Edith Stein and the Soul of a Woman

Richard A. Spinello

Controversies continue over the nature and role of women as modern society edges ever closer to embracing an androgynous anthropology. During the last Olympic Games, spectators were exposed to the surreal exhibition of biological males pummeling women boxers. Those who protested were informed that there is no scientific way to differentiate men from women.

The secular mentality has lost sight of what it means to be a woman. There are many reasons for this tragic exit of womanhood, but foremost among them is the negation of transcendence, which obscures the light that shines forth about the truth of our humanity. As Carrie Gress has pointed out, the poisonous influence of anti-Christian feminism has led to the "end of woman" because we have no answers to the question of what makes a woman a woman.

On this feast day of Edith Stein, Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, it is fitting that we consult her work on these issues because of its reflective openness to the depths of human existence. If we want to reconstruct the idea of womanhood, her daring and intelligent book Woman is an optimal starting point.

The details of her life are well-known. She was a brilliant Jewish atheist who studied philosophy under the famous phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. She converted to Catholicism after reading the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila. Several years later she became a Carmelite nun. When the Nazis targeted Jewish converts in Holland, she was sent to Auschwitz, where she was executed on August 9, 1942.

After her dramatic conversion, she encountered the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, which made a deep impression on her philosophical development. She was not a Thomist in the strict sense, but her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being, is certainly Thomistically inspired. She found an original way to harmonize the modern philosophy of phenomenology with the medieval philosophy of Thomism.

Stein follows Aquinas by endorsing a hylomorphic anthropology, an old idea with an Aristotelian pedigree: the person is a natural and indivisible unity of a material body and a spiritual soul. The soul penetrates the body as it unifies all the different physical and spiritual aspects of each person.

In Woman, Stein's main objective is to demonstrate the distinctive nature of womanhood that derives not just from the body but also from the soul. One's sex is determined by the body's given order informed by the soul, which comes into existence as already either male or female. Sexual differences, therefore, represent two irreducible ways of being a living, personal substance.

In declaring that there is a difference between the male and female soul, Stein parts company with Aquinas for whom the soul was the same for every member of the human species. For Aquinas, the soul becomes differentiated once it is united with a sexed body. But for Stein, the soul is different before it unites with and animates a male or female body, so that a person is feminine not just because of her body but also because of her soul.

Thus, Stein speaks about a "double species" because of the immutable differences between man and woman. Stein's subtle anthropological vision has implications for understanding how egregiously transgender ideology undermines the profound body-soul unity of the human person.

Transgenderism is a rebellion against the finitude that permeates our being. As Stein insists, no one is the source of her own existence, but rather finds oneself as a being created by God, either male or female. If Edith Stein is right, both the body and the soul impose certain natural constraints on our choices and aspirations. Also, proponents of transgenderism would be asking us to believe that God blundered when he infused a female soul into a male body.

Stein's anthropology becomes the foundation for her reflections on the nature of woman. Because they possess a different soul, women are different in kind from...