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A Reformer's Rocky Road
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10974 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1986 |
2,971 Words |
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Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
TERESA: A WOMAN
A Biography of Teresa de Avila
Victoria Lincoln
Albany, New York: State University of New York Press
425 pp. $14.95 pb., $39.50 hb.
Contrary to popular notions, mystics are a remarkably practical breed. A cornerstone of true mysticism is the knowledge of self, and in their arduous journeys inward, saints and mystics divest themselves of self-delusion. On the higher plane, they want God as He is, not as most would like Him to be. Their perception of the world is more real than that of the ordinary run of people, and realism gives rise to an intense practicality.
The Spanish saint and mystic Teresa de Avila is perhaps the quintessential embodiment of this seeming world/otherworldly dichotomy. She is at once the Saint of Raptures and the most "healthy" of Christians. In her there is a balance of piety and politics, of profound mystical experience and penetrating human psychology. The extraordinary works of religious reform and foundation for which she is celebrated required a degree of manly enterprise and farsighted business acuity rare in any age, but utterly discountenanced in a woman of her day--and in this new biographical study it is impossible to forget for a moment that this religious entrepreneur, this acclaimed Doctor of the Catholic Church, was very much a woman. It is precisely her historical setting in sixteenth-century Castile, where social and religious values, prejudices, and antagonisms impeded and threatened to destroy her work at every turn, that puts her real genius into proper perspective. A full appreciation
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