Sancta Teresia a Iesu, Virgo — for her feast on the fifteenth day of October, III classis
Misericordias Domini in æternum cantabo. “The mercies of the Lord I will sing for ever.” — Psalm 88:2, the verse she chose to stand over the whole account of her life
I. A house in Ávila
She was born on the twenty-eighth of March, 1515, in the walled city of Ávila in Old Castile, and baptized Teresa de Ahumada. Her father, Don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was a widower who had married again; her mother, Doña Beatriz de Ahumada, bore him nine children, of whom Teresa was the third of that marriage and the first daughter. The house was large, devout, and prosperous enough, and Teresa grew up in it surrounded by brothers.
One fact of the family’s history was unknown to her early biographers and must now be told, because the documents have since come to light. Her paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez of Toledo, was a merchant of Jewish descent, a converso, who in 1485 was reconciled by the Inquisition of Toledo after confessing to Judaizing practices, and did public penance through the streets of the city wearing the sambenito. He afterwards moved his family to Ávila, and his sons later pursued a lawsuit to establish their status as hidalgos. Teresa never mentions any of this. But it is worth knowing, in a Spain obsessed with limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, that the Church’s most celebrated daughter of that age was the granddaughter of a penitent of the Holy Office; and it gives a certain edge to her later insistence that she cared nothing for lineage, and that what matters before God is virtue, not blood.
II. The child who went to be martyred
Her father was a serious reader and kept good books in Spanish in the house; her mother, though a pious woman, had a weakness for the romances of chivalry, which she read secretly, and Teresa caught the habit from her. Before that, however, she had caught something better. When she was about seven, reading the lives of the saints with her brother Rodrigo, she was so taken with the thought that the martyrs had bought heaven so cheaply that the two children set out together from Ávila, begging their way, to go into the land of the Moors and have their heads cut off for Christ. An uncle met them on the road beyond the bridge over the Adaja and brought them home.
She tells the story herself in the opening chapter of her Life, and she tells it with amusement; but she adds that what had most struck the two of them was a single word they repeated to each other, para siempre, “for ever,” for ever, for ever. The fixed thought of eternity was planted in her as a child and never left her. When their martyrdom failed, the two children built hermitages of stones in the garden, which kept falling down.
Her mother died in 1528, when Teresa was thirteen. In her grief she went before an image of Our Lady and begged her to be her mother, and she says that the prayer was heard.
III. The divided years
Then came adolescence, and she is unsparing about it. She became very fond of dress, of perfumes, of the romances, and of the company of certain cousins; she did nothing she held to be grave sin, but she was drifting, and her father saw it. In 1531 he placed her as a boarder with the Augustinian nuns of Our Lady of Grace in Ávila. She went unwillingly, and found there a nun, Doña María de Briceño, whose conversation began to turn her mind back to God. Illness sent her home after a year and a half. On the way she stayed with her uncle Don Pedro de Cepeda, a widower given to prayer, who had her read to him; through the letters of St. Jerome, she says, she found the courage to tell her father she would be a nun.
He refused. She left the house before dawn on the second of November, 1535, and presented herself at the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation outside the walls of Ávila. Her father yielded. She received the habit the next year and made her profession on the third of November, 1537. She was twenty-two. She records that the leaving of her father’s house was like a separation of the bones, and that she did it by force of will, not of feeling.
What followed was nearly twenty years of a divided life, and her account of them is the reason she is trusted.
Within a year of her profession she fell gravely ill. Her father took her to a woman healer at Becedas, whose remedies nearly killed her; but on the way her uncle Pedro gave her the Third Spiritual Alphabet of the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, which taught the prayer of recollection, and it became her master. In August of 1539 she fell into a seizure so deep that she was taken for dead; her grave was dug at the Incarnation, and wax was found on her eyelids from the candles of the vigil. She revived after four days, and lay for three years in a paralysis from which she recovered, she was convinced, by the intercession of St. Joseph, to whom she remained devoted for the rest of her life, and whose name she would give to her first foundation.
Restored to health, she returned to the ordinary life of the Incarnation, which was a large house of some hundred and eighty women living under the mitigated rule, with a busy parlour and great freedom of visitors. Teresa was charming, quick, and good company, and the parlour loved her. She did not fall into grave sin. But she found herself unable to give herself wholly either to God or to the world, and the conflict wore her down. At one point she gave up mental prayer altogether for more than a year, telling herself that one so unfaithful was unworthy to speak so intimately with God. She came to regard this as the most dangerous temptation of her life: a humility that was really despair, and the devil’s surest way of keeping a soul from the only remedy that could heal it.
