By Robert Coles |
The New Oxford Review.
September 1983.
Note: Edith Stein was martyred in 1942 (aged 50) at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gau Upper Silesia, German-occupied Poland. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Cologne on May 1, 1987.
Among the 20th-century conversions to Roman Catholicism, that of Edith Stein is surely one of the most edifying and memorable. She was born in Breslau, Germany, to Jewish parents. Her father was a timber merchant who died when she, his last child, was only two. Her mother took over the business and managed well. She was, however, a woman of divided loyalties — a passionate commitment to the Jewish religion and culture lived uneasily with the requirement of participation in commerce. When Edith Stein was nine, the 20th century began — and soon enough her own personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey would intersect with the fate of the German nation.
She was an exceedingly bright child who luckily was not denied the advantages of an excellent education. By the late 19th century, Germany’s Jews, even the most orthodox, had obtained relatively secure access to a progressive society’s schools, not to mention its advanced literary, artistic, and musical life. The ghettos of Europe were elsewhere — to the east, in Poland and Russia. The Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II was significantly tainted with anti-Semitism, but it was not by any means of a kind to threaten the likes of a gifted, ambitious student such as the young Edith Stein.
Moreover, by adolescence she had abandoned Judaism in favor of an agnostic assimilationist posture not at all rare among early 20th-century German Jews.
By 1913 Edith Stein had become a serious student of philosophy, and was studying with Edmund Husserl. His phenomenological mode of inquiry would influence her greatly — and arguably, turn out to be the first major religious influence of her adult life. He had dared object to Kant’s continuing hold on so many German philosophers — a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the capacity human beings have to comprehend in a reasonably conclusive way the nature of this world. Husserl, it can be said, embraced with enthusiasm a world shunned by neo-Kantians, for whom thinking — one idea after another, and philosophical systems galore — was the great reality. He saw Truth in “the things of this world,” and never for a moment doubted that the here and now of this life was real and knowable. His brilliant assistant, Edith Stein, quickly absorbed that point of view — an important contrast to the hermetic relativism of idealistic philosophy. Her doctoral dissertation, published eventually as a book, On the Problem of Empathy, earned her quick recognition as a brilliant scholar, able to negotiate the treacherous and turbid waters of the question of “consciousness.” (Quite on her own, incidentally, she postulated the equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, thickly textured in response to childhood experience — in her term “the mode of non-actuality.”)
In November 1917 a dear friend of hers, a fellow philosopher, Adolph Reinach, was killed in military action on the Western front. He and his wife had a year before become Christians — moved from a world of intellectual curiosity to one of communion in Christ’s name. Edith Stein mourned the loss of a friend, but could not stop noticing the almost unnerving dignity and composure of his young widow. She was also aware of the conversion of Max Scheler, a fellow philosopher, to Catholicism.
Yet, she came to the Roman Catholic Church — she made quite clear later in life — through a chance meeting with St. Teresa of Ávila, whose autobiography happened to be on a bookshelf in the home of friends with whom she was staying. On New Year’s Day 1922, she was baptized in the Church — and, one gathers, kept thinking thereafter of St. Teresa and her passionate devotion to Jesus. Teresa’s exemplary love for God and His Son surely must have served to inspire Edith Stein to go through a dramatic shift in her career; she abandoned an exceptionally promising academic life for one of secondary school teaching and prayer.
Like Simone Weil, also a brilliant Jewish-born student of philosophy drawn to Catholicism, Stein found a certain exhilaration in her everyday work with young women — as if now a learned mind had, at last, found itself sprung from the dreary exertions of self-display. She was charged with the responsibility of others: to help them grow morally and educationally, and not least, spiritually. Additionally, she pursued St. Thomas — ultimately translating into German his Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate; and doing so she rendered significant and clarifying exegesis, thereby becoming (now among Catholic theologians) a formidable intellectual presence.
In early 1933 Hitler (yet another aspect of the Antichrist) took power in Germany, and so Edith Stein (in the Nazi eyes still a Jew) could no longer teach school. For her personally, an ironic moment of eternal good fortune had arrived: she felt free, at last, to apply for admission to the Carmelite Order. When, in a ceremony, she was clothed a nun, prominent intellectuals from all over Germany came to the Cologne Chapel of the Carmelites where the event took place. Germany had already begun its deep descent into Hell, and Edith Stein was prepared to pray fervently and by the hour to the Jesus of the Cross — that He take unto Himself the innocents already being brutally murdered by fascist thugs. Still, the Carmelite Provincial was not quite ready to permit the loss of a shining intellect — especially given the terrible outbursts of irrationality then prevalent. For several years, while Hitler consolidated his murderous hold, Edith Stein prayed, thought, and wrote — and the result was her great study, Finite and Eternal Being, published posthumously. She had moved from phenomenology to Christian existentialism.
Meanwhile Germany had moved closer to the lower reaches of the Inferno. By late 1938 the life of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein’s new name) was in distinct jeopardy. On December 31 of that year she was taken across the border to Holland; there she began the last and tragically brief period of her life in the Carmelite community of the town Echt.
For three full years she gave of herself unstintingly — with constant pleas to “the Heart of Jesus,” that she be taken “as a sacrifice of expiation for true peace, that the reign of the Antichrist may perish.” She also studied mystical theology, and wrote her final study, a series of reflections on St. John of the Cross, published eventually as The Science of The Cross. She was working on that project when (on August 2, 1942) the Nazis came, seized her, and sent her to Auschwitz, where a mere week later she was gassed.
It has been reported that during those last days in the concentration camp she displayed an utter calm — attending the hurt, the sick, the agitated and frightened.
Who was this center of stoic prayer and loving-kindness, this incarnation of thoughtfulness, good judgment, and decency — all in the face of imminent death? A splinter of the Cross, surely — an instrument of His grace, His example; and yes, given that awful time, a reminder that Christ was a Jew, and so were His disciples (as St. Paul put it, Hebraei sunt: et ego — “they are Jews, and so am I”), and so was by ancestry Teresa of Ávila, and in their beloved company so was Edith Stein, a proud and talented scholar who threw herself gladly, ecstatically at His feet, He of the Cross, He whose Cross had become her cross.
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