4
Teresa's Analogies for Her Mystical Experience
Life 11-22, Interior Castle

Teresa describes the terminus of her mystical experience as a "complete transformation of the soul in God" (Life 20.18) analogous to the alteration Christ made in Mary Magdalene with His words, "Go in peace." Although instantaneously awarded to Mary Magdalene, this transformation requires an extended exercise of the soul from those who succeed her: "What He did in a short time for the Magdalene His Majesty does for other persons in conformity with what they themselves do in order to allow Him to work" (Life 22.15). Teresa describes her own progression toward the required discipline throughout her works, most systematically in the section of the Life known as Four Ways of Watering the Garden (chaps. 10-22) and the Interior Castle . This chapter examines the verbal and theological resources Teresa marshaled to communicate her own experience of spiritual transformation to her multiple audiences, which here, as for other works, ranged from skeptical priests to sisters eager to follow her path to perfection.

Although like every mystic Teresa considers her experience ineffable, or inexpressible in linguistic or conceptual terms, she frequently attempts to explain it by using what she calls "comparisons" between material and spiritual phenomena.^[1] Critics usually define those works in which she extends these comparisons—the Four Ways of Watering the Garden and the Interior Castle —as allegories, while also pointing out their problematic

standing within the genre: of the Interior Castle Weber writes, "Although an allegory, its coherence is elusive, for there is no one-to-one correspondence between literal signifier and allegorical signified"; and Concha demonstrates that Teresa's allegories dissolve rather than develop.^[2] As these observations themselves suggest, Teresa's comparisons are more accurately identified as analogies than as allegories.

Teresa puts her comparisons not principally to the didactic, logical, or aesthetic ends associated with allegory but rather to theological purposes: she makes analogies between material and spiritual worlds as a means of understanding the spiritual. And while she does press the analogies into expository and pedagogical service, to convince confessors of the orthodoxy of her experience and to encourage her nuns, she often appears to be attempting to extend her own understanding of her spiritual experience by trying out various analogical avenues. Even within a single chapter she sometimes uses the same object to explain distinct experiences that she may have no interest in relating one to another, and when one analogy does not serve fully to explain a spiritual phenomenon, she continues to introduce more analogies until she has either given a sufficient explanation or exhausted her stores of comparison. With respect to genre, these sections of Teresa's works are not allegories but treatises on mystical theology in the form of an anatomy of her own soul. In defining Four Ways of Watering the Garden and the Interior Castle as treatises or commentaries on mystical theology, I decline to consider them as mystical texts, which Michel de Certeau defines as those texts that speak with the voice of the Other, texts effectively written not by the mystic but by God.^[3] While Teresa sometimes invokes the mystical topos, as when she implores God to use her as a vehicle for His speech as in Interior Castle 1.1.1 or when she tells of writing in an inspired frenzy, she most often speaks with her own voice. Her lack of education and empowerment prevent her from writing texts recognizable as theological, which Certeau considers the antithesis of the mystical text, but her treatises on mystical theology may be said to conduct a female mystic's dialogue with the abstract systems of theological texts.

The vocabulary that persists through even the most protean of Teresa's analogical constructs is Augustine's terminology for the faculties, or functions, of the soul: memory, understanding,

and will. Beginning with the observation that love is constituted of a triad—lover, loved, and love—Augustine developed the theory that spiritual self-knowledge entails the interaction of three faculties: the memory brings forgotten knowledge of the soul to the faculty of understanding, and when the soul is thus known to itself, the faculty of will binds all three together in love. Because the human soul is constructed in the image of God, Augustine reasoned, the exercise of the faculties in knowing the self leads toward, though not actually to, knowledge of the interrelations among the triad of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Teresa applies the theory of the soul's faculties, developed by Augustine for the purpose of explaining the operations of the Trinity, to spiritual self-interpretation. Discarding Augustine's idea of equality and interrelation of the faculties, Teresa describes battles and defections among them that reflect her own spiritual conflicts and capacities.

The significance Teresa gives to the Augustinian functions of the soul are idiosyncratic, devised from her experience, not from any system. While Augustine's notion of the will emphasizes its function as the instigator of action, Teresa privileges capacity for emotion in her descriptions of will (voluntad ), thereby representing her struggle against insensitivity. Teresa's descriptions of the process of knowing, which she assigns to both understanding and memory, diagnose her difficulties with mental activity. With Augustine, she defines the understanding (entendimiento ) as mental apprehension, an intuitive function of knowing both the self and God, but she distinguishes it more definitively from reason (razón ). While Augustine designates reason the highest of human attributes, Teresa considers it an inferior mode of knowing. In addition to treating memory (memoria ) as the Augustinian recollection of mental images,^[4] Teresa considers it the faculty for acquiring such images from God. And she often equates memory with thought (pensamiento ), an unreliable mental operation for her, and with the imagination (imaginación ), which conjures fancies and hallucinations. By adding these erratic aspects to memory, Teresa represents her own difficulties with unwanted reminiscence ("the deaths and worries of the world are nonsense, at least when grief or love of relatives and friends endures a long time" [Testimony 1.24]),^[5] and she portrays her struggle to discern diabolical deceptions from divine truth.

