A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She’s not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She’s a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her. Her gaze in the photograph is level and unhurried. It’s the gaze of someone who has learned to look at things until they give themselves up, which is, in the end, what phenomenology asked of its practitioners and what very few of them managed. I’ve spent the better part of the last few years learning to look at a black walnut tree in my backyard with something like that patience, and I have come to believe that the discipline Stein practiced in Göttingen seminar rooms and the discipline I attempt under Piedmont shade are the same discipline, differently housed. This essay is an attempt to say why her life and her work have come to sit so near the center of my own, and to trace the company she kept along the way, because Stein is unintelligible apart from her conversations… with Husserl, with Reinach, with Scheler, with Conrad-Martius, with Aquinas across seven centuries, with Teresa of Ávila across four, and finally with John of the Cross in a Dutch monastery as the trains began to move.
Breslau
Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, then a German city in Prussian Silesia, now the Polish city of Wrocław. The date was important to her mother and came to matter to Edith, as it was Yom Kippur that year, the Day of Atonement, and Auguste Stein always regarded her youngest child’s birth on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as a kind of sign.[1] She was the youngest of eleven children, seven of whom survived. Her father, Siegfried, died of heatstroke on a business trip before Edith was two, and Auguste took over the family lumber business and ran it with the shrewdness and iron piety that Edith would later describe, with unmistakable love, in the memoir she wrote to preserve the texture of German Jewish life against the caricatures then hardening around it.[2] That memoir, Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie, is worth including here because it establishes something about Stein that her philosophical reputation can obscure: she was a writer of place and household, of lumber yards and holiday tables and the particular smell of her mother’s ledgers. When she set out, in 1933, to answer Nazi propaganda, she did not write a treatise. She wrote down what her family’s life had actually been like, trusting description over argument. Anyone who has tried to write about a home place under threat recognizes the move. Perception first; the ethics arrives through the seeing.
That piety, however, did not last. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, by her own account, she deliberately stopped praying.[3] She would describe her adolescent and university self as an atheist, though a restless one, a young woman who had traded the God of her mother for what she called the search for truth, without yet suspecting that the two searches might converge. She began her studies at the University of Breslau in psychology under William Stern, and found the discipline, then in its experimental adolescence, unable to say what a psyche even was. Somewhere in those years she read Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, and the effect was the one Husserl’s early readers so often report: here was a philosophy that did not begin from theories about consciousness but from consciousness itself, patiently described, its structures allowed to show themselves. In 1913 she moved to Göttingen to study with Husserl directly. She was twenty-one.
Göttingen
The Göttingen that received her was one of the strangest and most fertile philosophical communities of the century. Husserl held court, working his way toward the transcendental turn of Ideen that would eventually estrange him from many of his best students. Adolf Reinach, Husserl’s brilliant assistant, taught the newcomers what phenomenology actually meant in practice; Stein always said it was Reinach, more than Husserl, who taught her to work.[4] Max Scheler moved through the area periodically, lecturing on sympathy, value, and, increasingly, on Catholic religious experience with the enthusiasm of a man in the middle of one of his several conversions. Stein later credited Scheler with removing her rationalist blinders: he did not persuade her of anything, but he made the world of faith visible to her as a world, a region of experience that a phenomenologist had no right to dismiss unexamined.[5] Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a few years ahead of Stein and already doing the realist ontology of nature that would occupy her whole career, became a close friend, and her farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern would later become the site of the decisive night of Stein’s life. The Göttingen circle believed, against the master’s developing idealism, that phenomenology’s slogan, zu den Sachen selbst, to the things themselves, meant the things were really there. Stein evidently belonged to that realist wing from the beginning, and the conviction that essences are discovered rather than constituted never left her. It is the thread that leads, twenty years later, to Aquinas.
