by Susan Jacoby
Another important influence on Stein during her student years was the philosopher Max Scheler (1874–1928), one of her few Catholic professors. Scheler, the son of a Jewish mother and a Lutheran father, had converted to Catholicism as a young man but had left the church (perhaps as a result of a checkered marital history). Stein’s dissertation on empathy was, in many respects, inspired by Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, published in 1913. (Scheler’s works would also have a powerful influence in the 1940s on a Polish seminary student, Karol Wojtyła, who would rise through the church hierarchy to become Pope John Paul II.)
At the time Scheler met Stein in Göttingen, he had recently returned to the practice of Catholicism. She recalls that he was “quite full of Catholic ideas at the time and employed all the brilliance of his spirit and eloquence to plead them. This was my first encounter with this hitherto totally unknown world. It did not lead me as yet to the Faith. But it did open for me a region of ‘phenomena’ which I could then no longer bypass blindly….The barriers of rationalistic prejudices with which I had unwittingly grown up fell, and the world of faith unfolded before me.”6 (Stein does not mention that, in the years before his death in 1928, Scheler had once again distanced himself from the Catholic Church.)
This passage exemplifies Stein’s unwillingness, for whatever reasons, to discuss the specifics of her own spiritual development in her autobiography. What “Catholic ideas” preoccupied Scheler at the time, and how did he present them to his pupils? It would certainly be interesting to know more about the “rationalistic prejudices” imbibed by Stein during her childhood—since she was to discard them so thoroughly not only by her conversion to Catholicism but by her attraction to the mystical writings of Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), who came from a Converso family on her father’s side. Teresa’s paternal ancestors, well-off merchants from Toledo, chose Catholicism over expulsion in 1492. Her grandfather was later convicted by the Inquisition of “Judaizing,” but her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, bought a knighthood and tried his best to be accepted into Spanish Catholic society. At age twenty, Teresa entered the Carmelite Order, but, like Stein, she was never able to escape the taint of her Jewish origins in her own society. Her writings, which would one day place her among the small group of female saints of unquestioned high intellectual stature in the history of Catholicism, were always questioned and inspected by the Inquisition because of her Jewish origins—and because she was a woman.
Stein’s “rationalistic prejudices” cannot have proceeded from Judaism itself, which Edith discarded as a personal religion when, at age fifteen, she stopped praying. Most summaries of Stein’s life, including those disseminated at the time of her canonization, state that she became an atheist at fifteen, but if that is true, she does not (once again) say so explicitly. Certainly, there is a considerable gap between the abandonment of prayer and atheism. When Edith was growing up, her family was moderately but not extremely observant. The Steins were the kind of Jews who observed the High Holy Days and Passover but were just as or more likely to have a picnic in the countryside on an ordinary Sabbath as to spend the day in shul. The Stein boys would have studied to become bar mitzvah, but they were not systematically exposed to Jewish learning through years of religious schooling. The girls, as Edith’s account of her secular education makes clear, were not exposed to any Jewish education beyond the basics of Sabbath and holiday observance, in which women, then as now, played an important role in the home. In this regard, acculturated, moderately observant German Jews were no different from more devout Orthodox Jews: sophisticated study of the Torah was not for women.
Most of Stein’s reminiscences about her exposure to Jewish tradition within her family involve the celebration of special feasts. Her memories (again, in contrast to Heine) are fond and respectful of the “indomitable consistency that marks the Jewish spirit.” Both as a Catholic thinker and as a German Jew in 1933, Stein was especially emphatic about the continuity between Judaism and Christianity. “Most Christians are unaware,” she wrote, “that the ‘Feast of Unleavened Bread,’ in remembrance of the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt, continues to be celebrated today in the identical manner in which it was celebrated by our Lord with his disciples when he instituted the Blessed Sacrament and took leave of his followers.”7 There is something unspeakably sad about this passage, by a devout philosopher-nun who has just realized her dream of becoming a Carmelite, as she writes on the edge of an abyss. She is trying, in a work intended not for philosophers or theologians but for a general German audience, to make her Christian compatriots see the continuity of the two religions. She is, in effect, raising the same question that Disraeli posed in the House of Commons in 1847: “Where is your Christianity, if you do not believe in their Judaism?” She is trying to hold back the oncoming barbarism and to correct the theological past, in which Jews in Germany, as in many parts of Europe, were in special peril during Christian Holy Week—when what mattered to the mobs was not that the Last Supper was a seder but that it was followed by the crucifixion. And the medieval German mobs blamed that crucifixion not on Romans but on Jews.
