Abstract
Edith Stein opens Finite and Eternal Being with the note that her work is prepared by a learner for fellow learners. In this spirit, I plan to provide some thoughts about eternal life, drawing primarily from Finite and Eternal Being but with references to On the Problem of Empathy and Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. I conclude that the spirit of one who has taken up him- or herself continues to carry the possibility of forming new relationships in a widening community.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Astrid Rodrigues, “Vatican Deemed Toddler’s Near-Death Experience a Miracle,” Transcript of television broadcast, April 1, 2010, available at http://abcnews.go.com/2020/miracle-benedicta-mccarthy-survived-tylenol-overdose-prayer-sister/story?id=10251732, accessed May 8, 2013; John Bookser Feister, “Edith Stein: Our Newest Saint”, St. Anthony Messenger, online edition, available at http://www.americancatholic.org/messenger/oct1998/feature2.asp, accessed May 8, 2013; Emanuel Charles McCarthy, “Pondering the Miracle and Living the Mystery Beyond It”, Vocations and Prayer, vol. 36, available at http://www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org/category/edith-stein, accessed May 8, 2013.
- 2.
“The most exact statement of all that Frederick the Great did from the day of his birth does not give us a glimmer of the spirit which, transforming, reached into the history of Europe” (E 113).
- 3.
FEB 337. Edith Stein takes this illustration from St. Thomas’s Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, qu. 2, a 11, corp. art.
- 4.
FEB 343. See also E 96–97 for the discussion of the “I” as spiritual subject.
- 5.
See E 91: “So far we have considered the individual “I” as a part of nature, the living body as a physical body among others, the soul as founded on it, effects suffered and done and aligned in the causal order, all that is psychic as natural occurrence, consciousness as reality. Alone, this interpretation cannot be followed through consistently. In the constitution of the psycho-physical individual something already gleamed through in a number of places that goes beyond these frames. Consciousness appeared not only as a causally conditioned occurrence, but also as object-constituting at the same time. Thus it stepped out of the order of nature and faced it. Consciousness as a correlate of the object world is not nature, but spirit.”
- 6.
See PPH 133: “What flows out of one ego belongs to one current of consciousness, which is isolated unto itself and walled off from every other, just like the ego is. Now it is quite extraordinary how this ego, notwithstanding its solitariness and inalienable aloneness, can enter into a community of life with other subjects, how the individual subject becomes a member of a super-individual subject, and also how a super-individual current of experience is constitutive in the active living of such a community-subject or community’s subject.”; see also FEB 508: “By virtue of its spirit nature [Geistnatur], humankind is called to a communal life which—after having grown from a temporally, spatially, and materially determined soil—eventually annuls the limitations of time and space.”
- 7.
See FEB 509: “Human beings may ‘find their own selves’ to a greater or lesser degree, but there is also the possibility of losing oneself. For those who do not find themselves do not find God either, and do not attain to eternal life. Or, more precisely, those who do not find God do not attain to their own selves—no matter how much they can be preoccupied with themselves—nor to that source of eternal life which lies in wait for them in their innermost being.”
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Latta, J.D. (2016). Eternal Life: A Phenomenological Exploration from the Perspective of Edith Stein’s Description of Person and Community. 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_6
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