Obojętność religijna św. Edyty Stein

Abstract

At the age of 14 Edith Stein stopped praying, rejected Judaism as her religion and declared herself as an atheist. Although she described her attitude as atheistic we attempted to prove that it can be better depicted as religious indifference. Unlike atheists she did not deny the existence of God; she simply stopped showing interest in God’s matters. However, having rejected God of Judaism, Edith Stein experienced a kind of emptiness in her life which needed to be filled. Before her dramatic decision it was religion that brought the spiritual significance into her life; it was God who explained the sense of human life: He was the truth and the foundation of the highest human value. Now, she had to discover other base and explanation of human existence. She had to find the answer to the question of the sense of human life and the sense of existence of all creatures. She needed to answer herself who she is, where she is heading to, what is the truth, the sense and the end of human life. At the beginning literature and art appeared to have answers to her questions. Then she tried to find the truth in knowledge, especially in philosophy. She undertook Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology which unexpectedly demonstrated her the phenomenon of God as an Absolute. Moreover, the philosophical problem of empathy opened her the world of people’s emotions in which God and faith was at the top of the hierarchy of values. Thanks to the problem of empathy Edith Stein could experience the feelings and emotions which were absent in her inner life. Both phenomenology and empathy brought her closer to God – they were the first steps on her road to conversion into Catholicism.