THE autobiography of Santa Teresa is the story of a most remarkable woman’s entry into the religious life, and at the same time a literary masterpiece that is, after Don Quixote, the most widely read prose classic of Spain. It is a piece of candid self-revelation, written in the liveliest and most unforced conversational prose. The saint herself states that it was composed in the first place at the request of her confessors, who required some account of her rare experiences to be circulated among those religious of a like bent, and who needed it also, in a day when accusations of heresy were frequent, as proof positive of her complete orthodoxy and utter obedience to the teachings and dictates of the Church. But although she herself protests that she lacked the time and leisure for her unwelcome task, and that she would have been better employed spinning or doing the household work in her poor convent, she was undoubtedly a born writer to whom words came freely and fast, and who took a craftsman’s delight in them.
The book as we have it gives an account of Teresa’s life up to her fiftieth year, 1565, but it was certainly begun some seven or eight years before the date when it was asked for by her confessors, and was addressed in the first place to those four close spiritual friends whom she mentions in Chapter 16 as her fellow members of ‘the Five’. Much of it was, in fact, written at Toledo, during the time that Teresa spent there as the guest of the wealthy Doña Luisa de la Cerda, about whom she tells us in Chapter 34. In its complete form, however, it first began to pass from hand to hand at the beginning of 1565, and soon Father Bañez, the saint’s confessor at the time and her firm ally and friend, was reproaching her for putting it about rather too freely. He realized, however, that the fault was not hers. Fashionable Spain was extremely interested in this active and forthright reformer of convents.
Much of the book’s immediate success was the result of its sheer good writing. Teresa’s thoughts seem naturally to clothe themselves in simple, direct, and picturesque language. Even when she is describing a difficult state of conscience or a very rare supernatural experience, she never fails to find the right homely words, the simple everyday metaphors, that will make it clear to readers whose life has never risen to such levels. Her language flows, as does that of Cervantes, like good talk; and she shares with Cervantes also a taste for proverbs and pithy country sayings. Teresa was a woman of little reading. The Imitation of Christ and Saint Augustine’s Confessions were two of the few books that she knew well. In her youth, as she tells us, she had been fond also of the romances of chivalry; and perhaps at the same time she read ballads and popular poetry. Latin she could hardly understand; any Latin quotations that occur in the Life are spelt so phonetically as to be almost unrecognizable. Her vocabulary, therefore, is that of a plain person; all grand words are suspect to her. Even many religious terms are lumped together in her mind under the heading of ‘mystical theology’, a theoretical science of which she confessed herself to be ignorant.
If Teresa’s spelling of Latin follows its own phonetic rules, so does her writing of Spanish. Her punctuation was weak, even to the point of non-existence, and this defect has been only imperfectly remedied by her editors. One is seldom in doubt as to what she is saying, but often puzzled by the syntax of her sentences, which abound in unrelated clauses. She does not appear to have re-read what she wrote. Several times in the course of the Life she remarks that she may have mentioned something before. It does not seem to have occurred to her that she could have turned back to see. She never verified her dates, and frequently lost the thread of her narrative when following a digression of consuming interest. A few liberties, therefore, have had to be taken in this translation. Sometimes punctuation has been made to conform with sense, in defiance of the best scholarly readings; and sometimes a bare ‘this’ or ‘that’ has had to be expanded, since the subject to which it refers has not in fact been mentioned for several pages.
Although a natural writer and a mistress of metaphor, proverb, and telling image, Teresa was not yet, in this first of her works, expert in literary construction. While setting out to describe both the inner and the external events of her life, she was chiefly concerned to tell of her conversion to the contemplative life, at the age of forty, and her subsequent progress in it. She was not content, therefore, to follow a purely autobiographical thread for very long. For the first ten chapters she does so, though without dwelling in great detail on any worldly event, or giving more than a passing description of the people she met. Proper names are very few, most of her friends being referred to merely as ‘a cousin of mine’, or’ a certain learned Jesuit who was then my confessor’, or merely, ‘a sister in the convent where I was’. Nevertheless these almost anonymous characters are frequently called to life in a single line.
