Edith Stein, now canonised as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, is a fitting saint for our times. Born in 1891 into a Jewish family in Breslau of cultural rather than religious observance, she deliberately rejected religious belief during her academically brilliant and intellectually restless adolescent years.

She became a disciple of the philosopher Husserl, founder of phenomenology (who also influenced the thought of John Paul II), yet did not lose her ‘longing for truth’. Later, looking back on these years, she would write, ‘All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not’.

Taken by a friend to Frankfurt Cathedral she was moved to see an ordinary housewife praying before the tabernacle. The Christian faith of a woman friend whose husband, Adolf Reinach, has died in the War, also impressed Edith. Conversion came quickly after she sat up one night reading the Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila. This spiritual classic, written with the warmth and intimacy of close friendship with Christ, showed her that ‘Truth’ is not found in a system of ideas but in ‘a Person – a Person on the Cross’.

Shortly after, Edith was baptised into the Catholic Church. Eleven years later, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 and her public career as teacher, writer and lecturer was swiftly curtailed by anti-Semitic laws, she fulfilled her longing to be a contemplative nun, entering the Carmelite convent in Cologne. Increased persecution of the Jews led to her transferral to the Carmelites at Echt, Holland; from here she was forced to join other Dutch Jews in the transports to Auschwitz, where she died with her sister Rosa, also a convert, on 9 August 1942.

Joanne Mosley’s book is divided into two parts: Part I, which is autobiographical, describes the ideals that influenced Edith’s life; first Truth, then the Cross. Part II discusses the ‘ideal figures’ in her prayer-life: Jesus, ‘longing to exchange his residence on the altar for the temple of the human heart’; Mary, his mother, a fellow-Jewess, whose roles as virgin, wife and mother were to deeply influence Edith’s writings on the vocation of women; Queen Esther from the Old Testament, with whose intercessory role on behalf of her people Edith gradually came to identify herself, in relation to her fellow Jews of the new holocaust. Finally, as a Carmelite nun, Elijah (traditional ‘founder’ of the Carmelite Order) and the Order’s 16th century reformers, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, as well as Carmel’s most famous modern saint, Therese of Lisieux, were the spiritual models and mentors for the singular journey of this exceptional woman.

This book provides a good, general introduction to Edith’s life and writings. Occasionally, in Part I, the author’s comments seem somewhat simplistic and intrusive to an educated reader, but this is not evident in Part II, an excellent summary of the originality and diversity of Edith’s writings. There is also a short epilogue of Edith’s own sayings, e.g. ‘Whoever surrenders unconditionally to the Lord will be chosen by him as an instrument for building his kingdom.’

She herself lived a life of continual self-surrender from her conversion, intensified on 6 April 1933 when she told the Lord that she would embrace the Cross as a representative of the Jewish people. To her heritage Edith was unswervingly loyal, despite the sorrow caused by her relations’ hostility – ‘Christianity was in our eyes in 1933 the religion of our persecutors’, commented a niece.

The lives of saints are always a challenge. Edith, in particular, with her insight that women have to express their maternal and wifely gifts in some form, has much to say to modern western woman, who has lost sight of her destiny, her ‘feminine genius’ as the Holy Father calls it.

© 2004 Francis Phillips

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