The Seven Mansions

Again and again, when the contemplative traditions describe the way to the knowledge of God or of the Self, they count it in sevens. A Carmelite nun in sixteenth-century Spain describes a castle of seven dwelling places. A Persian poet of the twelfth century sends his birds across seven valleys. An Indian scripture lists seven stages of knowledge; a Buddhist commentator, seven purifications; the Buddha himself, seven factors of awakening; a bishop in North Africa, seven levels of the soul.

This series reads those maps one at a time. It does not assume they describe the same road. Some begin in prayer, some in ethics, some in the analysis of the mind; some end in marriage, some in annihilation, some in a peace beyond all description. The aim is to let each tradition speak in its own terms, and only at the end, in the seventh essay, to set the maps side by side and ask what they share.

We begin with the most intimate of them, and in some ways the most practical: The Interior Castle of Teresa of Ávila, written in 1577 by a woman of sixty-two who had spent most of her life learning to pray, and who wrote, she says, because she was told to.

A castle made of a single diamond§

The book opens with an image that came to Teresa, she tells us, as she was asking God what to write. The soul is like a castle made entirely of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, as in heaven there are many mansions (Ávila, I.1). She is thinking of the words in the Gospel of John, that in the Father’s house there are many dwelling places. The rooms are arranged in seven sets of dwellings, some above, some below, some to the sides, and in the very centre, in the innermost room, is the King. The journey of the spiritual life is a journey inward, from the outer courts of the castle to the room where God lives.

Everything in the book follows from this image, and it is worth noticing three things about it before going further.

The first is that the castle is the soul itself. God is not reached by leaving the self behind and travelling somewhere else. He is found at the centre of what one already is. Teresa says she is astonished that anyone could be outside their own castle; and yet, she says, many souls live in the outer courts, among the guards, and never think of what is inside, or of who lives there. The forgetting that the contemplatives speak of, the condition from which the path begins, is here a kind of homelessness in one’s own house.

The second is the material. A diamond or a crystal is made to receive and reflect light. The soul’s beauty, for Teresa, is not its own: it comes from the light at the centre, which shines through all the rooms. When the soul falls into grave sin, she says, the light is not put out, but the crystal is covered as if with a black cloth, so that the sun still shines in the centre and none of its light reaches the rest (Ávila, I.2). Sin, in this picture, is not a stain on the soul’s substance but a blindness to the light already present in it.

The third is that the rooms are many. Teresa insists that the seven dwellings are not seven rooms but seven regions, each with many rooms, above and below and around. The numbering is a help to understanding, not a staircase to be climbed in order. People pass back and forth; some are admitted to inner rooms early and return to outer ones; the Lord, she says, gives as he wills.

The door is prayer§

How does one enter the castle? Teresa’s answer is immediate: the door is prayer and reflection (Ávila, I.1). She does not mean only formal or vocal prayer, though she does not despise it. She means attention: turning towards God and knowing what one is doing. Prayer that does not consider whom it is addressing, and who is asking, and what is asked, she says, is not prayer at all, however much the lips may move.

This is the key to the whole book. The seven dwellings are stages of prayer, and of the life that grows from prayer. The deeper the soul goes into the castle, the less prayer is something it does and the more it is something that is done in it. In the first three dwellings the soul works, with God’s help, by its own effort. From the fourth onward, the initiative passes to God.

The first dwellings: self-knowledge§

The souls in the first dwellings have entered the castle, but only just. They are in a state of grace and want to do good, but they are still full of worldly concerns, and these come in with them like reptiles and vermin through the gate, so that they can hardly see the light (Ávila, I.2). What they need above all is self-knowledge.

But Teresa’s self-knowledge is of a particular kind. It is not introspection for its own sake, and it is not a catalogue of faults. We shall never know ourselves, she says, unless we try to know God; by looking at his greatness we see our littleness, by looking at his purity we see our own stains. Self-knowledge and the knowledge of God grow together. The one who looks only at herself becomes discouraged or proud; the one who looks at God sees herself truly, without despair.

Teresa adds that this room of self-knowledge is never left behind. However far the soul goes, it must return to it, as the bee that makes honey must go out to the flowers. Humility, which is simply the truth about oneself, is the ground on which the whole castle stands.

