The Conversion of Edith Stein

The Conversion of Edith Stein

by Florent Gaboriau, translated by Ralph McInerny
St. Augustine’s Press, 2018
132 pp., $10.00
ISBN: 978-1587311338

Reviewed by Roy Schoeman

This is a very difficult book to characterize, and hence to review. At first glance it appears to be a short biography of the saint. The title suggests it might be an account of the graces that led to her conversion – how she crossed the chasm from agnostic Jewish philosopher to Catholic Carmelite religious and saint. As a great fan of such “witness testimonies” (having published a book of such Jewish to Catholic witness testimonies myself), I sat down with the expectation of reading one about this great Jewish convert to the Catholic Church.

I would have been better prepared for what I found had I noted that the front cover states “translation and preface by Ralph McInerny”. Why should one of the leading Catholic philosophers of our time have performed the humble task of translator, in addition to writing the preface?

And had I known the titles of other books by Florent Gaboriau, such as Heidegger from the Inside, Philosophy Born of Science, The Theological Turn: Today according to Karl Rahner, I would also have better known what to expect.

For the book, far from being a short biography or a conversion story, is an extended essay on the effect the saint’s philosophy had on her conversion and the effect her conversion had on her philosophy.  It is not an easy read, and its interest to non-philosophers (or at least to non-intellectuals) will be limited by both the subject matter and the language. I am afraid that McInerny is more distinguished as a philosopher than a translator -- the translation retains much of the sentence structure of the original academic French, making for difficult reading at times. There is scarcely a single sentence in the book that could be mistaken for having been originally written in English.

The book reflects its French origins in another way, too, which may be a deterrent for American readers. We are used to biographies in which the biographer tries to disappear, to become transparent, allowing the subject of the biography to be the only (or at least the main!) character. Today in France the style is quite different – one might think that a biographer would consider his work a failure if the subject of the biography, rather than the biographer, ends up as the main character.  The biographer is continually inserting his own observations, analysis, and conjectures into the text in a way that we may find obtrusive, distracting, or even offensive. 

However, as soon as I accepted the book for what it is -- an extended philosophical reflection on the interaction between Edith Stein’s philosophy and her conversion -- I began to appreciate it.  A reader who is interested in Catholic philosophy will undoubtedly find it of great interest, so much so that I suspect that Ralph McInerny took on the role of translator simply to make the book available in English.  The book also contains a good deal of relatively unknown primary source material, including personal letters and notes of Edith Stein in private possession and conversations with religious who knew her, which sheds light on Stein’s thinking at critical junctures.  The slim volume is also enriched by a judicious choice of extended philosophical reflections of Stein’s, which then set the stage for the author’s reflections on her thought. 

At one point in the book, Edith Stein describes a friend’s doctoral dissertation somewhat critically as “a work that is certainly the result of extraordinary application, but manifestly deprived of a proper philosophical impulse.”  When I read that quote, I could not help thinking that, slightly changed, it would serve as a fitting description of this book: “a work that is certainly the result of extraordinary application, but manifestly imbued with a proper philosophical impulse.”  Not for all, but of great interest for some. As is said in software engineering, “One man’s bug is another man’s feature.”

In conclusion, if you are looking for an easy-reading, short biography of the saint (which this book looks like from the outside), look elsewhere.  If you are looking for a moving account of how her relentless search for truth led to her receiving the grace of conversion, look elsewhere.  But if an exploration of the interaction between her philosophy and her conversion, and of how her conversion affected her engagement with the thought of Heidegger, Husserl, St. Thomas, and the Carmelite saints, you have found it.