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.