The Enigma of Divine Revelation: Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology (Contributions to Hermeneutics, 7) 3030281310, 9783030281311

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Intersections of Revelation and Hermeneutics
1.1 Setting the Scene
1.2 The Volume
1.3 The Chapters
References
Part I: Givenness and Interpretation
Chapter 2: The Hermeneutics of Givenness
2.1 The Objection of an Obstruction
2.2 Givenness, Not Intuition
2.3 The Construction of the Myth
2.4 The Critique of Immediacy
2.5 Interpreting, or the Response to the Call
2.6 Interpreting, Reducing Itself
2.7 Giving Itself, Showing Itself: The Gap
2.8 Hermeneutics of the Gap
References
Chapter 3: Whose Word Is It Anyway? Interpreting Revelation
3.1 Secularism, Plurality, Transcendence
3.2 Philosophical Accounts of Transcendence
3.3 The Need for Discernment
3.4 Hermeneutic Resources for Discernment
3.5 Conclusion
References
Part II: The Phenomenality of Revelation
Chapter 4: Revelation as a Problem for Our Age
4.1 Revelation as a Cultural Problem
4.1.1 A Secular Age
4.1.2 The Post-secular
4.1.3 Believing and Remembering
4.2 Revelation as a Philosophical Problem
4.2.1 The Great Divorce
4.2.2 ‘Returning’ to Religion
4.2.3 Revelation as the Ethical Relation
4.3 Revelation as a Theological Problem
4.3.1 Inverting the Paradigm
4.3.2 Theology Does Not Reify Being
4.3.3 Theology of Revelation
4.4 ‘Turning’ to Theology with Phenomenology
4.4.1 The Theological Turn and Phenomenology
4.4.2 Lacoste and the Paradoxical Phenomenon
4.4.3 Marion and the Saturated Phenomenon
4.4.4 Romano and the Event
4.4.5 The Place of Faith
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Revelation and Kingdom
Chapter 6: “A Whole Habit of Mind”: Revelation and Understanding in the Christology of St. Cyril of Alexandria
Part III: Transforming Ways of Being in the World
Chapter 7: Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love
7.1 Human Communication and Hermeneutics
7.2 Hermeneutics and Revelation: The Challenge of Language
7.3 Revelation and Hermeneutics: The Event of Manifestation
7.4 The Hermeneutical Paradigms of Yale and Chicago
7.5 The Need for a Hermeneutics of Love
7.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Embodied Transactions
8.1 Many Revelations: An Old Problem and a “New” Solution
8.2 Hermeneutics and Comparative Theology: Natural Alliances and New Directions
8.3 Subjectivity as a Way into “Strange Texts”
8.3.1 Insights from a Monological Hermeneutical Space
8.3.2 Insights from a Dialogical Hermeneutical Space
8.4 Embodied Subjectivity
8.4.1 The Habits That Make Bodies
8.4.2 Embodied Religious Identity at the Confluence of Other Identities
8.4.3 Comparative Theology as a Gateway to Somaesthetic Practice
References
Chapter 9: Into the Blue: Swimming as a Metaphor for Revelation
9.1 Full Disclosure
9.2 Submitting to Submission
9.3 The Weight of Water
9.4 Getting a Feel for the Other
9.5 Faith as Fluid
9.6 Mourning as a Faithful Response to Revelation
9.7 From Mourning to Empathy
Chapter 10: Revelation as Sharing in God’s Self-Understanding as Absolute Love
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Christian Tradition on the Scope and Content of Christian Revelation
10.2.1 The Perspective from Vatican I’s Dei Filius to Vatican II’s Dei Verbum
10.2.2 Yves Congar’s Retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s Evangelical Roots
10.2.3 The Perspective of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum
10.3 The Cognitive Function of Meaning and the Distinction Between Nature and Supernature
10.3.1 Beyond Both Extrinsicism and Reductionism: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth on the Gift of Revelation and the Pre-Vatican II Consensus
10.3.2 The Eastern Orthodox Rejection of the Nature/Supernature Distinction
10.3.3 The Theorem of the Supernatural and the Vertical Finality of the Created Cosmos
10.4 Receiving Divine Revelation: Counter-Positions and Positions
10.4.1 Overcoming the Deficits of Ahistorical Orthodoxy
10.4.2 Thomas Aquinas on the Light of Faith and of Prophecy in Relation to Theology
10.4.3 The Light of Glory and the Revelatory Role of Christ Jesus
10.4.4 The Holy Spirit’s Role in the Communicating and Receiving of Revelation
10.5 The Analogy of Light: From Faculty Psychology to Intentionality Analysis
10.5.1 The Transposition into the Perspective of the Primacy of Love
10.5.2 Receiving Revelation: The Distinction Between Faith and Belief
10.6 Revelation and Sin, Evil, and Redemption: ‘Love Alone Is Credible’
10.6.1 The Revelation of Sin and Evil
10.6.2 The Revelation of the Law of the Cross
10.7 Conclusion
Part IV: The Future of Revelation, Propositions (Revisited), and Close Reading
Chapter 11: Ta’wīl in the Qur’an and the Islamic Exegetical Tradition: the Past and the Future of the Qur’an
11.1 The Qur’an and Its “Past”
11.2 Qur’anic Exegesis: Tafsīr and Ta’wīl
11.3 The Importance and Limitations of a Hermeneutics of the Past
11.4 Ta’wīl as the Unfolding of Meaning over Time
11.5 Conclusion
Chapter 12: The Logic of Revelation
12.1 Revelation as Revealing First Premises
12.1.1 The Reality of Revelation
12.1.2 Indexicality as Mark of the Reality of Revelation
12.1.3 Predication as Non-given: The Danger of Idolatry
12.2 “Say to” (dibber l’): Revelation as Relational
12.2.1 Predications of Revelation Appear as Consequences of the Worldly Conditions of Revelation
12.2.2 Revelation Is Received by Human Language Communities (Without Precluding Other Modes of Creaturely Reception)
12.2.3 As Mattan Torah, Revelation Displays and Enacts Relations Between God and Israel
12.3 Dibber, davar (Speaking, Spoken-Thing): Revelation as Event-Relation to Creation
12.3.1 Creatures as Things
12.3.2 Revelation as Relation of God to God’s Word
12.4 Peshat (“Plain Sense” Reading) and derash (Interpretive Reading)
12.4.1 Plain Sense Is Given but Non-predicative
12.4.2 Derash, Interpreted Meaning, Is Predicative, Relational, Historically Conditioned, and it Is Authoritative Only When and Where It Is Articulated
12.5 Pagam (“Maculation,” Error and Sin): The Case of dochok (“Forced Reading”) or halakhah l’moshe misinai
Chapter 13: Revelatory Hermeneutics: How to Read a Gospel, in Light of Mīmāṃsā, India’s Greatest Interpretive Tradition
13.1 Mīmāṃsā: A Distinctively Indian Hermeneutics
13.2 Hermeneutics at Work
13.3 Hermeneutics Is Revelation
13.4 From Mīmāṃsā to Other Hermeneutics: Reading with the Rabbis and Wittgenstein
13.5 Vedānta’s Mīmāṃsā Hermeneutics of a Revelation Beyond the Text
13.6 Reading the Gospels after Mīmāṃsā
13.7 What a Mīmāṃsā Reader Might Look for in the Gospel According to John
13.8 In Conclusion: Revelation as Hermeneutics

