← [[appendix-a-f1a|Essential Themes — Way of Perfection Study Edition Glossary]] | [[formation-I-a-handbook|Table of Contents]] | [[appendix-c-f1a|Biographical Timeline — St. Teresa of Ávila]] → # Life Introduction — The Book of Her Life Copyright Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, Inc. 1976. Used with permission. THE BOOK OF HER LIFE INTRODUCTION Early Years Spain, separated from the continent of Europe by the Pyrenees, has a high central tableland both dividing the country within itself and stretching from the northern mountains to the southern coast. Without a natural center and without easy routes, this land was in the Middle Ages a disparate region, a complex of different races, languages, and civilizations. But at the end of the fifteenth century and the opening of the sixteenth, all the natural disadvantages were somehow overcome. Spain, with ten percent of its soil bare rock and only ten percent of it rich, became in the sixteenth century the greatest power on earth; this previously remote peninsula was ruler of the largest empire the world had yet seen, and all but master of Europe. During those exhilarating years of outward glory, Teresa of Avila lived and witnessed ironically to another, inward glory, to the sacred truth that becomes the rich possession of every genuine mystic, that a person’s greatest good is within and “won by giving up everything” (ch. 20, 27). Born during the reign of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, Teresa saw, under Charles V, Castile’s high moment of prosperity. Under Philip II, she saw her king’s struggles against Protestant and Morisco rebels, against the Netherlanders in the north and the Turks in the Mediterranean – not to mention Philip’s many activities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. Teresa’s grandfather, a Toledan merchant, a Jewish converso (Christianized Jew), victim of the use of religion for the sake of political unity, had to accuse himself before the Inquisition for judaizing and as a penance was compelled to wear in procession for seven Fridays the humiliating san benito. After his reconciliation, out of necessity, he moved with his family to Avila where he was able to continue in his profession as a cloth merchant. One of his sons, Teresa’s father Alonso, was about fourteen when the family arrived in Avila. In 1505 Alonso married; but two years later his wife died, leaving him two children. Alonso, after four years, married again, this time Doña Beatriz de Ahumada, who on March 28, 1515, gave birth to a daughter and future saint who received her grandmother’s name – Teresa de Ahumada. Doña Beatrix died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind from her marriage ten children. Biographers have given posterity a detailed description of Teresa de Ahumada. She was medium in height and tended to be more plump than thin. Her unusual face could not be described as either round or aquiline; the skin was white and the cheeks flesh-colored. The forehead was broad, her eyebrows somewhat thick, their dark brown color having a reddish tinge. Her eyes were black, lively, and round, not very large but well placed and protruding a little. The nose was small; the mouth medium in size and delicately shaped, and her chin was well proportioned. The white teeth sparkled and were equal in size. Three tiny moles, considered highly ornamental in 40 01.24 1-24-2024Appendix B those days, added further grace to her appearance; one below the center of the nose, the second over the left side of her mouth, the third beneath the mouth on the same side. Her hair was a shining black and gently curled. In many ways an extrovert, she was cheerful and friendly, a happy conversationalist, whom people found pleasing to hear as well as look at. Besides her talent as a writer, she was also gifted in the use of the needle and household tasks. Her undaunted spirit first began to show signs of itself when she was only seven and decided to set off with her brother Rodrigo to the land of the Moors to have her head cut off for Christ. With much the same ardor she enjoyed playing hermit life with other children – praying, giving alms, and doing penances. While she was growing up in this quiet atmosphere of piety, the revolt of the Comuneros took place, shaking all Castile. This was a movement of angry reaction to a long period in which royal government had eroded many of the traditional powers and prerogatives of the Castilian towns. During this period, too – in 1525 to be precise – the Imperialist army, largely through Spanish troops, won the greatest victory of the age at Pavia. Two years later Charles V’s armies broke from control and put Rome to the most terrible sack it had ever endured. It was about at the time of this latter incident that the piety of the now adolescent Teresa began to grow cold. She became over eager to read romantic tales of chivalry, began to cultivate her feminine charms, and to plan a possible marriage. The