We’ve all heard a saying or quote that just don’t seem attributed to the right person. But if you see on the internet, in church bulletins, on holy cards, or quoted from the pulpit then it must be right doesn’t it?
One such “quote” is attributed everywhere to St. Teresa of Avila and usually starts with “Christ Has No Body….”. One common variation is:
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.”
This quote is sometimes described as a prayer or poem she wrote, or some notation is a book reportedly owned by St. Teresa. What you wouldn’t find anywhere written or quoted is the source of that text.
So how would one go about looking for this text using the CDL? The first step is of course to start the CDL and move to the Search tab. As the CDL contains material other than just St. Teresa’s writing we need to narrow our search to just her works.
To look at just St. Teresa’s works and more specifically the material in English we click on the Book List: button and select the St. Teresa of Avila – English book list.
Returning to the search tab, a simple first attempt search might be +hands +feet. The + sign tells the search engine that both the words hands and feet must both appear in the document to consider it a match. This search will return 48 hits (documents containing both words). That is more than I care to examine one at a time.
The next step is to add more required words, so if we add the word body to the search string (+body +feet +hands) so all three words are required to be present. This search still has results in 27 hits which are still more than I care to examine individually.
Another way to narrow a search is to use proximity searching. Proximity searching requires that words must be within a certain distance or number of words from each other (more information can be found in the CDL Help files). So if one were looking for the word hands within 10 words of the word feet this is the search string that would be entered: “hands feet”~10. Using this search string will result in just 7 unique documents in all of the translated writings of St. Teresa that we have available. This is a much more reasonable number. The ICS translation has four matches (2 in the Interior Castle and 2 in the Letters [105 and 206]) and the Peers translation has 3 matches (only once in the Interior Castle and in two letters). If one examines all the texts none will resemble the quotation we are trying to find.
Have we proved that St. Teresa is not the author of this text? Not absolutely. There are quotes attributed to her that are not written down by her. However, all Carmelite scholars agree that this is not her quote, it is simply not something from 16th century Spain. Perhaps there has been a mix-up in the Teresa’s. Might the real author be Bl. Teresa of Calcutta?
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