A Study Of D'Dland 's Spiritual Thought

St. Teresa of Avila’s spirituality contains two aspects:Mysticism and Asceticism. In this article, I follow the model of three ways:the purgative way, the illuminative way and the unitive way, stage by stage, as my research approach. Based upon above, I arrange and analyze the two aspects of Teresa’s spirituality and then obtain the conclusions.Therefore, in Introduction of this paper, I present and explain the technical terminology of spirituality about my research objects, which are also the main categories in Teresa’s thought, and at the end of this section, I introduced the current research situation, highlighted the meaning and characteristic of this paper by comparison.In the first chapter, I introduce the background of St. Teresa of Avila’s thought: the King of Spain made use of Inquisition for maintaining Orthodox and actualizing the theocracy, so he attacked Islam and Judaism very strongly. However Protestant Reformation and Mysticism posed a great threat to Orthodox, especially the religious experiences of women made people feel panic. Teresa’s experiences and her spirituality which are under this cultural situation are extremely revolutionary.In the second and third chapter, I arrange and analyze Teresa’s thoughts of spirituality and practical experiments. In her main works The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection, the seven mansions of spiritual life can be reduced to three stages, which I called them the step of purifying, illumination and unity. The three virtues in The Way of Perfection can’t be ignored simultaneously, since they are the preparatory stage of the three stages in the above, and run throughout in these three stages all the time. Then, introduce her practice,which she reforms the Carmelite Order and live in the ascetic life. In short, Mysticism and asceticism can’t be separated, practical behavior and contemplation are integrated as a whole.In the fourth chapter, to analyze the characteristics of Teresa’s spirituality— —mystical experience, spirit of the apostle, humanity of Christ as the center, female characteristic, and its far-reaching significance. And the last part Epilogue concludes the main ideas of this article, and refers to several theses which I am not able to study further.