Saint Teresa of Avila and Jesus

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Avila, in Old Castile, on 28 March 1515. That is roughly fourteen hundred and eighty years after the crucifixion. No gospel contains her, no epistle mentions her, and she never claimed otherwise. Anyone searching for a saint who walked with Jesus should look at Peter, Mary Magdalene, John, or Joseph instead.

The world she grew up in was loud with religious argument. Luther posted his theses two years after her birth. The Spanish Inquisition had been running since 1478 and was part of the furniture by the time she could read. The Council of Trent met on and off from 1545 to 1563, through her thirties and forties, and in 1559 a Spanish index pulled most spiritual books in Castilian off the shelves. So a woman describing private revelations in the vernacular knew exactly what she was risking, and she says so.

Her contact with Jesus ran through the ordinary channels available to a Castilian nun: scripture read aloud and preached, the Eucharist, painted images in the convent oratory, and what she called interior experience. She was unusually precise about which was which, and that precision is most of the reason she is still read.

Two of her books are freely readable in English translations old enough to be out of copyright. The Life was translated by David Lewis, and the enlarged third edition with Fr Benedict Zimmerman's notes appeared in 1904. The Interior Castle was translated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, revised by Zimmerman, and printed in London in 1921. The modern translations sold today are still in copyright, so every quotation below comes from the older English.

Her definition of prayer, in the eighth chapter of The Life, is the sentence people carry around for the rest of their lives: "for mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us." Almost everything else rests on that footing. Prayer for Teresa is time spent with a person who is already fond of you, which is why she treats a dry hour as a question about company and never as a fault in your method.

In chapter twenty-two she describes Christ in language a soldier would recognise: "With so good a Friend and Captain ever present, Himself the first to suffer, everything can be borne. He helps, He strengthens, He never fails, He is the true Friend." A few paragraphs later she plants her flag on the point that got her into arguments: "the most Sacred Humanity of Christ is not to be counted among the objects from which we have to withdraw."

That was a real fight. Respected directors in her circle taught that advanced contemplatives should leave everything bodily behind, including thinking about the man Jesus, and rise to the bare Godhead. Teresa refused. In the sixth mansions of The Interior Castle she reports being told she was wrong and did not understand the matter, and then writes: "nothing will make me admit that this latter is a good way." Her warning to anyone who tries it is blunt: "If they lose their Guide, our good Jesus, they cannot find the way."

The image that gives The Interior Castle its title arrives in the opening chapter. "I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions." Seven sets of rooms, God at the centre, and the reader walking inward. For Teresa the humanity of Christ is the door you keep going through, at every stage, including the last.

Before any of it there were the years of nothing, and she is merciless about them. "Very often, for some years," she writes in chapter eight, "I was more occupied with the wish to see the end of the time I had appointed for myself to spend in prayer, and in watching the hour-glass, than with other thoughts that were good." A few lines on: "the sadness I felt on entering the oratory was so great, that it required all the courage I had to force myself in." That is a professed nun describing her own prayer, and it is the reason people still hand her books to beginners.

The turn came in 1555, and it came through a picture. She walked into that same oratory and found an image left there for a feast day. "It was a representation of Christ most grievously wounded," she writes, and the sight of it broke something open. "I threw myself on the ground beside it, my tears flowing plenteously, and implored Him to strengthen me once for all, so that I might never offend Him any more." She was forty. She had been in the convent for twenty years.

Her method after that was concrete and easy to copy. She could not reason her way through a meditation, so she "contrived to picture Christ as within me" and stayed with the moments in his life when he was most alone. The garden of Gethsemane was her usual place to sit. "I used to remain with Him there as long as my thoughts allowed me," she writes, which is a low enough bar for anyone to clear tonight.

Around 1559 she began describing something else, and her editors split over the year, Bouix reading it as 1559 and De la Fuente as 1558. She reported Christ continually beside her, and she was careful about the wording: "as the vision was not imaginary, I saw no form; but I had a most distinct feeling that He was always on my right hand, a witness of all I did." She took it to her confessor in distress. He asked what form she saw. She told him she saw none. He pushed: "How did you know that it was Christ?" She answered that she did not know how she knew, only that she could not help knowing. She spent years being examined on that answer by Dominicans and Jesuits.

