5
Teresa's Representation of her "New Life"
Life 32-36, Foundations
Teresa's representation of her new life in the role of apostle begins in the Life , principally in the chapters narrating the founding of the St. Joseph convent in Avila, and it emerges fully realized in the Foundations . The latter work, begun in late 1573, comprehends a retrospective narrative of the foundations made since Avila and a memoir of Teresa's activities to mid-April 1582, a few months before her death on 4 October. Teresa's least-known text, the Foundations portrays her in the role she had demanded for so long: as early as 1590, Ribera describes her as an apostle, another St. Paul; Bilinkoff, in detailing the circumstances of the Avila foundation, defines Teresa's project as "apostolic [and] missionary."[1] While in her account of the founding of St. Joseph in the Life she emphasizes the contemplative aspect of the composite figure of Mary Magdalene, in the Foundations she acts more as Martha, though without naming her. One should cease contemplating God, she advises, when He needs her works in the world: "It would be a distressing thing if God were clearly telling us to go after something that matters to Him and we would not want to do so but want to remain looking at Him because that is more pleasing to us" (5.5).[2] The occasional locution and vision from God guide her, but she no longer talks with God frequently or experiences raptures. Always ceding the ultimate responsibility for her achievements to God, she nevertheless accentuates the importance of her own work: "The
Lord desired that no foundation be made without great trial on my part" (24.15; my translation).[3]
Although more unified with respect to genre than her previous writing, the Foundations is not simply a historical narrative. Teresa justifies her apostolic mission with a motive that Spain used for its imperialist enterprise, evangelism. As a result, the Foundations shares some features with the genre of New World chronicle; Teresa's figure of the apostle includes an aspect of the conquistador. And as Teresa realizes that death will force her to cede her position, she turns the Foundations to biographical purpose, making her chronicle a frame for the lives of several of the first Barefoot Carmelite nuns. Together these stories constitute a work that, like Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies , may be considered, as Maureen Quilligan designates Pizan's work, "an allegory of female authority," albeit a very simple one.[4] Insofar as the New World chronicle bolsters the rhetoric of nationalism, which some theorists consider anchored in the inequality of gender roles, it clashes with the allegory of female authority.[5] While Teresa conceives her foundations as the expression of a female system of kinship, New World chronicle rests on the patriarchal model, in which, as Claude Lévi-Strauss formulates it, women are objects of exchange. Teresa's apparent blindness to this contradiction probably permitted her to proceed with her project, but it also restricted the scope of her success and drained her of satisfaction in it, as some of the miniature biographies reveal.
In her account of the founding of the first Barefoot Carmelite monastery, the convent of St. Joseph at Avila in 1562 (Life 32-36), Teresa portrays herself as an uncertain, sometimes even unwilling accessory to the action, probably in part to placate her opponents. Also, her engagement with the project did develop slowly. The idea was conceived in an informal gathering of nuns in Teresa's cell at the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in 1560. María de Ocampo suggested, apparently rather idly, that if they could not observe a stricter rule within their convent, which followed the mitigated Carmelite rule approved by Pope Eugene IV in 1432, they might follow the example of a group of Franciscan nuns in Madrid, the Royal Barefoot Nuns who followed a strict rule of discipline in a convent founded by King Philip II's sister, Juana. Teresa liked the idea because after a terrifying vision of hell, she had promised God that she would compensate
for the souls lost to Protestantism by conducting her spiritual life more rigorously. The idea also took root in the other young women, who were frustrated by the secular, social atmosphere of the Incarnation, which allowed the nuns extended journeys and unlimited visitors. Their plan, in Teófanes Egido Martínez's words, was "as enthusiastic as it was naive," however.[6]
On reflection, Teresa had some ambivalence about founding a new convent, because as she puts it, "I was very happy in my own monastery." The dowry she brought allowed her private quarters, and much of the time she enjoyed her lengthy stays outside the convent. Although she had already mentioned the plan to her friend Guiomar de Ulloa, who had agreed to finance it, she admits that her discussions were not very serious: "I hadn't done so with as much determination or certitude as was necessary to bring it about" (Life 32.12). Then God gave her a locution that forced her to action: "One day after Communion, His Majesty earnestly commanded me to strive for this new monastery with all my powers.... He said it should be called St. Joseph" (Life 32.11).[7] As she was instructed, she spoke with her confessor, Baltasar Alvarez, while Guiomar talked to the provincial administrator, Angel de Salazar. After some initial interest, both Alvarez and Salazar expressed reservations. In the meantime, nearly everyone in Avila had heard of the plan, and nearly everyone opposed it. They articulated their opposition as concern about the convent's scanty endowment, a real consideration in this impoverished city, but Bilinkoff speculates that they actually had more important objections, such as resistance to the disruption of the social arrangement that allowed wealthy families to locate a daughter in a convent while having her essentially in their control, as well as fear that Teresa's devotional practices, especially mental prayer, represented a defiance of Church orthodoxy and establishment.[8] It was at this time she wrote the spiritual testimony for Pedro Ibáñez (discussed in chap. 1).
Teresa gives the active roles to others in her narrative of this first foundation. Even after negotiations had been made to have her sister and brother-in-law buy a house without revealing their intention for it, Teresa did not fully understand the details of primitive Carmelite rule, which as formulated in the 1229 bull of Gregory IX mandated collective poverty and mendicancy. Teresa relates that she learned the details of this primitive rule
from María de Jesús, a nun from Granada who passed through Toledo while Teresa was staying there. Showing greater determination than Teresa, María had walked to Rome to secure permission to found a Carmelite convent under reformed rule. Teresa, who still awaited the return of a letter to Rome, now decided to found her convent in accord with these principles. When she returned to Avila she found others already planning the clandestine consecration of the house. Teresa does not say who did what, but with several priests she renovated the house and celebrated the reservation of the Sacrament in a secret ceremony on 24 August 1562. Even though Teresa had allowed for thirteen nuns including a prioress, only four women took vows that day. Afterward, Teresa experienced a paralyzing attack of emotional conflict, which was resolved by a vision of Pedro de Alcántara (a spiritual advisor who had recently died) supporting her decision to found in poverty, and she faced a lawsuit that required two years of litigation in the city council. While her advocates negotiated a settlement, Teresa remained in the Incarnation under orders from the prioress not to intervene in any affairs of St. Joseph. Teresa was permitted to join the new convent in February 1563, six months after its dedication.
By the time she began writing the Foundations , in late 1573, her convent at Avila had already filled its ranks and spawned a chain of Barefoot Carmelite foundations throughout Castile: for women, convents at Medina del Campo (1568), Malagón (1568), Valladolid (1568), Toledo (1569), Pastrana (1569), Salamanca (1570), and Alba (1571); for men, monasteries at Duruelo (1568, moved to Mancera) and Pastrana (1569). Soon afterward, she founded another at Segovia (1574) and then moved outside this Castilian orbit to make the Andalusian foundations at Beas (1575) and Seville (1575). While she still had a skeptical faction in her audience, now principally the Carmelite establishment that had begun to worry about the extent of her reach, she also wrote for present and future members of her new order. With less reason to minimize her role, Teresa portrays herself as founder, the one who conceives what Edward Said calls the "beginning intention," the "created inclusiveness within which the work develops."[9] She relates that when Giovanni Battista Rossi (known in Spain as Rubeo), father general of the Carmelites in Rome, visited St. Joseph in Avila, he deemed it such a beginning intention: "He rejoiced to see our manner of life, a portrait, although an imperfect one, of the beginnings of our order" (2.3).[10] "With the de-
sire that this beginning go forward," Rubeo gave her documents authorizing the foundation of more monasteries and censuring any local official who might hinder her efforts. Teresa now visualized the "inclusiveness" of the project: "And thus in seeing the strong desire of our Most Reverend General that more monasteries be founded, it seemed to me I saw them founded" (2.4).[11] While this intuition of the shape of the whole provides the impetus to begin, it also shows her the end, as she says here. As much as by a recognition of beginning, the Foundations is dominated by the "sense of an ending," or as Teresa puts it, a growing awareness of "how soon everything comes to an end" (29.33).
A Domestic New World Chronicle
Teresa defines the impetus for the additional foundations in relation to Spain's evangelical enterprise in the New World. After a Franciscan friar told her about the millions of non-Christians in the Indies, she pleaded with God for a part in the project of conversion.
I was so grief-stricken over the loss of so many souls [in the Indies, actually Mexico] that I couldn't contain myself. I went to a hermitage with many tears. I cried out to the Lord, begging Him that He give me the means to be able to do something to win some souls to His service, since the devil was carrying away so many, and that my prayer would do some good since I wasn't able to do anything else. (1.7)[12]
God answered her prayers with a prophecy: "'Wait a little, daughter, and you will see great things.'" Rubeo's permission for additional foundations fulfilled this promise: "Remembering the words our Lord had spoken to me, I now perceived some beginning to what before I could not understand" (2.4).[13] In narrating the events motivated by her desire to contribute to Spain's evangelical and imperial project, she writes a domestic version of the New World chronicle.
Others have remarked heroic aspects of Teresa's self-representations. James V. Mirollo treats Teresa and Benvenuto Cellini as contributors to innovation in Renaissance heroism.[14] Gaston Etchegoyen compares Teresa to the knight of chivalry: "Amadís of Gaul and Saint Teresa could both have taken for their motto: 'To love in order to act.'"[15] While traces of the novel of chivalry might be seen in the episodic succession of triumphs
in the Foundations , Teresa confines most of her allusion to the genre she loved as a child to narratives of her spiritual life, where she defines her desires in erotic and romantic terms and portrays herself as military defender of God's castle. The chivalric plot plays out in the realm of the marvelous, while Teresa's path in the Foundations leads through this world.
The New World chronicles are quite various, of course, some concentrating on description, others on defense of native populations or economic considerations.[16] The writings of Hernán Cortés serve particularly well to illustrate the aspects of Teresa's persona that resemble the New World conqueror for several reasons: the element of self-dramatization, the close identification between self-interest and national interest, the interest in governance, and the comprehensiveness of his vision of a future society. In seeking to promote himself as the true governor of Mexico, Cortés wrote a history of his activities in the form of letters to the king of Spain. Cortés's letters, like those of many other explorers, reached Spain soon after they were written, and beginning in 1515, his father had them published. While Teresa probably never read any printed chronicles, she certainly would have heard oral accounts of the same kinds of exploits and she received frequent letters from her brothers who fought with Spanish armies in Peru and Chile. Cortés wrote his letters in an attempt to displace the Spanish aristocracy in Mexico, and probably as a result, the publication of further letters was banned in 1527.[17] In addition to the adventure, the challenge made to the nobility would have interested Teresa.
The interplay of political with evangelical motives in Cortés's writings provides a way of understanding Teresa's self-representation in the Foundations . Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba argues that Cortés considered his conquest to have a double purpose, "religious (evangelization) and political (foundation),"[18] his principal political interest being to make Mexico a province of Spain rather than merely a colony or a territory. Teresa's motives similarly weave together the political and evangelical. As well as spiritual perfection for individuals, she intends an alteration in the sociopolitical order.
Like Dante in his Divine Comedy , Teresa measures the human reality of the world she knows against the divine order she has perceived in mystical vision. Like Dante also, although with deeds rather than words, Teresa undertakes to reform that hu-
man reality. Her foundations, she argues here with respect to the value of women, will make the eternal order visible in this world.
How differently will we understand these ignorances on the day when the truth about all things shall be understood. And how many fathers and mothers will be seen going to hell because they had sons and also how many will be seen in heaven because of their daughters. (20.3)[19]
In addition to the devaluation of girls and women, Teresa diagnoses other defects in the worldly order, such as attribution of honor based on lineage and the definition of wealth in strictly material terms. The order she seeks to impose alters these values in accordance with the eternal order. Because God measures piety rather than lineage, Teresa does not take family background into account in admission to the convents. Further, as in Toledo, she does not hesitate to accept patronage from the converso population: "He told me that lineage and social status mattered not at all in the judgment of God" (15.16). Because the "estates, inheritances, and riches" that parents confer on their children mean nothing in eternity, Teresa does not require a dowry. And because God values women equally with men, she devotes most of her energies to the spiritual education of women. Teresa's project in the Foundations , then, consists in making her convents and monasteries "a heaven, if there can be one on earth" (Road 13.7).
For Cortés, the evangelical aspect of his mission justifies any means of achieving it. His letters reveal no awareness of the Indians' perspective or remorse for the dispossession, injury, and death he inflicted. His explanations of retribution, as here to the observers of the execution of an Indian, intertwine political with religious grounds.
I had come by Your Majesty's command to protect and defend both their persons and their property and to teach them how they were to believe in and worship the One God.... Likewise I said I had come to tell them of Your Majesty whom Divine Providence has decreed that the whole world shall serve and obey.[20]
Teresa's textual persona operates on a similar assumption of divine right. To a greater extent than the biographies of Yepes and
Ribera, her account of the foundations shows her relying not simply on shrewdness but on deceit. Weber describes Teresa's deceptions as the technique of a pícaro , the character of the rogue introduced with Lazarillo de Tormes , anonymously published in 1554. Like the boy from Tormes whose poverty drives him to a life of service for cruel and unscrupulous masters, Teresa exposes society's faults from the margins: "Teresa, at odds against a collection of inept bureaucrats, waffling ecclesiastics and petty landlords, outwits hierarchical authority with ingenuity and determination."[21] As Weber also shows, this stance provides some of the ironic humor of the work. While agreeing that Teresa's stance toward society has something of the picaresque, I would characterize it as more than "mischievous."[22] Teresa portrays herself as quite a ruthless operator.
