Justified True Belief

(●) A Spanish nun who drew the plainest map of prayer the West has, and reformed an order while she was drawing it. + Most people who write about prayer write about it from the outside, as a duty to be recommended. Teresa of Ávila wrote from the inside, as a woman who had spent nearly twenty years praying badly and knew exactly what that felt like. That is why she is still read. She is not a distant figure handing down instructions; she is a nun with a bad back and a heavy travelling wagon, telling her sisters what she has found out, laughing at herself in the middle of the hardest passages, and stopping to admit that she cannot explain what she has just described. She matters on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with her miracles. Teresa is the great test case for religious experience: what a person can honestly claim to have received from God, what such an experience proves, and how you tell the real thing from the effects of hunger, illness, and wishful thinking. She was pressed on all three questions in her own lifetime, by confessors, by theologians, and by the Spanish Inquisition, and she answered them in writing. Her answers are tougher and more sceptical than most of her modern admirers expect. One fact outlasts all the others. In 1970, three hundred and eighty-eight years after her death, the Roman Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church, which is that church’s formal way of saying that a saint’s books are safe to learn from, and she was the first woman ever given the title. The book that earned it most directly, The Interior Castle, was written in under six months in 1577 while she was forbidden to travel and while her earlier autobiography sat in the hands of the Inquisition.

(●) 1515 AD: She was born in Ávila into a family with something to hide, and at seven she set out to be martyred. + Teresa de Ahumada was born on 28 March 1515 in Ávila, a walled town on the high Castilian plateau where the winters are long and the stone is the colour of bone. Her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was a cloth merchant who had bought his way into the appearance of gentility. What the family did not advertise was where the money and the name came from. Teresa’s grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a converso, a Jew who had accepted baptism, and in 1485 the Inquisition in Toledo required him to do public penance for having slipped back toward the faith of his fathers. He moved his sons to Ávila and started again. Teresa never mentions any of this in her books, which in sixteenth-century Spain was not dishonesty but survival. She was one of about a dozen children between her father’s two marriages, and the brother she loved most was Rodrigo, four years older. The two of them read lives of the saints together, and what caught them was not the holiness but the arithmetic: the martyrs bought endless joy with a few minutes of pain, which struck the children as a bargain. So they decided to walk to the country of the Moors and be beheaded. They got past the city bridge before an uncle spotted them and marched them home. Teresa told the story on herself sixty years later, and she is careful to say it was not love of God that moved her but a child’s appetite for a good return. Her mother, Beatriz de Ahumada, loved the chivalric romances that everyone then read and Teresa’s father disapproved of, and the two of them read them together in secret. Beatriz died in 1528, when Teresa was thirteen. The girl who was left behind spent the next few years on the things a thirteen-year-old turns to when her mother dies: novels, clothes, perfume, a cousin her father did not like, and enough gossip that in 1531 he put her in the Augustinian convent school of Our Lady of Grace to get her out of the house.

(●) 1535 AD: At twenty she left her father’s house before he was awake and entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation. + The convent school suited her better than she expected, though illness sent her home after about eighteen months. What followed was a long, honest argument with herself, and she reports it without flattering the result. She did not want to be a nun. She wanted, she says, not to be damned, and the cloister looked like the safer of two roads. A Spanish gentlewoman in 1535 had two futures, marriage or the veil, and Teresa had watched enough marriages to prefer the veil without being able to say she loved it. Her father refused permission. So on 2 November 1535 she left the house at first light without telling him, walked out to the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation just beyond the walls, and asked to be admitted. She wrote afterwards that the parting felt as though every bone in her body were being pulled out of its socket, and that she had no comfort in it from heaven, only a naked act of will. Her father, faced with the accomplished fact, gave way. She was clothed as a novice the following November, which meant the habit and a probationary year to find out whether she could live the life, and on 3 November 1537 she made her profession, the vows that bound her to it for good. The Incarnation was not a harsh place. It was a large, genteel, chronically underfunded boarding house of well over a hundred women, where nuns of good family kept servants and small private rooms, received visitors in the parlour, and were sent home to relatives for months at a time when there was not enough food to go round. Nothing there was scandalous. Nothing there was very serious either, and Teresa, who had a real gift for company, was extremely good at the parlour.

