“Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing;
God alone never changeth;
Patient endurance
Attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting
Alone God sufficeth."

Liturgy of the Hours (Nada te Turbe) by St Teresa of Avila

 

In 1576, at the age of 61, St Teresa of Avila posed for the young Italian painter Juan de la Miseria, who had been commissioned to paint portraits of the nuns of the recently founded Barefoot Carmelite convent in Seville, Spain. On seeing the finished picture, Teresa is said to have complained that the artist had made her appear “old and bleary eyed”.

Given that de la Miseria was not particularly gifted, Teresa’s comment is really quite telling for here was a woman who had an acute appreciation of the power of personal image. In her seminal work Foundations, she writes: “We are in a world in which it is necessary to consider the opinions others have of us in order that our words take effect.”

Through her writings, this remarkable Renaissance woman had already painted a picture of herself; and it is via the power of these, her own lively words, that Teresa wished to be regarded both by her contemporaries and by posterity.

This was crucial, for the world in which Teresa lived and moved (Renaissance Europe) was fundamentally a world that was represented by men, and men alone. If a woman was to be represented at all, it was to be through a man’s words, music or paintings as history has so amply shown. In fact, it was not until the 20th century that women, for the most part, began to present their own lives in text without male direction.

Yet so remarkable was the life and the influence of this 16th century Spanish nun and mystic, that she continues to generate attention not just in the Catholic faith and other religious disciplines but in the secular world as well, as the ideal of female heroic action.

The English Victorian novelist George Elliot modelled her heroine Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871–72) on Teresa, even writing briefly about the life and works of the saint in the prelude to her novel. “Teresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life,” wrote Elliot admiringly. “She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.”

Several of France’s most important thinkers, including Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have delved into Teresa’s mystical experiences, attributing a raft of psychoanalytic experiences to them. And in more recent times, Teresa was made a Doctor of the Church (along with Saint Catherine of Siena) by Pope Paul VI, making them the first (and to date the only) two women ever to be awarded this distinction by Rome.

So what was it about the life and works of this extraordinary woman, who was canonised a mere 40 years after her death in 1622 (and who, in 1814 became Spain’s patron saint), that makes her so exceptional?

Early life

Teresa was born on March 28, 1515, in the little picturesque walled Castilian town of Avila, which had been a Christian stronghold during the recent Moorish wars. She was christened Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada and was of mixed Jewish and Christian background. Her grandfather Juan Sanchez of Toledo had been a marrano (relapsed) Jewish convert. Teresa’s father, Don Alonso, on the other hand, had successfully assimilated into Christian society and had even bought a knighthood, while her mother, Beatriz (Don Alonso’s second wife), took great care to raise little Teresa as a pious Christian child and is described by the saint in her autobiography Life: as a “woman of many virtues and who endured a life of great sickness and was extremely modest”.

The family, by all accounts, was a large and happy one, comprising four girls and nine boys. Like her parents, Teresa enjoyed reading — especially the lives of the saints — once running away from home when she was seven with her brother Rodrigo to find martyrdom among the Moors, before being rescued by her uncle on the outskirts of the town.

When she was a little under 12, Teresa’s mother died. The saint writes: “When I began to realise my loss, I went in my distress to an image of Our Lady and, weeping bitterly, begged Her to be my mother.”

As she grew up, however, Teresa became more interested in pretty clothes, wearing perfume and gossiping with her cousins, whom she impressed with her witty conversation. “I began to wear finery,” she wrote “and to wish to charm by my appearance. I took great care of my hands and my hair, using perfumes and all the vanities I could obtain and I obtained plenty of them for I was very persistent.”

Taking the veil

In 1531, Teresa became a boarder at Our Lady of Grace convent, which was run by the local Augustinian Sisters. Her time there was a very happy one but after 18 months, sickness forced her to return home. On recovery, Teresa considered whether she should marry or enter the convent, and it was after reading St Jerome’s letters that Teresa eventually made up her mind to take the veil. But when told of his favourite child’s decision, Don Alonso refused to give Teresa his permission to join a nunnery during his lifetime.

So, on All Souls Day in 1535, Teresa went secretly to the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila. Her younger brother Antonio accompanied her and, despite feeling the pain of separation from her family, Teresa experienced great consolation in prayer and in the ordered life of the convent, although she openly admitted that she disliked being corrected!

Breakdown

Teresa was probably about 21 when she took the Carmelite habit and her subsequent breakdown in health is fully documented in her autobiography. By the age of 25, she appears to have been a complete invalid, suffering from partial paralysis — a situation made worse by being given the wrong treatment.

