Teresa of Ávila

Who they were

Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was a Spanish Carmelite nun, monastic reformer, and author of the most systematic account of the stages of contemplative prayer in the Western Christian tradition.

She was canonised in 1622 and in 1970 became one of the first two women declared a Doctor of the Church — a title acknowledging her writing as authoritative teaching, granted four centuries after the Inquisition confiscated her autobiography.

Where they came from

Her grandfather was a Jewish convert. Juan Sánchez de Toledo, a converso, was condemned by the Inquisition in Toledo in the 1480s and made to process through the city in penitential dress on successive Fridays. The family subsequently moved to Ávila and bought a certificate of noble status.

This is not biographical colour. In sixteenth-century Spain, limpieza de sangre — purity of blood — governed access to offices, orders and respectability, and converso descent was a permanent vulnerability. Teresa's family history was known and could be used against her, and it shapes how she wrote about everything.

She entered the Carmelite convent at Ávila in 1535, and spent nearly twenty years in a comfortable, socially porous religious house before an experience she described as a second conversion. From 1562 she founded a reformed branch — the Discalced Carmelites — committed to enclosure, poverty and contemplative prayer, working alongside John of the Cross.

She wrote under surveillance. Spain in this period was actively prosecuting the alumbrados, the "enlightened", for claims of direct interior illumination — precisely what Teresa was describing. She was investigated. Her Life was seized by the Inquisition and held for years. She wrote at the command of confessors, for confessors, knowing hostile readers would examine every line.

Her characteristic voice — self-deprecating, deferential, insisting she is only a poor uneducated woman who cannot possibly understand these matters — is now widely read as a survival strategy. It is the register of someone making unprecedented claims about direct experience of God while giving the authorities no purchase.

What they taught

The Interior Castle (1577) is her masterpiece: the soul as a crystal castle with seven dwelling places, or mansions, arranged concentrically, with God at the centre. Progress inward runs from vocal prayer through recollection, the prayer of quiet, and the prayer of union, to the spiritual marriage of the seventh dwelling.

Her account is unusually practical and diagnostic. She distinguishes states carefully, describes what each feels like, warns which are easily mistaken for others, and is consistently sceptical about spectacular phenomena — visions, voices, raptures — insisting that the reliable sign of genuine prayer is not experience but its fruit in ordinary conduct. Someone who has supposedly reached union and is still unkind to the other nuns has not.

She reported raptures and levitation, and the transverberation — an angel piercing her heart with a golden spear, an image Bernini made permanently famous. She was embarrassed by the public ones.

And she ran things. She founded seventeen convents, travelled Spain constantly by cart in poor health, negotiated with bishops, landlords and the papal nuncio who called her a restless disobedient woman, and managed money and property throughout. She is the standing refutation of the idea that contemplatives withdraw from the world — the point Evelyn Underhill built a career on making.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the writing is a first-rate source on contemplative practice and that its psychological precision has been useful to readers with no religious commitment at all.

We can say her scepticism about phenomena is the most valuable thing in it, and it cuts against much of what this site covers elsewhere. Her test is behaviour, not experience — and she applies it to herself.

We can say the context is not optional. Reading Teresa without the Inquisition, the converso ancestry and the alumbrado prosecutions is reading a woman's careful self-protective rhetoric as straightforward humility, and missing what she was actually doing.

We cannot say what happened to her, and she was more careful about that than her admirers. She repeatedly warns that experiences may come from God, from the imagination, or from the devil, and that telling them apart is difficult and requires an outside judgement — which is, in its own idiom, the position this site keeps arriving at.

Further reading

• The Interior Castle (1577) — the map, and readable.
• The Book of Her Life — the autobiography the Inquisition took.
• Cathleen Medwick, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (1999) — good on the political situation she was writing in.