Edith Stein

Extract

No form of biography is more difficult to write than the life of a man or woman credited with sanctity. If the account is to be uniformly honest, the impression of transcendent goodness must inevitably be marred: the smallest fault is enough to invalidate the claim to perfection. If the picture is deliberately edifying, the impression conveyed is too remote to command admiration, still less affection. The conventional Lives of the Saints possess an advantage over modem essays in hagiography in that they are concerned with persons sufficiently long dead for their faults to have sunk into oblivion. If the subject happens to be near-contemporary, however, certain imperfections are bound to loom large. ‘God protect us from living saints’, wrote an ancient ecclesiastic. In the first biography of Edith Stein to appear in English, the author makes a genuine attempt at objectivity. She does not minimize a certain stiffness of character in her subject, while admitting that this gradually mellowed; and there is much criticism of her theological views. If the book suffers from one major fault, it lies in its refusal to allow us sufficient opportunity of judging the woman for ourselves. For every little fact we are given a disproportionate amount of comment. And this liberal comment, however fair in intention, is apt to come between us and the extraordinary woman about whom we feel we can never know enough on the factual plane alone.

This stricture apart, Miss Graef’s book is of compelling interest: one hopes that it will-be both widely read and vigorously discussed.