The Life of St Teresa of Avila

This is the story of the Vida of St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), an exceptional woman plagued early in life with severe illnesses leading to what can only have been a prolonged near death experience in 1539, after which she recovered and gradually became a forceful presence within Spanish culture - indeed there was considerable disruptive activity around her incorruptible corpse and relics following her death. The Vida is Teresa's attempt to come to grips with her visionary experiences, mainly between 1554 and 1565, but within the context of an apologetic or forced confession so that the authorities could examine her writings for fraud, challenge to authority and orthodoxy. The challenge to readers then, and even more so now, is her unquestioning assumption and experience that 'human beings can transcend the sensory material world and have intimate relations with the Creator of the universe.'

Teresa was also influenced by earlier works by Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, Francisco de Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet and The Ascent of Mount Sion by Bernardino de Laredo, but her real gateway is mental prayer and recollection, which she explains with a metaphor of the four waters culminating in falling rain where the experience is of pure bliss and infusion by God, the prayer of union. She herself wrote: 'that this is all merely imagined is the most impossible of all impossibilities.' The rest of the book covers the history of the Vida from 1600s to the present day, including depictions of St Teresa in art and explanations from every point of view reflecting the existing ideas of investigators in a way similar to interpreting a Rorschach blot. She was canonised already by 1622, and declared only the second female Doctor of the Church by Paul VI in 1970. It is an epic spiritual narrative.