Dialogue: The Fifth Mansion

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:16)

Thanks.

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics. We're in season two and turning to the Mystics, St. Teresa of Avila. I'm here with Jim, and we're going to be reflecting on his lexio on Mansion Five from the Interior Castle. Well, where I wanted to start was, I get so confused about the way different people use the term the soul. And I think the way Teresa uses it and the way you're using it is very specific. So I wondered if you could define that for us.

James Finley (0:58)

You know, the word soul in the Christian tradition, say especially in the Christian tradition of the kind of philosophical theology of the Middle Ages through Aquinas and Augustine and Bonaventure and Scotus and those people. And then how it carries over into the mystics has different meanings. For example, Aquinas following Aristotle says that the soul is the principle of animate matter. So for example, plants have a soul because there's a principle that they have a movement from within, they have a vegetative soul, you know. And then likewise, animals have a sensate soul, dogs and cats and so on, because they're alive, the soul. And that for Aristotle too, that soul was immaterial, it was ontological. It was the being person. And then for the human person, that has a rational soul. So to think, to reflect the intellectual interior life, the subjectivity, you see. And in our age today, when we use soul, we tend to speak of a person being soulful as in deeply felt. I'm speaking from the depths of my soul, you know, kind of intimate, we think that. So it's good to clarify what she means by it. And I also didn't think what John of the Cross and the other mystics in these classical texts mean by soul. To me, one way of putting it is what she means by soul is that the soul refers to the mystery of who we are as persons created by God in the image and likeness of God is our soul, that when God creates us as persons in the image and likeness of God and that God-given godly nature of ourselves, that kind of divine stature of ourselves as persons is our soul.

And we might say in social justice and so on, see that's the innate value of the helpless, the innate value of the infant, of the elderly, the poor, that the fact a person is impaired in their ability to function doesn't lessen their essential dignity, it's a spiritual dignity that they're a person, they're a person. And so the soul has to do with that sense of faith that there's this godly spiritual innate value to all of us as our soul.

When she speaks then of, she says, I'm not going to lead you into a journey through your own soul. And so she says, you may say to me, well, since I am my soul, how can you lead me into a journey into my soul? And she says, understand, there's different meanings of what it means to be in a place.

So, for example, right now, I'm in my room here as I'm talking with you, you're in your room talking, and the people listening to this later are going to be where they are talking.

So we're all in the place that we are, but the degree to which each of us is aware of and one with the far-reaching implications of what we're talking about as divine union varies greatly from person to person. So when she uses the word mansions or dwelling places, she's talking about the grace states of consciousness in which we're aware of and open to the God-given, godly nature of our soul. Because she says some people don't even know they have a soul. That is, they're so trapped in the external demands of the externality of life, it isn't until they're awakened to the interior. If my life was an outside, I must have an inside. And specifically, when for the first time, God becomes real to you. That is, my faith matters to me.

That point at which it matters, you start to become conscious of your own soul. You always were your soul, but you weren't always conscious of your soul. And so she says the first mansion is for beginners. She said they do pray, but they don't pray well and they don't pray often and so on. So each of these mansions are kind of heightened, transformative degrees of conscious realized oneness with in response to the mystery of our soul, which leads into God in the hidden center of our soul, drawing us into union with themself.