The Paradoxical Saint.

In my never-ending research on the Shoah, undoubtably one of the most horrific crimes ever perpetrated against mankind, and a crime still denied by some creatures who have the audacity to call themselves human beings, I came across an essay, written by Olivia M. Espin. This Cuban American psychologist and expert in feminist therapy described the incredible life story of Edith Stein. Because I had already encountered this name several times but never dug deeper into her persona, I decided to read it. The destiny of this Jewish woman was exceptional: Apart from being a pioneer in the battle for women’s rights, she had innovative philosophical and theological views and became one of the most brilliant metaphysicians of her time.

She willingly converted to Christianity and even chose to lead the cloistered and restricted life of a Carmelite nun, a choice that, at first, seems paradoxical for an academic with a liberated mind, but after careful analysis of her writings, turns out to having been the obvious path. She was deeply enamoured with Christian mysticism, but to the Nazis who arrested and deported her, she was just another Jew. Her existence, that was so fruitful on a scientific, spiritual, and social level, ended with her gruesome execution in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest murder machine in the Endlösung der Judenfrage. Four decades later, she was declared a martyr and a saint by the leader of the Catholic Church. Her life influenced the position of women in the Church and broader society, and her death in a hellish concentration camp changed the way many Christians regard the Holocaust and forced them to take responsibility for their treatment of the Jews throughout the centuries.

Edith was born in the year 1891, in Breslau, a German turned Polish city, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Her mother, Auguste Stein, was a devout Jewess who believed this was a sign God had outlined a special plan for her daughter. Two years after Edith’s birth, her father died of a sunstroke, compelling her mother to be the sole breadwinner of the family and to raise her seven children alone. Auguste took over the failing lumberyard of her late husband and turned it into a successful business. This convinced young Edith that the societal roles imposed upon women might inhibit the development of talents and skills that were then attributed to men.

The absence of her father thus resulted in her first feminist aspirations. It must, however, be said that Edith’s feminism should not be confounded with the western, men-despising, feminist ideology of today – just like her later philosophical reflections, it was essentialist at its core: she believed, as I do, that women have innate, biological characteristics that make them more likely than men to adapt roles that involve caring and empathy.

Growing up, Edith became what one could call the black sheep of her community: an unmarried student who was more interested in enriching her knowledge than raising a family, the latter being the obvious aim of young women at the beginning of the 20th century. Above that, to the disappointment of her mother, she called herself an atheist. Being far more attracted to libraries than to kitchens, she immersed herself in books. In 1911, only ten years after women were allowed to undertake academic studies, she gained admission to the University of Breslau and started studying psychology. Just like feminism, psychology in that era had a different form than it has today: It was practiced as the ‘philosophy of the mind’ rather than the objective analysis of the human psyche.

Dissatisfied by the information she accumulated, she started looking for truth elsewhere and began reading the work of Edmund Husserl, a German contemporary philosopher. Fascinated by his way of thinking, she travelled to Göttingen to study phenomenology under him. Phenomenology, according to Husserl, is the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. In other words, it is a philosophical method to explain our sensory perceptions and experiences as phenomena in the structures of the human mind, rather than objective realities. The goal is to obtain a description of the nature or the essence of a particular phenomenon.

In his last book, Beyond Order, the clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson illustrates the essence of phenomenology with the example of an envelope. According to non-relativists, an envelope is a piece of folded paper imprinted with ink molecules. To phenomenologists, an envelope is the carrier of a message that could bring joyful or tragic news, an object with the potential to alter the life course of the one who opens it. A pianoforte, then, is not merely a stringed, sound-producing object, it is a gateway to musical ecstasy for the virtuoso, or a source of frustration for the mediocre pianist. The premise of phenomenology is that reality consists of objects and events which will lead to one hundred realities in one hundred people’s eyes.

Five years later, Edith graduated summa cum laude with her thesis on the phenomenon of empathy, in which she suggested that empathy is a way of feeling oneself (sich einfühlen) into the experiences of the other person, rather than merely understanding the other person. By imagining the feelings of someone else, we come to a greater understanding of ourselves. Impressed with her achievement, Husserl hired her as his assistant – an uncommon position for a woman in that era.

