The ground of the soul

In her final book, The Science of the Cross, completed just before she was taken to be killed by the Nazis, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – the philosopher Edith Stein – whose feast is celebrated today, described the human spirit as the inmost region of the soul, St Teresa of Avila’s “seventh dwelling place”, where God lives “all alone” as long as the soul has not reached the perfect union of love.

At this depth the life of the soul “precedes all splitting into different faculties”. “There the soul lives precisely as she is in herself, beyond all that will be called forth in her through created beings. Although this most interior region is the dwelling of God and the place where the soul is united to God, her own life flows out of here before the life of union; and this is so, even in cases where such a union never occurs. For every soul has an inmost region and its being is life.”

This life in the spirit is hidden even from the soul herself, and often our “I” dwells outside it, having been drawn out from this ground of the soul to a more