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Teresianum 44 (1993/1) 199-219

EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL A STUDY IN COMMITMENT MADELEINE GRACE

How does one respond to overpowering evil? How does one confront an evil which may terminate one's life? Those who lived amid the World II German experience as they saw the devastation brought about by the person of Hitler were faced with such questions. Many fled with the basic instinct of self preservation leading them on. Others could do none than fight in whatever way their saw fit. Two women who gave their lives for this cause are and Simone Weil. Their backgrounds have some simi­ larities yet vast differences and their motivating forces also vary. The end product was, however, the same and their loss remains with us today. It is the purpose of this study to dis­ tinguish their motivating forces and determine what might be drawn from them for all who look back and those who learn anew of the horror of this time period. Perhaps a look at their early life and education will provide some clues. Edith Stein was born October 12, 1891 on the Jewish feast of the Atonement in Breslaw (Silesia) into a Jewish family of great faith. She was the youngest child of seven', her father dying of a heat stroke while on a business trip when she was two2. This sudden death left her industrious mother with a timber business to manage. Frau Stein purchased whole forests, knew how to judge standing timber and made busi­ ness trips across Silesia to the Balkans3. The family reached

1 Jean de Fabregues, Edith Stein (Staten Island/ N ew York: Alba Elouse, 1965), 11. 2 Edith Stein, Collected Works of Edith Stein Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite 1891-1942, vol. 1, Life in a Jewish Family 1891-1916 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), 41, hereafter cited as Stein, Life in a Jew­ ish Family. 3 Fabregues, 11. 200 MADELEINE GRACE a level of prosperity which the children attributed to their mother's goodness rather than business efficiency. The poor craftsmen could tell how Frau Stein would sell them the wood they needed and not infrequently return the purchase money4. Edith's mother was determined to see that each of her children received a good education5. When Edith's sister Ema began classes, Edith was very anxious to go with her, but the Prussian schools did not allow a child to attend be­ fore the age of six. The only compromise was to send the young Edith to a kindergarten which hurt her pride. She preferred to learn to read and write with the older children rather than play with the babies. Thus, kindergarten had to be given up. Edith's elder sister Else promised that if she passed her teacher's examination with distinction, she would ask the headmaster if Edith might enter the school on her sixth birthday. This mission was successfully achieved. Edith excelled in her classes but never received the first place award. The youngest Stein attributed this to the headmaster's anti-Semitism, which was said to be widespread in Germany, particularly among the profes­ sional classes6. At the age of 10, Edith attended a funeral of a business associate of her mother who had shot himself. She recalled the words of the rabbi: "And when the body returns to dust, the spirit returns to God who gave it"7. There was nothing of faith in a personal life after death, nor any belief in a future reunion with those who had died. In later years, she was to attend a Catholic funeral. The contrast made a deep im­ pression upon her. There was no mention of the achieve­ ments or reputation of the deceased. Rather, "called by his baptismal name alone, the humble soul, in all its poverty was commended to divine . But how consoling and calling were the words of the liturgy which accompanied the deceased into eternity!"8

4 Sister Teresia de spiritu Sancto Posselt, O.D.C. Edith Stein (N ew York: Sheed and Ward, 1952) 9. 5 Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 43. 6 Hilda C. Graef, The Scholar and the Cross The Life and Work of Edith Stein (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press), 6-7. 7 Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 81. 8 Ibid. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 201 A year later Edith heard of another suicide by her fa­ ther's youngest brother. She found that the economic war against the had ruined many and led to a lack of belief in any prospect of life in eternity9. She confessed later that from the ages of thirteen to twenty-one, she was an atheist. Frau Stein was proud of her daughter's achievements but disturbed at this lack of religion in her life. In 1908 Edith passed the difficult entrance exam to the Studienanstalt and spent the next three years learning Latin, higher math plus the other school subjects. She pur­ sued her studies at Breslau and there constantly ran into ci­ tations from 's Logical Investigations. After reading this work, she decided that she must go to Gottin­ gen to study under him. Edith was introduced to Husserl through Adolf Reinach, who was a Jew led to Christ before his death in the First World War. Another, influence which entered Edith's life at this time was the Jewish Max Scheler, who also would enter the Catholic faith. At this time Scheler was full of Catholic ideas which Stein could no longer by-pass. Husserl did not approve of his stu­ dents taking their doctorate first and then their Staatsexa- men. He thought that one should concentrate on philosophy first which would familiarize one with the subjects and methods of other branches of study. He did agree to allow Edith to choose a subject for her dissertation which was the problem of empathy10. In this work, she described empathy as "the act of per­ ceiving". She looked upon her endeavor as an attempt to study "the experience of foreign consciousness in general." She believed that through this experience, human beings comprehend the psychic life of their fel­ lows... as believers they comprehend the love, the anger and the precepts of their God in this way; and God can compre­ hend people's lives in no other way. As the possessor of com­ plete knowledge, God is not mistaken about people's experi­ ences, as people are mistaken about each others' experiences.

9 Ibid., 82. 10 Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 269. 202 MADELEINE GRACE But people's experiences do not become God's own, either; nor do they nave the same kind of givenness for Him." Edith likewise envisioned empathy as a corrective for one's self perception. As she pointed out, one can have "as many 'interpretations' of my psychic individual as I can have interpreting subjects." However, when the interpreta­ tion is "empathically fulfilled," the empathic acts may be in conflict with the "primordial experience." The "empathized interpretation" is then exposed as a deception and a correc­ tion may follow. Luckily, I not only have the possibility of bringing my ex­ perience to givenness to reiterated empathy, but can also bring it to givenness primordially in inner perception. Then I have it immediately given, not mediated by its expression or by bod­ ily appearances.12 She finished her thesis in the winter of 1916 and re­ turned to Breslau where she took the place of a sick teacher at her old school. After Husserl got around to reading her thesis, she graduated the following August of 1916. Husserl had just taken a professorship at Freiburg University. There, Edith became his assistant. During this time she worked on his manuscripts and pursued her own philosophical works13. Simone Weil was the second child and only daughter bom (February 3, 1909) to Doctor Bernard Weil, a physician, and his wife Selma14 Simone was a sickly child, from appendicitis in infancy, and having other attacks later. She was so sick from her eleventh to her twenty-second month, that there was little hope of her becoming a normal child. Undergoing surgery at the age of three and a half, she had a slow recovery15. Doctor Weil was a distinguished

11 Edith Stein, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989), 11. 12 Ibid., 88-89. 13 Graef, 9-27. 14 Richard Rees, Simone Weil A Sketch for a Portrait (carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), 12. 15 Simone Petrement, Simone Weil A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 7-8. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 203 physician16 and both he and his wife freethinking Jews. They raised their children without religious instruction but in an atmosphere of "high and eclectic moral culture"17. When the First World War broke out, Doctor Weil volun­ teered. Mme Weil, determined that the family would stay together followed him to the various military hospitals during this time. Simone and her brother Andre were en­ couraged by their mother to forego chocolate and sugar and to save up their ration to send to their "war godsons" — sol­ diers whose families were behind the front lines, who could not receive packages from home and were "adopted" by other French families. In addition to these sacrifices, Si­ mone did chores to buy her "godson" modest, useful gifts18. After the war, the Weils settled in Paris and determined that their two children, Andre and Simone, receive the best education possible. Simone endured a period of "bottomless despair" during adolescence. This experience could have been due to her comparison to her brother, Andre, the fact that he was gifted in mathematics and that he three years older, or it could have its origins in the belittling remarks of a schoolmistress whom she took very seriously19. She was concerned with the definition of genius. After months of inner darkness I gained, suddenly and forever, the certainty that any human being at all, even if his natural faculties are almost nil, finds his way into that realm of truth which is reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and makes a perpetual effort of attention so as to reach it. In this way he too becomes a genius, even though, for want of talent, no genius is externally visible20. Simone's interest in the stems from these early years. While traveling with her friend Simone Pe- trement on the subway at the age of sixteen, she remarked that it was not only out of a spirit of "justice" that she loved them. She said that she loved them "naturally. I find them

16 Doctor Weil was originally from Strasbourg and his wife from Rostov-on- Don. See Petrement, 3-4. 17 Rees, 12. 18 Dorothy Tuck McFarland, Simone Weil (New York: Frederick Ungar Pub­ lishing Co., 1983), 12-14. 19 Ibid., 16. 20 Simone Weil, as quoted by Rees, 14. 204 MADELEINE GRACE more beautiful than the bourgeois"21. It seems reasonable to assume that her later interests in and social reform were a consequence of her interest in working class people22. Simone passed her first baccalaureate exam in June of 1924 when she was fifteen. She enrolled in the Lycee Victor- Duruy in order to study philosophy under the eminent philosopher Rene le Senne and there received her baccalau­ reate in philosophy in June of 1925. She had decided that she would be a teacher of philosophy and thus in the fall of 1925 entered the Lycee Henri IV for two to three years of study to prepare for the examinations required for entrance into the Ecole Normale Superieure, the grande ecole, in which the elite of upper lycee and university teachers are trained. She studied under the renowned Alain (Emile Chartier)23. Simone Petrement, Simone's friend for many years, believed that Weil owed "an essential part of her thought to Alain". In most situations, Alain preached obedi­ ence. He believed that revolt almost always ended by rein­ forcing the present powers and making the citizen more of a slave. He did spread a spirit of inquiry, resistance, the de­ termination to judge freely and keep the determining powers within their limits through the force exerted by opinion24. The young philosophy student felt free to criticize Alain, however, "his shortcoming is to have rejected pain"25. Of the great , Simone preferred Descartes. Her God was that of Descartes. "The true God... is what is infallible in myself"26. She offered a proof for the existence of God, consisting in the fact that value and existence are one and the same thing in respect to thought. Insofar as it exists, thought has value, and insofar as it is value it exists. If a thought has value, it is because it is truly a thought, because it exists as a thought and cannot not exist; and, reciprocally if it exists as thought, it has value27.

21 Pétrement, 43. 22 McFarland, 18. 23 Ibid., 19-20. 24 Pétrement, 25. 25 Ibid., 38. 26 Ibid., 67. 27 Ibid. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 205 Simone's conception of what she wanted to do with her life was colored by the fact that she considered it a misfor­ tune to have been born female. She tried to disregard her femininity so that this obstacle would be reduced28. Simone had what may have been termed a "congenital predisposition" for headaches, which caused her great dis­ comfort in later years. She, like her father who suffered from the same affliction, did not eat when she had migraines. Her condition was considered to be more serious and painful than that of her father29. Thus it can be seen that Edith and Simone shared some similarities on background: living during the same time pe­ riod each raised in a family which prized education sharing a Jewish heritage though not believers in the faith, pos­ sessing keen intellects and thirsting for knowledge in the philosophical arena which would ultimately lead them to the threshold of spiritual experience. Whereas Edith's non-believing years in reference to Ju­ daism may find its source in her own inner struggles with faith and some Jewish beliefs Simone's lack of practice of the Jewish faith contained an intellectual root which ex­ tended far beyond her parent's heritage. She rejected Israel with hostility and also the , with the excep­ tion of some books. It is difficult to surmise reasons for her antagonism toward the religion of Israel. Perhaps her out­ look could be best explained by her innate pessimism, her denial of and alienation from life, which is incompatible with the Old Testament conception and affirmation of bless­ ing30. A further sequence to this belief was that Simone wrote the Minister of Education in November of 1940, inquiring "What is a Jew?" (for Jews at this time could no longer hold teaching positions). She did not see herself as having three or more Jewish grandparents as the law stated. Rather she believed: "mine is the Christian, French, Greek tradition. The Hebrew tradition is alien to me, and no Statute can make it otherwise"31.

28 Ibid., 27. 29 Ibid., 70. 30 George A. Panichos, ed., The Simone Weil Reader (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1977), xxiv-xxvi. 31 "What Is a Jew? A Letter to a Minister o f Education," ibid., 80. 206 MADELEINE GRACE There is a significant contrast between Edith and Si­ mone concerning femininity. As noted earlier, Simone dis­ regarded her femininity. Simone's friend, Simone Pe- trement, recalled that the young philosopher's way of dress­ ing became "more and more that of a poor person or a monk, ... she was determined to be a man as much as possible". It could have been a sense of mischief, which sometime.: gave her pleasure in shocking people, or a contempt for bourgeois customs. Further, Simone's will toward accomplishments left her little time for other matters32. Edith gave lectures spanning the topics of woman's education, , in­ trinsic value in national life, the ethos of women's profes­ sion among other topics. She perceived a threefold goal pre­ scribed by the nature of woman: the development of her humanity, her womanhood,and her individuality. These are not separate goals, just as the nature of a particular human individual is not divided into three parts but is one: it is human nature of a specifically fem­ inine and individual character33. The philosophical pursuits of each of thesa women led them into rather different arenas over the next several years. During the time that Edith served as an assistant to Husserl, failing to obtain a lectureship at Gottingen, she spent much of her vacation time at Bergzaber in the palatinate. Her friend Hedwig ConradMartius and her husband were run­ ning a farm. She could not sleep one night in the summer of 1921 and picked up Teresa of Avila's Autobiography34. When she laid the book down, she said very simply, "This is the Truth". Teresa's story is one of Christ drawing the soul to prayer. Edith was already in that experience. She bought a catechism and missal after she made up her mind to be­ come a Catholic. When she approached a priest, he found her versed in the Catholic faith, full of supernatural faith, with the desire to live the Christian life in its integrity. She was baptized on New Year's day, 1922. In a certain way, her mind had been prepared through Scheler and Reinach.

