Personal Relation and Community: The Spiritual Life as Expressive and Transcendent

This chapter explores the ways in which Edith Stein’s thought on spirit blossoms into a rich understanding of what it means for a community of spiritual beings to “go out toward” each other through expression. As Stein asserts in FEB, “As spiritual soul [the soul] rises above itself, gaining insight into a world that lies beyond its own self—a world of things, persons, and events—communicating with this world and receiving its influences” (Stein 2006). Furthermore, it is of the nature of spirit not simply to receive the world as intelligible, but to reflect this intelligibility back to those with whom we share the world. In this way, we are not only affected by the world around us, but also effective. The world of “things, persons, and events” is made up of shared valuing, interpersonal relationship, and free action, and our receiving the world and in turn going out into it is a partaking in this valuing, this relating, this acting. In other words, community consists not simply of a collection of beings existing alongside each other, but in expression of spirit and in sharing the fruit of this outpouring with one another. In this chapter I also address the Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, as the discipline of analyzing human spirit, especially as it is made manifest in the human community through shared spiritual products. Finally, I examine Stein’s claim that the human community is an image of the unity with God that is the fullness of the actualization of the human person’s potential.