In making the foundation at Burgos in 1581, she displays a range of deceptive techniques, which while not exactly crimes, were not victimless either. On arriving in Burgos, Teresa had permission for the foundation from nearly everyone except the archbishop presiding there, Cristóbal Vega. Before sending word of her arrival to him, however, Teresa had already cleared the hurdle she knew would be the most difficult, permission from the city council, which all but preempted a negative decision from the archbishop.
There was little use telling him that once we had the permission of the city, as he had asked of us, nothing else was left to be done than simply make the foundation and that the bishop of Palencia had told me (for I had asked him if it would be good that I come without letting the archbishop know) that there was no reason for asking the permission because the archbishop had already said how much he desired the foundation. (31.21)
Besides, she adds, "if we had openly informed him, he would have told us not to come" (31.21). Apparently cornered, the archbishop imposed several conditions on the license: that the foundations have an income, that funds to buy the house not be taken out of monies the nuns had brought with them, and that the purchase be concluded before issue of the license.
Teresa arranged to buy a house in Burgos from an owner who had given power of attorney to a priest. When the contract was signed, other potential buyers accused the priest of taking too little for the property, indeed of virtually making it a gift, and
argued that the sale should be canceled "because of the great fraud [engaño ]" (31.37). Teresa reports that the owners were pleased with the purchasers' plans for the house, but, as she admits, they had no choice because they had already made a binding contract: "They were so happy that their house was being made into a monastery that they approved, although there was nothing else they could now do" (31.37). Before notifying the archbishop of the purchase, Teresa moved the nuns into the house and began alterations. When he forbade the saying of mass in the house, Teresa flamboyantly walked her nuns to another church every Sunday. After the archbishop had given the license, she canceled her agreement for the money she had borrowed to provide the specified income: "With the permission of the Father Provincial, we nullified in the presence of a notary the contracts concerning the money she had given us and returned all the documents." She justifies the secrecy of this default on her agreement with mock concern for the archbishop's feelings: "This was done in great secrecy so that the archbishop wouldn't know of it, for he would have been hurt" (31.48). Even if deception of the archbishop might be considered fair in this war, the negotiations apparently left some persons shortchanged and, more important, nuns trying to survive in a convent thought to have an endowment but actually dependent on charity.
No less than Cortés, Teresa wrote with a view to establishing her reputation for posterity. To this end Cortés narrates not only his battles but the difficulties he faced in devising strategies for them. Cortés uses an account of an attack on Indians who had been fortifying themselves against the Spaniards not simply to record the event but to demonstrate his command of the situation: "And I, knowing this and knowing how cunning and astute they are in war, had often considered how we might invade and attack them relatively unprepared."[23] Teresa also portrays herself as a talented founder, with political acuity, resourcefulness, good judgment, organization, and a canny eye for assessing value in real estate.
Even with her patent from Rubeo, the Barefoot monasteries usually faced strenuous opposition from residents in the town, many of whom feared the financial demands of a monastery without an income or endowment, and from other orders, which resented competition for public benevolence. As Teresa states with regard to the foundation at Medina, "Since the monastery
is to be founded in poverty, permission is everywhere difficult to obtain" (3.1). Weber and Bilinkoff detail numerous other causes of this antagonism: her insistence on poverty constituted a critique of the Church's wealth, a charge made also by Protestants; the attraction of her convents to conversos, which raised alarm about religious and political subversion; her defiance of a papal order against contemplatives' making foundations.[24]
Obtaining the license from local and Church authorities to found the monasteries required skillful political maneuvering, which she usually accomplished with her talent for, in Weber's words, "dismantling monolithic authority into lesser competing authorities [and] seeking out an authority whose will coincided with her own."[25] In Medina, Teresa first approached a former Jesuit confessor she knew to be friendly to her idea, Baltasar Alvarez, sending him and Julián de Avila, the chaplain of her first convent, to negotiate on her behalf. According to Efrén and Steggink, the bishop, Alvaro de Mendoza, marshaled numerous prominent lay and religious men against the foundation. After he was somehow persuaded to give the license, the council leaders who had responsibility for actually issuing it began a campaign against Teresa. The public charges that she resembled the still infamous Magdalena de la Cruz suggest the depth of hostility against her. When the plans appeared to be at a stalemate in Medina, Juliáan asked the bishop of Salamanca to set up a review panel. Julián and Teresa collected favorable witnesses, and after two months of rancorous public and private debate the license was issued.[26]
In Segovia, she found no pliable authority short of King Philip II, who had been convinced, by Teresa and others, that her project coincided with the national interest. She had made the foundation and celebrated mass with only oral permission given to a second party, an arrangement she disingenuously professes to have thought acceptable: "This gentleman didn't bother about getting the permission in writing, nor did this seem to me to matter" (21.5). When the vicar general learned of the foundation, he arrested the priest who had said mass there, ordered destruction of the altar, and posted a guard at the door of the house. Although he was eventually persuaded that the license had been given, he withheld the Sacrament from the convent. Teresa proceeded to press her case through her friends, in this case, a nephew of the bishop. She relates that when the license for the foundation at Caravaca appeared with the unexpected proviso
that the house would be subject to the council of the order of Knights, she appealed to the king: "The king is so fond of favoring religious who he knows are faithful to their profession that once he had learned of the manner of life in these monasteries and that we follow the primitive rule, he favored us in everything" (27.6). He resolved this dispute in Teresa's favor, as he did also the rivalry between the Barefoot Carmelites and the Carmelites several years later.
Teresa also portrays herself as financier and fund-raiser, even as she denies her capacity for this most essential function: "How could a poor wanderer like myself get credit for a loan unless the Lord would give it?" (3.2). Ribera cites her apparently miraculous accumulation of capital as a reassurance to nuns about the future: "She entered Seville to found the monastery there with only half a maravedí, and before she left, she bought a house that cost 6,000 ducats and a year or two later she bought another one that cost 13,000."[27] Egido Martínez judges that she "possessed a clear mind for economics" and that she understood investment, credit, and contracts.[28] José Antonio Alvarez Vázquez considers that Teresa developed a "capacity for negotiation [more literally, haggling]" that she used to obtain the best possible prices.[29] When a house was not given to Teresa, she solicited money from many sources, including the parent Carmelite order, benefactors (usually conversos), and, after continuing economic decline forced her to allow endowments, from dowries. In Medina, Teresa first secured money to rent a house from a woman who wished to be included in the convent, but when the nearby Augustinian friars prevented the nuns from moving in, she was forced to try to buy a house. This time she appealed for help to a priest, Fray Antonio de Heredia, who found someone willing to sell him a house in Medina "without her asking for any surety or binding force other than his word" (3.3). In Toledo, her expulsion from a house she had rented aroused sympathy among the converso population, who raised 12,000 ducats for one of the nicest houses in town. For the foundation in Seville, which otherwise seemed impossible, Teresa's brother Lorenzo de Cepeda returned after thirty-four years in the New World with the money to guarantee a loan for the entire purchase price.[30] One way or another, Teresa herself raised most of the capital for her foundations.
Teresa's narrative of her travels around Spain can be read as an imitation of the explorers' transatlantic voyages. As she tells
it, she braved the equivalent of the torments of hell, the roads of Spain, and she makes those trials vivid for future generations. While late in her life the order insisted that she travel with a priest, initially she made her trips, sometimes weeks long, with one or more nuns as companions. Riding at first in two-wheel carts, then in horse-drawn wagons, with a cloth cover the only protection, they endured extremes of heat and cold: "I tell you, Sisters, that since the sun was beating on the wagons, getting into them was like stepping into purgatory" (24.6). On other trips, extreme cold impeded their travel: "Once it didn't stop snowing the whole day" (13.3). A hostel room without windows and a mattress "like sharp stones" became bearable only when she considered that while she could exchange one discomfort for another (the heat of the wagons seemed preferable), the damned in hell suffered the same pains for eternity: "Never will there be any change at all, for even a change from one trial to another brings with it some relief" (24.9). Teresa gives few details about the course of the journeys, but the occasional glance at the frustrations she faced suggests the forbearance they must have exacted. Often she had to cede control of physical aspects of the journey to careless and incompetent drivers. Having put the wagons on a barge to cross the Guadalquivir River, she then watched them float downstream because "those who were holding the rope let it go, or I don't know what happened" (24.10). And after waiting hours for a permit to pass over a bridge into Seville, they found that the wagons' wheels were too wide, a problem that required sawing off part of the axles. Teresa's travels, more than occasionally comic, take on a heroic aspect for the stamina and patience they required.
Teresa's deeds form a homely counterpoint to the battlefield victories of the conquistadores . The houses she bought were usually in ramshackle condition, at best. The house at Medina "had completely collapsed except for one room." Although Teresa and her retinue of nuns managed to make a chapel from the unplastered walls by hanging tapestries and bed curtains, the decayed condition of the courtyard walls prevented them from living there. Eventually a local merchant offered to let them occupy one floor of his house, which to her delight even included a "gilded room" for a chapel, while the reconstruction proceeded at the other house. In Salamanca, university students still occupied the house when she arrived, and to follow her
practice of moving in before her presence and purpose became known, she had to prevail on a friend to have it vacated in one afternoon. This house was not decrepit, but to describe it as dirty would have been to understate its condition: "[The students] must not have had a gift for cleanliness" (19.3). When the several disadvantages of the house, including the location, forced Teresa to find another for them, she drew the designs for partitioning the larger rooms into cells. She supervised a hurried renovation and whitewashing and moved the nuns in before the contested sale of the house had been completed.
In addition to construction and design, Teresa's Mary Magdalene, a composite of the contemplative Mary and the active Martha, does the housework she also recommends to her nuns: "The Lord walks among the pots and pans helping you both interiorly and exteriorly" (5.8). The occasional descriptive detail Teresa includes about furnishings in a narrative that otherwise ignores the physical world suggests that she takes pleasure in making the house she buys into homes for the nuns she calls her daughters.
And as though I were to live in that house [in Salamanca] for the rest of my life, I sought to obtain everything, even the smallest thing that would contribute to the tranquility suitable for the life, and so it gave me great happiness to see that everything was in good shape. (19.6)
Teresa tells of shopping excursions for household items, including wool blankets, straw mattresses, utensils, even nails. She particularly attends to the texture and color of fabric, specifying that the material of a borrowed bedspread she uses to cover broken wall plaster is blue damask and that for the pennants hanging from the rafters in the chapel at Toledo she chose taffeta in bright red and yellow, a fortuitous choice since these colors seemed to prove fire-resistant. She describes the habits she designed for the nuns—"the veils, the white, coarse woolen mantles we wore, and our sandals of hemp" (24.13)—with the pride of a mother who has taken particular care in dressing her children.
Wishing like Cortés to portray herself as a governor as well as a founder, Teresa includes several chapters of advice to prioresses that can be considered analogous to the regulations, laws, and instructions that appear in his letters, as well as in separate documents. She devotes chapters 5 through 9 to advising
prioresses about handling their charges. Throughout she stresses the importance of requiring absolute obedience. She relates with satisfaction the story of a nun who knew better following her instructions to plant a cucumber sideways. Teresa thus urges prioresses to enforce strict discipline, denying fixations such as taking Communion every day, implementing rigorous work regulations to curb flights of imagination, and exercising caution about the source of visions. Weber argues that this authoritarian stance betrays Teresa's revolt against authority, denying autonomy and liberty to others.[31] Certainly Teresa's regulations for the convents, which she articulated in the Constitutions , seem extraordinarily harsh, prohibiting, for example, singing in harmony, touching each other on the face or hands, laughter, and games. Given what we can glean about Teresa's own playfulness and sense of humor, they seem inordinately repressive. Yet they should not be judged anachronistically by contemporary or secular standards of freedom. Teresa interpreted Scripture to mean that salvation requires obedience to God, and some of her disciplinary measures can be seen as training in the subordination of personal desire to divine will: "He is pleased more by obedience than by sacrifice" (6.22). Also, far from being coerced, women came voluntarily to Teresa's foundations, presumably because they preferred the life to any alternative. Teresa's statement on governance, which in 1576 she made a separate work, On Making the Visitations , extends Teresa's portrait of herself in the Foundations as a severe but supportive, even affectionate, leader. And, as the Foundations comes to closure, she permits others to succeed her by, in Said's terms for authorization, incorporating continuity into her beginning intention.[32]
An Allegory of Female Authority
In late 1575, Rubeo brought Teresa's wagons to a halt. Angered at the autonomy claimed by some groups of Barefoot Carmelite friars and by Teresa's defiance of his order against making foundations in Andalucía, he ordered Teresa and several others confined in Castilian monasteries. Teresa stayed in the convent at Toledo more than four years. Certain that she had made her last foundation, she wrote a conclusion to the Foundations in November 1576 (27.8). Teresa eventually did take to the road again, making four more foundations—Villanueva de la
Jara (1580), Palencia (1580), Soria (1581), Burgos (1582)—but during the hiatus, a feeling of old age had overtaken her. Even while telling of obstacles to these last foundations more serious than she had faced before, she expresses awareness that whatever her own accomplishments, others will take her place as founders: "Each one who enters in the future bear in mind that with her the observance of the primitive rule ... begins again" (27.11).[33] Further releasing her hold on future members of the order, she warns them against allowing pride in their beginnings to distract attention from its current condition.
Teresa prepares for this moment throughout the Foundations by splicing biographical narratives of several young women into the chronicle. These women, the "stones" and "cement" of her work, are themselves the foundations: "Some of the new ones entering the monastery it seemed the Lord had chosen as the kind of cement that is suited to an edifice like this" (9.1).[34] Thus Teresa writes an allegory of female construction reminiscent of Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies , in which Lady Reason appears to Christine and commands her to "establish and build the City of Ladies": "For the foundation and completion of this City you will draw fresh waters from us as from clear fountains, and we will bring you sufficient building stone, stronger and more durable than any marble with cement could be."[35] The stones with which Christine builds are the lives of famous women from all of Western history: Antigone, Sappho, Dido, Xanthippe, Penelope, Mary Magdalene, and so on. With God as her director, Teresa constructs her city of ladies with women she had met in Spain: Casilda de Padilla, Beatriz de la Encarnación, Teresa de Layz, Catalina Godínez, Catalina de Cardona, and Beatriz de Chávez. Expressing literary intentionality for the first time in all her writings, she gives as her reason for telling one of the stories, "It will give you pleasure" (26.1). As Weber points out, Teresa here includes some detail that seems purely novelistic.[36]
Critics have disagreed about whether Teresa's project of foundations reproduced the patriarchal order or whether they can be considered in any way protofeminist. Claire Guilhem judges Teresa's exclusion of beatas , those women who wished to live independently in female communities but not to enter an order, an indication of her collusion with the official misogyny.[37] In contrast, Lerner, writing of the medieval women mystics in general, considers that while their spiritual experience itself did not
produce social change, "it was different with the utopian visions of the religious sectarians, in whose lives personal experiences and communal expressions merged.... They went from the private to the public realm and acted in it, that is, they made their lives political." As the transcripts of the hearings for Teresa's canonization (discussed in chap. 6) demonstrate, Teresa shared with these other mystics "the capacity to make their private ecstatic experiences part of the collective experience."[38] The biographies that constitute Teresa's allegory of female authority suggest that her foundations did challenge the social and economic order of patriarchy, even if her ambitions did not extend to radical change.
The women to whom Teresa's foundations appealed had learned early that they had no value in themselves. Teresa de Layz had disappointed her parents at birth by becoming their fifth daughter. On her third day of life they neglected her for an entire day, "as though she mattered little to them" (20.4). Suspecting that the baby might have died, a woman arriving that evening hurried to Teresa's room, where she found a baby miraculously empowered with precocious speech that saved her life.
Weeping, the woman took the baby into her arms and complaining of the cruelty said: "How is it, my daughter, are you not a Christian?" The baby girl lifted her head and answered, "Yes, I am," and spoke no more until reaching that age at which all children begin to speak. (20.4)
With this act Teresa finally won a place in the family: "Her mother began to love and cherish her from then on" (20.4). Beatriz de Chávez, who entered the convent at Seville, took last place in her parents' affections while her brothers were alive: "Although she had had older brothers, they had all died, and she, the less loved by her parents, was left" (26.7).
Having reluctantly raised these girls, parents wished to exploit their exchange value in marriage. They arranged early marriages with the men they thought best able to preserve or enhance the family fortune, severely punishing any refusal or attempt to escape. When the family inheritance passed from an older sister to Casilda, she was engaged to an uncle as a means of keeping the wealth in the family, and when she took refuge in a convent, her parents obtained a court order to remove her.
Beatriz's parents made a marriage contract for her at the earliest possible moment: "When she reached the marriageable age, though she was still but a girl, her parents came to an agreement on whom she should marry" (26.7). Beatriz nearly died for her resistance.
Since they had already given their word and their not following through on it would have been taken as an affront by the other party, they gave her so many whippings, inflicted on her so many punishments, even to the point of wanting to hang her, for they were choking her, that it was fortunate they didn't kill her. (26.8)
Catalina Godínez tried to disfigure herself by getting severe facial sunburns to thwart her parents' attempts to marry her. When that failed, she developed an astonishing array of illnesses—breast cancer, consumption, tuberculosis, dropsy, inflammation of the liver, gout, and sciatica. After eight years in bed, she proposed that if God were to give her complete health within a month she should be allowed to petition for a license to found a convent rather than marry. When she was cured at the appointed time, her family released her from her nuptial obligation. Her successful appeal to Philip II resulted in the foundation at Beas.
The divine intervention that effects rescue in many of these narratives emphasizes the exigency of women's situations. Casilda received the miraculous gift of skillful argumentation that stunned her elders, who seem to have had quite low standards for women's speech. When relatives attempt to convince her that she is too young to decide to enter a convent, she asks why they considered her old enough to be married; when her fiancé argues that she could serve God more by giving alms than by becoming a nun, she retorts that he should give the alms. So clever were her responses considered that they "made it appear that it wasn't she who was speaking" (11.4). When Casilda's first escape plan failed, she devised another, which was typically elaborate. While her mother was at confession, Casilda sent the governess to ask for a mass. Left alone for a moment, she ran toward the convent. She might easily have been stopped by the bystander her governess signaled for help, but he was stricken with immobility: "He said afterward that he wasn't able to move, and so he let her get away" (11.10). When the governess reached the convent, Casilda had already taken the habit.