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Stein completed her doctoral dissertation on empathy in 1916, at age twenty-four. A few lines from that paper illuminate the reasons why her philosophical bent would not pose a conflict with her later Catholicism. “To consider ourselves in inner perception,” she asserts, “i.e., to consider our psychic ‘I’ and its attributes, means to see ourselves as we see another and he sees us….It is possible for another to ‘judge me more accurately’ than I judge myself and give me clarity about myself. For example, he notices that I look around me for approval as I show kindness, while I myself think I am acting out of pure generosity. This is how empathy and inner perception work hand in hand to give me myself to myself.”8 That we can only gain true self- knowledge through seeing ourselves as others see us and seeing others in a way that can comprehend their experience is a philosophy completely compatible with Christian (and many other religious) theologies. One wonders, had Stein survived the Holocaust, if she would have examined the loss of empathy, on a vast scale, that enabled ordinary men, in Christopher Browning’s phrase, to treat Jews as members of another species.
It undoubtedly took Stein longer to complete her dissertation than it would have had she not worked as a medical assistant, nursing wounded soldiers (against her mother’s wishes), during the First World War. Stein was no pacifist, and there is nothing in her autobiography to suggest that she had thought deeply about Germany’s responsibility for the war. She considered caring for the wounded her patriotic duty, just as her military-age male university friends (Jewish and Gentile) considered it their patriotic duty to enlist.*5 Her account of those years is informed more by regret for lost security than by the moral indignation of an Erich Maria Remarque or of postwar British writers like Vera Brittain. “Our placid student life was blown to bits by the Serbian assassination of royalty,” she recalls. “No one growing up during or since the war can possibly imagine the security in which we assumed ourselves to be living before 1914. Our life was built on an indestructible foundation of peace, stability of ownership of property, and on the permanence of circumstances to which we were accustomed.”9
Throughout the war years, Stein’s life was characterized by a combination of intellectual growth and professional frustration that may have had more to do with her being a woman, in a time and place where there was no socially recognized role for female intellectuals, than with her being a Jew. It is unlikely that Husserl, who had moved from Göttingen to the University of Freiburg, would ever have selected a woman as his assistant in 1916 if the brightest young men from the universities had not been in the trenches. As Stein’s perceptive translator, Sister Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., notes, “One cannot be certain that she would have considered herself for that position.”10 While serving as Husserl’s assistant, Stein not only received her doctorate in philosophy summa cum laude, but she began organizing Husserl’
s previous writings for a collected edition. However, Husserl, who was called “the Master” by his students, was not especially amenable to being organized; he even told Stein that his earlier work ought to be burned because it was outdated. (In Nazi Germany, his actual books would be burned, because of his Jewish origins.)
Meanwhile, Stein organized what she called a “Philosophical Kindergarten” to acquaint beginning students with phenomenology and the works of its founder. In 1918, Stein resigned from her job and began looking for a university-level teaching position. In a coincidence of history, Stein’s replacement, in 1919, turned out to be her near contemporary Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose career as a German philosopher was not hampered by being a man, and who, after joining the Nazi Party in 1933, would became the rector of the University of Freiburg.
During the war years, Stein’s search for an appointment as an entry-level professor turned out to be futile, in spite of the honors that accompanied her degree and a glowing recommendation from the Master. Throughout her unsuccessful search for a job that fit her credentials, Stein supported herself by giving private lessons to university-level students in Breslau. She also wrote essays and began to deliver lectures, in much the manner as adjuncts cobble together a living in the United States today. Because Stein was doubly marginalized as a Jew and a woman, it is impossible to know which disability played a larger role in her failure to find the academic job she craved. Even before the war, German women of Stein’s generation were aware of and affected by the international woman suffragist movement and the general agitation for women’s rights—more strongly developed in the United States and England than in much of Europe. Stein and her close female friends often discussed the problem of combining a career with marriage. “I was alone in maintaining, always, that I would not sacrifice my profession on any account,” she recalled. “If one could have predicted the future for us then! The other three married, but, nevertheless, continued in their careers. I alone did not marry, but I alone have assumed an obligation [the life of a nun] for which, joyfully, I would willingly sacrifice any other career.”11
Another unanswerable question is whether Stein would have been so preoccupied with religion in her twenties, or would have taken the enormous step of converting to Catholicism rather than Protestantism, had she been able to establish a more stable and promising (in conventional contemporary terms) academic career. That she had long been preoccupied with the meaning of suffering, and with the possibility of life after death, is as clear from her “secular” autobiography as it is from her writings on Catholic theology, particularly on the Christian meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross. The Catholic belief in the intrinsic value of human suffering as an offering to God—as Christ suffered to redeem man—could not be further from commonplace Jewish teaching and belief. Emphasis on suffering as a positive force in human lives also differentiates Catholicism from many of the more liberal forms of Protestantism. Yet there are passages in Stein’s writings that seem to bring the conventional Catholic view of suffering “down to earth” in a way that may have reflected, intentionally or unintentionally, the author’s Jewish background. In one short essay, she writes:
Thus, when someone desires to suffer, it is not merely a pious reminder of the suffering of the Lord. Voluntary expiatory suffering is what truly and really united one to the Lord intimately. When it arises, it comes from an already existing relationship with Christ. For, by nature, a person flees from suffering. And the mania for suffering caused by a perverse lust for pain differs completely from the desire to suffer in expiation. Such lust is not a spiritual striving, but a sensory longing, no better than other sensory desires, in fact worse, because it is contrary to nature….
