor condition; in fact they almost killed her. She was brought back, a pitiful sight, to Ávila, where she remained an invalid and paralytic for three years—until, as she devoutly testifies, through the intercession of her glorious father St. Joseph, she was able to walk again. But, probably as a consequence, she suffered the rest of her life from miserable health, a wide variety of illnesses. Antonio Aguiar, after his medical examination of Teresa when she was sixty-seven and nearing the end of her life, claimed that it was impossible to find the focal cause of her illnesses because her body had become a whole arsenal of ailments.

Able to get about again, Teresa next experienced a protracted period of great difficulty with prayer. She writes: “And very often, for some years, I was more anxious that the hour I had determined to spend in prayer be over than I was to remain there . . . and so unbearable was the sadness I felt on entering the oratory, that I had to muster up all my courage” (Life 8.7). According to Father Efrén, her most recent biographer, her difficulties amounted chiefly to a problem of technique. She didn’t realize that the mind, or imagination, and feelings can wander, as St. John of the Cross points out, while the soul on a deeper level many remain quiet in a hardly perceptible contemplation. These difficulties with prayer went on for about eighteen years until she experienced before a very devotional image of the wounded Christ and again while reading from the Confessions of St. Augustine some unusually strong and efficacious feelings of compunction. On these two occasions of peak experience she learned to lose completely any trust she had in herself and place it all in His Majesty.

Compunction is a basic sentiment running through the entire Life. To the undiscerning or inexperienced, Teresa’s outpourings of compunction might seem like exaggerated guilt feelings. But for Teresa, true sorrow does not disquiet, does not agitate. Her compunction consoled her; permeated with humility, it was a gift—quiet, gentle, and in the light (Life 30.9). The Desert Fathers, in fact, constantly exhorted their disciples to pray for the gift of compunction, the gift of tears. These fathers felt that when the soul was softened by this interior weeping, God would give the experience of his light; in the shadow of sorrow was to be found the spiritual joy of enlightenment. And so it was with Teresa. In addition, her feelings of compunction later became more intense through the mystical experience she had of God’s transcendent majesty, and of the shabbiness of sin beside His boundless outpouring love. Spiritual humiliations preceded her spiritual exaltations. “I don’t recall His ever having granted me one of the very notable favors of which I shall speak if not at a time when I was brought to nothing at the sight of my wretchedness” (Life 22.11).

Teresa began, then, at the time of this conversion, to experience passively and in a living way the presence of God in the center of her soul. To qualify experiences in prayer that she couldn’t acquire through her own efforts but that were experienced passively Teresa often used the term “supernatural.” With the onset of the supernatural another, new life began for her. “This is another, new book from here on” (Life 23.1).

Unfamiliar, unusual experiences started to occur, and Teresa, not yet enlightened about the stages of prayer, felt the surge of a new fear. “His Majesty began to give me the prayer of quiet very habitually—and often, of union—which lasted a long while. Since at that time other women had fallen into serious illusions and deceptions caused by the devil, I began to be afraid” (Life 23.2). The fear so increased that, she says, it made her diligently seek spiritual persons for consultations, marking the beginning of her struggles to explain her supernatural experiences. This recourse to spiritual men, and learned ones as well, led ultimately to the writing of her Life.

In the Context of Her Times

Readers today cannot readily grasp the reason for Teresa’s fears, and for those of her confessors, unless they have some nation of the spiritual movements and problems existing in Spain during the sixteenth century. Spain at that time was a world in effervescence not only politically but also spiritually. A longing for deep spirituality took hold among the people themselves and pervaded their lives, having at its center three basic characteristics: a call to the interior life; the practice of mental prayer; and strong leanings toward higher levels of the mystical life. Giving support to this spiritual rebirth was the Spanish Catholic reform initiated before the Council of Trent and championed by the militantly fervent and energetic Cardinal Cisneros. It coincided with the first half of Teresa’s life. Prior to the work of Teresa there were other highly influential reform movements, those of St. John of Ávila, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Benedictines, the Franciscans, and the Dominicans. Newly founded printing presses offered to the people a large supply of literature on prayer and the interior life: translations from the fathers, from the Italian, Flemish, and German schools, from Erasmus, the scholastics, the Protestants, and the humanists. The cross-fertilization of ideas that resulted from contact among these schools and movements was only to be expected.

Previously, medieval Spain had been the most tolerant land in Europe, with Christian, Muslim, and Jew living there side by side in peace and sometimes, in the closest friendship. But such relations did not last; in a country devoid of political unity a common faith was gradually seen to serve as a tool for binding together Castilians, Aragonese, and Catalans. In the constant interplay between politics and religion, the establishment of an Inquisition throughout Spain was seen as a convenient means to further the cause of Spanish unity, deepening the sense of common national purpose.

Now since in the Netherlands Christianity had developed a strong pietist strain, tending to stress mental prayer at the expense of forms and ceremonies, and in the Florence of Savonarola it had acquired a visionary, apocalyptic character, having an appeal to a number of Spanish Franciscans at that time in Italy, Spain was to find devotees for both these types of Christianity—particularly among devout women, often referred to as beatas, and among Franciscans of converso origin. It was only in the early years of the sixteenth century, however, that these types began to inspire another form of religious movement. For along with a push for the reform of the ecclesial community and of individuals, they gave rise to an illuminist movement which produced excellent as well as distorted forms of spirituality. Its members were known as alumbrados.

The alumbrados linked up with the movement of Erasmus in its stress on inwardness and its reaction against the misuse of devotional practices and formalism. They later divided into groups having common trends but distinguished by certain differences. Those known as the recogidos attached highest importance to recollection. This term referred to the effort the soul makes to withdraw from and forget everything. created so as to allow itself to be penetrated by the divine action. The other group, called the dejados, built its spirituality on the idea of self-abandonment.

In the course of years an evolution took place that accentuated the slightly divergent directions. The partisans of recollection were very largely of the religious orders. Their efforts were directed to building up a technique of the interior life and mental prayer for the sake of helping souls along the path to total nakedness of spirit and union with God. These partisans gradually became known as the “spiritual men,” or “men of experience.” Since this recollection was practiced above all among the Franciscans, it was not surprising that a Franciscan friar, named Osuna, should give the movement its definitive expression in his Third Spiritual Alphabet.

The supporters of abandonment on the other hand insisted more and more, sometimes imprudently, on the importance of interior inspiration and passivity and opposed all exterior devotion. This form was promoted particularly by the Franciscan, Isabel de la Cruz and her disciple, a layman, Pedro de Alcaraz.

