Mystic Had Raptures, and a Head for Business

Teresa of Avila, canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1622, was a mystic, a reformer and a courageous (and wily) thorn in the side of church hierarchy. She reformed her order of nuns, founded 17 convents and wrote four books. She was at once brilliant, flamboyant and down to earth. When her cart overturned on one of her many journeys, throwing her into a muddy river, she brazenly complained to God, and when she heard a voice within her say, “This is how I treat my friends,” she replied, “Yes, my Lord. And that is why you have so few of them.”

“She was,” as Cathleen Medwick writes in “Teresa of Avila,” “an extremely businesslike mystic.” Her relationship with God was characterized by a wholehearted abandon that either stemmed from or led to a series of ecstasies, or raptures, that overtook her whether in church or the kitchen. Medwick begins her wonderful biography with a meditation on Gianlorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in a chapel in Rome: “ On a billowy white marble cloud, is the figure of a nun who looks as if she has fainted, or is about to. Her eyes are lidded, her mouth half open in pain--or in ecstasy.” The statue freezes in stone an ecstasy Teresa described in her “Libro de la Vida,” the book of her life, in which she wrote, “In his hands, I saw a golden spear. . . . I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails. . . . [It] left me totally inflamed with a great love for God.” This complex and erotic experience of God, common to many women mystics, has been mistaken for, or narrowly defined by many modern historians (most of them men) as, sexual hysteria. The 20th century Freudian Jacques Lacan said of Bernini’s statue, “You have only to go and look at [the statue] to understand immediately” that the woman depicted is in a sexual rapture.

Medwick sees it more complexly. Her background is not Catholic but Jewish, and her goal is not to defend Teresa, but to follow the “progress of her soul” and to ask the question: “Was she heroic or histrionic, a saint encased in the armor of humility or an unstable woman . . . propped up by the ardor of faith?”

Teresa was born in 1515 in the city of Avila in Spain, “a city of walls within walls . . . built to guard against Moorish invaders [with] church and monastery walls erected as bulwarks of faith; and the facades of houses, designed to keep strangers out and family members [especially women] in.” Most of her childhood was spent at home with her mother, and she sought to be a martyr by running away with her brother in the hopes of being captured by infidels. This would, she thought, guarantee her a seat in heaven.

When she was 16, a flirtation with a male cousin led her father to pack her off to a convent. It was her introduction to the life of nuns. She decided she didn’t want to be a nun, but neither did she wish to marry, the only two options she had as a 16th century woman. But she worried over her fate. “I began to be afraid that if I had died right then, I would have gone to hell.” Ever practical, she concluded, “Even though I couldn’t make myself want to become a nun, I saw that that was the best and safest thing to do.” When her father tried again to persuade her to marry, she refused, asking instead to be sent to a convent. The impasse was finally resolved when she sneaked off with the help of one of her brothers to the convent of the Encarnacion, just beyond the ramparts of Avila, with a nice view of the hills.

Here began the great adventure of her life. As a nun, she learned to pray, to reflect and to practice discipline. She read the spiritual masters of her day and sought out spiritual directors. And she had her first raptures, sometimes becoming immobilized, sometimes, she said, even levitating. News of them spread across Spain, making her a celebrity and alerting the Spanish inquisitors. The Reformation was sweeping Europe, and the Roman Church was losing its hold on the lives of its congregations. Every spiritual flower was sniffed for the scent of Protestantism, but Teresa was savvy, and she was brave. She became a kind of businesswoman for Christ, with a gift for founding convents and for managing them, for negotiating with the church hierarchy and for increasing her celebrity status.

Medwick tells her story with a firm and affectionate hand, allowing the genius and humanity of Teresa to shine, mainly through carefully chosen selections of her writing. In the end, Medwick concludes: “She had to submit to God’s imperatives which, luckily for her, agreed with those of her immoderate heart.” It was a match of equals.

Nora Gallagher is the author of “Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.”