Teresa was no cold intellectual, but quickly became involved in the life and problems of anyone with whom she came into touch. We see her compelling a priest who was living in sin to throw away the amulet with which his mistress had ‘enchanted’ him, and to set about mending his ways. We learn too, later in the book, of the alarm with which various other priests viewed her when they began to hear her confessions. They were very much afraid that she might become attached to them in the worldly sense: a suspicion which she found quite absurd. Yet many passages in her works and letters testify to the warmth of her affections, and right at the end of her life she was not ashamed to confess her deep disappointment when an old friend failed to accompany her on a journey. ‘I must confess to you, Father,’ she wrote to him,’ that the flesh is weak, and it has felt this more than I should have wished – in fact a great deal.’
When Teresa reached that point in her autobiography at which the contemplative life became her true vocation – the moment that she thought of as her second conversion – she broke off her narrative, and for a dozen chapters enlarged on the differences between the successive stages of mental prayer. This section of the book is built up about her famous simile of the ‘Waters’, and it is not until she has fully worked it out that she returns to the story of her life, to tell of her meeting with some Jesuits who were able to confirm the validity of her spiritual experiences, which all her previous confessors had called into question. But soon she is digressing again on the subject of ‘locutions’ (supernatural words that fall upon the inner ear with the authenticity of actual speech); and for five more chapters she deals exclusively with the inner life, not passing on until Chapter 29 to the story of her first foundation, that of the convent of St Joseph’s, Ávila, and to the reforms that she inaugurated in the constitution of her own Discalced (or barefoot) branch of the Carmelite Order.
In Teresa’s last eight chapters, the balance between outer and inner events is at last achieved, and we leave her, at the end of her book, seemingly bent on a life of austere withdrawal from the world. In fact, Teresa’s Life ends just when she has passed the watershed between her years of spiritual endeavour and those in which she combined the religious life with one of great public activity. In these later years she wrote two books as great as the one before us: The Foundations, which tells the tale of her journeys and of the sixteen houses that she founded after St Joseph’s, and The Interior Castle, otherwise called The Mansions, an analysis of inner prayer and spiritual states which is probably her masterpiece. But for readers who do not unquestioningly accept either Roman Catholic dogma or those beliefs about the religious life to which she subscribed, the autobiography is the more interesting and approachable book. In it we see how a self-willed and hysterically unbalanced woman, who seemed on the way to becoming a worldly nun of the conventional sort, was entirely transformed by profound experiences. At first she seems to have viewed her vows as no more than an insurance against the complete loss of her soul. This she feared as, when younger, she had feared the loss of her reputation. But, for the rest, the impulse which had driven her as a girl to the religious life had almost completely died away. How she gained strength to combat her own waywardness, and gradually grew, almost unaided by her ignorant confessors, to understand and assess the spiritual experiences that befell her, is the central theme of her book. One sees her impelled by forces that she could not even pretend to control; and as she describes them, one comes to understand something of their nature. For Teresa never failed to remember as she wrote those who were but beginners on the spiritual path along which she had progressed at so giddy a rate.
Teresa is, therefore, the best of the mystical writers for those who do not accept or understand the relationship between God and man that is assumed by the mystics of all ages and countries. She is careful to explain everything that she can, and she dwells longer on the early steps than on the later. Some of her writings are addressed to the novices of her convents, but here the audience that she has in mind is made up of those many priests and laymen of her acquaintance whose outward dignities had far outgrown their spiritual stature. It is for this reason that her Life has worn so well. Her pupil, St John of the Cross, is a more brilliant and poetic writer, possibly also a person of profounder religious experience, but he has little to say to the beginner; he is always on the heights.
Teresa begins with the picture of herself as one without any true vocation at all. As a young woman, she has attempted to advance in prayer from mere petitions and the recitation of the Office to the stage of inner contemplation. She had tried to calm her busy mind and to make contact with some deeper reality. But, working without help from anyone who had trodden this path before, she had failed lamentably. Attacked by vomiting, heart-spasms, cramps, and partial paralysis, and wracked by pains that were probably functional, not organic, she had been compelled to give up her spiritual exercises, to stop praying, and even temporarily to leave her convent in search of a cure. One may suspect that in her unguided ascetic practices she had subjected herself to undue strains, and that in her attitude to prayer in general, she had been grasping for results, in the shape of visions, locutions, and other ‘sweet-nesses’, instead of working, as she afterwards learned to do, without thought of rewards. Her illness seems, at any rate, more readily explicable on these lines than in any strictly medical terms.
