Teresa was four years old when the municipal authorities brought a fiscal suit against the Sánchez de Cepeda family, requiring them to prove in court that they possessed the rank of hidalgos, without fiefs or titles perhaps, but exempt from tax. In fact, they already enjoyed this privilege. Juan Sánchez and then his sons had earned it by their social success; they lived like nobles and served the king. Formal hidalgo status was legally granted four years later. Was this how Teresa learned that she was the granddaughter of a converso? Her writings give no indication of it. Nevertheless, the suspicion of a lack of honra, “honor,” tormented the future saint all her life. She harps tirelessly on this “point of honor,” this obligation to “sustentar la honra,” uphold the burden of honor and preserve one’s rank. It was a constant worry for the Sánchez de Cepeda family, as much when they were rich as when they were poor: could it be due to their marranismo? Most theologians and other interpreters of Teresa have studiously ignored the sociohistorical and political dimensions of this particular obsession.
In 1528 Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda was left with twelve children on his hands — two from a first marriage (María and Juan), ten from the second (Fernando, Rodrigo, Teresa, Juan, Lorenzo, Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, Agustín, and Juana) — when Teresa’s mother Beatriz de Ahumada died, possibly in the course of her tenth and final delivery. In July 1531, aged sixteen, Teresa entered the small Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Grace in Avila. All of her brothers became soldiers, except for Juan. They emigrated: Fernando was the first to sail for the Indies (America), and the favorite, Rodrigo, embarked for the Plate estuary in 1535. Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, Lorenzo, and Agustín followed in their wake between 1540 and 1543, eager to acquire wealth and honors in the New World now that their father’s money had almost run out. Living exclusively off the land as a hidalgo was less profitable than selling silks or collecting taxes, and before long the Cepeda y Ahumada family was ruined.
On November 2, 1535, Teresa ran away from her father’s home to join the Carmel of the Incarnation. There she took her vows, after spending a year as a postulant. She was twenty years old. Her father died in December 1543, leaving considerable debts, over which some of his heirs would quarrel for two decades.
Teresa’s “conversion,” the beginning of her deep surrender to religion, dates from 1555. Her contemplative life intensified. A devotee of the orisons of the alumbrados, Teresa nonetheless strove to understand and elucidate them. Two years later she heard her first heavenly “words.”
In 1559, the Inquisition placed on its Index of Prohibited Books many of the spiritual books and chivalrous novels in Castilian that Teresa’s mother had taught her to enjoy. Christ appeared and reassured her: “Don’t be sad, for I shall give you a living book.”15 A vision of Christ in 1559, a vision of Hell the following year. First raptures. Disillusioned by the worldliness of the “calced” Carmelite order, she planned to found, with her fellow nuns, a convent that would reinstate the order’s original rule, the “discalced” Carmel. She would replace shoes with canvas sandals.
At the request of her confessor, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez, in 1560–1561 she undertook to write her life story. Already in 1554, following the advice of her confessors Gaspar Daza and Francisco de Salcedo, she had embarked on an autobiographical work, marking in her copy of Ascent of Mount Zion, by Bernardino de Laredo, the passages that mirrored her experience.16 The confessors, somewhat skeptical, suggested she make confession to the Jesuit Diego de Cetina. It was for him that Teresa set down “as clear an account of my life as I knew how to give, without leaving anything out.”17 But no trace remains of that early text; Teresa or her confessors must have destroyed it. In 1562 Teresa finished the first version of the Book of Her Life, delivered to the Dominican García de Toledo and subsequently lost, and founded the first reformed Carmelite convent, Saint Joseph of Avila, thanks to, amongst other donations, 200 ducats sent from Peru by her younger brother, Lorenzo. She took the name Teresa of Jesus. García de Toledo and the inquisitor Francisco de Soto Salazar asked her to resume and complete her account, which she did between 1563 and 1565: this is the version that has come down to us. It testifies to the way in which Teresa’s experience was influenced by the spiritual teachers of her time: Juan de Ávila, the “Andalusian apostle” acknowledged by Ignatius Loyola as his sole spiritual father; and in the lineage of the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, Bernabé de Palma; but also Bernardino de Laredo and Alonso de Madrid (The Art of Serving God). These practiced the mysticism of recollection and were regarded as recogidos, or contemplatives, but they were not ignorant of scholasticism. Such readings calmed the anguish provoked by the silent prayer of Francisco de Osuna and guided the nun toward a vocal prayer that began with reading, before turning into ecstatic meditation. Teresa met numerous Church dignitaries of various orders (Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carthusians) who supported or challenged her, criticized or guided her. Her mysticism gained authority under the notable influence of the Franciscan and future saint Pedro de Alcántara, whose kindliness toward women and special trust in her she commends in a 1576 letter to her brother Lorenzo.18
Teresa of Jesus wrote The Book of Her Life at the age of fifty: a sum of familial and amorous memories that bares, without the least coyness, a body sick with desire and exultant in its affliction. If Teresa’s faith asserts itself as an expression of love, the coiling of this lover’s discourse upon itself would infuse her writing with devastating lucidity, continually redoubling the lover’s illusion without ever breaking away from it altogether. Doubtful, skeptical, frequently hostile, at last won over, her confessors instructed her to record the strange raptures she spoke of, those half mad, half rational states that so fascinated the letrados, learned churchmen of rank. Under their supervision the ecstatic seer became a writer: theologians pored over her notebooks, revising and correcting, while the ardent author, whose humility veiled a certain astuteness, soon got into her stride and, while never less than self-deprecating, poured out more and more onto the page. Self-analyses, constitutions, counsels, letters, poems: syncopated, in spurts and gusts, Teresa’s writing grew mentally and physically incessant. This scriptorial therapy deepened the confessional analysis of raptures and agonies — sensations that were appeased, if not effaced, beneath the torrent of texts and monastic foundations. Teresa founded herself in writing at the same time as she founded the Discalced Carmelite order.
A writer? She demurred, waved it away, forgot about it. Her confessors were the ones who got her started, after all; they supervised her output, they edited it, and now and then they censored it. Only one work was to be formally signed and authenticated by her, The Way of Perfection (1573).
A woman possessed by the devil? More than once Teresa doubted her visions, and took care to obtain endorsement from her spiritual guides. When she was suspected of Illuminism during the 1560s, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez came to her defense with a highly favorable report. But matters were not always so simple. In February 1575, Teresa was the happiest of women: she had just met her “angel,” her “Elysium,” her “darling son,” Fr. Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God,* [*I have used the English version of Jerónimo Gracián’s name, as I have done with John of the Cross. Elsewhere I have kept the Spanish names. — Trans.] the apostolic visitor for Andalusia. He was thirty, she was sixty. They made up coded names for each other and loved under the Inquisition’s very nose: “I will never have better days than those I had there with my Paul.” As it happened, the Inquisition got onto La Madre’s case in 1575–1576. Thanks to the support of her confessor and spiritual director, the Dominican Domingo Báñez, doctor of theology and advisor to the Inquisition in Valladolid, they left Teresa alone but placed The Book of Her Life under lock and key: it could not be allowed to circulate among the populace. Recovering it in 1580, the next year she titled it, with wry humor, The Book of God’s Mercies. She no doubt held laughter to be next to love, and radiated both.