Teresa of Ávila
Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515-1582) is another saint whose life began in great wealth. Her maternal grandfather was a convert from Judaism (a marrano) who had been condemned by the Inquisition for allegedly returning to his original ways, but her parents were wealthy Spanish gentlefolk (having purchased their titles, Don and Doña, to match their fiscal worth). Teresa’s early life was remarkable only for its piety: like her parents, she was a committed Catholic, and read widely in the lives of the saints and devotional works that her wealthy father owned with her brother, Rodrigo.
Sometime around the age of 7, however, Teresa and Rodrigo displayed troubling fanaticism. Inspired by tales of Christian martyrs, the children set off to seek their own martyrdom in Morocco, but were fortunately intercepted by their uncle on the outskirts of town. Teresa’s religious zeal continued to wax as Rodrigo’s waned, but her tastes changed radically when she reached puberty. In secret, she read tales of dashing knights and courtly love, and when her mother died she began to look up to a vain cousin, who encouraged her interest in perfume, fashion, and courtiers.
An illness and her father’s ire provoked a return to Teresa’s pious ways, and she decided to take orders as a Carmelite nun. As a young woman, Teresa continued to suffer from ill health, but at the same time, she began to experience mystical visions. The visions only intensified as she subjected herself to more self-castigation for her sins and offered herself more fully to God. The visions formed part of her influential literary output, and she went on to reform the Carmelite Order of both nuns and friars, despite opposition from the Order itself and the Inquisition.
Teresa’s account of one of the visions, in which Christ appeared to her as a young man, bears lengthy quotation:
‘I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point, there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails… the pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.’ (The Autobiography, Book XXIX, Part 17)
The account is shamelessly erotic: moaning, the mention of the phallic spear entering her body, the young man responsible, thrusting, and the mixture of pain and pleasure suggesting virginal intercourse. In Bernini’s beautiful sculpture, reproduced above, the pseudo-sexual ecstasy of Teresa’s vision is perfectly captured. One suspects that the sexual awakening she had as a teenager, curtailed before it could fully blossom into the usual form, found expression in her religious fanaticism. Teresa is not the only female saint whose devotion has taken this unusual form: Margery Kempe, for example, in the fourteenth century described a mystical marriage to Christ.