Husserl assigned her a dissertation topic that he had left as a gap in his own work: empathy, Einfühlung, the act by which one consciousness apprehends the experience of another. World War I interrupted her dissertation work, and Stein left her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross nursing aide in a lazaretto for infectious disease at Mährisch-Weißkirchen, tending Austrian soldiers with typhus and cholera, an experience of bodies in extremity that marks the dissertation on every page.[6] She completed the doctorate under Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, summa cum laude, and Zum Problem der Einfühlung was published the following year.[7]
The publication is the hinge of everything I take from her. Stein argues that empathy is a sui generis form of intentionality. It is neither inference by analogy, as if I reasoned my way from your grimace to your pain, nor a merging of selves, as the popular use of the word suggests. It is a direct, though non-primordial, givenness of foreign experience: I perceive your joy in your face the way I perceive the tree in its bark and leaf-flutter, immediately, though your joy is given to me as yours and never becomes mine. The other is disclosed as a living body, a Leib rather than a mere Körper, a center of orientation and sensation that I apprehend from outside while acknowledging an inside I can never occupy. And Stein presses the analysis beyond the human: the perception of livingness, of sensate and striving interiority, extends in her account toward the animal, and the question of how far down the ladder of life such apprehension reaches is left standing in the text like an open door.[8] I walked through that door years ago and have not come back. What I have termed ecological intentionality in my dissertation work is, at its root, an attempt to ask Stein’s question at the scale of a watershed on an ecological basis: what would it mean to say that Lawson’s Fork, or the black walnut, or the shoal that remembers its shad runs, is given to consciousness as living, as an interiority I apprehend without occupying? Stein supplies the rigor that keeps such a question from dissolving into sentimentality. Empathy, on her account, is a form of perception with its own evidence, its own fulfillments and disappointments, its own discipline. It can be practiced. It can be trained. It is, in the strict sense, an education of attention, and everything I write under the sign of the Ecology of the Cross begins from her demonstration that such an education is philosophically respectable.
The Assistant
From 1916 to 1918 Stein served as Husserl’s private assistant at Freiburg, a role that consisted largely of imposing order on the master’s mountain of shorthand manuscripts. She organized and substantially edited the materials that became Ideen II, Husserl’s great unfinished study of the constitution of nature, animal life, and spirit, and scholars have increasingly recognized how much of that volume’s architecture bears her hand.[9] It is one of the quiet ironies of the tradition that the phenomenology of the living body which Merleau-Ponty would inherit and transfigure came to him partly through pages Stein arranged. When I set Stein and Merleau-Ponty side by side in my own chapters, I am in some measure reuniting a text with its editor.
She attempted to habilitate, the German qualification for a professorship, and was refused. Göttingen would not consider a woman; Freiburg deferred, and her 1919 petition to the Prussian ministry helped prompt a 1920 circular declaring that sex should be no bar to habilitation. This ruling came too late to help her and stands as one of those bureaucratic monuments built on a particular person’s closed door.[10] She wrote Potenz und Akt in 1931 as a final habilitation attempt, and it too went nowhere institutionally with publishers or her correspondence network. The academy’s loss is difficult to overstate. I read it as the historical condition of her freedom. Denied the academic chair, she was spared the chair’s constraints, and the work that followed, the Aquinas translations, the Münster lectures, the Carmelite metaphysics, has an amplitude that the Ordinarius system of her day rarely produced.
The Spiritual Turn
Stein’s conversion has been told so often that it risks falling into legend, and the legend flattens what the record shows: a convergence of encounters over roughly four years, each one phenomenologically dense. The first was Anna Reinach. Adolf Reinach died in Flanders in November 1917, and Stein went to Göttingen expecting to console a broken widow and to help sort his papers. She found instead a woman held upright by the Cross, grieving fully and yet somehow already handing her grief over, and Stein said late in her life that this was the moment her unbelief collapsed… her first meeting, as she put it, with the Cross and its divine power, borne by someone who carried it.[11] Notice what kind of evidence this is. Rather than an argument, it’s a perception of another’s interiority, an act of Einfühlung, and what Stein perceived in Anna Reinach was a real power operating in a real soul. Her own dissertation had prepared her to trust this sort of givenness. The philosopher of empathy was converted through an empathic perception; the system, so to speak, executed on its author.
The second encounter came in the summer of 1921 at the Conrad-Martius farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern. Left alone one evening, Stein took a book at random from the shelf, the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, and read it through the night. She closed it at dawn and said to herself, das ist die Wahrheit, that is the truth.[12] Teresa’s Life moves beyond the genre of apologetics. Instead, it’s a first-person description of an interior itinerary, the most sustained piece of phenomenology of prayer the sixteenth century produced, and Stein read it as a phenomenologist reads a protocol: here is a report of experience, coherent, differentiated, bearing its own evidence. She was baptized on January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s in Bad Bergzabern, with Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a Protestant, standing as her godmother, an ecumenical detail I hold onto for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows my own churchly arrangements.[13] Her mother wept when told. Edith knelt beside her in the synagogue afterward and prayed the psalms; she never regarded her baptism as a departure from the people of Israel, and everything that followed, to the very end, confirms that she was genuine in that belief.
