"Life"[20] which she wrote, by the advice of her superior, when
forty-six years of age; it is an autobiography worthy to rank with
Augustine's "Confessions." Read also the few hundred racy letters
written after the press of the day while the convent slept. Chief of
all, let the reader, if he is practical, know that inimitable book of
her fifty-eighth year, the "Foundations," with its Cervantes-like
pictures of the people and customs of the time. Perhaps only those who
have traveled on Spanish country-roads, those tracts of mud or rocks,
can appreciate the hardships endured by this aged woman as she went from
city to city to found her houses; in heavy snows to Salamanca; to
Seville in a covered cart turned to purgatory by the direct rays of the
Andalusian sun, with fever and only hot water to drink; rivers
overflowed by heavy rains; boats upset in the rivers. The last
foundation was at Burgos, barely four months before her death, the
jolting cart in which she rode from Palencia having to be pulled out of
the ruts and she entered the coldest city in the Peninsula on a raw
January day in a heavy rain, there to find further troubles.
Familiar with Teresa's physical endurance, her cool-headed business
ability, her candid hatred of shams and pretence, then approach her
loftier self and read the "Camino de Perfección." The treatise on prayer
in the "Life," (Chap. XI to XXII) prepares one for this second book,
which she wrote for her sisters and daughters of "St. Joseph's" in
Avila, "those pure and holy souls whose only care was to serve and
praise Our Lord, so disengaged from the things of the world, solitude is
their delight." Through the "Way of Perfection" runs her beautiful
exposition of the Pater Noster, with digressions to right and left as
her thoughts arose. She tells of the intangible land of worship in
magic-laden words that draw the cold heart to the far realm of
contemplation wherein lay the source of her strength. The "Camino" leads
one to her last book, the "Interior Castle," a glorious pæan to God, a
courageous exploring of the untrodden realms of the soul that is truly
one of the triumphs of the spirit, and when we consider it was written
by a woman of sixty-two, worn out with labors and penance, living in a
poor little convent, it is an incredible feat of genius. In all
literature is found nothing loftier nor more ethereal: "Oh, 'tis not
Spanish but 'tis Heaven she speaks!"
Teresa belonged to the race of the true mystics because she was a great
saint. It has been said that sainthood, the divine hunger of the soul to
do or to suffer _pro causa Dei_ is as difficult to define to the
imagination as genius. The materialist may scoff at it, but it remains a
primitive part of human nature against which argument beats itself in
vain. Its form may change with the times, the Eastern anchorite and the
mediæval ascetic may give way to the administrative bishop needed in his
age; to a knightly paladin such as that "Raleigh among the Saints" who
led his Free Lances to the fight for the salvation of souls; to a
large-hearted philanthropist like Vincent de Paul, with his unresting
Sisters of Charity; to a scholar of the schools, a Newman; to the
reformer in our ugly modern cities; under varying vestures the spirit is
the same. In the compelling power of her saints lies the force of the
Church; to the saints of the Catholic Reformation, to Philip Neri,
Charles Borromeo, Francis Borgia, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier,
Ignatius Loyola, the Church owes her rehabilitation. These great souls
rose in every land to purify abuses, to drive the money changers from
the temple: they were the leaven in the hundred measures of meal.
Macaulay noted the fact that since the middle of the sixteenth century
Protestantism has not gained one inch of ground, and this is due to
these saints of the Catholic Reformation; for deep in man's heart lies a
reverence for simple goodness that overrides all disputes, and when such
saints arose in the church that was called a sink of iniquity, men
paused; those who had passed from her ranks did not return, but none
after followed them. Had Luther been gifted with more of this personal
sainthood, the fatal division that bequeathed centuries of hate and
warfare might have been avoided, and the simpler method of example, of
holiness of life, have sufficed for reforming Renaissance Rome
intoxicated with the revival of pagan culture. Such regrets are futile,
a mere weighing the weight of the fire, a measuring the blast of the
wind; and they are ungrateful, too, since the spirit of that troubled
time roused among other great souls, a Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada.
The writings of this remarkable woman have the same allurements for us
to-day as when they flowed almost unconsciously from her pen, for
besides her mysticism and her sainthood, she was a poet, of the race of
those whose thoughts make rich the blood of the world. Her little nuns
tell that when she wrote her hand moved so rapidly, it seemed hardly
possible it could form human words, while in her face was an expression
of exaltation. "She ranks as a miracle of genius, as perhaps the
greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who
stands beside the world's most perfect masters," is the testimony of the
ablest English critic of Spanish literature. She wrote with her eye
direct on her soul's experience, with the glorious courage to give the
naked truth regardless of consequences, and she will be read as long as
sincerity of soul-expression is the poet's best gift and while the
conflict of faith and unbelief remains the highest of human themes.
