SSF229 – Masterpiece of the Divine Artist

This course will explore the concept of Beauty and Sanctity presented in St. Edith Stein’s writings and in her own life events.

God, the Divine Artist, does not work on inanimate material. We are not a block of marble or a lump of lifeless clay. Our Lord has infused us with His Holy Spirit and given us the freedom to correspond – or not– to His artistic strokes. The loving genius of our Divine Artist is that He works on living, breathing, free-willed material.

St. Edith Stein addresses this collaboration between the Divine Artist and His living artwork in her own life and thought. The outcome of such collaboration is the splendor of the human soul drawn near to divine beauty by grace, living images that declare the Divine Love to which they have responded, surpassing even the most stunning material artwork. And we all know when we have encountered such a masterpiece.

Fittingly, Stein herself becomes a living image, in her willingness to suffer martyrdom in the death camp at Auschwitz. During her final hours in her acts of love and mercy, in fact, Stein was said to have resembled “a living Pietà,” carrying these suffering children in her arms in the place of Christ, witnessing fully her faith in the Lord to whom she had abandoned her life.