These stories end happily from Teresa's point of view, with a transfer of wealth to the convents. Teresa de Layz, who received a sign that she should marry a man who would help support the order rather than join it herself, rejected having children in order to leave their estate to the convent at Alba de Tormes. Catalina de Godínez (and her sister) left their inheritance to the order "without any conditions, so that even if they were not admitted to profession the money would still belong to the order" (22.24). Previously vehicles for their fathers' accumulation of wealth, these women now diverted it to other women.
Teresa uses the vocabulary of kinship to describe this new social organization. Catalina Godínez's conversion gave her a new definition of lineage.
The Lord worked a complete change in her: She had been thinking of a marriage that was being sought for her, which was better than she could have hoped for, and saying to herself: "With what little my father is content, that I become connected with an entailed estate; I am thinking of becoming the origin of a new line of descendants." (22.5)[39]
The Spanish original is even more emphatic, closer to "I mean my lineage to begin with me." Teresa's system of female kinship provides for inheritance—but not principally of worldly goods. Teresa characterizes Casilda de Padilla's entering the convent at Valladolid as a rejection of her family's mistakenly material definition of inheritance. Christ, who possessed nothing in this world, passed on the only inheritance of value, the emblems of His suffering: "What could we, your descendants, inherit from You? What did You possess, my Lord, but trials, sufferings, and dishonors?" (10.11). Similarly, Teresa plans that her nuns will endow their descendants with the wealth of their suffering, and ultimately those with sufficient courage will "inherit His kingdom."
Two of the women on whom Teresa builds her foundations took roads to sainthood that she had tried out in youth: Beatriz de la Encarnación, the martyr, and Catalina de Cardona, the hermit. Because the details of the lives of many of these women resonate with Teresa's life, their biographies function as specular autobiographies, self-representations written in the act of gazing at others, from a stance of some regret. In them she finds reason to regret the course of her own life. When Beatriz en-
tered the convent at Valladolid, she already showed extraordinary virtue: "Both the nuns and the prioress affirmed that they had never noticed in any aspect of her life anything they would consider an imperfection" (12.1). Always willing to suffer to save souls, Beatriz found an opportunity when she learned that the Inquisition was to burn several men at the stake for heresy. She begged God to give her sufferings enough to save their souls, and that night a fever signaled that her prayer had been answered. From that moment she lived with hideous pain of several diseases, including an intestinal abscess "so internally located that the medicines they gave were of no help" (12.4) and an abscess on the throat that prevented her from swallowing. Throughout she cheerfully carried out all her duties as if she were well. The nuns in her convent gathered around her deathbed to witness her ascension, and at her funeral a sweet fragrance emanating from her body and a candle that burned but did not diminish confirmed her sainthood.
Teresa admires Beatriz, but she does not cause her to reassess her own vocation, as does Catalina de Cordona. A noblewoman who had been governess to the sons of both Charles V and Philip II, this Catalina embraced the hermit's life at age forty-four.[40] With the assistance of a male hermit, she found "a tiny cave hardly large enough for her" (28.24). He left her with three loaves of bread, the same number that St. Mary of Egypt took with her, and when these were gone she lived on herbs and roots for the next eight years. Although she disciplined herself two hours a day with a heavy chain, her greatest torment came from the devils who appeared to her in the form of huge dogs and snakes. Using her connections at court to obtain a license, she founded a monastery for Barefoot Carmelite friars on the site of her cave, which thus became a cornerstone of the foundation. Her life challenges Teresa's belief that the path she has chosen, that of the apostle, leads to sainthood.
I saw that the one who had done such harsh penance there was a woman like me, but more delicate because of her background, and not so great a sinner as I.... The desire alone to imitate her, if I could, consoled me; but not much, for all my life has passed in desires, but the deeds I do not perform. (28.35)[41]
Given Teresa's string of foundations, her discouragement here would not seem objectively explicable. By placing it within the
context of these other lives, however, Teresa associates it with the contradictions inherent in her attempts to valorize women within a patriarchal institution and society. Beatriz's heroism has a certainty and Catalina's a purity that Teresa's activity lacks. Her energy falters until a vision reassures her that she has Catalina's approval.
As fatigue and illness slow her pace, Teresa requires more and more divine encouragement and reassurance and, possibly, Alvarez Vázquez speculates, more external resistance.[42] In declaring her satisfaction at having provided enclosed spaces for others, she expresses nostalgia for the contemplative aspect of her own life: "So it is with souls accustomed to living in the running streams of their Spouse. When taken out of them and caught up in the net of worldly things, they do not truly live until they find themselves back in those waters" (31.46). Although very weary and even despondent, she continues her active life in the world until God announces the end she had conceived at the beginning: "'Everything is now finished; you are free to go'" (31.49).