Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781032136400, 9781032170299, 9781003251477, 1032136405

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Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience

This book explores the threshold between phenomenology and lived religion in dialogue with three French luminaries: Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Yves Lacoste. Through close reading and critical analysis, each chapter touches on how a liturgical and ritual setting or a spiritual vision of the body can shape and ultimately structure the experience of an individual’s surrounding world. The volume advances debate about the scope and limits of the phenomenological analysis of religious themes and disturbs the assumption that theology and phenomenology are incapable of constructive interdisciplinary dialogue. Joseph Rivera is a tenured professor of philosophy and theology at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is the author of The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry (2015) and Political Theology and Pluralism: Renewing Public Dialogue (2018). He’s the co-editor with Joseph O’Leary of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Theology.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Violence, Entitlement, and Politics A Theology on Transforming the Subject Steven G. Ogden Christological Paradigm Shifts in Prophetic Pentecostalism in South Africa Edited by Mookgo Solomon Kgatle, Marius Nel and Collium Banda Developing Animal Theology An Engagement with Leonardo Boff Clair Linzey Christianity and COVID-19 Pathways for Faith Edited by Chammah J. Kaunda, Atola Longkumer, Kenneth R. Ross and Esther Mombo

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Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience Spiritual Themes in Henry, Marion, and Lacoste Joseph Rivera

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Joseph Rivera The right of Joseph Rivera to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-13640-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-17029-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25147-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In Loving Memory of Lewis Howard Schmitt (1940–2016)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

PART I

Horizonality 1 Overcoming the metaphysics of representation 2 Affection and the horizon of experience

1 3 22

PART II

Michel Henry and life

53

3 Incarnate self: the night of love

55

4 Spiritual life and the phenomenology of life

69

5 The spirit of empathy

84

PART III

Jean-Luc Marion and the gift

101

6 Selving: l’adonné and ethics

103

7 Spiritual exercises: an Augustinian reduction

119

8 The given and the manifestation of the Trinity

142

viii

Contents

PART IV

Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy 9 Spiritual life: angst, peace, love

163 165

10 Lived experience and metaphysics in theology

191

11 The body and eucharistic experience

214

Postscript

235

12 Sacramental worldhood

237

Index

245

Acknowledgments

This volume consists of a deepening of the many phenomenological and spiritual themes explored in constructive conversation with Michel Henry, the phenomenological tradition, and the ressourcement of Augustine’s existential voice outlined in my The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015). Those thematic fixtures are taken up once more, but with a more thorough investigation of Husserl, Marion, Lacoste, and Heidegger. I also account for cognitive science of the body, philosophy of mind, poetry, and other patristic voices such as Irenaeus, even if Augustine remains always just below the surface—and on the surface in my discussions of the Trinity with Marion’s late and superb inspection of the doctrine of the Trinity. Nearly every chapter shall punctuate and rehearse what I consider to be the most basic concrete spiritual entrée into the performative dimension of the horizon of experience: the eucharist. Of course, this particular liturgical custom is a Christian spiritual practice of great importance. Yet, it does not follow from my privileging of it that other spiritual practices or other religious traditions cannot also challenge emphatically (i) the metaphysics of representation, (ii) the overly intellectual and disembodied formation of or lack of community yielded by modernity, and (iii) the deficit of concrete and worldly purchase noticeable in some theological responses to these problematics, such as I locate in part in Henry, Marion, and Lacoste. One could also utilize my emphasis on the mood of love as a method of reading spiritual dispositions and forces at work in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Judaism, not least Islam and other spiritual communities of practice. The most philosophically demanding (and thus the most theoretically intricate) chapters in the volume are the first two, both of which define and challenge the metaphysics of representation: this cognitive or intellectualist paradigm of the mind trades on the alleged hallowed formula of truth as the agreement between subject and object (Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus), and in the act of agreement, this formula insists one must always hold to their strict distinction. It consists of nothing less than a longstanding dogma that the mind must triumph over the embodied heart. I counter this formula strongly. Mood, instinct, and affect, each of which

x Acknowledgments is necessarily embodied in movement and gesture and practice, do not figure into the calculus of the representational metaphysics. Rehabilitating the wisdom of Augustine on love and the heart (that we are what we love and that we cannot overlook that we all want to love and be loved) denotes a vivid and refreshing counterclaim, and the Augustinian tradition is yet to be matched in rigor, eloquence, spiritual gravity on this score. While I also draw on the prolific and fertile material in Henry, Marion, and Lacoste, my overall thesis differs from their collective struggle to overcome the metaphysics of representation. They attempt to flee not only from representation but in so doing they flee also from the horizon of the world altogether, finding respite only an otherworldly form of self-as-passivity; whereas I suggest, in the final remarks of each chapter and in the postscript, that the world remains the chief setting for and circumstance of all experience as such. It constitutes the horizon, however expansive its boundaries are, of every event, person, object, practice, and experience and thus of the advent of the self in its very spiritual becoming. My heartfelt thanks are due to Dublin City University and my colleagues there in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music. I am happily indebted to the research culture nurtured by the Head of School Brad Anderson and the Dean John Doyle, up to the President of DCU, Daire Keogh. I also extend thanks to invitations from other universities, where talks and presentations there enabled me to refine my thinking on these matters: Boston College, University of Vienna, University Freiburg, and the Catholic University of Leuven. Many individuals have made their mark on my thinking and in my heart. My lovely kids Jack and Kate deserve the world and my thanks to them for showing me that love is the way. My own parents and my siblings are to be thanked for their continued support. My father-in-law, Howard, remained for me an unconditional support and source of love, and I’m grateful to have had him in my life, as well as Karen Schmitt, my mother-in-law. My thanks to Ruth O’Neill Fitzmaurice for conversations about the importance and meaningful human connection to be found in mood, instinct, affections, and the heart—these open genuine avenues of spiritual relationship and union between individuals and between individuals and God. Brian Robinette remains for me an inspiration and cherished conversation partner on theological and philosophical matters. Jeremy Kidwell’s increasing excitement about phenomenology is present here. I am also grateful to Brian Merry for reading several chapters and offering substantive feedback on prose and style. Conversations with Yazid Said on the heart are much valued and my longstanding dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan on both Augustine and Lacoste will be present in the following pages. My deep appreciation goes to Katherine Ong, editor at Routledge, for her support and encouragement throughout publication process. A few of the chapters are heavily revised versions of published articles in refereed journals. I thank the following journals for permission to

Acknowledgments  xi reproduces parts of those articles. Parts of Chapter 4 derive from ““Christian Life and the Phenomenology of Life,” Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie, vol. 16, no. 1 (2018): 307–327; some sections of Chapter 6 are drawn from “Jean-Luc Marion: The Subject as ‘Gifted’ in Christological Perspective” Heythrop Journal, vol. 51, no. 6 (2010): 1053–1060; Chapter 8 contains material in “The Myth of the Given? Rethinking Phenomenology’s Theological Turn,” Philosophy Today, vol. 62, no. 1 (2018): 181–197; and Chapter 10 originates from “God and Metaphysics in Contemporary Theology: Reframing the Debate,” Theological Studies, vol. 77, no. 4 (2016): 790–811. Joseph Rivera June 2021 Dublin

Part I

Horizonality

1

Overcoming the metaphysics of representation

I Introduction: nonconceptual affection A number of contemporary phenomenologists and philosophers of religion, including myself, have sought to complicate the traditional distinctions between subject and object, sensibility and understanding, truth and opinion, the world in itself and the world as the “I” represents it, a dichotomy captured succinctly in Kantian vocabulary: There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought.1 The limits on experience sanctioned by those who hold to such dualisms trade on the assumption that science or empiricism reflects the basic boundary of what is possible, that there is a psychomathematical objective touchstone to which the subject must conform. To be “manifest” as a phenomenon, as Descartes and even Kant would have it, is to insist on the acceptance of the principle that the subject corresponds to certain empirical conditions that predetermine what can be manifest. Indeed Kant names our encounter with the world “outer objects” which are “nothing other than mere representations of our sensibility” [nichts anderes als blosse Vorstellungen unserer Sinnlichkeit], whose true or real correlate, “i.e., the thing in itself, is not and cannot be cognized through them.”2 The extent that empirical data reflect a rigid structure which is objectively true and interpretation-free is the degree to which the metaphysics of representation or the mental “representation of our sensations” (Vorstellungen unserer Sinnlichkeit) reigns as a true model of experience. One may ask if this might be the model philosophers should adopt in their understanding of the relation of the subject to its surrounding world. If the realist, third-person model of empiricism that underlies representation turns out to be guided by interested subjects, and thus representation is in point of fact an outgrowth of embodied social practice (as I will argue),

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-2

4 Horizonality then phenomenology has something illuminating to say about manifestation. More precisely: it can tell us with rigor what can count as a “given” for manifestation. Phenomenology, by definition, adheres faithfully to the analysis of the first-person account of experience. In just this way, its methods and strategies may well enable us to restrain or “overcome” the metaphysics of representation, before it can take over and domesticate the conceptual ground on which experience is built. It is this phenomenological framework in which the following pages work. I inherit, in this book, a tradition of thinkers who interrogate the metaphysics of representation in a critical light. Phenomenological philosophy after Husserl, expressed in the body of work that consists of figures like Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, etc., can be reconstructed and extended in fruitful ways here. To achieve a strong critique of the metaphysics of representation from a theological/spiritual point of view is nearly impossible without recourse to specifically “phenomenological” vocabularies of experience. While I elect to reread critically only three figures, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Yves Lacoste, I do so only because they serve my conception of spirituality most explicitly. My argument, outlined in its phenomenological articulation, carves out a position within the broader nexus of debate about religious experience and the spiritual life discussed in continental philosophy, and specifically phenomenology, developed in France and North America after World War II.3 The primary lens, then, through which I view the phenomenon of experience is spiritual practice, one specifically inflected in a sacramental character. Such a reading involves a constellation of concerns and the overlapping of several themes and is to be formulated in questions like: does the ritual (of which the eucharist is an exemplar) communicate knowledge that is embodied and affective, and not wholly conceptual? If the eucharist/religious ritual does not elicit flight from the world of experience, then how does it follow that it puts us in touch with others and the world? Does Christian spirituality (as one particular religious mode of existence among other legitimate ones), exemplarily executed in eucharistic practice, possess a mood that discloses the world in a certain contemplative or spiritual light?4 Questions like these (and other related questions) will be addressed in the chapters below. My explanatory strategies grow out of critical confrontations with Henry, Marion, and Lacoste. I pause to note that for the most part the explanations of experience are cast in the phenomenological vocabulary of the “horizon.” I will tease out the details of this vocabulary in Chapter 2. For now I can admit that I use this particular terminology (horizon) as an entry point into the phenomenology of spiritual practice because it affords me the opportunity to utilize a subjective interpretation of experience that is marked chiefly by a domain of nonconceptual affection, the domain of the “heart.” Affective tonality is expressed in formations of embodied practice occurring in a context shared with others, a context like

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  5 ritual, worship, liturgy. The vocabulary in which this horizon of shared experience unfolds is a phenomenological one, even if it is not consistently endorsed or conscripted in the same set of idiomatic distinctions in each thinker. There remains no doubt in my mind that Henry, Marion, and Lacoste deploy a critique of representational metaphysics, even while each develops a unique perspective on the theological warrants and parameters of first-person givenness. My own argument about first-person givenness involves regular recourse to and analysis of the sacrament of the eucharist. I am inclined to think of the eucharist is not merely a poetic motif or discrete or episodic ritual, but a spiritual way of life consisting of a basic set of commitments that serve the subjective accomplishment of the theological narrative of creation, redemption, and consummation. 5 The eucharist, framed as a phenomenon in this way, expands the horizon of experience without transcending the basic integrity of phenomenological structures of the horizon. None of the figures with whom I discuss this thesis will share all the norms constitutive of the entitlements that justify either my philosophical or my theological commitments. Yet, read through the lens of a spiritual horizon of experience, I bring into focus basic discursive intuitions and explanatory strategies phenomenology offers to those who want to say something about spiritual phenomena that clearly point beyond themselves (e.g., prayer, eucharist, liturgy). Henry, Lacoste, and Marion do not share all the features of my project. Yet, aspects of it are emphasized to a high degree depending on the figure and text in question. Henry emphasizes, for example, the importance of affection and the overlapping of affections among individuals. Lacoste discusses suggestively the fertility of embodied mood and liturgy. Finally, Marion opens up space for a methodical analysis of sacrament as gift/love. All three, therefore, represent what I call sacramental or spiritual phenomenology. That is, their work enacts a particular expansion of the self, which involves a laborious critique of the empirical boundaries of representational thinking; it simply does not capture all that we are as human beings. Nor does it even capture what is most important about personal identity as such. Each thinker, I will show in a variety of ways below, employs the all-important phenomenological tool known as the “reduction,” in order to express a practical strategy of overcoming empiricism with recourse to nonconceptual affection. The enactment of the reduction, that is, prompts a way of life that broadens experience so that we can account for the experience of spiritual practice, the soil in which the heart (without concepts) yearns for a relationship with God. Here, briefly, it is crucial to note that the reduction formulates a strategy put into practice by the phenomenologist that enables a clear view of the first-person account of experience—no matter the object I behold. I may enjoy the waterfall, for example, that I encounter to my surprise in my morning walk in the hills. The reduction enables me to dwell in this experience

6 Horizonality just as it is given to me, in the context of the morning sun, in the silence of my solitude, a scene given to me without the intrusion of the bustle of traffic or the chatter of other people. The empirical perspective, in stark contrast, may invite us to understand the physical structure of the cliff from which the water cascades downward, and the physical molecular structure of the flowing water as it rushes into the pool below—it is highly conceptual and cognitive. The phenomenological reduction simply brackets or suspends this kind of cognitive “scientific” analysis in favor of first-person experience and affect. The reduction, that is, liberates us to see and feel the world just as it is given to us, waterfall and all. Each of the three thinkers involved in my reading of the reduction uses this tool to bracket the power of cognitive deliberation or representational metaphysics. The world, they argue, and I am inclined to concur, is given in representation as little more than a mindless object. The power of concepts to represent the experience of the waterfall, they carefully argue, is simply limited, cramping who we really are as feeling, embodied creatures who (above all) want to love and be loved. A conceptual framework cannot do justice to the experience of the gorgeous waterfall I enjoy as it is genuinely given to me, for it is the embodied heart that connects me to the waterfall, not the rational deliberation of a mind that occupies a neutral stance, perched from an imagined view from nowhere. This is why the domain of kinetic and nonconceptual affection is key to any phenomenological study of experience, whether that be of a waterfall or, more to the point of the present book, a liturgical practice carried out in a community of spiritual practice. The reduction assumes many spiritual, moral, and existential incarnations, of course. There is not one obvious articulation of it as a practice of unveiling experience as it is given according to the existential of authenticity as in Heidegger and Sartre, or according to the constituting ego as in Husserl; it is all the more pluriform in the French tradition. That is: Henry, Marion, and Lacoste formulate a trend in phenomenology that uses the reduction as a spiritual tool to be put into practice, like a form of contemplative meditation. Meditation may have general purpose or end, and yet, its style or character as a practice can assume different postures, settings, rhythms, idioms, languages, and tropes. The reduction, as contemplation, unveils that which is given, and it aims unapologetically at the excess of things just as I experience them.6 It locates the forms of givenness that most threaten empiricism’s “stranglehold” (Lacoste’s term, see Chapter 10), in order to harness and exploit the soul’s desire for diffuse levels of experience. Just so we may find not relief but emancipation from objects and sense data. We automatically think, even if we do not want to do so, in the vocabulary of science and third-person analysis. Only a therapy, perhaps a shock therapy, can undo that Western tendency to be materialist, what Henry calls a “barbarism” of cultural proportions, the scientific prejudice of our time, the belief “that scientific knowledge is not only the most important

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  7 but in reality the only true knowledge; that everything prior to this arrival of rigorous science in the West was only a mass of disordered knowledge and confused feelings.”7 From this rebellion against the culture of scientific prejudice is born the theological reduction in Henry, Marion, and Lacoste. Stated otherwise, French phenomenology suspends the cognitive categories of sense data in favor of the subjective experience of the heart’s encounter with the excess of things. The stranglehold of empiricism eludes our grasp often. Hence it remains a difficult threat (or trauma) to manage, not least suspend or neutralize. One way to understand French theological phenomenology, broadly, is to see it as the hard-fought determination to recover the evidence of the heart, the flow of lived experience that rarely admits of rational reflection at all: the subtle thrill of a walk in the park, the intensity of hitting a tennis ball, the taste of a delicious casserole (or apricot cocktail à la Sartre) hot out of the oven in the company of good friends, the internal wave of release following from a kiss exchanged with a spouse. Phenomenology, here understood as a canon of the excess of things, demands a theory of “know-how” instead of “knowing-that,” the latter of which suffers from the usual trappings of a disembodied calculus of objects.8 All objects and persons are given in the horizon, but it is precisely this horizon of experience governed by science that snuffs out all other experiences we may have. This is why Dominque Janicaud describes phenomenology’s rebellion against naturalism and empiricism a “theological turn” or “swerve” toward transcendence.9 A recent collection of interviews of French phenomenologist spanning decades, from the 1980s to the present, also notes that such a trend, if it is truly a trend, must be characterized by its collective stance against scientific masternarratives of meaning. The scientific norms appear to serve the purpose of a regime of taken-forgranted presupposition, a norm of all norms that governs or polices the boundaries of experience. To recuperate a broader view of experience, I have equated experience with the movement of the horizon. We dwell on this all-important theme briefly. This present book asks: why not permit experience itself to govern itself, and thus open and close its own boundaries in correlation to its own givenness? The logic of phenomenological “reason” challenges scientific norms precisely by asking if such norms should remain less a rigid set of eternal laws and more a fluid perspective on things; scientific reason is not immune to the excess of things as they are given to me (and to you). Phenomenology “questions why any such [scientific] norms should determine the space of rationally permissible phenomena prior to or independently of the possibilities that phenomena themselves proffer.”10 But the French trajectory of phenomenological analysis, liberating as it is, must confront its own stubborn prejudice, namely, the suspicion of the horizon of objects whose composition constitutes the physiognomy of the world. Suspicion breeds resentment, and ultimately, bitter resentment finds its only alleviation in the utter and complete denunciation of science (and empiricism).

8 Horizonality Henry, Marion, and Lacoste attempt in their work to posit the possibility of vigorous denunciation of the world-horizon, and this in accord with the alternative world of spirituality the practice of the theological reduction makes available (available to those who commit to the invisible). To reduce the horizon of experience to the field of empirical experience is to indulge in an insecure and hasty overreaction to the very idea of the horizon (including scientific reason and empirical norms). I think Henry, Marion, and Lacoste are representative of a trend guilty of an understandable, but overhasty, reaction. Their sacramental phenomenology suffers from the logic of a zero-sum game: one prejudice must wholly displace another. A sacramental phenomenology, as I conceive it, remains faithful to the sacramental character of the world precisely by not abandoning the horizon of objects, material things, and empirical reason, but by expanding and enriching that horizon (by making it less rigid). I encourage my reader to enjoy the excess of things while not transcending that horizon of those things. There are not two worlds, an empirical world opposed to a spiritual world. The exemplar or model of sacramental phenomenology’s concern to inhabit with steadfast dedication the single horizon of things, in all of its excess, is the eucharist. This may be why the eucharist, no mere ritual, appears in the final remarks of nearly every chapter below. When taken together as a trend in phenomenology, family resemblances emerge that involve Henry, Marion, and Lacoste in a common and recognizable sacramental phenomenology, one I hope to make more theologically concrete and conceptually discernable—even while I challenge its earnest but misplaced aim at every turn. Of the many topics and concerns addressed in what follows, the overarching intention is to provide a fresh phenomenological vantage point from which to view the hermeneutics and rationality of sacramental theology that eludes the grip of empiricism’s stranglehold, at least the rationality bound up with the metaphysics of representation—a sometimes befuddling philosophical bogeyman to which we now turn.

II The metaphysics of representation Henry, Marion, and Lacoste offer a sacramental “phenomenology of the heart.” The fundamental target of critique for them, and I no doubt follow them, is the arid and lifeless metaphysics of representation that dominates so much modern philosophy. Representation presupposes a two-world structure of experience which I shall refuse, or intercept by a more basic phenomenological paradigm of embodied experience. I relegate the metaphysics of representation to the misguided province of the conceits (and prejudices) of empiricism. Empiricism professes that it functions not so much as an interpretation of the world but as an impersonal and objective synopsis of brute givens derived from sense data. Such a pretense to neutrality and the third-person point of view belies its own metaphysical dogma of two worlds, a subject (world one) and an object (world two).11

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  9 Representation is a species of Platonic metaphysics insofar as it takes for granted something like a world of Eden and the world I experience one step removed from Eden. How, one may obviously philosophically inquire, can I experience Eden at all? One’s mind does not enter Eden according to representational standards of experience. I experience only a simulation or copy or duplication of that world on the strength of the power of the mind to duplicate the world as a facsimile. The logistical mechanics of how such a simulation works may differ according to the type of realism or empiricism adjudicated by a particular thinker, but both its structure and logic remain consistent. Hence: I as a subject represent the world “out there” as an object “inside” the chamber or cabinet of my mind. In this structure, the sense organs produce impressions or sketches of the world that accumulate for the express purpose of constructing a copy or hologram of the world to which the mind conforms and of which the mind can represent to itself in a phenomenally transparent stream of consciousness. Simple but elegant, the metaphysics of representation holds tightly to the basic sense data theory that, “perception is nothing but the acquiring of knowledge of particular facts about the world, by means of the senses.”12 To describe representation as an egoic “procedure” is to claim it is a subjective accomplishment of the mind’s capability to provide itself with representations [Vorstellungen] that reflect outside material and which are filed away, or “stored up inside.” This dichotomous picture of the boundary between mind and world echoes Heidegger’s sentiment that the “representational” mind transcends itself or leaps outside of itself in the imperious act of grasping; representation prompts “a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it.”13 No relic from the past of early modern philosophy, this “cabinet” metaphor retains a hold on the imaginations of philosophers up to the present. Thus: the ego is configured more recently to assume the shape of a “tunnel.” Inside, the subjective perspective admits only so much light from the outside world that, once admitted, illuminates the mind’s narrow and confined internal space (safely guarded by the brain). The principal point to understand here is that the brain or mind exists inside of itself, without direct access to the outside world, except as if through a small incision. That data arrive via the opening, and the brain fabricates a “world- simulation” model that gives the impression the tunnel’s content is transparently reflective of the content of the world. It is as if I were present in a world outside my brain. According to the metaphysics of representation, there remains a strict division between brain and world. The world I simulate inside my “ego tunnel” systematically externalizes itself by way of internal world-simulation (i.e., the unity of conscious experience follows from the hologram of the world it manages to generate).14 The upshot, then, of representation remains the following assumption: I have fallen from Eden, from being in the outside to being trapped within

10 Horizonality my mind. My experience of the world, therefore, does not entail a perfect representation or copy of that world, but it does approach something like a working cognitive or conceptual facsimile of that perfect world; the copy is a mosaic or composition put together by mind’s powers of simulation. In the act of simulation the representational faculty gathers data from the intake of small and diverse pieces of spatiotemporal content.15 The “givens” here are understood to be immediate and brute, and therefore objective, but in need of unification, an occurrence wrought in the mind’s faculty of integration, a site where the mind’s tunnel (or cabinet, or a similar spatial metaphor) continually makes an internal world-picture correlate to a flow of sense impressions. It is not as if the ego-tunnel has fragmentary experiences in which the world appears in the pluriformity of discrete pieces of data, sometimes connected to each other and sometimes not. The tunnel’s integrity as a single tunnel that unifies data into a simulation of the world does not accommodate back alleys, forks in the road, side streets, or alternative paths. The mind, according to the metaphysics of representation, must reflect or “mirror” the one world of Eden the best that it can, and it aspires to simulate the world of Eden as a single, intelligible whole, an egoic performance of world-binding. One philosopher imagines (dripping with snark that runs the risk of losing the force of the point) this representational picture to assume the existence of a miniature cryptographer inside the mind whose purpose is to set into operation the world-binding feature on which world-simulation depends. In other words, the homunculus can translate immediate, raw givens into a coherent, synchronic pattern of the outside world.16 Such a two-world model of representation remains a powerful myth that continues to hold captive the philosophy of mind in various quarters. I discuss, and counteract, the “myth of the immediate given” that underlies so much representational models in Chapter 7.

III Phenomenology versus representation Here, I outline the metaphysics of representation in more detail, in order to prepare the ground for subsequent essays. But first (to avoid confusion), I find it necessary to make clear that I reject this picture of experience on phenomenological grounds. It is crucial to observe at the outset here that the phenomenology of horizon I propose displaces this two-world image with a one-world domain in which discrete boundaries between subjective experience and sense data cannot in principle be disentangled from each other and thus cannot occupy two wholly separate worlds. The subject (domain one) and the thing itself (domain two) are not alienated one from the other but already imply each other. Husserl describes the rallying cry of phenomenology as the “return to the things themselves” in just this spirit of integration and holism.17 If the phenomenological tradition announces itself as the intellectual home of true or “genuine positivism,”18 it opens its

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  11 doors to experience only in the sense that first-person accounts of experience surmount the dualism inherent in third-person empirical studies. Phenomenology, that is, does not claim there are multiple worlds (that each subjective perspective reflects a world unto its monadic self), but one world experienced from various points of view. I see the world, the only world we have, as mine, and therefore according to my particular cultural, educational, religious, and linguistic perspective. The existential orientation to be made explicit in this book charts out this disposition as a middle condition between idealism and realism: neither is there a mind-independent world nor is there a subjective world unique and wholly relative to myself as a historicist world unto my communitarian self. My denial of the mind-independent world, in other words, does not reduce my position to the magical model of absolute idealism—that the mind somehow creates or fabricates the world in its own image. Knowing and experiencing is not the same thing as “making.” First-person experience is disclosing; it neither produces nor causes (the world has causal independence). The alteration enacted by the subjective act concerns the mode in which this agent (this “me” that I am in my particularity) experiences the world; just so, my viewpoint concerns the mode rather than the what of the awareness. The world as I experience it in my first-person perspective is given according to the local articulation my embodied heart grants to it. I experience the world according to the light my bodily mood sheds on it. But in such an act of illumination, I do not create or constitute the world from nothing. The world is independent of my mind, but its manifestation is tied to the first-person display of the world I enjoy in my embodied stream of consciousness. The embodied and affective structure of the mind conditions and thereby “enworlds” the givenness of the world, but there remains only one world for all. There is no mindless or disembodied world. Thus, the world is given, but it is not given to me as a brute fact or naked object. The mutually illuminating interrelation of the two domains (subject and world) is illustrated by the logic of the horizon of experience. Because causality runs in both directions at once, horizonality need not rely on the foundation of representation or the cognitive power of “copying” or “simulating,” precisely because the interrelation of the two domains abandons the clear and distinct cleavage between the representing mind (domain one) and the world represented in a unity of objects in the world (domain two).19 Further reflections on the structure of representation must lay the groundwork for the analysis of the horizon. The metaphysics of representation emanates from the principle that if an experience of an object is to be my own experience it must be from the beginning a representation that I grasp cognitively, with concepts and ultimately words. In this, I noetically apprehend the raw sense impression and what must be the effects of the connection between the aspects under which the impression gives itself and its synthesis into an object by the mind’s power to simulate the world. Here

12 Horizonality the return to the interior as a domain of subjectivity abstracted out from the horizon of the world modifies the way in which the synthesis of objects can obtain “in my mind.” For example, in Locke’s Essay we witness the language of the inner “cabinet” that identifies the mind as an empty space designed to be furnished over time by sense data, the “materials about which [the mind] exercises its discursive faculty.” Words eventually become attached to sense data, or “names got to them” precisely in the sense that language marks or picks out the impression. Language, by way of verbal signs, can match the “Reality of Things.”20 The priority falls on discursive faculties and linguistic conceptualization. Similarly, Bishop Berkeley likes to describe the phenomenon of experience as a representation of the world inside the mind. A picture drawn by sense organs, the idea of the world engraved in my mind represents or replicates the external world as it really is, but it does so according to discrete signs and concepts. 21 Hume follows suit, for “when I shut my eyes and think of my chamber,” he concludes that its form occasions the following thesis: “All ideas are deriv’d from impressions, and are nothing but copies and representations of them.”22 The conceptualism underlying these empiricist models of the mind takes for granted that it is “ideas” or the “discursive faculty” or the “conceptual power” that formulates the world I experience. Every chapter shall challenge this intellectualism or conceptualism by presuming to present not how we “think” about, but how we “feel” in relation to, the world, as a world endowed with meaning (even theological meaning enacted by the performance of the sacraments)—where no gap between myself and the world can obtain.

IV The visual gap of representation: cognition’s failure Thus far I have urged the thesis that there lies no gap between my embodied apprehension of the world and the world carte blanche. I recapitulate the argument and illuminate it more clearly in this section not so much as a point of repetition but as a strategy of reinforcement. I do not need the cognitive power of representation to feel and, hence, know the world. I simply feel it, and from within that known-how, I move competently within it. In my embodied mood, in my attentiveness to the horizon of experience, I also happen to throw open simultaneously my capacity to engage the world as a field of pragmatic know-how. The “no gap” thesis will be shored up in the following chapters, but it remains necessary here, up front, to outline the structure of the gap (and its failings) as starkly as possible, so as to avoid confusion about my own position. The metaphysics of representation, however many philosophical problems it involves (it is many), exhibits a chief structural problem that makes it irreparable as a paradigm of knowledge. Representation, precisely because it claims to achieve a representation of an object before a perceiving

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  13 subject that it “sees” before its gaze, poses a gap between the mind’s eye and world. The gap, or the space between, inaugurates a spatial metaphor that initiates the possibility of the act of vision: the interior chamber of the mind must traverse its barrier by way of language and concepts, and ultimately cognitive vision, in order to see the exterior world. Propositions, sentences, concepts, each of these categories determine the philosophical conviction that the mind’s eyes function like a great mirror; the conceptual mechanics of vision formulates representations that, as mental states, reflect the world as it really is, independent of the mind’s gaze. Such an ocular metaphor has deep roots in early modern post-Cartesian metaphysics, as does the imagery of the mind as an “interior chamber” that gathers together information about the free-standing objective world “out there.” The mind can testify to its own fidelity as a mirror, for by introspection and careful empirical analysis, it can ensure there is a proper match between the mind and the world. A principal claim of this book is that there remains little to be gained from an attempt to demonstrate how concepts and sentences map onto a mind-independent world. Why so? The return to the interior chamber (the world model active inside the mind) poised in opposition to the exterior world is the ontological interval or “gap” that I wish to identify as the principal structural flaw of representation. In this it reduces know-how to a mere knowing-that. The faculty of the mind’s vision is supposedly capable of seeing the world only once the mind admits sense data from the external world; the performance of representation creates a distance between the subject and the world to be bridged by concepts or discursive ideas that emanate out from the cabinet of the mind, whose line of sight can reach out and “appropriate” data. The uncrossable gap between subject and world demands that the mind pursue the connecting operations (or linkages) with abstract concepts. The reflective gaze of the mind, then, permits also the act of introspection, as if the mind as a spectator investigates how the external world reappears in the internal domain of concepts, language, reason. If representation works according to the logic of vision, a question ensues: how does representation make possible, however flawed it is, the match between mind and world if there remains an unbridgeable gap between those two domains? The short answer is that it does not permit a genuine relationship to transpire, precisely because the gap is uncrossable. The more developed and detailed answer shall interrogate the representational gap as an abyss of permanent alienation of mind from the world. The precondition for representation of the world is the self or subject. Moreover, it follows from this judgment (self as precondition) that the self stands outside of (or extrinsic to) the world of Eden. While it is true that I do not represent “myself” to myself as a marginal object floating next to the object I represent in my mind (the coffee mug I am beholding with my eyes with “myself” hovering next to it), the self nevertheless occupies a central role within the drama of representation. I represent, in front of myself, the

14 Horizonality object I behold. I pose it before me, as that objective correlate grasped by the self who exercises the power to represent the coffee mug before it, in front of it. The subject constitutes the basic field of vision and thus the condition where all discovery of objects unfolds; the self throws open the gap or interval where it may represent objects in front of it. In my vision of the coffee mug, the interval is not overcome but rather maintained by representation. The interval of representation, due to its rigid structure, necessarily constructs two incommensurable substances that communicate by sheer reflection or simulation. In representation, it is as if the fact that the tree that receives its reflection back from the river could constitute deductive grounds to claim that the tree is a living and embodied agent. 23 The deductive form of knowing-that depends on a single axiom or innate principle in the ego, an unmovable structure on which knowledge is contained. Deduction does not yield, in other words, an interrelation that presupposes an embodied agent with first-person subjectivity. In contrast, the self as I conceive of it here (and in subsequent chapters) is inductive, in which the self finds itself immersed in the horizon of experience from the start. An affective and embodied agent with the power to disclose the world begins not with theory but with experience. Husserl and phenomenology work backward, that is, inductively: understanding know-how is particularly important for overcoming, by way of inversion, the metaphysics of representation. The present book seeks to work backward from notions of commitment, practice, and inference to notions such as truth and representation. Husserl’s portraiture of the ego, unjustly conflated with the Cartesian ego, advocates for inductive forms of description. Phenomenological research carries out its agenda according to the law of observation of experience, prior to any theoretical standpoint, and, therefore, prior to the intervention of dogmatic prejudices about empiricism that could shape in advance what may be manifest. Husserl claims, rightly, that empiricists “start from unclarified preconceived opinions” which involve a dogmatic claim about what constitutes knowledge. The spirit of phenomenology deliberately purges itself of preconceived opinions. In so doing it is the genuine positivism of positivisms, in which “we allow no authority to curtail our right to accept all kinds of intuition as equally valuable legitimating sources of cognition—not even the authority of ‘modern natural science.’”24 There are not, according to Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, principles innate to the ego that lay a foundation from which the horizon of experience could be inferred. Thus, phenomenology and its descriptions are not governed by “an ell-embracing system of deductive theory,” but rather “are ultimately grounded, not on an axiom, an ego cogito, but on an all-embracing self-investigation.”25 The inductive approach does not deny that sense data make a landing on a subject. Certainly, to quote Husserl again, when it is “actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples.”26 Such occasions, however, are rare. The landing of sense data (the moment I see a waterfall)

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  15 already invoke the force of interpretation, in which the subject and world address each other as a compound or unity that precedes any representational gap between raw data and an interested subject. Should we follow an inductive approach, the phenomenology of experience results in two preliminary conclusions: (i) the world does remain at a distance, an object forced into a set of manageable, disposable significations or objective syntax, and (ii) the subject is not a static spectator whose interior chamber aims to simulate or copy the world. In this way, phenomenology’s idea of know-how overcomes representation. Within the metaphysics of representation lies the equally fundamental assumption that it is only the mind or thinking that can permit the mind to traverse the gap. This reductive view of the subject, as nothing more than a representational cryptographer, has been (thankfully) dismissed by some philosophers as cold and calculating, as passionless and abstract, as a type of deductive “cognitivism” or “intellectualism” or “mentalism” or “conceptualism.”27 Some like Antonio Damasio would dismiss deduction as “Descartes’ error,” the forlorn legacy of classical or early modern rational epistemology, that “thinking, and awareness of thinking, are the real substrates of being” (Je pense donc je suis). 28 What if there is an alternative way to inhabit the world that privileges affection, mood, and the body? What if we can outline the prospects of being at home with the things themselves and know them in body and soul, a know-how always in process, with no gap between mind and world? What if we allow the idea of know-how to heal the yawning alienation between an empty cabinet and interpretation-free sense data that representation falsely promotes? Certainly, I do not deny the force and importance, and above all, the utility of concepts or thinking. We may call the use of concepts an act of judgment or discernment or deliberation. For example, to portend theological things to come—the reflective power of the faculty of the mind enables many practicing Christians to understand their faith and read about their intellectual tradition (and other religious adherents their tradition). Phenomenology accounts for how the subject wields concepts, and yet, phenomenology properly practiced argues that concepts are not bare cognitive categories, but rather learned concepts already immersed in embodied social practice. They are inculcated in a normative context learned over time by embodied agents who do not stand at a distance from the world but are already part and parcel of the world. Thus, concepts do not have to be reduced to discrete cogs in the metaphysics of representation; concepts do not relay direct “immediate physical experience” but rather arrive as already-packaged practices, learned in the context of a vast network of cultural conventions and embodied social practices. Our conceptual experiences are framed by conventionality (social, bodily, religious). Know-how is already present in concept-use itself, with no gap between concept-use and the world. To speak of the spatial concepts of “up” or “bottom” is to locate them on the plane of emotive metaphors, tied

16 Horizonality to the basic orientation of the sensory-motor movements in relation to objects. More is always “up,” as if the stock market jumped. Less or bad refers to the “downward” motion, as if the stock market hit rock bottom. Ordinary social practices like pouring water into a glass and seeing the level go up enable us to conflate (at an early age) that more refers to the metaphor of upward movement. We live by embodied metaphors, not atomistic, floating concepts that hook onto the world (a view that trades on a gap between concepts and world). 29 Many more examples could be adduced in favor of the importance of non-representational experience that would also involve narrative composition and conceptual content. To repeat: I do not claim we exist in a world free of concepts, sentences, and narratives. Not at all. I emphasize instead only that a more basic way of relating to the world involves inductive logic, which, in turn, relies on embodied kinesis, affective mood, and social practice; taken together, they constitute the horizon of experience in which conceptual content, propositional attitudes, and narrative constitution make sense. Some examples of experience may seemingly elude concepts for the moment. In reality they do not: regular kissing one’s spouse or partner, even if perfunctory, shows that embodied intimacy can help both partners enjoy health benefits, emotional connection, and ultimately an increase in interpersonal happiness. Of course, the conceptual content that it be my wife or partner infuses the example with narrative meaning. When I play the piano, I do not think about every single move the fingers make as they glide across the keys, even while I do follow a specific pattern known as sheet music. Nor do I use concepts to think about every dribble of the basketball (or even every shot I attempt), even while I understand I can neither double dribble nor shoot a free three-pointer unless I’m behind 25 foot arc. The repetitive and quick nature of the bodily movements discloses a kinetic “knowing” or practical know-how. I know the piano and the basketball, and their fields of practice, as forms of tacit knowledge, an embodied skill-laden knowledge learned over time (and through repetition). Hubert Dreyfus, as is well known, will say we can use these examples, and others, to justify the larger claim that there remains a primitive, nonconceptual basis of all of living, what he calls the mood of skillful coping in the world. 30 But I do employ concepts and narrative orders of meaning all the time, even if they do not belong to the domain of the metaphysics of representation. To be clear, I am not saying that nonconceptual and nonverbal knowledge bound up with embodied habit must also cancel out conceptual forms of knowledge rooted in propositional attitudes and narrative imaginaries. Let us dwell on a more ordinary event to make my point: reading in a coffee shop in the city center of London. The shop is busy, and the noises abound. All the noise emanating from the espresso machines, customers, buses outside, and so forth remains background material, like conceptual wallpaper. The datum, the givenness of the multiplicity of noise, is present

Overcoming metaphysics of representation  17 to me as I read, but I do not notice it conceptually or consciously. Also, I do not notice the black and white properties of the words on the page. I am nevertheless aware all along of myself and of my surrounding world, because both are present to me even if they recede from conceptual knowing. If someone approaches me and asks me “what are you up to?” I will immediately respond in the medium of concepts that I’m reading Shakespeare in London City Centre at this particular coffee shop on this particular day (I may have backstory to tell about why I’m in London too). My attention shifts from being absorbed in the reading material to latent information that has been nonconceptually present to me all along, since I did not just then acquire that information by way of inference.31 This everyday example can show that I do not deny the use of concepts and discursive faculties of the mind What I am claiming, to be clear, is that it would be phenomenologically erroneous for us to grant to discursive reason a privileged status, as if there is a “faculty of pure reason” that constitutes the chief medium of my experience of the world. Phenomenology, expressed in its greatest exponents, brings to light the know-how of nonconceptual mood. Often, to reveal any mood, an analysis of the medium of embodied habit and social practice must take place. In mood, then, the body’s movement validates the fact that there is “always more” than what I behold with concepts directed at a particular object or person. The coffee mug (or the Shakespearean text), just as it is given to me from its particular angle, offers itself to me in perceptual awareness, an act synthesized in my mind. This cannot be denied. Because this side of the coffee mug purports to disclose more than one side, that there are further sides or angles of the mug, it becomes clear that there is a larger nonconceptual context or whole in which that single side of the mug fits into. Hence phenomenology states that the corresponding mug (this side of it) contains more than merely what is given in the sense data. Attached to the coffee mug is set within and conforms to (is in harmony with) a broader set of social norms and expectations and embodied practice (that the mug will have writing that is light and witty, or a picture of a landscape, or an advertisement, etc.). Experience of the coffee mug occurs in a horizon, and the horizon furnishes me with a field of experience. Experience and horizon go hand in hand with each other. The horizon of experience, to which I turn in the next chapter, constitutes a pregiven background of meaning, infused in, and carried by, our kinetic know-how, a foundation for our knowing-that. We are dealing with in this context not an isolated Cartesian subject, but an “openly endless horizon of human beings” who are capable of interrelating with each other, and thereby endowing objects with, a plurality of valid alterations. This horizon of communalization [Vergemeinschaftung], this horizon of affection and mood, involves a manifold of “ever-widening ramifications” of experience, a “something more” shaping me from within, as this individual, embodied subject. 32

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Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A15/B29, p. 152. 2 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A30/B45, p. 162. For the German, see Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Jens Timmermann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998), A30/B45, p. 105. 3 For a helpful review of this debate and the important figures involved, see Christina Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 4 My focus on the eucharist and ritual would contrast with Kevin Hart’s definition of phenomenological theology. He writes, “phenomenological theology begins with attention to a literary form, the parable. It is the study of metaphor and narrative that grounds Christian theology, not metaphysics or philosophy, or even phenomenology as a school within philosophy.” I do not think our positions are mutually exclusive. For more see his Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 154. In a general way, my approach resembles more closely that of Anthony Steinbock’s work on religious experience and givenness, and in like manner, Henry and Marion’s emphasis on the receptivity of the given according to the manner in which the given arises. Here lived experience of an embodied state of affairs takes precedence. Steinbock writes, In becoming vulnerable to the givenness of what is giving itself in its self-givenness, the phenomenologist becomes subject to the experience in the description. So it may happen that even if we try to describe these givennesses ‘abstractly’ or ‘theoretically,’ by opening ourselves implicitly to the direct experience of them, we open ourselves to being ‘struck’ by them, instigating a perceptual, an epistemic, an aesthetic, a moral, or even a religious insight, relation, and transformation. Of course, if there is too much self-interest, we can distort the descriptions/experiences to such an extent that the whole process becomes compromised. The danger here is not just that we leave too much out of account but that we become mere academics, mere professionals. Ifully concur. See Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 5. 5 Others, in a more distinctly Calvinist voice (one I can identify with), apparently reduce the liturgy to reading scripture and preaching about scripture; the eucharist, too, must be a fundamental point of departure for the liturgical enactment of love and community. For a narrow view of liturgy, reduced to scriptural experience, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, who writes, Third, the component of liturgical enactments that most people will have thought of first when reflecting on liturgical participation as formative of neighbor love is the reading of Scripture and the preaching of a sermon or homily. Depending, of course, on the content of the Scripture reading and on the content of the sermon or homily, this is indeed one of the most important ways—perhaps the most important way—in which Christians are schooled in love for the neighbor, as it is also one of the most important ways in which they are schooled in Christ-like friendship love. Iheartily disagree “most people” would see liturgy in this scripture-centered way. One of the most important liturgical enactments of love is the eucharist, as I intend to show in the following chapters. For his view, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Liturgical Love,” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 30, no. 3 (2017): 314–28, quote on p. 328.

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6 My interpretation of “thing” in the expression I use above and later in this book (“excess of things”) is inspired in part by Heidegger’s expansive interpretation of the “thing.” What draws me to the Heideggerian framework is the clear anti-representational (and thus anti-Kantian) structure of the experience of a thing(s). For example, Heidegger writes, for Kant, that which is becomes the object of a representing that runs its course in the self-consciousness of the human ego. The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the object-in-itself. To Kant, the character of the “in-itself” signifies that the object is an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it, that is, without the opposing “ob-” by which it is first of all put before this representing act. “Thing-in-itself,” thought in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us, because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible before: for the human representational act that encounters it. (pp. 174–75) Athing as Heidegger describes it in the following quote here is closer to how I would understand and thus formulate the meaning of “excess of things” in Heidegger’s wake, a phrase that captures properly the network of things (jugs, mountains, books, planes, sports, liturgical wine, etc.) that gives rise to our world and in which we ourselves, as living subjects, make meaning and dwell. Heidegger portrays the “thing” in the same well-known essay (entitled “The Thing”) as an object bound up with world making: If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing of world. Nearing is the nature of nearness. As we preserve the thing qua thing we inhabit nearness. The nearing of nearness is the true and sole dimension of the mirror-play of the world. When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means of human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance of mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents—that is, explains—to the thinking that responds and recalls. (p. 179)

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), pp. 161–84. See Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 11. For a lucid commentary on the importance of the recovery of a theory of “know how,” Mark Johnson, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), see chapter 7. See his now classic, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett, Quiet Powers of the Possible; Interview in Contemporary French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 5. For more on the dogmatic attitude of empiricism, especially the dogma of reductionism, see Quine’s justly famous, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review, vol. 60, no. 1 (1951): 20–43. David M. Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World (London: Routledge and Paul, 1964), p. 112. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 89. I’m also influence here by Michel

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16 17 18

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Horizonality Henry’s incisive critique and interpretation of representation. See especially his work, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 70–75 and 105–110. See also the excellent and concise John Drummond, “Intentionality without Representationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 115–133. For more on this world-simulation model, see Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009). I borrow this Edenic two-layer language from David Chalmers, who embraces it fully and with little qualification. See his “Perception and the Fall from Eden,” in Perceptual Experience, eds. Tamar S. Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 49–112. L.A. Paul recently suggested that the world may have a composition of spatiotemporal contents, so that the world reduces to a mosaic of those pieces gathered together into a patchwork of spatiotemporal material. See her “Building the World from Its Fundamental Constituents,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 158 (2012): 221–256. Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 6–7. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, trans. J.N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), §2. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), p. 39. I shall refer to this important text as Ideas I going forward. One may risk attaching the label of “absolute idealism” to phenomenology, as Didier Franck ostensibly attempts to do in passing (with some irony): precisely because there is no meaning apart from consciousness or the self, then it may follow that the world itself is accomplished only within the parameters of the ego. See his Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl, trans. Joseph Rivera and Scott Davidson (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 69. See John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 55 and 505. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. Howard Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 27, 142, 145. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 8 and 18. The image is drawn from Henry, Genealogy, p. 80. Husserl, Ideas I, pp. 38–39. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Springer, 1960), p. 156. Husserl, Ideas I, p. 39. Representational metaphysics is called cognitivism by John Haugeland, Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapter 1; intellectualism by Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, pp. 161–161, 375, 412 and by Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chapter 1; and mentalism by Hilary Putnam and Hubert Dreyfuss, see Putnam, Representation and Reality, chapter 1 and Hubert Dreyfuss, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. ix. Jean-Yves Lacoste might call it conceptualism, as I do in his wake in Chapter 9.

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28 Antonio Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1998), p. 248. 29 Jocelyn Benoist makes this argument well. Concepts are always already embedded and contextualized; see his Concepts: une introduction à la philosophie (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), pp. 50–55; also see the now classic work on this: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); while they admit that literal concepts do exist (and thus escape the schemata of metaphor), they state this in a later work: Can we think about subjective experience and judgment without metaphor? Hardly. If we consciously make the enormous effort to separate out metaphorical from nonmetaphorical thought, we probably can do some very minimal and unsophisticated nonmetaphorical reasoning. But almost no one ever does this, and such reasoning would never capture the full inferential capacity of complex metaphorical thought. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 61. 30 His work has been the site of a recent debate about the place of concepts in our coping. See the excellent contributions of Dreyfus in the Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. Joseph K. Schear (New York: Routledge, 2013). 31 For more on this, see Dan Zahavi’s excellent description of nonreflective awareness (and nonreflective self-awareness), in Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 20ff. 32 Husserl, Crisis, pp. 165–166. For the German, see Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und Die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 168.

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Affection and the horizon of experience

I Horizon and experience This “something more” underling all experience evokes the language of the horizon.1 The subject intends beyond the particular object and, in the context of transcendence, discloses in the margins of embodied practice (or is carried within embodied practice) the mood of possibility and expectation. Husserl will call this the “inner horizon” of each object and person latent in its particularity. Experience, then, does not take place within the head or cranium as a discrete series of individual mental pictures or representations. The mental picture does not determine the reference of the object it displays (e.g., the coffee mug from Chapter 1). The mind is not enclosed within the rigid outlines of its own internal domain, stranded within its own powers of duplication, simulation, imitation. The mind, that is, cannot be perceived as a disembodied thing that duplicates a world model within its subjective theater; for “the mind isn’t a thing with a location at all (so it is not simply the brain under another name), but a system of worldinvolving abilities and exercises of those activities.”2 Husserl will describe our world-involving abilities as a form of first-person givenness attached to an object’s “inner horizon” [Innenhorizon], “horizon-structure” [Horizonstructur], or “horizon-prescription” [Horizontverzeichnung]. In Experience and Judgment, he highlights that horizonality activates a gestalt shift in the subject (which Aaron Gurwtisch also emphasizes so well3). The embodied mind and the world-horizon, as two distinct sides of experience, retain their original occupations, but simultaneously, their interchange remains an affair of mutual illumination and reciprocal stipulation. The increase and expansion of the self occurs not in inverse relation to but in correspondence with the ever-widening ramifications of the horizon of experience. The embodied mind, the affective self, the subjective first-person ego, its growth and expansion unfolds in a context that allows its increase to be attended by an increase in the new determinations of the horizon. The excerpts from Husserl are long but necessary: Every experience has its own horizon; every experience has its core of actual and determinate cognition, its own content of immediate DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-3

Affection and the horizon of experience  23 determinations which give themselves; but beyond this core of determinate quiddity, of the truly given as “itself-there,” it has its own horizon. This implies that every experience refers to the possibility—and it is a question here of the capacity [Ver-moglichkeit] of the ego—not only of explicating, step by step, the thing which has been given in a first view, in conformity with what is really self-given thereby, but also of obtaining, little by little as experience continues, new determinations of the same thing… Thus, every experience of a particular thing has its internal horizon, and by “horizon” is meant here the induction which belongs essentially to every experience and is inseparable from it, being in the experience itself.”4 Each of us exists under the form of first-person lived experiences, whereby we have access to the horizon according to the first-person style of constitution; and yet, the first-person perspective or for-me-ness implies potentiality, indeed porosity, to the larger context of any individual thing given to me. This context invites an open-ended gestalt perception to take place. I shall describe its phenomenological givenness as the excess and porosity of things: the embodied mind and the world are not inevitable counterparts whereby the possibilities of the second overwhelm the not yet developed cognitive provisions contained in the first. The world belongs to me inasmuch as it elicits me to enter into its horizon, just as I belong to it inasmuch as I specify its shape if only for the sake of first-person order and apprehension. The two domains, (i) subject and (ii) horizon, are not unaccommodating to each other, but porous one to the other. Husserl again writes: While, beyond that, only an indeterminately general presumptive horizon extends, comprising what is strictly non-experienced but necessarily also meant. To it belongs not only the ego's past, most of which is completely obscure, but also his transcendental abilities and his habitual peculiarities at the time. External perception too (though not apodictic) is an experiencing of something itself, the physical thing itself: “it itself is there.” But, in being there itself, the physical thing has for the experiencer an open, infinite, indeterminately general horizon, comprising what is itself not strictly perceived a horizon (this is implicit as a presumption) that can be opened up by possible experiences. 5 I situate this particular coffee mug (the physical thing itself) within its larger context, what Husserl calls the object’s “infinite, indeterminately general horizon.” How can I understand this gestalt process unless the structure of the individual perception is porous to other objects proximate to it, not least to the history and future of the object itself? The approach of this book shall address this concern with the narrative that the horizon of experience is the manifestation of the porosity of things in relation to the first-person embodied “me.”

24 Horizonality Manifestation of this irreplaceable “me” involves the porosity of things, for the “me” discloses itself as a living subject precisely in throwing open porosity. I am embedded wholly within the horizon’s unfolding givenness, precisely because it—the unfolding as a process—takes its point of departure from “me.” I accomplish the world-horizon before whom other subjects who envision particular objects also appear, and who in their constitution of objects implicate a horizon that subsists as the porosity of things. Givenness, therefore, does not entail the prospect of a discrete object given as single unit isolated from other forms of givenness. The given is given within an endlessly flowing horizon of human beings who are capable of “meeting and then entering into actual contact with me and with one another.”6 My argument so far states that phenomenology’s aversion to the domain of discrete objects is an aversion not confined to any particular class of objects or persons, but rather to givenness as such. Phenomenology’s analysis, then, begins with givenness, for existence “opens and gives. And what does it give? Givenness.”7 Husserl claims the task of phenomenology is this: “to track down, within the framework of pure evidence or self-givenness, all correlations and forms of givenness, and to elucidate them through analysis.”8 The process whereby a phenomenon is given translates to the controversial and audacious claim that whatever may give itself can be manifest, or experienced as a “phenomenon” given to “me.” Givenness does not merely elucidate manifestation but simply is manifestation as such, which repudiates theory. Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that the given arrives within my field of experience prior to preconceived theory, in order to allow the following approach to unfold: that phenomena may give an account of themselves.9 An unstinting focus on givenness, from the side of phenomena, does not devolve into neutral description, like a methodical “hetero-phenomenology” that seeks to remove all traces of subjectivity or the first-person perspective.10 We must pause to note that phenomenology, in the academy, can have two definitions: first, the “precritical” definition of phenomenology as the pursuit of detached, neutral description, and second, the “critical” model in which first-person givenness is explored (in its many layers) as phenomenology’s fundamentum inconcussom. I adopt the second, critical model.11 This second model does not, and cannot, deviate from first-person givenness, the perspective I have of things that is uniquely “mine.” The heart of phenomenological analysis lies in its commitment to the clarification of the subjective structure of the given of this horizon, known as first-person givenness. All perspectives are born of embedded viewers, thinkers, and agents. Perspectives coincide with an angle or view; both angles and views emanate from an observer’s embeddedness, the particularity of “that” space and time, of “this” community, race, etc. A wide-open phenomenology, one that prohibits nothing in principle from being manifest, is possible because it concedes to perspectival givenness, that is, to the first-person context.

Affection and the horizon of experience  25 This broad view of phenomenology articulates a valuable corrective to scientific or empiricist paradigms of experience (covered in Chapter 1). The question to be addressed at this juncture is: what is the place of the first-person, subjective perspective in a wide-open phenomenology? It seems to me that “wide-open” phenomenology overcorrects in that it cannot tolerate what I summarily identify as subjective agency. I am an ego who experiences an object, but such a contention is generated out of the pressure that my agency opens or closes the field of experience. I give meaning, consequently, precisely because I am a subject with categories and taxonomies of agency, a capacity to appropriate objects which are thematized in conformity to my embodied particularity (my gender, race, language, height, etc.). The theme of the “passivity” of givenness (a theory of the subject found in figures like Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion) harbors a philosophical flaw about the first-person perspective, and eo ipso, about anthropology: it ignores the subjective ground of appearing that Husserl held to be indispensable for the structure of manifestation, i.e., subjective manners of givenness [subjektiven Gegebenheitsweisen].12 While Husserl neither presupposes a crude subject-object dualism nor devises a dichotomy between conceptual scheme and empirical world, he nonetheless affirms an important point made by transcendental idealism: namely, that the world engages each of us in acts of agency and predication because it cannot in principle take on the aura of a “ready-made” object, an unblemished free-standing structure quarantined from subjective judgments, concepts, categories, and standpoints. Husserl argues, in contrast to such bare empiricism, the ego fundamentally shapes (not manipulates) the world even as the world is given as the excess of things. The living ego does so according to the intentional complex of the lifeworld (a term to be defined below).13 The hermeneutical concept of lifeworld, or even “subjective experience,” framed here in a phenomenological sense I shall develop below, takes center stage. Because I see the world from my particular vantage point, and on that basis alone, I experience the world according to the particularities of the sphere of first-person givenness, from that unique vantage point, and no other. Can we enlarge the theater of manifestation beyond the boundaries of empiricism without falling prey to solipsism or subjectivism? The middle way between empiricism and subjectivism is illustrative of what may be called the “horizon-like depth of experience.”

II Affection and subjective horizon: more on experience Experience of any object occurs not only in the context of other objects but also in the flow of a vast river of possibilities of objecthood that we may call a “horizon.” In the domain of objects, the horizon functions like a surrounding halo of possibilities, in which the concrete possibilities

26 Horizonality involve constant negotiation with ever new possibilities. In response to the multiplicity of possibilities latent in the horizon, I may employ forms and vocabularies to grasp my surroundings, equipping me with words and taxonomies that enable me to give shape to my world. My unique cultural discourse and vocabularies have demonstrable hermeneutical limits, however. My urge to secure a final and sure boundary is overcome by the horizon’s indefinability. Horizonality prepares me, as I inhabit it, to reach into the unlimited and the indeterminate, and, thereby, into possibilities yet even to be made known. Feeling and mood can disclose more about possibility than cognitive discourse can: such is my thesis in what follows. It demands concrete examples to be outlined presently. The otherwise precise language of Husserl’s phenomenology fails to cope with the mystery and indefinability of the horizon. He writes: “My indeterminate surroundings are infinite, the misty and never fully determinable horizon is necessarily there.”14 Phenomena do not arrive in isolation, as if they appear to my heart and mind with the intensity of a vision that brackets all other phenomena. Husserl will instead indicate that a phenomenon (a chair, a mug, a person, etc.) is given along with other phenomena, and in conjunction with them, so that “groups of interconnections of knowing” constitute the lived experience of that particular phenomenon as a vast and intricate web of lived experience. Thus: I do not see, taste, smell, touch, or hear a phenomenon as a “free-floating particularity” but as a phenomenon given together with a cluster of other phenomena.15 Moreover, I grasp a phenomenon’s full manner of appearing when I place it in its proper interconnection with other phenomena; for any phenomenon to appear, it follows it must arrive in this horizon populated with other phenomena (and whole cultural framework of norms that teach me how to interpret those interconnections). May we offer a fuller phenomenological illustration of the horizon? What is its phenomenological shape if no one phenomenon can be isolated from all others? Can we describe the interconnections of knowing made manifest in the affection I undergo at the horizon’s behest? The horizon I see when I glance out over the ocean does not permit my eye to detect a “horizon,” if I am obligated to mean by that term a sharp boundary that may mark off clearly the sky from the ocean. The horizon instead appears to me as an indefinable “mist,” an infinitely shifting medium between sea and sky, a fluid space in which one territory bleeds into the other. I may eventually reach an equilibrium point, at which point I identify a general horizon-area, an edge-like silhouette, one in which I presume I can see distinct planes. Yet, the reality is that even at the equilibrium point I never isolate the precise locus of either the ocean’s beginning or the sky’s ending. Already, at this conjunction of sky and water, we can see that the horizon appears to be “out there,” but an equally important fact is that it evokes in me a subjective response. The “how” of givenness is here understood as a subjective process: the horizon unfurls “within” the

Affection and the horizon of experience  27 flowing stream of consciousness, the embodied expectations which govern the living valence of subjectivity, even if the horizon achieves its excess as a porosity of things that is neither exhausted nor enclosed in my subjectivity (as if the horizon fits inside the mind or the body). So elusive is the work of the depiction of the horizon that recourse to poetry strikes me as necessary. The poet elucidates the affective experience of a rose, a waterfall, an ocean, in contrast to the propositional attitude or the semantic analysis of a rose, a waterfall, an ocean. As Robert Solomon rightly observes, phenomenology is the best discipline for describing and unveiling our structure of feeling and what it can theoretically tell us about experience of the world.16 I concur, mostly. And yet, phenomenology does not suffice, not quite. The poet transcends literal language. Poetry vindicates the impulse we have that poetry’s utility lies in its capacity genuinely to illuminate the field of lived experience in manner consistent with the longings that emanate from the depth of the soul.17 One poet writes for example about the horizon:18 The horizon does not retreat Shimmers as if nothing Could endure to be there On its pitiless boundary The bob of a black something & the head of a seal Breaks the line Churns the surface With its far out silence It is nothing & it is there Why then is the heart elated At this elemental thing & its entreaty carried up To the lowering skies That never recede? There is nothing at all Nothing to it at all Why do I gaze blankly at the blank sea Empty of all things Expectant of all things Standing here so long an age

28 Horizonality As if my flesh were beyond all age & coagulated with the dark rock On which – in wave on wave – It founders? The ocean or sea (it may suffice here as a vivid metaphor) formulates one possible existential interpretation of the horizon. Affection, mood, concern—these crucial dispositions reveal the subjective formations of the horizon without implying such a revelation captures it in its totality. The poem says in the third stanza the “heart is elated” by this elemental thing that never recedes from view. It beckons or entreats my attentiveness, my concern, my care, so that it elicits in me a double heart-felt anticipation that the horizon is both empty of all things and full of all things (a few lines later: I’m “expectant of all things, standing here so long an age…”). The horizon, therefore, forms a vast web of interconnected phenomena, and their mutual illumination and porosity is a flowing experience that “coagulates” within me, as the final stanza states. My heart, the central site of lifeblood’s flow, grants to my experience of the world a sense of existential depth and temporal texture (e.g., expectancy), endued with meaning by my first-person subjective mood , my heart, where experience coagulates.19 When I stand on the beach and I focus on the sand beneath me, I am drawn out to the waves that I can see in my peripheral vision moving repetitiously. Its prominence affects me, and, in turn, my attentiveness is evoked and my heart-felt interest realized. In this arousal of my affection, Husserl will highlight that the prominence of the beach produces an “awakening attraction on the ego, a stimulus going to it,” which at the very same time opens up a horizon, so that my lived experience here and now “points beyond itself in an empty mode, which is filled only in subsequent realizations.”20 The mood of expectancy, as a continuous tendency, rises within me continuously. Hence my sense arise all at once, so that I hear the waves crashing down onto the sandy shoreline. I am, by the sound of crashing, drawn out further yet by the return and recurrence of the wave; I see the undulating ripples swallowed up by the ensuing wave. Further aroused, I look out, with the wind and sun in my face (this elemental thing), into the sequence of waves, where I glimpse the swell of rising water, before it crests and recapitulates the process. I look out yet further still, into the gentle, seemingly inert, body of water that expands behind the waves, which opens out into a rich and vibrant blue distance so vast that I cannot bring it into focus without doing violence to its mystery. However hard I concentrate on the water, I can only just glimpse the curvature of the globe, as my vision traces out the ocean to its eclipse, making my heart’s lifeblood coagulate. My eye can only grasp a vague distinction between the water at my feet as the water recedes and the point at which the

Affection and the horizon of experience  29 water vanishes from my field of vision in the far-off distance. The horizon of the water conceals an immeasurable depth as it moves outward from me, creating a horizontal plane invested with a “mist” of indeterminateness. At its limit, the ocean is manifest, as the poet says, in an interconnection of “points of mystery quivering with color,”21 a depth perception that recedes endlessly into the blue-gray horizon. The fusion of axis points, where blues and grays meet, represents the permanent indefinability of the horizon. The horizon does not lie within my grasp. It is not an object five or ten feet in front of me that I can single out or that my linguistic sign picks out among other referents in the world. It consists not of an assortment of objects or things, but of a depth or latency of indefinability that penetrates and surrounds my vision of all objects. Though my world is populated with objects and predictable possibilities, my “depth-perception” anticipates what the conscious, reflective ego cannot predict, because the mist of infinite possibilities that make up a horizon are never “on hand.” If I focus on the horizon itself, symbolized by the edge of the expansive ocean, I cannot grasp the full shape of its visual depth or spatial extension, as my eye moves from waves to the deep blue expanse of the ocean itself out to the horizon; nor can I apprehend clearly and distinctly the profile of the boundary between ocean and sky. What lays beyond the water? (Is it an island? Is it more water? Is it more sky? Is it nothing? Is it a fleet of ships?) Many visual fields merge, and therefore, the horizon invokes the possibility of their being an alliance between fields of experience (the ocean, the sky, the sun, etc.). They interact and overlap, forming and ongoing mutual definition and endless negotiation of one with the other. The shifting edge between the ocean and the sky communicates how complicated the task of marking off the boundary lines of territories can be. At which point does the sky properly begin? Where does the water stop? For now, let us dwell on physiognomy of the horizon. Just how large is it? Is it large, but measurable, like the circumference of the earth? The horizon’s shifting edge discloses a central manifestation of the boundary-free shape of a circle (or globe). Or better, the circle’s edges are infinite, and, in this sense, omnipresent. As a manifestation, the increase and movement of the horizon’s infinity cannot be enfolded into a set number of boundaries (if it has a number of boundaries or sides, it is then a polygon). A circle, like the horizon, has an infinite number of edges or sides. The horizon, if it truly is a horizon, must resist the definition and taxonomic clarity of defined, polygon-like shapes. How does one get outside of the horizon if it is infinite and indefinable? If the horizon’s indefinability renders its shape flexible and malleable, then it follows that, in principle, it cannot be breached or exceeded. For if water were to breach the hull of a ship, or I were found to be in breach of a contract, it follows that the water clearly moved from outside the hull to the inside of the hull or that I violated the terms of the contract that I had heretofore kept intact. In both cases, to breach something (a ship, a contract,

30 Horizonality etc.) is to isolate an object’s boundaries and then to step over the boundary line, moving entirely from one side of the boundary to the other. But, I wish to argue, the excess of the horizon prohibits breaching. The obvious consequence I may draw here about the nature of boundaries, borders, and “clear and distinct” outlines is that they do not apply to the horizon. Boundaries, in other words, ensure that we are talking about objects, things, episodes, and phenomena, not the horizon as such. Affection, or being-affected by the horizon, opens up an emotive strategy for inhabiting the horizon, and affections and emotions do not constitute a one-off disruption in our normal flow of experience.22 The horizonality of experience can neither ignore boundaries nor be sublated into them. The horizon accommodates every object that makes its appearance known, and, in this indirect fashion, is given to me. Such, at least, is my basic hypothesis. What this tentative definition of the horizon may suggest, and what I therefore want to make explicit here is that the horizon is the a priori of world-experience, which entails the concomitant claim that my moods and affections (being evoked by the horizon) are equally the a priori of world-experience. I need not reduce mood and affection to a set of emotional episodes beholden to particular stimuli, but rather I should reframe them as a condition for “being-affected” by the horizon. Being itself, Heidegger states rightly I think, is manifest only in the realm of affection. He writes being manifests itself because “it is capable of affecting us. “All affection,” continues Heidegger, “is a manifestation by which a being already on hand gives notice of itself.”23 Angst, care, love, and other basic attunements serve the function of “apertures” through which the world shows up, is illuminated, and stands out as meaningful at all. That is, I am affected by the world in the realm of affection (love, care, empathy, fear, angst, etc.), what Jean-Yves Lacoste will describe as our moral engagement with the world, in which no neutral or detached stance can be achieved; we are always concerned with and caring for the thing in the world with which we are occupied. To have an experience is to encounter an object in an indefinable expanse of potentialities of further experience, just as they bound up with shifting contours of cultural norms, historical optics, and linguistic habits. An experience of any kind, of any object, cannot transcend this condition of my being-affected by the horizon. Why? To reiterate: to transcend, exceed, or breach the horizon would assume that I can define the horizon clearly and distinctly, as if I could master its shape, in order to exceed, transcend, or breach it. If, then, the horizon consists of a fusion of experiences and constitutions in which shades of manifestations merge one with the other, then the use of the terminology of boundary is inappropriate. The horizon assures us that no boundaries exist in the structure of manifestation with the kind of fixity that certainty of scientific axioms require. I wish to claim that the contours of experience as a whole are ineluctably framed according to the logic of

Affection and the horizon of experience  31 horizon. Though experience enjoys the structure that cultural norms and social practices offer it, the domain of affection in which it occurs escapes the empirical convention of the authentication of secure boundaries, that once in place can be overcome in the name of theological, ideological, political, or spiritual protest. The upshot of my position is the double claim: (1) all experience takes place within the horizon, since the horizon is manifestation as such, (2) but that the horizon does not eliminate mystery, depth, or expansion of norms that theology, political theory, cultural studies, and critical theory celebrate.

