St. Teresa of Avila

1. The Mediocre Nun

For 20 years, Teresa was a "mediocre" nun. She liked the parlor more than the kneeler. Then, in her 40s, God woke her up. She realized that God deserved everything she had.

The word mediocre is hers. In The Book of Her Life she describes those years with a bluntness that is one of the reasons the book is still read: she says she spent them wanting to please God and wanting to please everyone else at the same time, that she gave up mental prayer altogether for about a year, and that she was neither happy in the world nor happy in God.

The setting explains a good deal. The Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila, which she entered in 1535, held something like a hundred and eighty women. It was not a scandal and it was not a place of serious enclosure either. Nuns from good families kept servants and their own rooms, went out for extended stays with relatives, and received visitors in the parlour, where conversation with well-born gentlemen of the town was a normal part of the day. The house was also poor enough that the visits and the connections mattered financially. Teresa was charming, well connected and much in demand, and she says she gave the parlour years she should have given elsewhere.

The turn came around 1554, when she was thirty-nine. She describes coming upon a statue of the wounded Christ that had been brought into the oratory, an image of the scourged Christ before the crowd, and being undone by it. She was reading Augustine's Confessions at about the same time and found her own case in it. What changed after that was not her emotional temperature. It was that she began to pray daily and did not stop.

2. The Interior Castle

She described the soul as a crystal castle with many rooms (mansions). Most people live in the moat (the body/senses). Prayer is the key to entering the castle and traveling to the center, where the King dwells.

The Interior Castle, called Las Moradas in Spanish, was written in 1577 at the order of her confessor, largely in two bursts totalling a few months, while she was in her sixties and while the reform she had started was under attack. The image came to her, she says, of the soul as a castle made of a single diamond or very clear crystal, containing many dwelling places, with God dwelling in the innermost one.

The seven dwelling places are stages of a life of prayer rather than rooms on a map, and Teresa is careful that they overlap and that no one moves through them tidily. In outline: the first three are the work a person can do with grace, which is to enter at all, to persevere in vocal and meditative prayer, and to reach a settled and orderly Christian life that Teresa thinks many people mistake for the destination. The fourth is the transition, where prayer begins to be received rather than produced. The fifth, sixth and seventh describe union, deepening through a long and often painful stretch in the sixth into what she calls spiritual marriage in the seventh.

Two of her insistences run through the whole book. The door into the castle is prayer, so that a person who does not pray is standing outside his own soul. And self-knowledge is required at every stage, including the last, because humility is knowing what is true about yourself. She adds a warning that later readers regularly ignore: nobody should aim at the higher dwellings. The task is the next step, done today.

She also refused, against the advice of some of her directors, to leave behind the humanity of Christ at the higher stages. Some spiritual writers of her time taught that advanced prayer should move past images, including the sacred humanity. Teresa says she tried it, that it did her harm, and that she will not counsel it to anyone.

3. Humor and Grit

She was a mystic who levitated, but she was also incredibly practical. When her carriage broke down in the mud, she complained to God. God said, "This is how I treat my friends." Teresa replied, "No wonder You have so few of them!" (Sass level: Saint.)

The exchange in the mud is a traditional anecdote rather than something Teresa recorded. It does not appear in her own writings, and it comes down through later lives of the saint. It has lasted because it is entirely in character, and it should be enjoyed on those terms rather than quoted as a transcript.

What is in her own hand is better. Her letters and The Book of the Foundations are full of a woman organising building work, arguing about water rights, handling patrons, managing bishops, and telling her prioresses to feed the sisters properly. She wrote that God walks among the pots and pans. She told her nuns that a melancholy sister should be given meat and kept out of the choir, and that a superior who wears people down is doing harm. She distrusted spectacular piety in the young and preferred obedience and common sense.

The verse in the box, Nada te turbe, was found written in her breviary and is attributed to her. It ends with the line that whoever has God lacks nothing, and that God alone suffices.

