Beyond the Reach of Modern Reason: Thomas Gricoski’s Being Unfolded
“There are the angels, who spread the desires in the depths of their minds like wings . . . in their desires they are quick to accomplish God’s will, the way a person’s thoughts speed swiftly; and by their forms they display in themselves the beauty of reason, by which God closely examines human deeds.” – St. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Scivias, Bk. 1, Vision 6:2
The beauty of reason evinced in Hildegard’s angels is not a construction of the human imagination, nor a product of some technological drive. No, it is in their nature, given by God. Note, however, that it is not simply reason “by which God closely examines human deeds” but by its beauty. Reason qua reason cannot suffice to judge humanity; it needs something beyond it. Perhaps this can be another way of saying there is no rational ground for reason itself, but only an ontological ground, or perhaps more, a divine ground. Hildegard’s vision, a drawing of which adorns Fr. Thomas Gricoski’s Being Unfolded: Edith Stein on the Meaning of Being, shows the centrality of God to all creation.
This transcendent quality of reason appears throughout Edith Stein’s oeuvre, which is haunted by two questions: How do we know God? And how does God know us? While these might seem prima facie epistemological questions, a closer look reveals their ontological structure. What does it mean to be a knowing being? The question is not “how have we socially constructed our language?” but “what do our words name?” In short: what is the meaning of being?
Being Unfolded: Edith Stein on the Meaning of Being expounds Stein’s rigorous answers to these questions, as they pertain to ontology. Though the front dust jacket is adorned with the illustration of St. Hildegard’s angelic vision, the purpose of Gricoski’s book is not angelological, but rather rigorously ontological. Therein, Gricoski seeks to investigate systematically Stein’s claim that: “The meaning of being is unfolding.”
Most readers will pick up Gricoski’s Being Unfolded as a companion to Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being (German title: Endliches und ewiges Sein). The single existing translation of the latter, after all, is somewhat cumbersome, and the sheer magnitude of the tome can be rather intimidating (not to forget the exorbitant price of used copies due to its having recently gone out of print). Gricoski promises to expand beyond Stein’s ontology with some original philosophical reflections (teasing also some engagement with William Desmond’s philosophy, who wrote the foreword and was Gricoski’s dissertation advisor). Gricoski fails to deliver on this promise, but the first monograph from this president of the Edith Stein Circle develops Stein’s ontology lucidly, faithfully, and enjoyably.
“The meaning of being is unfolding” Stein writes in Finite & Eternal Being (Gricoski’s translation). To some this might signal the priority of meaning over being; to others it might signal being’s priority over meaning. But Stein understands it in neither way. For her, meaning and being are co-primordial and unfolding is how they relate to one another. Gricoski writes that “the irreducible relation of being and meaning entails that there is no being without meaning and no meaning without being.” This relation can be seen in the constitutive self-relation of each being—beings become intelligible only as they unfold.
This should not be mistaken, however, for an updated Aristotelianism. Being is, for Stein, over-determined. The meaning of being overflows even our broadest cross-sections and is emphatically not reducible to its form or its essence. Inexhaustibly, there is always more to discover about being as such and particular modes of being. Not only is finite consciousness unable to comprehend the fullness of being, but the meaning of finite being itself cannot be self-sustaining. It must find itself in pleroma—namely, the eternal Trinity. Our inability to speak, therefore, might be an invitation to reverent silence, but not quite the same silence as Wittgenstein imagined in the Tractatus. But still also our inability to speak might invite us to speak more highly of being and its accompanying mystery.
To speak of God is not, for Stein, an idolatry against apophasis as some modern and postmodern theologians might like to maintain. Despite the “ever greater difference” which accompanies analogy of being (as noted by Aquinas, Scotus, and Przywara), “a saving similarity remains. . . . Finite being retains the ‘close-belonging together’ of being and meaning as a mirror or analogy of the intimate union of the same in eternal being.” Difference and similarity are not opposed; rather they point to each other. The difference between two beings, nonetheless, marks that they share in being together. Similarity too marks that their sharing in being is not identical.
As such, ever greater difference becomes also an ever greater similarity, so long as there is no absolute otherness or absolute identity. Gricoski writes: “the ‘similarity however great’ cannot be deleted from the formula of analogy, otherwise the difference dissolves relationships into the strife and divorce of being from meaning.” In other words, without analogy, ontology spirals into nihilism. It is important for Stein not to give up where finite reason begins to grow hazy. On the contrary, finite reason points beyond itself to divine being. Divine being is what unfolds before us, what is revealed to us through nature, through Scripture, through finite reason, through prayer, and through the sacraments.
It seems that only Stein scholars have resisted the dominant narrative (e.g. Herbert Spiegelberg) that Stein’s theological turn was an abandonment of the phenomenological method rather than an application thereof. Gricoski is among these resistant Stein scholars. For finite beings, according to Stein, phenomenology culminates in doxology, not a perfect and rational system, as the early Husserl sought. Gricoski writes, “If the aim of phenomenology is a perfect foundation for all knowledge, as well as the perfect fulfillment of all possible knowledge, then this goal is achieved only by the divine intellect. Phenomenologists in their armchairs fractionally emulate the divine mind in its all-encompassing intuition of meaning.” Philosophy then cannot be reliably quarantined from the reign of theology, for any reflection on being necessitates reflection on the eternal source of all being—namely, God. Stein’s philosophy is neither a stoic rationalism nor a fideistic rejection of philosophy, but a phenomenology which leads to mystical contemplation.
Angels by Hildegard von Bingen
Gricoski’s promise to develop ontology beyond Stein’s fundamental ontology goes mostly unfulfilled. Even up to the final pages, the focus on Stein’s work remains and any suggestions beyond Stein are simply that—suggestions. At the end of the book, I wondered: if this is truly how the world is (and as a compelled Steinian myself, I do believe this), what do we do with it? Certainly, it is not enough, in Stein’s philosophy, merely to state the facts of existence. On the contrary, Stein’s ontology is an invitation to delve deeper into our existence and the Logos which grounds us. Gricoski seems to suggest this only in the concluding sentence: “In the spirit of Stein’s project of Auseinandersetzung [creative confrontation] between different schools of thought, I hope that these investigations will contribute to the inexhaustible contemplation of the meaning of being.” In my hopeful interpretation, I take this to be an allusion to Stein’s contemplative mysticism, as seen, for instance, in her Science of the Cross (German: Kreuzeswissenschaft, Studie über Joannes a Cruce). The contemplation on the meaning of being does not lead us only to an understanding of the co-primordial nature of meaning and being, but also to a contemplation of the eternal source of meaning and being as well—that is, God. May we take the angels as the quintessence of this.
Katherine Apostolacus is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Villanova University and holds the department’s Theology-Philosophy Fellowship. Katherine’s research interests include philosophy of religion, ontology, liturgy, and mysticism.