Biography of a Presence (Natal Places of God in St. Teresa)

Abstract

If God is the experience, the feeling or the sensation of a «presence», and thus appears in Santa Teresa, it is obliged to provide a phenomenological characterization of that experience. In this regard we will visit the various forms of divine «presence» in Teresa's writings, collected and described by Teresa with such an introspective force that almost without parallel in the history of mysticism. Such presences are of various types: first, the «presence» of juxtaposition, internalization and panentheist; secondly, the so-called liberating presences from all forms of attachment or bondage, and finally the positive presence of the divine bond. We end up appealing to the «effects or fruits» of such presence.