Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur (Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur) 9781793625618, 9781793625625, 1793625611

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Reading Scripture with Paul 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 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, by Roger W. H. Savage A Companion to Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil, 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 Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self, by Brian Gregor

Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur Edited by Joseph A. Edelheit and James F. Moore

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 Copyright © 2021 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: 2021931055 ISBN 978-1-7936-2561-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-2562-5 (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.

This book is dedicated to our wives, Ilana K. Spector and Nova M. Moore, whose open and loving hearts sustain each of us in our ongoing dialogues.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction1 Joseph Edelheit and James Moore 1 Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur: Homage André LaCocque

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2 Resistance and Recognition: Paul Ricoeur on Translation Kathleen Blamey

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3 From Exegesis to Allegory: Ricoeur’s Challenge to Biblical Scholarship Barnabas Aspray 4 Biblical Hermeneutics, the Art of Interpretation, and Philosophy of the Self: A Tribute to Paul Ricoeur and Paul Beauchamp Alain Thomasset, S.J.

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5 From a Called to a Responsive Self: Ricoeur and Prophecy Timo Helenius

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6 Ricoeur’s Biblical Hermeneutics: From Poesis to Theology Steven Kepnes

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7 Challenging the Male Gaze: The Unabashed Rahab Emerges through Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics Stephanie Arel

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Contents

8 Paul Ricoeur and the Parable of the Lost Son Brad DeFord 9 Ricoeur’s Paradigmatic Challenge to American Evangelical Biblical Hermeneutics Dan R. Stiver 10 Epistles as Revelation: Expanding Ricoeur’s Account of Biblical Discourse Brian Gregor 11 An Authentic Ricoeurian Dialogue Project Joseph A. Edelheit and James F. Moore

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Index243 About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

Thomasset, Alain. “Biblical Hermeneutic, the Art of Interpretation, and Philosophy of the Self.” Ethical Perspectives. Volume: 9 Issue: 1/ 2002, pp. 48-55 is reproduced in this volume by permission from the publisher. Excerpts are republished with permission of University of Chicago Press, from Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, 2003; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Excerpts from Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992 are reprinted with permission from Northwestern University Press and the original French publisher, Éditions du Seuil. Excerpts from Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis. Fortress Press, 1980. Copyright © Fortress Press 1980 are reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Paul Ricoeur, & Mark Wallace, Figuring the sacred: Religion, narrative, and imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Copyright © Fortress Press 1995. Reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Histoire et Vérité by Paul Ricoeur. Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 1955.

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Introduction Joseph Edelheit and James Moore

Paul Ricoeur, the thinker, was fundamentally a reader of texts. His extraordinary oeuvre includes an exceptional range of ideas, thinkers, and texts. Those who studied with Ricoeur each has their experience of actually reading a text with him. This was a principled methodology for him, and a pedagogy he had been using since he was a prisoner of war in Germany. He taught fellow prisoners about Husserl, a hidden text he was translating while teaching. Though he is acclaimed as one of the leading continental philosophers of the twentieth century, he has a significant legacy as a religious thinker, especially as a hermeneutical theologian. We see his work in this vein even as he would continuously refer to himself as a philosopher. Ricoeur was a Protestant Christian for whom Scriptures were the cornerstone of his faith. In addition, his reading of scripture was a primary way that he clarified some of his most significant contributions to the quest for meaning and interpretation of texts. “The question is rather whether there is, before the philosophical-theological interpretation, an interpretation that would not be an interpretation of the text or an interpretation about the text, but an interpretation in the text and through the text.”1 Ricoeur emphasizes the text not the content at the center of his consideration. It is this lifelong relationship with the text, especially the Scripture that motivates this new collection. We have assembled several of his colleagues, students from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and his scholars from several universities. Our shared commitment is to provide the community with a volume in which you can experience reading the Scripture with Paul Ricoeur. In this introduction we want to contextualize the essential role of Scripture as the text which Ricoeur used in constructing his complex ideas, responses, and dialogues. Of course, the question remains, why scripture? An answer is not so easy since Ricoeur’s examination of texts is not only a focus on the 1

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actual meaning of the text, but also Ricoeur wants to allow scripture to be a prime example of textual interpretation as well. The texts become a way to show what must be involved in the process of interpretation. Reading Ricoeur today we have enough perspective to critically evaluate his use of Scripture as the foundational text of his earliest philosophical works. Charles Andrew Kelbley writes in his Introduction to the 1965 edition of “History and Truth,” “Moreover, they [the essays] exemplify the hope of Marcel—that the philosopher insert himself in the trajectories of civilization if he is to claim concern with the nature of truth.”2 Kelbley notes, “The unity of truth is a ‘timeless task only because it is at first an eschatological hope’. In short, Ricoeur introduces an eschatological stage which would seem to frustrate all hope for unity in history. “What eschatological language calls ‘hope’ is recaptured reflectively in the very delay of all synthesis, in the postponement of the solution to all dialectics . . . “There is, Ricoeur contends, only one way of emerging from the narrowness of the human condition, and this communication.”3 We begin by rereading Ricoeur’s words in “History and Truth,” his first (1955/1964) collection of essays in which he uses Scripture as the primary text in the development of his thought. I hesitated to include the essay on “Christianity and the Meaning of History” because it goes much further than the others toward a profession of Christian faith and thereby breaks a certain modesty which to me seems essential to philosophical dialogue. Personal integrity, however, here required that I deal directly with the issues. It is a fact that the meaning I see in my craft as a historian of philosophy is defined by the dual affinity it has with the critical discipline of the historian proper, which I am not, and the profession of an eschatological meaning which pertains to a theory of history, which I do not feel qualified to elaborate and which, perhaps, cannot be elaborated owing to a lack of criteria. I am not hiding behind any of the difficulties created by this last affinity. Yet the methodological rigor of the history of philosophy does not seem weakened by linking the rationality of the historian’s craft to the mystery of eschatology. [our use of italics for emphasis]4

Ricoeur weaves together his personal use of Scripture, faith, and his intellectual of philosophy. His seamless conclusion that the methodological rigor of an academic discipline can be linked to the “mystery of eschatology” receives no explanation or justification. Ricoeur the historian, philosopher, post-World War II thinker, and educator is a lifelong Christian for whom Scripture and faith are assumed as valid as the air needed to breathe. But then, does Ricoeur separate scripture from other texts so as to give foundation to the special nature of this investigation? If so, then this focus on scripture in Ricoeur is challenged to consider both the special nature of Ricoeur’s relation

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to Biblical texts and yet his constant effort to develop basic hermeneutical principles on the basis of this investigation. In his essay, “Christianity and History,” Ricoeur engages in the construction of discourse and intellectual exposition of “the Christian meaning of history” with a constant use of Scripture. Let us re-read the Prophets of Israel and the psalms; we shall find the themes of national pride, hatred of the wicked, fear of the common people . . . I think that one of the tasks of the theology of history would be to go back to this Biblical critique of power in light of our modern experience of the State and the contemporary world.5 What authorizes the Christian to speak of meaning when he takes shelter in mystery? . . . For the Christian, faith in the Lordship of God dominates his entire vision of history . . . . Revelation has a kind of bearing which is not an absurdity for us, for we may discern in it a certain pedagogical plan in going from the Old Testament to the New Testament.6 The Christian meaning of history is therefore the hope that secular history is also a part of that meaning which sacred history sets forth, that in the end there is only one history that all history is ultimately sacred . . . The Christian would be the man for whom the ambiguity and dangers of history are not a source of fear and despair. “Fear not!” is the biblical saying which confronts history. Despair, more than fear, is exorcized here; for the true contrary of hope is not progress; the contrary at the same level is hopelessness, “unhope.”7

At the very core of developing his ideas, Ricoeur uses Scripture as the textual reference and the textual discourse without stopping to explain or justify it. His assertion of “this Biblical critique of power in light of our modern experience” is remarkable coming from a prisoner of war within a decade of the war’s end. The reader cannot engage in any dialogue with the teacher and thinker whose life will embody his challenge regarding despair and “unhope”! His second essay in this section of “History and Truth,” is “The Socius and the Neighbor” an attempt by Ricoeur to offer a “mediation situated between a sociology of human relationships and a theology of charity.”8 Ricoeur cannot find a sociology of the neighbor shared in the common discourse of history and philosophy, so he pointedly turns to Scripture. First, let us renew our astonishment by immersing our reflection once more in the freshness of parable and prophecy . . . A unique narrative and a question at the end. Such is the Biblical nutriment of reflection and meditation . . . (Luke

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10:30-37) . . . . Astonishment is born of parable and reborn of prophecy . . . (Matthew 25:31–42)9 The Gospel prepares us in many ways for this recapturing of the scope of the theme of charity . . . The text does not advocate the spirit of subordination but primarily the recognition that the relation of ‘authority’ to ‘fear’ is one of the dimensions of charity, the dimension which St. Paul called justice.10

Ricoeur does not refer generally to biblical themes, but quotes chapter and verse from Christian Scripture to establish the discourse he needs to develop his sociology of the neighbor. The man who wrote in his Preface, “as a historian of philosophy” offers his reader the explanation, “When I reduce the theology of the neighbor to a theology of the encounter, I miss the fundamental meaning of the Lordship of God over history. It is this theological theme which gives to the theme of charity all the extension and breadth of which it is capable.”11 Ricoeur’s use of Scripture here is illustrative of how this singular text is to Ricoeur’s thinking. He is not writing a religious or theological essay but a constructive link in one of his earliest expressions of ethics. “The theme of the neighbor therefore effects the permanent critique of the social bond: in comparison to love of neighbor, the social bond is never as profound or as comprehensive.”12 “Has our meditation retained something of our initial state of astonishment? I believe so. The neighbor, we said is characterized by the personal manner in which he encounters another independently of any social mediation. The meaning of the encounter does not come from any criterion immanent to history . . . We must, therefore, say that history, with its dialectic of the neighbor, and the socius, supports the scope of charity.”13 While Ricoeur is writing about history, he develops the discourse through his own reading and understanding of Scripture rather than social science. In his final essay of Part I, “Truth in the Knowledge of History,” Ricoeur takes up “The Image of God and the Epic of Man.” Here we find more of his thinking about ethics and communal responsibilities, developed by weaving together Scripture, religious philosophical tradition, and the issues of language. Each century has the task of elaborating its thought ever anew on the basis of that indestructible symbol which henceforth belongs to the unchanging treasury of the Biblical canon.14 In order to acquire a fuller understanding of what is false in the contemporary opposition of the individual and the “big animals,”—in the words of Simone Weil—I shall give a simple example: that of language. It is a good example

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since the Lord allows himself to be called the Logos and since, according to Scripture, creation proceeds by the Word. Now, how do we experience the fact of language?15 Our initial example of language suggests to us that evil passes both through the individual and the collectivity. The story of Babel illustrates the destruction of language is an instrument of communication.16 Let us begin with the evil of having. In itself, having is not evil. It is the relation of the primordial Adam with the land he cultivates . . . That is why the rich young man must sell his possessions in order to follow Jesus. “Woe to the rich” thunders the Christ of the Gospels.17 The Old Testament abounds in violent criticisms of kings; the Magnificat foretells the humbling of the great and exaltation of the meek Jesus himself states that, “the rulers of nations enslave them.”18 These examples suggest the idea of continuity between a theological anthropology inspired by the patristic interpretation of “imago Dei,” and a concrete critique of power, adjusted to the realities of our time.19 In Romans 13, St. Paul develops a theory of government of which one aspect is relevant here; through its institutional and not its personal character, authority is said to come from God . . . It means, I believe that wherever the State is the State in the midst of and in spite of the evil of the titular authority, something is functioning for the good of man. I look upon this good credited to the State as a wager. It is the wager that, in the last analysis, in the midst of and even in the spite of the evil of the individuals in power, the State is good.20 Extending our reflections form the political to the economic sphere is relatively easy: we have already stated that the relation between man and his possessions has no existence outside of a system of ownership and an organization of economic power. Scripture itself attaches a significant value to the full master of nature: (Psalms 8:4-9) Dominion over things is thus one of the ways of access to maturity, to the adult state of man, and, in that respect, one of the expressions of the imago Dei. We know today that this dominion is established by the organization of labor, economic planning, and all the ‘constituted’ forms of economic power.21

This essay was written in 1960 and added to the 1964 edition of the book and introduces a Ricoeur who is more involved in the “trajectories of civilization” at this point, but still uses Scripture as his primal text, “the unchanging

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treasury of the Biblical canon.” He asks about the experience of language and uses the biblical text of Babel to assert the primordial destruction of language. How do we contextualize this early example of Ricoeur of 1964, within the later decades of his ideas of language? Central to understanding this legacy requires a review of how he links texts, reading, and Scripture. In 1970 he was named to succeed Paul Tillich as the John Nuveen professor of philosophical theology at the University of Chicago, with a joint appointment in the Divinity School, the Philosophy Department, and the Committee on Social Thought, he taught until his retirement in 1991. During the first decade of his work in Chicago, there are three significant sources of Ricoeur’s intellectual development in which we find more examples of how he used Scripture as a critical textual tool as he engaged in the area of hermeneutics. The essential relationship between the text and the reader/community underscores the product of teaching/teacher. The Scripture as text is therefore a very different source of understanding for the hermeneut, because of the purpose of this text among all texts. “Philosophy and Religious Language” was published in January 1974 by The Journal of Religion, University of Chicago. Ricoeur had just given his lectures at Texas Christian University in the Fall of 1973, Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning that would become his classic book, Interpretation Theory. As those lectures do not engage the “religious” text, one might wonder if this later piece was intended to fill that gap. Such is the hermeneutical way of treating our first assumption, namely that the religious faith of a community has to be identified through its language. In hermeneutical terms this means that the first task of a biblical hermeneut is to identify the different modes of discourse which, taken together, constitute the finite filed of interpretation within the boundaries of which religious language may be understood.22 Here too, a more philosophical hermeneutics paves the way to a more specific treatment of religious expressions, documents and texts. The category which has to be introduced here is that of the world of the text.23 In effect, what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and where I might project my “ownmost” possibilities. This is what I call the world of the text, the world probably belonging to this unique text. The theological implications here are considerable: the first task of hermeneutics is not to give rise to a decision on the part of the reader, but to allow the world of being which is the “issue” of the biblical text to unfold.24

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For a hermeneutical philosophy, faith never appears as an immediate experience, but always as mediated by a certain language which articulates its. For my part I should link the concept of faith to that of self-understanding in the face of the text. Faith is the attitude of one who accepts being interpreted at the same time that he interprets the world of the text. Such is the hermeneutical constitution of the biblical faith. But hermeneutics reminds us that biblical faith cannot be separated from the movement of interpretation which elevates it into language.25

Ricoeur returns to Scripture as the intentional text by which he can develop identity as anchored in the experience of “the world of the text.” Ricoeur warns the reader of Scripture that “the biblical text’s” unfolding is at risk, as well as one’s self-understanding. These are echoes of his conclusion in his TCU lectures, “I say that interpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being—gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself.”26 Ricoeur links his project of hermeneutics of his earlier concerns with Scripture and religious faith, they cannot be separated because “interpretation elevates it into language,” now the essay on Religious Language is consciously linked to Interpretation Theory. Let us pause briefly to consider this notion of the world of the text. We recall from his reflections on interpretation theory that Ricoeur rejects the idea that we can get behind the text. Though he draws on various notable historical critics especially in early work, he does not choose that approach for interpretation. Instead, Ricoeur chooses an approach which at certain points he calls structuralist. The text produces a structure of thought which creates a horizon of meaning, a world of meaning, which Ricoeur also calls the presumed author. For Ricoeur this world is brought to language through the process of interpretation, that is, through the merging of horizons between the reader and the world of the text (meaning in front of the text). In 1975, in his essay, “Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics,” we can once again follow the further development of his thinking, and his even more explicit use of Scripture. My purpose is to use the notion of text as a guideline of my whole inquiry. It may appear, therefore, that my hermeneutics is limited to a reflection on exegetical disciplines at large, i.e. to text-interpretations.27 . . . the text as the projection of a world; and the text as the mediation of self-understanding.28 Certainly, religious texts are primarily texts, texts among other texts. Therefore, theological hermeneutics must remain, at first glance, a province within the broader field of textual hermeneutics. But my thesis is that only the treatment of theological hermeneutics is regional, as applied to a certain category of

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texts—in our case biblical texts—can prepare a reversal in the relation between both hermeneutics. Only the specificity of the task of interpreting these specific texts will require that theological hermeneutics ultimately encompass philosophical hermeneutics and transform it into its own category.29 I would say that the task of hermeneutics is to explicate the “world of the text.”30 My thesis is that this route is the only one at whose end we can recognize the specificity of the biblical “issue” . . . it is only in listening to this book to the very end, as one book among many, that we can encounter it as the World of God. It will thus be the task of biblical hermeneutics to unfold all the implications of this constitution and this articulation of God-talk.31 It is a unique case because all the partial discourses refer to a Name which is the point of intersection and the index of incompleteness of all our discourses on God, and because this Name has become bound up with the meaning-event preached as Resurrection. But biblical hermeneutics can only claim to say something unique if this unique thing speaks as the world of the text which is addressed to us, as the issue of the text.32 But hermeneutics reminds us that biblical faith cannot be separated from the movement of interpretation which elevates it into language. “Ultimate concern” would remain mute if it did not receive the power of a word ceaselessly renewed by its interpretation . . . over the centuries.33

One can read the two essays, the previous one initially a lecture given at the Divinity School, so it is not a surprise to find Ricoeur repeating himself in the second essay. Ricoeur is teaching when he writes, “Nothing is more able to reveal the ‘ex-centric’ character of theology than the attempt to ‘apply’ to it the general categories of hermeneutics.”34 “Philosophy and Religious Language” and “Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics” are even more valuable when read together as a means of textually following Ricoeur’s mindful construction of an area that will become central to his thought for the rest of his career. He is not merely responding to Gadamer and the new focus on hermeneutics, rather he is integrating his own work on language and interpretation into the broader discourse. In 1980 “Essays on Biblical Interpretation” was published, providing a collection of work from the previous decade and Ricoeur’s first communal dialogue with a thinker from the Consortium of Divinity Schools that included the University of Chicago. Lewis S. Mudge, the Dean of McCormick Theological Seminary, engages Ricoeur reminding us of the challenge from “Marcel—that the philosopher insert himself in the trajectories of civilization

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if he is to claim concern with the nature of truth.”35 Ricoeur is an important model of the thinker who requires herself/himself to go outside their realm into dialogues. One of the ways out of this labyrinth would be to say that the world displayed by biblical stores and which shatters our ordinary beliefs about the ‘real’ world, is not a historical world, a world of real events, but the world of the text.36 I will begin directly from the manifestation of the world by the text and by scripture.37 We immediately establish a correspondence with the fact that the claim of revealed speech reaches us today through writings to be interpreted. Those religions which refer back to Abraham—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are in their different ways, and they are often very different ways, religions of the book . . . It produces a form of discourse that is immediately autonomous with regard to its author’s intention . . . This emancipation with regard to the author has its parallel on the side of whoever receives the text. The autonomy of the text also removes this reader from the finite horizon of its original audience.38 It is what I call the world of the text. By this I mean that what is finally to be understood in a text is not the author or his presumed intention, nor is it the immanent structure or structures of the text, but rather the sort of world intended beyond the text as its reference . . . The world of the text designates the reference of the work of discourse, not what is said, but about what it is said. Hence the issue of the text is the object of hermeneutics.39 If the Bible may be said to be revealed this must refer to what it says, to the new being it unfolds before us. Revelation, in short, is a feature of the biblical world proposed by the text.40

In another anthology, “Figuring the Sacred” is a collection of essays on various religious topics, many of which offer us more examples of Ricoeur’s evolving use of Scripture. In “The Sacred Text and the Community” we find an example of his willingness to dialogue with other disciplines. This essay was originally included in “The Critical Study of Sacred Texts” edited by his colleague Wendy D. O’Flaherty in the History of Religions. He begins by musing that a “critically edited text is no longer sacred, arguing that once critically edited, the text is” no longer the text that the community has always regarded as sacred; it is the scholars’ text. So, in a sense, there can be no such activity as the critical editing of sacred texts.”

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There is a reciprocity between the reading and the existing self-recognition of the identity of the community. There is a kind of reciprocity between the community and the text.41 Preaching is the permanent reinterpretation of the text that is regarded as grounding the community; therefore, for the community to address itself to another text would be to make a decision concerning its social identity.42 Revelation is a historical process, but the notion of sacred text is something antihistorical. I am frightened by this word “sacred.”43

In The Bible and the Imagination Ricoeur is responding to his colleague, Joseph Kitagawa, the Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. This lecture, then essay, was first published in The Bible as a Document of the University edited by Hans Dieter Betz in 1981. I would like to consider the act of reading as a dynamic activity that is not confined to repeating significations fixed forever, but which takes place as a prolonging of the itineraries of meaning opened up by the work of interpretation.44 I would like to see in the reading of a text such as the Bible a creative operation unceasingly employed in decontextualizing is meaning and recontextualizing it in today’s Sitz-im-Leben.45 Finally . . . this phenomenon of intertextuality, brought in this way to its highest level, is indeed the key to the rule-governed imaginations that, by the privileged way of narrative, invites the reader to continue, on his or her own account, the Bible’s itineraries of meaning. If this analysis can one day be carried through, we shall have recovered the level of our first presupposition that the biblical form of imagination is indivisibly a narrative and a symbolic form of imagination.46

Ricoeur the historian of philosophy engages Historians of Religion in a dialogue about sacred texts, the Bible, and imagination. There is no single category of intellectual discipline into which we can put Paul Ricoeur or that limits his ability to link texts, readers, and the process of interpretation that leads to understanding. In the discussion on intertextuality, Ricoeur draws us into yet another key aspect of his theory of interpretation—the givenness of the text. If both the historical critics and the anthropologists deconstruct the texts in order to establish a presumed historical context, Ricoeur restores the givenness of the text as a whole. Perhaps it is in the reading of the text as both manifestation and proclamation that this can work, since the setting

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of reading in the form of proclamation accepts the bible as a whole, as a given that moves the interpreter to connect texts even as they possess distinct forms. This linking of texts into a seamless whole that belies the historical claims and works with the text as it is given is the setting that Ricoeur would call in his work “the sacred” and sets the sacred text apart in the process of interpretation. Finally, Ricoeur’s mature relationship with Scripture is best illuminated in the work he cowrote with his longtime friend and colleague, Andre La Cocque, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies was published in 1998 and offers us many examples of how Ricoeur reads Scripture as a mature thinker. It is in interpreting the Scriptures [in question] 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. If this circle Is not vicious to the eyes of the faithful belonging to such communities, it is because the founding role attached to the sacred texts and the founded condition of the historical community do not designate interchangeable places. The founding text teaches—this is what the word torah means. And the community receives instruction.47

Thus, the essays in the book are intended to make clearer this evident truth that Paul Ricoeur treated the interpretation of the sacred texts as a central project quite apart from the other projects that consumed his philosophical curiosity over his lifetime. He was in that way a Biblical scholar offering an alternative approach to the reading of scripture. His contribution to Biblical scholarship has been significant even as we recognize that the essay in this volume cannot do justice to the whole range of this work. Still the essays do show how Ricoeur directly provided specific readings of scripture (Moore and Edelheit, DeFord, for example). This represents taste of the ways that Ricoeur offered specific interpretations even as the contributors push Ricoeur’s thinking further on each text, in a sense using Ricoeur to extend Ricoeur. Ricoeur described his approach in various ways, but clearly he approached the task differently than the historical critics even as he would refer to their work as he moved to what he called early in his writing a structuralist approach. This move allowed Ricoeur to take note more specifically of the various genres in the Bible though he paid special attention to narratives. Still Gregor offers an insight into one rarely managed genre—the Epistles—while using Ricoeur to do an analysis as if Ricoeur were doing it. The structural

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approach can also open up possible theoretical approaches often missing among Biblical scholars such as the application of feminist theory (Arel) or aesthetics (Kepnes) or to more general reflections on Ricoeur as Bible scholar (Helenius, Aspray, Stiver). Still, we could argue that the Bible was one keyway that Ricoeur exemplified his philosophical theories on hermeneutics, narrative, historical theory, etc. All these essays included in this volume also note this dimension of what it means to talk about Ricoeur and the Bible. We will find in the treatment of texts many of the familiar ideas that Ricoeur has brought into the wider philosophical discussion—manifestation and proclamation, a surplus of meaning, meaning in front of the text, meaning emerging between the reader and the text, etc. Given this aspect of what we wish to show through the chapters in this book, we hope it is clear that both dimensions—Ricoeur as Biblical scholar and the Bible as a special case example of hermeneutical theory—are always at work and indeed impact one another. As his philosophical thinking evolves over time, his reading of scripture is also reconsidered. Still, also in the reading of scripture, Ricoeur engages a process of self-discovery in which his philosophical ideas are rethought. Finally, we are pleased that two notable friends of Ricoeur can be included both in terms of recognizing their scholarship and allowing them to add a special personal touch to this volume. We have been blessed with an essay by Andre LaCocque as a preface for the essays in which Andre gives a personal reflection on his relationship with Ricoeur. We also are happy to include the essay by Kathleen Blamey whose reflection on translation (truly a critical aspect for any Biblical reflection but maybe especially so for Ricoeur) develops both her own understanding of the process and recognizes her longtime work in translating Ricoeur’s work. Of course, we know that the essays included in this volume can only be a small sample of what might be said about Ricoeur and the Bible. Thus, it is our hope that the book will be an invitation for much mire to be done and made public for scholars about this theme that we have shown is a vital part of scholarship on Paul Ricoeur’s writing. NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur and Mark Wallace, Figuring the Sacred, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 140. 2. History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, p. xii. 3. Ibid., p. iv. 4. Ibid., p. 7. 5. Ibid., p. 92.

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6. Ibid., p. 93. 7. Ibid., p. 94. 8. Ibid., p. 98. 9. Ibid., pp. 98 and 100. 10. Ibid., p. 104. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 108. 13. Ibid., p. 109. 14. Ibid., pp. 110–111. 15. Ibid., p. 113. 16. Ibid., p. 114. 17. Ibid., p. 115. 18. Ibid., p. 116. 19. Ibid., p. 118. 20. Ibid., p. 121 21. Ibid., pp. 124–125. 22. Interpretation theory: Discourse and the surplus of meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, p. 74. 23. Ibid., p. 78. 24. Ibid., p. 81. 25. Ibid., p. 84. 26. Ibid., p. 94. 27. Ricoeur, P. “Philosophical hermeneutics and theological hermeneutics,” Studies in Religion, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 1975, p. 14. 28. Ibid., p. 16. 29. Ibid., p. 17. 30. Ibid., p. 25. 31. Ibid., p. 28. 32. Ibid., p. 29. 33. Ibid., p. 32. 34. Ibid., p. 17. 35. History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, p. xii. 36. Ibid., p. 45. 37. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis. Fortress Press, 1980, p. 98. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., p. 100. 40. Ibid., p. 104. 41. Figuring the Sacred, p. 69. 42. Ibid., p. 70. 43. Ibid., p. 72. 44. Ibid., p. 145. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 149.

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47. André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Paperback. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. xvi–xvii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Paperback. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Ricoeur, P. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis. Fortress Press, 1980. Ricœur, P. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. Ricœur, P. History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Ricoeur, P. “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics,” Studies in Religion, Vol 5, Issue 1, 1975. Ricœur, P., & Wallace, M. I. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Chapter 1

Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur Homage André LaCocque

HOMAGE Paul Ricoeur was born in the crucible of the mutual carnage of German and French soldiers during World War I. The year he was born (1913) was marked by the death of his mother. In 1915, his father was killed on the Marne frontline. Later yet, his beloved sister Alice died of consumption at the age of 20. To this tragic list must be added the suicide of one of his sons, Olivier, in 1986. This is to say that Paul Ricoeur’s life was branded with the “evil” of which he spoke so eloquently.1 His paternal grandparents raised him and his sister—and his mother’s name was never again mentioned in his presence! The wound left in the philosopher’s psyche never healed completely. His active membership in the “Eglise Réformée de France” (ERF) provided a soothing element. There, he was exposed from tender age to the Biblical conception of reality, thus to “thinking biblically.”2 To say that he liked it is an understatement. Paul remained faithful to this first love till his last breath. He not only cultivated the formidable Biblical message but felt thoroughly fed by it. In parallel, he developed a strong respect for the Jewish people, old and contemporary. This intrinsic association of the two, People and Scripture, was to him decisive, the Biblical world being a combination of the People and the Faith of Israel.3 For Paul Ricoeur, this associative phenomenon displayed a unique dimension. It literally created the history of a perennial nation in a sacred space and time (a spatiotemporal transcendent dimension), and it did existentially change the world. Ricoeur elected to be counted among the beneficiaries as well as “missionaries” of the “good news.” And here we reach the crucial point of his dialectics. For People and Scripture stand in living dialogue, 15

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indeed in mutual creativity and authorship. While it must be stated that Israel creates her own Scripture, reciprocally Scripture creates Israel! To this, dialectical reality corresponds a mutual election of Elector and elected: Israel elects to be elected.4 In fact, Israel elects the Great Elector! (see Isa. 43:12–13). True, Ricoeur readily acknowledged that he, as a philosopher, was not an exegete of the Bible, although belonging to the so-called hermeneutic school of thought.5 But, while the preponderant modern criticism in Bible study is the Historical-critical method whose aim is to retrieve the earliest background of the text under consideration (its Sitz im Leben), the philosopher points to the foreground of the text. The interpretive passage is thus a shift from retrospective to prospective, from “archeology” to teleology, that is, to the reception of the kerygma and the impact of the latter on modern thinking. Such a philosophical contribution to understanding the message stresses a breakthrough discovery: the textual “author”—however he/she/they may have been (and they remain in a large part anonymous in the Bible)6—did not anticipate the further reorientation of their provided model to become typological. In other words, the text is endowed with a life of its own that demands a “lecture infinie”7 (an endless interpretation in the light of an “infinite” revelation in history). The text implies a trajectory of meaning from alpha to omega, from promise to fulfillment;8 its bearing is teleological. That is why memory plays a central role.9 Memory means here reactualization of the paradigmatic event (say the Exodus or the Golgotha) by the community of readers: they are actually creators of and created by “reinterpreting” it (in the musical sense). Both the agent and her production are inseparable. They are involved in a process of growing together. By interpreting Scriptures, the reader interprets himself, Ricoeur insists. Like in the human relation between genders, there is between kerygma and interpreter a mutual creation; the reader is reborn by his reading! This is what has happened and is happening in the perennial history of the Elected People. In a second tier, so to speak, the “nations” witness the God– Human relationship in medias res of Israel’s history and worship. They feel addressed and invited to participate in a heralding existence that is a perpetual choice of “good” against “evil,” with the realization that life is complex and fraught with the impulse (desire) to rearrange everything to one’s private benefit. Israel’s response is Love. From the outset, the Biblical human being is a relational being, in dialogue with the “other.” The latter does not come second or late. It is from the start and forever a soliciting one who is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). The Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, comes with the ultimate and decisive development of the notion of love.

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Love transcends everything else and is the golden rule by which all ethics is determined. True, the matter is far from simple.10 It demands nothing less than selfoblivion at the benefit of the “other.” As Pirke Aboth (5:10) puts it, “all that is mine is yours, and all that is yours remains yours.” This utter humility indeed leads to realize the self as another, a “Thou” that the other/Other recognizes as an intimate “neighbor” to be loved, to be (re)created, thus allowing the irruption of divine grace into my life. This context provides the sole justification for a “New Testament,” that is, a renewed Alliance.11 Thanks to both the intrinsic dynamism of the foundational text and the advent of a “news” that is rightly called “good,” Paul Ricoeur felt personally implicated in the dialogical adventure endlessly occurring between God and People; an adventure, he thought, with a universal dimension, that is, carrying a constant invitation to the “nations.” For from the outset, there has been an ontological tension between the universal and the particular, with the meaning that the universal is reached only through the particular.12 Paul Ricoeur, a man endowed with a remarkable humility, acknowledged coming second to the people of Israel, and he was always grateful for this shared privilege. He was, noticeably, deeply impressed by Romans 5’s “all much more” (5:9, 10, 17, 18–21). He saw in this superabundance the divine grace at work, a manifestation of a God who Himself chose humility so as to be accessible.13 Incidentally, Ricoeur had a deep reverence for Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy, in particular for his notion of traces left by God’s passage in human history14 and the philosopher’s insistence on the existential relationship with the “other/Other.” For Ricoeur as well, there is a dialectical relationship between the other within the self and the self present in the other.15 True, there is a profound difference between the self and the other, but the gap is bridged by dialogue that demands the understanding of the self as another. The aborted murder of Isaac by Abraham comes to mind. “All much more” may serve as a golden gate to Jesus’ teaching and living. Not only is the evil in this world contagious (like a rotten apple in an apple-bag), but, mirabile dictu, goodness (purity) is also contagious! This is a revolutionary idea, a lot less evident than what regards evil’s spread, but it is the very foundation for hope, for love, and for faith. Righteousness is never lost. When evil corrupts, God purifies. Ricoeur saw his writing career as an active struggle with evil. Good is sometimes writing a book or an article that promotes a generous “thinking biblically.” “Good is contagious,” this affirmation is a leap of faith. Once again, one has to realize that Ricoeur’s reflection occurred in a context of two frightful world wars. He was “engaged” as a POW during the World War II in Pomerania, and never more so after the devastating suicide of one of his sons.

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Darkness! Hell on earth. He however scrupulously continued to study and to “re-actualize.” In Pomerania, he read and translated Husserl, writing on incredibly poor material, for the time when “the liberation would come.” A light in the darkness. A model for all his existence as philosopher. His personal tragedies should not, however, distract from his consciousness of a surrounding universal catastrophe. Auschwitz was for him unforgivable and unforgettable. More than a divine “eclipse,” it was God’s absence, a perfect image of what the world would be without God. But there in the midst of the horror, there more than anywhere else, “good” radiated thanks to holy people like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Father Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein etc. These “saviors,” rescuers of sanity and righteousness, did blunt the absoluteness of evil. They were among the “lamèd-waw,” the thirty-six just who redeem the world in each generation, according to Jewish tradition. Paul Ricoeur was one of them, unknowingly to himself of course, but not to us, his witnesses. In the darkness of our terrible times, he was a beacon and he remains so for generations to come.

NOTES 1. His book on The Symbolism of Evil [originally published in 1992] is still a classic some 27 years after publication! 2. See Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically. Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 3. One of my courses at the Chicago Theological Seminary was called “People and Faith of Israel.” The title said it all. Under consideration is a historically living tradition, not an “oldish” document advantageously replaced by a superseding new one. 4. See Mek. Bahodesh, Yitro 5, 221–22, ed. H. S. Horovitz, [1931]). 5. Hence his admiration for Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work (see the latter’s Truth and Method, originally published in German in 1960). 6. The collective ownership of tradition. The “surplus of meaning.” See Ricoeur, L’Herméneutique biblique. Paris: Le Cerf, 2000, 142. 7. The beautiful title of a book by David Banon (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 8. Cf. Aristotle’s entelechy. He also introduced syllogism, which deduces particulars from universals. 9. See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. K. Blamey, D. Pellauer). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 10. Jesus comes with the exorbitant order to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mat. 5:44)! 11. The same is true also of the branching out of the Biblical tradition into Midrash and Oral law. 12. Again, we can draw an analogy with the particular relationship of woman and man. Adam is all men, Eve is all women. Through Eve, Adam is in relationship with

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all women; through Adam, Eve is in relationship with all men. One is all. It is highly remarkable that Israel’s history starts only in Genesis 12, after eleven chapters about all humanity! 13. Cf. the famous tsimtsum (God’s self-shrinkage) according to Rabbi Luria (sixteenth century). 14. He says, “l’événement survient et la trace demeure” (“Cahier de l’Herne: Ricoeur,” Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004, 193). 15. See Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Seuil, 1990 (Oneself as Another. [trans. K. Blamey]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gadamer, H. G. Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). (2nd ed.). New York: Seabury Press, 1994, originally published in German in 1960. LaCocque, Andre and Paul Ricoeur. Thinking Biblically. Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mekiltah de Rabbi Ishamel, ed. H. S. Horovitz, [1931]). Ricoeur, Paul. Cahier de l’Herne. Paris: Editions de l’ Herne, 2004. Ricoeur, Paul. L’Herméneutique biblique. Paris: Le Cerf, 2000. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. K. Blamey, D. Pellauer). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Seuil, 1990 (Oneself as Another. [trans. K. Blamey]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

Chapter 2

Resistance and Recognition Paul Ricoeur on Translation Kathleen Blamey

In discussing his work, Paul Ricoeur has frequently used the imagery of an itinerary, a path to be followed, emphasizing a long detour as a necessary part of the excursion. These figures of speech reflect a philosophical approach that can be described as generous and as rigorous. Generous, in his willingness to include the analyses, insights, and contributions of others in his own investigations, reflections of philosophers of the past as well as the views of contemporaries coming from diverse schools of thought. Rigorous, in his careful and sustained examination of competing views, and in taking the “arduous detours” characteristic of this indirect approach as it fleshes out the forms of mediation contributing, for example, to the hermeneutics of the self, the relation of the narrative to the human experience of time, and the stages in the course of recognition. With respect to Paul Ricoeur’s recourse to predecessors, the philosophers he has returned to repeatedly in his works—Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, among so many others—have been invoked in each case to address problems of contemporary concern. His works have shown how the reflections of thinkers of the past can illuminate our current investigations and sharpen our arguments. In the discipline of philosophy, we are not only heirs to a tradition, but in our work—whether writing or teaching—we construct for our thinking our own lineage of predecessors. Ricoeur’s analyses, for example, may bring out the significance of Aristotle’s muthos and mimesis in the Poetics for the linking of narrative and lived temporal experience, or underscore the description in the Nicomachean Ethics of the ethical aim of the “good life” and its implicit connection to the well-being of others. In Ricoeur’s work, however, the careful analysis of a philosophical position can also lead to a disavowal: his many analyses of Descartes’s positing of 21

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the cogito as “a final, ultimate foundation,” the vis-à-vis of clear and distinct ideas, recognize the philosopher as the founder of modern European philosophy and its legacy of ontological dualism. Acknowledging Descartes’s radical break from the tradition, his personal, autobiographical repudiation of the disputes of the philosophers, and his methodological rupture set forth in the Discourse and in the Meditations, Ricoeur enacts repeatedly in his writings his own rupture with the Cartesian tradition, confirming: “The fundamental limit of the Cartesian project, with its postulate of transparency, was always a problem for me.”1 And yet, Ricoeur returns again and again to the Cartesian corpus—whether to highlight the original features of Husserlian intentionality of consciousness, whether to confront Descartes’s ego cogito with the “masters of suspicion” Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, whether to present the insights and shortcoming of Descartes’s analysis of the exercise of judgment, separating the true from the false, in distinguishing, identifying, and holding as true—preparing the way for Ricoeur’s conclusion that “a philosophy of recognition cannot . . . be unfolded on Cartesian grounds.”2 These detours by way of Descartes, reexamining the project of the search for certainty, plumbing the resources of a reflective philosophy of the subject, setting out its intrinsic limits and the horizons left in the shadows of this enterprise, are repeated in Ricoeur’s rigorous investigations into so many other schools of thought. Let us mention here, as further examples, the extensive analyses of Hegel in so many of Ricoeur’s writings, both before and after he poses the question in Time and Narrative 3: “Should we renounce Hegel?” (Yes, with respect to the project of totalization, “having abandoned Hegel’s work site . . . we no longer think in the same way Hegel did, but after Hegel.”)3 And yet later in The Course of Recognition, Ricoeur devotes a major section of this work to Hegel, examining his concept of Anerkennung and the stages in the development of mutual recognition. The same, of course, can be said for Ricoeur’s continual return to the austere banquet of Kant’s critical philosophy. There is possibly no work by Ricoeur lacking a sustained analysis of Kant’s corpus—the three Critiques, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the essays “What is Enlightenment?,” “The Idea for a Universal History,” and “Perpetual Peace.” And yet, once again in his last major work, Ricoeur’s analysis of Kant’s approach in the first Critique to the recognition of objects as “identification” yields, he admits, only disappointment. Here, Ricoeur explains, Kant’s Copernican revolution has put out of reach any unifying principle other than the unity of consciousness, “objects themselves as phenomena being ordered after our mode of representation” (Preface to the second edition). The path to the first stage of recognition as the identification of things or persons in the course of their change over time requires an exit from Kantian transcendental

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idealism, not through addressing this or that argument, Ricoeur writes, but at a single stroke, taking a step outside the great circle of representation. Does recourse to these philosophical predecessors—and others frequently cited—allow us to trace a trajectory of reflection that could be called the “philosophy of Paul Ricoeur”? How would he, how has he characterized his own work? In an interview in 2000, 50 years after the publication of his inaugural works—The Voluntary and the Involuntary, and his translation of Husserl’s Ideen I—Paul Ricoeur responded to this question: “I do not have a philosophy that would be my philosophy, one that I would then develop from book to book. Each of my books has been targeted. I have always thought in terms of problems. These are discontinuous. It is only after the fact that I attempt, often along with my readers, to draw a line. The continuity of my work seems to me to have been assured by remainders, each book leaving a residue from which in each case I start up again.”4 Among these remainders emerging from earlier writings as problems unresolved, or as Ricoeur puts it in Critique and Conviction, as “something that flies outside the orbit of a work, becoming an obsession for me and forming the next subject to examine,”5 we find the question of language and the question of the other. The attempt even to formulate these questions from work to work disperses into multiple threads. In the case of language, this leads to the speaking subject, the written text, symbolic systems, natural languages, and formal constructions. Most often, these analyses remain within the milieu of language, but Ricoeur also, as he says, “treats the problem of the movement of language outside of itself, in its capacity to redirect, restructure experience, to produce a new manner of inhabiting the world.”6 In the case of the other, every investigation into the self—whether the ego of philosophies of the subject: the Cartesian cogito, Husserlian intentionality of consciousness, or the responsible agent of moral philosophy—requires a corresponding response to the ontological, epistemological, or ethical relation to the other—other subjectivities, other agents, other persons. Each of these investigations provides insight into the problem at hand, but Ricoeur cautions that he has no expectation of unifying these various perspectives into an overarching synthesis, agreeing with Merleau-Ponty that there is no overview of a totality, rather one can proceed only step by step.7 To follow, as it were, this step-by-step approach characterizing Ricoeur’s work, I propose returning to the themes of language and the other in the realm of translation, a topic that has concerned Paul Ricoeur throughout his career in theory and in practice. Indeed, translation as an activity and as a conceptual problem will provide an important confirmation for Ricoeur of the impasse of a speculative solution, of any attempt to construct a grand theory of the transfer of meaning. This echoes the general trajectory of Ricoeur’s philosophical approach in

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which conceptual problems open onto analyses of the mediating role of practices; these practices, in turn, are directed to an ethical idea. In the case of translation, this will be the ethics of hospitality. One of Paul Ricoeur’s early contributions to his chosen profession was the publication in 1950 of his translation of Husserl’s Ideen I, along with his doctoral dissertation, Le volontaire et l’involontaire. As is widely known, this translation of the Ideen was begun during Ricoeur’s five years of captivity in a German Oflag, a prison camp for officers. There, for lack of paper, Ricoeur began translating Husserl’s text in the margins of his copy. Along with fellow prisoners, among them other philosophers and writers, he was able to obtain books by German authors, reading them, deriving lecture notes, and giving courses on these works in the camp. Ricoeur has stated his determination to “read Goethe and Schiller there. The true Germany was there, the Germany of Husserl, of Jaspers.”8 This attachment to the German language, to German culture in the arts, literature, and philosophy, had begun well before this time. Just after passing the Agrégation, Ricoeur went to teach in Colmar, along the border with Germany. Looking back on this period, he says, “I knew I would turn toward German philosophy. I took German lessons and then went to summer school in Munich, ending in 1939 with the declaration of war.”9 Later, after the war, in 1948, Ricoeur succeeded in receiving an appointment to the University of Strasbourg, again on the German border, where, as he tells it: “I wanted to go to be close to the German language.”10 Although he made an effort to make frequent trips across the border to Freiberg and to Heidelberg, meeting with Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe, and with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ricoeur lamented that there were no exchanges at that time between French and German universities. In his own teaching in Strasbourg, Ricoeur worked to help his students overcome their fear that speaking German was forbidden. Later, in his writings on translation, Ricoeur will refer to the mediating role of the translator as a border-crosser, in memory perhaps of his own passages over and back across this frontier, which had been in his own lifetime a battleground, and a no man’s land. Before moving on to Ricoeur’s discussions of the art, the theory, and the everyday practice of translating, let us consider the product of this work undertaken in captivity, then completed during the post-war years in Chambon-sur-Lignon (1945–48), while an attaché au CNRS. Published in 1950, a critical edition with an Introduction and notes by the translator, Edmund Husserl’s Ideen is presented to a French-language public. Husserl’s work was not unknown to French philosophy—his Cartesian Meditations, An Introduction to Phenomenology11 (based on lectures delivered in February 1929 in Paris at the Sorbonne, Amphithéâtre Descartes) had been published in French translation in 1931 by Emmanuel Lévinas

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and Gabrielle Peiffer (we will return to Lévinas and this translation). In the preceding years, important works had been devoted to Husserlian phenomenology and to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, prominently among these Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). These works employ the phenomenological, descriptive method and present, in very different ways, certain key motifs in Husserl’s thought: the starting point in consciousness, the concept of intentionality, the stages of the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Reading these and other writings on phenomenology in the 1940s, the French-language public was in a position to welcome a turn to the things-themselves—the availability of Husserl’s own works in their language. This was perhaps not as bold a gesture as Descartes’s declaration in the Discourse on Method to present his method of properly conducting one’s reason to seek truth in the sciences, writing in French, he declares, the language of my country. As Husserl himself, as it were, enters on stage in France, it is notable that his own method, like Descartes’s, claims to be a new beginning for philosophy, building not upon past traditions and teachings, but laying out its own foundation, proclaimed to be free of presuppositions. The path of this method is traced, as in Descartes’s writings, by the activities of the ego. The Discourse presents the autobiographical version of the method of doubt, as Descartes casts aside the teachings of his professors, the opinions of others, his own unexamined beliefs, and the distractions of habits and companions, until alone remains the certainty of the ego cogito. Husserl’s call to the path of phenomenology as “the true method for the critique of knowledge” summons the “beginner in phenomenology” to perform for himself or herself, the Cartesian method of doubt, which presents the starting point in experience as it occurs and is reflected upon, proceeding through the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Carrying out these investigations in the corresponding acts of intuition, Husserl writes, phenomenology carries out its clarifications in the act of pure seeing: It does not engage in theory . . . it offers no explanations in the sense of deductive theories.12 As Paul Ricoeur writes in his Introduction to the French translation of Ideen I, this work, belonging to a complex of three volumes, and relying on the insights of substantial earlier writings, is difficult to grasp on its own. Ricoeur goes on, “Moreover, Ideas I is a book whose meaning is hidden, and we are unavoidably inclined to seek this sense elsewhere. At every moment, one has the impression that what is essential is not stated, because it is rather a question of bringing to mind a new vision of the world and of consciousness, than of saying something definitive about consciousness and the world, which precisely could not be understood without this change of vision.”13 Ricoeur recognizes the multiple levels of difficulty this task of translation presents. His philosophical background and his many years of studying,

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reading, and practicing the German language have prepared him as well as anyone to take on this work. His Introduction and his many notes throughout the text are intended to assist in the reader’s comprehension of Husserl’s text. And yet, obstacles remain in the transmission of this thought. To begin with, Husserl himself admits that in working out the phenomenological program, there is no set terminology: “It should moreover be noted in a general manner that in phenomenology at its beginnings all concepts, or all terms, have to remain in a state of flux (in Fluss) . . . All the terms chosen have an intention that is a function of their context (Zusammenhangstendenzen); they suggest directions for further relations.”14 Of course, terms in flux and concepts determined by their context constitute the common and everyday situation of the translator. Ricoeur attempts to shore up the shifting terminology in Husserl’s usage and to provide an initial form of standardization in French, the language of reception, in the form of a glossary. As an early translation of one of Husserl’s major works, this glossary was to serve as a guide for future translations of Husserl. The question, here for Ricoeur and later for others, is whether a given term in a different context should be translated with the same word in both contexts. In practice, one learns, there is no rule for this decision. In addition to the question of terminology, there are, as Ricoeur also points out in his Introduction, the difficulty of the interpretation of the work as a whole. After resolving as best one can the proper terms, the equivalent words, there remains the important issue of the meaning of this work: language, Ricoeur has affirmed, is addressed to someone and says something about something, about the world. Here, addressed to a new audience (yet still the world of readers of philosophy), Ricoeur confirms: “the phenomenology set out in the Ideas is incontestably an idealism, and even a transcendental idealism . . . (however) there is nothing more difficult than determining the final sense of Husserlian idealism, which is realized through the very process of reflection.”15 At this point, French phenomenologists diverge. Some readers of Husserl emphasize the importance of the reduction, as a conversion of the ego to a transcendental subject, not outside the world but the very foundation of a world. Siding with Gaston Berger and Eugen Fink, Ricoeur in his Introduction considers phenomenological philosophy to revolve around an exegesis of the ego, whereby each new dimension of the subject is a new dimension of the world.16 On the other hand, Ricoeur notes that Merleau-Ponty moves to the opposite side with respect to the role of the phenomenological reduction in the ultimate aim of phenomenology. In the final pages of his Introduction, Ricoeur does not fail to include Merleau-Ponty’s alternative perspective, one reflecting Heidegger’s assessment: “Phenomenology may ‘reduce’ the participation in our presence to the world, but only in order to interrupt for a moment our

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familiarity with the world and to restore in us our ‘astonishment’ in the face of the strangeness and the paradox of a world that situates us”; this is a philosophy that produces in us “the assurance that the world is always ‘already there’.”17 This viewpoint takes Husserl’s later work, the Crisis of European Sciences (1934–7), as the turning point for phenomenology in its return to the things themselves, incorporating historical reflection and the concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt), “always already there, existing in advance for us . . . the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon.”18 Paul Ricoeur, of course, was not unaware of the significance of the evolution of Husserl’s thought reflected in the Crisis, the crisis of Western culture and the occasion for opening the phenomenological project to history. The consciousness of a time of crisis is situated within a history, Ricoeur explains in his article “Husserl and the Sense of History”: it is this consciousness of crisis that brings, he writes, “this most anhistoric and most apolitical philosopher” to a preoccupation with history, to a search for the source of this crisis in a questioning-back (Rückfrage, question-en-retour) to the non-thematic ground of experience.19 This is the Lebenswelt, described by Husserl as “the everyday surrounding world of life . . . in which all of us (even I who am philosophizing) consciously have our existence; here also are the sciences, as cultural facts in this world with their scientists and their theories.” At the same time, “we are subjects for this world . . . contemplating it, valuing it, related to it purposefully.”20 We can also note here an earlier translation of Husserl’s work, accessible to the French public, that is, the translation of Husserl’s 1929 Paris lectures, Méditations cartésiennes. Une introduction à la phénoménologie (1931) by Emmanuel Lévinas, in collaboration with Gabrielle Peiffer. The title is apt, not only because these lectures, delivered in German, were addressed to a French audience, but also for Husserl’s approach, his presentation of a radical method, along the lines of Descartes’s, which takes consciousness as the necessary beginning for philosophy. Lévinas’s own connection with the author of these writings was not merely a scholarly one, reading and reflecting on Husserl’s works. After studying in Strasbourg for several years, Lévinas too crossed the border to Germany and spent two semesters in Freiburg (1928–9). These were the final days of Husserl’s tenure, as Lévinas states in his contribution to the centenary of Husserl’s birth (1959) in his article, La ruine de la représentation (a text that will play a prominent role in Ricoeur’s studies on recognition). Lévinas tells us he presented a paper at the final meeting of Husserl’s last seminar in Freiburg. Reflecting on his interactions with Husserl, Lévinas says, “Meeting a man is always being struck by an enigma. This enigma, in the case of Husserl, was always his work . . . what one encountered in Husserl was always Phenomenology.”21 Heidegger, who arrived in Freiburg in the Winter

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of 1928–9, was another matter. He was, Lévinas writes, “dazzling from the very start.” It was a time of fierce debates among students over these competing masters, their competing thoughts. “By means of these discussions, I myself entered into phenomenology and was shaped by its discipline.”22 A final comment by Lévinas regarding the influence of philosophy (whether that of a professor or of a work) on one’s own intellectual life: “What do you retain of a philosophy that marks you, is it the truths of ‘absolute knowledge’ or rather certain gestures and certain ‘inflections of the voice’ which form for you the face of an interlocutor, necessary for any dialogue, even an internal one?”23 The close reading (and rereading) of a work can produce in us this same effect, and indeed it is these “inflections of the voice” that the translator strives to convey. Lévinas’s 1931 translation of the Cartesian Meditations was truly, as its subtitle states, an “Introduction to Phenomenology” for the philosophical community in France. It is significant that the young Lévinas was to translate this particular work, which is at once an homage to French philosophy in the person of Descartes, and an effort to introduce the claims of phenomenological egology, extending from providing an absolute foundation for science in the First Meditation to attacking the problem of other egos in the Fifth Meditation. This latter task is not so easily accomplished, as this Meditation (“laboriously,” Ricoeur comments) develops on and on for forty-five pages, while the “other” is inevitably thrust outside the transparency of the ego’s sphere of belonging. This unfinished business of the phenomenological approach to the other, the stranger, the foreigner, will move to the center of Lévinas’s philosophical preoccupation. Published at almost the same time as the translation was Lévinas’s work on The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1931), which Paul Ricoeur says was his own first sustained encounter with Husserl, a work, he emphasizes that founded Husserlian studies in France, plain and simple. Later, “shortly after the end of the war, despite the sorrows and beyond the Holocaust, Emmanuel Lévinas opened up once again the field of phenomenology. He deployed it this time between Husserl and Heidegger, and ever since, this space has never ceased to determine the scope of the phenomenological field as such” writes Ricoeur in Texts for Emmanuel Lévinas.24 For both Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur, the introduction of phenomenology to the French-language public passed first through the work of translation in which they served an important role, making these works available to a wide audience; then, of course, through their teaching, giving generations of students the opportunity to engage in discussions around these texts, and finally reaching a broad, international public through their extensive writings—interpreting, analyzing, highlighting, and critiquing these thinkers.

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Establishing a glossary in French of philosophical terms appropriate to these German thinkers, setting them in the proper framework of philosophical investigation, and relating this to the corresponding context of historical and cultural influences, Lévinas and Ricoeur helped to prepare the foundation for decades of investigations by French philosophers—applications of the phenomenological method, critical studies of Husserl and Heidegger, and, yes, new translations of their works. At the same time, these writings have provoked reactions and resistances to these thinkers and to their influence on the twentieth century French philosophy. This aspect of hostility encountered in the reception of a foreign body (of work), the presumption of cultural and linguistic self-sufficiency, is analyzed by Ricoeur in a number of works. It reflects the broader issue of the relation between what is one’s own and what is foreign, the now conflictual, now analogical, now reciprocal relation of the self and the other. In one small work, On Translation, published in 2004, Ricoeur devotes three texts to the pitfalls and successes of the practice of translation. They are “Défi et bonheur de la traduction” (“Translation as challenge and source of happiness”); “Le paradigme de la traduction” (“The Paradigm of Translation”), and “Un ‘passage’: traduire l’intraduisible” (“A ‘passage,’: translating the untranslatable”).25 Although they overlap on some general points, these essays present a range of critical problems in the practice and theory of translation, the question of the locus or unit of meaning in passing from one natural language to another, and the problem of the linguistic, historical, and cultural obstacles to this transmission. In the first text, on the challenges and pleasures of translation, Ricoeur places the translator “at the center,” or rather in the space “in-between” (between languages and between author and reader). The analysis is set within the framework of the book, L’épreuve de l’étranger (The Experience of the Foreign) by Antoine Berman.26 Ricoeur notes that the obstacles to translation are summed up in the multiple meanings of “épreuve,” which expresses an ordeal, suffering endured; a test, a criterion of evaluation; and significantly, following Berman’s lead, the very character of human experience. “L’étranger” as well can express multiple meanings: as an adjective, it means what is foreign, modifying a language, a country, and so on; as a noun, it refers both to a foreigner and a stranger. There are two sides, as it were, two parties to this encounter with the foreign, the figure of the stranger: on one side, the work and the language of the author, and on the other side, the reader and the reader’s language; between these an intermediary—the translator, the border-crosser who passes through this no man’s land carrying to its destination the missive entrusted. Ricoeur stresses the dangers and uncertainties of this transmission, and the uneasy situation of the translator in the role of mediator. He rephrases the

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“task of the translator” (echoing the title of Walter Benjamin’s essay)27 as a form of “work” in the sense Freud assigns to the twofold “work of memory” and “work of mourning.” In Freud’s analyses of the interconnection between the overcoming of resistances in the exercise of memory and the step-bystep process of recognizing and accepting loss in the ordeal of mourning, the choice of the term “work” (Arbeit) is used to emphasize that these experiences are not simply undergone passively but are activities for which we take responsibility—even if they will necessarily remain unfinished tasks.28 On the side of the “work of memory” is the effort to preserve the work, to keep it intact against the resistance of the language of origin and its areas of opacity. On the side of the “work of mourning,” there is the difficult acceptance of imperfection, of falling short. The dynamic of this tandem, work of memory/ work of mourning, has been invoked by Ricoeur in the context of historical memory, in the construction of personal identity, and in the relation of self and other. Translating too, he affirms, involves an effort to salvage and a certain acceptance of loss.29 Depicting the work of translation in this way as the overcoming of resistances in both directions—of emission and reception—corresponds to Ricoeur’s characterization of the force that drives this effort, in his own words, the desire to translate, “la pulsion de traduire,” or the drive to translate. The translator inhabits two worlds: two separate linguistic systems with their own lexicons and syntactical orders are part of this distinction, but more fundamentally these are distinct worlds of experience, englobing the varied interactions of daily life, the impacts of social stratification, influences of popular culture, along with the weight of literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions, which underlie everyday practices and attitudes. This is a description of the situation of the translator, placed in the zone between, in the chiasma where the language of the work and the author cross the language of the reader and the intended audience of the work to come. However, in the practice of translation, the opposing languages and the differently situated standpoints—and the attractions and disinclinations to which they are attached—are not external forces of resistance to be overcome, but exist within the person of the translator. In this sense, the work of memory— the effort of retrieval or salvage to preserve what is given in the original—is the effort to avoid misunderstanding not against but within the language of the author. In reading any passage, say in one’s own mother tongue, when one tries to give an account of what it says, what it means, one can miss the mark through an excess of suggestive commentary on the expression or through an oversimplification of its content. In this work of comprehension, as in many other endeavors, the guiding principle is “to do no harm.” One iteration of this broad view is the claim made by George Steiner in After Babel that all understanding is a form of translation—that is, the transfer of signification

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whether inside or between languages. In this way, the same difficulties, and resistances, prevail in arriving at an adequate understanding of a text in one’s own language. At the same time, natural languages display their capacity of adaptability, flexibility in expressing our ideas, conveying our feelings, and responding to changing circumstances in appropriate ways. Such was also, of course, one of the characteristic distinguishing human beings in Descartes’s Discourse on Method, Part 5: the ability to arrange our words differently so as “to respond to the sense of all that will be said in our presence . . . composing from these words a discourse by means of which we make our thoughts understood,” our meaning clear to others. It is interesting that Descartes does not dismiss everyday usage in the manifesto of his method, but chooses to write in “French, the language of my country, rather than in Latin, the language of my teachers,” addressing this work broadly to all those who need only consult their natural reason to judge the merits of his proposals. This is a strong affirmation that philosophy need not be tied to a particular natural language—whether a living vernacular or a classical language. Ricoeur, too, recognizes that, in practice, philosophy can be written in multiple languages and yet, here again, the theoretical question of the very possibility of translation remains unresolved. Regardless of the care taken with the precision of usage, when the discussion of translation moves into the realm of theory, the appraisal has most often been thumbs down. In “The Paradigm of Translation,” Ricoeur examines the speculative impasse of the proposed alternative: translatable/untranslatable. “The dilemma is the following: in a good translation, the two texts, source and target, must be matched with one another through a . . . third text,”30 in which the semantic meaning would reside. But there is no third text, no absolute criterion of identity. Instead, translation belongs to a different regime, to what Ricoeur terms the “long litany of “malgré tout”—despite everything . . . Here, “despite the heterogeneity of idioms, there are bilinguals, polyglots, interpreters, and translators.”31 Recognizing this fact, he proposes replacing the opposition, translatable/untranslatable, with the practical alternative fidelity/betrayal (vow, wish, desire/ suspicion). Moving away from an attempt to provide a comprehensive “theory” of translation in no way implies that Ricoeur is placing translation outside the scope of philosophical investigation. On the contrary, the problems arising from the work of translation have been integral to Ricoeur’s philosophical life and the problems he has taken on in work after work. Setting aside a speculative approach to translation echoes the rupture made by Ricoeur in The Course of Recognition with Descartes’s method of evidence and with Kantian idealism. In his study of recognition as identification, self-recognition, and mutual recognition, Ricoeur situates his own approach within a philosophy of being-in-the-world. Here, “the fundamental

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experience of being-in-the-world is posited as the ultimate reference of every particular experience capable of standing out against this background.”32 And in so doing, he acknowledges the consequences of this gesture for his inquiry. Unlike Descartes’s requirement of certainty, and Kant’s a priori model of scientific knowledge, Ricoeur knows his philosophy of being-in-the-world will never be other than problematic, fragmentary, never forming a whole. Its nonscientific character, he avows, is not only due to the themes it treats, but, more significantly, he continues, “for reasons having to do with the commitments of the philosopher who professes it and who assumes the risk”33 of its ensuing controversies. This section, in which Ricoeur discusses the leap outside Kant’s circle of representation, takes as its impetus Husserl’s questioning-back (Rückfrage) in the Crisis to the unexamined, prethematic ground of experience, the Lebenswelt, life-world. As pre-given, always already there, the Lebenswelt is not an object of investigation but the very possibility of the experience of things. Ricoeur writes, “The primary function of the concept of Lebenswelt is the ruin ( . . . ) of the claim of consciousness to set itself up as the origin and master of sense.”34 This is the hubris of consciousness. Kant was correct, Ricoeur affirms, in holding that reason is always confronted by the necessity of the “transcendental illusion.” So, he continues in this passage, “consciousness’s self-positing is its desire to found itself in-itself, (while) turning-back to the Lebenswelt confounds this hubris by asserting that the world has always preceded it.” In the environing world of everyday life, our existence is situated within a cultural, historical, linguistic setting, with its horizons, receding or encroaching (including “even I,” as Ricoeur cites Husserl, “who am now philosophizing”). This philosophical position casts Ricoeur’s work in very much the same way he describes the task of the translator. Just as there is no absolute criteria for a perfect translation, no third text by which to measure the identity between original and replica, so there is for the philosopher no originary starting point to serve as an absolute foundation (as in Husserl and Descartes), nor is there an external, objective standpoint from which to unify all perspectives (into an epistemological whole). In his essay, “The Paradigm of Translation,” the limits Ricoeur places on his philosophical investigations are reframed in the context of interlinguistic translation. Given the bewildering and redoubtable diversity of human languages, philosophers have sought to assure the possibility of translation in the face of the alternative of fundamental untranslatability. If, given the multiplicity of linguistic communities, there are nevertheless transfers of meaning from one language to another, some have argued that there must be an underlying ground, perhaps traces of an original language or a priori codes, and universal structures.35 But this search for an original language—a language of paradise—is a false nostalgia, Ricoeur writes, of little use for the practice of translation, and conceptually,

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it reflects “the desperate refusal of the real human condition, which is that of multiplicity at all the levels of existence.”36 Moving from origins to ends, philosophers have also attempted to resolve the obstacles to the transfer of meaning between diverse linguistic communities by reordering, eliminating the inconsistencies of natural language (Bacon), or developing a universal character, a lexicon of simple ideas and rules of their composition (Leibniz). Beyond the difficulty of establishing a universal system of such “ideas basic to thought,” this endeavor too would be of little use for the practice of translation, for instance, breaking the works of Shakespeare, Rabelais, or Lao Tse down into atoms of thought. In the broader context of the unstable relation between sense and referent, Ricoeur chances, “Throughout the world sentences flutter between men like elusive butterflies.”37 The difficulties and obstacles to translation have to be confronted and addressed within the real world, in the context of natural languages characterized by the condition of dispersion and dislocation. Multiplicity, diversity is not viewed by Ricoeur as an imperfection to be overcome, but as the defining characteristic of the human condition, the fact of human plurality. For this reason, the desire to translate, to connect, to engage with others is always already underway. To express this conviction, in “The Paradigm of Translation,” Ricoeur proposes his own interpretation—citing the contemporary French translation by Chouraqui—of the myth of Babel, a recounting casting neither condemnation nor accusation.38 The narrative of dispersion described here is a given, a state of affairs, and responding to this situation, translation is called for, in Hannah Arendt’s words, as “the thing to be done so that human action can simply continue.”39 Ricoeur reads the myth in the following way: “You heard: there is no recrimination, no lamentation, no accusation. ‘The Lord scattered them abroad thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off building the city.’ They left off building the city! That is a way of saying: this is the way things are. Well, well! This is the way things are, as Benjamin liked to say. Starting from this fact of life, let us translate!”40 Standing before the original text, the translator’s aim is, of course, to remain faithful to the work at hand, faithful to the letter and to the spirit. This is the intention, a silent vow, that is met by the resistance of the text, not just the obstacles of terminology but, as Ricoeur himself has shown us in his translation of Husserl, the style of its presentation and the historical and cultural context it carries with it. Ricoeur writes that in the translation of philosophical works, “the difficulty is at its height with primary words [“maître mots”] “Grundwörter,” which the translator sometimes wrongly makes it a rule to translate word-for-word,” but this approach has its limits “inasmuch as these great primary terms—Vorstellung, Aufhebung, Dasein, Ereignis—are themselves summaries of long textuality where whole contexts are mirrored,

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to say nothing of the phenomena of intertextuality concealed in the actual stamp of the word.”41 The struggle to overcome the loss incurred in translation is well represented in the pair “work of memory”/“work of mourning.” In the work of memory, fidelity to the original text is viewed as the ongoing effort to preserve, maintain—in Ricoeur’s words “salvage”—what one can of the original, but this pledge of faithfulness to the author in the work is constantly tempered by the suspicion of betrayal, of falling short. And this calls for the second set of obstacles to be overcome in the course of translating—in the work of mourning, the necessity of giving up the idea of perfect equivalence. Ricoeur compares this abandonment of identity in the dream of an ideal translation, to the recognition of the unavoidable difference between what is one’s own and what is foreign, between the self and the other. Here there can be no identity, no assimilation. The term “resistance” is used again in this context to describe the underlying refusal by the language of reception to admit within its boundaries what is viewed as foreign, unfamiliar, even strange and unsettling. Because what is at issue here in translation does not lie in the appropriate choice of terms or the proper syntax of sentences, but in the contact of two linguistic communities, each with its cultural and historical identity. As Ricoeur writes in “Translating the Untranslatable”: “Translators know it perfectly well: it is texts, not sentences, not words, that our texts try to translate. And texts in turn are part of cultural ensembles through which different visions of the world are expressed.”42 People in all societies have recognized that there are strangers who have other customs, practice other religions, and speak other languages. This multiplicity of modes of life has prompted curiosity, the desire to view another society from within, as well as the apprehension, even fear of the unknown, the foreign. Although there have always been exchanges between linguistic communities, these have not been without persistent barriers thrown up in the name of cultural identity. Ricoeur points out the long-standing obstacles to transmission between languages and cultures in the history of Western thought. Employing the term in the psychoanalytic sense, Ricoeur stresses that the resistance to the work in translation by the reader (in the language of reception) should not be underestimated. He writes, “The claim of self-sufficiency, the refusal of the mediation of the foreign, have secretly nourished so many forms of linguistic ethnocentrism and, more seriously, so many claims of cultural hegemony, as can be observed in the case of Latin, from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages and even beyond the Renaissance, in the case of French in the Classical age, and in the case of Anglo-American English today.”43 The current hegemony of English is evident in commerce, technology, and scholarship in general. There would be much to say about the consequences of the

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dominance of English around the globe, the depreciation of other natural languages, and the “Americanization” of societies worldwide, as well as the effects on native English speakers, who are led to deemphasize or demean the ability to speak another language. Paul Ricoeur’s reaction to this state of affairs was always to try to bridge this gap, to foster an exchange—here, between the Anglo-American philosophy he encountered during his many years of teaching in the United States, and the works of contemporary European philosophers. In his works, he brought back to his students in France and to a French-speaking public too many English-language thinkers to name—however, for those who have read these works, the topics he addressed will evoke them: rhetoric and the use of metaphor, the theory of action, individuals and persons—along with repeated references to the British empiricist tradition including Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. In books on these problems, Ricoeur incorporates analyses of Englishlanguage philosophers, say Strawson on “Individuals” in Oneself as Another, introducing Strawson’s arguments regarding persons as “basic particulars,” in a broad context of things, persons, and selves. This book, among others, serves as an introduction to a range of English-language, basically analytical, philosophers for the French-speaking public, but, then, in the English translation, it is the English-language reader who is now able to see how these— probably quite familiar arguments—fit into a “Continental” approach to the question of selfhood. In this way, Ricoeur’s works can be seen as attempts to forge multiple points of contact between linguistic communities and their respective traditions. Cultural resistance to the foreign transplant is a real impediment to the ability to evaluate—to value—the quality, the significance of the original as it passes into the language of reception. The general pattern reveals that a single work, arriving in a new linguistic world without its cultural, literary, and philosophical context will fall prey to misjudgment and misappropriation. In the case of works of philosophy, as Ricoeur has stated, intertextuality, the relation to a complex history of interrelated works, is crucial to their significance. In this sense, it is not the text that is the unit of meaning, but the context of the work as such. For this reason, an individual work in translation can provide a glimpse of the world of the original, but only a constellation of related translations can help to open the way for a more comprehensive grasp of its meaning. Having given up the ideal of a demonstrable identity between the original text and the text in the language of reception, we arrive at an equivalence which is not perfect adequatio, but is always open to the risk of misunderstanding. In his essays on translation, Ricoeur suggests that because there is no clear measure, no external standard of equivalence, “the only way of

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criticizing a translation . . . is to suggest another supposed, alleged, better or different one.”44 But the retranslation of works is not only directed at correcting errors in an earlier version, it also serves to continually renew the great texts of a culture, to allow them to live again in a new context. He cites, as examples, the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, and in philosophy, the works of Plato, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to demonstrate how our culture thrives on retranslations, which are endlessly reworked. This reflects the desire, the drive to translate, and thereby to construct a different series of equivalents for contemporaries of a new epoch. These works may carry universal significance across the ages, but the language by which their import is conveyed shifts over time, as does the life of the communities into which they are received. Just as retranslation allows us as readers to reinscribe and reappropriate a work in a new context, in the same way appeals to philosophers of the tradition, so frequent in Ricoeur’s corpus, allow their writings to speak to our current preoccupations, enriching our own language and broadening the scope of our reflection. Allow me to interject here a recent example of this desire, this drive to retranslate a philosophical classic for a new generation. In 2018, a new French translation of Ideen I was published by Jean-François Lavigne, a weighty volume of over 700 pages.45 This translation contains, along with a Forward by the translator, 200 pages of accompanying texts. These include Husserl’s preparatory essays for the 1912 work, intended to provide a general introduction to a pure phenomenology, the early drafts in ink and in pencil, loose-leaf notes written over the years by Husserl in appendix to the published edition, notes on the translation of terms, German–French and French–German glossaries, and an analytical index made at Husserl’s request by Landgrebe. This translation appears in a context very different from the world of French philosophy in 1950. As Lavigne points out in his Forward, since that time Husserlian scholarship has made available forty-five volumes in the series of Husserl’s Complete Works, containing not only original manuscripts but also the many courses he gave while developing his phenomenological project, a number of previously unpublished writings, along with nine volumes of Husserl’s correspondence. These research materials have “provided an abundance of new knowledge which has entirely transformed the context in which we can read Ideen I today . . . ” Lavigne writes, continuing, “Our knowledge of Husserlian concepts, his technical vocabulary, and his systematic intentions at that key moment in the methodical establishment of transcendental phenomenology—has been so enriched and made so precise—that it is no longer possible today to rely on a text in French that was not able to benefit from this level of information.”46 These are the reasons Lavigne advances to explain the need for a new translation in French: scholarship has moved well beyond the period of

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discovery of Husserlian phenomenology in France in the 1940s and 1950s. Certainly, today the scope of available supporting material and the precision of rendering technical concepts will be of assistance in the ongoing work of contemporary Husserlian scholars. Lavigne recognizes that Ricoeur’s translation in its time, characterized by its “fluidity and its elegance,”47 was well suited to facilitate the first contact with Husserl’s complex and innovative thought. “Eminently readable in French,” it served as a primer for the introduction of phenomenology. And indeed, there have been several generations of French philosophers who were transformed by this encounter with phenomenology. Lévinas describes in “La ruine de la représentation,” how, for him, the innovative concept of intentionality exploded the sovereignty of representation, opening up the path to philosophies of existence, to a philosophy of the lived body, to analyses of the sensible and the pre-predicative. As a result of this contact with Husserl, we saw that Lévinas wrote, “I myself entered into phenomenology and was formed by its discipline.” Reading Husserl with Lévinas and Ricoeur, while preparing his own translation of Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” Jacques Derrida concurs: “In those days, I complied with (“je me suis plié à”) Husserlian discipline, to which I have always remained faithful: (faithful) to the reductions. I became a sort of ‘disciplined disciple’ of Husserl, despite the many questions I had.”48 The significance of Husserlian phenomenology as a spur to philosophical thought in France in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Its influence is signaled in a collection of Ricoeur’s writings published in 1986 under the title, A l’école de la phénoménologie, and such was indeed the formative role of Husserl’s thought in France. If new translations serve the role of reinvigorating great works of the tradition, bringing a work of the past to an encounter with contemporary views and expectations, the retranslation of Ideen I echoes this aim; in Lavigne’s words, “its massive array of documentation . . . is essential for the contemporary reader”49 in pursuit of the “erudite knowledge of transcendental phenomenology.”50 Perhaps a new “école de la phénoménologie” for a new generation? Ricoeur’s writings on translation, however, do not conclude with a paean to the techniques of transmission and reception, to the more complete understanding of foreign works and viewpoints. Rather, it is in the context of “On Translation” (as it also is to a large extent in the Course of Recognition) that Ricoeur sets out in stark clarity the unbridgeable gap between what is one’s own and what is other. If the capacity for language is a universal characteristic of human beings, the extreme diversity of human languages sets communities apart from one another, seemingly to the point of incommunicability. Reaching out across these barriers makes translation an ongoing, endless task. The profusion of languages is not a state of affairs to deplore, however, but a testimony to the richness of human culture, to the basic fact

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of “human plurality,” in the words of Hannah Arendt, echoed by Ricoeur. At the same time, cultural ties, reinforced by linguistic identity, have set societies not just alongside one another, but against one another. People belonging to a linguistic community will recognize the humanity of their own, but are suspicious of those from outside, who, from ancient times, have been considered not to make sense but just noise with their babbling. Ricoeur recognizes the tendency to view the other, the outsider as a danger, a threat to one’s own identity. But this is not exclusively the concern with the stranger, the foreigner and the foreign language. This is a general trait magnified and clarified by the encounter with the stranger, for we recognize that already in our own language, each of us has a limited perspective, a partial view, in the twofold sense of biased and incomplete. Recognizing this situation, Ricoeur concludes that we will never have reached the end of our discussions with others, others who do not view things from the same angle. The experience of encountering the foreign provides another valuable insight, for it makes us aware of the strangeness of our own language, setting this mantle that covers us at a distance, allowing us to see its peculiarities and inconsistencies. In this regard, Berman’s book recounts how German authors and translators from Luther to Goethe and Hölderlin sought to broaden the horizon of their own language and to uncover its hidden resources. Returning to one’s mother tongue after a sojourn in the land, and tongue of the stranger can instill the recognition that one’s own language can do more, can create new effects of rhythm, sonority, and significance. In Oneself as Another (1990),51 Ricoeur takes pains to show that our relation to others, even to those he terms “les proches”—our close relations, family and friends—can never lead to a merging, to the assimilation of the other to the self. The theme of setting at a distance runs throughout this work, distinguishing between personal identity as sameness (idem) and the indirect approach to the self (ipse) which is constituted only in relation to its other, reflecting the ways in which the self is implied in its operations. The fragmentary character of these studies, Ricoeur explains, is the consequence of giving up the primacy of the ego, and with it any starting point in the simplicity and immediacy of the cogito. In the writings on translation, Ricoeur has set his analysis at the furthest remove from the presumed sphere of owness. While emphasizing the duty of hospitality in the encounter with the stranger, this opening to the other, accepting the presence of the foreigner within our borders must not blot out the irrevocable difference marking this relation. In Perpetual Peace, Kant has proclaimed this “right of the stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another” a right deriving from the condition of our globe, where humans “cannot infinitely disperse, and so must finally tolerate the presence of each other.”52 In these circumstances, in different times and

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different places, we will find ourselves now the stranger, now the native, here the host, there the guest (in French, of course, l’hôte can mean the one providing hospitality and the person receiving hospitality, that is lodging, nourishment, companionship). The action of venturing out, taking up residence on foreign soil and so having the experience of being the stranger can be transformative, for having passed through the experience of being “at home” in the language and the land of the other, one then discovers a certain estrangement upon returning to one’s own people and language. These series of border-crossings resolve themselves into acts of bringing, offering, accepting, and returning. The evocation of a right of hospitality, the right of the stranger to be received within the borders of a foreign land, without being viewed as an enemy, also implies the duty of hospitality on the part of the resident, the potential host, to be open, receptive to the stranger. The intermediary here is the translator, and this mediation resonates for Ricoeur as the ethical dimension of the practice of translation. The translator aspires to bring “the reader to the author [and] the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and betraying two masters” (23). In working to bring the foreign work into the language of the reader (and entice the reader to edge into the realm of the author), the translator engages in the hospitality of language. This echoes the remarks of Derrida in Of Hospitality, who, invoking Lévinas’s claim that “language is hospitality,” adds that this is an absolute hospitality . . . offering the gift without reservation.”53 In On Translation, Ricoeur affirms that this hospitality of language, language as hospitality, “serves as the model for all other forms of hospitality . . .; confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistics which we must learn in order to make our way into them?”54 It also becomes apparent that learning the language of the other, being able to speak the language of the other, is the condition for being able to listen to the other, to engage in dialogue. Derrida points out that speaking “the same language” is not simply a linguistic operation but a matter of ethos generally (. . .) The language in which the foreigner is addressed or in which he is heard, if he is, is the ensemble of culture; it is the values, the norms, the meanings that inhabit the language.”55 Absent this practice of hospitality, what we have described as border areas would become places of hostility and recrimination where barriers are thrown up, leading to confinement. Where hospitality is lacking, translation will not be possible. In the case of cultures and languages, this closure stigmatizes the other and results, inside the barrier, in a rigid, fixed form of identity. However, in history it has also been the case that border zones have been places of multiple exchanges between traditions, where there is

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an interweaving of cultures and constant borrowing between languages. In such situations, for the polyglots who inhabit these zones and circulate freely among the diverse elements of their daily life, the hospitality of translation is ubiquitous. In distinguishing between a foreign language and one’s mother tongue, are we to understand that the members of a given community necessarily speak “the same language?” Although language may be the first and last condition of belonging, expressions like “native language” or “mother tongue” should not lead us astray. The presumed linguistic identity based on a shared natural, “national” language is shot through with estrangement, as we are not the initiators, the creators of our language. Just as the Lebenswelt is always already there, the prethematic ground that allows experience as such of a world, so language too is always already given, not an instrument under our command, but a “milieu” within which the world has always already been interpreted before we begin to speak. Recognizing the historically limited character of our situation, our relation to others passes through the mediation of language, the milieu of one or multiple natural languages. What Ricoeur has described as the “desire to translate,” even the “pulsion,” the drive to translate is invoked as the unceasing effort to create the conditions for dialogue. Here translation serves as the model for the relation of the self to the other, in which difference is not reduced to sameness, and the character of the foreign maintains its integrity. This capacity to generate exchange, reciprocity, and dialogue is inherent in the view of translation illustrated in Berman’s The Experience of the Foreign and his definition of a good translation: Translation is “the mode of existence by which a foreign work reaches us as foreign. A good translation retains this strangeness, even as it makes the work accessible to us.”56 The same point is made, more emphatically, in Berman’s definition of a bad translation: “A bad translation I call a translation which, generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work”;57 that is, making a work written in a different language read as though it had been written in the language of the reader. This definition of a good/bad translation may seem surprising to some, but it shares a concern expressed by Ricoeur in his writings on translation, where he stresses the force of the “resistance” to the foreign, the deep-seated refusal to admit the mediation of the foreign language into the language of reception, stemming from the presumed self-sufficiency of the native tongue. More generally, this concern with avoiding two major pitfalls—the exclusion of the other and the reduction of the other to the same—is found throughout Ricoeur’s works: in the subject, the danger lies in reducing the situated, fragmented, and ongoing constitution of selfhood (ipse) to the sameness and permanence of idem; in assimilating other subjectivities to the activities of

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the ego cogito; and, in the search for dialogue and reciprocity, the danger of failing to recognize the fundamental asymmetry inherent in our interactions with others. Certain works, such as Oneself as Another and The Course of Recognition, conclude with reflections on the difficulty of arriving at an answer to the problems associated with otherness, difference, and the foreign. In Oneself as Another, this discussion is placed on the level of ontology and the dialectic of selfhood and otherness, as it unfolds in the experiences of otherness as passivity in the form of one’s own body, the otherness of other people, and the experience of conscience. The Course of Recognition, too, proposes in its Conclusion an alternate reading, une lecture à rebours, a backward reading—a formulation echoing Husserl’s Rückfrage, a questioning-back, which Ricoeur has translated as “questionnement à rebours” in his article “L’originaire et la question-enretour dans la Krisis de Husserl.” This reading follows the thread not of identity but of otherness, alterity. All stages of this backward itinerary project figures of the other and refer directly or implicitly to others. Moving back from the sphere of mutuality, in which, for Ricoeur, otherness is most pronounced in the struggle for recognition, where alterity takes the form of confrontation; then to the sphere of self-recognition in which the self-assertion of capacities implies a reference to the other in the exercise of these capacities (“I can speak” implies the expectation of being heard, etc.); and, finally, in the sphere of recognition as the identification of something in general. On this initial level, Ricoeur invokes two forms of reference to others: first, in the philosophical works in which Descartes and Kant appeal to the reader to confirm these acts of judgment. But more significantly, in the “backward reading” by which Ricoeur traces “otherness” back to its sources: the other of identity is nonidentity, mistaken identity. This is the shadow of misrecognition that is the constant companion of recognition; it is the threat of mistaking one thing for another: “taking a thing or a person for what it or he or she is not.”58 Ricoeur acknowledges that the work of “clarification” he has undertaken here fails on the most basic level of “grasping things,” the level of the appearance of what is perceived. Just as was the case with Husserl’s Rückfrage, Ricoeur’s “backward reading” leads us back to the “ambiguities of an incomplete, open-ended life world,”59 with which the first chapter on identification ended—with the “épreuve du méconnaissable,” the experience of the unrecognizable, the constant possibility of misrecognition. The work of the negative in the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition is then traced from the fallibility and ambiguity of the initial stage of identification, through the instances of self-deception on the level of selfrecognition, to the third level of mutual recognition, where the dialectic of recognition and misrecognition acquires “its greatest visibility before taking

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on its forms of greatest dissimulation”60 in the struggle for mutual recognition. Here, the desire of each person to be recognized by others encounters the same demand on their part. In the struggle against misunderstanding, the recognition coming from the other will always fall short of one’s own selfappreciation, even as the latter includes mistaken views of itself—through its inhibitions, resistances, lies, and hypocrisy.61 The “competition between recognition and misrecognition lies at the very heart of [this dialectic] both as regards self-recognition and as regards the recognition of others.”62 The work of the negative takes one more significant step: misunderstanding and misrecognition may undermine the search for mutual recognition, but the very desire for recognition is extinguished when they evolve into contempt (mépris). Misunderstanding and misrecognition can be seen as mistakes that could be uncovered and challenged; in contempt one closes oneself off and recoils from relations with the despised other. These passages conclude with an acknowledgment of the inexpungible gap separating oneself and an other: there is an “originary asymmetry between the self and the other,”63 which we are wont to cover over and forget, but which should focus our attention on “the irreplaceable character of each of the partners . . . The one is not the other.”64 This recognition can also alert us to the danger of “a fusional union” in love or friendship, making us aware of the need to “preserve a just distance that integrates respect into intimacy.”65 Ricoeur uses almost the same words in “The Paradigm of Translation”: “And our dearest exchanges, in love and friendship, how are they to retain this quality of discretion . . . which preserves distance in proximity?”66 Working back from the need to value distance in our relation with others, as a sign of respect for the other, who will neither be assimilated (“fused”) into the self, nor eradicated, expelled from the relation, we arrive at the significance of the experience of the foreign and the necessity of preserving its quality of otherness, of strangeness. Assigning value to the encounter with the foreign can help to protect us from the most corrosive form of misrecognition signaled by Ricoeur, contempt for the Other. On the level of linguistic communities, this contempt, we have seen, takes the form of resistance to the mediation of the foreign in the name of the self-sufficiency of an intertwined linguistic and cultural system. I would like to conclude by returning one last time to Antoine Berman’s work on culture and translation, L’épreuve de l’étranger. We learn in the final chapter of the book that the expression, l’épreuve de l’étranger, the experience of the foreign, is taken from Heidegger’s reflections on Hölderlin’s poem, “Remembrance”—Andenken—and that it is coupled with a second phrase: “l’apprentissage du propre”—the proper, what is one’s own, itself involves a process of learning, education, instruction through experience. (Paul Ricoeur began his investigation into the multiple acceptations of

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“recognition” by paging through the dictionary entries as a guide to the connections underlying the gaps between definitions. In the case of “apprentissage,” The Robert, after the initial entry: education, instruction, lists “experience, initiation,” with a quote to illustrate common usage, “L’apprentissage à bien mourir.”) What is foreign and what is proper are linked together in the appeal to experience: the philosopher writes that the experience of the foreign instructs the poet—each of us—making the poet more learned regarding what is proper to him, to her. Heidegger continues: “In this way, the foreign is never just what is pushed away: it remains what is welcomed. Indeed, the foreign has its appropriate dwelling in being welcomed.” The title of a later work by Berman resonates with these reflections in the image of: “l’auberge du lointain”—the inn, the shelter of that which is far-away.67 In this, we hear an echo of the hospitality of language, a hospitality that welcomes without engulfing, awaiting, and listening in its opening to the foreign. Paul Ricoeur, in his life and in his works, has led by example—he has taken us across borders, and into the experience of the foreign. When bringing the far-away into proximity with the proper, he has taught us that what is closest, most common, may be the most difficult to see clearly. “The Paradigm of Translation” in its concluding section, offers us these words: “And then, without the experience of the foreign, would we be sensitive to the strangeness of our own language? Finally, without this experience, would we not be in danger of closing ourselves up within the bitterness of a monologue, alone with our books? All honor, then, to the hospitality of language.”68 NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, tr. K. Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 29. 2. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, tr. D. Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 36. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, tr. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 205–6. 4. Interview with François Ewalt, Magazine littéraire, September, 2000. 5. Op. cit., p. 81. 6. Ibid., p. 83. 7. Ibid., p. 31. 8. Ibid., p. 20. 9. Ibid., p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 20. 11. Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, tr. E. Lévinas and G. Peiffer (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931); Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).

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12. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, tr. L. Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 43. 13. Paul Ricoeur, Introduction to Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. XIII. 14. Edmund Husserl, Idées I, tr. P. Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 170. 15. Paul Ricoeur, Introduction . . . , op. cit., p. XXV. 16. Ibid., p. XXXVIII. 17. Ibid. 18. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 142. 19. Paul Ricoeur, « Husserl et le sens de l’histoire, » in La revue de métaphysique et de morale, no 54, 1949, p. 288. 20. Crisis, op. cit., pp. 104–5. 21. Emmanuel Lévinas, « La ruine de la représentation, » in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris : Vrin, 2006), p. 173. 22. Ibid., p. 175. 23. Ibid. 24. Paul Ricoeur, “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl, » in Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. F. Laruelle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place éd., 1980), p. 167. 25. Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004). On Translation, tr. E. Brennen (London and New York : Routledge, 2006). 26. Antoine Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (Paris : Gallimard, 1984). The Experience of the Foreign. Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, tr. S. Heyvaert (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992). 27. See Walter Benjamin’s essay, « The Task of the Translator » in Illuminations, ed. with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, tr. H. Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), pp. 69-82. 28. See, in particular, Sigmund Freud, “Remembrance, Repeating, and WorkingThrough,” in S.E., V. XII, pp. 145–156; and “Mourning and Melancholia,” in S.E., V. XIV, pp. 237–258. 29. Ricoeur, On Translation, p. 3. 30. Ibid., p. 7. 31. Ibid., p. 18. 32. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, p. 58. 33. Ibid., p. 58. 34. Ricoeur, “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl, » op. cit., p. 176. 35. Ricoeur, On Translation, pp. 15–16. 36. Ibid., p. 33. 37. Ibid., p. 31. 38. André Chouraqui, La Bible Chouraqui (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1977). 39. Ricoeur, On Translation, p. 19. 40. Ibid., p. 20.

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41. Ibid., p. 6. 42. Ricoeur, On Translation, op. cit., p. 31 (translation modified). 43. Ibid., pp. 4–5 (translation modified). 44. Ibid., p. 22. 45. Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie pure et une philosophie phénoménologique, tr. and Forward by Jean-François Lavigne (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). 46. Ibid., p. XXV. 47. Ibid., p. XXI. 48. Quoted in Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France II. Entretiens (Paris: Hachette, 2005), p. 94. 49. Idees, p. XXIX. 50. Ibid., p. XXV. 51. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 52. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in On History, tr. and ed., L. W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 102–3. 53. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, tr. R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 135. 54. Ricoeur, On Translation, p. 23–24. 55. Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 133. 56. The Experience of the Foreign, p. 224. 57. Ibid., p. 5. 58. The Course of Recognition, p. 256. 59. Ibid., p. 257. 60. Ibid., p. 258. 61. Ibid., p. 257. 62. Ibid., p. 258. 63. Ibid., pp. 259–260. 64. Ibid., p. 263. 65. Ibid. 66. Ricoeur, On Translation, p. 29, (modified). 67. Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999). 68. Ricoeur, On Translation, op. cit., p. 29 (translation modified).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations, ed. with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by H. Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1969. Berman, Antoine. La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Berman, Antoine. L’épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique. Paris : Gallimard, 1984. The Experience of the Foreign. Culture and

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Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. Chouraqui, André. La Bible Chouraqui. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie pure et une philosophie phénoménologique. Translated and Forward by Jean-François Lavigne. Paris : Gallimard, 2018. Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by L. Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Husserl, Edmund. Méditations cartésiennes. Translated by E. Lévinas and G. Peiffer. Paris : Armand Colin, 1931; Cartesian Meditations, Translated by D. Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. Janicaud, Dominique. Heidegger in France II. Entretiens. Paris: Hachette, 2005. Kant, Immanuel. ‘Perpetual History,” in On History. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Ricoeur, Paul. The Course of Recognition. Translated by D. Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 Ricoeur, Paul Critique and Conviction. Translated by K. Blame. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Ricoeur, Paul. « Husserl et le sens de l’histoire, » in La revue de métaphysique et de morale, No. 54, 1949, pp. 280–316. Ricoeur, Paul. Introduction to Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Ricoeur, Paul. “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl, » in Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. F. Laruelle. Paris: Jean-Michel Place éd., 1980. Ricoeur, Paul. On Translation. Translated by E. Brennan. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative 3. Translated by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Chapter 3

From Exegesis to Allegory Ricoeur’s Challenge to Biblical Scholarship Barnabas Aspray

For over 500 years, two traditions of Bible reading have been at war with each other: the historical and the allegorical. The conflict has produced a vast volume of polemical literature which continues to this day.1 While Ricoeur’s name has been occasionally invoked in the course of the debate, there has so far been no systematic treatment of Ricoeur’s distinctive contribution. This is surprising if we consider that Ricoeur is one of the best known hermeneutic philosophers of the twentieth century, and that he wrote a lot about both reading traditions. But what comes as no surprise, to anyone who knows Ricoeur, is that he offers a mediating position that seeks to reconcile the two opposing parties. I will use Ricoeur constructively, not simply expounding his thought but extending it, to show how it offers a way to reconcile historical exegesis with allegory. I will begin with a look at Ricoeur’s ambiguous relationship to biblical studies. This ambiguity will reveal some features of biblical scholarship that are not necessary, but are a contingent result of its history. Next, a brief survey of that history will enable us to understand why biblical studies as a discipline became estranged from other reading traditions, such as dogmatic and allegorical readings of scripture. Once the reasons for the conflict are clear, we will be ready to see the unique power of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to bring reconciliation. AN AMBIGUOUS RELATIONSHIP TO BIBLICAL STUDIES Ricoeur’s relationship to biblical studies has all the features of a tempestuous love affair. His influence on the discourse is hard to overestimate, and 47

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countless scholars have found him an invaluable source of inspiration for new approaches to scripture.2 But others have seen him as an unwelcome influence leading a younger generation astray.3 Ricoeur’s attitude also appears to vary wildly in return. On the one hand, he frequently states his preference for works of biblical scholarship over dogmatic or systematic forms of Christian reflection, referring to his own “biblical faith” as “nourished by exegesis more than by theology.”4 He even goes beyond personal taste to a general principle, arguing that “the philosopher, when he reflects on religion, should have for his partner the exegete rather than the theologian.”5 On the other hand, this famously irenic philosopher reserves some of his more surprisingly vicious remarks for biblical studies, calling it a “desert of criticism,”6 which turns the biblical text into a “cadaver handed over for autopsy.”7 How can we explain these contrasting positions? Is Ricoeur simply being inconsistent? The answer, I suggest, comes from a much-celebrated feature of Ricoeurian thought: a resistance to totalizing systems that claim exclusive access to the truth. Although modern biblical scholarship is crucially important to Ricoeur, this does not prevent him from holding the view that it claims too much for itself at times. Ricoeur’s seemingly opposing attitudes simply show a desire to keep exegesis where it belongs: preventing dogmatic theologians from restricting its freedom, and at the same time preventing biblical scholars from giving it dominion over all. Exegesis is a “necessary but not sufficient” part of his larger goal, which is that of allowing the Bible to speak life-giving words of meaning to the present day. His mediating spirit leads him to seek a hermeneutic that can even reconcile the historical-critical method with its arch-enemies: allegorical and dogmatic interpretations of scripture. Since its inception as an independent discipline, biblical studies have been practiced using primarily the historical-critical method. This remains the case today in spite of the birth of numerous rival approaches over the last forty years (structuralism, feminist criticism, liberation theology, etc.), which have led to some rather hasty announcements of historical criticism’s death.8 But in the majority of biblical studies departments, the historical-critical method is still the default mode of biblical interpretation and seems likely to remain so.9 Some scholars now call their method “historical-grammatical” rather than “historical-critical.”10 They typically give two reasons for this distinction. First, they are more concerned with scripture’s “literal meaning,” than with what lies “behind the text.” Second, historical criticism in its classic Troeltschian formulation excludes the possibility of supernatural causes (e.g., miracles) for historical events, whereas not all biblical scholars today want to be so constrained. Ricoeur, however, does not make this distinction. For him, the terms “historical criticism” and “the historical-critical method” have a broad meaning that is not necessarily tied to a naturalist metaphysics. They

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denote all attempts to understand the biblical text by taking seriously its historical, cultural, and literary context, with the aim of recovering its originally intended meaning. Indeed, for Ricoeur as for many people, the word “exegesis” almost exclusively denotes historical-critical interpretation.11 “No method is innocent,” writes Ricoeur, meaning neutral or self-evident.12 “The search for the original meaning independent of any engagement on the part of the reader is not some atemporal, ahistorical attitude, but itself stems from a history of reading.”13 It really is historical criticism, in that it has a history as well as being about history. Its history has given it features it might not otherwise have had, such as totalizing tendencies and a dogmatic opposition to dogma and allegory. If we want to understand why historical criticism has these features, we need to know its history. Ricoeur never wrote a history of historical criticism, so what follows is an attempt to tell that history in a way that best fits his understanding of it, to serve as the most helpful backdrop to understanding his evaluation of it. Brevity has required the omission of many figures whose influence on biblical studies was also crucial—such as Thomas Hobbes, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Leopold von Ranke, Ernst Troeltsch, Johann David Michaelis, Ferdinand Christian Baur, and David Friedrich Strauss.14 But although attention to these would enrich the picture, it would not substantially change it. I argue that four key drivers led to the formation of historical criticism as a totalizing system that was and is antagonistic toward dogma and allegory. These four are the Reformation,15 Baruch Spinoza,16 Friedrich Schleiermacher,17 and Wilhelm Dilthey.18 THE FORMATION OF THE HISTORICALCRITICAL METHOD Prior to the Reformation, the Bible was understood to have multiple levels of meaning—the famous “four senses” of scripture, with the literal sense being the most foundational. The Bible’s primary purpose was not to be a weapon in doctrinal disputes. Rather, it was a rich resource of spiritual nourishment, not only from its literal sense, but through its allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses as well. The doctrinal boundaries drawn by the combined authority of scripture’s literal sense, the church’s tradition, and the magisterium created a safe space in which allegorical meanings could be freely and playfully explored. When in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers rejected the Catholic magisterium, they shattered this consensus about how to interpret the Bible. Believing that if the Bible were only read on its own terms, its true meaning could be liberated from all the accretions of dogmatic history which

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had covered it over, they introduced the principle of sola scriptura and the doctrine of scripture’s clarity or perspicuity. This did not naïvely imply that anyone who could read would understand everything the Bible said. Nor did it mean that traditional interpretations of scripture could safely be ignored. It meant rather that the key to the Bible’s meaning was neither the privileged possession of the magisterium nor the result of special spiritual discernment; scripture was open to public scholarly inquiry. Among the Reformers, however, no consensus emerged about the literal meaning of scripture. Protestants found it impossible to agree, not only on secondary details of doctrine, but also on issues they considered central and were unwilling to compromise on. As Sheila Davaney puts it: The turn to Scripture did not solve the problem of religious authority; the ecclesial authority of the clergy and the weight of church traditions were replaced not by a singular transparent Scripture but by multiple communal and individual voices all claiming the correct interpretation of the Bible. The appeal to sola scriptura resulted in the multiplication of authorities.19

The multiplication put pressure on each church to articulate why its own reading of scripture was the right one. “For each group,” Michael Legaspi writes, “the presence of the other Christian confession, which also claimed fidelity to the Bible, made it necessary for each group to defend its distinctive mode of biblical interpretation.”20 The Bible became increasingly used as a weapon in doctrinal disagreements. The pressure to find a secure foundation for doctrine led to an insistence that the literal sense of scripture is the only sense. Allegory became associated with a way of reading scripture that was still under the captivity of the magisterium, even though there is no necessary link between the two.21 As Ricoeur writes: The declaration that Scripture is its own interpreter had the consequence of discrediting allegorical interpretation in general, which was henceforth understood to be contingent and arbitrary. In this way, the properly exegetical argument [against allegory] links up with the anti-authoritarian one in such a way as to reinforce both of them, so that they become indiscernible from each other. In this sense, the Reformation paved the way for the major objections [to allegory] of contemporary critics.22

In reality, the very existence of multiple churches claiming adherence to the Bible’s literal sense contradicted the principle that “scripture alone” could be authoritative. Consequently, each new church came to replicate the magisterial authority in less visible ways. As James Simpson observes: “Since the literal sense alone turns out to be fragile, disagreements about its

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meaning inevitably arise. These disagreements need to be resolved somehow, and in the sixteenth century they could only be resolved by affirmations of institutional power, whether by conciliar decision or absolutist fiat. The need for authoritative mediation was true of evangelical culture no less than of the Catholic Church.”23 In the midst of this “crisis of authority”24 one of the grandfathers of modern biblical criticism arose, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza knew first-hand of the traumatic effects of religious conflict, having not only grown up during the bloody Thirty Years War, but also suffering persecution and exile from his Jewish community due to his beliefs.25 His 1670 Theological-Political Treatise aimed to establish a new method of interpretation that could command universal assent and bring peace to a wartorn Europe. It was clear to Spinoza that Protestants, despite appealing to the plain sense of scripture, were reading it through a dogmatic lens just like Catholics. He did not distinguish: “Theologians,” for him, “have sought to extract their own thoughts and opinions from the Bible and thereby endow them with divine authority.”26 The problem was not this or that dogmatic position but the holding of any dogma at all. Turning the sola scriptura principle against its creators, Spinoza claimed that all religious dispositions were an obstacle to the right reading of scripture. The Bible should be interpreted with a “free and unprejudiced mind”—where for him “dogma” was identical with “prejudice.”27 Spinoza proposed a new authority for biblical interpretation, which he believed all human beings have in common: the light of “natural reason.”28 He writes: “As the highest authority to interpret Scripture rests with each individual, the rule of interpretation must be nothing other than the natural light of reason which is common to all men, and not some light above nature or any external authority.”29 The Bible’s truth is only discernible to “the autonomous biblical critic free of dogmatic commitments.”30 In this way Spinoza bequeathed to future biblical scholars the conviction that dogma is the enemy of exegesis. When he applied his new method, Spinoza came up with precisely the results he hoped would bring peace to Europe. He managed to deny the Bible’s political relevance by appealing to its historically particular character. As Legaspi puts it, according to Spinoza, careful philological study of the Bible shows that concerns with modern philosophical, political, legal, or scientific questions are alien to the Bible. The Bible contains the ancient historical record of a specific civilization, which is firmly embedded in the language and thought patterns of its time. Historical and textual investigation shows that it is neither timeless nor universal. Attempts

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to use the Bible to address modern questions, especially political ones, are unwarranted.31

This is another aspect that has remained in biblical studies to this day: the ease with which the Bible’s distance from our own time can be used to deny it political and moral relevance.32 But while Spinozist rationalism left an indelible mark on biblical study, it is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the “father of modern hermeneutics,” who made explicit the notion of authorial intention as the gold standard of interpretation. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics has often been misunderstood as placing the fullness of meaning in authorial intention. In fact, his brilliant notion of the “hermeneutical circle” includes an important role for the reader in appropriating the meaning of a text. Yet what is important here is that his notion of authorial intention was used in biblical study in a much more reductionistic way.33 Spinoza blamed misinterpretations on the stubborn prejudice and willful blindness of dogmatic theologians and insisted on historical distance as facilitating the right way to read the Bible. But for Schleiermacher, historical distance was the cause of innocent misinterpretations, which could lead people unwittingly to attribute a meaning that was not what the author had in mind. Hermeneutics is therefore the art of avoiding misunderstanding, and interpretation is all about overcoming that historical gap, putting oneself in the place of the first audience in order to understand what the author originally meant.34 One must “establish the same relationship between oneself and the author as between him and his original addressees.”35 The goal of interpretation is a reproduction of the author’s original intention.36 Still, the principle of authorial intention had not yet reached the status of a total and final authority. It needed, next, to pass through the crucible of scientific positivism that gripped the Western world in the second half of the nineteenth century. For the positivist, all knowledge is scientific in nature, discoverable by empirical methods; therefore, the only valid kind of knowledge is that which comprises objectively and universally verifiable facts. The rise of positivism put enormous pressure on the humanities disciplines to come up with equally objective, universally verifiable criteria and results. As Ricoeur puts it, “It seemed that the only way of rendering justice to historical knowledge was to give it a scientific dimension, comparable to that which the natural sciences had attained.”37 So the German historian and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) undertook “to endow the human sciences with a methodology and an epistemology which would be as respectable as those of the sciences of nature.”38 Dilthey was Schleiermacher’s “intellectual successor in hermeneutics.”39 He built on Schleiermacher’s idea that authorial intention is the key to the

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meaning of a text and that interpretation is reproduction of this original meaning.40 But he did not think that hermeneutics began with Schleiermacher. Seeing its initial impulse in the Reformation, he “credited Protestantism with the founding of both historical criticism and the science of hermeneutics.”41 Hermeneutics took a decidedly positivist turn with Dilthey. He gave a new language to hermeneutics borrowed from the sciences, speaking about “certainty” and “objectivity” in interpretation. As Merold Westphal puts it: [For Dilthey] interpretation must be “scientific” by being raised to the level of “objectivity” and “universal validity.” This suggests that differences of interpretation due to differences of context (subjectivity) should be eliminated so that everyone comes up with the same interpretation, relative to no particular context (universal validity). This is to be done by means of method, just as in the natural sciences . . . For Dilthey interpretation is to be guided by rules, and hermeneutics is the theory of those rules.42

Dilthey defined interpretation as “rule-guided understanding of fixed and relatively permanent objectifications of life.”43 Its goal was “to preserve the universal validity of historical interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and sceptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification for such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded.”44 WILLIAM WREDE AS AN EXEMPLARY HISTORICAL CRITIC This brief survey of the genesis of the historical-critical method has given us the following four characteristics of historical criticism. First, it was rooted in a Reformation context in which the clarity and sufficiency of the Bible was being asserted for the first time, which yet at the same time was proving an untenable doctrine in light of violent doctrinal disagreements, leading to a crisis of authority. Second, it arose out of Spinoza’s attempt to reject all dogma in favor of a historicizing reading that claimed total authority for itself and denied contemporary relevance to scripture. Third, it was refined by Schleiermacher into a methodological focus on overcoming historical distance to grasp the author’s intention. Fourth, it was transformed by Diltheyan positivism into a scientific discipline that aims at objectively provable and universally verifiable facts. Let us now see how all these hermeneutical threads come together in the work of a biblical scholar whose influence on biblical studies is still strongly felt, and who will serve as an illuminating contrast to Ricoeur.

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William Wrede (1859–1906) is a paradigmatic example of historical criticism in its purest and most totalizing form, someone for whom the historicalcritical method is the only way to arrive at the certain and universal truth of the Bible. He sees biblical studies as a “real, genuine science,” which has to “ignore all that has to do with the theological passions.” A biblical scholar must single-mindedly “aim at one end only – namely, to get right down to the bottom of the facts.”45 Theology has no place whatsoever in the pursuit of scientific knowledge: Biblical theology . . . tries to grasp [the New Testament] objectively [objektiv], correctly and sharply as possible. Like every other real science, New Testament theology has its goal simply in itself, and is totally indifferent to all dogma and systematic theology. What could dogmatics offer it? Could dogmatics teach New Testament theology to see facts [Thatsachen] correctly? At most it could colour them. Could it correct the facts that were found? To correct facts is absurd. Could it legitimize them? Facts need no legitimation.46

In Wrede we find the positivist dichotomy between objective and subjective applied to biblical studies with powerful effect: any theological treatment of the Bible is relegated to the realm of subjective opinion, of which biblical scholarship has no need. The point is to ascertain the facts of the case in regard to a long-past event. How, then, can subjective opinions, personal theological convictions, possibly contribute to its elucidation? They can only be a continual source of disturbance. Knowledge of what once was and what once happened can never be settled by subjective considerations, but only from existing historical documents and sources.47

Theological doctrines are for Wrede pure subjectivity and nothing but an obstacle to true knowledge of the Bible. Worse, even to approach the Bible with theological interests disqualifies the scholarship automatically: a biblical scholar, Wrede says, must be guided by a pure disinterested concern for knowledge . . . He must be able to distinguish between the alien modern ideas of his own thought and those of the past. He must be able to keep his own viewpoint, however precious, quite separate from the object of his research and hold it in suspense. Then he will indeed know only what really was [was wirklich gewesen ist].48

So, what makes New Testament theology “theological?” Nothing, in Wrede’s view.49 “This account of New Testament theology,” he admits,

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“entirely surrenders its specifically theological character. It is no longer treated any differently from any other branch of intellectual history in general or the history of religion in particular.”50 This is because any “theological type of treatment . . . would always result in a mixture which included the personal theological viewpoint of the scholar, and that,” he concludes, “could only obscure things.”51 RICOEUR’S EVALUATION OF THE HISTORICAL-CRITICAL METHOD A lot has happened in biblical studies since Wrede and many scholars today practice varieties of historical criticism that are more open to dogmatic theology and other ways of reading scripture (as a consequence of Ricoeur’s influence, in some cases).52 But the above depiction still has relevance for two reasons: it remains the model used by a large contingent of biblical scholars around the world, and—more pertinently for this article—it is an approximation of Ricoeur’s own understanding of historical criticism. Ricoeur saw his own approach to the Bible as “an expansion of the historicalcritical method,” affirming it as indispensable while at the same time denying it the totality it has so often claimed for itself.53 It is “irreplaceable” (irremplaçable) but it must be “corrected” (rectifiée).54 According to Sandra Schneiders, one of the scholars influenced by Ricoeur, historical criticism is “necessary but not sufficient.”55 The text’s meaning is not less than its author’s intention but it is more. On this model, to think historical criticism sufficient is like thinking the foundations of a house are the whole house, or the engine of a car is a car (foundations will not keep the rain out, and you cannot drive a car engine). That is why the key insights of historical criticism, especially the focus on authorial intention, are “not to be excluded from hermeneutics, but instead are to be released from the onesidedness of a non-dialectical concept of discourse.”56 Why is historical criticism irreplaceable? For three reasons. First, because every text has an author. “For my part,” Ricoeur writes, “I cannot conceive a text without an author, a text which would not have been written by anybody.”57 Every sentence spoken or written refers to its utterer in indelible ways, some obvious (e.g., the use of the first person) and some hidden (the choice of language and vocabulary that reveals the text to emanate from a singular perspective).58 Every sentence is also addressed to someone, the implied audience that the author had in view when writing it.59 These are indispensable aspects of the meaning of every text that cannot be abolished.60 Second, historical criticism of the Bible is indispensable because we do not belong to the same period of history as its authors. Historical distance is an undeniable fact with which all interpretation must grapple. Ricoeur writes:

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The Gospel itself has become a text, a letter. As a text, it expresses a difference and a distance, however minimal, from the event that it proclaims. This distance, always increasing with time, is what separates the first witness from the entire line of those who hear the witness. Our modernity means only that the distance is now considerable between the place I myself occupy at the center of a culture and the original site of the first witness.61

Third, historical criticism has a legitimate claim to the status of an objective science, says Ricoeur, provided science itself is understood correctly.62 To be truly scientific we must escape the positivist “fetishism of facts,” which is “by now regarded as false in physics where self-evident facts are not to be found either.”63 The idea of an “objective fact” is ambiguous, because the term “objective” (in both English and French) has two meanings, one ontological and the other epistemological.64 German has two different words for these things. Gegenständlich refers to an object in the world, whose “factual” nature simply means that it exists regardless of whether you know or want it to exist: its reality is ontologically independent of the perceiving subject. Objektiv (the term Wrede uses) refers, says Ricoeur, to “knowledge . . . which claims rigour and universality.”65 It denotes the epistemological idea of verifiable certainty that is the heart of positivism. Nobody questions whether science deals with objects in the sense of Gegenstände. But science departs from its own method when it claims objective (objektiv) certainty, because that would preclude any possible future revision in light of new evidence. Therefore, if historical criticism is to remain faithful to its own scientific nature, it can never come to any final, unchanging conclusions about the meaning of a biblical text. Its “assured results” must be forever open to revision or overturning by future research.66 For these three reasons, then, it is impossible to do without historical criticism: because (1) every text has an author, (2) every text is written in a particular historical-cultural situation, and (3) one can be right or wrong about the author’s intention; the “logic of validation,” where evidence is provided for different possible meanings, gives historical criticism the dignity of a science.67 “However, although the historical-critical method is irreplaceable, it can and must be corrected,” says Ricoeur.68 The first and most important problem is that it “tends to claim a univocal status for the meaning of the text.”69 When it claims sole rights to the text’s whole meaning, banishing all other interpretations, all other methods, all other meanings as illegitimate and false, then it becomes what Ricoeur calls totalizing, or an ideology. “I call ideology every hypostasis of the text which is forgetful of its own presuppositions.”70 We need to expose as a “postulate” (i.e., an unfounded presupposition) that

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there exists one true meaning of the text, namely, the one that was intended by its author, authors, or the last redactor, who are held to have somehow inscribed this meaning in the text, from which exegesis has subsequently to extract it, and, if possible, restore it to its originary meaning. Hence the true meaning, the meaning intended by the author, and the original meaning are taken as equivalent terms. And commentary thus consists in identifying this overall true, intended, and original meaning.71

Why does Ricoeur think this postulate is misguided? The reason is that, although historical criticism may call itself a science, its method is different from that of the physical sciences. Historical criticism made authorial intention the exclusive domain of meaning because it had failed to understand how its “object” was different from the objects dealt with in physics. An object of the kind that concerns physics is not trying to communicate anything, transmit thoughts from one mind to another. But historical criticism is dealing with texts, and a text is a unique kind of object. Ricoeur defines a text as discourse, and for him “the first and fundamental feature of discourse [is] that it is constituted by a series of sentences whereby someone says something to someone about something.”72 We miss half the interpretive process if we focus on the first “someone” (the author) and ignore what is happening when the second “someone” (the reader) grasps hold of the meaning of the second “something” (the external world shared by author and reader). Let us pursue this line of thinking further. Ricoeur teaches that the work of the historian is a continual dialectic between sameness and difference, mediated by analogy.73 Historical criticism tends to focus all its attention on difference. Its indispensable insight (taken from Schleiermacher’s definition of hermeneutics as the art of “avoiding misunderstanding”) is that the cultural/historical distance between the Bible and the present day often leads to unwitting misinterpretations of its meaning. But it has a tendency to miss the other end of the dialectic: we can only understand things in the past by translating them analogically into the cultural categories and concepts of today. “History’s task,” says Ricoeur, “is to specify what has changed, what has been done away with, what was other. [But] how can we designate and make discarded institutions and situations understood in contemporary language . . . if not by using functional likenesses which will be corrected later through differentiation?”74 Let us consider an example to illustrate this point. When we read “thou shalt not kill” in Exodus 20:13 (KJV), the historical-critical method will tell us that the word “kill” is translated from the Hebrew ratsach which is not identical to the English “kill.” Additionally, laws and legal frameworks functioned differently in the Ancient Near East than they do in contemporary nation-states, so we should not assume that this is a “commandment” in the

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modern sense.75 This is the dialectic of “distance,” which “avoids misunderstanding” by denying false meanings. It teaches, rightly, that we cannot naïvely take this text as a prohibition of all kinds of killing for any reason. And it is crucially important to know what this injunction does not mean. But what, then, does it mean? What about the “sameness” in the dialectic? Any attempt to offer a constructive meaning must draw parallels with contemporary categories. Peter Craigie, for example, suggests that ratsach “is normally used in the context of one Hebrew killing another Hebrew. . . . Thus, the preliminary meaning of the commandment seems to be: ‘You shall not kill a fellow Hebrew.’”76 What, then, is today’s equivalent of the “fellow Hebrew?” Does this command mean that we should not kill people who hold the same passport as ourselves, or come from the same ethnic group, or live in the same nation-state? Perhaps this is too narrow an interpretation and we are justified, with André LaCocque, in taking this commandment more broadly to include “killing ‘out of enmity, deceit, or hatred,’” in other words, “murder.”77 But does everyone agree today on what counts as murder? Does this category include abortion, euthanasia, and war? What about capital punishment? Ricoeur even suggests that it might be expanded to include wrongful killing of animals.78 Every attempt to give meaning to this commandment demands the use of a contemporary category of thought.79 There are no exceptions to this demand; it cannot be avoided. That is what Ricoeur means by saying that “if one could not identify or recognize the same function in other events there would be nothing to understand.”80 Therefore, “within even the historical-critical method there is a problem of being meaningful FOR.”81 It is because biblical scholars have often failed to understand this that they have turned the text into a “cadaver handed over for autopsy,” as per Ricoeur’s acerbic remark.82 By focusing only on one half of the dialectic, that of difference, they banish the text from contemporary relevance, turning it into nothing more than a museum piece for idle curiosity.83 What Ricoeur wants to recover is the moment at which the text’s meaning comes to life for the present day, the moment he calls appropriation, which is “not a contingent appendix added on to understanding and explanation, but an organic part of every hermeneutic project.”84 The full meaning of the text is only actualized when it is appropriated by completing the dialectic from distance back to sameness through analogy. Appropriation means “to ‘make one’s own’ what was previously ‘foreign,’” and for Ricoeur this is “the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics. Interpretation in its last stage wants to equalize, to render contemporaneous, to assimilate in the sense of making similar. This goal is achieved insofar as interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.”85 Because appropriation is an inescapable part of exegesis (even if it is inevitably done more or less adequately), historical criticism has an ineradicable

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subjectivity at its core, or, as Ricoeur puts it, “an incomplete objectivity by comparison with that which is attained, or at least approached, in the other sciences.”86 This is only a problem if “subjective” equals “false,” as we saw assumed in the example of Wrede. In fact, just as there are different kinds of objects, so also not all subjectivity is equal. An expert historian is not someone who has eliminated her subjectivity (“extinguished the individual” in Ranke’s famous phrase), but someone who has trained it as an expert wine taster trains his palette, not so that his personal opinion plays no role, but so that it plays the role demanded by their profession. “The historian goes to the men of the past with his own human experience,” writes Ricoeur. “The historian’s subjectivity takes on a striking prominence at the moment when, over and above all critical chronology, history makes the values of past men surge forth.”87 Therefore, “the subjectivity brought into play is not just any subjectivity, but precisely the subjectivity of the historian. . . . Like every scientific subjectivity, the historian’s subjectivity represents the triumph of a good subjectivity over a bad one.”88 HOW RICOEUR RECONCILES EXEGESIS WITH DOGMA Once we recognize that subjectivity is neither avoidable nor something we might want to avoid, we are ready to reevaluate the traditional opposition between biblical criticism and dogma. As we have seen, the latter was identical to subjectivity for Wrede. Ricoeur, on the other hand, does not see subjectivity as an obstacle, clouding our vision and preventing us from seeing what the biblical text “really” means. Rather, subjectivity is what enables us to make the biblical text speak meaningfully today. Using Ricoeur constructively, we may recover a sense of dogma, not as an unwarranted constraint on interpretation, but as a legitimate lens to guide it. This next step has obstacles that are emotional as well as cognitive. The word “dogma” has its own history, reaching contemporary ears only after its use to denounce clerics who stubbornly refuse to change their opinions when faced with counterevidence. But its original meaning derives from the Greek dokein, meaning “to appear” or “to think.” It has the sense of the “way one looks at things” and is not far removed from the modern term “worldview.” Dogma may be a consciously held belief, but it can also be unconscious, as we all have many unconscious principles that guide the way we process information. But whether conscious or not, dogma is the lens through which one interprets reality, the fundamental principles about the “way things are,” which, at least for the moment, are not being questioned. “Every claim to truth fosters a degree of dogmatism,” says Ricoeur.89 Seen this way, it becomes clear that everyone is dogmatic. It is part of our human constitution to view the world in a particular way, through a particular

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lens, due to our contingent place in history. The blind spot of modernity (historical criticism’s birthplace) is to imagine that it depicts the plain and simple facts without interpretation, not realizing that this stance is itself dogmatic. The irony of historical criticism is that even while dealing with history as an object “out there,” it takes no thought to history as affecting the subject. Wrede, for example, did not see himself as belonging to the flow of history at all. Either he was reading the Bible from an ahistorical vantage point, or (which amounts to the same thing) he was situated at the end of history, where nobody could come after him and place him at a particular moment within the history of interpretation, moved by the interests and prejudices of his own time. Against modernity, Ricoeur observes that “we readers . . . are not in a relation of subject to object, but of historical being to historical being. . . . The historical envelopment of the text and the reader is the very condition of the objectification and distanciation used by every analytical and critical method.”90 Against Wrede, we may hear these words of Ricoeur: “Modern exegetes are like us. They work and think at the end of a history. In this sense, the one thing that would be criticizable would be the naive claim of an exegesis that held itself to be without a history, as though it were possible to coincide, without the mediation of a tradition of reading, with the original signification of a text, even with the presumed intention of its author.”91 What about dogma that is being authoritatively imposed by a magisterium? Surely, this must not be allowed to forbid some interpretations and encourage others, for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific freedom of enquiry? To answer this question, we must take the lessons learned about subjectivity and historicity and add to them a third feature, the role played by communities of interpretation. Ricoeur writes that “the meaning of a text is in each instance an event that is born at the intersection between [the authors’ intention and] the different expectations of a series of communities of reading and interpretation that the presumed authors of the text under consideration could not have anticipated.”92 Due to the “structuring role performed by the ecclesiastical communitary life,”93 a religious community with authoritative texts has “rules of reading that are not at all the same as those that govern the manner in which philosophers read other philosophers.”94 To belong to such a community means to belong to a tradition of reading that has shaped the way the Bible is interpreted in that community. As I have argued elsewhere, dogma can thus be seen as “the ecclesial community’s decision to take Scriptural interpretation in a certain direction.”95 Does this mean no interpretation can be wrong if it is held by a community? Not at all. None of this means that an interpretation cannot be challenged or questioned, or that there is no such thing as a false interpretation. Ricoeur is often suspected of relativism because of his appeal to a plurivocity of meanings, but he is actually very clear:

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If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal . . . It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.96

What the communal setting does mean is that dogma, construed as the community’s traditional rules of interpretation, is not at a disadvantage compared with more purportedly “objective” readings of scripture, precisely because there is no ahistorical, fully objective (partly objective, yes, but not completely) meaning of the text that would be independent of the subjective, historically situated individual or community who appropriates it for themselves. In short, it is perfectly possible for a biblical exegete to be a faithful adherent of a community of interpretation, that is, a church or a synagogue, without the beliefs implied by such membership impairing her ability to practice historical-critical exegesis in full scientific rigor. Finally, a magisterium is simply the living authority to which the community submits for the safekeeping of its dogmatic guidelines. And, says Ricoeur, “we are not forbidden to salute the vow of confident adherence to an ongoing community of interpretation, up to and including submission to the external power of an ecclesial magisterium.”97 HOW RICOEUR RECONCILES EXEGESIS WITH ALLEGORY We are now in a position, with the help of Ricoeur, to bring about a reconciliation between exegesis, newly restored to its rightful place, and its ancient archenemy, namely, allegorical interpretations of scripture. If, for biblical scholars, dogma has always been an example of authoritarian restrictions on the freedom of scientific enquiry (cast in the oft-used mold of Galileo’s persecution by the church), then allegory represents the opposite problem, that of too much freedom in the absence of proper restrictions (of a scientific, not ecclesial, kind). Allegory is biblical interpretation gone mad, making random free associations that have nothing to do with the text’s original meaning, so the accusation goes. The scientific approach to texts condemns both ecclesial prohibitions on the one hand and arbitrary speculations on the other, both of which are “unscientific”—or rather “prescientific” (according to the model of progress for which we moderns understand reality far more accurately than those who came before us). “For many commentators,” says Ricoeur, “allegorical interpretations are only referred to in their introductions as examples of the prescientific antecedents of an investigation of the text that owes everything to the historical-critical

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method, which was unknown to the initiators of allegorical interpretation and even resisted by the last advocates of this approach.”98 My own experience confirms this remark. I have more than once heard Augustine’s reading of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35) used in classrooms as a perfect example of how not to do exegesis. Augustine says that the Samaritan represents Christ, the robbers are the devil and his angels, the inn is the Church, and the innkeeper is the Apostle Paul.99 How do we know this is wrong? Simply, because nobody who first heard the parable could possibly have understood it that way. This rejection of allegory depends on an understanding of exegetical method that has not lost its totalizing ambitions. It still claims there is only one true meaning to the text to which it alone has the key. If historical exegesis is the only valid way to interpret, then allegory can only be construed as bad exegesis that violates historical-critical principles. The reader is forced into an either/or dichotomy: if she accepts allegory, she must abandon history; if she accepts history, she must abandon allegory. “Today’s readers find themselves confronted with an alternative that in fact stems from the quasi unanimity among commentators,” observes Ricoeur.100 But “another outcome, built on ancient allegorical interpretation on the basis of a history of the reading and the reception of our text, is possible.”101 The exegesis/allegory alternative is a false one because allegory, as practiced in patristic and medieval times, was never trying to be historical exegesis. “The allegorical exegesis of the Greek fathers,” says Ricoeur, “is unaware of any claim to compete with an exegesis based on the historicalcritical method.”102 To complain that allegory violates the rules of exegesis is like complaining that a rugby game violates the rules of football, or a chess match is an anarchic abandonment of the right way to play draughts. How, then, can exegesis and allegory be rightly related? Only from a metaphysical framework that inhabits the world of scripture as a reality that impacts the method of interpretation itself. If the text of scripture is a series of signs pointing to a historical reality in the physical world, then for those who believe its message, that historical reality is itself a series of signs pointing to a spiritual and metaphysical reality beyond our vision. For example, the Song of Songs in its literal sense is nothing more than a celebration of erotic love between two human beings. But for the Jew and the Christian everything is created and is for that reason a sign pointing to the Creator. “It is the myth of creation as a whole that names God,” says Ricoeur.103 Erotic love is nothing less than a sign pointing beyond itself to the love between the Creator and the people he has chosen for himself. He then approvingly quotes the biblical scholar Paul Beauchamp: “If we say that there is allegory in these love poems, it is . . . not because the words have to be decoded, but because the things of men signify those of God.”104

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This is also why allegory cannot be done without historical exegesis, indeed depends on exegesis as its preliminary and its foundation. Until we have rightly understood the history to which the text points, we have no hope of understanding the spiritual truths to which the history points. “Hence [in interpreting Song of Songs] the spiritual sense is not substituted for the carnal sense. It is not substituted because it cannot be.”105 In summary, for classical historical criticism, what we learn from the Bible cannot alter the hermeneutical method itself. Wrede is a perfect example of this principle. For him, the metaphysical structure of reality is already known in its completeness before we open the Bible. Reading the Bible can achieve nothing more than piling additional “facts” onto our existing store of “objective knowledge.” Hermeneutics is not a circle but a line, proceeding from the unshakable foundation of the historical method toward the facts it uncovers. But for Ricoeur, hermeneutics is a (Schleiermacherian) circle in which our understanding of reality is altered by what we read. If we believe what the Bible says, this alters the metaphysical framework itself, which cannot fail to transform the way we read. When we interpret a Bible passage allegorically, we ascend to a higher level of interpretation, one that is based on the insights learned from the Bible at the first level. At the first level (historical exegesis), we learn that the world is created and everything in it points to its Creator. At the second level (allegory), we apply this metaphysical insight to Song of Songs, for example. This allows us to see in sexual and romantic love a sign of the Creator’s love for creation. CONCLUSION Ricoeur is not an enemy of biblical studies—far from it. For him, its signature method—historical-critical exegesis—is indispensable, even preferable to doctrinal theology for the goal of bringing the biblical text to life. But he does insist that the historical-critical method needs putting back in its place. His hermeneutical theory aims to strip it of its totalizing ambitions that it has picked up in the course of its historical formation, amid a vacuum of authority, violent disputes concerning the literal sense of scripture, the rise of scientific positivism, and the Romanticist turn to authorial intention. These totalizing ambitious have led it to banish all other claims to the meaning of the biblical text—claims coming from church doctrine, or from allegorical interpretations, or anywhere else than itself when practiced with the purity and rigor of an objective science. However, Ricoeur is no relativist, claiming that there is no such thing as a misinterpretation of scripture. “The text is a limited field of possible constructions,” Ricoeur says. The metaphor of a “field” indicates a space that

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is properly bounded, yet that contains space in which more than one person may play. There are many possible meanings to be found in scripture, but all build on the foundation of historical exegesis, which is rightly understood as having its own form of scientific objectivity. Instead, Ricoeur proposes a renewed, chastened historical criticism that does not see other approaches as threatening rivals, but rather as playmates in the rich field of meanings to be found in the Bible. As David Jasper puts it, Ricoeur “stretches back beyond the Reformation, to earlier modes of Christian hermeneutics characteristic of Augustine, the church fathers, and the medieval theologians, who saw many levels of meaning in the biblical texts all working together.”106

NOTES 1. For two recent contributions on opposing sides, see Iain W. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017); Craig Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018). 2. While an exhaustive list of biblical works using Ricoeurian methodology would be too long, a representative sampling across different fields includes: Sean Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988); Amos N. Wilder, Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in the Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture, Second Edition, 2nd ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999); Loretta Dornisch, ‘The Book of Job and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics’, Semeia 19 (1981): 3–21; Douglas S. Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture (Winona Lake: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Tania Oldenhage, Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship after the Holocaust, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). Regarding the last, Richard Briggs calls Brueggemann’s entire œuvre “the most persistent attempt to work out Ricoeur’s hermeneutic in biblical interpretation” (‘What Does Hermeneutics Have to Do with Biblical Interpretation?’, The Heythrop Journal 47, no. 1 [1 January 2006]: 69). 3. For example, Brevard Childs sees Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as totally incompatible with his own approach, because it “shows little or no interest in the historical development of the biblical text . . . [and] fails to take seriously the essential function of the canon in grounding the biblical metaphors within the context of historic Israel” (Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture [Fortress Press, 1979], 77). This is a misunderstanding. In fact, Childs’ canonical approach is far closer to Ricoeur than he seems to realize.

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4. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 53. 5. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 482. 6. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 349. This comment is directed more broadly at the critical spirit of modernity. But in the context of the book, it is modernity’s influence on ancient history, including biblical studies, that is at issue. 7. André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xii. 8. See, for example, Gerhard Maier, Das Ende der historisch-kritischen Methode (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1974). 9. John Barton notes that “in spite of the pressure for new paradigms a great deal of historical-critical study continues to be undertaken” (‘Historical-Critical Approaches’, in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Barton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 18). Hays and Ansberry agree that “the reports of historical criticism's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Historical criticism is not a passing craze; it is not going away” (Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry, ‘Faithful Criticism and a Critical Faith’, in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, ed. Christopher B. Ansberry and Christopher M. Hays [Baker Academic, 2013], 204). 10. See, for example, Craig Blomberg, ‘The Historical-Critical/Grammatical View’, in Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012). 11. See Ricoeur’s stated assumption about “identif[ying] exegesis with the historical-critical method” (Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], 148). Even when he tries to argue that “biblical exegesis” should not be considered a method itself, but rather the goal of all methods, he still treats the historical-critical method as a “backdrop” (toile de fond) for the other approaches (Paul Ricoeur, ‘Du conflit à la convergence des méthodes en exégèse biblique’, in Exégèse et herméneutique, ed. Xavier Léon-Dufour [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971], 35). 12. My translation: “Nulle méthode est innocente” (Ricoeur, ‘Du conflit à la convergence des méthodes en exégèse biblique’, 36). 13. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 295. 14. For more on Hobbes’ contribution, see Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300–1700 (Crossroad, 2013). On Michaelis, see Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On Lessing, Ranke, and Troeltsch, see Seth Heringer, Uniting History and Theology: A Theological Critique of the Historical Method (Lanham: Fortress Academic, 2018). On Baur and Strauss, see Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13–34.

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15. Michael Legaspi writes that “historical criticism owes a great deal to the theological and hermeneutical impulses of the Reformation” (‘What Ever Happened to Historical Criticism?’, Journal of Religion & Society 9 [2007]: 5). John Barton agrees: “There is a tradition in German scholarship of tracing the origins of historical criticism not to the Enlightenment but to the Reformation” (Barton, ‘HistoricalCritical Approaches’, 16). Robert Grant and David Tracy go further, stating that “modern historical study of the Bible could not have come into existence without the Reformation” (Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 2nd ed. [London: SCM Press, 1984], 92). 16. Jeffrey L. Morrow writes that “Spinoza . . . created the methodological blueprint later biblical critics would follow” (‘The Acid of History: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the Separation of Faith and Reason in Modern Biblical Studies’, Heythrop Journal 58, no. 2 [2017]: 169). Grant and Tracy agree that “Spinoza’s method is very much like that followed in modern introductions to the books of the Bible” (A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 108). 17. Werner G. Jeanrond calls Schleiermacher the “father of modern hermeneutics” (Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance [London: SCM Press, 1994], 44). Ricoeur also calls Schleiermacher the “founder of modern hermeneutics” (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 47). 18. Jeanrond writes that “Dilthey’s hermeneutical thoughts are very important, because they provide the bridge between Schleiermacher and hermeneutical developments in the twentieth century” (Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, 51). 19. Sheila Greeve Davaney, Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 2. 20. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, 17. 21. For William Tyndale (1494–1536), for example, “Scripture ‘hath but one simple, literal sense, whose light the owls cannot abide.’ Promotion of that simple, literal sense required strenuous repudiation of its competitor, allegory” (cited in James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents [Cambridge: Belknap, 2007], 111). 22. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 293–94. 23. Simpson, Burning to Read, 107. 24. See Allan Jenkins and Patrick Preston, Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth Century Crisis of Authority, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 25. See Roy Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 33–36. 26. Benedict Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97; Harrisville and Sundberg point out that here Spinoza is in continuity with the Reformation, for which “the suspicion of the dogmatic tradition was a chief interpretive principle” (Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 41). 27. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 9.

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28. Ibid., 111. 29. Ibid., 117. 30. Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 39. 31. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, 24. 32. Below we will consider an example of this moral and political distancing in the case of the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” 33. “[One] aspect of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics (his emphasis on developing methodical controls to avoid misunderstanding) tended to encourage the development of strictly methodological interests – first historico-critical, then formalist” (Grant and Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 154). 34. He writes, “Hermeneutics rests on the fact of the non-understanding of discourse: taken in its most general sense, including misunderstanding in the mother tongue and in everyday life” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, trans. Andrew Bowie [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 227). 35. Ibid., 27. 36. “One has only understood what one has reconstructed in all its relationships and in its context” (ibid., 228). 37. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, 49. 38. Ibid. 39. Anthony C. Thiselton, ‘Biblical Studies and Theoretical Hermeneutics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Barton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99. 40. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, 152; Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 22. 41. Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An IncarnationalTrinitarian Theory of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 81. 42. Merold Westphal, ‘The Philosophical/Theological View’, in Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), 81–82. 43. Wilhelm Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Selected Works 4 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 237. 44. Ibid., 250. 45. William Wrede, The Origin of the New Testament, trans. James Hill (London: Harper & Brothers, 1909), 2–3. 46. William Wrede, ‘The Tasks and Methods of New Testament Theology’, in The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter, trans. Robert Morgan (London: SCM. Press, 1973), 69–70. See William Wrede, Über Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten Neutestamentlichen Theologie (1897; repr., Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009). 47. Wrede, The Origin of the New Testament, 4. 48. Wrede, ‘The Tasks and Methods of New Testament Theology’, 70. This last phrase echoes Leopold von Ranke (1785–1886), who defined the goal of the historian as that of establishing “wie es eigentlich gewesen.”

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49. The original German title of his famous essay on method makes this clearer: “Über Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten [so-called] Neutestamentlichen Theologie.” 50. Wrede, ‘The Tasks and Methods of New Testament Theology’, 70. 51. Ibid. 52. See, for example, Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (London: SPCK, 2015); Francis Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997); R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Schneiders, The Revelatory Text. 53. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, xiii. 54. Ricoeur, ‘Du conflit à la convergence des méthodes en exégèse biblique’, 36; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Esquisse de conclusion’, in Exégèse et herméneutique, ed. Xavier Léon-Dufour (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 291. 55. “Traditional historical critical exegesis . . . is necessary but not sufficient for integral interpretation” (Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, 3). 56. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 23. 57. My translation: “Pour ma part, je ne concevrais pas ce que pourrait être un texte sans auteur, un texte qui n’aurait été écrit par personne” (Ricoeur, ‘Esquisse de conclusion’, 292–93). 58. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 12–13. 59. Ibid., 14–15. 60. This is why I think Gregory Laughery mistaken when he says that Ricoeur “downplays” authorial intention too much (Paul Ricoeur & Living Hermeneutics: Exploring Ricoeur’s Contribution to Biblical Interpretation [Milton Keynes: Destinée, 2016], 205). 61. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 387. 62. Historical criticism’s “desire for objectivity . . . is of the same nature as that of modern physics, and in this respect there is no reason for history to have an inferiority complex” (Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles Kelbley [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965], 25). Also: “The historical-critical method makes precise demands that one might even qualify as scientific without abusing the term” (LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, ix). 63. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 30. 64. “Objectivity designates both the being of the object immanent to the subject and the objective character of the knowledge of that object” (my translation: “l’objectivité désigne aussi bien l’être de l’objet immanent au sujet et le caractère objectif de la connaissance de cet objet” [Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris: Seuil, 1947), 34]). 65. My translation: “une connaissance objective, c’est-à-dire qui prétend à la rigueur et à l’universalité” (ibid.).

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66. This point is also made by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI): “At the heart of the historical-critical method lies the effort to establish in the field of history a level of methodological precision which would yield conclusions of the same certainty as in the field of the natural sciences. But what one exegete takes as definite can only be called into question by other exegetes. This is a practical rule which is presupposed as plainly and self-evidently valid” (‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’, First Things, 1988, https​:/​/ww​​w​.fir​​stthi​​ngs​.c​​om​/we​​b​-exc​​lusiv​​es​/20​​08​/04​​/bibl​​ ical-​​inter​​pr​eta​​tion-​​in​-cr​​isis). 67. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79. 68. My translation: “Mais si la méthode historico-critique est irremplaçable, elle peut et doit être rectifiée” (Ricoeur, ‘Esquisse de conclusion’, 292). 69. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, xv. 70. My translation: “J’appelle idéologie toute hypostase du texte qui procède de l’oubli de ses propres présuppositions” (Ricoeur, ‘Esquisse de conclusion’, 288). 71. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 266–67. 72. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, 138. 73. See Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984). 74. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 27. For more on the “dialectic of the similar and the dissimilar,” see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 100. 75. André LaCocque helpfully supplies the context and background of ancient laws and treaties in LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 71–88. 76. Peter Craigie, The Problem of War in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 58. 77. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 89. 78. Ibid., 137. 79. As James Barr says, “The use of concepts and categories taken from ‘without’ the Bible is both natural and necessary” (cited in Anthony C. Thiselton, Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980], 9). 80. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 24. 81. Ricoeur, ‘Conversation’, in David Aune and John McCarthy, eds., The Whole and Divided Self (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 240. Emphasis in original. 82. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, xii. 83. For biblical scholar Heikki Räisänen, this is the way things should be: “If we stop artificially maintaining the bond between exegesis and preaching, there is no reason why there should be a problem in presenting ‘negative’ results” (cited in Seth Heringer, ‘Forgetting the Power of Leaven: The Historical Method in Recent New Testament Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 [February 2014]: 90). 84. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 158. 85. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92. 86. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 26.

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87. Ibid., 29. 88. Ibid., 30. For more on the “dialectical nature of the correlation between objectivity and subjectivity,” see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. David Pellauer and Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 339. 89. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 42. 90. My translation: “Nous lecteurs . . . ne sommes donc pas dans une relation de sujet à objet, mais d’être historique à être historique. . . . L’enveloppement historique du texte et du lecteur est la condition même de l’objectivation et de la distanciation mises en œuvre par toute méthode analytique et critique” (Ricoeur, ‘Esquisse de conclusion’, 291–92). 91. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 332. 92. Ibid., xi. 93. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reply to David Stewart’, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Hahn, Vol. 22, The Library of Living Philosophers (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 448. 94. Ibid., 449. 95. Barnabas Aspray, ‘“Scripture Grows with Its Readers”: Doctrinal Development from a Ricoeurian Perspective’, Modern Theology 35, no. 4 (2019): 757. 96. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, 213. 97. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 291. 98. Ibid., 265. 99. Augustine, Quaestiones Evangeliorum, II, 19 100. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 267. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 276. 103. Ibid., 299. 104. Ibid., 299n38. 105. Ibid., 284. 106. David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 110.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aspray, Barnabas. ‘“Scripture Grows with Its Readers”: Doctrinal Development from a Ricoeurian Perspective’. Modern Theology 35, no. 4 (2019): 746–59. Aune, David, and John McCarthy, eds. The Whole and Divided Self. New York: Crossroad, 1997. Barton, John. ‘Historical-Critical Approaches’. In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, edited by John Barton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Blomberg, Craig. ‘The Historical-Critical/Grammatical View’. In Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012.

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Bockmuehl, Markus. Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Briggs, Richard S. ‘What Does Hermeneutics Have to Do with Biblical Interpretation?’ The Heythrop Journal 47, no. 1 (1 January 2006): 55–74. Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. Carter, Craig. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018. Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Fortress Press, 1979. Craigie, Peter. The Problem of War in the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978. Davaney, Sheila Greeve. Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Edited by Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Selected Works 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Dornisch, Loretta. ‘The Book of Job and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics’. Semeia 19 (1981): 3–21. Dufrenne, Mikel, and Paul Ricoeur. Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence. Paris: Seuil, 1947. Earl, Douglas S. Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture. Winona Lake: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Freyne, Sean. Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. Grant, Robert M., and David Tracy. A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press, 1984. Hahn, Scott, and Benjamin Wiker. Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300–1700. New York: Crossroad, 2013. Harrisville, Roy, and Walter Sundberg. The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Hays, Christopher M., and Christopher B. Ansberry. ‘Faithful Criticism and a Critical Faith’. In Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, edited by Christopher B. Ansberry and Christopher M. Hays, 204–22. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013. Hays, Richard B. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. London: SPCK, 2015. Heringer, Seth. ‘Forgetting the Power of Leaven: The Historical Method in Recent New Testament Theology’. Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 (February 2014): 85–104. ———. Uniting History and Theology: A Theological Critique of the Historical Method. Lanham: Fortress Academic, 2018. Jasper, David. A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Jeanrond, Werner G. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. London: SCM Press, 1994.

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Jenkins, Allan, and Patrick Preston. Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth Century Crisis of Authority. Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. LaCocque, André, and Paul Ricoeur. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Laughery, Gregory. Paul Ricoeur & Living Hermeneutics: Exploring Ricoeur’s Contribution to Biblical Interpretation. Milton Keynes: Destinée, 2016. Legaspi, Michael C. The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. ‘What Ever Happened to Historical Criticism?’ Journal of Religion & Society 9 (2007): 1–11. Maier, Gerhard. Das Ende der historisch-kritischen Methode. Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1974. Moberly, R. W. L. The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Morrow, Jeffrey L. ‘The Acid of History: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the Separation of Faith and Reason in Modern Biblical Studies’. Heythrop Journal 58, no. 2 (2017): 169–180. Neill, Stephen, and Tom Wright. The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861– 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Oldenhage, Tania. Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship after the Holocaust. Parables for Our Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Provan, Iain W. The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’. First Things, 1988. https​:/​/ww​​w​.fir​​stthi​​ngs​.c​​om​/we​​b​-exc​​lusiv​​es​/20​​08​/04​​/bibl​​ical-​​inter​​pret​a​​tion-​​in​-cr​​ isis. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Du conflit à la convergence des méthodes en exégèse biblique’. In Exégèse et herméneutique, edited by Xavier Léon-Dufour. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. ———. ‘Esquisse de conclusion’. In Exégèse et herméneutique, edited by Xavier Léon-Dufour. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. ———. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. ———. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Edited and translated by John Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. History and Truth. Translated by Charles Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. ———. ‘Intellectual Autobiography’. In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, edited by Lewis Hahn. Chicago: Open Court, 1995. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.

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———. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by David Pellauer and Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. ‘Reply to David Stewart’. In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, edited by Lewis Hahn, Vol 22. The Library of Living Philosophers. Chicago: Open Court, 1995. ———. The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. The Reality of the Historical Past. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984. ———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon, 1969. ———. Time and Narrative. Translated by David Pellauer. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. Time and Narrative. Translated by David Pellauer. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism. Translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schneiders, Sandra M. The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture, Second Edition. 2nd ed. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999. Simpson, James. Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents. Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. Spinoza, Benedict. Theological-Political Treatise. Edited by Jonathan Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Thiselton, Anthony C. ‘Biblical Studies and Theoretical Hermeneutics’. In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, edited by John Barton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. Watson, Francis. Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. ———. Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994. Westphal, Merold. ‘The Philosophical/Theological View’. In Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012. Wilder, Amos N. Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in the Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. Wrede, William. The Origin of the New Testament. Translated by James Hill. London: Harper & Brothers, 1909. ———. ‘The Tasks and Methods of New Testament Theology’. In The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter, translated by Robert Morgan. London: SCM. Press, 1973. ———. Über Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten Neutestamentlichen Theologie. 1897. Reprint, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009. Zimmermann, Jens. Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An IncarnationalTrinitarian Theory of Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.

Chapter 4

Biblical Hermeneutics, the Art of Interpretation, and Philosophy of the Self A Tribute to Paul Ricoeur and Paul Beauchamp Alain Thomasset, S.J.

My first objective is to show that biblical hermeneutics inspires the contemporary art of textual interpretation, especially in the way we understand the interaction between the “world of the text” and the “world of the reader.” In this sense, the art of interpretation is not only the science of “explanation” of the meaning of the text but also the “understanding” of the impact of the text in our lives. With reference to the works of Paul Ricoeur and Paul Beauchamp, I will show how interpretation addresses the configuration of the plot of our lives and how it contributes to form our moral identity and our self-understanding in history and memory. Secondly, I will indicate how biblical hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics of the subject are deeply intertwined. There is the influence of the Christian traditions on hermeneutics, but also a complex relationship of mutual inclusion between them. BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AS A PARADIGMATIC HERMENEUTICS Reading of Texts and the Transforming Power of Imagination Myths and literature in general are bearers of possible worlds. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory demonstrates the central role of the category of “world of the text.” Far from the Romantic ideal, which was to coincide with the 75

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author’s psyche, but also far from the Structuralist ideology, which sees the text only as a structure of meaning without references, Ricoeur’s theory insists on the dialectic between “distanciation” through the phenomenon of writing and “appropriation” through the act of reading. Language, especially in fiction, abolishes the direct reference to reality, for example the historical world of the writer, but opens the path for second-level references where “reality” is not just handling things but “being-in-the-world,” a world in which we can live. To interpret a text is to make explicit the sort of “beingin-the-world” which is proposed in front of the text and not behind it.1 It is my conviction that the decisive feature of hermeneutics is the capacity of world-disclosure yielded by texts. Hermeneutics is not confined to the objective structural analysis of texts or the subjective existential analysis of the authors of texts; its primary concerns are with the worlds which these authors and texts open up. It is by an understanding of the worlds, actual and possible, opened by language that we may arrive at a better understanding of ourselves.2

“To understand is to understand ourselves in front of the text,” Ricoeur often says. To be exposed to the text and receive from it a wider self is to have an existence that is the most appropriate response to a world proposed to us. If we specifically consider narratives, they are related to the dimensions of time and history. So they bear the poetic power to disclose new forms of human existence in time and of human community. Elsewhere, I have explained how Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory, linked to the theory of action and narratives, enables us to speak about a “poetic of morals.” Narratives inform our lives and transform them because they propose to us new attitudes toward time and history. They also give us new ways to make connections among the actions of our lives, through the ethical laboratory of imagination.3 The exegete and theologian Paul Beauchamp confirms and prolongs this theory in his own work. He and Paul Ricoeur inspired each other.4 The former, in his book Lun et l’autre Testament,5 argues that the biblical corpus falls under three headings derived from the rabbinic tradition: “the Law,” “the Prophets” and the “other writings,” often designated as “Wisdom.” Rather than literary styles, this division reflects three forms of relationship between “word” and “writing.” They are three steps in the construction of the Book, which are oriented toward the unity of both testaments and the closure of the Book. For Beauchamp, this study of the biblical “stylistics,” that is, the link between text and experience can be understood as a “phenomenology of a conscience in history.”6 For our study, it is important to note that these writings inspire different attitudes toward time and events. To put it briefly, the Law, which reminds us of the origins and of the salutary deeds of

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God, establishes a foundation in past time and inspires our confidence in the action of God. Prophets, on the other hand, emphasize the present time and the necessity of our immediate conversion. Wisdom establishes the permanence of time during daily life, out of narratives and history. It opens to the universality of creation and to the dialogue across cultures. So the conscience of the people of God changes in the course of history. Moreover, the variety of temporality—anteriority, actuality, permanence—is worked by an internal dynamics which enable these writings to converge toward the outside of the Book and toward the future. For Beauchamp the form that matches this telos is the Apocalyptic style. Here is the place for the New Testament to come and for the Book to open itself toward us and toward the creation of a new people. Beauchamp expresses the transforming power of the biblical text through the mediation of imagination, for which Ricoeur provides us with tools to understand: “Biblical texts, in fact, don’t prepare decision for us, neither do they contain oracles for our practical action. Rather they build for us a “world” in midst of which we make our own decisions; they draw a horizon. Our decision is not directly dependent upon our reading, but after reading, we are no longer the same. So we decide differently.”7 READING AS CONVERSION OF THE SELF The poetic power of language and the concept of interaction between text and reader could be related to religious concepts or experiences. However, this is not so easy. There is a subtle dialectic between poetry and religious experience or language, between modern hermeneutics and the Christian tradition. Before developing this dialectic, I will show some of the influences of religious experience on the analysis of the effects of reading. The experience of conversion undergone through the reading of the Bible provides the philosopher and the social scientist with a scheme of thought. When Ricoeur says “no methodological a priori can prevent the philosopher who has had his eyes opened [by the narrative of the Fall] to interpret human existence from the perspective of Fall,”8 he indicates how religious myths and symbols give rise to thought for the philosopher. The role of poets is to open our eyes to some hidden or obscure realities. Biblical reading and symbolic interpretation may open our eyes to new worlds: eschatological views, a sense of origins, considerations on evil, etc. They also open our minds to new types of reasoning. Hermeneutics and literary criticism found one of their sources in biblical exegesis, from the different traditions of the rabbis of Israel and the Church Fathers. But the most powerful tradition could be the wider experience of reading the Hebrew people’s history and the life of Jesus.

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When Augustine in the Confessions explains his conversion and the “tolle, lege,” “take and read,” he opens a great series of interpretations of the experience of conversion. The narrative of Jesus suddenly breaks into someone’s life. It opens new realities that enable him to make sense of his life and to take decisions. The spiritual experience that relates the two narratives—the life of Jesus and each of our lives—is an example of a broader experience of the effects of reading. It is a paradigmatic experience that has a profound influence on Western culture and on the science of interpretation. Strictly speaking, it is a Jewish and a Christian tradition rather than a Catholic one. Reading can be the occasion for conversion. We can draw a line from Saint Anthony and Saint Augustine through Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Paul Claudel, and Raïssa Maritain, to Edith Stein. This line is like a genealogy of readers. Augustine was in the garden of Alypius’s house when suddenly, having just heard Ponticianus telling how he met by chance the book on Anthony’s life and thought about embracing the same type of life, he cries out. His reading of neo-Platonic books had already opened his mind to the search for an incorporeal truth, but this time the blow is too strong. And now, I heard a voice coming from the neighbour’s house—or more certainly, from the divine House, anyway from outside—telling and repeating frequently with a voice similar to that of a boy or girl I don’t know: “Take, read; take, read.” Coming back, Augustine picks up the book of the Apostle he had put down, opens it and silently reads the verses 13 and 14 of Romans, chapter XIII.9

Theresa of Avila, reading the Confessions, re-lives the garden scene: While I began reading the Confessions, I believed I recognized myself . . . When I arrived at his conversion and read how he heard this voice in the orchard, it seemed to me that the Lord made me hear this voice as well, according to the feeling of my heart. I stayed a long moment submerged by my tears, deeply afflicted and dejected.10

And when Edith Stein opens the Autobiography of Theresa, she says: “I was overcome with it, and I read it at one go. As I shut it, I was telling myself: “This is the truth.” Reading opens up the way to other experiences. When Paul Claudel received his famous illumination in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, he was already prepared for it by his reading of the poet Rimbaud, six months before. “For the first time, these books opened a crack in my materialist jail,” he says. Raïssa Maritain received this illumination through Plotinus:

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One summer day, in the countryside, I was reading the Enneads. I was seated on my bed, the book on my knees. When I arrived at one of those numerous passages where Plotinus speaks about the soul and God . . . a stroke of enthusiasm drilled my heart. In an instant I was kneeling on the floor before the book, covering the page I had just read with passionate kisses, my heart burning with love.11

Reading can be this fleeting moment where the voice of the Word (Verbum) appears through the silence of the words. This moment of a cleavage in history, dividing into a crisis and cutting an incurable wound, is a visitation from God. The reading will have to go further, in the silence of this interior sanctuary. Going back to this place of the heart is where what is known by the heart from the beginning is recognized. “Intimior intimo meo.”12 This tradition where reading can become a spiritual reading forms a kind of chain of readers who are also writers. Tolle, lege—take, read—replies to the first sentence of the Soliloquies: the same inspiration summons to read and write, but through the mediation of life. The act of reading finds its fulfilment in the conversion of life. “Lectio transit in mores,” says Erasmus. And this action calls forth new writings. Between “word” (la parole) and “writing” (l’écriture), a hermeneutical circle takes place. Philosophical hermeneutics helps us to define it. Bible reading provides a paradigmatic example. In the Book of books, prophets and wise men are always rereading the foundational texts of Israel to understand their own situation and write the necessity of the moment in a new way. So do Daniel, Jeremiah, the authors of the Wisdom, and the Evangelists. So do we. Paul Beauchamp used to say “it is because biblical texts speak to one another that they speak to us.” BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE SELF A Triple Articulation According to Ricoeur, there are various types of articulation between biblical hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics, between Bible reading and philosophy of the self. I would like to explain these relations that Ricoeur himself is often reluctant to make explicit. I would also like to give an example of this articulation through some analysis of Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre)13 and the commentaries on Paul Beauchamp’s work, L’un et l’autre Testament. Tome 2.14 The first articulation is methodological. Biblical hermeneutics first appears as a regional hermeneutics, an application of general hermeneutics to a specific corpus of texts. The Bible is a text, a poem of existence among other texts. The analysis of the structure, the research into the semiotic sense, into

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the vocabulary paradigms, into the narrative plot and so on are the same techniques as those applied to any text. But it is precisely while treating biblical texts as any ordinary text that the relationship between the two hermeneutics is overturned little by little. Through these studies, biblical hermeneutics presents such original characteristics that, finally, philosophical hermeneutics is integrated as its own organon. The specificity of the religious language remains in the naming of God, which is at the same time the coordinator of the different types of discourse and the index of their nonachievement. In the same way, the word “Christ” gathers all these religious significations in a central symbol of a loving sacrifice, a gift of love. The uniqueness of biblical hermeneutics rests in the solidarity between the name of God and this meaning—event preached as Resurrection. Biblical language looks toward an existence taken in its totality and invites a radical metamorphosis. It informs our imagination and our existence through the figurative presentation of our liberation.15 The second type of exchange between biblical faith and philosophy is existential and practical. We know that in his “small Ethics” developed in Oneself as Another,16 Ricoeur tries to combine a teleological perspective (which he calls ethics) and a deontological approach (which he calls morals). He shows the primacy of ethics over morals, the necessity for ethics to go through the filter of the moral norms and finally the necessity for practical moral judgments to become practical wisdom. This “phronesis” has to retrieve the resources of the ethical intentions in order to be able to confront moral conflicts. The ethical decision in context must articulate a subtle dialectic between the universality of rational argumentation and the singularity of the well-considered motivations and convictions. Among other convictions, the religious representations of what the good life is enter into relation with the argumentation of the philosopher and the social scientist. Religion touches the “regeneration” of the will (as Kant already shows), but also the creative capacity of imagination. Therefore, the exchanges between faith and philosophy are signs of a deeper dialectics between the poetics of existence (which responds to the text as poem) and rational argumentation, which consists in linking logical propositions. Fundamental attitudes raised by the biblical world (such as agape, love, or forgiveness) enter into dialogue with the ethical categories (such as justice or punishment). If ethics is the theory of the mediations through which we fulfil our desire to be, our effort to exist, then an ethical interpretation of poetic and religious discourse has no reductive effects. It opens, on the contrary, a fruitful dialogue between ethics and hermeneutics. The concept, once more, is on the side of a philosophical ethics, whether we conceive ethics in terms of norms, values, institutions, or in terms of creativity, free expression, permanent revolution, etc. Now these

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concepts are empty without their indirect presentation in symbols, parables, and myths. It is the task of hermeneutics to disentangle from the “world” of the texts, their implicit “project” for existence, their indirect “proposition” of new modes of being. These intuitions are blind, to the extent that ethical concepts are empty. Hermeneutics has finished its job when it has opened the eyes and the ears, i.e., when it has displayed before our imagination the figures of our authentic existence. It is the task of ethics to articulate its coherent discourse by listening to what the poets say.17

The third dialectical relation between biblical faith and hermeneutics, and philosophical hermeneutics is more conceptual and speculative. Religious thought, which is figurative, has, through its own dynamism, a speculative power. In theology, many concepts have been borrowed from neo-Platonic or Aristotelian philosophies. Philosophy, on the other hand, borrowed from theology and religious discourses themes such as the problem of the origin and end of life, and the question of evil and suffering. The religious symbolism of evil, for example, raises the question of evil in the world for thought. This phenomenon is one of the fundamental sources of the present condition of western culture. Even if today there is no question of returning to the ontotheological mode of thinking, the relationship between religious symbols, representations, myths, and narratives, on the one hand, and an open conceptual type of thinking, on the other hand, is still relevant. Could we not say that the ‘empty’ requirement of an Unconditioned finds a certain fulfilment in the indirect presentations of metaphorical language, which, as we said, does not say what things are, but what they are like? It is because Kant had no idea of a language which would not be empirical, that he had to replace metaphysics by empty concepts. But if we give to poetic language the function of redescription through fictions, then we can say that the logical space opened by Kant between Denken and Erkennen, between “‘Thought’ and ‘Knowledge’” is the place of indirect discourse, of symbol, parables, and myths, as the indirect presentation of the Unconditioned.18

In his own way, Paul Beauchamp uses the same type of dialectic. When he speaks about the interrelations between “Writing” and “Word” in the Bible, he says that he wants to treat “word” and “scripture” as a human adventure. The biblical use of these terms is included in this practice. “To be disposed in such a way toward literature in general is what guarantees the Bible the most favourable and the most complete reception. Without the dignity (the nobility) of the scriptures there would be neither Holy Scriptures, nor inspired Book, if the book as such had not such a great destiny.”19

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Finally, the relationship between biblical and philosophical hermeneutics raises the question of truthfulness or falseness. If biblical texts are good mediators of religious experiences, they may also lead to false fantasy, or merely reinforce ideologies. Are we able to distinguish between deceptive interpretations of these texts and true ones? Though it is not possible to entirely refute this objection in the space of this article, I would like to address it briefly. First, a true interpretation respects the text. It is always the text (through the different means of analysis and then through our interpretation of it) that finally enables us to say something about it. It enables but never justifies. We could “falsify” an interpretation and show how, for example, this interpretation fails to respect the structure of the text, but we will never be able to “prove” it to be the right one. Second, and this is linked to the former point, our faith presents itself with a hermeneutical status. It is an interpretation about the meaning of our life and of the life of the man named Jesus. Biblical hermeneutics is not only a technical operation but also a process of unveiling existential meanings that presupposes the commitment of the reader. It is a form of attestation. It is consequently always under the threat of suspicion and remains a living process. Interpretation presents itself with a criterion of (relative) truthfulness when it is able to enlighten other texts or to illuminate the life of other persons. Examples of biblical readings given above illustrate this. Third, biblical faith (and therefore true biblical interpretation) can never be reduced to an alternative between ideology and utopia. These two figures of social representation are linked together as two dimensions of social imagination: the reproductive and the creative. However, biblical faith can be recognized in its truth as being able to overcome this division.20 THE STRUCTURE OF “IPSE” AS BEINGCALLED AND THE “SELF CONVOKED” IN BIBLICAL VOCATION TEXTS Finally, I suggest looking at some structural analogies between the philosophy of the self as developed in Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another and the type of subject disclosed in the biblical vocation narratives. My intention is not to theologize Ricoeur’s thought, but to point out a significant parallel that is due not to chance but to the fundamental question of how we treat anthropology. At the end of his major work, Ricoeur substantially maintains his concept of the otherness of consciousness. According to him, it cannot be reduced either to the Heideggerian facticity of being-in-the-world (which is, for the author, too much in sameness), or to the Levinasian exteriority of the other’s face (which seems to be too much in otherness). For Ricoeur we have to

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consider a third way: “the being-called as a structure of the ipse.”21 Otherness dwells in the self in the style of a call. This anthropological position is coherent with the description of the self as it appears in the interpretation of the prophetic vocation narratives made elsewhere by Ricoeur himself.22 For him, the relation that links the description of the symbolic world of the Bible and the determination of the self that understands itself in front of the text, is a relation between a call and a response. That is why he uses the term “self convoked” to express the fact that the “self is constituted and defined by its position of responding to the propositions of meaning coming from the symbolic web [of the Bible].”23 In his criticism of Ricoeur’s book Oneself as Another, Marc Richir pointed out cleverly that the last pages of this work take a strong philosophical position on the question of God.24 Certainly faithful to his philosophical agnosticism, Ricoeur does not want to say who is this Other at the source of this call.25 Nevertheless, Richir is right to say that this position cannot escape “suspicion” and has to assume the treatment of the question of God in philosophical thought. It means that the question of God (or at least openness to transcendence) is at stake in the type of anthropology developed in Oneself as Another. Anthropology and biblical hermeneutics correspond to one another, even if Ricoeur wants to keep them separated. In the same way, the biblical theology developed in the works of Paul Beauchamp is an example of unveiling (and not a foundation) of the anthropology of the self. Concerning the wedding significance of the Song of the Songs, for example, Beauchamp refuses to choose between the truth of the story of God with humanity and the anthropological truth. “The Bible speaks about the love of God within the love between man and woman. It even chooses this path with insistence.”26 Be the couple divine or human, no matter. “There is something else here. What is divine, in this couple, is what happens between one and the other, the relationship itself.”27 Nothing is more fundamental than this intertwining between the love of God and the love of the others to signify the mutual influence between Christian tradition of Bible reading, hermeneutics and philosophy of the self. NOTES 1. See Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in Philosophy Today 17 (1973): 129–141. 2. Paul Ricoeur, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds” (Dialogue with Richard Kearney), in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 490. 3. See my Paul Ricoeur. Une poétique de la morale (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996).

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4. Beauchamp and Ricoeur influenced each other. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of the text certainly helped Beauchamp to overcome the limits of structuralist analysis and to establish a link between biblical interpretation and existential attitude. On the other hand, Ricoeur states that Beauchamp is the exegete who most inspired him lately, especially by his understanding of the unity of the Bible through the process of fulfilment and the interrelations between the three fundamental writings: Law, Prophets, and Wisdom. The complicity between both authors appeared clearly during the session in honor of Paul Beauchamp that took place in Paris, Centre Sèvres, in October 1995, though they did not have any direct contact for many years. In this session, Ricoeur gave a very laudatory interpretation of Beauchamp’s book, L’un et l’autre Testament. Tome 2. Accomplir les Ecritures (Paris: Seuil, 1990). More recently, Ricoeur prefaced the last book of Beauchamp (Testament biblique) and wrote: “I am happy to write these lines in honour of an explorer of the Bible who dedicated himself, as a professional exegete, to ‘think the Bible’, as I tried myself to do as a mere amateur reader. We met together in this passion: we have been guided by the conviction that the writers of the Book ‘thought’ of themselves in an other sense than the Greeks did, namely in the non-speculative modes of narrative, law, prophecy, wisdom saying and apocalyptic expression.” I would like to dedicate this article to Paul Beauchamp who died last year and who helped me so much to understand the relationship between biblical interpretation and ethical perspectives. 5. P. Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament. Essai de lecture. Tome1 (Paris: Seuil, 1976). 6. Ibid., 138. 7. Paul Beauchamp, Parler d'Écritures saintes (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 63. 8. P. Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté I. Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 27–28. 9. Thérèse d’Avila, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964), 62. 10. Ibid. 11. For all this, I am indebted to François Marxer, “La conversion par la lecture,” Christus 187, juillet 2000: pp. 273–283. 12. Ibid. 13. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 14. Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament 2. Accomplir les Ecritures, Coll. « Parole de Dieu » (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 15. See Paul Ricoeur, "Philosophical hermeneutics and theological hermeneutics,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 5 (1975–1976): 14–33; “Naming God,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, n°4 (1979): pp. 215–228. 16. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, studies 7, 8, 9. 17. Paul Ricoeur, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975): p. 144. 18. Ibid., 142–143. 19. Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament. Tome 2, 97. 20. Indeed, the process of secularization tends to assimilate biblical faith either to ideology or to utopia, depending on its context and its social impact. However, we have to consider ideology not only in the pejorative sense of the distortion of reality,

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but also in the positive sense of the legitimization and constitution of a community. The same is true for utopia, which is not only a fantasy and a dangerous dream, but also an imaginative critique of the established order. In the course of history, Christian faith sometimes presents ideological figures, sometimes utopian ones. The same is true of the interpretations we make of biblical texts. They either could reinforce the current authority, contribute to defining the identity of the group, or they could be used as imaginative variations on power and fundamental critiques of “order.” Very often, in the course of events, it is not possible to know if a thought is ideological or utopian, because ideology and utopia are deeply linked. Only history can discern afterward, according to the fruits they have borne. We have to realize that the everlasting dialectic between ideology and utopia is insurmountable. This is due to the fact that they present two complementary figures of imagination: the reproductive dimension and the creative one. Is that to say that our interpretations are enclosed in this oscillation between ideology and utopia? It is the way biblical faith emerges at the surface of history, but Ricoeur claims, “Its ultimate constitution is the denial of this dichotomy itself.” Faith is rooted deeper than this historical alternative of secularization, because “the root of the faith is somewhere near the point where Expectation springs forth out of Memory” [P. Ricoeur, “L’herméneutique de la sécularisation. Foi, idéologie, utopie,” Archivio di Filosofia, II (1976), 66]. The remembrance of epochmaking events, such as Exodus or the Resurrection, is also the moment where hope arises with the coming of the Kingdom of God. As we have seen with Beauchamp, the Bible connects Law, which makes sense of the past, and Prophecy, which shatters the security coming out from the past. The creative and reproductive powers of imagination never emerge as such in history but always through their caricatures. Therefore, the truthfulness of biblical hermeneutics cannot receive any other confirmation than the possibility to overcome this struggle by presenting at the same time the dimension of constitution of the community and the dimension of counter-cultural hope. 21. cf. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 409. 22. For example, Paul Ricoeur, “Le sujet convoqué. A l'école des récits de vocation prophétique,” Revue de l'Institut Catholique de Paris, n° 28 (1988): 83–99, or “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” in J. F. Courtine, P. Ricoeur, J. L. Chrétien, M. Henry, J. L. Marion, Phénoménologie et Théologie (Paris: Critérion, 1992). 23. “Le sujet convoqué. A l'école des récits de vocation prophétique,” op. cit., 83. This lecture was originally the last one in the series of Gifford Lectures published as Oneself as Another. But this book doesn’t include the last two lectures having a more religious tone. So we have to interpret this article as simultaneously in continuity and in rupture with Oneself as Another. 24. Marc Richir, “Paul Ricoeur: Soi-même comme un autre,” in Annuaire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 41–63, especially pp. 58–63. 25. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 409–410. 26. Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre testament. Tome 2, 191. Ricoeur commented on this passage in the session at Centre Sèvres in honour of Paul Beauchamp. This conference has been published as “Hommage à Paul Beauchamp,” Médiasèvres, 1996. 27. Paul Beauchamp, ibid., p. 191.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Beauchamp, Paul. L’un et l’autre Testament. Essai de lecture. Tome1 (Paris: Seuil, 1976). Beauchamp, Paul. L’un et l’autre Testament. Tome 2. Accomplir les Ecritures (Paris: Seuil, 1990). Beauchamp, Paul. Parler d’Écritures saintes (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 63. “Hommage à Paul Beauchamp,” Paris: Médiasèvres, 1996. Marxer, François. “La conversion par la lecture.” Christus 187, juillet 2000: pp. 273–283. Richir, Marc. “Paul Ricoeur: Soi-même comme un autre,” in Annuaire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 41–63, especially pp. 58–63. Ricoeur, Paul. “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975): p. 144. Ricoeur, Paul. “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” in J. F. Courtine, P. Ricoeur, J. L. Chrétien, M. Henry, J. L. Marion, Phénoménologie et Théologie (Paris: Critérion, 1992). pp. 15–39. Ricoeur, Paul. “L’herméneutique de la sécularisation. Foi, idéologie, utopie,” Archivio di Filosofia, II (1976), pp. 49–68. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in Philosophy Today 17 (1973): 129–141. Ricoeur, Paul. “Le sujet convoqué. A l’école des récits de vocation prophétique,” Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, n° 28 (1988): 83–99. Ricoeur, Paul. L’un et l’autre Testament. Tome 2. Accomplir les Ecritures (Paris: Seuil, 1990). Ricoeur, Paul, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds” (Dialogue with Richard Kearney), in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 482–490. Ricoeur, Paul. “Naming God,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, n°4 (1979): pp. 215–228. Ricoeur, Paul. “Philosophical hermeneutics and theological hermeneutics,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 5 (1975–1976): 14–33. Ricoeur, Paul. Philosophie de la volonté I. Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950). Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil). Ricoeur, Paul. Une poétique de la morale (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996). Thérèse d’Avila, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964).

Chapter 5

From a Called to a Responsive Self Ricoeur and Prophecy Timo Helenius

In Thinking Biblically, Ricoeur studies Old Testament texts with André LaCocque, whose exegetical work is complemented with Ricoeur’s hermeneutic analyses equally as much as these analyses are complemented with LaCocque’s scholarly historical-critical insight. One text in particular stands out in a dramatic fashion: the discussion concerning the prophetic text of Ezekiel. The text itself is intriguing in its call for a new formation and a reanimated mode of living by way of “the return to the beginning”1 in the new Jerusalem. In LaCocque’s summation, “Ezekiel’s harsh judgment upon his contemporaries and their past history is balanced by a message of renewal in which the prophet exploits all the resources of a visionary poet, harbinger of the apocalyptic genre.”2 The apo-calypse (ἀποκάλυψις) or the unveiling is precisely that “the new beginning springs from the grave,”3 beyond all apparent failure, death, and cessation. This all is manifestly present in Ezekiel 37, in the dramatic and participatory revival of the dry bones, that is, as dead as they could be. Focusing his thought in the imagery of resurrection only in a secondary fashion, however, Ricoeur’s analysis on verses 37:1–14 brings out first the role of Ezekiel himself as the “sentinel of imminence.”4 The prophet’s role, according to Ricoeur, is to announce a judgment or a salvation that requires a confrontation with “a real, fundamentally dangerous and destabilizing history”5; destabilizing in the sense that the adopted security-providing traditions and historical framings prove out to be insecure and deviant from the traumatizing history of imminence. The prophet is the sentinel of an inaugurating intrahistorical history—a novel history beyond terrible disillusionment—that is in process and in the making. In short, “the end of history is the pathway to the new history.”6 The evident indetermination that comes from the veiled nature of the “exactly what” and the “exactly when” accompanies, however, 87

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this reanimating refiguration. One way to think about this is that “prophecy signifies without referring, without denoting.”7 Even as such, however, the prophecy yields a rereading of the past and casts the adopted assumptions in a completely new light. Following Ricoeur, we can think of this as an authentic recognition of the exposed situation in a historical narrative and in having the conditions of human existence. In short, authentic existence takes place in a narrative situation that admits of its nonfinality and its fragility. Encountering the other is the revelation, the terribilis that results in the ultimately hope-enduing need to reassess one’s situation in a manner that rewrites the narrative framing of both communal and personal existences. Put differently, the prophet stands for a human being who discovers his condition of needing to rely on the other that enables and facilitates the continuously needed reconfiguration or the authoring reading of one’s existence. Ricoeur’s words take their reference in the Hebrew Prophets: “here is where Ezekiel’s prophecy will be joined by that of Second Isaiah, which clearly opens to a truly universal history.”8 Confronting the other or to recognize the other—or, to recognize the condition of being recognized by the other—is the prophet’s precise task to the extent that he effectively makes an example of him or herself as an involuntary envoy of a terribly liberating encounter that sheds new light on human life as a life in quest of narrative. This thesis of prophets as sentinels of human imminence—which this essay will explore—is propaedeutically confirmed in Ricoeur’s treatment of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. As it comes to Ezekiel 37’s apparent theme of life beyond death, Ricoeur’s additional biblical point of reference is, perhaps surprisingly, The Song of Songs that nevertheless in an allegorical reading has many intertextual links with the prophetic texts of Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah; they all capitalize on the nuptial symbolism to describe the relation between God and God’s people.9 In his proposal for an “intersecting reading” of biblical passages that use the nuptial metaphor—that, in turn, is said to stand for the covenant—Ricoeur’s point is not merely methodological whereas it turns into an affirmation regarding his hermeneutics of the responsive self: If the places where we speak of love are so diverse, even dispersed, the figures of no one of them can be said to be superior to any other. They intersignify one another instead of arranging themselves in some hierarchy. May we not then suggest that what I have called the nuptial is the virtual or real point of intersection where these figures of love all cross? If such be the case, may we not then also say that the nuptial as such is an effect of reading, issuing from the intersecting texts, only because it is the hidden root, the forgotten root of the great metaphorical interplay that makes all the figures of love refer to one another?10

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Even though it is clear that Ricoeur’s comment warrants a number of deviating and disparate interpretations, his main proposal that “the nuptial as such is an effect of reading” brings out the imminent covenant between the text and the reader. In a similar fashion, Ricoeur’s treatment of prophet Ezekiel effectively highlights the process of reconfiguration that in some sense results in life beyond a kind of death in the reader’s imminent response to the revealed and effectuating Text. SUMMONED BY THE WORLD OF THE TEXT This essay will maintain its focus on Ricoeur and prophecy while studying the outlined reconfigurative imminence. Such double thought is present in Ricoeur’s writings that make a reference to scriptural material. In The Symbolism of Evil, for example, Ricoeur announces to dive deep in mythical expressivity for the sake of possibly finding something originary and forward-carrying: “Re-immersion in our archaism is no doubt the roundabout way by which we immerse ourselves in the archaism of humanity, and this double ‘regression’ is possibly, in its turn, the way to a discovery, a prospection, and a prophecy concerning ourselves.”11 In the name of a philosophical pursuit, it is therefore prudent to give a framing for what follows. I will continue, therefore, with a notion that grows out from the opening scene: the role of religion in Ricoeur’s thought. The summarily described turn from an understanding philosophical analysis (of a biblical text) to proposing the action-bound hermeneutics (of effective reading)—cited above—illustrates the philosopher Ricoeur’s general stance regarding religion. In short, Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion is based on three distinct and explicit presuppositions: First, that the religious constitutes a linguistic discourse. “Whatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language.”12 Second, this discourse is meaning-generating and carrying in that serves the dual purpose of community-building and communication; “either for the sake of self-understanding or for the sake of communication with others exterior to the faith community.”13 Third, the discourse is philosophical in the sense that it makes a claim for truth albeit in such a way that it challenges some other discourses such as the scientific ones. These three assumptions highlight Ricoeur’s general approach to religion, including his analyses on biblical scriptures that are explored through the notion of the “world of the text” and the redescription or the “imaginative variation”14 of reality it offers. To be clear, in applying this notion of imagination-based variation to biblical texts, Ricoeur “proposes to say that, for a philosophical approach, religious texts are kinds of poetic texts: they offer modes of redescribing life” in that

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they propose “a world that in the biblical language is called a new world, a new covenant, the kingdom of God, a new birth.”15 In significant ways, therefore, Ricoeur’s approach to scripture concerns their “prophetic” aspect of disclosing novel ways of being for the reader in front of the text. This exploration into the different aspects of reconfigurative hermeneutic process is also evident in Ricoeur’s discussion on the scriptural summons. His last two Gifford lectures, omitted from Oneself as Another,16 constitute “an inseparable whole”17 that at once highlights the dialectical, reflexive, and post-critical nature of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of reconfiguration. These lectures make it evident that the self becomes a self in the mirror of scriptures, and this results in the notion of the self as a summoned subject. Ricoeur’s angle of approach in these lectures is noteworthy in that they purposefully enter into a dialogue with the biblical, theological, and religious modes of discourse. In the analysis concerning the relation between a call and a response, Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation takes its material cues from the JudeoChristian scriptures while studying “how the self is instructed by the religious tradition.”18 This shift results in the question of Ricoeur’s possible move from philosophy to a religiously attuned mode of thought.19 The possible impression of adopting—counter to his explicit reservations— a faith-based approach is aggravated by the observation that even though it is “not at all” in his mind that “theology would provide the answer” to unresolved philosophical questions or challenges, Ricoeur nevertheless sets himself to explore the response to the call coming “from the Word.”20 Such statements can easily indicate of Ricoeur’s potential openness for adopting an extra-philosophical stance. The response Ricoeur has in mind is anthropological, however, in that it concerns “the self, which moves from being a self that is called to being a responsive self.”21 To phrase this differently, Ricoeur aims to give a phenomenological description of such a responsive self. Not therefore shying away from the religious but firmly committing himself as a philosopher willing to understand it instead, Ricoeur’s guiding thought for his phenomenological attempt is, in spite of his willingness to understand, to refuse to adopt “any apologetic attitude, whether it be intended to sing the praises of or to defend some profession of Jewish or Christian faith.”22 His stance is that religious traditions should be likened to other social institutions as they are never apart or isolatable from the “cultural milieu.”23 Moreover, the “call to which faith responds” is always conceptually mediated as it is “born within a setting of human experience and language.”24 This has not gone unnoticed by Ricoeur scholars. As Brian Gregor has put it, “it is important to remember that Ricoeur is doing philosophy rather than theology, even at those times when he appears to be entering theological territory.”25 For his part, David Stewart argues that it is the question of religious language that is at the heart of Ricoeur’s work.26 In his reply to Stewart, Ricoeur himself admits that

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“there is no doubt that the religious experience expressed in stories, symbols, and figures is a major source of my taste for philosophy.”27 Ricoeur’s personal motivations could be various, but his professional approach to studying the response to the summoning Word is decidedly philosophical. Beyond the question of language and other cultural institutions, it is ultimately the question of human self instructed and in-formed by these institutions—that it is in Ricoeur’s interest. Ricoeur’s emphasis lies on the summoned subject or on the subject as summoned by the world of the text. This is why we will need to be clear about the positive notion that the self is also reconfigured in the mirror of biblical scriptures. Given the philosophical framing, Ricoeur’s attention is focused on the experience (of faith) that is seeking an expression of and for itself—there is “an intimate union” between the two as an experience without an articulation would remain dull.28 More specifically, Ricoeur examines along the lines of Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another the con- and re-figurative aspects of self-understanding by using scriptural material: “the problem I want to pose is that of how the entirely original configuration of the biblical scriptures can refigure the self.”29 In short, Ricoeur contends that biblical narratives are cumulative and complementary to each other in the sense of building a discourse that by itself “aims at nothing outside itself”30; this is an exemplary configuration in its putting together a unique world of the text. The poetic discourse becomes a kerygmatic mirror, however, in assimilating the self with the discourse, that is, by way of appropriating its meanings at the subject’s level. Put differently, the scriptural aids the experience in its seeking for a (better or more suitable) expression of itself. In such process the self refigures itself in the light of the text, or understands itself better in front of the scripture by means of an innovative and tentative “imaginary unity”31 that is achieved by the self refiguratively identifying itself in and with the text and the imaginary unity cofiguratively produced in it; this is the responsive self Ricoeur explores. The fact that Ricoeur nevertheless uses scriptural material necessitates us to consider his relating analyses on narrative, prescriptive, and wisdom discourses in scriptures; this also furthers our exploration into Ricoeur’s philosophy regarding prophecy. Narration, for example, is coexistent with prophecy already in “the tradition that Moses was the unique narrator of the Pentateuch and that he was the prophet par excellence.”32 In spite of such strong reference to a religious tradition, Ricoeur’s philosophical attunement comes out in his request that “we should pay more attention to the things recounted than to the narrator and his prompter.”33 Rather than focusing on the divine source and the messenger, Ricoeur points out the narrative mode and structure of discourse. This can be put so that discourse is community-founding in that its events “mark an epoch and engender history” by way of “recounting themselves”34 and therefore also both facilitate and manifest the narrative

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structure of human (self-)understanding. In Ricoeur’s words, “a hermeneutic of revelation must give priority to those modalities of discourse that are most originary within the language of a community of faith; consequently, those expressions by means of which the members of that community first interpret their experience for themselves and for others.”35 This emphasis echoes Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics as developed in Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another, and Memory, History, Forgetting in particular. In short, we understand ourselves by weaving ourselves in a particular fabric of history. But that this self-understanding is not appropriation as immersion whereas it is always post-critical—“for a finite existence like ours, appropriation can only be a critical act”36—is figured in the image of the prophet who announces an interruption or even an overturn of the founding narration that places the structure of history (or self-understanding) in question and necessitates its thorough reevaluation. This can be seen in the Old Testament prophets “from Amos and Hosea to Zechariah,”37 and in a revised form from Jeremiah and Ezekiel to Second Isaiah.38 As the tradition does not merely look to the past but “also looks toward the future” in that “in founding the identity of the people, it projects itself toward the future in the form of an unuprootable confidence in a security that cannot fail,”39 the role of the prophet is to function as a catalyst for a thorough reevaluation of the illusory self-confidence in the permanence of the covenant that itself is the tradition. As the “polarity of tradition and prophecy”40 indicate, there is no security or finality in the continuing process of reconfiguration. Put metaphorically, the past has to be “divested of its founding function,” and the restoring “new covenant”—insofar as it is to come about—“is not written on stone but on hearts” as “Jeremiah and Ezekiel announce.”41 Ricoeur’s philosophical observation is that “the God of the exodus has to become the God of the exile in order to remain the God of the future and not only the God of memory.”42 The “tension between narrative and prophecy is exemplary”43 in that insofar as human life is a quest of narrative, this narrative is continuously construed in both reading and authoring it at the same time. The prescriptive or at least instructive aspect of narrative is thereby already available for our analysis. Continuing to use the Hebrew Bible as his point of reference, Ricoeur observes that “it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.”44 There is an integral connection between the instructive aspect and the community-founding narrative; the Law is rather a Covenant. Such understanding of a foundational relation between the community and the prescription also results in the prophetic proclamation “of a new relational quality”45 that is not merely external and nomological but internalized and, therefore, spiritual in the sense of a novel temperament and disposition. In this capacity the prophetic proclamation

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serves here to remind us of the need of (re)appropriation that Ricoeur analyses in Time and Narrative under the rubric of mimesis3 or refiguration.46 This is why such prophecy also engenders or borders wisdom discourse that “intends every person” not only in that in its themes “the misery and the grandeur of human beings confront each other,” but in that wisdom discourse culminates in “the overwhelming question of the sense or nonsense of existence.”47 Insofar as there is sense in existence, it relies on (re)appropriation that brings the process of reconfiguration into a semi-closure. Finally, another image pertaining to wisdom discourse adds to this analogy between Ricoeur’s analyses on scriptural discourses and his hermeneutic theory of threefold mimetic activity. Even though the sage does not claim to speak in the name of another—albeit still in the mode of having been divinely inspired—Ricoeur points out that the sage “does know that wisdom precedes him and that in a way it is through participation in wisdom that someone may be said to be wise.”48 Taking the image of a sage who is one due to knowing that the well of wisdom is unemptiable and that wisdom relies in a dynamic participatory relation, we are again instructed by this analogy of the process of reconfiguration through and in which we might find a “clearing” or a sunny break ourselves. THE ABSOLUTE IN EXPERIENCE Having clarified Ricoeur’s specific approach and use of scriptural texts as means of understanding, we might want to ask about the exemplarity of prophecy that Ricoeur manifestly stresses. Such questions lead us to Ricoeur’s final Gifford lecture “The Summoned Subject” in which he explores, just as he does more broadly in Oneself as Another and in The Course of Recognition, the notion of the self as a call and as a correlating response to becoming a self that recognizes him or herself as a subject summoned to ethico-political comportment. The self is never complete, but living the quest of becoming a consciousness with a conscience is already an effort to exist in a humane, or humaine, manner—this is the parcours de la reconnaissance. In “The Summoned Subject” this argument is made in reference to the scriptures that, according to Ricoeur, form “a symbolic grid—including the narrative dimension—by means of which the subject understands itself in the Jewish and Christian tradition.”49 Ricoeur’s quest, in short, is to identify those cultural mechanisms of self-recognition that facilitate life that can be called human; “the self constituted and defined by its position as respondent to propositions of meaning issuing from the symbolic network.”50 In the last Gifford lecture, Ricoeur’s interest is not, however, merely in the general cultural means but in the specific “symbolic ensemble” provided by the Judeo-Christian scriptural

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tradition. In this regard the prime figure exemplifying the responsive summoned subject is a prophet and his or her inner call or vocation. Ricoeur’s explanation for giving a prominent role to a prophet is threefold. First, the prophetic vocation or a prophet’s response to a call makes manifest the underlying dialogic structure that places God’s words and acts in relation to the human responses to them. Second, the Old Testament prophets such as Jeremiah or the Second Isaiah are mediators of an imminent judgmental turn in the lived historical continuum, or a new opening in its course. But third, the prophetic vocation or “the sorrowful career of the prophet”51 itself functions as an announcement of the suffering that comes along with the need to become a committed responsive self or to accept the quest of needing to continuously refigure one’s self. The prophet’s life is interrupted, he is an “exception, (. . .) uprooted from his condition, his place, his desire.”52 In short, the summoned subject is figured out in the prophetic narratives of vocation, or in the recounted monologues of the prophets: “The prophet is the figure of crisis. Through this crisis, he belongs to the people from whom he is withdrawn so as to be sent to them.”53 This is why the prophetic narratives constitute “the absolutely original paradigm”54 for the self that is summoned to find itself as a responsive one. A prophet is “individually designated,”55 but she asks her people to recall “their collective vocation.”56 A prophet is a summoned subject who has suneidesis or a collectively concerned conscience that evinces of the subject’s paradoxically individuating linkage to the collective57; “Conscience is fundamentally a principle of individuation rather than an instance of accusation and judgment.”58 The ultimate illuminating image in the figure of the prophet concerns, therefore, the acknowledged overall condition of human experience as a recipient of datum. The summoning other and the summoned are never in an equal footing but the relationship is always fundamentally asymmetrical. This comes clear, for example, in the images of Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In sum, Ricoeur maintains in the final 1986 Gifford lecture that a prophet is an archetypal figure of a responsive self. Even though such stance appears rather eccentric for a philosopher, Ricoeur has not avoided returning to it from time to time. Just as in The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur examines this theme sporadically in other long texts such as Critique and Conviction, and the essay “Sentinel of Imminence” pushes deep in the prophetic vision of Ezekiel as seen in our opening study.59 To be clear, Ricoeur also argues this in his 1972 essay “The Hermeneutics of Testimony” that adds to his analyses on response by extending it not only to the prophet but also to the respondents of the prophet’s testimony. Defining testimony as a story that is “found in an intermediary position between a statement made by a person and a belief assumed by another on the faith of the testimony of the first,”60 Ricoeur starts

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off with a generic account. In this sense the term “testimony” can be used a variety of ways, from juridical to historical and from rhetorical to its religious use. Even though the profane uses never cease to inform the application of the term, Ricoeur maintains that the religious registry brings an additional realm of meaning that recasts the secular ones. His key example of this is a prophet as a testimony-giving witness. As it then, in turn, comes to his own approach to the prophetic testimonies, Ricoeur retains a firmly methodological stance: “we will have recourse to the exegesis of testimony in the biblical prophets and in the New Testament. We will be forced by this new method to give an account of the change of meaning by which we pass from the ordinary sense of testimony to the prophetic and kerygmatic sense.”61 It is by this methodological approach that Ricoeur arrives at his observation that “the witness does not testify about isolated and contingent fact but about the radical, global meaning of human experience.”62 Human understanding, Ricoeur signals, is methodologically driven, and it finds enrichment or a better understanding in the dialectic of explanation and understanding (expliquer/comprendre). In other words, the self is responsive in that it responds to the call to make sense of what is sensed. Ricoeur’s reference to “human experience”—again, I should emphasize—warrants a brief pause. The apparent phenomenologically oriented observation is strengthened in Ricoeur’s datum-reminding remark that in the prophet’s case “the testimony does not belong to the witness,” whereas it is an expression of the given in that “it proceeds from an absolute initiative as to its origin and its content.”63 The point is that there is absolutely something in experience that, secondly, calls for an articulation, expression, or an expressive interpretation. Testimony testifies about an experience of the absolute. As Ricoeur puts it, “The absolute declares itself here and now. In testimony there is an immediacy of the absolute without which there would be nothing to interpret. This immediacy functions as origin, as initium, on this side of which we can go no further.”64 The word “testimony” can be read in this light as testifying of this condition that also binds phenomenology and hermeneutics together; “testimony” is on the path of interpretation that calls for further interpretation. “Testimony demands to be interpreted.”65 That “testimony” also grounds these interpretations is equally important, however; without the “testimony” about the absolute that appears in experience, interpretation would be “condemned to an infinite regress in a perspectivism with neither beginning nor end.”66 In sum, testimony functions as a verifying means for the self that reconfigures itself in front of the testimony about the experienced absolute. This really makes a prophet an exemplary figure of a responsive self; those heeding to her testimony should recognize their similar condition as recipients of datum.

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VISIONS OF ALTERITY Even though Ricoeur places emphasis on the prophetic testimony, his interest in testimony is not grounded religiously but philosophically. Giving credit to a prominent figure in reflexive philosophy, Ricoeur admits that he “was alerted” to the clarificatory potentiality of testimony “by a French philosopher whom I admire very much, Jean Nabert.”67 That Ricoeur is nevertheless open to consider the extra-philosophical aspects of his reflections and the implications of his thoughts sets up as prominent as provocative situation for us to explore. Summarily stated, the provocative thesis is that even though philosophy always remains at the side of immanence, it becomes a part of prophecy through the hermeneutics of its symbolic meaning—and vice versa. We will have to study this point more in depth. As it comes to the relation between prophecy and philosophy, the most illuminating texts are Ricoeur’s two essays in Lectures 3 on the scope of philosophy as possible prophecy. A brief disclaimer should be added here, however, as after a closer look we might find ourselves dissatisfied. Even though Ricoeur’s “Philosophie et prophétisme I & II” make an intriguing contribution in terms of their exciting point of reference—prophecy—they still keep their focus on philosophy. The first of the two essays, published in 1952, explores the contours and frontiers of philosophy, and asks what qualifies philosophical mode of thought and expression. The line of thought exemplifies Ricoeur’s detouring sense of being philosophical as he tries to extract the autonomically philosophical by focusing on the nonphilosophical sources of philosophy. The first of such sources is prophetism that critically tangents with the philosophies of existence: “the same historical phenomenon, Jewish prophetism, is on one hand a ‘type’ of non-philosophy and a ‘source’ of philosophical interrogation.”68 In spite of its clear difference from the Western philosophical ideals, the prophet nevertheless also explicates and makes manifest some fundamental aspects of existential thought. Counter to the philosophical avoidance of restricted thought that is exemplified by the theo-socially insisting prophetic visions, the prophet stands for the condition of being bound; “he is not a human being of liberty but that of necessity.”69 In Ricoeur’s thought, the prophet is a homme lié who only finds tragic possibilities in determined existence. Moreover, the prophet places the gravity of an unavoidable choice in front of her addressees: “Jahve or Baal, life or death, God or the human, good or evil, Being or Nothingness.”70 In existentially pertinent words, “the possibility of Nothingness, figured by the destruction, is the tragic possibility that stands alongside with human existence.”71 Furthermore, the prophet brings out the paradoxical bonds between universalism and historical particularity. As also philosophy points out, there can only be situated and engaged universalism for human beings.

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In spite of being “radically different,”72 both prophetic and philosophical thought share a visionary approach to the common and usual. The question of the “nonphilosophical” in philosophy can therefore be turned into asking about the philosophical in the “nonphilosophical.” Ricoeur’s view to this is, in his trademark fashion, again threefold. In the subsequent 1955 essay on philosophy and prophetism, he makes notes on the prophetic mode of existence, the relationship between prophetism and time, and the notion of universalism in relation to prophecy. That the question of existence should be so prominently highlighted is explained in Ricoeur’s continuing interest in the prophet’s standing as an exemplary of the human condition; the Covenant embraced by and with the prophet is a figure of the “dialogical relation that in the prophet achieves its degree of extreme virulence, dramatic contestation, and pain.”73 The prophetic dialogue between the violently informative Other and the human exposes the fragile human condition that in its reflective mode of understanding still relies on the prereflexive: “this dialogue exceeds all rationality by science and knowledge; biblical ‘knowledge’ is more carnal and conjugal than speculative and theoretical.”74 The existential question pertains to this aspect that escapes comprehension. The prophets, as all human beings, carry “the weight of an irrational election that has not been chosen, or sometimes even accepted.”75 In sum, prophetic existence exposes the scandalousness, subjugation, signification (existence signifiée), and singularity of human existence. This depiction is, however, only the surface of prophetic existence and to large extent repeats what we have already discussed in the opening of this essay. The philosophical of prophetism is substantially deepened in Ricoeur’s discussion on André Neher’s proposal of the various temporalities that correspond to different prophetic types. The claim is that they expose a variety of ways “to live time or to suppress it.”76 The prophetic is, first of all, bound to the ritual time conception that guards and stabilizes the cosmic order by both addressing human anxiety (l’angoisse de l’homme) in front of the cosmos, and celebrating the restoring mythical “original” agreement. But second, the notion of restoration and relating justice bring out a conception of human time that figures as accidental and disorderly in its dramatism and historicality; the cosmic (or the astronomical) order, in turn, is spatial and cyclical. The third time conception dives deep in the mystery of being, or that of the cosmic order, by losing a notion of time altogether as participation in the mystery seemingly overwhelms all temporalities and renders them inessential; so, at least, is viewed from within this conception of time. In Ricoeur’s words, ici le temps est refusé—“the time is declined.”77 The mystery claims to have no need for time. Lastly, the fourth time, conception that in Ricoeur’s notes accentuates particularly in the Jewish and Christian views brings out the paradoxical notion of living “in an instant of contemporaneity” while having

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lost the need for time: an eschatological time conception results in a faithful to be “already at the end; he is no longer waiting.”78 These four conceptions of time evince the ways how prophetism can at some level tie in with the philosophical problematizations of time; the breaking of common conception of time results in the need to existentially reassess one’s temporal standing. But that the temporal can furthermore be problematized79—not all time conceptions are prophetic in nature—brings out the fact that there remains a difference between the prophetic and the philosophical. This can be inferred from Ricoeur’s questions that challenge Neher’s analysis: “What does time signify [at the time] when the prophets no longer speak, when the Canon is closed, and which, in this sense, is post-biblical? How are all the times and all the post-biblical and extra-biblical stories to be understood by a ‘waiting,’ the prophetic waiting, which crosses us all, and already puts us in the past, while having gone past itself as an event?”80 These questions can be turned into one that asks for the possibility of universalism in the prophetic particularism—the Genesis flood narrative, for example, indicates as much of (s)election as it indicates of the universal hope. Moreover, the Hebrew davar cannot be equated with the Greek philosophical principle of Logos. At least according to Ricoeur’s contention, however, the relation between such particularism and universalism is “neither one of simple inclusion nor that of radical exclusion”81 as the matter concerns first the relation between the historical and the universal, second the similar general structure of prophetic or philosophical pursuit—“the Bible speaks about God, philosophy speaks about Being”82—and, third, the relation between beings and being. In both prophecy and philosophy, we will find a Principle behind their respective particular pursuits. Even though philosophy remains distinct and different from prophecy, it does not therefore escape Ricoeur’s attention that the Greek “subordination of being to the existence of the One who is absolutely brings us back from the divine to God, from philosophy to religion.”83 This is the view that Ricoeur holds promising; his exploration of the prophetic and the philosophical concludes with a radical question pertaining to notre propre existence or “our own existence”84 that can be illumined by both philosophy and prophetism. THE VEHICLES OF REVELATION Ricoeur’s phrase notre propre existence bring us yet again back to his philosophical quest, or his aim to spell out how one might begin to understand one’s self or one’s existence. Here another link with prophecy is, nevertheless, evident. In keeping with the idea of phenomenological datum, there will need to be a “revelation” that is then to be prophesied or taken as a prophecy.

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In Jean-Luc Marion’s terms this can be called the gift of givenness: “So much givenness, so much manifestation.”85 But in order to grasp something as a revelation, mere givenness is not enough whereas the revelation will need to be understood as one. Put differently, the phenomenology Ricoeur espouses is hermeneutical as we have already seen when focusing on Ricoeur’s analyses on testimony. For this reason it is good to be reminded that a key aspect of Ricoeur’s thought concerns existentially grounding poetic reconfiguration that can be studied by way of exploring polysemic semantic innovation or the innovative expression regarding the experienced. From The Symbolism of Evil to Time and Narrative in particular, Ricoeur analyzed various forms and modes of expression—symbolic, metaphoric, and narrative—through which the experiential ground of such expressivity could be acknowledged and indirectly approached. A central thought in his theory is that poetic imagination allows for an experience to be expressed by way of seeking either a novel or at least a suitable manner of expression; the polysemic character of language stands as a testimony to this originating use of linguistic expression as an outburst or a manifestation of an experiencing self. As Ricoeur writes in The Symbolism of Evil, a poetic image remains “a process for making present” as it is “much closer to a verb than to a portrait.”86 In sum, the poetic image enables (existentially revealing self-manifestation through) symbolization and semantification by bringing expressivity to experience that is thereby “made” present. These analyses also lead Ricoeur to explore speech “as revelation”87 in an existentially concerned phenomenologico-hermeneutical sense. We will need to be clear about this point as it integrally relates to his analyses on prophetic discourses; they are philosophically analyzable in reference to the “idea of a revelatory function of poetic discourse.”88 First, Ricoeur contends that it is discourse (parole), the correlate of poetico-productive expressivity, “in which the advancement of meaning occurs.”89 The creation of meaning utilizes mytho-poetic imaginary, but it realizes itself properly in “nascent speech,” or discourse in its state of finding expression (la parole à l’état naissant).90 Ricoeur, in other words, argues that productive poetic imagination not only enables existentially pertinent expression but creates meaning, or better, gives birth to the discourse that “speaks out” and reveals the otherwise mute or inarticulate human condition: My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject. Hence the function of poetic discourse is to bring about this emergence of a depth-structure of belonging-to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse.91

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In terms of the truth that could be assigned to such poetic revelations, it “no longer means verification, but manifestation, i.e., letting what shows itself be.”92 The poetic function of language is “a vehicle of revelation” in that “what shows itself is in each instance a proposed world, a world I may inhabit and wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities.”93 In sum, poetic revelation is an emergent “speaking out,” or an emergence of language, that discloses the depth-structures of human experience in its belongingness to the world it inhabits. Ricoeur argues along these lines that religiously accentuating the understanding of revelation also falls back to this experiential-expressive function: there are “those cardinal experiences, as language brings them to expression, which can enter into resonance or consonance with the modes of revelation brought to language by the most primitive expressions of the faith.”94 It also follows from the line of thought described above that, according to Ricoeur, religious revelation should not be reduced to “revealed [propositional] truths” or to “an [apocalyptic] unveiling of the future.”95 Revelation, in contrast with such narrowing views, is rather an originating feature of the discourse of faith. This is why revelation (in its givenness) and (reflective) reason stand in dynamic opposition to each other, albeit in such a way that they are in “a living dialectic” and “together engender something like an understanding of faith.”96 Framed in such manner that brings out the hermeneutic task to better understand understanding (through understanding faith), all discourses of faith will have to acknowledge their standing as discourses, whereas reflection has the task of acknowledging the depth that the various polysemic expressions of faith carry with themselves. In terms of the concept of religiously defined revelation that Ricoeur explores in his work, this means that it too is seen to grow out from expressive pluralism, held together by the underlying originating experience—of the summoning other—that seeks for an expression. In keeping with his phenomenologico-hermeneutical stance, Ricoeur’s aim is to uncover the fundamental, pre-theological level of the revelation discourse that is “established close to human experience.”97 Such approach is needed for the sake of seeking “the traits of a truth capable of being spoken of in terms of manifestation rather than verification, as well as the traits of a self-awareness wherein the subject would free himself of the arrogance of consciousness.”98 This is the phenomenologico-hermeneutical foundation for Ricoeur’s philosophy of prophecy that pushes in the direction of fundamental hermeneutics. The described expression-seeking experiences are, according to Ricoeur, well manifested in scriptural accounts that “declare itself to be pronounced in the name of . . . .”99 In Ricoeur’s words, prophetic declarations such as these serve as “the original nucleus of the traditional idea of revelation.”100 Prophecy and revelation are bound to each other in that “revelation is the speech of another behind the speech of the prophet.”101 The experience of “the other”

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is an existential summons in that it calls for “the prophet” to verbalize the encounter in form of revealing speech; “the prophet presents himself as not speaking in his own name, but in the name of another.”102 In keeping with Ricoeur’s thought that prophetic declaration exemplify revelation as an emergent expression or a “speaking out,” the notion that “the prophet presents himself” therefore ties in with the idea that the unveiling concerns—through the experience of an other—the mentioned depth-structures of human experience in its belongingness to the world (“of the text”103) it inhabits. Ricoeur insists that neglecting to pay attention to the particular contexts of prophetic accounts leads therefore to a misconstrued conception of prophecy in that it is not merely about “the other” and even less merely about unveiling a divine plan. IN PLACE OF A CONCLUSION: HOPE At this point it should be noted that all preceding explication on Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics relates to his anthropological understanding of a necessarily mediated human being or “the concept of the cogito as mediated by a universe of signs. (. . .) All reflection is mediated, there is no immediate self-consciousness.”104 The prophetic genre of biblical discourse serves as an example par excellence in that the explicit theologoumena make evident a dialectical if not a dialogical structure between the summoning text (or Text) and the summoned human being(s) who can only be mediatedly present to themselves. If there were no “textual” mediation, there would not be a sense of being a self. This is why prophecy also counts as an exemplary warning of not heeding to the nonimmediacy of the self; the prophetic condemnation concerns and points out the “lack of human response” that itself “constitutes the apostasy.”105 To explain, the lack of response avoids the responsibility of being a human in becoming one through the dialectic of call and response. At its core, human being is an experience seeking expression. Trying to avoid the mechanisms for executing the very task of becoming human falls therefore under the condemning judgment of that-​ which​ -is-g​ reate​ r-tha​n-any​-of-t​he-se​lves.​ Only a response “of confidence and hope” that accepts and affirms the condition of being in front of the text—or facing a prophetic condemnation “in the name of . . .”—is able to turn “toward the new future opening beyond all disaster through the promise of pardon and re-creation.”106 Human beings are called to respond as that is the possibility of a fulfillment of the promise concerning (self)understanding. Prompted to act through imagination, the human realm is opened up or unveiled. As Ricoeur puts it in History and Truth, “In imagining his possibilities, man acts as a prophet of his own existence.”107 Discussing the epic of human

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being as “redemption through imagination,”108 Ricoeur explores the fundamental possibilities that pertain to human existence. In human life, this fulfillment always remains fragile and merely tentative, but it would be a kind of fulfillment regardless as it does not fight against but realizes the enabling conditions of reconfiguration. Even though refiguration is always the new prefiguration, it is still a novel constellation or a world that the self could inhabit. In such world the self may hope to pursue finding himself: “the prophecy relates an event at the end of history which, in retrospect, unfolds the meaning of all the encounters in history. For prophecy bears upon and unveils the meaning of encounters.”109 Reconfiguration is prophetic in the sense that it is a process in which a turn toward “the new future opening”— or a kind of pardon or recreation—is possible “beyond all disaster” of an egotistically illusory immediate self: Allow me to say that what we call the subject is never given at the start. Or, if it is, it is in danger of being reduced to the narcissistic, egoistic and stingy ego, from which literature, precisely, can free us. [. . .] In place of an ego enamoured of itself arises a self instructed by cultural symbols, the first among which are narratives handed down in our literary tradition. And these narratives give us a unity which is not substantial but narrative.110

For Ricoeur, self-identification and attaining oneself as an existent being are both dependent on the other or that-​which​-is-g​reate​r-tha​n-any​-of-t​he-se​lves;​ human existence needs to figure out and find its expression. The baseline of Ricoeur’s thought is that the fragile self will absolutely find itself as a self only through the other. Ricoeur’s philosophy is without doubt not only anthropological but also existentially concerned, but in distinction to existentialists such as Camus, he does not therefore see the abandonment of hope as the condition for authentic and appreciative existence whereas he has confidence and sees hope in the very fragility of the self. In contrast with Camus’s stance that “contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation; and to live is not to resign oneself,”111 Ricoeur equates hope with the possibilities and ableness (puissance) he discusses throughout his work. It is in this particular sense that Ricoeur’s own philosophy can also be characterized prophetic, as “prophetic discourse draws from the traditional discourse an unforeseen potential of hope.”112 Ricoeur’s own “passion for the possible” for seeking the fundamental human condition both endorses and executes “a way of thinking according to hope” that can be summed up in a slogan “spero ut intelligam—I hope in order to understand.”113 Hope, in other words, is not resignation but firm commitment instead to the concrete horizon brought forth by human existence itself. For this reason, Ricoeur’s interest in the Old Testament prophets is philosophically warranted due to their “intrahistorical hope” that in spite of

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rewriting the significations of that history does not lose sight of the history itself: “The horizon is both that which delimits expectation and that which moves along with us. For the imagination, the distinction between a hope in history and a hope outside history is fundamental.”114 Ricoeur’s point is that our imagination is bound to finding novel ways of refiguring the human world in which we are situated; the hope he has is mind does not pertain to ecstatic displacement (ek-stasis) but existential replacement (ek-sistere). This makes Ricoeur himself a sentinel of imminence. The self is to “stand forth” or “to appear” in the full concreteness of its situation—in the manner that is appropriate for l’homme lié ou situé. It is in this particular sense that in Ricoeur’s “way of thinking according to hope” the ultimate framing is transhistorical. Not so that history would be dismissed, but rather so that all history gains meaning in the polarity of Genesis and Eschaton, or in a framework of “fundamental History”—historial, geschichtlich, but not historical, historisch— concerning the Beginning and the End.115 This is the kerygmatic “primordial drama”116 from which the narrative form of one’s understanding of the world and the self originates. Just as a culture or a civilization has a founding narration, the transhistorical (or historial) mythical structure of the Beginning (Genesis) and the End (Eschaton) is the founding narration for the full intrahistorical condition. The concrete experience of being a living, acting, and suffering subject is rendered meaningful by placing it “into relation with the totality of meaning.”117 The dialectics of subject’s archeology and teleology is fully understandable only in relation to a dialectics of Genesis and of the Eschaton, that is, in a dramatization of human condition such that it surpasses it altogether. The prophet’s role is to remind her fellow human dwellers of this fundamentally instructive reading. Here the limit of Ricoeur’s philosophy of prophecy is reached. Even though the philosopher Ricoeur would not let his post-Hegelian Kantianism slide, he leans as far out as he could while remaining at the side of religion within the limits of reason alone. But is it so that, at this limit, the prophet Ricoeur ultimately emerges or stands forth from the shadows of the philosopher Ricoeur? Is it so that through his philosophy Ricoeur nevertheless unveils a “new beginning” that “springs from the grave” of rationality and reflection?118 Is it so that a philosophy enriched by the nonphilosophical is able to transcend itself and provide a clearing or a sunny spell in the nonphilosophical? What is the reading we give to “What is revealed is the possibility of hope in spite of . . .”? We should begin to see at what point the notion of God’s design—as may be suggested in different ways in each instance, it is true, by narrative, prophetic, and prescriptive discourse—is removed from any transcription in terms of a plan or program; in short, of finality and teleology. What is revealed is the possibility of hope in spite of . . . This possibility may still be expressed in

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the terms of a design, but of an unassignable design, a design which is God’s secret.119

As it was put in the beginning, the apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις) or the unveiling is precisely that “the new beginning springs from the grave,”120 beyond all apparent failure, death, and cessation.

NOTES 1. André LaCocque & Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 147. 2. Ibid., 141. 3. Ibid., 164. 4. Ibid., 170. 5. Ibid., 169. 6. Ibid., 181. 7. Ibid., 172. 8. Ibid., 174. 9. See ibid., 183, 287–289, 291–292, 298. 10. Ibid., 303. 11. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 13. 12. Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 35. 13. Ibid., 35. 14. Ibid., 43. 15. Ibid., 43–44. 16. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23–25.; Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Translated by Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91. 17. Paul Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror of the Scriptures” in The Whole and Divided Self: The Bible and Theological Anthropology. Edited by David E. Aune and John McCarthy (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1997), 201. 18. Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror,” 201. 19. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 355. 20. Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror,” 201. 21. Ibid., 202. 22. Ibid., 204. 23. Ibid., 203. In his recent article, Werner Jeanrond recounts Ricoeur’s affiliation with the Chicago School of Theology and his indirect contribution to the YaleChicago debate concerning about the method and aims of theological hermeneutics.

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In Jeanrond’s words, “Yale claimed to possess a greater theological objectivity on the basis of a subjective decision in favour of a christologically inspired hermeneutics of biblical revelation. Chicago claimed to possess a greater theological objectivity on the basis of a decision in favour of an open-ended hermeneutics of signification capable of encouraging a public, global and critical discourse on God.” See Jeanrond, Werner G. Jeanrond, “Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love” in The Enigma of Divine Revelation: Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology. Edited by JeanLuc Marion and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer (Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 143. 24. Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror,” 202. In Figuring the Sacred Ricoeur exhibits the Kantian side of his philosophy by going as far as denying any possible non-conceptual mode of religious experience: “For a hermeneutical philosophy, faith never appears as an immediate experience but always as mediated by a certain language that articulates it. For my part I should link the concept of faith to that of selfunderstanding in the face of the text. Faith is the attitude of one who accepts being interpreted at the same time that he or she interprets the world of the text. Such is the hermeneutical constitution of the biblical faith.” Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 46. 25. Brian Gregor, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 7. 26. See David Stewart, “Ricoeur on Religious Language” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by L. E. Hahn (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995), 423–424. 27. Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to David Stewart” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by L. E. Hahn (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995), 443. 28. Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror,” 206. 29. Ibid., 205. 30. Ibid., 209. 31. Cf. Ibid., 207. 32. Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 78. 33. Ibid., 78. 34. Ibid., 77–78. 35. Ibid., 90. 36. Ibid., 114. 37. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 173. 38. See ibid., 175. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Ibid., 56. 41. Ibid., 175. 42. Ibid., 41. 43. Ibid. 44. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 82. 45. Ibid., 84. 46. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 70–82; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin

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and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 157–179. 47. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 86. 48. Ibid., 88. 49. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 262. 50. Ibid., 262. 51. Ibid., 264. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 266–267. 54. Ibid., 264. 55. Ibid., 266. 56. Ibid., 267. 57. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 341–355. 58. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 273. 59. See Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 6, 62–70, 78–81, 87–91, 95–96, 105–106, 240–243, 263–271, 331–332; Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 140–144, 148–149, 162–165, 185. 60. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 123. 61. Ibid., 122. Ricoeur makes an illuminating comparison between two theologians, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann: “What distinguishes Bultmann from Barth is that Bultmann has perfectly understood that this primacy of the object, this primacy of meaning over understanding, is performed only through the understanding, through the exegetical work itself. It is necessary therefore to enter the hermeneutic circle. Only in the understanding of the text do I in fact know the object.” Ibid., 59. 62. Ibid., 131. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 144. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 42. 68. Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophie et prophetisme 1” in Lectures 3. Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 155. 69. Ibid., 156. 70. Ibid., 157. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 160. 73. Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophie et prophetisme 2” in Lectures 3. Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 175. 74. Ibid., 175. 75. Ibid., 176. 76. Ibid., 177. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. See Ibid., 178–182. 80. Ibid., 182.

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81. Ibid., 184. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 185. 85. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6–7. 86. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 13. Translation corrected. 87. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 35–36, 551. 88. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 99. 89. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 543. 90. Ibid., 544. 91. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 101. 92. Ibid., 102. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 96. 95. Ibid., 74, 76. 96. Ibid., 73. 97. Ibid., 96. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 75. 100. Ibid.. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 100. 104. Ibid., 105–106. 105. Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror,” 215. 106. Ibid., 215. 107. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 127. 108. Ibid., 127. 109. Ibid., 100. 110. Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Edited by David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 33. 111. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien (New York, NY: Penguin Books Ltd, 1979), 137. 112. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 176. 113. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 165-166. 114. Ibid., 180–181 n2. 115. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 166–167, 169–170. 116. Ibid., 170. 117. Ibid., 169, 171. 118. LaCocque & Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 164. 119. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 87. 120. LaCocque & Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 164.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York, NY: Penguin Books Ltd, 1979. Gregor, Brian. Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Jeanrond, Werner G. “Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love” in The Enigma of Divine Revelation: Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology. Edited by Jean-Luc Marion and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, 133–150. Switzerland: Springer, 2020. LaCocque, André & Ricoeur, Paul. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. Givenness and Revelation. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Ricoeur, Paul. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ——— “The Self in the Mirror of the Scriptures” in The Whole and Divided Self: The Bible and Theological Anthropology. Edited by David E. Aune and John McCarthy, 201–220. New York: Crossroad Herder, 1997. ——— Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. ——— “Reply to David Stewart” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by L. E. Hahn, 443–449. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995. ——— Lectures 3. Aux frontières de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 1994. ——— Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. ——— History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. ——— “Life in Quest of Narrative” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, Edited by David Wood, 20–33. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. ——— Time and Narrative 3. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. ——— Time and Narrative 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. ——— Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. ——— Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. ——— The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. Stewart, David. “Ricoeur on Religious Language” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by L. E. Hahn, 423–442. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995.

Chapter 6

Ricoeur’s Biblical Hermeneutics From Poesis to Theology Steven Kepnes

INTRODUCTIONS When I was a graduate student in the 1980s at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I received a very nice note from my dissertation advisor, Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur wrote me to say that he was very pleased that my dissertation would “put his hermeneutics to the test” in applying it to the interpretive writings of Martin Buber and the larger corpus of Jewish sacred writings. That dissertation project eventually was published as The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology.1 In my book I was most interested in using Ricoeur to show how the explanatory (erklaeren) methods of academic Biblical criticism could be used along with the philosophical and existential approaches of understanding (verstehen)2 in Buber’s interpretive writings to produce an overarching method for the interpretation of sacred Jewish texts. Thus Ricoeur solved one of the thorniest of problems in interpreting the Bible in modernity and that is to make use of the sophisticated methods of modern biblical criticism without reducing the meaning of the Bible to some social scientific cypher such as history, politics, or philology alone. I was also interested in using Ricoeur to argue that the process of understanding scripture includes a creative process of applying the meaning of the Bible to the contemporary situation so that meaning is not locked away in the ancient past of the Biblical text. However, today, as I look back on the book, it appears to me that I did not fully “put Ricoeur’s theory to test” for its applicability to Buber and to Jewish hermeneutics. Although I believe that I made good use of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics for my book on Buber I would like now to carry out a more thorough going application of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to my current project of reviving Jewish theology. Here, I will need to lodge a few criticisms at Ricoeur even 109

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as I show the value of his hermeneutics for Jewish theology. In my older book I stuck largely to Ricoeur’s philosophical and theoretical writings and made little use of Ricoeur’s own writings on Biblical hermeneutics. I therefore will focus my attention here on showing how these writings are applicable to Jewish theological concerns particularly as they relate to the Bible. What I see in Ricoeur’s Biblical writings, especially those collected by Lewis Mudge in Essays on Biblical Interpretation,3 is a series of theoretical moves that, even though directed to Christian theology, seem to me to find a better home in Jewish theology. This is primarily because Ricoeur’s attention to the language, imagery, metaphors, and variety of genres in the Bible pushes him away from the doctrines and dogmas and categories of Christian theology toward the deepest relationship possible with the text of the Bible itself. Educated then by the celebrated “turn to language” in continental philosophy and the phenomenological desideratum to seek out the web of relations of “life world” which the text opens up, Ricoeur asks readers to listen to the Biblical text itself without reference to the set of creeds and doctrines of Christianity which rule much of the Christian interpretation of the Bible. In Jewish terms this could be put this way: begin with the text itself, discover, first the pshat, the direct, literal, simple meaning, which most often, if you look close enough, is neither direct, literal, or simple, but full of questions, gaps, lacunae, and therefore requires derash, or interpretation, in larger terms, hermeneutics. And since the Biblical text is not simple and is full of gaps and questions, it must necessarily issue not in a creed or doctrine, but, rather, in a multiplicity of interpretations and, in rabbinic terms, “midrash.” Beyond this idea of multiple textual interpretations which, by now, is the accepted wisdom in hermeneutics as applied to scripture, Ricoeur has additional redolent theoretical points to make. These are that the Bible speaks in not one primary genre or literary style but many and that attending closely to the rhetoric of these genres can yield a series of unique theological insights. In addition, Ricoeur finds a scriptural use of his theory of metaphor when he shows that the goal of Biblical metaphor is to suspend literal reference to open up new possibilities of seeing and new ways of being in the world. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s notion of “testimony” as a form of storytelling unique to scripture gives theology a way to address powerful revelatory events. Specifically, for Judaism, this could include individual events such as Jacob’s vision at Beth El (Gen. 28: 10–17) and collective historical events such as Exodus and Sinai. When Ricoeur moves to an articulation of the hermeneutics of testimony he moves beyond aesthetics and “poesis” to theology. Finally, a consistent preoccupation of Ricoeur’s work, that of his critique of the rational autonomous self of modern philosophy, is relevant to

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both issues of Jewish religious identity and theology. Ricoeur’s solution to the autonomous self is that the self must lose itself and find itself in the textual products and great traditions of humankind. What this suggests for Judaism is that modern autonomous secular Jews who often complain of loneliness and alienation from community and the Jewish tradition can find themselves, their community and tradition by refinding themselves in the texts of the tradition. In Jewish theological terms this means that on a first level Jewish religious identity is found in Talmud Torah, in study of Torah. However, Ricoeur wants to argue that the interpretation of texts is not only a vehicle for religious identity but that it is also an avenue for revelation, in theological terms, for enlightenment and direction from God. So here we can find a way of talking about commandments or mitsvot revealed in the Torah as God’s guidance for the good life as well as the bridge to relationship to God. Since Paul Ricoeur still remains relatively unknown and underused by that small group of scholars engaged in the project of Jewish Biblical Theology one could say that his really important, indeed, path-breaking work in hermeneutics has yet to receive the hearing it deserves. Thus the academic study of the Jewish Bible still remains split between two groups, a large one that largely operates in the sphere of critical academic approaches that bases itself on historical, archeological, political, sociological, and philological methods and another smaller group that operates with religious and philosophical categories to forge a contemporary Jewish Biblical Theology.4 A third group, that of Rabbinic Orthodoxy, largely works outside of both these groups in a sphere that one could refer to as “pre-critical,” clinging to premodern paradigms of Bible study characterized solely by the traditional categories of Midrash, Talmudic Aggadah, and medieval rabbinic exegesis.5 However, I would maintain that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics could provide a way to make good use of Rabbinic modes of interpretation so that this very creative Jewish religious form of interpretation could be placed into dialogue with modern biblical criticism. This move could have truly revolutionary consequences for Judaism in the contemporary world for it has the potential of uniting forms of Jewish study, the modern and the traditional, and thereby giving contemporary Jews another way of being both modern and critical and also authentically and religiously Jewish. In theological terms, this could allow Jews to restart the conversation, interrupted by modernity, with God. In this paper I will begin with a brief review of central presuppositions and creative moves in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (part 1). This will set the stage for a more developed discussion of the applicability of Ricoeur to Jewish texts as a form of “poesis” (part II) and Jewish theology as a form of testimony (part III).

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RICOEUR’S PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS The roots of Ricoeur’s thought are found in the German verstehen tradition of hermeneutics that goes back to Schleiermacher and Dilthey and is most fully expressed in the work Heidegger and Gadamer. Added to this is structuralist linguistic theory with figures such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and post-structuralist figures. The combination of the tradition of verstehen with linguistics leads to Ricoeur’s notion of hermeneutics as “results, methods, and presuppositions of all the sciences that try to decipher and interpret the signs of man.”6 Ricoeur has a complex relation to his intellectual forebears in both phenomenology and linguistics since he is critical of them and aims to use them in new ways. But we can still say that he assumes the basic orientation, questions, and many of the solutions of the figures we mentioned. With regard to the verstehen hermeneutical tradition and Heidegger and Gadamer in particular, Ricoeur assumes the following positions. (1) That the metaphysics of classical and medieval theology, what Heidegger calls “ontotheology” is bankrupt in serving the epistemological needs of modern philosophy and theology. (2) That the foundational strategies of Enlightenment philosophy based on mental processes and the autonomous rational self are epistemologically inadequate since they fail to address the temporal and relational quality of lived human social life and wall the self off from real relations to the signs and symbols of humanity that lie in the great literary and religious traditions of the West. (3) The turn to history and historical methods in the humanities also fails since they are unable to give expression to the normative truth claims of cultural products and also lock the meaning of cultural productions in the past of the authors that produced them and the “original audience” for which the text was intended. (4) The best path to preserve the normative status of human cultural expressions is found in the celebrated “turn to language” and the relational complexities of the “life world” advocated by phenomenology. (5) Heidegger’s focus on a pre-Socratic ontology over classic Greek metaphysics provides the grounding for a hermeneutical understanding the web of relations of self, society, world as well as textual meaning. (6) To Heidegger’s ontology, however, Ricoeur adds Aristotle’s notion of literature as “mimesis,” or representation in which the new possibilities and versions of reality are described. (7) The romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey is limited in that it looks for textual meaning in the mind or intention of its author. The notion of meaning in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s is preferred since meaning is located “in front of the text” in relation to readers. Gadamer sees texts as offering a vision of a world and the process of understanding involves a “fusion of horizons” between the world of the text and the world of contemporary readers.7

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Added to these seven presuppositions is Ricoeur’s creative attempt at bridge building where he seeks to place historical and critical methods in dialogue with Heideggerian ontology and Gadamer’s hermeneutics to create a comprehensive hermeneutic method. This also includes long philosophical forays into the truth value of the imagination, symbol, metaphor, and narrative, which as a whole he refers to as “poesis.” Finally, we have the addition of the notion of “testimony” from the French philosopher Jean Nabert which allows Ricoeur to move beyond aesthetics to add a full-blown theological dimension to his hermeneutics. With a summary of the presuppositions and goals of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics we can now put this hermeneutic “to the test” in relation to Buber and Jewish hermeneutics.

BIBLICAL POESIS From Doctrine to Life-World In his “Preface to Bultmann” Ricoeur suggests a new beginning for Biblical theology that moves beyond the “debacle”8 of onto-theology on the one hand and the reliance on Christian creeds, doctrines, and dogmas on the other. Onto-theology, narrowly understood, represents the tradition of Medieval theology based on Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophical categories, but it can also be used to refer to the continued attempt to subject the Bible to narrow philosophical criteria for truth like those of correspondence, coherence, and the empirical terms of verification and falsification from which the Bible rarely emerges as a warranted form of knowledge. The attempt also to understand the Bible, solely through the lens of Christian doctrines like original sin, the incarnation, and triune God or in Bultmann’s terms the “Kerygma” or proclamation of the Good News of Christ, takes the reader out of the more “originary” or “primitive”9 experience of the encounter with the Bible as text. To get to this primary relation with the Bible Ricoeur looks to phenomenology, to Husserl’s “life-world,” and to Heidegger’s ontological analysis that brings us to the experience of “being-in-the-world,” “fallenness,” “care,” and “being-toward-death.”10 Ricoeur criticizes Bultmann for beginning with an existential analysis but not having the patience to stay with it and moving too quickly to Christ as Kerygma. What such patience with an existential analysis could achieve is a deep association with the multiple characters in the Bible as real living human beings struggling with understanding “the place—the Da-sein—of humans”11 in relation to the natural world, other persons, and the social world. For Ricoeur, Heideggerian ontology allows us to see the Bible as one of those great “poetic texts” that can “restore to us that

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participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to subjects.”12 Here Ricoeur wants to enlist the Bible in the enterprise of opposing the modern split between subject who knows and object which is dissected, categorized, explained, and known. In Martin Buber’s words this is the attempt to overcome the I-It attitude with the I-Thou relationship. Ricoeur’s approach helps us to see the Bible as a record of human attempts to make sense of the realities of life that confront them out of the complex web of relations in society and the world. And we are primed then to see the Bible as a form of wisdom, what we could call “practical philosophy” or a “philosophy of life.” We see this focus when Ricoeur tells us that one goal of the Bible is to supply a “total interpretation of existence and reality.”13 And that it offers us an “inexhaustible treasure which stimulates thought about everything.”14 In other words, without being metaphysical in the Greek philosophical sense, the Bible does want to present us with a wholistic interpretation of all that is to offer explanations of the origins of the world in creation and a telos to the world in salvation and redemption. The Bible as Poesis After placing the Bible in the new starting point that Heidegger’s existential phenomenology offers, Ricoeur’s next move is to help us understand the Bible as a word, a letter, a text, and therefore something that requires interpretation. As Ricoeur puts this, the “letter serves as the Bible’s foundation”15 and “exegesis is its [the Bible’s] instrument.”16 Because understanding the Bible is an interpretive process, Ricoeur believes that we can benefit from the understanding that contemporary hermeneutics as a theoretical investigation entails. Ricoeur then attempts to connect Biblical literature to nonbiblical literary forms by utilizing Roman Jakobson’s notion of “poesis.” Ricoeur offers a theory of the text as “poesis” based on three notions: the autonomy of the text, the style or genre of the text, and the world of the text. What the autonomy of the text gives it, in distinction from speech, is “a form of discourse that is immediately autonomous with regard to its author’s intention.”17 This means that despite the author’s intention to say something that she specifically means, once the text is written, it achieves a certain “distance” from the author and displays an independence from its author’s intended meaning. And Ricoeur tells us that the autonomy of the text also “removes the reader from the finite horizon of its original audience.”18 Therefore, what the text “means” to its reader can be independent of both the intention of its author and the received meaning of the original audience. Therefore, the meaning of Bible, like all texts, is at least partially determined by the ways in which it is understood by the person who “receives” the text

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where and whenever she reads it.19 Herein lies the source of interpretive creativity and multiplicity for all texts, be they sacred or profane. Ricoeur wants to stress that every text is prepared and written in accordance with a particular “shaping” or “genre such as narration, fiction, the essay, etc.”20 Thus, writing is done in accord with “composition codes that assign to works of discourse that unique configuration we call a style.”21 Ricoeur then uses this to help us see the different genres in Biblical literature such as “narration, prophecy, prescriptions, wisdom, and hymns.”22 Here, Ricoeur wants us to recognize that the use of different genres in the Bible means that Biblical interpretation is not completely in the hands of the reader but that the text plays a role in its reception by the different ways, styles, genres through which it delivers its message. So that there are different types of messages or meanings that issue from prophecy than issue from hymns. The final and third aspect of a text that Ricoeur wants to sensitize us to is the “world of the text” identified by Gadamer in his hermeneutics. By this he means “the sort of world intended beyond the text as reference.”23 With this notion the meaning of a text is fully dislodged from the intention or “mind of the author” and the phenomenological notion of a “life-world” is employed to suggest that literary texts are fundamentally about projecting a world a human social, world in which humans will act, work, initiate, and carry out projects together. “The intended implicit reference of each [Biblical] text opens into a world, the biblical world, or rather the multiple worlds unfolded before the book by its narration, prophecy, prescriptions, wisdom and hymns.”24 Ricoeur then employs Jakobson’s notion of “poesis” by which he means not just poetry, but all fictive literary productions. The notion of “fictive” texts is important for Ricoeur for it suggests to him that the goal of poesis is not “accurate” representation of the world as it is. Literary words are neither history nor science and therefore they evade “the criterion of empirical verification.”25 Indeed “poetic discourse suspends this descriptive function. It does not directly augment our knowledge of objects.”26 What poesis aims to do then is not to provide a “copy,” but rather a “redescription of reality.” Here, Ricoeur creatively employs Aristotle’s notion of mimesis, representation, “which is not a slavish imitation, or a copy, or mirror-image, but a transformation or metamorphosis – or as I [Ricoeur] suggest a “redescription.”27 Biblical Metaphor As a form of poesis then the Bible redescribes reality and offers new possible ways of seeing reality. Ricoeur also enlists his own theory of metaphor here to suggest another way of talking of this redescription of reality is its “metaphoric reference.28 “Ricoeur finds that metaphor works with the linguistic tension between the “is not” and the “is like.”29 So metaphor is claiming on

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one hand that A is not B, but on the other, it is similar to it. The “is like” picks up on a first-order description of reality that is juxtaposed to a second order. For example in Book Six of the Odyssey when Odysseus comes out of the water naked and covered in sea weed in the presence of the Princess Nausikaa and her entourage of young girls, Homer describes him as looking “like a hill-kept Lion” (Book 6, line 130). Homer is suggesting that Odysseus is not, literally, a lion but that he is like one in his appearance, his appetite, his strength and bearing. And his appearance as a lion is especially relevant to the young women who are frightened by him coming out of the sea naked and covered in weeds. The trick in understanding metaphoric language is to remain long enough with the first level references, the appearance and qualities of the lion, to get a direct physical sense of what is being expressed. However, in a second move, one must also be prepared to “suspend the literal reference” so that another level of meaning is opened up. Therefore, there is something about the lion that is part and parcel of the meaning of the metaphor even as in a second order we are drawn to a new understanding, in this case, Odysseus as a strong, virile, somewhat wild and very passionate man. The metaphoric power to redescribe reality opens up deeper levels of human characters and even of reality that are often not apparent when language is used merely descriptively without recourse to metaphor. For Ricoeur, metaphor is taken both as a figure of speech, a rhetorical device, and a symbol for the powers of redescription inherent in all literature as poesis. This is the power to unearth new dimensions of reality not seen on the immediate face of things. This is the power to redescribe reality in new ways to open new possibilities and ways of seeing and living in the world. Biblical Poesis and Revelation Ricoeur ventures more closely into religion with his theory of poesis by suggesting that its metaphoric function has a “revelatory” dimension. He also describes what is expressed as experiences of “manifestation of dependence.”30 In this, the reader suspends some of her control over what she sees and knows and allows herself a measure of dependence on what the poetic text reveals. However, we can see something of the limits of Ricoeur’s notion of revelation for theology in the cautious and somewhat contradictory ways in which he presents it. On the one hand he argues that all fictive works, all literature that utilizes metaphor and falls under the heading of poesis, has a revelatory dimension. But he begins by letting us know that he wants to use the word “revelation” in a nonreligious way. The “poetic function conceals a dimension of revelation where revelation is to be understood in a nonreligious,

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nontheistic, and non-biblical sense of the word.”31 Therefore when he places “expressions of religious faith under the sign of the poetic function of language.”32 Ricoeur is not only placing religious language under his general notion of literature as poesis but also placing the notion of religious revelation under this general literary heading. We see more of this tell-tale move when he describes what is revealed in revelation. Here his Heideggerian language emerges. What is revealed is “this primordial ground of our existence, of the originary horizon of our being-there “33 and an opportunity to perceive “the new being that unfolds before us.“34 And he uses the word ‘revelation’ for this because the primordial ground comes to us outside of ourselves in a “manifestation,” a “letting what shows itself.”35 This “experience of manifestation” however, Ricoeur insists, “need not be referred to as God.”36 Following this line of argument further Ricoeur says that by subsuming religious and Biblical discourse under the category of poesis with its particular notion of revelation, the biblical concept of revelation can be “restored . . . to its full dignity.”37 So Ricoeur imagines that the full dignity of the Bible can be found precisely in restoring a nontheological dimension! As if by taking the word “God” (which occurs on almost every page) out of the Bible the Bible can somehow achieve a greater stature. On the other hand, Ricoeur also speaks of religious language, and specifically Biblical revelation as “analogous” to revelation as we have it in poesis. He mentions, too, that there are “resonances” between religious revelation and poesis. Therefore, religion is allowed some distinctiveness from secular forms of poesis. And in the same essay on Revelation in which Ricoeur seems to want to find a “nontheistic and nonbiblical” notion of revelation, we find him using specifically biblical and theological language. So that he says that in the Bible as poesis new possibilities of living in the world “unfolded before the Biblical book” and take the form of “a new creation, a new covenant, the Kingdom of God.”38 Perhaps, the best way to resolve this contradiction between religious literature and secular poesis is by saying that the two are continuous in sharing the common threefold structures of all texts (as autonomous from its authors, as constituted by styles and genres, and by projecting a world). But what makes them different is the unique Biblical genres “narrative, prophecy, prescriptions, wisdom and hymns” religious texts employ. Certainly, however, what Jewish theology wants to see in a Biblical hermeneutics is a recognition that what is revealed in the Torah is not merely new possibilities of being-inthe-world but God, YHVH Lord of the People Israel, creator, liberator, and revealer of his will in specific commandments (mitsvot) and laws. Furthermore, the category of poesis, as fictive literature that suspends direct reference in the service of another order of reality, undermines the notion of Biblical narrative as the attempt to give expression to God’s presence in the

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real world in which people live. So that although, for instance, the Bible is speaking metaphorically when it compares God’s power to a “lightening sword,” (Deut 32:41), it is not speaking metaphorically when it says that God “redeemed Israel from Egyptian slavery” or “revealed the Torah on Sinai.” There have been metaphoric uses of this notions that we find in the works of Philo or Jewish mystics. But these uses are meant to add additional layers of meaning to the Exodus and Sinai revelations without undermining the historicity of the events. However, truthfully, revelation of God and God’s word in the Bible is among one of the most difficult ideas for modern Jews to accept. How could the eternal noncorporeal transcendent God, creator of the universe, manage to enter into human history in the tiny space of the ancient Near East to reveal God’s will in the specific human words, Hebrew no less. Because of the difficulties for the human mind to grasp this notion of revelation, many modern Jewish thinkers have adopted metaphorical and existential notions of revelation that are parallel to those of Ricoeur. In this sense Ricoeur is not wrong when he offers that his notion of revelation as new possibilities of being in the world can “restore dignity” to the Biblical notion of revelation. We see a parallel to Ricoeur in the notions of Martin Buber for whom revelation is a species of what is given in an existential I-Thou encounter with God. We could use Heideggerian language to suggest that these encounters happen in “the primordial ground of our existence” as humans deal with intense moments of “being-with” others, being for other, and “being unto death.” And too, we could say that for Buber these encounters with God as “eternal Thou” open up “a proposed world, a world I may inhabit and wherein I can project my own most possibilities.”39 Buber’s notion of revelation is championed by Jewish theologians such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emil Fackenheim, and Michael Fishbane. And this notion remains popular with many Jewish thinkers and laypersons. So, one could say that Ricoeur is helpful here is supplying the Buberian notion of revelation with more theoretical support. Certainly, as a scholar of Buber and student of Ricoeur I have some sympathies with this view of revelation. However, I have come to see it as sorely lacking since it undermines the very notion of Torah as word of God and the notion of mitzvah as command from God to Israel and the central vehicle for relationship between the Jew and God. RICOEUR’S THEOLOGY: THE NOTION OF TESTIMONY If Ricoeur were to end his Biblical Hermeneutics with his notion of the Bible as a species of poesis, one could argue that he offers a Heideggerian

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hermeneutics of the Bible as literature that really stops short of theology. However, he does not stop with Heidegger but goes beyond him with his theologically rich notion of “testimony” that we find at the end of his essay “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” Here he adopts some of the positions of the French philosopher of religion Jean Nabert that go beyond the Bible as literature toward recognition of a truly transcendent and theological dimension.40 Beyond the Cartesian Autonomous Self In introducing his notion of testimony, Ricoeur, as is his way, begins with philosophy or rather with a problem in modern philosophy that is, however, to be answered by religion. The problem is the modern Cartesian notion of the autonomous subject which constitutes itself through its own consciousness. Ricoeur believes that the Cartesian cogito, the “idea of a consciousness which posits itself in positing its contents,”41 is responsible for the evils of excessive hubris, isolation, and loneliness. Here there are echoes of Heidegger’s alienated self of the technological age and Buber’s notion of the isolated self of the I-It relationship. Here, however, Ricoeur looks to testimony as a form Biblical literature which has the ability to cure the ills of the self-constituted self. For an understanding of the idea of testimony, Ricoeur then gives us three preparatory concepts which restate some of the central themes of his hermeneutics: (1) the notion of a mediated self-consciousness, (2) the notion of distance from and reflection on textual traditions, and (3) the notion of “appropriation” or “self-understanding before the text.”42 Ricoeur draws here upon his earlier writings in which he slowly worked through religious “symbols of evil,”43 Freud’s psychoanalytic writings and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit44 to develop a response to the Cartesian autonomous self. He sums up his answer to the problem of the autonomous self as follows. “All reflection is mediated, there is no immediate selfconsciousness.”45 In his words: “The first truth . . . ‘I think, I am,’ remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible; it has to be ‘mediated’ by the ideas, actions, works, institutions and monuments that objectify it. It is in these objects in the widest sense of the word, that the Ego must lose and find itself.”46 So, the self finds itself through reflection on ideas, actions, and works outside of the self. Therefore, we can say that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics begins with the realization that to “know myself” I must know about signs, works, institutions, etc. outside of myself. The second preparatory concept that we need to understand the religious function of testimony is one of thinking or reflection in which I take some “distance” from signs, works, and institutions, to see them not as mere expressions of my self or of individual authors but as “monuments” to

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previous human actions and works to build up traditions of cultural meaning and wisdom. Taking distance from signs, works, and institutions represents a moment in the hermeneutical process of reflection, a pause in the process in which the interpreter takes note of her relationship to a sign as part of a larger whole or tradition so that she is ready for the third and most important stage of “appropriation.” In his third stage the interpreter takes the meanings of a text and the wisdom of a tradition into herself. For the religions, the I allows itself to be reformed into the image of the person as Jew, as Christian, as Muslim, that is projected in front of the text and the form of life that is demanded by the tradition as an ethical and spiritual discipline. As appropriation includes a process outside of me that forms me, Ricoeur points out that there is a dimension of passivity to appropriation. The self must relinquish some control. There is a process of “letting go”47 that is required. And this recalls again the religious notion of revelation when a truth outside the self is revealed by a power outside the self.48 Testimony and Revelation Ricoeur’s review of central aspects of his hermeneutical theory prepares the way for an understanding of further dynamics of the nature of testimony as a central ingredient for Jewish and Christian understandings of revelation. Where hermeneutics is a theoretical construct, the notion of testimony moves the theory into practice and theoretical abstraction takes on historical dimension in the terms of a specific tradition. Here, the self comes to give “testimony” to the wisdom and power of the specific tradition which she has chosen or rather has “chosen her.” Testimony represents a fulfillment of the hermeneutical process of appropriation as the self takes in the lessons of a tradition and reframes and articulates it in her specific terms, in her life. The dynamics of religious testimony go beyond Ricoeur’s notion of symbol as “giving rise to thought” or metaphor as “opening up new possible worlds” to an encounter with the “Absolute” and then to an “affirmation of the Absolute.”49 Here, in testimony we are talking of “singular events” as Kierkegaard calls them, “in which each instance confers the sanction of reality upon ideas, ideals, and ways of being . . . which we discover.”50 Here, in religious testimony we are speaking of “a moment of history invested with absolute character.”51 Ricoeur then turns to examples of testimony and these come from “revealed religions” with the obvious paradigm case of “the founding events of the history of Israel.”52 Here again, ever the theorist who loves triads, Ricoeur provides us with three concepts to explain the dynamics of testimony: (1) event and meaning, (2) interpretation and the trial of false

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testimony, and (3) the testimony of what is seen in acts of suffering and martyrdom. The testimonies of Israel to founding events show a particular aspect of testimony in which a specific event, a happening of overwhelming power brings with it a specific message. “For Hebraic confession of faith, the event and its meaning immediately coincide.”53 Here, we may think of the Burning Bush event when Moses is struck by the fantastic occurrence of a “bush on fire that is not consumed (Ex:3).” We may see this as a pure manifestation of the holy even in Heideggerian terms as a “ disclosure of being” but then of course the event goes well beyond this as God reveals some important elements of his nature along with this very Name and then his mission to redeem Israel from slavery with Moses as his agent. Here, with the notion of testimony, revelation is no longer a vague revelation of being, or the opening to possible new worlds but a revelation with a specific meaning, a revelation with content. Ricoeur says we have the “the dialectic of the witness and the things seen. To be a witness is to have participated in what one has seen and to be able to testify to it.”54 In a second essay on testimony in the Mudge collection, Ricoeur finds confirmation for his theory of testimony in Second Isaiah. Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf yet have ears! Let all the nations gather together and let the peoples assemble. Who among them can declare this, and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to justify them and let them hear and say. It is true: “You are my witnesses,” says the Lord “and my servants whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no God was formed nor shall there be any after me. . . . You are my witnesses,” says the Lord. (Is 43:8–12)

Ricoeur, then sounding very much like a theologian explains, “It is Yahweh himself who is witnessed to in the testimony. Moreover, the testimony is oriented toward proclamation: . . . it is for all peoples that one people is witness.”55 So that the testifying people of Israel give witness to God not primarily for themselves but first for God and then for all the world. And the role of God in the testimony is extremely active since as Ricoeur says the testimony itself is demanded by God so that “it proceeds from an absolute initiative as to its origin and content.”56 Although Ricoeur does not refer to Martin Buber, he might very well have turned to him for further articulation of his notion of testimony in relation to the great event of the Exodus. In his book Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant57 Buber introduces concepts of “inner history” and “saga”58 to describe the form of narrative that biblical testimony takes. With regard to

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inner history Buber says the following. “What is decisive with respect to the inner history . . . is that the children of Israel understood this as an act of their God as a ‘miracle,’ which does not mean that they interpreted it as a miracle . . . but as such they perceived it.”59 Inner history displays some of the qualities of Ricoeur’s notion of metaphoric truth in that it is less about relating what actually happened as an historical document of the Exodus might do and more concerned with relating “that which roused the emotions of man undergoing the experience,”60,61 Along with the notions of “inner history” Buber is not shy in referring to the events as a revelation of God as “sole power not restricted by any other.”62 It is of course one thing for Moses and the Israelites who actually experienced the Exodus from Egypt to give testimony to it. But it is another, and harder, thing to give testimony to these events centuries after they occurred. Here Ricoeur and Buber too would benefit from a theory of ritual in which testimony is transferred from one generation to the next. For such is the power of ritual and liturgy that is able to give its believers the sense that they too participated in the great founding religious events of the community so that they feel as if they too experienced them and they, too, wish to give testimony to them. But this is all to say that God does not only appear as it were once in founding events but continues to appear to the believer in the rituals and liturgies in which founding events are witnessed. These acts of witnessing and testimony are seen both in daily Jewish prayer and in central festivals such as Passover, Shavuot (Festival of Weeks), and Sukkot (Festival of Booths). The Passover Seder, for Judaism, remains paradigmatic testimonial ritual, where not only is the Exodus story repeated but as the Seder requires “everyone is obliged to regard themselves as though they had actually gone out from Egypt.” The second dimension of testimony that Ricoeur refers to is unsurprisingly interpretation. Interpretation must be a part of the dynamics of testimony because although the event comes with a message that message is not always thoroughly clear in its meaning. This we see in our paradigm case of the Burning Bush, where God reveals his Name as YHVH, and its meaning as “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.” This latter Hebrew expression is so ungrammatical in Hebrew that it is really hard to determine what it means. Thus, for instance, the King James version translates it “I Am that I Am” and many Jewish exegetes suggest something closer to “I Will Be Present As I Will Be Present.” And as clear as the Ten commandments of Sinai appear to be on the face of it. Many questions arise as to what the ten actually are. What the people of Israel actually heard. Why these ten and not others were chosen and what the meaning of individual commandments actually is. Thus, even in an event that includes its meaning in it as Ricoeur suggests, interpretation is required.

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We have been discussing paradigmatic public cases of testimony from the Bible. However, Ricoeur also wants to include more prosaic testimonial acts of persons who have religious experiences and want to give testimony to them. Interpretation is necessary in the case of individual testimonies to religious events since we often will need to decide “between the false witness and the truthful one.”63 Thus just as the religious tradition develop ways of determining whether a witness is a true or false prophet a saint or sinner, a mystic or charlatan, individuals who claim themselves to be witnesses to religious events must be examined and these testimonies evaluated to determine whether they are real or imagined, true or false. The final dimension of testimony that Ricoeur wants to sensitize us to is how testimony “confers the sanction of reality on ideas, ideals, and ways of being.”64 And that at the deepest level “this proof becomes the price of life itself.”65 And then the witness “becomes a martyr.”66 Here Ricoeur extends his analysis by citing “the great historical archetype” that includes “the suffering servant, the persecuted righteous Socrates, and Jesus.”67 Here he tells us that the archetype of testimony comes to include “the commitment of a pure heart, and a commitment unto death.” And then with a philosophic religious flourish Ricoeur tells us this commitment of the archetypal martyr constitutes “the tragic destiny of truth.”68 So that one gives reality and truth to one’s testimony by literally giving one’s life for it. At this point it is clear that Ricoeur has moved into the heart of theology where appropriating the meaning of a text becomes actualizing that meaning in the identity one adopts, the way of life one lives, and the truth one dies for. In Judaism, this is addressed as taking on the yoke of Torah, living one’s life according to God’s mitsvot and laws, and, if necessary, giving one’s life for the sake of the One God of Israel in what is called “Kiddush Hashem,” the Sanctification of the Name. Here it seems we are far from Ricoeur’s more aesthetic notions of hermeneutics as helping to ground human beings in “being-with others,” or “opening us to deeper dimensions of reality” not given in literal, historical, or scientific descriptions. When hermeneutics becomes testimony to public events such as Exodus and Sinai (and for Christians, the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus), we no longer are interpreting the text, the text is interpreting us. This is most easily stated in Jewish terms as God commanding us and we fulfilling those commandments in the way we live and pray, in the liturgies we perform and even in the way we die. CONCLUSIONS Paul Ricoeur, Martin Buber and other philosophers of religion in the middle to later part of the twentieth century, found in great texts and their interpretation

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ways to address problems of isolation, meaninglessness, and the excesses of individualism and materialism. Even as they accepted the critique of traditional forms of philosophical theology offered by the medievals they saw in the Bible deep reservoirs of meaning, truth, and rich forms of life that moderns could still adopt for themselves. For these thinkers, the notion of God as the ultimate source of human meaning truth and value also still remained relevant. Given, the scars of Western religions carved into the landscape of Western history, they both, Ricoeur and Buber, display a certain theological reticence and caution. The presuppositions of Heidegger and phenomenology for Ricoeur, and Nietzsche’s existentialism for Buber, made then wary of religious institutions and formal aspects of religion such as doctrines and dogmas for Ricoeur, and law, ritual, and liturgy for Buber. Thus, we see even in the notion of testimony that Ricoeur sees the paradigm in individual martyrdom and Buber in powerful events that could be seen as existential encounters of the people Israel and God. Also, for both Buber and Ricoeur it is the individual reader of the Bible and not group or liturgical study, so central to Judaism, that is highlighted. The ongoing Jewish life of mitsvot, the group study of Torah and synagogue prayer and its parallels in the Christian Churches are not aspects that Buber and Ricoeur focus on. At this point in the twenty-first century as the institutional life of the synagogue and church continues to be threatened by apathy and abandonment, especially, in the more mainstream liberal forms, it is my judgment that more attention needs to be given precisely to the institutional aspects of Judaism and Christianity that Ricoeur, Buber, and many others ignored. But these more institutional and formal aspects of religion are not too far off from Ricoeur and Buber as one can take a hermeneutical approach to commandment and law and liturgy as we see in the writings of figures such as Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel and a number of “post-liberal” Protestant and Catholic Neo-Thomistic theologians today, some of whom are found in this collected volume of essays. Paul Ricoeur was mainly a philosopher who stood at the edge of religion and theology. But his hermeneutical theory forged a new way of doing theology that resurrected the primary importance of scripture to Western religion. As I have said, his relevance to Judaism is clear and compelling since Jewish scripture or Torah is the matrix of all Jewish thought and behavior and the primary point of connect between Jews and God.

NOTES 1. Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1992).

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2. For a good review of how Ricoeur placed these two approaches in dialogue see Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1976). 3. Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation Lewis Mudge, ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980) We will refer to this as (Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical) throughout this essay. 4. See the series of books by Jon Levenson and Michael Fishbane for good examples. 5. This is changing as a small but important group of Orthodox thinkers are beginning to embrace academic biblical criticism. See, for example, The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible. T. Ganzel, Y. Brandes, C. Deutsch, eds. (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019). 6. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 106. 7. Ricoeur restates Gadamer’s principle as follows. “The essence of a work of art, a literary work, or a work in general is to transcend its psycho-sociological conditions of production and to be open to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated within different socio-cultural contexts. In short, it belongs to a text to decontextualize itself as much from a sociological point of view as well as a psychological one, and to be able to recontextualize itself in new contexts. The act of reading accomplishes the latter.” (“The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” Philosophy Today XVII, 2/4, (Summer, 1973) 133. 8. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, 120. 9. Ibid., p. 100. 10. Ibid., p. 71. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 101. 13. Ibid., p. 53. 14. Ibid.. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 99. 18. Ibid. 19. This view is sometimes referred to as “reader response” theory, highlighting the creative role of the reader in constituting the text as she reads it. For an extended theory see the work of Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 20. Ibid., p. 100. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 103. 23. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 100. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 101. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 102. 28. Ibid., p. 101.

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29. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 6. 30. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 96. 31. Ibid., p. 102. 32. Ibid., p. 103. 33. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 102. 34. Ibid., p. 103. 35. Ibid., p. 102. 36. Ibid., p. 96. 37. Ibid., p. 104. 38. Ibid., p., 103. 39. Ibid., p., 102. 40. Jean Nabert, Le Desir de Dieu (Paris, Aubier, 1966). 41. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 105 42. Ibid., p. 108. 43. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 44. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Referred to as (Ricoeur 1970) in text. 45. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 106. 46. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 47. Ibid. p. 110. 48. In further explaining his use of the notion of appropriation Ricoeur launches a critique of the influential atheist Ludwig Feuerbach. For Feuerbach God is just a reflection of the higher self or highest aspirations of the human. Feuerbach assumes the position of the royal “autonomous subject, that produces the idea of God. As Ricoeur puts it human is “subject” and God “must be the predicate” (Ricoeur 1980,109). In the process of hermeneutical appropriation however, where an outside power forms me Ricoeur sounding like a theologian says “God is projected as the ‘subject’ for whom the human being becomes the ‘predicate’” (Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, 109). 49. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 110. 50. Ibid., p. 111. 51. Ibid., p. 112. 52. Ibid., p. 113. 53. Ibid., p. 112. 54. Ibid., p. 113. 55. Ibid., p. 131. 56. Ibid. 57. Martin Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (NY: Harper, 1958). Referred to as (Buber, 1958) in the text. 58. Ibid., p. 14. 59. Ibid., p. 75. 60. Ibid., p. 14. 61. There is an historical event at the heart of the Exodus, Buber will not deny that, but what the book of Exodus as testimony to the event relates is what Buber

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calls “historical wonder (Buber, Moses, 14).” Buber uses the notion of “miracle” here, but describes it as “as an abiding astonishment . . . the religious person . . . abides in that wonder,” so that nothing “can weaken that astonishment (Buber, Moses, 77). Buber wants us to know that precisely because what he calls “great turning-points in religious history” like the Exodus begin as historical events they are “fully included in the objective scientific nexus of nature and history.” In other words, they are neither dreams, nor fantasies, and the people know this. But they equally know that something unique has happened in their historical experience. “The real miracle means that in the astonishing experience of the event the current system of cause and effect becomes, as it were, transparent and permits a glance of the sphere in which a sole power not restricted by any other, is at work” (Buber, Moses, 77). 62. Ibid., p. 77. 63. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical, p. 112. 64. Ibid., p. 111. 65. Ibid., p. 113. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Buber, Martin. Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. New York: Harper, 1958. Ganzel, T., Y. Brandes, C. Deutsch, eds. The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetics of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Kepnes, Steven. The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology. Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1992. Nabert, Jean. Le Desir de Dieu. Paris: Aubier, 1966. Ricoeur, Paul. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Lewis Mudge, ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Chapter 7

Challenging the Male Gaze The Unabashed Rahab Emerges through Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics Stephanie Arel

Throughout the history of biblical exegesis, Rahab has been a woman of notice. She appears in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures. She understands the power of God in the Hebrew Bible and saves the Israelite spies. She assumes a profession biblically understood as errant: women who are prostitutes generally fall on the margins of society, and yet Rahab is on the inside in Christ’s genealogy. She is a family woman and a woman of faith. Rahab unabashedly moves throughout the Bible as a woman of strength, honor, deep knowing, and good works. Rahab’s story begins in Joshua 2. Two spies sent by Moses’s successor enter “the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab” (Joshua 2:1). Rahab helps the spies, hiding them overnight in her home in Jericho and lying to the King about the spies’ whereabouts. After misdirecting the spies’ pursuers, Rahab goes to the roof where she has hidden the spies and reveals what she understands, that her city is in danger: “I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you” (Joshua 2:9). She continues to recount how she has heard of the parting of the Red Sea and reports knowing that the Israelites utterly destroyed the two kings of the Amorites. She foresees the same for her city and asks the spies, in exchange for having hid them, that they protect her family: “Give me a sign of good faith that you will spare my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them” (Joshua 2:12–13). The spies agree, and upon their escape tell Rahab to hang a crimson cord out of the window during the Israelite attack on Jericho. The cord will indicate which home should not be destroyed during the attack.

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Rahab survives the destruction of Canaan. She and her family, spared by Joshua, are brought to Israel to live. She appears again in the Christian Scriptures, as an ancestress of the Messiah in The Gospel of Matthew (1:5), as an exemplar of faith in Hebrews (11:31), and as righteous in her good works in James (2:25). Throughout her appearances in both canonical texts, Rahab is a described as a prostitute,1 but the texts also depict her as someone who knows God, the God of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures. As a result, Rahab has been, for poets, scholars, religious leaders, and lay people, a biblical character of intrigue. Poets explore her appeal: in Dante’s Paradisio Canto IX she sits at the “foremost rank” and is “a trophy.”2 William Blake features Rahab less favorably interpreting her as a creator of “webs of torture,” engaged in decisive acts definitive of her sex “Dividing & uniting in Delusive feminine pomp.”3 In the 2013 miniseries The Bible, Stephanie Leonidas portrays Rahab, a smoky-eyed beauty yet not a named prostitute; she is rather a woman of her family who knows the strength of the Israelite God and is thus willing to help the Israelite spies. However Rahab is read, she is very frequently read through the male gaze, a gaze filtered through the patriarchal paradigm well established in Western culture. Reading Rahab through the male gaze confines her to particular roles and interpretations which belie her strength as a female character, and exemplum of female embodiment. Yet, Rahab exceeds the bounds of interpretation established by the male gaze. The various readings of Rahab do not undermine her ability to exemplify faith and good works but instead accumulate to create a more dimensional and sophisticated understanding of what it means to be holy as a woman in the Judeo-Christian context. In order to foster a hermeneutics of reading Rabah as multifaceted, I turn to the work of Paul Ricoeur. I assert that, Rahab offers a model for feminine sexuality and embodiment that exceeds her interpretation within the male gaze. I believe that the way in which Ricoeur encourages individuals to read, through stages (the hermeneutic arc), so that the text can open itself up to the reader, provides a pathway for releasing Rahab from patriarchal readings of her. For Ricoeur, the opening of the text occurs during the hermeneutic task “to read the hidden meaning inside the text of the apparent meaning.”4 Encompassed in this task is to “show that existence arrives at expression, at meaning, and at reflection only to light the world of culture. Existence becomes a self— human and adult—only by appropriating this meaning, which first resides “outside,” in works, institutions, and cultural monuments in which the life of the spirit is objectified.”5 By doing this, by looking deeply at how texts are interpreted, readings of Rahab through the male gaze can loosen, and Rahab herself can “light the world of culture,” offering a model of female sexuality that exists beyond or outside of the patriarchal paradigm.

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THE MALE GAZE In her ground-breaking essay, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” feminist film critic Laura Mulvey establishes the concept of the male gaze. Using psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey asserts the force of the male gaze: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.”6 In this definition, a first and foundational presumption of male and female roles emerges: the male is active, and the female is passive. Mulvey expresses passivity in terms of the male’s projection of his phantasy onto the woman. In the dynamic of the male gaze, desire, blame, and contempt are displaced onto the feminine, presumed passive, and thus she assumes meaning that reflects the projection of the male. Mulvey writes, that woman “stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”7 Woman therefore stands as a passive object of the gaze, a receptor of the interpretation of man and ultimately responsible for that interpretation. In this framework of the male gaze, woman, as passive, lacks the ability to assume meaning apart from that bestowed on her by male desire and projection. And this lack is seated in the phallus. Woman is missing the essential organ that organizes the social world of the patriarchal gaze. The phallus, present, defines what is potent and important; however, women persist without a phallus; this presents a problem for the patriarchal gaze, which instead of celebrating this difference, must problematize it. Why? Because it makes the reality of emasculation possible. Mulvey presents the fulcrum of the interplay between man and woman/male and female: what is female “connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.”8 Her lack of a penis becomes the material evidence for castration, and a complex ensues: in Freudian theory, the fear is that the penis will be removed as a result of desire for the mother; to suppress this fear, often compared with the fear of death, the male must assert power and regain control. Thus, the castration complex underlies entrance into the patriarchal symbolic order known in psychoanalytic theory as “the law of the father.” Rule and dogmatic religion in western society are founded on this paradigm. Under the law of the father, what is female always threatens to evoke castration anxiety. Mulvey asserts that the male unconscious can escape this anxiety in two ways: (1) through “preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma,” which means demystifying her “counterbalanced by

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the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object” or (2) denial of castration by the “substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure of itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.”9 In the first scenario, to alleviate his fear of bodily injury—which manifests in the male feeling powerless—he asserts power and control over the female. He considers her weak, and attempts to reduce the possibility of her own influence; he punishes her for any action she might take, or he creates a narrative where he comes to her rescue. In every case, she is powerless. In the second scenario, she becomes something good—an emollient to his damaged self—but in this transition, she transforms into someone worshiped, or made too good. She is then an “icon” subject to male gaze and functioning at the service of men—a source of man’s enjoyment. The male gaze, along with the male effort to assume power by interpreting a story in a particular way, is ubiquitous. The way that the male gaze reads Rahab is no exception. READING RAHAB THROUGH THE MALE GAZE Under the male gaze Rahab is first and foremost, a prostitute, a harlot. She is responsible for enticing men to commit immoral acts. She is devalued, implicitly. In Zevachim 116b, the Rabbis discuss Rahab’s prowess and her ability to evoke fear in men; under the male gaze, this constitutes her returning the male to the original trauma, or to fear of castration. The Gemara asks: What is different there, i.e., with regard to the splitting of the Jordan, where the verse states: “Neither was there spirit in them anymore,” and what is different here, i.e., in the statement of Rahab, where the verse states: “Neither did there remain [kama] any more spirit in any man” (Joshua 2:11)? The Gemara replies that Rahab used this phrase euphemistically, to say that their fear was so great that their male organs were not even able to become erect, as “kama” also means rise. The Gemara asks: And how did Rahab know this? The Gemara replies: As the Master said: You do not have any prince or ruler at that time who did not engage in intercourse with Rahab the prostitute.10

The structure of the last sentence solidifies the male gaze—Rahab is the prostitute, the one responsible and judged for the men’s actions. The Rabbis bestow upon her an imputed fault for bad male behavior: every prince and ruler has had sex with her, and this is due to Rahab’s wonton behavior. She is thus object of the gaze, a receptor of others’ interpretation of her and, under the male gaze, bears ultimate responsibility for that interpretation.

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Evidence of Rahab as a temptress under the male gaze manifests more precisely in Megillah. Similarly, Rabbi Yitzḥak said: Anyone who says Rahab, Rahab, immediately experiences a seminal emission due to the arousal of desire caused by Rahab’s great beauty. Rav Naḥman said to him: I say: Rahab, Rahab, and it does not affect me. Rabbi Yitzchak said to Rav Naḥman: When I said this, I was specifically referring to one who knows her personally and recognizes her beauty. Only for one who has met Rahab in person is the mere mention of her name capable of arousing lust.11

In this construction, even the utterance of the name “Rahab” can arouse sexual desire. This interpretation of Rahab, always underscored by her role as a prostitute, frees men from guilt or responsibility in the exchange of intercourse. This interpretation which seems to show her power is actually meant to relegate her to this more passive idolatrous role which subsequently robs her of her actual power. But Rahab is freed from this devaluation, not by her acquisition of power, but rather by being subsumed into the patriarchal order which operates in the “name of the Father and the Law.”12 Rahab lacks something that the father and the law can give to her: protection, status, virtue, and grace granted through union with the male. For instance, Rahab as a prostitute lacks a spouse (under the law) and virtue (under God the Father). She is an immoral prostitute who becomes venerable through her heroic action. This venerability has to be ratified for the Rabbis, so that Rahab’s worthiness as a convert to Judaism can be justified; they attest that Rahab married Joshua following her conversion, although the Book of Joshua does not say this explicitly. Rahab’s repentance also bolsters her status (although it presumably does not mitigate her ability to stir men’s sexual urges): The Gemara adds that the Sages said with regard to Rahab: She was ten years old when the Jewish people left Egypt, and she engaged in prostitution all forty years that the Jewish people were in the wilderness. After that, when she was fifty years old, she converted when the two spies visited her. She said: May all of my sins of prostitution be forgiven me as a reward for having endangered myself with the rope, window, and flax, by means of which I saved Joshua’s two spies. Rahab first concealed the spies in stalks of flax, and later assisted them in exiting her home by lowering them from the window with a rope (see Joshua 2:6 and 2:15).13

Similarly, from a Christian perspective, Peter Hawkins’s shows us how this problem is ameliorated, “Rahab was saved both by Joshua and by Jesus,

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not only in ancient Canaan but in the Christian dispensation’s ‘fullness of time’ (Gal. 4:4). In her, God’s glory is doubled.”14 Prior to this glory, she is cleansed of her harlotry, but then, as a result of her faith, she is ready to become acceptable, forgiven, holy. This shift illustrates Rahab’s movement from Mulvey’s scenario of demystification, punishment, and saving to the moment of idolization. Rahab becomes acceptable in this vein but still unchallenging to and in line with the male’s gaze. A popular online blog reads Rahab, illustrating the Christian need to frame her as saved. The point reveals itself in the title of the piece: “From Harlot to Heroine by God’s grace.” The moral code emerges: a harlot cannot be a heroine; thus, Rahab’s holiness springs not from her own action, but by God’s and His grace, which has a saving power, in this case from her status as a prostitute. Such readers viewing Rahab from the male gaze need to frame her as saved in order to legitimize her courage, power, and agency. At the same time that Rahab is defined by readings that decrease her worth, make her culpable, and then ameliorate the situation by absorbing her into the patriarchal order and saving her, she is also, in accordance with the second scenario of response to the fear of castration anxiety, made an idol. For instance, the Bible at no point tells readers that Rahab is beautiful, and yet, she is read this way through the male gaze. In fact, asserting Rahab’s beauty is critical to the male gaze (Rahab cannot be a powerful, spiritual, faithful, and ugly prostitute). The Rabbis read Rahab as a visual spectacle, observing in Megillah 15a: “There were four women of extraordinary beauty in the world: Sarah, and Abigail, Rahab, and Esther.”15 From a Christian perspective, Hawkins’s summary of how Dante uses Rahab begins at the same point as the Rabbi’s interpretation of Rahab: her beauty. “Composed within herself, Rahab sparkles.”16 Hawkins continues, Dante aligns her with the “the divine art that had its way with her,” turning her into “a woman of valor,” a “mother of prophets, priests, and kings,” and an “ancestress of Christ.”17 Rahab “appears in Venus as purity itself, at once sparkling and tranquil, she is, as both Dante and Hawkins state, “the trophy (‘palma’) of a double or two-palmed victory.”18 For Hawkins, and Dante, Rahab rests in the cradle of the male gaze, a prize, an idol, passive for fondling by the eyes of the men who look upon her. She is not perfect (she is a prostitute) but, and this is critical, she becomes perfect under the male gaze. Mulvey asserts that this transformation evidences a mis-seeing or misrecognition: “the image recognized” (Rahab) “is conceived as the reflected body of the self”; Rahab is the idealized figure mirroring the ego of those men that sleep with her, and the beautiful prostitute that elicits male fervor.19 Reading Rahab through the male gaze robs readers of understanding Rahab’s significance as a powerful, sexual woman who spans both biblical texts. Reading her as guilty or as saved, projects meaning upon Rahab,

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disrupting her ability to make meaning. Cast in the patriarchal paradigm as a passive subject in the Bible, she is an object to be subjected “to a controlling and curios gaze.”20 Controlled by the male who interprets her sexuality, as the promiscuous harlot, or the repentant whore cleansed of her shame, her cunning decision to free the slaves, her choice to be a prostitute with a family, and her acts of grace become inconsequential. Writers, especially Christian writers, try to cleanse her to make her right, and good enough for Jesus’s lineage. Reading Rahab through the male gaze limits her, confining her to particular realms comfortable for the male gaze and patriarchal society. Those realms are typically understood in the stereotypical categories of the virgin or the whore; the good asexual woman or the bad woman. As shown, readers of Rahab take such dichotomies as the virgin and the whore, interpret them, and then create structures for religious praxis: the good woman is a virgin, the bad woman a whore. Middle ground is unstable, so defining women along the lines of one of these extremes is necessary in the male gaze. Underneath the idea of Rahab’s being saved (from being a whore to virginhood) lies the imperative to see her as one of the extremes. In the blog for instance, the concept of the virgin is upheld; the harlot is transformed to become a heroine. Such polarities have a negative influence on both sexual and relational health.21 Confining the imagination into only two choices of a way to be in the world limits the reading of Rahab, but it also ultimately limits the female imagination and action about how to be a sexual being in the world. READING RAHAB THROUGH RICOEUR Ricoeur’s hermeneutics offers a method of reading Rahab emancipated from the patriarchal gaze which categorizes Rahab into antithetical roles. Ricoeur’s whole hermeneutic project rejects sole interpretations by readers on a text. Instead, Ricoeur insists on multiple meanings. In “Exegesis and Hermeneutics,” he asserts that from literal meaning unfolds levels of meaning. Interpretation is therefore the “work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning.”22 Ricoeur’s position allows for the reading of the male gaze but rejects the notion of the male gaze as the essential or exclusive interpreter of the text. The male gaze, although predominant in Western and patriarchal cultures, produces one level of meaning, a meaning deeply located in its historical context and Judeo-Christian religious frameworks. The writers I have referenced cannot or do not read Rahab outside of these contexts, which poses, as Ricoeur asserts, “a hermeneutic problem, that is, a problem of interpretation . . . because every reading of a text always takes place within a community, a tradition, or a living current of thought, all of which display presuppositions

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and exigencies.”23 Unfortunately, the readings I have referenced reflect an interpretation of women, represented by Rahab, as either the virgin or the whore. She cannot be both in a patriarchal paradigm. Ricoeur warns that reading cannot rely on univocal signs; the patriarchal paradigm works hard to solidify Rahab into univocal categories. But Ricoeur insists, “Exegesis has already accustomed us to the idea that a text has several meanings, that these meanings overlap, that the spiritual meaning is ‘transferred’ . . . from the historical or literal meaning because of the latter’s surplus of meaning.”24 If we take Ricoeur seriously here, then the univocal categorization of Rahab through the male gaze not only divests her of the capacity to take on complex meanings but it also deprives her of assuming a greater spiritual meaning. Failing to read Rahab and her story in its complexity, therefore, does a disservice to both the historical or literal meaning and the possible spiritual meaning or meanings of the narrative. In addition, regarding Rahab through the lens of the male gaze also constitutes a use of language in service of male or patriarchal power. Ricoeur writes in From Text to Action: Since the distortions of language do not come from the usage of language as such but from its relation to labor and power, these distortions are unrecognizable by the members of the community. This misrecognition is peculiar to the phenomenon of ideology. It can be analyzed phenomenologically only by appealing to concepts of a psychoanalytic type: to illusion as distinct from error, to projection as the constitution of a false transcendence, to rationalization as the subsequent rearrangement of motivation according to the appearance of a rational justification.25

Ricoeur’s suppositions about the distortions in language emerge very much like Mulvey’s critique of the male gaze where the illusion is the female idol, the projection the male’s desire of her, and the rationalization, the imbrication of Rahab with a narrative that cleanses her to make her suitable for Christ’s lineage. Moving through such a reading of Rahab reflects how language intertwined with power shapes what women ought to be under the male gaze, instead of allowing woman to speak for herself, whether in word or in action. Returning to the biblical text to review the literal meanings to be garnered by Rahab’s story enables an interpretation that emancipates Rahab from the male gaze and allows her to be seen as multifaceted human, a paradoxical whole. Rahab was a prostitute who saved spies and herself on one fateful day in Jericho; her deed accorded her the way into Christ’s lineage. She is later recorded as a model for both faith and good works. In contrast, the male gaze situated in Western cultural history cannot integrate the sometimes illegal, always immoral and shameful prostitute with the heroine.

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Throughout the Bible, the association of uncleanliness with prostitution is made frequently. Leviticus considers a prostitute a woman defiled who should not be married. In Amos 7, uncleanliness and prostitution are conspicuously linked. Psalm 106 goes a step further, connecting uncleanliness and prostitution with actions of worshiping idols, a theme that extends into the Christian Scriptures under the phrase “prostituting oneself to false gods.” Rahab reflects none of these interpretations. The Bible never addresses her as unclean. Being a prostitute is simply a non-pejorative identifier. The biblical texts themselves undermine a reading of Rahab through the male gaze, as neither indicates that Rahab has a stigma, or a lack that is made whole through union with the male. Instead, the texts promote a reading of Rahab who is a powerful, female prostitute who knows God; she supports a family, cunningly saving them from destruction and assuming a place in Christ’s lineage. Reading Rahab through the male gaze fails to recognize and reconcile these diverse characteristics. Ricoeur’s work calls readers to allow a surplus of meaning related to Rahab that emerges through various symbols. Ricoeur writes “Symbols alone carry all the vectors, both regressive and progressive, that the various hermeneutics, dissociate. True symbols contain all hermeneutics, those which are directed toward the emergence of new meanings and those which are directed toward the resurgence of archaic fantasies.”26 To begin with Rahab, at the level of language, a word symbolizes her biblical characterization, “prostitute.” “Prostitute” is a word and a symbol interpreted in multiple directions. The male gaze tends toward fostering archaic fantasies where the woman acts as a signifier in a patriarchal order where man imposes his fantasies on silent and powerless (at least in terms of meaning making) woman. Yet, on the other hand, Rahab is not a destitute prostitute; she has a father and a mother. Although the reason she has become a prostitute is obscure, the biblical story supports the belief that she chooses to be a prostitute, that she owns an inn, and that these roles which assume power illustrate her capacity to have agency in multiple situations—saving the spies, lying to the King, hanging the red cord—altogether which lead James to consider her righteous in her good works. Understanding Rahab is not a simple work of categorization, it is a work of thinking, reflecting, and interpretation. Ricoeur writes, “It is in the work of interpretation that this philosophy discovers the multiple modalities of the dependence of the self.”27 Thus, reading Rahab to discover her multiple modalities takes reflection, and time, and she offers much more than a dichotomous characterization to the developing self. To understand Rahab’s person, one must read and interpret her movement and behavior. The gestures or actions Rahab performs—protecting the spies and making a deal with them, hanging the red cord and saving her family—both garner her appreciation in the Bible and also function as symbols.

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Ricoeur calls such gestures “predicates.” Linguistically the verbal aspect of the sentence; they are actions which when considered repudiate a reading through the male gaze of Rahab as passive or as incapable of creating meaning.28 Active gestures illustrate Rahab’s autonomy, agency, and ability to be effective. Independent and courageous, even daring in her faith, Rahab is an influencer in the sacred texts. On top of this, her gestures signal to readers that she has no shame in her sexuality, her choice of professions, or her lies to the King. Instead these actions indicate an internal sense of trust. The Bible commends her faith which is the mainspring of her conduct. The reader does not forget that Rahab uses her sexuality like Ruth and Tamar to save the patriarchal lines and to rejoin Israel. Symbolically, Rahab is also a foreigner. She shares this status with other women in the Bible, presented as foreigners or as outsiders (Hagar and the unnamed women in Judges). She is also a prostitute. Yet, as other prostitutes in the Bible (Mary Magdalene), she is seen in a positive light (she does not share the stigma attached to adulterous wives or nonvirgin brides).29 Still Rahab is situated at the margins of society (as a prostitute), of a nation (she protects spies), and of a city (physically her apartment is located at the city’s walls.) However, these margins enable her to function as a door or passage way to new life: she and her family move to Israel, and she joins Christ’s lineage. As Meir Bar-Maymon asserts: “Rahab n’est pas seulement la frontière, elle est aussi la porte que les hommes doivent traverser pour obtenir leur nouveau statu – hommes de la ville, hommes de culture.”30After passing through this door, the men escape. Thus, Rahab can be read as both on the inside and on the outside: she is on the inside of the scene, on the inside of the walls, and ultimately on the inside of Christ’s lineage. Adding to her powerful characterization, Rahab is not nameless nor is she described according to her male kin. She is both named and attended to, in both biblical texts. As a result, reading Rahab results in assuming no lack. She holds a “surplus of meaning.” Rahab is not a problem to be solved here, through marriage or salvation, but instead she is a woman of significance. Ricoeur helps us see this through the idea of mutuality shared; this concept allows us to read Rahab not only an aggregate but also as capable. She is the capable human being, who through her symbolic construction in the biblical texts, in her gestures, and in her placement creates her own significance, independent of meaning cast upon her by western, patriarchal paradigms. Her capabilities in both biblical texts also set her up as a mirror for the self of a woman in general. Ricoeur’s assertion of the imbrication of agency with self-understanding functions to highlight this aspect of Rahab. Ricoeur writes, “Self-recognition thus found in the unfolding of the figures of the ‘I can,’ which together make up the portrait of the capable human being, its own space of meaning.”31

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In this meaning, and meaning making, Rahab consistently acts in the biblical texts—she is not a passive figure; neither is she constructed as an object of beauty to be merely gazed upon. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ontology can help readers see Rahab in this way. In From Text to Action, Ricoeur addresses Heidegger’s idea of belonging expressed in the language of “being-in-the world.” This is precisely where Rahab resides—in the world, in a moving world, in a world that is being destroyed and constructed where she is a fulcrum literally between two texts, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures; between two nations, the Canaanites and the Israelites; between two spaces, the city and the frontier; as a woman between complacency and action; and in her role as a prostitute, between what is considered abominable (the whore) and pure ( the virgin—here parallel with having a family, being loyal etc.) This idea of being-in-the world, modeled by Rahab in all her surplus of meaning, expresses, as Ricoeur says, “the primacy of care over the gaze, and the horizontal character of that to which we are bound.”32 CONCLUSION Ricoeur’s work urges readers to read and reread texts, to understand the literal meaning, as well as all the possible interpretations of a text all the while asking readers to be aware of what they project on to the text that gives it social and cultural currency. For readers in the western world, this amounts to reflecting on the way in which one falls into reading through the male gaze. Patriarchal paradigms that entrap Rahab into polarities do not stop with a reading of text but extend into the ways in which religious and social worlds operate. Reading through the male gaze disabuse both Rahab and women in general from being able to express themselves as powerful, sexual, and active selves in the world. The focus of the gaze on one thing—the narrative that Rahab is a prostitute who is forgiven and “saved” by Joshua, then a participant into the genealogy of Christ—disenables the ability to see another aspect—that Rahab has agency and does not need to be saved from the world she inhabits in the Hebrew Bible so that she could enter the Christian framework where purity trumps all in terms of sexuality. The possibility exists that Rahab choses to be a prostitute (she has a family, unlike other women in this profession), but she also understands a threat emerging from the Israelites, and hides Joshua’s men in her home. She has knowledge of God and trusts that if she helps the spies that they will in “good faith” return the favor and spare her family when Jericho is burned. Faith is intrinsic to her; she has faith as a prostitute. Her sexuality and sexual behavior do not factor in either her beliefs or in her practical decisions to save her family. She makes her way to the Christian

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Scriptures intact. She marries Joshua; they have children. Her past role as a prostitute does not disenable either her marriage or her lineage. Rahab wins, but she never tries to win, she just does what she believes is right. Read hermeneutically, Rahab is ultimately being-in-the-world. She is a model of knowing: she knows the God of the Israelites, and she is a member of Christ’s lineage. She is a model of intimacy and vulnerability: she is willing to put herself at stake for the lives of others, and to trust others, not blindly, but informed by a historical trajectory (the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and God’s participation on their side). She is a model of strength; she enacts brotherhood. And she is a model of embodied female sexuality; she is a prostitute with a family, who never apologizes or repents, although reading Rahab through the male gaze would have her do so.

NOTES 1. All Christian Scriptures quotations taken from the New Revised Standard Version: Joshua 2:1, 6:17, 25; Matthew 1:5; Hebrews 11:13; and James 2:25. 2. Dante Alighieri, The Vision of Paradise, trans. The Rev. H.F. Cary, M.A. (Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901), https​:/​/ww​​w​.gut​​enber​​g​.org​​/file​​s​/879​​9​/879​​9​ -h​​/8​​799​-h​​.htm. 3. William Blake, The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man (1797), http:​/​/jac​​obboe​​hmeon​​line.​​com​/y​​ahoo_​​site_​​admin​​/ asse​​ts​/do​​cs​/Zo​​as​.​14​​49335​​8​.pdf​. 4. Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict Of Interpretations, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 22. 5. Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 22. 6. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 62. 7. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 58. 8. Ibid., 64. 9. Ibid. 10. All quotations from the Talmud come from the Babylonian Talmudic canon, from the Vilna edition and its reprint in the form of the The William Davidson Talmud, Zevachim 116b, https://www​.sefaria​.org​/Zevachim​?lang​=bi. 11. The William Davidson Talmud, Megillah 15a, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sef​​aria.​​org​/M​​egill​​ ah​.15​​a​​?lan​​g​=bi. 12. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 58. 13. The William Davidson Talmud, Zevachim 116b, https://www​.sefaria​.org​/ Zevachim​?lang​=bi. 14. Peter S. Hawkins, “Dante’s Rahab,” MLN 124, no. 5S (2009), 77. 15. The William Davidson Talmud, Megillah 15a, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sef​​aria.​​org​/M​​egill​​ ah​.15​​a​​?lan​​g​=bi.

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16. Hawkins, “Dante’s Rahab,” S76. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 60. 20. Ibid. 21. See Orly Bareket, Rotem Kahalon, Nurit Shnabel, & Peter Glick, “The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy: Men who perceive women’s nurturance and sexuality as mutually exclusive endorse patriarchy and show lower relationship satisfaction,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 79(9–10), 2018. 22. Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 11–12. 25. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 291. 26. Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 23. 27. Ibid., 24. 28. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (New York: Routledge, 2003), 277. 29. Gail P. C. Streete, The Strange Woman: Power, Sex, and the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 14. 30. Meir Bar-Mayman, “La prostituée universelle. De Josué à Madame Rosa,” in Les espaces sexués, eds. Christophe Batsch and Françoise Saquer-Sabin, 181 (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2017). My translation: “Rahab is not only the border, she is also the door that the men must go through for obtaining their new status – men of city, men of culture.” 31. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 151. 32. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 30.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. The Vision of Paradise. Translated by The Rev. H.F. Cary, M.A. Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901. https​:/​/ww​​w​.gut​​enber​​g​.org​​/file​​s​/879​​9​/879​​9​ -h​​/8​​799​-h​​.htm. Bareket, Orly, Rotem Kahalon, Nurit Shnabel, & Peter Glick. “The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy: Men who perceive women’s nurturance and sexuality as mutually exclusive endorse patriarchy and show lower relationship satisfaction.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, no. 79 (9–10) (2018): 519–532. Bar-Mayman, Meir. “La prostituée universelle. De Josué à Madame Rosa.” In Les espaces sexués, edited by Christophe Batsch and Françoise Saquer-Sabin, 177– 188. Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2017. Blake, William. The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man. 1797. http:​/​/jac​​obboe​​hmeon​​line.​​com​/y​​ahoo_​​site_​​admin​​/ asse​​ts​/do​​cs​/Zo​​as​.​14​​49335​​8​.pdf​.

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Hawkins, Peter S. “Dante’s Rahab.” MLN 124, no. 5 (2009): 70–80. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 57–68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “Existence and Hermeneutics.” In The Conflict of Interpretations, edited by James M. Edie, 3–24. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. The Rule of Metaphor. Translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. From Text to Action. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Streete, Gail P. C. The Strange Woman: Power, Sex, and the Bible. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

Chapter 8

Paul Ricoeur and the Parable of the Lost Son Brad DeFord

This essay seeks to explore a series of ironies. To begin, it is safe to assume that, of all of the parables of Jesus, the Parable of the Lost Son1 is perhaps the best known. It may also be one most often misunderstood. For instance, Martha Nussbaum, in her Anger and Forgiveness: resentment, generosity, justice, presents the parable as a model of forgiveness. She has her reasons. “To understand this story, in short, we ought to put aside our ideas of transactional forgiveness, whether Jewish or Christian, and even an idea of unconditional forgiveness without contrition, which would still require the deliberate putting aside of anger.”2 It will become apparent in what follows that the lengths to which Nussbaum goes to maintain that the parable is about this extraordinary form of forgiveness simply indicates that the parable may not be about forgiveness after all, but about something else entirely. Yet, we will not find in Ricoeur’s work an explicit alternative interpretation. In fact, in no text available to me have I found Ricoeur referring to or providing his own interpretation of that parable. This is curious on several counts, including, just to name two: (1) Ricoeur wrote extensively on forgiveness, especially later in his life; and (2) Ricoeur wrote frequently on both fault and guilt. These concepts lend themselves to matters of confession, contrition, remission, and exchange/transaction. Yet, as far as I can tell, Ricoeur links none of these explicitly with this parable. With this in mind that I want to suggest that while the parable might indeed be about obedience, especially in a “following the rules” kind of way, doing everything “right” and as is expected of one, as exemplified by the elder son’s interaction with his father, what occurs between the father and the younger son has a very different meaning, one in contrast with the former. If the 143

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parable were to be about obedience, then it would also be about guilt, the guilt of disobedience. From this would flow the remedy of forgiveness, perhaps even along the lines that Nussbaum describes. However, the core premise of this essay is that this parable might be more about something other than the admission of guilt and a father’s forgiveness. The central contention of this essay is that The Parable of the Lost Son is less about guilt than it is about shame. To explore this using the categories and concepts of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics will entail a critique of Ricoeur’s own perspective in The Symbolism of Evil, followed by an application of themes and concepts from his later work in Oneself as Another, Memory, History, Forgetting, and The Course of Recognition. In that process, our aim is to come to a better understanding of the meaning of the parable, as well as the significance of Ricoeur’s work—then to bridge to a conjecture of a compassionate understanding of Ricoeur’s relationship with his son, Olivier. In other words, this essay has a broad scope. To begin, it will be necessary to define the difference between “guilt” and “shame.” This will be done from two perspectives: those of psychology and those of philosophy. Each has its own perspective on shame and guilt. Each can contribute to our understanding of the parable. And each can enhance our understanding of Ricoeur. As we will see, shame is a realization of fault in one’s being or character (shame tells me that there is something “wrong” with me). It differs from guilt, which is an acknowledgment of one’s faulty action (guilt tells me that I did something wrong). While it is often construed that the guilt from faulty actions stems from the fault in oneself, because forgiveness is concerned with one’s actions, the “reach” of forgiveness, itself an action, does not extend to shame. As a result, whereas forgiveness may be the appropriate antidote of guilt, there is no parallel antidote for shame that is as self-evident. It is at this point that Ricoeur’s terminology becomes exceptionally helpful. What he has to say about mutuality and reciprocity, for instance, contributes to a hermeneutics of shame that upholds the importance of dignity, that contributes to our understanding of both humiliation and humility, and that, above all, results in our affirming the power of love. This essay will show that the father in the parable displays these aspects of the self and character. Finally, there is one event in Ricoeur’s life which makes his not having written about The Parable of the Lost Son puzzling. This, of course, is the suicide of Olivier at a moment in Ricoeur’s life that would otherwise have been its apex. Pinnacle and nadir in a matter of weeks. That Olivier’s death was significant for Ricoeur cannot be doubted, on at least two counts: (1) the “Interlude” on “Tragic Action” curiously designated

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“for Olivier again” in Oneself as Another3; and (2) how many of the themes from that book, expressed and implied, arise in Ricoeur’s later work, for example, the “work of mourning” in Memory, History, Forgetting. Because I write as a thanatologist more than as a philosopher; because I am among those who study death, dying, and grief, and therefore try to grasp the significance of a suicide in any family as a trauma—because of its stigma—I am drawn to this event in Ricoeur’s life. On the one hand, there are discernible patterns that the grief of survivors of suicide typically follows. Many of these are related to that stigma, that social shame. On the other hand, I do not want to pretend to write a “psychobiography” of Ricoeur, along the lines of Erikson’s interpretive tradition. Ricoeur’s personal life was private. I have no desire to project the general upon whatever specifics he experienced. My more modest aim is simply to compare what Ricoeur wrote about “stigma” before Olivier died, and what he wrote about it after. This is the path I will follow. After a section on distinguishing guilt from shame in psychology, I will turn to what Ricoeur has written in The Symbolism of Evil. A close reading would show that what Ricoeur wrote about guilt is actually shame. When he says, “‘Guilt’, in the precise sense of a feeling of unworthiness at the core of one’s personal being, is only the advanced point of a radically individualized and interiorized experience,”4 it is apparent that Ricoeur is writing about shame (unworthy being), not guilt (unworthy action). The consequence of this reread of Ricoeur is that, having made this assertion about Ricoeur’s definition in that book, we can find in subsequent writing a certain interplay of concepts of shame and guilt, often made in the course of Ricoeur’s claims about forgiveness. Making this shift in our understanding of The Symbolism of Evil leads to deeper understandings of the excellent categories Ricoeur has identified there; defilement will be our example of how faulty action also exposes the faulty self of shame. If we carry this distinction between shame and guilt further, we will see it play out in Ricoeur’s other work as well. Then I will take the lead of Dan Zahavi, whose Self & Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame5 explicates several ways philosophers have written about shame. It is a compendium of viewpoints that exceeds what I am able to summarize here. Nonetheless, what Zahavi concludes will be shown to fit well with at least two of the three elements of Ricoeur’s “triad of passivity”6 upon which Ricoeur builds his hermeneutical ontology in Oneself as Another. For both are concerned with matters of alterity. In that context, the interplay of shame and guilt takes another turn. Once we have established these perspectives, we can consider how they are evident in The Parable of the Lost Son in the interactions among the three men: a father and his two sons. We will consider the parable in three

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steps: the younger son’s “coming to himself”; the father’s response when the younger son returns home; and the father’s response to the older son’s astonishment. He appeals to his “scrupulousness,”7 and the father responds to that with the refrain that is the chorus of the parable. To appreciate the theological significance of The Parable of the Lost Son, I will pursue a brief excursus comparing shame in the narrative with the story in Genesis of Cain and Abel. The point will be to contrast the two models of shame narrative. Finally, my imaginative implications also take The Parable of the Lost Son as a template for possibly understanding how the stigma/stain of Olivier’s suicide becomes applicable to Ricoeur’s own intellectual processes afterward. My premise is that Ricoeur, as both a man of faith and a philosopher faithful to his intellectual traditions, could have found for himself in that parable a model for coming to terms with Olivier’s actions. In short, that model would be based less on forgiveness of guilt than it would be on acceptance and love of Olivier. In sum, my commitment is to show how the relational concepts important to Ricoeur, for example, of mutuality and humility, speak tacitly to Ricoeur’s mourning of Olivier and the adjustments he made within himself to be the father who likely welcomed the “lost” son “home.” One more comment on my method: My intent is to structure a kind of dialogue or conversation, reading the parable in the light of Ricoeur and Ricoeur in the light of the parable, thus coming to a sort of reflective reciprocity between the two. This would entail being as accurate as possible about the semantics of the conversation. More importantly, I look at this less as a “hermeneutics in the light of faith,” than as a meditation, an inwardly turning thought process. I want to find where it leads. COMING TO TERMS Ricoeur’s tenth and last “study” in Oneself as Another is an exploration seeking an answer to the question, “What Ontology in View?” A culmination and collection of the implications of the previous chapters, Ricoeur ventures a “hermeneutics of the self,” in order to begin to answer his initial question, “what sort of being is the self?”8 The aim of this portion of the essay is to explore an answer to Ricoeur’s question in terms of “the self is a being who experiences both guilt and shame” by using a semantics of guilt and shame as a grid for interpreting these two experiences of the self. The route toward this answer will make use of Ricoeur’s “dialectic of selfhood and otherness,” for shame and guilt are experiences that take into account both selfhood and otherness in ways that elaborate practically upon what Ricoeur has written.

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The arc of the argument that follows begins in Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil by examining his definition of “guilt” in the light of contemporary psychological research into the distinction between guilt and shame. To maintain a brevity of focus, I will need to omit a discussion of the role of shame—and shamelessness—in the problem of Evil. Once the semantics of guilt and shame are established, I will then juxtapose Zahavi’s philosophical analysis alongside Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self and other in Oneself as Another. One goal of this process is to illustrate how Ricoeur’s categories enhance our understanding of shame’s ontological significance. At last, then, on that basis, we can turn to the Parable of the Lost Son and see it in the light of these distinctions. Toward a Semantics Shame and Guilt Here I will use psychology to distinguish guilt from shame and one’s actions from oneself. Ricoeur’s work reflected a certain lack of awareness of the distinctions between shame and guilt.9 This was common. When, in 1950, Erik Erikson published his first edition of Childhood and Society (1963), he described the first three (of eight) “ages of man” as: Basic Trust vs Basic Mistrust; Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt; and Initiative vs Guilt. This sequence is not without importance for understanding the significance of shame as opposed to guilt: shame is experienced earlier in our psychological development, Erikson claimed. It is more primitive. Shame threatens our basic trust and becomes a component in whether we experience guilt through our actions. Moreover, the way Erikson described shame and our response to it is worthy of note: Shame is an emotion insufficiently studied, because in our civilization it is so early and so easily absorbed by guilt. Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at; in a word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible; which is why we dream of shame as a situation in which we are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress, in night attire, ‘with one’s pants down.’ Shame is early expressed in an impulse to bury one’s face, or sink, right then and there, into the ground. But this, I think, is essentially rage turned against oneself. He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world. Instead he must wish for his own invisibility.10

When viewing Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self through these lenses, we would benefit from underscoring three aspects of Erikson’s analysis:

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(1) that shame entails a sense of exposure, and helplessness (“being seen when one does not want to be seen”), along with a wished violent response (“he would like to destroy the eyes of the world”); (2) that shame invokes the ambiguity of the term “self-consciousness” (one is aware of oneself in an awkward way—and wishes to be “invisible”); and (3) that shame entails a physiological response: one’s body collapses in on itself. (We’ll return to this below.) After Erikson it was not until Helen Block Lewis’ seminal work, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (1971), that a clinical tradition was begun, making a clear distinction between shame and guilt. That distinction can be summarized succinctly: Guilt concerns something I have done. Guilt is about “bad behaviors,” something I said, or did (or failed to do), or thought, was “bad.” Shame, on the other hand, concerns a revelation to the self about the self: shame concerns identity. When (a)shamed, one feels unworthy: “I am bad.” And while guilt can be a positive motivation to change, shame more likely leads to withdrawal, passivity—and frequently becomes a source of worse behavior. We can gain a sense of how widespread this clinical consensus is if we look at three sets of authors who have researched shame and guilt. First, from family systems theory, Fossum and Mason’ Facing Shame: Families in Recovery: While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one’s actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person. The possibility for repair seems foreclosed to the shameful person because shame is a matter of identity, not a behavioral infraction.11

Next, from self psychology, Andrew Morrison’s observation in Shame: the Underside of Narcissism: “As guilt invites confession and forgiveness . . ., shame generates concealment out of a fear of rendering the self unacceptable.” Morrison speculates that guilt was more “available” for analysis because “guilt is the result of activity” and “palliation comes through confession and forgiveness. Shame, on the other hand, reflects passivity, a failure or defect of the whole self.”12 Finally, from Donald Nathanson in Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self, building on the affect theory of Sylvan S. Tomkins: Often shame is confused with guilt, a related but different discomfort. Whereas shame is about the quality of our person or self, guilt is the painful emotion triggered when we become aware that we have acted in a way to bring harm to another person or to violate some important code. Guilt is about action and laws.13

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In addition, to understand the breadth of terms in the semantics of shame, Nathanson identifies shyness, embarrassment, humiliation, and mortification. He says all of these have this in common: “shame often attends the exposure of something that we would have preferred kept hidden, of a private part of the self.”14 The semantics of shame also include its opposites, for example, pride and honor. In contrast, the semantics of guilt references actions, behaviors, and events. Distinguishing Guilt from Shame in The Symbolism of Evil The first question Ricoeur asks in The Symbolism of Evil is: “How shall we make the transition from the possibility of evil in man to its reality, from fallibility to fault?”15 In what immediately follows, Ricoeur makes it clear that he is already philosophically interested in “the confession of the evil in man,” not as a testimony of “religious consciousness,” but as “an utterance of man about himself.”16 While Ricoeur is not interested in a “theory of myths,” he is interested in “the function of myths in relation to . . . the bond between man and what he considers sacred.” “Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech,” Ricoeur says, and “through confession man remains speech, even in the experience of his own absurdity, suffering, and anguish.”17 Although to bracket out the problem of Evil is to shift away from the theme of Ricoeur’s book, it is nevertheless to maintain a focus on the relationship between fault in the self and the faulty actions which arise from that, as psychologists have described. Ricoeur is right to take the extreme: evil actions arise from the conditions of the possibility for Evil in the human condition. However, my focus is not on that macrocosm but on the microcosm guilt and shame in intimate, familial relationships. It is within that more narrow focus that the parable takes place. This is not to minimize Ricoeur; it is only to maintain my focus. Still, there is something to be gained by that shift. When we return to Symbolism of Evil on that basis, we find that Ricoeur is claiming that what is confessed is guilt. This is Ricoeur’s definition: “Guilt,” in the precise sense of a feeling of unworthiness at the core of one’s personal being, is only the advanced point of a radically individualized and interiorized experience.18

However, we will immediately notice that what Ricoeur is calling “guilt” is more commonly, and more clinically, identified as shame. Thus, the significance of shame and its symbols might be accurately implied in what Ricoeur is exploring.

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This is important in terms of how Ricoeur frames the rest of his book. For one thing, as he says, there are “three moments of fault: defilement, sin, guilt.”19 But since what he has defined as “guilt” might be more accurately “shame,” then some more extensive reconsideration of his chapter on “guilt” might be warranted. However, let’s preserve only this: “It can be said, in very general terms, that guilt designates the subjective moment in fault as sin is its ontological moment.”20 Perhaps we could say that at the crossroads of guilt and shame, my subjective realization that I am capable of actions which are faulty opens up to me my sense of shame, namely that my actions say something about me as a faulted human being. This would, in turn, permit the conditions for the possibility of reconsideration what Ricoeur writes about defilement. For instance, Ricoeur speaks of defilement as being like an “infection,” that is, that which comes upon oneself and leaves a stain. This is essentially the post facto discovery that one has become “impure” and requires purification rituals to be again assured of one’s “purity.” All of this occurs on the symbolic, not literal level, of course.21 And for him, the process of infection then purification by rite illustrates a level of how symbols function—in both concept and in action. This might especially be effective when it comes to the experience of having committed a defiling act for which one is feeling guilty. Ritual remediation would be symbolically restorative of some sense of purity. However, there are two difficulties with this. One is that there are levels of defilement that cannot be ritually purified. Ricoeur names one: “The case of the murderer is striking in the respect. We have said above what basis shed blood provides for literal interpretation of defilement.” Because he has said that “defilement is to stain or spot as what lustration is to washing,” he then qualifies: “Nevertheless, the defilement that comes from spilt blood is not something that can be removed by washing.”22 I would think that this realization would itself be the source of a deep dread which Ricoeur says characterizes “the background of all our feelings and all our behavior relating to fault.”23 As he puts it: “infectious contact is experienced subjectively as a specific feeling which is of the order of Dread.”24 That is, what if we should discover a level of fault in ourselves that we experience as a “defilement” that cannot be remediated ritually? Would we not live in dread of what we were capable of? This is analogous to an experience of shame. In a similar way, another difficulty with defilement as an act for which one is guilty has to do with one’s sense of oneself. Ricoeur writes: “It is also true that impurity never attains the abstract level of unworthiness; otherwise the magic of contact and contagion would have disappeared.”25 Perhaps. But the discovery of one’s “unworthiness” is less “abstract” to one’s sense of oneself. And, in the way that faulted actions for which one feels guilt follows in one’s

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identity from one’s sense of oneself as faulty, it could be that there is no purification ritual symbolically effective enough to relieve one of one’s shame. Where we do want to follow Ricoeur is in how he relates what he calls “merely semantic understanding” to his “hermeneutics of myths.” As he puts it: “the most primitive and least mythological language is already a symbolic language: defilement is spoken of under the symbol of a stain or blemish [for example].” Not only does “the preferred language of fault [appear] to be indirect and based on imagery,” but “there is something quite astonishing in this: the consciousness of self seems to constitute itself at its lowest level by means of symbolism.”26 When we turn to the parable, we will build on the hermeneutic of myths to the hermeneutic of narratives to illustrate the hermeneutics of the self as Ricoeur has described. In this process we will see the roles that shame and guilt play in this process. To understand how shame affects the ontological moment, and thus our responses to it, we can turn to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self in Oneself as Another. From Philosophy: Shame, Self, and Other In the interest of being brief, I will draw principally from Dan Zahavi’s excellent synopsis in Self & Other: exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Zahavi begins with Michael Lewis, who has a somewhat developmental view of how we experience shame. This links us nicely to psychology. Zahavi concludes that “Lewis ends up defining [shame] as an intense negative emotion that is elicited when one experiences failure relative to a standard, feels responsible for the failure, and believes that the failure reflects a damaged self.”27 In this way, Lewis’ reasoning regresses back from guilt to shame, from the faulty action to the faulted self. Zahavi is not entirely satisfied with “Lewis’ account,” in part because of the title of his book: Shame: The Exposed Self.28 Zahavi notes that shame presents its own “self” vs “other” dilemma: in experiencing shame, is the “exposure” of our self to itself? Or is shame about how we are perceived by others? What is interesting is that Zahavi at this point mentions Darwin’s “blush.” Carl Schneider concurs in his Shame, Exposure, and Privacy: “for Darwin, blushing is the attribute that distinguishes human beings from other creatures.”29 Or, as has been said: Humans are the only animals who blush. This makes shame a distinctly human trait. Zahavi goes on to examine what he calls “the varieties of shame.”30 He speaks positively of Scheler, who recognized that “the feeling of shame occurs precisely because of the discrepancy between the values one continues to endorse and the actual situation. Indeed, shame anxiety, the fear of shaming situations, might be considered a guardian of dignity.” Moreover,

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Scheler “argues that the core feature of shame is that it points to the clash or discrepancy between our higher spiritual values on the one hand and our animal nature and bodily needs on the other.” It is there that Scheler meets Darwin in claiming that “shame is a distinctly human emotion,” “fundamental,” because it characterizes our “conditio humana.” Finally, Zahavi tells us that Scheler claimed that “one reason why we seek to cover our sexual organs, is precisely because they are symbols of animality, mortality, and neediness.”31 This fits with Schneider’s observation that “shame and death are closely linked.” Not only do we commonly say, “I could have died of shame,” but “in some cultures people literally die of shame.” In shame, we are “mortified.”32 Zahavi then shifts his focus from self to others, although he rightly notes: “One can certainly feel shame alone; that is, shame does not require an actual observer or audience.”33 He then lists five cases of “nonsocial shame,” including: “You feel ashamed of who you have become when compared to who you were; that is, you feel ashamed of not living up to your capacities, of having betrayed your potential.”34 As Zahavi’s analysis proceeds, he finds that this particular nonsocial shame fits with what he takes from Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni’s book, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. This is what they have called “deep shame:” “something we feel as a result of personal failure quite regardless of the evaluation by others.” Then Zahavi offers their definition of shame: Shame is the subject’s awareness that the way he is or acts is so much at odds with the values he cares to exemplify that it appears to disqualify him from his very commitment to the value, that is he perceives himself as unable to exemplify it even at a minimal level.35

Zahavi worries that Deonna and Teroni are perhaps too much “about exemplifying a self-relevant defect; that is, what is shame inducing is not the distance from an ideal self but the closeness to an undesired self.” (I would add that, in their focus on shame, their direction is the opposite of Ricoeur’s. That is, in defining nonsocial shame as they do, their implication might be more accurately guilt, albeit one that arises from the faulted self.) Zahavi’s own position becomes this: “my primary claim will be that there are other, and arguably more prototypical, forms of shame that cannot be adequately understood in non-social terms, and that an attempt to provide a non-social definition of shame is consequently bound to miss something quite significant.”36 Zahavi proceeds to look at “disgrace shame,” as opposed to “discretion shame.” He says something that will be of key interest to us once we come to the dynamics in the parable:

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I am not denying that we can sit in judgment on ourselves and as a result come to feel shame, but I think that this kind of repenting, self-reflective shame, with its accompanying feeling of self-disappointment, self-misery, or even selfloathing, has a somewhat different intentional structure and phenomenality than the overpowering feeling of shame that one can experience in the presence of others.

Moreover, “you cannot carefully attend to details in the environment while being subjected to that kind of shame. Rather, the world recedes and the self stands revealed.”37 In this way, he acknowledges that shame is “involved in an absolute sense of degradation,” which is at the intersection of one’s relationship with oneself and one’s relationship with others. Zahavi’s point of view takes both of these intersections into account. In mentioning Honneth, he notes, on the one hand: “In recent psychoanalytic theorizing, it has been proposed that shame is a reaction to the absence of approving reciprocity . . . If so, it would situate shame right at the core of our interpersonal life.”38 And on the other: “I think shame, in contrast to embarrassment, involves a sense of a flawed self and is linked to a global decrease of self-esteem.”39 Thus while “shame testifies to our exposure,”40 which relates to whatever sense of humiliation one might feel, people “do not necessarily believe that they deserve humiliation.”41 For Zahavi, as we come “to understand ourselves through others,” we come to see what “we might call the interpersonal self, that is, the self in its relation to and interaction with others.” This leads him to this significant observation: “I would consequently maintain that shame contains a significant component of alterity,” which in turn leads him to this conclusion: “we shouldn’t overlook the question concerning the relation between the intrapersonal and interpersonal shame.” “It is my empathic awareness of the other’s attention and my subsequent internalization of that foreign perspective that eventually allows me to gain the self-distance that is required for the kind of critical self-evaluation that can lead to decreased self-esteem.”42 What makes Zahavi’s analysis and conclusion important to us is that he frames the phenomenon of shame in such a way as to permit Ricoeur’s “ontology of the self” to contribute to our understanding of shame, especially as it relates to the parable. Shame, Guilt and Ricoeur’s “Triad of Passivity” To bring Zahavi’s points about shame from a philosophical perspective into conversation with Ricoeur, we will turn to his Tenth Study in Oneself as Another, “What Ontology in View?” There Ricoeur inquires “what mode of being . . . belongs to the self” in terms of “a hermeneutics of the self”?43

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There is more here than I can fit within the narrow focus of this essay. However, what I can do is “read back” Ricoeur’s core concepts using both Zahavi and Erikson in order to claim that they could illumine our understanding of shame. We will pick up precisely where Zahavi’s focus was, too, that is, on “Selfhood and Otherness.” Ricoeur starts us off in a manner that is quintessential Ricoeur as well as helpful to our project: “the polysemic character of otherness [implies] that the Other was not reduced . . . to the otherness of another Person.” Ricoeur then suggests “the triad of passivity and hence, otherness” of, first, “the experience of one’s own body”; then, “the relation of the self to the foreign, [that is], “the otherness inherent in the relationship of intersubjectivity. Finally, we have the most deeply hidden passivity, that of the relation of self to self, which is conscience in the sense of Gewissen rather than Bewusstein.”44 That is, when it comes to distinguishing shame and guilt on the basis of Ricoeur’s categories of his hermeneutics of the self, the difference between capacities of passivity and activity becomes significant. While activity, or the capacity to act, would correspond with guilt, passivity, or the state of being rendered helpless or otherwise not being able to respond adequately, would correspond with shame. To read Ricoeur in the light of Zahavi’s sense that shame has both interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of alterity, we would need to look in Ricoeur for the ways that the “triad of passivity” describes our being “other” to others as well as “other” to ourselves. When it come to the passivity of the body, the dialectic of “otherness” and “ownness” of one body is precisely one’s awareness of it in the experience of shame. As we have already seen from both Erikson and Zahavi, the physiology of shame is important. Perhaps this significance alone would help us to distinguish shame from guilt. When, for instance, Ricoeur discusses Husserl on “the difference (and the relation) between flesh and body,” he provides groundwork for our better understanding how shame makes us aware of the position we are in. To extend what Ricoeur says in contrast to Strawson to our experience of shame, it is “not what it means that a body is my body, that is, flesh, but that the flesh is also a body among bodies”45 That is, in the physiological implosion of shame, we find ourselves at this nexus in which I am aware of my body as mine (subject), of my body as flesh (object), and my body as “among” bodies (i.e., intersubjective). This passivity contributes to our connecting Zahavi’s interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of shame to Ricoeur’s other two passivities of otherness. In our interpersonal experience of shame, our awareness of the “foreignness” of others is heightened. Shame makes us aware of what Ricoeur calls “the Otherness of Other People”46 Simultaneously, others are aware of

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our otherness from them. In discussing Husserl on intersubjectivity, Ricoeur comments as follows: “the other is not condemned to remain a stranger but can become my counterpart, that is, someone who, like me, says ‘I.’”47 That is, my shame makes others aware of their shame, and in the paradox of the interpersonal, we discover that we have shame in common. A similar dynamic obtains when we think of shame as intrapersonal or in terms of conscience. Yes, on the one hand, conscience is one way we have of confronting ourselves, of assessing whether we are being “true” or “false” to ourselves. But conscience also links us beyond ourselves to, if I may put it this way, “that which is greater than ourselves,” to the transcendent values that we can only find in what Ricoeur calls “the hidden heart.” He says that “conscience is, in truth, that place par excellence in which illusions about oneself are intimately bound up with the veracity of attestation.”48 This “attestation” is a form of “self-assessment,” like that which Deonna and Teroni named49 and which Zahavi lists among his five cases of “nonsocial shame,” including: “You feel ashamed of who you have become when compared to who you were; that is, you feel ashamed of not living up to your capacities, of having betrayed your potential.”50 The importance of this for him is that this sense of nonsocial shame frees us from the concept from the regard of, say, Sartre’s sense of shame. The importance for us is Zahavi’s mention of betrayal. In the experience of having betrayed ourselves there is a conspicuous form of alterity that fits within Ricoeur’s concept of conscience. It is from here that Zahavi comes to distinguish intrapersonal shame from interpersonal shame. In intrapersonal shame, we become “other” to ourselves. That otherness we experience as conscience.51 Having juxtaposed Ricoeur’s emergent ontology in Oneself as Another with Zahavi’s exposition of shame in philosophy, we find that, among the three forms of alterity in his “triad of passivity,” the first, the passivity of “the experienced of one’s own body,” while it illustrates the psychological definitions of shame and its physiological reactions, it does not explicitly illuminate what occurs in the parable. However, the other two “passivities” do. The “passivity implied by the relation of the self to the foreign,” or that of intersubjectivity, relates to what Zahavi would call “social shame,” thus the “interpersonal” form of shame. And the third level of “passivity” Ricoeur names, “the most deeply hidden passivity, that of the relation of the self to itself, which is conscience,”52 relates to what Zahavi call “nonsocial” shame. It is a form of “intrapersonal shame.” Now that we have this grid in place, we can recognize when each of these two forms of alterity arise in the parable in the experiences of shame. We can follow the narrative of the parable through its three “turning points.”

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THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SON We have now arrived at the keystone of this essay: The Parable of the Lost Son. This Section will be structured as follows: First, the entire version of the parable from the NIV will be presented. Then it will be examined in three steps. Each step will focus on a different character in the parable: first the younger son, then the father, and finally the older son. The approach I will be taking will be to frame a kind of dialogue or conversation, one that reads the parable in the light of Ricoeur and then speaks to Ricoeur in the light of the parable. The aim is to come to a kind of reflective reciprocity between the two. This would be less a “hermeneutics in the light of faith,” than a meditation, an inwardly turning thought process to illustrate the roles that shame and guilt play in the interpretation of it. In this way, the parable becomes an “example story” for how shame and guilt are manifest in the interactions of this family. The Parable Itself: Luke 15:11–32 “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ [He] divided his property between them. 13 Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. 14 After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. 15 [He] hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. 16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. 11b

“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18 I will . . . go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ 20 [He] got up and went to his father.” 17

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ [They] began to celebrate.” 21

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“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 [He] called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’” 25

“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. [His] father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘…All these many years I’ve been slaving for you and I never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’” 28

“’My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’” 31

The Younger Son’s Self/Other Relationship In this section, I will want to draw principally upon what Ricoeur has written in The Course of Recognition for the conceptual framework being applied to this parable. Central to this would be what occurs when we have an experience of “Recognizing Oneself.” The first turning point in the Parable entails one principle moment of selfrecognition: Lk 15:17. In the Revised Standard Version, this moment is put this way: “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!” This “coming to himself” is translated in the NIV as “When he came to his senses.” In the terms of the parable, this may be the first loss and the first “being found.” That is, if within Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of the self,” and using terminology from The Course of Recognition, there is the assertion of one’s being a “capable human being,”53 in the parable, that assertion occurs as a self-discovery, even a self-recovery. For the young man’s “capability” had become lost in the manner of his living, in the choices that he had made. But this is also a moment of nonsocial shame, of conscience. The younger son has an experience of feeling “ashamed of who [he has] become when compared to who [he was]; that is, [he feels] ashamed of not living up to [his] capacities, of having betrayed [his] potential.”54 At this point in this parable, the capability of his being himself, and being able to “attest” to his being a “real” human being is a self-affirmation. It would be a “finding,” in the midst of still being lost. That ambiguity would last until he is able to construct a “narrative identity” for himself.55 He places his own circumstances in the narrative context of that

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of his family and he “finds himself” to be exiled even from the level of his father’s servants. At this point in his degradation, it would be a “step up” for him to be among his father’s servants. This is a looking back, as well as a looking forward. It is his moment caught between, as Ricoeur would say, “promise” and “memory.” Thus, when, having “come to his senses” his first narrative is about a future for himself, it is a promise. Lk15:18&19: “I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.’” Two things about this point in the parable stand out: On the one hand, this admission of culpability, and acceptance of responsibility for his actions, can find its context in what Ricoeur says in The Course of Recognition.56 That is, it is with this statement that confession opens the parable up to the matter of guilt. One would be conditioned to expect this to lead to some pattern of forgiveness to follow. After this admission to himself, the younger son could be thought to be aiming his narrative identity as a confession toward his father. One would think that this would result in the parable being about more guilt than shame. It is from this expectation that arise the concessions Nussbaum and others make to frame this parable a story about forgiveness. Common interpretations do not see shame coming, probably because, as Erikson pointed out, we are not conditioned to look for it. In contrast to our expectations, this narration of culpability is never completed when the younger son gets in his meeting with his father. Lk 15:21: “And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’” That is as far as the younger son’s well-rehearsed narrative gets. The son’s newfound narrative identity, whose aim was to be forgiven by being given the role of servant in his father’s household as his best hope in the face of his felt guilt, is cut short. Instead, the younger son’s self-narration ends with his unworthiness, his loss of a sense of self-worth. In this moment, the narrative emphasis of the parable shifts from being about guilt and seeking forgiveness for sinful actions to being about the shame of experiencing oneself as being unworthy, of lacking self-worth. Moreover, it is the father’s action which changes the son’s narrative identity from one of guilt to one of shame. And that is where we have to pick up the narrative thread or theme. Guilt is not responded to; it is dismissed.57 The matter, the core, becomes shame. Within our dialogue with Ricoeur, in the shift from guilt to shame, we are able to question whether, in the hermeneutics of the self, one’s self-worth is more central and important than one’s actions.58 Ricoeur has built his hermeneutic of the self upon the I can and the I say, and he has deep roots in Greek philosophy as well a modern philosophy for

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these aspects of self-reflection. But the parable interrupts this line of inquiry with a significant shift away, to the matter of worth. In doing this, the perspective shifts from faulty actions to a faulty self, which in turn is capable of faulty actions. However, the “coming to one’s senses” becomes more than the self-recognition of wrong-doing. In effect: “I have sinned” comes to mean “my wrong action has revealed to me my faulted self.” Moreover, “I am no longer worthy,” and “I am no longer worthy to be called,” fits the younger son’s personal narrative identity into the narrative identity of the family, as a son, as a son of his father. What Ricoeur calls “imputation” steps in here: in my unworthiness, membership in this family can no longer be imputed to me. We notice right away that forgiveness of guilt will not be sufficient to remediate this profound sense of lack of worth. Perhaps nothing would. But then we must go to where the parable leads us. And we may want to note that the parable illustrates that the “passivity” Ricoeur named as conscience might have more to do than merely with “right action.” But it is clear that if conscience is to have an ontological significance then it must be about more than what one does. It must be about who one is. And when one experiences oneself as “unworthy,” then one is experiencing an inward implosion that leads away from guilt toward shame. Here we also have the wider context of Lk 15:10: Having told two parables about “lost and found,” one about a shepherd with sheep, and another about a woman and a coin, Luke has Jesus say: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” But let us note what “repentance” means here. It does not mean confessing and saying one is sorry for or regrets one’s actions. Here, in the context of these three parables, emphasized by The Parable of the Lost Son, repentance is this recognition of self-estrangement, of loss. In the parable, that loss is of self-worth. In that way, repentance is a recognition of the connection between a faulted action and a faulted self, that is, that guilt is a consequence of shame. This leads in the parable to the father’s refrain: “my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” The Father’s Self/Other Relationships with his Son: Shame and Guilt I want to look at the next series of events in the parable in other terms Ricoeur uses in The Course of Recognition: mutuality, reciprocity, and recognition. In the terms we are using to describe the interactions in the parable, the focus shifts from the “intrapersonal shame” of conscience to the “interpersonal shame” of intersubjectivity. That is, the matter of alterity of the other, originally discussed in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur returns to in The Course of Recognition in two ways that are important to us and evident in the parable.

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The first is the matter of mutual recognition and the second has to do with the role of gratitude. In the context of the narrative of the parable, the father’s actions and his reasoning that frames them constitute the second turning point of the story. First, the younger son turns to himself in self-recognition. Then the father turns to the younger son. There are two steps to this turning point: First, 15:20b “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. 21 The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son’. 22 But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandels on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” Second, they began to celebrate. These are actions of acceptance, welcome, celebration, may be over the top—but rejoicing is what they are doing! At the outset of this second turning point in the parable, the father’s exuberance is both striking and an emotional force that will carry the plot of the parable to its complete conclusion. Although Ricoeur stakes his concept of “mutuality” in recognition on what he calls “the dialectic of reflexivity and alterity,”59 in the parable an initial imbalance is apparent. The younger son is focused on himself, on his own shame; it is not clear that he seeks any other “recognition” than what might follow from a degradation, from son and family member into servant. Yet the father’s response is restorative. The father accords his son a mutuality. What I mean by this is not just that the father recognizes his son to be his son, as “another,” but also, in that recognition, he restores a dignity to his son and restores his son to himself. This is how we might understand what the father says: “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” As a thanatologist, I find the father’s linking “death” and “loss” to be significant. Clearly, the son did not actually die. However, in his departure from the father, the father experienced his leaving as a “death” in a certain way, as a loss, a diminishment, and not just in terms of alterity, that is, as a loss of his relationship with his son, but also as a loss of a part of himself. Thus, when the younger son returns, the part of himself that the father had taken to be lost becomes found. The interpersonal and the intrapersonal are in resonance. That is, “the dialectic of reflexivity and alterity” is initially completely within the father. What he has “lost” has “been found,” because, as it is turns out, what he had thought had “died” has been found to be “alive” again. This revives the father.

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In the parable, the younger son has said all that he is given to say. However, in the reflexivity of this restoration a mutuality emerges: that is, the son is not reduced to being a servant; he is restored to a previous status. When Ricoeur mentions that by “mutuality” he means (in contrast to Levinas) “the question of life together,”60 he could be saying that that is an appropriate way to understand this moment in the parable. Which is to say, the father’s enthusiasm enacts a mutuality and brings about a restoration of the “life together” with his returned, younger son. We will want to underscore two things. The first is that this interchange is not “mutual” in its reciprocity. That is, there is no “exchange” here that brings about a reciprocity that is mutual. Indeed, the son has nothing to give.61 He is destitute. When Ricoeur moves to what he calls the “third” form of recognition, he looks at “The Paradoxes of the Gift and the Gift in Return and the Logic of Reciprocity.”62 There he says: “Yet what nevertheless pleads for a systematic vision of the sequence of gift and gift in return is the raising of enigma to the rank of paradox, in the strong sense of an inconsistent thought. This paradox says: How is the recipient of the gift obliged to give back?”63 Indeed, this is the bind of both the “gift exchange” and the forgiveness exchange—as if there were a “marketplace” for equitable reciprocity. In the section that follows, “Gift Exchanges and Mutual Recognition,”64 Ricoeur sets about disentangling mutuality from reciprocity. In the process, he comes to this observation: Receiving then becomes the pivotal category, in that the way in which the gift is accepted determines the way in which the person who receives the gift will feel obligated to give something in return. A word comes to mind here that we mentioned earlier in passing: gratitude. In French, one says reconnaissance in speaking of such gratitude.65

Although at this point Ricoeur links gift exchange with a “festive character” that might fit with events in the parable, I would note again two things: First, the son has nothing to give in exchange. Therefore, it is fair to conclude: there is no “exchange.” Second, there is the matter of uncertainty that Ricoeur himself brings up. He says: his “initial proposal . . . was to confront the lived experience of the gift with the struggle for recognition and the uncertainty of its being accomplished”66 and he asks: When “can an individual take for granted having been recognized?”67 In the course of addressing this question, Ricoeur says: “I mean the sense of recognize as a request in which ‘being recognized’ is what is at stake.”68 But if “the struggle for recognition” is not to remain “endless,”69 then what must occur? Well, within the dynamics of shame as exhibited in the parable, we must find a paradigm that unlinks “gift” from the analogy of “the gesture of forgiveness.”70

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That is, the self/other distinction in the parable is that the father “recognizes” himself in his son. Thus, in giving his son the “gift” of recognition, the “mutuality” that it reaffirms is grounded in the “reciprocity” within the father. That is, that father does have the option of “withholding” acceptance from his younger son. This would have established an alienation, a sense of the “foreign,” with his son—which was actually what the son was seeking. Instead, recognizing himself in his son, the father finds cause to celebrate: insofar as there was a gift given, it was one the father gave himself. Hence his gratitude is restorative both of his relationship with his younger son and with his relationship with himself. Moreover, the younger son’s receiving his father’s embrace and restoration to his previous place in the family is as important as the father’s gift. The younger son does not protest; he does not refuse nor insist upon his proposed degraded status. Instead, it is here, at this point, Ricoeur’s concept of mutuality and of recognizing oneself in another becomes important. For out of this flows the embracing of the other in their shame. As I will put it, this gesture of embrace can only occur when one is not ashamed of one’s own shame. The Father’s Self/Other Relationships with his Son: Shame and Dignity To this point I have attempted to separate guilt from shame and action from being. And I have suggested that because Ricoeur names conscience as among his “triad of passivity” in his hermeneutics of the self in Oneself as Another, shame “fits” conscience in a manner that links the faulted self to the faulty actions of the self. That is, I have consistently associated shame with the faulty self. In contrast, Evelyn and James Whitehead, in their Transforming Our Painful Emotions, remind us that there is another way to think of shame. A “healthy shame,” they say, a positive sense of shame, is evident in “the virtues of shame.” They state: [W]ith proper care a positive sense of shame matures into a resident strength in us. . . . [In fact, in] its most robust dimension a sense of shame gives a person “a sense of who one is and what one hopes to be.” If guilt concerns what we have done, shame concerns who we are. Guilt addresses correctness, but shame addresses worth.

In this way, the role of conscience is to maintain “a healthy sense of shame [that] allows us to be humbled without being humiliated.”71 The Whiteheads echo Erikson when they speak to how important it is for us when others encourage a health sense of shame in us: When shame “is

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blended with affection and tolerance in early childhood, shame impels the toddler to craft a balance between belonging and autonomy.” Later in life, when shame is seen as a “virtue,” “shame can become a disguised gift on the journey toward adult maturity.”72 Moreover, “a healthy sense of shame matures in the virtue of dignity.” The Whiteheads speak of dignity in way that alludes to Ricoeur’s “triad of passivity.” First, “in dignity we recognize the value of our embodied selves.” Then “Dignity is the esteem in which we hold ourselves. And dignity is selfrespect.” More, “if shame as a destructive emotion is a debilitating sense of inadequacy, dignity is an enduring awareness of our worth.” Finally, “Dignity is that sense of personal integrity against which the ploys of social shaming cannot prevail.”73 The Whiteheads’ linking of a healthy sense of shame to dignity echoes what Zahavi reports of Scheler, who “not only thinks the feeling of shame can in some instances be pleasurable, but more importantly, he considers a sensitivity to and capacity for shame ethically valuable and links it to the emergence of conscience.” Zahavi explains Scheler in a way that fits with the parable: “The feeling of shame occurs precisely because of the discrepancy between the values one continues to endorse and the actual situation. Indeed, shame anxiety, the fear of shaming situations, might be considered a guardian of dignity.”74 I would take two things from this. One is that the father responds to the younger son as if he were the guardian of his son’s dignity. This is the “affection and tolerance” of the parent, perhaps not just in early childhood but perhaps also at a later time in a child’s life when that adult has felt devoid of dignity. Second, to respond in this way, the father, the parent, must have a “healthy” sense of shame within himself. The Whiteheads note that “shame is a dangerous dynamic in the process of socialization.” Which means, in terms of its alterity, “if abused by those who are teaching us how to belong,” shame can be used destructively.75 In the father’s reassuring his younger son that he belongs, the father brings to his embrace a healthy sense of shame. It could be said that the father is not ashamed of shame.76 As it turns out, the father brings this positive sense of shame to his interaction with his older son as well. The Father’s Self/Other Relationships with both of his Sons We come to the third turning point of the parable: the conversation between the older son and the father. This becomes the most explicit point in the parable of the interplay between guilt/obedience and shame. To remind:

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“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 [He] called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’” 25

“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. [His] father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘…All these many years I’ve been slaving for you and I never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’” 28

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’” 31

Two Points need to be made. First, given what he has said, we can see that the older son bases his sense of identity on his obedience. In that way, he avoids guilt. Second, the way he speaks tells us how he shapes his “narrative identity.” Both of these become important to how we understand his interaction with his father. The Older Son’s Identity—A Kind of Confession, Really What we want to notice here is that the older son stresses his obedience, his good behavior, in contrast with which, he has not been suitably “rewarded,” or in Ricoeur’s terms, recognized. What is interesting is how, in the conversation with his father, the older son leads with his “not being guilty,” therefore his “not needing” forgiveness. But it turns out, he is also “needy” of recognition. He is feeling overlooked and unappreciated. However, what happens in his father’s response is two things: first, the father meets him where he is: “everything I have is yours.” But then, he shifts the conversation away from guilt and (dis)obedience to shame: “was dead and is alive; was lost and is found.” The obvious consequence of this framing is the celebration already underway. The older son can come to join it—or not. The father is merely explaining himself. In terms of our earlier concept of guilt vs shame, we will notice that the father does not return shame for guilt. In a manner oddly parallel to his behavior with the younger son, the father does not shame the older son. Instead, in effect, following the Whiteheads, the older son gets a lesson in dignity: the father’s healthy sense of shame explains his behavior, and invites the older son to mature.

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A Family’s Narrative Identity It’s all in how you tell the family’s story. Look at how the older son tells it: “‘But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’” The older son is blaming, and disavowing, and shaming: “this son of yours.” Then see how the father tells it: 31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’” That is, there is an acceptance of him, too, as a son. And more, he redefines the older son’s relationship to the younger brother: “this brother of yours.” Perhaps we can understand the significance of this better if we use Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity.” Ricoeur tells us that all of our “narrative identities” include other people. This is particularly true of families. In the parable, the father’s narrative identity includes both of his sons, and each son’s includes the father’s. In fact, the older brother makes an attempt to exclude his brother from his own narrative identity (v 30. “But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!”), but the father makes a point of reestablishing the narrative identity of the younger brother with the older brother: v 32. “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” When Ricoeur speaks of this under the title of “Love and the Struggle for Recognition,”77 he mentions Honneth, whose “psychoanalytic theory of object relations” recognizes that “just as the young child must face the test of the absence of the mother . . ., [so] in the same way love relationships in adulthood face the test of separation.”78 Honneth is referring to individual development, but families and their narratives are also characterized by “the alteration between presence and absence.” Later, Ricoeur alludes to this in mentioning Francoise Héritier’s book, Masculin/Féminin. She says: “three unvarying factors structure our being-inthe-world through the family:” (1) we are each born of a man and a woman; (2) “each of us is born as part of a set of possible siblings; and finally, (3) the birth order of those siblings is fixed.”79 Clearly these “sibling order” dynamics are playing out in this parable. Yet, as we also know from family systems, although our own narrative identity includes “other people,” each of us tells or claims our own. When Ricoeur tells us that “there is no narrative that does not mix together different life stories,”80 this is especially true of families.

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What makes this interesting within the confines of the parable is the father’s effort to align everyone’s “life story” and thus the family’s “narrative identity” with a healthy sense of shame. We noticed it with the younger son, when the opportunity for confession and request for forgiveness accompanied by a kind of self-abasement was bypassed by the father in the enthusiasm of his embrace. And we notice it here, too, when the haughtiness of the scrupulousness the older son is also supplanted by the father’s insistence on a healthy sense of shame. In that interaction, the false pride of obedience is replaced by the pride of dignity. Guilt is remanded by shame. One might well ask why is this important? What is to be gained, other than a level of individual, personal maturation, the one son “freed” from having to ask for forgiveness and the other son “freed” from the temptation to condemn and to punish? There is more to be found in this interplay between guilt and shame in what Ricoeur writes of “Difficult Forgiveness” in Memory, History, Forgetting.81 SHAME, STIGMA, SUICIDE, AND RICOEUR’S MOURNING My aim in this final section of this chapter is in effect to dialogue with Ricoeur as a thanatologist. To do this, I will read what Ricoeur has written for implications of what is occurring in his personal thoughts and feelings, then respond as a thanatologist, from how we think about death, dying, and dignity. Since I know nothing of Ricoeur’s personal life, what follows is merely speculation and suggestion. I hope I am being both gentle and kind. I see a progression in Ricoeur’s writing after Olivier’s death. It begins in the Ninth Study of Oneself as Another; the Interlude curiously titled “Tragic Action/for Olivier again.” It progresses into portions of Memory, History, Forgetting. And one might even see glimpses of what would be of thanatological interest in The Course of Recognition. My first step here is simply to notice what Ricoeur is saying in certain places in his work for whatever personal significance they might have. Then, taking off from where the previous Section ended, I want to continue the topic of narrative identity into a discussion of “the shame of Cain.” The purpose would be to compare what occurs in the Cain and Abel story with the events and themes of The Parable of the Lost Son. Contrasting matters of shame and guilt become evident. Finally, in the Conclusion, my aim is to suggest how Ricoeur might have come in his personal life to the “happy memory” he mentions in Memory, History, Forgetting. He writes of this progression: “The typology of mnemonic operations was thus from start to finish a typology of the ways in

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which the dilemma of presence and absence can be overcome.” Then he posits: “the phenomenon of recognition was confirmed.”82 This leads to: “Every act of memory (faire-mémoire) is thus summed up in recognition.” Still, remembering is not easy or facile, and Ricoeur concludes: “The price to be paid was the conjunction between the work of memory and the work of mourning.” Yes, for the work of mourning a son who has tyaken his own life is how to arrive at a “happy” memory that does not involve selective forgetting. I will suggest a path Ricoeur might have taken. Ricoeur’s Allusions to Olivier in Oneself as Another and Memory, History, Forgetting We begin with the Interlude in Oneself as Another because it is clearly designated by Ricoeur as an homage to Olivier. Moreover, Ricoeur begins by departing from philosophy to “nonphilosophy, [the voice of] Greek tragedy.” He says: “From this untimely irruption, we await the shock capable of awakening our mistrust with respect not only to the illusions of the heart but also to the illusions born of the hubris of practical reason itself.”83 There is in this statement a kind of confession, the sort of personal statement Ricoeur could not have made while speaking purely philosophically. Ricoeur turns to “as witnessed by Sophocles’ Antigone, those who act are in the service of spiritual powers that not only surpass them but, in turn, open the way for archaic and mythical energies that are also, from time immemorial, sources of misfortune.” When our actions are found to be “in the service of [such] spiritual powers,” then “tragedy teaches us” what Ricoeur calls “the agonistic ground of human experience.”84 Ricoeur selects Sophocles’ Antigone because in it “the ritual of burial attests to a bond between the living and the dead.”85 I am suggesting that Ricoeur is mourning here, mourning Olivier, and mourning what is the stigma of suicide, for it is the stigma of suicide when it comes into our personal lives that places our moral philosophy in conflict with our personal experience. But one might ask: why tragedy? And why Greek tragedy at that? Perhaps reading Sophocles within the framework of Hegel lends its own constriction as well as construct to Ricoeur’s thought. Hence: “Now was one of the genres of poetic drama, tragedy is distinguished from comedy by the fact that, in the former, the individuals that incarnate spiritual powers (die geistege Machte) and that are brought into inevitable collision by virtue of their onesidedness have to disappear in death; in comedy, man remains, through laughter, the lucid witness to the nonessentiality of goals that are mutually destructive.”86 That is, one answer might be that Ricoeur was searching for “one of the genres of poetic drama” in which to frame his sense that some actions are our

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own, originating in ourselves, yet some actions are more than our own. They “originate” beyond our selves. To explain this would be outside of the scope of moral philosophy, but it would fit within the poetic. By the time he is writing Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur has suffered more losses. This is the text that in Living Up to Death (2009), we learn he had put off writing while attending to his wife, Simone, as she died. Throughout Memory, History, Forgetting there are themes and topics of discussion that draw this thanatologist’s interest. Here, I just want to notice the progression of Ricoeur’s thinking on page 360. Ricoeur begins that page this way: “Loss and mourning display . . . unprecedented forms that contribute to our most intimate apprenticeship of death.” Clearly, he feels himself to be under “the apprenticeship of death” at that time in his life. Then he takes this turn: “There is, in fact, one form of death that is never encountered in a pure form, if one may call it so, except in the sphere of public existence: violent death, murder.” This is not initially surprising because he has mentioned murder before, in The Symbolism of Evil, for its representational capacity of evil. But that is not where Ricoeur is going here. Instead, he is going to generalize about death on the basis of violent death: “Violent death cannot be hastily numbered among those things entirely given and at hand. It signifies something essential concerning death in general and, in the final analysis, concerning our own death.” That is, Ricoeur does two things at once: he makes of violent death a general case, and he turns its significance toward himself, toward his own death. Then his writing becomes even more personally significant: “Violent death cannot be tamed so easily. In the same way, suicide, as murder turned against oneself, when it touches us, repeats a hard lesson. What lesson? That, perhaps, every death is a sort of murder.” That is, the scope of Ricoeur’s thinking expands from death, to violent death, to murder, to suicide, and includes his own death. If I may as a thanatologist say, this is remarkably dark thinking. As he goes on, Ricoeur references Levinas. And he adds: “What murder—raised to the level of a founding paradigm by the murder of Abel by his brother Cain—lays bare and what the simple disappearance, the departure, the cessation of existing in the death of close relations does not express, is the mark of nothingness, made by the intention to annihilate.” His apprenticeship of death and work of mourning has brought to mind the Genesis story he had only alluded to in The Symbolism of Evil. But now it is not so abstract. Ricoeur concludes: “But, in addition to this great lesson that inaugurates the entrance into ethics, murder, which is fundamentally death inflicted on others, is reflected in my relation to my own death.” What I take from this is that Ricoeur is under the shadow of death: Olivier’s, Simone’s, and his own,

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impending. In addition to what we thanatologists would call the “accumulation of losses” is the fact that Ricoeur’s health is failing. I want to end this section with what may seem to be an outrageous claim, which is that, as I read Ricoeur in these two sections of these two books, I see him struggling with shame and the stigma not only of Olivier’s suicide but also of being a “suicide survivor.” For instance, in Oneself as Another, when trying to make sense of the suicide of one’s son’s, there is, in the irrationality of that act, an invitation to nonphilosophical, “poetic” thinking. It is not just the symbol that “gives rise to thought,” but there are events in one’s life that do also. Then in Memory, History, Forgetting, suicide becomes both emblematic of death in general and in personal meaning for Ricoeur. Suicide takes on this significance because it is stigmatized. As Schneider has said: “some deaths in our society are seen as shameful. One of the most tabooed and suppressed experiences in our culture is suicide.”87 This is the “social shame” of stigma, a mostly tacit social shame to which suicide survivors are vulnerable. One consequence of stigma can be humiliation. First of all, it must be said that the stigma of suicide is meant to be a constraint against Evil. The sociocultural constraint of stigma is to incline one toward life, not death. This is how suicide becomes stigmatized. This would be the individual consequence of shame and suicide were it not the case that those in the family of the suicided come to have to live with that stigma. How to deal with the shame?—becomes the existential question of all suicide survivors. In addition, the larger significance of stigmatization and humiliation becomes evidence in murder, in violence, especially when it leads up to death, and thus in the perpetration of Evil on a social scale. On the one hand, Evil happens because those who enact it lack shame; they are shameless in their character and their shamelessness is manifest in their behavior. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur underscores the role of shame in the origin of human violence. The vulnerability to shame, beyond our capacity to act badly, transfuses human relationships and is integral to the malevolence we show to one another. Shaming another becomes a motivation: “Over and beyond the will to make others suffer and to eliminate them indeed stands the will to humiliate, to deliver the other over to the neglect of abandonment, of self-loathing.”88 In the terms of Ricoeur’s “triad of passivity,” being humiliated makes one aware of the self’s inescapable embodiment; of the hostile alterity of the other; and presents a dilemma of personal conscience in the face of the unconscionable. Because these are dimensions of “passivity,” one might ask: How is one to respond? The Whiteheads tell the story of Russion dissident Natan Sharansky’s response to the “humiliation forced upon him” by the KGB. He found himself

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saying to himself: ‘Nothing they can do can humiliate me. I alone can humiliate myself.’ For the Whiteheads, this was evidence that we can find within ourselves to resist the “will to humiliate” with a counter-will, to refuse to be humiliated. They say: “Dignity is that sense of personal integrity against with the ploys of social shaming cannot prevail.”89 I mention this, I tell this story, because it is the sort of dignity that I hope Ricoeur found within himself when faced with the stigma of being a suicide survivor. No one person would have sought to humiliate him, I am sure. At the same time, there are social forces against which we often have to find resources within ourselves to respond in ways that maintain our own dignity and our own integrity. Stigmatization is one of those. The shame “by association” requires one to come to terms with shame, and to find a healthy sense of shame within oneself to maintain one’s dignity. A Comparison of Shame Stories: Cain and Abel and the Parable The topic here picks up on what Ricoeur wrote in The Symbolism of Evil, namely that murder brings about a certain kind of defilement: “We have said above what basis shed blood provides for a literal interpretation of defilement.”90 This reasoning seemed to be an allusion to Cain and Abel story in Genesis (4:4–16). Then, in Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur says that “the murder of Abel by his brother Cain” has been “raised to the level of a founding paradigm.”91 Therefore, there is in that story a certain example for responding to shame in the “discovery” that one is defiled and “stained,” for one has committed an action that had led to one becoming “impure.” What is of interest to me here are two things: (1) how “the shame of Cain” relates to The Parable of the Lost Son; and (2) from it, what it suggests for Ricoeur’s coming to terms with his suicided son. The Shame of Cain The term, “the shame of Cain,” comes courtesy of Frederick Turner, whose book, Beauty: The Value of Values (1991), Susan Roos cites in her chapter in The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma.92 Turner writes: “Shame, fundamentally, does not come from a lack of ability to have, or possess; it comes from the consciousness of a lack of ability to give.” Because we harbor “a suspicion that our own gift to society was not acceptable and thus our exclusion from the human exchange system may, shamefully, be justified,” the result, Turner says, is “the shame of Cain.”93 This is insightful with regard to The Parable of the Lost Son because the younger son returns to his family destitute. As Roos puts it, “being barred from the human exchange system” results in an absence of mutuality as well as a lack of reciprocity.

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For us, in our discerning elements of shame in The Parable of the Lost Son, and in our seeking to have an understanding of Ricoeur’s relationship within himself to Olivier after his suicide, Turner’s perspective and Roos’ contextualizing adds to our understanding of the shame of the younger son and helps us to appreciate his father’s response. However, it begs the matters of shame in the Cain and Abel story. Honor Cultures Shame in the Cain and Abel story has two factors. On the one hand, the story is not only about murder, but also about “honor cultures.” In that way, on the other hand, God’s exile of Cain becomes a life-saving, a life-extending banishment for him. In the Cain and Abel story, the tension is between the herder that Abel is and the farmer that Cain is. Herders live in an “honor culture.”94 In honor cultures, violence maintains dignity; often in matters of humiliation, real or perceived, murder is committed in response. Matters of shame drive the violence in honor cultures—in a manner suggestive of how Ricoeur writes of murder in Memory, History, Forgetting. Forgiveness in honor cultures is more than “difficult”; it is not an option. Only vengeance suffices. This suggests that what Cain has done in murdering Abel was to bring down upon himself the consequences of Abel’s honor culture. Other herders would be honor-bound to kill Cain, to uphold not only Abel’s honor but the honor of all herders, whose friction with farmers was constant and historic. Two different senses of boundaries, two different ways of life. In that respect, in Cain’s shame and rage over having God prefer Abel’s offering to his own, Cain’s murder of Abel brings about three things: (1) the defilement of the land does cut him off from the soil; he can no longer farm there; (2) he has placed his life in danger from other herders, who will seek to murder him to avenge Abel’s death; and (3) God’s sending him out to “wander the earth” increases the likelihood that he will encounter other herders. In this way, God’s mercy of placing a “mark” upon him will protect him from others in the honor culture. But it still places Cain’s relationship with the land as a farmer in jeopardy—because the stain of his defilement is, as Ricoeur would recognize, “ineradicable.” “Nevertheless, the defilement that comes from spilt blood is not something that can be removed by washing.”95 In fact, this may be the paradox of this narrative: the stain of Cain’s defilement and the protective mark God places upon him are both “ineradicable.” And perhaps, metaphorically, identical, as aspects of Cain’s identity. For us, this means that “the shame of Cain” is not only the significance of the younger son’s awareness in the parable that he has nothing to give, but also it is an awareness of death, of mortality, in the way Ricoeur speaks of

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death in Memory, History, Forgetting: Cain’s killing of Abel was as much an act of suicide as of murder. There is one other connection between the story in Genesis and Lukan parable: the older brother is a herder. His, and maybe his family’s, was an “honor culture.” What this means in terms of the behavior in the parable is that the father is, in effect, teaching the older brother how to handle shame in a manner that does not involve anger, violence, and murder. No one is exiled in the parable. Everyone is embraced. And whatever honor culture has prevailed in the past, a different sense of shame, a different basis for dignity has been presented. The “healthy shame” conscience of the father is offered as a replacement of the honor culture conscience of the older son. Which leads to the question: What does this have to do with Ricoeur and his relationship with Olivier? Perhaps in this way: Once Olivier had died, he could not “participate” in any “human exchange” process. He could not ask for forgiveness, and it would not have mattered to him had Ricoeur said, “I forgive you.” Death exiles. It sends us beyond any meaningful forgiveness exchange. By that point, Olivier has nothing to give, and was incapable of receiving, too. Stigma exiles, as well. The stigma of being a suicide survivor can result in a sense that one is merely “wandering the earth,” exposed. To this experience can come a “healthy” sense of shame, one that restores dignity and replaces humiliation with humility. A healthy sense of shame enables and promotes embrace over exile. I want to make two points here. First, yes, once Olivier had died, he had placed himself beyond forgiveness as an exchange. There is no opportunity for Ricoeur, after Olivier’s death, to say: I forgive you. Nor is there any opportunity for Olivier to “receive” the “gift” of that forgiveness. Therefore, whatever forgiving occurred had to have been an internal dynamic within Ricoeur—in a way, as a gift Ricoeur gave himself. But it is in precisely this way that the embrace of shame could also function in Ricoeur: that is, Ricoeur did not “exile” Olivier; he did not behave like the older brother. Instead, Ricoeur found ways to continue to include Olivier as a member of his family, to embrace him, to affirm the significance of his life. That is what I take to be the silent significance of the passage he dedicates to Olivier in Oneself as Another. Second, being a parent who is a survivor of the suicide of one’s child is its own identity crisis. This is a key concept of grief: that the one who had died does not in fact “disappear,” as Ricoeur claims in Memory, History, Forgetting, but remains, only now internalized, that is, within oneself. A suicide of one’s child challenges one’s identity: Who am I, as a father, now that my son has died by suicide? To continue to “embrace” figuratively Olivier entails a certain kind of refusal: a refusal to let stigma separate, alienate, or

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create a distance. To embrace in shame is to refuse rejection, to bring close, to continue to hold within oneself. When Ricoeur links agape to peace, he tacitly affirms that to surround himself and Olivier in divine agape brings peace within himself. Ricoeur’s narrative identity can continue to include Olivier. My hope for Ricoeur is that he found that healthy sense of shame in himself and embraced Olivier in the course of doing his “work of mourning.” From Tragedy to Celebration We have come to the concluding section, with an aim for reconciliation between Ricoeur and Olivier and within Ricoeur himself. We could construe this using two of the three concepts of the “triad of passivity,” but it might be better simply to go where Ricoeur has directed us in Memory, History, Forgetting. He says: “the object of the entire quest merits the beautiful name of happiness.” He adds: “the lodestar of the entire phenomenology of memory has been the idea of happy memory.”96 And so it is with this essay. I will take here three steps. The first is to follow into the realm of shame a remedy that Ricoeur suggests helps forgiveness. The second is to follow him further into patterns of love and loving that he has suggested. And the third is to suggest for him, and for us, a path he had pointed to early in his work, but, to my knowledge, had not returned to as his life and his writing came about. Taking these three steps, I hope to arrive at a place of “happy memory” for Ricoeur. Separating a Person from their Actions As it was in the beginning, my task has been to expand Ricoeur beyond his focus on forgiveness to take shame into account. To do this I have bracketed out his primary focus on the problem of Evil, and I have declined to pursue sin and its symbolism. I want now to state that I am less interested in the sociopolitical implications of his thinking. What he wrestles with in being concerned with that is indeed important to his ethical and moral thought. However, my focus here has been much more narrow: not only on shame, but on shame in its intra- and inter-personal dimensions. I have sought to glean from Ricoeur’s writing perspectives on his interpersonal relationship with Olivier and on his intrapersonal mourning of his death. At this point, I am helped by taking a step Ricoeur advocates for approaching forgiveness. He writes: “Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults. . . . The formula for this liberating word, reduced to the bareness of its utterance, would be: you are better than your actions.”97 This statement, this enterprise is not only affirming of the other, but it helps the other with their greatest fear, namely that their faulted actions stem from a faulty self. To say to

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them: “you are better than your actions” is not only statement of forgiveness by the other, but it also provides a means for the bad actor to forgive him/ herself. Forgiveness at that level then seeps into the self as an affirmation that assuages the toxicity of shame and the resulting sense of being unworthy. Separating the goodness of the individual from the badness of the actions enables the individual to live with him/herself. In a way, Ricoeur recognizes this when he speaks of “the odyssey of forgiveness to the center of the self.”98 The embrace of another with love and acceptance confirms this “better than” by healing the wounds of shame and guilt. Moreover, as was true for the father and the younger son, the mutuality inherent in this affirmation can also be turned toward the one offering it. That is, not so much at the level of forgiveness but at the level of shame, the embrace within healthy shame brings about a level of reciprocity that might escape a forgiveness exchange—especially if the ashamed person considers him/herself to be exiled from and unworthy of human exchange. There benefit of distinguishing between a person and his actions after Olivier’s death would be a healing of the inter-personal shame between Ricoeur and Olivier. It would also be a helaing of Ricoeur’s intra-personal shame as the survivor of his son’s suicide. In that way, the stigma of the suicide would be lessened for both of them. They could figuratively “embrace” again, transcending the “absence and presence paradox” of mourning. Toward a Song of Love Ricoeur is fond of biblical metaphors and appeals, throughout The Symbolism of Evil, and to the role of “hymn” when he describes the importance of forgiveness in Memory, History, Forgetting. No less in Oneself as Another, where he says, “there is a form of commandment that is not yet law” that “can be heard in the tone of the Song of Songs, in the plea that the lover addressed to the beloved: ‘Thou, love me!’”99 When Ricoeur recounts this, he means it to fit within “a reinterpretation of otherness.” He says that “it is because violence taints all the relations of interaction,” this “commandment that is not yet law” is to be, in a way, a reinforcement of the commandment that is already law: “Thou shalt not kill.” This is to have a positive effect on “the trajectory of ethics.” But subsequently Ricoeur wanders into an analogy with suicide, reinforced by his reading of Levinas, “that, perhaps, every death is a sort of murder” and “murder, which is death inflicted on others, is reflected in my relation with my own death,” much like “suicide, as murder turned against oneself.”100 To take Ricoeur out of the realm of ethics and into that of his relationship with Olivier, let’s make this claim: the cry, “Thou, love me” is precisely what

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the one steeped in shame emits, albeit often tacitly. This is precisely the cry of the one who is (a)shamed—and the appeal is to the one who would love the (a)shamed one. For if shame sends us inward in silence, the call outward again, seeking restoration of relationship, hoping for reconciliation, is what makes shame bearable for the (a)shamed person. In this “Thou” moment,101 there is an affirmation of dignity, respect, and mutuality of which shame otherwise robs us. This is why we must remember the “commandment that is not yet law” that Ricoeur has taken from the Song of Songs. For that not-yet law is a commandment to love—one which originates as a plea in the one who feels unlovable or unworthy of love, and one which has its own origination in the one who would both love and be loved without the shroud of shame obscuring or obstructing. What Ricoeur has identified is the interaction of remediation, or restoration, and of reconciliation that attests to an enduring mutuality and connection. Here is love, but here also is mercy—the unwarranted embrace that exceeds forgiveness. And here this dynamic is symbolized in the embrace of the younger son by the father. Therefore, the Lukan parable opens for Ricoeur, along with any of us whose family member who has died by suicide, a model, an example moment for how to respond. The Parable illustrates how there is this kind of “hidden reciprocity” in shame: in offering acceptance to the other, in answering the plea of “Thou—love me!” when the other feels unlovable, one establishes a kind of “hidden” or “implicit” reciprocity with one’s healthy sense of shame. Thus, the dignity of one restores the dignity of the other, and neither is thereby diminished; instead, each is enhanced by the embrace of shame. Love and the Poetic Drama of Orphism We have come to love, to love in father and son relationships, in The Parable, and in Ricoeur and Olivier. We could follow the path that the later Ricoeur himself might have chosen on his way to happy memory. Within what he calls “the miracle of forgiveness”102 there is, for Ricoeur, “the hymn of love,” St. Paul’s articulation in 1 Cor 13: “This rhetorical attack articulates . . . the path which goes beyond all other spiritual gifts.”103 In this sense, it is the abundance of love, undeserved yet available, that enables us to live with shame. Ricoeur says “There is forgiveness as there is joy, as there is wisdom, extravagance, love. Love, precisely. Forgiveness belongs to the same family.”104 In Ricoeur’s terms, this may be a “family” of “miracle.”105 Our dignity is fragile; we are prone to humiliation, and thus to humiliate and be humiliated. What restores our wholeness to ourselves, and heals the wounds of shame in the self, is unwarranted love. Just as the otherness of the other and

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the otherness of ourselves to ourselves can be an occasion of our being (a) shamed, so can the love of an Other do for us what we cannot, in our paralysis, silence, and passivity, do for ourselves. However, within the “miracle of forgiveness,” as Ricoeur recognizes elsewhere, and as was referenced above, “receiving then becomes the pivotal category . . . In French, one says reconnaissance in speaking of such gratitude. Gratitude lightens the weight of obligation to give in return and reorients this toward a generosity equal to the one that led to the first gift.”106 This gratitude on the part of the receiver of forgiveness is what founds mutuality in the unequal reciprocity of forgiveness. Again, it is not that Olivier would not have been grateful to have known that his father had forgiven him, but it is that this imbalance at the level of forgiveness leads me to wonder whether a different level of reciprocity and mutuality might be available for this father and son, one that does not rely so much on acts of God and the gratitude of those receiving forgiveness. I find it in the latter pages of Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature: the voluntary and the involuntary (1966), where Ricoeur appeals to “the poetry of adoration” of Orphism, to Goethe, to Nietzsche, and to Rilke, in whose writing there is “metamorphosis and transcendence.”107 The view of death there is quite different from Ricoeur’s in Memory, History, Forgetting. It is very different, too, from the Greek tragedy in Oneself as Another. For example, here Ricoeur says: it is “by death [that] everything is metamorphosed, that all negating is surpassed.”108 This is the poetry of embrace, as opposed to the exile of Stoicism. These are songs of incantation. Orphic “poetry never humbles except to heal.” “The law of metamorphosis is painted before my eyes as death is surmounted.”109 One can feel the joy and uplift of Orphic poetry in how Ricoeur writes about it. Above all abides “consent and hope.” “Hope says: the world is not the final form of freedom.” “[F]or Orphism it would be on the basis of death accepted” that one hopes and the future can be faced.110 In other words, if Ricoeur’s memory is truly to be happy, especially by the time he is writing Memory, History, Forgetting, a view of living that is more exuberant and a view of death that is more about metamorphosis than about violence and humiliation, would be preferable. Orphism is about transformation and renewal, as is the chorus of The Parable: “my son who was dead is alive again; who was lost and is now found.” That is, what Ricoeur sought from Sophocles he might better have found in Rilke. The tragic view of Sophocles is replaced by a poetics of that is truly as joyful as Ricoeur seeks to find in 1 Cor 13. In fact, it may be that Ricoeur’s appreciation of symbols, and of narrativity, and of poesis, would have served him well in coming to an inner peace that embraces Olivier, Simone and himself. For what comfort philosophy does not

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bring, nonphilosophy can—or at least might. In this way, Ricoeur could have transcended the stigma of being a suicide survivor by keeping the memory of Olivier alive in his heart. NOTES 1. Here I take for the title that given by the NIV, the New International Version, rather than the one more commonly used following the RSV or Revised Standard Version of Luke’s gospel, namely “The Prodigal Son.” 2. Nussbaum 2016, 81. 3. Ricoeur 1992, 241f. 4. Ricoeur 1969, 7. 5. Zahavi 2014. 6. Ricoeur 1992, 318f. 7. A reference to Ricoeur’s term in The Symbolism of Evil, 118. 8. Ricoeur 1992, 297. 9. In Freud and Philosophy (1972), Ricoeur refers extensively to Freud and matters of guilt. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur takes “The Odyssey of the Spirit of Forgiveness” through the grid of Jaspers’ “four types of guilt” following from his The Question of German Guilt, written in 1947 (2004, 470f). In neither of these books, nor in Oneself as Another, is shame included in the index. Similarly, there is no explicit mention of shame in The Symbolism of Evil. 10. Erikson 1963, 252–253; emphasis supplied. 11. Fossum and Mason 1986, 5–6. 12. Morrison 1989, 2, 5. 13. Nathanson 1992, 19. 14. Nathanson 1992, 145. This brings us around full circle to Erikson. 15. Ricoeur 1969, 3. 16. Ricoeur 1969, 4. 17. Ricoeur 1969, 7. 18. Ricoeur 1969, 7. 19. Ricoeur 1969, 100. 20. Ricoeur 1969, 101. 21. Ricoeur 1969, 35: “In truth, defilement was never literally as stain; impurity was never literally filthiness, dirtiness.” 22. Ricoeur 1969, 35, 36. Murder and “spilt blood” are an allusion to the story of Cain and Abel, as we will see. 23. Ricoeur 1969, 25. 24. Ricoeur 1969, 29–30. 25. Ricoeur 1969, 35. 26. Ricoeur 1969, 9. 27. Zahavi 2014, 209. 28. Zahavi 2014, 211. 29. Schneider 1977, 3.

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30. Zahavi 2014, 212f. 31. Zahavi 2014, 215–216. 32. Schneider 1977, 77 and 78. Two points are worth emphasizing: (1) There is an evident consensus among Erikson, Scheler, Darwin, and Zahavi about the very human elements of shame and the behaviors that follow. (2) Schneider notes: “some deaths in our society are seen as shameful. One of the most tabooed and suppressed experiences in our culture is suicide.” (82) I will return to this statement below when suicide becomes explicitly important to our exploration here. 33. Zahavi 2014, 216. 34. Zahavi 2014, 217. 35. Zahavi 2014, 219 & 220. 36. Zahavi 2014, 221. 37. Zahavi 2014, 222, 223. In particular, Zahavi notes the physiological response to one’s being ashamed of oneself: “The behavioral manifestation of shame— slumped posture, downward head movement and gaze avoidance, covering the face— also emphasizes the centripetality of the emotion.” (222) In other words, this is the postural response noted by Erikson. 38. Zahavi 2014, 224. 39. Zahavi 2014, 226. 40. Zahavi 2014, 235. 41. Zahavi 2014, 228. 42. Zahavi 2014, 238, 239. 43. Ricoeur 1994, 297. 44. Ricoeur 1994, 317, 318. 45. Ricoeur 1994, 325–326. 46. Ricoeur 1994, 329. 47. Ricoeur 1994, 335. 48. Ricoeur 1994, 342, 341. 49. Zahavi 2014, 220: “Shame is the subject’s awareness that the way he is or acts is so much at odds with the values he cares to exemplify that it appears to disqualify him from his very commitment to the value.” 50. Zahavi 2014, 217. 51. Zahavi 2014, 222. In The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur writes: “If one should ask, then what the nucleus is that remains constant through all the symbolizations of defilement, we should have to answer that it is only in the progress of conscience, as it advances beyond and at the same time retains the notion of defilement, that its meaning will be manifested” (45–46; emphasis supplied). This can be connected back from Ricoeur’s third passivity. 52. Ricoeur 1992, 318. 53. Ricoeur 2005, 91. 54. Zahavi 2014, 217. 55. Ricoeur 2005, 101. 56. “Reparation in the form of indemnification or some other penalty is part of the punishment, for which the criterion is to make the guilty party suffer because of

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his fault. This imposed suffering in response to the infraction tends to cover over the first suffering, which was that of the victim.” (Ricoeur 2005, 108) 57. In keeping with this, I will not be commenting on the son’s confession: “I have sinned against heaven and against you.” Just as I did not remain within Ricoeur’s exploration of sin in The Symbolism of Evil, I will not retain a focus on the son’s confession and the awareness of his guilt in the parable. Instead, I will reframe what he says of himself in terms of the categories of shame from Zahavi and conscience from Ricoeur. This is also in keeping with events in the parable. The son does not prostrate himself before the father and ask for forgiveness. As Nussbaum says, there is no act of “contrition. And the father does not say, “Of course, I forgive you, son!” There is no exchange, no hierarchy. 58. This distinction will be address in the third section of the essay when we look at Ricoeur’s relationship with Olivier. 59. Ricoeur 2005, 152. 60. Ricoeur, 2004, 157. 61. This will become important when we come to the section below on “the shame of Cain.” 62. Ricoeur 2005, 225. 63. Ricoeur 2005, 228–229. 64. Ricoeur 2005, 232. 65. Ricoeur 2005, 243. 66. Ricoeur 2005, 244. 67. Ricoeur 2005, 245. 68. Ricoeur 2005, 248. 69. Ricoeur 2005, 246. 70. Ricoeur 2005, 244. 71. Whitehead 2010, 115. 72. Whitehead 2010, 114–115. 73. Whitehead 2010, 116. 74. Zahvi 2014, 215. 75. Whitehead 2010, 114. 76. Elsewhere, in Bushfield, S. & DeFord, B. End-of-Life Care and Addiction. (2010) Springer, New York, I have referred to this as not being ashamed of shame: “For end-of-life professionals, having a positive sense of shame means that they are not ashamed of shame.” (237) The father is not ashamed of the younger son’s shame, but also the father is not ashamed of his own shame. It is on the basis that he can bring affection and acceptance to a situation that others might have found off-putting—or even calling for a shaming response. 77. Ricoeur 2005, 189f. 78. Ricoeur 2005, 189. 79. Ricoeur 2005, 192. 80. Ricoeur 2005, 253. 81. Ricoeur 2004, 457f. 82. Ricoeur 2004, 494–495.

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83. Ricoeur 1994, 241. 84. Ricoeur 1994, 243. 85. Ricoeur 1994, 245. 86. Ricoeur 1994, 248. 87. Schneider 1977, 82. He adds: “Thus the core of shame experience is found in the sense of visibility and exposure. Several commentators have grasped this central modality of shame. However, what has remained unclarified in most discussions of shame, and has in turn led to much confusion, is the equal prominence given to such factors as failure, inadequacy, incompetence, loss of control, and stigma as constituents of shame” (1977, 34). 88. Ricoeur 2004, 464; emphasis supplied. 89. Whitehead 2010, 116. 90. Ricoeur 1969, 36. 91. Ricoeur 2004, 360. 92. Roos 2010, 187. 93. Turner 1991, 26. 94. For more information on “honor cultures,” see David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. (1989) Oxford University Press. 95. Ricoeur 1969, 36. 96. Ricoeur 2004, 494. 97. Ricoeur 2004, 493. 98. Ricoeur 2004, 489. 99. Ricoeur 1992, 351. 100. Ricoeur 2004, 360. 101. This use of “Thou” is reminiscent of Martin Buber in I and Thou. 102. Ricoeur 2004, 489. 103. Ricoeur 2004, 466. 104. Ricoeur 2004, 466. 105. Ricoeur may use the term “miracle” here, but I don’t think he would object if we borrowed from Gabriel Marcel the opposition of “problem” and “mystery” to understand guilt and shame. In Marcel’s terms, guilt presents us with a “problem to be solved,” that is, how do we act again in good conscience, how do we trust an other’s word-as-promise after their actions have spoken louder than their words. Forgiveness, as enigmatic as it might be, is the solution. However, shame presents itself less as a problem than as a mystery to be lived, and so must in its own way evoke other dimensions of mystery: love is one Ricoeur names, but also mercy and mutuality. Thus, we might each be guilty of bad actions which are our own, yet what we have in common is the human experience of shame. 106. Ricoeur 2005, 243. 107. Ricoeur 1966, 473. 108. Ricoeur 1966, 474. 109. Ricoeur 1966, 478. 110. Ricoeur 1966, 479, 480.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY New Testament translation: the NIV, the New International Version. Erikson, Erik. 1963. Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Lewis, Helen Block. 1971. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. Lexington: International Universities Press. Mason, Merle A. Fossum & Marilyn J. 1986. Facing Shame: Families in Recovery. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Morrison, Andrew P. 1989. Shame: the Underside of Narcissism. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Nathanson, Donald L. 1992. Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Nussbaum, Martha. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: resentment, generosity, justice. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: the voluntary and the involuntary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1972. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. Living Up to Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The Univeristy of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1969. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press. Ricouer, Paul. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roos, Susan. 2010. “The long road to relevance.” In The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma, by J. ed. Kaufman, 171–197. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Carl D. 1977. Shame, Exposure, and Privacy. New York: W.W. Norton, NYC. Turner, Frederick. 1991. Beauty: the Value of Values. London, England: University of Virgnian Press. Whitehead, E. E. & Whitehead, J. D. 2010. Transforming Our Painful Emotions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self & Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press.

Chapter 9

Ricoeur’s Paradigmatic Challenge to American Evangelical Biblical Hermeneutics Dan R. Stiver

The eminent evangelical church historian Mark Noll has strikingly indicated at the time of the Civil War debates how the proslavery advocates won the appeal to the Bible for the most part hands down. This was not so much due to the skill of their arguments but due to the hermeneutic that was widely shared on both sides that made it almost impossible to evade their conclusions. The literalistic or biblicist approach to the Bible was pervasive in American life at that time.1 While the strong defense of slavery gradually receded after the Civil War (although racism of course continued through the Jim Crow era and to the present day), George Marsden in a landmark book shows how evangelicals throughout the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century continued this basic hermeneutic that was behind the proslavery movement and also brings out how it was explicitly shaped by a philosophy, namely, Scottish Common Sense Realism. While the explicit appeal to this philosophy waned, even though carried well into the twentieth century, its impact on the shape of evangelical hermeneutics arguably persists to this day, a point made by sociologist Christian Smith in The Bible Made Impossible (verified in my own teaching experience with Baptists of the South over thirty-five years). Evangelicals continue to have great influence on American society, for example, being notoriously known for being the single largest demographic supporting Donald Trump and policies such as war and torture, despite their ostensible tension with evangelical emphases on the Bible and upright character. Their hermeneutic arguably continues to constrain their views. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic dramatically contrasts with Scottish Sense Realism and this evangelical hermeneutic, representing what could only be called a 183

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paradigmatic alternative. Ricoeur is one of the few prominent philosophers to engage in biblical hermeneutics, exemplified in his collaborative work, Thinking Biblically. His approach not only highlights the contours of an alternative hermeneutic and its societal implications, his philosophy of the imagination provides insight into how a paradigm change might occur. This contrast illuminates how the problem remains not just one of the specific viewpoints or interpretations but one of an underlying biblical hermeneutic. Another issue has to do with being able to reject poor interpretation. Is that possible with a hermeneutic like Ricoeur’s that emphasizes a “surplus of meaning”? Does anything go? Is any interpretation as valid as any other? Can some be ruled out altogether, on his principles? These are issues that are raised by this problematic of the Bible and the Civil War. BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Noll in an article entitled “The Bible and Slavery” states the problem of the Bible in his first words: A brief observation in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address highlighted the greatest theological conundrum of the Civil War. Both North and South, he said “read the same Bible.” The profundity of this statement was twofold. Most obviously, both North and South read the Bible, almost universally in the Authorized Version. More important for a theological understanding of the Civil War, both read the Bible in the same way.2 (Italics original)

Reading “the same way” limited the possibilities for dealing with the issue. Because the Bible refers to slavery and does not explicitly condemn it in some places makes it a more complex issue than just citing a passage. If the approach does not allow for a more complex hermeneutic, then one is doomed from the start, which the slavery proponents saw and took full advantage of. What kind of hermeneutic did they have? It was, in the words of an astute observer of the American scene at the time, “a literal interpretation of the Bible.” James Stirling from Britain, himself opposed to slavery, in 1857 commented upon a major defender of slavery, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, that “as against his opponents, . . . he is perfectly triumphant.” Along with a literal interpretation, he pointed out that they “consider every direction contained in its pages as applicable at all times to all men.”3 This is what one could call a “flat Bible” approach to hermeneutics. Although it is often shot through with inconsistency in that evangelicals of the nineteenth century did not follow

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practices of the Hebrew Bible in many cases, they could note certain passages about slavery and see them as applying to all times. Noll goes on to delineate a few key factors. One was the dominance of a Reformed hermeneutic that stressed statements in the Bible applying “at all times to all men.” A second was the influence of the American ethos that pushed toward the accessibility of the Bible to all, its authority over hierarchies, the Bible alone, and the simplicity of its message. The Reformation emphasized the “perspicuity of Scripture,” but it did not necessarily mean that all of the Bible was clear. In the United States this emphasis shifted to the need for the Bible almost altogether to be clear to the common person and to common sense.4 This gave impetus to an emphasis on literal interpretation and a dynamic where once people found what seemed clear to them, it had to be the message of the whole Bible—because the Bible had to clearly agree throughout with little nuance. As Noll points out, “Nuanced biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the scriptures.”5 So it led to what seemed to be “cherry picking,” but to the interpreter, it was just finding the clear message of the Bible. An ancient hermeneutical principle in the church has been to interpret the obscure by the clear. With this principle and this modern hermeneutic in mind, once one found a clear passage, the rest, the obscure, had to fit, was forced to fit. This allowed confirmation bias to run riot.6 One often went to the Bible to find what one wanted and found what agreed with one’s biases. As soon as one found that passage, in some cases, one passage, the rest was assumed to agree because it must. One could afford not even to look at other passages in some cases, or if dissonant passages were found, they were compelled to fit. Again, this approach made it difficult if not impossible to deal with “the conflict of interpretations,”7 implying that a contrary reading of Scripture must be due to perversity rather than diversity. The effect was to make the Bible’s message supposedly simple. While some aspects are rather simple, just daunting to do, like loving one’s enemies, looking for a message of the whole canon can be quite complex, complex enough to allow for multiple perspectives. In fact, multiple perspectives are found within the Bible, the four Gospels being an obvious example in the New Testament or to mixed perspectives on a king in the Hebrew Bible. The early church had a movement to consolidate the four Gospels into one but finally, wisely, resisted it. Nevertheless, this American hermeneutic virtually obliterated such differences. In the American context, Noll observes: Nowhere was the Christian-Enlightenment marriage more clearly illustrated than in the pervasive belief that understanding things was simple. The significance

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of this marriage was far-reaching. On the one side, it bestowed great selfconfidence as Americans explained the moral urgency of social attitudes and then of national policy. On the other, it transformed the conclusions reached by opponents into willful perversions of sacred truth and natural reason.”8

Noll does point out that other approaches to the Bible were available, but were such distinct minorities that they had little effect. The African-American church was quite conservative but had more of a narrative, dramatic, poetic style. The Roman Catholic Church could look for development within Scripture and also to a magisterial authority or tradition to unify interpretation. The Lutheran tradition at the time looked more to the spirit than the letter but had little effect. In fact, the appeal to complexity or the spirit often came across as a kind of liberal undermining of the authority of the Bible. Of course, one option was to take the moral high road and say too bad for the Bible if it took the low road. This of course further pushed away those holding to biblical authority.9 Another noted evangelical historian, George Marsden, analyzed this hermeneutic in the nineteenth century as explicitly appropriating Scottish Common Sense Realism to apply to the Bible as an encyclopedia of facts. Facts are not interpreted and do not change over time. They have one meaning and not multiple meanings, being a part of an exact science.10 And in this view, they are accessible in clear ways to “common sense.” So when the Bible seemed to state certain matters in a clear way, it was the way it was and was difficult to contend with. As Marsden sums up evangelical views of that time, “Common Sense philosophy affirmed their ability to know ‘the facts’ directly. With the Scriptures at hand as a compendium of facts, there was no need to go further. They needed only to classify the facts, and follow wherever they might lead.”11 At this time, evangelicals were enamored with the prestige of science, understanding that science was impressive because it dealt with facts. This was long before philosophers of science deeply challenged this notion and began to see all so-called facts as interpreted and theory-laden. Thus these evangelicals desired that the Bible be seen as a kind of science book, which also dealt with hard facts. Ironically, for conservatives at the time who were often extremely critical of modernity, they can be seen as deeply influenced by the modern paradigm that prized literal or propositional language over figurative, clarity over mystery, and facts over interpretation—even by major philosophers. Nancey Murphy has pointed out how the rise of the modern doctrine of inerrancy at this time reflected the modern penchant for a foundationalist epistemology across the board, from conservative to liberal.12 The conservative desire for uninterpreted facts, however, made it extremely difficult to deal with differences of interpretation at all, much less in a civil manner. The implication was

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that a disagreement on what was the plain fact of the matter must be due to one of the parties not just having a different perspective but being defective or deceitful. Charles Blanchard, prestigious president of Wheaton College in the early twentieth century, was virtually dumbfounded that a culture of people with reason and common sense could so go off the rails. He suggested that the cause must not be legitimate interpretive differences but an “age of insanity.” In frustration, he was driven to blame differences in biblical interpretation to professors having high pay, long summer vacations, and smoking.13 This incapacity for dealing with disagreement led to part of the breakdown of this approach in the twentieth century, particularly in dealing with the evolution question.14 The crisis at the time of the Civil War was that people using the same hermeneutic of looking at the same authoritative book could come out with different views, with the proslavery side having the best of the interpretive battle. In the end, the issue was settled more by force of arms and bloodshed than reasoning together in peace. As Noll put it, keeping in mind that the issue was a particular hermeneutic of the Bible, “The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.”15 After the Civil War, the proslavery advocates were muted and what are called the mainline or liberal churches for the most part adopted a different hermeneutic than the failed and humiliated proslavery hermeneutic, defeated only by military force. An effect, however, was to drive a wedge between the liberal and conservative or evangelical churches and incline the evangelicals to resist whatever the liberals were doing. They were thus pushed toward the literalistic hermeneutic. This played itself out in many ways, such as the evolution controversy, but one effect was to enable the pre-Civil War hermeneutic to persist. It was not the dominant American hermeneutic as it had been before, but it became the hermeneutic of evangelicals.16 It is patently obvious, as Noll points out, that it was not just a question of biblical hermeneutics, but that another controlling factor in exegesis was the huge role of culture. He notes that the problem of the Bible and slavery “was always a question of who had the power to interpret the Bible as ‘America’s book’ and who . . . had no voice in determining what an ‘American Bible’ should look like. The issue from first to last was one of cultural hermeneutics as well as biblical exegesis.”17 The problem is that the latter could not be easily disentangled from the former. A reason that the proslavery interpretation was formidable is that both sides shared in many ways not only the same biblical hermeneutic but the same cultural hermeneutic. The latter involved the application of democratic dynamics of the young nation to entail the ability of all to interpret the Bible, to understand it, and to apply it to their cultural circumstance, whether for or against slavery. Moreover, not only

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the same biblical hermeneutic is still with evangelicals, the same cultural hermeneutic in many ways is still with us. How does Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy help on both counts? But first, how is this hermeneutic still pertinent? BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND CONTEMPORARY WHITE EVANGELICALS Because of the trauma of the Civil War, the literalist hermeneutic lost some of its explicit character as being scientific, being purely made of facts, and being based on Scottish Common Sense Realism. Nevertheless, analysis of the current dominant hermeneutic particularly of white evangelicals in the United States is remarkably similar in its outlines. It remains largely literalistic, insensitive to genre, to history, to development, accessible in a simple way to all, supposedly, and still tends to disallow serious, sincere disagreement. Christian Smith is an evangelical sociologist teaching at Notre Dame who makes this point under the terminology of contemporary evangelical biblicism. In his book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, he refers to the tradition of Scottish Common Sense realism as well as the tragedy of the proslavery advocates using a literalist hermeneutic to their advantage at the time of the Civil War. He states provocatively, “Scripture is sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and incomplete—we have to admit and deal with that fact. Biblicism insists that the Bible as the word of God is clear, accessible, understandable, coherent, and complete as the revelation of God’s will and ways for humanity. But this is simply not true.”18 Smith is obviously not dismissing the Bible but arguing that, from a perspective of faith, it must be understood on its own terms. As he says as an evangelical: We ought in humble submission to accept the real scriptures that God has provided us as they are, rather than ungratefully and stubbornly forcing scripture to be something that it is not because of a theory we hold about what it must and should be. One of the strangest things about the biblicist mentality is its evident refusal to take the Bible at face value. Ironically, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to try to make it something that it evidently is not.19

Smith underscores all the characteristics that Noll, Marsden, and Murphy point out. He notes also the irony of evangelicals reflecting a kind of Cartesian modernity, “Without realizing it, evangelicals embraced a view of scripture that was more driven by Cartesian and generally modern preoccupations with

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epistemic certainty than by scripture itself and a long Christian tradition of scriptural interpretation.”20 A contemporary example of this hermeneutic is from Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and regarded as one of the main leaders among Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. As recently as 1998, he was already president of Southern Seminary as part of a conservative takeover of the denomination in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, he said in a Larry King interview that slaves should obey their masters, and to a question about Harriet Tubman, he said that she was wrong to have escaped but should have submitted to her master. Kevin Cosby, the African-American president of Simmons College, an earlier graduate of Southern Seminary, noted about a conversation on a plane with Mohler in the early 2000s, “I have never forgotten sitting on that airplane and hearing Al Mohler tell me that the scripture does not condemn slavery and that the Bible calls upon slaves to obey their masters.”21 Since that time, in 2020, Mohler has apologized for those remarks, to his credit, as he is running for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is remarkable, however, that such a prominent leader so recently could affirm that the Bible teaches slavery and submission to masters. A change on this issue implies, demands, a complex hermeneutic, but there is little evidence that Mohler has changed the underlying biblicist hermeneutic, for example, in his continuing opposition to women in ministry.22 The example shows not only what such a hermeneutic leads to but also the deep inconsistencies that plague it. Smith points out that the set of factors in literalism or biblicism make it very difficult to countenance what one might consider proper biblical conversation about the Bible that would reflect respect, consideration, fairness, compassion—and perhaps even love of neighbor. Rather, it promotes resistance, suspicion, and usually attack. Since all of the Bible is seen on the same factual, uninterpreted level, it can hardly distinguish between general and basic beliefs and more complex and specific beliefs, promoting more and more conflict between groups rather than finding unity over essentials and consideration toward what is at least less essential. As a sociologist, he says of the tendency to promote doctrines and opinions to the level of the most basic beliefs: Both tendencies clearly follow a well-known and established fact in social psychology: namely, that people predictably tend to inflate the goodness, importance, and credibility of anything associated with the social groups to which they belong (their “in-groups”) beyond what is objectively real and justified; and they predictably tend to depreciate the goodness, importance, and credibility of anything associated with groups that are socially different and to which they do not belong (“out-groups”). It is all unfortunately part of “normal”

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social-psychological personal and group identity construction and maintenance. But that does not make it right, good, or helpful when it comes to Christian theology and church unity.23

Arguably, white evangelicals have doubled down on this tendency. It goes a long way toward understanding how this wedding of a literalist hermeneutic, which accentuates the obviousness, certainty, and centrality of its conclusions, along with tribalistic cultural hermeneutics of white evangelicals, can lead to their startling and even shocking support, compared virtually to all other demographics, for Donald Trump, for torture, for war, for capital punishment, for harsh treatment of immigrant children, for opposition to policies helping children after they are born, for opposition to health care for all, for hostile rather than loving attitudes to gays, for continuing support for white supremacy, and the list could go on.24 As Wendell Griffin, Arkansas circuit judge and pastor, points out, “In every national election since King’s death in 1968, white evangelicals have shown a marked voting preference for politicians whose policies advance racism, capitalism, and militarism.”25 The biblicist hermeneutic actually helps entrench such views. RICOEUR AND THINKING BIBLICALLY It is tempting to offer at this point a short, utopian response to the effect that what American white evangelicals need is a Ricoeurian hermeneutic. In short, I think that is true. How to get there is longer and more complex undertaking. I will delineate first, though, the significance of a hermeneutic of Ricoeurian principles for the contemporary American context, especially the evangelical one. To underscore this point, Anthony Thiselton is a major evangelical biblical scholar and theologian who is especially noted for his emphasis on hermeneutics, drawing on the Anglo-American and Continental philosophical traditions. His recent book, Why Hermeneutics? An Appeal Culminating with Ricoeur, as one can see, climaxes with Ricoeur as the paradigmatic hermeneutical philosopher to follow as a model crucial for the re-envisioning task.26 His emphases are consistent with the following important aspects of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics notably stresses several crucial differences, which all reflect Smith’s appeal to take the Bible for what it is. One is that interpretation of rich texts involves a surplus of meaning.27 In other words, there is not usually or even often one and only one clear and distinct meaning. As Ricoeur pithily said, “A text means all that it can mean.”28 This is not something to deplore but rather to celebrate. A second is a consequence that there is often a conflict of interpretations—and this is to be expected.29 A

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third is the implication that such conflict is not obviously a matter of ill will but can reflect the best of intentions and efforts. A key implication is that his hermeneutic allows for and predicts differing interpretations, rather than such differences being an anomaly or a result of malevolence. A fourth point is that this does not necessarily lead to hermeneutical chaos. Ricoeur indicated that some interpretations are better than others. Some may even be ruled out. He noted, “The text is a limited field of possible constructions.”30 The value of Thinking Biblically is that it reveals interpreters at work on biblical texts with great care.31 They attend to history, context, and genre, relating the biblical writings also to the wider culture of the Ancient Near East (such as Babylon and Egypt) and the later Hellenistic context. They offer careful readings that point to warranted interpretations but also point away from other, less warranted interpretations. They correct or challenge some traditional interpretations and offer better. They allow for hermeneutical openness and creativity but not hermeneutical disarray. Such a variety of perspectives can result in an enlarged understanding, but these are legitimate and not quixotic additions. An aspect of the text meaning all that it can mean is that one gains from appropriating other perspectives. It is striking that Thinking Biblically is a work of dialogue, not of one interpreter but of two. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc includes a middle moment of explanation that calls for the application of rigorous analysis and even methods to test one’s initial, naive understanding.32 His work on ideology calls for legitimate ideology critique, or in his earlier terms, a hermeneutic of suspicion, that looks for abuses of interpretation.33 With respect specifically to religious issues, his development of a hermeneutic of testimony requires the testing of testimony just as would occur in a courtroom.34 Not all testimonies, or interpretations, pass the test. Critique is thus an essential aspect of interpretation. A fifth point is that, in the end, Ricoeur appealed to a third moment in the hermeneutical arc of a postcritical naivete or appropriation. It implies a possible reattestation of a testimony that has passed through the fires of criticism. And perhaps most important, the third moment points to appropriation. Kevin Vanhoozer, who wrote his dissertation on Ricoeur, exemplifies the import of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic in a later work where he utilizes the metaphor of drama to see Scripture as a script that is incomplete unless performed.35 Vanhoozer also develops the idea of “canonical practices” where Scripture is not simply a font of information but whose purpose is to foster practices, character, and virtues.36 This is actually done through a panoply of genres that require imagination and something like improvisatory theater to perform the script of Scripture.37 In other words, the canon is not a collection of inert information but canonical formation in a myriad of ways. As Vanhoozer indicates, sixth, a very significant aspect of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic is that he is sensitive to genre and especially to figurative language. An

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implication is that metaphors have a richness of meaning that is illuminative, an “ontological vehemence” that goes beyond literal, univocal language.38 In fact, figurative language like that of the parables may help create meaning and lead to paradigm changes in ways difficult for discursive language.39 All of this is obviously of help in understanding the biblical document that is full of symbol and story, even dominated by it. Ricoeur’s Gadamerian roots make him sensitive also to the history of interpretation and its development, again moving away from the idea of reading a text for one univocal meaning divorced from history and context. Such historical movement is related to the presence of typology in the Bible, where previous stories and events are continuously reappropriated as frames for later contexts, such as the Exodus and the Exile. Such an approach helps one to be sensitive to the movement and dialogue within Scripture itself that does not so much present one comprehensive point of view but a dialogue from various perspectives, such as the role of kingship and the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible or the varied perspectives of the four Gospels in the New Testament. Ricoeur’s emphasis on the imagination, seventh, suggests how an interpretation may change. In terms of ideology, he suggested that it takes a utopian imagination, a view from outside or even nowhere, to even become aware of negative ideology and also then how to counter it. His view of texts as opening up new worlds “in front of the text” on the part of ever new readers undergirds hope for the way even the Bible may explode entrenched hermeneutics.40 Ricoeur’s passion for the possible in figurative language and the imagination inherently pushes beyond a literalist hermeneutic even while it contains within it a serious critical dimension.41 To see this at work in Ricoeur’s writing, one can look at his attention to historical context in The Symbolism of Evil for various historical approaches to the problem. He traces developments in the Hebrew tradition about evil as defilement or stain, sin, and guilt.42 As much as he appreciates Augustine in many areas, he faults Augustine for inappropriately historicizing and theologizing out of the creation stories.43 In the essays on the creation stories in Thinking Biblically, he and the noted biblical scholar André LaCocque take great pains in careful reading to set the stories, as they do all the passages treated in the book, in the biblical context, their Ancient Near Eastern context in dialogue with other Canaanite and Babylonian stories, their genres, and yet the multiple meanings that can arise even in a contemporary context. Ricoeur called them primordial histories that should not be confused with modern historiography or science. As he reflected, “It is liberating to admit that there is no call for trying to date the creation of Adam in relation to Pithecanthropus or Neanderthal man.”44 As he does in The Symbolism of Evil, instead of trying to figure out where and why there is a forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, he explicates its significance as a primordial limit, always already present

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from the beginning of humankind, saying “‘Before’ any fault, the commandment is a structure of the created order for man. The Law implies a Limit, and the limit is constitutive of man in his finitude, distinct from the divine Unlimited.”45 What they show in their careful interpretation is that despite evangelical rhetoric about the significance of Scripture, evangelicals such as creationists who insist upon a modern scientific and historiographical reading of these stories often exhibit little care or respect for the text, as Smith points out above, as it is, the text that we have. They often push the text into a Procrustean bed that ironically is shaped more by contemporary culture rather than the biblical culture, the latter being something that they often roundly criticize others for. In a positive way, a Ricoeurian hermeneutic is not opposed to their aim to do justice to Scripture but provides a better way of fulfilling it. When Ricoeur and LaCocque turn to the prohibition against murder in the two versions of the Ten Commandments, they again set the stories not only in their Ancient Near Eastern Context of treaties and types of law such as apodictic or casuistic, but they set the texts in dialogue with the two versions of the Decalogue and wider context as well as related injunctions to love God and neighbor, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. He points out the “Israelite innovations” to these ancient covenantal treaties.46 As Ricoeur says of LaCocque’s exposition, “He does not overlook the question of origins.”47 At the same time, Ricoeur puts the text in dialogue with later tradition and contemporary discussions of the dialectical relationship of love and justice. He indicates how the text is set within a narrative and a personal relationship, which moves it away from being either fully heteronomous or autonomous. One cannot look at a prescriptive passage without realizing that God is named more chiefly in narratives and hymns. The relational aspect allows for a way, perhaps a metaphorical way, for love to be commanded in an economy of the gift rather than an economy of exchange.48 Such a reading is a far cry from a flat reading in passing a law to display the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall or in a public school, where the meaning, ironically, can run far afield from its biblical grounding.49 Rather, the writers pay attention to history, to context, to genre, to the whole Bible, and to contemporary dialogue and illumination. Nevertheless, it probably would take a utopian imagination to see American white evangelicals transforming their literalist hermeneutic, but in an ironic way, there may be hope in the midst of the current crisis. Already the data strongly indicates that not only do these views of white evangelicals with this hermeneutic contrast significantly from others in the United States, they are even more distinct from younger people and younger evangelicals. The views of the noted 81 percent of evangelicals who voted for Trump are thus mostly older white evangelicals.50 The younger evangelicals are increasingly

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dismayed at their elders’ views and are turning against even the term “evangelical.”51 As one younger evangelical put it in these words from his song, “Hymn for the 81 Percent,” “You taught me better than this.”52 One can observe in history that the Galileo crisis over time pushed Roman Catholics away from a literalist hermeneutic of creation. The crises of the Civil War and the evolution controversy in 1925 pushed liberal or mainline Protestantism away from this hermeneutic. If the Trump presidency ends badly, likely to be judged eventually by history as a colossal failure, it may not be just a debacle for the Republican party but also for white evangelicals. Like these other crises, they, especially the youth, may be, and are, shocked into radically reassessing their approach to the Bible. It is unlikely that most will forego taking the Bible as authoritative or interpreting the Bible,53 but is it possible that they may end up with a different paradigm, one that would enable them to interpret it better?

NOTES 1. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14. 2. Mark Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43. 3. Cited in Noll, 46. 4. This wedding of an authoritative text, accessibility to the masses, and ease of interpretation could yield energy to nation building as well as nation warring. Noll comments, “The combination of biblical faith and Enlightenment certainty imparted great energy to the builders of American civilization. It also imparted a nearly fanatical force to the prosecution of war.” Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 20. 5. Mark Noll, “Battle for the Bible: The Impasse over Slavery,” Christian Century, May 2, 2006, 24. 6. Confirmation bias has been studied enough to show that it is a serious and problematic issue in any case for critical thinking. Jonathan Haidt points out that even those with higher intelligence and even more education did not do much better but just had better arguments to defend their bias. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Kindle (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 93. 7. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). 8. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 20. 9. As Noll observes, “In fact, the willingness of Garrison and a few others to favor abolitionism in place of Scripture actually worked to the advantage of those who defended slavery on the basis of Scripture. With increasing frequency as the

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sectional conflict heated up, biblical defenders of slavery were ever more likely to perceive doubt about the biblical defense of slavery as doubt about the authority of the Bible itself.” Noll, 32. 10. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60. 11. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American, 56. 12. Nancey C. Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). 13. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 219–20. 14. Marsden in an essay that compares the American debacle of evangelicals over the evolution crisis with the way Dutch Calvinism, while being conservative, could deal with it rather healthily shows how the difference related to quite different biblical hermeneutics. The Dutch Calvinists had greater awareness of the way that presuppositions could influence even well-meaning interpretation and thus undergird differences in interpretive outcomes. George M Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 219–64. 15. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 8. 16. Noll expressed this point in terms of the hermeneutic that continued in the South after the War in referring to the hermeneutic that often convinced those in the South and the North that the Bible sanctioned slavery, “This was the situation with respect to biblical interpretation that prevailed in 1850, that would only strengthen throughout the whole country up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, and that would remain exceedingly powerful in the South long after most Northerners had reconfigured the War for the Union as also a War for Emancipation.” Noll, 39. 17. See for the significance of the term “cultural hermeneutics,” Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” 45. 18. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), chap. 6. Kindle location 2655 of 5280. 19. Smith, chap. 6. Kindle location 2585 of 5280. 20. Smith, chap. 7. Kindle location 3038 of 5280. 21. Jonathan Merritt, “Al Mohler, Southern Baptist Leader, Says He Was ‘Stupid’ to Defend Slavery in 1998 Cnn Interview,” Religion News Service, May 15, 2020, https​:/​/re​​ligio​​nnews​​.com/​​2020/​​05​/15​​/al​-m​​ohler​​-sout​​hern-​​bapti​​st​-le​​ader-​​says-​​he​-wa​​s​ -stu​​pid​-t​​o​-def​​end​-s​​laver​​​y​-in-​​1998-​​cnn​-i​​nterv​​iew/. 22. Will Hall, “Al Mohler Explains Women Cannot Be Pastors nor Preachers,” Baptist Message, November 1, 2019, https​:/​/ba​​ptist​​messa​​ge​.co​​m​/al-​​mohle​​r​-exp​​lains​​ -wome​​n​-can​​not​-b​​e​-pas​​t​ors-​​nor​-p​​reach​/. An interesting corollary comes from a reflection of the noted Baptist church historian, Bill Leonard, and Mohler’s professor about a conversation they had at Southern Seminary in 1990: “‘Al and I were talking about how he believed that Adam and Eve must be real historical figures, and I told him that if a person believed that, they also had to agree with the Apostle Paul’s views

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on slavery,’ Leonard told me [the writer Merritt]. ‘He replied that he did agree, and he said that if we lived in a society where slavery was legal, then Christians would have to follow Paul’s statement about the treatment of slaves.’ After the conversation ended, Leonard convinced himself that he must have misheard Mohler. ‘Based on his way of reading the Bible, he accepted slavery as a social given,’ Leonard said. ‘It’s the way Southern slaveowners read the Bible, but I couldn’t believe any thinking Christian believed that at the time.’” Merritt, “Al Mohler.” 23. Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, chap. 6. Kindle location 2759 of 5280. 24. For example, see Gregory A. Smith, “Evangelical Approval of Trump Remains High, but Other Religious Groups Are Less Supportive,” Pew Research Center (blog), March 18, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​19​/03​​ /18​/e​​vange​​lical​​-appr​​oval-​​of​-tr​​ump​-r​​emain​​s​-hig​​h​-but​​-othe​​r​-rel​​igiou​​​s​-gro​​ups​-a​​re​-le​​ss​ -su​​pport​​ive/;​ Ben Howe, “Evangelicals Have Abandoned Their Mission in Favor of Trump,” Washington Post, August 8, 2019, https​%3A​%2F​%2F​www​.w​​ashin​​ gtonp​​ost​.c​​om​%2F​​opini​​ons​%2​​Fevan​​gelic​​als​-e​​mbrac​​e​-of-​​trump​​-is​-u​​nchri​​stian​​%2F20​​ 19​%2F​​08​%2F​​07​%2F​​b60cb​​bcc​-b​​915​-1​​​1e9​-b​​ad6​-6​​09f75​​bfd97​​f​_sto​​ry​.ht​​ml; Myriam Renaud, “Three Reasons White Evangelicals Hate Obamacare | The University of Chicago Divinity School,” The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, April 12, 2018, https​:/​/di​​vinit​​y​.uch​​icago​​.edu/​​sight​​ings/​​three​​-reas​​ons​-w​​hite-​​ evang​​elica​​ls​-​ha​​te​-ob​​amaca​​re; Jay Michaelson, “Who Would Jesus Torture?,” The Daily Beast, January 18, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​daily​​beast​​.com/​​artic​​les​/2​​015​/0​​1​/18/​​ who​-w​​ould-​​​jesus​​-tort​​ure. For lament about this profile from a prominent evangelical writer, see Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 69. 25. Wendell Griffin, “White Politicians and Conservative Evangelicals Are Still Riding ‘the Wrong Train,’” Baptist News Global, May 7, 2020, https​:/​/ba​​ptist​​news.​​ com​/a​​rticl​​e​/whi​​te​-po​​litic​​ians-​​and​-c​​onser​​vativ​​e​-eva​​ngeli​​cals-​​are​-s​​till-​​ridi​n​​g​-the​​-wron​​ g​-tra​​in/. 26. Anthony C. Thiselton, Why Hermeneutics?: An Appeal Culminating with Ricoeur (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2020). 27. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). 28. Paul Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 176. 29. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations. 30. Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 213; Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 113. 31. André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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32. A representative treatment is Ricoeur, “Model of the Text.” For more exposition, see Dan R. Stiver, Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), chap. 2. 33. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, Terry Lectures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer and Kathleen Blamey, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 247. 34. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis Mudge, trans. David Stewart and Charles E. Reagan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 119–54. 35. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). His dissertation was published as Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 36. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 211. 37. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 335–44. See also for an emphasis on improvisation in relation to virtue ethics and character formation, Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). 38. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 299. 39. For Ricoeur’s groundbreaking work on the parables as metaphors, see Paul Ricoeur, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975): 27–138. 40. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson, Reprint edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 143. 41. See especially Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds., A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 42. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan, Religious Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pt. 1. 43. Ricoeur, 239. See also the recent set of essays about this book. Scott Davidson, ed., A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020). 44. LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, 33. 45. Ricoeur was not yet using inclusive language at this time. LaCocque and Ricoeur, 41. 46. Ibid., 113. 47. Ibid., 112. 48. Ibid., 119.

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49. Part of the historical background for emphasizing the Ten Commandments in such ways arose in the fifties in the United States as part of an effort by corporate America to overcome the progressive policies of FDR’s New Deal. Astonishingly, in their eyes, the commandment not to steal meant not to have a minimum wage or social security or a labor union that would in effect “steal” from their ability to make as much profit as possible. Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 50. Tara Isabella Burton, “Poll: White Evangelical Support for Trump Is at an All-Time High,” Vox, April 20, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.vox​​.com/​​ident​​ities​​/2018​​/4​ /20​​/1726​​1726/​​poll-​​prri-​​white​​-evan​​gelic​​al​-su​​pport​​-for-​​trump​​-is​-​a​​t​-an-​​all​-t​​ime​-h​​igh; Jessica Martinez and Gregory A. Smith, “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis,” Pew Research Center (blog), November 9, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​ resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​16​/11​​/09​/h​​ow​-th​​e​-fai​​thful​​-vote​​d​-a​-p​​relim​​​inary​​-2016​​-anal​​ ysis/​. 51. Eliza Griswold, “Millennial Evangelicals Diverge from Their Parents’ Beliefs,” August 27, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/news​​/on​-r​​eligi​​on​/mi​​llenn​​ial​ -e​​vange​​lical​​s​-div​​erge-​​from-​​the​ir​​-pare​​nts​-b​​elief​​s; Daniel Cox, “Could Trump Drive Young White Evangelicals Away From The GOP?,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), August 20, 2019, https​:/​/fi​​vethi​​rtyei​​ght​.c​​om​/fe​​ature​​s​/cou​​ld​-tr​​ump​-d​​rive-​​young​​-whit​​e​-eva​​ ngeli​​cals-​​​away-​​from-​​the​-g​​op/. Jay Parini in responding to the repudiation of Trump by Christianity Today, says especially of younger evangelicals, “The dam has broken . . . Younger evangelicals, those under 45, have been slowly but steadily moving away from Trump during the past two years or so, unhappy about his example.” Jay Parini, “‘Christianity Today’ Anti-Trump Editorial Is a Sign of Things to Come,” CNN, December 20, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.cnn​​.com/​​2019/​​12​/20​​/opin​​ions/​​chris​​tiani​​ty​-to​​day​-e​​ ditor​​ial​-o​​pinio​​n​-​par​​ini​/i​​ndex.​​html. 52. Shane Claiborne, “‘Hymn for the 81%’: A Conversation with Daniel Deitrich,” Religion News Service, January 21, 2020, https​:/​/re​​ligio​​nnews​​.com/​​2020/​​01​/21​​/ hymn​​-for-​​the​-8​​1​-a​-c​​onver​​satio​​n​-wit​​h​-​dan​​iel​-d​​eitri​​ch/. 53. There is great concern among evangelicals that younger people are not only leaving the church, as they often have in their 20s, but they are not coming back as they usually did, giving rise to the nomenclature of “nones” and “dones.” Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones,’” Pew Research Center (blog), May 13, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​15​ /05​​/13​/a​​-clos​​er​-lo​​ok​-at​​-amer​​icas-​​rapid​​ly​-gr​​​owing​​-reli​​gious​​-none​​s/. To some extent, this is a reaction to the bad faith or hypocrisy they see among prominent evangelicals. Nevertheless, not all are leaving the church, but they may abandon the term “evangelical.” Pew Research Center, “Why America’s ‘Nones’ Don’t Identify with a Religion,” Pew Research Center (blog), August 8, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​ rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​18​/08​​/08​/w​​hy​-am​​erica​​s​-non​​es​-do​​nt​-id​​e​ntif​​y​-wit​​h​-a​-r​​eligi​​on/; Darren Duerkson and John Richardson, “Learning from the ‘Dones’ and ‘Nones,’” Christian Leader (blog), March 1, 2019, https​:/​/ch​​risti​​anlea​​derma​​g​.com​​/lear​​ning-​​from-​​the​-d​​ ones-​​a​nd​-n​​ones/​;n Dan R. Stiver, “A Word about ... Evangelicals on the Left,” Review & Expositor 104, no. 4 (2007): 125–28; Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical (London: SPCK Classics, 2014).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Burton, Tara Isabella. “Poll: White Evangelical Support for Trump Is at an All-Time High.” Vox, April 20, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.vox​​.com/​​ident​​ities​​/2018​​/4​/20​​/1726​​1726/​​ poll-​​prri-​​white​​-evan​​gelic​​al​-su​​pport​​-for-​​trump​​-is​-a​​​t​-an-​​all​-t​​ime​-h​​igh. Claiborne, Shane. “‘Hymn for the 81%’: A Conversation with Daniel Deitrich.” Religion News Service, January 21, 2020. https​:/​/re​​ligio​​nnews​​.com/​​2020/​​01​/21​​/ hymn​​-for-​​the​-8​​1​-a​-c​​onver​​satio​​n​-wit​​h​-​dan​​iel​-d​​eitri​​ch/. Cox, Daniel. “Could Trump Drive Young White Evangelicals Away From The GOP?” FiveThirtyEight (blog), August 20, 2019. https​:/​/fi​​vethi​​rtyei​​ght​.c​​om​/fe​​ ature​​s​/cou​​ld​-tr​​ump​-d​​rive-​​young​​-whit​​e​-eva​​ngeli​​cals-​​​away-​​from-​​the​-g​​op/. Davidson, Scott, ed. A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil. Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Duerkson, Darren, and John Richardson. “Learning from the ‘Dones’ and ‘Nones.’” Christian Leader (blog), March 1, 2019. https​:/​/ch​​risti​​anlea​​derma​​g​.com​​/lear​​ning-​​ from-​​the​-d​​ones-​​​and​-n​​ones/​. Griffin, Wendell. “White Politicians and Conservative Evangelicals Are Still Riding ‘the Wrong Train.’” Baptist News Global, May 7, 2020. https​:/​/ba​​ptist​​news.​​com​/ a​​rticl​​e​/whi​​te​-po​​litic​​ians-​​and​-c​​onser​​vativ​​e​-eva​​ngeli​​cals-​​are​-s​​till-​​ridi​n​​g​-the​​-wron​​g​ -tra​​in/. Griswold, Eliza. “Millennial Evangelicals Diverge from Their Parents’ Beliefs,” August 27, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/news​​/on​-r​​eligi​​on​/mi​​llenn​​ial​-e​​vange​​ lical​​s​-div​​erge-​​from-​​thei​r​​-pare​​nts​-b​​elief​​s. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Kindle. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. Hall, Will. “Al Mohler Explains Women Cannot Be Pastors nor Preachers.” Baptist Message, November 1, 2019. https​:/​/ba​​ptist​​messa​​ge​.co​​m​/al-​​mohle​​r​-exp​​ lains​​-wome​​n​-can​​not​-b​​e​-pas​​t​ors-​​nor​-p​​reach​/. Howe, Ben. “Evangelicals Have Abandoned Their Mission in Favor of Trump.” Washington Post, August 8, 2019. https​%3A​%2F​%2F​www​.w​​ashin​​gtonp​​ost​.c​​om​ %2F​​opini​​ons​%2​​Fevan​​gelic​​als​-e​​mbrac​​e​-of-​​trump​​-is​-u​​nchri​​stian​​%2F20​​19​%2F​​08​ %2F​​07​%2F​​b60cb​​bcc​-b​​915​-1​​​1e9​-b​​ad6​-6​​09f75​​bfd97​​f​_sto​​ry​.ht​​ml. Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015. LaCocque, André, and Paul Ricoeur. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Lipka, Michael. “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones.’” Pew Research Center (blog), May 13, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​ nk​/20​​15​/05​​/13​/a​​-clos​​er​-lo​​ok​-at​​-amer​​icas-​​rapid​​ly​-gr​​​owing​​-reli​​gious​​-none​​s/. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia.” In Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, edited by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga, 219–64. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

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Martinez, Jessica, and Gregory A. Smith. “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis.” Pew Research Center (blog), November 9, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​ .pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​16​/11​​/09​/h​​ow​-th​​e​-fai​​thful​​-vote​​d​-a​-p​​relim​​​inary​​-2016​​ -anal​​ysis/​. McLaren, Brian D. A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010. Merritt, Jonathan. “Al Mohler, Southern Baptist Leader, Says He Was ‘Stupid’ to Defend Slavery in 1998 Cnn Interview.” Religion News Service, May 15, 2020. https​:/​/re​​ligio​​nnews​​.com/​​2020/​​05​/15​​/al​-m​​ohler​​-sout​​hern-​​bapti​​st​-le​​ader-​​says-​​he​ -wa​​s​-stu​​pid​-t​​o​-def​​end​-s​​laver​​​y​-in-​​1998-​​cnn​-i​​nterv​​iew/. Michaelson, Jay. “Who Would Jesus Torture?” The Daily Beast, January 18, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​daily​​beast​​.com/​​artic​​les​/2​​015​/0​​1​/18/​​who​-w​​ould-​​​jesus​​-tort​​ure. Murphy, Nancey C. Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996. Noll, Mark. “Battle for the Bible: The Impasse over Slavery.” Christian Century, May 2, 2006. ———. “The Bible and Slavery.” In Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, 43–73. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Parini, Jay. “‘Christianity Today’ Anti-Trump Editorial Is a Sign of Things to Come.” CNN, December 20, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cnn​​.com/​​2019/​​12​/20​​/opin​​ions/​​chris​​tiani​​ty​ -to​​day​-e​​ditor​​ial​-o​​pinio​​n​-​par​​ini​/i​​ndex.​​html. Pew Research Center. “Why America’s ‘Nones’ Don’t Identify with a Religion.” Pew Research Center (blog), August 8, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​ /20​​18​/08​​/08​/w​​hy​-am​​erica​​s​-non​​es​-do​​nt​-id​​en​tif​​y​-wit​​h​-a​-r​​eligi​​on/. Renaud, Myriam. “Three Reasons White Evangelicals Hate Obamacare | The University of Chicago Divinity School.” The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, April 12, 2018. https​:/​/di​​vinit​​y​.uch​​icago​​.edu/​​sight​​ings/​​ three​​-reas​​ons​-w​​hite-​​evang​​elica​​ls​-h​a​​te​-ob​​amaca​​re. Ricoeur, Paul. “Biblical Hermeneutics.” Semeia 4 (1975): 27–138. ———. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. ———. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Translated by John B. Thompson. Reprint edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. “Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, edited and translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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———. The Conflict of Interpretations. Edited by Don Ihde. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” In Essays on Biblical Interpretation, edited by Lewis Mudge, translated by David Stewart and Charles E. Reagan, 119–54. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, edited and translated by John B. Thompson, 197–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. ———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Religious Perspectives. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. ———. Time and Narrative. Translated by David Pellauer and Kathleen Blamey. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Smith, Christian. The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012. Smith, Gregory A. “Evangelical Approval of Trump Remains High, but Other Religious Groups Are Less Supportive.” Pew Research Center (blog), March 18, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​19​/03​​/18​/e​​vange​​lical​​-appr​​oval-​​of​ -tr​​ump​-r​​emain​​s​-hig​​h​-but​​-othe​​r​-rel​​igiou​​s​​-gro​​ups​-a​​re​-le​​ss​-su​​pport​​ive/. Stiver, Dan R. “A Word about ... Evangelicals on the Left.” Review & Expositor 104, no. 4 (2007): 125–28. ———. Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Thiselton, Anthony C. Why Hermeneutics?: An Appeal Culminating with Ricoeur. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020. Tomlinson, Dave. The Post-Evangelical. London: SPCK Classics, 2014. Treanor, Brian, and Henry Isaac Venema, eds. A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. Wells, Samuel. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004.

Chapter 10

Epistles as Revelation Expanding Ricoeur’s Account of Biblical Discourse Brian Gregor

A NEGLECTED GENRE? One of the unique features of Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion is its emphasis on the textuality of revelation. Philosophers of religion often talk about revelation in terms of religious experience, mystical states, and saturated phenomena, but Ricoeur helps to expand philosophical reflection on revelation by examining the specific ways in which texts are revelatory. Ricoeur works with a Heideggerian sense of revelation as manifestation, or “letting what shows itself be,” and he examines the poetic power of texts to manifest a world—"a world I may inhabit and wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities”1. By focusing on texts in this way, what Ricoeur provides is not an abstract concept of revelation, nor a direct phenomenology of revelation, but a hermeneutics of revelation. In his essay “Hermeneutics of the Idea of Revelation,” Ricoeur argues that “a hermeneutic of revelation must give priority to those modalities of discourse that are most originary within the language of a community of faith.”2 Ricoeur thus begins with the historically contingent texts that make up the Bible. What he finds in them is not one single, monolithic model of revelation but a plurality of diverse modes of discourse, each of which exercises the revelatory function of texts in unique ways. His aim is to expand the philosophical understanding of revelation, rather than cutting it to an a priori measure of what revelation must be. Ricoeur identifies five distinct genres of revelatory discourse in the Hebrew Scriptures: the writings of the prophets, biblical narrative (such as the Pentateuch and historical books), prescriptive discourse (the works of the 203

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law), wisdom discourse (such as Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), and hymnic discourse (primarily the Psalms). In the New Testament, Ricoeur treats the proverbs and parables of Jesus, as well as eschatological sayings, and occasionally apocalyptic. He thus has a list of eight, possibly nine, genres of biblical discourse. What is surprising about this list is that Ricoeur never discusses the New Testament epistles, or letters,3 as a genre. If the hermeneutics of revelation should begin with the most originary modes of discourse in a community of faith, it would seem that early Christian letter writing deserves consideration. Epistles are a defining mode of discourse in early Christianity. They make up the majority of the New Testament (22 out of 27 books), along with numerous non-canonical epistles and the epistles of the apostolic fathers. They are the earliest extant Christian texts, and they are essential to the formation of early Christian communities. Why no mention of the epistle, then?4 While it is a distinct literary genre, one possibility is that Ricoeur does not consider it a unique or originary mode of revelation. In this regard the epistle would be similar to Ricoeur’s view of apocalyptic. As David Pellauer observes, Ricoeur does not identify apocalyptic as an originary biblical genre, since it derives from the more originary modes of prophecy and wisdom.5 Ricoeur might say the same of the NT epistles, since they tend to incorporate other discursive genres, such as narrative (Hebrews), hymn (Philippians), wisdom (James),6 and apocalyptic (Revelation). The epistles also reflect the influence of prophetic discourse, as we will see below. Each of these genres involves a unique mode of revelation, and while the epistles use all of them, it is not clear that epistles enact their own unique mode of revelation.7 Whatever the reason for Ricoeur’s silence on the topic, the epistle is nevertheless a vital form of biblical discourse and therefore deserves the attention of a hermeneutics of revelation. This is especially true given Ricoeur’s efforts to expand the philosophical understanding of revelation by examining the plurality of biblical discourse. I propose that attending to the biblical epistles can further expand Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. The epistles raise a number of issues of hermeneutical interest, and in what follows I will highlight seven particularly salient points on the way toward a hermeneutics of the epistle. 1. The New Testament epistles take up and transform an existing form of discourse in order to direct it to new ends. The epistle form did not originate with the New Testament writers. Letter writing was a prominent practice in the Hellenistic world as well as the Jewish world, and the letters of Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude reflect the rhetorical conventions and devices of other ancient letter-writers. The practice of letter

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writing is relevant to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self because it was, in the ancient world, one of the exercises in the philosophical care of the self. Letters were a means for philosophers to exhort, instruct, correct, and counsel other philosophers in the shared pursuit of virtue. Many scholars have explored the influence of Hellenistic letter writing on the New Testament epistles, noting the presence of structural and rhetorical conventions. However, Christian epistles also mark the development of something new in the field of ancient epistolography. Philosophical letters aim at the cultivation of individual virtue. This is true even of letters like Seneca’s to Lucilius, which formally address one reader but anticipate a wider readership. Even if they intend the wider Stoic community, these letters nevertheless address their readers as individuals in pursuit of becoming virtuous selves. By contrast, the early Christian epistles reveal a larger vision than individual virtue. As Stanley Stowers observes, they seek to build up and equip church communities.8 These letters reveal a new way of being human, in a community bound together by agape love. Individual virtues still matter, of course, but they should be cultivated in the interest of serving others in and through the church community. Thus the NT epistles reflect a strong family ethos, with the letters seeking to “build and maintain” this family. The church is modeled like a household, and in addition to meeting in the homes of Christian believers, there was also a need for teaching, advice, the articulation of standards of conduct, and the resolution of disputes. Stowers also observes that the formation of Christian character, and the common life of the community, is not a merely human achievement, but the work of “God’s power and activity”.9 The epistles are one means by which this grace is conveyed; hence Paul’s greetings—”grace and peace to you”—as well as his benedictions. 2. The epistles reflect a continuity between the prophetic and the apostolic vocations. The epistles share much in common with the genre of prophecy, one of the primary genres Ricoeur examines. Just as letters appear in the writings of the prophets (see Jeremiah 29), so the prophetic tradition informs the NT epistles. This is not an accident, as there is also a continuity between the prophetic call and the apostolic call. Some NT epistles are not attributed to an apostle—Jude, for instance, and the unknown author of Hebrews. The apostolic letters, however, reflect this continuity between the prophetic and apostolic. For example, the apostle Paul’s self-understanding is prefigured by the texts in the prophetic tradition. In Romans 1 Paul sets himself in continuity with this tradition when he writes: “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel

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of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures…” The euangelion Paul is proclaiming is the one promised by the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures. Paul describes himself as “set apart,” and he links this to the prophetic tradition in his letter to the Galatians: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles…” (Galatians 1:15-16a). Here Paul is using images from the prophetic tradition to characterize his apostolic calling. The first is the image of being set apart even before his birth; the second is the image of being sent to the Gentiles—i.e., the people of all nations. This echoes the prophet Jeremiah’s self-description10: “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations’” (Jer 1:5). Compare this with Isaiah 49, which presents Israel as a servant with a similar calling and commission: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me … And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant … ‘I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’” (vv.1, 5a, 6b). The apostle Peter uses similar language when he addresses the Council at Jerusalem: “My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news (logon tou euangeliou) and become believers” (Acts 15:7). By using these images, Peter and Paul identify their own apostolic role as continuous with the prophetic tradition. Their letters are one means by which they carry this word to the nations. We should not, however, elide the differences between the prophetic vocation and the apostolic vocation, not suggest that the apostle is simply a new species of prophet. They have a unique responsibility and authority in the establishment of early Christian communities, which comes from their being appointed by Jesus (Mk. 3:13-19; Mt. 10:1-4; Lk. 6:12-16), being witnesses of the resurrected Jesus, and being bearers of the word that Jesus received from the Father and in turn gave to them (Jn. 17:8, 14). The NT letters are rooted in this unique apostolic vocation, as bearers of the word.11 There is thus continuity as well as discontinuity between the prophetic and the apostolic, which leads to our third point. 3. The figure of the apostle makes a significant addition to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the summoned subject. In addition to forming virtue, the letters of the apostles were also significant in constituting identity: the apostolic author is constituted as the one called, and the reader (or hearer) of the

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letter is in turn constituted by being addressed by the word proclaimed by the letter. This applies to readers or hearers as individuals as well as a community of faith. There is an interweaving series of callings. Consider Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God…To the church of God that is in Corinth…called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours…” The apostolic call corresponds to the call of those in the church, the call to be saints, and ultimately to all those who respond by calling on the name of Christ. In the apostolic calling, or vocation, we find another figure of what Ricoeur calls “the summoned subject.” In his essay “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation,” Ricoeur describes a series of figures of the “responding self”—i.e., the self who is called and responds—in biblical faith. The primary figure in this study is that of the prophetic self. The prophet is a mediator, who brings the word of the Lord to the world. What is distinctive about the prophets is that unlike judges and kings, they are “not conquerors, but suffering mediators”.12 If Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology treats the self in terms of both acting and suffering, the prophetic self leans more toward suffering than acting. The prophetic call is a rupture in the self-identity of the subject, making the prophet an “exception,” “uprooted from his condition, his place, his desire”.13 This call corresponds to a commission, in which the prophet is sent. This pair—the call and commission—is what constitutes the self as a prophet.14 Ricoeur sees the prophetic vocation as a paradigm by which “the Christian community, following the Jewish community,” might interpret itself. Accordingly, he examines three figures of the summoned subject from the Christian tradition: (1) the Christomorphic self in the New Testament and the later traditions of discipleship and imitatio Christi; (2) Christ as the Inner Teacher in Augustine; and (3) the call of conscience in LutheranHeideggerian theology (most notably Gerhard Ebeling). The figure of the apostle makes a valuable addition to this list, since it has been so formative for the Christian (and post-Christian) self-understanding of conversion and calling. This is especially true of the main features of Saul’s conversion narrative: the Damascus Road, the blinding light, and the scales falling from his eyes. These images have become have become paradigmatic figures of radical conversion and calling. The case of Saul is also worth considering because it fits Ricoeur’s schema of the prophetic vocation. Ricoeur outlines four key moments in the call and commission of the prophet. First, a confrontation with God, like Moses and the burning bush, or the theophanies of Isaiah and Ezekiel.15 Saul’s

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confrontation comes en route to Damascus when “suddenly a blinding light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’” (Acts 9:3-4). Second, God announces himself in an “immemorial word”.16 For example, God’s self-announcement to Moses: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6). Ricoeur observes that this basic formula—“I am”—has many variations. The calling of Saul presents a further variation. Saul asks, “Who are you, Lord?” and in this case is met with a startling reply: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5, emphasis mine). This divine self-identification opens onto the third moment, which is God’s commissioning and sending the prophet. “I send you,” “go and say to them…” “This speech lays out the very identity of the one sent, often called by his name, but always individually designated” (Ricoeur 1995: 266). Like the prophetic subject, the apostolic subject is constituted by a call and a commission. In the case of Saul, the commission is universal, as it intends all nations. He is called to be the apostle to the Gentiles and this becomes a defining mark of his self-understanding (Rom.1:5; 11:13; 15:16).17 The prophetic vocation also involves a sense of being “torn between the greatness of the mission and the smallness of the one sent.” This sense of unworthiness is the fourth moment in the prophetic calling: namely, the objection.18 Who am I, that I should do this? Paul’s sense of unworthiness comes not from a lack of confidence, but a recognition of his past mistakes: “For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain…” (I Cor 15:9-10). Who am I to carry this message? For Paul, his apostolic identity is a pure gift: “I am what I am” only by God’s grace. 4. The NT epistles push us to think more carefully about the relation between inspiration and revelation. The continuity between the prophet and the apostle also raises a question for understanding the revelatory quality of the apostles’ letters. Like the prophet, the apostle speaks on behalf of another. The Word of the Lord comes to the prophet, who then proclaims it. Similarly, the apostle also claims to be speaking not on his own behalf, but on behalf of another. On this point Ricoeur is very cautious. The notion of proclaiming the word of another could suggest divine inspiration in the form of the Holy Spirit “whispering in the ear” of the author. There is a voice behind the voice (or pen) of the prophet, and revelation “is then confused with the idea of a double author of sacred texts”.19 Ricoeur’s concern is that this model of

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double-authorship not become the paradigm for all revelation. This is often what happens, particularly when inspiration is construed as a kind of divine dictation or supervision that leaves the writer a passive recipient of the word. Such is the picture in Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel (1602). As Matthew writes his Gospel, the angel’s guidance is almost intrusive— reaching across the page, the angel’s hand on Matthew’s hand. This picture of inspiration leaves little room for the unique voice, concerns, and imagination of the human author, who becomes a merely passive recipient. Yet this is not how ancient readers of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures understood the inspiration of Scripture.20 Instead, we find a more positive acceptance of human mediation of divine revelation. This is true of the prophetic writings, which came about through what Walter Brueggemann calls “the move in emerging Judaism from prophetic utterance to scribal scroll.” The books of the prophets are often the work of scribes and collected by “scribal heirs” who collected, preserved, and compiled the utterances of the prophets.21 Consider also the pseudepigraphical text known as 4 Baruch, which contains a letter that purports to be written by Jeremiah’s scribe. An angel of the LORD instructs Baruch to write a letter to Jeremiah, telling him what to say to the Babylonian exiles. The text includes both the angel’s dictation and Baruch’s letter, and the difference is striking: Baruch’s letter adds a great deal and ends up over three times as long as the angel’s dictation.22 This tells us something about the context in which this text was written: whoever wrote it, the author clearly did not expect this kind of elaboration to arouse suspicion. Whatever one makes of this text, it is clear pseudo-Baruch was writing for readers who would not take these elaborations as an illicit exercise of creative license. In his context, even a divinely dictated message might be expected to initiate—indeed inspire—the imaginative vision of the human author. We find something similar in the New Testament, in the composition of the Gospels from the sayings and traditions of Jesus. The earliest Christian communities appear untroubled by the diverse content and style of the authors, as well as the fact that this kind of transmission very well include the author’s own contribution. This is also why the plurality of Gospel narratives could appear to them as an asset rather than a liability. Such circumstances do not entail some kind of authorial free-for-all. These authors were concerned about the veracity of these claims, and accordingly they cite eyewitnesses as testimony to events that really happened.23 Historical-factual accuracy mattered, but did not preclude the imaginative work of the author. Such a view is notably more subtle than our modern literalist sensibilities, which struggle to grasp that imagination does not mean fabrication and that divine inspiration and human imagination can intermingle. In this regard it seems Caravaggio came closer to the ancient view in his next painting, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602). There we see a rather different picture of divine inspiration:

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the angel is no longer intervening and overriding Matthew’s hand. Instead, “the angel speaks from a dark background, and the saint listens carefully as he notes down the received revelation”.24 This picture certainly seems to fit the New Testament epistles as we find them. In these letters the distinctive style and concerns of the apostles are evident, but these letters are also presented as bearing the divine authority entrusted to the apostles. Paul is clear that he is bearing the word of God. For instance, in his first letter to the Corinthians he writes: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived…these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (I Cor 2:9-10). “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual” (vv.12-13). He is also clear about the source of the revelation, that it is not the product of his own imagination, and yet his own distinctive voice and vision—indeed, his imagination—are operative in his exposition of the revelation.25 Paul also distinguishes this divine word from his own words. Later in 1 Corinthians he states clearly the divine origin of his teaching: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you…” (11:23). Likewise: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (15:3-5). Earlier in the same letter, he also offers his own advice, noting that it is not a divine command, writing: “To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord…” (7:10), and then contrasting this divine command with his own recommendation: “To the rest I say—I and not the Lord…” (v.12). In 14:37 he also specifies that the instructions he is writing about orderly worship “is a command of the Lord.” This distinction is significant for our concerns because it shows that the epistles can contain a variety of discursive modes— some with divine authority, others Paul’s personal opinions, along with other content such as Paul’s travel plans, greetings, et cetera. The question we need to ask, then, is just how these epistles are revelatory. 5. The NT epistles illustrate Ricoeur’s idea of revelation as the manifestation of a new world in front of the text. In his late essay “Paul the Apostle,” Ricoeur identifies “the core of the Pauline message” as the kerygma, “the proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified Christ” (Ricoeur 2013b: 256). Paul’s letters originate with the revelation of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Thus in his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes that the gospel he has proclaimed “is not of human origin,” but that he “received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11-12). This

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revelation is what initiated, oriented, and informed the proclamation of the gospel, both in speech and in writing (2 Thess. 2:15). This suggests that revelation and Scripture are not simply co-extensive. Paul can therefore write in Galatians 2:2 that he went to Jerusalem “in response to a revelation” (apokalypsin). The letters are a response to a revelatory call, and a means of proclaiming what has been revealed.26 That said, these letters are traditionally read as being revelatory themselves. How so? For Ricoeur, this is a clear application of his general idea of revelation. As he writes in his essay “Naming God”: “To reveal is to uncover what until then remained hidden.” This does not mean truth as the adequation of ideas to reality, but “truth as manifestation, in the sense of letting be what shows itself.” This description recalls the Paul’s language in his epistle to the Romans: “the revelation [apokalypsin] of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but is now disclosed [made manifest—phanerothentos]” (Rom 16:25-26). For the apostle Paul, this revelation is the manifestation of Jesus Christ, who is now “though the prophetic writings made known to all the Gentiles.” For the philosopher Paul—i.e., Ricoeur—this manifestation has a more general poetic, phenomenological sense: “What shows itself is each time the proposing of a world, a world wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities.” This is true of all existentially significant texts: they exercise a poetic function that manifests a world. These biblical texts “deploy their world,” and “poetically manifest and thereby reveal a world we might inhabit”.27 This manifestation of a world is the focal point of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of revelation. The NT epistles fit this description insofar as they reveal a new world—the Kingdom of God—and this is a world of new possibilities—a world I am called to inhabit. This world transforms the way I understand my ownmost possibilities—my origin and my ultimate destiny, my sin and my salvation. Does this mean these epistles are just a species of a more general poetics of revelation? Is there anything unique about them, anything that might distinguish them from any other literary work? One essential difference is that the New Testament epistles are authoritative texts for the Christian community. These texts are unique because they are founding texts that helped constitute the identity of the church. These are the texts that were read aloud in the early Christian movement, and they came to be the basis for Christian preaching in the church. Ricoeur therefore notes that some texts are sources for preaching while others are not: “the community would be completely changed if you chose a modern poet to do a sermon, or if you took the Bhagavad Gita into the church.” To do so would mark a crisis of identity in the community “because its own identity relies on the identity of the text”28.29

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Another feature that distinguishes biblical epistles from other texts is that they name God. All biblical texts name God, insofar as they have God as their referent.30 This is also true of the New Testament epistles: they name God by identifying him with the man Jesus, the crucified and risen one, the Christ.31 Another prominent act of naming occurs in several epistles, which open with a blessing and praise of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3; Col 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3). Naming is one of the many speech acts the epistles perform, and this is the basis for my sixth point. 6. The New Testament epistles perform a wide range of speech acts. The act of naming is a kind of speech act, a way to do something with words. The New Testament epistles show us how to do things, not only with words, but how to do things with letters. They are not merely treatises, nor a formulation of theological doctrine or a body of information. They contain speech acts. Letters do many things beyond merely making claims or asserting propositions. They proclaim and they instruct, but they also exhort. Correct. Greet (1 Cor 11:2). Test (2 Cor 2:9—Paul wrote his earlier letter to the Corinthians to test them). Admonish (1 Cor 4:14). Appeal (1 Cor 4:16). Command (1 Cor 7:10). Commend (Rom 16:1). Solicit gifts toward a collection for the poor (2 Cor 8-9). Warn (Gal 5:16-21). Defend (2 Cor 10:1-2). Encourage (1 Pet. 5:12). Remind (2 Peter 3:1). And as we just noted, they also name God. This is just a partial list, but it gives us a sense of the kinds of things that letters can do.32 The topic of speech acts raises a particularly thorny question regarding Ricoeur’s concept of revelation: namely, the question of divine speech.33 Who is the speaker performing these speech acts? Is it the human authors? Could it be God? It is clear that God speaks in the Bible, since there are many examples in the text where God speaks. But does God speak through the Bible? The question is thorny because Ricoeur tries to shift the hermeneutics of revelation away from the emphasis on speech, with its focus on the I-Thou encounter, toward the world of the text. This shift took place in the 1960s. Ricoeur’s earlier work, in the 1940s and 50s, reflects the distinct influence of personalism (Marcel and Buber) as well as Protestant theology (Barth, Bultmann, and the New Hermeneutic of Ebeling and Fuchs). These influences combine to create an idea of revelation as an event, in which the Word, the kerygma or proclamation, initiates an I-Thou encounter with God who addresses me in speech events, word events, and institutes a moment of decision. In the 1960s, under the influence of structuralism, Ricoeur moves away from this idea of revelation as personal encounter to focus on the world of the text. Writing severs the tie between the text and the living context of speech. In the dialogical encounter between persons, the speaker’s intentions

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can be discerned, and when they are unclear they can be clarified by asking questions. With writing, however, the text is cut loose from the original intent of the author, who is absent rather than present. This might seem like a loss, but Ricoeur insists on the gain: while speech makes meaning available to an immediate group of hearers, the written text makes meaning available to a host of readers separated from the author by space and time. “Thanks to writing, speech comes all the way to us, reaching us by means of its ‘sense’ and by the ‘thing’ that is at issue in it, and no longer through the ‘voice’ of its utterer”34 This raises my seventh and final point: 7. The NT epistles are hermeneutically interesting because they highlight the complex relation between speech and writing. This complex relation occurs at two levels: at the level of strictly human discourse, in all kinds of letter writing, as well as at the level of divine discourse, and how divine speech and human writing might intersect in the NT epistles. At first it appears that Paul and other apostles see a clear difference between speaking in person and writing their letters. They seem to prefer speech to writing. Paul often expresses his desire to be present with the people he is writing. He is keenly aware that his letters are not equal to physical presence. He writes of being absent in the body, but present in spirit (1 Cor. 5:3; Col.2:5). He writes of his desire to join the church in Rome and be refreshed by their company (Rom 15:32). He longs to see the Thessalonians again, face to face (1 Thess. 1:17). Likewise the third letter of John, who writes to Gaius: “I have much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink; instead I hope to see you soon, and we will talk together face to face” (vv.13-14). Comments like these have led some scholars to conclude that early Christianity was primarily an oral phenomenon, such that letters and other written texts were secondary to the primacy of speech. It is true that letters were supplementary to the primary work of building churches, which took place in face-to-face interactions—in proclamation of the gospel in synagogues, marketplaces, and house churches, in local meals and meetings, the exchanges of traveling messengers, and in conversation.35 And as John Barclay observes, Paul is acutely aware of the limitations of what he can accomplish through his letters in comparison with his own physical presence.36 That said, we should be careful not to push this emphasis on physical presence and orality too far, so that writing becomes a later, secondary addition to speech. In Larry Hurtado’s words, Christianity was from the beginning a “bookish” faith.37 As Ricoeur argues, the relation between speech and writing

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has always been constitutive of Christian preaching and proclamation.38 We should also note the way letters involve a relation of speech and writing, as well as authorial presence and absence. This gives the letter unique capabilities. Sometimes a letter can have an effect that physical presence cannot, since the author is physically absent. The letter allows the reader to ponder the meaning of what is written—perhaps more calmly or carefully—than what is spoken.39 That said, the letter is also uniquely able to make the author present. The letter is a written address from an I to a You, whether individual or plural. In this regard letters more closely resemble speech than most other literary forms.40 Letters are a prime example of someone writing something about something to someone: they address a recipient, and while they are not a spoken dialogue, they are implicitly dialogical. Thus one scholar refers to the letter as “a conversation halved”.41 Letters preserve something of the I-Thou relation, and even make possible an I-Thou relation that does not depend on face-to-face, bodily presence. The letter does not make a clean break with the author, because it has its own unique dialectic of presence and absence. The author is absent, yet has a kind of quasi-presence through the letter. This phenomenological idea of quasi-presence is most evident when the author is someone we have previously encountered face-to-face. Consider this example from one of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius: I am grateful to you for writing so often, for you are showing me yourself, in the only way that you can. It never fails: I receive your letter, and right away we are together. If portraits of absent friends are a delight, refreshing our memory and easing the pain of separation with a kind of comfort, though false and empty, how much more delightful are letters, which bring us real traces, real news of an absent friend! For what is sweetest about seeing someone face to face is also to be found in a letter that bears the imprint of a friend’s hand—a moment of recognition.42,43

Perhaps this is why Paul often signs his letters in his own hand, after having had the bulk of the letter transcribed by an amanuensis (1 Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18; 2 Thess. 3:17; Phil. 19). It is a way of inscribing a trace of his physical presence, and confirming his intent and authority in the letter. He is confirming what someone else has written down. Of course, most who read the epistles of Paul or Peter, James or John, have never met them in person. We don’t know what their voices sounded like. We have no experiential anchor in the physical, historical context of their speech. In the case of some letters, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews, we do not even know who the author is. Yet as we read these letters we do get a sense of their voice as authors. We even get a sense that they are addressing us through

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these letters. What is happening here? How can we understand this, from a phenomenological perspective? Ricoeur provides some help in his work from the 1980s and 90s. In Volume 2 of Time and Narrative, he proposes the idea of narrative voice in fiction, which orients the reader with two vital functions: point of view and narrative voice. Point of view answers the question “from where is one speaking?” “Every point of view is the invitation addressed to readers to direct their gaze in the same direction as the author or the characters.” Voice is what answers the question, “Who is speaking here?” Narrative voice is the “silent speech” that “addresses itself to the reader” and opens the world of the text: “Like the voice that spoke to Augustine at the hour of his conversion, it says Tolle! Lege! ‘Take and read!’”.44 Ricoeur’s notion of narrative voice adds a new level of insight to his discussion of speech and writing. The text is still independent of the author and the physical context of speech, but narrative voice allows for a greater recognition of the ways in which texts nevertheless speak to us. He later expands the narrative voice to the broader notion of a “written voice,” which is not an audible voice, but rather the distinctive “unity of style” by which the text speaks, addresses, and questions us.45 Voice is “the silent word that presents the world of the text to the reader”.46 This idea can help make sense of the distinctive voice of the biblical authors—the clear differences in the voices of Paul and Peter, James and John. At the same time, Ricoeur does not want to identify the written voice with the author’s voice. This voice is “not the known or presumed author, but the fictive entity who seems to address itself to me when I read”47 Written voice manifests the world of the text—not the mind of the author—to the reader. For biblical hermeneutics, however, the ultimate question is not whether we hear the voice of the apostles themselves when we read these epistles. The ultimate question is whether we hear the voice of God through these writings. In this regard, it is intriguing that Ricoeur illustrates narrative voice by citing the famous scene from Augustine’s conversion: Augustine hears the singsong voice of a child, and he interprets it as a divine command: take and read the first scripture he finds (Confessions VIII.12.29). Augustine hears God addressing him through the human word sung by a child’s voice. Ricoeur, on the other hand, is typically hesitant to identify a divine word behind a human word. For instance, in his 1979 essay “Naming God,” Ricoeur argues that it is impossible to look back to “identify God as the voice behind the narrative or prophetic voice”.48 This also applies to the written text. Instead of trying to identify the divine voice behind the text, the hermeneutical task is to attend to the written text and the world it opens in front of itself. Ricoeur therefore resists the theological tendency to “raise the Word above Writing,” and warns biblical hermeneutics not to “be too quick to construct a theology of the Word

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that does not include, from the outset and as its very principle, the passage from speech to writing”.49 Ricoeur later qualified these comments by noting that he was offering a corrective to an overemphasis on speech in Protestant theology. Yet the question remains: how does the voice of God manifest in Scripture? How can a text written by human beings reveal the Word of God? Ricoeur takes up this question in his later essay “The Entanglement of Voice and Writing in Biblical Discourse,” where he writes that the Word and Scripture are entangled, such that the biblical authors “use the resources of ordinary speech and writing to let the Word of the Other speak”.50 Scripture is founded by the Word—a word that is not merely a feature of the written text, but an immemorial Word that is prior to the writing. There is thus a mutual relation, in which the Word founds Scripture, and Scripture manifests the Word.51 Ricoeur does not try to explain this “mysterious relation” is some sort of mechanical way. Instead, he examines how the relation plays out in three genres of Hebrew Scripture (Law, prophetic writings, and wisdom literature), showing how each involves this tangle of speech and writing. This is similar to what we see in the epistles: the apostolic authors proclaim that which has been revealed, and it is now through the epistles that this Word continues to be manifest. This manifestation—is it the manifestation of the world of the text? Or does it also manifest the voice of God, that God himself addresses us through it, in an I-Thou encounter? With this later essay Ricoeur makes room for a concept of revelation that does not force us to choose between the world of the text and an I-Thou encounter, but instead opens the possibility that someone can speak to me—and us—in and through the text. This is how the biblical text “becomes for me the Word of God”: in reading, but also in preaching and proclamation.52 Here too Ricoeur is hesitant to explain too much, especially from a philosophical perspective. Traditionally, the theological answer to the question is one of divine illumination. And the idea of illumination, along with inspiration, raises the question of the Holy Spirit. Ricoeur is also cautious here: just as he resists simplistic ideas of inspiration as the Holy Spirit whispering in the ears of the biblical author, so he resists simplistic ideas of illumination that53 treat the Holy Spirit as a principle of private interpretation that I carry around with me. These distortions are worth criticizing, but at some point the hermeneutics of revelation also needs a more robust positive account inspiration and illumination. Ricoeur recognizes this in his closing remarks on the entanglement of voice and writing in biblical discourse: It is the Spirit who draws the largest circle within which the Word and Scripture, Scripture and the confessing community, are mutually constituted. Faith, as is

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professed by believers, but also as it can be understood in imagination and in sympathy in the suspension of belief, consists then in believing that the ‘interior testimony of the Holy Spirit’—from the side of communities of hearing and of interpretation—and the inspiration attributed to the Scriptures by the communities are the work of one and the same Spirit.54

Beyond these words of acknowledgment, Ricoeur never ventures. Nevertheless, the question of inspiration and illumination are vital issues questions to consider for any hermeneutics of epistles, and indeed of biblical revelation. NOTES 1. Paul, Ricoeur. 2013a. Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures, Vol. 2. Trans. David Pellauer. Malden, MA: Polity Press, p. 138. 2. Ibid., p. 127. 3. In this essay I will not make a sharp distinction between epistles and letters. Adolf Deissmann tried to draw a clear line between the two, but this was critiqued very quickly for being artificial (Stowers 1986: 17–18). 4. I am not the first to ask this question. Ricoeur delivered a version of his essay, “Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in February 1977 at the Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Berkeley. In the discussion that followed, Edward C. Hobbs observed that Ricoeur’s analysis “seems tailor-made for the Old Testament,” but that nothing in it “resembles the Letters or Epistles as modes of revelation” (Ricoeur 1977: 16–17). Unfortunately Ricoeur does not address this observation in his response. 5. Pellauer, David. 1981. “Paul Ricoeur on the Specificity of Religious Language.” The Journal of Religion. Vol. 61 (3) (1981), p. 272. 6. See Bauckham 1999, which reads James as an encyclical letter sharing wisdom of a disciple of Jesus, the Jewish sage. 7. If there is a distinctive revelatory function in the epistles, it might be proclamation (kerygma)—the announcement of the acts and suffering, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Kerygma originates in the oral teaching of Jesus and the apostles as the most primordial announcement of the kingdom of God. Ricoeur was interested in the transition from proclamation to the narrative form of the Gospels, which present a new literary form (Ricoeur 1984: 501–02). Proclamation is narrated in the Gospels as well as the book of Acts, but it is in the epistles that it first takes textual form. Ricoeur does discuss the role of proclamation in the Pauline epistles in his late essay “Paul the Apostle,” where he examines the relation between proclamation and various argumentative strategies in the apostles Paul’s writings (Ricoeur 2013b: 256–78). 8. Stowers, Stanley K. 1986. Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 42. 9. Ibid., p. 42–43. 10. Doering, Lutz. 2017. “The Commissioning of Paul: Light from the Prophet Jeremiah on the Self-Understanding of the Apostle?” Jeremiah's Scriptures:

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Production, Reception, Interaction, and Transformation, ed. H. Najman & K. Schmid, JSJSup 173, Leiden: Brill, 2017, p. 549. 11. In the case of Jude, who was not an apostle, this comes from his close ties to the apostles, being the brother of James and Jesus. 12. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, p. 263. 13. Ibid., p. 264. 14. Ibid., p. 265. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ricoeur also notes that the self-announcement—I am— provides assurance of God’s presence with the prophet (Ricoeur 1995: 265). For example, the LORD assures Jeremiah: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord” (Jer 1:7-8). Paul echoes this assurance in his third account of his conversion: “I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you…” (Acts 26:17). 18. Ricoeur 1995: 266 19. Ricoeur 2013a, p. 114. 20. In the early church, inspiration referred to the orthodoxy of a document’s teaching. Thus the texts that were deemed “inspired” were not limited to scripture, nor even to texts. Bishops, monks, martyrs, councils, and scriptural interpretations and prophetic gifts were also deemed to be inspired, insofar as they presented true and right teaching (Allert 2007: 59). 21. Brueggemann, Walter. 2007. The Theology of the Book of Jeremiah. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31, 72. 22. The angel dictates: “Let the stranger who comes among you be set apart and let 15 days go by; and after this I will lead you into your city, says the Lord. He who is not separated from Babylon will not enter into the city; and I will punish them by keeping them from being received back by the Babylonians, says the Lord” (6:16-17). After the angel left, Baruch got papyrus and ink and wrote the following letter (6:19): “Greetings! Rejoice, for God has not allowed us to depart from this body grieving for the city which was laid waste and outraged. Wherefore the Lord has had compassion on our tears, and has remembered the covenant which he established with our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And he sent his angel to me, and he told me these words which I send to you. These, then, are the words which the Lord, the God of Israel, spoke, who led us out of Egypt, out of the great furnace: Because you did not keep my ordinances, but your heart was lifted up, and you were haughty before me, in anger and wrath I delivered you to the furnace in Babylon. If, therefore, says the Lord, you listen to my voice, from the mouth of Jeremiah my servant, I will bring the one who listens up from Babylon; but the one who does not listen will become a stranger to Jerusalem and to Babylon. And you will test them by means of the water of the Jordan; whoever does not listen will be exposed—this is the sign of the great seal” (6:20-25).

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23. See Richard Bauckham’s groundbreaking work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Bauckham 2017). 24. Zimmermann, Jens. 2015. Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 79. 25. I hold in abeyance the question of Pauline authorship, while noting that the critical dismissal of certain texts as non-Pauline may be premature. Such dismissals are often based on preconceived ideas about what Paul’s theology is all about. They also assumes that author’s style is static, rather than being adaptable to diverse audiences. N.T. Wright refers to an observation by John A.T. Robinson: “a busy church leader may well write in very different styles for different occasions and audiences. The same person can be working simultaneously on a large academic project with careful, ponderous sentences and a short, snappy talk for Sunday school” (Wright 2013: 60). 26. Following Günther Bornkamm, Ricoeur writes that “to proclaim is to say what is revealed (apokalyptetai): “the righteousness of God” (Romans 1:17), and the coming of the Messiah. This revelation is a break, a “vehement moment” of “rupture with wisdom and the law” (Ricoeur 2013b: 262). 27. Ricoeur 1995, p. 223. 28. Ibid., p. 70. 29. For more on this point see Gregor 2019: 112–13. 30. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. London: The Athlone Press, p. 97. 31. According to Ricoeur, the name Christ adds a new level of meaning to the word God, thereby incarnating “all the religious significations in one basic symbol: the symbol of a sacrificial love, of a love stronger than death. It is the function of the teaching of the Cross and of the Resurrection to give the word God a density that the word being does not contain” (Ricoeur 1991: 98). 32. One might wonder, however, whether these speech acts count as modes of revelation. Nicholas Wolterstorff, for instance, has argued that speaking is not revealing. Revelation informs us of things we don’t know, so speech acts like promises and commands are not modes of divine revelation (Wolterstorff 1995: 35). Wolterstorff limits revelation to the communication of knowledge that can be asserted in propositional form, and excludes the wide range of other speech acts that occur in Scripture. Those discursive acts may be divine speech, but they are not revelation in the strict sense. It is not surprising that Wolterstorff and Ricoeur diverge on this point. For Wolterstorff, Ricoeur belongs to the Romantic-expressivist tradition that attempts to “treat discourse as a species of revelation” (Wolterstorff 1995: 35). Wolterstorff’s critique of Ricoeur has received a critique of its own (see Stiver 2001: 125-36 and Westphal 2001: 280), so for now I will simply ask whether Ricoeur is correct that there are other discursive modes of revelation besides the assertion of propositions. If we think of revelation as God’s self-disclosure, then promises, commands, and calls are revelatory. They reveal something of God’s character, desires, and plans. Even more fundamentally, they reveal God’s person. Wolterstorff anticipates this objection and responds that the point of promises and commands is not “to reveal something about oneself.” Instead, they require a

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response from us, such as trust or obedience. But the kinds of promises and commands one makes, and the way in which one makes them, also reveal the kind of person one is. If I make frivolous requests or bark irritated commands, I reveal something of myself. If I promise my wife, “I will be there,” the point is indeed to secure her trust, but I am also revealing something of myself—namely, my commitment to being there. Accordingly, consider one of the most fundamental revelations in the Hebrew scriptures—namely, Exodus 3:14: When Moses asks for God’s name, God says to him “‘ehyeh ‘ašer ‘eheyeh.” This is an act of revelation—what Andre LaCocque calls “the revelation of revelations” (LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998: 307-29). This revelation is par excellence an act of revealing something—not just about himself, but of himself: “I will be what I will be.” This is an act of self-disclosure, an act of selfnaming, and in this naming an act of promising: I will be what I will be. The point is indeed to secure Moses’ trust and to deflect his attempt to obtain a divine name that he might worship like an idol or wield like a talisman; but it is also to reveal something about who God is and will be. This revelation is not an assertion of a divine nature or essence, not a proposition, with an attribute or predicate attached to a divine subject. As LaCocque observes, the Name initiates/opens an “I-Thou relationship” (LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998: 321). We might also include questions in the category of revelation, if we consider the question that Jesus poses to Saul on the Damascus Road: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). There is something revelatory in that question alone, and not merely in the assertion that follows (“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”). With that question, Jesus manifests himself as the one Saul is persecuting, and this already forces a radical reconfiguration of Saul’s sense of what he is doing going to Damascus. 33. This too is a question raised in Wolterstorff 1995. 34. Ricoeur 1991, p. 94–95. 35. Barclay, John M.G. 2018. “The Letters of Paul and the Construction of Early Christian Networks.” Letters and Communities: Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography. Oxford University Press, pp. 289, 295. 36. Thus in 1 Cor. 4:18-21 he writes in anticipation of his upcoming visit: will he come with a stick, or with love, in a spirit of gentleness? In 2 Cor. 1:23, he writes that he abandoned earlier plans to visit the church in Corinth, in order to spare them his physical presence (2:1). Paul is the same in person as he is in his letters (10:9-12); and if he visits them again, he will not be lenient (12:20-13:4). 37. Hurtado argues that “Romantic notions of a pervasive early Christian ‘orality’ that left little room or need for texts all rest on a body of ill-informed assumptions” (Hurtado 2016: 116). It is true that Christian texts were written to be read aloud to Christian gatherings, but the emphasis on this oral performance forgets that “what were thus ‘performed’ were written texts read from manuscript copies.” Moreover, Hurtado also offers evidence that not all reading was public or communal; there are also copies of texts that were made for personal study (Hurtado 2016: 117). See also Hurtado 2014. 38. There was no speech fully independent of writing, since the Christian proclamation was tied to the reading and interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and in

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turn of the epistles and the gospels. As Ricoeur notes: “What appears to be primary is the series speech-writing-speech, or else writing-speech-writing, in which at times speech mediates between two writings, as does the word of Jesus between the two Testaments, and at times writing mediates between two forms of speech, as the gospel does between the preaching of the early church and all contemporary preaching. This chain is the condition of the possibility of tradition as such, in the fundamental sense of the transmission of a message” (Ricoeur 1991: 94). 39. As Margaret Mitchell observes, there are some instances in which Paul seems to see a written letter as preferably to his personal presence, since it promised to be a “more effective” means for addressing circumstances in a particular church. For instance, Mitchell suggests that Paul and Apollos alike may have opted to stay away from the church in Corinth to avoid perpetuating the split in loyalties to those who claimed to follow Paul, and others Apollos. She also suggests that Paul’s later conflict with the Corinthians would more likely be healed by a letter carried by his envoy Titus, acting as intermediary, and also that the crisis in Galatia might be handled more coolly via letter than a personal visit (Mitchell 1992: 642–43). 40. Other forms that closely resemble speech include dialogues and interviews, but in these cases the reader is a third party observing the I-Thou exchange. A closer comparison to the letter would be speeches and sermons, since these are both written in the first-person to address an intended You (whether singular or plural). 41. Poster, Carol. 2007. “A Conversation Halved: Epistolary Theory in GrecoRoman Antiquity.” In Letter-writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. Eds. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, p. 21. 42. Seneca. 2015. Letters on Ethics. Trans. Margaret Graver and A.A. Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 120. 43. Some might object that Seneca is being hermeneutically naïve here, but there is phenomenological warrant for his point: when we read a letter (or email) from a friend, we can often hear their voice speaking the written words. Of course, anyone who has received a letter from a loved one knows that this quasi-presence is not equal to full bodily presence. 44. Ricoeur, Paul. 1985: Time and Narrative, vol. 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, p. 99. 45. See Sohn 2016. 46. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. “L’enchevêtrement de la voix et de l’écrit dans le discours biblique,” in Lectures 3: Aux frontiers de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, p. 310. 47. Ibid. 48. Ricoeur 1995, p. 221. 49. Ricoeur 1991, p. 93. 50. Ricoeur 1994, p. 312. 51. Ibid., p. 311. 52. Ricoeur 1991, p.99. 53. Raynova, Yvanka B. 2009. Between the Said and the Unsaid: In Conversation with Paul Ricoeur, Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, p. 62. 54. Ricoeur 1994, p. 325–26.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allert, Craig D. 2007. A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Augustine. 1991. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press. Barclay, John M.G. 2018. “The Letters of Paul and the Construction of Early Christian Networks.” Letters and Communities: Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography. Oxford University Press: 289–302. Bauckham, Richard. 1999. James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage. New York: Routledge. Bauckham, Richard. 2017. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimonies. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing. Brueggemann, Walter. 2007. The Theology of the Book of Jeremiah. New York: Cambridge University Press. Doering, Lutz. 2017. “The Commissioning of Paul: Light from the Prophet Jeremiah on the Self-Understanding of the Apostle?” Jeremiah’s Scriptures: Production, Reception, Interaction, and Transformation, ed. H. Najman & K. Schmid, JSJSup 173, Leiden: Brill, 2017, 544–565. Gregor, Brian. 2019. Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hurtado, Larry. 2014. “Oral Fixation in New Testament Studies? ‘Orality’, ‘Performance’ and Reading Texts in Early Christianity.” New Testament Studies 60 (2014): 321–40. Hurtado, Larry. 2016. Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Mitchell, Margaret. 1992. “New Testament Envoys in the Context of Greco-Roman Diplomatic and Epistolary Conventions: The Example of Timothy and Titus.” Journal of Biblical Literature 111: 641–62. Pellauer, David. 1981. “Paul Ricoeur on the Specificity of Religious Language.” The Journal of Religion. Vol. 61 (3) (1981): 264–84. Poster, Carol. 2007. “A Conversation Halved: Epistolary Theory in Greco-Roman Antiquity.” In Letter-writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. Eds. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press: 21–51. LaCocque, André and Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raynova, Yvanka B. 2009. Between the Said and the Unsaid: In Conversation with Paul Ricoeur, Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation. Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, 1977. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. “From Proclamation to Narrative.” The Journal of Religion. Vol. 64, No.4. (Oct. 1984): 501–12. Ricoeur, Paul. 1985: Time and Narrative, vol. 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. London: The Athlone Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. “L’enchevêtrement de la voix et de l’écrit dans le discours biblique,” in Lectures 3: Aux frontiers de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2013a. Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures, Vol. 2. Trans. David Pellauer. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2013b. Paul and the Philosophers. “Paul the Apostle: Proclamation and Argumentation.” Eds. Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham University Press. Seneca. 2015. Letters on Ethics. Trans. Margaret Graver and A.A. Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sohn, Michael. 2016. “Word, Writing, Tradition.” In Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon. Edited by Scott Davidson and Marc-Antoine Vallée. Dodrecht: Springer. Stiver, Dan R. 2001. Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Stowers, Stanley K. 1986. Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press. Westphal, Merold. 2001. “On Reading God the Author.” Religious Studies, 37(3): 271–91. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1995. Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Wright, N. T. 2013. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Zimmermann, Jens. 2015. Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 11

An Authentic Ricoeurian Dialogue Project Joseph A. Edelheit and James F. Moore

Paul Ricoeur models his commitment to dialogue with his intellectual fascination with both the classics and his own contemporary thinkers. Ricoeur constantly engages others in his writing as the means through which he develops his own projects. An authentic dialogue for Ricoeur requires an analysis of ideas being reconsidered beyond their original context, and then offering the new interpretation provoked by textual reflections. Both of us studied at the Divinity School in various courses taught or cotaught by Paul Ricoeur. We sat with him as he read a primary text with us, sometimes as he translated the text, asking for our commentaries. During the more than a decade of engaging in Ricoeur Society meetings, we have consistently offered joint papers or panels in order to sustain the dialogical model we both experienced with Paul Ricoeur. We created the framing and purpose of this anthology as coeditors, knowing that our contribution would be one of our dialogues using both Scripture and Ricoeur’s extensive library as our lenses. We offer this essay as an “authentic Ricoeurian dialogue,” using a classical biblical texts, Genesis 4, Cain and Abel; through the lens of Ricoeur, specifically—“The Self and the Ethical Aim” (Oneself as Another) and “Interpretation and Argumentation” (The Just). This is an intentional Jewish-Christian dialogue, and rereading of Genesis 4 as an appropriate affirmation of our teacher’s projects. Paul Ricoeur’s diverse insights on being human created a significant arc of ideas while engaging many thinkers. In reflecting upon the application of criminal justice he writes, “If we begin with the interpretation of facts, we cannot overemphasize the multiple of ways a set of interconnected acts can be considered and, let us say, recounted . . . We never finish untangling the lines of the personal story of an accused with certainty, and even reading it in such 225

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a way is already oriented by the presumption that such an interconnectedness places the case under some rule.”1 AN INITIAL RABBINIC/JEWISH READING IN SEARCH OF DIALOGUE These philosophical assertions transform our interpretative challenge to reread Genesis 4, in order to critically consider the issues of “interconnectedness” and “untangling.” Our initial issue is whether anyone can read this text and without the bias of moral direction anchored by the universally known question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The commentary in the Jewish Study Bible announces that Genesis 4:1–16 is “The First Murder.”2 Hence, even a first-time reader of the biblical text is provided a biased conclusion without even a moment of shock or wonder. Biblical scholarship burdens the text with labels of etiology: the first death; telegraphing the competition of nomadic herds against archaic farmers; and of course, future genealogical implications. Cain and Abel are the first humans “born” into the post-Eden existence in which there is the transformative awareness of moral knowledge, the difference between good and evil. Cain and Abel are the first siblings—the complex and ambiguous relationship of happenstance and not choice, the most intimate relationship of blood that becomes a leitmotif throughout Genesis. In “The Self and the Ethical Aim,” Ricoeur’s dialogue with Aristotle’s paradigm of friends illuminates the distinct biblical paradigm. Siblings, we learn quickly, establish rivalries over their birth order, blessings, inheritance, and spoken and unspoken promises. Genesis 4 offers a dark and enigmatic template of sibling rivalries. The Hebrew text immediately confuses the unstated preference of elder and younger. Gen 4:2b, “Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the soil.” This simple inversion should alert the reader that herders and farmers are not of equal value, and hence neither are Abel and Cain. Yet, Cain initiates humankind’s first-ever “offering to the Lord,” which we know comes from the harvest of his land. This first-ever human worship/sacrifice is offered without any directions or rules or expectations from the intended recipient—The Lord. Going second, Abel’s offering is distinguished, “for his part,” inferring that Cain’s offering is the lower standard to surpass, hence the reader is not surprised by the additional emphasis, that Abel gave “the choicest of the firstlings.” Before any decision is made by God, Genesis 4:3–4 set up Cain and Abel in an easily recognized sibling conflict; this is now a competition not between the two brothers, but created by the third outside power, God.

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There is no time given for the brothers to resolve their unstated rivalry, as God “paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed.” (v:4–5). The text inverts the birth order to emphasize who is accepted and who is rejected. This first act of human worship provokes God to accept one brother and reject the other—the text makes it clear that God “sha’ah” “gazed with intention” on one worshiper and not merely his offering. Cain’s decision as a human to express gratitude to the Divine leads then to his unexpected experience of God turning away, the intentional absence of God, because the younger brother imagined a better offering. One might infer from the text that “choicest” in reference to Abel’s offering means more than merely physically better or quintessentially different, as lamb vs. fruits/grains. Does the text’s use of this word argue that Abel is more religious or devoted than Cain? Remember this is the first offering or sacrifice of any kind in all of Western religious biblical history. Since there have been no rules nor directions about such behavior, it would seem logical to conclude that both offerings must be equal in intent. But God, the shared recipient of both offerings, surprises the brothers and reader by ranking the offerings and, as such, accepts both but chooses only one. Hence, we understand the text’s use of “choicest” to confirm and explain that God’s choice is correct, or we are left with a capricious God. It is essential to stop and to reflect upon the dark complexity of these few verses, before any further consideration of the text’s known conclusion. Cain wants to thank God for the “bounty” of his harvest, but with no Divine expectation for such gratitude, there is neither a form nor a standard by which to evaluate Cain’s unique expression to the Transcendent. Paul Ricoeur wrote about the absence of any such standards. The unifying principle of a practice (profession, game, art, [worship>my inclusion]) does not reside only in the logical relations of coordination—even in those of subordination or nesting—nor in the role of constitutive rules in the sense of game theory and speech-act theory, which, we recall, are ethically neutral. The dimension of meaning contributed by the notion of constitutive rule, however, opens the sphere of meaning in which appraisals of an evaluative (and subsequently normative) nature are attached to precepts of doing (something) well. The properly ethical character of these precepts is ensured by what MacIntyre calls “standards of excellence,” which allow us to characterize as good, a doctor, an architect, a painter, or a chess player [or a person who brings an offering of gratitude to God—a worshiper—my inclusion!] These standards of excellence are rules of comparison applied to different accomplishment, in relation to ideals of perfection shared by a given community of practitioners and internalized by the masters and virtuosi of the practice considered.3

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THE CHALLENGE OF UNDERSTANDING Ricoeur helps in our rereading the text of Genesis, and to understand Cain’s predicament. Though he is the first to bring an offering of any kind to God, it becomes a comparative act of worship as done by Abel, who “for his part,” makes God judge Cain’s offering. Without any standards of excellence or warnings of what is unacceptable, how are Cain or Abel to decide what is appropriate, to say nothing determining excellence and superiority? The absence of any standards makes God’s judgment of both offerings unfair to say the least. Ricoeur offers a prescient comment that “recourse to the standards of excellence of practice” is valuable as a means of sustaining an interpretation of self-esteem, as he notes, “an initial support for the reflexive moment of self-esteem, to the extent that it is in appraising our actions that we appraise ourselves as being their author.”4 Ricoeur’s argument painfully illuminates God’s rejection of one of the offerings: “Cain was much distressed, and his face fell” (Gen 4:5b). This is the first time Bible describes the effect of the inexplicable relationship between the Divine and the Humans. There is no textual reference to Abel’s reaction to God or Cain. Commenting on a “life plan,” Ricoeur notes, “The person appears here from the outset as suffering as well as acting, subject to those whims of life” understood, quoting Martha Nussbaum, the “fragility of goodness.”5 How insightful that Cain in his simple moment of seeking “the good life” by expressing his gratitude to God, has his offering rejected; he is suffering because his self-esteem is profoundly challenged. “On the ethical plane, self-interpretation becomes self-esteem. In return, self-esteem follows the fate of interpretation. Like the latter, it provokes controversy, dispute, rivalry—in short, the conflict of interpretations—in the exercise of practical judgment.”6 Cain’s attempt to express himself to God, unwittingly stimulated a comparison and which resulted in a Divine choice and the new human experience of self-doubt. In the biblical text, God engages Cain and only Cain in the aftermath of the two offerings. Genesis 4:7 is translated as a dense and enigmatic statement of both consolation and warning.7 a’ Surely, if you do right,/There is uplift./ But if you do not do right/Sin couches at the door;/Its urge is toward you,/Yet you can be its master.” The Oxford Jewish Study Bible, as most contemporary Hebrew Bibles, notes: “Meaning of the verse uncertain.” Ricoeur argues in The Just that, “the concept of ‘discourse’ imposes a certain formalism, which is precisely that of argumentation, at the point where the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘argumentation’ tend to overlap. The question, therefore, is how the claim to correctness gets defined . . . correctness is the claim raised for intelligibility, as soon as it admits the criterion of universalizable communicability. A good argument is one that ideally will be understood, taken not only as plausible, but as acceptable by all the parties concerned.”7 The context of

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this assertion is a juridical argumentation, but there is a prescient application to this biblical text. God’s “advice-warning” to Cain does not meet the standards of either discourse or argumentation. Is it possible the reader’s textual footnote of “uncertainty” and Ricoeur’s argument about “intelligibility” raise the question of whether Cain understood the meaning of God’s statement? When God chooses Abel’s offering, Cain is both rejected and confused. God echoes and confirms Cain’s experience of suffering but in a text that defies understanding. To make these textual issues more inexplicable, v:8 begins, “Cain said to his brother Abel” and then there is always a notation of a broken text, “. . . .” And then the text continues with the brothers in the field and suddenly Cain attacks and kills Abel. The text does not provide any details that explain what happens after the ritual act of the offerings, the rejection of Cain and God’s enigmatic engagement which textually leads immediately to the first human act of violence and resultant death. This biblical narrative is universally known, and all too often not critically read, which means that it is usually misread. The simplest assumption is that Cain’s offering must be intentionally flawed, which explains and justifies God’s acceptance of Abel’s real devotion. Such a misreading further enhances Cain’s denial of responsibility while offering the assertion that it is obviously Cain’s jealousy that ignited his revenge. All this finally illuminates the paradigmatic rhetorical question and cover-up: Am I my brother’s keeper? The first death, a murder, comes when one sibling refuses to control his impulses, thus rejecting the primary legacy of Eden, moral knowledge. We can only read the text as Cain being both responsible and accountable for Abel’s death. The profound nature of Cain’s behavior is illuminated in the Hebrew text by an unexpected use of the plural for “blood,” “D’may”—“Your brother’s blood calls out to me from the ground” (v:10b). The English translation does not or cannot pick up the textual marker of the plural, but several Rabbinic interpretations of the word, D’may, is the origin for the famous axiom: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a.) The Rabbinic sages interpret “bloods” as pointing to all of the unrequited progeny of Abel, affirming Cain’s act as a sign of the universal interdependence of all humans, hence any act of violence is never merely a single act or single death. Ricoeur’s challenge draws us back into the specifics of Cain rather than using him as a foil for a warning about humans and violence. “We never finish untangling the lines of the personal story of an accused with certainty.”8 Too often we read Genesis 4 too quickly, and hence our understanding of Cain has no depth, Ricouer pushes us to take the time for “untangling” the details of the text. For instance, is God’s decision to accept one offering and

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reject the other, a source of responsibility? Since, this was the first human attempt at offering/worship, why were there no directions, rules, or even the loving offer by God to accept both initial offerings as equal, but then teach both humans what was expected and acceptable? God prohibited Cain and Abel’s parents from eating the fruit from the Tree of Moral Knowledge, why does the Divine now remain mute about the threat of violence? The absence of Divine direction or an example of constructive unconditional “parenting” illuminates Ricoeur’s “untangling” of the accused which continues to trouble me. This textual complexity does not obviate Cain’s behavior or accountability, but it does make the judgment and “sentencing” more complex. RECOVERING ABEL’S PRESENCE Abel is the first victim of violence in western religious texts. We read the text with such pathos for Abel, the victim, that we are certain he must be absolutely innocent. The text offers the reader only “absence,” as Abel never engages God or Cain in the biblical text directly. Yet, there is one very small phrase which enigmatically suggests that Abel was aware of Cain’s offering which then determined what he should offer based on that comparison, “and for his part” (v:4). Our text is “broken” so we have nothing to confirm what Abel said or did after his offering was accepted and his brother calls him to the field. It is purely hypothetical to suggest that Abel exacerbated Cain’s anger, disappointed, and/or isolation. Yet, it is also the complete “absence” of Abel in the text that invites our attention. Ricoeur, “We proposed a definition of the ethical perspective: aiming at the good life with and for others in just institutions . . . [m]y thesis is that solicitude is not something added on to self-esteem from outside but that it unfolds the dialogic dimension of self-esteem . . . self-esteem and solicitude cannot be experienced or reflected upon one without the other.”9 Ricoeur challenges the reader to be more nuanced with interpretations about these first siblings and how their relationship produced the first death by killing/murder. He argues that ethics is grounded in the dialogic self-esteem and solicitude which in turn illuminates and deepens our questions regarding the “absence” of Abel in the text. The first murder occurs between siblings, not strangers, hence, should we expect that both share the ethical imperative of being human. Ricoeur’s insights about justice directly challenge the unilateral presumptions of Cain’s sole responsibility. Suffering is not defined solely by physical pain, nor even mental pain, but by the reduction, even the destruction, of the capacity for acting, of being-able-to-act,

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experienced as the violation of self-integrity . . . For from the suffering other there comes a giving that is no longer drawn from the power of acting and existing but precisely form weakness itself. This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, when unequal power finds compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which in the hour of agony, finds refuge in the shared whisper of voices or the feeble embrace of clasped hands . . . For it is indeed feelings that are revealed in the self by the other’s suffering, as well as by the moral injunction coming from the other, feelings spontaneously directed toward others. This intimate union between the ethical aim of solicitude and the affective flesh of feelings seems to me to just the choice of the term “solicitude.”10

Is the absence of Abel’s “solicitude” an indictment of his arrogance or his use of God’s decision as his intentional abuse of Cain? Can we interpret the Hebrew text’s listing of Abel before his older brother as suggesting that he demanded that Cain submit to him? The text develops and carefully describes Cain’s suffering, which provokes an inscrutable Divine response, might we interpret that Cain sought, in Ricoeur’s words, “an authentic reciprocity . . . in the hour of agony?” Cain’s loss of self-esteem is directly a result of God’s decision, and the absence of what we represent as “solicitude”’ from Abel is yet another thread found in Ricoeur’s challenge of “untangling.” These and other interpretations do not excuse Cain’s violence nor diminish his accountability for Abel’s death. Any attempt to understand this biblical narrative as primal, as a first-order text—challenges us with the complexity of contemporary relationships, especially communal and public relationships. Our commitment to an “authentic” Ricoeurian dialogue refers to his fundamental insight of “the world of the text. By this I mean that what is finally to be understood in a text is not the author or his presumed intention, nor is it the immanent structure or structures of the text, but rather the sort of world intended beyond the text as its reference . . . . The world of the text designates the reference of the work of discourse, not what is said, but about what it said.”11 The text asks us, as readers, questions that could never have been imagined in the biblical setting, the original setting of Cain and Abel, cannot be replicated in our time, but the text continues to provoke questions. “If the Bible may be said to be revealed this must refer to what it says, to the new being it unfolds before us” [italics mine].12 When the text engages our sensibilities, we cannot imagine Cain’s naivete that all of our offerings will be accepted, but we also push against the cynicism that denies our hope that our most sincere offerings—worship, regardless of our diverse ideologies, politics, traumas—are markers of superiority or exclusion. Today, more than ever we strive to cultivate “OUR” offerings, attempting to merge Cain and Abel in an all-inclusive shared yearning—a

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common offering. But we cannot find the means of consciously requiring of others, Ricoeur’s “solicitude.” Regardless of Ricoeur or Levinas, we have not matured beyond the painful solitariness of Cain’s trauma, again and again, most individuals are not prepared to be present to the suffering and vulnerability, which reveals an authentic reciprocity.

LINKING THE VOICES IN DIALOGUE This bridges the separate essays of this dialogue as written texts, rather than spoken. The emergence of meaning now occurs not just between the two voices represented by the two essays but also in the process of reading engaged between the reader and the texts. This sense that the meaning is in front of the text is essential to any Ricoeurian reading of texts including this one. Thus, the original dialogue that produced these written texts is not the same as would occur in the setting of presentation. We can no longer presume the original intent but rather the process of interpretation draws in several points of intent depending on the interaction between the various readers and the texts (both the essays here) as well as the Biblical texts that are the focus of this dialogical exercise. The dialogue itself requires that each voice be heard in entirety before any interaction occurs following the ethic of discussion that Ricoeur developed in The Just. A more detailed reflection on this ethic can be found in the opening section of the next portion of this essay. In oral dialogue, interaction can happen so that all voices are heard without prejudice, but in written text, the need is to present the text fully so the reader can access the particular view of each voice without prejudice. Of course, in his book, Ricoeur is reflecting on courtroom discussion in which some conclusion is required. However, the conclusion even in the court may require a level of compromise since some issues cannot be resolved absolutely. In this dialogue, the reader becomes the arbiter of the arguments. Even so, we will present a brief epilogue to the two portions of this essay so as to facilitate that ongoing dialogue both about Ricoeur’s reflection on Biblical texts and on the particular text from Genesis 4. DIALOGUE AND THE POTENTIAL FOR AUTHENTICITY: A SECOND REFLECTION ON PAUL RICOEUR AND GENESIS 4 Our proposal for this dialogue is complex with a number of moving parts. It is made even more complex by the different trajectories for each of the

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elements of our interaction. Thus, I aim to clarify these complexities before launching into a reflection on Genesis 4, enlightened by Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of “Argument and Interpretation” from his little book entitled The Just in English. The moving parts are first the problematic of dialogue. Our preconference interaction has shown me that we have both a dialogue between Joseph Edelheit and James Moore and a dialogue assumed in Genesis 4. There is also the dialogue between the readers and the text. All of this should be familiar to students of Ricoeur. Indeed, the fact that our emerging conversation reveals not only differing interpretations but also differing starting points in our approach to a Torah text. These are the dynamics of dialogue which need to be unraveled before I can offer my understanding of the Genesis text. Second, the Ricoeur text also presents complexity that shows that both Joseph and I take differing insights from the chapter on argumentation and interpretation. This leads us in different directions when connecting Ricoeur to our reading of Genesis. The problem may also be that it is not clear whether our proposal suggests that Ricoeur is a window into reading Genesis or whether Genesis is a window into reading Ricoeur. In fact, it is probably both and to add complexity our dialogue likely exemplifies Ricoeur’s projects as well both because we are students of Ricoeur literally and dialogue is an important feature of Ricoeur’s concerns. In addition, there is a symbiosis between argumentation and interpretation much like the one between explanation and understanding that has characterized a good deal of Ricoeur’s contribution to our disciplines. Finally, dialogue reveals the richness of any text since it multiplies the awareness of pluralities of meaning in texts (Ricoeur’s point is that there is always a surplus of meaning). And we thought that we had so much time only to realize that we have bitten off far more than our time could allow. Fortunately, our preconference conversations have reoriented us and have led to some convergence which I hope will show in this time together. We also need to admit that our dialogue is now more than 30 years old so that we have had lots of practice in coming to know each other and our views. That is both strength and a problem for any of the rest of you who cannot know that background. THE PROBLEMATIC OF DIALOGUE Ricoeur is clear about conversation and the basic rules that are implicit in authentic conversation.13 Two features of the presumed rules of discourse as Ricoeur identifies them have immediate applicability to our reading of Genesis 4. First, discussion requires openness for all to participate. Second, once accepting a basic common sense of community, discourse requires a

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rule of justification (an argument needs to be made for the interpretation of any rule even if commonly accepted). I would suggest that these rules at least form a basis for Ricoeur’s understanding of dialogue. Given this, I can assert that in the interaction between us (Joseph and I) there is dialogue in the Ricoeurian sense both because there is a built in openness to allow for all voices and there is a common sense of community (Ricoeur argues in fact that the desire for community is basic to our humanness). Thus, there is the potential for presenting an argument to justify a particular reading. This is an emerging process, however, and no fixed point can be asserted since the actual conclusion of the dialogue is open-ended. It is not so clear that there is anything like a dialogue in Genesis 4. If there is a presumed dialogue, it is between God and Cain. But on Ricoeur’s terms there is no real foundation for dialogue because there is no presumed openness to allow all voices (particularly that of Cain). If there is a potential dialogue, it rests after the murder and is opened by Cain with his question in response to God’s question. God asks, where is your brother? And Cain responds, I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper? These are questions that beg for both a context and an argument. Still, both questions lack credibility since God is not really asking Cain about Abel’s whereabouts or is Cain really honest in saying I don’t know. In addition, there is no argument offered, no justification, and God ignores Cain’s question. This appears to be the opposite of dialogue (actually obvious from the initial interchange regarding Cain’s rejected sacrifice). So, the dialogue happens outside of the text even as there is an obvious need for dialogue inside of the text. The conversations between Joe and myself have raised the potential that this problem, like of real dialogue, is perhaps insinuated in the text as a part of a larger narrative. Perhaps the image of God in Genesis 4 is not yet an authentic image precisely because there is no basis for actual dialogue, there is no basis for shared community. This is a possible interpretation that might lead to an explanation as to why the Cain narrative reads like it does. That meaning arises as an interpretation of the text though or as Ricoeur would say in the midst, between the reader and the text. But the issue is complicated because this arises not as an individual read and text but in the context of dialogue. Can we see how all of this actually exemplifies critical elements of Ricoeur’s projects? Let me suggest one fascinating point (at least to me) about Genesis 4. The Hebrew word translated as the noun “keeper” in Genesis 4 is the same root as the word translated as “keep” (to till and keep the garden) found in Genesis 2. My point is that the question raised by Cain is an entrée into a conversation about the question, a conversation that does not happen even as the text seems to beg for this. Does the command to keep the garden also translate into the moral responsibility to keep our sisters and brothers? Also, the rejection of the sacrifice in Genesis 4 begs for some rules on sacrifice that

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can become a justification for the judgment rendered. We do not get any such rules until the Sinai covenant (or at least not until Noah). That is to say, the text begs for a setting larger than the Cain narrative in order to reach meaningful judgments. Since this does not happen in the text, both God and Cain come across as inauthentic. USING RICOEUR’S TEXT I have already tipped my hand in showing how I might connect key ideas from Ricoeur’s text to a reading of Genesis 4. It seems clear to me that Ricoeur can be useful in informing our reading of texts. However, the reverse can also be true. Our reading of texts can inform a reading of Ricoeur. Ricoeur, like many others, is a modern in the sense that he presumes a fundamental human desire for community. This emerges for him as a discursive community in which fairness (rule governed) shapes conversation (a kind of civil public conversation). It is not so clear what gives rise to this urge for community. In fact, the Genesis text suggests that such community is not so fundamental (not even in basic views of God). Something must be in place already. I had suggested before that Joe and I are in dialogue because we have a shared sense of community. For us, this is first of all the shared context of the text. That is, we are brought together because we have a common interest in the power of sacred text and the need to be careful with such power. This is precisely what Genesis 4 begs for and fails to provide. There is no shared common ground (even between brothers even as I suggest an argument could be made on the basis of the command to keep the garden). Does the commanding voice of God create this communal desire or is there a need for rules of engagement that govern both God and humans? This question looms over the Genesis text and implies that the latter is necessary. But this means the need is for covenant, something yet to arise in the flow of Genesis, and with that a religious, that is divine foundation for community. But for this we need an authentic God (not an arbitrary divine). I believe that Ricoeur finds his sense of communal desire in precisely this even as he holds this point in the context of a modern humanistic approach, a kind of social contract idea that remains a sort of fiction. I also think that Paul Ricoeur did not fully realize his own sense of these things until he encountered the Other in Rabbi Joseph Edelheit. What Ricoeur did say with regard to reading sacred texts is that we should be alerted to ironic twists in the text that suggest we should be paying attention. It is certainly challenging to accept that the divine is arbitrary even as the text of Genesis 4 clearly pictures the divine in this way. If we understand this twist not as an episode in this very human story but rather an intentional

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critique, then perhaps we have in Genesis 4 a basic challenge to the religious conceptions of the gods that characterized the cultures around the ancient Israelites (clearly the Tanach does not view this as resolved as the Israelites continue to mix their own theologies with the practices of the fertility religions of Canaan). Is Genesis 4 an obvious rejection of Canaanite/ Babylonian religion in favor of what would emerge as monotheism with a covenant God who is far from arbitrary? This would mean that the point of the text is not to judge Cain as guilty but rather to judge this view of God as inauthentic. DIALOGUE AND CONVERSATION Ricoeur’s treatment of conversation in The Just clearly asserts that conversation as civic discourse is governed by the rules that also govern argumentation and interpretation in the courts. Thus, judgment as aesthetic or ethical is actually the same as legal judgment. But this means that conversation in all of these settings is truly dialogical in which all are allowed voice. The setting of judgment in a legal sense (in what sense is this setting of Genesis 4?) requires that both the accuser and the accused have the right to speak. In addition, this legal setting requires that arguments be presented and defended (through interpretation of the law) before a judgment is rendered. As we have said the conversation between the Divine and Cain is not a dialogue in this sense. Not only is the judgment (first of the sacrificial offerings and then of Cain’s actions) seemingly arbitrary but there is no room for argument, no explanation that defends the judgment, no law that serves as a basis for interpretation. This image of the Divine may be fitting for many but appears to be challenged by the very nature of the language of the text. An ironic twist occurs when Cain is exposed for his violence but instead of receiving death for this capital crime, Cain is merely banished. When Cain protests that this banishment is as good as death, God marks Cain for protection almost as if God recognizes the invalidity of the judgment. We are naturally struck by what happens after this as we read of Cain’s wife and the generations of Cain. He is clearly not isolated, and the generations represent some of the most significant human achievements. This is clearly ironic. ABEL’S VOICE What strikes us further is clearly the absence of Abel’s voice. We not only do not know Abel’s thoughts either before or after the sacrifice nor do we have God portrayed as approaching and rewarding Abel at all. We have no

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idea what regarding Abel’s offering actually means since God is silent about this and Abel has no voice. My colleague wants to make much of this, and I grant that the text allows for much embellishment (certainly the interpretive tradition manages to fill in the gaps with all kinds of prejudice). The text says only of Abel “as for his part.” Nothing is explained of any of this as we do not know that either ritual offering is a public event. We do not know whether Abel knows either of Cain’s offering or of the Divine judgment on this. Neither do we know whether Abel was aware of the divine rejection or Cain’s anger. We cannot make much of this unless we assume that this is a real setting on human terms. It is far more likely a constructed story designed for specific “theological” intent. Thus, we attempt to understand the voice of the “presumed author” of the text and cannot say much about Abel’s voice. So, what can Abel’s silence mean as an intended framing of the story? This clearly is part of the complexity of the entangling personal account that characterizes every judicial case. Indeed, as Ricoeur argues, we never fully finish unraveling these personal aspects. It is the lack of evidence that perplexes us. Because we cannot just assert that Abel was aware of any of the events developing (not even of his own impending danger), we cannot assume that any of this was public. But this is critical since there is, then, no invitation to conversation, no dialogue either possible or even suggested by the text. Without dialogue there can be no presentation of argument (Cain to Abel and Abel to Cain) or any foundation for a universal rule (agreed to by all parties involved according to Ricoeur) that is even subject to interpretation. MY BOLD SUGGESTION Following this sense, the text of Genesis 4 confronts us with a picture of God that is arbitrary and thus a justice that is arbitrary. Indeed, could it be that Genesis 4 is a piece of a transition in the religious world of ancient Israel moving from the typical arbitrary nature of the divine so common in surrounding cultures to the covenant idea that now defines divine will in the context of promises and obligations. Is it not possible that this shows the working out of an idea that only emerges later in the story of Abraham (Genesis 18) with the declaration that shouldn’t the maker of the universe also be just? Indeed, in the Abraham narrative we actually do have the makings of a dialogue which is missing in Genesis 4. The proposal is that Genesis 4 is a remnant of a narrative that was broadly commonly known in the ancient Near East. It is a view of God that is not consistent with what will merge as the most dominant image, suggested by Genesis 18. The author/editor of the text has incorporated the earlier story into the larger narrative precisely because the earlier story forces the

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challenge to the older, prominent view of God. The question “should not the author of the universe be just?” is the larger context which insists that God is subject to the rules of justice as well. The Abraham story even stretches this since there is not law yet other than the principles of the Noachide covenant. We still are not so clear about what constitutes justice for Abraham other than the insinuation that God should not destroy the righteous with the wicked. The Cain narrative already includes twists that suggest a level of discomfort in the editor for the older narrative. The treatment of Cain is not just and the combination of exclusion together with the mark of protection is a jarring sign that this version cannot be like what has been. We see something like a merging of horizons here in which the older text is brought into the perspective of the later. This idea (something borrowed from Gadamer), of course, is critical to Ricoeur’s understanding of the interpretation of texts and the relation between explanation and understanding. Cain remains accountable but so does God. My proposal is a bit of a departure from other readings but seems to be a fruitful way of drawing on Ricoeur for a refreshed reading of texts. At least, I suggest that this can be a matter for conversation, for dialogue. But this calls into question the other matter, the issue of the elder and younger brother, not so fully resolved within the collection of narratives in Genesis. The editor continues to run this theme in many of the narratives that follow. This is not actually the notion that understanding is enriched through development (something closer to the Ricoeurian idea). The younger is not always better than the older. However, the Genesis text consistently shuns the elder in favor of the younger without justification. Within the texts there is always a sense of limited justice since God continues to bless the elder (Ishmael, Esau, etc.) even as the covenant blessing is reserved for the younger. AN ADDITIONAL CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE If the centuries of Jewish-Christian interaction have often been shaped by the notion that the sacrifice of Jesus is the more perfect offering (the Christian idea, though, is that God makes the sacrifice and not humans) so that the covenant blessing now passes to Christians (clearly a complete distortion of the views of the Paul of Romans but consistent to a point with the views of the author of Hebrews), then we need yet a further comment on Genesis 4. If the story of Cain is the first of a kind in this way (clearly Hebrews as well as I John and Jude claim this point), then Christians need to insist that no authentic Christian reading of any text of scripture can claim that Christians replace or supersede Jews in God’s economy and blessing.

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The conversation represented here in this dialogue on Ricoeur and the narrative of Genesis 4 is already rich, and I am confident has shown me and my colleague new directions in our thinking. I thus offer these thoughts not as a completion but a rough beginning to what must be an ongoing dialogue. That seems very much consistent with the work of Paul Ricoeur. EPILOGUE The two parts of this essay are two distinct voices which stand alone even as they are intended to be in dialogue. The intention also is that these two parts will be read and interpreted by a host of readers who will, in turn, create their own dialogue with the texts (both the essays themselves and the Biblical texts that from the focus of this chapter). We have also incorporated the work of Paul Ricoeur as one other voice that becomes both a tool for reading texts and another voice at the table regarding the texts and their meaning. Thus, the chapter implies a rich and complex interaction. That interaction is too rich to be summarized in this epilogue. Even the dialogue presumed between the two written parts of the essay is too rich to be simplified with a summary. It is better to leave the dialogue open to the plurality interpretations that will emerge in the reading of this chapter. In addition, the same can be said about the interaction between all of the essays forming the chapters in the book. On the one hand, they are standalone essays. Yet, on the other hand, they are also brought into dialogue around the multiple themes that form a reflection on Paul Ricoeur and the reading of scripture. Leaving the conversation open to invite more thinking about how Ricoeur’s work informs the reading of scripture is the point of this collection. Still, the aim is also to note a consistency of themes that show Ricoeur’s philosophical thinking about reading, interpretation, and scripture among a host of themes even more clearly when we are thinking about reading scripture. Perhaps some thoughts about the two parts of this essay can point in that direction as an invitation for yet more dialogue among all of us engaged with the work of Paul Ricoeur. The reader will notice, for example, that though focused on a single narrative from Genesis 4, the two parts of this essay select different starting points for the reflection. The two voices pick up the two themes first of the odd nature of the rejection of (or perhaps better said the judgment regarding) the two sacrificial offerings. The aim of Joseph Edelheit is to complexify this portion of the story beyond what might be standard readings. The second voice starts with the aftermath focused on the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper.” In fact, such a treatment could arise from any single author looking

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closely at the text from Genesis 4. However, this is a dialogue and represents two authors and their choices. First of all, the complexity suggested here only reinforces the Ricoeurian claim that there is a surplus of meaning in any text. Any reading begins anew with the potential for new meanings to be disclosed. On the other hand, that the two voices start at different places begs the question as to what motivates the choice. Ricoeur already sets aside many questions by arguing that we can no longer get behind any text. We are left with the presumed author(s). Thus, the reader is left with the choice as to what difference if any emerges by the choice of starting point. Does the choice of starting point impact both the reading of the text and the conclusions? The two voices are also developing themes from Ricoeur, especially the theme of discourse and argumentation. Both voices note that the two sections of the Genesis text leave us with the perplexing lack of rules for such argument. That lack of rules suggests that there is no argument in the text with the resulting meaning both for the humans (Cain and Abel) and for God. Can there be a presumed set of rules that inform the text itself beyond that which might be assumed for Cain or even for the God of the text? This question asks for context, for the world of the text. However, for Ricoeur, the world of the text stands in front of the text, in the midst of the dialogue between text and reader. One more observation could pique the interest of the reader to pursue further the discussion about both Ricoeur’s work and the Biblical text. An argument could be made that Ricoeur shapes his thinking in a profoundly dialectical way. Several examples can show this set of themes that permeate the entire corpus such as the reader and the text, explanation and understanding, manifestation and proclamation. Even more, this dialectical approach creates a hermeneutical theory that requires openness to new meaning. The dialectics are not closed but are an ongoing process flowing back and forth. This openness suggests a basic theme for dialogue—openness to novelty, to surprise, openness to the other, openness to new meaning. Even the notion of a surplus of meaning implies openness. Meaning in the reading of the text is never exhausted. Thus, could it be also argued that Ricoeur’s theory must be tested in dialogue? This also implies that there is not absolute claim to the truth since there is always this openness. No one interpretation can be claimed to be superior. Any claim to meaning requires argument and interaction and determination with some meanings likely less adequate but nevertheless always the awareness that there is always another possibility. This lack of closure is a strength to Ricoeur’s work on interpretation rendering the debate over truth as peripheral to the quest for meaning, ever new possible meanings. The openness implied allows for individual identity (holding a view) to remain without

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imagining that this requires that one identity (one view) supersedes another. The table for discussion is always open to new voices which, however, do not cancel out those that have already been at the table. NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, p. 121. 2. The Jewish Study Bible, p. 16. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as another, p. 176. 4. Ibid., p. 176–177. 5. Ibid., p. 178. 6. Ibid., p. 178–179. 7. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, p. 117. 8. Ibid., p. 121 9. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as another, p. 180. 10. Ibid., p. 190–192. 11. Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, p. 100. 12. Ibid., p. 104. 13. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, p. 118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berlin, Adele and Brettler, Marc Zvi. The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Moore, J. F. Toward a Dialogical Community: A post-Shoah Christian Theology. Lanham: University Press of America, 2004. Moore, James F. and Edelheit, Joseph. Dialogue as integral to the teaching about the Jewish Jesus. Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis. Zev Garber (Editor) New York: Routledge, 2014. Ricoeur, P. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis. Fortress Press, 1980. Ricœur, P. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. Ricœur, P. The Just. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Ricœur, P. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ricœur, P., & In Ihde, D. The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Ricœur, P., & Wallace, M. I. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Index

Arendt, 33, 38, 44 Aristotle, 18, 21, 112, 115, 226 Augustine, 62, 64, 70, 78, 192, 207, 215

144–45, 147, 149, 168–69, 173–74, 177–78, 192, 197, 226 faith, 2, 7, 121, 134, 138, 146, 156, 188, 204, 216 forgiveness, 80, 143–46, 148, 158–59, 161, 164, 166, 171–77, 179 Freud, 22, 30, 47, 116, 118, 130, 137, 139, 196, 218

Beauchamp, Paul, 62, 75–77, 79, 81, 83 Berman, Antoine, 29, 38, 40, 42–44 Buber, Martin, 109, 113, 118, 120–24, 126–27, 180, 212 conversation, 69, 111, 146, 153, 156, 163–64, 189, 195–96, 198–99, 213– 14, 221–22, 233–39 Course of Recognition, 21–22, 31, 37, 41, 43–46, 93, 141–42, 144, 157–59, 166

Gadamer, 19, 24 Genesis, 98, 103, 146, 168, 170, 172, 225–26, 228–29, 232–40 Gospels, 5, 64, 185, 192, 209, 217, 221 guilt, 133–34, 143–52, 154, 156, 158– 59, 162–64, 167, 168, 173–74, 178, 192, 236

death, 15, 48, 65–67, 87–89, 96, 104, 113, 118, 123, 131, 144–45, 152, 156, 160, 166–74, 176, 178, 190, 219, 226, 229–31, 236 Descartes, 21–22, 24, 27–28, 31–32 Dilthey, 49, 52–53, 66–67, 112 Epistles, 11, 204–5, 207–17, 221 Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 8, 13– 14, 105–7, 110, 125, 127, 197, 241 evil, 5, 15–17, 19, 62, 65, 77, 81, 89, 94, 96, 99, 104, 106, 119, 126–27,

Hegel, 21–22, 103, 119, 167 Heidegger, 21, 25–29, 36, 42, 82, 112– 14, 117–19, 121, 124, 139, 203, 207 hermeneutics, 6–9, 12–14, 21, 47, 52–53, 55, 57–58, 64, 75–77, 79, 89, 90, 92, 94–96, 100–101, 104–5, 109–15, 117–21, 123–25, 135, 137, 140, 144, 146–47, 151, 154, 156–58, 162, 183–84, 187–88, 192, 195–97, 203–6, 211–12, 215–17, 219. See also interpretation

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historical criticism, 49, 51, 53–58, 60, 63–66, 68 History and Truth, 2, 3, 12–14, 68–70, 101, 107 hope, 2–3, 12, 17, 63, 85, 88, 98, 101–3, 158, 162, 166, 170, 173, 176, 192– 93, 213, 231 Husserl, 1, 18, 21–29, 32–33, 36–37, 41, 43, 113, 154–55 interpretation, 1, 7, 51, 53, 59–61, 63, 65–67, 69, 81, 105–7, 110, 184, 196– 97, 231, 241. See also hermeneutics Jesus Christ, 5, 17–18, 64, 68, 77–78, 82, 123, 133, 135, 143, 159, 196, 204–12, 217, 238, 241 The Just, 225, 228, 232–33, 236 Levinas, 17, 24–25, 27–29, 37, 39, 43–44, 82, 161, 168, 174, 232 love, 4, 15–18, 42, 47, 62–63, 79–80, 83, 88, 105, 120, 140, 144, 146, 165, 173–76, 180, 189, 193, 205, 219–20 meaning, 1–8, 10, 12–13, 16–18, 25–26, 29, 31–33, 35, 39, 48–53, 55–64, 75–76, 80, 82–83, 89, 91, 93, 95–96, 99, 102–3, 109, 112, 114–16, 118, 120–24, 131, 134–41, 144, 169, 172, 184, 186, 190–91, 193, 213–14, 219, 227–29, 232–35, 239–41. See also understanding memory, 16, 18, 24, 30, 34, 75, 85, 92, 144–45, 158, 166–77, 214 metaphor, 35, 63–64, 81, 88, 92, 99, 110, 113, 115–16, 118, 120, 122, 171, 174, 191–93 Nabert, Jean, 96, 113, 119, 126–27 Nussbaum, Martha, 143–44, 158, 179, 228 On Translation, 12, 24, 29, 35, 37–40

Paul, the apostle, 4–6, 62, 175, 195–96, 204–8, 210–15, 217–21, 238 phenomenology, 24–28, 36, 37, 44, 76, 95, 99, 105, 113–14, 119, 124, 173, 203 philosophy, 2–4, 6–8, 10, 17, 21–28, 31–32, 35–37, 79–83, 89–91, 96–98, 100, 102–3, 105, 110, 112, 114, 119, 137, 144, 151, 155, 158, 167–68, 176–77, 183–84, 186, 188, 203 prophecy, 3–4, 84–85, 89, 91–93, 96– 98, 100–103, 115, 117, 204–5 prophets, 3, 76–77, 79, 84, 88, 92, 94– 95, 97–98, 102, 134, 203, 205–7, 209 reading, 2, 16, 17, 20, 25, 39, 67, 68, 77, 78, 81, 85, 148, 150, 153, 204, 208, 216 revelation, 3, 9, 10, 114, 116, 117, 127, 129, 131, 132, 138, 225, 226, 240 Schleiermacher, 49, 52–53, 57, 63, 66–67, 112 scripture, 2, 4–5, 12, 15–16, 49, 51, 61, 63–64, 110, 185, 193, 205, 216, 218 self, 21, 42, 90, 102, 112, 144, 146, 148, 151, 153–54, 157–59, 163, 168, 175 shame, 135, 138, 144–59, 161–64, 166, 169–80 Spinoza, 40, 51–54, 66 stigma, 39, 137–38, 145–46, 166, 169– 70, 172, 174, 177, 180 Symbolism of Evil, 18, 65, 81, 89, 94, 99, 144–45, 147, 149, 168, 170, 174, 192 testimony, 37, 94–96, 99, 110–11, 113, 118–24, 126, 149, 191, 209, 217 texts, 1–2, 6–12, 28–29, 31, 34, 36, 57, 60–61, 75–77, 79–80, 82, 85, 88–89, 92–93, 96, 109, 111–15, 130, 134, 137–39, 190–93, 203–5, 208, 211– 13, 216, 219–20, 225, 230, 232–33, 235, 238–39

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Index

theology, 3–4, 6, 8, 48, 54–55, 63, 81, 83, 109–13, 116–17, 119, 123–24, 190, 207, 212, 215 Thinking Biblically, 11, 15, 17, 87, 184, 190–92 Time and Narrative, 22, 91–93, 99, 215–16, 219 translation, 22–40, 42–43, 229 understanding, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 16–17, 30–31, 37, 42, 49, 52–53, 55, 57–58,

62–64, 75–76, 84, 89, 91–93, 95, 97, 100, 103, 105–6, 119–20, 130, 134, 137–38, 144–47, 151, 153–54, 171, 184–86, 190–92, 203–5, 207–8, 228–29, 233–34, 238, 240. See also meaning Zahavi, Dan, 145, 147, 151–57, 163, 178

About the Contributors

Stephanie Arel: Teaches at Fordam University. She was an Andrew W. Mellon fellow and researcher at the 9/1l Memorial & Museum. Her forthcoming monograph focuses on the costs of bearing witness to traumatic content as workers in the field of memorialization. She is the author of Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation as well as coeditor of Post-Traumatic Public Theology and Ideology and Utopia in the 21st Century: The Surplus of Meaning in Ricoeur’s Conception of the Dialectical Relationship of Ideology and Utopia. She has written extensively on Paul Ricoeur and is past president of the Society for Ricoeur studies (2018–2020). Barnabas Aspray: Junior Research Fellow-Pembroke College Oxford. Barnabas’ project will investigate both theoretical and practical Christian responses to refugees in the United Kingdom, using Paul Ricoeur’s ethics of selfhood and otherness. Barnabas is a philosophical theologian interested in the way religious belief and practice interact with contemporary society. His doctorate explored human finitude and transcendence in the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Kathleen Blamey: Studied with Ricoeur in Paris (1971–1986) including for her second PhD dissertation. She began translating in 1974, The Conflict of Interpretations. She taught in the philosophy at California State University, Hayward-East Bay (1986–2008). Translations of Paul Ricoeur works include The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Time and Narrative, vols. 1, 2, 3 (with David Pellauer) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988). From Text to Action. Conflict of Interpretations II (with John Thompson) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). Oneself as Another 247

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About the Contributors

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Critique and Conviction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Memory, History, Forgetting (with David Pellauer) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Philosophy, Ethics and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). Politics, Economy and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming). Brad DeFord: Was Ricoeur’s Research Assistant at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He teaches in the Edwin S. Shneidman Department of Thanatology of Marian University, WI. He is the coauthor, with Suzanne Bushfield, of End-of-Life Care and Addiction: A Family Systems Approach (2010), Springer, New York, and is the coeditor, with Richard Gilbert, of Living, Loving and Loss: the interplay of intimacy, sexuality and grief (2013), Baywood Publishing, Amityville, NY. He has published in journals as diverse as Healing Ministry, Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation and Rehabilitation Oncology. Joseph Edelheit: Emeritus Professor Religious and Jewish Studies, St. Cloud State University, MN. He studied with Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1980s. At that time, he was the Senior Rabbi of Emanuel Congregation in Chicago and invited Paul Ricoeur to give the sermon during the Holocaust Memorial Service. Ricoeur’s text, “The Memory of Suffering” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (Fortress Press, 1995). Since the beginning of the Society for Ricoeur Studies, he and James Moore have offered their Jewish/Christian Dialogues. He authored, What Am I Missing? Questions About Being Human (Wipf and Stock, 2020). He was honored as Alumnus of the Year (2021) by the Divinity School of the University of Chicago for his career in Interfaith Dialogue; he was the first Rabbi to be honored by the Divinity School. Brian Gregor: Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is the President of the Society for Ricoeur Studies, and the author of numerous articles and books, most recently  Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self (Lexington, 2019). Timo Helenius: Docent in Philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. Helenius has taught philosophy and ethics at Boston College, Mount Ida College, and the University of New Brunswick Saint John. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University from 2016 to 2019. Helenius’s research and many publications have focused on contemporary Continental philosophy in general and on Paul Ricoeur in

About the Contributors

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particular. His work: Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity (Lexington Books, 2016). Steven Kepnes: Professor of World Religions and Jewish Studies and Director of Chapel House at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. He wrote his dissertation under Paul Ricoeur at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. in the 1980s. This was published as The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Indiana, 1992). Kepnes is a founding member of the Society of Scriptural Reasoning which focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim dialogue based on group readings of scripture. He has taught at the Rabbinic School of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Jerusalem, the Religious Studies program at the University of Virginia and the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome. Andre LaCocque: Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Chicago Theological Seminary and founder-director of its Center of Jewish-Christian Studies (now, Center of Jewish, Islamic S.). He has written numerous books and articles in relation to the ThNKh and Jewish literature, in particular coauthoring with Paul Ricoeur Thinking Biblically (University of Chicago, 1998). James Moore: Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University. He is author of Sexuality and Marriage (1987), Christian Theology After the Shoah: a Re-interpretation of the Passion Narratives (1993, 2004), Post Shoah Dialogues (2004), and Toward a Dialogical Community (2004). His essay, “Cosmology and Theology: The Re-Emergence of Patriarchy,” in Zygon, won the 1996 Templeton award for best essay in theology and science, as well as numerous articles on Christian theology and the Holocaust, and on science and religion, including “The Amazing Mr. Jesus.” He has also published essays on teaching about Judaism, the Holocaust and antisemitism. He is on the editorial board of the Studies in the Shoah series of the University Press of America and the advisory board of the Wyman Institute. He is also on the board of the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science and the Executive Board of the Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust the Churches. He also contributed the article on HIV/AIDS and Religion for Religion Past and Present: an Encyclopedia of Theology, Bible and Religious Studies and contributed an article on Christianity and violence for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Violence published in 2011. He has also more recently published Self-inflicted Wounds: The Fate of the African American Community coauthored with Professor Nova Smith. Dan R. Stiver: Cook Derrick Professor of Theology in the Logsdon School of Theology of Hardin-Simmons University (2008–2019). President of the

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About the Contributors

Society for Ricoeur Studies (2010–2012). He is coeditor with Greg Johnson of the Series: On The Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Lexington Books). He coedited with Greg Johnson the first book in the series, Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy, and with Stephanie Arel, Ideology and Utopia in the Twenty-First Century: The Surplus of Meaning in Ricoeur’s Conception of the Dialectical Relationship of Ideology and Utopia. His publications include several that focus on Paul Ricoeur: The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol, and Story (Blackwell, 1996), Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Westminster John Knox, 2001), and Ricoeur and Theology (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012). Alain Thomasset, S.J.: Professor of Moral Theology—Dean of the faculty of theology Centre Sèvres—Facultés jésuites de Paris Jesuit, President of the Association of Theologians for the Study of Morality (ATEM), works with the journal Receherches de Science Religieuse, vice-president of the Jean Rodhain Foundation, editor-in-chief of the Revue d’Ethics and Moral Theology. He wrote, Paul Ricoeur: A Poetics of Morality: On the Foundations of a Hermeneutical and Narrative Ethics from a Christian Perspective (Leuven University Press, 1996). Interpréter etagir. Jalons pour une éthique chrétienne, Paris, Cerf, 2011, 422 p.; La morale de Vatican II, Médiaspaul, 2013, 150 p.; Les Vertus sociales. Justice, solidarité, compassion, hospitalité, espérance. Une éthique théologique, Lessius, Paris, Namur, 2015, 350 p.; Familles, belles et fragiles! La mise en oeuvre d'Amoris Laetitia dans l'Église (with Oranne de Mautort), Éditions jésuites, 2020.