Is Christian Spiritual Experience an Intellectual Form? Reflections on Edith Stein’s Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being)

Abstract

This article examines the nature of Christian spiritual experience in light of Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being. Historically, spiritual experience can be understood in terms of either intellectual form or the practical exercise of love of neighbor. Following Stein, the article identifies intellectual form as the source of spiritual experience, which not only proceeds from the Christian conception of the Logos but is also rooted in the entire spiritual and intellectual culture of the West, from Heraclitus to Nicholas of Cusa. Stein’s philosophical contribution is presented both as an attempt to bring phenomenological method into dialogue with Thomistic metaphysics and as an account of human spiritual experience in which intellectual form does not conflict with the affective depths of the soul. Her definition of the human mind as an image of the divine Logos reveals a phenomenon of transcendence within the human “I,” inviting a spiritual experience in which finite being encounters eternal Being. An important part of the article addresses Stein’s engagement with Martin Heidegger, a subject rarely discussed in the literature, including their shared critique of the metaphysical understanding of truth as the intellectual correspondence expressed by adaequatio rei et intellectus. For Stein, Heidegger’s interpretation of human being as Dasein ultimately remains unacceptable because it is confined to the finite horizon of human life, whereas she seeks an interpretation of truth as eternal Being. The metaphors of the soul’s affective interior that Stein employs in Endliches und ewiges Sein draw on the Christian theological and mystical tradition—Augustine of Hippo, Meister Eckhart, and John of the Cross—which describes the mystical union of the human person with God in terms of the soul’s interior, spark, and center.