The Reformation

by Will Durant

On another occasion she thought an “exceedingly beautiful angel” thrust “a long dart of gold,” tipped with fire, “through my heart several times, so that it reached my very entrails.”

  So real was the pain that I was forced to moan aloud, yet it was so surpassingly sweet that I would not wish to be delivered from it. No delight of life can give more content. As the angel withdrew the dart, he left me all burning with a great love of God.* 21

  This and other passages in the writings of St. Teresa lend themselves readily to psychoanalytic interpretations, but no one can doubt the high sincerity of the saint. Like Ignatius, she was convinced that she saw God, and that the most recondite problems were made clear to her in these visions.

  One day, being in orison, it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God.... It is one of the most signal of all graces that the Lord has granted me.... . Our Lord has made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be in three persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as extremely surprised as I was comforted.... And now, when I think of the Holy Trinity... I experience an unspeakable happiness.22

  Teresa’s sister nuns interpreted her visions as delusions and morbid fits.23 Her confessors inclined to the same view, and told her sternly, “The Devil has deceived your senses.” The townspeople thought her possessed by demons, called upon the Inquisition to examine her, and proposed that a priest should drive out her devils by exorcism. A friend advised her to send the Inquisition an account of her life and visions; now she wrote her classic Vida. The inquisitors scrutinized it, and pronounced it a holy document which would strengthen the faith of all who should read it.

  Her position fortified by this verdict, Teresa, now fifty-seven, determined to reform the order of the Carmelite nuns. Instead of attempting to restore the old ascetic discipline in the cloister of the Incarnation, she decided to open a separate convent, to which she invited such nuns and novices as would accept a regimen of absolute poverty. The original Carmelites had worn coarse sackcloth, had gone always barefoot, had eaten frugally and fasted frequently. Teresa required of her Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites approximately the same austere rule, not as an end in itself, but as a symbol of humility and rejection of this tempting world. A thousand obstacles were raised; the townsmen of Ávila denounced the plan as threatening to end all communication between nuns and relatives. The provincial of the order refused permission for a new convent. Teresa appealed to Pope Pius V, and won his consent. She found four nuns to join her, and the new convent of St. Joseph was consecrated in 1562 on a narrow street in Ávila. The sisters wore sandals of rope, slept on straw, ate no meat, and remained strictly within their house.

  The 180 nuns of the older establishment were not pleased by this simple exposure of their easy ways. The prioress, holding that Teresa was bound to her by the vow of obedience, commanded her to resume her former white robe, put on shoes, and return to the convent of the Incarnation. Teresa obeyed. She was adjudged guilty of arrogance, and was confined to her cell. The town council voted to close St. Joseph’s Convent, and sent four strong men to evict its now leaderless nuns. But the sandaled maidens said, “God wants us to stay, and so we shall stay”; and the hardened officers of the law dared not force them. Teresa frightened the Carmelite provincial by suggesting that in frustrating her plans he was offending the Holy Ghost; he ordered her freed. Four nuns left with her, and the five women walked through the snow to their new home. The four original members greeted Teresa happily as Madre. To nearly all Spain she now became Teresa de Jesú, the intimate of God.

  Her rule was loving, cheerful, and firm. The house was closed to the world; no visitors were allowed; the windows were covered with cloth; the tiled floor served as beds, tables, and chairs. A revolving disk was built into the wall; whatever food was placed by the people on its outer half was gratefully accepted, but the nuns were not permitted to beg. They eked out their sustenance by spinning and needlework; the products were placed outside the convent gate; any buyer might take what he liked and leave whatever he liked in return. Despite these austerities new members came, and one of them was the most beautiful and courted woman in Ávila. The general of the Carmelites, visiting the little cloister, was so deeply impressed that he asked Teresa to found similar houses elsewhere in Spain. In 1567, taking a few nuns with her, she traveled in a rude cart over seventy miles of rough roads to establish a Discalced Carmelite nunnery at Medina del Campo. The only house offered her was an abandoned and dilapidated building with crumbling walls and leaking roof; but when the townspeople saw the nuns trying to live in it, carpenters and roofers came, unasked and unpaid, to make repairs and simple furniture.

  The prior of the Carmelite monastery at Medina, wishing to reform his relaxed monks, came to Teresa and asked for her rules of discipline. The prior was tall, but was accompanied by a youth so short and frail that Teresa, with the humor that brightened her austerities, exclaimed, as they left: “Blessed be the Lord, for I have a friar and a half for the foundation of my new monastery.” 24 The diminutive friar, Juan de Yepis y Alvarez, was destined to be San Juan de la Cruz, St. John of the Cross, the soul and glory of the Discalced Carmelite monks.

  Teresa’s difficulties were not ended. The provincial of the Carmelites, perhaps to test her rule and courage, appointed her prioress of the Incarnation Convent. The nuns there hated her, and feared that now, in revenge, she would subject them to every humiliation. But she behaved with such modesty and kindness that one by one they were won over, and gradually the new and stricter regimen replaced the old laxity. From this victory Teresa advanced to found a new cloister in Seville.

  The friars of the mitigated rule resolved to stop the extension of the reform. Some of them smuggled an agent, as a discalced nun, into the Seville convent. Soon this woman proclaimed to Spain that Teresa flogged her nuns and heard confessions as if she were a priest. The Inquisition was again called upon to investigate her. She was summoned before the fearful tribunal; it heard her testimony, and gave its verdict: “You are acquitted of all charges.... . Go and continue your work.”25 But a papal nuncio was won over to her enemies. He denounced Teresa as “a disobedient, contumacious woman who promulgates pernicious doctrines under the pretense of devotion, who left her cloister against the orders of her superiors, who is ambitious, and teaches theology as though she were a doctor of the Church, in contempt of St. Paul, who forbade women to teach.” He commanded her to retire to confinement in a nunnery at Toledo (1575).

  Hardly knowing where to turn in this new vicissitude, Teresa wrote to the King. Philip II had read and loved her Life. He sent a special courier to invite her to an audience; he heard her, and was convinced of her saintliness. The nuncio, royally reproved, withdrew his order of restraint on Teresa, and announced that he had been misinformed.

  Amid her travels and tribulations she wrote famous manuals of mystical devotion: El camino de la perfección (The Way of Perfection, 1567), and El Castillo interior (The Interior Castle, 1577). In the latter she revealed the return of her physical ailments. “It seems as though many swollen rivers were rushing, within my brain, over a precipice; and then again, drowned by the noise of the water, are voices of birds singing and whistling. I weary my brain and increase my headaches.” 26 Heart attacks recurred, and her stomach found it hard to retain food. Even so she passed painfully from one to another of the many nunneries she had founded, examining, improving, inspiring. At Malaga she was seized with a paralytic fit; she recovered, went on to Toledo, and had another seizure; she recovered, went on to Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, Burgos, Alva. There a hemorrhage of the lungs forced her to stop. She accepted death cheerfully, confident that she was leaving a world of pain and evil for the everlasting companionship of Christ.

  After a shameful competition, and successive kidnapings of her corpse by Alva and Ávila, she was buried in the town of her birth. Pious worshipers claimed that her body never decayed, and many miracles were reported at her tomb. In 1593 t
he order of Discalced Carmelites received papal sanction. Famous Spaniards like Cervantes and Lope de Vega joined in an appeal to the Pope to at least beatify her. It was done (1614), and eight years later Teresa was pronounced, along with the Apostle James, one of the two patron saints of Spain.

  Meanwhile a greater than Teresa had come out of Spain to reform the Church and move the world.

  IV. IGNATIUS LOYOLA

  Don Iñigo de Oñez y Loyola was born in the castle of Loyola in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa in 1491. He was one of eight sons and five daughters begotten by Don Beltran de Oñez y Loyola, a member of the higher Spanish nobility. Brought up to be a soldier, Iñigo received little schooling, and showed no interest in religion. His reading was confined to Amadis of Gaul and like romances of chivalry. At seven he was sent to serve as a page to Don Juan Velásquez de Cuellar, through whom he had some access to the royal court. At fourteen he fell in love with Ferdinand the Catholic’s new queen, Germaine de Foix; and when, in due course, he was knighted, he chose her as his “Queen of Hearts,” wore her colors, and dreamed of winning a lace handkerchief from her hand as prize in a tournament.27 This did not prevent him from engaging in the casual amours and brawls that were half a soldier’s life. In the simple and honest autobiography that he dictated in 1553-56, he made no effort to conceal these natural escapades.