The second dwellings: the struggle to persevere§

In the second dwellings the soul has begun to practise prayer and has heard, through sermons, good books, good company and the trials of life, the voice of the Lord calling it further in. These calls are not yet the direct speech of God within, which comes later; they come from outside, and they are easy to ignore.

This is a stage of conflict. The attractions of the world, the opinion of others, the fear of what perseverance will cost, all press on the soul. Teresa calls it a battle, and her advice is plain: persevere, keep good company, do not look for consolations, and do not be discouraged by falling. The soul that wants to enter must be determined. She warns too against expecting sweetness: whoever begins prayer looking for delight builds on sand. The aim at this stage is only to bring one’s will into line with God’s, and that, she says, is the whole of perfection, here and at every stage after.

The third dwellings: the well-ordered life§

The third dwellings belong to those who have won the first battles. They lead well-ordered lives. They pray, avoid even small faults, are charitable, spend their time well and keep their households in order. Teresa says that many people reach this stage, and that it is a good one. And then she shows its danger.

These souls are good, but they are careful. They have given God a great deal and they know it. When a trial comes, a loss of money, a slight to their honour, a time of dryness in prayer, they are disturbed far more than their virtue would suggest, and they find reasons for being disturbed. Teresa compares them to the rich young man in the Gospel, who had kept all the commandments and went away sad when asked to give up everything. Their reason is still in control, and love has not yet carried them beyond it.

The cure, she says, is humility and a deeper surrender: not to measure what one has given, not to think God owes anything in return, and to accept trials as the test that shows where attachment remains. This is one of the most searching passages in the book, because it is about good people. The respectable spiritual life, she suggests, can become its own enclosure.

The fourth dwellings: the turning point§

With the fourth dwellings the book changes register. Here, Teresa says, the supernatural begins: prayer in which God acts and the soul receives. To explain the difference she uses an image of two basins of water (Ávila, IV.2). One is filled from far away, through many aqueducts and much engineering: this is the consolation that comes from our own meditation and effort, real but laborious, and accompanied by noise. The other is built at the source itself, and fills silently from within, overflowing without any work of ours: this is the spiritual delight that God gives, which begins in the depths and spreads through the whole person.

The forms of prayer proper to this stage are the prayer of recollection, in which the senses and faculties are gently drawn inward as if by a shepherd’s whistle, and the prayer of quiet, in which the will is held in God while the mind may still wander. Teresa is frank about the wandering. She was troubled for years, she says, by her thoughts running about during prayer, until she understood that the mind and the soul are not the same, and that the will can rest in God while the imagination makes noise like a mill in the distance.

Her most famous counsel belongs here. In this stage, she says, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever most awakens love. Love, she adds, is not a feeling of sweetness but a determination to please God in everything, to avoid offending him, and to pray for the good of the Church. It is a matter of the will, not of the emotions.

The fifth dwellings: the silkworm§

In the fifth dwellings comes the prayer of union, and Teresa describes it with her most memorable image (Ávila, V.2). The silkworm begins as a tiny seed, feeds on mulberry leaves until it is grown, and then spins its silk into a cocoon, in which it dies. From the cocoon emerges a small white butterfly. The soul, she says, is like the worm. It feeds on prayer, the sacraments, good reading and good works until it is grown; then it builds its house, which is Christ, and dies in it to itself; and it rises as something new, which does not recognize itself.

The union itself is brief, perhaps no longer than half an hour, and the faculties are suspended in it. The soul does not see or hear or understand anything while it lasts. What marks it is what remains afterwards: a certainty that the soul was in God and God in the soul, so strong that it cannot be doubted, even years later. This certainty, Teresa says, is the sign that it was real.

But she adds something that is easy to miss. There is another union, which does not need these suspensions and which everyone can reach with God’s help: the union of our will with the will of God. This, she says, is the union she has desired all her life, and the one that matters. The test of it is love of one’s neighbour. We cannot know whether we love God, she says, but we can know whether we love our neighbour; and the more we advance in the one, the more we advance in the other. If you see someone praised, be more glad than if you were praised yourself. Do not be content with devotion that feels warm while your neighbour is in need.