She wished to enter Carmel immediately. Her spiritual advisors, sensibly, said no. Her mother’s grief was fresh, and her gifts were needed in the world. So from 1923 to 1931 she taught German language and literature at St. Magdalena’s, the Dominican sisters’ teacher-training school in Speyer, living semi-monastically, teaching adolescent girls by day and working through the nights on the project her Jesuit director Erich Przywara set before her: a German translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.[14] Przywara, whose Analogia Entis was taking shape in those same years, understood that the phenomenological school and the Thomist revival needed each other, and he engineered the meeting inside one mind. Stein’s Aquinas is a working philosopher’s Aquinas, rendered into the vocabulary of the phenomenologists so that the two traditions could actually converse, and her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift, a staged dialogue comparing Husserl’s phenomenology with the philosophy of St. Thomas, remains one of the great short documents of twentieth-century thought. The student, with perfect filial respect, informing the master that intentionality does not itself settle the question of being.[15]
Here’s where Stein’s biography enters my comprehensive exams. Husserl held that essence, Wesen, could be described in bracketed independence from existence; the epoché suspends the question of being precisely so the structures of givenness can appear. Stein came to hold, with Thomas, that the analysis cannot rest there, because essence in a finite being does not carry its own act of existing. What a thing is and that it is are really distinct in creatures, and the distinction opens finite being toward the One in whom essence and existence coincide. In the terms Aristotle bequeathed to both of them, δύναμις (dynamis, potency) is intelligible only from ἐνέργεια (energeia, actuality), and the ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia) of a living form, its being-at-work-staying-itself, is prior to every capacity it grounds.[16] Stein worked this out first in Potenz und Akt (Potency and Act) and then, in the Cologne Carmel, expanded it into her masterwork, Endliches und ewiges Sein, Finite and Eternal Being. This was an attempt, as she framed it, at an ascent to the meaning of being with phenomenology and Thomas as the two guides.[17] My present argument about ecological normativity, that the self-maintaining organism can bear normative weight only as form-in-act and not as bare autopoietic process, is Stein’s argument against Husserl transposed into the philosophy of the organism. Potency cannot norm itself. The criterion arrives with act. I found the lever in her, and I keep finding that when I press on Bergson or Ruyer or the autopoiesis literature, the argument in the material is wherever Stein has already been standing.
Münster, the Letter, and Carmel
In 1932 Stein was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, where she lectured on the structure of the human person and on the education and vocations of women, essays that anticipate, with a calm that now reads as courage, arguments about the full intellectual dignity of women that the Church would take another half century to begin catching up with.[18] The appointment lasted a year. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 1933, ended the teaching career of every German academic of Jewish descent, and Stein, seeing with terrible clarity what was coming, wrote directly to Pope Pius XI, asking the Church to speak publicly against the persecution of the Jews, warning that silence would be purchased at the price of complicity. The letter received a routine acknowledgment. It was sealed in the Vatican archives until 2003.[19] I don’t know a sharper parable of institutional religion in the modern era, and I say that as an ordained minister who loves the institution enough to keep writing it letters.
The closed doors had, by then, become a sort of corridor. In October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne, and at her clothing in April 1934 took the name she had, in a sense, been carrying since Anna Reinach’s parlor: Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, Teresa Blessed by the Cross.[20] Her superiors, to their lasting credit, ordered her to keep writing. In the cell in Cologne she finished Endliches und ewiges Sein, whose publication was blocked because its author was, in the new legal fiction, non-Aryan. After the November pogrom of 1938 her presence endangered the Cologne community, and on New Year’s Eve she was driven across the border to the Carmel in Echt, in the Dutch Limburg. Her sister Rosa, herself by then a Catholic, joined her there as a portress. In Echt, at her superiors’ request, she began a study of John of the Cross for the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth: Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross, a phenomenology of the dark night in which the mystic’s itinerary of dispossession is read as the form of the soul’s conformation to Christ crucified.[21] The manuscript’s final pages were on her desk, unfinished, on the second of August, 1942.