III Conflicting interpretations of the horizon To evoke the horizon as an ultimate ground for manifestation is to throw up an all-important question: is such an interpretation plausible, not least illusory? Can a boundary-less horizon inform or illuminate the manifestation of an object, a thing, a subject, or manifestation in general? The question remaining is whether the horizon so conceived can be useful or valid, as a category for the present analysis. Is it a mere lexical trick, fabricated to suit my (admittedly spiritual) purposes? Or is there a tradition or phenomenological pedigree on which I drawing, even if I am providing what I deem to be an essential corrective (or emphasizing an aspect of the horizon that has been neglected)? The duality of manifestation, of the correlation between the appearing and what appears, unfolds in the horizon. 24 How this has been configured and even challenged is the topic at hand, and such a task may help us avert crucial misunderstandings about the nature of the horizon’s “ever widening ramifications.” Heidegger employs in early works the vocabulary of “horizon” and “horizonality.” In Being and Time, for example, he adopts the term in certain circumstances, whereby it seems to me he intends to describe horizon as a background against which or “out from which” a phenomenon is made manifest and thereby made available to Dasein. The horizon may mark a boundary, a clear backdrop against which the illumination of a particular object can become a meaningful and thus a visible phenomenon revealed out in bold relief for me. 25 Later in Being and Time, in Part II, the term takes on new significance, but it remains underdeveloped, if always linked to the finitude of Dasein, namely: that Dasein unfolds within the horizon of time. The horizonal “leeway” or “play” [Spielraum] of temporal projection, for example, remains a fertile use of the term by Heidegger that I intend to exploit in the service of sacramental spirituality below, in the final chapter (postscript). 26 So far there is little to engage here, concerning the affair of the use of the term. That changes once the meaning of horizon becomes a target of clear critique in the French tradition of phenomenology. The French reception of the term horizon, by Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion in particular, is deeply indebted to Heidegger’s spartan and seemingly neutral definition

32 Horizonality of the term. In keeping with the French tradition, both Henry and Marion are indebted to Heidegger only to the extent they object to, and thus react against, Heidegger’s totalizing usage of the vocabulary of horizon, since it seems Heidegger links the scope of horizon to the scope of temporal projection. Finding the Heideggerian horizon restrictive because of its pretense to neutrality, Henry and Marion seek a method of phenomenology that unveils uncharted fields of manifestation, at least uncharted according to the cannons of the narrow scope of Heidegger’s horizon. For both French interpreters, then, the work of phenomenology immediately takes on a moral imperative: the horizon (as Heidegger conceives it) eliminates from its purview important phenomena that are fundamental to life itself—the spiritual depth of the soul and the very right we owe to “invisible” phenomena to appear within the remit of manifestation, of that which can be given. For example, Michel Henry interprets the horizon as an accomplishment of the late modern ambition to “represent” the world as a visible stage of manifestation (noted above). The true core of Henry’s argument lies in the assertion that the horizon swallows up manifestation of phenomena within its clutches, and makes them submit to its definition of evidence as visibility (as if the horizon exercises an agency to subdue or assimilate things under its form). In his magisterial Essence of Manifestation, Henry associates the horizon with a tradition of modern philosophy that privileges the visible world at the expense of another domain of manifestation, what he calls the sublayer of manifestation of the invisible. Invisibility resides in an underground layer of the self, the domain of manifestation situated below or underneath the visible world (which, as we shall see below, is a theological domain). The clash between these two domains, as I read Henry, leads to a clash between truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, deception, or between being and representational illusion. What is at stake in this war of phenomenological grammars is the fundamental nature of manifestation, and, indeed, the definition of the horizon of experience. Just like the field of representation, the horizon in Henry’s eyes opens out as a field of presence that assumes the shape of a hologram. All phenomena, whether it be data as vast and diverse as an ocean or a forest, appear or are displayed as visible objects within the predetermined field of the horizonas-visibility. The forest is not really the thing itself but only a once-removed three-dimensional copy that vision can grasp in its act of beholding at a distance. Henry reduces the horizon to the power of representation, and so, he can write, As the transcendental condition of an object in general, as the pure form of objectivity which prefigures and precedes, by making it possible, every object as such. That which permits each Being to manifest itself, to become a ‘phenomenon,’ is the milieu of visibility wherein it can arise as an effective presence.27

Affection and the horizon of experience  33 I do not deny (pace Henry) that the horizon is the “transcendental condition of an object in general.” That is precisely the point I labored to make above. The question of whether a transcendental condition rests on a particular empirical presupposition raises the more fundamental question of whether that must be the only interpretation of the horizon available to us. In other words, does the transcendental condition suffer the fate of visibility or a “stand-in” placeholder, a copy like a hologram? Does the transcendental condition of necessity yield to limits imposed on manifestation by the structure of visibility? Or, as I have suggested, is the horizon open-ended (with ever widening ramifications), and thereby a field of manifestation that bears witness to the visible and invisible, to empirical objects and subjective dispositions? It should be clear by now that Henry does not accept my expansive, pliable description of the horizon. For Henry, the horizon’s reach constitutes a predetermined and universal theater of “light” or a “space of presence” that demands that an object appear in conformity to the light it emits, if that object intends to appear at all before my gaze. Henry will assert flatly that the horizon is simply “manifestation” as ecstatic visibility, or transcendence (here meant as a field of objects exterior to how they are lived within pure self-presence). 28 Hence Henry writes, The task of understanding such a horizon is that of universal phenomenological ontology which dominates every particular ontology and every ontic science, as their condition… The ‘lighting up’ of the necessary and sufficient ‘space’ wherein every Being can become what it is, this is to raise the fundamental problematic to which every specific inquiry must be subordinate. 29 Henry goes on to state as a matter of fact that the horizon is nothingness, because it denies the substance of invisibility. In light of this brief analysis, then, one may ask of Henry: what is affection? For Henry, as we shall see in Part II, affection is pure self-presence in which I affect myself wholly within the domain of myself. I do not see, but only feel, within the domain of first-person affection. Indeed, this domain of interior self-affection exists in relation only to itself, and so, it must necessarily not be attached to or integrated within the horizon of the world. The self, in Henry’s framework, affects itself, and is “that which is thus forever burdened with self, only this can we truly call a Self.” And again: “The Self is the surpassing of the Self as identical to self.”30 The world does not disappear or dissolve as a useless field of objectivity. Rather, it constitutes the field whereby opposition endlessly confers on the self a pressure of difference in the face of the world. I am affected first by myself, and then the world (as horizon) in opposition to myself, which accounts for two fields of display.

34 Horizonality The order of selfhood unfolds according to the timing of two phases. I am affected first by myself. Thereafter, I am affected by that which is distinct from me, the sense data flowing from the world-horizon. How do the two phases relate in Henry’s work? The self underlies the world as its true source and as the true essence of experience. Henry says, “The power of revelation of affectivity does not merely exercise itself independently of the understanding, of all representation; it precedes the intervention thereof” [Le pouvoir de révélation de l'affectivité ne s'exerce pas seulement, toutefois, indépendamment de l'entendement, de toute représentation, il précède l'intervention de celle-ci].31 No cognition, no intentional apprehension, no world-horizon can intervene in this underlying domain of self-affection, since affect, in all rigor, is blind [en lui-même, le sentiment est aveugle].32 For Henry, according to the strict logic of phenomenology, a system of manifestation emerges that accounts for two fields of manifestation, or two worlds, really: self-affection versus hetero-affection, or interior self versus exterior world-horizon. The world as a horizon, in the eyes of Henry, is a horizon of violent opposition. He will name it simply the field of being-opposed; he contends, Opposition makes possible the manifestation of that which is, as such, as being manifest, capable of touching us in such a way that the thing affecting is never a being itself but the object whose possibility resides in opposed-being, namely, in the world. [L'opposition rend possible la manifestation de ce qui est comme tel, comme être manifeste, susceptible de nous toucher, en sorte que l'affectant n'est jamais l'étant lui-même mais l'objet dont la possibilité réside dans l'être-opposé, c'est-à-dire dans le monde.]. 33 Certainly the world accomplishes, in Henry’s system, the revelation of a horizon, since being-opposed is the “act which forms the horizon,” that is, the “formation of a sensible horizon” [la formation d'un horizon sensible]. 34 Due to the fact that the self is identical to itself, it would follow that the self finds no place in the world’s horizon of difference, of being-opposed. How, then, do self and world-horizon relate at all? The world in Henry’s view asserts itself over us, precisely in its continual acts of opposing us. By the application of pressure against the interior domain of pure selfaffection, the world constitutes the horizon the self must overcome and thus resist. Henry writes that the “world is the milieu of affection, it is rather the world which affects us. The pressure which a being exercises on us is in reality that of the world” [La pression qu'exerce sur nous l'étant est en réalité celle du monde].35 Henry’s critique of the world-horizon invokes the language of pressure that one must overcome by way of the flight of indifference. Should we consider the world to have no hold on us, if we consider the world of opposition to consist of nothing, then we can reduce it to a form of nihilism to be withstood only by indifference, even passivity.

Affection and the horizon of experience  35 No doubt an allusion to nihilism, he writes of the world: “Nothingness which ‘hollows out the gap’ (that which we have called the horizon) where something and everything can emerge in Being could not, without absurdity, be restricted to the limits of this something.”36 The resistance to nihil’s pressure is carried out by the self’s capacity to hold onto to itself by gathering itself within itself, a practice of a forceful contradiction of the world-horizon. This duality between self and world communicates that the self can indeed retreat from the horizon, because the self can occupy itself, a site where it affects “itself without the mediation of a sense; herein resides the possibility for its affecting itself in such a way that the content of its affection is, as immanent content, constituted by it and by its own reality.”37 How may we judge, at this early stage, this strong language of Henry’s condemnation of the horizon? A principal thesis of this book is that Henry commits a fundamental error with this claim. The horizon of the world does not consist of nothing more than a field of opposition or a being-opposed. It consists, I have argued and will continue to do so, of a field of possibilities that constitute our personal identity from within, stretching and expanding the capacity we have for experience and for the reception of givenness. We cannot retreat from the horizon, it is structurally impossible. I agree with Henry that the horizon can serve the purpose of a transcendental condition of manifestation. Where I diverge from Henry is clear: his interpretation of the horizon consists in a negative characterization of it as a closed sphere, a “hollowed-out gap” that delimits and dominates manifestation. The horizon, as a gap in Being, belongs to the empirical domain of visibility for Henry. In contrast, I claim that Henry’s damning interpretation of the visible shape or arrangement of the horizon pretends to know too much about the horizon. Is it merely a gap or visible scar in Being, an opening onto a stage of visibility that forces phenomena to enter its reductive design, its strict boundaries of luminosity? Jean-Luc Marion, like Henry, would answer in the affirmative. Marion, no doubt influenced by Henry here, leverages the term “horizon” in similar ontological fashion, with the rhetoric to match. The horizon designates the chief way in which traditional phenomenology controls manifestation. As if cutting manifestation down to an ego-sized unit, a phenomenon may fit within the parameters of the gaze of the constituting ego, should a phenomenon like to appear or emerge at all. In principle, the phenomenon appears strictly to the extent that it amounts to a fulfillment of the conditions of manifestation outlined in advance by the ego-horizon, the nominative “I.” The presumption to limit in advance what may be a legitimate candidate for manifestation or what is thinkable as an object of experience depends on the proclivity metaphysics has to institute such a limit, and that limit corresponds to the horizon. Indeed, for Marion, metaphysics “always imposes a limit to the possibility of the phenomenon” [la métaphysique finit toujours par imposer une limite à

36 Horizonality la possibilité du phénomène]. 38 Herein lies the chief object of critique in Marion’s work: namely, that a phenomenon’s access to its own manifestation is required to be submitted to a possibility that depends on conditions besides its own. To whom do these conditions belong? That is, “what then does experience experience?” The objects of experience can enter the realm of experience only on the basis of meeting the conditions proposed by the horizon (for Marion). The horizon involved in the ego’s subjective prowess quite literally restrains and handcuffs phenomena: “given, but to a consciousness; combined, but by a consciousness: phenomena appear only on condition, alienated by an imposed phenomenality” [aliénés selon une phénoménalité imposée].39 The phenomenon depends radically on, and is bounded by, the illuminating “stage” of the ego-horizon. “Being probably only consists in this comprehension, which limits me, a horizon in the strict sense, a horizon by definition finite. It holds me and restrains me.”40 The phenomenon as it is understood in the vocabulary of horizon, in Marion’s perspective, is a derivative of the constituting power of the ego. In the realm of manifestation, where the given is supposed to appear by giving itself, the ego’s horizon is ruler, which indicates that the phenomenon’s mode of givenness cannot, and will not, be tolerated.41 If I understand Marion and Henry properly, they argue the metaphysics of the phenomenological horizon is therefore intolerant of the invisible.42 Marion contends, after reading Husserl, that The exterior of experience is not equivalent to an experience of the exterior because the horizon in advance takes possession of the unknown, the unexperienced, and the not gazed upon, by supposing them to be always already compatible, compressible, and homogenous with the already experienced, already gazed upon, and the already interiorized by intuition. All objects or persons correspond and are reduced to a mere anticipation, a “belated visible” [visible simplement retardé] that achieves the rank of a “pre-seen” [pré-vu].43 How might Marion respond to the horizon, whose power “takes possession” and makes phenomena “submit” to preordained conditions? Similar to Henry above, and as we shall see in a variety of ways in Part II, Marion invests phenomenology with the power to invert Cartesian anthropology and the Cartesian interpretation of the horizon. Marion’s solution (with which I disagree) is to suggest that instead of the horizon making demands on objects of experience, those objects can in fact elude the horizon altogether. The horizon must have boundaries or limits, for that definition means that the horizon “exerts itself over experience” [s’exerce sur l’expérience] precisely in its conferring on experience such a boundary.44 Whereas Marion should like to rename the phenomenon a

Affection and the horizon of experience  37 “self,” whose own force of givenness occurs in strict conformity with itself, without mediation in and through a boundary, the tradition against which he rebels cannot imagine this alternative. He writes, with little regard for what may constitute selfhood, that “The self of the phenomenon is marked in its determination as event. It comes, does its thing, and leaves on its own. Showing itself, it also shows the self that takes the initiative of giving itself.”45 The horizon shall wait for me so that it can exert itself over me. While it shall restrain me or handcuff me, it can never prevent me from retreating from it to a place of pure self-initiated givenness, where Marion suggests I allow the given to constrain me. Henry and Marion, in light of the above analysis, dedicate their work to the negation of the horizon. According to their view, only that which can appear within the restrictive limits of the horizon is granted the right to appear at all. Why not open up a path for phenomenology to renew givenness insofar as it is liberated from the horizon? I think this is the wrong question to ask. I think an alternative, and thus more phenomenological (in the sense that we do not veer without detour into theology), question to ask is: how can we reconceive of the horizon so a broader definition of it may obtain? The answer is found already formulated, at least in part, in the work of Husserl himself. Henry and Marion’s definition of the horizon (the same definition for our purposes) does not entail, as I think it should, the terminology of indefinability: play, flexibility, extension, expansion, and dilation. In redefining the horizon in accordance with the collective meaning of these various terms, and in the spirit of Husserl, the principal aim of this book is at once to appreciate and to problematize this French interpretation of horizonality (Levinas, Lacoste, and perhaps Falque would adopt similar definitions of the horizon, but more would need to be said about their interpretations). French phenomenology, in the work of Henry and Marion as exemplars, has recently attempted the transgression of the horizon in a quest for depth and mystery, of the kind that the domain of the invisible may yield forth. Whether in the form of Marion’s saturated phenomena, whose surprising manifestation breaches all horizons, or Henry’s notion of the invisible depth of interiority that appears antecedently to the horizon, or Jean-Yves Lacoste’s aspiration to bracket the horizon of experience in favor of the eternal (I engage Lacoste below), such phenomenological configurations of the horizon amount to the basic division between experience “in” the horizon and experience “outside” of the horizon. In contrast, I develop a phenomenology of the horizon that situates experience of any kind, of the given, to obey the horizon even while the horizon dilates in conjunction with life of the subject. The key to this interpretation lays in the recovery of the subjective dynamic of manifestation, one that does not fall prey to Henry and Marion’s claim that the imperious Cartesian ego must necessarily carry with it a horizon that limits in advance what may appear. Can we conceive of a self or subject whose polarity

38 Horizonality expands and grows in conjunction with the dilation and ever widening ramifications of the horizon?

IV Dilation of the horizon Is the horizon pregiven? Or does it depend on me, the constituting ego, who brings it forth by investing the world with meaning and signification? The philosophical difficulty does not consist in confirming the horizon as either independent of or dependent on me. Rather, the difficulty lies in fixing the horizon as both at once. That is, I am inclined to stage the horizon as an unfixed meaning-scheme that is at once pregiven and constituted by me. The point is not to triangulate three things at work discretely (a subject, an object, and a background of possibilities) but to show their fundamental entanglement. The horizon recedes from view even while it serves the purpose of a depth dimension of all phenomena. The horizon invests an object with meaning, and yet, its display depends on me as a condition for the displaying. My embodied intentional life mediates phenomena. Since I do not have immediate access to phenomena in the horizon, I am complicit both in the failure of some phenomena to be revealed and indispensable for the validation and thus manifestation of phenomena that are revealed. I open and close givenness. I am, as Levinas would say, a partner in revelation.46 Does this mean we have succumbed to the misbegotten Kantian paradigm of a two-world ontology? Is there an appearance to me in person of an object contrasted with (and utterly distinct from) the object itself that resides in a mysterious world of Eden, “out there” away from me? Do we have the classic distinction rehabilitated here between appearance and reality, or the thing I experience and the thing itself? The simple answer is that it is impossible to hold onto such a two-world dualism if the horizon as I have defined it frames all experience. There are not objects that exist inside and outside of the horizon. There is only “one horizon of experience.” As Husserl and his heirs emphasize about the anthropological root of manifestation, the phenomenon I encounter is the thing itself, and it can never be posited or extracted out from me. We return to the things themselves only once we acknowledge that the ego does not conform to objects and sense impressions (e.g., empiricism), but rather the objects of experience are integrated within my subjective life. In this way, the phenomenologist is the true positivist, without at the same time falling prey to empiricism. In manifestation, the ego is responsible for assigning meaning to and thus constituting objects, investing them with phenomenality. I can come upon an ocean, a bird, a door handle, or a person, only to invest them, and determine them, not according to an abstract notion of sufficient reason, but according to the structures of lived experience. I may be summoned by what gives itself to me, but ultimately I condition it as given “to me.” I provide a surplus of intentional signification, imposing on the given the demand that

Affection and the horizon of experience  39 it come under my meaning-scheme. I can take any object given to me and exercise my will over it. The propensity of the intentional life to give rise to passions, opinions, convictions, and provocations consists of an essential feature of the structure of lived experience. I can take any one phenomenon or a diverse set of phenomena, and endow them with meaning, qualifying the phenomenon as a phenomenon only to the degree that it is limited to my subjectivity. I can impose on a phenomenon very different, even contradictory, interpretations. I can fix myself upon one or another interpretation, and if the circumstances are right, I can swing between them, with aboutface reversals as violent as they are sure. I can imagine myself loving and adoring my best friend, over years of friendship. But if deeply disappointed by her, and after the lapse of some time with little recompense, I can just as well come to suspect her, and even hate her. This interpretive matrix does not license me to make the horizon an object at my disposal (I’m not arbitrary in my decisions; I don’t make them in a vacuum), but it does highlight that it dilates in conjunction with the movement of intentional experience. As a kind of “phenomenology without a particular phenomenon,” the analysis of the horizon is bound up with the ego’s dispositions. It lies within the remit of a subject-oriented philosophy. An egology, conceived in tandem with the horizon, shows the stark subjective reality of dilation: the consciousness of enlargement is the performative (or subjective) amplification of the world, which is due to its manifestation-as-horizon. The ocean metaphor above serves the purpose once again: when I fail perpetually to take in the massive scope of the ocean, the world dilates. Kant spoke of the sublime as a confrontation with an object that evokes a full emotional response, attended by feelings of bewilderment and perplexity, even inadequacy: when I see St. Peter’s in Rome or when I am positioned at the right distance from the summit of an Egyptian Pyramid (obviously there is little effect if I am too far away), the delight and bewilderment expands my subjective horizon of experience. As Gaston Bachelard notes, experiences as simple as looking at the ocean or walking in a forest show that while the physical scope of the world is measurable, it is an immeasurable “interior immensity” that phenomenology can illustrate—and yet, the two are not separable. Hence, the “immensity” I feel once I set sail on the ocean or venture into the forest comes from within, even while it is attached to the outward horizon, since it is always there within me, pregiven to me. When I enter deeply into the forest, the “infinity” of hidden grandeur and depth of the trees wells up from within me. The forest can be manifest as a vast horizon with no boundaries. That I can “lose myself” in a forest is a familiar refrain. Many have the anxious impression that going deeper into the woods creates the feeling of a limitless world. The forest tends to “accumulate an infinity within its own boundaries.”47 I can of course furnish documents that outline the geographical limits: the forest is 30 square miles, and if I head east for 2 miles, I’ll be at its outer edge, where a road can lead me safely home.

40 Horizonality The relationship between the constituting ego and the forest, between the subject and the object, generates a subjective dynamic of manifestation in which ego and forest co-emerge. I imagine the forest’s immensity, its depth and its possibilities, so that the forest’s collective power increases in grandeur. The forest’s manifestation depends on the constituting ego’s power to envisage (or feel) the forest as infinite. I am not answerable to the horizon, but it, to me. This does not translate into the totalizing egoism for which the Cartesian ego is relentlessly critiqued. If the horizon unfolds out from the ego’s inner infinity of possibilities, it does not follow that the horizon only appears as a “horizon” on the basis of the ego’s limits. The ego’s “I” does not need to be suspected of hermeneutical violence, as if the “I” determines the shape of the horizon in advance, as if the “I” grants to the horizon its being solely on the strength of its internal subjective manifold of concepts. I will admit that phenomenology must say that the concept of horizon maintains a direct relation with the ego. But the kind of relation is what is a stake. That there is a relation is not in question. I do not suggest the relation reduces to a solipsism or subjectivism, in which a hierarchy between the “I” on top and the “horizon” below is established. The position I am inclined to promote here frames the embodied ego and the horizon as a relationship of mutual interplay set within the wider horizon of cultural norms and social practices. I displace here the primacy of the ego, its reign as a timeless ego that “represents” the world to itself. But my rejection of subjectivism does not mean that the ego must eliminate its subjective prowess altogether from an analysis of the horizon.48 Phenomenology, generally speaking, does not understand the ontological nature of the horizon to yield forth an absolute, unbending structure of reality to which I must correspond my “thoughts” or intentional stance. As we shall see, phenomenological inquiry shows that temporality, the body, historical consciousness, cultural norms, and the subjective disposition I employ, endows objects with meaning. The subjective movement of intentionality invests the horizon of experience with “points of mystery quivering with color,” even while the horizon remains pregiven to me. Phenomenological analysis of intentional existence clarifies without imperiling the pregivenness of the meaning-schemes and cultural norms that are the chief objective coordinates of the horizon. Phenomenology focuses not so much on the “how” of intentional consciousness as it does on the “how” of meaning.49 The horizon can therefore signify a cultural depth dimension, the infinite range of possibilities bound up with any manifestation (ocean, forest, coffee mug, a lover, an old or new friend), and the language my cultural situation gives to me to frame my experience of it. Husserl will use the language “pregnant” to refer to constitution in light of ego’s pregiven lifeworld (which counts here as a “system of evidences relating to the object”). He says:

Affection and the horizon of experience  41 The heading, true being and truth (in all modalities), indicates, in the case of any objects meant or ever meanable for me as transcendental ego, a structural differentiation among the infinite multiplicities of actual and possible cogitationes that relate to the object in question and thus can somehow go together to make up the unity of an identifying synthesis. Actually existing object indicates a particular system within this multiplicity, the system of evidences relating to the object and belonging together in such a manner that they combine to make up one (though perhaps an infinity) total evidence.50 This is properly speaking, the anthropological angle of entry into the horizon, but the horizon does not belong only to my single subjective point of view. In other words, the horizon bears within its expanse a total system of evidences. Installed as a deep structure of cultural norms pregiven to me, the horizon feeds into my interpretation of the object even while I endow the object with meaning. Husserl will outline this in fascinating detail in Experience and Judgment, where the world-as-horizon forms for not only a “domain of what is pregiven in passive certainty” but also a set of culturally-laden norms, a pregiven praxis that conditions how I experience that particular object. Hence every “experience has its own horizon.” What might this mean for constitution? It relays the structural norms at work in my experience of objects, so every experience can be extended in a continuous chain of explicative individual experiences united synthetically as a single experience open without limit, of the same… And this horizon in its indeterminateness is copresent from the beginning as a realm of possibilities, as the prescription of the path to a more precise determination. 51 The existential configuration of the horizon is rooted in an inductive theory of knowledge. This means: Husserl suggests that induction allows us to see clearly that the ego is not passive but active, in that the ego exists always in the mode of anticipation of what may come, sensing or divining possibilities. The horizon expands as I extend a phenomenon’s possible meanings, which is the same as saying that my mind and heart dilate in tandem with the phenomenon. The relationship between the ego and the phenomenon is fundamental and inexorable. Husserl, in the face of science or “objectivism,” argues that consciousness constitutes objects, which, in its turn, generates a phenomenon; the ego’s fundamental subjective power, that of intentionality, configures experience as a layered process of emergence forever suspended between the ego and the horizon, even if the ego remains the central site of the constitution of meaning. The concept of experience opens up to the ego a vast network of interconnected objects, an “intentional complex”

42 Horizonality whereby ego and the horizon of norms and social practices emerge in relationship with each other. 52 Phenomenologically, I experience sense data on several levels. How may this occur? The multi-level approach to experience demonstrates, above all, the active agency or the ego’s meaning-endowing power, or its innate desire to disclose the space needed for an object to be a meaningful object for the ego. For example, to return to the volume Experience and Judgment, Husserl indicates that I “typify” objects as I encounter them. In so doing I attend to them; I automatically anticipate their shape. My intentional aim, my embodied mood and affection, may well yearn for an object, waiting for object to be given at all, in part or in full. As I attend to my surroundings, my attentive mood “saturates” the scene precisely when there is no object there to fulfill my intentional aim. I am saturated with the fullness of my own embodied attentiveness or anticipation of what the object may be like in its manifestation. 53 This happens regularly, upon partial fulfillment of a particular object, say a dog. I see a dog on the street, walking by me. I am inclined, without effort, to typify it. Just so, I turn my attention to it, as it attracts my interest. I apprehend it as a dog; in order to be acquainted with it, I reach a conclusion or predicative determination of the object. The ray of intention originating from me immediately saturates the object with meaning, namely “dogness.” I automatically know what its additional modes of behavior will be like in the ensuing moments; I know how it will play, run, jump, wag its tale, and so forth. I have not seen its teeth yet, but I know in advance what they will look like. I bring to bear a host of assumptions on the animal’s manifestation, in which a “horizon of possible experience with corresponding prescriptions of familiarity” aids me in my intentional constitution of the dog, of the python, table, mug, etc.54 The general form of dog aids me in my perception and experience of the particular dog, even while I recognize the dog remains an thing exterior to me, independent of my constitution (the ego does not create the dog out of thin air). In Ideas Book I, Husserl notes a similar dynamic at work when I look at an apple tree. He employs here the technical language of noesis and noema, or the subjective intentional ray, on the one hand, and, on the other, the object that I intend. The apple tree in my garden is what I apprehend, not the colors green and red. I see it with pleasure, perhaps with fond childhood memories. The relation between the perceiving and the perceived, according to the naïve attitude of representation, is direct, inasmuch as it simulates a hologram of the tree just as it appears in its spatiotemporal givenness. But Husserl highlights that while phenomenology does not deny the existence of the apple tree, it is nevertheless a complicated object “for me,” as an objective given in the first-person perspective. 55 For example: I may intend it with pleasure. The same apple tree might equally be perceived in anger or with despair, for it was the site where I tragically witnessed my son fall to his death. Each spring, when it blossoms

Affection and the horizon of experience  43 and its branches wisp in the wind, my heart relives that memory and is reminded of the terrible pain, of the profound sense of loss and guilt (why did I not run to catch him as he fell?). The tree, suffered in this precise manner, has become an “exemplary analysis” of the noetico-noematic correlation. The tree, in its sheer appearance, provides the ego with sensuous data, with hyletic material [ΰλη]. Such material substrates, however, must be overlaid with a stratum of meaning. The tree may become a genuine unit of experience for me once I endow it with form, with the intentive morphe [μορφή]. 56 A tree is never simply a tree in the interplay of noesis and noema. There is always already more intended in the noetic ray of attention than is actually given by the intuitive object arriving from the side of the noema. For me, this tree is at once a thing of memory and promise of life to come but also a thing of death and grief. I would like to cut the tree down, for its very site saddens me so much. And yet, it is my tree, which means I may be provoked if you try to cut it down. Even passive sense data, what Husserl calls the realm of experience at its most basic or primitive level, is taken up as repulsive or attractive, as ugly or beautiful, as useful or alarming. 57 Husserl’s frustrations with Galileo and modern science express not so much a repudiation of science as it does a concern for the discourse of science to be put in its proper place. In other words, science must relinquish its hold on our imagination as the only path to experience, so that it may function as a supplement to the lifeworld. Phenomenology and science, framed this way, do not oppose one in another in a conflict of the faculties. Husserl, in other words, seeks to unearth the taken-for-granted source, the living subjective foundation (the lifeworld), of the scientific method. As Husserl recognized, although the subjective lifeworld is the horizon and ground of all experience, and must therefore be presupposed by science, science also “streams into” the lifeworld. 58 If thematized carefully, experience can be shown, as will be shown in the chapters below, that it simply does not square with what the empiricist claims it to be. The empiricist’s central design rests on a mistaken anthropology: the presumption that the ego is passive and thus to be described chiefly as a white tablet or a passive receptacle of sense impressions. Husserl belabors the point that the calculus between mind and world is not unidimensional, as if the world acts on the mind, making its mark on the passive receptacle of the ego. The ego declares itself as an ego with agency, one exercised with a type of subjective power that constitutes without exhausting the mystery of the world-horizon. Certainly one way to frame that mystery is to utilize theological formations of mystery, to which we now turn in conclusion.

V Conclusion: theological horizons At this juncture, before we enter into the worlds of Henry, Marion, and Lacoste in the chapters that follow, it is sufficient already to observe that

44 Horizonality most religious traditions, and Christian theology in particular, cultivate a spirituality rooted in a supple horizon of experience: prayer, fasting, worship, sacrament, proclamation, and good deeds, not least the doctrines of Creation and Incarnation. All of these and more assume a spiritual form of manifestation, but one firmly rooted in the horizon of experience nonetheless. Objects used in ritual and practice are visible in the horizon of experience. Often, the experience of God, mediated in these words, deeds, and texts, yields objects that we see, objects no different than the blue sky that captivates my eyes, the smooth sand that pleasantly chafes the bottom of my feet, and the subdued clap I hear when the wave breaks onto the shore. The excess of things evokes that something more to which theological ritual points. Therefore, religious objects of experience, if I may portray them as objects for the moment, exceed the experience of any one object, thing, or tool. The sacrament of the eucharist, even though it is localized in a piece of bread or a cup of wine, does not remain bread and wine only; it dwells at the limit of the horizon of objectivity inasmuch as the sacrament may dilate in unique ways the manifestation of the horizon. Dilation? What does this mean as a theological form of manifestation? Theological discourse, as a discourse of divine things in Christ, touches down on intellectual terrain, but it does not remain there. By this statement I do not intend to declare that Christian theology celebrates the irrational, but rather the nonconceptual and nondiscursive (the evidence of affection). Theology is predicated on practice and first-person givenness: the manifestation of God, who enlarges the horizon of experience, of even basic elements like bread and wine, for me in “my” faith. Lest what Saint Paul calls me “sensitivity” to God grow dark or fade over time, the sacraments enliven the heart. Indeed, a “darkened heart” is a cold heart, it has lost sensibility or affect or simply “cast off all feeling” or (sensitivity) [ἀπηλγηκότες] for God (Eph 4.19). How may theology approach and thereby interrogate this contraction of the heart, and this theological order of manifestation rooted in feeling, affection, and practice? Whereas the investigation of phenomena carried out by most disciplines in the university aspires to achieve a detached or objective stance, theology in contrast does not bracket its principal motive, namely, faith in God. Theology is unique therefore in that it studies the lived reality of a contemplative way of life, the soul committed to God, an exercise born of faith, hope, and love. More than a collection of ideas or taxonomies, theology conducts its analysis of faith as an honest analysis of practice within the dilating horizon of experience of which it aspires to be the proximate cause. Theology, also named sacred doctrine, is a science insofar as it investigates how God is known and lived in this horizon. Aquinas in this precise sense describes theology as a “divine science” in the classical sense of seeking to know ultimacy, of scientia. 59 Theology as a discipline states, in this way, that the human condition desires to know not just information,

Affection and the horizon of experience  45 but also the good, a “higher science” grounded in divine self-revelation (or self-givenness).60 How do we know the good as true in light of divine revelation? Argumentative reason often aids the mind only so far, and so, reason cannot remain the final expression of our desire to know the good, divine, or otherwise. A theologian could claim that theology, as a discourse, is not properly a discourse at all. Faith believes and knows by loving, cast in the long horizon of eschatological hope, mediated through practice and ritual. Love before faith and hope, then. If I am pressed to permit an order to unfold, then I shall grant love the rank of first. Does this reduce my position to voluntarism? Only if I would claim that love exercises its move apart of knowing what it loves. Faith, underlined by love and embodied in hope, and, finally, expressed in the discursive grammar of theology, remains a performative communal action that does not always take time to convey information about the logic or cognitive content of the action. At least, that is the case if we define information and discourse as a communication of an idea by a series of arguments that assures its object by a representational subject. Faith rests on the embodied practice of love, and faith must assume its secondary role until the eschaton (1 Cor 13.2: “If I have faith to move mountains, and I do not have charity, I am nothing”).61 I do not want to be mistaken: I do not refuse the place of concepts in the Christian pilgrimage. I reflect in some detail on the conceptual structure of faith in relation to love in the concluding remarks of Chapter 4. The event of “divine self-manifestation” occurs decisively in the Christian tradition as a Word of truth, in and through the person and event of Jesus Christ. Philosophically, the use of the category of “manifestation” surely invokes the phenomenological claim that truth is primordially a form of manifestation (or unveiling of lived experience). Speaking theologically, the Christian understanding of revelation in the Word corresponds to a form of manifestation that enters historical molds of manifestation. This theological self-understanding of the person of Jesus of Nazareth begins, thus, with the hermeneutical insight that God assumed flesh to dwell among us, in the form of a historical Logos, who is proclaimed in the narrative grammars of the gospels. Here, history, temporal experience, and the body enjoy the status of genuine sites of disclosure-manifestation. But even when it is said that the Word as proclamation discloses a Creator-creature relationship based on the logic of incarnation, in a particular place in Palestine, it also incorporates within its historical narrative a theological cosmology: the whole cosmos reflects analogically the second person of the Trinity (Christ is the one “through whom all things are made” John 1.3) in order to establish the truth of creation. In this theological vision of the cosmos, this proclamatory Word invites a subjective act of recognition at the level individual consciousness that will no doubt deploy concepts and terminology (not beholden to the metaphysics of representation I should add). Recall the anthropological or first-person dynamics of manifestation above: a dialectic between the

46 Horizonality object given and the subjective endowment of meaning constitutes faith as a dialectic between objective gift and subjective reception. The gospel of John, whose author is particularly concerned with manifestation and illumination, makes present what is absent, for God’s manifesting himself in Christ as the “Word made flesh” is an event of disclosure ultimately based on faith, for those who can see the Christ: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” (John 1.10). This means that the spirit of truth to which the Christian is lead is a matter of the heart and, therefore, of the embodied performance of worship and adoration. Theology, from its early witness onward, has incorporated the wisdom of philosophy as a mode of clarification of the performative dynamic of faith in divine self-manifestation. How philosophy is used in a judicious way evokes serious debate about the nature of theology as such. “Theological method,” conceived by many, invites interdisciplinary techniques of study (did Augustine, for example, have a theological method?). Theology in the context of preliminary stage setting, typically, expands its traditional boundaries, where interchange with other disciplines can occur with fertility. Cross-fertilization is fertile precisely because it challenges and enriches traditional formulations of sacraments, grace, mystical experience, and prayer. If inattentive to the plurality of logics that constitute the non-theological humanities, and especially philosophy, theology suffers from an introverted and context-less identity. In dialogue with other disciplines, however, theology strengthens itself, and, importantly, chastens its inclination to take for granted the logic of faith. From the point of view of the theologian, the interdisciplinary exchange with philosophy forms an intersection between the ecclesial community of worship and the wider public culture, an exchange (from the side of theology) that can serve only to enrich and invigorate the incarnational dimension of the faith perspective. It follows from this concrete context that the language used in theology should neither license nor entertain grammatical absolutism, a style of articulation that is understood only in the narrow religious terms and sources of authority in which the grammar is made meaningful and ultimately intelligible.62 How a Christian may accomplish or enact theology in this open-textured way takes imagination, empathy, and the capacity to supplement one’s theological language with other idioms, metaphors, and examples, and for our purposes, we supplement theology with the idiom of phenomenology. We do not need to contract or restrict our theological vocabulary but instead expand and dilate it. What might this mean for the following chapters? It means, first of all, that theology like any other mode of reflection or way of life occurs within the horizon of experience. The Incarnation, unsurprisingly, will be of paramount importance for this claim, and reflection on the incarnation and its continuation in the eucharist will be found in nearly every chapter below. I do not use philosophy, in other words, to

Affection and the horizon of experience  47 prove Christian truth; nor do I employ philosophy as an apologetic tool in any other manner. I formulate theological experience in a phenomenological register, for the sake of clarification. That is, theology provides the “vocabulary of excess” we surely require in the face of embodied mystery of this mortal life. Phenomenology, while it does not demystify the theological impulse of this life, can challenge theology to say more precisely what it wants to say about the self-communication of God—as a form of communication mediated in signs, the body, affection, social practice.63 The doctrine of the Incarnation (and correspondingly, God as Trinity) as a “doctrine” took several hundred years to take shape. It is as conceptually wrought a discursive product as one can get from theological debate. While that debate and conceptual framework remains indispensable for theology, the thesis of this book is that God’s self-communication to us in Christ does not take place or disembark in the theater of the mind, or debate, or concepts. It occurs in the first-person seat of the heart. Does my position therefore reduce the Christian journey to an irrational and “gross personalism”64 that withdraws from conceptual clarity and propositional attitudes? God, as I will make clear, is (self)given to us in body and soul, and the encounter in which grace communicates and achieves its end lies in the power of embodied practice, above all, the eucharist. If theology remains seized up at the level of conceptual clarification, it shall reduce theology to a university “science” precisely because scientific clarity prioritizes the calculus of the mind: theology is the “active engagement in that cognitive relation to God… in the course of this activity we begin to understand something of the cognitive relation of men to God…” The principal medium here to achieve this cognitive relation to God is “semantic intention,” or “linguistic and conceptual forms,” and ultimately, the “give and take between subject and object.”65 The discursive intellectualism of theology is literally conceived as a modern science. I wholeheartedly reject intellectualism’s encroachment on theology. A response: does theology not involve practice, embodied habit, affective dynamics that precede the subject- object dichotomy? The spirit of the early church, no doubt, prioritized practice, worship, and liturgy over and above doctrine and linguistic-conceptual clarification. The community of Christ, the body of the covenant, develops a habit of learning about the Father through the incontrovertible encounter of Christ in experience, mediated in the Spirit, which culminated in the eucharist. Before biblical commentaries and debates about the Trinity or disputes about justification, many in the early church loved God in communal practice: there was awe and adoration before the exalted Son of God alive and present in the church’s offering of the eucharist. This truth preceded every effort to understand and nourished every attempt to express in words and concepts what Christians believed.66

48 Horizonality The logic of faith reveals a logic unique to itself, faithful to love and encounter, for “we do not reason from the signs to the revelation; we read the revelation in the signs.”67 The sign of signs, the eucharist, does not invite deliberative discourse or reason at all, but evokes an encounter to be read: a spirituality of the heart. The privilege of the practice of the eucharist may arouse suspicions among biblical theologians, especially epigones of Barth, who focus less on first-person practice and more on the intertextual nature of theological reflection and rational discourse (as interpretation and meditation on scripture). The most able proponent of this style of reflection, known as “theological theology,” is John Webster. Fear of philosophy in some theological quarters is a result of a more basic trepidation about contamination, as if a philosophical strategy (like phenomenology) codifies God according to a particularly anthropomorphic scheme, thereby importing a foreign (natural) element into the (supernatural) biblical story. Does phenomenological theology, as I propose it, lose its “theological nerve”68 because it resorts without hesitation to humanly crafted philosophical vocabularies? That is: does my model of theology rely on philosophy to the extent that it becomes an unwitting “instrument of false theological conceptions or asseverations…which are foreign and even completely antithetical to the message” of the Bible?69 Does the boundary of theology, once installed in the form of biblical revelation, demand protection (does it need a wall)? For Barth and Webster, theology properly protected shall not alienate itself from its own subject matter. The introduction of philosophy, as a discipline of exploratory human wisdom (of ancient scientia), solicits theology away from “its own habits of thought,” and that produces a “hesitancy of theology to field theological claims.”70 Proponents of theological integrity, whereby the process of theological reflection assumes the activity of biblical commentary and rational conceptualization of dogma, aspire to preserve theology’s underlying relationship with itself, to its own object, God. Theological theology does not involve correlation with other disciplines because those disciplines do not take God as their proper object. So, how could they contribute to the desired effect of theological reflection, carried out in faith, and nourished by revelation? The intellectualist or cognitive approach made available here in Barth and Webster belies a certain arrogance about theology as an academic discipline, as if its graced form were isolable from natural styles of inquiry.71 I would argue that theology is no discipline in the strict professional sense, but a lived practice, a dwelling before God in humility and creatureliness. This posture, to my mind, necessarily invites creaturely forms of communication (body, affection, mood, community, ritual, etc.) not to reach a determinate conceptual formula about God in the classroom, but to enable us to become sites of faith coram Deo. The first-person dynamic, in which faith enjoys intimacy with a God who cannot be uttered, but simply adored, spills out into an anthropological interrelationship with a God who teaches us to experience (not think

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about) the Spirit. And because theology speaks from the human point of view, and no other, it forms an alliance with any discipline that may facilitate a fuller illustration of lived faith.

Notes 1 For textured expositions of the horizon in Husserl, see the following helpful essays: Robert Walton, “On the Manifold Senses of Horizonedness: The Theories of E. Husserl and A. Gurwitsch,” Husserl Studies, vol. 19, no. 1 (2003): 1–24; Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Hermeneutics: From Intuition of Lived Experiences to the Horizonal Lifeworld,” in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes, eds. Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 105–22. 2 Hilary Putnam, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 181. 3 See, for example, Aron Gurwitsch, “Contribution to the Phenomenological Theory of Perception,” in Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch, Vol. II: Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, ed. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009) pp. 371–92. 4 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 32. 5 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 23. 6 Husserl, Crisis, p. 164. 7 Michel Henry, “The Four Principles of Phenomenology,” trans. Joseph Rivera and George Faithful, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (2015): 1–21, reference on p. 9. 8 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 68. 9 Heidegger writes that phenomenology fulfils the “requirement to open our eyes and take the phenomena as they offer themselves as against all firmly rooted theory and even despite it, that is, the requirement to align theory according to the phenomena rather than the opposite, to do violence to the phenomena by a preconceived theory.” See Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 62. 10 Hetero-phenomenology as a third-person philosophical research program was made popular by Daniel Dennett. For an excellent critique from a first-person point of view, see Charles Siewert, “In Favor of (Plain) Phenomenology,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 6, nos. 1–2 (2007): 201–20. 11 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 15. 12 Husserl, Krisis, p. 168. 13 See Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism,” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 41, no. 4 (2008): 401–25. 14 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 52. 15 Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, p. 55. 16 Robert Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling US (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 131. 17 David Jasper indicates that poetics and poetry can dig deep in the soul, below the level of literal language. See his The Language of Liturgy: A Ritual Poetics (London: SCM Press, 2018), pp. 29–31. Also for more on the epistemological import of poetry, see Jean-Yves Lacoste, Thèse sur le vrai (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018), pp. 62–67. 18 The poem is located at the beginning of a chapter in William Desmond and is penned by him, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 259.I

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Horizonality alert the reader that the formatting here is simpler and thus different than the poem’s original format in Desmond’s text. My emphasis on the elemental and the elements (ocean, forest, sand, etc.) is influenced in part by the excellent book, John Sallis, The Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 81. Carl Sandberg, “Last Answers,” in Chicago Poems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), p. 134. For more on emotions and mood consisting of strategies, not passive disruptions, see Robert Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions are really Telling Us, p. 20ff. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 132. I am indebted in part to the work of Rick Furtak (who is influenced by Heidegger and Marion) and his conception of mood or affection as an emotional apriori, a condition that permits anything at all to become an object of experience. Care and concern, even love, serve the function of an “aperture” through which the world shows up. The world is not flat and neutral, but charged with value. See his excellent, Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), especially, pp. 118–130. Husserl, Idea of Phenomenology, p. 11. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 19, fn. 4. For the German term, see Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 141, 185 and fn. 2 on 419. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 19. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, pp. 222–224. Henry, Essence of Manifestations, p. 19. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 473. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 573; Henry L’essence de la manifestation, p. 718. See Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, 2nd edition in one volume (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), p. 726. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 460; Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, p. 575. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 461; Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, p. 576. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 460; Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, p. 576. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 22; also see Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 55–63. Henry, Essence of Manifestation, p. 462. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 180; JeanLuc Marion, Étant donné: Essai d’une phenomenology de la donation, 3rd edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), p. 253. Marion, Being Given, p. 184. Jean-Luc Marion, Erotic Phenomenon: Six Studies, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 118. Marion, Being Given, pp. 186–190. Metaphysic is interpreted by Marion in a narrow fashion, as the primacy of the constituting I that imperiously rules over phenomena, dictating to them the

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62 63

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conditions they must meet if they are to enter the realm of experience. While this remains one powerful interpretation of metaphysics (as Cartesian anthropology), it is simply only one narrow viewpoint. For a broader understanding of metaphysics, and how it may relate fruitfully to theology, see Chapter 10. Marion, Being Given, p. 186; Marion, Etant donné, p. 261. Marion, Being Given, p. 185; Marion, Etant donné, p. 260. Marion, Being Given, p. 159. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 97. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 186ff. For a definition and rejection of solipsisum from the point of view phenomenological idealism, see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 150. Steven Crowell has written the definitive exposition of normativity in phenomenology. See his important Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 63. Husserl, Experience and Judgement, p. 32. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 282. On saturated intentionality, see Husserl, Experience and Judgement, pp. 122 and 209. Husserl, Experience and Judgement, p. 331. Husserl, Ideas I, §§ 85, 88. Husserl, Ideas I, §§ 97–99. Husserl, Experience and Judgement, pp. 53–54. Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 113, 138. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by the Dominican Friars of the English Province, Part I, Question 1, Article 3. Aquinas, Summa, Part I, Question.1, Article 2. My position, only given the barest sketch here, would come into conflict with Oliver O’Donovan’s appreciation of what he perceives to be Aquinas’s cognitivism, in which faith is asserted as logically prior to hope and love, precisely to ward off irrational voluntarism. Whether I disagree with his interpretation of Aquinas stands apart from the difference between us in the logical ordering of faith, hope, and love. See his penetrating “Faith before Hope and Love,” New Blackfriars, vol. 95, no. 1056 (2014): 177–189. On how to avoid grammatical absolutism in theology, see the illuminating Brian Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009), pp. 190–197. I agree, I think in part, with John Caputo’s statement that continental philosophy of religion is not dead because religion provides the vocabulary of “excess” that we need when confronted with limit phenomena. I also affirm in general his correlational method, in which theology integrates itself with contemporary philosophy, instead of simply using continental philosophy as a fideistic apologetic that protects Christianity from modernist critiques. While Caputo dismisses theology’s tendency to fabricate a world behind the scenes, and, seemingly, a transcendent God, I do not deny the dynamic Creator- creature interrelation of analogy of being, though I would not indulge in two-world Christian-Platonism (if that is what he means by a world behind the scenes). See his,

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Horizonality “Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Dead?” in The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds. Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt, and Jeffrey W. Robbins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 21–33. Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xiv. Torrance, Theological Science, pp. x–xi. Robert L. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 36. Henri Bouillard, The Logic of the Faith, trans. M.H. Gill and Son (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1967), p. 16. I am much influence by this excellent text. John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London: T&T Clark, 2005), p. 17. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 3, trans. G.W. Bromiley and R.J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), pp. 99–100. Webster, Confessing God, pp. 18–19. I cannot go into any detail here about the important interrelation (unity in difference) of nature and grace. For more on my interpretation of nature and grace, with attention given to the important debate concerning the supernatural, see my “Human Nature and the Limits of Plasticity: Revisiting the Debate Concerning the Supernatural,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, vol. 59, no. 1 (2017): 34–53.

Part II

Michel Henry and life

3

Incarnate self The night of love

I Incarnate selfhood No horizon of light, nor its outline, may establish the field in which incarnation or embodied affection arises. My true self, the very essence of who I am, folds back on itself in pure immanence, in the night of pure interiority. Such is the basic and irrepressible thesis advanced by Henry’s work on incarnation.1 To bring to light some of the core ideas associated with Henry’s theological turn, we introduce his remarkable, and always radical, philosophical analysis of the incarnate self. In attending to the unique manner of givenness by which it is made manifest, we intend to show that the gift of the incarnation, for Henry, can evoke a spirituality or ethic of the sort enjoyed by the ascetic or mystic—what I call the night of love. The incarnation for Henry is not only the event whereby Christ assumes flesh. It is also the strange but necessary event (if the nihilistic spirit of modernity is to be avoided) whereby Christ takes on flesh inside me, giving my flesh to me. Christ’s incarnation is also my incarnation. And there, in that same concrete manifestation, the incarnation draws me into the very life of God so that I become in my essence (in my incarnation) illumined before divine glory. Understood as a movement accomplished deep inside me, the incarnation elicits the Christian to put into play self-mastery and ascetic skillfulness, an order of discipline that enables the Christian to figure the way down into the nocturnal site of incarnation, a primitive site of utter passivity untouched by perceptual acts through which the mind constitutes objects before its gaze (i.e., the metaphysics of representation). God cannot be grasped by a higher cognitive act that conceptualizes God as an object represented before the mind’s eye. This descent into passivity is a descent into my flesh that discloses the purity of love, the delight of the heart, as it is sustained by the invisible radiance of God. The spiritual life of the ascetic therefore celebrates the mystical body of Christ, the “Word made flesh,” as the concrete site for communion with God. But the mystical body of Christ extends beyond my relation to God. In Christ I also commune with the wider body of saints. What would an experience with the other fully governed by the incarnation be like? Henry’s

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-5

56  Michel Henry and life prioritization of the incarnation means that Christian spirituality is refined within the complex network of the invisible lineaments of the mystical body of Christ, wherein my body relates to your body in an intimate and ineffable communion. I am in you and you are in me, a theological conception of flesh that highlights a pure and simple unity; the virtue of such a living unity is that it opens up a common genealogy between souls. There is, in other words, a decisive caesura situated between my natural genealogy and my divine condition as a Son of God born from the absolute life of God. 2 Living as an incarnate self amounts to admitting a simple, but difficult, truth: I am not one but two bodies. For Henry, the awareness of the twosided nature of the body is manifest as, on the one hand, an invisible subjective “feel” that grips me inwardly, and, on the other, a visible objective texture that fixes me as a three-dimensional silhouette with a particular depth and volume in the exterior world. My exterior body holds within itself a living flesh, an invisible inner content that endlessly receives its life through God’s invisible but concrete self-donation in Christ. In consequence of this donation, my flesh is comprised entirely of Christ, a divine substance that is nocturnal in nature, appearing in a sphere with no exteriority, no outside, and no world involved. The spirituality of the Christian soul brings this truth to life precisely because the soul can, from that invisible reservoir, draw out vital subjective resources that invoke God’s presence, bringing it to the surface (or just below the surface). Without denying the soul’s bodily existence in the world, Henry is emphatic that saintliness, holiness, and purity are to make themselves felt in a subjective manifestation sharply juxtaposed with the visible body on display in the world. The ascetic or spiritual subject is a living soul the world cannot accept and whose ascetic practices offer a spiritual profit immeasurable by the standard of the world. The “world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.”3 The ascetic, moreover, is the very negation of the world if the world represents the horizon where only bodies limited to their inert spatial polarity can appear. Henry’s conception of flesh, as we shall see below, is generally consistent with, and lends impetus to, the spiritual rigor evident in, for example, Maximus the Confessor’s call to endure the privative experience of charity attested to by the early Christian communities. We must become perpetually in union with divine grace that springs forth “from within” after mindful and purposeful detachment from the world.4 Our purpose, in what follows, is merely to lay out the logic of the structure of this double body Henry advances, to elucidate the course of the Christian life that may naturally flow from it, and to call attention to the intrinsic spiritual orientation of the incarnation.

II The sanctity of all flesh In a recent interview Henry contends that his work on the incarnation is equivalent to a conceptual archaeology that leads back to the origin of flesh

Incarnate self  57 itself. Once excavated, flesh flashes forth at its base as a pure incandescent matter (matière incandescente).5 Because it is an inner and thus invisible “matter” manifest within the exterior body, flesh belongs to the process by which the soul feels itself feeling as it crushes against itself in an utterly passive self-embrace. As a living pathos submerged within itself, the secret of flesh is that, as an inner disposition, it bears within it the very presence of God. In its essential receptivity, the union with God is accomplished through the communication to the soul of the mystical body, the love exchanged between the Son and Father, and, ultimately, the bond of their reciprocity that is the Holy Spirit. To communicate to me the same love the Father communicates to the Son, Christ raises me up, as a Son of Light, in an eternal movement into the life of the Trinity to share in the absolute motion of divine glory—what Henry phrases (awkwardly) as the “interior reciprocity between Father and Son enjoyed in their common bond, the Spirit.”6 Understood in this manner, the luminosity of flesh emits an invisible luminosity because it is maintained in and through divine life, the “Light of Truth incarnated in Christ,”7 whose interior illumination shines brightly and intensely with the invisibility of a white light incapable of appearing as mediated by the ordinary “outside’ horizon of the visible world. Without distance from its divine source, and thus in perfect union with the bare essence of God, living flesh is not a discrete object but a nocturnal affectivity that proliferates in, even swells with, the life of Christ. My flesh, according to Henry, forms an inviolable union with God’s infinite glory and thus contains “not merely traces of life but absolute life.”8 Such an archaeology appeals to a theological vision about the unity between the revelation of my flesh and the self-revelation of God in the “Word made flesh.” Dedicating most his work to unveiling this common substance with great imaginative force and philosophical depth, Henry perhaps puts forward the contemplative ascetic as an exemplar of such a living communion of flesh. The life of the ascetic can be depicted, after Henry, as a life of trial that sets into operation a lived experience whereupon the Word of Life is heard in the affective center of my life: namely, my “heart.” Constitutive of the heart’s pulse, Christ is never separate from the soul’s affective seat. I come into myself as this particular self while remaining in submission to Christ in my inner depth. What Christ feels is also what I feel. I am “predestined to receive the fruit of the Word”9 in my heart, wherein Christ speaks and through which my self-identity crystallizes—my heart is my essence. Mute in the world, and resident in my heart, the Word of God evades the noetic synthesis of language, its structural play between signs in which I apprehend that the sign “table” (for example) points to that object in the corner of the room. Thus affectivity or emotion is self-affectivity or self-emotion, which does not involve a framework in which emotions visibly expressed on the face could be used as currency in a manipulative transaction between two people who are face-to-face in the visible world.10 There is nothing exchanged, nothing transactional about the form of self-affection in Henry’s work, because it inhabits the night of non-intentional life.

58  Michel Henry and life Henry’s work intends to isolate a non-intentional domain of life that is brought to light by a pre-critical (or post-critical) phenomenological reading of the gospel of John, one that speaks to the radical disjunction between the eternal Christ and the visible world-horizon. This style of reading scripture is to shift the focus from the critical study of the kingdom of God in the world and its variegated incarnations in human history to the meditative enjoyment of the truth that I am in mystical union with Christ outside of the world and all horizonality. There is for Henry “that of the world, in which everything is seen from the outside, and that of life, in which everything is lived from the inside […] such that the latter is never separated from God’s self-revelation.”11 Henry’s exaltation of mystical flesh is motivated by the absolute Johannine juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the world where Christ was continually displaced as a resident alien and where “he came to that which was his own but his own did not receive him,”12 and, on the other, the acosmic Christ where the presence of God always reigns and where Christ dwells outside the world, for “before Abraham was, I am.”13 Henry is adamant that latter point encapsulates the “essential kernel of Christianity.”14 Ordered by a “logic of the invisible,” flesh appears in abstention from the world. For the sheep parable of John 10, for Henry, states explicitly that Christ constitutes a triumphal arch under which each of us must pass not only to enter into relation with Christ but with each other: for is Christ not the good Shepherd who joins us together in an invisible communion of saints?15 Such a secret cannot come into full view, however. The mystical union we share in Christ cannot be revealed as a relation made possible by the subject’s correlation with objects or the body’s relation to the complex manifold of sense impressions, as in the metaphysics of representation outlined in chapters one and two above. As lived entirely within the sphere of selfaffection, my unity with you on the basis of Christ resists the display of the world. The invisible nature of such a unity means, moreover, that it cannot assume a unity consisting of a plurality of objective displays or a multiplicity of empirical horizons brought together as a mosaic available to see in the world. All flesh is unified in an invisible and organic singularity within the Son of God: “for the Word is that place from which all are born and in which all are identical with each other.”16 One should receive the impression that Henry’s Christology suggests that while it may not be obvious from my body’s exterior display in the world, the inner possibility of all my bodily acts or manifestations in the world is based upon an interior flesh endlessly given to me by the life of Christ; hence, “there is a single and selfsame life [.].. and it has the same meaning for God, for Christ and for man.”17 Henry’s “phenomenology of soul” maintains that all flesh is holy in that it enjoys immediate union with the living power of Christ, and this unity is nocturnal, invisible, and pure: “In the depths of its night, our flesh is God.”18

Incarnate self  59 To clarify such a mystical, and yet philosophically rigorous, vision of the incarnation, we begin with the phenomenological framework with which Henry begins: namely, Husserl’s phenomenology of the body (Leibkörper).19 Given the peculiar structure of the incarnation and the phenomenological character of the Leibkörper advanced by Henry, an obvious step must be taken to ensure my union with the incarnation: the implementation of a radical disparity between interior flesh (Leib) and exterior body (Körper). By splitting the body into discrete segments, Henry accomplishes the decisive shift from the world to Christ. This move enables Henry to clarify the style of givenness by which the “Word made flesh” appears. But to shed light on Henry’s approach to the incarnation, it may be helpful to note how classic theological reflection on the incarnation can be fruitfully modified first from a Husserlian perspective. For Husserl, appearing is always an appearing of something to someone, a dual structure that enacts the ongoing harmonization between the genitive and dative poles of manifestation. 20 Fitted to this order of display and inscribed within the kenotic movement from inside and outside, one must say the incarnation unmistakably denotes a phenomenological appearing of Christ’s flesh to human flesh. Not considering himself equal to God, Christ took the form of a servant and emptied himself in humility. Becoming one of us, moving from inside God to the “outside” of the world, Christ was “made in human likeness […] and found in appearance as a man.”21 Descending into the world-horizon and disrupting the fabric of history from within by dying on a Cross and rising from the dead, the incarnate Christ was manifest as a humble servant cast into the world to redeem it and to draw it toward its eschatological telos. Christ is beheld, in this ancient hymn captured in Philippians 2:5–11, as a visible historical body, as a divine manifestation most evident in Christ’s humble visibility. The doctrine of the incarnation is traditionally understood, then, as divine revelation of God to something that is distinct from God (a distance between God and creation), a distance traversed by God in Christ’s hypostatic union. Such a traditional view of the incarnation finds no place in Henry’s thinking. As will become instructive for us momentarily, Christ’s incarnation (taking flesh) and our incarnation (taking flesh) are one and the same self-revelation in Henry’s peculiar scheme. We return to Henry’s juxtaposition between world and Christ. Henry invokes the principle of the “duplicity of appearing” as the principle that foregrounds not just the radical distinction between the world and Christ but also the radical distinction internal to the body itself. Given its programmatic status, the principle of duplicity orders the manifestation of all phenomena according to an absolute duality: either an invisible appearance of pure auto-affection (i.e., interiority with the genitive and dative situated in an original unity and thus with no fracture or distance) or a visible display of hetero-affection (i.e., exteriority, distance between genitive and

60  Michel Henry and life dative). This duplicity structures the fundamental contrast between subjective flesh (Leib) and objective body (Körper). It is not insignificant to note that in order to bring to light the nature of flesh (Leib) Henry looks to language used in the prologue to the gospel of John, which ascribes to Christ a “taking-flesh,” not a “taking-body.” For the gospel of John, “does not say that the Word had taken a body.]…” Rather, “it says that the Word was made flesh and thus it is a question of flesh and not body.”22 Henry continues, “for it is not a question thus of ‘form,’ of ‘aspect,’ or of ‘guise,’ but of reality. In itself, in its essence and reality it is the Word, and as the Word, it is that of the Word made flesh.”23 Turning attention away from the objective, historical body of Jesus of Nazareth whose presence unfolded in first-century Palestine, Henry maintains that the incarnation is acosmic— invisible and without relation to the world. Understood in these terms, the visible body (Körper) of Jesus of Nazareth does not bear any necessary resemblance to the “Word made flesh.” The incarnation, for Henry, assumes a manner of givenness with a unique style of verification all its own shut up inside itself and thus consists of a revelation that affirms itself with an apodictic certainty—a revelation whereby what appears and the appearance are co-original and thus identical, a style of appearing Henry names auto-affection. The materiality of auto-affection is immediate and self-confirming. Given as a formidable power, auto-affection makes itself felt inside itself, generating a living substance that continuously affects itself by crushing itself against itself so that “life [flesh] plunges into itself, crushes against itself, experiences itself, enjoys itself, constantly producing its own essence […].”24 The world is that primal “outside” which throws living flesh outside itself. Opened up as a horizon by the streaming movement of temporality, the world is positively foreign to the invisible union of living flesh with the “Word made flesh.” The unity is a secret unity because its phenomenological structure is conceived under the form of a living present set over against the flowing temporal ecstasies of future and past. The living present belongs, therefore, to the form of self-presence in possession of a stable and self-secure unity. Christ assumes flesh just in the manner of the living present—by way of an acosmic or non-temporal incarnation that presupposes no gap, no exteriority, no hetero-affection, no temporality, and thus no world: “Neither the mode of life’s giving as self-giving and as self-revelation nor the pure phenomenological substance of which this self-revelation is made, belongs to the world in any shape or form.”25 Henry does not deny that Christ, as a historical personage, assumed a physical, objective body disclosed within time and space. But, the luminous display of the world under which the visible body appears is simply bracketed as a subsidiary and unnecessary aspect of the incarnation. The incarnation is not only lived within the Trinity but, too, within my life, the depth or reservoir of affectivity inside me. In the pathos-soaked embrace of my auto-affection, I am given to myself by Christ’s Incarnate

Incarnate self  61 auto-affection. Christ’s living flesh replicates itself inside my flesh, carrying along my own feeling of myself as it continually arrives inside me as a primal impression. Christ’s incarnation, in short, makes possible my own coming into flesh as one who feels this body that I have as my own body. But my flesh is not my own. My flesh is given to me by the “Word made flesh.” Henry writes: I am not myself, and cannot be, except by way of Life’s original ipseity. The pathetic flesh of this ipseity, in which Life is joined to itself, is what joins me to myself such that I may be, and can be, this me that I am. Therefore, I cannot join me to myself except through Christ, since he has joined eternal Life to itself, creating in it the first Self. The relation to self that makes any me a me is what makes that me possible; in philosophical language, it is its transcendental condition […]. Christ is the transcendental condition of these transcendental me’s. 26 Does this “transcendental Christology” not pose an obvious theological problem? Does not feeling Christ’s flesh within my own flesh introduce an element of hetero-affection within the impenetrable sphere of autoaffection? Inserting Christ as the source and ongoing possibility of my own auto-affection, according to Henry, is not introducing an element of hetero-affection. This is because Christ’s flesh and my own flesh share the same living essence. They are structurally manifest together, co-given in one absolute, nocturnal auto-affection. To feel myself in radical immediacy without reference to anything outside the ego is therefore not to exclude divine flesh. What theological conclusions may we draw from such a radical analysis of the incarnation?27 Might this phenomenology of incarnation cast the dark cloud of heterodoxy over Henry, invoking the specter of Docetism whose teachings ascribe to Christ’s earthly body the status of illusion set over against a pure interior core? It seems difficult to deny that Henry’s duplicitous body gravitates toward the grievous imbalance of this and other early church Christological deviations. Henry’s preoccupation with the essence of Christ’s flesh at the expense of its appearing as a body to other bodies in the visible display of the world is symptomatic of the kind of absolute dualism upon which Docetism(s) trades. Henry’s phenomenology of flesh, moreover, prompts the issue of how my flesh and body interrelate, broaching a familiar problem that runs from Plato to Descartes: the soul versus body distinction. 28 While such Western philosophical debate is important in Henry’s work and reflects a topic for another time, our point in this section has been to highlight that the interior, subjective body (Leib) Husserl analyzed is singled out and thematized from a theological point of view. The Leib so understood by Henry is pristine, holy and in ongoing living relation with the “Word made flesh” insofar as the objective body on visible display de-realizes flesh and empties

62  Michel Henry and life it of its meaning because the body can achieve nothing more than the deplorable rank of simple thing visible for all to see among other things. 29 If I inhabit a duplicitous body, how do I proceed from my exterior Körper to my interior Leib? Is there a practical convention or spiritual practice I can perform thereby enabling the revelation of divine life to grip my flesh anew? While Henry speaks little of the life of the ascetic or saint or the praxis of Christian life, he nevertheless marshals theological resources that foster reflection on an ascetic spirituality, a mystical mood that takes flight from the world, once and for all. We nominate the performative dimension of Henry’s mystical spirituality as a “radical theological reduction.”

III Transcendental reduction as theological reduction We have already acknowledged that the principal thematic motif of Henry’s theological turn is a turn to interiority, that is, that my inner flesh (here understood as soul) is subsumed within Christ and thereby born of a divine act carried out in every instant entirely apart from the temporal streaming and spatial sequencing of the visible Körper in the world. By amplifying its capacity to bracket the world, Henry impresses upon Husserl’s wellknown doctrine of the “reduction” a theological imprint. We discuss other various theological reductions in Marion and Lacoste (in Chapters 6 and 8).30 Whereas the conceptual apparatus of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is typically understood as an abstract philosophical principle that enables the philosopher to meditate on how objects are constituted by a conscious ego, Henry attends, in contrast, to how the reduction permits not just the philosopher but also the spiritual heart a certain spiritual stimulus that may induce concrete union with God and other spiritual seekers. Husserl characterizes the reduction as a reflective exercise that brackets or parenthesizes the world, a reduction that effects a return to an original essence. The transcendental reduction, as it became known, intends to find out exactly how the ego is like a residue, like a pure substance that remains after the abstraction. Husserl strives to dispel, through steady and continuous application of the reduction, the ego from its naïve attachment to the world. For the unreflective person a certain attitude is natural—that the surrounding world stands over me and is finally there as nothing more than an open and transparent horizon given without further ado (one that I represent inside my head). But the world is never simply there, laid bare and exhausted as an unchangeable blank space, and, thus, as a monotonous display of sameness. Construed in this way, Husserl’s reduction does not function to disqualify the world’s appearing, for the world always impinges on the ego, giving itself to the ego as an object of attention and reflection. When the philosopher meditates by putting into play the transcendental reduction, the world is not annihilated but becomes “in a quite peculiar sense, a phenomenon.”31

Incarnate self  63 Husserl therefore states quite clearly that the proper province of the phenomenological reduction is the constituting power of consciousness—that the world is constituted by consciousness.32 An important, but often neglected, aspect about Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction is that he insists that it must be maintained, habitually, as an ongoing attitude about my relation to the world. In Ideas I, Husserl likens the process of enacting the phenomenological reduction to a conversion, an existential renewal. Sometimes he couches it the vocabulary of combat: as if it were a struggle or difficult trial undertaken to loose oneself of dogmatic notions about metaphysical realism. 33 It is naïve to live in the natural attitude, so once I undergo the conversion to the transcendental attitude, I must remain under its tutelage. Husserl is consequently concerned with how the transcendental condition for the possibility of the world is, after all, an accomplishment of the embodied ego’s own constituting consciousness. The world is always constituted inside me, as distinct from me, but as inside me nonetheless. I agree fully with this position as chapters 1 and 2 demonstrated. Henry welcomes Husserl’s strategy to employ the transcendental reduction as a means of unveiling the interior root of the world. 34Henry agrees with Husserl about the basic nature of phenomenology as a transcendental practice, “insofar as it takes into consideration the givenness in which every experience is rooted. The reduction returns us to this original domain and, as Husserl notes, is transcendental.”35 I concur with both Husserl and Henry thus far. Yet Henry parts company with myself, and no doubt with Husserl, when he is critical of Husserl about the degree to which the Husserlian reduction can purify the ego of all “outsideness.” While Husserl may have sought to bracket the exterior world in order to come back to it with the transcendental attitude, Henry thinks that only a theological reduction which reduces the self to its absolute subjective purity given to it by Christ entirely apart from the world is worthy of the name “transcendental.” How does the ascetic or Christian access such a primitive site, the original source of life and the unity of all saints in Christ? The saintly or theological reduction appears for Henry to be the only course of action, a Godward movement toward the living present inside the soul that, of necessity, requires a simultaneous movement away from the world-horizon. As the soul actively draws on its inner, nocturnal reservoir from whence its ascetic skills are refined, the radical theological reduction utterly brackets the world. This accomplishment takes the soul back to that pure residue left over after the disqualification of the world: the interior living flesh (pure Leib) as it is continuously born with all flesh within Christ’s incarnation. The communion of saints in Christ is necessarily an inward communion, where all souls become the invisible operations and action of God. Fleeing from the world and the outward appearances of my physical body, I bracket everything outside of me once and for all (like Descartes in the

64  Michel Henry and life Meditations). Depicted as a journey without return, the movement of the spiritual life of the saint is one governed by a descent inward into the subjective feel of flesh as it is lived in unity with the “Word made flesh.” While the course of action is clear, Henry typically avoids systematic consideration of examples that may lead one to accomplish its intended goal. Perhaps one may find a general “way of being” can be adduced in Henry’s line of inquiry. Henry discusses at length, for example, a Christian style of ethics shaped by the great paradoxes of the beatitudes. 36 To “move” in love toward the other, Henry insists that the saint must practice acts of mercy that are not motivated by self-interest or economic gain. The poverty of the soul is cashed out in great spiritual riches and blessing. To be first is to be last. I love the other by forgetting myself. To be truly active in the world I am to reject the world by remaining poor in spirit and meek in manner. 37 To find myself as I really am, as a living “me,” I am to remove myself from all egocentrism and place myself in the rank of last. This arch-humility orients me away from myself, which, in turn, provokes a “staggering-intomyself” as an immediate coming into Christ, as an abrupt reduction of my ego: “not as I will, but as you will.”38 Of course, love of this Christian kind requires patiently waiting on the other, the kind of waiting that taxes or tries one’s patience. The logic of patience, underlying the interpersonal structure of love, presupposes difference between myself and the other on whom I wait, instead of unity in the subterranean substance of absolute life.39 It is not at all clear, for my part, that one must abandon time, space, and the world should one want to adopt the perspective of love constitutive of the theological reduction (as Henry no doubt suggests). Another example of the theological reduction can be observed in Henry’s discussion of the “I-Can” (Husserl). The I-Can is discharged as a primal sense of possession or power through which I know myself to be in charge of my own body, its movements and destiny. Henry articulates a reduction that eliminates the autonomy of such a self-subsisting egoism. To have an “I-Can” is to have sense of singularity, of self-presence, to know directly and without explicit thematization I am the one who acts. But for Henry, the saint transfigures the I-Can by remaking it into a passive receptacle of God’s grace. My I-Can in reality emerges in and through Christ, whose flesh is manifest in me, empowering all that I do, my very bodily acts. The saint must dispel the illusion that the I-Can is an autonomous power that draws from its own resources. I am a living creature in possession of myself, for Henry, only because I am first possessed by God.40 To remain mindful that I am “not my own,” argues Henry, I must flee from acts of evil, malice, greed, violence and inhabit a passive, even pacific, life of peace, joy, wisdom, and love that is interested in, because it is vulnerable to, the flesh of other selves in the mystical body of Christ. The particular shape of this course of action is marked by non-reciprocal sacrifice, a gift given without expectation of return.41 To love those who do not love me is to abandon the conviction that the law of symmetry and reciprocity

Incarnate self  65 must be maintained in my relationships with others. By the same token, this is to abandon rivalry, competition, violence, power, prestige, and autonomy. To understand my primal I-Can properly, I must abandon the world and its laws. I must love those who hate me and embrace the truth of such a paradox that is foolishness to the world.42 Rolf Kühn helpfully describes Henry’s unique proposal of a theological reduction as a rupture from the world, a “leap” (saut), or an all-at-once movement that proceeds from the visible display of the world-horizon to the field of invisible display inside my elemental self-present flesh.43 Henry designs the theological reduction as a radical leap of faith, a Pascalian wager44 that leads one into the very depth of life by way of a radical and ascetic bracketing of the world. It must be emphasized that the application of the theological reduction does not perpetuate the idea of a disinterested onlooker or spectator, as if the saint could rise above his life and observe it without prejudice. The theological reduction, as Henry conceives it, is thus the work of a pure receptivity both motivated and set into operation by the desire of Christ himself, as the “Word made flesh” appears in its acosmic sphere. The leap into life circulates within itself, proving that my desire for life is already within me as it is given to me, forming me in my pure transcendental essence as this interior “me.” I leap into life, therefore, by way of a radical detachment from the field of visible display, by way of rejection of the world, as a counter-movement aroused by and brought to fruition according to Christ’s internal rhythm. By virtue of the nocturnal purity of flesh yielded by the theological reduction, I experience the deep pathos of myself within divine life’s generative self-donation in the transcendental life of Christ. There is no question that Christian mystical spirituality informs Henry’s practical phenomenology—perhaps this is why there are studies comparing Henry to both Meister Eckhart45 and St. John of the Cross.46

IV Conclusion: incarnation and flesh Henry’s theological turn highlights, in conclusion, a Christic flesh that fills the dark chamber of pure self-affection, my living flesh inside me. As the essence of my singularity, my flesh co-appears with Christ within the concrete mystical body (where all flesh lives) that cannot be indexed or seen in any empirical or visible sense. Self-affection is without relation to the temporal sequencing of reflective faith or hermeneutical decision-making. Put otherwise, the metaphysics of representation finds no place in the work of Henry. The theological consequence of Henry’s thesis on the incarnation is stark. Certainly there is more than a mild Docetism at work in Henry’s appropriation of the incarnation as well as Manichean themes at play in his theological reduction (I discuss this in more detail in this chapter below). The radical dualism that splits the body in half is no mere substance dualism, but rather is correlative with a Gnostic dualism that prompts a flight

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from the visible body toward the invisible soul. A sympathetic reading of Henry, similar to the rendition we provided above, ought to understand that perhaps, more than anything else, what is won by Henry’s theological turn is a theory of the self, of the soul, fully realized inside God, together with other souls (as I discuss in Chapter 4). The death of God theology so popular in the 1960s and the secular mood that has settled in our contemporary age consists, so observes Henry, in an absolute negation of selfhood. For Henry, without God, there is no self, no ipseity, and thus no “me.” The prophetic nature of Henry’s work is evident in his critical stance toward contemporary secular culture and its unreflective assumption that the body can be fully explained by the exterior body, brain synapses, and motor movements. Henry thus writes, “the negation of God is identically the negation of man.”47 Or more directly, and without reserve in his polemics, Henry writes, ‘The death of God,’ a dramatic leitmotif of modern thought attributed to some audacious philosophical breakthrough and parroted by our contemporaries, is just the declaration of intent of the modern mind and its flat empiricism or what he names objectivism (in the wake of Husserl). But because this death of God destroys the interior possibility of man, since no man is possible who is not first a living Self and a ‘me’, it strikes at the very heart of man himself.48 Only by way of the radical reduction, mystical detachment from the empirical world, can the life of the saint find itself renewed in the life of the Spirit where the invisible communion between saints is joined together in the common love that is the Spirit of us all. A sacramental phenomenology discloses this domain of spiritual communion of love as a genuine possibility, one made real in the incarnation, the word made flesh—a flesh beyond the confines of empirical objectivism.

Notes 1 The term “incarnation” will be in lower case throughout this and subsequent chapters, since the term itself may refer either to the idea of embodiment or to the assumption of flesh by the second person of the Trinity. The context of the term should enable the reader to decide which meaning should be applied. 2 Michel Henry, Paroles du Christ (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 58. 3 John 17:14. 4 See, for example, Maximus the Confessor, The Ascetic Life and Four Centuries of Charity, trans. Polycarp Sherwood (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1955). 5 Michel Henry, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 39, 47. 6 Henry writes, They are on in the other, the Father in the Son, the Son in the Father according to an interior reciprocity (where the one is experiencing, living and

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loving the other) that is an interiority of love, that is their common Love, their Spirit. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 108. Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 125. Michel Henry, Entretiens (Paris: Sulliver, 2007), p. 122. Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 118. For an excellent interpretation of emotion as transactional, especially in the context of religious experience, see John Corrigan (ed.), Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 175. John 1:11. John 8:58. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 62. Henry meditates at length on this parable in I Am the Truth, chapter 7, ‘Mans as “Son within the Son”’. Henry, Incarnation, pp. 353–354. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 101. Henry, Incarnation, p. 373. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), §§ 35–42. This genitive and dative duality is what Husserl refers to when he writes, “the meaning of the word ‘phenomenon’ is twofold because of the essential correlation between appearing and that which appears.” Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, p. 69. Philippians 2:7–8. Henry, Incarnation, p. 26. Henry, Incarnation, p. 27. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 55. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 97. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 115. The best critical reading of Henry’s theory of flesh is Emmanuel Falque’s essay, “Y a-t-il une chair sans corps?” in Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry: Les derniers écrits de Michel Henry en débat, ed. Philippe Capelle (Paris: Cerf, 2004), pp. 95–133. It is necessary to affirm that both Leib and Körper are components of the body in Henry, for it is only with the friction between them that Henry is forced to conclude that they relate by way of paradox. If there were no body (or if it were absorbed within the flesh), then there would be no need to describe the relation of flesh and body as a paradox. See Henry, Incarnation, pp. 282–283. Henry writes, “The derealisation of the flesh happens in and by the appearing of the world.” See Henry, Incarnation, p. 219. See, for instance, “La question de la vie et de la culture dans la perspective d’une phénoménologie radicale” in Phénoménologie de la vie, tome IV (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), pp. 11–29. Husserl, Crisis, p. 152. For more on the reduction, see especially, Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §15. See note in Husserl, Ideas I, § 62. Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 16. Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 16. See Henry’s chapter on ethics in I Am the Truth, chapter 10, “The Christian Ethic.” Also see Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 55.

68 Michel Henry and life 37 For an incisive review and critique of the excesses of self-forgetting in Henry, see Anthony J. Steinbock, It’s not about the Gift: From Giving to Loving (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), chapter 3, “Overcoming Forgetfulness: Henry’s Challenge of Self-Givenness.” 38 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 211; Matthew 26:39. 39 For more on the unity of patience and love, or love as a waiting patiently on the other, see Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest: Ethics as Theology 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), chapter 1, “The Sovereignty of Love.” 40 See Henry, Incarnation, § 26, 30, 34–35. 41 Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 46. 42 Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 72. 43 Rolf Kühn, “La contre-reduction comme “saut” dans la Vie absolue,” in Retrouver la vie oubliee: critiques et perspectives de la philosophie de Michel Henry, ed. Jean-Michel Longneaux (Namur, Belgium: Presses universitaires de Namur, 2000), pp. 67–80. 44 Henry, Paroles du Christ, p. 72. 45 For Henry’s discussion of Eckhart, see Henry, Essence of Manifestation, §§ 39–40. For those unfamiliar with Eckhart, it is both his theory of the birth of God in the soul and his theory of detachment or Abgeschiedenheit (i.e., detaching from the desires of the world) that Henry takes up. For more on Henry’s adoption of Eckhartian themes, see Nathalie Depraz, “Seeking a Phenomenological Metaphysics: Henry’s Reference to Meister Eckhart,” trans. George B. Sadler, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (1999): 303–324. 46 For more on the “night” of auto-affection in relation to the dark night of the soul, see Ruud Welten, “The Night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry,” Studies in Spirituality, vol. 13 (2003): 213–233. 47 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 263. 48 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 265.

4

Spiritual life and the phenomenology of life

I Christianity and life In an attempt to ally his phenomenological interpretation of the incarnation of God in Christ with Irenaeus of Lyons’s work, Michel Henry reaffirms his commitment to the reality of the “flesh” Christ assumed. If Christ assumes flesh, then it follows it must be a living flesh that he possessed in first-century Palestine, not a Gnostic counterfeit. And yet, even though Henry’s contrast between an interior flesh and exterior body object may directly challenge Cartesian dualism (as we just outlined above), it does not exactly overcome Gnostic dualism, at least as that category was conceived by Irenaeus.1 What is at stake, we shall see, is the nature of human flesh that Christ assumed. Where Henry and Irenaeus intersect is the point at which Christology and anthropology intersect in the early church debates about the person of Christ. Do these two paradigms (Henry versus Irenaeus) of theological anthropology mutually illuminate or mutually exclude one another? Is the spiritual life, and specifically Christian life, a species of the phenomenology of life, or vice versa? Henry’s focus on theological anthropology is reflective of a trend born of the decades-long climate in phenomenology. The question of the embodied “self” continues to exorcise contemporary philosophy, and French philosophy of religion in particular has explored not only conceptions of the body, temporality, otherness, and being-in-the-world, but also renewed interest in the concept of life. Often known as Lebensphilosophie, and going back at least to Nietzsche and Dilthey, the focused study of life continues to transpire and advance across disciplines. Scholars in fields, as diverse as cognitive science, biology, philosophy, and theology, have employed the vocabulary of life in order to reimagine the inner logic of subjective structures, be they concepts of soul, mind, body, or temporal movement. 2 Michel Henry has attended to such subjective structures of life with unparalleled phenomenological rigor; he has set himself the task of explicating the affective character of life, whereby he argues life unfolds entirely within the domain of self-feeling or self-affection, in which one’s experience and the content of one’s experience coincide.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-6

70  Michel Henry and life This internal experience of the “living present” (Henry’s vocabulary borrowed from Husserl as we witnessed in the previous chapter) connects to what Henry describes in meticulous detail as a domain of pure interiority. It dwells inside me and occurs in dramatic fashion as a self-feeling and self-suffering of myself in union with absolute Life, which is felt as pure presence because it eventualizes and materializes itself independent of all exterior signs usually associated with experience, such as bodily sensation, language, reflective or intentional thematization. These external signs, it should be emphasized, can in no way disclose the essence of life. For Henry, the domain of the living present, and its invisible drama, eludes the appearing of the world in all of its forms. Life opens up a domain immanent to itself, oriented wholly by a pathos of feeling that feels itself, a pure impressionality, so that it “draws its substance from the very substance of life… whose impressional character and affectivity never result from anything other than the impressional character and affectivity of life itself.”3 While Henry draws on the phenomenological tradition, and Edmund Husserl in particular, to express the technical philosophical foundations of this type of anthropology, he also enlists and modifies key categories in Christian theology. Using the Johannine tradition that originates in the gospel of John, Henry argues that theology represents a complementary vocabulary, which provides him with a crucial repertoire of theoretical skills to develop and enhance the invisible depths of the living present. Henry ultimately concludes that the cogito each of us possesses enjoys the selfsame relationship with the divine that Christ enjoys with the Father.4 Thus my life, as I experience it inside myself, is a gift I receive from elsewhere. I do not actively elicit myself but I undergo myself passively; my subjective being is not an accomplishment my ego brings about. That is, and this is the radical leap Henry initiates in his work on Christianity, I am given to myself by that which can self-generate all of life, the invisible and nonworldly First-Living, whose name is the absolute Life of God in Christ. But does spiritual life and the phenomenology of life, which represent two distinct vocabularies, contain identical grammars? Do their idioms overlap seamlessly? To put the point directly: how is Christ non-worldly if he assumed flesh in order to dwell among us in the visible sphere of the world? Because Henry insists on the acosmic or non-worldly character of the incarnation, questions about the extent to which Henry adopts Gnostic motifs persist. 5 Henry’s religious idiom, rooted in the particular theological discourse of Christology, is not without controversy. He acknowledges this controversy by offering a compact, and telling, reading of Irenaeus in his final systematic study of Christ, in Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair (2000). If each of us is an invisible “son within the Son,” then it follows Henry must make the incarnation of Christ, a doctrine fundamental to Johannine literature, the epicenter of his non-ecstatic and otherworldly anthropology.

Spiritual life and phenomenology of life  71 The question of Gnosticism haunts Henry’s work, and the question of how Irenaeus can be invoked in favor of the invisible domain of the living present equally haunts Henry. Should the reconfiguration of incarnation of Christ according to the phenomenology of life isolate the incarnation from the light of the world, the question of a Gnostic abdication necessarily ensues. The following pages in this chapter will examine the confrontation between Henry’s understanding of the incarnation and the anti-Gnostic formulation of Christ in Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses. What complicates, and finally what shows, their differing grammars of incarnation, is that Henry unreflectively aligns Irenaeus with the non-worldly logic of phenomenology of life. For Henry it is in the figure of Irenaeus that a “Christian cogito” is accomplished in the face of Gnostic flight. While Henry in his earlier C’est moi la verité appeared to espouse what Philippe Capelle called a “scriptural exclusivism,”6 the later Incarnation serves the purpose of a corrective in this regard by opening up a dialogue with patristic theology, in the figures of Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Augustine. Proceeding to elaborate a Christology informed by scripture and tradition, and framed by the philosophical category of absolute Life, Henry connects the “true reversal of Gnosticism” [véritable renversement des positions de la gnose] with the “reversal of phenomenology.”7 I wish in this chapter, however provisional it may be, to determine the extent to which Henry is successful in reversing Gnosticism. In the concluding remarks, I suggest that Henry instead succumbs to the trappings of a Gnostic disjunction between this world and the interiority of life, a disjunctive space that fosters the body’s tragic estrangement from the world (a conclusion not irrelevant for strictly phenomenological analyses of Henry’s work).

II Johannine phenomenology Henry’s relationship to theology goes back to his early tome, L’essence de manifestation (1963), most evident in his constructive analysis of the figure of Meister Eckhart. In the 1970s and 1980s, theological topics recede altogether from Henry’s oeuvre, presumably so that he may focus on other disciplines such as politics, art, psychology, modern culture, and phenomenological method. Henry then returns in the 1990s to treat Christianity in light of a finely grained phenomenology of life. I give pause here to note that, even with that gap in his oeuvre, the trajectory of Henry’s theological inclinations spans several decades, originating in his earliest work only to culminate in his final work, Paroles du Christ (2002). The trilogy, in other words, published during the twilight of his career does not generate a novel stage in his thought, but belongs to an overall arc consistently developed, an extension of the foundation laid in 1963 tome L’essence de manifestation. Whether Henry’s work is intrinsically theological is not so much a point of interest for the present chapter.8

72  Michel Henry and life I do not think Henry’s phenomenology is methodologically atheistic.9 The late trilogy on Christianity clearly shows how phenomenology and theology share a common object of study: absolute Life, or God. Strict separation between the two disciplines, therefore, never may finally hold, given both disciplines often evolved in relationship with each other in Henry’s framework. From what has just been said, it follows that some may detect illicit theological claims in his work, and that others may find the object proper to theology itself jeopardized by an unwarranted imposition of phenomenological method on the part of Henry. Whether or not his interpreters and critics can accept the complex arrangement of phenomenology and theology in Henry, it still remains for theology to continue engaging Henry’s thought as it has developed over several decades, from his L’essence de manifestation up to his trilogy on Christianity. Before any such theological engagement may take place, I shall outline in more detail the complex relationship between phenomenology and theology in Henry, without implying that I shall exonerate him of all conceptual flaws. Some of Henry’s readership appears to assert that Henry reads Christianity, and the gospel of John in particular, in a phenomenological manner, exempting him from theological presuppositions.10 I would argue, in contrast, Henry professes faith in God, and moreover, he assumes Christianity must be received as a gift, and this starting point is not to be contrasted with a strict phenomenological method that suspends religious faith, as it is in for example Jean-Luc Marion.11 For Henry, no cut-and-dried distinction between phenomenology and theology may obtain because both theoretical paradigms receive their data from the same source. Life generates philosophy and theology, not vice versa. I name his particular style of thinking a Johannine phenomenology because Henry takes God to be the principal object of investigation, and only derivatively does Henry treat the human condition. Because he adopts a theology from above, which is emblematic of the mystical theology of the gospel of John, the understanding of the human condition begins with what Christ said about his condition as Son of God and ends with the affirmation of Christ’s consubstantial unity with God the Father. Language, and human reflection that employs language such as philosophy or theology, fails to see the truth of God and the human condition, without the aid of divine revelation. It is only from above, by way of experience initiated by God that a living soul may finally vouchsafe the speech of theology, whether and to what degree it is inflected in a phenomenological vocabulary. It is little surprise that he subjects all disciplines and forms of thinking to critique, insofar as they function as boundary discourses that permit the reader to glimpse, not exhaust, the divine mystery that is Christ’s absolute Life. Henry, by the same token, is explicit about the limited utility of any discipline, theology, or otherwise, to grant access to divine Life. The emergence of life arrives according to no particular disciplinary method or

Spiritual life and phenomenology of life  73 speech act, but rather “is the original revelation that carries out the work of revelation with respect to itself.”12 This original revelation is known, in Henry’s vocabulary, as auto-affection, in which God’s self-disclosure reveals nothing other than itself, and is invincibly joined to itself and never ceases being joined to itself in its self-embrace. Non-theological readers may be tempted to claim that Henry’s work presupposes that philosophy is distinct from theology, as if philosophy remained an autonomous discipline whose arguments do not depend on the acceptance of divine revelation. Some may say, to continue in this vein, that the presence or absence of religious faith is incidental to phenomenological descriptions as such, since phenomenology intends to construct a cartography of subjective experience, concerning the how of a thing’s appearance, and nothing more (the content may be filled in with various disciplines, such as politics, psychology, and theology). That may be the case with the phenomenological project of Marion, and certainly with those projects developed by Husserl and Heidegger (the latter of whom says phenomenological theology is tantamount to a square circle). The upshot of Henry’s unique program is that the how of experience and the content of experience coincide in the lived expression of pure affection and pathos, since “affectivity is both the impression’s mode of givenness and its impressional content.”13 The subjective self-manifestation of the subject who appears to itself apart from the world is given in such a way that the impressional form by which it arrives dictates the modality and ultimately the content of its own fulfillment, understood as a pure self-revelation—in that what reveals itself in revelation is nothing but the revealing itself.14 Henry is quite clear that the primal self-revelation of absolute Life designates a non-cognitive and non-intentional self-revelation of God in Christ that does not require philosophy and theology to function as discrete disciplines that reveal its logic in fundamentally different languages; rather the primitive self-revelation of Christ is the “common presupposition” of both disciplines.15 How is God the common presupposition of philosophy and theology? God is for Henry characterized by the radicality of self-revelation, whereby God reveals Himself and nothing other than himself in the person of Christ, admitting in the self-manifestation of Christ no content that is foreign to its own self-revelation. In other words, Life is the relation that itself “generates its own terms. The content of Christianity is the systematic, and moreover unprecedented, elucidation of this relation between Life and all the living.”16 Such an interrelationship between the primal self-revelation of absolute Life in phenomenology and the doctrine of the incarnation in theology means that the two disciplines overlap because of the paradoxical logic of Life’s self-manifestation. In one sense, this indicates in no uncertain terms for Henry that the aspiration of philosophical method or theological reflection to attain the truth of life by the “force of its own thinking goes up in smoke” [part en fumée].17 In another sense, the arch-intelligibility of life’s elementary

74  Michel Henry and life self-presence unfolds in a primitive manner of givenness independent of theoretical understanding, which mysteriously and paradoxically in turn gives rise to and forms the ground of possibility for reflective thinking (pre-eminently in philosophy and theology). I can, in other words, thematize Life as a theologian or a philosopher only because Life is already there giving itself to me, so that it makes itself felt as an antecedent experience, “before the opening of the world and the unfolding of its intelligibility, absolute Life’s Arch-intelligibility fulgurates, the Parousia of the Word in which it is embraced.”18 I am able to think about and ultimately thematize life in a particular vocabulary (e.g., Parousia of the Word) because Life is there first giving itself to me, and joining me to itself, apart from reflective consciousness, indeed, apart from the light of the world as such. Theory “goes up in smoke” only when it presumes to produce or generate Life itself, whereas for Henry theory serves its purpose when it submits to the reality that Life is condition of possibility of all theory. I may pose a critical question at this juncture: if absolute Life, if God in Christ, is a self-disclosure who is manifest in a domain independent of the world, then how does Henry make sense of the incarnation using a Christian theological vocabulary? Henry does not refrain from asking in C’est moi la verité the simple question, “did Christ really come into the world?”19 For Henry, as it was for Irenaeus, the question invokes the debate about the nature and truth of Christianity itself. Henry, as we shall presently see, will focus like so many before him in the history of theological discourse, on the prologue of the gospel of John. 20 Such theological readings of John do not nevertheless lead him to prioritize visibility of divine self-revelation of God in Christ in the world, but rather to formulate in its place a non-worldly domain in which Christ may appear exactly as he gives himself to appear. To prioritize the structure of appearing that the world opens up is, for Henry, to betray the true self-manifestation of Christ. If the truth of Christianity proposes a more original or primitive form of truth, one that occurs under the tutelage of absolute Life as such, then Christianity must be liberated from the horizon of visibility that is the world itself. The question of Henry’s Gnostic proclivities now becomes acute and unavoidable.

III Auto-affection: gnostic or living Christ? Henry echoes much of the Christian tradition concerning the fundamental importance of the incarnation. The “Word made flesh” in John 1.14 is in point of fact an event of such epic and unprecedented proportions that it consists of “an entire spiritual and cultural development perhaps without equivalent in the history of humanity.”21 Some in twentieth-century theology have challenged the long-standing belief that Christianity cannot exist without the economy of redemption worked out in the incarnation, death,

Spiritual life and phenomenology of life  75 and resurrection of Christ. 22 But the preponderance of the Christian tradition, prompted by debate with Gnosticism in the second-century onward, has insisted on the indispensability of the incarnation; without the “Word made flesh” there is no Christianity: the second person of the Trinity entered the human condition and therein assumed real flesh, for it was this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. 23 The fate of one’s place in the economy of redemption is inexorably bound to the fate of Christ’s body, in which the union of two natures occurs in a single body, a doctrinal principle anticipated in Irenaeus (in Christ occurred the “blending and communion of God and man”24) and in Nicaea, finally to be established in 451 at Chalcedon in the more precise language of two natures unified in a single hypostatic union in the person of Christ’s flesh (against Eutyches and Nestorius). Hence, for Henry as much as for the patristic tradition, “Christianity situates its salvation in the body.”25 Moreover, what is at stake in the phenomenological determination of the body of Christ is the ground and possibility of salvation: how can we take part in this filiation toward God if we had not through the Son received this adoptive communion with God by means of the incarnation? Christ must have really and genuinely assumed flesh; otherwise, the salvation of the body wrought in the work and person of Christ becomes vain and abstract, which I would argue (and Irenaeus too) mitigates the gospels’ attempt to tell the story of God’s gracious dwelling among us. Henry, without question, accepts the incarnation as an indispensable article of faith. He observes it is the Gnostics who question the reality of the flesh Christ assumed in the incarnation. Henry will contend that arguments against Gnosticism lead to the “categorical affirmation of the reality of the flesh of Christ.” Yet in immediately pausing to reflect on the nature of flesh as such, Henry pursues a related question: “in what does the reality of the flesh consist, what allows us to speak of a real flesh?”26 A full-scale reversal of Gnosticism therefore requires of Christian faith (1) to affirm in its profession the reality of the incarnation of Christ and (2) to describe the kind of reality of this flesh. To address both of these sub-points, I turn now to Irenaeus, before I conclude with Henry’s idiosyncratic and problematic reading of the incarnation in Irenaeus. Gnostics like Valentinus argue that Christ only appeared to take on flesh. Irenaeus on two separate occasions indicates that Valentinus and his heirs think Christ was untouched ontologically by the flesh of Mary, the mother of Jesus, so that when he was born he appeared in the form of human nature without truly assuming human nature. The fact that Jesus was

76  Michel Henry and life mediated through Mary not by birth but by transport is reason enough for the Valentinian school to reject the incarnation. Mary, in this Valentinian framework, was a tube and Jesus “passed through Mary just as water through a tube.”27 Irenaeus counters this thesis on several fronts. He wonders, first of all, why Christ would arrive through Mary if not to adopt the traits and characteristic of Mary’s human flesh. Birth appears “superfluous”: to come at all through the body of Mary is strictly unnecessary if human flesh is not assumed. 28 Irenaeus further notes, on the level of ontology, mediation between God and humanity depends on genuine flesh being assumed by Christ. Thus Unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility. For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and men, by His relationship to both, to bring both to friendship and concord, and present man to God, while He revealed God to man. For, in what way could we be partaken of the adoption of sons, unless we had received from Him through the Son that fellowship which refers to Himself. Unless His Word, having been made flesh, had entered into communion with us? Wherefore also He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God. 29 Irenaeus continues with this train of thought so that he may make the following theological conclusion, namely, that without a genuine incarnation, no salvation is possible: “Those, therefore, who assert that He appeared putatively, and was neither born in the flesh nor truly made man, are as yet under the old condemnation, holding out patronage to sin.”30 The doctrine of recapitulation, for which Irenaeus is well known, appeals to a real unity between Christ’s flesh and our flesh. In other words, Christ had to become what Adam defiled, so that Christ may “furnish us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation.” The theological reason for this is that only God can restore what was lost, since the power of sin conquered human nature, and “destroyed it through disobedience.” No human, Irenaeus argues, can “reform himself, and obtain the prize of victory.”31 Thus the relationship between human nature and divine nature embodied in Christ ensures salvation: “so that what we had lost in Adam—namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God— we might recover in Christ Jesus.”32 Much of Book III of Adversus Haereses consists of a study of the incarnation that links the suffering of the flesh of Christ on the Cross to the reality of suffering that humans undergo in a fallen world (without implicating Christ himself in the sinfulness of humanity). Irenaeus goes on, in books IV and V, to expand on the nature of flesh as living flesh. This is the juncture in Irenaeus’ narrative where one may distinguish most clearly between the phenomenology of life and the Christian story of the incarnation.

Spiritual life and phenomenology of life  77 To say that flesh is the domain in which the human condition finds its capacity to live is to say it is the domain Christ assumes in becoming one of us in the incarnation. The designation of flesh as living appears in several texts of Adversus Haereses, especially in book V. For example, Irenaeus claims that flesh is capable of both death and life. Even though life and death may not remain in the same place at the same time, because they “mutually give way to each other,” they nevertheless occupy the same terrain, the terrain of flesh. The point here is, to be clear, that flesh is capable of life and death, and receives the former from God in an attempt to extinguish the latter. Thus: God, who is the fount of life, restores flesh to life, and in the process “drives out death.”33 Irenaeus writes, “for the breath of life, which also rendered man an animated being, is one thing, and the vivifying Spirit another, which also caused him to become spiritual.”34 And it is precisely for this reason that Irenaeus makes flesh the locus not only of life, but of the rivalry between life and death. What is it that dies and suffers due to sin? It is the substance of flesh that has become dead in the fall of Adam. What then becomes alive? To wit: flesh is “vivified” by God in the Spirit, in the incarnation of the Son. So, flesh “was what the Lord came to quicken, that as in Adam we do all die, as being of an animal nature, in Christ we may all live, as being spiritual, not laying aside God’s handiwork…”35 in which handiwork signifies flesh. It is therefore flesh’s capacity to suffer, die, and live that makes it a site worthy of the drama of salvation itself. Henry and Irenaeus, I would claim, privilege this marriage of suffering and life, and their differing vocabularies notwithstanding, they would be in agreement on this point. The Gnostics, as Irenaeus understood their theology, rejected this theological paradigm of flesh. They categorically refused to grant to flesh the capacity to live. He observed that a verse by St. Paul is “adduced by all the heretics in support of their folly,” which reads “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15.50). Irenaeus noted that the Gnostics point out that this passage supports the fact that God cannot make flesh and blood live, and thus, “the handiwork of God is not saved.”36 As if to dismantle the argument from the outset, Irenaeus simply claims that in 1 Cor. 15 St. Paul is referring to “fleshly works” not to flesh as such. Flesh, as long as it inhabits the living Spirit of God, can be inherited by the kingdom of God. In that same chapter of 1 Corinthians St. Paul claims that God will enable the mortal flesh to put on immortality and the corruptible flesh to put on incorruptibility. How may this be possible if flesh and blood cannot, in principle, inherit the kingdom of God?37 Flesh, too, Irenaeus does not hesitate to emphasize, is that which is humbled to the earth. Flesh, to be certain, represents the earthy dust and the suffering that attends such humility.38 This prompts a return to the topic of the virgin birth: why would Mary give birth to Jesus if he were “to take nothing of her,” including her capacity

78  Michel Henry and life to suffer? If he had taken nothing of her, no human flesh, then it follows “he would never have availed Himself of those kinds of food which are derived from the earth, by which that body which has been taken from the earth is nourished; nor would He have hungered, fasting those forty days.” But obviously, according to the gospel narratives, Jesus did inhabit all those “tokens of flesh.” Irenaeus belabored the point by observing that the gospel writers only pointed out that Jesus needed rest, that he wept over Lazarus, that he sweated drops of blood before the Cross, and that his side was pierced after his bodily death, in order to make clear the Son assumed real flesh. These are unequivocal “tokens of the flesh which had been derived from the earth,” so that Christ could be understood to have reworked human nature within the economy of the incarnation, in the form of recapitulation, the dramatic renewal of human nature in himself, which is an act that bears “salvation to His own handiwork.”39 Fatigue, suffering, hunger, thirst, that is to say, all traits of flesh’s capacity to suffer arise from within the economy of visibility, the “nerves and bones” that form the “common dust of mortality.”40 Irenaeus’s conception of flesh suffers and enjoys, and it thus lives; flesh counts as flesh only in terms of the elementary tokens which constitute the conditions of visibility, the common dust of the earth, whereby the invisible vivifying Spirit apprehends itself only properly in the indissoluble bond it enjoys with the visible body, seen on display in the world (to use an ocular metaphor for which Western thought is so famous). Nowhere does the difference between a phenomenology of life and Christian life appear more starkly delineated than in their distinct interpretation of flesh, and, as a consequence, their interpretations of the flesh of Christ. As if to ignore the above admonishments Irenaeus levies against the Gnostics, Henry undertakes a phenomenological analysis of flesh according to the opposition between two narratives of manifestation: one that argues flesh appears in the living present independent of the world (invisible), and one that regards the world to have illuminated flesh it in its most proper form (visible). Henry denies and condemns the visible in favor of the invisible. In the process, Henry attempts to assimilate select statements gleaned from Book V of Adversus Haereses. This final section of the ancient manuscript occasions what Henry calls the fundamental subjective site of the spiritual self, the “Christian cogito,” the vocabulary of theological anthropology that insists on the essentially invisible disclosure of flesh, in which its form and content appears outside the confines of the body in the world. In the mind of Henry, it is Irenaeus who “deepens in an extraordinary way the unconditional assignation of flesh to Life, from which it draws its pathos-filled effectiveness.”41 Henry, like Irenaeus, recognizes that Gnosticism denies the concrete reality of flesh, since Gnosticism rules out flesh on the grounds that flesh is too humble a form for a transcendent and living God to assume. Gnostics speculated about the nature or structure of another kind of flesh Christ could have assumed; for example, an “astral” flesh out which the stars are made, or a lighter flesh not of this world, to be characterized by

Spiritual life and phenomenology of life  79 pure intelligible mind.42 Henry refuses to see these Gnostic variants of flesh as concrete affective structures of life. Henry, nevertheless, diverges sharply from Irenaeus. Even while Henry enlists Irenaeus as a proponent of a phenomenology of life because Irenaeus focused on the capacity for flesh to suffer as the grounds for calling it a “living” [vivant], it is nevertheless the kind of flesh to which suffering yields forth that singles out Henry as vulnerable to Gnosticism. For, Henry, the impact of suffering makes itself felt inside me, but it never may appear in the world. How is this so? Do we not see suffering around us, as we look out onto the world? Henry suggests that the real root of suffering lies in self-suffering, a self-embrace that is named auto-affection. Here, in the domain of self-suffering, the self-givenness of God’s very life is received, and in this the power of God is made manifest in the weakness of flesh, its suffering, its depth dimension, whereby my pain and life is lived, not seen. I may see the tears or hear the exclamation, but I do not feel the suffering or joy of the other. Suffering, in its dialectic with joy, assumes a mode of appearing that is “foreign to the phenomenality of Ek-stasis.”43 Ek-stasis, as readers of Henry well known, is tantamount to the world. The world is illusory, and as a domain of appearing it expresses itself at a remove from the original pain or joy itself, a mere representation of suffering and joy can be but faintly discerned “in the ‘outside itself’ of the world… [where] nothing touches itself, feels itself, or experiences itself in any way.”44 We return to Irenaeus. Reduced to a species of the calculus of the phenomenology of life, Irenaeus’ Christian cogito mutates into the invisible site of self-affection, and in an unorthodox reading, doing great violence to the careful critical treatments of Valentinus, the Christian cogito emerges “not through the material of the world but through suffering and thus through life’s phenomenological material.”45 What of the world’s materiality? Henry offers nothing but counsel of despair concerning the world simpliciter. For life, if it not be marked by manifold forms of estrangement, must remain within life itself, the absolute arch-Life of God, if life is to live at all. Indeed, only Life generates Life, and thus living flesh: There is no flesh that is not self-affirming and self-legitimating as to its existence through exactly what makes it flesh (or rather living flesh)— no flesh that does not bear Life within it and the Arch-intelligibility that makes it an unshakable foundation.46 Indeed, flesh’s inner cogito, its living center, is God. Declaring that in its night, in its invisible living present, flesh overlaps in every way with ArchFlesh, Henry does not leave us with a question mark concerning what happens in the living present: God arrives ceaselessly inside the ego, giving the ego to itself, just as the self-presence glory God in Christ is given, in very realization of the Parousia.47

80  Michel Henry and life Should I be forgiven for speaking momentarily on behalf of Irenaeus, the most frequent protest he may advance against Henry’s doctrine of the incarnation is that it is a Gnostic rendition of divine subjectivism, which in turn must abandon any doctrine of participation of the world in God. Irenaeus, to return to book V of Adversus Haereses, will sound like a phenomenologist of Life, when he admits happily that the “glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.”48 Irenaeus will also claim, again sounding like Henry, that “it is not possible to live apart from life, and the means of life is found in fellowship with God.”49 The ray of critical reflection must be cast also in the direction of the earlier parts of Irenaeus’ argument, specifically in book I, where he describes the many traits of Gnosticism. Central to the logic of Gnosticism was a particular relationship between God and Christ, and this was inaugurated by Valentinus. Christ, so understood in his unity with the Father, could not escape the “Pleroma” or the presentation of the Divine realm to itself. For if Jesus escaped or were released from the Pleroma, even in the incarnation (assuming it happened), then the subjective integrity of the Pleroma would be violated by way of an outward venture into the land of alienation known as the world. The Pleroma remains always intact for Gnosticism, as does the inner unity of Life for Henry. And yet: Irenaeus suggests a simple counter-thesis, rooted in the biblical narrative itself: “flesh is that which was of old formed for Adam by God out of the dust, and it is this that John has declared the Word of God became.”50 From this fact Irenaeus indicates that we as human creatures, made from dust, draw our life from God because God kenotically descended from the Godhead and became one of us; the result is that properly Christian life in the world is a life nourished by faith in God’s visible incarnation, the visible display of an order that is not the same as God but crafted in his image. Only the Gnostics claim that the inner soul is divine, and redemption is guaranteed by looking inward. 51 Henry confirms how close he may come to classical Valentinian Gnosticism by picking out arguments in Irenaeus that appear to challenge Irenaeus’ proto-phenomenology of life. Henry admits, in his dialogue with Irenaeus, of the Christian linkage to the Gnostic imagination: a secret gnosis animates Christianity from within. Such is the truth of Irenaeus’s work itself, who apparently (according to Henry) never argued against gnosis but only “gnosis falsely so-called.” Thus Henry can declare with confidence that “We must recognize that Christianity is an Arch-gnosis.”52 Henry’s critiques of the Gnostic position, justified as they may appear, make available aspects of Henry’s own thought of which he is unaware, aspects themselves I argue which are vulnerable to Gnosticism. What this may suggest is that Henry’ work continues to generate debate about the nature and scope, not least the working vocabulary of theological anthropology, ever ancient in its ontological basis. Hans Urs von Balthasar, while he never wrote on Henry specifically, has published much material on Christianity, modernity, and Gnosticism, depicting not incorrectly

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Gnosticism as a relentless promethean pathos, one of escalation Godward. The Gnostic aspiration escalates endlessly into an aspiration for the human to become divine, not by way of participation but by way of pure identity between human and divine. While Henry has challenged this particular version of Gnosticism (my auto-affection is different than God’s absolute auto-affection), what has often escaped Henry’s attention is the deeper topology which gives the unnoticed context for both the original (i.e., Valentinian) version of and the challenges brought out by Gnosticism. Henry’s overrealized eschatology, his enthusiastic commentary on the eternal now of the Parousia, both of which unfold in an acosmic drama within the interior soul in its pure identity with God (Henry rejects that human nature is different than divine nature53) apart from the visible horizon of the world, have the net effect of pointing up the possibility that Henry’s thesis may be an evocation not so much of Christian truth as of pagan “myth”54 as well as evocative of an otherworldly monism contrasted (but equally monistic) with contemporary sensible monisms.55

Notes 1 Gnosticism is of course a term of abuse and subject to much interpretation, given that we have little of their own writings, although the Nag Hammadi discovery rectified that in part. For the sake of delimiting the interpretive challenge of Gnosticism, I will focus on Irenaeus, while not concluding that all Gnosticism is accurately portrayed by his work. On the continued utility of the term “Gnostic,” as a signifier for a set of writings in the ancient world, see David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Also see Cyril O’Regan’s magisterial Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001). 2 See Nietzsche’s analysis of decadence in the Ecce Homo as one example among many of his analyses of life, which are often discussed in contrast to Christianity, a religion whose theology represents a “crime against life” in that it seeks to “suck the blood out of life itself, to make it anemic” (Ss.148–150). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Other early sustained treatments of the conception of life appear in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, in for example his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Hrsg.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). I won’t rehearse here the main lines of inquiry in current literature, but indicative examples are found in the work of Evan Thompson, Francesco Varela, Hans Jonas, and Mark C. Taylor. 3 Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, trans. Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), p. 121. All references to this volume will refer the reader to the English translation, unless otherwise stated. 4 See Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, chapter 7. 5 See Jad Hatem, La sauveur et les viscères de l’être: sur le gnosticisme et Michel Henry (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 174; Joseph Rivera, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), chapter 4. Rolf Kühn is acutely aware of the

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Michel Henry and life Gnostic problem associated with Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life, see his Lebensreligion: Unmittelbarkeit des Religiösen als Realitätsbezug (Dresden, Germany: Verlag Text and Dialog, 2013), p. 68. Philippe Capelle, “Phénoménologie et vérité chrétienne: Réponse à Michel Henry,” in Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry: Les derniers écrits de Michel Henry en débat, Philippe Capelle (Hrsg.) (Paris: Cerf, 2004), p. 48. Henry, Incarnation, S. 132–133. In the French original, see Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), p. 190. The connection between the two reversals is made explicit in §33 of Incarnation. I have addressed this elsewhere; see Rivera, Contemplative Self after Michel Henry, §§15–16. Rolf Kühn also highlights this point about the intrinsically theological nature of Henry’s work; see his Wie das Leben spricht: Narrativität als radickale Lebensphänomenologie: Neuere Studien zu Michel Henry (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), pp. 24–32. Also, atheism is not so much a question of method as it is a metaphysical decision. Dominique Janicaud’s suggestion that atheism is about strict rigor (without prejudice of any kind) fails to account fully for Jean-Luc Marion’s critique that atheism is itself funded by metaphysics. See Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and the Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), §1, The Idol. See, for example, Frédéric Seyler, “Michel Henry,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/michel-henry/; Christina Gschwandtner (accessed January 30, 2019), “The Truth of Christianity? Michel Henry’s Words of Christ,” Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, vol. 13, no. 1 (June 2014): 1–14; Paul Audi, Michel Henry (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2006), p. 222ff. Marion insists that phenomenology and theology are strictly separate. See his “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology,” trans. Thomas Carlson, Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 4 (1994): 572–591. Henry, Incarnation, p. 255. Another programmatic statement by Henry: There where God originally arrives in himself, in the phenomenalization of phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality proper—there alone is access to God. It is not that thought is lacking and so we cannot accede to the Revelation of God. Quite the contrary, it is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God—the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.

Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 27. 13 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 17. 14 Henry writes, in his own inimitable words, “Access to God, understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to Him, is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so.” Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 27. 15 Henry, Incarnation, p. 255. 16 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 62. 17 Henry, Incarnation, p. 255. In the French, p. 364. 18 Henry, Incarnation, p. 255. 19 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 22. 20 Rolf Kühn and Markus Enders, “Im Anfan war der Logos…” Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Johannesprologs von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg im Bresigau: Verlag Herder, 2011).

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21 Henry, Incarnation, p. 5. 22 Ingolf Dalferth highlights the shift away from the Incarnation in modern theology that undermined belief that Christ was a God-man, a movement underway in Europe and North America in the 1960s. See Ingolf Dalferth, Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology, trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), chapter 1. 23 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 19, 1. 24 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 4. 25 Henry, Incarnation, p. 6. 26 Henry, Incarnation, p. 128. 27 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, I, 7, 2; and 3, 11, 3. 28 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 22, 3. 29 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 18, 7. 30 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 18, 7. 31 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 18, 2. 32 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 18, 1. 33 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 12, 1. 34 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 12, 2. 35 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 12, 3. 36 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 9, 1. 37 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 13, 2–4. 38 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 15, 2; and V, 14, 2. 39 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 22, 2. 40 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 2, 2; and V 7, 1. 41 Henry, Incarnation, p. 132. 42 Henry, Incarnation, p. 132. 43 Henry, Incarnation, p. 134. 44 Henry, Incarnation, p. 130. 45 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 131–132. 46 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 134–135. 47 Henry, Incarnation, p. 374. 48 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 20, 7. 49 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 5. 50 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, I, 9, 2–4. 51 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 20, 5–7. On the notion of a divine particle having been deposited in the human soul, as it appears in some Gnostic teachings, see II, 19, 3. 52 Henry, Incarnation, p. 261. 53 Michel Henry, Paroles du Christ (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 146, in which Henry rejects the Chalcedonian claim that Christ has two natures. This is because humans have the same nature Christ has. 54 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. II, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), pp. 417–429. Hans Jonas also ascribes as a central motif in Gnosticism the idea of an interiorized eschatology. See Hans Jonas, “Myth and Mysticism: A Study of Objectification and Interiorization in Religious Thought,” Journal of Religion, vol. 49, no. 4 (1969): 315–329. Both call this mode of overrealized eschatology mythic. Balthasar use his concept of “Gnostic escalation” to describe the errant impulse to be divine, Theo-Drama, vol. II, pp. 418–420. 55 Perhaps the best recent example of a sensible monism, inspired by Spinoza (as Henry was), is Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), which essentially moves in the opposite direction of the monistic continuum. A constructive comparison between Henry and this text would be fruitful, but I leave that to others.

5

The spirit of empathy

I Introduction: spirit and affection It goes without saying that Michel Henry never presumes to play the role of theologian, as we have indicated above; and yet, he nevertheless firmly submits the argument to his readers that his late trilogy be understood as an emphatic witness to spiritual truth: namely, that the soul dwells at once inside itself and inside God. As a philosopher, one specifically trained in phenomenology, he extends and enriches the legacy of the theological turn—in that he takes on unflinchingly the complicated task of the philosophical description of a specifically Christian theological anthropology, one grounded in the spiritual dynamics of affection, empathy, and intersubjective love. How does a spirituality formed in Christian practice make possible a relation to God and the other that is a relation shaped wholly by affection, and yet, one specially formed by the spiritual practice of the eucharist? If this chapter (like each of the chapters in all three parts of this book) repudiates the underlying ontology of the metaphysics of representation, then it follows a nonrepresentational and nonreflective mode of embodied pragmatics unveils what is most proper to Henry’s spiritual articulation of the eucharist. Indeed, a final reflection on the theological valence of embodiment, located in the closing remarks of his book Paroles du Christ (2002), will reveal the necessary role the eucharist must play in the process by which one enters the invisible realm of the supernatural. This occurs, for Henry, without the aid of the mind, concepts, or the intentional display of object-oriented manifestation. While I do not think concepts recede from eucharistic practice altogether, it is Henry’s audacious claim that concepts and mental formations have no place in the unfolding of my interrelation to, and feeling of togetherness with, the other, a unity consummated in spirituality of the eucharist. I name this non-representational process eucharistic empathy, and I intend below to enlist it critically within my own understanding of the horizon of experience. The single greatest achievement of Henry’s theological turn is that it overcomes mentalism or representational cognitivism, and true to his spiritually attuned theo-Phenomenology, we

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-7

The spirit of empathy  85 shall end this chapter with a reflection on Christ’s speech in a synagogue in Capernaum, located in the gospel of John chapter 6. I.1 Stripping mental paint I do not wholly adopt Henry’s phenomenological strategy, however. To phrase it differently, I do not deny the force of concepts in my involvement with the world, not least the eucharist (as Henry does). They color all that I enworld. While concepts remain indispensable for the daily negotiation of the world, I do not see concepts as primary, as if they band together into broad hermeneutic “paint” that glazes over and thus colors my experience of the world in its totality. Some argue that concepts, as if they fuse together into a thick mental paint, contain the property of grammar that shapes how I speak about the world. Some philosophers depict concepts as a type of “mental paint” we apply to the world, in order to make sense of the world at all. What this might mean for phenomenological experience is briefly outlined here so that my own position (and Henry’s) can be thrown into greater relief for the reader. Can mental perception of the yellow coffee mug situated on the desk before me simply give itself to me directly without the intervention of concepts that, if deployed as noetic rays, would constitute the mug in a certain light? Mental paint theorists address this with a stark negative. The coffee mug, while given as a coffee mug, assumes a place within my mind only once it is thoroughly painted by my conceptual colors, whatever shade they may be. I am directly aware of the coffee mug when I attend to it with my eyes and behold its rounded physiognomy and yellow color. However, I am not “directly” aware of it in the sense that its phenomenal character is given to me as pure “bits” of sense data. It arrives to me as a suite of blank sensations that I experience as a unity (this coffee mug) once I spray paint them with concepts. I see the coffee mug at a cocktail party. I do so only on the basis of selective attention. Someone else standing right next to me may not see the coffee mug situated on the edge of the breakfast bar (we’re standing in the kitchen). Even though the coffee mug is an object whose appearance is phenomenally present to both of us, I am the only one who sees it because my attention is directed to it. Of course, the “cocktail party effect” belongs to the nonconceptual domain of selective attention, in which at any given point in the scene I do not consciously grasp all that is present to me in the kitchen, especially when holding a conversation. Perhaps the friend next to me sees the painting on the kitchen wall just behind the coffee mug, and I do not, even though we are both looking in the same direction.1 Herein lies the mentalist interpretation of selective attention, which I think has some validity: my mental paint, and my friend’s unique color of mental paint confer the room with a particular hue or shade rooted in the power of concepts, which occupy pride of place in visual attention. The properties

86  Michel Henry and life of my mind’s conceptual framework, then, enjoy the privilege of being responsible for constituting the mug in a particular cognitive light. The yellow coffee mug reminds me, for example, of my late grandfather with whom I was very close. I took as a safekeep the 30-year-old plastic yellow coffee mug that said “Daylight Donuts” after his passing, because it reminded me of him and the donut shop he once successfully opened (true story). Any yellow coffee mug will arise within my mental space with this happy “mental color” painted on it. This may rightly account for why the yellow coffee mug “affects me” with a prominence other objects are not capable of doing. It quite literally juts out before me. My relationship with my grandfather (a component of my lifeworld) justifies why the mug appears to me with greater intensity and brightness than it does to my conversation partners, who also see the mug from the exact same phenomenal perspective. 2 What about when it is not an inanimate object or thing I am beholding (mug, painting, etc.), but another person, another ego? What if it is an “alter ego” that I encounter? Do I paint him or her with mental concepts, orienting myself to that alter ego by means of selective attention? Perhaps their selective attention about my countenance demands that I see or paint their appearance in a different light? Perhaps if they ignore my selective attention they enrage me or dishearten me? What if I tell the other I love her? What if I seek from the other a connection, a shared feeling known as empathy, but she does not reciprocate, not least acknowledge me? The mental paint theory, to put it bluntly, is too intellectualist to approach and address such questions. Only a phenomenology of the experience of the alter ego, gleaned from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (the fifth Meditation) and Henry’s corrective outlined in Material Phenomenology, can furnish the needed vocabulary that makes more intelligible the mystery of the other. The vocabulary of emotional valence, of feeling, of empathy, of affection, and of mood: these concepts accumulate, building up an embodied picture of my perception of the other, such that the word “perception” does not do justice to the nonconceptual and nonrepresentational experience I have of the other. It is true, no doubt, that conscious attention, mentally applied and enacted, changes one’s grasp of an object or a whole scene. But the mental paint theory as it stands, for myself and for Henry, is a disembodied relation shorn of affective moorings. Mental paint needs to be stripped by the power of affection (affection is like paint stripper, to continue with the paint metaphor). Concepts, in this sense, become subordinate to the embodied practice of mood and affection. Perhaps mental paint exists. Perhaps it emanates out from the conceptual framework the ego or the “I” employs, but the conceptual paint can be applied only in thin daubs (so we shall thin it down, not completely remove it). In empathy, affective and bodily mirroring occurs in a fashion that exceeds the grasp of any single concept or mental idea, for empathic mirroring occurs outside of the stream of objectifying consciousness. When I

The spirit of empathy  87 empathize with your grief, I instinctively sink heavily downward. Perhaps I, without reflecting on it as an object of attention, move my hand to my brow and close my eyes in pain. When I share your joy, say your job promotion, I move expansively similarly to, and in conjunction with, your tone of voice, facial expression, and arm movements. I raise my arms or punctuate my affective connection to you with a clap of the hands or a vast smile and widened eyes. The “resemblant kinetics” between you and me are dynamically attuned one with the other, between bodies who share in grief or joy. Their congruence, in other words, validates an embodied affection that is mutually involved, so that I live or enact my movements on the basis of affections I share with you.3 Theologically, the shared affection of life together in the spirituality of the eucharist, in this community, too, enjoys intersubjective exchange based on corporate affection. One limb links to the other limb, whereby they move in harmony, attuned to each other’s bodies as they feel one another in love and humility, mediated in the Spirit of Christ’s love for each member of the body. Augustine writes, for example, that the mystery of faith is that it is at once spiritual and embodied, that we share our bodies insofar as we live from the spirit collectively: “Let him approach, let him believe, let him be embodied, that he may be given life. Let him not shrink back from the coalition of members.” Indeed we approach each other in the coalition only because my body lives from spirit, yours from your spirit. The body of Christ can only live from the Spirit of Christ. It is for this reason that the Apostle Paul, explaining this bread to us, says, ‘We though many, are one bread, on body.’ To be embodied together, in the unity of the Spirit of Christ, reflects a living form of knowing that permits us “to become the body of Christ, so that we may live from the Spirit of Christ.”4 The bread of concord, the cup of mutuality, entreats us to the common practice of becoming the body of Christ, quite apart from the faculty of representation or the level of concepts and mental paint. We join together in faith, we enact the body in hope, and we feel each other in love; ultimately, the sacrament of unity promises life together, in the vocation of eucharistic empathy, consummated only in part now, to be realized fully in eternal life. In what follows, I draw out the strictly phenomenological portraiture of empathy and shared life in more detail, and in conversation with Henry, before I close with further reflections on eucharistic empathy.

II Pathos-with Henry, a true disciple of Husserlian monadic interiority, remains the chief exponent of the interior givenness of selfhood, which he nominates with the

88  Michel Henry and life term “auto-affection.” Reframed in light of the doctrine of radical interiority, phenomenology in Henry’s work involves a series of textured descriptions of the internal formation and structure of feeling, the non-thematic self-awareness by which I know and feel myself without consciously apprehending myself as an explicit object of attention. This domain of internal, first-personal self-awareness, born of pathos, emerges in and through a sphere defined strictly by feeling, formulated in order to clarify a feeling so close to who I am that it consists of nothing less than self-feeling or selfaffection, a site of pure immanence in which I discover myself only as a self who experiences nothing other than itself. This self-reference, or form of self-affection, moreover, is itself a nontemporal moment of the concrete self. In this scenario, I am prereflectively or non-intentionally aware not only of each experience as mine but of each experience as taking up its determinate position within the immanent domain of the self-affection of mineness. I am overcome with myself, as it were, in that self-impression follows on from self-impression, until I undergo the self-embrace of pure immanence, the primordial suffering of life driven back to itself, crushed up against itself, and overwhelmed by its own weight. It is not an affection at a distance, isolated, and separate, something one can escape, for example, by moving away or by turning the regard away. 5 I am prereflectively aware, in other words, of a single life in multiple stages of self-suffering without, however, thematizing this self-impressionality as an object in its own right. If I am aware of myself as a concrete life, as a self who is the subject of experience and not (ever) an object of reflection, how do I experience the other? How does this kingdom of immanence conceived by Henry open its borders to that which is other? Henry discovers the way forward only in conversation with Husserl. He argues that Husserlian egology, in spite of its emphasis on subjectivity, promotes a radical distance or abyss between subjective monads. Those acquainted with Henry’s philosophical genealogy know that it accuses the whole of the phenomenological tradition of ontological monism. Those acquainted with Henry’s position will also understand that Henry readily associates Husserlian apperception with ontological monism. For Henry, intersubjectivity is monistic in that it presupposes one foundation of manifestation, a singular, and hence “monistic” structure of phenomenality— the outside of the self (hors de soi) of the exterior or the ek-static horizon of the world and nothing else.6 Simply put, Husserl fails to uncover in the fifth Meditation in Cartesian Meditations the site of radical and pure immanence and the real possibility of immediately experiencing the other. How may I experience the other immediately, in Henry’s phenomenological system? I shall explore this in more detail subsequently, but for now it may be helpful to cue the reader to certain limit examples that Henry

The spirit of empathy  89 invokes as exemplars of intersubjectivity: the infant and the mother’s bond, which does not require conscious reflection, language, or representational capacities exercised by the cognitive-intentional structures of the mind. The mother and the infant communicate, but they do so only on the level of affection, a mode of exchange whose occurrence unfolds in a manner entirely independent of reflective conscious apprehension of culture, language, social conventions, etc. Henry also mentions the intensity, indeed mystery, of the inarticulable bond between the lover and the beloved. An embrace here understood may occur only within the confines of affection, and, therefore, independently of the knowledge of a particular personality trait or cognitive process of the beloved. Husserl does not account for these kinds of elusive, but genuine and powerful, kinds of intersubjective solidarity.7 The second problem bedeviling Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality (in the fifth Cartesian Meditation), for Henry, is that it cannot in principle advance a strategy that enables the phenomenologist to bridge the gap between two monads, even if he should desire to do so. How can two Husserlian monads really have intersubjective contact with each other if they preserve structurally their absolute integrity as distinct monads? How can the monadic ego concretely experience the alter monadic ego on the basis of a monadology? If we each require a movement outside of ourselves into the abyss in order to meet, how do we not fall into the abyss? And how do we not thereby fail to encounter one another? According to Henry, we should condemn Husserlian intersubjectivity to philosophical failure, since it embodies a phenomenology of the “abyss,” that is: it posits not the relationship between two monads, but rather the yawning interval between them. This space alone remains the site where the community of monads interact. But how is that philosophically plausible? For Henry it is not. Henry thinks that an emphasis on the abyss in Husserl fosters philosophical irrealism.8 For Henry, irreality does not mean “fantasy,” “imaginary,” or “nonreal”; rather it calls to mind a striking ontological statement: irreality communicates a sense of self-alienation. When I am alienated from myself, I am thrown outside of myself into the realm of the visible world, the field of exterior disclosure. The phenomenologist, in Henry’s framework, can only properly unearth the subjective core of the ego by means of the logic of auto-affection. As soon as a monad is forced outside of itself (ejected into the world or the flow of intentional life), it cannot experience itself. As a result, it becomes a non-self. Without pure immanence the self no longer inhabits its real, essential subjectivity.9 Therefore, when both monads lurch into the sphere of the world, into the abyss, the representational act of apperception is nothing more than the idealism in the sense of having an “idea” or “noematic correlate” of the alter ego, which cannot in principle take up residence in the ego’s Originalsphäre. The ego mediates or mirrors the alter ego by force of a noematic idea of the alter ego. Henry, whose theory of the other serves the purpose of a corrective to Husserl on this score, sets into operation what he thinks is a genuinely concrete experience of the

90  Michel Henry and life other that allows for “real” (and not irreal) communion and interpenetration of egos, what he calls the life-community (which I discuss below). The final, and perhaps most imposing, critique of Husserl is Henry’s insistence that Husserl never accounted for the affective state of affairs we obviously experience when confronted with the other. How can the other wound or thrill or even love/hate me if intersubjectivity is reduced to a cognitive-perceptual act alone? Henry writes about Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation: “In what is its ownmost (and, I would add, its most horrendous), it is a phenomenology of perception applied to the other.”10 Even though Husserl discussed the pivotal role of empathy in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Henry thinks it is merely a cog in the larger perceptual wheel of objectivating (or representational) cognition. Thus, Henry would argue that Husserlian intersubjectivity fails to distinguish between how we experience an object and how we experience another human being. The body of the other becomes in nuce a simple empirical thing, a body-object that resembles, perceptually speaking, the ontology of a stone or a tree. Our openness to others, insists Henry, must point to a life-community.

