By Subhasis Chattopadhyay
The Interior Castle: Study Edition Teresa of Avila
Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, ocd and Otilio Rodriguez, ocd
ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Rd. NE, Washington DC 20002–1199, usa. Website: https://www.icspublications.org/. 2007. 484 pp. $26.95. pb. isbn 9781939272805.
George Edayadiyil, a Carmelite of Mary Immaculate, in his books, Exodus Event: Its Historical Kernel and Israel in the Light of the Exodus Event proves that the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt to Israel, from slavery to freedom, was, and still is, a model for the journey from the vita apostolica to the vita contemplativa. That is, the Hebrew Scriptures, erstwhile known as the Old Testament, gesture and fashion typographically the motif of the journey as an interior one. To use St Teresa of Avila’s nomenclature: a journey into ‘the interior castle’. Neither is the exodus as a type for all future interior journeys or St Teresa’s journey to the interior castle unique.
This journey and the methodology for reaching ‘the interior castle’ has been well mapped earlier by sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutra. These sutras, much before the birth of Christianity, show us how to reach ‘the interior castle’ and yet in this ‘Study Edition’ of St Teresa of Avila’s book under review, we do not find mention of sage Patanjali. A ‘Study Edition’ is not meant for only Christians, but for all scholars, irrespective of their religions.
To give an analogy, Prabuddha Bharata is not meant for Hindus alone, nor is this journal, a patrimony of Hindus and Indians, but it belongs to the entire world. There are other pre-Christian and pre-Carmelite influences at work in this book, which have been erased by the translators and editors of this edition. Perhaps, these erasures are not intentional but being white Christians, these Carmelite scholars forgot to mention other influences on St Teresa of Avila. To give two examples, they never speak of the Stoics in their notes, confining themselves to St Teresa’s own zeitgeist. Neither do they talk about the influence of Benedictine spirituality on St Teresa and yet, this is supposed to be a ‘Study Edition’!
Now, we shall analyse this edition of the book, keeping in mind our noisy zeitgeist where the capitalistic twenty-four hour work ethic of the Pharaoh is at work evermore now than during the pre-Exodus times. Robert Cardinal Sarah in his The Power of Silence, translated by Michael J Miller, writes this about the need for silence in a world distracted by the abomination of consumerist noise: ‘Noise is a desecration of the soul, noise is the “silent” ruin of the interior life. Man always has the tendency to remain outside himself, But we must ceaselessly come back to the interior castle’ (Robert Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2017), 83).Cardinal Sarah’s admonition to ‘ceaselessly’ return to ‘the interior castle’ is a wake-up call for all of us who believe that they do not serve who only stand and wait; and also a powerful re-affirmation of St Teresa of Avila’s call to the vita contemplativa. In passing, we note that St Teresa of Avila builds upon the works of the St Augustine of Hippo, whose The City of God, is one of the significant templates on which St Teresa built her Interior Castle.
This too, has not been mentioned in the edition under review. In chapter three of The Interior Castle, we have St Teresa talking of that prayer which is one of the best ways to remind oneself of God in the hurlyburly of the world. Here she is nearest to the Ignatian ‘magis’ of being in the world, but not of the world. Or, what Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa will later remark as being like a domestic help, so to say, in her workplace: she cleans the rooms but her mind is at her own home. St Teresa of Avila says this: ‘It is a recollection that also seems supernatural because it doesn’t involve being in the dark or closing the eye, nor does it consist in any exterior thing … It seems that without any contrivance the edifice is being built … The senses and the exterior things seem to be losing their hold because the soul is recovering’ (138).
The commentary by Kieran Kavanaugh and Carol Lisi to this prayer of recollection amidst the snares of the world is lucid but reductive, and not faithful to the spirit of Vatican II which had insisted on greater dialogue: ‘Returning to the castle metaphor, Teresa asks us to suppose that the people of the castle (the senses and faculties) have walked for years outside the castle. Sometimes they enter, but they cannot remain, even though they see the dangers outside’ (149, brackets are by the commentators). Kavanaugh and Lisi who have prepared this edition should have included at least a passing reference to the Bhagavadgita here. In the Gita, the senses are presented as riotously extroverted requiring constant reining in through self-control. One needs to remember that not mentioning this in the commentary would be technically plagiarism if this book were to be reprinted by a person of colour and a non-Christian.
If a non-Christian from a developing world even so much mentions that all philosophy is a footnote to the Vedas and the tantras, then all manners of First World savants will cry foul that Plato was uncited. By the same logic, we should be careful in referring to this edition of St Teresa’s masterpiece, since it does not even come close to being a true ‘Study Edition’. The commentary is reductive, simplistic, and narrow. Narrow, not only by today’s standards but narrow by the standards of the translators’ and editors’ times too. They have, as mentioned above, not bothered to heed their own Church’s doctrinal refashioning leading up to and then enacted by Vatican Council II.
In chapter eleven titled ‘The Sixth Dwelling Places’, St Teresa of Avila speaks of the wounds of mystical love, agape. This whole aspect of union with Jesus Christ has been recently scurrilously attacked by Julia Kristeva in her deplorably erroneous sacrilege of a book, Teresa, My Love (See Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Columbia University, 2014)). Swami Narasimhananda had rebutted Kristeva and proved the enormity of Kristeva’s hubris in assassinating St Teresa of Avila’s character in his review of Kristeva’s book published in this journal (See ‘Reviews’, Prabuddha Bharata, 122/10 (October 2017), 721–2).
Again, this reviewer has to stress that while a Hindu Advaitin monk took the trouble to refute Kristeva’s erotic and psychoanalytically spurious charges against a Roman Catholic Doctor of the Church; hardly any Roman Catholics raise their voices against books like Vishnu on Freud’s Desk (See Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, eds T G Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey J Kripal (New Delhi: Oxford University, 1999)).
St Teresa of Avila writes of an experience comparable to samadhi: ‘Two experiences, it seems to me, which lie on this spiritual path, put a person in danger of death: the one is this pain, for it truly is a danger, and no small one; the other is overwhelming joy and delight, which reaches so extraordinary a peak that indeed the soul, I think, swoons to the point that it is hardly kept from leaving the body—indeed, its happiness could not be considered small’ (377). About this crucial passage on the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the commentators have nothing specific to say. This is one of the worst study editions that this reviewer has come across. E Allison Peers’s translation is much better.
But both the edition under review and the 2019 Peers and the Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey’s editions do not engage fully with the Eastern influences on St Teresa of Avila. Even the Byzantine influences on her are just not glossed fully in the 2019 edition, leave alone Hindu references. In short, we await better editions and commentaries in the future on this critical work. It is for another day and some other scholar to show how St Teresa of Avila inaugurated early modern feminism and brought in the phenomenological turn in European thought.
The review of this edition of this book is done from a Hindu perspective. The reviewer is clear that he does not have the spiritual experience(s) of Saint Teresa of Avila. His issues are with the reprinted study editions of this work. It is not possible for a cloistered nun during the European Renaissance to known of the Yoga Sutras. The reviewer is well aware of that.
Prabuddha Bharata, March 2020, 376-378. The PDF as is can be accessed here.