The Dutch Catholic bishops had, the previous Sunday, read from every pulpit a pastoral letter publicly condemning the deportations of the Jews. The occupation’s reprisal was precise: the arrest of all Catholic Jews in the Netherlands, the converts, the ones the Church had claimed as her own. Stein and Rosa were taken from the Echt Carmel that afternoon. Witnesses in the transit camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork describe her moving among the distraught mothers, washing children, combing hair, a Leib among Leiber, doing what she had done in the typhus wards of 1915.[22] Her reported words to Rosa at the moment of arrest were, come, we are going for our people.[23] The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942, and she was killed in the gas chambers that day, with Rosa, among the people of her birth, under the sign of the name she had chosen. The Church beatified her in Cologne in 1987, canonized her on October 11, 1998, under Pope John Paul II, and named her, a year later, co-patroness of Europe, a Jewish philosopher standing in the calendar beside Benedict and Bridget and Catherine, which is either an astonishing act of ecclesial repentance or the beginning of one.[24]
Why She Holds Me
Stein instructs me at four depths, and the deepest is the one hardest to write about.
First, she gives me the philosophical warrant for the kind of attention my work depends on. Einfühlung, in her strict sense, is the perceptual act in which foreign interiority is given without being possessed, and her analysis is the strongest available foundation for what I have been calling ecological intentionality: the claim that creatures, watersheds, and living places can be apprehended as centers of striving and sensation, that such apprehension is perception rather than projection, and that it carries evidence and admits of discipline. When I stand under the black walnut in early May and register its leafing-out as an act it is performing rather than an event merely occurring, I am doing something Stein described in 1916, and her rigor is what lets me distinguish that perception from wishfulness. The tree is given as living. The givenness can be interrogated. That is her gift, and it is why perception precedes ethics in everything I write. She showed that the seeing itself, done honestly, already carries the claim.
Second, she models the route from phenomenology to ontology that my dissertation attempts to walk. Description was never enough for her, because the described essence kept raising the question of its own act of being, and she followed the question all the way to the real distinction and to the God in whom essence and existence are one. The organism that grounds ecological normativity in my work does so only as form-in-act, ἐντελέχεια, and I learned to make that argument from her long negotiation between Husserl and Thomas. She teaches that fidelity to the phenomena eventually requires metaphysics, and that the metaphysics must be earned, page by patient page, never imported.
Third, there is the Cross. My theological work gathers under the phrase the Ecology of the Cross, and I owe the grammar of that phrase to her Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross. Stein read John of the Cross’s dark night as a science (not in our current objective-minded understanding of what that term implies), a structured knowledge of dispossession, the soul unmade in its attachments so that it may be conformed to the crucified and rising Christ. Paul writes in Philippians that Christ ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν, emptied himself (the verb is κενόω; the noun tradition drew from it is κένωσις or kenosis), and Stein’s insight, the one I have carried into ecological territory, is that this self-emptying is a pattern legible in the structure of creaturely existence itself.[25] The fallow field, the leaf abscission of October, the flood that unmakes a channel so the channel can live, the whole creation that Paul says συστενάζει, groans together (Romans 8:22, from συστενάζω), in the futility, ματαιότης, to which it was subjected in hope: these are, I have come to believe, the science of the cross written in the book of “nature,” and Stein is the one who taught me that such a science could be rigorous.[26] She also, in the manner of her death, finished the teaching. The last thing she wrote was a phenomenology of dispossession, and the last thing she did was undergo one, freely construing it as an offering for her people. The work and the life close like two halves of a hinge on a door that swings open.
Fourth, and least articulable: she shows me that a life does not have to choose between the seminar room and the sanctuary, between the archive and the prayer bench, between the people of one’s birth and the faith of one’s conviction. Every institution she approached partially refused her… the university for her gender, the Reich for her blood, and even the Church, in her lifetime, gave her petition a form letter. She responded to each refusal by going deeper rather than elsewhere, and the depth turned out to be where the work was. I teach Sunday school in a Presbyterian church as a Baptist minister while writing a dissertation at an institute in California on phenomenology, trees, and mycorrhizal networks, and there are days when the arrangement feels less like a vocation than a filing error. Stein is the figure I consult on those days. Her life argues that the integrations the institutions cannot imagine are exactly the ones a person can live, provided the person is willing to let attention, rather than ambition, set the itinerary. She looked at things until they gave themselves up. Then she let herself be given. The order of those two sentences is, I think, the whole lesson from her work and life and faith, and I am still early in learning it, out under the walnut, where the light comes down through the leaves the way it must have come down through the grille at Echt, ordinary and unrepeatable, asking only to be seen.
Notes
[1] Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), 71–72. Stein records her mother’s attachment to the Yom Kippur birth in the memoir’s opening chapters.
