Teresa of Avila wrote some of the most beautiful and animated
descriptions of the intricacies of the spiritual life.
Her book Interior Castle is one of
the most celebrated books on mystical theology in existence. It is the most
sublime and mature of Teresa of Avila's works, and expresses the full flowering
of her deep experience in guiding souls toward spiritual perfection.
In addition to its profound mystical
content, it is also a treasury of unforgettable maxims on such ascetic subjects
as self-knowledge, humility, detachment, and suffering.
TERESA OF AVILA
Teresa of Avila was an instigator of
the sixteenth-century reform of the Carmelite monastic order. She wrote several
volumes that articulated her understanding of mystical union with God for the
benefit of her cloistered sisters. The most notable of her books is The Interior Castle, her mature work.
It is probable that no other books by
a Spanish author have received such wide popular acclaim as the Life and
Interior Castle of St. Teresa of Avila.
It is remarkable that a woman who
lived in the sixteenth century, who spent most of her life in an enclosed
convent, who never had any formal schooling and never aspired to any public
fame, should have won such an extraordinary reputation, both among scholars and
among the people.
Although some of her ideas and
descriptions appear to be strange to the modern mind, her words still have
something to give to this present age, an age of narcissism and selfishness.
THE INTERIOR CASTLE
In The
Interior Castle, the obstacle to union with God for the human person is the
space that exists between where the soul lives outside of itself and where God
is at the soul’s center. For Teresa, this distance exists because “we do not
understand ourselves, or know who we are”.
Teresa’s language, though
metaphorical, suggests that the center is the destination, the place where the
soul should be. And therefore the center is the place where we must travel to,
through prayer, in order to experience full intimacy with our Creator.
To assist her readers on their
pilgrimage toward mystical union, Teresa images the soul as a spacious
translucent structure containing many mansions, in the center chamber of which
lives “His Majesty,” God. The task of the contemplative is to journey inward
through the soul’s many mansions until he or she can be unified with God in the
soul’s most inward chamber.
How then does a person even enter
one’s self or castle?
In Interior Castle, Teresa makes it
clear that self-entry occurs through prayer. Prayer is the vehicle by which the
soul navigates through all of its inner chambers.
Her understanding of the role and
function of prayer is one of the most complex and revealing aspects of her
teaching on union because it is both something the soul does and something God
does in the soul on the journey toward mutual union, and it is also,
mysteriously, union itself.
TERESA’S MYSTICISM
Is Teresa’s mystical model for
everyone?
In my opinion, probably not.
The Interior Castle is an
indirect telling of Teresa’s own inward journey, and as such it is unwise to
set it up as an exact map for every pilgrim. She also wrote it as a guide book
for the nuns of her order, people who have chosen to live in prayer and
mystical contemplation of God their whole life.
Teresa says that the soul should feel
at leisure to explore its own mansions, implying that not everyone will explore
the same mansions on their way toward union with God. But the end is the same
for all souls who enter themselves and persevere through the dynamic work of
prayer.
Mystical
union is a gift to be sought now, for it is by seeking and receiving that
gift that the soul also becomes a gift to others, and better still, to God.
