At the beginning of the 21st century it is easy to be patronizing the mystical ecstasies of Teresa of Ávila, also called Jesus (1515-1582). Repressed sexuality? Bad nutrition? The surprise comes when we see that she was the first to be very demanding before accepting a supernatural vision.
Francisco Franco honored her as a "saint of the race", but it is not her fault that the regime wanted to appropriate her legacy. Before 1936, it was not uncommon for people on the left, communists included, to admire her. The unusual thing would have been the opposite, that she responded with silence to a figure of such intellectual power and leadership capacity.
As a reformer of the Carmelite order, she aroused the suspicions of a world of men. Not surprisingly, the papal nuncio called her "restless and wandering woman." Far from the fossilized image transmitted by ultra-conservative Spanishism, feminist historiography has claimed it for ensuring a space where women's creativity could develop. Although she was in closed environments like a cloistered convent.
As a writer, the Carmelite reformer explained her religious experience in the Book of Life, based on the classic scheme of sin-repentance-salvation. In principle, she had to follow a mandate from her religious superiors. However, hers was not a strict act of discipline, because she took the opportunity to apologize for her mystical experiences.
From a secular mentality, it is easy to attribute them to the manifestation of a repressed sexuality. That was what the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan did, for example, when he identified his ecstasy with an orgasm. Before, Sigmund Freud had already defined her as the "patron saint of hysteria".
The hypothetical link between mysticism and sexuality is controversial terrain, not to say swampy. The historians Rosa María Alabrús and Ricardo García Cárcel are right to point out that, in this field, it is difficult to distinguish “what is seriously scientific from what is pure media publicity”.
Actually, we are dealing with a woman who tries to express what by nature is inexpressible. That is why she needs metaphors, the only way to give an approximate idea of what she feels. Giving an account of her mystical experience requires her to use a language that the uninformed reader can confuse with simple eroticism.
Teresa, far from the stereotypes, was not an exalted fan. She wasn't naive enough to take any vision for reality, although she didn't agree with her systematic rejection either. In her opinion, the best thing was to communicate the possible supernatural grace to the confessor and learn to distinguish the true from the false.
Because a mystical outburst could actually be a hallucination caused by excessive penance. For this reason, when she finds out about a case like this, the first thing she advises is that the protagonist stop excesses and return to normal life: “I told her what I understood and how it was to waste time and impossible to be rapture, but weakness; that she take away her fasts and disciplines and make her have fun ”.
The nun in question, who did not belong to Carmel, but to the order of the Bernardas, followed this advice. She recovered immediately and her visions did not appear again: "Since a little while she was gaining strength, there was no memory of rapture."
The confusions, therefore, could be avoided if the nuns enjoyed good health, without indulging in excesses when fasting or depriving themselves of sleep. Teresa, like other Christians of her time, tried to follow a middle path in matters of asceticism. Not too little and not too much. She liked holiness, not self-righteousness. It was not a matter of falling into the naiveté of taking anything, at the first opportunity, for a supernatural contact: "So it is necessary that for every little thing that strikes us, we do not think about vision afterwards."
Therefore, to live a serious and profound spirituality, the nuns needed to avoid certain dangers. Only then would they avoid seeing what was only in their imagination. In the event that the religious went through a stage of depression, the precautions should be even stricter. Sadness, in this type of matter, was never a good adviser: "Where there is some melancholy, much more notice is necessary." The good nun, on the other hand, had to stay cheerful and face life with courage, without fear of any of life's events and neither of death.
The body had to be mortified, but without falling into arbitrariness or stupidity: suffering should not be gratuitous, but be oriented towards a spiritual end, the approach to God. For this reason, Teresa de Ávila was outraged when she found out that the prioress of Malagón slapped other nuns. Because this and other practices did not lead to anything, unless it was an unhealthy complacency with pain.
Undoubtedly, she was more sensitive to this type of deviation because she herself, when she was a novice, had undergone penances that had broken her health. The search for God, in her case, is not incompatible with joy. She wants her nuns to laugh, sing, to participate in poetry contests.
In The Path to Perfection, the Carmelite leader offers a guide for religious life. On the other hand, she documents her adventures as a convent initiator in The Book of Foundations, a work that has captivated critics for its entertainingness and fine humor. In Las moradas, her masterpiece, she talks about the path of the soul towards union with God. Nor should we forget, obviously, her mystical poetry, with verses as memorable as "I live without living in myself."
Compared to his major works, his correspondence, the close to five hundred letters that have been preserved, has received less attention. But it is in them that he expresses himself more freely and reflects on his daily life: if he was happy or sad, what pleased him and what disappointed him, who he admired, who he could not swallow.
The letters convey to us a wealth of feelings that make up a transgressive psychology. Because, in contrast to the prevailing stereotypes, which prescribed seriousness as the proper state of good religious, excluding humor because it was frivolous, she does not hesitate to laugh or make people laugh, a particularly wise method to de-dramatize adverse situations, such as the threat of the Holy Office.
Teresa de Ávila is a woman who is not afraid to bring her emotions to light. She also knows how to be tender when the usual, at the time, was the opposite, because her affection was understood as a sign of weakness.
