Edith Stein

German philosopher and theologian

• Born: October 12, 1891
• Birthplace: Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland)
• Died: August 9, 1942
• Place of death: Auschwitz, Poland

Stein, a disciple of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, became a leading proponent of his method of philosophy. Alongside her spiritual evolution from Judaism to atheism to Roman Catholicism, she tried, in her writings, to relate phenomenology to personalism, Thomism, the Catholic tradition on women, and the mystical theology of Saint John of the Cross. She was killed, along with her sister, by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942.

Early Life

On the Day of Atonement, the tenth day of the seventh month (Tishri) in the Jewish calendar, Edith Stein (stin) was born in Breslau. She was the youngest of eleven children, and Auguste Stein, her intelligent and devout mother, thanked the god of Israel in her synagogue for this sign of the special election of her last child. The Steins were merchants who had come to Breslau from Silesia in central Europe (now in southwestern Poland) when the family’s lumber business failed. Soon after he had settled in Breslau, Edith Stein’s father, who was only forty-eight, died of a stroke. Stein was only a year old, and her mother was left with the management of a debt-ridden lumber business and the care of seven children (four had died before Stein arrived).

With Auguste Stein’s energies absorbed by her duties as principal provider, Else, her eldest daughter, assisted with the children’s upbringing. Edith Stein was a gifted but high-strung young girl, difficult to control. She possessed an agile mind and an independent spirit, which she enjoyed exhibiting by reciting poems and making witty remarks. Around the age of seven, however, she isolated herself from her family, perhaps because they treated her as “Edith, the smart one.” This characterization hurt her feelings, since she recognized, even then, that being good was much more important than being smart. She did not reveal these emotional undercurrents of her interior world to her sisters or mother, and her great firmness of will allowed her to construct a placid temperament for the exterior world.

Stein’s formal education began at the Viktoriaschule (Victoria School) in Breslau, where, at her own insistence, she was admitted early. She quickly established herself as the best student in the class, a position she maintained throughout her schooling. She once said that she felt more at home in school than in her own family. In fact, in her need to nourish her hungry mind, she turned her home into a school by her voracious reading. Her academic success made it all the more shocking to her family when, at thirteen, she announced that she was leaving school. Unknown to her mother, Stein was passing through an adolescent religious crisis. Though remaining publicly observant, she no longer believed in God and had abandoned private prayer. The family attributed her change in personality to frail health, and she was sent to recuperate at the home of her sister Else in Hamburg (Else had married a doctor and already had three children).

After an eight-month hiatus, Stein returned to the Victoria School to recommence a college-preparatory program, for she had decided to become a teacher and dedicate herself to the discovery and communication of truth. In choosing teaching as a career, she was being faithful to the evolution of her personality as she experienced it in her thoughts, feelings, and abilities. Despite her youth, she manifested a remarkable insight into her own intellectual development and a daring independence from her family, religion, and society.

Life’s Work

Stein entered the University of Breslau in 1911, and not long after, she came into contact with phenomenology, the philosophy that was to dominate her intellectual life. Her path to phenomenology began when she attended lectures in psychology. She hoped to discover through this “science of the soul” the undergirding coherence of human existence, but the course, which emphasized experimental psychology, disappointed her because the teacher completely ignored the soul. Amid this disillusionment, she read Logische Untersuchungen (1900; logical investigations), by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology’s founder, and this experience revolutionized her thinking. While attending classes at the university, Stein lived at home, but her enthusiasm for phenomenology grew so keen that she soon expressed her strong desire to leave Breslau and to study with Husserl at the University of Göttingen. By this time her mother had become aware of her daughter’s apostasy from Judaic beliefs and her recent conversion to a modern philosophy, and she was deeply disappointed, but she did not prevent her daughter from transferring to Göttingen.

As one of the first women admitted to Göttingen, Stein stood out at the university, but she found a comfortable philosophical home with the phenomenologists. She had come to Husserl searching for truth, and he convinced her that phenomenology, when practiced rigorously, would lead to the truth. In her early days as a phenomenologist, Stein found that empathy was her key to the truth.

Although Stein became friendly with several Catholics at Göttingen, her main entré into Catholicism came through Max Scheler, one of Husserl’s Jewish students who would later convert to Catholicism. His lectures on religious philosophy, which were attended by Stein, made her an admirer of the spiritual beauty of Catholicism. She was sympathetic with Scheler’s attempt to rank values hierarchically, ascending from sensory through life to spiritual values. Scheler held that religious values make a person fully human, and the empathic heart of Stein responded to the message of Christianity, even though it led her to acknowledge her own spiritual poverty. Adolf Reinach, another phenomenologist who would later convert to Christianity, also helped her to start the internal transformation that would bring her to the Christian faith.

