St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and one of the most influential mystics in all of Church history, writing two spiritual classics still read today: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Her autobiography (more accurately, a confession to Spanish Inquisitors) is The Life of St. Teresa of Ávila, detailing her spiritual experiences of the love of God. In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.
St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and one of the most influential mystics in all of Church history, writing two spiritual classics still read today: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Her autobiography (more accurately, a confession to Spanish Inquisitors) is The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, detailing her spiritual experiences of the love of God.
In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.
About Carlos Eire
Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state. He was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online faith.yale.edu.
Carlos Eire: Mysticism is a double-edged sword and one edge is the fact that religion itself is based on such experiences, religion and in human history. Going back even to the Neanderthals who we now find out. I had some sort of religious life. It's all about experience of the other dimension. So mystics, they are the eyewitnesses there and the teachers of what lies beyond, but the other edge is the danger to institutions and hierarchies because every mystic is a potential challenge to religious authorities, but it has nothing to do with knowledge as normally acquired.
God is speaking, and God says, since the soul cannot fathom what it understands, it understands without understanding. If you can understand the experience you've just had, it wasn't God. You can't explain it. It's ineffable. If you understand it, you have not gotten to experience God. It has to be totally ineffable.
This
Evan Rosa: is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. As long as there's been religion, there have been mystics, individuals who report singular experiences, a kind of spiritual transcendence that connects them to the heart of God, inspiring anyone with a longing or yearning for something more.
St. Teresa of Avila was a 16th century Spanish nun. And one of the most influential mystics in all of church history. She was a Carmelite nun and initiated a reform that made the poor mendicant life even more strict, working with St. John of the Cross and facing the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition.
She wrote extensively, including two spiritual classics, The Way of Perfection and The Way And the Interior Castle, which are both still read widely today. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites her in response to the question, what is contemplative prayer? As she writes in her autobiography, Contemplative prayer, in my opinion, is nothing else than And a close sharing between friends.
It means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us. This autobiography of hers is known as The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, but in reality, it was less autobiography than a confession for inquisitors. Who felt threatened by her experiences and teachings. And my guest today writes that this text is a mystical treatise full of claims that many readers in our day and age would consider bizarre, insane, or fraudulent.
This is a text that assumes, unquestioningly, that human beings can transcend the sensory material world and have intimate relations with the creator of the universe. Those words belong to Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrison Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Born in Cuba in 1950, all of his books are banned there, as he's been proclaimed an enemy of the state.
But that's a story for another time. Carlos is author of A Wonderful Companion to the Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, as well as many other books, including Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award, as well as his most recent exploration of Medieval Mystics, They Flew. The History of the Impossible.
In this conversation, Carlos helps us learn how to read St. Teresa of Avila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering deeper insights on close readings of several selections from her classic confession slash autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.
Thanks for listening today. Carlos Eire, it is such a pleasure to have you on For the Life of the World. Thank you for joining me. Oh, thanks for the invitation. The medieval mystic, Teresa of Avila, I think is a captivating figure and her, I mean, whether to call it an autobiography or a kind of spiritual diary, it's an enigmatic and beautiful text that serves devotional purposes to so many people, theological purposes.
And it's this window into her soul. It's a window into the divine. Yes.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And as to what her so called autobiography should be called, the Spanish title that she gave to it was El Libro de Mi Vida, The Book of My Life. And it came to be known as an autobiography, but in truth, what it is, is a very long confession to the Inquisition, which had her under investigation.
And so everything that she wrote in this text, she was always looking over her shoulder, figuratively. She knew it would be read by her male superiors as well as by inquisitors, who were very curious. I mean, the reason they asked her to write it was that she was having these ecstasies, some of which had physical manifestations that were astounding.
And this was Spain in the 16th century. Anything like this would be checked out by the inquisition to make sure that everything was genuinely holy or of divine origin and that there was no fraud involved because there were many fraudsters.
Evan Rosa: You call it not just an autobiography, but maybe an autohagiography.
And I think that might be helpful to consider a little bit about the genre. of the book. It's helpful to know this background context of the Spanish Inquisition and maybe the danger that's lurking there. And I think maybe we need to unpack a little bit more once we talk about the text itself, but tell us about what an auto hagiography might look like.