The sixth dwellings: the betrothal and its trials§

The sixth dwellings are by far the longest section of the book, and the most crowded with experience. The soul has been, in Teresa’s image, betrothed to God, and longs now only for him. It is given extraordinary experiences: raptures, in which it is carried out of itself; flights of the spirit; words spoken interiorly; visions, both those seen with the imagination and those understood without any image. It is also given extraordinary sufferings: illness, misunderstanding and slander from others, fear that it is deceived, and an interior desolation in which it seems that God has gone and will never return.

Teresa writes about all of this with remarkable caution. She describes at length how to tell experiences that come from God from those that come from the imagination or from the devil. Words that come from God, she says, carry power and authority, leave the soul at peace, and stay in the memory; they often concern things the soul was not thinking of. False experiences leave restlessness and pride. She warns repeatedly against desiring visions, and says that one can reach the highest perfection without them. And she insists, against some of the spiritual writers of her day, that the soul must never leave behind the humanity of Christ, however lofty its prayer becomes.

At the heart of this stage is what she calls the wound of love. The soul is touched, she says, as if by an arrow or a spark from the fire at the centre, which does not consume it but leaves it burning with a longing for God that is at once pain and delight. This longing is the motor of the sixth dwellings. Everything else, the raptures and the trials alike, serves to purify it until the soul can bear the last union.

The seventh dwellings: the marriage§

In the seventh dwellings the soul enters the room at the centre of the castle, where God lives, and the union becomes permanent. Teresa calls it the spiritual marriage. She explains the difference between this and the earlier unions with two pairs of images (Ávila, VII.2). The earlier unions are like two candles joined so closely that their flames make a single light, which can afterwards be separated into two candles again. The marriage is like rain falling into a river, or a stream entering the sea, or the light from two windows coming into a room as a single light, where the waters and the light can no longer be divided.

This is the closest Teresa comes to the language of identity that other traditions use. She does not cross that line: the soul remains a creature and God remains God, and she speaks always of a marriage, not a merging. But within that distinction she claims a union so complete that the soul can no longer find itself apart from God. The first thing given in this dwelling, she says, is an understanding of the Trinity, not by sight but by an interior knowledge, in which the soul knows that the three Persons dwell in it.

And then comes what may be the most important teaching in the book. The soul in the seventh dwellings does not withdraw from the world into endless contemplation. It becomes more active, not less. It forgets itself entirely, desires nothing for itself, and wants only to serve. The raptures cease. A great peace remains at the centre, even when the outer rooms are in turmoil. And the purpose of the whole journey becomes clear: Martha and Mary must work together. The point of prayer, Teresa says, and of the spiritual marriage itself, is the birth of good works (Ávila, VII.4).

What the map teaches§

Read as a whole, The Interior Castle teaches several things that will recur, in other forms, through this series.

The path is inward. The goal is not elsewhere but at the centre of the soul, and the journey is a return to what is closest. Teresa shares this with nearly every map we will read, though she gives it a personal form: the centre is not an impersonal ground but a King, a Bridegroom, the Trinity.

The path has a turning point. There is a stage of effort and a stage of receiving, and the passage from one to the other, in the fourth dwellings, is the hinge of the whole book. Other maps will describe the same hinge in other terms: the shift from concentration to insight, or from practice to grace, or from the seeker’s search to what the search discovers.

The path is tested by love. Teresa does not trust experiences, however exalted, unless they make the soul more humble and more charitable. The marks of progress are not visions but the forgetting of self and the service of others. This test, too, appears in almost every tradition, and it is one of the strongest reasons to take these maps seriously.

The path returns to the world. The seventh dwelling is not an escape. The soul at the centre of the castle goes on working, and works better, because it no longer works for itself.

And the path is not a ladder. The seven dwellings are a help to understanding, not a programme. Teresa is clear that God gives as he wills, that people move back and forth, and that the numbers matter less than the direction. This will be important when we come, at the end of the series, to compare maps that seem to disagree. A map is a description of a country. It is not the country, and two good maps may be drawn for different travellers.

The next essay goes east, to twelfth-century Persia, and to a very different kind of map: a company of birds who set out to find their king, and must cross seven valleys to discover who he is.