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In what follows, Dürer’s self-portrait as a mirror-painting will be compared to The Book of Her Life as a mirror-text. Both works of art are similar on the level of content in so far as they are both representations of Jesus Christ, aesthetically represented through two different autobiographical modes, which turn the works of art into a mirror.

Teresa did not know Albrecht Dürer and had no knowledge of De visione Dei.1 The question of how she might have been influenced in creating a text which aims to function as a mirror will be left for the third part of this chapter, as this essay first explores the claim that Teresa’s book seeks to be a mirror-text.

Two aspects seem relevant in this respect: Teresa’s book functions like a mirror because she addresses her readers at eye level, and she does so both with regard to the content as well as rhetorically.

I will start out by focusing on the most significant aspect of Teresa’s narration, which is stressed throughout the book: her ‘wicked life’ (‘ruin vida’). A question extensively discussed is why she does not sustain this claim by describing her sins. As concrete deeds, Teresa only mentions her compromising readings (as did her mother, Teresa read books of chivalry) and a somehow also compromising friendship with one of her cousins. In the second chapter of her autobiography she writes:

I began to get the habit of reading these books [reading books of chivalry]. And by that little fault, which I saw in my mother, I started to grow cold in my desires and to fail in everything else.2

Yo comencé a quedarme en costumbre de leerlos [libros de cavallería]; y aquella pequeña falta que en ella vi, me comenzó a enfriar los deseos, y comenzar a faltar en lo demás […]. (V 2,1)3

The description continues in the same chapter when Teresa adds:

I began to dress in finery and to desire to please and look pretty, taking great care of my hands and hair and about perfumes and all the empty things in which one can indulge, and which were many, for I was very vain.

Comencé a traer galas y a desear contentar en parecer bien, con mucho cuidado de manos y cabello, y olores y todas las vanidades que en esto podía tener, que eran hartas, por ser muy curiosa. (V 2,2)

Teresa finishes this enumeration of her ‘sins’ by writing about a somehow suspect friendship:

Until I began to associate with her when I was fourteen, or I think older (I mean when she took me for her friend and confidante), I don’t think I would have abandoned God by a mortal sin or lost the fear of God, although the fear of losing my honor was stronger in me.

Hasta que traté con ella, que fue de edad de catorce años, y creo que más (para tener amistad conmigo, digo, y darme parte de sus cosas), no me parece había dejado a Dios por culpa mortal, ni perdido el temor de Dios, aunque le tenía mayor de la honra. (V 2,3)

Only if one is willing to translate Teresa’s habit of reading books of chivalry into a more precise, almost sexual attitude in which one’s own appearance became important and was recognized by others – namely young men – could one detect a hint of what was considered misconduct within the social rules of sixteenth-century Spain. But since this hint is so subtle, it seems more obvious to understand this way of speaking as a pure form of convention towards the confessors, or at least as a way of addressing a powerful audience that Teresa tries to gain. Alison Weber writes:

The many references Teresa makes to her own ‘wretchedness’ in The Book of Her Life have long perplexed her readers. […] In sum, we can only conclude that Teresa’s position, as a woman and an ecstatic, was so precarious that she repeatedly needed to request the benevolent cooperation of her audience and at the same time ‘disavow her abilities and favors.’ Captatio benevolentiae was not a petrified tradition but a vital necessity. In this sense all of Teresa’s work are extended prologues because, in her circumstance, the act of disavowing the privilege to write was of necessity conterminous with the act of claiming the privilege to write.4

From my point of view, the topos of the ‘ruin vida’ is not a mere way of speaking to a powerful audience, nor is it an authentic expression of a truly self-critical attitude of Teresa’s. My claim is that the ‘ruin vida’ has an important aesthetic function within the text, because it is through her own sinfulness that Teresa addresses specifically her female readers, thereby inviting them to consider her text as a mirror. This look into the ‘mirror’ (Teresa’s text) allows them to reflect and to recognize themselves in the foreign text and to feel directly addressed, ultimately leading them to imitate Teresa. As a prioress for a female convent,5 Teresa taught her sisters how to lead a pious life, but already before fulfilling this social status, she worked as a teacher through her writings.6 Of course, these writings were published only after her death, and it has already been discussed to what extent they were designed for a broader audience than merely the named male confessors,7 but the very aesthetic form of Book of Her Life seems to legitimate the assumption that Teresa also had a female audience in mind, to which she wanted to appear as similar. She wrote from a female perspective not only because she was a woman herself but also with regard to her possible female readers. The stressing of her own weakness instead of her own perfection sustains this interpretation. Within the strongly misogynic environment in which Teresa had to persist, weakness was automatically part of the image of the female.8 On almost every single page, she sustains this image, rendering her self-portrait accessible. Teresa is therefore not the distant Saint that instructs her audience within a hierarchical setting. Nonetheless, she requires the role of being a model. This double-edged strategy not only aims at the benevolentiae of the clerical superiors but also tries to reach an equitable female audience.9 The assumed similarities are built to encourage a reading process sustained by identification, where a first impression of closeness and sameness is relevant.10