Carlos Eire: Well, a hagiography from the Greek word hagios or holy is The life of an individual written with the express purpose of proving to anyone who reads it that this person was a saint, that this person was very special, holy. And of course, if she had written it with that title while she was alive, that would have gotten her into a lot of trouble.
All the more scrutiny. All the more because the chief virtue for any saint, not just throughout the Middle Ages, but especially in this period, was humility. And without humility, you could never, ever, ever. be considered truly holy, much less end up being canonized as a saint.
Evan Rosa: So you talk about the context of Therese's mysticism.
And I wonder if you can also introduce that in the broader context of medieval mysticism and what was going on and how those People saw the spiritual realm and how they wrote about their own spiritual lives.
Carlos Eire: Yeah. Well, let me divide it into, uh, at least two parts. Maybe it'll end up being three or more, but in the middle ages, especially in monastic communities, we have so many men and women who dedicate their lives to self denial and prayer, lots of fasting and constant praying, and not just fasting, you know, in some cases we're talking about men and women who inflict all kinds of physical pain on themselves.
Something that we now in the 21st century find not just distasteful, but perhaps a bit of a psychological problem or psychiatric. Teresa is part of this monastic Christianity. She's born in 1515, two years after her birth, Martin Luther begins the Protestant Reformation and does away with monasticism.
All of the emerging Protestant churches of the 16th century do away with monasticism. They think it's useless. They think it's wrong, actually. It's useless because of Luther's theology of salvation by faith alone. You can fast as much as you want, and you can punish yourself as much as you want. That's not going to make God love you any more than he already does.
And it's not going to wipe out your sins. Christ has wiped out your sins. All of this self obsession and posturing, the very concept of holiness is redefined.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You talk about the pursuit of moral and spiritual perfection. Yes. As being this very important, really like a sense of purpose, a kind of daily sense for what their lives were to be about and how they were to break through to otherworldly realities, to break through to the divine.
Carlos Eire: Right. And that was the second part. I said, I'd break it down into two parts. The first one we just covered, this is the second one. So you, you anticipated the second part, going back to the very beginnings of monasticism. And we can go back to the fourth century to St. Anthony of the Desert and the hagiography written by St.
Athanasius of Alexandria. This man broke through, if we want to use that term, broke through from the level of experience that all humans have on earth. Let's call it the material world. Break through to the spiritual realm and actually have direct experiences of the divine at various levels, various different levels.
And it was believed that this could only be achieved through a life of self denial and prayer. And that there were three basic steps The first was purgation, or cleansing. Second one was, well, after a certain point, you start getting feedback from God, right? You're not just praying, just hearing your own words, no.
You get feedback, you feel a presence, you feel a person there and the love of that person for you, that's illumination. And then the, the top level, which it was commonly agreed is rarely reached union, a very close, uh, encounter with the divine in which, uh, paradoxically you lose yourself when you find yourself and you find yourself in God.
Now, not that you're divinized, not that you become God. Uh, Bernard of Clairvaux used the following two images. Very poetic, very metaphorical. A drop of wine dropped into the sea, or as a piece of iron up to the fire that gets so red hot. It's one with a fire, or two flames, two candles become one flame, but there's still two candles, and so on.
The metaphor of mixed liquids, it's very common, the drop losing itself in a vast amount of liquid.
Evan Rosa: One I wanted to clarify, because I think I heard you say, find yourself to lose yourself, but did you mean it the other way around? Lose yourself to find yourself?
Carlos Eire: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's all about selflessness, this longing for the divine.
You have to surrender completely and you have to surrender your will at that moment. Yes. And losing yourself, you find your true deepest self. And as by the 14th century, Especially in the region of the Rhine River, a cluster of mystics emerged who stressed presence of the divine in the human. And at the very core of the human self, there was a divine spark.
And what one does in the mystical quest, basically in monastic life, is not to go up to heaven, but to find God. at your deepest point inside yourself. As Bernard of Clairvaux put it, the two flames of the two candles merge into one.
Evan Rosa: This is a central metaphor, as you point out, in Therese's interior castle.
And there's this technical term, I hope I'm going to pronounce it right, but recogimiento. Yes. And this idea, and I'm quoting you here, but you say, this teaching that God is most intensely present. in the core of the soul.
Carlos Eire: Correct. And recogimiento was a method of praying and meditating in which you let go of your senses, your sensory input as much as possible.
I think it's, it's a very difficult word to translate into English because recogimiento comes from the verb recoger, which is to gather up. Let's say you spill your marbles. Tengo que recoger. I need to pick up, reassemble my marble collection. You gather it all in. And this practice of recogimiento, in Teresa's case, by the time that she became a nun, was also linked to achieving a kind of prayer that was silent prayer, right?
Monastics spent much of their day actually either reciting or singing mostly the Psalms and other prayers. So it was audible. And ideally, not just silent inside you, but you reach a point, mostly in the stage of illumination, where actually, you're not praying. You're having, as Teresa put it, a spiritual awakening.
a nice chat with a friend, a very pleasant and nice chat with a friend. And at the higher reaches, ideally, as one finds most intensely in one text, especially the cloud of unknowing, a 14th century English text. We don't know who the author was. There've been all kinds of guesses made, but none has stuck.
You reach wordlessness, wordlessness. You just are communing. You're having a very, very nice chat. With someone who just loves you more than you can ever imagine, and you feel that, you're not using words. And actually, I finally got this bit, not just from the cloud of unknowing, but listening to a lecture by a translator on his method of translating.
And I forget his name, but he's the person who translated into English. Most of the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and he said, I don't try to match up the words. It's not like I have a dictionary in my brain and I find it. No, to the concept, I get to the concept itself, not to a word. And then the word emerges from the concept.
So going to that wordless space where it's meaning that is found. without specific words.
Evan Rosa: Another word that you use, I'm thinking it's the same, or maybe a translation for recojimiento. Is it recollection then?
Carlos Eire: Yes, recollection is pretty much the same as recojimiento, to recollect. Recojim is to collect. In English, you collect, you gather up, recollection and recogimiento.
I think recogimiento sometimes is translated in English as recollection. And where did she get this? Well, there is the oral tradition in any monastic community, you know, monks and nuns are taught to pray a certain way and so on. But in the case of Teresa, all of this silent prayer, recollection, recogimiento, divine spark in the soul.
This comes from the Rhineland region into Spain because there is one churchman who embarks on a project to translate as much of that Literature, which was in German and Dutch and in Latin, translated into Castilian Spanish. And that was Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, who himself was a Franciscan and very, very committed to his vow of poverty, even as Archbishop of Toledo, which gave him access to an incredible salary.
He made more money than any other churchman. in Spain, and actually his income was much better than many nobles. He tried to spend as much of it as possible. He established a university through which many later great mystics would pass, the University of Alcala, and he funded this translation project.
Teresa had all of plus the texts that some Spanish monastics had written of their own based on this literature. And I have argued, and I'm not alone in arguing this, that the mystical flowering that took place in Spain in the 16th century is largely due to this influx of northern mysticism from the Rhineland region.
That's
Evan Rosa: fascinating. You make the point in your book that many of these contemplative traditions and this form of mysticism really focuses on stages of spiritual development. And in the Vita, Teresa's description of her life, she talks about four waters and she's got a different approach several years later for the interior castle.
And some people will be familiar with the ladder of St. Benedict or other kinds of staged approaches to spiritual development. Curious if you could introduce that concept and maybe do so through the Vita, the four waters.
Carlos Eire: Yeah, well, it's all an attempt to represent progress or evolution. And the bottom line is that you don't just zoom.
From saying vocal prayer to the higher states of prayer. No, it's gradual builds up your skills build up and to call them skills actually is to leave out something that's very important part of the process according to Teresa and other mystics, which is God is doing the transforming. You're doing some transforming of your own, of course, by being engaged in this, but it's really a gift from God progress.
And. Progress and progress, or pretty much like an athlete whose skills become better and better, or any artist whose skills improve and improve and improve. Except in this case, there's someone else involved. You're not just working out. or rehearsing, it's the other party involved in this phenomenon of prayer.
Evan Rosa: This is such an interesting response to the Lutheran or Protestant, at least on one interpretation, the critique of, of this form of monasticism and, and the emphasis on the relational and on the collaborative nature. That's, that's happening there. It's collaborative. Yeah. That's a great word. Walk us through the four waters.
I'm fascinated to see how this works out. And I'd love for you to rely on some of Theresa's language too, because that's what I'm hoping to offer the listener here is some language to hang on to. Well, the four waters are
Carlos Eire: basically four different ways of obtaining water to represent Prayer itself. Why are you drawing this water?
