Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, October 17, 2023
Speaker: Paulina Monjaraz (Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí)
In this Seminar, which is part of a broader research, Paulina Monjaraz intended to show whether we can speak of a Trinitarian Ontology in Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being.
Edith Stein is very clear in her philosophical approach to the problem of being. Together with Heidegger, she affirms that the question about being cannot be other than the question about the meaning of being.
As a Christian thinker, she allows herself to be enlightened by Revelation. Thus, congruently, in an argumentative (rational) way, Edith Stein approaches phenomenologically to the knowledge of the finite being in order to access the Eternal being, which she knows by faith that is a Triune being.
Consistently with this position, in her ascent to the meaning of being she takes ” the fact of being itself as the starting point of the objective investigation”. After the phenomenological reduction, what remains as a field of investigation is the field of consciousness in the sense of the life of the self. From this, she analyzes the actuality of finite being. Stein finds that this being in time (or finite being) is an essentiality that “carries” and, therefore, it is a dynamic essentiality that moves to its fullness. This leads her to conclude that the finite being is an essentiality that “carries” being, and that means that is not justified in itself but in the Eternal being.
Starting from this analysis, Edith Stein rereads the notions of essence, ousia and hypostasis in order to rethink the conceptual bases for the understanding of God’s Triune Being.
