ABSTRACT
Teresa of Avila is indisputably a gure whose inuence and attraction have been extensive beyond the limits of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to the (admittedly not very adequate) discussion of her by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, and Vita SackvilleWest’s idiosyncratic but sympathetic study in The Eagle and the Dove, we have the enormous labours of Edgar Allison Peers, an Anglican, as editor and translator of her letters and author of a luminous brief study of her life (Allison Peers 1961); and also a magisterial essay by another Anglican, E.W. Trueman Dicken, still one of the fullest comparisons in English of the schemes of spiritual ascent in Teresa and John of the Cross (Trueman Dicken 1963). Yet this ecumenical appeal has its ironic side. Teresa herself, as her comments (especially in The Way of Perfection) amply demonstrate, saw the Reformation as an unequivocal disaster. What she was primarily aware of was the spiralling violence between Catholic and Reformed just north of the Pyrenees; and for her the Reformation was more or less coterminous with a ‘Lutheran’ revolt not only against ecclesiastical authority but – far more importantly – against sacramental religion, a matter of the destruction of churches and the discarding of the reserved sacrament. She tells us at the start of the Way (CV: 1.2) that she learned of the religious violence in France as she began her reforming work, and that it spurred her to intensify the austerity and poverty of the new communities as an act of reparation for the ‘Lutheran’ rebellion and all that it brought with it.1 A little further on (CV: 3.8), she elaborates this, in the context of a treatment of how Christ is to be honoured: ‘Human forces’, she writes, ‘are not suf- cient to stop the spread of this re caused by these heretics’ (CV: 3.1); and so the sisters must pray that the life of contemplation in the Teresian Carmel will strengthen the hand of those who resist more publicly the dissolution of true religion. God must be petitioned to safeguard his honour, or, more specically, the honour of his Son, who has already endured so many dishonours and humiliations for our sake (CV: 3.7). The faithfulness of the sisters to their rule is a witness to the honour of God, and by keeping them
faithful, God secures his honour. And this is a matter of some urgency: the destruction of churches elsewhere in Europe means that Christ is threatened with homelessness, just as on earth he had no place to lay his head (CV: 3.8): how can the Father tolerate this? Has Christ not already suffered all he needs to? What is happening is that human beings are losing those places Christ has ‘for inviting his friends’ – churches imagined as places of refuge where the weak or displaced may nd food. Is all this a punishment for our continuing sin? If so, we must pray and offer our own poverty to God so that he will act to ‘defend’ his Son.
