The Book of Her Life

"This is Teresa’s own account of her journey. It was written at the request of her confessor. She was already attracting a certain amount of unfriendly attention from the authorities, including the Inquisition . It’s worth remembering that, at this time, the Inquisition was very active. We all have the Monty Python view of the Spanish Inquisition. We think of this rather grotesque, monstrous surveillance institution. A lot of it was not like that. It was a huge bureaucracy, more like the Inland Revenue. If you got something slightly wrong, it would be on the books for ages and you’d be pursued for minor debts, as it were. There were, of course, the great set pieces, the public executions, and so forth, but for many people, the real nuisance of the Inquisition was just being harassed constantly, and held accountable for things that were said. All sorts of very reputable, learned and holy figures got into deep trouble with the Inquisition, and took years to get out of it. Teresa’s confessor was really saying, ‘Look, get down on paper what you think you’re doing, just in case things get difficult.’ Predictably, the Inquisition confiscated copies of the manuscript and it took Teresa several years to get it back. Eventually she had to appeal to the King of Spain to intervene with the Inquisition to get her own book back. “She famously comes up with the image of irrigation. The soul is like a garden, it needs rain in order to grow. How do you irrigate the soil?” What she’s doing in The Book of Her Life is explaining why it is that she is a reformer of the monastic life. She describes growing up in a pious household, some of the experiences she had as a child. She describes her early years in the convent, having become a nun at the end of her teens. She describes how, for a while, she was very devout, very prayerful, and then, partly in the wake of a serious illness, it all becomes a bit ordinary, a bit dull. She sinks to the level of most nuns of her day. The convent she belongs to is not spectacularly wicked or corrupt. It’s just a bit cosy. It’s the sort of convent where younger daughters of aristocratic families are boarded out, to while away their lives doing some sewing and going to church, with their own personal attendants and servants as well. Gradually, Teresa became attuned to the fact that there was something wrong. She describes a very significant moment where she has—not literally a vision—but she sees a statue of Christ in the cloister of the monastery and feels a personal appeal. The statue was of Christ being scourged before his crucifixion, of Christ in the middle of his suffering. And she says it was as if Christ were saying, ‘I need you to be with me.’ And that really shifts her perspective. She decides she must reform her order. She begins to petition for leave to found a smaller and more austere convent, and then begins to found more of them. So, gradually over the years that follow, she spreads this particular style of religious living. That’s not something she tells us a lot about in The Life because her focus in the book is to help us look at the nature of the life of prayer. She famously comes up with the image of irrigation. The soul is like a garden, it needs rain in order to grow. How do you irrigate the soil? How do you make it moist and receptive enough for growth to happen? She describes four stages. At one end is us doing all the work—we can take out the water in buckets and pour it on; we can get machinery to help us; and we can dig irrigation ditches. Or we can just wait for rain. And rain, actual rain, is what’s best for soil. So how do we turn ourselves into soil that is just waiting for rain? That’s how God really does the work. So her sense of the life of prayer is to ask how we gradually let go of our insistence on being in charge of things and doing stuff and, instead, become really receptive. The paradox is that that involves quite a lot of work, but that’s the heart of the argument of The Book of Her Life . And I think that’s what people go back to. There are two things that come through very clearly in what she says about her communities,and not only in The Life but in other books. One is this vision of the community being small enough to be friendly. This is a community of friends of Jesus, who are able to be friends with one another. Friendship doesn’t depend on hierarchy, so you can’t have elaborate fixed hierarchies. You have a prioress and a cellarer and a bookkeeper, but these offices rotate. When you’ve done your job, you go back to doing the washing up. She’s very clear about that. Because of that, she’s also very clear about the fact that you don’t invest a huge amount in what you might call ‘plant’. You don’t build huge convents, you don’t build elaborate churches, you don’t go wooing the local nobility by saying, ‘We’ll give you a fancy tomb in the church.’ You don’t go fishing for grants of land and property that will give you an income. You need to be dependent—yes, on charity—and whatever you can make by your work. The model is very different from the big sprawling communities that characterised most Spanish cities and, indeed, most southern European cities at that time. These things were very basic for her. This is interesting and a very pertinent question. In fact, she does talk a bit about her childhood. What she doesn’t talk about here is her family in detail, because until the middle of the 20th century, nobody really knew this, but her family was Jewish. Her grandfather and her father had been in trouble with the Inquisition at various points, suspected of reverting to Judaism. It’s the familiar pattern: Jewish people were forced to convert in 15th century Spain and then, of course, because they’ve been forced to convert, nobody believes that their conversion is sincere. You can’t win. We know that her father had to leave Toledo because of trouble with the Inquisition and settle in Avila. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Now, Teresa doesn’t mention that. And, frankly, I don’t blame her because if there would be one thing worse than an independent woman teaching about prayer and theology in the 16th century Spanish church, it would be an independent Jewish woman teaching theology and prayer. So she doesn’t touch on that and it was a very well-kept secret for centuries. What is intriguing is the way that subtext appears at a number of points in her writing, as if she is almost daring somebody to call her on it. She says, ‘Of course, it doesn’t matter what your family origins are. This obsession with family, honour and the purity of blood has nothing to do with what happens in the church.’ She is very insistent that her communities will accept people from any background. This is a time when most religious orders were explicitly banning people of Jewish ancestry from joining their communities. We also know that she admitted somebody—we don’t know all the details—from the Spanish colonies in the New World, who seems to have been an indigenous person. Race and religion are something which the community is meant to cut across. So, I think there is an easily discernible subtext when she writes about honour and status. She’s very careful to insist that in the community there should be no distinctions based on family background. In practice, she resisted what were called the ‘statutes of purity’, which denied entry to people of non-pure Christian blood."