The Reform of Monastic Life
At about the same time a movement of moral renewal appeared among the monastic orders too. We can gauge the monks' earlier ill repute from the words of Michelangelo, devout and true to the faith: when he heard that Sebastiano del Piombo planned to paint a picture of a monk in the chapel of San Pietro in Montorio, he objected, because he believed that since monks had already tainted a world so large, there was no doubt the painter would taint a corner of so small a chapel. Gregorio Cortese patiently set himself to reform the Benedictines at Padua; Girolamo Seripando the Augustinian canons, Egidio Canisio the Augustinian hermits, and Paolo Giustiniani the Camaldolese. Newly founded orders insisted on bringing about reform. Antonio Maria Zaccaria founded at Milan the order of "Obligated Servants of the Apostle Paul," a society of priests who vowed to live in monastic poverty; since they first always gathered in the church of San Barnaba, they were later known as the Barnabites. In 1535 St. Angela founded the "Ursuline nuns" to teach girls, nurse the sick and care for the poor. In 1540 St. John of God (Juan de Dios) founded at Granada the "Brothers of Mercy" to run hospitals. In 1523 Matteo da Bascio, in a spirit of rivalry with St. Francis of Assisi, resolved to carry out the rule of that founder of the Franciscans word for word.
The Capuchins
Other friars joined him, and in 1525 their growing number encouraged Matteo to ask the pope to sanction this new branch of the Franciscans, whose members lived under strict and ascetic discipline; instead Matteo was jailed for disobedience, but was soon freed. In 1528 Clement VII recognized the new order of Capuchins, a name given because its friars, following St. Francis, wore the cappuccio, the hooded cowl. The Capuchins wore the coarsest cloth, ate nothing but bread, vegetables, fruit and water, kept hard fasts, lived in narrow dark cells and humble huts, never traveled except on foot, and went barefoot the whole year. Their outstanding service was their self-sacrificing, heartfelt nursing of the sick during outbreaks of plague (1528 and 1529). Thanks to their devotion, recent converts to Protestantism, such as Vittoria Colonna and others, gave up apostasy and remained loyal to a Church that could still produce such ardent Christians.
Teresa of Avila: Youth
The most outstanding figure of this age of monastic reform was a frail but strong-willed Spanish nun. Teresa de Cepeda was the daughter of a Castilian gentleman of Avila. Her father, a man who prided himself on his strict honesty and loyalty to the Church, read a chapter from the lives of the saints to his family every night. Her mother, bedridden, cheered the dreary days of her life a little with tales of chivalry and the exploits of Amadis. Teresa's childish imagination swung between sentimental love and religious martyrdom. At ten she vowed to enter the order of nuns. But four years later she suddenly blossomed into a beautiful and spirited young woman, and forgot the dark habit of the convent amid bright dresses that doubled her beauty. Suitors came from every side, and Teresa, trembling and frightened, lost her heart to one of them and was invited to a rendezvous; at the moment of acting a nameless terror seized her, and she revealed her risky plan to her father. Since her mother had died by then, Don Alonso de Cepeda put his sensitive daughter in the care of the Augustinian nuns at Avila.
Teresa detested the formal life and discipline of the convent and refused to accept the obligations of renouncing the world, waiting only until she came of age at sixteen to leave on her own. But as she neared her wish she fell dangerously ill, near death. She finally recovered from that fatal illness, but had lost the radiance of her youth. She appears to have developed a kind of nervous illness with seizures, probably caused by her restraint from rebelling against restrictions at odds with her instincts. The attacks recurred from time to time and left her half-conscious in bed. Her father took her out of the convent and sent her to her half-sister in a village. On the way, one of her uncles gave her a volume of St. Jerome, a book that described the terrors of hell in fiery words and likened the love between the sexes to a crowded highroad leading to eternal torment. Teresa read it fearfully and, after another nervous attack, put worldly pleasures wholly out of her mind and resolved to carry out her childhood vow; she returned to Avila and entered the Convent of the Incarnation, belonging to the Carmelites (1534).