Augustine treats the will as the most intractable of the faculties, the one that causes his agonizing delay before conversion: "The mind orders itself to make an act of will, and it would not give this order unless it willed to do so; yet it does not carry out its own command. . . . The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will" (Conf. 8.9). Augustine comes to understand that original sin causes his will to be divided and that only God's grace, won by Christ on the Cross, can repair it. Teresa's misquotation of a line from the Confessions illustrates her lack of concern with will in this Augustinian sense. In book 10, after confessing to persisting desires for carnal pleasure, Augustine pleads that God keep his will steadily directed toward spiritual objects: "Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will!" (Conf. 10.29). Teresa refers to these lines several times, and although indicating direct quotation, she alters them to delete the request for the healing of the will: "Understanding this [that I couldn't do anything by myself] helped me very much; and also what St. Augustine says; 'give me, Lord, what you command, and command what You desire'" (Life 13.3; also see Meditations 4.9, Exclamations 5.2).^[6] This plea to be given what He commands, rather than the grace to do as He commands, suggests that Teresa's inability to act requires not God's reparation of her will but His intervention with external, societal forces. For Teresa the most problematic of the faculties, the one whose progress defies human effort, is the memory.

Augustine conducts the introspective operation of the faculties as a means of knowing God: "Who is this Being who is so far above my soul? If I am to reach him, it must be through my soul" (Conf. 10.7). Teresa, by contrast, considers the exercise of the faculties as a means of preparing the soul for His appearance in the soul. She recommends contemplating the disparity between God's grandeur and human lowliness, for example, not as an end in itself but as a means of strengthening the faculties: "Our intellects and wills, dealing in turn now with self now with God, become nobler and better prepared for every good" (1.2.10). For this reason, the condition and activity of the faculties serve Teresa for taking the measure of the soul's development in Four Ways of Watering the Garden and the Interior Castle . Teresa's definitions of the faculties, because so personal, alter somewhat with her own development, yet within a given

work, this vocabulary of the faculties remains relatively steady while her comparisons multiply and succeed one another.

Rather than on the sequence of correlations or analogies, then, my discussion of the mystical treatises centers on the particular faculties whose development Teresa chronicles in each of her mystical treatises. While Teresa's mystical works have been considered as a progression in the sense that the later ones include additional heights of experience, other differences in emphasis have not yet been identified. In bringing Augustine's construction of the soul to Teresa's analyses, I find that she isolates, with some consistency though not with absolute rigor, different faculties for scrutiny in each of the works: the will in Four Ways of Watering the Garden, the understanding in the first three dwelling places of the Interior Castle , and the memory in the next three. In the seventh dwelling place, soul and spirit divide, with the repaired faculties assigned to conducting the soul's work in the world while the spirit is instructed by God.

The Extension of the Will: The Soul as Garden (Life 11-22)

Teresa defines her subject in Four Ways of Watering the Garden as the process of becoming a "servant of love," a state the soul achieves by following "the ascent to possession of perfect love" (Life 11.1). Teresa's choice of a comparison to describe this development, the analogy between the soul and a garden, conveys the nature of her own principal obstacle to loving God, the incapacity to feel.^[7] Observing the nuns' displays of emotion in the first convent she entered, she discovers that she feels nothing: "So hard was my heart that I could read the entire Passion without shedding a tear" (Life 3.1).^[8] Water, as she implies here, alleviates the principal symptom of the disabled emotions, aridity of the soul, or "that great dryness" (Life 4.9).^[9] Defining the soul as a garden, then, makes it a repository for water from every possible source: tears, underground springs, irrigation, mists, clouds, drenching rains. Teresa specifies that water in whatever form is a manifestation of love: "By 'water' I am referring to tears and when there are no tears to interior tenderness and feelings of devotion" (Life 11.9).^[10] As early as the second stage, however, Teresa begins to identify God's gifts to the soul in terms of fire as well as water. She develops the flame along with water as a sign of the developing love until the two

analogies meet in a confrontation that, logically and aesthetically speaking, should extinguish the flame but does not: "The driving force of that fire is quenched by a water that makes the fire increase. This sounds like gibberish, but that's what happens" (Life 19.1).^[11] As Teresa's parallel analysis of this spiritual development in the terminology of the faculties demonstrates, water serves Teresa for describing a reversible process, such as the development of the will's capacity to feel, but it does not describe the transformation of the will that occurs at the heart of the mystical experience she chronicles here. Water, as Teresa herself acknowledges in the Interior Castle , does not describe all spiritual experience: "I don't find anything more appropriate to explain some spiritual experiences than water" (4.2.2; my emphasis). When she comes to experience not explicable with water, the analogy of the soul as garden also loses its explanatory power.

Teresa's ways of watering the garden, like all her explanations of spiritual development, divide into two stages, the natural and the supernatural: those that require human exertion alone (the first way of watering), and those in which God assists the soul in increasingly greater proportion (the second, third, and fourth ways).^[12] In the first grade of prayer, the soul cultivates the garden, which is at this point a wasteland of "very barren soil, full of abominable weeds" (Life 11.6), entirely by its own effort: "You may draw water from a well (which is for us a lot of work)" (Life 11.7).^[13] Before collecting even one drop, the soul may spend long periods "letting the pail down into the well and pulling it back up without any water" (Life 11.10). While Teresa acknowledges that the understanding, even discursive reasoning, may be useful for some persons at this stage, she designates the will as the faculty that develops; even when the understanding does not work, the "will is being strengthened and fortified" (Life 11.15). Thus she recommends mental prayer, a practice independent of understanding and reason, as the best means for the soul to rehearse its prospective emotional relationship with God. All of the soups "manual labor" here yields only a drop or two of water, not enough to irrigate the garden but sufficient to demonstrate the incipient will to love.

