Skip to content
The ConsciousLibrary

Library Teresa of Ávila

The Way of Perfection — Teresa of Ávila

Written work · Essential works

The Way of Perfection

Camino de perfección

Retrato de Santa Teresa de Jesús por fray Juan de la Miseria (1576)
byTeresa of Ávila

Written for the thirteen nuns of Saint Joseph's in Ávila, who asked her to speak to them about prayer. It begins with the three virtues that make community life possible (mutual love, detachment, humility) and flows into a commentary on the Lord's Prayer, petition by petition, which is in fact a treatise on the prayer of recollection and quiet. It is her most pedagogical and direct book, with its famous demand for a 'determined determination' (ch. 21) not to abandon the way.

Buy the book

amazon.com · Link to the store.

Editions and translations · 3

EnglishDeutsch

What it is about

The Way of Perfection is the book Teresa of Jesus wrote to teach her nuns how to pray. Where the Life recounts her experience before her confessors, the Way turns it into teaching for a particular community: the first thirteen Discalced nuns of San José in Ávila, who asked her to set down in writing what she taught them aloud. The result is a practical handbook, warm and at times combative, written with the freedom of someone speaking within the family and addressing her readers as “daughters” and “sisters”.

The book has two great movements. The first lays down the conditions for a life of prayer: one cannot pray well without living well. Teresa sums them up in three virtues —love for one another, detachment from all created things, and true humility— and develops them with examples drawn from daily life together: exclusive friendships that divide a community, attachment to honour and lineage, the temptation to feel more spiritual than the others. The second movement is a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. Through the prayer every Christian knows by heart, Teresa shows that vocal prayer, said attentively, can open onto the highest contemplation: whoever prays the Our Father well is already on the road to union.

This is the thesis of the book and its boldest move. At a time when the Inquisition distrusted mental prayer and preferred women to confine themselves to reciting set prayers, Teresa argues that there is no boundary between the two: vocal prayer done well is already mental prayer, and no one can forbid a nun to think about what she is saying when she prays. With this move she protects her daughters and, at the same time, opens the way to contemplation for them.

The book also introduces the notion of the “prayer of recollection”, in which the soul gathers in its senses and turns inward, where it discovers that God is present. It is the hinge between one’s own effort and grace, and one of Teresa’s most lasting contributions to spirituality. Alongside it, the Way contains the famous call to a “determined determination”, the firm decision never to turn back whatever happens.

Because of its intimate tone, its relative brevity and its grounding in a universal prayer, the Way was for centuries the most widely read of Teresa’s books in convents, and it remains an introductory text for anyone who wishes to learn how to pray.

Authorship note

Two autograph redactions: the first (c. 1566) is kept at El Escorial; the second, revised by Teresa herself, at the Discalced Carmelites of Valladolid, and underlies modern editions.

Context of composition

Teresa wrote a first draft around 1566, shortly after finishing the Life, at San José in Ávila. Her confessor García de Toledo, who had read the autobiography, forbade her to give that book to the nuns and suggested she write another one for them. The first draft, more spontaneous, circulated in the convent and was reviewed by a censor —probably the Dominican Domingo Báñez— who struck out and annotated passages. Teresa then rewrote it in a second, more cautious and orderly version around 1569. The background is twofold: the Wars of Religion in France, which Teresa knew by report and which led her to ask her nuns to pray for the Church; and the distrust of vernacular mental prayer after the 1559 Index, which explains her defence of vocal prayer. The book was thus born for a tiny, female readership, and in full awareness of being watched. That double awareness, of particular addressees and of watchful readers, explains its blend of confidence and caution.

Structure

  1. 01

    Chapters 1–3: why San José exists

    Teresa explains the purpose of the foundation: faced with the “troubles in France” and the division of the Church, a small group of poor, enclosed nuns can help, through prayer, those who defend it. It is the apostolic justification of a hidden life.

  2. 02

    Chapters 4–15: the three virtues

    The foundation of prayer is life itself: mutual love, detachment and humility. Teresa distinguishes spiritual love from emotional attachment, criticises particular friendships, concern for honour and lineage and excessive penances, and advises on choosing confessors and admitting novices.

  3. 03

    Chapters 16–26: contemplation, determination and recollection

    Contemplation and active life (Martha and Mary), the game of chess in which one “checkmates” the King, the living water of contemplation and the “determined determination”. A defence of vocal prayer and first guidance on praying by looking at Christ as companion.

  4. 04

    Chapters 27–42: commentary on the Lord’s Prayer

    Each petition becomes a lesson: “who art in heaven” leads to the prayer of recollection (28–29); “thy kingdom come”, to the prayer of quiet (30–31); “thy will be done”, to self-surrender (32); “our daily bread”, to the Eucharist (33–35); “forgive us”, to forgiveness (36); the final petitions, to love and fear of God (37–42).

Main themes

Living well in order to pray well

Teresa does not separate prayer from common life. The three virtues are not moral prerequisites but the very ground of prayer: without mutual love, detachment and humility, prayer turns into spiritual vanity. That is why she devotes almost half the book to such prosaic matters as jealousy between sisters or an obsession with lineage.

Vocal and mental prayer

The book’s great defence: praying with the lips without knowing what one says is not prayer, and praying with awareness of whom one is addressing is already mental prayer. In this way Teresa disarms suspicion of interior prayer and, at the same time, dignifies the simple prayer of someone who knows only the Our Father.

