Mystic, saint, and poet, she can claim yet another title, that of philosopher. By the road of self-study, she reached that sublime height of metaphysics, the intellectual vision of the Absolute. The further Psychology advances, the more wonderful is found her knowledge of the soul and its moods and powers. "The highest, most generous philosophy that ever man imagined," wrote the scholar, Luis de León. "Sainte Térèse a exploré plus à fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l'âme, ... elle explique savamment, clairement, le mécanisme de l'âme évoluant dès que Dieu la touche ... une sainte qui a vérifié sur elle-même les phases sur-naturelles qu'elle a décrites, une femme dont la lucidité fut plus qu'humaine" is the appreciation of Huysmans. Not only orthodox believers yield her this preëminence: Leibnitz read and deeply admired her; a recent French critic of the skeptic school compares her to Descartes. Hyperbole is inevitable in speaking of this "sweet incendiary," and all who know her books feel the same enthusiasm. "A woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman," wrote the old English poet, Richard Crashaw, whose "Flaming Heart" is touched with her own potency:
"Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
And by thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;...
By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him,
(Fair sister of the seraphim!)
By all of Him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me,
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may die."
Spain may claim the glory of having appreciated this her greatest daughter. She is a colonel of artillery; she is a doctor in Salamanca; the manuscript of her "Life" was placed in the Escorial and the King carried the key; at country inns they tell of the night she rested there, as if it had been yesterday; her devotees to-day sign their letters "su amigo teresiano." It was reserved for later generations of different race to explain what they could not understand by calling it hysteria and epilepsy. Richard Ford's account of the saint is so wide of the original that Froude, no lover of Catholic Spain, says it is not even a caricature; the article on her in the Encyclopedia Brittanica is a disgrace to intellectual thought.
Spain stands indifferent to such criticism. She knows herself secure in her mystics who seem to have left the race an intuitive understanding of the life of the soul. This inherited intuition has, of course, its dangers, for all intelligences are not those of a Teresa de Jesús. It needs indeed "large draughts of intellectual day" to be a mystic. Valdés' novel, "Marta y María" shows this mistaken insisting in the nineteenth century on conditions of life suitable to the sixteenth. But because smaller minds have imitated her disastrously, their neo-mysticism need not be considered a serious menace in modern Spain, since following a saint, even haltingly, is not by any means an easy life to choose.
St. Teresa and Avila: her name evokes that of her native city as instantly as St. Francis' that of Assisi; every stone in Avila breathes of the heroic woman. Our first visit was to the small plaza under the city walls, where the casa solar of the Cepeda family stood. Teresa came of the untitled gentry of Castile, de sangre muy limpia, and a Spaniard's pride in his blood, untouched by Moorish taint, by crime, or illegitimacy, is as strong to-day as then: perhaps it is this pride, in peasant as well as noble, that makes the democratic relation of the classes in the Peninsula.
At right angles to the mediocre church built in commemoration, on the site of the Cepeda house, stands the mansion of the Duque de la Roca, which gives a good idea of the solid escutcheoned homes of the hidalgo. Many such dignified houses are scattered over Avila, making a stroll in her streets full of the charm of surprise; their chief adornments are the doorways, truly splendid old portals with coping stones sometimes nine feet deep radiating round the entrance. In one of these solid Romanesque houses Teresa was born in 1515. Through a city gate before her house, I looked out on just the same scene she had known during the first eighteen years of her life; the rocky plain, through which the river wound, stretched to a spur of the Guadarrama mountains, capped already with the winter's snow. Leaving the venerable little plaza, I descended the steep street that led to the river bridge, in the spirit of pilgrimage still, for the child Teresa and a small brother wandered here alone one day on their way to seek martyrdom among the infidels. Met by an uncle beyond the bridge, the runaways were brought home. Truly in the saint's life, the child was father to the man, her days bound each to each in natural piety, despite that short period which her too tender conscience ever regretted when, as a pretty girl, love of fine clothes and flattery allured her. It is told of these remarkable children, that, hearing the word "Forever," they clasped their little hands and gazed wide-eyed in each other's faces, overcome by its stupendous meaning.
When Teresa was eighteen she went to visit a married sister who lived at a distance, and on her return stopped to see an uncle who had just taken the resolution of entering a monastery. The religious feeling in her partly awoke, and she too desired the life of the cloister, but her parents not finding strength to part with her, one morning she and a brother slipped away from home, and after he had conducted her to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, he went on himself to beg admittance at the Dominican Convent of St. Thomas. For over twenty-five years Teresa lived in the Encarnación: during the first twenty years she was miserable in bodily health and as miserable in spirit, for the saint had not yet found her vocation, and the laxity of the rule allowed the nuns to see much of the world, to receive visitors and hear the gossip of the town. "I was tossed about in a wretched condition, for if I had small content in the world, in God I had no pleasure. At prayer time I watched for the clock to strike the end of the hour." Strange words for this future great genius of prayer! Her conversion, the change of heart that sooner or later, disregarded or welcomed, comes to all who live with any depth, came to Teresa as she was approaching her fortieth year. She had been roused to more serious thoughts by her father's death, and one day in the oratory she suddenly seemed to realize in a figure of her crucified Saviour the unspeakable wonder of his sacrifice:
"Thy hands to give Thou can'st not lift.
Yet will Thy hand still giving be,
It gives, but O, itself's the gift,
It gives tho' bound, tho' bound 'tis free."
———
"Love touch't her heart, and lo! it beats
High, and burns with such brave heats
Such thirst to die, as dares drink up
A thousand cold deaths in one cup."