In the Second Way of Watering the Garden, which Teresa labels both prayer of quiet (oración de quietud ) and first recollection (in later works she separates these two states), the soul begins to receive some divine assistance with its watering. She

gives this supernatural intervention the form of mechanical devices: "Or you may get it by means of a water wheel and aqueducts in such a way that it is obtained by turning the crank of the water wheel" (Life 11.7). The watering accomplished through human and divine collaboration begins to transform a wasteland into a verdant, fragrant garden that eventually will provide fruits with which the soul can display His grace to the world: "These trees are beginning to bud so as to blossom and afterward give fruit—and also the flowers and carnations so as to give forth their fragrance" (Life 14.9). To keep these fragile plants thriving, the soul must vigilantly root out the weeds, or sins, that compete for territory in the garden. Even as she develops the analogy of the garden, she begins to replace water with fire as the sign of divine love: "This [second] prayer, then, is a little spark of the Lord's true love which He begins to enkindle in the soul" (Life 15.4).^[14] In the conflict of the elements at this stage, water prevails: "However much [the soul] may desire to light the fire and obtain this delight, it doesn't seem to be doing anything else than throwing water on it and killing it" (Life 15.4). Yet she forecasts the priority she will give fire: "And if we don't extinguish it through our own fault, it is what will begin to enkindle the large fire that (as I shall mention in its place) throws forth flames of the greatest love of God" (Life 15.4). In the fourth stage, fire succeeds water as the principal analogy for God's gift to the soul and its reciprocal expression of love.

Teresa's treatment of this stage with the terminology of the faculties reinforces the importance of the shift of analogy from water to fire. While the will had been impervious to feeling, it now can receive God's love: "Only the will is occupied in such a way that, without knowing how, it becomes captive" (Life 14.2).^[15] The extraneous activities of the understanding and memory here, however, have the potential to "make the will tepid" (Life 15.7), that is, to choke off the fire: the understanding, which she likens to a millstone, casts about for reasons that the soul might not merit such favors, composes speeches using "rhetorical artifices" rather than the emotions of humility and reverence, and searches for ideas and explanations; the memory races around, bringing back her past sins and other disruptive thoughts, while the imagination represents images of the distractions in which the other faculties indulge.^[16] These extraneous activities of the understanding and memory cause so much

interference, which Teresa describes as noise, that she recommends the will ignore them to enjoy "the beginning of a love of God that has much less self-interest" (Life 15.14).

Teresa returns to the analogy of watering the garden for the third stage of prayer. Here the soul expends little of its own effort to obtain water: "It may flow from a river or a stream. (The garden is watered much better by this means because the ground is more fully soaked, and there is no need to water so frequently—and much less work for the gardener)" (Life 11.7.) Now the soul has only to direct the flow of the water because Christ virtually takes over as gardener. Teresa's explanation with the analogy of the garden makes this way of watering seem instantaneously achieved, but with the terminology of the faculties, she reveals the intricate process of its achievement. This third stage actually comprehends three different configurations of the faculties. In the first of these, "the will is held fast and rejoicing" (Life 17.4) as if in the posture of Mary Magdalene sitting in contemplation at Christ's feet, while the understanding and the memory remain free for work in the world as Martha: "In this prayer [the soul] can also be Martha in such a way that it is as though engaged in both the active and contemplative life together" (Life 17.4).^[17] The soul can conduct business negotiations and do acts of charity, yet because its will resides with God, it avoids excessive attachment to worldly things and the consequent misplacement of its energy. In the second phase, the understanding joins the will in union with God. The memory, often in alliance with the imagination, attacks and torments the faculties held by God, bringing her to a desperate plea for the unification of the faculties: "'When, my God, will my soul be completely joined together in Your praise and not broken in pieces, unable to make use of itself?"' (Life 17.5).^[18] Governing the memory, like saturating the garden, requires divine assistance, however, which it receives in the culmination of the third stage, a "sleep of the faculties" (sueño de las potencias ) from which not even the memory can stray: "The faculties are almost totally united with God but not so absorbed as not to function" (Life 16.2).

Teresa's fourth way of watering comprehends two spiritual states, union and elevation: "The union, as I understand it, is different from the elevation. . . . Though they are one, the Lord works differently in each case" (Life 18.7).^[19] While Teresa

manages briefly to use the analogy of the garden for explaining union, she abandons it for elevation. Even before she begins to write, Teresa perceives a compositional impasse: "When I began to write about this last water it seemed impossible to know how to speak of it without making it sound like Greek [literally, Arabic]" (Life 18.8). After attending Communion to request divine guidance, she makes a self-conscious attempt to begin developing the analogy: "Well now, let us speak of this heavenly water that in its abundance soaks and saturates this entire garden" (Life 18.9). By the end of the sentence she changes the subject to the absence of water and suggests that the soul compensate for such a loss by drawing on alternative sources. The next time she takes up the original analogy at any length, she proceeds from showing how the fruits of the garden benefit others to the ways in which the garden, even after having flourished, can be lost (Life 19.3). Teresa's description of union in the vocabulary of the faculties explains the deterioration of the analogy. In the union Teresa describes in the Life , even though all the faculties are absorbed in God, only the will actually performs its function, which is to love.

This bothersome little moth, which is the memory, gets its wings burnt here; it can no longer move. The will is fully occupied in loving, but it doesn't understand how it loves. The intellect, if it understands, doesn't understand how it understands; at least it can't comprehend anything of what it understands. (Life 18.14)^[20]

Further, this configuration of the faculties holds only a moment, for memory and understanding, withdrawing from the union, begin their interference again: "It is the will that holds high the banner; the other two faculties quickly go back to being a bother" (Life 18.12).^[21] Spiritual development through the stage of union, as Teresa's analogies and confessions of her lapses illustrate, can be reversed.

The experience of elevation, which Teresa also defines as rapture, transport, and flight of the spirit, makes an enduring alteration in the soul, however: "Rapture produces much stronger effects and causes many other phenomena" (Life 20.1). Teresa's garbled, digressive explanations of this phenomenon in the Life , by comparison with more lucid passages in the Meditations and the Interior Castle , suggest that she does not comprehend it as

fully as she will after further experience. Reading this section of the Four Ways of Watering thus requires searching out submerged associations between images and ideas. Admittedly making some connections not quite visible in the Life , I argue that Teresa requires the analogy of fire to complete her explanation of the transformation of the will.

With the vocabulary of the faculties, Teresa describes the requirements for an analogy appropriate to explaining elevation, as she presents it here. The mystical experience related in the Interior Castle produces a division in the soul: "There is some kind of difference, a difference clearly recognized, between the soul and the spirit, even though they are both one.... [T]he one functions differently from the other" (7.1.11).^[22] In the Life , however, she asserts the unity of the soul: "Neither do I understand what the mind is; nor do I know how it differs from the soul or the spirit. It all seems to be the same thing to me" (18.2).^[23] In her descriptions of the parallel experience of corporeal elevation, Teresa reveals the anxiety that the prospect of this division causes: "Although this experience is delightful, our natural weakness causes fear in the beginning" (Life 20.4). To the end of maintaining the integrity of the soul throughout mystical experience, Teresa deploys the analogy between the soul and fire.

The way this happens is comparable to what happens when a fire is burning and flaming, and it sometimes becomes a forceful blaze. The flame then shoots very high above the fire, but the flame is not by that reason something different from the fire but the same flame that is in the fire. (Life 18.2)^[24]

In a later chapter she attempts to use the analogy of water, which all along has the dual function of describing the soul itself as well as gifts from God, proposing that God raises the soul as "clouds gather up the earthly vapours." Teresa herself acknowledges its failure: "I don't know if this comparison is holding together, but the truth of the matter is that this is what happens" (Life 20.2).^[25] This analogy, as she conceives it here, does not convey the soul's expansion in ascent, but with the analogy of fire, she succeeds in explaining how although soul and spirit remain one, "the soul sometimes goes forth from itself" (Life 18.2).

Teresa's description of elevation in terms of the faculties reveals that she also requires an analogy to describe the trans-

formation of the soul. In elevation, God suspends all the faculties for extended periods, and even though the understanding and the memory detach themselves occasionally, they defer to the will's continuous experience of loving. As a kind of graphic illustration of spiritual elevation, God sometimes carries the body away with the soul. This rapture, manifested to other persons as something like a state of unconsciousness or sometimes, Teresa claims, as an elevation of the body, results in the healing of physical ailment. Teresa describes the concomitant transformation of the soul with the analogy of fire. Now, however, the soul becomes the implement made malleable in the divine fire.

A small fire is just as much a fire as is a large one. Through this example one can see the difference there is between union and elevation of the spirit. In a small fire it takes a lot of time for a piece of iron to become red-hot. But if the fire is great, the piece of iron, even though large, will in a short time lose its entire being—or it will appear to do so. (Life 18.7)^[26]

In an oblique way, then, Teresa uses fire to introduce the notion of the divisibility of the soul, because once having entered the fire, the spirit wishes to remain, while the soul pulls to rejoin the body: "The soul seeks a remedy so as to live—much against the will of the spirit, or of its superior part, which would not want to break away from this pain" (Life 20.14).^[27] In this fire, the soul, now become a piece of gold, is purified, fashioned, and enameled by God (Life 20.16). When the soul reemerges, God possesses the keys to its will: accordingly, the soul, a "servant of love," functions as custodian of the garden, keeper of a fortress flying the banner of God, mayor of a city. The soul experiences this state as a burning love equal to that of the apostles: "What must St. Paul and the Magdalene and others like them have undergone, in whom this fire of the love of God had grown so intense?" (Life 21.7). For relief from this painful fervor Teresa prescribes works.

As if traveling beneath the surface for several chapters of the Life , the image of fire returns with the scene known as the transverberation, in which she describes the piercing of her heart by one of the cherubim.

I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached

deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. (Life 29.13)^[28]

Teresa articulates this experience in overtly sexual imagery, as Bernini's sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome suggests. Bernini ignores her strenuous cultivation of feeling that prepared her to receive God's love, however. Unlike the merely phallic arrow of Bernini's cherub, which is aimed at her genitals, God's dart pierces Teresa first through the heart.

