On Edith Stein and Teresa of Avila

Steven Greydanus discusses a new film on Saint Edith Stein:

...the film contemplates Edith’s life in terms of the “seven chambers” of Saint Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. In a key sequence in the middle of the film, just before taking her vows as a Carmelite nun, Edith explains to another novice Teresa’s account of the seven chambers, based on the saint’s vision of the soul as a castle formed from a single diamond or crystal. This castle, Teresa wrote, is filled with chambers on all sides, with one central chamber representing the innermost realm of nuptial union and intimacy with God. To reach this state, one must progress by stages through various outer chambers or stages of spiritual development and discipline, in the process stripping oneself (or being stripped) of exteriority and attachments to passing things, coming to belong ever more completely to God.

This idea of St. Teresa’s interior castle and the seven chambers is the structural and thematic key to the film. (I think that St. Teresa herself even makes a brief, uncredited appearance, right in the beginning.) Certainly the idea of spiritual progression toward final union with God is powerfully dramatized by the film, which gradually strips its heroine of more and more. Upon her baptism, she loses her mother’s approval and acceptance; with the rising tide of Nazi power, she loses her position as a lecturer, and eventually her family, most of whom flee Germany; in entering Carmel, she gives up the career she could have had outside of Germany. Eventually she is forced to leave her fatherland and flee to Holland; then she is taken out of Carmel and begins her journey to Auschwitz. The film boldly depicts the gates of Auschwitz and the corridor leading to the gas chambers as the entrance into the “seventh chamber,” the climax and resolution of all the film’s tensions and themes...