Writing anxiety in Teresa's 'Interior Castle.'

Theological Studies, June, 1995 by Terrance G. Walsh

at a great distance.... For there are many things which assault her soul with an interior oppression so keenly felt and so intolerable that I do not know to what it can be compared, save to the torment of those who suffer in hell, for in this spiritual tempest no consolation is possible.(41)

In this state of darkness and absence, consciousness of sin and radical self-doubt force Teresa to reinterpret her entire spiritual experience. Totally exposed to such fears, she suspects that all past consolations and graces were her own creation: a poetic trope for an obscure loss and furtive restoration. Yet her greatest suffering and distress continues to reside in the mind, frequently exacerbated by scrupulous and inexperienced confessors, whose misgivings abrade her already strained sensitivity about the incompatibility of mystical experience and human imperfection. Such doubts, which she ascribes to a confessor, are of a piece with fears about the origin of her present condition:

He thinks that people to whom God grants these favours must be angels; and, as this is impossible while they are in the body, he attributes the whole thing to melancholy or to the devil. The world is so full of melancholy that this certainly does not surprise me ... and the devil makes so much use of it to work harm, that confessors have very good cause to be afraid of it and to watch for it very carefully.(42)

Francisco Marquez Villanueva has drawn a connection between Teresa's undeniable preoccupation with psychosomatic causes of spiritual states and 16th-century medical studies of melancholy.(43) He argues that Teresa had read a medical treatise, Remedio de cuerpos humanos (1542), in which its renowned author, Dr. Luis Lobera de Avila, presented a mechanistic conception of anatomy, the body being controlled by its capitan, the brain. Mental diseases could disrupt the smooth functioning of the entire mechanism, and chief among them Lobera listed "melancholy," which tended to corrupt the judgment and so inclined the soul to attacks of depression and anxiety. Moreover, "this disease often is caused by the devil," Lobera wrote in a somewhat speculative vein. This pronouncement is echoed by Teresa in her book of Foundations.(44)

Bodily existence, including psychological moods, is a constant counterweight to mystical presence, but of greater significance to Teresa is the tension in the soul itself between its created or perceptible operations and its purely spiritual essence or center. Stretched to its finite limits by spiritual oppression, the soul begins to sense, even to touch, its "non-other" self, a dimension of pure spirit "proceeding from the very depth of the soul" (de lo muy interior del alma).(45) As a result of contact with the Spouse, who resides in this interior depth, the soul feels itself to be wounded with a delectable and sweet pain, from which it would like never to be healed. These intimate operations of divine love deep within the essence of the soul appear to rational reflection as contradictory because the Spouse's call to the soul causes it such acute distress and pain. The puzzling array of images and impressions evoked by the following passage is due, in part, to the fact that the Spouse's being in the center of the soul can neither be understood nor appropriated by the faculties of the soul: