The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus

Summary

The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer. Teresa begins with devout parents and a father fond of good books; at about seven she and her brother Rodrigo set out to beg their way to the land of the Moors to be martyred, and are brought back by an uncle. After her mother's death she grows vain, reads romances of chivalry, and is sent to the Augustinian convent school in Avila, where a holy nun rekindles her piety. Against her father's wishes she enters the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation. Her health soon breaks down: fainting fits, heart trouble, harsh remedies at a healer's town, a trance of about four days in which she is thought dead and anointed, and a paralysis lasting years, from which she credits her recovery to St. Joseph. For many years after she gives up and resumes mental prayer, divided between God and the pleasures of conversation in the convent parlor. Her turning comes before an image of Christ grievously wounded and in reading Augustine's Confessions. Chapters XI to XXII break off the story to describe prayer through the image of a garden watered in four ways: by drawing water from a well (meditation by one's own labor), by a water wheel (the prayer of quiet), by a stream (the sleep of the faculties) and by rain from heaven (union). Teresa insists that the humanity of Christ must never be left behind. Returning to her life, she describes locutions and intellectual visions, the doubts of confessors who fear the devil is deceiving her, the help of Jesuit confessors, Francis Borgia and Peter of Alcantara, the vision of an angel who pierces her heart with a golden spear, and a vision of the place prepared for her in hell. Chapters XXXII to XXXVI tell how she founded St. Joseph's, a poor house of thirteen nuns living the primitive Carmelite rule, amid the anger of the city and her own monastery. The last chapters record further favors and counsels. The Lewis translation also prints Benedict Zimmerman's introduction, chronology and notes, and Teresa's Relations, shorter accounts of her soul written for confessors. Teresa finished a first version in June 1562 and the present text, as most scholars agree, between 1563 and 1565; it passed through the Inquisition's hands and was first printed by Luis de León at Salamanca in 1588. David Lewis's English translation first appeared in 1870; the library text is the enlarged third edition of 1904.

Top Lessons

• Prayer as friendship

  In Chapter VIII Teresa defines mental prayer as being on terms of friendship with God and conversing often with Him who loves us. She urges even those who pray badly not to give it up, since she herself abandoned prayer and returned to it. Prayer, for her, is less a technique than a relationship kept up through faithfulness.

• The four waters: effort and grace

  Teresa's garden can be watered from a well with much labor, by a wheel, by a stream, or by rain. As the soul advances, God does more and the gardener less, until the rain falls without labor. The image keeps together human effort and divine gift, and warns beginners not to expect the later waters by their own striving.

• Humility and discernment

  Teresa submits every grace to her confessors, writes because she is commanded, and admits she may be deceived. She gives tests for telling true locutions from false: the true leave peace, humility and a desire to obey. Her caution is part of her holiness, not opposed to it.

• Reform begins small

  Moved by a vision of hell and by news of divisions in the Church, Teresa founds a house of only thirteen nuns living in poverty and enclosure. The city rises against her and her own monastery censures her, yet the small house becomes the root of a reform across Spain. The lesson is that renewal can begin with a few people living faithfully.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Chapters IV to VI are one of the fullest first-person illness narratives of sixteenth-century Spain. Teresa describes fainting fits, a heart complaint, months of violent remedies from a healer at a place famous for cures (Becedas, according to the chronology in this edition), a collapse in her father's house in which she lay insensible for about four days, was anointed and was thought dead, and a paralysis that lasted years and left her, by her own account, praising God when she could at last crawl on hands and knees; she attributes her recovery to St. Joseph's intercession after physicians had failed. Later writers have proposed retrospective diagnoses ranging from infection to epilepsy to a conversion disorder; these are speculative readings of a sixteenth-century account and the evidence does not settle them. Her careful phenomenology of prayer, including the suspension of the faculties, rapture with bodily effects, and the piercing of the heart that she says is spiritual pain in which the body shares, has interested psychologists of religion such as William James, who discussed her in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Teresa herself submits her experiences to confessors for testing and judges them by their effects on her conduct, not by their intensity.

• Chapter IV, §§ 6-8

  Fainting fits and heart trouble after entering the convent; her father takes her to a place of cures, where she suffers harsh remedies.

• Chapter V

  The crisis in her father's house: about four days insensible, the last anointing, and her family's belief that she was dead.

• Chapter VI

  Years of paralysis and pain endured with patience, and her recovery, which she credits to St. Joseph.

• Chapters XVIII-XX

  Union and rapture described with attention to their bodily effects: loss of sensation, coldness, and the body lifted or held motionless.

• Chapter XXIX, §§ 16-17

  The vision of the angel with a fiery spear and her description of a pain that is spiritual but shared by the body.