The heart of the spirituality by the alumbrados is identical with that of other illuminist movements. It brings into greater focus the importance of mental prayer, contemplation, and the manifestations of mystical phenomena. In this sense, Osuna, Laredo, and Teresa herself can be considered among the alumbrados. Where there was danger, it lay in exaggeration, in an exclusivism with which these themes were proposed, and in the practical consequences of such distortions. For example, through mental prayer one acquits oneself of everything else—works of penance, asceticism, and virtue. Furthermore, it was taught that as a means of avoiding any detriment to abandonment, recollection, or quiet, one should abstain from interior acts and exterior works, even from turning one’s thoughts to Christ in His humanity. All of this, it was claimed, as well as obedience, did harm to the union contracted with God through passivity and abandonment. Once united to God through passivity and abandonment a person could not sin. As always this unqualified teaching gave rise to some depraved moral consequences. For example, in 1529 the Inquisition arrested a leading woman illuminist, Francisca Hernández. The circle this attractive woman gathered around her in Valladolid consisted of alumbrados, some of whom, it seems, freed from their qualms by such a theory, brought their spiritual companionship with her down to the level of the physical.

In addition, an unrestrained infatuation with ecstasy and other extraordinary phenomena developed. These experiences were thought of as something to be obtained at all costs. Among some noted but deceptive visionaries of the time was the stigmatic, María de Santo Domingo (1486–1524), known as the Beata of Piedrahita. Her monastery became a center of spirituality and high prayer; she herself wrote a book on prayer and contemplation. But soon the Master General of the Dominicans had to isolate her because of certain aberrations and prophetic revelations. None in the order, with the exception of her confessor, was allowed to converse with her or administer the sacraments to her; nor was anyone allowed to speak about her prophecies, ecstasies, and raptures, except to the provincial.

Another visionary, Magdalena de la Cruz, a Poor Clare with a reputation for holiness, severe fasts, and long vigils, also bearing the stigmata, let it be known that she no longer required any food except the consecrated Host in daily Communion. In an investigation by the Inquisition she confessed to being a secret devil worshiper. Inspired by two incubuses with whom she had made a pact, she became very skillful at all sorts of legerdemain. Through her success in fooling both bishops and kings, she brought the fear of being deceived to all of Spain.

Turning its attention understandably to the activities of the alumbrados, the Inquisition condemned, in 1525, forty-eight illuminist propositions. That same year a decree was promulgated against the heresies of Luther, for the Inquisition suspected that Lutheranism and Illuminism were closely connected in that both movements emphasized internal religion at the expense of outward ceremonial. Anyone suspected of illuminist practices was quickly taken into custody, the net having been thrown wide enough to ensnare even St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was forbidden to preach for three years. Followers of Erasmus as well fell into disfavor.

The driving force behind the revolt of the Comuneros had been hatred of the foreigner and of foreign ways and ideas. Although the Comuneros were defeated, naturally enough the many ideas that inspired them lived on, defended and upheld by the more conservative members of the religious orders. If the friars who ran the Inquisition bridled at alien briefs, they also acted under the impulse of fear, a fear that in a land where heterodox views abounded new heresies might easily take root. The result was a tendency to generate a climate of mistrust and mutual suspicion, one peculiarly propitious for the informer and the spy-victims never being informed of their accusers, and accusers often finding an ideal opportunity for the settlement of old scores. Authors even of non-theological works tended just the same to exercise a kind of self-censorship, if only to keep their writings free of anything capable of misleading the ignorant and the uneducated.

There is no reason to assume, on the other hand, that the Inquisition was the sole source of constraint. Suspicion of those who deviated from the common norm was deeply rooted in sixteenth-century Spain, even though deviation was more normal there than elsewhere. People could be suspect because of their race just as well as because of their faith. In addition to all the concern about purity of faith there was an inordinate concern about purity of blood.

Another prevalent fear in the society of Teresa’s time was fear of the devil. From the fourteenth century the attention of Christians turned more and more to the devil and his powers, and fear of his forces and wiles loomed large. The measured terms and prudent skepticism with which St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century had dealt with the subject of diabolical temptations and marvels had been too readily ignored. The idea gradually grew more widespread that woman, the daughter of Eve, could serve as Satan’s intermediary in order the more easily to tempt man and draw him to evil. The diabolical powers that astounded the masses made the Inquisitors feel that they were at grips with supernatural powers.

If we keep all of this in mind, it is not difficult for us to understand why the times were weighed down by distrust of mental prayer, especially that practiced by women (nuns, beatas, or “foolish women”), by suspicion of spiritual books that fostered the practice, and by an open hostility toward mystical manifestations, symptoms of a certain morbid religiosity or of Illuminism. It is not a wonder that there was skepticism and caution among Teresa’s directors over her unusual experiences. Nor a wonder that Teresa herself, though she experienced certitude during the actual moments when she received these favors, began to feel doubts and fears that she might be a victim of diabolical deception. She herself testifies: “since at that time other women had fallen into serious illusions and deceptions caused by the devil, I began to be afraid. I experienced wonderful delight and sweetness . . . and in addition I was aware of the greatest assurance that this delight was from God, especially when I was in prayer . . . But after a little distraction I began to fear and wonder whether the devil, making me think the experience was good, wanted me to suspend the intellect . . . this fear increased in such a way that it made me diligently seek out spiritual persons to consult” (Life 23.2). Some zealous individuals went so far as to warn her confessor to be careful of her. “I feared that I would have no one who would hear my confession, but that all would run from me” (Life 28.14).

Teresa came to realize in the midst of these suspicions that the safest course of action was to hide nothing from her confessor, to lay open before him the whole state of her soul and tell simply and humbly about the favors she received. She also came to the conclusion that the confessor should be learned and that she should obey. Not without some perplexity, she discovered, in turn, that when she obeyed her confessor’s direction to resist the favors, they only increased (Life 29.7). Through her experience Teresa also acquired the ability to discern when a passive experience was not the result of the workings of God’s grace. “I have so much experience now of when something is from the devil that since he at present sees that I understand him, he doesn’t torment me in this way as often as he used to. He is recognized clearly by the disturbance and disquiet with which he begins, by the agitation the soul feels as long as his work lasts, by the darkness and affliction he places in the soul, and by dryness and the disinclination toward prayer or toward any good work” (Life 30.9).

If people can be misled and deceived by desires for God’s favors in prayer, these favors in themselves are not to be disparaged, being, as they were for Teresa, a source of fortitude and strengthening in faith. The foretaste of heavenly things left her with feelings of detachment she could hardly believe after having had so much experience with her own futile efforts, and it prepared her for her mission. “By these gifts, the Lord gives us the fortitude that by our sins we are losing. If people don’t have, along with a living faith, some pledge of the love God has for them, they will not desire to be despised and belittled by everyone and have all the other great virtues that the perfect possess. For our nature is so dead that we go after what we see in the present. Thus these very favors are what awaken faith and strengthen it” (Life 10.6).

