The Monastery, Paradise, and the Castle: Literary Images and Spiritual Development in St Teresa of Ávila
1985; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382852000362245
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Women Writers
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: CASTILLO INTERIOR, EL [TERESA DE JESÚS]CASTLES [IN HISTORY & LITERATURE]IMAGERY/METAPHORMONASTERIES [IN HISTORY &/OR AS LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]MYSTICISMPARADISE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]RELIGION [AS LITERARY, CULTURAL & IDEOLOGICAL THEME]TERESA DE JESÚS, SANTA [SAINT TERESA OF ÁVILA] (1515–1582)WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — SPAIN & PORTUGAL Notes 1. Santa Teresa de Avila (New York: Twayne, 1969), 23–61. I developed this essay while I was a participant in Professor Javier Herrero's 1983 NEH Summer Seminar at the University of Virginia. I am grateful to Professor Herrero for reading a draft of this article and for the comments, suggestions for improvement, and encouragement he offered. 2. El arte literario de Santa Teresa (Barcelona: Ariel, 1978), 228–74. 3. The Camino de perfección exists in two autograph manuscripts. The first is on display in the Escorial; the second is kept in the monastery of the Carmelite nuns in Valladolid. Their dating has been disputed, although it has been recently argued on the basis of internal evidence that both versions were composed in 1566: see Camino de perfección: Reproducción en facsímil del autógrafo de Valladolid, ed. Tomás de la Cruz et al., 2 vols. (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1964–65), II, 15–30. All references to St Teresa's works in this essay are to Obras completas, 4th ed., eds. Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 212 (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1974). References to the Vida, Camino, and Libro de las fundaciones are to chapter and section, e.g., 12.1 = ch. 12, sec. 1. Unless otherwise noted, references to the Camino are to the Valladolid version. References to the Castillo are to mansion, chapter, and section, e.g., 3, 1.5 = mansion 3, ch. 1, sec. 5. References to prologues and epilogues are to page. 4. The bibliography on monasticism is immense: see Giles Constable, Medieval Monasticism: A Select Bibliography, Toronto Medieval Bibliographies, 6 (Toronto: Toronto U.P., 1976). Works I have found particularly helpful are: Louis Bouyer et al., A History of Christian Spirituality, I and II: The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers and The Spirituality of the Middle Ages, respectively, trans. Mary P. Ryan and the Monks of Holme Eden Abbey (New York: Desclée, 1963–68), I, 303–30, and 495–522; and II, 127–220, and 283–343; Christopher Brooke, The Monastic World, 1000–1300: The Rise and Development of the Monastic Tradition (London: Paul Elek, 1974); Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, The Pelican History of the Church, vol. I (New York: Penguin Books, 1967; rpt. 1982), 174–83; and M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, ‘and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968; pbk., 1979), 202–69. 5. On the historical development of the Carmelites, see Joachim Smet, The Carmelites: A History of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, 4 vols. (a fifth is expected) (Darien, III: Carmelite Spiritual Center, 1975–82), I, 1–23, and 85–87; Bede Edwards’ introduction to his edition and translation of The Rule of St Albert, Vinea Carmeli, 1 (Aylesford, 1973), 11–41; and David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1948–59; pbk., 1979), I, 195–99. 6. Trans. Leonard J. Doyle (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1961). 7. For instance, in St Athanasius’ Life of St Antony, the oldest monastic biography we possess, we read that Antony's daily life of asceticism was a martyrdom: ‘he was a daily martyr to his conscience, ever fighting the battles of the Faith’ (trans. Robert T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 10 [Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950; rpt. New York, 1978], 60). Moreover, the faithful revered Antony in the same way they did the martyrs: people slept outside his cell just as they slept outside the graves of the martyrs, with the hope of being healed of an illness or freed from a demon (ibid., p. 61). 8. See Edward E. Malone, The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as the Successor to the Martyr, The Catholic Univ. of America Studies in Christian Antiquity, no. 12 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1950), 91–111. 9. The source of the image of the hortus conclusus is the Song of Songs, 4:12. 