The Hope of Edith Stein

One reason Edith Stein continues to attract so many followers, indeed the reason she has attracted me to her teachings, is because she addressed issues of timeless importance—often in a fearless and prophetic way.

Both before and after her conversion, in 1922, and her decision to become a nun in the Carmeite order, in 1933, Stein wrote, lectured, and taught about faith and mysticism, Church-state controversies, the role of women, relations between the sexes, racism, discrimination, suffering, death and dying, morality, holiness, the liturgy and renewal in the Church.

Pick up any of her writings and it’s clear how they powerfully convey wisdom for any time!

There are three overarching themes in Stein’s life, and they lie at the heart of her enduring appeal.

The first is Stein’s absolute authenticity. As Stein recounts in her autobiography, Life In A Jewish Family, growing up as an inquisitive Jewish child in Breslau, Germany, (now Wroclaw, Poland) she encountered various stages of belief and unbelief and yearned for the truth about human existence, but she found it elusive—so much so that she often anguished about it and contemplated suicide several times. Stein’s struggles and longing for truth were always treated by her with honesty, passion, and great originality. When you read Edith Stein, you hear that authentic search for truth in her voice.

After Stein finally discovered truth in the Catholic Church, she embraced it in full, never looking back. She expressed her new beliefs movingly, and admirers continue to hear her ardent desire to speak that truth in love.

The second reason is Stein’s compassion for “the Other”—those individuals who have been marginalized and treated as outcasts. As a woman, a Jewish scholar, and a saint, Edith Stein was the quintessential ‘Other.’ A target of prejudice and hostility herself, Stein sought to forge bonds with those in similar situations.

Much like some of our religious leaders, who have exhorted us to protect people on the peripheries—prisoners and migrants, the disabled, poor and lonely—Stein always reached out to people who were isolated and suffering. Her doctoral dissertation, “On The Problem of Empathy” involved that very concern, and it was written after she spent time as a Red Cross volunteer, nursing those who had been maimed or stricken with contagious diseases during World War I.

Later, during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, she strongly defended the Jewish community, whom she always identified with, even after converting to Catholicism, and continued to do so after becoming a cloistered nun—at one point, she wrote an impassioned letter to Pope Pius XI on their behalf.

Had Edith Stein survived the Holocaust, she would have been the first to focus her attention on the six million Jews who had not, asking how humanity could have ever allowed such a catastrophe to happen.

One point made abundantly clear had the Powers that Be in the 1930s and ’40s been listening to Stein’s courageous messages about empathy, inclusion, love, and grace, there would have been no Holocaust, not to mention subsequent genocides and persecutions. Not to mention that we would now be living in a much more humane and caring world.

To illustrate this point, we can draw a sharp contrast between Stein and her contemporary philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger moved in a radically different direction than she and actually became a member of the Nazi Party. Stein, however, the mother of personalism, believed that each human being was unique, divinely given—unrepeatable. Heidegger, in contrast, misses the value of the person, of knowing the person, and of loving the person. Stein’s thinking aims at the Kingdom of God, wherein all persons thrive.

A further divide is that Heidegger placed anxiety at the center of human experience, and he believed it was the pathway to authenticity and existential value. On the other hand, Stein held that the natural attunement to the world was trust, the feeling of being held in a parent’s strong arms.

Edith Stein believed in the grandest of Christian narratives, whereas Heidegger became enveloped in an evil ideology, which deeply affected his personal life. In fact, when Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, he dismissed faculty who were not sufficiently Nazi. For Heidegger, an authentic being is leaning towards death. For Stein, an authentic being is a redeemed being leaning towards eternal life. Heidegger was a Nazi; Stein was exterminated by the Nazis. The moral and philosophical gulf between the two could not have been more profound.

The third reason for the growing interest in Edith Stein’s vision was her commitment to intellectual dialogue, especially with those outside the Catholic tradition. Stein was a forerunner of ecumenism, interfaith relations, and the culture of encounter actively promoted by the Church since Vatican II. But the future saint did not believe in dialogue for dialogue’s sake; she was clear in seeing it as an opportunity with people of differing views to sincerely seek truth—in hopes of finding common ground, even if they could not reach total agreement.

