“The divine light, the Holy Spirit, has never ceased to illumine the darkness of the fallen world. He has remained faithful to his creation, regardless of all the infidelity of creatures. And if the darkness would not allow itself to be penetrated by the heavenly light, there were nevertheless some places always predisposed for it to blaze.”
—Edith Stein, The Hidden Life and Epiphany[1]
“And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
1. On (Not) Reading Edith Stein
I’ll be honest, it has taken me years to get to reading some of Edith Stein’s corpus. I first came across Stein as a footnote to a moral philosophy course I took, the main text of which was Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics. Soon thereafter, I took a class which used Rowan Williams’ little book On Being Human, and the book alluded to her work on empathy. She again came up in passing in a spirituality course I took, while we looked at the Carmelite tradition. Again and again, my curiosity was piqued, and for years some of her books sat unread on my ever-growing to-read pile. At long last, this spring, I received the impetus to rescue her books from my Shelf of Limbo when I heard that Pope Francis received a petition to name Stein a Doctor of the Church.[2] (Sometimes a veneer of timeliness helps even timeless works to be read.)
What I encountered was so much more than I expected. While her intellect was impressive, more impressive still was the quality of her heart. And, most impressive, at least to me, was the unison of intellect and heart that she achieved as so few people do. I cannot improve upon the formula that John Paul II provided upon her canonization: “Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”[3]
2. Phenomenology
Rowan Williams begins a discussion of Stein’s life by noting that “[s]he came from a Jewish family, not particularly practicing, but with some religious background.”[4] He continues, “She studied philosophy and became a very distinguished teacher of philosophy and the trusted associate of one of the most important German philosophers of her day.”[5] The associate was Edmund Husserl, who was the director of her dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (the work that initially and repeatedly piqued my curiosity about Stein).
Stein’s dissertation is short and thoughtful, but if a reader (like myself) lacks training in its philosophical school (phenomenology), it is a rather difficult read. The briefest and most limpid account of it that I could find was Alasdair MacIntyre’s:
What she showed is that the feelings and thoughts of others do not belong to some hidden inner world of the mind, so that we can only infer to their existence and nature from their outward bodily effects, but that feelings and thoughts are characteristically expressed in and through gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily movements. Our thoughts and feelings are embodied thoughts and feelings. Yet at the same time, since bodily movements thus understood have to be interpreted as expressions of intentional acts of thought and feeling, bodily movements are not just physical movements and are badly misunderstood if treated only as physical movements.[6]
In her dissertation Stein provides a holistic vision of the human person, which neither sets the human spirit at odds with the human body nor reduces the human being to their body. And in her vision, people are open both to the world and to one another. C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”[7] Stein was an exemplary practitioner of good philosophy answering bad. There is always a temptation for philosophical reflection to become solipsistic; for the thinking mind to close itself from the world, including other people in the world. Stein’s philosophy resists precisely that.
While her study is a rigorous work of phenomenology complete with the thought-school’s technical vocabulary, every now and then an insight leaps with radiant clarity from the page:
If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the prison of our individuality. Others become riddles for us, or still worse, we remodel them into our image and so falsify historical truth.[8]
She writes, “Every step I take discloses a new bit of the world to me or I see the old one from a new side.”[9] Something similar happens when we see the world as another sees it; in such moments our perspective on the universe undergoes, to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase, “a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Through empathy we discover that we are not alone, but that we are one being with a rich internal life—loving, meditating, imagining—among many other such beings, and this has a de-centering effect. By offering one a number of outlooks on the world, empathy offers one a stronger access to reality, a way “beyond ‘the world as it appears to me.’”[10] It influences us in many ways, both drastic and subtle. Stein writes, “My love [for my friends] is living even when I am not living in it.”[11] One consequence she draws from this is that we might refrain from doing something not because it is wrong, per se, but because somewhere below the conscious level of our being, we know it would displease them. Of course, such things may actually be morally wrong, in which case we would derive a genuine spiritual insight from our friend. There may be many such insights. Stein writes, “It is possible for another to ‘judge me more accurately’ than I judge myself and give me clarity about myself.”[12]
While reading Stein’s dissertation, I could not help but recall C.S. Lewis’ poignant reflection on the loss of his close friend, Charles Williams. I find it to be a powerful illustration of her theory of empathy, displaying how our inner lives are enriched by their engagements with others:
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. . . In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.[13]
Of course, Lewis here moves from philosophy to theology, which Stein cannot yet do. Nonetheless, in the conclusion of her thesis, she raises the question, “Is it essentially necessary that spirit can only enter into exchange with spirit through the medium of corporeality?”[14] Such a question, phrased in such a manner, could be taken from a scholastic treatise on angelology. Stein concedes that her question would require “the study of religious consciousness,” and she ends with a phrase at once unsatisfying and propitious: “It is not clear.”[15]
3. Conversion
From here, Stein’s life would take a turn, such that, in Rowan William’s wry words, “what she had written about consciousness and identity” would become “rather more than just a set of academic challenges.”[16] Already we have seen that Stein’s philosophical meditations were leaning towards a spiritual direction. Soon, her reading would transport her into that direction with great haste. The works of the Counter-Reformation’s St. Teresa of Ávila, who established the Discalced Carmelites, were of particular importance.
As MacIntyre describes the logic of her conversion, Stein’s response “to Teresa’s autobiography was to follow the path that Teresa had described; that is, the Carmelite path.”[17] Of course, “a Carmelite life is possible only within the Catholic Church,”[18] so to become a Carmelite, she’d have to become a Catholic as well. In MacIntyre’s account, her winsome zeal in becoming a Carmelite was paired with a certain naiveté about the process of becoming one:
She was surprised some months later to learn that she could not at once, as a sequel to her baptism, be admitted into a religious order. . . . The immediate sequel to her reading of Teresa was to buy a catechism and a missal, to study them, to go regularly to mass, and to ask the parish priest at Bergzabern to baptize her. She needed a much shorter period of instruction than most converts and on January 1, 1922, she was baptized.[19]
Her actions reveal a heart filled with the Holy Spirit—a heart moved by an intense yearning to dive quickly into the ever-deepening love of God. The same Spirit appears to have tempered her desire with patience.
Stein’s Self-Portrait in Letters provides a vivid account of the struggles she faced in her conversion. Perhaps the most poignant of these is that which she faced in her very home. She describes her mother as a person of “a very simple and strong nature,”[20] who “declines anything that is beyond her Jewish faith.”[21] It is plain that her mother’s sorrow pained her, though it did not shake her conviction:
She particularly rejects conversions. Everyone ought to live and die in the faith in which they were born. She imagines atrocious things about Catholicism and life in a convent. At the moment it is difficult to know what is causing her more pain: whether it is the separation from her youngest child to whom she has ever been attached with a particular love, or her horror of the completely foreign and inaccessible world into which that child is disappearing, or the qualms of conscience that she herself is at fault because she was not strict enough in raising me as a Jew.[22]
Stein was very sensitive to her mother’s qualms, and she acknowledged her mother’s “very strong and genuine love for God,” as well as her mother’s “love for me that nothing can shake.”[23]
Nonetheless, Stein did not swerve from the path God had set out for her. She entered the religious life, making her temporary vows on April 21, 1935, and her perpetual vows on April 21, 1938. As a Carmelite speaking to Carmelites, she said, “To stand in the face of the living God—that is our vocation.”[24] Her life, for a time, was to be the life of a contemplative, enclosed from the world:
The walls of our monastery enclose a narrow space. To erect the structure of holiness in it, one must dig deep and build high, must descend into the dark night of one’s own nothingness in order to be raised up high into the sunlight of divine love and compassion.[25]
Though she continued her philosophical work during this time, prayer was her vocation, and, as she writes, “Prayer is looking up into the face of the Eternal.”[26] Here, she yearned for nothing else than to be one of those contemplatives who surrender themselves wholly unto God. “Hidden with Christ in God,” she writes, such persons “can do nothing but radiate to other hearts the divine love that fills them and so participate in the perfection of all into unity with God, which was and is Jesus’ great desire.”[27] But Stein knew that to surrender herself unto the divine love, she could not simply contemplate Christ on Mount Tabor but on Calvary.[28]
4. Martyrdom and Canonization
Stein would comment, not “every age give[s] us a reign of terror during which we have the opportunity to lay our heads on the executioner’s block for our faith.”[29] Many would be martyrs, and find it more difficult to face the smaller mortifications of one’s will in day-to-day life. Richard Crashaw writes the following of Teresa of Ávila:
Love touch’d her heart, and lo it beats
High, and burns with such brave heats,
Such thirsts to die, as dares drink up
A thousand cold deaths in one cup.
