The most readable and accurate version of The Interior Castle available! The classic book on prayer, plus discussion questions for group & school study "While I was beseeching Our Lord today...I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions." This was St. Teresa’s sweeping spiritual insight. Journey with one of the most remarkable figures in history as she explores the mystical mansions of the human soul ... of your soul. This is a journey unlike any other. Do you want to learn how to pray? The Interior Castle presents a breath-taking journey of the entire spiritual life from imprisonment by mortal sin to the Mystical Marriage of the soul with Christ. St. Teresa speaks to both the beginner and the advanced and the saints. She gives practical advice regarding the early struggles and the temptations to turn back. She describes each of the seven mansions in turn and urges us forward. Progress toward God through prayer is worth vastly more than all the treasures of this earth. A masterpiece of spiritual literature, this sixteenth-century work was inspired by the mystical vision of St. Teresa of Avila, one of the most gifted and beloved religious figures in history, who experienced spiritual espousal to God. In The Interior Castle, her most important and widely read book, St. Teresa describes how the soul enters the castle through prayer and meditation and experiences humility, detachment, suffering, and, ultimately, self-knowledge, as it advances from room to room. As the soul progresses toward the castle’s center, it comes closer to achieving ineffable peace and divine communion with God.

Seeks the origins of later Christian anti-Judaism in Gnosticism and Pauline theology. Describes Gnostic anti-Judaism as directed primarily against the Jewish God and his law, rather than against the Jewish people who are their blind servants. Judaism for the Gnostics is more contemptible than dangerous, since its power is only in this world, to which the Gnostics attached no importance. Suggests that their hostility was aroused by Judaism's claim to equate its God with the higher God of Hellenistic thought. Paul took over much of the Gnostic two-power scheme, including the view of the Jews as blind servants of the Law. Argues that his own anti-Judaism did not go beyond that of the Gnostics. But in seeing the Crucifixion as central to salvation, and in singling out the Jews for a special role in salvation history, he added to the Gnostic two-power theology elements that later took shape as the Christian view of the Jews as Christ-killers and instruments of Satan.