Matt C. Abbott
'Edith Stein: Seeker of Truth'
By Matt C. Abbott
Many thanks to Elizabeth Mitchell, Ph.D., director of development at Trinity Academy in Pewaukee, Wis., and ENDOW, "a Catholic educational program that brings women together to discover their God-given dignity and to understand their role in humanizing and transforming society," for providing me with, and granting me permission to print in this column, excerpts from Edith Stein: Seeker of Truth, an educational textbook authored by Dr. Mitchell.
(Footnotes and related references have been omitted, as have the discussion questions that are included throughout the textbook.)
Many thanks to Elizabeth Mitchell, Ph.D., director of development at Trinity Academy in Pewaukee, Wis., and ENDOW, "a Catholic educational program that brings women together to discover their God-given dignity and to understand their role in humanizing and transforming society," for providing me with, and granting me permission to print in this column, excerpts from Edith Stein: Seeker of Truth, an educational textbook authored by Dr. Mitchell.
(Footnotes and related references have been omitted, as have the discussion questions that are included throughout the textbook.)
By Elizabeth Mitchell, Ph.D.
(With the Collaboration of
Sr. Prudence Allen, R.S.M., Ph.D. and Terrence C. Wright, Ph.D.)
Introduction — Why Edith Stein?
Pope John Paul II on Stein
On a bright October morning in Rome, the faithful sat hushed in St. Peter's Square. His Holiness Pope John Paul II was about to pronounce the words of canonization for a remarkable witness to the faith: a modern saint, a convert from Judaism, a woman, and a martyr. She had been known in religious life as Sr. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, literally Teresa Blessed by the Cross. Making her mark in the secular world as Edith Stein, a brilliant German philosopher, teacher and lecturer, she had completed her years as a cloistered Carmelite with a heart consecrated to Christ Crucified. She died in the death camps of Birkenau-Auschwitz, a living witness to the Truth which had so defined her life's journey of faith.
As Pope John Paul II pronounced the words of canonization, on October 11, 1998, entering Stein into the list of saints in Heaven, he commented on her significance for the modern world, a world in search of the Truth:
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For a long time Edith Stein was a seeker. Her mind never tired of searching and her heart always yearned for hope. ... Eventually she was rewarded: she seized the truth. Or better: she was seized by it. Then she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ. From that moment on, the incarnate Word was her One and All. Looking back as a Carmelite on this period of her life, she wrote to a Benedictine nun: 'Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously'. ... This woman had to face the challenges of such a radically changing century as our own. Her experience is an example to us.
Seeker, Scholar, Saint
St. Edith Stein's appeal and significance lie primarily in her life's story, a story which we will come to appreciate through this ENDOW Study Guide as we journey through her life and thought. Throughout her life, Stein can best be recognized for her identity as a seeker of the Truth, a scholar of the highest caliber, and a saint and martyr who gave her life at the hands of her Nazi persecutors who put her to death "in odium fidei," in hatred of the faith.
As we walk with Stein through her life, we will see her constant search for absolute Truth, which she ultimately finds in Christ and His Gospel. She will turn away from her family's faith heritage of Judaism at a young age, proclaim herself an atheist, and search the annals of psychology and then philosophy for the answers she seeks. Her brilliant mind will be fed along the way by the best that German scholarship has to offer in the Phenomenological Movement of the early 20th century. Ultimately, she will encounter Christ through the believers who cross her path, and through the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, 16th century woman reformer of the Discalced Carmelites and a Doctor of the Church.
In finding the truth, Pope John Paul II pointed out at her canonization, she also found Love Himself:
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In our time, truth is often mistaken for the opinion of the majority. In addition, there is a widespread belief that one should use the truth even against love or vice versa. But truth and love need each other. St Teresa Benedicta is a witness to this. The 'martyr for love,' who gave her life for her friends, let no one surpass her in love. St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.