absorption of her fantasy with chivalrous themes along with her faculty for writing stirred her at this time to try, together with her brother, writing a book of the kind she liked to read. In the judgment of her early Jesuit biographer, Ribera, it contained “much that could be said for it.” As time went on, after the death of her mother in November 1528, Teresa began to meet with opposition at home because of her affection for her cousins, sons of her aunt Doña Elvira de Cepeda, and her friendship with a frivolous, unidentified relative whose influence was not of the kind that strengthened Teresa’s piety. Teresa was later to look back with much distaste upon this whole period in which she lost the fervor of her early years. On the watch for an excuse to free his daughter from the vain company and enticements she was experiencing, Don Alonso found one, in 1531, when his oldest daughter married. At the age of sixteen Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns of Our Lady of Grace in Avila. Since there was no public education system in Spain at the time, Don Alonso’s daughter probably learned to read and write at home. Nor could one compare what was offered to her in the way of education at Our Lady of Grace to any modern boarding school. The nuns did little more, we now conjecture, than prepare the young girls for their future life in marriage, teaching them the usual household tasks: cooking, sewing, embroidery, and other things of the sort. Undoubtedly the girls also received some basic religious instructions. The gentle, friendly nun, Doña Maria Briceño, who had charge of the girls and carefully watched over them, was a woman of deep prayer. As things turned out she began to mean more to Teresa than all former friends. Doña Maria loved to talk about prayer, and her high spiritual ideals made Don Alonso’s daughter begin to think about a vocation to the religious life and feel more favorable to the idea. But it seems the strain caused by the inner struggle over the pros and cons of the life of a nun harmed Teresa’s health so that she had to leave the school 41 When her health improved, she was brought to her sister’s house in Castellanos de la Cañada, but with a stop along the way for a visit with her uncle Don Pedro de Cepeda, who lived as a hermit in Hortigosa. He introduced her to spiritual books, which helped her in the struggle she was experiencing over her vocation. The Letters of St Jerome, finally, became the occasion of her courage to make a definite decision. But then unable to bear the thought of separation, her father refused to give his consent to her becoming a nun. On November 2, 1535, at the age of twenty, she once again stole away from her father’s house, this time not to go off to the land of the Moors but to give her life to God as a nun in the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation. Yet the action was not the result of so cold or indifferent an attitude to her father’s feelings as it may seem to have been. She later was to write: “When I left my father’s house I felt the separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered” (ch. 4,1). Don Alonso, in fact, accepted it all with resignation, gave her a dowry that was more than substantial, and acquired for his daughter a private room of her own in the monastery. Life at the Incarnation Recent studies have shown that at the time of Teresa’s entry the Incarnation numbered among eleven Carmelite monasteries for nuns in Spain. Its canonical status lay midway between that of the sanctimoniales, those with obligation to choir office and enclosure, and that of the beaterios, where the life resembled tertiary life. The nuns were required to recite the Divine Office but not to observe enclosure. They were engaged in no outside forms of service. Some two hundred persons, including servants and nun’s relatives, were living together at the Incarnation in Teresa’s days there. Contrary to common belief, religious life at the Incarnation was austere. Days each week were set aside for fasting and abstinence; silence was carefully maintained so as to encourage the spirit of continual prayer. With many kinds of detailed, minute rubrics, the Divine Office was celebrated in solemnity and splendor. No time, however, was designated in the legislation for mental prayer – a deficiency not without its drawbacks in what must have been a crowded monastery. Novices received instructions about the Carmelite order, its eremitical origins, its devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to the prophets Elijah and Elisha. They were also trained in the practice of the intricate ceremonies used in chanting the Divine Office. Oddly enough and irrespective of the Carmelite rule’s exhortation to continual prayer, Teresa states that until reading Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet, given to her later by her uncle, she didn’t know how to go about praying or being recollected. The spiritual books she mentions