Self-Sacrifice and the Sacred: Edith Stein on Phenomenology, Christianity, and Mysticism

Abstract

In Edith Stein’s thinking, there is a gradual transition from the discovery of Christianity in her phenomenological studies to the mystical realization of her own role as a Christian. The present paper explores the historical, cultural, and personal circumstances of Stein’s approach to Christianity and reveals how philosophical insights contributed to her Christian commitment and supported her receptivity to mysticism. My thesis is that Stein’s philosophical reflection and the deepening of her personal religiosity are mutually evolving. The thesis of this paper is based on a letter written by Edith Stein to Roman Ingarden in 1927, at a time when she had not yet entered the Carmelite Order in Cologne but was already living as a monk. In this sense, the letter represents a zigzag reflection between past and present events, describing events in the apocalyptic horizon of eternity. Through recurrent reflection on the letter, I argue for the parallel development of mystical insights and philosophical achievements in Stein’s life, and finally, I show that the two are inextricably linked and contribute to a philosophical understanding of her own holocaust.

1. Parallel Development Between Phenomenological Insights and Inner Life-Decisions

I believe that we can and must speak of religious experience. However, it is not a matter of a “direct intuition” of God. That is possible only in totally expectational cases (in ecstasy and the like) for which, however, a strict proof is never possible, as with genuine revelation. The usual way is via effects that you notice in yourself, in others, and in events in nature and in the lives of people, for which there is no complete proof—taken in itself—that clearly points to God’s authorship; events for which no other explanation would be thinkable and that in themselves contain such a proof, many in isolation already so strong that you can still methodically doubt but cannot really doubt. […] It is not necessary that we come to a correct proof of religious experience before the end of our lives. However, it is necessary that we come to a decision for or against God. That is demanded of us: to decide without a guarantee. That is the great wager of faith. The way leads from faith to understanding, not the other way around. Whoever is too proud to go through this narrow gate does not enter. Whoever does enter acquires in this life a brighter clarity and experiences the legitimacy of “credo ut intelligam”. I also believe that it gains us little to begin with construed or fantasized experiences. Where the actual experience is missing, we have to get it from the testimonies of the religious—and there is no lack of them. According to my experience the most impressive come from the Spanish mystics, Teresa and John of the Cross.

(Stein 2014, 20 November 1927)

There is a permanent debate about the question whether Edith Stein was a mystic sui generis. Jacob W. Torbeck raises the question in his paper, “Mystical God-Forsakeness and the Ethics of Solidarity”, that “to what extent are mystical categories appropriate for understanding the complex life and thought of Edith Stein?” (cf. Torbeck 2022). Stein was, on the one hand, a prophetic visionary who predicted historical events in the twentieth century. On the other hand, her predictions engaged with her own life, and she identified herself with her own visions. As Josephine Koppel also writes in her biography, “[Her] mysticism […] will be understood by persons who practice it themselves.” (cf. Koppel 1990, p. 168).

In the present paper, I will argue that the religious insights Edith Stein led her to mystical insights, which she then returned to phenomenological investigation. Although Edith Stein’s mystical insights interwove her entire life, certain signs in Stein’s life indicate that the years 1927/28 were decisive for her in finding the common path of faith and reason. As she reported to Fritz Kaufmann on 13 September 1925, she “began studying the Questiones of St. Thomas”; in 1929, she published Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Festschrift for Edmund Husserl, which was basically planned in dialog form, and two years later, in 1931, she submitted her habilitation thesis, which was clearly influenced by Thomism. In 1933, she entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne. These are such successive events that prove that Edith Stein found her own path. Mette Lebech is also of the opinion that “Stein’s status as a mystic has every bit to do with her own exploration of the questions of empathy, constitution, consciousness, the soul, the mind, the body, and the relationships between them” (cf. Torbeck 2022, p. 45). Stein reflects only a few times in her letters on her own historical time and on the history of Europe, but her reflections prove that she identifies with global historical events in her own vision of her destiny. In this paper, I would like to show how self-awareness and religious development are connected with the reflection on external events in Stein’s thinking.

