She could not help herself, and, since she was given to the most meticulous accuracy in all matters, even to a painful parenthetical extent, for ever checking, qualifying, apologising, correcting, modifying, it may be taken that she set down nothing she did not really believe. For one thing, her natural and searching honesty apart, she would have been afraid to do so; she was writing by the specific order of her confessor and for his eye alone; indeed, she enjoins secrecy upon him, almost as though she were speaking under the seal of the confessional: he may publish the recital of her sins as an advertisement to others, that they may not think her better than she is, but she will give him no leave to publish the rest, nor, if it be shown to anyone, will she consent to the name of the author being revealed. On the whole, if what she writes is not correct, let him destroy it. At best, it is very difficult for her to write at all, for she is living in a very poor house and has many things to do; her writing hinders her from spinning; she can write only little at a time and wishes she had more leisure, for when a writer is in the mood (or, as she puts it, when our Lord gives the spirit) it is easier and better done; it is then as with a person working embroidery with the pattern before her, but when the spirit is wanting, i.e. when inspiration is lacking, there is no more meaning in words than in gibberish.fn3 No one understood better than St. Teresa this inconvenient peculiarity of the artist, and her experiences in this matter might profitably be included in any study on the subject of inspiration. “I see clearly that it is not I who speak, nor is it I who with her understanding has arranged it; and afterwards I do not know how I came to speak so accurately. It has often happened to me thus.”
To return. That Teresa’s beliefs should seem to us incredible is beside the point. That she was no ignorant peasant, ready to be scared by any tale of superstition, but a woman of breeding and some culture, accustomed to the society of learned men, is irrelevant also, since her associates naturally shared her own convictions. The point is that she held those beliefs as a daughter of her country and her century. She held them to such an extent that they drove her step by step into a life she did not desire. She literally frightened herself into a convent; it was “the safest,” the most secure. The intimations of love were there too, but they were very weak and spasmodic; their full revelation was to come much later. The fear from which she suffered, and its concreteness, can be realised only through her own descriptions, explain them as we may. The Devil, his personal appearance, his abode, and his wiles were very real to her; she speaks of his intrigues as of a mischievous person she might have known in the world, almost in a matter-of-fact, taken-for-granted way; his mischief is to do all in his power to steal souls from God, with so much subtlety and ingenuity and disguise that it is necessary to be continually on guard; had she been acquainted with the word and art of camouflage she, who liked realistic similes, would certainly have used it in illustration of his designs. The most innocent and even elevated symptoms of grace must be suspect lest they proceed from the evil realms. He works like a file, secretly and silently wearing its way; he would turn Hell upside down a thousand times to make us think ourselves better than we are. You think you have attained humility and other virtues? oh no, they are sham virtues springing from the evil root, accompanied by a vainglory never found in those of divine origin. He can affect you even by means of things so trivial that you would laugh at them at any other time; he can make the soul stumble over anything he likes, lays it in fetters, makes it lose all control over itself and all power of thinking of anything but the absurdities he puts before it. Then, the devils make a ball of the soul (jugando a la pelota), and it is unable to escape out of their hands. And as for his personal appearance, let Teresa continue to speak for herself: she was once in an oratory when Satan in an abominable shape appeared at her left hand. She looked at his mouth in particular because he was speaking to her, and it was frightful (espantable). A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow. He spoke to her in a fearful way, saying that although she had escaped out of his hands he would yet lay hold of her again. In great terror she made the sign of the cross, when the form vanished, only to reappear instantly. Not knowing what to do, she took some holy water and threw it in the direction of the figure which then vanished without return.
Nor was this all. On another occasion she saw “a frightful little negro” gnashing his teeth in despair at losing what he attempted to seize. Teresa, who was meanwhile in great pain and violently shaken in the body, arms, and head, derided him and had no fear; her only fear was lest those who were with her should notice and be afraid. She must have been a disquieting housemate and companion, for these perturbations came upon her without the slightest warning. At last, as her pain could not be relieved, she told them that if they would not laugh at her she would ask for some holy water. They brought it, and with her own hand she threw some in the direction of the negro, who fled in a moment and all her sufferings with him, except that she was tired and felt as though she had been beaten with many blows. Holy water, to her thinking, was of greater efficacy even than the sign of the cross, which dismissed evil spirits but did not preclude their return; holy water, however, sent them away for good. Upon her own soul it had a most refreshing effect, and this was no fancy, for she had watched it very carefully, and several times had put it to the test. Undoubtedly there was a great difference between holy water and water that had never been blessed.
By the same means she abolished Satan who had put himself on her open Breviary, to prevent her finishing her prayers; this time she saw also some souls coming out of Purgatory, and thought that Satan must have been trying to hinder their deliverance. Another time she saw a great fight between evil spirits and angels; and yet again a great multitude of evil spirits all round her, from whom she was preserved by an enveloping light. She learned, however, that after holy water there was nothing the Devil disliked so much as contempt, and that every time she was able to despise these terrors their force lessened and the soul gained corresponding power. To this end, she sometimes addressed him as “Goose.”
Sometimes he appeared multiplied, as when she saw a dead body in a winding sheet, tossed to and fro by devils who also dragged it about with great hooks. She was so frightened as to be almost out of her senses at the sight and it required no slight courage on her part not to betray her distress. Another time she saw two devils with their horns fitted round the throat of a priest bearing the Host. She was pleased, however, when one day she saw a devil quite near her in a great rage, tearing to pieces some paper which he had in his hands, for then she knew that her prayer for the repentance of a certain person had been granted. It was less pleasing when the Devil pushed her with such violence that she struck her head and body against the wall.
And if the Devil, or his envoys, could manifest themselves with such precision, the same might be said of the place from whence they came. Teresa’s vision of Hell was topographical in its exactitude. She was one day in prayer when she found herself, without knowing how, plunged apparently into the infernal regions. The entrance was by a long, narrow pass (callejon) like a furnace, very low and dark and close; the ground saturated with water and mud, exceedingly foul, sending forth pestilential odours and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end was a hollow place in the wall like a cupboard, and in that she saw herself confined. She could neither sit nor lie down, there was no room; there was no light, only thick darkness. But all that was pleasant to behold in comparison with what she felt while she was there. She had read, she said, of the diverse tortures and how the devils tore the flesh with red-hot pincers, but all this was a wholly different matter. She is anxious, as always, to emphasise that her vision is real, original, and actual, not subjectively derived from anything she has heard or read, and moreover she explains in another place that her deliberate imagination was so sluggish, she never could picture even our Lord’s humanity, however hard she might labour. Her corporeal body, indeed, was racked by unendurable sufferings—and
she knew something of physical pain; her own physicians had told her that the contraction of her sinews when she was paralysed was the greatest that could be borne—but even this was nothing to the spiritual torment she endured. She could not see how to describe it, save by saying that she felt a fire in her soul. It was not even as though her soul were being torn from her body, for that would imply the destruction of life by the hands of another; no, in Hell it is the soul itself that tears itself in pieces, with an inward fire surpassing all torments and all pain. It lasted but a moment, but it seemed to her impossible that she should ever forget it, even if she were to live many years, and the terror of that vision was so greatly upon her as she set it down on paper six years later that the natural warmth of her body was chilled even as she wrote.fn4
It would become tedious to enumerate the constant visions to which Teresa was unwillingly subjected, but without at least indicating them it is impossible to form any picture or estimate of what went on in that troubled mind. Some of these visions, for all her denial of the subjectivity of her visions in general, can naturally be traced to the things she knew or had heard about. Thus when she sees herself on a wide plain alone, surrounded by a multitude of people armed with spears, swords, daggers, and long rapiers; or sees men fighting on a plain, their faces beautiful and as it were on fire, it is not necessary to look further than the stony uplands of Castile or to remember anything beyond the romances of mediaeval combat.
VI
IT IS TRUE that these particular experiences, and many others with which she would not trouble her confessor, took place several years after she had entered her second convent, of the Encarnacion, but, even in anticipation, they serve to reveal the stuff of which her fears were made. Ill-health and its consequences came also to hasten her steps towards the cloister. No doubt modern medical knowledge and also modern studies in psychology would supply their own interpretation to explain many of the complicated inter-reactions between Teresa’s physical and mental states, and no doubt much of it would be enlightening even if only partially true. There is still something which eludes the scientific explanation, and still something which eludes the historical explanation too, of the age she lived in, the fanatical Spain of the Inquisition when heresy was the Devil’s direct work and the laceration of the flesh of no account compared with the danger to the soul.
Illness drove her from Sta Maria de Gracia, first back to her father’s house and then to convalesce in the country house of her sister at Castellanos de la Cañada, about two days’ ride from Avila. Both her sister and her brother-in-law had so great an affection for Teresa that they wished to keep her always with them; but on the road she had broken her journey to stay with an uncle, a most excellent man whose conversation and reading made an important impression upon her uneasy mind. He made her read aloud to him, and although she “did not much like” his books, she characteristically pretended to enjoy them, for it had always been her practice to please others. The good books and the elevated conversation did their work, for God against her own will constrained her to do violence to herself, and three months of struggle (batalla) followed as a direct result of this short sojourn in the feudal and arcaded manor-house among the scrub-oak and pines of Hortigosa.
Shortly after her return home, Teresa informed her father of her decision to enter a convent. She was his favourite child, and the announcement was ill received. It therefore became necessary for her to run away again, which she did with greater effect than had resulted from her previous escapade. Once more she enlisted one of her brothers as an accomplice, and, what is more, prevailed upon him to become a friar at the same time. It was not without sorrow that she left her father’s house very early in the morning; indeed, she could not believe that the pain of dying would be greater, for it seemed to her as if every bone in her body were wrenched asunder, and, as she had no love for God to destroy her love for her father and kindred, this latter love came upon her with great violence. She thought more, however, of the salvation of her soul, and in this manner her strangely reluctant resolution was finally accomplished.
Finally, yes, but not without breaks and interruptions. During her time of struggle the Devil had already suggested as a deterrent that her health might not stand the strain and privations of the monastic life, a suggestion which proved to be perfectly correct. She had not been for quite two years in the Encarnacion when, although already a professed nun, her fainting-fits and heart-attacks became so frequent and alarming that she was removed first to her sister’s country house and then to the village of Becedas, where she was subjected to the excruciating mediaeval treatment of a curandera or medicine-woman, renowned in Castile for her cures but worse than powerless to bring any help to Teresa. The patient herself thought the treatment too severe for her constitution. This was putting it mildly, for after two months she felt her life to be nearly worn out; the pain in her heart was such that it seemed to be seized by sharp teeth and it was feared that the torment might end in madness. She could neither sleep nor eat, only drink; she was never without fever, and so reduced owing to the violent purgatives they had given her daily, that her sinews began to shrink and she was in pain from her head down to her feet. Her physicians, when at last her father removed her from the curandera and took her back to Avila, declared that the pain from her shrunken nerves must be intolerable; but despite their sympathy they could do nothing for her; came to the conclusion that she must be consumptive, and gave her up as beyond their skill.
A frightful crisis followed. For four whole days she remained in a state of insensibility; the sacrament of Extreme Unction was administered; and “they did nothing but repeat the Credo, as if I could have understood anything they said.” The friars at a neighbouring monastery recited the funeral solemnities; a grave was dug at the Encarnacion ready to receive her body and some nuns were actually sent to fetch her away for burial. It is said that her brother, left to keep vigil one night over his supposedly dead sister, fell asleep and overturned a candle, setting fire to the bed clothes, but even this failed to rouse her. They certainly regarded her as dead, for when she finally revived at the end of the four days she had the unusual experience of finding that her eyelids had been sealed with wax. Fortunately her father alone remained obstinate, keeping his finger on her pulse (que sabia mucho de pulso) and insisting that his daughter was not yet for the sepulchre.
But when she did come to her senses, in what a terrible condition did she find herself! She had bitten her tongue to pieces; there was such a choking in her throat that she could not swallow even a drop of water; her bones all seemed to be out of joint and the disorder in her head extreme. She was “bent together like a coil of ropes,” unable to move either arm or foot or hand or head unless others moved her, and this they had to do suspending her in a sheet, one holding one end and another the other, for she was so bruised (lastimada) that she could not endure to be touched. If no one came near her, her pain sometimes ceased and gave her a little rest, though even so it would return during the cold fits of a violent and intermittent fever.
In this condition she had herself carried back to her convent, where “they received alive one whom they had waited for as dead.” Her body, she says, was worse than dead, and the sight of it could only give pain, for it was nothing but bones. For three years she remained semi-paralysed, thankful to God when she could begin to crawl about on her hands and knees. It is a shocking contrast with the plump, carefree, vivacious girl in her orange and black velvet frock who had diverted herself so effectively with her cousins in the palace of her youth. Yet, even now, she was only twenty-four.
The question of course arises in the mind: what really ailed her? What malady or maladies produced these fearful effects of emaciation, insensibility, paralysis, cardiac agony, fever, and pains in the head which often drove her to distraction? To what extent were her disorders physical or pathological? Were they due to a combination of genuine physical infirmity aggravated by the nervous tension of her most peculiar tempera
ment? The truth probably lies in this hypothesis. The mental and the physical are in some cases inexplicably mixed up; inexplicably, that is, to the incomplete attainments of our so-far knowledge. Are we perhaps putting the cart before the horse in ascribing the mental disturbance to physical causes, and would it not be truer to say that a mental composition of such excessive sensibility produced so severe a strain that the body inevitably paid? Or was it that a low physical resistance impaired the control and balance of the mind? Impaired is perhaps not the right word, since the spiritual gain of such unspeakable benefit could not be purchased at too high a price.
Furthermore, it must be emphasised that Teresa was not at all the type of malade imaginaire. On the contrary she was exasperated by her ill health and by the interruption it brought to whatever matter she might have in hand. She neither desired it nor gloried in it, any more than she desired her raptures or gloried in them except in so far as she welcomed them as a grace from God. In her sensible way she would not despise the remedy of medicine, “I never fail to take that which I see to be necessary for me. May our Lord grant that I do not take more than is necessary—I am afraid I do.” Yet in spite of this concession, she disregarded her infirmities as far as possible, and even practised a kind of Christian Science of her own: “My health has been much better since I have ceased to look after my ease and comforts. It is of great importance not to let our thoughts frighten us in the beginning. Believe me in this, for I know it by experience.” That is not the language of hysteria, a subject on which she had many tart and rational things to say when she observed its occurrence in other people. But it is interesting nevertheless to make out the formidable list of complaints from which she chronically suffered. There were those already mentioned: the paralysis, the fainting-fits, the prolonged insensibility, the constant fever, the pains in the heart. In addition to this, she sometimes trembled uncontrollably from head to foot; she endured daily sickness which she had to “bring on with a feather” to reduce the pain; quinsy and sore throats; and, above all, intense headaches and chronic noises in the head which sometimes made it impossible for her to write and which she describes as “a number of rushing waterfalls within my brain, while in other parts, drowned by the noise of the waters, are the voices of birds singing and whistling.” It does not sound too unpleasant, but it occasioned Teresa great distress. She was convinced, however, that her raptures improved her bodily condition, a conclusion she came to after careful study—“I do not think that it is fancy, for I have considered the matter and reflected on it.”
The Eagle and the Dove Page 4