(●) 1539 AD: A coma nearly buried her, and a borrowed book taught her how to pray. + Within two years of profession she was seriously ill, with fainting fits, a racing heart, and pain nobody could name. Her father took her out of the convent to a woman healer in the village of Becedas, and the cure very nearly finished what the disease had started. In August 1539 she fell into a coma that lasted about four days. The convent dug her grave. Wax was put on her eyelids. She woke to find her family arguing with the sisters about the funeral, and afterwards lay helpless for months and crawled on hands and knees for something like three years before she could walk properly again. Something else had happened on the road to Becedas, and in the end it mattered more than the cure or the coma. Her uncle Pedro had handed her a book to read: the Third Spiritual Alphabet by Francisco de Osuna, a Franciscan. It taught what was called the prayer of recollection, and the idea is simpler than the name. Instead of reciting words at God, you gather your scattered attention inward, as you might close a door on a noisy street, and stay quietly in his company. Teresa, who could not concentrate and could not hold a thought, took hold of it like a rope, and for the rest of her life she treated that book as the beginning of everything. Then came the part of her story she is hardest on, and it went on far longer than the illness did. For roughly twenty years, by her own account, she prayed and lived at half strength, pulled between the chapel and the parlour and giving her best hours to neither. At one stage she gave up mental prayer altogether for more than a year. Mental prayer is the unscripted kind, praying in your own words or in none rather than reciting a set text, and her reasoning for dropping it was that a woman as inconsistent as she was had no business pretending to it. She called that decision, looking back, the worst mistake of her life, and she is blunt about why she made it: not unbelief, but a kind of embarrassment. She was ashamed to keep turning up.

(●) 1554 AD: A carved Christ left standing in the oratory ended twenty half-hearted years. + Somebody had borrowed a statue for a feast day and left it standing in the oratory, the small room a religious house keeps for prayer. It was a figure of Christ badly wounded, the kind of unsparing Spanish carving that shows the sores. Teresa, then thirty-nine, came in and saw it. She writes that the sight of it broke her, that she felt what she had given back for those wounds, and that she threw herself on the ground beside it in tears and begged God to strengthen her once and for all. Around the same time she read Augustine’s Confessions, the story of another late convert who had known better for years, and found her own case set out in someone else’s book. What followed she did not go looking for. Over the next several years she began to experience what she calls locutions, interior words heard without ears, and raptures in which she lost the use of her senses, and visions of Christ that she insisted she saw with no bodily eye. In 1559 came the experience later painters made famous, in which an angel seemed to pierce her heart with a golden spear. She was frightened by all of it, and so were her advisers. Half the learned men she consulted told her it was the devil. Something was taken from her as well, and it was a loss entirely of this world. In 1559 the Inquisitor General, Fernando de Valdés, published an Index, a list of books Spanish Catholics were forbidden to own, and on it were a great many of the devotional works then circulating in Spanish. The ground given sounded reasonable enough, that untrained readers were being led astray. What it meant for Teresa was that she lost at a stroke nearly everything she had been reading. She reports that the Lord answered the loss by telling her not to be sad, because he would give her a living book instead. It is a characteristic Teresa moment: a real deprivation, an unfussy comfort, and no attempt to pretend the ban had not happened.

(●) 1562 AD: With four novices and no income she opened a house of thirteen, and Ávila went to law to close it. + The plan began as a conversation among a few nuns and friends about whether the old Carmelite rule could actually be kept. Teresa’s answer was a house small enough to be serious: no more than thirteen sisters, strict enclosure, which meant that the sisters did not go out and visitors did not come in, no dowries required, no family titles used inside the walls, hands working at spinning, and no endowment at all, so that the house would live on alms and would have to stay poor whether it wanted to or not. Compared with the crowded, well-connected Incarnation, it was less a new order than a return to an old one, and it was meant as a rebuke that nobody could miss. Saint Joseph’s opened in a small house in Ávila on 24 August 1562, and four novices took the habit. The town reacted as though a fire had started. Ávila already carried more religious houses than it could feed, and one more mendicant community, which is to say one that lives entirely on what it is given, looked to the magistrates like a bill the city would have to pay. The council resolved to suppress it, found that the bishop had licensed it properly, and went to court instead. Teresa was summoned back to the Incarnation to explain herself before her provincial, the superior set over all the Carmelite houses of a region, and before her sisters. She talked her way through it, the lawsuits failed, and she rejoined the four novices at Saint Joseph’s in the following year. Those were also the years she began to write. Her confessors had ordered her to set down an account of her interior life so that trained men could judge it, and the result grew into the Life, finished in a first version in 1562 and enlarged by 1565. She wrote it as a defendant writes, laying out the evidence for people who might well conclude she was deceived.

(●) 1567 AD: A patent from Rome put her on the roads of Spain for the next fifteen years. + In 1567 the Carmelite prior general, Giovanni Battista Rossi, came from Rome on visitation, the formal inspection a superior makes of the houses under him, expecting to discipline an irregular convent. He met its prioress and did the opposite. He gave Teresa written authority to found more houses of nuns like Saint Joseph’s, and later authority for houses of friars as well. She was fifty-two years old, in poor health, and had never run anything larger than a household of thirteen. By her death she had founded seventeen convents. The founding trips are the least mystical thing about her and among the most attractive. She travelled in covered carts over roads that were often riverbeds, argued with muleteers, slept in verminous inns, ran out of money, negotiated for houses with owners who changed their minds, and dealt with town councils, bishops, and lawyers, most of whom would rather she went home. The Book of the Foundations, which tells these stories, contains almost no visions and a great deal of practical comedy, and it is the book to hand anyone who thinks a contemplative is a person who avoids the world. At Medina del Campo in 1567 she met a small, silent friar in his twenties named Juan de Yepes, who was on the point of leaving the Carmelites for the Carthusians in search of something stricter. She talked him out of it and into her reform, and he became John of the Cross, one of the finest poets Spain produced and the reform’s other great writer. The first house of discalced friars, so called because they went barefoot or in sandals, opened at Duruelo in November 1568 in a farm cottage so small that its three friars had to stoop. Then her own past caught up with her. In 1571 the apostolic visitator, an inspector carrying the pope’s authority rather than the order’s, sent her back to the Incarnation as prioress, over the loud objection of nuns who remembered exactly who she was and what she had said about houses like theirs. She arrived, set a statue of the Virgin in the prioress’s stall with the keys of the house in its hands, and told the community that the Mother of God would be their prioress. Within three years the house was solvent and at peace, and she had brought John of the Cross in as its confessor.

(●) 1575 AD: Her own order moved to shut her down, and she wrote The Interior Castle while confined. + A reform is a judgment on the unreformed, and by the mid-1570s the Carmelites who had not gone barefoot had had enough of being judged. The reckoning came at the order’s general chapter at Piacenza in 1575, a general chapter being the assembly of superiors that governs a whole order and can undo anything a province has done. It ordered the discalced houses founded in Andalusia suppressed, and it told Teresa to pick a convent and stay in it. She chose Toledo, and spent much of 1576 and 1577 there under what amounted to house arrest. It went harder with the friars. In December 1577 John of the Cross was seized by his own brethren and held for some nine months in a cell in Toledo barely larger than a man, where he wrote most of the Spiritual Canticle in his head and then escaped over a wall. And all through those same years her Life sat in the Holy Office, which is what the Inquisition called its tribunal, denounced to it by an offended noblewoman who had got hold of a copy. Confined, forbidden to found, over sixty, and with her most personal book impounded, she sat down in June 1577 and wrote a new one. The Interior Castle was finished on 29 November of the same year, which is to say she produced the classic account of the life of prayer in under six months while under investigation, in two stretches of writing broken by a move and by illness. She composed it, as she composed everything, at speed and without revision, in a rush of talk that jumps its own sentences, and she says at the start that she does it under obedience and would rather be spinning. The end of the fight was administrative and undramatic, as the ends of such fights usually are. In 1580 a brief from Pope Gregory XIII, a brief being a short papal letter with the force of a decree, separated the discalced Carmelites into a province of their own, and at a chapter at Alcalá in 1581 they elected their own provincial, Jerónimo Gracián. Teresa, who had spent five years being told she was disobedient, was suddenly the founder of a recognised branch of an ancient order, and she went straight back to work, founding at Palencia and Soria, sending Anne of Jesus to open the house at Granada, and finishing at Burgos.

