Teresa of Avila

Mystical Theology and Spirituality in the Carmelite Tradition

Peter Tyler, Edward Howells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317046202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This innovative book offers an original insight into the context and times of St Teresa of Avila (1515 – 1582) as well as exploring her contemporary relevance from the perspective of some of the foremost thinkers and scholars in the Teresian field today including Professors Julia Kristeva, Rowan Williams and Bernard McGinn. As well as these academic approaches there will be chapters by friars and nuns of the Carmelite order living out the Carmelite charism in today's world. The book addresses both theory and practice, and crosses traditional disciplinary and denominational boundaries – including medieval studies, philosophy, psychology, pastoral and systematic theology - thus demonstrating her continuing relevance in a variety of contemporary multi-disciplinary areas.

Part I
Teresa in her context

1 True confessions

Augustine and Teresa of Avila on the mystical self

Prof. Bernard McGinn

Introduction

In 1554 Teresa of Avila was given a copy of Augustine’s Confessiones published in Castilian in January of that year. This is how she describes the effect the book had on her:

As I began to read the Confessiones, it seemed to me I saw myself in them. I began to commend myself very much to this glorious saint. When I came to the passage where he speaks about his conversion and read how he heard that voice in the garden (Confessiones 8.12.29), it only seemed to me, according to what I felt in my heart, that it was I the Lord called. I remained for a long time totally dissolved in tears and feeling within myself utter distress and weariness. (V: 9.7–8)¹

Teresa goes on to speak of the pain she experienced in giving up the false, self-reliant, ego before being in full possession of the new self dependent on God. ‘Dear God,’ she says, ‘what a soul suffers and what torments it endures when it loses its freedom to be its own master! I am astonished now that I was able to live in such a state of torment.’

Nevertheless, viewed from the perspective of the transformed Teresa as author looking back on the old self-centered Teresa, she concludes with a paradoxical act of confession: ‘God be praised, who gave me the life to forsake such utter death!’ (V: 9.8). The nun of the Encarnación convent revalorizes Augustine’s being turned (convertere) to God, although the divine instrument here is the text of the Confessiones not a child’s voice in a garden inviting a reading of scripture.

Like the bishop of Hippo, the Spanish nun later felt compelled to tell the story of God’s work in her life through a book that interweaves various forms of confession: confessio fidei (confession of faith), confessio laudis (confession of praise) and confessio peccati (confession of sin).² Throughout her Life Teresa returns to this decisive event and the change it made in her. In Chapter 10.7, for example, she says that she is perfectly willing for her confessors to publicize the story of her sinful self, but for what follows in the narrative, ‘I do not give this permission; nor do I desire, if they should show it to someone, that they tell who it is who has experienced these things, or who has written this’ (V: 10.7). Teresa’s new self is not independent or autonomous, but is swallowed up in the love of God. At the beginning of Chapter 23, when she returns to the story of her post-conversion life, she says: ‘This is another, new book from here on – I mean another new life. The life dealt with up to this point was mine; the one I lived from the point where I began to explain these things about prayer is the one God lived in me’. Again she makes a confessio of God’s action: ‘May the Lord be praised who freed me from myself’ (V: 23.1).³

Teresa’s mystical progress

Teresa had been practicing ‘mental prayer’ (oración mental) since the Fall of 1538, when she first read Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet (V: 4.7), but she seems not to have made much progress until the mid-1550s when the visions and locutions described in Books 9 and 10 of the Life,⁴ as well as the experiences of the presence of God she calls ‘mystical theology’ (V: 10.1),⁵ signify what has been called her ‘second conversion’ to a truly mystical stage of prayer.⁶ These chapters of the Life serve a function not unlike Books 7–9 of Augustine’s work – that is, an account of how divine grace finally prevailed over the sinful self as witnessed to by special moments of deeper consciousness of God’s presence, such as the brief visions of divine light that Augustine recounts in Confessiones 7.10 and 7.17, and the more powerful, if still temporary, ascent of Monica and Augustine to the place where they touch Divine Wisdom ‘slightly with the entire beat of the heart’ (attigimus eam modice toto ictu cordis. Conf: 9.10.23–26).⁷

