Can I laugh a lot and still be holy? Some Thoughts on St. Edith Stein’s “The Science of the Cross”

“In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I don’t think anybody believed it. I still don’t think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who . . . loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children.”

This passage from Jayber Crow came to mind after reading St. Edith Stein’s book on St. John of the Cross, The Science of the Cross. Jayber observes that loving God without loving His world produces a strange tension. Is it possible to be holy and enjoy things that aren’t blatantly spiritual?

I started writing this to critique The Science of the Cross on the basis that it over-spiritualizes Christian life, denies the worth of the human body, and confuses self-denial with self-annihilation. After revisiting the book, I realized this ignored some nuances, but do think that Stein’s perspective on suffering — or at least, the way in which she expresses it — fails to capture the Christian integration of joy and suffering, body and soul, word and flesh, by erring too far towards a kind of puritanism.

Take up Your Cross

Stein establishes that the purpose of existence is to unite our souls with God. This union goes deeper than intellect or even conscious faith. Marriage is the closest humans come to understanding this kind of intimacy. When united with God, someone will want “nothing more but what God wills” (Stein 166). But the only way to this union is suffering. As Christ challenged His disciples, anyone who wants to follow Him must take up his cross (Matthew 16:24).

To master “the science of the cross” means to have its image and meaning so imbedded in us that everything we do and experience is seen through the cross’ shadow. While “The cross has no purpose of itself. It rises on high and points above” (22), we can’t bypass it — the only way up is through its bloody center.

We aren’t made for pleasure, but for holiness. The book’s explanation of how suffering brings us closer to God is inspiring and encouraging.

Endure Suffering, or Seek it?

But my hesitancy is this: you can’t draw close to God without suffering, but everyone — Christian or not — suffers. Life brings pain — physical, mental, and spiritual.

So does a Christian approach to suffering entail how to respond to the suffering we will inevitably experience? Or does it mean seeking suffering in order to be with God?

A bride who says to her husband “I’d be willing to starve with you” can “prove” that by being moderate and unselfish, but it would be odd if she refused to eat while there was food on the table to prove her love.

Plato’s Shadow

An assumption of the book’s argument is that the body is a burden to the soul (198). The body is useful simply because it can suffer, which is spiritually beneficial. If we want to become closer to God, we should avoid things that bring pleasure. Stein writes that,

“At the first movement of joy at something created, therefore, the spiritual person should strive to curb it” (93).

She adds that joy is alright only if the sensory pulls the soul up to consciously delight in God.

“Treat your body with wise rigor, with self-contempt and self-denial, and seek never to follow your own will and tastes” (278).

Never? Is laughing at a joke, singing to a pop song, or enjoying a drink backtracking on the road to holiness? If unification with God only happens through self-negation, and intense contemplation, how can an ordinary person with responsibilities in the physical world achieve this? Why is ‘seldom laughing’ considered saintly? (Stein 294)

Stein makes the assumption more explicit when she comments, “It is a hallmark of [St. John of the Cross] that he hardly ever speaks about people, sometimes about persons, but usually about souls” (288).

The Resurrection of the Body

We should be cautious about that kind of language. By resurrecting, Christ redeems our bodies and souls. In the new heavens and earth, we won’t exist as mere souls in union with God, but will enjoy perfect, embodied communion. While Stein/St. John of the Cross necessarily disagree, the book treats it like an afterthought.

Stein writes that,

“Since God cannot be reached by any of the senses it would be ‘at the least, a useless undertaking’ to seek one’s delight in sensory apprehensions; the will could then ‘no longer occupy itself with God nor seek all its joy in Him alone” (95).

I struggle to reconcile this with the Incarnation, when God became a man who could be seen, touched, smelt, heard — and even tasted as He gives Himself in the Eucharist. As Pope John Paul II writes in A Theology of the Body,

“the resurrection of Christ is the final and fullest word of the self-revelation of the living God as ‘God not of the dead, but of the living’ (Mk 12:27). It is the final and fullest confirmation of the truth about God, who from the beginning has expressed himself though this revelation” (70.3).

Christ’s humanity is a revelation of God, not a booby prize. Our bodies aren’t prison cells that we sit in until we die and our souls escape (see A Theology of the Body 66:6). Our bodies are temples (I Corinthians 6:19). They’re fixer-uppers, but they’re destined for glory in their physical form.

Can we love the world?

And if this is true, then there’s a goodness and beauty to the world — not despite its materiality, but including it.

While on earth Christ didn’t just suffer, He celebrated. He preached detachment from worldliness and warned that “he who loves his father or mother more than Me…” (Matthew 10:37) but He also wept over His friend’s grave.

I can’t help but think that to love and enjoy creation isn’t a denial of the Cross — for to love something inevitably means to suffer. Loving God stretches and tear our souls because He is “too big” for our desires. Loving creation will eventually leave us hollow because the world is “too small” for our desires. But is something less valuable because it’s not eternal? Christ bound Himself to the Cross because He loves the world He made. We live in the shadow of the cross, but also in the light of the resurrection.