The idea I had in mind did not allow me to neglect a phase that seemed to me so characteristic of the life I was studying, but I was conscious that I must tread warily. They say that to understand mysticism you must be a mystic, as to understand love you must be a lover. And Catholic mysticism demands a belief in certain affirmations that many of us find it impossible to accept. This is not the place for me to say what my own beliefs are in the matters with which religion deals, but it is only proper that I should state my conviction that no one of the faiths that men have embraced is ample enough to account for the enormous mystery. They seem to me like blind alleys cut into a primeval jungle and man deceives himself when he thinks they can lead him to its heart.
I think the mystic is in error when he regards mysticism as essentially religious. I do not think religious mysticism is its only form; I should hesitate even to admit that it was its highest. If the mystical experience is a liberating sense of community with what for want of a better word we name reality, and this you can call as you will the Absolute or God, then at some time we are all in greater or less degree mystics. Did not Plotinus say that the power of spiritual intuition was a faculty that all possess, though few use? The sap of the Mystic Vine may be set flowing in more ways than one. The mystical experience is an awareness of a greater significance in the universe, 'other than the known and above the unknown,' a dissolution of the self into a wider self; and this is accompanied by a great rush of vitality, a feeling of power, a sense of union with God or nature, and a strangely exhilarating feeling that depths upon depths of truth are within one's grasp. It is an ecstasy. But you can get it, if you are that way inclined, from a glass of cold beer, from the sight of a well-remembered scene, from opium, from love, by prayer and fasting and mortification of the flesh, and if you are an artist in the excitement of creation.
It is a natural, though unreasonable, instinct to judge of the value of a thing by its origin, and it is hard to accept the fact that the ecstasy that may be aroused in a weary man from drinking a glass of beer can have as much worth as that of the monk in his cell when a divine rapture rewards his long vigil and urgent prayer. But the ecstasy is the same and its value lies in its results. On this point all the mystics are agreed. St. Teresa, tormented by the fear that her experiences were the work of the devil, states that the only test is the effect they have. The mystical experience is valuable only if it strengthens the character and enables him who has enjoyed it to do great things.
The Spanish mystics, the only ones I know at first hand, and that I must admit but inadequately, are not, if I may say so, lively reading. Spanish writers have never cultivated the austere virtue of concision and when they deal with religious subjects feel no call to check their verbosity. They write, not to entertain the reader, but to the glory of God; and it is perhaps natural for them to suppose that they achieve this object more nobly by dissertations of great length. The mystics suffer also from the disadvantage that they all have very much the same thing to say. Their peculiar experience seems to each of them extremely important, as indeed it is, but it is not sufficiently different from mystic to mystic to make it easy to peruse with patience the various accounts. On one occasion I found myself in foreign parts with the complete works of St. Teresa and nothing much else that I wanted to read at the moment, so with the exception of one or two short pieces that were too ejaculatory for my taste I read them all. Though doubtless I did not obtain from them the spiritual edification I might have, they gave me a great deal of enjoyment. The critics say she was a careless writer, but she always managed to get into her writing that sound of the living voice that we all, for the most part without success, aim at; and there was nothing she wrote in which she failed to display her vivacious, charming, wilful, spirited and determined character. She was, if not a great, a grand woman. Maria de San José describes her as of medium height, but on the tall side. In her youth she was thought beautiful and she retained traces of good looks to the end of her life. Her face was neither round nor long, her brow broad and comely; the eyebrows were thick and arched, of a reddish colour; her eyes black and vivacious, not very large but well placed in her face. She was of good proportions, stout rather than slender, and her hands were small and shapely. She was not indifferent to her looks, indeed she accused herself of the fault in confession, and when Fray Juan de la Miseria did a portrait of her she cried, on looking at it: 'God forgive you for having painted me, Brother John, for you have painted me ugly and blear-eyed.'