4. Who Teresa Was

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born at Avila on 28 March 1515, one of a large family. Her father, Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda, was a merchant who had acquired the standing of a gentleman. Her mother, Beatriz de Ahumada, died when Teresa was about thirteen, and Teresa says she went to an image of Our Lady and asked her to be her mother from then on.

One fact about the family was recovered only in the twentieth century, from Spanish legal archives, and it matters. Her paternal grandfather, Juan Sanchez, was a Jewish convert to Christianity in Toledo who was reconciled by the Inquisition in the 1480s and afterwards moved to Avila, where the family acquired documents of noble status. Teresa therefore grew up in a society obsessed with purity of blood, in a family with exactly the background that society penalised. She never mentions it in her writing. Historians reading her insistence that honour is a fiction, and her rule that in her convents nobody was to be addressed by a title of rank, generally read it against this background.

The convent and the illness

She ran away from home as a child with her brother Rodrigo, intending to be martyred by the Moors, and was retrieved by an uncle; she tells the story against herself. She entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in 1535, over her father's objection. Within a few years she fell gravely ill, was treated by a healer whose remedies made her worse, and passed several days unconscious, to the point that a grave was prepared. She recovered with paralysis that took about three years to lift and left her weak.

She lived at the Incarnation for twenty-seven years before founding anything. She was forty-seven when St. Joseph's opened.

5. The Reform and the Seventeen Foundations

The reform began as a small conversation among a handful of nuns about whether a Carmelite house could be lived the way the order's early rule described: small, poor, enclosed, silent, with the day built around prayer.

St. Joseph's at Avila opened in 1562 with a handful of sisters, on a plan Teresa held to in every later house. No more than thirteen nuns, later raised to about twenty. Enclosure kept strictly. Coarse habits and no shoes beyond rope sandals, which is where the name Discalced, meaning unshod, comes from. No family titles inside the house. Manual work, and poverty real enough to depend on alms.

The reaction in Avila was hostile. The town objected to a new house with no endowment, the Carmelite superiors objected to a foundation made without their control, and Teresa was recalled to the Incarnation while the matter was fought out. It was resolved in her favour, and from 1567 she was authorised to found more.

She then spent fifteen years on the roads of Castile and Andalusia in a covered cart, founding houses at Medina del Campo, Malagon, Valladolid, Toledo, Salamanca, Segovia, Seville, Burgos and elsewhere. She was in her fifties and sixties, frequently ill, and negotiating for property with people who did not want her.

John of the Cross

In 1567 she met a young friar, John of Saint Matthias, who was considering leaving for the Carthusians. She persuaded him to take the reform to the friars instead. He became St. John of the Cross, and the first house of Discalced friars opened at Duruelo in 1568. Their partnership produced the two greatest bodies of writing on prayer in the Spanish language.

The opposition

The conflict between the reformed Carmelites and the unreformed branch became serious in the 1570s. A general chapter of the order at Piacenza in 1575 moved against the Discalced expansion, and Teresa was ordered to withdraw to a convent and stay there. In December 1577 friars of the unreformed branch seized John of the Cross and imprisoned him in a cell in Toledo for about nine months, from which he escaped; he wrote some of his greatest poetry there. The dispute was settled when Pope Gregory XIII established the Discalced as a separate province in 1580, and they became a separate order in 1593, after her death.

6. How She Taught Prayer

Teresa's definition of mental prayer is the most useful sentence she wrote, and it is deliberately unspectacular. Prayer, she says in her Life, is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends, taking time frequently to be alone with the one who we know loves us. Everything else in her teaching sits under that.

In the Life she explains the growth of prayer with the image of four ways of watering a garden. The first is hauling water up from a well by hand, which is slow, tiring work, and stands for beginners who must labour to keep their attention on God. The second is a waterwheel with buckets, which moves more water for less effort. The third is a stream running through the garden, where the gardener directs water that is already flowing. The fourth is rain, which the gardener does not produce at all. The point of the image is that the labour is real and necessary at the beginning, and that the later stages are given rather than achieved.

The Way of Perfection, written for her own nuns at St. Joseph's, is the practical book: how to begin, what to do about distraction, why vocal prayer said with attention is genuine prayer, and a long, warm commentary on the Our Father that is probably the best entry point into her writing for a reader who has never read a mystic.

Her advice for people who cannot concentrate is characteristically concrete. Use a book. Look at an image. Say the Our Father slowly and stay on one phrase. Do not measure prayer by whether it felt like anything, because feeling is not the point and dryness is not failure. Our page on prayer sets out the forms the Church recognises and how they fit together.

7. The Visions, and How She Tested Them

Teresa reported visions, locutions and raptures from her late thirties onward, and she reported them reluctantly, in writing, because confessors ordered her to.

The best known is the transverberation, described in chapter 29 of her Life: an angel in bodily form beside her holding a long golden spear with a point of fire, which he drove into her heart repeatedly, leaving her burning with love of God and in a pain she says she wished would never end. Bernini's sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, made in the 1640s and 1650s, is a reading of that passage, and much of what people think they know about Teresa comes from the sculpture rather than the text. The Discalced Carmelites keep a separate commemoration of the transverberation on 26 August.

She also describes raptures in which her body was lifted from the ground against her will, and says she asked the sisters to hold her down and begged God to stop giving her favours that could be seen. Witnesses testified to such events during the process leading to her canonisation.

What is most instructive is her own suspicion of all of it. She writes at length about how to tell a genuine locution from imagination and from diabolical suggestion, and her tests are practical: does it leave the soul humble, does it agree with Scripture and the Church's teaching, does it produce obedience and charity or self-importance, and does it survive being told to a confessor. She submitted her experiences repeatedly to directors who told her she was deceived. She kept obeying them.

That is also why she was investigated. Spain in the mid-sixteenth century was hunting for the alumbrados, a movement of illuminist spirituality condemned by the Inquisition, and a woman writing about interior experience was an obvious suspect. The Index issued in 1559 by the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdes removed a great many devotional works in Spanish from circulation. Her Life was denounced to the Inquisition and held for years. She was not condemned, and the same book was later put in front of Rome as evidence for her sanctity.

8. What the Record Shows and What Was Added Later

Teresa is unusually easy to check, because she is one of the best documented saints of the sixteenth century.

From her own hand: four major books, a large body of letters, and the constitutions she wrote for her convents. The Life and the Foundations are autobiography written under obedience, and they are candid in ways that a hagiographer would never have permitted. This material is the primary evidence for everything on this page.

From the canonisation process: sworn testimony taken from people who had lived with her, gathered in the years after her death for the process that ended in her canonisation in 1622. This is close to the events and gathered for a purpose, which is worth remembering when reading the more spectacular depositions.

Added later: the mud and the carriage. Various sayings that circulate on the internet under her name and are not in her works, including several attributed to her that belong to other writers. The popular image of her as a woman in permanent ecstasy, which owes more to Bernini than to anything she wrote. Her actual books spend far more time on distraction, dryness, self-deception and administration than on ecstasy.

Her remains: she died at Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582 and was buried there. Her body was exhumed within a few years, reported to be intact, and relics were divided and distributed, which was normal practice at the time. The principal relics remain at Alba de Tormes. This page does not attempt to assess the physical claims made about them.

9. Doctor of the Church, Feast Day and Patronage

Her feast, and why it is the fifteenth

Teresa died on the night of 4 October 1582, and her feast is kept on 15 October. The gap is not an error. Spain adopted the Gregorian calendar reform in that very month, and the day after 4 October 1582 was 15 October 1582. She died on the last night of the old calendar, and the following day, her first, was the fifteenth.