(●) 1582 AD: She died at Alba de Tormes on the night the calendar skipped ten days. + The Burgos foundation of 1582 nearly killed her; she arrived in floods and freezing weather and was ill for most of the negotiation. On the way home she was ordered to break her journey at Alba de Tormes, where the duchess wanted her, and she got there worn out and haemorrhaging. She died on the night of 4 October 1582, sixty-seven years old, having asked for the Church’s last rites and repeated that she was a daughter of the Church. The date is a small historical curiosity. Catholic Europe adopted the Gregorian calendar that very week, and the day after 4 October 1582 was 15 October, so the night she died is the reason her feast is kept on the fifteenth. She was buried at Alba, and there she stayed, after an unedifying tug of war between Alba and Ávila over the body that involved two exhumations and a good deal of politics. Her books were still unpublished. Six years later, in 1588, most of them appeared in Salamanca, edited by Luis de León, the Augustinian scholar and poet who had himself spent nearly five years in an Inquisition cell for putting the Song of Songs into Spanish and for preferring the Hebrew text to the Latin of the Vulgate, the official Latin Bible of his church. He never met her, and said so in his preface, where he wrote that he knew her now in her daughters and her books and had no doubt the Holy Spirit spoke in them. He printed her text as she wrote it, resisting the temptation to tidy her grammar. Almost everything the world knows of Teresa it owes to that decision.

What She Taught

(T1) The soul is a castle of many rooms, and God lives in the innermost one. + Think of a large old house you know well, and then notice how much of it you never enter. There is a room at the back you have not opened in years, a cellar you avoid, an attic full of things you inherited. Most of us live in three rooms of a house with twenty. That is Teresa’s picture of a person. She asks her sisters to imagine the soul as a castle cut from a single diamond, with many rooms arranged in rings around a central chamber, and God dwelling in the middle one. The Spanish word she uses for the rings, moradas, means dwelling places, which older English translations render "mansions" from the wording of John 14:2. The outermost rooms are the ordinary religious life: prayers said, duties done, God believed in and rarely met. The inner rooms are where he is actually at home. Her whole book is a set of directions for walking inward, and its first and most repeated instruction is not a technique but a fact about the reader: you already possess the castle. The startling thing, she says, is not that a soul can reach God but that a soul is the sort of place God chose to live in. The picture is her own, but the doctrine behind it is Paul’s. "Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16). Teresa takes that sentence with complete seriousness and asks the obvious follow-up question, which most Christians never ask: if the King is living in the middle of the house, why do we spend our lives in the porch? She is also careful about what the picture does not mean. The centre of the castle is occupied by someone; the journey inward is not a journey into the self but through the self toward another, and a soul that arrives at the middle and finds only itself has taken a wrong turn.

(Q) "I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, First Mansions, ch. 1, § 2 (Benedictines of Stanbrook translation). The opening sentences of the book, written the day she began. She has just told God that she does not know what to say or how to start, and then this occurred to her, and it became the frame for everything that follows (T1).

