Teresa of Ávila

Biography

Early life

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.

Religious life

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 finally to the "devotions of ecstasy", during which she achieved "perfect union with God" and experienced the "blessing of tears" (see § Mysticism). 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 eased her scrupulosity. She found solace in the knowledge 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:

Last days

Her final illness overtook her on one of her journeys from Burgos to Alba de Tormes. She died in 1582, just as Catholic Europe was making the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which required the excision of the dates of 5–14 October from the calendar. Teresa died either before midnight of 4 October or early in the morning of 15 October, which is celebrated as her feast day. Her last words were, "My Lord, it is time to move on. Well then, may your will be done. O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another."

After death

She was buried at the Convento de la Anunciación in Alba de Tormes. Nine months after her death the coffin was opened and her body was found to be intact but the clothing had rotted. Before the body was re-interred one of her hands was cut off, wrapped in a scarf and sent to Ávila. Gracián cut the little finger off the hand and – according to his own account – kept it with him until he was captured by Barbary corsairs when sailing from Messina to Rome, from whom he had to redeem it with a few rings and 20 reales. The body was exhumed again on 25 November 1585 to be moved to Ávila and found to be incorrupt. An arm was removed and left in Alba de Tormes at the nuns' request, to compensate for losing the main relic of Teresa, but the rest of the body was reburied in the Discalced Carmelite chapter house in Ávila. The removal was done without the approval of the Duke of Alba de Tormes and he brought the body back in 1586, with Pope Sixtus V ordering that it remain in Alba de Tormes on pain of excommunication. A grander tomb on the original site was raised in 1598 and the body was moved to a new chapel in 1616.

The body still remains there, except for the following parts:

Rome – right foot and part of the upper jaw

Lisbon – hand

Ronda, Spain – left eye and left hand (the latter was kept by Francisco Franco until his death, after Francoist troops captured it from Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War)

Museum of the Church of the Annunciation, Alba de Tormes – left arm and heart

Church of Our Lady of Loreto, Paris, France – one finger

Sanlúcar de Barrameda – one finger

On August 28, 2024, it was made the canonical recognition of Teresa's relics. The postulator general of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, Marco Chiesa, announced that those present at the scene were able to see that "it is in the same condition as when it was last opened in 1914."

Writings

Autobiography

The autobiography La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesús (The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus) was written at Ávila between 1562 and 1565, but published posthumously. Editions include:

The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus ... Written by herself. Translated from the Spanish by D. Lewis, 1870. London: Burns, Oates, & Co

The Autobiography, written before 1567, under the direction of her confessor, Fr. Pedro Ibáñez, 1882

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by herself. J. M. Cohen, 1957. Penguin Classics

Life of St. Teresa of Jesus. Translated by Benedict Zimmerman, 1997. Tan Books, ISBN 978-0-89555-603-5

The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila. Translated by E. Allison Peers, 1991. Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-01109-9

The Book of Her Life, translated, with notes, by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, 2008. Introduction by Jodi Bilinkoff. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0-87220-907-7

The Book of My Life. Mirabai Starr, 2008. Boston, Massachusetts: Shambhala Publications, ISBN 978-1-59030-573-7

The Way of Perfection

The Way of Perfection (Spanish: Camino de Perfección) was published in 1566. Teresa called this a "living book" and in it set out to teach her nuns how to progress through prayer and Christian meditation. She discusses the rationale for being a Carmelite, and the rest deals with the purpose of and approaches to spiritual life. The title was inspired by the devotional book The Imitation of Christ (1418) which had become a favourite expression of Teresa much before she wrote this work, as it appeared at several places in her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus. Like her other books, The Way of Perfection was written on the advice of her counsellors to describe her experiences in prayer during the period when the Reformation was spreading through Europe. Herein she describes ways of attaining spiritual perfection through prayer and its four stages, as in meditation, quiet, repose of soul and finally perfect union with God, which she equates with rapture.

Editions

El Camino de Perfección (The Way of Perfection), written also before 1567, at the direction of her confessor.

The Way of Perfection, and Conceptions of Divine Love, translated by J. Dalton, C. Dolman, 1852.

