With the inflowing of true religion, Teresa longed for a stricter life, for the original rule of Mount Carmel as conferred by Innocent IV in 1248. She was misunderstood by those around her, her locutions and visions doubted; as a natural result of the false beata of that day, she was considered a woman who for the sake of notoriety pretended to sainthood. Only after years of semi-persecution did the ring of truth and the ethical fervor of Teresa's words convince the learned men who examined her, and she was allowed to leave the Encarnación to found the convent of St. Joseph, her first house of the barefoot or descalzos Carmelites.
Associated so closely as is the Encarnación with the saint, it is with emotion one looks down from the city on the pleasant oasis it makes in the rocky plain. Teresa had there the memorable interviews with St. Francis Borgia, just returned from a visit to his friend and former lord, Charles V at Yuste; with the mystic poet, St. John of the Cross (whom Coventry Patmore has followed in his "Unknown Eros"); with St. Peter of Alcántara, who too held that "the cornerstone and chief foundation of all is humility." These devout men confirmed Teresa in her belief in the divine origin of her prayer: "There is no pleasure or comfort which can be equal to meeting with another person to whom God has given some beginnings of the same dispositions," she wrote, harrassed by the petty suspicions around her.
A tenderer association than the Encarnación is that of San José, her first foundation. The convent lies outside the Puerta del Alcázar, Gate of the Castle, past the plaza where the townspeople stroll under the arcades, and peasant women sell fragrant celery from the big saddle-baskets they lift from their donkeys' backs to the pavement. The visitor is shown treasured relics by the nuns, the quaint musical instrument their mother played on, her drinking jug, and wooden pillow, a letter in her strong, clear hand-writing. During the later strenuous years of her life the saint ever looked back lovingly here. "I lived for five years in the monastery of St. Joseph at Avila, and those now seem to me to be the most peaceful part of my life, the want of which repose my soul often feels." From the age of fifty-two to her death at sixty-six (1582) this wonderful woman traveled over Spain, founding her reformed order, sixteen convents for women and fourteen monasteries for men. While on a visit of inspection at Alba de Tormes the end came; with her favorite words of the Psalmist, "A contrite and humbled heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise," she passed, as she had written in her "Way of Perfection," "not to a strange country, but to her native land."
Avila is worthy of her saint, Avila of the Knights, Avila the Loyal, the King's Avila. It is one of the most perfect examples existing of the fortified towns of chivalry. Built on an eminence, it is completely encircled by grand old walls, forty feet high, whose sameness is broken by some eighty-six towers; two of these here and there are placed close together and arched, so as to make a gateway. Below the town on every side stretches a plain, so strewn with shattered rocks that it is easy to picture it the scene of some battle of giants. The Cathedral may be called part of the city ramparts, since its apse forms one of the eighty encircling towers; the walls are so thick that the radiating chapels round the chancel are not seen in the exterior view, being quite lost in the depth of stone and mortar. Our inn, the Fonda Ingles, looked out on the square before the Cathedral, a windy spot, where the gusts from the mountains seized and tossed the men's long capes. Like Burgos and Salamanca, Avila is on the truncated mountain of central Spain, and one is reminded of its 3,500 feet of altitude by the bitter cold. Nothing can pierce so sharply as the wind of the Castile plains. Each day we crossed the gusty plaza to the church and so grew to know it with the heart-affection Spanish cathedrals win. The large windows have been walled up to darken the interior, for Spain, the hardy, the all-enduring, ignores the frosts of eight months of the year to provide against the summer heats. The details of Avila Cathedral are truly lovely; a double-aisled ambulatory round the warm space of the High Altar, a retablo of ancient pictures, isolated marble shrines between chancel and choir near which kneel groups of black-veiled worshipers, gleaming brass rejas, a carved coro where the canons chant and where are massive illuminated hymnals on the lectern, all make up one's ideal of a house of God. Do not miss the sacristy, one's ideal too of what a sacristy should be, with antique silver wrought by the De Arfe family, with painted and gilded cabinets, and alabaster altars cut like ivory.
