Abstract
This essay will elucidate briefly the primary hermeneutical channels through which Edith Stein presents the human soul: (1) the form of the body; (2) the inner life of the person; (3) the substantial image of God the Father; and (4) a spiritual vessel (vas spirituale). Her account of the soul will be traced through her hybrid methodology in order to examine the relevance of her conceptions for today. The brazened claims of the Neo-atheist camp, e.g., Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, will be countered directly on grounds of intellectual insufficiency and a truncated anthropology. I argue that Stein submits an integral and holistic anatomy of the human person—body, soul, and spirit—which is formative for a contemporary interdisciplinary inquiry into the question, what is it to be human?
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Notes
- 1.
See also FEB 6–7: “The question then arises whether the reborn philosophy of the Middle Ages and the newly created philosophy of the twentieth century can possibly find a common meeting ground in the one broad river bed of the philosophia perennis.”
- 2.
Matthew 13:52 (NAB).
- 3.
“The being of human beings [menschliche Sein] is a composite of body, soul, and spirit. Insofar as human beings—according to their essence—are spirit, their ‘spiritual life’ is an outgoing life that enters into a world which discloses itself to them, while they yet retain a firm hold on their own selves. They not only ‘breathe’ out their essence in a spiritual manner—as does every actual formal structure—unconsciously revealing themselves, but they are, in addition, active in a personal spiritual manner. The human soul as spirit rises in its spiritual life beyond itself. But the human spirit is conditioned both from above and from below. It is immersed in a material structure which it be-souls and molds into a bodily form. The human person carries and encloses ‘its’ body and ‘its’ soul, but it is at the same time carried and enclosed by both” (FEB 363–364). See also FEB 245, 274 and 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (NAB): “May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit [πνεῦμα], soul [ψυχή], and body [σῶμα], be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
- 4.
“This is why the natural direction of the soul life is a going-out-of-itself rather than a turning-into-itself and an abiding ‘in and with itself’…The soul is spirit [spiritus] in its innermost essence or nature, and this spirit nature underlies the actual deployment of all its powers (faculties)” (FEB 442, 461).
- 5.
See: “Being moved and shaped from within is the peculiarity of living things, their mode of being; it is life. And the living inner form that gives life is the soul. The forming and shaping of the whole that the soul belongs to is the effect of bringing the potential to actuality, for the soul itself is actual and active…we ought to call this actual life-giving soul ‘spirit’” (PA 248); “Act, understood as the actual being of the living soul, is life”; “…the soul as a whole can be called the form of this living material body [Leibkörper]” (PA 249); “I mean that the soul shapes its body not only into an organism of the human kind but into an expression [Ausdruck] of its own individual distinctiveness and into a tool for its specific (= individual) working” (PA 396); “Anima forma corporis [the soul is the form of the body]—the phrase applies to the human as well as to the animal soul…Just as are plants and the bodies of animals, the human body [Körper], too, is shaped by an inner form into an organism. Just as the animal’s body [Körper] becomes a living body [Leib] because in it (‘in’ here has no spatial sense) the soul has its own inner life and is able not only to form the body but to manage it once formed in external activity, so too the living human body is as it were the scene in which and around which the life of the soul unfolds as well as the tool that extends its effectiveness beyond itself…In this sense, we could call the soul as a whole the form of the body and the act of its potency” (PA 351–352); “…the soul functions as the form, the body (i.e., the besouled body) as the matter which is being formed, and the nutriment as a matter which is to receive form but is as yet unformed” (FEB 183); “As the actuating principle in the living being—the principle which forms the living being and thus makes it actual—the soul is itself actual, but its actuation [Wirken] is at the same time a constant actualization of its own potentialities” (FEB 273); “Therefore, the human soul is not a mean between spirit and matter, but a spiritual creature—not only a formed structure of the spirit, but a forming spirit. But the human soul differs generically from pure spirits on account of the fact that it does not cease to be a medium and a transition. As the form of the body, it forms itself into space like the lower forms. Its spirituality shows distinct traces of its being tied to matter, and its spiritual life rises from a hidden ground” (FEB 427); FEB 434. See also Edith Stein [1, 179]. Furthermore, Stein indicates that material being is “pure receptivity for the form” (PA 288).
- 6.
“What the person is, therefore, remains ever mysterious for him and for others, it is never completely disclosed nor disclosable. Never, that is, insofar as and as long as his being alternates between potentiality and actuality over time…Insofar as all that it is allows in principle for actualization in the flow of spiritual living, the person’s entire core is in potency to this actualization, and spiritual actuality, conscious of itself, is its highest mode of being” (PA 200).
