3
Teresa's Representation of "Old Life"
Life 1-10
Like Augustine, Teresa uses imagery of rebirth to describe her life after conversion. Augustine writes of having "slain my old self" and "purposed to renew my life" (Conf. 9.4). Teresa considers that conversion divides her life into two segments, a "new life" so separate and distinct from her "old life" that she introduces the narrative as a different text: "This is another, new book from here on—I mean another, new life" (Life 23.1).[1] In both function and perspective, then, the preconversion narrative of the Life corresponds to the retrospective narrative of the Confessions , in which Augustine narrates "the twisted tangle of knots" (Conf. 2.10) that comprise his life prior to conversion and confession of faith.
Against Augustine's adventures in the "cauldrons of lust" at Carthage and Rome, however, many critics find Teresa's narrative of her old life uninformative and uninteresting. Gaff Laguardia expresses that dissatisfaction.
The reader who turns to Teresa's text expecting the type of revelations found in other works of the same genre—those of Saint Augustine or Rousseau, for example—is bound to be disappointed. While Teresa is fond of berating herself for her sins, she gives the reader few specific examples to justify her bad conscience.... [I]t is surprising that she does not take the opportunity to utilize the first section as an exemplary catalogue of sinful activity. On the contrary, those chapters which concern her life before taking up her religious vocation are the vaguest of all.[2]
While this complaint misses the point that Augustine provides few specific details and that many of the sins he confesses, such as the theft of pears, refer generically to the sins of all humankind, it does correctly remark the cryptic nature of Teresa's confessions in the Life .
Critics have explained this vagueness about her sins in various ways. Many biographers have assumed that as a prospective saint, Teresa had few if any sins to confess. Laguardia argues that Teresa lacks the Augustinian conviction of sin because she transforms her unacceptable carnal emotions into justifiable spiritual desires.[3] Both explanations, however, mistakenly assume that the Life reflects Teresa's emotion and action straightforwardly. Instead, as we have seen, she wrote in a perilous rhetorical situation that precluded sincerity while demanding the appearance of it. For this reason, Weber's explanation based on rhetoric more nearly accounts for Teresa's evasiveness about her sinfulness. Defining her situation as a double bind, the necessity of presenting herself with the contradictory qualities of virtue and humility, Weber argues that Teresa "engages in contradictory speech acts, pleading innocent and guilty at the same time.... Teresa executes speech acts whose force is confessional ... but the rhetorical effect is defensive."[4] An extension of rhetoric to include genre provides an even more complete answer. Having been commanded to write judicial confession, Teresa does not select the events of her past based on the remorse they caused her. Neither did she choose incidents that demonstrated her sinfulness or that illustrated her theology and anthropology, the principles of selection Augustine used.[5] Instead Teresa concentrated on narrating those circumstances and events from her early life that could raise suspicion of heresy, as well as those that might serve to counter the charge.
Ascertaining the significance Teresa herself attaches to any particular situation or event, particularly those of her childhood, presents insurmountable difficulties in many instances. Teresa's assessment of her father's affections for his children, for example, defies interpretation even while clamoring for it.
We were in all three sisters and nine brothers. All resembled their parents in being virtuous, through the goodness of God, with the exception of myself—although I was the most loved of my father. And it seemed he was right—before I began to offend God. For I am ashamed when I recall the good inclinations the
Lord gave me and how poorly I knew how to profit by them. (Life 1.3)[6]
Until recently many critics and biographers have restated such assertions as historical fact. With no apparent source but this passage, Efrén and Steggink write that "all of the others [in the household] revolved around her."[7] Reading even more literally, it seems, Lincoln suggests that this love nearly resulted in incest.[8] Contemporary critical methods might provide an array of possible meanings, including the psychoanalytic suspicion that she might be expressing the fantasy of an unfavored child. Without a way to verify the emotions of Teresa's father, the modern reader can reliably conclude only that Teresa found it important to represent herself as the child he loved most.
Reading the discourse of the Life as a play of genres provides a means of understanding the principles of selection Teresa followed, if not always the significance of particular details. In Bakhtinian terminology, the retrospective narrative of the Life , in chapters 1 through 10, can be understood as a hidden polemic against the genre of judicial confession conducted with the inflections of hagiography and Christian spiritual autobiography. In the hidden polemic Teresa anticipates the questions an Inquisitor might raise about her heritage, and she addresses both general and particular accusations of sexual sin by giving her early years the structure of a saint's life.
A Response to the Inquisitional Questionnaire
The retrospective narrative of Teresa's Life may be read as a response to a hypothetical interrogation covering those subjects on the Inquisition's questionnaire as well as the events in her life that, possibly because they had prompted some gossip, were already known to some of her early readers.
Sixteenth-century Inquisitional practice of interrogation established the autobiographical narrative as the principal form of evidence. Starting in the early 1500s, the Inquisition systematically asked every accused person to tell the story of his or her life.[9] In the Directorium , Nicolau Eyreerich stipulates the questions to be asked.
The Inquisitor will interrogate the accused about his or her place of birth and place of residence. About his parents (are they alive.?
Deceased?). He will ask where the accused was brought up, by whom, and where he has lived. He will be especially wary of changes of domicile: has the accused left the places of his childhood? Has he traveled in regions infected with heresy, and if so, for what reason?[10]
The Directorium further instructs the Inquisitor to determine the extent and quality of the accused's education in Christian doctrine by asking, for example, "if he has ever heard talk of the poverty of Christ, or of the apostles, or of the beatific vision." If the Inquisitor continues to have doubts, the Directorium recommends, he "might ask the accused to recite ordinary prayers, one might interrogate him about Christian doctrine, and finally one might ask him where, when, and to what priests he has confessed his sins."[11] From these standard questions, Inquisitors turned to inquiry related to the specific charges.
For every accused person, the Inquisition flied written responses, which were either taken down by a notary or, on occasion, written out by the accused. Later, Inquisitors would ask the same questions and compare the answers with the record, often seizing on the omission of details or contradictory stories, whether related to the charge or not, as proof of the accused's guilt. The archives of the Inquisition burgeoned with autobiographical narratives that even persons once found innocent might be called on to duplicate at any moment.[12] While Teresa never stood formal trial, she, like all conversos and others who were automatically suspect, might well have considered herself continuously on trial. Much of the detail of the opening chapters of the Life suggests that she had assimilated the charges implied in the Inquisitional questionnaire and formulated her responses in anticipation of an accusation.
Teresa was not alone in attempting to adapt this Inquisitional autobiographical narrative to her own purposes. Adrienne Schizzano Mandel shows that María de San Jerónimo used her deposition to construct a life that would be recognizable rather than invisible to the authorities. María, who had been adopted by the prominent Lutheran Agustín Cazalla (burned at the stake in 1559) and then was converted to Islam by her Moorish fiancé, denounced herself to the Inquisition in 1581. Mandel observes that this uncoerced statement provided her the position of a speaking subject: "The judicial inquiry, which gives the archi-
tectural structure to her account, permits her the use of official writing to register her discourse, the pen of the notaries furnishing her with a power that the dominant ideology had explicitly denied her."[13] Perry adds that women also sought influence by taking the Inquisitional roles of accuser and witness.[14] Teresa's commands to write specified that she use the discourse of judicial confession, but rather than writing the script of self-condemnation demanded by the genre, Teresa deployed it to the end of self-defense.
Teresa opens the Life with an enigmatic statement about her relationship to her parents: "To have had virtuous and God-fearing parents along with the graces the Lord granted me should have been enough for me to have led a good life, if I had not been so wretched" (Life 1.1).[15] The sentence has most often been read as a formulaic admission of sinfulness (see the discussion of this sentence in the preface). A 1636 version of the Flos Sanctorum , like most subsequent biographies, recast the sentence into a statement of her family's nobility: "Both [her parents] were noble, and excelled in all kinds of piety and virtue."[16] The sentence is neither so simple nor so artless, however. Márquez Villanueva correctly notes that Teresa does not actually say that her parents belong to the nobility or that they have the "clean blood" required for such social status.[17] Teresa's use of the subjunctive for the main verb, to suffice , undermines the apparent certainty of the assertion of their virtue. In disavowing the influence of such ambiguous parental influence, Teresa might even be seen to distance herself from her family.
Many, if not most, of Teresa's contemporaries would have known that she was descended from Jewish lineage on her father's side. Teresa's grandfather, Juan Sánchez (1440-1507), a successful textile merchant, had converted to Christianity, but like many other conversos in the fifteenth century, he returned to Jewish observances and educated his sons in them, or so his brother-in-law complained to the Inquisition.[18] When a traveling tribunal visited Toledo to offer the edict of grace, a temporary provision that offered absolution to those who denounced themselves, Juan Sánchez declared himself and his family guilty of unspecified acts of heresy and apostasy against the Catholic faith.[19] In 1484, he complied with the ritual for absolution, the humiliation of walking, on seven consecutive Fridays, through the streets of Toledo wearing a sambenito , a bright yellow knee-length
tunic embroidered with black crosses and flames to identify him as a Judaizer.[20] Teresa's father, six years old at the time, accompanied him on these walks. As a reminder of their disgrace, their tunics were put on permanent display in the cathedral.