The life that St. Teresa wrote of herself is one of the great autobiographies of the world. It does not stand too far below the Confessions of St. Augustine. She wrote her more important works only at the command of her confessors, but when you read her life you can hardly resist the conviction that it would have been a very subtle confessor who avoided commanding her to do what she had set her heart on. One of the greatest mercies vouchsafed to her took the form of private communication from the Lord, in which for the most part he ordered her to do what she had very much a mind to. He even enjoined her to write down his observations so that men might profit by them, though some must have offended her deep humility and others to the modem reader must seem a trifle lacking in piquancy. It hardly needed a voice from heaven to tell us that true security consists in the testimony of a good conscience. It is perhaps a little unexpected to hear the Lord apprising St. Teresa of the fact that it was the devil who had caused the Lutherans to remove the images from their churches in order to deprive them of the possibility of correcting their errors, from which ensued that they were all damned. Once indeed he gave her an assurance which the event so little substantiated that one can only imagine that omnipotence sometimes takes a rest. For the Lord told St. Teresa that Father Jeronimo Gracian, a confessor for whom she had a particular attachment, was his real son and that he would never cease to help him. She could hardly have anticipated from this that his life would be one of extreme vexation. He got on the wrong side of most of the people he had to do with and was forced to resign pretty well every appointment his talents secured him. He was clapped into the prison of his monastery by direction of his superiors and finally expelled from his order. He was rejected by all the other orders that he tried to enter. He was captured by Turks, branded with red-hot irons, loaded with chains and thrown into an underground dungeon where he was given black and verminous bread to eat and water to drink so foul that none could have drunk it unless he were dying of thirst. Seldom indeed has the rod been so little spared.
St. Teresa offers the best account that for my part I have read of the various steps of the Mystic Way, and since its main lines can be given very briefly I hope the reader will forgive me if I here state them. The first stage is called Purgation and in this the Soul, aware of Divine Beauty, realises its own nothingness. By prayer and mortification it prepares itself for the second stage of Illumination. In this the Soul begins to recollect itself and touches the supernatural. St. Teresa calls it the Prayer of Quiet. It is a period of rich contemplation. The faculties are not lost, neither do they sleep, but they are gathered up within the soul; and only the will is alive. And the will surrenders itself to God. It desires nothing and asks nothing. Some reach this. Few pass beyond. The third stage is the state of Union and this is the goal of the Mystic Way. It is a glorious folly, a heavenly madness, says the saint, in which is learnt true wisdom, and it is an exquisite enjoyment of the soul. It offers peace, strength and certainty. But it is impossible to explain. 'He that has experienced it will understand something of it, for it cannot be told more clearly, since what here occurs is so obscure. All I can say is that one feels that one is joined with God, and so great a certainty of this remains that in no way can one cease to believe it.'
But St. Teresa never lost her fear that these states of the soul might be inspired by the evil one and she sought constant reassurance from her confessors. She was suspicious of such experiences when they occurred to the nuns under her charge. When she spoke of those moments of ecstasy, when the soul losing consciousness was seized by the rapture of the Divine Vision, she did not fail to add a warning: 'this is the end of that spiritual union: she told the nuns, 'that there may be born of it works, works.'
