Identity - Lesson 14

I. Background and Context

Our next lecture is on the spiritual formation and the Christian identity of Teresa of Avila, who lived 1515–1582. I need to explain that I’m jumping chronologically. We should be looking at Calvin before we look at Teresa, but it’s simply because we want to keep the more Catholic context together and then we can turn to the reformers, who of course stood against the abuse of some of the things that developed in the life of the church.

The other thing I should point out is, why do we choose these individuals? It’s partly, like Bernard of Clairvaux, my personal choice, but it’s also because we’re trying to look at what we might call “hinge periods of history.” That is to say, there are certain periods that are very formative, like a hinge, for a whole change in direction that that Western culture was moving into. We’ve seen what a critical hinge it was in the 12th century when there was a swing around from a much more corporate sense of being a self to becoming now an individual. This is a big sea change. As we’ve seen, it’s associated with many other things that arose with it, like the rise of the towns that, instead of a raiding economy, we have an exchange economy. That the most fertile lands turn out now to be in the dense forest, but there has been the introduction of the Saxon plough from the East that turns the sod and not just simply dusts the ground like the Mediterranean ard did. There were major technological changes taking place that have created much more the shaping of our world since the 12th century. We didn’t have time to talk about all those kinds of things. But Bernard is, therefore, a very critical figure. The monumental development of more than 350 foundations of such communities that Bernard did in his time was quite extraordinary.

Another hinge period is the 16th century. First of all, it was a change that was brought about by the discovery of the New World. By the voyage of Christopher Columbus, there was a whole new continent and therefore a whole new landscape or new horizon for Western man that had never been conceived of. There were major things that were taking place in the 16th century. It’s also the end of eight centuries of civil war in Spain, because the pushing back of the Moors, the Arabs, who had occupied the peninsula at the time of the Visigoth period in the early 5th century/6th century; from then on, you have the Arabs occupying the whole peninsula, except for the mountains of the Cantabrians and the Pyrenees in the North. Pushing back, stage by stage, in the reconquest of Spain was finally achieved in 1492 with the fall of Grenada. That’s another major change in European history.

One of the significant things that happened with the fall of Grenada was now the attempt of the Catholic kings. There had been at this conclusion the union of the two crowns of Aragon and Castile. Isabella of Aragon was a devout Catholic. She as a real devout Christian. Her husband was a political Catholic and so it was she who introduced a spiritual reform. Its consequences—she never imaged would be what they were. 

The significant thing of this whole period is that—the irony is that the people who were to create new spirituality under the devotion of Isabella, such as her own chaplain, who became Cardinal Cisneros; he was a Franciscan—all the great spiritual writers of the 16th century were Franciscan.

What’s that got to do with our study? Well, the fact is these Franciscans were Jews. So, God uses his people in completely new ways to what we might think. This movement is called the Marranos Moor movement, or the Marranos. I would recommend you read—and this is all brand-new scholarship in the last 10 years, less than 10 years—an author who is Jewish: Yirmiyahu Yovel and his book is called, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity. It’s a wonderful study. It’s only come as a result of recent archaeology. Because they discovered, first of all, in the Caribbean and then near the sites of the reconquest in the Andes and actually also in the estuary of Buenos Aires—there would be the skulls of conquistadors and when they’ve been recovered, they’ve discovered that they have a metal insignia which is the text of Leviticus 4:7 [recte Exodus 20:3]: “Thou shalt not have any other gods before me.” These were Jews, but they were Jewish Christians. If they’d been recognised, they would have been burned at the stake because after the fall of Grenada, there was the policy of the Spanish monarchy to get rid of impure blood, and the Arabs were that impure blood.

What they didn’t recognise was there was also a lot of Jews in Spain. The Jews were wherever you make money and the great money maker of the Middle Ages in Spain was sheep rearing and the sheep’s wool was like the golden fleece. It was the gold of the period. The Jews were very active in the wool trade of the Middle Ages in Spain that was shipped elsewhere. If you go to the Cotswolds in England, you have again the wool trade and you get the most prosperous churches and beautiful medieval villages in the Cotswolds that you get anywhere in England. Same thing: it was the wool trade.

