The experience of immaterial dwelling A reading of dwelling from Santa Teresade Jesús and Lluis Duch

Abstract

Man is the only living being conscious of inhabiting a space and capable of transforming it. However, 
he is also capable of the transcendent and of dwelling in the immaterial. Based on these anthropological 
premises, the idea will be developed through the analysis of the case of Saint Teresa of Jesus in some 
of her poems. These elements will be read from the understanding of the clear and dark space offered 
by the anthropologist Lluís Duch. Thus, it will be seen that the human being's existence in the 
world is the clear space, which is tangible and transformable, and that God is the dark space that 
transcends everything. However, these two spaces meet and blend together, as happens in the case of 
Saint Teresa, so that the human being dwells in God and God dwells in the human being. This makes 
the human being "imprison" God, according to Saint Teresa, but it also means that the 
human being inhabits an infinite and immaterial space that is God. From all this, it can be concluded 
that the human being is as open to the material as to the immaterial, and that this dwelling between the 
clear and the dark reaches its fullest development in death, as the clear aspect of the human being, his 
body, dissolves into nature and the dark aspect, his transcendence, reaches fulfillment in the encounter 
with his creator. The possibility of dwelling in the immaterial offers the human being the possibility 
of surpassing mere materiality.