Mystic, saint, and poet, she can claim yet another title, that of
philosopher. By the road of self-study, she reached that sublime height
of metaphysics, the intellectual vision of the Absolute. The further
Psychology advances, the more wonderful is found her knowledge of the
soul and its moods and powers. "The highest, most generous philosophy
that ever man imagined," wrote the scholar, Luis de León. "Sainte Térèse
a exploré plus à fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l'âme, ...
elle explique savamment, clairement, le mécanisme de l'âme évoluant dès
que Dieu la touche ... une sainte qui a vérifié sur elle-même les phases
sur-naturelles qu'elle a décrites, une femme dont la lucidité fut plus
qu'humaine" is the appreciation of Huysmans. Not only orthodox believers
yield her this preëminence: Leibnitz read and deeply admired her; a
recent French critic of the skeptic school compares her to Descartes.
Hyperbole is inevitable in speaking of this "sweet incendiary," and all
who know her books feel the same enthusiasm. "A woman for angelical
height of speculation, for masculine courage of performance, more than a
woman," wrote the old English poet, Richard Crashaw, whose "Flaming
Heart" is touched with her own potency:
"Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
And by thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;...
By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him,
(Fair sister of the seraphim!)
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."
Spain may claim the glory of having appreciated this her greatest
daughter. She is a colonel of artillery; she is a doctor in Salamanca;
the manuscript of her "Life" was placed in the Escorial and the King
carried the key; at country inns they tell of the night she rested
there, as if it had been yesterday; her devotees to-day sign their
letters "_su amigo teresiano_." It was reserved for later generations of
different race to explain what they could not understand by calling it
hysteria and epilepsy. Richard Ford's account of the saint is so wide of
the original that Froude, no lover of Catholic Spain, says it is not
even a caricature; the article on her in the Encyclopedia Brittanica is
a disgrace to intellectual thought.
Spain stands indifferent to such criticism. She knows herself secure in
her mystics who seem to have left the race an intuitive understanding of
the life of the soul. This inherited intuition has, of course, its
dangers, for all intelligences are not those of a Teresa de Jesús. It
needs indeed "large draughts of intellectual day" to be a mystic.
Valdés' novel, "Marta y María" shows this mistaken insisting in the
nineteenth century on conditions of life suitable to the sixteenth. But
because smaller minds have imitated her disastrously, their
neo-mysticism need not be considered a serious menace in modern Spain,
since following a saint, even haltingly, is not by any means an easy
life to choose.
St. Teresa and Avila: her name evokes that of her native city as
instantly as St. Francis' that of Assisi; every stone in Avila breathes
of the heroic woman. Our first visit was to the small plaza under the
city walls, where the _casa solar_ of the Cepeda family stood. Teresa
came of the untitled gentry of Castile, _de sangre muy limpia_, and a
Spaniard's pride in his blood, untouched by Moorish taint, by crime, or
illegitimacy, is as strong to-day as then: perhaps it is this pride, in
peasant as well as noble, that makes the democratic relation of the
classes in the Peninsula.
At right angles to the mediocre church built in commemoration, on the
site of the Cepeda house, stands the mansion of the Duque de la Roca,
which gives a good idea of the solid escutcheoned homes of the hidalgo.
Many such dignified houses are scattered over Avila, making a stroll in
her streets full of the charm of surprise; their chief adornments are
the doorways, truly splendid old portals with coping stones sometimes
nine feet deep radiating round the entrance. In one of these solid
Romanesque houses Teresa was born in 1515. Through a city gate before
her house, I looked out on just the same scene she had known during the
first eighteen years of her life; the rocky plain, through which the
river wound, stretched to a spur of the Guadarrama mountains, capped
already with the winter's snow. Leaving the venerable little plaza, I
descended the steep street that led to the river bridge, in the spirit
of pilgrimage still, for the child Teresa and a small brother wandered
here alone one day on their way to seek martyrdom among the infidels.
Met by an uncle beyond the bridge, the runaways were brought home. Truly
in the saint's life, the child was father to the man, her days bound
each to each in natural piety, despite that short period which her too
tender conscience ever regretted when, as a pretty girl, love of fine
clothes and flattery allured her. It is told of these remarkable
children, that, hearing the word "Forever," they clasped their little
hands and gazed wide-eyed in each other's faces, overcome by its
stupendous meaning.
