Martin Heidegger & Saint Edith Stein : two contrasting lives
28 August 2024
by Roberto de Mattei
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new philosophical school in Europe stepped forward to try and bring modern thought to its “critical maturity”. The founder of the new school was Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), professor in Göttingen and Freiburg im Breslau, who sought the objectivity of knowledge and values in human consciousness.
In the circle of Husserl’s associates, the two young scholars — Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger — stood out, their opposing intellectual and existential itineraries seeming to emblematically summarise the different possibilities that modern philosophy and civilisation have before them. Martin Heidegger, born Catholic, followed to the full the theoretical itinerary of modern immanentism, arriving at a nihilism that was as ambiguous as it was radical. He succeeded Husserl in the professorship, joined the National Socialist Party and, after the war, lived out the rest of his life as an acclaimed philosopher; today he is a controversial prophet of the postmodern Left.
Husserl’s favourite pupil, Edith Stein, born Jewish, converted to Catholicism after a painful personal search; she turned her back on a brilliant university career and found the fullness of Truth and Life that she was yearning for in the philosophy of being of Saint Thomas Aquinas and in the interior profundity of Carmel. She sealed her complete adherence to Christ with martyrdom. Her figure deserves to be remembered.
Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany in 1891, the eleventh child of a fervent Jewish couple. In 1910, after completing her secondary studies with great success, she enrolled at the University of Breslau. In 1913, she transferred to the University of Göttingen, where she met the philosopher Husserl and became his assistant, together with Martin Heidegger, two years her senior.
The Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, which she read one summer night in 1921, changed her life. Edith was at the country house of some friends, who had to leave for a while. Before their departure she was invited to select a book from the shelves. She recalls, “I picked at random and took out a large volume. It bore the title The Life of St Teresa of Avila, Written by Herself. I began to read, was at once captivated, and did not stop till I reached the end. As I closed the book, I said, ‘That is the truth’.”
On New Year’s Day 1922, against her parents’ wishes, Edith received Baptism and First Communion. She turned her back on a successful future and, on 14 October 1933, as Nazism came to power in Germany, she entered the Carmelite monastery of Cologne, with the name of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Father Cornelio Fabro wrote of her:
“Carmelite life instilled in her a peace of spirit, a fullness of life, an inexpressible joy of heart that beamed on those who on rare occasions were able to approach her: striking, in her clear and youthful appearance, was a dignity of simplicity, a charitable affability, a fraternal understanding that gave that joy and at the same time that prodding with which we are struck every time, in this wretched existence, some authentic ray of the infinite Good touches us.” (“Edith Stein, dalla filosofia al supplizio”, in Ecclesia, IX, 7, 1949, pp 344–346)
On 21 April 1933, Martin Heidegger, on the proposal of a group of National Socialist teachers, was elected rector of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg. On 21 April 1938, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross made her perpetual profession in the order of Carmel. A few days later, on 26 April, her teacher Edmund Husserl died in Freiburg, uttering words of abandonment in God. Martin Heidegger, after a turbid romantic relationship with his student Hannah Arendt, died in Freiburg, at the age of eighty-six, in 1976.
On the night of 30 December 1938, to escape the racial persecutions, Edith left the Carmelite convent in Cologne to take refuge in the Carmel of Echt, in Holland. She wrote of this in her testament:
“I have a persistent thought: down here there are no permanent dwellings. I desire nothing, except that God’s will be accomplished in me and through me: how long will He leave me here, and what will happen next? All of this depends on Him, and therefore I don’t have to worry at all. But it is important to pray much, in order to remain faithful in every circumstance.”
“From this moment, I accept the death that God has destined for me, with joy and with total submission to His most holy will. I beg the Lord to take my life and my death… for all concerns of the sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and the holy Church … as atonement for the unbelief of the Jewish People, and that the Lord will be received by His own people and His kingdom shall come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world, at last for my loved ones, living or dead, and for all God gave to me: that none of them shall be lost.”
After the outbreak of the Second World War in May 1940, the Germans occupied Holland. On 2 August 1942, the Reich Commissioner had all the “non-Aryan” religious men and women present in the convents arrested — around 300 in all — as an act of retaliation against the Dutch episcopate, which had publicly opposed the persecutions of the Jews. Sister Teresa Benedicta, together with her sister Rosa, was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in a gas chamber on 10 August 1942.
Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Carmelite nun, virgin and martyr, was proclaimed blessed in 1987 by John Paul II, canonised in 1998, and elevated to the dignity of co-patroness of Europe together with Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Bridget of Sweden.
The greatness of Edith Stein, even more than in her martyrdom, lay in the heroic choice with which she decided to turn her back on the spirit of the world in order to immerse herself in the spiritual depths of Carmel. The grace of martyrdom was the reward for this ardent love for the Truth that constituted the common thread of her life.