After almost two years of tolerating the irritability and temper of her mentor, she was ready for her next step and asked Husserl to write a recommendation letter to apply for a faculty position in another university. He first declined, believing women should not have such ambitions. Eventually, he did change his mind and wrote a praising letter, but the male faculty members of the university did not want to collaborate with a woman, and in the atmosphere of the upcoming Nazi regime, certainly not a Jewish woman. Her thesis returned unread, which sparked Edith’s protest: she wrote a letter to the Ministry of Science, Art, and Education. A few months later, the minister himself ruled that “belonging to the female sex may not be seen as any hindrance to obtaining habilitation”. This feminist act of protest against sexism in academic circles obviously has had beneficial consequences for female graduates in Germany, up until the present day.

It was in this period of her life that Edith started to doubt her self-professed atheism. Husserl, himself a Jew, had converted to Lutheranism, as well as many other German-Jewish intellectuals at the end of the century. He said to his students:

“See my New Testament? It is always on my desk, but I never open it. I know once I open it and read it, I shall have to give up philosophy.”

His conversion was clearly not fueled by fear of persecution, but by conviction and true belief in Christ, which he achieved after a long period of meditation and self-reflection. (Many Jews, however, saw conversion to Christianity as what the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine called his “ticket of admission to European culture”. Another famous convert was the romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose mesmerising music would later be banned by the Nazi regime. When Richard Strauss was asked to write new music for a theatrical production of William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, he answered that he could not improve Mendelssohn’s compositions). Max Scheler and Adolf Reinach, both important phenomenologists and teachers of Edith, also became Lutherans.

Intrigued by this voluntary collective conversion, called “the conversionary impulse” by historian Alan Levenson, Edith started reassessing her spiritual views, but it was her discovery of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, not coincidentally a woman, that finally triggered her own conversion. Teresa was a Spanish mystic who revived Catholicism when Protestantism threatened to bring it down in the 16th century, and the reformer of the Carmelite Order for women, which was founded by Christians on Mount Carmel in Israel in the 12th century.

On the first of January 1922, Edith was baptised, unaware of the fact that Teresa von Avila was born into a family of conversos, and was of Jewish descent, just like her! Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Associate Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and the past President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, says about Teresa that “no female author of similar status exists within the Jewish spiritual canon”.

After some unsuccessful attempts to finding an academic position, because she was a woman and because she had a Jewish name, Edith started teaching German literature at St. Magdalena College. In this Catholic girl’s high school in Speyer, she started writing about women’s education and issues. Her writings reveal her rebellion against the Nazi policies concerning women, but also against the ban on the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. Roman law and Judaism, she believed, lied at the core of the sexism she encountered in the Church – in synagogues, women were and still are segregated from men, while in life, they do not have the same religious responsibilities. In Jewish orthodoxy, a woman’s task is to raise a family, not to write commentaries on the Holy Script, and even if she did, she would not be taken seriously.

But just like Orthodox Judaism does not allow women to become rabbis, the Catholic Church, until today, does not allow women to become priests, arguing that the latter are imitators of Christ and should therefore be male. Christ himself would certainly disagree with this discrimination – his most intelligent and loyal follower, Mary from Magdala, was a woman – an unmarried one! Edith indeed wrote that she made the distinction between “the attitude expressed in dogma, in canon law, and by the hierarchy of the Church and that taken by Our Lord Himself”.

Despite this undeniably sexist rule, women in monasteries have, since Medieval times, been given the chance to develop their intellect and talents without enduring the hardship of being a wife and a mother.

This resulted in magnificent contributions in science and art. I think about Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179), the Benedictine abbess who was a true homo universalis and the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. Another abbess, Herrad von Landsberg (1130 – 1195) wrote the scientific pictorial compendium ‘Hortus deliciarum’ (the Garden of Delights). Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718 – 1799) was the first female mathematician to write several calculus textbooks – Pope Benedict XIV was so impressed he appointed her to the faculty at the University of Bologna. Maria Dalle Donne (1778 – 1842) was the first female doctor in medicine. The nun Lucy Agnes Carter (b. 1875) was the first woman to be awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow, for a thesis on mitosis of the yellow fever mosquito. Sister Hillary Ross, a contemporary of Stein, was a microbiologist who established the first laboratory in Carville, … the list goes on. For Edith too, the context of monastic life, with the absence of a family to take care of and the daily routine of spiritual contemplation en meditation, represented a fertile ground for the growth of her intellect and inspiration.

