Justified True Belief

(●) Edmund Husserl’s first assistant, who reasoned her way out of atheism into the Catholic church and was killed at Auschwitz as a Jew. + In the years before the First World War, a small group of students gathered around a professor at Göttingen who was trying to teach philosophy how to look at things again. The best-trained of them, by common consent of the others, was a young Jewish woman from Breslau who had stopped believing in God on purpose and was after the truth with nothing else in the way. She took her doctorate with him, wrote out his shorthand notebooks into readable German, and was turned down four times by four universities for the qualification that would have let her lecture: at the start because she was a woman, and at the end because she was a Jew. She matters to a Christian reader for two reasons that pull in different directions. The first is that she is a rare case of someone who came to faith along an argument rather than away from one. She was a trained philosopher before she was baptized, she stayed one afterwards, and her largest book is an attempt to hold Husserl’s method and Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics in the same hand. The second is that she died in a gas chamber at Birkenau on 9 August 1942, a Carmelite nun who had gone to the transport in her habit with a yellow star sewn onto it, murdered along with her sister Rosa and roughly a thousand other people from the same transport. Here is the fact about her that is hardest to shake. Her masterwork, Finite and Eternal Being, was finished at the beginning of 1937 and actually set in type by a Breslau printer. It never went to press; the publisher, she wrote to a colleague in America, "no longer had the courage to publish it under my name." Three thousand kilos of lead type sat waiting for a book that could not legally carry the name of the woman who wrote it. It was printed in 1950, eight years after she was dead.

(●) 1891 AD: Born in Breslau on the Day of Atonement, the last of eleven children, and out of her family’s faith before she was twenty. + Edith Stein was born on 12 October 1891 in Breslau, then a Prussian city and now Wrocław in Poland. The date mattered in her house: it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the Jewish year, and her mother never stopped treating that as a sign about her youngest child. Her father Siegfried, a timber merchant, died in the summer of 1893, when Edith was not yet two. Her mother Auguste was left with seven surviving children and a lumber business she had never run, and she ran it, and made it pay. Auguste Stein was observant, and her daughter was not. Edith described the change in her own memoir without dressing it up: she "consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying." There was no crisis and no quarrel. She simply stopped, at about fourteen, and what took the place of prayer was an appetite for knowing things that her family found faintly alarming. Looking back much later she summed those years up in a sentence that is either a boast or a confession depending on how you read it: her longing for truth, she said, was her one prayer. She left school at fourteen and spent ten months in Hamburg helping her married sister Else with the children, in a household where religion was simply not mentioned. She came back, finished her schooling first in her class, and in 1911 entered the University of Breslau to read psychology, which was then the fashionable science of the mind. It disappointed her. The psychologists, she thought, were busy measuring things without ever having settled what a mind is.

(●) 1913 AD: She went to Göttingen for Edmund Husserl, and stayed for a doctorate on how one person knows what another is feeling. + At Breslau it was Georg Moskiewicz who put Husserl’s Logical Investigations into her hands, with the remark that at Göttingen the students philosophized day and night and talked of nothing but the phenomenon. She read the second volume through. In the spring of 1913 she moved to Göttingen to study with the man himself. Husserl had founded what he called phenomenology, which is a fairly plain idea buried under a heavy word: instead of theorizing about what experience must be like, describe carefully what it is actually like, and let the theories come afterwards. His slogan was "to the things themselves." For a student sick of psychologists counting reaction times, it was air. The Göttingen circle she joined was extraordinary and short-lived. Adolf Reinach, Husserl’s brilliant younger colleague, was the one who actually taught the students, and Stein loved him. Max Scheler lectured there on values and on religion, and she later wrote that he was the first person to knock a hole in her settled assumption that a serious thinker could not be a believing Christian. Then the war came, and at the start of it she wrote, "I no longer have a life of my own." In the spring of 1915 she volunteered as a Red Cross nursing assistant and was sent to a military hospital for infectious diseases at Mährisch-Weisskirchen in Moravia, where she worked the typhus ward. She was good at it and it cost her. When the hospital closed she went back to her dissertation, followed Husserl to Freiburg, and on 3 August 1916 came through her doctoral examination on On the Problem of Empathy with summa cum laude, the highest grade the German system gives. The book itself was printed the following year. Husserl took her on as his assistant that October. Her job, for the next year and a half, was to turn his private shorthand into publishable text, and the second volume of his Ideas, one of the most quoted books in twentieth-century philosophy, is a manuscript she assembled.

(●) 1919 AD: Göttingen refused her the qualification to teach, because she was a woman. + German universities required a second and harder thesis after the doctorate, the Habilitationsschrift, before anyone could lecture in their own name. Without it there was no career. Stein wrote hers, applied to Göttingen in 1919, and was turned down. Her sex was the reason; the faculty did not pretend otherwise. Husserl supplied a letter of recommendation on 6 February of that year which was, by any reading, tepid, and the injustice of the whole business stayed with her. She did not simply take it, either. She petitioned the Prussian ministry about the exclusion of women, and she was not the only one pressing; the bar did eventually come down for later applicants. It did her no good at all. She tried again anyway, first at Kiel, then at Breslau, and in 1931 at Freiburg, where Husserl’s old chair was now held by Martin Heidegger. By then, though, the objection had quietly changed. It was no longer that she was a woman. What blocked her, as she and her friends read it, was that she was a Jew. So she published instead. The rejected thesis went into Husserl’s own yearbook in 1922 under the title Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, and a study of the state followed in 1925. She made her living from 1923 to 1931 teaching German at St Magdalena, a Dominican sisters’ school and teachers’ college at Speyer, marking exercise books by day and translating Thomas Aquinas at night. It is worth sitting with that for a moment. One of the sharpest philosophical minds in Europe spent eight years grading schoolgirls’ essays because no university would have her.

(●) 1921 AD: She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through one night, closed it saying that this was the truth, and was baptized at the turn of the year. + The approach took years and came through people rather than books. In November 1917 Adolf Reinach was killed in Flanders, and Stein went to Göttingen to help his widow Anne sort his papers, dreading the visit. What she found was a young woman recently baptized who was grieving and not destroyed, and it unsettled every assumption she had about what religion was for. Four summers later she was staying at Bad Bergzabern on the fruit farm of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a philosopher friend from the Göttingen years who had become a Protestant. Left alone one evening, she took a book at random from the shelves: the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, which is to say a nun of an order whose women live shut away in one house and give their days to prayer. She read it straight through the night. As she told it afterwards, she closed the book in the morning and said to herself, "This is the truth." She bought a catechism and a missal the same week, the first being the book that sets out what the church holds and the second the book that carries the words of its Mass, read them both, went to Mass herself, and asked the priest to baptize her. He did, on 1 January 1922, in the parish church at Bergzabern. She took the names Edith Teresia Hedwig, and her Protestant friend Hedwig stood as her godmother, which is irregular and which nobody seems to have minded. She wanted to enter Carmel, Teresa’s own order, immediately. Two things stopped her: her spiritual advisers thought her gifts were needed in the world, and there was her mother, for whom the baptism was a wound that never healed. Edith went home to Breslau, told her, and then went with her to the synagogue and sat beside her through the service.

(●) 1933 AD: The racial laws ended her teaching, her letter to the pope brought back a blessing and nothing more, and in October she entered Carmel. + The 1920s had finally opened a door. From 1928 she lectured all over Germany and beyond it on the education and the working life of women, and the halls were full. In 1932 she was appointed to the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy at Münster, the first proper academic post she had ever held. She kept it for about a year. In April 1933 the new government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which required proof of Aryan descent from anyone teaching in a state-funded institution, and she was told her lectures would not continue. What she did next was extraordinary and almost nobody knew about it for seventy years. She wrote to Pope Pius XI and asked him to say something. "As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church," the letter begins, "I dare to speak to the Father of Christianity about that which oppresses millions of Germans." She asked the church to raise its voice and put a stop to the abuse of Christ’s name, and she wrote that faithful Catholics feared the worst for the standing of the church if the silence went on any longer. The letter went to Archabbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron, who sent it on to Rome under a covering letter of 12 April 1933. She received a blessing for herself and her family, and no answer to the question. The Vatican released the text from its archives in 2003. So on 14 October 1933, eleven years after her baptism and after being told to wait, she entered the Carmel of Cologne, an enclosed order of contemplative nuns who leave the house only under necessity. She had turned forty-two two days before. A woman does not simply arrive in such a house and become a nun; she is admitted by stages, and Stein went through all of them, beginning with six months as a postulant. She was clothed as a novice on 15 April 1934, which is the day a woman is given the habit and begins her novitiate, the year of testing that comes before any vow is made, and she took the name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, Teresa Blessed by the Cross. Her first vows, which bind for three years, came on 21 April 1935, and her final vows, the ones that are made for life, on 21 April 1938. Her superiors told her to keep writing philosophy, which is how the great book got written between 1934 and the beginning of 1937 in a monastery cell with almost no library. Not everything inside those walls was quiet. Her mother died in Breslau on 14 September 1936, still unreconciled to the baptism; her sister Rosa, who had been waiting for exactly that before taking the same step herself, was received into the church that Christmas Eve.

(●) 1938 AD: On the last night of the year she was driven across the Dutch border, and Rosa followed her to Echt. + On the night of 9 November 1938 the synagogues of Germany burned, Breslau’s among them. After that, a Jewish nun inside a German convent was a danger to every other woman in the building, and everyone in the house knew it. On 31 December 1938 she was driven over the frontier to the Carmel at Echt in the southern Netherlands. Rosa followed her there and lived as the extern sister, the one who answers the door, because the enclosure itself was full. Safety lasted sixteen months, and then it did not. In May 1940 the German army took the Netherlands, and the frontier she had been driven over on the last night of 1938 stopped meaning anything at all; in time both sisters had to register as Jews. Edith kept working through all of it, which is the detail about these years that stays with you. In 1941 her community asked her for a study of John of the Cross, the Spanish Carmelite poet and mystic, for the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, and she began the book that became The Science of the Cross. She had already written her will, and it is worth noticing how early. On Passion Sunday, 26 March 1939, she asked the prioress, the nun who governs a Carmel, for permission to offer herself as a sacrifice for true peace. On 9 June 1939, before any invasion and while the Netherlands were still neutral ground, she set down a testament accepting in advance whatever death was coming. Friends, meanwhile, were working to get both sisters away to a Carmel in Switzerland. The papers were still unfinished when the Gestapo came, and in any case she would not leave without Rosa.

(●) 1942 AD: A week after the Dutch bishops’ protest was read from the pulpits, the Gestapo came for her, and she died at Auschwitz on 9 August. + In July 1942 the Dutch churches decided to protest publicly against the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands. A joint pastoral letter was read from Catholic pulpits across the country on Sunday 26 July. The occupying administration answered it precisely: since the Catholic bishops had spoken, Catholics of Jewish descent, who had until then been left alone, would be taken. The Gestapo came to Echt on the afternoon of 2 August 1942 and gave the two sisters a few minutes. Rosa was frightened, and the words Edith is remembered as saying to her, reported afterwards by those who were there, have become the sentence everyone knows about her: "Come, we are going for our people." They were held at Amersfoort and then at the transit camp at Westerbork, where Julius Marcan, a fellow prisoner put in charge of a group there, remembered afterwards a woman moving among the terrified mothers, washing the children and combing their hair while the mothers sat past caring. A Dutch official at the camp offered her a way out, and she would not take it. On 7 August the transport left. Dutch Red Cross records put her death on 9 August 1942, in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was fifty. Rosa died with her. Pope John Paul II beatified her in a stadium at Cologne on 1 May 1987, which is the formal step of declaring a dead Christian blessed, and then canonized her in Rome on 11 October 1998, which is the declaration that she is a saint. On 1 October 1999 he named her a co-patroness of Europe, alongside Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. The convent at Echt still has the last page she wrote of the unfinished book.

What She Taught

(T1) Another person’s inner life is given to us, not guessed at. + Start where she starts, with something that has happened to nearly everybody. A friend tells you that his brother has died, and you become aware of his grief. Perhaps his face is pale, perhaps his voice has gone flat. Now, she says, do not ask how you worked it out. Ask what the awareness itself actually is. Her word for it is empathy, Einfühlung in German, which in 1916 was a technical term and not yet a warm one: it means the act by which one person experiences another person’s experience. The theories on offer in her student years all said, in one way or another, that you never really get there. One of them said you infer the grief the way you infer fire from smoke, reasoning backwards from the pale face to whatever must be behind it. Another said you catch it, the way a room catches a mood. Stein thought both were wrong, and, what is more interesting, she thought they were wrong in a way anybody can check simply by looking. His grief is not a conclusion you reached. It is there, presented to you, in the way the far side of a coin is there when you hold it. And yet it is not yours, and she takes some trouble to keep hold of both halves of that. She calls your own joy primordial, meaning lived from the inside, first-hand, the way a joy is yours when it is yours. The joy you reach in another person she calls non-primordial, meaning genuinely given to you but not lived by you: you are led by his experience without it ever becoming your own. Lose either half and the whole thing collapses. If his grief becomes yours, there is no longer anyone to sympathize with. If it is only an inference, you never actually meet him. She then turns the instrument around, and this is the part that repays sitting with. Meeting another person is also how you first learn what you are. Until you see yourself from where someone else is standing, your own position is simply the centre of the world; afterwards it is one place among many, and your body is one body among others. The human being who has never been met by anyone has not yet found out what he is.

(Q) "I can be skeptical myself and still understand that another sacrifices all his earthly goods to his faith." + Source: Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chapter IV, section 7 (Waltraut Stein translation). The German of the 1917 first edition has ungläubig, unbelieving, where her translator puts "skeptical." She is making a technical point: empathy can reach a level of a person that you do not possess yourself, and reach it without ever filling it in from your own experience. Her next sentences say what she means: "In this way I empathically gain the type of homo religiosus by nature foreign to me, and I understand it even though what newly confronts me here will always remain unfulfilled." The Latin phrase means simply the religious sort of person. She wrote all of that as an unbeliever in 1916, six years before her baptism.

(T2) A woman is turned toward persons before things, and that is a gift to be trained rather than a limit to escape. + Between 1928 and 1932 she was on the road constantly, speaking to teachers’ colleges and Catholic women’s associations across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the halls filled. The subject was what she called the ethos of a profession, which is a useful word she uses in an old sense: not the rules of the job but the inner attitude a person brings to it, the thing that decides whether the work is done well or merely done. Her claim was that women are drawn first to the person and only then to the thing, and that men, generally, run the other way. She was careful about what this did and did not mean. It did not mean fewer professions. She argued that every occupation should be open to women, including the ones then closed to them, which in a Catholic lecture hall in 1930 was not the safe thing to say. What it meant was that a woman brings something specific into whatever work she enters, and that the loss of it is a public loss. Her concrete case is a workplace where a man is slowly being turned into a component. Somebody in that room is going to notice first that a person is being used up, and in her experience it is generally not the man running the numbers. If nobody notices, nobody speaks, and the room simply gets worse. She was equally hard about the other side of the ledger. Human nature, she says, is not found in a pure state any more; it is bent, as experience and theology both teach. So the very gift goes rotten in a predictable direction: interest in people curdles into curiosity, which has stopped caring about the person at all and just wants something new. Her prescribed antidote is cold and slightly funny, and it is the opposite of flattery. Get on with some plain, unsentimental, competent work. And she held that the difference shrinks as people get closer to God, quoting Paul: "there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

(Q) "It is her gift and happiness to share the life of another human being and, indeed, to take part in all things which come his way, in the greatest and smallest things, in joy as well as in suffering, in work, and in problems." + Source: Edith Stein, "The Ethos of Women’s Professions," a lecture given at Salzburg on 1 September 1930, in Essays on Woman (Freda Mary Oben translation). Notice that she calls it a happiness and not a duty. The whole argument of the lecture turns on that: a woman who lives this way is not being spent on other people, she is doing the thing she is actually built for, and a society arranged so that nobody does it has arranged its own poverty.

(T3) Nothing finite holds itself in being; it receives its being moment by moment from a being that does not. + She begins her largest book where Augustine and Descartes had begun before her, with the one thing she cannot talk herself out of, which is that she is. Descartes made the move famous in a sentence most people have heard: I think, therefore I am. Stein takes the same starting point and then does something less comfortable with it. She looks hard at what her own existing actually amounts to, and finds almost nothing there. Only this present instant is really alive. The moment before it has already gone and cannot be got back; the moment after is not here yet. Your existence, she writes, is a continuous movement, the extreme opposite of anything that stands still. Try to catch hold of your own being and it runs out between your fingers while you are reaching. From this she draws the old argument, but through a new door. Philosophers call it the argument from contingency: what receives its existence cannot be the source of its own existence, so somewhere the chain has to end in something whose existing is not received from anywhere, something whose very nature is simply to be. Aquinas got there from motion and causes out in the world. Stein gets there from the inside of a single human life, using Husserl’s method of careful description on her own moment-by-moment existence, which is why her book is subtitled an attempt at an ascent to the meaning of being. Then she does something the argument does not strictly require, and it is the reason people still read the chapter. She turns to Heidegger, who had made anxiety in the face of death the honest human posture, and she asks whether the ordinary human sense of being held is really just an illusion we maintain to avoid the abyss. Her answer is no, and it is not sentimental. A child carried in strong arms who spent the whole time afraid of being dropped would not be the clear-eyed one in the room. He would be the one who had misread his situation.