But Christ had another plan: she was to “embrace [the] milder martyrdom” of establishing the Discalced Carmelites. It was Stein’s fortune to be a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism during Hitler’s rise to power—to denounce evil as evil in a world fallen to darkness and insane ideology.
She knew, to some extent, about the evils that were happening. Speaking to her community at Echt Carmel in 1939 on the occasion of its annual renewal of vows, she said,
The Saviour today looks at us, solemnly probing us, and asks each of us: Will you remain faithful to the Crucified? Consider carefully! The world is in flames, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist has broken into the open. If you decide for Christ, it could cost you your life.[30]
In his book Luminaries, Rowan Williams recounts the moment of Stein’s arrest, demonstrating how she practiced what she preached:
Just as in the early church the martyrs died because they would not say ‘Caesar is Lord’ (they knew that this was what Jesus was), so with Edith Stein. . . . [W]hen she was summoned to the convent parlour by the SS commandant who was rounding up the Jews in the area. He greeted her with the words ‘Heil, Hitler’, and she greeted him with what she said to her sisters every morning of her life: ‘Laudetur Jesus Christus’ (‘Jesus Christ be praised’). There, you might say, are the two lordships in conflict in the 1930s; her response was once again in the form of a life making sense of a senseless and terrible world.[31]
Hitler may have been the Reich’s Führer, but Christ is the one true King of the one true Kingdom, and Stein was not about to save her skin at the cost of her soul.
Indeed, even her soul was not the center of her concern—others were. As we saw from her dissertation, she did not “take the self as the standard.” This aspect of her thought was only heightened by her turn to faith. In 1939, Stein wrote her final testament, whose concluding lines read thus:
I joyfully accept in advance the death God has appointed for me, in perfect submission to his most holy will. May the Lord accept my life and death for the honor and glory of his name, for the needs of his holy Church, . . . for the Jewish people, that the Lord may be received by his own and his Kingdom come in glory, for the deliverance of Germany and peace throughout the world, and, finally, for all my relatives living and dead and all whom God has given me: may none of them be lost.[32]
May none of them be lost: the Church, the Jewish people, Germany, Stein’s relatives, and all whom God has given her. One suspects she felt that God had given her nothing less than all, and that she merely had to empty herself to receive the world in its givenness. One could imagine her approving of Thomas Traherne’s dictum: “All things were made to be yours, and you were made to prize them according to their value.”
I might have italicized the words none and all in her final testament, for I believe Stein means them in their precise senses (she never ceased to be a precise thinker). Her hope and love are truly universal in scope. Hans Urs von Balthasar ends his essay “A Brief Discourse on Hell” with a lengthy quotation from Stein, which describes the theologoumenon shared between the two of them. They held a view sometimes called “hopeful universalism”—it is a vision of the Last Things which holds out the hope that all people may yet be reconciled with God through Christ. To share but an excerpt of the excerpt:
All-merciful love can thus descend to everyone. We believe that it does so. And now, can we assume that there are souls that remain perpetually closed to such love? As a possibility in principle, this cannot be rejected. In reality, it can become infinitely improbable—precisely through what preparatory grace is capable of effecting in the soul. . . . Human freedom can be neither broken nor neutralized by divine freedom, but it may well be, so to speak, outwitted.[33]
Universalists, whether of the hopeful or certain variety, often face the criticism that their belief is rather naïve—surely, they must be sheltered from the worst of humanity if they can believe that the Hitlers and Himmlers and Mengeles of the world shall be or may be redeemed.
Stein would die with her fellow Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. She was anything but sheltered. Hers was not the “fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed” that Milton denounced. In 1941, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, she reflected that the vow of poverty “includes the readiness to leave our beloved monastery itself. . . . God did not pledge to leave us within the walls of the enclosure forever.”[34] Yet, when such a one leaves the monastic enclosure, God provides the “invisible pinions” of his angels to “enclose [their] souls more securely than the highest and strongest of walls.”[35] Or, to quote Milton yet once more, “A thousand liveried angels lackey her, / Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.”
