Fr. Ulrich Dobhan, OCD
When Edith Stein crossed the threshold of the Cologne Carmelite cloister on October 14, 1933, after the solemn first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, her wish, which she had held in her heart for a long time, was fulfilled. On that day, the saint, Saint Teresa of Jesus, was like a godmother on her long journey to Carmel.
The first biographer of Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Renata Posselt from the Cologne convent, recounts: “From her study and work contact with Hedwig Conrad-Martius and her husband developed a faithful friendship that frequently brought Edith to Bergzabern for longer or shorter stays, where her friends tended a large orchard. However, during one such summer visit, both the couple were busy elsewhere. Before they left, Mrs. Conrad-Martius introduced her friend to the library and urged her to choose whatever she liked. Everything is at her disposal. Edith herself recounts: ‘I reached into the library randomly and pulled out a hefty book. It was titled ‘The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila’ and was written by her own hand. I began to read; the book immediately captivated me, and I did not stop until I had read to the end. When I closed it, I said to myself: This is truth!’ Dawn was breaking. Edith hardly noticed. God had taken hold of her, and she would not let Him go. In the morning, she went to town to buy two things: a Catholic catechism and a missal.”1
This description of Edith's conversion has become world-famous and has almost acquired a legendary quality over time. Edith herself wrote in her autobiographical work How I Came to the Cologne Carmel2: “About ten days after my return from Beuron (i.e., in April 1933), it occurred to me: Has the time finally come to go to Carmel? For twelve years, Carmel had been my goal. Since the summer of 1921, when ‘The Life’ of our holy Mother Teresa fell into my hands, it ended my long search for true faith.”3 Edith does not recount the exact circumstances of the event “in the summer of 1921.” Interestingly, Pavlína Reinach also attests: “During the summer of 1921, when the servant of God was preparing to leave us, my sister-in-law and I invited her to choose a book from our library. She chose the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. I am absolutely sure of this detail.”4 This means that Edith Stein encountered Teresa’s Vita not only in the home of Hedwig Conrad-Marituse in Bad Bergzabern. The fact that Edith read the book in just one night likely belongs to legend.
The significance of St. Teresa in Edith's conversion to Catholicism is, however, indisputable. This is confirmed by Fr. Johannes Hirschmann SJ in a (still unpublished) letter dated May 13, 1950, to the then prioress of the Cologne Carmelite convent, Sister Teresa Renata Posselt: “The reason why, drawn to Christianity, Edith did not become a Protestant like her teacher Husserl, her friend Hedwig Conrad-Martius or Mrs. Reinach, but rather a Catholic, was directly due to the reading of the biography of Saint Teresa. She believed, however, that this step was prepared by Scheler's influence, which particularly affected her during his Catholic period.”5 We must not overlook these “preparatory” moments on Edith Stein’s path to faith and entry into the Catholic Church. I will attempt to outline them here.
The starting point for Edith's search for truth lies in a certain kind of basic religious disposition, which was evident even in her childhood. Edith recalls: “... within me was another, hidden world. What I saw and heard during the day was processed here... About all these matters, which I secretly suffered from, I never spoke a word to anyone.”6 Even as a child, she knew that - to quote Saint Teresa - “there is something incomparably more valuable in us than what is seen outwardly.”7
From this inner world, which was essential and even vital for Edith, arises, and this directly as a consequence, her decision made at the age of 15: “completely consciously and of my own free choice to give up praying.”8 Despite her mother's deep piety, Edith seemingly never internalized the Jewish faith, primarily perceiving its exterior, which rather discouraged her, as is evident from her description of her uncle's funeral: “The funeral speeches (...) looked back at the life of the deceased, highlighting what good he had done (...); they contained nothing comforting (...). They were not backed by faith in the afterlife of man and in reuniting after death.”9 Or it is also evident from how Edith describes the Passover celebration in the family circle: “The sanctification of the holiday was marred by the fact that only my mother and the smaller children participated piously. The brothers, who had to recite the prayers instead of the deceased father, did so in a rather undignified manner. When the older brother was absent, the younger one, who had to assume the role of head of the family, even explicitly showed that he found the whole thing amusing.”10 I am also referring to her explanation of relatively frequent suicides among Jews11 and her notes about Talmudic trivialities, “which repelled me.”12 In such - according to her experience: superficial - piety, nothing could stir or agitate in her inner life from which she lived her life. And it could not have been very difficult for her to give up this kind of piety and prayer, especially since “the decisions arose from an unknown depth within me.”13
It is also understandable that what was happening in this “depth” was not something Edith could easily manage; and this means that the question of religion required an appropriate moment in time. Thus, about her first acquaintance with the Gospel - while studying Old High German at the University of Wroclaw, she read Wulfila's translation of the Bible - she writes: “At that time, it did not interest me from a religious standpoint; (...) and – had we been touched – we would have debated religious questions just as openly as we would have about others.”14 And in recounting her way to the university, she reveals to us: “I did not enter beautiful churches. After all, I had nothing to seek there.”15
Given Edith's typical and remarkable gift of empathy, which she had displayed since childhood, it was hardly to be expected that it would be encounters with other people that would further advance her - also in the religious question - as soon as the right moment arrived. Encounters with Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and especially with Max Scheler caused a turning point in her. She writes about it: “It was my first touch with a completely unknown world. It did not yet lead me to faith, but opened up to me the area of ‘phenomena’ that I could no longer blindly ignore. Not for nothing did they continuously instill in us that we should look at all matters without prejudice and cast off all ‘blinders’ from our eyes. The barriers of rationalist prejudices, in which I had grown up - without knowing it - fell, and the world of faith suddenly stood before me. The people I interacted with daily, whom I admired, lived in it. They certainly deserved at least serious consideration. I had not yet started to systematically address faith questions, I was still too filled with other matters. I was content to gradually accept stimuli from my surroundings without resistance, and that virtually unnoticed transformed me.”16 In hindsight, this was a very decisive moment in Edith Stein's life, which she herself must have somewhat sensed during her farewell in Wroclaw since “in my deepest heart, I had - like probably she (i.e., my mother) - a mysterious premonition that this farewell reached deeper.”17 This was also the beginning of a painful and long journey, as four good years would still pass before her baptism in Bad Bergzabern. But now Edith was internally far enough along that “she looked at all things without prejudice.”
Recognizing this attitude of hers, it is understandable that three wind-tossed trees on a bare hill in the vicinity of Göttingen “constantly reminded me of the three crosses on Golgotha,”18 that she noticed the triple ringing of bells from St. Albani, even without knowing its significance,19 that - as she writes - “I learned in Göttingen to respect religious questions and believing people” and “even sometimes went with my friends to a Protestant church.”20 and that during her service in the hospital in Hranice, Moravia, in 1915, she was open towards religious “phenomena”: “While sorting through the few possessions, a note fell from the notebook of the deceased (i.e., a soldier): it contained a prayer for the preservation of his life that his wife gave him. This touched me deeply. It was only now that I felt the human dimension of this death.”21 Such an inner disposition also gives particular significance to previously minor experiences that Edith Stein had in the summer of 1916 in Frankfurt am Main: “We entered the cathedral for a few minutes, and while we lingered there in respectful silence, a woman from the market came in with her basket and knelt in the pew to pray briefly. This was entirely new to me. In synagogues and Protestant churches that I visited, people only went for service. But here someone came from everyday affairs into an empty church for a personal conversation. I could never forget that.”22 Or the visit to the Liebieg Museum, where Myron's Athena stands: “But before we reached her, we came to the room where four figures from the Flemish ‘Entombment’ of the 16th century were displayed: the Blessed Virgin and John in the middle, Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus on the sides. The body of Christ was no longer there. The expression of these figures was so captivating that we could not tear ourselves away for a long time. And when we finally reached Athena, I found her only very lovely, but she left me cold (...) Only many years later, during a return visit, did I find access to her.”23
After these “preparatory” experiences, it could hardly be otherwise than that the meeting with Anna Reinach, whose husband fell in 1917 in Flanders, caused a profound change in Edith. The first to mention this is Fr. Jan Hirschmann SJ in the above-cited letter from May 13, 1950, to Sister Teresa Renata Posselt: “The decisive impetus for her conversion to Christianity was, as she told me, the way in which her friend Mrs. Reinach bore the burden imposed on her by the death of her husband at the front in the force of the mystery of the cross. In this sacrifice, she experienced proof of the truth of the Christian religion and opened herself to it. After Reinach's death, she stayed in their home to inspect his estate” (see above). The author of Edith's biography incorporated this information into the 7th edition (1954) of her book, allowing Edith herself to speak: “It was my first encounter with the cross and the divine power that the cross gives to those who bear it. For the first time, I saw directly in front of me the Church born from Christ's redeeming suffering in its victory over the sting of death. It was a moment in which my unbelief collapsed, Judaism faded, and Christianity shone: Christ in the mystery of the cross.”24 It cannot be overlooked that there is a tendency to embellish the report, which makes it inaccurate, for Edith's Judaism had long faded.
This transformation is also testified to by the writings that Edith produced in these years (1918–1921), although they do not directly deal with religious themes, as well as by her letters from that period. F. J. Sancho Fermín says: “It is undoubted that Edith is now experiencing a dramatic situation for a certain time: she wants to believe, and yet she cannot; faith comes and then eludes her; intellectually she suspects that truth is in God, but she has not yet experienced it in life; she feels that faith attracts her, but it has not yet fully penetrated her.”25
After all this, it would have been very close to a conversion to Protestantism, especially when various friends from the circle around Edmund Husserl made this step, and when, on the other hand, conversion to Catholicism must have meant an even greater tragedy for her family, especially for her mother. Nevertheless, Edith turns to the Catholic Church. This decision, which was certainly spurred on by reading Teresa's autobiography, was “prepared.” Edith writes: “The mixing of politics and religion that prevailed there (i.e., in Protestant churches) could not lead me to the recognition of pure faith and often repelled me.”26 On her path to Catholicism, the significance of reading Möhler's explanation of the dogmatic differences between the Catholic and Protestant understanding of faith, Augustine's Confessions, and Ignatius of Loyola's Exercises cannot be understated.27 Nevertheless, it was only the encounter with Teresa of Avila in the summer of 1921 that led Edith Stein to the conviction that she had found “the truth,” and ultimately to the decision to be baptized in the Catholic Church.
Excerpted from the magazine Karmelimpulse, Volume 9, 1999/I, pp. 16-21.
Translated from German by Sister M. Petra of the Risen One, OCD.