1933 was the year Adolf Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor. It was also the year that Edith’s mother took her final breath, at the same moment Edith took her vows as a nun of the Carmelite order. Soon after, her sister Rosa Stein also converted and joined her. The rest of the Stein family, who planned to flee and do everything in their power to escape persecution by the Nazis, did not understanding the decisions of the two sisters: Living in a monastery under their Jewish names put both of them in great danger of being found by the Gestapo – a danger of which Edith was very aware. In ‘The Road to Carmel’, she wrote:

“Now on a sudden, it was luminously clear to me that once again God’s hand lay heavy on his people, and the destiny of this people was my own”.

That same year, Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State who would later become Pope Pius XII, signed the most controversial treaty in the history of the Catholic Church: The Reichskonkordat guaranteed the rights of the Church in Germany, on the condition that clergy would never interfere in political matters. Some historians say this deal legitimised Hitler’s dictatorship, while others say that the Vatican had no choice than to surrender to the Nazi regime, fearing that disobedience would lead to the murder of thousands of priests and nuns. As Harriette Sherwood, former Jerusalem correspondent of the Guardian, wrote:

“Critics of Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns”.

Was Pius XII a covert anti-Semite who knew about the horrors of the camps but stood aside and did nothing, or was his silence calculated to fuel the behind-the-scenes efforts of the Church to save Jews? In his book “Three Popes and the Jews”, the Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that the Pope was instrumental in saving between 700 000 and 860 000 lives. In fact, the chief rabbi of Rome, Emilio Zolli, was so impressed with the efforts of the Pope on behalf of the Jews, that he later became a Catholic.

Clergy indeed saved Jews all over Europe. They did this through lobbying of Axis officials, providing Jews with false documents, and hiding them in churches, monasteries, convents, schools, and among families. In Belgium, the country I call home, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Dom Bruno, a Benedictine monk, and no less than 48 nuns were honoured as Righteous among the Nations by the state of Israel. Although she was not a nun, I would like to mention that in Poland, my own Catholic great-grandmother took in a Jewish girl, died her dark hair blonde so she would have a more Polish Catholic appearance, and pretended to be her mother, thereby risking her life and that of her own daughter, my grandmother.

Edith too deemed that praying alone was not sufficient and decided it was time for action. Her plan was to convince the Vatican to openly criticise and condemn Nazism and anti-Semitism. She requested an audience with Pope Pius XI and was then invited to participate in a semi-private audience with others. Thinking she wouldn’t be able to elaborately explain her points of view, she refused and instead wrote the Pope a personal letter:

“Everything that has happened and that is going on every day is down to a government that calls itself “Christian”. Not just Jews, but thousands of Catholic faithful in Germany, and I believe, throughout the world, have been waiting for Christs’ Church to speak out against this abuse, in the name of Christ, for weeks now. Isn’t the idolatry of race and State power, which the radio hammers into the minds of the population on a daily basis, open heresy? Isn’t this war of extermination against Jewish blood a violation of our Saviour, of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the Apostles? Is it not in complete contrast to the behaviour of our Lord the Redeemer, who even prayed for his persecutors on the cross?”

To her great disappointment, he replied with his spiritual blessing, without addressing the content of her writing.

In 1938, Edith’s superiors decided Germany had become too dangerous, and sent her to the Carmelite Convent in the Dutch city Echt. Two years later, Dutch priests started preaching against the Nazi regime during mass. The Nazis, who had invaded the Netherlands in 1940, offered a bargain: if the Church remained silent about the deportation, they would not deport converted Jews. The Lutheran Church accepted this bargain, but the bishops of the Catholic Church refused. On Sunday, the 26th of July 1940, priests in all Dutch Catholic churches read a statement fiercely condemning the deportation and treatment of the Jews.

