Exégesis, tradición y autoridad de la experiencia: Teresa de Ávila y los Conceptos del amor de Dios

The communication examines Teresa of Ávila’s Meditations on the Song of Songs through a historical-textual lens that places the question of female authority in the early modern period at its centre. It begins from a well-established problem in historiography and contemporary theology, the tension between institutional forms of authority and experiential or charismatic ones, and reconsiders it within the concrete historical conditions of the sixteenth century. First, it contextualizes the environment in which the Meditations were composed, taking as a paradigmatic example the trial of Fray Luis de León for his vernacular translation of the Song of Songs. Second, it shows that Teresa’s hermeneutics is grounded in an affective epistemology (a cognitio Dei experimentalis) that grants love, rather than rational understanding or speculative thought, the capacity to penetrate the meaning of Scripture. Far from proposing a “carnal” reading of the Song, Teresa offers a commentary that rearticulates its symbolical apparatus on the basis of her own charismatic experience.