In 1559 Fernando de Valdés, the Inquisitor General of Spain, published an Index of forbidden books that took away much of what Spaniards could read about God in their own language: Scripture in Spanish, and books on prayer by the Dominican Luis de Granada and the Jesuit Francis Borgia. A Carmelite nun in Ávila, then forty-four and without Latin, wrote later that losing them grieved her, because those books had been her recreation. Christ then told her, she said, not to be troubled, since he would give her a living book. Within a few days she understood what he meant. From then on she had little or no need of books; Christ himself, she wrote, had been the true book in which she saw the truths.
Teresa of Ávila built a doctrine on that experience: a claim about who may know God. In her Life she defined mental prayer, the silent prayer of the heart rather than recited words, as nothing other than friendship: time spent often and alone with one we know loves us. On that account prayer needs no learning and no Latin, only perseverance, and the person who prays can describe its stages from the inside. She did exactly that, for nuns who, like her, read only Spanish. The Book of Her Life compares prayer to four ways of watering a garden, and The Interior Castle leads the soul inward through seven dwelling places to union with God.
She reached the doctrine late, and slowly. She was born into a family with something to hide. Her grandfather, Juan Sánchez, a Jewish convert in Toledo, had confessed to the Inquisition in 1485 that he had returned to Jewish practice, and was given penance and reconciled to the Church. Between 1519 and 1523 her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, brought a lawsuit to have the family recognised as hidalgos, minor nobility — a claim that historians read as a way of covering that origin.
In November 1535, without her father's consent, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila. Illness soon forced her out for a cure, and on the way an uncle gave her the Third Spiritual Alphabet, a manual by the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna on the prayer of recollection. The cure almost killed her. She lay unconscious for nearly four days, with a grave open for her at the convent for a day and a half, and she remained crippled for almost three years. By her own count, of her first twenty-eight years of prayer she spent more than eighteen in a battle between God and the world, much of it in dryness.
The turn came in Lent 1554. Entering the convent oratory, she saw an image of Christ covered in wounds and threw herself down before it in tears. She was reading Augustine's Confessions at the time, and saw herself, she said, in the story of a sinner turned back. The visions followed, and so did the suspicion: several of her confessors judged them the work of the devil. In the Life she wrote that being a woman was enough to make her wings fall, and being a wretched one more so.
Her answer came in foundations as well as books. On 24 August 1562 she opened San José in Ávila, the first convent of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, and by her death she had founded seventeen. With John of the Cross, the friar and poet, she extended the reform to men at Duruelo in 1568. The Calced Carmelites, the unreformed branch of the order, fought it. In October 1578 Felipe Sega, the papal nuncio, put the reformed houses under Calced superiors. The reform's own chronicle, Francisco de Santa María's Reforma de los descalzos, has him describe her as a restless, roaming, disobedient and stubborn woman. The Discalced became a separate province in June 1580. Her books drew the same scrutiny. The Inquisition seized her Life in 1575, she wrote The Interior Castle in 1577 to replace it, and at a confessor's order she burned her commentary on the Song of Songs.
She died at Alba de Tormes on the night of 4 October 1582, as Spain changed to the Gregorian calendar, so the next day was 15 October. Luis de León, the Augustinian scholar, printed the Life and The Interior Castle at Salamanca in 1588, and she was canonised in 1622. On 27 September 1970 Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, the first woman to hold the title. His homily addressed Saint Paul's instruction that women keep silent in church, explained that the title carried no office of teaching authority, and quoted her definition of prayer as friendship.