St. Teresa's writings are printed, the book the Inquisition held among them

SALAMANCA, 1588 AD — The writings of Saint Teresa of Ávila went on sale in Spain this year, six years after her death, in one volume printed here at Salamanca by Guillelmo Foquel and edited by the Augustinian friar Fray Luis de León. The title page calls it Los libros de la madre Teresa de Iesus (The books of Mother Teresa of Jesus). It holds the Way of Perfection, her book of advice for her nuns, the Interior Castle and the account of her own life and prayer. The Book of the Foundations is the one thing left out; it comes later.

St. Teresa was the Carmelite nun of Ávila who founded and governed seventeen convents of her reformed branch of the order in twenty years, and who died at Alba de Tormes at nine at night on October 4, 1582 AD. One of the books took much longer to reach print than the rest. She did not choose to write the account of her life: her confessors ordered it, and she finished it at Ávila in 1565 AD for the judgment of St. John of Ávila. The book was then denounced to the Inquisitors. Her confessor, the Dominican Fray Domingo Báñez, carried the manuscript to the Holy Office at Madrid in 1575 AD without waiting to be asked for it. It stayed there twelve years, passed from examiner to examiner, and she never held it again.

The book says on its first page why it exists. St. Teresa begins: “As I have been commanded and left at liberty to describe at length my way of prayer, and the workings of the grace of our Lord within me, I could wish that I had been allowed at the same time to speak distinctly and in detail of my grievous sins and wicked life.” She asks God for grace to give “this account of myself which my confessors command me to give”.

She wrote it in time taken from her work. In the tenth chapter, where she begins on the graces given her in prayer, St. Teresa writes: “They only who ordered me to write know that I am writing, and at this moment they are not here. I have, as it were, to steal the time, and that with difficulty, because my writing hinders me from spinning.”

A few lines further on she puts the book in her confessor’s hands. St. Teresa tells her confessor that he must answer for whatever she has written beyond the plain story of her life, if it agrees with the Catholic faith. If it does not, he is to burn it: “if it be not, your reverence must burn it at once — for I give my consent.”

The difficulty starts in that same chapter. From there to the end she describes, in the first person, visions, words heard inwardly and degrees of prayer. The examination she got for it is bound into the manuscript. Báñez wrote his opinion on blank leaves at the back, at the College of St Gregory in Valladolid, in July 1575 AD. “I have not found anywhere in it anything which, in my opinion, is erroneous in doctrine,” he wrote of a book in which “Teresa of Jesus, Carmelite nun, and foundress of the Barefooted Carmelites, gives a plain account of the state of her soul, in order to be taught and directed by her confessors.”

Then he set down the one thing that gave him pause. “It contains many visions and revelations,” Báñez wrote, “matters always to be afraid of, especially in women, who are very ready to believe of them that they come from God, and to look on them as proofs of sanctity, though sanctity does not lie in them.” Against that he set the record of the Church: saints, men and women, have had revelations in modern times as well as ancient.

Báñez had told her before that the original ought to be burnt, because women’s writings should not be published. She answered that she knew it, and would burn it if he told her to. He did not tell her. He handed it to the Holy Office for safe keeping instead.

She had word of the examination while it went on. In February 1577 AD she wrote to her brother Lorenzo that her papers were with the head of the Inquisition: “The Inquisitor-major himself reads them, which is something new.”

Those were hard years for the reform. The prior general who had signed her authority to found, her protector at Rome, died in 1578 AD.

Three years after that letter she heard the same from the Inquisitor General in person. Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga, Archbishop of Toledo and president of the Council of the Inquisition, told her at Toledo in March 1580 AD: “they have given a book of yours to the Inquisition to do you harm; but it has been examined, and there is nothing in it that is not very good, for I have read it all.”

The manuscript came out of the Holy Office only after her death. The Venerable Anne of Jesus was founding a house of the order at Madrid in 1586 AD, set on publishing the writings of her spiritual mother. She asked the Inquisition for the book. The Inquisitors made no difficulty. The governing council of the province decided that year to publish the works, and gave the manuscripts that could be found to Fray Luis de León at Salamanca.

St. Teresa had her own title for the book that spent twelve years with the Inquisitors. Writing to Don Pedro de Castro, a canon of Ávila, on November 19, 1581 AD, she called it De las Misericordias de Dios (Of the Mercies of God).