Human and divine being: a study on the theological anthropology of Edith Stein

315 Pages·2017·2.05 MB·English

by  Donald Wallenfang

Human and Divine Being
A Study on the Theological Anthropology of Edith Stein
Donald Wallenfang
foreword by John C. Cavadini
HUMAN AND DIVINE BEING
A Study on the Theological Anthropology of Edith Stein
Veritas 23
Copyright © 2017 Donald Wallenfang. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in
critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner
without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock
Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
: 978-1-4982-9336-5
PAPERBACK ISBN
: 978-1-4982-9338-9
HARDCOVER ISBN
: 978-1-4982-9337-2
EBOOK ISBN
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Wallenfang, Donald. | Cavadini, John C., foreword.
Title: Human and divine being : a study on the theological anthropology of Edith Stein /
Donald Wallenfang ; foreword by John C. Cavadini.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2017 | Series: Veritas 23 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: 978-1-4982-9336-5 (paperback) | 978-1-4982-9338-9 (hardcover) |
ISBN ISBN
978-1-4982-9337-2 (ebook)
ISBN
Subjects: LCSH: Stein, Edith, Saint, 1891–1942. | Theological anthropology—
Christianity. | Philosophical theology.
Classification: BT701.3 .W35 2017 (print) | BT701.3 .W35 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/25/17
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: On Human Vocation
I. The Revelatory Dialectic of Potency–Act
II. Creaturely Existence as Intersubjective
Becoming
III. Universal Human Vocation: Awakening to
Eternal Being
Chapter 2: Spiritual Being
I. Contemporary Polemics in Pneumatology
II. Kreuzeswissenschaft: The Science of the Cross
III. The Pneumatological Matrix of Edith Stein
IV. Conclusion
Chapter 3: The Soul as the Form of the Body
I. The Possibility of the Human Soul
II. Aristotle’s Four Kinds of Causality
a. Material Causality
b. Efficient Causality
c. Formal Causality
d. Final Causality
e. Summary of the Four Kinds of
Causality
III. Actuality, Potentiality, and Logos
IV. Toward an Ontology of Spirit
V. The Rational Soul and Its Redemption
VI. Conclusion
Chapter 4: The Soul as Inner Life and as Substantial Image
of God the Father
I. Conscious Spiritual Being
II. Getting at the Heart of the Matter
III. The Substance of Spiritual Being
IV. The Analogy of Material Being
V. The Analogy of Divine Being
VI. Conclusion
Chapter 5: The Soul as Spiritual Vessel
I. Entrée into Divine Love
II. The Meaning of Self-Surrender
III. Afterlife of the Soul and Union with God
a. Death
b. The Hypostatic Union of Christ
c. The Hypostatic Union of the Soul with
God
IV. Conclusion
Chapter 6: The Antinomy of Material Being
I. Clarification of Terms
II. Ontology of Matter
III. The Human Body and the Possibility of Its
Regeneration
Chapter 7: Empathy and the Other
I. The Paradox of Alterity: An Ode to Otherness
II. The Essence of Empathy
1. “Acts in which foreign experience is
comprehended”
2. “An act which is primordial as present
experience though non-primordial in
content”
3. “An experience of our own announcing
another one”
4. “The basis of intersubjective experience
[that] becomes the condition of possible
knowledge of the existing outer world”
III. The Individual Soul and the Other
a. The Soul in Relation to the Other
(l’Autre) in General
b. The Soul in Relation to the Personal
Other (l’Autrui)
c. The Soul in Relation to the Voice of the
Other within the Self: Conscience
IV. Conclusion
Chapter 8: The Logic of the Cross
I. Edith and the Cross
II. The Dark Night of Solitude
III. The Cruciform Pattern of the Cross
a. Alterity
b. Humility
c. Love
IV. Conclusion
Epilogue: An Addendum to Suffering
Bibliography
VERITAS
Series Introduction
“. . . the truth will set you free” (John 8:32)
In much contemporary discourse, Pilate’s question has been taken to mark the
absolute boundary of human thought. Beyond this boundary, it is often
suggested, is an intellectual hinterland into which we must not venture. This
terrain is an agnosticism of thought: because truth cannot be possessed, it must
not be spoken. Thus, it is argued that the defenders of “truth” in our day are
often traffickers in ideology, merchants of counterfeits, or anti-liberal. They are,
because it is somewhat taken for granted that Nietzsche’s word is final: truth is
the domain of tyranny.
Is this indeed the case, or might another vision of truth offer itself? The
ancient Greeks named the love of wisdom as philia, or friendship. The one who
would become wise, they argued, would be a “friend of truth.” For both
philosophy and theology might be conceived as schools in the friendship of
truth, as a kind of relation. For like friendship, truth is as much discovered as it
is made. If truth is then so elusive, if its domain is terra incognita, perhaps this is
because it arrives to us—unannounced—as gift, as a person, and not some thing.
The aim of the Veritas book series is to publish incisive and original current
scholarly work that inhabits “the between” and “the beyond” of theology and
philosophy. These volumes will all share a common aspiration to transcend the