Her father died in 1543. Before his death she had taught him mental prayer, and it was his Dominican confessor, Fr. Vicente Barrón, who persuaded her to take it up again and never abandon it.
IV. The wounded Christ, 1554
The turning came in Lent of 1554, when she was thirty-nine. An image had been brought into the oratory for a feast: a Christ, as she describes it, muy llagado, covered in wounds. Seeing it, she was overwhelmed by the thought of how badly she had repaid those wounds, and she threw herself down before it in tears, begging Him to strengthen her once for all, and resolving not to rise until He did. About the same time the Confessions of St. Augustine came into her hands, newly translated into Castilian, and when she reached the scene in the garden at Milan, she says, it seemed to her that the Lord was calling her. From that time she dated her real conversion. She was not made a different woman. She was made, at last, a whole one.
The graces that followed were of the kind that frightened her as much as anyone. She experienced the prayer of quiet and of union; she heard interior locutions; she had intellectual visions of Christ beside her. Several of her early confessors, good men without experience of such things, told her it was the devil, and one ordered her to make a gesture of contempt whenever the vision came, which she obeyed in anguish. She was examined by the new Jesuits of Ávila, Fr. Diego de Cetina and Fr. Baltasar Álvarez, and met St. Francis Borgia, who reassured her; and in 1560 the Franciscan reformer St. Peter of Alcántara, old and gaunt and austere, told her plainly that her experiences were from God.
From these years comes the grace she describes in the twenty-ninth chapter of her Life: an angel, small and very beautiful, his face aflame, held a long golden dart tipped with fire and seemed to thrust it into her heart several times, leaving her wholly on fire with the love of God, the pain so great it made her moan and the sweetness so excessive she could not wish it gone. The Carmelites later obtained a feast of this Transverberation, and her heart, preserved at Alba de Tormes, is shown to this day.
From the same years comes the vision of hell recorded in the thirty-second chapter of her Life: a narrow, dark, foul place in which she was shown the place prepared for her had she continued as she was. It was, she says, among the greatest mercies of her life, and it is from it that her apostolic zeal for souls was born.
V. San José, 1562
The question that now took hold of her was simple. If the Incarnation, with its crowded parlour and its hundred and eighty nuns, made it hard to live for God alone, why not found a house where it would be easy?
A group of friends gathered in her cell one evening in 1560 and talked of a small convent on the primitive Carmelite rule, the rule given by St. Albert of Jerusalem and mitigated by Eugene IV in 1432. The idea took fire, and also took fire against her. The city of Ávila was outraged at the thought of another convent without endowment, living on alms; the nuns of the Incarnation took it as an insult; her provincial withdrew his permission. She persisted, quietly and with every canonical precaution, obtaining a brief from Rome and the protection of the bishop of Ávila, Don Álvaro de Mendoza. On the twenty-fourth of August, 1562, the monastery of St. Joseph was founded with four novices in a small house in Ávila, and she put off her family name: from that day she was Teresa of Jesus.
The riot that followed in the city very nearly closed it; the case went before the royal council; she was ordered back to the Incarnation for a time. But the house stood, and in 1563 she was permitted to live there. For five years she lived the life she had imagined: thirteen nuns at most (later she allowed more), strict enclosure, poverty without endowment, abstinence from meat, two hours of mental prayer each day, manual work, and sisters chosen for good sense as much as for piety. These were, she said afterwards, the most restful years of her life. There she finished the Life that her confessors had commanded her to write, and there, for her daughters, she wrote the Way of Perfection.
VI. The roads of Castile
In 1567 the Prior General of the Carmelites, Giovanni Battista Rossi (Rubeo to the Spaniards), came to Ávila, visited St. Joseph’s, was delighted with it, and authorized her to found as many houses of the same kind as she could. She was fifty-two, often ill, and without money. Over the next fifteen years she founded sixteen more.
The Book of the Foundations, which she wrote at the command of her confessors, is the record of those journeys, and it is one of the most human books in the history of the saints. She travelled in covered carts over the roads of Castile and Andalusia, in summer heat and winter snow, lodging in inns she describes without illusion, and arriving in towns where she had been promised a house and found none. She founded at Medina del Campo in 1567, Malagón and Valladolid in 1568, Toledo and Pastrana in 1569, Salamanca in 1570, Alba de Tormes in 1571, Segovia in 1574, Beas and Seville in 1575, Caravaca in 1576, Villanueva de la Jara and Palencia in 1580, Soria in 1581, and Granada (by her delegates) and Burgos in 1582. She bargained with landlords, wrote to the king, dealt with bishops, and kept the accounts herself. She had, she said, very little to start with but God, and God was enough.
