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Theology of the Heart- the Saints |
Edith
Stein and the science of the cross
By Freda Mary Oben
We can
picture a little German Jewess of the 1890s, sitting with her mother
in a synagogue, formally dressed in black as they attended the
Sabbath service. It is our Edith Stein, or little "Yitschel" as she
was then called. Perhaps, she is listening to the words of the
prophets or the psalmist as they admonish the faithful to be led by
the holy spirit of God, to do good and avoid evil. Edith tells us
that, even when she was growing up and had become somewhat skeptical
about religious matters, she knew that it was more important to be
good than to be smart. But in her teens, she fell away from the
Jewish faith, and when she was in high school her wit was apt to be
very caustic at times; the best that could be said for her critical
way is that she could be "deliciously malicious."
At college,
she found Christ, and after five years of hesitating as to what
church to join, she became a Catholic, accepting him absolutely
without reservation. Immediately she wanted to be a nun, but her
spiritual director advised against that because, as a well-known
philosopher, she was too valuable as a laywoman. She turned inward
towards changing herself. Undergoing a real conversion, her entire
personality changed. Instead of telling people off in that
"delicious, malicious manner, " she developed a spirituality which
bade her look inwards. In a full attempt to imitate Christ, she
became a holy woman. In fact, her definition of a holy person is to
become "an other Christ." But, she writes, this invitation to
holiness is for everyone, and it is a person’s primary vocation.
Because she
had turned to teaching young Catholic women and nuns, she analyzed
not only woman’s nature but also the man’s, and the differences
between them. Also, she applied her training under the master
philosopher Edmund Husserl and her study of St. Thomas Aquinas and
came up with answers pertaining to the constitution of the person.
What makes a person? How is a person formed to best advantage
according to the purpose of our Creator? What makes for personal
happiness?
She writes
that God has actually simplified this whole problem: He has created
each human being as an image of himself. There is a seed within each
of us pushing blindly towards fulfillment of this goal for which we
are created. We can think of the plant which reaches constantly for
sun, air and water, which will flower to its own perfection. We, too
have instilled that awaiting perfection = holiness = as a unique
image of God.
Edith Stein is
considered one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth
century, even by our Holy Father who, like her, is the product of
both phenomenology and scholasticism. One of the reasons he lauds
her is that Stein exemplifies the journey taken by a modern day
scientific agnostic into the world of faith: She describes herself
as once guilty of the radical sin of disbelief, for, she tells us,
at the age of fourteen and a half years, she "deliberately and
consciously stopped praying" until her early twenties. But this
self-declared atheist finally emphasizes that, in the confused and
hungry world today, scientific answers are not enough: rather, the
way of faith provides a wisdom that is unattainable through
philosophy and reason alone. In her university course taught on the
person, she developed a method of philosophical anthropology; here
in her lecture notes, she tells us that faith has a double
significance in scholarship: it is a measuring rod by which we are
kept free from error; also, revealed truth is able to answer many
questions which natural reason cannot. (See Introduction to Der
Aufbau der menschlichen Person) (Structure of the Human Person).
Even in her day, there was high promiscuity, personal alienation,
stress, mental illness, and loneliness. Let us remember, she died
through the so-called scientific methods of the gas chamber. And
today, science is still killing off innocent lives, quite
methodically.
How can we be
formed to this holiness, this person who images God? Edith Stein
teaches us how, through her life and writings. In her conversion,
she experienced Christ Incarnate. She also tells us that the birth
of Christ is an announcement of the struggle between good and evil.
His birth must be followed by the cross. She writes in an essay "The
Mystery of Christmas":
The Christian
mysteries are an indivisible whole . . . . Thus the way from
Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross.
(Simon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light
and darkness that already showed itself before the crib . . . . The
star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the
Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is
extinguished in the darkness of Good Friday, but it rises all the
more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the
Resurrection. The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the
Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company
the way of every one of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through
suffering and death to this same glorious goal.
For, she
writes, the teaching of the cross would be lost if it did not
express one’s own personal existence. Through love, we are each to
combat evil, and love triumphs over evil. The amazing fact remains
that it was an early awareness of this power of the Crucified Christ
that worked her conversion. She tells us that her search for truth
had been a constant prayer. Then she visited a Christian friend who
had recently lost her husband, and in her friend’s peace attained
through acceptance of the cross, Edith met the Crucified Christ. At
that moment, she tells us, Judaism paled and the Cross loomed high.
She had been able to empathize with the participation of her friend
in the redemptive power of Christ: this became her own personal
driving force and the core of her philosophy of the person. In
teaching us how to attain full personhood, she teaches us a Science
of the Cross.
Why is this?
First of all, we can perfect all of our personal faculties only by
knowing, loving, and serving God. It is the only way to total
perfection of our own unique personality, the very reason for which
we are created as an image of God. So, God is the Supreme Educator.