It is now that one is inclined to pause. For as everyone knows the saint's great achievement was the reform of the Order of Carmel. Starting with one small convent at Avila she presently founded houses both for men and women in other places. I have always been a little sorry for the poor nuns on whom her zeal forced a stricter rule. It is true that they no longer fasted, as they had originally done, from Holy Cross Day till Easter, nor lived in perpetual solitude; visitors were allowed and the nuns were permitted to leave the precincts of their house. But it must be remembered that the conventual life was adopted in Spain at that period for motives that were not exclusively religious. The entail of estates on eldest sons forced the younger ones either to enter the army or the church, and in the humbler ranks of society the church offered clever men their only chance of advancement. The times were insecure and means of livelihood hard to come by. The cloister promised safety and at least bed and board. Trade was disastrous and those engaged in it were despised. It was only natural that men should put their sons to a calling that kept them alive and was honourable besides. Nor was it always an urgent devotion that led women to the nunnery. Great gentlemen often could not give their daughters a dowry sufficient to marry them suitably and the convent was a dignified way of disposing of them,. With the wars in Flanders and the attraction of the Indies men were scarce and many women had no chance of marrying. The convent was their refuge. It offered the disconsolate widow a respectable retreat from the temptations to which her condition was liable. It was the refuge also of girls whose reputation had by their own fault or by an accident been tarnished, and the faintest breath of suspicion was enough to sully a Spanish woman's delicate honour. The reader will remember the Mayor of Zalamea's sardonic remark, 'the Lord is not fastidious of the quality of his brides.' In fact there were a dozen reasons for a woman to enter a religious house other than the love of God. Sometimes they were communities engaged in a particular handicraft and you went to the convent as you might go to a shop. It is not astonishing if these women, performing their duties with sufficient exactitude, sought such alleviations as they could get for a life that only a perfervid piety could save from being very monotonous. They were simple and industrious; they fed the poor who came to their gates, and if they were not more than reasonably pious, they were harmless. It was always possible even in these circumstances for a nun to lead a life devoted entirely to prayer and mortification. It is no wonder that considerable resistance was set up when Teresa de Jesus sought to restore her order to its primitive severity.
There was a plague of nuns and monks in Spain. Whole families entered the church; of the five brothers and sisters of the Jesuit Baltasar Gracian, all but one who died young were members of a religious order. To save his soul was in the sixteenth century the main business of a Spaniard. It has been reckoned that thirty per cent of the population were in the church. Not only were politicians and economists alarmed, but the clergy themselves. The authorities of Madrid and Toledo petitioned for a reduction of the number of religious and the Bishop of Badajoz noted the abundance of convents as one of the ills that were ruining the country. To their number then St. Teresa, regardless of everything but salvation, added. Her fame and the attraction for the Spanish character of the austerity of the rule led many who would otherwise have been content with the life of the world to take the vows. With the growing distress of the country the Lord was providing for his brides with increasing inadequacy; it was all very well to look upon privation as a mortification pleasing in his sight, but the poor nuns were obliged to eat to keep body and soul together and in certain convents they were just dying of hunger. The bishops were in consequence determined that no religious house should be founded unless it was properly endowed. They frowned on the fancy to set up houses of their own that nuns of position or character sometimes took. But the bishops were no match for Teresa de Jesus. With the prestige of her visions and the Redeemer's very words to support her she got as usual her own way. The order was divided and the Discalced Carmelites formed into a distinct province. The energetic saint founded no less than thirty-two houses. Her nuns lived entirely upon alms. They were to have no income, the Lord would provide; and in the Constitutions (a document very revealing of her character) she lays down that if there was food it should be eaten at eleven in winter and at ten in summer; but that no regular hour could be fixed, for it must depend upon what the Lord gave. It may be that St. Teresa's example was salutary to many and that a number of religious who followed her rule found salvation, but it can hardly be denied that her activity assisted in the ruin of her unhappy country.
But none of this is very much to my purpose. I have been seduced into writing this short piece by the interest which, as a novelist, I have not been able to help feeling in her curious personality. She was not, I think, a woman of remarkable intelligence but she had charm, determination and courage. These are the traits that effect great things in the world. They do not always effect wise ones.
In the Book of the Foundations, a work rich in entertainment, full of good sense, humour and curious anecdote, there is a charming account of the founding of a convent at Salamanca. St. Teresa, accompanied only by Sister Mary of the Sacrament, arrived there on the Eve of All Souls about midday after travelling great part of the night in excessive cold. She was in poor health. From the inn she sent for a good man, Nicolas Gutierrez, whom she had entrusted with the work of making a house ready for her. It had been no easy matter to get it, since it was not the season for letting houses and it was in possession of a number of students who were most unwilling to leave. Nicolas Gutierrez told her that the house was not yet empty, for he had been unable to get the students out. The good mother told him how important it was for her to move in at once, so he went to the landlord and so arranged things that it was empty by evening. But when the two nuns were able to go in it was dusk. The students had left the house in bad order, and so dirty that they had not a little work to do that night. It was large and rambling, with many garrets, and Mary of the Sacrament, more timorous than her stout-hearted Superior, could not get the students out of her thoughts. They had been so loth to go she was afraid some of them might still be hiding in the house. The women shut themselves up in a room with straw in it, 'that being the first thing I provided for founding the house, for with straw we could not fail to have a bed.' The fathers of the Company of Jesus had lent them a couple of blankets. When the door was safely closed Sister Mary seemed somewhat more at her ease about the students, but she kept looking about her first on this side and then on that.