She wished to extend the reform to the friars as well, and at Medina in 1567 she met a young Carmelite named John of St. Matthias, who was thinking of leaving to join the Carthusians. She persuaded him to stay. On the twenty-eighth of November, 1568, at Duruelo, he and Fr. Antonio de Heredia began the first house of the Discalced friars, and he took the name by which the Church knows him: John of the Cross. She called him her little Seneca, and he became her confessor and her equal in the things of God.
Her practicality was the fruit of her mysticism, not a distraction from it. To daughters who thought the kitchen a poor place for prayer, she answered that the Lord walks among the pots and pans (Fundaciones 5.8). Her letters, of which several hundred survive, are full of business, humour, gossip, illness, and wisdom in the same paragraph.
VII. Prioress of the Incarnation and the spiritual marriage
In 1571 the apostolic visitor, the Dominican Pedro Fernández, appointed her prioress of the Incarnation, the house she had left, which had not elected her and did not want her. The nuns met her with shouting. She entered the choir, set in the prioress’s stall an image of Our Lady, and placed the keys at its feet: the Virgin, she told them, would be their prioress, and she herself only her vicar. Within months the house was at peace. She brought John of the Cross to be its confessor.
It was there, on the eighteenth of November, 1572, receiving Holy Communion from his hand, that she was given the grace she later called the spiritual marriage. She records in her accounts of conscience that Our Lord appeared to her, gave her His right hand, and showed her a nail, saying that from that day she would be His bride and should care for His honour as her own, for His honour was now hers and hers His. Five years later, in the Interior Castle, she described this innermost dwelling of the soul, and said its whole purpose was the birth of works.
VIII. Persecution
The reform did not go on undisturbed, and the trial that came upon it is told here plainly because she told it plainly.
The Princess of Éboli, Ana de Mendoza, had insisted on a foundation at Pastrana in 1569 and then, widowed, insisted on entering it, on her own terms, with her servants. The nuns could not live the rule beside her, and in 1574 Teresa withdrew the entire community by night. The princess in revenge denounced the manuscript of Teresa’s Life to the Inquisition, which held it for years. In Seville in 1575–76 a discontented novice denounced the house to the Holy Office as well, and the inquisitors examined Teresa herself. Nothing was found against her.
The more serious conflict was within the Order. Tensions between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites, worsened by a conflict of jurisdiction between the Prior General and the apostolic visitors appointed by Philip II, reached a crisis. In 1575 the General Chapter at Piacenza ordered that no further foundations be made and that Teresa retire to a convent of her choosing and stay there. She obeyed, and went to Toledo, where she wrote the Interior Castle in 1577. In December of that year John of the Cross was seized at the Incarnation by the Calced friars and imprisoned for nine months in a cell at Toledo, from which he escaped in August of 1578, having composed in his prison the Spiritual Canticle. The new papal nuncio, Filippo Sega, hostile to the reform, is reported to have described Teresa as a restless, roving woman, disobedient and contumacious, who under colour of devotion invented bad doctrines and left her enclosure against the decrees of Trent.
She wrote to the king. She prayed. She told her daughters that these were hard times, tiempos recios, and that they needed strong friends of God. And she did not break communion, did not curse the friars who opposed her, and did not cease to call herself a daughter of the Church.
The storm passed. On the twenty-second of June, 1580, Gregory XIII by the brief Pia consideratione erected the Discalced into a separate province, and in 1581 the chapter of Alcalá gave them their constitutions. She was free to found again, and did, though now very old and very ill.
IX. Alba de Tormes, 1582
Returning from the hard foundation of Burgos in the autumn of 1582, exhausted and ill, she was diverted on the orders of a superior to Alba de Tormes, where the Duchess of Alba wished her present for a family birth. She arrived on the twentieth of September and went to bed, and did not get up again.
She received the Viaticum on the third of October. The tradition of her last hours, preserved by those who nursed her, records that she thanked God repeatedly for having made her a daughter of the Church, saying that she died a daughter of the Church; that she prayed the Miserere, and especially the verse Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies; and that she spoke of longing to see her Bridegroom, saying that it was time to set out. She died at about nine in the evening of the fourth of October, 1582, in the arms of Blessed Anne of St. Bartholomew. She was sixty-seven.
That very night the reform of the calendar ordered by Gregory XIII took effect in Spain, and ten days were removed from the year. The day after her death was the fifteenth of October; that is why her feast is kept today.