[Illustration: HOUSE OF THE DUQUE DE LA ROCA, AVILA]
When Teresa was eighteen she went to visit a married sister who lived at
a distance, and on her return stopped to see an uncle who had just taken
the resolution of entering a monastery. The religious feeling in her
partly awoke, and she too desired the life of the cloister, but her
parents not finding strength to part with her, one morning she and a
brother slipped away from home, and after he had conducted her to the
Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, he went on
himself to beg admittance at the Dominican Convent of St. Thomas. For
over twenty-five years Teresa lived in the _Encarnación_: during the
first twenty years she was miserable in bodily health and as miserable
in spirit, for the saint had not yet found her vocation, and the laxity
of the rule allowed the nuns to see much of the world, to receive
visitors and hear the gossip of the town. "I was tossed about in a
wretched condition, for if I had small content in the world, in God I
had no pleasure. At prayer time I watched for the clock to strike the
end of the hour." Strange words for this future great genius of prayer!
Her conversion, the change of heart that sooner or later, disregarded or
welcomed, comes to all who live with any depth, came to Teresa as she
was approaching her fortieth year. She had been roused to more serious
thoughts by her father's death, and one day in the oratory she suddenly
seemed to realize in a figure of her crucified Saviour the unspeakable
wonder of his sacrifice:
"Thy hands to give Thou can'st not lift.
Yet will Thy hand still giving be,
It gives, but O, itself's the gift,
It gives tho' bound, tho' bound 'tis free."
"Love touch't her heart, and lo! it beats
High, and burns with such brave heats
Such thirst to die, as dares drink up
A thousand cold deaths in one cup."
With the inflowing of true religion, Teresa longed for a stricter life,
for the original rule of Mount Carmel as conferred by Innocent IV in
1248. She was misunderstood by those around her, her locutions and
visions doubted; as a natural result of the false _beata_ of that day,
she was considered a woman who for the sake of notoriety pretended to
sainthood. Only after years of semi-persecution did the ring of truth
and the ethical fervor of Teresa's words convince the learned men who
examined her, and she was allowed to leave the _Encarnación_ to found
the convent of St. Joseph, her first house of the barefoot or
_descalzos_ Carmelites.
Associated so closely as is the _Encarnación_ with the saint, it is with
emotion one looks down from the city on the pleasant oasis it makes in
the rocky plain. Teresa had there the memorable interviews with St.
Francis Borgia, just returned from a visit to his friend and former
lord, Charles V at Yuste; with the mystic poet, St. John of the Cross
(whom Coventry Patmore has followed in his "Unknown Eros"); with St.
Peter of Alcántara, who too held that "the cornerstone and chief
foundation of all is humility." These devout men confirmed Teresa in her
belief in the divine origin of her prayer: "There is no pleasure or
comfort which can be equal to meeting with another person to whom God
has given some beginnings of the same dispositions," she wrote,
harrassed by the petty suspicions around her.
A tenderer association than the _Encarnación_ is that of _San José_, her
first foundation. The convent lies outside the Puerta del Alcázar, Gate
of the Castle, past the plaza where the townspeople stroll under the
arcades, and peasant women sell fragrant celery from the big
saddle-baskets they lift from their donkeys' backs to the pavement. The
visitor is shown treasured relics by the nuns, the quaint musical
instrument their mother played on, her drinking jug, and wooden pillow,
a letter in her strong, clear hand-writing. During the later strenuous
years of her life the saint ever looked back lovingly here. "I lived for
five years in the monastery of St. Joseph at Avila, and those now seem
to me to be the most peaceful part of my life, the want of which repose
my soul often feels." From the age of fifty-two to her death at
sixty-six (1582) this wonderful woman traveled over Spain, founding her
reformed order, sixteen convents for women and fourteen monasteries for
men. While on a visit of inspection at Alba de Tormes the end came; with
her favorite words of the Psalmist, "A contrite and humbled heart, O
God, Thou wilt not despise," she passed, as she had written in her "Way
of Perfection," "not to a strange country, but to her native land."
Avila is worthy of her saint, Avila of the Knights, Avila the Loyal, the
King's Avila. It is one of the most perfect examples existing of the
fortified towns of chivalry. Built on an eminence, it is completely
encircled by grand old walls, forty feet high, whose sameness is broken
by some eighty-six towers; two of these here and there are placed close
together and arched, so as to make a gateway. Below the town on every
side stretches a plain, so strewn with shattered rocks that it is easy
to picture it the scene of some battle of giants. The Cathedral may be
called part of the city ramparts, since its apse forms one of the eighty
encircling towers; the walls are so thick that the radiating chapels
round the chancel are not seen in the exterior view, being quite lost in
the depth of stone and mortar. Our inn, the _Fonda Ingles_, looked out
on the square before the Cathedral, a windy spot, where the gusts from
the mountains seized and tossed the men's long capes. Like Burgos and
Salamanca, Avila is on the truncated mountain of central Spain, and one
is reminded of its 3,500 feet of altitude by the bitter cold. Nothing
can pierce so sharply as the wind of the Castile plains. Each day we
crossed the gusty plaza to the church and so grew to know it with the
heart-affection Spanish cathedrals win. The large windows have been
walled up to darken the interior, for Spain, the hardy, the
all-enduring, ignores the frosts of eight months of the year to provide
against the summer heats. The details of Avila Cathedral are truly
lovely; a double-aisled ambulatory round the warm space of the High
Altar, a _retablo_ of ancient pictures, isolated marble shrines between
chancel and choir near which kneel groups of black-veiled worshipers,
gleaming brass _rejas_, a carved _coro_ where the canons chant and where
are massive illuminated hymnals on the lectern, all make up one's ideal
of a house of God. Do not miss the sacristy, one's ideal too of what a
sacristy should be, with antique silver wrought by the De Arfe family,
with painted and gilded cabinets, and alabaster altars cut like ivory.