Her grandfather's acceptance of the edict of grace permitted him to avoid the bankruptcy usually caused by the long period of presumed guilt and self-defense required under the more severe edict of faith enacted in 1500, but he did not escape the stigma that Spain attached to Jewish heritage.[21] Although some clergy had expressed the hope that baptized Jews would be regarded simply as Christians, in fact converso families were identified as such and persecuted, at first informally and then institutionally, by both Church and state. Ignoring the stipulation of canon law that baptism is irreversible, the Church denied the efficacy of the Jews' conversion on the basis of what Henry Kamen calls a "racialist doctrine of sin."[22] First formulated in the late fifteenth century, the statutes of racial purity (limpieza de sangre ) prohibited converted Jews from entering universities, holding public office, joining religious orders, and conducting most types of financial transactions and eventually excluded them from nearly every outlet for participation in society. It is not too extreme to characterize these statutes as, in Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez Nieto's words, instruments for the sociopolitical death of the conversos.[23]
When her grandfather's Toledo business deteriorated as a resuit of his denunciation, he moved his business and family to the nearby Castilian town of Avila. Attaching his wife's Old Christian surname to his own, he assumed the name Juan Sánchez de Cepeda. Gossip did reach Avila about his condemnation in Toledo, but at this time Spanish society provided many ways of fabricating an Old Christian background. In 1500, he purchased a certificate of pure blood (ejecutoria ), which permitted him to step into the social role of a nobleman. He followed the typical practice of attempting to assimilate the next generation by marrying his sons into Old Christian families, most of them, like the family of Teresa's mother, in a state of financial decline that induced them to accept the larger dowries conversos offered. With the certificate he and his sons also gained the right to conduct a variety of businesses, including tax collection, which royal decree prohibited to recently converted Jews. It was business competitors rather than religious zealots who brought a lawsuit
charging his sons with false nobility in 1519, when Teresa was four. They prevailed by having friends testify that the family had lived as nobility in Toledo. The apparent ease of the settlement belies the danger such a suit presented to the family. Writing anonymously in 1515 a converso assesses the impact of the statutes: "Before the Inquisition the conversos were the most wealthy, powerful, and feared segment of society but now they are the most abject and least respected, particularly if one of their grandfathers had been punished by the Inquisition."[24] The words Teresa is reported to have spoken on her deathbed, "I die a daughter of the Church," might be taken in part as an expression of a wish to secure a posthumous identity apart from her biological parentage.
Teresa nowhere acknowledges her converso heritage directly, but she almost certainly knew about it. Castro argues that conversos recognized each other by their condition in life and the means by which they concealed their origins: "For the conversos themselves it would not have been as difficult as it is for us to know who was and who was not [a converso]."[25] Of Teresa's works, the Foundations provides the most concrete evidence: she describes a prospective nun, Teresa de Layz, as of "pure blood" (20.2), and she discusses the role of lineage in some of the business transactions (15.15). Many of her contemporaries also indicate that they knew. Diego de Yepes, who met Teresa in 1576, virtually acknowledges her heritage in his 1587 biography of her.
