A Worm So Vile: Christological Humility and the Affirmation of the Self in the Works of Teresa de Jesús

Readers of Santa Teresa de Jesús (1515-1582) are often confounded by her frequent self-disparaging remarks. Following Alison Weber’s Rhetoric of Femininity (1990), many critics have regarded these utterances of wretchedness and humility as rhetorical legerdemain, which Teresa employed to navigate the patriarchal atmosphere of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet, in doing so, Teresa would have done a disservice to women by reinforcing feminine stereotypes and ideologies of women’s subordination. In this dissertation, however, I explore Teresa as a theologian, where her utterances of wretchedness and humility are integral elements of her Christ-centered worldview. My thesis is that Teresa’s humility is Christological and, therefore, affirms the self rather than negates it. As a Christological virtue, Teresa’s humility is essential for the self’s teleological fulfillment. It is the catalyst for its restoration, for her spiritual poverty culminates in spiritual wealth: the soteriological process that reconstitutes the fallen self, reorients it to God, and restores the agape relationship for which it was created. In such a reading, the rhetorical effect of Teresa’s expressions of wretchedness would result from emphasis rather than exaggeration. But in that case, humility allows for subversion, not of Scripture or of the Church, but of interpretations of Scripture that would limit women’s public participation; for if every self is spiritually empty before God, the result is an ontological leveling of all humanity. Simply, women cannot have more nothing than men. They, therefore, cannot be spiritually inferior. In this way, Teresa wrote a theology sanctioned by the Church to subvert misogynistic dogma within the Church. Furthermore, current research on the role of Christian theology in the development of modern liberalism allows for such a reading. The ideological consequences of her Christology—namely, 1) an ontological equality that presupposes civil equality and 2) a circle of obligation that is universal rather than local—became indispensable to forming the concept of the modern individual and autonomy in the secular West. As such, Teresa’s writings (though not necessarily Teresa herself) represent a progression of Western thought that steadily undermined ideologies of subordination and made conceptually possible a vision of society established on civic equality.