were by Franciscan not Carmelite authors, and she offers no clear indication of receiving instruction about mental prayer during her novitiate training. Although Teresa’s decision about her vocation had been costly, once she was inside the monastery she threw herself into the life with zest and found that it, in fact, delighted her. But shortly after her profession, which took place two years later, her health gave way once more. Authors can only speculate about the nature of this illness. Teresa herself attributes it to the food and lifestyle at the Incarnation. After the doctors admitted they could find no cure for her sickness, her worried father decided to bring her to Becedas for treatment by a quack, famous there for many cures. The harsh, painful methods of cure, lasting three months, only aggravated 42 01.24 1-24-2024Appendix B Teresa’s poor condition; in fact they almost killed her. She was brought back, a pitiful sight, to Avila, where she remained an invalid and paralytic for three years – until, as she devoutly testifies, through the intercession of her glorious father St. Joseph, she was able to walk again. But, probably as a consequence, she suffered the rest of her life from miserable health, as wide variety of illnesses. Antonio Aguiar, after his medical examination of Teresa when she was sixty-seven and nearing the end of her life, claimed that it was impossible to find the focal cause of her illnesses because her body had become a whole arsenal of ailments. Able to get about again, Teresa next experienced a protracted period of great difficulty with prayer. She writes: “And very often, for some years, I was more anxious that the hour I had determined to spend in prayer be over than I was to remain there … and so unbearable was the sadness I felt on entering the oratory, that I had to muster up all my courage” (ch. 8,7). According to Fr, Efrén, her most recent biographer, her difficulties amounted chiefly to a problem of technique. She didn’t realize that the mind, or imagination, and feelings can wander, as St, John of the Cross points out, while the soul on a deeper level may remain quiet in a hardly perceptible contemplation. These difficulties with prayer went on for about eighteen years until she experienced before a very devotional image of the wounded Christ and again while reading from the Confessions of St. Augustine some unusually strong and efficacious feelings of compunction. On these two occasions of peak experience she learned to lose completely any trust she had in herself and place it all in His Majesty. Compunction is a basic sentiment running through the entire Life. To the undiscerning or inexperienced, Teresa’s outpourings of compunction might seem like exaggerated guilt feelings. But for Teresa, true sorrow does not disquiet, does not agitate. Her compunction consoled her; permeated with humility, it was a gift – quiet, gentle, and in the light (ch. 30,9). The Desert Fathers, in fact, constantly exhorted their disciples to pray for the gift of compunction, the gift of tears. These Fathers felt that when the soul was softened by this interior weeping, God would give the experience of his light; in the shadow of sorrow was to be found the spiritual joy of enlightenment. And so it was with Teresa. In addition, her feelings of compunction later became more intense through the mystical experience she had of God’s transcendent majesty, and of the shabbiness of sin beside His boundless outpouring of love. Spiritual humiliations preceded her spiritual exaltations. “I don’t recall His ever having granted me one of the very notable favors of which I shall speak if not at a time when I was brought to nothing at the sight of my wretchedness” (ch. 22,12). Teresa began, then, at the time of this conversion, to experience passively and in a living way the presence of God in the center of her soul. To qualify experiences in prayer that she couldn’t acquire through her own efforts but that were experienced passively Teresa often used the term “supernatural.” With the onset of the supernatural another, new life began for her. “This is another, new book from here on” (ch. 23,1). Unfamiliar, unusual experiences started to occur, and Teresa, not yet enlightened about the stages of prayer, felt the surge of a new fear. “His Majesty began to give me the prayer of quiet very habitually – and often, of union – which lasted a long while. Since at that time other women had fallen into serious illusions and deceptions caused by the devil, I began to be afraid” (ch. 23,2). The fear so increased that, she says, it made her diligently seek spiritual persons for 43 consultations, marking the beginning of her struggles to explain her supernatural experiences. This recourse to spiritual men, and learned ones as well, led ultimately to the writing of her Life. --- **Source:** Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, *Formation I Year A: The Way of Perfection* (US National Formation Program, 2024).