When World War I began in the summer of 1914, Stein, who had absorbed an intense patriotism from her family, felt a sense of duty to her country. She volunteered her services and was assigned to a hospital for infectious diseases in Austria, where she cared for soldiers suffering from typhus, dysentery, and cholera. After the hospital closed in 1915, she returned to Göttingen and resumed her doctoral studies. Building on her concrete wartime experiences, she was able to probe the subject of empathy more pointedly as a special kind of knowing involving the entire human person. Husserl was very impressed by her work and called her the best doctoral student he had ever had (which was high praise, indeed, since Martin Heidegger was also his student at the time). When Husserl was offered a professorship at the University of Freiburg in 1916, he asked Stein to come with him as his graduate assistant. During her first summer in Freiburg, she completed her dissertation, “The Problem of Empathy,” and after its successful defense, she was awarded her doctoral degree summa cum laude. She then became a member of Freiburg’s faculty and quickly gained a reputation as one of the university’s leading philosophers. Her main duties were to initiate new students into the strange world of phenomenology and to edit Husserl’s manuscripts.

At the end of 1917, Stein received the sad news that Reinach had been killed on the battlefield of Flanders, and, while attending his funeral, Stein was approached by Frau Reinach to put her husband’s papers in order. Stein discovered that many of Reinach’s writings were concerned with the person of Jesus Christ, and this caused her to read the New Testament. The experience of Frau Reinach’s faith at the funeral and of Jesus Christ’s message in the Gospels led her to abandon her atheism, and she began to wonder whether she would eventually convert to Lutheranism or Catholicism. Although intellectually convinced of God’s existence and the Incarnation, she nevertheless found herself unable to take the practical step of conversion.

On her return to Freiburg, Stein applied to the University of Göttingen, where she wanted to work on her Habilitationsschrift (a second dissertation that would qualify her as a university lecturer), but, despite a laudatory recommendation from Husserl, Göttingen’s reluctance to hire a woman professor proved to be unconquerable. Thus, in 1919, Stein returned to Breslau, where she gave lessons and continued her philosophical research. A turning point in her life occurred during the summer of 1921, when she was visiting friends at Bergzabern in southeastern Germany. She happened to pick up the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila, which so fascinated her that she continued reading it all night. On completing it in the morning, she had an overwhelming sense that the Catholic Christianity that guided Teresa was the truth for which she had been searching. She immediately bought a catechism and went to her first Mass. She wanted to be baptized, but the local priest informed her that a preparation period was required. She returned to Breslau and continued her teaching and research, but she returned to Bergzabern to be baptized on January 1, 1922. Prior to her conversion to Catholicism, she had always assumed that she would eventually marry, but with faith had come a call to consecrate herself to God as a nun. Realizing that her mother would have serious problems accepting her conversion, she postponed her entrance into the religious life. She continued to attend synagogue services with her mother, who was surprised that the Psalms in her daughter’s breviary were the same as the Jewish Psalms.

Having abandoned her past plans for an academic career, Stein accepted a position as a German teacher at a girls’ school run by Dominican sisters at Speyer in the Rhineland. Her life became a blend of teaching and prayer, and she enjoyed sharing the life of a religious community. Though not a Dominican, she lived as one, refusing to accept any salary beyond what she needed for room, board, and clothing. In 1925, Erich Przywara, a Jesuit priest and philosopher, encouraged her to resume her research, and she began to translate from Latin into German a treatise by Saint Thomas Aquinas on truth. Through Aquinas, she became familiar with Scholasticism, a philosophical approach developed in the Middle Ages to help Christians obtain a deeper understanding of revealed truth. Przywara and Aquinas helped her realize that God could be served through scholarship. Aquinas, like Teresa of Ávila, effectively communicated his personal experience of God in his writings, and his example facilitated Stein’s own spiritual development through her writings on phenomenology and Aquinas.

Stein’s philosophical writings and translations attracted the attention of many groups, especially associations of Catholic women, and she received numerous invitations to speak on women’s issues in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. So popular did she become as a lecturer that Przywara set up periodic tours for her. Stein’s success as a lecturer convinced her that she had outgrown the small school at Speyer, which she left in March, 1931, to devote herself to the writing of her Habilitationsschrift on phenomenology and Scholasticism. Unable, because of male chauvinism and anti-Semitism, to obtain a position at Freiburg or Breslau, she became, in 1932, a lecturer at the Educational Institute in Münster. Before moving there, she again investigated the possibility of entering a contemplative religious order, but her spiritual advisers counseled her that she could best serve the Catholic Church as a teacher and lecturer. Yet after a decade’s hiatus from university work and secular life, she found it difficult to reroot herself into a modern world that increasingly horrified her. She witnessed Jews being attacked, and she worried about her family in Breslau. She was a vehement opponent of Nazism, and when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, she, like many others of Jewish descent, lost her position.

