The book that changed St Teresa of Avila’s life
When Teresa of Avila was 23, she stayed overnight on a journey at her uncle Pedro’s house at Hortigosa (20 miles from her home town). There she looked into a book by Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, and it changed her life.
It didn’t change her overnight. It was not so much a “How To” book as a “What” book. The subject was prayer. Teresa had suffered a great deal because the conventional methods of prayer she was taught as a novice depended on setpiece meditations on Gospel scenes and so on. It suited many people well but she found it worse than useless.
Osuna’s book did not tell her how to pray but it informed her that there was such a thing as prayer of contemplation, a kind of mental prayer that certainly required being in the presence of God, and of God incarnate (Jesus Christ), but did not necessarily begin with imagining anything.
Teresa, through years of patient application, became a great contemplative nun in the Carmelite order, driven to found a string of reformed convents to pass on the tradition of prayer.
She has been declared a Doctor of the Church for her command of so-called mystical theology. But it would be a mistake to think of her discoveries in terms of information; they were, in the first place, practical.
Teresa was an accomplished writer and (in the book misleadingly called by others her Life) tried to explain what mystical union with God in prayer was all about. She had to be careful about the Inquisition, which at the time was deeply suspicious of claims about mental prayer. Partly she outwitted them by presenting the persona of a simple unlettered woman; partly she covered herself by formal obedience, writing in response to the demands of her spiritual directors. But she knew what she was about, and if anyone makes sense of the life of prayer she does.
Teresa was born in 1515 and her quincentenary was marked the year before last. Now we are getting the fruits of symposia held then, one of which is a small book Teresa of Avila: Mystical theology in the Carmelite tradition, edited by Peter Tyler and Edward Howells.
Teresa’s mentor in bookform, Francisco de Osuna, was passing on a tradition of mysticism largely founded on that extraordinary figure Dionysius (the Areopagite), or rather the pseudoDionysius, since the author lived in the fifth century, not in St Paul’s day. His reputed identity might have been pseudonymous, but his theology was the real thing.
The impossibility of describing God in positively categorical terms was among Dionysius’s insights. What could be said was often by way of negation: that God is not like the things we see around us.
Professor Tyler counts Teresa among the “affective” followers of Dionysius, as she put the loving will at the heart of conversation with God, rather than the knowing intellect. Osuna (Dr Tyler has discovered) was passing on the approach of Jean Gerson (Chancellor of the University of Paris from 1395, pictured above teaching), who wrote in French, not Latin, to engage non-experts. He saw eros, a kind of love, as the bond between God and human beings.
Dr Howells, the co-editor of this book, emphasises the lack of negativity in Teresa’s writing. She does not regard God as dark and impossible to speak about, rather she denies an easily describable role in prayer to the workings of her own soul.
Her notion of union with God, he declares, puts “the whole soul and body in the divine presence and action, in what must rate as one of the most optimistic, positive anthropologies of human transformation in Christian theology”.