Welcome to our collection of quotes by Edith Stein. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Edith Stein
Edith Stein (religious name Saint Teresia Benedicta a Cruce ; also known as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or Saint Edith Stein; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Christianity and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six co-patron saints of Europe.
She was born into an observant Jewish family, but had become an agnostic by her teenage years. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915, she took lessons to become a nursing assistant and worked in an infectious diseases hospital. After completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1916, she obtained an assistantship there.
From reading the life of the reformer of the Carmelite Order, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Edith Stein was drawn to the Christian faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church. At that point, she wanted to become a Discalced Carmelite nun but was dissuaded by her spiritual mentor, the abbot of Beuron Archabbey. She then taught at a Catholic school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position.
Edith Stein was admitted as a postulant to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 14 October, on the first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresia in remembrance to Saint Teresa of Avila, Benedicta in honour of Saint Benedict of Nursia). She made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.
The same year, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce and her biological sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern (tertiary of the Order, who would handle the community's needs outside the monastery), were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. In response to the pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops on July 26, 1942, in which they picked up the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis as a central theme, all baptized Catholics of Jewish origin (according to police reports 244 people) were arrested by the Gestapo on the following Sunday, 2 August 1942. They were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in a gas chamber on 9 August 1942.
Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
Usually one gets a heavier cross when one attempts to get rid of an old one.
We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be.
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.
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.
The deeper one is drawn into God, the more one must 'go out of oneself'; that is, one must go to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.
I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God.
And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God's hands and leave it with Him.
Woman's soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.
Energy apparently increases with the amount of work to be done. When nothing of burning urgency is waiting, it decreases much sooner. Heaven seems to understand such economy.
The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.
Each finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature; thus, in the diversity of His creatures, God's infinity, unity and oneness appear to be broken into an effulfgence of manifold rays.
The Bread that we need each day to grow in eternal life, makes of our will a docile instrument of the Divine Will; sets the Kingdom of God within us; gives us pure lips, and a pure heart with which to glorify his holy name.
The state has got to be its own master. The modalities of civic life may not be prescribed for it through any power standing outside of that state -- be it a private person or be it a community superior, collateral, or subordinate to that state.
One could say that in case of need, every normal and healthy woman is able to hold a position. And there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.
The emotions have been seen as the center of woman's soul. For that reason, emotional formation will have to be centrally placed in woman's formation.
Since Mary is the prototype of pure womanhood, the imitation of Mary must be the goal of girls' education.
Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone.
Because human development is the most specific and exalted mission of woman, studies in anthropology and theory of pedagogy are essential in girls' education.
Every true prayer is a prayer of the Church; by means of that prayer the Church prays, since it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church, Who in every single soul 'prays in us with unspeakable groanings'.
The entire educational process must be carried out with love, which is perceptible in every disciplinary measure and which does not instill any fear. And the most effective educational method is not the word of instruction but the living example without which all words remain useless.
Both spiritual companionship and spiritual motherliness are not limited to the physical wife and mother relationship, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.
Whoever resorts regularly to the lessons of Holy Scripture as an apt pupil will take the Savior into her group, and the children will perceive that He is present and that He assists in their work; thus, He will take possession of their souls.
On the question of relating to our fellowman -- our neighbor's spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.
The limitless loving devotion to God, and the gift God makes of Himself to you, are the highest elevation of which the heart is capable; it is the highest degree of prayer. The souls that have reached this point are truly the heart of the Church.
As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor's soul must break all precept. All that we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in itself, because God is love.
In order to be an image of God, the spirit must turn to what is eternal, hold it in spirit, keep it in memory, and by loving it, embrace it in the will.
During my early years, I was mercurially lively, always in motion, spilling over with pranks, impertinent and precocious, and, at the same time, intractably stubborn and angry if anything went against my will.
This is a serious warning cry: Surrender without reservation to the Lord who has called us. This is required of us so that the face of the earth may be renewed.
As the possessor of complete knowledge, God is not mistaken about people's experiences as people are mistaken about each others' experiences.
Diverse forms of memory can have a variety of gaps. Thus it is possible for me to represent a past situation to myself and be unable to remember my inner behavior in this situation. As I transfer myself back into this situation, a surrogate for the missing memory comes into focus.
All our own present experiences are primordial. What could be more primordial than experience itself?
The community that stands behind a culture as a comprehensively productive personality must be so extensive that in it, to a certain degree, all partialities balance out and work together.
A community having the breadth and scope of a people still cannot claim to be an ethnic community unless and until there emerges from its mentality a distinctive culture particularized by the community's special character.