Though Teresa feared greatly that she might be deceived by her experiences, go astray, and lose her Lord, the Inquisition was not the type of thing that could frighten her. When others approached and cautioned her with such fears, she writes: “This amused me and made me laugh . . . And I said they shouldn’t be afraid about these possible accusations; that it would be pretty bad for my soul if there were something in it of the sort that I should have to fear the Inquisition; that I thought if I did have something to fear I’d go myself to seek out the Inquisitors” (Life 33.5). What was considered the most ignominious thing that could happen to a person at that time, Teresa saw as a fortuitous opportunity to submit her spirit totally to the judgment of the Church. Any disgrace involved she did not look upon as a cause for shrinking in terror but as a chance to grow in love for her Lord. Though subsequently accused at different times before the Inquisition, she was never found guilty.

In general it can be said that where there was exaggeration, Teresa in her time was a sign of contradiction; where there were aspects of truth, she was a reconciler. Stressing throughout her life the absolute necessity of prayer and the interior life, her path was that of a devotee of Christ. She found it extremely difficult to be open to any system of mysticism that would demand setting aside the corporeal for the sake of mounting to the spiritual. Devotion to Christ in His humanity was never for her an obstacle to the most perfect contemplation. The obstacle for her was the mistaken notion that all thought of Him must be set aside; to do this, she stated, would impede “raptures and visions and other favors God grants to souls” (Life 22.2). She believes that in trying to rid themselves of any thought of the human Christ so as to approach the Divinity many souls do not pass beyond the prayer of union. Paintings and images of Christ, these simple means, were greatly prized and devoutly venerated by Teresa, devotion never being a roadblock for her. But when God desired to suspend all the faculties in the higher degrees of prayer yes, then the presence of the humanity of Christ is taken away. “Then let it be so—gladly; blessed be such a loss that enables us to enjoy more that which it seems is lost” (Life 22.9). “When one is in the midst of business matters, and in times of persecution and trials, when one can’t maintain so much quietude, and in other times of dryness, Christ is a very good friend because we behold Him as man and see Him with weaknesses and trials—and He is company for us” (Life 22.10). Her spirited defense of friendship with and devotion to Him even in higher stages of the mystical life did not spring from any special talent she had for picturing things with her imagination. “For God didn’t give me talent for discursive thought or for a profitable use of the imagination. In fact, my imagination is so dull that I never succeeded even to think about and represent in my mind—as hard as I tried—the humanity of the Lord” (Life 4.7). Frequently, as a result, in speaking of meditation she has in mind a simple quiet presence to Christ through one of His earthly mysteries. “But one should not always weary oneself in seeking these reflections but just remain there in His presence with the intellect quiet. And if we are able we should occupy ourselves in looking at Christ who is looking at us” (Life 13.22).

News that the sacred images of Christ and His saints were being destroyed in other parts of Christian Europe was a torment to her. Even a simple devotional object like holy water left her with the imprint of its efficacy. “The power of holy water must be great. For me there is a particular and very noticeable consolation my soul experiences upon taking it. Without a doubt my soul feels ordinarily a refreshment I wouldn’t know how to explain, like an interior delight that comforts it entirely . . . and I rejoice to see the power of those words recited over the water so that its difference from unblessed water becomes so great” (Life 31.4). On the other hand, those devotions popular in her day, especially among women, that were downright superstitious, she confesses she never cared for (Life 6.6).

The first two persons Teresa consulted about her experiences decided after examining her written testimony that her supernatural experiences were from the devil. Told not to remain alone, she seldom dared to stay in a room by herself during the daytime. Once, while terrified that the devil would deceive her, agitated and weary and not knowing what to do, she heard the Lord speak to her. “I was given calm together with fortitude, courage, security, quietude, and light so that in one moment I saw my soul become another” (Life 25.18). The words of His Majesty liberated her from the unnecessary and terrible fears of the devil with which society had burdened her. As for devils, she could then say with complete freedom: “I pay no more attention to them than to flies” (Life 25.20). The key element of her teaching about the devil, then, so psychologically and spiritually sound, is the utter uselessness of all fears concerning him. “I don’t understand these fears, ‘The devil! The devil!’, when we can say ‘God! God!’, and make the devil tremble” (Life 25.22). With disapproving words she concludes this little section:

“I fear those who have such great fear of the devil more than I do the devil himself, for he can’t do anything to me. Whereas these others, especially if they are confessors, cause severe disturbance” (Life 25.22).

A deep division slowly developed in Spain between those persons Teresa refers to as learned men (theologians or intellectuals) and spiritual men (those with experience in prayer, who now-a-days might be referred to as mystics or charismatics). The men of learning often scorned quietism, distrusted prayer, and spoke deprecatingly of the mystical life, especially when promoted among women. They denounced to the Inquisition books dealing with all such matters. On the other hand, the spiritual men often looked down on theologians as professionals in the letter of the law but lacking in the spirit; they grimaced at any mention of the competence of these men in spiritual matters and declared them to be inept in the business of guiding souls.

The intellectualist tendency, spearheaded by the schools of Salamanca and by Dominican theologians, was definitively assumed and imposed as the norm of the Inquisition. Two of the more notorious among the theologians were the formidable Dominican, Melchior Cano, and the Archbishop of Seville and Supreme Inquisitor, Fernando Valdes. Cano taught that the practice of mental prayer was a danger not only for the Church but for the Christian republic as well. Rather incredibly for so illustrious a theologian, he reasoned that since it is impossible to devote oneself to both the active and the contemplative life, colleges and universities would have to be suppressed, books closed, and studies annihilated if all were to dedicate themselves to prayer. As for the assertion that the practice of prayer serves for the acquisition of virtue more than any other practice does, he complained that it was ridiculous.

In 1559, Fernando Valdes published an index of forbidden books among which were included almost all books dealing with prayer; cherished spiritual books by the most renowned contemporary Spanish authors as well as translations from classic writers: St. Francis Borgia, St. John of Ávila, Luis of Granada, Osuna, Tauler, Harphius, and Denis the Carthusian. Many of Teresa’s favorites.

The prohibition of Francis Borgia’s Obras del Cristiano, it is interesting parenthetically to note, is perhaps more easily explained in view of the anti-Jesuit sentiments prevalent in the Spanish Church in the sixteenth century. Never one to make facile condemnations, Teresa, despite what others thought, felt high esteem for the fathers of the Society, and she consulted Father Francis personally, finding him to be a wonderful help because, as she says, he was a man of experience, one who “was advancing in the favors and gifts of God” (Life 24.3). In her judgment the Jesuits were spiritual men, men of prayer and experience: “I see that what happened was all for my greater good, that I might get to know and deal with people as holy as are those of the Society of Jesus” (Life 23.3, 9, 15).

Despite the Inquisition and Melchior Cano and the index, this Carmelite nun had little doubt about the central place prayer must take. She views prayer as the source of the good things God worked in her. Turning away from prayer would be the equivalent of shutting the door on God who longs to share His life intimately with us. So her tribute to a spiritual and experienced man like St. Peter of Alcántara is glowing. And she agrees also with him that there are many more women than men to whom God grants His favors (Life 40.8).