The Way of Perfection. Translated and Edited by E. Allison Peers, Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-06539-9

The Way of Perfection, TAN Books, 1997. ISBN 978-0-89555-602-8

Way of Perfection, London, 2012. limovia.net ISBN 978-1-78336-025-3

Interior Castle

The Interior Castle, or The Mansions (Spanish: El Castillo Interior or Las Moradas), was written in 1577 and published in 1588. It contained the basis for what she felt should be the ideal journey of faith, comparing the contemplative soul to a castle with seven successive interior courts, or chambers, analogous to the seven mansions. The work was inspired by her vision of the soul as a diamond in the shape of a castle containing seven mansions, which she interpreted as the journey of faith through seven stages, ending with union with God. Fray Diego, one of Teresa's former confessors, wrote that God revealed to Teresa:

... a most beautiful crystal globe, made in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost of which was the King of Glory, in the greatest splendour, illumining and beautifying them all. The nearer one got to the centre, the stronger was the light; outside the palace limits everything was foul, dark and infested with toads, vipers and other venomous creatures."

Christia Mercer, Columbia University philosophy professor, claims that the seventeenth-century Frenchman René Descartes lifted some of his most influential ideas from Teresa of Ávila, who, fifty years before Descartes, wrote popular books about the role of philosophical reflection in intellectual growth. She describes a number of striking similarities between Descartes's seminal work Meditations on First Philosophy and Teresa's Interior Castle.

The first English translation was published in 1675.

Fr. John Dalton (1852). John Dalton’s translation of The Interior Castle contains an interesting preface and translations of other letters by St. Teresa.

Benedictines of Stanbrook, edited by Fr. Zimmerman (1921). The translation of The Interior Castle by the Benedictines of Stanbrook also has an excellent introduction and includes many cross-references to other works by St. Teresa.

E. Allison Peers (1946). E. Allison Peers’ translation of The Interior Castle is another popular public domain version translated by a professor and scholar of Hispanic studies.

Other

Relaciones (Relationships), an extension of the autobiography giving her inner and outer experiences in epistolary form.

Her rare poems (Todas las poesías, Munster, 1854) are distinguished for tenderness of feeling and rhythm of thought.

The Complete Poetry of St. Teresa of Avila. A Bilingual Edition – Edición y traducción de Eric W. Vogt. New Orleans University Press of the South, 1996. Second edition, 2015. xl, 116 p. ISBN 978-1-937030-52-0

"Meditations on Song of Songs", 1567, written nominally for her daughters at the convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Conceptos del Amor ("Concepts of Love") and

Exclamaciones.

Las Cartas (Saragossa, 1671), or her correspondence, of which there are 342 extant letters and 87 fragments of others. The first edition of Teresa's letters was published in 1658 with the comment of Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Roman Catholic bishop of Osma and an opponent to the Company of Jesus.

The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus, in five volumes, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers, including 2 volumes of correspondence. London: Sheed and Ward, 1982.

Mysticism

The ultimate preoccupation of Teresa's mystical thought, as consistently reflected in her writings, is the ascent of the soul to God. Aumann notes that "the grades of prayer described in The Life do not correspond to the division of prayer commonly given in the manuals of the spiritual", including due to the fact that "St. Teresa did not write a systematic theology of prayer". According to Zimmerman, "In all her writings on this subject she deals with her personal experiences [...] there is no vestige in her writings of any influence of the Areopagite, the Patristic, or the Scholastic Mystical schools, as represented among others, by the German Dominican Mystics. She is intensely personal, her system going exactly as far as her experiences, but not a step further."

Teresa describes in the Interior Castle that the treasure of heaven lies buried within our hearts, and that there is an interior part of the heart which is the centre of the soul.

Four stages as described in the autobiography

In her autobiography she describes four stages, in which she uses the image of watering one's garden as a metaphor for mystical prayer:

The first, Devotion of the Heart, consists of mental prayer and meditation. It means the withdrawal of the soul from without, penitence and especially the devout meditation on the passion of Christ (Autobiography 11.20).

The second, Devotion of Peace, is where human will is surrendered to God. This occurs by virtue of an uplifted awareness granted by God, while other faculties, such as memory, reason, and imagination, are not yet safe from worldly distraction. Although a partial distraction can happen, due to outer activity such as repetition of prayers or writing down spiritual things, the prevailing state is one of quietude (Autobiography 14.1).

The third, Devotion of Union, concerns the absorption-in-God. It is not only a heightened, but essentially, an ecstatic state. At this level, reason is also surrendered to God, and only the memory and imagination are left to ramble. This state is characterized by a blissful peace, a sweet slumber of at least the higher soul faculties, that is a consciousness of being enraptured by the love of God.

The fourth, Devotion of Ecstasy, is where the consciousness of being in the body disappears. Sensory faculties cease to operate. Memory and imagination also become absorbed in God, as though intoxicated. Body and spirit dwell in the throes of exquisite pain, alternating between a fearful fiery glow, in complete unconscious helplessness, and periods of apparent strangulation. Sometimes such ecstatic transports literally cause the body to be lifted into space. This state may last as long as half an hour and tends to be followed by relaxation of a few hours of swoon-like weakness, attended by the absence of all faculties while in union with God. The subject awakens from this trance state in tears. It may be regarded as the culmination of mystical experience. Indeed, Teresa was said to have been observed levitating during Mass on more than one occasion.

The seven mansions of the Interior castle

The Interior Castle is divided into seven mansions (also called dwelling places), each level describing a step to get closer to God. In her work, Teresa already assumed entrance into the first mansions by prayer and meditation.

The purgative stage, involving active prayer and asceticism:

The first mansion begin with a soul's state of grace, but the souls are surrounded by sin and only starting to seek God's grace through humility in order to achieve perfection.

The second mansions are also called the Mansion of the Practice of Prayer because the soul seeks to advance through the castle by daily thoughts of God, humble recognition of God's work in the soul and ultimately daily prayer.

The third mansions are the Mansions of Exemplary Life characterized through divine grace and a love for God that is so great that the soul has an aversion to both mortal and venial sin and a desire to do works of charitable service to man for the ultimate glory of God. The prayer of acquired recollection belongs to the third mansion.

The illuminative stage, the beginning of mystical or contemplative or supernatural prayer:

The fourth mansions are a departure from the soul actively acquiring what it gains as God increases his role. In this mansion, the soul begins to experience two types of supernatural prayer, namely the Prayer of Supernatural (or passive) Recollection and The Prayer of Quiet;

The fifth mansion is The Prayer of Union, in which the soul prepares itself to receive gifts from God;

Unitive stage:

The sixth mansion is the betrothal (engagement) of the soul with God can be compared to lovers. The soul spends increasing amounts of time torn between favors from God and from outside afflictions.

Nine grades of prayer

The first four grades of Teresa's classifications of prayer belong to the ascetical stage of spiritual life. These are vocal prayer, meditational or mental prayer, affective prayer, and acquired or natural recollection.

According to Augustin Poulain and Robert Thouless, Teresa described four degrees or stages of mystical union, namely the prayer of quiet, full or semi-ecstatic union, ecstatic union or ecstasy, and transforming or deifying union, or spiritual marriage (properly) of the soul with God. While Augustin Poulain and Robert Thouless do not mention the Prayer of Supernatural (or passive) Recollection as a separate stage, Aumann discerns infused contemplation as a separate stage in the fourth mansion of the Interior Castle. Together, these "five grades are infused prayer and belong to the mystical phase of spiritual life".

Thomas Merton disagrees on a fine-cut distinction between acquired contemplation and the prayer of quiet, noticing the Carmelite tendency of systematization, whereas Teresa herself was just describing her personal experiences. Commenting on Teresa's writings and the scholarly discussions on the precise stages, Thomas Merton comments: "with all these divisions and distinctions, comings and goings and varieties of terms, one tends to become impatient with the saint".

Aumann synthesizes Teresa's writings into nine grades of prayer:

Mental prayer is a form of prayer "performed without aid of any particular formula." It is distinguished from vocal prayers, "prayers performed by means of a given formula", Prayer is mental when the thoughts and affections of the soul are not expressed in a previously determined formula. According to Teresa of Ávila, mental prayer is meditational prayer, in which the person is like a gardener, who, with much labour, draws the water up from the depths of the well to water the plants and flowers. According to Teresa of Avila, mental prayer can proceed by using vocal prayers in order to improve dialogue with God. According to Lehodey, mental prayer can be divided into meditation, more active in reflections, and contemplation, more quiet and gazeful.

For Teresa of Avila, in natural or acquired contemplation, also called the prayer of simplicity there is one dominant thought or sentiment which recurs constantly and easily (although with little or no development) amid many other thoughts, beneficial or otherwise. The prayer of simplicity often has a tendency to simplify itself even in respect to its object, leading one to think chiefly of God and of his presence, but in a confused manner.

Portrayals

Portrayals of Teresa include the following:

Literature

Simone de Beauvoir singles out Teresa as a woman who truly lived life for herself (and perhaps the only woman to do so) in her book The Second Sex.

She is mentioned prominently in Kathryn Harrison's novel Poison. The main character, Francisca De Luarca, is fascinated by her life.

Don DeLillo in End Zone depicted Teresa as a saint who eats from a human skull to remind herself of final things.

R. A. Lafferty was strongly inspired by El Castillo Interior when he wrote his novel Fourth Mansions. Quotations from St. Teresa's work are frequently used as chapter headings.