- 7.
See PA 62, 76, 321–322, 330–331.
- 8.
See FEB 87. Also: “But we should remember here that this substance, or the person’s core, is entelechy. Its core has the task of constructing the entire organism of body and soul in a process of ongoing development. And this means not only progressively forming from within a given matter into which it is immersed but also appropriating the matter it needs for its telos, which is the fully developed individual. This matter includes first of all the space-filling matter the body needs for its conservation and growth, but it also includes the ‘matter to construct’ the soul…The full unfolding is prescribed beforehand as telos in the entelechy, in the person’s original core” (FEB 402–403); “The individual unity of the life of the soul is conditioned on the one hand by the fact that the soul is entelechy not only for the body but also for itself—I mean that the soul bears a telos in itself that its living strives after—and on the other hand by the fact that the soul constructs itself as an ‘organism,’ that is, as a whole wherein all the parts work together according to a fixed order” (PA 339).
- 9.
Stein defines empathy as “the perceptual consciousness in which foreign persons come to givenness for us” (E 95–96).
- 10.
Also: “‘Having ‘soul’ means to possess an interior center, in which it perceives as crashing all that which comes from without, and from which proceeds everything that manifests itself in the behavior of the body as coming from within.” Stein, La estructura, 81 (translation my own).
- 11.
The end of the quoted text is followed by footnote 1, which reads, “Here one must recall that in these distinctions we are using a spatial image for something that is not spatial. Actually, the soul ‘has no parts, and there is no difference as to inward and outward.’ See, The Living Flame of Love by John of the Cross, 1.10.” See also: “The spirit or soul is not an extended thing, nor is the understanding a spatial part of such a thing. The understanding is not a kind of drawer we can shove things into. It is not a material body that can be molded and impressed with forms like visible, tangible shapes” (PA 153); “The soul is the ‘space’ in the center of the body-soul-spirit totality…As spiritual soul it rises above itself, gaining insight into a world that lies beyond its own self—a world of things, persons, and events—communicating with this world and receiving its influences. As soul in the strictest sense, however, it abides in its own self, since in the soul the personal I is in its very home. The soul as the interior castle—as it was pictured by our holy mother Teresa—is not point-like as is the pure ego, but ‘spatial’” (FEB 373); also FEB 433.
- 12.
See also: “In the human soul personal erectness has become a fact. Here the inner life has become conscious being. The I has been awakened, and its vision moves in an outward and inward direction. The I is capable of viewing the multitude of external impressions in the light of its understanding and of responding to them in personal freedom. And because the human I is capable of doing this, people are spiritual persons, i.e., carriers of their own lives in a preeminent sense of a personal ‘having-oneself-in-hand’” (FEB 370). “We can never imagine deriving the conscious from the unconscious, for in so doing we should have asserted a real creation out of nothing. It is quite absurd to think that the origin of the soul can be explained in terms of a combination of atoms, none of which possesses either sensation or intelligence, or any other psychological quality. Hence there is no alternative but to assume consciousness as an original phenomenon, in the atoms themselves; we cannot assume consciousness emerges from atoms as a creation, but that it develops within the atoms and rises to higher and higher degrees of clarity.” Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans: Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 89.
- 13.
“The awake and conscious ego-life is the entrance portal to the soul and its hidden life, just as the life of the senses is the entrance portal to the body and its hidden life. The awake and conscious life is the entrance portal because it is a manifestation of that which takes place in the soul, and it is an actualization [Auswirkung] of the soul’s essence. Everything I consciously experience issues from my soul. It is an encounter of my soul with something that ‘impresses’ it” (FEB 375).
- 14.
See also: PA 257, 258, (including footnote 220), 340: “Lastly, in this inner life the soul’s very depth opens up, and albeit (according to Conrad-Martius’s discourse on ‘the soul’) the soul remains a ‘ground beyond’ which does not fully enter its actual life, nevertheless what the soul is in itself lights up in its inner life. And as we have seen, it is possible for the soul to pass into a form of being wherein it is entirely actual, hence entirely illumined. We also saw that the free activity of the I, what is specifically personal, proceeds from its ‘interior.’ From here, too, the real [real] unity of soul and body evinces itself…The child does not know what it is nor what it is like inwardly. It is given over wholly to its actual living, radiates itself therein without restraint, and this is precisely why the aura it gives off is so strong…Children differ greatly, however, in how much their ‘depth’ is involved in their actual living; we should sharply distinguish this involvement or non-involvement from the kind we are reflexively aware of. I daresay, though, that on average children also live ‘with their whole soul’ more than adults do…The life of a soul is the life of the subject that has the soul…the acts of the soul—as in man—have the form of intentionality.” Moreover, Stein indicates the potential perfection of the highest mode of being human: “Whoever truly wants, in blind faith, nothing more but what God wills, has, with God’s grace, reached the highest state a human being can reach” (SC 166).
