Edith Stein is a “special person,” to-me only in part because Pope John Paul II canonized her as Catholic and Jewish martyr during the Holocaust; my current effort to limn her Worldview/Weltanschauung has begun a process of casting about for proper and real measures of her specialty in human kind and kind woman kind. I quickly came to realise that any “content analysis” on a model of reverse-psychopathology as in the psychiatric mental status exam would-- first of all-- inconvenience any search for rooted Dasein, here Stein’s particular awareness in a lyric here-and-now, there-and-then re-collection (which Kierkegaard contrasts with memory-- a basal process of recounting “just the facts, just the facts)." The facts do not per se fashion a meaning that conveys re-collected understanding of “the song of one’s life”; the ten components of a mental health exam simply provide a “box of categories” yes in a kind of phenomenology that describes the Geist (“Soul” and “Mind”) but not a “moving picture” of the person’s legend-- skimpy or opulent depending on divergence from trivial herd-mentality, by which I impute that those re-collecting need be found rather outside than inside “conventional wisdom.”
I QUESTION Martin Heidegger as functional then in Stein’s time as Nazi collaborator; yet in his testament that being-toward-death, being-as-such-being-that-from-which-Dasein-flees, AND his later simplification of the analysis of Dasein (Daseinanalyse) as best described in the mode of lyric-- the thinker as lyric-poet, the lyric-poet exuding Being-per-Se (that deep understanding as Kant called-- and existential phenomenologists in personalism to call the Ding-an-Sich, what an English spirit-minded person would call “The Soul,” “the understanding of meaning in life that one has.” Heidegger-- perhaps in penitent re-collection and recoil from bastard-Nazism-- at death was beginning to esteem existential phenomenology as lyricism, a reaching for the “song in the face of death, and the Abyss Death.
This awareness feels gainful to me=> in the same way that Heidegger waxed as lyric poet recoiling from Nazism, in the way that he saw lyric poet Hoelderlin as bearing an utter truth-song, we can I think esteem Edith Stein as having a quaint being-toward-death psalm, voiced in total conversion from secular Judaic near-atheism to the martyr’s song in the utterly Roman Catholic idiom, conversion experience from the-gonadal to that-end-of-life’s intercourse as Virgin-Facing-Hot/Cold-gas-at Auschwitz.
Conversion experiences-- like mine repenting man hood-- ever always have a strangeness (by reference to the “world” left-behind); the would-have-been-Night Stein left behind opens into a New Song, along the perfect metre and melody of martyrdom sometimes-to-seculars-evincing-wince of the placid martyr submitting to the Devil’s immolations.
It seems clear that Stein is spirited in the dancesteps lying between the carefully bracketed phenomenology toward the emphatic certainty, always as “Eye in the center of Storm,” to “speak with authority” as did Messiah Jesus toward His Cross. In The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, the seeming paradoxical nature of conversion plays a signal topic; for strangeness of going from a Night to a Day James does not reach for lyricism, but we need heed Heidegger to trace Stein from the phenomenological Husserlian “hard science” in her walk to Auschwitz, to the utterly protracted and yet lyric Kreuzeswissenschaft “Science of the Cross,” ostensibly an amelioration of The Dark Night of the Soul by John/Cross with elements as well of Ste. Teresa de Avila and Ste. Therese de Lisieux.
Therefore-- regard!-- I shall reach for the-song; in this conversional song of Stein, I note music that nearly goes opposite of mine-- for I went from what Wayne Oates the Baptist called “sick religion” in a hyper-orthodox-fanaticism to a surrender of My Stud Ideas to surrender to Mater Generatrix and the coming-Matriarchy-- with almost the same acceptance of penitent sexuality as we find in Pope John-Paul-II’s Love and Responsibility or the Corpus of Dionysius called Areopagite in the mode that Divine Love is inextricably erotic, an emptying of self into the Cave, toward Life.
Now I note the notes and song of Ste. Edith Stein; my own and almost opposite spiritual veneration of the Creators, The Matem Marias, the Wombed as my being-toward-death and phishy resurrection.
vernonlynn stephens, hermit, sissy, penitent
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