Searches, interrogations; are you about to be arrested, Madre? A vehicle belonging to the Inquisition is stationed before the door of your convent in Seville. But only a deposition is required, which you will send to the Jesuit Rodrigo Álvarez, the acknowledged expert in matters of delusion and error.
But you, skillful Teresa, not only bewitch your world with the grace of a writing that thrills us today, four centuries after the tempest; you also carry out a veritable plan of military encirclement! First, you present a long list of ecclesiastics prepared to testify to your good faith: Fr. Araoz, the Jesuit commissary; Fr. Francisco de Borja, the former duke of Gandía; and numerous others. Then comes the epistolary race, the gallop of letters:
tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo
tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo
tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval
tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo
tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo
Humbly you confess your penchant for mental prayer in the wake of Pedro de Alcántara and Juan de Ávila, well aware that that’s your major transgression in the eyes of the authorities. You swiftly move on to reference the many illustrious scholars who helped you protect yourself from this unconscionable error, Dominicans this time, necessarily; chief among them the councilor of the Holy Office at Valladolid, the ubiquitous Domingo Báñez.
But don’t expect to get out of trouble so easily. The investigation has only just begun. You are summoned again—to justify your ecstasies! Kindly provide a new deposition!
You’re enjoying this gallop of writing, after the race of the roads. Here’s how you sum up that phase of the adventure in a missive to María Bautista, on February 19, 1576: “Jesus be with you, daughter. I wanted to be in a more restful state when writing to you. For all that I have just read and written amazes me in that I was able to do it, and so I’ve decided to be brief. Please God I can be.”39
Of course, it pleases Him to fulfill your every wish. His Majesty is hand in glove with you, His Voice speaks through your lips, as you don’t fail to remind us. And you’re capable of convincing anyone who takes the time to listen. Indeed, the wind is momentarily turning to your advantage. How could even the wind resist your galloping?
A new house is purchased, the recalcitrant Franciscans eventually come around, they didn’t want you in the neighborhood, poor things, and now they do.
Teresa is triumphant. She leaves Seville, where María de San José takes over as prioress. Before departing she sits for Fr. Mariano’s painter friend, Giovanni Narducci, now Juan de la Miseria. Writing to Mariano on May 9, 1576, she sounds elated, hopping gaily from one topic to the next, as if the Sevillean ordeal had been nothing but fun and games, a period of ebullient agitation:
The house is such that the sisters never cease thanking God. May He be blessed for everything.…This is not the time to be making visitations, for [the friars] are very agitated.…Oh, the lies they circulate down here! It’s enough to make you faint.…Nonetheless I fear these things from Rome, for I remember the past, even though I do not think they will be to our harm but to our advantage.…We are receiving many compliments and the neighbors are jubilant. I would like to see our discalced affairs brought to a conclusion, for after all the Lord won’t put up with those other friars much longer; so many misfortunes will have to have an ending.40
Prior to departure, after kneeling before the archbishop to be blessed, Teresa cannot believe her eyes and ears when the same archbishop, don Cristóbal de Rojas, the source of so many vexations, kneels in turn before her and asks for her blessing. It is June 3, 1576.
1576–1577. Enjoying the mild climate of Toledo, housed in a pleasant cell, you receive from Lorenzo the manuscript of the Foundations you had left at Saint Joseph’s and continue composing your text. The updates concern Gratian, the calced and the discalced, your idea of creating a special province of the Carmelite order with Gratian as the provincial, a project you already mooted in your letter to Philip II. Separately you draw out the political lessons of past experience, from the Incarnation to Seville. Firstly, it is important to consolidate the temporal sphere by a “government” that is temperate and yet clearly hierarchical, in order to advance the spiritual good: “It seems an inappropriate thing to begin with temporal matters. Yet I think that these are most important for the promotion of the spiritual good.”41
Respect for hierarchy is essential from your point of view as foundress, especially among women who are duty-bound to acknowledge their chief, that is, yourself:
I don’t believe there is anything in the world that harms a visitator as much as does being unfeared and allowing subjects to deal with him as an equal. This is true especially in the case of women. Once they know the visitator is so soft that he will pass over their faults and change his mind so as not to sadden them, he will have great difficulty in governing them.42
Is that because obedience is harder for a woman? For a woman like you?