Stein’s confidence in this approach was not only inspired by her conversion but her life-long interest in phenomenology, a school of thought founded by Edmund Husserl (Stein’s academic director, and later, his first assistant), which employs a method that analyzes structures of consciousness and the objects of experience. Phenomenology sought to affirm objective truth and the existence of a knowable world in which we live, starting from the point of view of subjects who experience it.

Stein believed the best elements of phenomenology were compatible with Christianity and in harmony with the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and John Henry Newman, among other Catholic luminaries.

It is no surprise, then, that Stein, as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, has been held in high esteem by St. John Paul II–himself a student of phenomenology and a pupil of Roman Ingarden, one of Stein’s best friends—as well as Pope Benedict and Pope Francis.

Indeed, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsulte, on the call to holiness, Francis singles Stein out for special praise. Encouraging us to be “spurred on by the signs of holiness” in the “humblest members” of the Church, Francis commented:

“We should consider the fact that, as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross suggests, real history is made by so many of them. As she writes: ‘The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. But for the most part, the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible. Certainly, the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.”

Another highlight of Stein’s greatest insights is the redemptive value of human suffering.

In The Science of the Cross, Stein’s powerful study of St. John of the Cross, Stein teaches us that suffering need not be wasted. Although our culture discounts and disdains suffering, Stein provides a meaning for it on a supernatural level. Suffering is not to be salvaged by distraction or denial. Through suffering, we can share in Christ’s own life by imitating his magnanimity and trust. We can baptize the inevitable pains of human life as gifts from Our loving Father who wants us to grow Christ Himself.

Perhaps the other reason so many are drawn to Edith Stein is her very story, of how Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, ended her earthly life with martyrdom in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. And how, although her life might seem to have been a defeat, it is precisely in her martyrdom that the brightness of Love which dispels the gloom of selfishness and hatred shines forth.

Three years before her tragic end, Edith Stein, approaching some Sisters in the monastery of Echt, in the Netherlands, said to them: “I am ready for anything. Jesus is also here in our midst. Thus far I have been able to pray very well and I have said with all my heart: ‘Ave, Crux, spes unica.’”

Witnesses who managed to escape the terrible massacre recounted that while Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, dressed in the Carmelite habit, was making her way, consciously, toward death, she distinguished herself by her conduct full of peace; her had a serene attitude, calm behavior, and attentive to the needs of all. Prayer was the secret of this Saint, who, “Even after she found the truth in the peace of the contemplative life, she was to live to the full the mystery of the Cross.”

With Edith Stein, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, we enter a very different historical and cultural context. For she brings us to the heart of that tormented century and this one, pointing to the hopes that the times, then and now, stir, and the contradictions and failures that have disfigured it.

Edith was not from a Christian family. What we see in her is the anguish of the search and the struggle of an existential “pilgrimage.” Even after she found the truth in the peace of the contemplative life, she was to live to the full the mystery of the Cross.

It was with a listening attitude, formed early in her life, that she came face to face with the testimony of Christian spiritual experience given by Teresa of Avila and the other great mystics of whom she became a disciple and an imitator. On the other hand, she was equipped with the ancient tradition of Christian thought as consolidated in Thomistic philosophy. This path brought her first to baptism, and then it brought her to the choice of a contemplative life in the Carmelite Order. All this came about in the context of a rather turbulent personal journey, marked by inner searching and commitment to study and teaching, a project she engaged with admirable dedication. Particularly significant for her time was her struggle to promote the social status of women; what is profound are the pages in which she explores the values of womanhood and woman’s mission from the human and religious standpoint.

Stein’s encounter with Christianity did not lead her to reject her Jewish roots; it enabled her fully to rediscover them, but this did not mean that she was spared misunderstanding on the part of her family. It was especially her mother’s disapproval that caused her profound pain. Her entire journey towards Christian perfection was marked by human solidarity with her native people and by a true spiritual sharing in the vocation of the children of Abraham, or the mystery of God’s call and his “irrevocable gifts” (cf. Rom 11:29).

In particular, Stein made her own the suffering of the Jewish people, even as this reached its apex in the barbarous Nazi persecution which remains, together with other terrible instances of totalitarianism, one of the darkest and most shameful stains on the Europe of our century. At the time, she felt that the systematic extermination of the Jews and the Cross of Christ was being laid on her people, and she took personal part in it by her deportation and execution in the infamous camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her voice merged with the cry of all the victims of that appalling tragedy; she joined to the cry of Christ on the Cross, which gives to human suffering a mysterious and enduring fruitfulness. The image of her holiness remains forever linked to the tragedy of her violent death, alongside all those who with her suffered the same fate. And it remains as a proclamation of the Gospel of the Cross, which she identified herself by the very choice of her name in religion.

Today we look upon Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and, in her witness as an innocent victim, we recognize an imitation of Christ and a protest against every violation of the fundamental rights of the individual person. We also recognize in it the pledge of a renewed encounter between Jews and Christians which, needed as much now as ever, to courageously enter a renewed time of promise marked by openness on both sides.

I know that I will spend the rest of my days before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and at the same time a daughter of the Carmelite Order, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was one who united within her rich life a dramatic synthesis of our century. It was the synthesis of a history full of deep wounds that are still hurting … and also the synthesis of the full truth about us. And all this came together in a single heart that remained restless and unfulfilled until it finally found rest in God.

*

It is indeed wonderful to have Sarah Borden Sharkley’s Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being: A Companion. This is a clearly written, detailed, fine scholarly study of Edith Stein’s attempt in her later work, Finite and Eternal Being, to bring us closer to Stein’s consistent metaphysics of individuality, offering a modern version of what the medieval scholastic Duns Scotus had tried to do with his notion of haecceitas (literally: ‘thisness’).

Edith Stein maintained that human beings participate in the universal form of humanness and that each possesses an individual form which has its own distinct intelligibility. The two forms (universal and individual) are not co-present as independent parts but seamlessly unite to produce the single substantial form with its unique essence. Each person (e.g. Socrates) has an essence (what it is to be Socrates), and this is what Stein calls ‘individual form’ (individuelles Wesen).

Furthermore, Stein believes that the individual as such must be recognized as intelligible precisely as an individual, not just as a member of the species ‘human.’ This intelligibility of the individual goes against traditional views (from Aristotle through Aquinas), according to what is intelligible for humans is the universal.

To defend her view, a radical modification of the traditional Thomistic account (that places intelligibility in the formal and universal and individuation in the material) is required, and this is what Stein sets out to do in her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being (completed in 1936 but published posthumously in 1950). Indeed, Finite and Eternal Being is Stein’s most ambitious and difficult work, a sprawling ontological meditation on existence, essence and being. It was a reworking of her earlier Potency and Act, a work that she had proposed in 1930, leading to her second unsuccessful attempt to gain that German university teaching qualification.

Sarah Borden Sharkey’s new companion is primarily expository of Stein’s ontological discussions and succeeds very well in fleshing out and clarifying Stein’s notions of individual form, essential being, and whatness (quiddity), in relation to the more familiar accounts in Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus and others

This is careful exegesis. For example, Borden Sharkey is alert to all the terminological ambiguities and inconsistencies in Stein’s writing, providing a much welcome and helpful glossary of Stein’s technical terms. This is an especially key addition here, because, for example, Stein – in part following Husserl and Heidegger – uses several variants of ‘essence’ (Wesen), including Wesenwas, Wesenheit, Einzelwesen, individuelles Wesen, as well as speaking of ‘whatness’ (Washeit), and other terms (e.g. Selbstand, subsistence) to distinguish different dimensions of essentiality and quiddity. Stein, for instance, recognizes that to be an individual is itself a form. There is a substance of individuality – a common character individual things must necessarily have in order to be individuals. But aside from this formal substance, as it were, there is also the unique individual character of the individual – what makes it this particular and not just a particular. She struggles to articulate this insight especially in Finite and Eternal Being “‘The Meaning and Foundation of Individual Being,” which can be found in Chapter Eight.

