Teresa of Ávila

About this figure

Teresa of Ávila was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada in 1515 in Ávila, Spain, to a family of partly converso (Jewish-convert) ancestry on her father's side. She entered a Carmelite convent in her early twenties against her father's initial wishes, and spent years troubled by illness and by what she experienced as a spiritually lax convent atmosphere, before a deepening of her prayer life in her forties led her toward a stricter form of religious life. She described this inner development, along with her often startling mystical experiences, in her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, written at the direction of her confessors and completed around 1565.

In 1562 she founded the Convent of St. Joseph in Ávila as the first house of what became the Discalced ("shoeless") Carmelite reform, intended to restore stricter poverty, enclosure, and contemplative prayer to an order she felt had drifted from its origins. Despite opposition from within the Carmelite hierarchy and suspicion from the Spanish Inquisition, which was wary of unsupervised female mystics in this period, she went on to found more than a dozen additional convents across Spain, traveling extensively in an era when such travel by a woman was unusual. She collaborated closely with the younger friar John of the Cross in extending the reform to Carmelite men.

Beyond her autobiography, Teresa wrote The Way of Perfection as a guide for her nuns and The Interior Castle, an account of the soul's progress toward union with God through a series of inner "dwelling places," completed in 1577. She died in 1582 at Alba de Tormes. She was canonized in 1622, and in 1970 she and Catherine of Siena became the first women declared Doctors of the Church, a title recognizing the enduring theological significance of her writing.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.