Teresa seems all her life to have been overwhelmed with a sense of her own wickedness, which may have contributed to her sorry state. This habit of self-reproach, which our century has learnt to think of as pathological, acts as a constant refrain to her writings. In every chapter she harps on her unworthiness. When she confesses at the opening of the book to such childish frivolities as a liking for scents and pretty clothes, to the enjoyment of gossip and the habit of seeking garrulous company, she comes near to alienating the modern reader’s sympathy. If such disproportionate importance is to be attached to these slight and common failings, how inhumanly bleak the opening steps on the path to God must be! Then, when the Saint expresses her surprise that she still feels a worldly attachment to her sister, the twentieth century reader is likely to be more surprised still. To him it may seem that the spiritual life cannot, at least to-day, be lived in isolation from the world, its obligations and affections, and that what it demands is not a change of circumstances but a change of heart or attitude.
Teresa, as has been noted, was a woman of strong affections. Her family played a great part in her life, from her father to whom, in his last years, she dared not confess her defection from the life of prayer down to her niece, the little Teresa, who became one of her nuns at the age of sixteen, who accompanied her on some of her most difficult journeys, and who acted at the last as her secretary. Teresa’s fight to free herself from worldly ties was hard and far from successful.
Her references to heretics too, to the rascally Lutherans who were, as she saw it, close allies of the devil, leave one aghast. The narrowness of her outlook was in no way less than that of the Inquisitors who were at that time condemning Jews to the stake for preferring their own faith, which had also produced its mystics, to Christianity, to which their fathers had been forcibly converted. Against such bigotry neither Teresa nor John of the Cross raised the least protest; nor did they even suspect that in the very cities where they walked Mohammedan mystics, less narrow and exclusive in their beliefs than they, had flourished in the days of the Moorish emirates.
It is necessary to discount those facets of Teresa’s thought that divide her from the modem world, and also from the less dogmatic mystics of the East, from Plato and Plotinus, from the Greek Church fathers. If she had seen things in their way, Teresa would have incurred accusations of heresy, like those that had been levelled against the great fourteenth-century mystic, Meister Eckhart. She pursued her path close beneath the shadow of her Church’s dogma, and by continually dwelling on it unconsciously shaped the imagery of her visions and locutions to suit its teaching. Often she protested that if her experience taught her one thing and the Church another, she was on the side of authority.
Clearly the visionary’s mind must mould the ineffable forms that touch his inner eyes and ears; without some translation into the language of the discursive mind and the common emotions, they could not be expressed at all. Teresa uses the conventions most natural to her, those of the Counter-Reformation. When Christ appears to her he takes the form of some picture that she knows; and the little devils that she sends flying with splashes of holy water are the ugly little negroes that she had seen carved on pew-ends or on the capitals of columns. Her psychological understanding, on the other hand, is entirely authentic. In her analysis of those thoughts and imaginations whose perpetual stirring is a hindrance to visions, and in her symbolic explanation in terms of the different Waters of the emotional union that can take place between some depth within and some depth without – which is for her the soul’s union with God – she is absolutely true to her experience. What her confessors had led her to expect were visions that appeared before the physical eye and words that struck the actual ear. But what she met with was nothing like this, and she said so. Again, she had been warned against the activities of the imagination, and many of her experiences had been condemned as imaginary, or even as temptations of devilish origins. But in her moments of rapture she was able to see the actual workings of her imagination and of her common intellect, at first stilled by the impact of this new state, but later returning and attempting to disrupt it. Teresa was a very acute analyst of exalted states, from whom one can learn a great deal about these tracts of the mind to-day lumped together under the general name of the unconscious. She knew what was genuine and what was not, and this she said too.
The unconscious, in its narrowest connotation, makes occasional incursions into Teresa’s thoughts. There is that vision of hell as a narrow muddy passage leading to a cupboard in a wall, which is pure Kafka. Teresa was haunted by these hideous visions, as well as racked, throughout her life, by persistent symptoms of the disease that had nearly killed her as a young woman. But far more constantly she was transported into states far above those experienced by ordinary men. In these she knew, as if she had been told by God’s own voice, what she should do and say in any situation. The foundation of St Joseph’s was carried through under this divine inspiration, as was the writing of large parts of the Life and of her other works. She did not herself know how to explain her loftiest experiences, but left it to God to explain them through her. There are several descriptions by her fellow nuns of moments when they saw her with glowing features, writing as if at a heavenly dictation. But not all the supernatural states that possessed Teresa were equally welcome to her. She herself tells how, in prayer, she would be lifted into the air, to her own consternation and to the alarm of those sisters who were praying beside her in the choir.
These mysterious levitations were matched after her death by the equally mysterious incorruptibility of her body. Both are well-known phenomena which occur in the histories of many saints and that can only be accounted for by some actual change in the physical structure that takes place at the same time as spiritual transformation. In Teresa’s case the fragrance that surrounded her uncorrupted body led to most disgraceful results. In the wild rush to acquire sacred relics, various of her limbs were torn from her corpse. Her old friend Father Graciàn, who had only lately so disappointed her by failing to accompany her on a journey, inaugurated her dismemberment by cutting off one of her hands.
The events of Santa Teresa’s life up to her fiftieth yeai are set out, though not with perfect accuracy, in the autobiography. A few facts and dates, therefore, are needed to make clear many points that she left imprecise. She was born in the neighbourhood of the little, walled Castilian town of Ávila, which had been a Christian stronghold in the Moorish wan, on 28 March 1515, and named Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada. She was of mixed Jewish and Christian blood, her grandfather Juan Sánchez of Toledo being a relapsed Jewish convert. She was one of a large family, the daughter of her father’s second wife. Of her mother’s early death, her sister’s marriage, and her entry as a boarder, at the age of sixteen, into the school run by the local Augustinian sisters, we are told in the autobiography. She was probably twenty-one when she took the Carmelite habit, and for about twenty years after that engaged in a continuous ‘strife and contention between converse with God and the society of the world’. Her resulting breakdown in health is fully described by herself. At twenty-five, she seems to have been a complete invalid, and it was not till she was forty that the principal symptoms of her malady disappeared. Some time during this interval she found, as she tells us, the work of Francisca de Osuna, a Spanish Franciscan who was her contemporary though twenty years her senior, on the practice of that first stage of the contemplative life, the prayer of quiet. But at the time of her father’s death in 1543, she seems, at least temporarily, to have abandoned her efforts to achieve it. It was not till 1555, when she was already forty, that some new and sporadic attempts bore fruit. It was then that she first read St Augustine’s Confessions, which threw light for her on her own experiences, and it was at this time that she began to meet the Jesuits who had just established a college at Ávila.
Teresa’s arguments with her old confessors, this acquiring of new friends, her advance to the stage of ‘intellectual vision’, and the beginnings of her Reform movement, which fill the years from 1557 to 1562, are fully described in the autobiography, which also says something about the processes of its composition. It was, as has been said, completed in its final form by the end of 1565, and on its last pages she speaks of her life as passing as if in a dream. Her supernormal experiences were the reality, and outward events moved her not at all. Her dearest concern seems to have been the instruction of her thirteen nuns at St Joseph’s, for whom she composed her second book, The Way of Perfection. At the same time, also, she began to write more fully of her early spiritual development in a series of ‘Relations’, intended, like the Life, to be read by her confessors.
In the year 1567 Teresa was impelled to continue with her work of reformation and to begin a series of new foundations, the last of which was to be made in the last months of her life. Far from retiring into a life of contemplation, she was violently projected into one of great activity. But just as she had positively known it to be God’s will that St Joseph’s should be founded and flourish despite every obstacle, so she was filled with the certainty that the growth of the Discalced Carmelite Order and its eventual separation from the Unreformed Order was a divinely ordained task. The difficulties that she met were even greater than those of her first foundation; her strength in combating them even more flint-like. The tale of this work, of the countless difficulties encountered and the repeated journeys involved is told in her Book of Foundations and further illustrated by the many letters that have been preserved from this period of her life. From that covered by the autobiography hardly any survive, but from 1573 onwards she was in constant correspondence with a number of ecclesiastics, with nuns of her Order, and with certain great men and ladies to whom she looked for help in the form of endowments and assistance in combating the attacks which she and her Order sustained. Most of these were at the hands of conservative churchmen, but on one occasion she found an even more difficult enemy in the shape of a famous benefactor. The Princess of Eboli, a rich woman of dubious morals who was reputed to be the King’s mistress, wrecked one of Teresa’s houses by taking up her residence there in a fit of hysterical grief at the death of her husband. Teresa and her nuns were forced to retire.