St. Teresa's city is small: one can encircle its walls several times in
a constitutional, yet every walk discovers new treasures. We were
constantly stumbling on yet other of the imposing portals that exist in
their perfection only here and at Segovia, and in the sleepy squares or
courtyards we found some of the roughly-hewn stone animals, the
primitive god of Druid days, used later by the Romans as milestones.
From these comes another title for Avila, _Cantos y Santos_. An easy
afternoon walk can be taken to Son Soles, a hermitage on the lower slope
of the mountains, whither the saint must have gone in the summer
evenings when the sunset glorified the plain and hills, for the customs
of Avila to-day are those of Avila in the sixteenth century. A path led
us across the aromatic fields, and country men in wide-brimmed velvet
hats gazed at us with clear, fearless eyes, grave yet courteous, like
true Castilians. In the meadows we met a gentleman of the town pacing
slowly, book in hand; one would have time in the home of the mystic for
such fruitful hours of pause, such sessions of sweet silent thought. On
the way to Son Soles, just on the outskirts of the town, stands Santo
Tomás, the Dominican monastery that long supplied missionaries to the
Philippines. Before the High Altar is a white marble mausoleum of
Isabella's period, worthy to rank with that of her parents at
Miraflores,--the truly touching tomb of her only son. He lies with calm
upturned face, a crown on his thick locks, his gauntlets thrown beside
him. The royal prince was educated with ten young nobles in a former
palace near this church. Generous, handsome, a scholar and musician,
with the fair future stretching before him of the first king to rule the
_Españas_ rich and united, he died suddenly at Salamanca in 1497,
turning all the conquests, all the discoveries of his parents' reign to
dust and ashes. The Queen bowed her head in submission, saying "The Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away, Blessed be his name": but it is told
that she often came to sit in her special stall of the raised choir
here, to gaze with broken heart on the white tomb of her son. Had he
lived would Spain's evil day have been averted? One can almost believe
so; for tyrannic government came in with the Austrian, who ruled here
because of Don Juan's death. Charles V, Isabella's grandson, was not a
Spaniard; he could little understand the system of individual city
rights that prevailed in the country he came to govern. Spain can boast
she was one of the earliest of European nations to teach the municipal
doctrine that the state has freedom if the town is free. We too
completely forget that it was nearly a century before the celebrated
Leicester Parliament that Burgos in 1169 had popular representation.
When the Austrian arrived, with his autocratic idea that all power
should be concentrated, the Castilian cities rose in the Comuneros
rebellion, but they were ruthlessly put down and for three hundred years
the land's vigor and wealth were exploited for the benefit of one
family. I am sure that as she sat pondering in the choir stall of Santo
Tomás Isabella foresaw what a tragic loss to her cherished land was the
death of her only son. Avila can link the names of Isabella la Católica
and Teresa de Jesús, the two most incomparable women in whom the sex has
culminated, both born on the bleak invigorating steppes of Castile, in
the same province, within the same hundred years, both making an
indelible impression on their race, both leaving a deathless heritage of
aspiration and onspurring pride. Is there any wonder that a people who
can claim two such heroines look at one with fearless eyes?
Avila is rich in tombs. There is a second lovely one in Santo Tomás,
that of Prince John's attendants, and down by the river bridge, the
picturesque chapel of San Segundo holds a most beautiful work by Spain's
best sculptor, Berruguete. The kneeling bishop has so gentle an
expression that it is hard to believe he could hurl a Moslem chief from
the city walls above this hermitage. In the Cathedral, behind the High
Altar, is another Berruguete tomb, Bishop Tostado, whose industry has
passed into a proverb; he is here represented with speaking, alert
expression, leaning forward, this tireless pen suspended in his hand.
The tomb of St. Teresa is not found in her native city, for she was
buried where she died, at Alba de Tormes, some miles from Salamanca. Not
long after her death Avila stole the saint's body--strange to our modern
notions are those old disputes over relics--but through the influence of
the Duke of Alva it was restored to his town.