Human and Divine Being

A Study on the Theological Anthropology of Edith Stein

Donald Wallenfang

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498293372
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Nothing is more dangerous to be misunderstood than the question, "What is the human being?" In an era when this question is not only being misunderstood but even forgotten, wisdom delivered by the great thinkers and mystics of the past must be recovered. Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Jewish Carmelite mystical philosopher, offers great promise to resume asking the question of the human being. In Human and Divine Being, Donald Wallenfang offers a comprehensive summary of the theological anthropology of this heroic martyr to truth. Beginning with the theme of human vocation, Wallenfang leads the reader through a labyrinth of philosophical and theological vignettes: spiritual being, the human soul, material being, empathy, the logic of the cross, and the meaning of suffering. The question of the human being is asked in light of divine being by harnessing the fertile tension between the methods of phenomenology and metaphysics. Stein spurs us on to a rendezvous with the stream of "perennial philosophy" that has watered the landscape of thought since conscious time began. In the end, the meaning of human being is thrown into sharp relief against the darkness of all that is not authentically human.

1

On Human Vocation

Behold, I stand at the door and knock;

if any one hears my voice and opens the door,

I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

—Revelation 3:20 (RSV)

Rather than begin with the question of what the human being is, chapter 1 considers how the human being is called to live. In taking our interpretive cue from Emmanuel Levinas by regarding ethics as first philosophy, we commence this project in theological anthropology. The first word is that the human being is the ethical being. This, too, is how Stein understands the peculiarity of human nature. To be authentically human is to be responsible for the other, to be responsible for all. Intersubjective existence is defined by a summons to responsibility and the call to form a communion of persons in love.1 Paradoxically, analysis of human being begins by turning my attention to the other who faces me. Human being is defined, first of all, by the essence of human vocation: how am I called to live?

For Edith Stein, human vocation is comprised of a call and a response. The call issues from the divine, precisely in the other who faces me, and the human response is enabled by divine assistance. Human vocation is not simply a matter concerning choice of occupation, but rather concerns the ultimate Gestalt, or shape, of one’s life. She writes the following to a former student of hers, Rose Magold, in a letter dated August 30, 1931: “The question of vocation cannot be solved merely through self-examination plus a scrutiny of the various possibilities. One must pray for the answer—you know that—and, in many cases, it must be sought by way of obedience. I have given this same advice several times, and those involved have arrived at peace and clarity by following it.”2 Stein suggests that shaping from within demands pliability from without. Human vocation emerges from intersubjective existence—living in community—that awakens one to possibility and development. Obedience implies a prior call. For Stein, human vocation involves a divine summons issued in and through the other who faces me. Human vocation is realized through prayer and ethical action, through contemplation and the work of social justice. In order to awaken from vocational slumber, it is necessary to heed the personal divine hail to travel eastward toward the Son of glory.3 Only in the imitatio Christi does human vocation reach its full potential.

This chapter will trace the contours of Stein’s portrayal of universal human vocation. First, analysis is made of the Aristotelian and Thomistic potency–act hermeneutic as developed by Stein. The relationship between potency and act serves as the lynchpin of Stein’s life’s work, which attempts to answer the question of being through a synthesis of Thomistic sacra doctrina and Husserlian phenomenology. Second, inventory is taken of the components of what Stein calls “intersubjectivity.” For Stein, personal vocation does not consist in turning away from the other and toward the self but in turning outward and opening to the agency of the other. Third, the notion and function of grace in Stein’s anatomy of human vocation is assessed. In presenting a teleological vision wherein finite being stretches toward infinite being, Stein frames the question of human vocation as integral to the question of being itself. This sketch helps to understand the way in which Stein fulfilled her personal life vocation as well.

I. The Revelatory Dialectic of Potency–Act

Edith Stein embarks on her philosophical project confident that she draws from the immutable riches of philosophia perennis, that is, “perennial philosophy.” In her preface to Finite and Eternal Being, Stein writes that “above and beyond the limitations of historical epochs and peoples there is something in which all those share who honestly search for truth.”4 Perennial philosophy testifies to those truths that do not change. The question of being pursues such immutable truths and it was the same question for Aristotle, as it was for Thomas, as it was for Stein, as it is for us today. At the heart of philosophical investigation always has been the question of being. What is it to be? What is being? What is the relationship between being and beings? Stein’s lifelong philosophical project is marked by the struggle to understand, as fully as possible, the meaning and constitution of being (Sein). She finds Aristotle to be a helpful guide as he broaches the question within the heart of his Metaphysics: “And we think we know each thing most fully, when we know what it is, e.g. what man is or what fire is, rather than when we know its quality, its quantity, or where it is; since we know each of these things also, only when we know what the quantity or quality is. And indeed the question which, both now and of old, has always been raised, and always been the subject of doubt, viz. what being is, is just the question, what is substance [ousia]?”5 For Aristotle, to know something is not to know its color, texture, size, location, etc. (those accidental properties of a being) but to know its specific substance and the peculiar essences that together work to form the substance. Substantial differences are what distinguish one kind of being from another. Human, fish, bird, rock, tree—all such differentiated kinds of being are distinguished according to their substantial makeup. Rational life distinguishes human being; marine life (including fins, gills, and the like) distinguishes fish being; avian life (including feathers, wings, flight, etc.) distinguishes bird being; geologic nonliving existence (including lithic sedentariness, etc.) distinguishes rock being; and arborescent life (including woody stems, roots and shoots, leaves, vertical extension, etc.) distinguishes tree being. Aristotle’s formulation of the question of being in terms of substance effectively peels back arbitrary layers of difference and identifies that which stands beneath a being’s appearance and makes it what it is.

The question of being is primary for Aristotle, and for Stein it is the same. Stein suggests that her culminating work, Finite and Eternal Being, “may have grown out of this question as out of a living seed.”6 Stein finds Aristotle’s hermeneutic for being, namely, the categories of potency and act, as the most helpful way to understand the mystery of being.7 As human beings, we are able to fathom the being of existents as a perpetual process of becoming on all levels of existence. When a being becomes, it changes from a potential state of being to an actual state of being. The change from potentiality to actuality is caused by a prior actuality that acts on the latent potentiality. In biology we observe that animal cells rely on the continuous citric-acid cycle for the production of energy. Similarly, we observe that plant cells rely on the photosynthetic process for the production of energy in order to grow, develop, and reproduce. In these fundamental processes of energy production, organisms exhibit a host of potentialities that become actualized. Underlying such biological processes are the potent molecular polarities that make possible the series of chemical reactions which produce energy for the organism and allow it to attain other possibilities of its being—for example, movement, mating and nurturing its offspring. And so it is the case with all finite existents: every process of becoming begins with actuality and ends with actualized being. In contemplating the question of being according to the interpretive dialectic, potency–act, we are led swiftly to the conclusion that there must be a pure, absolute and eternal actuality that is prior to all potentiality. For we observe that nothing that is potential becomes actual on its own accord but instead relies on an anterior actuality to stir its potentiality into actuality. It is this pure actuality (actus purus) which Thomas Aquinas calls “God.”8

While the potency–act relationship can be construed in terms of causality (whether formal, material, efficient, or final), it runs deeper than interpretation based on causality alone would admit. Even though “a universal causal connection between all real things” exists, by penetrating into the nature of things a “unity of a totality of meaningful existence [Sinn-Ganzes]” is ...