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By Gianluigi Gugliermetto 10/16/2025 |
Today, October 15, is the feast day of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). This most famous and revered Spanish saint — proclaimed “doctor of the Church” by Pope Paul VI in 1970 — brings up for me very contradictory feelings. |
In some ways, she is recognized as the epitome of that intimist and unengaged spirituality which is in direct contra-diction with the Vatican II surge of vitality in which I grew up. The famous marble statue by Bernini — from around 1650 — which depicts her ecstasies has |
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attracted the interest of psychoanalysts resulting in the perception that her repressed sexuality is in fact the origin and explanation of her experience of the divine. On top of that, her prose — I tried to read her many times — has never looked to me perspicuous or even interesting. |
But I dug deeper. A contemporary Carmelite nun — the same Order which Teresa vigorously reformed — says this: Teresa of Avila had that mysterious quality the Spanish call “duende” which is characteristic of gypsies, flamenco guitarists, and dancers. “Duende” is raw, primitive, tempestuous energy, a vulnerability to inspiration boiling in the blood.* Wait! What? My deeper digging made me realize that I was misled and wrong. Teresa, like many other women mystics, designed a life path away from humiliation and guilt toward wholeness and stability. She did it within conditions that most of us today would see as very limiting, but she did it with a vigor that we would do well to imitate. She claimed her divine soul. She could have easily be condemned by the Inquisition, as she had contacts with some alumbrados and their writings. One is alumbrado — which means enlightened — when God is in direct contact with one’s soul, without intermediaries. |
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| The village of Piedrahita, near Avila, had been home to Maria de Santo Domingo (1485-1524) who was accused to be a fake mystic, though she eventually was discharged and became a Dominican
prioress. Much farther away, in the Italian city of Genova, Caterina Fieschi (1447-1510) experienced God’s visitations in ways that are very similar, quite in |
detail, to Maria’s and Teresa’s. Teresa was not alone. These women experienced the ecstasy of love without the intervention of any men. And they proclaimed that not their minds alone, but their bodies were the place where God was visiting them, filling them with pleasure and eventually with a
transcendent calm which, in turn, enabled them to live a fully active life of service and companionship. Teresa’s most famous work — being in itself remarkable that a woman in her time and age would write and publish notes of her personal experience — is titled The Interior Castle. In it, she treats the soul as
a diamond palace with many hidden rooms to be discovered, and life as a journey of exploration and deeper intimacy with the divine. She questions at the very beginning of her book why don’t we recognize the beauty of such a castle. |
Mistakes are present along this journey, as well as feelings of desolation and abandonment, but they don’t prevail. In Teresa’s time, the notion of original sin was a way to control people’s consciences, the power-over of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was identified with God’s will, and reputable women lived locked inside a house or a convent. |
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She
played a quite different tune, travelling extensively through Spain and becoming — besides her other accomplishments — the only woman in the history of the Catholic Church to reform an order of men, the Discalced Carmelites. Duende makes us ready to be devoured in the heroic struggle for individuation and genuine
freedom. Devoured by the love of God which consumes any residual ego. There is little to pity about Teresa’s life and much to admire. |
Queries for Contemplation How often to you look at your soul as a diamond? And how can you reconcile this notion with that
of utter lack of ego? |
Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, or read other comments and enter into dialogue, please click HERE to go to our website and scroll down to the Comments field. |
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