Citation preview

Contributions to Hermeneutics 7

Jean-Luc Marion Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer Editors

The Enigma of Divine Revelation Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology

Contributions to Hermeneutics Volume 7

Series Editors Jeffery Malpas, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia Claude Romano, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France Editorial Board Jean Grondin, University of Montréal, Canada Robert Dostal, Bryn Mawr College, USA Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, UK Françoise Dastur, Nice, France Kevin Hart, University of Virginia, USA David Tracy, Univeristy of Chicago, USA Jean-Claude Gens, University of Bourgogne, France Richard Kearney, Boston College, USA Gianni Vattimo, University of Turin, Italy Carmine Di Martino, University of Milan, Italy Luis Umbellino, University of Coimbra, Portugal Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK Marc-Antoine Vallée, Fonds Ricoeur, Paris, France Gonçalo Marcelo, University of Lisbon, Portugal Csaba Olay, University of Budapest, Hungary Patricio Mena-Malet, University Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile Andrea Bellantone, Catholic Institute of Toulouse, France Hans-Helmuth Gander, University of Freiburg, Germany Gaetano Chiurazzi, University of Turin, Italy Anibal Fornari, Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina

Hermeneutics is one of the main traditions within recent and contemporary European philosophy, and yet, as a distinctive mode of philosophising, it has often received much less attention than other similar traditions such as phenomenology, deconstruction or even critical theory. This series aims to rectify this relative neglect and to reaffirm the character of hermeneutics as a cohesive, distinctive, and rigorous stream within contemporary philosophy. The series will encourage works that focus on the history of hermeneutics prior to the twentieth century, that take up figures from the classical twentieth-century hermeneutic canon (including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, but also such as Strauss, Pareyson, Taylor and Rorty), that engage with key hermeneutic questions and themes (especially those relating to language, history, aesthetics, and truth), that explore the cross-cultural relevance and spread of hermeneutic concerns, and that also address hermeneutics in its interconnection with, and involvement in, other disciplines from architecture to theology. A key task of the series will be to bring into English the work of hermeneutic scholars working outside of the English-speaking world, while also demonstrating the relevance of hermeneutics to key contemporary debates. Since hermeneutics can itself be seen to stand between, and often to overlap with, many different contemporary philosophical traditions, the series will also aim at stimulating and supporting philosophical dialogue through hermeneutical engagement. Contributions to Hermeneutics aims to draw together the diverse field of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics through a series of volumes that will give an increased focus to hermeneutics as a discipline while also reflecting the interdisciplinary and truly international scope of hermeneutic inquiry. The series will encourage works that focus on both contemporary hermeneutics as well as its history, on specific hermeneutic themes and areas of inquiry (including theological and religious hermeneutics), and on hermeneutic dialogue across cultures and disciplines.All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13358

Jean-Luc Marion  •  Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer Editors

The Enigma of Divine Revelation Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology

Editors Jean-Luc Marion University of Chicago Divinity School Chicago, IL, USA

Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry Australian Catholic University East Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2509-6087     ISSN 2509-6095 (electronic) Contributions to Hermeneutics ISBN 978-3-030-28131-1    ISBN 978-3-030-28132-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Intersections of Revelation and Hermeneutics��������������    1 Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer 1.1 Setting the Scene����������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 The Volume ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 1.3 The Chapters ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   14 Part I Givenness and Interpretation 2 The Hermeneutics of Givenness�������������������������������������������������������������   17 Jean-Luc Marion 2.1 The Objection of an Obstruction����������������������������������������������������   17 2.2 Givenness, Not Intuition ����������������������������������������������������������������   21 2.3 The Construction of the Myth��������������������������������������������������������   24 2.4 The Critique of Immediacy ������������������������������������������������������������   28 2.5 Interpreting, or the Response to the Call����������������������������������������   32 2.6 Interpreting, Reducing Itself ����������������������������������������������������������   36 2.7 Giving Itself, Showing Itself: The Gap ������������������������������������������   39 2.8 Hermeneutics of the Gap����������������������������������������������������������������   40 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   45 3 Whose Word Is It Anyway? Interpreting Revelation���������������������������   49 Shane Mackinlay 3.1 Secularism, Plurality, Transcendence ��������������������������������������������   51 3.2 Philosophical Accounts of Transcendence��������������������������������������   52 3.3 The Need for Discernment��������������������������������������������������������������   56 3.4 Hermeneutic Resources for Discernment ��������������������������������������   59 3.5 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   62 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   62

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Part II The Phenomenality of Revelation 4 Revelation as a Problem for Our Age����������������������������������������������������   67 Robyn Horner 4.1 Revelation as a Cultural Problem����������������������������������������������������   70 4.1.1 A Secular Age ������������������������������������������������������������������   70 4.1.2 The Post-secular����������������������������������������������������������������   72 4.1.3 Believing and Remembering��������������������������������������������   73 4.2 Revelation as a Philosophical Problem������������������������������������������   76 4.2.1 The Great Divorce������������������������������������������������������������   76 4.2.2 ‘Returning’ to Religion ����������������������������������������������������   77 4.2.3 Revelation as the Ethical Relation������������������������������������   80 4.3 Revelation as a Theological Problem����������������������������������������������   81 4.3.1 Inverting the Paradigm������������������������������������������������������   82 4.3.2 Theology Does Not Reify Being��������������������������������������   83 4.3.3 Theology of Revelation����������������������������������������������������   87 4.4 ‘Turning’ to Theology with Phenomenology����������������������������������   91 4.4.1 The Theological Turn and Phenomenology����������������������   92 4.4.2 Lacoste and the Paradoxical Phenomenon������������������������   94 4.4.3 Marion and the Saturated Phenomenon����������������������������   96 4.4.4 Romano and the Event������������������������������������������������������   98 4.4.5 The Place of Faith ������������������������������������������������������������   98 Bibliography����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  100 5 Revelation and Kingdom ������������������������������������������������������������������������  107 Kevin Hart 6 “A Whole Habit of Mind”: Revelation and Understanding in the Christology of St. Cyril of Alexandria����������������������������������������  119 William C. Hackett Part III Transforming Ways of Being in the World 7 Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love ��������������������������������������������  133 Werner G. Jeanrond 7.1 Human Communication and Hermeneutics������������������������������������  133 7.2 Hermeneutics and Revelation: The Challenge of Language����������  134 7.3 Revelation and Hermeneutics: The Event of Manifestation ����������  140 7.4 The Hermeneutical Paradigms of Yale and Chicago����������������������  142 7.5 The Need for a Hermeneutics of Love��������������������������������������������  144 7.6 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  148 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149

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8 Embodied Transactions ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 Mara Brecht 8.1 Many Revelations: An Old Problem and a “New” Solution ����������  153 8.2 Hermeneutics and Comparative Theology: Natural Alliances and New Directions��������������������������������������������������������  156 8.3 Subjectivity as a Way into “Strange Texts”������������������������������������  158 8.3.1 Insights from a Monological Hermeneutical Space����������  159 8.3.2 Insights from a Dialogical Hermeneutical Space��������������  163 8.4 Embodied Subjectivity��������������������������������������������������������������������  165 8.4.1 The Habits That Make Bodies������������������������������������������  165 8.4.2 Embodied Religious Identity at the Confluence of Other Identities ������������������������������������������������������������  167 8.4.3 Comparative Theology as a Gateway to Somaesthetic Practice ��������������������������������������������������  170 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  173 9 Into the Blue: Swimming as a Metaphor for Revelation����������������������  177 Michele Saracino 9.1 Full Disclosure��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  180 9.2 Submitting to Submission ��������������������������������������������������������������  181 9.3 The Weight of Water ����������������������������������������������������������������������  184 9.4 Getting a Feel for the Other������������������������������������������������������������  187 9.5 Faith as Fluid����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  189 9.6 Mourning as a Faithful Response to Revelation ����������������������������  191 9.7 From Mourning to Empathy ����������������������������������������������������������  192 10 Revelation as Sharing in God’s Self-­Understanding as Absolute Love��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 Frederick G. Lawrence 10.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  198 10.2 Christian Tradition on the Scope and Content of Christian Revelation ������������������������������������������������������������������  198 10.2.1 The Perspective from Vatican I’s Dei Filius to Vatican II’s Dei Verbum������������������������������������������������  198 10.2.2 Yves Congar’s Retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s Evangelical Roots��������������������������������������������������������������  200 10.2.3 The Perspective of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum����������������������  202 10.3 The Cognitive Function of Meaning and the Distinction Between Nature and Supernature����������������������������������������������������  203 10.3.1 Beyond Both Extrinsicism and Reductionism: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth on the Gift of Revelation and the Pre-Vatican II Consensus ��������������  203 10.3.2 The Eastern Orthodox Rejection of the Nature/Supernature Distinction������������������������������  205 10.3.3 The Theorem of the Supernatural and the Vertical Finality of the Created Cosmos����������������������������������������  206

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10.4 Receiving Divine Revelation: Counter-Positions and Positions ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  206 10.4.1 Overcoming the Deficits of Ahistorical Orthodoxy����������  207 10.4.2 Thomas Aquinas on the Light of Faith and of Prophecy in Relation to Theology��������������������������  208 10.4.3 The Light of Glory and the Revelatory Role of Christ Jesus ������������������������������������������������������������������  213 10.4.4 The Holy Spirit’s Role in the Communicating and Receiving of Revelation ��������������������������������������������  215 10.5 The Analogy of Light: From Faculty Psychology to Intentionality Analysis����������������������������������������������������������������  216 10.5.1 The Transposition into the Perspective of the Primacy of Love������������������������������������������������������  217 10.5.2 Receiving Revelation: The Distinction Between Faith and Belief ����������������������������������������������������������������  222 10.6 Revelation and Sin, Evil, and Redemption: ‘Love Alone Is Credible’��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  224 10.6.1 The Revelation of Sin and Evil ����������������������������������������  225 10.6.2 The Revelation of the Law of the Cross����������������������������  229 10.7 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  233 Part IV The Future of Revelation, Propositions (Revisited), and Close Reading 11 Ta’wīl in the Qur’an and the Islamic Exegetical Tradition: the Past and the Future of the Qur’an ��������������������������������������������������  237 Maria Massi Dakake 11.1 The Qur’an and Its “Past” ��������������������������������������������������������������  239 11.2 Qur’anic Exegesis: Tafsīr and Ta’wīl����������������������������������������������  242 11.3 The Importance and Limitations of a Hermeneutics of the Past����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  247 11.4 Ta’wīl as the Unfolding of Meaning over Time������������������������������  251 11.5 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  258 12 The Logic of Revelation��������������������������������������������������������������������������  261 Peter Ochs 12.1 Revelation as Revealing First Premises������������������������������������������  264 12.1.1 The Reality of Revelation ������������������������������������������������  264 12.1.2 Indexicality as Mark of the Reality of Revelation������������  264 12.1.3 Predication as Non-given: The Danger of Idolatry ����������  266 12.2 “Say to” (dibber l’): Revelation as Relational��������������������������������  267 12.2.1 Predications of Revelation Appear as Consequences of the Worldly Conditions of Revelation��������������������������  267 12.2.2 Revelation Is Received by Human Language Communities (Without Precluding Other Modes of Creaturely Reception) ��������������������������������������������������  268 12.2.3 As Mattan Torah, Revelation Displays and Enacts Relations Between God and Israel������������������������������������  269