The Elaboration of the Understanding: The Soul as Castle (Interior Castle 1-3)

Teresa takes the process of becoming a servant of God as her subject in the Interior Castle also, but here she makes the determination to serve God a function of knowledge rather than emotion, the obstacles to it ignorance rather than insensitivity. The soul Teresa represents in the Interior Castle rather naturally enters into the enjoyment of loving God that the soul of the Life begins to experience only at the end of the third way. In fact, the most natural course for the will circumvents the understanding: "Once God is found the soul becomes used to seeking Him again through the work of the will, the soul doesn't want to tire itself by working with the intellect." The will depends on the understanding for its function of loving, however: "To avoid [using the understanding] will be impossible, especially before the soul reaches these last two dwelling places; and the soul will lose time, for the will often needs the help of the intellect so as to be enkindled" (6.7.7).^[29] In the stages of natural experience (the first three dwelling places), Teresa considers the understanding as the principal working faculty, while in the supernatural stages (the final four stages), as she suggests, she leaves behind the understanding to explore the role of the memory.

Many recent critical analyses of the Interior Castle seek to understand why Teresa does not develop the comparison between the soul and a castle into a consistent allegory.^[30] Teresa does not drop the analogy of the castle, but she relies on numerous other analogies: the soul as crystal and diamond; as palmetto and tree of life; as silkworm, turtle, and hedgehog; as butterfly, fledgling, and dove. Traditional explanations focus on

her lack of formal education and the obvious haste with which she wrote. More recently critics have speculated that she deliberately chose the cascade of competing analogies. Helmut A. Hatzfeld judges that her pedagogical aims took precedence: "An overall image chosen at the start undergoes a considerable extension and produces a galaxy of accompanying images taken from quite different domains to make the experimentally gained insights clearer and clearer."^[31] Catherine Swietlicki emphasizes her aesthetic aims, speculating that she was influenced by "Zohar stylistics, in which mixing metaphors and interrelating simultaneous symbol systems is considered an art."^[32] Weber considers that the "proliferation of conflicting comparisons" in the Interior Castle serve as a "rhetoric of obfuscation": "disorder, digression, and imprecision—these are the tactics that disguise a charismatic text as women's chatter."^[33] Rather than the pedagogical, aesthetic, or rhetorical aims of comparison, I think the heuristic function paramount for Teresa. Teresa's choice and orchestration of the multiple analogies of the Interior Castle can best be understood in relation to problems she confronts, the process by which the soul comes to know God and in consequence of this knowing, to serve God.

Even the initial presentation of the analogy of the castle indicates that Teresa considers it a heuristic device rather than a definitive comparison to be extended for either literary or pedagogical effect. In constructing an otherwise realistic castle of diamond or crystal, Teresa suggests at the outset that the castle will not suffice for her project of diagramming the soul.

Today while beseeching our Lord to speak for me because I wasn't able to think of anything to say nor did I know how to begin to carry out this obedience, there came to my mind what I shall now speak about, that which will provide us with a basis to begin with [sic]. It is that we consider our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places. For in reflecting upon it carefully, Sisters, we realize that the soul of the just person is nothing else but a paradise where the Lord says He finds His delight. (1.1.1)^[34]

Teresa makes the rooms of the castle, which correspond to the dwelling places promised in heaven, the most vital aspect in her extension of the comparison. Thus God's dwelling place coin-

cides with the innermost room of the soul. The wall surrounding the castle offers an apt analogy for the body, not simply because it is exterior but also because it suggests that some physical barrier obstructs the entrance, and the image of the soul contaminating the outer rooms by the things it brings along, vanities and honors represented by wild beasts and snakes, conjures an effective image of a person walking on a carpet with muddy feet. A few of the allusions to the castle seem more like nearly moribund metaphors, however, such as the designation of prayer as a door to the castle (1.1.7) and then as a foundation for the castle and the admonition that the castle must not be built on the sand of expecting rewards for one's efforts (2.1.10). Occasionally she acknowledges the artificial nature of her development of the comparison, simply determining to stick with "the image I have taken for my explanation" (4.3.2). The intermittent and occasionally strained development of the metaphor suggests that Teresa's castle functions only to a minimal extent as what Certeau calls the "borrowed space in which it [the soul] can mark its movements, [which] is itself the inarticulable echo of an unknown Subject."^[35] God does appear to Teresa in the center of her soul, but rhetorically speaking, the castle, rather than a location from which God speaks, is principally a means of sketching some of the configurations of her soul.

The crystal or diamond Teresa also introduces here functions not simply as a building material for the castle but also as an analogy that contributes essential features to Teresa's description of the soul. The crystal provides a spherical image, which, while conflicting with most architectural design for castles, emerges as an aspect of the space Teresa seeks to describe: "This castle has, as I said, many dwelling places: some up above, others down below, others to the sides; and in the center and middle is the main dwelling place where the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place" (1.1.3). The emphasis on this concentricity avoids the tradition of ascent to God, which locates God at the top of the castle's highest tower. Also with the crystal, which she considers an entity that emits light (rather than reflecting it as the material object does), Teresa emphasizes God's communication with the faculties and senses, which guard the exterior of the soul, from the center: "There is a Sun in the interior of the soul from which a brilliant light proceeds and is sent to the faculties" (7.2.6). From this image Teresa moves to

explain the darkening of the outermost compartments of the soul, which she does not do as vividly with the castle. In the sinful soul, a layer of pitch or a black cloth covers the rays at the center of the soul (1.2.3; 1.2.4) in the same way that, as she puts it in the Life , the mirror of the sinful soul is covered with a grime that prevents it from reflecting the image of God. Here as elsewhere Teresa invests her energy not in the consistency of the analogy but in the qualities of the soul it allows her to delineate.