institutional divorce in which these two disciplines often find themselves, and to
engage questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians in
such a way as to reinvigorate both disciplines with a kind of interdisciplinary
desire, often so absent in contemporary academe. In a word, these volumes
represent collective efforts in the befriending of truth, doing so beyond the
simulacra of pretend tolerance, the violent, yet insipid reasoning of liberalism
that asks with Pilate, “What is truth?”—expecting a consensus of non-
commitment; one that encourages the commodification of the mind, now sedated
by the civil service of career, ministered by the frightened patrons of position.
The series will therefore consist of two “wings”: (1) original monographs; and
(2) essay collections on a range of topics in theology and philosophy. The latter
will principally be the products of the annual conferences of the Centre of
Theology and Philosophy (www.theologyphilosophycentre .co.uk).
Conor Cunningham and Eric Austin Lee, Series Editors
To my father, John Michael Wallenfang (1947–2003),
and my mother, Linda Jo Wallenfang (1948–2013)
“At the father’s death, he will seem not dead, for he leaves after him
one like himself, whom he looked upon through life with joy, and in
death, without regret.”
Sirach 30:4–5 (NABRE)
“Indeed, we had accepted within ourselves the sentence of death,
that we might trust not in ourselves but in God who raises the
dead.”
2 Corinthians 1:9 (NAB)
And to the Sundarams, especially Sathish Andrew,
witness to hope and determined determination
Ricorda questa sera, perché sarà l’inizio dell’eternità.
Dante Alighieri
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he led me out in the spirit of the
Lord and set me in the center of the broad valley. It was filled with bones.
He made me walk among them in every direction. So many lay on the
surface of the valley! How dry they were! He asked me: Son of man, can
these bones come back to life? “Lord God,” I answered, “you alone know
that.” Then he said to me: Prophesy over these bones, and say to them:
Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God to these
bones: Listen! I will make breath enter you so you may come to life. I
will put sinews on you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin,
and put breath into you so you may come to life. Then you shall know
that I am the Lord. I prophesied as I had been commanded.
—E 37:1–7 (NABRE)
ZEKIEL
Foreword
I to be asked to write a foreword for this magnificent
AM PLEASED AND HONORED
book by a young scholar. Donald Wallenfang warns us at the outset that “Stein’s
masterpieces in philosophical theology are rigorous and dense,” and that “it is a
great feat just to read through one of them in its entirety,” and I would add, in
English, let alone in German, because some of Stein’s most important works
have not yet been translated into English. A true introduction to the thought of
Edith Stein could not do it honor unless it was to some degree in its own right
“rigorous and dense.” Indeed, Wallenfang has “sifted carefully” through Stein’s
works, all of them, to produce a synthesis that, let the reader be forewarned then,
is surely properly described as “rigorous and dense”! But the careful reader will
find herself amply repaid for her efforts in sustained attention. And the book is
designed, at any rate, to be read in manageable chunks of short chapters in order
to encourage the reader and to assist her in mastering its contents. For all of its
difficulty, it also manages to mirror faithfully one of the other salient features of
Edith Stein’s work no matter how abstruse—the way in which it is nevertheless
suffused with a warmth that glows from every page.
The rigor of this book, and of Edith Stein’s philosophical/theological
anthropology, which is the subject of this book, gives it the feeling of alterity, of
“otherness,” to adopt one of Stein’s favorite expressions from her earliest work
on empathy. In turn, its alterity is itself a function—at least, I believe I have
learned this from the book—of the banality with which most of us, steeped in a
reductionist culture, greet the central question of Human and Divine Being,
“What does it mean to be human?” with a complacency of the obvious.
Whatever it does mean, we know from the outset of cultural presupposition that
it is culturally constructed without remainder, because, whatever it means, there
is, before and behind and under these cultural constructions, nothing but matter
and energy and natural law. For even those of us who are believers have a hard
time, for example, imagining spirit as actually something. And, as Stein in
Wallenfang’s re-voicing shows, we therefore have a hard time imagining even
matter as something. For being something implies form, and if there is truly
form, and not the simulacrum of form that a purely natural-law description of
reality provides, then there is something higher than matter that allows matter to
also be something instead of a random association of entities that have no name
but what we arbitrarily attach to it and which therefore can generate nothing with