Outraged by this event, the Nazis retaliated. On Sunday, the 2nd of August 1942, as the Carmelite Sisters of Echt gathered for meditation, the doorbell rang. Members of the Schutzstaffel, the back-uniformed elite corps of the Nazi Party, demanded Edith Stein to exit the building within 10 minutes. At the moment of her arrest, the convent was surrounded with neighbours who loudly voiced their opposition. They saw Edith taking Rosa’s hand and saying:

“Rosa, come, let us go, for our people”.

In an article published in Time in 1987, David Brand remarks: “In those words rests the very paradox of Sister Teresa: Were her people Jews or Catholics?”. Edith herself did not seem to regard her views as paradoxical: Judaism and Christianity, to her, were not opposing, but complementing religions. How could it not be, if Jesus himself was a devout Jew who claimed not one letter of the Torah should be changed?

The two nuns were then pushed in a van and taken to Westerbork, a building complex that was initially constructed by the Dutch government to shelter Jewish refugees fleeing the enemy. Now, it was used by the enemy as a transit camp where thousands of Jews were awaiting their final transport to their merciless killing. They were assigned to barrack 36, where Edith wrote to her Mother Superior in what would be her last letter, asking for their identity cards, warm underwear, a toothbrush, a rosary, and her breviary.

A few days later, like millions of other Jews, Edith and Rosa Stein suffocated in a gas chamber in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

The few days before Edith was murdered would spiritually be the most glorious days of her life. After the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, survivors of the camp testified that Edith had taken care of the children like an angel. She had washed them, combed their hair, and tried to find food for them. She had comforted people in agony, and astonishingly, had not seemed to be in agony herself. There is indeed a psychological benefit in taking care of others: it takes away the focus on the self. She did not surrender to her fate in fear and weakness, but rather, accepted it as an opportunity to helping others, in dignity and strength. The darkness of her fate was conquered by the fire of her love.

Those who have read the New Testimony cannot help but notice the striking resemblance between the life endings of Edith Stein and Yeshua Immanuel ben Yossef: Like him, she anticipated her arrest, she did not revolt against those who deported her, she remained silent, and she did not attempt to escape, even though she was offered help by a journalist who managed to contact her in the transit camp.

Christianity teaches that suffering is inevitable, and that each one of us has his own cross to carry in life. But the good news is, that our suffering needn’t be arbitrary and useless – we can choose to make it meaningful. In other words, if we live and suffer for a greater good, our pain becomes redemptive, for others and ultimately ourselves. Like Albert Einstein, the genius physicist who believed the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical, said:

“Only a life lived in the service of others is worth living.”

Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce believed that, by imitating the man she believed to be the Messiah, she could carry the cross God had chosen her. She wrote:

“The science of the cross can only be obtained when you personally experience the Cross thoroughly.”

The story of Edith Stein, however, does not end here. In 1987, Pope John Paul II, whom I consider the most admirable Church leader in the history of Catholicism because of his decisive role in the fall of European communism, his great efforts to reconcile Christians and Jews, and the spiritual depth of his literary oeuvre, esteemed that Edith’s murder was a direct consequence of the rebellion of Dutch priests, and should therefore be beatified as a martyr. Later, a very sick girl suddenly healed after her family had prayed to Edith, which is considered a miracle and led to her canonisation – decisions that did not go down well with the Jewish community. If she died because she was Jewish, how could she be a Christian martyr and a saint?

Edith was indeed murdered because she was a Jewess, and she would not have been murdered if she was a Christian by birth. But her attitude towards the horror of the Shoah and the deeds she committed in her last days were inspired by her faith in Christ and were so extraordinary they attained the level of what Christians would call sacred.

May Edith Stein, who made the world a better place for women, for philosophers, and for victims of terror, who inspired others with her kindness and her vision, who shone her light on the darkest event in modern history, after her fantastic intellectual and spiritual journey on Earth, rest in peace, by the hand of God, whom she loved so much.

“Living the concealed life and still experience the glory of the light. Being peaceful and nevertheless full of warmth.” – E.S.