What Saint Teresa said after the vision of hell

Saint Teresa of Avila, who was one of the main writers of her century, had from God, in vision, the privilege of going down to hell while still alive. Here is how he describes, in his "Autobiography" what he saw and felt in the infernal abysses.

“Finding myself one day in prayer, I was suddenly transported to hell in body and soul. I understood that God wanted to show me the place prepared by the demons and that I would have deserved for the sins in which I would have fallen if I had not changed my life. For how many years I have to live I can never forget the horror of hell.

The entrance to this place of torment seemed to me similar to a kind of oven, low and dark. The soil was nothing but horrible mud, full of poisonous reptiles and there was an unbearable smell.

I felt in my soul a fire, of which there are no words that can describe nature and my body at the same time in the grip of the most atrocious torments. The great pains that I had already suffered in my life are nothing compared to those felt in hell. Furthermore, the idea that the pains would be endless and without any relief completed my terror.

But these tortures of the body are not comparable to those of the soul. I felt an anguish, a close to my heart so sensitive and, at the same time, so desperate and so bitterly sad, that I would try in vain to describe it. Saying that the anguish of death suffers at all times, I would say little.

I will never find a suitable expression to give an idea of ​​this inner fire and this despair, which constitute precisely the worst part of hell.

All hope of consolation is extinguished in that horrible place; you can breathe a pestilential air: you feel suffocated. No ray of light: there is nothing but darkness and yet, oh mystery, without any light that you illuminate, you can see how much more repugnant and painful it can be at sight.

I can assure you that everything that can be said about hell, what we read in the books of tortures and different torments that demons make the damned suffer, is nothing compared to reality; there is the same difference that passes between the portrait of a person and the person himself.

Burning in this world is very little compared to that fire I felt in hell.

About six years have now passed since that frightening visit to hell and I, describing it, still feel taken by such terror that the blood freezes in my veins. In the midst of my trials and pains I often recall this memory and then how much you can suffer in this world seems to me a laughing matter.

So be eternally blessed, O my God, because you have made me experience hell in the most real way, thus inspiring me the most lively fear for all that can lead to it. "