Teresa of Ávila described the soul's inner castle, a dwelling reached only by turning inward, away from worldly attachment
Teresa's central image reframes the whole spiritual life as an inward architecture to be explored rather than an external set of rules to follow, and continence functions as one requirement for even entering its outer rooms.
Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Carmelite reformer, wrote The Interior Castle in 1577 near the end of her life, describing the soul in its opening pages as a castle in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions. The First Dwelling Place, the outermost rooms nearest the castle's entrance, are where souls still entangled with worldly attachments and self-concern reside, still capable of grace but easily distracted by what she calls vipers and poisonous creatures that follow them in from outside. Teresa is explicit that turning inward, away from worldly attachment, including the demands of household and marriage she herself had left behind by entering religious life, is not the goal itself but the necessary direction of travel toward the castle's center, where God dwells. The work is considered one of the great texts of Christian mystical theology precisely because it maps interior stages of prayer with a psychological precision unusual for its era, written by a woman under real scrutiny during the Spanish Inquisition.
I began to think of the soul as resembling a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms.
Teresa wrote The Interior Castle in 1577 while under scrutiny from the Spanish Inquisition, which makes her candor about interior mystical states notable for the risk it carried.
The Interior Castle