Edith Stein, an outstanding phenomenologist who was a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a renowned German Carmelite, was martyred at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942.
Edith courageously answered Jude the Obscure’s riddle: “Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or just a fraction wanting its integer?”
For Edith humanity is a composite of male and female. She writes: “I am convinced that the species humanity embraces the double species man and woman; that the essence of the complete human being is characterized by this duality; and that the entire structure of the essence demonstrates the specific character.” Yet, woman is unique, mainly in her soul. “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 pronouncedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.”
Contrary to man, who is more task and abstraction oriented, woman tends to emphasize the whole and the personal. In fact, she tries to increase “harmonious development in herself” and the others around her. Moreover, adds Edith, “her peculiar characteristic of discernment suits her duty as companion and mother; her strength lies in her intuitive grasp of the concrete and the living”. Since she is focused on “being” in its wholeness than with “doing”, a woman joyfully celebrates creation. The “deepest longing of woman’s heart is to give herself lovingly, to belong to another, to possess this other being completely... such yearning is an essential aspect of the eternal destiny of woman. It is not simply human longing but is specifically feminine and opposed to the specifically masculine nature”.
Original sin imposed “a form of union against the original order”. As a result of this distorted union, woman had to bear her children in pain, being subjugated to man, and, as Edith notes with great sorrow, “that he (man) would not be a good master was evident in his attempt to shift responsibility onto the woman”. Nevertheless, woman has been assigned a “particular duty to struggle against evil and to prepare for the spiritual restoration of life”. This is made manifest in God’s promise to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman...”, words which embody both Mary and each and every woman.
The fall made woman more susceptible to perverted emotionalism, or “unilateral emotional development”, sensualism, over-possessiveness, superficiality, an immoderate desire to communicate and an “indiscreet need to penetrate into the intimate life of others”. As Edith observes: “A dominating will replaces joyful service. How many unhappy marriages can be attributed to this abnormality! How much alienation between mothers and growing children and even mature offspring!”
Fortunately, the way out from this female existential impasse is to be found in “solid objective work”, a formation sensitive to woman’s distinctive nature, and as the sound basis, a life of grace invigorated by the love of the living God.
Edith calls “abnormal” the society whose economic conditions impel women to work when their energies could be wisely employed to manage the family. Married women can work outside their homes provided that by their work they do not destroy the harmony of domestic life. In effect, Edith admits that such work is needed, “wherever the circle of domestic duties is too narrow for the wife to attain the full formation of her powers”. Thus, a woman’s social role is comprehensive inasmuch as there should be “no legal barriers” to women entering professions of their preference. Having said that, professions which demand personal contact and intuition, as is the case with teaching and nursing, are more suited to a woman’s nature. The point Edith is accentuating is that a woman’s natural inclination for wholeness and the personal can successfully ease certain “maladies of modern culture, such as the dehumanisation of the person, fragmentation and the one-sided development of certain faculties”.
Education is the way forward for the integral development of women.
Hence, a woman’s education must be, first and foremost, religious.
This is so since a “woman can become what she should be in conformity with her primary vocation only when formation through grace accompanies the natural inner formation”. For you, Maltese Catholic women, Edith says that your vocation finds its fullest expression and accomplishment in a profound Eucharistic life and following the Virgin Mary’s example, the perfect woman, taking her as your role model.
“Whether she is a mother in the home, or occupies a place in the limelight of public life, or lives behind quiet cloister walls, she must be a handmaid of the Lord everywhere... Were each woman an image of the Mother of God, a Spouse of Christ, an apostle of the divine Heart, then each would fulfil her feminine vocation no matter what conditions she lived in and what worldly activity absorbed her life.”
What a formidable exponent Edith Stein is of the feminine genius!
Mario Attard OFM Cap