“I confess, first of all, my imperfect obedience at the outset of this writing. Even though I desire the virtue of obedience more than anything else, beginning this work has been the greatest mortification for me, and I have felt a strong repugnance toward doing so.”43
Be this as it may, the works are multiplying. You maintain a prolific correspondence (200 letters up to 1580), dispense advice of all sorts, circulate The Way of Perfection and keep an eye on its reception. In 1577 you begin The Interior Castle—a metapsychology avant la lettre, the quintessence of your journey toward the Spouse and ultimate nuptials with Him. Nothing is left to chance, and all these works are created while managing in hands-on fashion the establishment and staff of twelve nunneries, without neglecting the affairs of the male counterparts founded in accordance with your new-old Rule.
You have the gift of asserting your authority without dispelling good cheer, your own or that of others. Witness that sparkling vejamen, also from 1577—a response known as the Satirical Critique, mixing faux pedantry with schoolboy humor, to a solemn colloquium held in your absence in the parlor at Saint Joseph’s in Avila. You had requested Julián de Ávila, Francisco de Salcedo, John of the Cross, and your brother Lorenzo de Cepeda to reflect on those words the Lord once spoke to you, “Seek yourself in Me.” Once the bishop who was also present had arranged for the various speeches to be sent to you in Toledo, you replied with the jovial irony of one who had just escaped the clutches of the Holy Office: “I ask God to give me the grace not to say anything that might merit being denounced to the Inquisition.”44 And you then proceeded to mercilessly tease each of your friends for their contributions; we shall reread these remarks once you have passed away.
I have a notion that the months from July 1576 to December 1577 constitute the most luminous period of your later life. You are given over to writing, elucidating, and transmitting. You don’t have much longer to live, but for the present, time has ripened: you experience it fully, soberly, and laughingly.
The papal nuncio who championed your reforms, Nicolás Ormaneto, has died. You leave for Saint Joseph in Avila; could it turn out to be a definitive “prison”? Your fevered race repudiates such a thought. Let’s wait and see.
The new nuncio, Felipe Sega, bishop of Piacenza, loathes the discalced movement and brands you a “vagabond and a rebel.” Accusations rain down once more on Gratian, relating to his licentious ways with women. That’s the situation, and nothing’s going to change: Gratian needs your protection more than you need his presence or his affection. Another letter to His Royal Majesty is called for. You write and sign it on December 13, 1577.
All is not well at the Incarnation, either. On the order of Gerónimo Tostado, vicar-general of the Carmelites in Spain, the calced provincial Juan Gutiérrez de la Magdalena arrives to preside over the election for prioress. He threatens to excommunicate anyone who votes for you.
Such is the frayed atmosphere in which you continue exploring the Dwelling Places of The Interior Castle, that masterpiece of introspective analysi
s. Yet the work is completed on November 29, 1577, in less than six months. However did you do it, Teresa?
“Hosts of demons have joined against the discalced friars and nuns,” you complain to your friend Gaspar de Salazar on December 7.45 Matters reach such a pass that John of the Cross and a close associate, Germán de San Matías, are taken captive by Gutiérrez. Where to turn, when the general of the order and the nuncio are both ranged against you? To your pen, Madre!
For the fourth time you write to Philip II, outlining the conflict between the two rules and pleading on behalf of John of the Cross, for “this one friar who is so great a servant of God is so weak from all he has suffered that I fear for his life. I beg Your Majesty for the love of our Lord to issue orders for them to set him free at once and that these poor discalced friars not be subjected to so much suffering by the friars of the cloth.”46
Absorbed in founding, in writing, in Gratian, have you not rather neglected your “little Seneca”? Is he too ascetic for you, too saintly in his inhuman self-mortification, too inaccessible in his elliptical purity? Are you feeling guilty, Teresa? It’s time to make amends! Between you and me, John deserves salvation more than Gratian. But you’ll save both of them, my future Saint Teresa.