[2] Stein began Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie in 1933, framing it explicitly as testimony against National Socialist caricature; see her foreword, Life in a Jewish Family, 23–25.
[3] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 148. Her formulation is that she “deliberately and consciously” gave up praying.
[4] On Reinach’s pedagogical role in the Göttingen circle, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 58–74.
[5] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 260–261, where she credits Scheler with dismantling the “rationalistic prejudices” of her upbringing and opening “the world of faith” to her regard.
[6] Stein’s lazaretto service at Mährisch-Weißkirchen is narrated at length in Life in a Jewish Family, chaps. 8–9.
[7] Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917); English: On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989).
[8] Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58–63, on the constitution of the living body (Leib) and the extension of empathic apprehension to animal life. For the systematic development of sentient and plant life, see also her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000).
[9] On Stein’s editorial shaping of the Ideen II materials, see Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), esp. chaps. 5–6.
[10] The Prussian ministerial circular of February 21, 1920, issued in the wake of Stein’s petition, declared that membership in the female sex constituted no obstacle to habilitation. See MacIntyre, Edith Stein, 14–15.
[11] Stein’s testimony, reported by the Jesuit Johannes Hirschmann from her own account at Echt, names the encounter with Anna Reinach as “my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it.” See Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. Bernard Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 56–57.
[12] Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 65. The night reading of Teresa’s Vida at Bad Bergzabern occurred in the summer of 1921.
[13] Stein was baptized January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s Church, Bad Bergzabern, taking the baptismal name Theresia Hedwig, the latter in honor of Conrad-Martius, who stood as godmother despite her Protestantism. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 68–69.
[14] Thomas von Aquin, Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate), trans. Edith Stein, 2 vols. (Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932). On Przywara’s direction, see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 82–86.
[15] Edith Stein, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino,” in Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), 315–338; English in Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000). The published essay recast an original dialogue form in which Husserl and Thomas converse at night in the master’s study.
[16] Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Θ), 1049b4–1051a3, on the priority of ἐνέργεια to δύναμις; De Anima II.1, 412a19–b9, on first and second actuality and the soul as ἐντελέχεια of the organic body.
[17] Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005; composed 1931); Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006; composed 1935–1936); English: Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).
[18] The Münster lectures and related addresses are collected in Edith Stein, Essays on Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2nd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).
[19] Stein’s letter to Pius XI, dated April 1933 and transmitted through Abbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron, was made public upon the 2003 opening of the relevant Vatican archives. For the text and circumstances, see the documentation of the Cologne Carmel and Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 104–107.
[20] Stein entered the Cologne Carmel on October 14, 1933, and received the habit and her religious name on April 15, 1934.
[21] Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18 (Freiburg: Herder, 2003); English: The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).
[22] The Westerbork testimonies, including that of the Dutch official Wielek and fellow prisoners, are gathered in Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 180–186.
[23] “Komm, wir gehen für unser Volk.” The words were reported by witnesses in the Echt community; see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 177–178. As with most last words, the attestation is testimonial rather than documentary, and I report it as such.
[24] Beatified by John Paul II in Cologne, May 1, 1987; canonized in Rome, October 11, 1998; named co-patroness of Europe, with Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in the apostolic letter Spes Aedificandi, October 1, 1999.
[25] Philippians 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών (“but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”). The verb is κενόω, “to empty”; the theological noun κένωσις derives from it.
[26] Romans 8:20–22: the creation subjected to ματαιότης (“futility,” the Septuagint’s rendering of הֶבֶל in Ecclesiastes) in hope, and πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, “the whole creation groans together and labors together” (συστενάζω, “to groan with”). I have traced this line at greater length in “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes,” Carolina Ecology, 2026.
Bibliography
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Harrelson, Sam. “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes.” Carolina Ecology, 2026.
Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.
John Paul II. Spes Aedificandi. Apostolic letter. October 1, 1999.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.
Stein, Edith. Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12. Freiburg: Herder, 2006.
Stein, Edith. Essays on Woman. Translated by Freda Mary Oben. 2nd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.
Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.
Stein, Edith. “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino.” In Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, 315–338. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband. Halle: Niemeyer, 1929.
Stein, Edith. Knowledge and Faith. Translated by Walter Redmond. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.
Stein, Edith. Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18. Freiburg: Herder, 2003.
Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.
Stein, Edith. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.
Stein, Edith. Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10. Freiburg: Herder, 2005.
Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.
Stein, Edith. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917.
Thomas Aquinas. Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate). Translated by Edith Stein. 2 vols. Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932.
PDF version available for download here:
