The Interior Castle (or The Mansions)

What it is about

The book Teresa of Ávila wrote in 1577 under obedience, in a few months and without drafts: the description of the soul as a castle with seven rooms, and of the way towards the innermost.

Context and history

The image is hers and carries the whole work: the soul is a castle of diamond, the door is prayer, and one advances from outside inwards through seven dwelling places corresponding to seven degrees of interior life, up to the seventh, where she describes what she calls the spiritual marriage. The value is not merely devotional: it is one of the most precise documents in existence on uncommon states of consciousness, written by someone who had had them and who examines them with a cool head, distinguishing what comes from God from what comes from imagination or illness. She wrote under the suspicion of the Inquisition, and it shows in the caution with which everything is said. Teresa's Spanish is direct and full of spoken turns, and is among the great prose of the sixteenth century.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.