Borden Sharkey critically engages with Stein’s attempts to articulate the form of the individual, section by section, subsection to subsection. In so doing, we are given access to Stein’s account of human individuality to be closer to Aquinas’ account of angelic individuality (whereby each angel instantiates its own type and there are different types of angels, as expressed in the angelic hierarchy) rather than to the Thomist position on human individuality. With this clear approach of ventilation, Borden Sharkey opens the text in ways that are often insurmountable, and Stein sees that to Aristotle and Aquinas, form is the principle of commonality (and intelligibility – since understanding is of the common or universal) and matter the principle of individuality. We are identical in terms of our humanness but differ in terms of our accidental qualities. This does not seem to safeguard the true individual identity of humans. Stein criticizes Aristotle and the medievals for making matter to be the principle of individuation. Matter does not have this power. Form is what individualizes. Humanity is a universal essence; all humans share by virtue of being human, but there must also be an individual essence like what makes each of us the unique person we are/ what gives each of us enduring identity.

As is well known, Stein, following a night reading St Teresa of Avila in the home of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, converted to Catholicism in January, 1922 (to leave aside completely her personal journey into the convent). It is wonderful to find an appendix devoted to Stein’s critical appraisal of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, which gives us a vital clue on exactly how Stein read the great work, with an eye to reckoning how each accounted for how the sense of soul. As Stein appreciates Avila’s overall description and approach to the soul, she sharply distinguishes two senses of “losing one’s way” in the world outside: one of which is non-problematic and the other quite problematic. “The first, non-problematic version is that of forgetting ourselves in an activity; this type of ‘self-forgetfulness’ is compatible with entering our interior. The second, on the other hand, involves problematic entanglements arising from sin and sinful desires which prevent us from making the inward turn.” (p. 219) And it’s a powerful distinction, as Borden Sharkey designates, because Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein have different purposes: Avila’s goal is purely religious, but Stein’s goal is intent on plumbing the depths and structures of the soul. Both do, though, seek freedom from worldly bondages, even to the point of severing the bond between soul and earthly body.

Most commentators on Stein over the years have sided either with Stein’s Husserlian or with her Thomist meditations, and a few like her attempts to develop a dialogue – even a synthesis – between these two figures. But, reading through the Companion, we can clearly see Stein was not a Thomist in the usual sense. She was not a participant in the then burgeoning Neo-Thomist movement in Europe, but she was deeply influenced by her contemporary, the German Jesuit theologian and Augustine scholar, Erich Przywara (1889-1972); he was a personal friend of Husserl’s and with whom Stein was in correspondence between 1925 and 1931. Przywara’s Analogia Entis (1932) was deeply influential for her Finite and Eternal Being, (where she records her debt to Przywara).

As Borden Sharkey notes, giving us a great look into the very origins of her great book, Stein was trained in phenomenology (and was Husserl’s assistant from 1916 to 1918), and she was particularly interested in the justification of the human sciences, especially psychology in its relation to the unique human individual.

Stein never left behind her phenomenology; she continued to discuss the manner in which it can relate to metaphysics or ontology in Finite and Eternal Being. Following Husserl and Scheler, Stein surely wanted to develop both a phenomenology and an ontology of the person as a unique individual and as a substance. In a certain sense, she was an existentialist who valued the unique and original in human existence, but she moved more in the direction of ontology. It was influenced both by her close association with the Munich realist school of phenomenologists, especially Hedwig Conrad-Martius, as well as with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew quite well from her time in Freiburg.

In her Author’s Preface (written in September 1936) to Finite and Eternal Being, she acknowledges the importance of Heidegger’s philosophy of existence as she found it in Being and Time, as well as Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ ontology. Indeed, Stein acknowledges certain ‘reminiscences’ of Heidegger in her own study. Stein commends Heidegger’s move to study Being itself and not just beings as such, but she disagrees with Heidegger’s location of the understanding of Being solely in relation to human projection. For Stein, metaphysics is concerned with beings as such and not with human beings alone. Heidegger, for her, has made the mistake of placing all his emphasis on the finite human Seinsverständnis whereas the understanding of Being cannot be a property of finitude. The finite needs to be measured against an infinite understanding. Stein herself follows Conrad-Martius in thinking that finite being implies infinite being.

Furthermore, Stein, in returning to Thomas, is not being an antiquarian. Under the influence of Husserl and Przywara, she wanted to develop an ontology that is sensitive to the complexity of human consciousness as, to put it in Heideggerian terms which she does not use, the site where being is revealed. In fact, Stein begins from the more Husserlian point of view, beginning with Descartes’ discovery of the ‘ego cogito’ as a recognition of the fact of one’s own existence as a conscious subject. In other words, all inquiry must begin from the life of ego. Stein’s certitude about her own existence is the most primordial, intimate, and immediate self-experience she can have.

For Stein this is consistent with Aristotle; since following Aristotle, she thinks of the living organism as the model for understanding substance. For her, the living human has a form which itself is living and progressive: the being of the form is life. There is no end to personal formation: the living being is never finished.

Form or essence, then, has to be conceived of as living, evolving, and developing, not as a static, constitutive principle, conceived of as a Platonic form or some kind of unfinished structure or blueprint that simply needs to be completed by matter.

Stein proposes to think of individual essence in an original and challenging manner. She distinguishes between the universal essence of soul (what anything must have in order to qualify as being a soul) and the specific nature or personal particularity of a soul (also called the soul’s essence. Personal essence can be changed radically (as in the case of genuine remorse). However, there must be a deep continuing identity. This is – and here the influence of St Teresa of Avila is evident – something like an interior ‘castle of the soul.’

Stein recognizes that most individuals never reach this depth of soul nor do they live ‘collected lives’ (inspired here by Heidegger). Yet, all spiritual teachings recognize the need to enter into this inner life and to recognize its depth. Stein’s meditations on individual being and personhood weave around these themes. Given this complex background, as well as the tragic manner in which Stein’s work was disrupted due to her persecution and death at the hands of the Nazis, it is difficult to form an overall sense of Stein’s project.

Borden Sharkey does an excellent job of parsing and articulating Stein’s basic intent to develop an account of human existence that recognized its common form (animal rationale) and the uniqueness of each individual, situated, historical existence as a person.

The person, moreover, is not just a mereological sum of parts but has a distinct individuality, identity, and wholeness (as well as a capacity to develop). Matter alone cannot account for this individuality. Borden Sharkey sees Stein’s account of the relation between individual and universal, influenced by Husserl’s accounts in Logical Investigations and in Ideas I. Individuals instantiate universals.

The Companion ends its journey on Chapter Eight, The Meaning and Foundation of Individual-Being, of Finite and Eternal Being, unpacking Stein’s explicit focus on the differing senses of the Body of Christ. We read how Stein believed that Christ incarnate brought to completion what was begin in Adam; that is,

Adam together with Eve were to be faithful and bring forth a race, which Stein thinks indicates that Adam did not (and could not) embody the fullness of humanity himself. The fullness could only be actualized in our entire race. There is thus a sense in which humans as a whole are the Body of Christ, with each member contributing their uniqueness.

Borden Sharkey’s book is a valuable contribution to this work of the later Stein. She shows great fluency in walking through Stein’s work and great affinity with her project to develop an ontology of individual personhood.

Furthermore, Borden Sharkey does not attempt to draw a sharp contrast between the earlier phenomenological Stein and the mature, Catholic metaphysician. She properly reveres Stein as an intensely sincere and deep thinker who sought to explore the uniqueness of the individual person and the depth of personal being drawing on diverse resources. She sought to do so by rethinking (unencumbered by the need to accurately reflect the history of philosophy) the categories of essence, form, matter, act, and potency inherited from the Neo-Aristotelian Scholastics and informed by the ontological considerations of Husserl, Conrad-Martius, Heidegger and others.

Borden Sharkey’s Companion in hand is a giant step in a very complex terrain, and you can yield much insight from it. Borden Sharkey’s Companion has made a significant contribution to this challenging and necessary book and has admirably amplified Edith Stein’s importance as an original philosopher of depth. We are indebted to Sarah Borden Sharkley for making smooth the path that leads to Stein.

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being A Companion
By Sarah Borden Sharkley
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 244pp

Print