'I asked her why she was looking about, seeing that no one could possibly come in,' says Teresa.
'She replied: "Mother, I am thinking, if I were to die now what would you do by yourself?"'
Teresa could not help thinking it would be a horrible thing. She was a little startled, because though she did not actually fear dead bodies they made her nervous, even when there was someone with her. But she answered:
'Sister, should that happen I will think what to do. Now let me go to sleep.'
As they had spent two bad nights, sleep soon put an end to their tremors. Next morning mass was said in that house for the first time. But Teresa could never afterwards think of Sister Mary's trepidation without wanting to laugh.
Yes, a woman of character.
It is character too that makes Fray Luis de Leon a fascinating subject and in his case I feel that I have some justification for dwelling upon him for a little. He died in 1591, so the hero of my book could hardly have listened to his lectures, but I like to think that when he was studying at Salamanca he might have come in contact with the young Augustinian whom in Los Nombres de Cristo, Fray Luis calls Juliano and from him heard something of the master of Spanish prose.
Salamanca is an agreeable place to linger in. It has a noble square, with arches all round it, and here towards evening the whole population perambulates, the men in one direction, the girls in the other, so that they may ogle one another as they pass. The town-hall, with its plateresque façade, is rose-coloured. The mass of the cathedral seen from a little distance is fine; it seems to be planted on the ground with a sort of solid arrogance; but when you approach you are repelled by its ugly reddish brown and the florid decoration. The interior is overwhelmingly magnificent. There are huge, lofty pillars that tower to a height that seems hardly believable. The choir is surrounded by elaborate bas-reliefs. It is all so grand and sumptuous, it reminds you of a Lord Mayor's banquet; it suggests a ceremonial, assured, opulent religion, and you ask yourself what solace in trouble the stricken heart could hope to find there.
At the University, sadly fallen from its ancient glory, I went to see the lecture-room of Fray Luis, a whitewashed room, large, dark and square, with a vaulted ceiling. Narrow benches and narrow desks fill the whole space, and at the side is a long, boxed-off passage where, it appears, the spectators stood. Over the pulpit at the back is a wooden hood somewhat like a great extinguisher. It is from this pulpit that Fray Luis, according to the legend, in which, however, the learned declare there is no truth, gave that lecture the first words of which have carried his name down to posterity more firmly than any of his works. After four years in the prisons of the Inquisition he was acquitted and returned to Salamanca. He was received to the sound of drums and trumpets by a great concourse of gentlemen, professors at the University and students, who came out on to the road from Valladolid to meet him. After a due interval he gave his first lecture. A crowd collected to hear him. They expected him to attack his accusers and once more to speak in his own defence. He began with the words: 'As we were saying yesterday.'
While he was in prison he wrote his most celebrated work. It is called De los Nombres de Cristo. This book is in the form of a dialogue between three friends in the Augustinian order whom the heat of summer has brought to the house of the community on the Tormes a few miles from Salamanca. It was called La Flecha. The scene of the various conversations is in the garden of this and on a little island in the river. I thought I should like to see a spot so celebrated in Spanish letters and having inquired the way, set out; but after driving for some time I began to think I had lost it. Presently I met a fat young priest, with a round, red face and spectacles, who was strolling along the road reading his breviary. I stopped the car and asked him if he could direct me. He seemed glad to do so. He was a poor parish priest, in a shabby cassock discoloured by sun and rain, and he talked in a high-pitched voice. He was very polite and when he got into the car and then out again took off his hat, but when he put it on seemed very uncertain which was the front and which the back. He never stopped smoking cigarettes he deftly rolled himself.
