THE LIFE OF ST. TERESA COVERS, almost exactly, her first fifty years. In our introductions to later volumes, within the context of her other writings, more information will be given about Teresa’s life, interior and exterior, as it progressed after 1565. In this volume we are including a collection of other written reports left by Teresa about her spiritual experiences. Besides the six longer accounts of her state of soul, there are in this group numerous shorter reports and fragments in which she usually describes some particular grace or counsel given her by the Lord. It would seem from a statement made by María de San José and from Spiritual Testimonies 24 that these shorter accounts were written down at our Lord’s command.
Three of the longer accounts (Spiritual Testimonies 1–3) were composed by Teresa for her confessors before she completed her Life; the other three were written much later. Of the two written from Seville in 1576 for Rodrigo Alvarez, S.J., one (Spiritual Testimonies 58) is a reply to an investigation by the Inquisition. The final long account was destined for a former confessor, the bishop of Osma, and written in 1581, the year prior to that in which Teresa died. These lengthier accounts of her spiritual state of soul provide an often neglected rich source for students of the mystical life. It is particularly enlightening to note the difference between her spiritual state as manifested in the report of 1560 and that shown in the report of 1581. There are also some excellent descriptions of mystical prayer and, in Spiritual Testimonies 59, an interesting summary of its stages.
The writings in this collection taken as a whole have two common characteristics: a thematic unity, since all of them consist of affirmations about Teresa’s own spiritual life; and a chronological discontinuity, for they were written at different times.
No consensus exists with respect to the place this collection should occupy in the Teresian corpus. If one follows a chronological order, the collection has to be divided up and the various accounts put in different places throughout Teresa’s writings. Doing so prejudices the value the group of writings has as a collection and as an important complement to the Life.
Some editors, on the other hand, though keeping the accounts together, have tried to follow a thematic order, dividing the group into two sections: one, under the title of Relations, which comprises the longer accounts; the other, under the title of Favors of God, which comprises the shorter accounts which deal with instances of particular graces more than with Teresa’s spiritual state in general.
In this new translation we have opted for keeping these writings together under the general title of Spiritual Testimonies and for arranging them in chronological order rather than thematic, placing them in this first volume after the Life. These testimonies have been compared to X-rays of Teresa’s soul, and, thematically, are indeed a complement to the Book of Her Life. Her Life contains accounts of her state of soul as well as descriptions of many of the favors the Lord granted her up to the time of the completion of the book in 1565. The three first accounts could serve as a kind of foreword to the Life, and all the others would of necessity be a kind of epilogue since they deal with facts or experiences occurring after the book was finished. Since the word “relations” used in the title of former English translations is ambiguous, the general title Spiritual Testimonies, though new, seems more appropriate. These writings, as in the case of the Life, do indeed have the value of being testimonies to Teresa’s experience of God and of His action within her.
We have followed the text presented in Fr. Tomás Alvarez’s edition (Burgos: Edit. El Monte Carmela, 1971). He bases his text on those autographs still preserved (Spiritual Testimonies 4; 5; 12; 35; 36) and on the text of Ribera taken for the most part from copies in the Ávila codex. The headings at the beginning of each testimony were added by us as a convenience for the reader.
K.K.