Abstract:

Teresa of Ávila is a widely studied 16th-century Catholic mystic, though relatively little attention has been paid to the overtly philosophical themes in her work. Writing during the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa was regularly treated with scrutiny, given concerns that she might be deceived by demons. Consequently, she developed an epistemology of mysticism aimed at testing the veridicality of apparent mystical experiences – where an ‘apparent mystical experience’ refers to any perceptual, cognitive, or spiritual state that seems to have been caused by a special act of God. The puzzle is an interesting one: if we assume that apparent mystical experiences are possible, is there a way to know whether an experience is genuinely divine in origin?

I argue that Teresa develops an epistemology of mysticism with at least three conditions. First, the experience must bear the right kinds of internal properties. These concern features of the experience itself: the specific faculty affected, the vividness, and the indubitability. Second, the experience should produce the right kinds of effects. Veridical experiences yield prolonged certainty, interior peace, and increased love of God. Teresa holds that demons cannot sustain such effects over time. Third, the experience should be verified by experts. Teresa emphasizes the importance of social-epistemic discernment – those who experience apparently supernatural states should consult spiritual directors knowledgeable in such matters, whose role is to help determine whether the experience is divine in origin.

We should situate Teresa’s account. At least two avenues of philosophical literature have considered Teresa’s work. Philosophers of religion have been interested in whether religious experience can justify belief in God, frequently citing Teresa as a kind of case study (Alston 1993). Historians of philosophy, meanwhile, have recently been debating whether Descartes used Teresa as source material for the Meditations (Mercer 2017; Underkuffler 2020; Forsman 2023; Agoff 2025). By turning directly to Teresa’s epistemology, we notice a couple of things. First, Teresa’s epistemology of mysticism is not aimed at justifying a belief in God. Rather, she is concerned with distinguishing between veridical and non-veridical mystical experiences. The question is never whether God exists, but whether God has actually affected the soul through a special act. Second, her epistemological framework is to some degree more robust than the Cartesian model. While Descartes’s epistemology appeals primarily to the clarity and distinctness of a given perception, Teresa’s account includes additional conditions, like the production of certain moral and affective effects, and the involvement of others capable of verifying the experience.

This project has two upshots. First, it encourages historians of philosophy to look more closely at Teresa’s work. Though couched in a spirituality unfamiliar to contemporary philosophical questions and frameworks, it nonetheless contains robust and understudied epistemological themes, including a latent social epistemology. Second, it avoids the pitfalls of previous approaches that either interpret Teresa through the lens of contemporary philosophy of religion or treat her as some kind of proto-Cartesian. Instead, she should be understood as grappling with a distinct set of questions, grounded in the concerns of her historical context.