The Counsels of the Heart
The Dove and Rose is a science of the counsels of the heart.
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The Dove and Rose is a science of the counsels of the heart.
Therefore, judge not before the time: until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts. And then shall every man have praise from God. (I Cor 4:5)[1]
This science is also aspirational. Like St. Thérèse we experience our lowliness and nothingness while at the same time aspiring to sanctity through God’s mercy. In our nothingness we aspire to the counsels of the Holy Spirit in our heart, rejoicing in our misery and in God’s mercy which shines through our miserableness. This science is Thérèse’s Little Way.
Instead of being discouraged, I concluded that God would not inspire desires which could not be realized, and that I may aspire to sanctity in spite of my littleness. For me to become great is impossible. I must bear with myself and my many imperfections; but I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way--very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new.[2]
This science seeks union with the Logos, Jesus Christ, and its purpose is to lead us to Him through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the combined spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. This union, however imperfect, sanctifies us through grace in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary where Jesus Christ reigns in all His glory. It is in the center of the Immaculate Heart that our logos and the ‘ratio’[3] of the world are in union with Jesus Christ that we may better receive the counsels of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. This reflects the eternal Now, that is, Heaven on earth, but it remains imperfect in temporality since the perfect union of mind, heart, and soul will be only in Heaven. The shared empathic noematic sense[4] across the communion of saints we call a union of hearts. It is of this we speak when we refer to a union of hearts with St. Joan and St. Thérèse. This noematic union is grounded in Jesus Christ, its essence is Jesus Christ, and it leads us to Jesus Christ, through the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Knowledge according to Edith Stein is “grasping something that has not been grasped before.” It is a state of affairs by which any knowledge of it “harks back to an intuitive grasping of objects.” This intuitive grasping of objects is in the form of intellectual viewing which “may be the grasping of persons… individual structures of mind, or it may the grasping of ideal objects.”[5]
The Dove and Rose is all three in this sense, that it involves the spiritual grasping of the Person of Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of the saints, notably St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It also is the grasping of structures in a Platonic ultra-real sense, or perhaps even in a Dionysian sense, that leads us in a step-by-step process of coming to know God. Edith Stein emphasizes that these structures of knowing in the Dionysian framework are like “streams” that “return to the place whence they have issued to again flow forth” and which flowing forth again “implies not a separation but an inclining to what lies below in order to raise it up.”
A thread runs through all of Dionysius's writings that have come down to us. In the prologue of his commentary 8 on Dionysius, Albert the Great summed it up in a quotation from Ecclesiastes: Ad locum unde {69} exeunt flumina revertuntur ut iterum fluant [the streams return to the place whence they have issued to again flow forth].9 This flowing should be taken first as the order of being: every be-ing issues from God as from the First and returns to him again. Iterum fluere [flowing forth again] after reuniting implies not a separation but an inclining to what lies below in order to raise it up.
Like the law of issue and return of which it forms part, hierarchy is not only an order of being but also an order of knowing.[6]
We can express the same understanding of “inclining to what lies below in order to raise it up” in Thérèse’s language of her Little Way.
We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. I have sought to find in Holy Scripture some suggestion as to what this lift might be which I so much desired, and I read these words uttered by the Eternal Wisdom Itself: "Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me." Then I drew near to God, feeling sure that I had discovered what I sought; but wishing to know further what He would do to the little one, I continued my search and this is what I found: "You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees; as one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you."[7]
Finally, this science involves the grasping of ideal objects in the sense by which Stein deduces Aquinas’ delineation of forms and ideas and by which we find bridges from Plato and Augustine to Aristotle and Aquinas.
Consequently Thomas rejects an independently existing world of objective ideas. He admits created “forms”: the essence-forms that have their being in things, and he admits ideas different from them as eternal types of things in the divine mind.[8]
The way of The Dove and Rose is phenomenological, that is, through “the structure of objects in the temporal flow of mental life.”
We call the structure of objects in the temporal flow of mental life the “phenomenological” or “transcendental constitution.”[9]
The timelessness of the Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Catholic and Royal France as an eternal type in the mind of God is accessible to the finite mind through contact with the temporal, as received through the heart of St. Joan of Arc and a sharing of her noematic sense. Being timeless, it cannot be known to a finite mind immediately in its timeless existence without an analogous temporal relationship. Thus, our union with the heart of St. Joan of Arc serves as that analogous relationship that brings the timeless Kingdom of the Father, “On earth as it is in Heaven.”
[1] Holy Bible - The Verse It: All(TM) Edition - Catholic Douay-Rheims Version.
[2] Thérèse, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 151.
[3] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1108. “Phenomenology has especially stressed this passive element because it sets off its mode of inquiry, which allows itself to be led by objective ratio, from those trends of modern philosophy wherein thinking means “constructing” and knowledge a “creation” of the inquiring understanding. Phenomenology and scholasticism meet again in their opposition to any subjective arbitrariness and in the conviction that intuiting, in the sense of passively receiving, is the most proper contribution of the understanding and that all of its action is but a preparation for it.”
[4] Burns, “The Curious Case of Collective Experience: Edith Stein’s Phenomenology of Communal Experience and a Spanish Fire-Walking Ritual,” 10. “There is a single noematic sense to the experience that is shared between us.”
[5] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1396.
[6] Stein, loc. 1701.
[7] Thérèse, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 151–52.
[8] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1614.
[9] Stein, loc. 1439.