Carmelite
Conversations
Wednesday
the 7th of September 2022
Presented
by Philip Harvey
The
three women we are reading today lived through the 1930s in Europe, a period
that witnessed the rise of totalitarian states and culminated in a world war
that involved the persecution and destruction of Jews known as the Shoah, or
Holocaust. It is in this context that we read their different understandings of
a central fact of Christianity: the Cross of Christ.
Edith
Stein on the Cross
Edith
Stein adopted the name in religion Teresia Benedicta a Cruce when she entered the
Carmelite Order in 1933. Teresia after the guiding light of the sisters, Saint
Teresa of Avila, and Benedicta after Saint Benedict. Crucially, as we would say
in English, she added ‘of the Cross’, as an indication of her dedication to the
cross of Christ, but also fairly clearly in emulation of Teresa’s great protégé,
Saint John of the Cross. A central work of Stein’s has the slightly formidable
title ’The Science of the Cross’, an extensive study of the thought of John of
the Cross, the manuscript of which was found on her desk on the day she and her
sister were arrested by the Nazis. To begin to understand Edith Stein, there is
no way around the fact that we must learn something about her theology of the
Cross.
Concerned
for her welfare as a person of Jewish identity, the Order transferred Edith
Stein to a Carmel in Echt, the Netherlands, before the outbreak of the War. She
lived there with her sister Rosa. Edith was not allowed to teach due a law forbidding
Jews from teaching, but did continue to instruct the sisters inside the
community. They later said that she was preparing herself for life in a
concentration camp by enduring hunger and cold, behaviour in solidarity and empathy
with those persecuted that we also see in Simone Weil. Eventually she and Rosa
were arrested in a round-up of Jewish converts, sent first to Westerbork, where
Etty Hillesum witnessed their presence, as we said at the opening, then sent
from Holland to Poland and death at Auschwitz in August 1942.
Edith
Stein writes , ‘One can only gain a scientia crucis (knowledge of the
cross) if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of
this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: ‘Ave, Crux,
Spes unica.’ (I welcome you, Cross, our only hope.)’
‘One
cannot desire freedom from the Cross when one is especially chosen for the
Cross.’
‘”Thy
will be done,” in its full extent, must be the guideline for the Christian
life. It must regulate the day from morning to evening, the course of the year
and the entire life. Only then will it be the sole concern of the Christian.
All other concerns the Lord takes over. This one alone, however, remains ours
as long as we live … And, sooner or later, we begin to realize this. In the
childhood of the spiritual life, when we have just begun to allow ourselves to
be directed by God, then we feel his guiding hand quite firmly and surely. But
it doesn’t always stay that way. Whoever belongs to Christ, must go the whole
way with him. He must mature to adulthood: he must one day or other walk the
way of the cross to Gethsemane and Golgotha.’ (Sullivan 125)
Etty
Hillesum on the Cross
On
July 26, 1942 the Dutch Catholic bishops protested against the deportation of
Jews from Holland by having a pastoral letter read in all the churches. The life
of Edith Stein was decisively influenced, like those of thousands of other
Jews, by the Germans’ retaliatory action to this pastoral letter, ordering the
immediate deportation of all Catholics of Jewish descent. Etty Hillesum lived
with the same kind of threats. She freely chose to go and support and work with
detainees in the main transit camp in the Netherlands known as Westerbork. Members
of her family, including her parents, were sent there and Etty saw it as her
calling to be with the victims. When we read her diaries this is the culmination
of the underlying reality she keeps mentioning in passing all the time. She and
many of her friends live in a wartime situation of extreme social abuses, one
in which their personal identity compromises their very existence. Here is
someone who, like thousands of others at the time, tries to live a normal social
life while aware that at any moment it could be taken away from her by force. Although
not a professed Christian, Etty is highly conversant in Christian language,
just as she is in Judaism, even though she is not practising. When we read her
we are left wondering, what do these words ‘Christian’ and ‘Jew’ mean if they
are not applicable to someone like Etty Hillesum?
Here
are two quotes from Etty Hillesum on the Cross, the first written early in her
Diaries. This entry presents us with the seriousness with which Etty took her decision
to start keeping a journal. Our understanding of what we read deepens once we
appreciate the vocational choice she has made about her writing.
‘You
have to describe the concrete, the down-to-earth reality, and so illumine it
with your words, with your spirit, that the soul behind it evoked. If you
allude directly to the so-called soul, then everything becomes too vague, too
formless. If I really get it into my head more and more firmly that I want to
write, do nothing but write, then I must also realize that I am preparing a
cross for my back – I already feel it every now and then and shudder a little.
The question is, whether I have the talent for it.’
Diaries 5 August 1941
The
other quote is the final words of the Diaries. Written privately, they speak
conclusively of the role Etty knew she had played in her relations with others.
‘We
should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.’
Diaries 13 October 1942
Simone
Weil on the Cross
Essential
to Weil’s thought are her teachings about affliction. This word had special meaning for her. Unlike
Stein and Hillesum, Weil escaped the Nazis, travelling first to New York and
then to London. Throughout this closing period of her life she suffers guilt
for not being with those who are enduring occupation and her strongest desire
is to return to France to work in the extremest conditions with the French
Resistance. Her own physical wellbeing deteriorates, not helped by her refusal
to eat any more than what she believed to be the subsistence level meals rationed
out to the French poor. In other words, she was starving herself to death, a
condition that combined with tuberculosis led ultimately to her death in a
sanitorium in 1943.
And
so to conclude, here are two quotes from Simone Weil on the Cross, taken from
the numerous meditations she wrote down throughout her life on this subject.
‘Whoever
takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the
sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.’
‘The
Trinity and the Cross are the two poles of Christianity, the two essential
truths: the first, perfect joy; the second, perfect affliction. It is necessary
to know both the one and the other and their mysterious unity, but the human
condition in this world places us infinitely far from the Trinity, at the very
foot of the Cross. Our country is the Cross.’ (Panichas 456-7)
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