Doctor of the Church

Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church on 27 September 1970. She was the first woman to receive the title in the history of the Church, followed a week later by Catherine of Siena on 4 October 1970. The title is given for the value of a saint's teaching, and in Teresa's case it recognises her writing on prayer, which had already been used by directors of souls for four centuries.

Patronage

She is a co-patron of Spain, a title that provoked a long public quarrel in the seventeenth century with the partisans of Saint James at Compostela. She is patron of the Discalced Carmelites and of Avila, and she is invoked by sufferers from headaches and other chronic pain, a patronage that comes straight from her own health, which was poor for most of her adult life.

10. What a Reader Can Take From St. Teresa

Twenty wasted years were not disqualifying. She began the work she is remembered for at forty-seven, after two decades she describes as half-hearted. Age and a poor record are not arguments against starting today.

Prayer is time with a friend, not a performance. Her own definition removes the requirement to feel anything. Showing up is the practice; dryness is normal and is not failure.

Do not aim at the seventh dwelling. She warns explicitly against ambition for advanced states. The next step, taken today, is the whole assignment.

Test any spiritual experience by its fruit. Her tests were humility, obedience, agreement with Scripture and the Church, and willingness to tell a confessor. Anything that makes a person self-important and secretive fails them.

God walks among the pots and pans. She ran building projects, argued with officials, and told her prioresses to feed people properly. The interior life she described was lived inside all of that.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Teresa of Avila?

St. Teresa of Avila was a Spanish Carmelite nun, writer and reformer who lived from 1515 to 1582 and founded the Discalced Carmelites. She entered the Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila in 1535, underwent a conversion in her late thirties, opened her first reformed convent at St. Joseph's in Avila in 1562, and founded seventeen convents in her lifetime while writing The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle and The Book of the Foundations.

What is The Interior Castle about?

The Interior Castle, written in 1577, describes the soul as a castle of a single diamond or clear crystal containing seven dwelling places, with God dwelling in the innermost one. The seven are stages in a life of prayer rather than rooms on a map, running from the first entry into prayer through a settled Christian life to what Teresa calls spiritual marriage. Her two central insistences are that the door into the castle is prayer, so that a person who does not pray is standing outside his own soul, and that self-knowledge is required at every stage.

Why is St. Teresa of Avila's feast day 15 October when she died on 4 October?

Spain adopted the Gregorian calendar reform in October 1582, the month she died, and the day after 4 October 1582 was 15 October 1582. Teresa died on the night of 4 October, the last night of the old calendar, so the first day after her death was the fifteenth, and her feast is kept on that date.

Did St. Teresa of Avila really levitate?

She describes raptures in her own writing in which her body was lifted from the ground against her will, says she asked the sisters to hold her down, and says she begged God to stop giving her favours that other people could see. Witnesses testified to such events in the process leading to her canonisation in 1622. Teresa herself was consistently suspicious of spectacular phenomena and judged spiritual experience by whether it produced humility, obedience and charity.

Did St. Teresa really say "no wonder you have so few friends"?

The exchange, in which Teresa complains after a mishap on the road and is told this is how God treats his friends, is a traditional anecdote that does not appear in her own writings. It comes down through later lives of the saint. It has lasted because it is in character with the woman visible in her letters, and it is best enjoyed on that basis rather than quoted as a record of something she said.

Was St. Teresa of Avila the first woman Doctor of the Church?

Yes. Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church on 27 September 1970, the first woman ever given the title, followed a week later by St. Catherine of Siena on 4 October 1970. The title recognises the value of a saint's teaching, and in her case it recognises her writing on prayer, which spiritual directors had been using for four centuries.

What is the prayer "Let nothing disturb you"?

The lines beginning "Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing, God alone suffices" are known in Spanish as Nada te turbe. The verses were found written in her breviary and are attributed to her. The full text ends with the assurance that whoever possesses God lacks nothing, and that God alone is enough.