Teresa identifies the understanding (entendimiento , often translated as "intellect" by Kavanaugh) as the faculty responsible for exploring the crystalline castle of the soul: "I don't find anything comparable to the magnificent beauty of a soul and its marvelous capacity. Indeed, our intellects, however keen, can hardly comprehend it, just as they cannot comprehend God" (1.1.1).^[36] In the first three dwelling places, Teresa defines the object of the understanding as spiritual self-knowledge (propio conocimiento ). Failure to use the faculty of understanding to acquire this knowledge results in ignorance as ludicrous as not knowing one's own name.

It is a shame and unfortunate that through our own fault we don't understand ourselves or know who we are. Wouldn't it show great ignorance, my daughters, if someone when asked who he was didn't know, and didn't know his father or mother or from what country he came? Well now, if this would be so extremely stupid, we are incomparably more so when we do not strive to know who we are, but limit ourselves to considering only roughly these bodies. (1.1.2.)^[37]

Teresa recommends the exercise of comparison and contrast between God and the soul as the means to this self-knowledge: "We shall never completely know ourselves if we don't strive to know God. By gazing at His grandeur, we get in touch with our own lowliness" (1.2.9).^[38] The very activity of making this comparison benefits the faculty of understanding: "[In Christ and the saints] we shall learn true humility, and the intellect will be enhanced" (1.2.11).^[39]

In the second dwelling place, the understanding plays the decisive role in urging the soul to continue pressing forward to its center. At the outset, faith counters reason (razón ), which attempts to deceive the soul, by reminding the soul that its fulfillment lies in spiritual rather than worldly things. In the con-

current dispute among the faculties, the understanding prevails. While the other faculties function to some extent, the memory presenting images of transient worldly things and the will inclining to love, the understanding provides a profusion of reasons for abandoning the outside world: "The intellect helps it realize that it couldn't find a better friend. . . . [T]he intellect tells the soul of its certainty that outside this castle neither security nor peace will be found. . . . [T]he intellect will ask who it is that finds everything he needs in his own house" (2.1.4).^[40] The principal preparation for meeting God, she explains in the third dwelling place, which otherwise merely extends the exhortation to persistence with little reference to analogy, consists in understanding oneself (3.2.3).

The Imprinting of the Memory: The Soul as Silkworm (Interior Castle 4-6)

The fourth dwelling place marks the transition to the supernatural phases of prayer, which, as in the second water of the Life , she labels the prayer of quiet (4.2.2).^[41] Teresa continues to identify knowing as the route to perfection in these stages.

O Lord, take into account the many things we suffer on this path for lack of knowledge! The trouble is that since we do not think there is anything to know [saber ] other than that we must think of You, we do not even know how to ask those who know nor do we understand what there is to ask. (4.1.9)^[42]

The repeated use of the verb saber , meaning to know information, rather than conocer , to be acquainted with, indicates a transition to a different kind of knowledge. In the supernatural phases, Teresa more often refers to this knowledge as certainty or assurance (certeza or certidumbre ) than as understanding. Rather than being achieved by the exercise of a human faculty, this knowledge derives from supernatural forces.

The certitude is so strong that even in things that in one's own opinion sometimes seem impossible and in which there is doubt as to whether they will or will not happen, and the intellect wavers, there is an assurance in the soul itself that cannot be overcome. (6.3.7)^[43]

The faculty Teresa shows receiving this kind of knowledge is the memory (and occasionally the understanding). In keeping

with Teresa's continual complaint that she has no control over her own memory, attaining this knowledge does not depend on the exercise of the human faculty but instead is received as the impression from a divine stimulus. "The wax," she explains, "doesn't impress the seal upon itself; it is only disposed" (5.2.12).^[44]

With a different kind of knowing at stake, Teresa again takes up the problem of mind. While previously linking mental activity and the understanding, now she associates the mind with the imagination, which, as we have seen, she frequently attaches also to the memory: "I came to understand through experience that the mind (or imagination, to put it more clearly) is not the intellect" (4.1.8).^[45] Teresa expresses preoccupation with the faculties she associates with mind by making the head an anatomical referent for the soul. After reflecting that the constant movement of "the interior world" resembles the motion of the heavens, she links both to the commotion in her head.

While writing this, I'm thinking about what's going on in my head with the great noise there that I mentioned in the beginning. It makes it almost impossible for me to write what I was ordered to. It seems as if there are in my head many rushing rivers and that these waters are hurtling downward, and many little birds and whistling sounds, not in the ears but in the upper part of the head where, they say, the higher part of the soul is. (4.1.10)^[46]

Continuing in a more optimistic vein, she speculates that she might be able to put the action in her head to some use: "I wouldn't be surprised if the Lord gave me this headache so that I could understand these things better" (4.1.10). Yet although the mind makes a "great noise" as distracting as the beat of a catch against a grindstone, she can learn only to ignore it, not to control it: "We must let the millclapper go clacking on, and must continue grinding our flour and not fail to work with the will and the intellect" (4.1.13). In this fourth dwelling place God begins to divulge His secrets, first in the form of rising water and then as warmth from burning embers. While the will and understanding have the capacity to evaluate these phenomena correctly, the memory and imagination, particularly in those persons with "weak heads and imaginations," mislead the soul.

