Kim Gentes

Saint Teresa of Avila is another of the Catholic mystics who has profoundly impacted Christian formation/spirituality in the last 500 years. Like Therese of Lisieux, St. John of the Cross and others in the mystic tradition, Teresa of Avila takes a route of growth that focuses profoundly on the topic of love and uses the lens of introspection to probe the depths of the soul to find and purge inconsistencies for the person to find ultimate union with God.

To begin down this path Teresa defines an expanded understanding of the soul as a philosophically different and complete component to a human being, much in the Platonic/Geek dualistic model of separated body/spirit. Her exploration of this soul description begins with its magnitude.

In speaking of the soul we must always think of it as spacious, ample and lofty; and this can be done without the least exaggeration, for the soul's capacity is much greater than we can realize, and this Sun, Which is in the palace, reaches every part of it.[1]

But within this Platonic construct, the imagery and understanding of the soul is quite articulate and helpful. Teresa jumps immediately into the examination of the inner self.  She finds in this inward journey, a more careful examination of the human condition, both as broken and beautiful agencies to the purpose of God. Again of this inward reflection, she says:

self-knowledge is so important that, even if you were raised right up to the heavens, I should like you never to relax your cultivation of it; so long as we are on this earth, nothing matters more to us than humility. And so I repeat that it is a very good thing -- excellent, indeed -- to begin by entering the room where humility is acquired rather than by flying off to the other rooms. For that is the way to make progress, and, if we have a safe, level road to walk along, why should we desire wings to fly? Let us rather try to get the greatest possible profit out of walking. As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God: let us think of His greatness and then come back to our own baseness; by looking at His purity we shall see our foulness; by meditating upon His humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble.[2]

Teresa begins with the assumption that self-investigation is actually a way of expressing humility, since we are changed when we see the contrast between ourselves and God, our nature and God’s nature.  In fact, for Teresa of Avila, humility is acquired by self-knowledge. For most individuals in modern culture, this type of approach would seem more selfish and less apt for personal change. But this is the gift of the mystic writers - they actually become the true inquisitors of their own hearts, who deal in honestly and expect you will as well. 

What develops in this book particularly is a description of the soul as a series of unique mansions within mansions (something like a Russian doll configuration). The initial exterior mansions are representative of lesser levels of union with God, fraught with sin and seemingly regularly pulling people back to a starting of spiritual development largely due to a lack of freedom from sin and a continued unhealthy self-absorption. The interior mansions also correlate with levels of prayer progress that the adherent makes as they manage through these levels of mansions.

What anchors the mystics insistence on self-knowledge as a path to purity is their equally consistent trajectory of faith founded deeply in love. Love is the lynch-pin, the catalyst and end game for every point and sub-point of The Interior Castle, and the Avila saint says as much: 

As I have written about this at great length elsewhere,I will not repeat it here. I only want you to be warned that, if you would progress a long way on this road and ascend to the Mansions of your desire, the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do, then, whatever most arouses you to love. Perhaps we do not know what love is: it would not surprise me a great deal to learn this, for love consists, not in the extent of our happiness, but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything, and to endeavour, in all possible ways, not to offend Him, and to pray Him ever to advance the honour and glory of His Son and the growth of the Catholic Church. Those are the signs of love; do not imagine that the important thing is never to be thinking of anything else and that if your mind becomes slightly distracted all is lost.[3]

If there is any problem with the approach of the saint of Avila, it is not in the sincerity of her heart or the assumption that she puts forth that we should have likewise. Instead, it may be simply in the belief that such great wisdom can be birthed from a person living a life in the convents and taken for use among people who live daily in the strain and grime of broken humanity as it exists outside of the cloistered communities of the monastic traditions.

Product Link on Amazon: The Interior Castle

Review by Kim Gentes

[1]Therese of Avila,  “The Interior Castle”, translated E. Allison Peers (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008),Kindle Edition, Location 495

[2]Ibid., Location 509

[3]Ibid., Location 988