Experience in prayer and prudence, she taught, were the more necessary qualifications in the spiritual direction of beginners. “I say that if these learned men do not practice prayer their learning is of little help to beginners” (Life 13.16). On the other hand, she cautioned that anyone experiencing favors, women especially, should consult learned men. “Let not the spiritual person,” she wisely warns and reasons, “be misled by saying that learned men without prayer are unsuitable for those who practice it. . . . For though some don’t have experience, they don’t despise the Spirit nor do they ignore it, because in Sacred Scripture, which they study, they always find the truth of the good spirit” (Life 13.18). Learning was of particular value, then, in the cases of those who had begun to experience God’s favors. The learned man could discern if one were walking in conformity with the truths taught in Scripture. But expertise in Scripture studies doesn’t make up for experience and humility; so there may be much that is baffling to the learned man. He may prove somewhat obtuse in puzzling over the infused loving experience that the psychologist William James, exploring the varieties of religious experience, apologetically but not without sarcasm refers to as an amatory flirtation between the devotee and the deity. But Teresa’s source of wisdom was her Lord, and she has some motherly-sounding advice for the learned man in his quandary: “As for the rest he shouldn’t kill himself or think he understands what he doesn’t . . . Let him not be surprised . . . that the Lord makes a little old woman wiser, perhaps, in this science than he is, even though he is a very learned man” (Life 34.11–12).

Teresa could not be content that men of learning be simply men of learning. She suffered too keenly because she had no one to consult who had experience of the spiritual path she was being drawn along (Life 28.18). Deficient in experience, those she consulted frequently disturbed and afflicted her (Life 40.8). It was Friar Peter of Alcántara, austere and saintly, who ultimately understood her and, through his own experience, was able to explain things, comfort, and encourage her.

With her ideal that men of learning be also men of experience, or spiritual men, Teresa managed to win the illustrious Dominican theologians Garcia de Toledo and Pedro Ibáñez to the path of prayer. Through her charming influence, dedicating themselves earnestly to this newly discovered way, they soon themselves began to experience God’s favors. Contrary to the prosaic teaching of some scholars of the time that many years of arduous asceticism were required before there could be any passivity in the spiritual life, the Lord, Teresa taught, follows no fixed time schedules. Often “the contemplation the Lord doesn’t give to one in twenty years He gives to another in one” (Life 34.11). Instances of this fact she observed, too, in the young sisters entering the newly established monastery of St. Joseph (Life 39.10). Of Pedro Ibáñez, “the most learned man” in Ávila, she writes: “I told him then as clearly as I could about all the visions and my manner of prayer and the great favors the Lord granted me. I begged him to consider my prayer very carefully and tell me if there was something opposed to Sacred Scripture and what he felt about it all. . . . For although he was very good, from then on he dedicated himself much more to prayer and withdrew to a monastery of his order where there was much solitude so that he could practice prayer better” (Life 33.5). When she saw him again and heard of his happiness for having done what intensified his life of prayer, she was the recipient of some of its benefits: “And I, too, was able to agree because previously he assured me and consoled me only by his learning, but now he did so also through his spiritual experiences” (Life 33.6). In chapter thirty-four she tells of how, when she considered the striking talents and gifts of Garcia de Toledo, she felt an uncontrollable longing that he give himself entirely to God and of how this prayer was answered and God began to favor him.

Worth recalling is that in the Spain of that time the faithful were unable to read Scripture, unless, of course, they had knowledge of Latin, since no vernacular edition was permitted. Teresa had to turn to other spiritual books, which usually abounded with quotations from Scripture. When many spiritual books were placed on Valdes’s Index, she was beside herself, wondering what to do. In the midst of her consternation she received a locution from the Lord telling her not to be sad but that He would become for her a living book. Subsequently she began to receive mystical understanding of many truths His Majesty wanted to teach her and, as a result, felt little or almost no need for books (Life 26.5). Because of her consequent lack of spiritual books dealing with prayer, she later wrote her own books to explain and give instructions to her new followers about the path to union with God.

Her First Spiritual Directors

The early group of censors and confessors that played a role in Teresa’s story was made up of about eight persons. Francisco de Salcedo, the first whom she consulted, was a devout layman, who had been practicing mental prayer for about forty years and had diligently followed the course in theology at the College of St. Thomas for twenty years, never, it seems, being able to hear enough about the sacred science. It was he who received the first account of Teresa’s life and sins, the first sketch of her future book. Salcedo, bewildered, in turn consulted the ascetical priest, Gasper Daza. They were the two who concluded that her experiences were from the devil, and unrelentingly held to this conclusion for a number of years.

Following the suggestion of the well-intentioned Salcedo, Teresa next consulted the Jesuits. Those she approached at this time were young, little more than half her age. Diego de Cetina, the first, was twenty-four, and one year a priest. After only a couple of months he was transferred and followed by Juan de Pradanos, twenty-seven, but also only one year ordained. After serving two years as Teresa’s confessor, this second was also transferred. The third, most noted, was Baltasar Alvarez, twenty-five or twenty-six, and one year ordained at the time he consented to accept the task of directing Teresa.

Perplexed and wavering in his guidance of this extraordinary woman, Alvarez was, nonetheless, heroic in standing by her, ever willing and quick to give a boost to her sagging spirits during the crucial years when everything seemed to be going wrong. But his own uncertainties lagged on and were slow to dissipate completely. Only ten years later, when he began to feel drawn himself into the mystical path of prayer, did he win total peace about the experiences of Madre Teresa. Once, years later, he laconically confided to Ribera, pointing to a large pile of books: “All those books I read in order to understand Teresa of Jesus.”

In the group of Dominicans three eminent figures stand out: Garda de Toledo, Pedro Ibáñez, and Domingo Báñez. Garda de Toledo, to whom Teresa relates as to a disciple as well as to a director and confessor, and whom she calls “my father and my son,” is addressed directly in the Life as though Teresa were writing him a letter. A true aristocrat, being a nephew of the count of Oropesa and cousin of the Viceroy of Peru, it was he, most likely, who urged Teresa not to worry about going on at too much length or about getting lost in a multiplicity of details. He had held various offices within his order, including that of provincial of Peru. Having known him from some years before, Teresa met him once again in Toledo, an event she speaks of enthusiastically in chapter 34. Within a short while, through her influence and prayers, he underwent a more complete conversion to God and began to grasp, by his own deeper experiences, a great deal more about spiritual matters.

Pedro Ibáñez was a professor of theology. Little by little Teresa opened her soul to him, and he, in turn, was attracted to prayer. Her account of his death, a death that took place before she finished the second redaction of her book, provides us with a notion of the kind of person for whom she was writing initially: “His prayer had reached such a degree that at the time of his death when he wanted to avoid mental prayer because of his great weakness, he couldn’t on account of his many raptures. He wrote to me a little before he died asking what he should do, because when he finished saying Mass he often went into rapture without being able to prevent it” (Life 38.13).

Domingo Báñez didn’t appear on stage until the spring of 1562. Highly respected for his powers of mind and his doctrinal authority, he had some influence on the definitive redaction of the Life and played a part in the later history of the manuscript, giving a favorable opinion of it to the Inquisition.

