Knowledge and Faith by Edith Stein

First published:Erkenntnis und Glaube, 1993 (English translation, 2000)

Edition(s) used:Knowledge and Faith, translated by Walter Redmon. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Didactic treatise; essays; theology

Core issue(s): Faith; God; knowledge; mysticism; truth

Overview

Edith Stein’s Knowledge and Faith, a collection of five philosophical essays (three of which are fragments), was written between the years of 1929 and 1941 after the Jewish woman’s conversion to Christianity. In 1942 Stein, then a Carmelite nun, was executed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

The five documents in Knowledge and Faith are “Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison,” “Knowledge, Truth, and Being” (a fragment), “Actual and Ideal Being” (a fragment), the foreword to “Finite and Eternal Being” (a fragment of a draft), and “Ways to Know God.” The first complete document presents similarities and differences between the ideas of Stein’s teacher Edmund Husserl (founder of phenomenology) and the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. The second complete work, “Ways to Know God,” investigates the instructions given by Dionysius the Areopagite about the mystic’s path toward God.

Stein presents Husserl’s main theories about knowledge and consciousness in the first essay. He held that reality consists of objects, events, and ideas as they are understood by human consciousness alone. No other reality exists above or apart from human consciousness that cannot be accessed by human consciousness. In examining consciousness, philosophy aims to apply the same rigorous methods as science, with the goal of achieving perfect, complete knowledge. This knowledge is gained only by an intentional act of will and by careful, step-by-step analysis. Over time, humankind can know all there is to know, including the Logos (ultimate truth).

Thomas Aquinas would agree with Husserl, Stein believes, that human beings can come to understand the Word, or Logos, that supports all of creation. Stein notes disagreement between them, however, in how far Husserl’s method can take human thought toward ultimate truth. Aquinas would not accept that full knowledge can be achieved by means of an unending process of inquiry. Instead Aquinas thought divine knowledge is infinite; it embraces all knowledge. The extent of the knowledge humans can have on earth is limited by the finite character of their minds. Complete knowledge is possible only in the presence of God after death. Aquinas believed that knowledge of spiritual things in the earthly time frame can be achieved only through faith, a kind of knowledge imparted through revelation by God.

Husserl maintained that religion has no place in philosophy. If philosophy accepts that truths are accessible only through faith, then there can be no claim for philosophy to contain perfectly correct, universally verifiable truth. In pursuit of this pristine knowledge, or prima philosophia (first philosophy), Husserl spent a good part of his philosophical career eradicating irrational and uncritical elements in methodology to arrive at a transcendentally purified consciousness. By superimposing Husserl’s thought on that of Aquinas, Stein shows that the conflict between science and religion, a persistent part of Western intellectual history, continued into the twentieth century.

After Stein’s conversion to Christianity in 1922, all her writings contained a spiritual purpose. In 1929, as Stein moved closer to entrance into the life of a Carmelite nun, she found phenomenology—indeed, all philosophy—to lack the answers to questions that trouble scholars and nonscholars alike. Stein believed that people needed something to cling to other than “methodical deliberations.” She concluded that her era required a “philosophy for life.”

The second complete essay in this volume was written in 1941, a year before Stein’s death. It is a study of Dionysius the Areopagite, a somewhat mysterious figure in church history whose works were known around 600 c.e. Stein’s treatment of Dionysius emphasizes several key ideas. First, faith has less to do with intellectual assent to propositions about God than with the acceptance of received revelations. Second, these revelations require a solid grounding in sacred Scripture. Third, theology itself has three forms.

The first form of theology, natural theology, corresponds to what can be known of God through ordinary life experiences. Dionysius considered this theology a minimal approach to God. The second form of theology is symbolic theology, the interpretation of “hidden meanings” of Scripture available to inspired seekers. Mystical theology, the highest of the types of theology, occurs when the seeker feels the presence of God, followed by a darkness that cannot be communicated to others. These stages of religious experience anticipate those of the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” of Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and others.

Although fragmentary, the other documents in this collection are evidence of Stein’s technical skills as a philosopher. In “Actual and Ideal Being,” for example, she identifies “ideal beings” as potentialities or possibilities that God causes or allows to be realized in specific objects. She contrasts this approach, a type of realism, to that of Plato, whose forms she finds to be lifeless and rigid. The Logos in her thought knows a finite being during the time preceding, during, and after its earthly existence.

Stein’s religious writings continued to occupy her thoughts even after she and her sister Rosa were seized and transported to Germany. As her biographers have noted, she requested her unfinished manuscript The Science of the Cross, a study of Saint John of the Cross, while at Auschwitz. The manuscript remained, at least in a literary sense, unfinished. Stein’s exemplary behavior after her capture until her death in the gas chamber is thought by many to be the fullest possible expression of her Carmelite identity—Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross—and the culmination of her desire to know the “science” of the cross. This mystic consciousness is prefigured in the work Knowledge and Faith. Stein was canonized in 1998.

Christian Themes

Stein’s early work with phenomenology concentrated on what the human mind can know and how this knowledge is perceived or received by consciousness. In her life and thought following her conversion, knowledge became less important as a philosophical construct than the knowledge of God gained through prayer and meditation. Stein viewed this later knowledge not as the product of human effort alone but as the gift of faith.

In her development from philosopher to mystic, Stein underwent a dramatic conversion from a life of purely intellectual studies to a life powerfully focused on God. The hunger for God that suffuses her writings as a Carmelite nun produced a transformation of her life, another gift from God, she suggests throughout this work, not so much produced by faith as manifested as faith. Thus, Stein relocated the locus of control in the creation of faith from the believer to God. Faith is by Stein’s definition a state of grace.

Despite God’s unknowable nature as ultimate truth, as both Aquinas and Stein accepted, she continued to apply her training in phenomenology to her quest for union with God. In her writings about mystics and mysticism, she notes how religious states and experiences compare with ordinary consciousness. The earliest person to attempt to catalog the characteristic states and stages of mysticism was Dionysus the Areopagite. In this early medieval writer, Stein found some of the elements of the spiritual life that became part of her discipline as a Carmelite nun, two of which are a thorough grounding in Scripture and the recognition that a transcendent relationship with the divine is often followed by a period of darkness and even confusion.

The harmony between knowledge and faith implied by the interrelationships of the documents in this collection rests on these key ideas: Higher knowledge is imparted through revelation, and the soul’s journey toward God is powered by grace instead of intellectual effort alone.

Sources for Further Study

Berkman, Joyce Avrech, ed. Contemplating Edith Stein. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Chapters on Stein’s life, humor, original scholarship, and contributions to the women’s movement, and on her translation of John Henry Newman’s letters before his own conversion to Catholicism.

Borden, Sarah. Edith Stein. New York: Continuum, 2003. An analysis of Stein’s treatment of being and essence in her major writings. Borden displays the breadth of Stein’s interests and the power of her thought as well as reviewing the negative reactions to her canonization in 1998.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922. Oxford, England: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. MacIntyre analyzes Stein’s life and thought prior to her conversion to place her philosophical theories within European schools of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Sullivan, John, ed. Edith Stein: Essential Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002. Stein’s spiritual writings reveal her high regard for Saint Teresa of Ávila and other mystics who inspired in her a desire to emulate the sacrificial life of Christ.