Christmas Eve, 1577. Teresa falls down the stairs and breaks her arm. The traveler is getting old. Her morale is as solid as ever, but her bones are getting brittle.
Don Teutonio de Braganza, appointed to the archbishopric of Evora in Portugal, who was a Jesuit from 1549 to 1554 and knew Loyola in Rome, asks you to make a foundation in his city. Alas, it’s impossible. Your reforms are under threat in Spain, and there’s still many a road to be galloped down in your native country; it’s no time to be going abroad. But can his lordship do something for Gratian, perhaps, and for John of the Cross? The latter “is considered a saint by everyone…In my opinion, he is a gem.”47
Her arm in a sling, the aging Teresa can still write. A deluge of diplomacy, of piety, of courage and craftiness will come to drench everyone who has the honor of knowing her, closely or from afar.
But where is John being kept? Rumor has it that Germán, his companion in misfortune, is coughing up blood, and that John has been sent away, but where, where? Doña Guiomar, a saintly lady and unswervingly loyal, can’t stop crying. Is Gratian really doing everything in his power to have John released? You feel that the apostolic visitator, the much-cherished Eliseus-Paul-Pablo, has hardly noticed John’s absence: Might people be put off by that odd brand of sanctity that aspires above all to self-annulment? “I am shocked by the imprisonment of Fray John of the Cross and the slow pace of all our negotiations.”48
That’s the problem, Gratian is too slow. Whereas sanctity is speed, and John is the swiftest of us all, the most condensed; and in consequence the most unfindable, the one who escapes us, is always already beyond us.
I tell you I am certain that if some influential person were to ask the nuncio to have Fray John set free, he would at once give orders that he be returned to his house. It would be enough to tell the nuncio about this father and how he is kept in prison unjustly. I don’t know what is happening that no one ever remembers this saint. If Mariano were to speak to the Princess of Eboli, she would intercede with the nuncio.49
Precisely because he is like lightning, gentle John didn’t need help from anybody in the end. He’s escaped on his own from the prison of the order, in Toledo, where he had languished for nine months in a dungeon so cramped that even he could not stand up in it, body and soul compacted in that Nothingness that stands him in lieu of sanctity. He’s taken refuge with the Discalced Carmelites. Will he be safe from persecution there? Teresa is vigilant, leaves on a trip, keeps watch again, goes off on a tangent, follows her own path.…
Even the Society of Jesus becomes infected by the climate of suspicion, and the friars are divided; repression smites Teresa’s Jesuit allies. Baltasar Álvarez, who defended Teresa at the time of her first raptures, is charged with “wasting his time among women and chiefly Carmelites,” instead of following Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises to the letter. He will be sanctioned.50 Gaspar de Salazar, another Jesuit who wants to join the discalced friars, becomes the target of malign insinuations relating to Teresa. In a curt letter to Fr. Juan Suárez, the Jesuit principal, in February 1578, La Madre goes bravely out on a limb to defend her right to “friendship,” however misunderstood:
I will never deny the great friendship that exists between Padre Salazar and me or the favor he shows me. Yet I am certain that in what he has done for me he has been moved more by the service it renders our Lord and our Blessed Mother than by any friendship. Truly, I think it has even happened that as much as two years went by without a letter passing between us. If the friendship is an old one, it is because in the past I was in greater need of help, for this order only had two discalced Fathers. At that time I would have had a greater motive for wanting him to transfer than I do now. Thanks be to God we have more than two hundred, I think, and among them not a few who are especially suited for our poor manner of life. I have never thought that the hand of God would be more sparing toward his Mother’s order than to the other orders.51
March 15, 1578. The Inquisition arrests Juan Calvo de Padilla, who had often lent a hand in the management of Teresa’s convents and whom she had recommended to King Philip in 1573.
Events continue to accelerate, in contradictory ways.