Anti-Semitic persecution contributed to Stein’s realization of her unique vocation the reconciliation of Judaism and Christianity. She began writing Aus dem Leben einer Jüdischen Familie (1965; Life in a Jewish Family , 1986), in which she tried to show young Germans that Jewish families shared the same joys and frustrations in their daily lives as their Christian neighbors. She finally decided that the time had come for her to carry out her long-held wish to enter the Carmelite Order. After applying to the convent in Cologne, she worried that, at age forty-two, she might be judged too old, but the sisters were impressed with her, and the notification of her acceptance came in June, 1933. She finally faced the soul-shattering task of telling her mother that she would be leaving her forever for a life that she knew her mother would never understand.

Many friends and relatives predicted that Stein would become discontented in a cloistered life with nuns of constricted intellectual interests, but she adjusted surprisingly quickly to her new environment. She found the Carmel community full of solicitous love, and, although her fellow novices were much younger than she was, she was stimulated by their sense of spiritual adventure. Stein took Teresa Benedicta a Cruce as her religious name to express her gratitude for the spiritual patronage of Saint Benedict and Saint Teresa of Ávila and also to reflect her special devotion to the Passion of Christ.

At the request of her superiors, Stein returned to her philosophical research and writing. Most of her efforts centered on her synthesis of the major ideas of Husserl and Aquinas in a study begun several years before and now called Endliches und ewiges Sein (1950; finite and eternal being). Her religious experiences had changed her, however, and she no longer shared the aversion of most phenomenologists to metaphysical assertions. Consequently, she incorporated theological truths into her discussions without supporting Phenomenological analysis. Despite problems of lack of an adequate library and of opportunities to consult with other philosophers, she completed her account in the summer of 1936. While awaiting news from a German publisher, she learned that her mother had died, unreconciled to her daughter’s vocation, on September 14, 1936, the Feast of the Holy Cross. More bad news arrived soon after, when she was told that anti-Jewish laws prevented the publication of her book.

In the winter following her mother’s death, Stein’s spirits revived on hearing that her sister Rosa had entered the Catholic Church, but the situation in Europe was so distressful that her happiness was short-lived. She saw the sufferings of the Carmelites in Spain during the Civil War as a harbinger of what the German Carmelites could expect. These upheavals made her eager to pronounce her solemn vows as quickly as possible. On November 8, the so-called Kristallnacht occurred, when many windows of synagogues and Jewish businesses were smashed and many Jews were beaten. Stein was aghast at the abyss of sinfulness revealed by these attacks on her fellow Jews. Many of her relatives applied to emigrate to America, and some of them were fortunate enough to escape, but others had their applications turned down. Stein herself, who had explored the possibility of emigrating to a Carmelite convent in Palestine, left Cologne on December 31, 1938, for the Carmelite convent in Echt in the Netherlands. Leaving the Cologne Carmel was difficult, since she felt so much a part of the community, but she knew that her presence there would endanger her fellow nuns. She had no illusion that she was escaping to safety, however, for in a final testament that she wrote in 1939 she stated her acceptance of the death that she believed God was preparing for her.

In 1940, Stein’s sister Rosa, fleeing from the Nazis, joined her in Echt, where she became porter at the convent. Their joy of reunion soon turned to anxiety when the Nazis overran the Netherlands. Stein and Rosa again faced the threat of anti-Semitic persecution. Under the constant danger of being taken from her convent, Stein tried to continue with her life. A new superior assigned her to teach the postulants Latin, and Stein began instructing Rosa in the basics of the Carmelite life. Stein’s superior also asked her to write a book on Saint John of the Cross, the great Carmelite mystic, in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. She devoted much time and thought to Kreuzewissenschaft: Studie über Joannes a Cruce (1950; The Science of the Cross: A Study of Saint John of the Cross , 1960), a phenomenological study of the saint’s life and work.

During the summer of 1942, the Nazis began to deport Jews from the Netherlands. Throughout 1942, Stein had been desperately trying to get a Swiss visa to transfer to a Carmelite convent in Switzerland, but she was unable to make arrangements for her sister, and she refused to go without her. In July, as the deportations increased, the situation of the Stein sisters grew more critical. On August 2, Gestapo officials came to the Carmel cloister of Echt and arrested Edith and Rosa Stein. From Echt, the sisters were driven to local police headquarters for questioning and then taken to a concentration camp at Amersfoort, several miles northeast of Utrecht. While at Amersfoort, Stein gathered with other religious people to pray and to care for the sick. She was soon transported with twelve hundred fellow Jews to Westerbork, the central detention camp in the north of the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the efforts of the Carmelites at Echt and Catholic officials to obtain permission for Stein and Rosa to emigrate to Switzerland proved fruitless. By August 7, Stein and her sister were deported to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Stein’s long-nourished sense that she would be asked to sacrifice her life intensified during these last days. Despite her fear, she approached death with serenity and in the spirit of atonement. Not much is known of her final hours, except that she was probably killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber on August 9, 1942, along with her sister and hundreds of other Jews. Her body, like the others, was initially thrown into a mass grave, but later in the year, to obliterate evidence of their crimes, the Nazis exhumed and cremated the remains.