Recollection

The prayer of recollection consists in withdrawing the senses and entering within oneself, where God dwells, like someone shutting themselves inside a small inner heaven. Teresa presents it as something that can be learned and practised, unlike the higher favours, and considers it the safest path for beginners.

The “determined determination”

Rather than extraordinary qualities, Teresa asks for steadfastness: to set out on the path resolved never to leave it, whatever the cost, whatever people say, even if one dies on the way. Perseverance is for her the real test of love and the antidote to the inconstancy she lamented in her own youth.

Christ as companion

Teresa proposes to her nuns not lofty reflections but a gaze: to imagine Christ beside them, according to each day’s mood, sorrowful with the sorrowful and joyful with the joyful. It is an affective, concrete pedagogy within anyone’s reach.

Key passages

«The first is love for one another; the second, detachment from all created things; the third, true humility, which, though I name it last, is the chief of them and embraces all the rest.»

La una es amor unas con otras; otra, desasimiento de todo lo criado; la otra, verdadera humildad, que, aunque la digo a la postre, es la principal y las abraza todas

Camino de perfección (redacción de Valladolid), cap. 4, n.º 4

The programme of the first half of the book in a single sentence. Humility, named last, is what holds up the other two. English translation our own.

«What matters greatly —indeed everything— is a great and very determined determination not to stop until one reaches it, come what may, happen what may, whatever the toil, whoever may grumble.»

importa mucho, y el todo, una grande y muy determinada determinación de no parar hasta llegar a ella, venga lo que viniere, suceda lo que sucediere, trabájese lo que se trabajare, murmure quien murmurare

Camino de perfección (redacción de Valladolid), cap. 21, n.º 2

“It” is the fountain of living water, an image of contemplation. The accumulation of subjunctives mimics the rhythm of a decision that admits no exceptions. English translation our own.

«I am not asking you now to think about him, or to draw out many ideas, or to make great and subtle reflections with your understanding; I ask nothing more of you than that you look at him.»

No os pido ahora que penséis en Él ni que saquéis muchos conceptos ni que hagáis grandes y delicadas consideraciones con vuestro entendimiento; no os pido más de que le miréis

Camino de perfección (redacción de Valladolid), cap. 26, n.º 3

Prayer reduced to a gaze. Teresa frees her nuns from the demand to reason things out and puts contemplation within anyone’s reach. English translation our own.

Reception and influence

The Way was the first of Teresa’s books to reach print, and it nearly did so in her lifetime: the Archbishop of Évora, Dom Teotónio de Bragança, sponsored its publication, which appeared in Évora in 1583, after Teresa’s death, together with the Maxims. The Salamanca edition of 1585 followed, and it was included in Fray Luis de León’s edition of 1588, which used a copy corrected by the author herself. The existence of two autographs —El Escorial and Valladolid— has fuelled philological work ever since: modern editions usually follow the second version and note the variants of the first, which is freer and at times sharper.

For centuries it was the formation book of the Discalced Carmelite convents that spread across France, Flanders, Italy and the Americas, and the commentary on the Lord’s Prayer was also read beyond the order as one of the classic texts on that prayer. Twentieth-century scholarship highlighted its historical value, for what it reveals about female convent life and inquisitorial pressure, and its pedagogical modernity. The censor’s deletions in the El Escorial autograph, still visible today, have become an eloquent record of how a woman’s words were policed.

How to read it

It is probably Teresa’s most accessible book and a good entry point to her teaching. It can be read straight through in a few sittings; those mainly interested in the teaching on prayer can start at chapter 19 and return to the opening chapters later. An edition that marks the differences between the two versions is advisable, since some of the liveliest sentences appear only in the first (El Escorial). Recommended editions include those of Tomás Álvarez (Monte Carmelo) and María Jesús Mancho Duque (Espasa-Calpe, Austral). In English, Kavanaugh and Rodriguez (ICS, vol. 2) record the variants.

Editions and translations

Editions in your language first, without hiding the others. Each with its cover and its store.

English

Deutsch

Further reading

  • The Book of Her Life

    The *Way* was written as a substitute for the *Life*, which her confessor did not want the nuns to read; it reworks its teaching on prayer for teaching purposes.

  • The Interior Castle

    Where the *Way* stops at recollection and quiet, the *Mansions* continue to the spiritual marriage.

  • The Lord’s Prayer (Mt 6:9–13; Lk 11:2–4)

    The second half of the book is a petition-by-petition commentary on the prayer the Gospels attribute to Jesus.

Other works by Teresa of Ávila

Sources

  • Teresa de Jesús. Obras completas. Transcripción, introducciones y notas de Efrén de la Madre de Dios y Otger Steggink. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962 (ediciones posteriores revisadas).
  • Teresa de Jesús, *Camino de perfección*, ed. de María Jesús Mancho Duque, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe (Austral), 1991.
  • Teresa de Jesús, *Obras completas*, ed. de Tomás Álvarez, Burgos, Monte Carmelo.
  • Kieran Kavanaugh y Otilio Rodriguez (trads.), *The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila*, vol. 2, Washington, ICS Publications, 1980.
  • Rowan Williams, *Teresa of Avila*, Londres, Geoffrey Chapman, 1991.
  • Alison Weber, *Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990.
  • Víctor García de la Concha, *El arte literario de santa Teresa*, Barcelona, Ariel, 1978.

Affiliate link: if you buy through it, the library may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. When an edition's real cover is not available, we show an illustrative library cover.