Edith Stein's significance for our times emerges into ever higher relief since her canonization as martyr in 1999 caused the controversy with which the present book ends, and which I address first.
That Stein's deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau together with some 300 Catholic Jews was the Gauleiter of Holland's reaction to the Dutch bishops’ protest against the persecution of Jews is stated by Borden and others in answer to Jewish hurt at what could appear the appropriation by the Catholic Church of a death suffered in their Shoah, the Holocaust.
Where she seems less convincing is over Stein's own sense of the import of her life and anticipated death: ‘for our people’, she put it to her sister, Rosa, as they prepared to leave the Carmel at Echt for the train-ride to execution; ‘for the unbelief of the Jewish people’, she expressed in her will, made three years previously. One view Borden advances that would interpret these words as an offering in satisfaction for Jewish ‘atheism’, might itself appear insulting to believing Jews. Like it or not, surely the ‘unbelief’ Stein had in mind was the refusal of Judaism as a body to recognize in Jesus its Messiah.
In her first chapter, Borden traces Edith, youngest of seven children whose father died when she was two, from Breslau in Silesia, through studies in psychology at its university, as doctoral student with the phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl at Göttingen, as nurse during the First World War with the Red Cross, from which she received a medal for valour, to her return to her mother's house from where, in the collapsed conditions of Germany, she continued to study and teach. In 1922 she requested Catholic baptism.
Thereafter Stein, teaching at a Dominican college and a girls’ school in Speyer, became well-known as writer and broadcaster, particularly in the field of women's education. A letter from her to the Prussian Minister of Education prompted the lifting of the ban on women in university positions and in 1932 she achieved an appointment in Münster – only to lose it within the year to Hitler's anti-Jewish laws. It was then that she decided to fulfil her longstanding desire to enter Carmel, taking the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Borden's remaining chapters present the unfolding of the saint's philosophical, political and social thought: Chapter 2 her beginnings in phenomenology; Chapter 5 her turn to Christian philosophizing; Chapter 6 her ‘comprehensive vision’ of Finite and Eternal Being, the 500-odd page Endliches und Ewiges Sein. To phenomenology she contributed a distinguishing between causality and motivation applied to her theory of the four-fold individual, composed of the physical, the sentient, the mental and the personal – this last, the will, in which she saw our freedom as residing.
Following her conversion, Edith Stein came under the influence of Fr Erich Przywara, editor of an influential Catholic journal, who encouraged her to translate Newman's diaries and letters and subsequently Aquinas's De Veritate, to which she gave, arguably, a transcendental turn. Her relationship to medieval philosophy was Scotist rather than Thomist, though in a dialogue ‘What is Philosophy?’, subsequently published in essay form in a Festschrift for Husserl, she imagines St Thomas visiting her professor.
Stein's first attraction to psychology, infuses her thought. It is unlikely she knew the work of her elder contemporary, Sigmund Freud, but Borden finds a parallel to his libido in her positing of ‘lifepower’(Lebenskraft), while to this reviewer a similarity to Freud's pupil, Carl Jung's assertion of an immixture of feminine and masculine in the human personality (as in his anima-animus construct) appears in Stein's observation that, in Borden's words, ‘individuals do not fall simply into one [sexual] category or the other’(p. 70). Chapter 4, ‘Woman and Women's Education’, explores how ‘Stein consistently affirms her commitment to a distinctive feminine nature, but she also insists on genuine equality between the sexes and emancipation in all professional spheres’. Regarding women and the priesthood, ‘[Stein] says that while it cannot be forbidden by dogma, tradition and the example of Christ both speak against it’(p. 81).
The saint's spiritual writings are the subject of Chapter 9 and, belonging largely to the nine years of her life spent in Carmel, were unpublished until long after her death, when many of her writings were lovingly reconstructed from notes found in the destroyed convent of Echt. Disappointingly, Borden does not supply the dates of original publications in German, only of English translations now issuing fast from the Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington DC – bringing riches to the intellectual and spiritual life of the Church.
A pedantic caveat: It is hard to believe Stein herself would have approved the silly convention current in American academia of substituting feminine for common pronominals: ‘her’ for ‘his’ etc. Some of this blemish derives from the translations – despite the very different way pronominals are used in German – but a good deal is Borden's own, and applied with often incongruous effect: thus we have, ‘If one were a Thomist, one read Latin; if one were not, she did not read Thomas’(p. 104, cf also p. 141). Once or twice Borden lapses with a ‘his’ or a ‘his or her’(pp. 50 and 96), or – as if in desperation – a ‘you’, as on p. 39, where, too, the perverse ‘she’ actually becomes confused with the female subject, Stein herself.
In general, though, this book, described on its jacket as ‘an overview’, is to be recommended as steering a course between the less and the more initiate in philosophy.
Stein overcame a wilfulness in early childhood and a later blackness of mood not uncommon in doctoral students, to become, despite the terrors of the time she lived and died amid, an apostle of joy. A favourite ‘phenomenon’ already in her first philosophical work, joy reappears as a ‘substantial form’ in Finite and Eternal Being. In the Commentary on St John of the Cross written at the behest of her superiors, she writes, ‘the joy in creatures is increased by renouncing them’. May she pray for us!
