Silêncio e interioridade pessoal em Edith Stein

Abstract

Through the analysis of Edith Stein’s “The interior castle”, the present study aims at the ex-perience of silence related with each of the seven levels of personal interiority identified in the image of the castle. Commenting in terms of philosophical anthropology and based on Teresa of Ávila’s text on mystical experience, Stein opens the way for the identification of vari-ous modalities of silence: silence based on the dispersal of the person in the lived experience of external circumstances, silence related to the experience of the self in the lived experiences of the circumstances, silence related to answers to appeals identified in the experience itself, silence lived in the search of one’s own personal interiority, silence in front of the event of the person itself and of the world with its mystery, silence in the experiences of lucidity, definitive silence and silence in experiencing the person’s core. The various modalities of silence are presented in their connection with each degree of the graded structure of being. This study points at implications for a properly human science of experience.