In the fifth dwelling place Teresa introduces the comparison

between the silkworm and the soul, which conveys, better than any she has previously used, the miraculous transformation of the soul. Ignoring the concept of sexual reproduction, Teresa explains that the apparently dead seed comes to life as a worm "by the heat of the Holy Spirit."

You must have already heard about His marvels manifested in the way silk originates, for only He could have invented something like that. The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper. . . . When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live, for they are dead until then. (5.2.2)^[47]

Teresa acknowledges that she relies in part for this seemingly fantastic claim on the technique of the nascent scientific movement, observation, though at second hand: "I have never seen this but heard of it, and so if something in the explanation gets distorted it won't be my fault" (5.2.2). Then, she relates with complete amazement, the developed worm disappears into a cocoon, and a butterfly emerges: "Now if this were not seen but recounted to us as having happened in other times, who would believe it?" she asks rhetorically (5.2.2). The difference between a soul before and after experiencing union, then, corresponds to the disparity between the "ugly worm" and "a little white butterfly," and the transformation is equally marvelous: "Truly, I tell you that the soul doesn't recognize itself" (5.2.7).^[48] Unable to "go back where it came from" but also unable to serve God, the butterfly suffers from its desire, as will the transformed soul.

Now betrothed to God, the soul endures a seemingly indefinite wait for God's call in the sixth dwelling place. As reassurance God gives the soul a variety of interior sensations, including powerful feelings in the soul, locutions, raptures, and visions. Everyone around her questions the provenance of the gifts, however. A confessor with little experience "fears everything and finds in everything something to doubt because he sees these unusual experiences.... Everything is immediately condemned as from the devil or melancholy" (6.1.8). Understanding even less, the public subjects her to scorn and ridicule, and God, wishing to test her love, subjects her to serious illnesses and torments: "Many are the things that war against it with an interior oppression so keen and unbearable that I don't know what to compare this experience to if not to the oppression

of those that suffer in hell" (6.1.9). Under this assault the soul begins to doubt its own knowledge and certainty, to wonder whether all its spiritual experiences "have been dreamed up or fancied" (6.1.11). To identify the gifts as divine or demoniacal, the soul attempts to read their signs (señales ), most significant among them the imprint they leave on the memory.

As one demonstration of His love, God gives the soul locutions, which Teresa defines as words coming from within the soul. Knowing that the devil can still intervene in the stage of spiritual betrothal to prevent the marriage, the soul must evaluate every locution. A locution, when divine rather than demoniacal or imaginary, leaves these effects in the soul: words with the power to fulfill what they signify; a "great quiet" bestowed on the soul; and the persistence of the words in the memory: "These words remain in the memory for a very long time, and some are never forgotten, as are those we listen to here on earth" (6.3.7). Even without the assent of the understanding, the soul can confidently base worldly action on these locutions.

With the two most precious gifts she describes, the intellectual vision and the imaginative vision, the devil tries even harder to shake the soul's certainty: "The devil can stir up doubts, as he does with temptations against matters of faith, that do not allow the soul to be firm in its certitude" (6.9.10). The principal difference between the two visions inheres in the way they are remembered. The secrets God reveals in imaginative vision, she proposes, "remain so impressed on the memory that they are never forgotten" (6.4.5).^[49] Teresa likens the ultimate imaginative vision to opening a chest or reliquary finally to view the amulet that even before being seen has provided protection. The sight is a brilliant "inner vision" of God revealed in His human aspect: "He shows it clearly His most sacred humanity in the way He desires; either as He was when He went about in the world or as He is after His resurrection" (6.9.3). By comparison with a painting of Christ or with the images that the imagination or an "overly active intellect" might conjure, both of which she describes as dead, the imaginative vision is "something alive" (6.9.4).

While the soul can relate all the details of the imaginative vision, "when the visions are intellectual, the soul doesn't know how to speak of them" (6.4.5). To explain the soul's certainty that it has had such experience while not being able to remem-

ber many, if any, details, Teresa relates an autobiographical anecdote that at the same time reveals her essentially ascetic temperament more effectively than her exhortations for austerity in the convents. She recalls that when she entered the Duchess of Alba's treasure room, she was so overwhelmed by "the conglomeration of things" that while retaining a clear memory of having visited the room, she remembered nothing in particular; similarly, "after it returns to itself, the soul is left with that representation of the grandeurs it saw; but it cannot describe any of them" (6.4.8). An intellectual vision brings the soul not images but the sensation of the continual presence of God, Christ, or the Virgin, who are sometimes accompanied by saints.^[50] The intellectual vision thus cures the soul's loneliness, and more important, the "continual companionship" brings an intimate knowledge of God. These representations, although not images imprinted on the memory, are "inscribed in the very interior part of the soul and are never forgotten" (6.4.6).^[51] Having received such visions, the soul need not echo Pilate in asking, "'What is Truth?'": the soul knows with certainty that "God alone is Truth" (6.10.5).

