Teresa of Ávila

Teresa of Ávila, born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada on 28 March 1515 in Ávila in the Crown of Castile, was a Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, writer, and reformer. Her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, belonged to a family of Jewish conversos who had converted to Christianity in the late fifteenth century; her mother, Beatriz de Ahumada y Cuevas, came from an Old Christian family of the lesser nobility. Teresa grew up in a large household of considerable wealth and piety. She later recalled reading lives of the saints with her mother and also chivalric romances that she feared had harmed her spiritual life. Beatriz died when Teresa was in her early teens, and Alonso placed his daughter for a period with the Augustinian nuns of Santa María de Gracia in Ávila so that she might be educated and kept from worldly influences. In adolescence she experienced serious illness and a growing, if still unsteady, desire for religious life.

In November 1535 Teresa entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila, against her father’s initial wishes, and took the name Teresa of Jesus. The Incarnation was a large community living under a mitigated rule that allowed visits, conversation, and a relatively comfortable standard of living. Within a few years she fell gravely ill, suffered a prolonged collapse that left her paralyzed for an extended period, and recovered only slowly. For many years thereafter her prayer was distracted and her observance ordinary. From about the mid-1550s she described a decisive conversion to a more interior life: she took up mental prayer with new seriousness, experienced visions and locutions, and underwent the mystical grace later called transverberation, in which she felt her heart pierced by an angel’s dart. These experiences, scrutinized by confessors and by the Inquisition, convinced her that the Carmelite order needed reform. In 1562 she obtained permission to found the small, strictly enclosed convent of Saint Joseph in Ávila, the first house of the Discalced Carmelites, dedicated to poverty, silence, and contemplative prayer according to the primitive Carmelite rule.

During the 1560s and 1570s Teresa traveled extensively through Castile and into Andalusia, establishing further convents of Discalced nuns and, together with John of the Cross and other friars, houses of Discalced Carmelite men. Her foundations and her insistence on enclosure and poverty provoked opposition from unreformed Carmelites, from some civic authorities, and from ecclesiastical critics who questioned her visions and her authority as a woman. She was at times ordered to cease founding houses and was subjected to investigation. In the midst of this activity she wrote the works that secured her place in Christian spirituality and in Spanish literature: an account of her life and prayer written under obedience (the Vida), The Way of Perfection for the instruction of her nuns, The Interior Castle (Las Moradas), which maps the soul’s journey through seven dwelling places toward union with God, and the Book of Foundations, a narrative of her reform. She also left an extensive correspondence that reveals her practical intelligence, humor, and skill as a superior.

Teresa died at the Discalced convent in Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582. Because the Gregorian calendar was introduced in the Catholic states at that moment, the day after her death was numbered 15 October. She was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1614 and canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, in the same ceremony that raised Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Philip Neri, and Isidore the Farmer to the altars. In 1970 Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, the first woman, together with Catherine of Siena, to receive that title. The Catholic Church keeps her feast on 15 October. She is invoked as a patron of Spain, of the city and diocese of Ávila, of headache and migraine sufferers, of lace makers, of the sick, of those ridiculed for piety, of people who have lost parents, and of Catholic writers. Her principal relics remain at the convent of the Annunciation in Alba de Tormes.