Happy St. Edith Stein Day!
As you may or may not know, I did my doctoral dissertation on Edith Stein, and so feel a duty to blog about her today. Most people know something about her life, but I will summarize. She was born and raised a Jew in 1891, and by her teenage years had decided that God did not exist. A brilliant girl, she decided to go to college to study psychology, but she became disgusted with the lack of scientific rigor in that science. (A problem that remains today: As Walker Percy points out, every method of psychotherapy works about as well or as poorly as every other one. And a recent study showed that Prozac works almost as well in curing depression as sugar pills.) Edith read a book called Logical Investigations by Edmund Husserl, and decided that she needed to study philosophy. Husserl was the founder of a major philosophical school of thought known as phenomenology.
The motto of phenomenology is "Back to the things themselves!" Philosophers had been too much cut off from the genuine and primary experiences of reality, according to Husserl. Sciences were developing that had no original founding insights, like psychology, or that were unclear as to what these insights were, like mathematics. Husserl thought that all science could be grounded and clarified by a careful, rigorous inventory and description of the content of human consciousness. For example, a scientist might say that we see by means of light waves bouncing off an object into the eye, where they form an image on the retina that is interpreted by the brain. A phenomenologist will say that we see by means of the immediate presentation of an object. We don't interpret light waves, we see objects. The light wave explanation is certainly true, but it is not what we do, it is only the material condition for what we do. We see things!
Stein studied under Husserl, following him from Gottingen to Freiburg (a beautiful town, by the way) and working as his first graduate assistant (a post later held by a guy named Martin Heidegger). She graduated summa cum laude, and published some very good phenomenological works on empathy (quoted by Scheler) and on the relationship of psychology and the humanities, as well as the phenomenology of the state.
She had a dear friend named Adolf Reinach, a philosopher of note himself, who died in the trenches in World War I. Stein went to visit his widow in order to gather his papers for posthumous publication, and she dreaded the visit. Edith thought that it would be horrible to be around a grieving widow. But amazingly, Frau Reinach was peaceful, almost cheerful. She was a Christian (later Catholic) and had faith in the resurrection. The death of her husband was not the end, and she was peaceful. This gave Edith for thought, and while visiting a friend's house she cae across St. Teresa of Avila's autobiography. She stayed up all night reading, finished the book, and said "This is truth." Shortly after this she became a Catholic.
I have named Edith Stein the patron saint of philosophy Ph.D.'s seeking jobs, because despite having her doctorate with highest honors from Edmund Husserl, she never got an academic position, and taught high school until she entered the Carmelites. Being Jewish and a woman in Germany made it very difficult. But she continued to write. She did a German translation of Newman's letters, translated Aquinas' De Veritate into German (quoted by Karl Rahner), and continued to write and think, especially about the problem of the meaning of being.
Her final major philosophical work was Endliches und ewiges Sein, or Finite and Eternal Being, a large and difficult book that is an attempt to ascend to the meaning of being. It is noteworthy because it is a phenomenological and Thomist ascent. Stein uses all of the tools at her disposal, from Husserl and Hering to Aquinas, Aristotle, and Augustine, in order to get closer and closer to an understanding of what it means to be. She begins with the being of consciousness itself, and shows how this consciousness is contingent and dependent on sources outside itself for both its being and the meaning that fills it. She then gives a detailed analysis of how meanings can be reduced to basic units of meaning. So the first Being is seen as both the source of being and meaning, which finally leads her to conclude that the first Being must be not only the Prime Mover or the Demiurge, but is rather a Person. Since Being itself (God) is a person, we have a basis for understanding God: persons can be asked about themselves. So the second half of the book examines the relationship of the divine person to human persons, which turns out to be an intimate indwelling in the core of each human being.
But, as I said, this is a difficult book. If you want to more you could look up my dissertation, "Faith and Reason in the Philosophy of Edith Stein."
Edith Stein and her sister Rosa (who had converted as well) fled Germany to a Carmel in Echt in Holland to avoid the Nazis. In an episode that should give pause to the many modern critics of Pope Pius XII, the bishops of Holland issued a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of Jews. In retaliation, the Nazis rounded up all of the religious in Holland of Jewish origin and sent them to Auschwitz. Stein and her sister were arrested and taken from their convent, and were murdered on or around August 9, 1942. From the little we know of the last days of her life, it is apparent that Edith showed heroic compassion in comforting and caring for her fellow passengers, much as did another saint of Auschwitz, Maximilian Kolbe.
Pope John Paul II canonized her in 1998, and she is now St. Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (her religious name). Pray for us!
(Unfortunately, few of her philosophical works have been translated, but her spiritual writings and her work on the nature of women are well worth reading, and are available here. In fact, I made use of her thought in my blog on the ordination of women.
