Teresa of Avila is the most practically gifted teacher in the Christian contemplative tradition. Born to a Castilian family of converso heritage, she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila at twenty, spent twenty years in conventional religious life, and at forty experienced a sudden contemplative opening that reorganised her entire path. The remaining twenty-seven years of her life were a sustained burst of activity: founding seventeen reformed convents, dictating a series of major books, and arguing in writing with the Inquisition, with her Carmelite superiors, and with confessors who could not keep up with what was happening in her prayer.
Her four major works, all written under direct ecclesiastical pressure, are the Autobiography, the Way of Perfection, the Foundations, and the Interior Castle. The Castle is the masterpiece. It maps the soul as a crystal castle of seven mansions, with the divine indwelling in the innermost chamber. The contemplative path is the slow movement inward through the successive mansions, each requiring its own kind of letting go, until the soul arrives at the centre and finds it has always been there.
Teresa’s distinctive contribution is psychological precision. She describes specific contemplative states with the matter-of-factness of a botanist describing plant species: the prayer of recollection, the prayer of quiet, the orison of union, ecstasy, raptures, intellectual visions versus imaginative visions versus corporeal visions. She is candid about the dangers of self-deception and equally candid about her own mistakes. The result is a manual that has been read for four centuries by contemplatives in and outside the Christian tradition.
She and John of the Cross together founded the Discalced Carmelite reform, a partnership that produced two complementary masters: he the apophatic stripper, she the cartographer of states. She died on the road in 1582 while on yet another founding journey.
