The Science of the Cross (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Vol. 6) by Edith Stein

Author:Edith Stein [Stein, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
Publisher: ICS Publications
Published: 2011-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

c. The Interior of the Soul and the Thoughts of the Heart

The thoughts of the heart are the original life of the soul at the ground of her being, at a depth that precedes all splitting into different faculties and their activity. There the soul lives precisely as she is in herself, beyond all that will be called forth in her through created beings. Although this most interior region is the dwelling of God and the place where the soul is united to God, her own life flows out of here before the life of union begins; and this is so, even in cases where such a union never occurs. For every soul has an inmost region and its being is life.

But this primary life is not only hidden from other spirits but from the soul herself. This is so for various reasons. Primary life is formless. The thoughts of the heart are absolutely not thoughts in the usual sense of the word; they are not clearly outlined, arranged, and comprehensible constructions of the thinking intellect. They must pass through various formulations before they become such constructions. First, they must rise out of the ground of the heart. Then they arrive at a first threshold, where they become noticeable. This noticing is a far more original manner of being conscious than is perception by the intellect. It too lies before the splitting into faculties and activities. It lacks the clarity of purely sensible perception; on the other hand, it is richer than a bare grasping by the intellect. That which arises is perceived as bearing a stamp of value on the basis of which a decision is made: whether to allow what is rising to come up or not. It must be mentioned here that, already, what rises in purely natural ways and becomes noticed, is no longer the purely interior life of the soul, but is rather already an answer to something that she has brought into motion. But this leads in a direction in which we cannot follow further here.

At the threshold where the rising movements are perceived, types of recognizable spiritual faculties begin to split off and conceivable structures are formed: to these belong thoughts elaborated by the intellect with their reasonable arrangement (these are interior words for which, then, exterior words can be found) movements of the mind and impulses of the will that, as active energies, enter all that is connected with the spiritual life.

Spiritual life is now no longer the primal life in the depth, rather it is something that can be grasped by interior perception. And interior perception is a totally different art of comprehending than is that first noticing of what arises out of the depth. So, too, this emergence out of the depth is different from the surfacing of an already formed image that was stored in the memory and now has become alive again.

By no means is all that rises and becomes perceptible actually perceived. Much rises up, becomes interior and exterior word, turns into wish and will and deed “before one is aware of it.

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