A handbook on mysticism

The chronicler of mystical experience labors at a distinct disadvantage as a memoirist. After all, by definition, spiritual transcendence resides beyond story. It is even beyond words. That is its point or at least its strongest claim: that it cannot be described. But since when did “the indescribable” ever stop a writer?

The most convincing and enduring testaments of mystical union in the Christian tradition turn for a method -- it seems instinctively and against the let-me-be-lost-in-you-oh-Lord claims of the writer -- to the ways and means of autobiography. Perhaps it must be so. On this subject, personal experience alone is authority and intimate testimony the only thing that counts as expertise. No detached investigator can assess and no objective journalist can accurately “report” on transcendence. We’re stuck with the claim of the first-person account.

Autobiography, a form that in our day bristles with sharply secular and psychological concerns, traces its literary taproot to St. Augustine’s attempt, begun in 397, to struggle the angel of mystical union onto the mat of the page in his “Confessions.” Nor is he alone. The history of Western autobiography is punctuated by such religious accounts, as if the very insubstantiality of spiritual life were, paradoxically, the real subject of any examined life, the engine powering every personal story.

After St. Augustine, there is the “great” St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, another classic of Western autobiographical literature. In modern times, the slim “The Story of a Soul” by St. Therese of Lisieux (“The Little Flower,” as she is known, to distinguish her more childlike spirituality from that of the mature Teresa) remains a perennial bestseller. The personal accounts of such unsettling 20th century mystics as Simone Weil and Edith Stein also retain a hold over the imaginations of readers. Describing the indescribable by using their own lives as their only evidence, these spiritual writers cannot stray far from personal testimony. Augustine, Teresa, Therese, Stein, Weil -- all mystics, all memoirists.

Perhaps because of the centrality of spiritual testimony in the history of autobiography, the classic works of religious witnesses emerge again and again over the centuries in fresh translations that bear the mark of their own times as well as the testimony of their original authors. Following her 2002 translation of “Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr, a professor of Spanish and of philosophy and religious studies at the University of New Mexico, has translated “The Interior Castle,” a manual on contemplative prayer that St. Teresa began in 1577. The translation is earnestly contemporary. What E. Allison Peers’ 1972 translation renders “This sort of life will be a great mortification” becomes, in Starr’s version, “You might feel ashamed of this lifestyle.” And in seeking to calm the overheated spiritual seeker, the Peers version urges “relax as much as you can.” Starr turns this to “try to do something for fun.”

Starr does not claim to present a rigorously accurate translation that leaves intact St. Teresa’s sometimes embarrassing (for feminists at least) habit of self-disparagement and her urgent claims of orthodoxy. Starr even acknowledges “brazenly rewriting” the book “in hopes of making it accessible to a contemporary circle of spiritual seekers.” A faintly Buddhist sensibility reigns in the translation: St. Teresa speaks in Starr’s version of “mindfulness.” “Sin” becomes “limitations” and “negativity,” “hell” morphs into “the underworld,” and “the devil” is decommissioned as the “spirit of evil.” Starr’s St. Teresa even speaks of “the perils of unconsciousness” -- a very post-therapy Teresa indeed. Yet this version of St. Teresa’s “Interior Castle” -- perhaps a fairer description than “translation” -- delivers what it promises, if at a certain price of historical and theological accuracy. St. Teresa feels immediate, her advice cogent. And this version has the interesting advantage of indicating the tenor of our times, if not St. Teresa’s.

“The Interior Castle” is, in effect, an antimemoir. It is St. Teresa’s second try (written more than a decade after her 1565 autobiography) at describing the galvanizing, subliminally erotic communion with the divine that is her radical spiritual legacy within Christianity. Unlike the autobiography, this later book is not a personal story. St. Teresa even employs patently transparent locutions like “I know a person who ...” to put a scrim between herself and her testimony.