Well, it's for a garden. And at first it's very difficult. It's labor intensive. It's like getting water out of a well. And then you progress to the point where the second water, you have easier access to the water. You don't have to pull up a bucket from a well, but you've got little irrigation channels.
But there's still labor involved in this. And by the third stage, you've got a stream, not just irrigation channels, but a stream. And the fourth stage is rain. You don't have to do anything. It just rains. Your garden is watered from heaven.
Evan Rosa: Would you read some of the quotes that you're bringing from the Vita to describe the second stage? Yeah.
Carlos Eire: It's
Evan Rosa: a
Carlos Eire: water wheel with dippers attached to it. and an aqueduct that conveys water to the garden. So that's the irrigation part. As the crank on the wheel is turned, water flows steadily down the aqueduct with much less labor than the first method.
And at that stage, Teresa says, it already touches on the supernatural. And it is now that the soul begins to recollect itself and to realize that it is experiencing something that it, quote, could not in any way attain by its own efforts. So there's the collaborative dimension of all this. And it is at this stage that the soul begins to experience the prayer of quiet.
And now,
Evan Rosa: maybe you could supply some of her quotes from the third method as well.
Carlos Eire: Yes, at this stage, you cross over into the realm of the supernatural fully, and here God quote, assumes the work of the gardener and lets the soul relax. Now the soul, quote, flings itself totally into God's arms. And this kind of prayer, she says, is, quote, a union of the whole soul with God.
And one's joy is so intense that sometimes it seems that the soul is about to leave the body, and oh, what a blessed death that would be.
Evan Rosa: This is where you start to get these descriptions of ecstasy. Yes. And it begins to feel truly otherworldly. Yes, you cross over. It's this very unfamiliar kind of space to, I think, the way we normally look at the world.
Carlos Eire: The fourth, yeah, well, it's the falling rain from heaven that, quote, abundantly soaks and saturates the entire garden with water. In this state of prayer, she says, quote, There is no feeling, but only enjoying, without any comprehension of what is being enjoyed. That's the prayer of union. It is obvious, she says, what union is.
It is two distinct things becoming one. And I should add at this point that, you know, whenever she explains something like this with such certainty, she usually adds, Oh, forgive me, I may not have the correct term because I am not. a learned scholar. Uh, and I, I have not studied theology formally. So if I'm making a mistake here, please correct me.
Evan Rosa: Which seems like it's a nod to the Inquisition that like, oh yeah, yes, please, please don't assume me a heretic for describing my experience. Yes. Or for making
Carlos Eire: assertions so forcefully.
Once while she was wondering what the soul did during this unitive fourth stage ecstasy. Teresa, Heard God say, and I quote, the soul undoes itself totally, daughter, speaking to fellow nun, in order to get itself deeper in me, God is speaking to her. So the soul undoes itself totally, daughter, God is speaking to her, in order to get itself deeper in me, capital M, She is no longer the one who lives, but I, since it could not fathom, what it understands without understanding.
Evan Rosa: This is fascinating because it's an expression of that humility and that loss of self and the finding of self. You point it to Galatians 2 20. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
Carlos Eire: She is making so many points clear or as clear as possible here all at the same time, you know, including this undoing, which is not the same thing as dissolving Bernard's mixed liquids metaphor.
It's not. It's that you're undoing yourself. And it's a cognitive experience in that, you know, you're experiencing it. But it has nothing to do with knowledge as normally acquired because you don't know what this is. How did she put it? God is speaking and God says, since the soul cannot fathom what it understands, it understands without understanding.
That's another form of cognition completely.
Evan Rosa: Is that how you understand it? Because it seems at this stage, and what I'm curious about here is the paradox of it all,
Carlos Eire: right?
Evan Rosa: And this, and really laying bare the fact that this is one world speaking to another world, there is a kind of liminal space that the mystic is crossing over.
Carlos Eire: Oh, yes. And you can't explain it. It's ineffable. And I can't remember which mystic said this. The sentence I'm thinking of goes something like this. If you can understand the experience you've just had, it wasn't God. Wow. It can't be. If you understand it, you have not gotten to experience God. It has to be totally ineffable.
Evan Rosa: Is this part of what the wordlessness is doing as well? Yes. This prayer of quiet, the prayer of union and wordlessness and non understanding or the cloud of unknowing, right? You're beyond
Carlos Eire: language. And Teresa doesn't give you a method in the same way that the cloud of unknowing does. And I think to me, it's pretty clear she did not know the cloud of unknown because I don't think it had been translated into Spanish.
And she could only read Spanish, she, she, she could understand some Latin just from her constant exposure to liturgy in Latin, but she didn't have any other languages. But anyway, the cloud of unknowing tries to derail language by suggesting that one use a single word over and over again, God, just say God over and over or just God, God, God, God, God.
Or do the opposite and say the word sin over and over and over again. And that's you. Sin is you. God is God. This is what the Eastern Orthodox Hesychast Mystics did, too, with the Jesus Prayer, which is repeating the name of Jesus over and over again. Or saying Jesus Christ. Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And that somehow derails your use of language. Or as in some Asian traditions of meditation, you know, the mantra, your spiritual director or superior gives you. a mantra to repeat over and over and over again.
Evan Rosa: I want to continue into more of her description, allowing some of Teresa's own words to land here, but with your guidance about how to understand them.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And you know, that's the power that this book has had to change lives is truly amazing. Among those whose lives were radically changed by this book was the philosopher Edith Stein, who was staying overnight at some friend's house and picked the book off the shelf, started reading it, and could not put it down.
Next thing you know, she's not just converting because she was Jewish. She's not just converting to Catholicism, but becoming a Carmelite nun. And Edith Stein had a brilliant mind. She was up there with Heidegger, Husserl. So a passage like this, which she would have read in the middle part. She's describing the physical effects of all of this.
So, quote, The very great and sweet delight, the soul feels that it is fainting away almost completely, and a kind of swoon. It begins to lose breath in all bodily strength. It can't even wiggle the hands without great pain, the eyes close involuntarily, or if they remain open. They can hardly see anything, and if it tries to read, it can hardly spell out a single letter or recognize it, and hears but cannot understand what it hears.
It can apprehend nothing with the senses. Speaking is impossible, for it can't bring itself to form a single word, and even if it could, it would not find sufficient strength to pronounce it, for all external strength vanishes While the strength of the soul increases so that it may better enjoy its
Evan Rosa: bliss.
Again, this description of something that is not a common experience and probably feels all the more foreign to our ears than it would, as you point out, to a Spain that looked for these kinds of words. realities that was far more open and expecting of these kinds of things.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And especially within a monastic community.
Absolutely. You know, these contemplative nuns who basically imprisoned themselves inside a convent and could only have access to the outside world through basically the same thing as a prison, you know, a room where visitors came in That had a window with a metal grill on it. Yeah, that was their contact with the world.
The rest was all of this, I guess I should also emphasize that there was a lot of hard work that went on for these nuns because, you know, they took care of the convent and all the cooking and sewing and whatever else they did. Some nuns, for instance, made lace. and sold lace and so on. But anyway, one of her most famous sayings is that God walks amidst the pots and pans.
You're cooking in the kitchen. You can find God there. It's not, it's not just, you know, you're kneeling. all alone in a room where he's not. God walks amidst the pots and pans in the kitchen.
Evan Rosa: That of course reminds me of like a brother Lawrence kind of approach to finding ecstasy in the quotidian in the mundane.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And then the later Carmelite nun who actually shared a name with Teresa. Yeah. Uh, Teresa, the child Jesus, her, her little way. Just to write the little way. It's Theresa of Avila's. Little way Theresa of Avi actually made it popular.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I wanna continue because I think the visions that she has, you know, that this is what she's carrying with her as she goes through the pots and the pants.
You described the physical manifestation of it. She described it and you read it. She also has these, I mean, they're controversial in many ways, but the visions of Christ that she describes in the Vita.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And her confessors early on can't believe that these are genuine visions of Christ. And they actually tell her you're being fooled by the devil.
This isn't Jesus. This is the devil appearing to you. And one confessor at one point says, okay, fine, next time Jesus shows up, give him the fig, which is the equivalent of, uh, you know, in our culture, giving someone the middle finger. Really? Yes. It's that obscene. So
Evan Rosa: the fig is a medieval Spanish kind of thing?
Is it still in use? Yes, I think so. Well, I've never heard anybody say it, but I think people understand. This is a fascinating question in itself, describing a physical profanity on an audio podcast. I wonder if you, cause you, I saw you hold up your hand, but no one will see that. Well, you put
Carlos Eire: your thumb between your index and middle finger.
That's giving someone the fig. The fig, which is the same as in our culture, giving someone the middle finger. Sure.
Evan Rosa: So her confessor is recommending that she flip off the devil. Yes. The next time she sees a vision of Christ. Right, because he doesn't believe her.
Carlos Eire: That's right. And actually this is an ancient, ancient monastic strategy of dealing with the devil since he is so crude and evil and filthy and ugly and everything.
Yeah. You respond to the devil with crudeness to show him that you know who he is and you're not gonna have anything to do with him. So she has a vision of Christ after she gets this advice. And she gives Jesus the fig. And this is her relating the story, right? Her own words, although I'm not reading it verbatim, Jesus says, thank you.
Thank you for obeying your confessor. That's wonderful. Thank you. Now go tell him I am not the devil. Go for it. This is Christ. Yes. Just go with it. And you know, she ends up having this one experience. Which you also find in Catherine of Siena, 14th century. Mystical marriage with Christ. She becomes the spouse or bride of Christ.
And she obviously read The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua. One of the current top experts on Teresa of Avila, Alison Weber. is so convinced that Teresa read the life of Catherine of Siena and actually it's one of the ways in which she modeled herself because that's what hagiographies do.
Hagiographies are written so that you can model yourself after this person who has achieved all these great and wonderful things. A kind of exemplarity. It's a way to imitate. Yes, and it's as much for edification. as for imitation.
Evan Rosa: I want to hang on to the visions of Christ for a moment. There's another extended quote that I'd love to have you read and interpret. I'm fascinated about how to understand the nature of these visions. It ties into exemplarity because these sort of visions you can't just have. They would come to you.
They might come through the staged process that you might go through, but if they're to be veridical and if they're to be a genuine crossing over into this other spiritual reality amidst the pots and pans, then this is a kind of fascinating
Carlos Eire: thing. And she would have known how to make a distinction because this had been part and parcel of monastic tradition for a long time.
Distinguish between physical visions, That you see with your physical eyes and intellectual visions, which you don't see with your eyes. It's you're in another realm. It's another dimension. But that's what she's describing, right? The intellectual. Right. Variety. And she would know it's much easier for the devil to fool people when you see with your eyes.
Conversely, it's much harder for the devil to fool you in an intellectual vision. So, uh, here's what she has to say about seeing Christ. In some instances, it seemed to me that I was seeing an image, but many other times it seemed like it was Christ himself. Depending on how clearly he wanted to show himself to me.
Notice that she's not saying she has some special power. No, this is God doing the revealing. Sometimes, it was all too confusing. It seemed to be an image. Not like drawings from this world, even the most accomplished kind. If it's an image, It's a living image, not a dead man, but the living Christ, and He reveals that He is both man and God.
And sometimes He comes with such great majesty that no one can doubt that it's the Lord Himself. And once again, she made it clear her visions were beyond her control. Quote, There is nothing one can do about them. Our own efforts cannot make us see more or fewer of them or make them happen. Or not, they are gifts.
And the Spanish word she uses most often is Mercedes. mercies, but that's also a gift.
Evan Rosa: You describe the most famous of all Teresa's visions, and you call it the transfibration. I'm wondering if you could describe that and it's important in the Vita in her own spiritual life. Yeah.
Carlos Eire: And it's one of the strangest, strangest visions that doesn't involve Christ, involves an angel.
And she has this vision An angel appears with a dart in his hand. The dart was a very specific weapon used at the time. It was a short spear and he thrusts the spear into her abdomen, let's leave it at that, into her abdomen and puts it all the way in and the pain is exquisite. It's a paradox, the pain and bliss at the same time.
Pain and bliss at the same time, but this wounding, it's a wounding, right? And the wounding is being carried out by an angelic being. But the way that it's worded, you know, it's unclear whether this happened once or it happened repeatedly. The way I read it and interpret it is that this happened to her more than once.
And it's known as a transverberation because That is a technical term, very Latin, which Rashid does not use. It first appears at the time of her canonization in 1622, the papal proclamation of her sanctity. Transverberatio is the first time that that term is used. So it has come to be known as the transverberation.