(T2) Prayer is friendship with someone we know loves us, not a performance we have to get right. + Ask most people why they do not pray and you will get a version of the same answer: they are not good at it, their mind wanders, they run out of things to say, and they suspect that people who are good at it have some knack they lack. Teresa spent twenty years believing exactly that, and her definition of prayer is aimed straight at it. The term she is defining is mental prayer, which in sixteenth-century Spanish usage means prayer that is not recited: not the psalms or the set prayers of the hours, but time spent thinking about God and speaking with him in your own words or in none. Her definition is deliberately unimpressive. It is a friendship, and friendship is a matter of spending time with someone, which is a thing anyone can do badly and still be doing. Nothing in it depends on having interesting thoughts. What it depends on is turning up, and on one piece of knowledge held onto in the dark: that the person you are turning up to already loves you. She kept saying it in different ways because she knew it was the sentence people needed. If prayer is a performance, then a dry hour is a failed hour and the sensible response is to stop, which is what she herself did for more than a year. If prayer is friendship, a dry hour is simply an hour spent with a friend in silence, and the only real failure is to stop coming. Teresa was ruthless on this point with her nuns, and the reason is autobiographical: she had made that mistake, and it had cost her two decades.

(Q) "For mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Life, ch. 8, § 7 (David Lewis translation). She has just finished the chapter in which she confesses that she abandoned prayer for over a year, and she is begging anyone who has not begun to pray not to deprive himself of it. The sentence is the reason she gives (T2).

(T3) What she received in prayer was given to her, not worked up by her. + Teresa divides the life of prayer into what a person can do and what a person can only receive. The first part she compares to drawing water from a well with a bucket: hard, honest, tiring work, and entirely within reach. The last part she compares to rain, which falls or does not, and which no amount of effort produces. Everything she is famous for belongs to the second part, and the point she hammers is that it is a gift and not an achievement, so that nobody can earn it and nobody should be discouraged by not having it. Her own experiences were vivid and she describes them with a novelist’s exactness. Among them is the one in 1559 that Bernini would later carve in marble in Rome: an angel with a golden spear tipped with fire, thrusting it repeatedly into her heart, leaving a pain she would not have been rid of. Later Carmelites called it the transverberation, from the Latin for piercing through. The marble has made everyone think they know the story, and her own account of it is stranger and a good deal more careful than the statue. She insists the pain is not bodily but spiritual, though the body shares in it. She admits she cannot explain the mixture of pain and sweetness. And she ends not by recommending the experience but by praying that anyone who thinks she is lying might be given it. That last line is the tell. Teresa never argues from her experiences to her doctrine. She reports them because her confessors made her, she submits them to examination, and she treats them as God’s business rather than her credentials. Christians have always been divided about how much weight such reports can carry, and Teresa herself gives that objection its full force (T4): the experiences prove nothing on their own, and she says so more sharply than her critics do.

(Q) "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Life, ch. 29, § 17 (David Lewis translation). She has just explained that she almost never sees an angel in bodily form, and that this one was small, beautiful, and burning. The paragraph immediately after this one records that she went about for days as if beside herself, wanting to see and speak with no one (T3).

(T4) Not every trance is from God, and the first thing to check is whether the nun has been eating. + A confessor once came to Teresa about a Cistercian nun who collapsed every time she received communion and lay on the floor for eight or nine hours. The whole convent thought it was a rapture. Word of it had spread through the district. Teresa listened, asked what the woman had been eating, and gave her verdict: it was not a trance, it was starvation and self-flagellation, it was a waste of time, and the confessor was to forbid the fasting and the disciplines and find the nun some distraction. He did. The woman got her strength back and the trances stopped, which is exactly what Teresa said would happen, since a real gift of God does not stop when you have a proper dinner. This is the side of Teresa that surprises people. She had every incentive to treat unusual experiences as credentials, since her own were the reason anyone listened to her, and she did the opposite. She lays down tests. Does the experience leave real strength behind, or only exhaustion? Does it make the person more obedient and easier to live with, or more remarkable and harder to correct? Above all, does it leave the reason free? Anything that takes hold of a person so that they can no longer think straight she calls suspicious on its face, and she puts a whole chapter of the Book of the Foundations into the difference between a soul touched by God and a nun who is ill, melancholy, or simply not eating. Her instinct here matches the plain instruction of Scripture: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). Teresa gives the test teeth by making it practical and administrative. A prioress who suspects a case of visions is told to check the diet, order the sister to sleep, and stop the penances, and to see whether the visions survive that.

(Q) "The lesson to be learnt from this is, that whatever masters us in such a way as to make us feel that our reason is not free, should be looked on as suspicious." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Book of the Foundations, ch. 6, § 17 (David Lewis translation). Her conclusion from the case of the Cistercian nun, written for the prioresses who would have to make such judgments without her. She goes on to say that a soul in this state cannot grow, because it must not only walk but fly (T4).

(T5) The proof of prayer is the works it leaves behind. + The last of the seven dwelling places in The Interior Castle describes the union Teresa calls spiritual marriage, and a reader who has climbed that far might reasonably expect the book to end in the clouds. It does not. Having brought the soul to the innermost room, she turns round and asks what it is for, and answers in one flat sentence: good works. Not feelings, not knowledge, not experiences. Works, which she says are the unmistakable sign that the favours came from God at all. She presses it with the story of Martha and Mary, and she refuses the usual moral. The point is not that Mary chose the better part and Martha should have sat down. The point is that both of them must entertain the Lord and neither can do it alone, because if Mary is at his feet and nobody cooks, the guest goes hungry. Then she asks what his food is, and answers that his food is that in every way possible we should draw souls to him. A contemplative who is no use to anybody, on Teresa’s account, has misunderstood contemplation. It is the same test Christ gave, and she means it as such: "Thus you will recognize them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:20). The practical form of it, in her houses, was ordinary. She thought the sisters would meet God at the stove as readily as in the choir, and she said so in the sentence her order has never stopped quoting. That sentence changes how everything else she wrote has to be read. If the Lord is genuinely present among the cooking pots, then the elaborate map of the seven dwelling places is not a ladder out of ordinary life, and the woman peeling vegetables is not in the outer courtyard while the visionary sits at the centre.

(Q) "This is the end and aim of prayer, my daughters; this is the reason of the spiritual marriage whose children are always good works." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, ch. 4, § 10 (Benedictines of Stanbrook translation). Three chapters into the innermost dwelling place, at the summit of the book, she stops to say what the whole ascent was for. The sentence immediately after it adds that works are the unmistakable sign which shows that these favours come from God (T5).

(Q) "Well, then, my children, be not discouraged, for if obedience employs you in outward things, know that even if you are in the kitchen our Lord moves amidst the pots and pans, helping us both within and without." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Book of the Foundations, ch. 5, § 8 (David Lewis translation). Written for sisters who feared that being sent to work would cost them their prayer. She has just described people she knew whose whole time had gone in obedience and charity, and who had grown more, not less, for it (T5).

(Q) "For when Thou wert in the world, Lord, Thou didst not despise women, but didst always help them and show them great compassion." + Source: Teresa of Ávila, The Way of Perfection, ch. 3 (Peers translation). She is praying about the state of the Church and about how little she and her sisters are permitted to do for it. The passage does not appear in her second version of the book, and in the surviving manuscript of the first it has been crossed out, which is itself a fact about the century she wrote in. Fifty years after she wrote it the Spanish parliament proposed her as a patron of Spain, and four centuries after she wrote it the Church named her one of its teachers.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) The church that had investigated her books ended by making her one of its teachers. + The turnaround was fast by the standards of these things. Luis de León printed her works in 1588, and from there the church that had impounded one of her books worked its way steadily toward the opposite verdict. She was beatified by Paul V in 1614, which is the first formal step, and canonised by Gregory XV on 12 March 1622, canonisation being that church’s declaration that a person is a saint and may be honoured everywhere in it. That was one of the more remarkable single days in the history of canonisation, because the same ceremony also produced saints of Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer. Not everyone was pleased with her. In 1617 the Spanish parliament voted to make her a patron of Spain alongside Saint James, and the proposal set off a public quarrel, with the poet Francisco de Quevedo writing furiously against it on Saint James’s behalf. It was later withdrawn. The title that mattered most came much later. On 27 September 1970 Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, a formal recognition that a saint’s writings are a reliable teacher for the whole body. No woman had ever been given it; Catherine of Siena received it a week afterwards. The title is not a claim that she was infallible. It is a claim that her books can be handed to a beginner without a warning label, and that is a strong thing to say about a writer whose autobiography once sat impounded in the Holy Office. What the church actually took from her was less her visions than her method. Her map of prayer, from vocal prayer through recollection and quiet to union, became the standard vocabulary of Catholic spiritual direction, and her insistence that a director must be learned as well as holy, because a holy fool can do enormous damage to a soul, was written into the practice of an order and spread from there.

