Wisdom and suffering in Teresa of Cartagena

Abstract

I argue that Teresa of Cartagena's Grove of the Infirm offers a recalibration of the wisdom emergent from suffering by moving from a cruciform spirituality to an intellectual ‘scientia,’ which benefits specific marginalized groups (prolonged sufferers) by establishing new paths of agency (through distinctive cooperative virtues) for those who suffer. I show that by disengaging suffering's spiritual meaning from the Franciscan focus on the cross, Teresa is able to amplify the relationship of virtue to wisdom while maintaining the validity of the painful experience endured. I argue that Teresa's focus on wisdom challenges the diminution of sufferers' experiences and elevates their spiritual wisdom as applicable to the church writ large. Teresa's work opens new spaces of agency for the most sidelined and secures the lasting significance of the wisdom of suffering.

The two works of fifteenth-century Teresa de Cartagena (c.1425–?), Grove of the Infirm (Arboleda de los enfermos, c.1475) and Wonder at the Works of God (Admiraçión operum Dey, c.1477), astonished her contemporaries not merely on account of the gender of their author, but also because of their emergence from a woman whose disability robbed her of her hearing, muted her voice and severed her connection with those within and outside her convent walls.¹ Today, however, scholars like Yonsoo Kim, Ma Mar Cortés Timonar, María Milagros Rivera Garretas, and Elena Deanda, among others, embrace the ‘deaf nun who dared to “speak” about disability, God, and the right of women in medieval Spain’ and offered a ‘discourse on marginalization in order to insert normally excluded groups into the hegemonic written world’.² Teresa's writings present complex intersectional matrices of gender, class, disability, religion and professed life that are as much subversive as complicit in the paradigms they challenge.³ While her privilege as a woman of status connected to a family of means shapes her offering, her work defies simplistic categorisation.⁴

Scholars have written on significant literary insights that help distil the unique contributions of this female author in a patriarchal society, as well as about particular facets relevant to Teresa's historical position as the granddaughter of a prominent converso.⁵ As Nicole Reibe points out, though, relatively little theological attention has been paid to Teresa and her offering within the Christian tradition more broadly. ‘Most of the scholarly treatments of Cartagena discuss the impact of her gender, her Jewish roots, or her disability on the very act of her writing, but not the theological substance of her writing.’⁶ Reibe's contribution begins to correct for Teresa's theological neglect. Turning to the significance of the nun's deafness, which emerged early in her adult life and shaped her theological framework, Reibe heralds Teresa as an important voice for theological studies of disability. She argues that Teresa's virtue-based approach opens new ideas for meaningful reflections on suffering, disability and their role in Christian spirituality.

My argument takes up Reibe's suggestion that there is more to mine theologically in Teresa's writing. I argue that Teresa of Cartagena's Grove of the Infirm offers a recalibration of the wisdom emergent from suffering by moving from a cruciform spirituality to an intellectual scientia, which benefits specific marginalised groups (prolonged sufferers) by establishing new paths of agency (through distinctive cooperative virtues) for those who suffer. First, I claim that Teresa transitions her scholastic training into a discourse on virtues emergent from suffering as a way to elevate the wisdom particular to suffering. I show that by disengaging suffering's spiritual meaning from the formative Franciscan focus on the cross, Teresa is able to re-evaluate suffering's distinctive contribution. Rather than imitation of the crucified savior (imitatio Christi), wisdom emerges from an intellectual exploration of suffering's fruits. Second, I claim that Teresa challenges the marginalisation of the wisdom of suffering within the church and opens new spaces of agency for the most sidelined by reframing the medieval understanding of Christ as physician (Christus Medicus). Teresa's separation of the ‘surgical’ purging of vice from the virtuous excellences specific to suffering makes visible and elevates the theological wisdom that emerges from prolonged suffering. Finally, I argue that Teresa strategically places the ‘paz-scientia’ of suffering above the cardinal virtues and antecedent to the theological virtues, using Job as biblical authority and precedent, in order to secure its lasting significance for the ecclesial body as a whole. Much as her writing resists patriarchal occlusion, Teresa's work opens spaces for new discourses on suffering to emerge and convey kerygmatic wisdom to the church at large.

