It is an eye-opening exercise to compare the overlap of time between the death of our great titular patron, St Thomas More (1478-1535) and the magnificent personality of Santa Madre Teresa or St Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), who was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada, one of three sisters and nine brothers.
Both of these great Christian saints and witnesses lived in quite different vocations. One was an energetically reforming mystic, contemplative nun within Catholic Spain – the other was a leading public intellectual, husband and father, cultural leader and eventually martyr within the fractured Christianity of Tudor England.
One was a layman and much more, and the other a woman, the great figurehead of Carmelite religious life and much more. One a figure of the Reformation and the other of what is called the Counter-Reformation.
Both figures appreciated the formative work of the family in developing both character and faith. Teresa writes of the importance of her parents in her own outlook on life, her father a generous merchant and her mother a beloved woman who died when she was a teenager:
“It was a help to me that I never saw my parents inclined to anything but virtue. They themselves had many virtues. My father was a man of great charity towards the poor, who was good to the sick and to his servants – so much so that he could never be brought to keep slaves, because of his compassion for them.”
Of her mother, she writes of her great unselfconscious beauty, her prayerful example and her patience despite long infirmity: “She was a very tranquil woman, of great intelligence. Throughout her life she endured great trials and her death was most Christian.”
The same year that St Thomas More was egregiously beheaded as a traitor, Teresa had not yet experienced her “second” conversion to Christ even though she had – just at the age of 20 – entered the Carmelite convent.
Looking back on her life in her famous autobiography, or her Vida, she recalls that prayer was – despite her ongoing distraction, worldliness and ingratitude to Christ – like a life-rope for her soul, as was the scriptural accounts of the conversion and faith of “the glorious Magdelene” – St Mary Magdalene. (The classic translation by E. Alison Peers can be found here.)
Teresa’s mighty spiritual classics and her major reforms of religious life would begin at a relatively late stage in her life, some 20 years after the death of More and in the last decades of her life. She describes her true and intimate conversion to Christ as taking place when she was 39. It was from that time onwards that her great mystical literary works began to flow and her hundreds of lively letters were to issue across the Christian world.
Both saints had recognised with enormous insight, the pedagogical, spiritual, cultural and intellectual challenges to an integrated Catholic Church and Christian life.
In the lifetimes of both figures, an exhilarating but challenging world was emerging: the European discovery and exploration of the “New World” of the Americas, the lure of wealth and rapacious ownership of resources, a zeal for the reading and distribution of the Scriptures, the rise of various humanisms and widespread exposés (both accurate and false) of corruption within “the old religion”. They were contradictory times of inarticulate violent passions, the loss of shared “civic ethos”, along with the rise of new sciences and “rationalism”.
In so many ways, we can see a mirror in our current times.
Both saints offer us insights into the teaching and the formation of the heart, mind and soul in such times – St Thomas More through the formation of household and public virtue, conscience and a well-rounded Christian humanism.
Pope Benedict XVI calls Teresa a “spiritual apex” in the life of the Church and suggests that Teresa’s is not so much a pedagogy, but an imaginative and existentially gripping mystagogy:
“Rather than a pedagogy Teresa’s is a true “mystagogy” of prayer: she teaches those who read her works how to pray by praying with them. Indeed, she often interrupts her account or exposition with a prayerful outburst.”
St Teresa is recognised not only as a spiritual teacher but as a Doctor of the Church, declared so in 1970 by Pope St Paul VI.
Both St Thomas and St Teresa had a great respect for the Scriptures. It is notable that much of the turbulence of those centuries was a concern for the personal relationship and place of the “Word” of God revealed in the languages and the images of the Scriptures.
Teresa, despite her lack of formal theological training, was immersed in the Scriptures and imbued her symbolic imagination with biblical imagery.
Her great spiritual masterwork The Interior Castle, written when she was 62, offers a feast of tangible images which assist the reader to make an advanced pilgrimage through the different “mansions” of the castle of the person towards psychological, moral, intellectual and spiritual maturity and conversion.
As Pope Benedict XVI observes: “The Saint draws inspiration from Sacred Scripture, particularly the Song of Songs, for the final symbol of the ‘Bride and Bridegroom’ which enables her to describe, in the seventh room, the four crowning aspects of Christian life: the Trinitarian, the Christological, the anthropological and the ecclesial.”
Here Benedict indirectly evokes the revival of Christian theological anthropology, moral theology and the sacrament of marriage and the family in the “nuptial mysticism” of his predecessor Pope St John Paul II, with his mystical and theological heritage in the great Discalced Carmelite reformers, St John of the Cross and St Teresa.
St Teresa wrote with immense metaphorical colour and immediacy, she mastered autobiography, organisational genius, profound mystical and doctrinal insight – a complete “woman of letters” to rival any other.
It is not often remembered that she also wrote poetry.
Her poetry captures her vivacity and energetic “restlessness”, which irritated and alarmed some the ecclesial critics of her time.
We sense in Teresa’s poetry her bold and questing spirit, the same energy with which as a child of 12 she persuaded her brother Rodriguez to (unsuccessfully) run away with her to martyrdom at the hands of the Islamist Moors.
The most recent translator of St Teresa’s poetry, Dana Delibovi, explains how the great Mother Teresa helped her to return to faith and prayer after being a student of modern secular feminist writers.
Delibovi’s translation aims to capture St Teresa’s direct and vigorous language – which she hopes is authentic and will speak to contemporary readers:
Let’s all truly offer
to lose our lives for Christ,
and then, in the heavenly wedding
we will all delight.
Let’s follow this flag!
No need to fear,
Christ marches in the lead. But don’t sleep—
There is no peace on earth.
How does this resonate with our lives of faith today?
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
Featured image uploaded by Nheyob to Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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