And Christ, as God’s most perfect image, is the ideal personality —Gestalt—by
which we are to be formed. She writes in Essays on Woman,
To begin
with, where do we have the concrete image of total humanity?
God’s image walked amongst us in human form, in the Son of Man,
Jesus Christ…. We therefore achieve total humanity through Him
and, simultaneously, the right personal attitude. Whoever looks
to Him and is concentrated on Him sees God, the archetype of all
personality and the embodiment of all value.
Frequently
in her lectures and writings, Edith says that if there were only
one thing to tell her audience and readers, it would be to
counsel them to live as God’s child, in his hands. This means to
surrender oneself totally in perfect trust and humility. It
means to do God’s will, not one’s own, to put all sorrows and
hopes in his hand. Such surrender is the highest act of freedom
available to the person. And, in keeping with her mentor St.
Teresa of Avila, she writes that only by this emptying of self
can one be filled by the presence of God. This free act of
spiritual poverty is mandatory for union with God.
God resides in
each one of us, and it is the Triune God. The divine life within us
is the divine Trinitarian life. She writes in The Science of the
Cross:
The soul in which God dwells
by grace is no impersonal scene of the divine life but is itself
drawn into this life. The divine life is three-personal life: it
is overflowing love, in which the Father generates the Son and
gives him his Being, while the Son embraces this Being and
returns it to the Father; it is the love in which the Father and
Son are one, both breathing the Holy Spirit. By grace this
Spirit is shed abroad in men’s hearts. Thus the soul lives its
life of grace through the Holy Spirit, in Him it loves the
Father with the love of the Son and the Son with the love of the
Father.
What a
powerful statement! She also writes that our meeting with the
Crucified Christ within us creates a further kind of trinity: the
intentions of Christ, ourselves, and those we serve. "One’s own
perfection, union with God, and works for the union of another
person with God and his/her perfection absolutely belong together."
Because, in our perfect love, we can act as proxy for Christ in his
redemptive action. Empathy, respect and love for the other person as
an image of God constitute the core of Edith’s writings. Her
political philosophy presents the spiritual person as nucleus of a
just society. Edith struggled with all problems of existence, its
meaning, its social inequities and political problems. She evidences
to a holy degree the ordinary person’s desire to contribute to human
rights and social justice. True to her Jewish heritage, she
describes humanity as one family, one organism, in the process of
growth. The individual is responsible for all and all are
responsible for the one. A person’s role is society thus becomes a
religious concern. Her own example provides a gleaming stepping
stone in the pilgrimage of humanity towards the Kingdom of God.
But not only
is action of a communal nature, but prayer itself. In the prayer of
perfect love, we are to beg God to bring the sinner to contrition.
This constitutes the nature of the Church as community. We can even
offer ourselves as proxy for the sinner, requesting that the
punishment due the sinner be visited on ourselves instead. We can do
this for the enemy as well as friend because God gives us the power
to do so. Of course, Edith is describing what she herself is doing.
When Hitler came on the scene, she became a Carmelite in order to
pray for the evil ones—the Nazi oppressors —as well as for the
innocent ones, the Jews and all souls everywhere suffering in World
War II. Shortly before her death she said to a priest, "Who will do
penance for the evil that the Germans are inflicting?" On the way to
her crucifixion, the gas chamber at Auschwitz, she spoke of her
suffering as an offering "for the conversion of atheists, for her
fellow Jews, for the Nazi persecutors, and for all who no longer had
the love of God in their hearts."
There is an
exquisite passage in her essay, "The Natural and Supernatural in
Faust". It reads:
The battle wages over the
human soul; heaven and hell wrestle for it. If we could see this
soul in its loneliness and need, conscious of its way only in
dark distress, its way shrouded in foggy night, if we could
witness its struggles, its fallings and recoveries, we would be
engulfed by a trusting certainty that the soul is signified in
the hand of God, that its way and end lie clear as day before
the gaze of the Almighty, and that He has commanded His angels
to lead it from error to light.
Edith
describes evil as a living power and perverted being. She calls
Hitler "the Anti-Christ" and offered herself up for his downfall. An
important factor that brought about her death was the disclosure of
her Jewish identity when she refused to vote for Hitler at a fixed
plebiscite. She declared his ideology to be of Satan. But Edith is
keenly concerned with the workings of evil in the person. In this
author’s essay "Good and Evil in the Life and Work of Edith Stein"
in Logos (Winter 2000), some of the thoughts found in her
text Endliches und Ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being) are
presented:
Until the end of time when
God intervenes, Adam’s sin continues in the war of flesh versus
spirit, the darkness of the human intellect, the laziness of the
will, and the evil inclination of the heart. Satan disavowed the
difference between himself and God in a disobedient denial of
truth. He rebels not only against God but against his own being,
for in saying "no" to God, he destroys the harmony of his own
being: love, joy, willing service. This denial of being
simultaneously becomes hatred—of self, of all others, and of
God. Thus evil is a being contrary to its own nature and
direction, a perverted being…. And for the person vacillating
between good and evil there is the possibility of conversion, of
cooperation with God’s call to justification and grace. God can
see the repentant sinner in Christ and accept Christ’s expiation
for the sins. For Christ is the only proxy for all sin before
God; through His merit, the sinner attains contrition and grace.
