a general question before getting to the books on saint teresa of avila. I think most people, if they know anything about her, they know about the bernini statue, the ecstasy of saint teresa and that she had these extraordinary and ecstatic religious experiences. i didn’t even know, before i started reading the books you recommended, that saint teresa of avila is a ‘doctor of the church’, one of the 36 saints whose doctrinal writings bear a particular stamp of authority from the catholic church. . Could you start by telling us what makes her great?
I have a picture of saint teresa in heaven approaching bernini and saying: ‘mr. Bernini, you have some explanations to do. i don’t think the statue in rome begins to tell us what really matters about teresa. she did, she had extraordinary experiences, but she was a reformer, a practical reformer. she was a writer and spiritual director. seeing her work as coherently united in all these ways is part of what we must do to fully understand it. she had a very strong notion of what she meant by the incarnation, the involvement of god and humanity. everything she says is based on that. she had a very strong ideal of what the Christian community is like, especially the religious/monastic community, in which a kind of equality is profoundly important. In addition to that, she had a lot of very interesting things to say about the typical phases or stages of spiritual growth. for her, that involved a series of admittedly very remarkable experiences, which she records, but we shouldn’t approach her through that lens. we must see her as someone who in her own complex context was doing critical work teaching the Christian faith at a time when women were not expected to be teachers of the faith, much less doctors of the church. p>
So, is it through her teaching and practical life as a religious reformer that she became a doctor of the church, rather than any kind of great knowledge she developed as a result of her ecstatic experiences?
You are reading: St teresa of avila books
yes. one could say that his long experience of prayer and contemplation, including his experience of visions and so on, was part of his theological vision. but it’s not like he listens to heavenly secrets that are then broadcast to the world. she always returns to the gospel narrative. I have found, in my own reading of her over the years, that her use of biblical texts is in itself an extremely interesting clue to how she thinks about faith and about her calling.
let’s move on to the first book, which is the book of the life of st teresa.
This is Teresa’s account of her journey. it was written at the request of his confessor. he was already attracting a certain amount of unfriendly attention from the authorities, including the inquisition. It is worth remembering that, at this time, the Inquisition was very active. We all have Monty Python’s vision of the Spanish Inquisition. we think of this rather grotesque and monstrous surveillance institution. much of it was not. it was a huge bureaucracy, more like public finances. if you messed up a bit on something, it would be on the books for a long time and you would be haunted by minor debts, so to speak. There were, of course, the big scenes, the public executions, etc., but for many people the real annoyance of the inquisition was simply being constantly harassed and held accountable for things that were said. all kinds of holy, scholarly, and reputable figures got into serious trouble with the inquisition and took years to get out of it.
Teresa’s confessor was really saying, ‘Look, write down what you think you’re doing, in case things get tough.’ Unsurprisingly, the Inquisition confiscated copies of the manuscript and it took Teresa several years to get it back. he eventually had to appeal to the king of spain to intervene with the inquisition to retrieve the book itself from him.
“The famous image of irrigation comes to mind. the soul is like a garden, it needs the rain to grow. How is the soil irrigated?”
what she is doing in the book of her life is explaining why she is a reformer of the monastic life. she describes growing up in a godly home, some of the experiences she had as a child. she describes her early years at the convent, having become a nun in her late teens. she describes how she, for a time, was very devout, very prayerful, and then, partly because of a serious illness, everything becomes a bit ordinary, a bit boring. she sinks to the level of most nuns of her day. the convent she belongs to is not spectacularly evil or corrupt. it’s a bit cosy. it is the kind of convent where the youngest daughters of aristocratic families stay to spend their lives sewing and going to church, with their own personal attendants and servants as well. Little by little, Teresa realized that something was wrong. She describes a very significant moment in which she has, not literally a vision, but she sees a statue of Christ in the monastery cloister and feels a personal calling. The statue was of Christ being scourged before his crucifixion, of Christ in the midst of his suffering. and she says it was as if christ was saying, “i need you to be with me”. and that really changes her perspective. she decides that she must reform the order of her. she begins to request permission to found a smaller and more austere convent, and then she begins to found more.
thus, gradually, over the following years, spread this particular style of religious life. that’s not something he talks to us about much in life because his focus in the book is to help us see the nature of prayer life. she comes up with the famous image of watering. the soul is like a garden, it needs the rain to grow. how is the land irrigated? how do you make it moist and receptive enough for it to grow? she describes four stages. at one end we are doing all the work: we can take the water out in buckets and pour it; we can get machinery to help us; and we can dig irrigation ditches. Or we can just wait for the rain. and rain, real rain, is the best thing for the soil. So how do we become soil that is just waiting for the rain? that’s how god really gets the job done. so the point of her prayer life is to ask ourselves how we gradually let go of our insistence on being in charge and doing things and instead become truly receptive. the paradox is that it involves a lot of work, but that is the heart of the plot of the book of her life. and I think that’s what people come back to.
