“One Word Will Contain Within Itself a Thousand Mysteries.”: Teresa of Avila, the First Woman Commentator on the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs, the wonderful and to some still-shocking love poem of the Bible, is a Magna Carta, or founding document for both Jewish and Christian mysticism.² Perhaps no biblical book has been more quoted by mystics, although the Psalms and John’s Gospel come close. In Jewish mysticism, the witness of the second-century sage, Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, is often cited: “The whole world is not worthy of the day the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of Scripture is holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”³ The first great Christian commentator, Origen of Alexandria, said the same: “Rightly then, is this Song to be preferred to all songs.”⁴ Beginning with Origen, a long line of mystical commentaries on the Song has been central to Christian mysticism: Gregory of Nyssa in the East; Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, Thomas Gallus, Peter John Olivi, Jean Gerson in the West, to cite only some of the more important. Mystics who did not write commentaries still mined it, or sometimes re-created it, for their own purposes, such as Richard of St. Victor and John of the Cross.

To be sure, the potent language of the Song was not to be taken straight in a literal way. The Antiochene exegete Theodore of Mopsuestia got in trouble in the fifth century for writing a more-or-less literal commentary on the book, and in the mid-seventeenth century the Puritan Westminster Confession denounced those who viewed the Song as “an hot carnall pamphlet.” The non-literal readings of the Song of Songs can be conveniently triaged: an ecclesial reading that saw the Song as a description of the love between Christ (the author, King Solomon) and his church; a mystical reading interpreting the book as speaking of the intense love between Christ and the soul; and a Marian reading, which focused on the love between Christ and his Mother, the soul closest to him among all those ever born.

For thirteen centuries all the commentators on the Song were men. This is not to say that women mystics did not know and use the Song of Songs, as can be seen in the case of figures like the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of

Hiver Dan le Pays de Borgloon

© Nobert Heyers

Bingen, who cites about half the verses of the Song across her writings, or the thirteenth-century Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg, who uses the Song often and re-creates its love-language in her own courtly idiom.⁵ Still, the patriarchal prerogatives of Western Christian culture made it clear that commenting on a text as explosive—and potentially misleading—as the Song could not be entrusted to women. This is where Teresa de Jesus, or Teresa of Avila as we call her, comes in. She was the first women in Christian history to have the effrontery to dare to comment on the Song of Songs.

Teresa was born in 1515, so we are celebrating her 500^th this year. She entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in her native Avila in 1535, but was a mediocre nun for almost twenty years, someone wishing to devote herself wholeheartedly to mystical prayer, but unable to do so. Finally, about 1554, God took over, giving her the grace to make a firm break with her wishy-washy life and devote herself to interior prayer and to be open to the many mystical gifts that she recorded in the Vida, or Life, that she wrote between 1562 and 1565. During these years, Teresa and a small group of nuns at the Incarnation also succeeded, against considerable odds, to get permission to begin a reform of the Carmelite order, opening the small community dedicated to St. Joseph at Avila in 1562, a house that was to be the source for the flowering of the order of the Reformed, or Discalced...