Now, behind all this was the fact that probably Christian Jews had become a monopoly of the first church to be called Christian, which is on the coast of Syria. It was from there that we find John Chrysostom preaching later and saying, you know, “One of the things that rebukes our Christians is that they don’t keep the first day of the week sacred like the Jews in our community keep the Sabbath day holy.” There’s a long spiritual tradition that devout Jews are more devout Jews than many Christians have ever been devout Christians. But when you have devout Jews that have become devout Christians, they’re more devout than their fellow Christians. It’s one of the ironies of history that we haven’t really explored further enough.

Now, these volunteers to go to the New World were escaping the Inquisition. They knew that even though it became disclosed that they were Jewish Christians, well, when you’re in the army, that doesn’t matter. You’re already perhaps a general or a high officer in the command already. That’s why we find that the evidence for the Marranos is not in Spain, but it lies in these texts that they wore. 

Now, why did they wear the text? They wore the text because they were entering a place of idolatry. That’s what a Catholic church had become. It was the worship of Mary that they were protesting against. Lord, forgive me from associating with idolaters when I worship the one true, Christian God. Isn’t it ironic? That’s the background to the Marranos.

When I have studied the works that my father as a missionary in Spain used to tell me to read as a boy, I would read the works of Louis de Granada—his work on prayer. I would read The Names of God by the great Hebrew scholar in the University of Salamanca called Luis de León. I began to move into the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. But who are all these devout Christians? They’re all Marranos. One of the extraordinary things of 16th century Christian identity that the people who are most Christian had to hide their identity as Christians from the fellow members of the churches of that time. It was precisely because of this inner hidden life that they’re so passionate and so devout, in fact, mystical, some of them, in what they did. Now we’re betraying Teresa of Avila’s identity.

There are two kinds of hiding Jewish identity. One way of hiding your Jewish identity is you’re a rich merchant and everybody knows that you’re a Jew. How do you avoid the Inquisition that was set up as an instrument, and it was set up by the Thomists. Because the whole movement of the Crusade in the 12th century was to get rid of the Catharism of Languedoc and the South of Provence, which was a great heresy. That was the first great Crusade in the West. It was a Crusade to stamp out Catharism. From then onwards, their scholars were all crusaders for truth and in the generations that followed, they were therefore, the pioneers of the Inquisition in Spain. They were rooting out heresy wherever they could. That was their mindset, not spiritual renewal, but stamping out heresy.

Here are two orders of the Church. The Franciscans, who have a simplicity of their faith in God—they’re not interested in wiping out heresy, but they are celebrating with the birds like Francis does the simple world that Aquinas would find so familiar to him. You might say that Bernard would have been a kind of pre-Franciscan in his simplicity, like Francis of Assisi. There’s the irony that we have in that background. Now that we are following this, we discover that the Marranos had two great waves of revival and conversions. The first wave was 1391 to 1414, when it’s estimated that over 100,000 Jews got converted to Christianity. The second wave of mass conversion was, ironically, after 1492, but those mass conversions after 1492 were now much more political. They were much more the saving of the fortunes of the Jewish merchants and their families.

With the expulsion of the Moors, there was now this attempt to have pure blood. The political machinations of the Inquisition had already begun in 1480, but its reign of terror then was dominated by the Dominican leaders. In other words, the Dominican crusaders like St. Dominic had been leading the crusade in the 13th century against the Cathars. Torquemada was elected as the Inquisitor General of all Castile and Aragon in 1482. Secrecy and fear, torture and public auto-da-fé were its instruments, motivated by creating what they thought was a state of national emergency.

II. Teresa of Avila's Life

Now, in Teresa’s family her grandfather was a wealthy converso. He was a wealthy Jew, Juan Sanchez, because he was a cloth merchant. There was a grace period that allowed Jews to become Christians, and he took that grace period. I beg your pardon… It was not he, but it was his father, so it was Teresa’s grandfather who first confessed that he was a Jew. He was a changed man socially but did not have a change of heart. It was nominal. Having done so, it enabled his son Alonso de Cepeda, who was Teresa’s father, to become even more acceptable in climbing the ranks. What he did was to bribe the King of Spain with a large sum of money to give him the status of an aristocrat. If you’re an aristocrat, that was one way of avoiding taxes. It’s like paying all your taxes in one year and then for the rest of your life you’re free. It was all a matter of money. Although he was in some ways a pious man, he was also a double-minded man.