Without claiming that it was intentional, there are interesting analogies between the triple structure of Augustine’s Confessiones and the four parts of Teresa’s Life in their interweaving of the narrative and the didactic aspects of their teachings.⁸ The first nine books of the Confessiones are an exercise in memoria’s retrospective function in which the bishop calls up events from his early life to confess his sinfulness (confessio peccati) and thus give praise to God whose love gave him his true self (confessio laudis). Book 10 is an introspective analysis of memoria as the site where God is at work healing the convalescing self.⁹ The third part of the Confessiones, Books 11–13, places the story of Augustine the individual within the wider didactic framework that reveals its universal meaning, the Genesis account of creation culminating in homo as the creature made in God’s image and likeness. Despite debates about the unity of the Confessiones, there is a deep integrity to the text centred on the notion of confessio itself, which is central to all parts of the work.¹⁰

Teresa’s Life consists of four parts with the more didactic section placed within a narrative envelope. The first ten chapters deal with her life between 1515 and 1554. Chapters 11–22 are a treatise on the four stages of prayer, while Chapters 23–40 return to her life in two sections – Chapters 23–31 on the mystical gifts she received from 1554 to about 1562, and Chapters 32–40 on the beginning of the Carmelite Reform with the foundation of St. Joseph in Avila in 1562.¹¹

The seven years between 1555 and 1562 deepened the transition between the old self, Doña Teresa de Ahumada, and the new Teresa de Jesús. The mystical gifts Teresa received during these years help illustrate her treatise on prayer, but accounts of her special favors also appear in the sections of the narrative envelope. These favors from God provide a kind of mystical itinerary. Among them are her first locution from Christ (V: 19.9; ca. 1557), the first experience of rapture in 1558 (V: 24.5), the noted Transverberation of 1559 (V: 29.13), and the earliest intellectual and imaginative visions of Christ probably in 1560 and 1561 (V: 27.2–5, 28.1–5). A key event mentioned in the Life 26.5 helps explain the transition from Teresa the enclosed contemplative to Teresa the mystical author and reformer. In 1559 the Inquisitor Fernando de Váldes issued an Index of Forbidden Books that banned almost all vernacular versions of spiritual literature. Its devastating effect on Teresa and those devoted to interior prayer was mitigated by Christ’s appearance to her promising that he would give her a living book for her instruction and that of the other nuns (V: 26.6).¹² It is no accident, then, that the two aspects of Teresa’s public persona became evident around 1560. The first was the discussion with like-minded nuns about the possibility of creating a reformed convent in which they could live in the manner of the original Carmelite Rule; the second was Teresa’s growing desire to make public an account of God’s gifts to her.

Soon after her conversion, probably in 1555, Teresa wrote a short ‘account of my life and sins’, as well as a second text she described as ‘as clear an account of my life as I knew how to give’ in preparation for her general confession. These were the documents that led her spiritual counselors, Don Francisco de Salcedo, the priest Gaspar Daza and others, to the conclusion that she was suffering from diabolical deceptions.¹³ Fortunately, her Jesuit confessor, Diego de Cetina, disabused her of this (See V: 23.14–18). In 1560–61 Teresa began compiling the first two of her personal spiritual ‘Testimonies’ for her confessors.¹⁴ In 1562, the same year as the foundation of St Joseph, she composed the early version of what she always called mi libro (not Vida), or the libro de las misericordias de Dios.¹⁵ Mystical women with whom Teresa was familiar, such as Angela of Foligno, had also written ‘books’ that gave an account of their lives, but focused more on the graces they had received. In the whole process of self-revelation leading up to the final composition of ‘My Book’, Teresa made use of written materials, such as saints’ lives and mystical narratives, as well as the verbal practice of sacramental confession that was so much a part of the life of a 16th-century nun (see Carrera 2005).

