Light On Dark Water

Edith Stein 1

For some time now I’ve been wanting to study the
writings of St. Edith Stein, or, as she is formally known, Saint
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I prefer to think of her as Edith
Stein; it makes her seem no less holy, and closer to our earthly
life, and, specifically, closer to the culture and events of the
20th century which eventually took her life (of
which you can read a brief outline here).

I keep running into snippets of her work (for instance in the
daily meditations of the invaluable devotional magazine
Magnificat).
And I’m drawn to them in an odd
way—it’s not just that I find them insightful or well
expressed, it’s that they seem like promising indicators or
clues of some kind, as if they’re saying to me “There
is something for you here—follow the trail.” So
I’ve made it part of my Lenten discipline this year to make
some kind of serious start. I decided it wasn’t practical
to make her work my only reading for six weeks, but she’ll be my
emphasis, and I won’t start any other large or demanding
reading projects. That’s why this is titled “Edith
Stein 1”—it’s the first of as many comments on
Edith Stein as there are Sundays from now through Easter.

I know at the outset that a large part of her work is
technical philosophy that is well over my head. I have no more
than a nodding acquaintance with philosophy of any sort, and none
at all with that of her philosophical mentor, Edmund Husserl. So
I’ll be dabbling. I have several of her books, and am
starting my dabbling with a fairly brief essay in Knowledge
and Faith, “Knowledge, Truth, and Being.” I have
glanced at this essay before, and it seems to move in the
direction of some vague ideas about faith which I’ve toyed
with for some time but never really articulated; I’m hoping
she can help me.

It’s really the mystical in her and not the
philosophical that interests me, and now that I’ve written
that I think maybe part of what has attracted me to her is a
sense of the philosophical reaching its limits and continuing
beyond them into mysticism. Mysticism is probably the wrong word:
contemplative worship is a better term. I plan at least to sample
her final work, The Science of the Cross, which she had
barely completed when the Nazis took her away.

So far I’ve encountered this striking formulation:
“being = being-known-by-God,” which reminds me of
Julian of Norwich’s well-known “It is, because God
loveth it.” I have no doubt that both are true. And both
serve as a sort of justification or explanation for my own most
fundamental intuition: a pleasure in sheer existence which
is, at least where sight is concerned, almost independent of the
specific thing being seen, although it (somewhat paradoxically)
cannot be had without a simultaneous awareness of the
individuality of the thing itself.

This is also, to me, the foundational function and power of
art: to bring home to the beholder somehow (and new means are
always possible and necessary) this intuition of the splendor of
being. Most art of course does more than this. Literature, for
instance, inevitably deals with moral questions, but without this
power it’s only a textbook. The desire and attempt to
effect this have always been at the bottom of my own desultory
literary work. I’ve never quite understood, or felt any
connection with, the idea that art is
“self-expression.” I experience something incoherent
within me which I need to bring into definite existence, but
it’s not me. It feels like something separate,
something given. Joseph Conrad’s words have always seemed
my own: “above all, to make you see.” And what I want
to make you see is not me, but the splendor of being as I have
seen it living in some specific thing. It only involves me because I don’t
have the power of imagination required to get much beyond the
basic material of my own life.