Carmelite
Conversations
Wednesday
the 7th of September 2022
Presented
by Philip Harvey
Eighty
years ago today Europe was in the middle of a world war. Countries were
occupied or under attack, people were displaced everywhere, and chance
encounters occurred every day. One very simple chance encounter is the start of
our conversation today. In early August 1942, a Dutch woman by the name of Etty
Hillesum was living in Westerbork. Her home was Amsterdam, but she had chosen
to live in the transit camp at Westerbork in north-eastern Netherlands in order
to care for her family and others who were Jewish, sent there by the Germans on
the trip eastwards to extermination. We know this because Etty kept diaries and
wrote letters, which since 1981 have had a growing influence worldwide for their
deepfelt spirituality and truth to experience. This influence accelerated in
2002 with the publication of her complete writings into English. This is the
brief paragraph in her diary entry for the 18th of September, a
typical entry at this time listing or recalling new arrivals at the camp, in
particular the sudden influx of Jews who were Catholic converts:
‘Sister
Mendes de Costa from the Carmelite convent with four Portuguese grandparents.
And the Father with the untroubled eyes and the rough hands, who predicted the
Comm[unist] revolution. He hadn’t left his monastery for fifteen years. And the
two nuns from that rich, strictly orthodox and highly talented family in Breslau,
with stars on their habits. They were being taken back to memories of their
youth …’ (Hillesum 24)
The
two women from Breslau are Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun, and her sister Rosa.
Although the sisters were born Jewish, they are being transported out of Holland
because they are Catholics. And this is because the Archbishop of Utrecht had
publicly criticised the treatment of Jews by the occupying forces, issuing a
statement in all the churches one Sunday. In retaliation, the Germans were
punishing Catholics by selectively arresting many and sending them to their
deaths. Etty also mentions Dominican nuns and a Cistercian monk in this entry, in
which she is recalling their arrival over a month earlier on the 2nd
of August. By the time Etty writes the entry she would not know that Edith and
her sister Rosa had already been killed at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Today’s
Conversation is the briefest introduction to three major figures in the history
of 20th century spirituality. All three were Jewish women who either
converted to Christianity or, as in the case of Etty Hillesum, were deeply
influenced by Christian thought. All three were passionate about philosophy, actively
engaged in different practices of
thinking and reflecting that they then applied to their emerging encounters
with religion. It is an understatement to say that all three were, in their
different ways, highly original thinkers. Thinkers, but also very seriously
writers, women who wrote as though their lives depended on writing; women who
wrote almost every day as a means of explaining life, and their lives, to themselves
and very importantly, to others. And all
three are most famous today for their expression of the spiritual life. Two quotes
from Edith Stein are true for the lives of all three people here.
‘My
longing for truth was a single prayer.’
‘Anyone
who seeks truth seeks God, whether or not they realize it.’
We
will learn a little about them and hear some of their words on three main
subjects: empathy, love, and the cross.
Edith
Stein, Etty Hillesum, and Simone Weil on Empathy
In
recent years the word ‘empathy’ has flowed freely in public discourse and on
social media. We see and hear the word quite often, as people come to terms
with opinions and behaviour that shows empathy, though more particularly when those
opinions and behaviour do not show empathy. Politicians and their commentators
will be criticised for a lack of empathy. People in general are judged on their
level of empathy for a person, an identity, a situation, often being found
wanting. There is even such a thing as empathy fatigue, defined as the
emotional and physical exhaustion brought about by caring for others day after
day. This is also called compassion fatigue, the diminished ability to
empathise with others. It is regarded by some analysts as a defence mechanism,
and examples may involve what is called secondary traumatic stress. Sometimes it
is hard not to arrive at the conclusion that we are simply talking about a lack
of care, or an active indifference to others’ needs. Sometimes, to anyone’s
needs other than our own.
Edith
Stein (1891-1942) completed her university thesis in 1916 on the subject of
empathy. This was an unusual subject for a philosophical dissertation, though
it is typical of what we come to know about Edith Stein. She was a young Jewish
woman who grew up in Breslau, then part of Germany but today part of Poland. She
attended synagogue with her family. At the time of writing her thesis in Göttingen,
Edith did not show signs that she wished to become a Christian, let alone enter
a religious order of Carmelites. Indeed, she was a student and close associate
of Edmund Husserl, the German founder of the influential school of Phenomenology.
