Saint Teresa of Jesus

 

(Gotarrendura, Avila, 1515 – Alba de Tormes, 1582) Religious and Spanish mystical writer, also know as Santa Teresa de Ávila. Teresa de Jesus is the name of religion adopter by Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, probable descendant of converted Jews, and Beatriz de Ahumada, belonging to a notable Abulian family. His life and spiritual evolution can be followed through his works of an autobiographical natura, including some of his greatest works: Life (written between 1562 and 1565), Spiritual Relations, the Book of Foundations (initiated in 1573 and published in 1610) and his nearly five hundred Letters.

Life ranges from his childhood to the foundation of the first renovated convent of San Jose de Avila, in 1562. Thanks to her she knows her childhood fondness to read lives of saints and the then popular calvary books, that Miguel de Cervantes would parody in Don Quixote de la Mancha a century later. In 1531, her father placed her as a pupil in the convent of Augustine nuns of Santa Maria de Grace, but the following year she had to return home suffering from a serious illness. Determined to take the Carmelite habit against his father’s will, in 1535 he fled his house to head to the convent of the Incarnation. He saw the habit the following year, and in 1537 he made his profession.

At that time a time of anguish and illness began for his, which would last until 1542. During these years she confesses that she learned to trust God unlimitedly and that she began to practice the method of prayer called “recognizing”, explained by Francis de Osuna in his ‘Third Spiritual alphabet’. She rejoiced from his ailments, she began to instruct a group of nuns of the Incarnation in the life of prayer and to plan the reform of the Carmelite order to restore the ancient rigor, mitigated in 1432 by Pope Eugene IV.

She then began to be favoured with visions- imaginary, and “intellectual”, visions that would happen throughout his life and that determined his crises to find out if that was the spirit of God, or the deceit. Its ideal of reform of the order was concretised in 1562 with the foundation of the convent of San José. Then begins a new stage in his life, in which the dedication to contemplation and prayer is shared with an extraordinary activity to achieve the triumph of the Carmelitean reform.

From 1567 until his death, he founded in Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladold, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Beas, Seville, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Palencia, Soria and Burgos. In 1568 the first reformed male convent was erected in Duruelo, thanks to the collaboration of San Juan de la Cruz and Father Antonio de Heredia. She drafted the Constitutions (1563), which were approved in 1565 by Pius IV and which are based on the following points: life of prayer in the cell, fasting and abstinence of meat, renunciation of rents and properties (communal or private) and the practice of silence.

To help his nuns realize their ideal of religious life, he composed Camino de Perfection (written between 1562 and 1564 and published in 1583)  and The Homes or Castle Inner (1578). The reaction of members of the former Carmelite observance reached its climax in 1575, when they denounced the barefoot to the Inquisition. A brief from Rome, in 1580, ordered the separation of the two orders.

In 1604 the process of canonization of Teresa began. In 1614 she was declared a beate, and in 1622 she was canonized by Gregory XV. In 1970 she was proclaimed a doctor of Church, being the first woman to receive this distinction. In addition to the above-mentioned works, he left the following written: Meditations on song, Exclamations, Visiting barefoot, Notices, Ordinances of a brotherhood, Notes, Spiritual challenge, Vejamen and about thirty poetry.