The Interior Castle (or The Mansions)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 4 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 552 passages
Cite this work
- APATeresa of Ávila. (n.d.). The Interior Castle (or The Mansions). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/teresa-of-avila/the-interior-castle-or-the-mansions
- MLATeresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle (or The Mansions). Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/teresa-of-avila/the-interior-castle-or-the-mansions.
- ChicagoTeresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle (or The Mansions). Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/teresa-of-avila/the-interior-castle-or-the-mansions.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
the soul grows and profits by its communications with God. Until the teaching of this great do(flor became known it seemed as though God were inaccessible, being surrounded by darkness, through which Moses and some other persons had to pass when approaching Him;** but they neither ex-" 2 Cor. iv. 6. ^^ The example of Moses is scarcely to the point (cf. £xod. xxxiii. 1 1, and Num. xii. 7, 8). 24 INTRODUCTION plained the manner nor showed the way whereby they came to the enjoyment of the sweetness of the Spouse. Now, however, this way is clear and patent to all, having been pointed out in the Mansions, in language so straight and so methodical, and no longer such as could not be understood, or required further explanation. In my opinion this holy writer derived not only the substance of her teaching from infused knowledge, but even the words with which she explains it.'**