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]