The Interior Castle of St. Teresa of Avila and Its Origin

The Carmelite Family of Davao started the one year count down to the Celebration of the 500 years birth anniversary of St. Teresa of Avila last March 28, 2014. Major events have already been planned for the year which include a series of talks and film showing about the life and teachings of St. Teresa of Avila to start on May 2014, an Art Festival in October 2014, a Pilgrimage to the Sta. Teresa Parish in Malalag Davao del Sur in November 2014, an Essay Writing Contest in February 2015, and the Centenary Celebration in March 2015.

Also we will run a series of articles in the Davao Catholic Herald that will feature the major writings of St. Teresa of Avila which include the Book of Her Life, the Book of Foundations, the Way of Perfection and her masterpiece, the Interior Castle. In this article, we will begin with an overview of her book the Interior Castle.

The Interior Castle is considered as the Spiritual Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. St. Teresa wrote the Interior Castle because she was commanded by her Superior to write “about matters relating to prayer” and which was supposed to be addressed to her nuns, the reformed Carmelites who were perceived by the Superior to have difficulty with prayer. But before we can begin to tell you what the Interior Castle is all about, we find it most beneficial to let you in on an anecdote about the origin of Teresa’s concept of the Interior Castle. What follows is the story.

Towards the end of her life, probably near the end of the year 1579, St. Teresa was travelling with three of her nuns from Medina del Campo, across the bleak Castilian plateau, on her way to St. Joseph’s, Avila. Accidentally (or, as it would be more accurate to say, providentially) she fell in with an old friend, a Hieronymite, Fray Diego de Yepes. Their meeting took place at an inn in the town of Arevalo, where he had arrived some time previously, and, as was fitting, he had been given the most comfortable room. When the little party of nuns, half frozen but still cheerful, reached the inn, there was mutual delight at the encounter; and Fray Diego not only gave up his room to them but appointed himself their personal servant for the period of their stay. They spent, so he tells us, “a very great part of the night” in conversation about their Divine Master. On the next day it was snowing so hard that no one could leave. So Fray Diego said Mass for the four nuns and gave them Communion, after which they spent the day “as recollectedly as if they had been in their own convent”. In the evening, however, St. Teresa had a long conversation with her former confessor, who later was to become her biographer, and in the course of this she recounted to him the story of how she came to write the Interior Castle. The report of this narrative may suitably be given in the words of Fray Diego himself, taken from a letter which he wrote to Fray Luis de León about nine years later.

“This holy Mother,” he writes, “had been desirous of obtaining some insight into the beauty of a soul in grace. Just at that time she was commanded to write a treatise on prayer, about which she knew a great deal from experience. On the eve of the festival of the Most Holy Trinity she was thinking what subject she should choose for this treatise, when God, Who disposes all things in due form and order, granted this desire of hers, and gave her a subject. He showed her a most beautiful crystal globe, made in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost of which was the King of Glory, in the greatest splendour, illumining and beautifying them all. The nearer one got to the centre, the stronger was the light; outside the palace

limits everything was foul, dark and infested with toads, vipers and other venomous creatures.

“While she was wondering at this beauty, which by God’s grace can dwell in the human soul, the light suddenly vanished. Although the King of Glory did not leave the mansions, the crystal globe was plunged into darkness, became as black as coal and emitted an insufferable odour, and the venomous creatures outside the palace boundaries were permitted to enter the castle.

“This was a vision which the holy Mother wished that everyone might see, for it seemed to her that no mortal seeing the beauty and splendour of grace, which sin destroys and changes into such hideousness and misery, could possibly have the temerity to offend God. It was about this vision that she told me on that day, and she spoke so freely both of this and of other things that she realized herself that she had done so and on the next morning remarked to me: ‘How I forgot myself last night! I cannot think how it happened. These desires and this love of mine made me lose all sense of proportion. Please God they may have done me some good!’ I promised her not to repeat what she had said to anyone during her lifetime.”