32 Pétrement, 28. 33 Edith Stein, Edith Steins Werke quoted in The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2, Essays on Woman, 9. 34 Posselt, 64. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 207 Thus, the culmination of her spiritual journey was reached when she met Teresa of Avila. Edith's mother wept upon hearing of the conversion. This distance between Edith and her mother was a great heartache to the young convert35. Edith secured a teaching position at the Dominican convent school at Speyer. There she taught German gram­ mar and literature for eight years (1922-31), actually living the life of a religious. She became known as a conscientious professor, devoted to her students. During her spare time she translated the Letters and Journals of Cardinal Newman. At this time Edith made the acquaintance of Father Przy- wara who sensed the richness of her soul and mind. He asked her to translate St. Thomas' Quaestiones Disputate de Veritate into German. The young convert perceived the point of departure for Thomas as "God and his relation to cre­ ation" in contrast to Husserl's purified consciousness. She came to the realization that philosophy can lead only to , to the knowledge of being, to ontology and on­ tology can lead only to God36. Edith began her lectures series for women in 1928. She was now speaking with Father Przywara and Dom Walzer, a Benedictine, whose advice she had sought on retreat at Beu- ron Abbey, about entry into Carmel. They both advised against it, stating that she was needed in the world to tell the women of Germany what she did37. In the spring of 1932, when Edith accepted the tutorial position at the Educational Institute in Munster, Hitler be­ gan to carry out his plans which would bring him to power. During this time, Edith always looked upon herself as one of the vanquished people despite her conversion experience. She encouraged her students to form anti-Nazi Groups. Eventually, the Jewish boycott would prevent her from teaching. Everything around her seemed to direct her to Carmel38. When Edith was refused her teaching position, she again considered Carmel which she had now waited twelve years to join. While the objections of her mother and the influence she had exercised on Catholic life had prevented

35 Fabregues, 48-55. 36 Ibid., 56-66. 37 Ibid., 67-75. 38 Ibid., 87-88. 208 MADELEINE GRACE her earlier, these hesitancies had now vanished. She could no longer teach and she assumed that her mother would prefer to see her in a Catholic convent than teaching in South America where she was offered a position39. When she went to the Church of St. Ludger on Good Shepherd Sunday, she told herself that she would not leave until she could see clearly whether she should enter Carmel. At the final blessing, she received the Good Shepherd's con­ sent. She wrote home that she had been accepted by some Sisters in Cologne and would be going there in October. Her family thought it a new appointment and congratulated her. Upon hearing the decision in its entirety, Edith's mother took the news very hard. The other members of the family did not understand the decision either, except her sister Rosa who had been with the Church in her heart for some time. This response was influenced by the reality of a family burdened by a business going badly. Edith was comforted when Sister Marianne from the Ursuline convent visited her mother several times. Edith spent these last days before en­ tering with her mother, attending the synagogue service of the Feast of Tabernacles with her. She took the train to Cologne, spending one night in Cologne with her Godchild, and entering Carmel the following day. Thus, Edith's for­ mal professional life ended and her journey toward Christ in carrying His Cross became more apparent40 Simone Weil chose to follow the experiential road of the worker during some part of her professional career. Between 1931, when Simone took up a first teaching appointment at the Lycee for girls at Lepuy, and her return from the in 1936, she was absorbed in labor problems and politics. This overriding interest however did not interfere with her concern for her pupils. She offered supplementary lectures on the history of science which were attended voluntarily by the whole class41. In observing the conditions of the working class, Simone argued that the proletariat had great difficulties in regimes in all areas of the political spectrum. The technocrat elite were becoming the great oppressors. The class struggle was

39 Posselt, 120. 40 Ibid., 120-32. 41 Rees, 22. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 209 no longer adequate to the proletariat situation. In her "Re­ flections concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Op­ pression" (1934), she voiced her belief that there are "new demons" which the fathers of communism had not envi­ sioned. Work is no longer done with the proud consciousness that it is being useful, but with the humiliating and agonizing feeling of enjoying a privilege bestowed by a temporary stroke of fortune... that one enjoys, in short, a job... Technical progress seems to have gone bankrupt, since instead of happi­ ness it has only brought the masses that physical and moral wretchedness in which we see them floundering... As for sci­ entific progress, it is difficult to see what can be the use of pil­ ing up still more knowledge onto a heap already much too vast to be able to be embraced even in the minds of special­ ists42. Her words bear need of amplification. What is technical progress? What factors play a part in it? Later in the same work, she referred to "an unlimited increase in production"42. The vagueness of the terminology brings further questions. In this essay, she calls for the abolition of social oppression44. Simone spent nine months at the Alsthom and two other factories. During this time, she spoke for , yet partic­ ipated in the Spanish Civil War. A cooking accident caused her hospitalization at Sitges during this War and led to her return to France. Upon leaving Spain, in August of 1935, she felt that she was marked forever with the brand of a slave. From her experience there, she believed that no war can ever advance the cause of freedom but rather strengthens bu­ reaucracy against the individual; yet three years later, in 1939, she would renounce her pacifist views45. After she returned from Spain, her father persuaded her to take a year's leave from teaching to recover her health. Thus, she took a holiday in Italy. Sometime between 1935 and 1940, simone's religious outlook deepened. She re­ marked herself that for a long time, the name of God had no

42 Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (London: & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1958), 37-38. 43 Ibid., 47. 44 Ibid., 55. 45 Reess, 33-40. 210 MADELEINE GRACE place in her thoughts. When she visited Santa Maria Degli Angeli, she recorded that she was impelled by "something stronger" than herself to kneel down and pray. After return­ ing from the Italian holiday, she began teaching at the Lycee yet had to stop due to chronic headaches. She accompanied her mother at Easter in 1938 to hear Gregorian music at Solesmes46. At this time she received her own touch from the divine. Stating that she was suffering from these splitting headaches, she was able to "rise above this wretched flesh... to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable of the chanting and the words." She further recorded that this experience enabled her to better understand the possibility "of loving divine love in the midst of affliction". It was during these services that "the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all"47. The experience led Simone to look for Christian values in older religious and philosophical traditions48. When she was approached about entrance into the Catholic faith, she replied: Christianity should contain all vocations without excep­ tion since it is catholic. In consequence the Church should also. But in my eyes Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence. All the immense stretches of past centuries except the last twenty are among them; all the countries inhabited by colored races; all secular life in the white peoples' countries: in the history of these coun­ tries, all the traditions banned as heretical, those of the Manicheans and Albigenses for instance; all those things re­ sulting from the renaissance, too often degraded but not quite without value. Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be49. Simone found that some of her own countrymen be­ lieved in a special relationship hetween France and Divine

46 Rees, 40-57. 47 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (N ew York: Harper Colophone Books, 1973), 68. 48 Rees, 60. 49 Weil, Waiting for God, 75. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 211 Providence. This group included such distinguished indi­ viduals as Charles Peguy, Jacques Maritain, Paul Claudel, among others. Simone found this distasteful. Some of the French attributed the rise of Hitler to "German national pe­ culiarities, to a mysterious movement called Nazism, or to the evil genius of Adolf Hitler"50. This assumption was far less demanding than going through the self scrutiny to dis­ cern origins of Hitlerism in oneself. Hitler wanted to play a part in history. She believed that the Roman impulse lay at Hitlerism's root cause. The purgation af Hitlerism could be accomplished within each individual's mind. It required consciously "modifying the scope of the sentiment attached to greatness"51. Her attachment to the teachings of Jesus are linked to her efforts to resist Hitler. She was sensitive to the Roman element in Hitlerism and was struck by what she perceived as Jesus' anti-Roman and anti-imperialist outlook52. This sentiment countered what she saw as a per­ verted nationalism and patriotism in her time. In the Gospels, there is not the least indication that Christ experienced anything resembling love for Jerusalem and Judea, save only the love which goes wrapped in compassion. He never showed any other kind of attachment to his country. But his compassion he expressed on more than one occasion. He wept over the city, foreseeing... the destruction which should shortly fall upon it53. From the very beginning of World War II, Simone wanted to be an active participant. When a student uprising in Prague failed, she devised a plan to parachute French arms and volunteers, including herself, into Czechoslovakia to help support a popular resistance movement. Her idea was dismissed by political figures. She then devised the no­ tion of organizing a corps of nurses who would accompany soldiers on the front lines into battle in order to give emer­ gency first aid to the wounded. She received an equally firm rejection54. When her family moved from Paris that was

50 John Heilman, Simone Weil An Introduction to Her Thought (Waterloo, On­ tario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), 44. 51 Ibid., 45. 52 Ibid., 37-46. 53 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (New York: Harper: Colophon Books, 1972), 170. 54 McFarland, 99. 212 MADELEINE GRACE soon to be occupied to , Simone made the ac­ quaintance of Father Perrin with whom she commenced the correspondence concerning the question of her . It was during this interim that she wrote her commentary on the Lord's Prayer and met Gustave Thibone, whose land she worked during the grape harvest5S. In recounting portions of the professional life and reli­ gious development of Edith and Simone, it can easily be as­ certained that a philosophical thrust was a major tool in leading them to their own realization of God. The rise of Hitler placed a major obstacle in their professional careers as they could not teach. Each, by her words or writings, saw Hitler for what he was and urged others to reject him. Whereas Simone entered the political arena basically through the subject matter of her works, Edith remained within the religious and philosophical domain. The future Carmelite's concern for her own people led her to a request for an audience with the Pope, hoping that an encyclical might help the plight of the Jews. She learned that she had no chance of a private audience owing to the pressure of business in Rome. Only an audience of a small group could be arranged. This did not serve Edith's purpose so she gave up the idea and submitted her plea in writing. Her letter was handed sealed to the Holy Father56. It was not long after this that she lost her teaching position57. When Edith entered Carmel, the question of whether she would continue her scholarly work never came up. She wished two things: to give herself totally to God, and by so doing, to offer herself as a "willing victim" for the sins of her people58. She found that when she entered, she moved from the "height of a brilliant career into the depths of insignifi­ cance"59. (Edith may well have recalled her kindergarten experience, perhaps reflecting upon the foundational virtue of the spiritual life, humility.) Adaptation to the life of the

55 Ibid., 119-24. 56 This incident took place in April, 1933, prior to the signing of the new Concordat, and the German bishops' pastoral letter of July 26, 1942 in which the churchmen spoke out concerning the plight of the Jews. Reprisals against that let­ ter cost Edith Stein her life. See Posselt 118, 203-05, 209. 57 Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein A Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985), 64-65. 58 Graef, 112. 59 Edith Stein, Life as quoted in Graef, 114. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 213 community would be a major adjustment for anyone, but especially for someone of Edith's background and age60. Edith's sister, Rosa, had wished to enter the church for sometime but had sacrificed her desire for the sake of her mother. Since Erau Stein had passed away61, she wished to see Edith and be baptized. Edith had an accident the night before her sister's arrival day, December 15. Edith ended up in the hospital recovering from a broken hand and Poot yet at the same time was able to instruct her sister Rosa for her Baptism62. As the political situation worsened, Edith's Jewish friends came to talk with her about emigration. They always left strengthened and consoled. As she told one of these visi­ tors, she was well aware that the Nazis would probably come and take her from the enclosure. During this time, the young Carmelite had finished the work Finite and Eternal Being but was not optimistic about finding a publisher for a work written by a Jew. In the year 1938 she was able to make final vows. At Carmel, Edith was known as Sister Benedicta of the Cross. She was overjoyed after this turning point in her own life to hear that Husserl had turned back to God on his deathbed63. While she was at the Carmel at Cologne, Edith began to reflect upon the relationship between the official liturgical prayer of the Church and the wordless prayer of the heart. She wrote in her article "The Prayer of the Church" that Christ is the model of one at prayer. One can only learn to speak with the Father through Christ. In later writings, she emphasized the relationship between the and Christ's atoning sacrifice, the contributions of great women of prayer, the role of the spiritual director and also the place of in religious experience64. Death was a subject which took an increasing promi­ nence in Edith's writings. While at Cologne she wrote a friend:

60 Graef, 114. 61 Frau Stein died on September 14, 1936, unreconciled to Edith's decision to enter Carmel. See Herbstrith, 75. 62 Graeft 166-67. 63 Herbstrith, 75-78. 64 Ibid., 86-93. 214 MADELEINE GRACE Though we would certainly have a lot to tell each other if you came for another visit, the important thing is to stay united in prayer so that we can meet again in the light of eter­ nity. Every time I see someone go on ahead of me, my own yearning becomes all the greater65. Edith wrote Mother Petra Bruning, Superior of the Ursu- line Sisters in Dorsten, that she believed the Lord had ac­ cepted her life as an offering for all. Edith did escape from the Carmelite convent in Cologne under the cover of night on New Year's Eve (December 31, 1939) to the Carmelite convent of Echt in Holland. For Edith however this under­ cover journey must not be seen as flight. Her earlier corre­ spondence bore testimony that she wished to offer her life "as a sacrifice of atonement for true ." For her, there­ fore, the journey was an entrance into the redeeming action of Christ66. The following year (1940) the Germans occupied Hol­ land. As a result of the pastoral proclaimed by the Dutch bishops on July 26, 1942 protesting the persecution of the Jews, all non-Aryans were arrested in Holland on August 2. When the SS men came to pick up Sister Benedicta and her sister Rosa at the Carmelite convent in Echt, the sisters protested, stating that they had a passport for Sister Bene­ dicta to Switzerland. The SS men replied that if they did not turn them over immediately, her own sisters would suffer67. At the Gestapo office, Edith saluted with "Praised be Jesus Christ." Edith and Rosa broke the law by not wearing the yellow star of David on their outer garment. Several priests had urged her to escape but she refused, fearing reprisal on her own sisters. Edith and her sister Rosa both died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on August 9, 194268. While working in the grape harvests in the autumn of 1941, simone Weil first began to pray. Her commentary on the Lord's Prayer accompanies this period in her life. In May of 1942, Simone's parents asked her to accompany them to New York. She wanted to experience all the forms of human bondage to dire necessity before she died, including the ex­