Stein was beatified by Pope John Paul II at a ceremony in Cologne on May 1, 1987. She was proclaimed a martyr for her Catholic faith, an action that deeply disturbed those Jews who considered her an apostate as well as others who were convinced that she was murdered because she was Jewish and not out of hatred for her Catholic faith. The pope, who was an admirer of phenomenology and of Stein’s personalism, wanted to make her a modern saint, but he also wanted to soothe bruised Jewish feelings. He emphasized that she had shared the fate of the Jewish people.

Significance

Stein’s life was an intellectual and spiritual odyssey toward the truth. Highly intelligent and sensitive, she first became thoroughly familiar with scientific truth, but she soon discovered that this truth did not deserve her absolute devotion. Furthermore, it did not coincide with her experience of truth incarnated in persons. She once compared philosophy to a walk along the edge of an abyss, and she saw her philosophical and spiritual commitments as matters of life and death. Although she always maintained a scholar’s appreciation for the value of scientific and philosophical findings, she increasingly centered her quest on spiritual truth, even when this cost her dearly. She identified herself with Jesus Christ, a deeply spiritual Jew, and she became a prayerful woman some say a mystic who continued to be an active and influential philosopher.

In the period following World War II, Stein’s importance as a phenomenologist was overshadowed by the circumstances of her death. Many of the German Catholic women’s organizations for whom she once lectured made her martyrdom into a symbol of Christian solidarity with Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Some Catholic scholars thought that her lack of theological training weakened the import of her writings, and to secular philosophers, many of whom had moved away from the phenomenological approach to a concern with language analysis, her attempt to link phenomenology and a philosophy of being seemed to be religious apologetics, with little to say to the modern world. Stein, who believed that she was living in a spiritually impoverished age, would have understood this neglect of her ideas. More recently, some scholars have begun to see her importance in the light of her work rather than in terms of her death. In this reevaluation, she emerges as a superb scholar and translator as well as a woman of penetrating moral acumen.

Bibliography

Borden, Sarah. Edith Stein. New York: Continuum, 2003. Overview of Stein’s life and philosophy, including her ideas about phenomenology, her political writings and studies about women and women’s education, and her spiritual and religious texts.

Calcagno, Antonio. The Philosophy of Edith Stein. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2007. Analyzes a range of Stein’s writings, from her early work in phenomenology to her later ideas about medieval Christianity, to explain her philosophy and its development.

Graef, Hilda C. The Scholar and the Cross: The Life and Work of Edith Stein. Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1955. Graef, a British writer, based her account of Stein’s life on a German biography written by the female prior of the Cologne Carmel and on new material gathered from several sources, including collections of manuscripts at Louvain and the personal reminiscences of Stein’s friends and colleagues. The biography is strongest on the period after Stein’s conversion to Catholicism.

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1985. Herbstrith, a Carmelite nun who knew Stein, presents an affectionate portrait of her as a Jew, a phenomenologist, and a Carmelite. She intersperses her largely chronological account with ample quotations from Stein’s letters and writings as well as with analyses of her philosophy, theology, and interior development. The book contains notes to primary and secondary sources, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Nota, John H. “Misunderstanding and Insight About Edith Stein’s Philosophy.” Human Studies 10 (1987): 205-212. Attempts to correct a widespread misunderstanding about Stein’s use of phenomenology after she became a Catholic (several philosophers have remarked that she was lost to the phenomenological movement after her conversion). The author’s thesis is that Stein remained faithful to phenomenology throughout her life and that her Catholicism made her a better phenomenologist than she had been before her conversion.

Oben, Freda Mary. Edith Stein: Scholar, Feminist, Saint. New York: Alba House, 1988. Oben, like Stein, is a convert from Judaism to Catholicism. Her biography, the first written since Stein was beatified by John Paul II in 1987, seeks to answer the question of why Stein is more famous now than during her lifetime. Oben’s work gives a balanced treatment of Stein as a Jew, philosopher, Catholic convert, educator, feminist, Carmelite nun, and martyr.

Posselt, Teresia Renata de Spiritu Sancto. Edith Stein. Translated by Cecily Hastings and Donald Nicholl. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1952. During the years after World War II, Teresia Renata, the prior of the Carmelite convent in Cologne, collected the biographical data then available about Stein. She published this biography mostly a collection of reminiscences and testimonies in Nürnberg in 1948.