ONE OF THE DISTINCTIVE TRAITS of St. Teresa is the spontaneous prayer to God that flows so easily and frequently from her pen. Throughout her works there are many wonderful instances where she shares her prayers with the reader. In the brief and fervent outpourings of this collection, we are able to participate in the prayer of Teresa and contemplate the ardor of the devotee. She laments over the absence of her God, over the time she has lost in living apart from Him, over a life that is an obstacle to perfect union; and she praises God’s mercy and grandeur, the adorable humanity of Christ who suffers and seeks souls, Him whose delight is to be with the children of the earth. The meditative, prayerful quality of these writings is expressed in the long descriptive title—a peculiarity of the period—given to the collection by Fray Luis de León in the first edition of the Saint’s works published in Salamanca in 1588: Meditations or exclamations of the soul to God written by Mother Teresa of Jesus in the year 1569 on different days according to the spirit our Lord gave her after Communion.
Though we don’t know exactly where Teresa wrote these meditations, their form and the occasion on which they were written are revealed by Luis de León in the above title. The circumstances in which she wrote them defined their meditative form; but, being spontaneous, they manifest no organized plan. The great number of “oh’s” and other vehement utterances make it clear why the first editor referred to them as exclamations. The style of these meditations, however, greatly resembles that found in the soliloquies that have come down to us under the name of St. Augustine. The Soliloquies, together with the Meditations (both known now as pseudo-Augustinian works), were available in the vernacular in sixteenth-century Spain and bound together in one volume. They were probably read and reflected on by Teresa. Because of the possible influence of that volume by pseudo-Augustine on these Teresian writings but more particularly because of the similarity of literary genre we have chosen for them the new, but simple, title Soliloquies in place of the more elaborate, previously used, Exclamations of the Soul to God. The introductory headings to each soliloquy are additions of our own for the convenience of the reader.
Worth noting is that in these few soliloquies there are thirty-six scriptural quotations, mainly from the Gospels, with Teresa’s personal insights and interpretations.
The collection is also, in a way, a complement to the Life, and so we include it in this first volume. Through these meditations and fervent outpourings Teresa’s most intimate religious sentiments reveal themselves to us.
The autograph of this work has not been preserved. A complete copy by Ribera is the one Fray Luis de León probably used and the one followed in this translation.
K.K.