Edith Stein

There are 17 chapters and an Index in Notre Dame University Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's 2006 intellectual biography, EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. Eight chapters concentrate on intensely, largely technically academic philosophy. If you are already familiar the thinking of Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), you will find some of these eight chapters covering familar ground. Six other mixed "philosophical" chapters may be new to most readers: especially, about the "phenomenological" approach to philosophy pioneered by Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). That was a fresh approach within German philosophy, critical of both Kant and the post-Kantian Idealism of Hegel and others. McIntyre's presentation of academic phenomenology is accurate and lucid. *** Only three chapters, in my judgment, are immediately intelligible to a person not already reasonably well read in modern philosophy: (1) Why Take an Interest in Edith Stein as a Philosopher?; (10) 1916- 1922: The Complexity of Stein's History and (16) Stein's Conversion. * * * Who was Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) and "Why Take an Interest in Edith Stein as a Philosopher?" She was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Silesia (then politically Prussian now Polish). Only her mother was devout among the entire Stein family, including eleven children, seven of whom survived beyond childhood). Edith was the youngest. Although Breslau, where Edith grew up (her father died when she was only two), had an important Jewish institution of higher learning, Edith's combined Stein-Courant families did not move in intellectual Jewish circles. Mildly rebellious, Edith stopped believing in her inherited religion as a young teenager. She did however for the rest of her mother's life accompany her to synagogue and pray alongside her. *** In 1922, after reading a life of Saint Teresa of Avila (whose grandfather was a converted Spanish Jew), Edith Stein was baptized Roman Catholic. Eleven years later, at age 42) she became a Carmelite nun. In August 1942, Stein and her older sister Rosa were taken by the Gestapo from their convent in the Netherlands and executed by gassing at Auschwitz one week later. In 1998 Edith Stein, whose name as a nun was Sister Teresa (or Teresia) Benedicta of the Cross, was declared a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II. He also proclaimed her one of the six principal Roman Catholic patron saints of all Europe. *** That personal life is why non-specialists in philosophy read about Edith's life in philosophy. For at the University of Breslau, after two years finding psychology unconvincing, she turned to philosophy. She then went to the University of Goettingen and studied the new "phenomenology" of Professor Edmund Husserl. She moved with him to the University of Freiburg, became his graduate assistant, and took her PhD summa cum laude in 1916 with a pioneering phenomenological dissertation on "Empathy." That dissertation along with all her major works in philosophy and her 500-page autobiography, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916, are now readily available in English. *** By the accounts of biographer MacIntyre and others, Edith Stein was a very gifted and in some ways original philosopher, especially when improving and applying Husserl's phenomenological method to problems of human interactions, friendships, family relationships and politics. During her eleven years as a Catholic laywoman before becoming a nun, Edith Stein had lectured extensively on women's equality with men and women's New Testament-attested (through Paul's praise of celibacy) right to lead fully professional lives in universities, the law, medicine and elsewhere -- rarities in her days in Germany. She also translated some of Cardinal John Henry Newman's letters into German and published them. She studied the medieval Catholic theologian-philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas and translated his essay "On Truth" from Latin into German ***By all accounts, Edith Stein was a loving Jewish daughter, sister and aunt. She nursed infectious diseases during World War I. She loved dancing and hiking. She had many friends at university, smoked but did not drink. She had even picked out her future mate (unnamed) among her university friends. She was very, very secular. *** She was also a philosopher in the life-changing mold of Socrates, Plato and Saint Augustine. Like them, her "love of wisdom" led her beyond sheer abstract thinking about tough problems. A surprising number of Husserl's students either became better Jews or Christians for their philosophizing. Or, like Edith, they became converted from Judaism and were then baptized Lutherans or Catholics. Yet, Edith concluded, for all its powers of observation of the thinking human being, phenomenology did not lead beyond itself to God. Something more was needed: in her case, the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Bible reading and the example of her friends. Her focus in religion was on Christ crucified. Later she developed a theology of combined Jewish-Christian atonement for the monstrous evils of such once baptized Christians as Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. *** My recommendation: read at least the three chapters I have flagged of EDITH STEIN: PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. They will give you a sense of how philophizing (even if the academic details are initially too technical for you) can in some cases radically transform a person's life and lead her to a "rebirth" as a profoundly religious person. If you already have some Plato or Hume or Kant under your belt, the entire intellectual biography of Saint Edith Stein will be an "open book" that you will read more than once. -OOO-