III Communauté de vivants Henry’s distinctive contribution to the problem of intersubjectivity begins with the following question: “What, then, could one say about an experience of the other in which perception would play no role at all?”11 Henry prizes affection (in contradistinction to perception) as the all-embracing domain of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Where, then, does the community of life gather? Where do we find its members sharing life together? The disclosure of affection, in Henry’s mind, transcends the simplistic or naïve interpretation of an affection as a “gut feeling” or emotional impression or the exorbitant sensation of ecstasy. Affection contrasts with particular episodes or manifestations of an emotional state of mind (it is neither intentional nor representational in structure). It instead reflects the aboriginal and undetectable structure that lay behind the scenes, that is, the transcendental form of subjectivity: “Affectivity as the Universal Form of All Possible Experience in General and as Form of this Form. The Pure Concept of Affectivity.”12 There is, therefore, an unambiguous hierarchy in Henry’s phenomenology of Life: “affection” elucidates a primitive form, inasmuch as it dictates the transcendental condition for the possibility of both non-intentional self-experience and intersubjective experience. Affection, however it may be conceived as a transcendental form, does not deprive the ego of the experience of the alter ego. But neither does it permit the ego to encounter the alter ego in the horizon of the world or within the parameters of the structures of consciousness that perception utilizes. The performative domain of perception, exercised in the world, remains posterior to and thus

The spirit of empathy  91 subordinate to affection, which is an antecedent form of experience that is self-experience. Affection is superior to perception because, for Henry, auto-affection is by necessity always pure, while perception remains fundamentally tainted by that which is alien to perception’s form. Pure in what way? In affection, if it is to remain within the sphere of auto-affection, it may admit of no exteriority, no mode of givenness that is transcendent to it. Life is pure and cannot appear anywhere but in itself, the site of radical, pure immanence. Life is tantamount to the color of pure white; this means that even if the color white is slightly tinted with another color (say red) and even continues to look white to the naked eye, it does not count as white. It is rather a very light shade of red. Thusly illustrated, like the phenomenon of life, the color of white never may admit of any other shade of non-white color. Life is pure and cannot appear outside itself, and must only manifest itself within itself by giving itself to itself. It crushes against itself in a constant interior reciprocity between self and itself. In so doing it produces the affective pathos of the self-suffering of being a self. As soon as I proceed toward the sphere of transcendence I step outside of Life altogether. Henry also claims, in equally radical fashion, that only reality and truth can be found in the rich experiential purity of auto-affection. There is no truth “hors de Soi.” When the ego experiences itself within the pure embrace Life (i.e., pure self-presence), it can embrace itself, a style of subjectivity he names ipseity. The human being is not, Henry would argue, an object or mechanistic, empirical thing. The ego suffers, loves, hates, and enjoys itself in an original self-suffering of being riveted to itself. The ego, as uniquely this self, feels the burden of not being able to escape its “me-ness.” Given this radical philosophy of concrete immanence, and the purity of auto-affection as the sphere of subjective reality, how can the ego be “affected” by another ego? Is the purity of auto-affection ruptured by the presence of an alter ego? Or can we experience the other ego within the purity of Life itself, apart from all hetero-affection? How do a community of egos experience one another in the community of Life? Life does not appear in the world nor in any horizon, nor even within flow of temporality, so in what domain does intersubjectivity arise? Recall that auto-affection’s manner of givenness resembles the way in which an infant intimately feels and experiences its mother, being reliant on the mother for all nourishment and self-identity (yet it is a relation, from the infant’s perspective, that remains outside of the world, language, and intentionality). Henry, in his later systematic work on the subjective body (he calls flesh [chair]) entitled Incarnation, devotes space to the analysis of sexual love as another representative paradigm of auto-affection. Pornography is the outcome of a sexual union that wholly occupies the physical body, whereas true love, an affective union of egos, occurs when the invisible subjective depth of each body has concourse with the other prior

92  Michel Henry and life to the physical body. The physical body recedes into the background, for true erotic love evokes a point at which two egos can dovetail, where one auto-affection yields reciprocally to another auto-affection. The “night of lovers” is the scene here, in which the word “night” quite literally conveys its invisibility, that the sexual union of love enjoys a union of the invisible space of auto-affection, wherein love occurs outside of the “daylight” of the world and the structures of representational consciousness (which illuminate objects with perceptual “light” for the ego). The affective tonality lived between lovers, in the “lover’s night,” does not correspond to a particular conscious apprehension of sex, or to a psychosomatic flutter of the heart. It points to the depth dimension of love, in which lovers enter each other at the level of invisible affection, the living subjectivity they each possess one in the other, prior to their exchange of a “kiss in the objective bodies” that may appear to be nothing more than a “bombardment of microphysical particles.”13 Sexual acts, when understood as a display of gratification and power, of using the other to quench a sexual drive, constitute the masochist and sadist profanation of erotic love that happens “in” the world.14 Only when that relation between lovers is taken outside the realm of objects and particles and placed back inside its immanent life, inside the union between souls, can the night of lovers invoke a union of peace, joy, and love and “real” living union occurring in the Spirit.15 Given Henry’s radical theory of intersubjectivity based on non-intentional intersubjectivity, one can perhaps agree with Sebastian Laoureux, following Rudolf Bernet, in declaring Henry’s notion of intersubjectivity as a form of hyper-transcendentalism— insofar as the relation between egos happens within the “form” of affection, and nowhere else.16 We all have one and the same origin, in Henry’s system, and we must afford ourselves the opportunity to tap into that shared life should we aspire not simply to enter into solidarity with the other but to share life itself, to experience the other in every way the other experiences himself. Intersubjectivity has its site in Life and in Life alone; each ego possesses an essential co-belonging between it and Life. For it is in Life in which I am borne forth, for I am self-affected in what occurs as my own life only in Life’s self-affection; I am self-revealed to myself in Life’s own self-revelation, this is the common source of the individual “me” to whom is given life. To reinforce Henry’s principal thesis about the first-person singular who is declined in the accusative, moreover, I am consubstantial with what Life reveals; hence at no moment does it let that person go outside it, but rather holds him within, in its radical immanence… by giving him to be embraced within this embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself. The embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself is its love, the infinite love with which it loves itself.17

The spirit of empathy  93 The universal structure of self-affection presupposes the universal address and embrace of love. In the context of an amorous or “emotional acoustics,” Henry will insist that community of Life consists of a collective accusative stance, inasmuch as each ego feels the other’s auto-affection through the absolute auto-affection of Life. Where is this community of life, then, if it is an inward unity in which I feel you in love? As Henry provocatively writes, The community is a subterranean affective layer. Each one drinks the same water from this source and this wellspring, which it itself is. But, each one does so without knowledge and without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the basis.18 One may beg the question of Henry: how does the temporality and cultural implications of Christian theology intrude if at all in the connection between intersubjectivity and the body of Christ?

IV Eucharistic empathy: Capernaum John chapter 6 recounts the “bread of life” sermon Jesus delivered in a synagogue in Capernaum. Much of it revolves around whether and to what extent his followers should eat his flesh and drink his blood, if they are to partake of eternal life and be drawn together under his lordship. At the end of his radical claims, which lay the foundation for a rich eucharistic theology, his disciples exclaim, “‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’” (John 6.60). For Henry, the discourse on the bread of life is ample evidence that the word of Christ lies in structural contrast to the word of the world. The narratives and propositions of Christ are difficult to grasp and understand because they do not fit within the flow of conscious apprehension or cognitive concepts at all. The revelation of the word of Christ, for Henry (not for myself exactly), is accomplished in an “Arch-revelation by which, embracing itself, Life engenders itself, makes itself Life. Word of Life, self-revelation of Life, Word of Life, Logos of Life—as says John, summarizing Christ’s many affirmations reported after the Prologue.”19 Above all, it is the words spoken at the synagogue in Capernaum, in John 6, that discloses the means by which a disciple may hear the voice of Christ, and thus rediscover the invisible domain of the Holy Spirit. In Capernaum, Christ speaks of life dwelling in himself, of real food and real drink that corresponds to his body and his blood. For Henry, the site of the heart in each of us is the site wherein the self hears the word of Christ. It is here that the identity of revelation of Christ with myself in my heart that can explain why Christ knows the secret of our hearts. It also explains why Christ loves us in his word, since it is in the heart that he assumes the shape as the self-revelation of God: the self-revelation is accomplished in

94  Michel Henry and life such a way that makes the human being truly human, so that “hearing the word is thus consubstantial with human nature.” Further, I am embraced in Christ upon this hearing, and once lived, I can feel the love of Christ, so that in “embracing itself in the First Self in whom, loving itself in him, who loves himself in it, it reveals itself in the profusion and splendor of his Parousia.”20 Yet the comprehension of this truth, of the lived experience of love, involves the difficulty of the obstacle of representation. For Henry, it is clear by now, the duality of manifestation means that the visible words of Christ, the phonemes spoken in Capernaum, do not communicate the truth of love felt in the heart. When we hear the word of Christ spoken to us, we hear it not as noise of the world. We hear it in the silence where no noise is possible, no gaze—in the secret of the heart where God sees, where his Word speaks. Each of us hears it in our suffering and in our joy, in our ennui as much as through our Desire which has no object on earth. 21 Located not in the domain of light or in the representational space of cognitive distance, the word of life is present to us in the Spirit: “Only the Spirit permits us to know the Spirit.”22 By giving ourselves to the word, together in collective communion, only then do we remain open to being recipients of the word of God. But “how” do we give ourselves to that Word of the Spirit? The closing remarks on Capernaum in Henry’s Words of Christ provide the clue: the eucharist. Here, as we bind together, we resonate with each other in the bond of love, consummated by the Spirit, as we eat his flesh and drink his blood. The radical unity of love and will presupposed by empathy is grounded in the radical unity of love we have with the word of God expressed in the eucharistic rite. The economy of salvation is shown in all clarity in Capernaum. The omnipotence of the Word is the invincible coming into itself of absolute Life, revealing itself in its Word. Because the Word has become incarnate in Christ’s flesh, the identification with this flesh is the identification with the Word—to eternal Life. ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day’ (John 6.54)23 The community of life is the community of Christ, the body of Christ, to which Henry no doubt refers us to in the final lines of his great work Incarnation.24 This subterranean self-affection, a domain invisible to that of representation or empiricism, nonetheless requires embodied practice, community, and shared love cultivated by spiritual practice, her: the ritualizing of the body of Christ. What of concepts and reflective awareness? That is, what of the metaphysics of representation? What of physical movement borne forth in

The spirit of empathy  95 empathy, whereby we mirror one another on the basis of shared affection? Perhaps we mirror each other by way of collective intentionality, in our explicit profession of the love of Christ? Augustine’s own commentary on Capernaum, found in his Tractates on the Gospel of John, reveals a similar (and thus long-standing) Christian concern for the embodied heart. For out of the root of the heart does confession come forward, argues Augustine. Confession trades on conviction and passion about a particular person and his work on the Cross. 25 In our joint love and joint attention, where concepts feature, Augustine insists that the heart must accompany the mind if true understanding and mutuality should obtain among believers: Give me one who loves, and he feels what I am saying. Give me one who desires, give me one who hungers, give me one traveling and thirsting in this solitude and sighing for the fountain of an eternal homeland, give me such a one, and he knows what I am saying. But if I speak to someone coldly unresponsive, he knows not what I speak. 26 Impassioned and desirous confession (from those who thirst and hunger for God), nonetheless, utilizes concepts, metaphors, language. Desire of Christ does not flee the mind (Augustine on the same page submits Arius’ Christology to a harsh theoretical critique). Even if the communication of the Spirit is made real in the communication of love, the empathic unity I enjoy with you in the eucharist involves a conceptual and narrative structure. For example, we seek forgiveness and reconciliation not only with God but with each other, in preparation for the eucharist: Approach without anxiety; it is bread, not poison. But see to it that you forgive; for if you do not forgive, you lie, and you lie to him whom you do not deceive. You can lie to God; you cannot deceive God. He knows' what he does. He sees you within, he examines you within, he inspects you within, he judges you within, he either damns or crowns you within.27 The Holy Spirit draws us together, in our common thirst and hunger for Christ, but only in the context of self-examination and forgiveness of one other. In our heart of hearts, we know Christ together with the other, just as we simultaneously know each other in the unity of forgiveness and reconciliation (to be conducted “without anxiety”). We may certainly emphasize with Henry that the heart remains paramount in this conceptual exchange, and that the more important interconnection between souls is the unity of heart joined together in the body and blood of Christ (over and above some cognitive unity in which we agree on concepts to be used). In this interpenetration of ego-poles, we echo, too, Karl Rahner’s perspective that the Holy Spirit’s work opens up the human condition to the infinite sprawl of invisible affection. We can distinguish between representational

96  Michel Henry and life apprehension of the other and implicit presence of the other. Consciousness of the other in the Holy Spirit may be felt in on the stage of consciousness, but it should only reinforce the poverty of that stage, and so generate a movement into the infinite increase of the love of the body of Christ that arrives always as an implicit or “transcendental” presence. For our ordinary consciousness is “no more than a tiny island in a boundless ocean of the nameless mystery which grows and becomes clearer the more precisely we know and will in detail.”28 This detail, I would add, invokes the Holy Spirit in the eucharist, the particularity of Christ’s death and resurrection, the yearning it produces as the eschatological transgression of expectation dilates the future orientation we have jointly. Even if we share that future inclination only in a depth dimension that is not visible on the conscious stage of conceptual apprehension, it should be stated that the gap between myself and the other, while minimized in our sharing of dilated hearts in Christ (we do not fuse), could be said to be an eschatological gap. Only in the Parousia, do we enjoy perfect unity, and truly share life. Until then, we seek forgiveness continually, as we become continually the body of Christ: that is eucharistic empathy. The underlying problem of eucharistic empathy, the abyss or foreign element in intersubjectivity, is resolved by Henry. But it comes at a high cost. Henry’s opposition to the eschatological gap, I suggest, leads him to hold an arbitrary presupposition about reality, and ultimately the reality of perfect love, present here, and now inside us. Why must reality wholly reside in pure immanence and nowhere else? This position is redolent of an extreme Cartesian substance dualism; perhaps it elects to replay aspects of a Gnostic dualism that pits two radically opposed spheres against each other, namely the illusory world and the real inner self.29 Also, and equally important, Henry’s position succumbs to his own critique of the philosophical tradition: auto-affection effectuates the inverse of his interpretive category of “ontological monism.” In other words, Henry’s Life proposes one sphere of manifestation, immanence and nothing else—a proposal that purposely abandons the obligation to treat phenomenologically the domains of physical embodiment, intentional life, temporality, and thus every form of transcendence where important entitlements of intersubjectivity and shared life persistently emerge. To say that we cannot truly experience the other in the world is to rebut contemptuously the preponderance of the phenomenological tradition and much of Christian theology. It is thus to claim that language, physical embodiment and place, temporality and cultural/social context have neither bearing nor normative force on our interrelation with others and Christ in gathering of the eucharist. One could argue that Henry’s Life- community reflects an acosmic, immanent form of panpyschism, which, moreover, takes the primordial infant-mother relation not merely to represent an exemplary accomplishment of empathic love but to establish the norm that governs and orders the content implicit in intersubjectivity.

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V Conclusion: eschatological empathy The way forward lies in the temporal logic of the eucharist empathy, the horizon on which empathic “intentional interpenetration” transpires. One strategy that would manage to feature the strong affective dimension of Henry’s work and to incorporate the intentional performativity of Husserl’s thesis. Both are achieved in eschatological empathy.30 How may this emphasis on narrative yield result within the larger structure Husserl names the empathy horizon? Familiarizing myself with the alter ego’s narrative is tantamount to narrowing the gap between my lifeworld and the alien narrative content of the alter ego’s lifeworld. As an expression of love, narrative empathy evokes in the other the power to reimagine their life in the words or plot points of a storyline, which express one’s life in a coherent form for the other. To ask about the alter ego’s life story may create a collective mood of joint attention on the alter ego’s personal narrative. Giving and seeking forgiveness plays out on this field of joint attention. The more I know about the alter ego, the more narrative information I gather, the better suited I am to empathize or to transfer the “over there” to my primordial “here.” I can, for example, better empathize or share in the pain of my best friend than I can an acquaintance. I can better empathize or share in the pain of an acquaintance than I can a total stranger, and so on. In eschatological empathy I do more than simply mirror or analogize, since I am seeking out points of overlap between my narrative and the alter ego’s narrative, inclusive of cultural, social, religious, and linguistic story lines, always knowing that such narrative remains incomplete until the Parousia. 31 As humans and more so as Christians, we are from the outset together already living on the bridge, with intentional dispositions that overlap, because each ego is “intentionally implied in advance.” I quote Husserl, “Every other ego is already intentionally implied in advance by way of empathy and the empathy horizon.”32 We begin to make explicit this shared life the more we share narratives, the more we enjoy social practices together, the sacrament of sacraments, the eucharist—but always from the point of view of the eschaton. I conclude with the eschatological night of faith, a poem of St. John of the Cross, in which the night only becomes day in the parousia: The eternal fount is hidden in living bread, That we with life eternal may be fed, Although 'tis night. Call'd to this living fount, we creatures still Darkly may feed hereon and take our fill, Although 'tis night.

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Michel Henry and life This living fount which is so dear to me Is in the bread of life, which now I see, Although 'tis night.33

Notes 1 For more on the mental paint theory, which contains phenomenological insights, see Ned Block, “Attention and Mental Paint,” Philosophical Issues, vol. 20 (2010): 23–63. 2 Block, “Attention and Mental Paint,” pp. 55–56. 3 See Maxine Sheets-Johnston for more on this fascinating portrait of the connection between the empathy and the body. See Roots of Morality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2008), p. 205ff. 4 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 28-54, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), no. 26, p. 271. 5 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 130. 6 For a careful description of ek-stasis in Henry, see his Incarnation, part I. 7 On the mother-infant dynamic, see Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 115. 8 These three points are presented in somewhat compressed fashion in Henry, Material Phenomenology, pp. 107–114. 9 For more on Henry’s discussion of the nature of reality vs. irreality, see M aterial Phenomenology, 116 and Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Hijhoff, 1973), §41, 57 and 67. 10 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 114. 11 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 114. 12 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, §57. 13 Henry, Incarnation, p. 146. 14 Henry, Incarnation, p. 312. 15 Henry, Incarnation, pp. 300–310, 321. 16 See Rudolf Bernet, “Christianity and Philosophy,” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (1999): 325–342; Sébastien Laoureux, “HyperTranscendentalism and Intentionality: On the Specificity of the ‘Transcendental’ in Material Phenomenology,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2009): 389–400. 17 Henry, I Am the Truth, pp. 226–227. 18 Henry, Material Phenomenology, p. 133. 19 Henry, Words of Christ, p. 115. 20 Henry, Words of Christ, pp. 116–117. 21 Henry, Words of Christ, p. 118. 22 Henry, Words of Christ, p. 120. 23 Henry, Words of Christ, p. 124. 24 Henry, Incarnation, §48, “La relation à autrui selon le christianisme: le corps mystique du Christ.” 25 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 26-52, p. 261. 26 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 26-52, p. 263. 27 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 26-52, p. 269. 28 Karl Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983), p. 196. 29 Several critics of Henry have reservations about his version of Christianity. Both Kevin Hart and James G. Hart find clear Gnostic tendencies in I Am the Truth. And Jad Hatem argues that Henry’s theology is unambiguously Gnostic.

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See Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology of Life,” pp. 195–196; Kevin Hart, “‘Without World’: Eschatology in Michel Henry,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, eds. Neal DeRoo and John P. Manoussakis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 167–192, 185–187; and Jad Hatem, Le Saveur et les viscères de l’être: Sur le gnosticisme et Michel Henry (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). To avoid confusion, I am not claiming that Henry’s discourse of auto-affection can accommodate narrativity or hermeneutical norms. It cannot. Narrative empathy, as I frame it here, nevertheless takes with full seriousness the importance of affection and love, even it does so without relying on auto-affection. For a recent attempt to blend Henry’s phenomenology of immanence with narrative philosophy (unsuccessfully), see Rolf Kühn, Wie das Leben spricht: Narrativität als radikale Lebenwphänomenologie: Neuere Studien zu Michel Henry (Dordrecht: Springer Academic, 2016), p. 102ff. For more on the narrative possibilities that underlie empathy, see Marya Schectman, “Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View,” in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 155–178; and see also David J. Velleman, “Self as Narrator,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, eds. John Christman and Joel Anderson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 56–76. Husserl, Crisis, p. 255. John of Cross, The Spiritual Canticle and Poems, trans. E. Allison Peers (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 455.

Part III

Jean-Luc Marion and the gift

6

Selving l’adonné and ethics

I The sapiential and the dialectical Part II interrogates certain phenomenological-cum-theological aspects of Marion’s body of work. While I do not engage in a close reading of his varied profile in its entirety (from his readings of Descartes and Husserl to Augustine and mystical theology), I highlight in this chapter central points he makes across many works. The present chapter, more exactly, decides to engage charitably with the basic shape of the anthropology outlined in his chief philosophical work, Entant donné (1997); subsequent chapters will engage more closely with his later work on Augustine, Au lieu de soi (2008), and his Gifford lectures on the Trinity, Givenness and Revelation (2016), and to, a limited degree, the large-scale L’ailleurs (2020). I lead with the present chapter because I think Entant Donné remains Marion’s most comprehensive and systematic presentation of the structure and possibility of the gift, which is applied almost without revision in various distinct contexts later (the erotic exchange between lovers, as a lens through which to reread Augustine, etc.). A critical discourse on Marion’s phenomenology will bring into focus the central breakthrough of his work: the saturated phenomenon and its immediate implications for anthropology. Generating a new lexicon of philosophical terms like “saturation,” “l’adonne,” and the “call,” Marion’s well-known critique of the Cartesian ego will emerge in its properly theological context. To this we now turn. To aid me in an exposition of Marion, I turn first to an incisive, gemlike article by Brian Robinette; he offers a trenchant critique of Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “saturated phenomena” in relation to the ethical motifs native to Christology. Robinette’s critique raises an important question about the structure of selfhood in Marion’s narrative of the gift.1 Does the process of becoming a self, the “selving” intrinsic to the living structure of the given, render my self-narrative inattentive to, even helpless in the face of, evil, injustice, and totalitarianism? Invoking the rich Christian paradigm of Christology, both its contemplative and the prophetic-ethical poles (vita contemplativa and vita activa), Robinette elucidates (ostensibly) a key weakness in Marion’s

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-9

104  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift phenomenological theology: the lack of attentive analysis of ethical and prophetical structures that underlay the spiritual quest for life in Christ made manifest in the Spirit. What is the theological upshot of Robinette’s analysis? A life in Christ demands a twofold Christology, one that for Robinette shall account for not only the (1) joy and contemplative peace we experience in an encounter with the living Christ but also the (2) ethical responsibility of discipleship, especially lived in harsh light of profound suffering and evil. These are, respectively, the contemplative-sapiential and ethical-dialectical poles of spiritual life, a performative outworking of the vision of blessing and wisdom. The ethical-dialectical pole, celebrated in contemporary trends of liberation theology, formulates a major trend in Catholic Social Teaching, expressed in the work of Johann Baptist Metz, Gustavo Gutierrez, Edward Schillebeeckx, and David Tracy, as well as a newer generation of Catholic theologians like Brian Robinette himself. It is in this context that Robinette brings Marion into conversation with Schillebeeckx in particular, in order to expose an imbalance in Marion’s systematic treatment of the gift; following from this, a critique internal to Marion’s principle of saturation is urged by Robinette, namely: that Marion offers an impoverished analysis of what may count as a saturated phenomenon. In particular he believes that Marion’s phenomenology of donation has fixed unduly on the contemplative experience of saturation, whether in the form of analysis of paintings of Christ (the Carravagio painting of Christ calling Mathew, on the cover of English translation of Being Given) or celebrations of Road to Emmaus in Luke 24, in which an encounter with the living Christ overwhelms the hearts of the disciples. 2 Framed in this critical light, Robinette argues that Marion’s phenomenology of saturated phenomena stands in need of correction by Christology’s dialectical-ethical pole. 3 I challenge this binary representation of Marion’s anthropology, as if the only practice Marion validates is the contemplative posture, one sharply contrasted with the imperatives of an ethical model of the self. I concede up front that a recent interview conducted with Marion on his oeuvre, spanning his various interests from the 1970s to the present, does in fact give the impression that the question of evil simply does not register with him; not once does he seek to talk about or discover the theological or phenomenological implications of a minimal analysis of evil.4 I appreciate the acute sensitivity to this problem in Marion on display in Robinette. That Marion has never suggested he or phenomenological theology should altogether avoid the phenomenon of evil is a plausible position. The goal of the present chapter is to identify exactly what within the structure of givenness repeatedly invites us into attributing the self with a logic of embodied action, of strategic resourcefulness of a form of selfhood, whereby my mood articulates itself in an idiom of its own making—what I call the essential premise of Marion’s entire undertaking, the process of “selving.”

Selving: l’adonné and ethics  105 Marion, as I intend to punctuate, discovers a universal structure of “selving” that includes every imaginable form of praxis to be recounted in this context: contemplation, social justice advocacy, or otherwise. Others recently have picked up on the interpretive divergence between Robinette and myself concerning the structure of givenness in Marion. 5 My particular strategy is to develop what I see to be a latent phenomenological truth about the manifestation of the self as such, and to depict that structure with clarity, however overburdened it can be with technical vocabulary that alternates between Husserl and Heidegger. My thesis is the following: the very structure of the self is “drawn into” relation to what is given, by the force of what is given. Marion’s anthropology, in other words, belongs to a process of gift exchange (nonproprietary): an arduous journey of “selving” whereby each self, each dative “me” unfolds in direct proportion to what it receives (even if Marion blunts the agency of the “I,” a move I would have no truck with). How may we characterize this erotic and affective exchange between self and gift? The phenomenological interrelation of the call (l’appel) and the response (or the gifted, l’adonné 6) in Marion’s work represents one way a phenomenology of the gift can offer resources for Christian selfhood. The call and the gifted form inseparable poles within his thought, which are always made manifest in tandem with each other. It is precisely the divorcing of these concepts, which is structurally unthinkable in Marion, that may well prompt Robinette to mistake Marion’s project as a one-sided binary, as if Marion’s work is wholly occupied with sapiential and contemplative practice.7 We turn first to the logic of the call, the concrete ground from which the self emerges.

II The logic of the call We may adduce examples within Marion’s work that illustrate the nature and function of the “call.” I may be summoned or called by the face and eyes of the other. I am called into action and thus into myself by the accusative, for I am subject to the demands that the orphan’s sheer presence makes upon me. For example, the call of Jesus, extended to Matthew the tax collector, occurs in precisely this manner of givenness (even though the context is totally different). The call unfolds without delay, suddenly. Matthew appears to be defined by the call, precisely because Matthew could not predict or anticipate the call. Jesus simply walked up to him and declared “follow me.” Without delay he followed, even in the face of criticism directed at Jesus from the Pharisees (Matthew 9.9–12). Theologically, we admit that the call, as vocation, reflects generally a Johannine mystical sensibility, or a “contemplative letting be” before the other’s demand.8 We note the Levinasian influences on Marion in this respect, and therefore the ethical possibilities latent in Marion’s work. Not irrelevant here, Marion has recently penned an essay on Levinas, exploring the very topic of the

106  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift accusative.9 Accordingly, Robinette, to his credit, writes of Marion: “The contemplative ‘letting be’ in the aesthetic encounter is isomorphic with the ‘letting be’ of the Other – not as indifference, but as radical receptivity to his/her self-disclosure and call.”10 While Robinette highlights the hospitality to the other that is the outcome of this “radical receptivity” to the call of the other, I am convinced there remains a lack of attention here on the part of Robinette to the ethical dynamic that underpins the interplay between the call and the response (the “l’adonné”) Hence the issue for Marion, in the context of the call, is nothing less than the nature and indeed possibility of the self as such. The implications for selfhood are radical—in my receptivity, in my coming to be in relation to the other, I discover I have no essence. Possibility defines my being, so that existence is higher than essence, a trope which Marion borrows from Heidegger (who inverts Aristotle). I do not possess myself on the basis of myself, but I am given to myself, aroused and evoked by the other, in that place where the exchange with alterity takes place.11 Metaphysics’ totalizing conception of humanitas aspires to know exactly the thinking thing that I am. It outlines in advance who I am, weighing me down with the yoke of infallible definition. Marion’s counternarrative sharply denies what has just been affirmed by Cartesian metaphysics of representation. The existential counternarrative of selving, precisely by laying an axe to the root of essence, shows us that the self in its most intense evocation of representationalism becomes the substantiation of the most elusive species of development and modification, even convertibility. Marion proposes, in the face of the rigidity of the metaphysics of representation, a negative anthropology, an elegant and fluid indiscretion that achieves selfhood not by courting representational acts but by the reception of data given in the embodied stream of givenness, effected and sponsored by the “fold” of givenness. I am no longer a self. I never have been. I am l’adonné. What may this mean in Marion’s work? As a contingent creature, I show myself in this flux of lived experiences in response to what is given to me: “What gives itself (the call) becomes a phenomenon—shows itself—in and through what responds to it and thus puts it on stage (the gifted).”12 I do not fix and freeze objects within the parameters of an intentional power that emits from the nominative ego; just the opposite, for I am given to myself by way of a counter-intentionality, as if my agency submits to the power of the agency of the other, whoever the other is. The other, specified in its acts of giving, assumes the form of a self, displacing me from self to recipient, from agent to witness: “The one to whom what gives itself from a first self—any phenomenon—gives a second me, the one of reception and of response” (epigram above). Selving in this exact sense corresponds to the “being given over to” a multiplicity of summons, in which I abdicate myself from the realm of the transcendental I. The l’adonné must “quit the ‘I think’ in favor of the ‘I am affected.’”13

Selving: l’adonné and ethics  107 I should like to be clear that I intend to bring more fully into view only the inner possibility of the structural capacity for practical theology embedded in Marion’s unique iteration of phenomenology. In doing so, I will suggest that to separate the “call” and the “l’adonné” within Marion’s phenomenology is tantamount to (or runs parallel with) separating the contemplative from the prophetic-ethical pole in Christological discourse. That Marion highlights the interplay between the contemplative and ethical (the vita contemplative and the vita activa) is suggested not only in a recent essay but comprehensively and systematically in Etant donné.14 The premature conclusion, which will require some philosophical backup on my part, is that Robinette, and host of other of Marion’s critics such as Richard Kearney, Christina Gschwandtner, and Shane MacKinlay do not attend adequately to the logic of the gift as Marion conceived it in Entant donné. The key, I am inclined to state up front, lies in Marion’s conceptual category of the l’adonné, quite literally the substitute for the modern conception of the “self.”15

III L’adonné and the delay The prophetic-ethical axis can be more fully illumined once l’adonné has taken its rightful place alongside the call. In book V of Etant donné, Marion develops in detail the nature of the integral relationship of the call and the gifted. Sections 26 and 28 represent especially fertile discussions. In §26, entitled “To Receive One’s Self from What Gives Itself,” Marion introduces the nature and function of the “gifted” in strict relationship with the “call.” Speaking here in a phenomenological idiom, Marion describes how the “subject” is born, how it “receives itself from the given phenomenon and from it alone.”16 The process of receiving intensifies when one goes beyond experiencing events of near-zero or poor intuition. Even phenomena that are merely adequate in their fulfillment (meeting exactly our capabilities of perception) do not properly reorient to us toward the phenomenal world; the Cartesian ego (within each of us) will always seek to master and constitute those kinds of objects; the ego forms and shapes objects as our idols who only reflect egoic preconditions for arrival.17 This is the limitation of manifestation to the ego-horizon I described in Chapter 2. Marion’s attempt to transcend the horizon follows from the attempt to overcome the subjectivism of transcendental metaphysics. Only by receiving saturating phenomena, or those experiences that overwhelm and surprise us, do our experiences of reality become genuine experiences of reality, which, in turn, alter the self and the horizon of experience: in this shift we move from the nominative “I” to the passive “me.” On this exchange between the self and the saturation we must now dwell. As one encounters a saturated phenomenon, the given’s impact requires a whole new vocabulary for philosophical reflection. With the impact of

108  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift the saturated phenomenon, “the gift will be radicalized into a call, and the receiver into the gifted.”18 In opposition to phenomena poor or adequate in intuition, the call as a “saturated phenomenon” arises against the flow of the intention, decentering and countering the gaze of the receiver, and as such “inverts the intentionality and submits the receiver to the presence of the call.”19 From this encounter with a saturated phenomenon, the l’adonné is born, “whom the call makes the successor to the ‘subject,’ as what receives itself entirely from what it receives.”20 Yet, this relationship of the call and the l’adonné becomes ever more complicated with the introduction of the delay of the response. Marion develops what Jean-Louis Chrétien in The Call and the Response intimated, namely that, “All radical thought of the call implies that the call be heard only in the response.”21 There is “the delay of the responsal” which, for Marion, emphasizes two facts: first the call must be responded to, and second, the call must have specifically a subjective stage known as a “gifted” on which the call may make an appearance. If either of these phenomenological conditions is not met, the call will be forever delayed. However, most (if not all) phenomena are simply delayed. They, over time, manifest themselves by giving themselves over to l’adonné. A delay always occurs in this exchange, because, “the call can be heard only in the response,” that is, after the fact. Furthermore, according to Marion, delays are inevitable because we enter the world where the call always already precedes our response. Thus no hearing can in advance outline a horizon of manifestation for the call. 22 But how does this call, free from all predetermined conditions, give its identity to or “leave its mark” on the gifted? How does this dynamic exchange between the call and the response unfold? The delay in the response renders explicit the utter dependence of the identity of the self on the call. And yet, a moment of negotiation, a discourse of hermeneutics, keeps the delay in place. I receive my identity wholly from the given, but this is a reception that I surrender to, a decision I make not as a spectator but as an actor: “The gifted is defined entirely in terms of givenness because he is completely achieved as soon as he surrenders unconditionally to what gives itself—and first of all to the saturated phenomenon that calls him.”23 By surrendering completely to the saturating impact of the given, l’adonné-as-actor receives not one narrative among many, but its very character, its identity. But it does so in a space suspended between receptivity and agency, between a supreme passivity and an active constitution of the kind wielded by the sovereignty of the transcendental ego. This particular point demands elaboration. In other words, Marion confers on l’adonné various labels, but the most frequent are the stage, the prism, or the filter through which saturated phenomena are enabled to burst forth into reality. 24 L’adonné aids or facilitates (without altering) a phenomenon’s arrival into manifestation. If a decision occurs not in vacuum but in a lived context, then ethics is attached to or is copresent with l’adonné at its inception. In this way, the call depends on l’adonné for its

Selving: l’adonné and ethics  109 ratification, for permission to enter into the field of phenomenality; in fact Marion thinks l’adonné exercise great agency, behind the scenes at least, since, “The gifted, inasmuch as finite, has nothing less than the charge of opening or closing the entire flux of phenomenality.”25 The screen functions like a gatekeeper; it is therefore responsible in part for what phenomena may enter into the realm of manifestation (does l’adonné not smuggle in the transcendental I anyhow?). The mutual interdependence of call and response, then, can be stated more precisely in this way: the call is dependent on the l’adonné, which functions as a “prism” through which the call arrives into phenomenality. Just so, the l’adonné relies wholly on the call because it is by means of reception of the call that it can make possible the manifestation of selving at all—the l’adonné, as given over, receives its identity from what gives itself. 26 Talk of whether saturated phenomena will enter the field of manifestation, or whether the delay will be deferred forever, seems a moot point in light of the importance of the “call” in the process of selving. The call constitutes me as a dative “me,” or a receiver. The call endows me with identity, content, and character. No longer does the “I” or the ego constitute the identities of phenomena but just the opposite—I am constituted by my encounter with saturating moments that surprise, decenter, and invert intentionality. Further, since I am preceded by a call, I cannot avoid the call and I cannot help but respond to its summons: “The meaning invested by the responsal can be chosen, decided, arrived by accident, but the responsal is nothing like an optional act, an arbitrary choice, or a chance—in it we are, we live, and we receive ourselves.”27 In other words, though the call may be deferred or delayed temporarily, its power cannot be stopped from irrupting onto the scene of manifestation, a horizon for which I serve as gatekeeper. Selving, described thus far, is unambiguously relational, and it splits the difference between pure passivity and active agency of the transcendental I. For Christians, Christ’s death and resurrection signifies the “call” or the “saturated phenomenon” that impacts us prior to the constitution of the “I,” transforming those who profess faith into the dative-gifted. Christ gives “me” to “myself.” Christian selfhood, and the praxis of the Cross, is not simply derived from the otherness of the Other, but from the Spirit of Christ. 28 This markedly Christological view of the l’adonné opens out onto prophetic-ethical pole of Christian pragmatics. For the Christian, the gift of the Spirit, its donation in Christ, grants to the believer a dynamic and relational drama of mission, making visible the ethics of the servant, the martyr, the vocation of the Cross.

IV Selving and ethics The major burden of his essay, noted above, is to widen the scope not of the properties of, but rather the indicative examples associated with, saturated

110  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift phenomena; Christ is the saturated phenomenon par excellence, yet Christ does not exhaust all the possibilities of saturation. Robinette’s analysis, as we noted above, intends to correct an imbalance in Marion’s phenomenology; to wit: Marion disallows any serious consideration of negative saturated phenomena such as suffering or evil. 29 Both Christ and evil saturate our horizon of experience, surprising and overwhelming the constituting ego. This is precisely the moment where the performative life praxis of Jesus of Nazareth figures so prominently for Robinette as a source of resistance to the realities of shocking injustice, suffering, and evil. 30 One cannot deny the force of Robinette’s argument on this point. If one were to skim through the various books in which Marion develops his phenomenology, one would find an absence of sustained consideration of the saturating effects of evil and, in turn, an absence of clear and present strategies for models of ethical action, not least an ethical model of the self. Before I move to a phenomenological treatment of the paschal events as recorded in Scripture, I want to make clear that I am developing Marion in a direction that has been dealt with in only a preliminary way in his own work. In both Marion’s theological and philosophical works, the major theological questions he addresses are two: the possibility of revelation in philosophical discourse and the possibility of thinking or speaking about God, the imago Dei, and the sacraments outside the constraints of Being. In neither of these areas does he systematically explore the meaning of the death and resurrection in view of the “selving” intrinsic to the givenness of saturation.31 I am therefore developing his work slightly beyond its present articulation. It seems that it is not without some warrant to interpret the death and resurrection as saturated phenomena; the resurrection in particular formulates the saturated phenomenon par excellence (this is so for Robinette in his book Grammars of Resurrection).32 Reading Revelation with a phenomenological eye is a style of interpretation Marion himself encourages theologians to carry out: he asks why theologians do, not undertake, or undertake so little (Hans Urs von Balthasar remains here insufficient and exceptional), to read phenomenologically the events of revelation recorded in the Scriptures, in particular the New Testament, instead of always privileging ontic, historic, or semiotic hermeneutics?33 In the ensuing paragraphs, I shall attempt two tasks. First, I will read scriptural events of the death and resurrection phenomenologically. Second, because I conclude that the death and resurrection constitute extremely rich examples of saturated phenomena, it follows that they shall therefore carry with them clear active, ethical implications in light of the logic of the call. 34 Space permits me only to survey quickly the four characteristics of saturated phenomena. The four characteristics Marion lays out are: (1) invisible

Selving: l’adonné and ethics  111 according to quantity or “unforeseeable”; (2) unbearable according to quality; (3) absolute according to relation or without analogy; and (4) irregardable according to modality.35 Invisable or invisible, according to quantity, means for Marion that a phenomenon is unforeseeable and thus resists prediction. This is the surprising and amazing factor involved in the saturating experience of Christ’s death and resurrection. Therefore, recast in this framework, the death of Christ shocks and surprises, leaving the Apostles stunned. On only three occasions did Christ foretell his death, but this episode remained too unforeseeable for it to register with the Apostles (Luke 18.24). The resurrection, no less than the death, occasions supreme moments of amazement and bewilderment. One only needs to read the Luke 24 narrative in which the women find the empty tomb, realize that Christ is risen, and run to inform Peter and the other Apostles. When Peter hears the news of the resurrection, he feels shocked and amazed and runs to the tomb to see for himself (Luke 24.1–12). The Road to Emmaus, also in Luke 24, invokes similar scenes of amazement when the risen Christ encounters the disciples on the road. Their “hearts” burned within them prior to their recognition of him, an unexpected vision that occurred during the sharing of bread with Jesus (Luke 24.30–32). Moments later, in the Luke 24 narrative, the disciples were “startled and frightened” upon the risen one’s self-disclosure, a descent among them, in which he says “peace be among you” (Luke 24.36–37). Doubting Thomas also evidences the impact of the shocking, unpredictable reality of the resurrection of Christ, for Christ had to actually appear and challenge Thomas face-to-face before he would believe (John 20.25–28). The second characteristic saturated phenomena according to Marion, unbearable according to quality, determines the “bedazzling” effect of phenomena. In their “too muchness” they reveal darkness and beget ignorance. They saturate l’adonné to the point of invisible glory, a disclosure in which one may not discriminate between the “too much” of the given or the absence of the given altogether. The “excess of the gift assumes the character of shortage,” where no assurances can be had concerning the excess or shortage of the given.36 It is for this reason that the saturated phenomena leave nothing more than a trace of their impact after its withdrawal; only a vestige of their power remains as they streak across the screen of the l’adonné with a glory too great and too weighty to be born.37 How may, in brief, such a feature of the given clarify the Christ event? The glory of the death and resurrection reflect this bedazzling quality, and it is on display at the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross when the earth can no longer bear the glory of Christ: the splitting of rocks, the tremors of an earthquake, the tearing of the curtain in the temple, and the opening of tombs (Matt. 27. 51–53). The hermeneutics of saturation reorients us away from visible empirical objects and toward the given that unfolds from the givenness of manifestation as such. Empirical data, such

112  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift as the tearing of the curtain, formulate touchstones that point to the given that exceeds the horizon of objectness and the visibility of the world. Also, it could be said that invisible glory of Christ blinds, because it bedazzles, those who disbelieve, as “they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4. 4). The resurrection, in similar fashion, exhibits a fundamentally bedazzling glory on the Road to Emmaus: the disciples were blinded by the glory of his resurrected body, and the moment Christ became visible (in breaking the bread, an allusion to the eucharist), he retreated and disappeared (Luke 24. 16–32). Though while walking with him they could see him but could not recognize him, and once Christ’s real identity burst onto the stage of phenomenality, he overwhelmed their hearts—the weight of the glory pressed on the hearts of the apostles until eventually he become too much to bear, “did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road…” (Luke 24.32). The third characteristic is that saturated phenomena arrive as absolute according to relation, or without analogy.38 This characteristic perhaps describes the central argument of the Letter to the Hebrews regarding the death and sacrifice of Christ: it was once for all, without analogy and thus the yearly sacrifice of the goat or ram no longer obtains grace (Hebrews 9). The resurrection represents an event without analogy, and especially the resurrected body which defies all empirical norms embodiment with its vanishing and reappearing, walking through walls, etc. No matter from how many different horizons the death and resurrection is approached, one cannot possibly contain, fully perceive, or tolerate these events: Then, not only no single horizon, but no combination of horizons, could successfully tolerate the absoluteness of the phenomenon, precisely because it gives itself as absolute, that is to say, free from all analogy with common-law phenomena and from all predetermination by a network of relations, with neither precedent nor antecedent in the already seen or foreseeable.39 However, as I shall note presently, the breach of the horizon here trades on a particularly narrow definition of the horizon that I have been challenging heretofore. Christ must remain present in a horizon if it is to ascend into the field of experience. Without the horizon intact, no genuine ethical vocation is possible. The fourth and final aspect of saturated phenomena is irregardable according to modality. This feature communicates the prior status of saturated phenomena to objectification. Saturated phenomena possess a shapeless, primordial form, and thus do not resemble the discrete boundaries of an object. For Marion, “the saturated phenomenon must be determined as a nonobjective or, more exactly, nonobjectifiable phenomenon.”40 The death, though considered an historic event with objective content, also reverses objecthood, especially when Paul tells the Corinthians, “we always carry

Selving: l’adonné and ethics  113 around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (II Corinthians 4. 9). A few lines later Paul informs the Corinthians of the similar the similar power of the resurrection: “because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence” (II Corinthians 4.14) How can we consider the death of Christ an “object” if we are to carry it in our bodies? How can we consider the resurrection of Christ an “object” if it functions to raise us to his presence? The answer is clear: we cannot. The paschal events, as designated here, emerge as a nonobjectifiable phenomenon that cannot be gazed at, grasped, or ordered by the linguistic categories of representational language. The simply defy objecthood. What of the ethical implications, however subtle, of this phenomenological hermeneutic? As noted above, when l’adonné welcomes the saturated phenomenon, the subject is declined, moving from an “I” to a gifted “me.” I do realize that the call always remains anonymous according to Marion, and only after the fact, after a delay, are we able to venture to name the Call.41 But this immediately dilates the horizon of the subject to incorporate a new way of life, a new vocation, but it does not breach the horizon. To where are we transported by saturation, according to Marion, if the invisible does not reside in the horizon? What is beyond the horizon if not Gnostic flight?

V Conclusion: the endless call of love Planted firmly in the horizon, Christians are the receivers of the “call” of the death and resurrection. The call functions to “single out” or “summons” the subject to be more than ipseity, more than an ego-centric Cartesian representational subject. This something more reflects the way of love. Christ forms the soil in which love grows deep roots, nourished in the fertile gift of the Spirit. Always calling by of his Spirit, Christ’s summons originating from himself, preceding the gifted at all times; in other words, the call is eternal. Thrown into a field of calls, the gifted, next, hears a “call” and makes a decision whether to heed the call. This moment of decision may be exactly what Marion intends to highlight with his later work on the hermeneutics of the given.42 The subjective dynamic of the horizon of experience formulates the point of departure of ethics here. As this call is heard, it cannot fall on deaf ears, for “the call shows itself in the response.”43 Once the call is received by the gifted, the call emerges in and through the gifted endowing it with its identity: “what gives itself (the call) becomes a phenomenon—shows itself—in and through what responds to it and thus puts it on stage (the gifted).”44 In Christological terms, the prophetic-ethical pole manifests itself. The eternal call of the death and resurrection (remember the Lamb of Christ was slain from the foundation of the world, e.g., Revelation 13.8) continually calls the individual to receive it. Once the heart holds within it this

114  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift “call,” the receiver enjoys relationship, formed according to the logic of love. The conversion unfolds, and in this event of becoming I convert to a “gifted” who thus finds her identity in Christ’s mission. The “gifted” becomes Christ in a strictly imitative sense, and is thereafter named a Christian. We die with Christ. We are born again in his resurrection. In this my urge to exact vengeance fades. In this my urge to marshal evidence according to the logic of concepts and representation also fades. Instead I occupy with my heart the way of life, without the assurance of truth secured according to cognitive analysis (where the discursive idea of God latches onto a readymade conceptual framework). In imitation Christi I have no concept of God. I enjoy God as a vocation, in response to call of Christ. For the way of Christ, this vocation, is resolved in the question of faith, where I do know formal cognitive modes and categories of empirical evidence. I know God by loving God, in faith, where I confess the “Paschal mystery of the death and resurrection… as the failure of assurances.” The gift of the Spirit, granted in the eucharist preeminently, greets me with a claim over my life, the lordship of Jesus, to whom I submit out of love. In my confession I find my confirmation. And my confirmation given to me justifies the rationale of interpersonal love, expressed poignantly for all to behold in the dereliction of the Cross, a victory won by the resurrection. Marion writes here pleasingly of the event of Easter: The phenomenon here constitutes the I, precisely because the Resurrected alone can say, in truth and before the world, ‘I am’—for ‘I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf’ (John 8.18). Only Christ can still say I on Easter morning, so that any transcendental I must recognize itself before him as constituted—a self called out because stunned [interloqué]. The Revelation that is fulfilled in the privileged miracle of the resurrection divests the I of any a priori character. I love Christ in the cross in which I discover the humility of the cross in kenosis, a display of his having first loved me, a love borne forth in me by the grace of resurrection power: “When Jesus rises, he does not rise at all by himself but by the power and will of the Father.”45 The Christian as “gifted,” therefore, seeks not on the strength of his own conceptual standing the “call” of the paschal mystery. Instead the life of love involves devotion and adoration, a logic manifest in the embodied advance of dereliction, destitution, humility, service, and, ultimately, the Spirit of Christ. The hermeneutics of Cross and resurrection endow me with the Spirit, who invites me to suffer exaltation in the crucifixion. From this phenomenological reading can be thought of as a call that manifests itself in the life of the Christian, moving all Christians to pattern their lives on the gift of the death and resurrection. It is here at this moment we can reclaim what Robinette thought was lost in Marion: the active dimension or the prophetic-ethical life praxis of Christian spirituality.

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The death and resurrection are not abstract doctrines, as if I could indulge speculative metaphysics. Nor does the work of the Cross and event of Easter constitute literary climaxes in a New Testament gospel narrative. They can be more: they can be given in the horizon of experience, and in that transformative encounter, a way of life is given over to me—they are transformative at the level of theological anthropology. Christology thereby empowers and strengthens the recipient to resist, to which Christ bore witness so demonstratively, the imperialistic ambitions of all those power structures in the world reprehensible for inflicting evil and pain on the marginal. In receiving Christ’s death and resurrection as a nonobject, and to refuse it as a concept, amounts to a decision to undergo it as a saturated phenomenon in the bread and wine. Evoked, aroused, and affected, the kenotic love of Christ grants to us the status or figure of the gifted, the devoted witness, “whose function consists in receiving what is immeasurably given to him, and whose privilege is confined to the fact that he is himself received from what he receives.”46 The orchestration of this movement can be captured in the performance of the eucharist. While theology and philosophy can doubtless benefit from conversation partners who offer a strong prophetic-ethical voice, or even who endorse a strong political theology, Marion has constructed a phenomenology adequate for the theologian to develop an ethics rooted in erotic, nonconceptual agency. The logic of the call-and-the-gifted reads the life, death, and resurrection phenomenologically, gifting the Christian with the identity “in” Christ, calling the Christian to become and ascetic, to inhabit the Cross and Resurrection, and, thus, to live as Christ lived. The saturation of these paschal events forever alters and transforms the “gifted,” equipping the Christian with the kenotic gift of sacrificial love, a way of love embodied in the performance of the eucharist, a know-how learned at a remove from the metaphysics of representation.

Notes 1 See Brian Robinette, “A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘Saturated Phenomenon’ in Christological Perspective,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 48 (2007): 86–108. 2 For commentary on Caravaggio painting, see Being Given, p. 283. For his analysis of the Road to Emmaus, see Marion, “‘They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them,’” Modern Theology, vol. 18, no. 2 (2002): 145–152. 3 John Milbank has leveled a criticism that highlights the absence of ethics in Marion, but in more unequivocal terms than Robinette. Milbank writes of Marion’s conception of the gift: “For this reduced gift which is not identifiable object, derived from no known source, and passes to no known willing recipient, can only be ‘recognized’ in a fashion that can make no conceivable difference to actual ethical life.” See Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 156. I obviously disagree. The present chapter will show why.

116 Jean-Luc Marion and the gift 4 See the excellent Quiet Powers of the Possible, Interview in Contemporary French Phenomenology, pp. 40–64. 5 See Peter Joseph Fritz, “Jean-Luc Marion and the Catholic Sublime,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 59, no. 2 (2018): 187–200. 6 For a clear exposition of the “gifted” or l’adonné, see Kevin Hart, “Introduction,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), esp. pp. 1–3 and 16. 7 One caveat: I do recognize that Marion’s active ethics take on an inflection of charitableness that shrinks from the outright political overtones of a Baptist Metz or Gutierrez, or from the ethical urgency of Levinas. Marion’s ethics instead represents the voice of the martyr, a kind of activity akin to Martin Luther King Jr., for example. I do not defend Marion at every turn; rather, my only point is that Marion’s position does not constitute banality in the face of evil. 8 Robinette, “A Gift to Theology?” pp. 92 and 96. 9 See explicit commentary on Levinas, see Marion’s Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida (Paris: Vrin, 2012), chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9. 10 Robinette, “A Gift to Theology?” p. 92. 11 Marion develops this point on several occasions. By no means exhaustive, see his Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 37–53; “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing,” Journal of Religion, vol. 85, no. 1 (2005): 1–24; “The Possible and Revelation,” in The Visible and the Revealed, pp. 1–17 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). “The Question of the Unconditioned,” Journal of Religion, vol. 93, no. 1 (2013): 1–24; see finally the subsequent essay below, on the Augustinian reduction. 12 Marion, Being Given, p. 287. 13 Marion, Being Given, p. 255. 14 Marion has defended himself against the claim that the process of manifestation in the call-and-the-gifted is simply and unmistakably passive. Marion argues that it could be both passive and active, the point for which I am precisely arguing, even more forcefully than Marion himself. For Marion’s recent essay in defense of the active and passive dimensions of the gifted, see Jean-Luc Marion, “The Banality of Saturation,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, trans. Jeffrey Kosky, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 385–389. 15 Marion makes a literal substation in his later work on Augustine, see In the Self Place, §15, “The Gifted, More than the Ego.” 16 Marion, Being Given, p. 262. 17 Marion, Being Given, pp. 189–199. 18 Marion, Being Given, p. 266. 19 Marion, Being Given, p. 267. 20 Marion, Being Given, p. 268. 21 Marion, Being Given, p. 287. Marion takes his quote from the Chrétien’s work, L’appel et lat response (Paris: 1992), p. 42. 22 Marion, Being Given, p. 287. See also this following illustrative example: In effect, not only am I born as if from a call, but this call even precedes my birth, which constitutes only its first responsal. Before my birth, words were said around me and I heard them without understanding; even before my conception, words were exchanged by others, words ranging from joy to violence and from which I no doubt come. See Marion, Being Given, p. 290.

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23 Marion, Being Given, pp. 282–283. 24 Marion names the gifted or l’adonné also the screen, the filter or the prism through which the call manifests itself into phenomenality. For a fuller explication of this, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, pp. 264–265 and 287; and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, pp. 50–52. 25 Marion, Being Given, p. 307. 26 Marion, Being Given, p. 296. 27 Marion, Being Given, p. 288. 28 Of course Christ is very “distant” or “other” with regard to our experience of him. Just as there remains an eternal distance between the Father and the Son so is there one maintained between the human encounter with the living Christ. See, Marion Idol and the Distance, pp. 111–113. 29 One may also note how Marion does not account for the mystical experiences of poverty and emptiness, what may be called “poor phenomena.” An illuminating critique of Marion in this regard is carried out intelligently by Anthony Steinbock, It’s not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), chapter 4, “The Poor Phenomenon: Marion, Givenness, and Saturation.” 30 Robinette, “A Gift to Theology?” p. 103. 31 Though it should be noted that Marion does address the concept of sacrifice and sacrificial forgiveness as a form of ethics in Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chapter 4. 32 See Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroads, 2009), chapter 2. 33 Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, p. 29. 34 Merold Westphal has demonstrated how the transfiguration of Christ, following from Marion, can be read as a saturated phenomenon. See “Transfiguration as Saturated Phenomenon,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 2003): pp. 26–35. 35 Marion, Being Given, pp. 199–202. 36 Marion, Being Given, p. 246. 37 Marion, Being Given, pp. 202–206. 38 Marion, Being Given, pp. 206–209. 39 Marion, Being Given, p. 211. 40 Marion, Being Given, p. 213. 41 Marion does indeed offer a possibility of naming the anonymous call from the perspective of paternity. This happens in such a way that while the call is named the anonymity of the call is not compromised. Marion explains it thus: The name by which the child is called is only the father’s response to a nameless call. The anonymity of the call (and of the child) neither contradicts nor interdicts paternity, but constitutes its terrain, stakes, and condition of possibility. the father will therefore be born into his own paternity to the extent that he responds to the child’s anonymous call with a naming response. This nomination is laid out in a history: first, the father gives his own name (last name), then the first name (Christian name), both borrowed; next he gives real identity, through word, speech, and language, then through the community, religion, “Weltanschauung,” etc. Continually giving him a name through the indefinite succession of his responses, the father will never annul the anonymity of the initial call enact by the child. See Marion, Being Given, p. 301. 42 For the actual expression of the hermeneutics of the given in light of Christian theology, see his Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation

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43 44 45 46

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and the Irrationality of Some Believers, trans. Christian M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), chapter 10, “The Recognition of the Gift.” Marion, Being Given, p. 282. Marion, Being Given, p. 287. Marion, God without Being, pp. 193–194. Marion, Being Given, p. 322.

7

Spiritual exercises An Augustinian reduction

I Introduction Phenomenology, as a particular idiom or style of philosophical reflection, is one not wholly free of theological supposition, as we discovered in the chapters above. Perhaps the leading consensus in the academy today is that philosophical discourse, without first abandoning its commitment to rigor and principled reason, never may have meaningful and fruitful interchange with theology. In many contemporary French currents of phenomenology that flow through to the wider discourse of philosophy of religion there have been strong theological currents at play for some time now, whose collective force is able to keep at bay those impulses that might otherwise expunge from the horizon of experience its spiritual traces. Philosophers of religion, depending on certain metaphysical commitments, may want to reconfigure the relationship between philosophy and theology into an antithetical imperative. The inner constitution of philosophy and theology, as recent phenomenological voices emanating from France and North America have articulated it, has been strengthened by a spirituality that advances the creature’s desire for God under the form of a particular philosophical articulation, the phenomenological reduction. The reduction remains a contested category because it is often frustrated by the transcendental idealism from which it proceeds (I have no problem with certain forms of idealism, as Chapters 1 and 2 reveal). The reduction, preceded by the suspension of the natural attitude (called the epoché), grants to Husserl’s philosophical project a larger philosophical rigor, an emphasis on the meditative cultivation of the living structure of the first-person shape of the ego, a domain which Husserl thought phenomenology should aspire to unveil.1 The phenomenological reduction, on first glance, seems to offer nothing more than a technique for opening the path to the metaphysics of representation, funded by the pure ego, who is incapable of being altered by the world; this depends on the philosophical calculus between ego and world on which an unrefined interpretation of Husserlian transcendental idealism trades. So stated, the reduction already is exceedingly more than technique or analysis, more than a meticulous apprehension of the field

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-10

120  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift of an ego purified of the empirical contents of the world. It is instead to be conceived a lived event that, as we shall see, begins from an encounter with the world and ends in an ever more concrete, more properly attuned encounter with the world that defines the basic correlation between ego and the ever widening ramifications of the horizon. In the life of the ego, there is a pregiven existential encounter with “something more,” a transcendence that immediately draws the ego outside itself into the expanse of the horizon, the excess of things. But might it also be said of the reduction that it may involve (if one is motivated to modify it) a Logos who is manifest as divine transcendence? Can the reduction open up space in the subject for a wholly transcendent other to enter the horizon of experience? Or more precisely: can it enable one to see that the Logos has always been a mysterious depth within the horizon of experience, even if it is a transcendent Logos who refuses to enter within the parameters of the constituting gaze of the transcendental subject? On this reading, can a spirituality arise that provides occasion for the reflective phenomenologist to grasp (only in part) the mystical union between the created order and God? Admittedly, an affirmative answer would be sustained by faith, which enables the ego to dilate the horizon of experience. One may rightly wonder, if it is not entering into its twilight, how commerce between philosophy and theology could be concretely thematized in terms appropriate to phenomenology. This book interrogates that question over and again. Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Emmanuel Falque, and Jean-Luc Marion, to mention only the most celebrated of recent figures, have all worked under the pretense that the reduction is able to be modified in accord with theological presuppositions, no doubt in a manner to which Husserl himself would be adverse. I will focus principally on Marion’s “Augustinian reduction,” ensuring that it is understood as a form of practice carried out always and already within, not without, the horizon.

II Theological reductions Stimulated by what these French thinkers perceive to be post-metaphysical techniques born in the formative stages of the phenomenological tradition, they not only attempt to modify the phenomenological reduction from a theological point of view, they also seek to deduce from it a richly mystical “spiritual exercise.” As a performative askēsis rooted in the spiritual conviction that the world belongs originally to atheism, 2 the theological reduction consists of a counter-movement, a sharp existential shift away from the horizon toward God: a radical flight from the world-horizon that is the perfect expression of an eternally accomplished event of union, whose concrete form is a breach with the horizon, an encounter with God preserved by and elevated in the reduction. Flight intends to heighten the experience of transcendence, in which the horizon of eternity opens vertically out onto

Spiritual exercises  121 the invisible presence of God in Christ “who is not of the world” because he has “overcome the world” (John 17:16 and 16:33 respectively). Explication of such a spiritual exercise is consequent upon the discourse of phenomenology. This may mean, on the one hand, that Marion, Lacoste, and Henry challenge the common tendency among phenomenology’s critics to relegate the reduction to the philosophical wasteland of the representational subject who determines the world in its totality fully within its cognitive equipment—a reading that imposes on Husserl, in particular, a facile Heideggerian misinterpretation; and, on the other, that they highlight theological possibilities latent in Husserl’s thematization of the world thereby claiming Husserlian phenomenology as a propaedeutic for theological discourse. And the latter is most definitely a result of an aspiration to understand more exactly, to disclose and express more properly, the essentially theological horizon of the world. But how is the contemporary world to be understood? Is it secular or atheistic? And how is the reduction to be viewed as a properly theological resource to respond to such a world? These are the two focal questions that shall guide this chapters explication. A brief consideration, to begin with, of a cluster of recent French “theological reductions” is in order, inasmuch as they give the reduction its peculiar theological shape. The most radical of Husserl’s theological heirs is Henry, on account of his work prompting a complete withdrawal from the world; because his theological retrieval of and critical confrontation with Husserl is at once philosophically formidable and theologically inventive, readers shall continue to profit from Henry’s theological-Johannine turn. I advise the reader to return to Part II above for a fuller treatment of his work. Jean-Yves Lacoste’s work, too, entails an inclination toward escapism, but his “liturgical reduction” enjoys a kind of dialectical quality (between inner self and outer world) reminiscent of the spirituality of St. John of the Cross; Lacoste’s form of spirituality enacts a purgative exit from the world that, in its full turn, precipitates a prayerful return back to its secular order. In this, the world is (symbolically) placed between brackets nonetheless by Lacoste, and such a theological reduction equally appeals to a style of Johannine dualism: for Lacoste, the mystic removes the “veil” of the secular world so that he can see God’s eschatological horizon more clearly, even though such an arduous spiritual task is often boring and fatiguing— symbolized in the “work” bound up with holding a midnight vigil. Hence it is the prioritization of the image of “vigil” that permits a monastic pathos to come immediately into play here. Part IV interrogates his body of work more carefully. Emmanuel Falque’s phenomenological reading of scripture, to which we devote too little here, counts as a creative (if highly compressed) synthesis of philosophical reflection and performative comportment to the Christian scriptures, attending especially to scripture’s Christological locus. The reduction, cast in this textual light, yields something like a lectio divina or

122  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift meditative spiritual exercise. Falque’s reduction reveals that it is one particularly fertile species of what has already been understood by theological discourse as the act of scriptural contemplation, the privilege of beholding the face of God in in the Word of Christ—through “listening” to and imitating thereby the literal words of scripture. This is why Falque thinks the reduction embodies not so much a philosophical exercise but a spiritual exercise. More specifically, this suggests a mode of reading the gospel narratives in a way that may offer a reprieve from the world. The confrontational episode of Mary and Martha, for example, can be read off in terms of distinct, if contrasting, “attitudes” taken up in regard to the world. At once a gloss of Husserl’s focus on the ego’s “attitude” (epoché) and an exegetical practice of contemplation that “suspends” the secular logic of the world, Falque’s theological reduction is motivated by a faith always responsive to the text.3 For Falque, then, Mary simply removes herself from the daily considerations of the world and beholds Christ face à face, while Martha remains baffled by this gesture, precisely because her attitude conceals within it an unreflective “absorption” in the idle chatter of the world. Suggestive as this may be, Falque’s interest in orienting the gospel narrative toward the terminology of “inside” and “outside” the world succumbs to the ill-fated binary logic I sought to overcome in Chapter 2. As if to attain an “eidetic purity,” Falque appears to wish for a glimpse of a universal theological ground untainted by structures of the horizon of experience. Jean-Luc Marion’s theological reduction abides by a principle of his own making, “so much reduction, so much givenness,” which he later names the “erotic reduction.” This emphatically affective inflection of the reduction does not intend to read scripture (although it does, the Road to Emmaus of Luke 24) but tradition; working through the discourse of the reduction in Husserl, the “erotic reduction“ finds its fullest expression in the vast network of writings associated with St. Augustine. It is Marion’s reduction that I find the most compelling primarily because it enlists in meticulous fashion the Augustinian liturgical grammar of confessio. But it frames Augustine, unapologetically one might advise, entirely under the restrictive aspect of the erotic reduction, under whose provenance the confessio is truncated, even while it is adroitly illustrated. The most balanced of “theological reductions,” in that it does not wholly bid the world-horizon adieu, Marion’s reduction nevertheless does not address as fully as he could the spiritual utility of the world. Marion, as we shall see presently, advances a set of spiritual exercises that embraces a radical bipolarity, from which utter passivity of the soul before God is set over against the metaphysical construct of the self- constituting (Cartesian) ego.4 Hence Marion does not so much resent the world as offer an incomplete picture of the world, one that does not sufficiently attend to how the soul belongs to the world naturally. The creature, as we shall outline presently, is ultimately a being whose spiritual quest occurs within the element of contingency, fragility, conflict, and difficulty precisely because

Spiritual exercises  123 its faith is “confessed” in the world. Augustine, and so many of the early church Fathers, situate the soul’s desire to see God in the world. With Augustine in mind, it is therefore acceptable for the contemporary believer to approach the “secular” world with a sense of dynamic openness, accomplished only in the degree to which the Christian yields to her place as a “creature fitted to love the world.” One may legitimately ask at this juncture: why are the theological reductions so suspicious of the world-horizon? From the spirit of the age emanates a “secular mood.” A dramatic shift in the metaphysics of the cosmos has occurred with advent of modernity, one which the present study shall acknowledge. But it is to be admitted up front that this world is a habitat in which the Christian is invited by the eucharist to take delight. The world constitutes the horizon of experience and under whose light I am to contemplate God, which is a “shift in attitude” from the natural attitude but is not one of radical refusal of the world, despite pleas to the opposite offered up by Henry, Lacoste, Falque, and Marion—all of whom, to varying degrees, consider the world a foreign land wherein a spirituality can emerge only once the world’s atheism is bracketed. To temper the “theological reductions” articulated above is, for myself, to see the world in altogether different light than such a theological reduction would allow: that the world is the grammar or horizon of experience in which the believer or religionist (however conceived) speaks to God. But its secular order invariably presents a challenge to the believer, admittedly. The modern world makes it impossible for a believer of any sort to conceal within his soul an unreflective, taken-for-granted faith, as was so often the case for many a layperson of ages past. The world, after the Enlightenment, is a place of uncertainty and radical pluralism, an experience of “danger” for the believer, which the French cadre above make exceedingly lucid; but against the forms of theological reduction outlined above, I will argue that the world-horizon itself serves the purpose of spiritual purgation. The modest thesis of the present chapter is that a purposeful movement into the horizon of experience, a deep and abiding residence in the temporal flow of the world, is what constitutes the very motion of a late modern spiritual exercise—not a “bracketing off” the world. The antiseptic nature of Christendom, its “official religion,” as Kierkegaard noted in the mid-nineteenth century, 5 frequently denied the soul real faith in favor of taken-for-granted complacency, whereas the mood of the secular order of late modernity meets the soul with the full force of a stark choice: reflective faith that is to be constantly justified or a variety of secular humanism. To that world we now turn before a constructive (and very critical) analysis of Marion’s Augustinian reduction is undertaken.6

III Is the horizon of experience secular? After Nietzsche, Christendom has been inverted. No longer may a takenfor-granted faith subsist, for as Peter Berger says, the “heretical imperative”

124  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift of late modernity constitutes a choice to be made for or against religion from a particularly secular vantage. Either I choose to single myself out as “spiritual,” or I remain, typically by default and without justification, a secular humanist or something not clearly identifiable.7 To be religious after Nietzsche is to be “heretical” (Berger’s term). Religiosity of any kind is a form of eccentricity, for all that one needs to do to give up religion is simply walk into the world and immerse oneself in the emporium of choices, life styles, and the multiplicity of preferences that invigorates modernity; the precarious construction of religious plurality, most of all, forces individuals to identify with a religious tradition in an explicitly self-conscious manner.8 Whether it is experience or tradition, faith or community, every form of spiritual exercise is to take place in the world-horizon, as tempting as it is to say that the theological attitude belongs to a process of “bracketing off” or of forbidding the world as “secular.” The type of piety typically associated with sacramental spirituality belongs to the pathos of the ancient world; Christians (and no less for Jews and Muslims and even Plato) sought to raise the theological order of the “heavens and the earth” above scientific suspicion. In this a discourse of “classical cosmology” was obliged to define the inmost expression of the early spirit of Western culture. Formed by theological presuppositions, the discourse of the ancient model of the world invests the stars, the skies, and the earth with boundless divine wisdom and depth, inscribing the divine within its every manifestation, at each and every ontological level, so that they “participate equally in the good, and that nothing that exists is excluded from the higher nature.”9 Augustine once offered a portraiture of the meaningful harmony between the city of God and the city of earth in rich gospel imagery, one that obtains in spite of the series of interruptions and discords that result from the sinful order of a fallen humanity and an enfeebled creation: the skies are the holy apostles of God from whose mouth flows forth the words of truth, raining down on humanity so that the harvest of the church may be plentiful.10 The theological interpretation of the horizon of experience (the patristic and medieval horizons) to which this cosmology makes appeal is bound up irrefutably with the logic of creation. Sacred and secular intertwine in the Christian interpretation of the cosmos. Together they contribute to the good of the world-horizon as a sensible horizon fixed in relationship with God. As Remi Brague observes, the world long possessed a wisdom cultivated by the early Christian church, illustrated by the motion of the soul toward the skies, known simply as “contemplation.” The soul beholds the sky, an upward ascent that enables the soul to descend upon the prospect of being carried beyond sky itself. For many in the ancient world, the contemplative gaze looks beyond the limit of the visible theater of the skies to that light that illumines them from a higher point of transcendence. Hence the Creator displaces the limits of the visible to the measure that the heavens summon the reflection of the glory of He who is invisible, which, in turn,

Spiritual exercises  125 summons the soul’s contemplative delight to partake in the motion of the skies themselves—and so to pass from glory to glory with a face unveiled (2 Cor. 3.18). In this, it can be understood that for many in the West, “the study of the skies does not lead directly to imitation of the skies, but to knowledge of their Creator.”11 Heidegger observed, with a philosophical prescience characteristic of his later work, that a peculiar kind of metaphysics of the world is manifest in the modern age. The language used to depict the horizon of experience today may continue to unfold in ways not entirely foreseen by him. Insisting that a metaphysics of the world must ground every age and, in so doing, gives to that age its identifiable ethos, Heidegger characterizes the modern world (as a distinct age from the medieval or patristic and ancient worlds) as a new “framework” (Gestell). The modern world so understood submits to an instrumental logic, a pernicious logic of disenchantment consummated by technology. Here the world is laid bare by the autonomous, technological subject, who prioritizes knowing-that above all, and deploys the metaphysics of representation as the sole means of apprehending the world. Hence the world has “become a picture,” so says Heidegger. In this age, the isolated subject, the subjectum, “becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its being and its truth.”12 As a “picture” at the disposal of the self-positing representational subject, the world is conquered by means of representation, which is, without delay, the very event that yields forth a world that bears witness to what he calls the “loss of the gods.”13 Such a depiction of the world resonates with a picture of the world to which Charles Taylor has given the expression, “immanent frame.”14 The immanent world brings forth a world whose horizon is rigid, and whose boundaries have shrunk to a single end, the storage of empirical data. Such a rigid representation of the horizon of the world is recast under the heading of pure empiricism, detached from the lived horizon of expansion, growth, and dilation, where the way of love and service enjoys participation in God; presumably such a withdrawal behind the veil of the rigid and confined strict boundaries of the immanent frame marks the modern age to the extent that the world can open up no further than the enframed limits of its own empirical drama—to extent that exclusive humanism, as a principal spiritual outlook among others, lay at the heart of modern worldhood. As Vincent Descombes writes, it is not that modernity formulates the world in terms of pure “secularism” or “atheism.” Rather it is the vocabulary of “autonomy” that defines modernity, whose design from its Cartesian beginning was to allow the ego to transcend tradition and authority, and, with that, to gain a meaningful sense of practical autonomy: The modern subject is defined by autonomy but it is not independent in all regards: it is certainly independent with respect to what is presented as a foreign power, but it is subordinate to a rational law (moral). One

126  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift is thus excluded here from the ‘radical alterity’ of a divine legislator, since he engenders a situation of heteronomy.15 This complex fabric of the secular age, its autonomy, its desire for mastery, remains the challenge the modern world poses to the theologian and philosopher alike. But it is a constructive challenge for theology. Modernity and its accompanying secular sensibility are preferable to Christendom. As Kierkegaard complained often enough in the 1850s, Christendom, as fraudulent and hypocritical as it was, consisted of a sociological state of affairs taken for granted, namely, that “we are all Christians”16 in which there were “immense battalions of Christians, nations, kingdoms, lands, a whole world of Christians.”17 This is no longer the case, for the secularization theory holds true, at least empirically. So much modernization, so much secularization.18 Hence twentieth century has dramatically altered the spiritual landscape of the west. An Augustinian spiritual exercise can unfold as a theological mood, an affection embodied in the heart which dilates the horizon of experience beyond the constrictive immanence of our age.