Two other persons, who were a consolation and great help to Teresa, were later canonized by the Church: Francis Borgia, the duke of Gandia, who renounced all and entered the Jesuits; and Peter of Alcántara, the Franciscan penitent and reformer.

A Report in Writing

At the time Teresa took up her pen to begin The Book of Her Life she was approaching fifty and had been experiencing a steady flow of mystical grace for close to ten years. She was obliged, finally, to report in writing her unusual and sometimes disconcerting experiences so as to submit all to the judgment of professionals. She did not at once meet with the best of fortune. Neither Salcedo nor Daza were prepared to deal with anything of this kind and depth. Fearful about her experiences, as was mentioned, they obliged her to go from one counselor to another, Jesuit as well as Dominican. These counselors, in turn, asked for detailed written information.

The painful difficulty for Teresa was that, though she could give a report in word and writing of her sins, the mystical life she was experiencing stubbornly resisted all her attempts to describe it. Her final resort was Laredo’s Ascent of Mount Sion, in which she underlined and marked passages that seemed to be telling of something similar to her own experiences. “For a long time, even though God favored me, I didn’t know what words to use to explain His favors: and this was no small trial” (Life 12.6). To give an adequate explanation of what she was experiencing she still needed other graces. “For it is one grace,” she later discovered, “to receive the Lord’s favor; another, to understand which favor and grace it is; a third, to know how to describe it” (Life 17.5).

Still extant among Teresa’s writings are some accounts of her spiritual state written before she wrote her Life. These are the first two of her Spiritual Testimonies. It was Garda de Toledo, the one most eager, it seems from what she says of him, to know all he could about her, who told her to write a more extended and detailed report of her whole spiritual life and not just of her actual state.

In the wealthy, somewhat peaceful surroundings of the palace of Doña Luisa de la Cerda, where she had been staying, at this noble lady’s request and by order of her provincial, Teresa set her mind to the task of putting her history on paper. Satisfied with her first draft without dividing her work into paragraphs or chapters, she presented the finished product to Fr. Garcia in June 1562, before returning to Ávila. The manuscript read more like a long letter, in which she frequently addressed the person for whom she wrote, carried on a dialogue with him, made appeals to his theological competence, and so on.

Unfortunately, the first draft of her Life has been lost. The learned Dominican priest did however read that composition, making some observations about certain phrases that seemed too strongly worded. He most probably shared the manuscript with some who were close friends, such as Ibáñez, and then returned it to its author with the request, again with his customary eagerness for further details, that she not only transcribe it but add an additional section on the foundation of St. Joseph’s in Ávila. This request, which Teresa ascribes to her confessors, reached her at the end of 1563, when she had been given verbal permission to reside in her new foundation—or perhaps later, after the year 1564 had begun. The second draft must have been written somewhat quickly amid the tranquil contemplative life of religious observance that was followed in her new monastery, in a cell stark for its poverty, without any comforts, without even a table or chair.

The revisions she made were not all minor ones. Anxious to make matters clear and herself understood, she added eleven new chapters (from chapters 11 to 22 inclusive) in which, using the allegory of the four ways of watering a garden, she composed a complete little treatise on the degrees of prayer. She added, as well, the requested account of the foundation of St. Joseph’s (chapters 32–36), and then tacked on four additional chapters, most gratifying we surmise to Fr. Garda, that tell of other extraordinary favors she received up until the end of 1565. This latter date accounts for the supposition that it was at this time she finished the book.

The Nature of Her Book

Although usually referred to as such, Teresa’s book is not an autobiography; nor is it an intimate diary. What she deals with mainly are the supernatural (infused or mystical) realities of the interior life. Nonetheless, she does make use of autobiographical material as a backdrop against which she treats of the existence and value of the favors of God. The fragmentary and scattered biographical data comprise two levels, one exterior, the other interior. The difference between these two levels runs much deeper than any met with in everyday autobiographies. The exterior level deals with the historical facts; it is a personal chronicle limited in value. The interior level deals almost exclusively with the mystical facts, facts that by reason of their quality and depth lie beyond the layers of ordinary inner life, beyond the purely historical, and beyond the usual ways in which the psyche functions. It embraces higher states of consciousness, passive perception and love, relations with the transcendent God, intensification of the life of the spirit.

The evident preponderance of interior facts does not, however, prevent an interweaving of both levels that results in the ingenious plan of the book. As for the exterior events of her Life, the first part, 1515–1535, consists of twenty years of family life; the next twenty-seven years, 1535–1562, comprise her Carmelite life in the monastery of the Incarnation; the final period includes three years, 1562–1565, of her life at St. Joseph’s, those initial years in her newly established form of Carmelite life, the expansion of which was to become her mission until her death in 1582.

As for the interior events, her life was by and large of an ascetical type until her conversion experience in 1554 (Life 9.1, 8). For the next two years or so she experienced the first in-pouring of mystical graces: feelings of God’s presence, passive recollection and quiet, and the first tastes of union (Life 9.9; 10.1). About 1557 she received her first locution and rapture (Life 19.9; 25.5). From the following year until 1560 she had to resist persistently, in obedience to her confessor, the locutions and raptures (Life 25.1, 15; 27.2). In June, 1560, she had her first intellectual vision of the humanity of Christ (Life 27.2). In January, 1561, the sacred humanity in its risen form was represented to her in an imaginative vision (Life 28.3). For two and a half years, 1561–1563, she frequently received this favor (Life 29.2). This other more sublime favor belongs to the state she was in at the time of the writing of her book. It was a period of vehement impulses of love, spiritual wounds of love and the transpiercing of the soul. “You can’t exaggerate or describe the way in which God wounds the soul and the extreme pain this wound produces, for it causes the soul to forget itself. Yet this pain is so delightful that there is no other pleasure in life that gives greater happiness” (Life 29.10). It feels that the only remedy for this painful sickness is death.

Before adding the final touches to her work, Teresa was raised to a still higher form of mystical experience. It is an experience, she teaches, that comes much later than all the visions and revelations she spoke of. The soul is lifted far above itself and brought into a vast solitude in which it experiences intense spiritual pain. Just as the powerful spiritual joy of union and rapture suspends the faculties, so in this form of prayer it is pain that suspends them. “Who could give a good explanation of this prayer . . . It is what my soul is now always experiencing. Usually when unoccupied it is placed in the midst of these anxious longings for death; and when it sees they are beginning, it fears that it will not die. But once in the midst of them, it would desire to spend the remainder of its life in this suffering, even though the suffering is so excessive a person cannot endure it. . . . I sometimes really think that if this prayer continues as it does now, the Lord would be served if my life came to an end, . . . I am oblivious of everything in that anxious longing to see God; that desert and solitude seem to the soul better than all the companionship of the world. If anything could give the soul consolation, it would be to speak to someone who had suffered this torment” (Life 20.12–13). This painful spiritual fire never produced the death and subsequent vision of God she longed for. But what is worth pointing out is that the definitive work on her Life poured from her pen while she was at this particular milestone of her spiritual journey. In later works she speaks of a further deepening of her union with God, of a more gentle, peaceful fire in which the soul feels that it already enjoys the possession of God, although not the fruition, in which it goes about so forgetful of self that it thinks it has partly lost its being.

