By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
Edith Stein: The Life and Legacy of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, by Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, NH, 2017), 221 pp.; paperback $15.95. Available from www.SophiaInstitute.com or 1-800-888-9344.
An engaging, comprehensive introduction to the life, writings, thought, and martyrdom of a Jewish convert to the Catholic faith beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998 by St. Pope John Paul II, this book provides ample information from many sources about a heroic saint who died in 1942 at Auschwitz with other Jewish victims slaughtered by Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies in his “Final Solution.” A gifted scholar who completed a Ph.D. in philosophy and specialized in phenomenology under the tutelage of Edmund Husserl at the University of Gottingen, Stein pursued an academic life of teaching and writing.
Her love of wisdom that inspired her passion for truth led her by chance to discover a book that changed the entire direction of her life from Jewish intellectual, teacher, and author to a Carmelite nun.
Vacationing with colleagues at the home of friends in 1921, she noticed the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Reading the entire book in one day, she felt profound conviction and absolute certitude: “This is the truth!” In addition to the truth known to human reason Stein pursued as a student of philosophy, she encountered the nature of truth that awakens love in the heart. As Carmelite Sr. Maria Neyer wrote, “Now in Teresa of Avila she was filled with the truth of love that is not knowledge, but relationship” — the relationships of love, intimacy, and friendship known as “connatural” knowledge that unite hearts and souls.
In a letter to a nun, Stein wrote, “Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously” — a prophetic statement that eventually led the seeker of truth to the heart of God’s love in the Catholic Church.
As a student of philosophy at Gottingen under the influence of famous phenomenologists Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl, Stein studied under intellectuals deeply imbued with a spiritual life and enjoyed the freedom to think “unencumbered by the conditioning of home and family” and to be unhindered by “narrow preconceptions” in order to examine the fullness of truth with objectivity and impartiality.
As she explains, the mentors encouraged their students “to observe all things without prejudice, to discard all possible ‘blinders’.”
In this intellectual atmosphere of gifted minds searching for wisdom and pursuing spiritual lives, many conversions to Catholicism followed. Stein recalls two incidents that introduced her to Catholic spirituality. First, as she beheld the grieving widow of her teacher Adolf Reinach who died in World War I, Stein witnessed a woman at peace who carried her cross with Christian fortitude: “It was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power that it bestows on those who carry it.” The widow who was not destroyed by the agony of death illuminated for Stein “the mystery of the Cross” — the meaning of redemptive suffering. Stein explained that this incident motivated her conversion to Christianity.
Stein also cites an episode in which she was a tourist in Frankfurt visiting one of the old cathedrals. when a woman busy shopping entered the church and began praying in the most natural way “as though she were having an intimate conversation. I could never forget that” — a sight she never witnessed in any Protestant church or synagogue. These seeds of faith and the exemplary Christian lives of her teachers gradually moved Stein to enter the Catholic Church “despite her realization that it might cost her the love and understanding of her family and friends.”
Stein’s sister Erna wrote that “this decision of Edith was the most severe blow for Mother, for she was a truly devout Jewess” — a decision the mother condemned as an act of disloyalty.
Although Stein was baptized a Catholic in 1922, out of respect for her mother’s Jewish sensibility and in deference to the advice of her spiritual director, she deferred her religious vocation and pursued a career in teaching until 1933 when she entered the Carmelite order — a decision which caused great anguish for her family. In her own words, “all tranquility had vanished. A cloud lay upon the whole household.”
In a poignant final farewell to her mother who “covered her face with her hands and began to weep, I stood behind her silvery hair and held her head to my breast.”
Stein’s mother found it incomprehensible that her beloved daughter would sacrifice her Jewish faith and heritage to embrace the religion of a Christian nation under Hitler’s regime that was persecuting the Jewish people. Despite all the efforts of family members to dissuade Stein from becoming a Carmelite, she followed her heart and conscience: “I had to take that step in the complete darkness of faith.” As she wrote in a poem to God the day her sister Rosa entered the Catholic Church, “Ah, no one’s heart can fathom, / What You’ve in store for those who love You.”