The writing of the Foundations was followed by that of The Interior Castle, an amplification of those chapters in the Life that describe the progress of the soul in terms of the various ‘Waters’. This book, which develops another metaphor, that of the soul’s seven ‘Mansions’, is more mature in its experience than the Life, and more uniform in its composition. It was written at great speed in 1577, as the outcome of a vision that came to Teresa on Trinity Eve of that year.
From 1568 onwards Teresa was greatly strengthened by the formation of a company of Discalced friars who accepted her reform, chief among whom was her friend and pupil Juan de Yepes (1542–91), known to us as St John of the Cross. He became spiritual director of St Joseph’s in 1572, but was seized and thrown into prison by his Unreformed brothers a year later. He was subjected to great hardships, and remained in captivity for fourteen years. Teresa herself was on occasions forced to resort to the highest authority in the land, Philip II himself, to save herself from similar treatment. The Unreformed Carmelites fought hard with ecclesiastical backing to suppress the Discalced, but Rome and the Court, as well as several grandees, were on Teresa’s side.
Teresa’s dealings were throughout her life chiefly with the great, to whom she stood up as an equal. Despite her initial reluctance to take office or responsibility, once she did so she prided herself on her reputation as a sound organizer and a good business woman. When negotiating a site for one of her new foundations she was careful to guard against any possible interference from the landlord that might one day endanger the prioress’s freedom of action; and in attracting and selecting novices with sufficient dowries to put her nunneries on a sound footing, she was careful not to incur any passengers in the spiritual sense. Every one of her nuns she said, must be fit to be a prioress.
Teresa was not only a sound woman of business, but also a born intriguer; and one can still see the delight with which, during the persecution of her Reformed houses, she would coin fictitious names for her friends, in case her letters should fall into the hands of the Unreformed faction; whom she calls the ‘grasshoppers’, in contrast to her own Order, the ‘butterflies’. But nowhere, even at the height of her troubles, does she show, in her letters or in the Foundations, any hint of malice or any real hatred of her rivals. True, when exposing some tale of spiritual malingering on the part of a nun, or some attempt to gain more than her share of her superior’s attention, she will speak of her own malicious nature. But even when she is most ruthless in her criticism of her ‘daughters’, or in combating some hostile ecclesiastic, she never indulges in those personal spites and slanderings that are the current coin of worldly rivalries.
‘One of the things that makes me happy here,’ she wrote from her foundation at Seville, ‘is that there is no suggestion of that nonsense about my supposed sanctity. That allows me to live and go about without fear that the ridiculous tower of their imagination will come tumbling down on top of me.’ A year or two later she is congratulating herself on just beginning to be a true nun.
Nevertheless the world persisted in believing that Teresa was a saint, and in 1622, a bare forty-five years after her death, she was canonized. In 1814, when Spain, with the help of its English allies, was driving out its French conquerors, she was proclaimed the national saint of her country.
The Life was first published together with other works of Teresa’s in 1588, under the editorship of the poet and religious writer Luis de León. Two translations into English were made by Roman Catholic exiles in the seventeenth century, and one in the nineteenth century by David Lewis. The most recent and most authoritative, which follows the authoritative Spanish texts, is that of the late E. Allison Peers, which forms the greater part of a volume of his Complete Works of Santa Teresa. But, hitherto, the book has not been available in England in a cheap or handy form. The best biographies of Santa Teresa are Allison Peers’ short sketch Mother of Carmel (S.C.M. Press, 1945) and an ampler French work by Michelle Audair which has been translated as Saint Teresa of Avila (Burns Oates, 1953). Allison Peers’ two-volume edition of the Letters (Burns Oates, 1951), however, probably makes even more lively biographical reading.
May 1956 J.M.C