Teresa of Ávila Reforms Carmel

Teresa of Ávila was a Carmelite nun at Ávila (Teresa, Foundations prologue 2 (p. 2)) (Teresa, Life 36.27–31). She writes that her convent kept the rule of the order as relaxed by a papal bull of mitigation, that the house was large and comfortable, and that the nuns often left it to stay elsewhere (Teresa, Life 32.12). She tells of a vision of the place prepared for her in hell, which left her distressed at the loss of souls, “especially of the Lutherans”, and resolved to keep her rule as perfectly as she could (Teresa, Life 32.1–11). A companion suggested that they found a small convent like those of the barefoot orders, and Teresa reports that after communion the Lord commanded her to work for it and said that it should be called St Joseph’s (Teresa, Life 32.13–14).

The plan was mocked in the town and resisted in her own convent, and the Carmelite provincial withdrew his consent (Teresa, Life 32.17–18). A brief authorising the house came from Rome, Teresa placed it under the bishop, and on St Bartholomew’s Day 1562 the first sisters took the habit (Teresa, Life 36.1–6). Within days the city council resolved that the convent must be closed, and a lawsuit followed; Teresa in the end refused the compromise of an endowment (Teresa, Life 36.14–21). The house was to hold no more than thirteen nuns, living on alms. They kept the Carmelite rule in the form given in 1248, never eating meat except in need and fasting eight months of the year (Teresa, Life 36.27–31).

Teresa went on to found other convents, seven more by 1573 (Teresa, Foundations prologue 2 (p. 2)). The general of the order also gave her licence for two houses of friars under the same rule (Teresa, Foundations 2.4–6 (pp. 16–17)). At Medina del Campo she met a young friar, John of the Cross, who was thinking of joining the Carthusians, and persuaded him to wait for her foundation (Teresa, Foundations 3.16 (pp. 30–31)). The friars’ first house was in a small hamlet, which her editors identify as Duruelo, and the first mass was said there in Advent 1568 (Teresa, Foundations 13.2 and 14.5 (pp. 106, 111)).

The reform divided the order. In December 1577 Teresa wrote to Philip II that friars of the old observance had seized the two confessors of the reform who served the convent of the Incarnation at Ávila and were holding them prisoner (Teresa, Letters to Philip II, 4 December 1577 (vol. 3, pp. 3–5)). The next year she wrote that John had been kept nine months in a cell hardly large enough to hold him before he escaped (Teresa, Letters to Father Gracián, August 1578 (vol. 3, pp. 147–148)).

Both left writings on prayer. Teresa’s Interior Castle, written in 1577, pictures the soul as a castle of crystal with many rooms, entered by the gate of prayer, with God in the innermost chamber (Teresa, Interior Castle preface; First Mansions 1.2–4, 9). John’s Dark Night comments on his own poem and describes two purgations, of the senses and of the spirit, on the way to union with God (John of the Cross, Dark Night prologue; 1.8).