At this stage in their history, the Carmelite nuns were observing a mitigated form of the Carmelite Rule. They were encouraged to spend holidays with relatives and friends as a way of reducing convent expenses and it was assumed that the rigours of the Carmelite Rule were unsuitable in an age when so many people had died of the plague. In her writings, St Teresa paints a picture of the depths to which the spiritual life of the Carmelites at Avila had sunk. Acts of genuine piety had all but disappeared to be replaced by exaggerated penances and false mysticism.

While ill, Teresa spent some time at home with her family and, when her health had improved, she asked to be taken back to the convent. It was not until she was about 40, however, that the main cause of her illness seems to have disappeared.

Devotion and contemplation

Attributing her recovery to the intercession of St Joseph, and learning during a vision of the importance of devotion to the saint, Teresa made up her mind to spread devotion to him, eventually making the Carmelite Order a primary mover in promoting devotion to the saint.

Sometime during this stage in her life, Teresa found the works of Francisca de Osuna, a Spanish Franciscan 20 years her senior, on the practice of the prayer of the quiet, the first stage of the contemplative life. It was not until she was nearly 40, though, that her attempts to achieve this contemplative state actually bore fruit. By then, Teresa had read Augustine’s titanic work, Confessions, which helped shed light on her own experiences. It was also during this time in her life that she began to meet the Jesuits who had recently established a college in Avila.

During recurrent bouts of ill-health, Teresa began to experience mystical states during which she rose from “recollection” (the lowest stage) to “devotions of silence”, even at times to states of ecstasy, which she called “devotions of ecstasy” when she felt in perfect union with God and when she frequently experienced a rich “blessing of tears”. During this final stage, or raptures, Teresa heard voices and experienced divine visions, sometimes being suspended in mid-air, which always embarrassed her as she could neither resist them nor conceal them. The visions lasted uninterrupted for two years and, during one particular rapture, a seraph drove the fiery point of a golden lance through her heart, causing her a sweet but irresistible spiritual-bodily pain. This was later referred to by her friend and fellow Carmelite, St John of the Cross, as “a dart of love”.

Teresa afterwards wrote: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

This vision was later to be immortalised by the sculptor Giovanni Bernini in his most famous work, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which can be seen at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.

Mysticism

The memory of this mystical experience was the catalyst for Teresa’s reforming work in the Carmelite Order and was the personal motivation to dedicate her own life to imitating the life and suffering of Jesus, which has been epitomised in the motto that has come to be associated with her: Lord, let me either suffer or let me die.

For Teresa, her supernatural experiences were the absolute and only reality and from her writings you can see that worldly concerns hardly moved her at all. At the end of her autobiography, she describes the passage of her mortal life as if it were a dream. Her dearest concern appears to have been for the instruction of her 13 nuns at St Joseph’s, for whom she wrote her second work: The Way of Perfection.

Reforming

In her great work of reforming the Carmelites and bringing it back to its Primitive Observance, Teresa was helped by many people. Initially, however, the extreme poverty of the new convent, established in 1562 and named St Joseph’s, caused something of a scandal among the locals and the authorities in Avila, but powerful patrons including the local Bishop as well as wealthy and influential citizens soon turned animosity into applause.

The Primitive Observance or Rule was to be lived in the spirit of the original hermits of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. The nuns’ lives of prayer and penance were to be offered to God for the conversion of sinners and to obtain God’s blessing on all priests in their various ministries. Because Teresa’s nuns wore hempen sandals instead of the more regular shoes, the religious were known as the Discalced or “barefooted” Carmelites. Those women without genuine vocations were asked to leave. It was at this time that Teresa took the name Mother Teresa of Jesus.

Teresa was 47 when she began her reforming work and, by 1567, she had received a patent from the Carmelite General, Fray Juan Bautista Rubeo de Ravenna, allowing her to establish a series of new convents in Castile. She was also given permission to set up two houses for men who wished to adopt her reform and, while at Olmedo, Teresa was visited by Antonio de Jesus and John of the Cross, who were to become the first friars of this new branch of the Carmelite reform.

Teresa generally travelled in a converted mule cart with heavy wooden wheels and no springs. Her journeys were always undertaken regardless of the weather. On one particularly gruelling trip, the saint felt she had reached the limits of her endurance, when she heard Jesus say to her, “Teresa, this is how I treat all my friends”, to which Teresa famously answered, “I understand, lord, why you have so few.”

In 1575, a series of persecutions spurred on by the older Carmelite order against Teresa and her reforms began with the opposition calling a halt to the establishment of any more new convents. Teresa was denounced by the Inquisition of Seville and ordered by Rubeo to confinement in a Castilian convent.

While at Toledo, Teresa wrote what is considered her masterpiece, The Interior Castle, which discusses the soul’s journey to God, stressing the importance of love, detachment and humility. The book was written in great haste in 1577 as a result of a vision Teresa had been granted on Trinity Eve of that year.

Death and miracles

After many years of pleading with King Phillip II of Spain, in 1579, Teresa was granted royal protection and the Inquisition lifted its ban against her. She was finally able to resume her reforming work. During the twilight years of her life, Teresa founded a total of 17 more convents throughout Spain in Andalusia, Palencia, Soria, Burgos and Granada. Teresa’s 32nd and final foundation was made at Burgos in 1581. By then her strength was almost spent and she was seriously ill.

She died at the Carmelite convent in Alba de Tormes on the night of October 4–5, 1582, as Catholic nations were making the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar we have today. Her last words were: “My Lord, it is time to move on. Well then, may your will be done. Oh my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another.”

Her body was buried in a wooden coffin but after nine months it was exhumed and, to everyone’s amazement, even though her clothes had decayed, Teresa’s body was incorrupt. While the Carmelite nuns reclothed her, a delightful scent spread throughout the monastery. Later, Teresa’s heart was enclosed in a crystal vessel inside a jewelled reliquary. While this was being accomplished, the wound from the angel’s dart could clearly be seen.  Teresa’s heart has miraculously kept its colour and during the 19th century, three sharp thorns became visible at the base of the heart.

A literary legacy

Although Teresa wrote only four main books, her writings rank among the most remarkable mystical literature ever produced in the annals of Christianity. Her spiritual directions to all remain as fresh, pertinent and meaningful today as they were to 16th century men and women, regardless of creed.

Her autobiography has become a literary masterpiece and, after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, remains the most widely read prose classic of Spain. And it is not hard to see why.

Teresa is a natural author and her thoughts flow simply and readily. Her style is engaging and down to earth. She was no cold intellectual but became involved in the problems and the lives of those people around her with whom she came into contact. We see her advising a priest, for example, who was living in sin, to throw away an enchanted amulet with which his mistress had ensnared him; while on another occasion, she offers advice to parents on the rearing of their children.

But it is from her masterwork, The Interior Castle, that we get a firm grip on her spiritual teachings and how relevant they are to contemporary living.

In The Interior Castle (sometimes referred to as Mansions), Teresa presents an analysis of inner prayer and spiritual states. The work was written by the saint primarily for those who were beginners on the spiritual path along which she herself had progressed so rapidly. Author Caroline Myss used this book as a template for her own remarkable work, Entering the Castle (Simon & Schuster 2004), in which she adapted Teresa’s vision of the soul as a beautiful crystal castle with many floors, or mansions, and many rooms within those mansions.

The hub of Teresa’s mystical thought remains the ascent of the soul and her definition of contemplative prayer is still in use in Catholic Catechisms: “Contemplative prayer,” wrote Teresa, “in my opinion is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.”

For Christians, prayer is fundamentally the movement of the Holy Spirit in human hearts through which God reaches out and embraces us. It has been described as a “duet of love” in which the action of the Spirit both inspires and sustains and is an inward call from Christ, who dwells within all human souls and who longs to be known and loved there. For Teresa, prayer was an adventure in search of God’s presence and she believed that all who enter into this duet will progress along four basic prayer paths.

The first is mental prayer and during this devout contemplation (usually on Christ’s Passion and on Penance), the soul withdraws from the world.

The second stage is the prayer of the quiet in which the human will is given over to God and the prevailing state (despite distractions) is one of a companionable silence in the presence of the Creator.

The third stage is that of devotion of union. Here we have arrival at the state of ecstasy and the birth of a supernatural union with God, during which only the memory and imagination are left to roam. This level of prayer is felt as a blissful peace, a beautiful “slumber”, as the soul rises to meet God in a conscious rapture of divine love.

The fourth and final stage is simply rapture when all consciousness of the human body disappears and memory and imagination are totally absorbed in God. From this trance-like state, the person will quite often awaken in tears.
 

Claire Porter has been a freelance journalist for over 30 years. She is the author of 70,000 Veils: The Miracle of Energy (O Books, UK).