Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Read the rest at Substack.

The piece concludes:

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

Addenda (8/9/2025)

• I say above that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, but is that right? Perhaps not. It might be closer to the truth to say that philosophy by its very nature rests on the autonomy of reason, and that the  "other conception" is not philosophy sensu stricto but a worldview. If so, any view according to which "faith is its own guarantee" is not philosophy or a philosophy, but beyond philosophy.
• Thomas wears at least four 'hats.' He is a philosopher, a Christian, a Christian theologian, and a mystic.  You could be any one of these without being any one of the others. He plays the philosopher in the praeambula fidei of the Summa Theologica wherein he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his quinque viae or Five Ways.  These proofs make no appeal to divine revelation via Scripture nor do they rest on the personal deliverances of mystical experience. They proceed by discursive reason alone on the basis of sense experience.
• So you could say to me that Thomas's theistic worldview is not beyond philosophy inasmuch as the philosophy of the praeambula is an integral part of his defense of the Christian worldview. My response will be that the Five Ways do not conclusively prove the existence of God, let alone provide any support for such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation (which of course they were not intended to do). So in the end, a will-driven leap of faith is required to arrive at Thomas's theistic worldview. So at best, the Five Ways are arguments (not proofs) that render rationally acceptable Christian belief.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally mandatory. In the end you must decide what to believe and how you will live. My concluding sentence, "the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason" is not quite right. I should have written: the decision to accept the Christian worldview, while neither it, nor the generic theism at its base, can be proven from natural reason operating upon the deliverances of the sense, can nonetheless be rendered rationally acceptable.
• "Go ahead, believe!" Thus spoke Wittgenstein. "What harm can it do?" I add: you won't be flouting any canons of rationality.