St. Teresa's city is small: one can encircle its walls several times in a constitutional, yet every walk discovers new treasures. We were constantly stumbling on yet other of the imposing portals that exist in their perfection only here and at Segovia, and in the sleepy squares or courtyards we found some of the roughly-hewn stone animals, the primitive god of Druid days, used later by the Romans as milestones. From these comes another title for Avila, Cantos y Santos. An easy afternoon walk can be taken to Son Soles, a hermitage on the lower slope of the mountains, whither the saint must have gone in the summer evenings when the sunset glorified the plain and hills, for the customs of Avila to-day are those of Avila in the sixteenth century. A path led us across the aromatic fields, and country men in wide-brimmed velvet hats gazed at us with clear, fearless eyes, grave yet courteous, like true Castilians. In the meadows we met a gentleman of the town pacing slowly, book in hand; one would have time in the home of the mystic for such fruitful hours of pause, such sessions of sweet silent thought. On the way to Son Soles, just on the outskirts of the town, stands Santo Tomás, the Dominican monastery that long supplied missionaries to the Philippines. Before the High Altar is a white marble mausoleum of Isabella's period, worthy to rank with that of her parents at Miraflores,—the truly touching tomb of her only son. He lies with calm upturned face, a crown on his thick locks, his gauntlets thrown beside him. The royal prince was educated with ten young nobles in a former palace near this church. Generous, handsome, a scholar and musician, with the fair future stretching before him of the first king to rule the Españas rich and united, he died suddenly at Salamanca in 1497, turning all the conquests, all the discoveries of his parents' reign to dust and ashes. The Queen bowed her head in submission, saying "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Blessed be his name": but it is told that she often came to sit in her special stall of the raised choir here, to gaze with broken heart on the white tomb of her son. Had he lived would Spain's evil day have been averted? One can almost believe so; for tyrannic government came in with the Austrian, who ruled here because of Don Juan's death. Charles V, Isabella's grandson, was not a Spaniard; he could little understand the system of individual city rights that prevailed in the country he came to govern. Spain can boast she was one of the earliest of European nations to teach the municipal doctrine that the state has freedom if the town is free. We too completely forget that it was nearly a century before the celebrated Leicester Parliament that Burgos in 1169 had popular representation. When the Austrian arrived, with his autocratic idea that all power should be concentrated, the Castilian cities rose in the Comuneros rebellion, but they were ruthlessly put down and for three hundred years the land's vigor and wealth were exploited for the benefit of one family. I am sure that as she sat pondering in the choir stall of Santo Tomás Isabella foresaw what a tragic loss to her cherished land was the death of her only son. Avila can link the names of Isabella la Católica and Teresa de Jesús, the two most incomparable women in whom the sex has culminated, both born on the bleak invigorating steppes of Castile, in the same province, within the same hundred years, both making an indelible impression on their race, both leaving a deathless heritage of aspiration and onspurring pride. Is there any wonder that a people who can claim two such heroines look at one with fearless eyes?
Avila is rich in tombs. There is a second lovely one in Santo Tomás, that of Prince John's attendants, and down by the river bridge, the picturesque chapel of San Segundo holds a most beautiful work by Spain's best sculptor, Berruguete. The kneeling bishop has so gentle an expression that it is hard to believe he could hurl a Moslem chief from the city walls above this hermitage. In the Cathedral, behind the High Altar, is another Berruguete tomb, Bishop Tostado, whose industry has passed into a proverb; he is here represented with speaking, alert expression, leaning forward, this tireless pen suspended in his hand.
The tomb of St. Teresa is not found in her native city, for she was buried where she died, at Alba de Tormes, some miles from Salamanca. Not long after her death Avila stole the saint's body—strange to our modern notions are those old disputes over relics—but through the influence of the Duke of Alva it was restored to his town.
Admiration for St. Teresa tempted me to Alba de Tormes, but to those who would go thither I must say, resist the temptation. Unfortunately, the spirit of religiosity, which is to religion what sentimentality is to sentiment, has taken possession of her burial place. If you do go to Alba, however, make it a day's excursion from Salamanca. The evening was over before we reached the town, and we drove in darkness from the station, bumping over the ruts of an awful road. Railway and villages seem often at enmity in Spain; though we had passed directly by the gleaming lights of Alba, we ran on some miles further before stopping in its station, hence the necessity of a drive of several kilometers back to the town. The inn was most primitive, being merely the poor house of a country woman, our waiter at table her ten-year old son dressed in corduroys. A friendly pig met us in the front hall, coming out from the kitchen to look at the unaccustomed foreigners; nevertheless, the house was clean and the landlady got out fragrant linen for the bedrooms. On our admiring a picture of their great patroness, the kindly woman, after dusting it, presented it with the customary polite phrase of "this your picture," which was no mere formality, since the next morning when she found it secretly restored to its former place, she rushed out to thrust it again on us as we were stepping into the diligence. This generous landlady, our grave little garçon, the night watchman the sereno, calling the hours, a daybreak view from the plaza of the vivid green meadows along the river, these are the pleasant reminiscences of Alba. Opposite the inn stood the church where the saint is buried, but willingly would I blot out its memory. An excitable monk was our guide. He turned on the electric light with a spectacular air, as if that, not the great relic, was the boast of the church; he showed the saint's silver tomb, her heart hung round with votive gifts, archbishop's rings and diamond coronets, then he led us to the revolving door of the convent, whence personal mementoes were passed us for inspection. Lowering the lights, he bade us look through a grating at the back of the church, and suddenly the electricity was turned on in an interior room, and there on the cot lay the image of a Carmelite nun asleep. The whole thing was in the worst possible taste, on a level with the bad Churrigueresque architecture of the same period. A spot worthy of silent pilgrimage, where one of God's greatest saints breathed her last prayer, "Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies," this solemn cell of her death-bed has been turned to a vulgar show. How Teresa's intelligent simplicity would sweep aside such ill-judged honors! In silent protest at the tawdriness surrounding them, lie the patrons of this Alba foundation, Don Francisco Velasquez and his wife Doña Teresa, distinguished, superb effigies in stone, hidalgo como el Rey. Doña Teresa, in the delightful way of Spanish ladies on tombs, is reading tranquilly in her book of devotions.