- 15.
“We have repeatedly described the soul as a sort of ‘space,’ and we have spoken of its ‘depth’ and its ‘surface.’ The same idea is expressed in the metaphor of the castle of the soul, a castle that has outer and inner chambers as well as an innermost abode. The ‘I’ inhabits this castle, and it may choose to reside in one of the outer chambers, or it may retire into that nearer and innermost abode” (FEB 433).
- 16.
See SC 381–383 for a discussion of the three actualities: understanding, sense appetite, and will.
- 17.
See SC 352–353 on the notions of self-possession and self-mastery. See also, SC 242: “…the base of a man is shifted into his spirit, and so he can have his soul and master it.”
- 18.
See Stein SC 163–164 for a brief discussion on the spiritual prospect of self-denial and sacrifice.
- 19.
See also FEB 463: “The threefold formative power of the soul must be regarded as a tri-unity, and the same is true of the end product of its forming activity: body-soul-spirit. If we attempt to relate this tri-unity to the divine trinity, we shall discover in the soul—the wellspring that draws from its own sources and molds itself in body and spirit—the image of the Father; in the body—the firmly designed and circumscribed expression of the essence or nature—the image of the eternal Word; and in the spiritual life the image of the divine Spirit.”
- 20.
See Exodus 3:14: “God replied to Moses: I am who I am. Then he added: This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you” (NABRE); Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (RSV); Judges 13:18: “The angel of the LORD answered him: Why do you ask my name? It is wondrous” (NABRE); “Darkness is not dark for you, and night shines as the day. Darkness and light are but one” (NABRE).
- 21.
See also PA 410–411: “Only by God entering and ‘passing through’—theology calls what enters grace is man ‘born of the spirit’ after having already been created by God as a personal spiritual be-ing [Wesen]…And in virtue of this higher being, which is his personally spiritual being, a ‘being born of the Spirit’ (a life of grace) is possible for him. It is possible simply because of his original openness, and it may come to his share by his merely ‘allowing’ it, indeed if he does not actively allow it but just fails to resist it.”
- 22.
See Psalm 131: “LORD, my heart is not proud; nor are my eyes haughty. I do not busy myself with great matters, with things too sublime for me. Rather, I have stilled my soul, like a weaned child to its mother, weaned is my soul. Israel, hope in the LORD, now and forever” (NABRE).
- 23.
2 Corinthians 4:7 (NAB).
- 24.
See also, “Grace is the means to unite God and creatures and to make them one. According to what it is in God, grace is the divine love or the divine being, as bonum effusivum sui, i.e., a goodness which effusively diffuses or imparts itself while maintaining itself undiminished. According to what it is in creatures, grace is what creatures receive in themselves as imparted divine being, an imparted similitude of the divine nature, and as such limited and created, but replenished by the inexhaustible source of infinite divine being, and capable of unlimited growth” (FEB 399); “But because love is the highest kind of freedom, a giving of self as the act of one who fully possesses himself (i.e., a person)—in the case of God, however, the act of a person who is and loves not in the human manner, but who is love or whose very being is love—the divine love must itself be a Person: the Person of Love. And when Son and Father love each other, their mutual self-giving is simultaneously the free act of the Person of Love. However, love is life in its highest perfection. Love is being which eternally gives itself without suffering any diminution, and it is thus infinite fecundity. The Holy Spirit is therefore the gift as such: not merely the mutual self-giving of the Divine Persons to one another, but the self-giving of the deity ad extra [nach aussen]. The Holy Spirit thus comprises in itself all the gifts of God to his creatures” (FEB 419–420).
References
Edith Stein, La estructura de la persona humana, trans. José Mardomingo (Madrid: Biblioteca Autores Christianos, 2002).
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der Menschlichen Person (Freiburg: Herder, 1994).
Edith Stein, Was ist der Mensch?: Theologische Anthropologie (Freiburg: Herder, 2005).
Mette Lebech, On the Problem of Human Dignity: A Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Investigation (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009).
Marian Maskulak, Edith Stein and the Body-Soul-Spirit at the Center of Holistic Formation (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
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Wallenfang, D.L. (2016). Soul Power: Edith Stein’s Meta-Phenomenological Construction of the Human Soul. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and Public History. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21124-4_14
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