Teresa of Ávila Biography

Teresa of Ávila is remembered now as a mystic, a saint whose visions were carved into marble by Bernini and whose books are read five centuries after her death. It is worth beginning, then, with the least mystical fact about her: for roughly twenty years she was a nun who could barely pray. She kept the hours, she wore the habit, she was inside the machine of religious life — and by her own account she spent most of those two decades restless, distracted, and half-hearted before God. The woman the Church would one day name its first female Doctor spent her first twenty years in the cloister as an ordinary, struggling, unremarkable religious. That is not a footnote to her holiness. It is the road into it.

A daughter of Ávila

She was born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada on 28 March 1515, in the walled Castilian city of Ávila. Her family was prosperous but carried a shadow the age did not forgive lightly: her paternal grandfather was a Jew who had converted to Christianity and been reconciled by the Toledo Inquisition in 1485. Teresa was, in the language of the time, of converso descent — a background that meant her family's standing was never quite secure in a Spain obsessed with purity of blood. She grew up bright, sociable, and fond of the world, by turns devout and vain.

Her mother, Beatriz, died when Teresa was about thirteen. The girl, grieving, went to an image of the Virgin and asked her to be a mother in her place — the first act of a life that would keep turning grief and longing into prayer. A few years later her father placed her, for a time, in a convent school; and slowly, against her own resistance and her father's initial opposition, she came to believe she was called to religious life.

In 1535 she entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila, and she professed her vows in 1537. What followed was not a straight ascent. She fell gravely ill, so ill she was once thought dead and a grave was readied for her. She recovered, but her health was broken for life, and her prayer went slack. The Incarnation was a large, comfortable, half-worldly house where nuns received visitors and kept private property, and Teresa — charming, well-liked, easily distracted — drifted with it. She would later be unsparing about those years, blaming no one but herself for a prayer life she called mediocre and mostly abandoned.

The wounded Christ

The turn, when it came, came late and came suddenly. Around 1554, nearly forty years old and nearly twenty years a nun, Teresa passed a statue that had been brought into the convent — an Ecce Homo, an image of Christ scourged and wounded before his death. She stopped. Something in the sight of that suffering broke her open. She threw herself on the ground before it in tears and begged God to strengthen her once and for all. Around the same time she read Augustine's Confessions — one restless soul recognising itself in another — and found there the words for what was happening to her.

This is the hinge of her life. Everything the world now associates with Teresa — the visions, the reform, the books — comes after it, and none of it comes before. The mystic was born not out of natural piety but out of a woman finally surrendering, at forty, after twenty wasted years, in front of a broken image of Christ.

Prayer as friendship

Out of that surrender came the teaching for which she is loved. Teresa did not think of prayer as performance, or as a technique for the spiritually gifted. She thought of it as a relationship — plain, personal, and available to anyone willing to give it time. Her definition of mental prayer, written in the eighth chapter of her Life, is the most quoted sentence she ever wrote, and it is disarmingly simple:

Mental prayer, in my opinion, is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.

— Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life

Everything else in her spiritual writing is an unfolding of that line. In the Life she compared the growth of prayer to watering a garden four ways: hauling water from a well by hand, which is laborious beginner's prayer; turning a water-wheel, which is easier; letting a stream run through, easier still; and at last the rain, which asks nothing of the gardener and is given wholly by God. Years later, in The Interior Castle, she pictured the soul as a castle of clear crystal with seven sets of rooms, and the life of prayer as a journey inward through them toward the innermost chamber where God dwells. She wrote for her own nuns, in a warm, direct, sometimes teasing voice, always insisting that this friendship with God was not reserved for the extraordinary.

The fire and the spear

Teresa's mystical experiences were vivid, and she reported them as plainly as she reported everything else. The most famous, which she describes in the twenty-ninth chapter of her Life and which is usually dated to around 1559, she gives entirely as her own testimony — and it is right to receive it that way, as what she said happened to her. She saw beside her, she wrote, an angel in bodily form, small and beautiful, its face aflame. In its hands was a long golden spear tipped with fire, and it thrust the spear again and again into her heart, piercing to her very entrails. The pain, she said, was so great that she moaned aloud; yet it was so sweet that she could not wish to be rid of it, and it left her all on fire with a great love of God.

It is this scene that Bernini later froze in marble in Rome. Teresa herself would have been wary of the attention; she distrusted spiritual experiences that a soul went looking for, and always turned her nuns back from raptures toward the ordinary, hidden work of love and obedience. The fire in the heart, for her, was never the point. The friendship was.

Barefoot, and on the road

A woman that alive to God could not stay content in a lax and comfortable house. Teresa became convinced that the Carmelite life needed to return to its roots — small communities, strictly enclosed, living in real poverty, at prayer. In 1562 she founded the first reformed convent, St Joseph's in Ávila, consecrated on 24 August. The nuns there owned nothing, took no endowment, wore coarse habits and sandals of rope and straw. From those bare feet came the name that stuck: the Discalced, the "unshod," Carmelites.

The opposition was immediate and fierce. The city authorities of Ávila took her to law, alarmed at an unendowed convent with no visible means of support. Churchmen were uneasy about a woman who taught mental prayer so boldly, in an age when the Inquisition watched such things closely and a nun's inner life could be treated as dangerous. Teresa met all of it with a combination the record keeps insisting on: she was a genuine contemplative and a shrewd, funny, indefatigable organiser. Over the next twenty years, in poor health and over bad Castilian roads, she founded convent after convent across Spain.

In 1567, at Medina del Campo, she met a young friar, small and intense, who wanted to carry the same reform to the men of the order. His name was John of the Cross, and he would become one of the greatest poets and mystics of the Christian tradition in his own right. Together they launched the reform among the friars, whose first house opened at Duruelo in 1568. It was a costly partnership. From around 1575 a bitter jurisdictional war broke out between the Discalced and the older Calced ("shod") Carmelites; John was seized and imprisoned by his opponents; Teresa was, for a time, confined and silenced. Only in 1580 were the Discalced finally recognised as a separate province, and the reform secured.

Through it all she carried a small piece of paper, found after her death in her breviary in her own hand — a few lines that hold the whole temper of a life lived under illness, suspicion, lawsuits and the road:

Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you; all things are passing; God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.

— Teresa of Ávila, the "Nada te turbe" found in her breviary

What she left, and one word she did not say

Teresa died on the night of 4–15 October 1582 at Alba de Tormes, worn out by a last journey. The dates are not a misprint: she died on the very night the Gregorian calendar took effect, when 4 October was followed directly by 15 October, which is why her feast falls on the fifteenth. She left behind a reformed order, a scattering of small poor convents, and four books that have never gone out of print — The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle, and The Book of the Foundations. She was canonised in 1622. On 27 September 1970, Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church — the first woman ever so honoured, a week before the same title was given to Catherine of Siena.

One caution belongs in any honest account of her. A much-loved prayer that begins "Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours" is very often printed under her name. It is not hers. It is a later composition, from the nineteenth or twentieth century, and however lovely it is, attaching it to Teresa is a mistake. Her real words stand on their own and need no borrowing.

What she actually leaves is smaller and stronger than any single quotable prayer. She leaves the witness of a woman who was, for twenty years, exactly the sort of tired, distracted, half-serious believer most of us recognise — and who was met, late, in front of a wounded Christ, and became one of the great friends of God. Her whole teaching can be folded back into the one sentence she gave us: that prayer is nothing more, and nothing less, than taking time to be alone with him who we know loves us. She was almost forty before she believed it. She spent the rest of her life proving it was true.