Edith Stein
True love for oneself can only be understood based on love for God: we must love our neighbor – as we love [i] ourselves – for the sake of God. Love in its highest fulfillment is mutual surrender and unity; for this, more persons are needed. The "cling" to oneself and self-validation, which are characteristic of a perverse love for oneself, create the most stark contrast to the divine essence, which is indeed to give oneself.
The only perfect realization of love is the divine life itself, the mutual giving of divine persons. Here, each person finds themselves again in others, and since their life and essence are one, love is mutual and at the same time love for oneself, an affirmation of one’s own essence and one’s own person.
This pure love, which is God, is most closely approached in the surrender of a finite person to God. No finite spirit can fully encompass the divine spirit, but God – and He alone – fully embraces each created spirit; whoever surrenders to Him reaches the highest fulfillment of being in loving union with Him, to that love which is simultaneously knowledge, the surrender of the heart, and a free act. This love is entirely directed towards God, but in [its] union with divine love, the created spirit embraces, knows, and blissfully and freely accepts itself as well. Surrendering to God is at the same time surrendering to [one's own] divine, beloved self and to all creation, namely all spiritual beings that are united with God.
However, such a surrender of love is something that a person is not capable of on their own. If we can only come to know other people and to genuinely fulfill our love for them when they open themselves to us in love, how can we come to love God, whom we do not see, unless we are [first] loved by God? In order to give ourselves to God in love, we must know Him as loving. And thus, He can only open Himself to us.
In a certain way, this is done by the word of revelation. And to receive divine revelation through faith logically includes [also] a clinging [to God] in love. However, this is only fulfilled when God Himself gives Himself to the soul in the life of grace and glory, when He shares His divine life with her and draws her into His divine life.
The divine life, which unfolds in the soul loving God, cannot be anything other than the trinitarian life of God. After all, the one to whom [the soul] surrenders is the triune. Therefore, she yields to the paternal will of God, which almost begets the Son anew in her. She unites with the Son and would like to disappear in Him, so that in her the Father sees nothing but the Son. And her life unites with the Holy Spirit, becoming a divine outpouring of love.
The soul (and thus the whole person) experiences a fundamental transformation through the unification with the divine Spirit. And yet it remains preserved in its own being, not becoming (merely) a part of the divine. And yet this unification can still be called even more profound than the connection between soul and body. After all, both God and the soul are spirit and penetrate each other, as only spirit and spirit can penetrate: by the power of mutual free personal surrender, which assumes the separateness of [their] being, but – despite the infinite distance between the uncreated and the created – [at the same time] a community [as to] essence, which allows them to genuinely enter into each other.
(Finite and Eternal Being, p. 419n., according to Christian Interiority 15/5,1980,
translated by Sister Petra of the Resurrected OCD, Carmel of St. Joseph, Prague.)
