Teresa of Ávila (born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada; 28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), religious name Teresa of Jesus, was a Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic and spiritual reformer.
Active during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal, reforming the Carmelite orders of both women and men. The movement was later joined by the younger Carmelite friar and mystic Saint John of the Cross, with whom she established the Discalced Carmelites. A formal papal decree adopting the split from the old order was issued in 1580.
Teresa's autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, and her books The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection are prominent works on Christian mysticism and Christian meditation practice. In her autobiography, written as a defense of her ecstatic mystical experiences, she discerns four stages in the ascent of the soul to God: mental prayer and meditation; the prayer of quiet; absorption-in-God; ecstatic consciousness. The Interior Castle, written as a spiritual guide for her Carmelite sisters, uses the illustration of seven mansions within the castle of the soul to describe the different states one's soul can be in during life.
Forty years after her death, in 1622, Teresa was canonized by Pope Gregory XV. On 27 September 1970 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Teresa the first female Doctor of the Church in recognition of her centuries-long spiritual legacy to the Catholic Church.
Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada was born on 28 March 1515. Her birthplace was either Ávila or Gotarrendura. Her paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a marrano or converso, a Jew forced to convert to Christianity or emigrate. When Teresa's father was a child, Juan was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to Judaism, but he was later able to assume a Catholic identity. Her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was a successful wool merchant and one of the wealthiest men in Ávila. He bought a knighthood and assimilated successfully into Christian society.
Sánchez de Cepeda was previously married to Catalina del Peso y Henao, with whom he had three children. In 1509, he married Teresa's mother, Beatriz de Ahumada y Cuevas, in Gotarrendura. Her brother, Lorenzo de Cepeda y Ahumada, was the father of Teresa de Ahumada.
Teresa's mother raised her as a dedicated Christian. Fascinated by accounts of the lives of the saints, she ran away from home at age seven with her brother Rodrigo to seek martyrdom in the fight against the Moors. Her uncle brought them home when he spotted them just outside the town walls.
When Teresa was fourteen years old, her mother died, leaving her grief-stricken. This prompted her to embrace a deeper devotion to the Virgin Mary as her spiritual mother. Teresa was also enamored with popular fiction, which at the time consisted primarily of medieval tales of knighthood and works about fashion, gardens and flowers. Teresa was sent to the Augustinian nuns' school in Ávila.
After completing her education, she initially resisted the idea of a religious vocation, but she eventually relented after a stay with her uncle and other relatives. In 1534, aged 20, much to the disappointment of her pious and austere father, she decided to enter the local, easy-going Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation, built on land that had previously been used as a burial ground for Jews. She took up religious reading on contemplative prayer, including Osuna's Abecedario espiritual ("Third Spiritual Alphabet," 1527), a guide on the examination of conscience and "spiritual self-concentration and inner contemplation, known in mystical nomenclature as oratio recollectionis". She also dipped into other mystical ascetical works such as the Tractatus de oratione et meditatione of Peter of Alcantara.
Her zeal for mortification caused her to become ill and she spent almost a year in bed, causing huge worry to her community and family. She nearly died but she recovered, attributing her recovery to the miraculous intercession of Saint Joseph. She began to experience bouts of religious ecstasy. She reported that, during her illness, she had progressed from the lowest stage of "recollection", to the "devotions of silence" and even to the "devotions of ecstasy", in which was one of perceived in "perfect union with God" (see § Mysticism). She said she frequently experienced the rich "blessing of tears" during this final stage. As the Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin became clear to her, she came to understand the awful horror of sin and the inherent nature of original sin.
Around the same time, she received a copy of the full Spanish translation of Augustine of Hippo's autobiographical work Confessions, which helped her resolve and to tend to her own bouts of religious scruples. The text helped her realize that holiness was indeed possible and she found solace in the idea that such a great saint was once an inveterate sinner. In her autobiography, she wrote that she "was very fond of St. Augustine [...] for he was a sinner too".
Around 1556, friends suggested that her newfound knowledge could be of diabolical rather than divine origin. She had begun to inflict mortifications of the flesh upon herself. But her confessor, the Jesuit Francis Borgia, reassured her of the divine inspiration of her thoughts. On St. Peter's Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ had presented himself to her in bodily form, though invisible. These visions lasted almost uninterruptedly for more than two years. In another vision, the famous transverberation, a seraph drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing her an ineffable spiritual and bodily pain:
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it ...
The account of this vision was the inspiration for one of Bernini's most famous works, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Although based in part on Teresa's description of her mystical transverberation in her autobiography, Bernini's depiction of the event is considered by some to be highly eroticized, especially when compared to the entire preceding artistic Teresian tradition.
The memory of this episode served as an inspiration throughout the rest of her life, and motivated her lifelong imitation of the life and suffering of Jesus, epitomized in the adage often associated with her: "Lord, either let me suffer or let me die."
Teresa, who became a celebrity in her town for dispensing wisdom from behind the convent grille, was known for her raptures, which sometimes involved levitation. It was a source of embarrassment to her and she bade her sisters hold her down when this occurred. Subsequently, historians, neurologists, and psychiatrists like Peter Fenwick and Javier Álvarez-Rodríguez, among others, have taken an interest in her symptomatology. The fact that she wrote down virtually everything that happened to her during her religious life means that an invaluable and exceedingly rare medical record from the 16th century has been preserved. Examination of this record has led to the speculative conclusion that she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.
Over time, Teresa found herself increasingly at odds with the spiritual malaise prevailing in her convent of the Incarnation. Among the 150 nuns living there, the observance of the enclosure, designed to protect and strengthen spiritual practice and prayer, became so lax that it appeared to lose its purpose. The daily invasion of visitors, many of high social and political rank, disturbed the atmosphere with frivolous concerns and vacuous conversation. Such intrusions in the solitude essential to develop and sustain contemplative prayer so grieved Teresa that she longed to intervene.