Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her twentieth year.[[265]]
We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps, convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[[266]] It is not improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced, and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St. Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[[267]]
On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat, through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous crime.
In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer, and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.
The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila, established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there, discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad, flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually dumb.[[268]] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year, would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.
In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[[269]] Under this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world; which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons. Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy. Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall; who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says, as if he were made of the roots of trees (hecho de reyzes de arboles[[270]]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and incessantly asks him if he is quite sure that she is sincere. Such a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all, the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed idea.
Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the Veni Creator, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but angels.‘[[271]] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions, of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready. They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila. The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews with the future General of the Society of Jesus.
A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross, and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director. Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he had before forbidden![[272]] Of course. For who knows what might come of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of ecclesiastical interests.[[273]] The condemned quietists were merely mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil. Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee off captive to their home of dolour!
The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to change him when they deem it desirable.[[274]] John of the Cross, too, dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[[275]] Her next guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether, when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.