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12.3 Dibber, davar (Speaking, Spoken-Thing): Revelation as Event-­Relation to Creation ��������������������������������������������������������  269 12.3.1 Creatures as Things ����������������������������������������������������������  270 12.3.2 Revelation as Relation of God to God’s Word������������������  270 12.4 Peshat (“Plain Sense” Reading) and derash (Interpretive Reading) ��������������������������������������������������������������������  271 12.4.1 Plain Sense Is Given but Non-predicative������������������������  271 12.4.2 Derash, Interpreted Meaning, Is Predicative, Relational, Historically Conditioned, and it Is Authoritative Only When and Where It Is Articulated ����������������������������������������������  272 12.5 Pagam (“Maculation,” Error and Sin): The Case of dochok (“Forced Reading”) or halakhah l’moshe misinai ��������  277 13 Revelatory Hermeneutics: How to Read a Gospel, in Light of Mīmāṃsā, India’s Greatest Interpretive Tradition��������������������������  283 Francis X. Clooney SJ 13.1 Mīmāṃsā: A Distinctively Indian Hermeneutics����������������������������  284 13.2 Hermeneutics at Work��������������������������������������������������������������������  287 13.3 Hermeneutics Is Revelation������������������������������������������������������������  291 13.4 From Mīmāṃsā to Other Hermeneutics: Reading with the Rabbis and Wittgenstein ��������������������������������������������������  292 13.5 Vedānta’s Mīmāṃsā Hermeneutics of a Revelation Beyond the Text������������������������������������������������������������������������������  294 13.6 Reading the Gospels after Mīmāṃsā����������������������������������������������  296 13.7 What a Mīmāṃsā Reader Might Look for in the Gospel According to John ����������������������������������������������  297 13.8 In Conclusion: Revelation as Hermeneutics ����������������������������������  300

Chapter 1

Introduction: Intersections of Revelation and Hermeneutics Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer

Abstract  This introductory chapter begins by contextualizing the volume with reference both to post-conciliar shifts in understanding divine revelation as God’s selfcommunication in Christ, and to tensions surrounding the Papacy of Francis and his affirmation of creativity in ecclesial renewal. The chapter explains the overarching theme to which the authors respond – namely, the intersection of revelation and hermeneutics – and proposes that, taken as a whole, the essays illustrate a dynamic movement in contemporary discourse on revelation. That movement begins with the problem of historically mediated transcendence and proceeds to reflection on the transformative power of this complex area of speech. The second part of this introductory chapter includes brief descriptions of each of the essays. Keywords  Phenomenology · Hermeneutics · Revelation · Vatican II · Pope Francis

1.1  Setting the Scene “Catholicism can and must change, Francis forcefully tells Italian church gathering.” So the title of the article in the National Catholic Reporter read after Pope Francis addressed the participants of the 5th convention of the Italian Church on 10th November 2015. The title captures something important about the time of Francis and the ongoing tensions of the post-Conciliar Church about how to live and teach the Catholic faith. In fact, Francis rarely prevaricates on the question of how the church should understand the practice of its faithfulness, and despite the anxieties of his detractors over the integrity of revealed truth, he consistently encourages

C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (*) Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, East Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_1

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Catholics to embrace change, not deny or punish it. For Francis, pitting doctrinal faithfulness and pastoral innovation against each other betrays misshapen theological sensibilities. It poses a false problem. Addressing the Italian Church, he said: We are not living in an era of change but a change of era…Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally…Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives -- but is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened. It has a face that is not rigid, it has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ (McElwee 2015).1

Francis’s remarks illustrate a deepening shift. The Second Vatican Council broke dramatically with the manual tradition that preceded it by conceiving revelation in terms of the self-communication of God (see the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei verbum). The Council upheld the permanence of dogma, arguably the main concern of the Council’s critics (as well as Francis’s), but significantly shifted the frame for understanding it. Rather than focusing on a set of clearly defined propositions, which regulate and inform Christian belief and practice, the Council placed revealed truth in the interpersonal context of faithful relation with Jesus. As Richard Gaillardetz suggests, with reference to Dei verbum, “The Church does not so much possess revelation as it is possessed by it; the church is called to live into divine truth” (2016, 75). More than a conceptual move, this understanding of revelation marks a tremendous shift for Christian life and ecclesial culture. It contributes to what Pope John XXIII wanted the Council to do for the church – “to open the windows and let in the fresh air” – and keeps open the possibilities for renewal, as Francis attests. Where John XXIII, in his opening address of the Council, recognized the obligation of the church to communicate the substance of the faith according to changing circumstances, Francis speaks of doctrine itself as active and alive, “generating questions, doubts, interrogatives.” His way of speaking implores Catholics not to adhere to theological postures (i.e., ways of being Catholic) that would stifle their responsiveness to the pressing pastoral needs of their communities. Christian doctrine has a pastoral orientation, he avers. Despite his critics’ strong stance on continuity, he urges Catholics to recognize that being faithful entails creative activity. Such concerns inform the background of this volume. Exactly how faithful creativity reconciles the gift of revelation and the activity of the church poses a significant theological problem in our cultural moment. The way theologians resolve this relation depends at least partly on their basic commitments regarding the nature 1  The material here is cited from the NCR article. For the text of Francis’s speech, see his Meeting with the Participants in the Fifth Convention of the Italian Catholic Church: Address of the Holy Father, accessed 18 Feb 2019: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/november/documents/papa-francesco_20151110_firenze-convegno-chiesa-italiana.html. The material of this address informs his more recent Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate: On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, see the Vatican website, accessed 18 Feb 2019: http://w2.vatican.va/ content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_ gaudete-et-exsultate.html