What could that mean? What's the significance of describing it in that way? To be completely run through, you're just completely skewered, right? And the word that Teresa uses is that, you know, you feel it in your entrañas. Your, your, your, your innards. Huh? Some English translations say bowels, but no. Yeah, it's not bowels.
That's your inner self. Your very interior self. All your organs inside are just ripped apart with pain. Mm-Hmm, and bliss simultaneously.
Evan Rosa: Now I want to continue on with yet another expression here, back to the limits of human comprehension. and knowledge and the ineffable nature of mysticism and the ineffable nature of Therese's spiritual life, this claim that she has to have grasped the reality of the Trinity itself.
And it's a fascinating description.
Carlos Eire: Uh, with, with a warning, uh, uh, that Teresa herself would have made. Now please, if I don't get this right, correct me because I, I'm not a theologian. I don't have a university degree. I'm just a una mujercilla, a little woman, right? But by the way, you know, let me try to explain the Trinity to you.
Once I was given a very clear understanding of the manner in which there can be only one God in three persons. And I was both shaken and consoled. The other extreme claim that she was able to comprehend, I'm not quoting her now, all right? The other extreme claim is that she was able to comprehend. The relation between God and everything that exists, including the human soul and all the sins committed by every single human being.
That is an extreme claim. And here comes the quote. Once, it's always once. She doesn't give you a date. Once, when I was in prayer, I saw very briefly how all things are seen in God, and how he contains them all within himself. It was very clearly presented to me, but without any forms whatsoever. I don't know how to put it into words, but this vision has remained firmly imprinted upon my soul.
In this vision, which is at once sublime and terrifying, this is what she has to say, how she comprehends God as, quote, a very clear diamond, much larger than the whole world, which contains everything within itself. And
Evan Rosa: wow. Yeah. It's fascinating how she says it's hard to put into words. And yet I think one of the draws to Teresa is that she does find certain words.
Yeah, she does. We wouldn't read her otherwise. It wouldn't have lasted. And the beauty of that is amazing.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And, you know, please, if I'm wrong, correct me. This is what Alison Weber, whom I mentioned before, has written a wonderful book, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. That rhetoric of femininity is this constant self humbling, Oh, I'm just a little woman.
I'm just a nun. I don't have a university degree. But that allows her to say the most sublime, but also most outrageous things, such as what I just read.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. In all of this, it seems that she is overwhelmed by love as well. You're providing this, this beautiful entree for the listener into Teresa of Avila.
And one of the things you point out from her Vita again is Christ's words about his great love that he says to her, you're mine now, and I'm yours. And again,
Carlos Eire: echo, an echo of. the life of Catherine of Siena, who exchanges hearts with Christ. Oh, wow. Yes. Exchanges hearts with Christ. Huh. And then you can tie this like a long string of rosary beads to all of these other devotions to Christ and to the Virgin Mary, which emerge in this very time period.
You know, the devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus and the devotion to the immaculate heart The heart imagery gets increasingly intense in Catholicism and in Catholic mysticism as The power of human reason is exalted higher and higher and higher. The heart comes into Catholic piety more forcefully.
Actually, I'm glad you took us through these quotes because each and every one of them emphasizes the fact that Teresa is saying, you know, I'm not doing any of this. None of this is mine. I'm not understanding it. I'm not reaching this with my powers of reasoning. I'm not understanding. This is all a gift.
Once, when she was explaining what it's like to levitate, that is, to go up in the air, which, by the way, She did once while cooking in the kitchen, holding a pan in her hand, she went up with a pan in her hand. She had ordered the nuns to pull her down and they're trying to pull her down, but they're afraid the oil is going to spill.
She finished
Evan Rosa: cooking. I mean, the levitation element, this is for the listener, especially we brought Carlos on to talk about his Avila, but You can find his most recent book, They Flew, as well as this exploration of the impossible, in particular, the act of levitation and rapturing. So that's an important nod and another thing you can look into.
Carlos Eire: But the reason I brought this up was that she says that it's like this powerful force comes from beneath you, pushing you up like some great force that you cannot resist. And on another occasion, when describing Or trying to figure out why this happens. She says, well, you know, when you get one of these ecstasies, the soul is shot out of your body, much like a bullet from a gun.