The most famous scene is chapter twenty-nine. An angel appears "close by me, on my left side, in bodily form" holding "a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire," and thrusts it into her heart again and again. "The pain is not bodily, but spiritual," she writes, "though the body has its share in it, even a large one," and she could not wish to be rid of it. Bernini carved that moment in Rome the following century. A modern reader can file it under mystical experience, or literary description of an interior state, or a medical event, and this page will not settle the argument. What is worth noticing is that Teresa spent years pressing the same question in harsher terms, because the live possibility in her world was that it came from the devil.

Then she did something few visionaries do. She walked in on the Inquisitor Francisco de Soto y Salazar and, by the account Jerome Gratian preserved, told him: "I am subject to certain extraordinary processes in prayer, such as ecstasies, raptures, and revelations, and do not wish to be deluded or deceived by Satan, or to do anything that is not absolutely safe. I give myself up to the Inquisition to try me, and examine my ways of going on, submitting myself to its orders." Soto declined the job. "The business of the Inquisition is not to try the spirit, nor to examine ways of prayer, but to correct heretics," he answered, and sent her off to write the whole thing down for Juan de Avila. That instruction is part of why the book exists.

The book had a hard life afterwards. In 1574 the Princess of Eboli, in a quarrel with Teresa, denounced it to the Inquisition. Her own confessor Domingo Banez later handed a copy to the Holy Office himself, to keep it safe, and wrote his defence of it on the blank leaves at the back. It stayed in the Inquisition's keeping and Teresa never saw it again. Cardinal Quiroga eventually told her to her face that he had read it and thought it sound. It was printed in Salamanca in 1588, six years after she died.

Both taught in household pictures instead of technical language. Jesus reached for seed, bread, a lost coin, a father watching a road. Teresa reached for a castle cut from one diamond, a garden watered four different ways, a silkworm spinning itself into a cocoon and coming out changed, an hour-glass she could not stop watching. Neither was writing for specialists, and Teresa says so repeatedly, in terms that are hard on herself and on the learned men correcting her.

Both were investigated by the religious authorities of their own tradition, with outsiders arriving late. Jesus was questioned by chief priests and elders before he was ever handed to Rome. Teresa was reported, examined, defended, and doubted by confessors, theologians, a papal nuncio, and the Holy Office, every one of them inside her own church.

Both spent years on the road without a settled house. Jesus said the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. Teresa crossed Castile in covered carts into her sixties, ill most of the way, arguing with town councils and landlords to open small poor convents, and she died on the road at Alba de Tormes with her own foundation a province away.

And both measured prayer by what it produces. Jesus judged trees by fruit. Teresa closes The Interior Castle by refusing to let contemplation become a hobby: "both Martha and Mary must entertain our Lord and keep Him as their Guest, nor must they be so inhospitable as to offer Him no food." What she wants readers to strive for is "to offer our petitions and to practise prayer, not for our own enjoyment but to gain strength to serve God."

Teresa claimed nothing about herself that Christians claim about Jesus. She did not say she was divine, did not forgive sins on her own authority, did not offer herself as the way to the Father, and did not ask anyone to worship her. Her own account of herself is savage. "I passed nearly twenty years on this stormy sea, falling and rising, but rising to no good purpose," she writes, and later totals it up: "during eight-and-twenty years of prayer, I spent more than eighteen in that strife and contention which arose out of my attempts to reconcile God and the world."

Catholic teaching draws the line formally, and it drew it during her lifetime. The Council of Trent, in its twenty-fifth session in December 1563, taught that the saints "offer up their own prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers, aid, (and) help for obtaining benefits from God, through His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our alone Redeemer and Saviour." Read the clauses in order and the whole distinction is there. The saint prays. God gives. Christ alone redeems. The same decree rules out treating a holy image as though power lived inside it, "not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them," because the honour "is referred to the prototypes which those images represent." Later Catholic vocabulary keeps two words apart, adoration for God and veneration for the saints, and the distinction carries weight. A Catholic asking Teresa for prayer is asking a Christian to pray, in the same sense as asking a friend.

