St Teresa and the Visionary Nuns
Stephen Clissold explains how, after twenty years of life as a nun, St Teresa began to experience visions and ecstasies which led her to found a reformed Carmelite convent in Avila.
Spain’s golden age, ushered in by the reign of one remarkable woman - Queen Isabella the Catholic - has no greater or more attractive figure than that of another - the nun Teresa of Jesus, born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada and known to posterity as St Teresa of Avila.
Foundress and organizer, a woman of unusual warmth and charm, a religious genius who combined humble sanctity with the most exalted mystical experiences which she recorded with the vivid force of the born writer, she impressed her contemporaries - in the words of one of them - as ‘a very great woman in the affairs of this world, and in those of the next, greater still.’
It is her life on the lowlier, mundane plane - though she saw it as indissolubly linked with the higher - that concerns us here. Even in that century of outstanding achievement there are few Spanish women to whom the epithet ‘great’ can confidently be applied.
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