« L’Incarnation change tout » : corps et imago Dei chez Edith Stein. Confrontation avec saint Augustin

Abstract

From the very first centuries of the Christian era, Christian faith in the divine incarnation and the resurrection of the flesh recast the representations of man, largely inherited from Platonism and Neoplatonism, which tend to devalue the body. Augustine thus endeavours to elaborate an anthropology which integrates the dignity of the body, considering it no longer to be a prison of the soul, but to be constitutive, for eternity, of subjective identity. He nonetheless fails to achieve a true integration of the bodily dimension into his thought on the imago Trinitatis. Edith Stein, on her part, claims, in support of her own phenomenology of the body, that the triad body, soul and spirit can be regarded as a trinitarian unity, thus positing “the whole human being”, not only the soul (mens), as an image of the Trinity. Stein thus boldly prolongs Augustine’s thought, itself very daring, in its time. Confrontation of these two philosophies shows that although the “incarnation is the turning point”, as Merleau-Ponty asserts, this assertion has not yet been fully thought through; it can and indeed must be considered further.