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of human understanding and the conditions of knowledge. These issues lie beneath both the endless contestations of the meaning of the Council as well as the controversies surrounding Francis.

1.2  The Volume The contributors to this volume address the theme of revelation and hermeneutics at a foundational level. Rather than resolve cultural polemics, or reframe historical debates, they address the constructive interactions of the terms. Importantly, they explain these interactions according to the different forms of philosophical thinking they practice and the different traditions they engage: phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-phenomenological discourse, semiotics, and Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Hindu exegesis are all represented here. Against this variety of commitments, the authors consider a series of rather broadly constructed questions. How does revelation connect with hermeneutics? How does it inform or constrain hermeneutics and vice versa? What counts as revelation? Is that not already a hermeneutical choice? Though the array of approaches prevents any unifying principle or thesis to emerge in this volume, the essays display, I suggest, a certain movement (however dispersed) on the weight of thinking about revelation in several corners of the academy. The weight settles at first on a distinctive difficulty. The interaction of revelation and hermeneutics unavoidably generates polemics over the conditions of possibility and impossibility for divine self-disclosure. But the theme also sparks considerations of the relation of theory and practice that move the discourse away from merely epistemic concerns. Bald assertions of truth give way to reflection on what happens in the course of living out what revelation gives and demands. It becomes a discourse as much about the effects of this complex area of speech as about the content. A sacramental logic takes over  – bringing about the very thing represented – whereby theology cannot gainsay the participatory and transformational dimensions of its theme. Jean-Luc Marion’s incisive discussion of the “delay to interpretation” (a conspicuously tantalizing phrase for this volume) in his earlier work demonstrates this point so very well: “…theological progress,” he writes, “would indicate less an undetermined, ambiguous, and sterile groping, than the absolutely infinite unfolding of possibilities already realized in the Word but not yet in us and our words; in short the infinite freedom of the Word in our words, and reciprocally” (1991, 158). What I gather from these essays resembles this movement of theological reflection starting in one place only to end up in a much richer position. The constructive problem of historically mediated transcendence may focus the theme of revelation and hermeneutics at first glance, but in the end it seems less critical (if not distracting) than grappling with the kind of change in persons and communities that this area of speech addresses. In fact, the resolution of the former seems to unfold best

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not by endless theorizing on its own terms, but rather by a multivalent (including the contemplative) reflection on the latter. In what follows, I attempt briefly to elaborate this suggestion and then offer short descriptions of each of the chapters. First, then, the constructive problem. How can theology account for speech that occurs at a given time and place, addresses specific persons and communities, and yet claims in some way to come from somewhere else and say something far more essential to human destiny than any human achievement? Such language invariably takes shape in specific ways and contexts. It functions dramatically in networks of social relations and often with remarkably predictable results. As a particular way of speaking, it bears the characteristics of a finite, historical, human project, demonstrating human concerns and foibles, and yet at the same time claims something more. The theological language of revelation purports to say something that no human person or community could simply manufacture or impose. By many accounts, it has the character of a gift. Revelation thus poses a problem: invoking a territory beyond the control of earthly powers, it remains thoroughly tied to the linguistic constraints of human understanding. What comes from somewhere else, if recognized as such, comes in language. That language of revelation confronts theology with this formidable challenge – that is, to negotiate the impact of a transcendent gift with human power and history – suggests perhaps unsurprisingly that theology can miss the mark. It misses by not treating its subject matter in terms that are appropriate to its otherness, and at the same time by emphasizing that otherness in ways that undermine critical reflection. It can domesticate the impact of revelation by relying too heavily on ordinary categories of experience and rationality, but it can also displace those categories in ways that threaten to create insular communities by restricting genuine knowledge to the normativity of a particular culture and language. The attempt to negotiate this tension constructively brings theology to an intersection of sorts: thinking the possibility of revelation and its implications requires us to think also about the nature of human understanding. In other words, a theology of revelation has to take account (an interpretation) of interpretation by virtue of its very subject. Revelation and hermeneutics go together. Many of the contributions to this volume critique a propositional approach to revelation because it undercuts the practice of interpretation and the role of community in determining both what counts as revelation and what it means and implies. A theology of revelation has to contend with the often ambivalent character of the particularities of human history if it should make a critical claim that neither dismisses nor strong arms objections; these hermeneutical considerations can helpfully limit speech about revelation. On the other hand, the propositional approach attracts criticism in the essays that follow because it also overestimates or wrongly configures the kind of certainty that theology can claim in this territory. It tries to fully control what must otherwise remain uncontrollable material. Attentiveness to the way that revelation gestures in and to a different register of speaking suggests that a theology of revelation may also open spaces of learning about learning. The weight

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of the pendulum swings to the other side, the transformative power of revelation. Rather than undermine the hermeneutics of critical history, revelation may very well enrich a theory of interpretation with (for lack of adequate words) something more.2 The idea that the language of revelation does something more excessive and complex than simply impart information about God and the world repeats in various ways in these essays. In fact, it seems to me that they push us to go even further: taken together, they suggest that because this language does something other than merely impart information for theology to transmit, it also holds in abeyance the very meaning of revelation in a way that deeply inflects any reflection devoted to it. The authors here do not presuppose a single definition of revelation, or theology for that matter (nor do they need to), and seem content to shape these terms in the ­process rather than depend on them at the outset. The important question thus focuses not on how the content of revelation enters the world of human (linguistic) affairs, but rather on the risk that theology may betray that content if it attempts simply to trot it out in advance of thinking about what communication of it entails or perhaps initiates. Even beginning with a range of culturally laden ideas about revelation, as a matter of being thrown into a lifeworld, it remains the case that only by stripping away mistaken assumptions about its objectification (or objectness) and its implication (or not) in historical relations of power can we in fact grasp something true of its language, if not speak truly within its register. The force of this stripping away extends beyond a strictly epistemic problem, a question about the conditions of knowledge, and anticipates the existential transformation of the person, the communal environment, or the cosmos. The intersections at stake in this volume suggest that a nuanced approach to revelation recognizes more promise than peril in analyses of history and interpretation. Such sensibilities certainly are not obvious if only because many voices within modern theology negotiate the relationship with historical study very differently and often in line with narrowly epistemic conceptions. These tensions predate their iterations in contemporary controversies. As Johann Adam Möhler remarked in the early nineteenth century, the terms can seem plainly contradictory. “How is it possible,” he asked, “for the truth given by Christ to have a history? We cannot conceive of a history in any other way than that some object passes through a series of changes. But it has been said that the truth revealed and imparted by Christ is to remain as it was originally given” (1971, xiii). The modern era inherits from sixteenth century scholastic theologians a concept of revelation – whether as a divine deposit of truth (Catholics) or the truth of Scripture (Protestants) – that generates a series of familiar difficulties. It leads rather anxiously to the challenge of resolving historical contingencies with (revelation-understood-as-) the truth of Christian doctrine as well as a host of other equally crucial, related aspects of faith (e.g., the authority of God and the church, the efficacy of the sacraments). It also tends to

2  For example, see the discussion of saturated phenomena in Marion’s chapter and his reconfiguration of hermeneutics as radically phenomenological.

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cover over its own historical particularity and inspire a variety of one-sided attempts: integrating historical study in a way that rustles in and neatly proof-texts commitments to the authority of a specific confession of faith. The essays here are less sanguine about the assumptions that motivate this uneasy relationship with history. Both Kevin Hart and Frederick Lawrence chart historical trajectories in discourse on revelation that arrive at the remarkably fresh horizon of Vatican II (as mentioned above). Not that this horizon jettisons belief, or parts ways with earlier ecumenical councils, but rather that it moves away from the propositional notion of revelation and focuses on the person of Jesus: again, revelation as God’s self-­ communication in Christ. The shift here places the truth of Christian doctrine in the far richer, more expansive and participatory context of God’s redeeming love for all of creation. Beyond narrow propositional structures, the language of revelation now invites the variegated and complex forms of critical theological exploration that the subject matter of Jesus’ personal presence in history, sacrament, and prayer requires. Exactly how theology should move forward in this space remains significantly unwritten, but the shift in focus marks a generative horizon. “Although those framing Dei Verbum do not use this language,” writes Hart, “we have quietly slipped from theological epistemology to phenomenology.” In fact, as our authors recognize, this shift exemplified by the Council harmonizes at some level theological styles as disparate and unlikely as G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and Karl Rahner (Hart) and Hans Urs von Balthasar and again Karl Barth (Lawrence). The movement to phenomenology, as Hart recognizes it, illustrates a specific point of interest of this volume. What forms of phenomenology – or of philosophical thinking in general – are most appropriate to negotiating the otherness of revelation and the structure of human understanding? As an example, where Hart’s essay considers the task of “thinking the manifestation of Christ in its own terms,” drawing on the resources of phenomenality, Werner Jeanrond begins his essay underscoring the impossibility of bypassing our hermeneutical predicament and asks about the “measure of subjective involvement” in linguistic processes that condition theological hermeneutics. Of course, these essays negotiate both sides of this demanding tension  – givenness and interpretation  – together, but the volume’s theme suggests the possibility of reading the essays in critical conversation. Indeed, the different essays address a wide range of concerns around language, power, authority, the body, the banal, the excessive, the catastrophic, time and hope (to name only a few), and despite the grievances of many authors over propositional styles, Peter Ochs gives a more appreciative, constructive reading of propositions. The variations are generative, I suggest, and at times explicitly engaged with each other. Where several essays contend that Marion’s innovative use of “saturated phenomena” opens constructive possibilities, for example, Shane MacKinlay’s chapter echoes opponents who argue that Marion’s approach renders the subject too passive. Our volume, in fact, begins here.

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1.3  The Chapters Titled “The Hermeneutics of Givenness,” Marion’s essay offers a thoroughgoing response to critics who suspect that his phenomenology of givenness insufficiently attends to (if not undermines) hermeneutics.3 More than an isolated or marginal argument within Marion’s extensive oeuvre, the criticisms take exception with the very heart of his constructive project. A phenomenology that focuses on pure givenness imposes a certain form of quietism, they say. It cloisters the given by shutting out critical interpretation and undercutting discursivity. These criticisms tie into central intersections at stake in our volume; they echo concerns that certain discourses on revelation effectively overload the authority of belief by neglecting to account for underlying interpretive decisions. Where the essay here focuses strictly on the notion of the given as such and its relation to hermeneutics, readers familiar with Marion’s work will make connections with his Gifford lectures (published also in 2016) and his thesis that Christ appears as the saturated phenomenon par excellence. His essay in this volume addresses the crucial issues at stake in any speech about revelation that would draw constructively on phenomenality’s resources. Returning to the notion of givenness, what Heidegger called the “magic word” of phenomenology, Marion challenges his critics to re-evaluate their assumptions. The given as such seems to them pitted against hermeneutics because they conceive givenness problematically, as furnishing, writes Marion, “an objectifiable phenomenon, one therefore constituted by a univocal sense, which would neither tolerate nor require any interpretation.” Recasting the notion of the given against mistaken assumptions, Marion makes two key, clarifying moves. (1) He distinguishes givenness from intuition and (echoing Husserl and Heidegger) warns against conflating it with anything in the “horizon of objectness or thingness.” (2) He also rejects the assumption of its immediacy (as in sense data), and thus repositions both givenness and hermeneutics as “enigmas” that trouble ordinary dichotomies (immediate and mediate). In short, Marion exposes the fraught attachment to a Lockean paradigm of representation that underwrites familiar critiques of the purported “myth of the given.” He reverses his critics’ accusations: the unconditioned universality of givenness demands rather than forbids hermeneutics, and in a way that problematizes common assumptions on both sides. In the essay’s latter half, he goes a step further, drawing favourably on Gadamer. Rather than clarify the hermeneutical status of phenomenology, which may yet concede too much to his critics, Marion argues that a proper understanding of givenness allows us to appreciate the radically phenomenological status of hermeneutics. “Far from hermeneutics exceeding givenness or substituting itself for it,” he writes, “it is unfurled in it.” As noted above, Mackinlay’s essay offers a critic’s perspective on these same issues. He foregrounds concerns over authority and the capacity of phenomenology for self-criticism. He begins with the conceptual difficulty of the theme: If Jesus 3  Translated by Sarah Horton for this volume, the essay was originally published in Reprise du Donné (Paris: PUF, 2016) 59–97.