A vital detail of the self-portrait Teresa creates sustains this claim. In chapter nine, the author presents herself as a reader. Seemingly knowing about the topic of the life-changing reading experience, she writes about how she had experienced reading the Confessions by Augustine. It is a reading that resembles looking into a mirror:

As I began to read the Confessions, it seemed to me I saw myself in them. I began to commend myself very much to this glorious saint.

Como comencé a leer las Confesiones, paréceme me vía yo allí: comencé a encomendarme mucho a este glorioso santo. (V 9,8)

For some reason, Teresa sees herself within this autobiography. This perception of the own self within the foreign is crucial if we want to characterize an aesthetic experience as ‘looking into a mirror’. Unfortunately this impression is lost for Teresa as soon as Augustine starts to describe what happened after his conversion. Once he begins to narrate his immaculate life as a person called by God, Teresa can no longer associate the narration with her own life.

Teresa mentions the Confessions by Augustine twice, the first time in her prologue, the second in chapter nine. In the prologue Teresa writes:

I have not found a saint among those who were converted to God in whom I can find comfort. For I note that after the Lord called them, they did not turn back and offend Him. As for me, not only did I turn back and become worse, but it seems I made a study out of resisting the favors His Majesty was granting me. (Life, prologue)

[…] que no he hallado santo de los que se tornaron a Dios con quien me consolar. Porque considero que, después que el Señor los llamaba, no le tornaban a ofender: yo no sólo tornaba a ser peor, sino que parece traía estudio a resistir las mercedes que Su Majestad me hacía […]. (Vida, prólogo)

In chapter nine she refers to this statement by writing:

I am very fond of St. Augustine, because the convent where I stayed as a lay person belonged to his order; and also because he had been a sinner, for I found great consolation in sinners whom, after having been sinners, the Lord brought back to Himself. It seemed to me I could find help in them and that since the Lord had pardoned them He could also pardon me. But there was one thing that left me inconsolable, as I have mentioned, and that was that the Lord called them only once, and they did not turn back and fall again; whereas in my case I had turned back so often that I was worn out from it.

Yo soy muy aficionada a San Agustín, porque el monasterio adonde estuve seglar era de su Orden; y también por haber sido pecador, que en los santos que después de serlo el Señor tornó a Sí, hallaba yo mucho consuelo, pareciéndome en ellos había de hallar ayuda y que, como los había el Señor perdonado, podía hacer a mí; salvo que una cosa me desconsolaba, como he dicho: que a ellos sólo una vez los había el Señor llamado, y no tornaban a caer, y a mí eran ya tantas, que esto me fatigaba. (V 9,7)

By presenting herself this way as a passionate reader of the Confessions, Teresa makes it clear that she knew very well about the ‘mirror-effect’ of an autobiographical text. She knew how strongly reading can involve the reader as long as she (or he) has the impression that the text treats her (or his) own life. As an author, Teresa tried to reproduce this effect by adapting it to her own world, as when she changed the success story of calling in the garden of Milano into an almost lifelong process of struggling.11 In saying this, I do not wish to claim that Teresa made up her spiritual doubts, but I am saying that her way of presenting them becomes understandable within a specific tradition and within a specific rhetorical intention. Teresa’s rhetoric was successful in inviting her recipients to recognize themselves within a work of art.