The nuncio issues a brief to strip Gratian of all his powers.
On August 14, Roque de la Huerta, one of Philip’s right-hand men, announces that on the ninth the king promulgated a counter-brief: Gratian retains his functions as a visitator.
It is vital not to take sides between pope and king, you know that better than anyone, my careful Teresa; it’s all about wriggling through…with rectitude; above all one should not bristle, act “foolishly,” or indulge in gloomy “prophesying,” like dear Gratian is prone to do. In love, but not blindly, La Madre is frank with her Eliseus in a letter written at the end of August 1578.52 To any purpose, one wonders?
The worries don’t let up. The discalced convent at Almodóvar holds its second general chapter: La Madre is furious, what a moment to choose, it’s crazy! In Gratian’s absence, old Antonio de Jesús is elected. John of the Cross is sent, or should we say banished, to El Calvario, near Beas. The discalced communities are placed under the baton of communities of the cloth; Gratian’s punishment requires him to retire to Alcalá. There’s a rumor that he plans to defect to another order, in disgust. Will he abandon Teresa? To cap it all, the calced friars march into Saint Joseph’s accompanied by policemen and lawyers to oversee the handover.
The situation in Seville is even worse. The provincial appointed by the nuncio Felipe Sega starts defamatory proceedings against Gratian, while the prioress María de San José is replaced by Beatriz de Chávez, who spreads all sorts of slander against the discalced nuns and is completely under the thumb of Diego de Cárdenas, the provincial of the cloth in Andalusia.
Has the galloping switched sides? The adversaries are the ones charging forward now: Teresa’s clan is badly weakened, and it’s all it can do to resist. But she does not give up, just adapts her ammunition. Ever carriers of His Majesty’s Voice, her letters increasingly do the work, in place of mules and stagecoaches.
January 31, 1579. A trustworthy friend, the octogenarian Hernando de Pantoja, asks Teresa to vouch for the moral propriety of her nuns and to deny all those stories of extravagant mortifications at Seville. Can it be true that they hang sisters from the ceiling to flog them? Outraged, the fundadora hastens to reject all such lies and accompanies her indignant response with an open letter to the “Discalced Carmelite nuns, Seville” designed to share this defense of her order’s holy, wholesome lifestyle with the community concerned.53
Either Teresa’s epistolary battle was beginning to bear fruit, or the king’s reformist zeal was exerting its irresistible effect on the course of events. Personally I feel sure that w
hat weighed heaviest in the balance of history was your graphic pressure, my single-minded Teresa. Philip II appointed the Dominican Pedro Fernández, a veteran of the discalced cause, as a counselor to the papal nuncio. Gratian and María de San José were rehabilitated. And yet Teresa never regained her trust in this eccentric woman, María; was it a question of female rivalries, stirred up by the slippery Gratian? We shall keep an eye on that. Teresa sent a new friend of hers, the Genoese banker Nicolo Doria, to call on the prioress in Seville and get her to acknowledge her mistakes. An educator and a politician underlay the businesswoman and the mystic. Could it all be one and the same person?
1580–1581. High time to be back on the road, after two years’ immobility. Her traveling companion is Ana de San Bartolomé, acting as both nurse and secretary. First they visit Valladolid, then Malagón, where the convent projected since 1568 can at last be made reality in a new, harmonious, simple space. After that, a new foundation at Villanueva de la Jara. On the way back, they stop, with Gratian, in that fateful Toledo where the cardinal archbishop, don Gaspar de Quiroga (painted by El Greco as the grand inquisitor general), grants Teresa permission to take back The Book of Her Life, something forbidden until now. The “Great Angel,” as he is dubbed, addresses the Mother in these terms:
I am glad to make your acquaintance. I have long desired to do so. You have in me a friend who is ready to help you in your undertakings. Some years ago, one of your books was submitted to the Inquisition; the material was most rigorously examined. I myself read it from beginning to end. You expound very solid arguments there, of great profit to readers. You may have it collected whenever you wish; you may do as you like with it; I hereby grant permission. Pray for me.54
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