IV Augustinian reduction: a spiritual exercise in dilation The field of response to the “secular world” may be delimited from various vantages; one particularly fertile perspective that might best serve the question of the Christian’s relation to the secular world is no doubt the Augustinian “suspension” of the authority the world certainly exercises over our mood. As I have indicated, this viewpoint has been outlined with some theoretical sophistication recently by Jean-Luc Marion.19 Marion has noted on many occasions that the task of phenomenology after Husserl is to explicate theological lines of inquiry which presume to “enlarge the theater” of appearing or phenomenality; the ego is to be freed from being entirely bound up with the strict intentional logic of objective verification (between intention and sense date or intuition of objects) originally set out by Husserlian phenomenology (even if I may disagree about his interpretation of Husserl). 20 We have showed one such theological endeavor of his in the preceding chapter. In this chapter we pay more careful philosophical attention to Marin’s sacramental reconfiguration of the reduction. The reception of Husserl’s reduction should be understood as precisely as possible. It opens up a discourse of pragmatics that unveils a space in which the very motion of the inner life of the ego flows and operates, which is where the practical and performative movements (and instincts) to which it is ordered are clearly seen. The reason Marion therefore thinks the Augustinian confessio effects its own reduction is that Husserl thematizes the reduction as a conceptual tool that is a tool designed to open up the ego’s full range of human expressions, instincts, and impulses, some quite literally as old as humanity.

Spiritual exercises  127 Imagine the preoccupation of the wood-worker who is carving a bench, his “vocational time” (as Husserl calls it) is a unique time inasmuch as it puts aside all else in the world without eliminating the world. He’s absorbed in the utter enjoyment of the craftsmanship. The academic engrossed in a stimulating book proceeds according to an essential “attitude” of intensive and heart-felt labor that puts out of play all other interests and world involvements, and yet does not in the process eliminate the world. The pragmatics of the ego when predicated of the reduction simply point to the inexorable dialectic between ego and horizon, that the ego is never free of ontic determination, of undergoing an existential burden of having a lifeworld that is only properly “living” because it unfolds within the narrative of the changing horizon of subjective experience as such. But the reduction, one could plausibly argue even in Husserl, enables the ego to dwell in the world with a “theological attitude,” as one legitimate attitude among others in which to dwell. 21 In Ideas I, Husserl suggests that putting into play the reduction is like undergoing a conversion or a suffering of a difficult trial. 22 In the Crisis of European Sciences he formulates the reduction explicitly in theological terms (arguably), for it is a “complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to humankind as such.”23 The reduction is thus a form of first-person praxis, perhaps even ascetic contemplation. 24 Does this statement of Husserl not adopt a theological pathos? The unique inflection of the ego’s gaze within the work of the reduction is transformative and laborious, religious in the sense that it requires an absolute question to be asked: whence the origin and meaning of the world? The reduction therefore constitutes, even for Husserl, an all-consuming suspension of the vision I naturally have of the way things are for me in their spatiotemporal givenness. It is well known in Ideas I (§49) that Husserl discusses the hypothetical “annihilation” of the world. The reduction, perhaps, may annihilate the world, which would in no way affect or alter the being of the ego. His point here, however, is not that the world can be in fact annihilated, of course, nor that the reduction is able to bring the world to the brink of nihil but that the world is a correlate of consciousness, dependent on consciousness for its being. The world is a being for consciousness: “Strictly speaking, we have not lost anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being (which is the pure ego) which, rightly understood, contains within itself, ‘constitutes’ within itself, all worldly transcendencies.”25 The world is bracketed off from the ego so far that the truth of transcendental idealism may achieve its fullest expression, viz., that the world is a correlate for, and constituted by, the lived experience of consciousness. The world is a subjective achievement, not a frail phenomenal appearance vulnerable

128  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift to dissolution upon being bracketed off. Henceforth it is to be understood that the world is never annihilated but becomes “in a quite peculiar sense, a phenomenon.”26 My aim in making this point clear is to prompt a more thorough consideration of whether the theological reductions, while not interested in annihilating the world, may want take flight from the world as if it could finally have no real meaning for the ego, perhaps so they may enable their readers to escape scientific realism and technocratic mass culture. Marion’s book, Au lieu de soi: l’approche de Saint Augustin (2008), is a significant achievement, both philosophically and theologically, in the context of the foregoing. It boasts an abundance of phenomenological descriptions of the life of faith in its liturgical setting. Much of the analysis of the reduction is rooted in the first half of the book, where Marion develops the thematic of reduction in light of the double of movement of confessio (confessing sins and praising God). Finding its phenomenological articulation in the Confessions, the “erotic” reduction reaches its fullest liturgical expression in that text. What is at stake in Marion’s theological reduction is the very “place of the self,” which is sacramental, or liturgical in the sense that chants, songs, and prayer feature more prominently than the eucharist (though not to the exclusion of the eucharist). The spirituality of the reduction is therefore the means by which I can receive myself in my proper place, a site where I arrive at a “place” or “home” in which I enjoy liturgical rest before God. What is the spiritual upshot for Marion concerning the horizon of experience? My place is not to be found in that horizon—for there it finds nothing but the turbulence of immanence. I must find reprieve, in Marion’s understanding, through escape from that turbulence. Such a view of the horizon, as a place of temptation and violence, of disbelief and a disordered heart, communicates a single point about the theological reduction: its performance furnishes relief from that turbulent complex of immanence by enabling escape from that horizon. The true economy of salvation is to be understood only properly as a path of progress the soul may take toward full liturgical participation in God, so that this inward union is the sole order of disclosure toward which salvation is oriented. Marion surely follows Augustine (though this is dubious) in describing the world-horizon as a place of temptation wherein my desires can become distorted and my proper identity as authentic self can remain hidden. The nonconceptual practice of the confessio unveils my proper place. The confessio, or the reduction performed by the liturgy, trades on a primal utterance, a preworldly revelation of my true form in Christ. As a kinematic and affective structure of experience itself, then, the confessio does not permit base impulses within soul to go unrestrained insofar as it provides the occasion for methodical spiritual practice to take hold of the soul, in order to submit intractable obstacles such as greed, pride, and hate to the purification of the reduction. Sin and perverse appetites will remain a problem, but not so long as one finds oneself given to oneself in

Spiritual exercises  129 every instance by God’s grace in and through the confessio;27 recognition of this truth involves not descent, but practical ascent. I find this point about kinematic and affective movements important in Marion and it merits emphasis here, even if I disagree with the end goal of the spiritual practice (i.e., escaping the world-horizon). The spiritual practice of confession does not at all involve the cognitive or deliberate reflection on the theological debate about the existence of God. Nor does it involve the knowing-that of theological or philosophical discourse, as if God could become here a concept to be ordered among other intellectual categories in an intellectual profile. Rather the reduction, as confessio, concerns the heart’s life before God. The confessio opens a path to my proper place: the performance of charity, which resides on an underlying structure that supports my entire being, one found neither inside me nor in the horizon, but “in” Christ, whose Word assumes rule over the soul so that the soul is raised up to share in fullness of Trinitarian life. The liturgical setting of the confessio does justice to the possibility of living in a manner that the self can grow, change, and elevate. But does such a spiritual practice go too far in the direction of ascent and elevation? Marion claims the self is plastic, but that in contrast the world-horizon is rigid. Marion insists that plasticity of selfhood results in the fundamental incompletion of selfhood. Hence Christ cultivated in the liturgy “discloses to me an opening that will never be closed again. This horizon, the neverimpossible possibility of loving, is never closed, never goes on vacation.”28 No matter the duration of the interval of reduction, the spiritual exercise, according to Marion, opens the soul so that it can enter into Christ only once the soul discovers that it must endure the deprivation of self. Here one must allow God to grant grace where it is needed to enable one to discern not just particular existential states of mind but the very scope of selfhood itself—one of poverty, abnegation, of utter detachment not just from objects and idols, but equally, and most emphatically, from myself. I am, so to speak, a creature who is “locked” outside or dislocated from myself (“enfermé hors de lui-même”). 29 I come to appreciate in this state both in the fact that I am neither a self-positing representational subject nor a collection of noetic powers capable of grasping God as mental object. I love God, simply put. I feel God by enjoying God in the liturgical reduction of confessio. According to Marion, I do not achieve myself, ever, on the strength of any kind, species, or essence, nor on the basis of cognition or deliberation. Hence, “if I love there, I am there as in my self.”30 I am therefore delivered from every anthropology of mentalism by way of love.31 With this point I heartily agree. But the place of love appears to me to hover above the horizon of experience, a problem in Marion I intend to capitalize on below. There is a key point with which I agree in Marion’s work that I feel is crucial to punctuate here: the nonconceptual experience of God cultivated in the kinetic dynamic of sacramental practice, rooted in the logic of love. The most definitive reality of selfhood, Marion insists, is that it is not within my

130  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift conceptual and existential reach to say “me.”32 I am not a self-subsisting essence (Marion continually petitions his readers not to associate the place of the self with an “essence,” and so for him, as for Heidegger, existence precedes essence33). Because Marion privileges existence over essence, he contends that I always stand outside myself, to the extent that I remain forever vulnerable to influence, open to the flow possibilities. The road to my properly theological place is opened up by the theological reduction—the sacramental hermeneutic of the confessio. One observation is immediately relevant for the thesis of this book and for the present discussion. That is, the theological reduction put into play by the confessio records a first-person encounter with God sustained and amplified by regular ritual performance. The liturgy therefore involves know-how instead of knowing-that. In order to facilitate this know-how, the horizon of experience recedes from the Christian’s point of view. The world-as-horizon for Marion is personified as a rigid container that restricts my liturgical joy. So, for Marion, the performance of love and joy before God validated with each successive liturgical performance is shared with others, but the liturgical setting occurs outside of the horizon because my practice is an interpersonal form of speaking to God. Reentry into the horizon would enable nothing more than a theoretical speaking about God. This is a critical point for Marion given that the reduction arranges its speech act specifically as a performative set of gestures, not a theoretical reflection about God or a speculative convention concerning the concept of a God, as if I were an academic tabulating the attributes of God. The confessio is strictly a performance that transports me beyond the reach of the horizon. In its movement I enter habitually into a new attitude, moving from the way of the metaphysics of representation into the way of love, i.e., the theological attitude that beholds God in liturgical love, that enables me to “pass beyond all horizonal limitation.”34 I love God before I know or anticipate the concept of God. I take the risk of loving God without first securing for myself that God loves me in kind; no reciprocity is here achievable, at least not the kind outlined in advance, predicated on the basis of a horizon of possibilities. The theological reduction authorizes, and, in fact, portrays a conversion (to harken back to Husserl and Henry) in that it fiercely brackets both my natural attitude of thinking that the world is my true place (place of the self) and my metaphysical attitude of thinking that theoretical or logical proof about God is my true means of relating to God (grasping and freezing God within a concept or set of attributes). To speak about God, Marion says, is strictly a contradiction in terms— for there is no referent when I talk about God. By bracketing proposition logic and the disembodied state of theological debate, the confessio invokes, outside the horizon, an experience of faith lived in love, a liturgical posture that beckons the presence of God in the context of confession, praise, forgiveness, scripture, eucharist—only to lead me to realize that it is God who first loved me; the confessio-as-reduction therefore embodies

Spiritual exercises  131 a disposition of love and grace, the subjective cultivation of an embodied state of mind in which I am given over to God by receiving God through praise and confession, a dilation of my heart, “set forth according to a logic as strict as motion.”35 Configured as a motion of the heart, in response to a God who first loved me, I take place as “myself” in a movement of ascent, since “what is most intimate to me, my place, is found elsewhere than in myself, superior… the self finds its place—in other words, itself—only there where it loves.”36 That is, in the reduction enacted by the sacramental setting of confessio, “I become myself by receiving myself originarily from elsewhere—oneself not only by another but coming from an other, oneself from elsewhere. In the self’s place is found elsewhere than self, from where alone, as an other-self, more self than myself, the self can receive itself.”37 And so, the theological reduction envisaged by Marion prompts an act of speaking to God who has seized me in love. In word and sacrament, I do not seize God first by a metaphysical representation that uses language or categories to think about God.38 To this liturgical end Marion reminds us that St. Augustine’s Confessions is essentially a look at one man’s conversation and struggle with God (like Anselm’s Proslogion centuries later). It constitutes nothing less than a spiritual exercise that commences with a journey to God by praying to God. Formulated in nonconceptual practice, rooted in love and dilating the heart, the self finds its place not in a philosophical apology aimed at proving the existence of God. Augustine rather proposes the self as an address to God in and through his life story, a narrative strategy adopted as a movement of the heart, in order to prompt his readers to decry explicitly the philosophical alternative: the disembodied logical predication of, and cognitive certainty about, the name of God (or worse, a defensive posture about the logical precision of the nature of God). The 13 books of the Confessions do not address any other audience other than God and fellow Christians (Augustine refers several times throughout to “his readers”). As if praying together with his readers, the Confessions serves the liturgical order of a sprawling prayer (a love letter?). Its very movement of love originates in a word addressed directly to God. In and through the confessio, both admitting faults and praising God’s glory, I find my place before God. To use language familiar to Marion’s earlier work, I am in that place given over to God as gifted (l’adonné), a screen through which God is manifest in the Son’s saturating love, effected by the Spirit, opening me up to a place outside myself, in a irrefutable exteriority where I find myself in loving God and neighbor. I do not therefore discover my place in myself or within the expansion of the horizon of experience, but in my confession to God with fellow Christians, the “liturgical vocabulary” of word and sacrament that is spoken outside of the horizon. 39 This theological reduction, Marion contends, is subject to a double description: on the one hand, my place escapes me and can never be seized once and for all (explicit Heideggerian overtones). On the other hand, it is

132  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift intimate to me as a place where communion with God materializes (Henryian overtones). If I am what I love, and my weight is my love (and Marion quotes this overused Augustinian lyric), then I discover my proper place in the continual movement of embodied love, always in a collective chorus with others who also confess their love for God.40 My place is not grasped or held within myself. The confessio as the theological reduction induces a performative word, a reduction that I must maintain as a habitual liturgy of the self. To be embraced within my very being, the reduction makes explicit the affliction I must undergo: I am required at every moment to place the natural attitude of representational metaphysics and scientific realism between brackets, which prompts a decisive break with the empirical realities of our world, so that the world truly as it is (as creation) can be seen from the place of confessio. But the theological reduction as confessio also prompts a temporal movement in contradistinction to time’s ecstasy, its spreading out in all directions: confessio enacts the bracketing of the temporal finitude of the world. Here a step toward the eternal is taken that aligns Marion’s position with Henry’s radical flight from the horizonal shape of the world. Marion shall characterize the reduction as leading back to the pure “givenness” or “donation” of God’s word to me, so that the confessio is nothing more than a re-gifting or re-saying of what was originally said to me in and through the Word spoken at creation, “in the beginning was the Word and through him all things were made” so says John in the famous prologue (John 1.3). I am not the one who dictates the content of the confessio since God’s selfdisclosure elicited the confessio in the first instance. God comes before me: “the place for the confessio of God is determined by and in God, to such an extent that creation consists only in the opening of the place of confessio.”41 Marion enlists Augustine’s famous discourse on memory in service of the claim that the movement of love is a work of grace. The words I say to God were given to me in advance by the Word who is the origin of every word, spoken or thought. Marion states it this way, God precedes my living word, which repeats it, but my word only becomes living by resaying what was originally said by the living word of God. Praise is thus accomplished as a word of repetition, which responds in re-saying that which was first heard, in a word, as ‘la parole de response’ (the word of one who responds).42 God, in other words, always has the first word, one said prior to and at the origin of the temporal world itself. The Word of God is thus the “immemorial,” in whom I find my place—a place, that is, outside of the horizon of experience. To speak to God, in the site of the confessio, is to bracket the world, to advance upward. This liturgical vocabulary enacts a leap backward to that eternal verbal structure, the immemorial Word from whose mouth the world issued forth.

Spiritual exercises  133 The theological reduction yields to a call, making its practioner’ response a repetition of that first primal Word, for God always speaks first and from eternity. Herein lies Marion’s debt to Henry’s theological reduction (I outlined above, in Chapter 3). The confessio seeks the living present in which the Word dwells, a “place” prior to the world’s opening. And yet Marion shall never say, as is Henry’s refrain, that I am the living present in my essence. Recall that for Marion I subsist exterior to myself, set on a course of seeking that which is beyond me, inasmuch as I wish to find my proper place there. But to do that, I must nevertheless look away from the horizon, its turbulence and its control, flee its restrictive boundaries, and seek with my neighbor the love of God in love’s endless motion into the Spirit. The manifestation of the sacrament formulates the place of the natural order of bread and wine without excluding the eyes of faith to reconstitute (or “recognize”) bread and wine as divine gifts received in the sequencing of confessio.43 Transported by confessio, the liturgy enables a “turning to God designates first of all the exodus from the ubi toward an illic—which means, of course, that I am only because I arrive in him by praise.”44 Does the sacramental phenomenology on display here succumb to a dualism that undergirds the metaphysics of representation? Does Marion not promote sacramental experience that breaches the horizon?

V Sacramental confessio: restless horizon A sacramental confessio as I conceive it entails a movement of love, but unlike Marion’s, its path invites the Christian to “return to” a more aboriginal experience of being Christian in the horizon of experience. The reduction, too, asks its practioners to “return to” or “leading back” (Marion uses the vocabulary of re-conduction) to a more primitive origin of our experience of the world, to that pregiven subjective origin of the world.45 Marion’s discussion of the Augustinian distentio (converted into exstensio)46 provides the occasion for more precise reflection on this theological step back to the subjective origin of life before God. To do so, we read Augustine afresh. True, as Marion shows, there are many lines of cultural resonance between antique orders of social thought in Augustine and post-Cartesian modernity (modernity is not an age all its own without relation to previous epochs). The West was born of Romulus’s defeat of Remus, and so from bloodshed the city of earth has continued up through Nietzsche and contemporary incarnations of secular thought, all of which promote self-assertion and disenchantment of theological patterns of comportment toward the world. Whereas, for the city of God, original peace underlies its very beginning and end, two temporal poles which are held together in eschatological tension within the eternal Godhead, for the kingdom of heaven is already perfect and is yet to come, which provides a stark alternative to the original violence of the secular age. This kind of dualism, which can be singled out from Augustine’s narrative in the City of God, may prompt a kind

134  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift of escapism from the world, one characteristic of Henry, Lacoste, Falque, Marion, and others (and one could say this of the kind of counter-ontology of the church that John Milbank advances).47 But a strict dualism, ontological or otherwise, is not so obvious in Augustine. It may be, as I argue, that for Augustine there is only one world, one “horizon of experience” in which we perform a liturgy of love. This vision of a sacramental worldhood informs my understanding of what kind of spiritual exercise I envisage in contradistinction to the Augustinian reduction articulated by Marion. For Robert Markus the worldly style of thinking on display in Augustine is not dialectical, as if peace always must pass through violence. Augustine’s proposal conveys rather a single theological vision of creation that embraces within its vast narrative both sacred and secular in one economy of redemption. Markus comments, The difference is thus not a difference between what is God’s work and what is man’s. Augustine had no doubt that all history was in a sense God’s doing and, conversely, that the redemptive history told in the Bible is in fact carried out through human agency.48 There are distinctions to be made between created order and God, and even “narrative” distinctions between secular and sacred, but there is no final and marked caesura between the city of God and the city of earth, as if one theological topos were isolable from, and thus opposed to, the secular topos. An Augustinian reduction as I frame it does not descend into an unpalatable dualism, insofar as it alerts us to the dangers of escapism. To practice the reduction is to lead oneself back, by grace, to point at which it makes sense to enter fully into the horizon of experience with an attitude of dilation. The horizon of experience, in fact, is the spiritual exercise itself.49 In this way I invert the course of action in Henry, Lacoste, Falque, and Marion (less so with Marion). The world serves as a site of purgation and purification; I labor in the world, which, in turn, means that I do not bracket it or refused its hold on my imagination, but that I recruit it as a site of affective know-how, which implies that love and identify with the horizon, that is to say, live from it by dwelling and standing steadfastly in its possibilities that are accomplished in me. Because of this circumstance, one may agree or disagree about the spiritual performance or mechanisms for deriving or establishing a more Augustinian way of worldmaking. Because the mood of faith in Augustine arises in a liturgical context where the community deprives itself of the surety of cognitive knowing-that and because of the perception that the joy of faith unfolds as a series of confessions, praises, and prayers rather than propositional statements, the performative dimension of the heart in the theological reduction means that the confessio functions more as an embodied motion of love amid competing loves than as an intellectual theory of the good life catalogued in a deliberative discourse.

Spiritual exercises  135 Hence the two cities in Augustine are two modes of performance, of ways of love. The city of earth welcomes and challenges my deepest convictions, so it is the case that it ought to be incorporated within the economy of the spiritual life as a trial of joy to be undergone with patience. In my trial, the horizon of experience expands, precisely because I expand in conjunction with it. The horizon of experience does not split into two autonomous horizons each correlated with a particular city. The horizon, as I understand it, dilates. It consists therefore of both cities, whose citizens embody ways of love and affection, the fundamental disposition of selfhood. The expansion of one city involves the movement of the other city. For the Christian, the heart dilates within the social practice of the city of God, the sacramental performance of the vision of the Cross and Resurrection, the kenotic outpouring of love in the context of others. The heart incorporates a larger vision of the horizon as a site of sacramental communion, as a eucharistic interchange of bodies together in the one body of Christ: The sacrament would show itself (would manifest the invisible within it) by virtue of the authority of what (or who) gives itself (or himself) within it: nothing less than the Spirit, such as Christ gives the Spirit by delving himself up on the Cross to beloved humans in their desert of love. Only this self-givenness—kenosis as abandon that enters irrevocably—immediately captures the authority that considers water and blood as more than daily tools but as the matter of the sacraments of the Spirit. 50 Augustine argues that though they are distinct, the two cities are always intertwined and mutually engaged (the two cities “are implicated and mixed with one another in this world”51). The theological upshot is that the world cannot be contrasted with the church, no matter how secular the former appears. But the contrast does not dissolve into pure identity between them. And so, for Augustine, the world’s horizonal manifestation strays beyond the boundaries of the law of the city of God in its quest for domination, opening up a place of trial and hostility that constitute real moral valency in the horizon. A contemporary Augustinian reduction insists upon the double capacity of the self, to live in both cities at once, so that the one and only place of the self is the horizon which encapsulates all modalities of love (city of earth or city of God’s modality of love). The place of the church and the place of the secular world, the one a place of rest the other of trial, whose intermixture constitutes the single place of the self, where the saint who yields to the spiritual exercise of contemplative reduction does so only properly in the secular world. Contemplation, then, does not detach from the world but enacts a sacramental vision of the world itself from within its horizon. The task of the reduction adequately conceived in this way is to live in the world in a manner that sees it as “heaven and earth,” as creation, which

136  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift might serve the saint well as a form of spiritual action, a restless confessio, one worked out in the face of the profanations of growing secularism of the horizon of experience (what we have called the stranglehold of empiricism). Spiritual refinement is achieved by a mandate to suffer and endure prayerfully the petitions delivered from the secular quarters of the horizon, which implores one to see the horizon as an “immanent frame” of sensibility, materiality, temporality. But in this sacramental vision, we are not to conceive of the world-horizon as a closed immanence, hermetically sealed within itself. The immanence of the horizon at once invokes the excess of things, which forbids the closure of pure immanance. If we are to reformulate the “Augustinian reduction” in a way that avoids either dualism or escapism from the horizon of experience, then it must entail a “leading back” to the visible stage of the horizon in recognition that it is God’s creation—that is, as one Augustinian understood it, that Christian theology reflects the fact that the “the positive valuation of the secular realm and its independence form religion is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, especially as formulated by Augustine of Hippo.”52 Marion shows us that Augustine constantly reminds his readers to look upon the world with the eyes of faith, in order to behold it as a creation with an integrity of its own. How may we fine tune this viewpoint? A spiritual exercise, based on Augustine’s confessio, recognizes that creation was originally created as an autonomous order. The world itself does not emanate out from God as in Platonic cosmology; nor does it consist of a semi-divine force (see book XII of the Confessions.)53 This means, of course, the world-horizon for Augustine is independent of God. And yet, the God of the Confessions is active in every single moment of time, as in every part of space.54 The hermeneutic of creation posed in this way, cultivated in the confessio’s reduction, should never require one to condemn the world’s place in the economy of God’s relation to the creature. Obvious as it may be, Augustine’s point is that even though the world is distinct from God, such a claim does not entail the necessary conclusion that the world must be alienated from God. That is: the world is not originally atheistic (in Augustine’s day or our day). The world, in reflecting its Creator, is good. As a principal vehicle of grace, the world is not neutral but imposes pressure upon the soul, which can offer the soul an endless series (a lifetime’s worth) of purgative moments. Purgation cultivates sacramental worldhood, a style of habitation learned in the body of Christ. The church’s sacramental body unfolds (I wish to argue) not in opposition to, but within, the world. While rest is the soul’s nourishment received in the breaking of bread within the walls of the church, the soul must return from whence it came. The outward motion that constitutes the key feature of the spiritual exercise compels one to enter into the world fully, without one eye looking back in hope that its timeless origin in God may be recaptured. What perhaps is absent from Marion’s valuable and rich study on the “place of the self” is a more sustained

Spiritual exercises  137 understanding of how the later books of the City of God affect Augustine’s conception of sacramental love, and ultimately spiritual perception. It might be plausibly argued, therefore, that the few passages on creation and temporality drawn out of books XI-XIV by Marion do not attest to the full range of Augustine’s understanding of the shape of spiritual life, its pilgrimage through the (secular) world. Book XIX, of course, is arguably the beginning of Western political theology, of a spirituality of public life. But that book alone cannot be consulted. Book XVIII remains, too, a critical turning point in Augustine’s vast narrative, for here a recapitulation of the previous 17 books occurs, along with the appearance of additional layers of analysis that depicts the unimpeachable intertwining of the two cities; it is recognized that “just as both cities began together, so throughout the history of the human race have they undergone the vicissitudes of time together.”55 Due attention, finally, Augustine confesses in book XVIII, must be paid to the city of earth, to the place of the “world.” It can be shown in such an analysis not just where the two cities meet on many occasions but how also the world might serve  the church, and it might reasonably be asked how the “temporal world” plays a constructive role in the unfolding of the spiritual exercises. 56 From an Augustinian perspective, we might say that the world is the “site of confessio” whose passage promises purification, whether bodily or spiritual. Recounting the historical narrative, as it has been received, of the Greek cities, of the many Israeli Judges and Kings, of the Assyrian rulers and the founding of Rome, leading on up to the time of Christ, Augustine turns in book XVIII finally to offer a theological remark on the pragmatic nature of the interrelation between the two cities. Yes, each city contains within its respective walls a unique set of goals. Citizens of their respective cities obey their distinct versions of faith, hope, and love: “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the early by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self.”57 But there is a fruitful contrast (rather than strict dualism) to be harnessed here: precisely in their difference, the world purifies the city of God. Augustine writes: Indeed, all the enemies of the Church, however blinded by error or depraved by malice, train the Church in patience if they are given the power of inflicting bodily harm; whereas, if they oppose her only by their wicked beliefs, they train her in wisdom. Moreover, they train her in benevolence, or even beneficence, so that she may show love even to her enemies…58 An Augustinian reduction, in just this way, motivated by a desire for training in wisdom, prompts the Christian to expand the world, making it a home of spiritual delight, pathos, and growth (which can be painful). Spiritual exercises in the horizon of the world call those who seek God to consider turbulence, violence, “secularism,” and opposition a source of

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“training in wisdom,” an ascetic practice that belongs to the process of refining the spiritual athlete as she passes through this world, symbolized in the restless performance of the eucharist. Sacramental faith, on nurtured by regular worship and reception of word and sacrament (as Marion no doubt recommends in many of his theological works), engages in the interplay between rest and restlessness in a secular world, in which seeking after God, in this state of disequilibrium (Marion), 59 becomes a choice to be made at every interval of time, in recognition that “God alone gives rest, because he alone has it, And he alone has it because he alone is it.”60 Every temporal phase of pilgrimage takes place in this interplay between city of God and city of earth; the former purifies the latter. While Henry, Lacoste, Falque, and Marion may invite a contemplative pathos that yields to the eternal rest whose heights are outside the flowing horizon of experience, the spiritual exercise I propose here, an Augustinian reduction, if I can risk such a label, urges transformation through action and purification in and through the horizon of experience that can be recognized (with the eyes of faith) as God’s world.

Notes 1 For a concise and clear outline, rooted in Husserl’s texts, of the distinction between the epoché (suspension of the natural attitude) and the reduction (the bracketing off the world accompanied by a move inward), see Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 46–50. 2 Jean-Yves Lacoste is an exemplar on this score; in the wake of Heidegger, he says, The disturbing hypothesis of a humanity satisfied with existing ‘without God in the world’ must therefore be taken seriously. Atheism is neither simply nor in the first place a theoretical problem: it is first what is a priori to existence.

3 4

5 6

7

See Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raferty Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 105. Emmanuel Falque, Dieu, la chair et le’autre: D’Irènée à Duns Scot (Paris: PUF, 2008), p. 149. Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), in addition to chapter 1, see also §9, “The appearance of a cogito,” where an anti-Cartesian discourse on the ego, from an Augustinian perspective, is brilliantly explicated by Marion. See Soren Kierkegaard, Attack upon ‘Christendom:’ 1854-55, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). I note here the related attempt by Paul Ricœur to rethink faith after atheism, for atheism too may purge faith of its idols and complacency, granting to faith an authentically worldly hue. See Paul Ricœur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretation, trans. Don Ihde and Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 436–463. I thank Michael Staudigl for this reference. Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (London: Collins, 1980), pp. 26–31.

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8 See Berger, The Heretical Imperative, especially chapter 2, “Religion: Experience, Tradition, Reflection.” 9 Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, in Dogmatic Treatises, etc., trans. Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1893), p. 480. 10 Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, 1-32, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 32, 3, 5, p. 409. 11 Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: the Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 172. 12 See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), pp. 28, 115–154. 13 Heidegger says that “a fifth phenomenon of the modern age is a loss of the gods.” See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 116. 14 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chapter 15. 15 Vincent Descombes, Le complément de sujet: Enquête sur le fait d’agir de soi-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 334 (translation mine). 16 Kierkegaard, Attack upon ‘Christendom,’ p. 107. 17 Kierkegaard, Attach upon ‘Christendom,’ p. 35. 18 Steve Bruce makes a strong case for this in empirical-sociological terms, see Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 Marion is particularly open to dialogue between Christians and non- Christians in a more popular text, in which he calls for communion to be a priority in the public realm. See his fascinating, Brève apolgie pour un moment catholique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2017), especially the chapter entitled, “De l’utilitéde la communion.” 20 In the avant-propos of Certitudes negatives, Marion indicates that each of his phenomenological works has sought out an “élargissement du théâtre de la phénoménalité.” This presumably does not mean Marion aspires to collapse the distinct between philosophy and theology (he keeps them strictly separate), but that aims to enlarge what is possible as an experienceable phenomenon. See Marion, Certitudes negatives (Paris: Éditions Grasset and Fasquelle, 2010), avant-propos. 21 See, for example, Emmanuel Housset, Husserl et l’ideé de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010) and James G. Hart, Who One Is, Book 2 (The Hague: Springer, 2009), the final two chapters especially. 22 See note in Husserl, Ideas I, §62. 23 Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 137. 24 For an excellent and concise defence of this interpretation, see Nathalie Depraz, “The Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 6 (1999): 95–110. 25 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 113. 26 Husserl, Crisis, p. 152. 27 Marion writes, Now, I who no longer have a place for myself (the quaestio), I who no longer give place to myself (memoria), I who do not know from where the place of my desire comes to me, I hear it named everywhere, provided that I know longer listen to myself but to heaven and earth inasmuch as created. Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 241; also see the discussion of grace on p. 285ff.

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28 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 271. 29 For the French, see Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: PUF, 2008), p. 107. 30 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 270. 31 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 259. 32 Marion writes, I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself [ne connaît pas son essence et ne peut jamais (se) dire, en toute rigeuer, moi]. Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 63; Au lie de soi, p. 100. 33 One such compressed example of this enlistment of Heidegger, see Marion, “Nothing Is Impossible for God,” in Believing in order to See, chapter 7. 34 Marion, Being Given, p. 209. 35 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 266. 36 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 284. 37 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 287. 38 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 18ff. 39 See the visual model of the triangular relation between myself, the other ego and God; Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 43; also see pp. 236–237. 40 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 270. 41 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 252. 42 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 45. 43 For more on the hermeneutics of recognition, elaborated in a sacramental context, see Marion, “The Recognition of the Gift,” in Believing in Order to See, pp. 125–135. 44 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 242. 45 Often in the phenomenological tradition the movement of the reduction is understood to consist of a “stepping back to” or “returning to” a more basic, and thus concrete way of inhabiting the world. The point here is to see the value of the reduction as means of recalling what we often forget, that we enjoy and live from the world just as we find ourselves living in it, in our first-person absorption in its values, goods, impressions, vocabularies, and temporal flows. Heidegger says, “We call this basic component of the phenomenological method-the leading back or re-duction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to being—phenomenological reduction.” See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 21. Husserl, too, though in a different technical lexicon, will illustrate the movement of the reduction as a stepping or leading back, step by step, to a more original way of experiencing the world. He writes, By the method of transcendental reduction each of us, as Cartesian 2 meditator, was led back to his transcendental ego naturally with its concretemonadic contents as this de facto ego, the one and only absolute ego. When I keep on meditating, I, as this ego, find descriptively formulable, intentionally explicatable types; and I was able to progress step by step in the intentional uncovering of my “monad” along the fundamental lines that offer themselves. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 69. 46 Marion, In the Self’s Place, pp. 226–228. 47 See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993), chapter 12, “The Other City: Theology as a Social Science.”

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48 Markus, Saeculum, p.16. 49 Some have argued that Michel Henry may after all view the world as a site of purgation and spiritual trial. See, for example, Michael Staudigl, “From the ‘Metaphysics of the Individual’ to the Critique of Society: On the Practical Significance of Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Life,” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 45, no. 3 (2012): 339–361. 50 Marion, Believing in Order to See, p. 114. 51 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), X, 32, p. 448. 52 Robert Markus, “Political Order as Response to the Church’s Mission,” Political Theology, vol. 9, no. 3 (2008): p. 321. 53 For more on this “disenchantment of the world” by way of the logic of creation, see the classic statement in Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan Company, 1965), p. 35ff. 54 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 7, 15, 21. 55 Augustine, City of God, XIX, 1, p. 909. 56 See Robert Markus’ brilliant book on Christianity and the Secular for a fruitful thesis, although he rarely invokes book XVIII of the City of God as I do here. Nonetheless, my position would affirm, in large part, Markus’ critique of theocracy from an Augustinian vantage. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006). I have elsewhere drawn out the political implications of Augustine’s work on this front for political theology. See my Political Theology and Pluralism: Renewing Public Dialogue (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), chapter 3. 57 Augustine, City of God, XIV, 28, p. 630. 58 Augustine, City of God, XVIII, 51, p. 898. 59 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 229. 60 Marion, In the Self’s Place, p. 262.

8

The given and the manifestation of the Trinity

I Two types of givenness Modern philosophy, from its Cartesian inception up to the current “analytic versus continental” division, has sought to elucidate the field of evidence known as the “given.” Descartes anticipates the vexing problem of the given by indicating that it operates according to the logic of a basic disjunction between sensation and mind, a primitive form of the metaphysics of representation: “I remembered that the use of my sense had come first, while the use of my reason came only later…” and the sensations as such represent the “immediate objects of my sensory awareness.”1 Descartes thinks, as common observation he hoped would teach us, the immediacy of those sensations can often be “obscure and confused,”2 and require the judicious activity of conceptual formation that permits the mind to inform and clarify them: again, the fundamental intellectual inclination of the metaphysics of representation starts here, with the Cartesian quest for the “thinking thing.” The given can with equal justice frame how Descartes prefers his readers to conceive of the representationalism bound up with the concept of God. Analogous to the dichotomy between the mind’s faculties and the world, Descartes’ verdict here is that the given operates on the plane of theology according to the disjunction between the idol we make of God and the God who is self-given and who thus arbitrates theological reflection. In the Meditations the divine is said to be given to the mind, as an innate idea, one that is “not dependent on my thought” and which “determines” the mind’s thinking in matters of divine things. The mind refrains from imposing its preconceived idea on God so that it can welcome the divine as a being who attests to the accomplishment of Revelation, in the measure to which God proposes and posits God’s own disclosure. Hence “the necessity” of the divine “thing itself” shapes the mind’s formulation of God. 3 The given, therefore, which Descartes elucidates in an empiricist light, affects the mind at the most basic of levels, in both the disciplines of philosophy and theology. The experience of sense data (philosophy) and the experience of divine data (theology) foreshadow what modern philosophers call the “Myth of the Given,” the early modern version of the metaphysics of representation.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-11

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  143 And yet, the paradigm of immediacy (of sense impressions) only reflects what we may name one type of givenness. Interpretation of Descartes’ metaphysics of representation aside, I endeavor in this Chapter to indicate that the Myth of the Given, while beginning with Descartes and ending with twentieth-century positivism, opens up the prospect of a second type of givenness, one expressed in phenomenology’s emphasis on nonconceptual affection, the kinetic know-how by which we occupy the world-horizon. Givenness, in this phenomenological paradigm of experience, is always already given in, and mediated through, my embodied disposition by which I constitute the horizon of experience, which in turn overcomes the Myth of the Given. The “Myth of the Given” could be restated as the “Myth of a certain kind of Given.” The logic of immediacy funds the Myth of the Given, whereas the phenomenological tradition demands that the given makes its impact by way of the logic of mediation. The temptation of immediacy is tantamount to the temptation to which positivism or empiricism succumbs: that immediate experience, because it is thought to be a brute fait accompli, should function as a tribunal that passes judgments on empirical reflection exercised by the cabinet of the mind. Put otherwise, the logic of immediacy urges the following illconceived thesis, namely, that all experience may be verified and confirmed only by referring our analysis of how we speak about the world back to the neutral (unprejudiced) “facts” or the brute “givens” of sense data.4 The myth is immediacy as such. Naïve and misguided are the philosophies that purport to unearth occurrences of immediacy that should serve as tribunals of our statements about reality. The second type of givenness, i.e., that the subject appropriates the given according to the logic of embodied mediation, reconfigures the framework of empirical sense data no less than it does the framework of divine Revelation. Divine Revelation, as a form of givenness that “reveals” something, invokes God as a mystery mediated in a community of interpretation, keeping at bay any suggestion that Revelation consists of an immediate sense impression of God. While the devout heart may experience the divine, such an encounter is not immediate, and therefore does not adjudicate (as if it were a tribunal) between competing interpretations of the divine. The last section, Part III, intends to explain that divine revelation arises within the confines of a sacramental form of life, inducted under the constraint of an embodied holism of affective experience. Because it belongs to a vocabulary that participates in a larger cultural and linguistic grammatical repertoire of interpretations of the world, Revelation delivers data that take shape principally in sacred texts and creeds entrusted from one generation to the next. Phenomenology can make this kind of theological “given” explicit as a form of mediated givenness, just as intentionality shapes empirical data as mediated givens. The future of a sacramental phenomenology, I wish to suggest, lies in its continued commitment to givenness of this mediated kind. Phenomenology

144  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift demands strict and meticulous attention be paid to how a thing or an object may be given, whereby the “how” (Wie) of the object’s givenness determines the mode of “delivery,” the manner of givenness as such. 5 Another way to frame the question of the “how” of phenomenalization is to recall the rallying cry of Husserl’s system, that “we must go back to the things themselves!” [Wir wollen auf die ‘Sachen selbst’ zurückgehen].6 Husserl famously indicated the single mindedness of the phenomenologist in this regard when he declared later, in Ideas I, that such attention to the thing itself means that “we are the genuine positivists.”7 Such a sweeping mission statement about the phenomenologist’s task tells us that empiricism and positivism have forgotten the key to experience: that the subjective experience of a phenomenon counts as the experience of the “thing itself.” Phenomenology, in other words, cultivates a mindful attitude that liberates the philosopher from the prejudices of empiricism, in order to illuminate the subjective ground of givenness as the true ground of the phenomenon. As Michel Henry observes, “the insufficiency of positivism stems from the fact that it does not take into account the positivity which it constantly presupposes in describing phenomena…”8 This shift from the objective to the subjective throws into light phenomenology’s chief task, namely, to reveal the “how” of experience in the following way: the “thing itself” is lived through at the very point in which it is given. More exactly, lived experience operates according to a single subjective mechanism, named by Husserl as intentionality. Basic sense data are taken up at once by the intentional stance of the subject-pole. Intentional reflection bears the responsibility of constitution of the world-horizon, not just of discrete bits of data. A “genuine theory of knowledge” must remain within the boundaries of the “tablet of consciousness” which consists not of a mere passive writing tablet in which psychic data come and go, but of an active agent whose living consciousness shapes the world. Husserl insists that we must not forget the tablet itself is conscious of itself as a tablet as much as it is conscious of the world as horizon.9 For the experience of the thing itself has to do exclusively with systematic clarification of the knowledge performance, a clarification in which this must become thoroughly understandable as an intentional performance. Precisely thereby every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a ‘product’ of transcendental subjectivity, a produce constituted in just that performance.10 Phenomenology is therefore a positivism tied to the performance of intentionality. A renewed focus on the subjective structure of intentionality enables phenomenology to lift the given out of the empirical prejudice of sense-impression immediacy, without at the same time eliminating the given as a reality that truly gives data to the conscious mind.

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  145 Theology provides data analogous to sense data. Theology names its data divine Revelation, a mode of manifestation in which God’s self- disclosure obtains in texts, creeds, ritual, and prayer. How it is experienced is a theme phenomenology can in principal explore according to the logic of intentionality, whereby texts and rituals (handed down to the community of faith) are appropriated only in faith by the individual. Innovative analyses of this theological style of phenomenology are on display in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and others. Before we enter theological terrain, it is imperative that the Myth of the Given be analyzed in more detail from a phenomenological point of view.

II The Myth of the Given The question of the given, traced back to Descartes, comes down to us today in a calculated critique of empiricism. Analytic philosophers take as their point of reference for this critique Wilfred Sellars’ vocabulary (that he coined) of the Myth of the Given, and continental philosophers look to Husserl’s persistent opposition to psychologism.11 We shall return to phenomenology, and to Jean-Luc Marion in particular. He has distinguished himself as the phenomenologist who has thematized the manifestation of the given with a rigor unmatched in the continental tradition. Thinkers in the analytic tradition, from Sellars, up through the work of Donald Davidson and John McDowell, carry out a critical re-appropriation of empiricism in light of pragmatism. I do not have space to go into the rich debate that has unfolded in recent decades among those who write in this philosophical idiom. I can pause to note that pragmatism’s parallels with phenomenology’s thesis concerning the necessary relationship between givenness and the intentional structure of lived experience is striking. The “mythical” features of the given reveal the point at which two modern philosophical traditions converge, without complete overlap (Anglo-pragmatism and phenomenology); future research would entail a fuller consideration of the substantive issues involved in this area of overlap.12 Bridging the philosophical divide would constitute a valuable pursuit, but it is a topic for another day. Here I only point out the important fact that the Myth of the Given consists of a critique of sense-impression immediacy. Sellars suggests that sense data may be understood as a legitimate, if always mediated, source of knowledge of the world around us. The principal problem, for Sellars, lies in empiricism’s transcendental aspirations. The empiricist aims to reduce philosophy to the narrow study of language’s direct reference to the world.13 This, in turn, sets up a linear relation between a word and an empirical referent, as if language functioned like the “mirror of nature.” Framed according to the paradigm of empiricism, the logic of mirroring reshapes language: linguistic concepts need only to “hook onto” the bits of sense data, already there present or given to the mind. The culmination of Sellars’ corrective to this form of the

146  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift given arrives midway through his rightly celebrated essay, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” a seminal text wherein he proclaims that there are not and never were pure, unfiltered givens available to guide and shape philosophical reflection. Crude or “direct” realism can obtain only at the level of naïve presumption. Why? Even a base-line impression like the color of red invokes a whole cultural vocabulary that necessarily contributes to the constitution of the meaning of redness. Sellars writes that empiricism is mistaken because it suffers from the inability to recognize that even such ‘simple’ concepts as those of colors are the fruit of a long process of publicly reinforced responses to public objects (including verbal performances) in public situations, we may well be puzzled as to how even if there are such things as impressions or sensations, we could come to know that there are, and to know what sort of thing they are. For we now recognize that instead of coming to have a concept of something because we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice a sort of thing is already to have the concept of that sort of thing, and cannot account for it.14 The mythology of the given assumes a mythic dichotomy: on the one hand, the immediately given sense data passively received, and, on the other, the cognitive receptacle that cumulatively builds up an intelligible experience out of the raw material of discrete sense data. Such is the false map of the mind-world dualism drawn by empiricism. As Donald Davidson observes, the best way to overcome this dichotomous map is to construct a new framework of experience, in which “intersubjectivity is the root of objectivity.”15 Decades before Sellars (and his heirs like Davidson), phenomenology produced a finely grained vocabulary that continues to nourish a critical attitude concerning the level of the “purity” of the given. A phenomenon is given and makes its impact, not according to the naiveite of empiricism (as pure sense data), but by means of the given’s interrelationship with the subject’s lifeworld.

III Phenomenology’s Given The diversity of phenomenologies notwithstanding,16 the focus on the given remains a consistently explored item in writings of many of the movement’s greatest exponents. Obviously, how the given is conceived and interpreted, how it is “situated” in the order of concepts that constitute the system of any one phenomenologist remains a question of intense academic debate. Jean-Luc Marion has devoted several texts (rooted in Husserl, Heidegger, and Henry) to the task at hand. The phenomenological articulation of the gift, the conceptual scaffolding by which it is made intelligible, and its

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  147 degrees of manifestation by which it appears, each of these components of the gift is addressed by Marion in order to bring into focus what is at stake: is the “given” or the “phenomenon” immediate or is it mediated in a larger context of experience? The answer is not so obvious upon a cursory reading of Marion’s central thesis. The opening pages of Marion’s Étant donné alert us to his central claim: To show implies letting appearances appear in such a way that they accomplish their own apparition, so as to be received exactly as they give themselves. To show, to let appear, and to accomplish apparition do not imply any privilege of vision.17 Does Marion already on the first page succumb to the Myth of the Given? Marion’s sustained treatment of the given launched with this salvo develops what are chiefly Husserlian insights. This should strike philosophers as an odd and unexpected point of departure. Husserl’s “Cartesian ego” reflects not a passive recipient who has abandoned vision, but a transcendental subject who constitutes the world by way of the optical power of intentional consciousness. Marion, as we shall see, does not abandon, but rather alters this Cartesian style of vision itself. That is, Marion does not “quit” constitution. The all-encompassing power of constitution undergoes a fundamental reversal in the work of Marion: “Constituting does not equal constructing or synthesizing, but rather giving-a-meaning, or more exactly, recognizing the meaning that the phenomenon itself gives from itself and to itself.”18

IV Anamorphosis There is not space to rehearse in descriptive detail the sinuous logic of Marion’s analysis of the gift (see Chapter 5). He advances, no doubt, perhaps one of the great founding principles of phenomenology, the notion of “so much reduction, so much givenness.”19 The particular thesis with which I am occupied in Marion’s work, and with which I shall sketch only too briefly, is the question of the “how” of givenness as such: is the phenomenon successfully a phenomenon only once it is mediated through lived experience, or is it capable of appearing to me with the brute force of immediacy? Marion marshals evidence in favor of immediacy initially, as I shall highlight; however, the phenomenon appears only by passing not unscathed through the “screen” of the subject. The subject “recognizes” the object by neither foreseeing nor predicting it, but rather by clearing a path for the phenomenon to arrive just as it arrives according to its own manner of giving itself. , For Marion, I consist of a screen; and that screen, in turn, consists of a cultural lifeworld through which the phenomenon passes, granting to it form and shape already latent in the phenomenon, “in order to let lived experiences bring about as much as possible the appearing of what manifests itself as

148  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift and through them.”20 Marion therefore makes a much-needed subjective turn at various points in his thematic analysis of the gift. By Marion’s own lights, the phenomenon unfolds not wholly from itself but is rather constituted in the performance of anamorphosis, the self’s intentional agency exercised on behalf of the phenomenon’s mode of disclosure. Indeed, anamorphosis “opens” the field of manifestation for a phenomenon to count as a phenomenon at all, even the saturated phenomenon. To show the operation of anamorphosis, let us revisit the problem of sense data. Marion interprets the given here as a phenomenon that must give itself, from itself. How does it make its impact felt, how does it come ashore and make its landing on me? Marion insists that a phenomenon, once freed of the dogma of empiricism, will impose itself on me in a particular way. That is, the subject must let phenomenon transpire what it has the right to give itself, from itself: manifestation is permitted to manifest itself. Think of a lectern, from which Marion may deliver a lecture on this very topic in the classroom. The lectern may appear to be a simple box constructed out of particle board. It may be used as a stepping stool. Perhaps it could be box that contains fruit or carries shoes inside. And yet, it is given or disclosed as a square phenomenon laid on top of a table. It serves to support the paper on which the lecturing material may rest. It also serves as a balancing device, for the lecturer grips the box with tense hands. The lecturer may well make a point by striking the box with a closed fist, as the classroom is addressed. In this scenario, is it obvious that the wooden box appears as a lectern? Before the university existed, a medieval peasant from long ago would see it as an odd contraption that looks like, well, a wooden box. But I “see” it as a lectern in my present context. How is this possible precisely? It arises in my field of experience as a phenomenon in a manner of forceful givenness, what Marion calls a fait accompli. The lectern imposes itself on me as a lectern, with violence, so that I suffer its impact. But the reverberation does not rob me of my agency. For Marion, if I am an undergraduate student, it is possible that I may well see the lectern as kindling wood to burn in tonight’s bonfire. If I am scientist, I may well reduce the lectern to its molecular basis, and I then recast it according to the vision of empiricism. Neither the student nor the scientist does the phenomenon justice, however. Their interpretive gestures are forms of “devivfying” the phenomenon, which is an act by which I strip the lectern of its lifeworld. 21 So, if I am to permit the phenomenon to give itself, as it is given from within the fold of its ownmost givenness, then I shall suffer it just as it is given in its natural environment, as a university lectern. Initially, it accomplishes itself therein as a fact, a factum in the sense that as a phenomenon it is to be taken simply as it shows itself. It arrives in this manner not by me, but at my expense. “It is a fact made on my account; by it, I am made.” As the screen, the site of manifestation, I am the surface on which the fait accompli accomplishes its work, as it forces itself on me, as it weighs in on me.

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  149 Its landing (if I let it) transforms me from a passive spectator into an engaged actor, or better “a critical patient into whom the fact has crashed in being visibly accomplished.” I of necessity occupy neither the ego-less terrain of pure passivity nor the calculus of a transcendental ego. I “let myself be made” by the imposition of the fait accompli. The event, whereby I experience the phenomenon, whereby I shepherd its movement from invisibility to visibility, marks the middle voice. I am neither spectator nor author. Je me suis fait as the French say. 22 The lectern gives itself to me, and yet, it occupies my attention by demanding a response from me. I am called to receive it, just as it gives itself. More precisely, I am called into a particular intentional stance, a mode of interpretation governed by the lectern. The object appeals to me, it sanctions me to see it as a particular manifestation of a lectern. I may be within my rights to see it as a slab of wood, or even of as a collection of molecules. I may see it as a foot stool, but the self-disclosure of the lectern challenges the hermeneutical liberties I may take. Anamorphosis elucidates the phenomenological skill involved in the logic of mediation of the lectern. I am the screen on which the phenomenon makes its violent (and sometimes) unpredictable landing. The phenomenon, the lectern, ascends into manifestation only through me. My vision, even in Marion’s work, brings to light the phenomenon just as it gives itself. The “process of becoming a phenomenon” authorizes the subjective ground to operate as a basic transcendental condition for the possibility of all phenomenality. I have suggested only implicitly that Marion’s scheme of the given designates an evasion of immediacy by way of the logic of hermeneutics. The interlacing, so to speak, of the subject and the given whose force is imposed on me designates that the given has its terminus in the subject, whom Marion names appropriately the gifted or l’adonné. The intentional stance the subject must take up in this context, if the gift is to show itself by giving itself, is called anamorphosis. The lectern, to return to our example, beckons me, it evokes in me a response in proportion to its givenness, namely, that I align my vision with the angle at which the lectern appears to me as a lectern. Marion will acknowledge that phenomenology’s decision to privilege the fait accompli resonates with a key thesis of empiricism: the recourse to the facts. 23 The phenomenon “accedes to its visibility only by way of a givenness.”24 Is Marion vulnerable to the naivety attached to the Myth of the Given? Not at all. The lectern gives itself, and this fact appears to us straightaway, as soon as we encounter the lectern. For Marion, the axis of the given sets the terms of engagement. This suggests that I struggle to receive the given just as it is given because I am not a passive spectator. I see, I engage, and I interpret the lectern as it is given to me when I enter the classroom. I glance at it from the side, and it initially has no recognizable form beyond a few pieces of wood glued together in the shape of a box. I direct my vision to the proper angle, in order to line up

150  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift with the axis of givenness. The lectern demands that I submit to its position in the larger world of the classroom. In this way, I can recognize it once I enter its jurisdiction. To do this, I must change my point of view. I must walk from the entry point and walk over to the middle of the classroom. I move, in real space (other examples may require I move in conceptual space), to the front of the room and recast my gaze over the wooden box. I see it now, for the first time, as a lectern with a microphone attached to it, located firmly on top of a table. In this vision, the phenomenon appears, “when my gaze has satisfied the demands of the perspective.” Just as I see writing on the street (in yellow paint it says yield) only once I stand in front of it at some distance (not to the side). No phenomenon, even a lectern, or writing on a street, is “neutral” and “passive.” Rather, the ego responds to the call of the given, because the call accomplishes itself by affecting me, indeed, by changing me. It can modify my field of vision, if I let it. 25 I clearly have the capacity to exercise my agency and thereby adjust my vision. I am an engaged actor on the stage in which I encounter phenomena. I change my vision on that stage in order to give myself over to the object’s manner of appearing, so it may count as a phenomenon for me. Without subjective agency, how else does one make sense of Marion’s radical claim that the ego, now declined in the form of the gifted, has “nothing less than the charge of opening or closing the entire flux of phenomenality?” The subject, the ground on which a phenomenon makes its manifestation, is the “gatekeeper” for the ascent into visibility “of all that gives itself.”26 If I decide to remain blind to the lectern, then I am free to do so, but I may also resituate my gaze according to the demands of the “lectern as phenomenon.” The object given to me is accompanied by a host of demands, what we have called a lifeworld or public context. It awakens in me, then, not a single object among others that I imagine I see in a manifold of empirical objects. It illuminates instead a vocabulary of cultural assumptions, a whole lifeworld. When I see the lectern, I receive with it a “surrounding world.”27 Sellars calls this, as noted above, a public object defined in the vocabulary of publicness, or what Davidson calls intersubjectivity. Herein lies the hermeneutical logic proper to the gift: I receive data, a “given,” as a world laden with interpretive conditions that permit manifestation to arise between the subject and the object—I am neither spectator nor author, but engaged actor who is but one part of a larger surrounding, public world. How may this paradigm of the given link up with a theological analysis of divine revelation?

V Anamorphosis in trinitarian context: seeing the “elsewhere” from above I have suggested that the Myth of the Given need not eradicate the very idea of givenness as such from philosophical analysis. Marion’s rigorous defense of the priority of the phenomenon as that which gives itself from itself

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  151 alone stands as an exemplary treatment of the “given” as non-mythical. Recall Marion’s claim: a piece of data of whatever kind appears to me not in isolation, but in the context of a public world. The public context (i.e., lifeworld) in which I encounter the sense impression determines how I receive and thereby how I experience that sense impression as a phenomenon. The process in which I experience the phenomenon in the context in which it is given is called anamorphosis. Does this structure of the given, acknowledged by recourse to anamorphosis, also apply to theological data, the positum of Revelation? Phenomenologists writing under the persuasion of divine Revelation, like Marion, offer innovative resources for thinking about a theological optics in just this way. How is divine data, that is, Revelation, mediated to me?28 While the eucharist and prayer are obvious candidates for phenomenological analysis, since they evoke a cultic scene accompanied by a cluster of sense data, 29 there has been a surge of interest in the phenomenon of the Trinity as a “phenomenon” subject to phenomenological investigation.30 Among the many kinds and forms of theological “data” given over the course of a two-millennium-long Christian tradition, the Trinity obviously does not break in upon us as a particular sensation or complex of liturgical gestures and words (e.g., reception of bread and wine in the eucharist). How is God disclosed or manifest in Triune form? And how is such a given made intelligible with phenomenological analysis? The Trinity, in other words, is not the obvious object of choice for philosophers interested in pursuing theological objects of experience from a phenomenological vantage point. This is unfortunate. Karl Rahner’s influential analysis of the Trinity punctuates the lack of pastoral purchase the doctrine historically wields, so much so that the Trinity could be eliminated from the Christian lexicon and its absence would affect neither an individual’s faith nor a parish’s sense of community. Christians are so thoroughly “monotheistic” that to bear witness to God as tri-personal would occasion little to no reconfiguration of an individual’s confession of faith or embodied social practice.31 Hence the Trinity appears in the church to be a curiously abstract doctrine. The trend, of a few decades ago, was to address this problem by adapting the Trinity to the problematic of ideal social interactions between humans. The resolution of the crisis of Trinitarian theology found in the “social doctrine of the Trinity,” for many, offers a practical application of the Trinity appropriate to the modern age: recast in light of the social reality of the human condition and the problem of loneliness (endemic in the industrial age), the Trinity functions as a model of social integration that can teach us how to relate to each other in love, just as the social community of the Father and Son exchange the gift of love in the Spirit they share. 32 And yet, the Trinity so understood remains only at the level of model or symbol—not a phenomenon I encounter, as manifest before me in flesh and bone. If the Trinity is more than a model or symbol, how does a phenomenological analysis of the Trinity get off the ground?

152  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift I do not deny the Trinity, like the incarnation, is an article of faith. How it becomes a phenomenon and what type of phenomenon it can be is the urgent twofold question now before us. Marion’s analysis of the Trinity’s “logic of manifestation” charts one plausible approach. Recall our analysis above of Marion’s principle of anamorphosis. We now turn to his problematic application of it (as a way of seeing) to the Trinity. Not so much a phenomenology of the Trinity as a phenomenology of “vision” that beholds the Trinity, the logic of anamorphosis in Marion attains a high point of mature development his systematic work on revelation, D’ailleurs (2020). This volume essentially completes what Marion began in the Gifford lectures, Givenness and Revelation, to which we now turn briefly before highlighting two key points of emphasis outlined in D’ailleurs. Marion in those Gifford lectures suggests that the “gifted,” to whom the Trinity is given, inhabits a first-person perspective that is plastic, in that it is capable of enacting a radical shift in vision. That is, the ego may rotate the direction of its vision so that its gaze can “line up” on the axis of the Trinity (that is the movement of vision enacted by anamorphosis): the invisible is made manifest in the visible, insofar as the Father illuminates the Son, who is the visible Icon of the invisible Father. How do I see this reality? How do I make this radical shift? The Spirit illustrates the proximate cause of a shift in perspective. It possesses divine power that enables the gifted to receive and recognize the Trinity as a phenomenon. In keeping with pneumatology, it is not “I” who enacts the shift in gaze, it is the Holy Spirit in me. The iconic model of this logic of manifestation, for Marion, suggests that God’s revelation can only be experienced as a saturated phenomenon in the Spirit. The Spirit’s work in the iconic model consummates in “complete anamorphosis… or the arrangement wherein the gaze of man would be placed at the exact site required by the icon itself for it to be recognized in full manifestation.”33 The model that enables the radical shift in vision is itself Trinitarian. In this the worshipper appropriates in faith the person of Jesus as a Son, with whom the Father is one, a recognition made possible by the optical power of the Spirit (who gives me the eyes of faith). Hence the Spirit positions the human gaze at the exact place and point of view where the visible face of Christ (Jesus as Son) can at once, with a sudden and perfect precision, be uncovered as the very axis where the gaze of the Father on the Son and that of the Son at the Father pass. 34 Marion, moreover, argues that I receive the Trinity due wholly to the operation of the Spirit. The Spirit confers on the gaze an “optical power” to see in the visible face of Jesus the invisible depth of God the Father. But the Spirit remains invisible in the reconfiguration of vision, because the Spirit makes possible the iconic vision by fusing with me. Just as I cannot see the eyes through which I see the world, neither can I see the Spirit whose gift of

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  153 vision I receive. The Spirit recedes into the background of the stage of visibility, opening up in the process a visible place where only the Son appears before my “spiritual eyes.” In D’ailleurs, Marion successfully incorporates a stronger explication of the role of love in the process of anamorphosis. The vocabulary of anamorphosis takes center stage in the sprawling investigation of the Trinitarian revelation, especially in chapter 4 on “Christ as phenomenon.” I cannot accomplish a full review of Marion’s expansive analysis of affection-love and revelation here, but it is worth focusing on the role of love Marion emphasizes, which I find to be a new development in the theological hermeneutic of anamorphosis. In D’ailleurs, the logic of anamorphosis (as the shift in vision) is embedded within the heart, and so, it remains there in the heart where I receive the invisible power of love from the Spirit. The eyes of faith must love what it wants to know. Instead of serving the purpose of disengaged reason, the act of anamorphosis invites the subject to enjoy and be evoked by the revelation of God in the Spirit. Indeed, revelation constitutes a counterexperience precisely because the Spirit takes the initiative to evoke in me the desire to love what is revealed in the Spirit. Revelation is essentially “attraction” in the Spirit. In this the ego “suffers an attraction that sets revelation into motion” [éprouve une attraction qui la met en oeuvre] in the first place.35 It is from within the motion of the Spirit’s love (come upon me) that God as Trinity is made manifest, since “when love truly, we also love God” [quand nous aimons vraiment, donc aussi quand nous aimons Dieu].36 So crucial is the motion of love to the unveiling of God as Trinity (i.e., revelation as apocalypsis or unveiling) that the Spirit’s work in the heart of the subject necessarily overwhelms the ego, submerging the ego in the love of Spirit that opens access to God at all. Hence the “charity that surpasses all knowing does not close, but opens access to the elsewhere.”37 The Trinity, as beyond this world, and beyond the closure of myself as pure ego, arrives from this transcendent elsewhere, “out there,” and attracts me from on high. This is the “hyperbolic” love the Christian saint suffers and enjoys in the gift of the Spirit who descends from elsewhere, the site where the Spirit is the love eternally exchanged between Father and Son.38 But Christ is the lone visible or “iconic” reference point of the Trinity’s elsewhere. The Spirit does not appear since I see through it. The Father too does not appear, for He is “one with the Son.” It is the Son alone who is the sole “phenomenon in and for all the Trinity… the body of Christ made visible, the only place of manifestation for the entire Trinity.”39 The iconic model of phenomenality reduces the manifestation of the Trinity to the visible manifestation of the Son. And yet, the question remains: how is the Son experienced as a phenomenon? The only angle of entry into this question is to interrogate further the act of anamorphosis. In this shift in vision, Jesus Christ does not stand before

154  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift me as a person in flesh and blood. I do not have an actual spatiotemporal vision in which I see an apparition of Christ. The turn toward scripture, where the story of Jesus is revealed, or the sacrament of the eucharist where he is liturgically revealed are two obvious sites of givenness from which the Trinity may unfold in the Spirit. Marion incorporates objects that can display the phenomenon of the Trinity (Marion relies on scripture and Basil of Caesarea and St. Augustine). But are they not objects that mediate the experience of the Trinity? I will address this question in the final remarks. With regard to the strategy of anamorphosis, the Spirit must serve to “convert” my vision (Marion’s phrase), a grace given to me that permits me to undergo a complete theological gestalt shift: I can all at once after the conversion see the love of the Father in the visible face of the son on the Cross. My point of view changes, through faith, so that a space is opened in me whereby God can be received within “the limits of our finitude and egocentrism.”40 My finite limits expand, because it is my heart that expands. The Spirit dilates my heart, and this is precisely what anamorphsis accomplishes: it “is only possible on the condition that our spirit is found to be invested, displaced, and empowered by the Spirit.”41 In the expansion of the heart, I take on a new capacity to see that which cannot be contained by or manifest in the world—the “elsewhere” of the Trinity. Here the emphasis on the “otherworldly” nature of anamorphosis is clearly exhibited in the story of Nicodemus in John chapter 3. Marion employs the famous expression Jesus used in the face of Nicodemus’ question about salvation to great effect: being “born again” (John 3.3) is a translation found in many English versions of the New Testament, whereas the Greek can also be rendered “born from on high,” as the NRSV states; Marion opts for this translation, and in the French it semantically reads “from on high” [d’en haut].42 Theologically speaking, Marion prepares to take hermeneutical liberties, as I discuss below in the conclusion, in rereading the Nicodemus story as a statement about the location of the Trinity as “on high” to the degree that it reflects a cesura between this world and the heaven on high: God [“l’ailleurs de l’Espirt, hors du temps et du monde, hors du temps due monde”].43 This stems from Marion’s flat reading of the dualism between “earthly things” and “heavenly things” enunciated in John 3.12. Hence the “call of the elsewhere” comes from on high, and it originates from the heavenly realm. Because the call comes from neither me nor the world, it can truly displace my egocentrism, reconstituting me in its light.44 He writes, anamorphosis designs the transfer of the point of anchorage in an intentional vision (zero point, Nullpunkt), to another point, distance and different, the displacement of the intentional ego from a point of view to another point of view… that of the phenomenon given to vision… and we understand here that the place demanded by anamorphisis is exclusively defined by the Spirit, who ‘will guide you unto all the truth’.45 (John 16.13)

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  155 The gift of the Spirit is received according to the structure of its alterity, of its elsewhere, from which it arrives by way of the logic of the call, and, finally, of its surprise of saturation. With a logic unique to itself, the gift of the Spirit contradicts any logic derivative of the world or empiricism. And so Marion states, problematically: “We behold Christ, in the form of a Resurrection body, whose landing on me reconstitutes me, by way of the saturating impact of Christ’s manifestation.”46 The Trinity, then, framed according to the logic and force of saturation, remains unforeseeable, and, most of all, remains a phenomenon that eludes the rank of worldliness. It overwhelms me in that its manifestation is excessive when compared to my grasp of mundane objects in the world. For even in performance of faith I cannot anticipate God in Triune form, because its phenomenality eludes my capability to constitute it. God comes from “elsewhere.” I instead behold or bear witness to God, who at that very moment reconstitutes my gaze from on high. It is important to make explicit what is implicit in Marion’s drama of the “elsewhere.” Christ, who is the iconic center of the Trinity, consists of finely grained theological doctrine worked out over centuries of early church debates. The Trinity and incarnation are doctrines that assist the Christian believer in framing and apprehending God as God unfolds in the biblical narrative. Marion appears to leap over the long intellectual debate that surrounded both doctrines, debates that must be said (I would argue) to inform and shape faith, rather than overwhelm and saturate (from on high) the logic of faith.

