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WorkTeresa of Ávila

The Book of Her Life

Written at her confessors' command to account for her visions, it then spent eleven years in the Inquisition's keeping.

by Teresa of Ávila590 passages held

  • Spanish, the original language
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Original title
Libro de la vida
First published
(aged 50)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

Edith Stein, a philosopher trained by Edmund Husserl, read this book in the summer of 1921 and was baptised on the first day of 1922. It was written for a far smaller audience: the confessors who had to decide whether Teresa of Ávila's visions came from God or from the devil. Its claim is that the life of prayer can be described from experience, stage by stage, by the person living it. Teresa gave them the whole record, including the confessor who ordered her to make a gesture of contempt at each vision of Christ. Then she went further than they had asked. In chapters 11 to 21 she compares prayer to watering a garden in four ways: hauling buckets from a well, turning a waterwheel, letting a stream run in, and finally rain, when God does all the work and the gardener does none. She also argues against the books on prayer that told contemplatives to rise above everything created, and insists that the road runs through Christ's human life rather than past it. A first version was finished in Toledo in June 1562, in the house of the noblewoman Luisa de la Cerda; the version that survives was rewritten in Ávila around 1565. In 1574 the Princess of Éboli, a powerful figure at court, denounced it to the Inquisition, which seized the manuscript in February 1575. Domingo Báñez, the Dominican theologian asked to examine it, approved it that July, but the tribunal kept it until 1586. Luis de León, the Augustinian poet and Salamanca professor, printed it in 1588, six years after Teresa's death, and in 1592 Philip II had the autograph placed in his library at El Escorial, where it remains.

Key concepts

What does Teresa mean by mental prayer?

Friendship, not a technique. Mental prayer, Teresa writes, is nothing other than friendly dealing: spending time, often and alone, with the one we know loves us. No one who took God for a friend, she adds, went unrepaid. And if we do not yet love him back, because our nature is so unlike his, we should still bear the discomfort of keeping company with someone so different, for the friendship is worth it.

What are the four waters of prayer?

Four stages of prayer, pictured as four ways of watering a garden. Beginners draw water from a well by hand, which is hard and yields little. Next comes a waterwheel with its buckets, more water for less work. Then a stream or river runs into the garden and soaks it. Last, God sends rain, and the gardener does nothing at all. At each step the soul's labour shrinks and God's gift grows.

What is a rapture, as Teresa describes it?

A grace that seizes the soul so suddenly and strongly that it usually cannot be resisted. Teresa compares it to a cloud, or a mighty eagle, catching a person up on its wings: they see themselves carried off and do not know where. Sometimes, she reports, even the body was lifted from the ground. It frightened her at first, and what it left behind was humility, the sense that she could do nothing of herself.

What kinds of vision does Teresa distinguish?

Three: those seen with the body's eyes, those seen with the eyes of the soul, and those in which nothing is seen at all. Teresa never had the first kind. The second formed within her, like a picture more vivid than sight. The third came one feast of Saint Peter: she saw nothing, yet knew Christ was beside her, speaking. She was told the bodily kind ranks lowest, the easiest for the devil to fake.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Four ways to water a garden

How much of prayer is a person's own labour, and how much is simply given? Teresa answers by watching the gardener's work shrink to nothing.

Prayer, for Teresa, begins as friendship: time spent, often alone, with the one we know loves us. Its growth she maps as four ways of watering a garden. Buckets hauled from a well are the beginner's toil, a waterwheel yields more for less effort, a stream running in leaves the gardener little to do, and rain, sent by God, does all the work. Against books that told advanced souls to leave every bodily image behind, she insists the road runs through Christ's human life, never around it.

  • prayer
  • contemplation
  • divine grace
  • grace
  • perseverance
  • mystical experience
  • devotion
  • faith

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God or the devil?

When a woman at prayer hears words and sees Christ, who decides where the visions come from? The book is her evidence, handed to the men who must judge it.

Several of Teresa's confessors took her visions for the devil's work, and one ordered her to meet each appearance of Christ with a gesture of contempt. She obeyed in anguish, and argued neither from rank nor from feeling. Her test is what an experience leaves behind: what comes from God brings peace, humility and firmer hold on the truth, while the devil's work leaves unrest and little humility. Hence her trust in learned confessors, and her complaint that half-learned ones had done her soul great harm.

  • religious experience
  • spiritual discernment
  • discernment
  • spiritual direction
  • spiritual guidance
  • religious authority
  • obedience
  • fear
  • spiritual experience

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Twenty years on a stormy sea

Why would a nun who kept praying stay divided between God and the world for so long? The book tells that failure in full, because the mercy it shows is the point.

For almost twenty years, Teresa writes, she crossed a stormy sea, falling and rising again: with God, the world's attachments unsettled her, and in the world, the thought of God weighed on her. Her worst mistake was to stop praying for over a year, thinking herself too wicked for it, and leaving prayer, she concludes, is the only way to lose the road. The turn came through an image of the wounded Christ and Augustine's Confessions, in which she saw herself. She tells it all as proof of God's patience.

  • humility
  • sin
  • repentance
  • temptation
  • self-knowledge
  • suffering
  • divine providence
  • divine love
  • religious vocation
  • religious life
  • detachment
  • virtue

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Within this work

passages held
590
distinct concepts
528
by passages held, corpus-wide
#122

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “humility” and “prayer”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
humilityprayer31
divine graceprayer28
divine gracehumility25
contemplationprayer22
prayerreligious experience19
mysticismprayer14
humilityspiritual discernment13
mysticismreligious experience13
divine gracemysticism12
prayersuffering12
religious experiencesuffering12
humilityreligious experience11
prayerspiritual discernment11
contemplationdivine grace10
religious experiencespiritual discernment10
humilitysuffering9
divine gracereligious experience8
contemplationhumility7
divine gracespiritual discernment4
mysticismsuffering4
contemplationmysticism3
divine gracesuffering3
humilitymysticism3
spiritual discernmentsuffering3
contemplationspiritual discernment2
contemplationreligious experience1
mysticismspiritual discernment1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1565 The Book of Her Life (Libro de la vida) you are here ES
  2. 1567 Meditations on the Song of Songs (Conceptos del amor de Dios)

    In form a commentary: seven short chapters on a few verses of the Song of Songs, read through her own experience of prayer rather than through the scholars' glosses.

     ES
  3. 1577 The Interior Castle (Las moradas del castillo interior)

    Meant to replace the confiscated Life, it returns to that book's ground a dozen years on, now laid out as seven stages and addressed to the nuns of her reform.

     ES
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