The autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, written at the express command of her confessors to give an accurate and detailed account of her spiritual progress, is one of mankind's most treasured spiritual legacies.
The first part of the book is autobiographical in the ordinary sense of the word: it describes the author's parentage, early life and education, the interior conflicts which she experienced, and finally the crisis which ended in her resolve to seek perfection and walk in the way of prayer. After a parenthetical section which describes the contemplative life under the figure of the Four Waters, each of which corresponds to one stage of spiritual progress, St. Teresa returns to her own life, in order to describe the surpassing favors which the Lord granted her and the spiritual trials in which she was so greatly helped by the Franciscan St. Peter of Alcantara. The LIFE closes with a moving enumeration of the new favors which she is receiving from God and of the effects produced by them in her soul. Here is a book which, as its distinguished translator puts it, "for the naturalness with which it is written, for the profundity and detail of its psychological analysis and for the sublimity of the spiritual mysteries which it unfolds, is worthy of a place beside the Confessions of St. Augustine."