VI Conclusion: seeing the Trinity in the world The Trinity does not occur as a “given” independent of the cultural language with which Christianity has provided the believer to appropriate the phenomenon within the economy of mediation. Even a saturated phenomenon must be received and thus “recognized” as a particular kind of gift only according to conditions outlined in advance.47 The Trinity, understood in Marion’s framework, does not succumb to the myth of immediacy. But Marion fails to thematize Trinity as an experience, and, more specifically, fails to outline how it is mediated within the horizon of subjective experience in the world. As an engaged actor within the lifeworld or lived horizon of Christianity, the meaning of Trinity does must appeal to the liturgical setting of the Trinity. Phenomenology could, in principle, illuminate with precision the liturgical act of the eucharist as the chief site of Trinitarian manifestation—rather than claim the “elsewhere” of the Trinity is alien to the world. It appears to me that Marion pays insufficient attention to the fact that the Trinity is a Christian dogma, sedimented over by centuries of debate, and is thus given or “posited” as a doctrine that emerged out of a particular lifeworld. Phenomenology, as a method, can emphasize the logic of mediation in any context. Against Marion, we must claim that the Trinity is a phenomenon that is handed down in scripture and tradition, and tied

156  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift to those two formations of manifestation, the liturgy. Hence the Trinity cannot be discovered or “encountered” under the auspices of saturating experience, as if I am surprised and caught off guard by its manifestation, as if it can land on me antecedent to the doctrinal content I receive about it. The Trinity may be a counter-intuitive and inexhaustible mystery, but as a phenomenon, the Trinity must be received in a way that is in keeping with the “how” of all doctrine, a lifeworld learned in scripture, prayer, and liturgy. The risk, otherwise, is what is on display in Marion’s D’ailleurs, a Gnostic-like retreat to paradox and otherworldly duality between earthly things and heavenly things. Let us return to the analysis of the lectern in order to illustrate the way in which the Trinity may give itself as a phenomenon within the Christian lifeworld, and this, within the parameters of this world. The lectern is a phenomenon that imposes its logic on me, to which I am called to conform and bear witness to, as the one who is gifted by its visible presence as a box of wood. I am never capable of remaining a passive spectator, but I do not craft the lectern in my own image as if I am its author. It is a public phenomenon, mediated to me by the world in which it appears and the selfsame world from which I narrate my life. By analogy, the Trinity operates on this mediated plane of experience. But it is not an object among other objects like a lectern. It is not a discrete object of sense data that I can pick out from a series of objects that are flowing in my stream of consciousness. Rather the Trinity, twice removed from immediacy, is redoubled in its mediated form of manifestation, appearing as a mediated phenomenon. It appears to me only in the intellectual tradition of Christianity, as a liturgical idea and a doctrine (formed over centuries). The “how” of experience gains its intelligibility once the “how” of the given involves not just the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon’s lifeworld carries out the full measure of manifestation. The “optical power” of the Holy Spirit belongs to the lifeworld illuminated by the same Spirit, namely the Christian tradition and the body of Christ in the form of the Church. The Trinity is seen or recognized as a “given” only to those who are initiated into the particular lifeworld of the phenomenon under analysis. The lectern may mean nothing to the toddler, except that it appears to her as a heavy wooden box. Once initiated into the lifeworld of higher education and university life, the lectern will become or will be “given” as a phenomenon ready to hand, as a crucial piece of furniture used by the professor. The attitude of the subject, if initiated into the relevant lifeworld, determines the mode of disclosure of the phenomenon under investigation. The same hermeneutic imperative applies in the arena of theological revelation. Aquinas indicates that the Trinity is not perceivable in or available to nature. Natural reason, therefore, cannot achieve on its own strength the knowledge of the Trinity. I may know, via general revelation, and by the ordinary use of my faculties of reason, that God exists. But Aquinas remains emphatic that other doctrines appear to us only with the aid of divine grace,

The given and manifestation of the Trinity  157 in the form of special Revelation, such as the Bible and sacraments. The Trinity is classified as this kind of special Revelation, available only to the intentional aim of faith. As Aquinas observes, it is “for the manifestation of faith,” that God as Trinity is knowable by way of “similitude” and “dissimilitude” with created things.48 To attempt to prove the Trinity with use of reason would injure the dignity of faith itself, since its purpose is to celebrate the mystery of the invisible.49 The aid of special Revelation, appropriated in faith, makes visible the phenomenon of the Trinity only in a mediated fashion. Aquinas, to continue with his analysis of the knowability of the Trinity, argues that the divine essence transcends our powers of apprehension. The divine essence, “considered in itself,” cannot be known by the powers of our intellect, even when those powers are assisted by special revelation. Marion certainly stresses this aspect of the experience of the divine, who is fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible (evident in his pioneering work on the saturated phenomenon). 50 God appears in an incomprehensible fashion, for Marion, because God reveals a presence that is “too much,” a Revelation that overwhelms our capacity to signify or understand it. Aquinas appears to imply the opposite of Marion. We apprehend God as Trinity, in Aquinas, according to our “own mode” insofar as we find the Trinity “in sensible objects, whence its knowledge is derived.”51 When God the Father, for example, is disclosed as a “Father” figure in the New Testament (Father of Jesus), we know God is not feeble as human fathers are sometimes by old age (God is known here by dissimilitude with created things). God as Trinity appears as a phenomenon only in this mediated or analogous manner. God is given through the imagery and concepts provided by scripture and the liturgy, not least tradition of commentary on Trinitarian theology. The Trinity does not saturate my horizons like a rainbow before me can. Rather, it moves in the opposite direction: the Trinity is a phenomenon taken up in faith because there is no fulfilling content. It is, moreover, a doctrine acquired by a repertoire of skills and languages, which are learned in the Christian tradition. I employ those skills in that they permit me to recognize the Trinity as an article of faith that reveals the invisible mystery of the Father in the visible face of the Son, by the grace and power of the Spirit. Jean-Yves Lacoste says faith often has no fulfilling content, and its lived dynamic is a phenomenon poor in or absent of fulfilling intuition. 52 This seems to me to be a more properly phenomenological way (as Aquinas would say, a way consistent with a creature’s reliance on sensible objects) to treat the manifestation of the Trinity. What is given in faith but the gift of giving love. The gift itself, as an exchange, may well lead to possession, but it can also prompt dispossession as a final movement. 53 One receives a gift so that one may release it down stream. I can dispossess myself because the gift I receive is one dispossession, in the Trinitarian work of Christ’s assumption of flesh, consummated on the Cross and

158  Jean-Luc Marion and the gift verified on Easter morning: Christ is sent by the Father, with whom he does not consider equality with the Father something to be grasped, but instead empties himself, taking on the nature of a servant; death on the Cross followed by Resurrection unites us to Christ, which makes our “common sharing in the Spirit” the ground for “being-like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind” (Phil 2.1–2). So in our relationships with each other, we are drawn into the Trinitarian economy of gift of Christ, so we too may be “poured out like a drink offering” in the form of sacrifice and service (Phil 2.17). Is not the eucharist the obvious theological context the Christian may be given occasion to participate in the Trinitarian work of dispossession, of being poured out? As an article of faith worked out in dispossession of oneself, then, the Trinity is phenomenalized, if anywhere, in the liturgical context of the eucharist. The Son, Father, and Spirit are memorialized together in the elements of bread and wine. Hilary of Poitier informs us that in faith, the elements when eaten and drunk, bring it to pass that both we are in Christ and Christ in us. He therefore Himself is in us through the flesh and we in Him, while together with Him our own selves are in God. Hilary does not truncate the eucharist by limiting it to Christology alone. In fact, in eating and drinking, “we might arrive at unity with the Father, since in him who dwells naturally in the Father by birth, we also dwell naturally, while He Himself abides naturally in us also.” The hypostatic union, a concept arriving only in the fifth century, reframes our unity with the Father in an incarnational light, mediated to us in the Trinitarian practice of the eucharist. Hilary stops his analysis of the eucharist neither at the level of the Father nor at the event of the Cross in the sacrifice of the Son. For it is the Holy Spirit that consummates the eucharistic participation in God made manifest in the Son’s obedience, which is the “sacrament of this perfect unity.” Unity may communicate a union of Son and Father, but here in Hilary’s text, it is a broad union of Son, Father, Spirit, together with human nature, whereby each member is brought into supernatural union by the work of the Holy Spirit. By analogy, Hilary indicates in no uncertain terms that in the reception of the eucharist we shall live through Christ in the same manner Christ lives through the Father. And this supernatural communion belongs to the work of the Spirit: “Must He not naturally have the Father within Himself according to the Spirit since he Himself lives through the Father?” And so, as the Holy Spirit is the advocate sent by Christ to his people, it is the same Spirit in whom we enjoy the eucharist, then, that consummates “the unity between Himself and the Father.” Not a mere unity of will, but a unity of the Holy Spirit, we abide in Christ through the Father’s

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love of the Son, a gift given by the Spirit. 54 How might this be given, if not only in faith, tasted in the unity of love between Christ and his body? Augustine, on whom Marion heavily draws, contends that the Trinity is the bedrock of an eschatological pilgrimage. We see God now only in an enigma and in a puzzle, because of lack of presence, precisely because we do not undergo the stupor of overabundance. 55 Trinitarian experience, due to the temporal delay of eschatology, cannot in principle saturate me. It rather becomes a phenomenon that can evoke in me a contemplative posture (if I let it), one that requires my focus, both my love and intellect. It therefore results in the recession of God from the intention-intuition duality. I stand instead in an eschatological posture of readiness that disposes me to receive God-to-come in the liturgical context of embodied mediation. I am an engaged actor (Marion), which means I do more than simply “align my gaze” with the axis of the phenomenon. I learn about the phenomenon’s lifeworld by entering its liturgical gift. In turn, I enjoy the liturgical (eucharistic) framework as a means of interpreting and apprehending God as Trinity in scripture, liturgy, and prayer: entering the Christian lifeworld is born of the hermeneutic imperative, the mood of faith, embodied in word and sacrament.

Notes 1 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. John Cottingham, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52. 2 Descartes, Meditations, p. 55. 3 Descartes, Meditations, p. 46. 4 For more on this see W. V. Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (see fn.1 in Chapter 1). Husserl, decades before Quine, calls empiricism a dogma that grips us with a naïve attitude about the structure of sense impression. See his Ideas I, §62. 5 As Husserl says, phenomenology is interested in discovering “objects in their ways of appearing” [Gegenstände im Wie]. See Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 121. 6 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, trans. J.N. Finlay, ed. Dermot Moran (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 168 and xxiii (the latter contains the German). 7 Husserl writes, If ‘positivism’ is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the ‘positive,’ that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists. In fact, we [phenomenology] allow no authority to curtail our right to accept all kinds of intuition as equally valuable legitimating sources of cognition. See Husserl, Ideas I, p. 39. 8 Henry, Essence of Manifestation, pp. 53–54. 9 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 251.

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10 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 84–85. 11 Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, p. 40ff. 12 For more on Heidegger’s value for the pragmatist tradition, see the seminal article, Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” in A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 214–232; and Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 13 Kant depicts empiricism as a kind of transcendental realism, in which reality unfolds wholly from the object or sense data. Time and space he says, in this paradigm, are assumed to be “something given in themselves” (independent of our sensibility). See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 426, A369. 14 Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1963), p. 176. 15 Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 91. 16 For a brief commentary on the varieties of phenomenology, see Joseph Rivera, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology, chapter 1. 17 Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, p. 7. 18 Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, p. 9. 19 Michel Henry critically supports Marion’s case for a fourth phenomenological principle. See his “The Four Principles of Phenomenology,” trans. Joseph Rivera and George Faithful, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 48, no. 1 (2015): 1–21. 20 Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, p. 10. 21 I follow Marion’s decision to borrow the “lectern” example from Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum Books, 2008), p. 55. 22 Marion, Being Given, pp. 146–147. 23 Marion, Being Given, p. 119. 24 Marion, Being Given, p. 123. 25 Marion, Being Given, p. 125. 26 Marion, Being Given, p. 307. 27 Marion in a later essay draws on Heidegger’s lucid lectures on the “enworlding” of phenomena as constitutive of how they give themselves. See Jean-Luc Marion, The Reason of the Gift, trans. Stephen Lewis (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 45ff; for Heidegger’s important analysis, see Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 56ff. 28 Joseph O’Leary’s thesis is heeded here: the conventional can communicate the ultimate, but conventions never may be left behind. The given, even a divine given, always arrives in a form of mediated givenness, whether that is language, the body, time, etc. See his incisive Conventional and Ultimate Truth: A Key for Fundamental Theology (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015). 29 See, for example, The Phenomenology of Prayer, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Jean-Luc Marion, “The Phenomenality of the Sacrament,” in Believing in Order to See, trans. Christina Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 102–115; and Jean-Yves Lacoste, L’intuition sacramentelle et autres essais (Paris: Ad solem, 2015), pp. 59–96.

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30 For example, see Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 175ff; Jean-Louis Chretien, Under the Gaze of the Bible, trans. John Marson Dunaway (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 66ff; Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) p. 88ff; Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chapter 3; Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 69ff. 31 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (London and New York: Continuum Imprint, 1986), pp. 10–11. 32 Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with the Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars vol. 81 (2000): 432–445. 33 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, p. 108. 34 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, p. 108. 35 Marion, D’ailleurs: la revelation (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2020), p. 218. 36 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 213. 37 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 330. 38 For references to l’hyperbole de la charité, see Marion, D’ailleurs, pp. 320–321. 39 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, pp. 110–111. 40 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, p. 117. 41 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 323. 42 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 374. 43 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 378. 44 Marion, D’ailleurs, p. 526. 45 Marion, D’ailleurs, pp. 473–474. 46 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, p. 49. 47 Marion gestures toward this point in his “Recognition of the Gift,” in Believing in order to See, pp. 125–135. Marion is also clear that all divine Revelation appears not as a poor or common phenomenon but as a saturated phenomenon. See Marion, In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 53. 48 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican English Province (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1913–1942), Part I, Q. 39, A.7. 49 Aquinas, Summa, Part I, Q.32, A.1. 50 As saturation applies to the Trinity, see Marion, Givenness and Revelation, pp. 52–54 and 99. 51 Aquinas, Summa, Part I, Q.32, A.2; and Part I, Q.13, A.2. 52 Recall here Steinbock’s work on poor phenomena, and thus, the clear overlap between Lacoste and Steinbock on this score. 53 Calvin Schrag’s work makes this helpful point explicit in his illuminating, and often underappreciated, God as Otherwise than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 107ff. 54 I have drawn here on Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2002), book VIII, sections 13–19. 55 For more on this, see especially Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1990), book XV as a whole, but also the prayer on the final page.

Part IV

Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy

9

Spiritual life Angst, peace, love

I The world of possibility Part IV shall open with a sustained study of Jean-Yves Lacoste’s early work. Of the same generation of Marion, and thus shaped by similar influences (e.g., Heidegger and Husserl and Derrida and Levinas), the work of Lacoste is, however, later chronologically. For this reason Lacoste remains less accessible to the Anglophone world. In the late 1980s his articles begin to appear and in 1990 his first work was released, Note sur le temps, which remains available in French only. In 1994 a major second monograph appeared, Expérience et absolu, and it was translated into English only in 2004.1 Several other collections of essays and monographs have since been published in French.2 A couple of monographs released in English have examined his work, and a recent symposium on aspects of his work appeared in the journal Modern Theology.3 While I will eventually draw on Lacoste’s later phase (in the mid-2000s forward), the present chapter draws heavily on his first two works; both volumes constitute the ground of a distinctively apophatic spirituality formed consciously in the wake of Heidegger’s existentialism, what I shall call a “spiritual life,” a type of liturgical existentialism. While philosophical existentialism began in earnest with Martin Heidegger’s ground-breaking work Being and Time (1927) and was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s and 1950s, these atheistic variants of existentialism were quickly supplanted by, among other things, the post-structuralism and deconstruction of the 1960s. The assumption is that Heidegger’s existentialism was born wholly of atheistic convictions and is therefore incompatible with theological reflection and spiritual formation. This is not necessarily the case, as Lacoste deftly shows. The young Heidegger’s study of being-in-the-world used religious sources in the early 1920s to his advantage. The footnotes critically developed not only key methodological features drawn from Husserlian phenomenology. They also selectively adduced theological elaborations of the self’s temporal constitution, found in the works of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Calvin, and Kierkegaard.4 It is this intersection between existential phenomenology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-13

166  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy and theology that several French phenomenologists of the 1980s (down to the present) have exploited Heidegger for theological purposes: how can a détente between phenomenology and theology be struck in the wake of Heidegger? Perhaps we may witness the most sustained expansion of the Heideggerian horizon of experience from a theological point of view in these early works of Lacoste. While many aspects of Heidegger’s work (both early and later phases) receive critical attention in the French philosophical tradition, Lacoste narrows his focus to the category of mood [Befindlichkeit] in its temporal movement, outlined in Being and Time. Primarily in Experience and the Absolute and Note sur le temps, 5 but also in various later thematic essays, Lacoste elucidates and develops an innovative theological technique designed to bring to light authentic Christian existence in the world, a spirituality worked out in the shadow of being-in-the-world and beingtoward-death. Lacoste names this particular theological vocation the “liturgical reduction,” which we treated only briefly in Chapter 6.6 We treat it in more detail here. For Lacoste, God (or the “Absolute”) obtains the status of a “limit” phenomenon, e.g., a liminal possibility that occurs in the margins of the world. Clarity about the meaning of limit is only properly achieved if the conceptual architecture of “worldhood” in Heidegger can be shown in some (and I emphasis some) detail. The world unfolds before each individual as a project to be explored and refined, and each individual can inhabit the world according to any given hermeneutical project. The decision of faith is the exemplarily hermeneutical; indeed, it is an intentional performance of the Christian project, the Christian manner of worldmaking. The intentional stance of faith does not throw open a field experience in which God appears as an object graspable by the mind’s noetic capabilities. Rather God, as mystery, expands the contours of what may count as a way of existing, a fundamental attunement that illuminates the world in a theological light. The upshot of Lacoste’s phenomenological theology is that fundamental moods, like angst or resolute anticipation, represent only one (and inadequate) aspect of the horizon of manifestation. Christian life (or the Christian moods of faith, peace, and love) remains a possibility of worldmaking. How so?

II Heidegger: mood and world We must first elucidate the meaning and existential framework of “mood” in the landscape of being-in-the-world. Only the barest sketch of this can be delineated here, given the circuitous argument and technical lexicon developed in Being and Time. As a philosophical sensibility, existentialism corresponds to a collection of late-modern concepts which are regulated by the logic of the most basic philosophical question of all: the nature of subjectivity. What is it “to be?” Heidegger throws opens a new angle of entry

Spiritual life  167 into the question, the theme of “fundamental ontology,” which wholly abandons the subject-object dichotomy that funds the metaphysics of representation. The human condition does not explicate itself within the logic of the Cartesian or Kantian subject-object duality, but within the horizon of the “world” as it relates to, and is founded on, the constitutive power of “mood.” My being, in the vocabulary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, consists of my “there-ness” of my mood, which does not emerge within me as a private mental state, but as a world projection, the primal way of being open to a temporal horizon of worldhood. Heidegger speaks not unsurprisingly, then, of the “worldhood of the world” [Weltlichkeit der Welt].7 It constitutes a native or intimate habitation the subject enjoys with the world, precisely because the world emerges in relationship with the subject’s mood. Heidegger is no crude realist. He denies the matching game model of truth, as if the subject’s concepts, moods, and dispositions simply correspond to determinate, free-standing objects, whose truth has a reference which is independent of any conceptual scheme or mood. According to crude or “direct” realism, my affective disposition, say, a joy, appears to function as a mental representation that matches or links to external world “out there,” say a marvelous sunset. The state of affairs outside of my lived mental representation, which we may name the sunset in this particular case, constitutes a fixed world, or a ready-made collection of objects to which our language, concepts, and moods must conform (the direction of fit is such that concepts and moods are aiming to fit the world).8 The world, the sunset manifest here as a particular object, is “outside” my lived experience I am undergoing “inside” my head. The built-in structure of self-identifying objects, the ready-made world, designates a model of truth rooted in the metaphysics of representation; the mind “inside” my head must grasp that object “out there” (a chair, table, sunset, etc.) mediated by an idea synthesized by the mental faculties of apprehension, so that the mind’s disposition achieves a correspondence with the world “out there.” The configuration that belongs to realism is that the causal transaction between the mind and the world of objects lies primarily on the side of the object: I would not utter sunset or possess the mood of joy without the causal transaction first having taken place.9 A principal corrective Heidegger imagines he is prosecuting against post-Cartesian discourse of representational realism lies in his recovery of mood as the medium in which the world emerges, overcoming thereby the inside-outside causal paradigm of realism. The mood I enjoy has the capability or power to disclose the world. In other words, the world as an object originates from the side of the subject. Dasein can formulate words and concepts to make sense of the world, but its mood assumes the existential entitlement of “enworlding” the world. The facticity of Dasein, expressed in its primal moods, consists in the fundamental unity of subject and world, even if an accent is place on the side of the subject.

168  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy To frame it in phenomenological vocabulary, Being and Time launched a thinly veiled attack on Husserl’s “worldless subject” [weltlosen Subjekt].10 Authorized by the Cartesian legacy, a “worldless I” had befallen Kant and Husserl, initiating the process whereby the transcendental ego withdraws from the world. Heidegger proceeds in the opposite direction: If, in the ontology of Dasein, we ‘take our departure’ from a worldless ‘I’ in order to provides this ‘I’ with an Object and an ontologically baseless relation to that Object, then we have ‘presupposed’ not too much, but too little.11 In this post-Cartesian context, Dasein’s relation to the world involves a corrective against the metaphysics of representation. Dasein is not separated out from the world. There is neither gap nor interval between self and world according the logic of Dasein, for it endures an aboriginal “intimacy” [Vertrautheit, “confident familiarity”] with the world. Mood or concern expressed continually by Dasein is the chief factor of this intimacy: “Any concern [das Besorgen] is always already as it is, because of some intimacy with the world. In this intimacy Dasein can lose itself in what it encounters in the world and be fascinated [benommen] with it.”12 Dasein can discover if it wishes to do so, the pluriformity of “ways of being-in” (Weisen des In-Seins) this world-horizon. But, how does it do so? How does it occupy or prioritize one way of being-in-the-world over another if Dasein does not represent and conceptualize the world to itself? If Dasein does not deliberate among options according to the law of theoretical cognition or propositional logic (which decouples the subject from the world), then how does it enjoy various types of intimacy with the world? The key to an answer lies within the inner infrastructure of mood as such. Heidegger addresses this fundamental integration of subject and world on the basis of mood, or affection, or non-intentional awareness of one’s sense of being amid other beings in the world: It has been one of the merits of phenomenological research that it has again brought these phenomena more unrestrictedly into our sight. Not only that: Scheler, accepting the challenges of Augustine and Pascal, has guided the problematic to a consideration of how acts which 'represent' and acts which 'take an interest' are interconnected in their foundations. But even here the existential-ontological foundations of the phenomenon of the act in general are admittedly still obscure. A state-of-mind not only discloses Dasein in its thrownness and its submission to that world which is already disclosed with its own Being; it is itself the existential kind of Being in which Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the 'world' and lets the 'world' "matter" to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self. The existential constitution

Spiritual life  169 of such evasion will become clear in the phenomenon of falling. A stateof-mind is a basic existential way in which Dasein is its “there.”13 Many commentators on Being and Time retranslate the terminology of Befindlichkeit not as “state of mind” but as various other broader terms that encapsulate Dasein’s intimacy with the world. Hubert Dreyfus suggests “where-you-are-atness” or “affectedness,”14 whereas Stephen Mulhall offers the phrase “frame of mind” that discloses the properly existential meaning and range of reference of the German term. In this semantic context, the world belongs to Dasein as a realm of practical possibilities that matter to Dasein.15 Matthew Ratcliffe thinks “attunement” captures a central aspect of Befindlichkeit because it indicates the unthematic interaction Dasein has with objects. Another Heideggerian phrase relevant here is Fürsorge, which poses translation problems for Macquarrie and Robinson, who indicate it may mean something like an affection motivated by “welfare” for the world.16 For Fürsorge Lacoste uses the word in French solicitude, which highlights the “concernful” engagement we automatically have with the world.17 I do not use the keyboard as a conspicuous piece of plastic with square buttons. Nor do I encounter the keyboard as a bare thing, as an entity, but rather as an extension of academic discourse, a tool integrated within my task of thinking and writing, say, this term paper or this journal entry; the keyboard is “equipment” that inhabits the pragmatic order of the “in order to,” a style of skillful coping, in the context of serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability. The keyboard, the sunset, the chair, the hammer, all these “things” or “entities” each bear a unique geometrical spatial configuration, but those entities do not, and, indeed, cannot show themselves to us in a physicalist, empirical fashion.18 Rather our “circumspection” or concern with their use, our dealings with them in the context of pragmata, subordinates the hammer or chair to its serviceability which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time. They become extensions of me and “how” I disclose the world.19 It is true, indeed, as many commentators acknowledge, that underlying Heidegger’s existentialism is a rich account of normative pragmatics, an existential rationality defined neither by theoretical reflection nor by cognitive deliberation, but by practical habit. Lacoste has meditated on this at some length. 20 I engage with and invest myself in objects, for I do not simply stare at them as an impartial representational spectator; and my engagement with them trades on a know-how learned by immersion in the world; ecstatic Dasein is thus skill-laden. Dasein assumes a norm-governed directedness toward equipment treated as available, ready-to-hand.21 On the basis of these considerations, much has been made of the “hammer” example, in which the object appears to Dasein as always already a tool used for construction, an object endowed immediately with practical significance for the worksite, an object

170  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy immediately placed within a context-filled setting that prompts me to already know how to use the hammer as a tool specified to realize my possibilities of hammering a nail in the construction of a house or shed (with a view to the picture I’m intend to hang on the kitchen wall). The same existential backdrop forms the practical or absorbed activity of the five sense organs: I understand and listen to sounds or words on the basis of circumspective absorption, by being affected by them, by the mood-oriented dealings I have with them. Mood therefore elucidates the very world as my world which is always at stake for me as my ownmost possibility. When I hear a sound wave, I understand the noise already as suffused with meaning and value, because I am “in thrall” with being-inthe-world, with the others and objects that give that soundwave its referential depth and emotional richness. Sound carries meaning and I grasp that meaning already without reflecting on the sound first as if it became a theme of semantic analysis; so, in hearing I never first hear acoustic dynamics, simple noises, or complexes of sounds, but the creaking of the wagon, the motorcycle, woodpecker tapping, or the campfire crackling. 22 I have become, without realizing it, preoccupied with it because I have a hermeneutical relationship with sound as meaningful and genuine communication. Dasein transcends the inside versus outside model of crude (direct) realism because Dasein is already outside, communicating with and trafficking in objects in their practicable context. Thus far my analysis of mood in Heidegger has been a preparation for a larger question about the internal link between mood and world. I am affected by my concernful engagement with the hammer or the sunset or the crackling campfire. 23 It should be obvious at this juncture that mood does not convey the facile idea of a discrete experience, like a fleeting private, mental state that colors my view of the world from time to time. As a way of worldmaking, it is to be understood rather as a fundamental dimension of existence, as a way of being-in-the-world. There are layers or degrees of affectedness. Perhaps there are as many as three. Ordered from primitive to culturally conditioned, the foundational mood is the primal instinct of angst. 24 How does angst not only shape the most basic sense of worldhood but actually grant to me my world as the existential ground of all other possibilities of specific, practical moods? Mood, cast in a phenomenological analysis of the worldhood of the world, does not involve particular emotions intended at individual objects or concrete events, such as the happy wedding day or the depressing rainy day. The existential attunement or depth of mood instead refers to the overall feel of the world as such, which recedes from conscious, thematic encounters I have with the furniture of the world. Mood’s knowledge, its expansive logic, which unfolds within me as a distinct type of practical knowledge independent of perceptual cognition, is enworlding. Angst, then, as the power to disclose the world, does not involve a particular object (say angst about the oncoming traffic I accidently stepped

Spiritual life  171 into; that is fear). Angst is anxious about being-in-the-world. In §40 of Being and Time Heidegger designates angst as the “distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed.” And how is that? Its mood or feeling discloses an uncanny sense of being not at home in the world, and inarticulate apprehension of the being of my selfhood as bound up with my possibility to be anything I want to be. It surges within me initially as overwhelming, even painful, in the way that suffocating from a crowd’s presence is painful. That in the face of which one has anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere. Anxiety 'does not know' what that in the face of which it is anxious is. 'Nowhere', however, does not signify nothing: this is where any region lies, and there too lies any disclosedness of the world for essentially spatial Being-in. Therefore that which threatens cannot bring itself close from a definite direction within what is close by; it is already 'there', and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one's breath, and yet it is nowhere. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the "nothing and nowhere", does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself. What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. 25 When the world obtrudes in our daily conversation, it stifles us. For most of us, this lasts but a fleeting moment, for we often overcome the oppressive force of the worldhood of the world by repudiating it. We flee from the fundamental possibility of inhabiting the world according to the mode of possibility. To do so, we often say the uncanny obtrusion of the world, the depth feeling of angst, belongs to my imagination, “that it was nothing.” Why? For what reason would any thinking and reflective person reject an important mood that may well disclose our ultimate relationship not with things but with the world in its worldhood? Do not most of us want to know what it feels like to confront the “summation of everything present-at-hand” so that we may treat the finer details of how the world itself is at once already there and yet nowhere? The reason we may as a default resist such a profound existential confrontation with the world is that it is unsettling, since the fundamental attunement of angst is being-toward-death, which “is essentially anxiety.”26 Why is it is essentially being-toward-death? Because angst is a Grund-befindlichkeit, it brings Dasein face to face with its ownmost possibility, the ultimate height not to be outstripped, the greatest of all possibilities. Death, as a form of being-toward-the-end, embodies nothing less than the act of holding open the utter and constant threat of the possible impossibility

172  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy of existence. this, in turn, invariably shall prompt Dasein to lay claim to this greatest of all possibilities. Death, construed in this existential fashion, does not belong to the realm of biological death or the cessation of brain function, but rather to the existential field of future possibilities, the “nothing” of the possibility impossibility of that hovers always as an indefinite horizon of freedom. The “freedom toward death” lies within the reach of those who are able to seize the day, to choose a path for themselves, and to not surrender unreflectively to the idle chatter of the “they” of mass culture. Individual “possibility of being itself” arrives to Dasein only once Dasein can project its own possibilities as future possibilities which rest on its own potentiality to be itself. To give testimony to this kind of authentic resoluteness, this kind of existential courage to be, is to demonstrate that Dasein can be itself truly according to its own rule of life as it sees who it “can be” in the future. In so doing it rejects the majoritarian viewpoint whose inauthentic mood dwells on past occurrences and victories.

III Liturgical reduction The mood of angst, together with authentic being-toward-death, opens up a path toward the world as a world of possibilities. How might a Christian inhabit this world, in which the temporal flow of possibilities achieves the rank of first philosophy, and thus becomes the chief point of departure for the true discovery of one’s ownmost possibility to be in the horizon of experience? Heidegger neither excludes nor incorporates Christian selfhood as one mode of being-in-the-world, for later he states this explicitly: The ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world decides neither positively nor negatively concerning a possible being toward God. Presumably, however, the elucidation of transcendence first achieves an adequate concept of Dasein, and with respect to this being it can then be asked how things stand ontologically concerning the relation of Dasein to God. 27 For Lacoste, this statement means that the rights of theology are protected, for it is the only discourse qualified to speak of coram Deo. If the God of the philosophers is to be avoided, then it remains the task of theology to carve out a possible Christian authenticity within the parameters of Being and Time. It is the province of Christian theology, therefore, to propose peace as a fundamental mood that may well cancel out or compete with angst. 28 The mood of peace relies on the temporal movement of faith in Christ (or at least this is one way to conceive of peace, other world religions shall have their conceptions of faith). Faith’s decision triggers a gestalt shift of mood (from angst to peace) within the flow of time and the field of possibilities latent within the flow native to being-in-the-world.

Spiritual life  173 This shift Lacoste names the “liturgical reduction.” Interestingly, Lacoste brings to the fore the bivalent reality most of us inhabit: a world that oscillates between two basic moods, one of stability versus one of rupture, or one of equilibrium versus disequilibrium, or one of happy versus unhappy, or lonely versus socially integrated, and so forth. Cognitive science, integrated with phenomenology on this score, tends to highlight this bifurcation, and interplay between, two basic moods. 29 For Lacoste the bivalence occurs in the war between angst and peace. Dasein exists before God, then, on the side of the mood of peace, in direct contradistinction to angst. How does the liturgical reduction expand or dilate the horizon of experience with the Christian mood of faith? Lacoste says that faith must understand itself to occupy hostile territory, since The disturbing hypothesis of a humanity satisfied with existing ‘without God in the world’ must therefore be taken seriously. Atheism is neither simply nor in the first place a theoretical problem: it is first what is a priori to existence.30 Of course, one may raise the question, as Lacoste continually does: how may God make an appearance to me in the world so conceived, if at all? How do I experience the sacredness of the Absolute who transcends my enclosure within being-in-the-world? Can I put into play an ascetic spirituality that brackets the world as a secular obstruction by placing it between parentheses?31 As we shall see momentarily, Lacoste makes Christian spirituality correspond to the existential mit-Befindlichkeit of faith, a mood of “temporal becoming” realized in conjunction with others in a community of faith. Life shared together communicates the body of Christ with each other, and this understanding does not convey opinions or wishes from the interior of one subject to the interior of the other. The body of Christ and the individuals who make up its composition are essentially co-attuned; their being-with, their faith-together belongs to the tacit realm of affection and mood, and it becomes explicitly shared in liturgy, where certain moods (of love, joy, hope, all rooted in Christ) cultivated help the subject learn how to appropriate the body of Christ. This interpretation of faith contrasts with interpretations that trade on the existential projection of resolute angst or self-reliance. Liturgy designates not only religious rites, prayer, vigil, and the ritual of the eucharist sacramentally mediated by the church. Liturgy also embodies a primal existential attunement to the world, a “way” of existing before God as coram Deus, as if I were to enlist the charism of a monk or an ascetic. 32 And so Lacoste does not promote a Christian existentialism of the sort that is radically subjective and anti-institutional, as one might tend to see explicated in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, or Tillich, for example. 33 Concerned with the church life and community, Lacoste unequivocally appropriates

174  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy the mystical theme of darkness/absence from St. John of the Cross, in order to advance an ecclesial subversion of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, opening up a viable spiritual life within logic of mit-Befindlichkeit. Influenced by Carmelite spirituality, then, Lacoste understands faith to induce a liturgical vocation of peace. A space of contemplative peace should be what the church protects. 34 If formulated in a phenomenological idiom, faith can unfold as an existential mode of being-in-the-world within Heidegger’s framework. Faith does not have particular reference to the anxiety associated with Dasein’s mortality and death, but to the death of Christ on the Cross, the moment par excellence of kenotic self-expenditure and paroxysm which, in turn, gives rise to the institutional and sacramental bodies of Christ. Faith signifies, therefore, in Lacoste’s estimation, a particular mystical-and-ecclesial form of dwelling in the world. Made manifest by the freedom to choose to exist before God, faith operates on the order of a spiritual practice that puts into play a theological epoché or reduction (or bracketing, parenthesizing, suspending, etc.) of the world. The reduction may be understood here to represent an imposition Dasein asserts over its native condition as anxious. How does one combat the fundamental attunement of angst? One theological strategy is to specify faith as an alternative mood that exercises the will to indifference (not the will to power), and in particular an indifference to being-toward-death. No doubt John of the Cross emerges at just this juncture, where indifference and boredom are moods assumed in the face of angst: “The Sanjuanist term of ‘night’ precisely here is that of boredom, which says everything: the preeschatological presence of negation.” Here the dark night of the soul does not descend into dereliction in the sense of depression but of pure boredom, of waiting on God. Indeed, the “pure distension” of time itself, an endless stretching of time, involves the logic of boredom, since boredom exemplifies the disappropriation of time, in which the figure of linear time (chronos) is “dead” to me.35 Phenomenological description of the mood of faith occurs within the basic attitude of reflection, known as the reduction. The reduction of what appears to its appearing is achieved through a disengagement from the existential “pull” or “drift” of the reality of what appears. The reduction, practiced properly, results in something like an interruption of the natural absorption of the meaning-giving process in which the representational mind operates. The meaning-giving vector of the mind formulates the resolve to turn back onto itself, so that it may unveil the “how” of what appears. The phenomenological attitude of the reduction redescribes a phenomenon in terms of its being an appearing of what appears and as inseparable from that to which all appears—the self or ego-pole. Phenomenology aspires to offer a science of selfhood, of the “to which” appearing may appear, and thus is a science of standpoints or perspectives. 36 Consisting of symbolic subversion of the world, and consisting therefore of a fundamental alteration in standpoint, this liturgical reduction renders

Spiritual life  175 the ascetic indifferent to the resolute anxiety ascribed to authentic beingin-the-world. To render myself indifferent to the world is to enter into an attitude of abstention about being-in-the-world’s boundary (being-towarddeath) and fundamental attunement (angst). An ascetic who professes faith in a God subverts the inner logic of beingin-the-world by the power of abstention: a shift of interest brought about by abstention enables the ascetic to find the possibility of assuming an alternative position, in order to alter the direction of the thematic “regard” or “gaze” situated within being-in-the-world. When I as the ascetic adopt the position required by the liturgical reduction, I alter my thematizing direction specifically to inhibit the thematizing performance that belongs to the old direction, that of angst. This may be challenging, for such a goal-oriented redirection of focus presupposes particular awareness of the direction of angst in the first place. Hence peace occupies the attention of the ascetic. The change in theme enacted under the liturgical reduction awakens certain horizons, which aims at liturgy’s mode of givenness as peace, without interest in how being-in-the-world can continue its course of the experience of angst and being-toward-death. Only how God “appears as he appears” interests me in this shift in thematic content and this redirection of my gaze; my existential mood of faith prescribes for me how far I should continue to identify myself with angst, death, and resolute projection. As a shift, it can happen only from within the mood of angst itself. I do not transcend the world of angst as a disinterested spectator. Indeed, the disinterested spectator of Descartes’ Meditations contrasts with the dark night of indifference in St. John of the Cross. In Lacoste, the contrast plays out in the starkly contrasting attitudes cultivated by each figure. For Descartes, the field of sensation is bracketed by doubt so that the certitude can be discovered in the ego’s ownmost capacity to think: I think, therefore I am. As an intellectual exercise or thought experiment, I can doubt everything around me except the fact that I am doubting, which discloses an immovable egoic reference point (a pure ego) for my being certain of myself. Lacoste highlights that the San Juanist paradigm of “stripping down” of certainty operates, in sharp contrast to Cartesianism, as a way of living humility. The nocturnal state of affairs of faith, as a mood of destitution, makes the self bare, stripping it of all certainty about empirical realities, including epistemic contents derived from sensation. Unlike Descartes, the “epochè” in John of the Cross consists not of an intellectual exercise, but of an ascesis which merits the name mortification. Hence, In Descartes, his methodological poverty is used only to gain sure and certain knowledge of oneself. Instead of the discovery of pure self of which I am certain, John of the Cross’s project is to denude the self in an attempt to achieve an existence or way of life that remains ‘denuded’ or ‘impoverished.’

176  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy That is, “Le dénuement est état. Jean de la Croix pense sa genèse et son institution. Le cogito est un moment; le dénuement est un mode d’existence.”37 The dark night, enacted under the concernful moods (Fürorge) of boredom and destitution, invokes a way of life, one never rooted in epistemic certainty but in the eschatological hope of the Cross. Liturgical dereliction (déneument), then, requires that I embody the sacramental character of the liturgical reduction. In time, with the acquisition of a new mood, I will “learn” the way in which a thematic shift can happen. Thus, “signification is not thrown over some naked object present-at-hand; we do not stick a value on it.”38 Heidegger, it is true, will not permit the thematic shift to take place fully, for angst often eludes conscious focus and does not yield particular intentional contents that I can single out as an object to bracket or abstain from: “anxiety in Dasein is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in what makes us ‘jittery…’”39 Following Heidegger closely, Lacoste will agree. Angst never leaves me as a background attunement. How does Lacoste counter or lessen angst, without taking leave entirely of Heidegger’s existential topology? For Lacoste, it is being-in-peace which counters, but does not cancel out, the fundamental mood of angst.40 So powerful is the mood of peace that it possesses the capability of bracketing the existential disorientation of “being thrown.” Precisely because angst is rooted in the original abyss of being thrown, peace must recalibrate our sense of origin, of “why” we are here.41 Heidegger will claim that “thrownness” is a fact of the entity which Dasein is. In what way is it a fact? “That it is factically, may be obscure and hidden as regards the ‘why’ of it.”42 I am cast into the world from where I do not know. I have no essence or substance from which I emerge that may endow my existence with meaning or purpose. For Lacoste, in contrast, being-in-peace calms this uncanny feeling of disorientation (and angst) tied to thrownness. In other words: the liturgical reduction consists in a determined intentional act of thematic redirection, a theological act which amounts to a bracketing of the finitude of the world played out in the shift from angst to peace. According to Lacoste, professing faith in God as a theological act designates, at bottom, a way of coping, of finding peace, amid an anxious world without God. Lacoste writes, “the world takes possession of man and the function of his opening onto the world is to underpin his acts of consciousness, to provide them with a ground or basis.”43 And given that Lacoste acknowledges Dasein’s native reality is that it exists in a world without God,44 he invokes faith as a way to reconfigure that ground: faith’s mood copes with that absence inasmuch as being-in-peace seeks to abstain from angst, not least the “atheism” to which the mood of angst yields. If peace does not correspond to a fleeting moment of tranquility, but occupies a fundamental attunement, then how does it operate in contradistinction to angst? In Etre en danger (2011), Lacoste associates being-in-peace with a kind of retraction from trouble, which is a term that communicates

Spiritual life  177 a host of potential acts and temptations, but the chief “trouble” of them all is the spiritual poverty of angst and being-toward-death. How does Lacoste recommend we respond to this chief trouble, to angst? We could depict the movement of peace as a positive indifference assumed in the face of the form of identity accompanied by angst. Peace as positive indifference interrupts the play of angst and being-toward-death that governs the event whereby I come face to face with myself. Heidegger formulates the power of angst in the vocabulary of displacement, in which my absorption in the world of “busyness” and “idle chatter” (which deflect from the genuine confrontation with my death) is displaced by a direct and immediate confrontation with my death. Only angst, individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse.’ But this existential 'solipsism' is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring, that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world. As we have said earlier, a state-of-mind makes manifest “how one is”45 Solipsism frames the initial interruption of angst, but the type of individualization proper to the disclosure of angst belongs not to literal solipsism, but to existential self-reflexivity. Authentic angst consists of a displacement from idle chatter to world-disclosing authenticity, that “I as Dasein” can project possibilities in the world, and in so doing take responsibility for myself as one who can project possibilities as my own, making thereby the world my own world. How does being-in-peace serve as a counter-existential? How does it interrupt the interruption of angst? Peace interrupts the displacement of angst by virtue of a further displacement. Being-in-peace opens within Dasein a space that allows something other than myself to intervene, so that myself “as this me” passes away in the dimension of indifference. The letting appear, or letting Dasein interpret itself as it truly is from an existential point of view (as Heidegger recommends that we do with the aid of angst)46 in this context of the liturgical reduction, translates to the spiritual practice of positive indifference toward angst-identity.47 Being before myself in angst is displaced by being before God in peace and reconciliation. In peace, I am thus twice removed from idle chatter. Angst displaces me from the unreflective chatter of the “They,” in order to bring me before myself as one who is empowered in freedom. Faith displaces me from angst, in order to bring me before God in reconciliation between myself and God. No doubt Romans 14.7–8 informs Lacoste: For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

178  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy The self-referential existentialism of Heidegger entails a lonely solipsism after all. For Lacoste and the Christian tradition, I do not belong to myself, but to the Lord—I concur with Lacoste’s use of a theological hermeneutic as a way of coping in the face of Heideggerian angst. The existential shape of the liturgical reduction, which displaces angst, need not be conflated with sheer indifference to anxious projection. Lacoste’s emphatic critique of Heideggerian angst put into play by the liturgical reduction occupies a fragile line between angst, on the one hand, and, on the other, a contemplative ecclesial existence before God. Such fragility may verge toward quietude, a monastic flight toward another world. The nocturnal character of faith presupposes the quiet of the vigil and the isolation of the monk and thus avoids the angst of being-in-the-world.48 By bracketing Heideggerian angst, Lacoste ascribes to the liturgical reduction a deeply mystical “dark way” exemplified by figures like St. John of the Cross. And yet, this Carmelite was interested in critiquing experiential excess of rapturous mystical experience, not in escaping the anxieties of the world. The liturgical reduction, as Lacoste conceives it, signifies an eschatological existence that appears to yield to the temptation to flee the present world’s horizon of experience. With this I cannot agree. For me: eschatological existence, being-in-peace, is problematic inasmuch as it neglects to embrace the world fully as the site of “possibilities” and “temporal horizonality.” Contrary to Lacoste’s reduction, the world’s temporal horizon and spatial boundaries constitute the opening through which a spiritual life, properly conceived as existential, must realize itself. Lacoste’s work on this score is at once valuable and problematic, at least from a phenomenological perspective. In what follows, I wish to maintain that, even though Lacoste’s nocturnal spirituality engendered by the liturgical reduction enjoys the possibility of conferring upon the Cross the symbolic power of bracketing the anxiety of Dasein’s native tie to the world, it nevertheless neglects a more careful approach to existentialism’s ontological link to the world. Questions follow: can I truly submit Heidegger’s analytic of being-in-theworld to a theological “reduction” in the name of a hermeneutics of faith? An ascetic who professes faith in God can no doubt critically attend to the mood of angst from a theological point of view. But is it so certain that such a path must adopt the mood of peace-as-indifference? The next section treats this last question more fully and critically.

IV Eschatological vigil: being-toward-peace Taking as its exemplar the ascetic praxis of “vigil,” Lacoste’s liturgical reduction designates the world as an object of critique by appealing to the rich conceptual resources available in the tradition of Christian negative theology. To be sure, Lacoste subscribes to the Christian convention of the “dark way” of self-abnegation, in order to harness the existential utility of

Spiritual life  179 the spiritual practice of indifference to the world, which supports the struggle to overcome divertissement or distraction. A pragmatics of spiritual self-deprivation therefore cultivates a “night” whereby self-empowerment recedes and thereby surrenders to bodily passivity and enfeeblement, even fatigue.49 This arid, desert-like sensibility of non-experience is thematized principally by St. John of the Cross (to whom Lacoste acknowledges a large debt);50 it is also embodied by Martin Luther and his conceptualization of the feeling of “Anfechtung” in the face of the Deus Absconditus51 and, furthermore, features as a main theological principle of negative theology as a spiritual exercise.52 As Denys Turner suggests, the mystical tradition in the West commands a long line of thinkers from Augustine, to Meister Eckhart to Denys the Carthusian, all of whom embrace strong elements of the dark, non-experiential style of negative theology. 53 The great merit of Lacoste’s project is that he invokes this tradition as a counter-existential set against angst as the fundamental attunement of being-in-the-world. Lacoste’s liturgical reduction proposes to develop a theological variant of being-in-the-world without taking leave entirely of the internal logic of Being and Time. Or does it? If God is unable to make an appearance in the luminous horizon of the world because God transcends the finitude of the world, how might one experience God without also seeking to escape the world? Lacoste’s conceptual framework of the “vigil” and “night” comes into play at just this juncture. It opens up the possibility of Christian existence informed fully by faith, a “dark night of faith” that hopes in a God whose appearing transcends, and is thus hidden from, the visible display of the world. The vigil has profound hermeneutical implications in Lacoste’s mind for how the Christian confronts the world. 54 Only after being thrown into a world without God does Lacoste insist that the liturgical reduction, as a Christian form of life, can be summoned forth. No one is born a Christian (or any other spiritual creature found in other world religions), but must become one—the supernatural comes posterior to the natural. Lacoste’s liturgical reduction, then, reflects both a homage to and subversion of Heidegger. What is at issue is not that the world designates the sphere of all human experience—for Lacoste it certainly shapes all existence—rather, the issue is that Heidegger prohibits the night of faith as a specifically vocational, performative mood that can reshape being-in-theworld.55 If Heidegger seizes on “angst” as the Grund-Befindlichkeit of being-in-the-world, then Lacsote’s counter-existential explores “peace” or being-in-peace as a rival Grund-Befindlichkeit.56 Enacted in the drama of “existing from the future onward” symbolically expressed in the liturgical play of the vigil, the liturgical reduction submits angst to the calming indifference of peace. To this end, Lacoste writes, “the way in which the recluse plays with his being-there, and thus finds himself grappling with his facticity is nonetheless born of a desire for the eschaton.”57 Unencumbered by the demands of the present, the ascetic enjoys

180  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy future peace in the here and now. An existential phenomenology of liturgy, for Lacoste, maintains as its ideal the temporal disposition of the recluse who keeps vigil. Though the recluse may occupy the temporal horizon of the world (and can never leave it behind), he temporally exists in the presence of the parousia, from the “future onward” by bracketing the temporality of the world—especially the wakeful daytime of activity and “salaried work.”58 An ascetic being-in-the-world sustained and nourished by faith deploys a specific type of temporality ordered by the vigil, “the present lived in the shelter of the eschaton.”59 It is through self-alienation from the time of the “world” by way of the liturgical reduction (or bracketing or suspending) that enables the ascetic, the recluse, the monk (i.e., she who is cloistered) to appropriate, or at least, hope to appropriate eschatological time through keeping the nocturnal play of the vigil intact. The liturgical reduction so conceived takes shape as a powerful symbolic gesture. As such, the act of vigil shapes the affective and embodied structure of the self. For it does not rely on the metaphysics of representation whose cognitive reach unfolds strictly within the constraint of the subject versus object dichotomy. Heidegger reminds us that mood’s affect has a reach that exceeds the calculus of rational deliberation. I cannot properly “know” peace as it is embodied in the vigil the way I can know that Jefferson City is the Capitol of Missouri. I cannot (properly speaking) cognitively know my place in the world. I must feel it by way of the power of mood, which discloses my “there.” Heidegger writes, “the possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to moods, in which Dasein is brought before its Being as ‘there.’” Why this is the case remains to be fully explored in light of the question of time.Yet, Heidegger can intimate at the very least that mood, especially the fundamental mood of angst, “makes manifest ‘how one is, and how one is faring’ [‘wie einem ist und wird’]. In this ‘how one is,’ having a mood brings Being to its ‘there.’”60 Granting it the power of world-disclosure, mood does not provide one with information but rather with an embodied strategy, a kind of affective know-how that enworlds the world. Hence the theological setting of mood, in Lacoste’s work, evokes a spiritual life: in time I become “in thrall” to the valence of peace as my ownmost possibility of being-in-the-world. In the mood of vigil, I am brought before myself, and I find myself in my existential setting, in my state of “how I am” most basically in my being before God. Mood, here understood by Lacoste (following Heidegger), inculcates a new unthematic habit, one that is at once affective and embodied. The vigil, therefore, draws out the desire of faith, and its world, just at the moment when one is most tired, fatigued, and weak (the midnight hour). In making me pliable in this existential way, Lacoste will employ the famed Augustinian terminology of “distention” as the temporal mode of being in liturgy: I live from an eschatological frame of reference, by “stretching” into it. Just so, my future, as mine, lies in the infinite distention

Spiritual life  181 of faith in the eschaton, so that it “assures me an identity that overcomes being-toward-death, at which refuses to think of this overcoming as definitive possession of the self.”61 In eschatological growth, I expand or distend, so that “I discover myself as myself” in a fusion of past, present, and future. I do not grasp myself as a representational subject or a substantive “I,” but become a me, as the eschaton draws near. The future plane of existence emerges as a rupture of the present, presumably to prohibit a return to a static ego-pole or the subject as entity—Heidegger’s Ichding.62 I am not complete, but dispossessed of myself ecstatically, in a state of temporal becoming. Phenomenologically speaking, I can “manipulate” the world by dwelling in it, and, thereby, building it, according to the logic of any worldview I choose.63 Theologically speaking, my future orientation reflects a movement toward a horizon of the end, of death, one that eschatology assures us is not really an end, but a new beginning, a possibility of an endless vision of God. This liturgical reduction of time is exemplified in the play of the vigil. Vigil’s aim is single, even if it carries out the task over time and in a variety of settings: to remove the world-as-angst as an obstacle interposed between the self and God. It as if the world were there as an opaque blade slid between myself and God, not just causing me to look through a glass darkly but to look at nothing more than my own reflection as I stare into the glass. Lacoste’s reduction is that spiritual practice which thereby removes this opaque blade through the symbolic power of the midnight vigil, for the “the experiential practice of liturgy can open up a space where neither world nor earth is interposed between man and God.”64 But how can the liturgical reduction symbolically bracket the world, and in that practice overcome being-toward-death? We recall Lacoste conceives of the liturgical reduction as a spiritual exercise symbolized in holding vigil that renders the ascetic indifferent to the world. Lacoste shall even argue that this nocturnal non-experience overcomes me quietly, making me submit to its embodied mood of weariness. It amounts, ultimately, to a critique of the representational ego: I do not seek to know God as a propositional argument; I instead know God by waiting on God. I exercise restraint in all activity, for the mood of peace requires I give myself over to God, that I make myself like clay in the divine potter’s hands;65 the reduction even provides “a sanction for the liturgical dismantling of the ‘subject.’”66 The deprivation and toil intrinsic in the act of waiting coincides with an existential mood of weariness and fatigue and a feeling of pure passivity, one that compels Lacoste to conclude “the I to be nothing but its opening to God.”67 The emphasis on existential release, disappropriation, destitution, indifference, boredom, all of these parallel, once again, the radical passivity of St. John of the Cross’ dark night, “wherein the soul does nothing, and God works in the soul, and it remains, as it were, patient.”68 This is to angst, according to Lacoste, does not have the final say on the bounds of Dasein’s existential potentiality. Though faith is

182  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy a choice, it is also a way of being-in-the-world before a God who transcends the world. To negate the self-positing subject through vigil, of course, seems like folly to the “world” and exhibits a weakness which is precisely, according to Lacoste, the existential counter-narrative of vigil.69 But how is the liturgical reduction so conceived to give rise to confusion with regard to Christian existence in the world? Undoubtedly, Lacoste accounts for the temporality of being-in-the-world as the native horizon through which I project possibilities. But he also insists that Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death and the future possibilities it makes possible are not the final word on my destiny. The liturgical reduction understands being-toward-death as inescapable, certainly. And yet, the liturgical reduction also seeks to “bracket” being-toward-death and its finitude, its crude atheism. In Note sur les temps, for example, Lacoste reduces Heidegger’s conceptual framework of authentic being-toward-death to a half-truth. Being-toward-death represents my pre-eschatological existence but cannot denote the ultimate temporal destiny of my alliance with the Cross and the promise made on Easter that vouchsafes the coming Parousia.70 This eschatological hope is nourished by a promise of peace, and “the promises of God are not measured by the limits of the world and death, human experience shared by God himself, in the person of the Son, constitutes in fact a penultimate reality.”71 Indeed, Lacoste retains the existential symbolism of the paroxysm of the Cross because it invests pre-eschatological temporality with theological meaning. The alienation of the Cross is the condition for the possibility of the midnight vigil I hold now, prior to the parousia, when faith alone satisfies. To render myself indifferent to being-toward-death does not annihilate its existential reality, for “liturgy does not annul what it brackets: the world is all that is available to us within it.”72 If the liturgical reduction is forever ensconced in the temporal horizon of the world, then it follows that I attend to my present time with great violence, overcoming it by actively bracketing its existential hold over me.73 Correspondingly, Lacoste’s liturgical reduction attests to the rigor and discipline of ascetic spirituality. As such, the violence Lacoste associates with the reduction is pitted over against the existential power of the angst of being-in-the-world. My hope in the coming eschaton is in continual “danger” as long as I dwell in the shadow of angst. I run the risk of “constantly of being enfolded within being-in-the-world… The world urges us to conform to its measure of, i.e., to its mode of existence.”74 The liturgical reduction is therefore a subversion of Heideggerian temporality inasmuch as it violates the assumption that the Grund-befindlichkeit is angst and its resolute anticipation in the face of death. Lacoste writes, “the meaning of this subversion must not elude us. Liturgy actually suspends, or treats with utter indifference, the dialectical unfolding by which the world can appear to whoever exists there as a homeland or a land of universal exile.”75 Further, he writes that the liturgical reduction “does not approve of nor contest world and earth but rather brackets it.”76 In other words, the discipline

Spiritual life  183 of being-in-peace occupies a fragile state, tarrying amid the danger of the world where, if not carefully bracketed, it can limit my destiny to the utter finitude of angst.

V Subjectivity reclaimed But there remain problems with Lacoste’s account of ascetic spirituality tied to being-in-peace. The confusion, I would like to contend, of such a bracketing of temporality emerges at just this “fragile” situation. That is, the liturgical reduction engenders a spirituality of passive vigil, of existing as a contemplative ascetic upon whom nothing weighs but the desire for the eschaton and by which the metaphysics of representation is challenged. Indifference to the time of the world-horizon is the chief fruit born of the reduction in which I am disoriented by keeping vigil—I am constituted by the divine Subject, and in this I am nourished by tradition, practice, embodied ritual, and affection.77 Thus: the embodied mood I exude does not consist of a discrete subjective experience, but of an entire framework of living, a manner of inhabiting the world, endued explicitly as a theological world. A contradiction is plainly in view here on Lacoste’s part. The reduction induces a theological act carried out by an active subject, an act imposed with great violence on the world in the face of angst. If the liturgical reduction overthrows the modern representational subject who aspires to mirror and simulate data received from the world of sensation, then how does this “dismantled subject” wholly informed by practice and mood even capable of marshaling the intentional power it takes to “bracket?” That is, the deliberate choice to adopt the ascetic disposition necessarily assumes agency on the part of the subject—even while the nocturnal play of the ascetic’s vigil undermines agency. If the reduction is imposed with great violence as a subversive act, an act to which Lacoste consistently equates the reduction, then how can such a passive de-centered subject78 find within itself the fortitude to overcome the temporality of being-toward-death? If Lacoste privileges such existential states as “anticipation”79 and restlessness, then surely the liturgical reduction achieves this, and not by rendering the self indifferent to the world; rather it achieves this by valorizing subjective power to bring about an existential critique of being-in-the-world. The ascetic is, in some sense, a subject who displays a world-forming power.80 If the liturgical reduction reflects a subjective act that seeks a temporal destiny outside of the world, then how can Lacoste characterize the reduction both as an indifferent “undergoing” or a passive “submitting to” the gaze of the Absolute, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a violent overdetermination of being-in-the-world rooted in active agency? The tension between passive and active states of subjectivity is a tension in Lacoste that certainly calls for greater clarification, and one that can be achieved through an analysis of love.

184  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy By emphasizing peace over Heidegger’s fundamental attunement of angst, Lacoste achieves a breakthrough that invokes the power of other fundamental moods, such as love, which may compliment peace (and angst). The way forward, beyond Lacoste, then, is to develop a spiritual or liturgical life that integrates love with peace and angst, as three temporalities intertwined one with the other. Certainly, love obeys the dictates of the heart that yearns, seeks, and gropes. The temporality of love cannot bracket time (contra Lacoste) since the shape of love is temporal. A spiritual life properly conceived upon the foundation of Heidegger’s world does not incline toward a hope that circumvents the world but reconfigures from within the temporal flow of the world. As a pilgrim I groan for the parousia, along with the world (Romans 8.22), in hope determined by a promise of redemption and the eternal Sabbath to come. Because hope is temporal act tied to the world and its renewal, it cannot bracket the world. It is no surprise that hope is a qualitatively different mood than angst. Although hope is prior to angst, hope does not detach from angst. Hope is professed in a world in need of redemption, in a world riddled with angst. In other words, I never receive the eucharist in the body of Christ free of the world that besieges me with its angst, finitude, and frailty. I never enjoy the favorable time of eucharistic hope as a pure temporality, a hermetically sealed temporal experience shut up inside of itself, as if the eucharist secured for me the power to bracket the temporal flow of the world. Hope, I would argue, reorders temporality and calms my angst but does not bracket it. Yet, and this remains crucial, hope flourishes in the context of life together, in a community that together profess hope. It is this life together and the fusion of love that emerges from it, a liturgical love, that is the topic to which we now turn.

VI Conclusion: spiritual love Love understood as an act of agency carried out in the world fundamentally challenges Lacoste’s conception of peace and repose. The advance of love does not move at the other’s behest. Love, formed in the liturgy, instead exercises its will to make the first move. It is better to love than to be loved. Aquinas clearly indicates that the underlying passivity of the desire “to be loved” succumbs to self-indulgence. In a friendship, Aquinas observes, it is clear that the friend who only receives love (who only takes) is to be “blamed,” whereas the friend who loves is to be commended. Blamed in what way? One can only assume that the movement proper to charity lies in the outward agency of activity, not passivity. The more passive or inoperative one is, the more one retreats from love as such—this is the logical implication of Lacoste’s emphatic celebration of passivity. In a relationship, with a friend, spouse, or child, one can be blamed for the relationship’s failure if one retreats from love by only receiving love.81 In this way beingin-peace, in the form of liturgical inoperativity (must it be inoperative from

Spiritual life  185 all movement, including love?), shall suffer blame. Peace, unless it admits love as integral to its ascetic repertoire, can appear to adopt a Gnostic performance that withdraws from agency altogether, even that of love. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz says, in his poem entitled “Love,” the movement of love “means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many.”82 A healthy self-reflexive self-awareness puts myself at a distance from myself, so that I do not place myself at the center of the world. Though the ascetic monk/recluse as Lacoste understands him to be is humble, the irony is that he contradicts humility in refraining from actively giving himself in the movement of love. Lacoste’s liturgical reduction affords the ascetic a dwelling place not at center but at the darkened margins of the luminous space of being-inthe-world. By margins, Lacoste means the edge, the hinterland or the far reaches of the visible horizon. It is beyond the lights of the city, where ascetic appeals to the nocturnal stillness of the forest, desert, or cave—like the cenobitic and eremetic recluse.83 As a place of purgative peace, the cave symbolizes poverty, destitution, and the darkness of a purged consciousness and a pruned self-awareness. Who or what can be loved there? Lacoste describes the violence of peace as a forceful movement away from the world, such that he calls it a relance of experience—the French word for the “relaunching,” “reopening,” or “restarting” of the basic orientation of the horizon of experience.84 The reopening of experience reconstitutes the proper place of that experience, and takes the symbol of the Cross as its exemplar—a nonplace which for Lacoste is the place of utter abandonment, and thus of peace, because one has died to the world. Who or what can be loved there?85 A spiritual life properly conceived is ordered not by Gnostic-like asceticism, but by ascetic “pilgrimage.” It is at this juncture that I part ways with Lacoste. As Augustine states, pilgrimage takes place in and through the world-horizon, for the Christian, “by grace he was a pilgrim below, and by grace he was a citizen above.”86 Not a circumvention of the world by way of a reduction, pilgrimage necessarily engages the world, in order to cultivate as desire to transfigure the world from within. As the poet says above “to use himself and things so that they stand in the glow of ripeness” signifies the essence of love, and how it may dilate the subjective horizon of experience. Love, proclaimed in the sacramental form of prayer, symbolizes in the world that which the world cannot possibly measure, which is, as Lacoste says, the “l;intimité [intimacy] de l’homme et de l’Absolut.”87 The love of God, poured into my heart, enables me to active the advance of love, whether or not I am loved in return by finite creatures. Highlighting the world’s renewal in the love, the pilgrim announces that though we look through a glass darkly now we shall, in that final day, see God face to face (1 Corinthians 13), in this eschatological context, love before faith and hope. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God’s love never fails. Love does not need to think, rather it moves.

