Book Review

Philosopher,Carmelite and Saint

Edith Stein: a philosophical prologue

It is a moot point whether the name of the author or that of his subject will be the greater inducement for potential readers to take up this book. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the great names of contemporary philosophy: his work has been a powerful influence on recent moral theory, and his celebrated After Virtue radically changed the perspective of many of those working in ethics. Edith Stein's writings, by contrast, are not at all well known.

It is Stein's life, rather than her published output, that secures her place in history. Born in 1891 into a devout Jewish family, she rejected religion in her teens, and became fascinated with philosophy, where she struggled to make a career in an academic environment still largely closed to women. Shortly after reading the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila while on holiday in 1921, she converted to Catholicism and in 1934 she was received into the Carmelite order, entering its convent at Cologne and taking the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In the face of the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred her to the convent at Echt in the Netherlands, but following the Dutch bishops' condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism in 1942, Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish converts, who had previously been spared. She and her sister Rosa were sent to Auschwitz, and died in the gas chambers later that year. Edith Stein was canonised in 1998.

Stein's philosophical interests were strongly influenced by the "phenomenology" movement founded by Edmund Husserl, with whom she studied at Göttingen and Freiburg. Husserl's work, concerned with the content of consciousness and its relation to reality, caused great excitement on the Continent in the early part of the twentieth century, where it seemed to offer a stimulating alternative to the then dominant neo-Kantianism. Yet it has never gained many adherents in the anglophone philosophical world. Stein's mature writings, aimed at reconciling the phenomenological approach with the principles of Thomistic philosophy, are read by a tiny minority of English-speaking philosophers.

So why has MacIntyre been drawn to write on Stein? Part of the answer must lie in his enduring preoccupation with the relationship between philosophical thinking and the personal and cultural context of an individual's life. One of the recurring ideas in his ethics is that our grasp of philosophy, morality, and indeed all human endeavour, depends on locating its elements within an intelligible narrative. For MacIntyre, we are, necessarily, socially located creatures who do not write the script from scratch, but are only "co-authors" of our own history. In After Virtue he writes, "Man is, in his actions and practice, essentially a story-telling animal ... But I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"

Stein is remarkable for the dramatic way in which, in her conversion, she rejected, or transcended, the Jewish story into which she was born; and MacIntyre's closing chapters on various types of conversion form the climax of his book. He compares Stein with two contemporaries, Franz Rosenzweig and Georg Lukács, both from Jewish families, and both educated within a neo-Kantian academic culture. Rosenzweig, though attracted for a time to Christianity, ended up re-converting to Judaism; Lukács, by contrast, became a Marxist-Leninist.

In both cases, MacIntyre argues, the moves were conditioned by a complex process of self-discovery and self-realisation; but "Stein's conversion involved neither the discovery of an underlying continuity as with Rosenzweig nor the kind of discontinuity that Lukács experienced". Instead, her conversion involved a "new ordering of goods", but one in which "everything that had been of importance ... up to this point was to find some place in her new life".

The integration of the disparate elements of a life to form a meaningful whole is the key to human flourishing. This is perhaps the main underlying message of MacIntyre's study, and his judgement on the non-integrated life is a correspondingly severe one. Martin Heidegger is a case in point: many apologists for his involvement with Nazism have argued that his political connections were irrelevant to his philosophy. But MacIntyre sternly warns that this kind of defence "enables those who teach Heidegger's philosophy in the classrooms of today to domesticate it and render it innocuous, while at the same time projecting on to Heidegger the type of compartmentalisation that they take for granted in their own academic lives". That final sting is significant. MacIntyre makes no secret of his distaste for "curricular compartmentalisation" and the corrupting belief that "philosophical thought and enquiry are one thing, the vicissitudes of everyday activity quite another".

Though the book is full of such fascinating reflections, the story of Stein's own integration of her life and her philosophical interests is left disappointingly unfinished by the end of the volume. In describing his book as a "philosophical prologue", MacIntyre makes it clear that it "does not take us beyond Stein's beginnings". We are left with the suggestion that Stein is a "significantly more important thinker than she has often been taken to be", but MacIntyre announces in the final paragraph that such importance attaches "more obviously" to the later writings "that I have not discussed in this book".

The feeling of a project not quite achieved tends to pervade the book, despite the many riches it contains. A great many pages, for example, are spent unravelling various aspects of Husserl's thought, and its relation to the neo-Kantian ideas it grew out of and reacted against; while these ponderous philosophical debates were clearly important for Stein's intellectual development, rehearsing them makes for very heavy reading - nor (at least for the present reader) do they seem to illuminate the background to her conversion.

More satisfying links are made, though, between Stein's work as a military nurse in Moravia and the abstract questions on the topic of einfühlung (empathy) that she was working on for her doctorate: in caring for wounded soldiers, issues about "how to be aware of the feelings and judgements of others" suddenly became questions of "daily practical import". MacIntyre's subsequent discussion of Stein's treatment of other minds in her doctoral dissertation is among the most interesting parts of the book.

Despite certain defects of shape and rhythm, this study provides much food for thought. It is not often that such an extraordinary life is illuminated by the thoughts of such an outstanding philosopher.

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