Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Human beings long to be continuously gifted with being, to exhaust what the moment gives and takes away simultaneously. They do not want to give up what provides fullness, and they would like to be endless and boundless, to have it completely and constantly. Endless joy, happiness without shadow, love without limits, heightened life without fatigue, the most powerful action that is at the same time perfect peace and release from all tension – that is eternal bliss (...) That is the being for which a person strives in life.
To the undeniable fact that my being is transient, defined from one moment to the next and exposed to the possibility of non-being, corresponds another, equally undeniable fact: that despite this transience, I am upheld in being moment by moment, and that in my transient being is contained eternal being. I know that someone is holding me, and in that lies my peace and certainty. It is not the self-assured certainty of a man standing on solid ground by his own strength, but rather the sweet and blissful certainty of a child, held by a strong arm, a certainty – in factual terms – no less rational. Would we call a child “rational” if it lived in constant anxiety that its mother would let it fall?
In my being, I thus encounter another being, which is not mine, but which forms the support and foundation of my being, which lacks support and foundation itself. In order to recognize eternal being in this foundation of my being, with which I encounter myself within, I can arrive at it by two paths. One is the path of faith: when God reveals Himself as “He who is”, as the one who creates and sustains life, and when the Redeemer says: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36). All of this provides clear answers to the mysterious question of my own being. And when God, through the prophet, says to me that He stands by me more faithfully than my own father and mother, that He is even love itself, then I see clearly how “rational” my trust is in the frame that holds me, and how foolish all anxiety and fear of falling into nothingness is – provided, of course, that I do not tear myself away from this secure shoulder.
The second path is the path of philosophical knowledge, which follows its own route. It is a path of deductive reasoning through which the proofs of God’s existence proceed.
Excerpted from the book: Edith Stein, Thoughts and Meditations
Published by: Trinitas, 2000
Selected and edited by: Norbert Žuška, OCarm.
