Edith Stein: a biography

A SAINT TO COME

IT IS increasingly clear that Edith Stein, the philosopher, mystic, and Carmelite nun who lost her life in the death camps of Auschwitz, was one of the truly remarkable women of this century. Her capacity for abstract speculation was deep and brilliant in a field where the female contribution has not been outstanding; indeed, her special value as a philospher derived from her feminine perspective in areas historically dominated by men. Unlike most philosphers, however, who have presumed that their philosophies are the answer to everything you ever wanted to know about anything, Edith Stein's thinking came to that point of anguish which informs the mind that thinking itself, or mere rationality, can go no further. She then proceeded to become a saint.

A biography of this yet uncanonized saint, Edith Stein, by a Carmelite nun named Waltraud Herbstrith, has just been published here and serves the long-standing need in this country for more information about this extraordinary person. The enthusiasm of the publishers's blurbist, however, gets a little out of hand, leaving the impression that this is a brand-new biography of Edith Stein. It is in fact a translation, sometimes infelicitous, of the fifth German edition (1983), here expanded. As a volume of less than 130 pages, neither can it claim to be definitive, lacking the richness of biographical detail that would be needed to present the subject in the similitude of a life actually lived.

God knows, if anyone does, that Edith Stein's life was actually lived and freely given in a most holy and awesome way. And yet Waltraud Herbstrith's Edith Stein is largely a Carmelite nun's version of a Carmelite nun--a study, par excellence, of intellectual development and spiritual progression, but one from which we would never learn whether Edith STein herself, a vibrant and very existential Jewish woman, ever sat down to a human meal and talked about human affairs. Did she ponder the theory of phenomenology so relentlessly that she never picked a flower? It was indeed the aim of phenomenology, as a reaction to the neo-Kantianism of the period, to redispose the mind to a contemplation of real objects in a real world. Anyway, this is what we want to know about saints and potential saints--not how holy they were but how human.

It nevertheless remains a fact that what was most human about Edith Stein was the quality of her intellect. You sense this most vividly in the stunning photographs of her that are available today. As Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein is no doubt the greatest Carmelite nun since her namesake in religion, Teresa of Avila herself. In her very young girlhood, however, Edith was now and then something of a spoiled brat. She knew too much. But at some point in the process of her individuation, as Carl Jung would put it, she came to the realization that her gifts were of such an order that they would have to be used not only with discretion but with a compassionate dispensation. She turned to teaching and excelled in that field.

It was to philosophy, however, that Edith Stein was inexorably drawn. After majoring in philosphy at the University of Breslau, the city of her birth, she pursued doctoral studies under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl at the University of Gottingen. Phenomenology is a grand word that means looking at things very closely and with an objective passion for the truth. Edith was so brilliant in this endeavor that she was appointed Husserl's assistant. Still, there was something missing in Husserl's philosophy, which Edith's searching mind found at last in the work of Max Scheler--another phenomenologist, to be sure, but one who saw through the prism of a Catholic conversion. It was Scheler, indeed, who was also to influence the future pope, Father Karol Wojtyla. Years later, Pope John Paul II would speak on Edith Stein's behalf in memorial rites at Auschwitz.

Though demonstrably brilliant in her field, Edith Stein was turned down in her applications for a faculty position at the University of Breslau and at the University of Freiburg. She had given lectures worth reading today on the role of women in Christian life and education, but her applications were rejected not on that account, nor because she was herself a woman. In 1931, the Nazis were sufficiently powerful to promote the anti-Jewish prejudice they would officially escalate three years later upon taking full control of Germany. Even before the terrible Kristallnacht of November 9 and 10, 1938, Sister Teresa Benedicta knew that the Nazis would pursue her to the very end. She requested a papal audience in hopes of convincing Pius XI to issue an encyclical on behalf of the Jewish people in her homeland, but the request was refused, and all she got was a benediction for herself and her family. On the other hand, the danger of the Church's speaking out strongly against anti-Semitism was demonstrated when the Catholic bishops in Holland did just that; as a result, Edith, who had by then escaped to Echt, was rounded up with other Jews and eventually sent to Auschwitz, where she was gassed to death on August 9, 1942.