St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
In my being, I encounter another being that is not mine, but is a support and foundation of my being, which has no support and foundation. In this foundation of my being, upon which I touch within myself, I can come to know eternal being.
One path is the path of faith: When God reveals Himself as the one who is, as Creator and Sustainer, and when the Savior says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36), these are clear answers to the mysterious question of my own being. And when He communicates to me through the mouth of the prophet that He stands by me more faithfully than a father and a mother,1 even that He is Love itself, then I perceive how “reasonable” my trust in the arm that holds me is, and how foolish all fear of falling into nothingness is—if I do not tear myself away from that protective hand.
The path of faith is not the path of philosophical knowledge. It is the response from another world to the question posed by knowledge. Philosophical knowledge has its own path. It is the path of judgmental, evidential thinking, and along this path goes the proof of God [...] Evidential thinking creates succinct concepts, yet even they are unable to grasp the One who is Ungraspable; they even distance us from Him, as is often the case with anything abstract.
More than the path of philosophical thought, the path of faith gives us: a personally close God, a loving and merciful God, and a certainty that no natural knowledge can provide. However, the path of faith is a dark path. God Himself reduces His speech to human measure so that the Ungraspable can become more graspable for us.
(From the German original Endliches und ewiges Sein, Freiburg 1959, pp. 57–58, translated by Vratislav Jiljí Slezák.)