65 Edilh Stein as quoted by Herbstrith, 77. 66 Herbstrith, 63, 92-95. 67 Graef, 227. 68 Fabregues, 125-31. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 2 1 5 perience of prison. In New York, she became obsessed with the plight of the Blacks and spent much time in Harlem. While in New York, she met a number of Frenchmen who spoke against the Vichy government's supporters. She had a dislike for a government which surrendered to Hitler and prevented her from teaching. Simone's parents remained in America and she went to London where she worked on var­ ious writing projects (the book The Need for Roots in addi­ tion to a number of essays) for four months before being admitted to the Middlesex Hospital with pulmonary tuber­ culosis. She wrote her parents nothing of her deteriorating health. She passed away on September 3, 1943, her death labeled "Strange Suicide. Refused to eat." She gave as a rea­ son for not eating-the thought of her people in France starv­ ing69. Thus, E dith and Simone both gave their lives in total dedication to what they believed in. Perhaps Edith's work which most visibly reflected her journey to Auschwitz is The Science of the cross. She wrote it on the request of her superi­ ors on the four hundredth anniversary of the death of . The book was not completed but does tell the stoiy of a philosopher who has found the faith. She had analyzed the image of God in the soul and had mentioned the theological concept of person in previous works. At the beginning of this piece, she seems to have given a portrait of her own soul. If we speak of a Science of the Cross, this is not to be un­ derstood in the ordinary meaning of science... It is indeed, known truth, a theology of the Cross, but it is living, actual and active truth: it is placed in the soul like a seed, strikes root and grows, giving the soul a certain character and forming it in all it does or leaves undone, so that its own being shines forth and is recognized in it. This form and force living in the depth of the soul nourish the philosophy of this man and the way in which God and the world present themselves to him, ana thus they can be expressed in a theory... The redemptive power raises to life those in whom the divine life had died through sin. This power had entered into the Word of the Cross, through which it penetrates to all who accept it without demanding signs or rational proof. In them it becomes that

69 Rees, 68-84. 216 MADELEINE GRACE formative, lifegiving power which we have called the Science of the Cross70. In the same work, Edith traces the message of the Cross from the Old Testament prophecies to Saint Paul as seen by John of the Cross. She then proceeds with an analysis of the works of John of the Cross, as this theme of the Cross con­ tinues. She looks upon John's "active night" as the "night of the following of the Cross" and the passive night as "being crucified." []1'. The work, as she left it, is divided into three parts: the message of the Cross, the doctrine of the Cross and the following of the Cross. Al­ though she only had short spans of time to work on it, and did not have proper references at her disposal, it was her desire to grasp John of the Cross at the root of his being. She did not finish the third part72, for her own following of the Cross intervened. A term which Sim one highlighted in several of her writ­ ings, but especailly her last is "malheur," affliction. She de­ scribed this condition as "physical suffering carried to the extreme limit, without the slightest consolation... accom­ panied by utter and complete moral distress"73. She viewed affliction as the essential characteristic of human existence— separation from God74. She believed that joy contained an equivalent potentiality for enlightenment; however "the only two ways are affliction and pure and extreme joy; but afflic­ tion is Christ's way"75. The Cross of Christ is the only source of light that is bright enough to illumine affliction. Wherever there is affliction in any age or any country, the Cross of Christ is the truth of it... Affliction without the Cross is hell, and God has not placed hell upon the earth76.

70 Edith Stein, Science of the Cross A Study of Saint John of the Cross (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966), 1-10. 71 Graef, 213. 72 Waultraut J. Stein, "Edith Stein, Twenty-Five Years Later", Spiritual Life 13 (Winter, 1967): 248-49. 73 Simone Weil, Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (N ew York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1956), 429. 74 McFarland, 135. 75 Simone Weil, Intuitions pre-chretiennes, quoted in Rees, Simone Weil A Sketch for a Portrait, 168. 76 Simone Weil, "The and Affliction", Gateway to God (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 87. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 217 Earlier in this same essay on "The Love of God and Af­ fliction", she commented, The man who sees someone in affliction and projects into him his own being brings to birth in him through love, at least for a moment, an existence apart from his affliction... To pro­ ject one's being into an afflicted person is to assume for a moment his affliction, it is to choose voluntarily something whose very consists in being imposed by constraint upon the unwilling. And that is an impossibility. Only Christ has done it. Only Christ and those men whose whole souls he possesses can do it77. When she was refused her own plan of action for her en­ tering into the War, she wrote Joe Bousquet, a veteran. Fortunate are those in whom the affliction which enters their flesh is the same one that afflicts the world itself in their time. They have the opportunity and the function of knowing the truth of the world's affliction and contemplating its reality. And that is the redemptive function itself... But alas for those who have this function and do not fulfill it78. It is noteworthy that Simone used the word possession in connection with her own mystical experience at Solesmes. As she recounted, an English Catholic gave her 's poem "Love". She learned it by heart. Dur­ ing one of these recitations, "Christ Himself came down and took possession of me"79. Did Simone perceive her own death as the means of fulfilling her own "function", since her will as denied? Much has been made of Simone Weils refusal to accept Baptism into the . She has been accused of being unhistorical, for she included some of her own "dis­ cursive mythologizing", and paid particular attention to the pre-Christian era as containing pure examples of the Chris­ tian spirit80. Her refusal to enter the Church has led others to believe she possessed intellectual pride. The meaning Si­

77 Ibid., 84. 78 Simone Weil, Seventy Letters (London: , 1965), 137- 38. 79 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 68-69. 80 E.W.F. Tomlin, Simone Weil (N ew Haven; Yale University Press, 1954), 38- 39. 218 MADELEINE GRACE mone has attached to the term "attente" is worthy of reflec­ tion. She perceived "attente" as active and contemplative. For Simone, it became a kind of "transmuting activity." In tiring God with our patience, we oblige him to trans­ form time into eternity... A patience capable of thus wearying God proceeds from an infinite humility... By humility alone can we become perfect as our Father is perfect81. Yet, as she stated in her thoughts concerning Baptism, if she possessed this virtue of humility, she would not have experienced this general sense of inadequacy82. For Simone, "Humility is the refusal to exist outside God"83. She recorded in her familiar Waiting for God that there cannot be a greater good on earth than to share in the of Christ. She saw the Cross of Christ as "our only hope"84. Despite her highly original and sometimes criticized thoughts, simone's sense of inadequacy, attente, and her own mystical experience have endeared her to many. The expression of the authenticity of her own mysticism has undoubtedly affirmed that of many other readers. The lives of Edith Stein and Simone Weil show similari­ ties in background noted here, but the roads they traveled which led to the ultimate motivating forces for their exis­ tence were quite different. Undoubtedly, each of these figures met at the foot of the cross. They shared with Christ an em­ pathy for His people. Whereas Edith's doctoral dissertation on empathy attempted to approach the topic from every possible philosophical perspective, her conversion experi­ ence led her to embody what she originally approached as a graduate student85. Regardless of whether one refers to the experience of "givenness" penned by the graduate student Edith or taking on the afflictions of another, the great con­ cern of Simone, each of these women longed to be possessed by God that their own acts might in some way become re­

81 Simone Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle quoted in Tomlin, 53-54. 82 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 46. 83 Simone Weil, La pesanter et la grâce, quoted in Marie-Magdeleine Davy, The Mysticism of Simone Weil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 30. 84 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 127. 85 Noel Dermot O'Donoghue, ed. The Way of the Christian Mystics, 12 Edith Stein Philosopher and Mystic by Josephine Koeppel, OCD (Collegeville, Minnesota: Michael Glazier / Liturgical Press, 1990) 184. EDITH STEIN AND SIMONE WEIL. A STUDY IN COMMITMENT 219 demptive. Their "lifegiving power" was truly the Cross. For Edith, it was giving her life for the sins of her people and for simone, taking on the afflictions of her fellow Frenchmen, imprisoned by the Vichy regime. Each of these figures presents a challenge in conversion, transformation and commitment to the Cross of Christ. Edith Stein is certainly remembered more for her life and Simone Weil for her writings86, yet their deeds and words have met in a common thrust. If one considers Edith Stein's wish found written on the back of a picture in her cell stating that she desired to give her life for the conversion of the Jews87 or the interpretation of Simone Weil perceiving the Cross of Christ as the means of illuminating affliction88, each woman drew her strength from the Cross. There is much to be learned about the message of redemption from their lives and writings.

86 Neville Braybrooke, "Edith Stein and Simone Weil: Spiritual Heroes of Our Times," American Ecclesiastical Review 163 (Novem ber 1970): 328. 87 Posselt, 211. 88 Simone Weil, Gateway to God, 84.