  His carefree youth came to an end when he was assigned to active military service at Pamplona, capital of Navarre. Four years he spent there, dreaming of glory and waking to routine. A chance came to distinguish himself: the French attacked Pamplona, Iñigo heartened the defense with his bravery; the enemy captured the citadel nevertheless, and Iñigo’s right leg was fractured by a cannon ball (May 20, 1521). The victors treated him kindly, set his bones, and sent him on a stretcher to his ancestral castle. But the bones had been wrongly set; they had to be rebroken and reset. The second operation proved more incompetent than the first, for a stump of bone stuck out from the leg; a third operation set the bones straight, but the leg was now too short; and for weeks Iñigo bore the torture of an orthopedic stretcher that kept him helpless and weak and in constant pain.

  During the weary months of convalescence he asked for books, preferably for some exciting tale of knighthood and imperiled princesses. But the castle library was composed of two books only: Ludolfus’s Life of Christ, and Flos sanctorum, recounting the lives of the saints. At first the soldier was bored by these volumes; then the figures of Christ and Mary grew upon him, and the legends of the saints proved as wonderful as the epics of courtly love and war; these cavaliers of Christ were every bit as heroic as the caballeros of Castile. Gradually the thought formed in his mind that the noblest war of all was that of Christianity against Islam. In him, as in Dominic, the intensity of Spanish faith made religion no quiet devotion as in Thomas à Kempis, but a passion of conflict, a holy war. He resolved to go to Jerusalem and free the sacred places from infidel control. One night he had a vision of the Virgin and her Child; thereafter (he later told Father Gonzalez) no temptation to concupiscence ever assailed him.28 He rose from his bed, knelt, and vowed to be a soldier of Christ and Mary till his death.

  He had read that the Holy Grail had once been hidden in a castle at Montserrat in the province of Barcelona. There, said the most famous of all romances, Amadis had kept a full night’s vigil before an image of the Virgin to prepare himself for knighthood. As soon as Iñigo could travel he mounted a mule, and set out for the distant shrine. For a while he still thought of himself as a soldier accoutered for physical combat. But the saints he had read about had had no weapons, no armor, only the poorest clothes and the firmest faith. Arrived in Montserrat, he cleansed his soul with three days of confession and penance; he gave his costly raiment to a beggar, and donned a pilgrim’s robe of coarse cloth. All the night of March 24-25, 1522, he spent alone in the chapel of a Benedictine monastery, kneeling or standing before the altar of the Mother of God. He pledged himself to perpetual chastity and poverty. The next morning he received the Eucharist, gave his mule to the monks, and set out on limping foot for Jerusalem.

  The nearest port was Barcelona. On the way he stopped at the hamlet of Manresa. An old woman directed him to a cave for shelter. For some days he made this his home; and there, eager to surpass the saints in asceticism, he practiced austerities that brought him close to death. Repenting the proud care that he had once taken of his appearance, he ceased to cleanse, cut, or comb his hair—which soon fell out; he would not trim his nails or bathe his body or wash his hands or face or feet;29 he lived on such food as he could beg, but never meat; he fasted for days at a time; he scourged himself thrice daily, and each day spent hours in prayer. A pious woman, fearful that his austerities would kill him, had him taken to her home, where she nursed him back to health. But when he was removed to a cell in a Dominican monastery at Manresa he resumed his self-flagellation. His remembrance of past sins terrified him; he waged war against his body as the agent of his sins; he was resolved to beat all thought of sin out of his flesh. At times the struggle seemed hopeless, and he thought of suicide. Then visions came and strengthened him; at communion he believed that he saw not a wafer of bread but the living Christ; at another time Christ and His Mother appeared to him; once he saw the Trinity, and understood by a flash of insight, beyond words or reason, the mystery of three persons in one God; and “at another time,” he tells us, “God permitted him to understand how He had created the world.”30 These visions healed the spiritual conflict that had produced them; he put behind him all worry about his youthful follies; he relaxed his asceticism; and having conquered his body he could now cleanse it without vanity. From the experience of this struggle, almost a year long, he designed the Spiritual Exercises by which the heathen flesh could be subdued to the Christian will. Now he might present himself before the sacred shrines at Jerusalem.