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reveals the Father’s will to his disciples, giving to them “something of the beyond,” still the disciples understand the phenomena according to what they bring to the experience and how they interpret it. The word that claims divine authority displays their claim, too. How then can we account for the possibility of revelation without also negating it by reducing its transcendent character to the plane of immanence? Mackinlay notes that Marion addresses this problem in “The Possible and Revelation” (2008), and suggests that his notion of “counter-experience” – or what Hart (following Blanchot) calls “experience of nonexperience” (2003) – goes a long way towards resolving this difficulty. He also recognizes a nest of persistent problems, however. The phenomenality of counter-experience seems insufficient for discerning divine revelation against the possibilities of deceit and harm. How do we know the difference between God’s voice and a monstrosity (à la Richard Kearney’s objection)? Echoing concerns mentioned above, Mackinlay suggests that Marion’s phenomenology leads to an impasse: either counter-experience undermines interpretation and lacks resources for self-criticism, or it allows assessment, which entails objectification, and no longer constitutes the same experience. Strikingly, as with Marion’s essay, Mackinlay draws constructively on Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Though readers will judge the extent to which they agree or not, Mackinlay’s proposal in a sense favours this result. Emphasizing the importance of multiple readings, he recommends “a critical and modest hermeneutics of the phenomenon in its actual appearing, undertaken in dialogue with others who propose interpretations of it.” Robyn Horner’s essay applies the resources of phenomenology to the complex challenge of speaking about revelation in the context of Western secularity, as in her title: “Revelation as a Problem for Our Age.” She recognizes that language of revelation often falls flat in three different registers. (1) Culturally, it has little purchase in secular milieux that carve commonsense out of immanence and scarcely invest in the linguistic resources needed for making good sense of it. Quite literally, revelation can seem out of place – that is, anachronistic, irrelevant or simply bizarre. (2) The discipline of philosophy often stunts conversation on revelation too, because of various commitments or biases (e.g., empiricism, positivism, or any notion of reason allergic to the particularity of religious belief) that disqualify it. Arguing for more critical, expansive consideration of the theme, and in a way that crosses traditional boundaries of philosophy and theology, Horner proposes that phenomenology’s attentiveness to interruptions of ordinary conceptions of experience and belief (à la Marion’s “saturated phenomenon” and Jean-Yves Lacoste’s “paradoxical phenomenon”) can revitalize speech about God’s engagement with the world. (3) Likewise, she argues that theology on its own has not fared much better as a home for revelation because of its history of focusing too narrowly on propositional content and neglecting lived experience. But if we rethink revelation in terms of a phenomenology of experience rather than mere belief, suggests Horner, we can develop ways of speaking that embrace Vatican II’s legacy of a relational notion of revelation, and that connect as meaningful possibilities within our fragmented, secular environments.

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Kevin Hart elegantly illuminates the way that language of revelation draws us into a confrontation that does more than challenge ordinary ways of thinking (and praying, in fact). He notes key historical transitions in conceptualizing and speaking about revelation, tracking the entrance of “reuelacion” in English to the late fourteenth century, and suggests that since Vatican II “revelation” invites us to phenomenological reflection on how Christ manifests himself. “I want to suggest,” writes Hart, “that Jesus stands out only when we view him within the horizon of the Kingdom that he preached, which itself can be understood only within the horizon of his Judaism, which includes the enthronement psalms, the Targum of Isaiah, and the title ‘King of the Jews’ [βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων].” Where critics often accuse phenomenology of neglecting hermeneutical concerns with textuality and historicity, Hart’s thesis displays incisive sensitivity to the importance of texts, the c­ entrality of interpretation, and the history of concepts. But he also avoids reducing the Kingdom to a natural phenomenon, merely an idea introduced into positive history, as many versions of liberal Christianity propose. The dynamics of Jesus revealing the Kingdom are more complex because they involve the intimate relations of divine and human persons in the life of grace; they open the way for phenomenology because they demand something more than what ordinary categories of knowledge can furnish. By hearing Jesus’ parables and meditating on his acts, Hart argues, a conversion of intentionality and horizon take place: rather than bringing Jesus into our gaze, we find ourselves constituted and made manifest in his. Where Hart and Horner explore the resources of phenomenality in thinking about the possibility and pressure of revelation on language, W. C. Hackett focuses on the pressure. He describes the creative intelligence that marks a distinctively Christian mode of interpretation. He notes first that speech about God confronts the peculiar problem of negotiating its participatory, experiential dynamics in a way that forestalls the overwhelming of that dynamism by theoretical objectification. He then suggests that Cyril of Alexandria’s “sacrifice Christology” offers a way forward, and proposes four theses that effectively connect the salvific logic of the Christ event with the patterns of theological reason. The Incarnation of the divine Word (kenosis) makes possible the divinizing union (henosis) of all members of Christ’s body in the Eucharist, and this ordering (kenosis-henosis) makes life-giving flesh central to salvation as well as to theology’s task of understanding the mysteries of faith. Cyril’s refutations of Nestorius attest to the primacy he attributes to Eucharistic experience over theoretical abstraction in orthodox thinking. Hackett writes: “The acknowledgement of the diversity of natures, if made the starting point in Christology, veils the Eucharistic (kenotic-henotic) truth of the Incarnation. In other words, it is a step away from the living, present and saving Christ…” For Hackett, Cyril offers theology a powerful reminder that revelation opens a new intellectual horizon. Where theology begins with experience of the Word made flesh in Eucharist and Scripture, Christ’s body transforms reason from within, displaying both antinomy and irony: suffering of the unsuffering, flesh that gives life, and images that elevate the mind where concepts falter.