Pierre Klossowski prominently features Saint Teresa of Ávila in his metaphysical novel The Baphomet.

George Eliot compared Dorothea Brooke to St. Teresa in Middlemarch (1871–1872) and wrote briefly about the life and works of St. Teresa in the "Prelude" to the novel.

Thomas Hardy took Saint Teresa as the inspiration for much of the characterisation of the heroine Tess (Teresa) Durbeyfield, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), most notably the scene in which she lies in a field and senses her soul ecstatically above her.

The contemporary poet Jorie Graham features Saint Teresa in the poem Breakdancing in her volume The End of Beauty.

Bárbara Mujica's novel Sister Teresa, while not strictly hagiographical, is based upon Teresa's life.

Timothy Findley's 1999 novel Pilgrim features Saint Teresa as a minor character.

Vita Sackville-West wrote a double biography contrasting the two Carmelites Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux, The Eagle and the Dove, re-issued in 2018.

Painting, illustration, and sculpture

Saint Teresa of Ávila's Vision of the Holy Spirit is a 1612–1614 painting by Peter Paul Rubens and is exhibited in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and Rubens' c. 1614 painting of the same subject is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Another Rubens portrait of Teresa, from 1615, is now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Saint Teresa was the inspiration for one of Bernini's most famous sculptures, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (mid-17th century) in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

St. Teresa was painted in 1819–20 by François Gérard, a French neoclassical painter.

St Theresa of Avila is a 1754-1755 painting by Joseph-Marie Vien and is exhibited in the New Orleans Museum of Art in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Theresa is usually shown in the habit of the Discalced Carmelites, and writing in a book with a quill pen. Sometimes there is a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit.

In art

Drama and film

Hugh Ross Williamson wrote a play, Teresa of Avila, about her life, which premiered in London in 1961.

Performance artist Linda Montano has cited Teresa of Ávila as one of the most important influences on her work and since her return to Catholicism in the 2000s has done performances of her life.

Teresa de Jesús (1984), directed by Josefina Molina and starring Concha Velasco, is a Spanish made-for-TV mini-series. In it, Teresa is portrayed as the determined foundress of new Carmelite houses while protecting the Infant Jesus statue on her many arduous journeys. The devotion to the Child Jesus spread quickly in Spain, possibly due to her mystical reputation, and then to other places, including France.

Nigel Wingrove's 1989 short film Visions of Ecstasy was based on Teresa of Ávila. The film features fantasised sexualised scenes of Teresa with the body of Jesus on the cross. It is the only work to be refused certification by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) on the grounds of blasphemy.

Dževad Karahasan. The Delighted Angel drama about Teresa of Ávila and Rabija al-Adavija, Vienna-Salzburg-Klagenfurt, ARBOS 1995.

Paz Vega stars as Teresa in Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo, a 2007 Spanish biopic directed by Ray Loriga.

St. Teresa also features prominently in the 2009 Ron Howard film, Angels and Demons, where the Bernini sculpture Ecstasy of St. Teresa is an important clue in helping Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) find an anti-matter bomb that is hidden in and set to destroy the Vatican.

Marian Álvarez portrays Teresa in the 2015 television film of the same name directed by Jorge Dorado and made for the 500th anniversary of her birth.

Blanca Portillo, Greta Fernández, and Ainet Jounou portray Teresa in the 2023 film of the same name directed by Paula Ortiz.

Music

Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed two motets for the feast of Saint Teresa: Flores, flores o Gallia for two voices, two flutes and continuo (H.374), c. 1680 and the other, for three voices and continuo (H.342), in 1686–87.

She is a principal character of the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by the composer Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein.

Saint Teresa is the subject of the song "Theresa's Sound-World" by Sonic Youth off the 1992 album Dirty, lyrics by Thurston Moore.

"Saint Teresa" is a track on Joan Osborne's Relish album, nominated for a Grammy Award in 1996.

References to Saint Theresa and her visions appear in several songs across multiple albums by the Hold Steady, including "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night", "The Sweet Part of the City", and "Our Whole Lives"

John Zorn composed a 2021 album entitled Teresa de Avila for a guitar trio consisting of Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Gyan Riley. The album is the last of a trilogy inspired by Christian mystical figures.

"Saint Teresa", as released by indie band Doves, on their 2025 album Constellations for the Lonely.

Rosalía's track "Sauvignon Blanc," off her 2025 album Lux, was inspired by Saint Teresa and her rejection of material possessions for spiritual love.

"St. Teresa", as released by Tori Amos, on her 2026 album In Times of Dragons