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).