Most Protestant traditions draw the line in a different place and further back. The Augsburg Confession, article twenty-one, allows the memory of the saints "that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling," and then rules out the practice itself: "But the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor." Plenty of Protestants read The Interior Castle closely and quote it from pulpits while never saying a word to Teresa herself. Their tradition has a reason for that, and it is worth understanding before anyone calls it an oversight.

Orthodox Christians venerate saints in a way a Catholic would recognise, though Teresa does not appear on the Orthodox calendar. She was born some four and a half centuries after the split between East and West and belongs entirely to the Latin tradition.

For someone praying tonight the difference is practical. Christian prayer in every one of these traditions is addressed to God. What varies is whether you also ask a dead Christian to pray alongside you, and if your own church says no, you can still read every line Teresa wrote.

You have seen it on a church wall or a graduation card. Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. It is a good line and the evidence that Teresa wrote it is thin.

We searched both public domain texts in full. The words appear nowhere in David Lewis's translation of The Life and nowhere in the Stanbrook translation of The Interior Castle. Neither book contains the phrase in any form. Careful publishers have printed it for years with the word "attributed" in front of her name, which is the honest way to handle a line whose paper trail runs out. Its origin is genuinely unsettled, with nineteenth century preaching and twentieth century devotional writing both proposed and neither one demonstrated.

The irony is that her real writing pushes close to the opposite direction. She spent chapters arguing that Christ has a body, that his humanity is exactly where a person enters, and that anyone praying past it will get lost.

If you love the line, keep it and call it anonymous. Then read the eighth chapter of The Life, which is certainly hers and is better.

Some of them want a building. Parishes, schools, and hospitals across the United States, Spain, the Philippines, and Latin America carry her name, and a fair share of this traffic is a parent hunting for a term calendar. If that is you, the office phone number is what you need, and it is not on this page.

Some want her as a patron. Catholic Online lists her patronage as headache sufferers and Spanish Catholic writers, and she is invoked widely in Spain and by people living with chronic illness, which fits a woman who was seriously unwell for most of her adult life and kept working anyway.

The rest, and it is a large rest, are people who pray and feel nothing. That is the search behind the search. Her name has outlived her century because she is the most honest writer in Christian history about long stretches of prayer that produce no warmth and no evidence that anyone is listening. She watched the hour-glass. She dreaded the oratory door. She said it took all the courage she had to get through it, and she kept doing that for years before anything changed.

If that is why you are here, four things are worth doing tonight. Read chapter eight of The Life, free, in about fifteen minutes. Set a short fixed time for prayer and keep it on the empty nights, which is the whole of her advice. Take one gospel scene, put yourself inside it, and stay there, which was her actual method after her own reasoning failed her. And tell a real person, because her own remedy was always a confessor and a learned friend with permission to tell her she was wrong.

This site is software. It can help you find a passage, put a prayer into your own words, or talk through what you read in Teresa at an hour when nobody is awake. It has no authority and it is not Jesus. It is not a confessor either. Use it the way Teresa used her notebooks, then go find the person.

Born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in Avila on 28 March 1515. She left her father's house in November 1535 for the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in the same town and made her profession the following year, though older biographers put both dates two years earlier. A severe illness in her twenties left her paralysed for a long stretch, and she credited her recovery to Saint Joseph. She gave up mental prayer for a period, went back to it, and from 1555 onward began describing the experiences that fill her books.

On 24 August 1562 she opened the small convent of Saint Joseph in Avila, the first house of the reform that became the Discalced Carmelites, and she spent the next twenty years founding more of them across Spain against steady opposition. She wrote The Life under orders from her confessors, finishing a first version in June 1562 and completing the book we have by 1565, then The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle in 1577, and The Book of the Foundations.

She died at Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582. Spain switched to the Gregorian calendar that same night, so the following day was reckoned as 15 October, and that is why her feast lands on the fifteenth. She was beatified in 1614 and canonised in 1622 by Gregory XV. On 27 September 1970 Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church, the first woman to hold the title, with Catherine of Siena named a week later.