TERESA: A WOMAN
A Biography of Teresa de Avila
Victoria Lincoln
Albany, New York: State University of New York Press
425 pp. $14.95 pb., $39.50 hb.
Contrary to popular notions, mystics are a remarkably practical breed. A cornerstone of true mysticism is the knowledge of self, and in their arduous journeys inward, saints and mystics divest themselves of self-delusion. On the higher plane, they want God as He is, not as most would like Him to be. Their perception of the world is more real than that of the ordinary run of people, and realism gives rise to an intense practicality.
The Spanish saint and mystic Teresa de Avila is perhaps the quintessential embodiment of this seeming world/otherworldly dichotomy. She is at once the Saint of Raptures and the most "healthy" of Christians. In her there is a balance of piety and politics, of profound mystical experience and penetrating human psychology. The extraordinary works of religious reform and foundation for which she is celebrated required a degree of manly enterprise and farsighted business acuity rare in any age, but utterly discountenanced in a woman of her day--and in this new biographical study it is impossible to forget for a moment that this religious entrepreneur, this acclaimed Doctor of the Catholic Church, was very much a woman. It is precisely her historical setting in sixteenth-century Castile, where social and religious values, prejudices, and antagonisms impeded and threatened to destroy her work at every turn, that puts her real genius into proper perspective. A full appreciation of Teressa's greatness is impossible outside of an understanding of her milieu. Through a skilled and insightful evocation of Teresa's times, Victoria Lincoln transforms normally superficial, idealized hagiography into an absorbing reading as colorful and uncompromising as an historical novel.
Sixteenth-century Spain was the scene of deep-seated conflicts between so-called Old Christians and new conversos--for the most part forcibly converted Jews. To Spain's "pure bloods" a converso background was a social stigma. In the eyes of the still-formidable Spanish Inquisition, it was often cause for suspicion on theological grounds. At the heart of the conflict were the "new trends" in mystical theology and mental prayer, which the inquisition identified with Protestant and IIluminist heresy--heresy to which converses and women were thought to be particularly prone. Anyone writing about, or engaged in, mystical practices, recollection, and mental prayer ran the risk of being branded a heretic.
Then, as now, mysticism attracted flocks of fanatics, hysterics, and crackpots. These were lumped together in a class with visionaries and Illuminists, since, to the mind of the times, visions, raptures, and revelations seldom came from God, but were the products of a deranged mind or temptations of the devil. In the wake of some notorious scandals, Illuminist heresy also became associated with sexual hysteria and depravity.
Against this roily backdrop, enter Teresa de Avila: a woman of "impure blood" (her grandfather and father were converses) who in her writings proclaims herself a fallen Magdalen, who has become a nun subject to visions and raptures as well as to sex rumors, who advocates a
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