St. Theresa Benedict of the Cross.

Reason and faith in the life and work of Edita Steinová

As a scientist and a modern-day intellectual, Edita shows her generation new possibilities of knowledge, faith, and new paths that she has trodden in that area. Her efforts so that all transformations in the world and her soul are involved in building God’s Kingdom on earth are before II. By the Vatican Council, the first essential announcers of the aggiornamento in the Church. By combining philosophical thinking with faith, in her lectures at the German Institute of Scientific Pedagogy in Munster, she boldly pointed out the need to supplement the philosophical view of man with a theological aspect. In the IX. lecture on the structure of the human person, she discussed with the students the pedagogical significance of Eucharistic truths. She ended the course with a characteristic statement: “The science of education will not reach its perfection if he does not include the entire content of the revealed Truth in his research; this, in turn, means living the faith and, through it achieving the goal of life.”

Edita Stein’s aggiornamento can include her new perspective on the Church, salvation, and ecumenism. With her, everything comes together in harmony: thinking rooted in solid science and its highest dimension enlightened by Revelation. Her passion for seeking to understand, originality of believing with simplicity, and conviction of one’s limitation, give direction and a point of reference to our research. As a model of the “thinking interior,” he can say a lot to those who find it challenging to combine science and faith, the intellect and the spiritual soaring of the heart.

“Examine everything and hold on to the good,” – she said with St. Paul in his ontology Finite and Eternal Being. But she learned the art of choice for a long time, and the sown seed of faith slowly ripened in her soul. When she first tried to search for the Incomprehensible through the path of philosophical knowledge, God responded to her eager search with a grace that preceded her and gave her faith. On that memorable autumn night in 1921, the Truth appeared to her as a Person “as the personal nearness of a loving and merciful God, and endowed her with such certainty as is not inherent in any natural knowledge.” Edita knew that a philosopher would not come to such a conclusion on his own, much less understand that that person is Love. Only God can appear to him as the One who exists for himself and, in his freedom, chooses, disturbs, and finally firmly grasps the hand that gropingly reaches out to him. In one moment, the Lord changed her basic philosophical understanding to an attitude of freedom with which, in the thirtieth year of her life, she responded with a radicalism of her own: “I will grasp the hand that touches me, and I will find absolute support and protection.” Almighty God is a God of goodness, “our support and strength.”

The vision of Truth as a personal God-Love showed her a new “something” in the colorful mosaic of life’s realities – the inexpressible truth about the soul’s communion with God.

Edita understood that God chose and “elected” her from the ancient world where she grew up and that this election was a concrete form of the love of the One who invited her. Her response was love in return, obedient, yes, submission to his will. Since she understood the nature of the experienced “liberation” – she was, after all, a Jew who had been told since she was a child that Israel had been freed from slavery to the freedom of the Promised Land – she allowed God to lead her to his space. He, in turn, led her beyond everything that the world offers, although he did not significantly show another way, but increased her faith that He Himself is the Way. She was ready to give everything for the found pearl of the heavenly kingdom (Mt 13, 44 n.), even the current form of his life in the world. She wanted to enter Karmel immediately because that creative “something” was seemingly closer there, more attainable. With her faith deprived of all certainties, Carmel acted on her as a place of particular friendship with the Crucified, where her contemplative intimacy with the Lord could be fulfilled and her preparation for another “mission.