Always identifying with Christ’s and the Holy Mother’s life of redemptive suffering and honoring the lovers of the cross as God’s allies, the Carmelite who professed the name of St. Benedicta of the Cross observed: “Of course one cannot wish for a deliverance from the Cross when one bears the noble title ‘of the Cross’.”
Stein explains that the suffering a soul offers to God “truly unites one to the Lord intimately,” and she regards her own vocation as an imitation of the Holy Mother’s role at the foot of the cross, companions who “Must purchase heavenly glory for those souls / Whom God’s own Son entrusted to their care.”
She also expressed her religious vocation and commitment to the cross as the surrender of love: “Whoever surrenders unconditionally to the Lord will be chosen by him as an instrument for building his kingdom.” The nuptial union of the soul with God, she wrote, is purchased, perfected, and sealed with the cross.
The events of Hitler’s rise to power soon precipitated his anti-Semitic persecution to eliminate the eleven million Jews in German-occupied countries. His genocidal policy reached the Netherlands where Stein was living at a Carmelite monastery. Because the Dutch bishops in a pastoral letter read in every church openly condemned the Nazi deportation and execution of the Jews and demanded that the German army cease persecutions in their country, Hitler took vengeance and ordered that all Catholic Jews also suffer the same fate — the political turn of events that led to Stein’s death at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.
Great Human Interest
The final chapters of the book examine the legacy of this modern saint by reflecting on the nature of her moral choices. She embraced the Catholic faith by suffering criticism and rejection from her family for renouncing her Jewish heritage. She chose to enter a Carmelite monastery instead of seeking escape and asylum during Hitler’s rise to power. She chose to follow the First Commandment and love God with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength rather than pursue a worldly career or academic distinction. She embraced a life in complete imitation of Christ, writing: “One who belongs to Christ must experience the whole life of Christ and must enter upon the way of the cross, to Gethsemane and Golgotha.”
Stein’s legacy also includes the many writings that reveal the sensitive heart of a woman who admired in St. Teresa of Avila the virtue of “the infinite love of a heart tender as a bride’s and kind as a mother’s.” This shaped Stein’s own Christian sensibility. For in her personal letters Stein confesses to this indissoluble union of love as central to her life — “an unshakable bond with all whom life brings in my way, a bond in no way dependent on day-to-day-contact.” In another letter she admits that “forgetting has never been my thing where human relations are concerned” and reassures her correspondents that she is always interested in anything they have to say about themselves.
Her written work on the vocation of womanhood provides great spiritual wisdom that addresses the ideology of radical feminism. Acknowledging that both men and women share many qualities common to their human nature, she then distinguishes between the masculine and feminine ways of being human. Because woman by nature “is destined to be wife and mother,” she is endowed with “a differing type of soul” — one that is most personal, nurturing, and caring: “Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole,” and, “Abstraction in every sense is alien to the feminine nature.”
In these Essays on Woman she defends the right of women to pursue professional careers and other vocations besides marriage and family, always insisting that “the same spiritual attitude which the wife and mother need” can spread and extend itself to all professions and society at large by its special human touch that rescues a person from the “danger of becoming mechanized and losing his humanity.” While Stein recognizes woman’s nature as “designed to be subordinate to man in obedience and support,” she also identifies it with a source of great strength, “a shelter in which other souls may unfold.”
This feminine gift or spiritual maternity, Stein argues, is for all of humanity: “The soul of woman must therefore be expansive and open to all human beings.” Wherever woman finds her place or her vocation “she must be the handmaid of the Lord everywhere” in all circumstances as the example of the Holy Mother illustrates whether at Bethlehem, Nazareth, or Jerusalem.
This rich, moving biography of Edith Stein’s saintly life is a story of great human interest. As it presents her in all the personal dimensions of her life from a child in a large Jewish family to a gifted student and teacher of philosophy to a Catholic convert to a Carmelite nun to a saint, it also reveals the great turning points, the hand of divine Providence, and the mysterious hiddenness and palpable nearness of God that are present in every person’s life.
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