Suffering's scientia and imitatio Christi

Teresa began her vowed life as a Franciscan, although with papal permission she eventually joined the Cistercians, and the writings of Bonaventure provide an entry into the intellectual Franciscan heritage that Teresa's discussion of wisdom juxtaposes.⁷ There, the cross stands centrally as a point of spiritual insight for both Francis and Bonaventure, and it is the cross that reveals and mediates wisdom to the sufferer.⁸ Like the darkness of Pseudo-Dionysian unknowing that leads to greater insight, the darkness of Bonaventure reveals a form of wisdom. In the latter, the via negativa and via excessus of divinity becomes a ‘suspended transition’ that expresses the darkness of a very specific impression – namely, the wounded Christ held aloft on the cross. The crucified image within the flaming seraph becomes a cipher for Bonaventure, which ‘is not only the object of contemplative loving meditation: he is also active and expresses himself by impressing himself, which is to say his wounds, in Francis’.⁹ The Christian enters into the wisdom of God's love through contemplation of the cross, and Jesus’ wounded corpus acts as the mediator of God to the world. As Bonaventure states at the beginning of Tree of Life, ‘the true worshiper of God, the true disciple of Christ, wanting to conform perfectly to the Saviour of all who was crucified for his sake, should try in the first place, with earnest intent, always to carry about, in soul and in body, the cross of Jesus Christ’.¹⁰ For Bonaventure, Christ crucified becomes the ‘integrating center of theology’.¹¹

Like the Franciscan tradition out of which she comes, Teresa claims that great insight comes by delving into, rather than shying away from, experiences of suffering. Her insights are hard-won and emerge not only from the loss of her hearing, but also the isolation that her impairment forced upon her.¹² At the outset of Grove, she describes this experience of solitude and exclusion – she lives on an ‘island [that] cannot be populated with residents’ and is ‘sterile of temporal pleasures and dry of vainglories and the fount of human honors’.¹³ Teresa begins Grove by associating her experience with Job, who decries his life as a curse, and Tobit, whose laments his own blindness as form of living death itself. Like these biblical figures, though, Teresa finds new wisdom in the spaces of seeming absence.¹⁴ However, after establishing the kind of dwelling in which she lives, Teresa resists turning to a cruciform unification with Jesus’ pain and suffering in order to unpack what offers deeper meaning. Throughout Grove, references to the cross are few.¹⁵ The tomb, rather than Christ's cross, becomes a place of encounter with understanding, where a space that is more a ‘sepulcher than a dwelling’ of ‘shadowy banishment’ joins to the ‘mercy of the Most High’ that will ‘illuminate me with the light of His compassionate grace’.¹⁶ In the first pages of her work, Teresa quotes from the prophet Isaiah (9:2), conjoining the darkness of wandering in exile to the those who have ‘seen a great light’. Both coexist in her investigation. She does not negate her prose's embeddedness in the darkened experience of suffering, but she turns from alignment with the darkness of the cross to conjunction with the light of grace, which she finds illuminating for the realm that she inhabits.