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As Milosz says again in that poem, love serves the other in a manner that does not always register with understanding and that in doing so love encourages us tomake “use” of others so they stand in the glow and ripenessof love.

Notes 1 See Jean-Yves Lacoste, Note sur le temp: essai sure les raisons de la mémoire et de espérance (Paris: PUF, 1990); and Expérience et absolu (Paris: PUF, 2004). The translation is Experience and the Absolute, trans. Mark Raferty-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 2 See Jean-Yves Lacoste, Présence et parousie (Paris: Ad Solem, 2006); La phénoménalité de dieu: neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008); Êftre en danger (Paris: Cerf, 2011); L’intuition sacramentelle et autres essais (Paris: Ad Solem, 2015); Thèse sur la vrai (Paris: PUF, 2018). 3 See Kenneth Jason Wardley, Praying to a French God: The Theology of JeanYves Lacoste (New York: Routledge, 2014); Joeri Schrijvers, An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste (New York: Routledge, 2012); the special issue is in Modern Theology, vol. 31, no. 4 (2015); also see Robyn Horner’s excellent “Words that Reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the Experience of God,” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 51, no. 2 (2018): 169–202. 4 See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004); for an excellent critical commentary on this text, see A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life, eds. S.J. McGrath and Andrzej Wierciński (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). 5 It is interesting to acknowledge that in Note sur le temps the reduction is originally entitled the “theological reduction,” which is subsequently re-named as the “liturgical reduction” presumably to emphasize that the reduction is not just a theological act of reflection but a spiritual practice. See Lacoste, Note sur le temps, 122. 6 Lacoste puts to work the liturgical reduction for the purpose of liturgical purgation. In accord with Husserl’s ambitions to bracket the world and uncover the constituting power of pure consciousness (which eventually led to transcendental idealism), Lacoste symbolically brackets the visible topology of being-in-the-world so as to unveil the night of the nonplace. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lacoste affirms Heidegger’s insight that the world constitutes the fundamental structure of the self. Although Lacoste may be a temporal idealist in the way William Blattner describes Heidegger’s position: as an innovative idealism bound up with Dasein’s capacity to reconfigure and project temporal movements in Being and Time. See William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For more on Husserl’s conception of the reduction, see the classic statement by Husserl in Ideas I, §32, “The phenomenological epoché.” 7 Heidegger, Being and Time, §18. 8 For more on the idea of directionality of fit, see John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay on the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9 For more on this see Hillary Putnam, “Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made World,” in his collection of essays, Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 205–228. 10 A fuller statement is here: Thus the significance-relationships which determine the structure of the world are not a network of forms which a worldless subject has laid over

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some kind of material. What is rather the case is that factical Dasein, understanding itself and its world ecstatically in the unity of the “there,” comes back from these horizons to the entities encountered within them. [Die Bedeutsamkeitsbezüge, welche die Struktur der Welt bestimmen, sind daher kein Netzwerk von Formen, das von einem weltlosen Subjekt einem Material übergestülpt wird. Das faktische Dasein kommt vielmehr, ekstatisch sich und seine Welt in der Einheit des Da verstehend, aus diesen Horizonten zurück auf das in ihnen begegnende Seiende].

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Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 417; p. 366 in German, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967). Heidegger, Being and Time, 363. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 107. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 178. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 168–170. Stephen Mulhall, The Routledge Guidebook to Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 75. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 157, translators note fn. 4. Lacoste, Thèse sur la vrai (Paris: PUF, 2018), pp. 108–109. Matthew Ratcliffe, “Why Mood Matters,” in The Cambridge Companion to Being and Time, ed. Mark Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 157–158. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 94–98. See especially, Thèse sur la vrai, §§14, 15, 19. For excellent exegetical commentary on this aspect of Heidegger, see Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 325ff. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 206–207. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary, p. 170, table of three types of affectedness. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary, p. 240. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 231. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 310. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 371: fn. 62. For his detailed reading of Being and Time on just this point, see Lacoste, “Existence et amour de Dieu: sur une note d’ “Être et Temps,” 111–132 in La phénoménalité de Dieu, pp. 118–119. For more on the oscillation between two fundamental moods, expressed in the idiom of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, see the following excellent texts: Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016). Francisco Varela, Ethical KnowHow: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Mark Johnson, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Solomon tends to disagree with the avocado model of moods, that is: the reality of a core mood that never leaves us (the seed of the avocado) that will govern the squishy and flexible moods or episodes of emotions (the green part of the avocado). This is an interesting point that requires further investigation; see his True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions are really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 1. See Experience and the Absolute, p. 105.

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31 For more on how theological can train one “to see” the world as creation, rather than bracket it, see Mats Wahlberg, Reshaping Natural Theology: Seeing Nature as Creation (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). 32 For more on Lacoste’s correlation of liturgy to “everything that embodies the relation of man to God,” see Experience and the Absolute, 22. 33 For an overview of the anti-institutional nature of theological existentialism so common in many of the figures from Kierkegaard forward, see George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (London: Macmillan, 1999). 34 For a textured recent reading of the San Juanist logic of Lacoste’s work, see Matthew D. Farley, “Jean-Yves Lacoste on John of the Cross: Theological Thinker Par Excellence,” Modern Theology, vol. 32, no. 1 (2016): 3–19. 35 Lacoste, “De la ‘Phénoménologie de l’Espirit’ à ‘la Montée du Carmel,’” Revue thomist, vol. 97, no. 4 (1989): 569–598, quote on p. 592. 36 See especially Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 10–15, for the variety of “attitudes” one may take up when alighting upon any given object. 37 Jean-Yves Lacoste, “De la certitude au dénuement: Descartes et Jean de la Croix,” Nouvelle Revue théologuqie, vol. 13, no. 4 (1991): 516–534, citation on p. 526. 38 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 190. 39 Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 93. 40 Lacoste appears to claim that angst and peace are dialectically integrated, even their tension is hermeneutically violent. See Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 208. 41 Lacoste, “Expériences hors existence: Un problème,” 97–124 in L’intuition sacramentelle, p. 111. 42 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 321. 43 Lacoste, Expereince and the Absolute, p. 40. 44 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 87. 45 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 233. 46 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 179. 47 I have found the study of indifference here to be of great help in elucidating the multi-layered conception of indifference. See Charles E. Scott, Living with Indifference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 60ff. 48 For more on the “four-fold” characteristic of Heidegger’s interest in the sacredness of the earth, see Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Modern Classics, 2001), pp. 141–161. 49 See Lacoste, “Petite phénoménologie de la fatigue,” in Présence et parousie, pp. 309–322. 50 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 2. 51 See for example Bernard McGinn, “Vere tu es Deus absconditus: the Hidden God in Luther and Some Mystics,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 94–114. 52 Lacoste recognizes a long mystical apophatic tradition from Pseudo-Denys to Jean of the Cross. See for example his illuminating essay, “La connaissance silencieuse: des évidences antéprédicatives à une critique de l’apophase,” in Présence and Parousia, pp. 117–144. 53 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 54 Unlike the Thomistic doctrine of analogia entis or its contemporary inflection of Neo-Transcendental Thomism, Lacoste draws an essential distinction between natural and supernatural or the profane and sacred. Insisting on the

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stark distinction between the visibility of the world and the darkness of faith, Lacoste opts not for anlogia entis but for the term “alliance” to describe how the Christian dwells “toward” God (ȇtre-vers) in an alliance with the Cross while always remaining in the world. Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, pp. 79–80. I would find this problematic in the extreme: with analogy of being how does one participate in the eucharist, not least enjoy a relationship with God in Christ at all? For his detailed reading of Being and Time on just this point, see Lacoste, “Existence et amour de Dieu: sur une note d’ “Être et Temps,” pp. 119–120. Robert Solomon suggests fear and anger and compassion are “basic feelings,” and thus he argues that some feelings or attunements are so fundamental they cannot be bracketed. They are basic in the sense that these emotions can be continuous with, and structure, one’s life, remaining in the background. They are not merely neurological responses or triggers that last a short time. Brief spurts of anger do not illustrate how one sees the world in an angry manner, in and through an angry disposition. Emotions are “about” the world and engage relationships. Again, it merits noting here once more that Solomon, much like Lacoste, would see moods and emotions as strategies of being-in-the-world, not passive episodes or disruptions of one’s intellectual apprehension of the world. See Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us, pp. 18–22. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 29. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 80. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 82. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 172. Lacoste, “De soi à soi: présent vivant à et avenir infini,” pp. 179–204, in La phénoménalité de Dieu, p. 198. (translation mine). Lacoste, “De soi à soi: présent vivant à et avenir infini,” pp. 190–191 (translation mine. Emphasis in original). For Heidegger’s critique of the subject or ego as thing, see History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 248 (German, p. 341). Lacoste writes this explicitly: “Le monde est donne pour qu’il habite—donc pour qu’il y edifie son monde.” This may read: “The world is given for us to inhabit—thus one can manipulate or construct one’s world.” Elsewhere, Lacoste uses the French, “nous amengageons l’espace,” which means we are capable of “manipulating space” as such, since space does not represent a neutral geometrical grid. See Lacoste, “Bâtir, habiter, prier,” Revue thomist, vol. 87, no. 3 (1987): 357–390. First quote from p. 365 and the latter from p. 364. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 28. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 156. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 162. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 163. St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. E. Allison Peers (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2008) book 1, 13, 1. This celebration of the weakness of the Cross finds allies in other contemporary phenomenological renderings of Christology, ones which take on a more prophetic/ethical tonality. This is especially evident in John Caputo’s recent work on the “weakness of God,” which gives way to a radical ethics of social justice. See Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Equally, Stanislas Breton utilizes the symbolic power of the Cross to call into judgment the power of the strong in favor of the weak. See Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans. Jacquelyn Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), especially chapters 3–5. While Lacoste would not divorce

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the Cross from ethics/justice, the liturgical reduction he advances is a type of spirituality that privileges the “ascetic self” as preparatory work for praxis. For commentary on ethics as a second-order praxis, see Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 70–80; also for an Lacoste’s critical engagement with Levinas’ claim that ethics is first philosophy, see “Ethique et Phenomenologie” in Présence and parousie, pp. 231–256. Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, §92, “De l’être-vers-la-mort a l’hoirzon de la croix.” Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, p. 208. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 174. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 89. Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Plus qu’existence et être-en-danger,” in Presence et Parousie, pp. 145–168, reference on 164. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 33. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 34. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 152. My transcendental “I” is liturgically disoriented, more precisely, reversed, as I become the object of the gaze of the divine subject. Much like Jean-Luc Marion’s “Gifted” (l’adonné), Lacoste’s liturgical existentialism argues that the ascetic’s subjectivity is eliminated insofar as his identity is given by the Absolute subject’s givenness—the ascetic is the screen upon which God manifests the not-yet in the already. This parallels Marion’s notion of the subject as l’adonné (see Chapter 5). Lacoste speaks of the gift in the context of subjectivity, see Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 157. Joeri Schrijvers performs the service of drawing out the connection between Lacoste and Marion on this point, see his excellent article, Schrijvers, “Ontotheological Turnings? Marion, Lacoste and Levinas on the Decentering of Modern Subjectivity,” Modern Theology, vol. 22, no. 2 (2006): 221–253. For more on the liturgical structure of anticipation, see Lacoste, “La phénoménalité de l’anticipation,” in La phénoménalité de Dieu, pp. 133–157. Heidegger maintains that Dasein is existential precisely in that it is “worldforming” insofar as the animal is “poor in world” and the stone “without world.” See Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), §42 ff. Aquinas, Summa, Part II/2, Q.27, A.1. Czeslaw Milosz, “Love,” in New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 50. Lacoste explicitly links liturgical existence to cenobitic and eremetic monasticism. See, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 31 and 175. Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, pp. 69, 74, 201. Lacoste clearly invokes the concept and “play” of love, but he does not always draw out systematically how love is involved in the liturgical reduction, except to say that Lacoste thinks love is vulnerable to idolatry. Fidelity to God must serve as an ever-present corrective to love (erotic love too), unless love’s eye wonder away from God. See his, “Vouloir aimer,” pp. 125–146, in L’intuition sacramentelle. Augustine, City of God, pp. 15, 1. Lacoste, “Bâtir, habiter, prier,” p. 381.

10 Lived experience and metaphysics in theology

I Theology without metaphysics? Twentieth-century theology, Protestant and Catholic, has been embroiled in a vigorous debate about the identification of God and “Being.” For much of the Christian tradition God has been understood as Being precisely because Exodus 3.14 (“I am who I am”) provides warrant for such a metaphysical grammar. Arguably one of Etienne Gilson’s most enduring and wideranging insights lies in his simple contention that with the “metaphysics of Exodus” patristic and medieval theology reached a kind of philosophical consensus, the truth or ultimate principium by which speech about God is guided, manifest in the work of nearly every major figure from Irenaeus to Augustine to Aquinas.1 This consensus suggests that theology itself had determinable parameters, within which theologians could arrange the place of one set of concepts relative to other sets of concepts, and thereby define and address an authoritative catalogue of problems proper to the discipline itself, be they moral, spiritual, doctrinal, or philosophical. A chorus of contemporary voices, from Jean-Luc Marion to George Pattison to John Caputo and postmodern theology broadly conceived, to most recently the “analytic theology” of Kevin Hector, have sounded a “post-metaphysical” note now audible in contemporary theology. 2 The collective force of this trend may serve to justify a critical reassessment of the very idea of Christian metaphysics. This, in turn, tells us that theology as a discipline, in the present, is fragmented.3 It would take a long book to begin to do justice to this complex and varied post-metaphysical trajectory, as well as to the contested state of theology as a discipline. I wish instead to focus on a recent treatment of the post-metaphysical method, in the figure of Jean-Yves Lacoste, whose work is singular in its subtlety and range. Lacoste, in Être en danger (2011), works under the assumption, now de rigueur in France at least, that Heidegger’s conception of onto-theology involves an important critique of God-language.4 In this climate Lacoste interrogates the “question of Being” (Seinsfrage) by submitting to rigorous critique the classical model of metaphysics, governed by the Aristotelian notions of substance and efficient causality. Following from this, however,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-14

192  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy Lacoste does not advance a straightforward post-metaphysical itinerary, but rather explores, cautiously, the possibility of a “conceptual rescue operation” of metaphysics as such (opération de sauvetage conceptuel). The Heideggerian critique, while admittedly potent, does not characterize metaphysics as a whole, and therefore should restrict, but not eradicate, the intellectual task of naming God. 5 How should onto-theology restrict theological language? Conceptualism, the reduction of God to a concept, may often license total representation, which counts as a “totalizing” strategy, an event of abstracting God out from concrete experience. The violent inclination toward totalizing God under an abstract concept maximizes the power of representation, as if to exhaust God referentially. Most philosophers and theologians will agree that concepts inform our noetic value of the divine, and they provide linguistic resources with which we reach out to God. But in my view, conceptualism will aspire to grasp or apprehend, and thus exhaust the mystery of God in that projective or overly speculative act, precisely by way of abstraction.6 The mind so premised sets into operation the act of constitution, on the strength of its power to cultivate and “mold” objects to its concept; in a real sense the mind does not see God but only an abstract principle, which becomes a dazzling reflection of the mind’s own gaze: conceptualism is onto-theology. These dangers associated with onto-theology or conceptualism notwithstanding, a series of related questions ensues: can we employ concepts at all in speech about God? The very idea of metaphysics, to which I will turn momentarily, measures reality by concepts and linguistic signs. But does metaphysics, in principle and of necessity, yield forth only one kind of God, the abstract God the philosophers and academics? Is abstraction the underlying logic of metaphysics? Or can metaphysics advance toward experience, in order to examine the ultimacy of religious experience? Not speculative abstraction, but experience, sacramental experience in particular, is the chief object of metaphysics for Lacoste. Onto-theology has cast a pall over metaphysics, and it now constitutes for philosophy and theology embattled intellectual terrain. Post-metaphysics retreats altogether from the question of Being, in order to escape from totality’s economy of abstraction, and the conceptual violence such an act entails. I judge this to be an understandable reactive posture; however, I am not convinced that such a recoil enables theology to function as a discourse properly formulated, that is, as an account of what is taken to be true, and what is the experiential ground of truth (even if theology does not propose a necessary masternarrative of grounding). Reframing the debate as it is currently underway consists, in part, of challenging parochialism of the partisans of “overcoming metaphysics.” Rooted in the praxis of a particular community’s form of life, post-metaphysics enacts a deliberate retreat from the universal, to that place where a particular community decides the truth value of its speech, e.g., the pragmatics of the sanctuary of the church or seminary (or any other community’s language game). Post-metaphysics

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  193 effects a shift in perspective, so to speak, away from abstract speculation to concrete experience, given shape by a particular community. I applaud this shift in emphasis. However, metaphysics and “experience” are not mutually exclusive. In my view, the risk of post-metaphysics is that of parochialism, in which experience constitutes an order of practice intelligible only within a particular community. This restrictive definition of experience denies the universal in favor of the incommensurability of the particular, whereas I want to suggest a fuller theological narrative accepts both the ultimacy and the conventionality of experience. I experience the world consistent with my particular “here,” my context, but I share experiences with others all the time, quite apart from a thorough consideration of their particular context. A Christological arrangement of the two terms follows: metaphysics embraces, without eliding, the ineluctably conventional nature of Christ’s first-century Palestinian ministry (the particularity of his humanity) and the prophetic call of grace that appeals to every form or convention of experience (the universality of his divinity). I will address the problematic of the tension between the ultimate and conventional forms of expression in more detail in the final remarks. Presently we can say that on both counts, then, as irrelevant parochialism and as truculent conceptualism, metaphysics invites critical retrieval, framed by the mystery of mediation of the ultimate in and through the conventional. What form, then, can such an attentive critique of post-metaphysical theology take? For Lacoste, theology may specify in a new register where its conceptual “place” lies: in a deflationary metaphysical model that justifies the mysterious character of theological speech mediated through the conventional structures of experience, as long as I acknowledge theological speech is bereft of any final power to exhaust that mystery through a concept.7 Much depends on a definition, as important as it is obvious, of metaphysics. How is metaphysics, an elusive and controversial category, to be understood, even if tentatively, after all?8 Metaphysics has undergone a narrowing or constriction; in response to this narrow definition (that is I admit a historically legitimate interpretation), I want to expand or broaden the basic boundaries of the conceptual scope of metaphysics, accomplished in part by looking at another definition of metaphysics, which focuses on experience as primary. Once I outline a definition of metaphysics in the broadest sense, a constructive interchange between metaphysics and theology will come into fuller view.

II Metaphysics in the broadest sense Spatial metaphors and analogies abound in literature which concerns the nature and scope of metaphysics. Yet confusion reigns. Frédéric Nef observes bluntly, “Metaphysics is everywhere, and it is at the same time

194  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy nowhere. Metaphysics is almost never taught.”9 So, how may we understand and frame metaphysics? Some philosophers say metaphysics functions like a “horizon” of meaning or a maximal field of vision in which all analysis of objects occurs.10 Others have invoked the image of the tree, in which metaphysics symbolizes the roots, physics the trunk, and all the remaining disciplines the branches.11 Others, still more, have said metaphysics operates like a subterranean “grammar” that expresses the most basic features of the human condition.12 Metaphysics could also represent, in its more polemical form, a battleground (Kampfplatz) where seemingly incommensurable epistemic languages, paradigms, or propositions work out their differences.13 Each “picture” outlined here has something in common: each offers a broad definition of metaphysics, whereby the science of being enjoys such broad scope that it has become a kind of gathering place, in which all other sciences converge. Aristotle contrasts the ultimacy of metaphysics with the conventionality of experience. Whereas physics investigates the sensible forms of the world, and mathematics treats the ideality of numbers, the scope of metaphysics transcends the boundaries of any one particular locale or form or experiential ground. It is all-encompassing, an absolute form: it typically seeks to answer the question that bears on the highest form, or simply being; indeed Aristotle’s Metaphysics defines the science of metaphysics as the science of “being qua being,” which implies the study of “first principles and the highest causes.”14 But, such a quest for first principles, a first philosophy as such, Aristotle, perhaps like Plato before him, explicitly roots metaphysics in an abstract type of theology, for “the highest science must deal with the highest genus… something eternal and immovable and separable… [here] the divine appears to us.”15 The scope of metaphysics and theology coincide, since both seek a first cause. This science of Being forges an alliance with the science of God: “knowledge of it belongs to a theoretical science— not, however, to physics nor to mathematics, but to a science prior to both.” Theology is this “science prior to both,” and is therefore to be more “desired than the other theoretical sciences,” because its object belongs to the highest genus predicated of Being, the eternal and immovable substance.16 There is much here in Aristotle, in my view, to appropriate for theological purposes, even if Aristotle’s “eternal and immovable substance” abstracted out from experience cannot stand up to the post-metaphysical critique.17 Heidegger certainly marks Aristotle, one could argue precisely in book Epsilon in the Metaphysics, as the beginning of onto-theology.18 Currently, the many detractors of metaphysics say “metaphysics” is onto-theological inasmuch as it exhausts the otherness God in a violent act of abstraction. It assails in its very conceptual reach the otherness of the supreme Other, for the profit of the same. The dialectic between the same and the other completes an understanding of God as an event of correspondence, which, properly conceived, is a form of conceptualism between mind and God. Understood in this way, metaphysics in the narrow sense (i.e., as

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  195 onto-theology) prepares us to consider it not only as a theoretical science but also as an oppressive existential specter; a philosophy of pure identity, metaphysics eliminates the otherness and transcendence of divine mystery. It serves the purpose of conceptual “war,” a desire to dominate the other’s alterity. Unsurprisingly, proponents of post-metaphysical paradigms, writing under both Christian and secular inclinations,19 say this totalizing economy of metaphysics appears to have reached its “end.”20 For the sake of dramatizing the non-metaphysical trend, I wish to highlight the observation Nietzsche made about the inner logic of metaphysics. Master of suspicion though he was, I should add up front that I appreciate, but do not accept wholesale, his critique. His critique of metaphysics continues to be borne out in an aspiration, increasingly common in the late modern epoch, to celebrate the end of metaphysics. Nietzsche claims metaphysics remains “stuck” in its Platonic legacy. What does this mean? Metaphysicians, often unconsciously, revert to philosophical “savagery,” which is to “slip into the unchanging,” a mode of discourse that suspends the flux of experience in an attempt to find refuge in a reliable and steady Archimedean principle; the long-celebrated discovery of an unmoved mover illustrates a case in point of such savagery. 21 Nietzsche claims metaphysics consists of a fundamental sickness of the soul, which arouses the impulse to secure something “final,” a “craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above” the world of becoming. 22 Metaphysicians create, fabricate, and contrive narratives of stability, and foster and conserve thereby the human mind’s need for certainty. They have become “artists in abstraction,” insofar as they invent such strategies of epistemic security, be they eternal forms, apriori categories, or scientific laws, converting these metaphysical abstractions into immutable divine law, as if the supreme Being was their guarantor. 23 The Platonic legacy of metaphysics lives on in post-Cartesian paradigms of first philosophy, and can be seen in Descartes’ chief name for God, causa sui, as well as Kant’s interpretation of the divine as an impersonal (or abstract) moral order. 24 It is unsurprising that a recent detractor of metaphysics, Kevin Hector, concludes that metaphysics “seems to alienate us from experience, to do violence to objects, and to reduce God to an idol.”25 By way of commentary on this frequent post-metaphysical refrain, and to avoid confusion from the outset, I want to make clear that I think metaphysics is improperly cast in a wholly negative light; reframing the debate requires that I effectively reconfigure metaphysics precisely not as “abstraction,” in order to move the debate out from under the shadow of the onto-theological critique. A genuinely constructive dialogue about the point of departure of metaphysics shall originate with lived experience. Such a shift in focus breaks the link between metaphysics and the tyranny of conceptualism and the totalizing power set into operation and ensured by abstraction. I accomplish this reconfiguration by broadening the scope of metaphysics, which enables me to “picture” metaphysics as the study of the

196  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy objects in which we traffic daily with the aim of detecting in what manner experience may mediate a glimpse of the ground of existence. 26 One might characterize, then, the theoretical field of metaphysics in a twofold manner: the internal differentiation between, on the one hand, beings that I experience and, on the other, their fundamental ground. Metaphysics involves the study of Being par excellence (a supreme being or summum ens) and, second, the contingent beings in general (ens commune) who appeal to the supreme Being for their causal ground and even for their moral norms. Is metaphysics necessarily tied to a “ground” or a divine being? The positive answer will indicate that, within any metaphysical economy, the divine assumes a prominent, and, indeed, an unimpeachable “grounding” role. It could be argued that many surrogates have replaced the supreme Being. Terry Eagleton has shown recently that, beginning in the nineteenth century, culture, reason, the nation, humanity, the state, morality have supplanted divine transcendence. The supreme Being is not dead but is reborn with each new surrogate. 27 Husserl reoccupies metaphysics in this way, when he quite consciously admits the ground he seeks is the pure ego, illumined as the grounding structure of a community of monadic egos, which therefore can be grasped by the philosopher as the supreme and ultimate ground: humanity’s self-explication of its experience in a community of other egos is the “first being.”28 Even Nietzsche’s uncompromising atheism replaced God with the eternal return of the same: “In place of ‘metaphysics and religion, the theory of eternal recurrence.”29 Whatever the ground supposed, metaphysics consists of the whole in experience but not the whole of experience as such. There is no final or complete apprehension of the ground of experience, for no principle can be “abstract” or “separated out” from the ensemble of experience that prompts further interrogation of that ground, no matter how diffuse the interpretations are of what the ground may consist of. Metaphysics, then, in its quest for the ultimacy and meaning, for a “ground,” asks a most basic question: why is there something instead of nothing? Heidegger himself, alert to the historical evolution of metaphysics, explores this particularly broad vantage fruitfully in his Introduction to Metaphysics. While Heidegger may have imparted into contemporary thought the now well-worn vocabulary of onto-theology, his earlier work attends in a more nuanced fashion to the fundamental “question” of metaphysics: why is there something instead of nothing? This question is for him inexhaustible.30 Onto-theology, imposed retrospectively, rests on a totalizing answer to this question (usually associated with Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and other Enlightenment figures). For this reason onto-theology neither represents the full range of possible “grounds” in metaphysics nor does it articulate a ground that is integral to experience; onto-theology refers to a narrow early modern trajectory within the long career of metaphysics. If we are careful not to reduce metaphysics to a determinate system of rules guided by abstract and formal principles, which suffer from the

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  197 ill-effects of procedural totalization, but to cultivate its complex and “open” character, then we may become mindful that metaphysics invites a quest to bring into focus the possible grounds of experience. Metaphysics conceived in this broadest sense is fragile; it is crucial not to underestimate this fact, and I think Christian theology’s metaphysical inclinations (more often than not) remain fertile, open and incomplete, a vision of the divine in relationship with a community, a metaphysical “optics” that looks through a glass darkly, a form of speech that thematizes faith, hope, and love, a spiritual practice that grows out of a concrete community of agape. Awe and wonder, as primal moods, accompany the fundamental question of metaphysics, and Christianity nurtures those moods. The Christian doctrine of God, to be more direct, refuses totality’s economy of conceptual violence. Karl Rahner says theology is like “endless allegory,” inasmuch as it works within the boundaries of the world, which theology cannot transcend, even while it seeks to subvert and expand those boundaries. Theology, as a discourse, belongs to the province of the world; Rahner, to continue with this picture of theological language, argues that theologians cannot help but employ the world’s vocabulary of finitude. The lesson to be learned from Rahner is the following: if I could transcend or master my existence, if I could look at the world from a God’s eye point of view. These conditions of knowing would enable me to defy contingency; I would be divine. But, as a mortal, I continue to explore existence because I am contingent, insofar as I am not able either to choose or to transcend my world. I interrogate without ceasing divine Being as ground of beings, because the mystery of their interrelation eludes me in my condition as a contingent and finite creature. 31 Metaphysics, broadly conceived, then, offers a “picture” of experience that includes not just theological, but scientific or secular perspectives as well. Whatever the surrogate (that serves the function of a supreme ground), it should not surprise the metaphysically inclined theologian that secularists bear witness to an increasingly common phenomenon: they speak of their awe before the world they experience. One atheist labels the sublime feeling of excess a kind of “Aweism.”32 Daniel Dennett, who intends to disenchant the world by means of evolution, which measures the world according to the conditions of a “mindless algorithm,” invokes the word “awe” as that feeling which best describes what he regularly feels when reflection on evolution and the world escapes full comprehension. 33 Evolution, turned into an ideology or form of truth, is of course intrinsically metaphysical because it addresses the question “why.”34 Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly co-authored the secular manifesto All Things Shining, which has enjoyed a wide readership already; they depict their experience of awe before the world with a vivid word, “whoosh,” which evokes a primitive, inarticulate feeling many undergo in the face of radiance and mystery. 35 Metaphysics, posed as a limit question, grows out of this primal feeling of awe; conceived in this broad way, metaphysics yields forth a point of overlap, in which anyone who ventures to reflect on the “why” of existence,

198  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy its ground, can engage in a public and mutually illuminating exchange of reasons. J.J.C. Smart, an atheist, sees mystery “in the fact that the universe exists at all, and that there is something wrong with us if we do not feel this mystery.”36 The fundamental question of metaphysics may defeat our powers of comprehension, but it does not silence the voice in search of this mystery: metaphysics is inescapable. Christian theology maintains that no one answer properly resolves the fundamental question “why,” because it represents a “limit question.”37 The logos of Christianity, its economy of mystery, address this most basic question with humility. Lacoste teaches that theology, informed by the humility of the Cross, does not entail the totalizing calculus of onto-theology. Nor does theology call us to retreat into an internal narrative or community of practice that lives independent of metaphysical claims. Metaphysics, in the broadest sense, fosters dialogue, debate, and the exchange of “deep” forms of reasoning, employed by all faiths and none in their quest for a fundamental ground. If metaphysics is inescapable, and yet, it admits of no final “ground,” how may Christian theology propose that the Being of God be understood? Is God mediated in and through concrete objects? If so, how? It is to these theological questions, taken up in Lacoste’s work, we now turn.

III Starting from experience: from beings to being Metaphysics, in its historically narrow definition, abstracts a divine principle out from the “becoming” of the world of experience; such a philosophical coup d’oeil rejects the language of becoming in favor of a reality the mind has wrought within itself suitable to the logic of abstraction: an immovable concept, causa sui. Many name this danger onto-theology or conceptualism. I have challenged this interpretation as one particular “interpretation” that in no way accounts for metaphysics as such. In its broadest configuration, metaphysics refuses to abstract a divine principle from the world of objects; instead I suggest in what follows that metaphysics shall be the occasion for a focus on the world itself as a site of mediation of the horizon of experience. The world so understood is a site from which the soul stretches forward, and so enacts a lived movement from the objects of experience to higher things. If unending ascent from lower to higher constitutes the movement of metaphysics, it is not a system of completion, but is itself creative, and so is always infinite; and because the contemplative quest is properly an economy of “seeking,” one that is always open to the mystery of the excess of things, it can include concepts in itself without exhausting that which it seeks. Jean-Yves Lacoste’s wide-ranging study, Être en danger (2011), intends to explore how this natural desire to see God presupposes a metaphysical framework. Theology, born of metaphysical inclinations, endeavors to understand God. It seems obvious that here we must be talking about

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  199 the tradition of the “divine names,” and of the ontology of Exodus 3.14 (I am who I am), and so in both cases of a desire to predicate of God an “Apart, Beyond or Above” endemic to the classical interpretation of YWHW’s eternal form. From the vantage of prayer and sacrament, the moment speculation on the divine names suffers the fate of hubristic misadventure becomes acute when the power of abstraction relegates concrete experience to marginalia. To avoid not speculation, but its excess, my counterclaim involves the following deflation strategy: a metaphysical search for a “ground” does not of necessity terminate in a static or abstract principle, but rather accommodates, indeed, exalts in the becoming of experience. Seeking for a ground in and through shifting sands of experience is endless, so that what is grasped at any particular point renews motivation, prompts infinitely greater researches. In other words, while the process of metaphysical ascent may involve a level of fulfillment, the soul never rests content with what has been discovered in the mediation of experience. In an early article, Lacoste aptly describes the embodied soul as a subjectivity always in locomotion, neither arrested in static rest nor released into hysterical convulsions of displacements. We are instead always walking, from here to there, migrating from one place to the next, from here to there, as the subjective horizon of experience dilates. As fundamentally given over to mobility, the démarche moves the soul in an endless transit, whereby we expand or dilate to occupy the world to move from one vantage point to another. And theological “places” like the church, the chapel, the sanctuary are signs of spiritual ambition that involve displacing us from the world to site free from the world. The church “contests the worldliness of the world” (mondanité du monde), a pilgrimage nourished in the always mobile pilgrimage of the night of faith. 38 The soul’s proper focus, to speak biblically for the present, is to “seek his face always” (Psalm 105.3), and true progress lies not in comprehension but in endurance, wherein the failure to obtain God prompts not grief but further seeking, not disappointment but incomprehensibility, which in turn generates a “stretching forward” in desire and hope for what is at once beyond and integral to the soul. Certainly physicalism or bald materialism, once one makes experience the locus of metaphysics, constitutes a principal conceptual danger. To recall Chapter 1’s point, phenomenology is nothing less than a counterweight to bald materialism. Lacoste, who advocates for speculative restraint, acknowledges that a tireless focus on lived experience, if the prejudices of physicalism prevail, reduces something complicated and ambiguous to something simple and unitary. But phenomenology, in principle, refuses such naivety.39 Experience is a contested affair, accompanied by much interdisciplinary conflict. Late modern technology and philosophy that trades on materialism strips experience of its subjective valence and the elusive mystery of ground to which it is oriented; materialists are not in the least

200  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy reluctant to dispense with all talk of a divine ground. For Lacoste, to adopt a physicalist position in this way is to see the world as a field of “beings without Being.”40 This “physicalist” danger doubtlessly makes the idea that there is a grounding Being a fragile one, that is, one that could be unreflectively and with little effort denied in favor of beings and their many modes of objectivity. But Lacoste suggests an alternative paradigm, hermeneutical in method, that challenges the reduction of experience to the rank of object. The thesis of the Être en danger is relatively simple: human beings can approach God, like anything else, only inductively. But they do so in a way that does not belong wholly to the strict objective limitations that is the trademark physicalism. For Lacoste experience is as much subjective as it is objective, for the self consists of a prism through which I see phenomena; experience so understood occasions, indeed shapes, my apprehension of an object, whether it is a chair, a piece of art, or God. This is not the place to conduct a sustained or detailed reading of Lacoste’s book as whole, but there are particular insights relevant to my immediate object of study: if God is not abstracted from the world of experience, how then may experience mediate the divine? Of critical importance, then, among other things, is the fundamental phenomenological character of experience: it is partial and plural. If this is indeed the case, it follows that one may question whether experience serves as a reliable guide to address metaphysical questions at all, or, equally problematic, to prepare one to have faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If experience enables me to look at God only through a glass darkly, and in an enigma, how may I extrapolate from experience to name God, not least posit his existence? The problem, to reinforce the point, is compounded by the complex “shape” of experience: my experience of the world eludes, even subverts, linear logic or static taxonomies. Imagine, for example, you are sitting in a lecture theater listening to a world-renown speaker on a topic of great interest to you.41 You are immediately absorbed by the content as much as by the stimulating style of presentation. The delivery, in fact, electrifies the audience, you among them. You follow each sentence on the edge of your seat, as the narrative of the lecture reaches its climax, after which you feel a moment of satisfaction, perhaps a cathartic expenditure. Exhausted but satisfied, you leave the theater and drive home. In this experience you had completely forgotten you were sitting in an uncomfortable lecture seat. There was the stage, other furniture, the microphone, hundreds of other people, etc. You forgot them all for a while. Obviously your chair did not disappear during the lecture, nor did the microphone or the hundreds of other enthralled listeners. What did occur, then? Lacoste, an attentive phenomenologist, observes that, for a moment, you “bracketed” or “put between parentheses” every object that proved unnecessary to your being able to attend to the content of the lecture. You “forgot” your surroundings for a little while, even if it was unintentional. Now imagine you are a school-aged boy, admitted to the same lecture with his parents, but allowed only to sit in

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  201 the back. The boy’s particular interests converge on his fire truck; that object occupies a special place in the imaginative story he invents in his mind for the two-hour lecture. While playing quietly on the floor, he forgets the lecture altogether; he does not comprehend one word. The chairs and the floor in the back of the lecture theater do not disappear for a little while, but become instead objects of intense focus, for the fire truck negotiates among them as road blocks. What does this simple observation of the experience of a lecture, told from two distinct perspectives, tell us about the complex and plural shape of experience as such? And how may a more detailed analysis reframe how we perceive God from the point of view of experience? Experience, consisting of a halo of objects I live through, is richly varied. This means, more precisely, that the study of experience properly conceived is as much as study of objects in their givenness as it is an investigation of the subject who experiences them.42 Like others writing in the “Continental” tradition, Lacoste takes his methodological bearings from phenomenology. His detailed studies of experience involve, therefore, the notion that experience is pluriform, partial, and often elusive. Experience emerges in the exchange between the subjective life of the ego and the objective world of things. Should I attend, as a phenomenologist, to the manner in which God is disclosed in this field of experience, what actually becomes apparent is not first and foremost God as such but rather the change of the recipient’s former ways of “seeing” how objects exist. Once I exploit my spiritual aptitude, objects may indeed point to God. Thus, as one commentator notes, the “phenomenology of ‘God’ turns out to be a phenomenology of the human ‘sight’ of God.”43 Lacoste sees phenomenology as the only viable alternative to strong metaphysical paradigms. An inflated paradigm of metaphysical theology, which often trades on the Thomistic claim that God is Ipsum esse subsistens, may well involve an act of hubris; the logical conclusion of this style of metaphysics ends up in a “match” or correspondence between God and a supreme “thing.”44 How could anyone, not least a genius like Thomas Aquinas, actually come to know or have a mental notion that God is in fact manifest as an esse subsistens? What kind of philosophical or theological warrant does one need to have for such an “inflated” metaphysical abstraction? The fact that Thomas defines metaphysics as a search for a “first being, which is separated from matter”45 appears to make his God a function of abstraction, of metaphysics in its onto-theological aspect. I do not intend to challenge Lacoste’s scornful depiction of Thomistic metaphysics, not because I agree with it, but because it would take us too far from our present course. Many scholars of Thomas Aquinas have defended the idea of esse subsitens against accusations of onto-theology.46 Even Gilson himself, the principal representative of inflated Thomism, will say that analogy of being involves not perfect comprehension of God under a concept but ramifies God into an endless series of philosophical frameworks, in which the possibility of further theological conceptualization is always open. Gilson will

202  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy go so far to say, in his later work, that Thomistic metaphysics depicts a divine Being who belongs to the mysterious realm of the analogical, polymorphous, and inexhaustable (analogique, polymorphe et inéspuisable), where the God of faith resides.47 The focal point of the present chapter lies not in a consideration of the nature of Thomistic metaphysics, but in an interrogation of the scope of metaphysics conceived in Lacoste’s phenomenological framework. How high may metaphysics ascend to Being, should it start from experience? Just as the plurality and partiality of experiences counts as a profound mystery, how much more will concepts of God, invariably conceived as supreme Being, reflect the mystery of metaphysical speculation. Relevant for my present task is that I see nothing implausible about the basic definition of theology Thomas endorses: it is a “speculative” discourse, because it cultivates in the mind a studied desire to interrogate rationally the fundamental nature, however mysterious and however apophatic, of divine being.48 The point I want to make explicit is that Lacoste does not deny the capacity for speculation, conjecture, and extrapolation. The human condition routinely avails itself of these speculative exercises all the time. But Lacoste cautions against the assumption that such pursuits of the mind will yield total truth, clearing the way for a “god’s eye vantage,” as if creaturely knowing could transcend the boundaries of experience itself. Experience, the daily trafficking among objects, provides the only legitimate point of departure for metaphysical reflection that I have at my disposal. If experience assumes the rank of primacy, then the subjective mood or affective structures of experience, too, assume the rank of primacy. The fundamental question of metaphysics belongs to the subject’s capacity to interrogate its own existence: I am the being who asks about the ground of my own being. Lacoste, like Heidegger, takes this question as an exceptional question, and perhaps one from which so many flee.49 Quite independent of the question of authentic “questioning,” the question remains nonetheless one the subject brings to bear on the world of experience: why is there something instead of nothing? One can glimpse the ground, the reason for existence, only through the prism of experience. Hubris says absolute knowing is attainable, but this kind of “grasp” of Being “appears to abstract Being from its historical reality.”50 The return to experience is a return to my historical circumstance, the condition of finitude and the many objects that constitute the only network of meaning I have at my disposal. Mood or affection shapes how I experience objects in my field of vision that make up my historical conditions. If I am anxious, the world looks very different than if I am hopeful. Augustine, in a famous account of his grief-stricken state of mind following the death of his good friend, describes how such a trauma wholly altered his conception of the world: Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My home town became a torture to me; my father’s house a strange world of unhappiness; all

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  203 that I had shared with him was without him transformed into a cruel torment.51 After I experience a “new chapter” in my life, whether it is marriage or the birth of a child, the world may take on a luminous luster of joy. Exterior factors, the objects in which I am immersed, affect how I feel about the world. But I also shape the world with my own subjective structures, and it is more typical that my mood shall constitute the existential feel of the world. The temptation for the phenomenologist is to isolate a fundamental mood or affection, from which all other moods emerge, and in fact under whose light the world is manifest. This is, to address this only incidentally, existential angst as Heidegger calls it in Being and Time, or enjoyment as Levinas describes it vividly in Totality and Infinity. Lacoste suspects no single, fundamental world-disclosing mood is isolable. Lacoste insists that, more often than not, I am the one responsible for endowing an event or object with a particular subjective hue that involves several moods at once. I am not an impartial spectator. For example, when I see a Kandinsky or listen to a Bach cantata, I may feel different each time I experience those objects, for my mood configures and determines, in large part, my perception of the object. 52 But the question of “why is there something at all?” certainly will prompt a mood of its own kind, a philosophical inquisitiveness, which then explores the prospects of an ultimate ground. While there may be no fundamental or basic “affection” that configures the world in a certain light, Lacoste does open up the prospect of naming two that have become indispensable for most of us: angst and peace—or the feeling of not being at home in the world versus being at home in the world. Metaphysics involves the interplay between these two moods. Because there is no primal mood, and because I am no impartial spectator, my subjective life empowers me to confront, not flee from, the fundamental question of metaphysics. The inner depth of my being, the source out of which mood comes forth, equips me with the resources to address the fundamental question of metaphysics. In so doing, I realize I do not occupy neutral ground. I am brought before myself, and become a question to myself. Many affections and moods surface, but two in particular predominate, angst and peace. Once the question is addressed theologically, the mood of “being in peace” takes precedence as the chief expression of myself in relation to the world, and functions thereby as a disciplined counter-existential, a living existential corrective to the mood of angst. 53 The contemplative posture of faith, a spiritual vision, decides how I “see” the world of objects. If metaphysics is inextricably bound up with the subjective experience of the soul’s existential disposition, it is natural for worship and sacraments to become metaphysical motifs, precisely because they require the existential mood of faith. If metaphysics, once again, explores experience, such as the sacraments, how it may point to (without abstracting from experience) the ground of experience, the God of Christianity?

204  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy The eucharist, for example, permits one to enter a whole cultic scene. There is the chalice, as well as the monstrance that holds the host. The chalice, made out of silver, appears as an object; in the ritual, when the Priest or the Minister consecrates the elements, the chalice maintains its organic structure as a thing, its appearance as a silver cup. The wine continues to contain the properties any other alcoholic beverage will have upon consumption. The host is composed of flour, water, and other ingredients. Lacoste admits there is nothing “intrinsically religious” about a silver jug, wine, bread, and an ecclesial building. How, then, may a sacrament, which is a res, appear as a sacramentum res? How may the “inapparent,” or the “invisible” appear under the form of the apparent and visible? Faith enables me to forget, for a little while, the objectivity of the wine and the bread. Lacoste suggest that faith, as a stance or attitude, permits the recipient of grace in that event to “see” what is not visible. I “bracket” or put between parentheses the objective structure, even while I do not annul or annihilate that structure. This is the style of perception associated with the theological optics, what Lacoste names the “liturgical reduction.”54 In this intentional stance, the chalice is always simply a chalice. But the power of faith, as a subjective mood of peace and joy, reconstitutes the objects of bread and wine as spiritual gifts, which conceal or harbor the inapparent, the logic of incarnation, of mediation. This indeed is what faith accomplishes: the logic of “mediation” is the process by which God discloses grace through a material sign. Lacoste says the logic of mediation enjoys the privilege of preserving the mystery of things while not exhausting how real presence occurs.55 What does this “bracketing” faith performs feel like? Lacoste will say that sacramental experience, while it does not offer immediate vision of Christ or ecstatic experience of union with God, involves a kind of temporary “rupture” or “perversion” of my ordinary experience of the world, resulting not necessarily in discontinuity with ordinary experience. Sacramental experience is basically continuous with, and integral to, the sphere of objects, ordinary perception, and everyday sense experience. Hence the theological attitude of faith does not forbid the chalice its objective status as “metal cup.” Rather it implies only the possibility of invisible depth concealed within its parameters, even if that invisible grace may not yield to consciousness an object I can apprehend or see with my mind’s eye.56 Faith, therefore, may “infirm” the objectivity of the chalice and the monstrance, or the wine and bread, by practicing with diligence the discipline of “forgetting” or “bracketing.”57 The eucharist in particular mediates the “fullness of time” eschatologically within the concrete structures of historical experience. The desire to see God does not liberate the soul from angst or inquiétude, but it may open up the “nœud” between angst and peace that the eucharist offers (only as possibility) in the element of faith. Sacramental experience, a performative way “between” angst and joy, is “simultaneously historical and metahistorical.” It is a possibility that sanctions our

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  205 finitude and mortality, but opens up the absolute possibility that my life may exceed the boundaries of finitude and death; my life, its spiritual depth and sacramental meaning, remains fragile, because it is sustained only in the pilgrimage of faith. 58 The logic of mediation to which Lacoste attributes the power of sacramental intuition is borne of metaphysical language. Lacoste is uncomfortable with traditional metaphysical vocabulary, such as “mediation” (which he says is theoretically difficult59), theosis, participation, and analogy. He opts for a new term, the “entre-deux,” or the between, whereby the spiritual life before God, lived in the world of objects, finds its place between interior prayer and exterior life with others, between angst and peace, between finitude and God, between the danger of physicalism and the possibility of the invisible.60 This is that “nœud” that I am, a “place” I inhabit, or more precisely a living amphibole that occupies a point of overlap between visible and invisible. Intended as nothing more than a sketch here, perhaps Thomistic metaphysics would enjoy welcome within a phenomenological method so outlined. If we avoid the traditional language of esse subsistens or analogia entis, just for a moment, then may we take conceptual bearings in the Summa from an alternative angle of entry, one more properly Christological in form? For Aquinas, against whom so many of Lacoste’s critiques are directed, will interpolate the concept of “filiation” within the most metaphysical sections of the Summa, the famed Prima pars. The “middle term” that unifies God and creatures is participation in the Son, that is, filiation. No creature shares in Sonship in a perfect manner, of course, but experience is its locus. Aquinas says, “since the Creator and the creature have not the same nature; but by way of a certain likeness, which is the more prefect the nearer we approach to the true idea of filiation.” And this likeness is borne out, in time, the more the creature assimilates the life of Christ, bearing the fruit of the love and humility of the Cross; hence “filiation is applied as it participates in the likeness of the Son.”61 Later, in the Tertia pars, on the sacraments, Aquinas will say that in the eucharist the sacrament makes possible a form of experience, the communication of grace in a material sign. But how does this mediation occur? Christ himself, the entre-deux between creature and Creator, obligates us to formulate the logic of mediation in incarnational terms. In the sacrament grace The principal cause of grace is God, for whom the humanity of Christ is a conjoined instrument (like a hand) and the sacrament a separate instrument (like a stick, itself moved by the instrument joined to it, the hand). It is necessary then that the power of salvation descend from the divinity of Christ through his humanity until it reaches the sacraments.62 Christian metaphysics, inspired as much by Christological moments in Aquinas as by Lacoste’s proposal of “sacramental experience,” privileges

206  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy silence, humility, and hesitation, but it also cultivates the courage to speak in love, to respond to the call of love and compensates for its poverty of language. Analogy, mediation, participation, while these terms suffer sometimes from inflationary onto-theological claims that trade on the power of abstraction, they also open out onto concrete experience, the fullest expression of which is sacramental experience.

IV Conclusion: metaphysics and mediation I return, then, to the chapter’s beginning: the conjunction of metaphysics and theology, as a quest to understand the human condition, does not reveal myself as I have to be, but as I would seek to be; I avail myself of the mystery of God and employ the grammar of metaphysics to make sense of my experience of finitude in light of that mystery. While it is commonplace to say that theology is diffuse and fragmented, perhaps reconsideration of its relation to metaphysics may prompt a series of questions concerning the relationship between conventional and ultimate forms of discourse. I have argued that metaphysics, in its historically narrow definition, is onto-theology, and that this particular understanding of Western philosophy is restrictive. Metaphysics can also represent, I suggested, a subjective horizon in which an inexhaustible search for the ground of experience may be conducted. Following from this broad definition, I considered the phenomenological analysis of ordinary experience of objects that Jean-Yves Lacoste explores; sacramental experience in particular designates a faith stance which opens up a “place between” two modes of being, namely, between the invisible and the visible, between peace and angst, between metahistory and history, but never in a manner that escapes the boundaries of lived experience. If metaphysics is ineluctably tied to experience, and many disciplines explore experience, theology’s ownmost voice, as one that addresses the reason for existence in light of the biblical narrative, then it follows: theology may dialogue with other disciplines that also address this most basic question. Theology’s truth is certainly conventional and regulated by particular tradition of reasoning (scriptures, creeds, patristic authorities, and so on) and communities of practice (the living church, liturgy, and so on). But the form of truth it seeks to realize is ultimate, about reality as such. Framed in this this way, humans seem to have an underlying concern for ultimacy and often employ religious language to address the question, “why is there something instead of nothing?” So how may metaphysics provide a type of “common grammar” that mediates between distinct cultural idioms? Ultimacy does need not eliminate conventional practices and cultural languages that provide meaning schemes or paradigms of truth reflective of a particular grammar. Seemingly incommensurable communities engage in dialogue often. Empirical evidence for this can be adduced by referencing the popularity

Lived experience & metaphysics in theology  207 of “Scriptural Reasoning,” a form of interreligious dialogue carried out among Abrahamic religions.63 Many of us can differ on fundamental answers to life’s basic questions, even on questions of methodology, and yet we can still listen to arguments, consider each other’s assumptions and inferences, and so on. Metaphysics, as we have described it thus far, does not have to be the common “third” between two or three incommensurable paradigms, for that would assume there is some external vantage absolutist view, independent of any particular cultural convention. An absolute view is unattainable. Rather it seems to me that metaphysics can be seen as the overlapping terrain where each discipline or “language” considers, without exhausting, the why of existence. The picture, illustrative here, is that of an indeterminate number of floating rings, each a form of life or cultural language, on an open ocean. Some rings are closer to others, but their mutual contraction and expansion dialectically emerges in and through the waves of dispute and collaboration; passing supplies between rings occupies much of the residents on each ring, for they have to work hard to remain afloat. Hence even though I live on my ring, I am found often talking to others standing on rings on my left and my right. Sometimes I leaps to a different ring if unsatisfied with the one on which I currently stand; conducive to this scenario of movement is the momentary merging of one ring with my own ring. As “messy” as this interchange is, no one is out of signaling distance, and there is individual responsibility and collective cooperation often. The debate about metaphysical theology versus post-metaphysical theology, then, can be extended into the wider value-laden dialogue that theology, and the church in particular, tries to sustain with the external world. The spiritual climate of the Western world is increasingly secular, and atheism now an unimpeachable form of life. How may two languages (or two rings) as different as Christian theology and secular reason find a point of overlap concerning their differing interpretations of the human condition? The post-metaphysical account, to recall, objects to the very notion of overlap.64 It decides, in contrast, to confine theology to a particular hermeneutical stance with a logic and integrity all its own, meaningful only to those initiated into the rationality and logic of that particular community of practice. Public dialogue, understood in these terms, with other schemes of deep reasoning appears impossible since genuine communication yields to the idea of incommensurable rationalities. The difference in underlying media between, say, the way of speaking relative to Christianity and the way of speaking relative to a secularist or a materialist cannot be bridged. Partisans of the post-metaphysical mood often say Christianity is unique, and there is no way to understand its language but from the “inside,” a position I can occupy only once I learn the rules of syntax native to Christianity. If a conceptual rescue operation can indeed “rescue” theology from this parochialism, then metaphysical interrogation about the ground of experience may serve this purpose. I have no problem admitting that Christianity offers a unique interpretation of the existence of the world and the

208  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy place of the human condition in that world. Christianity is not only historically and culturally conditioned, it is also differentiated and elucidated by the subjectivities to whom Christ appears. A deflationary metaphysics rejects totality’s economy of violence and its accompanying absolutism, but it nevertheless elicits universal claims, because such claims are open to all eventualities bound up with the search for meaning. Metaphysics does not reduce one’s faith, therefore, to a generic common denominator describable as a “metaphysical underground.” Nor does metaphysics consist of neutral territory, into which any one’s conventional language can be translated for the purpose of rational exchange of ideas in the public sphere. Metaphysics may represent that point of overlap, where authentic and real unity occurs between two traditions, and specifically where they converge on the idea of a search for a ground, even while maintaining no unity eliminates the radical differences say between a Christian and a secular humanist. Metaphysics in the broadest sense makes space for both claims relative to a community and claims embedded in universal symbols. Christian metaphysics, for example, does not refuse to listen to other voices who make truth claims about the nature and meaning of finitude, no matter how alien the interpretative strategy may appear to the Christian. For whatever the interpretive angle, a single, guiding theme guides each paradigm, scheme, language, tradition, deep reasoning, etc., and that theme is a search for an intelligible and meaningful ground of being that grows out of experience, a search that never suspends the limits of finite experience. For this reason, whatever its material content, metaphysics opens out endlessly onto the interplay between the many conventional stories involved in this quest; no god’s eye point of view is attainable. If this is the case, metaphysics enjoins one to practice the virtue of listening and open-mindedness. Listening with an open mind does not require eliminating one’s beliefs or meaning scheme. Indeed, it has been argued one cannot genuinely be open minded unless one has deep convictions with which to wrestle.65 Rather, listening involves simply “suspending” or “forgetting for a little while” one’s conventional identity, born of the conviction that one’s own existential identity, in my exchange with the other, is broadened and humbled (i.e., keeping at bay a totalizing or inflationary metaphysics).66 Lacoste will advocate for this model of humility, especially from the Christian point of view; being at peace with oneself and God requires being reconciled with the other.67 From a Christian point of view, the humility of the Cross refuses to grant to the Christian an absolute intellectual ground. Metaphysics, then, mediates a ground without exhausting the prospect of ever new possibilities to be apprehended within any one particular tradition (each which has its own intellectual ground). Metaphysics is uniquely inflected, therefore, each time a tradition elucidates with critical distinction a particular grammar of metaphysical speculation. Metaphysics belongs to Christianity as much as

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it belongs to Buddhism, secular humanism, or Islam. Metaphysical speculation occupies terrain unique to a particular grammar because it is experience, the subjective life of the ego in its ambient world, that configures the content of metaphysical reflection. The science of the Cross, the experience of the Christian soul, enjoys metaphysical warrant precisely because the principal site of experience is the sacrament of the eucharist, the logic of which is that the invisible grace of God is mediated in that material sign; in its concrete form, the ritual of the wine and bread yields to the power of reflective faith, the gaze that sees only in an enigma the ground of existence, the person of Christ. Reframing the debate, above all, requires that experience occupy the seat of metaphysics; the elusive God exceeds every manifestation of experience and God is understood only properly from the point of view of the creature, of the subjective mood cultivated by the soul, which is always partial and plural, which is to say: a conventional practice which mediates the ultimate.

Notes 1 See, for example, Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), pp. 52–54; also Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Laurence K. Shook and Armand Mauerer, 6th edition (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002), chapter 3, “The Divine Being.” 2 I need not rehearse here a comprehensive bibliography, but the most importance texts are noteworthy: Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012); George Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006); Kevin Hector, Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language and the Spirit of Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 3 Fragmentation and multiplicity express the richness of the world as I or anyone else experiences it. I do not therefore seek out an absolute consensus or unity by which theology as a discipline “hangs” together, but I do want to find a voice in which theology can speak on its own terms that is both intelligible and meaningful to those outside of the seminary and the church. 4 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être en danger (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 2011). 5 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 18. 6 For more on the dangers of “conceptualism,” see Gregory Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay between of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), p. 155ff. 7 Lacoste specifically invokes the label “deflationary metaphysics,” but what he means by the term, outlined below, is distinct from the term as it is employed in analytic philosophy and their intramural debates about metaphysics versus anti-metaphysics. For a review of this stimulating dialogue, conducted among well-known Anglo-American voices such as Michael Dummett, Richard Rorty, and other epigones of Wittgenstein, see Hilary Putnam’s lucid presentation in Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 44ff.

210 Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy 8 For a comprehensive treatment of the complex genealogy of metaphysics up to the present, which attends to both Continental and Analytic debates, see Frédéric Nef’s excellent, if prolix, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? 9 Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? (Paris: Folio, 2004), pp. 34–35. 10 Bernard Lonergan, “Metaphysics as Horizon,” in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, eds. Frederick Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 188–204. 11 Martin Heidegger invokes this metaphor, drawn from Descartes. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 277. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 214; also see P.F. Strawson, similarly has recourse to the metaphor of grammar; see his Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 1. 13 Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, p. 50. 14 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933–36), 4.1, 1003a. 15 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 6.1, 1026a. 16 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 6.1, 1026a. 17 For more on book the possibility of theology in Aristotle’s Epsilon of the Metaphysics, see Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, p. 238ff. 18 Martin Heidegger, Identify and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 70–71. Here the allusion to Aristotle is obvious; interestingly, Nef defends Aristotle against charges of onto-theology, because Aristotle’s overall metaphysics concerns sensible forms and physics, but also because, if we read carefully, Aristotle does not say there is without question an immovable ground separated out from experience, but only that there “may” be one. Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, p. 250ff. 19 A purely secular critic of metaphysics, I note here, is Jurgen Habermas. See Jürgen Habermas, Post-metaphysical Thought, trans. William Mark Hogengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1992); on p. 32 he condemns metaphysics as a totalizing rubric of ontology, as it tries to “secure the precedence of identity over difference and that of ideas over matter.” 20 Technically, Heidegger’s expression the “end of metaphysics” descends into terminological equivalence. He does not claim necessarily that metaphysics has “ended” or “subsided,” but rather that metaphysics has reached a point where it has consummated itself and is now ready to move into a new phase. The German word for the word “overcoming” that he employs is Uberwindung which may intend to convey the idea advancing, not leaving behind, metaphysics into new territory. See Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 84ff. For commentary on this concept, see Jean-Luc Marion, “The End of the End of Metaphysics,” trans. Bettina Bergo, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2 (1994): 1–22. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 333. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5. 23 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 277. 24 See Jean-Luc Marion for a wider discussion of early modern forms of onto-theology in On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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25 Kevin Hector, Theology without Metaphysics, p. 46. 26 Jean-Luc Marion, alert to the crucial distinctions to be made on behalf of the term metaphysics in the early modern period, says that Heidegger’s term “onto-theology” provides us with the most rigorous determination of metaphysics currently at our disposal. This historically narrow definition of metaphysics as onto-theology “offers the most powerful working hypothesis for the historian of philosophy.” Is this in fact the case? I argue that metaphysics can be understood from an alternative, and equally acceptable, vantage. Should the debate be reframed, the working hypothesis of metaphysics as such must undergo a broadening. See Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 52. 27 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 151. 28 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), p. 156. 29 Nietzsche, Will to Power, p. 255. 30 See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 1ff. In my view, Heidegger carries out his analysis in an “exclusivist” or polemical register, evident in his claim that Christianity (and by extension all religions) cannot contribute to the dialogue. He argues that Christianity, as a well-developed theological tradition, fails to explore the fundamental question of metaphysics because it presupposes beforehand how to answer it. Christianity, its ambitious metanarrative, exhausts the metaphysical question before it is asked, contends Heidegger. It constructs an idol because it expresses a clear agenda that lays out a variety of principles and propositions, drawn from revelation, whose intention is to give expression to what is an inexpressible metaphysical question. For a direct challenge of this facile grasp of Christian theology, see Joseph G. Trabbic, “A Critique of Heidegger’s critique of Christian Philosophy in the Introduction to Metaphysics,” Religious Studies, first view, November (2015): 1–16. 31 Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych (New York: Continuum Publishers, 1994), pp. 58–62. 32 Phil Zuckerman, Living the Secular Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 12 “Aweism.” 33 Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 268, for example. Dennett is quick to say his awe does not generate a religion, for he has none. But does he have a metaphysics? 34 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 21. He writes, Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question ‘Why?’ 35 Hubert Dreyfus and Sean D. Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), p. 200 ff. 36 J.J.C. Smart and John J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 36. Cited in Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 234.

212 Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy 37 Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, pp. 236–247. Turner makes the case that Thomas Aquinas’ five ways or proofs of God may constitute a response to the question why there is something instead of nothing. 38 Lacoste, “Bâtir, habiter, prier,” pp. 362–363 and 380–381. 39 Husserl himself will say phenomenology, as he defines it, does not reject metaphysics as such, but only naïve metaphysics, typically associated with empiricism (what he calls objectivism) or the myth of “things in themselves.” Lacoste is deeply indebted to the Husserlian style of phenomenological method. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 4, 35, 150, 156. 40 Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 4 and 345. 41 Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 18–19 and 37. 42 Lacoste says he wants to articulate a position between subjectivism and realism. See Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 324–325. 43 Claudia Welz, “God—A Phenomenon?” Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, vol. 62, no. 1 (2008): pp. 4–24, especially p. 18. 44 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), Part 1, Q.7, A. 1. See also Lacoste, Étre en danger, pp. 4, 11, and 24. 45 Aquinas’ nomenclature: “Metaphysics simultaneously determines [how things stand] concerning being in general and concerning the first being, which is separated from matter” [Metaphysica simul determinat de ente in communi et de ente primo, quod est a materia separatum]. Thomas Aquinas, “Proemium Sancti Thomas,” in Librum Primum Aristotelis de Generatione et Corruptione, Expositio, in Aristotelis Libros—De Caelo et Mundo, De Generatione et Corruptione, Meteorologicorum—Expositio, ed. Raymondo M. Spiazzi (Taurini: Marietti, 1952), p. 315. 46 See, for example, Gregory Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God; also see the illuminating essay by Rahner, “Thomas Aquinas on the Incomprehensibility of God,” Journal of Religion, vol. 58, supplement (1978): s107–s125. 47 Etienne Gilson, “L'être et Dieu,” in Constantes Philosophque de l’être (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), p. 192. 48 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Q.1, A.4. 49 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 273. 50 Lacoste, Étre en danger, p. 354. 51 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), iv, 4, 9, p. 57. 52 Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 318–319. 53 For more on the counter-existential (contre-existential) of peace, joy and innocence, see Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 197–211. 54 It is a principal theme of Lacoste’s Experience and the Absolute, but is elaborated upon in Être en danger, p. 108ff. 55 Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 115–119. 56 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 305. 57 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 38. 58 Lacoste, Être en danger, pp. 306–307. 59 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 116. 60 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 150. 61 Aquinas, Summa, Part I, Q.33, A.3. For more on the Aquinas and the naming of God, see Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, p. 295ff; also see David Burrell, “Aquinas on Naming God,” Theological Studies, vol. 24, no. 2 (1963): pp. 183–212. 62 Aquinas, Summa, Part III, Q.62, A.5.

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63 For more on Scriptural Reasoning in this regard, see the illuminating essay, Nicholas Adams, “Making Deep Reasonings Public,” Modern Theology, vol. 22, no. 3 (2006): pp. 385–401. 64 John Betz, while edging his thesis too far in the polemical direction, writes similarly: Metaphysics has, a regulative function that keeps Christian discourse (first and foremost of the incarnate Logos) from degenerating into mere mythology or, what amounts to the same thing, simply the ‘language game’ of this or that community… Without a theological metaphysics, the transcendent perspective, which metaphysics holds open, threatens to collapse into the ‘way of speaking’ of this or that ‘faith community’. John Betz, “The Beauty of the Metaphysical Imagination,” in Belief and Metaphysics, eds. Peter M. Candler Jr. and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM, 2007), pp. 41–65. 65 Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 8, “Open-Mindedness.” 66 Jean-Louis Chrétien is illuminating on the nature of genuine listening. See his Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 13ff. 67 Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 189.

11 The body and eucharistic experience

I Mystical bodies The Pauline language of the “mystical body of Christ” [Corpus mysticum] has become a theological grammar for understanding both the limits and possibilities of sacramental experience in recent phenomenological theology. Unlike Kant who compares the corpus mysticum to a “moral world” in which civic virtue reduces to the pursuit of moral, practical principles of reason,1 Lacoste invests the term with the content of lived experience and embodied practice, ultimately informed by the communal enjoyment of the eucharist. In this context, he denounces the modern construct of the self as an autonomous and disengaged ego who “uses” her body as an object represented alongside other objects in a world of entities. 2 The advance a sacramental body, in a phenomenological framework, explores the self’s properly incarnational structure, one formed in its relation to the mystical body of Christ, the eucharist. That human beings are open to a world of objects does not block the sacrament from the possibility of effecting a non-objective order of manifestation based on embodied social practice. As we shall see below, the non-discursive background of the body, together with the subjective enactment of experience, discloses our familiar world without the mediation of conceptual content, precisely because my body is the medium in which I touch down on the world. Embodied selves relate to things and equipment as extensions of the practical, kinetic potentialities of the body. My body endows the world with meaning in relationship with other bodies who, in turn, endow the world with meaning in conjunction with me. When bodies join together in a collective we-synthesis, we may see by force of this unity that a profound social unity can unfold. As a prelude to Lacoste and my exposition of the embodied mood of eucharistic experience, it is to be acknowledged that the language of “mystical body of Christ” draws on a long theological lineage going back to Pauline texts that refer to the church as the body of Christ. 3 In his now classic book, Corpus Mysticum (1944), Henri de Lubac traces the historical evolution of the term mystical body of Christ from many of the early Fathers to Augustine up to the High Medieval era. His discovery is that the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-15

The body and eucharistic experience  215 mystical body referred not only to the physical, historical body of Christ but, preeminently, to the twin concepts of the eucharist and the public, visible church itself. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the mystical body denoted simply the public, temporal sphere of the church (which leaves the eucharist by itself as one of many subsidies of the church, one of seven sacraments of the ministry of the church).4 De Lubac wrote the book, in part, as a historical corrective to the 1943 Papal Encyclical entitled Mystici Corporis Christi. One can observe in this Papal document the categorical connection Pope Pius XII makes between the mystical body of Christ and the public, visible reign of the church. This connection strategically integrates the authentic display of the mystical body with the exterior institution of the church itself (with the Pope’s headship as symbolic of Christ’s headship). Consequently, in this encyclical Pope Pius XII seeks to challenge the double error that he perceives to be operative in some modern Catholic theology—the movement toward the invisible, spiritual meaning, on the one hand, and the movement away from the visible, public and thus political signification of the institution of church, on the other. According to the encyclical, to disengage the mystical body of Christ from the church’s concrete social, historical, cultural, and political dimensions amounts to the radical delimitation of the church’s task “to perpetuate on earth the saving work of Redemption.”5 To exorcise what he perceives to be Docetic elements6 present in modern theology, the Pope renders the mystical body of Christ in objective, practical terms which are thoroughly purged of “mystical” elements. The church’s juridical laws, liturgical rights, and ritual practices as well as its hierarchical governance with a singular head at the top constitute the visible manifestation of the mystical body of Christ and thus illuminate it as a set of embodied social practices. According to the encyclical, not only prayer, eucharist, word, and ritual contribute to the embodied norms of Christian life, but the institutional authority too, a reality that may well recede from the following pages just as it drops from Lacoste’s subject matter (perhaps it should not?). The encyclical, in other words, highlights unequivocally the papal authority is the condition for the possibility of any mystical body whatsoever. The body of an individual saint whose joy is shaped by worship together with other saints cannot detach from the head of the body, the conciliar structures of the institutional structure of the church. The institution too consists of embodied exchanges and interconnections between members of the worshipping community. Institutional power and its machinery too have a body. Hence: the Pope must “be visible to the eyes of all, since it is He who gives effective direction to the work which all do in common in a mutually helpful way towards the attainment of the proposed end.”7 Accordingly, without duly attending to the juridical and papal components of the church’s institutional presence, Christians may fall victim to

216  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy an “unhealthy quietism,” a subjectivism without control, an interiority that envelops the mystical body of Christ in sphere of interiority.8 De Lubac’s volume clearly adds historical context to this mid-twentiethcentury encyclical. Perhaps his book merits the controversial claim that it corrects an imbalance implicit in the encyclical’s denial of subjective experience in favor of a public, institutional interpretation of the mystical body; as we shall presently see, Lacoste offers phenomenological context that may well address the embodied dimension of liturgy as a dialectic between subjective mood and collective social practice (ecclesial practice for Lacoste). He recasts the very conceptual ground of the mystical body in an existential vocabulary that complements de Lubac’s rich historical analysis of the mystical body of Christ.