Model for Women: Universal Call to Holiness
So, why St. Edith Stein? Why this particular saint, at this particular time in history? The answer is that Stein's life speaks to many audiences. Her journey of faith, her own dark night of the soul in search of the truth, her heroic giving of her life for her beliefs, are a model for us all. She speaks to those victims of the modern malaise who believe there must be something more to life than the "me" culture which pervades our society. She speaks to converts, who seek ultimate Truth even at great personal cost, and who, as Stein put it, "in seeking the Truth, are seeking God, whether they realize it or not." She speaks to Catholic scholars who, like Pope John Paul II himself, understand Stein's legacy to be of particular significance for the Church in the 21st century. She speaks to members of the Jewish faith interested in the positive impact which Stein's witness and legacy can have upon Jewish Christian relations. Lastly, and most importantly for our ENDOW Study Guide audience, she speaks to advocates of the unique dignity and vocation of woman, interested in learning what Stein, a significant modern voice on the topic, has to offer through her own unique life story and her philosophy. Edith Stein is one of the most important Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century, partly because she was able to synthesize contemporary phenomenology with the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.. She also offers an original philosophy of woman's identity, which influenced Pope John Paul's teachings on the nature and dignity of woman.
As Stein's religious name, "blessed by the Cross," denotes, her journey of faith and love will also entail a heroic embrace of the Cross in suffering. Pope John Paul II notes:
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Faith and the Cross proved inseparable to her. Having matured in the school of the Cross, she found the roots to which the tree of her own life was attached. ... St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is offered to us today as a model to inspire us and a protectress to call upon. We give thanks to God for this gift. May the new saint be an example to us in our commitment to serve freedom, in our search for the truth. St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, pray for us!
Truth and the Self
As we have followed the story of the life of Edith Stein, we have become acquainted with her as a spirited and scholarly girl, and later, as a relentless seeker, a teacher and ultimately, a deeply faith-filled convert to Catholicism. In this chapter we will look closely at two sides of her nature: Stein, the philosopher and Stein, the lover of art and culture. As we will see, by opening herself to these two aspects of her nature — by reading, studying, and basking in the beauty of the arts she so loved, Edith Stein ascended to a higher place of understanding the God she so loved and desired to know.
At this point, we will step out of the chronology of her life events and revisit her work in philosophy as well as her love for the arts. After Stein was thoroughly schooled in the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, she was introduced, rather late in her career, to another philosopher/theologian named Thomas Aquinas. Saint Thomas, so revered by the Church Stein had come to love and be part of, was known for his scholarly mind and personal holiness. In the book that was his great life's work, the Summa Theologiae, he tackled the questions that Stein and her philosopher friends had grappled with — fundamental questions pertaining to the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and so on. Why St. Thomas and not one of the other great thinkers or doctors of the Church? It is because St. Thomas is the preeminent teacher to serious Catholic scholars. In humility, she undertook the study of Thomism because of the high place he occupies in Catholic thought and tradition. Through her study of phenomenology, Stein had already arrived at Thomas's view that there is a natural orientation of the human mind toward the objective reality that is truth.
As a convert to Catholicism, Stein often commented on her surprise at encountering the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas so late in her philosophical career. Throughout her life she continued to be interested in identifying both common ground and places of departure between the two schools of thought: the phenomenological and the Thomistic.
In 1937 Stein completed her major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, which she developed out of her earlier work, Potency and Act. Because of her Jewish heritage she could not find a publisher in Germany or Austria for the manuscript. It was finally published posthumously after the war in Germany in 1949. Stein describes Finite and Eternal Being as a book "by a beginner for beginners" as she attempts to explore "the meaning of being" through a "comparative elucidation of Thomistic and phenomenological thought." One of the most significant themes in this book is Stein's development of a theory of truth and its consequences for our understanding of ourselves.
