Aug. 9, 2018: St. Edith Stein
Aug. 9, 2018: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross “Edith Stein”
Getting to know Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)
To Edith Stein, a woman who is in full control of herself is free to live for others. True strength lies in sacrificial love that holds up the weaknesses of others. In a world where power, wealth, and attention seem to gather all the applause, this is a good reminder that a woman actually finds joy and contentment by making her soul beautiful first.
“Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession.” - Edith Stein (Spirituality of the Christian Woman)
We all have different callings in life. Not every woman needs to be a mother, or a nun, or president of a Fortune 500 company, but whatever a woman is called to be, she will best fulfill it by understanding what she is on this earth to do, and how it will contribute to her lasting happiness. She believes that whatever your vocation, you should let God be a part of it.
“Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning. “ -Edith Stein (The Ethos of Women’s Professions)
All of us are flawed, yes, and we’re all probably embarrassed about mistakes we’ve made in the past. Edith insists that women can approach these feelings almost the way a mother would, by seeing flaws not as a single trait to be relentlessly criticized or as a way of defining an entire life, but instead to follow a better way and see people as a whole, as works-in-progress, and capable of being nurtured into greatness.
“[Women] comprehend not merely with the intellect but also with the heart.” -Edith Stein (Problems of Women’s Education)
The intellect is valuable for insights into basic truths and skills, but when we truly know a person or thing, our knowledge helps us to also love them. The goal of knowledge is to love those beautiful and wonderful truths we uncover. This means that the heart, when combined with the mind, is necessary to knowing the world around us. The gaze of the lover sees most clearly, which means that whatever we love best, we can also know best. In a world where science and technology dominate, let us not neglect the valuable knowledge that comes from the heart.
https://aleteia.org/2017/04/23/7-edith-stein-quotes-that-all-women-need-to-hear-today/
Edith Stein Biography
Edith Stein was born in Breslau on 12 October 1891, the youngest of 11, as her family were celebrating Yom Kippur, that most important Jewish festival, the Feast of Atonement. “More than anything else, this helped make the youngest child very precious to her mother.” Being born on this day was like a foreshadowing to Edith, a future Carmelite nun.
Edith’s father, who ran a timber business, died when she had only just turned two. Her mother, a very devout, hard-working, strong-willed and truly wonderful woman, now had to fend for herself and to look after the family and their large business. However, she did not succeed in keeping up a living faith in her children. Edith lost her faith in God. “I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying,” she said.
In 1911 she passed her school-leaving exam with flying colours and enrolled at the University of Breslau to study German and history, though this was a mere “bread-and-butter” choice. Her real interest was in philosophy and in women’s issues. She became a member of the Prussian Society for Women’s Franchise. “When I was at school and during my first years at university,” she wrote later, “I was a radical suffragette. Then I lost interest in the whole issue. Now I am looking for purely pragmatic solutions.”
In 1913, Edith Stein transferred to Göttingen University, to study under the mentorship of Edmund Husserl. She became his pupil and teaching assistant, and he later tutored her for a doctorate. At the time, anyone who was interested in philosophy was fascinated by Husserl’s new view of reality, whereby the world as we perceive it does not merely exist in a Kantian way, in our subjective perception. His pupils saw his philosophy as a return to objects: “back to things”. Husserl’s phenomenology unwittingly led many of his pupils to the Christian faith. In Göttingen Edith Stein also met the philosopher Max Scheler, who directed her attention to Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, she did not neglect her “bread-and-butter” studies and passed her degree with distinction in January 1915, though she did not follow it up with teacher training.
“I no longer have a life of my own,” she wrote at the beginning of the First World War, having done a nursing course and gone to serve in an Austrian field hospital. This was a hard time for her, during which she looked after the sick in the typhus ward, worked in an operating theatre, and saw young people die. When the hospital was dissolved, in 1916, she followed Husserl as his assistant to the German city of Freiburg, where she passed her doctorate summa cum laude (with the utmost distinction) in 1917, after writing a thesis on “The Problem of Empathy.”
During this period she went to Frankfurt Cathedral and saw a woman with a shopping basket going in to kneel for a brief prayer. “This was something totally new to me. In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot. “Towards the end of her dissertation she wrote: “There have been people who believed that a sudden change had occurred within them and that this was a result of God’s grace.” How could she come to such a conclusion?
Edith Stein had been good friends with Husserl’s Göttingen assistant, Adolf Reinach, and his wife.
When Reinach fell in Flanders in November 1917, Edith went to Göttingen to visit his widow. The Reinachs had converted to Protestantism. Edith felt uneasy about meeting the young widow at first, but was surprised when she actually met with a woman of faith. “This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it … it was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me – Christ in the mystery of the Cross.”