Teresa embraces ‘a theology about spiritual growth in the service of reason’.¹⁷ Her vantage challenges the church – then and now – to embrace thinking into the mysteries of suffering without patterning what is understood simply by turning to the form of the cross. This is not to say that Teresa rejects the cross, but rather that spiritualities of the cross do not allow her to fully express what she learns through her own dialogic experience with suffering, texts, God and the church. Hers is not a private unitive experience, such as a mystic might describe, but rather a scholastic form of debate with God and the world that surrounds her. Teresa writes, ‘my books which have wonderous graftings from healthful groves’ become the tools for her ‘to make use of … those counsels that aid most the purpose of my suffering and the growth of my devotion of spiritual consolation’.¹⁸ Where the cross offers a language and shape to understand the mystic's suffering and offer consolation of the suffering God whose presence abides therein, Teresa's writing claims another form of spiritual wisdom for those whose experiences do not conform to such a paradigm. Teresa's writing offers a path into spiritual discovery for all who continue to suffer, question and lament their condition when feeling the absence of God's presence.¹⁹

Teresa's work challenges the notion that suffering provides an obscured mystery to be accepted and embraced, rather than debated and analysed through prayer. Intellectual references dominate the first part of Grove as Teresa builds a foundation for the work she will do in the second half, where she reframes the kinds of virtues particular to suffering and their status in the church.²⁰ Teresa argues that her speech has been freed of the worldly affliction of useless chatter in order to fulfil its main purposes: first, to praise and bless God; second, ‘in order to ask questions and to be answered’.²¹ The work of probing and discovery culminates at the end of the first part of Grove with a redefinition of patience as an intellectual opportunity that is particular to suffering.²² Of the he who suffers, she first writes that ‘we exhort him to have patience, saying “have patience, since our Lord gave this suffering to you”’. Yet for Teresa, patience is neither passive endurance nor cruciform mystical union. It certainly ‘is not in whether or not one complains about one's pains, for this pertains to the discretion of the individual and even more to the quality and quantity of the pain that he experiences’.²³ As Reibe describes Teresa's stance, ‘it is through disability, not because of disability, that patience reigns in the soul of those with disabilities’, continuing: ‘it is through this spirituality that Teresa reclaimed, albeit in a different manner, all that she has lost’.²⁴

Teresa reframes patience as wisdom particular to suffering, which is the cornerstone for virtue's development therein. She uses etymological parsing to develop this idea. Patience, she argues, cannot but relate to its components: a peace (paz) that emerges in the activity (not avoidance) of suffering (pasión) combined with a commitment to continued perseverance (padesçer). Only together can we understand the real nature of patience – namely, as a particular kind of wisdom (çiençia).²⁵ Patience thus becomes a form ‘suffer[ing] with prudence’, where the wisdom particular to right judgement continuously examines and takes up the intellectual work of understanding the experience of suffering.²⁶ Reason and judgement add to, rather than subtract from, suffering's meaning. Today, we might be wary of rationalising the experience of suffering by layering reflective interpretations upon it. For Teresa, however, the opposite holds true. Suffering is rescued from meaninglessness by reason's ability to engage what cannot be avoided and act in relation to it through the intellect. Reason and inquiry become the ‘bit’ of the guiding bridle of the experience of ailment, ‘fitting for our temporal good and our spiritual well-being in the service of our Lord’.²⁷ She claims it would be ‘excessive negligence’ for those who are ill to ignore this spiritual wisdom.²⁸ Suffering and patience offer much that can be spiritually useful, both for the sufferer and for the church at large.

The patience that she describes as a form of wisdom enables her to redeploy the meaning of suffering's work as a spiritual corrective. Several places in the treatise bring forward a strand of conventional medieval wisdom applied to those physically stricken – a link between the body and soul means that illness in the one betokens ill health in the other.²⁹ As she initially examines this idea, however, Teresa's writing challenges this premise. First, Teresa questions the ubiquitous uses of suffering as a correction for vice. She notes that suffering has long been a useful remedy for uprooting vice, but she investigates whether or not her prolonged suffering fits the punitive model.³⁰ As Teresa points out, her suffering has been prolonged and ‘even increase[d]’, asking ‘were my faults corrected surely my suffering would cease?’³¹ She proceeds to weigh the mercy and justice of God, noting that justice punishes the guilty. However, as much as she concedes that this wisdom applies to many who suffer, she notes that her experience, as well as many others who suffer without seeming end, do not fit neatly into this category.

Teresa concludes her initial round of questioning by declaring that God ‘never punishes me but rather invites me to them [spiritual things], and He even pulls at my mantle to lead me to a rich supper’.³² She turns to the Johannine image of the marriage supper of the lamb (Revelation 19:9) to argue that God invites the suffering and sick as the first guests, bringing them into the supper not on account of vice but rather ‘mak[ing] them enter through the door of virtuous deeds’ such that they reach ‘such great heights of honor as to be seated at the table of divine generosity’.³³ It is the sick, not the healthy, who are first pulled into the bounty of the banquet, and it is through their affliction that they receive the benefits of the feast. The supper of the Lamb becomes the banquet of ‘spiritual reflection that nourishes the soul’.³⁴ By using this eucharist imagery, Teresa makes several important claims about the wisdom that comes from suffering. First, it endures. What the sufferer learns is not a lesson to be gotten over in the face of the beatific banquet. Second, suffering's wisdom is valuable. What is acquired by prolonged suffering is rare, since not all have it, and precious – it is both welcome and important for the church. Third, Teresa's wisdom of suffering need not transform into a cruciform spirituality to be part of suffering's transfiguring work. Intellect and debate, rather than spiritualities connecting suffering's experience to the cross, open theological insight. By linking her wisdom to Revelation's eucharistic imagery, Teresa inserts what she distils into the eucharistic memory and economy. The wisdom of suffering redirects the church's understanding of suffering as cruciform as well as punitive. It also opens new ways to think about what wounded transfiguration offers the sufferer and the church at large.³⁵

From Medicus to virtue

Teresa refrains from direct reference to Christus Medicus – Christ the healer – in Grove. While her writing is replete with references to God and passages in the Old and New Testament, Teresa's work never champions Christ as divine physician.³⁶ Teresa most frequently references God as a parental figure – one who can be corrective, guiding and enigmatic, but one whose love for her and other sufferers she does not doubt even as she labours to discover spiritual meaning that accompanies her suffering. Rather than give the role of physician to Christ, Teresa assigns it directly to suffering. She writes, ‘if you want a physician who will cure you, look only to your affliction, for if you allow it to work within you, it will purify you of bad humors more than you think’.³⁷ The further she goes into this medical exegesis of uprooting vice, however, the more it becomes clear that Teresa addresses the medical uses of suffering to those unlike herself or others afflicted with prolonged suffering. She reminds her readers to question simplistic alignments of physical and spiritual wellness. The physician (suffering) addresses the proud with ‘gallantry of … body’, the young and beautiful, the eloquent and intellectual, those socially honoured and those who are wealthy.³⁸ She points out that those who suffer are quite far from the sins that distort and mirror the physical distress they have had to bear.³⁹ It is hard for a wan, malnourished and disfigured individual to increase in vanity, eat enough to be prey to gluttony, or take a sloth's rest on account of the painful agony that occupies her every waking moment.⁴⁰

Much as distancing her spiritual reflection from the cross opened up new avenues for thinking about suffering's spiritual elements, so too does decoupling God from a physician's role change how one is able to understand divine agency in suffering. Beyond challenging suffering as divine punishment, this framework also works against understanding God as the divine rescuer, the divine soother and the divine wish-fulfiller. God's active presence is not conditioned on any of these roles. Rather, she presses her readers to reimagine the paternal role of God and the meaning of healing. The one who cares for children is less the guardian from harm and the healer of ailment than the one with the power to care about producing goodness within and through the very spaces of loss.

Furthermore, Teresa uses this transposed vision of divine agency to explore new meanings for the sufferer's agency. God does not act alone in cultivating transformation within loss. It would be a mistake, Teresa argues, not to see that ‘the invalid confined to his bed labors more than a worker who keeps his hand to his hoe from morning to night’.⁴¹ In Grove, suffering primarily promotes a journey into distinctive spiritual excellences with an eye to conjoined divine-human agency. Teresa turns to a familiar biblical story – the parable of the talents – to expound this idea through virtue's distinctive appearance as cooperative transformation.⁴² In this enigmatic account of Matthew's gospel, three servants are given a number of talents by their master, with two investing wisely and receiving back additional money, and one who fearfully buries what is given and earns nothing additional by the story's end. Using the framework of Matthew's parable, Teresa proposes that the five initial talents particular to suffering can be considered as follows: singular love, afflictions, mortification, humiliation and time, with the additional talents representing reverential love, filial fear, mortification of sins, willing humiliation and repayment.⁴³ Each initial talent represents a particular aspect of suffering, dispensed by God, where each secondary talent flows from the active response of the sufferer. All of the talents relate to the ‘patience’ that is particular to the scientia of suffering.

Teresa argues against the idea that sufferers exist as spiritually diminished. On the contrary, they have access to some of the highest spiritual virtues. She uses the parable of talents to shift focus from the physical limitations of suffering to the great opportunity and power suffering provides with the second set of talents. Physical mortification acts like a seal does upon wax, which alters the shape of the medium (wax) and imparts deep meaning upon it (seal).⁴⁴ What would normally be available to the educated opens to those who may have never had, nor ever will have, opportunities for formal education. She writes, ‘although suffering makes the invalid powerless in outward deeds, it makes him powerful in inward thought’.⁴⁵ Where those in full health have many other concerns and activities to busy themselves, Teresa argues that those whose bodies are not fully able have their own great source of power. Those who suffer can accomplish ‘in one hour’ what others ‘cannot hope to accomplish in one year’ if they attend to suffering's opportunities for growth in virtue.⁴⁶

Teresa places attention on the power that both the sufferer's intellect and will offer – powers that she sees operative within the bleakest physical circumstances. Although sufferers cannot rehabilitate their bodies, they are not without agency. Teresa considers whether it would be better for the sufferer to ‘esteem … those who enjoy complete physical health as more blessed, more God's friends than we who are in poor health’, followed by a second question of whether the sufferer ought to reject his physical affliction and ‘curse’ his plight.⁴⁷ She rejects both ideas, answering instead that ‘wherever this happens there must be a great lack of prudence, for if prudence were present, it would examine at length all the blessings that in its absence seemed misfortunes and would speak of perfect and complete patience, revealing to the sufferer the five talents received from God and the quantity, value, and quality of each of the coins, and also how fitting it is to profit with them to repay the Lord’.⁴⁸ The examination Teresa claims for every sufferer embraces their intellectual faculty, while the prudential judgment she advises provides them a means to act in the midst of their physical limitations. The result, for Teresa, is transformative – the afflicted becomes a ‘prudent and wise sufferer’.⁴⁹ Such an experience of suffering does not mean that the sufferer will not ‘suffer bouts of impatience’, but rather that the sufferer has access to ‘singular blessings’ the physically able ignore.⁵⁰ To will suffering, for Teresa, does not signal masochistic embrace of punishment or pain, but rather it opens an opportunity for intellectual, spiritual empowerment. While Teresa presumes a universal mental accessibility for intellectual growth, which may not actually attend all cases of prolonged suffering, her claims attempt to demonstrate universal opportunity. Rather than a position of degradation, sufferers have access to the heights of the intellect and wisdom's spiritual fruits. Rather than work alone, they are cooperative with God in multiplying virtue's fruits through work inaccessible to their able-bodied fellows.