In the early 1930's, Stein had translated St. Thomas Aquinas's De Veritate (On Truth) into German and his theory greatly influenced her own understanding of truth. We will focus on only a few aspects of her theory of truth. Like Thomas, Stein recognizes that the ultimate foundation of the truth is God, who is the source of all truth. For Aquinas and Stein truth must be understood as a type of correspondence between an idea and reality. For example, I know the truth about a tree when my idea of it corresponds to the real tree given in my experience. Stein calls this correspondence between the human mind and the reality it knows logical truth. For Stein, the tree itself can be said to be true to the extent that it corresponds to the form of tree in the mind of God, what Stein calls the essential truth of the thing. This is based on the idea of God as the exemplary cause of the world. An exemplary cause is the idea that a maker has which guides his acts as he makes something, like the way a gardener's decisions as she plants in May are guided by the idea she has of what she wants the garden to look like in June, July, and August. Catholic tradition teaches that in the divine wisdom there exists the exemplary form or archetype of all things prior to their being brought into existence. For example, there is a divine archetype of humanity which would include, among its possibilities, the essential aspects of human motherhood. A particular human mother may be described as "truly a mother," as possessing the essential qualities of a mother, to the extent to which her actions, emotions etc. correspond to God's idea of motherhood. This divine archetype is most perfectly realized in the Blessed Mother since in her life she most completely corresponded to the idea of motherhood. On the other hand, we might say that even though someone is a biological mother she fails as a true mother because she does not act in a way that corresponds to the divine idea. Similarly we may speak of someone as a true friend meaning that he or she possesses the qualities essential to friendship or speak of a man as a true priest because he conforms to God's idea of priesthood. One individual may possess qualities of several archetypes. For example, one can be a mother, a daughter, a leader etc., but the truth of each aspect is determined by the extent to which it corresponds to the divine archetype.
In Finite and Eternal Being, Stein develops an understanding of human form based on the notion that there are archetypes in God's mind to which we are called to correspond in order to be truly ourselves. In this work and later, Stein does not mention her previous claim that woman is a sub-species of the human species which we discussed in Chapter Four. Even though by omission Stein never referred in her later work to woman as a species, she also never refuted her previous decision to do so in her essays on woman. Therefore, she leaves it to the reader to draw out the implications of her new understanding of form for the concept of woman. First, let us look at her understanding of human form, and then we will see how that can shape our understanding of women.
We will focus on three distinctions she makes in her discussion of form: pure form, essential form and individual form. The pure form of a thing is the idea that God has of it, the divine archetype that we were just discussing. According to Stein: "Comprised and incorporated in the unity of the divine logos, the pure forms are primordial prototypes of all things in the divine mind, which places them into existence and which has inscribed in them their end-structure [i.e. their natural goals]" For Stein, each human being has an essential and an individual form, both of which are reflections of pure forms, the divine archetype. Each human being reflects the primordial prototype of human and this is his or her essential form. In other words, two human beings, Ben and Rachel, each have essential form and that essential form in each of them is a reflection of the same pure form or archetype in God's mind. Essential form is the basis of what is common to all human beings. The tradition maintains that we are only distinct from each other in terms of our physical bodies but Stein argues that we are also distinguished by our individual form. Beyond what physically distinguishes Rachel as a unique individual, her individual form distinguishes her as this particular human being who is tending towards the full realization of her pure form.
While the essential forms of Ben and Rachel reflect a single pure form or archetype in God's mind, their individual forms are reflections of two different pure forms: the pure form of Ben and the pure form of Rachel, each known by God in their individuality and called toward fulfillment as the particular human being they are. This may be one way of understanding the passage from Isaiah where God speaks of knowing us before we were formed in the womb. What God knows when he knows my individual form is my true self. But just as we can fall short in our approach to the different aspects of the human archetype (I could be a better friend, for example), it is also the case that we fall short of realizing our individual form. In this sense our individual form is not who we are but who we ought to be in order to be our true self. Those times when we feel dissatisfied with our lives might spring from the experience that the life we are leading is not the one we ought to be leading to realize our true self as God intended us to be. It is important to note that this individual form does not force me to do anything but rather God allows me to choose whether I will become the person I ought to be. God may call me or point me to my true self but it is still up to me to make the choice.
At this point one might say, "Okay, I can believe that I ought to become my true self through bringing my life in accord with God's idea of me. But how can I know what that God's idea of me is?" According to Stein, each of us has a "feeling" for or a perception of our true self which we seek to know. For Stein, this knowledge is pursued and obtained through both faith and reason. She says, "Reason and faith are both appeals of the soul, calling it to 'enter into its own self' and to mold human life from the innermost center."
Stein's understanding of this experience is strongly influenced by St. Teresa of Avila and she draws extensively upon Teresa's image of the soul as an "interior castle." According to Stein, "The 'I' inhabits this castle, and it may choose to reside in one of the outer chambers, or it may retire into that nearer and innermost abode." Self-knowledge is gained by venturing into our inner-most being, according to Stein, and this venture is a rational activity: "A conscious life of the soul in the depth of its interiority is, of course, possible only after the awakening of reason." Further, the individual must make a conscious choice to pursue this interiority in order to know the essential truth of herself. Individuals who choose to remain in the outer chambers of their being will only have a superficial understanding of that being. While the demands of daily life make it very easy for us to remain in these outer chambers, Stein maintains that true self knowledge resides in the interior chambers. As a phenomenologist, Stein describes our experience of being caught up in the superficial aspects of our existence; we are constantly bombarded with the world as promoted and prioritized by our popular culture. But for Stein it is necessary that we turn away from the merely surface aspects of our lives and turn our gaze inward to find our true self.
