You know, I don't exactly know why/how I ended up reading this whole book to be fair but I'm not mad that I did, just kind of baffled. I've intended to read works about or by St. Teresa of Avila just to see what all the fuss was about and it does genuinely have very moving and beautiful metaphors. Reading it definitely required a kind of suspension of disbelief or disagreement because obviously we practice religion very differently but I found some of the imagery of God living in the soul and of prayer and internal life and love manifest through works resonated. And even the kinds of structural beliefs I disagree with like fear of hell or deference to church authority felt like I could understand and identify with where some of the peace and value of those ideas were coming from.

Also sometimes it felt like she was emphasizing the beliefs about the weakness of and idiocy of women in a nearly sarcastic or way. Like, when she said things that might have been controversial she had this way of framing any mistakes as potentially inevitable for the weaker sex while also calling on God's authority and right to speak through whoever God chooses (woman or no). So that was pretty cool.

And I listened to the whole thing on audiobook I guess. So that's that.

The Interior Castles is a very wonderful book on how to get closer to God and how to overcome the trials come upon you. St. Theresa originally wrote this for the sisters in her convent, at the urging of a friend of hers. She says that the way to the "ultimate marriage with God" is through humility and a humble life, and through prayer. She also says that we have to be aware of when God speaks to us, and know when Satan is trying to veer us away from Him.

The reason why I gave it only three stars was because St. Theresa always seems to ramble off and it makes it hard to understand what she's talking about. I was lucky to have read the E. Allison Peers translation, because if I read the Mirabai Starr edition I would have been exasperated.

rating renaissance theology on here is always weird and then you give it stars like it's the hunger games or something

"The darkness is not caused by a flaw in the room—for I don’t know how to explain myself—but by so many bad things like snakes and vipers and poisonous creatures that enter with the soul and don’t allow it to be aware of the light. It’s as if a person were to enter a place where the sun is shining but be hardly able to open his eyes because of the mud in them. The room is bright but he doesn’t enjoy it because of the impediment of things like these wild animals or beasts that make him close his eyes to everything but them. So, I think, must be the condition of the soul."

I find Teresa of Avila so interesting, but like The Book of Margery Kempe, the book itself isn't as engrossing as the woman behind it IMO. Still worth a read but def takes some adjusting to as someone more accustomed to works from later time periods.

While I realize this is a classic of western theology, the book is too dripping in self-hatred and moments of misogyny for me. I was so hoping for something really rich in the visualization of an interior world inhabited by God, but Teresa is too much of her time and of the culture of medieval Christendom, where shame and self-denial is the central human response to God's holiness. I believe there is more and I think other mystics from all ages would agree.

There is something certainly beautiful here, but there is something truly broken as well.

Read this for class. It wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be. I felt like I got a good sense of who Teresa was with this book.