The Science of the Cross

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Thus, In Shakespeare's 1601 play TWELFTH NIGHT tippling Sir Toby Belch taunts Mistress Olivia's spoil-sport puritan steward Malvolio (Act II. Scene III. l. 58). These words express an abiding two-way tug within Incarnation-based Christianity: "virtuous" v. "cakes and ale." *** Catholics and other Christians of 2013 need reminding from time to time that while "cakes and ale" are good and have their place, nonetheless, drawing deliberately closer to God requires something more: not just natural virtue, but supernatural hope: taking up our personal cross daily, thereby personally imitating and following Jesus, the Son of God. *** The Spanish Carmelite priest, mystic, spiritual director of souls and later Doctor of the Church, Saint John of the Cross (Juan de Ypes, 1542 - 1591) in a number of poems and essays taught Spanish Christians of his day how to draw closer to God through openness to personal suffering and consciously willed renunciation of both self and purely earthly pleasures. Centuries later, in a Carmelite convent for nuns in Echt, the Netherlands, the year 1942, 400th anniversary of Saint John's birth, was approaching. Exiled from her original convent in Cologne, German, one time atheist, Jewish Catholic philosopher, feminist, and finally Carmelite nun, Edith Stein aka Sister Teresa of the Cross, would be gassed to death at Auschwitz in August of that anniversary year 1942. Joining her would be her blood sister Rose and hundreds of other Jewish Catholics in the Netherlands, including one family of priests and nuns. Edith's convent superior had earlier directed Edith to prepare a celebratory text on the great Carmelite reformer Saint John of the Cross. Sister Teresa completed her well researched manuscript in 1942. That was not long before Edith and her sister Rose were removed by German Nazis from their Carmelite convent in Echt, Limburg Province, Netherlands, for deportation by rail to occupied Poland and next day execution. The future martyr, canonized saint (1998) and Patroness of Europe, had just composed in German as tribute to Saint John of the Cross, KREUZESWISSENSCHAFT: STUDIE UEBER JOANNES A CRUCE, translated into English and published in 2003 as THE SCIENCE OF THE CROSS. ***THE SCIENCE OF THE CROSS is Edith Stein's pellucid summary and commentary on Saint John of the Cross's description in classic poetry and prose of his recommended ways to discipline human memory, imagination, passions, intellect and will consciously to prepare in this life to receive -- not achieve! -- mystical union with God. For his part God freely bestows the joys and pains of mystical union as His Spirit wills. Thus some persons striving honestly and mightily to love and serve the Lord and also following the specific preparatory paths suggested by Carmelites Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John and future Saint Edith Stein are never rewarded mystical gifts. On others by contrast, God mysteriously showers mystical, intuited love and union without obvious signs of merit or conscious preparation by the human recipients. *** Saint John of the Cross was the chosen spiritual advisor of the great Doctor of the Church Saint Teresa of Avila (1515 - 1582) and also confessor to one convent of her nuns. He was a highly valued spiritual director. In John's celebrated works in poetry and prose, the mystic saint constantly reminds Christians aspiring to closer union with God that they are members of a church, that while they must as indiviiduals be open to God's mysterious graces and doing things God's way, but that they must also submit their visions, stigmata and other signs to their spiritual advisor humbly and obediently and within the ancient framework of Catholic teachings about grace, faith, hope and charity. For it is not only God who can reach the human soul through joys, consolations and sorrows. So can Satan. And humans are so constituted by God as to need human advisors other than themselves for "discernment of spirits." *** Once atheist yet always consciously and proudly Jewish to her death, Edith Stein had been one of Europe's most promising young philosophers -- indispensable assistant to and expositor of her Professor Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), founder of Phenomenology -- when she became a Catholic convert in 1921, (baptized January 1922), then a teacher for a decade in a Dominican girls' school in Speyer, lecturer on feminism and finally in her 40s an austerely living Carmelite nun in Cologne, Germany just as Nazis were coming to power. ***Stein writes clear, direct, accessible German. If anyone can make clearer the already clear but breath-taking and daunting teachings of Saint John of the Cross about the cross of Jesus Christ as one freely chosen and personally emphasized Christian way to union with God, it is Saint Edith Stein. Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! (Pick up this book, read it!) (Saint Augustine CONFESSIONS). -OOO-