Alonso’s brother, Pedro, went a third way and that was he was covered because they were now Catholics, but he gave away his wealth. He lived as a semi-recluse. He truly wanted to be a better Christian. He in that sense was a great inspiration for Teresa to follow her uncle and not her father or grandfather. He had been reading—he didn’t know it—but he was reading the spiritual literature of the Marranos that preceded him. One of these was a man called Osuna, who in the 1530s, had written a wonderful classic called The Third Alphabet [recte The Third Spiritual Alphabet]. The Third Alphabet was a wonderful guide to pray. As we’ve said, some of the earlier Franciscan friars who wrote on meditative works focused very much on the life of prayer, like we mentioned already the example of the earlier writer on this subject.

Another influence that was to help Teresa was that a close friend of hers—when she became a nun—was the niece of a great uncle called Luis de León. He was the greatest Hebraic scholar in the 16th century in Spain, at the University of Salamanca. Why was he so skilled in Hebrew? He was a Moreno: Luis de Leon, 1527–1591. In order to encourage his niece as a nun (because nuns in those days were not taught Latin). Therefore, they had no access to the Bible and the only access to the Bible that this niece, as well as Teresa of Avila had, was the Lord’s Prayer that they recited every week in church. But the other thing that they recited that was given was that he translated the Song of Songs into Castilian. This was a no-no as far as the Inquisition was concerned. The Song of Songs and the Lord’s Prayer are all the biblical background that Teresa of Avila ever had. This was given in the period 1572–76.

The other thing that we should bear in mind about nuns in those days is—I really don’t know what they did in the convent because under the Inquisition women were not supposed to pray, that emotionally they were unsound from having any prayer life whatever. So why be a convent nun? No wonder it was a boring existence. But this indomitable uncle was imprisoned between 1572 and 76, and while he’s imprisoned, he sings. He became one of the great lyrical poets of Spain, and his music and lyricism was enabling the imprisoned self to escape into the heavenly realms. One of his poems on leaving jail, which he had been there simply under the jealousy of some of his colleagues who were jealous of his scholarship but discovered that he was a Jew and that condemned him.

Here envy and lie
Had locked me.
Blissful the humble state
Of a sage retiring
From this evil world,
Who with a poor table and house,
In the delightful field,
Passes his life in solitude
Neither envied nor envious
Measured only with God.

Again, he sings another lyric:

How peaceful is the person’s life
Who flees the world’s vain noise,
And follows the hidden path
Trodden by the few sages
Who have been in this world.

What Luis de Leon was to release—he had a great influence on other poets of the period like John of the Cross, who became one of the young disciples of Teresa de Avila. But in our collection of sources of identity there’s a Spanish professor from London who has done a wonderful study of the lyrical identity of Luis de Leon. This became the golden age of Spanish literature for it’s the golden age of lyricism that the world has never seen before or since. This lyricism comes from the suffering of the Marranos. 

He outlasted Teresa of Avila, although an old man. But selflessly, not thinking about his own publications at all, he collected all Teresa’s works immediately after her death and proceeded to instigate the process of her beatification. It’s precisely because of that process, like in the case of Bernard, that we then have the collection of all her works. His own poems had to wait for over a century before they were recognised by another Spanish poet, Francisco de Quevedo.

Teresa came from a large family. She had three sisters, nine brothers. In 1505, her father, Alonso Sanchez, married Catalina del Peso, who did have some aristocratic background and that’s how he latched onto her and then paid for the rest of it with his own money. But very early in the life of Teresa—she died in 1507, and she’d given birth to Teresa only two years before, so Teresa grew up motherless. Then he married again, Beatriz de Ahumada, who was scarcely 15 years old when he married her. She gave him ten sons and lastly Juana, a little girl. Then the mother died aged 33. So, her stepmother died when she was just 16.

