Читать книгу Saint Teresa of Ávila: Collected Works. The Life of St. Teresa, The Interior Castle, Way of Perfection онлайн

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ssss1 The Saint interrupts her history here to enter on the difficult questions of mystical theology, and resumes it in ch. xxiii.

ssss1 Ch. ix. § 4.

ssss1 Ch. xxx. §§ 10 and 11.

ssss1 See ch. xiii. § 5.

ssss1 F. Pedro Ybañez, of the Order of St. Dominic.

ssss1 See ch. xxxi. § 17.

ssss1 See ch. xv. § 12.

ssss1 See ch. xiv. § 12.

ssss1 See ch. xxiv. § 5.

ssss1

Why Men Do Not Attain Quickly to the Perfect Love of God. Of Four Degrees of Prayer. Of the First Degree. The Doctrine Profitable for Beginners, and for Those Who Have No Sensible Sweetness.

1. I speak now of those who begin to be the servants of love; that seems to me to be nothing else but to resolve to follow Him in the way of prayer, who has loved us so much. It is a dignity so great, that I have a strange joy in thinking of it; for servile fear vanishes at once, if we are, as we ought to be, in the first degree. O Lord of my soul, and my good, how is it that, when a soul is determined to love Thee--doing all it can, by forsaking all things, in order that it may the better occupy itself with the love of God--it is not Thy will it should have the joy of ascending at once to the possession of perfect love? I have spoken amiss; I ought to have said, and my complaint should have been, why is it we do not? for the fault is wholly our own that we do not rejoice at once in a dignity so great, seeing that the attaining to the perfect possession of this true love brings all blessings with it.