Writing anxiety in Teresa's 'Interior Castle.'

Theological Studies, June, 1995 by Terrance G. Walsh

Examined by the Inquisition about her private experience, and believing herself called to reform a spiritually decaying order with no other means than spiritual insight and fortitude, Teresa of Avila became a writer in order to convince her religious world of the cognitive character of what passed between her soul and God, and of the relevance of such experience for transforming the life of her nuns. Inevitably, the attempt encountered a variety of obstacles, some trivial, others invidious, that called into play, at the deepest level of her self-awareness, suspicions and fears regarding the validity and the authenticity of those mystical claims. I will argue in this article that Teresa's treatise, Interior Castle (1577), is her most trenchant response to such suspicions and fears about the mystical life. My thesis is that this masterpiece of spiritual self-knowledge presents a cogent defense (1) of the various truth claims of mystical experience, in spite of her famous difficulties in communicating its exact nature and quality, and (2) of the human capacity, finite though it might be, to integrate the experience of divine union into temporal existence.

I will distinguish four kinds of fear in the Interior Castle, and then show how each dialectically moves the soul and the will of the mystic to deeper levels of spiritual experience and understanding. I will begin by examining the first three Mansions as a dialectical movement between two kinds of fear: (1) fear of death and the suffering caused by sin, and (2) fear of the Lord, or biblical piety. In subsequent sections, I will discuss how Teresa's initial experience of fear becomes, in the properly supernatural Mansions, an experience of fear as (3) radical self-doubt, and as (4) existential anxiety or groundlessness. Finally, I will argue that Teresa's understanding of fear constitutes a compelling defense of Christian mysticism by the way in which she links both her existential fears and writing anxiety to the death agony and passion of Christ. Writing, understood as a way of conforming the will to the divine, is, paradoxically like the cross itself, a symptom of human finitude and sinfulness, as well as an act of transforming redemption.

MYSTICAL WRITING AS PARADOX

The integration of mystical union with worldly existence is both a necessary and an urgent task because it occurs, according to Teresa, "in the most interior place of all and in the soul's greatest depths," a realm of pure subjectivity, which has itself been cleansed of all contact with the body and the external world.(1) Thus, the anxiety (temor) that envelops her soul at every command of her spiritual directors to produce a written account of her mystical experiences transcribes in the public realm of language and meaning her spiritual anxiety at stating for herself that which perhaps cannot be stated and at manifesting to the world a realm of pure mystical union, which might in fact divide her from the natural world as experienced in her corporeal and sinful self:

Few tasks which I have been commanded to undertake by obedience have been so difficult as this present one of writing about matters relating to prayer: for one reason, because I do not feel that the Lord has given me either the spirituality (espiritu) or the desire for it.... My will very gladly resolves to attempt this task although the prospect seems to cause my physical nature great distress.(2)

The act of mystical writing focuses attention dramatically on the author's dilemma of trying to create a text which by its own subjective genesis seems to supplant the divine source of the mystical dialogue in the soul. I want to elaborate this point, since it touches the root of Teresa's self-understanding. In a series of important works dealing precisely with this issue, the late Michel de Certeau argued that the resurgence of mystical literature in the 16th century sprang directly from a radical sense of loss, in an increasingly corrupt Church and society, of the two most important manifestations of the temporal certitude of Christian belief: ecclesiastical institutions and the authority of Sacred Scripture.(3) De Certeau analyzed the formal characteristics of mystical discourses, which create their own ideal "space," and in which the mystic's ego can interact with divine inspiration to produce a transcendent utterance all its own. Yet, how can the mystic's desire for a divine Thou "cross through a language that betrays it by sending the addressee a different message, or by replacing the statement of an idea with utterance by an 'I'"? This linguistic distress engenders the "mystic space," in which a new world in the form of a text, outside the field of ordinary knowledge, arises.(4)

The issue, which de Certeau's work highlights, is our modern skepticism regarding the very possibility of a traditional understanding of revelation, a skepticism that cuts to the heart of mysticism itself. In the Interior Castle, Teresa expresses constant frustration at her inability to make the content of her intellectual illuminations understandable in discursive language: