Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope (Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur) 9781793647177, 9781793647184, 1793647178

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Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur

Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur Series Editors: Greg S. Johnson, Pacific Lutheran University/Oxford University (ELAC), and Dan R. Stiver, Hardin-Simmons University Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur, a series in conjunction with the Society for Ricoeur Studies, aims to generate research on Ricoeur, about whom interest is rapidly growing both nationally (United States and Canada) and internationally. Broadly construed, the series has three interrelated themes. First, we develop the historical connections to and in Ricoeur’s thought. Second, we extend Ricoeur’s dialogue with contemporary thinkers representing a variety of disciplines. Third, we utilize Ricoeur to address future prospects in philosophy and other fields that respond to emerging issues of importance. The series approaches these themes from the belief that Ricoeur’s thought is not just suited to theoretical exchanges, but can and does matter for how we actually engage in the many dimensions that constitute lived existence.

Recent Titles in the Series Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope, by Christina M. Gschwandtner Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur, edited by Joseph A. Edelheit and James F. Moore Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body, edited by Roger W. H. Savage A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, edited by Scott Davidson Narrative Medicine in Hospice Care: Identity, Practice, and Ethics though the Lens of Paul Ricoeur, by Tara Flanagan A Companion to Ricoeur’s Fallible Man, edited by Scott Davidson

Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur Between Fragility and Hope

Christina M. Gschwandtner

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933433 ISBN 978-1-7936-4717-7 (cloth : alk. Paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-4718-4 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Esther and Joyce

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Ricoeur

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PART I: READING RICŒUR TOWARD RITUAL 1 1 Symbolism, Myth, and the Move to Second Naïveté 3 2 Scripture, Narrative, and the Move to Action

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3 Ethics, Justice, and the Move to Wisdom

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Interlude: Liturgy and Hermeneutics

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PART II: READING RITUAL WITH RICŒUR71 4 Liturgical Truth: Fidelity, Attestation, Manifestation

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5 Liturgical Meaning: Prefiguration, Configuration, Refiguration

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6 Liturgical Language: Symbolism, Polyphony, Dialogue

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7 Liturgical Imagination: Memory, Creativity, Tradition

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8 Liturgical Identity: Confession, Conversion, Community

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Conclusion 177 Notes 185

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Contents

Bibliography 249 Index 267 About the Author

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Preface

The title and topic of this book must appear strange to any careful reader of Paul Ricœur’s extensive œuvre. Ricœur was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century who reflected extensively on religious topics and biblical texts on numerous occasions, often in generous response to invitations from a great variety of people and institutions. Yet, ritual or liturgy certainly does not figure prominently in his work. His occasional comments about it are hesitant at best and hostile at worst, ranging from expressing fear of the ritualized sacred (FS, 72), dismissing its supposed logic of equivalence or correspondence as outdated and superstitious (SE, 5, 350; FS, 61–63), to seeing it as the primary cause of religious violence (RB, 31–36).1 Instead he locates a “hermeneutic of religious language” almost exclusively in an examination of religious texts, preeminently the biblical texts (FS, 39–41). And, yet, religious ritual not only “gives rise to thought” (cf. SE, 347–57), but requires interpretation and serious hermeneutic work as much as the biblical texts do. Furthermore, something is missing in a hermeneutics of religion that focuses solely on texts and ignores the places where they are read and heard or the practices that instantiate religion in concrete ways and shape religious identity and community. Many of these places and practices are liturgical, and rite has been an important element of religious expression for most of human history. It deserves more hermeneutic attention than Ricœur himself gave it in his work. This is the task the present work seeks to undertake. Part I reads Ricœur on religion and challenges several aspects of his work. Chapter 1 examines his early work on religious myth and symbolism and criticizes his dismissal of “primitive myth,” his assumption that their symbols were originally taken literally, and the somewhat too facile move from first to second naïveté. Chapter 2 lays out his biblical hermeneutics and wonders why it focuses so heavily on texts when he is more willing to move to action ix

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in other aspects of his work. It also challenges his contention that only religious texts give rise to hermeneutics and that religious experience must be “immediate” and is thus not open to hermeneutics in the same way (e.g., FS, 48). Chapter 3 focuses on his later writings on narrative identity, ethics, and justice and raises questions about the minimal role religion plays in these accounts. It also wonders why his philosophical work tends to focus on the capacities of the self, while his writings on religion instead highlight our incapacity to do the good and appeal to religion for assistance. As a whole, Part I argues that considering religious ritual practices more explicitly would address several of these problems in Ricœur’s work and provide a fuller account of religion. Part II, conversely, uses Ricœur as a guide to consider ritual or liturgical practices, arguing that his hermeneutics provides important insight for thinking about ritual and liturgy. It draws on various aspects of his work to shed light on the sort of truth at work in ritual or liturgy (chapter 4), the kind of mimetic world opened by liturgy (chapter 5), liturgical language (chapter 6), the role of imagination in liturgy (chapter 7), and the ways in which ritual shapes identity (chapter 8). Part II as a whole seeks to demonstrate that drawing on a rigorous hermeneutic approach allows us to think about liturgy in more substantive and critical fashion and maybe helps resolve some of the problems liturgical theology and ritual studies have been unable to tackle successfully, such as the role played by mimesis in liturgy, the status of innovation or creativity in ritual, or the relationship between the liturgical “world” and the world outside of liturgy. It suggests that Ricœur is a valuable guide for substantive reflection on ritual practices. Methodological speaking, this book thus proceeds as Ricœur himself frequently did: confronting two sides or positions that are apparently in contrast or conflict, showing the lacunae or shortcomings in both sides or discourses, and then putting them into productive dialogue, so that “sparks of meaning fly up at the point of friction” (TB, 303). The two sides or conversation partners here are, on the one hand, Ricœur’s hermeneutic work, despite its dearth of discussion of ritual and liturgy, and, on the other hand, liturgical practices that have received far less hermeneutic attention than biblical texts. It suggests that both sides would be enriched by this dialogue: that Ricœur’s religious hermeneutics will gain from a consideration of liturgical practices and that a reflection on what liturgy does and how it tries to accomplish it will be deepened if it is informed by hermeneutic considerations and insights. Ricœur consistently stressed that there is no view from nowhere, but that we always speak from a particular place and context (cf. CC, 154). The hermeneutic locus that informs this particular investigation is the liturgical “world” of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the tradition with which I am most familiar (and which, conveniently, happens to be a particularly rich liturgical

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tradition). Yet, while it is important to acknowledge this hermeneutic starting point, and although examples will often be drawn from this tradition, the book interacts extensively with the work of liturgical scholars in the Western Christian traditions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. (These discussions of Christian liturgy also have important implications for and significant parallels in the rituals of other religious traditions, but I am certainly not equipped to engage those in any substantive or responsible fashion.)2 At the same time, bringing Eastern Orthodoxy to bear on Ricœur’s work might also challenge some of his more problematic Augustinian leanings, such as the strong emphasis on the “servile will” or the “restless heart,” the dichotomy between love and justice, and the distinctions between nature and grace or law and grace that characterize so much of the Western tradition and deeply inform Ricœur’s account of evil and his reading of biblical texts.3 This manuscript arose out of the realization that I keep coming back to Ricœur. There is something about the charity, generosity, and honesty in his work that draws me profoundly: his incredible hospitality in reading and citing the work of other scholars, his generous ways of interpreting them, and his honesty in taking seriously the contemporary challenges to religious convictions.4 His careful hermeneutic approach is useful for topics that go far beyond what Ricœur himself engaged. Even when I want to criticize or challenge his insights and especially his narrow focus on the biblical texts in his mature work on religion, I still find his methodology and approach helpful on all kinds of levels. Over the last two decades, I have written roughly a dozen articles primarily on Ricœur and many other pieces drawing on his philosophy to some extent for reflection on dimensions of religious life or experience. This book is informed by some of those prior explorations, but weaves them together in new ways and does so in significantly revised form. These are not primarily readings of Ricœur. Although I often explicate or explain his arguments and sometimes challenge or criticize them, this is more a book that uses Ricœur’s work as an inspiration to consider in a philosophical manner topics in religious thinking and practice that he himself did not engage or discussed only rarely. It is reading religious themes with Ricœur, sometimes even against Ricœur, but drawing on his philosophy throughout for insight and perspective.

Acknowledgments

Some of the ideas and reflections presented here were first articulated in the form of conference presentations, articles, or contributions to edited collections. I thank all those who initially invited me to present or write, especially Eric Severson, Ingolf Dalferth, Michael Staudigl, Bruce Janz, Scott Davidson, and Beth Sutherland. The first chapter is a slightly revised and significantly expanded version of a previous publication (the penultimate one listed below), the rest of the book is much more loosely based on or inspired by previous publications or presentations. Nevertheless, they are acknowledged here for some overlap of ideas and occasionally of phrasing (with permission of the respective original publishers). “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic of God: A Symbol That Gives Rise to Thought,” Philosophy and Theology 13.2 (2001): 287–309. “Our Responsibility for Universal Evil: Rethinking Fallenness in Ecological Terms,” I more than Others, ed. Eric Severson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 60–74. “Toward a Ricoeurian Hermeneutics of Liturgy,” Worship 86.1 (2012): 482–505. Used by permission of Liturgical Press. “Paul Ricœur and the Relationship between Philosophy and Religion in Contemporary French Phenomenology,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 3.2 (2012): 7–23. “‘Adhesion’ to the ‘Essential’: From Sacred Text to Faithful Action,” contribution to Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion: The Legacy of Paul Ricœur, eds. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 231–72. Copyright © Mohr Siebeck Tübingen.

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Acknowledgments

“Space and Narrative: Ricoeur and a Hermeneutic Reading of Place,” contribution to Place, Space and Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce B. Janz (Cham: Springer, 2017), 169–81. “Philosophical Reflections on the Shaping of Identity in Fundamentalist Religious Communities,” Special Issue on “Phenomenology and the PostSecular Turn: Reconsidering the Return of the ‘Religious’,” eds. Michael Staudigl and Jason Alvis, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24.5 (2017): 704–24. “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Scripture: Marion, Henry, and Falque on the Person of Christ,” Special Issue on “Beyond Myth and Enlightenment: Phenomenology and Religion,” eds. Michael Staudigl and Ludger Hagedorn, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 17.2 (2018): 281–97. “Faith, Violence, and Phronesis: Narrative Identity, Rhetorical Symbolism, and Liturgical Embodiment in Religious Communities,” Special Issue on “Phenomenology and the Post-Secular Turn,” ed. Michael Staudigl, Continental Philosophy Review 53.2 (2020): 371–84. “Wagering for a Second Naïveté: Tensions in Ricoeur’s Account of the Symbolism of Evil,” contribution in A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, ed. Scott Davidson (Lexington Books 2020), 87–101. All rights reserved. “The Language of Worship: Some Elements of Liturgical Imagination,” contribution to Imagining Christianity, a Phenomenological Discussion, eds. Katarzyna Dudek and Javier Carreño (London: Bloomsbury Publishing: forthcoming). I was fortunate to have two of the most important and eminent scholars of Ricœur’s work as teachers and mentors at early stages of my philosophical training: Richard Kearney at Boston College in a 1998 course on philosophy of narrative and a couple of years later David Pellauer at DePaul University in a course on Ricœur (Dr. Pellauer also mentored my dissertation on JeanLuc Marion). I have learned a great deal from them and also from many other scholars of Ricœur at several of the annual meetings of the Ricœur Society. My students in two graduate and three undergraduate courses on hermeneutics have also informed my thinking in a variety of ways. This is even more the case for several PhD students in whose dissertations Ricœur—or hermeneutics more broadly—plays some role and with whom I was or still am privileged to work as either reader or mentor, including Rob Duffy, Kate Bresee, Vita Emery, Max Racine, Joseph Gruber, and Stephen Ferguson. Special thanks is owed to Charlotte Labbé, head of the interlibrary loan department at the Fordham University library, who procured any number of sources for me under the most difficult of circumstances. I am most grateful to her both for the sources and for her friendship.

Acknowledgments

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Jana Hodges-Kluck at Lexington persisted at several SPEP conferences over the years in encouraging me to contribute something to the series. Without her generous invitation and repeated gentle inquiries, this book would never have been written. She was also immensely helpful during the publication process, answering my countless questions and queries with much patience, thoroughness, and promptitude. Dan Stiver was also very generous in his assistance and encouragement throughout the process. I am very happy and grateful to be able to use once again some of Leanne Parrott’s beautiful photos for the cover. This book is dedicated to two friends who supremely display the wisdom, generosity, kindness, and hospitality that characterized Ricœur as a person and is also the hallmark of his work. Esther was one of the first people I ever met in this country, who has loved and mentored me for almost three decades with immense generosity, unfailing kindness, and unstinting forgiveness. She and her husband Keith have been steadfast friends for years. (She was also an officiating minister at the first more “liturgical” parish I attended and so in some ways set me on the path toward interest in liturgy.) Someday I hope to emulate her wisdom, kindness, generosity, and hospitality. Joyce became a good friend in our joint years of teaching in Scranton. Her wisdom, forthrightness, and integrity have not only often guided me but even more often humbled me and provided a salutary example of living life against the prevailing currents of gossip, criticism, and backbiting so common in the academy and elsewhere. She combines a deeply grounded faith and steadfast commitment to principles bordering on stubbornness with an amazing openness of mind and generosity of spirit. Upon her retirement, she also generously bestowed on me her trove of early and obscure articles by and on Ricœur. To employ some literary images in the spirit of Ricœur’s writing on narrative: Esther reminds me of the wise and talented pianist Katherine Forrester Vigneras in Madeleine l’Engle’s A Severed Wasp with her ability to guide others, to perceive what is needed in a particular situation, to perform beautifully when called for, and to be infinitely hospitable, while being grounded firmly in reality. Joyce is maybe best exemplified by the minister John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; she has the same wisdom, humility, gracious attitude, and unwavering integrity. Maybe above all, both Esther and Joyce are the very best of conversation partners, always challenging presuppositions, always thinking anew, always pushing for a more generous, wider, and wiser perspective. Truly they “give rise to thought” in the best sense of Ricœur’s famous expression.

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Ricœur

AGT

CC CI CR FFR FM FN FS H HT

“All That Gives Us to Think: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur.” In Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium. Ed. Andrzej Wierciński, 670–96. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Ed. Don Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. The Course of Recognition. Trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality.” Man and World: An International Philosophical Review 12.2 (1979): 123–41. Fallible Man. Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. Erazim W. Kohák. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures, Vol. 2. Trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. History and Truth. Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965.

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IT J LD LIU LQN MHF OA PA PR RB

RJ RM SE TA TB TN I TN II TN III

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Ricœur

Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. The Just. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Living Up to Death. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood, 20–33. London: Routledge, 1992. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Philosophical Anthropology: Writings and Lectures, Vol. 3. Trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016. [Interviews with Paul Ricœur in] Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. London: Routledge, 2004. “Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious.” In A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Eds. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, 27–40. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Reflections on the Just. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLoughlin, and John Castello. London: Routledge, 2003. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007. with André LaCocque. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Ricœur

TT

“Experience and Language in Religious Discourse.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, 127–46. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.

Less frequently cited texts by Ricœur are indicated in the notes.

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Part I

READING RICŒUR TOWARD RITUAL

Chapter 1

Symbolism, Myth, and the Move to Second Naïveté

The Symbolism of Evil constitutes one of Ricœur’s earliest and most sustained attempts to articulate a hermeneutics that can grapple with religious texts and insights, while remaining committed to rigorous philosophical thinking.1 It is also famous for several notions that have become inextricably linked with Ricœur’s work, such as the proposal of the wager, the move from first to second naïveté, and his insistence on the “fullness of language” that requires an engagement with symbol, myth, and metaphor and in this way can give “rise to thought.”2 The tension between religious and philosophical language and their respective truths, which pervades Ricœur’s work (and which chapters 2 and 4 will consider more fully), is already evident in this early text. Ricœur clearly does not want to abandon central theological, biblical, or religious insights and yet is fully in agreement with scholars like Rudolf Bultmann that critical thought and commitments to truth, honesty, and academic rigor require untangling the conflation of history and myth. This chapter will highlight some of the problematic tensions in Ricœur’s account of the symbolism of evil and question whether the move to a second naïveté can really proceed as smoothly and easily as he implies in this work and whether this wager of meaning can “save” the religious truth in the way he proposes. It will suggest that mythic symbolism functions in much more complex ways than Ricœur contends and that his account would profit from an engagement with liturgical texts. SYMBOL, MYTH, AND THE FULLNESS OF LANGUAGE Ricœur proposes the exploration into the symbolism of evil with the explicit claim that symbolic and metaphorical language can offer something that 3

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propositional or philosophical language does not. Already in Freedom and Nature he had suggested that the relation between freedom and bondage might require more than a purely philosophical analysis—that it might have to have recourse to the empirical or the poetic (FN, 24). In that context, he outlines three steps for a philosophy of the will that proceeds from a strictly phenomenological (“eidetic” and “abstract”) analysis of the voluntary and the involuntary, via a more empirical account of the will and fallibility (in Fallible Man), to a poetics of the symbolism of evil. An “eidetics of the will” remains incomplete, if it is not supplemented by a “faithful description of incarnate freedom,” such as only a “poetics” can provide through an exegesis of myths and symbols (FN, 32). He argues that such symbolism and “concrete mythics” has to be explored within its “own universe of discourse” (FM, xlii), a claim he makes about religious language also in other contexts (e.g., FS, 35–47). Such figurative language is always already hermeneutic; consequently, this primary symbolism can serve as “an initial step toward bringing myths nearer to philosophic discourse”; that is to say, the philosophical concept of fallibility can approach the “enigma” of the more “indirect or cyphered” religious discourse (FM, xliii). Fallibility refers to the “disproportionality” of our fragility: “Disproportion, intermediateness, fragility, fallibility, constitute a meaningful sequence” (PA, 2).3 He reiterates such claims in The Symbolism of Evil. Serious thinking about the reality of evil is not reducible to purely rational statements but requires a fuller and richer language, namely the language of symbol or myth (see also CI, 287–334). When it comes to the question of evil, rationality can be deceptive and must therefore listen “to the least elaborate, the most inarticulate confessions of evil” (SE, 4).4 Myths bring us closest to “living experience” (SE, 5). This is especially true of narrations of origins, which serve to establish “all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in the world” (SE, 5). The function of myths is, first, to “embrace mankind as a whole in one ideal history” (SE, 162), second, to show the movement of narration as “essential history of the perdition and the salvation of man”; third, “to get at the enigma of human existence” “by means of a narration.” In this respect, the myth has “an ontological bearing” inasmuch as it connects what the human is with how humans exist historically (SE, 163). The myth, Ricœur suggests, has a heuristic and explanatory function via the symbol inasmuch as it evokes further thought and cannot be translated into purely literal language: “By its triple function of concrete universality, temporal orientation, and finally ontological exploration, the myth has a way of revealing things that is not reducible to any translation from a language in cipher to a clear language” (SE, 163; emphasis his; see also PA, 107–23, 149–75). Thus, the clarity of philosophical thinking can prove reductive and must be enlivened by the richness of symbolic and mythic language.5

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Ricœur often stresses the proximity of such poetic language to lived existence. Symbolic language is directly linked to life, both because it is always already inscribed in speech and because it enacts language in existential living: “Symbols are already in the element of speech. . . . they rescue feeling and even fear from silence and confusion; they provide a language for avowal, for confession; in virtue of them, man remains language through and through” (SE, 350). In other contexts, too, he distances himself from purely structural analyses that miss the richness and complexity of narrative and life (e.g., IT, 2–8, 80–86). This is why we must “start again from the fullness of language”; the meanings of myths and narratives are full and “pregnant” in expressing the ties between the human and the sacred (SE, 349). This may even lead us to the “hope for a re-creation of language” that would go beyond the movement of critique to a new kind of thinking (SE, 349). Thus symbolic language can “revivify” philosophy “through contact with the fundamental symbols of consciousness” (SE, 351). Symbolic thought and mythic narratives present an existential lived experience that expresses truth in fuller and more immediate language than philosophical abstraction would be able to do. It is closer to life and expresses it more authentically and with more emotional valence. Much of the book develops these insights via a close analysis first of symbols of evil, such as defilement, sin, and guilt, and then of four myths of the origin of evil (ritual, tragic, eschatological, and gnostic), which are interpreted as giving insight about the human condition and the lived experience of evil. Ricœur is not only engaged in a general philosophical analysis of symbolism, but—in light of his earlier project on “fallible man” (in the French original printed together with Symbolism of Evil as Part I)—particularly concerned to deal with fragility, fallibility, finitude, fault, and guilt. He presents the symbol of guilt and the Adamic myth as the respective heights of the compared symbols and myths, as they gather together insights from earlier stages and express them in more sophisticated fashion. For example, while “the symbolism of sin breaks with that of defilement,” inasmuch as it is “an experience of a power that lays hold of man,” it also “rediscovers the major intention of the symbolism of defilement” (SE, 70). Similarly, the “feeling of guilt points to a more fundamental experience, the experience of ‘sin,’ which includes all men and indicates the real situation of man before God, whether man knows it or not” (SE, 7). The story of the fall and, later, the dogma of original sin both try to make sense of this primordial experience of sin. Guilt is the most fundamental experience of evil and best expressed by the myth of the fall. Thus, “the ‘Adamic’ myth is the anthropological myth par excellence; Adam means Man” (SE, 232). This narrative best encapsulates our experience of the human condition. Therefore, “we should not say, ‘The story of the ‘fall’ is only a myth’—that is to say, something less than history—but, ‘The story of

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the fall has the greatness of myth’—that is to say, has more meaning than a true history” (SE, 236). Ricœur tries to restore a philosophical significance to myth as a prefiguring of basic insights about the human condition, expressed in narrative and poetic form that conveys meaning in nonliteral and nonhistorical fashion. Throughout, he seeks to connect philosophical reflection on finitude with the experienced reality of sin and evil. Both sides have something to add to the discussion: “The hiatus between pure reflection on ‘fallibility’ and the confession of ‘sins’ is patent” (SE, 347). On the one side, philosophy proper, as committed to rationality, does not appeal to myth or symbolism, and thus cannot come to an adequate appreciation of evil in its everyday, existential reality and lived experience of being subject to passion. From the other side, religion, which is conscious of the enigma of the servile will, does not require the same methodological commitment to rational reflection. Thus, although philosophical thought is more rational, this also prevents it from a direct access to experience and a full comprehension of it, for which more mythic language is essential. At the same time, Ricœur’s own project intends to transcend the symbolic and mythic language in favor of philosophical insight: “The failure of our undertaking challenges us to pose the more radical problem of the method of a philosophy which would learn from the symbols and yet be fully rational” (SE, 346). He is quite clear that his commitment is to philosophical thinking and that such philosophical speculation is far superior to the superstition of myth, which can no longer serve as “explanation” of reality today (SE, 5). Or, as he says in a different context: “Myth narrates, wisdom argues” (FS, 252). While the mythic narrative provides us with accounts of lived experience, here it does not itself convey truth. Rather, the kernel of truth, the logos, must be carved out of or “exorcised” from the myth (SE, 352). In fact, “the question of truth is unceasingly eluded” in the symbol (SE, 353). Symbols just point to further symbols; while they can “give rise to thought,” the thought or reflection itself is a separate endeavor. Truth for Ricœur, at least in this context, thus lies with the historical and philosophical, not the symbolic or mythical. While they can instruct us about primordial human experience, they are ultimately no longer meaningful or truthful today. Although myths may give us access to a living experience of defilement, sin, and guilt, the myths themselves are no longer convincing to us (SE, 161). We must investigate the fullness of language in the myth in order to be able to “think” the symbols, but then demythologize, that is, strip the concepts of their mythic trapping and re-enact the experience in “sympathetic imagination,”6 not to get back to the myth but to recapture the more primordial truth conveyed through the symbols. The embrace of symbol and myth, then, is only temporary and has to be superseded by philosophical

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analysis. It provides the rich data, which philosophy can then mine, but is itself without truth and ultimately no longer believable, but something to be discarded once its kernel of meaning has been extracted. Although Ricœur judges the “detour” through symbolic and mythical language useful and enriching, maybe even necessary, he ultimately rejects such “primitive” language in favor of more strictly philosophical thought. Here Ricœur seems to compromise his own earlier insights. Why should we listen to the “fullness of language” if in the end it turns out to be superstitious and no longer believable today? What has the myth added to our philosophical analysis if it is ultimately superseded and even replaced by it? Can a philosophical truth be carved out from the complexity of the myth, the symbolism cleansed of its superstitious trappings, and the kernels recovered in a second naïveté? Does that not close down or at least compromise the fullness of language of the myth? What has the detour taught us if it must finally be abandoned? Can the meanings of symbols be recovered today if they are no longer permitted to take on mythic or narrative garb? Part of the problem is that there is a slippage in Ricœur’s account between the “primordial” and the “primitive.” While the primordial is taken to be instructive and worth exploring, the primitive is dismissed as simplistic and superseded or even invalidated by critical thought. On the one hand, Ricœur often insists that a return to the primordial is profitable and that we should not rush too quickly to complicated philosophical or theological speculation. Both in the Symbolism of Evil and in other articles, he refuses to engage the Augustinian doctrine of original sin in favor of more primordial symbols of evil (e.g., SE, 4; FS, 249–61;7 for one exception see CI, 269–86). He consistently takes the biblical texts as the most primordial expressions of Christian (and occasionally Jewish) faith (FS, 35–47) and expends much energy interpreting them—far more than theological doctrines or speculative ideas. Going back to such primordial symbols allows the philosopher to “elaborate existential concepts” (SE, 356). The symbolic and mythical language has access to originary experience in a way speculative thought does not. Ricœur also often refers to goodness as more “primordial” than evil in a way that clearly implies it to be superior to, better than, and ultimately more powerful than evil (SE, 156; FS, 203–16; RB, 27–40).8 At the same time, he argues that this primordial symbolic language is a first and immediate stage that can later give rise to more “abstract” language or speculation, in a way that suggests a linear progression of increasing sophistication: “There is something quite astonishing in this: the consciousness of self seems to constitute itself at its lowest level by means of symbolism and to work out an abstract language only subsequently, by means of a spontaneous hermeneutics of its primary symbols” (SE, 9). He outlines three separate stages, where myth and philosophy both go beyond but draw inspiration from

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the primary symbols. The primary symbols come first, followed by myth as a second level, and resulting in gnosis or reflection on the third level. The interpretation of the second and third levels relies on the first, especially in regard to confessing fault and fallibility (SE, 9). Indeed, Ricœur often distinguishes these three levels in mythical and symbolic language about fallenness— “first that of the primordial symbols of sin, then that of the Adamic myth, and finally the speculative cipher of original sin”—referring to “the second as first-degree hermeneutics, the third as second-degree hermeneutics” (SE, 237). He thus posits a fairly linear move from inchoate symbol to narrative myth to explicit articulation of doctrine. Ricœur acknowledges that interpretation is always already at work at all of these levels, with the possible exception of the primordial symbol itself, which he tends to interpret as immediate. But there is interpretation already at the level of the myth: “The myth anticipates speculation only because it is already an interpretation, a hermeneutics of the primordial symbols in which the prior consciousness of sin gave itself form. That it gives rise, in its turn, to thought is a consequence of the fact that it itself interprets other symbols” (SE, 237). A hermeneutic process enables us to “re-enact” the myth in “sympathetic imagination” and thus to recognize the movement from primary symbols to secondary mythic language and the tertiary doctrines that might be built upon the symbolic core at work in them. Here the primary or primordial stage of symbolism and the later stages of narrative and philosophical speculation seem to exist in dynamic tension where each provides something to the other. Yet, in other parts of the account, the language of the primordial is employed in more ambivalent or even negative fashion. The symbol of defilement is seen as the most primordial but also as the most simplistic and most problematic of the three symbols of evil he discusses. It is linked to the “primitive” or “elementary” language of ritual (SE, 9), which is dismissed as “magic” and seen to be governed by fear (SE, 47). Indeed, Ricœur often labels ritual language itself as “primordial” in ways that actually seem to imply “primitive” with all the derogatory connotations that term carries (e.g., CI, 447). Although ritual confession brings to light various insights about the experience of evil—such as “blindness, equivocalness, scandalousness” (SE, 7)—it remains hampered by the ways in which the defilement seems to come from without. It does not involve self-reflection or any clear recognition of fault. For Ricœur, ritual is almost exclusively identified with defilement and does not seem linked to sin or guilt in the same way: “It is the rite that exhibits the symbolism of defilement; and just as the rite suppresses symbolically, defilement infects symbolically” (SE, 35). Once there is a conception of a personal God rather than a more anonymous cosmic order, we move from defilement to sin (SE, 48).

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Ricœur explores these latter “higher” stages or more sophisticated levels of the recognition of evil in much more detail. He thinks of this progression and advancement as a fairly linear movement, one that moves away from cosmic dimensions to more personal ones that become increasingly psychologically sophisticated. The move to the individual is especially significant for him: “This individualization of guilt breaks with the ‘we’ of the confession of sins” (SE, 105). Only if sin is an individual experience can redemption become a similarly individual and personal experience (SE, 105). This makes possible something like the “scrupulous conscience” with all its attendant effects (SE, 138). He is particularly interested in the psychological dimensions of the Adamic myth and its impact on the consciousness of the self or what it reveals about this consciousness. The value of the Adamic myth is precisely its universalization of the recognition of sin and guilt: “It was because the confession of sins involved this virtual universalization that the Adamic myth was possible: the myth, in naming Adam, man, makes explicit the concrete universality of human evil; the spirit of repentance gives to itself, in the Adamic myth, the symbol of that universality” (SE, 241). This myth enables philosophical speculation via the rupture it introduces between the ontological and the historical dimensions (SE, 242). It is not clear, however, why a heavy emphasis on the individual is necessarily an improvement over more communal ways of grappling with fault and guilt—or why this alone can be universalized to define all humankind. This is simply assumed. Ricœur consistently considers the cosmic dimension as more primitive, while the ontological symbolism is more sophisticated and more philosophical, a higher and more advanced stage of thinking. He speaks of it as a progressive movement that moves from defilement to sin and then to guilt, away from the cosmically ritualized to the ontologically experienced (SE, 11). This identification of ritual and the cosmic is evident also in some of his later texts and almost always presupposed in any comments he makes about ritual or liturgy (e.g., FS, 48–67). Ricœur considers these “earlier” stages of religion “primitive” (especially the “cosmic” nature religions Eliade explores) and is certain that under no conditions can the philosopher or scholar return to them.9 Primitive religion features elaborate nature symbolism that engages in an unsophisticated “logic of correspondence” or equivalence (FS, 53–55, 279–83), which is often understood literally in ways that are utterly unconvincing to the contemporary person. Such literalism and primitive belief must be rejected by anyone who thinks. Critical thought is essential and ostensibly incompatible with ritual and its cosmic symbolism. We can thus never return to the primitive stage; ritual no longer holds lived meaning for us. In this regard, Ricœur follows the Bultmannian and Durkheimian assumptions that the primary discourse is less sophisticated and riddled with superstitions, and therefore its demythologization is

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absolutely essential: “demythologization is the irreversible gain of truthfulness, intellectual honesty, objectivity” (SE, 350, repeated almost verbatim on 352). Again he associates truth here not with the “fullness of language,” as evident in symbol and myth, but with the rigorous academic and scholarly search for historical objectivity. This is particularly evident in his analysis of the Adamic myth, which he considers the highest and most comprehensive narrative account of evil (SE, 306–46). It holds together the notions of “the chaos in me, among us, and outside” (SE, 258; emphasis his). Yet, at the same time, he is quite clear that even this myth is no longer believable and that it cannot be read as either history or explanation: “What does it mean to ‘understand’ the Adamic myth? In the first place, it means accepting the fact that it is a myth.” Thus, the question about when and where Adam ate the fruit is meaningless today; the story cannot possibly be understood literally, as he assumes the original hearers did. What today’s educated hearers know of human evolution “leaves no place for such a primordial event” (SE, 235). It is fairly evident throughout that Ricœur dismisses what he sees as the traditional assumptions about the figure of Adam and that he thinks it was previously taken in a literal, historical sense. He is quite adamant that a historical or literal interpretation of this myth is not only false but actively harmful: “Hence, it is false that the ‘Adamic’ myth is the keystone of the Judeo-Christian edifice; it is only a flying buttress, articulated upon the ogival crossing of the Jewish penitential spirit” (SE, 239). The doctrine of original sin comes in for even harsher condemnation: “The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told.” He calls it a “mythico-speculative mass” that should never have been posited as an explanation. By doing so, “the theologians have unduly required a sacrificium intellectus where what was needed was to awaken believers to a symbolic superintelligence of their actual condition” (SE, 239). Thus, apparently both myth and doctrine are to be rejected, even if the symbol itself gives rise to further reflection. Ricœur consistently thinks of “primitive” religion as problematically entangling history and myth. To have separated them constitutes progress. We must engage the myth in a much more sophisticated manner that dismisses its (false) historical dimensions and “conquers” the myth via critical demythologization: “But another possibility offers itself to us: precisely because we are living and thinking after the separation of myth and history, the demythization of our history can become the other side of an understanding of myth as myth, and the conquest, for the first time in the history of culture, of the mythical dimension” (SE, 162). Ultimately, myths in general,

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but especially those with more cosmic and communal dimensions, must be left behind in our more enlightened and critical age. FROM FIRST TO SECOND NAÏVETÉ The contemporary educated person thus cannot return to a simple belief in myths. Mythical language no longer has meaning for us. Ricœur thinks that we cannot possibly go back to a primitive naïveté, because such immediacy of belief has been “irremediably lost”; we cannot return to it (SE, 351). It can only be retrieved in a radically different fashion after moving through the stage of enlightened critique. Ricœur presents this move from first naïveté—through doubt, demythologization, and critique—to second naïveté in a fairly linear fashion. It is a process of growth or maturation from a childlike or “primitive” faith to an intellectual engagement with insights of science and rationality, which might lead us to doubt or even reject the more primitive faith, ultimately resulting in a mature faith that does not deny the intellectual insights yet goes beyond them to further and fuller thought. In a later interview, he reiterates this: “We can no longer approach myth at the level of naïveté. We must rather always view it from a critical perspective. It is only by means of a selective reappropriation that we can become aware of myth. We are no longer primitive beings, living at the immediate level of myth” (PR, 120; emphasis in the original). Later, such immediacy will be problematic also because it is not open to interpretation in the same way as texts are. The “distance” or mediation of interpretation destroys the immediacy of belief. Accordingly, he contends that one can arrive at a second naïveté via a thorough engagement with the symbolism employed in myths and a sophisticated recovery of the meaning in the original experiences they represent. What is required, in Kearney’s words, “is a hermeneutic dialectic between the claims of logos and mythos” (PR, 70). This is only possible through the “wager” of belief that enters deeply, albeit provisionally, into the symbolic and mythical accounts. The philosopher must adopt “belief” in “sympathetic imagination” in order to understand and analyze how it functions: “The philosopher adopts provisionally the motivations and intentions of the believing soul. He does not ‘feel’ them in their first naïveté; he ‘re-feels’ them in a neutralized mode, in the mode of ‘as if.’ It is in this sense that phenomenology is re-enactment in sympathetic imagination” (SE, 19). Thus, the philosopher maintains a sophisticated “neutral” distance from the original experience; he or she can analyze it and even enter into it to some extent via empathy albeit not real participation, but does so in an educated fashion that does not succumb to the more primitive dimensions of the myth. In a different context, he affirms: “To

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separate kerygma from myth is the positive function of demythologization” (CI, 390). Thus, belief or doctrine is treated as separable from their ritualized instantiation. Ricœur insists upon the important role of hermeneutics in recovering this naïveté: on the one hand, “there exists nowhere a symbolic language without hermeneutics” (SE, 350); on the other hand, “it is by interpreting that we can hear again” (SE, 351). The attempt to “re-feel” in sympathetic imagination is an interpretive process that reveals the meaning hidden in the symbol or myth. Therefore, “it is in hermeneutics that the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together” (SE, 351). Hermeneutics moves through the moment of belief, and via the process of interpretation it is able to isolate its truth and recover it for today: “For the second immediacy that we seek and the second naïveté that we await are no longer accessible to us anywhere else than in a hermeneutics; we can believe only by interpreting. It is the ‘modern’ mode of belief in symbols, an expression of the distress of modernity and a remedy for that distress” (SE, 352). Thus, hermeneutics is able to bring together the meaning of now-defunct symbols and our modern, more critical and thus more honest, condition. We cannot, however, ever return to the more immediate situation of belief. Thanks to the hermeneutic circle, “I can still today communicate with the sacred by making explicit the prior understanding that gives life to the interpretation” (SE, 352). While the ancients lived within a sacred universe of immediate relation with the gods, today we have hermeneutic sophistication, but thus give up the ability to live within the sacred dimension. Hermeneutics is consistently associated with the movement to critique: “Thus hermeneutics, an acquisition of ‘modernity,’ is one of the modes by which that ‘modernity’ transcends itself, insofar as it is forgetfulness of the sacred.” Being or transcendence no longer speak to us “under the precritical form of immediate belief, but as the second immediacy aimed at by hermeneutics.” This becomes “the postcritical equivalent of the precritical hierophany” (SE, 352). Thus, the wager of empathetic belief pays off in a “modern” and critical appropriation of “being” without its superstitious entanglements with the sacred. Yet, what exactly does it mean to have such an “equivalent” of the primitive or precritical? How can such sympathetic imagination still be possible, if the immediacy of belief and ritual life is really so utterly foreign to us? What would it mean to come to an “equivalent” insight that preserves the “truth” of what we have now discovered to be irredeemably false? We have left the enchanted world irretrievably behind us and have progressed to a stage of modern enlightenment that despite his sensitivity to the importance of symbolic language Ricœur clearly sees as superior: the criticism of demythologization is an advance that is more truthful, more intellectually honest, and more objective (SE, 352). If truth and honesty are so firmly associated

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with scientific objectivity can the primitive symbol or myth really teach us anything? The various tensions uncovered here consequently point to troubling dichotomies in Ricœur’s early work. He elevates the primordial but rejects the primitive. He seeks the fullness of language but ultimately equates it with superstition. He wants to move to a second naïveté while rejecting the first as false and dishonest. He tries to remove the kernel of truth from a symbol that no longer functions with a commitment to objectivity as “real” truth. He acknowledges that purely philosophical language is insufficient and requires recourse to the fullness of symbol and mythical language, yet assumes that this language no longer functions, that it no longer compels us, and that it must be rejected as untrue. Ricœur’s analysis, then, depends on two related assumptions: first, that a core or nucleus of truth or meaning can be isolated in the primordial symbols or myths and that this core is transferable into the contemporary situation or can be recovered as a truth; second, that this proceeds via a linear, progressive movement where something of the primordial continues to be preserved across the stages of development and is in some form encapsulated in later insights. Yet, both of these are questionable assumptions. First, can such a core of insight really be isolated, can it be protected and transferred without loss, and can it be recovered today?10 Is it possible to gain such truth and retrieve kernels of symbol or myth, if they are, in fact, so patently false and so unbelievable to us today? Can the second naïveté really retrieve anything from the first if all narrative trappings have to be removed entirely? Is it possible to isolate the core of truth from the primordial symbol in a way that can transfer smoothly to the philosophical insight? Ricœur repeatedly refers to such a “nucleus” of meaning that must be isolated from the “magical” interpretation of primitive symbolism. This nucleus emerges fully only via the more sophisticated levels: “If one should ask, then, what the nucleus [le noyau] is that remains constant through all the symbolizations of defilement, we should have to answer that it is only in the progress of conscience [or consciousness11], as it advances beyond and at the same time retains the notion of defilement, that its meaning will be manifested” (SE, 45–46). Even the meaning of the earlier symbol ultimately only emerges as interpretation progresses to higher stages. The interpretive process of isolating the meaningful kernel is thus linked to his assumptions about the connected linearity in which higher stages sublate the insights of lower ones in a quasi-Hegelian progression, while also constituting significant advance beyond them.12 For example, although he admits a “phenomenological continuity between defilement and sin,” Ricœur argues that the ontological dimension or reality of sin stands in contrast to the “‘subjectivity’ of the consciousness of guilt”

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(SE, 86, 82). He consistently thinks of guilt as superior: “What is essential in guilt is already contained in this consciousness of being ‘burdened,’ burdened by a ‘weight’” as internalized anticipated chastisement (SE, 101), but this superiority can take on some of the insights from the symbolism of defilement. This is a decisive moment for him, which constitutes an important advance: “The birth of a new ‘measure’ of fault is a decisive event in the history of the notion of fault; and this event represents a double advance, from which it is not possible to turn back” (SE, 104). We thus succeed in discerning the meaning of fault via the progression from defilement via sin to guilt, while also advancing or progressing in such a way that earlier stages are rendered primitive and inaccessible in comparison. Guilt means that we have internalized the sense of sin in the form of the conscience, the interior feeling of guilt that measures and evaluates itself (SE, 143). Ricœur consistently describes the internal and personal movement of guilt as superior to the external and communal elements of defilement or sin (e.g., CI, 430). Guilt is the higher stage that develops out of the lower stages and constitutes the kind of progress that cannot and should not be reversed. Yet, is the complete internalization of fault in the form of guilt really such a high achievement? This linear progression from defilement over sin toward guilt can certainly be questioned. Returning to ritual more fully might have enabled Ricœur to complicate his account.13 Part of the great insight but also the problem of his work here is that he tries to separate fault from finitude, while also holding these insights together. He wants to argue both that an individual consciousness of guilt (i.e., the development of a personal conscience and of individual notions of redemption) are an achievement and higher stage than the more communal and cosmic accounts of defilement, while simultaneously maintaining that the most sophisticated myth (i.e., the Judeo-Christian Adamic myth) combines all the insights of the earlier stages. Yet, this is not only contradictory; it also misrepresents the historical record. Many symbolic expressions of ritual, which Ricœur repeatedly associates with earlier, primitive stages, are highly sophisticated, nonliteral enactments of the enmeshment of defilement, sin, and guilt. Indeed, ritual is not simply about cosmic defilement but also about guilt and evoking contrition. Rites of confession acknowledge the person as sinner who must be forgiven (and redeemed), while also often employing language of illness and defilement that figure finitude more in terms of weakness or attack by evil forces. Although Ricœur conflates them, the latter two images are actually substantively different: the contrast or cure for defilement is purification, for illness it is healing. Such language of sin in terms of illness and redemption as salve, geared at the health of soul and body, is pervasive in early patristic and medieval texts of all Christian traditions. Many religious rituals in various traditions, including Christian liturgy, speak of sin in terms of both illness and weakness, thus

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acknowledging that the line between finitude and fault, weakness and sin, fallibility and guilt are not always clearly drawn, but that all these aspects are entangled with each other in complicated ways. To provide just one example from the Orthodox lenten liturgy: “I am clad in a garment that is defiled and shamefully blood-stained by a life of passion and self-indulgence. I have stained the garment of my flesh, O Saviour, and defiled that which was made in Thine image and likeness. I have fallen beneath the painful burden of the passions and the corruption of material things; and I am hard pressed by the enemy.”14 Here stain and defilement are interpreted as conditions for which one is culpable, while at the same time the situation is interpreted as one of temptation and attack by the enemy. Ritual practices can express this kind of enmeshment of fragility, fallibility, fault, and guilt, which can register existentially as imprisonment or illness, while not absolving the penitent of culpability or excluding feelings of guilt. The distinctions between defilement, sin, and guilt are far from clear in liturgical language, and this itself conveys an important existential truth: feelings and even actions can be experienced both as overpowering us or imprisoning us and as something in which we are deliberately involved and for which we are culpable. We can cause harm to others unintentionally and feel guilty for it, even when we were practically unable to act otherwise. Ricœur acknowledges the ways in which these experiences can be enmeshed in a different context where he points to the “strange experience of passivity at the very heart” of evil, in that “human beings feel themselves victims while at the same time being guilty.”15 Symbol, myth, and especially ritual can give voice to this experience. It is also not true that symbolic or mythic language was originally taken literally in the sort of simplistic fashion Ricœur often implies, at least not when speaking of Christian liturgy.16 Liturgical texts often deliberately confuse persons and time periods; they do not treat them in any straightforward historical, literal, or chronological fashion. This is particularly evident in the way in which biblical or historical characters (including Christ and the “saints”) are remembered or referenced within liturgy. It rarely occurs in the manner in which we usually speak of historical events; rather, they are often treated as present in some form or even evoked in a future mode through petition for assistance. (Later chapters will grapple with this much more fully.) The liturgical texts in these traditions handle the figure of Adam in particular in far more complex ways than Ricœur acknowledges for ritual practices. There is no sense in which the myth of Adam is used in a purely historical fashion within Christian liturgy, at least as regards the patristic tradition. Rather, it is a richly mimetic employment that often deliberately upsets historical chronology. A particularly fascinating example of this is found in the liturgical poems of Romanos the Melodist (6th c.), one of the most famous liturgical authors in the Eastern Christian tradition.17 In one of his kontakia

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(liturgical verse poem) for nativity, he describes Adam and Eve coming to Bethlehem after Christ is born in order to ask how much longer it will take for them to be finally redeemed. Eve and Mary become involved in a long discussion in which Mary—after consulting with her son—tells them that they must wait a little longer.18 Romanos also composed a liturgical hymn specifically about Adam and Eve, which was sung during the second week of Lent and portrays the biblical story in dramatic fashion. But Adam shows up all over the place: on Theophany, where Adam’s eyes are opened as Christ is baptized, on Palm Sunday, multiple times during Holy Week—both in Hades and on earth—and of course after the Resurrection.19 Indeed, several popular hymns for Holy Week imagine debates between hell, the devil, and death, in which Adam is the spoil they discuss and do not want to let go. Some of the journeys to Paradise, imagined to be taken by Mary after the Dormition (her “falling asleep”) or by the dead thief who was crucified with Christ in accounts of Holy Week, also comment on Adam’s presence or absence in Paradise.20 Clearly, these are highly imaginative performances that have a variety of pedagogical and theological purposes, but they do not pretend to make any literal historical claims. Instead, they are profoundly poetic. Both the patristic examples and contemporary liturgical texts take great liberties with the biblical personages and even the scriptural texts on which they are based. No straightforward historical claim is being made when Adam and Eve visit the nativity crib or show up at the foot of the cross. Although most of the ancient and medieval audiences engaged in these prayers presumably assumed that some particular Adam and Eve had actually been around at some point as first-created people, this assumption is quite irrelevant to the creative mimetic way in which the figures are employed throughout. Contemporary Orthodox liturgy, which often draws on these patristic texts in some form, still handles the figures and biblical texts with similar ambivalence that does not come down to taking them literally or treating them as straightforward historical accounts.21 In these contemporary texts,22 particularly during penitential seasons such as Great Lent, Adam is referred to in the first person (singular and plural), the second person, and the third person, thus moving ambivalently from a symbol for all of humankind and its shared condition, or a figure encapsulating our own personal transgressions, to an identifiable person having committed a particular sin, to a model held up as warning against imitation, to serving as harbinger of Christ, to someone one can address for help in one’s own struggles. Adam is all of these at the same time. The liturgical figure of Adam speaks both of our transgressions and of a broader implication in evil structures, on the one hand, of our personal evil acts for which we are responsible and must repent, and, on the other hand, of our enmeshment in a whole history of evil, which both

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precedes and follows us and of which we are a part not by our own choosing. Adam designates our need for repentance as well as our need for healing. Adam thus functions liturgically on multiple levels: as a person who speaks for us and on our behalf and hence might give us insight into our own condition, as someone with whom we identify, and as a symbol that contrasts first and second Adam and hence sees him in relation with Christ. The distinction between historical or symbolic would make very little sense here; it is a distinction completely foreign to this narrative world or liturgical context. The composers of these texts clearly did not think of these distinctions as a hindrance or of these different liturgical “persona” as incompatible. This is by no means a literal or “naïve” reading. Indeed, most liturgical texts are not at all interested in providing a history of origins. Sin and evil are realities with which we must cope and the liturgical texts and practices help us do so. They speak from within a condition of fallenness and weakness, a condition that knows itself both personally responsible and overpowered by larger forces that it often finds itself helpless to combat. And these forces operate both externally and internally. All these realities are expressed and addressed within the liturgical texts while not attempting to solve the whence and where of sin and evil. In either case, the “primitive” use of symbolic figures and mythical accounts, at least within liturgical texts, is far more complex than Ricœur assumes. They already operate at multiple levels and are far from being understood only or even primarily in a strictly historical sense. This might suggest that the early uses of these myths were neither “naïve” nor “primitive”—and possibly that our firm distinctions between literal, historical, psychological, and ontological levels do not constitute great progress. The liturgical texts are already complex readings of primordial human experience in a theologically sophisticated manner. The figure of Adam functions within the liturgical texts in much the rich and complicated way Ricœur wants to reserve only for the philosophical and hermeneutic analysis. One might suggest that to arrive at the primary modes of religious faith, one must look not only at biblical texts but also at the actions and practices in which religious believers engage. Liturgical texts and performances may well constitute just as originary and authentically an expression of religious faith as the biblical narratives. Analyzing them hermeneutically may uncover important dimensions of the meaning of faith and religious expression to the philosopher. WAGERING ON THE SERVILE WILL The culminating point of the move from defilement via sin toward guilt for Ricœur is the notion of the “servile will,”23 which he consistently interprets as

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a great achievement. It is not simply a concept of fallibility but is found at the level of more sophisticated speculation (SE, 151). The contradiction implied in a will that is both bound and free is “insupportable for thought,” but at the same time constitutes “the central theme of ‘salvation’” (SE, 152). The notion of the servile will combines aspects of all three symbols of evil and thus serves as “the symbol of a sinful being who is at the same time act and state” (SE, 154; emphases his). He outlines a triple schematism of the servile will, in which defilement must become a “positive” guilt (“positiveness”); evil is experienced as external and always already there, taking us captive (via “seduction”); and the yielding of the self to slavery (via “infection”) “points toward the relation of radical evil to the very being of man” (SE, 156). Thus, despite his reluctance to engage in theological speculation, the idea of the “servile will” constitutes the apex of his analysis, the core insight that can be isolated via the progression through the symbols, the culminating point of the development of evil, as extracted from the poetic and narrative developments. Ricœur elaborates on this in other contexts. He considers the servile will the religious equivalent of the “wounded cogito” that the “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, reveal to us in their attack on the illusion of self-consciousness (CI, 148, 322). This wounded cogito “posits but does not possess itself”; it “understands its originary truth only in and by the confession of the inadequation, the illusion, and the lie of existing consciousness” (CI, 173). By uncovering this condition, psychoanalysis in particular proposes a sort of rival hermeneutics of symbols.24 Although Ricœur rejects the “dogma” of original sin as original, inherited guilt, he consistently affirms the theological insight that evil precedes us, that our fundamental condition is sinful, and that we are held captive by it (CI, 282–83).25 The Adamic myth reveals the mystery that “each of us also discovers evil, finds it already there, in himself, outside himself, and before himself: such that I do not begin evil; I continue it” (CI, 284). After reviewing the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius, he affirms that “it is Augustine who remains right, through and in spite of this Adamic mythology” (CI, 281). Evil, then, “is a kind of involuntariness at the very heart of the voluntary, no longer facing the voluntary but within the voluntary, and it is this which is the servile will” (CI, 286). That Augustine might be profoundly mistaken, not just about hereditary evil, but also about the bondage of the will, does not seem to be entertained as a possibility.26 The Adamic myth, then, shows us “the ‘tragic’ aspect of evil” and gives us “the symbol of ‘captivity,’ of slavery” that shows evil both proceeding from freedom and limiting it, both “act and habit” (CI, 306, 308; emphasis his). The myth is “irreducible to the ethical,” even shows a “humiliated ethical” (CI, 309). At the same time, the tragic vision of evil points to the “category of hope,” an insight he will also reiterate in many other contexts (e.g., CI, 314,

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436–39; FS, 203–16; FS, 299). Indeed, one might say that this tension between fragility and hope permeates Ricœur’s thought from beginning to end. The notion of original sin takes “up one fundamental aspect of the experience of evil, namely, the both individual and communal sense of human impotence in the face of the demonic power of evil already there, long before any bad initiative may be assigned to some deliberate intention” (FS, 254). Even in one of his final lectures on religion, he still considers the notion of the bondage of the will central: “That which is called bad will, captive free will, servant-will is about an easily identifiable experience: it is felt as an intimate binding of oneself by oneself” (RB, 28). Therefore, “the religious has as its function the deliverance of the core of goodness from the bonds that hold it captive” (RB, 30). Even in the fragments left after his death and published posthumously as Living Up to Death, he reiterates this conviction to some extent (LD, 23–29). The notions of fragility and fallibility are also at the very origin of Ricœur’s work. Already Freedom and Nature raised the question of the fault and of fallibility in regard to the will, which Fallible Man then goes on to explore more fully in phenomenological and existential terms.27 He suggests that “the idea that man is by nature fragile and liable to err” is “an idea wholly accessible to pure reflection” (FM, 1). Fallibility, fault, fragility, and finitude are all closely connected for Ricœur, although he does distinguish his project frequently from a Heideggerian or Sartrean notion of finitude (e.g., FM, 3, 25, 39, 43, 134). Fallibility concerns the gap between our desires and our capacities, the disproportion between what we are and what we wish to achieve, between the misery of the human condition—including the puzzle whether this is a “primal wound” in our condition or “our fault” (FM, 13)—and its striving for transcendence. The human is restless; we are divided against ourselves, in conflict with ourselves (FM, 92, 106, 125, 132). Indeed, “the restless heart” is “the fragile moment par excellence” (FM, 82). Again, the Augustinian tenor of this is unmistakable. Fragility in these early texts encapsulates a sense of limitation, disproportion, the “fault” line or mediation between reality and possibility (FM, 140). Fragility is about human weakness, but read in terms of the “capacity to fail” (FM, 141). He rarely considers dimensions of weakness or frailty that are not already on the way toward fault. While fallibility is not itself evil, it provides the occasion for it: “Fallibility is the condition of evil, although evil is the revealer of fallibility” (FM, 144). Fragility connotes this gap between fallibility and fault, between possibility and reality (FM, 142); it is “fallibility without fault” or before fault (FM, 144). Even here Ricœur insists that the primordial “shines through” the fallen, that “however primordial badness may be, goodness is yet more primordial” (FM, 144, 145), although the contrast remains one between good and evil. This is a fundamental conviction that Ricœur will never abandon (he reiterates it almost literally in MHF, 491; RB,

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29; and other contexts). He concludes his treatment: “Fragility is not merely the ‘locus,’ the point of insertion of evil, nor even the ‘origin’ starting from which man falls; it is the ‘capacity’ for evil” (FM, 146). In another context, he stresses that fragility is “clearly prior to the fall” (PA, 4). Fragility remains linked to fallibility or fault in these early texts. Phenomenology can access and depict the notion of fallibility, but a recourse to symbol or myth is required for a fuller account of evil and fallenness (FM, xliv). Although Ricœur insists repeatedly in this text that he is undertaking a purely philosophical reflection, it is fairly clear that it is profoundly informed by Augustinian notions of the restless heart and the bondage of the will. Yet, is this servile will really such an unmitigated achievement? It is a thoroughly Augustinian notion, appropriated by several Protestant traditions, that does not represent the entire Christian tradition, much less the experience of evil in other religious or secular contexts. The Eastern Christian tradition—Syriac, Coptic, Byzantine, Slavonic, and others—does not feature such a notion of the bondage of the will and instead brings ideas of defilement, illness, sin, and guilt together in ways that do not suggest a development of one as superior to others, but instead always assumes intricate and intimate connections between them. As already mentioned, it is also an eminently liturgical tradition in which ritual continues to convey primary theological meaning rather than being superseded or replaced by theological speculation. The “servile will,” one might thus suggest, is not the highest Christian achievement, the “final word,” so to say, on evil, the deepest insight into the human condition, as Ricœur maintains repeatedly, despite all his reluctance to speak of original sin. Rather, it is an Augustinian aberration that contradicts the Christian message. The infamous passage in Romans 7:14–20 about Paul’s supposedly tortured conscience (“the introspective conscience of the West,” in Krister Stendahl’s famous phrase) was not read in such Augustinian (or Lutheran) fashion anywhere in the Christian East and the high view of human potential to repent and do the good continues unabated in much of that tradition. That may cause its own set of problems, but at the very least it suggests that an account of evil that holds together dimensions of defilement, sin, and guilt is indeed possible, while also remaining deeply liturgical. In this respect, it may provide a salutary alternative to the tortured conscience of the West—and a liturgical means for grappling with its consequences. Maybe most problematic is Ricœur’s strong emphasis on individual consciousness of guilt (i.e., the development of a conscience) and the high value he places on individual notions of redemption.28 Yet what makes religion so powerful and compelling—and this can obviously have both positive and negative implications—is its communal nature, its ability to bind people together (religare actually means to “tie” or “connect”) and to allow them to participate in something higher, larger, and more meaningful than themselves, more

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than an individual can generate on his or her own. Existentially, weakness, fault, and even guilt are at least as much communal or relational phenomena as they are purely personal ones, although fault and guilt can obviously separate us from others and be experienced in immensely isolating ways. Yet, it is precisely the harm to or even breakdown of relationships that turns sin or fault into debilitating experiences, causes feelings of guilt, and shows the need for the restoration of relationships. And sin can clearly also be a communal phenomenon, as is true for structural or systemic injustices—such as racism, genocide, or environmental devastation—that transcend the fault of any one individual and may well require communal repentance and certainly redress on scales much larger than individual ones. Even redemption makes very little sense as a purely individual notion, even if it can obviously be an intimately personal experience.29 Besides challenging Ricœur’s somewhat too simplistic linear configuration and suggesting that liturgical experience moves much more fluidly back and forth between “first” and “second” naïveté (or at least that the first is not as “naïve” as he suggests), one might thus also contend that the liturgical use of Adam could still prove helpful for addressing issues of systemic and corporate evil that go beyond individual responsibility. How do we best acknowledge our culpability for environmental problems, for example, when the problem far transcends our individual “will” or personal trespass?30 Ricœur may well be right that symbols can help us deal with a reality here that is not simply rationally resolvable and that it opens a space for confession that cannot be expressed in simply rational (or Enlightenment) parameters. The complex liturgical identification with Adam, replete with superlatives and emotive content (with “limit-expressions,” to use Ricœur’s later language), might open a path toward confessing and confronting deep complicity in realities of evil that go far beyond what we can “fix” individually and yet require confession and repentance maybe more insistently than much smaller personal trespasses. Instead of trying to move to a naïveté that rejects the mythic dimension in favor of a reappropriation of the symbolic meaning, we might be better advised to operate at multiple levels simultaneously. In many ways, the modern scientific version of things constitutes impoverishment and simplification, not enrichment or progress. Maybe what we need is not a recovery of “naïveté” but an appreciation and reappropriation of the narrative richness and poetic depth of religious myth as it is expressed in the fullness of liturgical language without abandoning scientific insights or seeing them as intrinsically opposed to each other, operating with conflicting accounts of truth.31 Such engagement with liturgical practices might also shift the emphasis from an exclusive focus on belief to one more aware of the ways in which religion is expressed in practices. The symbolism of ritual is not primarily about

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belief; it is the enactment within ritual that matters existentially. Therefore, there are no kernels of belief or knowledge to be carved out and transported to a new reality. Ricœur consistently insists on the importance of belief, including his famous formulation of the wager: “Such is the wager. Only he can object to this mode of thought who thinks that philosophy, to begin from itself, must be a philosophy without presuppositions. A philosophy that starts from the fullness of language is a philosophy with presuppositions. To be honest, it must make its presuppositions explicit, state them as beliefs, wager on the beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding” (SE, 357). In a different context, he even says: “I understand religion as a primitive structure of life which must always be overcome by faith” (CI, 441). Yet, maybe starting from the fullness of religious language and tradition would lead one not first of all to beliefs but to practices and actions. That is to say, we would start not only from the fullness of language but the fullness of practices and ways of living. One must participate actively in a ritual for it to function; it is not primarily, or at least not exclusively, a matter of belief or faith. One comes into ritual not really in order to affirm something that might be true or false, but in order to experience something, to live within it, to participate in it. Its truth is an existentially lived reality. The wager in that case is not only a wager of belief that must be filled with understanding. Rather, the ritual “wager” is a wager of participation that becomes filled with meaning. That does not exclude belief, language, or understanding, but they are not the primary or sole stakes. Although Ricœur for the most part moved beyond these early explorations of myths and engaged religious topics subsequently via a more single-minded hermeneutics of biblical texts, he remains focused on the issue of “belief” (rather than examining practices) to the very end of his career (cf. RB). Although much of his other hermeneutic work explores connections between texts and actions, narrative and life, when it comes to faith or religion, especially in its Christian iteration, Ricœur remains firmly focused on the biblical texts. This is what will be examined more closely in the next chapter, which deals with what might be considered the “middle” period of Ricœur’s religious hermeneutics.32

Chapter 2

Scripture, Narrative, and the Move to Action

Ricœur’s hermeneutics is one that moves fluidly back-and-forth between text and action, as most evident in the title of his second collection of hermeneutic essays From Text to Action. This movement is evident also in his magisterial Time and Narrative that explores the connections between fictional or historical narrative and life, as well as in his development of a narrative account of identity in Oneself as Another. These intriguing parallels and often complex connections between text and action, narrative and life, narrating oneself and becoming a self, are among his most central insights. It is curious, however, that in his more explicitly religious work—whether on the symbolism of evil, on biblical hermeneutics, or the occasions when he commented on his personal faith and its possible influence on his philosophy—he rarely stressed this connection between texts and actions as explicitly, but focused much more exclusively on an internal reading of biblical texts or on personal faith. To some extent, this is already evident in his reflection on the symbolism of evil, but it is even far more the case for what might be considered the “middle period” of Ricœur’s writing on religion, namely his many essays on biblical interpretation. This chapter will first lay out the basic contours of Ricœur’s biblical hermeneutics and then point to some of the ways in which he draws connections between texts and actions, narrative and life in his broader hermeneutic work in order finally to challenge his strong focus on the biblical texts in his religious hermeneutics and push him on this reluctance to move to actions and practices when it comes to the topic of religion.1

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POETRY, POLYPHONY, AND THE LOGIC OF SUPERABUNDANCE Ricœur contends that the best place to examine religion is to look at its language.2 In his essay “Philosophy and Religious Language” he appeals again to the notion of the wager in order to posit three basic assumptions or presuppositions about religion that he then examines more fully in order to validate them and fill them with meaning. The first assumption is that religion is best analyzed through its language: “Whatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression” (FS, 35). This applies preeminently to Christian faith, which Ricœur suggests always emphasizes the word and maintains that God is a God of speech. Christian faith lends itself particularly to religious hermeneutics because it is so focused on language.3 In a different context, he contends that in Christian discourse, the word takes over the function of the sacred, abolishes and re-affirms it in an anti-sacral way (FS, 62–65).4 Second, he argues that this linguistic expression is meaningful: “It is worthwhile to analyze it, because something is said that is not said by other kinds of discourse—ordinary, scientific, or poetic—or, to put into more positive terms, that it is meaningful at least for the community of faith that uses it either for the sake of self-understanding or for the sake of communication with others exterior to the faith community” (FS, 35). The third presupposition is that the discourse has to be “understood on its own terms,” from “within” so to speak, that it must be allowed to use its own criteria of truth instead of having foreign parameters imposed upon it (FS, 35). This examination displays a similar circularity to the examination of the symbol: the project of religious language starts in belief and returns to faith; faith leads to understanding and understanding to faith (FS, 217). There is no ulterior and abstract starting point. Ricœur sets faith and hermeneutics in a dialogical tension to each other: “Faith never appears as an immediate experience but always as mediated by a certain language that articulates it.” This goes both ways, in that faith means that one is being interpreted while one interprets the text. Therefore, “faith is the limit of all hermeneutics and the nonhermeneutical origin of all interpretation” (FS, 46; see also FS, 218). It is precisely the movement of interpretation that raises biblical faith into language. Ricœur thus rejects an artificial divorce of faith experience from language. Not only is such experience always expressed in language, continually articulated, and always interpreted, but faith is not even possible without such interpretation. In this respect, biblical faith is fundamentally different from the immediacy of religious experience in religions of the “sacred.”

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In his many essays on biblical hermeneutics, he speaks of biblical texts frequently as primordial or originary discourse (FS, 37), similar to his exploration of myth and symbol, but in considerably less negative fashion.5 (Primordial here is never equated with primitive.) In characteristic fashion, he regards the biblical texts as more primordial than theological reflection or doctrinal statements, which constitute a second- or even third-order discourse, much further removed from experience (FS, 37; H, 112). In the most general sense, Ricœur claims, religious language is poetic language. He means by this that it is “world-making” language, inasmuch as poetry attempts to paint a picture of a reality that is not yet, that is in the process of becoming, that holds out a hope or an ideal and calls the reader to enter within it and make it become manifest (FS, 223; H, 134–40). Poetry suspends the descriptive functions of ordinary discourse and opens up a new world, in which the readers are invited to understand themselves in face of the text and to develop a self that can inhabit this world by the use of imagination and sympathy (FS, 43, 232).6 In a later text, he puts this more broadly: “To speak of a world of the text is to stress the feature belonging to every literary work of opening before it a horizon of possible experience, a world in which it would be possible to live” (LQN, 26). Yet, scripture is poetry only in what Ricœur calls an “eccentric sense” (FS, 221). What distinguishes biblical poetry from other kinds of poetry (or even fiction) is the God-reference within it (FS, 45–46). The biblical texts name the divine. Yet, God is not named in the same way by all the scriptural texts. For Ricœur, there is not simply one kind of biblical language but a whole host of them; he refers to this as biblical polyphony. He outlines eight different genres or types of discourses: narratives, prophecies, laws, proverbs, prayers, hymns, liturgical formulations, wisdom writings (FS, 224). At times, he distinguishes narrative, prophetic, prescriptive, wisdom, and hymnic speech in the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament) from parables, proverbs, and eschatological sayings in the Christian New Testament (TB, 117). God is named in a unique and original fashion in each of these discourses (FS, 224; CI, 482; TT, 138–146; H, 113–31). Thus, “the first task of a biblical hermeneut is to identify the different modes of discourse that, taken together, constitute the finite field of interpretation within the boundaries of which religious language may be understood” (FS, 38). One can only speak about God by interpreting the specific discourses in which God has already been named: “Naming God, before being an act of which I am capable, is what the texts of my predilection do when they escape from their authors, their redactional setting, and their first audience, when they deploy their world, when they poetically manifest and reveal a world we might inhabit” (FS, 223). Ricœur suggests that God functions as the “index of incompleteness” or the vanishing point to which the individual discourses point in different ways (FS, 228).

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These various discourses or genres do not necessarily agree with each other or paint the same picture of the divine.7 For example, within the narrative discourse God appears as the one who accompanies the people of Israel, telling of the events of deliverance in the form of a story (FS, 40). This biblical naming of God is first of all and primarily a narrative naming in which God is the principal character. God is named as actant by the story, spoken of in the third person, as one of the characters within the story (FS, 225; CI, 484; TB, 212; H, 115–19). To name this God is thus to name a God who is at work in human history. The confession of faith “remains inseparable from the structure of the story,” such that “not just any theology whatsoever can be tied to the narrative form, but only a theology that proclaims Yahweh to be the grand actor of a history of deliverance,” namely “a theology in the form of Heilsgeschichte” (FS, 40). Narrative confesses the trace of God in the events. Primary among these events are the exodus and the resurrection (FS, 225; H, 152). Yet, while God is portrayed as affirming and sustaining within the narrative story, the divine is projected as threatening or even destructive by the prophetic oracle (FS, 41). This disparity is exacerbated by the other modes of discourse. In the legal writings, God is the “face-to-face” of the ethical relationship and simultaneously the author of the Torah. Wisdom speech is the struggle for sense in the face of the chaos and lack of sense of the world. Wisdom discourse, thus, encounters a hidden God who hides behind the inhuman course of events in history (FS, 227; H, 123–25). While hymns affirm faith and trust in God and speak to the divine as present or proximate, wisdom literature wonders about God’s absence and questions the seemingly anonymous guidance of—often terrifying—events. Not merely the content of the modes of discourse apparently contradict each other, however, but also their form. In narrative, God is named by the text as an actor within the story. In prophecy, God is the voice that sustains and enables the voice of the prophetic speaker (FS, 225). Thus, in narrative God is recounted in third person, while in other discourses Yahweh is addressed in second person or even regarded as first person behind the first person of the speaker (see also TB, 212). Hymns name God, in that they are addressed to God as the other (FS, 227; H, 126–31). Consequently each form of discourse speaks of God in its own unique way. Ricœur insists repeatedly that “throughout these discourses, God appears differently each time: sometimes as the hero of the saving act, sometimes as wrathful and compassionate, sometimes as the one to whom one can speak in a relation of an I-Thou type, or sometimes as the one whom I meet only in a cosmic order that ignores me” (FS, 41). Although the divine is the referent intended by each discourse, no monolithic picture of God emerges. Rather, the referent “God” “expresses the circulation of meaning among all the forms of discourse wherein God is named” (FS, 228). The disjunction of the

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various discourses must not be resolved, but “the power of the most powerful revelation is born in the contrast and the convergence of all the forms of discourse taken together” (FS, 44). One might say, in parallel with Ricœur’s work on symbolism, that they all give “rise to thought” about God. They are “itineraries of meaning” within the texts that set thought upon the path toward a process of metaphorization that guides the imagination beyond the text (FS, 147). In regarding God as the excess beyond the discourses, as what transcends each of them, the divine name becomes a symbol that gives rise to further reflection.8 The various biblical discourses are characterized by what Ricœur calls “limit-expressions” or a “logic of excess or super-abundance.”9 Limitexpressions can be defined as an “indication or modification which affects every form of discourse through a sort of passing over the limit” (FS, 230). They are marked by exaggeration, hyperbole, and an intensification that dislocates and reorients our imagination (FS, 59), introducing extravagance into the story and portraying the extraordinary within the ordinary. Limitexpressions “rupture ordinary speech” and produce a “burst or exploded universe” (FS, 60). Such expressions are evident in the biblical language of “not yet,” “in spite of,” and “how much more.” Prayer, lament, parable, and many other modes of discourse reveal these excesses in a variety of ways (TB, 220). The various modes of discourse all in some way or another indicate the divine inscrutability (TB, 222, 226). In an earlier text, Ricœur points to the resurrection as speaking most clearly of the hope of this “not yet” (CI, 406, 410). The parables of Jesus are among Ricœur’s favorite examples for limitexpressions.10 They “open up” our experience and “explode it in the direction” of experiences at the limit, in that they are purposefully extreme, depict moments of crisis and decision, distress and culmination that together portray the extravagant, abundant life of the kingdom of God (FS, 60–61). This hope for the kingdom is conveyed by both the content and the style of excess and abundance. Ricœur will often align hope with such experiences or expressions of excess. Paradoxical and superlative formulations are part and parcel of Jesus’ message, calling for overreactions or for extreme responses (FS, 280–81). This “logic of superabundance” calls us to extraordinary and excessive action and understanding (FS, 164). Our normal logic is called into question and disoriented in order to open our imagination to a new orientation or another way of seeing according to a new rule of exceptionality (FS, 281; FS, 293–302; TB, 125). The biblical texts set forth this logic of generosity and superabundance (FS, 282–83). Yet, it is striking that Ricœur repeatedly contrasts this logic of excess and abundance in the biblical texts to a “logic of the sacred” in ritual that he consistently identifies as a logic of correspondence or equivalence. He identifies a hermeneutic and prophetic function in the biblical texts, which

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he distinguishes from a phenomenology of religious experience or from a “hierophany of the sacred,” which he explicitly judges to be “antihermeneutical” (FS, 49). Ritual exemplifies and requires immediate and hence unmediated experience. Ricœur always relies on Eliade’s analysis of the varieties of religious experience for such a “hierophany of the sacred.” In the famous essay on “Manifestation and Proclamation” that contrasts the sacred and the biblical explicitly, it is fairly clear that Ricœur sides with “prophetic” proclamation over “sacred” manifestation. This is particularly obvious through his identification of the logic of manifestation with the “law of correspondence” that establishes equivalences between symbols and the sacred cosmos, while he interprets proclamation to be about superabundance and excess, characterized by limit-expressions (FS, 54–61). A phenomenology of experience or a manifestation of the sacred must necessarily be unmediated and is therefore not open to hermeneutic interpretation (FS, 48, 70–71; TT, 128–31; PA, 113). He again reiterates the conviction that we now live in a desacralized world where the traditional myths are no longer meaningful, although apparently the biblical texts are not subject to the same obsolescence. While Ricœur distances himself more clearly from Bultmann’s program of demythologization here than he does in his early work on symbolism, his retrieval of the sacred remains half-hearted.11 It is focused on “powerful” dimensions of the Word in proclamation and a transformation of cosmic symbolism into pure proclamation, concluding with the tentative suggestion that symbolism might reinvigorate the word (FS, 65–67). In a later text, he again insists on the importance of the sacred text in contrast to Eliade’s emphasis on manifestation. And he acknowledges: “I was very reluctant to use the word ‘sacred’ in my essay on revelation. I had to fight very hard to say finally what I believe, what I think, when I use the word ‘revelation.’” He interprets revelation here as referring to “what is not frozen in any ultimate or immutable text,” but instead to a “permanent process of opening something that is closed, of making manifest something that was hidden.” Thus, “revelation is a historical process, but the notion of sacred text is something antihistorical.” He concludes: “I am frightened by this word ‘sacred’” (FS, 72; see also H, 138–40). This fear of the sacred and of religious experience (especially as a kind of “mystical” or “ritual” experience) re-emerges in several other contexts. In Critique and Conviction, he says: “I have vigorously resisted the word ‘experience’ throughout my career, out of a distrust of immediacy, effusiveness, intuitionism: I always favored, on the contrary, the mediation of language and scripture; this is where my two affiliations confront each other” (CC, 139).12 Religious hermeneutics must thus focus on texts, preferably the biblical texts (FS, 48; TT, 132–35; H, 133–34). Ricœur is immensely reluctant to speak of religious experience and to move

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beyond biblical texts to the actions they might propose to us. Yet, must ritual necessarily be effusive or “anti-hermeneutical”? Throughout his essays on religion, Ricœur is most frequently concerned with questions of biblical interpretation. Many of his articles are about the appropriate ways of using interpretive methods for the biblical texts. The work of interpretation is about discerning meaning in and revealing the intention of a text. To interpret means “to explicate the sort of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text” (FS, 43, 221). The text unfolds a certain kind of reality, namely that of the kingdom of God or a new covenant. The recognition of scripture as “word of God” is that of “the quality of the new being as it announces itself” (FS, 45). For Ricœur, any notion of revelation is closely linked to this idea of the world of the text and its proposal for a new reality (FS, 44).13 Yet, in his discussion of this biblical world Ricœur rarely considers the narratival impact on life in any explicit fashion. It is telling, for example, that even in the aforementioned movement to “a new kind of being,” Ricœur focuses again primarily on faith as one’s “self-understanding in the face of the text.” Consequently, “faith is the attitude of one who accepts being interpreted at the same time that he or she interprets the world of the text,” which he calls “the hermeneutical constitution of the biblical faith” (FS, 46). The stress, then, is on understanding oneself and a particular kind of attitude toward the text, not on action more broadly. This emphasis is evident in other places as well (e.g., TT, 135; PR, 135).14 What does it mean to understand oneself before or through the text? It means “to develop, in imagination and sympathy, the self capable of inhabiting this world by deploying his or her ownmost possibilities there” (FS, 232; emphasis his). Here Ricœur argues that “to understand the world and to change it are fundamentally the same thing” (FS, 234). This is one of the very few essays in which he gestures to a “poetics of politics” that might nourish an “ethic of the limited use of violence,” although he does not develop such a poetics or ethics in this context (FS, 235). In most of his biblical analyses, Ricœur remains at the level of “understanding” and leaves the potential for moving to action unexplored. This is true also in other cases where he moves to the verge of implications for actions or practice but hesitates to go further. For example, he speaks of the implications of a method of interpretation in an exegesis of Genesis, but focuses mostly on the structural analysis, so the import of the analysis remains on purely linguistic levels (FS, 129–43).15 Interpretation goes beyond mere exegesis, but only inasmuch as it “preserves this interplay” between structure and intention and magnifies it (FS, 143).16 In another example, he analyzes the parables of the vineyard and of the sower in light of the ways in which they lead to activation of productive imagination in the reader. In this context, he does speak about the impact of the work of interpretation on life

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and action, explaining that “the transition between semiotic explication and interpretation” “has its fulfillment in the thought, action, and life of interpreting individuals and communities.” That is, by “accompanying the interpretive dynamism of the text itself,” one goes from the structure or sense of a text to its “application or appropriation (the reference)” (FS, 161; emphasis his). He sees this again operative primarily in the reciprocal ways in which texts interpret the interpreter, so that it becomes “itself a work of productive imagination before giving rise to an interpretive dynamism in the reader that is analogous to its own” (FS, 161). The text thus already begins a movement of interpretation, which is then completed by the reader in a parallel movement. The text hints at how the reader is to approach and understand it. Ricœur ends by discussing a kind of referential intentionality that is about moving to religious experiences, but still in terms of the text: “Here is where we pass from the work of imagination in the text to the work of imagination about the text” (FS, 166; emphasis his). The essay ends here and there is no discussion of how this imagination about the text might result in change within the community interpreting it and motivate them to action outside it.17 In this regard, it is interesting that his essay on the “summoned subject,” which was originally one of the concluding Gifford lectures that became Oneself as Another, also emphasizes an “understanding” of the self and not primarily its activity (FS, 262). The paradigm of the summoned subject, he suggests, could help Christian and Jewish communities to greater self-understanding. He then goes on to consider a theology of conscience that enables the “responding” self to judge itself in response to the word of the scriptures (FS, 274). This self-understanding enables us to be more honest with ourselves: “This discernment is an interpretation. And this interpretation is the outcome of a struggle for veracity and intellectual honesty” (FS, 275). Ricœur claims here again that the biblical logic of superabundance clashes with our secular logic of economy (FS, 281). Yet, in response to the question whether we are not called to rectify inequality in the world today, he says: “Putting into practice the sayings discussed above means searching for concrete signs that it is asked of us to give today according to the logic of Jesus” (FS, 283). It seems strange that such signs must still be sought, when in his parallel analysis of fictional texts they seem far more evident. Similarly in an essay on losing one’s life for Christ he says: “To take up my cross is to renounce the representation of God as the locus of absolute knowledge, the guarantee of all my knowledge. It is to accept knowing just one thing about God, that God was present in and is to be identified with Jesus crucified” (FS, 288; emphasis added). Why should we be able to draw only epistemological conclusions here, whether positive or negative, from the injunction to give one’s life?18 Why is it only about knowing something about God, even if that includes renunciation of firmer knowledge? Despite

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the parallels of his analysis of the world of biblical texts to his analysis of narrative worlds more generally, Ricœur remains almost entirely within the text when focusing on scriptural sources. He shows that important insights might be gained from the text: we learn something about the biblical world, something about God (at least as “God” is envisioned by the biblical authors), maybe even something about ourselves. The possibility of our actions being shaped by these insights or even our lives transformed by them is certainly opened, but Ricœur himself does not proceed into this area of application. Ricœur gives some hints of why he hesitates to venture further in several interviews on his work, where it often seems to come down to a matter of disciplinary boundary lines (e.g., CC, 139–70; AGT, 683–91). He insists on the importance of distinguishing between philosophical readings of biblical texts and purely confessional readings (CC, 140–41; AGT, 683–84).19 The two are not identical and Ricœur claims to be engaged only in philosophical readings, although he admits that these philosophical readings do not ignore the confessional elements of the texts.20 He explicates this further in the introduction to the collaborative text Thinking Biblically, where he employs the hermeneutic circle in order to explain the interaction between the philosopher and the exegete: “A third presupposition, thanks to which the work of the philosophical hermeneut moves toward that of the exegetical hermeneut, has to do with the relation between the texts of the biblical corpus and those historical communities that we can here call communities of reading and interpretation” (TB, xvi). He suggests that these communities of reading engage in self-critique and gain enhanced self-understanding via their readings of the biblical sources: “It is in interpreting the Scriptures that the community in question interprets itself. A kind of mutual election takes place here between those texts taken as foundational and the community we have deliberately called a community of reading and interpretation” (TB, xvi). He undertakes his work of interpretation as a participant of that community. This helps him define the role of faith in this interpretive exercise: “In this regard, faith is nothing other than the confession of this asymmetry between the word of the teacher and that of the disciple, and between the writings in which these two types of words are inscribed” (TB, xvii). Although the philosopher need not him- or herself belong to the community or have such faith, at least an act of imaginative identification is necessary: “To enter this circle is to participate at least by way of imagination and sympathy in the act of adhesion by which the historical community recognizes itself as founded and, if we can put it this way, as comprised, in every sense of the word, in and by this particular body of texts” (TB, xvii; emphasis his). Yet, whether the philosopher’s activity of interpretation is marked by adhesion to the faith of the community or not, such interpretation always remains at the level of a deeper comprehension of the texts. In his various essays on biblical interpretation,

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Ricœur rarely comments on how the texts might shape or impact our lives and how they might move us to action.21 FROM TEXT TO ACTION AND FROM NARRATIVE TO LIFE Yet, Ricœur’s broader philosophical work frequently draws parallels between life and narrative, text and action. His most basic argument is that as narratives are taken from life, so life is always narrated, and that as texts speak of actions, so actions can often be read as quasi-texts. Beyond establishing such parallels, however, Ricœur also attempts to draw more explicit connections between them. Actions are not only “like” texts, narrative does not merely “mirror” life in some fashion, but texts can move us to action, narrative can shape and transform life. This is, of course, not a monolithic or simple movement, but always characterized by the interplay of a desire for concordance or harmony and the reality of discordance or even chaos in our lives. Indeed, telling a coherent narrative about our lives precisely arises out of this desire for concordance, a way of making life meaningful and giving it purpose, direction, and coherence.22 Yet, any “neat” narrative always continues to be interrupted by the discordant vicissitudes of life. This recognition is one of the reasons why Ricœur was often critical of Gadamer’s rather benign reading of how we interact with texts and their authors or even how we engage in dialogue with other people.23 He is reluctant to speak of a complete fusion of horizons or to say that we could ever come to any sort of full understanding, even with the best of will and the most careful interpretation. A hermeneutics of suspicion is and must always continue to be at work. No final closure is ever possible. This is true also of the interaction between text and action, narrative and life—rarely is it straightforward or uncomplicated.24 He articulates these connections in various ways: on the one hand, via the parallels drawn between text and action in the central portion of From Text to Action, on the other hand, via the role of narrative in Time and Narrative and in the construction of the self in Oneself as Another.25 In the middle section of From Text to Action, Ricœur analyzes action theory and parallels it to the theory of texts. He shows that they have several characteristics in common. Like texts, actions can be hermeneutically interpreted: action always has an actor, an audience, even at times a recorded text.26 This is most fully established in the essay “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” where he argues that the human sciences can have a hermeneutic, because their actions can be analyzed in a manner similar to texts: “The notion of the text is a good paradigm for the so-called object of the social sciences” and “the methodology of text interpretation” can be

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used “as a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of the human sciences” (TA, 145). He draws four parallels between written and spoken discourse: both types of discourse have a temporal component, both refer back to a speaker, both “claim to describe, to express, or to represent” a world, and both are addressed to others as interlocutors. Drawing on speech act theory, he claims that action similarly displays these four elements. Action “has the structure” of speech acts and displays many of its characteristics. Action refers to an “author,” although at times in a less clear fashion than texts do. Actions leave traces and marks, which can “become the documents of human action” (TA, 152–53; emphasis his). Furthermore, action is an “open work” that is “addressed to an indefinite range of possible ‘readers’” (TA, 155; emphasis his). In terms of methodology, the paradigm of text interpretation can be used to analyze action as well.27 In the essay “Explanation and Understanding,” Ricœur questions what he calls the “dualism of explanation and understanding” and instead proposes an alternative that sees both as mutually interpenetrating. He shows this by establishing a parallel between the theory of texts (hermeneutics and semiology) and action theory or theory of history. In all three cases, we can move from explanation to understanding and from understanding to explanation. An “interpretive arc” extends from “naive understanding to informed understanding through explanation” (TA, 130). These movements of explanation and understanding are therefore parallel to each other. Ricœur goes on to analyze action theory as it appears in Wittgenstein, Austin, and Anscombe. He interprets the apparent dichotomy of explanation and understanding in terms of motivation and causation, which cannot be divorced from each other, suggesting that there are a variety of important reasons that allow us to transfer “the theory of the text to the theory of action and vice versa” (TA, 137). Most profoundly, “on the one hand, the notion of the text is a good paradigm for human action and, on the other, action is a good referent for an entire category of texts” (TA, 137; emphases his). There is a parallel between the autonomy of the text and that of action; this is further validated by the idea of the archive, in which actions and texts leave marks. Ricœur applies this also more broadly to the study of history, which rethinks past action in terms of a narrative text: “History combines the theory of the text and the theory of action in a theory of the true narrative of the actions of those of the past” (TA, 142). Both understanding and explanation are required in all three theories. Understanding is the “nonmethodical” moment, for which explanation provides the method. Understanding and explanation together speak of the movements of distanciation and belonging, which are both necessary. Explanation and understanding also come together in the essay on “The Model of the Text” (TA, 125–43; see also IT, 71–88, HHS, 145–64). Although the text must be treated as a whole, it is subject to

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the hermeneutic circle of constant guessing and validation. Both texts and actions give rise to a plurivocity of meanings that allows for different kinds of interpretations, some of which may be in conflict with each other.28 Ricœur here speaks of the plurivocity of action in a way that parallels some of his comments on the polyphony of ways of naming God in the biblical texts: “There is a specific plurivocity belonging to the meaning of human action. Human action, too, is a limited field of possible constructions” (TA, 160; emphasis his).29 Text and action, then, are closely linked through their various parallel characteristics. Text and action together open a world that is mutually influenced by both. Communication and shaping of community become possible through the interplay of texts, speech, and actions. Texts, then, both depict and transfigure the world in which we live. Fiction has the “capacity to open and unfold new dimensions of reality by means of our suspension of belief in an earlier description” (TA, 175). Here Ricœur is beginning to move more explicitly in the direction of narrative, drawing parallels between fictional and historical narratives. We are affected by history.30 Fiction is really a description of human action, but at the same time imaginatively envisions new courses of action and new possibilities: “Between what could be a logic of narrative possibilities and the empirical diversity of action, narrative fiction interposes its schematism of human action.” Therefore, narrative can be described as “a procedure of redescription, in which the heuristic function proceeds from the narrative structure and redescription has action itself as its referent” (TA, 177). Redescription of action opens new narrative possibilities, but also new imaginative options for action. Ricœur, then, is deeply interested in the interplay between texts and actions. Most fundamentally, he argues that texts and actions are parallel or similar in many ways: on the one hand, texts deal with actions or perform actions and, on the other hand, actions have a textual or narratival structure. This already suggests a link between them, although it focuses primarily on their structural parallels. More importantly, it supports the idea that actions and practices are open to interpretation, maybe even require it. Ricœur’s work goes on to deal much more fully with how especially narrative texts shape not merely individual actions but entire lives. Actions and life already have narrative qualities and both fictional and historical narratives draw from this life and are rooted in it. Already in “Explanation and Understanding” he speaks of the “interpretive arc” in a way that previews his concerns with narrative. Narrative constitutes and shapes a community that understands itself through the narrative (TA, 131). Narrative unfolds a world of action before the readers, transforming them in the process.31 Narrative describes life, but at the same time shapes and influences it. This aspect is obvious in the case of history but it is also true of fictional narratives: they function mimetically only because they are “prefigured” in life. Ricœur carries these insights about

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narrative further in his three-volume work Time and Narrative, which not only establishes the parallel between fictional and historical narratives more fully, but also explicates more specifically how narrative impacts and transforms life. Ricœur’s analysis of narrative in terms of a three-fold mimesis is probably among the most well-known aspects of his work.32 He argues that narrative is always prefigured in life, that life is configured in the narrative, and that subsequently the narrative refigures (or transfigures) life in its turn. Mimetic “reflection” of life is at work in all of these stages. Volume I of Time and Narrative focuses especially on the ways in which narratives are already rooted in life. This refers both to a kind of pre-understanding and to the norms and signs human action follows. The parallels established between texts and actions in the previous analysis are assumed here. On the one hand, “the composition of the plot is grounded in a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character” (TN I, 54). On the other hand, human action underlies norms and rules that mediate it “symbolically” and thereby make narration possible. We can “read” other people’s actions and lives because they figure for us symbolically: “Symbolism is not in the mind, not a psychological operation destined to guide action, but a meaning incorporated into action and decipherable from it by other actors in the social interplay” (TN I, 57). Life is meaningful in ways that allows it to be narrated. At the same time, action already has narrative and quasi-textual elements because of the way in which it gestures meaningfully and allows for the interpretation of human conduct and concrete behaviors (TN I, 58). In fact, “literature would be incomprehensible if it did not give a configuration to what was already a figure in human action” (TN I, 64). Narrative is impossible without relying on human action, but human action is meaningless without its narratival structure.33 Ricœur insists, however, that this is not merely a mirroring of life, but that there is real interaction between narrative and action in such a way that our lives change in response to the narrative. The philosophical task is precisely to highlight and show this: “It is the task of hermeneutics, in return, to reconstruct the set of operations by which a work lifts itself above the opaque depths of living, acting, and suffering, to be given by an author to readers who receive it and thereby change their acting” (TN I, 53). As we read the story, it becomes real in our own lives: “To follow a story is to actualize it by reading it” (TN I, 76). Here this actualization is still limited to the narrative itself and Ricœur’s focus is primarily on the ways in which narratives are always informed by life. In volume III, he will address more fully how the narrative in turn shapes and transforms our lives.34 Throughout the three volumes of Time and Narrative, Ricœur establishes parallels between historical and fictional accounts. He argues against

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various tendencies in historical research that seek to downplay or eliminate its narrative function by showing ways in which historical accounts are meaningful precisely in narrative ways even when narrative is eschewed. Any attempt at explaining an event or establishing causal connections between events will already be to some extent narratival in character, especially when it takes into account the event’s temporal dimension: “historical events do not differ radically from the events framed by a plot” (TN I, 208). This leads us to reconsider the superficial ascriptions of truth and falsity to historical and fictional narratives, respectively, as a false dichotomy. Both kinds of narrative battle between concordance and discordance and both attempt emplotment via events, characters, and temporal frames. Historical understanding relies on narrative understanding. Both seek to negotiate the relationships between life and narrative in somewhat different but also deeply connected ways.35 Ricœur will continue to employ this parallel between history and fiction when he considers how we narrate ourselves in order to establish ipseity and meaning in our personal lives and will also draw on it when he discusses the questions of memory and history in Memory, History, Forgetting. Volume III of Time and Narrative focuses more fully on the third stage of mimesis by examining specifically the ways in which time is narrated. After addressing various difficulties with the structure of time, Ricœur argues that the story opens a world before the reader, which the reader comes to inhabit via imagination and where various possibilities of acting are explored. As he stresses in a different text, the “function of fiction in shaping reality” consists in the fact “that new realities become open to us and old worlds are made new” (FFR, 141). This world is not completely separate from our “lived” world, but an imaginative world that has the ability to shape and transform the reality in which we live. Narrative re-describes the world and in some sense gives it new meaning, thereby changing it permanently. Narrative addresses reality, in that it is “revealing, in the sense that it brings features to light that were concealed and yet already sketched out at the heart of our experience, our praxis” and it is “transforming, in the sense that a life examined in this way is a changed life, another life” (TN III, 158). The narrative “world of the text” opens the text to the reader and invites the reader into its world, made possible by its own rootedness in the reader’s life, while the “world of the reader” approaches the narrative text and invites it to enter within the reader’s own world and to transform it. While the activity of reading allows configuration to take place, it is only in the action beyond the reading “that the configuration of the text is transformed into refiguration” (TN III, 159). The parallel to the biblical world of the text is obvious. Yet, for fictional and historical worlds, Ricœur stresses the move from and back to life much more explicitly and more frequently than he does for the biblical texts. This may

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well be the case at least partly because he does not consider how those texts might be instantiated in the “reading” practices of ritual. The two worlds (of text and reader) must confront each other in order for real transfiguration to take place. The reader must engage the text and appropriate it for him- or herself. Our reading of the text hence both interrupts and reorients us; it serves “as a new impetus to action” (TN III, 179). The more we lose ourselves in the narrative, the more it will transform us and have an “influence on social reality” (TN III, 179). He argues that this always has an ethical dimension although he does not go on to explore in this context what this might mean concretely.36 He ends his discussion by explicitly raising the question of narrative identity that will form the central concern of Oneself as Another: “The story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told” (TN III, 246). Similarly, communal identity is shaped via the stories and texts of its particular tradition (TN III, 248).37 The question of narrative identity, then, especially encapsulates the dual contention that, on the one hand, narrative texts arise from, parallel, and influence life and, on the other hand, that life and action in some fashion require (textual) narratives.38 Oneself as Another carries these more general structural claims further by focusing them on the ways in which they shape a continuous and coherent self over time.39 The interplay between narrating and acting are central to the aporia of identity. Ricœur distinguishes between idem-identity, which refers to sameness or simple continuity of identity over time, and ipse-identity, which is about becoming a self, as is particularly evident in narrative constructions of the self.40 Actions are again fundamentally important to the account, as they become integrated into the overall narrative of a life and are expressed especially in ethical ways. Ricœur explores how a narrative view of the self is not only able to answer the question about identity, but can actually shape our actions in the world in specifically moral and more generally in meaningful ways. The fifth and sixth studies, which explore narrative identity in light of the theories of action and agency considered earlier in the book, are especially important here.41 Personal identity is intimately wrapped up with acting: “the major issue resided . . . in determining what specifies the self, implied in the power-todo, at the junction of acting and the agent” or what Ricœur often calls “the capable self” or “capable person” (homo capax) (OA, 113). The capable self becomes his most fundamental way to speak of the human being or the subject as it seeks to establish coherent identity through its actions. This acting is part of a history and relies upon the temporal dimension of the self. He suggests that narrative can provide a middle ground between approaches to the self that are “descriptive” (who we are) and “prescriptive” (what we should

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do), following the triad “describe, narrate, prescribe” (OA, 114), which also structures the book as a whole. Narrative can do this because “in many narratives the self seeks its identity on the scale of an entire life” (OA, 115) and also because narratives are concerned with action. Indeed, there is “no ethically neutral narrative” (OA, 115). The analysis of character in emplotment allows us to explore the identity of a moral subject (OA, 130). After laying out the case for employing narrative, he discusses narrative identity more fully in the sixth study by considering how narrative function calls for an “extension of the practical field” (OA, 140).42 The notion of emplotment can be useful for identity because it focuses on the development of plot and character. In the case of narrative, “telling a story is saying who did what and how, by spreading out in time the connection between these various viewpoints.” Through the narrative “attribution is established” (OA, 146). The question of the connection between identity and action is here raised in a different way through this question of attribution or ascription. Narrative addresses these problems particularly well: “The dialectic of character and plot makes the aporias of ascription productive, and narrative identity can be said to provide a poetic reply to them” (OA, 147). Ultimately, the difficulty of ascription goes back to the interplay of concordance and discordance.43 On the level of the narrative, this happens via the interplay between plot and character. Yet, we seek to establish identity of character over the course of a life in very similar fashion. The two are closely connected: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character” (OA, 148). The dialectic of discordant concordance is precisely that between sameness and selfhood (OA, 148).44 Ricœur shows that practices have a pre-narrative structure, although he stresses that this does not mean “that practices as such contain ready-made narrative scenarios, but their organization gives them a prenarrative quality” (OA, 157). On a more complex level, the actions making up a life display such narrative structures. Narrative then becomes closely linked to the idea of leading a certain kind of life, especially a “good life”: “The idea of gathering together one’s life in the form of a narrative is destined to serve as the basis for the aim of a ‘good’ life,” ultimately of ethics (OA, 158). The narrative shape of life is important to one’s becoming an ethical subject. Ricœur asks: “How, indeed, could a subject of action give an ethical character to his or her life taken as a whole, if this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not, precisely, in the form of a narrative?” (OA, 158) Narrative, then, is crucial not just for personal identity but also for ethical action. Of course, the interplay of concordance and discordance—maybe the narratival equivalent of hope and fragility—is still at work here. This is never a

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complete or entirely cohesive narrative.45 Indeed, “it is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or from history” (OA, 162). Ricœur concludes by highlighting again the parallels between life and narrative and the ways in which their interconnection can prove helpful: “The conclusion of this discussion, then, is that literary narratives and life histories, far from being mutually exclusive, are complementary, despite, or even because of, their contrast. This dialectic reminds us that the narrative is part of life before being exiled from life in writing; it returns to life along the multiple paths of appropriation and at the price of the unavoidable tensions just mentioned” (OA, 163). Narrative and life are not only parallel but deeply implicated in each other. Preparing his movement toward the prescriptive in the final chapters of the book, Ricœur stresses that narratives always have ethical implications. The actions we perform and the ways in which we narrate these actions in order to give them coherence and establish identity, at the same time serve to justify our actions and therefore have an evaluative moral dimension. Simultaneously, they make possible imaginative variation of various possibilities of narrating our lives. Ricœur speaks of these as “thought experiments” that might enable us to evaluate good and evil (OA, 164).46 Imagination and narrative have ethical dimensions inasmuch as they always imply valuing and judgment. The seventh through ninth studies explicitly explore these ethical dimensions of the self, while not abandoning narrative concerns entirely. Ricœur’s ethical thought will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, but what matters in the present context is that these ethical considerations are seen to be in full continuity with the narrative functions just outlined. Narrative is what links action, selfhood, and ethical aim. Narrative texts and narrative structures more generally can thus provide a framework for ethical action, to the point of unifying descriptive and prescriptive aspects of identity.47 Ricœur claims that “the idea of the narrative unity of a life therefore serves to assure us that the subject of ethics is none other than the one to whom the narrative assigns a narrative identity” (OA, 178). This narrative identity shows the person as both acting and suffering. We are subject to the “whims of life” in the sense of Nussbaum’s “fragility of the goodness of human action” (OA, 178). A person emerges as the subject of capabilities of acting within the context of life’s complications.48 The tension between the active and passive elements of life reproduces the earlier tension between voluntary and involuntary or between fragility and hope. The “capacities” we have as human beings are both about our identity and what makes possible our actions. It designates the power we have to act meaningfully in the world, while also acknowledging the essential elements

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of “contingency, uncertainty, and unpredictability” in our lives. While “the person is his or her history,” this is made possible through “the capacity to say, the capacity to act, and the capacity to recount.”49 Emplotment in lifenarratives enables us to conceive of identity in more complex ways than mere sameness and opens the discussion of identity to the possibility of moral action via imputation and promising. In Oneself as Another, Ricœur compares this to the hermeneutic circle: “between our aim of a ‘good life’ and our particular choices a sort of hermeneutical circle is traced by virtue of the back-and-forth motion between the idea of the ‘good life’ and the most important decisions of our existence.” He contends that “this can be likened to a text in which the whole and the part are to be understood in terms of the other.” Thus, “for the agent, interpreting the text of an action is interpreting himself or herself” (OA, 179).50 Text and action are here then fully linked in one’s pursuit of identity over time, as one lives and provides an account of one’s life.51 RELIGIOUS NARRATIVES AND THE LITURGICAL WORLD Both Ricœur’s work on narrative and his biblical hermeneutics employ the notion of the world of the text in almost identical fashion.52 He even points to this parallel himself (TA, 89–101) and actually at times has trouble distinguishing the “biblical” poetic world from the narrative worlds opened by fiction or poetry. Biblical texts “intend being” and provide “imaginative variations” in very similar fashion to fiction. The only difference Ricœur seems able to cite between biblical and fictional texts is the God-reference within the biblical discourses (TA, 97). And yet, as just demonstrated, he hesitates to move more explicitly to action or life from these texts and discourses. This is surprising in light of the fact that the biblical texts themselves consistently draw explicit parallels between text and action. Countless texts concretely enjoin actions upon their audiences: “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37); “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27); “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40); “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Ricœur’s account of three-fold mimesis applies fully to the biblical texts in the ways in which they assume action and lead to action. The parables and historical narratives especially are taken from life, either recounting historical events or at least referring to a life familiar to the audience: that of shepherds, keepers of vineyards, merchants, farmers, and so forth. Many biblical texts move to action, not merely by their concrete injunctions, but often by their rhetorical force. Even when the parables do not

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explicitly exhort to action within the parable itself, their very rhetoric seeks to move the audience to respond in concrete ways that go beyond mere “insight” or “self-understanding.” As shown above, Ricœur occasionally hints at this in his analysis of limitexpressions and the logic of superabundance, but surely much more could be said here. The biblical narratives and other religious texts function mimetically, just as do the fictional and historical narratives he examines in his more “secular” work. Ricœur himself clearly notes that even the biblical texts open a world before the reader, a world he characterizes in eschatological terms as a world of promise and hope. Yet, we do not merely gain insight about God or greater self-understanding from this scriptural world. Rather, the world opened before us by the biblical texts challenges us to action. If we choose to enter it, we are called upon to change our lives, repent, become part of the kingdom of God, where values are turned upside down, where the first will be last and the last first—a kingdom of radical hospitality that, if taken seriously, implies fundamental changes in social structures and even economic relations. Of course, it does not give a blueprint for political action—neither do fictional narratives. And yet it has the potential for transforming our lives and shaping us in radically new ways, as Ricœur himself obviously knows and occasionally implies. Yet, how and where do we encounter these texts and their narrative world? Not usually, or at least not solely, in passive, solitary reading. From the earliest centuries onward—in fact, from the very writing of the texts—they were heard in community and were part of the context of the liturgical celebration and gathering of the people. Ricœur does not usually speak of liturgy, although he mentions the Eucharist occasionally (e.g., FS, 71) and also sometimes points to the activity of preaching (especially its hermeneutic character). He acknowledges the liturgical context for preaching once in an essay on narrative theology, where he tries to draw a distinction between “sacred” and “mundane” stories: “First, these stories are traditional in the sense that their having been told in that way in the past constitutes a reason for retelling them. Second, they are authoritative in the sense that they consist in selections and collection that separate the canonical from the apocryphal ones. And third, they are liturgical in the senses that they reach their full meaningfulness when reenacted in a cultic situation” (FS, 243; emphases his). Unfortunately, he does nothing further with this insight but focuses instead solely on the narrative character of the biblical stories. In his analysis of the “Song of Songs” in Thinking Biblically, Ricœur also once refers to the liturgical context, speaking of it as “a privileged place for the reproduction of the text” (TB, 279), although he talks about it here in terms of a “speech situation” (TB, 281) rather than as a way of motivating actions or opening a world. Yet, religious worship is a good locus for examining how biblical and other liturgical texts

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can move people to action, not only because this is the place in which the text is usually heard and because it already assumes a certain level of activity, but most profoundly because it opens a world, which shapes and transforms the listeners’ lives in precisely the ways Ricœur has explored in his more general philosophical hermeneutics. Ricœur’s insights actually apply eminently well to the liturgical experience, as Part II of this book will show more fully. Liturgical experience, maybe even more than historical experience, is also characterized by texts, written and unwritten, at the very least the biblical texts, but, depending on the tradition, also specific liturgical texts (Typicon, Missal, Book of Common Prayer, etc.). Yet these texts are always concretely enacted: they are not meant primarily for reading, but for praxis—for the performance of the rites they describe and govern. Often the entire community participates in the actions prescribed and depicted by the texts. In liturgy, there is a conscious move from text to action: the text is enacted or reproduced in the liturgical action. Text within liturgy is rarely just heard passively but is acted out and performed. Biblical and liturgical texts become meaningful as and in liturgical action, within the context of the celebration. At the same time, the actions and movements of liturgy, including the arrangement of physical space and various signs accompanying the action, do actually function as a kind of text: they are meant to be read and to signify within the celebration. The action of the breaking of the bread, for example, is clearly not just a one-time surprising action, but becomes meaningful precisely through its repetition and the repetition of certain texts: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26, cited in many eucharistic liturgies). Text and action are intricately connected here. Biblical texts are not merely texts, they become real as they are proclaimed and become enacted. Liturgy here serves as the transition between what seems like mere text and what might appear as purely action. The biblical and liturgical texts already become action within the liturgical drama. At the same time, they serve themselves as text for the action enjoined upon the participants by the liturgical message. This connection between text and action is absolutely central to an analysis of liturgy. Liturgical theologians and ritual scholars in recent years have increasingly stressed that liturgy is action and not merely text. Liturgy is performed, not just read or even chanted. The liturgical theologian Graham Hughes, for example, argues that “the ‘meaning’ of the event consisted as much in the performance of the act as in the markings on the page—even if we agree that the one could not have come into being without the other.”53 Bridget Nichols takes up Ricœur explicitly by formulating the connection between liturgical text and its performance in terms of the hermeneutic circle.54 Liturgical hermeneutics, in her view, allows for a greater emphasis on

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the performative aspect of liturgy. She insists that liturgy is always both text and performance. Don Saliers also emphasizes that understanding the theological implications of liturgy relies as much on examining how it was practiced as it does on looking at the texts themselves: “The central issue is not ‘what are the theological truths contained and stated in the texts?’ but ‘what is being said and done in the liturgical action with the use of these words?’” He thinks that the second question “cannot be answered by recounting the earliest version of the liturgical texts under study, or by analyzing the language of the prayers as such. Rather, the actual performance of the language is done by a community.” He concludes that “the ‘hermeneutics’ of the assembly’s social, economic, and political/ethical energies and patterns are central” and warns that “preoccupation with reformed texts and rubrics neglects the most difficult challenge: to uncover the intersection of human pathos with the symbolic power and range of liturgical rites authentically celebrated.”55 Texts are enacted and both the texts and the action require careful interpretation. The sacramental theologian Kevin Irwin maybe stresses this most strongly in an early text where he laments that “trying to underscore the priority of the lex orandi in doing theology” most theologians “have tended to emphasize liturgical texts.” While this has the value that “it gives due weight to texts which have been crafted over centuries of Church life and prayer and which are essential to the ritual enactment of liturgy,” it harbors “the danger of using liturgical texts as ‘proof texts’ and of textual fundamentalism.” Instead, he says we must recognize: “Liturgy is far more than texts. Liturgy is an enacted communal symbolic event with a number of constitutive elements and means of communication, including, but not restricted to, texts.” He defines his own project as “intended to shed light on an elusive task—how to develop liturgical theology based on the multifaceted event called liturgy.”56 Throughout his book, he emphasizes the relationship between text and context or the circumstances within which liturgy occurs as an event. Text and action closely interact in multiple ways within liturgy. Texts not only inform action but are also shaped by it. Not only do participants enter a world as they come into liturgy and bring their own world into it, carry it into the holy space, but the liturgical world also does not remain confined to the church or temple. Rather it permeates the lives of those who worship and is carried after the service into the rest of the week and into the “secular” space and lives of the community. Liturgical scholars often emphasize that liturgy is not limited to the ecclesial space, but is somehow meant to affect all of life, as it is touched by liturgy. The “organized” liturgy within the sacred space is a microcosm, the beginning of a promise, which is to permeate the entire cosmos and be fulfilled in our lives as a whole (some of these claims will be taken up in later chapters in more detail). The liturgical narratives, then, are taken to transform regular life, to re-configure it in accordance with the

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rhythm and content of the ritual. Text and action are closely aligned within the liturgy. The texts represent human action, but actions are also inspired and transformed by the texts. Liturgy may well be a more successful bridge between text and action than the reading of scripture, which one can essentially do on one’s own and purely passively. Although liturgy can obviously become a rote experience that is no longer meaningful to its participants, it always has the potential of provoking us anew to enter its world and listen to its message of challenge and hope. At the same time, liturgical texts, like narrative texts, can have troubling implications for action.57 A hermeneutics of suspicion must be at work also for liturgical texts and practices. Like biblical texts, liturgical texts and actions require vigilant interpretation. The movement of appropriation must be accompanied by various hermeneutic circles that set individual texts and actions in the context of larger bodies of texts or ceremonies. Actions can interpret texts mimetically, while the texts serve to guide practices. Here also the struggle between concordance and discordance plays an important role. If liturgical texts are to be genuinely reflective of life, they must (and do) also grapple with our fragility, with our less savory emotions, and with our worst tendencies, that is, with the ways in which our lives are defined by struggle, weakness, and even evil. Yet, liturgy cannot just be a mimetic performance of such feelings and experiences, but must also become a space in which we are challenged to change, invited to transformation, renewed and led toward greater concordance between the message of salvation and the reality of our lives. These capacities of the self within the context of community, informed by the phronetic resources of the liturgical material, are crucial for the relationship between text and action, narrative and life, liturgical world and the world “outside” of liturgy. This dimension of ethics and wisdom will now be explored more fully.

Chapter 3

Ethics, Justice, and the Move to Wisdom

Narrative, as just discussed, configures or constructs actions and life in its texts. This aspect may be more obvious in fictional narratives, but Ricœur insists that these notions can also be applied to historical narratives. Narratives are meaningful inasmuch as they provide order and coherence for the chaos of data, whether in the case of historical events or of the discordant dimensions of our own lives. These narratives then refigure our lives by mimetically shaping a world that we can enter, with which we can interact, and that ultimately has the capacity to transform us. We act and live differently because we have gone through the mimetic stages. Although this may occur even on the level of a single fictional narrative, it happens much more profoundly on the scale of our lives as a whole as we seek to shape a coherent narrative identity for our lives that forms us into “capable selves” and enables us to act in certain ethical ways within community and to provide a truthful account for such acts. All this also has profound repercussions for how we tell communal narratives, how we narrate the lives of the victims of history and give testimony to their suffering. Here also narrative moves to action and, in fact, becomes itself the action in some way: the memory expressed in the testimony—as fragile and unreliable as that may often be—at the same time can serve as a tribute to forgotten victims and can work restorative justice in the acts of remembering and recognition. These are the themes that characterize Ricœur’s final works. Already in his earlier work on ideology and utopia, Ricœur was interested in the question of how a social or political imaginary is shaped.1 In Time and Narrative, as just demonstrated, he considers the mimetic import of narrative and its potential for refiguring life. Although he does not employ the language of the social imaginary in that context, surely that is partly what mimesis3 is all about. In Oneself as Another, Ricœur not only develops a 45

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notion of narrative identity in order to examine the question of selfhood and moral imputability, but also puts forth an ethical proposal that seeks to bring together Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel in a particular way, culminating in an analysis of phronesis as central to reaching the ethical aim via moral norms in concrete situations, in order to pursue “the ‘good life’ with and for others in just institutions.” He pushes some of these insights further in what are maybe his most explicitly “political” works, The Just and Reflections on the Just. Yet, neither the impact of narrative nor phronetic ethics plays much of a role in Ricœur’s extensive work on biblical interpretation and religious notions of the self. And, conversely, religion plays almost no role in his discussions of ethics and justice. The references to religion or even biblical texts in Ricœur’s later works are extremely brief, often amounting to just a couple of sentences or an aside in the text. He mentions forgiveness as a “Christian insight” in the final section of his long work Memory, History, Forgetting (MHF, 457–506) and similarly briefly considers the topic of pardon or mercy in The Just (J, 144). In The Course of Recognition, he points to the Christian idea of agapic love in regard to peace and mutual recognition (CR, 220–24). None of these are explored in any detail. This chapter will return more fully to the ethical proposal Ricœur develops in Oneself as Another and to some of his work on memory, justice, and recognition. It will examine the curious absence of the religious in these discussions and question Ricœur’s emphasis on passivity in his notions of the religious self in light of his emphasis on the capacities of the self in his philosophical work on these topics. NARRATIVE, WISDOM, AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY As already explored in the last chapter, Ricœur employs his work on narrative in his examination of narrative identity in Oneself as Another and in several shorter texts. In these contexts, he almost always exclusively focuses on questions of selfhood or sameness over time and the problem of ascription or attribution of actions. Although the latter certainly have a moral dimension and he once refers to the possibility of narrative as a “laboratory for thought experiments” about possible variations of identity, he does not always explicitly connect narrative and phronesis.2 This is surprising in light of the fact that Aristotle argues that one of the important goals of tragedy is to teach listeners wisdom and to enable them to become more moral individuals. Ricœur notes this latter point briefly but does not develop it.3 The ethical dimensions of his discussion of narrative identity in these chapters focus almost entirely on the questions raised by the earlier analytical treatments. The role of narrative is described as primarily concerned with giving coherence to one’s life (i.e.,

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negotiating the tension between discordance and concordance) and with making actions attributable to a responsible actor: “How, indeed, could a subject of action give an ethical character to his or her own life taken as a whole, if this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not, precisely, in the form of a narrative?” (OA, 138). The self caught in the chaos of discordance seeks to establish concordance and to give meaning to life via narrative constructions that provide a coherent narrative of this life (OA, 162; LQN, 31–33). While Ricœur has recourse to Aristotle both for his notion of emplotment (in the first volume of Time and Narrative), which he develops out of Aristotle’s Poetics, and more broadly for his methodological middle way, he does not explicitly appeal to Aristotle’s notion of phronesis in his work on narrative or elaborate specifically moral dimensions of selfhood (beyond the affirmation of identity and the possibility of ascription) in these contexts. Conversely, when he does speak extensively of phronesis in his ethical treatment, the focus on narrative disappears. He also seldom employs any notion of phronesis in his biblical hermeneutics and thus gives little indication of how such narrative constructions of identity might apply to religious practices within a religious social imaginary. In fact, as shown earlier, the religious tends to remain limited to personal faith or self-understanding rather than exploring any implications for a broader social imaginary. Ricœur’s most explicit and most thorough examination of ethics and morality comes in chapters 7–9 of Oneself as Another.4 Set in the context of questions of subjectivity and selfhood, identity over time, and the possibility of imputing actions to an agent, he develops what he calls his “little ethics.” He begins with Aristotle’s virtue ethics in order to develop a notion of the ethical aim as oriented toward “the good life, with and for others, in just institutions” (OA, 169–202). He appeals briefly to narrative as having shown the possibility of ethical integration (OA, 175).5 The middle section of that chapter draws on Aristotle’s notion of friendship in order to develop the possibility of mutual esteem for self and other. Aristotelian praxis ends in justice, described as “equality without egalitarianism.” Such equality on the model of solicitude “provides to the self another who is an each” (OA, 202). In chapter 8, he draws on Kant for a development of moral norms that might enable one to reach the ethical aim, yet modifies Kant’s universalism by putting him in conversation with Aristotle. This analysis reaches its height in chapter 9 with a re-reading of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit through the lens of Aristotelian notions of phronesis. Practical wisdom does not introduce some new agency but guides us through the conflicts that moral principles alone are unable to resolve. Phronesis or practical wisdom is crucial to Ricœur’s analysis, and he develops this partially via a quasi-narrative interlude of the tragedy of Antigone.6 Antigone “teaches us” and calls us to “deliberate well,”

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although for that to occur we have to move from tragedy back to philosophy (OA, 243, 246, 249), maybe paralleling the earlier move from primitive myth to philosophical thinking. The rest of the chapter focuses on the possibility of the just distribution of goods, the arbitration of conflict, the qualifying (or modifying) of self-sufficient notions of autonomy, and overall the issue of the contextualization of action for the applicability of norms. Yet, especially considering his extended reference to the story of Antigone, it is striking that he really has very little recourse to his own analysis of narrative identity, developed just previously in chapters 5 and (especially) 6, or maybe more importantly—considering those two chapters say little about the stages of mimesis or the intersection of the world of the text with the contemporary world—to his analysis of narrative in Time and Narrative. He ends the chapter on practical wisdom by calling for a “reflective equilibrium between the ethics of argumentation and considered convictions” precisely in light of “the cultural history belonging to the West, with its wars of religion” (OA, 289). Critical phronesis calls us to abolish suffering and to make good judgments, mediated by Sittlichkeit. Although Ricœur tries to bring all of his previous studies together here, he does not employ narrative as a model for learning phronesis, but only for resolving the “who” of acting and the question of the imputability of actions or of responsibility based on selfconstancy (OA, 291–96). Ricœur draws on Hegel (rather than Aristotle) for bringing the abstract into the concrete, although this is a constantly reiterated theme in Aristotle. While Ricœur’s discussion of practical wisdom shows its importance in deciding moral norms in order to achieve ethical aims in concrete situations, he does not discuss the ways in which narratives of particular wise people might help the ethical self to develop greater wisdom and make concrete well-deliberated choices.7 Yet, based on his earlier work on narrative mimesis, surely the potential of narrative to transfigure the subject and to open new possibilities via an imaginative narrative world can also be harnessed for transformations of the social imaginary in moral fashion. And this is indeed what Aristotle himself implies. Phronesis cannot be learned in a vacuum or deduced from the abstract. It is learned by looking at examples, such as the phronimos, the wise person who knows how to deliberate because of intensive practice and extended experience. Aristotle himself refers to stories to teach us this: the six kinds of possible ignorance in Book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics are all illustrated with reference to various ancient stories and he often has recourse to such narratives in other contexts. Furthermore, he explicitly tells us in the Poetics that the point of tragedy is to teach phronesis.8 By watching the characters in a play, their foibles, mistakes, choices, and the consequences of these actions, we can learn how to become wise ourselves. Ricœur points to this in the chapter on emplotment in Time and Narrative I, but he does not go back to it in Oneself as Another, despite his reference to tragedy

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there. Yet, narrative teaches phronesis because we see it in action in the particular circumstances. To get things right, to “hit the target” is hard, because each time it depends on the place, time, situation, aims, means, people involved, and so forth. To work all this out requires wisdom and experience, the kind of wisdom that is able to apply general principles to concrete situations.9 Ricœur alludes to this possibility in his earlier chapters on narrative identity: “But in the unreal sphere of fiction we never tire of exploring new ways of evaluating actions and characters. The thought experiments we conduct in the great laboratory of the imaginary are also explorations in the realm of good and evil. Transvaluing, even devaluing, is still evaluating. Moral judgment has not been abolished; it is rather itself subjected to the imaginative variations proper to fiction” (OA, 164).10 Here Ricœur’s concern is to show that moral judgment is not absent from narratives, but this “exploring of new ways,” including the activity of evaluating actions experimentally, surely is a phronetic activity, even if Ricœur does not identify it as such.11 The wisdom the religious cultural tradition might provide is mentioned nowhere; indeed, the only reference to religion is the brief mention of the “wars of religion” in the cultural history of the West. But surely that history is also shaped by its religious heritage in more positive ways? Cannot religion also serve as such a “laboratory of the imaginary” that might enable good moral judgment via “imaginative variation”? Even when Ricœur is looking at religious texts or topics, he still associates wisdom primarily with the philosophical tradition, unless he is explicitly commenting on the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., FS, 260, see also PA, 168–69). He provides one reason for this in the final lines of an essay on evil: “However, I do not want to separate these individual experiences of wisdom [such as that of Job] from the ethical and political struggle against evil that may bring together all people of goodwill. In relation to this struggle, these experiences are, like all acts of nonviolent resistance, anticipations in the form of parables of a human condition where, such violence having been suppressed, the enigma of real violence will be revealed” (FS, 261). Yet, why should the story of Antigone have potential for such wisdom, while the story of Job or the exodus, at least as part of the broader cultural heritage in the West, must be eschewed for any insights of wisdom, justice, or liberation?12 Why is Job (or Deborah or Ruth or Hosea) less able to bring together “people of goodwill” than Antigone? HISTORY, JUSTICE, AND RECOGNITION Ricœur carries these questions of testimony, wisdom, and judgment further in his final works on history, justice, and recognition. In Memory, History,

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Forgetting, Ricœur addresses the questions of historical research, of witnessing and of testimony, which are not only characterized by an essential interplay of text and action but also raise important questions of justice.13 Already in Time and Narrative, Ricœur had highlighted the importance of remembering for the sake of justice: “We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated.” Indeed: “The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative” (TN I, 75). We must narrate the lives of victims, because not to do so would be unjust; it would mean to silence them a second time.14 In Memory, History, Forgetting, he stresses the importance of truthful testimony that would bear witness to victims’ lives. Testimony, in particular, is at the intersection of text and action in a variety of ways. As oral or written narrative it has textual characteristics, yet it reports action and influences action. It is central to the historian’s desire for truth and accuracy, yet testimonies are notoriously unreliable. Similarly, memory often has narratival or even explicitly textual structure, yet we speak of “acts of memory,” and “remembering” or “forgetting” certainly are activities. At the same time, all these activities of remembering, accounting, witnessing, writing, and even forgetting are central to identity in a variety of ways—on both individual and communal levels. Ricœur ties memory to the capacities of the “capable self” that he has already examined on several previous occasions. For Ricœur, the questions of trust and of truth are closely linked. Their interplay is at the intersection of the active and passive self: “This search for truth determines memory as a cognitive issue. More precisely, in the moment of recognition, in which the effort of recollection is completed, this search for truth declares itself. We then feel and indeed know that something has happened, something has taken place, which implicated us as agents, as patients, as witnesses. Let us call this search for truth, faithfulness.” Speaking of faithfulness or “being true to,” Ricœur is able to unite epistemic or “veridical dimensions of memory” “with the practical dimension tied to the idea of the exercise of memory” (MHF, 55; emphases his). Throughout Ricœur is concerned to hold these epistemic and practical dimensions in tension. The duty of justice, for example, again relies on the “epistemic fidelity of memories” and the practices of preserving memory (MHF, 88). At the same time, it returns us to the relation between self and other: “The duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self” (MHF, 89).15 He discusses the credibility of testimony that is linked to promise-keeping and ultimately to constancy of character (MHF, 165).16 In a later essay, he discusses a “hermeneutics of reception” as a way of reappropriating the past in memory.17 This is closely connected for him to the notion of attestation already explored at the end of Oneself as Another and also previews his concern

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with recognition explicated more fully in his final work The Course of Recognition. He concludes on precisely this note: “That something did actually happen, this is the pre-predicative—and even pre-narrative—belief upon which rest the recognition of the images of the past and oral testimony.” This means that “events like the Holocaust and the great crimes of the twentieth century, situated at the limits of representation, stand in the name of all the events that have left their traumatic imprint on hearts and bodies: they protest that they were and as such demand being said, recounted, understood.” This insistence that something did occur, “which nourishes attestation, is part of belief: it can be contested but not refuted” (MHF, 498). Testimony is both about the past event as narrated and the activity of faithfulness in the narrating itself. Text and action, narrative and event, individual and communal identity, fidelity and justice, all come together here. Ricœur considers questions of justice more fully in two collections of essays devoted to the topic, The Just and Reflections on the Just.18 While the first focuses on the idea of justice and legal justice as an institution, the second is more concerned with the activity of judging and includes several practical studies on medical judgment. Ricœur highlights the ways in which speaking of the “capable person” requires imputability and accountability (RJ, 2). Justice, therefore, is closely connected to the discourses of identity. In an essay on “Justice and Truth,” he explicitly seeks to bring together theoretical and practical philosophical approaches by showing their equivalence and reciprocal relationship. Attestation in particular has both epistemic and practical dimensions. Justice and truth are connected, in that “my wish to live in just institutions is correlative with the attestation that I am capable of this wish to live well” and in the universalizing capacity for impartiality (RJ, 66, 68–69). Good judgment requires the narration of facts, the capacities for compassion and impartiality, as well as the wisdom to come to a good and truthful decision. Ricœur reflects on the topic of justice also repeatedly in his essays on biblical interpretation (most prominently FS, 315–29), yet the insights of Hebraic wisdom for justice do not really inform his account in either The Just or Reflections on the Just. In these contexts, Ricœur stresses again that becoming a “capable person” requires imputability, namely the possibility of identifying oneself as “the actual author of one’s acts” (RJ, 75). He alludes here both to his work on narrative identity and to his repeated insistence on the tension between capacity and incapacity: “Narrative identity is something claimed, something like a mark of power. And it also declares itself as a kind of attestation. But it is also a term for impotence through the admission of all the signs of vulnerability that threaten any such narrative identity” (RJ, 79).19 An autonomous subject is precisely one capable of narrating its own life with coherence (RJ, 80). Furthermore, such a subject is always connected to the other, grounded

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in language and collective memory.20 At the same time, proclaiming oneself the author of one’s actions includes dimensions of responsibility or obligation and hence of moral norms and actions. In an epilogue to Reflections on the Just, originally delivered as a witness in a case concerning blood contaminated with HIV, Ricœur stresses again the connections between responsibility and testimony (RJ, 250). Responsibility implies that I am the author of my acts but at the same time commits me to rendering an account for such actions. This activity of imputation (of one’s self and before others) by rendering an account is balanced by the need to hear the account of others and to enter with empathy into their suffering. He concludes the epilogue with reminding the justices again of the plight of the victims, including a call for an honest narration of the events.21 In his essay on evil, he similarly calls for a response of action against evil and argues that “every action, whether ethical or political, which diminishes the quantity of violence exercised by some against others diminishes the level of suffering in the world.”22 (Given this explicit condemnation of violence as the cause of suffering, it is particularly unfortunate that his few comments about ritual only consider its potential for violence.) These notions of faithfulness, imputation, and recognition find their culmination in the final work of Ricœur published during his lifetime The Course of Recognition.23 In this text, he carries further his discussion of capacities and the struggle to be recognized by another, culminating in a discussion of the gift.24 He begins what he calls “a phenomenology of the capable human being” by examining different kinds of capacities: the ability to speak, to act, to narrate, and to recognize. A hermeneutics of the self can provide a nuanced account of “what” we do and “how” we do it in order to recognize the “who” of action (CR, 93). Ricœur again explores the tension between acting and suffering or undergoing, holding together the paradox of initiating utterances and actions versus being subject to what others inflict on me or say of me. A phenomenology of the capable human being must take the “detour through narratology” (CR, 100) for the sake of identification and appropriation: “Learning to narrate oneself is also learning how to narrate oneself differently” (CR, 101). This story of the self always includes and indeed incorporates “interaction with others” (CR, 103). The capacities of speaking, acting, and narrating make imputation possible, which in turn enables ethics, law, and systems of justice (CR, 105). Recognition goes beyond even notions of imputability by providing a notion of narrative identity that includes “memory and promise, where the temporality of the self unfolds in the directions of past and future” (CR, 250). The movements of memory and promise, respectively, show how capacities can persist and be executed (or betrayed) by a subject over

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time (CR, 109–34). Ricœur points out that promising in particular summarizes our capacities in that it “presupposes the ability to speak, to act on the world, to recount and form the idea of the narrative unity of a life, and finally to impute to oneself the origin of one’s acts” (CR, 128). Memory and promise “have the virtue of revealing the temporal dimensions of each of the powers” that he has considered in the form of human capacities (CR, 254). The acts of faithfulness and testimony that constitute the speech of memory and promise bring together past and future, self and other, speech and action, capacity and passivity. In this context, he also goes on to speak of social capacities and what he calls “collective representations” (CR, 135–39). Drawing on economist Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, he confronts the need for social justice and collective responsibility with ensuring and protecting personal freedoms (CR, 141–46).25 This brings him to his discussion of mutual recognition in the third study, where he ultimately concludes that love and forgiveness are gestures that “contribute to the advance of history toward states of peace” (CR, 245). He speaks of them as “optative” uses of language that are neither purely descriptive nor solely normative. The plot of the narrative of one’s life “is the configuration that weaves together events and characters” in terms of saying, acting, recounting, and especially attestation or imputation (CR, 253).26 Attestation establishes identity in a way that no longer allows for strict distinctions between narrative and practical dimensions. Ricœur’s work culminates in this emphasis on the capable self, evidenced also in the speech he gave for receiving the prestigious Kluge Prize in the Humanities.27 In fact, he mentions in a late interview with Richard Kearney that his next book—a book he did not live to write—would focus on the “capable self” (PR, 166).28 Throughout his work, Ricœur seeks to hold together acting and suffering, activity and passivity, initiating action and undergoing it, from his early work on the voluntary and involuntary to his final discussions of the capacities of the self and our need for recognition.29 In his work on justice and memory, this is especially highlighted by the fragility of the victims of history, the “naked cry” of the suffering (RJ, 256). Here fragility is no longer simply fallibility but also weakness and vulnerability. Recognition via testimony and other forms of remembrance function as the promise of hope and compassion in these situations of weakness and fragility. Dan Stiver affirms that Ricœur “walked a narrow line between the limitations encountered in life that render human life so fragile and between openness to the continuing springing up of possibility.”30 Yet, it is startling that this balance or tension is structured quite differently in his work on religion.

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RELIGIOUS SELFHOOD, CAPACITY, AND THE BIBLICAL IMAGINARY Although the idea of the capable self is crucial to Ricœur’s mature philosophical work,31 his work on religion tends to emphasize more passive dimensions of the self. The fundamental religious insight for Ricœur is that I cannot do the good alone and need help. He points this out repeatedly in his essays on various biblical texts: “Human being can surely be defined as a ‘capable subject’—a subject capable of speaking, of acting, of narrating, of allowing responsibility for its acts to be attributed to it. But is this capacity itself really simply available to us? Does not evil consist in a radical incapacity?” For Kant, to whom he often appeals in this context, “reflection gets underway by a meditation on radical evil and continues through an examination of the conditions for the regeneration of a moral subject” (TB, 135).32 Religion challenges autonomy via notions of “loving obedience” (TB, 114–36). Although it is addressed to the “capable” human being, caught between ontology and ethics (PA, 269–71), it highlights the tension between fragility and capacity (PA, 272). Religion envisions human capacity only via and within the “specific incapacity” of “fault, sin, and moral evil,” to which it offers “help” (secours) via various means of “regeneration” (PA, 276). While the “bondage of the will” and the “inscrutability of the origin of evil” “constitutes a crisis of attestation,” it is “relieved” (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) by hope (PA, 286). That is to say, hope is “the reply of the religious” to the incapacities of the servile will and the “inscrutability of the origin of evil” (PA, 286). Hope thus escapes the dichotomy between ethics and ontology (PA, 289).33 The religious “solution” of hope as response to human fragility is stressed already much earlier: “Now, if I ask what is the specifically religious way of speaking about evil, I would not hesitate for a moment to answer: the language is that of hope” (CI, 436).34 Instead of being held together, fragility and hope are here bifurcated as plight and solution, respectively. For Ricœur, the religious appears consistently “at the heart of the problematic of the capable” person by referring to one’s “incapacity to do the good oneself” (RB, 28). The most central message of religion, whether in terms of the biblical texts or as the core of all religious traditions, is a belief in the hope for the good in the face of evil and our incapacity to do the good: “The religious will have a fundamentally dependent bond with the basis of originary goodness held captive and hidden—in a word, with the release of goodness” (RB, 29). This hope, however, is always firmly associated with divine assistance rather than any capacities of the human. Belief means to assent to the message of the prophets in regard to “the regenerative power of the Christic symbol” (RB, 29).35 This is based on the belief that good is more original than evil, something he also reiterates in other contexts (FM, 145; MHF, 491).36

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Ricœur concludes this late essay with the affirmation: “At the very depth of my own conviction, of my own confession, I recognize that there is a ground which I do not control. I discern in the ground of my adherence a source of inspiration which, by its demand for thought, its strength of practical mobilization, its emotional generosity, exceeds my capacity for reception and comprehension” (RB, 39). This emphasis on incapacity and lack of control permeates his work on religion from beginning to end.37 In his discussion with the neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux, he explains it as follows: “I see religion as consisting in a fundamental approval that comes from somewhere further away and higher than I am: in my courage to live and to make goodness prevail over evil whose radicality I have both lamented and accepted.” He continues by affirming that “the fact that evil may always be with us does not make us a condemned species, because we are fundamentally approved and assisted in our courage to live.”38 He will consistently interpret this as the fundamental contribution of religious faith. In this respect, it is interesting that Ricœur scales back his usual enthusiastic embrace of limit-expressions and the logic of superabundance when he tries to maintain a balance between “love” and “justice.”39 While he associates justice with a logic of correspondence and love with a logic of excess, he does not break with the standard Western conviction that these two must always be in balance (thus effectively reducing them to a logic of correspondence or equivalence). He links the love of neighbor enjoined by the Jewish and Christian scriptures to the economy of the gift (FS, 325) that reconciles the logic of equivalence with the logic of superabundance (FS, 326).40 This must be a “living tension,” characterized by the “synergistic action of love and justice” (FS, 329). On the one hand, “a supplementary degree of compassion and generosity” must be inserted into our penal codes and the social justice system; on the other hand, love must be “mediated by justice” (FS, 329). Ricœur consistently holds these together in proportionate balance (cf. also CR, 243–45). Part of the reason for this seems to be his embrace of the Western theological dichotomies between nature and grace or especially the Lutheran contrast between law and grace. The abundance that can sweep away the logic of equivalence and correspondence in Ricœur’s religious work is more or less exclusively attributed to the divine. The human always remains in the realm of justice and injustice, which can be superseded or exceeded only by divine intervention. He attributes this characteristic of the theological heritage to Augustine and Luther, describing it as “the dialectic of human destiny that is now depicted in terms of perdition and justification, of enmity and reconciliation with God, of law and grace, of death and life” (FS, 282). His reference to Augustine and Luther in this context is not coincidental, because this is indeed the heritage with which they have saddled the West, but it is by no

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means the whole Christian story. Isaac the Syrian, for example, insists that God’s mercy is overwhelmingly greater than God’s justice.41 The two are not comparable, not anywhere on the same scale. The Christian East never gave up hope that all may be saved and that justice would be swallowed up in love and mercy. This tension between human incapacity and belief in or hope for divine good permeates Ricœur’s writings on religion.42 It is a consistent thread of his work from the early writings on symbolism to his final essays in Thinking Biblically and other places. What religious texts give us more than anything is the belief in the hope that good will be stronger than the evil in which we always already find ourselves enmeshed, but for Ricœur this good always comes to us from elsewhere; we do not produce it ourselves. The ethical dimension that grapples with freedom in the face of evil is superseded by the religious promise of hope (CI, 438). This is the hope of the kingdom or of resurrection, a hope beyond death (CI, 409, 422, 436, 439). Such hope is seen, for example, in the narratives of deliverance, which provide the foundation for biblical faith: “Hope, unconditional trust, would be empty if it did not rely on a constantly renewed interpretation of sign-events reported by the [biblical] writings” (FS, 47). These consist in divine deliverance opening up new possibilities. Good comes in the form of divine deliverance not in the form of increased capacities of the self. This is also the case for the interaction between the various genres of the biblical texts. In his essay “Biblical Time,” Ricœur claims that “narrative when touched by prophetic eschatology liberates a potential of hope, beyond the closure of the established tradition” (FS, 176). Prophecy, the genre that most directly claims divine inspiration and most fully disrupts the human condition, provides a message of hope to the established structures of ordinary human living. Acknowledging the depths of our suffering, prophecy “calls for hope in the very depths of distress” (TB, 225). Hope and the good are always disruptive and supererogatory. It is only in this sense that one might speak of a “restored” self, inasmuch as the self is called or interpellated by the divine: “This restoration, this regeneration, this rebirth of the capable self, stands in a close relation to the economy of the gift” (TT, 146). It does so in tension between love and justice (TT, 146) and under the sign of hope. Morny Joy affirms that “to the extent that this interweaving [of the confession of radical evil and the assumption of the means of regeneration] is constitutive of the motif of hope, we can say that hope is the specific object of the philosophical hermeneutic of religion” in Ricœur.43 As noted in the previous chapter, limit-expressions especially proclaim hope: “Hope means the ‘superabundance’ of meaning as opposed to the abundance of senselessness, of failure, and of destruction” (FS, 206). They speak of the impossible, the divine promise, in light of our incapacity to do the good

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and our tendency to settle for half-hearted measures and compromise instead of love and mercy. This is always hope in the divine, linked to the “symbol of God.” From the very beginning God is a God of hope: “The God of beginnings is the God of hope. And because God is the God of hope, the goodness of creation becomes the sense of a direction.” In this way, “the predicate ‘good’ attached to the process of creation returns enriched by the symbols of the gift of the Torah and the gift of the remission of sins.” Therefore, “it is the task, the heavy task, of the hope engendered by the symbol of God of unknown possibilities to preserve the sense of directionality in spite of . . . in spite of evil” (FS, 299). We cause evil. God gives hope. This focus on hope, and its firm association with divine intervention, is evident not only in Ricœur’s reflections on specifically biblical texts, but also in his more general claims about religion.44 For example, he points to the hope Christ brings as the most important aspect of religion in an essay on Kant’s notion of radical evil: “Practical reason has no need of religious symbolism to account for this exemplification” of what a human being must be. “It does need religious symbolism, however, to designate the mediation between the confession of radical evil and the confidence in the triumph of the good principle. The Christ figure represents more than a mere hero of duty and less than an actual kenosis of the absolute itself; within the strict limits of the theory of analogy, it represents a genuine schematism of hope” (FS, 85; emphasis his; see also FS, 91). Similarly he argues that hope is central to a philosophical hermeneutics of religion, because it “gives embodiment to an understanding of hope as the unique kind of reply to the confession of radical evil” (FS, 92; CI, 402–24). Again, evil is attributed to the human and hope to the divine. Hope is religion’s salvific response to the reality of evil. This is of course not to say that evil should somehow become associated with the divine and that the good ought to be solely lodged in purely human capacities.45 Yet, surely religion should and does generate and increase capacities for the good in people. While Ricœur may well believe that this is the case, aside from his single reference (in an endnote) to the “rebirth” of the capable self (TT, 146), he does not explore how this might occur and tends to attribute all capacities for regeneration exclusively to the divine. This is of a piece with his tendency to associate wisdom with philosophy rather than religion. In a later essay on “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” he seeks to find an “intelligibility of hope” in philosophy and theology, borrowing for part of his analysis from Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope (FS, 204–205). The essay concludes that both philosophy and theology are concerned with hope as a limit-experience in different ways. In theology, this culminates in hope for the resurrection, while in philosophy it concerns the “relation between freedom and its full actualization” (FS, 216; CI, 406–11). In fact, freedom often functions as the

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philosophical equivalent of hope in the religious realm (e.g., CI, 411–24; PA, 124–48).46 But freedom is a dimension of human capacities, while the source and agency of religious hope is always attributed by Ricœur to the divine. While philosophy must remain in the realm of reason alone, he claims that the eschatological event of Easter constitutes the center of theology.47 Again, while the philosophical dimension can consider the actualization of human capacities, the religious must rely on the supernatural hope of resurrection. In this regard, it is interesting that Ricœur seems to have relinquished any hope of personal resurrection in his final reflections.48 In his posthumously published fragments Living Up to Death, Ricœur identifies this sense of hope as “the Essential” to which he continues to proclaim “adhesion” even as he gives up belief in an afterlife or hope in personal resurrection and is fairly critical of traditional theories of atonement, especially in light of Girard’s work on scapegoating. What is this Essential to which he continues to adhere? It emerges in the anticipation of the death of a loved one. Ricœur says that “this vocabulary of the Essential will accompany me throughout this meditation.” He explains that “the Essential in one sense . . . is the religious; it is, if I dare put it this way, that which is common to every religion and what, at the threshold of death, transgresses the consubstantial limitations of confessing and confessed religious” (LD, 14). What emerges as “religious” is this essential conviction about the dignity of life and an adhesion to it as what is most important. A religion is a kind of language that “filters” the Essential in particular ways (LD, 15). He speculates: “It is perhaps only in the face of death that the religious gets equated with the Essential and that the barrier between religions . . . is transcended” (LD, 15).49 And he admits that “this is perhaps the only situation where one can speak of religious experience” as “the Essential breaks through the filter of reading ‘languages’ of reading” (LD, 16). And yet we have no direct access to this experience of the dying person but in many ways are only bystanders, at best moved by compassion and friendship to a kind of “accompanying” of the dying person. The “dignity” of the dying person bears witness to the Essential (LD, 19). This is still a hope that is a “confidence in grace” (LD, 44).50 This passivity of the self who hopes on the divine is coupled in Ricœur with the repeated insistence that religion disrupts or unsettles or undoes the self. The disproportion between the divine call and the human self always leads to an unsettling of the self (FS, 271, 284–88, 313, 329). He notes this difference between the philosophical and the religious approach himself: “I believe more and more that one has to divest oneself of that concern [with the afterlife] in order to pose the problem of life until death. Everything I have tried to say about the self and otherness in the self, I would continue to defend on the philosophical plane; but, in the religious order, perhaps I would ask to

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give up the self” (CC, 155). Religion has to give up the self that philosophy has shown us to be capable. It is maybe above all this emphasis on hope in light of our own incapacity and tendency to evil that leads Ricœur to stress more passive dimensions of the self in his religious work and to speak correspondingly less of the active or “capable” dimensions.51 Hope for him designates a fundamental belief in divine goodness and the acknowledgement that grace must come to help us, because we ourselves are incapable of action on our own. We can have faith or confidence, we can even adhere to it firmly, but calls to act on it or work it out are rare in Ricœur’s work. The religious self, deeply aware of its incapacity, hopes on the divine, waits to be summoned by the divine, and seeks the help of the divine, but does not really engage in phronetic practice or move toward substantive action. Maybe understandably for a Protestant thinker, Ricœur consistently focuses primarily on faith as personal conviction or faithful adhesion and less on religious experiences and ritual practices. The texts do shape us, but most profoundly they influence our personal convictions and thought-world. Religious belief for Ricœur addresses primarily the passive and suffering aspects of our identity, less the active, “capable” ones. Such belief is, indeed, “Essential”; we cannot live without hope. Evil would overwhelm us. Yet, this definition of religion has the consequence that Ricœur focuses almost exclusively on more passive aspects in his religious work and speaks more of belief and adhesion or understanding and insight than of action and transformation. Ricœur, then, claims that the religious functions especially as a witness to the dependent nature of our capacity for the good and provides us with the grounds of belief. One might wonder, however, whether adhesion is possible without concrete practices to instantiate and sustain it. Can adhesion be maintained in the face of adversity if it is primarily mental assent or purely private conviction and does not have the important affective, sensory, and corporeal dimensions of practices? Indeed, religion, especially as practiced, may well have a unique capacity for harnessing our fervor and commitment and directing our actions. Religious narratives and the religious imaginary have a special ability to shape action and are often more exorbitant in their effect and impact—both positive and negative—than other cultural aspects of the social (such as aesthetic or historical dimensions, although these can obviously also be linked to the religious). Historically, religious narratives have incited both terrible violence and extraordinary compassion.52 Religions—or at least representatives of religion—have promoted war and peace, inflicted injustice and advocated for justice, and religion is frequently an important part of the context that shapes the choices between the two. The sorts of narratives we tell, how we tell them, and what sort of imaginary they consequently open up or shape, have a significant impact on personal and communal identity,

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including in—maybe especially in—religious communities. Religious communities are shaped and allegiance to them is formed and maintained via narratives and ritual practices on a variety of levels. Although Ricœur has shown how religious symbolism and myth may be rooted in primordial experiences and analyzed extensively the biblical configuring of narrative (and other poetic genres), the crucial element missing in his treatment of religion is a more substantive reflection on the third prong of mimesis, namely the “refiguration” of life by narrative and its potential for teaching wisdom and giving us visions of hope that concretely enhance our capacities for acting in better ways. Religious worldviews and adhesion to them is informed by a wide variety of narratives, drawn not only from sacred texts like the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and others, but also a particular tradition’s or community’s “lore” that accumulates around stories about founding events, important transitions, survival in struggle (external or internal, such as narratives about schism or heresy), and the ways in which such stories are communicated and re-appropriated to defend current ways of being in the world. For instance—to give a positive example—tales like the Israelites’ redemption from Egypt have been retold countless times in order to interpret, justify, and give impetus to a variety of struggles against oppression, including during slavery and later the civil rights movement in the United States. Such narratives—drawn from the lived experience of the people who first told them, even when they appear in “mythical” garb—are mimetically configured in the telling and then refigured by the manifold ways in which they are heard in the “today” of the listeners who become new participants in the stories. Many such “tellings,” whether via preaching or in a variety of other forms, occur in ritual settings, such as religious services or other religiously inflected contexts.53 Even when the narratives are told in the home or read on the internet, they can take on a quasi-ritualistic function and probably never lose their ritual context and significance entirely. This means that the stories are heard in a particular fashion and are given a special weight. We are more “attuned” to them when we encounter them in a context considered “sacred” or at least one heightened in significance by its religious “garb.” It also implies that their appropriation or embodiment is weighted with a quasi-moral imperative; they serve an exemplary function that is stronger than that of generic fiction. Their presumed truth value and authority is taken more seriously by those who tell them and those who listen to them. Their characters are more likely to be held up as exemplars on which one is to model one’s own life. Thus, their possibility of refiguring life in new ways is heightened. Ricœur does indeed point to this element of biblical texts (although he downplays its ritual character) by emphasizing that biblical “poetry” opens new ways of being in the world. Yet, religious narratives and their poetic construction and enactment in ritual practices shape imaginary worlds not only in literary fashion but also in much

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more “physical” ways via images, architecture, performance, film, and even “geographical” arrangement of social space (including economic spaces). Participants in religious “myth,” broadly understood, are not merely readers of texts, but consumers of all the ways in which such narratives are concretely manifested in the world. And such ritual settings not only serve to heighten the significance of the stories but to model ways of appropriating them phenomenologically. Liturgies do not just “tell” a story, but often embody it in dramatic fashion. Listeners are not simply passive but are taken up into the life of the story by participating in it, by instantiating it in the here and now, by singing and dancing it in response to or as part of the telling. Such narratives shape identity more profoundly because they are inscribed on the bodies of their hearers, because the hearers themselves often become active tellers of the stories and serve as embodied models for further appropriation. Such ritual embodiment of narratives usually occurs precisely in the struggle between concordance and discordance that Ricœur recognizes as central to narrative figuration and the quest for narrative identity. Penitential and cleansing rituals, for example, seek concordance within strongly experienced discordance (of sin, impurity, failure, etc.) and the narratives that configure and sustain them help their participants to appropriate the narratives personally within the communal ritual setting. These are not just narratives of inadequacy and the need for divine healing, but they are concretely experienced within the ritual. And while the divine is still seen as a source of salvation or assistance, such healing and transformation is concretely instantiated in rites that are meant to transform the participants and enhance their capacities for living differently. This embodied appropriation occurs both on the mundane, day-to-day (or maybe week-to-week) level in attending religious services regularly and in those heightened moments of a religious festival, a threshold ritual, or a once-in-a-lifetime event (such as a religious pilgrimage). The bodily and affective involvement in both cases inscribes the participation in the narratives and myths more firmly onto people’s lives. On the one hand, the mundane and oft-repeated engagement creates habits that enter deeply into a person’s character and function primarily on subconscious levels—and often continue to function in this way even long after a particular person may have left the religious tradition in which he or she was raised. On the other hand, the “special” occasions of the festival or the religious marking of a key life event (e.g., coming of age, marriage, birth of children, death), although usually much rarer, also shape identity in profound fashion, not only because one chooses to interpret this moment of one’s life in a religiously ritualized fashion and thus identifies with particular religious traditions explicitly and often publicly, but also because such moments and events are embodied even more fully and carry immense emotional weight.54

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The potential for both phronesis and for shaping the capacities of the self are thus far stronger within the religious imaginary than is the case for the worlds opened by fictional narratives. Religious narratives are assumed to be more firmly rooted in life—whether they are read literally as having occurred historically in the way the text recounts or whether they are interpreted as more metaphorical accounts of divine models for life—(mimesis1), they are believed to be configured more deliberately (mimesis2), and they are taken more clearly as guidance for life and actively expected to transform their listeners (mimesis3). That is, they are taken to be exemplary narratives in a special sense. Furthermore, they are read and heard in a context in which the struggle between concordance and discordance is played out with higher stakes: discordance is more deeply felt, concordance more strongly desired, thus opening the religious self to the narratives more fully and with fewer inhibitions than might otherwise be the case. And this is not a singular self; the fact that such narratives are usually experienced in a communal setting, in which these stakes are shared and resolution desired in common, also intensifies their impact. In addition, these narratives are not merely read in cursory fashion, they are taught and actively staged ritually. Such ritual embodiment of the narratives involve affect and corporeality more profoundly than fictional narratives usually do and such embodiment and appropriation is heightened by the “sacred” or “holy” character of the liturgical occasion, whether regular or exceptional. The characters of such narratives and their actions are taken as models for religious conversion and their moral exemplarity is far stronger than that of purely fictional characters. While all these dimensions of the religious imaginary must be appropriated—made one’s own—the imperative to do so is part and parcel of the very message of religion and an integral part of its daily lived experience. In this respect, it is troubling that when Ricœur does (very briefly) speak of ritual, he thinks of it primarily in terms of its potential for violence.55 The religious capacity to “release goodness” also has the potential for fueling violence. He argues “that the creative sources of the process of release of goodness, in the ways that Kant named—that is, by means of the great foundational symbols, the traditions of belief, and the community mediations of an ecclesial nature—that the originary sources of this powerful upsurge of benevolence can be, as such, an object of mimetic rivalry, of scandal, of lynching, of the reconciliation of all against one, of the divinization of the guilty victim and the exoneration of the violent” (RB, 34). He interprets these as ways in which violence seizes “the source of life itself” (RB, 34). That is to say, religious adherents attempt to control access to the divine good and jealously defend it from others. Alluding to the work of René Girard, he sees this violence particularly operative in ritual.56 In Ricœur’s view, it is really jealousy that leads to religious violence: “Meaning, invigorating each time

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for each religious community—the source of life is undoubtedly that. But jealous capture of the source remains the historically attested, disturbing phenomenon. The war of religions and the wars of religion have their origin there.” He argues that “the religious never exists but in religions. And the religions, under the influence of the radical evil of which no one knows the origin, are connected, one to the other, in a relationship of mimetic rivalry, having as object the source of life undivided in its outflow, divided in its receptacles” (RB, 35). This essay concludes with the hope that violence might be overcome through the continual inspiration to goodness that is at the source of religious adhesion and the recognition and acknowledgment that such “ground” cannot be controlled and ought not be possessed.57 Yet, how is such “inspiration to goodness” concretely embodied and how does it move people to compassionate action or transform their imaginary in a way more conducive to peace and less likely to engage in violence? Ricœur does not really address that question in this context. To recognize that one is dependent or summoned and requires divine assistance for one’s action, as he insists, can lead both to humility and to marshaling the divine as justification for acts of violence. Resistance can be to both real and perceived evils. Religion can enhance our capacity for good and also for evil. But it is precisely its narrative function, the particular world of scriptural and ritual imaginary it opens to its adherents, that can teach them wisdom or hatred, compassion or violence. The difference lies not only in the stories it tells, but also in how it tells them, how it embodies them in ritual, and how such rituals inform the rest of people’s lives. Furthermore, such ritual does not simply attribute all action to the divine, but enhances and tries to shape the capacities of those who participate in it. Both the experiences of fragility or failure and of joy or hope are figured mimetically in the liturgical context and are acknowledged as dimensions of the human experience. Humans can generate good, not only evil. Many liturgies speak of hope and joy as much as they refer to sin and penitence. There is no need to institute a practically Manichean distinction that lodges all the evil on the side of the human and reserves the good solely for the divine. Religion grapples with both dimensions and inasmuch as the philosopher examines it as a fundamental human experience, both dimensions can be found in the human condition, whether religious or not. Liturgy provides a particularly good lens for how this fundamental human condition is religiously configured.

Interlude Liturgy and Hermeneutics

Ricœur’s religious hermeneutics, then, would profit from a greater engagement with practices that might provide further nuance for his claims about religious symbols, might push his emphasis on faith or self-understanding to greater engagement with action, and might draw on the wisdom communicated in religious traditions for enhancing capacities of the religious self as they are embodied in ritual practices. First, religious symbols, especially as they are employed in liturgy and ritual, were not taken literally in naïve fashion, they do not display a linear move from defilement via sin to guilt, and they must not necessarily culminate in a notion of the servile will, but liturgical practices grapple with fragility, fallibility, and finitude in more complex ways than Ricœur supposes. Second, religious hermeneutics must not focus exclusively on the biblical texts, but can also move to action by examining the practices that instantiate and sustain religious convictions and hopes. Such practices can be “read” in hermeneutic fashion and their “narratives” also function mimetically in the rich way Ricœur allows for fictional and historical narratives, both in terms of shaping identity and in dealing with the tension between concordance and discordance, between fragility and hope. Liturgy is particularly well situated for displaying this potential in religious narratives and practices. Third, religious traditions shape the cultural imaginary not only in terms of a legacy of violence but also harbor rich resources for wisdom, hope, and compassion. Ritual actions can enhance the capacities of the self and by doing so within the context of liturgical communities shape religious identities in profound ways that carry more weight than a merely personal adhesion of belief. In all these ways, Ricœur’s religious hermeneutics can be enriched by a more substantive consideration of liturgical and ritual practices. Is the reverse also the case? Can thinking about ritual or liturgy profit from more substantive hermeneutic engagement or even specifically from 65

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drawing on Ricœur’s insights? Does liturgy need hermeneutics? Some liturgical theologians and a handful of scholars of ritual have suggested as much.1 As regards liturgical theology, Joyce Ann Zimmerman employs Ricœur for a Roman Catholic approach to liturgy, Bridget Nichols for an analysis of Anglican liturgy, and Brian Butcher for a reflection on Orthodox liturgy by putting Ricœur in conversation with the early liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann. Zimmerman and Nichols both focus primarily on Ricœur’s early work and do not take into account the much richer development in Figuring the Sacred and Thinking Biblically. Nichols undertakes a reading of three rites from The Book of Common Prayer in light of hermeneutic theory (especially Ricœur and Gadamer) to evaluate their respective possibilities to move participants toward “entry into the Kingdom.”2 Zimmerman examines one of the post-Vatican II eucharistic rites for its linguistic dynamics of forming Christian existence and experience.3 Butcher employs themes from Ricœur’s work in order to prolong Schmemann’s liturgical theology and illustrates this with an analysis of the “Great Blessing of Waters” during the Orthodox liturgy for the feast of Theophany (January 6).4 Graham Hughes in his Worship as Meaning makes frequent use of Ricœur as well, although he focuses even much more heavily on contemporary semiotics.5 Ricœur’s work on symbolism (especially the famous phrase that the symbol gives rise to thought) is occasionally mentioned by liturgical scholars.6 Marianne Moyaert explicitly employs Ricœur’s notion of “linguistic hospitality” as a model for interpretation across different ritual traditions.7 The ritual studies scholar Catherine Bell also briefly draws on his work on discourse theory in her discussion of ritual theory.8 (In this context, it might be worth pointing out that while this discussion will for the most part focus on Christian liturgy, as most liturgical theology and liturgical studies does, it will try to emulate the more dispassionate approach of ritual scholars—who tend to investigate ritual much more broadly and often take a sociological or anthropological approach—and not load down the discussion with lots of theological assumptions, as is almost invariably the case for discussions of Christian liturgy. The present project intends to be a philosophical examination of liturgy and its ritual practices, neither a theological nor an anthropological or sociological one.9 In that narrower sense of ritual practices in the Christian liturgical traditions, the terms liturgy and ritual are employed more or less interchangeably, as indeed scholars of both often also do when dealing with Christian or sometimes Jewish ritual.10) Liturgy and ritual actually call for interpretation on multiple levels and some of these directly pertain to persistent problems in liturgical theology and liturgics. Most obvious is the question of meaning in liturgy, which occurs on the level of the texts that are employed but also of ritual practices and of the

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entire liturgical environment. What do liturgical texts, affirmations, gestures, postures, actions, movements, and so forth, mean? How is one to interpret them or, indeed, their interplay with each other? Even more complex is ascertaining the meaning of particular rites in their entirety as they are composed of many elements and the interaction of various rites with each other. What does a text or gesture mean in the context of a particular rite and how might they signify differently in the context of a different rite or on a different occasion? How is meaning created in liturgy in the first place? Many of Ricœur’s insights about how discourse functions and how actions can signify are of relevance for trying to respond to such questions. Second, liturgy requires hermeneutics because it deals with events of the past that are themselves interpreted and manifested within liturgy in a particular way. Often, though not exclusively, these are biblical. Many concern stories about Christ, as they are reported in the Christian Scriptures, such as his annunciation, birth, life, death, and resurrection, celebrated liturgically as the feasts of the Annunciation, of the Nativity (or Christmas), of Epiphany (the Western feast of commemorating the arrival of the magi) or Theophany (the Eastern feast of celebrating Christ’s baptism), Pascha or Easter, Pentecost, the feasts of the Transfiguration and the Ascension, and so forth. Yet, although the relevant biblical texts are often read out during celebration or cited literally in some of the liturgical texts for the respective occasion, that is far from the only way in which they appear. They are frequently employed much more freely, as inspiration for prayers, rites, even “staged” in some way, as in passion plays or, most prominently and obviously quite differently, in the Eucharist. Although eucharistic rites often cite biblical texts, they tend to elaborate on them and to add many performative elements; they are not simply a reading of a particular text. Liturgy, thus, already exercises interpretation of the biblical texts, but these interpretations themselves require hermeneutic unfolding. Ricœur’s interpretation of the biblical texts can provide some guidance here, even though he himself does not make the move to liturgy.11 In a different way, this relationship between religious past and present experience itself calls for hermeneutics. How does the historical event mean or signify now? How do Christ’s birth or death impact the contemporary participant in liturgy—a question that parallels that of the reader of the biblical text. (This is obviously just as true for other religious traditions: How does Esther’s victory over Haman mean now for the celebrants of Purim; how does the story of the exodus impact the Passover; how does the victory of the Maccabees signify for those commemorating Hanukkah? Several of the rites for those occasions actually explicitly raise that question repeatedly, as is especially true of the liturgical texts for Passover or Pesach.) Here the “world” or horizon of the biblical text comes together with the world or

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horizon of liturgy and the world or horizon of the people who enter liturgy and participate in it. Thus, at least three horizons interact, which means that the task of interpretation is more complex than when one is reading a text on one’s own and seeking to understand or appropriate its meaning. Ricœur’s work on three-fold mimesis is especially relevant here in the intersection of these horizons and their respective worlds. This tension between historical and contemporary goes even further and actually sustains a sort of split in the very discipline of scholarship on liturgy: on the one hand, many liturgical scholars (or “liturgiologists”) focus very narrowly on purely historical research, trying to reestablish original texts or documenting when a particular rite or practice emerged; on the other hand, liturgical theologians tend to focus on contemporary meanings of liturgy for those who participate in it.12 These two are in uneasy tension—and sometimes outright conflict—with each other, especially when one tries to impose normative claims on the other. (This is a special hazard in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which strongly values antiquity over innovation and often glorifies a supposedly golden age of liturgy, sometimes making very questionable assumptions about patristic practices and sentiments.13) How is the historical record for liturgy to be interpreted? How exactly were these early practices, for which we usually have scant evidence, actually concretely officiated and what were they meant to effect in their participants?14 Should rites or specific practices that emerged later be discarded in favor of earlier ones? In general, what is the relationship between patristic liturgy and contemporary performance?15 All these questions require hermeneutic vigilance and guidance. Ricœur often stresses that interpretation cannot mean climbing back into the “mind of the author,” as early Romantic hermeneutics often suggested (TA, 56–57). This is especially applicable to liturgical texts where usually no such original author can be identified and where the historic distance is often incomparably greater than is the case for fictional texts. Ricœur’s insights about what it means to interpret narrative—whether fictional or historical— may well prove salient also for liturgical texts. Finally, a crucial question that troubles liturgical theologians persistently is that of the relationship between what happens within liturgy, that is, as people find themselves in church and engage in a rite or act of worship, and what happens “outside” of liturgy, when they leave the space of the church and do not actively engage in identifiable liturgical acts. How does the “world” of liturgy relate to the “real” world? Is liturgy supposed to transform the world—or at the very least the personal lives of its participants—in some tangible way?16 If so, and most theologians would affirm that it does or at least should do this, how does it accomplish such transformation? (And if it does not, then what is the point of doing liturgy?) Does liturgy have some sort of ethical dimension or does it even harbor potential for greater justice in

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the world?17 While traditionally “conservative” congregants tend to focus on personal transformation and personal encounter with the divine within worship, traditionally “liberal” parishes (and scholars) tend to focus on broader implications for social justice or transformation of particular unjust social or global practices, whether in terms of racism, ecology, immigration, poverty, homelessness, or other types of injustice.18 Yet both approaches assume that liturgy is supposed to effect something, that it is supposed to transform its participants and have an impact on the world beyond the rite as exercised. It is not at all clear, however, exactly how this can be grounded in liturgy. Here Ricœur’s discussions of the interplay between the world of the text and the world of the reader, his move from text to action in his philosophical work, and his reflections on the construction of selfhood and identity, may well shed some important insight on such questions. Ricœur, then, may prove to be a valuable guide for a hermeneutics of liturgy on a variety of levels.

Part II

READING RITUAL WITH RICŒUR

Chapter 4

Liturgical Truth Fidelity, Attestation, Manifestation

Given how crucially the biblical texts figure in Ricœur’s hermeneutics, the first question to be posed is whether the parallel between scripture and liturgy is even a valid one that would allow extending his insights about biblical interpretation to the interpretation of ritual. Ricœur speaks of the biblical texts as primary or even primordial expressions of faith, and in this respect, he is certainly in line with the emphasis placed on the importance of scripture in much of the Christian tradition (and indeed in somewhat different ways in Judaism and Islam as well; not without reason are all three referred to as “religions of the book”). Can a similar authority be claimed for liturgical texts? Biblical texts are often taken to be inspired or revealed by a divine source—can the same be said of liturgical texts? What would revelation or inspiration mean in that context, especially given that liturgical rites change over time and do not necessarily have an approved “canon”? Are liturgical texts “true” in the ways in which truth is claimed for the biblical texts? If so, how is such truth exhibited in liturgy? This also raises the question of how contemporary liturgy relates to earlier versions. Are there more or less correct ways of celebrating liturgy that are more authentically connected to how early Christians worshiped? How would one discover such an original “truth” of liturgical practice—and is only a liturgy that adheres to such original forms “truthful”? Apart from these broader questions of historicity, truth is also at stake in a variety of ways within the liturgical celebration. Do people mean what they say or sing in worship? Are they confessing or repenting truthfully and does this lead to authentic transformations of their lives? Does liturgy convey the gospel truthfully? Does it speak truth to and about the lives of those who participate? Can Ricœur’s hermeneutics help us respond to these questions about authenticity, historicity, and revelation? 73

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The second chapter already showed that Ricœur claims a particular kind of truth for religious discourse. In general, “truth” is not actually a central topic of Ricœur’s work, as least in an explicit sense, although it is often implied in his treatments and sometimes emerges more explicitly. Especially in his hermeneutic concern with translating texts and conversations, finding meaning in or mediating between opposing positions, truth is an underlying theme even when it is not explicitly stated. According to the index, his late text Memory, History, Forgetting, mentions the term “truth” a mere twelve times in a book of almost 700 pages, but the theme is central to the work. Similarly, truth is not a major topic of either Oneself as Another or Course of Recognition and yet their common concern with personal identity is closely linked to certain notions of truth. Time and Narrative also does not often explicitly speak of truth and yet the topic is clearly important in the work. The same is the case for Ricœur’s work on religion or the biblical texts: whether they are “true” is often at least implicitly at stake. While Ricœur does not elaborate a full epistemology, he does often make claims about truth and its relevance. In both his biblical hermeneutics and his analysis of historical writing, Ricœur develops an account of truth that would function as alternative and complementary counterpoint to more analytic or scientific approaches that think of truth in terms of facts and states of affairs. This account of truth is more about commitment and faithfulness than it is about verification of data. Truthfulness is ascertained in consistent action and trustworthiness. This truth grows out of the legacy of tradition or history, but even more personal attestation is always fidelity in front of others and witnessed by others, whether these are the witnesses of history, the partners in mutual recognition, or the congregants listening to the biblical texts. Truth is lived before and toward the other and always has a connotation of responsibility, although it is also multifaceted or polyphonic, speaking in several and often contradictory voices, which require careful discernment. To some extent, for Ricœur, truth is thus always elusive: there is no single and no simple account of truth, but in fact it is always changing, unsettled by various hermeneutics of suspicion. Such practices of suspicion do not amount to simple rejection, reckless doubt, or pure relativism, but rather to the critical tools that penetrate deeply and rigorously beneath layers of semblance, hypocrisy, false authority, misleading witness, or unreliable testimony and can decide between alternative and conflicting interpretations.1 This truth, then, is at the same time a radical honesty and humility that does not settle for easy answers or complacent closures. This chapter will show that a common and coherent notion of truth underlies these various investigations, especially as applied to the biblical texts.2 There are clear parallels, not only between Ricœur’s earliest and his later works, but also between what Ricœur establishes about faithfulness in history, what he shows about attestation in his explicit writings on the self, and what

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he says about truth as manifestation in his texts on biblical interpretation. This is not an attempt to develop all of Ricœur’s philosophy of the self or even to give a full account of what he says about history (some of which has already been explored in earlier chapters). Rather, the parallels between what Ricœur says about truth in these various contexts are explored in order to show how they inform his work on religion and how they might be applied to liturgical truth. The chapter will contend that this description of the function of truth is especially appropriate for and gives a good account of the ways in which liturgy or ritual might be said to be true. Not only does liturgy display all three dimensions of truth—fidelity, attestation, and manifestation—but these also help to begin to address some of the questions about its relation to the events it commemorates or celebrates and the relationship between historical sources and contemporary practice. In light of these insights, the chapter will ultimately suggest that liturgy functions as primordial or originary language in ways that parallel or possibly even undergird the primordiality claimed for the biblical texts. Liturgical texts can speak truly and authentically to the primordial experience of liturgical participants. HISTORY AND TRUTH AS FIDELITY Ricœur entitled an early collection of articles History and Truth. He justifies his title by identifying the two notions of the title as “an intention and a direction of research,” which is concerned with the dilemma for historical “objectivity” and a more philosophical “passion for unity,” although both of these notions will turn out to be problematic (HT, 5). Ricœur explains that the notion of truth makes us uneasy because it may “seem disturbing and deceptive while making us long for a fullness of knowledge in the unity of immutability” (HT, 42). He is consistently suspicious of such full and complete knowledge. Instead, he tries to find a middle way between total skepticism and a unified and immutable notion of absolute Truth, wanting to preserve, on the one hand, the individuality and specificity of the historical event with all the requirements of careful and meticulous research as well as, on the other hand, the need for finding meaning in and communicating with various historical epochs or philosophical ideas. We must therefore “correct our idea of truth” (HT, 44). In order to arrive at a better understanding of ideas and their setting, Ricœur suggests that we must be engaged with the ideas, must make “an effort of sympathy” to the point of an “engagement and the risk of being mistaken” (HT, 49). We must be personally involved in this task that is on some level our own search for meaning and identity, while, on the other hand, keeping in mind the community: “To search for truth means that I aspire to express something that is valid for all, that stands out on the background of

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my situation as something universal” (HT, 50). He insists that truth must therefore retain an ontological dimension, something he also stresses in his work on personal identity. Yet this level of personal engagement and search for meaning is not sufficient. We must also recognize that we seldom arrive at a coherent picture of truth valid for all people and all times. Ricœur reminds us that our search for truth cannot be dogmatic but that a “skeptical” and a “dogmatic” moment alternate: “I suspend my own questions and my own answers so as to make myself other and submit myself to the author studied; then I reassume my responsibility by bringing the critique to this more profound level” and so forth in a continual “to-and-fro movement” (HT, 53; emphasis his). Throughout Ricœur stresses both responsibility and open-endedness. Truth retains a dimension of ambiguity and of hope (HT, 55).3 This notion of truth is always radically intersubjective for Ricœur and relies on communication, although such communication cannot be total (HT, 67). He emphasizes the need for encounter and mutual understanding in a search for truth. In this context, he makes a distinction between what he calls “two models” or “two extremes” for truth. One tends toward a totalizing system, while the other focuses on individuality. Ricœur sees both of these aspects continually present in history; both are important possibilities that philosophical reflection can uncover and employ (HT, 73). Lived history in its event-like character cannot be suppressed by a more systematizing effort. An account of the truth of history therefore must pay attention to its praxis, to the actions that go beyond the texts and inspire them. In his much later work on history Memory, History, Forgetting (published roughly forty years after these early essays), Ricœur no longer explicitly addresses the concept of truth and yet it is certainly at stake in the text without being explicitly mentioned at every turn. He himself points out at the center of the book: “I have rarely to this point pronounced the word ‘truth,’ nor have I risked any affirmation concerning the truth in history, even though at the beginning of this work I promised to compare the presumed truth of the historical representation of the past with the presumed trustworthiness of mnemonic representation” (MHF, 278). Ricœur is interested in the ways memory has been abused, when remembering is essential, and when forgetting and forgiving might be more appropriate. As much as he again seeks to destabilize any simplistic notion of history as an accurate account of clearly identifiable events that require no interpretation, he certainly does not want to imply that therefore everything is “up for grabs” and we cannot know anything “true” about history. For example, he repeatedly argues vigorously against Holocaust deniers as the most insidious examples of this (MHF, 498). The sections “The Historian’s Representation” (Part II, Chapter III)

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and several sections from Part III are of special relevance for the question of truth in history. Chapter III of Part II is concerned with the ways in which historians represent the remembered past. Memory, for Ricœur, is fundamentally about faithfulness (which he talks about as a kind of happiness in his conclusion to this section; MHF, 494). Memory is “summed up in recognition” and thus closely connected to self-identity; yet it is not fundamentally about “certainty” but instead about a “claim” or a “demand” of attribution (MHF, 495–96). History, in Ricœur’s view is more complex and raises more questions than memory, as it is indeed a “project of truth” and not just about recognition (MHF, 497). Although history is linked to memory, it cannot be reduced to the witness of testimonies. While memory is primarily about faithfulness, history is indeed concerned with truth—and yet the two are also closely linked (MHF, 498–500).4 Ricœur makes the distinction between the faithfulness of memory and the truth of history frequently throughout the book, but in some ways also posits them as parallels. In these cases, “truth” in history does seem to have strong connotations of certainty or accuracy and yet ultimately opens up again to notions of faithfulness. In the historian’s written “representation,” history is continually revised and documented as participating in both its original world and that of the contemporary reader for whom the historical account is written (MHF, 234). Ricœur argues for the narrative understandings of history while distinguishing this narration carefully from fiction, which would dispense with the truth of history (MHF, 241–42; see also TN III, 180–240). History has a “force of truth” that does not permit any sort of narration but only certain kinds. The difficulty is the gap between narrative and the historical “event” which (falsely) attempts to separate “what really happened” from any account of it. Ricœur wants to overcome this dichotomy in a notion of “narrative coherence” that assumes that, unlike metaphor or fictional narrative, history has a real referent (MHF, 243, 247). He criticizes Roland Barthes’ conception of history, which dismisses its referential function in favor of imaginative meaning (MHF, 250). Ricœur also reviews the debate between Hayden White and Carlo Ginzburg in regard to narrative about the Shoah, using the term of the “image” to show how we approach a historical text with different expectations than a literary text, an attitude that expects honesty (MHF, 261). The truth claim of historical discourse can only be sustained through the combination of “scripturality, comprehensive explanation, and documentary proof” that come together in the testimony of witnesses (MHF, 278). These truth claims of history must be set in the context of the truth claims of other sciences and, yet, Ricœur questions a simple identification of “referential truth” as “correspondence” or “adequation,” which must be dismissed, especially in its most simplistic forms

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(MHF, 279). He refers back to his treatment in Time and Narrative for these insights (MHF, 280). In chapter I of Part III, Ricœur is concerned with the philosophy of history. This chapter in particular is “devoted to truth in history” and to showing that interpretation is indeed a dimension of truth (MHF, 235). In history, “truth [is] in critical relation to the faithfulness of memory” (MHF, 285). Although Ricœur does here employ the expression “truth of history” primarily to describe history’s reliance on historical data and documentary proof, he does not simply reduce truth to historical objectivity. The historian’s representation or interpretation of history “proves in this way to possess the same scope as the project of truth” (MHF, 295). Truth as a whole is the proper aim of the historian (MHF, 314). Interpretation, finally, underscores “the validity of history’s project of truth within the limits of its space of validation” (MHF, 333). Ricœur tries to overcome the distinction between interpretation and understanding by focusing instead on a distinction between interpretation and representation of history. Subjectivity and objectivity are correlated on many levels for history (MHF, 337). On the one hand, the historian is always selective and is guided by particular questions and concerns (MHF, 338). On the other hand, “documentary proof” as verification of “facts” serves an important function. We never have access to “brute facts” or “the events themselves” (MHF, 338). There is, then, a “correlation between interpretation and truth in history” which “commands the status of truth in history” (MHF, 340). Truth and interpretation require each other reciprocally in order to function. Ricœur relies on Jacques Rancière to conclude this investigation where he seeks to bring together critical and ontological hermeneutics of history. He points out that Rancière uses the term “poetics” to designate the struggle to mediate between “scholarly explanation and mendacious fiction, between history-as-science and history-as-narrative,” thus precisely the struggle about the status of “truth in history” (MHF, 340). Rancière seems to find a balance in poetics that allows the narrative presentation of historical science leading to understanding and interpretive representation. Ricœur concludes that “the mode of truth belonging to historical knowledge consists in the play between this indeterminacy and its suppression” (MHF, 341). History is a “naming process” that grants a voice to the various dead protagonists; it gives to be seen and yet must always be concerned to recover new voices and to realize that it may say more about the hidden than about the obvious. It is particularly telling that Ricœur here embraces the word “poetics” for the truth of history, as this is of course the term he also employs to speak of the “truth” of biblical discourses. This account of the truth of historical writing that recognizes the role of interpretation in the faithful telling of historical events is certainly useful for

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how events are handled in liturgical texts and practices. The events that are “remembered” in liturgy are neither straightforwardly historical events, for which clear evidence exists in the historical record or some historical archive, nor are they purely fictional events. Our evidence for them are stories—primarily the stories of the biblical gospels, although supplemented by other texts, such as hagiography or apocryphal accounts.5 At the same time, they are clearly treated as true and meaningful by the liturgical texts and actions. This truth and meaning is one of faithfulness, not of historical literalness or accuracy. Often this truth is even transposed into the present reality by claiming that these events are happening right now. That obviously cannot be accurate on an account of truth as mere verification or literal correspondence: Christ is not being born “today,” coming for baptism today, rising today, or ascending today in the literal sense we often solely associate with a notion of truth.6 The liturgical account cannot be “verified” by recourse to facts or data, yet it certainly presents the events it narrates as true. Ricœur’s account of historical truth as fidelity to memory is far more useful for making sense of how liturgy treats these events of Christ’s, Mary’s, or the church’s life. Liturgy precisely gives “voice” to these singular events, portrays them with fidelity rather than historical accuracy, and represents them as displaying the truths of salvation. In this context, the language of testimony, which Ricœur employs in several contexts, is especially helpful for making sense of how liturgy treats the events it celebrates.7 While the liturgical action is certainly not an eyewitness account of a particular historical incident, it does retain the sense of bearing witness to something that truly occurred and to the event’s ongoing significance. One of Ricœur’s essays celebrates Emmanuel Lévinas as a “thinker of testimony” (FS, 108–26). He suggests that with the notion of testimony “the problematic of truth coincides with that of veracity” (FS, 1118). Lévinas’ account of substitution turns testimony into “a mode of truth” that exposes the self in a way different from the “certitude of representation” (FS, 123). Testimony functions as the trace that witnesses to the Infinite. While Ricœur refuses the excessive thrust of Lévinas’ account, he brings him together with Nabert in order to suggest that “testimonies are real events whose depth no reflection can plumb” (FS, 117).8 At one point Ricœur calls the “advance of testimony over reflection” “the gift that the religious offers to the philosophical” (CC, 160). Liturgical references to prior events are more like testimonies than they are like historical accounts. The contemporary participants in liturgy do not participate in the event because it is “historical,” but because the event celebrated by the liturgical ceremony or performance is significant now and matters for their lives. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur focuses on the importance of testimony for witnessing to the atrocities of history. He points out that witnesses

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are often unreliable and that testimony is thus not always trustworthy (MHF, 162). The core meaning of testimony rests on fidelity and confidence. Testimony has a “kinship” to recounting, in that it narrates an event where both event and narrator have to be presumed trustworthy (MHF, 163). It has the personal character of testimony where the narrator is implicated in the account and insists on its importance (MHF, 164). Testimony also requires a dimension of steadfastness and reliability that is related to promise-making: “The witness must be capable of answering for what he says before whoever asks him to do so” (MHF, 165). This creates a bond of trustworthiness that has a communal or social dimension. Testimony lies in some way between fidelity and attestation.9 While the earlier account, focused on Nabert and Lévinas, stresses the ethical dimension and the later account the juridical and historical one, both are useful for the liturgical recounting of events. Although here the testimony is not an eyewitness account to the historical event but instead a testimony to the present liturgical experience, it similarly insists on its importance or significance in this sense of reliability. It also requires trustworthiness that has a communal character. The character of the liturgical narrators is at stake in some form. The bonds of the community depend on the reliability and steadfastness of the liturgical testimony across time so that present participation in it remains possible. Liturgy can precisely be said to be a “project of truth” in Ricœur’s sense: a practice that “makes truth” by representing faithfully what is of immense significance to those participating and defines their lives in important fashion. It is testimony or memorial more than historical archive. In fact, many liturgies take great liberty with the biblical sources; they do not actually attempt to correspond to them in literal accuracy. Rather, they put them before the listeners—or maybe, more precisely, put the contemporary participants within them—to serve as testimony to what occurred in such a way as to make it relevant to this moment in time. They commemorate or celebrate the events in such a way as to open them up to the present moment. Liturgies have a “real referent” in the biblical texts and the events they recount, but this referent is commemorated or celebrated anew in the present testimony. Just as we do not have access to the brute facts of history, we do not have access to the brute facts of Christ’s life or even of the earliest stages of liturgical development. While they can guide us, they cannot be recreated in terms of historical accuracy. And that is not even the point: liturgy is not archive, it is living experience. Staging a historical liturgy as it might have taken place in Hagia Sophia in the time of Justinian might be of historical or musicological interest, but it does not signify for worship in the way that even the humblest liturgy performed in some small chapel does. Even the historical sources of liturgy must be treated in terms of fidelity to the experience they try to convey rather than solely in

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term of accuracy or some elusive correspondence to what a liturgical event at the time might have looked or felt like. It clearly matters to the scholar to understand how liturgical change occurs and how various elements of ritual practice emerged, but liturgy cannot return to some golden age of liturgical performance. Even if such a return were possible that misses the very point of liturgy, which always occurs again anew in the “today” of the participants in liturgy. One must thus ask not whether a given liturgical rite corresponds accurately to some fourth- or fifth-century ideal, but whether it speaks truthfully of the events it recounts and the human experience it tries to convey and influence: on the one hand, is it faithful to the witness of Christ’s life and death, on the other hand, does it attest to the human struggle with the discordant elements of their lives and the world in which they live? Indeed, the point of liturgy is not simply a true performance that has fidelity to the events it celebrates, but its primary point concerns the people who presently participate in it and who enter it for the purposes of confession, celebration, adoration, or transformation. It is for their sake that it must be faithful and not arbitrary. PERSONAL IDENTITY AND TRUTH AS ATTESTATION As already analyzed previously, in Oneself as Another Ricœur explores questions of selfhood and identity, drawing on insights from both analytical and continental thinkers.10 Regarding the permanency of the subject, he makes a distinction between “sameness” and “selfhood”: idem-identity and ipse-identity. He focuses on analytical theories of action and speech, contrasts theories of utterance and theories of identifying reference, throughout suggesting that they must mutually enrich each other in order to prevent a fall into solipsism or to fail at any sort of self-designation. Action cannot remain without a coherent account of the agent. In a manner that parallels his claims about the biblical texts, he argues here that consistency and truth in regard to the person cannot be put in terms of verification or correspondence to states of affairs.11 It is not enough to talk about a person as simply a blueprint of certain genes or a mass of accumulated memories or states of consciousness that could be transferred to another body, as certain scenarios in analytical treatments seem to suggest.12 Instead truth must be described as veracity, as truthfulness that corresponds to the sustained development of a character in a complex narrative. Various aspects and experiences of a person must be integrated into this overall narrative in order to have a “truthful” picture of the person. Truth is then more connected to truthful speech and action, namely to performance, than to description of facts. Far from reinforcing correspondence at some level, this version of truth actually leaves it behind in favor of transformation

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and change. For Ricœur, this means that I must see myself always also as another and not simply as a consistent and unchanging self. One might well argue that this is precisely the sort of truth that is revealed by liturgical texts and practices, especially those that focus on confession or penitence: namely the attempt to speak truthfully of our character, to attest to the self and its actions. In practices of confession, we give an account of ourselves, but this is not an account concerned only with accuracy, stating particular facts, but it is a deeper analysis of character, of how these confessed actions display our dispositions and how they concern who we are. Practices of confession require truthfulness in their very structure; there is no point to penitence if it is false or hypocritical—and liturgical texts often warn about this. This is the case not only for the rites of personal confession but also for the broader liturgical exhortations to penitence, such as they are especially manifest in lenten liturgies and practices. These repeatedly exhort their listeners to confess their lives truthfully and to engage in practices— such as abstinence or almsgiving—that would lead to an amelioration of life. At the same time, such practices and rites have as their explicit aim to integrate and transform the self: to grapple with the consequences of sin and guilt and enable the penitent to lead a renewed life. Again, this is true both of the ritual granting of absolution to an individual penitent and to the broader liturgical thrust of penitential seasons that all call for change of heart and transformation of the self. Veracity is here clearly a performance of the self and of the community that practices such rites: we liturgically confess a certain kind of self, acknowledge its actions to be our actions, to describe our selves, which are thus envisioned as these fallible selves, for whom fault or transgression is a reality. At the same time, the rite envisions a new self, one that no longer practices such actions and acts in new ways, developing a new character or at least experiencing a transformation of character. The “new” and the “old” self are always in continuity with each other, the old self is not simply discarded and forgotten. Indeed, in most ritual traditions, this is a cyclical experience: one returns to confession over and over again, the penitential season occurs again each year or in some traditions even multiple times a year. (This issue of transformation of the self will be treated more fully in chapter 8.) In this context, Ricœur also deals with problems of ascription: how can one attribute a particular action to a specific agent? He reflects on the importance of responsibility for one’s actions (OA, 101), surely a topic of similar importance for rites of confession. He suggests that narrative provides a solution to these various dilemmas by integrating notions of time and character and addressing issues of memory and permanence. Here also Ricœur argues that an account of truth as verification or correspondence is inadequate. Questions of selfhood, he insists, do not “lend themselves in the same way [as questions

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of sameness] to the test of truth claims” in terms of criteria of verification (OA, 129). He claims that questions of my identity with my body and my present identity with my remembered past self are questions of attestation instead of being issues of verification or falsification, insisting that an alternative criterion and “test” of truth is required (OA, 129). The notion of attestation is particularly important here.13 Ricœur points out that “this is why we can no longer confine ourselves to the definition of attestation made at the beginning in terms of certainty.” Rather, “by defining attestation from the viewpoint of aletheia (truth), we have already engaged, without saying so, another discussion than that which could be said to be purely epistemic, as if it were a matter of simply situating attestation on a scale of knowledge. The alethic characterization of attestation is not limited to a given epistemic determination” (OA, 299). Ricœur thus clearly distinguishes truth from a mere epistemic knowing of certainty. Drawing to some extent on Heidegger’s work on this topic, truth as aletheia includes other dimensions than certainty or verification, namely those of trust and credence.14 He draws on Aristotelian distinctions in order to mediate between reflection and analysis. Attestation is a being true that does not merely talk about abstract action but about the concrete practical engagement of a real and specific self. Ricœur points out that this notion of attestation is in fact closely linked to a sense of suspicion. Suspicion “is not simply the contrary of attestation, in a strictly disjunctive sense as being-false is in relation to being-true. Suspicion is also the path toward and the crossing within attestation. It haunts attestation, as false testimony haunts true testimony” (OA, 302; emphases his). He sees this uneasy balance or fragility of truth at work in all aspects of his treatment of the self and introducing a notion of otherness within the sameness of the self.15 Attestation is therefore a kind of “assurance . . . of existing in the mode of selfhood” (OA, 302). Later he will connect it to a Heideggerian notion of conscience, again appealing to the moral sense of responsibility. Truth does not lead to a strong and unassailable sense of self that posits the self as a solipsistic ruler of the world. Rather, it is “the inverse of the certainty of the ego,” a sort of testimony in a Lévinassian sense (OA, 341). It therefore requires not only a commitment to justice but also a community that originates, supports, and exercises justice. Here again the parallel to liturgical rites of penitence is telling. The very existence of these rites presumes that confession in front of another or a community serves an important function in veracity and constitution of the self. Sometimes the prayers accompanying rites of confession explicitly exhort to suspicion of the self in order to aim at greater honesty. The Jesuit practice of the “examen” or the daily examination of conscience, as a habit in several monastic traditions and also sometimes adopted by lay individuals,

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is another illustration of such liturgical forms of attestation, even if in this case it concerns more a personal practice than a communally structured one. Conversely, communal forms of penitence as they occur in the regular worship practices of many traditions—whether as a communal expression at the beginning of a liturgy, as for example in the Anglican rite, or as communal “seasons” of penitence, as in lenten traditions—surely aim at communities originating, supporting, and exercising justice in some form, even if not in explicitly political or legal fashion. Many lenten liturgies call for more deliberate acts of compassion toward the poor and indigent during this time. Personal transformation of life is to be accompanied or maybe even made possible by concrete acts of justice. Ricœur carries his analysis further in Course of Recognition, where attestation is again an important topic. Recognition itself is rooted in an estimation of truth, namely to identify and distinguish something, as Ricœur points out in a comparison of Descartes’ and Kant’s epistemological notions of recognition. Recognizing is about “accepting as true” (CR, 35). Yet this simple understanding is constantly destabilized by mis-recognition and the threat of error. Putting “recognition to the test” leads us to consider the importance of “recognizing oneself,” which will ultimately lead us also to recognize the other and being recognized by the other. For Odysseus and Oedipus, being recognized as truly themselves, implies a notion of trust and responsibility for their actions. The virtuous person, according to Ricœur’s reading of Aristotle, requires wisdom as a type of practical truth, as excellent deliberation that discerns the truth of what action is required in a particular situation (CR, 88). While recognition and truth may initially seem to be concerned with certainty, they really are ultimately about attestation (although constantly destabilized and threatened by suspicion). Attestation here amounts to witnessing or testifying and finally about the ability to narrate oneself in order to establish one’s self-identity. Concordance and discordance in emplotment establish identity as enduring over time, truth as selfhood and not only as sameness (CR, 100–102; he also again points to the fragility of selfhood caused by otherness). Recognition by another thus enhances self-recognition. This analysis brings Ricœur to return to notions of memory and promise (CR, 109–34). One recognizes oneself by remembering one’s self of the past (albeit haunted by everything one has forgotten) and committing oneself to the future (albeit threatened by the possibility of betrayal). The truth of self-identity here emerges as “trustworthiness” and reliability, constant commitment to the other person to whom one speaks the truth about oneself, past, present, and future (CR, 130).16 In his Kluge Prize Speech, he says: “attestation relates to the self as testimony relates to an event, a meeting, an accident.”17 Agents commit themselves and become

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responsible for others: “imputability makes the powerful responsible for the weak and vulnerable.”18 In both the speech and in Course of Recognition, Ricœur therefore moves from truth as identification to truth as attestation and as just action. And, as explicated in the first section of the chapter, all these connotations of truth are also fundamental to Ricœur’s work on history. Again, such trustworthiness and reliability are crucial in liturgical truthspeaking as well. Not only are trustworthiness and reliability required for confession and penitential practice more broadly but also for other aspects of liturgy. Many liturgical acts express commitment and promise, especially prominently in rites of conversion, baptism, chrismation, or confirmation. But, more broadly, participating in liturgy expresses commitment to the community. In rites of confession, the penitent expresses a commitment of truthfulness about him- or herself to the person who hears the confession. In general attendance at liturgy, all congregants express a commitment of truthfulness by their very participation in the rites. Liturgy requires honesty to function. Doing it merely pro forma or out of habit—or guilt or obligation—makes it almost impossible for it to work meaningfully for that person or even for the community as a whole.19 Thinking of truth in terms of fidelity and attestation, then, are eminently appropriate for liturgical practice and reveal something about the way in which liturgy is meant to function. What does this say, then, about the question of revelation? BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AND TRUTH AS MANIFESTATION Even in his earliest texts, Ricœur claims that religious discourse implies philosophy and makes philosophical statements and truth claims. On the one hand, it is precisely in regard to these texts that he develops most clearly his distinctions between truth as verification or correspondence and truth as manifestation or revelation. On the other hand, he insists that not only must we recognize that religious language does indeed make these truth claims, but he suggests that its truth claims put in question the criteria of truth of other kinds of discourse. Not only may “God-talk” be just as true, just as meaningful, just as verifiable as scientific discourse in its own sphere and manner of discourse, but it may actually serve to question the assumptions and versions of truth of other discourses (FS, 35). He also always regards as an essential presupposition of his work, on biblical hermeneutics, that this truth is “verified” in life (FS, 217). Precisely because Ricœur believes in the truth of the Bible, because he is convinced that its texts do indeed speak truly, he is concerned with what truth

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means when he talks about matters of faith in general or the biblical texts in particular. As noted in the second chapter, Ricœur admits a certain circularity of the truth of biblical faith that he often labels a kind of “wager”: starting from the assumption that the texts have something meaningful and truthful to say, he works within that conviction and from within the community that reads the texts in this fashion, and thereby fills the wager with meaning and content by showing in what way the discussion can be enriched through the discovery of further meaning. This wager includes for Ricœur the assumption that the biblical texts in particular are primordial sources of faith and speak of it in originary fashion, without the heavy theological and doctrinal “overlay” of later development.20 There is a sense in which this implies that these texts are primordial inasmuch as they speak faithfully and authentically of human religious experience. The second sense in which truth is at stake in the biblical texts, according to Ricœur, concerns its “poetic” dimension of manifestation. He says repeatedly that poetic speech calls into question our uncritical concepts of adequation and verification and provides a nondescriptive reference to the world. To admit that art and fiction can shock us by challenging our prejudices is to let go of a notion of truth informed only by scientific correspondence to data (FFR, 139). The two can be clearly distinguished: “One sort of language describes reality; then; as an outcome of the crisis in this vision of things supported by this first language, a second sort of language arises to redescribe the world” (FFR, 139). He argues against the idea “that the arts merely evoke feelings, emotions and passions devoid of any ontological weight” (FFR, 140). Poetry is indeed also about the world, but more specifically about our ways of belonging to the world. That is to say, poetic language uncovers “modalities of our relation to the world that are not exhausted in the description of objects” (FS, 222). This is also what he will identify in several contexts as justification for speaking of the biblical texts as revealed or inspired: “Revelation, in this sense, designates the emergence of another concept of truth than truth as adequation, regulated by the criteria of verification and falsification: a concept of truth as manifestation, in the sense of letting be what shows itself” (FS, 223).21 This clearly parallels his account of historical truth as fidelity or testimony. But it is also closely linked to the idea of the world of the text that he explicates in terms of attestation and constancy of character in his work on narrative and selfhood. In an interview, he argues that “we need a third dimension of language, a critical and creative dimension, which is directed towards neither scientific verification nor ordinary communication but towards the disclosure of possible worlds. This third dimension of language I call the poetic” (PR, 124). He proclaims as his “conviction that the decisive feature of hermeneutics is the capacity of world-disclosure yielded

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by texts” (PR, 125). Texts have a revelatory function in regard to the truth of our reality. Yet, this goes beyond a description or representation of the world as it currently is. The biblical texts function like poetry, in that they give us a picture of the world not as it is but as it should be (FS, 43). Similarly, the parables are “true” not in the sense that they can be verified or that they correspond to something that “actually” happened, but rather in that they speak truly about the world and provide testimony of what should be instead of what is. Biblical poetry thus envisions and opens a new world with which we can engage creatively. This world does not “exist” in a scientific way, but it is also not whimsical fantasy. Its truth is an alternate version, not in competition with more scientific notions of truth, but equally valid in its own way and on its own terms. The biblical texts challenge us to enter this world and to perform within it, thus calling us to change and transformation. Here also he gestures toward the notion of revelation: “I would go so far as to say that the Bible is revealed to the extent that the new being unfolded there is itself revelatory with respect to the world, to all of reality, including my existence and my history. In other words, revelation, if the expression is meaningful, is a trait of the biblical world” (FS, 44; emphasis his). The biblical texts are true, then, inasmuch as they are revelatory. And they are revelatory inasmuch as they manifest a certain kind of existence for human experience. This is of course precisely what the liturgical texts strive to accomplish. Manifestation is a good description not only of what the liturgical texts do with biblical texts or events but also of what liturgical actions and practices do with our lives. It captures both the element of fidelity to the events that are commemorated or celebrated and the element of attestation to the self or selves engaged in its practices. Liturgy manifests the events of salvation to those who enter within it, while at the same time confronting them both with a vision of themselves as they are and a vision of themselves as they should or could be. Liturgy strives for a truthful picture of the fragile and struggling self and opens new possibilities to the self and the community. As the next chapter will focus specifically on the notion of the world of the text (and correspondingly the “world” of liturgy), the focus here will be instead on the other element of Ricœur’s discussion of biblical truth, namely his emphasis on primordiality and its relevance for liturgy. As already mentioned, Ricœur often claims that the biblical texts give us a more immediate experience than theological reflection does, which he suggests is a second- or third-order discourse. Interestingly, he uses the terminology of lex orandi, also employed by liturgical theologians, to chastise a theology that abstracts from this primary experience and to develop a concept of revelation that is not “opaque” or “authoritarian.” Instead, one must distinguish “three levels of language familiar to a certain traditional teaching

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about revelation: the level of the confession of faith, where the lex credendi is not separated from the lex orandi; the level of ecclesial dogma, where a historic community interprets for itself and for others the understanding of faith specific to its tradition; and finally, the body of doctrines imposed by the magisterium as the rule of orthodoxy” (H, 112). Ricœur argues that abstracting from the primary expression of faith within the community that speaks and hears the living word turns this primary discourse of faith into a secondary or even tertiary discourse that then imposes a notion of revelation of certain concepts on the community and sterilizes its living faith. He makes similar statements about theology more generally in his later work, defining it as a secondary discourse that is always dependent upon the primary discourse of faith as expressed in the biblical texts (FS, 37; TB, xv–xvii). Yet although Ricœur consistently identifies the primary discourse of faith with the biblical texts, for him this discourse is always the expressed faith of the community. There is a reciprocal relationship between the community and the text that it regards as expressing and confirming its experience of faith.22 For Ricœur, the truth of the biblical discourse finds its locus in the community out of which it arises and whose faith it informs and confirms. Biblical texts are “true” in the sense that they come to life in a community of religious believers and are confirmed by their lives: “Faith, inasmuch as it is lived experience, is instructed—in the sense of being formed, clarified, and educated—within the network of texts that in each instance preaching brings back to living speech. This presupposition of the textuality of faith distinguishes biblical faith . . . from all others.” In this respect, the “texts do precede life.” This means that “I can name God in my faith because the texts preached to me have already named God” (FS, 218). There is a reciprocal relationship between the living community and the texts of faith. While the texts arise out of the experience of the community and are validated by it, they also inform and shape the faith of the community and such faith is only possible because of this prior context opened by the texts (FS, 69). It is telling that Ricœur sees the texts coming to life in the activity of preaching, which happens most frequently in a liturgical setting. This may suggest that liturgy can serve as such a primordial context as well. In order to see this more fully, it might be worth returning briefly to what it means to speak of something as “originary” or “primordial.” The language of primordiality (Ursprünglichkeit) is largely derived from Heidegger who employs it (not always consistently) to distinguish between ontic and ontological, positive and phenomenological, particular and structural.23 It refers to human experience “as such” (überhaupt and schlechthin). Heidegger usually equates it with what is essential (wesentlich), referring to the ontological or existential (rather than ontic or existentiell), namely what points to “constitutive” broader structures rather than narrower areas or

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empirical instances.24 To say that a structure of human experience is primordial does not mean that it is primitive or somehow from the dawn of human experience.25 Although it emphasizes the source or origin (Ursprung means source, origin, or fountainhead), it is not about going back to the innocence of the child; the point is not to provide a developmental account of infantile behavior. Rather, it gets at something fundamental or even paradigmatic about the human experience, something that serves as the wellspring and source for other feelings, affects, activities, behaviors, or dispositions.26 It describes what Dasein is “always already” (immer schon). In this respect, it serves as the ground or basis for “deficient” (defizient), “derivative” (privativ), “average” (durchschnittlich), or “everyday” (alltäglich) modes of being, but refers to what is “really,” “truly,” “essentially” (eigentlich) the case.27 This does not necessarily mean that everyone experiences it in a given empirical instance, but it does imply that it is a broad, representative, or even constitutive kind or aspect of human experience. If hardly anyone were to experience it or if it revealed something only about very special and isolated experiences, it could not be called primordial. For Heidegger (at least in Being and Time), this is the essential task of phenomenology: a phenomenological examination intends or aims at the “structural whole” (Strukturganzheit) of Dasein’s being and its primordial (ursprünglich) being as care (Sorge). It goes furthest and deepest, grasps the phenomenon as a whole, in unitary fashion, seeks to penetrate to its most basic and most fundamental reality.28 Obviously, it has been challenged whether this can even be accomplished, whether it is ever possible to reach what is most fundamental or essential and to be able to distinguish it successfully from what is derivative or accidental. What makes one type of experience (e.g., Angst) more fundamental than another (e.g., fear or even love)? Can we really get to experience as such? Is not all experience always already embedded in the lifeworld, instantiated in particular practices and concrete experiences, such that an abstraction to an experience “as such” is always artificial and maybe takes the experience of the one doing the abstracting as normative or paradigmatic without admitting it is doing so? At the same time, it seems problematic to deny that there are at least some aspects of the human experience that are shared. We are not all so utterly distinct and different that we cannot communicate or empathize with each other. We can learn new languages, acquire new worldviews, share new ways of being, and we can become friends with people who are quite different from us.29 It is as problematic (ethically, culturally, and religiously) to insist on total particularity as it is to assume a blanket universality that does not take differences sufficiently seriously.30 In light of this, what would it mean to refer to liturgy as “primordial” in some sense? It obviously cannot mean that everyone practices liturgy in the same way or even that everyone engages in it in the first place. But that is

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not necessary; it would be sufficient to show that it is somehow essential, points to something basic or structural about human experience and that it serves as the source for other sorts of experiences that are derivative from or dependent upon it. This is what Ricœur’s claim about the biblical texts seems to capture; these expressions of faith are the ones “through which the members of this community have interpreted their experience for the sake of themselves or for others’ sake” (FS, 37). He also calls them “ordinary” in the sense that even uneducated believers can engage them; they do not require theological sophistication (FS, 37). The “lived experience” is “brought to language” within them (FS, 220). Such texts have a more originary function, inasmuch as description and reference (as second-order discourse) are suspended in them in order to convey more primary ways of belonging within the world (FS, 222). They precede any present naming or reflection of the divine because they provide the context, the poetic world, within which any such naming becomes possible. Yet, although they expand our understanding of ourselves, ultimately such opening of a poetic world has to be appropriated in concrete practice (FS, 234–35). To say that a text or an experience is primordial, then, would mean that it is primary or paradigmatic in some way, serves as source for other experiences, grounds them in some fundamental fashion, provides a more or less comprehensive vision that can be adopted, which would result in practice (not just theory or knowledge). All this is, in fact, true of liturgy. Liturgy is historically prior to creeds and other texts (to some extent even the Christian scriptures, certainly the final versions of the Gospels) and it is the context within which they are read and heard.31 Liturgy is where people first and often primarily experience the religious community and it is the paradigmatic place for the expression of faith and theology.32 Indeed, to a large extent, the scriptures themselves came to be confirmed as authoritative precisely because of the ways in which they were used in the worship of the early church and confirmed its experience of faith. Liturgy means “work of the people” and in the past it was the most fundamental and often very public manifestation of faith on social and cultural levels that had significant economic and geographical impact (e.g., in the building of churches, the fasting regulations of Great Lent, the public celebrations of feasts with processions, etc.). Liturgy was—and in many ways continues to be—the primary locus for shaping Christian identity, including via baptism, chrismation, and catechesis. Liturgy is both originary, in the sense of originating, serving as source or foundation, and it is fundamental in the sense of grounding, underlying, or informing more concrete expressions of behavior, which are shaped by it or derivative from it. Even beyond the Christian tradition, ritual is probably the primary, most distinctive, and most paradigmatic expression of religion. In fact, ritual is a basic human activity that shapes individual, social, communal, and political identity in important

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ways, showing up not only in religion but in sports, politics, and manifold other social activities. Ritual is meaning-giving and meaning-producing activity. In all these respects, liturgy is as fundamental a form of religious expression as the biblical texts, in many respects maybe more fundamental. If this is the case, can liturgy also be said to serve as a source for theology in the same way as the Bible? Can liturgy be said to be “revealed” or even “inspired” in the way often affirmed of the biblical texts?33 Many contemporary liturgical theologians speak of liturgical practice as primary and theological reflection as secondary in almost exactly the same fashion as Ricœur does of the biblical discourse. Often this emphasis on liturgy as primary is encapsulated in the phrase to which Ricœur himself refers: lex orandi, lex credendi (loosely translated as “the law of worship determines the law of belief”).34 Aidan Kavanagh and David Fagerberg make this distinction the most forcefully, although it is a common assertion in many writers.35 Kavanagh emphasizes that to see liturgy as primary theology “is very radical,” implying “that worship conceived broadly is what gives rise to theological reflection, rather than the other way around.”36 And this indeed takes on a circular character where liturgical practices shape the life of faith and this faith of the community informs and shapes the liturgical texts and actions. It “is about the possibility that liturgical worship, an endeavor both worldly and ecclesial, is itself fundamental to and constitutive of the faithful community and also of the ways in which that community reflects upon itself theologically.”37 Community and liturgy shape each other in a reciprocal fashion that is not unlike the hermeneutic circle. Hughes claims, against Kavanagh, that the relationship between lex orandi and lex credendi must work in both directions and that thus theology can critique liturgical practice.38 Kavanagh himself, however, does allow for theology’s impact on liturgy: “To detect that change in the subsequent liturgical act will be to discover where theology has passed, rather as physics detects atomic particles in tracks of their passage through a liquid medium.”39 He objects to a theology that merely employs liturgy as a quarry for arguments and maintains that instead liturgy reveals the discourse of an ecclesial society.40 He concludes: “Lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi says something about the deepest structure and purpose of Christian worship. It also suggests a method of analytical procedure which the secondary theologian ignores to the Church’s peril. For the liturgy of faithful Christians is the primary theological act of the Church itself, and the ways in which this act carries on its proper discourse are above all canonical in structure and content, and eschatological in intent.”41 It is now claimed by many liturgical theologians that liturgy can and indeed must serve as a source for theology and that it is primary theology in contrast to systematic or speculative theology, which reflects on doctrine that is secondary to and dependent upon it. These various claims

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about the language of liturgy and its interpretation closely parallel Ricœur’s insights about biblical language and interpretation. This would suggest that his hermeneutic methodology would be eminently useful for an interpretation of liturgical texts and actions. Liturgical theologians also often point to the limitations of thinking of biblical texts as superior to liturgical ones.42 Kavanagh is quite emphatic that liturgy “is the very condition of doing theology, of understanding the Word of God” and that we have “to begin by shedding our fixation with scripture as a text from which Christian liturgy somehow results as effect from cause.”43 He reminds his readers that the liturgy is deeply embedded in the Jewish context out of which the scriptures also arose and that “liturgy and scripture were compenetrating endeavors in earliest Christianity no less than they had always been in Judaism.” That is to say, “scripture and liturgy were each part and parcel of what has here been called rite, that is, the whole style of life founded in the myriad particularities of worship, law, ascetical and monastic structures, evangelical and catechetical endeavors, and in particular ways of theological reflection.”44 He concludes by drawing parallels between the biblical word, the incarnate and resurrected word, Christ, and the liturgy: “Biblical word, incarnate Word, risen Word, and liturgy of the Word are all the more fully human because they are fully of God. The liturgy of the table is called divine by many Eastern Churches for a good reason.”45 Joseph Ratzinger, referring to the same ascription of “divinity” to the liturgy, also speaks of liturgy as divinely revealed in some sense.46 Both Bible and liturgy make possible encounter with God, an encounter in which we are also transformed. The liturgical scholar Robert Taft draws an even more explicit parallel between Bible and liturgy: “To borrow a term from the biblical scholars, the liturgy is the ongoing Sitz im Leben of Christ’s saving pattern in every age, and what we do in the liturgy is exactly what the New Testament itself did with Christ: it applied him and what he was and is to the present. For the Sitz im Leben of the Gospels is the historical setting not of the original event, but of its telling during the early years of the primitive Church.” And he asks: “Do not both New Testament and liturgy tell us this holy history again and again as a perpetual anamnesis?”47 Like biblical texts, liturgical discourse and action is meaningful and true in Ricœur’s sense of truth as manifestation. Ricœur’s concept of truth as manifestation in the sense of fidelity and attestation is thus indeed useful for liturgical texts and practices. Liturgy is true when it is faithful to the experience it seeks to convey, when it attests to the human movement toward the divine, and when it testifies faithfully to the events manifested within it, both historical and contemporary. Its truth is not best depicted as verifying facts (historical or otherwise) or corresponding

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to some normative ideal. Rather, this is a more fluid truth of fidelity that can take a variety of forms, depending on how it “fits” a given context, while remaining faithful to its sources and basic impetus. Yet, what exactly is it that liturgy tries to express? What does it manifest, to what does it attest or seek to remain faithful? What is its meaning, point, or goal? An answer to these questions requires returning again to Ricœur’s notion of the world of the text.

Chapter 5

Liturgical Meaning Prefiguration, Configuration, Refiguration

What does liturgy mean? What is its point? This is a question often raised explicitly by liturgical theologians. Hughes makes it the guiding question of his inquiry: “What sort of meaning is this which some people construct and in which other people participate which we call a liturgical event?” He wonders how a “theory of meaning” might be possible that “could guide or facilitate the achievement of this kind of meaning?” That is, “is it possible to give some account of the ways in which the meanings of worship are organized and transmitted by those who lead and are appropriated by those who participate in a worship service?”1 He draws both on Ricœur and insights from semiotics for his analysis of how worship can become meaningful, arguing that in order for a worship event to have meaning it must “make sense” in some way and be theologically comprehensible.2 Meaning is created in the circular engagement of traditional rite and postmodern worshipper. Consequently, “convictions need to be held on an open palm rather than in clenched grip; our work must be undertaken in a seriously experimental way, as a wager for meaning rather than senselessness, and for the particular wager suggested by the liturgical signs themselves.” The person who engages in worship must “yield to the promise and the invitation proposed in the liturgy . . . in proposal and in acceptance, then, is the meaning of worship constructed.”3 The production of liturgical meaning depends on this interplay of liturgy and participants in a hermeneutic back-and-forth.4 For Nichols, liturgy and faith exhibit a similar circular structure, in which they continually inform each other. Relying on both Ricœur and Gadamer, she stresses that “meaning is therefore no longer to be construed through retrieving something behind the text, but is inherent in a certain practice of interpretation,” namely in a “dialectic between understanding the text and self-understanding.”5 Meaning is created at the intersection between reader 95

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and text. She expresses this in consciously Ricœurian language: “Liturgical hermeneutics is able to add to this discussion the conviction that the worshippers bring an initial faith in the world being proposed to their participation. In the presence of faith, the world of the rite is expressed both in the ‘first-’ and in the ‘second-level denotation’ of the liturgical act.”6 She argues that these two levels of the faith brought to the ritual act and the appropriation that occurs via liturgical entry into the kingdom continually interact.7 For Nichols, the “world” of liturgy is supremely shaped by the life of faith and by the practices of actual ecclesial gatherings. Although not everyone appeals to the hermeneutic circle explicitly, the circular interplay between the liturgical event and the lives of its participants is often highlighted. Kavanagh emphasizes that this task of ascertaining and creating meaning is no easy matter, but “a knowledgeable accomplishment of the highest order.”8 He finds that such meaning becomes possible through the practice of Christian worship as it engages with faith and the reciprocal interchange between the two. Rite emerges precisely through this interaction between liturgical acts and faith.9 This circular arrangement is also emphasized heavily by Gordon Lathrop who juxtaposes a continual back-and-forth relationship between two aspects of liturgy (such as praise and beseeching, teaching and bath, pascha and year, etc.) in each of his chapters on liturgical practice and argues that the meaning of liturgy emerges from this paradoxical pattern.10 There is thus a reciprocal interaction between the liturgy and the community that functions in mimetic ways. Understanding arises from this circular relationship. In the Protestant liturgical scholar Byron Anderson this relationship is explicitly linked to mimetic performance in the sense of “communicative event,” which discloses and manifests “a particular complex of meanings and relationships,” both in the sense of experience and in the sense of transformation by constructing “meanings, relationships, and ways of being.” Such mimetic performance “draws us into its own meaning now and, in doing so, requires that we set aside our conscious connections to that past and future.”11 Thus, ritual mimetically exhibits prior “meaning,” this meaning is experienced in the present configuration, and enables subsequent transformation of meaning and of the self. Although Anderson does not appeal to Ricœur explicitly here, this three-fold interpretation of ritual meaning maps fairly neatly onto Ricœur’s account of threefold mimesis. Some patristic or medieval texts also raise the question of the meaning of liturgy, either in the context of catechesis—especially of converts—or in more general interpretive explanations of liturgy, referred to as “mystagogies.” These include such texts as Cyril of Jerusalem’s catechetical and mystagogical lectures (4th c.),12 Ambrose of Milan’s and Theodore of Mopsuestia’s lectures on the Eucharist (4th c.), Maximus the Confessor’s

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Mystagogy (7th c.),13 Germanos of Constantinople’s explanation of the liturgy (8th c.),14 Nicholas Cabasilas’ “Commentary on the Divine Liturgy” (14th c.),15 and Symeon of Thessalonika’s text drawing on many predecessors (early 15th c.).16 Most of these are exegetical in character, interpreting what each part of the liturgy is supposed to mean, often with explicit pedagogical focus.17 Many of these explanations speak of liturgy primarily as anamnesis, as remembering and representing the life and death of Christ. This is especially true of Cyril, Germanos, and Cabasilas. Sometimes the thrust is more eschatological: for Maximus, liturgy accomplishes the reunification of all things. It does so mimetically, by representing or imitating nave and sanctuary respectively as the corporeal and mental dimensions of the human, as earth and heaven, and as sensible and intelligible realms. This tension between interpreting the thrust of liturgy as primarily memorial or anamnesis versus seeing its meaning primarily in its representing or imitating function (a mimesis of the cosmos or of a heavenly reality) continues in contemporary reflections on the meaning of liturgy, even when the terms are not used explicitly. Is this the same sort of mimesis Ricœur explicates in his work on narrative? Does his account help make sense of what liturgy means or how it functions? Does liturgy relate mimetically to life? Does it allow its participants to project themselves into a different perspective? Does it open a world to them that challenges them to conceive themselves differently, to enter within it and be transformed by it? And, if so, how might that relate to the more imitative or memorial dimensions? The first part of the chapter will explicate these assumptions about mimesis in contemporary thinking about liturgy, suggesting that Ricœur’s richer account of mimesis can resolve some of these tensions by broadening the understanding of mimesis at work in these discussions. The second part will propose Ricœur’s notion of the world of the text as a useful framework for thinking about the “world” of liturgy and thereby address and qualify some of the claims made about that world by liturgical theologians. The third part of the chapter will then consider the question of how this world is concretely entered or appropriated by the participants.18 THE ROLE OF MIMESIS IN LITURGY The tension between “anamnesis” and “mimesis” is actually configured in several different ways in the literature. First, the tension between remembering and imitating functions is sometimes applied by historical scholars to the way in which liturgy deals with the past in either its texts or actions, which are interpreted as either anamnetic or mimetic, respectively. Second, as in the patristic interpretations of liturgy, the two terms can be posited in a more

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general sense as a tension between liturgy’s task to remember the past versus its goal to anticipate or even instantiate the future. Third, the two terms are sometimes employed for two conflicting interpretations of liturgy as either memorial or dramatic performance. In all three regards, Ricœur’s broader notion of mimesis can help ease the tension at stake and show the two terms or elements to be far less at odds with each other than often supposed. Some historians of liturgy employ the language of mimesis in the sense of imitating in contrast to anamnesis in the sense of remembering. In these examinations of patristic or medieval texts, the two terms are often juxtaposed to each other, but used fairly narrowly to interpret the tenor or thrust of a particular liturgical text or ritual action as either explicitly imitating a biblical precedent (mimesis) or as directing the listeners to remember it (anamnesis) without any attempt to imitate it. Stefanos Alexopoulos utilizes the two terms in this way in order to distinguish between texts that speak of the liturgical hours as an imitation of what Christ or the early church did (for which he cites Origen as support) and texts that simply remember events (as he thinks Tertullian suggests).19 He explores many further historical interpretations of the liturgical texts for the hours, applying the two terms “mimetic” and “anamnetic” consistently to texts for their interpretation of the hours either in terms of imitating a biblical precedent or in terms of remembering a biblical event, respectively. Harald Buchinger similarly employs the two terms in order to establish the relationship between imitative and remembering dimensions of the paschal liturgy in Jerusalem in late antiquity.20 He thinks that holy week has a basic mimetic structure in the sense of following the biblical precedents, as to location and readings, but that these are limited by the broader liturgical cycles and by the supplements of other readings that are not imitative in nature. He also traces a later development that he considers to become increasingly anamnetic in the sense of remembering rather than reproducing or imitating the paschal events directly. Apart from an expansion of the stational system and an increase in mimetic actions, there is also a greater focus on the more “spectacular elements” and an “increasing materialization of piety.”21 He concludes that “liturgical memory (anamnesis) occurs in the interplay of mimesis and interruption of mimesis by synthetic and centrifugal tendencies on the different levels of symbolism.”22 Unlike some other thinkers, he does not necessarily see the two dimensions as in competition with each other; they are different liturgical directions that are weighted differently at different times in liturgical history and can cross each other to some extent. In a second, more general, sense, liturgy is interpreted alternatively as an anamnesis of historical memory or as a mimetic instantiation of an eschatological future, although the term mimesis is less likely to be used explicitly in this context. Liturgy is very frequently affirmed to be primarily about

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remembering the events of salvation and so to be fundamentally anamnetic in character. Many of the ancient mystagogies read it in this way, interpreting the liturgical texts and each liturgical act as corresponding to a particular event in Christ’s life. Ironically, this is actually often understood mimetically, as a kind of mirroring or imitative function. Many contemporary scholars also refer to liturgy as primarily anamnesis.23 Yet, liturgy also has profoundly eschatological dimensions, as already articulated by Maximus in the seventh century and picked up by many contemporary theologians.24 In this sense, liturgy is seen to mirror or even imitate the celestial angelic worship believed to be taking place continually or to anticipate eschatologically a future heavenly worship. Especially Orthodox liturgy is often interpreted as anticipating the heavenly liturgy in some form or even as performing a present participation in it. Peter Galadza points out that this eschatological dimension can already be detected much earlier: “When discussing the mimetic and anamnetic aspects of this commemoration [of Palm Sunday] in the liturgical calendar and the stational liturgy of Jerusalem, it has become commonplace for liturgical scholars to explore the ritual within the context of historicism, often overlooking the dominant resurrectional and eschatological themes in the ritual’s texts.”25 He tries to retrieve these eschatological and mimetic elements in his analysis. While some theologians (past and present) tend to emphasize one interpretation over the other, the two need not be in conflict. The Catholic sacramental theologian Kevin Irwin argues, for example, that “liturgy is anamnetic in the sense that it combines the past redemptive deeds of Jesus . . . and draws the contemporary Church into a unique and ever new experience of these redemptive deeds through the words and symbols of liturgy even as the Church yearns for redemption’s eschatological fulfillment in the kingdom.” Therefore, “all liturgy bridges the past, present and future of the Church in Christ.”26 He contends that the reading of scripture within the services makes present the sacred event within the celebration at this time and place: “In fact the notion of in illo tempore that operates here is that these events happen still hic et nunc. In the Liturgy of the Word the event and its announcement coincide.”27 At the same time, he insists that this always has an eschatological dimension, in which the promise begins to be fulfilled here and now: “Thus the synaxis of the Word is itself an eschatological experience—of salvation experienced here and now and of the fullness of salvation to be realized in the eternal kingdom. Thus all liturgy can be understood as the privileged, though provisional, encounter with saving events of the past experienced anew though the liturgy.” Consequently, “the Liturgy of the Word, which manifests and is an epiphany of the kingdom, moves the Church toward the time of its completion and fulfillment in the eschaton.”28 Thus, although the relationship of liturgy to the past as anamnesis and to the future as anticipation goes in

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different directions, the two are not necessarily understood as incompatible with each other. In an even broader sense, mimesis as a term for liturgical action as a whole is often eschewed or even explicitly rejected, partly because it is deeply implicated in ancient Greek theater. The Greek patristic theological tradition is profoundly influenced, on the one hand, by Plato’s suspicion of representation as mere imitation and his rejection of it as arousing the wrong kinds of passions, and, on the other hand, by Aristotle’s more positive interpretation of the characters in tragedy as exemplary and as enabling a catharsis of emotion as we identify with them. The same ambivalence characterizes the contemporary discussion, with some thinkers arguing strenuously against any mimetic dimension in liturgy and others contending that liturgy is fundamentally mimetic in character. Andrew Walker White—illustrating the Platonic suspicion of mimesis— claims that Byzantine liturgy contains no mimetic features and is not about performance.29 He associates mimesis with Greek theater as a “pagan cult activity” that was firmly rejected by early Christianity. The Byzantines, he contends, deliberately turned against mimetic interpretations of liturgy and opted for purely “spiritual” ones, whether in liturgical space, music, or overall performance of the liturgy. Any parallels between liturgy and theater in terms of architecture, iconographic display, or musical performance are purely accidental and superficial.30 Similarly, Richard McCall, who wants to argue for liturgy as enactment in a stronger sense than the empathy felt by theater goers with the characters in a drama, rejects mimesis because he thinks of it as pretense. Entry into the Paschal mystery within the Paschal celebration “need not be mimetic. To fast and to feast is not to play-act Jesus.” Instead he refers to it as anamnesis, which for him means “enacted narrative.” He describes what liturgy is not: “Fully costumed and theatrically-lit plays using full characterization (i.e., lines of dialogue interpreted by the actors as if they were the character), not to mention stage blood at the crucifixion, although potentially moving, would seem to be less anamnetic than mimetic” and therefore problematic.31 Albert Gerhards in somewhat more differentiated fashion argues that “the genuine liturgical manner of representation is anamnetic, in contrast to which mimesis is a secondary category that supplements or comments on the liturgy” and suggests that “the tendency to represent biblical events in scenic fashion” leads to “allegorizing” and an unfortunate “loss of the anamnetic dimension.”32 Mimesis is considered to be problematic because somehow destructive of the spiritual (Walker White), the christological (Gerhards), or the genuinely performative (McCall) dimensions of liturgy. Instead, liturgy is defined as wholly or at least primarily anamnetic, which is seen as opposed to a mimetic theatrical function.

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In radical contrast to this, several contemporary theologians explicitly speak of liturgy as a form of theater or at least as employing theatrical means. Roger Grainger argues that liturgy’s “action is dramatic in the sense that it resembles an actual piece of theatre.”33 “Liturgy speaks with authority as a drama” and its value lies in its “dramatic armature.”34 Liturgy “creates its own world” and makes sense only within that world.35 He appeals explicitly to Aristotle to argue for “a close affinity” between theater and ritual.36 Christine Schnusenberg employs Ricœur’s notion of mimesis, as well as Eliade’s description of myth, for an interpretation of Eucharist in mimetic and “mythological” ways.37 For Jürgen Bärsch liturgy stages the drama of salvation in Christ symbolically in a way that is parallel to theater.38 He traces this historically from the fourth century through the Middle Ages. Frederick Dillistone similarly suggests that early Christianity took on many elements of Greek drama: “The church was the theater; the eternal passion of God was the drama; the sacred ministers were the actors. To all intents and purposes, religion and drama had become one.”39 Krueger also draws an explicit parallel to ancient mimesis: “In a manner analogous to theater, ritual activities involve playing and ultimately inhabiting the mythic roles of sacred narrative.”40 The idea of liturgy as play or drama is extremely popular, often informed by Gadamer’s discussion of play for the work of art in his Truth and Method.41 This is, of course, diametrically opposed to Walker’s claims about Byzantine liturgy and McCall’s distinction of enactment from mimesis.42 Ricœur’s understanding of mimesis can help address some of these tensions and conflicting interpretations. The first thing to be noted is that his use of the term mimesis is much broader than that usually assumed in the liturgical literature. He does not juxtapose imitating and remembering to each other as opposed, but instead speaks of mimesis as configuration or emplotment, which recalls precisely by (re)presenting previous experience in new ways. He also significantly expands the notion of mimesis to refer not only to the text—whether fictional or historical—itself, but also to what precedes and follows, that is, the ways in which the text or action draws on life and in turn impacts it. Thus, mimesis is three-fold: prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. Ricœur employs Aristotle explicitly in the second chapter of the first volume of Time and Narrative to develop the notion of emplotment that can give unity to the heterogeneous in narratival fashion. For Aristotle, in Ricœur’s view, mimesis is not merely imitative but creative: it consists in the poetic representation of action with which the spectator can identify and thus purify emotions cathartically. He highlights that for Aristotle “tragedy—which for him is poetry par excellence—is a mimesis of reality, but under the condition that the poet creates a new mythos of this reality. Thus mimesis is not simply reduplication but creative reconstruction by means of the mediation of fiction” (FFR, 140). In

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a different context, he also stresses this creative dimension: “mimesis does not mean the duplication of reality; mimesis is not a copy: mimesis is poiesis, that is, construction, creation” (HHS, 180). As noted in chapter 2, he applies the notion in similar ways to historical writing and to action more broadly, thus going beyond texts. Liturgy is precisely such a “creative reconstruction” in a variety of ways, drawing on what precedes it not just as a simple reduplication and always keeping in mind its goal of future transformation. These mimetic functions of prefiguration and refiguration are expressed most clearly in the two central temporal “directions” of liturgy. As already noted repeatedly, liturgy has both anamnetic and eschatological dimensions, not just in a literal sense of citation or reproduction, but in a much broader sense of being grounded in prior life and pointing forward to transformed life. Furthermore, as examined in the last chapter, liturgy has elements of both “historical” and of “fictional” writing, aspects of both “memory” and “hope.” Both of these dimensions are directly linked to the notion of mimesis in Ricœur’s sense of the term. On the one hand, the liturgical year remembers and represents the central events of Christ’s life (or even those of church history). These events are believed to have occurred historically, in life, yet they are not primarily or exclusively historical assertions. Rather, they are now configured in the liturgical acts and events. The liturgical texts and the way in which liturgy is performed both show that these events are not simply memories but that they are also happening right now—that we are involved in them in some way. On the other hand, liturgy has profoundly eschatological dimensions, but these are not opposed to the historical features. Rather, the two dimensions are always held together: it is only by configuring the salvific events that the future hope can be prefigured. In a kind of reversal of the three stages, one might actually say that liturgy configures and even refigures the remembered or the historical dimension and prefigures the hoped for or the eschatological dimension. The dichotomy between “spiritual” recall and “dramatic” performance is also too stark. The liturgical celebration is not merely commemorative information or insight. Nor is it theatrical entertainment or spectacle. Rather liturgy is an event the participants perform together, at the present moment, of which they are a real part. It is configured not only for them but also with them, as they enter into it deliberately and participate in it. The poetic means of configuring the events for the present participants allow the world that is opened to be not a historical recreation, a kind of museum piece, but instead an event that is in some way occurring right now. The liturgical action seeks to express the meaning and significance of the events it commemorates, not merely to represent a historical event with some sort of literal accuracy. In this sense, it is unlike, for example, a

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restaging of the Battle of Waterloo. In this respect, the liturgical scholars that reject mere imitation of the salvific event are correct, even as their understanding of mimesis is far too narrow. The liturgical configuration is a consciously mimetic act that gains in meaning via its performance, establishes a bridge between the historical and the mythical, the then and the now, the narrator and the audience, who become part of the narration by engaging in the liturgical action. The texts and actions manifest a reality that is mimetically based on a remembered past and mimetically creates an imagined future: a future in the here and now, which becomes real as we enact and appropriate it in community. Ricœur’s three-fold mimetic function is clearly at work in liturgy: liturgy is based on and “remembers” life (mimesis1), it configures life within its liturgical performance (mimesis2), and it seeks to refigure and transform our lives in light of the eschatological promise (mimesis3). Through this three-fold mimetic movement, liturgy calls us to a new kind of self. Ricœur’s notion of mimesis, then, is far more adequate for the liturgical configuration than the simple dichotomy between imitating and remembering would suggest. Ritual configures or constructs in much more complex ways than either a theatrical imitation of a particular event or a simple pointing to the event for recall. It takes the events and stages them anew, not as a mere imitation or even presentation of what occurred then, but instead as an event that is happening now and of significance to the contemporary participants in worship. This is particularly evident in the central event of liturgy for most Christian traditions, the Eucharist. Although it is generally presented by liturgical scholarship as an anamnesis, a remembering of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, it is far more than that. In fact, it is almost never treated solely as a memorial event in the liturgical celebrations themselves. Regardless of tradition, the Eucharist is neither performed as simply remembering something Jesus did the night of his betrayal nor is it staged like a scene from a play in purely imitative fashion. Rather, it is always configured for the present participants. When a priest or minister lifts the host or breaks the bread and says “This is my body broken for you,” this is not simply a quotation or a straightforward representation of something that occurred in the deep past but an address to the present congregants: this body is broken for them and will shortly be offered to them for consumption. Eucharist could not function if it were either purely imitative or purely memorial. Even in traditions where the memorial function is most strongly emphasized and more “realist” interpretations viewed with suspicion, communion is still taken to have profound transformative significance for believers’ lives via their meditative remembering of Christ. This anamnesis is deeply mimetic in its opening of a liturgical world into which it invites its participants.

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THE ENTRY INTO THE LITURGICAL “WORLD” Although Ricœurian terminology is not always employed, the idea that liturgy opens a world and calls liturgical participants to transformation within it is central to much liturgical theology. Schmemann explicates this in terms of what he calls the eschatological dimension of the liturgy. He presents the liturgy primarily as a sort of entrance, where the entire cosmos is carried into the presence of God. Not only does the church ascend into heaven, but the kingdom also begins to become present within the liturgy. The beginning of the eschaton dawns within the celebration of the Eucharist: “The reconciliation, the forgiveness, the power of life—all this has its purpose and fulfillment in this new state of being, this new style of life which is Eucharist, the only real life of creation with God and in God, the only true relationship between God and the world.” This means that it serves as “the preface to the world to come, the door into the Kingdom.” The proclamations about the arrival of the kingdom in the liturgy “affirm that God has already endowed us with it. This future has been given to us in the past that it may constitute the very present, the life itself, now, of the Church.”43 This idea that the kingdom becomes present within the liturgy and that liturgy constitutes entrance into the kingdom is central to Schmemann’s work and is stressed also by many other Orthodox theologians. But it is not always clear how the kingdom becomes present or how one would enter it in the liturgical event. A fuller consideration of Ricœur’s notion of the world of the text may well be helpful here. As already discussed in the second chapter, Ricœur explicates the poetic dimension of the biblical discourse in terms of what he calls “the world of the text,” which gives rise to new possibilities of living and being and challenges the community to conceive itself differently. Texts are “about a world, which is the world of the work” (HHS, 177). The biblical texts depict a world into which we are challenged to enter and where we can imagine ourselves as part of the world it proposes: “Through fiction and poetry new possibilities of being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality. Fiction and poetry intend being, but not through the modality of givenness, but rather through the modality of possibility.” This means that “everyday reality is metamorphosed by means of what we would call the imaginative variations that literature works on the real” (FS, 43). To understand a text is to enter into this “about” which the text speaks, namely its world: “Beyond my situation as reader, beyond the situation of the author, I offer myself to the possible modes of being-in-the-world which the text opens up and discloses to me” (HHS, 177). In following this invitation, we reconceive ourselves. Thus, interacting with the world of the text has the potential to change us and subsequently to live differently. This is a continual, reciprocal movement of interpretation and

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appropriation, of “making one’s own what was initially other or alien” (HHS, 178). By making it our own, we allow the world to transform us. Although Ricœur attributes this poetic function to literature (especially narrative) in general, he often applies it to the biblical texts: “Religious texts are kinds of poetic texts: they offer modes of redescribing life, but in such a way that they are differentiated from other forms of poetic texts” (FS, 43). This notion of the world of the text has several implications. First, the reader must allow this world to unfold and represent its “issue.” In the case of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, this is the world of the covenant or the kingdom or of a new birth. Second, this world has many dimensions: “Humankind is reached through a multiplicity of dimensions that are as much cosmological and historical and worldly as they are anthropological, ethical, and personal” (FS, 44). Furthermore, this poetic world, and the new being it projects and proposes to us, comes to rupture our world and to call us to decision in light of it. Again, our interaction with the text is circular (FS, 223). Ricœur speaks of life as “an activity and a passion in search of a narrative” (LQN, 29). Life can be depicted as a narrative in which discordance and concordance battle with each other in order to give meaning and coherence to life as lived in the chaos of existence. Life is as complex as a narrative and has no simple story line. And yet we give meaning to our lives (and achieve “personal identity”) precisely by narrating them and trying to give a coherent account of our narrative, whether as an individual or a group: “It is in this way that we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life. We can apply to ourselves the concept of narrative voices which constitute the symphony of great works such as epics, tragedies, dramas and novels” (LQN, 32; emphases his). When texts are meaningful, they have an impact on us and transform us. In fact, Ricœur affirms repeatedly that “the world is the whole set of references opened by every sort of descriptive or poetic text I have read, interpreted, and loved” (TN I, 80; IT, 37; TA, 149; see also HT, 275–77). To be human is “to be capable of this projection into another center of perspective” (HT, 282; see also TN I, 62). The world of our lives (in both personal and communal senses) is shaped by the poetic worlds with which we interact and into which we enter via imagination and sympathy. This concept of the world of the text is eminently useful for an analysis of liturgy.44 Indeed, one might say that the “opening” of a “world” happens far more vividly and with clearer temporal, spatial, corporeal, and communal dimensions within worship.45 Liturgical practice opens a world in quite concrete physical fashion. Ecclesial architecture is profoundly shaped and inspired by liturgy. The liturgical space is arranged so that liturgical worship can take place and achieve its highest expression.46 As one enters the church and its sanctuary, one enters into a physical and material world that is shaped

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by the poetic dimensions of the texts that are read and chanted within it, as well as the actions that are performed. This is a particular ritual world that configures space in specific ways.47 Regular worshippers know how to move and conduct themselves in this space, what parts of it are meaningful and how they convey meaning. The world of the participant in liturgy comes into repeated encounter with this world of the texts chanted during the liturgy and the world that is opened by its practices; the world becomes familiar and its structures and landscape are read more easily with such familiarity. With regular participation, the world of the congregants is increasingly shaped by the ritual space and time where the texts are heard and experienced through the liturgical practice. In this respect, it is interesting that although generally Ricœur seems to employ the term “world” in metaphorical fashion and not as a concrete spatial category, he does actually in a couple of contexts draw an explicit parallel between architecture and narrative mimesis. He summarizes this insight briefly in Memory, History, Forgetting: “As for the act of constructing, considered as a distinct operation, it brings about a type of intelligibility at the same level as the one that characterizes the configuration of time by emplotment. Between ‘narrated’ time and ‘constructed’ space there are many analogies and overlappings” (MHF, 150). This is worked out in far more detail in several versions of an article on architecture and narrative. He posits at the outset that “architecture is to space what narrative is to time” and then goes on to explicate three ways in which they function in parallel fashion. He recognizes that both architecture and narrative are means of configuration that put something into place or make it happen. Space and time are hence both constructed and narrated in similar fashion. The distinction Ricœur had made in Time and Narrative between lived and chronological time he now translates into the tension between lived place and geometrical space. The “now” point of time corresponds to the “here” point of space. Rather than “presence” it is “site” that matters for space.48 He goes on to apply his notion of three-fold narrative mimesis to place: (1) dwelling/living as a form of prefiguration, (2) constructing as a form of configuration, and (3) re-reading of towns and places of habitation as a form of re-figuration. As life prefigures narrative, so living or dwelling is the presupposition of constructing. At the first stage, “mise en intrigue” becomes “architectural making,” namely a “spatial synthesis of the heterogeneous.” Building and constructing, second, “take charge of” living or dwelling. Architectural “signs” for the “reader” are “inscribed” in the building. Configuration becomes the inscription of an enduring object. He also transposes the notions of concordance and discordance, so central to his analysis of narrative, to architectural use of “irregular regularities.” The architect has the same intention of discordant coherence that the narrator does in composing a story.

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Similarly, like a fictional work, an architectural work is a “polyphonic message.” The phenomenon of inter-textuality applies to space also, namely the “reservoir of edifices” that provide the context for new buildings. Here time and space interact much more fluidly. As narrative is an act of constructing, of configuring space, so constructing itself takes time: “constructed space is condensed time.”49 As Ricœur says in a different context, narrative makes time human (TN I, 3).50 The same is true for space. Both space and time can thus function mimetically. And this is certainly the case for liturgy. Not just Maximus in his description of the space of the liturgy as representing the unification of all dimensions of reality in the divine, but even liturgical architecture on the most basic levels assumes this. Liturgical architecture configures a particular place for people to experience the impact of ritual in all its many facets. The space itself becomes supportive of the world opened by the texts and actions. The popular patristic rhetorical means of ekphrasis—of the interpretive description of a physical space, especially that of a church—also illustrates this well. Procopius, Paul the Silentiary, and other patristic authors wrote elaborate descriptions of ecclesial spaces that “read” them in mimetic fashion.51 Although churches and the liturgies celebrated within them are often primarily interpreted as “sacred,” as somehow manifesting the divine, one might well also say that liturgy renders space and time “human” in Ricœur’s sense, inasmuch as it constitutes a configuration of ritual time and space. It does so in a variety of ways, through the texts, the architecture, the images, icons, or other decorative features, the material implements (censors, vestments, chalices, etc.), and by the way in which they call forth and direct affect, emotion, and sensory perception. The task of opening a world, then, is central to the liturgy. It configures the events of salvation history but also speaks with hope of the future kingdom that is assumed to become present and to begin within the liturgy. Within the liturgical celebration something new emerges into which the liturgical participants can enter and where they can become part of what is being manifested. Yet they also contribute to it. Liturgies become molded in accordance with people’s experiences of the divine and the practical necessities of living out their faith in their particular space and time. In fact, liturgical developments can often be traced to specific geographical areas or interactions between certain communities.52 Liturgy arises out of the ecclesial community and informs its practice. It is grounded in liturgical texts, yet the texts themselves have no life if they are not performed. They are preeminently active and reenact the hermeneutic wager by their cyclical nature. Ritual actions and the broader events of liturgy become meaningful precisely through that very circularity. Human experience is brought to liturgy, makes liturgy meaningful; and liturgy, conversely, creates, informs, and sustains experience. Ricœur’s notion of the “world of the text” not only captures well this relationship between

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what happens within liturgy and the lives of those who participate in it, but also helps make sense of how meaning is created in the interplay of liturgical event and ritual participation. In this regard, liturgy configures or “emplots” not just some particular event in Christ’s life, but also draws far more broadly on the participants’ own lives. The actions and rites of liturgy are prefigured in the lives of its participants, configure their lives in the liturgical action, and thereby seek to refigure them. Liturgy deals not just with Christ or the saints, but with our very mundane, ordinary, human lives and their most existential concerns. It does so not necessarily on the level of individual texts or sentences—although some clearly do appeal to the concretely lived reality of the participants—but in the broader liturgical framework of penitence and celebration, of blessing agricultural seasons and the fruits of our labors, or by providing rituals to negotiate the fears and hopes of major moments of people’s lives, such as birth, coming of age, marriage, or death. All these have mimetic functions in the broader sense of emplotment that Ricœur proposes in his analysis of narrative. In fact, some liturgical scholars explicitly employ Ricœur’s notion of the world of the text. Hughes draws on Ricœur for a process of sign-production and sign-reception. The worshippers receive and interpret the signs produced by others. Receiving the signs “is ‘a world seen differently’, a world in which ‘we might project our ownmost possibilities’, a ‘sanctuary of meaning’, perhaps indeed ‘the Kingdom of God’.”53 He contends that the fusion of meaning that occurs between the production of signs and their reception and interpretation introduces something richer: “Now it is just this surplus, I am wanting to say, that is that which is generated in the fusion of meanings brought by the sign’s interpreter with those proposed by its producer. ‘Something more’ comes into the world than had been known previously by each.”54 In opening a world, liturgy also transforms the things of this world.55 Zimmerman pushes this slightly further by suggesting that the liturgical world transforms Christian living as a whole. She draws on Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self to argue that the ecclesial reality does not end when people go home from church. Rather, “liturgy ritualizes what, in fact, Christian living is all about. Unless each member of the assembly lives the ritual moment in their daily lives, the content of the celebration is reduced.”56 Other thinkers go even much further by arguing that liturgy must change all of reality or is even the only true vision of reality. Kavanagh repeatedly presents liturgy as an alternative to a secular world that is distorted in its reality and can only be recalled to its true nature by the liturgical action of the ascetic who presents the “normal” within a world “flawed into abnormality by human choice.”57 Christians are normal in an abnormal world and are therefore regarded as an alien threat by that world. Liturgy is (or at least

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ought to be) a “sustained transaction with reality restored on a cosmic scale,” which implies that it must celebrate and enact a transformed world.58 This means that liturgy is “nothing less than the way a redeemed world is, so to speak, done.”59 This is reiterated by other thinkers who stress the significance of liturgy for society, world, or even the whole cosmos.60 Gordon Lathrop wonders whether liturgy’s “symbolic interactions propose to us a realistic pattern for interpreting our world, for containing our actual experiences, and for enabling action and hope.”61 Dimitrios Passakos points to ceremonies for transition moments to argue that “worship embraces our whole life, the whole space and time, the whole universe” and that not only “every moment of the [church] member’s life” is sanctified by worship but that this constitutes a hallowing of space and time. Therefore, “the final aim of worship is the transformation of all in the direction of the kingdom of God.”62 Schmemann similarly famously contends that liturgy is “for the life of the world” and that it constitutes “a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.”63 These are rather sweeping claims. How can the world of the liturgical “text” or the world of liturgy more broadly transfigure the world of the “reader” or that of the participant in ritual? How does “refiguration” or transfiguration happen for liturgical mimesis? DISTANCIATION, APPROPRIATION, AND REPETITION Ricœur’s account of the world of the text suggests that the world of liturgy can have an impact on the world outside of liturgy, because it is prefigured by it, configures it, and in turn refigures it. By entering its world, we are invited to change. Not just the references to historical remembered events or future redemptive promises are mimetically figured in liturgy, and prefiguration and refiguration apply not only to the “characters” of liturgy, especially its central character, Christ, but they apply also to the participants in liturgy. It is not just the biblical world that prefigures the liturgical action and is configured by it, but this must also be the case for those who enter liturgy. It can, then, not only be about divine action or the events of Christ’s life, but it must also be about our actions and lives in such a way as to give rise to reflection about them. Although not everyone who comes into liturgy is a “reader” of its “texts” in a literal sense, all congregants bring their own world to the world of liturgy, just as the world of a reader intersects with the world of the text. Ricœur’s hermeneutic claims about how understanding occurs and meaning is formed are just as, maybe even more, relevant here. If we can enter the world of liturgy and if that world has the capacity to affect our world and refigure it in some form, this is possible only if that world is in some sense prefigured

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in our own experience, if these “worlds” or horizons can manage to intersect and influence each other. Nichols draws explicitly on Ricœur’s notions of distanciation and appropriation for a consideration of how liturgical participants can enter the “world of the kingdom.” She seems to assume, however, that for Ricœur this is an automatic process in which the world is always open and is appropriated without risk. She worries that “the apparent orderliness of the narrative form” “can give rise to facile assumptions about a seamless progression from the text’s proposal of a world, through distanciation by writing, to appropriation.” In her view, for Ricœur, “this process demands no risk” and “holds open the possibility that the reader will assume that what the text proposes, and what he or she appropriates, is in fact the truth.”64 Later she claims even more forcefully that “Ricœur’s position assumes that no human experience is so intractably resistant to outside influences that it cannot respond to the world proposed by the text” and that “Ricœur asserts the power of the text to make its proposal against all odds,” concluding that “appropriation is a foolproof procedure,” which idealizes the text inappropriately.65 This is clearly false, as risk is always involved for Ricœur, and appropriation is never easy or straightforward, certainly not “foolproof.” Ricœur employs the notion of distanciation to refer to the manifold ways in which texts are at a remove from our concrete experiences.66 The world of the text is always already at a distance from us, it is not simply the empirically real as we encounter it when looking out the window. Interpretation is precisely the bridging of this distance in an engagement with the possibilities opened up by the text (TA, 86). Via appropriation or application, the distance that separates us from the text is not annihilated but made productive: by “exposing ourselves to the text” we receive “from it an enlarged self” (TA, 88). The world that has been transformed by the mimetic configuration in the text then enables a related “metamorphosis of the ego” (TA, 88). In some respect, the distance between the world of liturgy and the contemporary world is significantly greater than that between the world of a work of fiction and the world of the reader. In the case of liturgy, this distance is not just that of the literal text, but of the entire world as it is presented to those who enter within it. Especially in more traditional liturgical forms, the whole structure of the liturgical event and all the ways in which it is staged are for the most part quite removed from our present experience of the contemporary world, in terms of dress, lighting, music, movements, and many other aspects of the ritual. This makes it both harder to enter into it and in some ways easier to be challenged by it, given its very strangeness and clash with our “ordinary” experience. For Ricœur, distanciation can also refer to the “critical moment” of reflective thought in encountering and confronting the world of the text. It “is

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contemporaneous with the experience of belonging that is opened or recovered by poetic discourse, and because poetic discourse, as text and as work, prefigures the distanciation that speculative thought carries to its highest point of reflection” (RM, 370). Thus, the very distance or foreignness of a fictional, poetic, or religious world invites reflection and translation. Precisely because its world is different from our own, unfamiliar, and strange, it challenges us to new conceptions of reality, different ways of thinking about the world. The redescription of reality undertaken by the text is a specific figure of distanciation inasmuch as it gives rise to thought (RM, 371). A similar redescription occurs within liturgical events. Like narrative, liturgy also “augments” our reality by adding something new to it (TN I, 80). It is precisely through the fact that a certain distance is maintained, that we are not simply collapsed into liturgy, that meaning can be ascertained, appropriated, and applied. At the same time, liturgy has to “take up” our experience in some form and configure it mimetically. This is maybe most vividly the case in the experience of repentance, where our actions and lives are continually addressed. More broadly, liturgy can be said to configure our fragility in its manifold aspects, as weakness, frailty, temptation, transgression, or guilt. Liturgy addresses and configures this prior human experience. Our human experience of fragility in all its many dimensions from weakness to fault prefigures the liturgical world that is to a large extent preoccupied with configuring and refiguring the various aspects of such fragility, both in its promises of healing and its confrontation with sin and guilt. More than simply by reading, participating in liturgy “actualizes” (TN I, 76) the texts and the experience they represent. In this respect, liturgy, like narrative, can function like a “laboratory” for action (OA, 164) or like a “storehouse of those expressions that are most appropriate to what is properly human in our experience” (TN I, 62). By “sympathy and imagination” we are able to enter into this world, because it portrays our own experience mimetically, primarily through the experiences of others that are likened to ours, but also by configuring it even more directly through exhortation or invitation. Appropriation is as crucial for liturgy as it is for fictional or historical narrative. Ricœur discusses the notion of appropriation as the response to what has been offered by the text: “To understand is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation” (HHS, 182–83). This interpretation brings the world of the text together with one’s own experience by struggling against distance and making the alien familiar (HHS, 185). We are addressed by the work, divested by it, reoriented by it, and receive a new self from it, if we are willing to engage it (HHS, 190). This is obviously especially true of the liturgical world that challenges us on multiple levels, confronts us with our fallibility, and opens the possibility

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of repentance and transformation. This is always a work that involves labor and effort. It does not happen automatically. Via processes of appropriation—of making the message of this world our own—we become transformed and thus reenter the world as changed persons. This obviously does not happen in one instant; rather, just as Ricœur affirms for fictional texts, we are shaped by the liturgical texts and performances that we have heard and loved and the liturgical worlds we have entered over and over again, often accompanied by music and festivity. Because this entry amounts not just to reading but to active participation within it, presumably we are shaped more profoundly than we would from the more passive activity of reading a novel. Liturgy always opens a world through its very exercise; and it does so differently on different occasions.67 A funeral liturgy opens a different poetic world than a festal liturgy does. The particular interplay of the texts, their harmonies and musical settings, the visual elements of colored vestments, candles, and other markers of specific liturgical occasions, the spatial arrangements within the worship space, and the ritual gestures, postures, and actions undertaken all provide a rich imaginative world that invites the participants of liturgy to enter its mood and atmosphere, to participate within the festal occasion, and to become touched and potentially transformed by it. The interplay of the musical, spatial, corporeal, and communal settings enables such a poetic world to open for the participants and contributes to the possibility for transformation to occur. The world of the texts becomes our own, as we enter within them and appropriate them through chanting, singing, or speaking them, and allowing our bodies to move within them.68 It is crucial, then, that this applies not just to the literal words or texts that are being spoken but to enacted bodily experience of gestures, postures, and motions. Kneeling or prostrating announces our grief or failure maybe even more fully than words do. Embracing one another expresses the joy of the feast more fully than simply uttering words of jubilation would accomplish. The music that is such an essential part of worship similarly heightens the impact, not just because sung words are remembered more easily and enter us more deeply, but also because the harmonies and melodies affect and shape mood in fundamental ways. Both sorrow and celebration are expressed more profoundly in music than in mere speech.69 The dramatic configuration that occurs in elaborate liturgy, then, takes the emotions, thoughts, and experiences we bring to liturgy and heightens, deepens, and amplifies them. At the same time, it challenges us with other emotions and dispositions via the models or exhortations that liturgy presents before us or imposes on us. These configurations are also rooted in life, but in someone else’s life, with whom we can imaginatively identify. This “sympathetic imagination” then enables us to enter into them and to take them up as our own. By thus taking them up,

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our own thoughts and dispositions are altered. If we take them on frequently and repeatedly, transformation of character can occur. This is especially evident in the ways in which it constantly enjoins upon its participants to imitate the examples liturgy sets before them in narratival fashion. It does not only itself function in mimetic fashion by representing certain actions, but imposes mimesis on its participants as their present task. This is encapsulated both in the liturgical texts that frequently exhort to such imitation, visually in the presence of icons of the saints, and structurally in the liturgical calendar, especially the sanctoral cycle (i.e., the remembering of different saints on basically every day of the year). It is in this sense, especially, that liturgy transforms us: within the liturgical practices our experiences are taken seriously but mimetically likened to those of others with whom we can then identify and whose experience we can in turn make our own. In doing so, we ourselves become transformed, as our lives more and more come to resemble those mimetically provided to us by the liturgical world. Ricœur claims that appropriation refers to “the process by which the revelation of new modes of being” or life give us “new capacities for knowing” ourselves (HHS, 192). Thus, appropriation is not about possession but about dispossession (HHS, 192; see also FS, 284–88). In his interview at Taizé, he says something quite similar in regard to his own experience at their liturgy: “I am grateful to the liturgy for wresting me from my subjectivity, for offering me not my words, not my gestures, but those of the community. I am happy about this objectification of my feelings themselves.” He recognizes that “by entering into the liturgical expression, I am torn away from sentimental effusion; I enter into the form that forms me; by taking up for myself the liturgical text, I become text myself, praying and singing.” And he concludes by affirming that “through the liturgy I become fundamentally unpreoccupied with myself.”70 To become transformed by liturgy means both to let go of a certain kind of self or certain aspects of the self and to take on new forms of conduct and character. This mimetic refiguration is the central task of liturgy and if it does not accomplish it, the liturgical practice has failed.71 Of course, as Ricœur points out repeatedly, our lives are continually marked by chaos and struggle, so this is certainly no easy or monolithic task. Liturgy embraces the struggle between discordance and concordance and often acknowledges it explicitly through its juxtapositions of fasting and feasting, and especially the central place of repentance within it. Although liturgy opens a world of hope and seeks to transform our lives to cohere more fully with its vision, liturgy always recognizes that we are fragile and broken and in need of healing and forgiveness. The cyclical nature of liturgy itself points to this continual need: it is not enough to celebrate Pascha, the feast of feast, once, to make

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it through one period of Lent, but each year we need to repent and be purified again and to celebrate again. Maybe we need it each week or even each service.72 In fact, repetition is immensely important within liturgy. The language of liturgy functions most profoundly through its patterns of repetition: not only the simple repetition of certain words or phrases within one service or liturgical occasion but also the larger repetitions on weekly and annual levels. Ritual traditions generally follow ritual calendars and while they certainly develop over time, such change is usually slow and imperceptible. It functions through its stability, its predictability. It is an important element of much liturgical language (which will be discussed more fully in the next chapter) that it is highly scripted or at least predictable. Even in very extemporaneous forms of worship, the participants are usually familiar with what is going on and there is a broader pattern of how worship is normally conducted. The individual words might change from day to day or week to week, but the overall patterns signify far more strongly. And in more “liturgical” traditions, the same words are said every week or every year at predictable times, sung in familiar melodies, which people expect and cherish and which communicate as much through their melodies and harmonies than they do through the specific words.73 Repetition is also absolutely crucial for appropriation. Liturgical language implicitly claims that this ritual moment can signify for a broader reality and that this must occur over and over again. This is a temporal claim about how the particular connects to and instantiates the general, but the liturgical language employed is not primarily about a historical account that then is remembered. Rather, it is about the repeated instantiation of paradigmatic events that matter for themselves and yet at the same time point beyond themselves to broader patterns of the human condition. Liturgical words and actions have significance in the moment and yet function beyond this place and time. Repeating them does not lessen but heightens their significance. Here memory and hope inform and transform each other; we can only enter fully into the Paschal liturgy because we remember how to do so from all the previous years, because the music is familiar, because we anticipate it and it touches us with its weight and solemnity. Although it can overwhelm or dazzle on accidental or first exposure, it gains its meaning and significance precisely from the repetition and the imaginative entry into the present instantiation of the remembered and commemorated. Liturgy, one might say, configures human fragility and hope. The liturgical texts take human experience—the experiences of suffering and rejoicing, failure and celebration, inadequacy and elation—as their starting point. They do so, however, not simply for those entering into liturgy right now, but draw on previous human experience as it is expressed in the scriptures and previous

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liturgical texts. Particularly prominent in that regard is the use of the psalms, which are employed very heavily in many types of worship of most Christian (and Jewish) traditions. Many psalms express these fundamental human feelings, including even the sense of being abandoned by God or anger and rage at injustice. The liturgy configures anew these texts that already themselves configure prior human experience, and liturgy offers them back to those who pray them within the liturgical context. They thus both take up and reorient our own experience by giving it the words and postures of liturgy. We can express our own experience of failure or inadequacy in terms of biblical or patristic penitents; we can celebrate our moments of elation and happiness in the words of those who have feasted before us—and of course in fellowship with all those celebrating presently. Liturgy thus is meaningful because it arises out of the experience of various communities of faith, but also because it challenges and transforms this experience. Liturgy opens a world to us, which it calls us to enter and to inhabit. This world challenges how we conceive ourselves and, indeed, calls us to new ways of living. Its appropriation includes moments of confirmation or concordance, but also many aspects of critique and challenge that produce conflict and discordance. Taken together, the liturgical world both narrates our experience—as well as primordial human experience—and refigures or transfigures our experience. Our lives prefigure what happens in liturgy, and liturgy is meaningful only as it mimetically figures (and refigures) the lives of those who participate in it: experiences of sin and repentance, death and life, sadness and joy. Liturgy is based on life and “represents” life in the rich ways Ricœur has laid out. Only thus can it refigure life and transform those who participate in it.74 From a philosophical perspective, then, liturgy grapples with the concrete realities of our lives. It is prefigured by our human needs of inadequacy, our desires of belonging, our hopes to be transformed. It configures our experiences by placing them mimetically into those of Christ, Mary, and the saints, as they are structured by the liturgical year. It then enables—and indeed calls for—refiguration by challenging us to participate in moves of penitence and joy, confession and celebration, conversion and communal belonging. It does so in manifold fashion via its language, its actions, its imaginative construction of a world in the arrangement of time and space (especially, but not only, via liturgical architecture and the liturgical calendar). This creative construction via the liturgical language will be considered next.

Chapter 6

Liturgical Language Symbolism, Polyphony, Dialogue

Although the overall thrust of this book seeks to stress liturgical practice rather than focusing just on the interpretation of liturgical texts, Ricœur’s hermeneutics is obviously eminently useful for exploring also the language of liturgy, which is evidently an important dimension of its “world.” In many ways, liturgical language is unlike other kinds of language in its flavor and tenor: it is often sung or chanted, sometimes exclaimed or proclaimed. Even when spoken, it frequently has a different tone to it than ordinary ways of speaking; it can be hushed or fervent, fearful or enthusiastic, broken or insistent, but it is rarely neutral or matter-of-fact. Furthermore, the impetus and aim of such language has a special character; it generally does not primarily convey information but instead exhorts, confesses, praises, invokes, or petitions—and often several of these and other elements are combined and crossed in uneasy or insistent ways. As discussed in chapter 4, its primary aim is not to describe the world or to state facts although that does not mean that it traffics in falsehoods. Religious language—especially the language of worship—conveys and expresses a whole range of human emotions and desires, but it does so in ways that are particular to it. It also often employs unique artistic, musical, or performative modes. The language of worship is richly imaginative in its texts and speaking or chanting activities. Yet, liturgical language is not simply verbal, but its gestures, postures, and movements express meaning in ways that can be read like a language and clearly signify in linguistic ways.1 The gestures of raising or folding hands, the postures of kneeling or prostrating, and the movements forward or backward, all vividly express meaning. When participants bow or prostrate, their actions speak more loudly than words. When people sway in song, they are expressing a liturgical language of praise that is conveyed bodily in ways far more striking than whatever words they might be singing. 117

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Indeed, the use of music and rhythm (in chant) affects us far more deeply than mere speaking or reading the texts would. Music creates mood, a mood that is reinforced through motion, gesture, arrangement of space, and many other aspects. These elements all function together as the language of liturgy, as it becomes embodied in the space and the community that gathers there. Sometimes the words are dispensable altogether and mere sounds are repeated.2 What happens in liturgy and what it “means” has to be read from the way in which it “functions,” the way in which it negotiates time, organizes space, affects bodies, impacts on the senses, and shapes affectivity. In some sense, all of this is about language, but language in the widest sense as meaningful expression, which can take corporeal, spatial, or affective forms. It is not simply about texts. Actions and practices—especially highly symbolic actions or practices like the liturgical ones—can be “read” and interpreted just like texts, as Ricœur argued over and over again in his broader hermeneutic work. Actions and practices are an essential part of the liturgical “universe” of meaning, and they often invite to participation far more vividly and more obviously than texts alone can do. Ricœur’s analyses of symbolism and metaphor, of the polyphony of the biblical texts, and of the ways in which action and life can be read and interpreted in narratival ways can illuminate several of these dimensions more fully.3 Much of his analysis of features of the biblical texts, such as their polyphony and limit-expressions, as well as his discussion of symbolism and metaphor, are eminently applicable to liturgical language, whether it is textual or figures via its postures, actions, or affects.4 SYMBOLISM AND METAPHOR Liturgical theologians often speak of the symbolic nature of liturgy or stress its use of symbols. The language is most frequently employed in the context of discussions of the Eucharist.5 For example, Louis-Marie Chauvet in his magisterial analysis of the symbol in worship focuses primarily on the sacraments rather than on liturgy more broadly. He intends to examine the sacraments as “acts by which Christian identity is symbolized and which employ a ritual expression that cannot be ‘translated’ into any other language, an ‘instituted’ expression which, precisely as such, ‘institutes’ the Church and the people who believe it.”6 He speaks of this in hermeneutic fashion: “Reality is never present to us except in a mediated way, which is to say, constructed out of the symbolic network of the culture which fashions us,” although he also insists that “ritual always involves a symbolic rupture with the everyday.”7 For him, the symbolic dimension functions primarily in terms of its gratuity. At the same time, it “unfolds the primary dimension of language” and “makes

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the real speak.”8 In liturgy, this occurs most profoundly on the “stage” of the body, as a “symbolization” of human corporeality.9 In a similar fashion, Irwin defines symbols as “elements from creation and elements which are the result of human productivity.”10 Creation thus receives a symbolic content within the liturgy: “These texts serve to indicate that part of the fundamental anthropological and theological foundation upon which the act of liturgy is based—in our terminology this is part of liturgy’s context—is the use of creation and symbolic interaction through which means the divine is disclosed and faith in the divine is shaped and renewed.” He argues that the context for liturgy refers to “times for celebration and motivation for celebration.”11 The “time” of celebration he interprets in terms of the symbolic significance of light and darkness and the use of candles,12 while the motivation is exemplified by the eucharistic elements.13 This comes quite close to Ricœur’s description of the cosmic elements of mythic symbolism. Some liturgical scholars employ language of symbolism to point more broadly to the richness of liturgy. Mitchell treats symbols as “visible words” that are able to proclaim truth in nonliteral fashion.14 Saliers also emphasizes the nonverbal elements: “To focus solely on the verbal or surface language of liturgical prayer is to neglect the very way that the language gains meaning and depth. Liturgical language is radically dependent upon what is not verbal for meaning and significance.”15 Kavanagh argues that “Christian discourse is radically symbolic” in that it “thickens meaning found in reality and then increments that meaning with style.”16 In a different context, he puts it even more strongly: “One who is convinced that symbol and reality are mutually exclusive should avoid the liturgy. Such a one should also avoid poetry, concerts and the theater, language, loving another person, and most other attempts at communicating with one’s kind.” This is the case because “symbol is reality at its most intense degree of being expressed. One resorts to symbol when reality swamps all other forms of discourse.” Therefore symbol is “as native to liturgy as metaphor is to language. One learns to live with symbol and metaphor or gives up the ability to speak or to worship communally.”17 Despite this superlative endorsement of the symbolic nature of liturgy, Kavanagh does not say all that much about how it actually functions. To say that liturgical language is symbolic or metaphorical is sometimes understood as meaning that it is untrue, and thus some liturgical scholars express ambivalence about these terms.18 Many also appear convinced that traditional symbols no longer function in contemporary society. For example, David Power speaks of a crisis of the symbol and of liturgy, which requires incorporating “the symbolism of popular culture,” although this means that one has “to learn how to interpret it.”19 He defines a symbol as making “present the things that they signify” thus allowing “communion with them.”20 In this sense, symbols make the world meaningful by opening multiple

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possibilities. Consequently, “liturgy suffers when an effort is made to tie down the meaning.”21 Alluding to Ricœur’s Symbolism of Evil, he suggests that “symbolic language is the only access to dealing with certain experiences, such as evil, since they are not available for philosophical thought and reasoned explanation by reason of their negative nature.”22 Despite his extensive discussion of symbol and metaphor, he seems doubtful that their traditional meanings can be retrieved. Liturgiology has rationalized, allegorized, and distorted symbols, leading to a “breakdown of communications within the symbolic world which leaves some, even many, lives semantically empty.”23 New ways of fashioning meaning must therefore be explored today. Susan White thinks that technological change offers new opportunities for Christian worship. For her, this requires abandoning “traditional liturgical images and symbols” as “irrelevant to the lives of technologized people” and the adoption of “new images and symbols.”24 The sociologist Kieran Flanagan explicitly draws on Ricœur’s hermeneutics to articulate how symbolic action functions in liturgy, but also seems quite skeptical that a contemporary commercialized society can still appropriately approach the sacred: “The cancer of modernity blunts sensibilities of the holy, eating into the need to attend to view that which lies below the social surface of rite. . . . Technology ruptures the relationships liturgies can make by civilising that which is sacerdotal.”25 Unlike Power and White, however, he firmly rejects the move to make liturgy more “relevant” by abandoning traditional symbolism.26 In a similar way, Alexander Rentel laments the disconnect “between some of what Orthodox Christians should do in liturgy—seek meaning and understanding—with some of what Christians should engage with in liturgy—signs and symbols” and admits that “the distance between the sign and meaning can be great.”27 He does not suggest that we abandon traditional symbols or invent new ones, but instead wants us to recover the purpose of the “signs, symbols, words, and gestures” of liturgy as revealing the mystery of Christ with the goal of fostering faith in Christ: “In the mysteries, Christ is revealed and comes and dwells amongst the faithful.” Therefore, “the word mystery could be applied to all the liturgical services of the Church, because they all have one and the same purpose: the revelation of Jesus Christ.” This means that “every sign, every gesture, every rite, every symbol that the Church uses for liturgy must point exclusively to him and be understood within the context of his mystery.”28 This is informed significantly by Schmemann who already appeals to this language of mystery in order to speak of the purpose of the symbol. Symbols “explain the mysterion, the spiritual meaning, the spiritual reality, hidden, yet present behind the visible signs and rites of the liturgy.”29 This means that “the liturgy, both in its totality and in each of its rites or actions, is symbol. The symbol, however, not of this or that particular event

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or person, but precisely of the whole mysterion as its revelation and saving grace.”30 Schmemann is actually quite critical of a merely “symbolic” interpretation of the liturgy, which sees all parts of the rite as a historical representation of aspects of Christ’s life.31 Such a symbolic reading of the liturgy is to be rejected because it posits a “radical discrepancy” between the liturgy itself and its symbolic interpretation. Instead, he thinks that we must recover an earlier notion of symbolism, which is of the kind explained to neophytes in early catechetical instructions.32 He traces the way in which the meaning of the symbol has changed over time and become increasingly separated from the central mystery of the faith, especially in Western definitions of symbolism, which he thinks empty it of its connection with reality and lead to an alienation that is at the root of contemporary secularism. This separation of the notions of symbol and sacrament from reality in his view has “truly disastrous consequences.”33 The liturgical act is a symbol both of this world and the world to come in a unity of knowledge and existence.34 He claims that Christ makes the world into the symbol of God via the church, which serves as “the ‘mysterion’ of God’s presence.”35 Liturgy is symbolic inasmuch as it brings together world, God, and kingdom. Taft concurs with this idea that the meaning of symbol has changed and is now often misunderstood. He cites Harnack to remind us that “today, we understand by symbol something that is not the same as what it signifies. At that time [of the Fathers of the Church], one understood symbol to mean something that in some sense really is what it signifies.”36 Like Schmemann, he employs “symbol” in a broader sense to speak of liturgy as a whole, which he says serves as a symbol in the sense that it expresses who we are and calls us to a fuller reality.37 He often points to this connection between symbol and life: “In short, the touchstone of our liturgy is whether or not it is being lived out in our lives. Is the symbolic moment symbolizing what we really are? Is our shared celebration of life a sign that we truly live in this way?”38 Although he does not mention Ricœur, the symbolic space of liturgy is here interpreted as mimetic in Ricœur’s sense of mimesis: it configures the prefigured reality in a specific manner that opens up the possibility for the refiguration or transfiguration of the lives of those who participate in it. Ricœur’s analysis of symbol and metaphor can illuminate some of these accounts of symbolism in liturgy more fully. The first chapter already discussed Ricœur’s extensive exploration of myth and symbol. The analysis here will focus on his somewhat later text Interpretation Theory, which brings together a slightly revised account of the symbol with a summary of his study of metaphor in The Rule of Metaphor, a detailed exploration of the treatments of metaphor in a variety of time periods and disciplines.39 In this context, Ricœur points especially to the semantic or linguistic dimensions of symbol

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and metaphor (IT, 43). While symbol also has a nonsemantic dimension, metaphor remains entirely in the semantic realm. In this respect, the symbol goes beyond metaphor. Yet, while the symbol is bound in terms of establishing a direct correspondence between the symbol and what it symbolizes, metaphor is more open in its relation to the world. In this respect, metaphor goes beyond the symbol (IT, 68). He argues that both symbol and metaphor have to function at the level of the sentence or of discourse more broadly rather than being limited to merely verbal expressions or single words, as has often been contended. In this respect, both symbol and metaphor contain a “surplus of meaning” (IT, 55). In this essay, as well as in his broader study of metaphor, he contrasts a “substitution theory” of metaphor with a “tension theory” of metaphor (cf. RM, 291–302). Metaphors do not simply substitute one term for another or establish perfect correspondence between two words, but function in more complex ways by creating a tension between the old and the new. They thus tell us something new about reality; they are “living” or vibrant not dead.40 Ricœur explains: “Metaphor is living not only to the extent that it vivifies a constituted language. Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination into a ‘thinking more’ at the conceptual level. This struggle to ‘think more,’ guided by the ‘vivifying principle,’ is the ‘soul’ of interpretation” (RM, 358). More specifically, metaphor “is the result of the tension between two terms in a metaphorical utterance” (IT, 50) or maybe more precisely between two conflicting interpretations of the utterance. This conflict of interpretations gives rise to a work of meaning. Metaphor introduces something new; it is not a simple comparison of previously established meaning. A metaphorical utterance “is the appearance of kinship where ordinary vision does not perceive any relationship” (IT, 51). What seems like a misunderstanding or odd juxtaposition gives rise to new thinking. It is thus not a matter of simple substitution but of a “semantic innovation,” where new meaning emerges and reality is augmented (IT, 52). In a different context, he argues that “the power of metaphor stems from its connection, internal to the poetic work, with three features: first, with the other procedures of the lexis; second, with the fable, which is the essence of the work, its immanent sense; and third, with the intentionality of the work as a whole, that is, with its intention to represent human actions as higher than they are in reality—and therein lies the mimesis” (HHS, 180). In all these ways, metaphor augments reality. In his essay on the role fiction can play in the transformation of reality, he also discusses the role of metaphor. Here he defines it as follows: “Metaphor is the figure of style which enables the preparatory stage to interrupt conceptual formation because, in the metaphorical process, the movement toward genre is arrested by the resistance of the difference and, in some way, intercepted by the figure of rhetoric” (FFR, 132). In this context, he clarifies that

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the issue is not just a tension “between semantic fields,” but also “between the levels of effectuation” of the various ideas that come together in the metaphor (FFR, 133). This applies particularly to images, which especially encourage us to see the meaning that is displayed, to see it “as” something else (FFR, 133). In the metaphorical process, such images can become auditory rather than visual: “we see some images only to the extent that we first hear them” (FFR, 134). Therefore, metaphor transforms ordinary language and its meaning “by way of unusual uses.” In this way, it elevates language beyond itself in a “mutual and profound affinity” with mimesis, which he here describes as “the project of making human actions appear better than they are” (HHS, 181). Metaphor, then, serves to enrich our reality, to heighten and widen its meaning by introducing new ways of describing it and thereby to help us see it not only anew but also differently. In many ways, this is what he will later also argue for the role of narrative more broadly. In contrast to metaphor, symbols have a double meaning that includes both verbal and nonverbal dimensions. In this respect, they go beyond metaphors, which already hold literal and figurative meanings in tension: “Symbolic signification, therefore, is so constituted that we can only attain the secondary signification by way of the primary signification, where this primary signification is the sole means of access to the surplus of meaning” (IT, 55). Symbols thus, like metaphors, also allow for “semantic innovation,” for new conceptions of reality, but in this case, by establishing new connections between the semantic and the nonverbal. Ricœur briefly explores three examples, all of which he has examined in prior texts: poetic (or fictional) discourse, psychoanalytic therapy, and the language of the sacred.41 All three allow for symbolic figuring that connects the verbal and the nonverbal via new connections that in some sense “invent” meaning. Concepts and symbols need not be opposed to each other: although no concept “can exhaust the requirement of further thinking borne by symbols,” only the labor of the concept can help us see the “surplus of meaning” in the symbol (IT, 57). He reiterates that symbolism of the sacred shows us a bound universe, where a logic of correspondence links each symbol to an element of the cosmos. Thus, while metaphor “is a free invention of discourse,” the symbol “is bound to the cosmos” (IT, 61). This is a conviction he repeats frequently. Pulling these discussions of symbol and metaphor together, Ricœur draws on biblical metaphors for the divine to argue that there are “root metaphors” that function almost like symbols inasmuch as they “have the ability to engender a conceptual diversity,” that is, “an unlimited number of potential interpretations at a conceptual level” (IT, 64). There are also particularly important cultural metaphors with deep significance. Finally, like symbols, “certain metaphors are so radical that they seem to haunt all human discourse” (IT, 65). In this last respect, symbolic experience needs metaphor to

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express itself. At the same time, symbols can serve as a reservoir for further generating of metaphors. This is why metaphors are so crucial for poetic discourse: “In the same way that the literal sense has to be left behind so that the metaphorical sense can emerge, so the literal reference must collapse so that the heuristic function can work its redescription of reality” (IT, 68). Symbol and metaphor mutually enrich and vivify each other.42 In a different context, he argues that “the responsibility of the philosopher is to show that symbolism is not a deficient language, but that it is an appropriate language, a correct, pertinent, adequate language.”43 This is clearly also the thrust of Ricœur’s own work on metaphor and symbolism. It is certainly the case that liturgy uses a plethora of verbal metaphors, where relationships are established between items or people that would not normally be associated.44 Within the Orthodox liturgy, for example, there is an abundance of metaphors employed for Mary, many of which are drawn from biblical texts in ways that make no literal sense. For example, the famous “Akathist to the Theotokos” (i.e., a hymn to Mary as Mother of God) compares her to the red (or reed) sea that drowned pharaoh’s army, the rock that gushed water for the Israelites in the wilderness, the branch that turned bitter water into fresh, the pillar of fire that guided them by night, the manna that fed them, the land of promise, the table on which the offering is prepared in the temple, the gate of the temple that was shut when the glory of the Lord departed not to be reopened, and so forth. While many of these metaphors sound rather odd to a contemporary ear, they establish rich correspondences to biblical stories that would evoke connections in the minds of the listeners familiar with these biblical sources and their broader biblical contexts. Ricœur’s theory of metaphor as living connection that augments reality helps make sense of how patristic thinkers in particular read biblical texts.45 When they employ biblical imagery in liturgical poetry, the reality they depict is enhanced and deepened, augmented in Ricœur’s sense via the new connections introduced. Furthermore, his insistence that metaphor and symbol function at the level of the sentence or even of discourse more broadly rather than simply at a correspondence of individual words is eminently true of liturgy and makes far better sense of it than taking individual symbols in isolation. The metaphors employed in liturgical texts are often colorful and highly imaginative, requiring familiarity with the references to many other texts in order to allow them to function in this sense of augmentation. The metaphor works only in the whole universe of discourse opened up by the liturgical occasion and its broader context. Its sometimes strange juxtapositions are precisely directed at helping us see our reality differently, often via the suggestion that the divine is at work in it. Our perception of reality is disrupted by the unusual metaphors employed in liturgy and we are encouraged to

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interpret reality differently, both our own and the broader world around us.46 Similarly, Ricœur’s account of symbolism guides us away from lodging the symbolic simply in a “spiritual” realm that disregards the “bound” connection to the material (even if this is not purely “cosmic” as Ricœur’s heavy reliance on Eliade assumes). Symbols are not abstracted spiritual signs that have no connection to the earthly or physical. In fact, the language that developed around icons in the defense against iconoclasm corresponds fairly well to how Ricœur explicates the symbol, inasmuch as they establish a relationship between the person who is represented in the image while referring back to the prototype thus represented. While the image is venerated, it is the saint (or Christ) who is actually thereby honored. Image and prototype are “bound” to each other in a real connection, yet there is a “surplus of meaning” beyond the representation in the painting. In this regard, icons can be interpreted as a form of discourse, as a symbolic language. The icon is both “true” and “more” than itself. The use of symbols in liturgy goes far beyond the merely verbal. Ricœur thinks of symbols as establishing a clear connection between the verbal and the nonverbal, inasmuch as the symbol “corresponds” to something in our experienced reality. One side of the link thus is always semantic. Yet, in liturgy, symbols can be entirely nonverbal inasmuch as gestures or postures can function in symbolic ways. The raising of hands or bending of knees function symbolically to designate celebration or adoration, repentance or invocation. The symbolic lifting of the eucharistic chalice does not necessarily require words or at the very least the gestures complement the words and reinforce their symbolic function. Even eucharistic participation itself is largely symbolic: the small sip of wine and tiny piece of bread or wafer one receives clearly does not constitute significant feeding or eating, yet it is read and understood as such.47 Obviously, the correspondence of bread and wine to body and blood of Christ itself is deeply symbolic, in that one stands for or corresponds to the other. It is precisely the symbolic nature of this that makes it so hard to “explain” this correspondence, to say in what sense this bread figures as Christ’s body. Surely this qualifies as an “augmentation of reality” and here Ricœur’s contention that symbols can tell us something that literal language does not, fully applies. Trying to explain it in some sense misses the point; that is precisely why symbolism is needed. Liturgy as a whole is symbolic inasmuch as almost every action it undertakes gestures at more than itself. Each gesture and motion performed in liturgy, whether in individual rites such as a baptism or a wedding celebration or in regularly reoccurring liturgies like the eucharistic rites, points to more than the action as such. They enhance human lived reality and endow it with significance. Pouring water on someone or immersing them in it symbolizes

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and thereby works purification, bowing or prostrating symbolizes and thereby exercises repentance, breaking the bread symbolizes and thereby enacts Christ’s death. The symbolic action reaches both forward and backward, tying together references to past events with future promises in a present experience. It is improbable that liturgy could draw present significance out of past events or gesture to future promises if it did not employ symbols in its exercise and language. Yet, the use of metaphor and symbol in ritual is not simply about remembering the past or promising hope for the future. It also serves to broaden and widen our present reality. Almost all the actions undertaken in liturgy symbolize—in this sense of augmenting—dimensions of our lives. When someone is granted absolution, sins and trespasses are symbolically removed in a way that is clearly meant to eliminate them from the person’s life, to ease guilt, and to set the penitent on the path to different conduct. When someone is baptized, the symbolic pouring of water is understood to effect fundamental transformation in the reality of the one baptized. The symbolic anointing with oil is taken to transform the reality of the anointed by provoking healing on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. Even the weekly attendance at liturgy—which often consists mostly in standing or sitting in a familiar space and listening to, saying, or singing familiar prayers and hymns—is understood to enrich the participants’ reality and endow it with a significance that goes far beyond the literal words uttered or even actions undertaken. Even when they are colorful, they are far smaller and in some ways negligible in comparison to what they are taken to effect. All this requires much further exploration—and probably detailed examination of specific texts, rites, and actions—but it can indicate at least a direction in which Ricœur’s work could be helpful for the interpretation of liturgical language.48 POLYPHONY AND LIMIT-EXPRESSIONS As discussed in the second chapter, Ricœur outlines several features of biblical language, stressing both its poetic character of opening a world and its multiform and polyphonic nature. The world of the text, as it is shaped via the multiplicity of genres, is not a monolithic and straightforward experience, just as personal life or history rarely proceeds in a smooth narrative line. Ricœur stresses conflict in all of these respects. In the personal or communal narratives of life, he speaks of this as the struggle between concordance and discordance. Our lives strive for concordance and coherence as they deal with the discordant messiness of reality. Within scripture he sees this exemplified by what he calls the polyphony of the biblical texts. Each of the biblical genres or discourses (narrative, prophecy, wisdom literature, etc.) speaks of

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God and life differently, and often these various discourses are in conflict with each other. Ricœur insists that these “genres of discourse in which biblical faith has found expression must be brought together, not just in an enumeration that would juxtapose them, but in a living dialectic that will display their interferences with one another” (FS, 226). The incompatibility between the various ways of speaking about God cannot be erased but is itself meaningful (FS, 227–28; H, 112–31). New meaning arises precisely in this juxtaposition of and conflict between different genres. Later Ricœur carries this conflict of interpretations further in showing a similar disagreement between the various ways in which the biblical texts have been interpreted and appropriated by various communities through time.49 Thus, a “tradition of interpretation” arises that cannot simply be dismissed, but informs and challenges our own interpretation of the scriptures. Due to this conflict of interpretations and indeed the continually new interpretations that arise as the worlds of new hearers interact with the worlds of the text, judgments are necessary. Sometimes interpretation is dismissed as utterly relative and as dependent on the personal whim of the interpreter. Ricœur is quite clear that this is a misunderstanding of hermeneutics. On the one hand, it is never possible to arrive at “the” one or correct interpretation because texts always allow for multiple meanings and give rise to new thoughts, precisely because they continually interact with the horizons of new readers and interpreters (e.g., HHS, 193; FS, 305–06). Yet, on the other hand, the horizon or world of the text does not lend itself to just any sort of interpretation. Hermeneutic discernment and judgment is necessary to distinguish between better and worse, enabling and disabling interpretations. A conscious engagement in and commitment to the hermeneutic circle will allow greater meaning to emerge, even as it never reaches final closure. This is as true of the biblical as of any other texts.50 Liturgical language is marked by such polyphony and need for discernment even far more profoundly than Ricœur claims for the biblical texts. In liturgy, we are not merely dealing with different poetic or narrative literary styles in one compiled text, but with a far greater variety of discourses that are incorporated into a living performance. Not only are all the biblical genres heard within the liturgical occasion, but the biblical polyphony is set within the context of an even larger, broader, and more diverse polyphony of discourses. Aside from readings from scripture, liturgy also includes prayers, songs or hymns, homilies, blessings, and complex performances of rites. These different genres and styles are put together in a variety of ways, not all of which harmonize easily. In the Orthodox tradition, this is particularly obvious in festal services that are often an elaborate amalgam of several liturgical traditions.51 Litanies are inserted and repeated at various points.52 The canon during the Orthodox matins (morning) service often presents especially glaring

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evidence of various styles compiled together that are sometimes very much at odds with each other. At other times, the juxtaposition of one reading with others or one type of music with another is quite deliberate, bringing joy and sadness or beauty and suffering together in ways that inform each other in the contrast.53 There is also obviously not only one type of liturgy. In fact, increasingly scholars realize that the early centuries especially were characterized by a much greater variety of liturgical texts and practices than often assumed. Paul Bradshaw emphasizes this great variety of styles and the multiplicity of early traditions that cannot be easily homogenized.54 Throughout his study of the early sources, he stresses diversity and multiplicity.55 The lectionary itself serves as an interesting example of how juxtaposing certain texts to each other and to a particular occasion can give rise to friction and new meaning. As various liturgical traditions interact with each other, further clashes result that enable new meanings to emerge. Ecumenical encounters or, in a quite different way, the experience of converts can give rise to such interaction and generate both a conflict of interpretations and new sources of meaning. The liturgy is also deeply characterized by what one may well call “limitexpressions,” in Ricœur’s sense of that term, both in its affirmation of human inadequacy and the hope for transformation that the liturgy helps to convey. As already mentioned, in Orthodox liturgical prayer one often confesses oneself as the worst of sinners, having transgressed far more than anyone else ever before.56 Of course, this cannot be objectively true of every single person saying these prayers. Such language is not one of verification or exact oneto-one correspondence. Rather, it is a language of manifestation that shows a deeply experienced truth about our reality as falling short and feeling ourselves guilty before God and each other. Liturgical texts do not aim to make verifiable statements that can be proven by correspondence to facts. They open a world before us, invite us to inhabit its meaning, and to be transformed by its truth about the reality of our lives. This effect is indeed often achieved through excessive language, limit-expressions, and polyphony. Such language seeks to foster both a deep sense of repentance and the glorious hope of transformation. Of course these two extremes often clash, and Ricœur’s language of discordance and concordance is not too strong to describe this continual conflict. In fact, the notion of limit or excess to speak of what happens in liturgy is quite common in the literature on liturgy. Hughes speaks of a clash “between the meanings proposed in the liturgy and the meanings proposed by the world to which the worshipper returns.”57 He finds that a “sense of boundary” or limit is precisely the most meaningful way of connecting the contemporary experience with the meaning of the liturgy.58 Worship must evoke “the awareness of the wonder and the dread of exposure to forces not of our

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own contriving.”59 Hughes contends that because liturgy thus hovers “at the boundary of the knowable,” the congregation must realize “that all its images of God are constructed” and live within this tension.60 Nichols similarly uses Ricœurian language to analyze “the illogical logic of religious language that allows the extraordinary to break through the ordinary.”61 Throughout her study of liturgical hermeneutics, she speaks of liturgy in terms of a “threshold experience.”62 Threshold positions invite us into the kingdom.63 In her discussion, she points to such liturgical thresholds in a variety of rites and practices. Kavanagh also flirts with the language of limit and chaos, although for him it is introduced not by the clash with the world but by the encounter with the divine. He defines the growth of liturgy as “a function of adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God,” which is precisely why it is primary theology.64 Lathrop throughout his liturgical theology employs the notion of juxtaposition between “old” and “new” thus forming what he calls a “breaking” or speaking the “wrong words.”65 All three of his books on liturgy are structured in terms of this juxtaposition of conflicting meanings and “wrong words.”66 The liturgy always deals in opposites and is not afraid of ambiguities.67 He expresses this in terms of the polyphony of voices contributing: “The meeting’s one center, its one purpose, can only be spoken in this diversity. The liturgy is not a single voice, in authority; telling us the single truth of God. It is many voices in dialogue with a single voice. It is all of us singing, each one of us eating and drinking.”68 Writings on liturgical theology recognize and even emphasize the superlative and pluriform character of its language in its attempt to give an account of liminal experience, even if there is disagreement over what exactly the “liminal” designates. But too much focus on excess and limit-expressions can also be problematic. Polyphony also functions in much more ordinary ways through the interplay of multiple genres and types of musical settings. Sometimes liturgical theologians flirt too excessively with boundary situations. Not every liturgical experience is a threshold moment. The boundary also does not consist simply in the clash between liturgical language and extra-liturgical experience, on the one hand, or in the encounter between human and divine, on the other. There is a plurality of voices already heard within the liturgical performance itself via the juxtaposition of various genres, plural traditions, and texts against practices. Polyphony is a regular and even “ordinary” occurrence on all of those levels. Not only are different genres—like litanies, hymns, quotations from scriptures, and so forth—employed together in ways that can clash, but the compilation of a variety of sources that have been absorbed into the liturgical record creates such pluriform discourse. Ricœur’s hermeneutic account is a salutary reminder that these clashes need not necessarily be eliminated or cleaned up, but that the conflict between different voices can itself become

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meaningful and point to the fact that liturgical events and experiences always go beyond what can be captured in language. Similarly, the juxtaposition of texts and actions within the liturgical event need not always harmonize neatly. Meaning is created partly by distance or clash between words and actions that call out for interpretation and appropriation by the listener or observer. If we seek to participate in the liturgical actions, we have to make the words our own, but that is not necessarily a simple or straightforward process. In this respect, it is crucial that liturgical language is not simply spoken, but in many religious traditions is chanted, sung, or intoned with instruments. This means that it engages its participants and performers—and far more of them simultaneously than in the simple reading of scripture—in complex and often visceral fashion, as it addresses not simply their minds but their emotions, affects, and desires. Liturgical language does not just consist of words that are spoken or proclamations that are made, but of a variety of genres that are delivered in many types of intonations and forms, including rhythmic ones. Furthermore, while many rituals involve words, they signify in far more complex ways than texts via the ritual actions that instantiate them. Here also the “language” of liturgy—even in this not solely verbal sense—can be both polyphonic and at times indeed superlative. The gestures and motions asked of us in liturgy are often excessive, especially when it comes to lenten practices that may involve extensive kneeling and frequent prostration or longstanding. These corporeal limit-expressions of liturgy signify precisely via their excess. And they often clash: liturgy can be experienced as both deeply unsettling and overwhelmingly beautiful. The plurality of texts, actions, and meanings need not be curtailed or made homogeneous. It requires a labor of interpretation and appropriation of those who seek to participate in it that is itself significant, in that it points to the complexity of our lives and experiences. If liturgy were simple and straightforward and if we could understand all of it perfectly, it could hardly serve as a vehicle for expressing our deepest fears and insecurities or our highest joys and celebrations. A perfectly coherent, fully transparent, or completely rational liturgical language would miss the ways in which our experience is never fully coherent and our emotions often far from rational. For Ricœur, the excess and plurivocity of the biblical texts is meaningful because they name the divine who always escapes any particular naming. But excess and plurivocity are needed also to express the human condition in meaningful ways, because human experience similarly cannot be captured in a single genre or discourse. Noticing and analyzing liturgical polyphony and limit-expressions will enable the interpreter to describe more fully and more faithfully the kind of world opened by a particular liturgy.

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DIALOGUE AND PARADOX The configuration or “staging” of the action of liturgy is not just symbolic and polyphonic but also deeply dialogic in character. Although some forms of ritual can feel like one-sided performance, most types of liturgy require response from the congregation or gathered assembly. This can involve dialogue between priest or pastor and members, between deacons and priests, between choirs and clergy, and most fundamentally between the gathered assembly and the divine. The very presupposition of liturgy is that it is a back-and-forth of call and response on some level. Within liturgy we praise God, confess our sins, or call out for help, but also listen to God’s “word” and hear what is said to us.69 The abundant “God”-reference of liturgical language means that liturgy operates as dialogue with another. Ricœur claims such dialogic structure for the biblical texts, where a “summoned self” is put in the position of respondent (FS, 262–75).70 He argues that “the self that here responds, responds precisely to that symbolic ensemble delimited by the biblical canon and developed by one or another of the historical traditions that have grafted themselves to the Scriptures to which these traditions claim allegiance” (FS, 263). Yet, what Ricœur does not acknowledge in this context is that these traditions are conveyed most profoundly via the reading of scripture within the liturgical setting and exhibit their dialogic structure most clearly there. He focuses instead on the role of the conscience in this context: “It is to the extent that the self is capable of judging itself ‘in conscience’ that it can respond in a responsible way to the word that comes to it through Scripture” (FS, 274).71 Yet, the dialogue occurs not only in the personal reading of scripture but also in its public proclamation in the liturgical context. In fact, even more than private reading of scripture, liturgy constantly elicits such response via its very performance that always operates in the dialogic space of calling upon and being called by the divine. Ricœur does acknowledge this once very briefly, although he does not elaborate: “The case of liturgy is most enlightening as regards our inquiry [of biblical texts]. The liturgy makes use of a dialogical structure, where the participation of the worshippers is constitutive of the working of the liturgical action under the imprint of a convocation that generates a new ‘us.’” He contends that “the practice of language within the liturgical framework has one specific intention, that of drawing near to a ‘mystery’ that is as much enacted as said.” Therefore, “when the liturgy cites the texts of Scripture, the participants reassume the movement of involvement and commitment through the words and in the dialogue of the protagonists of the originary dialogue.” He concludes that “in this way, the liturgy becomes a privileged place for the reproduction of the text” (TB, 279). This is the only mention of liturgy in the whole book, but it is telling that Ricœur here thinks of it as a “privileged

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place” and one inherently characterized by dialogue. It is also notable that he thinks of this as creating a new self via this dialogue with the divine “mystery.” Besides this larger sense in which all of liturgy functions as dialogue, there are also very specific dialogic aspects within liturgy, such as the litanies or other prayers, which occur at many places within the liturgical services of various traditions. For example, in the Orthodox tradition, each request addressed to God is followed by a response from the people that reinforces the request (usually through the line “Lord, have mercy” or “Grant this, O Lord”). In Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic services, there are scripted responses to certain phrases after prayers, before the reading of scripture, or during the eucharistic liturgy. Thus, the larger implied dialogue with the divine is enhanced through a further dialogue between those chanting the liturgical requests on behalf of the assembly and the congregation as a whole.72 This also requires an interpretive exercise, not only because the community’s address of the divine proceeds through the mediation of priests, pastors, choirs, icons, and so forth, but also because the prayers and chants themselves—whether scripted or more free-style—constitute already an imaginative configuring of the dialogic language. Prayers, litanies, chants, and other modes of interaction in worship open a dialogic space, in which mimesis can operate in order to envision the configured reality: to experience this space as heaven on earth or the temple of God or the veiled presence of the divine in some form. Liturgy not only posits itself as a dialogue with God in a broad sense, but also frequently incorporates further dialogue into its texts.73 This constitutes maybe one of the best examples of the creative configuring of texts within the liturgical setting. Many of the earliest Christian liturgical hymns were composed as dialogues, often sung by antiphonal choirs, responding to each other; thus, even the performance itself was dialogical. Both Ephrem the Syrian (fourth-century Syria) and Romanos the Melodist (sixth-century Constantinople), probably the two greatest eastern liturgical poets, employ dialogue extensively in their hymns. Indeed, the dialogue style was a popular form in the Syriac context—the tradition and language closest to the Aramaic and Hebrew origins of Christianity—and probably precedes its liturgical use.74 Many such dialogues remain in Christian liturgical texts today, especially in the Orthodox tradition but also elsewhere. A particularly popular version that entered various Eastern liturgical cycles permanently is the dialogue between Mary and the angel at the annunciation.75 Mary is explicitly praised for arguing with the angel and posited as a contrast to Eve who simply gives in to the serpent without argument. Not only is Mary affirmed to be right in questioning the angel to ensure he is really a messenger from God, but she is applauded for her rationality. Liturgy hence both employs and promotes dialogue.

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Such dialogue often interprets the biblical texts with great freedom and places them imaginatively into the present situation of the worshippers. At the same time, it allows for the poetic appropriation of the texts in ways that constitutes a “redescription” of reality, a way of imagining our world differently via the liturgical settings. Indeed, one might say that the dialogic structure points to the fact that such reimagining cannot be accomplished in solipsistic or solitary fashion, but must be done in community, precisely in dialogue with others. A purely private interpretation very quickly succumbs to the danger of arbitrariness, heresy, or fundamentalism. Although the liturgical setting is not a total safeguard against such dangers, the dialogic elements of the structures of liturgy present a certain back-and-forth that permits a “testing” of interpretations. The variety of voices and the fact that they are at times pitted against each other weeds out the most extreme voices, raises questions about singular positions that don’t “quell” with the broader tenor, and tests for appropriateness and “fit” with the liturgical occasion and context. “Fundamentalist” or extremist religious tendencies rarely allow for dialogue. There is one further sense in which liturgical language is dialogic, already briefly alluded to in prior chapters. Maybe one of the most important distinctions between liturgical prayer and individual prayer is that liturgical language tends to be far more scripted. In more fluid liturgical traditions, there is obviously much more spontaneity in worship, but liturgical language usually follows a recognizable pattern and employs predetermined texts, even if it does so with some flexibility. Much liturgical language consists of citation. Not only is the liturgy permeated by citations from biblical texts, especially the psalms, but often it also employs phrases from previous liturgical compositions. Thus, participants in liturgy listen to and engage in a language that precedes them. In praying liturgically, we make others’ prayers our own and are in some way in dialogue with them.76 Liturgy thus is dialogically distended, not just spatially but also temporally. We are liturgically connected across time and space through the language we use, by saying or singing the same prayers. Yet although biblical texts are cited and sometimes reinstantiated in liturgy, this is never a literal repetition of a historical occurrence. Rather, the events are taken as happening in some form “now” or at least as having a significant effect on its present participants. Another element of liturgy that is particularly evident in Orthodox worship (although maybe less so in other traditions) is the use of paradox. This is abundant in Orthodox liturgy, not only in the texts themselves but also in the ways in which the actions are juxtaposed to each other, and even in the overall setting of the liturgical calendar that moves continually back-andforth between fasting and feasting. Liturgy alternates between celebration and mourning, between confrontation of fault and gratitude for healing, and

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often these are combined in paradoxical fashion.77 Hymns of praise and jubilation are coupled with imprecatory psalms or dirges of mourning, sometimes juxtaposing them against each other within the same liturgical occasion, thus heightening paradox via polyphony. This can also occur through setting an especially sad or tragic text to beautiful harmonies or conducting a solemn rite in an especially festive context, thus creating a paradox through the performance of the hymn or action.78 To give just a couple of concrete examples: Mary, the Theotokos (“mother of God”), is often referred to as khora akhoraton (“container of the uncontainable”) and the paradox of a “virgin mother” is frequently remarked upon by the texts, highlighting its seemingly impossible and certainly its paradoxical character. She gives birth “in time” to the “timeless” one and henceforth the “creator” has become a “creature.” The feasts of the incarnation, such as Annunciation, Nativity/Christmas, and the feasts of the Theotokos are full of such language. The Orthodox services for holy week constitute a further prominent example, replete with paradoxical juxtapositions. Sometimes particular biblical figures are posited against each other, such as the prostitute who anoints Jesus with the disciple who betrays him. At times, the paradox is conveyed in the poetic texts themselves: “Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung on the tree. The king of the angels is decked with a crown of thorns. He who wraps the heavens in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery.”79 Often this paradox is meant to express the paradox present in the very situation that is being commemorated or celebrated: “In return for healing, you give me blows; in return for life, you put me to death. You hang your benefactor on the cross, as an evildoer; your lawgiver, as a transgressor; the king of all, as one condemned.” At other times, it expresses the paradox of the divine kenosis: “We see a strange and fearful mystery today. He whom none may touch is seized. He who looses Adam from the curse is bound. He who tries the hearts of men is unjustly brought to trial. He who closed the abyss is shut in prison. He before whom the hosts of heaven stand with trembling stands before Pilate. The Creator is struck by the hand of his creature. He who comes to judge the living and the dead is condemned to the cross. The conqueror of hell is enclosed in a tomb.”80 Although especially evident during the festal services, similar language is pervasive in Orthodox liturgical texts more generally, which are full of contrasts, surprising connections, unusual parallels, and poetic similes. In many instances, such paradox and contrasts seem employed to juxtapose the transcendence of the divine with the immanence of our experience, especially in the celebration of the incarnation that paradoxically brings divine and human together fully without impairing either: the uncreated has entered creation, the invisible has become visible, the uncontainable taken on form, the immutable changed, the impassible has come to suffer.

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These paradoxical juxtapositions engage the participants in twofold fashion. On the one hand, they startle and surprise the hearers, alert them to pay attention via the presentation of the unfamiliar and apparently contradictory. We are provoked to thought not only through the vivid language of dialogue that invites to participation or the symbolic features that point to a deeper and broader meaning than appears at first glance, but also through this paradoxical juxtaposition that challenges the participants to work out how the two extremes can be held together or how the paradoxical truth might be possible. This complicates the challenge to appropriate the message; it is not easily made one’s own. It also evokes awe, wonder, or admiration at the mystery conveyed, surely a central function of worship. On the other hand, theologically speaking, the role of the paradox is most frequently to hold together the divine and the human, whether in the natures of Christ or in the activity of worship more broadly. Opening a world in which the transcendent divine can be encountered within the fullest immanence of human life maybe requires such paradox. In this respect, paradox, metaphor, symbolism, and polyphony work together. Liturgical language, then, is richly poetic in its use of metaphor, symbolism, polyphony, limit-expressions, dialogue, and paradox. What is especially striking is how richly imaginative all of this is in the elaborate use of poetry, the beautiful staging in highly decorated spaces, the many luxurious visual, auditory, and linguistic elements. Much of this requires immense creativity. Imagination seems to play a crucial role in this. This role will now be examined more fully.

Chapter 7

Liturgical Imagination Memory, Creativity, Tradition

Imagination is a term with a difficult philosophical history and it is often employed in ambiguous ways.1 In the context of considering the role of the “imagination in discourse and action” Ricœur outlines some of the obstacles to any coherent use of the term, which can refer to representation of something absent, pictorial or mimetic representation (especially artistic), fiction or fantasy, and illusion, captured in the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination (TA, 168–87).2 A similar ambivalence about the role of the imagination also characterizes the liturgical legacy. It is obviously a crucial tool not only for the writing of liturgical texts, the staging of ritual performances, but also for the creating of the manifold tools of worship, from concrete material implements like vestments and chalices to the composing of liturgical music or indeed the designing and decorating of the worship space as a whole. Liturgical art, music, and architecture would be unthinkable without creative imagination. Yet, the tradition has been reluctant about its use from the beginning, partly adopting the Platonic hesitance about imagination in the sense of semblance or imitation, raising the fear of superficiality or even falsity, partly rejecting the wealth, luxury, and opulence that accompanied liturgical decoration, fearing it as a distraction from genuine devotion or even as direct interference with the Christian’s true task. At the same time, the liturgical arts have often flourished and are an essential component of liturgical celebration. Perhaps the liturgical back-and-forth between ascetic fasting and lavish feasting instantiates this paradox on another level. A different, but not unrelated, tension is expressed in the dispute over whether the Christian life should be focused on this world—healing, bettering, or even celebrating it—or whether it should set its sights on the next world and leave this one behind as much as possible. An interpretation of liturgy as an anticipation of heaven, as is characteristic of much Orthodox 137

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liturgy over the centuries, could result both in an ascetic rejection of liturgical beautification as too focused on this life and too preoccupied with worldly matters, and, ironically, in the opposite move of decorating more lavishly so as better to represent the heavenly realm anticipated within the liturgical event. Liturgical artists were often treated as simple technicians and their products as mere implements, not named or attributed to particular creators, yet enormous expense was lavished—especially in the Byzantine empire and the Western medieval and baroque periods—on creating magnificent ecclesial architecture with opulent furnishings. The most valuable materials and best artistic skills were often employed for designing and creating ritual objects, capitalizing on deep religious devotion, while simultaneously always inviting condemnation as unnecessary luxuries, which take away the resources that would have been better spent on the poor and indigent suffering and dying outside the church doors.3 The Eastern controversy over icons is just one particularly fierce battle over the role of the imagination, in this case heightened by the charge of idolatry that has always haunted creativity on a certain level with the artist imitating or maybe even usurping the divine creativity.4 Despite all the controversy, for the most part, liturgy has opted to a greater or lesser extent for imagination, often appealing to the incarnation as theological support. If the divine is able to manifest within the human, then even the material can convey the holiness of the divine.5 The Orthodox eucharistic liturgy in its closing prayers contains the phrase “blessed are those who love the beauty of thy house” and beauty was pursued with a vengeance, both in the physical space and in the musical arrangements of liturgy. At the same time, ironically, innovation was usually condemned, the old glorified, change eschewed, and creativity confined into very narrow strictures, both in terms of the visual arts (icons, chalices, etc.) as the auditory ones (order of worship, texts employed, and musical arrangements). In other Christian traditions, innovation and creativity are valued more highly, although ironically this is often disproportionally related to the level of beauty or magnificence desired. What is often called “high liturgy” tends to be less subject to change and considerably more focused on beauty and luxurious display. So-called “low” liturgy with highly flexible liturgical arrangements also tends to be simpler and to employ less “smells and bells,” as the often dismissively used phrase goes. Protestant traditions, given the heritage of the Reformation, tend to reject a strong focus on beauty as a luxury that corrupts the individual and distracts from true devotion. That obviously does not mean that imagination plays no role there, but it usually takes other forms than it does in some Anglican, many Catholic, and most Orthodox contexts. Not all of these distinctions can obviously be explored here, so the examination will focus more generally on the particular hermeneutic insights relevant

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to the role of the imagination in liturgy and the ways in which it might inform liturgical reflection on creativity and beauty.6 The chapter will proceed in three steps, again using Ricœur as a guide: first, it will briefly explore the role of the imagination as representation or imitation, then it will focus on imagination in terms of innovation and creativity, and lastly it will consider Ricœur’s discussion of ideology and utopia as the bearers of imagination for their potential relevance for liturgical imagination.7 IMAGINATION AS MEMORY AND REPRESENTATION In an interview with Richard Kearney, Ricœur outlines two functions for the imagination: “one is to bring us outside the real world—into unreal or possible worlds—but it has a second function which is to put memories before our eyes” (PR, 155; emphasis in the original). He mentions testimony as “the ultimate link between imagination and memory” (PR, 155).8 One function of imagination is to make the past visible; the other is to envision a possible future. Imagination is thus directed to both past and future, but always in such a way that it focuses on the present reality. It brings past and future into the present via images or other means (such as symbols). Kearney describes this in regard to fiction, in which imagination “can tell us about the way things actually happened in the past at the same time as it makes us see, feel and live the past as if we were there” (PR, 101).9 He points out that Ricœur reminds us that a “crucial function of narrative memory” is empathy, which requires imaginatively placing oneself into another’s situation (PR, 107). Narrative imagination can help identification while not collapsing necessary distance. Narrative remembrance, he suggests, “can serve two functions: it can help us represent the past as it really was, or to reinvent it as it might have been” (PR, 108).10 Liturgy always brings both of these together by not abandoning a necessary link to what has been (the events of salvation), but at the same time refiguring them creatively so that we can enter into them today. Thus, imagination is crucial for the work that liturgy does in terms both of commemoration or mimetic presentation of the events of salvation, on the one hand, and of anticipation and transformation, on the other. One might say—although Ricœur does not do so explicitly—that imagination is what ties prefiguration and refiguration to configuration and is the tool that allows for configuration to occur. In an essay on biblical imagination, he also distinguishes two functions of the imagination in slightly different ways. On the one hand, imagination can be productive in terms of interpretation. For the biblical texts, this means that the “act of reading is a dynamic activity that is not confined to repeating significations fixed forever, but which takes place as a prolonging of the

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itineraries of meaning opened up by the work of interpretation” (FS, 145). New meanings emerge when the text is interpreted in the act of reading. On the other hand, reading is “a creative operation unceasingly employed in decontextualizing its meaning and recontextualizing it in today’s Sitzim-Leben” (FS, 145).11 This section of the chapter will focus on the side of memory or the ability of imagination to bring something “before our eyes” and return to the future-oriented role of imagination in the next part of the chapter.12 Liturgy exercises imagination in the twofold sense Ricœur claims for the biblical texts. On the one hand, the biblical texts are always already interpreted within the liturgy. This is obviously the case for homilies, but it is also true of many other aspects of liturgy. Even when texts are cited literally, as is frequently the case for psalm texts that are chanted or sung in many liturgical traditions as prayers of praise or confession, their locus in the service and the fact that they are chanted or sung already constitutes an interpretive and imaginative exercise. The musical setting of such literal “quotation” influences and shapes affect and emotion, thus leading to particular interpretive “hearings” of the psalm that are different from reading them alone at home and without the musical arrangement. The liturgical setting—comprised not only of the musical configuration, but also the broader context of the liturgical calendar, the decorated space of the ecclesial environment, the communal nature of the gathering, and so forth—all inflect the texts in a particular way and serve already as an interpretive tool. Simultaneously, they provide the space for employing the texts as a “redescription” of reality in Ricœur’s sense. This imaginative “redescription” is increased when the texts are not cited literally but instead used imaginatively for what one might call new “stagings.” While all types of Christian liturgy usually involve the reading of biblical texts and cite some texts literally even in other parts of the service, they often employ texts far more freely, using them as inspiration for new poetic settings. One assumes such freedom and variation for more free-style forms of worship, as is the case for many Protestant congregations, but it is in fact also true of more “liturgical” traditions. Byzantine and Syriac liturgies are replete with imaginative settings of biblical texts, frequently employing stories in new poetic forms, which involve imagining the biblical characters engaged in dialogue far beyond what the biblical texts themselves report (cf. the section on dialogue in the previous chapter).13 This is heightened in the visual representation of many stories on the walls of churches in painting or icons that are often of biblical scenes, but not in any sort of straightforward historical presentation. Often these visual and auditory interpretations of the biblical sources imagine the current participants in liturgy within them in some form, visualizing poetically what a particular character might have felt

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at the time, how a different character might have replied, or vividly imagining the present audience’s possible responses.14 These manifold variations and riffs on the biblical texts thus concern not only “memory,” that is, an imaginative recreation or representation of the traditional stories, but at the same time vividly stage an imaginative world for the participants in liturgy based very loosely on the biblical stories. They invite—sometimes literally—those who come to liturgy to enter into this world, to imagine themselves within it, and thus to be transformed by it.15 Imagination is at work at each of these levels: in the creation and performance of the liturgical texts and rites, in the sympathetic identification of the liturgical participants with the “characters” of the liturgical texts and the participation in the accompanying ritual actions, and in the willingness to be challenged and transformed by the world into which they have entered. This includes variation, creativity, innovation, imitation, representation, empathy, and production—all elements ascribed in various ways to the imagination. In his essay on the idea of biblical revelation, Ricœur concludes with a comment on the importance of the role of the imagination: “Are not the poem of the Exodus and the poem of the Resurrection addressed more to our imagination than to our obedience? The historical testimony that our reflection wants to internalize, is it not addressed to our imagination? If to understand oneself is to understand oneself in front of the text, must one not say that the reader’s comprehension is suspended, made unreal or potential, in the same way as the world is transfigured by the poem?” He concludes: “If that is the case, one must say that the imagination is that part of ourselves that responds to the text as Poem and that alone can encounter revelation no longer as an unacceptable pretense but as a non-constraining appeal” (H, 152; trans. mod.). To hear the call of the text and to heed it as an appeal upon us requires imagination. The same is true of the liturgical celebration, albeit limited not only to its texts. In fact, the phrase sometimes translated as “sympathetic imagination”— actually literally “in sympathy and imagination”—pervades Ricœur’s work and is used over and over again, not just in the Symbolism of Evil but also in his work on metaphor, on narrative, on biblical interpretation, on history, and in many other contexts, including in the Taizé interview. Sympathy and imagination are crucial for any “entry” into a text or empathetic identification with its characters. Texts cannot be “appropriated” without such sympathy and imagination. Symbols remain meaningless historical artifacts, irrelevant to the present reality. Metaphors cannot connect phrases or inaugurate anything new. Any drawing of meaning from something that either precedes us or is otherwise at some distance from us requires sympathy and imagination. This is especially true of liturgy. To see the icons on the walls as a “cloud of witnesses” celebrating with us, to taste the Eucharist as “the body and blood

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of Christ,” to hear the reading of the gospel as good news for us today—all this is an immensely imaginative undertaking. If liturgy is entered without imagination, the texts or actions mean nothing, seem superfluous or even ridiculous. This is especially true of Orthodox liturgy: people dressed up in garishly colorful and very oddly shaped garments, waving smoke-producing metal containers on chains, performing dramatic gestures, processing majestically in circles, upholding cups with little liquid of which one receives barely a sip—all this would make absolutely no sense without imagination and cannot function without the meaning attributed to the acts, words, gestures, and movements by the shared imagination of the community. It is structured by the heritage, by the weight of meaning previous interpretation has given it. We do not, in fact, imagine “from scratch,” so to speak, but enter into a legacy of imagination in which things, words, actions, structures already mean or signify. But even to appropriate this meaning, to make it one’s own by participating in it deliberately, requires the “sympathy and imagination” of the participant. The meaning is not imposed automatically; one chooses to see and hear it via an imaginative exercise. Without such imaginative participation, there is no liturgical meaning. Understanding and appropriation always require imagination and sympathy. Several liturgical scholars claim that liturgy “shapes” the imagination.16 This may well be true, but only if and when the participants allow their imagination to be so shaped. In the sense of the world that is opened, liturgy does mold the imagination of those who participate in it: as we have seen, it sets an imagined world before its “audience”—a world that is prefigured by the biblical texts and draws on them, yet simultaneously opens new imaginative possibilities—and invites its participants into this world. Ricœur explains this relationship between creative imagination and narrativity of past events as follows: “To ‘repeat’ our story, to retell our history, is to recollect the horizon of possibilities in a resolute and responsible manner.” He continues: “To say that narration is a recital which orders the past is not to imply that it is a conservative closure to what is new. On the contrary, narration preserves the meaning that is behind us so that we can have meaning before us.” Therefore, “there is always more order in what we narrate than what we have actually lived; and this narrative excess of order, coherence and unity, is a prime example of the creative power of narration” (PR, 131). In similar fashion, liturgy imposes order and structure—obviously more order and structure in some liturgical traditions than in others—on past narratives as they are creatively repeated in the present, but they are repeated, so as to open meaning for the future, not as mere memorials of the past. Ricœur contends in his work on narrative that “stories are recounted but they are also lived in the mode of the imaginary” (LQN, 27). Similarly, the stories of liturgy are not only recounted but are acted out and lived in the

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performance of the rite, which occurs in the realm of the liturgical imaginary. The liturgical world, as pointed out repeatedly already, is not simply passive, as may well be the case for the fictional world that readers encounter in novels, but it is a physical world of configured time and space, in which the liturgical participants move and dispose themselves and where they participate in real action that is both physical and highly symbolic. It is crucial that this world is both constant and always changing: one can imaginatively enter into a feast with a festive mood and atmosphere because one knows it is coming, can anticipate it and prepare for it, has a hermeneutic lens for it already because of all of one’s past experiences of feasting and one’s familiarity with the liturgical calendar and the liturgical practices and chants associated with this particular feast, and yet it is always new, because we have not celebrated this feast in this way before, because it is a new year and a new season and we ourselves and the community has changed in the intervening year. One would think that this feature of repetition, which is so strongly evident in liturgical practice, especially in so-called “high” liturgical traditions, inhibits the work of the imagination. That is, in fact, the standard interpretation, which sees imagination at work primarily in the “impulsive” and “creative” dimensions of worship.17 The assumption is that repetition smothers imagination, forbids invention, and kills impulsivity. Liturgy becomes rote and little change or innovation—hallmark of imagination—is possible. Yet, the opposite is actually the case; imagination can flower most fully within the context of the familiarity created by repetition. Variations are only recognizable when they are variations on what we know. It is when ritual has created habits and patterns of expected behavior that the new stands out as innovative and different. No musician or artist invents out of a vacuum, but even the most radical innovations depart from a tradition they challenge or augment.18 This is true also of liturgical creativity, even if the range and type of creativity differs significantly in style and extent among different religious traditions. Even the repeated entry into the familiar requires the exercise of imagination in terms of experiencing oneself within it, preparing for it, and appropriating it in the sense of making it one’s own. Ritual can only function as meaningful when worshipers actively participate in the actions and words offered, respond to them, and take them up into their lives. This is only possible if they are sufficiently familiar with the rite in order to orient themselves within it and to know how to participate. Ricœur reiterates frequently that the capacity of the text to shape a new self requires “imagination and sympathy” (FS, 232). It is not passive, not simply imposed on us, but requires the active exercise of imagination, even if it may not be always consciously deliberate at each moment. To say “I also am Adam” or to affirm that “this is truly the body and blood of Christ” means that the participants imagine that Adam represents them in some way

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or imagine this eucharistic confession to be true—imagining it not in the sense that it would be fanciful or fake or fantastical, but in the sense that they represent it as such, “see” it as such. Otherwise, they do not see it at all. The water in the font looks no more clean or holy than that coming out of the tap; the bread tastes no different than that on the breakfast table—except that the latter might be fresher and more flavorful. Without imagination, the oil is mere grease on the forehead rather than a healing balm. Imagination, then, is crucial for the “representing” function of liturgy. It is just as important for the “making” or “innovative” dimensions. IMAGINATION AS INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY For Ricœur, as already pointed out repeatedly, new meanings emerge in the encounter with texts. In his essay on biblical imagination, he stresses that the imagination has “the power of redescribing reality” (FS, 144; also FS, 43). The reader is invited to follow the biblical “itinerary of meaning” via the exercise of “productive imagination” in the activity of interpretation (FS, 149, 160). Ricœur’s prime example in this particular context is the intertextuality of narrative parables (FS, 149–60).19 These texts structure our horizon such that new existential interpretations become possible.20 Ricœur speaks of a “linguistic imagination” in addition to an “epistemological and political imagination,” which consists in generating and regenerating meaning “via metaphoricity.” Narrative especially is a “production or creation of meaning” that “transmute[s] natural time into a specifically human time” (PR, 127).21 Imagination enables us to live in the world by giving it meaning. In his essay on “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Ricœur elaborates a notion of “productive imagination” that is not merely a reference to reality but actively shapes reality (FFR, 123). He discusses the specific modes of givenness of images, which function as copies taken to be real and yet not completely identical to perceptions (FFR, 124). In this context, he chides what he takes to be previous philosophy’s predominant focus on representative or reproductive imagination that ties imagination to image in a focus on portrait painting as most paradigmatic, where the mental representation is based on the physical image through interiorization and analogy. In this case, Ricœur suggests “the image becomes a mere nothing.” Fiction becomes based on this derivation of complex from simple images, which in his view misses a “shift in the referential status” (FFR, 125). Fictions also refer to reality, but unlike portraits, they are not reproductive but productive. Fiction “changes reality,” both in the sense of “invention” and in the sense of “discovery” (FFR, 127). This disconnects imagination from a singular focus on perception and on imitation; instead a focus on language can show

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an augmentation of reality via the creation of new meaning: “Imagination at work—in a work—produces itself as a world” (FFR, 128). He draws on his theory of metaphor to elaborate this shift to language. Metaphors “invent” meaning via new connections of sense and “the production of a clash between semantic fields,” such that new connections can emerge (FFR, 130).22 In regard to metaphor, “imagination is the apperception, the sudden insight, of a new predicative pertinence, specifically a pertinence within impertinence” (FFR, 131). That is to say, “imagination is that stage in the production of genre, where the generic relationship has not acceded to the quietness of the concept, but lives in the conflict of ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’” (FFR, 131). Imagination is therefore not merely an addition or reproduction. Instead, it can “create a redescription of reality” (FFR, 134). This is true also of painting: “images created by the talent of the artist are not less real but more real because they augment reality,” in that they “offer new models for perceiving the world” (FFR, 136, 137; emphasis his). In other contexts also he argues that poetic discourses, such as fiction or narrative, have the ability to “redescribe reality” and thus the “capacity to open and unfold new dimensions of reality by means of our suspension of belief in an earlier description” (TA, 175; emphasis his). That is to say, “literary works depict reality by augmenting it” (TN I, 80; emphasis his). Therefore, we must overcome the split between the poetic and the epistemological functions of imagination (FFR, 140). The “creative mimesis of reality proceeding from the poetic mythos” would have a “heuristic” function for “redescribing reality” (FFR, 141). In this way, “new realities become open to us and old worlds are made new” (FFR, 141). Imagination would then no longer be about the derivation of images from experience, but instead refer to “the capacity for letting new worlds shape our understanding of ourselves” via language and especially metaphor (HHS, 181). Imagination is thus absolutely crucial not only for the philosophical activity of interpreting but for the role of the arts, in general, and fiction, in particular, to have an impact on our reality.23 In his biblical hermeneutics, Ricœur also draws on his theory of metaphor, suggesting that even for biblical discourse or scriptural texts imagination is best understood in terms of “metaphorization,” “parabolization,” and “semantic innovation,” especially through the means of “intertextuality” (FS, 160–66). Imagination in this case of both the biblical and fictional texts refers to “the free play of possibilities in a state of noninvolvement with respect to the world of perception and of action,” which enables us to “try out new ideas, new values, new ways of being in the world” (TA, 174).24 The biblical texts spark our imagination by proposing to it “figures” of redemption or “liberation” (TA, 101). Ricœur reiterates this in several contexts, often referring to the role of the imagination without exploring it explicitly. His notion of the

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world of the text relies heavily upon it. The text—biblical or fictional—cannot open a world to us or present new ways of being or “augment” our reality, if imagination is not at play. Ricœur’s discussion of the imagination in fictional and biblical texts is also helpful for understanding how imagination may function in liturgical settings. Although he places the locus for such work of interpretation and imaginative redescription of reality in the personal reading of scripture, it is actually more evident and greatly amplified within communal worship. It is telling that he concludes the essay on biblical imagination by pointing to the necessary “passage from the text to life” where “we pass from the work of imagination in the text to the work of imagination about the text,” but does not take this step himself (FS, 166). This is the step that liturgy takes continually by its very nature. On the one hand, liturgy can be said to make time and space “human” through its imaginative configuring of the liturgical space, not only in a strictly semantic but also in a corporeal and physical sense. In allowing human fragility to be expressed by the imaginative language of liturgy, the postures and gestures of the body, and the arrangement of material implements and architectural space, “new ideas” and “new ways of being in the world” are, in fact, tried on and made possible. Liturgy creatively configures and refigures the reality of human finitude, weakness, and failure, not just by acknowledging the emotions, affects, and dispositions associated with them, by allowing them expression, but by transforming them in the direction of hope. And this is obviously not only true for the configuring of the human world of passions and emotions, but even more so for their refiguring. There is no hope without imagination, because it takes imagination to envision the new. This is similarly true for the configuring of hope within the liturgical imagination, whether this concerns celebrations of feasts or the anticipation of future hope. To make a feast happen—to transform this place and time into Christmas or Easter or Pentecost—takes significant amounts of imagination. Even the most elaborate liturgy essentially uses the same implements in the same liturgical space with very little elaboration: colors of vestments and altar covers change in many Christian traditions according to the church year and sometimes there are special items brought out only on certain occasions, such as a candelabra, a burial shroud, or a festal icon, but generally things do not really change all that much. It takes tremendous affective imagination to move from the somber mood of Holy Friday to the expectant waiting of Holy Saturday to the enthusiastic elation of Pascha night.25 The vestments have changed from black to white and the church has been decorated with flowers, but really imagination supplies everything else, supported by the change of tone in the music (itself the product of imaginative creativity).

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This is even more true for the feasts that make exorbitant claims of transformation: to experience the world freed from the powers of evil on Theophany, the triumphal victory over death on Pascha, the cosmos sanctified by Mary’s falling asleep on Dormition requires a tremendous feat of the imagination, a kind of seeing that enhances the purely empirical experience of the person entering the space in manifold fashion via the memory and anticipation that enables the liturgical participants to enter into the world created imaginatively by the ecclesial event. It is important that this does not transport the community or individual back in time to a supposed historical event that took place in year x or even forward to the eschaton when these promises might have become a reality, but instead makes an event occur now as created by the liturgical manifestation in this location at this moment in time.26 This would be impossible without the creative power of the imagination as Ricœur describes it. The role of beauty in liturgy may well at least partly consist in supporting the imagination and allowing it to flourish so that this present experience becomes possible. If liturgy is too stark, bland, or empty, our ability to sympathize or enter imaginatively into the event shuts down or is never activated. Beauty serves at the very least as the impetus for getting the imagination “going”—though surely that is not its only role. We are drawn and attracted by beauty, maybe fascinated by it, and our imagination is engaged by it, even set loose by it. While creating beautiful implements and furnishings surely requires productive imagination, these aids to worship also activate the imagination of those who do not themselves create them. Entering the liturgical world and imagining ourselves within it becomes easier when that world is rich and beautiful, not just verbally but also in many other ways. Especially if it is supposed to challenge us to imagine ourselves differently, to become transformed by it in some way, the imagination has to be assisted in taking on that challenge and to allow such novel visions of the self—and of the community and of the world—to emerge and to become compelling. Beauty can aid this process significantly. To say that this occurs through the role of the imagination is not to say that it is either mere fiction or some sort of magic. That is to say, it is neither mere fancy or fantasy in the mind of an individual standing or sitting in the church nor is it an event that supposedly took place long ago transferred magically into the present moment.27 To say that Christ is born today or is transfigured today or ascends today, as the Orthodox and some Catholic and Anglican liturgies claim over and over again, especially in festal services, is not to transport us back in time to the first century or to move that century into our present experience. Rather, it is to enter the liturgical event in “sympathy and imagination” (in Ricœur’s sense), to allow the words, music, affects, gestures, postures, and movements of liturgy to shape our imagination such

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that we find ourselves participating in the reality of Christ’s manifestation in this liturgical moment. Similarly, to say that Christ “tramples down death by death” (the Orthodox Paschal troparion) or overcomes the power of death, is not a magical flight to an eschatological future, but the imaginative participation in a reality, beginning in our present but not yet completed. Hermeneutically speaking, imagination here brings together memory and anticipation to configure them into the liturgical event opening the liturgical world to its present participants. IMAGINATION BETWEEN IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA Ricœur argues that the “practical function” of the imagination is most clearly displayed in the formation of a social imaginary, illustrated especially by the two extremes of ideology and utopia, which he thinks are always in paradoxical tension with each other.28 He suggests that the ambiguity between these two “figures” of the imagination may well get to the very heart of the phenomenon (TA, 169). Ideology and utopia are both “imaginative practices” that seem at opposite poles from each other, but especially employ the productive imagination in ways that paradoxically interact (TA, 181).29 Both ideology and utopia challenge the current social reality, but the former does so in terms of the imagined past, the other in terms of an imagined future. While ideology has an essentially integrative function, utopia has a primarily subversive one (TA, 186; LIU, 17). Ricœur insists that while both ideology and utopia can have “pathological” expressions, they also play an important role in any shaping of the social imaginary, which is extended between these two extremes or elements. A conceptual framework informed by both enables “a theory of cultural imagination” (TA, 308). Utopia and ideology both deal in different ways with the “noncongruence, typical of social imagination” (TA, 309). This “imaginary is constitutive of our relation to the world” (LIU, 145).30 Ideology “appears as the inverted image of reality” (TA, 310) or as a symbolically mediated action (LIU, 258).31 It makes an image of reality that is more integrated and more coherent than actually the case. Ideology has the “fundamental function” “to pattern, to consolidate, to provide order to the course of action,” thus of “conservation” both positively and negatively (TA, 318; LIU, 261). Ricœur attributes to it elements of “simplification, schematization, stereotyping, and ritualization” (TA, 182). In a discussion of Althusser, he elaborates on his use of “interpellation,” which he interprets in theological terms: “The use of the term ‘interpellation’ is an allusion to the theological concept of the call, of being called by God. In its ability to interpellate subjects, ideology also constitutes them. To be hailed is to become

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a subject” (LIU, 149). He does not elaborate on the ways in which ritual might be implicated in ideology,32 but it is not hard to see how that would be the case, given the tendency of rituals to reinforce identity via shared social practices that are repeated over and over and given heightened significance by the ritualized form and the devotion (religious or secular) attached to it. Authorities of various stripes legitimize themselves by recourse to ideology and its reinforcement in ritual. Ideology relies on this integrative function of imagination. Its main goal is to shape and preserve identity (LIU, 258–66). While ideology tends toward confinement and consolidation, utopia instead goes in the direction of upheaval and rebellion. Utopia imagines an alternative vision of reality, a new place and time. It is thus essentially related to hope (LIU, 252). From the “no place” of utopia, we “are able to take a fresh look at our reality; hereafter, nothing about it can be taken for granted” (TA, 184). This is why utopia has transformative power. It constitutes “the imaginary project of another kind of society, of another reality, another world” (TA, 319). It thus employs imagination in its sense of innovation and creativity. Utopia, Ricœur affirms “is the mode in which we radically rethink the nature of family, consumption, government, religion, and so on” as “the most formidable challenge to what-is” (TA, 184, almost literally repeated on 320; also LIU, 173, 179, 299–300). It can upset power structures and overhaul unjust systems (LIU, 298–300). The utopian spirit has the “capacity to establish new modes of life” (TA, 185; LIU, 310). In regard to religion, it “may mean radical atheism or new cultic festivity” (TA, 319; LIU, 295). While it may not seem particularly obvious how liturgy can function in “utopic” fashion, this is in fact an important dimension of its exercise. Liturgy always challenges our present personal and social reality with the vision of a better world or even a heavenly realm. We always find ourselves in this tension between the “already” and “not yet,” the promise and hope of a future still to come. And that future is certainly often vividly imagined in “utopic” terms, including at times the wholesale rejection of life here on earth. This can lead to pathological extremes, but in its less extreme forms, it is always an important dimension of liturgy. Liturgy holds open the hope for change and it does so by imagining an alternate reality that is better than our current one, more whole, healthy, and holy. It purports to have salvific function, seeks to redeem our present life. This imagining of the heavenly other is an important function of liturgy, although it cannot (at least should not) replace or erase the rootedness in our present existence. Ricœur points out that utopias often call for radical equality or superlative perfection, although those elements can also lead to “escapism” and “denial of praxis” (TA, 321–22). Liturgy harbors similar potential and similar dangers. Ricœur concludes that the two dimensions must always work together: “The crisscrossing of utopia and ideology is the result of two fundamental

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directions of the social imaginary. The first moves toward integration, repetition, reflection. The second, because it is excentric, tends toward wandering. But you cannot have one without the other” (TA, 186; LIU, 312). Not only is the tension between them insurmountable but they need each other. He thinks that we reach the social imaginary “only through the figures of false consciousness,” as they are on display in ideological and utopian tendencies. Indeed, “we take possession of the creative power of the imagination only in a critical relation with these two figures of false consciousness” (TA, 187, repeated on TA, 324). He also explores these tendencies of sedimentation and innovation in regard to narrative: “The constituting of a tradition indeed depends on the interaction between two factors, innovation and sedimentation” (LQN, 24; TN I, 68–70).33 Yet, “innovation remains a rule-governed behavior; the work of imagination does not come out of nowhere. It is tied in one way or another to the models handed down by tradition. But it can enter into a variable relation to these models. The range of solutions is broad indeed between the poles of servile repetition and calculated deviance, passing by way of all the degrees of ordered distortion” (LQN, 25). Different types of literary works tend to more sedimentation or repetition, others to more innovation or “deviance” (TN I, 69). Imagination here is a “process rather than a state of being” (TA, 323). This balance between preservation and creativity is an important one. Ricœur thinks that this is crucial to the very activity of interpretation. Even in regard to scripture, the balance between fidelity and creativity has to be maintained. The admission that scripture always requires interpretation “must not be taken as a confession of weakness; rather, it must be said that the history of their interpretation and that of the diverse traditions that result from it is constitutive of the very meaning of the Scriptures.” He thinks that this results in “a certain competition between fidelity to the original text and the creativity at work in the history of interpretation.” This hermeneutic circle defines “the status of tradition,” which is not simply the “transmission of an unchangeable deposit,” but rather characterized by “the dynamism of an innovative interpretation without which the letter would remain dead” (TT, 133). Imagination, then, functions not just on individual or personal levels of appropriation but also on broader communal and cultural levels. Without it, traditions cannot be maintained or cultivated. This also helps make sense of how liturgy can shape individual imagination, namely by presenting a broader imaginary to those at liturgy, into which they can enter and in which they can participate. These ideological and utopic extremes of imagination in their tendencies to conservation or repetition and upheaval or challenge bring together the two functions of memory and opening of new worlds discussed already. On the one hand, imagination helps to repeat, to set before us again and again

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within imaginative memory, thus tending to familiarity, consolidation, and sedimentation. On the other hand, imagination serves to unsettle, to innovate, to create anew, to imagine the possible and maybe even the impossible, thus allowing for upheaval, hope, and the announcement of the radically new. Both tendencies are always at work in liturgy and pathology results there also, if the tension collapses into only one of them. One might say that ideology tends toward fundamentalism, toward undue glorification of the past, toward ethnic factionalism and ethnophyletism (the “love” of the “ethnic,” a heresy officially condemned but also vividly displayed by many Orthodox jurisdictions, often organized along ethnic lines). Utopia tends toward rebellion, revolution, schism; tendencies displayed by all religious traditions to a greater or lesser degree. At the same time, their “healthy” versions play the positive role of shaping identity and community, while always challenging them toward a better vision of self and group. Liturgy has both “integrative” and “subversive” functions and, just as societies or governments, it goes wrong when it forgets or neglects one of them. Tradition, as Ricœur points out in his discussion of narrative mimesis, requires the tension and balance between sedimentation and innovation (TN I, 68).34 This, then, helps at least to some extent in discerning appropriate and problematic uses of imagination in worship, namely by avoiding those that tend to the extremes or collapse the tension between consolidation and subversion, representation and innovation, familiarity and disruption. If all is new and disruptive, entry into the liturgical world is hindered or even becomes impossible. If there is no newness, no challenge, we become too comfortable or complacent and merely reinforce our own stereotypes and presuppositions. Liturgy must be able to confront us with another vision of ourselves and the world, move us to new action, and summon us to new forms of life. But it must do so in a way we can hear, because we are sufficiently attuned to it by the familiarity of the structure and the language. The habits and familiarity created by liturgy, especially via repetition, actually make it possible to focus on the new and unfamiliar, otherwise it would not show up, could not be heard or seen in the overall chaos of the unfamiliar. Even traditions that embrace more innovation and impulsivity in worship rely on shared structures and familiar patterns in order to enable the participants to appropriate what is presented. The more participation a liturgy desires, the more familiarity is required. If too much is new and unfamiliar (or requires too high a level of “expertise”), it becomes mere performance and turns the congregants into passive spectators.35 Participation in liturgy is thus disproportionately related to the level of innovation and unfamiliarity a liturgy contains. And surely liturgy should not just disrupt and challenge but also comfort and console us. We turn to ritual especially in moments of crisis, suffering, and grief, when our lives are already disrupted and in upheaval. The

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familiarity of ritual in these cases can serve a consoling function, precisely by integrating us into broader patterns of ritual that express the cumulative grief of centuries and that many people before us have used to cope with their suffering and to find consolation. Here the primary goal of liturgy is to offer hope and consolation, not in the sense of radical disruption but in the sense of healing. Something similar is true of celebration, though maybe not as existentially urgent there: feasting has recourse to ritual because it heightens the meaning through imaginative participation in something of broader communal significance. It also allows others to participate in our personal celebratory moments, such as a wedding or ordination. Indeed, some traditions require the agreement or confirmation of the community for the liturgical acts. Mourning is soothed and celebration is magnified via this imaginative employment of ritual structures. This is obviously not just about “ideology” or “utopia” but they represent two dimensions or two extremes that “fit” the two movements of liturgy: the tension between memory and hope and that between consolidation and innovation, between tradition and reform. Both are always needed to prevent liturgy from becoming mere rote or romanticized nostalgia without relevance to the present, on the one hand, or arbitrary invention or the sort of “reform” that disconnects people from meaning, on the other. Surely the balance between these is always extremely difficult to calibrate. Ricœur’s hermeneutics can help here at least as a general guideline: liturgical “reform” cannot (or should not) disrupt the liturgical world or make it impossible to enter it, yet this world must retain its ability to challenge us and present us with new visions of reality. Imagination must be able to function in terms of representation—its creative uses must undergird or support this capacity rather than overrule or even destroy it. If we can no longer imaginatively enter the world because it has become too radically different (too “utopic”), then imaginative “sympathy” (and hence participation) has become impossible. But if the liturgical world has lost its capacity to challenge us, if it merely confirms our comfortable stereotypes and familiar habits, even when they are not conducive to holy living, then it has become mere ideology. This may also help to begin to address another vexing question in liturgical studies, namely to what extent a particular version of liturgy is normative and whether some liturgies are better than others. Don Saliers insists, for example: “There are, after all, good and bad, more adequate and less adequate liturgical patterns and structures” of worship.36 Byron Anderson also explores the question of the normativity of liturgical texts and structures in some detail: “The normative question asks: How do liturgical sacramental practices establish and maintain particular standards for the Christian life? The constitutive question asks: How do these practices function to organize or construct Christian identity both individually and communally?”37 He suggests that a

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balance must be found between a “classic” ordo and the diversity of contemporary liturgical experience.38 Geoffrey Wainwright sees liturgy and tradition in normative relationship: “Liturgy constitutes the Tradition. Or even more boldly: Liturgy is the Tradition, and (more boldly yet) the Tradition is liturgy.”39 This means for him that liturgy provides the normative context even for the transmission and interpretation of scripture. The two are in a reciprocal relationship: “The canonical Scriptures serve as the internal norm of the Tradition and thereby also as an instrument of its transmission.” He sees this as supported by the fact that copies of biblical texts are often found within liturgical manuscripts and were copied for that purpose. This indicates that “the normativity for the Tradition of the liturgically preserved Scriptures is illustrated by the way their reading has, ordinarily, provided guidance for the ongoing life of the church and of the individual faithful—and, extraordinarily, sparked reformation or renewal where need or opportunity arose.”40 Tradition and renewal are mutually wrapped up with each other. Stringer, conversely, argues that there “is no such thing as a wrong liturgy or a mistaken form of Christian worship.”41 Ricœur’s balance between sedimentation or preservation and innovation as constitutive of living tradition does not give detailed instruction for how to interpret a particular liturgical text or how to evaluate a specific liturgical development, but it does provide the broad guidance of this important tension that must always be maintained. Preservation becomes excessive and pathological when it turns into ideology. A liturgy that is simply a remnant of antiquity, repeated solely for its historical longevity, or romanticizing a particular time and place as “the” liturgical standard, falls into this trap. Creativity and innovation become similarly excessive and pathological when they value the new for its own sake and impose such radical change on those who come to liturgy that they can no longer participate or enter its world, because it is a world they no longer recognize at all, that has no entry point for them. “Good” liturgy and “authentic” liturgy, “faithful” to the tradition, must preserve the balance or tension between the two. This requires careful hermeneutic discernment not just of the texts that are employed but of the liturgical change as it occurs in evaluating how it manifests the liturgical world and whether appropriation can occur across the particular distance in a given time and place.42 Many liturgical theologians are emphatic that liturgical interpretation is not utterly relative, but requires—and can make—interpretive judgments. Nichols argues that “liturgical hermeneutics aims to show that worship is better, the better it understands itself, or the better its practitioners understand it.” Therefore, “liturgical hermeneutics strives to preserve the duality in each liturgical performance of an action meaningfully rendered, yet never exhausted in any one performance.”43 She develops her idea of liturgy opening

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the world of the kingdom as “normative” for liturgical practice and thus able to exercise judgment about it, while also emphasizing faithful description.44 Ricœur addresses the fear of relativism that always haunts hermeneutics in the interview with Raynova: “But the word ‘relativism’ is contrary to ‘dogmatism’ . . . It is as if there could be only one point of view, and as soon as you say that there are different points of view, you are a relativist.” Instead, he prefers using the word “finitude,” which indicates “that I have a limited perspective on the problems and that others have another limited perspective.” That is to say, “I belong to a philosophical community, and I admit that there are others who see things that I do not see. It is true, you can call that ‘relativism,’ but it is also an act of reliance on the capacity of others to perceive and understand things that I do not understand.” He clarifies that he “would say this even for the religious tradition,” inasmuch as he admits “that there are people who have understood things that I do not understand any more. I belong nevertheless to this large community where people understand or will understand things that I would never understand. This is what limits my own ‘relativism’: the ‘relativism’ of the others” (AGT, 676; emphasis in the original). This applies not only to the scriptures or to the religious tradition but also to liturgy. There are a variety of liturgical traditions, and they are needed precisely because we are finite and do not have the full perspective. This is not a failure, as if reaching an ideal, single perspective were a goal we ought to pursue and of which we fall short only reluctantly and with regret. Rather, living in concrete worlds with particular horizons at specific points in time and place means that new distances always open, that new forms of appropriation are always called for, and that new understandings remain always necessary. This plurivocity is needed for living experience, not something to be bemoaned or exorcized. Liturgy, then, enacts a particular imaginative “vision” of the world— though not simply in a “visual” sense, but also in an auditory, sensory, and communal sense—so that this vision can be adopted, taken on, made the participants’ own. Liturgy is not just “symbolic” in the sense that it merely represents a disembodied “meaning” and has no further relation to reality. Rather it configures a part of reality—that is, the time and place of liturgy—in a particular way so as to serve as an imaginative, intensified, paradigmatic (albeit not “definitive” or final) lens for the rest of reality. It is a meaning that is not simply expressed in language, but that makes or produces meaning imaginatively through its sensory, affective, corporeal, and communal instantiations.

Chapter 8

Liturgical Identity Confession, Conversion, Community

The last section of the previous chapter, in its focus on the ways in which ideology and utopia can shape a social imaginary, has already raised questions of identity and suggested some of the ways in which liturgy might be pertinent to them. Other aspects of Ricœur’s account of the self have also already been considered in multiple places in this book: in terms of attestation, in terms of the transformation opened as a possibility by the narrative or mythic world, in terms of the possibility of identifying with the characters of liturgical texts and images. But this topic must now be investigated more deliberately, for it is absolutely crucial for what liturgy does. There is no point to staging liturgy if it is simply that, a “staging” or performance of something that happened in the past and if it has no impact on those who participate in it or come into it. Yet what sort of impact does it have? What does liturgy do to us? Why should we bother engaging or participating in liturgy? This is a question often raised by liturgical theologians, sometimes with some exasperation that liturgy does not seem to do more to people, does not transform them more profoundly.1 Even that exasperation is marked by the clear expectation that liturgy ought to change us, that doing it is meaningful not just in some abstract sense or as supporting our faith, but as instantiating it, as making it real, or even as producing it in the first place. Robert Taft, for example, insists that “the touchstone of our liturgy is whether or not it is being lived out in our lives” and asks: “Is the symbolic moment symbolizing what we really are? Is our shared celebration of life a sign that we truly live in this way?”2 Derek Knoke wonders: “What does ritual do in the people who do the ritual? . . . What vision of the world does this ritual generate?”3 Irwin requests, on the one hand, that “the text of the liturgy be interpreted in relation to the context of our communal and personal lives,” but that, on the other hand, this context “be lived in harmony with the text of enacted liturgy so that liturgy and life 155

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can be intrinsically and keenly related.” He concludes with the hope “that they might eventually become congruent.”4 Yet, how exactly does liturgy form or transform the church and the liturgical participants?5 Liturgy is precisely what is supposed to shape people into faithful adherents of their respective traditions, to form their identity, to create community, to pass on the tradition, and to effect real change in people’s lives. This is particularly obvious for rarer sacramental acts like baptism, chrismation, marriage, or ordination. Here something truly happens in the act and in many places this is even recognized by the state (especially for marriage and ordination). But even repeated acts like confession, the blessing of certain implements used in worship, or certainly the Eucharist, are supposed to make something happen and to affect the people who participate in these actions. What might be a hermeneutic perspective on what happens here? How are we to interpret the meaning of such ritual acts? And how might the rites themselves function as a hermeneutics of the self? The question of the self and its identity is at the core of Ricœur’s work.6 Identity, he argues in Oneself as Another, can be understood both in terms of sameness (what he calls “idem-identity”) and in terms of selfhood (what he labels “ipse-identity”).7 Both are important for liturgy. The question about sameness or identifiable selfhood, both for Ricœur and for liturgy, is about the possibility of attribution or responsibility, about identifying someone as the author or agent of an action. This is crucial for the liturgical preoccupations with fault and repentance. If we cannot confess ourselves to be the ones who have perpetrated certain actions or display certain dispositions, then penitence, absolution, or even forgiveness would make no sense. Liturgy requires a self. In fact, despite its heavily communal nature in some ways, it even requires an individual self, a self that identifies itself as an agent of its own personal action, both good and bad. At the same time, liturgy always goes beyond this, because it does not wish for us to remain who we are. Here Ricœur’s reflections on the “summoned self” are particularly useful.8 Liturgy summons or calls the self to a new identity; the world it opens before us invites us to change, challenges us to be transformed. Liturgy, then, requires a notion of selfhood that has to be open to transformation.9 What might this mean hermeneutically and how can Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self, in particular, inform such reflection on liturgical identity? This chapter will examine first, the notion of identity as it is experienced by the person who comes into liturgy, appropriates it for the self, and identifies as an actor within liturgy and one’s own life. The second section will focus on the notion of transformation and examine how liturgy purports to change identity or to shape a particular liturgical character. The final part will consider the ways in which ritual shapes not just individual but communal identity, given that liturgy is primarily a communal and not solely an individual

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experience. While this latter may be the most obvious and in some ways the most important dimension of liturgical practice, the manner in which liturgy shapes communal identity and maybe even calls to concrete action, is a particularly fraught one. It will emerge in all these dimensions that liturgy ultimately proposes a hermeneutics of the self, a way of reading personal and communal identity. AGENCY IN ASCRIPTION AND CONFESSION Ricœur’s second magnum opus, Oneself as Another, fully develops the distinction between the two types of identity, as sameness or selfhood, respectively.10 He tries to find a middle way between the strong Cartesian cogito and the wounded or shattered ego of Freud and Nietzsche. At the same time, he tries to address the difficulty of ascription or of attribution of action to an agent that is central to much Anglo-American philosophical discussions of identity. As the title indicates, he ultimately suggests that we must discover a dimension of alterity within the self. Drawing on his own work in narrative identity, he tries to negotiate between capacity and incapacity of the self, agency and passivity, acting and suffering. Indeed, this interest in the capacities and incapacities of the self, the tension between agency or willing and passivity or suffering goes back to his earliest discussions in The Voluntary and the Involuntary. We are, on the one hand, subjects responsible for our actions and capable of agency, as well as, on the other hand, victims or more passive agents who do not have complete freedom but are imposed on by others or impacted by them in various ways. This passivity in the self thus points to a dimension of otherness that is always already there in the constitution of the self (OA, 318).11 One of the ways in which he finds dimensions of “otherness” in the self is in our embodied nature.12 Identity makes little sense for a disembodied self. Although our bodies change over time, there is a continuity of the flesh in our experience of the self. Our body, Ricœur says, is our place of belonging (OA, 319). Self-constancy is in some sense anchored in the body. At the same time, the body or, more precisely the flesh, is the site of passivity and suffering (OA, 320; see also FN, 199–37). Drawing on Maine de Biran, Michel Henry, and Edmund Husserl, Ricœur argues for an account of the flesh as intimacy and passivity. He suggests that “the flesh precedes the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary” (OA, 324). It allows for a dimension of otherness within the self. He highlights “the fact that the flesh is most originally mine and of all things that which is closest, that its aptitude for feeling is revealed most characteristically in the sense of touch” and argues that “these primordial features make it possible for flesh to be the organ of

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desire, the support of free movement; but one cannot say that they are the object of choice or desire.” Thus, “this is the foremost otherness of the flesh with respect to all initiative,” inasmuch as “selfhood implies its own ‘proper’ otherness” (OA, 324).13 There are therefore three related issues in regard to identity at stake here: the issue of ascription or of the attribution of action to an agent that would enable responsibility for such actions, the tension between action and suffering, and the issue of the body or the flesh. All three are applicable to liturgy and help make sense of the way in which liturgy identifies a “liturgical self,” at the same time proposing a lens for interpreting the self as it presents itself in liturgical acts. First, liturgy makes possible ascription by identifying a self that is responsible for actions, attitudes, and dispositions. As discussed already in the chapter on truth (chapter 4), attestation within liturgy requires a liturgical subject that is identifiable and acknowledges itself as the self that has perpetrated the confessed acts. This occurs in various ways: through personal rites of confession, either in prayer or in the structured liturgical act of confession, through prayers of confession within the Sunday morning liturgy in various Christian traditions, through public acts of penance, or through penitential seasons and their various practices, such as Great Lent. In all of these in various ways, penitents confess themselves, identify with their own sinful actions, admit faults, and repent for them. All of these require an actor identifying with actions and making it possible to attribute them to this actor as agent. Liturgy explicitly encourages such attribution or ascription through the various rites of confession that require the penitent to identify his or her faults and to take responsibility for them. Here the liturgy provides an eminently “active” and “capable” sense of the self. Although this is a fallible self who is even explicitly “at fault” or guilty, liturgy treats the penitent as fully capable of confessing to such fault and owning up to the actions. The liturgical structures themselves enable this capacity, providing the penitent with a means for coping, a structure and impetus for confessing, and a way of turning around, providing new visions of the self. It thus does not leave the penitent within an overwhelming sense of guilt, but shows a way forward and provides measures for taking on responsibility. This liturgical self is then both acting and suffering; and the liturgy clearly conveys this, both in its texts and in its actions and postures. On the one hand, postures and gestures of liturgy signal both activity and passivity. Many are about an attitude of receptivity that put the participant into a more passive posture: kneeling or prostrating, holding up one’s hands for communion, offering one’s forehead for anointing, bowing for confession. Yet, none are ever imposed on the liturgical participant against his or her will—liturgical texts for baptisms or weddings often stress this explicitly. Liturgy requires the voluntary participation of the person on multiple levels:

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worship is meaningless if it is constrained. Gestures of celebration, such as embracing or bringing items for blessing, signal the active dimensions even more explicitly. On the other hand, the texts also frequently go back and forth between accusations of fault or pronouncements of guilt—some put in very strong and superlative language—and admissions of weakness, fragility, and suffering. One admits to being led astray or overwhelmed by desires or evils in ways that connote illness, addiction, or imprisonment rather than straightforward culpability. These require healing or assistance and compassion rather than inviting condemnation. The two are often held together, albeit without conflating them: fragility is both weakness and can lead to fault, but weakness is not therefore fault. This describes a self who is an actor with clear responsibility for actions, but also a sufferer who has succumbed (maybe unwillingly) to a stronger foe. We both perpetrate and are subdued by evil. It acts on us, through us, and within us. Liturgy provides a hermeneutics of the self that sees it at least to some extent as enmeshed in evil, complicit with it but also tainted by it, both its agent and its victim. Both dimensions are held together and acknowledged in all their paradoxical complexity. Liturgy, then, construes the fragility of human life in at least three ways: first, we are weak and finite, we undergo suffering—it figures this often in terms of illness which requires healing or sustenance; second, we are fallible, fickle, easily tempted, not steadfast in our commitments—this requires assistance and encouragement, especially from those who have faced similar temptations and managed to overcome them; third, we do in fact wrong and harm others—such faults are confronted and means for grappling with them, confessing them, and turning away from them are provided. Sometimes these dimensions are connected and cannot be easily distinguished from each other; sometimes one leads to another, although that need not necessarily be the case: fragility does not always lead to fault. Liturgy tries to help us cope with fragility in all of its aspects; it does not equate it simply with fallibility. Even the superlative contrast between Lent and Pascha or more broadly between fasting and feasting, presents this vision of the self as both humbled and hopeful, fragile and sustained. It does not, however, envision this to take place in a single moment of conversion. Such a moment might begin the process, prove the catalyst for a new life, yet the life has to be instantiated in daily actions and habits formed over time. It is a prolonged process, requiring frequent reminders and repetition. The cyclical nature of liturgy, the alternation of feasts and fasts, illustrates this vividly. One is never done confessing, repenting, and trying anew. Yet, this is an essentially hopeful message providing a constant means of grappling with the weakness, inadequacies, and shortcomings of the self, supplying it with formulae and expressions of mourning and joy, confession and celebration.

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The corporeal dimension is also absolutely crucial for liturgy.14 Identity in terms of continuity and bodily integrity is not only necessary for ascription of acts to an agent, but also constituted in some way by the liturgical action. The penitential practices that accompany gestures of repentance and acts of confession are not simply verbal, but in many liturgical traditions are exhibited in bodily fashion by bowing, kneeling, or prostrating. One acknowledges oneself sinful or at fault verbally in the rite of confession, but one also expresses this in corporeal fashion via gesture, posture, and other motions. These maintain a reciprocal relationship, for the bodily postures also shape and influence affect and attitude. By praying penitential prayers and participating in penitential services with their somber mood, often reinforced by semi-darkness or flickering candle light, engaging in the bodily postures and movements of bowing or kneeling, a penitential spirit is induced or supported that might not have emerged in the same way without these bodily and material dimensions. By participating in such services, the subject practices and thereby becomes a sorrowful self that can feel and express guilt and repentance. Happier liturgical moments similarly require a certain sense of self in terms of identity. In some traditions, one identifies by name when coming forward to participate in eucharistic communion. This is also the case for rites of baptism in most Christian traditions and certainly in celebrations of marriage or ordination. It matters that it is this person or even this individual that participates in this particular sacrament at this moment in time. The person identifies as this specific subject now “subject” to the liturgical act and engaged in it. A commitment is implied in one’s participation. One proclaims oneself part of this community, enters within it (especially in baptism) or reaffirms one’s belonging every time one shows up and participates. Indeed, commitment is an important part of liturgical identity and here one might go beyond Ricœur’s focus on ascription or attribution of acts. Commitment is a crucial element for forming liturgical identity and goes from just “showing up” all the way to full and faithful participation in varying degrees of intensity. It has already been argued that liturgy functions only through appropriation, by making the words, gestures, and actions one’s own. One commits oneself by becoming active in liturgy: saying or singing the words (even if silently), bowing, kneeling, prostrating with others—all of which involve significant commitment of engaging one’s body and emotions in these humbling ways— to the explicit public commitment of participating in official rites, such as baptism, confession, or Eucharist.15 Some are of more intense significance as one-time events, especially those marking so-called threshold moments, while others show ongoing commitment and fidelity like participation in the eucharistic liturgy. Such commitment involves a certain conception of the self, a seeing or interpreting oneself as willing to have one’s identity shaped in this way by the community, by its traditions and ritual structures.

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Ricœur explains the move toward identity in regard to the world of the text primarily in terms of self-understanding: “On the one hand, self-understanding passes through the detour of understanding the cultural signs in which the self documents and forms itself. On the other hand, understanding the text is not an end in itself; it mediates the relation to himself of a subject who, in the short circuit of immediate reflection, does not find the meaning of his own life” (HHS, 158). Thus, “in hermeneutical reflection—or in reflective hermeneutics—the constitution of the self is contemporaneous with the constitution of meaning” (HHS, 159; emphasis his). Hermeneutics thus struggles against the cultural distance of the text (or what is to be interpreted) through the process of appropriation or making it one’s own and making it present (HHS, 159). What he says of reading is also eminently applicable to participating in liturgy, indeed, maybe more so: “Reading is like the execution of a musical score; it marks the realisation, the enactment, of the semantic possibilities of the text,” making it “signify here and now” (HHS, 159; emphasis his). Liturgy promotes this kind of self-understanding by providing a lens for “reading” and interpreting the self in particular ways through the liturgical texts and actions. This becomes possible through the move of appropriation, as Ricœur explains: “What we make our own, what we appropriate for ourselves, is not an alien experience or a distant intention, but the horizon of a world towards which the work directs itself.” This implies that “to understand oneself in front of a text is quite contrary of protecting oneself and one’s own beliefs and prejudices; it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding which I have of myself.” In this way, “the hermeneutical circle is not repudiated but displaced from a subjectivistic level to an ontological plane.” This involves a circle “between my mode of being—beyond the knowledge which I may have of it—and the mode opened up and disclosed by the text as the world of the work” (HHS, 178). Similarly, by appropriating the world of liturgy, the participants in this hermeneutic circle come to understand themselves in this way, as constituting a self in accordance with the meaning offered by the world in which they have agreed to participate, as signaled by their continued commitment. Ricœur’s notion of “narrative identity” is especially useful here. Liturgical experience is deeply shaped by narrative. These liturgical narratives are organized in daily, weekly, and seasonal (i.e., annual) fashion. There is a narrative to what happens in every service, but this is part of larger narratives that permeate and organize the entire year. It is in the context of these narratives that religious lives are formed and gain meaning. Furthermore, these narratives ground and justify actions. The liturgical narratives shape the religious person’s sense of self, precisely because in worship one already actively participates within them. Ricœur argues that

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“narrative constructs the durable properties of a character, what one could call his narrative identity, by constructing the kind of dynamic identity found in the plot which creates the character’s identity.” This “narrative identity of the character” would “correspond to the discordant concordance of the story itself.”16 Like personal narratives, liturgical narratives are not only about harmony and coherence, but are just as fully marked by discordance, doubt, and suffering. The person coming into liturgy has the task of “making sense” of life’s vicissitudes in light of the liturgical context that attributes particular meanings to postures and actions, thereby conveying the hope that life is finally meaningful. The liturgical actions and stories, themselves marked by the struggle of concordance and discordance, can enable the self to construct an identity in light of the liturgical vision or world. This becomes possible through a multitude of examples, such as the manifold images of other repentant sinners one might imitate in one’s own penitential struggles. Ricœur stresses that the identity of the character as constructed by the story can be appropriated by the reader: “Characters on stage or in a novel are beings similar to us—acting, suffering, thinking and dying. In other words, variations in the literary field have as their horizon the inescapable terrestrial condition.”17 The “characters” of liturgy, both visually as they are presented in icons or other images, and narratively, as they show up in the liturgical texts, are similarly acting, suffering, living and dying characters.18 Here it might be a bonus that some of those examples are so extreme: few sinners would find their faults as completely without precedent in the tradition. Liturgy thus shapes a broader liturgical imaginary, in which we can come to know and identify ourselves in terms of the narratives that are being told and the symbolic actions that often also carry narratival function. These create what Ricœur calls “imaginative variations of our own ego” that help us to gain “a narrative understanding of ourselves, the only kind that escapes the apparent choice between sheer change and absolute identity.” This enables a constitution of the self that is no longer an autonomous Cartesian ego, but instead “a self instructed by cultural symbols, the first among which are the narratives handed down in our literary tradition” (LQN, 33; emphasis his). He argues that this establishes a parallel between life and narrative, inasmuch as the distinction between them “is partially abolished by our power of applying to ourselves the plots that we have received from our culture and of trying on the different roles assumed by the favourite characters of the stories most dear to us” (LQN, 33). We gain increased narrative self-understanding “by means of the imaginative variations of our own ego” and are thereby able to escape “the apparent choice between sheer change and absolute identity.” Thus, “the subject is never given at the start. Or, if it is, it is in danger of being reduced

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to the narcissistic, egoistic and stingy ego, from which literature, precisely can free us” (LQN, 33). Exactly the same is true of liturgy: it encourages us to apply the liturgical “plots” to our lives; in fact, it often exhorts us to this quite insistently. It elaborates the roles of characters we are supposed to assume and imitate. What happens haphazardly and accidentally (and very partially) in the reading of a novel becomes deliberate in the participation in liturgy. Here roles are set before us over and over again and so it is far more likely that we will be influenced by them and take on the roles presented to us. Not only do we encounter them more frequently, but they are presented to us with heightened significance and often in both auditory and visual fashion. Liturgy itself elaborates “imaginative variations of our own ego” and presents to us a “narrative understanding of ourselves” in a much clearer and more forceful manner than fiction does. Not just literature, but liturgy tries to free us from a “narcissistic, egoistic and stingy ego”! Yet, this is not simply a penitential identity of a self as sinful or guilty, but the liturgical actions also form liturgical identity in broader ways. Going through the liturgical year together with others within a community identifies the liturgical subject as a fasting and feasting, lost and redeemed, needy and generous, giving and receptive self. The particular capacities and incapacities of the self as both active and passive (or suffering or acted upon) are interpreted, shaped, and constituted within the context of liturgical community. This is a self, even an individual self, but not an isolated self. It is a self as experienced within community, committed to it (maybe to varying degrees) and accepting its liturgical descriptions as its own, taking them on during the liturgical rites and identifying with them as accurate descriptions of itself. Such appropriation is obviously never complete or perfect—this is partly why we do it again each year or sometimes each liturgy—and it can be refused, but the person who chooses to enter liturgy and participate in it, at least opens him- or herself to such identification. SELFHOOD IN CONVERSION AND TRANSFORMATION Yet, this is not a static identity; it is one that is invited to transformation. The discussion of narrative identity already implied this. Ricœur frequently stresses the potential of narrative to call us to transformation or refigure our lives in some form. The notion of the world of the text leads to “authentic self-understanding” (TA, 301). That is to say, “to understand is not to project oneself into the text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds that interpretation unfolds”

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(TA, 301; emphasis added). Such self-understanding is not immediate, but requires the narrative interpretation: “The refiguration by narrative confirms this aspect of self-knowledge which goes far beyond the narrative domain, namely, that the self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly by the detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which are articulated on the symbolic mediations which always already articulate action and, among them, the narratives of everyday life.”19 This implies that identity is not simply a personal affair but is always shaped by the broader social imaginary.20 This makes possible a “metamorphosis of the ego” (TA, 301). As demonstrated earlier, he makes similar claims in his broader work on narrative. The article which constituted the final lecture of the Gifford Lectures (but was not included in Oneself as Another) is also instructive in this regard. In this lecture, Ricœur envisions a “summoned self” that responds to various types of “calls”: the prophetic vocation, the summons to imitate Christ, the Augustinian notion of the inner teacher, and the testimony of conscience (FS, 262–276). The prophet is addressed by God, his or her self “decentered” and “unsettled” and sent on a mission to proclaim the divine word. Similarly, the later “Christian” versions of imitatio Christi, inner teacher, and the voice of conscience imply a dialogue with the divine that calls and redirects the self for mission. Thus, the tradition he examines highlights the importance of unsettling self-identity and summoning the self to a different vision of the world (FS, 273). It is interesting that his original delivery of the Gifford lectures ended with this focus on the decentering of the self, which is now mostly missing from Oneself as Another. His broader biblical hermeneutics however often takes up this idea of the unsettling of the self and its potential reorientation via the world of the biblical texts. At the same time, this “unsettling” remains fairly passive in Ricœur, leading apparently primarily to greater self-understanding or acknowledgment of one’s incapacity to do the good and dependence on the divine. Liturgy provides a much more substantive and insistent call to transformation that perceives the penitent as capable of genuine change. First of all, liturgy actually amplifies this function of unsettling and decentering. Although it requires us to confess our faults and be truthful about them in the sense of identifying ourselves as the ones who have perpetrated the fault and caused harm to happen, at the same time it does not remain there, but continually calls to transformation, both in the rites of confession itself and in the broader liturgical context of the cycles of penitence and celebration. Liturgy posits the self as capable of transformation and sets before it the possibilities of such transformation, especially in the stories of sinners who have undergone radical change in their move to sainthood or, in many Protestant forms of worship, in the call to and testimony of conversion and its radical change of life. Language of dispossession or metanoia is frequent

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in liturgical rites. They all aim to leave us not as we are but in some way to undo the self and create a new kind of self, whether this is through concrete ascetic practices, like fasting or other forms of abstention, or through more amorphous expressions in personal prayer. How else does liturgy seek to effect such transformation? On some level it does so through exhortation, by telling us over and over again that we must change and live a new life. The repetition itself is important here. Liturgy crucially recognizes that a simple call to transformation will not be sufficient, but that this needs to occur over and over again, both to reinforce the call and to form and sustain new habits of behavior. Krueger, in his important study on the formation of the self in Byzantium, claims that “the sincerity of one’s contrition, it would seem, increases with repetition.”21 On a different but related level, this is accomplished through the examples, both biblical and from the tradition. Setting both positive and negative examples before the worshippers shows them vividly what constitutes right and wrong ways to live and emphasizes that they ought to follow the good rather than the evil, sometimes by painting the consequences elaborately, whether in narratival or iconic fashion. It is maybe not coincidental that images of the last judgment are often featured over the entrances of both Eastern and Western churches or on their walls, prominently displaying the punishment of sinners and the reward for the righteous. Yet, this happens not just in images but in the continual reference to the saints, in the use of biblical examples within the rite, and obviously also in preaching. In the Orthodox liturgy, this is accomplished particularly vividly in the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete that displays a long litany of biblical examples and explicitly exhorts the participants to follow certain examples and avoid many others. Krueger has argued that this and other early liturgical texts served to shape a Byzantine “liturgical subject” that recognized itself as sinful and in need of redemption. He points to the exegetical and hermeneutic dimension of this in its use of biblical imagery: “In its emotionally charged performance, the Great Kanon both expresses and produces contrition. Its use of biblical models renders exegesis an instrument of subjectivation, a reading of the Bible to make the self and make it known.”22 He argues that this occurs in a unified fashion, such that it “encouraged a recognition of the self as sinner in need of divine assistance.”23 In that respect, liturgical texts and images had a moral function. Krueger concludes that “the rites and offices of the church offered the forum where Byzantine Christians learned to apply a penitential Bible to themselves. The liturgy produces not only the body and blood of Christ, but also a Christian congregation—itself a body of Christ— situated in liturgical time, revisiting the life of Christ in the course of the liturgical calendar.” Byzantine Christians learned to “perform a self” before a merciful God.24 But this is not simply a recognition of the self as sinful.

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Rather, it is a call to change, to turning away from sin and instantiating a new self, transformed by penitence and developing new capacities for action in different, non-sinful ways. Similarly, the liturgies of Orthodox holy week contrast the choice of Judas with that of the prostitute who anointed Jesus, exhorting the listeners not to follow Judas’ example of betrayal, but instead to emulate the prostitute’s example of repentance and subsequent faithfulness. For example: “As the sinful woman was bringing her offering of myrrh, the disciple was scheming with lawless men. She rejoiced in pouring out her precious gift. He hastened to sell the precious one. She recognized the Master, but Judas parted from him. She was set free, but Judas was enslaved to the enemy. How terrible his slothfulness! How great her repentance! O Savior, who didst suffer for our sakes, grant us also repentance, and save us.”25 This was dramatized even more vividly in the many Syriac poems about this “sinful woman” or in the liturgical poet Cassia’s (or Kassiana’s) famous hymn, which is still sung during the Orthodox matins for Holy Wednesday.26 Mary of Egypt, who is commemorated during Orthodox Great Lent and whose story is read in some communities during the celebration of the Great Canon on the Thursday of the fifth week of Lent, is another dramatic example.27 But the entire sanctoral cycle in many ways has this function of inspiring us to change and live a holier life. The stories of radical conversions or the admirable exploits of missionaries or evangelists presumably serve a similar function in evangelical Protestant contexts. In this respect, it is interesting that these are often exorbitant examples of either abysmal sin or extraordinary holiness—or often both, moving from one to the other. It is almost as if the liturgical composers consider extreme examples to make the point more vividly or compel the participants or hearers more effectively. Exaggeration seems to play an important role in general, at least in the Orthodox tradition: as already mentioned when discussing limit-expressions, many personal and liturgical prayers traffic in superlatives, identifying oneself as the worst of sinners and judging oneself infinitely worse than anyone else. Obviously, these expressions cannot all have been meant literally. Rather they function rhetorically: they display the conviction that especially dramatic examples and superlative language will work more effectively in moving people to conversion or transformation. Maybe they even partly grow out of frustration with liturgical ineffectiveness, just as more elaborate eucharistic liturgies and greater levels of secrecy in the conversion process emerged when personal commitments seemed to have become laxer and Christianity more widely spread and thus affiliation with it more politically desirable.28 But the liturgies most definitely expect such change and exhort its participants to it. Even these extreme examples provide a vision of the self as capable of radical change and able

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to undertake the pursuit of a holy life, all the way to theosis, likeness to the divine. Another important element of this is forgiveness, which plays a crucial role in enabling the self to move from identifying as sinful or guilty to conceiving the hope for a new kind of self. Ricœur explicitly addresses the topic of forgiveness in the concluding section of his monumental Memory, History, Forgetting.29 He seems to think of this as a quasi-religious excursus in his philosophical work and one can sense some of his discomfort as he ventures into these more religious areas in a philosophical text. He situates forgiveness in the context of forgetting and promising. Forgiveness releases the other self from guilt and restores the capacity to act (MHF, 457–58). Ricœur sees a paradox in forgiveness, in that it refuses to be institutionalized: “My thesis here is that a significant asymmetry exists between being able to forgive and being able to promise, as is attested by the impossibility of genuine political institutions of forgiveness.” He argues that “at the heart of selfhood and at the core of imputability, the paradox of forgiveness is laid bare, sharpened by the dialectic of repentance in the great Abrahamic tradition.” Therefore what is at stake “is nothing less than the power of the spirit of forgiveness to unbind the agent from his act” (MHF, 459). He castigates the attempt to institutionalize forgiveness as a “monstrous failure” and cites the Catholic rite of penance as one such example that gives rise to many “perplexities” (MHF, 488). Yet, why would ritualized forms of forgiveness have to constitute such monstrous failure or invite such censure or perplexity? Clearly when the rite is not engaged authentically or becomes a way of excusing oneself or skirting responsibility, it has not functioned as it ought. But surely the function of rites of forgiveness is precisely to unbind the agent for new life, without thereby erasing the deed or its memory entirely.30 For Ricœur, forgiveness releases the other from existential guilt; it “unbinds” the “agent” and “reveals the who.” This assumes that agent and action can be separated and that a new beginning is possible: “This unbinding would mark the inscription, in the field of the horizontal disparity between power and act, of the vertical disparity between the great height of forgiveness and the abyss of guilt. The guilty person, rendered capable of beginning again: this would be the figure of unbinding that commands all the others” (MHF, 490). The agent released from his or her action is now able to act anew. A capacity for continuing is resurrected: “Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults. He is held to be restored to his capacity for acting, and action restored to its capacity for continuing.” He describes the renewed capacity as “signaled in the small acts of consideration in which we recognized the incognito of forgiveness played out on the public stage,” but also in the “restored capacity” for promising, which “projects action

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toward the future.” He concludes: “The formula for this liberating word, reduced to the bareness of its utterance, would be: you are better than your actions” (MHF, 493). He also returns to this possibility of pardon in one of the final essays of his The Just, where he speaks of pardon as a “healing of memory” or “the end of mourning”: “Pardon gives memory a future” (J, 144). Forgiveness allows a benevolent sacred to emerge instead of one focused on vengeance.31 Ricœur’s dismissal of ecclesial rites of repentance in this context seems rather harsh. Even his reference to the “benevolent sacred” is to Greek tragedy not the Christian tradition (J, 145). He appears to see little mimetic potential in religious texts and practices concerning forgiveness. Yet at the same time, he cites the abundance of feasting as a possible way of getting beyond the economy of reciprocity at work in retribution. The ceremonial character of festive exchange, including certain ritual gestures, can open a space for hope and love and the possibility for pardon and forgiveness (CR, 244–45). Closer analysis of rites of repentance and forgiveness can confirm this more optimistic evaluation. One example of this is the Orthodox “Vespers of Forgiveness,” celebrated on the afternoon or evening of the Sunday of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (the final Sunday before the start of Great Lent). At the end of this service, which begins Lent proper, every person in the congregation prostrates or bows before every other member— from the smallest child to the greatest bishop—and asks the other for forgiveness. Both say: “Forgive me a sinner!” and both respond: “God forgives (and I forgive).”32 Forgiveness is thus enacted within the liturgy; not only are words said, but they are performed via prostration and embrace. A world is opened in which repentance and forgiveness become possible, not only for this moment, but for the coming weeks of Lent begun by this service. Although this ceremony is grounded in the liturgical texts and prepared by the service preceding it, the performed actions give it its full meaning and promise. Of course, appropriation is still necessary. Presumably one could go through the rite in a merely perfunctory manner and continue to nurse one’s grudges.33 The fact that invariably some people will leave before this ceremony or choose not to attend at all points to the fact that there is at least some recognition that genuine forgiveness is expected of them, that they cannot merely say the words without also enacting and practicing them on some level. The whole ceremony is marked by this tension or paradox. Even while the ceremony of forgiveness is enacted (in most parishes it takes quite a while and a circle forms around the entire church, visually creating a kind of community), it is a tradition in many places for the choir to sing the canon from the Paschal matins—the exorbitant celebration of the feast of the resurrection. The joy of Pascha is hence juxtaposed with the somber mood of repentance on the very

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threshold of Great Lent, where we are another seven weeks and many efforts removed from Pascha. The texts here enact a real transformation: narrative becomes life, and life is integrated into the world of the narrative. We can live differently because such a transfiguring vision has been pictured and enacted for us within the liturgy. Here remembering (we have been forgiven) and promising (I forgive you) come together in the rites of forgiveness. We become anew “capable” of action, because of the release granted through the ceremony of forgiveness. And this is not a mere solitary experience of an individual, but a communal and corporate effort that enacts mercy and forgiveness for all who willingly enter its world. Religious identity is formed by experiences such as these and especially by their repeated practice, as it occurs in a liturgical context. The liturgical structure of the rite provides the possibility for appropriating it for oneself and thus becoming a transformed self. On yet another level, liturgy also employs concrete more specific occasional actions to encourage people to change, such as practices of confession, various forms of anointing, and, most dramatically, rites of baptism and chrismation or confirmation.34 The language of turning around and radical change characterizes many baptismal liturgies. The legacy of expectation of a transformed, indeed holy, life deeply informs practices of baptism today and in the patristic age could lead to long delays in accepting baptism for fear of contracting further sin afterward and not being able to live up to the holy ideal of the Christian life. Rites of penitence partly tried to compensate for this by making a way for confession and repentance after baptism, which could only be undergone once. Even the biblical imagery of baptism already heavily emphasizes its impact on the repentant and now transformed self. The practices of immersion in water as a cleansing of the person and of wearing new, white clothes as a sign of purity and transformation all point to the profound impact baptism was supposed to have on the self. In some cultures, the person baptized (or ordained) is given a new name or the name is even first conferred at this moment in the cases of infants. In the Orthodox tradition, people are communed under their baptismal name, not their “secular” name, if the two differ. Given the important link between naming and identity, baptism here is clearly taken to identify and to some extent even inaugurate a new self. From the very start, then, the shaping of identity and personhood mattered deeply to the Christian vision and the shaping of such identity was implemented liturgically on multiple levels. Yet, such personal shaping of identity was not disconnected from the community. Baptism and chrismation were (and are) not just personal rites of transformation but entry points into the community. Early on, catechumens had to have a sponsor—of unblemished character—from the community who could vouch for the authenticity of their desire of conversion, assist them in the process, and serve as a guide

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and model. Today, this role is usually taken on by the godparents or in some traditions by the parents. Aside from this sponsor or godparent, the rites themselves clearly signal entry into the ecclesial community. Again, this is both explicitly said in the texts or rubrics for the rites, but also performed vividly in the actions. In the Orthodox tradition, a baptism begins in the back of the church (the narthex) with a dramatic turning away from the “world” and the “devil” (including a physical turning around) and then proceeds into the church, accompanied by the godparents or sponsor, and in various stages sometimes all the way into the sanctuary, but certainly into the midst of the gathered assembly. In most Christian traditions, rites of baptism have not just elements of personal confession and transformation, but also of entry into the community in some form. COMMUNAL IDENTITY BETWEEN FRAGILITY AND HOPE Liturgy thus enables and enacts a process of formation, of shaping those who participate in it into particular kinds of people within community. Its structures bind the person to the community and reality in such a way as to allow individuals to participate in and become part of something larger and broader than themselves, not necessarily to transcend their particularity but to open their concrete context up to this larger dimension. It endows the particular existence with greater significance, allows for meaning that is not limited just to the specific self but experienced within the broader life of the community. Liturgy accordingly does not shape only personal identity but also communal identity, and, indeed, personal identity within the communal. Liturgy shapes a congregation or a people, gathering them as one in concrete corporeal fashion. In liturgy, we dwell with each other, spend time with each other, and participate in each other’s paths and stories. We share joys and sorrows, as we feast and repent together. Liturgy not only explicitly encourages such sharing of life, it cannot exist without it. While it is difficult to sustain ascetic and penitential practices on one’s own, it is entirely impossible to celebrate on one’s own.35 Fasting becomes easier when done communally, but feasting requires community. Ricœur does not speak of alterity or community as frequently as some other French thinkers do.36 In fact, he is suspicious of Lévinas’ excessive emphasis on the other and his strong language of substitution and of becoming hostage to the other (OA, 338; also FS, 108–26). Yet, he argues that his hermeneutics of the self introduces a “new dialectic of the same and the other” which “attest that here the Other is not only the counterpart of the Same but belongs to the intimate constitution of its sense” (OA, 329). Greisch argues that “the

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maxim ‘the shortest route from self to self passes through the other’ teaches us not only something about how Ricœur thinks about the constitutive relationship between ipseity and alterity, but also characterizes his philosophical writing.”37 The self only posits or recognizes itself via the other. Indeed, in his final work, Ricœur elaborates this further in terms of self-recognition and recognition by others, which culminates in notions of respect (CR, 198). He contends that within this plural human existence acting and being acted upon, activity and passivity, are reversible, so that “each agent is the patient of the other” (OA, 330). In this text, he tries to find a middle way between a Husserlian emphasis on the self and self-esteem and a Lévinasian emphasis on the ethical call of the other. The other is not an object but a subject who “perceives me as other than himself” and we “intend the world together” so as to build “communities of persons” (OA, 332). The other is always already given in experience and yet I never have access to the other’s experiences directly, as they are experienced within the other’s personal subjectivity (OA, 333). He suggests that the movement from the other to the self has priority from an ethical perspective, while the movement from self to other has priority in an epistemological sense, at least on phenomenological grounds (OA, 335). In the face of what he considers the hyperbole and excess in Lévinas’ work, Ricœur wants to insist on the possibility of response, of receptivity, and responsibility, which require self-recognition (OA, 340–41). On the other hand, Ricœur chides Heidegger for a generic account of conscience that no longer recognizes other people (OA, 352). He concludes: “To these alternatives—either Heidegger’s strange(r)ness or Lévinas’s externality—I shall stubbornly oppose the original and originary character of what appears to me to constitute the third modality of otherness, namely being enjoined as the structure of selfhood” (OA, 354; emphasis his).38 That is to say, both selfattestation and injunction by the other must be maintained. He also insists that a certain ambiguity in identifying the other must be preserved: “Perhaps the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not know and cannot say whether this Other, the source of the injunction, is another person whom I can look in the face or who can stare at me, or my ancestors for whom there is no representation, to so great an extent does my debt to them constitute my very self, or God—living God, absent God—or an empty place” (OA, 355). The one who “calls or enjoins” the self cannot be identified philosophically.39 Liturgical subjects are continually enjoined, called forth, by human and divine others in liturgy. As previously discussed, the language and even the structures of liturgy are for the most part dialogical in character. In liturgy, participants face the other, not only in the ethical sense of confrontation or the theological sense of facing the divine, but also in the interpersonal sense of sharing in the community and being shaped together as an ecclesial body.

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Identity cannot, in the final account, be established on one’s own, in isolation from others. It is always identity with or within community, taken on from others, learned from others, but also participating in a shared sense of identifying as a group. This can obviously become problematic when communal identity is shaped in contradistinction from others and identified by keeping others out, but it can also open space for hospitality and generosity.40 Liturgical scholars do often stress the importance of liturgy for ethical formation on personal and communal levels. Don Saliers develops a link between liturgy and ethics in an early article under that title, later reprinted in various volumes. He laments that “there has to date been a paucity of dialogue between liturgical studies and ethics, even though it seems obvious that there are significant links between liturgical life, the confession of faith, and the concrete works which flow from these” and argues that “the relations between liturgy and ethics are most adequately formulated by specifying how certain affections and virtues are formed and expressed in the modalities of communal prayer and ritual action. These modalities of prayer enter into the formation of the self in community.”41 In this article and in other works, he tries to spell out the implications of liturgy for a life of ethical and social action shaped by the liturgy.42 Susan Ashbrook Harvey shows how Syriac liturgical texts served this function in the early centuries. She contends for Ephrem’s hymns of nativity: “Proper celebration of the liturgical feast of the nativity, then, included ethical activity to transform the civic order. The faithful practice of each Christian— trained and prepared in the Nativity vigil—contributed to the body of the whole: a congregation (the body of Christ) enacting liturgy throughout its whole body, the streets of the city. The civic body would be healed of its injustice and oppression.”43 She demonstrates that Jacob of Serug, a later Syriac liturgical poet, similarly expects his congregation to be transformed by the liturgy and their identities shaped communally accordingly.44 Bruce Morrill stresses the political dimension of such communal identity even more strongly and insists on it in contemporary practice.45 Morrill actually explicitly refers to Ricœur’s work on the world of the text as useful for such political engagement and active participation in liturgy.46 Ricœur also sometimes comments on the importance of social bonds more broadly. For example, in his Kluge Prize Speech he says: “The question arises whether the social bond is constituted only in the struggle for recognition, or whether there is not also, at the origin, a sort of good will tied to the resemblance of one person to another in the great human family.”47 He argues that testimony and promise-making cultivate a shared world: “The credit granted to the word of others makes the social world a shared intersubjective world” (MHF, 165). This creates community: “What confidence in the word of others reinforces is not just the interdependence, but the shared common humanity,

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of the members of the community” (MHF, 166). This shared humanity is confirmed also by the fact that “transferences of meaning are possible from one language to another; in short, because we can translate.”48 In his interview with Raynova he goes even further: “But life is nothing if it is not a life-with. Now, as soon as we go into the life-with, into the life together with others, we are in daily linguistic practice. You should not think that language is always structured by logic; language is also the daily practice of exchange with others, the simple dialogical dimension” (AGT, 681).49 Thus, language always already presupposes a shared community of meaning. This involves not only the present experience of dialogue, but also the ways in which meaning is shaped via a shared past. Kearney stresses the importance of memory for communal identity: “It is precisely because stories proceed from stories in this manner that historical communities are ultimately responsible for the formation and re-formation of their own identity. One cannot remain constant over the passage of historical time—and therefore remain faithful to one’s promises and covenants—unless one has some minimal remembrance of where one comes from, of how one came to be what one is. For Ricoeur, then, identity is a form of memory” (PR, 104). Ricœur affirms that the mythical or imaginary “nucleus of a society is only indirectly recognizable. But it is indirectly recognizable not only by what is said (discourse), but also by what and how one lives (praxis), and third, as I suggested, by the distribution between different functional levels of a society” (PR, 118; emphasis in original). Thus, the broader cultural imaginary is shaped by discourses, practices, and social structures. Liturgy is an especially good example of this, because it combines discourse and action within ritual functions in a way that few other aspects of the imaginary do and reinforces them via repetition and the heightened emotion that comes with feasting. While this sort of communal identity or at least contribution to shaping social bonds occasionally appears in Ricœur’s work on narrative and justice, it seldom comes up in his biblical hermeneutics, which are much more exclusively focused on personal belief. In an essay on pastoral praxis, he does admit once that “we are also a character in others’ stories and histories, in that story that others set forth and write, that they write in setting it out, and that they set out in writing it. In short, being caught up in others’ stories is what creates an inextricable aspect to our lives” (FS, 310). So, while Ricœur recognizes various aspects of the shaping of communal identity through memory and narrative, his strongest emphasis is on the other as a source of an ethical injunction that makes the person more aware of the structure of otherness even within identity and selfhood. Liturgy practices such calling of the self constantly—yet, it almost always does so within the context of community.50 The very structure of liturgy presumes this. Although it often employs very personal language, appealing

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directly to those who have come to worship, the plural dimension is always already implied via the use of prayers that are often centuries old (at least in the Orthodox tradition) and addressed to everyone who comes and hears and responds to them (in all Christian traditions and in many other forms of religious ritual). Regardless of how I choose to act—in repentance or in defiance, in joy or indifference—I am always already joining the group of all those others who went before me and responded in similar ambivalent or wholehearted fashion. In many ways, we come into liturgy to know we are not alone. Liturgy recognizes that weakness and suffering isolates and thus treats it as a shared and communal problem. We encounter healing and compassion in the community that mourns, suffers, confesses, and celebrates with us, together. If we do not, then the liturgy—or maybe, more precisely, the community—has failed. At the same time, we are also prodded to provide such assistance to others and practice such compassion for the weak. Ricœur argues for this as an important dimension of the model of forgiveness on social levels in light of the suffering we have inflicted on each other. To examine “the entanglement of our stories with the stories of others” enables “the exchange of the memory of sufferings inflicted and sustained.” This also calls for “imagination and sympathy.” The “poetic power” of forgiveness “consists in shattering the law of the irreversibility of time by changing the past, not as a record of all that has happened but in terms of its meaning for us today.”51 This “extra” or “surplus of charity” teaches us to show “compassion and tenderness” via “imagining” the suffering of others.52 In a different essay in the same collection, he reads fragility no longer in terms of fallibility but as the weakness of those in precarious situations that calls us to responsibility: “We feel . . . required or enjoined by the fragile to do something, to help, but, even better, to foster growth, to allow for accomplishment and flourishing.”53 We must therefore awaken the kind of capability that consists in such response to fragility and vulnerability. By inviting us to confession and modeling it for us, by encouraging us to bring our own fragility to liturgy in a variety of ways and treating it compassionately, liturgy also invites and encourages us to do the same for others. All participants together are addressed by the language, symbolism, models, postures, and gestures of liturgy. Liturgy only functions if it functions as a community of persons, a koinonia of fraternity. Beyond enveloping the person in a broader community that witnesses to, assists with, and sustains these personal feelings, acts, and commitments, liturgy also provides a communal identity that is not simply about support of the person but qualitatively different from a merely personal experience. Liturgy shapes communal identity. Rituals give that broader identity meaning and significance. This happens on smaller scales—family rituals like marriages, baptism of children,

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funerals—and on broader levels, as the entire ecclesial community celebrates together during festal seasons or even one-time events like the dedication of a church or chapel. Participating in these shared rituals binds the community together, creates a plural experience that would be impossible alone or even with very few people. It also magnifies the affective and corporeal dimensions: feasting functions quite differently in a packed crowd than it does with just a couple of people gathered. What sort of identity does liturgy ascribe to this crowd or community? It presents it essentially as a stumbling people in pursuit of holiness while acknowledging that this is a pursuit and hope, not yet a reality. The images and narratives of the saints—in liturgical texts and icons—are treated as guides to and foretaste of that holy community and we are constantly exhorted to imitate them, both personally and as a community. Ritual shapes community in fundamental ways and maybe in some ways communal identity is only truly possible with some ritual functions (obviously this applies not only to the religious). Ritual forms and cements social bonds, as we come together to mourn or celebrate. Participating in rituals together deeply forms communities and creates and sustains a sense of belonging. It also conveys meaning on communal levels in ways very little else is able to accomplish. In his discussion of ideology, Ricœur stresses its importance in shaping and preserving social identity, while utopia seeks to challenge the injustices of society. Liturgy is especially able to enact these “conserving” and “challenging” dimensions of social identity via its shared ritual activity. What the communal dimension of liturgy—both in the literal sense of gathering with other people and in the figurative sense of the broader tradition—accomplishes maybe above all is to convey and cultivate a sense of hope.54 Left alone with our frailty and finitude, adrift in a world of chaos and suffering, it is easy to despair. We can take hope that life has meaning, that suffering may be relieved, that injustice will be overturned and that justice will reign, through the rituals that instantiate that hope. Communal rituals of mourning, burial, and remembrance of the dead give hope to those left behind, sustain them in their grieving. Rituals of feasting and celebrating give hope for future possibilities to our lives and mark out important moments through the communal celebration. There is maybe little that sustains and even increases hope more than singing and celebrating together. Liturgy does not just speak of hope in some elusive fashion, it does not simply gesture to it as a far-away eschatological possibility eventually worked by divine intervention, rather it instantiates such hope within its very structures. It does not erase our fragility, does not eliminate our weaknesses and frailties, does not render us magically faultless, but supports us within our fragile condition and enables us to develop new capacities. If we enter the liturgical worlds and participate in them in the shared experience of community, their

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structures—and the support of the community—can enhance our capacities to work for transformation and to make hope real in shared activity toward that end. If there is genuine transfiguration through the world of liturgy—for persons and communities—hope must begin to become a living reality within it. Ricœur likens the festive in its “ceremonial character” to “requests for pardon,” opening spaces for hope on social and political levels (CR, 245). Liturgy not only enables expressions of confession, requests for pardon, and gestures of forgiveness, but it also provides a communal context within which to develop new capacities, practice compassion, foster friendships, exercise hospitality, and celebrate together.

Conclusion

Fragility, fallibility, fault, finitude have become something close to f-words in the philosophy of religion.1 Love, abundance, excess, and eschatology are the order of the day. Yet, for much of human history, religion was the means for expressing grief, for confronting suffering, for coping with failure and inadequacy. Even celebratory feasting was often linked to times of difficulty: either to moments of transition wrought with danger or fear, like birth, maturity, and death, or to periods of abstention or fasting in annually recurring cycles (such as Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Great Lent). People turn to religion—and especially to communal ritual—at times of trouble, insecurity, or fear. Religion at its best always grapples with the tension between human finitude, fragility, or failure, on the one hand, and the hope for healing, succor, and consolation, on the other. Ricœur’s hermeneutics maintains this tension maybe better than any other contemporary approach to religion. His philosophical work moves from fallibility to capability, from evil to justice, from defilement to mutual esteem. His religious work stresses both human weakness and divine hope. Ricœur never abandoned the dual fundamental convictions that the human being is fragile, fallible, and often at fault, but also that good is ultimately more fundamental than evil and able to triumph over it. Yet, Ricœur’s religiously inflected work, at least after the early investigation into symbol and myth, explores such insights primarily via the interpretation of texts, preeminently the biblical texts, although he clearly goes far beyond texts in his broader hermeneutic work to an analysis of our actions, lives, and identities. Rarely does he venture to consider how symbols of hope might be ritually instantiated, how biblical texts might move us to transformative action, or how liturgical and ritual structures might increase our capacities. Yet, ritual speaks of the concrete truths of fragility in our lives: testifies or attests to it and manifests a reality that can address it. It does so 177

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by constructing a world, by mimetically “figuring” fragility and hope in concrete ways. It employs symbolic language of concordance and discordance, of conflict and reconciliation, to speak authentically of the messiness of our lives and longings of our hearts. It provides richly imaginative constructions of memory and hope that creatively convey the promise of new possibilities while providing the impetus of style and structure that enable their instantiation. In all these respects, liturgy constructs and depends upon a hermeneutics of personal and communal identity. What, then, has the juxtaposition of Ricœur’s hermeneutics with liturgy provided? How has the dialectical conversation enriched both sides of the dialogue? How does philosophy profit from an engagement with ritual and, conversely, how is the attempt to understand liturgical or ritual practice illuminated by taking seriously hermeneutic considerations? What might it mean to provide a “hermeneutics” of liturgy or of ritual? Ricœur’s work had already thoroughly demonstrated that philosophy can engage religious symbols and texts without ceasing to be philosophical or degenerating into a confessional apologetics. In Ricœur’s writings, philosophy remains rigorously philosophical, even when it considers religious sources and despite his own “adherence” to Christian faith. That is not to say, of course, that theological or even confessional use cannot be made of philosophical insights or methodology.2 Yet, Ricœur’s work shows us that it is possible to draw on religious symbols and texts and to interpret them philosophically for an understanding of the human condition, just as it is possible to do this for aesthetic, historical, political, or other sorts of sources. Religion is an important dimension of the human experience and deserves philosophical consideration, even calls for philosophical understanding, partly precisely because of its deeply personal, sometimes contentious, and often mysterious character. Ricœur’s discussions of the symbols of evil and fallibility, of the polyphony and limit-expressions of biblical discourses, and of the agapic dimensions of mutual recognition and forgiveness remain rigorously philosophical and thereby provide a model for how philosophy might take such sources and dimensions of experience seriously. This can consequently also serve as a guide for taking similarly seriously the ritual expressions of human religious behavior: the religious practices of fasting and feasting, participation in sacred ceremonies and sacramental activities, liturgical forms of regular communal gatherings and the rites that govern and shape them—and the many ways in which this forms the identity and conduct of participating individuals and communities. Philosophy can and must take such forms of expression seriously, examine them for their meaning, and seek to understand how they function in human experience. It should be possible to bring a genuine academic critical spirit to religious sources without thereby denigrating them or emptying them of their

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substance. To show ways in which religious—and specifically ritual—logic, texts, or actions function in the human experience is not to deny or disprove that the divine might be at work in them, but simply to set that question aside for the philosophical examination. This does not mean—as Ricœur showed eloquently especially in his examination of Freud—that such activities are thereby emptied of their specifically religious meaning and significance. Nor does it deny the worshippers’ conviction that the divine might be revealed in such practices or speak to the participants through them, just as a philosophical examination of biblical texts neither denies nor validates divine inspiration of such texts. Philosophy, instead, focuses on the human expressions of religion, which constitute a crucial, widespread, and highly influential part of human experiences throughout history and across global cultures in manifold fashion. A philosophical investigation of ritual and liturgy, whether with hermeneutic or phenomenological tools, enriches our understanding of human behavior, both in its regular day-to-day or week-to-week participation in religious activities and in its more excessive and elaborate expressions of feasting and celebration. Shorn of some of its Bultmannian and Durkheimian presuppositions—of which he himself already became increasingly more critical in his later years—Ricœur’s work can be a valuable guide for such a study. More specifically, as the present investigation has sought to demonstrate, examining the structure and impetus of liturgical rites of confession, penitence, and forgiveness can illuminate human experiences of precarity in its various forms, from fragility or frailty, to fallibility or fault, all the way to evil and guilt. It also reveals how humans have sought means of relief or redemption from consuming guilt or for repairing relationships on individual and communal levels. The investigation into penitential behavior and practices highlights dimensions of the self that bring together questions of attribution or ascription of actions but also the possibility of transformation and shaping of new identity. It shows the various ways in which human beings as individuals and communities try to cope with guilt or harm, how they negotiate broken relationships, and why the promise of forgiveness is an essential feature of many religious traditions and a crucial part of human interaction even beyond religious contexts. A philosophical investigation into ritual structures can also help us understand how identity is shaped in religious communities but perhaps even more widely in other sorts of committed groups that employ some ritual functions yet are less explicitly “religious” in character. Entering into the “world” of the ritual allows participants to take on new ways of being that are modeled for them in the ritualized world, both in its narratival and aesthetic dimensions. In this way, the “world” of liturgy, because it is so rich in physicality, corporeality, and affectivity, can expand and give substance to the Ricœurian notion

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of the “world of text.” It also demonstrates the interactions of various literary and aesthetic dimensions of the liturgical world in the art and architecture of the ritual space, the plurality and multiplicity of texts, musical settings, and other aspects of the “performative” arrangements, demonstrating the ways in which the world functions and is made “real” via movements, gestures, corporeal postures, and their impact on affect and emotion. In this regard, a philosophical examination of liturgy and ritual can clarify—in more substantive fashion than Ricœur himself did—why the “biblical” or religious world might differ from the fictional one, why it functions more emphatically—sometimes more violently—than other worlds, and why it impacts those who enter within it more profoundly than reading a novel does. It is not just because of the God-reference in its texts, as Ricœur points out for the biblical sources, but because of the many ways in which ritual functions in people’s lives. The entering of the “world” in religious ritual goes far beyond the reading of fictional or even biblical texts: rituals are entered more fully, more actively, and more physically, involving body and affect more profoundly than reading does. These elements are also engaged far more frequently: liturgy is repetitious by its very nature. If the world is entered every week it has the potential to shape its participants in deeper and more fundamental ways than re-reading a novel does. The ritual repetition and its instantiation in affect and bodily participation serve to open the world more frequently, more emphatically, and more vividly, making the entry into the world more physically real. The “myth” or “narrative” of liturgy is more richly presented and generally more participatory, which may also be why it forms such a central part of human religious expression in almost all cultures. Furthermore, a philosophical examination can shed light on how imagination—in memory and creativity—functions to carry on tradition and keep it a living reality for those who stand within it. At the same time, it can provide a wider and more nuanced perspective on how “truth” operates in religious forms of expressions and how it characterizes religious practices in terms of authentic participation and adherence to the community and tradition. Such investigation enriches our sense of how faithfulness and commitment are fostered in religious communities and contexts, while also broadening our often very limited understandings of truth or historicity as correspondence to facts or data. It thus moves us away from dealing with religion only in terms of doctrine or belief and comprehending religious truth solely in terms of the coherence of such beliefs or compatibility of various doctrinal statements. All this provides a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of how religious adhesion works and how it is expressed, cultivated, shaped, and maintained via the participation in ritual activities and practices. This goes a long way toward explaining why religious ritual has been such a crucial element of the human experience in most cultures and why it continues to figure

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prominently in religious commitment, even when individual beliefs might be challenged by various aspects of the broader culture. What, conversely, does the hermeneutic method—especially as it is employed by Ricœur—add to liturgical or ritual studies? How can approaching liturgy with a philosophical hermeneutics enhance our understanding of it? What might a hermeneutics of liturgy entail? While this study has not attempted a comprehensive response to that question, some suggestions can certainly be made in light of the dialogue undertaken with Ricœur’s works. Ricœur defines hermeneutics not just as an interpretation of texts, but in terms of a “reading” of the human experience: “If we succeed in understanding that the entirety of human existence is a text to be read, we will be at the threshold of that general hermeneutic, by means of which I have tried to define the task of the next philosophy.”3 Accordingly, following the lead of his interpretation of action and narrative, not just the literal texts, but also the actions and gestures of liturgy or ritual can be read and interpreted like texts, as a kind of language. They convey meaning through symbol, metaphor, polyphony, paradox, dialogue, and other means of style. All these can be analyzed for their function in specific contexts and practices. The hermeneutic circle and three-fold mimesis are valuable tools for such an understanding. Not only must our understanding of liturgy and ritual always be guided by the relationships between parts and wholes, the instantiation in particular situations and their broader contexts, the received texts and practices of the tradition in conversation with contemporary forms of living and performing them. We must also investigate more fully how the configured practices and ceremonies are prefigured in life, construct fundamental human experiences of concordance and discordance, and, in turn, transfigure their participants. In many ways, liturgy and ritual function in narratival fashion and Ricœur’s analysis of the manifold aspects of narrative are eminently helpful for understanding them more fully. Ricœur’s work can be a valuable guide for much fuller explorations of these dimensions of the liturgical worlds. This does not mean, of course, that all liturgical actions and practices must be likened to texts. Rather, it broadens our understanding of liturgical “language,” seeing how it is instantiated in many nonverbal ways that speak meaningfully even if they are not literal or verbal and cannot be construed as texts or even quasi-texts. Just as philosophical examination of religion must move beyond a focus solely on texts or doctrine (or beliefs that can be stated in verbal affirmations), so a study of liturgy must continue moving beyond a preoccupation with liturgical texts to appreciate how ritual conveys meaning in richly embodied practices and the manifold other ways in which rites function beyond the words that might be uttered in a particular ceremony. Second, Ricœur’s work can illuminate and bring a new perspective to discussions in liturgical and ritual studies about truth, meaning, and normativity

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of rites or liturgical traditions. A hermeneutic approach to liturgy shows that its truth functions in terms of faithfulness to the events it ritualizes in ways that are far broader and more imaginative than literal historical objectivity. It also demonstrates that the truth of liturgical participation is one of manifestation and even attestation to experience, rather than that of a strict correspondence to a particular state of affairs. What is revealed or manifested in liturgy can be investigated for its meaning without making unprovable claims about a divine source, but also without denying that the divine might be at work and that this is the expectation with which people enter liturgy. It provides a richer account of the truth of ritual practices, much closer to how these practices actually developed in most religious traditions: not because they dropped wholesale from heaven, but because they developed in the experience of particular communities who experienced them as meaningful and life-giving. It may even aid in understanding liturgical change: how rites fade out of existence and new liturgical practices emerge over time in their interaction with the particular worlds or horizons of a specific community at a concrete place in time. Third, Ricœur’s work can inspire a more careful and nuanced look at the role of the imagination in worship practices. Imagination functions in both the “staging” or performance of memory and in the creativity of new developments. The events celebrated in liturgy or ritual are only meaningful and “true” for their participants if they are entered imaginatively, and such participation is enabled and heightened by creativity and beauty. Liturgy asks a lot of its participants: to envision themselves as participating in events temporally removed from them, often assumed to be extraordinary and superlative, and yet believed to be meaningful and transformative for them, today, in this mundane place and time. And it does so over and over again in ways that might easily become habitual or even rote. For liturgical practices to evoke authentic participation, generate faithful commitment, and provoke truthful conversion again and again, it must activate the “sympathetic” imagination of its participants and draw them into a world in which they can both envision themselves and by which they are continually challenged anew. Liturgy must provide, on the one hand, comfort and consolation, healing for frailty and sustenance for our fragility, and, on the other hand, confront fault, enable forgiveness, provoke transformation, and provide meaning to lives in the struggle of daily existence, marked by discordance and trauma. It can only do this if it continually maintains the balance between faithfulness to memory and tradition, the shaping of habit via repetition and familiarity, and the creative newness of promise and hope for a transformed reality. In this way, an understanding of liturgy informed by Ricœur’s hermeneutics can move liturgical theologians beyond the controversies over the extent to which liturgy functions mimetically and whether liturgy is primarily

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memorial or dramatic enactment. Ricœur widens our understanding of mimesis by helping us see how it functions both within and “outside” of explicitly configured liturgy, before we come to liturgy, within the ritualized configuration, and in its continued impact on our lives. Liturgy, then, is not just about what happens in the worship space, but about the complex ways in which its dimensions of configuring our hopes and fears are prefigured in life and in turn transfigure them. It also disabuses us of the idea that liturgy is somehow purely “spiritual” or concerned only with “theological” truths by showing how it serves as a configuration of primordial human experience, manifesting our struggles and revealing new possibilities for our lives. By applying such a hermeneutics to liturgy, we come to understand that the question whether liturgy is primarily about remembering or primarily about entry into an eschatological reality is a false dichotomy. While both elements are surely at work in liturgy, it is most fundamentally about the meaning of its world for our present existence. Liturgy neither magically transports us back in time to the events of Christ’s life nor mystically flies us forward into a heavenly paradise. Rather, it presents the meaning and significance of narrative events such that we can enter into their reality for us here and now, while continually challenging our present circumstances, assumptions, and prejudices with new possibilities, augmenting our reality and calling us to transformation. Finally, such a hermeneutic examination of ritual practices and their functioning can help us understand more fully how personal and communal identity is shaped by participation in them. It shows how liturgy can have ethical, social, and political dimensions without being reducible to them. Liturgy enables the confession of a fragile and fallible self, a self in need of consolation but also of penitence and forgiveness. A hermeneutic analysis of penitential practices helps us see how these function in shaping and enhancing our self-understanding—and how such new understanding of the self might then be put into practice in concrete actions. Liturgy requires an authentic and faithful self, but it provides the practices to make us so without assuming participants to be faultless. The repetition of ritual practices on weekly, monthly, and annual cycles provides ample, predictable opportunities for increased honesty and renewed faithfulness or commitment beyond the crucial threshold rituals that magnify such commitment in emotionally heightened, but rarer, ceremonies. Yet, ritual practices not only provide the space for a penitent or confessing self, but also challenge its participants continually to transformation. Liturgy calls for and enables transformation of the self, even the abandoning of a certain kind of self in favor of a different identity. Again, this can occur in both singular events of profound ritual significance and more regular opportunities where the stakes are not as high and participation more easily enabled through repeated and predictable occurrences. Such confession and

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conversion is made possible liturgically on both individual and communal levels; indeed, these are often enfolded in each other in complicated fashion. Liturgy presumes and consoles a fragile self, but simultaneously stages and engenders a capable self; it confronts faults and provides hope for renewal by providing concrete practices that allow for the development of new capacities. The imaginary space opened by liturgy profoundly shapes personal and communal identity, as its world is “appropriated” by the participants in worship. In liturgy, we experience ourselves as joined to others in our struggles of finitude, fragility, and fault. We come to know we are not alone and we experience possibilities for hope and joy. Our capacities are awakened, sustained, and strengthened by the participation in supportive and compassionate liturgical communities. We mourn and celebrate together. Beyond recognizing or acknowledging various aspects of our fragility, liturgy helps us within our finitude, including its most final versions, that of mourning and burying the dead. It thus also assists and consoles us, proposes tentative meaning to our struggles, binds us to others who face similar frailties, or provides us with examples of those who have persisted. In this way, liturgy can become a hospitable space for hope in the midst of our fragile and finite human existence. Liturgy, then, gives us hope: hope that we are not alone, hope that we can change, hope that there is meaning to our lives and our struggles. It gives us hope in the examples it sets before us, it gives us hope in the music that moves us, in the rites that speak of new beginnings and new possibilities. Above all, it gives us hope because it does not treat our weaknesses and failures as definitive, as who we are, but instead always lets us try again, each week, each year, each season of fasting and feasting. Surely, it also gives us hope in divine assistance, but even this hope is structurally inscribed in an earthly liturgy that takes into account our corporeal existence—and, indeed, cannot function without it. Liturgy provides us with a way to narrate our lives, to do so tangibly in motions, gestures, and music, and to experience all this within community. Liturgy does not erase our finitude or frailty; rather, it meets us in the very tension between fragility and hope.

Notes

PREFACE 1. Ricœur did speak very positively about his experiences at Taizé, where he spent many Easter celebrations and also visited on other occasions. See his “Postface,” in Jean-Marie Paupert, Taizé et l’église de demain (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1967), 247–51, which includes a brief statement about the book and a short interview. (It is striking, however, how often the questions employ the term “liturgy” and how seldom Ricœur’s replies do, often taking the question into a slightly different direction.) 2. Some of this interreligious dialogue has already been opened by Marianne Moyaert, Richard Kearney, and others (see the “Interlude” below for brief discussion and full references). 3. This is meant in the spirit of David Tracy’s advice: “Christianity experiences its own fullness only by fidelity to the dialectical oppositions become tensive polarities expressed in the distinct emphases (sometimes conflicts) in its three major classical expressions: the manifestory, liturgical, iconic, cosmic theologies of Orthodoxy; the analogical, sacramental, nature-grace theologies of Catholicism; the ethical, prophetic, sin-grace theologies of classical Reformation as well as modern neo-orthodox and evangelical Protestantism. Each of these major traditions in turn contain an amazing variety of forms, which these three very general terms (Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism) like all general terms for any religion cannot capture, unless—both philosophically and theologically—thinkers in each tradition can relate their own center of gravity to the other two great options. A Christian theologian today [a philosopher presumably even more so], in my judgment, should hold herself responsible for interpreting all three major Christian traditions without losing one’s own center of gravity.” David Tracy, “Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Dialectic of Religious Forms,” in Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion: The Legacy of Paul Ricœur, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 31.

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4. Michel Philibert says: “The trait that makes Paul Ricoeur unique in our time, and no less unique in the history of philosophy lies in the way he combines an eager and humble attention to practically all previous philosophers with a feeling for our present situation and a modest but strong determination to speak his own mind on any problem he deals with.” “The Philosophic Method of Paul Ricoeur,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 134. David Pellauer reports: “One of the jobs the dean and some of his colleagues in the Divinity School assigned me when I was Paul’s assistant, by the way, was to keep people from putting their books or articles directly in his hand, as he, of course, would almost always read them.” “Time of the Work: Reading Ricoeur Now,” Keynote Address to Ricoeur Society Annual Meeting 2014. See also his “Remembering Paul Ricoeur,” in A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 41–48, and Adriaan Peperzak’s lovely tribute: “Ricoeur and Philosophy: Ricoeur as Teacher, Reader, Writer,” in Ricoeur Across the Disciplines, ed. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2010), 12–29. Joél Schmidt is somewhat more critical of Ricœur’s generosity, especially in regard to his retrieval of religious symbols, in his “Generous to a Fault: A Deep, Recapitulative Pattern of Thought in Ricoeur’s Works,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 3.2 (2012): 38–51. Jean Grondin completes his introduction to Ricœur’s work with a touching anecdote about Ricœur’s final visit to Montreal where at age 86 and after a long lecture he received a completely incoherent question from a young student, graciously listened to it, took it seriously, slightly reformulated it to show its “interest and pertinence,” and responded to it generously. Jean Grondin, Paul Ricœur (Paris: PUF, 2013), 121.

CHAPTER 1 1. David Pellauer argues that this book “may conveniently be taken as a starting point for any analysis of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.” David Pellauer, “The Significance of the Text in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic Theory,” in Reagan, Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 99. Jérôme Porée also thinks of it “as the best possible entryway into the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur” and as a preview of his critical hermeneutics. Jérôme Porée, “The Question of Evil,” in A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, ed. Scott Davidson (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2020), 3, 4. 2. For an early discussion of Ricœur on religious symbols, see Beatriz Melano Couch, “Religious Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,” in Reagan, Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 115–31. For a whole collection of essays on The Symbolism of Evil, see the just mentioned companion to the text edited by Scott Davidson. [An earlier and shorter version of the present chapter is included in that companion.] For a theological appropriation or “retrieval” of Ricœur’s symbolism of evil, see Peter B. Ely, “Revisiting Paul Ricoeur on the Symbolism of Evil: A Theological Retrieval,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Understanding 24.1 (2001): 40–64. Ely provides a detailed summary of Ricœur’s interpretation of the Adamic myth in particular (the

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theological “retrieval” is confined to the last couple of pages). See also Jean Greisch, L’Herméneutique comme sagesse de l’incertitude (La Plaine Saint-Denis: Le Cercle Herméneutique Éditeur, 2015), 97–116 and idem, Paul Ricœur: L’itinérance du sens (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2001), 89–141. 3. For an analysis of Ricœur’s thought of the “fault” from Symbolism of Evil to Oneself as Another, see Guilhem Causse, “La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur. De l’identité symbolique et narrative, à l’identité gestuelle et langagière,” Études Ricœuriennes/ Ricœur Studies 9.2 (2018): 74–89. He argues for continuity between the two texts and interprets the fissure, gap or fault line of “faille” in terms of corporeal expression and gesture, arguing that “this fissure, this fault line, passes through the very heart of the human, but not as between two substances, but between two types of belonging, each lived as a whole, yet neither excluding the other” (75). 4. In his book on Freud, Ricœur argues that “the great symbols concerning the nature and origin of evil are not simply one set of symbols out of many, but are privileged symbols.” Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 527. 5. Marc-Antoine Vallée says that “the phenomenological hermeneutics elaborated in The Symbolism of Evil can help us understand philosophically something meaningful about sin as a human experience of evil expressed in a biblical and theological language.” Marc-Antoine Vallée, “A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Sin,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 38. Daniel Frey contends that Ricœur grapples with the issue of how one should “interpret symbolic-mythical discourse philosophically when one is fully aware—as too few philosophers have been!—of their specifically religious nature.” Daniel Frey, “On the Servile Will,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 59; emphases his. 6. The expression “sympathetic imagination” exists only in the English translation; the original French literally says “in sympathy and imagination,” a phrase Ricœur used extensively throughout his work. See the chapter on the imagination below. 7. A slightly longer version of this piece was also published in English separately as Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, trans. John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2007). In this piece Ricœur first discusses the relation between suffering, pain, and evil (an even much more obvious connection in French, which employs the same word le mal for both pain and evil), then considers various historical answers—beginning with myth and ending with theodicy—and concludes with a reflection on acting and feeling that acknowledges that the problem does not simply consist in thinking. 8. Indeed, Olivier Mongin considers this the central unifying theme in Ricœur’s work: Paul Ricœur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 248–49. 9. For a more sympathetic reading, see Brian Gregor’s account of the relationship between Ricœur and Eliade: Brian Gregor, “Between Barth and Eliade: Ricoeur’s Mediation of the Word and the Sacred,” in Davidson, Companion to the Symbolism of Evil, 103–22. 10. Richard Kearney raises this question as well in an interview: “But is it possible to extract the logos and yet leave the mythos intact?” (PR, 121). In his response

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Ricœur does not really address the question, but does distance himself more fully from Bultmann’s method of demythologization than he does in Symbolism of Evil (PR, 122). Kearney appropriates Ricœur’s notion of the wager, especially in regard to a move through a critical, quasi-atheist, position in order to return to faith, in much of his work. See his “Returning to God after God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur,” Research in Phenomenology 39.2 (2009), especially 172–83, and Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 11. Although Ricœur stresses the development of the “conscience” later in the book, here he seems to mean a growth in “consciousness” instead. (The words are the same in French and are obviously related in this context: a greater awareness or consciousness of sin or guilt may result in the development of the conscience.) 12. In a different context, Ricœur will later be slightly more hesitant about the idea that one could isolate a kernel of truth and carry it successfully across a process of demythologization to a new context (FS, 62). 13. In one of his early essays Ricœur proposes to undertake this, but does not really do so. He claims the philosophers ought to consult “penitential literature wherein the believing communities have expressed their avowal of evil” and look at “confession of sin,” but no such texts—much less practices—are actually discussed in his essay (CI, 425). 14. From Ode 2 of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, prayed on the first four weekday evenings of the first week of Great Lent and in its entirety again on the Thursday of the fifth week of Great Lent. Translation taken from The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002), 382. Being a victim of evil as well as a perpetrator of it are often mentioned within a few lines (or minutes) of each other. For example, the first ode includes the verse, “I am the man who fell among thieves . . . they have covered all my body with wounds, and I lie beaten and bruised,” and prays for Christ’s healing (ibid., 379). A few lines further it is affirmed that “from my youth, O Saviour, I have rejected Thy commandments. Ruled by the passions, I have passed my whole life in heedlessness and sloth” (ibid., 380). This sort of smooth back and forth between speaking of evil as an illness to which one succumbs versus a fault one commits or a condition in which one finds oneself is extremely common in the liturgical texts, especially in the Great Canon. The text was originally composed in the late seventh or early eighth century and has been used liturgically since at least the tenth century. For a detailed discussion—that actually shares Ricœur’s interest in the consciousness of sin—see the fifth chapter of Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 130–63. See also Doru Costache, “Andrew of Crete’s Great Canon, Byzantine Hermeneutics, and Genesis 1-3,” in Sarah Gador-Whyte and Andrew Mellas, eds., Hymns, Homilies and Hermeneutics in Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 67–85. 15. Ricoeur, Evil, 38. 16. I strongly suspect that this is also not the case for most other forms of symbolic ritual or religious myth. In fairness, Ricœur does seem to recognize this once

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for Christian liturgy. In his interview at Taizé he says: “On the level of representation liturgy accomplishes something of that post-critical naïveté that I have sometimes called a second naïveté . . . although it is certainly true that only predication has meaning, liturgy already lives it in its figures.” “Postface,” 250–51. He does not develop this further in the brief interview and does not return to this tentative suggestion elsewhere, as far as I am able to ascertain. 17. For English translations of the liturgical poetry of Romanos, see Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, trans. Ephrem Lash (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995) and Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit: Romanos the Melodist, trans. R. J. Schork (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1997). For secondary discussions, see the second chapter of Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 29–66; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977); Joost van Rossum, “Romanos le Mélode et le «kontakion»,” in L’Hymnographie. Conférences Saint-Serge XLVIe Semaine d’Études Liturgiques 1999, eds. A. M. Triacca and A. Pistoia (Roma: Edizoni Liturgiche, 2000), 93–104; Sarah Gador-Whyte, Theology and Poetry in Early Byzantium: The Kontakia of Romanos the Melodist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the two chapters on Romanos in Gador-White, Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium, 89–123. 18. It is fascinating that women function very prominently in many of these kontakia, including those of Ephrem the Syrian, which are even considerably earlier. Eve does all the talking; Adam does not really get a word in edgewise. 19. Adam is also mentioned in several other hymns, such as that for Palm Sunday and for “The Triumph of the Cross” during Holy Week, as well as the one for Holy Friday, where Adam is portrayed as being in error not really as particularly sinful, and those for the Resurrection (of which there are several). An examination of the role of Adam in Romanos’ liturgical poetry alone would make for a fascinating and instructive study. 20. See Steven J. Shoemaker’s Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), which includes translations of several of these late antique sources. 21. This is probably true for the use of biblical texts in worship more broadly, even in Christian confessions that otherwise tend to greater literalism. 22. “Contemporary” is obviously a relative term here, given that most Orthodox liturgical texts reached their final form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although the music developed further and changes in performance also occurred, the texts themselves have not really been altered since then and many rely on much earlier sources. But Romanos’ kontakia, for example, are no longer employed in their original form, although some remnants remain in later liturgical texts. 23. It is translated as “slave will” in some of the translations of his work (and as “bound will” in PA). In an interview with Yvanka Raynova it is even rendered as “bad will” (AGT, 671). All these translations refer to what is usually in English called “the bondage of the will” in its Augustinian sense. For a fuller treatment, see Frey, “On the Servile Will,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 51–66 and Greisch, L’Herméneutique, 73–78.

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24. This is obviously worked out in far more detail in his book on Freud, which is also the first book to posit itself explicitly as an exercise in hermeneutics. The French title is De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (title and subtitle were reversed and slightly amended in the English translation to Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation). See also some of the essays included in Conflict of Interpretations and in the first volume of essays and lectures, entitled (in English) On Psychoanalysis: Writings and Lectures, Volume 1, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012). 25. He also refuses the idea that only the theologian would have the right to reflect on these questions. Indeed, he says quite forcefully: “I, for one, do not divide philosophy and theology in this way. As revealing—and not as revealed—the Adam symbol belongs to a philosophical anthropology just as much as all the other symbols.” He continues: “For my part, I hold that no symbol qua opening and uncovering a truth of man is foreign to philosophical reflection. Hence I do not take the concept of original sin to be a theme extraneous to philosophy but, on the contrary, to be a theme subject to an intentional analysis, to a hermeneutics of rational symbols whose task is to reconstruct the layers of meaning which have become sedimented in the concept” (CI, 305; emphasis his). 26. In the interview with Raynova, he admits that “all that I had said on bad will was bound to a very specific tradition of our culture, the tradition of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Luther, Karl Barth, etc., and transposed into philosophic terms” (AGT, 671). 27. For fuller discussions of these texts, see the two collections edited by Scott Davidson, A Companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018) and A Companion to Ricoeur’s Fallible Man (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), as well as the discussions in Greisch’s L’Herméneutique, 59–95 and his Paul Ricœur, 29–87. 28. See also the crucial essays on guilt and punishment in CI, 354–77, 425–39. 29. In this respect, it is telling that in a different context Ricœur associates (communal) religion with the naïve stage that has been superseded by the attacks of the atheist “masters of suspicion”—Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—and to which we can now no longer return and instead retrieves an (individual) form of belief that remains viable after the move through atheism (CI, 440–67). 30. I work this out more fully in my contribution “Our Responsibility for Universal Evil: Rethinking Fallenness in Ecological Terms,” I more than Others, ed. Eric Severson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 60–74. 31. This might also help us grapple with the great discomfort Ricœur expressed at the end of his life about traditional Western theories of atonement, especially in his Living Up to Death, fruitfully connecting one of his earliest texts with his final posthumous work and confronting the challenge it might pose for the theologian drawing productively on Ricœur’s work. 32. For an early self-interpretation of this shift in his thought, see Paul Ricœur, “From Existentialism to the Philosophy of Language,” printed as appendix to Rule of Metaphor (RM, 372–81, especially 379). Peter Kenny has delineated three stages in Ricœur’s career in which he drew the boundary between the two discourses or

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disciplines differently. He suggests that in Ricœur’s very early work the boundary was still very fluid until Ricœur realized that such fluidity was not acceptable in the academy. The “middle” stage is marked by a stricter division between the two as Ricœur became established as a major thinker with strong philosophical pedigree. After his retirement, when he no longer needed to prove himself, Ricœur again felt freer to engage the two discourses with each other. Although this assessment is helpful on some level, it explains Ricœur’s drawing of distinctions and relationships primarily in terms of Ricœur’s personal psychology and need for academic recognition. Peter Kenny, “Conviction, Critique, and Christian Theology,” Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 92–102. See also Patrick L. Bourgeois, “From Hermeneutics of Symbols to the Interpretation of Texts,” in Reagan, Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 83–95. For an excellent review of the relationship between philosophical and theological hermeneutics in Ricœur’s thought, see Francesca Brezzi, “Paul Ricoeur: Interrogare e interpretare la fede,” Aquinas: Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia 57.1 (2014): 159–75. She thinks that the two function in complementary fashion in his work, in the form of “hermeneutic circularity or reciprocal donation” (173; emphasis hers). Aside from those by Mongin and Grondin already mentioned, see also two other recent helpful introductions to Ricœur’s overall thought: Greisch’s Paul Ricœur: L’itinérance du sens and Johann Michel’s Paul Ricœur: Une philosophie de l’agir humain (Paris: Cerf, 2006).

CHAPTER 2 1. The literature on this reluctance, or on the broader relationship between theology and philosophy in Ricœur’s work, is extensive. Dan R. Stiver tries to demonstrate that “Ricoeur’s philosophy is one of the most viable postmodern philosophies for theology” in his Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 247. See also his Ricoeur and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Henry Isaac Venema contends that Ricœur’s “philosophical explorations have indeed been deeply motivated by his Christian faith and cannot be isolated from this religious faith” and that the “strict separation between religious confession and autonomy of thought” cannot be maintained. Henry Isaac Venema, “The Source of Ricœur’s Double Allegiance,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 63. He describes the various discourses, in which Ricœur engages, as nesting within and interacting with each other, so that “while each of these levels of discourse retains its own irreducibility, none is truly autonomous” but instead “each level opens to the other by way of attestation to a surplus of meaning, to the morethan-possible of superabundance” (ibid., 65). Venema goes on to show how this is the case via an analysis of Ricœur’s “capable man” in light of the reality of forgiveness. In his analysis he relies heavily on the interviews in Critique and Conviction and Ricœur’s posthumous work Living Up to Death. Jean Greisch comes to very similar conclusions about the ways in which Ricœur cannot maintain the neat separations in

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his article “Le même, l’autre, le soi: Paul Ricœur à la recherche d’une herméneutique du soi,” Cahiers Parisien/Parisian Notebooks, vol. 3, ed. Robert Morrissey (Paris: Beaudoin, 2007), 26. See also his essay “Toward Which Recognition?” (in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 90–111) and his even more extensive discussion in Greisch, Paul Ricœur, 397–434. Boyd Blundell criticizes some of the earlier approaches, which often rely heavily on interviews or Ricœur’s more explicitly religious work. Instead he explores Ricœur’s position “between theology and philosophy” by engaging Ricœur’s larger philosophical corpus. He distinguishes between “three Ricœurs”: biblical hermeneuticist, philosopher of religion, and professional philosopher and suggests that the first two have received undue weight in the American appropriation of Ricœur, which makes him seem far more “theological” than he actually is. Blundell deliberately focuses on Ricœur’s writings on narrative and the self, employing the structural pattern of “detour and return” as an organizing principle for his analysis of Ricœur’s “philosophical detour” and “theological return.” Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Brian Gregor explores Ricœur’s religious hermeneutics in terms of the notion of the “capable self,” suggesting that his hermeneutics of religion shows a “reborn capability.” He consistently criticizes Ricœur for the distinctions he seeks to uphold between his philosophical and his theological work, desiring to push him in a far more full-blown theological direction. He claims that Ricœur “excludes precisely those deeper religious sources—such as the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, divine judgment, and justification by faith—that would be most helpful for addressing philosophical questions of meaning, love, justice, forgiveness, and human capability.” Brian Gregor, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2019), 9. William Schweiker considers the relation between philosophy and theology in Ricoeur’s work and interprets his hermeneutics as compatible with and a valuable resource for a “mediating theology” in “Ricoeur and Theology: Act and Affirmation,” in Davidson, Ricoeur Across the Disciplines, 44–64. Claudie Lavaud thinks that Ricœur’s work is “intrinsically philosophical, and, because it is philosophical, as a requirement of philosophy, open to religious thought” as a matter of “intellectual honesty and rigor of thought.” Claudie Lavaud, “Philosophie et religion dans l’œuvre de Paul Ricœur,” Études 362 (1985): 519. He insists that Ricœur is not doing religious philosophy but pushes back against “religious anti-intellectualism” (520). He traces the development of Ricœur’s thought from his early work up to Time and Narrative, concluding that Ricœur’s account of narrative could also enrich “biblical theology” (533). Johannes Haryatmoko tries to negotiate between faith and reason by employing Ricœur’s hermeneutics as a sort of via media between postmodern relativism and a universal claim to power in “Critical Reason and Faith: The Contribution of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics,” Prajña Vihara: Journal of Philosophy and Religion 12.1 (2011): 113–30. Luc Pareydt argues that Ricœur’s work makes it possible again to consider religion in a philosophical manner in an age of secularization in his “Paul Ricoeur. Comprendre ce que l’on croit et agir où l’on est,” Archives de philosophie 63.2 (2000): 279–84. Daniella Iannotta questions the distinction between philosophy and theology in Ricœur, contending that his “convictions” should give more to think to his critical thought, in her “Fra inquietudine e critica: Il momento della convinzione in

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Paul Ricoeur,” Agora: Papeles de Filosofia 25.2 (2006): 183–96. She includes a long discussion of Ricœur’s Living Up to Death. Knut Wenzel argues that Ricœur does not practice any sort of apologetics, but, quite to the contrary, draws on the fiercest critics of religion in order to question the very foundations of faith in fruitful fashion, in “Kritik—Imagination—Offenbarung. Zur theologischen Hermeneutik nach Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005),” Theologie und Philosophie: Vierteljahresschrift 88.4 (2013): 560–74. He points out, quite rightly, that Ricœur is not first of all interested in providing a concept of the divine, but instead in examining the consciousness of faith (563). Eric Crump defends Ricœur’s “position concerning agnosticism and attestation” against Pamela Sue Anderson by drawing on his grounding in reflexive philosophy via the influence of Roger Mehl and Pierre Thévenaz in “Between Conviction and Critique: Reflexive Philosophy, Testimony, and Pneumatology,” Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity, ed. Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 161–86. See also Michael D’Angeli, “‘The Double Privilege of Athens and Jerusalem’: The Relationship between Philosophy and Religion in the Works of Paul Ricoeur,” Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics 56.3 (2017): 453–69; David E. Klemm, “The Word as Grace: The Religious Bearing of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 10.4 (1993): 503–20; Rolf Kühn, “Paul Ricoeur’s religionsphilosophisches Denken zwischen Schrift(en) und absolutem Voraus,” Studia Phaenomenologica: Romanian Journal of Phenomenology 13 (2013): 335–57; Marco Salvioli, “Note su esegesi ed ermeneutica a partire da ‘Ermeneutica filosofica ed ermeneutica biblica’ di Paul Ricoeur,” Sapienza: Rivista di Filosofia e di Teologia 58.3 (2005): 323–50; Jacques Schouwey, “De la possibilité d’une herméneutique philosophique de la religion. À propos d’un ouvrage de Paul Ricœur,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 127.4 (1995): 357–67; Fedor Stanzhevskiy, “Towards a Hermeneutics of Religion(s): A Reading of Ricoeur’s Readings,” Forum Philosophicum: International Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2008): 193–211; Merold Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Philosophy of Religion,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 109–27. 2. On the topic of religious language in Ricœur, see: David E. Klemm, “Philosophy and Kerygma: Ricoeur as Reader of the Bible,” in Kaplan, Reading Ricoeur, 47–69; Dan R. Stiver, The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol and Story (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gregory J. Laughery, Living Hermeneutics in Motion: An Analysis and Evaluation of Paul Ricoeur’s Contribution to Biblical Hermeneutics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002). Laughery presents Ricœur’s work on hermeneutics and contends that it “has the potential capacity to debunk modernist-post-modernist perspectives of Biblical interpretation” because it finds a way between modernism and postmodernism (11). Scannone also reviews Ricœur’s biblical hermeneutics in detail, including an explication of how the various biblical genres interact and are in conflict with each other in Juan Carlos Scannone, “La versión religiosa del habla y sus variaciones. Estudio inspirado en Paul Ricoeur,”

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Stromata 60.1–2 (2004): 17–36. (The study is not just “inspired” by Ricœur, but constitutes mostly a summary of Ricœur’s account. He does end with a brief consideration of potential applicability to the Argentinian situation [33–36].) 3. See also Ricœur’s essays “The Critique of Religion” and “The Language of Faith” where he makes this claim again in opening. “Two Essays by Paul Ricoeur,” trans. R. Bradley DeFord, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28.3 (1973): 203. 4. This implies also a certain priority of the text over speaking. Already in Interpretation Theory, Ricœur defended the written text against hermeneutical theories that seem to devalue it (IT, 25–44). He argues that texts are unique and important and more than mere dialogue. Writing adds something to speech and allows texts to be re-contextualized (FS, 218–19). Ricœur places the same emphasis on writing when he considers religious hermeneutics. Although speaking in a sense gives rise to the text and the text is brought to speech again in the event of preaching, there is a primary import laid on the text. Ricœur interprets preaching essentially as that which brings the text to speech, although he values the experience of reading as equally important. He thinks of speech and writing as a sequence, in which experience leads to language leads to discourse leads to writing leads to the living speech of preaching and reading (FS, 219). See also TB, 167. 5. In fact, Ricœur often appeals precisely to this notion of the primordial in order to distance himself from a more explicitly theological project. For example, he argues: “This double renouncing of the absolute ‘object’ and the absolute ‘subject’ is the price that must be paid to enter into a radically nonspeculative and prephilosophical mode of language. It is the task of a philosophical hermeneutic to guide us from the double absolute of onto-theological speculation and transcendental reflection toward the more originary modalities of language by means of which the members of the community of faith have interpreted their experience to themselves and others. It is here where God has been named” (FS, 224). He often defines theology as a systematic exercise, too far detached from the original text (CI, 482; TB, xv). He also agrees with and is heavily influenced by the criticisms of theology voiced by Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud. In an article on “Religion, Atheism, and Faith” he sides with Nietzsche and Freud in regarding the God of morality, the god of metaphysics, of theology, of necessary being, of first cause or prime mover, and of “onto-theology” as dead (CI, 445–46). 6. The reference to imagination and sympathy here (and in many others of the essays collected in Figuring the Sacred) is the same expression as that translated as “sympathetic imagination” in Symbolism of Evil. 7. He will later also point to the plurivocity of biblical texts that call for multiple interpretations (TB, 165). Indeed, the history of interpretations of the biblical texts themselves constitutes an example of such plurivocal naming and should not be reduced or the earlier interpretations simply dismissed (TB, 240, 266–91, 332, 336–55). Ricœur is attentive not only to the content of these discourses, but also to their form. He regards as a fundamental point of his essay on philosophy and religious language that “the ‘confession of faith’ that is expressed in the biblical documents is inseparable from the forms of discourse, by which I mean the narrative structure” (FS, 39). The tensions and contrasts that the text exhibits in the confrontation of the

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various forms within it are theologically significant (FS, 39). All three aspects are important: the relationship of the form of discourse to the confession of faith, the relationship between diverse modes of discourse within the text, and the relationship between the modes of discourse taken together and the interpretative space of the whole (FS, 39). This interpretive space is characterized by diversity, paradox, and explicit tension. 8. At one point, Ricœur does suggest that the Christ-event in some sense summarizes this polyphony of discourses. Yet, in no way does it resolve the tension or easily locate God. He claims that “it is a unique case because all the partial discourses are referred to a name that is the point of intersection and the index of incompleteness of all our discourse about God, and because this name has become bound up with the meaning-event preached as resurrection. But biblical hermeneutics can claim to say something unique only if this unique thing speaks as the world of the text that is addressed to us, as the issue of the text” (FS, 46). 9. Venema interprets this as a unifying factor in Ricœur’s work: “At this point it appears to me that Ricoeur’s philosophy is one that has long since taken the risk of naming an excess and superabundance that undoes every system and sedimentation of exchange.” Henry Isaac Venema, “Ricoeur’s Double Allegiance,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 75. 10. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Raúl Kerbs, “Las parábolas bíblicas en la hermenéutica filosófica de Paul Ricoeur,” Ideas y Valores 113 (2000): 3–26. He thinks of Ricœur’s discussion of the parables as an opportunity for hermeneutics to think outside linguistic parameters via “an extralinguistic reference” (18). He focuses on the logic of extravagance especially on 20–23. Laughery also devotes significant space to Ricœur’s analysis of the parables in his Living Hermeneutics in Motion, 78–105. 11. In a later essay Ricœur distinguishes between demystification and demythologization (CI, 381–401), as he does also in the two Union Seminary Quarterly Review essays. The first, “The Critique of Religion,” is split between one section on “de-mystification” and one on “de-mythologization.” “Two Essays,” 205–12. He mentions phenomenology and proclamation in a more balanced sense in his book on Freud: “This is where a phenomenology of the sacred in the sense of Van der Leuuw [sic] and Eliade, joined to a kerygmatic exegesis in the sense of Barth and Bultmann . . . can come to the aid of reflection and offer to meditative thought new symbolic expressions situated at the point of rupture and suture between the Wholly Other and our discourse.” Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy, 526. 12. In Living Up to Death, Ricœur also speaks again with great reluctance of religious experience and then continues: “I am wary of the immediate, the fusional, the intuitive, the mystical” (LD, 16). 13. On the topic of revelation, see Nicola Stricker, “Thinking the Revelation,” in Dalferth, Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion, 209–24. She finds that “in relation to the dialogue between philosophy and faith, but also for theology itself, the idea of a power inherent in the world of the text is a much more useful concept than the over-psychologization of revelation that comes from the idea of verbal inspiration” (217).

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14. It is, however, a matter of emphasis. Ricœur’s work on narrative more generally certainly also stresses self-understanding, but the emphasis on action is stronger there than in his work on biblical texts, as explored in the next section. 15. On the topic of creation in Ricœur, see Mirela Oliva, “Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Creation,” Revue roumaine de philosophie 54.2 (2010): 197–204. She is particularly interested in the parallels to Gadamer. 16. Later in a reading of the “Song of Songs” Ricœur establishes a further parallel to Genesis. Here also the focus is on the insight we might gain about God, rather than the ways in which this text might move us to action: “If so, when reread in light of Genesis, the Song of Songs becomes a religious text insofar as we can hear in it the word of a silent, unnamed God, who is not discerned owing to the force of attestation of a love caught up in itself” (TB, 299). He talks about the effect of reading which corrects the reading of other texts with different tonalities (TB, 300). 17. In a different essay (“Interpreting Narrative”), Ricœur explores the passion narratives. Here also the focus is entirely on what happens within the text: “These are some of the resources for a literary analysis of the passion narratives that allow us, if not completely to capture or, even less, to exhaust them, at least to get closer to this unique literary genre: a narrative constructed as interpreting a kerygma, which it brings to language by articulating it on the level of narrative” (FS, 191). For his analysis of the Golden Rule, Ricœur focuses on the economy of the gift conveyed in it. He ends this reflection: “The lack of measure is the ‘good measure.’ This is, using the tone of gnomic poetry, a transposition of the rhetorical paradox. Superabundance becomes the truth hidden in equivalence. The rule is ‘repeated.’ But ‘repetition’ henceforth signifies transfiguration” (FS, 302). Again Ricœur does not carry this further to discuss how this might result in real action or transformation of lives. 18. Ricœur justifies this with being a member of the university community. 19. Daniel Frey re-examines this distinction in his “Lecture philosophique et lecture théologique de la Bible chez Paul Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 3.2 (2012): 72–91. He argues that “Ricœur’s philosophy also starts from a form of transcendence, but it concerns the transcendence of symbols and finally of language, rather than the transcendence of God” (77). He also questions the parallel Ricœur draws repeatedly between speaking one’s native language and growing up in a particular religious tradition and criticizes Ricœur’s rejection of the theological doctrine of the atonement in Living Up to Death. 20. Ricœur does qualify his reluctance slightly in several later texts and interviews. In an interview with Richard Kearney, referring to his previous separation of the disciplines, he admits: “I no longer consider such conceptual asceticism tenable” (PR, 169). Even in Critique and Conviction, he already tentatively goes in that direction: “This is what I would say today, after having spent decades protecting, sometimes cantankerously, the distinction between the two orders. I believe I am sufficiently advanced in life and in the interpretation of these two traditions to venture out into the places of their intersection” (CC, 159). See also his concluding note to “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse” (TT, 146). Yet, he says again quite empathically in Living Up to Death: “I am not a Christian philosopher, as rumor would have it, in a deliberately pejorative, even discriminatory sense. I am, on one

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side, a philosopher, nothing more, even a philosopher without an absolute, concerned about, devoted to, immersed in philosophical anthropology, whose general theme can be placed under the heading of a fundamental anthropology. And, on the other, a Christian who expresses himself philosophically, as Rembrandt is a painter, nothing more, and a Christian who expresses himself through pictures, and Bach a musician, nothing more, and a Christian who expresses himself through music” (LD, 69). 21. One brief exception is a comment on God’s lamenting in Ps. 22: “This goes with the call for a personal and communal practice of compassion in regard to our human brothers and sisters who often are not so much guilty as suffering” (TB, 232). In general, Ricœur is more interested in the history of reception of a text and in the way various interpretations might interact with each other (TB, 266–67). On this particular text specifically, see Carsten Pallesen, “A ‘Questioning Lament’. Trajectories of Biblical Poetry and Interpretive Prose in Psalm 22 and in the Passion of Mark as a Hegelian Moment in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Dalferth, Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion, 103–35. 22. For an early discussion of the role of narrative in constitution of the self, see Domenico Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur, trans. Gordon Poole (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990). The original Italian was published in 1984, so it only considers Ricœur’s earlier work. 23. See especially Ricœur’s essays on Gadamer in TA, chapters 1–3. See also MHF, 413. Jervolino also frequently points to connections with or distinctions from Gadamer in his account of Ricœur. See also his “Gadamer and Ricoeur on the hermeneutics of praxis,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 63–79 and Jean Grondin’s “De Gadamer à Ricœur. Peut-on parler d’une conception commune de l’herméneutique?” in Gaëlle Fiasse, ed., Paul Ricœur. De l’homme faillible à l’homme capable (Paris: PUF, 2008), 37–62. 24. In the interview with Raynova Ricœur speaks of it as a conflict: “And the reader brings with him a lived experience and some expectations, Erwartungen. Consequently the reader brings his world to the text. Reading is an act that puts the world of the text into conflict with the world of the reader” (AGT, 679; emphasis his). 25. For an exploration of Ricœur’s work on narrative that establishes connections with some of his previous writings, see Morny Joy, ed., Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997). See also Greisch, Paul Ricœur, 143–281. 26. This is particular obvious in the essay in which Ricœur draws a further parallel to history and provides a preview of the argument he will not much later make in Time and Narrative. (The collection From Text to Action was originally published in 1986 and the first volume of Time and Narrative in 1983, but most of the essays in the collection precede the three-volume work and prepare for it.) 27. John Arthos is quite critical of this, arguing that the analogy between text and action does not work, that Ricœur is too focused on texts, and that he persists in a false “binary of world and text.” John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricoeur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 51–71, 96–98, 107–09. 28. “The same actions that may be put into ‘records’ and henceforth ‘recorded’ may also be explained in different ways according to the plurivocity of the arguments

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applied to their motivational background” (TA, 161). Jean-Luc Petit roots Ricœur’s account of action in his earlier philosophy of the will in his “Ricœur et la théorie de l’action,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 5.1 (2014): 142–52. 29. In fact, one of his essays on biblical hermeneutics is included as chapter 4 of From Text to Action. 30. “In conclusion, the possibility of historical experience in general resides in our capacity to remain exposed to the effects of history, to borrow Gadamer’s category of Wirkungsgeschichte. But we continue to be affected by the effects of history only to the extent to which we are capable of broadening our capacity to be so affected. Imagination is the secret of this competence” (TA, 181). Ricœur analyzes the notion of time in his article on “Initiative” (TA, 212–213), where he claims that “language is a sort of action” (TA, 217). 31. “What is to be understood in a narrative is not first of all the one who is speaking behind the text, but what is being talked about, the thing of the text, namely, the kind of world the work unfolds, as it were, before the text” (TA, 131). Ricœur highlights “the mimetic function by which the narrative remakes the human world of action” (TA, 131). See also his essay “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” which first outlines many of the themes explored in more detail in Time and Narrative. Mario Valdés stresses that for Ricœur the task of hermeneutics is “to reinsert the world of the text into the world of praxis, fully recognizing that not everything is a text and that all texts belong to a culture.” He emphasizes that “the reinsertion of texts into the world of praxis is itself part of the process of reality that hermeneutics recognizes.” Mario Valdés, Cultural Hermeneutics: Essays after Unamuno and Ricoeur (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 157. 32. See, for example, Pol Vandervelde, “The Challenge of the ‘such as it was’: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narratives,” in Kaplan, Reading Ricoeur, 141–62; On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1992); and the volume edited by Morny Joy mentioned earlier (Paul Ricoeur and Narrative). Laughery makes the threefold mimesis the organizing principle of his work on Ricœur’s contribution to biblical hermeneutics (Living Hermeneutics in Motion), although much of the book is devoted to negotiating between different (predominantly theological) hermeneutic positions, rather than the question of narrative per se. Arthos criticizes what he considers the “false linearity between configuration and refiguration” in his Hermeneutics After Ricoeur, 108. 33. See also the important essay “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in Paul Ricoeur, On Psychoanalysis: Writings and Lectures, Volume 1, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 187–200. Ricœur explores the role of narrative in psychoanalysis in several contexts, including in this volume (201–10). 34. Ricœur does preview this briefly already in the first volume: “The postulate underlying this recognition of the function of refiguration that belongs to the poetic work in general is part of a hermeneutics that aims less at restoring the author’s intention behind the text than at making explicit the movement by which the text unfolds, as it were, a world in front of itself.” And he adds a self-interpretation: “For some years now I have maintained that what is interpreted in a text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might project my ownmost powers. In the

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Rule of Metaphor, I held that poetry, through its muthos, redescribes the world. In the same way, in this work I will say that making a narrative [le faire narratif] resignifies the world in its temporal dimension, to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the poem’s invitation” (TN I, 81). Ricœur devotes all of volume II to discussing fictional narratives and their ways of emplotment and of negotiating time via configuration. In this context, he does gesture already to the ways in which narratives shape culture, by issuing a warning: “For we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things” (TN II, 28). 35. At the end of volume II, Ricœur gives three reasons for the kinship between historical and fictional narratives: first, both are rooted in more basic uses of narrative in daily life; second, both kinds of narrating can be measured by the same standard, namely emplotment (which history borrows from literature) as “the temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous” and “discordant concordance”; third, the “methods of derivation” of narrative configuration allow for a generalization of plot in such a way that it applies on both historical and fictional levels (TN II, 156–58). The historian Hayden White calls Ricœur’s “magisterial” Time and Narrative “the most important synthesis of literary and historical theory produced in our century.” Hayden White, “The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History,” in Wood, On Paul Ricoeur, 141. 36. Ricœur does suggest that it always has an ethical dimension: “The theory of reading has warned us that the strategy of persuasion undertaken by the narrator is aimed at imposing on the reader a vision of the world that is never ethically neutral, but that rather implicitly or explicitly induces a new evaluation of the world and of the reader as well. In this sense, narrative already belongs to the ethical field in virtue of its claim—inseparable from its narration—to ethical justice. Still it belongs to the reader, now an agent, an initiator of action, to choose among the multiple proposals of ethical justice brought forth by reading. It is at this point that the notion of narrative identity encounters its limit and has to link up with the nonnarrative components in the formation of the acting subject” (TN III, 249). This question of “ethical justice” is similarly raised by historical accounts, as they seek to represent historical events truthfully. 37. Ricœur points out that this resolves the circularity of the relation between text and life in helpful ways: “The first mimetic relation refers, in the case of an individual, to the semantics of desire, which only includes those prenarrative features attached to the demand constitutive of human desire. The third mimetic relation is defined by the narrative identity of an individual or a people, stemming from the endless rectification of a previous narrative by a subsequent one, and from the chain of refigurations that results from this. In a word, narrative identity is the poetic resolution of the hermeneutic circle” (TN III, 248). Jérôme Porée argues that the limits of narrative map onto the limits of hermeneutics itself in his “Les limites du récit,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 4.2 (2013): 38–49. He outlines four limits to narrative: (1) narratives are always partial and plural, (2) narrative is being eclipsed by information, (3) not all experiences can be synthesized into a unified narrative, (4) it cannot express certain aspects of life that call for silence, such as suffering. Porée thinks that Ricœur is aware of these limits of language and addresses them through his work on psychoanalysis.

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38. See also Ricœur’s essay “Narrative Identity,” which functions in some way as a transition between Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another. In Wood, On Paul Ricoeur, 188–99, reprinted in PA, 229–42. 39. For a synopsis of the entire book, see Charles E. Reagan, “Personal Identity,” in Cohen, Ricoeur as Another, 3–31. 40. Causse interprets the gap between idem and ipse in terms of the “faille” or fault line at the heart of the self that Ricœur had explored in his earlier philosophy of the will. In both cases it is “the place of fragility.” Causse, “La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur,” 77. 41. Ricœur will again seek to establish explicit connections between analytical and continental approaches by arguing that Parfit’s “puzzling cases,” for example, display a narrative structure, even as they disassociate selfhood and sameness, ultimately dissolving the self (OA, 151, 167–68). Interestingly, he also mentions the idea of “puzzling cases” in an essay on “Pastoral Praxeology, Hermeneutics, and Identity” (FS, 311–12). 42. On narrative identity in Oneself as Another, see David Rasmussen, “Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self” in Cohen, Ricoeur as Another, 57–69 and the (basically identical) essay under the same title in Kearney, The Hermeneutics of Action, 159–72. See also Alain Loute who brings Ricœur together with Emmanuel Renault’s sociological critique of capitalism and the suffering it causes in his “Identité narrative collective et critique sociale,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 3.1 (2012): 53–66. 43. “From this correlation between action and character in a narrative there results a dialectic internal to character which is the exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordance developed by the emplotment of action” (OA, 147). 44. Ricœur also likens narratives that involve a complete loss of character to selfhood without sameness. He reiterates again that narration is able to function as a mediator between description and prescription (OA, 152). 45. “I am always moving toward my death, and this prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end” (OA, 160). 46. This is true also of historical narratives, in Ricœur’s view. Responsibility means not only that someone can count on me, but that I can give an account, that I am accountable (OA, 165). 47. “We recall in what way, under the pressure of narrative theory, we were led not only to broaden but to hierarchize the concept of action in such a way as to carry it to the level of the concept of praxis: in this way, we have placed at different heights on the scale of praxis practices and life plans, put together by the anticipation of the narrative unity of life” (OA, 175). 48. Indeed, the notion of the “capable human being” is central to Ricœur’s work, prepared already in his early discussions of the will (Freedom and Nature and Fallible Man) and continued until his final discussions of mutual recognition (The Course of Recognition). A nice summary of his insight on this matter is contained in his address for the reception of the 2004 Kluge Prize in the Humanities from the Library of Congress: “Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 22–26 (reprinted in PA, 290–95). The next chapter will discuss this topic more fully.

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49. Ricœur, “Asserting Personal Capacities,” 23. 50. In fact, Ricœur interrupts his own analysis of ethical action with an analysis of the ancient tragedy Antigone (OA, 241–49). 51. “This apparent paradox attests to the fact that, if there is a being of the self— in other words, if an ontology of selfhood is possible—this is in conjunction with a ground starting from which the self can be said to be acting” (OA, 308). Ricœur asserts: “There is no world without a self who finds itself in it and acts in it; there is no self without a world that is practicable in some fashion” (OA, 311). 52. See Marco Salvioli, “Note su esegesi ed ermeneutica a partire da ‘Ermeneutica filosofica ed ermeneutica biblica’ di Paul Ricoeur,” Sapienza: Rivista di Filosofia e di Teologia 58.3 (2005): 323–50. 53. Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38. 54. “The circle I am talking about is a hermeneutic circle, in which the relationship between the liturgical text and its performance ceases to be a competition for priority, and becomes mutually sustaining. The whole endeavor, then, devolves on the very simple point that liturgy must be recognised as simultaneously text and performance. The approach to interpreting liturgy which it develops under the name of liturgical hermeneutics, strives to be faithful to this condition.” Bridget Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994), 15. 55. Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 141. 56. Kevin Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994), 32. 57. For example, in many areas Good Friday liturgies concluded with communal destruction of Jewish property and violence against Jewish villagers. Here the condemnation of “the Jews” within the liturgical texts clearly led to action, but to destructive and deeply troubling action. These texts have been removed from Protestant and Roman Catholic liturgical texts, but are retained in Eastern Orthodox liturgies for Holy Week. Careful interpretation is required through homily, catechesis, and various other means, as is the case for troubling biblical texts, like the imprecatory psalms, or indeed for other literature that has incited violent action or hatred. On this topic, see Mary B. Cunningham, “Polemic and Exegesis: Anti-Judaic Invective in Byzantine Homiletics,” Sobornost 21.2 (1999): 46–68; Bert Groen, “Anti-Judaism in the Present-Day Byzantine Liturgy,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 60 (2008): 369–87; Michael G. Azar, “Prophetic Matrix and Theological Paradox: Jews and Judaism in the Holy Week and Pascha Observances of the Greek Orthodox Church,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 10 (2015): 1–27; and Bogdan G. Bucur, “Anti-Jewish Rhetoric in Byzantine Hymnography: Exegetical and Theological Contextualization,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 61.1 (2017): 39–60. (I am grateful to Gregory Tucker for pointing me to some of the more recent references.)

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CHAPTER 3 1. See especially the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (LIU), which Ricœur gave at the University of Chicago in the fall 1975. He appropriates the term “social imaginary” from the work of Castoriadis. See Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, ed. Suzi Adams (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and his interview with Richard Kearney in Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge, ed. Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 5–17. Johann Michel discusses the relationship between Ricœur and Castoriadis in his Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 123–45. Roger Savage explores the intersection of aesthetic judgment and practical wisdom for the plane of ethics, justice, and politics in his “Judgment, Imagination and the Search for Justice,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 6.2 (2015): 50–67. 2. One exception is “Life in Quest of Narrative,” where Ricœur says: “We must nonetheless speak of understanding but in the sense that Aristotle gave to phronesis (which the latins translated by prudentia). In this sense I am prepared to speak of phronetic understanding in order to contrast it with theoretical understanding. Narrative belongs to the former and not to the latter” (LQN, 23). He does not, however, develop the notion of phronesis further in this piece in any explicit fashion. The same is true for a brief reference to “phronetic intelligence,” which he distinguishes from “theoretical intelligence” in a piece on narrative, remarking that narrative belongs into the former, not the latter category. Ricœur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrative,” On Psychoanalysis, 190. For an account of Ricœur on practical wisdom, see David Pellauer, “At the Limit of Practical Wisdom: Moral Blindness,” in Cohen, Ricoeur as Another, 187–201. Pellauer is particularly interested in the kinds of situations that do not initially “show up” as moral situations and where wisdom can help us “see” differently (or even to see for the first time). He concludes that “what reflection on moral blindness can ultimately teach us is that in the deepest sense evil is not equivalent to an incapacity or unwillingness to do the good or to find the just solution within some established moral order. It can also be a failure to see the problem, in the sense of a failure to see that there is a problem, even before we ask for a description or an evaluation of that problem. . . . because evil is a failure to see for which we are finally responsible, this is why it is condemnable and why we can and will be held accountable for it” (199). See also Fernando Nascimento who is primarily interested in an application of Ricœur’s work to an ethics of technology in his “Technologies, Narratives, and Practical Wisdom,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 10.2 (2019): 21–35; JeanPhilippe Pierron who brings together Ricœur and Nussbaum for a pluralistic context in his “L’invention morale et la sagesse pratique. Une lecture de la petite éthique de Paul Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 10.2 (2019): 36–51; and Luiz Rohden who argues that literary imagination is always a hermeneutical practice with an ethical dimension in his “Ethical Assumptions and Implications of Hermeneutic Practice as Practical Wisdom,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 10.2 (2019): 5–20.

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3. He alludes to it in chapter 2 of the first volume of Time and Narrative (TN I, 46–47). 4. For an account of Ricœur’s ethics in terms of affectivity that reads Oneself as Another in light of the earlier work, see Beatriz Contreras Tasso and Patricio Mena Malet, “Le risque d’être soi-même. Le consentement et l’affectivité comme fondements de l’éthique ricœurienne,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 9.2 (2018): 11–28. Blundell and Kaplan take Ricœur’s ethics in new directions in David M. Kaplan, “Paul Ricoeur and Development Ethics,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 112–28; Boyd Blundell, “Refiguring Virtue,” in ibid., 158–72. Nathan Pederson explores the potential of Ricœur’s work on symbolism for questions of race in “The Symbol Gives Rise to Race,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 153–68. See also James L. Marsh, “The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics Controversy,” in Cohen, Ricoeur as Another, 223–34; Mara Rainwater, “Refiguring Ricoeur: Narrative Force and Communicative Ethics,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 99–110; John Wall, “The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur’s Significance for Theological Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29.2 (2001): 235–60 and his fuller development in Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The book draws on various aspects of Ricœur’s work in order to develop an account of the self that can poetically “create” itself in quasi-divine manner: “I argue for an ethics of love that mediates a Levinasian origination in the Other with a Ricoeurian responsiveness to it, in the radical human capability for creating new moral relations to others of transcendingly self-disruptive kind” (105; emphasis his). He contends that “we cannot realize our human telos or good unless we are in some way like our Creator” (100). (It should be obvious from what follows that I am not in agreement with this.) Venema also suggests that in Ricœur there “is the deep connection between the power of creativity and the power of the self, so much so that they can easily be confused” in his Identifying Selfhood, 9. 5. It is still about identity: “The idea of the narrative unity of a life therefore serves to assure us that the subject of ethics is none other than the one to whom the narrative assigns a narrative identity” (OA, 178). 6. See also Ricœur’s essay on phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics: “À la gloire de la phronesis (Ethique à Nicomaque, livre VI),” in La vérité pratique. Aristote, Ethique à Nicomaque, Livre VI, ed. Jean-Yves Château (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 13–22. In a later interview, he reiterates his use of phronesis primarily for “taking new decisions in the face of difficult cases: the hard cases of law, medicine or everyday life” (CC, 92). When he shifts to justice in this discussion, narrative is left behind as a topic. On wisdom and hermeneutics more broadly, see also Greisch, L’Herméneutique comme sagesse de l’incertitude. (The first three chapters are explicitly on Ricœur; the others focus less explicitly or less exclusively on his work.) 7. See also Robert D. Sweeney, “Ricoeur on Ethics and Narrative,” in Joy, Paul Ricoeur and Narrative, 197–205. 8. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b, 1453a-b, 1461a. See also Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 125–56.

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9. See Brian Treanor, “Emplotting Virtue: Narrative and the Good Life,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 173–89. 10. Later Ricœur says “Telling a story . . . is deploying an imaginary space for thought experiments in which moral judgment operates in a hypothetical mode” (OA, 170). 11. Ricœur tentatively goes in that direction in a different context where he affirms that the “unbridgeable distinction” between life and fiction “is partly abolished by the power we have to apply to ourselves the plots we have received from our culture and to try out in this way the different roles assumed by favorite characters in the stories we love best.” Here he suggests that “it is by means of imaginative variations on our ego, that we try to apply a narrative understanding to ourselves, the only kind of understanding that escapes the pseudo-alternative of pure change and absolute identity.” On Psychoanalysis, 200. 12. Ironically, Ricœur chides Heidegger for “a listening turned more attentively to the Greeks than to the Hebrews” (RM, 369). In the interview with Raynova, Ricœur explains this as follows: “I try hard to distinguish between my religious motivation and my philosophic argumentation. In my philosophical works there are no quotations of biblical texts, no references to theology; philosophy lives with its own texts.” At the same time he admits: “There are unifying texts, such as those on Greek tragedy, and also speculative aspects of biblical texts and this whole tradition of wisdom. I think that between the wisdom of the Middle East, expressed in the Bible, as for example in the book of Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and maybe in the Gospel of John—wisdom that is not so narrative and that has many meditative sides—and my philosophical concerns are that there are necessary intersections” (AGT, 673). He does not, however, explicitly draw on any of these texts in his philosophical work. I want to be clear, however, that I do not intend this as the kind of claim that Gregor, Venema, and others make, namely that Ricœur’s personal faith or religious convictions should influence his philosophy more fully rather than keeping the two commitments separate. Instead, I am suggesting that biblical sources are valid sources of wisdom inasmuch as they are part of the broader cultural imaginary and that philosophical thinking can draw on them without becoming confessional or theological. 13. For good commentary on the complex works discussed only very briefly in this section see Farhang Erfani, ed., Paul Ricoeur: Honoring and Continuing the Work (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011) and Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Paul Ricœur’s Moral Anthropology: Singularity, Responsibility, and Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). Dierckxsens focuses on ipseity in Part 1, alterity in Part 2, and justice in Part 3. Throughout he tries to articulate a notion of singularity that would permit more “embedded” versions of ethics and justice, as he judges Ricœur’s concepts too universal and not sufficiently attentive to the cultural differences in concrete lived experience. He draws especially on insights from moral anthropology to argue for this cultural relativism in regard to values, contending that “moral norms should be understood as communal standards that relate to natural feelings, rather than as universal correctives of human nature” (56). His repeated claim that “the mixed feelings people express” toward cases of injustice or cruelty demonstrate “the ambiguous nature of justice” seems, however, rather questionable. The (descriptive) fact that

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people disagree about moral issues does not therefore imply that broader (prescriptive) norms cannot be established or that one should not argue for them. 14. See also TN III, 189 and PA, 263. For much fuller exploration of this duty, see Kearney’s On Stories, his Strangers, Gods and Monsters, and his essay “Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 18–32. Dierckxsens also discusses this issue in his final chapter “Narratives and Moral Critique,” Ricoeur’s Moral Anthropology, 209–31. Two essays in the volume by Erfani specifically consider the implications of Ricœur’s work for the victims of history: Gregory Hoskins’ “Remembering the Battle of Gettysburg: Paul Ricoeur and the Politics of Memory,” Paul Ricoeur, 85–103, and Morny Joy’s “Paul Ricoeur and the Duty to Remember,” (ibid., 165–87). Kemp considers more generally Ricoeur’s role “in the transformation of the philosophical conception of ethics in 20th-century France” in his “Foundation of Ethics Considered through the Ethics in the Century of Ricoeur” (ibid., 217). 15. See also Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “The Place of Remembrance: Reflections on Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Collective Memory,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 147–57; idem, “The Time of Collective Memory: Social Cohesion and Historical Discontinuity in Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting,” Études Ricœuriennes/ Ricœur Studies 10.1 (2019): 102–11; Pamela Sue Anderson, “Confidence in the Power of Memory: Ricoeur’s Dynamic Hermeneutic of Life,” in Dalferth, Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion, 51–70; and Esteban Lythgoe, “Social Imagination, Abused Memory, and the Political Place of History in Memory, History, Forgetting,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 5.2 (2014): 35–47. Lythgoe focuses especially on the role of the imagination in remembering. 16. See also the section “The Ethico-Political Level: Obligated Memory” at the end of chapter 2 (MHF, 86–92). 17. Ricœur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, eds. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 148–56. This was an address originally delivered in 2003 in the context of a conference on “Haunted Memories? History in Europe after Authoritarianism” (ibid., 344). 18. See also David Rasmussen’s discussion in “Justice and Interpretation” in Kaplan, Reading Ricoeur, 213–23. 19. On this tension or paradox between responsibility and vulnerability, especially in regard to justice, see Élodie Boublil, “Instaurer la ‘juste distance.’ Autonomie, justice et vulnérabilité dans la pensée de Paul Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/ Ricœur Studies 6.2 (2015): 13–31, who draws on the notions of difference, gap, and interval, in order to articulate a “just distance” in regulating relations between individuals. Boublil interprets the “virtue of hospitality” as “paradigm for just distance” (26). Tasso and Malet argue that responsibility works both forward and backward for Ricœur in their “Le risque d’être soi-même,” 14. Morny Joy traces the tension between activity and passivity across Ricœur’s work in her “Ricœur’s Affirmation of Life in this World and his Journey to Ethics,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 9.2 (2018): 104–23. She interprets Ricœur’s acute sense of suffering in the world as the impetus for the development of his ethical thought (112, 114). See also Roger

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Savage’s “Fragile Identities, Capable Selves,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 4.2 (2013): 64–78. He is particularly interested in situations of systemic injustice, pointing out that “the refusal to recognize others as capable human beings adversely affects the sense of others’ self-worth to the detriment of all” (64). 20. “On the one hand, we identify ourselves by designating ourselves as the one who speaks, acts, remembers, imputes action to him- or herself, and so on; on the other, to identify oneself is to identify with heroes, emblematic characters, models, and teachers and also precepts, norms whose field extends from traditional customs to utopian paradigms, which, emanating from the social imaginary, remodel our private imaginations” (RJ, 81). 21. “Why must we listen to the victims? Because when they come to the tribunal, it is not a naked cry that is heard. It is already a cry of indignation—not fair, unjust! And this cry includes several demands. First, that we understand, accept an intelligible, acceptable narration of what happened. Second, the victims ask that acts be qualified in a way that sets in place a just distance between all the protagonists. And perhaps we need also to hear, in our recognition of their suffering, a demand for an apology addressed to our politicians by those who suffer. Their request for indemnification comes only in the last place” (RJ, 256). See also the section on “Power and Evil” in HT, 254–61. In a different essay, alluding to his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another, Ricœur argues that “it is violence and the process of victimization engendered by violence that invites us to add a deontological dimension to the teleological dimension of ethics” (PA, 207). Referring to both the efforts of psychiatry and those of medical professionals, he points repeatedly to the paradoxical relationship of fragility and responsibility (PA, 253). 22. Ricoeur, Evil, 66. He appeals briefly to “wisdom” at the end “as a spiritual aid to the work of mourning, aimed at a qualitative change in lament and complaint” (ibid., 68). Belief in God is despite or in the face of evil (ibid., 70). On this question see also Jérôme Porée, “The Question of Evil,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 3–18. 23. Reagan shows how four dimensions of justice (judicial, distributive, social, and political) all require a notion of recognition in order to demonstrate the connection between recognition and justice in Ricœur’s account in his “Recognition and Justice,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 6.2 (2015): 118–29. (He also provides a list of every connotation of justice and recognition in both French and English [123–28].) See also Jean Greisch, “Toward Which Recognition?” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 90–111. Sebastian Purcell takes Ricœur’s account in a quite different direction in his “Recognition and Exteriority: Towards a Recognition-Theoretic Account of Globalization,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 2.1 (2011): 52–69. 24. CR, 141–49, chapter 2, and 225–46, respectively. 25. Arthos attributes this combination to Ricœur’s religious heritage: “The double heritage of Ricoeur’s Christianity is his extraordinary and obvious devotion to loving community and his interest in the fate of each individual in judgment.” Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricoeur, 134; emphasis his. 26. Amalric points out quite rightly that “the theme of recognition does not replace that of attestation, but rather completes and enriches it, by grounding more

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deeply the poetic-practical affirmation of a self in search of truth—in desire, in intersubjectivity and in life.” “Affirmation originaire, attestation, reconnaissance,” 28; emphasis his. 27. As noted already, the speech is included in Treanor, Passion for the Possible and also reprinted in PA, 290–95. 28. David Pellauer also mentions this in his 2014 Keynote address to the Ricoeur Society Meeting “Time of the Work: Reading Ricoeur Now,” 3. 29. Jean-Luc Amalric explores these tensions between activity and passivity in detail in his “La médiation vulnérable. Puissance, acte et passivité chez Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 9.2 (2018): 44–59. 30. Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology, 117. He argues that Ricœur becomes more deliberate in articulating a “poetics of hope” in his later years and consciously shifts from his emphasis on “the incapability of humans to the capable human self, to the positive possibilities of human acting and living.” Dan R. Stiver, “The Symbol Gives Rise to Theology,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 176. 31. The fullest discussion of the capable self is found in Course of Recognition, the final book published in Ricœur’s lifetime (CR, 89–146). Richard Kearney in one of the interviews with Ricœur points out that he seems to have moved from focus on incapacity to increasingly stressing capacity instead (PR, 167). This is of a piece with his much stronger earlier focus on religion and the ways in which it speaks of fallibility, sin, and guilt, and his relative lack of focus on religion in his final writings. In this regard, I disagree with Brian Gregor’s treatment who interprets Ricœur’s hermeneutics of religion as one of the “capable self” rather than an incapable one. See especially Gregor, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion, 79–96. Jean Greisch is right to warn, however, at least in regard to Ricœur’s philosophical work: “One would be wrong to oppose the first ‘philosophical anthropology’ of Ricoeur, as contained in Fallible Man, against this second ‘philosophical anthropology,’ as though it were necessary to choose between the fallible human and the capable human.” Greisch, “Toward Which Recognition?” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 101. See also his much fuller treatment of the topic in Greisch, Paul Ricœur, 283–396. In L’Herméneutique, Greisch suggests three stages in Ricœur’s “philosophical anthropology”: an “anthropology of disproportion in Symbolism of Evil, a “hermeneutics of the self” in Oneself as Another, and a “phenomenology of the capable human” in his final works (120, worked out in 120–43). Jean-Luc Amalric also identifies three stages in Ricœur’s “anthropology,” represented by Fallible Man, Oneself as Another, and Course of Recognition, respectively. Like Greisch he questions the dichotomizing that sees the latter work as completely different from Fallible Man and instead argues for a “fundamental continuity in Ricœur’s anthropological project,” which he associates closely with the influence of Jean Nabert. Jean-Luc Amalric, “Affirmation originaire, attestation, reconnaissance. Le cheminement de l’anthropologie philosophique ricœurienne,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 2.1 (2011): 13, 14; emphasis his. He focuses in particular on the themes of witness, affirmation, attestation, and recognition and argues that it his confrontation with Nabert that leads Ricœur to abandon the early notion of “original affirmation” (22), although he continues to make use of Nabert’s notion of witnessing or testimony (23). Nabert is indeed mentioned again

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in Course of Recognition (CR, 92–93). On this topic see also the essays collected in Paul Ricœur. De l’homme faillible à l’homme capable, ed. Gaëlle Fiasse (Paris: PUF, 2005). 32. Ricœur seems to embrace Kant fully on this point. In fact, he says in an interview: “I return again to Kant—he is always my preferred author for this philosophy of religion” (CC, 148). This is fully evident in many of his writings on religion (e.g., CI, 302–09, 414–24, 434–36; FS, 75–92, 209–16, 255–56, 294–97; PA, 276–89). Gregor criticizes this repeatedly in his book Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion, especially 83–85. Klemm thinks that Ricœur goes beyond Kant by emphasizing the “mythopoetic imagination” that addresses humans via the “enabling quality of gift by extending to them the actuality of a reasonable promise” in his “The Word as Grace: The Religious Bearing of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 10.4 (1993): 507. He seems to read Ricœur’s account of symbolism into his biblical hermeneutics somewhat problematically. Ricœur does not “demonstrate that philosophical thinking (which includes both pure reflection and hermeneutics), is always already religious thinking” (517). Antoine Grandjean criticizes Ricœur’s reading of Kant (mostly for not linking grace and freedom firmly enough) in his “La grâce de la liberté. Kant, Ricœur et la dialectique de la foi salvatrice,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 146.1 (2014): 27–42. Claudia Serban treats Kant’s and Ricœur’s as parallel explorations and argues that Ricœur is able to move beyond fallibility by drawing more fully on grace in her “Vouloir et pouvoir. Kant et Ricœur face au problème de la grâce,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 146.1 (2014): 43–57. Éléonore Dispersyn shows how Ricœur appropriates Kant through the lens of the category of hope in her “L’herméneutique de la religion à l’épreuve du mal chez Kant et Ricœur: Quelle espérance? Présentation et problématision du dossier,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 146.1 (2014): 1–8. She also argues that in the move from “fallible man to capable man, his entire conception of praxis changes, a conception that integrates the consenting to life despite the reality of evil, making it a living source to the opening of action” (6; emphases hers). (Her piece is the introduction to an issue that also contains a contribution by Greisch, and the ones by Serban, Grandjean, and Ehrsam discussed in this note.) See also Giovanni Lo Giudice, “‘Impenetrabile per noi’. Kant e Ricoeur sul male radicale,” Filosofia e teologia 26.2 (2012): 361–76; Raphaël Ehrsam, “L’herméneutique Ricœurienne de la religion. Avec ou contre Kant?” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 146.1 (2014): 59–74; Patrick Bourgeois, “Hope, Imagination, and Reflective Judgment: Paul Ricoeur and Immanuel Kant,” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 119–33; and the chapter by Greisch mentioned in the previous note. 33. Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann suggests that the religious symbols of evil can provide hope for the human situation in the world in his “Das Subjekt als ein Anderer. Paul Ricoeurs Vermittlung von Psycho-Analyse und Christentum,” Concordia: Internazionale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 43 (2003): 54. William Schweiker similarly wants Ricœur to draw more fully on theological resources for his account of moral capability in his “Imagination, Violence, and Hope: A Theological Response to Ricoeur’s Moral Philosophy,” in Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul

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Ricoeur, ed. David E. Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 205–25. 34. Serban argues that by “considering fallibility a capacity,” Ricœur is able “to establish reciprocity or even identification between the fallible and capable person,” inasmuch as grace becomes “inscribed into the horizon of thought of ipseity.” Thus, the “capable person” and the “capable God” go together. Hope is accomplished in the paradox and excess of grace. Serban, “Vouloir et pouvoir,” 44, 57. 35. Here Ricœur claims that religious practice means to gather in nonpolitical ways and to contribute to delivering “the core of goodness from the bonds that hold it captive” (RB, 30). Religious belief motivates us to do good, especially through love: “Thus is the religious added to the moral: as courage to be and as love. The courage to be reaches the capable man in his private solitude, the love in his shared otherness” (RB, 31). Yet, in the rest of the essay Ricœur abandons this interest in what religious communities do or how they or religion more generally might motivate us to action and instead focuses on religious veracity and the relationships between different religions. 36. Ricœur also points this out in the conversation with the neuroscientist JeanPierre Changeux: “I would say that the radicality of evil is superimposed on the originality of good.” He continues: “If religion has a meaning it is to be found here, in the attestation of support, of help offered to what I would call poetic resources, to our capacity to liberate goodness, to deliver it from captivity.” Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 287, 288. 37. Kearney argues that Ricœur attempts “to think impossibility in terms of possibility, incapacity in terms of capacity, impotency in terms of potency” in his “Capable Man, Capable God,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 55. He relies especially on Ricœur’s analysis of forgiveness as “restored capacity” (ibid., 56–57). 38. Changeux and Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think, 286. 39. On this essay, see Fred Dallmayer, “Love and Justice: A Memorial Tribute to Paul Ricoeur,” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 5–20 and, in a quite different vein, Pamela Sue Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness: When (Where?) Love and Justice Come Apart,” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 105–17. 40. See André LaCocque, “Love Proceeds by Poetic Amplification,” in Kaplan, Reading Ricoeur, 129–39 and Morny Joy, “Solicitude, Love, and the Gift,” Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, ed. Jonna Bornemark and Hans Ruin (Södertörn: Philosophical Studies, 2010), especially 100–101. 41. “As a grain of sand does not balance a load of gold, so the effort of God’s justice does not counterbalance His compassion. As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh compared with God’s mercy.” Indeed, the text even claims in regard to humans that “compassion and justice in one soul are as a man adoring God and idols in one house. Everywhere compassion is the enemy of justice. . . . As stubbles and fire cannot remain together in one room, so justice and compassion cannot in one soul.” Isaac the Syrian, Homily 50, in Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, trans. A. J. Wensinck (Wiesbaden: Dr. Martin Sändig oHG, 1969), 231.

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42. Rebecca K. Huskey has explored the centrality of hope in Ricœur’s thought overall in much more detail in Paul Ricœur on Hope: Expecting the Good (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). She also briefly reviews most previous discussions in her first chapter (1–20). Stiver says that “Ricoeur attempted to work out a philosophical approach to hope that ‘approximates’ religious hope.” Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology, 153. John Wall points out that the topic of hope was “originally intended to form the centerpiece of his poetics of the will.” Wall, “Ricoeur, Poetics, and Religious Ethics,” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 55. 43. Joy, “Solicitude, Love, and the Gift,” 85. 44. Peter Joseph Albano thinks that Ricœur develops an “apologetic of hope.” See his Freedom, Truth and Hope: The Relationship of Philosophy and Religion in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Lanham, MD: The University Press of America, 1987), especially 97–114 and 223. Stiver often points to the tension between risk and hope in Ricœur’s work (e.g. Theology After Ricoeur, 228). Vanhoozer similarly thinks of hope as central to Ricœur’s work, although he puts it in terms of a “passion for the possible.” Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, especially 3–16 (although this is the main theme of the book as a whole). Vanhoozer ultimately considers this a problem because it causes Ricœur to embrace an interpretation of the biblical texts that is too poetic and not sufficiently literal or historical: “While granting that the story of Jesus is indeed a source—even criterion—of hope, I have argued that Ricoeur needs to be more explicit concerning the conditions for this possibility if he wishes to distinguish it from fantasies, utopias and illusions” (278). Oddly, he refers to Ricœur as a representative of those trying to articulate the “sacred” (280), even claiming that “it is evident that Ricoeur views himself in the vanguard of a renaissance of the sacred” (284), although Ricœur always eschewed language of the sacred and even professed fear about it (e.g., FS, 72). Laughery, conversely, thinks that Ricœur remains sufficiently literal and historical in his biblical hermeneutics. Laughery, Living Hermeneutics in Motion, 126. 45. For example, I am hesitant about Wall’s frequent equation of the human with the divine in his Moral Creativity. Rather, what seems problematic in Ricœur’s account is the seemingly absolute dichotomy between fragility and hope, at least in his religious work, which thinks of fallibility as the defining human characteristic and hope as solely a divine redemptive response. The two are in far more creative tension in his broader philosophical work. 46. In an essay on “The Image of God and the Epic of Man” Ricœur instead refers to “the concept of Utopia as a purely human, reasonable, and civil expression of hope” (HT, 125). 47. On the topic of the eschaton, see also HT, 190–91. For a reading of the biblical book of Revelation that employs Ricœur’s hermeneutics as methodology, see Cameron Afzal, The Mystery of the Book of Revelation: Reenvisioning the End of Time (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 48. Ironically, Michael DeLashmutt draws on Ricœur’s account of narrative identity via a “detour through finitude” in order to argue for the hope of personal resurrection (through the narrative coherence of the passion story). Michael W. DeLashmutt, “Paul Ricoeur at the Foot of the Cross: Narrative Identity and the Resurrection of the Body,” Modern Theology 25.4 (2009): 589–616.

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49. On this issue specifically, see Yasuhiko Sugimura who investigates Ricœur’s rethinking (vis-à-vis Heidegger) of attestation in the face of death as key to the possibility of thinking religion in “‘Demeurer vivant jusqu’à . . .’ La question de la vie et de la mort et le ‘religieux commun’ chez le dernier Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/ Ricœur Studies 3.2 (2012): 26–37. 50. Interestingly, resurrection becomes rethought here in terms of continuing to be remembered by God, which moves hope even more firmly exclusively over to the divine side. This comes close to some of the claims of process thought. 51. Morny Joy points to this disjunction in her tracing of Ricœur’s account of fragility from his earliest to his final works, arguing that Ricœur does not have recourse to his religious insights on wisdom in his “public” philosophical work. She attributes some of the shifts in Ricœur’s work on this topic to his encounter with Arendt. This also involves a shift from fragility as designating my own fallibility to fragility as expressed in the weak and vulnerable other who is suffering, giving rise to solicitude. Morny Joy, “Ricoeur from Fallibility to Fragility and Ethics,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 20.1 (2016): 69–90. Interestingly, Ricœur does sometimes attribute the insight that the self has to undergo a “disappropriation” to psychoanalysis, not just to religion (e.g., On Psychoanalysis, 72; Freud and Philosophy, 420–30). 52. See also Ricœur’s comments on this in the discussion with Changeux in What Makes Us Think?, 259–79. 53. This is certainly true of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches and Desmond Tutu’s shaping of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Both drew deeply on a fount of narratives from a religious and profoundly biblical imaginary. Barash also comments on Martin Luther King Jr. in his “The Place of Remembrance,” Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 155–57. 54. It is not coincidental that it is often religious festivals or special occasions that result in violence. Emotions are already at a pitch and thus it takes much less to make them boil over—or even to have them turn into their opposite (the joy of celebration into hostility against the “other” who does not celebrate with “us”). 55. In his book on Freud, instead, Ricœur interprets it as an alternative to neurosis: “The same causes—life’s hardship, the triple suffering dealt the individual by nature, his body, and other men—give rise to similar responses—neurotic ceremonials and religious ceremonials, demand for consolation and appeal to Providence—and obtain comparable effects—compromise formations, secondary gain of illness and discharge of guilt, substitute satisfaction.” Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy, 533. 56. Duque employs Ricœur to rethink the relationship between violence and power on religious grounds, relying on the category of hospitality. A “religious” ethics of hospitality can help the (secular) state to push for more democratic political organization: a “religious attitude” can “coincide with a metaethics of hospitality” (209). See João Manuel Duque, Hospitalidade e Violência. Sobre un possível fundamento religioso anterior ao estado laico,” Franciscanum 167.59 (2017): 195–213. There are two early essays on the topic of violence included in Ricœur’s History and Truth (HT, 223–46). Erfani and Whitmire claim that Ricœur “does not recognize the fact that the desire to live together itself is necessarily caught in a struggle, in

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a conflict of interpretations of the good life” in their “A New Fragility: Ricoeur in the Age of Globalization,” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 68. In light of Ricœur’s repeated considerations of violence that seems an odd claim. 57. Ricœur concludes the essay: “Coming to a still higher level—and it is here that I can hope to overcome violence—at this more advanced stage, I say this: ‘At the very depth of my own conviction, of my own confession, I recognize that there is a ground which I do not control. I discern in the ground of my adherence a source of inspiration which, by its demand for thought, its strength of practical mobilization, its emotional generosity, exceeds my capacity for reception and comprehension.’ But then the tolerance that arrives at this peak risks falling down the slope on the other side, that of skepticism: aren’t all beliefs worthless? That is to say, do the differences not become indifferent? The difficulty then is to hold myself on the crest where my conviction is at the same time anchored in its soil, like its mother tongue, and open laterally to other beliefs, other convictions, as in the case of foreign languages. It is not easy to hold oneself at this crest. . . .” (RB, 39). The primary goal of this discussion seems to be tolerance of other beliefs. I wonder, however, whether the crucial goal should not be a different one: not a move from thinking I’m right to tolerating other opinions, but rather a move from a focus on thinking/belief to a focus on practice. On the topic of religion and violence, see also his essay “Religion and Symbolic Violence,” Contagion 6 (1999): 1–11. Informed by a reading of Girard, he articulates religious violence in terms of the disproportion between the abundance of the religious and human incapacity to receive it (3–4). He also identifies religious violence with ritual (7–8) in a similar way to the essay on religious belief, relying on Maurice Bloch’s account. A notion of sacrificial atonement reversing “the relation of the victim to the victimizing system” would enable a “deepening of conviction regarding the groundless ground and reinforcing the criticism of exclusionary impulses” (11).

INTERLUDE 1. On the broader topic of liturgy and hermeneutics, see the liturgical theologian and ritual studies scholar Margaret Mary Kelleher who argues that “anyone who attempts to study liturgical performance needs to develop some principles of interpretation which will guide the process” in her “Hermeneutics in the Study of Liturgical Performance,” Worship 67.4 (1993): 293. She briefly appeals to Ricœur (301–303), but mentions the difficulty of treating liturgical performance as text (303). Benedikt Kranemann bemoans the fact that so little work has been done in considering the hermeneutic dimensions of liturgics or discussing the role of interpretation in liturgy. He claims that almost nothing has been published in the area of hermeneutics and liturgy. Benedikt Kranemann, “Anmerkungen zur Hermeneutik der Liturgie,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 50 (2008): 128–61. He outlines several principles for interpretation of liturgical events. (Neither Gadamer nor Ricœur are mentioned in the article.) 2. Bridget Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994). See also Martin D. Stringer, “Text,

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Context and Performance: Hermeneutics and the Study of Worship,” Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (2000): 365–79, which is primarily a response to Nichols’ critique of his earlier claims about liturgical meaning being situated in the minds of his listeners. He criticizes both Nichols and Ricœur as far too strongly focused on texts and not paying sufficient attention to performance and the liturgical participants. He does assume, however, that when Ricœur draws parallels between texts and actions, he is arguing that the actions cease to be actions and become texts (370). That is both a strange claim and not at all what Ricœur suggests. Stringer seems right, however, in his critique of Nichols (and others) who focus far too exclusively on liturgical texts and do not pay sufficient attention to the rites themselves and the actions performed within them—and the ways in which those rites and actions are embodied. 3. Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur’s Textual Hermeneutics (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988); idem, Liturgy and Hermeneutics (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999). She draws from Ricœur primarily the three movements of participation, distanciation, and appropriation and the idea that liturgy like any meaningful action can be treated as text and hence interpreted. For a succinct summary, see chapter 3 of her Liturgy as Living Faith: A Liturgical Spirituality (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 1993), 36–51. Causse also briefly considers eucharistic and baptismal ritual in his discussion of Ricœur on “fault” in “La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur,” 83–85. 4. Brian A. Butcher, Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 5. Hughes, Worship as Meaning, especially 86–90, 101–03, 164–66. While Ricœur is mentioned frequently, Derrida, Peirce, Taylor, Jameson, etc. are more significant sources. 6. For example: Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 5; David N. Power, Unsearchable Riches: The Symbolic Nature of Liturgy (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1984); LouisMarie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995); Rainer Volp, ed., Zeichen: Semiotik in Theologie und Gottesdienst (Munich and Mainz: Chr. Kaiser und Matthias Grünewald, 1982); Kieran Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy (London: Macmillan, 1991). He discusses Ricœur briefly in his chapter on “Action, Symbol, Text,” 274–76. 7. Marianne Moyaert, “Ricoeur and the Wager of Interreligious Ritual Participation,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78.3 (2017): 173– 99. She also responds to some of the critiques of ritual scholars (such as the dominance of textual models) in this piece. For a much fuller treatment of how Ricœur could be used for interreligious dialogue, see her Fragile Identities: Towards a Theology of Interreligious Hospitality (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2011) and In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), as well as Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, eds. Richard Kearney and James Taylor (London: Continuum, 2011). Maria Vendra

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also employs Ricœur for interreligious dialogue, drawing especially on his notions of fragility and fallibility. Maria Cristina Clorinda Vendra, “Between Fragility and Openness: Cohabitation in the Interreligious Dialogue with Paul Ricoeur,” Teoria: Rivista di Filosofia 36.1 (2016): 115–32. See also Richard Kearney, “Ricoeur and Biblical Hermeneutics: On Post-Religious Faith,” in Davidson, Ricoeur Across the Disciplines, 30–43. 8. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; originally 1992), 50–52. Fred Clothey tries to develop a comprehensive hermeneutics of ritual phenomena, but does not appeal to Ricœur for this (there is one reference to Gadamer in note 4), arguing that it must adopt the hermeneutic circle, be contextual, multiform, historical, and morphological. Fred Clothey, “Toward a Comprehensive Interpretation of Ritual,” Journal of Ritual Studies 2.2 (1988): 147– 61. Victor Turner appealed primarily to Dilthey. There was some interaction between Clifford Geertz and Ricœur; Geertz also occasionally draws on Ricœur’s work (as does Ricœur for Geertz, for example, LIU, 254–66; Evil, 39; PA, 182, 185, 193). For a consideration of the connections between Ricœur and Geertz, see Maria Vendra, “Paul Ricœur and Clifford Geertz: The Harmonic Dialogue between Philosophical Hermeneutics and Cultural Anthropology,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 11.1 (2020): 49–64. James W. Fernandez criticizes employing the model of discourse or text for sociological and anthropological research in his “Exploded Worlds—Text as a Metaphor for Ethnography,” Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1985): 15–26. He contends that Ricœur’s model of the text for action is reductive and ignores the interaction with other people. While that does not seem quite fair to Ricœur, care certainly should be taken that the parallel between text and action does not collapse action into text. Fernandez’ argument, however, is primarily about the practice of anthropology or ethnography. 9. In this respect, emulating the spirit of Ricœur in his distinction of the disciplines: “Thus I find that there is much more violence in this integration of religion with philosophy [i.e. collapsing one into the other in Hegelian fashion] than in the recognition of their specificity and the specificity of their intersection” (AGT, 588). Wenzel thinks that Ricœur was able to provide genuine philosophical (rather than pseudo-theological or apologetic) thinking about faith. Ricœur’s poetics allowed him “to do what the philosopher can do legitimately in the face of revelation without being guilty of a sacrificium intellectus, namely to examine the conditions of human existence—in this case the ‘interpretive structures of human experience’—under which revelation (in the religious sense) would be thinkable.” Wenzel, “Kritik— Imagination—Offenbarung,” 572. This seems right to me. 10. For one example of the latter, see Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 11. This is the main thrust of Butcher’s approach. 12. The work of Robert Taft, Paul Bradshaw, Maxwell Johnson, and Thomas Talley are good examples of the former approach, that of Aidan Kavanagh, David Fagerberg, Gordon Lathrop, and Byron Anderson are prominent examples of the latter, although there is obviously also some overlap between the approaches (and many other representatives could be listed).

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13. Alexander Schmemann’s pioneering work is now often accused of this. He certainly does try to locate a clear “ordo” in the early centuries that he thinks then underwent decline or corruption and ought now to be recovered. See especially his Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986) and the volume edited by Thomas Fisch, Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990). Butcher also criticizes Schmemann in this respect, especially for his facile dismissal of the liturgical commentary tradition, in his Liturgical Theology After Schmemann, 9–13. The “popular” versions of this are obviously far more egregious than Schmemann’s. Taft speaks of tradition as a “genetic vision of the present, a present conditioned by its understanding of its roots.” The point of studying history for him “is not to recover the past (which is impossible), much less to imitate it (which would be fatuous), but to understand liturgy which, because it has a history, can only be understood in motion, just as the only way to understand a top is to spin it.” In a different article, he argues that “the past is always instructive but never normative.” Robert F. Taft, S.J., Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (Rome: Edizioni Orientalia Christiana, 1997), 191–92, 291; emphasis his. 14. For one prominent attempt to describe this, see: Robert F. Taft, S.J. Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It (Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2006). 15. John F. Baldovin explores this question for several historical elements of liturgy in his Worship: City, Church, and Renewal (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1991); see also his “The Uses of Liturgical History,” Worship 82.1 (2008): 2–18. Robert F. Taft ends his magisterial analysis of the liturgical hours with a reflection on “What it all means”: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), Part IV. 16. Texts that raise this question explicitly include E. Byron Anderson, Worship and Christian Identity: Practicing Ourselves (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2003) and Hughes’ Worship as Meaning. 17. See especially E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill, eds. Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God: Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998) and Bruce T. Morrill Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). 18. These are obviously only broad tendencies; there are plenty of more conservative congregants concerned about poverty or other “social” issues and certainly many mainstream churches also aim for personal transformation, even if the rhetoric employed for either focus tends to be quite different.

CHAPTER 4 1. This is why Kearney calls it a “diacritical hermeneutics” in his contribution “Owl of Minerva Takes Flight: Obituary for Paul Ricoeur” in Erfani, Paul Ricoeur, 1.

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2. For an early examination of Ricœur on truth—especially in regard to history, language, and the biblical texts—see Albano, Freedom, Truth and Hope, especially 129–96, and Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur, especially 188–228. 3. Ricœur says: “Our initial skepticism has been driven from several successive positions; but it has also unseated us. At the outset, it is conquered in the One; but I do not know this One. Consequently, skepticism remains existentially the temptation par excellence of the historian’s craft. History remains the place of the abolished, of the distant, and of the ‘other.’ No one may write the philosophia perennis. This ambiguous status of the history of philosophy is that of communication which modulates on the Same and the Other, on the One and the Many. It is ultimately the ambiguous status of mankind, for the history of philosophy, in the last analysis, is one of the privileged roads on which mankind struggles for its unity and its perenniality” (HT, 56). He also reminds the reader repeatedly that history is multiple. The “spirit of falsehood is inextricably bound up with our search for truth” (HT, 166). Truth is not mere agreement, but a continual experiment and search for better accounts. 4. See also again the essay “Memory, History, Oblivion” mentioned in the last chapter. 5. For example, some of the Marian feasts rely heavily on the Protevangelium of James, which purports to be a narrative of Mary’s childhood. The feast of the Dormition relies on a variety of early dormition accounts (cf. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption). 6. Nicholas Wolterstorff objects to this language of the liturgical present—both in the liturgical texts and in the work of liturgical theologians—as “extraordinary” and ultimately false. Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 188–208. His treatment is a good example of what happens when truth is understood solely in terms of verification or literal correspondence, namely a profound misunderstanding of what is happening in the liturgical event. He also discusses in detail the question of authenticity raised by the issue of whether people actually mean what they say in worship, especially when that language is liturgically scripted. For a fuller account and critique (and a comparison with some of Marion’s exorbitant claims about revelation), see my “Why Philosophy Should Concern Itself with Liturgy: Philosophical Examination of Religion and Ritual Practice,” Liturgies: Philosophical Explorations of Embodied Religious Practice, ed. Aaron Simmons, Neil DeRoo, and Bruce Ellis Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 7. Although Kühn does not focus on liturgy, but more broadly on religious experience, he does consider the notion of testimony in Ricœur’s work as crucial: Ricœur thinks “religious conversion” from a “hermeneutics of testimony.” Rolf Kühn, “Paul Ricoeur’s religionsphilosophisches Denken zwischen Schrift(en) und absolutem Voraus,” Studia Phaenomenologica: Romanian Journal of Phenomenology 13 (2013): 344, worked out more fully in Section 2, 345–48. 8. Jacques Schouwey highlights the discussion of testimony especially in his “De la possibilité d’une herméneutique philosophique de la religion,” 360–62. 9. Jean Greisch argues that attestation is the “hidden core” of Ricœur’s “hermeneutics of testimony” and his “hermeneutics of the self.” He points out that

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“testimony has been an important theme in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical thought since at least 1972.” He coins the term “narrative attestation” to “stress the exceptionally strong bond between the concept of narrative identity and the phenomenon of attestation.” Greisch, “Testimony and Attestation,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 81, 90. Amalric points to similar parallels in his “Affirmation originaire, attestation, reconnaissance,” 12–34. On attestation, see also Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur, 195–202. 10. In fact, Ricœur is well known for this attempt to bridge the continentalanalytical divide. He attempts this not by a simplistic amalgamation but by an effort of mutual enrichment, often employing the tools and claims of one tradition in service of aims more characteristic of the other. This is particularly true in his work on narrative identity. Yet his hermeneutics throughout is informed by a deep appreciation and competent knowledge of both sides of the discipline. In all his reflections he seeks to find a sort of Aristotelian “golden mean,” a higher middle way that is not merely compromise but a place where new meaning is produced in dialogue and even friction. Dierckxsens explores the intersection between Ricœur’s work and analytic philosophy (especially in regard to moral feeling) in his Paul Ricœur’s Moral Anthropology. 11. “If the possibility of suspecting the veracity of a declaration of intention argues against its descriptive character and against the truth claim attaching to descriptions, this very possibility of suspicion proves by itself that the problem posed belongs to a phenomenology of attestation, which cannot be reduced to a criteriology suited to description. Tests of sincerity. . . are not verifications but trials that finally end in an act of trust, in a final testimony, regardless of the intermediary episodes of suspicion. . . Veracity is not truth, in the sense of the adequation of knowledge to its object.” OA, 72–73; emphasis added. 12. Ricœur focuses especially on Davidson’s account of events and Parfit’s reflections on identity, finding both ultimately insufficient since they lose sight of the person, the body, and the connection between agent and action. Causse also points to the importance of corporeality in attestation in his “La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur,” 79. 13. See also Stiver, Theology After Ricoeur, 188–228; idem, Ricoeur and Theology, 126–35; Butcher, Liturgical Theology after Schmemann, 137–49. 14. Ricœur’s distinction between verification and manifestation in the biblical texts is similarly close to Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia, showing forth or revelation (and his later distinction between calculative and meditative discourse). See “On the Essence of Truth” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993) and “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Ricœur refers explicitly to Heidegger in one of the contexts where he explicates this (FS, 36). 15. In addition, Ricœur insists that this notion of otherness is characterized by diversity (OA, 318). 16. Ricœur also points out here the close connection between the truth of the testifier’s assertion about an event and that of the witness’ reliability itself. 17. In Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 22. 18. Ibid., 24.

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19. Moyaert warns of this danger by asking: “Does loyalty to certain ritual practices, symbols, and actions remain loyalty to God?” Moyaert, Response to the Religious Other, 105. 20. Sometimes he expresses this in fairly normative fashion: “philosophical reasoning should consult expressions of the confession of evil which are the least elaborated, the least articulated” (CI, 426). 21. In a different context he challenges a notion of revelation that reduces it to a question of origin (CC, 147). 22. See especially Ricœur’s essay “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community” (FS, 68–72). 23. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 34–39, 129, 231–35. (German pagination is noted in the margins of both existing English translations.) 24. E.g. Heidegger’s explication of the meaning of Weltlichkeit (ibid., 64). He also insists that this must always refer to the phenomenon as a “whole” (not only partially) and to the “unified” (einheitlich) experience (ibid., 130–34). This is also where he introduces the notion of equiprimordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit). 25. Ibid., 50–52. 26. Heidegger often says that the everyday “entspringt” out of the more fundamental “Ursprung.” 27. Although eigentlich is often translated as “authentic,” it has all the aforementioned connotations (which often make much better sense of Heidegger’s claims). Etymologically, it is also related to “own” (eigen), which Heidegger employs heavily in arguing that we have to “own” our existence in order to exist “authentically”/eigentlich. 28. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 180–84. 29. Indeed, this is what Ricœur stresses repeatedly in the three essays collected in his On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (London: Routledge, 2006), 13, 20, 25. Interestingly, he refers to “eucharistic hospitality” as an analogy for the risk between faithfulness and betrayal that is at stake in any translation (ibid., 24). 30. In this respect, I have some hesitations about the account of singularity on which Dierckxsens insists in his Moral Anthropology, which takes for granted sociological and anthropological assumptions about cultural relativism. The fact that there are many differences between cultures, even in terms of conceptions of morality, does not necessarily mean that no comparisons between cultures are possible or that one cannot argue for broader guidelines for ethical conduct transcending individual cultural mores and allowing us to live together in a global world. 31. Taft also points this out in Beyond East and West, 235. This was obviously even more broadly the case before the invention of the printing press when most people did not own a Bible and did not have access to the text (often could not even read). 32. It is also traditionally the place for catechesis, that is, for instruction into the faith. Although parents may obviously do this also at home, most Christian communities have more or less formal processes for the pedagogical conveying of Christian faith.

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33. This notion is considerably less foreign to the East than to the West. Paul Meyendorff has pointed out that ancient and medieval mystagogies (interpretations of liturgy), in fact closely follow the methods of interpretation for scriptural texts (such as typological, allegorical, and anagogical interpretation). See his introduction to St. Germanos of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984). The liturgical texts are in some sense seen as having a very similar nature to biblical texts and thus are to be treated in the same fashion. Andrew Louth has also suggested that the notion of inspiration is a rather Western notion and that in the East inspiration was understood in terms of what allowed for an encounter with Christ and confirmed the church’s experience of such encounter. Thus, “inspiration” was applied not only to the scriptures but to the mysteries (sacraments), the writings of theologians, icons, and the liturgy itself. Liturgical reception of texts or experiences as an “authentic witness to Christ” testify more to inspiration than something “located” in a text. Andrew Louth, “Inspiration of the Scriptures,” Sobernost 31.1 (2009): 39. See also Thomas Pott, Byzantine Liturgical Reform: A Study of Liturgical Change in the Byzantine Tradition, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010), especially Part I. 34. This is a shortened version of Prosper of Aquintaine’s longer statement lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi. This phrase is repeated and examined by many liturgical thinkers and in most introductions to liturgical theology. Alexander Schmemann also used the phrase heavily. For a particularly useful and thorough introduction see Irwin, Context and Text, chapter 1. 35. It has even become the revised title of Fagerberg’s book on liturgical theology. For his discussion of “primary theology” see chapter 1 of the early edition and chapters 1 and 2 of the revised version. David Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What is Liturgical Theology? A Study in Methodology (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004 [1992]). See also Taft, “Liturgy as Theology,” in Beyond East and West, 233–37. He makes his point in his usual colorful rhetoric: “To think that a homily of John Chrysostom or John Calvin, or a book by Karl Rahner or Karl Barth, is worthy of the theologian’s attention, and fail to understand how the ways and the prayers by which these same gentlemen along with some other millions have worshiped God is worthy of the same, is the prejudice of those so locked into a narrow concept of expression as to think that only words communicate anything theological” (234). 36. Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1984), 3. 37. Ibid., 22. He thinks of this as a radical notion: “Sacramental discourse in fact is often thought of as theological adiaphora best practiced by those with a taste for banners, ceremonial, and arts and crafts” or “as an academically less than disciplined swamp in which Anglican high churchmen, Orthodox bishops, and many if not all Roman Catholics and others are hopelessly mired” (ibid., 46). He uses colorful language to express why we have difficulty with the notion that liturgy might be more primary than theology: “We today can hardly be expected to understand how liturgy could be considered seriously as the basic condition for doing theology, even less as the law which founds or constitutes the law of belief, so long as we perceive liturgical

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worship as a pastel endeavor shrunk to only forty-five minutes and consisting of some organ music, a choral offering, a few lines of scripture, a short talk on religion, a collection, and perhaps a quick consumption of disks or pellets and a beverage” (ibid., 60). 38. Hughes contends that ambiguity about the direction of worship is problematic. Careful distinctions must be made so that it is clear when the presider is speaking for the people and when to them (Hughes, Worship as Meaning, 163). 39. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 74. 40. Ibid., 82, 85. Again, he draws the contrasts in vivid language: “Unlike these [systematic theologies], however, it [liturgy] is proletarian in the sense that it is not done by academic elites; it is communitarian in the sense that it is not undertaken by the scholar alone in his study; and it is quotidian in the sense that it is not accomplished occasionally but regularly throughout the daily, weekly, and yearly round of the assembly’s life of public worship” (ibid., 89; emphases his). He insists that liturgics should not be considered art or even practical theology, but instead “is a major discipline, similar to biblical exegesis or church history or doctrinal theology, particularly in those institutions which devote themselves to preparing people for ministry to assemblies of faith” (ibid., 148). 41. Ibid., 150. 42. Schmemann explores this question in some detail in the first part of his Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 13–15. See also his essay “Liturgy and Theology,” in Fisch, Liturgy and Tradition, 49–68. Baldovin stresses that the Bible “does not precede Christianity historically nor does it come down from heaven whole and entire like some excellent divine gift. Rather, it is the produce of struggle, division, controversy, and witness of faith. We call it inspired, not because god or an angel or some such divine intervener guided the various writers’ hands but because in this collection of diverse writings the church has recognized its faith in Jesus.” Baldovin, Worship: City, Church, and Renewal, 213. He examines different ways in which Bible and liturgy interact. 43. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 89, 111. He explicitly refers to liturgy as “the dynamic condition within which theological reflection is done, within which the Word of God is appropriately understood” and as the source for theology (ibid., 7–8). He also bemoans the contemporary development in which “rite and its liturgical enactment ceased to be scripture’s home and became its stepchild first, then its third cousin, and finally an unrecognized stranger” (ibid., 119). Dalmais argues, somewhat more tentatively, that “the Word of God remains alive in the Church, and it is in the liturgy that this life has its highest manifestation . . . Theologians can therefore appeal to the liturgical uses of Scripture, not as though they themselves were Scripture, that is, the source of faith, but as privileged witnesses to the faith.” In Aimé G. Martimort, A.G., ed. The Church at Prayer I: Principles of the Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1987), 280. 44. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 111. 45. Ibid., 113. The reference in the last sentence is to the “divine liturgy,” which is the term employed for the main eucharistic service (usually, but not exclusively, on Sunday mornings) in the Eastern Orthodox churches.

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46. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. J. Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 165. He criticizes the fact that “eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the consciousness of the West” (ibid., 165–66). He insists that the liturgy “contains an essential exposition of the biblical legacy that goes beyond the limits of the individual rites, and thus it shares in the authority of the Church’s faith in its fundamental form. The authority of the liturgy can certainly be compared to that of the great confessions of faith of the early Church. Like these, it developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit . . . Scripture is Scripture only when it lives within the living subject that is the Church” (ibid., 167). [The book predates his papacy.] 47. Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 336. He draws several other parallels between New Testament and liturgy in the following pages.

CHAPTER 5 1. Hughes, Worship as Meaning, 11. 2. Ibid., 31. 3. Ibid., 302. 4. Stringer, instead, would locate meaning entirely in the mind of the attendee or audience: “Each individual attending the liturgy—each with their own context, their own perspective, their own level of engagement with the rite and so on—will have their own interpretation of, or construct their own meaning for, the rite in question. This would suggest that there are as many interpretations, or ‘meanings’, for any liturgical act as there are people attending.” The anthropologist or liturgical scholar cannot “know the meaning of any one specific rite for any one individual.” He thinks it is possible to conclude that “‘meaning’, therefore, is probably not an issue the liturgist should be concerned with,” although he suggests that one might discover the “strategies” by which meaning is negotiated within a given liturgical rite. Stringer, “Text, Context, and Performance,” 378. See also his A Sociological History of Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In a different way, Nathan Mitchell argues that the point in liturgy is not “meaning” but “meeting”: “Liturgy’s goal isn’t meaning but meeting. And meetings are always risky. Christian worship is not doctrine disguised in ritual shorthand but action that draws us into the dynamic, hospitable, yet perilous space of God’s own life.” Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2006), 59. 5. Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 24. 6. Ibid., 84. 7. Consequently, Nichols thinks that there is no clear “point of origin for the practice of liturgy.” The question of “whether worshippers continue to participate in liturgical action because they believe in the textually enshrined promise of the Kingdom, or whether they gain glimpses of the Kingdom as a consequence of their belief in the validity of the act of worship” must remain open and “an act of faith.” Therefore, “liturgical hermeneutics is responsible not only for finding an adequate

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way of approaching this unique form of discourse, but also for seeking an ever more precise means of discussing liturgical faith.” Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 37. 8. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 48. 9. Ibid., 100. 10. Lathrop, Holy Things, especially 33–53. Part I of this book develops the “pattern” of liturgy, which he then goes on to apply or highlight in all three volumes. 11. Anderson, Worship and Christian Identity, 93. 12. Cyril of Jerusalem, Lectures on the Christian Sacraments, trans. Maxwell E. Johnson (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017). 13. Maximus the Confessor, “The Church’s Mystagogy,” in Selected Writings, ed. G. C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). 14. Germanos of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984). 15. Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, trans. Joan M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997). 16. Symeon of Thessalonika, The Liturgical Commentaries, trans. Steven Hawkes-Teeples (Rome: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2011). 17. See also Enrico Mazza, Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1989). 18. This chapter takes up in a more explicitly hermeneutic vein several themes and considerations already articulated in my Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 19. Stefanos Alexopoulos, “Anamnesis, Epiclesis, and Mimesis in the Minor Hours of the Byzantine Rite,” Worship 94 (2020): 228–45. See also Olaf Richter, Anamnesis—Mimesis—Epiklesis: Der Gottesdienst als Ort religiöser Bildung (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2005). 20. Harald Buchinger, “Heilige Zeiten? Christliche Feste zwischen Mimesis und Anamnesis am Beispiel der Jerusalemer Liturgie der Spätantike,” in Peter Gemeinhardt und Katharina Heyden, eds., Heilige, Heiliges und Heiligkeit in spätantiken Religionskulturen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 299–310 (Section 3 of the contribution). He points out that the terms are simply being employed, but that there has not been explicit discussion of their meaning or importance (285). 21. Ibid., 309–10. For further discussions of the issue of mimesis (and anamnesis) in the Paschal Triduum, see La Celebrazione del Triduo Pascquale: Anamnesis e mimesis. Atti del III Congresso Internationale di Liturgica (Rome: BenedictinaEdizioni, 1990), especially the contributions by Anscar Chupungco and Crispino Valenziano. 22. Buchinger, “Heilige Zeiten?,” 312. 23. Taft often stresses this. Anamnesis is “what liturgy is all about.” What “we do in liturgy” is that “we make anamnesis.” Beyond East and West, 22, 23. This is a repeated refrain in many of the articles included in this volume. That liturgy is primarily anamnesis in the sense of remembering and portraying the events of salvation is often simply taken for granted by liturgical scholars. 24. See, for example, Gennadios Limouris, “The Church as Mystery and Sign in Relation to the Holy Trinity—in Ecclesiological Perspective,” in Church, Kingdom,

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World: The Church as Mystery and Prophetic Sign, ed. Gennadios Limouris, Faith and Order Paper No. 130 (Geneva, WCC: 1986); Kallistos Ware, “The Theology of Worship,” The Inner Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004) and Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, “The Eucharist and the Kingdom of God,” trans. Elizabeth Theocritoff, Sourozh: A Journal of Orthodox Life and Thought 58.1–2 (1994): 32–46. 25. Daniel Galadza, “‘Blessed is He Who has Come and Comes Again’: Mimesis and Eschatology in Palm Sunday Hymns and Processions of Twelfth-Century Jerusalem,” in Gador-White, Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium, 168–89. Taft also argues against historicism and a simplistic juxtaposition of historical and eschatological interpretations of liturgy in his “Historicism Revisited,” in Beyond East and West, 31–49. 26. Irwin, Context and Text, 47. 27. Ibid., 93. Irwin explains: “The in illo tempore of saving history becomes, in the hodie of the liturgical celebration, the quotidie of the experience of salvation, as an et in saecula and already anticipated experience of salvation celebrated in the hic et nunc of the liturgy” (ibid.). 28. Ibid., 99. 29. Andrew Walker White, Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Instead he stresses the role of rhetoric in the development of liturgy, assuming that rhetoric had no mimetic features. 30. For example, ibid., 41, 46, 52. Walker White puts this in the strongest possible terms: “Why not read the Divine Liturgy as a drama, when the Church Fathers seem to invite us to do just that? The answer, in a nutshell, is: because the Liturgy was not conceived as a drama, it was not performed as one, and the record shows clearly that the Fathers and their successors intended the laity to have a primarily spiritual experience through their work, not an aesthetic one.” Ibid., 52. 31. Richard D. McCall, “Anamnesis or Mimesis? Unity and Drama in the Paschal Triduum,” Ecclesia Orans 13 (1996): 319, 320. See also his Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 32. Albert Gerhards, “Mimesis—Anamnesis—Poiesis: Überlegungen zur Ästhetik christlicher Liturgie als Vergegenwärtigung,” in Walter Fürst, ed., Pastoralästhetik: Die Kunst der Wahrnehmung und Gestaltung in Glaube und Kirche (Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 2002), 170. Karl-Heinrich Bieritz criticizes this reading of liturgical history as a demise of anamnesis in favor mimesis. He interprets mimesis in spatial terms as focused on images and providing experience or presence, anamnesis in temporal terms as focused on the word and providing meaning or sense. Both are forms of “representing” salvation, which he thinks are ultimately complimentary rather than in conflict. Karl-Heinrich Bieritz, “Zwischen Raum- und Zeitgenossenschaft: Vergegenwärtigung des Heils in Liturgie und geistlichem Spiel,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 48 (2009): 38–61. 33. Roger Grainger, The Drama of the Rite: Worship, Liturgy and Theatre Performance (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 17. He does not so much argue that liturgy is drama or performance as simply assume it, instead discussing ways in which such performance and drama can take place successfully.

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34. Ibid., 19, 83. 35. Ibid., 18, 90. 36. Ibid., 39. Grainger does not actually explicitly discuss mimesis as an idea within the text, but later affirms (without further support) that “the Eucharist was regarded by Christians during the first centuries as a drama” (ibid., 88). 37. Christine Schnusenberg, The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama: The Eucharist as Theater (New York: Paulist Press, 2010), especially 1–14. 38. Jürgen Bärsch, “Ist Liturgie Spiel? Historische Beobachtungen und theologische Anmerkungen zu einem vielgestaltigen Phänomen des christlichen Gottesdienstes,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 47.1 (2005): 1–24. 39. Frederick W. Dillistone, “Interplay between the Religious and the Dramatic,” Theology Today 31.2 (1974): 127. See also Robert W. Hovda, “Play, Drama, and Life-Giving Rite,” Liturgy 6.4 (1986): 40–47, and Willem Marie Speelman, “Liturgy and Theatre: Towards a Differentiation,” Questions Liturgiques 83 (2002): 196–216. 40. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 7. Krueger locates the mimetic dimension of liturgy primarily in terms of the models portrayed within it but also in the performative nature of much hymnography. He thinks that Byzantine authors exhort to the imitation of actions in order to shape a certain kind of self. Thus, ritual is mimesis in the sense of performing the rules that are provided by the liturgical narrative. 41. Many contemporary scholars refer to liturgy or ritual as a form of play. That seems fundamentally false and wrong-headed to me. See my critique of this in “Is Liturgy Ludic? Distinguishing between the Phenomena of Play and Ritual,” Religions 12.4 (2021): 1–26. 42. The philosopher Terence Cuneo also explicitly emphasizes the mimetic function of liturgical language. Although he rejects a purely anamnetic or vividly dramatic account, he does consider liturgy to be a form of reenactment that immerses us in patterns of life via the roles we observe. Liturgical “reenactment” enables the listener to “imaginatively identify . . . with characters in the core narrative,” to imitate the roles presented by liturgy via identification with them, to “appropriate the riches of the narrative,” and hence to “construct and revise their narrative identities.” Ritualized Faith: Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 87. Cuneo distinguishes between two theories of “liturgical reenactment,” namely “anamnetic theory” and “dramatic representation theory” (76), which to some extent reproduces the dialectic between anamnesis and mimesis present in some of the other authors. 43. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 39 (emphases his). See also his The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, 1987), which interprets the eucharistic celebration as entry into the kingdom. In a different context he laments: “But the individual believer, entering the church, does not feel he is a participant and celebrant of worship, does not know that in this act of worship he, along with the others who together with him are constituting the Church, is called to express the Church as new life and to be transformed again into a member of the Church” (Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 30). Morrill appropriates and criticizes some of this in his Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory; see especially the chapter on Schmemann.

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44. Moyaert employs Ricœur in this sense for ritual performance: “The ritual has a power to project a possible world that is appropriated differently by different performers. In my ‘understanding,’ this interaction between performer and ritual avoids reducing the meaning of the ritual to some kind of idealized intention of the religious community (the official meaning the ritual is meant to express) as well as reducing the meaning of the ritual to the subjective intentions (and experiences) of the ritualist.” Moyaert, “Interreligious Ritual Participation,” 192. 45. I work this out much more fully than I can do here in my Welcoming Finitude. 46. See also some interesting comments on liturgical space and the “bodily” nature of worship in Bruce T. Morrill, ed. Bodies of Worship: Explorations in Theory and Practice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999). For a discussion of sacred space see Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), chapter 14; Philip H. Pfattreicher, Liturgical Spirituality (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), chapter 6; James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), chapter 3; David Brown, God and the Enchantment of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Susan White, “The Theology of Sacred Space,” in The Sense of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time, eds. David Brown and Ann Loades (London: SPCK, 1995), 31–43. 47. Nichols argues in regard to space: “The fundamental hermeneutic assumption in the case of both the community and the individual is that the Kingdom is at once the ground of liturgical action, and its eschatological destination. This manifests itself in its simplest form as a function of space and architecture, when the congregation presents itself to the possibility of the Kingdom by moving out of the secular space, into the place set aside for worship.” Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 53. 48. See the three slightly overlapping pieces: Paul Ricœur, “Architettura e narratività,” Triennale di Milano XIX Esposizione Internazionale. Integrazione e pluralità nelle forme del nostro tempo. Le culture tra effimero e duraturo (Milano: Elemond Editori Associati, 1996), 64–72; idem, “Architecture et narrativité,” Urbanism 303 (1998): 44–51; idem, “Architecture et narrativité” (a typed manuscript without pagination archived on the Fonds Ricœur website, www​.fondsricoeur​.fr). See also Sebastian Purcell, “Space and Narrative: Enrique Dusserl and Paul Ricoeur: The Missed Encounter,” Philosophy Today 54 (2010): 289–98. 49. Ricœur, “Architecture et narrativité,” 44–45. 50. Ricœur explains what this means in an interview with Kearney: “I mean the formulation of two opposing forms of time: public time and private time. Private time is mortal time . . . As soon as we understand our existence as this mortal time, we are already involved in a form of private narrativity or history; as soon as the individual comes up against the finite limits of its own existence, it is obliged to recollect itself and to make time its own. On the other hand, there is public time. Now I do not mean public in the sense of physical or natural time (clock time), but the time of language itself, which continues on after the individual’s death. To live in human time is to live between the private time of our mortality and the public time of language. . . . history—as public narrativity—produces human time.” Kearney, Debates in Continental

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Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 102–03. This interview is also printed in PR, 127–430. 51. On ekphrasis, see Ruth Webb, Ekphraseis: Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). Many of the primary texts are collected in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 3121453: Sources and Documents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). See also Brian Croke, “Looking, Listening, and Learning: Justinian’s Hagia Sophia,” in Gador-Whyte, Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium, 140–67. 52. For a thorough discussion of the diverse developments, see Paul F. Bradshaw and Johnson E. Maxwell, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011). 53. Hughes, Worship as Meaning, 197. 54. Ibid., 209. Hughes uses Ricœurian language to talk about the world experienced by the worshipper: “If, on the other hand, what I have called the iconicity, the indexicality and the traditional (symbolic) dimensions of the significations have been successful, she will have seen her world, her self, her engagements and her possibilities opened to a new way of viewing all these. She will have been brought to the edge of what we can think and must thereafter only imagine; she will have apprehended that such was the intentional ministry of those who devised and executed the words and actions; and she will have grasped that God, Christianly understood, was the innermost subject matter of all these. Such, we may say, are the meanings of worship” (ibid., 216). 55. “But liturgy does not leave these things as we encounter them in their ordinariness. In many and various ways we subject them to what have been called ‘ritualizing strategies’: the ministerial party does not exactly walk, it processes; baptism is a form of washing but unlike any other lustration the candidate will undergo; the Eucharist is a meal, but one in which the bread is broken and given with a prayer and wine is consumed from a handsome cup; and so on, at pretty well every point. Whatever else it is, worship may be described as a richly complex series of intensifications of ordinariness” (ibid., 295; emphases his). 56. Joyce Ann Zimmerman, “Liturgical Assembly: Who is the Subject of Liturgy?” Liturgical Ministry 3 (1994): 51. 57. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 161. 58. Ibid., 171. 59. Ibid., 100. Kavanagh concludes that “this means that in a Christian assembly’s regular Sunday worship, a restored and recreated world must be so vigorously enfleshed in ‘civic’ form as to give the lie to any antithetical civitas.” The liturgical assembly “is the world made new.” Ibid., 175; emphasis his. 60. Fagerberg reiterates the transformative power of liturgy for the world the most strongly and the most frequently: “The people do not assemble on Sunday to worship because God is confined to a sacred place on a sacred day. They do not assemble to do Church, they assemble to do redeemed world. The arena of the life of faith is not some kind of sacred precinct, it is the world.” He asks about the purpose of coming together on a Sunday, suggesting that it is “not because God is here and not there, but so that the assembly, in their individual mundane vocations, can

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transform what is there by what was ritualized here.” Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, 190, emphases added. Hughes criticizes the liturgical theologians (like Schmemann, Kavanagh, and Fagerberg) for ignoring the reality of the contemporary world and not taking sufficiently seriously the clash “between the meanings proposed in the liturgy and the meanings proposed by the world to which the worshipper returns” (Worship as Meaning, 42, 222–33). 61. Lathrop, Holy Things, 1. Throughout his three-volume liturgical theology, he often stresses the transformative power of liturgy for the world, interpreting this in a variety of ways including ecological ones. Power similarly argues that liturgy and sacraments “transform human experience.” Unsearchable Riches, 3. 62. Dimitrios Passakos, “Worship, Rituals and Liturgy in Orthodox Tradition: Insights from Practice and Theology,” in Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller, eds., Worship Today: Understanding, Practice, Ecumenical Implications (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2004), 23. 63. Schmemann, Life of the World, 27. Frank Senn, a Protestant liturgical scholar, similarly says: “The purpose of proclaiming the word and celebrating baptism and the Lord’s Supper is to form a community of priests who will offer a sacrifice of praise and prayer for the life of the world.” The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 55; emphasis added. In a different context, he raises a number of relevant questions: “What theology is being prayed? What experience of (what) God is being promoted? What in the story of Christ is being proclaimed? What understanding of the church is being generated? What attitude toward the creation is being cultivated? What relationship to the world is being strategized? What kind of worship is being made possible? What kind of hospitality is being extended? How are new Christians being made? What values are being instilled? What doctrines are being expressed?” New Creation: A Liturgical Worldview (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), xi. 64. Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 31. 65. Ibid., 189. 66. David Pellauer explains: “Texts introduce new questions in so far as they (1) are complex works of discourse which transcend the problem of understanding at the levels of both the word and the sentence, and (2) because many texts, especially myths, are culturally and methodologically distanciated from us. We must discover whether this distance constitutes an unbridgeable form of alienation or if it is a necessary aspect of the basic structure of understanding.” Pellauer, “The Significance of the Text,” in Reagan, Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 101. See also the section devoted to distanciation (ibid., 106–108). Haryatmoko interprets distanciation negatively in terms of self-alienation (via ideology critique and deconstruction) and positively in terms of the creativity of play in his “Critical Reason and Faith,” 121–28. Moyaert employs Ricœur’s notions of distanciation and appropriation for interreligious dialogue in her “Interreligious Ritual Participation,” 177–81. 67. One might also say that various liturgical traditions open their respective liturgical worlds differently—and maybe even open quite different worlds, although there are obviously also overlaps.

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68. The movement into this world is particularly evident in the liturgies for baptism, for becoming a catechumen, for chrismation or confirmation, for marriage, and for ordination, which all designate an important change also in the real lives of those for whom they are performed. Saliers expresses this as follows: “Worship characterizes human beings who recall and give expression to a story about the world. The language of this story teaches us to describe all creatures in the world as God’s. Worship forms and conveys the awareness of God and the orders of creation and history.” Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics,” in Anderson, Liturgy and the Moral Self, 17. 69. Ricœur sometimes speaks of the performance of music as the kind of enactment a reader must perform: “Reading resembles instead the performance of a musical piece regulated by the written notations of the score” (HHS, 174). In a discussion of aesthetics he says: “Now each piece of music gives rise to a feeling that exists nowhere else except in that particular work. Could we not say that one of the main functions of music is to construct a world of singular essences in the realm of feeling?” In that context he is quite dismissive of “sacred music,” however, likening it to figurative painting because it is in “service of a text.” He prefers instead “when all external intentionality has disappeared and when it no longer has a signified that it possesses its full power of regenerating or recomposing our personal experience. Music creates feelings for us that have no name; it extends our emotional space, it opens in us a region where absolutely new feelings can be shaped. When we listen to a particular piece of music, we enter into a region of the soul that can be explored only by listening to this piece” (CC, 174). 70. Ricœur, “Postface,” 249. 71. Ricœur is quite insistent about the need for the “world” to have “bite,” that is, “power over the real.” He warns that “one cannot use the term ‘world,’ in a rigorous sense, unless the work performs for the spectator or the reader the work of refiguration that overturns expectation and changes horizons; it is only inasmuch as it can refigure this world that the work reveals itself as capable of a world.” Otherwise, it is “sheer entertainment” (CC, 173). 72. See Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West; Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991); Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Aimé G. Martimort, The Church at Prayer: The Liturgy and Time (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1986). For a theological interpretation of the meaning of this circularity, see Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, especially Part IV, 116–70. 73. Thus, familiarity and strangeness are in continual tension with each other. This will be discussed in the final section of chapter 7. 74. Both Western and Eastern scholars sometimes express the implications of liturgy for wider action or transformation of the “world” by adding the term lex vivendi or lex agendi to the more common phrase lex orandi, lex credendi. For example, these are used as the three major sections [Lex orandi, Lex credendi, Lex vivendi] of a work honoring H. Boone Porter: Creation and Liturgy: Studies in Honor of H.

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Boone Porter, ed. Ralph N. McMichael, Jr. (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1993).

CHAPTER 6 1. Mark Searle argues: “We kneel to confess, stand to salute and to praise; we bow, we beat the breast, we raise our hands, we genuflect, we make the sign of the Cross — and in all this we discover the meaning of the rite by putting ourselves as best we can into what we are doing. In all these ways and more, the liturgy encourages us to try on the metaphor; not just to stand there, but to body it forth.” “Liturgy as Metaphor,” Worship 55.2 (1981): 115. 2. One might say that the same effect is created when the liturgy is conducted in a language its participants no longer speak or understand. Despite the various challenges and problems this poses, clearly such liturgies do still function in many ways that are not solely tied to linguistic comprehension. 3. For uses of Ricœur for theological language more broadly, see Franz Prammer, Die philosophische Hermeneutik Paul Ricoeurs: in ihrer Bedeutung für eine theologische Sprachtheorie (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1988), especially Part III; Stiver, The Philosophy of Religious Language, especially chapters 5 and 6; Joseph Verheyden, Paul Ricœur: Poetics and Religion (Louvain: Peeters, 2011); David Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur on the Specificity of Religious Language,” The Journal of Religion 61.3 (1981): 264–84. Ana Wicks Escribar reviews Ricœur’s hermeneutics of religion in light of his writings on symbolism, metaphor, poetic, and ethics, seeing a “profound unity” in his thought in “La hermenéneutica como camino hacia la comprensión de sí. Homenaje a Paul Ricoeur,” Revista de Filosofia: Universidad de Chile 61 (2005): 43–59. See also Dan Stiver’s “The Symbols Gives Rise to Theology: A Poetics of Theology,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 169–87. Philippe Lacour considers the role of signification and reflexivity in Ricœur’s work and argues that his philosophy can be read as a “reflexive discourse” on the world’s meaning in his “Signification et réflexivité dans la philosophie de Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 11.1 (2020): 86–116. He examines five levels of discourse in Ricœur’s work: descriptive analysis, “transphrastic” composition, interpretive self-understanding, fundamental anthropological capacities, and metaphysics (88–92), stressing the role of reflexivity and translation in Ricœur’s explication of them. David Pellauer distinguishes six types of discourse in Ricœur (poetic, narrative, religious, political, legal, and philosophical) in his “Ricœur’s Own Linguistic Turn,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 5.1 (2014): 115–24. 4. Indeed, Prammer criticizes Ricœur for not considering symbolic actions more fully and paying more attention to the “unfolding of the meaning of the symbol” within its inscription in the life of the community that employs it. Prammer, Philosophische Hermeneutik, 216. 5. See, for example, Michael G. Lawler, Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). Leonardo Boff in his analysis of the sacraments says “a sacrament is a way of thinking, first of

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all. Sacramental thinking views reality not as a thing but as a symbol. The symbol arises from human encounter with the world. In this encounter both the human being and the world are changed; they become fraught with meaning.” Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life, Life of Sacraments, trans. John Drury (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1987), 89. 6. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 3. 7. Ibid., 84, 330. “It is in language that the ‘world’ becomes for us a world that speaks; it speaks in both senses of the word ‘speak,’ transitive and intransitive: it speaks us and it speaks to us” (ibid., 89; see also 111–28). 8. Ibid., 108, 123, 121. 9. Ibid., 355. See also Causse’s interpretation of gesture as symbolic in Ricœur’s sense in his “La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur,” 84–86. 10. Irwin, Context and Text, 132. 11. Ibid., 132. 12. “The very use of candles is significant. These are commodities whose purpose is to shed light and by their nature to be totally consumed in the act of being burnt. The purpose of the candle is to be burned, consumed. It is a complete oblation. Sacrificial overtones of complete self-offering are thus operative because of the nature of the candle as symbol” (ibid., 153). 13. Ibid., 158. 14. This cited expression refers to Augustine’s term for the sacrament. Nathan Mitchell, “‘Tell it Slant’: Gestures and Symbols in the Liturgy,” Liturgical Ministry 11 (2002): 89. Despite the title the essay actually focuses more on metaphor than on symbol. He thinks that liturgical and biblical narrative tells the religious truth “slant” or sideways via the employment of symbolic and metaphorical language. 15. Saliers, Worship as Theology, 140. He employs Victor Turner’s work to identify three aspects of the ritual process. These are: “(1) multivocality, or a fusion of many levels of meaning; (2) the power to unify several disparate referents and experiences; and (3) the ability to accumulate meanings around both affective and morally normative values. . . . On the one hand, symbols can be spoken of as objects, gestures, utterances, or complex actions. On the other hand, ritual symbols are never merely things. This is because ‘things’ like light, water, oil, or bread are already, for the Christian tradition, embedded in a history of shared social life. Such objects are not themselves ‘symbolic’ by virtue of using them to express our experience. Rather, only by being vulnerable to and learning to participate in the shared life toward which these symbols point is ‘experience of the symbol’ possible” (ibid., 143). 16. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 45, 47. 17. Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1982), 103. See also Grainger, Drama of the Rite, 24–28. He speaks of poetry, metaphor, and symbol as characteristics essential to ritual, although the distinctions between them are not all that clear; he seems to treat them as elements of each other. 18. It is strange, for example, that Nichols does not draw on Ricœur’s work on symbolism, since her project is precisely to develop a liturgical hermeneutics based to a large extent on Ricœur. Hughes also does not employ the language of symbol or

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myth all that much, but most of his treatment is concerned with signs and their meaning in worship. 19. Power, Unsearchable Riches, 28. 20. Ibid., 61. 21. Ibid., 65. 22. Ibid., 99. He also follows Ricœur in his interpretation of metaphor in chapter 5. 23. Ibid., 175. 24. Susan J. White, Christian Worship and Technological Change (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 125. 25. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy, 287, 333. 26. “In striving to make liturgy relevant to modern culture, liberal theologians have managed to make it peculiarly irrelevant” (ibid., 15). 27. Alexander Rentel, “Where is God in the Liturgy?” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 59.2 (2015): 215. 28. Ibid., 221. Taft also asks what liturgy is “all about” and responds with sixteen theses that try to articulate what liturgy does. Like Rentel he argues that “liturgy is the salvific relationship between God and us” and therefore it “is the most perfect expression and realization of the spirituality of the Church.” Beyond East and West, 240, 257. 29. Schmemann, “Symbols and Symbolism in the Byzantine Liturgy,” in Fisch, Liturgy and Tradition, 120. 30. Ibid., 123. “Through its symbols the liturgy gives us the theoria: the knowledge and the contemplation of these saving mysteries, just as, on another level of the same symbolism, the liturgy re-presents, makes present and active, the ascension of the human soul to God and communion with Him” (ibid.). Thus Schmemann wants to speak of an “eschatological symbolism” (ibid., 125). 31. Schmemann contends that “symbol here is reduced to an illustration whose purpose can be termed pedagogic or educational.” Ibid., 116. 32. Ibid., 119. 33. Schmemann, “Sacrament and Symbol,” in For the Life of the World, 142. 34. Ibid., 145, 147. He also criticizes the tendency of contemporary theologians to call for new symbols or try to make liturgy more relevant (ibid., 149). 35. Ibid., 151. 36. Taft’s Foreword to Symeon, Liturgical Commentaries, 13. Although Schemann, Rentel, and Taft are probably right that the meaning of symbol has shifted significantly and used to apply far more broadly, it is less clear that this original and broader meaning could be successfully recovered today. 37. Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 341. 38. Ibid., 343. “This is what Christian life, our true liturgy, is all about. Our common worship is a living metaphor of this same saving reality, not only representing and re-presenting it to us constantly in symbol to evoke our responses in faith and deed, but actively effecting it in us through the work of the Holy Spirit, in order to build up the Body of Christ into a new temple and liturgy and priesthood in which offerer and offered are one” (ibid., 344).

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39. For a summary of Ricœur’s discussion of metaphor, see Jeanne Evans, Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 87–149. Colby Dickinson considers its relationship to myth in his “Metaphor as Dynamic Myth in Ricoeur,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 123–35. Gilbert Vincent relates Ricœur’s account of metaphor to his biblical hermeneutics in his “Métaphores, paraboles et analogie. La référence à la théologie dans la pensée de Paul Ricœur,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 3.2 (2012): 92–109. 40. The French title of his book on metaphor is La métaphore vive; vive means “living” but can also refer to being “vivid” or “vibrant.” This living or vibrant element of metaphor is absolutely crucial to Ricœur’s account and it makes no sense at all to translate it as The Rule of Metaphor. In an interview with Kearney, he says: “The term vive (living) in the title of this work is all-important, for it was my purpose to demonstrate that there is not just an epistemological and political imagination, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a linguistic imagination which generates and regenerates meaning through the living power of metaphoricity.” Debates in Continental Philosophy, 99; emphasis in the original (also PR, 127). In Interpretation Theory, he says that “there are no live metaphors in the dictionary” (IT, 52). The topic of the imagination will be considered in the next chapter. 41. These are discussed also in several essays in Ricœur’s Conflict of Interpretation and in his “The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought” (PA, 107–23). 42. This essay is also an excellent illustration of Ricœur’s frequent procedure of juxtaposing two terms, insights, positions, or traditions against each other and then showing how they are mutually implicated or require each other. In regard to hermeneutics, he does the same for speaking and writing, explanation and understanding, ideology and utopia, text and action, historical and fictional narrative, and any number of other topics. 43. Ricoeur, “Two Essays,” 220. 44. On the topic of liturgy and metaphor, see Searle, “Liturgy as Metaphor,” 98–120. Oddly, the does not discuss Ricœur at all, despite mentioning the importance of recent research into metaphor in philosophy. (He also seems to conflate the terms “metaphor” and “symbol.”) 45. See John Behr, “Reading the Fathers Today,” in Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift In Honour of Andrew Louth, eds. Justin Mihoc and Serafim Aldea (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2014), 7–19. 46. In this regard, see Iris Gildea who employs Ricœur’s work on metaphor to argue for a “poetics of the self” marked by fragility in her “A Poetics of the Self: Ricœur’s Philosophy of the Will and Living Metaphor as Creative Praxis,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 9.2 (2018): 90–103. 47. In his brief discussion at Taizé Ricœur mentions the use of symbol in liturgy (in response to a question that points to it), but interprets it solely as “memorial” that “fights against forgetting.” The symbol “has a memory, is memory; it takes up other older symbols that it integrates into the present sign.” “Postface,” 248. He does not seem to recognize the ways in which the symbol in liturgy opens up our reality and does not merely serve a memorial function.

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48. As will be true throughout this chapter, a fuller analysis would actually have to consider specific texts and examples. In the scope of this volume only the broader principles can be set out, but they need to be tested on and applied to specific instances of texts and practices. While I try to give illustrative examples throughout, a full analysis of specific passages or details of a rite would go beyond the bounds of this project (especially given the tight word limits placed on academic books by US publishers). 49. This is a point Ricœur constantly reiterates in Thinking Biblically. The theme of the “conflict of interpretations” is of course a major aspect of Ricœur’s more general hermeneutic philosophy, grounded in his analysis of the “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. See also Oswald Bayer, “Theology in the Conflict of Interpretations—Before the Text,” Modern Theology 16.4 (2000): 495–502 and Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (New York: Continuum, 2009). Bayer challenges some aspects of Lutheran forms of biblical interpretation and draws on Ricœur to argue that his notion of the “self before the text” “gives theology a decisive impulse towards reflection on its basis, its subject-matter and its methods” (499). Kearney analyzes Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as a form of ideology critique that must be (and is) supplemented with an “eschatological” “hermeneutics of affirmation” that goes in the direction of “utopian imagining” in his “Religion and Ideology: Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic Conflict,” Irish Philosophical Journal 2 (1985): 37–52. He ties this to the dialectic between mythos and logos, as well as the tension between belonging and distanciation. 50. Most of Ricœur’s specific work on hermeneutic judgment is in the context of his reflections on history and memory, as well as his writings on justice. Although he affirms this as true of the biblical discourses as well, he spends much less time explicating critical judgment in regard to biblical texts. 51. For an overview of the development of the Byzantine liturgy, see Taft, “How Liturgies Grow: The Evolution of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy,” in Beyond East and West, 203–32. There are obviously many detailed historical studies of the development of particular aspects of certain rites. 52. Many a first-time visitor has breathed a sigh of relief at the words “Let us complete our prayer to the Lord” only to discover that the service continues for another hour or so. Often the same litany is repeated multiple times in the same service. Most Western liturgies have been “cleaned up” so as to be more straightforward and avoid repetitions or glaring inconsistencies. 53. This is the case, for example, for the Orthodox liturgies of the first week of Great Lent where joy and repentance are deliberately juxtaposed to each other in the texts, the music, and in various practices. 54. Bradshaw explicates four principles for the study of early liturgy: “1. That we know much, much less about the liturgical practices of the first three centuries of Christianity than we once thought that we did. A great deal more is shrouded in the mists of time than we formerly imagined, and many of our previous confident assertions about ‘what the early Church did’ now seem more like wishful thinking or the unconscious projections back into ancient times of later practices. 2. That what we do know about patterns of worship in that primitive period points towards considerable

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more variety more often than towards rigid uniformity. . . . 3. That the ‘classical shape of Christian liturgy’ that we have so often described is to a very large degree the result of a deliberate assimilation of different Christian traditions to one another during the fourth century rather than the survival of the one pattern of Christian worship from the earliest apostolic times, perhaps even from Jesus himself. 4. That what emerges in this post-Nicene era is frequently a liturgical compromise, a practice that includes a bit from here with a bit from there modified by a custom from somewhere else, rather than the triumph of one way of doing things over all others, although this latter phenomenon is not unknown in some instances. This means that what then becomes the mainstream liturgical tradition of the Church in East and West is often quite unlike what any single Christian group was doing prior to the fourth century. A real mutation had taken place at that time, and many primitive customs had either disappeared or had been greatly altered from their former appearance” (Bradshaw, Search for Origins, x). 55. “First, once again, as in the cases of baptism and Eucharist, the further one digs into the primary sources, the more it is diversity rather than uniformity which is encountered in the first few centuries. Second, what has been perceived as the mainstream practice of the early Church is in many instances often a later development or adaptation of earlier traditions, and what were dismissed as seemingly local aberrations are frequently in reality ancient practices that exerted a much more powerful influence on the rest of Christian antiquity than was formerly supposed. Third, the traditional assumption that it was the calendar which gave rise to the lectionary cannot be sustained in every case. On the contrary . . . it may sometimes have been the tradition of reading certain biblical passages at particular times of the year that led to the institution of some feasts and seasons in the annual cycle” (ibid., 191). 56. For example, in one of the Orthodox prayers read before communion, one says: “I know, O Saviour, that none other hath sinned against Thee as have I, nor hath wrought the deeds that I have done.” Yet the prayer continues: “But this again I know, that neither the magnitude of mine offences nor the multitude of my sins surpasseth the abundant long-suffering of my God and His exceeding love for mankind; but with sympathetic mercy Thou doest purify and illumine them that fervently repent, and makest them partakers of the light, sharers of Thy divinity without stint.” Prayer attributed to St. Symeon the New Theologian, Sixth Prayer in Preparation for Holy Communion. Prayer Book (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996), 366. 57. Hughes, Worship as Meaning, 42. 58. “Liturgical meaning is effected at the extremity of what we can manage or comprehend as human beings. Worship is a journey ‘to the edge of chaos’. It is something liminal, standing on the borderline of finitude and the infinite. It is thus that I shall argue that liturgical theology is equally cognizable from within universal human experience and, simultaneously, attends to the inalienable alterity by which we are confronted when we dare or are driven to approach this place of radical marginality” (ibid., 257). 59. Ibid., 275. 60. “On the one hand, obviously, all the strategies adopted are here intentional: worship is an advertent journey to the edge. On the other hand, the effects achieved

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are (when the means are successful) much closer to those of inadvertent limit experiences: in contrast to the measured degrees of exposure of most willful limit experiences, there is here (again, when the signs ‘work’) the sense of being wholly overwhelmed, of powerlessness and awe, of wonder and joy, of thankful self-giving and rich benefaction” (ibid., 298). The two phrases cited in the text are found on the previous page. 61. Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 79. 62. Ibid., 87, 92. 63. “A threshold position in liturgical experience does not limit human action within the confines of this world. On the contrary, it is the vantage point from which worshippers can take up their stance towards the Kingdom. This effectively switches the poles, so that the thresholds of mortal experience are considered in the light of their implications for eternal life” (ibid., 93). 64. Kavanagh, Liturgical Theology, 74. 65. Lathrop, Holy Things, 33. 66. For example, in an analysis of Justin’s use of the words pempein/anapempein, Lathrop insists that we “easily miss the critical wrongness of these words. Indeed, the words of that particular texts seem intended to avoid any metaphorical character that lingers in the offering terminology of the Roman canon and to say directly that Christians do give offerings to God” (ibid., 155). See also the other two volumes in the series, which display the same style of juxtapositions of opposites: Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999) and Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 67. “The Christian liturgy, in contrast, embraces contraries: life and death, thanksgiving and beseeching, this community and the wide world, the order expressed here and the disorder and chaos we call by name, the strength of these signs and the insignificance of ritual, one text next to another text that is in a very different voice. In Christian use this ambiguity is not simply a general devotion to contrary principles as a way to truth. For the Christian, in fact, the balance is in favor of life and thanksgiving and the hope for order, but only in such a way that all things are remembered, all sorrows comforted, all wounds assuaged. The mystery of God is the mystery of life conjoined with death for the sake of life. The name of this mystery revealed among us is Jesus Christ. The contraries of the liturgy are for the sake of speaking that mystery. It is by the presence of these contraries in the juxtapositions of the ordo that Christians avoid the false alternatives so easily proposed to us today.” Lathrop, Holy Things, 176. 68. Ibid., 220. 69. Wolterstorff also discusses the question of how God speaks in or through the liturgy, albeit in a quite different way. Acting Liturgically, 209–48. 70. Jean-Louis Chrétien examines this much more fully (and maybe differently) than Ricœur, especially in his The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Drawing on Chrétien, Bruce Ellis Benson also thinks of liturgy in terms of dialogue in the sense of a jazz improvisation in his Liturgy as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). Kühn helpfully distinguishes Ricœur’s call/response model from the question/answer models

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in others thinkers (such as Husserl or Gadamer) and his more hermeneutic approach from the more phenomenological one in Lévinas, Chrétien, Marion, and others. “Paul Ricœur’s religionsphilosophisches Denken,” 337–45. 71. Ricœur points to the dialogic nature of some biblical texts in other contexts as well (e.g. FS, 233). 72. See also Aimé Georges Martimort, The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy, vol. 1 Principles of the Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), Section II, chapter III and, in a quite different sense, Wolterstorff, Acting Liturgically, 31–55. 73. On the use of the dialogue style in patristic homiletics and poetry, see Mary Cunningham, “Dramatic device or didactic tool? The function of dialogue in Byzantine preaching,” in Rhetoric in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-fifth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Exeter College, University of Oxford, March 2001, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 101–13; Sebastian Brock, “Dialogue Hymns of the Syriac Churches,” Sobornost 5.2 (1983): 35–45; idem, “Dramatic Dialogue Poems,” in IV Symposium Syriacum. Literary Genres in Syriac Literature, eds. H. J. W. Drijvers, R. Lavenant, C. Molenberg and G. J. Reinink (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1987), 135–47; idem, “Syriac Dispute Poems: The Various Types,” in Dispute Poems and Dialogues, eds. G. J. Reinink and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 42, 1991), 109–19; Manfred Hoffmann, Der Dialog bei den christlichen Schrifstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte, Texte und Untersuchungen 96 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1966); Bernd Reiner Voss, Der Dialog in der frühchristlichen Literatur (Munich: W. Fink Verlag, 1970). 74. See several of the articles collected in Sebastian Brock, Studies in Syriac Christianity: History, Literature and Theology (Aldershot, UK/Brookfield, US: Ashgate, 1992) and idem, Fire from Heaven: Studies in Syriac Theology and Liturgy (Aldershot, UK/Brookfield, US: Ashgate, 2006). 75. For example: Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches, trans. and ed. Sebastian Brock (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1994); two hymns for Annunciation in his translated collection Treasurehouse of Mysteries: Explorations of the Sacred Text through Poetry in the Syriac Tradition (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 135–43, 241–44. 76. This is especially striking in something like the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Prayed twice every Great Lent (during the first and the fifth weeks) during contemporary practice, it operates in some sense a quadruple citation: the congregation prays as the priests chant St. Andrew’s recitation of the biblical stories. Much of this long canon is written in the first person singular, deliberately identifying one’s own prayer and conduct with the foibles and choices of the biblical characters. We hence allow others to “voice” us. We participate in the prayer of these characters, in the prayer of St. Andrew, and in the prayer of those who speak with us and on our behalf. And we do it each year, so in some way we are also citing ourselves each year anew. 77. Indeed, one might suggest that something has gone seriously amiss when worship becomes all jubilation and affirmation and there is no longer any place for lament, confession, or challenge to conduct.

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78. This is especially true of many holy week services in multiple traditions. In the Orthodox tradition, the singing of the hymn of the “Noble Joseph” while venerating the burial shroud with the icon of the dead Christ at the closing of the Vespers service for Great and Holy Friday is maybe the most striking example of this. It is a deeply moving hymn and its emotional impact is clearly visible on people’s faces during this service. 79. The first three lines from the 15th Antiphon during the Matins of Great and Holy Friday. Such paradoxical juxtapositions abound in the Orthodox liturgical texts, especially those for the great feasts. 80. Both passages are from the stichera (verses) for “Lord, I call” during the Vespers of Great and Holy Friday. David Fagerberg argues that “liturgy is the icon for the theological imagination because it is the prolongation of the paschal mystery wherein the human face of God turned grey with death, and then white with glory, and now also transfigures the faces of all of his friends.” “Liturgy as Icon of the Theological Imagination,” Louvain Studies 34 (2010): 241.

CHAPTER 7 1. Edward Casey summarizes some of the difficulties and ambivalences in the introduction to his Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000 [originally 1976]), while Richard Kearney reviews the philosophical history of the term in his The Wake of Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998 [originally 1991]). He considers a variety of “postmodern” approaches and challenges to the imagination in his Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998 [originally 1988]). See also his Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995) and “Between Imagination and Language” (PR, 35–58). 2. Kevin Vanhoozer examines the role of Kant’s notion of productive imagination on Ricœur’s account of narrative in his “Philosophical Antecedents to Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative,” in Wood, On Paul Ricoeur, 35–41. (The other influence he considers his Heidegger’s discussion of temporality.) 3. John Chrysostom especially condemned such luxury frequently in colorful terms and strongly urged his congregants to care about the poor instead, but this is a common theme in other patristic thinkers, such as the Cappadocians or Clement of Alexandria, as well. For patristic discussions of poverty, see Susan Holman, The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and idem, ed. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). 4. For an interesting discussion of this, see Jean-Louis Chrétien’s “From God the Artist to Man the Creator,” in his Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 94–129. The chapter traces the historical legacy of a reversal in which artistry became increasingly attributed to the divine as creation becomes increasingly attributed to the human.

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5. This is probably expressed most famously in John of Damascus’ defense of icons: “I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and in matter made his abode, and through matter worked my salvation. ‘For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ It is clear to all, that flesh is matter and is a creature. I reverence therefore matter and I hold it in respect and venerate that through which my salvation has come about, I reverence it not as God, but as filled with divine energy and grace.” On the Divine Images II.14, trans. Andrew Louth as Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 70–71. 6. On the broader topic of liturgy and imagination, see James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2013). 7. For a more in-depth exploration of Ricœur on imagination, see Evans, Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Imagination, especially 151–81 for an application to biblical discourse, and George H. Taylor, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination,” Journal of French Philosophy 16.1–2 (2006): 93–104. Venema also devotes significant attention to the role of the imagination in Ricœur’s work, especially in regard to the construction of identity. Henry Isaac Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), especially chapters 2 and 4. For a treatment of the role of the imagination in narrative identity, see Pamela Anderson, “Narrative Identity and the Mythico-Poetic Imagination,” in Klemm, Meanings in Texts and Actions, 195–204. Amalric sees a crucial role for imagination even in Ricœur’s anthropology in his “Affirmation originaire, attestation, reconnaissance,” 16, 18–20. Alain Thomasset explores the important role of the imagination in the formation of the subject in his “L’imagination dans la pensée de Paul Ricœur. Fonction poétique du langage et transformation du sujet,” Études théologiques et religieuses 80.4 (2005): 525–41. He is particularly interested in the link between imagination and spirituality, that is, the formation of a “believing subject” (525). He distinguishes between three functions of the imagination: the power to schematize, to picture or image, and to suspend or neutralize the real (530–31). He traces Ricœur’s oft-repeated expression “in sympathy and imagination” back to Husserl’s notion of Einfühlung (empathy) or Paarung (pairing), which requires “a transfer in imagination” (535). 8. As noted earlier, in his interview at Taizé he focuses on the importance of memory in liturgy, arguing that its symbolic nature is an attempt to keep memory alive. “Postface,” 248. He also employs his oft-repeated expression, “in imagination and in sympathy,” to describe his participation in the life of the community there as a “visitor,” cultivating a “friendship” that was “a bit more than an exchange of ideas and a bit less than a sharing of life” (ibid., 247). On memory and imagination see Lythgoe, “Social Imagination, Abused Memory, and the Political Place of History,” who argues for two elements of the imagination in History, Memory, Forgetting, poetic and practical, showing that they function somewhat differently there than in Oneself as Another (36), especially in regard to the individuals and institutions that “manipulate” or reconstruct memory (41). Rohden also focuses on imagination

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in his “Ethical Assumptions and Implications of Hermeneutic Practice as Practical Wisdom.” 9. See also the section on “Narrative and Memory” (PR, 104–08). 10. On the topic of collective memory, see Barash, “The Place of Remembrance: Reflections on Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Collective Memory,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 147–57 and his essay in Fiasse, Paul Ricœur, 19–36. 11. Vanhoozer thinks this is deeply problematic: “Ricoeur’s growing appreciation of the creative imagination in his work on metaphor and narrative leads him, I believe, to lose his balance” in regard to biblical texts, undermining their historicity. Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 278. (Gregor seems to have some similar fears, although he puts them in more theological and less literalist terms.) 12. In a slightly different sense, Jonas Torres Medeiros tries to develop Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination out of his discussion of symbolism. “A hermenêutica dos símbolos como aporte para uma fenomenologia da imaginação em Paul Ricoeur,” Ipseitas 4.1 (2018): 101–30. Besides the Symbolism of Evil, he also draws on Ricœur’s work on Freud, on metaphor, and on The Conflict of Interpretations. Several other scholars also point to the important role of the imagination in Ricœur’s treatment of metaphor, for example, Evans, Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Imagination, 87–149. 13. For example, there are a variety of poetic reimaginings of paradise, of the binding of Isaac, of the annunciation, of the prostitute who anoints Jesus, and many other biblical stories. For a more detailed discussion of this, see my “Performing Anatheism: Dialogic Hospitality in Syriac Liturgical Poetry,” The Art of Anatheism, eds. Richard Kearney and Matthew Clemente (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 175–95. 14. This is especially evident in the form of the Byzantion kontakion (which achieved its highest form in Romanos the Melodist) and in much Syriac liturgical poetry, which provides richly imaginative variations on biblical texts, often taking tremendous poetic license with the biblical source, in ways that would seem unfathomable to our contemporary literal-mindedness. This also often occurred in homilies—maybe a form where we are presently more comfortable with such play of the imagination—although many patristic homilies are close to liturgical texts in their poetic style and were often copied within liturgical manuscripts. Particularly striking examples include the poetic verse homilies of Proclus of Constantinople and the memre of the Syriac tradition. See Proclus of Constantinople, Homilies on the Life of Christ, trans. Jan Barkhuizen (Brisbane: Australian Catholic University, 2001) for Proclus. Several Syriac memre are included in Treasure-house of Mysteries: Explorations of the Sacred Text through Poetry in the Syriac Tradition ed. & trans. Sebastian Brock (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012); Wider Than Heaven: Eight-Century Homilies on the Mother of God, trans. Mary B. Cunningham (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008); Jacob of Serug, On the Mother of God, trans. Mary Hansbury (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998). 15. Proclus often does this in his poetic homilies. For example, in a homily on nativity, he repeats the line “Come, let us observe” over and over as a poetic chorus,

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inviting the congregation to come and observe (Homily 4). In a different homily he invites people to travel around the earth and the sea, to search the air and even the whole of creation to observe evidence of the feast (Homily 5). (In fact, he often calls on various natural elements as witnesses.) He also at times calls various groups within the congregation to come forward and “see” the event being celebrated. Homilies on the Life of Christ, 85, 93–94. 16. Krueger argues this repeatedly in his Liturgical Subjects. Don Saliers speaks of “the imaginative power of good liturgy for the formation of character” in his “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings” (in Anderson, Liturgy and the Moral Self, 23). This is also one of the central questions examined in Anderson’s Worship and Christian Identity. James Smith explores the pedagogical function of liturgy in his Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009). These questions will be explored more fully in the next chapter. 17. See Cyprian Love, “Spontaneity in the Liturgy,” Worship 79.6 (2005): 536–53; Janet Walton, “Improvisation and Imagination: Holy Play,” in Worship 75.4 (July 2001): 290–304; Constance F. Parvey, “The Liturgy as Holy Play,” Liturgy 6.2 (1986): 48–53. 18. Ricœur points this out repeatedly in the conversation about aesthetics (CC, 171–86) and also occasionally uses it as an example in other contexts (e.g., TN I, 76–77). 19. See also Mark Christopher Gorman, “Reading with the Spirit: Scripture, Confession, and Liturgical Imagination,” Liturgy 28:2 (3013): 14–22. 20. Evans comments repeatedly on Ricœur’s “depsychologizing” of the imagination in following Heidegger’s more “ontological” account of “creative imagination” linked to language rather than separate from it. Hermeneutics of the Imagination, 100, 184. 21. Taylor summarizes Ricœur’s lectures on imagination at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, where he distinguishes between “four domains of productive imagination,” namely “social and cultural imagination” (especially utopia), epistemological imagination (in the sense of scientific models), poetic imagination (of poetry or fiction), and religious imagination (of symbols). Interestingly, Taylor argues that the first three are all productive of new dimensions of reality, although he says nothing of the sort about the fourth, religious, kind. Taylor, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination,” 95, 97. 22. In his book on metaphor Ricœur argues that “we must restore to the fine word invent its twofold sense of both discovery and creation” (RM, 362). 23. Cecilia Avenatti points to the importance of imagination in a hermeneutic poetics of hospitality. Cecilia Avenatti de Palumbo, “La hospitalidad como poética de la esperanza,” Franciscanum 168.59 (2017): 179–80. What is original about Ricœur’s account of poetics is that it combines productive imagination and the metaphoricity of language with mimetic action, enabling a “poetics of hope” (181). 24. Richard Kearney in his several studies on the imagination describes it in very similar terms as an act of consciousness that enables us to “surpass the empirical world as it is given here and now in order to project new possibilities of existence.”

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Imagination refers to “our ability to transform the time and space of our world into a specifically human mode of existence.” Poetics of Imagining, 6, 4; emphasis his. 25. For a vivid description of this see Vassa Larin, “Feasting and Fasting According to the Byzantine Typikon,” Worship 83.2 (2009): 133–47. 26. On this issue, see especially Khaled Anatolius who argues that “the byzantine liturgy is not so much about a temporary excursion to an otherworldly reality, as it is about the truth that here and now in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has drawn near.” “Heaven and Earth in the Liturgy,” Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal 5.3 (2000): 2. 27. Taft asserts: “The present encounter is the point of it all. In memorial we do not take a mythic trip into the past, nor do we drag the past into the present by repeating the primordial event in mythic drama.” Beyond East and West, 16–17. 28. For a good summary account, see Kearney, “Between Ideology and Utopia” (PR, 75–90). Ricœur’s lectures on ideology and utopia were given in the same semester as those on the imagination and an edited version was published by Taylor as Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Ricœur provides close readings of many thinkers on the topic of ideology and (considerably fewer) of utopia, such as Marx, Althusser, Mannheim, Weber, Habermas, Geertz, Saint-Simon, and Fourier. Aside from the interpretations of specific texts, his broader comments are of a piece with the published articles in From Text to Action. 29. Taylor argues that in his lectures on imagination Ricœur associates utopia with the productive imagination and ideology with the reproductive imagination. “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Imagination,” 75. For an analysis of imagination in ideology and utopia in regard to aesthetic judgment and the possibility for justice, see Savage, “Judgement, Imagination, and the Search for Justice,” especially 58–83. 30. In this context, Ricœur also frequently stresses its symbolic dimensions (LIU, 144–46). Later, previewing his discussion of Geertz, he says that he “shall attempt to show that it is the structure of symbolic actions which is distorted by ideology, in the more narrow sense of this term. When reappropriated in a broader sense, one that gives full weight to the structure of symbolic action, we shall see that ideology—a primitive, positive ideology—acts for both groups and individuals as the constitution of their identity” (LIU, 158). 31. In a different essay Ricœur draws on Habermas’ critique of ideology for an analysis of the hermeneutic dimension of critique, but the focus is more on critique than on ideology (TA, 285–307). He argues that “the concept of ideology plays the same role in a critical social science [such as that of Habermas], as the concept of misunderstanding plays in a hermeneutics of tradition” (TA, 290). 32. Ricœur does give a couple brief examples in the lectures. For example, in summarizing Althusser’s account of the “material” dimensions of ideology, he refers to ritual: “The word ‘material’ is used in four ways: material actions, kneeling, for example; material practices, kneeling as religious behaviour; material rituals, kneeling as part of a service of worship; and the material ideological apparatus, the church as an institution” (LIU, 147). 33. On the creative relationship between tradition and utopia, see Kearney’s contribution “Between Tradition and Utopia: The Hermeneutical Problem of Myth”

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in Wood, On Paul Ricoeur, 55–73. He also parses the difference between traditionality, traditions, and Tradition as categories for historical memory in Ricœur (58–64). 34. This also has an ethical dimension. Kearney says: “Ethical logos shares with poetic mythos the desire for freedom—our freedom to imagine others and others’ freedom to imagine us” (PR, 73). He insists that fidelity to traditional narrative and myth requires questioning and thus a sense “also to be elsewhere.” That is to say, “for hermeneutic imagination to be inside tradition is to be simultaneously outside it.” And he concludes: “This is one of Ricoeur’s most compelling insights: to imagine ourselves as we truly are is to imagine ourselves as otherwise” (PR, 73). 35. In his speech accepting the Berakah award of the liturgy society, Taft rightly warns: “What ordinary people in ordinary parishes need is familiarity, sameness, the stability of a ritual tradition that can be achieved only by repetition, and that will not tolerate change every time the pastor [or choir director] reads a new article. The only way people are going to perceive liturgy as their own, and therefore participate in it, is when they know what is going to happen next.” He points out that “when liturgical professionals talk about spontaneity, they mean their spontaneity, not the community’s” and insists that “the only way to secure the congregation’s appropriation of worship is to celebrate the order of worship that is theirs, and not to lay on their already weary shoulders a spontaneity [or ‘originality’] trip in which they have had no part.” Consequently, “repetition is of the essence of ritual behavior. We will always have to explain things only if we insist on reinventing the wheel at every liturgy.” And he adds slightly later: “The great irony of most of the present efforts in creativity is that it is precisely in the two areas officially left to our creativity—the homily and the intercessions following the Scripture lessons—that our worship is so irredeemably awful.” “Response to the Berakah Award: Anamnesis,” Beyond East and West, 297, 298–99, 302–03. [This piece is included only in the second edition of the collection.] 36. Saliers in Anderson, Liturgy and the Moral Self, 17 37. Anderson, Worship and Christian Identity, 34. His central question in this work is how worship shapes Christian identity. He relies on several surveys about worship as experienced in order to explore the conflict between what is intended by worship and how it is actually experienced or evaluated by the participants. See especially chapter 2 “Making Claims About Worship,” 33–58. See also Maxwell E. Johnson, “Can We Avoid Relativism in Worship? Liturgical Norms in the Light of Contemporary Liturgical Scholarship,” Worship 74.2 (2000), on whom Anderson relies heavily in his analysis. Butcher also summarizes this piece in Liturgical Theology after Schmemann, 168–69. Baldovin similarly wonders about normativity in worship in response to a survey regarding worshippers’ experience of the Roman Catholic liturgy after Vatican II. See John F. Baldovin, “Liturgical Renewal after Vatican II: Pastoral Reflections on a Survey,” in Worship: City, Church, and Renewal, 189–208. 38. For Anderson the “only normative criterion to be applied to worship is whether it fosters an experience of God.” Anderson, Christian Identity, 48. While that is certainly one important criterion, it is less clear why it should be the only one.

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39. Geoffrey Wainwright, Worship with One Accord: Where Liturgy and Ecumenism Embrace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45. 40. Ibid., 57. 41. Stringer, Sociological History of Christian Worship, 239. 42. In his essay on biblical revelation, Ricœur also stresses the importance of discernment and judgment in biblical interpretation (H, 140–52). 43. Nichols, Liturgical Hermeneutics, 46. I am, however, slightly hesitant about the strong emphasis on comprehension here. I’m not sure liturgy is “better” if it is more transparent or more easily understood. If it can be fully comprehended it no longer challenges or disrupts us. 44. She speaks of liturgical hermeneutics as normative inasmuch as it lays out the proposal of the kingdom, but thinks of it as descriptive in terms of the concrete performance. She thinks that both “difficult” and easy liturgy have something to teach us. Ibid., 258.

CHAPTER 8 1. See, for example, the essays collected in James G. Leachman, ed. The Liturgical Subject: Subject, Subjectivity, and the Human Person in Contemporary Liturgical Discussion and Critique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Wendy Mayer argues that “there is a reason why the shaping of Christian identity (in which performative ritual plays a part) is a topic that is currently exciting much attention” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s: Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, eds. Teresa Berger and Brian D. Spinks (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2016), 290. See also Anderson’s Worship and Christian Identity, which argues that worship functions as a form of catechesis that shapes Christian identity. 2. Robert Taft, Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 343. See also his “What Does Liturgy Do?” in Beyond East and West, 239–58. 3. Knoke does interpret this effect in terms of ethical impact. Derek Knoke, “Generating Movement in the Social Sphere: Implications from Ritual Studies for the Relation of Theology and the Social Sciences,” Worship 87.2 (2013): 111. 4. Irwin, Text and Context, 346. 5. Simon Chan asks: “If the liturgy forms the church, how does it do it?” Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), 84. See also Smith’s discussion of liturgy in terms of pedagogy in Part 2 of his Desiring the Kingdom, 131–214. 6. Wenzel argues that the “perspective” of “a hermeneutics of the subject” unites the “landscape” of the various “fields” of Ricœur’s research. “Kritik— Imagination—Offenbarung,” 571. Many other commentators also point this out in different ways. 7. Ricœur’s account of identity in Oneself as Another was summarized in chapter 2. 8. See also Butcher, Liturgical Theology after Schmemann, 111–36.

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9. On liturgy’s formation of Christian identity, see Margaret Mary Kelleher, “Liturgy and the Christian Imagination,” Worship 66.2 (1992): 125–48 and Anthony J. Godzieba, “Agnus Dei: Sin, Sacrament, and Subjectivity in the Liturgical Imagination,” Louvain Studies 34 (2010): 249–74. 10. For discussions of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self, see also Walter Schweidler, “The Self-Repeating Origin. Ontological Aspects of Ricoeur’s Concept of Hermeneutics,” in Dalferth, Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Religion, 81–95 and Pierre Bühler, “‘Here I stand . . .’: Hermeneutics of the Self as a Legacy of Reformation Thought,” in ibid., 181–95. See also Boublil’s account of how Ricœur undermines notions of autonomy in “Instaurer la ‘juste distance’,” 15–19. 11. Gildea employs Ricœur in order to show “how an individual’s own efforts to express her affective fragility of existential tension in the discourse most apt to support it, poetics, may be conducive to a greater hermeneutic processes of becoming aware of and learning to live in relationship with the embodied conflicts rooted in dialectics of freedom and nature, i.e. subjective perspective and objective belonging.” The universal human experience of suffering can become a point of connection with others. “Poetics of the Self,” 90–91, 97. On the issue of suffering, see also Joy, “Ricœur’s Affirmation of Life” and, in a different sense, Moyaert, Response to the Religious Other, 31–36, 38–40. For a reading of the self in Fallible Man, see Annemie Halsema’s “The Self is Embodied and Discursive,” Pol Vandevelde’s “From Fallibility to Fragility,” Timo Helenius’ “The Quest of Recognizing One’s Self” and Jean-Luc Amalric’s “Finitude, Culpability, and Suffering,” all in Davidson, Companion to Fallible Man, 125–200. 12. Adam Graves judges this a crucial theme in Ricœur’s work, going all the way back to Symbolism of Evil. See his “The Ambiguity of Flesh,” in Davidson, Companion to Symbolism of Evil, 19–36. Jean-Luc Amalric also considers the role of the body in Ricœur’s anthropology in his “La médiation vulnérable,” arguing that Ricœur’s philosophy of “incarnation” is best understood in terms of three dialectics: one between act and power, one between activity and passivity, and one between the ontological structure of the acting and suffering self and the contingent event of my birth. Incarnation results from an “originary correlation of affectivity and imagination” (56). See also Kearney’s rather more critical account in Carnal Hermeneutics, eds. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 46–55. 13. The Voluntary and the Involuntary deals with capacity and incapacity in regard to body and motion even more fully, but not necessarily in regard to questions of identity and in a considerably less explicitly hermeneutic register. See the piece by Amalric just mentioned for a fuller account and the essays collected in Davidson, Companion to Freedom and Nature. 14. In fact, Mitchell calls the Paschal celebration “hermeneutics with skin on.” Mitchell, “Tell it Slant,” 91. Throughout the article he stresses the ways in which liturgy transforms the self, precisely as an act of hermeneutics. He also argues that the liturgical “today,” the present tense often employed in liturgy, is metaphorical in the sense of announcing change as a form of “re-translation” (ibid., 93). Although Mitchell does not mention Ricœur in his essay, he repeatedly employs the language of “world” and other hermeneutic terminology.

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15. Indeed, sacramentum referred to the oath of loyalty to the emperor before it became a designation for certain ritual acts (in the Greek tradition these were referred to as the “mysteries”). 16. Ricœur, “Narrative Identity,” in Wood, On Paul Ricoeur, 195. 17. Ibid., 196. 18. Considering how many are stories of martyrdom, “dying” is particularly prominent in many of these narratives. 19. Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” 198. 20. Ricœur objects to the “puzzling cases” employed in analytic philosophy on precisely these grounds. In these experiments “the subject who undergoes them lacks relations, lacks the other in the sense of the other person” (OA, 197). They also do not maintain the essential connection to the earth in their scenarios of downloading consciousness into a computer or sending it off to some alternative universe: “I wonder whether we are not violating something that is more than a rule, or a law, or even a state of affairs, but the existential condition under which there exist rules, laws, facts at all” (ibid.) On the question of how the broader social imaginary shapes the self, see Timo Helenius, Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). 21. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 212. 22. Ibid., 162. 23. Ibid., 163. 24. Ibid., 218–19. See also Sarah Gador-White, “Knowledge in Song: Liturgical Formation and Transformation in Romanos the Melodist,” in Gador-White, Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium, 89–104. 25. A verse during the Praises for Bridegroom Matins of Holy Wednesday. The entire service pursues this contrast between the “sinful woman” who anoints Jesus and Judas who betrays him. 26. On the hymn of Kassia, see Andrew Mellas, “The Tears of a Harlot: Kassia’s Hymn On the Sinful Woman and the Biblical Mosaic of Salvation,” in Gador-White, Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium, 124–38. 27. It is obviously somewhat problematic that so many of the (comparatively few overall) female figures that appear in the liturgy are reformed prostitutes. That does not exactly give much potential for identification to the average woman attending liturgy. 28. See, for example, Dayna S. Kalleres, “Cultivating True Sight at the Center of the World: Cyril of Jerusalem and the Lenten Catechumenate,” Church History 74.3 (2005): 431–49; Georgia Frank, “‘Taste and See’: The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century,” Church History 70.4 (2001): 619–43; Wenrich Slenczka, Heilsgeschichte und Liturgie: Studien zum Verhältnis von Heilsgeschichte und Heilsteilhabe anhand liturgischer und katechetischer Quellen des dritten und vierten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); Edward Yarnold, The AweInspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of the Fourth Century (Slough: St. Paul, 1971). 29. On this theme in Ricœur, see especially Henry Venema, “Twice Difficult Forgiveness” and Pamela Sue Anderson, “A Feminist on Forgiveness: When

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(Where?) Love and Justice Come Apart,” both in Erfani, Paul Ricœur; Gaëlle Fiasse, “The Golden Rule and Forgiveness,” in Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 77–89; and Maria Duffy, Paul Ricoeur’s Pedagogy of Pardon: A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting (London: Continuum, 2009). 30. Absolution is often coupled with exhortations to make amends or to address the consequences one’s sins have had for others. 31. See also the section on forgiveness in Ricœur’s “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 9–12. Here he calls forgiveness “a specific form of that mutual revision, the most precious result of which is the liberation of promises of the past which have not been kept” (9). 32. Thus maybe signaling that divine assistance is necessary for such transformation and unbinding. 33. Derrida points this out in a discussion of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement or, in French, of “Great Pardon.” “Hostipitality,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. G. Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 380–402. 34. A further example are liturgical expressions (especially as undertaken recently by several Protestant and Catholic communities) of penitence or reconciliation for historic injustices such as slavery or apartheid. There have also been various efforts to explore “green” liturgies that might promote penitence for ecological devastation, reconciliation with the environment, and inaugurate new ways of living in and with the natural world. 35. The coronavirus shutting down churches during Lent and Easter 2020, which raged during my writing of this, vividly demonstrated this difficulty and impossibility. 36. He does, however, extensively consider legal and political questions in several contexts, especially in his two volumes on justice. Yet, those reflections are not explicitly about questions of identity, but are concerned with other dimensions of the legal and the juridical. 37. Greisch, Paul Ricœur, 41. 38. For discussions of Ricœur’s reading of Lévinas, see Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Ricoeur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence,” and Richard A. Cohen, “Moral Selfhood: A Levinasian Response to Ricoeur on Levinas,” both in Cohen, Ricoeur as Another, 109–60; Herman Rapaport, “Face to Face with Ricoeur and Levinas,” in Klemm, Meanings in Texts and Actions, 226–33; Peter Kemp, “Ricoeur between Heidegger and Lévinas,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 41–61; Bernhard Waldenfels, “The Other and the Foreign,” in ibid., 111–24. For a quite different approach to the topic, see Mark I. Wallace, “From Phenomenology to Scripture? Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Philosophy of Religion,” Modern Theology 16.3 (2000): 301–13. Wallace argues that Ricœur negotiates successfully between self-esteem and solicitude in his dialogue with Lévinas. Dierckxsens defends Lévinas against Ricœur and draws on his philosophy extensively for a more nuanced account of singularity and alterity than he thinks Ricœur is able to provide. Ricoeur’s Moral Anthropology, 91–180. Marc de Leeuw shows how both Husserl and Lévinas are important sources for Ricœur’s account of intersubjectivity in his “Paul Ricœur’s Search for a Just Community: The Phenomenological Presupposition of a Life ‘with and for others.’” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 8.2 (2017): 46–54. See also

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Peperzak’s comparison of their approaches in his “Ricoeur and Philosophy,” in Davidson, Ricoeur Across the Disciplines, 22–28. 39. On this topic, see also Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, “Das Subjekt als ein Anderer: Paul Ricœurs Vermittlung von Psychoanalyse und Christentum,” 37–57 and Gary Foster, “The Representative Other: Confronting Otherness in Kierkegaard, Levinas and Ricoeur,” Philosophical Writings 25 (2004): 19–29. See also Gonçalo Marcelo’s discussion of mutual recognition in Ricœur, which he sets in the context of other work on the topic at the time (Honneth, Hénaff, Boltanski, and Thévenot) and interprets as a “hopeful utopia”: “Paul Ricœur and the Utopia of Mutual Recognition,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 2.1 (2011): 110–33. 40. In this respect, Ricœur’s work on linguistic hospitality and translation is also crucial. 41. Saliers in Anderson, Liturgy and the Moral Self, 16, 17; emphasis his. 42. Senn is also interested in how the action of the people influences the liturgy itself, thus how action informs text and its practice: “My aim in this work, however, is to venture off the beaten path of documentary studies to explore the impact of the people on the performance of their ‘public work,’ by means of which they signified their hopes and aspirations, expressed their devotion to God, and acted out their human relationships in the presence of the Judge of all.” Senn, The People’s Work, 7. The rest of the book is a narrative examination of how the various social and political situations influenced the development and understanding of liturgy. 43. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Liturgy and Ethics in Ancient Syriac Christianity: Two Paradigms,” Studies in Christian Ethics 26.3 (2013): 308. 44. Ibid., 314–16. 45. Bruce Morrill, “Liturgy, Ethics, and Politics: Constructive Inquiry into the Traditional Notion of Participation in Mystery,” Mediating Mysteries, Understanding Liturgies: On Bridging the Gap between Liturgy and Systematic Theology, ed. Boris Geldhof (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 187–206. 46. Morrill, “The Liturgical is Political: A Narrative-Theological Assessment of Alexander Schmemann’s Work,” Studies in Liturgy 98.3–4 (2017): 41–59. 47. In Treanor, Passion for the Possible, 25. 48. “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 4. Ricœur’s essays on translation also often stress the importance of hospitality and shared humanity, despite all the dangers of betrayal and miscommunication attendant upon any effort of translation. He suggests three models for the negotiating of identity and alterity in this essay: translation, sharing of memories, and forgiveness. 49. See also Morny Joy on solicitude in her “Paul Ricoeur, Solicitude, Love, and the Gift,” 83–107. 50. Anthony Ugolnik interprets the communal nature of liturgy as the “hermeneutic” contribution of the Orthodox to Western hermeneutics in his “An Orthodox Hermeneutic in the West,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27.2 (1983): 93–118. Joyce Zimmerman draws on Ricœur to speak of the “assembly” as the “subject” of liturgy in her “Liturgical Assembly: Who is the Subject of Liturgy?,” 41–51. She describes the “liturgical assembly” as having “two predicates” (God and liturgical

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ministers) who function “in relation to the common referent, the liturgical person or assembly as subject of liturgy” (51). 51. Ricœur, “New Ethos for Europe,” in Kearney, Hermeneutics of Action, 10. Ricœur is clear that this does not simply abolish debt or erase guilt, but “lifts the pain of the debt” (10). 52. Ibid., 12, 11. In a footnote, he stresses that “Christian denominations also have a role to play in this threefold work of translation, crossed narration and mutual compassion insofar as they have received a legacy of evangelical words about forgiveness and loving one’s enemies” (ibid., 12). 53. Ricœur, “Fragility and Responsibility,” in ibid., 16. He sees this as an important element of civil society, “to the vitality of the associate life which regenerates the will to live together” (ibid., 21). 54. This is maybe especially important in situations of oppression. Gathering in community, often with strong ritual elements, kept hope alive and sometimes made resistance possible for many oppressed peoples. (To give a nonacademic reference here, Miriam expresses this in one of the most well-known songs from The Prince of Egypt: “Though hope is frail, it’s hard to kill.” The famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves, “Va, pensiero,” in Verdi’s opera Nabucco conveys a sense of both hope and lament in the midst of suffering in more colorful language.) See also Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron’s account of memory and forgiveness, in which he puts Ricœur into conversation with Bergson, especially on duration and time: “Mémoires et conflits. Conflits de mémoires, collision de durées,” Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 4.2 (2013): 25–37.

CONCLUSION 1. The work of Jean-Louis Chrétien is another important exception to this. 2. Frey recognizes that “this does not prevent us from recognizing, finally, that the philosopher works in a kind of unsurpassable discomfort of which the theologian knows nothing.” Frey, “Lecture philosophique et lecture théologique,” 85. 3. Ricœur, “Two Essays,” 223.

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Index

abundance, 24, 27–28, 30, 41, 55–56, 124, 168, 177, 191, 195n9, 196n17, 212n57. See also excess; extravagance action, ix, 4, 15, 17, 22–55, 59, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 74, 76, 79, 81–85, 87, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100–103, 106–15, 117, 118, 120, 122–23, 125–26, 130–34, 137, 141–43, 145, 148, 151, 153, 156–64, 166–70, 172, 176–77, 179, 181, 183, 196nn14–17, 197–98nn27– 31, 199n34, 199n36, 200n43, 200n47, 201n50, 201n57, 206n20, 208n32, 209n35, 213nn2–3, 214n8, 217n12, 218n19, 221n4, 221n7, 224n40, 225n47, 226n54, 228n74, 229n4, 230n15, 232n42, 235n63, 240n23, 241n30, 241n32, 247n42. See also agent Adam/Adamic, 5, 9–10, 15–17, 21, 134, 143, 168, 189nn18–19, 190n25. See also fall; myth; sin adoration, 81, 125. See also veneration; worship affect/affective/affectivity, 27, 59, 61, 62, 89, 107, 112, 118, 130, 140, 146, 147, 154, 160, 172, 175, 179, 180, 203n4, 230n15, 244nn11–12. See also emotion

agency/agent, 37, 40, 47, 50, 58, 81–82, 84, 156–60, 167, 171, 199n36, 217n12. See also action; person alterity, 157, 170–71, 204n13, 234n58, 246n38, 247n48. See also other anamnesis, 92, 97–100, 103, 222n21, 222n23, 223n32, 224n42. See also memory; mimesis Anderson, E. Byron, 96, 152, 214n12, 215nn16–17, 222n11, 228n68, 240n16, 242nn36–38, 243n1, 247n41 Anderson, Pamela Sue, 193n1, 205n15, 209n39, 238n7, 245n29 annunciation, 67, 132, 134, 236n75, 239n13 application, 30, 31, 110, 202n2, 238n7. See also appropriation appropriation, 12, 30, 39, 44, 52, 60–62, 96, 105, 109–15, 130, 133, 142, 150, 153, 154, 160, 161, 163, 168, 186n2, 192n1, 213n3, 227n66, 242n35. See also application architecture, 61, 100, 105–7, 115, 137– 38, 180, 225nn47–49. See also space Aristotle, 46–48, 84, 101, 202n2, 203n6, 203n8. See also phronesis ascription, 38, 46, 47, 82, 92, 157–58, 160, 179. See also attribution 267

268

Index

attribution, 38, 46, 77, 156–58, 160, 179. See also ascription Augustine, xi, 7, 10, 18–20, 55, 164, 189n23, 190n26, 230n14. See also sin, original awe, 135, 235n60. See also veneration Baldovin, John, 215n15, 220n42, 242n37 baptism, 67, 79, 85, 90, 125, 156, 160, 169–70, 174, 226n55, 227n63, 228n68, 234n55. See also chrismation beauty, 128, 138–39, 147, 182. See also creativity belief, 9, 11–12, 21–22, 24, 34, 51, 54, 56, 58–59, 62, 65, 91, 145, 173, 180, 190n29, 206n22, 209n35, 212n57, 219n37, 221n7. See also faith Bible/biblical, ix–xi, 3, 7, 15–17, 22–31, 34, 36, 40–42, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 56, 57, 60, 65, 67, 73–75, 78–81, 85–92, 98, 100, 104–5, 109, 115, 118, 123– 24, 126–27, 130, 131, 133–34, 139– 42, 144–46, 153, 164–65, 169, 173, 177–80, 187n5, 189n21, 192–93nn1– 2, 194n7, 195n8, 196n14, 198n29, 198n32, 201n57, 204n12, 208n32, 210n44, 210n47, 211n53, 216n2, 217n14, 218n31, 219n33, 220n40, 220n42, 221n46, 230n14, 232n39, 233nn49–50, 234n55, 236n71, 236n76, 238n7, 239n11, 239nn13– 14, 243n42. See also scripture body, 14, 81, 83, 119, 146, 157–58, 160, 165, 171, 172, 180, 188n14, 217n12, 221n55, 229n1, 244nn12– 13; eucharistic/of Christ, 103, 125, 141, 143, 172, 231n38. See also corporeality; embodiment; flesh Bradshaw, Paul, 128, 214n12, 226n52, 228n72, 233–34n54 Brock, Sebastian, 236nn73–75, 239n14 Bultmann, Rudolf, 3, 9, 179, 195n11

call, 52, 58, 131, 141, 148, 164–66, 171, 197n21, 199n37, 235n70 candle, 112, 119, 160, 230n12. See also light canon, 73, 127, 131, 168, 235n66; of St. Andrew of Crete, 165–66, 188n14, 236n76 capacity/capability, x, 19–20, 25, 29, 34, 37, 39–40, 44–46, 50–63, 65, 80, 86, 105, 109, 113, 131, 143, 145, 149, 152, 154, 157–58, 162–64, 166–67, 169, 174–77, 184, 191–92n1, 193n2, 198n30, 200n48, 203n4, 206n19, 207–9nn30–37, 212n57, 228n71, 229n3, 244n13. See also selfhood celebration, 41–42, 67, 73, 81, 99, 100, 102, 104, 107–8, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 125, 133, 134, 137, 141, 152, 155, 159, 164, 166, 168, 172, 175, 179, 211n54, 223n27, 224n43, 244n14. See also feast chant, 42, 106, 112, 117–18, 130, 132, 140, 143, 236n76. See also hymn; music chaos, 10, 26, 32, 45, 47, 105, 113, 129, 151, 175, 234n58, 235n67. See also discordance Chauvet, Jean-Marie, 118, 213n6, 230nn6–9 chrismation, 85, 90, 156, 169, 228n68. See also baptism Christ, 15–17, 30, 57, 67, 79, 92, 97–99, 101, 103, 108, 109, 115, 120–21, 125, 135, 142, 143, 147, 148, 164, 165, 172, 195n8, 219n33, 227n63, 231n38, 235n67, 237n78, 241n26 church, 43, 68, 90–92, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 118, 120–21, 138, 146–47, 153, 156, 168, 170, 175, 220nn40–43, 221n46, 223n30, 224n43, 226n60, 227n63, 231n28, 233–34nn54–55, 241n32, 243n5. See also ecclesial

Index

commitment, 3, 6, 13, 59, 74, 83–85, 127, 131, 159–61, 166, 174, 180–83, 204n12. See also fidelity communion, 103, 119, 158, 160, 231n30, 234n56. See also Eucharist community, ix, 24, 30–31, 34, 41–45, 62, 63, 75, 80, 82, 83, 85–88, 90–91, 96, 103, 104, 107, 113, 118, 133, 142, 143, 147, 151, 152, 154, 156, 160, 163, 168–76, 180, 182, 184, 194n5, 196n18, 206n25, 225n44, 225n47, 227n63, 229n4, 235n67, 238n8, 248n54 compassion, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 63, 65, 84, 159, 174, 176, 197n21, 209n41, 248n52. See also forgiveness concordance, 32, 36, 38, 44, 47, 61, 62, 65, 84, 105, 106, 113, 115, 126, 128, 162, 178, 181, 199n35, 200n43. See also discordance confession, 5, 6, 8–9, 14, 18, 21, 26, 31, 55–57, 81–85, 88, 115, 140, 144, 150, 156–70, 172, 174, 176, 179, 183, 188n13, 191n1, 194–95n7, 212n57, 218n20, 236n77. See also penitence; repentance configuration, 21, 35, 36, 53, 96, 101, 103, 106–7, 110, 112, 131, 139, 140, 183, 198n32, 199nn34–35. See also prefiguration; refiguration conscience, 9, 13–14, 20, 30, 83, 131, 164, 171, 188n11. See also consciousness; guilt consciousness, 5, 7–9, 13–14, 18, 20, 81, 150, 188n11, 188n14, 193n1, 221n46, 240n24, 245n20. See also conscience corporeal/corporeality, 59, 62, 97, 105, 112, 118–19, 130, 146, 154, 160, 170, 175, 179, 180, 184, 187n3, 217n12. See also body; flesh correspondence, ix, 77, 79, 81–82, 85, 86, 122, 124, 125, 128, 180, 182, 216n6; logic of, 9, 27, 28, 55, 123

269

creation/creative/creativity, x, 5, 16, 57, 62, 86–87, 101–4, 115, 119, 132, 134–35, 137, 138–53, 178, 180, 182, 196n15, 203n4, 210n45, 227n63, 227n66, 228n68, 237n4, 238n5, 239n11, 240n15, 240n20, 240n22, 241n33, 242n35. See also beauty; imagination Davidson, Scott, 186nn1–2, 186n4, 187n5, 187n9, 189n23, 190n27, 192n1, 202n1, 203n4, 206n22, 207n30, 214n7, 229n3, 232n39, 244nn11–13, 247n38 death, 16, 19, 55, 56, 58, 61, 67, 81, 108, 115, 134, 148, 177, 200n45, 211n49, 235n67, 225n50; of Christ, 42, 97, 103, 126, 147, 148, 237n80. See also finitude; mourning demythologization, 9–12, 28, 188n10, 188n12, 195n11 Dierckxsens, Geoffrey, 204n13, 205n14, 217n10, 218n30, 246n38 discordance, 32, 36, 38, 44, 45, 47, 61, 62, 65, 81, 84, 105–6, 113, 115, 126, 128, 162, 178, 181, 182, 199n35, 200n43. See also concordance discourse, x, 4, 9, 24–27, 33, 40, 51, 66, 67, 74, 77, 78, 85–92, 104, 111, 119, 122, 123–30, 137, 145, 173, 178, 187n5, 190–91n32, 191n1, 194n4, 194–95nn7–8, 195n11, 214n8, 217n14, 219n37, 222n7, 227n66, 229n3, 233n50, 238n7, 244n11 divine, 25–27, 54–59, 61–63, 69, 73, 90, 92, 107, 109, 119, 123, 124, 129–32, 134, 135, 138, 164, 165, 167, 171, 175, 177, 179, 182, 184, 192–93n1, 203n4, 210n45, 211n50, 220n42, 220n45, 223n30, 237n4, 238n5, 246n32. See also God Dormition, 16, 147, 216n5 Durkheim, Émile, 9, 179

270

Index

Easter, 58, 67, 146, 185n1, 246n35. See also Pascha ecclesial, 43, 62, 88, 91, 96, 105, 107, 108, 138, 140, 147, 168, 170, 171, 175. See also church ekphrasis, 107, 226n51 Eliade, Mircea, 9, 28, 101, 125, 187n9, 195n11 embodiment, 57, 60–63, 65, 118, 157, 181, 213n2, 244n11. See also body; corporeal; flesh emotion, 5, 44, 55, 61, 86, 100, 101, 107, 112, 117, 126, 130, 140, 146, 160, 165, 173, 180, 183, 211n54, 212n57, 228n69, 237n78. See also affect emplotment, 36, 38–40, 47, 48, 84, 101, 106, 108, 199nn34–35, 200n43. See also myth; plot Ephrem (the Syrian), 132, 172, 189n18 equiprimordiality. See primordial eschaton/eschatological/eschatology, 5, 25, 41, 56, 58, 91, 97–99, 102–4, 147–48, 175, 177, 183, 210n47, 223n25, 225n47, 231n30, 233n49 ethical/ethics, x, 18, 26, 29, 37–39, 43–56, 68, 80, 89, 105, 171–73, 183, 185n3, 199n36, 201n50, 202nn1–2, 203nn4–5, 204n13, 205n14, 205n19, 206n21, 211n56, 218n30, 229n3, 242n34, 243n3. See also moral/ morality; justice Eucharist, eucharistic, 41, 42, 66, 67, 96, 101, 103, 104, 118–19, 125, 132, 138, 141, 144, 156, 160, 166, 213n3, 218n29, 224n43, 226n55, 230n45, 234n55. See also communion evil, xi, 3–10, 14–21, 23, 39, 44, 49, 52, 54–57, 59, 63, 120, 134, 147, 159, 165, 177–79, 186n2, 187nn4–5, 187n7, 188nn13–14, 202n2, 206n22, 208nn32–33, 209n35, 218n20. See also fall; fault; good excess, 27–28, 55, 79, 128–30, 142, 153, 170, 171, 177, 179, 195n9,

209n34. See also abundance; limitexpression explanation, 6, 10, 33, 77, 78, 120, 232n42. See also understanding extravagance, 27, 195n10. See also excess; limit-expression Fagerberg, David, 91, 214n12, 219n35, 226–27n60, 237n80 failure, 6, 56, 61, 63, 112, 114, 115, 146, 154, 167, 177, 184, 202n2. See also fault faith, 7, 11, 17, 22–26, 29, 31, 47, 55, 56, 59, 65, 73, 86, 88–91, 95–98, 107, 115, 119, 120, 121, 127, 155, 172, 178, 188n10, 191–93n1, 194n5, 194–95n7, 195n13, 204n12, 214n9, 218n32, 220n40, 220nn42–43, 221n46, 221–22n7, 226n60, 231n38. See also belief; fidelity fall/fallibility/fallenness, 4–8, 15, 17–20, 53, 65, 81, 82, 111, 128, 154, 158–59, 174, 177–79, 183, 207n31, 208–9nn33–34, 210n45, 211n51, 214n7. See also fault; guilt; sin fasting, 90, 113, 133, 137, 159, 163, 165, 170, 177, 178, 184. See also Lent/lenten fault, 5, 8, 9, 14–15, 19–21, 54, 82, 111, 133, 156, 158–60, 162, 164, 167, 177, 179, 182, 184, 187n3, 188n14, 200n40, 213n3. See also fall; guilt; sin feast/feasting, 66, 67, 90, 100, 112, 113, 115, 133, 134, 137, 143, 146, 147, 152, 159, 163, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179, 184, 216n5, 234n55, 237n79, 240n15. See also celebration fiction, 23, 25, 30, 34–36, 39, 40–41, 45, 49, 60, 62, 65, 68, 77–79, 86, 101, 102, 104, 107, 110–12, 122, 123, 137, 139, 143, 144–46, 147, 163, 180, 199nn34–35, 204n11, 232n42, 240n21. See also poetry

Index

fidelity, 50, 51, 74–75, 79–81, 85, 86– 87, 92–93, 150, 160, 185n3, 242n34. See also faith finitude, 5, 6, 14–15, 19, 65, 146, 154, 175, 177, 184, 210n48, 234n58 flesh, 15, 157–58, 209n41, 238n5. See also body; corporeality forgiveness, 46, 53, 104, 113, 156, 167–69, 174, 176, 178–79, 182, 183, 191–92n1, 209n37, 246n31, 247n48, 248n52, 248n54. See also reconciliation Freud, Sigmund, 18, 157, 179, 187n4, 190n24, 190n29, 194n5, 195n11, 211n55, 239n12. See also psychoanalysis Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 32, 66, 95, 101, 196n15, 197n23, 198n30, 212n1, 214n8, 236n70 Geertz, Clifford, 214n8, 241n28, 241n30 generosity, xi, 27, 55, 172, 186n4, 212n57 gesture, 53, 67, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 125, 130, 142, 146, 147, 158–60, 168, 174, 175, 176, 180, 181, 184, 187n3, 230n9, 230n15 gift, 12, 52, 55, 56, 57, 79, 166, 196n17, 208n32, 220n42. See also gratitude Girard, René, 58, 62, 212n57. See also sacrifice God, 5, 8, 24–27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 40, 41, 55, 57, 85, 88, 92, 101, 104, 115, 121, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 148, 164, 165, 168, 171, 180, 194n5, 195n8, 196n16, 196n19, 206n22, 209n34, 209n41, 211n50, 218n19, 219n35, 220nn42–43, 226n54, 226n60, 227n63, 228n68, 231n28, 231n30, 234n56, 235nn66–69, 237n80, 238n5, 242n38, 247n42, 247n50; kingdom of, 108, 109, 241n26; Mother of, 124, 134. See also divine

271

good, x, 19, 20, 39, 40, 48, 49, 51, 54, 56–57, 59, 62, 63, 75, 87, 142, 152, 153, 156, 164, 165, 172, 173, 177, 196n17, 202n2, 203n4, 209n35, 209n36, 240n16; life, 38, 40, 46, 47, 212n56. See also evil grace, xi, 55, 58, 59, 121, 185n3, 208n32, 209n34, 238n5. See also mercy gratitude, 133 Gregor, Brian, 187n9, 192n1, 204n12, 207n31, 208n32, 239n11 Greisch, Jean, 170, 187n2, 189n23, 190n27, 191n32, 191–92n1, 197n25, 203n6, 206n23, 207n31, 208n32, 216n9, 217n9, 246n37 grief, 112, 151, 152, 177. See also mourning guilt, 5, 6, 8–9, 13–15, 17–18, 20–21, 65, 82, 85, 111, 126, 158, 159, 160, 167, 179, 188n11, 190n28, 207n31, 211n55, 248n51. See also fall; fault; sin habit, 18, 61, 83, 85, 143, 151, 152, 159, 165, 182 healing, 14, 17, 61, 111, 113, 126, 133, 134, 137, 144, 152, 159, 168, 174, 177, 182, 188n14. See also illness Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 46, 47, 48, 54, 214n9 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 83, 88–89, 171, 204n12, 211n49, 217n14, 218nn23– 28, 237n2, 240n20 history, ix, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 16, 17, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45, 48, 49, 50, 53, 74, 75–80, 85, 87, 92, 98, 102, 107, 126, 137, 141, 142, 150, 177, 179, 186n4, 194n7, 197n21, 197n26, 198n30, 199n35, 205n14, 215n13, 216nn2–3, 220n40, 223n27, 223n32, 225n50, 228n68, 230n15, 233n50, 237n1 Holocaust, 51, 76. See also Shoah

272

Index

holy, 43, 62, 92, 120, 144, 149, 152, 167, 169, 175. See also sacred; saint hospitality, xi, 41, 172, 176, 205n19, 211n56, 227n63, 247n48; eucharistic, 218n29; linguistic, 66, 247n40; poetics of, 240n23 Hughes, Graham, 42, 66, 91, 95, 108, 128, 129, 201n53, 213n5, 215n16, 220n38, 221n1, 226nn53–54, 227n60, 230n18, 234n57 human/humanity/humankind, ix, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 19–20, 26, 33–35, 37, 39, 43, 44, 50, 52–53, 54–58, 63, 81, 86–90, 92, 97, 105, 107, 108, 110–11, 114–15, 117, 119, 122–23, 125, 128, 129, 130, 134, 135, 138, 144, 146, 159, 171–73, 177–84, 187n3, 187n5, 192n1, 197n21, 198n31, 199n37, 200n48, 203n4, 204n13, 206n19, 207–8nn30–33, 209n41, 210nn45–46, 212n57, 214n9, 225n50, 227n61, 228n68, 230n5, 231n30, 234n58, 235n63, 237n4, 237n80, 241n24, 244n11, 247n42, 247n48; condition, 49, 114, 130, 178; sciences, 32–33. See also individual; person; subject Husserl, Edmund, 157, 171, 236n70, 238n7, 246n38 hymn/hymnic/hymnography, 16, 25, 26, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134, 166, 172, 189n19, 224n40, 236n75, 237n78, 245n26. See also chant icon/iconography, 100, 107, 113, 125, 132, 138, 140, 141, 146, 162, 165, 175, 185n3, 219n33, 226n54, 237n78, 237n80, 238n5. See also image identity, x, 37–40, 50–53, 59, 65, 69, 74–77, 81–84, 90, 105, 118, 149, 151, 155–75, 178–79, 204n11, 217n12, 238n7, 241n30, 243n7, 244n13, 246n36, 247n48; Christian, 90, 118, 152, 242n37, 243n1, 244n9;

communal, 37, 51, 59, 156–57, 170–75, 183–84; narrative, x, 23, 37–40, 45–50, 51–53, 61, 157, 161–62, 163, 199nn36–37, 200n42, 203n5, 210n48, 217nn9–10, 238n7; religious, ix, 169. See also person; selfhood; subject ideology, 45, 139, 148–53, 155, 175, 227n66, 232n42, 233n49, 241nn28– 32. See also utopia illness, 14, 15, 20, 159, 188n14, 211n55. See also healing image, 51, 61, 77, 107, 120, 123, 124, 125, 139, 144–45, 148, 155, 162, 165, 175, 223n32, 238n7; of God, 15, 129. See also icon imagination, x, 27, 29–31, 36, 39, 122, 137–54, 180, 182, 198n30, 202n2, 205n15, 208n32, 232n40, 237n1–43n44, 244n12; productive, 29–30, 137, 144, 147, 148, 241n29; sympathetic, 6, 8, 11–12, 25, 105, 111–12, 141, 174, 182, 187n6, 194n6, 238n7; theological, 237n80. See also creativity imitation, 16, 98, 100, 103, 113, 137, 139, 141, 144, 224n40. See also mimesis; representation incarnation, 134, 138, 244n12 individual, 9, 14, 19–21, 25, 30, 34, 46, 49, 50, 51, 75, 76, 82, 83, 90, 105, 133, 138, 147, 150, 152, 153, 156, 160, 163, 169, 170, 178, 179, 184, 190n29, 199n37, 205n19, 206n25, 211n55, 218n30, 221n4, 221n46, 224n43, 225n47, 225n50, 226n60, 238n8, 241n30, 244n11. See also person; selfhood; subject inspiration, 7, 55, 56, 63, 67, 73, 140, 179, 195n13, 212n57, 219n33. See also revelation interpretation, ix, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 23– 25, 28–35, 43, 44, 46, 51, 56, 66–68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 85, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98–100, 101, 103, 104, 108, 110,

Index

111, 117, 121, 122, 123, 126–28, 130, 133, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 150, 153, 163, 164, 177, 181, 186n2, 190n32, 193n2, 194n7, 196n20, 197n21, 198n34, 201n57, 210n44, 212n1, 212n56, 219n33, 221n4, 223n25, 228n72, 230n9, 231n22, 233n49, 241n28, 243n42 intertextuality, 144, 145 Irwin, Kevin, 43, 99, 119, 155, 201n56, 219n34, 223nn26–27, 230nn10–11, 243n4 Jacob of Serug, 172, 239n14 joy, 63, 112, 115, 128, 159, 168, 174, 184, 211n54, 233n53, 235n60. See also celebration; feast Joy, Morny, 56, 197n25, 198n32, 203n7, 205n19, 209n40, 210n43, 211n51, 244n11, 247n49 justice, x, xi, 45–61, 68, 69, 83, 84, 173, 175, 177, 192n1, 199n36, 202n1, 203n6, 204n13, 205n19, 206n23, 209n41, 233n50, 241n29, 246n36. See also ethical/ethics Kant, Immanuel, 46, 47, 54, 57, 62, 84, 194n5, 208n32, 237n2 Kavanagh, Aidan, 91, 92, 96, 108, 119, 129, 214n12, 219n36, 220n39, 220nn43–45, 222nn8–9, 226nn57– 59, 227n60, 230nn16–17, 235n64 Kearney, Richard, 11, 53, 139, 173, 185n2, 187n10, 188n10, 196n20, 200n42, 202n1, 203n4, 203n8, 205n14, 207n31, 209n37, 214n7, 215n1, 225n50, 232n40, 233n49, 237n1, 240n24, 241n28, 241n33, 242n34, 244n12 Kingdom, 27, 29, 41, 56, 66, 96, 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 121, 129, 154, 221n7, 224n43, 225n47, 235n63, 241n26, 243n44. See also God, kingdom of

273

Krueger, Derek, 101, 165, 188n14, 189n17, 224n40, 240n16, 245nn21–24 lament, 27, 55, 197n21, 206n22, 236n77, 248n54. See also mourning Lathrop, Gordon, 96, 109, 129, 213n6, 214n12, 222n10, 227n61, 235nn65– 68 law, xi, 28, 52, 55, 91, 92, 174, 203n6, 219n37, 245n20 Lent/lenten, 15, 16, 82, 84, 90, 114, 130, 158, 159, 166, 168–69, 177, 188n14, 233n53, 236n76, 246n35. See also fasting Lévinas, Emmanuel, 79, 80, 83, 170, 171, 203n4, 236n70, 246n38 liminal, 129, 234n58. See also rupture; threshold limit-expression, 21, 27–28, 41, 55, 56, 118, 126–30, 135, 166, 178. See also abundance; excess logic, ix, 9, 24, 27, 28, 30, 34, 41, 55, 123, 129, 173, 179, 195n10. See also correspondence; extravagance logos, 6, 11, 187n10, 233n49, 242n34. See also myth/mythos Luther, Martin, 20, 55, 190n26, 233n49 manifestation, 28, 75, 85–87, 90, 92, 128, 147, 148, 182, 217n14, 220n43. See also revelation; proclamation Mary, 16, 115, 124, 132, 134, 147, 216n5; of Egypt, 166. See also Theotokos Maximus (the Confessor), 96, 97, 99, 107, 222n13 memorial, 80, 97, 98, 103, 142, 183, 232n47, 241n27 memory, 36, 45, 46, 50–53, 76–79, 82, 84, 98, 102, 114, 139–41, 147–48, 150, 151, 152, 167, 168, 173–74, 178, 180, 182, 232n47, 233n50, 238–39nn8–10, 242n33, 248n54. See also anamnesis; history

274

Index

mercy, 46, 56, 57, 132, 169, 209n41, 234n56. See also grace metaphor/metaphorization, 3, 27, 62, 77, 106, 118–26, 135, 141, 144–45, 181, 229n1, 229n3, 230n14, 230n17, 231n22, 231–32nn38–46, 235n66, 239nn11–12, 240nn22–23, 244n14. See also symbol mimesis, x, 35, 36, 40, 48, 60, 62, 68, 96–103, 106, 109, 113, 121, 122, 123, 132, 145, 151, 181, 183, 198n32, 222nn19–21, 223n25, 223nn31–32, 224n36, 224n40, 224n42 mood, 112, 118, 143, 146, 160, 168. See also affect moral/morality, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46–49, 52, 54, 60, 62, 83, 165, 194n5, 202n2, 203n4, 204n10, 204–5n13, 208n33, 209n35, 217n10, 218n30, 230n15. See also ethics Morrill, Bruce, 172, 215n17, 224n43, 225n46, 247nn45–46 mourning, 133–34, 152, 159, 168, 175, 184, 206n22. See also death; grief Moyaert, Marianne, 66, 185n2, 213n7, 218n19, 225n44, 227n66, 244n11 music, 100, 110, 112, 114, 118, 128, 137, 146, 147, 184, 189n22, 197n20, 220n37, 228n69, 233n53. See also chant mystagogy, 96–97, 99, 219n33 mystery, 18, 100, 120, 121, 131–32, 134, 135, 235n67, 237n80. See also sacrament myth/mythos, ix, 3–21, 25, 48, 60, 61, 101, 121, 145, 177, 180, 186n2, 187n7, 187n10, 188n16, 198n34, 231n18, 232n39, 233n49, 242n34. See also fiction; symbol Nabert, Jean, 79, 80, 207n31 naïveté, ix, 3, 7, 11–13, 21, 189n16 Nativity, 16, 67, 134, 172, 239n15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 157, 190n29, 194n5, 233n49

originary, 7, 17, 18, 25, 54, 62, 75, 86, 88, 98, 131, 171, 194n5, 244n12. See also primordial Orthodox/Orthodoxy, x, xi, 15, 16, 66, 68, 88, 99, 104, 120, 124, 127, 128, 132–34, 137, 138, 142, 147, 148, 151, 165, 166, 168–70, 174, 185n3, 189n22, 201n57, 219n37, 220n45, 233n53, 234n56, 237n78, 247n50 other/Other/otherness, 8, 26, 32, 35, 47, 50, 51, 53, 58, 74, 76, 83, 84, 95, 105, 109n35, 149, 157–58, 167–71, 173, 195n11, 203n4, 211n51, 211nn54–55, 214n8, 216n3, 217n15, 234n56, 245n20. See also alterity parable, 25, 27, 29, 40–41, 49, 87, 144, 195n10 paradox, 27, 52, 96, 133–35, 137, 148, 159, 167, 168, 181, 195n7, 196n17, 201n51, 205n19, 206n21, 209n34, 237n79 participation, 11, 22, 61, 80, 85, 96, 99, 106, 108, 112, 118, 125, 131, 135, 141, 142, 148, 151, 152, 158, 160, 163, 172, 178–84, 213n3, 238n8 Pascha, 67, 96, 98, 100, 113, 114, 146– 48, 159, 168, 169, 222n21, 237n80, 244n14. See also Easter passion/passions, 6, 15, 75, 86, 100, 105, 146, 188n14, 210n44; of God, 101; narratives, 196n17, 210n48; play, 67 passive, 39, 41, 42, 44, 50, 54, 59, 61, 112, 143, 151, 157, 158, 163, 164 Pellauer, David, 186n1, 186n4, 202n2, 207n28, 227n66, 229n3 penitence/penitent, 10, 15, 16, 61, 63, 82–85, 108, 115, 126, 156, 158, 160–66, 169, 170, 179, 183, 188n13, 246n34. See also confession; repentance; sin person, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 26, 37, 39, 40, 48, 51, 54, 58, 61, 81, 84–85, 95, 119, 121, 125, 128, 147, 156, 158,

Index

160–63, 167–74, 209n34, 217n12, 236n76, 245n20, 248n50. See also individual; selfhood; subject phenomenology, 4, 11, 13, 19, 20, 28, 52, 61, 88, 89, 171, 179, 187n5, 195n11, 207n31, 217n11, 236n70 phronesis, 44, 46–49, 59, 62, 202n2, 203n6. See also Aristotle; wisdom plot, 35, 36, 38, 53, 162, 163, 199n35, 204n11. See also emplotment plurivocity, 34, 130, 154, 194n7, 197n28. See also polyphony poetic/poetics/poetry, 4–5, 6, 16, 18, 21, 24–25, 29, 38, 40, 60, 78, 86–87, 90, 101, 102, 104–6, 111, 112, 119, 122–24, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 140, 145, 166, 172, 174, 189nn17–19, 196n17, 198n34, 199n37, 203n4, 207n26, 207n30, 209n36, 210n42, 210n44, 214n9, 229n3, 230n17, 232n46, 236n73, 238n8, 239nn13–15, 240nn21–23, 242n34, 244n11. See also fiction polyphony, 24–25, 34, 74, 107, 117–18, 126–31, 134, 135, 178, 181, 195n8. See also plurivocity posture, 67, 112, 115, 117–18, 125, 146, 147, 158, 160, 162, 174, 180. See also body; gesture preaching, 41, 60, 88, 165, 194n4, 236n73 prefiguration, 101–2, 106, 109, 139. See also configuration; refiguration primordial/primordiality/ equiprimordiality, 5–8, 10, 13, 17, 19, 25, 60, 73, 75, 86–90, 115, 157, 183, 194n5, 218n24, 241n27 prophet/prophecy, 25–28, 54, 126, 164, 185n3 prostrate/prostration, 112, 117, 126, 130, 158, 160, 168 psalm, 115, 133, 134, 140, 197n21, 201n57 psychoanalysis, 18, 198n33, 199n37, 211n51. See also Freud

275

reader, 25, 29, 30, 36–37, 41, 67, 69, 77, 95, 104–6, 109–10, 144, 162, 197n24, 199n36, 216n3, 228n69, 228n71 reconciliation, 55, 62, 104, 178, 211n53, 246n34. See also forgiveness redemption, 9, 14, 20, 21, 60, 99, 109, 145, 165, 179, 210n45. See also salvation reenactment, 224n42. See also imitation refiguration, 36, 37, 60, 101, 102, 109, 113, 115, 121, 139, 164, 198n32, 198n34, 228n71. See also configuration; prefiguration; transfiguration repentance, 9, 16, 17, 20–21, 41, 73, 111–15, 125–26, 128, 156, 158–60, 162, 166–70, 174, 233n53, 234n56. See also confession; penitence representation, 30, 51, 76–79, 87, 100, 101, 103, 121, 125, 137, 139–44, 151, 152, 171, 189n16, 224n42. See also imitation; mimesis responsibility, 21, 48, 52–53, 54, 74, 76, 82–84, 124, 156, 158, 159, 167, 171, 174, 200n46, 205n19, 206n21. See also ascription; attribution revelation, 27–29, 73, 85–88, 113, 120, 121, 141, 195n13, 210n47, 214n9, 216n6, 217n14, 218n21, 243n42. See also inspiration; manifestation Romanos (the Melodist), 15, 16, 132, 189n17, 189n19, 189n22, 239n14 rupture, 9, 27, 105, 118, 120, 195n11. See also liminal; threshold sacrament, 118, 121, 152, 156, 160, 178, 185n3, 219n33, 219n37, 227n61, 229n5, 230n14, 245n15. See also Eucharist; mystery sacred, ix, 5, 12, 24, 27–28, 41, 43, 60, 62, 99, 101, 107, 120, 123, 168, 178, 195n11, 210n44, 225n46, 226n60, 228n69. See also holy

276

Index

sacrifice, 10, 212n57, 214n9, 230n12; of praise, 227n63. See also Girard saint, 15, 108, 113, 115, 125, 164, 165, 175. See also holy; sacred Saliers, Don, 43, 119, 152, 172, 201n55, 228n68, 230n15, 240n16, 242n36, 247n41 salvation, 4, 18, 44, 61, 79, 87, 99, 101, 107, 139, 222n23, 223n27, 223n32, 238n5. See also redemption Schmemann, Alexander, 66, 104, 109, 120, 121, 215n13, 219n34, 220n42, 224n43, 227n60, 227n63, 228n72, 231nn29–34 scripture/scriptural, 16, 23–31, 41, 44, 49, 55, 63, 67, 73, 77, 90, 92, 99, 105, 114, 126, 127, 129, 130–32, 145, 146, 150, 153, 154, 219n33, 220n37, 220n43, 221n46, 242n35. See also Bible/biblical selfhood, 38, 39, 46–47, 54, 69, 81–84, 86, 156, 157, 158, 163, 167, 171, 173, 200n41, 200n44, 201n51. See also identity; individual; person; subject senses, 41, 105, 118 Shoah, 77. See also Holocaust sin, 5–21, 54, 61, 63, 65, 82, 111, 115, 166, 169, 185n3, 187n5, 188n11, 188nn13–14, 207n31; original, 5, 7, 8, 10, 18–20, 190n25. See also Augustine; fall; fault; guilt soul, 10, 11, 14, 122, 209n41, 228n69, 231n30. See also body space, 21, 42, 43, 44, 61, 68, 78, 100, 105–7, 109, 112, 115, 118, 121, 126, 131–33, 137, 138, 140, 143, 146–47, 168, 172, 180, 183–84, 195n7, 204n10, 221n4, 225nn46– 47, 228n69, 241n24. See also architecture Stiver, Dan, 53, 191n1, 193n2, 207n30, 210n42, 210n44, 216n2, 217n9, 217n13, 229n3 story, 26, 27, 35, 36, 37, 38, 48–49, 52, 56, 61, 67, 105, 106, 142, 162,

166, 173, 204n10, 210n44, 210n48, 227n63, 228n68; of the fall, 5, 10, 16. See also fiction; history subject/subjectivity, 13, 30, 37–39, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 78, 81, 113, 148–49, 157, 158, 160–63, 165, 171, 194n5, 199n36, 203n5, 221n46, 238n7, 243n6, 245n20, 248n50. See also individual; person; selfhood suffering, 35, 39, 45, 48, 50, 52–53, 56, 59, 114, 128, 138, 151–52, 157–59, 162–63, 174–75, 177, 187n7, 197n21, 199n37, 200n42, 205n19, 206n21, 211n51, 211n55, 244nn11– 12, 248n54 superabundance. See abundance suspicion, 83, 84, 100, 103, 217n11; hermeneutics of, 32, 44, 74, 233n49; masters of, 18, 190n29, 233n49 symbol/symbolism, ix, 3–21, 23–25, 27–28, 35, 43, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62, 65–66, 98, 99, 101, 109, 117–26, 131, 135, 139, 141, 143, 148, 154–55, 162, 164, 174, 177–78, 181, 186n2, 186n4, 187nn4–5, 188n16, 190n25, 195n11, 196n19, 203n4, 208nn32–33, 218n19, 226n54, 229–31nn3–38, 232n44, 232n47, 238n8, 239n12, 240n21, 241n30. See also myth Taft, Robert, 92, 121, 155, 214n12, 215nn13–15, 218n31, 219n35, 221n47, 222n23, 223n25, 228n72, 231n28, 231nn36–37, 233n51, 241n27, 242n35, 243n2 temporality, 52, 237n2 testimony, 45, 49–53, 74, 77, 79–80, 83–84, 86, 87, 139, 141, 164, 172, 207n31, 216nn7–9, 217n11. See also attestation; witness theologian/theological/theology, x, 3, 7, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 25–26, 30, 41, 42, 43, 55, 57, 58, 66, 68, 86,

Index

87, 88, 90–92, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 118, 119, 129, 135, 138, 148, 153, 155, 171, 178, 182, 183, 185n3, 186–87n2, 187n5, 190n25, 190–91nn31–32, 191–93n1, 194n5, 195n7, 195n13, 196n19, 198n32, 204n12, 208n33, 212n1, 214n9, 216n6, 219nn33–37, 220nn40–43, 227nn60–63, 228n72, 229n3, 231n26, 231n34, 233n49, 234n58, 237n80, 239n11, 248n1 Theophany, 16, 66, 67, 147 Theotokos, 124, 134. See also God, mother of threshold, 58, 61, 129, 160, 169, 181, 183, 235n63. See also liminal; rupture transfiguration, 37, 67, 109, 121, 176, 196n17. See also transformation transformation, 28, 44, 59, 61, 68–69, 81–82, 84, 87, 96, 102, 104, 109, 112–13, 122, 126, 128, 139, 147, 155–56, 163–66, 169–70, 176, 179, 182–83, 196n17, 205n14, 215n18, 228n74, 246n32 truth, x, 3, 5–7, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, 36, 50–51, 60, 73, 74–93, 110, 119, 128, 129, 135, 158, 180–83, 188n12, 190n25, 196n17, 207n26, 211n53, 216nn2–3, 216n6, 217n11, 217n14, 217n16, 230n14, 235n67, 241n26 understanding, 10, 12, 22, 24, 27, 29, 30–36, 41, 43, 47, 57, 59, 65, 75, 76, 78, 84, 88, 90, 92, 95, 96, 109, 120, 142, 145, 161–64, 178, 181, 183, 196n14, 202n2, 204n11, 225n44, 227n63, 227n66, 232n42. See also explanation utopia, 45, 139, 148–52, 155, 175, 210n46, 232n42, 240n21, 241nn28–29, 241n33, 247n39. See also ideology

277

venerating, 125, 237n78, 238n5. See also awe; reverence; worship vestment, 107, 112, 137, 146 virtue, 5, 40, 47, 53, 122, 199n36, 205n19, 230n15. See also ethics; habit; moral/morality vulnerability, 51, 53, 85, 174, 205n19, 211n51, 230n15. See also fragility will, 4, 21, 32, 158, 172, 198n28, 200n40, 200n48, 210n42; servile, xi, 6, 17–20, 54, 65, 189n23, 190n26 wisdom, 6, 44, 46–49, 51, 57, 60, 63, 65, 84, 202nn1–2, 203n6, 204n12, 206n22, 211n51; writings, 25–26, 126. See also phronesis witness, 50, 52, 58, 59, 74, 77, 79–80, 81, 84, 141, 174, 207n31, 217n16, 219n33, 220nn42–43, 240n15. See also attestation; testimony Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 216n6, 235n69, 236n72 world of the text, 25, 29, 36, 40, 48, 69, 86, 87, 93, 97, 104–12, 126, 127, 146, 161, 163, 172, 195n8, 195n13, 197n24, 198n31 worship, 41, 43, 68, 69, 73, 80, 84, 90, 91, 92, 95–96, 99, 103, 105, 109, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118–20, 128, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 143, 146–47, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159, 161, 164, 174, 182, 183, 184, 189n21, 216n6, 220nn37–40, 221n4, 221n7, 224n43, 225nn46– 47, 226nn54–55, 226nn59–60, 227n63, 228n68, 231n18, 231n38, 233–34n54, 234nn58–60, 236n77, 241n32, 242nn35–38, 243n1. See also adoration; venerating Zimmerman, Joyce Ann, 66, 108, 213n3, 226n56, 247n50

About the Author

Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches continental philosophy of religion at Fordham University. She is author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Indiana, 2007), Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments about God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham, 2012), Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Indiana, 2014), Marion and Theology (T&T Clark, 2016), Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (Fordham, 2019), besides many articles at the intersection of phenomenology and religion. She has also translated several books and articles by Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and other French and German philosophers.

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