Light On Dark Water

St. Edith Stein 2

Because Lent is a time for reflection, events naturally
seem to line up so
as to prevent one from doing much reflecting. This past week I
made no more than a start at reading Edith Stein’s “Ways to Know God,” a
somewhat lengthy essay in explication of the teachings of
Dionysius the Areopagite (or
Pseudo-Dionysius, if you prefer—not being a scholar I
don’t feel obliged or even entitled to have any
opinions about the identity of the writer). And not having read
him I’m mainly interested in what he may provoke Edith
Stein to say, mindful that it may not be clear what is her
thought and what is his.

I haven’t gotten very far, and have made only a few notes,
but the effort has already been fruitful. Dionysius views the
world as a hierarchy having the task of “lead[ing] all
creation back to the Creator.”

For although not everything can receive divine
enlightenment…nevertheless even the lowest creatures, those
lacking reason and even life, are fit to serve as tools
and being-images [Seinsbild] of spiritual and divine
being and acting.

I had a few years of German long ago, and retain just enough to
have a feel for the sense of Seinsbild.
“Being-images” is adequate but has, as is
naturally the case when there is no equivalent term,
an unfortunately vague quality. I’m struck here by the
applicability of the idea to human art: I’ve always liked
Tolkien’s idea of art as a sub-creation, or perhaps I
should say sub-Creation. And the sub-Creation is itself composed
of Seinsbilder: being-images which are so designed and
ordered as to comprise a single Seinsbild by means of
which we can speak (if we’re the artist) or hear (if
we’re not) some truth about the sub-creator, the greater
Creation, and the Creator. Tools, in short.

And, looking at it from the other side, we could say that the
entire Creation is a work of art of which the purpose is (as the now scoffed-at but
in fact very accurate old formula put it) to
delight and instruct.

Knowing and witnessing go together.

This is now an aphorism that will stay with me.
Maybe what I have seen in stray bits of Edith Stein’s
work is not so much mystical theology as mystical poetry. At any
rate I always seem to head straight for the possibility of
bringing her insights to bear on the question of art, and in
particular the question of the relationship between art and
religion. That last sentence could serve—could serve me
as a theology of art, or at least the foundation of one.
I spoke last week about my
incomprehension of the idea of art as
“self-expression.” When one
sees—knows—the splendor of being, and at the same
time has the impulse to make, the result is a need to make
something which communicates the splendor—to
witness.

Since the Catholic faith is the most truthful account of being
in its foundations, art which is informed by the Catholic faith
(and this may be at several removes, as in, for instance, the
English novel of the Protestant centuries) is at an advantage in
bearing witness to the truth, which is to say, the splendor. Art
is not religion, and breaks down when it is treated as one, as it
often has been over the past hundred years or so. But it is
another form, a way, of witnessing.