10. The expression ‘paradise of delights’ reflects the Vulgate reading of Genesis 2:8, which other versions normally have rendered otherwise: ‘Plantaverat autem Dominus Deus paradisum voluptatis a principio, in quo posuit hominem quern formaverat’. 11. On the monastery as paradise as well as on monastic gardens, see also David N. Bell, ‘Heaven on Earth: Celestial and Cenobitic Unity in the Thought of Baldwin of Ford’, in Heaven on Earth: Studies in Medieval Cistercian History, IX, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1983), 1–21; Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1978), 41–50; Jean Daniélou, ‘Terre et paradis chez les pères de l’église’, Franos Jahrbuch, XXII (1954), 433–72, at 466–67; John Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens (Beaverton, Or.: Timber Press, 1981), passim; Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St Call: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols. (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1979), I, 240–49; II, 203–09; and III, 108–09; Jean Leclercq, ‘Le Cloître est-il un paradis?’, in Le Message des moines à notre temps (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1958), 141–59; and The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Fordham U.P. 1974), 65–86; Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 13–58; Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, ‘Monastic Gardens and Gardeners’, in her Garden-Craft in the Bible and Other Essays (1917; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 99–107; and The Story of the Garden (London: The Medici Society, 1932), 28–38; Marilyn Stokstad and Jerry Stannard, Gardens of the Middle Ages (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, 1983), 46–49, and 56–57; and George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper, 1962), 38–46. 12. See Smet, op. cit., I, 18–19; and Robert A. Koch, ‘Elijah the Prophet, Founder of the Carmelite Order’, Speculum, XXXIV (1959), 547–60. 13. The monastery as heaven on earth was a commonplace in monastic literature. William of St Thierry, e.g., associated the words cella ‘cell’ and coelum ‘heaven’ both phonologically and etymologically: see Bell, op. cit., 20, n. 83. 14. See Kieran Kavanaugh's introduction to his and Otilio Rodríguez's translation of The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976–80), II, 19–20. 15. ‘What had occurred is that some harsh rumors had reached Teresa, but her remarks show that her knowledge of the facts was vague. It must be remembered that her references to the Lutherans in France represent her hazy way of speaking of Protestantism and demonstrate neither historical nor geographical precision. The unhappy news that had spread even to the enclosure of St Joseph's concerned the religious war between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Teresa's stereotyped remarks reflect the way the ordinary people in Spain probably commented on the news’ (Kavanaugh, op. cit., II, 20). 16. Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders, trans. Alastair Lang (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1972; pbk., 1980), 192. The classic example of this conjunction was the Escorial, the construction of which began in 1562: see Braunfels, 196–200. 17. This effort to withdraw from exterior distractions might be seen as another aspect of the militia spiritualis the religious must engage in with self in the pursuit of the life of perfection. 18. On the biblical, Patristic, and medieval landscape of paradise, see Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 144–50; Daniélou, ‘Terre et paradis …’, 433–42; and Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: Toronto U.P. 1973), 56–75. From the Patristic period on the image of paradise was associated not only with the monastery but also the Church and the soul as well: see Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. W. Hibberd (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1960), 11–65; ‘Terre et paradis …’, 455–72; and Pearsall and Salter, 60–63. 19. For a full examination of St Teresa's use of the castle image to present the phases of the spiritual life, see Hatzfeld, 42–61; and my article ‘The Literary and Theological Method of the Castillo interior’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, III (1979), 121–33. 20. For a detailed study of the content of each mansion, see my article ‘St Teresa's Presentation of her Religious Experience’, Carmelite Studies, III (1984), 152–88, esp. 175–80. 21. For a survey of the development of the theme of martyrdom in the Vida and Castillo, see ‘St Teresa's Presentation of her Religious Experience’, 161, and 178–80.
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