After a while he put up his hand and we stopped. A rough path led to the shady garden, surrounded by a hedge of box, where the friar sat and chatted with his friends. A brook ran by it, a tiny trickle of very clear water, and beyond was an orchard. It was a quiet and pleasant spot and the coolness was grateful in the heat of the Castilian summer. The priest showed me this place with a sort of proprietary air that I found very delightful and then he did a singular thing. He began to recite.
'Era por el mes de Junio, à las bueltas de la fiesta de San Juan, al tiempo que en Salamanca comiençan à cessar los estudios . . .'
It was the beginning of the book, and the liquid, exquisitely balanced periods fell from his lips like music. On his fat, red face was a look of rapture.
'What a memory!' I cried, when at last he stopped.
'I have read it so often. I often have long walks to the farms in my parish, three and four and five leagues, and it shortens the way if I repeat to myself my favourite passages. No one ever wrote Spanish like my Fray Luis.'
Then he said he would show me the island on which Fray Luis used to walk and we returned to the high road. This offered a wide prospect over the plain of Castile. In the distance the hills were diaphanous. We walked along the river, bordered with handsome, close growing poplars, till we came to a farm built on the bank of the river, and here on a little terrace overlooking the water a woman with a handkerchief over her head was busy sewing. She greeted the shabby young priest with affection and me with politeness and we passed through a mill on to the island. Beyond the mill-race the water seemed only just to flow. On the farther bank was a line of poplars and then the fields dry and brown after the harvest. A faint, pleasant breeze blew on the island, and here in a little circle of trees was a table where tradition says the friar sat and wrote. Now holiday-makers come on Sundays to picnic and the ground was strewn with old newspapers. The spot was exquisitely peaceful. The broad, placid river had a curious effect on one. One's mind was tranquil, but at the same time alert and buoyant.
But the recollection I brought away from the excursion was of this stolid peasant priest reciting line after line of that harmonious prose.
I have read the book from which he quoted, not every word of it, but a great deal. It consists of a series of homilies upon the appellations given to Jesus Christ in the scriptures, and I must admit I should have found it heavy going but for the charming descriptions with which the dialogues open, the digressions and illustrations, and the revelations here and there of the author's character. The reflections which are aroused in him by the subjects of his discourse do not seem to me of great subtlety. I should have thought them within the scope of any pious man who had an intimate acquaintance with theological literature.
To me there seems something extraordinarily modern about Luis de Leon. He was not all of a piece as so often appear the famous figures of the past. I do not suppose men then were any different from what they are now, but it looks as though to their contemporaries they seemed more homogeneous. Otherwise they could hardly have so often described them in terms of 'humours.' But Fray Luis was a contradictory creature in whom dwelt uneasily incongruous qualities and warring instincts. Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velasquez, has painted him in a few words: a little man, but well proportioned, with a big head covered with curly hair, a wide forehead, a round, rather than a long, swarthy face, and sparkling green eyes. He was vain and humble, arrogant and patient, sombre, peevish, bitter, loyal and chivalrous. He loathed fools and hypocrites. He was very tender to little children. He loved nature and truth. He was fearless. No matter what enmities he aroused he was always prepared to denounce tyranny; he would incur any danger to combat injustice. He was an ascetic, of great abstemiousness, and he seldom allowed himself the luxury of going to bed, so that the servitor who entered his cell in the morning found it as he had left it the night before. But he loved the fair things of life, the lovely, lulling sound of the Tormes flowing by La Flecha, the heavenly music of blind Salinas and the harmony and cadence of the Spanish tongue. He was quarrelsome, rude, violent, and he yearned above all else for peace. The cry for rest, rest from the turmoil of his thought, rest from the torment of the world, recurs in all his works. It gives his lovely lyrics a poignancy that pierces the artificiality of their Horatian manner. He sought for happiness and tranquillity of spirit, but his temperament made it impossible for him to achieve them. They count him among the mystics. He never experienced the supernatural blessings which solace those that pursue the mystic way. He never acquired that aloofness from the things of the world that characterises them. He had an anxious longing for a rapture his uneasy nature prevented him from ever enjoying. He was a mystic only in so far as he was a poet. He looked at those snowcapped mountains and yearned to explore their mysteries, but he was held back by the busy affairs of the city. I always think that the phrase of his, no se puede vivir sin amar, one cannot live without loving, had for him an intimate, tragic meaning. It was not just a commonplace.
