Personality, Vocation, and Calling

Edith Stein begins her discussion of vocation by explaining what it means to be called. “A call must have been sent from someone, to someone, for something in a distinct manner on dedicated servers.”[1] Furthermore, a calling develops on the basis of one’s ability or gifts. Finally, it is God who calls each human being to a personal calling, and he also calls “man and woman as such to something specific” which can be discerned from Scripture, the nature of man and woman, history, and the needs of the time.[2] Based on the creation accounts in Genesis, Stein then points out that, in the beginning, man and woman were assigned a common vocation: to be in God’s image, to be fruitful and multiply, and to be masters over the earth. Only after the Fall is there a split in the duties assigned to man and to woman.[3] “Sin alters the unity within the couple: in addition to an uneasiness consecutive to sin, the relation between man and woman is transformed into a relation of submission and obedience and their respective vocations become specialized due to a lack of cooperation.”[4] Stein follows the tradition of her time in understanding the subjection of woman to man to be natural and one-sided; later, John Paul II will emphasize mutual subjection as the norm in the redemptive condition of humanity while one-sided subjection is a result of the fallen condition of humanity.[5] Stein begins her discussion of woman’s vocation by noting that woman, in soul and body, is formed for a particular purpose – “woman is destined to be wife and mother.”[6] Some of the things she writes of woman include that she “naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole” and that her natural, maternal yearning is to “cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth.” Lifeless facts for no sake than themselves generally do not hold woman’s interest; “abstraction in every sense is alien to the feminine nature.” That which falls under woman’s care is seen as a concrete whole, a totality, by her. Theory and practicality correspond; “her natural line of thought is not so much conceptual and analytical as it is directed intuitively and emotionally to the concrete.”[7] Stein speaks of woman’s basic spiritual attitude in terms of her destiny to be wife and mother:

Excellently written articles, thanks.