Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (review)

Teresa of Avila. The Progress of a Soul.By Cathleen Medwick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 304 pp. $26.00.

This lively, refreshing biography of Teresa of Avila makes fascinating reading. The author, Cathleen Medwick, better known as a contributing editor of Vogue, House and Garden, and Elle, offers a surprisingly engaging introduction to the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, reformer, and Doctor of the Church. Her perspective is that of a Jewish woman, a talented writer and student of English and comparative Renaissance literature, rather than that of a theologian, academic, or spiritual writer.

It was through the study of literature, in particular Richard Crashaw's cycle of Teresa poems, written in 1646 and 1648, that Medwick first discovered Teresa. Her book is inspired by the third poem in the cycle, "The flaming Heart. Upon the book and picture of Teresa. As she is usually expressed with a Seraphim beside her" (251-254). Here, Crashaw draws on Teresa's well-known account of her vision of the angel with the golden dart piercing her heart (The Book of Her Life 29:13) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's statue of this same ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.

Medwick's aim is to present Teresa in a compelling way to a contemporary lay reader, to look at Teresa's journey through the eyes of a woman at the close of the twentieth century. The journey is that of "a soul in progress toward a very specific and elusive goal . . . the true north of saints . . . the road to God" (xvii). The reader who discovers Teresa learns that the journey is as "full of wonder and terror as any ocean voyage through uncharted seas" (xvii). Relying on the expertise of previous translators such as J. M. Cohen, E. Allison Peers, Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., the author produces her own translations of passages from Teresa's works to illustrate her narrative. These translations are free and colloquial in style, and demonstrate a serious, personal involvement with her subject, although they are placed in the text without references or footnotes.

With a writer's skill, Medwick opens her biography with a triptych of images of Teresa. First, there is the graphic scene in which Jerónimo Grazián de la Madre de Dios, provincial of the Discalced Carmelites and very close friend of Teresa, comes to Alba several months after the saint's death, exhumes her intact body and severs her left hand to take back to Avila, while reserving the little finger for himself. The next image comes from a portrait painted by Juan de la Miseria in 1576 when Teresa was sixty-one years old, presenting her as "a stolid, watchful nun, not likely to be felled by a bolt of lightning, much less by an angel's spear." (6). Bernini's "marble mystic who swoons divinely" (6) completes the picture. Such conflicting images of Teresa lend a note of intrigue to the questions with which the Prologue ends: "Was she heroic or histrionic: a saint encased in the armor of humility, or an unstable woman, brown as a date, propped up by the ardor of faith?" (7)

Drawing from Teresa's major works, The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection, Foundations, and The Interior Castle, and relying on well-researched background material, Medwick presents Teresa's journey through life and her journey to God. At the age of seven, Teresa began the first of many journeys, setting off for the land of the Moors to seek martyrdom along with her brother, Rodrigo. There follows her brief education at the Augustinian convent, her entry into the convent of the Encarnación in her native Avila, her introduction to mental prayer through reading The Third Spiritual Alphabet by Francisco de Osuna, and her key conversion experience before the image of...