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The Book of Her Life — Teresa of Ávila

Written work · Essential works

The Book of Her Life

Libro de la vida

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

An autobiographical account in forty chapters: childhood, illness, twenty lukewarm years at the Incarnation, the conversion of 1554 and, at its centre, a treatise on prayer set out through the allegory of the 'four waters' used to irrigate a garden (chs. 11–22). The second part describes the 'favours' (locutions, visions, raptures, the transverberation) with unusual phenomenological precision, always under the gaze of the confessors who would read it. It is at once confession, a defence against the suspicion of Illuminism, and the first great work of autobiographical prose in Castilian.

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What it is about

The Book of Her Life is the spiritual autobiography of Teresa de Ahumada, Teresa of Jesus in religion, and one of the great achievements of sixteenth-century Spanish prose. It is not an autobiography in the modern sense. Teresa does not set out to tell her story in order to make herself known; she gives an account of it to her confessors, who needed to judge whether the extraordinary favours she claimed to receive —locutions, visions, raptures— came from God or were the work of the devil or of her own imagination. The book is therefore born under suspicion and written out of obedience, and that tension between the need to speak and the fear of being misunderstood gives it its characteristic tremor.

The narrative follows a recognisable line: childhood in Ávila, a taste for chivalric romances and lives of the saints, entry into the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation, a grave illness that left her paralysed, almost twenty years of lukewarm and divided religious life and, at last, a conversion she places before an image of Christ “sorely wounded”. At that point the story breaks off to open a treatise on prayer —the famous comparison of the four ways of watering a garden— and resumes with her mystical experiences, the doubts of her confessors and the founding, against fierce opposition, of the small convent of San José in Ávila in 1562, the first house of the Discalced reform.

The thesis that runs through the book is simple and radical: prayer is not a technique reserved for the learned or an exercise of the intellect, but “an intimate sharing between friends” with one who loves us. Teresa argues that anyone may take up this path, that times of dryness are not failure, and that the experience of God, though it cannot be fully explained, can be told truthfully. More quietly, she also defends the right of a woman without theological training to say what she has lived.

Its importance is twofold. As a spiritual document it fixed a vocabulary —recollection, quiet, union, rapture— that later mysticism inherited and that scholars of religious experience still use. As a literary work it inaugurated a prose that writes the way people speak: full of digressions, jokes, corrections made on the run, homely images drawn from the garden, the kitchen or games. That voice, at once humble and assured, has kept the book alive for believers and non-believers alike, and for many readers it remains the best way into Teresa herself.

Authorship note

Teresa's autograph, written at her confessors' command (first redaction 1562, second 1565). The original is kept in the Royal Library of El Escorial; impounded by the Inquisition in 1575, it was published by Fray Luis de León in 1588.

Context of composition

Teresa wrote a first version in 1562 in Toledo, in the house of Doña Luisa de la Cerda, at the command of the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez; that draft does not survive. The version we read was completed in 1565 at San José in Ávila, at the request of another Dominican, García de Toledo, whom she often addresses as “your reverence”. The moment was delicate. The Index of forbidden books issued by the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés in 1559 had withdrawn many spiritual works in the vernacular, and Castile was prosecuting the alumbrados, whose unmediated mysticism was regarded as suspect. A nun who spoke of visions and wrote about prayer in Spanish was exposed on every side. The book was not written for the public but for a small circle of learned men charged with examining her. It circulated in copies, was denounced to the Inquisition by the Princess of Éboli, who felt slighted by Teresa, and remained impounded by the Holy Office from 1575 until after the author’s death in 1582.

Structure

  1. 01

    Chapters 1–10: childhood, vocation and the lukewarm years

    Her family, the childhood escape “to the land of the Moors” with her brother Rodrigo, adolescence and entry into the Incarnation (1535). Then the illness, the failed cure at Becedas, paralysis and the years of prayer abandoned and resumed. The section culminates in chapter 9 with her conversion before a wounded Christ and her reading of Augustine’s *Confessions*.

  2. 02

    Chapters 11–22: treatise on the four degrees of prayer

    A doctrinal parenthesis. The soul is a garden watered in four ways: drawing water from a well by hand (11–13), with a water wheel (14–15, the prayer of quiet), with water from a river or stream (16–17, the “sleep of the faculties”) and with rain from heaven (18–21, union and rapture). Chapter 22 argues that the humanity of Christ must never be set aside.

  3. 03

    Chapters 23–31: mystical favours and discernment

    The narrative resumes: locutions, intellectual and imaginative visions, the fear of being deceived and the conflicting advice of confessors. The Jesuits appear, as does Peter of Alcántara, who reassures her. Chapter 29 recounts the transverberation, the angel’s fiery dart that later inspired Bernini.

  4. 04

    Chapters 32–36: the founding of San José

    After a vision of hell that drives her towards a more radical life, Teresa plans a small, poor, strictly enclosed convent. She recounts the secret negotiations, the opposition of the city and of her own order, the lawsuit, and the opening of San José in Ávila in August 1562.

  5. 05

    Chapters 37–40: later favours and epilogue

    Final chapters in a calmer key: the effects of the favours, visions of heaven and of the Church, counsel on inner freedom. The book closes with a letter to García de Toledo in which Teresa submits it to his judgement and asks him to burn it if it is of no use.

Main themes

Prayer as friendship

Teresa’s most quoted definition appears here: mental prayer is “an intimate sharing between friends” with one we know loves us. Against school methods that required orderly reasoning and meditation, she proposes a personal relationship, with its silences and complaints. Friendship is measured not by feeling but by faithfulness to the relationship; hence her insistence on never giving up prayer, even when one lives badly.

The garden and the water

The comparison of the four waters organises the whole theology of the book. The further the soul advances, the less work it contributes and the more God does: from the bucket hauled up by hand one passes to the rain that falls without effort. Drawn from the rural life of Castile, the image turns a complex doctrine of grace and mystical passivity into something any reader grasps at once.

Discernment without self-deception

Teresa writes in fear of being wrong and says so. She offers criteria for telling true favours from false ones: the genuine leave humility, peace and better conduct; those of the devil leave unrest and dryness. She also claims the guidance of learned confessors, though they often hurt her, preferring sound learning to ignorant devotion.

The humanity of Christ

Against certain teachers who advised setting aside every bodily image in order to rise to pure contemplation, Teresa maintains in chapter 22 that Christ’s humanity must never be abandoned. She admits she once tried it and judges it a mistake. It is one of the most personal features of her spirituality, which is concrete and affective.

A woman who writes

The book is shot through with formulas of humility —“I am a woman, and a wretched one”— that critics have read as a rhetorical strategy enabling her to speak in a world that denied women doctrinal authority. Beneath that modesty lies great confidence in what she has lived and a delicate irony towards learned men who have never prayed.

Key passages

«For mental prayer, in my view, is nothing other than a sharing between friends, often spending time alone with the one we know loves us.»

que no es otra cosa oración mental, a mi parecer, sino tratar de amistad, estando muchas veces tratando a solas con quien sabemos nos ama

Libro de la vida, cap. 8, n.º 5

Teresa’s definition of prayer, quoted endlessly. The key is the verb *tratar*: not to think or to feel, but to keep company with someone. The English is our own translation of the original.

«It seems to me that a garden can be watered in four ways: by drawing water from a well, which costs us great labour; or with a water wheel and buckets…; or from a river or stream…; or by plentiful rain, when the Lord waters it without any labour of ours.»

Paréceme a mí que se puede regar de cuatro maneras: u con sacar el agua de un pozo, que es a nuestro gran trabajo; u con noria y arcaduces […]; u de un río u arroyo […]; u con llover mucho, que lo riega el Señor sin trabajo ninguno nuestro

Libro de la vida, cap. 11, n.º 7 (con elisiones)

The opening of the comparison that structures chapters 11–22. The progression runs from human effort to pure grace. English translation our own.

«I saw in his hands a long golden dart, and at the tip of the iron there seemed to be a little fire; he seemed to thrust it into my heart several times, so that it reached my very entrails.»

Víale en las manos un dardo de oro largo, y al fin del hierro me parecía tener un poco de fuego; éste me parecía meter por el corazón algunas veces y que me llegaba a las entrañas

Libro de la vida, cap. 29, n.º 13

The transverberation, basis of Bernini’s sculptural group in Santa Maria della Vittoria (Rome, 1647–1652) and of the liturgical feast of 26 August. English translation our own.

Reception and influence

After its impoundment, the manuscript was recovered thanks to Ana de Jesús and the mediation of the Empress Maria, and Fray Luis de León included it in the first edition of Teresa’s works (Salamanca, Guillermo Foquel, 1588), prefaced by a letter defending the author and her style: he would sooner correct those who had corrected her than change a word. From there the book spread across Europe, with translations into Italian (1599), French (1601) and English (Michael Walpole’s in 1611 and Tobie Matthew’s The Flaming Hart in 1642). Her beatification (1614) and canonisation (1622) multiplied its readership.

Its reception has had as many layers as its readers. For the Carmelite and Catholic tradition it is a treatise on prayer and a record of holiness; for literary critics, from Menéndez Pelayo to Víctor García de la Concha, a summit of Renaissance plain prose. In the twentieth century it was read passionately by Edith Stein, who said she had found “the truth” in it, and also by psychiatry and feminist theory: Simone de Beauvoir cites Teresa in The Second Sex, and studies by Alison Weber and Rosa Rossi have analysed her rhetoric of humility as a form of authority. Pathologising readings that attributed her visions to hysteria or epilepsy now belong to the history of science rather than to the interpretation of the book.

How to read it

It is best read in order, but without fear of skipping: chapters 1–10 read like a novel and are the best way in; chapters 11–22 demand more attention and can be saved for a second reading, though chapter 11 (the four waters) is essential. Accept the digressions: they are part of the style and often contain the best passages. In Spanish, the editions by Dámaso Chicharro (Cátedra) and Fidel Sebastián Mediavilla (Real Academia Española) offer a reliable text and helpful notes; Tomás Álvarez’s (Monte Carmelo) are very practical. In English, the translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications) is the standard.

Editions and translations

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

English

Español

Deutsch

Further reading

  • The Interior Castle

    Twelve years later Teresa reorganises the doctrine of the four waters into the seven mansions, with greater maturity and system.

  • The Book of the Foundations

    It continues the story where the *Life* leaves off: after San José, the other foundations of the reform.

  • Spiritual Testimonies

    Short reports to her confessors that extend and refine the experiences told in the *Life*.

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, *Libro de la vida*, ed. de Dámaso Chicharro, Madrid, Cátedra (Letras Hispánicas), 1979.
  • Teresa de Jesús, *Libro de la vida*, ed. de Fidel Sebastián Mediavilla, Madrid, Real Academia Española (Biblioteca Clásica), 2014.
  • Teresa de Jesús, *Obras completas*, ed. de Efrén de la Madre de Dios y Otger Steggink, Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos.
  • Kieran Kavanaugh y Otilio Rodriguez (trads.), *The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila*, vol. 1, Washington, ICS Publications, 1976.
  • Víctor García de la Concha, *El arte literario de santa Teresa*, Barcelona, Ariel, 1978.
  • Alison Weber, *Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990.
  • Rosa Rossi, *Teresa de Ávila. Biografía de una escritora*, Barcelona, Icaria, 1984.

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