For Stein, this inward turn is experienced as a response to a call. But if I am called to this innermost region, who is it that is calling me? Obviously, we cannot call ourselves to this true knowledge of self because we simply lack this knowledge: if we already had it there would be no "call" to seek it. If Stein's theory of truth is correct, then the only one who has complete knowledge of the being I am intended to be, is my Creator. According to Stein, in order to attract the self to the depths of its being, the source of this call must transcend the self, and this requires a power supernatural and divine. For Stein, the call must come from God.
For Stein, the call [der Ruf] must be understood as vocation [der Beruf]. In an essay from 1931 entitled "The Vocation of Men and Women According to Nature and Grace," she says that the human vocation is twofold: the vocation to become truly human (to fully realize our essential form) and the vocation to become truly ourselves (to fully realize our individual form). Stein argues that it is God who calls us to this twofold realization. She writes:
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But the person's nature and his life's course are no gift or trick of chance, but — seen with the eyes of faith — the work of God. And thus, finally, it is God Himself who calls. It is He who calls each human being to that to which all humanity is called, it is He who calls each individual to that to which he or she is called personally . . .
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Human beings are called upon to live in their inmost region and to have themselves as much in hand as is possible only from that center-point; only from there can they rightly come to terms with the world. Only from there can they find the place in the world that has been intended for them.
She also points to the problem of those she identifies as "den Ich-menschen" ("the ego-persons"), people whose own "I" stands as the central point of their consciousness. Superficially such a person can appear to be grounded in her inner most region but if all she finds there is her own self, her own ego, the call is obstructed in a way that may be even more serious than the obstruction experienced by the person immersed in the material world. While this individual may appear to have herself completely in hand, her true depths and true self remain obscured because her true self, her pure form can be found only in God.
Since, for Stein, it is God who calls and draws us to enter into ourselves, coming to know one's true self is not only an activity of reason but also of faith. Prayer is one of the activities of this interior chamber of the soul, and it is through prayer that we can come to understand our true self as the person God wants us to be. For Stein, prayer is an act which simultaneously places us at the center of ourselves and in relation with the divine. Prayer is a response to a power beyond the self, a power strong enough to attract one away from the surface concerns of the external world and from our own egos. In this internal gaze, directed to God, one seeks to discern the will of God. Following St. Teresa of Avila, Stein maintains that this prayer is "silent dialogue with their Lord" which allows individuals to understand the will of God and what He is calling them to do. In her essay "The Prayer of the Church" (1936) Stein states: "We need hours for listening silently and allowing the Word of God to act on us until it moves us to bear fruit in an offering of praise and an offering of action."
This commitment to the interiority of prayer is reflected in Stein's own prayer life. Letters and biographical accounts reveal a women who spent long hours in solitary prayer. And she was strongly attracted to forms of spirituality which required hours of intensely focused contemplation and meditation. In a letter from 1928 she says: "The only essential is that one finds, first of all, a quiet corner in which one can communicate with God as though there were nothing else, and that must be done daily." While the primary purpose of such isolated contemplation is to encounter God and to discern His will, it is significant to note that for Stein an important point of this discernment is to carry the will of God into the world. According to Stein, in prayer we come to understand our own abilities and our obligation to act as God's instrument. This is how she understood her own intellectual abilities: "We are to see them [our abilities] as something used, not by us, but by God in us."
In prayer the individual attempts to discern what God intends her to be, to discern, in other words, our pure form. As we have noted, based on this understanding the individual must come to understand how she is to carry the will of God into the world. For Stein this understanding is not something achieved through an act of the human will but rather something made possible through the grace of God. She believes, "because the human soul by divine grace is drawn near to the divine being in an entirely new sense, the splendor which grace pours out over a human soul surpasses all purely natural brightness and harmony."
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