Edith Stein Quotes

Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.

All those who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror

The woman's soul is fashioned as a shelter in which other souls may unfold.” -- Edith Stein

To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels—this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.

In the words of Pope John Paul II at the canonization of St. Edith Stein—a Catholic Carmelite nun who died in Auschwitz because of her Catholic faith and her Jewish descent—“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.

Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order or in a worldly profession.

At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.

You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.

Philosopher-saint Edith Stein puts it this way: “As woman was the first to be tempted, so did God’s message of grace come first to a woman, and each time woman’s assent determined the destiny of humanity as a whole.

Intellect is the light which illuminates its path, and without this light, emotion changes back and forth. In fact, if emotions prevail over the intellect, it is able to obscure the light and distort the picture of the entire world…. Emotional stirrings need the control of reason and the direction of the will.

Appropriate environmental influences can prevent mistakes. The soul of a child is soft and impressionable. Whatever influence enters there can easily form it for a lifetime. When the facts of salvation history are introduced in early childhood and in an appropriate form, this may easily lay a foundation for a saintly life.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.

At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.

If the mystery of the cross becomes the inner form of this science, a living energy that allows the soul to be molded by what is received from this mystery, it turns into a science of the cross . On the contrary, excessive interior preoccupation with one’s own personal concerns can develop in the course of life into a general indifference to things religious.

So he writes for contemplative souls, and at a very particular point along their way he wants to take them by the hand, at a crossroad where most halt, perplexed, not knowing how to proceed.

The entirely comfortable being-at-home in the world, the satiety of pleasures that it offers, the demand for these pleasures and the matter-of-course consent to these demands—all of this that human nature considers bright daily life—all of this is darkness5 in God’s eyes and incompatible with the divine light. It has to be totally uprooted if room for God is to be made in the soul. Meeting this demand means engaging in battle with one’s own nature all along the line, taking up one’s cross and delivering oneself up to be crucified. Holy Father St. John here invokes the Lord’s saying in this connection: “Whoever does not renounce all that the will possesses cannot be my disciple” [Lk.

Previously, perhaps using an Ignatian method, one has exercised the spiritual powers in the hours of meditation—the senses, imagination, understanding, the will. But now they won’t work. All efforts are in vain. The spiritual practices that up to now have been a source of inner joy become a torment, intolerably dull and fruitless. But there is no tendency to occupy oneself with worldly things. The soul desires more than all else to remain still, without bestirring itself, allowing all its faculties to rest.

Wie wir „ursprünglich verstehen “, was Wahrheit ist, wenn wir erkennen, und was Gutheit ist, wenn unser Streben Erfüllung findet, so verstehen wir, was Schönheit ist, wenn jener „Glanz “ uns an die Seele rührt. Er begegnet uns in der sinnlichen Welt als das Strahlen des körperlichen Lichtes selbst, ohne das uns alle sinnliche Schönheit verborgen bliebe, als Farbenglanz und als Liebreiz körperlicher Gestalten. Aber er ist nicht an die Sinnenwelt gebunden. Es gibt eine geistige Schönheit : die Schönheit der Menschenseele,...

There was a man who was always writing to his daughter that she should not do things that were wrong that would disgrace him, she should not do such things and in every letter that he wrote to her he told her she should not do such things, that he was her father and was giving good moral advice to her and always he wrote to her in every letter that she should not do things that she should not do anything that would disgrace him. He wrote this in every letter he wrote to her, he wrote very nicely to her, he wrote often enough to her and in every letter he wrote to her that she should not do anything that was a disgraceful thing for her to be doing and then once she wrote back to him that he had not any right to write moral things in letters to her, that he had taught her that he had shown her that he had commenced in her the doing the things things that would disgrace her and he had said then when he had begun with her he had said he did it so that when she was older she could take care of herself with those who wished to make her do things that were wicked things and he would teach her and she would be stronger than such girls who had not any way of knowing better, and she wrote this letter and her father got the letter and he was a paralytic always after, it was a shock to him getting such a letter, he kept saying over and over again that his daughter was trying to kill him and now she had done it and at the time he got the letter he was sitting by the fire and he threw the letter in the fire and his wife asked him what was the matter and he said it is Edith she is killing me, what, is she disgracing us said the mother, no said the father, she is killing me and that was all he said then of the matter and he never wrote another letter.

To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone. When she has once realized that no one other than God is capable of receiving her completely for Himself and that it is sinful theft toward God to give oneself completely to one other than Him, then the surrender is no longer difficult and she becomes free of herself. Then it is also self-evident to her to enclose herself in her castle, whereas, before, she was given to the storms which penetrated her from without again and again; and previously she had also gone into the world in order to seek something abroad which might be able to still her hunger. Now she has all that she needs; she reaches out when she is sent, and opens up only to that which may find admission to her.

But John himself intuited that readers might find his thought dry or at least troublesome and admitted at the beginning of his Ascent of Mount Carmel that though the doctrine he was to expound was solid and good for everyone, not everyone would find it easy to take in. “We are not writing on moral and pleasing topics addressed to the kind of spiritual people who like to approach God along sweet and satisfying paths” (A. Prol. 8). Yet John advises perseverance and that thereby one will come to understand better, and then to read the work again. As Sr. Benedicta must have discovered, John becomes clearer and more beneficial and even pleasing to read as one reads more. In Science of the Cross she gives readers an opportunity to read John of the Cross again but in a different pattern.

God the Creator is present in each thing and sustains it in existence. He has foreseen each, and knows it through and through with all its changes and destinies. By the might of his omnipotence he can do with each, at every moment, whatever he pleases. He can leave it to its own laws and the normal flow of events. He can also intervene with extraordinary measures. God dwells in this manner in every human soul, also. He knows each one from all eternity, with all the mysteries of her being and every wave that breaks over her life. She is in his power. It is up to him whether he leaves her to herself and the course of worldly events or whether, with his strong hand, he will interfere in her destiny. Such a marvel of his power is every rebirth of a soul through sanctifying grace.

El hombre está llamado a vivir en su interior más profundo y a ser tan dueño de sí mismo como sólo puede serlo desde ahí; sólo desde aquí es posible un trato correcto con el mundo; sólo desde allí puede hallar el sitio que en el mundo le corresponde. Pero, aun siendo esto así, ni él mismo llega nunca a penetrar del todo en ese interior suyo. Es un misterio de Dios, cuyos velos sólo Él puede levantar, en la medida que a Él le plazca. Sin embargo, se le ha encomendado su interioridad; puede disponer de él en perfecta libertad, pero también tiene el deber de conservarlo como un preciado bien que se le ha confiado” (Ciencia de la Cruz, OC V, 341).

Furthermore, to be human is to be intuitively aware of that fact.

every individual human soul has proceeded from the hands of God and bears a special seal.

reasons, Edith Stein is the saint who, instead of advancing Jewish-Christian relations, impedes them. Until the Church accomplishes a complete reckoning with a past that reaches far beyond the Holocaust, Edith Stein, instead of blessing the Church, will haunt it.

Quem procura a verdade prefere escolher como ponto central da sua permanência a actividade indagadora da inteligência; e, se é realmente a verdade que tal pessoa procura (e, portanto, não um mero amontoado de conhecimentos particulares), podemos afirmar que talvez esteja a aproximar-se de Deus, que é a própria verdade.

Quem procura a verdade, consciente ou não, procura Deus.

The nation... doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.

Se a minha busca é a busca da Verdade, da revelação da Verdade, do encontro da Verdade, não posso deixar temas fora da minha investigação.

Human beings truly are created in the imago Dei and this image is fulfilled perfectly in Christ, who is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible . . . He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church . . . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell.”333 Because of the Son of God’s hypostatic union with human nature, human beings are empowered by the life-giving soul of Christ to participate in the process of cosmic redemption. The human soul becomes the gateway of salvation “and when it opens itself in its innermost being to the influx of divine life, the soul (and through it the body) is formed into an image of the Son of God.”334 In becoming configured to Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man, according to the pattern of his self-giving and self-emptying life, human beings sacramentally are incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ, thereby incorporating the totality of created being along with them. As enmeshed within the created order—both materially and spiritually—human beings serve as the lynchpin of salvation’s circuit.

To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone. When she has once realized that no one other than God is capable of receiving her completely for Himself and that it is sinful theft toward God to give oneself completely to one other than Him, then the surrender is no longer difficult and she becomes free of herself.

By the cross I understood the destiny of God’s people.… I thought that those who recognized it as the cross of Christ had to take it upon themselves in the name of all….

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that

Pero la invitación más grande y fecundamente vital —como lo he querido subrayar en la reciente Exhortación Apostólica recordando a Edith Stein— nace de la confianza y convicción que: «en la noche más oscura surgen los más grandes profetas y los santos; sin embargo, la corriente vivificante de la vida mística permanece invisible.

This inability may be grounded in an inborn dull-mindedness (in the literal sense), or in a general indifference developed in the course of a lifetime, or finally, in an insensitivity to certain impressions as a result of repeatedly ignoring them.

Meanwhile, in Freiburg, her departure left a gap in Husserl’s gang. In 1918 — still long before Sartre had heard of any of them or thought of going to Germany — that gap was filled by another impressive young phenomenologist. His name was Martin Heidegger, and he would prove far more trouble to the master than even the forthright and rebellious Edith Stein had been.