The Interior Castle

Overview

About two hundred pages, written in a few months in 1577 at the request of Teresa’s confessor, for the nuns of her reformed Carmelite convents. She pictures the soul as a castle of crystal with seven suites of rooms, or mansions, and God at the centre.

The first three describe the ordinary Christian life of prayer and its temptations; the fourth the beginning of supernatural prayer; the fifth, sixth and seventh the soul’s betrothal and marriage to God, including her own raptures, visions and sufferings, described with unusual candour.

What happens

The castle and its outer rooms. Teresa sets out the image of the soul as a crystal castle with many rooms, and describes the first mansions, where the soul has entered by prayer but is still surrounded by the reptiles and distractions of the world outside.

The second and third mansions. The soul that perseveres learns to hear God’s call through sermons, books and trials, and reaches a settled, virtuous life of prayer, which Teresa warns can become complacent, its very orderliness a hindrance to going further.

The fourth mansions. Here supernatural prayer begins. Teresa distinguishes the consolations that the soul can produce by its own reflection from the spiritual delights that come from God alone, using the image of two basins, one filled by aqueducts and one welling up from a spring.

The fifth mansions. The prayer of union, in which the soul is briefly absorbed in God, is compared to the silkworm that spins its cocoon and dies to emerge as a white butterfly, the old self left behind.

The sixth mansions. The longest section describes the soul’s betrothal to God through raptures, visions, locutions and great sufferings, both inward and from others, and Teresa draws throughout on her own experience to explain what can and cannot be trusted.

The seventh mansions. The spiritual marriage, a permanent union in the centre of the castle, brings not withdrawal but a settled peace from which the soul returns to serve, since Martha and Mary must work together.

How to read it

Read the castle as an architecture you are meant to locate yourself within, Teresa writing so that each nun could recognise which rooms she had entered and what lay further in.

Pay close attention to the line drawn in the fourth mansions between the consolations effort can produce and the delights only God can give, the book’s central distinction and the one later Catholic teaching on contemplation most relied upon.

Notice how the candour about her own raptures, visions and sufferings makes the treatise also a testimony, and weigh how much of the book’s authority rests on that witness.

Consider what it meant to write this in plain Castilian, as a woman under the eye of the Inquisition, and how often Teresa’s disclaimers about her own ignorance are protective rather than sincere.

Read this book alongside Augustine’s Confessions to compare two accounts of the soul’s movement inward toward God, one told as a life and one as a map.

Questions it raises

• Does the image of seven mansions clarify the life of prayer, or does it impose a sequence on experiences that Teresa herself admits are not so orderly?
• How can a reader distinguish supernatural prayer from self-induced consolation, and does Teresa’s test, the fruits it leaves in the soul, actually settle the question?
• What is gained and what is risked by describing union with God in the language of betrothal and marriage?
• Why does the seventh mansion end in service rather than withdrawal, and what does that say about Teresa’s understanding of contemplation?
• How much of the book’s authority depends on believing Teresa’s account of her own raptures and visions, and how much would survive if a reader took them as metaphor?
• What does it mean that the highest mystical teaching of the Spanish church came from a woman writing in the vernacular under suspicion, and how did the institution that watched her come to name her a Doctor of the Church?