As the letter to Roman Ingarden also shows, there is a clear, multifaceted parallelism in Stein’s philosophical thinking and mystical insights, which are inseparable from each other, but in the first phase of her life, one can observe a stronger phenomenological interest, an influence of the outside world, while in the last phase of her life, a stronger spiritual contemplation is present. In other words, the scientific method of Stein shifts from the purely phenomenological questioning to the questioning of the mystics, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it shifts from the themes of phenomenology to the phenomenological understanding of the experience of God, i.e., to the phenomenological justification of the own destiny. In addition to this scientific approach in Stein’s acquaintances with the mystics, it is also important to note that in the first phase of her life (during the time she was a student in Göttingen), the relationship between phenomenology and mystic is mostly scientific, a scientifically motivated relationship, and then the scientific interest gradually turns to spiritual insights and the perception of mystical experiences in her own life.1 Although the part of the letter quoted above demonstrates some insights whose origin can be traced back to an earlier phase in Stein’s life, and which found their point of rest at the time of the letter, there is a continuity and linearity in Stein’s thinking, as well as in her spiritual development, which constantly thematizes the experience of God and repeatedly returns to the original meaning of experiencing God: a methodical question on the one hand, and a question about the object of experience on the other hand, which is present in the phenomenological investigations of Stein on religious experiences. Stein’s visitation in the Archabbey of Beuron gave her an explicit impulse to the question on the object and the method of religious experiences.

Although her encounters with monasticism and the encounters with the mystical experience represent different periods in Stein’s life, none of them are separable from her phenomenological studies. The prerequisite for the encounter with monasticism was a fundamental openness to religious experience. Although this openness was prepared in phenomenology studies, this openness was also influenced by the socially and existentially uncertain time of the First World War. There are numerous letters to Roman Ingarden in which Stein reports with astonishing openness about her religious conversion and her inner decisions:

I do not know whether you have inferred from my earlier comments that I have overcome all the obstacles and increasingly have a thoroughly positive view of Christianity. That decision has freed me of all that had suppressed me and at the same time has given me the strength to see life anew and, thankfully, to start living again. Thus, I can speak of a “rebirth” in the deepest sense of the term. However, my new life is so closely connected with the experiences of last year that I will never dissociate myself from them in any way. They will always be vividly present for me. And I no longer see misfortune in all the experiences. On the contrary, that part of my life is one of my most valuable possessions.

(Stein 2014, 10 October 1918, Nr. 53)

Two days later—on the day of her 27th birthday—she reported to Ingarden that she had a pile of letters and an entire library in front of her: “A mound of letters and an entire library lie before me: four volumes of Schleiermacher’s sermons (original edition), Die Brüder Karamosow, the Christuslegenden by S. Lagerlöf, and a collection of German religious poems in the Bücher der Rose. That is still not all that I expect to have” (Stein 2014, 12 October 1918, Nr. 53). As it is well known, Stein’s first encounter with Christianity was through the existential experience of the loss of her teacher Adolf Reinach and the view of his wife’s faithfulness. According to the report of the Jesuit Johannes Hirschmann to Teresia Renate Posselt Prioress at the time of Edith Stein’s stay in the Cologne Carmel, the baptism of Edith Stein was given a definite impetus by Anne Reinach, and the fact that Stein was baptized not as a Protestant but as a Catholic is due to the reading of The Life of St. Teresia of Avila.2 She reports on her relationship with Teresia of Avila in connection with her vocation to Carmel in How I Entered the Carmelite Convent in Cologne, which she wrote in 1938 shortly before moving to the Carmel in Echt: “Carmel had been my aim for almost 12 years. Ever since the ‘Life’ of St. Mother Teresa fell into my hands in the summer of 1921 and put an end to my long search for the true faith. When I received Holy Baptism on New Year’s Day 1922, I thought that this was only the preparation for entering the Order” (Stein 2010b, p. 350).

The years between 1914 and 1918 brought several changes in the life of Edith Stein, not only historically, but also mentally and spiritually. She wrote her dissertation On the Problem of Empathy during the war and, according to her biography, she had to start everything anew and once again address the importance of empathy because of her war experiences. “In Weisskirchen I used to get anxious indeed when I leafed through the pack of abstracts and outlines. And the winter, that dreadful winter of 1913/14, was not yet forgotten. Now I resolutely put aside everything derived from other sources and began, entirely at rock bottom, to make an objective examination of the problem of empathy according to phenomenological methods. Oh, what a difference compared to my former efforts” (Stein [1986] 2016, p. 376). Stein had worked as a nurse during the war, and she wrote about these experiences in detail in her autobiography. Here, Stein formulated the insight that historical events clearly played a role in her spiritual turn to Christianity. The influence of the Zeitgeist and the experience of war showed their effects much earlier than the Second World War, namely in the existential experience of the consequences of the First World War. Turning to the mystics appeared to be a deviation from the consequences of the war and a realization of what still held Europe together in terms of cultural and religious unity, which was a prevalent phenomenon among Jewish and Christian intellectuals at the time. Not only Edith Stein but also Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Roman Ingarden read the great mystics—Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard at the end of the 1910s—whose existential questions filled the atmosphere of the time. Heidegger prepared a series of lectures on mysticism in 1918, which he finally did not give, but he announced a lecture on the phenomenology of religious life in 1920. Stein reported to Ingarden in 1918 about a “religious-phenomenological walk” (Stein 2014, 8 June 1918. Nr. 36) with Husserl and Heidegger and, in 1921, referred to a “religious-phenomenological treatise”3, which she did not yet know what would become of it.

In the early work, Freedom and Grace, which can be identified with the work mentioned in the letter from 1921, she describes divine grace as an impulse to reality that leaves its traces in the human being through the momentary act, which then work and sometimes torment the human being for life.

Devotion to preparatory grace is also not necessarily a single act and the work of a moment. Rather, the person in whom grace works and who turns to it also requires a lifelong struggle in order to progressively detach himself from the natural world and from himself.

(Stein 2005a, p. 31)

This quotation again proves a parallelism in the external worldly life experiences and the inner decision in Stein’s life. The whole “movement” for the “phenomenology of religion” in the 1920s proves the common claim for the scientific formulation of religious experience, which, in my opinion, was inspired by the world view and world experience and also by the experience of the war. The existential experiences strengthened the liturgical youth movements that dominated intellectual life from the 19th century onwards. Husserl himself became aware of the influence of the liturgical youth movements, and in a letter to Rudolf Otto in 1919, whose work, The Idea of the Holy (Otto 1923), he considered to be the first phenomenologically acceptable work on religious studies (cf. Husserl 1994), he reported on the phenomenon of conversion within the phenomenological society, a phenomenon with which he apparently could do nothing, but which he attributed to his own philosophical influence:

There is something strangely revolutionary about my philosophical effectiveness; Protestants become Catholic, Catholics become Protestant. But I am not thinking of catholicizing or evangelizing, I want nothing more than to educate the youth to radical honesty of thought, to a way of thinking that is careful not to veil and violate the original views, which necessarily determine the meaning of all rational thought, through verbal constructions, through the dazzling use of concepts.

(cf. Husserl 1994, 206f.)

Although Husserl’s two sons took part in the First World War, one of whom he had also lost in the war, Husserl’s phenomenological method did not reflect reality in this respect. The connection between existential experiences and social movements as an expectation of spiritual renewal was centralized in the Benedictine abbeys of Solesmes and Beuron (cf. Bentz et al. 2002), where, from 1928, Stein, but also Heidegger and Scheler, and later Husserl himself, stayed a few times and maintained personal contact with Abbot Daniel Feuling. In this respect, phenomenology, Christianity, and world experience—an experience of Europe—can be understood in the phenomenon of Beuron. In her autobiography, How I Entered the Carmelite Convent in Cologne, Stein describes Beuron as “the forecourt of heaven” (Stein 2010b, p. 353), which she visited for years until entering the Carmelite convent in Cologne, and which contributed to her greatest life decisions. She made regular retreats in Beuron, spent Holy Week and Easter there, and in 1933, she decided to enter Carmel; she decided to do something for Judaism, to ask the Holy Father for a private audience and for an encyclical.

Stein’s letter from 20 November 1927 looks back on an initial period in which it was still assumed that religious experience could be understood as a direct experience of God and described phenomenologically. “The path goes from believing to seeing and not the other way around”. This also proves Stein’s gradual shift from the methodological question of religious experience to the phenomenological description of her own life experience, a slow deviation from the expectations of the outside world to the understanding of external events in the light of beatitude. As the letter to Ingarden quoted above—first—shows, a typical sign of Edith Stein’s self-reflection is to observe her own life in the spiritual horizon of development and to see her own destiny in the events of her life, to have determined the history of time in her own life story.

2. Commitment to Christianity Through Comfort in Historical Destiny

It is noteworthy that Stein viewed political and historical events from the outset in the light of the fate of Europe, which gradually shifted in the direction of Judaism: At the outbreak of the First World War, Stein understood her concern to be that the war would reformulate the whole of European society and the meaning of security and freedom: “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. When one finally noticed that the storm was inevitably approaching, one attempted to get a clear idea of what was likely to happen. One thing was certain. It would differ totally from all previous wars” (Stein [1986] 2016). In 1939, in a letter to Hans Bieberstein (to her brother-in-law), she expressed her feelings against Hitler’s “Third Reich” by identifying her fate with Judaism and its sacrifice in European history.

Nowadays, I always feel transported into the Napoleonic times, and I can imagine in what tension people lived then everywhere in Europe. I wonder: will we live to see the events of our days become “history”. I have a great desire to see all this sometime in the light of eternity. For one realizes ever more clearly clear how blind we are toward everything. One marvels at how mistakenly one viewed a lot of things before, and yet the next moment one commits the blunder again of forming an opinion without having the necessary basis for it.

(Stein 1993, 17 November 1939, Nr. 307)

A great transformation can be seen in Edith Stein’s commitment to her “people”. In a letter to Anneliese Lichtenberger, Stein writes about the call to suffer in Christ and thereby to participate in eternal life: “When we are united with the Lord, we are members of the mystical body of Christ; Christ lives on in his members and continues to suffer in them; and the suffering borne in union with the Lord is his suffering, incorporated in the great work of salvation and fruitful therein” (cf. Stein 1993, 26 December 1932, Nr. 129). The submission of her life to the Church, in addition to her letter to Lichtenberger, proves that although she had already asked for an encyclical before joining Carmel, she had not acted on it until she received a papal reference. In Judaism and in her Jewish roots, Stein sees the unbreakable connection with Christianity, whose message makes her own fate in the historical situation visible, and through which she accepted her fate in God’s will from early times.

What is even more interesting in our context is that she begins her memoirs, in How I Entered the Carmelite Convent in Cologne, with the following sentences, and they show that she has identified her own life with the historical events:

Perhaps I will be leaving this house soon after Christmas. The circumstances that have forced us to initiate my transfer to Echt (Holland) are vividly reminiscent of the circumstances when I joined. There is probably an inner connection behind it. […] Now it suddenly dawned on me that God had once again laid His hand heavily on His people, and that the fate of this people was also mine.

(Stein 2010b, p. 345)

There is still a bitterness in Edith Stein’s words, and it seems that she found peace in the knowledge of God’s will after her relocation to Echt. Stein’s connection with Christianity was, in one sense, a connection with the Catholic Church, in which she saw the fate of Judaism borne. Her letter to Ottilia Tannisch, the former prioress of the Carmel in Echt, on 26 September 1939, immediately after the election of Pope Pius XII, seems to resonate with her attempt for an audience with Pope Pius XI:

Please allow me to offer myself to the Heart of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for true peace: that the reign of the Antichrist may collapse, if possible without a new world war, and that a new order may be established. I still want it today because it is the 12th hour. I know that I am nothing, but Jesus wants it, and He will certainly call many others to it in these days.

(cf. Stein 2005b, 26 September 1939, Nr. 608)

For Stein, the rootedness of Catholicism in Judaism is not simply to be understood in its historical context but as the individual experience of the martyrdom of her own Jewishness in the Christian world. The more she immerses herself in the mystical self-surrender of faith, the clearer it becomes to her that she must extend this self-surrender to her whole life, to her destiny: The gift of self to God must be realized here and now, in the historical situation in which we live. Very early on, years before Hitler came to power, she understood that her own Christian self-giving would be realized in self-destruction, in complete self-surrender. In 1930, she wrote in a letter to her former student and later Benedictine convent nun, Adelgundis Jaegerschmied, that there is a responsibility in talking about the last things with Husserl. “It is not up to us to pass judgement, and we may confidently leave all to God’s unfathomable mercy. But we may not becloud the importance of these last things. After every encounter in which I am made aware how powerless we are to exercise direct influence, I have a deeper sense of the urgency of my own holocaustum. And this awareness culminates increasingly in a: hic Rhodus, hic salta” (cf. Stein 1993, 16 February 1930. Nr. 52). Even if Stein does not yet understand “her holocaust” in the sense of atonement, the parallel with her later fate is astonishing: the self-sacrifice for phenomenology, self-sacrifice for the world, and devotion to Christianity mean, for her, self-surrender for the Christian world, for a Christian Europe that is destroying its cultural and religious tradition through the war. On the last day of her stay in the Cologne Carmel, on 31 December 1938, at the time of finalizing the memoire, How I Entered the Carmelite Convent in Cologne, Stein wrote to Petra Brüning—the superior of the Ursuline convent in Dorsten:

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.

(Stein 1993, 31 December 1938, Nr. 281)

3. Inner Development and Philosophical Achievements

During the last phase of her life as a Carmelite, Edith Stein was still scientifically active, which shows that her inner spiritual development and her scientific life ran on different tracks. The question therefore arises as to how Stein’s inner development on the path of mysticism and the philosophical debate, that spanned almost her entire life, are connected with each other. In 1935, Edith Stein was given the opportunity to continue working on her work Potency and Act (cf. Stein 2009c), which was once intended as a habilitation thesis. The work Finite and Eternal Being (cf. Stein 2009a) was written as a revised version of this work. In the vein of a course of thought already begun in Potency and Act, the investigation focuses on the question of whether it is possible to reconcile modern philosophical thought with Christian philosophical thought, which embraces also the revealed truth. Stein emphasizes the decisive role of reason and stresses that insofar as revealed truth is accessible to the non-believing thinker, one can speak of a common way of thinking. For Stein, the point of connection between Christian and non-Christian thinking is based on the concept of the body, which plays a key role in the phenomenological thinking, while in Christianity, the mystical body of Christ means the presence of Christ in all of creation (Borden 2003, pp. 65, 100). It is noteworthy that Stein positioned her treatise in opposition to Heidegger’s Being and Time, specifically challenging his concept of finitude. In the introductory section of her work, she critiques the phenomenological approach to finitude, emphasizing a distinction from Heidegger’s framework. While Stein engages with Heideggerian concepts, she aligns them with scholastic terminology, interpreting the phenomenological notion of being through the lens of salvation. The concluding thoughts of the work, Finite and Eternal Being, open the way to a mystical thinking that aims to be able to grasp the divine presence in the objective view and in the experience of the world. In its mystical devotion, Stein’s observation can be seen as an expiatory sacrifice that spiritual devotion, the union with God’s will in one, is the bodily union with the Church.

Although Stein’s last unfinished work, The Science of the Cross (cf. Stein 2013), also undertakes a kind of thoroughgoing investigation and attempts to make sense of the mystical experience, it is no longer a philosophical study in the strict sense. However, we must mention three works that accompanied Stein throughout her mystical development and were particularly important in the last phase of her life. Between 1938 and 1942, Edith Stein wrote three essays in which she attempted to deepen her mystical approach. The three studies build on each other in the sense that Stein gradually progressed from natural knowledge to contemplative meditation, from grasping the mystical experience of God in the nature to a negative theology of divine knowledge and an intimate contemplation of the cross. Both the study of St. Teresa of Avila’s Inner Castle, The Fortress of the Soul (cf. Stein 2010a)—as she called her treatise— and the translation and commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Science of the Cross, based on the poems of St. John of the Cross, were preceded by years of study. As already mentioned, Stein became acquainted with the life of St. Teresa of Avila shortly before her baptism, and the influence of this work led her to a long period of study. In 1934, while still a candidate for the order, she wrote a study on the life of St. Teresa, Love for the Sake of Love. The Life and the Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus (cf. Stein 2009b) and in 1935: A Mistress of Education and Pedagogy: Terea of Jesus (cf. Stein 2001). In contrast, in the later The Fortress of the Soul (1938), Stein concentrates on the natural knowledge of God and examines how the soul can attain knowledge of God on the basis of natural knowledge. Starting from the external, natural experience of the world, Stein examines how the phenomenological concept of the soul can be linked to the theological sense of the soul and how the mystical experience of God is revealed to us through its inner layers. The concepts of the mystical body and the spirit in the Teresian sense are subjected to a phenomenological examination. The body, which is “the wall that surrounds the castle”, and reason and memory, which are “the eternal inhabitants of the castle”, correspond in a phenomenological context to the relationship between external experience and internal experience. The role of the ego in the mystical experience is defined by Stein in the moment of will, of decision. The moment of decision is the moment that God demands the most from us. The more the soul unites with the spirit, the more reason subordinates itself to the soul, the freer it becomes from all earthly concerns: “This hidden source is—in the sense of the substantive separation of substance and spirit—a spiritual one, and the deeper the soul descends into it and the more it fixes itself in its center, the more freely it can rise above itself and free itself from the attachment to substance” (Stein 2010a, p. 525). In The Fortress of the Soul, Stein shows the gradual transition from the bodily life to the spiritual life, where the transition is understood in the bodily commitment, in the destruction of the body in subordination to the spiritual.

The Science of the Cross. Studies on St. John of the Cross is Edith Stein’s last, unfinished work. The studies were written for the 400th anniversary of the birth of St. John of the Cross, but it is true that Stein was already preoccupied with the mysticism of St. John of the Cross as a student, and her relationship with him is evident in small moments of her life. Her attachment to St. John of the Cross is reflected in her choice of her religious name—Teresia Benedicta of the Cross—which she formulated in a letter to Petra Brüning when she moved to Echt:

I received it [the order] exactly as I requested it. By the cross I understood the destiny of God’s people which, even at that time, began to announce itself. I thought that those who recognized it as the cross of Christ had to take it upon themselves in the name of all. Certainly, today I know more of what it means to be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the Cross. Of course, one can never comprehend it, for it is a mystery.

(Stein 1993, Nr. 287)

The constant movement towards eternal life and the identification of her own life with the historical events of the twentieth century dominate Edith Stein’s entire life, which she defines as a gradual understanding of the meaning of the Cross. The Cross, with its mysterious meaning, gradually becomes a central phenomenon of understanding; this is the mystical marriage with God as Borden describes (Borden 2003, p. 118) it, whose symbolic meaning is revealed in the parallelism of life experiences and contributes to the understanding of one’s own life in an eternal horizon.

4. Summary

Edith Stein, Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, was named the patron saint of Europe by St. Pope John Paul II in 1999. How does the parallelism between phenomenology and Christianity appear in her life? Phenomenology and mysticism appear in her with a double meaning: they cover a scientific interest in the great mystics, an interest according to the method of mystical experience, on the one hand, and an interest of a mystic of our time, who herself reads the great mystics, on the other. For Stein, being a Carmelite means mystical devotion, which is not only carried out in spiritual visions, but which encompasses the whole of life, fits into historical situations, and opens up vision through faith. “To decide without a certificate of guarantee”—as she puts it in the letter to Roman Ingarden in 1927 quoted above—means surrendering to the dark light of knowledge in faith. For Stein, the meaning of Thomas Aquinas’ formulation is the first encounter with the community of reason and faith, which, through the strict rules of scholasticism, understands the experience of the world in the truths of faith and whose reality can only be seen through mystical contemplation. The gradation of scientific activities is reflected in the spiritual development of Stein in their interweaving; the fact that she remained intellectually active until the last phase of her life and was filled with mystical vision from the very beginning shows her comprehensive mystical devotion to science, history, and the renewal of the Church. In this sense, Europe means to her the unity that was shattered with the outbreak of the First World War, a unified culture rooted in Christianity that grew organically out of Judaism. This common cultural and religious heritage forms, in its fragility and diversity, the history of the twentieth century.