…And so those who have a predilection for the way of the cross by no means deny that Good Friday is past and the work of salvation has been accomplished.12
In a 1930 letter to a friend and former student (who had become a Benedictine nun), Stein wrote that, whenever she had an encounter with another person that deepened her feeling “of our powerlessness to exert a direct influence, I have a deeper sense of the urgency of my own holocaustum.” Stein’s use of the Latin holocaustum (notwithstanding the anachronistic fantasies of some of her biographers) had nothing to do with prescience about what is now called the Holocaust; she was talking about her offering of herself, as a person and a Catholic, in whatever capacity she was called to serve. As her doctoral dissertation states, she thought of giving herself to others—her holocaustum—as the way to give herself to herself.
In any case, Stein made the decision to convert to Catholicism after reading the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life, in a friend’s library in 1921. She also decided that she would, like Teresa, join the Discalced Carmelites. Stein was baptized on January 1, 1922, but her spiritual adviser, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Speyer (in which she was baptized), told her that she was not ready to enter the convent. This was an order, not a suggestion, in the days when nuns were not uppity and convent authorities would never have dreamed of admitting a postulant whose priest advised against such a move. There was, however, nothing unusual about advising a new convert against taking an immediate step to enter either the priesthood or a convent. Most priests, in every part of the world, would have told a recent convert to gain further experience in the Catholic faith before leaping into a religious vocation.
After her baptism, Stein took a job teaching at St. Magdalena’s, a Dominican training institute in Speyer. During this period, she remained active as a lecturer on phenomenology and translated the letters and diaries of the famous nineteenth-century English cardinal (and convert from Anglicanism) John Henry Newman into German, as well as Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones from the Latin.
Despite her absorption in her new religion, Stein had not given up her secular ambitions. In 1931, she made one last attempt to obtain a professorship at a German university—at Freiburg, where she had worked as Husserl’s assistant. She spoke with Heidegger, the future Nazi and university rector, and he apparently received her politely but, not surprisingly, did nothing to help her get a job. Stein was also turned down by the University of Breslau, because, according to Josephine Koeppel, the university was unwilling to grant a professorship to a woman.*6 After that disappointment, she accepted a teaching job with the Catholic Pedagogical Institute of Münster, which was developing a curriculum for Catholic education. “Edith had never intended to teach,” her translator observes. “…her career as a philosopher never became an actuality, and, therefore, teaching perforce took its place.”13
In the spring of 1933, with Hitler in power, Stein’s career as a teacher and an author came to an end in Germany. She was informed—as a Jew, not as a Catholic convert—that she could no longer teach in any German institution (including one run by the church itself). German Catholic leaders, despite their official position that converts from Judaism were no different from any other Catholics, accepted these new restrictions. That Edith Stein, Catholic convert, was immediately dismissed as a Jew from an insignificant job at an insignificant teacher training institute speaks volumes about the nonsensical idea that she was murdered at Auschwitz because she was a Catholic. In life as in death, she was treated as a Jew by the Nazis.
In April 1933—after her dismissal as a teacher but before she joined the Carmelites—Stein wrote a pleading letter directly to Pope Pius XI, whom she urged to speak out against the Nazi persecution of Jews, and against the use of traditional Christian justifications for the campaign. “For weeks,” Stein said, “not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany and, I believe, in the whole world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this misuse of Christ’s name….All of us who are truthful children of the Church and who are observing conditions in Germany closely fear for the worst for the reputation of the Church if this silence goes on any longer.” Pius XI’s secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would s
ucceed him in 1939 as Pius XII, did not reply directly to this unknown German woman—how could such a person think she had the right to question church policy?—but instead wrote to a German arch-abbot who had forwarded her letter to the Vatican. Pacelli said only that he had shown Stein’s letter to the pope and that he hoped Christ would protect his church in turbulent political times.14 It is a measure of the power of Stein’s conversion—and of her inability to contemplate the possibility that she might have made a mistake—that this indifferent response did not shake her determination to remain a Catholic or to become a nun.*7