Nor did she underestimate the evil of the Nazis; she saw them as undertaking the work of the “antichrist.”[36] Even so, she hoped for their salvation. In her merciful spirit, she is obediently joining her will to her God’s, whose name is mercy, and who desires “all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”[37] Such obedience is the perfection of her will:
The created will is not destined to be free to exalt itself. It is called to come into unison with the divine will. If it freely submits itself to this unison, then it is permitted in freedom to participate in the perfection of creation.[38]
In embracing the fate of a martyr, and in forgiving those who martyred her, she joins the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, in following the way of the Cross. By a simple change of pronouns, her comments on St. Stephen apply equally well to herself:
[She] followed the Lord in what may be by nature the most difficult for the human heart, and even seems impossible: [she] fulfilled the command to love one’s enemies as did the Saviour himself.[39]
She died in solidarity with her Jewish kindred and as a beloved daughter of her Church. Far worse than the pain inflicted on her body, was the anguish inflicted on her spirit as God’s image-bearers treated his other image-bearers as things worse than beasts. And in the midst of that torment, she still chose the path of mercy, the path of love.
As befits one who lived such a life, “Edith Stein, ‘a daughter of Israel blessed by the Cross,’ was beatified by John Paul II in Cologne on 4 May 1987.”[40] One expects that the petition for Stein to be made a Doctor of the Church will be well-received. Doctor, after all, simply means teacher; it derives from the Latin docēre, meaning “to teach.” And surely the Church has learned from her, as has the world. And we go on learning. The earth would be a kinder place if, from time to time, we allowed ourselves to fall silent, and to listen to her whispering in a still, small voice: “For the Christian, there is no such thing as a ‘stranger.’ There is only the neighbor—the person who happens to be next to us, the person most in need of our help.”[41]
Bret van den Brink is an MA student at the University of Toronto, where he studies English literature. His article “Beatrice Nest, White Goddess: Romance and Ecology in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance” has been published in The Robert Graves Review. His sonnet series “Measure for Measure: Five Readings” is available in The Westmarch Literary Journal.
[1] Edith Stein, The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts, translated by Waltraut Stein, (ICS Publications, 2014), 109.
[2] Courtney Mares, “Could Edith Stein be declared the next doctor of the Church?,” Catholic News Agency, May 6, 2024, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/257587/could-edith-stein-be-declared-the-next-doctor-of-the-church.
[3] John Paul II, “Homily at Canonization Eucharist,” in Holiness Befits Your House: Documentation on the Canonization of Edith Stein, edited by John Sullivan, (ICS Publications, 2000), 10.
[4] Rowan Williams, Luminaries: Twenty Lives That Illuminate the Christian Way, (SPCK Publishing, 2019), 107.
[5] Ibid., 107.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 159.
[7] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, (HarperOne, 2001), 58.
[8] Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, translated by Waltraut Stein, (ICS Publications, 1989), 116.
[9] Stein, Empathy, 47.
[10] Ibid., 64.
[11] Ibid., 74.
[12] Ibid., 89.
[13] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, (Mariner Books, 2012), 61-62.
[14] Stein, Empathy, 117.
[15] Ibid., 118.
[16] Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons, (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018), 14.
[17] Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 168.
[18] Ibid., 168.
[19] Ibid., 168.
[20] Edith Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters 1916-1942, translated by Josephine Koeppel, (ICS Publications, 1993),no.156.
[21] Ibid., no. 158.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Stein, The Hidden Life, 1.
[25] Ibid., 6.
[26] Ibid., 3.
[27] Ibid., 16.
[28] I allude to Gemma Galgani: “Let whoever wishes it contemplate Him on Mount Tabor; I will contemplate him on Calvary with my dear Mother Addolorata.” Germanus C.P., The Life of Saint Gemma Galgani, translated by A.M. O’Sullivan, (Aeterna Press, 2015), 43.
[29] Stein, The Hidden Life, 6.
[30] Ibid., 94.
[31] Williams, Luminaries, 110.
[32] Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, (Ignatius Press, 1985), 168-69.
[33] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?, translated by David Kipp and Lothar Krauth, (Ignatius, 2014), 175-77.
[34] Stein, The Hidden Life, 102.
[35] Ibid., 103.
[36] Ibid., 94.
[37] 1 Timothy 2:4, KJV.
[38] Stein, The Hidden Life, 103.
[39] Ibid., 113.
[40] Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, (Cornell University Press, 2001), 200.
[41] Ibid., 205.