This effort is recognizable not only in the content but also in the form of Teresa’s language. Even though her mastery has long been ascertained, it is obvious that Teresa writes in a language that openly presents itself as deficient. There are many occasions where the syntax has not been sharpened; some of her phrases transgress every rational limit.12 Furthermore, interjections give her text the appearance of spoken, non-edited language, as do the colloquial expressions.13 Teresa, moreover, openly cites phrases in Latin that are incorrect, which does not particularly bother her.14 This staging of an oral language is underlined by an at times noticeable spelling. Much scientific research has been done into the question of why Teresa for example writes “ilesia” instead of “iglesia”. Juan Antonio Marcos has given a distinct answer to this:

Teresa followed the norm of the Spanish from the North in her writings. She thereby literally fulfilled Nebrija’s project for whom the first rule of the Spanish orthography was ‘that we have to write as we pronounce, and pronounce as we write’ (I, 10). Thus, Teresa wrote how she spoke, which was the way of Ávila; even though her publishers corrected her in order to adapt her habits to those of the people from Toledo […].15

This intentional recourse of the spoken and not sophisticated language of her surroundings supports the claim mentioned above: Libro de la Vida is a text that tries to address its readers via a strategy of approximation. But why should the Carmelite nun do so?

In this regard Teresa again becomes comparable to Augustine as an author; both want to convince their audience to lead a Christian life, and in Teresa’s case a particular Christian life. In order to borrow this idea from the text, the readers have to feel they are being personally addressed. In other words, especially as a teacher, Teresa has to be the ‘sister’ of her readers. Only in this role can she teach them her own life. Due to the Christian appreciation of the confession of sins, Teresa can – as a sinner – fully assume the role of a model. This role becomes palpable in chapters 11-21 of her text, where she develops the allegory of watering the garden as a school of inner prayer. This teaching stands at the center of Teresa’s pedagogical attempts. She wants her readers to integrate these contents into their own lives. But instead of writing a theoretical treatise with moral instructions, she narrates her own life as a deficient model that can be used as mirror in order to lead to an identification with what can be called Teresa’s doctrine.

This estimation shall be sustained by a further observation again concerning a detail of Teresa’s autobiography. Even though the word “mirror” does not appear often within The Book of Her Life, it occupies a crucial position in the text. Whereas the instruction for prayer is located at the beginning of the book, the effect, the highest closeness to God, is narrated at the end. Although readers of Teresa are fascinated with the vision of the transverberation in chapter 29, the visions named by Teresa herself as the most important are placed at the end of the book in chapter 40. I will focus on the following passage, which offers a clear connection to the idea of a mirror text:

Once while I was reciting with all the Sisters the hours of the Divine Office, my soul suddenly became recollected; and it seemed to me to be like a brightly polished mirror, without any part on the back or sides or top or bottom that wasn’t totally clear. In its center Christ, our Lord, was shown to me, in the way I usually see Him. It seemed to me I saw Him clearly in every part of my soul, as though in a mirror. And this mirror also – I don’t know how to explain it – was completely engraved upon the Lord Himself by means of a very loving communication I wouldn’t know how to describe.

Estando una vez en las Horas con todas, de presto se recogió mi alma y parecióme ser como un espejo claro toda, sin haber espaldas ni lados ni alto ni bajo que no estuviese toda clara, y en el centro de ella se me representó Cristo nuestro Señor, como lo suelo ver. Parecíame en todas las partes de mi alma le vía claro como en un espejo, y también este espejo – yo no sé decir cómo – se esculpía todo en el mesmo Señor por una comunicación que yo no sabré decir, muy amorosa. (V 40,5)

In this passage, Teresa describes a mystical experience which took place during prayer. All of a sudden she ‘sees’ her soul in the appearance of a mirror. In this mirror, she identifies not her own counterfeit but Jesus Christ. The astonishing moment occurs when the image seemingly turns into a somehow real appearance.

The image of the soul as a mirror is an early Christian metaphor16 and also appears in Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet.17 But by seeing Jesus Christ coming out of the mirror “by a most loving communication”, Teresa sees him face to face and the mirror disappears. This coming out of the mirror makes an important difference because it changes the status of the vision Teresa describes; it turns the vision into a mystical one, as it becomes obvious that Teresa experienced something that is normally reserved for the afterlife in heaven: she sees God face to face. Both the idea of the mirror and the sensation of seeing God in the appearance of Jesus Christ as if He was there establish a clear link to the previously cited passage from the first letter to the Corinthians: “For we see now in a mirror indistinctly, but then face to face. Now I know partially, but then I shall know fully just as God has fully known me.” This “then” of a full knowledge of God and of the self happens to her during the vision she describes in the last chapter of her Book of my Life.