A simple definition of phenomenology is “a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate source of all
meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. All philosophical
systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic judgments have the status of
abstractions from the ebb and flow of the lived world.” (Brown) Edith Stein’s
thesis was extending Husserl’s interest in the moment of human
intersubjectivity. The word empathy itself comes from Greek, but our modern meaning
of the word is derived from the German Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into”. Its
relative recent adoption into English may be why only now we hear so much of
this empathy talk. When we read this passage we encounter the technical,
academic expression of the time, its jargon and but once through that start to
appreciate Edith
Stein’s own attempts at explaining empathy from experience, quite a new
scientific approach to the subject.
‘I
consider every subject whom I empathetically comprehend as experiencing a value
as a person whose experiences interlock themselves into an intelligible, meaningful
whole. How much of this one’s experiential structure I can bring to my
fulfilling intuition depends on my own structure. In principle, all foreign
experience permitting itself to be derived from my own personal structure can
be fulfilled, even if this structure has not yet actually unfolded. I can
experience values empathetically and discover correlative levels of my person,
even though my primordial experience has not yet presented an opportunity for
their exposure. He who has never looked a danger in the face himself can still
experience himself as brave or cowardly in the empathic representation of
another’s situation.
By
contrast, I cannot fulfill what conflicts with my own experiential structure.
But I can still have it given in the manner of empty presentation. I can be
skeptical myself and still understand that another sacrifices all his earthly
goods to his faith. I see him behave in this way and empathize a value
experiencing as the motive for his conduct. The correlate of this is not
accessible to me, causing me to ascribe to him a personal level I so not myself
possess. In this way I empathically gain the type of homo religiosus by nature
foreign to me, and I understand it even though what newly confronts me here
will always remain unfulfilled …
‘Now
we see what justification Dilthey has for saying, “The interpretive faculty
operating in the cultural sciences is the whole person.” Only he who
experiences himself a person, as a meaningful whole, can understand other
persons.’ (Sullivan 81)
And
here is offered a clearer and more precise definition of empathy from the second
half of her life:
‘As
for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our
neighbour’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.’
Etty
Hillesum (1914-1943) was a woman in her twenties when she began writing her
diaries, which are much more than diaries, a thorough self-examination of
emotions and relationships that evolve in private into a testimony of the
growth of the soul. She had studied law but was now discovering ideas, people,
literature, friendships, and not unexpectedly her sexuality. In the context of
war in occupied Amsterdam, she writes again and again about her contradictory
feelings about empathy. Hillesum actively pursues more than one sexual relationship
at a time, which makes her different from Stein and Weil; she lives without judgement
or conflict about any of this, simply treating all her close relationships as essential
parts of life. In her reading we meet Dostoyevsky and Rilke, we encounter the
medieval Netherlands mystics of the devotio moderna.
Quotes
from Etty Hillesum on Empathy
‘My
head is the workshop, in which all worldly things must be thought through until
they become clear. And my heart is the fiery furnace in which everything must
be felt and suffered intensely. This is a very profound awakening indeed.
Diaries 15 August 1941
Oh,
you know, I only take my depressions seriously because by trying to understand
them I get to understand others as well and perhaps to help them in their times
of difficulty. Whenever I feel low, I also feel a readiness to help others, to
guide them through the dark labyrinth of their own soul and so perhaps spare
them many unhappy moments. But before I can bring clarity into the life of others,
I must first have clarity in myself.
Diaries 15 August 1941
Simone
Weil (1909-1943) studied philosophy at the university in Paris, where she
topped her year. Her classmate Simone de Beauvoir was second. Simone’s family
were secular Jews and relationship with her Jewishness was vexed, due in part
to her personal philosophical requirement for absolute truth in all things, an
attitude that caused her to question many aspects of historical Judaism. But to
call her a convert is laden with question-marks as even though she immersed
herself in Christian thought and attached herself to the Catholic Church, she
refused to be baptised on principle, attending Mass regularly but not partaking
of communion. Simone Weil has been called a Christian Platonist. She worked
alongside the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and with the French Resistance
in London almost up until her death. Nearly all of her writings were published
posthumously, one critic summarising that “all of her work constitutes an
attempt to regenerate connective tissue between all disciplines, between
culture and nature, science and art, and God and humans.” (Wampole para. 5) As
with the other two, we think of Simone today as a philosopher, but first and
foremost as a spiritual writer and mystic.
Quotes
from Simone Weil on Empathy
‘Compassion
directed at oneself is true humility.’
‘The
feeding of those who are hungry is a form of contemplation.’
‘Difficult
as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for
him to know that compassion is listening to him.’
‘There
is no contradiction between seeking our own good in a human being and wishing
for their good to be increased. For this very reason, when the motive that
draws us toward anybody is simply some advantage for ourselves, the conditions
of friendship are not fulfilled. Friendship is a supernatural harmony, a union
of opposites.’ (367)
‘Friendship
is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and
without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to them as food.’
(370)