Four years later, Rodrigo sailed to Argentina as a conquistador in 1535, dying there in 57. Another brother, Antonio, was killed on Pizarro’s mission to Ecuador and Jeronimo, another one, survived another expedition. Then Augustine soldiered on in Chile. Then Lorenzo, he lived 34 years as a conquistador. In other words, more than six brothers of Teresa all went to the New World, and you can understand why. Two of the family, Teresa and Rodrigo, became discalced Carmelites. We have to speak about what all that means. Let’s go back to a summary of her life.

The first part of her life was a worldly life as a child and a teenager: 1515–1535. Then there’s the 27 years of her life taking her conversion and her serious growth seriously: 1535–1562, then her spiritual maturity from 1563–82. Born on 23rd March 1515 in Toledo at 5 o’clock in the morning and baptised a few days later at the Church of St. John with two godparents, friends of the family. Her godfather’s brother became the first Viceroy of Peru, so they stood up in high nobility. Her family gained the third rank of [inaudible], that is to say, of aristocracy. All through her life, in all her writings, what Teresa is fighting against is the snobbery of the system of [inaudible].

All of this documentation was found in the archives of [inaudible] only in 1940 during the trial of her grandfather Juan in Toledo, who had been arrested and brought before the Inquisition in 1485. He bribed the jurors, escaped death, and now we have the documentation from that trial of the early start of the family. 

Her father, as we’ve said, only had one ambition: to make money. As for her stepmother, her inner life was filled with romantic novels of the alternatives of paradise or purgatory, of fighting North African pirates or the Moors.

Martyrdom was the way to go to Heaven. This is what she tried to do. She was a spirited little girl and when she was 11 years old, filled with the romance of her mother and all the fighting about the Moors, she escaped from the nanny’s care of the big house they lived in, escaped through the streets of Avila and escaped through the gates. They got a long way, and they were on the road south. Dragging with her was her little brother Rodrigo, who was later to be, as we’ve seen, a conquistador. He was seven years old. When they were rebuked, “What in the world are you doing?” She replied, “Oh, we’re going to fight the Moors.” So that feistiness is what characterised Teresa for the rest of her life.

I said she was 15 when she lost her mother. No, it was 13. She was beautiful. She was intelligent. She was well read. She was a people pleaser. She was flirty and humorous, very dangerous to have a teenager without a mother. The family decided to keep her virginity by sending her to a local convent that was full of similar young women. For two years, from 16–18, she entered into having a convent life with no idea what to do. 

Well, she fled, and she walked into another Carmelite convent called La Encarnación, and there she was to stay a further seven years from 1536–43. The first was a place of teenage social chatter. The second place was more rigorous. There was daily penance. But there was no reason for what she was supposed to be doing. She got sick and ill. Quack doctors made her medicinal treatments even worse. What was being undetected were her psychosomatic illnesses, so within two years, she suffered a serious nervous breakdown.

Now we know from recent medical studies that she possibly suffered from heart conditions of epilepsy. Then, wisely, her eldest sister Maria arranged for a female healer to see her and she in turn recommended a spiritual director. Then there followed for a long period of her life a sequence of good and bad spiritual directors, sometimes contradicting each other. 

III. Spiritual Influences

Ultimately, although she thanked God for those who were wise, it was her own private readings that really gave her the discernment that she needed for her own life. As we’ve said, it was her own saintly uncle who had recommended to Teresa in her illness a book by Francisco de Osuna, The Third Alphabet [recte The Third Spiritual Alphabet]. This book had been published in 1527 on the spiritual practice of contemplation or ‘reconhecimento,’ as it was called. It was a book that was banned by the Inquisition in 1559. It was written by a Marrano.