(Q) "In the knowledge that being holds me, I rest securely. This security, however, is not the self-assurance of one who under her own power stands on firm ground, but rather the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm." + Source: Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, chapter II, section 7, "The Being of the Ego and Eternal Being" (Kurt F. Reinhardt translation). She is answering Heidegger directly here, in the section of the book that sets the fleeting being of the ego against eternal being. Her next sentence asks whether a child would be the reasonable one for living in constant fear that its mother might let it fall. The book was finished in a Carmelite cell at the beginning of 1937, blocked from publication because of her descent, and printed in 1950.

(T4) Knowledge of the cross is not a theory about suffering; it is bought by suffering. + The Latin phrase she uses is scientia crucis, science of the cross, and by science she does not mean laboratories. She means what the older word meant: knowledge that a person actually possesses. Her last book asks what John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish poet who wrote about the dark night of the soul, was really describing, and her answer is that his night and the cross are one thing under two pictures. To go into the darkness is to be carrying the cross, and the knowledge you come out with is not information. It is the sort of thing you can only know from inside, the way a person who has sat up all night with a dying friend knows something the textbook cannot hand over. This is an ancient Christian claim and it is worth stating exactly, because a careless version of it is cruel. The claim is not that suffering is good, or that God arranges pain as a teaching method. It is that the centre of the Christian faith is an execution, that a follower is told to take up a cross and not to admire one (Luke 9:23), and that Paul’s stated ambition was to know Christ and to "share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death" (Philippians 3:10). Stein had been writing about this for years before it arrived. She took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1934, when the cross in question was a lost career and a mother who would not speak of her conversion. Two weeks after Germany invaded Poland, the prioress at Echt asked her to write something for the community to hear on 14 September, the feast on which Carmelites renew their vows. What she produced is barely a page long and it does not soothe anybody. The nuns were enclosed women who could not nurse a single wounded soldier, and she tells them so, and then tells them what they can do instead. Three years later the fire reached their house and took her out of it.

(Q) "The world is in flames. The conflagration can also reach our house. But high above all flames towers the cross. They cannot consume it." + Source: Edith Stein, "Elevation of the Cross, 14 September 1939," in The Hidden Life (Waltraut Stein translation). Written at the Carmel of Echt for the prioress to read aloud to the community, a fortnight after the German invasion of Poland and her own first chance to renew her vows in her new house. It opens on the cry she used constantly in her last years, Ave Crux, Spes unica, hail the cross, our only hope, a line from the old Passiontide hymn Vexilla Regis.

(Q) "Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me." + Source: Edith Stein, testament written at the Carmel of Echt on 9 June 1939, quoted in the biography issued for her canonization. She was forty-seven, the Netherlands were still neutral, and Germany had not yet invaded Poland. She goes on to ask God to accept her life and her death for a list of intentions: for her own people, for Germany, and for the peace of the world. That list is the reason her canonization became an argument, and the argument is worth having.

What Her Readers Made of Her

(†) The church made her a saint, and then had to explain carefully what she died for. + John Paul II beatified her at Cologne in 1987 and canonized her in Rome in 1998, and in 1999 named her one of the patron saints of Europe. He also put her in a short list in Fides et Ratio, one of his encyclicals, which is the name for a letter a pope addresses to the whole church, alongside John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, as examples of philosophical work that gained rather than lost by facing what faith claims. That is a fair description of what she actually did, and it is rarer than it sounds. The canonization forced a hard question into the open. To declare someone a martyr, the Catholic church has to hold that they were killed out of hatred for the faith rather than for some other reason. Edith Stein was arrested because the Nazi state classified her as a Jew, and it would have killed her if she had never been baptized at all. So on what grounds is she a martyr and not simply one more murdered Jew with a rosary? The answer the church gave rests on the timing, and the timing is a matter of record. Catholics of Jewish descent in the Netherlands had been left alone until the summer of 1942. The Dutch bishops read their protest from the pulpits on 26 July. The raid that took Edith and Rosa Stein came a week later and was explicitly a reprisal for that protest. She was arrested, in the most literal sense, because the church had spoken. Whether that settles the question is something reasonable people still argue, and the argument does not go away just because a canonization took place.

(†) Jewish readers objected, and their objection deserves to be stated at full strength. + Put at its sharpest, it runs like this. Six million Jews were murdered, and the one the church selects for an altar is the one who left Judaism. She died in a chamber with people who had not been baptized and who get no feast day. To canonize her as a martyr is to read the Shoah, which is the word Jewish writers use for the murder of Europe’s Jews, as a Christian story with a Christian heroine, and to do it in the same decade as the quarrel over a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz itself, when Jewish communities were asking Catholics not to plant crosses in that particular ground. Several Jewish scholars said exactly this at the time, and they were not being unreasonable. A church that spent centuries pressing Jews toward the font does not get to be casual about the appearance of collecting one. The Christian answer has to concede the force of that before it says anything else, and then it can say two things. The first is about her own words, which are on the record and are not ambiguous. She wrote to the pope in 1933 as "a child of the Jewish people." She spent her last free years writing Life in a Jewish Family for the express purpose of showing German readers what an ordinary Jewish household was actually like, because she could see what the caricature was being used for. She never described her baptism as leaving anything. The second is about the end. Offered help at Westerbork, she would not take it if it meant separating herself from the people around her, and she went out of the convent door with Rosa’s hand in hers. What Christians should not do is treat the objection as settled by those facts. Paul, who was a Jew, wrote that God has not rejected his people and that "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:29). A Christian who believes that sentence has every reason to listen when Jewish readers say a story has been taken from them.

(†) Philosophers who want nothing to do with her theology still use her dissertation. + Her 1916 account of empathy (T1) has had a second life she could not have predicted. The dispute in current philosophy of mind is whether we understand other people by running a private simulation of them in our heads, or whether we perceive them more directly. Phenomenologists arguing for the second option reach for Stein constantly, because she set out the case with unusual precision a century before the debate took its present shape, and because her distinction between reaching someone else’s feeling and having it yourself is exactly the distinction the discussion keeps needing. The same distinction turns up in medical and nursing ethics, where the practical problem is how a person can stay genuinely open to a patient’s suffering for thirty years without either going numb or breaking. She is read in the history of philosophy too. Alasdair MacIntyre, who is not in the business of hagiography, wrote a whole book on her early years, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, arguing that her path is a serious philosophical position and not a biographical curiosity. And the labour that has left the largest mark is the least visible: Husserl’s second volume of Ideas, which shaped Merleau-Ponty and much of what came after, exists as a readable text because a young assistant spent a year and a half turning her professor’s shorthand into German sentences.

(†) Where her readers have to weigh her words: offering a death in atonement. + Her testament of 1939 does not merely accept her death. It offers it, as expiation, and the word is worth stopping on for a moment, because everything in the disagreement turns on it. To expiate a wrong is to make amends for it, to cover a debt so that it no longer stands against anybody, which is the language the Bible uses for what the sacrifices did and then for what the cross did. Among the things Stein names her own death as expiation for is the unbelief of her own people. She had been using this language for years, and it is the one place in her writing where Christians across the traditions genuinely do not agree with each other. Read her fairly first. She did not think she was adding anything to Christ. She thought she was doing what Paul described when he wrote, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church" (Colossians 1:24). Catholic and Orthodox readers hear her plainly in that verse: a Christian’s own sufferings, joined to the one sacrifice, are not wasted. And there is a nearer parallel still. Paul also wrote, "For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh" (Romans 9:3), which is, near enough, what Edith Stein wrote in 1939 about the same people. Now state the other side without softening it. Protestant readers, and some Catholics, hear in the word expiation a claim that Scripture closes: "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). If atonement is finished, then nothing a Carmelite does at Echt or anywhere else adds to it, and language that suggests otherwise is worth resisting even when the person using it is on her way to a gas chamber. There is a second and quieter worry too, which does not depend on the first: naming her own people’s unbelief as the thing needing expiation puts a weight on them that Paul’s own sentence in Romans 9 does not put there, since Paul offers himself and blames nobody. The honest summary is that she was not confused about the gospel and was not trying to supplement it, and that the vocabulary she chose carries more than she meant it to. Whoever reads her should say both.