Although knowing the origin of the parents that a servant of God had on this earth matters little, in order that this account not be lacking in truth or fact, I will have to relate those of this saint. She was, then, born in Avila, and of noble lineage on both sides.[26]
Another early biographer who also knew Teresa, Francisco de Ribera, mentions the lawsuit against her father and even as he denies its significance by attributing it to the move from Toledo, provides a detail that would have signaled the likelihood of converso heritage to Inquisitors instructed to be "especially wary of changes of domicile."[27] In the hearings for Teresa's canonization conducted throughout Spain from 1591 through 1610, many witnesses who had known her gave guarded responses to questions about her lineage: Báñez, who evaluated the manuscript of the Life , states that "no one denies her parents' nobility"; Yepes bases his confirmation of her nobility on the report
that the Marqués de las Navas had said that "Teresa's lineage was older than his own."[28] In 1591, the current mayor of Avila testifies to her Old Christian heritage by referring to a genealogical investigation that had cleared one of her nephews.[29] About her canonization Teresa might have commented ironically, as she did about her success in overcoming financial obstacles to making her foundation in Caravaca, "It could not be because I am from the nobility [literally, illustrious blood] that He has given me such honor" (Foundations 27.12).[30]
Teresa's Jewish descent remained publicly unmentioned until 1946, when Narciso Alonso Cortés presented records of her grandfather's reconciliation with the Inquisition in the Bulletin of the Spanish Royal Academy .[31] Even having the documentary evidence, many biographers continued to describe her ancestry as Old Christian. Efrén and Steggink, authors of the most comprehensive modern biography, admit that they suppressed the information in the first (1968) edition "to mitigate the moral effect of the surprise to readers"; another recent biographer attempts to demonstrate that her grandfather was an Old Christian who made a superfluous conversion out of exaggerated piety.[32]
Teresa's Jewish heritage, then, gave her particular reason to stress her parents' contributions to her Christian education. Because those conversos who returned to Jewish traditions generally did so by observing household rituals rather than by gathering publicly, the Inquisition found descriptions of early religious instruction revealing. A child's mention of lighting candles or eating particular foods sometimes led to denunciation of the entire family. The succeeding sentences in the first paragraph of the Life , which accentuate her parents' virtue, might also be considered to anticipate questions about her family's religious practices.
My father was fond of reading good books, and thus he also had books in Spanish for his children to read. These good books together with the care my mother took to have us pray and be devoted to Our Lady and to some of the saints began to awaken me when, I think, six or seven years old, to the practice of virtue. (Life 1.1)[33]
On this subject also, Teresa's praise of her parents is muted by ambivalence. An inventory of her father's books made after the death of his first wife reveals that he did own several devotional
books, the "good books" to which Teresa refers, as well as a collection of Spanish literature and classical works in translation.[34] A later chapter, however, reveals that for instruction in reading "good books," she awaited a visit at age twenty-three to her uncle, who introduced her to Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet , the book she relied on for spiritual instruction (Life 3.4).
In the meantime, Teresa's mother taught her to read the bad books of the day, novels of chivalry.
She loved books of chivalry. But this pastime didn't hurt her the way it did me, for she did not fail to do her duties; and we used to read them together in our free time.... Our reading such books was a matter that weighed so much upon my father that we had to be cautioned lest he see us. I began to get the habit of reading these books. And by that little fault, which I saw in my mother, I started to grow cold in my desires and to fail in everything else. (Life 2.1)[35]
Teresa's father was not alone in disapproving of the novels of chivalry. Even though the knights in the Spanish novels of chivalry, such as Amadís de Gaula and Las sergas del Esplandián , often defended Catholicism against infidels, their sexual license defied contemporary standards of morality. Intellectuals and clergy alike attacked the novels as instruments of vice. Revealing a similar attitude, Teresa links her budding adolescent sexual desires to her insatiable pursuit of the chivalric chain of signifiers: "I was so completely taken up with this reading that I didn't think I could be happy if I didn't have a new book. I began to dress in finery and to desire to please and look pretty" (Life 2.1, 2).[36] Teresa excuses her mother's indulgence in the forbidden novels as an escape from "the great trials she had to bear" (Life 2.1), which she does not specify but which might refer to the circumstances of her mother's life that led her prematurely to adopt the dress of an old woman. Already pregnant when she married Teresa's father at age fourteen, Beatriz de Ahumada (1495?-1528) bore ten children in fewer than twenty years; she died soon after giving birth to Teresa's sister Juana.[37] Anxiety aroused by Teresa's identification with her mother's reading might explain the exchange she attempts to make between her sexually bound mother and the inviolable Virgin Mary: "I remember that when my mother died I was twelve years old or a little less. When I began to understand what I had lost, I went,
afflicted, before an image of our Lady and besought her with many tears to be my mother" (Life 1.7).[38] After the litany of complaints against her parents, her exoneration of them rings rather hollow: "If I start to complain about my parents, I am not able to do so, for I saw nothing but good in them and solicitude for my own good" (Life 1.8).[39] Her later ecstatic vision of Joseph and Mary as benevolent parents outfitting her with jewels (Life 33.14), which conversos were forbidden to wear, might be interpreted in psychological terms as an attempt to replace her own parents with others who could suitably reward her.