Illness and Recovery
For some time she lived happily in the soothing monotony of daily prayers, the chants of the Mass and the soul-cleansing confessions. When she received the sacrament and ate the bread, she felt she truly had the body of Christ in her mouth and blood. But she was dissatisfied with the lax discipline of that convent. The nuns lived in comfortable rooms instead of poor cells; though they kept the weekly fasts, on other days they ate a great deal; they adorned themselves with necklaces, bracelets and rings; they received visitors in the parlor; and they spent long holidays outside the convent walls. Teresa felt these loose conditions could not keep her safe from the temptations of the self. Perhaps because of this unease and growing dissatisfaction, the attacks of her illness became more frequent and painful. Once more her father sent her to her half-sister, and once more on the way her uncle gave her a religious book, the Third Spiritual Alphabet by Francisco de Osuna. This book was an alphabet of mystical and inward prayer, prayer without words; for, as its author says, "only those who seek nearness to God in silence have their voice heard and receive an answer." In her rural seclusion Teresa practiced this kind of silent, contemplative prayer, which suited well the daze that came with her nervous attacks.
A doctor who treated his patients with herbal drinks undertook her care, but his brews nearly killed her. When Teresa returned to her convent at Avila (1537), she was dying and longed for the end. At that time the most violent seizure came upon her. She fell into a faint and lay like a dead woman, cold and motionless, apparently without breath, for two days; and the sisters prepared her grave. Then Teresa came to, but was so weak that she could take nothing but liquids and could not bear the slightest touch on her body. For eight months she lay in the convent infirmary almost wholly paralyzed. Little by little she improved, to a partial paralysis, but, as she wrote in her notes, "the moments when I was not writhing with severe pain were very rare." She gave up hope of any medical treatment and decided to make prayer her only consolation. For three more years she suffered and prayed. Then, suddenly, on the morning of one day in 1540, the bedridden invalid, apparently incurable, woke up and found her limbs sound.
Teresa got up and walked, and with each passing day her activity in the work and rules of the convent increased. Her recovery was counted a miracle, and she herself held the same belief. Perhaps silent prayer had calmed nerves worn out by the clash of contradictory desires, the sense of guilt and the fear of hell, and that nervous relief, together with the blessing of the doctors' absence, had brought her body back to normal balance.
Visions
The Convent of the Incarnation became famous as the scene of a miraculous cure. People from nearby towns came to visit the nun whom God had healed and gave money and gifts to the holy house. The prioress encouraged these visits and insisted that Teresa show herself to the pilgrims. Teresa felt ashamed that the people's attention, her meetings with good-looking men, and the fame and popularity gave her pleasure and delight. Once again a sense of guilt over bodily pleasure darkened her spirit. One day (1542), while she was talking in the convent parlor with a pilgrim who particularly pleased her, it suddenly seemed to her that Christ stood beside that man; a nervous attack came upon her and the sisters carried her to her cell in their arms.
For the sixteen years that followed, such manifestations appeared repeatedly before her eyes, and gradually their reality outweighed the reality of her daily life. In 1588 (the source's date; plainly a slip for 1558), while absorbed in prayer, she felt her soul leave the body and fly toward heaven, where she saw Christ and heard his voice.
These spiritual manifestations no longer drained her strength but breathed new life into her. Teresa writes: often, when the state of rapture comes, the body is weakened and worn by deadly pains, but afterward the soul comes out of it fresh with health and wholly ready for every kind of activity ... It is as if God wished the body, which is always subject to the desires of the soul, to share also in its happiness ... The soul, having grasped this gift, is so filled with zeal that if at that moment its body were torn to pieces in the worship of the Lord, it would feel nothing but the most joyful delights.
In another instance Teresa fancied that "an angel of great beauty" hurled at her a long gilded spear with a flaming tip, "which passed through my heart several times until it settled in the depths of my being." The pain was so real that she cried out in anguish, and at the same time so beyond imagining pleasant that she wished never to be freed from it; no pleasure in life gives a person such inner contentment as that pain, and when the angel drew the spear out of her, it left her burning in the fire of divine love. (The Church of Spain honors 27 August in memory of this piercing vision as a holy day, with a splendid ceremony each year, as the source's footnote says.) Of course these accounts of St. Teresa admit wide interpretation from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, but there can be no doubt of the saint's perfect honesty and sincerity in what she described. Like Ignatius she believed she saw God and that, in that state, the most mysterious questions were revealed to her.