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Edith Stein

Edith Stein (October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942) was a German-Jewish philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. In 1922, she converted to Christianity, was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and was received into the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1934. She was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name) by Pope John Paul II in 1998; however, she is still often referred to, and churches named for her as, "Saint Edith Stein".

Life

Stein was born in Breslau (Wrocław), in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia, into an observant Jewish family. She was born on the date of October 12, 1891. She was a very gifted child who enjoyed learning. She greatly admired her mother's strong faith, however, by the time of her teenage years Stein had become an atheist.

In 1916, she received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Freiburg, with a dissertation under Husserl, "On The Problem of Empathy." She then became a member of the faculty in Freiburg. In the previous year she had worked with Martin Heidegger in editing Husserl's papers for publication, Heidegger being appointed similarly as a teaching assistant to Husserl at Freiburg in October 1916. She had her Dissertation in 1916 with Zum Problem der Einfühlung (About the Problem of Emphathy) and held a Ph.D. since, but as a woman was rejected with further habilitational studies at the University of Freiburg and failed to successfully reach in a habilitational study Psychische Kausalität (Psychic Causality) at the University of Göttingen in 1919.

While Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading of the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila on a holiday in Göttingen in 1921 that caused her conversion. Baptized on January 1, 1922, she gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer from 1922 to 1932. While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate (On Truth) into German and familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general and abandoned the phenomenology of her former teacher Husserl for Thomism. She visited Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, in the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl (like Stein, a Jewish convert to Christianity) on his 70th birthday. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933: the same year in which her former colleague Martin Heidegger became Rector at Freiburg and stated that "The Führer, and he alone, is the present and future law of Germany." In a letter to Pope Pius XI, she denounced the Nazi regime and asked the Pope to openly denounce the regime "to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name."

She entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Cologne in 1933 and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she wrote her metaphysical book "Endliches und ewiges Sein," which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.

To avoid the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred Stein to the Carmelite monastery at Echt in the Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft ("The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross").

However, Stein was not safe in the Netherlands—the Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism. In a retaliatory response on July 26, 1942, the Reichskomissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts, who had previously been spared. Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942.

Legacy

Stein was beatified as a martyr on May 1, 1987, in Cologne, Germany, by Pope John Paul II, and canonized by him on October 11, 1998, under the name Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.The miracle which was the basis for her canonization was the cure of a little girl who had swallowed a large amount of paracetamol which causes hepatic necrosis in small children. Immediately her relatives prayed to Edith Stein (intercessory prayer ). Shortly thereafter the nurses in the intensive care unit saw her sit up completely healthy. This girl as a teenager was present at the canonization ceremony in the Vatican.

Today, there is a school named in tribute to Stein in Darmstadt, Germany, as well as one in Hengelo, the Netherlands. The University of Tübingen has a women's dormitory named for her as well.

In 2008, her bust is to be introduced to the Walhalla temple in Regensburg.

Controversy

Some Jewish groups have challenged the beatification of Edith Stein. They point out that a martyr is, according to Catholic doctrine, someone who died for his or her religion; whether Stein was killed for her Jewish ethnicity, her faith, or both, is, for them, open to debate. The position of the Catholic Church in this matter is that Edith Stein also died because of the Dutch hierarchy's public condemnation of Nazi racism in 1942—in other words, that she died to uphold the moral position of the Church, and is thus a true martyr.

Writings

Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1986
On the Problem of Empathy, Translated by Waltraut Stein 1989
Essays on Woman, translated by Freda Mary Oben, 1996
The Hidden Life, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1993
The Science of the Cross, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1998
Knowledge and Faith
Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to an Ascent to the Meaning of Being
Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, 2000
An Investigation Concerning the State, translated by Marianne Sawicki, 2006
Heidegger's Existential Philosophy, translated by Mette Lebech, 2007
Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942
The Hidden Life