Fray Luis had something of the universal capacity that we wonder at in certain figures of the Italian Renaissance. He was a mathematician, an astrologer and a jurist. Untaught, he acquired considerable proficiency as a painter. He was not only deeply versed in theological literature, but also in the classics, and their dreams of the Golden Age never ceased to haunt him. He wrote some exquisite lyrics, after San Juan de la Cruz he is the best poet his country has produced, and I think all judges admit that nobody in Spain ever wrote prose so perfectly. Pen in hand Fray Luis was a scholar and a gentleman; he wrote with elegance, rather than with vigour. In La Perfecta Casada he quotes at length from Tertullian and even in the translation you can hardly fail to see how much more vivid, racy and virile was the African writer. But even a foreigner cannot but be sensible to the charm of Luis de Leon's liquid prose. It is as clear as the rivulet that runs through La Flecha. It is eloquent and at the same time colloquial; it is concise and yet abundant. It has a grave, playful music. To my cheerful mind the most attractive and diverting book of Fray Luis is The Perfect Wife. The reader, interested neither in theology nor in mysticism, can read it with entertainment. It offers sage counsel to a bride on her conduct in the various necessities of the married state. One cannot help feeling a certain amused astonishment at its curious mixture of simplicity, shrewdness and nobility. Incidentally it gives a pleasant glimpse of domestic life in the upper class and a hint here and there of circumstances which the conventional view of Spanish society would never have led you to suspect. Fray Luis was a Castilian gentleman of excellent family and his ideal of the good life was that of the landowner living on the produce of his estate. He does not seem to have considered the possibility that men might be born so unhappily as to have no broad acres to till. He had only scorn for such as engaged in commerce; it was not only disreputable, but gravely prejudicial to the soul's well-being. 'The life of the field,' he says, 'and the cultivation of one's inheritance is a school of innocence and truth because one learns from those with whom one works and talks. And as the earth renders faithfully what is entrusted to it, and in its unchangeableness is stable and downright, bountiful in its fruits and generous of its riches, liberal and productive to well-doing; so it seems to engender and to impress in the breasts of them that work it a peculiar goodness and a simplicity of temper such as are found with difficulty in men of other kinds. So it teaches sincerity, true and faithful dealing and keeps in remembrance the good old customs.'
The longest chapter is devoted to an attack, supported by abundant quotations from the classics and the fathers, on the unaccountable mania the women of his day had for dyeing their hair and painting their cheeks. (He thought, the good monk, that the beauty of a good woman resided not in the lineaments of her face, but in the secret virtues of her soul; and he was not sure that it became the perfect wife to be fair and lovely.) He admitted that not all women who painted had evil intentions. 'It is politeness to think so,' he remarks dryly. But if this mask on the face did not discover their bad desires, at all events it aroused those of their neighbours. This is how virtuous women should perform their toilet: 'Let them hold out their hands and receive in them water poured from a jar, which their servant will pour from the washing-stand, and let them put it to their faces, and take some of it in their mouths and wash their gums, and rub their fingers over their eyes and in their ears, and behind the ears also, and let them not desist till their whole face is clean; and after that, letting the water be, let them cleanse themselves with a rough towel, and so will they remain more beautiful than the sun.'