In giving personal testimony of her own experience, Teresa proceeds from her particular case to what can be said on a universal plane. In addition to a personal testimony, then, we have a teaching suitable for all. In giving her testimony she examines her conscience and analyzes her spiritual life, making an extraordinary effort to explain herself, and this truthfully and with simplicity. She tells of both sins and favors—“good things and bad.” With the favors preponderating over the sins the balance between these two constitutive elements of her account is broken. Although this is partly due to the fact that in her story the mystical element did prevail over the ascetical, there is, nonetheless, the added factor that the real object of her testimony is the supernatural; to witness to the existence and the value of these realities of her inner life and to affirm their excellence and importance on a universal plane. The resultant intermingling of testimony and doctrine is a characteristic of Teresa’s method of teaching. Never does she attempt to camouflage her ignorance nor does she need to. She frankly admits the problem she has with explaining herself clearly in writing; that she doesn’t know the precise terminology; that she doesn’t know philosophy and theology. Nor does she even have for her use so much as a Bible. Irrespective of her lack of means she has certitude, the certitude of incontestable experience. “I know through experience that what I say is true” (Life 27.11). A certitude that would not cower before renowned theologians. “The mystery of the Blessed Trinity and other sublime things are so explained that there is no theologian with whom it [the soul] would not dispute in favor of the truth of these grandeurs” (Life 27.9).

Not all possess the charism to speak of the unutterable mystical experience, the grace of speech as Thomas Aquinas calls it (Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 177, aa. 1–2). The Lord gave her his gift only after she had experienced years of stammering and powerlessness. By God’s gift not only were her spoken words imbued with unction but her written ones were as well. Those who knew her testified that reading her words was like hearing her talk; the effect was the same, her manner of writing being the equivalent of her way of conversing. She herself was definitely aware of the divine source from which some of the pages flowed. “Many of the things I write about here do not come from my own head, but my heavenly Master tells them to me” (Life 39.8). She cherished her spiritual books and doesn’t deny the debt contracted from some of them. But, though she thought she was understanding something of what she read in them, she later realized “that if the Lord didn’t show me, I was able to learn little from books, because there was nothing I understood until His Majesty gave me understanding through experience” (Life 22.3). Often in setting about to describe a particular mystical state she begins to experience the very prayer she wants to describe. “I believe that on account of the humility Your Reverence has shown in desiring to be helped by as simple-minded a person as myself, the Lord today after Communion granted me this prayer; and interrupting my thanksgiving, He put before me these comparisons, taught me the manner of explaining it, and what the soul must do here” (Life 16.2). Sometimes the force of the infused love welling up within her leaves a striking mark on what she writes. “Since while I write this I am not freed from such holy, heavenly madness coming from Your goodness and mercy—for You grant this favor without any merits on my part at all—either desire, my King, I beseech You, that all to whom I speak become mad from Your love, or do not permit that I speak to anyone!” (Life 16.4). She longs to attract souls to the practice of prayer and encourages them to persevere: longs that others be afflicted with her madness, and sick with her sickness (Life 19.4; 16.6).

Where did Teresa discover her message? In the story of her own life. There she found the lessons she must write about, the practical doctrine she thought could be helpful to all who might read her work. Unconcerned about abstract notions, conceptualizations, systems of thought, or articulated outlines, she preferred to tell her story and teach her doctrine without any literary artifices or aids.

The Plan of Her Book

Teresa’s book, resembling a long letter, contained no pauses, divisions, intermediate titles, or any initial title. When she tried to divide the work into chapters and add chapter headings she met with unsurprising difficulty. According to the custom of the times each heading had to be a summary of the material covering the ten or twelve folios the chapter comprised, obliging her to figure out the common denominators, central themes, and bookish formulas that her digressions and letter-writing tone would allow. She rarely succeeded, but limited herself to suggesting the general idea of what was being discussed, and then often adding, with engaging simplicity, a few words of praise for what is written, or an ingenuous exhortation to read and allow oneself to be convinced.

With all this in mind, one supposes that the final result would have to be a jumble of themes, held only loosely together by the thread of her personal story. The supposition proves false. Amazingly enough, the structural plan results in a remarkable unity, developed with sharp, impeccable logic, and articulated in four sections expertly joined and almost equal in length. By combining the basic outline with a summary of the contents the following guide can be constructed.

1. She starts off by telling how from a very early age she began to receive God’s abundant grace. She was introduced to the path of prayer and, in her early twenties, even led to some initial experience in mystical prayer. Though she repeatedly frustrated God’s work, even to the point of abandoning prayer and the interior life, His mercy was finally victorious over her own sorry state. When, in the end, she surrendered more totally to His grace, God began His admirable and more immediate work within her soul (chapters 1–10).

2. So wonderful was this work that she finds it necessary, in order that it be understood, to present a detailed exposition of prayer, its nature, degrees, and effects. She goes about this task with the help of an allegory, that of four different ways of watering a garden: using buckets of water drawn from a well, the equal of meditation; using a bucket-type water wheel that has to be turned by hand, the equivalent of the prayer of recollection and quiet; diverting a stream along irrigation ditches, equal to the prayer of the sleep of the faculties; and allowing the garden to be watered with rain from heaven, the equivalent of the prayer of union (chapters 11–22).

3. From the detailed exposition of these forms of prayer the reader understands more easily how the latter ways of watering were accomplished in the soul of Teresa; how the Lord purified her, flooded her with grace, allowed her to perceive His divine presence, hear His voice, penetrate the mysterious abyss of His trinitarian life, and come into contact with the most varied realities of the supernatural world. Throughout the pages of her book a steady series of rare and wonderful things is set before our minds: ecstasies, visions, locutions from God, transpiercing of the soul, infused love of the purest and strongest kind, new wisdom, the flowering of sturdy virtues, premonitions of a probable death of love, and foretastes of beatific life (chapters 23–31).

4. A practical result of this outpouring of divine grace is the fruitfulness of her life of service. She observes that in the earlier period of her spiritual life only three persons, in the course of many years, profited from what she said to them. Later when she had been strengthened through God’s favors, many profited within two or three years (Life 13.9). In Carmel itself, through the foundation of St. Joseph’s she inaugurated a new, more contemplative lifestyle that stressed divine intimacy and was to spread throughout the entire world, serving as yeast, reminding all that if they seek resolutely through prayer the things that are above, they will soon enjoy the possession of perfect love, a blessing more precious than any earthly thing (Life 11.1–2).

She begins, furthermore, to live with surprising intensity the mystery of the communion of saints. She deals on familiar terms with the saints in heaven. Her prayer bears special efficacy for those in purgatory as well as for those on earth; it also gives her dominion over demons (chapters 32–40).

