The Heirs of St. Teresa of Ávila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy (review)

Fray Luis de León, first editor of Teresa’s writings (1588), wrote that although he did not have the privilege of knowing Teresa in this life, “now that she lives in heaven I know and see her in two living images that she left us of herself, which are her daughters and her books” (pp. 45, 117). In recent years North American scholars have concentrated on explicating Teresa’s books. These essays, originally presented as talks at the symposium “The Heirs of St. Teresa” that was hosted by the Discalced Carmelites, contribute to our knowledge of her daughters and sons—those nuns and priests who initiated the project of extending Teresa’s institutional influence beyond the borders of Spain. In addition to presenting significant biographical information for Teresa’s most active protégés, this collection illustrates Teresa’s immense capacity for motivating spiritual development and her talent for conceiving monastic organizations flexible and durable enough to survive transplantation from Spain to foreign, even hostile, environments.

The symposium marked the 400th anniversary of the year 1604, when Teresa’s heirs began to form Discalced Carmelite foundations across the Pyrenees and across the Atlantic. In his succinct, discerning introduction, Christopher C. Wilson describes the scope of Teresa’s enterprise as global, thus placing it at the forefront of the phenomenon we now confront full-blown, globalization.

Alison Weber’s case study of the monastic career of María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) provides a good lens for viewing Teresa’s modes of leadership as well as the political challenges that confronted her successors. María, now thought to be an illegitimate child of a duke of Medinaceli, quickly distinguished herself for exceptional intelligence, charisma, and piety. Her forceful personality and determination became liabilities when she made sometimes unwise unilateral decisions and, without Teresa’s gifts for incisive political and rhetorical finesse, she too bluntly challenged the male leadership of the order.

In “Paul the Enchanter: Saint Teresa’s Vow of Obedience to Gracián,” Barbara Mujica explores the most anomalous and puzzling of Teresa’s personal relationships, with Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios (1545–1614). When Teresa met Gracián in 1575, she was twice his age, sixty to his thirty. Teresa admitted that he stirred in her emotions more like infatuation than mere enthusiasm about a promising recruit. Most commentators then and now have so studiously avoided describing the relationship as “romantic” that by default they leave the impression of an ardent, even perhaps sexualized, attraction. To her credit, Mujica raises many possible explanations, while keeping them appropriately conjectural. Teresa transferred her vow of obedience from Christ to Gracián, who, she maintained, ordered her to establish the otherwise unauthorized foundations in Andalusia, a move of questionable judgment that constricted Teresa’s range of action for many years and thus delayed advancement of the order.

Elizabeth Teresa Howe’s subject, Ana de San Agustín (1555–1624), who was less well known than other women disciples because she was less active in the order, holds great interest for her writings, two books of spiritual testimonies recounting her “intense interior life” (p. 47). These testimonies reveal that Ana always experienced Teresa as an interior presence, both because and after her death, often a disturbing one.

Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., devotes his paper to Anne of St. Bartholomew (1549–1626), said to be the nun who knew Teresa best. Ana de San Bartolomé, an orphan who entered the St. Joseph convent as a lay sister in 1570, became Teresa’s traveling companion, nurse, and secretary. Because Ana de San Bartolomé and Ana de Jesús (1545–1621) knew Teresa well, the French selected them to carry the Discalced Carmelite torch to France. From the outset...