Passion in the Carmelite Tradition: Edith Stein

The Carmelite tradition transmits a legacy of profound passion. While the Carmelite Rule (1206) cautions moderation in everything, in all the major texts and personalities of the tradition beginning with its basic Elijahn myth in the Institution of the First Monks and moving through the life and writings of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, Edith Stein and others, one encounters magnificent passion bordering on excess. ¹ The way the Carmelite prayer tradition helps and educates is by showing us how passion for God matures, that is, how desire grows in ardor, how communion and being God's partner in love comes about in our lives.

In Webster's Dictionary passion is defined, first of all, as suffering or agony (from the Latin to suffer) and secondarily, as compelling emotion, specifically, enthusiasm, strong love and desire. Taken together these meanings show the complexity and richness of my understanding of the word passion as I use it in this essay. ²

The ardor of their desire to love and be transformed in love and the intensity of their experience of, reflection on and appropriation of human suffering is precisely what characterizes those marked by the Carmelite ethos. In fact, nothing is so expressive of the passion we find in the Carmelite prayer tradition as this simultaneous intertwining emphasis on love and suffering which we see elegantly portrayed, for example, in the poetry of John of the Cross and more simply demonstrated in the writings of Therese of Lisieux. John sings:

O living flame of love
that tenderly wounds my soul
in its deepest center! Since
now you are not oppressive,
now consummate! if it be your will: tear through the veil of this sweet encounter. ³

When Therese, in her turn, writes that, "she had but one desire, that of being taken to the summit of the mountain of love," ⁴ she is echoing the aspiration of Carmel through eight hundred years.

Love, how well our heart is made for that! . . . Sometimes, I seek for another word to express love, but on this earth of exile words are powerless to express all the soul's vibrations, so we have to keep to this one word: (love!). ⁵

If we study The Story of a Soul we are not only awed by the magnitude of Therese's love, but also perplexed by the way she seems actively to pursue suffering, unable to learn the borderline between acceptance of the human condition and actually precipitating suffering. This is a danger she poses to those who do not read her work critically, who do not interpret her text. In this she is probably as 'dangerous' as her Carmelite mentor, John of the Cross, who realizing that "love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved" seems to counsel us to deny all human desires and choose what is most difficult, that is, make ourselves suffer. ⁶

Edith Stein, the actual focus of this study, in her turn attempts to fathom the significance of this attitude toward suffering in John and in her own Carmelite life in an essay written around 1934 in which she explores "the burden of the cross." ⁷ I suspect, moreover, that this is so important to her that in her last written and unfinished work, The Science of the Cross, composed during the year before her death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in August 1942, she uses her own philosophical theory of empathy, initially developed in her doctoral dissertation, as a hermeneutic to trace the inner experience and processes of prayer John goes through in his life and writing to reach his convictions about love and suffering. By means of this profound, original analysis she, herself, connects with and lays claim to his meanings which empower and energize her life, motivation and ultimately her death. One conclusion...