ONE SHREWD LADY.

Teresa of Avila
The Progress of a Soul
By Cathleen Medwick
Alfred A. Knopf, $26, 264 pp.

Teresa of Avila's life spanned the better part of the sixteenth century. Barely a generation before her birth in 1515 unconverted Jews were expelled from Spain in the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed west for the Indies. Both events would impact Teresa's life. Her own family came from converso stock who fell under the suspicion of the Inquisition. Later in her life, her religious foundations would benefit from the monies her brothers earned in the New World. Sixteenth-century Spain flourished both economically and culturally. This was the century of Ignatius Loyola, Philip II, Cervantes, El Greco, Zurburan, Saint John of the Cross, to say nothing of Teresa herself. It was also the century of the Protestant Reformation as well as the Catholic reform whose energies were crystallized in the work of the Council of Trent.

The Spanish Inquisition busied itself not only with the rising tide of mainly female visionaries and mystics whose experiences needed the check of orthodoxy but also with Judaizers among the conversos, and the infiltration of Protestants who went under the generic term of los luteranos. Nor was the Inquisition disposed to tolerate vernacular translations of the Scriptures, or writers too much influenced by such humanists as Erasmus.

Cathleen Medwick pays glancing attention to these swirling eddies of intellectual and spiritual experimentation; her main focus is on the life of Teresa. Medwick traces Teresa's early years, her entrance into the genteel life of the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, her second conversion as a person of prayer, and her subsequent trials as a founder of reformed monasteries of women under the austere rule of Mount Carmel. By the time of her death in 1581, Teresa had founded more than a dozen monastic houses. She accomplished this by surmounting obstructive civil authorities who saw no need for yet another convent in their cities, by surviving wrangles with church authorities over how the convents were to constitute themselves, and by besting ever intrusive aristocrats who would supply monies but felt their generosity allowed them the right to determine how the nuns were to live.

Readers disinclined to learn much about the ecclesiastical and civil machinations of the period may sigh with impatience at the author's attention to these matters. However, they will not fail to see, in Medwick's telling, how this extraordinary woman, with her relentless will (Teresa called it muy determinada determinacion), her overwhelming sense of the presence of God, her extraordinary administrative skills, her mastery of diplomacy, and her capacity for the subtle application of flattery-as well as her uncanny ability to get her way while being obedient to her superiors-became one of the most luminous and attractive figures in the history of Christian holiness.

In the midst of all her labors and travel, Teresa also managed to compose some significant books and a vast corpus of letters. She wrote, at the instigation of her confessor, her autobiography (Mi Vida), which shows the influence of Augustine's Confessions newly available to her in a vernacular translation, as well as The Way of Perfection, her book of Foundations, and a commentary on the Song of Songs. And then there is her masterpiece, The Interior Castle. All of these works were written out of need or out of obedience. Her commentary on the Song of Songs was a daring enterprise since women were not considered to be capable of teaching theology. It is worthwhile to remember that a friar who was her contemporary spent some years in a prison for translating the Song into Spanish.

Medwick is no theologian, so her analysis of these texts is fairly conventional. Nonetheless, we must be grateful that she resists the reductionist temptation. She allows Teresa to speak, she takes seriously the saint's self-understanding that she has had deep spiritual experiences, and she never explains Teresa's writings as mere erotic sublimations (although there is a deep strain of the erotic in her writing) or some sort of psychological construct. Nor, we might note in passing, is her book burdened with that tedious jargon that mars so much contemporary academic writing about Teresa. Medwick, in short, presents Teresa at face value while keeping a keen awareness that the formulations and the vocabulary of a sixteenth-century nun whose wellsprings are a spiritual tradition that goes back into the early patristic period cannot but sound strange to the modern ear.

A Roman nuncio of the time described her as an "unstable, restless, disobedient, and contumacious female who, in the name of devotion, devised false doctrines...teaching as if she were a master in spite of Saint Paul's order that women should not teach." The word "master" meant a theologian who could expound the Scriptures. Teresa's right to teach, however, would not be vindicated until our time when the late Paul VI named her a doctor of the church. In her own lifetime Teresa had the good sense to ally herself with outstanding supporters such as the observant Franciscan Peter Alcantara and the famous Dominican theologian, Domenico Banez. To aid her reforming efforts she enlisted a young Carmelite friar, nearly three decades her junior, named John of the Cross, to begin a reform among the male Carmelites. John was her sometime confessor and perhaps the only person, male or female, before whom Teresa stood in awe. Teresa called him, jokingly, "half a friar" (because of his diminutive size) and her "little Seneca" because of his learning and discretion. They were not close friends but esteemed colleagues.

In 1588 Luis de Leon edited Teresa's writings for publication and included an apologetic introduction indicating that her work was firmly rooted in the tradition of Christian spirituality. In 1622 Teresa was canonized. In that same period, her sisters brought Teresa's teachings on prayer to France. Radiating from those French Carmels, the influence of Teresa helped nourish the seventeenth-century movement we now call the "French School of Spirituality." In the summer of 1921 a young philosopher, Edith Stein, picked up a copy of Teresa's autobiography and read it straight through one evening. When she finished, she tells us that she said "this is the truth." A year later, she sought baptism and subsequently entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany, taking the name Benedicta of the Holy Cross.

There is an eerie symmetry between these two women: both of Jewish background, both powerful intellects, both nurtured in the mystical tradition of the Carmelites, and both writers. In his recent encyclical Fides et ratio, John Paul II lists Edith Stein as one of the figures he sees as a model for those who have integrated the life of the mind with the life of the spirit. Teresa, as Medwick makes clear, was not by the standards of the day a letrado (a "lettered one"). Her Latin was sparse, her writing style is not elegant (in the autobiography, she has a multichaptered digression!), and her reading depended very much on what she could find in the vernacular. But as this biography makes clear, she was an authentic religious genius.

Lawrence S. Cunningham writes the "Religion Book Notes" for Commonweal. He teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.