  He set sail from Barcelona in February 15 2 3. En route he stayed two weeks in Rome, escaping before its pagan spirit could bend him from sanctity. On July 14 he took ship from Venice for Jaffa. He suffered a host of calamities before reaching Palestine, but his continuing visions sustained him. Jerusalem itself was a tribulation: the Turks who controlled it allowed Christian visitors, but no proselytizing; and when Iñigo proposed to convert the Moslems nevertheless, the Franciscan provincial who had been charged by the Pope to keep the peace bade the saint return to Europe. In March 1524, he was back in Barcelona.

  Perhaps he felt now that though he was master of his body he was subject to his imaginations. He determined to chasten his mind with education. Though now thirty-three, he joined schoolboys in studying Latin. But the itch to teach is stronger than the will to learn. Soon Ignatius, as he was scholastically called, began to preach to a circle of pious but charming women. Their lovers denounced him as a spoil-sport, and beat him brutally. He moved to Alcalá (1526), and took up philosophy and theology. Here too he taught a little private group, chiefly of poor women, some of them prostitutes hungering for redemption. He tried to exorcise their sinful propensities by spiritual exercises, but some of his pupils fell into fits or trances, and the Inquisition summoned him. He was imprisoned for two months,31 but he finally convinced the inquisitors of his orthodoxy, and was released; however, he was forbidden to teach. He passed on to Salamanca (1527), and went through a similar sequence of teaching, trial before the Inquisition, imprisonment, acquittal, and prohibition of further teaching. Disappointed with Spain, he set out for Paris, always on foot and in pilgrim garb, but now driving before him a donkey loaded with books.

  At Paris he lived in the poorhouse, and begged in the streets for his food and tuition. He entered the Collège de Montaigu, where his sallow, haggard face, starved body, unkempt beard, and aged clothing made him a cynosure of unsympathetic eyes; but he pursued his purposes with such absorbed intensity that some students began to reverence him as a saint. Under his lead they engaged in spiritual exercises of prayer, penance, and contemplation. In 1529 he transferred to the Collèg
e Ste.-Barbe, and there too he gathered disciples. His two roommates came by different routes to believe in his sanctity. Pierre Favre—Peter Faber—as a shepherd in the Savoyard Alps, had suffered deeply from fears superstitious or real, and under their influence he had vowed perpetual chastity. Now, aged twenty, he concealed under his disciplined manners a soul struggling feverishly against temptations of the flesh. Ignatius, though making no pretensions to intellect, had the power of sensing the interior life of others through the intensity of his own. He surmised the problem of his younger friend, and assured him that the impulses of the body could be controlled by a trained will. How train the will? By spiritual exercises, answered Ignatius. Together they practiced them.

  The other roommate, Francis Xavier, came from Pamplona, where Loyola had soldiered. He had a long line of distinguished ancestors; he was handsome, rich, proud, a gay blade who knew the taverns of Paris and their girls.32 He laughed at the two ascetics, and boasted of his successes with women. Yet he was clever in his studies; he already had the master’s degree, and was aiming at a doctorate. One day he saw a man whose face was pocked with syphilis; it gave him pause. Once, when he was expounding his ambition to shine in the world, Ignatius quietly quoted the Gospel to him: “What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Xavier resented the query, but he could not forget it. He began to join Loyola and Faber in their spiritual exercises; perhaps his pride stirred him to equal the other two in power to bear deprivation, cold, and pain. They scourged themselves, fasted, slept in thin shirts on the floor of an unheated room; they stood barefoot and almost naked in the snow, to harden and yet subdue their bodies.

  The spiritual exercises that had first taken shape at Manresa now reached a more definite form. Ignatius modeled them on the Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (1500) of Don Garcia de Cisneros, Benedictine abbot at Montserrat; 33 but he poured into that mold a fervor of feeling and imagination that made his little book a moving force in modern history. Loyola took as his starting point the infallibility of the Bible and the Church; individual judgment in religion, he held, was the vain and chaos-breeding pretense of proud, weak minds. “We ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.”34 To avoid damnation we must train ourselves to be unquestioning servants of God, and of God’s vicar on earth, the Church.