Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul

"This is a very successful, quite recent overview of Teresa’s thinking as well as her life. There are a number of good lives but this one brings in her thinking, her writing, rather more. He’s a theologian and someone who’s written extremely well about the history of spirituality. He’s written a very good book on St John of the Cross, as well. I would recommend this as a really good introduction to her as a thinker. As I said at the beginning, I want us to do full justice to her as a thinker. She is a very original theologian in many ways. She’s a very original reader of the Bible. I mentioned earlier how interesting I found her use of the Bible. Some years ago, I did a short study of which texts from the Gospels she was using, which bits of the Gospels she really liked. She likes St. Luke’s Gospel quite a lot. She likes the stories about women in the Gospels, and she uses them sometimes a little bit mischievously, one might almost say. There’s a passage in one of her works where she says that she realises that, of course, women must be silent in church and all the rest of it. But, you know, look at the Gospels and who is it who’s there at the cross and the resurrection? It’s the women isn’t it? So, think about that. She’s fascinated by the figure of Mary Magdalene. In medieval legend, Mary Magdalene is not only a repentant sinner, she’s also a model of the contemplative life because the legend is that she spent her last years as a hermit. The Carmelite order itself began as a group of hermits in the Holy Land. The Crusaders come across this community and bring back the ideals and visions of this group living on Mount Carmel to Europe. So the notion of that prophetic calling to solitude, Elijah on the mountain, remains as part of the background of Carmelite imagination. Mary Magdalene, for Teresa, is a very good example of that solitary and intensely interior life. Also, Teresa assumes the truth of the medieval legend identifying Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman who washes Jesus’s feet. Behind that is the idea of Mary Magdalene doing something extravagant and embarrassing for the sake of Jesus. She, Teresa, is asking women of her own day to do something extravagant and embarrassing, which is to become Carmelite sisters—to forget their comfort, their reputation, their status. She’s a very innovative, very insightful reader of the Bible. I think he would agree with the kind of perspective I’ve outlined here, which is that you have to read her as a real thinker as well as a reformer. You have to read her as somebody who is deliberately commenting on and modifying attitudes to prayer and contemplation at the time. Her theology is contemplative, she draws her theology from her prayer. I think Peter Tyler is very good at weaving those themes together in the book. To be honest, I don’t think that these perspectives tell us very much of real significance about her. Again, it’s the danger of reading her through Bernini’s sculpture, where we see somebody in an abnormal condition. As many commentators have noted, Bernini is depicting somebody who looks as if she’s in a state of orgasm. The imagery of the angel driving a spear to the centre of her body—it doesn’t take a genius to work out the symbolism of that. But this is one episode in Teresa’s life. There are all kinds of accounts that she gives of her personal spiritual experience, which certainly include odd, inexplicable, non-normal phenomena. But all the time she is writing books, she is running convents, she’s founding new convents, she’s travelling around negotiating with unsympathetic town councils, and trying to avoid the Spanish Inquisition. The one thing that she’s not is some kind of mentally fragile person. I think some of the commentary that focuses on what may or may not be mental or psychological conditions rather takes for granted that anything that looks like explicit and complex religious experience is simply a sign of some kind of mental disorder. You’re in a slightly circular argument there, so I’m not much helped by that. The case for epilepsy seems to me negligible. If there are episodes and experiences which may result from sleep deprivation, food deprivation, well possibly, yes. These things happen—though she’s not one to encourage excessive self-denial. To understand her, you need to look at what she actually says and does. You need to look at the background against which she works, and speaks. That’s why I think you need to locate her in the context in which these books help to place her."