Edith Stein 1891 – 1942

Edith Stein was a German philosopher, phenomenologist, and Carmelite nun. She studied under Edmund Husserl at Gottingen, served as his assistant, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the problem of empathy as the foundation for the constitution of other minds. She converted to Catholicism in 1922 and entered the Carmelite order in 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Arrested for her Jewish ancestry, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed in 1942. Her later philosophical work, especially Finite and Eternal Being, attempts a synthesis of phenomenology with Thomistic metaphysics.

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Breslau, then in eastern Germany, the youngest of eleven children in an observant Jewish family that her widowed mother kept devoutly together. After studies in psychology at Breslau she went to Gottingen in 1913 to work with Edmund Husserl, took her doctorate summa cum laude in 1916 with a dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, and served until 1918 as Husserl's research assistant in Freiburg.

Reading the autobiography of Teresa of Avila in 1921 led to her baptism into the Catholic Church the following year, and to a long decade of Catholic teaching, lecturing on Catholic women's education, and translating Aquinas. Her major works of this period are the philosophical Finite and Eternal Being (largely written 1936), Potency and Act, and the comparative essays on Husserl and Aquinas. In 1933 the Nazi exclusion of Jews from public life ended her teaching career; in 1934 she entered the Discalced Carmelite convent at Cologne as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Transferred to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands in 1938 for safety, she was arrested with her sister Rosa in August 1942 in retaliation for the Dutch bishops' protest against the deportations and was killed in the gas chamber of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 9 August 1942. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998 and named a co-patron of Europe in 1999. Her phenomenology of empathy, person, and finite and eternal being remains a major resource for Catholic and phenomenological philosophy.