There is one chapter that is headed: 'How important it is that women should not talk much and that they should be peaceable and of a gentle disposition.' In this he has a phrase so modern that it makes one smile; he remarks that a 'foolish and chattering woman, as foolish women generally are, whatever other merits she has, is an intolerable business.' Further on he observes that the peculiarity of stupidity is that it is not aware of itself but contrariwise takes itself for wisdom. 'And whatever we do it will be the greatest difficulty to instil common sense (into persons of this sort), for that is something you learn ill if you do not learn it with your mother's milk... . And the best advice we can give to such women is to beg them to hold their tongues; since there are few wise women they should aim at there being many silent ones.' Before I leave this engaging work I should like to give an extract from the chapter entitled: 'On the obligation of married couples to love one another and to assist one another in their labours.' It is a quotation from St. Basil. 'The viper, the most ferocious animal among reptiles, assiduously goes out to espouse the sea-lamprey, and having arrived, whistles, as though to give the signal that he is there, and attract her from the sea so that he may take her in his marital embrace. The lamprey obeys and rejoins the poisonous and savage beast without fear. What do I say to this? What? That however harsh and of savage qualities the husband may be, it is necessary for the wife to put up with it and that she should not allow peace to be disturbed for any cause.'
That's talking, that is.
No one has ever thought even of beatifying Fray Luis de Leon. He never attained the peace that rewards the saints. By way of contrast I will give now a brief account of one whose way of life shows pre-eminently how mighty was the force that inspired these Spaniards. This is St. Peter of Alcantara and here is what St. Teresa says of him in her autobiography.
'How good an example has God lately taken from us in the blessed Father; Peter of Alcantara. The world is not able to endure such perfection. They say that our health is more feeble and that times have changed. This holy man was in our own time; his spirit was mighty and so he held the world beneath his feet. And though men may go not naked nor make such harsh mortifications as he did, there are many things, as I have said on other occasions, whereby they may trample on the world, and the Lord teaches them when he sees that courage is there. And how great was that which God gave to this saint of whom I am speaking to enable him to perform for seven and forty years the harsh mortifications that are known to all. I want to say something about it for I know it is all true.
'He told me and another person from whom he kept little (me for the love he bore me, and this the Lord willed him to have in order to protect and encourage me at a time of great need, as I have said and will ever say), that for forty years, I think he said it was, he had slept only an hour and a half between day and night; and that this at the beginning was the most difficult mortification he performed, to conquer sleep; and in order to do it he always stood or knelt. When he slept it was sitting up, his head resting against a little piece of wood driven into the wall. He could not have lain down even if he had wanted to because his cell, as is well known, was only four and a half feet long. During all those years he never put on his hood, however hot was the sun, or whatever the rain, nor anything on his feet, nor garment save a habit of sackcloth, with nothing underneath, and this as tight as he could bear it, and a little cloak of the same stuff over it. He told me that in the great cold he took this off, and left the door and the little window of his cell open so that when he put on the cloak again and shut the door he might satisfy his body with the comfort of greater warmth. It was very usual for him to eat every third day. And he asked me why this astonished me, for it was very possible to anyone who accustomed himself to it. A companion of his told me that it happened to him to go a week without eating. This must have been when he was in prayer, for then he had great raptures and ecstasies of love for God, of which I was myself once a witness.
'In youth his poverty was extreme, and his mortification, for he told me that it had happened to him to live for three years in a house of his order without knowing a friar except by the sound of his voice; for he never raised his eyes; and so when he was obliged to go from place to place he did not know the way and had to follow the fathers. This happened on journeys. Women he never looked at and that for many years. He told me that now it was all the same to him whether he saw them or not; but he was very old when I came to know him, and his weakness was so great, he seemed to be made of nothing but the roots of trees. With all this holiness he was very affable, though of few words, unless you asked him questions. His answers were very delightful, for he had an excellent understanding. I should like to say much more, but I am afraid you will ask what business I have to write this. I have written it with misgiving. And so I will leave the matter only adding that he died as he had lived, preaching and admonishing his friars. When he saw his end approaching he said the psalm: Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi, and kneeling down, died.'
No wonder they were able to conquer half the world, these Spaniards, when they could so terribly conquer themselves.
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