With spiritual marriage, which takes place in the seventh dwelling place, God makes a "division in the soul," actually a division between soul and spirit.

One understands with certitude that there is some kind of difference, a difference clearly recognized, between the soul and the spirit, even though they are both one. So delicate a division is perceived that sometimes it seems the one functions differently from the other, and so does the savor the Lord desires to give them seem different. (7.1.11)^[52]

While Teresa occasionally slips into using the word soul for both the soul and the spirit in this section, in general she distinguishes their functions and experiences. While the spirit, represented by Mary, experiences the pleasures of marriage in the center of the interior castle, the soul continues its worldly work in the person of Martha.

In spiritual marriage, God and the soul, which might have been separated in any previous stage, become irrevocably united through the spirit: "The soul, I mean the spirit, is made one with God" (7.2.3).^[53] Water, Teresa explains, serves her better than

fire to explain the resulting indivisibility: while two matches joined to make a larger flame can always be separated, "in the spiritual marriage the union is like what we have when rain falls from the sky into a river or fount; all is water, for the rain that fell from heaven cannot be divided or separated from the water of the river" (7.2.4).^[54] God strips the spirit of the faculties and the senses, blinding it as He did Paul on the road to Damascus so that he can teach it by spiritual means alone: "God now desires to remove the scales from the soups eyes and let it see and understand, although in a strange way" (7.1.6). With intellectual visions, which do not proceed through either the bodily eyes or the eyes of the soul, God gives the spirit understanding of the truths of the Christian faith. In particular, the soul perceives the truth about the Trinity, that while completely distinct, "all three Persons are one substance and one power and one knowledge and one God alone." The three Persons converse with the spirit, making their interrelationship vivid in a way that Scripture does not, and they provide perpetual companionship to the spirit. While God occasionally permits the understanding to watch the instruction of the spirit, which like Solomon's work on the temple at Jerusalem (1 Kings 6:7) proceeds silently, this education proceeds independent of human faculty.

The faculties remain with the soul during and after spiritual marriage. Now repaired by the previous spiritual experience, they cause only the occasional disturbance or distraction. The soul no longer desires spiritual delights, and the interior union of the spirit provides the peace necessary for devoting full energies to the service of Christ. As the spirit communicates its understanding outward to the faculties and senses, the soul perfects its desire and capacity to imitate Christ, acquiring qualities such as forgetfulness of self, desire to suffer, love for persecutors, and disdain of death: "All these things must come to the soul from its roots, from where it is planted. . . . What is there, then, to marvel at in the desires this soul has since its true spirit has become one with the heavenly water we mentioned?" (7.2.9). In the terminology of the Christian life, the contemplative spirit provides water that sustains the growth of the active soul.

Teresa expresses certainty that her spirit has been transformed with allusions to the Pauline baptismal formula. In passages such as Galatians 2:20, "I live not now but Christ lives with me," Paul assures the prospective convert to Christianity

that he or she will acquire an entirely new nature, one shared with Christ. While Teresa refers to this formula several times—to mark God's rescuing her from death (Life 6.9) and to describe the final stage of the Four Ways (Life 22.10)—here she takes the passage as a reference to spiritual marriage, which marks the culmination of the transformation that began with her conversion.

Perhaps this is what St. Paul means in saying that "He that is joined or united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" [1 Cor. 6:17] and is referring to this sovereign marriage, presupposing that His Majesty has brought the soul to it through union. And he also says: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" [Phil. 1:21]. (7.2.5)^[55]

While Teresa considers the spirit definitively transformed, the soul can always revert to its "natural state" of sin and confusion if it is attacked by the poisonous creatures of the outer rooms of the castle. Still, she proposes, the soul also can pronounce its conversion in Pauline terms: "The soul as well [as the spirit], I think, can say these words now because this state is the place where the little butterfly we mentioned dies, and with the greatest joy because its life is now Christ" (7.2.5).^[56] This use of Pauline language underlines the difference between Teresa's concept of transformation and Augustine's: while for Augustine conversion consists in the perfection of the will through grace, for Teresa, both in the narrative of the Life and in this recapitulation, conversion requires certainty of the interior presence of God.

In summarizing the experience of both spirit and soul, Teresa leaves analogy for scriptural allusion: "Who would know the many things there must be in Scripture to explain this peace of the soul!"

He brings the soul to Himself with this kiss sought by the bride, for I think this petition is here granted [Song 1.1]. Here an abundance of water is given to this deer that was wounded [Ps. 49.2]. Here one delights in God's tabernacle [Rev. 2.1:3]. Here the dove Noah sent out to see if the storm was over finds the olive branch as a sign of firm ground discovered amid the floods and tempests of this world [Gen. 8:8-12]. (7.3.13)^[57]

These scriptural passages can be translated into the same array of analogies she deployed in describing all the previous stages of spiritual passage. God consummates spiritual marriage with the

kiss the Bride has requested—"Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth"—a kiss that, as we have seen in her Meditations on the Song of Songs , ignites the flame of love in the soul. Like the deer of Psalm 42, to which Teresa gives a wound that recalls the piercing of her heart, the Bride receives water for the garden of the soul. The soul arrives at the center of its interior castle, where it finds both itself and God. Finally, as Noah's dove, which Teresa frequently substitutes for the little butterfly, the soul finds solid ground (tierra firme ) on which to build His Church.