I realized that [Luisa de la Cerda] was a woman and as subject to passions and weaknesses as I, and how little should be our esteem for the status of nobility, and that the greater the nobility the more the cares and trials. I observed the solicitude they had for preserving their composure in conformity with this status, which doesn’t allow them to live, obliging them to eat without rhyme or reason because everything must be done in accordance with their status and not with their bodily constitution. (They have often to eat food that is more in harmony with their position than with their liking.) As a result I totally abhorred any desire to become a lady of the nobility…This is a kind of subservience that makes calling such persons “lords” one of the world’s lies, for it doesn’t seem to me that they are anything but slaves to a thousand things.7
Could it be the very luxury you enjoy in this milieu that awakens in the hardness of your heart an unprecedented “compassion for the poor”? Unless I am very much mistaken, it is here, in the Cerda palace stuffed with gold, wrought furniture, fine porcelain, and precious stones, that for the first time in your life you notice the existence of paupers and register the hellish existence of outcasts whose misery doesn’t need the spur of penitence:
It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This I now see is a gift given by God. For even though I used to give alms for love of Him, I didn’t have the natural compassion. I feel a very noticeable improvement in this matter.8
During these six months in Toledo you also find the necessary seclusion to write, something that will prove crucial both for you and for history. But you have not forgotten the little discalced Convent of Saint Joseph, back in Avila. And since your mystical life takes the form of a series of coups de théâtre, like a picaresque novel of the soul’s pilgrimage toward the Other, recast as His Voice in you—so, before building your inner mansions, you continue to have extraordinary encounters that move the action forward.
A pauper, excuse me, a beata, knocks on the door of the palace: her name is María de Jesús Yepes. Born in Granada, widowed when still young, this bizarre, freewheeling character had become a Franciscan beguine (or beata) after giving away all her worldly goods. She had then trekked to Rome on foot and obtained an audience with Pope Pius IV himself. To what end? To implore him on her knees to let her found a Carmelite house under the Primitive Rule. (The same idea you had, and on the same day: isn’t that funny?) Flabbergasted, the Holy Father called her “a mannish woman”—he had his reasons—and ordered his entourage to comply with her request, referring her to Cardinal Rainucio, who gave the authorization. Once she returned to Granada, however, the local Carmelites and the population at large were all for flogging her in public! Princess Juana, the kingdom’s regent, advised her to speak to a Jesuit whom you, Teresa, know very well—Fr. Gaspar de Salazar—and he in turn dispatched her to see you in Toledo. María laid before you her project for a Carmel governed by absolute poverty; eventually she would found the reformed Carmelite Convent of Alcalá de Henares.
Illiterate but gifted with a prodigious memory, María knows the Primitive Rule by heart, rather better than you do, admit it. Historians today even suggest that you were thoroughly ignorant of this first Rule, composed at the beginning of the thirteenth century by Saint Albert of Jerusalem. I can inform you that it went through two subsequent versions: the Rule was amended and approved by Pope Innocent IV in 1247, and then softened by the mitigations Pope Eugene IV granted in 1432.
María de Jesús Yepes’s most important revelation is that, according to the Primitive Rule, the nuns must live without patronage, subsisting on their labor alone, and not give way to any power, whether of bishops or secular rulers. This lesson does not fall on deaf ears! Between ourselves, the beata also imparts a few lessons in Vatican diplomacy that will not come amiss for the task in hand.
For two weeks you observe each other, admiring, agreeing, and disagreeing. The beginning of the Discalced Carmelite Constitution gradually takes shape. Your supporters are impressed, and at the same time concerned: can one rely on Providence alone for such an ambitious work?
Father Pedro Ibáñez himself has some misgivings and writes you two pages of theological objections. You understand that further supporters are called for, more powerful than Ibáñez and possessors of a bold, ascetic, saintly spirituality. An idea comes: you could consult Brother Pedro de Alcántara. You are well acquainted already with the authority of this ideal arbiter, the only man capable of cutting the Gordian knot in which you are presently caught between the plaudits and critiques elicited by your reforms. He is already a great partisan of the project, given his fervent endorsement of the desire for poverty—an evangelical principle he will have you commit to—and to the dignity of women, whom he declares equal to men in the love of Christ. Admit it: Pedro de Alcántara was extremely helpful to you when he wondered why you were consulting letrados, those jurists or theologians who might be excellently qualified for legal disputes and cases of conscience but knew nothing of the life of the spirit! Thus comforted, you are able to parry the theological arguments deployed by Fr. Ibáñez against your notion of foundations without funds.
Backed up by some, contested by others, you assert your own authority more and more, my resistant Teresa. No woman before has been seen to stand up to her superiors the way you do in the text you will shortly deliver to Fr. Ibáñez, in which you address all your confessors—whose greater knowledge and competence you acknowledge in all humility, for it stands to reason that you need them, every one.
On the one hand, you like to draw them toward prayer:
I told [Fr. Gaspar de Salazar] about [my trials of soul] under the seal of confession. He seemed to me wiser than ever, although I always thought he had a great mind.…As soon as I see a person who greatly pleases me, with longings I sometimes cannot bear, I want to see him give himself totally to God. And although I desire that all serve God, the longings come with very great impulses in the case of these persons I like; so I beg the Lord very much on their behalf. With the religious I’m speaking of, it so happened to me.9
On the other, you sleep with one eye open:
Since I believe that my confessors stand so truly in the place of God, I think they are the ones for whom I feel the most benevolence. Since I am always very fond of those who guide my soul and since I felt secure, I showed them that I liked them. They, as God-fearing servants of the Lord, were afraid lest in any way I would become attached and bound with this love, even though in a holy way, and they showed me their displeasure. This happened after I became so subject to obeying them, for before that I didn’t experience this love. I laughed to myself to see how mistaken they were.10
It is a source of satisfaction to you that Luisa de la Cerda likewise visits, and often the dignitaries of the Carmelite order, including the provincial father, Ángel de Salazar, come to call. The latter informs you around this time that a new prioress is to be elected at the Convent of the Incarnation; you are free to return there or not, as you please. In such a conundrum, of course, it falls to His Majesty to have the last word, and as usual His Voice promptly comes through. Your ideal superego commands you to leave! By the grace of God, the papal brief so long awaited by doña Guiomar arrives on February 7, 1562: a coincidence, no doubt.
The moment has come to act with even greater celerity than usual, especially in the wake of that long sojourn with Luisa de la Cerda. Not that the interlude was one of pure repose, as we have seen: rather, a flexing of soul sinews before the great leap. It was at her house that you completed the first draft—since lost—of the book of your Life. Enough writing for now! You hasten back to Avila, where trouble awaits, as one might expect after the absence of the foundress.
Juan de Ovalle has fallen prey to double tertian fever, which strengthens the case
for his return to the convent house he and his wife Juana moved out of after Teresa’s departure. But consent is required from the bishop of Avila, don Álvaro de Mendoza. Nothing doing! Such a man cannot conceive of a monastery without money!
“I don’t want penniless nuns,” complains this noble lord to Pedro de Alcántara, summoned to the rescue by Teresa yet again. After writing to Mendoza, the friar has journeyed on mule-back all the way to El Temblío to meet the intransigent bishop face to face.
Alcántara (who was to die on October 18, 1562) must have moved don Álvaro all the same, for the bishop turned up, it seems, at the parlor of the Incarnation. It was up to the foundress to play the charisma card, and Teresa of Jesus dispelled any last doubts he may have had. From that day on, the bishop of Avila, grandee of Spain and of the Church, acted as a staunch and efficient champion of the discalced reform.
As for Pedro de Alcántara, did you intuit the nearness of his death, Teresa? Before seeing the indomitable Franciscan on his way, you, the intermittent anorexic, made a point of rustling up the most delicious dishes for him, recipes inherited from that excellent housewife, doña Beatriz de Ahumada. The Rule strictly forbids the consumption of meat, except for unavoidable reasons of “necessity.” What greater necessity than the entertainment of so dear a friend? An Old Christian saying held that after the Friday fast, the next best certification of Catholic orthodoxy was to tuck into eggs and bacon on the Saturday. The erudite Juan assures me that you would have made him some olla podrida, my lip-licking Teresa: a hearty potpourri of mutton, beef, and bacon with plenty of white cabbage, turnips, onions, and garlic, smothered in spicy coriander, and cumin. One could even throw in the heads and feet of birds! (A bottomless well of knowledge, that Juan.)
I don’t buy it, too over the top, and what about her Marrano background…
“Meat was banned? If you say so.” My Hispanist is trying his best to oblige me. “Well then, La Madre would dish up some caviar. Absolutely! Sturgeon eggs imported from the Black Sea! I swear! Okay, that particular delicacy might not have reached Avila, but Don Quixote…” (Oh, him, I might have known: Juan thinks of nothing else all day long.) He’s off again: “Don Quixote and his sidekick thought nothing of quaffing down at least six skins of wine to lubricate the local caviar made of gray mullet, sea-bass, and chub roe all mashed together.11 Honestly, Sylvia, in those days people all along the north Mediterranean coast were total fans of this confection. It made a change from boring old ham and cheese, pieces of which, and I quote, ‘if they were past gnawing were not past sucking. They also put down a black dainty called, they say, caviar’—cabial in the Spanish—‘and made of the eggs of fish, a great thirst-wakener.’ You see? Verbatim, I assure you!”
Juan preens, he’s got me, bravo, I give in. In fact he’s on my side: “A woman like that, who gets off so jubilantly on her writing, she can’t have been anorexic for long, eh, Doc?”
I say that Teresa may well have enjoyed that black dainty, I like the idea, it suits her. As it suits her friend Alcántara, like black lights in interior castles.
And so it was that Pedro de Alcántara’s last memory of you, my tongue-smacking Teresa, was a “seraphs’ banquet.”
By this point, your staff was eager and ready for the consecration of the first discalced convent. Julián de Ávila would be the chaplain, Gaspar Daza would say the first Mass. Four novices were preparing to receive their habits from Teresa’s own hand: Antonia de Henao, one of Alcántara’s spiritual daughters, who took the religious name of Antonieta of the Holy Spirit; Úrsula de Revilla de Álvarez, of Daza’s circle, who became Ursula of the Holy Angel; a lady-in-waiting of doña Guiomar, María de la Paz, renamed María of the Cross; and the sister of chaplain Julián, María de Ávila, now María of Saint Joseph.
On Saint Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1562, the bells of Saint Joseph pealed out to all of Avila the creation of a “monastery” in obedience to the so-called Primitive Rule. Among those attending the ceremony were Teresa, Daza, Juana Suárez, Inés and Ana de Tapia, Juana and her husband Juan de Ovalle, plus Francisco de Salcedo, the “saintly gentleman” who had “helped in every way.”12 Also present were don Gonzalo de Aranda and, of course, Teresa’s faithful, indispensable, inevitable, noble “sister” and benefactress, Jerónima Guiomar de Ulloa—dressed like a poor person, in accordance with the Primitive Rule.