With the remainder of the retrospective narrative, which recounts events after she left her family home, it is equally difficult to ascertain Teresa's motives for selecting particular incidents: the tone of paranoia belies the vagueness of the details. The Inquisition's policy of withholding information about the exact nature of the charges against the accused, quoted below from the Directorium , could have caused her to review every event in her life with anxiety.
In the matter of heresy, one proceeds the same way [as in civil law]: it is necessary that the accused not know the specific thing with which he is charged. It is necessary to arrive there by a constant digression, posing questions about the bill of indictment itself to bring the accused to confess or perhaps to remember the crime that he had forgotten. Mentioning the bill of indictment to the accused so that he might escape the snares of the interrogatory constitutes, in Inquisitorial terms, a very grave offence.[40]
While the burden of prospective accusation provoked some persons to denounce themselves, it spurred Teresa to defend herself.
Unlike Augustine in the Confessions , Teresa does not narrate her actions as a confession to God: the principal audience for the Life is man, not God, even though she sometimes addresses Him directly. Unlike God, who judges her by her intentions rather than her actions, the human beings for whom she writes have already judged her by appearances. She sometimes complains that they have been too lenient with her because God has allowed her to masquerade as a virtuous person: "I was doing deeds that uncovered what I was, and the Lord was covering my evils and uncovering some little virtue, if I had it, and making it great in the eyes of others so that they always esteemed me highly" (Life 7.18).[41] At the same time she protests that they
have wrongly accused her: "Often times [in the novitiate year] I was accused about things without my being at fault" (Life 5.1). As Weber shows, Teresa retracts or qualifies every concession she makes in the Life . When she does confess to a misdeed, she shifts the responsibility to others: "In falling I had many friends to help me; but in rising I found myself so alone that I am now amazed I did not remain ever fallen" (Life 7.22).[42] Because these friends were either known to or included among her readers, she necessarily proceeds with circumspection, concealing while seeming to reveal.
Teresa summarizes the nearly twenty years between her monastic vows and her conversion experience as a "battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world" (Life 8.3). In a losing battle much of that time, she broke her monastic vows.
I don't know how I am going to continue here when I remember the kind of profession I made and the great resolve and happiness with which I made it and the espousal that I entered into with You. I cannot speak of this without tears; and were they tears of blood and were they to break my heart, the sentiment would not make up for the way I offended You afterward. (Life 4.3)[43]
Ribera found these admissions of sin sufficiently alarming to cause readers to believe that "she must have sinned against her chastity and virginity." After making written inquiries into her conduct, he identifies her sin as "open dealing and friendly conversations with men," not as innocuous as it now seems for its implication of flirtation, but not mortal sin. Drawing mainly from exculpatory evidence in Teresa's Life , Ribera certifies that her sins were venial rather than mortal.[44] Teresa blames her confessors for this betrayal of Christ. While she obscures the specific nature of their complicity in her sin, she does express three general complaints against them: they did not correctly distinguish venial and mortal sin; they failed to instruct her in mental prayer; and they did not discourage those friendships and activities that distracted her from spiritual development. Lincoln explains this criticism by positing Teresa's romantic involvement with one or more confessors, but she provides no substantiating evidence. Whatever the reason, Teresa expresses considerable bitterness toward them. In addition to explaining or justifying events that apparently had provoked gossip or
criticism, every episode Teresa narrates demonstrates her confessors' failings.
In one of the most detailed episodes, Teresa relates that she stole an amulet from her confessor at Becedas, who is identified by editors as Pedro Hernández. In spending several months in the spring of 1539 at a nearby spa to attempt to recover from the first stages of an illness that would develop into nearly total paralysis, she learned that a local woman held the parish priest under a magical spell of love with a copper figurine he wore around his neck. Convincing the priest to give her the amulet, Teresa threw it in the river. Teresa admits doing wrong here, though she mitigates her offense by stating her desire to do good: "My intention was good; the deed bad. For in order to do good, no matter how great, one should not commit the slightest wrong" (Life 5.6). Yet it is difficult to know exactly what wrongdoing she admits. Teresa implies that deception and theft may be her sins, yet the Inquisition would almost certainly have approved the destruction of such a tool of witchcraft, a practice treated as heresy.[45] Teresa also implies that she might have sinned by showing Hernández the affection necessary to make him surrender the figurine, but she continues by speculating that his desire rather than hers actually accomplished the benefit, reinforcing her earlier insinuation that he was the one who demonstrated the inappropriate affection.[46] Finally, while confessing to venial sins, if not to mortal ones, Teresa accuses the priest, whom she describes as "learned, although not greatly so," for misleading her about the nature of her sins.
I have come to see by experience that it is better, if they are virtuous and observant of holy customs, that they have little learning. For then they do not trust themselves without asking someone who knows, nor do I trust them; and a truly learned man has never misguided me. Those others certainly could not have wanted to mislead me, but they didn't know any better. I thought that they really know and that I was obliged to no more than to believe them, especially since what they told me was liberal and permissive. If it had been rigid, I am so wretched that I would have sought out others. What was venial sin they said was no sin at all, and what was serious mortal sin they said was venial. (Life 5.3; also see 4.7, 8.11)[47]
Teresa takes the blame for relying on this misinformation: "It was on account of my sins, I believe, that God permitted these
confessors to be mistaken themselves and to misguide me" (Life 5.3). Nevertheless, the episode as a whole functions to condemn the system that gave even priests with little education and doubtful intelligence total authority over women.
In another intriguing though even more enigmatic episode, Teresa confesses to what she calls pastimes, vanities, and "occasions" (translated by Peers as "situations"). On one of these "occasions," which she describes as a prolonged intimate conversation with a person she does not identify, she saw a huge toad approaching them (Life 7.8). While the twentieth-century mind might explain this apparition as an actual toad (as Lincoln suggests), an optical illusion, or a hallucination, for Teresa it signified a warning from God. Lincoln identifies the other person as Garcia de Toledo, then vice rector at St. Thomas in Avila and one of Teresa's longtime confessors; Efrén and Steggink do not identify the person.[48] Whatever the nature of the toad or the conversation, it is unlikely that these startling events would have gone unreported in the convent. An Inquisitional audience would have considered the rumor of such an unnatural occurrence as possible evidence of heresy, and the hint of any romantic or sexual relationship would similarly have led to investigation. Teresa's narrative of this incident can plausibly be seen as a defense against real or imagined accusations by the Inquisition. For her indulgence in "occasions" like these Teresa blames the system of open convents that allowed nuns and their visitors of either sex to come and go without restriction or supervision. Although she begins with the assertion, "The convent where I resided was not at fault" (Life 7.1), two paragraphs later she charges, "It did me great harm not to be in an enclosed monastery" (Life 7.3).[49] Efficient with her rhetoric here as elsewhere, Teresa makes an argument for stricter discipline while also explaining, even if not entirely justifying, her well-known "occasions."
The only episode in which Teresa truly accuses herself involves deceiving her father about her own spiritual condition just prior to his death. Teresa herself notes the anomalous character of this anecdote: "I don't know why I have told this" (Life 7.16).[50] Indeed, for its confession of wrongdoing as well as its entirely private nature, it is atypical. For more than a year, Teresa relates, she allowed her father to believe that her chronic illnesses, daily vomiting and severe chest pains, prevented her from
engaging in the discipline of prayer when she knew her lapses attributable to her "occasions." Nearly identical phrasing suggests that with this episode Teresa rehearses her earliest relationship with her father. In introducing her father, she offers that "he was very honest" (Life 1.1), a trait she emphasizes again here: "He did not lie, and by this time, in accord with the things I spoke of to him, I shouldn't have lied either" (Life 7.12).[51] By this time, Teresa implies, she should not again have deceived her father, as she had in reading novels of chivalry and conducting the adolescent sexual experimentation that led him to send her at age sixteen to the Augustinian convent of Santa Maíia de Gracia as a kind of reform school. Yet she implicates him in the blame, for here, as in her childhood, his "esteem and love" for her incapacitate him for carrying out his parental responsibilities, or in the terminology Laguardia uses, he is a "bad 'reader' of her discourse," unable to "decipher her code."[52] In addition to reiterating her complaint against him and expressing remorse for this now irreparable evasion, Teresa uses the episode to deflect any speculation that he might have reverted to Judaism. In his principal symptom, severe shoulder pain, Teresa remarks the physical effects of carrying burdens equivalent to the Cross.[53]
Even in the most apologetic and personal of her narratives, then, Teresa keeps the Inquisitional questionnaire in her peripheral vision. While she does not mention her identification with Mary Magdalene in this section of the Life , those readers knowing Teresa's interpretation of her as a "woman of nobility" who was criticized not for prostitution but for her high social station might have transferred the attributes of chastity and nobility to Teresa.