The basic structure of the book, then, consists of four parts:

Main Ideas

Teresa in a letter once called this work of hers the Book of God’s Mercies. The infinite divine mercy, persistent and inexhaustible alongside our shoddy lives, provides the underlying doctrinal support of her Life. Convinced of her own misery, she is convinced too that the story of her life can serve as a dark backdrop for the glorious contrasting light of His Majesty’s mercy. And what mercy; reckless and prodigal and lavish, without any seeming limits to the favors He bestowed.

Her doctrinal thesis rises out of her personal story. The mercy of God reaching out to the misery of humans is not an exception but a law. Mercy and munificence pervade the divine attitude, reaching out toward every soul. She is certain that everyone is called to the summit of the mountain where only the glory of God dwells, that God is keeping watch, waiting for the hour to give. Teresa, or the reader, can put off the hour; yet if and when it arrives, early or late (her early childhood or her late conversion), God will not fail to act with a generous mercy substantially identical with that referred to in the book. “Oh, what a good friend You make, my Lord! How you proceed by favoring and enduring. You wait for others to adapt to Your nature, and in the meanwhile You put up with theirs!” (Life 8.6). It is in this sense that Teresa’s case is a typical one.

For the hour to arrive, an unavoidable condition is required: total surrender to God. “Let Your will be done in me in every way, and may it not please Your Majesty that something as precious as Your love be given to anyone who serves You only for the sake of consolations” (Life 11.12). In addition, sounding like a wiry old Zen master, she insists again and again on determination. The determination must be joined to the surrender, determination to follow Christ in this way even though the dryness may last for one’s whole life (Life 11.10). His Majesty wants this determination, and He is a friend of courageous souls (Life 13.1–3). Courage and determination, on the other hand, do not go without recompense. “But I have seen clearly that God does not leave one, even in this life, without a large reward” (Life 11.11).

Individuals then, must undergo a change in the recesses of their being before they can perceive and follow the delicate urgings of the Spirit, become somewhat like those newly-discovered precision instruments capable of the subtlest forms of reception and transmission. This requires the time and the effort. “The most we have to strive for in the beginning is to care for oneself alone and consider that there is nothing on earth but God and oneself” (Life 13.9).

This brings us to the central theme of her book: mental prayer, which she conceived of as “an intimate sharing between friends . . . taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us” (Life 8.5). This concept of prayer as a relationship between friends who know they love each other and need to be alone in order to share intimately their deepest feelings and thoughts is the simple and strikingly human Teresian characteristic of the path to perfection. Teresa as a young girl and later as a young religious felt powerfully drawn to human friendship. She was highly talented in the art of conversation. But she experienced as well that so much of her conversation, weighty or frivolous, was enervating to the life of the Spirit. “For more than eighteen of the twenty-eight years since I began prayer, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world” (Life 8.3). Feeling powerless in her struggle (for it is necessary that “we see by experience our own worthlessness so that what happened to Lucifer will not. happen to us” (Life 11.11), she one day, while praying in solitude to her God for light about some friendships to which she was attached, experienced her first rapture in which she heard the words: “No longer do I want you to converse with men but with angels.” The words were efficacious. “I have never again been able to tie myself to any friendship or to find consolation in or bear particular love for any other persons than those I understand love Him and strive to serve Him” (Life 24.5–6). Her unusual capacity for friendship was lifted up and transformed. Prayer is an actuation of the theological virtues; charity is friendship of human beings with God. The friendship is intensified through the growth simultaneously of charity and prayer, a growth coinciding with the four ways of watering the garden, the four degrees of prayer, or ways of receiving the inflow of grace.

The dimensions of this development can be grasped by observing the first and last degree. At the outset the prayer begins with an ascetical effort at personal communion with God, either by means of the tedious and often dry exercise of discursive meditation or by patient repetition of vocal prayer—in both cases always making the effort to keep Christ present. These initial efforts reach their culmination in the higher mystical graces, with locutions, visions, and union, when the divine Friend removes some of the veils and reveals His presence.

With the support of these graces, she is ready to discuss another important topic: the sanctifying power of the mystical favors. While writing her Life she is undergoing herself a transfiguration in the depths of her being. Still not clearly aware of what the outcome will hold, she knows with strong conviction that this kind of grace bears with it an incomparable efficacy. Human efforts of the other kind, even though intense and forceful, lie on a more superficial plane, remaining weaker in their effect. Long years of painful efforts and tenacious struggle do not reach into the deep caverns of energy and power as does a brief experience of these supernatural graces. In speaking of mystical understanding she concludes: “. . . one of these favors is enough to change a soul completely” (Life 27.9).

Her mission is the mystical life. She protests against those who belittle its graces or, on the other hand, those who think these graces can be evoked through subtle techniques, that the toad can fly of itself whenever it wants (Life 22.13). No. In regard to the mystical graces one’s whole task consists in accepting the cross of dryness with courage and humility and the freedom of spirit that comes with detachment from consolation; it consists in persevering prayer so as to open to receive what God gives: first the little spark, which in turn will enkindle the large fire. “I say only that prayer is the door to favors as great as those He granted me. If this door is closed, I don’t know how He will grant them” (Life 8.9). And so she goes on—underscoring her basic message, that the favors of the mystical life have an incomparable value. “Let us not cease to believe that even in this life God gives the hundredfold” (Life 22.15).

History of the Autograph

Though the Life was written for her confessors, Teresa wasn’t completely content with the approval they gave of her spirit. There was still another whose opinion she couldn’t rest without; that was St. John of Ávila, the apostle of Andalusia, then considered the most qualified person in Spain to judge spiritual matters. In 1568, after no little difficulty, Teresa was able to get the manuscript delivered to him. After studying it, he returned it to its author with a letter of approbation and praise dated September 12, 1568.

In 1570 she brought her account with her to Salamanca and let some of her confessors there read it: two Jesuits, Martín Gutierrez and Jeronimo Ripalda, and two Dominicans, Bartolome de Medina (who at one time had been highly critical of Teresa but later changed into one of her strong supporters) and Pedro de Herrero. As word spread concerning the secret manuscript, Teresa was urged by certain persons from whom she had received many favors to allow some copies to be made by the duchess of Alba and the bishop of Ávila, for example.