With this example before us of the pass to which religious extravagance can be carried, it may be time to touch on a tendency in Spain that is a distress to the northern Catholic who is less childlike in his inward life. Of course, since there is every kind of temperament, there must be every kind of taste; perhaps I am too much guided by personal likes or dislikes. However, I feel that those who crave the appropriate and simple will agree with me that making allowance for an emotional people, a coquettish shepherdess under a glass case on a church altar, (such as I saw in Cadiz,) is misunderstood religion. One of Spain's wisest sons, the philosopher Vives, agitated against the dressing of statues, and the Council of Trent later prohibited the bad usage. Why is not their advice followed? I do not mean to criticise the little country shrines whose inartistic decoration is often most heart-moving; in a remote village certain things are touching which elsewhere are displeasing. It should be the effort of the Spanish clergy to discourage the extreme devotion to special altars and statues. Artificial and roccoco in sentiment and expression, it is a menace to religion in the Peninsula. Spain has the vital Christian faith, she is unspoiled by the tinsel, beneath the symbol is a soul; but, if she insists on clinging to what the modern mind finds ugly and insincere, she may lose many to whom the inner religion of a St. Teresa would appeal. People seldom will see both sides justly; to rid themselves of an irritating detail, some will throw away the whole. There are not a few whose antipathy to religion has been caused by this blind clinging to the non-essential: the novelist Pérez Galdós, I should say was such a case. Though his stories prove that he has never grasped what interior religion means, has never gone to the fountain head and drank of the pure, mystic waters, but has tasted only the contaminated streams of the valley, yet it cannot be denied that some of the religiosity he depicts is a phase that exists only too truly. The evil is the result of ignorance, not of malice. For this reason it would die a natural death were the Spanish clergy given a wholly rounded education. I do not refer here to the learned canons or monastic orders, but to the parochial clergy. Spain watches her neighbor France too closely, let her look further afield and she will lose her fear that education and skepticism go hand in hand; in England and America the priesthood is with the advancing tide, not against it: knowledge never yet harmed religion, but ignorance cripples her. Science should have no silly terrors for priests whose church is the greatest proof of evolution through the ages, advancing relentlessly so that what is worth retaining of man's increasing knowledge finds its inevitable place in her body, but advancing slowly, (impatient abuse cannot hurry her magnificent conservatism); a complete organism, a living entity ever changing, yet ever the same.[21] We can hardly expect the clergy of a land where tradition is a sacred thing, to be in the vanguard of modern thought, but they at least should not forget their own noted men of learning. Ximenez, Luis de León, Feijóo, Isla, Suárez, Balmes,—the names come crowding—all of them churchmen, who, the more they knew, the deeper grew their faith.
After this vexatious visit to Alba de Tormes, it was with trepidation that I came to Avila, there to find Teresa's vigorous, truly-spiritual personality the living presence of the proud, high-minded little Castilian city. And a happy coincidence the night of our arrival gave proof that her generous enthusiasm, her unresting love of souls, were not things of the past. Having spent the day at the Escorial, at ten in the evening we took the express to Avila. In the carriage Reservado para Señoras, we found ourselves with three religious of the Sacred-Heart; a touch of home for me were their familiar fluted caps, buttoned capes, and silver crosses. The few hours of the journey fled all too swiftly in delightful talk; like nuns the world over, they were gay and happy as children, with the serene youth of the convent life in their faces. One of them was so distinguished a woman that it was a fascination to look at her.