Hagiography in the First Person
With the Confessions Augustine made the figural reading of one's own life an essential generic feature of Christian autobiography. While Augustine interprets himself with numerous biblical figures, including St. Paul and Christ, he makes the prodigal son of Luke 15:11-32 the most important figure for self-interpretation.[54] From the perspective gained in conversion, then, Augustine sees that the young man pursuing sensual pleasure in Carthage and professional advancement in Rome was replicating
the itinerary of the prodigal son into forgetfulness of God. Because Augustine considers that the prodigal son's journey away from God does not take place in spatial terms, neither does the return. Like the prodigal son, who eventually "return[s] to himself" (Luke 15:17), Augustine begins his own return when he accepts the Neoplatonic concept that God can be found within himself (Conf. 7.1). With his conversion, he reenacts the homecoming of the prodigal son, receiving a forgiving welcome and the assurance that God places particular value on his love for its having been lost. The parable of the prodigal son also provides Augustine with his epistemology, formulated as "I believe in order to know" ("credo ut intelligam ").[55] Now casting himself as one searching for something lost, he reasons that he could not even conceive the search for knowledge of God unless he had some memory of it. The answer to his question, "How, then, do I look for thee?" (Conf. 10.20), is that he must search his memory, which contains not only what he has learned about God but also, as part of its nature, the Truth or Word.
Teresa's figural reading of her life, then, locates the work in the tradition of Christian autobiography Augustine inaugurated in the Confessions . For reasons considered in chapter 1, her references to her paradigm, Mary Magdalene and other New Testament women, are not nearly as systematic as Augustine's. In the retrospective narrative of the Life preceding the conversion scene, where she makes explicit her identification with Mary Magdalene, she casts herself as a more generic saint.
Teresa represents her early life as a quest to imitate the lives of the saints she read in the Golden Legend . In childhood play she tries out the paths of both the martyr and the hermit, which in his structural analysis of the Golden Legend , Alain Boureau considers as strands of the category of the "witness saints." Witness saints, Boureau explains, make their lives an imitation of the life of Christ, the martyrs with physical suffering and the hermits with spiritual suffering.[56] When Teresa finds obstacles to these roles, she experiments in play with being a nun, but with, as she puts it, considerably less desire. Through spiritual marriage with Christ, she eventually finds a route to Him that combines two categories of saints in the Golden Legend that Boureau considers to encompass the suffering of the witness saints while augmenting it with additional functions: the
defenders, who protect the Church by attacking heresy and extending the physical territory of the Church, and the preachers, who in addition to the activities of both the witness and defender, convert souls.[57]
In an episode of the Life made famous by George Eliot in Middlemarch , Teresa tells of running away from home to make herself a martyr. She identifies martyrs as those saints who achieve an immediate enjoyment of God: "When I considered the martyrdoms the saints suffered for God, it seemed to me that the price they paid for going to enjoy God was very cheap" (Life 1.4).[58] In the case of St. Catherine, a fourth-century virgin martyr from Alexandria to whom Teresa later dedicates a poem, the price Teresa considered "cheap" included beatings with scorpions, starvation, and torture on the wheel; and when these methods failed to kill her, beheading.[59] Teresa convinced an older brother, usually identified as Rodrigo, to help her achieve her goal of martyrdom: "We agreed to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there" (Life 1.4). Several witnesses in the canonization hearings testified that Teresa told them that the two had reached the Adaja Bridge at the edge of Avila before an uncle, dispatched on horseback by their mother, recovered them.
Rather than martyrdom, Teresa's principal desire seems to have been rejection of society. Martyrdom, Alison Goddard Elliott explains in Roads to Paradise , takes place within society: "Literal martyrdom is unimaginable divorced from its political and social context."[60] The most significant portion of a martyrdom is a courtroom scene, in which the prospective martyr engages in a verbal confrontation with the social authorities. The Golden Legend portrays St. Catherine successfully disputing the emperor with "diverse modes of the syllogisms, by allegory and metaphor, by logic and mystic." Her persuasive rhetoric converts the fifty orators lined up against her, the emperor's wife, the captain of the army, and two hundred soldiers. Rather than emphasizing her own relationship to society, however, Teresa defines the journey as a thwarted attempt to escape from society, specifically, her family: "Having parents seemed to us the greatest obstacle" (Life 1.4).[61] Just as she crossed into liminal space, however, her family reintegrated her.
