The Letters of St Teresa of Jesus

by Teresa de Ávila, E. Allison Peers

St. Alphonsus writes: "a single bad book will be sufficient to cause the destruction of a monastery." Pope Pius XII wrote in 1947 at the beatification of Blessed Maria Goretti: "There rises to Our lips the cry of the Saviour: 'Woe to the world because of scandals!' (Matthew 18:7). Woe to those who consciously and deliberately spread corruption-in novels, newspapers, magazines, theaters, films, in a world of immodesty!" We at St. Pius X Press are calling for a crusade of good books. We want to restore 1,000 old Catholic books to the market. We ask for your assistance and prayers. This book is a photographic reprint of the original. The original has been inspected and some imperfections may remain. At Saint Pius X Press our goal is to remain faithful to the original in both photographic reproductions and in textual reproductions that are reprinted. Photographic reproductions are given a page by page inspection, whereas textual reproductions are proofread to correct any errors in reproduction.

1036 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1980

About the author

Saint Teresa of Jesús, also called Saint Teresa of Ávila, was a prominent Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter Reformation. She was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered to be, along with John of the Cross, a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. In 1970 she was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI.

Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada Borned in Ávila, Spain, on March 28, 1515, St. Teresa was the daughter of a Toledo merchant and his second wife, who died when Teresa was 15, one of ten children. Shortly after this event, Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns. After reading the letters of St. Jerome, Teresa resolved to enter a religious life. In 1535, she joined the Carmelite Order. She spent a number of relatively average years in the convent, punctuated by a severe illness that left her legs paralyzed for three years, but then experienced a vision of "the sorely wounded Christ" that changed her life forever.

From this point forward, Teresa moved into a period of increasingly ecstatic experiences in which she came to focus more and more sharply on Christ's passion. With these visions as her impetus, she set herself to the reformation of her order, beginning with her attempt to master herself and her adherence to the rule. Gathering a group of supporters, Teresa endeavored to create a more primitive type of Carmelite. From 1560 until her death, Teresa struggled to establish and broaden the movement of Discalced or shoeless Carmelites. During the mid-1560s, she wrote the Way of Perfection and the Meditations on the Canticle. In 1567, she met St. John of the Cross, who she enlisted to extend her reform into the male side of the Carmelite Order. Teresa died in 1582.

St. Teresa left to posterity many new convents, which she continued founding up to the year of her death. She also left a significant legacy of writings, which represent important benchmarks in the history of Christian mysticism. These works include the Way of Perfection and the Interior Castle. She also left an autobiography, the Life of St. Teresa of Ávila.

Reviews

[7jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have read this saint's other books, you can certainly still get something out of her letters. She wrote a lot of letters, to a variety of people (bishops, noble ladies, siblings, people of different religious orders, priors, confessors and so on).

The letters give us a further picture of her: with common sense and sound actions, cheerfulness and great optimism, deep faith and dutiful in business (incl. hard travel). She was gentle, careful, grateful, persuasive and with good management skills. She wrote despite sometimes being sick or having headaches, and saw good even in persectuation.

The subjects vary: on troubles (incl. on establishing new places), thorough guidance of people, showing thankfulness for support (often on money which could be hard to find sometimes), and management of order (some receivers needed straightforward-yet-gentle guidance and mistake-correction; Teresa is never off-handle even when angry at some troubles).

So if you want more, here's a good book to finish one's reading of her writings :) (If you're starting, go for 'Life' or 'Interior Castle' - with the latter I can say that reading it in your mother tongue makes it open sometimes better, so do that if it's possible *blushes*.)

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much what the title says, a collection of the correspondence of Teresa de Jesus, the foundress of the Discalced Carmelite order, in the later years of her life after her Reform was pretty firmly established, though there was still some opposition among various factions in the Catholic Church.

If one has (as I do) a degree of devotion to this Saint, it provides glimpses into her daily life as she continues to establish convents of her order across Spain, at a more quotidian level than what appears in her autobiographical works, the Life and the Foundations .

One frustrating feature of the particular edition I read is that the letters are in no particularly discernable sequence: certainly not chronological. While the letters to a particular correspondent are sometime grouped together, this is not always the case, and even when they are, no strict chronology is imposed upon them.

Nor am I at all clear who the translator, in this ebook of Teresa's complete works, actually is. I have the impression that (a) this is not a complete Letters, and (b) the order in the original Spanish edition -- though probably no more helpfully ordered than this version -- is different from what is seen here.

Seven out of ten incorruptible bodies.