Both the autobiography and “The Interior Castle” were undertaken at the request, really the command, of her religious directors and were probably partly written as prudent defenses against the ever-vigilant Inquisition. Mystical prayer may not strike the secular modern as a particularly dangerous political enterprise compared, say, to a direct critique of the ruling structures of the prevailing powers of church or state.

Yet as orthodoxies of all kinds at all times understand very well, it is precisely the interior experience of personal coherence -- felt as certainty -- that makes individuals virtually impossible to control en masse. Nor is this religious unruliness a lost figment of history -- think of China’s response to the Falun Gong movement: Can a lot of people, many of them elderly, doing breathing exercises in public while waving their arms above their heads really pose a threat to the governing orthodoxy, well-armed and in charge of the power structures though it is? Well, yes.

St. Teresa, like all mystics, attests not only to the wonder of God’s love but also to the divinity residing within each individual. This is an extremely volatile assertion, and in a paradox often missed in our secular world (at least until Sept. 11), interior prayer and mystical experience can be serious political threats. Christianity, though ironically enough a religion based on this notion of God-made-Man, has been particularly nervous about promoting the interior experience of religious union. The church’s motto has long seemed to be: Do not try this at home alone. For if interior prayer is based on a loose federation of seekers and “guides,” then what happens to Christendom, with its structures and hierarchies?

St. Teresa’s “Castle” is a handbook on mysticism, written for her sisters but really useful to any serious lay practitioner, a sort of proto-self-help book for contemplatives. All St. Teresa’s fluttering of fans before her own face -- “a certain person I know,” “one woman who” -- cannot keep her ardent personality off the page, no matter that she has sought to efface herself as she attempts to present, instead of another autobiography, a practical guide for other aspiring contemplatives.

Mystical experience may not lend itself to narrative, but it is more than half in love with poetry. St. Teresa’s text positively dances with metaphor -- her primary figure of speech of course is her vision of the “interior castle,” the image on which the book’s contemplative model is based. Known in Spanish as The Mansions and in Starr as Dwellings, these seven locations are stages in the progress of the contemplative to ultimate union. This is the unreal estate of the spirit.

It is interesting to note that in a tradition as skyward and vertical -- and hierarchical -- as St. Teresa’s Catholicism, her natural figure for this progress of transcendence is not upward but inward, penetrating to the inmost regions of the “palace where the king lives.” The soul is “a garden in which the Beloved takes great delight.” And the body -- always a vexing limitation to the mystic -- is but “the outer walls of the castle.” Selfknowledge is “a room,” and the aspirant is instructed always to “visualize your soul as vast, spacious, and plentiful. This amplitude is impossible to exaggerate.”

In her ceaseless image-making, St. Teresa bears a certain kinship with Rumi, the glorious Sufi poet. Both delight in invoking lovemaking as the metaphor that best captures the sensation of spiritual ecstasy. “Imagine a palmetto fruit,” she says. “Layer upon layer must be peeled away to reach the tasty part in the middle. So it is with the interior castle. Many rooms surround the central chamber.”

In the seventh and final Dwelling, the ultimate arrival of spiritual intimacy between God and self, St. Teresa turns, as if inevitably, to the metaphor of marriage. And she does not mean a modest domestic arrangement but the passionate merging of love, the union of beloveds.

In an age -- our own -- in which the treasures of Catholic spirituality often seem to be eclipsed in the popular mind by the brittle restrictions and prohibitions of the institutional church (no gays, no women in the clergy) and the shameful subterfuges of the sex abuse scandal, it is indeed like entering a “vast, spacious, and plentiful” chamber to read St. Teresa’s evergreen masterpiece of the searching heart.

Body and soul find perfect register with their God in the metaphor of the spousal embrace within the palace’s inmost chamber. Here, St. Teresa assures us, past all the struggles, all the serpents and “beasts” that beset the courtship, we arrive at “a secret place where His Majesty has taken the soul and unveiled himself to her.”