Teresa of Ávila

• 1. Introduction

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  Teresa of Ávila was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada on the 28th of March 1515, and she died either just before midnight on the 4th of October or in the early morning of the 15th of October 1582. Her last words, recorded by those who were with her, read like a letter she had been waiting her whole life to send: "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."

  She died travelling, as she so often did, on a road between Burgos and Alba de Tormes. The timing was almost absurd in its precision. Catholic Europe was at that very moment switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which required cutting the dates of the 5th through the 14th of October from the record entirely. So even Teresa's death date remains ambiguous, a small historical joke for a woman whose entire life was spent navigating between the visible and the invisible.

  What this documentary will trace is how a wool merchant's daughter from a family of converso ancestry became the first woman named a Doctor of the Catholic Church, how her visions inspired one of the most famous sculptures in Western art, how she founded seventeen convents and reformed an ancient religious order against fierce opposition, and how her ideas about the soul may have quietly influenced a philosopher who never once cited her name.

• 2. A Family of Converts

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  Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, Teresa's father, was one of the wealthiest men in Ávila. He had purchased a knighthood and worked hard to assimilate into Christian society. That careful social climbing was not incidental. His own father, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was what the Spanish called a marrano or converso: a Jew who had converted to Christianity under pressure. When Alonso was still a child, Juan was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly reverting to Judaism, before eventually re-establishing a Catholic identity.

  The shadow of that history shaped the family's trajectory. Alonso had been 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. Teresa's birthplace was either that same village or Ávila itself. Into this household of social ambition, religious anxiety, and hard-won respectability, Teresa was born.

  Her mother raised her as a dedicated Christian, and the stories of saints gripped the young Teresa with an intensity that was almost dangerous. At age seven, she ran away from home with her brother Rodrigo, aiming to seek martyrdom fighting the Moors. Their uncle caught them just outside the town walls and brought them back. When Teresa was fourteen, her mother died. Her grief pushed her toward the Virgin Mary as a kind of spiritual substitute, and she also found herself drawn to popular fiction: medieval tales of knighthood and books about fashion, gardens, and flowers. She was sent to the Augustinian nuns' school in Ávila, the beginning of a formal religious education she had not initially sought.

• 3. Illness, Ecstasy, and Augustine

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  In 1534, aged twenty, Teresa entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Ávila, to the disappointment of her father, who had hoped for a more austere vocation elsewhere. The convent itself sat on land that had previously served as a Jewish burial ground. She took up contemplative reading, including Francisco de Osuna's Abecedario espiritual, a guide to inner contemplation published in 1527.

  Her dedication to spiritual mortification made her ill. She spent nearly a year bedridden, causing alarm among her family and community. She nearly died. She attributed her recovery to the intercession of Saint Joseph. During this illness, she later wrote, she had moved through recognizable stages of prayer, from the lowest level of recollection up through what she called the devotions of ecstasy, which she described as a state of perfect union with God. She said she frequently experienced what she called the blessing of tears during that final stage.

  Around this same period, she received a copy of Augustine of Hippo's Confessions in Spanish translation. The effect on her was immediate. Augustine had been, by his own account, a sinner before becoming a saint, and Teresa found that fact genuinely consoling. In her autobiography she wrote that she "was very fond of St. Augustine … for he was a sinner too." The Confessions helped her believe that holiness was possible for someone with her own turbulent interior life, and it helped quiet the religious scruples that had been troubling her. The book arrived at exactly the right moment.

• 4. The Golden Lance

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  Around 1556, people close to Teresa raised a troubling possibility. Her visions and mystical experiences, they suggested, might not come from God at all. They might be diabolical. She had begun inflicting mortifications of the flesh upon herself. The question of the source of her inspiration was not idle gossip: it was a matter of spiritual life and death under the scrutiny of the Counter-Reformation church.

  Her confessor, the Jesuit Francis Borgia, reassured her that her experiences were divinely inspired. Then, on Saint Peter's Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ had presented himself to her in bodily form, though invisible. These visions continued almost without interruption for more than two years. One particular vision, which became known as the transverberation, is the one history remembers most vividly. She described a seraph thrusting the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart. In her own words: "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."

  Gian Lorenzo Bernini read that account and turned it into marble. His sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, installed at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, is considered one of his most famous works. Some have called his depiction of the moment highly eroticized, especially when set against the broader tradition of Teresian art that preceded it.

  Teresa became a kind of local celebrity in Ávila, known for dispensing wisdom from behind the convent grille and for her raptures, which sometimes involved levitation. She found levitation embarrassing and asked her sisters to hold her down when it happened. Centuries later, neurologists and psychiatrists including Peter Fenwick and Javier Álvarez-Rodríguez would examine the unusually detailed record she left of her experiences and speculate, tentatively, that she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. The record exists because Teresa wrote down virtually everything, making it, as historians have noted, an exceptionally rare medical document from the sixteenth century.

• 5. Reforming the Carmelites

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  By the time Teresa had been at the Convent of the Incarnation for decades, she was profoundly troubled by what she saw there. Among the roughly one hundred and fifty nuns living at the convent, the rules of enclosure, meant to support prayer and contemplation, had become nearly meaningless. Visitors of high social standing arrived daily, filling the atmosphere with what she considered frivolous concerns and empty conversation. The solitude she believed was essential to genuine contemplative life had all but vanished.

  The Franciscan priest Peter of Alcantara, who met her early in 1560, became her spiritual adviser and gave her the encouragement she needed to act. A friend, Doña Guiomar of Ulloa, secured permission for the project. In 1562, Teresa established a new convent named Saint Joseph's, or San José, in Ávila. Its abject poverty caused a scandal among the city's citizens and authorities, and the small house with its chapel very nearly faced suppression. Powerful patrons, including the local bishop, helped turn that hostility into acceptance.

  In March 1563, Teresa received papal sanction for the foundational principles of the new community: absolute poverty and renunciation of property. She formalized these into a constitution. The stricter rules included three weekly disciplines of ceremonial flagellation and the practice of going unshod, which gave the reformed branch its name: the Discalced Carmelites. Teresa spent the first five years after the founding largely in prayer and writing.

  In 1567, the Carmelite General Rubeo de Ravenna gave her a patent to establish further houses across Spain. Between 1567 and 1571, reformed convents were founded at Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladolid, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, and Alba de Tormes. She convinced two Carmelite friars, John of the Cross and Anthony of Jesus, to extend the reform to men. In November 1568, they founded the first monastery of Discalced Carmelite brothers at Duruelo. Teresa's account of all these journeys survives in her book Libro de las Fundaciones.

• 6. Opposition and Royal Intervention

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  In 1576, the Carmelite order of the Ancient Observance turned against Teresa and her allies. Following resolutions from the general chapter at Piacenza, the order's governing body banned any further founding of reformed convents and instructed Teresa to go into what it called voluntary retirement at one of her own institutions. She obeyed and chose Saint Joseph's at Toledo. Her friends and associates faced ongoing attacks.

  The cases against Teresa, her ally Jerónimo Gracián, and others had been brought before the Inquisition. Teresa appealed directly by letter to King Philip II of Spain. The appeals worked. By 1579, those inquisitorial cases were dropped. A decree from Pope Gregory XIII allowed the appointment of a separate provincial to govern the newer branch of the Carmelites, and a royal order created a four-member protective board for the reform. A formal papal decree adopted the split from the old order in 1580.

  In the final three years of her life, despite declining health, Teresa founded convents at Villanueva de la Jara in northern Andalusia in 1580, Palencia in 1580, Soria in 1581, and Burgos and Granada in 1582. Across roughly twenty years, her reforms had produced seventeen convents, all but one founded by her personally, as well as an equal number of men's monasteries. Gracián, her longtime supporter, later suffered a bizarre misfortune that speaks to how far Teresa's relics would travel: after her death, he cut a finger from her severed hand and kept it until Barbary corsairs captured him while he was sailing from Messina to Rome, from whom he had to ransom the finger back for a few rings and twenty reales.

• 7. The Interior Castle and Teresa's Theology

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  The Interior Castle, written in 1577 and published in 1588, is the work Teresa's contemporaries and successors most closely studied as a guide to the life of prayer. Its central image came from a vision: the soul as a diamond in the shape of a castle, containing seven mansions. In the words of one of Teresa's former confessors, Fray Diego, 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."

  The seven mansions map a journey. The first three mansions involve what Teresa called purgative practice: active prayer, humility, and a growing aversion to sin. The fourth and fifth mansions mark the beginning of supernatural or mystical prayer, including the Prayer of Quiet and the Prayer of Union. The sixth mansion describes the soul's betrothal to God, torn between divine favor and external affliction. The seventh is spiritual marriage: the soul achieving clarity in permanent union with God.

  Scholar Thomas Merton, reflecting on the elaborate classifications Teresa and her interpreters built around these stages, wrote: "with all these divisions and distinctions, comings and goings and varieties of terms, one tends to become impatient with the saint." Teresa herself was explicit that she was describing personal experience, not systematic theology. As one commentator noted, there is no trace in her writings of influence from the German Dominican mystics or the Patristic or Scholastic traditions. She went exactly as far as her experience took her, and no further.

  Christia Mercer, a philosophy professor at Columbia University, has argued that the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes borrowed some of his most influential ideas from Teresa, who wrote fifty years before him about the role of philosophical reflection in intellectual growth. Mercer identifies striking similarities between Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy and The Interior Castle. The first English translation of The Interior Castle appeared in 1675.

• 8. Relics, Recognition, and Afterlife

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  Nine months after her death, Teresa's coffin was opened. Her body was found intact; only her clothing had decayed. Before the body was reinterred, one hand was removed, wrapped in a scarf, and sent to Ávila. The body was exhumed again on the 25th of November 1585 and again found to be incorrupt. It was moved toward Ávila, an arm was left behind in Alba de Tormes at the nuns' request, and the remainder was reburied in the Discalced Carmelite chapter house in Ávila. The Duke of Alba de Tormes, whose authority over the original burial site had been ignored, had the body retrieved in 1586. Pope Sixtus V ordered it to remain in Alba de Tormes permanently, under threat of excommunication. A grander tomb was raised on the original site in 1598, and the body was moved again to a new chapel in 1616.

  Her remains were subsequently distributed across Europe. Her right foot and part of her upper jaw went to Rome. A hand went to Lisbon. Her left eye and left hand went to Ronda, Spain; the left hand was held by Francisco Franco until his death, having been taken from Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. Her left arm and heart remain in the Museum of the Church of the Annunciation at Alba de Tormes. Individual fingers went to Paris and to Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

  Forty years after her death, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV canonized her. The Cortes elevated her to patron saint of Spain in 1627, though a broader national debate in that decade ultimately kept James the Great as the patron of the Spanish people. On the 27th of September 1970, Pope Paul VI named Teresa the first female Doctor of the Church, an honor conferred simultaneously with Catherine of Siena. Teresa is designated specifically as Doctor orationis, Doctor of Prayer. Her influence reached theologians including Francis of Sales and Fénelon in the centuries that followed, and her coffin was plated in silver in 1670. On the 28th of August 2024, a canonical recognition of her relics was conducted; the postulator general of the Order of Discalced Carmelites announced that those present confirmed the body was "in the same condition as when it was last opened in 1914."