She’s one of the most outstanding and fascinating women of our century. Since the originality and the complexity of her life, it is difficult to set her accurately in a short biographical sketch.

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Breslaw then belonging to Germany as a chief town of the Prussian Silesia ( now Wroclaw in Poland). She was the last of seven children of a deeply religious jewish family very devoted to traditions. She was born on the 12^th October, day of the Kippur , that is theExpiation, a religious Jewish feast. Her mother saw this circumstance as a sign of predilection by God and an anticipation of a particular destiny for her daughter.

Intelligent, lively, initiated by her brothers to cultural interests since her early years, in 1910 Edith entered the University of Breslaw, the only woman that year attending the philosophy courses. Once she said:" Studying philosophy is like walking on the brink of a precipice", but she, mature intellectually and spiritually, made of it a privileged way to meet the truth.

Following a particular seminar of study, she contacted Edmund Husserl’s thought, a teacher at Gottinga University. She felt a deep interest in it. She became enthusiastic over this author, the beginner of phenomenology, who to her eyes appeared as " the philosopher" of her time. She moved to Gottinga University and she was introduced to the philosopher Husserl at once.

From her enthusiasm for the Master’s first work, the "Logical searches", Edith, together with other research students, changed her mind when Husserl with his " Ideas for a pure phenomenology" passed from the realism of studying the phenomena to the trascendental idealism.

She knew another phenomenologian, Max Scheler, very different from Husserl, who provoked the auditorium with original intuitions and inflamed the spirit of it. Scheler succeeded in arousing the religious need rather asleep than dead in her who declared herself an atheist. Since a short while Scheler came back to the Catholic faith and expressed his creed in a fascinating way.

Edith still didn’t join the faith, but she saw before her a new ambit of phenomena, to which she couldn’t be insensible. At Husserl’s school she knew to contemplate everything without any preconceptions. Listening to Scheler, the barriers of the rationalistic prejudices among which she grew up unconsciously, were falling down. She said: " Suddenly the world of the faith was opening wide before me".

At the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, she dedicated herself to contrast hate with a service of love. And she became a volunteer Red Cross nurse in a military hospital for infectious illnesses, in a little town in Moravia. She turned back to philosophy with a new attitude: " Not science, but devotion of life has the last word!".

In spite of her reservations on Husserls’ philosophical thought,Edith remained next to hhim, and in 1916 she followed him as his assistant a t the Friburg University, where she graduated with a thesis titled The problem of empathy (Einfuhlung). One year later she got the doctorate summa cum laude at the same University.

First because of her studies, later for friendship reasons, she spent long summer periods in Bergzabern, in the Palatinate, at the Conrad-Martius’s. In summer 1921, during one of these periods, Edith read-all in one night - the Life of St. Theresa of Avila, written by herself. Closing the book, at dawn, she had to confess to herself: "This is the truth!".

She was christened in Bergzabern few months later, on January 1^st 1922. She asked for and obtained as a sponsor her friend Hedwig conrad-Martius, who was a Christian but Protestant in her Confession. She added to Edith the names of Theresa and Edvige.

Then she came back to her family, to the old mother Augusta, to tell her what had happened. She Knelt before her and told her: "Mother, I’m a Catholic!". Her mother, a strong keeper of the Jewish faith, cried. And also Edith cried. Both felt that still deeply loving eachother, their lives were definetly parting. Each of them found in her way, in her faith, the courage of offering to God the sacrifice requested.

Edith started to feel uncomfortable in Friburg. She was feeling the first inner calls of her vocation to the total consecration to the God of Jesus Christ. Then she left her job as Husserl’s assistant, and chose the teaching at the Dominican Institute in Speyer.

"It was St. Thomas -she writes- that tought me how to join the study with a life all dedicated to prayer. Only after having understood this, I dared to dedicate myself to my studies . On the contrary I think that more deeply one is attracted by God, more he has to come out of himself, even in this sense. That is: he has to come back in the world to bring in it the Divine Life".

Then she dedicated herself to compare the philosophical current in which she had studied, phenomenology, to the Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas of Aquino, which she was studying now. The result of this investigation was the study that she dedicated to her old teacher Husserl, in his 70^th birthday: Husserl’s phenomenology and St. Thomas philosophy. It was 1929. In the same year she started the cycles of cultural Conferences for the women’s promotion.

Edith Stein in 1930

Three years later, in 1932, she left Speyer, to dedicate herself completely to philosophical studies and she entered as a teacher at Munster Pedagogic Academy. But only for one year. In fact, with Hitler ascent to the power, the law on racial discrimination was promulgated and Edith had to leave teaching.

On April 1933, during the Blessed Sacrament’s Adoration, she clearly felt that vocation to the religious monastic life of the Carmel that she had started to feel the day of her Christening and she decided. Another blow to her mother! " Even if you are a Jewish you can be religious " she told her trying to dissuade her. "Of course –Edith answered- if you didn’t know anything else ".

God was calling her to bring her to the desert, to speak to her heart, to share with her the endless thirst of Jesus for the men’s salvation. Freeely and happily she was leaving a world full of friends and admirers, to come into the silence of a bare anf silent life, only attracted by her love to Jesus. On October 15^th 1933, Edith entered the Kholn Carmel. She was 42.