When the capricious and wealthy princess of Eboli, through whose benefactions Teresa was able to found two Carmels at Pastrana, heard news of the secret work, she insisted so emphatically on reading it that Teresa was forced to yield. The princess made no effort to keep the manuscript out of the hands of the servants, and soon this intimate, deeply spiritual account became a subject of gossip and ridicule throughout the entire household by people who were completely out of their depth. After her husband’s death the domineering princess, with much fanfare, expressed her grief by entering the Carmel of Pastrana to become a nun. She caused so much disturbance to the quiet contemplative life of the community that the nuns had to abandon the monastery there for Segovia. This was a blow to the princess’s self-love. She settled the score by denouncing Teresa’s Life to the Inquisition as the work of a heretical, illuminist nun and as being all about visions, revelations and dangerous doctrines. Without delay the Inquisition began its inquiry. A letter was sent on January 2, 1575 to Don Alvaro de Mendoza, bishop of Ávila, ordering him to give over the book he had by Teresa of Jesus. Fortunately the Inquisition let the manuscript fall into good hands. It was Fr. Báñez, one of Teresa’s confessors, who was appointed censor. His judgment of the book contained a matterof-fact statement of approval: “Although this woman . . . is mistaken in some matters, at least she does not intend to lead others into error, for she speaks so frankly of good and bad, and with such desire to be correct in what she says, that one cannot doubt her good intention.”

The autograph, however, was not returned but kept in the secret archives until 1588, after Teresa’s death. At this time, Mother Ana de Jesús, then prioress of Madrid—one of Teresa’s most noted and talented daughters, for whom St. John of the Cross wrote his commentary on the Spiritual Canticle, and who had influential friends at the royal court—managed to obtain the manuscript from the Inquisition in view of the printed edition of Teresa’s works being prepared by the scholarly Augustinian friar, Luis de León. King Philip II later obtained the autograph for his own royal library of the Escorial where it is still preserved. It was placed beside works of two doctors of the Church, St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine, almost as if to predict that Teresa herself, even though a woman, would one day be declared a doctor of the Church. This she was by Pope Paul VI on September 27, 1970.

Teresa’s writings have been continuously popular throughout the world since the time of their first printing, and have been translated into twenty-one languages. With regard to the Life, it was the first of the saint’s works to attract translators. As early as 1611 an English translation of the Life by a W. M. was published in Antwerp. These were the initials of William Malone, a Jesuit persecuted and in exile from Ireland. In this century the most widely circulated English translation of Teresa’s writings has been that done by the British scholar and authority on the Spanish mystics, E. Allison Peers. His translation was from Fr. Silverio’s edition.

A New Translation

Unlike other Spanish classic authors, Teresa had no training as a writer. Her style is thoroughly spontaneous, without the slightest trace of artificiality or sophistication. Writing the way she talked, she reflects the popular language of the Castilian people of her time: natural, direct, colorful, and incisive. As though her thoughts were jostling with each other for position, her sentences often become highly involved with parentheses and digressions, causing her sometimes to lose the thread—which never prevents her from leaping forward quickly and easily to a new thought. Within her sentences she bothers little about preserving the agreement between the parts of speech required for the sake of clarity; she shifts back and forth from singular to plural, from first person to third, from past to present, and so on. Translating Teresa’s sentences is often like working on puzzles, and some of the puzzles we can never be completely sure that we have solved. But by and large her meaning can be determined with certitude from the context. There are, finally, numerous instances of cacophony (ya yo me temia a mí [Life 3.7]); or of the use of semitisms (estaba enferma de grandisima enfermedad [Life 5.2]); of redundant or excessive uses of superlatives (muy honesto en gran manera [Life 1.1]); or of the use of multiple verbs (dejé de holgarme de oirlo [Life 3.1]).

In spite of the grammatical or stylistic shortcomings there is something about the color, spontaneity, and simplicity of Teresa’s style that makes her a delight to read. There is also a subtle wit frequently at work in what she says or in the way she says it. It is not an unusual sight to see Spaniards chuckling to themselves at the reading of Teresa of Ávila in the original.

Those who had the privilege of observing her write have testified that she could do so as rapidly as any public notary, that she never paused to think or correct a word, or cross one out. She once said herself that she wished she could write with both hands so that all the ideas pouring into her head could be got on paper. She doesn’t punctuate, and the paragraph divisions are few.

This is the first volume of a projected new English translation of St. Teresa’s writings. One of the objectives of the Institute of Carmelite Studies in the United States is to provide new translations of the classic writings of the Carmelite saints. As a result it will be possible for the Institute to keep the works of these Carmelites in print in their entirety and always available to the American public, updating them when necessary. We are also taking full advantage of new findings and of all that recent scholarship has contributed to a better understanding of Teresa and her writings.

In this new translation we have striven above all for fidelity to Teresa’s thought; in addition we have sought to capture something of her style, while at the same time rendering her in the language we use today. No purpose would have been served, however, in aiming after a type of literal fidelity that would even translate the shortcomings in Spanish grammar into shortcomings in English grammar. Compromise was our way out of many a difficulty as supposedly it is with most translators. We have tried to bring as much clarity and precision to our rendering as we could while at the same time preserving something of the peculiarities of the Teresian style.

Although no thorough critical text of Teresa’s writings have yet been produced, we were fortunate in having for our use the edition prepared by Fr. Tomás de la Cruz (Alvarez) of the complete works of St. Teresa (Burgos: Edit. El Monte Carmelo, 1971). His punctuation of the text and ample supply of footnotes were an important aid to us in a number of obscure passages. Many of our own notes, with his gracious consent, are based on, or taken word for word, from those in his Spanish edition. For further accuracy we have made use of the new editions prepared by Frs. Efrén and Steggink (Madrid: B.A.C., 1967); Fr. Isidoro (Madrid: Edit. de Espintualidad, 1963) and Fr. Enrique Llamas (Madrid: Edit. de Espintualidad, 1971). For a Teresian bibliography by English authors or of works translated into English see Sebastian Ramge, An Introduction to the Writings of St. Teresa (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963), pp. 124–135. For ongoing Teresian bibliography see Archivum Bibliographicum Carmelitanum (Rome: Teresianum, 1956–) and also Bibliographia lntemationalis Spiritualitatis (Rome: Teresianum, 1969–).

The introductions by Tomás Alvarez in his Spanish edition of the works of St. Teresa as well as many pages of research gathered by my colleague Otilio Rodriquez were especially helpful to me in preparing the introductions for this volume. I am grateful to these two Teresian scholars and also to some other persons in particular who have labored to make this book possible: Adrian J. Cooney for his careful reading of a good portion of the manuscript and his many valued suggestions about the English rendering; Joseph Crawford for his editorial work; Sister Josephine for the index; our typist Jean Mallon; and our printer Robert Rowe. Finally, I would like to thank those many others who by their constant encouragement helped us to reach this first stage of a long and so far to us thoroughly rewarding work.

For some important studies of various subjects covered in the above introduction concerning the Spain of Teresa’s time see R. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain 1501–1621, Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1937); J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716, A Mentor Book (New York: The New American Library, 1966); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: The New American Library, 1965); P. Tommaso della Croce, “Santa Teresa e i movimenti spirituali del suo tempo,” Collana Fiamma Viva, vol. 4 (Rome: Teresianum, 1963), pp. 9–54; Dictionnaire de Spintualité, s.v. “Espagne: l’Age d’ôr, “by Adolfo de la M. de Dios; and Ibid., s.v. “Illuminisme,” by Eulogio de la Virgen del Carmen.

K.K.