Saint Teresa of Avila

Life and historical context

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born on 28 March 1515 in Avila, in the Spanish Kingdom of Castile, the third of the twelve children of Don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and his second wife Doña Beatriz de Ahumada. The family was converso on her paternal grandfather's side (her grandfather had been a Jewish convert to Christianity who was reconciled to the Catholic Church by the Spanish Inquisition in 1485) and noble in standing. Teresa's youth coincided with the high period of the Spanish Reconquista, the discovery of the New World, and the early Reformation. The Cepeda household was devout, her father an avid reader of saints' lives and devotional literature, and her mother of intense Marian piety.¹

Her vocation to the religious life developed gradually. After her mother's death when Teresa was thirteen, her father placed her at the Augustinian convent school of Santa Maria de Gracia in Avila for her education. She entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Avila on 2 November 1535, at the age of twenty, taking the religious name Sister Teresa de Jesús. She was professed the following year. Her early religious life was unremarkable. The Convent of the Incarnation was a large community of about 180 sisters, and the standard of observance was relaxed: sisters were permitted to maintain personal possessions, to receive visitors at the locutorio (parlor), and to spend time outside the cloister. Teresa lived in this manner for almost twenty years and described herself in her later writings as having spent that period in a state of spiritual mediocrity, neither giving herself fully to God nor abandoning the religious life.

The decisive turn in her interior life came around 1554, at the age of thirty-nine, when she was praying before an image of the Wounded Christ (Cristo Llagado). Her Vida (Autobiography) records that she was suddenly struck by the realization of how poorly she had been responding to Christ's love and resolved to give herself entirely to him. The conversion was followed by an intensification of her interior life: mystical prayer became habitual, and she began to receive what she would later call intellectual visions of Christ and other supernatural experiences.

The decisive turn in her exterior life came in 1562, when at age forty-seven she founded the Convent of San José in Avila as the first house of the Carmelite Reform (the Discalced Carmelites, named for the simple sandals or bare feet that replaced the shoes worn by the Calced Carmelites). The Reform was an attempt to restore the strict primitive observance of the Carmelite Rule of Saint Albert of Jerusalem (early thirteenth century), with strict enclosure, communal poverty, manual labor, and an emphasis on contemplative prayer. The Reform met with considerable opposition from within the Carmelite Order and from civil authorities, but Teresa's combination of mystical depth, practical wisdom, and personal courage gradually established it. By the time of her death in 1582, the Discalced Carmelite Reform numbered seventeen houses of nuns and fifteen houses of friars across Spain.²

The Carmelite friars of the Reform were principally the work of Teresa together with Saint John of the Cross, the young Carmelite priest who joined the Reform in 1568 at the age of twenty-five and who became its principal theological writer. Teresa traveled extensively across Spain in her last twenty years, founding new Discalced houses despite poor health, harsh weather, and the chronic intrigues of the unreformed Carmelite hierarchy. She died at Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582 during one of these foundation journeys, at the age of sixty-seven. (The Gregorian calendar reform took effect the following day, with 4 October being followed immediately by 15 October; her feast is therefore celebrated on 15 October, though her actual death was on 4 October by the old calendar.)

Theological and spiritual significance

Teresa of Avila is one of the principal mystical theologians of the Catholic Church and is honored as one of the four great Doctors of contemplative prayer (with Saint John of the Cross, Saint Therese of Lisieux, and Saint Catherine of Siena). Her four principal works constitute one of the most important corpora of Catholic mystical writing:

The Book of Her Life (Spanish: Libro de la Vida, also known as the Vida or Autobiography), composed 1565, is Teresa's spiritual self-examination in the form of a confession written to her spiritual directors. It includes the influential treatment of the four stages of prayer, often described as the four waters (drawing water from a well, drawing water by waterwheel, drawing water from a stream, and rain), corresponding to four progressively deeper modes of prayer.

The Way of Perfection (Spanish: Camino de Perfección), composed 1566, is a practical guide to contemplative prayer written for the Discalced Carmelite nuns of San José. It includes a sustained commentary on the Our Father as the framework of Christian prayer.

