St. Teresa finishes a book that pictures the soul as a castle

ÁVILA, Castile, November 29, 1577 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila finished a book here today, on the eve of the feast of St. Andrew, at the convent of St. Joseph. She is a Carmelite nun of sixty-two who has spent fifteen years founding convents that keep the older and stricter Carmelite rule, and her superiors in the Order have stopped her founding any more. The book is a treatise on prayer, written for the nuns of those houses. She began it at the convent of St. Joseph of Carmel at Toledo on Trinity Sunday, June 2 of this year.

She did not choose to write it. The order came from Fray Jerónimo Gracián, the superior to whom she has vowed obedience, and from Don Alonso Velázquez, a canon of Toledo. She asked to be let off. St. Teresa answered that holy and learned men had written so many books already that there was nothing left for a woman to write. María of St Joseph, who heard the story from Mother Mary of the Nativity at Toledo, says St. Teresa obeyed the order anyway.

Monsignor Nicolás Ormaneto, the papal nuncio who protected her reform, died in June, and his successor, Monsignor Filippo Sega, has dealt severely with her friars since August. Last month the nuns of the Incarnation here elected St. Teresa their prioress against their superiors’ threats. The provincial rejected the votes and declared the fifty-five nuns who had cast them excommunicated. None of it appears in the book.

What the work cost is on the first page. “Rarely has obedience laid upon me so difficult a task as this of writing about prayer,” St. Teresa writes, and adds that for three months she has suffered from “noises and a great weakness in my head that have made it painful for me to write even on necessary business.” The reason she was given for the assignment is in the same prologue: the nuns “need some one to solve their difficulties about prayer”, and women “understand one another’s language best”.

On the day she started she had no subject. “While I was begging our Lord to-day to speak for me, since I knew not what to say nor how to commence this work which obedience has laid upon me, an idea occurred to me,” she writes at the head of the first chapter. The idea is the sentence that follows it: “I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.” The rooms lie above, below and to the side of one at the centre, “in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse”. The book is built in seven sets of rooms, ending at that one.

The picture is not ornament, and she says so to the nuns who count themselves past needing it. “You may think, my daughters, that all this does not concern you, because, by God’s grace, you are farther advanced,” St. Teresa writes; “still, you must be patient with me, for I can explain myself on some spiritual matters concerning prayer in no other way.” She is explicit about the gap it is there to fill. Her nuns are bound by their own Constitutions to a fixed number of hours of prayer every day. “Our Constitutions oblige us to pray so many hours a day,” she writes, “yet tell us nothing of what part we ourselves can take in it and very little of the work God does in the soul by its means.”

Having built the castle, she spends the next pages keeping her nuns from reading it wrongly. It is not a corridor: “You must not think of a suite of rooms placed in succession, but fix your eyes on the keep, the court inhabited by the King.” Nor is it a route to be walked in order. “Permit it to wander at will through the rooms of the castle, from the lowest to the highest,” she writes of a soul given to prayer. “Let it not force itself to remain for very long in the same mansion, even that of self-knowledge.”

The hardest place in the opening is an objection she raises against her own image. A castle is a thing you go into, and the soul is not. “This appears incongruous: if this castle is the soul, clearly no one can have to enter it, for it is the person himself: one might as well tell some one to go into a room he is already in!” Her answer is that there are different ways of being in a place you already occupy: “many souls live in the courtyard of the building where the sentinels stand”, not caring to go any deeper. The way deeper is one thing only: “the gate by which to enter this castle is prayer and meditation.”

She does not claim the rest came easily. “My readers must be patient with me, as I am with myself while writing what I do not understand,” she writes; “indeed, I often take up the paper like a dunce, not knowing what to say, nor how to begin.” She wrote in the early mornings and the late evenings, with the rest of the day going to the business of the Order. The work stopped for five months, so the book took about four weeks of actual writing, two weeks for each half.

At the end St. Teresa tells the nuns what she thinks she is handing them. “Considering your strict enclosure, the little recreation you have, my sisters, and how many conveniences are wanting in some of your convents, I think it may console you to enjoy yourselves in this interior castle which you can enter, and walk about at will, at any hour you please, without asking leave of your superiors.” Then the date, in her own hand: “I finished writing this book in the convent of St. Joseph of Avila, 1577, on the Vigil of St. Andrew, for the glory of God, Who liveth and reigneth for ever and ever! Amen.”