If Teresa of Avila lived today she could have been a captain of capitalist industry, the Machiavellian chief executive officer of a communications or transport company, at any rate, a successful but embattled operator. In 16th-century Spain, there were only two careers for women: marriage or the Church. The circumscribed life of the wife, however, was not heroic enough for Teresa de Ahumada; she chose the Church and made a considerable name for herself, first as a mystic and later as the foundress of 17 convents.
There was nothing Christian in the Spanish Church of the time, which was obsessed with power, prayer and the desire to guarantee the afterlife. Spaniards, in all walks of life, lived in a state of religious and superstitious fear: in dread of eternal damnation, temporal punishment and the Inquisition. The wealthy endowed convents as a way to buy a place in heaven through the prayers of nuns, and Spain seemed to teem with battalions of religious communities. Teresa set out to reform what she regarded as the rather lax rule of her order, the Carmelites, by imposing a strict adherence to their vow of poverty. Against considerable and powerful opposition, she used her form of feminine wiles: a nice line in self-deprecation and shrewd bargaining skills.
Thus she was able to negotiate with great agility the convoluted twists and turns of religious and secular politics. She loved travelling but, in general, it was her communities of nuns who practised self-denial, while she roamed the land, from new foundation to wealthy mansion, extending her sphere of influence. It is difficult in this more rational century to take the mystical persona of Teresa of Avila seriously. One commentator described her as the patron saint of hysteria, and Cathleen Medwick, in this well-researched book, refers to her as an extremely business-like mystic. More recently, her type of religious ecstasy has been interpreted as spontaneous orgasm. Teresa's trances, her transports of ecstatic love of the Almighty, could possibly have been tactical, as they later became a direct line through which she received customised instructions from God.
These directives - usually what she herself wanted to do - confounded her opponents in Church and State. Teresa, on the other hand, regarded the visions and ecstasies of other nuns as hallucinations. The ideal of religious life in the sixteenth century was prayer and a dehumanised spiritual perfection. Holiness had nothing to do with Christianity or love of the neighbour; it existed only in a miasma of divine worship. In this regard Teresa was a star. Her spiritual writings, particularly Libro de la Vida, the biography of her soul, are still highly regarded in spiritual circles. However, they were written to impress her confessors and the bishops to whom she was accountable. As the author says, her life was spent among women but her spiritual welfare resided with men. The Vida portrays a self-absorbed personality, totally involved in introspection and in her physical health.
The life of Teresa of Avila has been picked over by historians and biographers, by theologians and hagiographers, in every century since her death. She became a feminist icon in the latter half of the twentieth century, praised for her ability to function in a male-dominated society. Nevertheless Medwick's lively and scholarly account of her life has uncovered no evidence that she ever did anything to relieve the lot of women (or the poor). On the contrary, her life's work was directed towards their greater oppression.
Ethna Viney is an author and critic