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St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
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St. Teresa's position among writers on mystical theology is unique. In all her writings on this subject she deals with her personal experiences, which a deep insight and analytical gifts enabled her to explain clearly. The Thomistic substratum may be traced to the influence of her confessors and directors, many of whom belonged to the Dominican Order. She herself had no pretension to found a school in the accepted sense of the term, and there is no vestige in her writings of any influence of the Areopagite, the Patristic, or the Scholastic Mystical schools, as represented among others, by the German Dominican Mystics. She is intensely personal, her system going exactly as far as her experiences, but not a step further.
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John of Avila was denounced to the Spanish Inquisition in 153 1 and spent more than a year in prison before he was exonerated. In 1556 his treatise, Audi, filia, et vide, was published without his permission and was placed on the Index in 1559. It was not republished until 1574, after the death of the author. It was greatly modified... and for this reason historians of spirituality have lamented the fact that the Inquisition acted as a restraint on great mystics like John of Avila who dared not put into print the lofty theology which they preached in their sermons and conferences.
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Teresa of Avila recounted an incident when she was sick and suffering and feeling miserable, and Jesus told her that is how he treats His friends. Teresa replied that it was no wonder that Jesus had so few friends.
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The mystical name given to the seven stages of the soul's ascent toward divinity, according to such Christian mystics as St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). These seven processes of psychic evolution are as follows: (1) the state of prayer in which one concentrates on God; (2) the state of mental prayer, in which one seeks to discover the mystic significance of all things; (3) the obscure night, believed to be the most difficult, in which self must be utterly renounced; (4) the prayer of quietism, complete surrender to the will of God; (5) the state of union, in which the will of man and the will of God become identified; (6) the state of ecstatic prayer, in which the soul is transported with joy, and love enters into it; (7) the state of ravishment, which is the mystic marriage, the perfect union, and the entrance of God and heaven into the interior man.
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St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)