The Foundations (Spanish: Las Fundaciones), composed 1573-1582, narrates the foundation of the Discalced Carmelite houses in chronological order and provides much of the historical record of the Reform.

The Interior Castle (Spanish: Las Moradas or El Castillo Interior), composed 1577 in just six months, is her mystical masterwork. The treatise describes the soul as a crystal castle of seven mansions, with God at the center, and the Christian life as the soul's progress through the seven mansions toward the mystical marriage with Christ in the innermost mansion. It is one of the most influential works of Catholic mystical theology, comparable in stature to the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas in scholastic theology.³

She was canonized by Pope Gregory XV on 12 March 1622, only forty years after her death, in the same ceremony that canonized Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Isidore the Farmer, and Saint Philip Neri (the Quintet of 1622). She was declared a Doctor of the Catholic Church by Pope Saint Paul VI on 27 September 1970, becoming with Saint Catherine of Siena the first two female Doctors of the Church.⁴

Devotion and liturgical observance

The feast of Saint Teresa of Avila is celebrated on 15 October in the universal Roman Calendar with the rank of memorial. In Spain, where Teresa is a national saint and a Doctor of the Church, the feast is observed with greater civic and ecclesiastical solemnity. The Discalced Carmelite Order observes the feast as a high feast of the Order's calendar.

The principal pilgrimage destination associated with Saint Teresa is the Convent of San José in Avila (the first foundation of the Discalced Carmelite Reform) and the city of Avila itself, with its medieval walls and the various Teresian sites. The Convent of the Annunciation in Alba de Tormes preserves her tomb (her body is preserved incorrupt) and her right hand and other relics. The Convent of the Incarnation in Avila preserves the cell where she lived for twenty-seven years and where her Vida and other writings were composed.

The traditional iconography of Saint Teresa shows her in the brown Discalced Carmelite habit and white mantle, holding a book or quill (in reference to her writings) and often a dove (representing the Holy Spirit). She is sometimes depicted with the heart pierced by an arrow of divine love (in reference to the famous mystical experience of the transverberation, an experience of mystical union she records in chapter 29 of her Vida and which became the iconographic subject of Bernini's celebrated Ecstasy of Saint Teresa sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome). Her liturgical color on the feast is white.

Prayers and novenas associated with Saint Teresa

The principal devotion to Saint Teresa is the Novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, prayed for the gift of contemplative prayer, for the renewal of the religious life of the Catholic Church, and for the increase of vocations to the Discalced Carmelite Order. The novena is most commonly prayed in the nine days leading up to her feast on 15 October.

The most-quoted brief prayer of Saint Teresa is her Bookmark Prayer (Spanish: Marcador de Libros), found among her books after her death:

Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things pass; God does not change. Patience obtains all. The one who has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.

Catholics commonly pair Saint Teresa devotions with the Holy Rosary, the Memorare, and the Anima Christi (which Saint Teresa loved and recommended to her sisters). For the broader theological context, see Communion of Saints, Saint John of the Cross (her great collaborator in the Carmelite Reform), Saint Therese of Lisieux (the great nineteenth-century Carmelite of the same Discalced family), and Saint Catherine of Siena (with whom Teresa was named the first female Doctor of the Church).

Sources

Footnotes

1. Saint Teresa of Avila, Libro de la Vida (Autobiography, 1565), the principal source for her early life. Marcelle Auclair, Teresa of Avila (1953, English translation 1953). Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila (1991). Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), "Saint Teresa of Avila," available at newadvent.org. ↩

2. Saint Teresa of Avila, Las Fundaciones (The Foundations, 1573-1582). The Discalced Carmelite Reform's institutional history is documented in the order's general archive in Rome and in the Annales Carmelitarum Discalceatorum (the official annals of the Order). ↩

3. Saint Teresa of Avila, Las Moradas / El Castillo Interior (1577). The standard English translation is by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, in The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila (Institute of Carmelite Studies, three volumes, 1976-1985). ↩

4. Pope Gregory XV, Omnipotens Deus (canonization bull, 12 March 1622). Pope Saint Paul VI, Multiformis Sapientia Dei (declaration of Teresa as Doctor of the Church, 27 September 1970). Available at vatican.va. ↩