This is God’s compassion for the sinner, that He justifies the
sinner through redemption worked by Christ. The mystery of the
cross makes possible a restoration of the original order of
grace as the "highest good." And the fullness of humanity leads
to God’s ultimate goodness—eternal life.
Edith Stein
suffered a martyr’s death in 1942 at Auschwitz. She had been
convinced from the beginnings of National Socialism that it was the
cross of Christ being laid on the Jews, a continuation of His
crucified humanity in time. She wanted a share in that for two
reasons: she was a born Jewish recognizing the sacred link of
Judaism and Christianity, and she believed that only the Passion of
Christ could save humanity. So her redemptive role was unique in its
duality: as a Jew, she suffered for her people and as a Christian,
she imitated Christ her Lord, united to him as he suffered for Jews
and gentiles alike. And her cross was intensified by the anguish she
herself was bringing to her family by her conversion and entrance
into the religious life. How could they understand that it was their
suffering that had helped put her in Carmel?
Yet, in a
letter after her mother’s death, she is able to write concerning her
family:
But I trust that from
eternity, Mother will take care of them. And (I also trust) in
the Lord’s having accepted my life for all of them. I keep
having to think of Queen Esther who was taken from among her
people precisely that she might represent them before the King.
I am a very poor and powerless little Esther. But the King who
chose me is infinitely great and merciful. That is such a great
comfort.
Such is the
prayer of a saint. And as she writes of others so is it true of her,
that the saints have always desired to suffer: united to Christ’s
sufferings on the cross, their suffering also wields redemptive
action. But this role is not for the saints alone, but for each one
of us. How did she, how can we find the strength to do this? Solely
through prayer which she names as the most sublime of all human
acts. Edith’s studies of prayer and the interior life are works very
important to anyone trying to develop in spirituality. She writes,
"every person who seeks the inner life knows that he /she is drawn
to it in a stronger way than to the outer world because they
experience there the dawn of a new, powerful, sublime life—the
supernatural life, the divine life." And it is this inner life which
motivates us to act through a world of values instilled by God. In
fact, it is only from within out that one is capable of relating to
and serving the outer world. "This mystical stream of prayer is the
lifeblood of the Church."
Edith’s own
prayer life was so intense that she has been described as
exemplifying ecclesia orans—the prayer of the Church. As a
laywoman during her years of teaching, she spent Christmas and
Easter at the Benedictine Abbey in Beuron. A priest who was to
become an Abbot there, and whom I later had the privilege of
interviewing, writes of her:
When I saw her for the first
time in a corner of the entrance in Beuron, her appearance and
attitude made an impression on me which I can only compare with
that of the pictures of the ecclesia orans in the oldest
ecclesiastical art of the Catacombs. Apart from the arms
uplifted in prayer, everything about her was reminiscent of that
Christian archetype. And this was no mere chance fancy. She was
in truth a type of that ecclesia, standing in the world
of time and yet apart from it, and knowing nothing else, in the
depths of her union with Christ, but the Lord’s words: "For them
do I sanctify myself; that they also may be sanctified in
truth."
How different
is Edith’s philosophy of life from the modern refusal to accept
suffering and the crosses of life. We live in a world of illusion
and escapism. As both scientist and mystic, Edith knew intimately
the greatest reality there is—God. In her holy life and writings, we
find God and are brought closer to him because we see an absolute
manifestation of our faith. To make this great treasury of love and
faith our own—St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross—is to take a journey
into holiness.
Freda Mary Oben,
T.O.P., was followed into the Church by her family. Her doctorate
was earned at the Catholic University of America in 1979. While
teaching (St. Joseph’s College, Howard University, The Washington
Theological Union), she was involved with race, poverty, and
Catholic-Jewish relations. Her almost forty years of research on
Edith Stein include writing, lecturing, appearing on radio and
television and CD Rom. Her major works are : a translation of
Stein’s Essays on Woman (Institute of Carmelite Studies); Edith
Stein: Scholar, Feminist, Saint (Alba House); an album of tapes,
Edith Stein: A Saint for Our Times (ICS); The Life and Thought of
Edith Stein (Alba House, 2001).
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary
