St Edith Stein’s feast day is on August 9, the date of her death in Auschwitz. Even if she had not died as a martyr, Stein would have been known for her contribution to 20th-century philosophy and mysticism.
Edith Stein was born into an observant Jewish family in 1891. She became an atheist in her teens; a long intellectual journey then began, in which Stein engaged deeply with the philosophy of her mentor Edmund Husserl. Through Husserl’s phenomenological school, she was also connected to Martin Heidegger. She was a rising star of European philosophy when, in 1921, she picked up St Teresa of Avila’s autobiography. It floored her: “When I had finished the book,” she wrote later, “I said to myself: This is the truth.”
Philosophy and Providence
Stein’s philosophical studies continued: among her works was a study of St Thomas Aquinas, inflected with modern phenomenology, and many lectures on women’s issues. At last her spiritual director allowed her to join the same order as St Teresa, the Carmelites. Stein took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Later she would write: “Things were in God’s plan which I had not planned at all. I am coming to the living faith and conviction that – from God’s point of view – there is no chance and that the whole of my life, down to every detail, has been mapped out in God’s divine providence and makes complete and perfect sense in God’s all-seeing eyes.”
Martyr of Auschwitz
But the next few years were a test of that faith. She was moved from Cologne to the Netherlands, as the wave of Nazi violence approached.
Not long after completing her study of St John of the Cross, she was arrested by the Gestapo and, as a Jewish Christian, was sent, eventually, to Auschwitz. She died in the gas chambers, a death later recognised as martyrdom. Today she is one of the six patron saints of Europe.
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