Teresa of Ávila

Works

• 1565The Book of Her Life

  An autobiography written at the request of her confessors, describing her conversion and four degrees of prayer through the image of watering a garden; published in 1588.

• 1577The Interior Castle

  Describes the soul as a castle of crystal with seven dwellings through which prayer leads inwards, from self-knowledge to spiritual marriage with God.

Position

Teresa is on the map as a writer of Christian mysticism who is still widely read and as a reformer whose foundations shaped her order. Her books describe inner prayer as friendship with God and analyse its stages with great precision: in the “Life” as four ways of watering a garden, in “The Interior Castle” as seven dwellings of a soul made of crystal, from self-knowledge to spiritual marriage. The way, she insists, begins with humility and self-knowledge and is tested in love of neighbour, not in extraordinary experiences; she had learned the prayer of recollection from Francisco de Osuna’s “Third Spiritual Alphabet”. She wrote in plain, conversational Spanish for her sisters, at a time when the Inquisition distrusted mental prayer, spiritual teaching by women and devotional books in the vernacular; Alison Weber (1990) has shown how a self-deprecating “rhetoric of femininity” allowed her to teach under these conditions. William James drew on her in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) as a witness to mystical states, while criticising what he saw as the narrowness of her piety. Edith Stein read the “Life” in 1921 before her baptism and wrote a short study of her (1934); Jacques Lacan took Bernini’s statue of Teresa as an image of feminine jouissance (Seminar XX), and Julia Kristeva devoted a long narrative study to her (2008).

Life & context

Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Ávila on 28 March 1515; her paternal grandfather, a Toledo merchant of Jewish descent, had been reconciled by the Inquisition in 1485. In 1535 she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila and took her vows in 1537. A severe illness left her paralysed for a time. Around 1554, before an image of the wounded Christ and while reading Augustine’s Confessions, she underwent a conversion, followed by visions that her confessors at first distrusted. In 1562 she founded the convent of San José in Ávila, the first house of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, with stricter enclosure and poverty; from 1567 further foundations followed in Castile and Andalusia, seventeen in all, and with John of the Cross she began the reform of the friars. Conflicts within the order led in the mid-1570s to an order to withdraw to a convent, and she chose Toledo; the papal nuncio Filippo Sega called her a restless, wandering woman. From the mid-1570s her autobiography lay with the Inquisition. She died in Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582. Luis de León edited her works in 1588; she was canonised in 1622 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

Further main works

• The Way of Perfection (Camino de perfección, c. 1566)
• The Book of the Foundations (Libro de las fundaciones, 1573–82)