How to Read Teresa of Ávila / Carlos Eire

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and one of the most influential mystics in all of Church history, writing two spiritual classics still read today: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Her autobiography (more accurately, a confession to Spanish Inquisitors) is The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, detailing her spiritual experiences of the love of God.

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.

About Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state. He was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.

• The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Carlos Eire (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164939/the-life-of-saint-teresa-of-avila )
• The Book of My Life by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/the-collected-works-of-st-teresa-of-avila-vol-1 or https://www.shambhala.com/teresa-of-avila-1518.html )
• A long confession to the Inquisition which had placed her under investigation and read by those who were curious and believed her mysticism might be a fraud
• The Spanish Inquisition in the 16th Century
• Autobiography v. Auto-hagiography
• The chief virtue of sainthood was humility
• Medieval mysticism in the asceticism of monastic communities
• The Reformation’s rejection of monastic communities and their practices
• “You can fast as much as you want, and you can punish yourself as much as you want. That's not going to, uh, make God love you any more than he already does. And it's not going to wipe out your sins. Christ has wiped out your sins. So, all of this, uh, Oh, self obsession and posturing, uh, the very concept of holiness is redefined.”
• Direct experience of the divine in mysticism: purgation (cleansing), feedback from God (illumination), and union with the divine.
• On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux (https://litpress.org/Products/CF013B/On-Loving-God)
• Surrendering of the self in order to find oneself, and in turn God
• Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/st-teresa-of-avila-the-interior-castle-study-edition)
• Recogimiento - a prayer in which one lets go of their senses; a form a prayer in which you are just in a chat with a friend
• The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (https://paracletepress.com/products/the-cloud-of-unknowing )
• Meaning that is found without words - recollection and recogimiento
• Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo - translation of Rhineland mysticism into Spanish
• Staged approach and a development of spirituality
• “You're doing some transforming of your own, of course, by, you know, being engaged in this, but it's, it's really a gift from God progress and progress. Uh, progress and progress, or, uh, pretty much like an athlete whose skills become better and better and better. Or any artist whose skills improve and improve and improve and improve.Except in this case, there's someone else involved. You're not just working out or rehearsing. It's the other party involved in, in this, uh, phenomenon of prayer.”
• The Four Waters as an image for the progression of prayer
• The irony of Teresa’s writing and her nods to the inquisition found within her writings
• The experience of mysticism and God cannot be understood - it is beyond language
• Repetition in prayer and meditation
• Edith Stein was inspired by Teresa of Ávila
• Monastic life was very isolated and was filled with hard work
• The doubt of her confessors that her visions of Jesus were real
• Responding to the devil with crudeness
• Mystical marriage with Christ
• The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua ( https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-life-of-saint-catherine-of-siena-the-classic-on-her-life-and-accomplishments-as-recorded-by-her-spiritual-director/ )
• Physical visions and intellectual visions
• Her visions were beyond her control
• Transverberation - a vision of an angel with a spear that she is struck with; pain and bliss simultaneously in the wounding
• God as a very clear diamond
• Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity by Alison Weber (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691027449/teresa-of-avila-and-the-rhetoric-of-femininity) - Constant self-humbling of Teresa
• Devotion to heart imagery in mysticism, Catholicism, and Teresa’s spirituality
• They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280074/they-flew/)
• The bodily effects and physical nature of Teresa’s mysticism
• mysticism for the masses and books for the laity
• Mysticism is a double edged sword - this is also what makes Jesus threatening in the gospels
• Steven Ozment (Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century?) https://archive.org/details/mysticismdissent0000ozme/page/n295/mode/2up
• Human nature and our potential
• Great detail and charming in her writing

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Carlos Eire
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, & Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give