St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life

Rating:
Summary: Erudite, but hardly readable.
Review: It is not clear as to what audience Ms.Slade was addressing in writimg her study of St. Teresa of Avila, certainly not the general reader looking for insights into the personality and life of Teresa de Jesus. Readability apparently was not a prerequisite. The text is hardly free flowing, most of the writing indeed is quite tortuous. Perhaps the volume can be appreciated by an exegete.

Rating:
Summary: Profound and powerful!
Review: There are many places online where you can download Teresa of Avila's writings -- for instance, her LIFE, or the INTERIOR CASTLE or the WAY OF PERFECTION, even a selection of her LETTERS. These works, translated by Allison Peers, are now in the common domain. This is important, because it is with these searchable reference tools in hand, that books like this one by Carole Slade become even more fascinating.

St.Teresa said that she was called to write, not for the world at large, but for her community of sisters, and thus in the style of the "language of women." What makes ST. TERESA OF AVILA : AUTHOR OF A HEROIC LIFE, so marvelously absorbing is its ability to open up Teresa's feminine imagery into the more minimal paths of modern thinking. I would like to just list the names of the chapter headings in Slade's book to give you an idea also of how beautifully she organizes this material:

The Genres of the Book of Her Life
Teresa's Feminist Figural Readings of Scripture
Teresa's Representation of Her 'Old Life'
Teresa's Analogies of Her Mystical Experience
Teresa's Representation of Her 'New Life'
The Role of Teresa's Books in the Canonization Proceedings
Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Teresa's Mystical Experience

Within each of these chapters, there are other unexpected and delightful sectional headings -- one of the most interesting appears in the chapter, "Analogies for Her Mystical Experience," and is titled, "The Extension of the Will: the Soul as Garden." Here Slade discusses Teresa's four ways of watering the soul as a garden. Slade says:

"Water, as [Teresa] implies here, alleviates the principal symptom of the disabled emotions, aridity of the soul, or 'that great dryness.' Defining the soul as a garden, then, makes it a repository for water from every possible source: tears, underground springs, irrigation, mists, clouds. Teresa specifies that water in whatever form is a manifestation of love..."

In some ways Carol Slade's essays are a reminder of the great, great writing on mysticism by Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941). Slade has that same kind of clarity and depth. I highly recommend this book, and I believe you will find it very fine indeed.