A Phenomenology of Ethics and Excess: Experiences of Givenness and Transcendence According to Edith Stein

Abstract

For Edith Stein, experience of God is not founded merely as a cognitive phenomenon. In fact, the experience of transcendence is no phenomenon at all. Rather, Stein holds that experience of God is a non-experience, it emanates as a response to a call that comes from outside the self. Experience of God describes a calling or invitation, an ethical command to respond, a “being laid claim to” without limit and without sufficient reason why. Such experience of transcendence reveals a kind of givenness or dark knowledge, it points to a third term of ecstatic wonderment, to what Bernini called the “spiritual ecstasy” of that other Jewish convert to Carmel, Teresa of Avila. It is the paradox of excess, of supplement, of joy; it is the surplus of desire without concern for self. Edith Stein’s understanding of experience of God thus radically places into question transcendence and the whole world that gets opened up by language and through which reality becomes manifest.