The paz-scientia of Job

As she draws her work to its climax and conclusion, Teresa turns to the paragon of biblical suffering – Job – who becomes the final ‘witness and authority’ for Teresa's teaching on virtues that emerge through suffering.⁵¹ By using this biblical figure, Teresa solidifies the authority behind her position on suffering and its specific virtues. Job, she claims, stands above the learned masters at the University of Salamanca. One cannot discount the wisdom of suffering without discounting this paragon of the Bible. Furthermore, Job underlines the fact that lived experience is a requirement for its specific wisdom and virtues. Job's ‘doctrine deserves to have these two names: façere e doçere [to practice and to teach]’, where the practical experiences of this master elevate the teaching he offers, in contrast to what is merely learned at scholastic universities. Teresa praises Job as the ‘Master of Patiences’, turning to his wisdom rather than the ‘Master of Sentences’ in medieval universities, with wisdom derived neither from ‘Paris nor Salamanca but in the school of perfect works’.⁵²

Job, she claims, proves that sorrow, pain and woundedness from suffering are complementary, rather than antithetical, to virtue and spiritual wisdom. She declares, ‘I well believe that it is true that his heart was not whole nor free from sorrow, but torn and wounded with unbearable pain and natural emotions that advised his discretion and prudence how the greatest and most perfect patience of patiences was coming to visit him in order to justify and make his saintliness more clear and refined.’⁵³ Sorrow thus ‘precedes and makes way’ for Job's wisdom. Suffering's virtues, even in the example of the talents, do not appear in the absence of sadness, but rather they prepare the sufferer for the specific virtues available within their experience. Teresa goes so far as to claim that ‘bitter weeping favors patience more than dissolute laughter, for to walk around the street or cloisters laughing at our ills is neither patience nor discretion’.⁵⁴ The purpose of patience as a form of wisdom is ‘to please God’ and grow closer to the divine by growth in virtue.

Teresa's return to the personal experience of suffering links the first and final parts of her treatise. On the one hand, such a connection validates Teresa's personal experience and writing. Job as a biblical witness and precedent justifies suffering's utterance. Teresa's treatise challenges medieval mindsets but not its orthodoxy. On the other, her use of Job lays the groundwork for other sufferers to provide authoritative spiritual wisdom. Teresa's use of patience as a biblical science indicates that its domain is not limited to one voice or one experience. On the contrary, she proposes a space where examining the experiences of sufferers transcends the personal. Just as Job matters for the church at large, so too do the voices that offer new reflections on suffering express vital and distinctive truths. These two bookends of suffering's wisdom, Teresa's and Job's, point to the deeper truth that serves as the pivotal transition within Teresa's discourse – namely the eschatological and eucharistic image of the wedding feast that God pulls Teresa into by the mantel of her suffering. Suffering's wisdom moves beyond enduring. It is also nourishing for the church writ large.

The sorrow that appears as part of an emotional response to pain reshapes into virtue as Teresa examines Job – both are important and included within the wisdom she promotes. Job cries to God in lamentation and prayer and falls to his knees in sorrow, which ‘teaches us prompt and willing humility … second after our natural emotion, and immediately and without delay’.⁵⁵ Suffering's humility is distinctive for the conditions it arises out of (pain) and the tone it embraces (lament). When Teresa claims that ‘whoever considers well Job's deeds will see them filled with knowledge of God and with repayment of thanks’, she does not ignore the biblical portrait that bemoans life as a curse to the point of wishing not to be born.⁵⁶ Rather, Teresa highlights the diligence of Job's choices to refrain from ‘sin’ and ‘vain or proud words against God’.⁵⁷ Job's words are not conditioned upon his return to bodily health, nor are they dependent on his ability to wipe away his experiences when he addresses the divine. On the contrary, Teresa argues that Job's sadness, weeping and lamentations are the very forms that lead into active wisdom that develops the ‘spiritual patience that is contained in the five talents’.⁵⁸ Job's cries are filled with ‘heartfelt reverence and filial love, mixed with harshness and devout prayer’, precisely because they emerge from the experience he cannot escape.⁵⁹

The parable of the talents and the use of Job act as significant contrasts that work alongside one another. By using the parable of the talents, Teresa recasts suffering as cooperative transformation rather than punitive reformation. With Job's lamentation, however, Teresa reminds readers that suffering, and the virtues that can emerge from it, never annul the reality of this painful experience. The humility found on Job's knees emerges from loss, rather than an experience of plentitude. This two-directional expression thwarts a univocal and linear view of suffering as virtuous transformation. The sufferer, like Job, may continue to bemoan his or her trials while simultaneously growing in and offering lessons in suffering's wisdom to others. The Master of Patiences grows in wisdom by moving into the trials he faces, rather than ignoring, negating or overpowering them.

