The Conversion of Edith Stein
Nicholas Madden, OCD
Reading the Life of the great mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, Edith Stein's own life was transformed. To get an insight into that moment, the author examines the great German/Jewish Carmelite's life and philosophy—for her they were almost one and the same—paying particular attention to her originality as Husserl's assistant. Originally published in Irish Theological Quarterly 68 (2003) 325-342 by the Pontifical University in Maynooth (reprinted with permission).
It is possible to trace the path of the conversion of Edith Stein from two points of view: on the one hand, we have evidence for her philosophical enquiries that issued in her thesis on empathy and in her studies in the philosophy of psychology and the humanities as well as community and the state. On the other, we can identify crucial moments in her life and experience that gradually converge, with a sustained exercise of the illative sense, on a fatal night in the summer of 1921, when she read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and realized that she had arrived at the truth. What follows has no claim to completeness; it is merely a set of sketches outlining some of her philosophical interests and describing briefly occasions that she recognized as significant in her coming to Christianity. We have a diptych, and its two leaves are undoubtedly related; but here there shall be no more than preliminary indications of how that is so. Edith was reticent about her inner life, so that this has to be an essay on what might be called the surface of her experience. Its inner depths, together with the formative play of divine grace, must remain wrapped in secrecy. The record of her thinking and of what happened to her would be misleading, if it gave the impression that there was a merely human inevitability in its culmination. Edith knew that our rough-hewn ends require the shaping of the divine initiative. In what follows, I try to use language that is immediately intelligible, even although occasionally a term may have technical exactitude. The examples are meant to provide easily disposed phantasms.
The Student of Philosophy
While Edith was studying psychology at Breslau, she discovered Husserl's Logical Investigations. Psychology, studied in a positivist Kantian style, fell short of the kind of knowledge to which she aspired. The Investigations held out possibilities of study, and even of life, for which she longed. She recognized in herself the urge that inspired Husserl's work: zur Sache selbst. She was encouraged to find a program that "consists precisely in a work of clarification, and because one forges from the beginning the tools of thought which one needs." She wanted to make sense of her life as a whole. She sought what she would later describe as "truth" in a moment of defining enlightenment. Her search was an unrelenting pursuit of reality, marked by the deepest respect for things as being and accompanied by an intimation that she should be open to being grasped rather than grasping. So she set out for Göttingen where she came to know Reinach, Conrad-Martius, Lipps, Ingarden, Scheler, and "The Master" himself, Husserl. "The Master" was impressed by the fact that she had already studied the Investigations. She took lectures and shared in the stimulating conversations of this brilliant group of phenomenologists. She had the independence to find lacunae in Husserl's work and set out to remedy them. This led to her undertaking research into "empathy," which was to become the theme of her doctoral thesis.
When Edith first encountered Husserl, he taught that truth is an absolute—that it is not the creation of the one who perceives it—but later he seems to have balked at the claims of objective reality. While his early work was marked by psychologism, under the influence of Frege, he came to hold that logic is not reducible to psychology. It is accepted that Husserl and his followers were keen to overcome the skepticism that arose from the cluster of positivism, historicism, and idealism, which were prevalent at the time. In his Logical Investigations (1900), he claims that you cannot eliminate logic—the structure of thought—at work in thinking, or reduce it to a psychological factor. This can be seen as a step out of the quicksand of philosophical subjectivism. Something "other" is imposed on the arbitrariness of mere thought. Consciousness was seen as intentionality directed to an object that was not given in experience, an "essence." Logic treats of meaning, what is intended, the objects of consciousness, not with the acts of consciousness as such. The former are "phenomena," the latter are experiences. It was the purpose of Husserl to describe scientifically the phenomena as they appear. His method was calculated to enable us to return to our primordial noetic engagement with the object, with what is known. He concentrated on how the world strikes consciousness, the appearance of meaning, which was for him the origin of knowledge.
Husserl was indebted to Brentano for the notion of "intention," a stretching out of consciousness to the object. To perceive or imagine an object is already to be stretching out to the object itself. For an earlier philosophy, this implied grasping the object by enabling it to become itself in a new mode of being, intellectually. Husserl, who strove for "meaning" in a preobjective intuition of "things in themselves," in their "flesh and blood presence," seems to have veered away from this and concentrated on what appears as such, the "phenomena." In this view, meaning is a relationship of consciousness embedded in a preobjective intuition. To access meaning, the thinker is required to engage in an exacting intellectual ascetiscism, to suspend his judgment of reality by epoche, the exclusion of whatever does not present itself as an object of consciousness, whether empirical or metaphysical, and concentrate on what appears by phenomenological reduction. This suspension or bracketing out of what does not appear was in the interest of Husserl's idea of the rigor required by science and was extended even to the question of whether what was being inspected existed in reality or not. He sought an incontrovertible basis for our assumptions about the empirical world. In this view, I know the phenomena, but do I know the things themselves by means of the phenomena? The ut quo of a bolder psychology and epistemology seems to have been a stumbling block to him. But there is undoubtedly, as he sees it, a stream of consciousness; and he finds its unity in the "pure I." …
Some Significant Events
When Edith was a child, she was known playfully to her siblings as "the book of seven seals" because of her keen intelligence and her marked inwardness. She tells us that school meant a lot to her. "I almost believe that I felt more at home there than in our house." "In my dreams, I always foresaw a brilliant future for myself. I dreamed about happiness and fame, for I was convinced that I was destined for something great and that I did not belong at all to the narrow bourgeois circumstances into which I had been born." While these intense desires were bound up with knowledge, she was aware too, not least due to her mother's influence, that "it was much more important to be good than to be clever." She did not identify this with religious faith or practice. She had her share of suffering. Apart from her father's death when she was very young, at the age of ten and eleven she had the bewildering experience of the suicide of two of her uncles. While she was a brilliant student, prejudice in school prevented her from being allowed the preeminence that she merited.
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