Next year, on Sunday, April 15^th 1934, she became a nun with the name of Sister Theresa Benedicte of the Cross. Meanwhile the Carmelite provincial let her to dedicate to complete her work Finite Being and Eternal Being, started before her entering to the Carmel. In 1938 the procedure was complete and on May 1^st she became a Carmelite for all her life.

But on December 31^st 1938 Edith suffered the tragedy of the Cross. To avoid the racial laws against the Jewish, she had to leave the Kholn Carmel. She went to Netherland, to the Echt Carmel. The hour was tragic, for all Europe and paticularly for the Jewish persecuted by the Nazi. On March 23^rd she offered herself to God as a victim of expiation. On June 9^th she made her spiritual will, in which she pointed out the acceptance of the death for the great intentions of the moment, while World War II was bursting.

In 1941, by appointment of the Echt Monastery Prioress, she started and continued until she could do it,a new work, this time about St. John of the Cross mystic theology. She titled it: Scientia Crucis. The worf remained unfinished, because even in Echt she was caught by the Nazis. The SS squads deported her to the Amersfort Camp and later to the Auschwitz one. "Let’s go! - She told going out with her poor luggage to her sister Rose, who was living at the Monastery guest house, and who was caugt with her - let’s go and die for our people!".

She had passed from the University teaching to the Carmel. And now, from the peace of the cloister, a place of contemplative love, she was passing to the horrors of a Nazi lager.Edith Stein, Sister Theresa Benedicte of the Cross, died in a gas room in Auschwitz on August 9^th 1942.

She was Blessed by John Paul II in Kholn,in the anniversary of her definite consecration , on May 1^st 1987. She has been proclaimed a Saint by the same Pope in Rome, in St. Peter Square, on October 11^th 1998.

Edith Stein in 1931, two years before entering the Cologne Carmel

Edith reached that goal passing through an intellectual and philosophical maturation that can be considered complete since the time she left the world to immerse in God only in contemplation, which is the carmelite monastic vocation.

What strikes more in Edith Stein is the clearness of her goal, the untiring continuity of her searching for it during all her life. " The thirst of truth – she said about the period preceding her conversion- was my only prayer ". This searching, opening itself to the Divine Being, will become a searching for God, that it is not the God of abstract philosophies, but it is a personal God, Jesus Christ’s God.

No wonder therefore that from phenomenology Edith Stein came to Scholastic and that in this point of view of total light on the Being she felt the need of immersing in a mystic doctrine and experience.

In the Thirties, there were many circles of neo-scholastic thinkers who frequently dealt with the relation between philosophy and mystic, interested especially in the differences among the ways proposed by Thomas from Aquino and by John of the Cross, to the spiritual life.

Dubois writes:" It was the time of the Thomist Conferences, of the Carmelite Studies, of the meetings in Meudon, around to Jaques and Raissa Maritain. There are evidences that in this period of the Christian thought a life of prayer and the searching for sanctity were considered forms of the philosopher’s task, in the reality of existence".

At that time Edith had already matured the overcoming of her teacher Husserl’s position. Her interests, as regards her studies, were directed to St. Thomas and her spirit was looking to the Carmelite mystic experience,still she was deeply marked by her birth in the philosophy of Husserl’s school.

All the trend of Husserl’s thought attracted many disciples. " Every conscience is the conscience of something. The password is coming back to things and asking them what they are saying about themselves, so obtaining some certainties that don’t result from preconceived theories, from opinions received and never verified. They were attracting prospects. Wording as "Truth is an Absolute", that Husserl gave in his first work Logical Investigations were a breaking off with the Relativism" (Dumareau).

Edith Stein in 1938, five years after entering the Cologne Carmel

Edith entered then in a group of people joined by their passion for the truth and by real human relationships. A reliable evidence of Hedwig Conrad Martius: " Born in the Spirit! I want to say with these words that it wasn’t only a matter of a common method of searching and of thought. This method was and is among Husserl’s disciples a link that can only be compared to a natural birth in a common spirit. Since the beginning it had to be a great secret, hidden in the intention of this new philosophical orientation, a nostalgia of coming back to the objective, to the sanctity of the Being, to the pureness and chastity of the things".

Though the Subjectivism hasn’t been overcome completely even by Husserl, actually the opening to the object, typical of the original intention of this school in which Edith had her philosophical formation, pushed many disciples forward, on the way of objectivity, towards the Being in itself.

What attracted Edith Stein strongly was the direct opening of the conscience to the existence of the world. " It is through this reality of the existence of the world that God is speaking to us. He’s there, at the back, he’ s He Who is. Opening oneself to the voice of the world that speaks to the conscience is opening oneself to God, it is listening to God. The walking of contemplation is very near" (J.De Fabrègues).

Edith’s critical attitude towards Husserl’s doctrine development in the so called " trascendental idealism",favoured her entering into Scholastic. And meeting the Finite Being started her spirit to contemplation.

Going on with the phenomenological method, first accepting the objectivity of things, Edith dealt,in her first scientific production, with some themes of psychological , social and public interest. According to one of Edith Stein’s most important scholar, Reuben Guilead," there is a problem on which all her philosophical interest is concentrated: that of the human person.It is not by chance that her first works gravitate around matters of a psychic,public and social nature.Now the searching for the essentiality of the human being is strongly joined to the one of the spiritual dimension. So it is not surprising that, since her first works, Edith Stein puts the question of an ontology of the spirit".