Books: Edith Stein A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922

The Hidden Life of Wisdom

by Christopher O. Blum

Edith Stein was an unlikely saint. A former Jewish-atheist bluestocking who died for the Faith as a Carmelite nun in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, Stein was impelled by a quenchless thirst for truth. God in His Mercy placed in her life friends who were themselves, in one way or another, “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), and who helped her draw near to the source of wisdom.

Although raised in a large, devout Jewish family, Stein strayed from God during her youth. She later said that she “consciously decided” to stop praying. As a university student, she passed through a phase of being—again, in her words—a “radical suffragette.” Soon, however, she began the arduous work of pursuing the truth, moving to the university at Göttingen to sit at the feet of Edmund Husserl. Stein’s life as the student and then as the graduate assistant of Husserl, with her consequent membership in the circle of ardent young philosophers Husserl had collected around himself, has been admirably told by Alasdair MacIntyre, whose Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922is a penetrating investigation of character as it relates to the search for truth.

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How does a headstrong girl, in open rebellion from a good and honest family life, find her way back to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and then discover the fullness of truth in Jesus Christ? As John Paul II put it, Stein is an “eloquent example of … interior renewal. A young woman in search of the truth has become a saint and martyr through the silent workings of divine grace.” Hurried and harried as we are, we stand to gain a valuable lesson from her life. The quiet, unpretentious, and hidden pursuit of wisdom is one of the great means by which God draws souls back to himself, and not merely the contemplative few, but also their friends, neighbors, and family members as well.

Stein once confessed that before becoming a Christian, she had thought that being devout meant “having one’s mind fixed on divine things only.” She subsequently learned, however, that “other things are expected of us in this world” and that “the deeper someone is drawn to God, the more he has to get beyond himself in this sense, that is, go into the world and carry divine life into it.” To be authentic, the hidden life of wisdom must not be closed in on itself. Rather, it must be like a deep well in which water is kept pure and cool not for its own sake, but so as to be readily drawn upon by those who thirst.

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