Teresa's experiences

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the notion of personal experience in relation to mysticism. I observe that St. Teresa of Jesus includes both her ordinary and extraordinary experiences in her writings on prayer, and I argue that these experiences are essential to her theology.

KEYWORDS:

• experience
• experientialism
• humanity of Jesus
• meditation
• mysticism
• St. Teresa of Jesus

Notes

1. I will leave the names of the Spanish saints in their Anglicized form but will use the Spanish titles for their writings. Also, I would like to thank Christopher Rios for introducing me to The Darkness of God, and for his helpful comments on an early draft of this article.

2. I wish that Williams had specified which confused interpreters he was referring to, but John could probably be included in the category, although it would be more accurate in John's case to say that he was concerned rather than confused.

3. Both Teresa and John are wary of condoning behavior reminiscent of the alumbrados. See Ahlgren for details of this historical context.

4. Teresa describes her suspension at the beginning of Chapter 10 of the Vida: “Acaecíame en esta representación que hacía de ponerme cabe Cristo que he dicho [she is referring to 9.4, in which she describes her prayer as including representing to herself the suffering Christ], y aun algunas veces leyendo, venirme a deshora un sentimiento de la presencia de Dios que en ninguna manera podía dudar que estava dentro de mí u yo toda engolfada en Él. Esto no era manera de visión; creo lo llaman ‘mística teoloxía.’ Suspende el alma de suerte que toda parecía estar fuera de sí: ama la voluntad, la memoria me parece está casi perdida, el entendimiento no discurre, a mi parecer, mas no se pierde; mas, como digo, no obra, sino está como espantado de lo mucho que entiende; porque quiere Dios entienda que de aquello que Su Majestad le representa, ninguna cosa entiende” (66).

5. See Slade for a discussion of Augustine and Teresa. According to Rowan Williams, “Teresa's castle is unintelligible without the Augustinian tradition of turning inwards to find God, and her imagery is essentially a free development of this” (49). On the subject of architecture in Teresa, see María M. Carrión's exhaustive and illuminating Arquitectura y cuerpo en la figura autorial de Teresa de Jesús.

6. Following Charles Taylor, I am using reflexivity as referring to that moment in which we become “aware of our awareness”: this is when we “experience our experiencing” by focusing on ourselves as “agent[s] of experience” and making this experience the object of our attention (130–31). According to Taylor, Augustine's development of this “radical reflexivity” in conjunction with a “language of inwardness” was a powerfully influential combination (131). At the same time, we must keep in mind that for Augustine himself, the reflexive turn was always “a step on our road back to God,” in the sense that “[b]y going inward,” one is “drawn upward” (Taylor 132, 134).

7. See Weber for the rhetoric of femininity in general, and specifically page 50 for humility topics in Teresa and Augustine.

8. There is a long tradition, going back to the Church Fathers and Mothers, of describing the Trinity as featuring perichoresis (“rotation” in Greek), the “dynamic interrelatedness of the three persons of the Trinity” (Shepherd 110).

9. For a thorough discussion of Bonhoeffer and how this understanding of God might be applied to the current “secular age” through incarnational discipleship, see Stassen. In terms of the action that Teresa herself took, see Jodi Bilinkoff's excellent article, “Woman with a Mission: Teresa of Ávila and the Apostolic Model.”