She absolutely insisted that the Reformed Carmelites should only depend on public alms for their livelihood. Is that fundamental to this idea of how Christians should live their lives?
There are two things that are very clear in what he says about his communities, and not only in life but in other books. one is this view that the community is small enough to be friendly. this is a community of friends of jesus, who can be friends with each other. friendship doesn’t depend on hierarchy, so you can’t have elaborate fixed hierarchies. you have a prioress and a winemaker and an accountant, but these jobs rotate. When you’ve done your job, you go back to doing the dishes. she is very clear about it. therefore, it is also very clear that a large amount is not invested in what we could call ‘plant’. you don’t build big convents, you don’t build elaborate churches, you don’t court the local nobility by saying ‘we’ll give you a fancy tomb in the church’, you don’t go fishing for grants of land and property that will give you an income. you need to depend on—yes, on charity—and whatever you can do with your work. The model is very different from the large sprawling communities that characterized most Spanish cities and, indeed, most southern European cities at the time. these things were very basic for her.
And does the book of his life focus entirely on the development of his prayer life and his spiritual and religious evolution, or does it deal with his family and his upbringing, more directly autobiographical material?
This is an interesting and very pertinent question. in fact, it talks a bit about his childhood. what he doesn’t talk about here is his family in detail, because until the middle of the 20th century no one really knew, but his family was Jewish. his grandfather and his father had had problems with the inquisition at various times, suspected of returning to Judaism. It is the familiar pattern: the Jews were forced to convert in 15th century Spain and then, of course, because they were forced to convert, no one believes that their conversion is sincere. You can’t win, we know that his father had to leave Toledo due to problems with the Inquisition and settle in Avila.
now, teresa doesn’t mention that. And frankly, I don’t blame her because if there was anything worse than an independent woman teaching prayer and theology in the 16th century Spanish church, it would be an independent Jewish woman teaching theology and prayer. so she doesn’t touch that and it was a closely guarded secret for centuries. what’s intriguing is the way that subtext appears at various points in her writing, as if she’s almost daring someone to call her out. she says, ‘of course, it doesn’t matter what your family origins are. this obsession with family, honor and purity of blood has nothing to do with what happens in the church.” she is very insistent that her communities will accept people from any background. this is a time when most religious orders explicitly prohibited people of Jewish descent from joining their communities. We also know that she admitted someone—we don’t know all the details—from the Spanish colonies in the new world, who appears to be an indigenous person. race and religion are something the community must go through. So, I think there is an easily discernible subtext when she writes about honor and status. she is very careful to insist that there should be no distinctions in the community based on family background. her in practice, she resisted the so-called “purity statutes”, which denied entry to people of pure non-Christian blood.
let’s move on to j.h. elliott’s imperial spain.
this is a book that, for me, helps enormously to understand the type of society that teresa was part of. I just mentioned the blood purity statutes. what is happening in 16th century spain is all in the reversal of the reconquest, the reconquest of spain from the muslim rulers who had held on to parts of spain until the 1490s. the new spain, ruled by catholic kings , is very consciously a kind of flagship of Christian identity and is at a high point in the sixteenth century. the new world is producing huge amounts of income. gold and silver are flowing from the americas. Spain has a well-equipped army and navy, and has a massive diplomatic and political presence in continental Europe. culturally and intellectually, it is also an immensely creative place. you have some of the leading scholars in europe, you have the new edition of the bible produced in spain during this period, and so on.
Elliott’s book certainly helped me to see how the confidence of Spain really blossomed in this period, after the conflicts of the middle ages, and how that blossoming had the profound dark side of intensifying the contempt and marginalization of the racial and religious minorities. Muslims and Jews had been largely expelled from Spain by 1492, or forcibly converted. People of “mixed blood,” as the Spanish would call them, were suspect, even if they had become Christians, like Teresa’s own family. All this comes together in this sense that Spain is not entirely a chosen nation, but certainly a favorite son of God, and has a very special relationship with the Catholic Church.
“The convent she belongs to is not spectacularly evil or corrupt. it’s a bit cosy”
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now, already in teresa’s life, this is beginning to fragment a bit. We know that, for example, agriculture in Castile was in decline in the middle of the century. We know that the avalanche of foreign bullion in Spain had a rather depressing effect on indigenous Spanish industry. people didn’t feel like they had to work the same way. People who wanted to make a quick fortune in the New World would neglect land and business in Spain itself. So not everything is as sunny a picture as the propagandists of Imperial Spain at the time would have liked to think. By the time of Teresa’s mid-century maturity, say in the 1560s, when he is writing quite a bit, things are shakier than they were. There is also the awareness, which teresa undoubtedly reflects, not only of the internal conflicts of the Spanish church, but also of the new conflicts in Europe, between Catholic and non-Catholic powers.
she is well aware of the fact that the wars of religion are starting in france, that there is, as she sees it, violence against the church by the reformers. she sees her business in religious reform as, in part, a response to attacks on the church that are occurring in other parts of europe. she knows next to nothing about Reformed theology, and not much about what’s really going on. she reads the horror stories, and her response is to them. but it’s all part of the sense that it’s “a world on fire,” an expression she used at one point. she might have grown up in the first great blaze of Spanish imperial prosperity, in the first half of the century, but that does not seem so favorable at the time when she is most active. she is aware that the systems she takes for granted are more fragile than anyone thought.
Elliott, who is one of the great Spanish historians of the last generation, provides a wonderfully readable account of this rise and fall of self-assured, expansionist Spain, in which context Teresa makes quite a bit of sense.
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Did she see herself timidly serving this great Spanish Catholic adventure, or don’t you realize that?
I don’t think he makes much sense of the Spanish project although, curiously, he has a brother serving in the armies in the new world; There are letters from Mexico. we know that some of the early carmelites, including st. Juan de la Cruz, his confessor and great friend, considered missionary work in Mexico. then there is an awareness of that new world perspective. teresa is very clear that the armies of the king of spain in the new world are doing the work of christ. she takes that into account quite routinely, but it’s not something that comes up on a regular basis. Similarly, she is sometimes only too happy to make use of her contacts in the royal court, even going directly to the king. at the same time, she maintains a considerable distance from that world when necessary, and she is quite capable of being extremely critical of all her habits.
on the subject of the new world, it is perhaps worth noting, as one of those completely useless facts, that one of the earliest references to potatoes in european literature can be found in teresa’s letters. her brother sends her potatoes from the new world.
excellent! since we are talking about the background, let’s move on to the next book, the next one is the avila de santa teresa by jodi bilinkoff.
yes. This is a wonderfully vivid and well-researched study of the actual civic and urban world in which Teresa lived, and it certainly reinforces the impression that this is a city well stocked, or even overstocked, with religious communities, typical of its time.
Ávila is, as those who have visited it know, a classic medieval walled city. like so many others, its geography is dotted with churches and religious communities of various kinds. Bilinkoff’s book gives a very clear idea of the extent to which the religious and monastic communities were intertwined with the economic life of the city. they took from that economic life, they enjoyed the patronage of various people. they were quite dependent on aristocratic patronage, on aristocrats who bought their tombs in churches, or even bought their nursing homes in convents and monasteries, living off their patrimony within a religious community, when they were no longer particularly active in society. /p>
“Spain is not entirely a chosen nation, but it is a favorite son of God”
also, of course, as in the rest of pre-reformation europe, religious communities provided social services, employment, etc., to the general population. practically all the main religious orders are represented, even in a medium-sized city like Ávila. if you wanted to be a nun, friar or monk, there were many options. there, as in other places, when teresa founds new communities, she has to overcome a bit of suspicion from the civic authorities who ask if they can really afford another convent. Part of what Teresa is eager to promise is that her new foundations will not be a waste of resources.
so, i put bilinkoff’s book on because it’s really helpful to see how deeply intertwined the religious communities were with the civic landscape and how that all worked out.
The initial reformed Carmelite convent was in Avila, but did Teresa find many sister communities during her life?
a lot, that’s why I traveled most of the time. his book on the foundations is a very vivid account of how he traveled the country, going to places where he thought there might be an opportunity, where perhaps someone had written to him saying, “we think we could use a reformed Carmelite.” convent here.” This is another reason Bernini’s sculpture doesn’t give you much of an image. part of his life is simply rolling around spain in overheated and uncomfortable oxcarts visiting new possible settings for convents. some of the best-known little anecdotes of his life come from those trips. when he says that we have to think of our human life on earth as a night in a bad hotel, he knows what he is talking about: you know it will soon be over, you have to put up with it, and you have to make the most of it; but there are bedbugs, draft and overheating.
Have you ever left Spain?
not. part of the history of the foundations is the interest that aroused in the male branch of the Carmelite order. she began by reforming the Carmelite order of women. then a couple of young friars from the Carmelite order say that men’s communities could use something similar. one of the first people to respond to that is the man we know as saint john of the cross, who was a very well educated young friar, albeit from a very poor background. he recommits himself: the carmelite brothers and sisters would always have a kind of dedication, so teresa became ‘teresa de jesús’. John of the Cross was originally called ‘John of Saint Matthew’, and later becomes John of the Cross when he recommits himself to the Reformed Order. We know quite a bit about the beginnings of the reform in the order of men from the letters and testimonies about the life of Saint John of the Cross.
“Teresa is extroverted, even flirtatious”
john of the cross becomes, very importantly, teresa’s confessor and spiritual director for a while. They are very, very diverse personalities. They clearly love each other very much and they also find each other a bit infuriating. John is very intense, very interior. Teresa is outgoing, even flirtatious. she’s quite an overwhelming presence, I think you’d know if she was in the room. and I think it’s quite wonderful. the two of them shared so much, exchanged so much, and learned so much from each other. there are several notes by teresa about juan de la cruz, but there is one in particular where she talks about a kind of recreation/rest time in the convent one day when she had asked the opinion of several clergy friends about a phrase that had come out to her in pray. she then gives her point of view, her judgment on each of these comments, quite scathing. and she says of juan de la cruz, ‘and then father juan de la cruz, as usual, continued with darkness and loneliness.’ you feel that teresa is bothering him a bit.
let’s move on to the essential writings of ruth burrows.
The Carmelite order continues to this day and continues to produce some notable people. Ruth Burrows, otherwise Sister Rachel, of the Carmelite community at Quidenham in Norfolk, is a writer whose work I first came across in the 1970s thanks to a Benedictine friend of mine. Her book, Guidelines in Mystical Prayer, appeared at that time. I must say that, like many others, I was totally captivated and engaged by this completely new perspective on the Carmelite tradition of prayer. in this book, ruth burrows does a bit of what teresa does in the book of her life, that is, she spells out a series of metaphors that take us from one stage of prayer to another, and instead of teresa’s watering metaphor uses, ruth burrows uses travel metaphors from one island to another. there are territories where we feel at home, but we have to travel and the transition between them can be quite difficult.
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fundamentally, as for teresa, the journey is one from self-sufficiency to trust in god. In that process, there are long stretches where you can’t really understand things much, where you don’t have much more than blind trust that God is still holding on to you. you just have to stick with it and you need people around you to support you in that. Again, part of the book is Ruth Burrows, as the author’s voice, discussing her perspectives on things with two other sisters in her community. she chooses to focus on two sisters of very different temperaments. she talks about the ‘light on’ and ‘light off’ temperament. there are those for whom there is usually a fairly strong feeling that things are going well, and you can continue. and there are those who almost never have the feeling that things are going well, but they know that they have to stay where they are.
then, “on” or “off” doesn’t really matter because it’s not about whether you’re having great experiences or not. it is a question of whether your whole being is turned inside out and opens to a degree of receptivity to divine love, which will come through you and transform your actions. When I first read this book, I thought it was truly one of the best things I had ever read about prayer and contemplation. And everything Rachel has written since then has had the same impact. so I was delighted when this anthology of his writings appeared a few years ago. and in my opinion, she is truly one of the greatest prayer teachers in our own time.
Does the Carmelite tradition of prayer have a very fixed practice, or routine, of the kind found, for example, in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius?
is a good question. In a certain way, the Carmelite tradition is absolutely opposed to the Ignatian exercises, because there is no prescribed method. what is interesting is that teresa herself was very close to many of the early jesuits and she had great respect for the jesuit teachers and pastors. she’s not ruling it out. again, when she makes her mocking comments about saint john of the cross, she says: “this kind of thing would be very nice for the people who were doing the spiritual exercises”. it’s not exactly dismissive, but there is a feeling of “that’s fine for those who like it”.
I guess the contrast is that st ignatius, in the exercises, is trying to encourage people to use their minds and their imaginations almost, in a way, to go beyond them: use your imagination, think about what What Christ’s words might have sounded like, what the scene might have looked like, place yourself there in the story, follow your imaginative instinct and curiosity. then at the end of that ask what he has learned. what difference has he made? what are you going for?
now, teresa, I think, she would have said, ‘it’s fine, but it’s really a technique to get you into something else.’ the something else is where the images and imagination, the exercise of your mind, will just freeze and eventually melt and disappear because ultimately what you want is a receptive state of being. while you will never, on some level, stop thinking about the human jesus (she’s adamant about that), you shouldn’t obsess over your own images of it. I think she is speaking to people who have already gotten a little used to silence and darkness in prayer. she is not as far from san juan de la cruz as she sometimes sounds or pretends to be. Like Saint John of the Cross, she believes that there is a real dismantling of the routine ways we think and imagine that has to continue because so much of our thinking and imagination takes a long detour around the world and lands back in the center. of the ego, business as usual. and somehow, we have to go beyond the usual. meditating on the life of jesus is fine, and teresa certainly doesn’t discourage him, but it is, at best, like a kind of open door for her. you have to detach yourself, detach yourself from that constant return to what makes you feel good.
let’s move on to your latest book, which is teresa de Ávila by peter tyler.
this is a very successful and quite recent overview of teresa’s thought, as well as her life. there are a number of good lives, but this one brings her thinking, her writing, much more.
Is Tyler a theologian or a historian?
is a theologian and someone who has written extremely well on the history of spirituality. he has also written a very good book on saint john of the cross. I would recommend this as a very good introduction to her as a thinker. As I said at the beginning, I want us to do her full justice as a thinker. she is a very original theologian in many ways. she is a very original reader of the bible. Earlier I mentioned how interesting I found her use of the Bible. Some years ago, I did a little study on what texts of the gospels she was using, what fragments of the gospels she liked the most. she likes st. Much the Gospel of Luke. she likes the stories about women in the gospels, and she uses them sometimes with a bit of mischief, you could almost say.
There’s a passage in one of your plays where you say you realize that of course women should be quiet in church and everything else. but, you know, she looks at the gospels and who is the one that is there in the cross and the resurrection? are women right? then think about it.
He is fascinated by the figure of Mary Magdalene. In medieval legend, Mary Magdalene is not only a repentant sinner, she is also a model of contemplative life because she tells the legend of her that she spent her last years as a hermit. The Carmelite order itself began as a group of hermits in the holy land. the crusaders meet this community and bring back to europe the ideals and visions of this group that lives on mount carmel. so the notion of that prophetic call to solitude, Elijah on the mountain, remains part of the background of the Carmelite imagination. Maria Magdalena, for Teresa, is a very good example of that solitary and intensely interior life.
also, teresa assumes the truth of the medieval legend that identifies mary magdalene with the sinful woman who washes the feet of jesus. behind that is the idea of mary magdalene doing something outrageous and shameful for the sake of jesus. she, teresa, is asking the women of her time to do something extravagant and shameful, which is to become carmelite sisters, to forget their comfort, their reputation, their status. she is a very innovative and insightful bible reader.
Is peter tyler looking into all those problems? does he have a particular opinion in this book about the life of st teresa de avila or about her importance as an individual or her role?
I think he would agree with the kind of perspective I’ve outlined here, which is that you have to read it as a real thinker and also as a reformer. she must be read as someone deliberately commenting on and modifying her attitudes toward prayer and contemplation of the moment. her theology is contemplative, she derives her theology from her prayer. I think peter tyler is very good at weaving those themes into the book.
I just want to ask you one last question, which you may not want to hear. there has been work on her life exploring whether some of her religious experience was caused by being epileptic or rooted in other forms of mental illness or instability. do you think that kind of modern theory, of whatever kind, is useful to understand it? Or do you think that, fundamentally, if you don’t try to understand it in a Christian theological context, you won’t have a clue what drives it and you won’t be able to understand it at all, as a human being?
To be honest, I don’t think these perspectives tell us much about her. again, it is the danger of reading it through bernini’s sculpture, where we see someone in an abnormal condition. As many commentators have pointed out, Bernini is depicting someone who appears to be in a state of orgasm. the image of the angel sticking a spear in the center of her body, it doesn’t take a genius to decipher the symbolism of that. But this is an episode in Teresa’s life. there are all kinds of accounts that she gives of her personal spiritual experience, which certainly include strange, unexplained, and non-normal phenomena. but all the time she is writing books, she is directing convents, she is founding new convents, she is traveling negotiating with unfriendly city councils and trying to avoid the Spanish inquisition. the only thing she’s not is some sort of mentally fragile person.
I think some of the comments that focus on what may or may not be mental or psychological conditions assume that anything that appears to be an explicit and complex religious experience is simply a sign of some sort of mental disorder. you’re in a slightly circular argument there, so that doesn’t help me much.
the case of epilepsy seems insignificant to me. if there are episodes and experiences that can result from sleep deprivation, food deprivation, well possibly, yes. these things happen, although she is not one to encourage excessive self-denial. to understand it, you need to look at what it actually says and does. you need to look at the background in which she works and speaks. That’s why I think you have to place it in the context in which these books help to place it.
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