As she concludes Grove, Teresa elevates the status and function of suffering's patience. She asks what place it has with respect to the four cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance), as well as whether it relates to the theological virtues (faith, hope and love). While suffering's patience ‘is not among the cardinal virtues … nor is it of the theological virtues’, Teresa argues that it is ‘not right to place patience among the seven lesser virtues assigned against the seven principal sins’.⁶⁰ Rather, she claims, ‘we should give it a more honored position’.⁶¹ Patience both adheres within the four cardinal virtues as well as dwells ‘over them’.⁶² Prudence is a part of patience by definition (to suffer with prudence), while fortitude reveals its ‘proper strength’ in patience.⁶³ Justice that ‘maintains equality in all things’ requires patience to ‘measure with equal and exact weight the afflictions, anguish, and travails … in order to maintain a continuous balance and avoid undue hardship, giving God the exact tribute in our hardships and sufferings that we owe’.⁶⁴ Temperance, that which requires moderation, demands patience ‘to contemplate the vexations and emotions of the hardships that befall us’.⁶⁵ Teresa so firmly enmeshes patience with the cardinal virtues that she claims ‘if true and perfect patience is founded upon these four virtues, where these four are absent, there can be no patience at all; and where patience is, all four virtues are as well’.⁶⁶ Moreover, the patience that has its ‘dwelling over the four firm pillars of the cardinal virtues … climbs its stairway leading directly to the theological virtues’.⁶⁷

Where she used the parable of the talents to argue for suffering's distinctive nature with respect to the sufferer and God, Teresa's final use of the cardinal and theological virtues all the more expands its significance and prominence within spiritual excellences. The hard-won wisdom of suffering is not segregated from the spiritual excellences of the church. It is foundational within the cardinal virtues and preparatory for growth in the theological virtues. By being enmeshed with the cardinal virtues, the sufferers are all the more integrated with the ecclesial body at large that journeys toward God. By standing above the cardinal virtues, suffering's fruits are clarified and made fully visible. Their position as pathways and ‘staircases’ to the theological virtues all the more secures their significance and distances these virtues from punitive measures. With Job as her final authority, Teresa safeguards against any who would unseat the position she claims for suffering's paz-scientia.

Conclusion

Grove of the Infirm challenged the spiritual meaning of prolonged suffering in the fifteenth century. Teresa's questioning of the spiritual meaning of her own deafness directed her to amend the correlation of physical illness, disability and impairment to spiritual failures and punitive punishment. Teresa argues that a distinctive, non-cruciform, wisdom and corresponding virtues belong to those who suffer without apparent cause. God has not forgotten the sufferer, but rather led her into a banquet of cooperative virtue and spiritual wisdom. Teresa's discourse embraces the lived experiences of sufferers – she recognises that pain remains even as wisdom deepens. As Job's tears attest, to be a master in the wisdom of suffering only emerges by walking into the depths of suffering itself.

Teresa presses the ecclesial community to embrace suffering's wisdom. She tasks us with examining how suffering's virtues appear today through rational debate and exploration. Without rejecting the cross, she pushes us to reassess theological insights that emerge out of experiences of suffering. In her time, the educated men who would read her words were forced to engage the elevation of this wisdom and its status in the church. Teresa's writing punctured a dominant form of ecclesial presumption and laid the groundwork for sufferers to offer enduring theological insight. Her writing challenges her readers today to continue this work of questioning and learning from the wisdom of suffering.