Teresa’s ‘seeing God’ includes many aspects, the most important of which is the fact that she ‘sees’ (both recognizes and experiences) him in his human form.18 She explains the lesson that can be taken from this insight into God’s humanity by referring to Saint Augustine, when she says:

I think this vision is advantageous to recollected persons, in teaching them to consider the Lord as very deep within their souls; […].

Paréceme provechosa esta visión para personas de recogimiento, para enseñarse a considerar a el Señor en lo muy interior de su alma […]. (V 40,6)

God is therefore not a foreign entity but an aspect of the soul’s ‘inner life’. This insight into the essence of God permits Teresa an insight into her own status: she can understand herself as being loved (accepted, forgiven). Later on in this chapter she writes:

So His mercy is seen more clearly since even when we understand all this He bears with us.

[…] y ansí se ve más su misericordia, pues entendiendo nosotros todo esto, nos sufre. (V 40,10)

Thereby she recognizes two aspects at once; her knowledge of God as a loving God and her knowledge of herself as a beloved sinner. Both are intermingled, and at this point we therefore discover a final function of the extensive description of Teresa’s sinfulness: the more she underlines her own guilt, the more she can stress God’s grace. The latter becomes more splendid by the depth of the first because God does not turn into a punishing father, even though Teresa has the feeling of failing to complete His demands. This dialectic of sinfulness and forgiveness also characterizes the portrait of the ‘wicked’ nun and allows us to understand the double function of this astonishing sinfulness: it is part of Teresa’s effort to reach the reader and it is also part of an indirect description of God’s mercy insofar as Teresa, the sinner, discovers God as merciful. Both aspects are articulated within the named vision in the last chapter.

This reading of the vision brings us back to Dürer’s painting. In both works of art, we find hints to the first letter to the Corinthians and to the idea of experiencing a direct encounter with God. This encounter transmits knowledge about God as well as about the self. Dürer translates this idea of the encounter into the sensible transformation of his own counterfeit. Like Dürer, Teresa makes God appear through Jesus Christ within the narration of her own deficient life. Comprehensibly, she narrates the development of her own soul in which she discovers the presence of Jesus Christ. Despite different mediums, the idea of transmitting this encounter to the recipient is palpable in both insofar as both works of art address their respective audiences by offering similarities between the contents represented and their spectators or readers. In Self-Portrait with Fur Collar we have Dürer’s face and his direct gaze that render close the counterfeit of Jesus Christ; in Teresa’s Vida we have the basso continuo of her so-called sinful life and her omnipresent fragility communicating God’s love. The joining metaphor is the image of the mirror by which the knowledge of the self can be linked to an indirect knowledge of God.

The specialty of Teresa’s writing therefore consists of the cross-fading of two different but related forms of the metaphor of the mirror. On the one side we find the image of the ‘mirror of the soul’ that Teresa refers to in her vision and on the other side, we can ascertain that the text itself is designed as a mirror for its readers. These two rather distinct metaphors of the mirror are connected insofar as Teresa not only writes down her autobiography but also puts her own soul into writing. She produces a verbal portrait of her inner life in which God is present. This portrait is a text-mirror for its readers as well as the written mirror of Teresa’s soul, where God is present.

Another important metaphor by which Teresa explains this circumstance is the ‘engraving of the heart’, the ‘imprinted soul’19. Everything that occurs in her soul is an inscription by the hand of God; her Vida then, is nothing more than a written record of this inscription. Within this concept, the reader can ‘read God’ by reading The Book of Her Life. The book’s initial title, “Fuente de agua viva (‘Spring of Living Water’), given by Carmelite and Teresa’s confident Jerónimo Gracián, confirms this assessment.20 Teresa’s text thereby becomes recognizable as a complex intersection of Dürer’s self-portrait, which is a human portrait of Jesus Christ in the form of a mirror for the spectator, and of Augustine’s Confessions, which also narrate the encounter with God via an autobiographical mode but without making the same step toward a potentially fragile audience.

The significant gap between Augustine and Dürer shall be filled here by having a final look at the work of art that definitively inspired most of Teresa’s writing and reading, and which throughout Christianity has always been understood as a mirror for its readers: Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony.