Edith Stein owes her conversion to Catholicism to her reading of the writings by Teresa of Avila. When she compares her doctrine of prayer with the steps of Jacob’s ladder, in the uppermost of which God himself must dwell, she falls back on Descartes, who comes from an unquestionable doubt to the Creator as the ultimate cause. In doing so, Stein and Teresa draw on Augustine, who had already proposed a stepladder of the soul, using elements of the ancient philosophy of skepticism. The philosopher Husserl and his student Edith Stein proceed in a very similar way, when they demand a bracketing of the concrete existence with its contingencies through the epoché (ἐποχή). Therefore, it is only consistent when Edith Stein compares the path of philosophical thinking with that of the mystic and comes to the conclusion that both are similar.