She then began to read other Franciscan books: The Ascent of Mount Sion by Bernardino de Laredo, that was published in 1534. We’ve mentioned Luis de Granada’s Book of Prayer and Meditations, that came out in 1554, and the Sinner’s Guide, that he wrote in ’56. She also began to read Augustine’s Soliloquies. I don’t know how she got access to them. After 1554, she read and quoted Augustine’s Confessions, that had been translated by the Marranos, again in 1554. Of course, by the end of that period all these books were banned by the Inquisition, so she had to hide her copies of them. But God providentially enabled her to enter into the world of classical literature before the ban came down.

All this now prepared her to revolt from the conventional Carmelite way of life at the second convent. How could she exercise contemplation with the orders of the mother superior to go and have worldly visits in the town of Avila…in other words, not to get so bored with the life in the convent? Or to live with all the Spanish and provincial political tensions that were then saying that Spain was more Catholic than the Italian pope. 

IV. Founding a New Convent

One of her close friends had an idea: why don’t we found another convent? Her older step-sister offered a thousand ducats—it’s a lot of money—and other gifts secretly collected, especially from a wealthy aristocrat called [inaudible]. Now they had to be both normal human beings yet have an extraordinary faith and sanctity, and Teresa showed she had both.

Feminists today both love and hate her. They love her feistiness but hate her faith. In prudence, Teresa waited three months to find the right place and then a further wait upon the Pontifical authorisation to proceed with the new Discalced Order of Carmelites. 

I should interlude and say, and who in the world were the Carmelites? Well, the Carmelites had been founded in Palestine in the 12th century after the First Crusade. Their purpose was to live a life of prayer. It was all about prayer. But they’d been so abused that the Carmelites had forgotten that they were supposed to be praying and that’s why she wanted a reform. The way to show it as a reform was to be discalced: the symbol was you were now barefooted. 

I remember we had the first New Zealand student that came discalced to Regent College. He had been a hippy, used to going barefoot, and so he arrived at Regent barefoot in the snow. But I reminded him he should read about the discalced order of Teresa.

At the nativity season of 1563, she was summoned to Toledo, waiting around until the next June. What she probably didn’t know was that the new king, Philip II, son of the old religious politician, Ferdinand of Aragon, and succeeding him in 1561 was to declare himself Henry VIII, the head of the national church. Philip now announced the Vicar General of the Carmelites in Spain, should have been a Spaniard and not an Italian. This political event paved the way for Teresa to now have her discalced order without Papal interference. The new Vicar General, Rossi, appointed in April 1566, then visited the new convent, La Encarnación, that is to say, The Incarnation, in Avila in February 1567 and returned two months later. 

The personality of Teresa impressed him. He was at peace about the order and in April 1567 he authorised her mandate and ordered all the new convents that she founded to be directly under his control and not under the Italian Vicar General of the old regime. So now you have two Vicar Generals of Carmelites in rivalry with each other: one reformed in Spain and one renegade in Italy. No wonder the Spaniards were saying, “We’re more Catholic than the Pope.”

On 9th February 1570, Teresa had a vision of the crucified Christ, whose crown of thorns were transmuted into a crown of golden glory. Teresa now knew her mandate was to use the new foundations as her participation in the salvation of Christendom. Now like Bernard she was always travelling. But travelling the poor roads of the peninsula in a mule cart is no fun. “Always,” she remarked, “the weary travellers would enter the new convent in the dead of night like robbers to avoid being seen or because of the length of the journey.” Bone-tired and being hungry was her daily diet. It was while spending weary hours on a mule cart that was springless in the heat and in the cold of the Iberian Meseta that that’s how she prayed meditatively and prayerfully. But she was spiky too. One day it was raining, and she stumbled out of the cart, and all her clothing was befouled with the mud. She says, “There, God, no wonder you have so few companions if you treat them that way.” But it’s not in a springless mule cart that you think of having your personal devotions, which is what she did most of her time.

Well, I shall be, in the other course on the prayer life of the saints, telling you more about Teresa, but just let me summarise what her works were. Her Life [recte The Life of Teresa of Jesus, also known as Her Life or Life] which was written between 1652–65, was at the command of the Inquisition. They wanted to know who she was and what she thought. The Way of Perfection was written between 1566–69 and this was to show her nuns what the new order was all about. Meditations on the Song of Songs was the result of her response to the smuggled document for which Luis de Leon spent five years in prison. These are her own contemplative exercises. She was a practical woman that wrote the Foundations, which is about, between 1573–74, her journal of her travels and the notes of her public life and connections that she might make. Then she writes the great classic The Interior Castle in 1577, which is her spiritual journey in the life of prayer. Finally in her old age, she writes Conciencia, or Conscience, about her inner thoughts, 1560–1581. There’s her diary. As for letters, we have over 450.

She writes with different genres for each of these sessions and these occasions. Her Life is what we can call the rhetoric of confession. It’s reproducing the kind of Augustinian genre of the Confessions. The rhetoric of irony is The Way of Perfection. She’s teasing the nuns while at the same time giving them mentoring. You don’t take yourself too seriously when you’re a mentor. There’s the rhetoric of authority when she is writing the Foundations, which means this is the way you’re going to follow in this way of life, so take it seriously. She writes there as the abbess. Then we may say the fourth is the rhetoric of intimacy. Now she’s in contemplation on the bosom of her beloved Lord.

She really had no idea she was going to be a writer. Being a writer is the self-consciousness that we’ve had in more recent centuries. In those days, it was no big thing. Even at the zenith of the Spanish Renaissance of literature and lyricism when her fellow alumbrado reformers were producing the finest literature of Spain, Teresa was actually creating a new genre. You might call it the language of the inner life—the genre of herself, of my soul.

There are many feminist interpretations of her. Some of them are quite healthy, like Rebecca Sackville-West. But others like Alison Wilson, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, are really very negative. The best guide is to go to a fellow Carmelite and the Carmelite that has been the best exponent that I think is Ruth Burrows. She writes The Interior Castle Explored, which tells you what a good book it is because it was published in 1981/1982 and then reproduced in 2007.

There have been some remarkable responses to Teresa. It might shock you that Dr Alexander Whyte, who was an eminent Edinburgh Presbyterian preacher of the late 19th century, actually edited an anthology of her works in 1897. He says, “The greatest and best talent that God has ever given to any man or woman is the talent of prayer. It was this that first drew me to Teresa. It was her singular originality in prayer, her complete captivity to prayer, her refuge, the peace and the sanctification, her fidelity, and the utter surrender of herself to the first and last of all her religious duties.”

The anthology of Teresa was one of the first spiritual classics that I myself edited, remembering that just about 20 miles from the walls of Avila, my own mother was stoned out of her village as a missionary. As a child I grew up rather prejudiced about Teresa. You have to read for yourself. Then I read. It’s ironic that from that background where sometimes I’ve been accused at Regent of recruiting Catholics when my own parents were persecuted in Spain. I remember at the world alliance that we had in celebrating the centenary of the first evangelical chapel in Spain in 1969, I stood up and said I’m a product of the persecution of Spain.

I had the courage to reach out to Clayton Berg, who was head of the Latin American Mission, and I said, “You represent Protestantism in Latin America. Would you ever dare endorse Teresa of Avila and write an endorsing appreciation of her for our little book on classics of faith and devotion on Teresa?” And this is what he says: “As a young seminary student in the early 1950s, it was the writings of Santa Teresa de Avila that pricked my understanding of what true spirituality in prayer in practice are all about. Her prayer has echoed throughout the centuries: ‘Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.’”

There was an amazing baroque response by the poet Crashaw at the beginning of the 17th century. This is the poem he writes in her memory, beginning with the words, “Let me so read thy life that I unto all life of mine may die.” Crashaw had seen the sculpture Lorenzo Bernini composed: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Meditating on the sculpture, Crashaw concludes:

O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all dow’r of light and fires…
By all thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more than they…
By all of him we have in thee,
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may die.

As we’ve said, Luis de Leon quickly collected all the evidence for her quick canonisation. And the Empress of Austria and Philip II—Philip II was a devout radical Catholic—she read her manuscripts, and she desired their immediate publication. We know later that some of the great aristocrats of the early 16th century that were to give patronage to people like John Calvin were all profoundly influenced by Teresa of Avila. Such is the inside story of history.