(†) Readers who reject her theology have gone on reading her on prayer. + The first and greatest of her heirs was the friar she recruited at Medina del Campo. John of the Cross took her practical psychology of prayer and turned it into poetry and rigorous analysis, and the phrase "the dark night of the soul" comes from him. Her own nuns carried her books wherever the reform spread, which within a century meant France, Italy, the Low Countries, Mexico and Peru. Outside her communion the reception is more interesting. William James, an American psychologist with no Christian belief to defend, made her a principal exhibit in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, because she gave him what almost no other mystic gives, a precise and self-critical description of what the experiences were actually like from the inside. The Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill leaned on Teresa throughout her survey Mysticism in 1911 for the same reason. In 1921 a young German philosopher named Edith Stein, a Jewish atheist and a former assistant to Edmund Husserl, picked up Teresa’s Life in a friend’s house and read it through the night; the story told by those who knew her is that she closed it in the morning saying that this was the truth. She was baptised the following January, became a Carmelite, and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. Protestant readers have generally kept Teresa at arm’s length on doctrine and kept reading her anyway, and the reason is the one she would have wanted. Almost everything distinctive in her advice is about the ordinary difficulties: distraction, dryness, discouragement, the temptation to give up because you are no good at it. Those difficulties do not belong to one communion, and neither does her answer to them, which is that prayer is a friendship and friendships are kept by showing up.

(†) She wrecked her health with penances before she learned better, and her map of prayer can leave an ordinary Christian feeling second class. + Two things in her own writing invite the criticism, and she saw both of them coming. - The penances. Teresa the young nun did herself real harm. She ruined an already weak body with fasting and self-inflicted discipline, and the collapse of 1539 was not unrelated to it. She learned; the mature Teresa spends chapters ordering prioresses to feed their nuns, to shorten their prayers, and to stop the disciplines when a sister is ill (T4). But the correction is hers and so is the record it corrects, and even the mature Teresa regulates the disciplines rather than giving them up: her Constitutions keep them, and the reform she is famous for was a reform toward austerity, not away from it. - The map. The seven dwelling places are a scale, and any scale invites a reader to place herself on it. Teresa builds in the answer, that the favours are gifts nobody can earn and that works are the only reliable test (T5), and she says repeatedly that a soul in the outer rooms doing its duty may be dearer to God than one further in. Yet the shape of the book still pulls the other way, and Christians who take the New Testament’s picture of the ordinary believer as the norm have asked, fairly, whether a scale of interior favours is the right frame for a life that Scripture describes in terms of faith working through love. Beyond these, Teresa held the full sixteenth-century Catholic account of merit, purgatory and the intercession of the saints, and died saying she was a daughter of the Church, which she meant as the Council of Trent meant it. Where the Reformation parted from her on those points, it parted from her whole communion and not from anything peculiar to her, and it is a division between Christians rather than a fault in her ledger. On the things she is actually read for, her judgment is severe in exactly the places a critic would expect indulgence. She distrusted her own raptures, submitted them to men she often thought less spiritual than herself, and left a written rule for telling God apart from indigestion.