The composition and history of Teresa’s mi libro

Teresa tells the reader over and over that she wrote the Life under obedience to her confessors, primarily the Dominican García de Toledo. This is certainly true, but also not the whole truth. Permission from male clerical authority was almost always necessary for any medieval or early modern woman to set pen to paper (Marguerite Porete forms a tragic exception). This was especially true in 16th-century Spain.¹⁶ Clerical authorization was necessary, but not sufficient. Like almost all female mystics, Teresa claims that it was God himself who wanted her story told. Addressing García de Toledo at the end of the book, she hopes that the work ‘…may bring someone to praise the Lord, even if only once’. To that end she asks García and three of her other confessors to pass on its quality, so that if it is badly done, they can blame her, but ‘…if it is done well, they are good and learned men, and I know they will see where it comes from and praise Him who spoke it through me (y alabarán a quien lo ha dicho por mí)’ (V: 40.24).¹⁷

We will never know the full details of the delicate dance of negotiations that took place between Teresa and a series of confessors and critical readers.¹⁸ Teresa was deeply attached to some of her confessors, especially García de Toledo. She even recounts something like a joint rapture the two enjoyed while seated in the convent parlor and talking about prayer, not unlike the ascent of Augustine and Monica in Book 9 of the Confessiones (V: 34.15). Teresa certainly wanted to write; the sympathetic confessors who got to know her often (not always) responded by ‘ordering’ her to put down the favors that God had given her in writing, while retaining the right to investigate, critique, emend and make suggestions for additions.¹⁹ One might say that the Life is a manipulative text in which Teresa gets to do what she felt she had to do, while her confessors had roles to play that they could ultimately be satisfied with. Some moderns might see these complicated relationships as evidence of bad faith or trickery, but they rather can be viewed as ways to attain a mutually desired result in the midst of an ecclesiastico-political situation that was not only deeply patriarchal, but increasingly suspicious of mystical claims, especially on the part of women.

It had never been easy for women to leave a public record of the graces they received from God and the teaching they developed.²⁰ From the time of Hildegard of Bingen on women had deployed an arsenal of strategies – literary, political and theological – to make their voices heard within the unfriendly confines of the male-dominated church. Teresa employed many of these, but also refined and expanded on them, because the situation she faced in mid-16th-century Spain was particularly inimical to women. It is not possible here to comment on these many strategies, such as humility (both ironical and non-ironical), self-deprecation, self-censorship, concessions, alternate narratives, deliberate unclarity, appeals to divine authority and the like.²¹ The recognition of their importance to her book, however, heightens the case for Teresa as a skilled writer.

The unification of Spain and the growing insistence on a monolithic Christian society characterized by purity of blood and unquestioning orthodoxy took many expressions, not least the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 (see Kamen 1986). First used against the suspect Jewish converts (conversos), or ‘New Christians’, in the 1520s the Inquisition also attacked religious movements that supposedly threatened true Christianity, such as Erasmian humanists; ‘Lutherans’ (a term of great vagueness) and especially the ‘Enlightened’ (alumbrados) – shifting groups practicing and preaching forms of mystical release and annihilation. The debates about the nature of mystical prayer that had begun in the late 13th century reached a new stage with the condemnation of the alumbrados issued by the Inquisition in 1525 (see McGinn 2004), an act which led to growing fears of almost all mental prayer as bordering on heresy (see Hamilton 1992, 2010 and Marquez 1972). Gillian Ahlgren goes so far as to say, ‘Teresa’s interaction with the Inquisition—both direct and indirect—was the most significant influence on her career as a writer’ (Ahlgren 1996: 33).^2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A note on Teresian sources
• Introduction
• PART I Teresa in her context
• PART II The impact of Teresa
• PART III Teresa in the twenty-first century
• Bibliography
• List of contributors
• Index