II Intercorporeity Lacoste insists that something like a non-representational spiritual bond occurs between those who pray together, who chant together, who read sacred scripture together, and, above all, who share in the eucharistic elements of bread and wine together. The knowledge imparted by various liturgical acts enumerated here evokes the embodied learning communicated by the kinematics of affection, a prethematic domain of intimacy between bodies that eludes the cognitive apprehension of information that flows from the objectifying acts of conceptualism that is the hallmark of the metaphysics of representation. As Mark Johnson wisely suggests, the locus of what and who we are is embodied. The body is not just a site where cognition and feeling can occur, as if they could occur elsewhere but just happen to hang out in bodies. Rather, our embodiment shapes both what and how we experience, think, feel, value, and act. It shapes who we are in such a way that it is implicated in all of our possible self-descriptions.9 The experience between bodies, then, belongs to the “We” of Mitbefindlichkeit, what Lacoste will simply call co-affection.10 For Lacoste, and equally for myself, phenomenology aims to study how things “appear” to us, measuring the concrete, lived experience of the “things in themselves.” Encounters with an object belong to an embodied domain of lived experience that entails a shared world of other subjects who undergo lived experiences, sometimes in concert with, and sometimes in direct contradiction to, my body. To encounter an object is to undergo its form of givenness. I experience it therefore in “flesh and bone” or “in person” (leibhaft gegeben),11 and the object is thereby drawn into the flow of my embodied life-stream, the leibkörper: the kinetic medium in which the world is manifest to me. Objects thus appear to me, as mine, only within the larger backdrop of the world-horizon that is already given to me as a condition for the possibility of bodily acts. To be sure, my experience of the world, mediated in and through my body, is a form of enworlding the world as “my” world. I have not only

The body and eucharistic experience  217 punctual, discrete segments of experience in which I pick out a particular object so that I envisage it this way or that way (think of mental paint from Chapter 4), but I also have a pregiven stream of consciousness that constitutes the flowing horizon in which particular objects and intentional modifications take place. The effect of the world on me, therefore, incorporates me insofar as it situates me within its flowing horizon. The incorporation within the world’s norms, its intersubjective flow, does not make me submit wholly to the world. I do not remain passive or static in the face world’s effect on my agency. I manipulate the world, for the world’s unity as this world belongs to the domain of embodied disclosure. I do not have a living surrounding world, an Umwelt, as a passive unity, but I intend and inhabit this life as my world. The world therefore occupies within me the central constituent of my lifeworld on the basis of my taking a stand or position in the world as a unity for me. How? In the living unity of the horizon of experience that constitutes the world as my world, I take for granted my belief in the world as the horizon always there. It serves the function of a primordial background, given that the layers of contours of experience that emanate out from the borders of the field of consciousness. I grasp the world as a stream of affections, which are given not as isolated objects that displace each other from one temporal moment to the next, but as a pregiven horizon that makes up a living background of meaning, called an environment, also called a surrounding world [Umwelt]. In this phenomenological context, the world remains embedded within the flow of my constitution of objects as a pregiven horizon of meaning and belief. Hence the world is achieved not as a brute fact, but as a meaningful environment, a homeworld. As a pregiven domain, this environment lies in my background as always already there without any attention of a grasping noetic ray, without any awakening of interest. Any embodied turningtoward a particular object in order to apprehend it presupposes this domain of pregivenness. My body’s aboriginal contact with the world-horizon forms, then, a basic and pregiven unity between mood and world, whereby the horizon of meaning that precedes all particular cognitive operations enables me to grasp without delay (by way of affection or mood) that the rug I step on continues to display the same check-pattern in the part of the rug that is hidden underneath the couch, or to interpret immediately whether the scream emitted by my wife is one of urgent danger or one motivated by playful sarcasm. The horizon of experience furnishes, it could be said, a prethematic, embodied disclosure of the worldhood of the world. I am acquainted with my surroundings in such a way that I make the world my environment due to my bodily intimacy with it. Another example may suffice to establish the point: when I climb a mountain, I already presuppose the mountain as a whole to be integrated within my body. The mountain “becomes” an extension of my embodied lifeworld. The disclosure of the lifeworld includes

218  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy levels of horizonality, in which the conscious apprehension of objects includes an objectifying act that attends to the particular object as “this object” prominently displayed within the stream of consciousness. Underlying this objectifying act lies layers of non-prominent horizons, what may be labeled the level of empty (or marginal) horizons of experience; these horizons also communicate knowledge of which I am implicitly aware. So, the mountain recedes into the background, inasmuch as I forget about it within the immediate field of objectifying acts occurring in the complex of intentional life. The mountain is “submerged” or buried in the deeply tacit layers of the horizon of experience. I have forgotten it: “Something forgotten however is something that no longer has any prominence.”12 Such forgetfulness of the mountain signifies that the mountain remains latent until it awakens. Once it was not prominent until it erupts within the field of consciousness, at which point it is explicit. The expansion and depth dimension of the lifeworld’s empty horizon does not internalize, of course, a literal physical mountain. How, to pursue the topic further, does the lifeworld know the mountain as a latent background without at the same time involving the claim that the mountain as a whole is an object incarnated within conscious apprehension of the intentional ray of cognition? This background, an empty horizon that I already know, consists of a horizon of implicit practical possibilities that evoke in me the attunement or mood of familiarity, until the background erupts into the foreground of consciousness and thereby fundamentally alters my mood, creating in the process other moods (horror, joy, fear, wonder). Once the mountain disrupts my streaming mood of familiarity (i.e., the mountain was once an extension of my lifeworld), it is “being hauled up out of ‘forgetfulness,’ which modes belongs to what has been hauled up through the awakening.”13 The awakening thereby activates my attention (my turning-toward) to focus on a particular component part of it as wholly distinct from me. It does not fabricate a whole new lived experience, but instead reorients my attention, and lays thereby the groundwork for the mountain to generate a new mood that is attentive but not representational. Something like this may follow from the fact that my right foot slips on a small crevice of the mountain. That individual part of the mountain immediately protrudes, it becomes an object with which I am intensely preoccupied. The mountain is not mere thing or object or instrument, but instead forces itself on me, and I grasp it in the mood of terror in which I fear for my life.14 It awakens in me, to put it differently, a mood about my right foot’s faltering relationship with that craggy square-inch of what used to be moments before the empty horizon of the mountain. But “belonging to the essence of the empty retention is its capacity to be fulfilled, and this fulfillment is remembering.”15 A moment before the mountain as a whole insinuated itself as an affection allocated within the stream of passive pregivenness of the world-horizon. Now, in the moments subsequent to the slippage, the

The body and eucharistic experience  219 mountain no longer elapses into the forgotten past, but emerges (dramatically) into the living present of disclosive moods. The mountain as such remains the mountain, but I recall the bodily skill it requires to negotiate “this” part of the mountain, this discrete entity (a square inch) that captures my conscious effort to hold my balance and climb safely upward; the interface between my body and the mountain breaks from the kinetic unity of the empty horizon. It is, framed thusly, now an object of theoretical interest, an object of prominence so much so that I grasp it in the mood of horror. I can achieve this act of spatial attentiveness because my body already “knows” this part of the mountain. My intercorporeal connection with the mountain means that my body already knows the mountain in diverse, though, specific ways that representational cognition or propositional attitudes alone fail to articulate. In other words: once my right foot slips, my body weight knows how to shift across the interface of the mountain. My left hand compensates immediately upon slippage. Its grip, for example, knows where on the mountain to “grab” bit by bit to ensure I do not fall, just as my center of gravity may lean inward toward the mountain in conjunction with left foot’s balance. My body contains “potential knowledge” of the mountain. This corresponds to preknowledge or a gestalt apprehension of the horizon of the mountain. Such preknowledge, to return to the domain of kinematic knowledge bound up with the empty horizon, cultivates an intercorporeal affection that unites me to the mountain. In this context, I “know” the mountain in a non-representational manner, precisely because it remains within my body as a potential possibility of movement, and thus remains a form to which my body attends, even if it does not do so in a way that makes every particular part of the mountain determinate content. In point of fact the mount remains mostly indeterminate in specific content (or at least not completely determinate).16 Intercorporeity grows complicated once the two bodies in question are sentient, conscious egos, whether that be an exchange between individuals or groups. Not only can I touch the other, but I can feel touched-by the other, and the handshake may be the exemplary intercorporeal bond, causal though it is, and Western though it is (and sometimes gender specific). The reversibility of touching and being-touched occupies many pages in the work of Merleau-Ponty: The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching … Their landscapes interweave [Leurs paysages s’enchevêtrent], their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same “consciousness” the primordial definition of sensibility.17 We may think of a variety of more intense, and thus more intimate, exchanges of embodied reversibility. No doubt Sartre’s famed analysis of the

220  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy “look” resonates with anyone who has felt the burn of the lover’s gaze. Well-known affect theorist Silvan Tomkins declares that the “affect is primarily facial behavior.”18 What of the angry parent scolding a child with a cold look? What of the impoverished street beggar, the widow, the defenseless? The eyes of a disappointed friend? The genuine exchange of a gaze or look, to be clear, involves more than an interlocking of physical synaptic connections firing in conjunction with each other. Rather, what may arise is a profounder existential unity, whereby co-affection emerges: the interweaving of subjective les paysages. Indeed, embodied interweaving follows upon the fact that the interpretation of semantic content must be set in its embodied stream for one to grasp the full meaning of a sentence’s grammar. Purposeful body language, rooted in primitive action-based gestures such as requesting, informing, and sharing, precedes verbal communicative intentions. Utterances, which are then verbalized into coherent messages, evolved from the more basic embodied medium of communication, which demands habitual participation in the simple syntax of the communicative signal performed in direct conjunction between you and me, in the here and now. The intercorporeal dynamic of “pointing” exhibits a central theme relevant to our purpose. It illustrates the hermeneutical privilege of the body in acts of communicative interweaving. The pointing of an index finger serves the purpose of gestural sign that directs the attention of the recipient spatially to some locale in the context of two parties, a communicative occurrence that operates independently of the discursive reference of language. This is due to the network of meaning in which pointing is already embedded, what Gurwitsch would call an “index of appurtenance,” or that realm of corporeity that is a member of a specific context.19 Inference on the part of the recipient does take place, but the point established here is that its embodied meaning eludes formal semantic structures. The pointing usually supplements language in a particular situation in which language simply cannot achieve the practical intention of the pointer, a mode of communication always placed firmly within a social intention (one that is fully embodied). I may point to my pint glass at the bar when I lock eyes with the bartender (facial expressions and the moment of interlocking of eyes matters. Is the bartender frustrated or preoccupied or on his way to the bathroom? I can tell right away upon interlocking eyes). He nods his head back happily, and his eyes are soft toward mine. My message has been received: please refill my pint with the same stout I just finished, whenever you have time in the next ten minutes or so. He infers this on the back of several linguistic and social conventions, namely, that I ask him politely for a beer (I don’t get it myself), that I wait for the same beer (not whiskey or an IPA), that I have to pay him right after (unless I have a tab), and other forms of common understanding we share in our embodied exchange, in which I have induced the recipient to meet

The body and eucharistic experience  221 my request (which he regularly invites by walking back and forth in front of me, sometimes chatting with me). Research shows that despite the assumption we may have that such embodied gestures are parasitic on complex grammars of language, it is rather these gestural forms of communication, enacted in embodied co-affection, that lay the ground for common social intentions and intercorporeal reversibility, even verbal communication as such. 20 To put it directly, Michael Tomasello suggests that “it is also possible that the human capacity for language evolved quite a long way in the service of gestural communication alone, and the vocal modality is actually a very recent overlay.”21 Infants, for example, do not use language to communicate with the mother, and vice versa. The prelinguistic domain of co-affection, in which infant and mother enjoy the intimate bond of intersubjective communication, also involves social intentions about requesting, informing, and sharing. 22 The world-horizon may sometimes correspond to the idea of a readymade object, but this claim fails, in my view, to elucidate the most basic structure of our acquaintance with the world’s changing horizonal shape. As an intersubjective phenomenon, the world ultimately submits to the logic of intercorporeal meaning, the interpersonal dynamic of social practices, and, ultimately, to the “store of experience we take over by communication, education, and tradition” (Husserl’s doxa of the lifeworld). This includes not only the immediate horizon of “typical familiarity” but also the open horizon of living possibilities that grow out of such familiarity and the cultural conventions attached to intercorporeity—a tangle of experience lived independently of the metaphysics of representation (since our social practices do not “hook onto” the world out there). 23 If “liturgy disqualifies representational consciousness,”24 and I think it must do, then how is the knowledge of the Spirit communicated in the reception of the bread and wine? What are the phenomenological dynamics of interweaving (Merleau-Ponty) in eucharistic experience? Lacoste states flatly, “our gestures, in the ceremony of the eucharistic memorial, taken in all of its dimensions, are those of affection.” And this “does not point to our concepts” [non point de nos concepts], but it instead highlights the knowledge transmitted to us in “our gestures purely and simply” [purement et simplement de nos gestes]. 25 What might this involve for those who pursue, in a collective spirit, the presence of Christ in the collective gestures of the eucharist?

III Lacoste: eucharistic Mitbefindlichkeit To know God liturgically is to realize a type of knowledge acquired through friendship or, more precisely, through worship in an ecclesial context informed by chants, eucharist, prayer, and sacred community. 26 For Lacoste, God is surely “felt” and “known” as unknown through liturgical gesticulations. But, faith, knowledge, doctrine, and the objective rites of the liturgy

222  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy always guide and inform the subjective, affective character or religious experience. Simply put, faith occupies the lifeblood of sacred existence but is regulated by the space of the church, a shelter where “liturgically the knowledge of God learns to break with the quotidian order of the world,” which leads to “la rupture inaugural” with the place of the world that the reduction makes possible. 27 When eucharistic experience is carried out under the auspices of the community of Christ (the mystical body), the representational structure of knowledge fades. No doubt, the eucharist “gives less to know than it gives to be.”28 It goes without saying, I would suggest, that this proves manifestation within the horizon of the world cannot be annexed by cognitive calculation. Eucharistic experience frustrates and ultimately eludes the triumphant mood of the metaphysics of representation, whose impulse lies in conquest of uniformity, homogeneity, and totality. The aggregate parts of the world we may experience do not add up to a sum total of the so-called unabridged and unspoiled configuration of manifestation. This is no such thing as an unspoiled configuration of manifestation. A work of art appears to me in a manner neither like a tool nor like another animate, conscious being. Furthermore, a single artistic phenomenon, like a Rembrandt painting, may well appear to me at one moment like an object under theoretical investigation, to be dissected carefully into its various parts (if I want to restore it) or like a masterpiece to be enjoyed all at once (as an informed witness to its beauty in a museum). Things of all kinds, from numbers, to tables and chairs, to works of art, not least, to an embodied other, reveal to me the complicated layers and plurality of manifestation. Yet, “God is admittedly no thing.” Thankfully, liturgy does not “require an actual representational consciousness, but actors in a spectacle.”29 Embodied affection underlies the category of drama and the performative knowledge located therein. Born of drama, the liturgy, prayer, the bread and wine in particular, show that mood and desire involve the whole person and the knowledge of embodied kinematics, one centrally experienced in the co-affection that transforms the “other bodies” into brothers and sisters. Lacoste writes, In giving themselves common words and common gestures, men who pray clearly speak their wish—their wish for a plenary presence of the Absolute at the heart of co-affection. An affectivity that does not serve the manifestation of the world, but that of the neighbour and of God: the liturgical logic of presentiment tells us that this is not unthinkable. But for that to become reality, this world must pass … or at least it must be bracketed.30 In the collective focus on transcending the world, the mystical body in worship “knows neither subjects nor objects,” but it knows nonetheless the

The body and eucharistic experience  223 collective heartbeat of the church. In this deep co-affective bond, brothers and sisters in Christ can “shatter the measure of the world.”31 This is radical and violent language. Can we really bracket or shatter the world together in this manner? Lacoste advances the following phenomenological thesis about the social practice of liturgy: it is a drama that requires more than a mere cognitive act of faith. Faith enables one to practice the art of inhabiting the limit (l’art d’habiter la limite).32 The limit lay between this empirical world and the domain of supernatural presence where one comes face to face with God. Faith, expressed in prayer, can even “incapacitate history’s hold us”33 not because prayer wills an intellectual erasure of history but because one feels transported into a relationship with God. But, without hesitation, Lacoste reminds us the limit remains always a limit, a pre-eschatological space that does not permit the soul to enjoy an immediate face-to-face relationship with God to be manifest, however much we may desire and yearn for God’s presence. For the sacraments embody points of “mediation” that force us to admit we cannot “annul the empirical” in our sacramental relationship with Christ. The beatific vision, in which I encounter God face to face, is a non-sacramental experience of God in which God could be present to us without mediation. We are not yet there. We remain, this side of death, obligated to practice the art of dwelling at the limit.34 The body carries sacramental know-how, in that such gestures and language sustain the performance of the liturgy. The medium of the body’s memory, expectation, and affectivity opens the soul up like a receptacle, in order to receive the Spirit of Christ. For the “sway of the world remains when we want to exist beyond the world,” and so we participate in the liturgical performance by making “all that we are empirically participate in it.”35 The domain of co-affection, the interweaving of bodies, forms the central mis-en-scene of collective action and social intention, of eucharistic knowledge born of the group’s heart. Because it expands our experiential reach beyond the cognitive limits of the metaphysics of representation, co-affection enables the “we” of those who receive the sacrament together to “shatter”36 the measure of the world, or to “rupture”37 the closure of the world, or to “liberate oneself”38 from the government of the world, because the sacrament enacts, and directly prompts, intercorporeal play between brothers and sisters, a unity not thematized in a textbook. For Lacoste, the “mystical body of Christ” gives to Christian practice the focus and power to remove the Christian from the world (without leading to a disembodied spiritual practice). The collective space of church belongs to the public space of being-in-the-world in a way that is subversive to being-in-the-world. A space formed by the grace of Christ and its eschatological orientation, ecclesial communion makes available the home of liturgy: the time of prayer, the gestures of the eucharist, the music of liturgical song. The mystical body of Christ is where one anticipates, and

224  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy only anticipates, the full presence of the Parousia, a practice promoted, perpetuated, and molded by the non-representational logic of the sacrament, prayer, preaching, song. What is made present, if anything, by the economy of the eucharist and the liturgy? In other words: what is it about the logic of the ecclesial space that distinguishes it from the logic of being-in-the-world? In other words: is there a sacramental datum, a sacramental “intuition”? In addressing this problematic directly, Lacoste remains critical of the “stranglehold” [La mainmise] empiricism.39 Science is sometimes described as a discourse of objects without a subject, a mindless world, or what I might call a disembodied world. Does the eucharist welcome the traditional language of “real presence” even when late modern discourse defines real presence as the consciousness of a reified sensible object impressed onto the mind’s faculty? The short is answer is that such empiricism remains impossible in a community performance like the liturgy. The presence of myself, together with brothers and sisters, forms the ground of the mystical body of Christ, which, in turn, makes possible the presence of an invisible Christ communicated in the Holy Spirit. This may well be analyzable phenomenologically. That collective intentionality, that joint attention that cultivates a focus on the economy of the sacrament of the eucharist, offers access to the community’s mood of faithful expectation. Lacoste’s eschatological interpretation of embodied religious experience does not allow for ecstasy or subjective euphoria, either individually or collectively. So radical is Lacoste’s focus on eschatology that he will assert the “not-yet” of the future abolishes all sacramental economies of presence. The eschatological anticipation of presence, to put it another way, is antithetical to that of the guaranteed enjoyment of unspoiled presence. What does the eschaton accomplish now? Nothing, properly speaking, since anticipation of the eschaton does not generate tangible or empirical presence. The eschaton, and the contemplation of Christ in this temporal directionality, involves a “horizon of the end” that never arrives, certainly not in this life.40 My interpretation of unguarded statements like these is that Lacoste refuses to grant transubstantiation a legitimate place in phenomenological theology, not least any form of presence that trades on representational metaphysics. God does not condescend into the elements as if the presence of Christ’s body and blood occupies the substance of the elements, in a moment of pure substantial presence. I concur with Lacoste, if my reading of his argument is permissible. In two essays Lacoste released in the book L’intuition sacramentelle, the sacramental economy of experience unfolds wholly within the eschatological horizon of time.41 It appears, on my reading, that sacramental presence may be affirmed after all, but he forbids “real presence” if we mean by that term that we can grasp Christ in our representational conscious apprehension of an object inside the flow of consciousness. Eucharistic experience, as a paradigm for religious experience, yields the opposite: an apophatic discourse of absence which gives way to a parched spiritual consciousness, born of the embodied kinematics of patience, hope, and peace, even fatigue. The ecclesial mystical body designates the site of a

The body and eucharistic experience  225 purified faith, whereby social practice intends to teach one to wait patiently “between the times,” in accord with the temporality of eschatological hope. We remember Christ until he comes again, the past and the future drawn together in the present, even if the present does not yield presence. The mystical body of Christ is precisely “mystical” in that it describes a form of asceticism. In proposing that we identify with the monk who imitates the humility and poverty of the Cross, the presence of Christ is present only in that poverty we display. The church for Lacoste (and this is important) is not a political or social body visible within the world nor the place of ethics and justice but rather a place of contemplative security, the home of passive grace, not work. It reflects a site of mystical existence where one can exist before God and find rest from the world. It is a place of love and vigil, of faith and anticipation, and, finally, of sacramental symbolism where one enjoys the eschatological anticipation in which creation groans for completion. We do not enjoy this presence as a presence of “fulfilling content” born of sense data, at least not until we see Christ face to face, in the eschaton. The eschatological framework grants symbolic power to the bread and wine as symbolic gestures of grace. The symbolic power of the bread and wine lies precisely in the symbol’s capacity to stand in for what is no longer there, at least no longer there in the world. This intuition may not correspond to sensible intuition, but it remains intuition nonetheless. The symbolic power is cultivated, to be clear, by a sacramental attitude, a world of faith as Lacoste names it (le monde de la foi), which occupies in us a subjective world rich in affection, as “une sorte de Befindlichkeit inalienable.”42 The world of faith, however, does not permit the Christian to easily indulge in feelings of religious experience, such as the heart flutter, or the “taste of the infinite” (Schleiermacher) or the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto). Any such experience one may undergo in the eucharist or in prayer, and they are inevitable are pre-eschatological experiences. In the world of faith, then, I labor to envisage God who is yet to come, in the eschatological future. It is a natural act for me only once I exercise faith. Those who do not dwell in the world of faith may see in the bread and wine a “luring” transcendence, but they must look closely. Hence, the givenness of the sacrament, or sacramental intuition, is made present in the subjective horizon of faith. My world expands to include the world of faith, and sacramental intuition, once received, is “identical to an entrée into the world of faith.”43 Framed as a lived experience that unfolds within the world of faith, sacramental “intuition” is not necessarily sensible or physical stuff insofar as intuition may be manifest according to other modes of manifestation (i.e., aesthetic, moral, supernatural). Husserl lays the conceptual groundwork for a phenomenology of intuition in this manner: there is a proportional relation obtained between intuition and mode of givenness: To every fundamental species of objectivities — as intentional unities maintainable throughout an intentional synthesis and, ultimately, as unities belonging to a possible “experience” — a fundamental species

226  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy of “experience”, of evidence, corresponds, and likewise a fundamental species of intentionally indicated evidential style in the possible enhancement of the perfection of the having of an objectivity itself.44 Every given, that is, possesses its own objectivity, or form of givenness. For Lacoste, faithful obedience unverified by sensible experiential content constitutes the locus of authentic religious affection (not ecstatic subjective feelings). How is this possible anthropologically? He avoids anchoring the sense of self in essentialist terms which philosophers like Henry and Levinas above call “ipseity” (Latin for “in itself”). Rather Lacoste defers the self’s presence by the delay of action, the sense of becoming inherent in the act of temporal selving, what he calls “adseity”45 (an embodied orientation toward something different than or beyond itself). The adseity of the eucharistic experience highlights the saint’s (non) present temporal posture of becoming or being-toward, the endless movement of sacramental anticipation, again, made manifest in the subjective world of faith. The temporal dynamic of the eschatological shape of the eucharist offers its own objectivity: a temporal rhythm to be learned by the saint, and the corresponding mood of foretaste is cultivated over and again in the eucharist. The more we bracket the apparent in favor of an attentive look at the inapparent, enacted and embodied in the mood of faith, the more we become manifest according to the way it gives itself, in the “taste the joy that shatters the limits of the world.” Such joy remains partial and it does not disclose the definitive, but rather the “next to last,” the pre- eschatological penultimate logic of the sacrament, which implicates “our body, and that also implicate some things chosen among all the things of the earth—bread, wine, water, fire, and still more—it is indeed a matter of perceiving and even tasting the definitive.”46 This may suffice to satisfy us for now, before we encounter Christ face to face. Interpreted in this way, eucharistic experience invites a tempered joy, rooted in the mood of faith, nourished by a promise, and communicated and reaffirmed by performative gestures that implicate the whole body. The eucharist is a pre-experience of the Parousia, but joy is mistaken when it pretends of be in full grasp of its object, in full presence. So it is joy expressed in the elusiveness of the fragmentary, in the foretaste of what yet is to come and what has been promised to come.47 To be in the mystical body of the church is therefore to live in the shadow of the temporality of the Cross and Resurrection, a form of life that Lacoste calls being-in-church (l’être-en-Eglise) or the “existential sense of ecclesiality”48 —an apophatic “unsaying” or negation of the world; ultimately, it constitutes a spiritual liberation from the stranglehold of empiricism. Yet, and this remains crucial for my present argument, the “unsaying” never may take leave of those objective and empirical modes of disclosure altogether, frustrating as it may be in the moment of reception of the elements of bread and wine.49

The body and eucharistic experience  227 As one becomes grafted into the mystical body of church through belonging to (and Lacoste stresses belonging) and participating in the liturgical life of the church, a necessary phenomenological step ensues: the theological reduction.50 The theological reduction occurs neither in a living room nor in a prison cell nor in a nature reserve. Only in the life of the church does the manifestation of the world of faith infirm the empirical manifestation of objects. The bracketing of the world is hard work (even existential and emotionally violent) and it takes effect through the eschatological reorganization of one’s temporal plane of which the church is uniquely equipped to accomplish. This is why Lacoste says that the church is, “the primordial place of the theological reduction” and the present moment of non-experience, or the “play between memory and absolute hope.”51 The totality of one’s experience in the church constitutes, for Lacoste, the hermeneutic of Christian life (not institutional power or political capital). It is an (im)pure place insulated from the world—where no relation with the world can take hold (except an ontic or physical relation). 52 If the eucharist manages to liberate us from the existential stranglehold of the empirical world, surely it does not invite us to take leave of it altogether? I dwell now on this tension between the gift of eucharist and empirical givens of sense data that make up so much of the horizon of experience.

IV Conclusion: eucharist and empiricism from Out of This World 1 ‘Like everybody else …’ ‘Like everybody else, I bowed my head during the consecration of the bread and wine, lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice, believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred. I went to the altar rails and received the mystery on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt time starting up again. There was never a scene when I had it out with myself or with another. 53 —Seamus Heaney The embodied practices of ritual, and the eucharistic site of contemplation in particular, belongs to my kinematic knowledge of the world. Faith does not have a discourse. Faith does not employ concepts to speak about or “explain” God (recall Chapter 1), unless the paradigm of conceptualism or

228  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy representationalism were to reign over faith. Rather faith decides to submit body and soul to God in adoration, in which we are summoned by the mystical body to eat his flesh and drink his blood. In this performative context our gaze becomes converted and wholly modified in and by the Spirit of adoration.54 How does, then, eucharistic adoration involve us in the horizon of experience? Herein lies the chief problem that undermines, in my view, Lacoste’s liturgical/theological reduction, embodied though it remains: the logic that motivates his vocabulary of “shattering” or “rupturing” the measure of the horizonal world reintroduces the cleavage between the subject and the horizon. Related to the action of rupturing is the logic of “stranglehold” [La mainmise] bound up with the realm of objects and empirical data. Here Lacoste cultivates a position of suspicion, even fear, concerning the spiritual power of empiricism. True, Husserl says, phenomenologists are the genuine positivists. But for Lacoste, this Husserlian statement may mean that manifestation must be protected or safeguarded from the “pull” or the “grip” of objectivism and empiricism as it is conceived by late modern science (no doubt Lacoste echoes here Henry’s thesis in Barbarism). Positivism, therefore, reflects two types of lived experience: the subjective ground of experience versus the objective flow of raw data. Lacoste no doubt brackets the latter in favor of the former. This gives rise to at least two problems. First, how can we rupture or shatter the measure of objective empiricism even while acknowledging the power of the embodied field of affection to disclose knowledge about empirical objects in the world? Second, can we retreat into oneself, or once set within the domain of co-affection, can we withdraw into the church? This movement of “withdrawal” remains fundamentally impossible from a phenomenological point of view (not least a theological one). One way to demonstrate the counterpoint I wish to advance against Lacoste is to dwell on a textured poem about the reception of the eucharist penned by the Irishman Seamus Heaney. Empiricism, or the realm of objects, ought not cause us to descend into a mindless world, a domain shorn of all subjective dynamics of the lived body and the norms of social practice to which we are entitled. The opposite remains of singular importance: the embodied faith of the Christian does not bracket or shatter objectivity, because there is no fear that objects exercise agency that may make the Christian submit to a stranglehold of positivism. There is no sacramental intuition sui generis in structure, as if the eucharist’s invisible disclosure had only to do with the world of faith occupied by the Christian (is there in Lacoste a two-world dualism operative, the world of faith versus the world of empirical data?) to the exclusion of the visible horizon of objects. The world of faith may well “infirm” or “weaken” (Lacoste’s words) the rigidity of empiricism; however, the world of faith does not see the object first, and then, after the fact, interpret it (recall our attempt to dismantle the Myth of the Given in Chapter 8).

The body and eucharistic experience  229 That is: I would like to draw the simple conclusion, that the world of faith constructs a world that is always already embedded in the horizon’s empirical givenness. Just so, I dwell sacramentally between subjective and objective domains without separating out facts and values, or interpretive schemes and sense objects, for the causality of experience runs in both directions at once. There are not two worlds but one world mediated to us by a theological stance. In eucharistic contemplation there is sensible intuition (bread and wine) overlaid with an interpretive gesture, embodied in ritual practice. I must be careful here not to return to the myth of the brute given. It is not as if empirical data consist of a collection of floating neutral objects or “brute facts” that the Christian, after prayer, decides to interpret as the bread and wine mediated by the Holy Spirit. The Christian does not, that is, take pieces of bread and a cup of wine, and subsequently frame them within a particular interpretive scheme rooted in a sacred text (e.g., the Last Supper text). Rather, as the poem indicates, eucharistic action shows us that God’s design invokes a holism in which the sensible givens of bread and wine co-emerge with the interpretive meaning granted to them in scripture and liturgical practice. In other words, I automatically enjoy an embodied knowledge of the bread and wine as rich sacramental symbols that exceed, without contradicting, the realm of empirical objects. I bow my head during the eucharistic prayers. I then lift my eyes to behold the chalice and bread, and, at the same time, “I believe” or submit to God in adoration through the work of the Spirit. I do not in my “act of believing” (as Heaney expresses it) engage in a theoretical deliberation or rational calculation of the metaphysical mechanics of real presence. Nor do I rely on an argument for the existence of God. No such conceptual or discursive thresholds exist in eucharistic contemplation. I instead simply enjoy the liturgy as given, for it invites me to enjoy and love, that is, to adore God, as I receive the bread on my tongue and drink of the cup with my lips. In my approach to the rails and upon my return, “I shut my eyes fast” in order to make an act of thanksgiving. When I open them, I may have “felt time starting up again.” Heaney offers a phenomenological portraiture of the affective flow of contemplation. Profoundly ordinary for so many Christians, many walk up to the rails to receive in humility the eucharist. What follows from the reception of the mystery is the subjective experience of affective knowledge, of a grace communicated to me in body and spirit, even if I do not cognitively understand or reflect on real presence from a narrative or conceptual point of view. While there is no rule against debating the eucharist in the liturgical setting, no one does so. The narrative told about the last supper during the eucharist does not involve the interpretive work of reading a parable or the life of Jesus as a whole, nor does it require any narrative imagination whatsoever. In fact, the embodied mystery of approaching the rails after the consecration and returning to the pews does not evoke a “scene when I had it out with myself

230  Jean-Yves Lacoste and liturgy or with another.” The gestures themselves communicate the love I know when I come under the kinetic knowledge enacted by the habit of ritual. I do not think but enjoy. I do not “have it out with myself” in the language of concepts. Rather even after the moment when time starts up again, the words and ritual acts possess me, inasmuch as they mark me with what later in that poem above Heaney calls an “undying tremor and draw. Like well water far down.” The depth dimension of grace, the well water far down in each of us, reveals the subjective “gathering point” of the structure of sacramental manifestation: loving interrelation with each other in Christ. Things such as sacred signs can be disclosed in the “how” of their appearing, such that the bread and wine are what they are through their appearing to a subjective life, who is the medium of disclosure as such. Things become actualized and appear to me in flesh and bone in the world of faith, whereby wine and bread are understood from the standpoint of the theological attitude. Here, according to the affective logic of eucharistic experience, I change my thematic direction so that I collectively intend to study how I am in relation to God, even if it is not conceptual or couched in explicit narrative form. By grace, one could say Heaney urges us to admit, I am given to myself in the eucharist. By force of embodied social practice, I evaluate all the relational components of my life in the light of death and Resurrection of Christ. I can determine in this setting how my life lived conforms to the kenotic self-giving of Christ and the long-range mission of Christ as the body of Christ in which I participate. Do I really participate? If so, how? More than an argument or set of precepts is to be adduced in the eucharist if I am to be converted into the imitatio Christi. I submit to the wine and bread as they are given, within the cultic scene, which involves the corporeal elements as theological symbols that judge my life in a Christological light. Their reception shapes not only my sense of time but my horizon of experience as well. The “well water far down,” the origin of the sacramental tremor, coordinates my interior life of affection with the exterior world of signs, embodied elements, and the community of other embodied agents. The collective intentionality of the mystical body, therefore, invests us with power not to shatter the measure of the world by literally stopping horizon’s time (or finding refuge in the eschaton), but to appropriate to ourselves the universal well of divine water, the eternal spring of Christ for us in sacrifice and Resurrection. In unity of the eucharist, we are called to the vocation of collective enjoyment of Christ, and, in the same act, of loving interrelation with each other. The pathos of Christ in us (the well water far down) draws each of us together in community of the living water, in order to incorporate us within the selfsame kenotic mission of Christ. The ultimacy of embodied love is that it is learned in ritual practice, but it only comes to fruition once

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it occurs in the context of others: a stark conclusion to draw here is that the eucharist does not stop time so that we may individually retreat into the church. No. In receiving we may understand more precisely, because we adore and love each other in Christ, the eschatological (already-not yet) scope of Christ in the world. Once time “starts back up” (Heaney), figuratively speaking, a fresh perspective on the world motivated by love can emerge, which dilates my horizon of experience (and yours). The manifestation of imitatio Christi within me broadens my horizon just to the degree it firmly situates me in loving relation with others in the body of Christ. The eschatological enjoyment of the world, the outward course into the structure of the empirical world (populated by other individuals), follows from the ongoing collective transformation in Christ the eucharist makes possible.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 679, A808/ B836. 2 For more on the autonomous and disengaged structure of the modern self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chapter 17. 3 We note the word “mystical” or “mystic” has a historical contingency of its own. See, for example, Louis Bouyer, “Mystique: Essai sur l’histoire d’un mot,” Supplément de la Vie spirituelle, vol.1, no. 9 (1949): pp. 2–23. 4 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), especially chapters 4–5. 5 Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, June 29, 1943. Papal Archive, The Holy See, §65. 6 Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §64. 7 Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §69. 8 Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §87. 9 Mark Johnson, “What Makes a Body?” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 2 (2008): pp. 159–170, reference, p. 167. 10 Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” in The Experience of God, eds. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 93–103; also for similar themes see Être en danger, p. 254ff. 11 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 86. 12 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 525. 13 Husserl, Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 526. 14 Emotive moods, which recede from thematic representational consciousness is explained lucidly in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), p. 80ff. 15 Husserl, Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 527. 16 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 31. 17 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 142. For the French expression,

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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see Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 185. Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery: Consciousness, Vol. I (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008), p. 114. Aron Gurwitsch, “Marginal Consciousness,” in The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch, vol. III, eds. Richard M. Zaner and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Spring, 2010), p. 489. Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 60ff; Mark Johnson, claims (rightly I think) here is “no language in itself,” but only a grammar enacted with the body and metaphor. See his The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 81. Tomasello: Origins of Human Communication, p. 246. For an excellent phenomenological treatment of this in the context of the intercorporeal, see Shaun Gallagher, “Intercorporeity: Enaction, Simulation, and the Science of Social Cognition,” in Phenomenology and Science: Confrontations and Convergences, eds. Jack Reynolds and Richard Sebold (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), pp. 161–180. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, pp. 42 and 49. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 98. Lacoste, “La présence et la demeure: L’eucharistie par-delàtoute ‘métaphysique de la présence,’” pp. 29–59 in L’intuition sacramentelle, p. 56. Lacoste, “‘Resurrectio Carnis:’ Du savoir thélogique à la connaissance liturgique,” pp. 205–227 in La phénoménalité de Dieu. Lacoste, “Resurrectio Carnis,” p. 227. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 103. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 97. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 103. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 102. Lacoste, “Bâtir, habiter, prier,” p. 382. Lacoste, “Bâtir, habiter, prier,” p. 389. Lacoste, “De la ‘Phénoménologie de l’Espirit’ à ‘la Montée du Carmel,’” Revue thomist, vol. 97, no. 1 (1989): 5–39, quotes on p. 33, but see pp. 33–39. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 104. Lacoste, “Liturgy and Coaffection,” p. 103. Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 305. Lacoste, “Expériences hors existence: Un problème,” p. 124. For more on the ideological stranglehold empiricism wields, see Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 69ff. Lacoste, “The Phenomenality of Anticipation,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, eds. Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 33. See “La presence et la demeure: L’eucharistie par-delà toute ‘métaphysique de la presence,’” pp. 29–58 and “L’intuition sacramentelle,” pp. 59–96, both in the text L’intuition sacramentelle. Lacoste, “L’inuition sacramentelle,” p. 91. Lacoste, “L’inuition sacramentelle,” p. 93. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 161. Lacoste, Note sur le temps, pp. 83, 133, and 180. Lacoste, “The Work and Complement of Appearing,” in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 91–92.

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47 Lacoste, “The Phenomenality of Anticipation,” p. 32. 48 l’être-en-Eglise is Lacoste’s phrase. See Lacoste, Note sur le temps, p. 190. 49 Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Petite phénoménologie de la fatigue,” in Présence and Parousie (Genève: Ad Solem, 2006), pp. 309–322. 50 Lacoste, Note sur le temps, p. 211. 51 Lacoste, Note sur le temps, p. 190. 52 Lacoste, Note sur le temps, p. 210. 53 Seamus Heaney, New and Selected Poems 1988–2013 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 162. 54 For more on how eucharistic adoration is brought about by the Holy Spirit, and how God “sees” us in the Spirit (we do not see God), I refer you to the provocative Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), especially, §32, “Adoration.”

Postscript

12 Sacramental worldhood

I Sacramental leeway We have above in nearly every chapter touched on why a conceptual system in which representational consciousness plays the chief role does not do justice to the world-horizon’s unity with our subjectivity. The irrefusable investment the world makes in us we have named the horizon. In this final chapter we shall have the occasion to explore how one may manage to live sacramentally in the horizon on the strength of the mood of faith, as a possibility among possibilities of “life in the world.” We can now, therefore, take a final step, and speak the language of faith to designate the domain of sacramental worldhood, an expressly theological vocation. This requires us to emphasize that structure of experience the horizon makes available: the structure or domain of possibility. The world in which we move and have our being does not contain contents we have at our disposal, as if we can arrange and “grasp” the world with a plan we have thought through (as if I were a smaller circle located within the world’s larger circle). The world is not grasped quantitatively, but rather is lived qualitatively. We must accommodate ourselves to the excess of the world and, in particular, to its character as a land of possibilities. Which possibilities are seized or “projected” by a theological Dasein must be decided by asking Dasein to come under the provenance of a mood that is learned over time by embodied practice. The horizonal “leeway” [Spielraum] of which Heidegger speaks, as I understand the term, enables a theological vocation to take hold precisely as a possibility of worldhood, one legitimate projection among many. Projection eludes the jurisdiction of consciousness and of thematizing and grasping. Dasein performs the mood of projection because, as a self whose structure remains incomplete, it is always a possibility to be realized. In projecting, Dasein “throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such,” not so it can thematically reduce the contents of possibility to the static sphere of consciousness. Hence possibility can achieve just what it is: the self’s dynamism of becoming, the potentiality-for-being that is always held open ready to evolve into more possibilities of selfhood.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251477-17

238 Postscript What might it mean to say that a standpoint on the possibility of worldhood governed by sacramental projection is at once sacramental and tied to the horizon of experience? How does vocation, to use another terminological distinction, unfold in the space between immanence and transcendence? No doubt some have claimed that a kind of secular enchantment inhabits nothing but the order of immanence, which serves as a critique of theological transcendence. Woosh, wonder, awe, each constitutes a primitive feeling evoked by those who are decidedly not religious, or even atheistic in outlook (we discussed this in Chapter 10). The “joy of secularism,” for some (increasingly for many), possesses a capacity, as a worldview of immanence, that authorizes one to affirm fully the world just as it is given in empirical nature. The logic of secular enchantment recruits a formidable counter-narrative against those (whom they claim are mostly religious) who should seek to oppose immanence to transcendence. This opposition may well result in a Gnostic retreat from the world (escape from immanence) or in the domestication of the world according to a particular religious ideology (imposition of transcendence). Sacramental worldhood holds both immanence and transcendence in difficult but necessary tension. It does not overcome the secular as secular, but instead affirms the secular in a different way. Because the world subsists in a bundle of possibilities, it should be clear at this point that no closed immanence can grant to the world a purely secular or theological shape. Secular enchantment, no less than theocracy, restricts possibility. In its act of totality, such a static worldview (whether secular or theological) at once presupposes totality and compels us to reduce the world to a closed system, like a massive empirical thing or circle (composed of a mosaic of bits of things). The sacramental horizon of the world opens the field of worldhood as a field of possibilities. As fundamentally suspended among possibilities, sacramental worldhood opens the door to theological evidence and ultimately to forms of transcendence (or the supernatural) that are latent as possibilities to be realized. Precisely because the horizon has no clear boundaries, in principle it must refuse to shut off the “something more” to which transcendence points. Does not the Heideggerian principle of “leeway” indicate that while there may exist a general shape of the world, it must obey the law that its borders stay open? Leeway implies the world belongs to an endless state of “becoming,” that the world corresponds to hermeneutical “play” as its apriori. The soft and malleable terrain of possibility is where a sacramental worldhood, a theological vocation, can take root and grow.

II Landscapes of the sacramental For the purposes of conceptual clarification, it will be necessary to make a terminological distinction between “sacrament” and “sacramental.” The

Sacramental worldhood  239 concept of sacramentality represents a contested motif in contemporary systematic theology and philosophical theology. In recent decades, the meaning of “sacramentality” has come under increasing constructive scrutiny, which I am inclined to think can prompt fruitful reconsiderations of sacramentality’s hermeneutic. 2 Recall here the debate, at least since Karl Barth, about what constitutes the ground of the sacraments, a ground often assigned the distinguished name of the “fundamental” or “primordial” sacrament. Rejecting all sacraments except for one, Barth’s position entailed the then radical claim that only the person of Christ can be considered a worthy enough sign to merit the name “sacrament”: Christ is thus the fundamental sacrament, even to the exclusion of proper rituals like baptism and eucharist.3 Karl Rahner thematized all sacraments as but derivatives of the church, for she is the primal sacrament of God’s presence in the world.4 Edward Schillebeeckx worked out in more detail Barth’s principal claim that Christ unfolds as the sacrament of the encounter with God, the origin of both the church and the ritual of the eucharist, because both represent and embody Christ as the fundamental sacrament. 5 Liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo reframes the human condition as a principal cipher of grace; the human being personifies the fundamental sacrament by which God communicates and imparts grace to creatures.6 In this spirit, David Brown interprets the work of gardening, the performance of dance, and the enjoyment of laughter as sacramental signs.7 Others still yet, like Elizabeth Johnson, contend that sacramental theology must be prepared to profess that the “whole physical world itself is a primordial sacrament.”8 Similarly, some have suggested that inanimate parts of the universe, like a cup or a cigar, if the context is right, can function sacramentally.9 Going back at least to Calvin, the tradition of expanding the definition of the sacrament opens out onto the discussion of whether a rainbow (for example) is a sacrament.10 These figures, and these internecine debates, generate a clear distinction between (1) discrete sacraments and (2) sacramentality, as a hermeneutical vision capable of perpetual interpretation of things, humans, institutions, animals, dance, plants, etc., all as ciphers of grace and transcendence. This trend enables one to recast, by broadening, the economy of sacramentality. A sacrament no longer refers exclusively to baptism and eucharist, or to the other additional five sacraments in a Roman Catholic context. These rituals, even taken collectively, remain too narrow in what they signify, namely: merely the individual’s covenant relationship with the divine. What if we could find a broader category that widens the field of sacred signs, like sacramentality, which by definition asks us to imagine our relationship with the world as such as a “potentiality to-be-before-God” or a vehicle to commune with God? Theologians across the ecumenical spectrum, from Eastern Orthodox to Catholic and Protestant, unequivocally argue that the world is a sacrament, a thesis predicated upon the doctrine of creation. Trinitarian metaphors

240 Postscript abound that describe the hallowed dogma of creation, for God the Father, to invoke Irenaeus’ memorable phrase, creates the world with two hands of the Son and the Spirit.11 For some in modern theology, like Hans Urs von Balthasar, the world envisaged as a Christian doctrine is “more than nature,” because it operates by the power of grace: it is the imago trinitatis, it is a continual “turning toward” [Gegen-Wendung] the Father’s begetting of the Son, who together breathe forth the Spirit.12 We briefly map out a dialectic between two conceptions of the world, so as to bring into tension their apparently antithetical logics: (1) late modern framework of disenchantment or secular enchantment and (2) sacramental interpretations of the world, and how they are mirror images of each other, and thus appear to function as mimetic rivals. Secularism (pure immanence) operates within the parameters of “this world” in contradistinction to the counter-narrative of the “other-world,” which belongs to the province of Christianity. This dualism between worlds is precisely my target of critique. While I do not think such models of the world can be fully reconciled, I propose that the concept of the world as “horizon” may move forward the debate. In order to celebrate creation, and as a corollary, to combat Gnostic renunciation of the world, I sketch the possibility of sacramental vision applied to the world. How may one implement such a theological optics? Obviously, the world has dramatically changed from its medieval form to its modern one (we discussed this in some detail in Chapter 7). Some argue the world has been “de-divinized,” insofar as Christianity’s spiritual influence no longer captures the imagination of the majority of western citizenry, and liberal democracy has differentiated social institutions from their ecclesial context. As Jean-Luc Nancy has observed, as a matter of fact, Christianity has “ceased giving life.” It no longer “organizes our structure of experience” at a cultural, religious, linguistic, and political level. Christianity is surpassed, insofar as it is incapable of furnishing a large-scale meaning-scheme; it relinquished its function as the “common reference point” and “explicit regulative index” of Western worldhood, of discourse itself.13 While it is outside the scope of the present chapter to conduct a more detailed analysis below of this cultural shift, it is important to comment that sacramental styles of worldhood can be construed as means of recovery of what was once lost, which is precisely this lifegiving meaning-scheme that Christianity provides, especially in the face of a post-Christian, disenchanted West. I am inclined not to deny the importance of scripture and tradition (and other nodes of revelation), but rather to see the link between sacramental worldhood and theological naturalism. My position: while immanent to itself, and without implying that such immanence is purely closed on itself, the phenomenon of the world possesses an integrity all its own, resting in point of fact on its own foundations, goals, and goods. To say, as I claim, that the world possesses its own inner horizon is also to claim that the

Sacramental worldhood  241 world has goals can be fulfilled in proportion to its own measure. We have natural goods, with natural endowments we can work a particular good, even if we cannot do all the good natural to us. This does not mean that the natural world is closed off from grace. Just the opposite, to continue with Aquinas, it is to be perfected and elevated by grace, even while it remains natural.14 I do not intend to enter into the complicated debate concerning natura pura and the interrelation of nature and grace, so important in the discipline of theology since Henri de Lubac’s landmark Surnaturel.15 I wish to make explicit here only the fact that for Aquinas (at the very least) nature possesses its own internal logic or capabilities that operate apart from grace, which is not to say that the realm of “nature” remains self-sufficient and without need of grace. The world, for Aquinas, is more than a cipher or channel of grace, because it has intrinsic value in itself.16 As I have framed the world according to the logic of possibility, the world evolves over time in conjunction with the flux and contingency of all creatures who inhabit, expand, and create the world’s intersubjective fabric. A specifically “sacramental” worldhood designates, and indeed demands, a particular subjective point of view, a dilation of the heart by the love of God. I close with a meditation on the hermeneutical shape of this sacramental attitude.

III The sacramental attitude: skill acquisition In this final remark, I offer not so much a conclusion as a praise about love in fellowship with others who love. Leeway, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, informs us that existence may have primal or ground moods (Grundbefindlichkeit), but that such moods can shift into other primitive moods.17 Leeway therefore brings to light that possibility can never restrict or shut off other possibilities (otherwise, the world would no longer be a field of possibilities). We are never held hostage to one particular ground-mood, but we are rather always embedded within the possibility of projection. The sacramental attitude of love may not be a “new” ground mood, for it may allocate its manifestation across several different moods, recasting them all within its grace. The mood of grace, one could argue, is integrated within the field of moods that constitute the affective know-how of the horizon of experience. How is it integrated? Love does not so much displace the mood of angst or peace as it dilates the horizon of experience (in all that it entails, including angst) by enlarging the heart itself. And this is only by grace. Augustine writes, I have run the way of your commands, for you enlarged my heart. Not by my own decision, as though it needed no help from you, but only because you enlarged my heart. Enlargement of heart means delight in righteousness. This is a gift of God. With it we are not cramped by fear in the observance of his commands but led into the broad freedom

242 Postscript of love as we delight in justice. He promises us this wide space in his pledge, I will dwell in them, and walk about in them (2 Cor. 6.16). How spacious must be the place where God walks! In this breadth of heart there is poured out in us that charity which comes from the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.18 In the Holy Spirit the heart expands or dilates, so that its perspective on the world also dilates. Marion may call this a type of anamorphosis (Chapter 8), which enacts a radical gestalt switch, but dilation demands more than a perspective change: it requires a deepening of our love for Christ by the work of the Spirit, which enables the heart to love what Christ loves, the world-horizon as horizonal gift. Indeed it may be that theology’s central task is to teach (to all who will listen) skill of “seeing” the world as God’s creation.19 This I claim, on theological grounds, signals an enlargement of heart by the operation of grace, and on phenomenological grounds, such a vision can be nurtured by regular training in embodied contemplative action (rooted in the eucharist). We stand with charity in the courts of the Lord, reflected in the world as in a mirror. Hence, Stand in charity; then you will stand in his courts. There is wide space in charity but cramped quarters where there is hatred. But what does he say about the breadth of charity? The charity of God has been poured abroad into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given us. (Rom 5.5)20 Of course, to submit to Christ, in the sacrament of the eucharist, is to submit to God in kenotic humility, opening one to the reception of grace. It is to be ready to have one’s heart enlarged or dilated by love, in the Spirit who is the gift of love. The eucharist is more than a discrete ritual; it is more than a collective sharing in the body of Christ. Above all, eucharistic action involves training in sacramental worldhood, and I observe that such training wins for me the acquisition of a new skill. A new vision or optics, the sacramental attitude nourished in word and sacrament can be learned. My heart dilates not because I flip a switch or will it to be all at once, but because I inhabit it over time in ardor and labor, like an ascetic who trains for a new habit of soul and body. In communion with others, I learn it is better to love than to be loved. Empathic and learned love covers a multitude of sins. In the horizon of love, I understand that the transformation from novice, to advanced beginner, to competent practitioner, finally, to expert disciples takes a lifetime of intentional pilgrimage, which can develop a prethematic, affective mood of grace, empathy, forgiveness—a wide heart (largeur de coeur). From the infant to the elder, we seek eschatological dilation, not perfection here and now. Augustine chides Pelagius for the works-based economy of redemption, as if we lived before God in a series of moralistic

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episodes which finally resolve our sin. Sacramental worldhood is instead an endless pursuit, a “becoming” like Christ in and through the power the Incarnation: “if we confess that this savior and his remedy by which the Word was made flesh to dwell among us, are required by both great and small, by all, that is, from crying infants to white-haired elders, then all controversy between us on this question will be resolved.”21 For the world to become “my” sacramental world, I involve myself in the labor of expansion of the horizon of experience. The dilation of the heart in this temporal orientation is not a miracle, but a work of grace mediated by the kinetic body in relationship with other bodies. My affections change not all at once, but slowly, a process whereby the virtue of love grows as I learn its way and internalize its habit. 22 In every part of my embodied life will dilation occur, and such contemplative training will demand every part of the body. This affective expansion (dilation, extension, etc.) is eschatological, for we yearn now with heart and see in part now with the body, only then to see God face-to-face.

Notes 1 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 185. 2 For more on the connection between sacramentality and worldview or ontology, though the connection is too otherworldly for myself, see Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 3 For his conception of Christ as sacrament, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, trans. T.H.L. Park, et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 53ff; for his rejection of baptism and the eucharist as sacraments, see the whole of Church Dogmatics IV/4. 4 Karl Rahner, Church and the Sacraments, trans. W.J. O’Hara (London: Burns and Oates, 1963). 5 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, trans. Paul Barrett (London: Sheed and Ward, 1964). 6 Juan Luis Segundo, The Sacraments Today, trans. John Drury (New York: Orbis Books, 1974). 7 David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8 Elizabeth Johnson, “Is God’s Charity Broad Enough for Bears?” Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 4 (2015): 283–293, quote on p. 287. 9 Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life, trans. John Drury (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1987). 10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. II, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), p. 1294. 11 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7. 12 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. V: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1998), p.105. See Also see Alexander Schmemann, The World as Sacrament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966). 13 Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettino Bergo, et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 141–143.

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Postscript

14 See Aquinas, Summa, Part I, Q.1, A.8; also Part 2/1, Q.109, A. 2. 15 Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études historiques (Paris: Lethielleux, 2010), originally published in 1946. 16 I enter the debate concerning the supernatural from the point of view of theological naturalism. I rely not so much on Aquinas as I do Gregory of Nyssa. For more on this debate and my view, see Joseph Rivera, “Human Nature and the Limits of Plasticity: Revisiting the Debate Concerning the Supernatural,” Neue Zeitschrift für Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, vol.59, no. 1 (2017): 34–53. 17 See Heidegger’s exemplary statement on leeway: Because Dasein as temporality is ecstatico-horizonal in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so factically and constantly. With regard to that space which it has ecstatically taken in, the “here” of its current factical situation [Lage bzw. Situation] never signifies a position in space, but signifies rather the leeway of the range of that equipmental totality with which it is most closely concerned - a leeway which has been opened up for it in directionality and de-severance. Bringing-close makes possible the kind of handling and Being-busy which is ‘absorbed in the thing one is handling’ [“in der Sache aufgehende”]; and in such bringing-close, the essential structure of care falling- makes itself known. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 420. 18 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 99-120, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2003), 118, 10, 6, pp. 385–386. I am indebted to the work of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s analysis of Augustine in this regard, in his La joie spacieuse: essai sur la dilatation (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2007), chapter 1. 19 See Eberhard Jüngel writes, “Theology cannot cease to think of the world as God’s creation; indeed, this is its primary responsibility above all others, and everything else that it does must be done in service to this.” See his “The World as Possibility and Actuality: The Ontology of the Doctrine of Justification,” in Theological Essays, trans. John Webster (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 110. 20 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 121–50, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2004), 133, 1, p. 187. 21 Augustine, Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, trans. John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), p. 68. 22 The phenomenological analysis of the stages of skill acquisition, as it relates to the prethematic background, is outlined lucidly by Hubert Dreyfuss, Background Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 29ff. In a theological context, Balthasar writes, Indeed, those who have been trained, both intellectually and existentially, to contemplate all physical reality as a likeness and expressive field of intelligible truth within the world will find themselves best equipped to interpret the whole of creation as a similitude and expressive field of the Creator. See Theo-Logic, Vol. I, p. 233.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. adseity 226 affect theory 219–221 analogy of being 45, 51n63, 189n54, 201 Anamorphosis or displacement of the ego 147–155 Aquinas, Thomas 44, 156–157, 185, 201, 205, 241 Augustine, Saint 87, 95, 122, 128, 133–138, 159, 161n55, 185, 202–203, 241–242 auto-affection 59–61, 74–80, 88–89, 93, 96, 99n30; and mother-child relationship 91–92 baptism 239 becoming 42–43, 46–48, 96–98, 103, 114, 149, 173, 181, 195, 198–206, 219–220, 226, 237; see also dilation being 106, 110, 130, 201–202, 208 being-toward-death 166, 171–172, 174–176, 180–183 Brague, Remi 124 call, the 103, 105–109, 113–114, 133, 150, 154, 206 Caputo, John 51n63, 191 Cartesian ego 14, 17, 36–37, 40, 103, 106–107, 113, 122, 142, 147, 167, 175 Church, the 47–48, 69, 124, 135–137, 155–156; in Lacoste’s existentialism 173–174, 192–193, 199, 206–207, 214–215, 222–223, 226–228, 239 co-affection 216, 220–223, 228 cognition 3, 9–14, 47–48, 22–23, 86–87, 89–90, 94, 114, 121, 129,

134, 146, 169–170, 180, 229; on cognitivism 15, 84; Henry on cognition’s failing 34; Lacoste on 216–219 concepts 6, 11–16, 25, 44, 47–48, 84–87, 93–95, 114, 115, 128, 142, 145–146, 166–167, 192–195, 198, 214, 221, 227; on conceptual wallpaper 16 Descartes 13, 15, 63, 142–143, 175 Desmond, William 49n18 dilation 37–43, 45–46, 96, 113, 120, 125–126, 131, 134–135, 154, 173, 185, 199, 231; eschatological dilation 242 distention 133, 180 ecclesial existence 174, 178, 216, 221 Ek-stasis 79, 88, 98n6 empathy 46, 86–87, 93–94, 97, 242 empiricism 3, 5, 6–9, 12–14, 25, 33, 38, 58, 65–66, 91, 94, 111–112, 125, 142–146, 148–149, 155, 169, 175, 206, 223, 228–229, 238; Henry on barbarism of 6; Lacoste on stranglehold of 6–8, 136, 224, 226–227; Quine on dogma of 148 eschatology 45, 55, 81, 96–98, 121, 133, 159, 176–177, 178–183, 185, 204, 223–227, 231, 242 eucharist 4–5, 8, 44, 47–48, 84, 87, 93–97, 114–115, 128, 135, 138, 154–155, 158, 173, 184, 204–206, 221–231, 242

246 Index Falque, Emmanuel 121–123, 134, 161n30, 233n54 final or abstract principle 195–196

joint attention 95, 97, 224 joy 79, 87, 94, 104, 130, 135, 167, 173, 203–204, 215, 226

gestures 130, 151, 220–223, 226, 229–230 Gnosticism 65, 69–71, 74–81, 96, 113, 156, 185, 238, 240 Grund-Befindlichkeit 171, 179, 182

Kant, Immanuel 3, 38, 39, 160n13, 195, 214 kenosis 114, 135 Kierkegaard, Søren 123, 136, 173 know-how 7, 12–17, 115, 130, 134, 143, 169, 180, 223, 241

Hart, Kevin 18n4, 81n5, 98n29, 116n6, 161n30 Heaney, Seamus 227–228 Heidegger, Martin 9, 19n6, 30–32, 125, 130, 140n45, 160n27, 165–172, 174, 176–182, 190n80, 193, 194, 196, 203, 237–238, 241; on Leeway 237 Henry’s Principle of the duplicity of appearing 59–61 Hilary of Poitiers 158 horizon 60, 74, 81, 84, 90, 97, 107–110, 112–113, 115, 119–125, 127–128, 130, 132–136, 143, 155, 166–167, 172, 175, 179–180, 182, 185, 198–199, 216–219, 221, 225, 227–229, 231, 237–239, 241–242; conflicting interpretations of 31–38; the definition of 5, 7–8, 10, 12, 14, 16–17, 22–30; dilation of 38–43; theological horizon 44–49 Hume, David 12 Husserl, Edmund 6, 10, 14, 22–26, 28, 36–37, 40–43, 44–46, 59, 61–64, 70, 86–90, 119–122, 126–127, 130, 144–145, 159n7, 168, 196, 221, 225, 228 hypostatic union 59, 75, 158 incarnation 44, 46–47, 55–61, 63, 65–66, 71–76, 77–78, 80, 94, 152, 155, 205, 214, 243 indifference 106, 174–175, 177–179, 181–183, 188n47 inductive reason and phenomenology 14–16, 41; and theology 200 inoperativity 184 intentionality 25, 38–42, 70, 84, 89, 106, 108, 126, 144–145, 148–149, 154, 166, 183, 204, 217, 225, 242; on collective intentionality 95, 224, 230; on intentional interpenetration 97 intercorporeal bond 216–221, 223 Irenaeus 69, 74, 76–80, 240

l’adonné 107–109 lifeworld 25, 40, 43, 97, 127, 146–148, 150–151, 155–156, 217–218 liturgical dereliction 114, 174–176 liturgical gesticulation 221–223 Locke, John 12 “Me,” the 11, 23–25, 64–66, 91–92, 105, 107, 109, 113, 130 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 219 metaphysics, the definition of 193–198; and experience 199–203, 206–208 metaphysics of representation 3–5, 8–12, 14–15, 45, 55, 58, 65, 84, 94, 106, 115, 119, 125, 130, 142, 167–168, 180, 183, 216, 221–222, 228, 237 Milosz, Czeslaw 185 mind-independent world 13, 146 monk, the 173, 178, 180, 185, 225 mood 11–12, 16–17, 26, 28, 30, 42, 50n23, 86, 97, 104, 123, 126, 159, 172–176, 179–181, 184, 187n29, 189n56, 197, 209, 214, 222, 224, 226, 241–242; on embodied mood 216–219; in Heidegger 166–171; in relation to the mood of metaphysics 202–204 narrative empathy 97, 99n30 Nietzsche, Friedrich 123–124, 133, 195–196, 69, 81n2 non-representational affection 15–16, 216, 219, 224, 84 ontological monism 81, 88, 96 opening of confessio 123, 126–133; its sacramental character 133–138 otherworldliness, my critique of x, 70, 81, 154–159, 183–186, 206, 227– 231, postscript x, 240

Index  247 peace 64, 104, 133–134, 172–178, 184–185, 203–206, 224, 241; on being-toward-peace 179–183 phenomenological reduction 5–6, 62–63, 119–120, 126–127, 174–175, 182 post-metaphysics 120, 191–193, 195, 207 Quine, W. V. 19n11, 159n4 realism 3, 9, 11, 63, 128, 132, 146, 160n13, 167, 170, 186n9 representational gap 12–15 restlessness 133–138 Robinette, Brian 51n62, 103–107, 110, 114 sacramental intuition 225–226 sacramental know-how 223–225; or sacramental attitude 240–242 sacramental phenomenology 8–9 Saint John of the Cross 65, 97, 121, 174–175, 178, 181 saturation 103–104, 107, 108–112, 115, 131, 148, 152, 155–156, 157, 159; Husserl on saturated intentionality 42, 51n53 secular mood 123–125 secularity 124–126, 136, 197, 238; on secularization theory 126 Seinsfrage 191 selfhood 32–34, 37, 39–41, 66, 87, 103–105, 109, 135, 129, 172–174, 237 Sellars, Wilfred 145–146 selving 109–113, 226–227

subjectivity reclaimed 11, 16–17, 32, 39–40, 95–98, 183–186, 241–243 theological reduction 7–8, 62–65, 120–123, 128, 130, 227–228 ; on Augustinian reduction 130–137; critique of liturgical reduction 182–184; on liturgical reduction 121, 129, 172–178, 180–181, 186n5, 204 theology, the types of 43–49 the thing itself 143–144 Tomasello, Michael 221 Tomkins, Silvan 220 Trinity 45, 57, 60, 75, 129, 150–159, 240 two types of givenness 8–10, 142–146, 228 vigil 121, 173, 178–181, 183, 225 voice of Christ 93–94 world as correlate of consciousness 10, 14, 127 world of Eden 9–10, 13, 38 worldhood 11, 125, 166–167, 170, 171, 217; on sacramental worldhood 134, 136, 237–238, 240–242 world-horizon 8, 22, 24, 34, 35, 43, 58, 63, 120, 123, 128–129, 216, 218, 242; on inner horizon 22, 240; not as closed immanence 136, 239–241; subjective constitution of 22–25, 27–9, 39–41, 43, 86–87, 127–128, 143–144, 147, 186n6, 221 Zahavi, Dan 21n31, 138n1 zero-point of experience (Nullpunkt) 154