STEIN, EDITH

STEIN, EDITH (1891–1942), German philosopher. Born in Breslau, of an Orthodox Jewish family, Edith Stein studied philosophy under edmund husserl at Goettingen and then became his first assistant at Freiburg University. Her dissertation, Zum Problem der Einfuehlung (1917; On the Problem of Empathy, 1964), played an important role in the phenomenological movement. She also prepared some of Husserl's works for publication. In 1922, after reading the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila, she converted to Catholicism, gave up her university post, and went to teach at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer. Here she studied Catholic philosophy, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, and translated his treatise Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate (Untersuchungen ueber die Wahrheit, 1931). Her study in the Husserl-Festschrift, "Husserls Phaenomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino" (1929) attempted to show the points of contrast between phenomenology and Thomism. In 1932, Edith Stein was appointed lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Muenster, but in 1933, with the advent of the Nazi regime, she had to give up this position, and entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Here she completed her large work Endliches und ewiges Sein (Werke, vol. 2, 1950), relating Thomism and contemporary phenomenological and existentialist thought. In 1938, to escape Nazi persecution, she was taken to a monastery at Echt in Holland, where she wrote Kreuzeswissenschaft (Werke, vol. 1, 1950; The Science of the Cross, 1960), on the life and teaching of St. John of the Cross. Shortly after finishing the work she, along with other priests and nuns of Jewish origin, was arrested by the Gestapo as a reprisal for the condemnation by the Dutch bishops of Nazi antisemitism. She died in the Auschwitz gas chambers. In 1998 she was canonized by the Catholic Church. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: H.C. Graef, The Scholar and the Cross (1955); H.C. Bordeaux, Edith Stein: Thoughts on Her Life and Times (1959), includes bibliography; A.A. Devaux et al., in: Les Etudes Philosophiques, 11 (1956), 427–72, incl. bibl.; H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (1960), index; The Writings of Edith Stein, selected, translated, and introduced by H. Graef (1956), 7–18, biographical introd.; C. Alexander, Der Fall Edith Stein. Flucht in die Chimaere (1970). (Richard H. Popkin)