Wow. Right? And it goes upwards to God and. Since God is in heaven as well as in you, but you know, your body has to follow your soul and its upward trajectory. That's how levitation occurs. My goodness. But then she would say that her whole body hurt afterwards. Really? Especially her joints. And she said in one particular ecstasy that she tried to resist, she couldn't hold her quill pen for several days.
Her fingers hurt that much. She's very physical. You can call that heavy lifting. Yes.
Evan Rosa: Heavy lifting.
Carlos Eire: Yeah. She is very, very physical.
Evan Rosa: I want to close with a consideration of what you call mysticism for all, you know, kind of mysticism for the masses that was kind of burgeoning. in Teresa's day as she was writing this. And I think that's a fitting place to end, which is The devotional quality of it, the invitation, the egalitarian nature of it, the democratic nature of it.
Would you point out? Yes. Well, of
Carlos Eire: course, if you really wanted to devote yourself to the mystical quest, best place to do it was a monastic setting. But at this time, all sorts of books are being published that are aimed at the laity. Vida, quote unquote, autobiography, is translated into every major Western European language and even some Eastern European languages, and it's a bestseller repeatedly, century after century after century.
It's not being read only by nuns or monks, no, this laity are reading this. And they find also other texts that are much clearer about instructions on methods of how you pray. than any of her texts because they're aimed at the laity and all of this gets passed on to the laity but of course there's another dimension to consider which is that mysticism is a double edged sword and one edge is the fact that religion itself is based on such experiences.
Religion worldwide and in human history, going back even to the Neanderthals, who we now find out had some sort of religious life. It's all about experience of the other dimension. So mystics, they are the eyewitnesses there and the teachers of what lies beyond. But the other edge is the danger to institutions and hierarchy, because every mystic is a potential challenge to religious authorities.
And for instance, I see that now as the major theme. of all four Gospels. Why does Jesus end up being crucified? He is challenging the religious authorities. They fear him and they fear what an effect he can have on the people and also how he can cause the diminution of their power and authority. Every mystic, you know, Jesus, of course, calls himself openly the Son of God.
And that's one of the things that gets him in trouble. Mystics don't say, I'm the Son of God, but mystics like Teresa and many others, They say, I've been there. I've seen this. So
Evan Rosa: his heart is my heart.
Carlos Eire: Yeah. How is that compared to the. Many priests, bishops, and popes not only don't cross over, but are behaving shamefully.
It's a challenge. The monastic environment is one way of keeping things in check, keeping these potential loose canons in check, that they don't get carried away. We don't have time to go into it, but for every Teresa, there were many others who were imitating her, but were total frauds and, and get processed by the Inquisition.
The Inquisition actually had a term for these kinds of people. And the charge laid against them was that they were quote unquote, inventing religion. Yeah. Yeah. My doctoral dissertation advisor, Osment, saw all mystics as troublemakers and he liked to put it in his own inimitable way. How are you going to keep The people in the church after they have seen God.
Evan Rosa: Well said. I wonder if you'd make one final recommendation. What is it that drew you to Teresa, that keeps you with Teresa and that you think is so special about her?
Carlos Eire: For one thing, it's the enormity of what she claims, the enormity of her claims. Which, as I think I've said now probably for the 13th time, this is not all about her.
It's not about her. This is human nature that she's describing. So these things are happening to her. That's a special gift to her, which is, this is true of all humans.
This is our potential as humans. And I've always been drawn to her because she explains things in such great detail. She is so magnificently disarming. She's charming. She wins you over in her vita, especially, and in the interior castle. She describes these otherworldly experiences in such great detail, while at the very same time, pointing out that she's failing at actually describing them to you.
To me, she seems very genuine. And as a historian, you know, historians of religion have trouble when it comes to religious experience, because in our dominant culture, we're trained to put brackets around religious experience, right? All we know is what people say they experience, but we can't ask the question, did that really happen?
Or does that really happen? That's always what's drawn me to it, to mysticism. The fact that it's within the brackets. I'm not allowed to go there. There's something transgressive actually about going into the bracket. and to the experience itself. Carlos,
Evan Rosa: thank you so much for joining me to share your, your love and your interest and your beautiful recommendation of Teresa of Avila. Thank you so much.
Carlos Eire: Thank you for inviting me to join you. It's been wonderful.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Carlos Eire. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett. and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu, where you will find all sorts of resources, including articles, books, podcasts, and other educational resources, all to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to our show, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode.
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