“Some pages further on, she writes: ‘Return to our beautiful and magnificent castle and consider in what manner we may enter. What I may say now seems to be absurd, for if the castle is the soul, then it is plain that it is not necessary for the soul to enter because soul and castle …
“St. Teresa informs her untrained sisters of this image in the simplest way: ‘Let us regard our souls as a castle,’ she writes, ‘which is made wholly of a single diamond or a pure crystal and in which there are many mansions. Indeed, my sisters, thinking over this, the soul is nothing else than a …
“In her diamond castle of the soul, St. Teresa places the sun as a source of light in the inmost mansion and has it shoot its rays to the numberless neighboring mansions. In the most external the solar rays pierce only dimly because all sorts of hindrances restrain that radiation. But that light shining out …
“Here also there is a marvelous harmony between nature and supernature, between the life of grace and the mystic, superabundant influx of grace. God, so to say, enlarges His creature and raises it to its highest perfection. There is such a gradual development that it should not be too arduous for nature; but at the …
“So the mystical life is a methodical way, an accommodation of the faculties of the soul to the object of knowledge and love. Because God, Who gives happiness and joy, is the highest and most satisfying object of that knowledge and love, so in the method of love, He must rank first. That God must …
St. Teresa paints the mystical life as something which develops in the soul, according to the latter’s natural ability, as the ultimate realization of man’s powers. These have been implanted by God in man’s nature and will be realized when the soul is aware of its possibility to reach that high degree of perfection and …
“Recollection and quiet, slumber and spiritual sleep, passage and death, resurrection and new life infused by God – these are the four degrees of the mystical life described by St. Teresa in four successive psychological states, each of more intimate intercourse with God.“ St. Titus Brandsma What do you think of this quote? Write it …
“In the sixth mansion, the soul is altogether immersed in the contemplation and the enjoyment of the object of its love and to the world, it is as though dead and forlorn. It flings itself, as it were, in the arms of its Beloved and becomes engaged to Him. It should like to stay with …
“In the sixth mansion, the soul is altogether immersed in the contemplation and the enjoyment of the object of its love and to the world, it is as though dead and forlorn. It flings itself, as it were, in the arms of its Beloved and becomes engaged to Him. It should like to stay with …
“In the fifth mansion, the faculties of the soul dare, as it were, inaccessible to the impressions other things should like to make. It seems that they are blunted to the external life and are carried away in the contemplation of Him who rises high above all others and claims all contemplation. They seem as …