Barefoot to beatitude

Christopher Howse

TERESA OF AVILA by Cathleen Medwick Duckworth, £20, pp. 284 As Jeronimo Gracian got out his saw and began to cut off the left hand of Teresa of Avila, he had no doubt she was a saint. It was 1583, the year after her death. Gra- clan contemplated the uncorrupt body of the 67-year-old nun whom he had ordered to be disinterred from her tomb in the Carmelite convent of Alba de Tormes. She had caused him much trouble by persuad- ing him to support her single-minded reforms, the founding of a chain of houses for Carmelites who would follow the ancient rule of the order and go barefoot — discalced. Gracian's sufferings were far from over yet.

The hand was a relic, to be honoured for its association with one who was very close to God. Gracian later left it at Avila, where Teresa had started her campaign. He kept a finger for himself and carried it every- where. A decade later he was captured en route to Naples by Barbary pirates, who tattooed his feet with crosses and took him off in chains. They stole the finger, but he bought it back. He himself was ransomed in 1595 and died in 1614, not amid the love and honour of his fellow Discalced Carmelites (which he might have deserved as a close friend of their founder), but expelled from their order and exiled to Flanders.

Gracian's adventures and hard emotional knocks mirrored the adventures and dan- gers that Teresa herself risked. She was a visionary who saw deep within her soul Christ present, and sometimes dictating mundane instructions. 'I've begun having raptures again,' she writes towards the end of her life, 'and they're a problem because they've happened several times in public. It is no use resisting them, or pretending that nothing is happening. I get so embarrassed that I want to hide.' Sometimes when she began to levitate, her nuns said, they had to hold her down.

But she was no neurotic. Her portrait shows her as a round-faced elderly woman. She had been clever enough to run rings round her enemies (while never stepping a foot outside her obligations of obedience). And her enemies wanted nothing more than to get the Inquisition to persecute her. The chilling threat of the Inquisition is something of a leitmotif of Cathleen Med- wick's urgent narrative. Will she escape torture at their hands after her latest dar- ing escapade? I feared at one point that this might unbalance the book. Cathleen Medwick tells us that she is of a Jewish background, like Teresa herself, who was descended from conversos, Jews turned Christian who were suspected and perse- cuted by the Spanish Inquisition.

But this danger did not dominate Tere- sa's mind — after all, in 16th-century Spain torture was an ordinary procedure in civil law. In any case Teresa really had no fear of arrest, interrogation and imprisonment at all. The terrible months of incarceration of her supporter, John of the Cross (in a dark cell, fed on sardines and regularly flogged) — by monks, for heaven's sake showed that if reformers feared their ene- mies, they would get nowhere.

Teresa was absolutely sure where she wanted to get. Heaven. And she could get there only by doing God's will, which she discovered in prayer. She prayed for years in which she experienced nothing but dry- ness. It was only in middle age that she began to penetrate deeper into her soul (as she describes in The Interior Castle), where she found God. Paradoxically it was then that she followed God's instructions (which Cathleen Medwick sometimes presents as a sort of oracle) to set off through heat, fleas and floods to found convents for nuns to take the same interior journey that she had made.

Since she was often met by physical resis- tance she chose the night to move her nuns into some tumble-down house that she had rented. The foundation of the convent at Medina del Campo is described in this way by one of her followers:

Our Mother arrived and, as in such cases she acted with decision, we took with us the vest- ments and altar furniture required for Mass

'I'm not snarled up with anyone at the moment. How about you?'

and without further delay started out on foot — nuns, priests, the prior, and three other friars. We went through the outskirts of the city as it was the hour for driving the bulls through the streets for bullfights the next day. Laden as we were, we looked like gyp- sies who had been robbing a church.

Teresa had to rely on whatever people she could get; she was a warm personality and a good judge of character. But it must have been chiefly by spiritual insight that she welcomed the intervention of Peter of Alcantara (later declared a saint). Cathleen Medwick makes him a sort of likeable sadhu, his bare feet gnarled, his habit threadbare, his thin body caked with dirt. He was known for his austerities — sleep- ing for only an hour and a half a night, sit- ting up with a log nailed to the wall for a pillow. But he had the respect of the king and he was no fool. As he lay dying he had himself brought on a litter to talk the Bish- op of Avila into giving permission for Tere- sa's first Discalced foundation there.

It was Peter who told Teresa that one of her most painful trials would be the 'oppo- sition of good people'. Not that the bad held back. Another fine character-part in the drama was the one-eyed Princess of Eboli, familiar from 16th-century paintings — a cruel, beautiful, courtly schemer, always in a tantrum, the mother of 11 children and lover of many men. She was not to be crossed. She offered Teresa patronage, Teresa would have nothing to do with her. After the death of Ruy Gomez, her elderly husband and one of Philip II's lieutenants, the Princess, though five months pregnant, even joined a con- vent herself. 'The Princess of Eboli as a nun,' remarked Teresa, 'was enough to make you weep.'

The Princess showed in her way what a woman in 16th-century Spain could do, despite the cultural presumption that women were weak, irrational and temptresses. Teresa chose another way. In her own day she was denounced by the papal nuncio, Filipo Sega, as an unstable, restless, disobedient, and contu- macious female who, in the name of devo- tion, devised false doctrines, leaving the enclosure against the orders of the Council of Trent and her superiors, and teaching as if she were a master, in spite of St Paul's injunction that women should not teach.

Under another Pope, in 1970, she was declared a Doctor of the Church, the first woman to be given the title. Her principal lesson, perhaps, was not so much how to pray as the need to persevere in prayer with determination, and to act accordingly, whatever the consequences. Cathleen Med- wick calls the story of her journey one 'that, with all its unexpected deviations, was as full of wonder and terror as any ocean voy- age'. She tells it straight but racily, with style.

Christopher Howse is Obituaries Editor of the Daily Telegraph.