Yesterday you were so emotional that you vomited before the inaugural Mass. The day before, you were stitching habits, veils, and bonnets. Today, your cup spills over…And yet, on reading your account four centuries later, I find that you’re not easy in your mind, for there are threats looming over the foundation. In the very lap of success you’re still a persecutee, Teresa:
Well, for me it was like being in glory to see the Blessed Sacrament reserved…and to see a work accomplished that I knew was for the service of the Lord and to the honor of the habit of His glorious Mother—for these were my concerns.…
After all was over and about three or four hours had passed, the devil stirred up within me a spiritual battle…He brought doubts to my mind about whether what I had done was wrong; whether I had gone against obedience in having made the foundation without my provincial’s orders.…And all the virtues, and my faith, were then suspended within me without my having the strength to activate any of them or defend myself against so many blows.13
The happiness of August 24, 1562, did not last long. The Incarnation felt betrayed, and anger mounted against Teresa. Her insolence had to be punished. It was a serious error, surely, to seek to undo the Mitigated Rule and go back to total enclosure, penitence, silence, fasting, and bare feet? Positively medieval! That Ahumada woman is not keeping up with the times. Who does she think she is? She has committed a serious fault, clearly, but is it merely “serious,” “more serious,” or “extremely serious”? Does she deserve two strokes of the scourge, or life imprisonment, sorrow, and abstinence forever?
Avila was abuzz with rumors.
Despite fear, distress, and melancholy, those “devils” that embattled you, you held firm, Teresa, His Majesty being duly at His post inside you.
The prioress of the Incarnation, Mother María Cimbrón, orders you to come back “at once” to her monastery. Julián de Ávila, that faithful squire and chaplain, escorts you to the meeting. A veritable tribunal: your sisters don’t mince words. On top of that, the Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar, deals out a “serious reprimand.” Allegedly you “gave scandal to the people” and were “promoting novelties.” What have you to say for yourself? Fortified, once more, by His Majesty’s Voice, you stick to your guns. And like the Machiavellian diplomat you are, you confound your adversaries by feigning to bow to their wishes, my crafty Teresa: “None of what they said caused me any disturbance or grief, although I let on that it did so as not to give the impression that I didn’t take to heart what they said.”14
Father Salazar, as smooth an operator as yourself, is playing a double game: on the esoteric side, he reassures you; on the exoteric side, he pretends to espouse the mood of the institution and the city. “Afterward I spoke to him more freely, and he was very satisfied and promised—if all went well—to give me permission to go there once the city quieted down, for the clamor throughout the whole city was vehement.”15
Formidable measures are taken. The consistory meets with the corregidor (the mayor or highest city authority, representative of the royal power), and leading members of the chapter. It is a Grand Tribunal, practically the Last Judgment! All the participants call for the destruction of your monastery.
Only one member, a presentado of the order of St. Dominic [Fr. Domingo Báñez], although he was opposed (not to the monastery, but to its being poor), said that it wasn’t something that had to be suppressed, that the matter should be considered carefully, that there was time for this, that such a decision pertained to the bishop [Álvaro de Mendoza, bishop of Avila since 1560] and other things of this nature. What he said was very helpful, for they were
so furious that it was a wonder they didn’t carry out their decision straight away.16
The story didn’t end there. Royal constables were sent to Saint Joseph’s to evict the novices manu militari. The girls refused to let them in; not without an order from the one who had brought them here, period! The alguaciles did not dare break down the door.
On August 30 all of Avila’s political authorities gathered together to deliberate, notables side by side with Church delegates, and the hostility was unanimous; some were for appealing to the Council of State, as though the convent threatened the security of the realm.
I can see you from here, Teresa, swaying between your devils and the unfailing Voice of His Majesty, which fortunately proved the stronger: “‘Don’t you know that I am mighty? What do you fear?’”17 Confident in that unswerving Third Person who expresses Himself in your style, as we know, you went on to deal as one must with earthly men, my subtle Teresa. Given that several of these powerful individuals were theologians, it was important to approach them:
Afterward, when the negotiations were on their way toward a settlement, another person, a very zealous servant of God, came to me saying the matter should be put into the hands of learned men. As a result I had many worries. Some of those who were helping me agreed with this proposal; this snarl in the affairs, which was caused by the devil, turned out to be the most complicated tangle of all. The Lord helped me in everything; for in a summary like this you can’t explain all that took place in the two years from the time this house was founded to the time the litigation ended. This last phase and the first were the most laborious.18
Teresa, My Love Page 36