Teresa and her brother then tried out the mode of spiritual suffering represented by the hermit saints, whose experience
does occur in liminal space. In contrast with the public drama of martyrdom, the suffering of the hermit takes place in solitude, sometimes becoming known to the world only when another hermit seeking a cave finds the corpse along with evidence of self-imposed deprivation and suffering. The first move toward this sainthood is a flight from society, often on the eve of an occasion that signals irreversible incorporation into society, such as marriage. The prospective saint then shows the capacity to endure suffering by taking little, if any, food and water on the journey to the site of hermitage, usually a natural cave rather than a human construction of any kind. Their experiment confined to their own backyard, Teresa and her brother saw their gestures toward such sainthood collapse immediately: "In a garden that we had in our house, we tried as we could to make hermitages piling up some little stones which afterward would quickly fall down again" (Life 1.5). Teresa abandoned this project also, but late in life when confronted with the example of Catalina de Cordona, a hermit who founded a monastery on the site of her cave, Teresa suffered severe regret that she had not persisted in taking this path.
Teresa also uses play to try out the role of nun, which has been considered a less extreme point on the continuum of spiritual suffering that culminates with the hermit. Charles F. Altman argues that the lives of the hermit saints display an ethos of gradation between good and evil that differs from the binary opposition in the plots of the martyr saints, where martyrdom represents the only good. While the extreme measures taken by the hermit may represent the best religious life, intermediate stages such as an ascetic or a monastic life are judged merely not quite as good rather than as unacceptable.[62] Rather than external obstacles, as with martyr and hermit, Teresa faces internal resistance to the role of nun: "When I played with other girls I enjoyed it when we pretended we were nuns in a monastery, and it seemed to me that I desired to be one, although not as much as I desired the other things I mentioned [martyr and hermit]" (Life 1.6).[63] Teresa eventually takes this route, and when she does, she makes an escape characteristic of the hermit saints. Unlike those saints, however, her motive consists in fear rather than love. Without her father's permission and in part because she "feared marriage" (Life 3.2), she persuaded another of her brothers, Antonio, to accompany her in an early morning escape
from home. Her ambivalence caused her tremendous suffering: "When I left my father's house I felt that separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered." (Life 4.1 ).[64] Laguardia and Weber argue that her conflict did not cease until she transferred her emotions from her father to God.
Even having entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila, Teresa continued to test herself in various saintly roles. Among her colleagues she observed a nun who suffered patiently through a particularly painful, repellent illness: "There were some holes in her abdomen which caused obstructions in such a way that she had to eject through them what she ate" (Life 5.2). After her death, Teresa undertakes to imitate this model of sainthood, essentially a martyrdom in which the prospective saint flaunts physical suffering as a means of devaluing this world: "I asked God that, dealing with me in like manner, He would give me the illnesses by which He would be served" (Life 5.2). She relates that God answered this prayer with an illness no "less painful or laborious" than the other nun's. In 1538, she developed dizzy spells and chest pains which were diagnosed as consumption, and then a seizure that left her unconscious for four days, probably 15 through 19 August 1538. The ensuing paralysis, which at its most extreme permitted her movement of only one finger of her right hand, lasted for three years. In part because her muscles did not deteriorate during these years as they would have if she had had an illness, many doctors have judged the paralysis to be neurotically produced.[65] Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud pronounce Teresa "the patron saint of hysterics," and indeed her descriptions of her illness coincide with their definition of hysteria as the discharge of an affect in a somatic reaction.[66] Teresa herself links her physical symptoms to spiritual malaise, describing the suffering in mental and emotional as well as physical terms: "Everything seemed to be disjointed; the greatest confusion in my head; all shriveled and drawn together in a ball" (Life 6.1). This illness nearly permitted Teresa the opportunity for a martyr's death. After she had lain unconscious for a couple of days, doctors and priests, convinced that she was already dead, sealed her eyes with wax and dug her grave. On her revival, she decided, "I would be able to serve God much better if I were in good health" (Life 6.5). By the time she had finished the Life and made her first foundation,
she had exchanged the model of the martyr for the role Boureau defines as the preacher, a decision she reaffirms here: "When we read in the lives of the saints that they converted souls, I feel much greater devotion, tenderness, and envy than over all the martyrdoms they suffered" (Foundations 1.7).[67] Over time she extended that role to include the functions of defender of the faith.
In chapter 4, I describe Teresa's path to mystical union with God, where she receives the equivalent of Christ's words to Mary Magdalene, "Go in peace." These words, Teresa argues, make her an apostle. St. Paul similarly uses visionary experience to substantiate his claim to apostleship: "Am I not an apostle? Did I not see Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cot. 9.1).