Her body, exhumed nine months later and repeatedly afterward, was found incorrupt and fragrant. It rests at Alba de Tormes, where her heart, bearing what is venerated as the mark of the Transverberation, and an arm are also preserved.
X. Glorification
She was beatified by Paul V on the twenty-fourth of April, 1614, and canonized by Gregory XV on the twelfth of March, 1622, together with St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and St. Isidore the Farmer: the Romans said that day that the Pope had canonized four Spaniards and a saint. The Cortes of Castile in 1617 proclaimed her co-patroness of Spain alongside St. James, which provoked a fierce controversy among the partisans of Santiago, and the matter was eventually laid aside by Rome. The 1962 Missal keeps her feast on the fifteenth of October as a feast of the third class, with the Mass Dilexisti of the Common of Virgins and a Collect proper to her, which asks that we may be nourished by her cælestis doctrina, her heavenly doctrine. (In 1970 she was named the first woman Doctor of the Church; the Collect had already called her a teacher for three and a half centuries.)
Her daughters spread from Castile to the whole world. Among them, three centuries later, would be a young nun of Lisieux who called her “our holy Mother.”
XI. What the life teaches
That it is never too late. She was nearly forty when she was converted, and had spent almost twenty years as a good, respectable, divided religious. The great work of her life was done between fifty-two and sixty-seven, in a body that was nearly always ill. Grace does not keep our calendar.
That prayer is friendship, and friendship requires time. Her definition of mental prayer is the simplest in the whole tradition: an intimate sharing between friends, taking time often to be alone with Him who we know loves us (Vida 8). The one temptation she feared most was the one that kept her from it: the false humility that says, I am not good enough to pray. The remedy for an unworthy soul is not to stop praying. It is to pray.
That humility is truth. She defined humility as walking in truth: knowing what we are of ourselves, which is nothing, and what we have from God (Moradas VI.10). It is why she could write of her own sins without self-pity and of her graces without vanity, and why she could be called restless and contumacious by a nuncio and still kneel to him.
That union with God bears fruit in works. The great mystic of the Spanish Church spent her last fifteen years on the roads, in account books, and in correspondence with landlords. She did not consider this a distraction from contemplation but its fruit. Martha and Mary, she said, must go together to entertain the Lord (Moradas VII.4).
Practice
Examine. Have I given up some practice of prayer because I feel unworthy of it, or because it has become dry? Is there a “parlour” in my life, some legitimate pleasure or company, which has quietly become the thing that keeps me from giving myself wholly to God?
Do. Take fifteen minutes of mental prayer today, before the Blessed Sacrament or a crucifix, and simply keep the Lord company, as she taught: look at Him, and let Him look at you. And do one practical, unglamorous duty with deliberate love: the Lord walks among the pots and pans.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Exaudi nos, Deus, salutaris noster: ut, sicut de beatæ Teresiæ Virginis tuæ festivitate gaudemus; ita cælestis eius doctrinæ pabulo nutriamur, et piæ devotionis erudiamur affectu.
“Hear us, O God our Saviour: that as we rejoice in the festival of blessed Teresa Thy Virgin, so we may be nourished by the food of her heavenly doctrine, and be taught the affection of loving devotion.”
Aspiration. Sólo Dios basta. “God alone suffices.”
Devote. It is October, the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Joyful Mysteries, and at the fifth, the Finding in the Temple, ask St. Joseph, her chosen patron, to teach you how to seek Our Lord when He seems to have been lost, and to find Him in His Father’s house.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up mental prayer step by step, following the Way of Perfection and the first dwellings of the Interior Castle. The Lives of the Saints path continues with St. John of the Cross, St. Peter of Alcántara, and Blessed Anne of St. Bartholomew. The Church History path treats the Catholic Reform in Spain, the Carmelite reform and its conflicts, and the Inquisition’s dealings with the mystics of the Golden Age. The Theology and Doctrine path examines the stages of prayer and the classical distinction between ascetical and mystical theology which her writings did so much to shape.
Sancta Teresia a Iesu, virgo et mater, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. Teresa of Jesus, Libro de la Vida (esp. 1, 4–9, 29, 32), Camino de perfección, Libro de las Fundaciones, Moradas del castillo interior (VI.10, VII.4), Cuentas de conciencia, and her letters; the depositions of the beatification process and the testimony of Bl. Anne of St. Bartholomew on her death; the brief Pia consideratione of Gregory XIII (1580); the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), s.v. “St. Teresa of Avila”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and modern documentary scholarship on the Sánchez family of Toledo. St. Teresa and the other authors are given in paraphrase throughout.