Encounter with the Cross
Society of Edith Stein
Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) was a German philosopher and a prominent figure in the early phenomenological movement, closely associated with Edmund Husserl. His work on social acts and law exemplified clarity and rigor, qualities that deeply influenced Edith Stein.
Stein, a student of Husserl, shared philosophical and ethical interests with Reinach, forming an intellectual connection grounded in phenomenology.
Reinach’s promising career was tragically cut short when he served as an officer in World War I and was killed on the Western Front in 1917. Despite his brief life, his insights left a lasting impression on Stein and her own philosophical development.
Late in 1917, Edith Stein traveled to Göttingen upon learning of Reinach’s death, intending to console his widow, Anna.
Expecting profound grief, she instead encountered a calm, luminous presence. Anna’s sorrow was real but had been transformed into a serene strength that surpassed ordinary understanding.
Stein later described this moment as the pivotal turning point in her inner life. The composure and faith she witnessed revealed a form of strength beyond reason, her first encounter with the Cross. She reflected,
“For the first time, I saw the Church, born from the redeeming suffering of Christ, visibly before me in her victory over the sting of death.”
This encounter made suffering intelligible through love, awakening in Stein the realization that truth must first be lived before it can be fully understood.
The Reality of Faith
After the visit, Stein could no longer view faith as a concept to be studied from outside. The Cross she had seen in Anna’s eyes was not a theological symbol but a lived phenomenon. It drew her attention not to doctrine but to the reality of experience itself, where empathy becomes knowledge.
She later wrote,
“I am getting nearer and nearer to an absolutely positive Christianity. It has freed me from a depressing life, giving me the strength to accept life once again and with gratitude.”
In Anna, Stein met an existential truth. Her phenomenological training had taught her to attend to the essence of things as they appear in experience. Now she saw that faith, when lived authentically, possesses its own givenness.
It discloses itself through human encounter. The widow’s grief became a text Stein could read with the eyes of both philosopher and friend. Through empathy, she entered the inner horizon of another and perceived there the reality of grace.
Awakening to Providence
What began as consolation turned into illumination. The encounter did not yet lead to Stein’s baptism, which would come years later, but it marked the beginning of a new orientation of her being. The walls of unbelief had cracked.
She reflected, “Things were in God’s plan which I had not planned at all. I am coming to the living faith and conviction that from God’s point of view there is no chance and that the whole of my life, down to every detail, has been mapped out in God’s divine providence and makes complete and perfect sense in God’s all-seeing eyes.”
The insight was not sentimental. For Stein, it was phenomenological. To perceive providence meant to grasp the form of one’s life as intelligible within a larger whole. What she had once considered accident now appeared as structure. The event of Anna’s faith, lived within the abyss of loss, revealed that suffering could participate in meaning.
Adolf Reinach and the Formation of Thought
Long before his death, Adolf Reinach had shaped Stein’s philosophical discipline. At Göttingen, his lectures on phenomenology and law offered her a model of clarity and rigour. His work on social acts, published in 1913, gave her the conceptual foundation for her later reflections on empathy, community, and the state.
Reinach and his wife, Anna, lived their intellectual and spiritual life as a shared vocation. Their Christian faith did not stand apart from their thought but animated it. Stein had admired this unity from a distance; in their home she had seen reason and belief coexisting without conflict.
When Adolf was killed in 1917, that harmony was tested in the fire of loss. Anna’s steadfastness under grief became the proof that their faith was not an intellectual posture but a real participation in transcendence. In that moment, Stein understood that philosophy could no longer remain neutral before the mystery of the human person.
Adolf had given her a method; Anna revealed the reality that the method could uncover. Together, they became the living evidence that truth requires both clarity of thought and depth of heart.
The Cross as Encounter
Looking back, Stein spoke of this moment as the beginning of her transformation. She would later write that the funeral of Adolf Reinach was her first vision of the Church in victory over death. “For the first time in my life, I saw the Church in her victory over the sting of death,” she recalled.
In her notebooks, she wrote again,
“My unbelief collapsed, Judaism faded, and Christ rose radiantly before my eyes, Christ in the mystery of His Cross.”
The Cross, for Stein, became the meeting place between human fragility and divine strength. It was no longer a concept to interpret but an event of relationship, the point where empathy and redemption converge.
In her native German she expressed it most vividly:
“Es war dies meine erste Begegnung mit dem Kreuz und mit der göttlichen Kraft, die es seinen Trägern mitteilt. Ich sah zum erstenmal die aus dem Erlöserleiden Christi geborene Kirche in ihrem Sieg über den Stachel des Todes handgreiflich vor mir. Es war der Augenblick, in dem mein Unglaube zusammenbrach, und Christus aufstrahlte: Christus im Geheimnis des Kreuzes.”
Through the eyes of Anna Reinach, Stein recognised that faith is not the negation of pain but its transfiguration. In that recognition, her path as a philosopher of empathy deepened into the journey of a soul toward truth.