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Werner Jeanrond addresses a range of concerns shared with many of the authors in this volume (e.g., the truth of interpretation, the uniqueness and relationality of revelation, the amenability of theology to scrutiny in diverse environments). His essay offers a kind of hinge point for the volume as a whole. As with Marion and Mackinlay, he draws positively on Gadamerian hermeneutics for negotiating the notion of truth with the involvement of historically embedded subjects in the practice of interpretation. Recognizing limits in Gadamer’s anti-methodological attitude, he also adopts Paul Ricoeur’s sensitivity to textuality and ideology critique. The specific character of the truth of revelation manifest in the text remains impossible to possess or administratively control. It may not rightly dissolve into ordinary rationality and yet cannot escape the interrogation of subsequent interpreters for whom that truth may become a live possibility. Sharply contrasting postliberal (Yale) and correlational (Chicago) theological sensibilities, Jeanrond argues for a hermeneutics of signification (Chicago) that refuses to restrict the horizon of ­theology to a specific group’s authoritative commitments. He underscores the need to balance the exigencies of the notion of truth with unmitigated openness to otherness in the practice of (self-) critical interpretation. Recognizing theology’s need for an interpretive awareness informed by responsiveness to the demands of relationality with God and neighbour, he recommends a hermeneutics of love that Christians cannot monopolize. “Such a hermeneutics,” writes Jeanrond, “could encourage us no longer to consider the necessary pluralism of interpretation as a threat to faith, truth and church in our increasingly globalising context.” Mara Brecht connects the hermeneutics of signification to comparative theology in her essay, “Embodied Transactions.” The practice of reading revelation in both familiar and “strange texts” – and thus learning from a range of concerns, strategies and resources across religious boundaries – tacitly demonstrates the global orientation that Jeanrond recommends for theological interpretation. In other words, Brecht contends that comparative theologians presuppose this approach, even if they rarely name it, and urges that they should make their hermeneutical commitments explicit. She then argues that any adequate theory of interpretation must account for embodiment in a way that significantly exceeds more narrowly defined accounts of subjectivity in traditional, two-dimensional approaches (e.g., Gadamer, Ricoeur). The socio-economic conditions of embodied, human experience suggest that theoretical frameworks cannot gainsay these factors in explaining the linguistic mediation of meaning. Drawing on several feminist thinkers, Brecht shows how this shift in attention opens up discourse on revelation to questions of power and work that (by the logic of power) ordinarily go unasked. She also presses further, creatively arguing that where interpretation reflects socially constructed ways of inhabiting the world, comparative theology can “shed light on the embodied habits of Christians, not just the theological ones.” Where Christians may understand their gendered and racial identities as merely “given,” and their religious identity as chosen, Brecht argues that by attending to how habits of bodying intersect and inform interpretation, comparative theology can trouble these assumptions and enhance self-­ awareness in profoundly transformative ways.

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Michele Saracino creatively shifts the terms of discussion. She connects the theme of the volume to the everyday phenomenon of swimming and what proper attention to it can teach us. Her essay invites us to explore the embodied dynamics of relationality and warns of becoming dimly preoccupied with authoritative concepts that can overly determine discourse on revelation. More than certain actions and utterances, loving relationships – the kind at the heart of revelation – require specific forms of learning. Saracino reminds us that in relationship with others we find ourselves thrown “in the middle of things,” and often unsettled by the experience of not knowing exactly how to move forward. Drawing on an array of thinkers for inspiration, she explains how relationships require intentionality and improvisation (Turkson, Steiner, Bateson); they demonstrate our vulnerability (Vanier); they demand our willingness to surrender familiar ways of being and thinking (Balthasar, Levinas, Lyotard); they invite us to cultivate empathy without consuming one another, and they allow us to mourn our desire for mastering situations where certainty eludes us (Jamison). The different ways we enter deeply into relationship express our aptitude for developing what Saracino calls a “feel for the other.” The experience of swimming becomes a powerful metaphor here. Where swimmers negotiate hydrodynamic drag with stroke technique, and cultivate their proprioceptive skills, Christians who learn new ways of relating to the mysterious presence of God in their lives develop a keen awareness of their position in all their relations; they get a feel for the other – and all the others – and learn in the darkness of faith how to move forward in the deep waters of revealing love. The essay by Frederick Lawrence urges us to learn how to hold together in creative tension both God’s self-disclosure and God’s unknowability. He argues that a proper understanding of revelation has to account for the possibility of sharing in God’s self-understanding without “prejudicing the apophatic dimension of human participation in God’s redeeming love.” He tracks shifts in conceptualization between Vatican I’s Dei filius and Vatican II’s Dei verbum, and underscores how the latter challenges theology to hold together several different dimensions in the nexus of cognitive content and participation in historical patterns of redemption. Referring to problems of reductionism, extrinsicism, and ahistorical orthodoxy, Lawrence notes how mistaken approaches thwart this complex area of speech. He also retrieves strategies that many theologians no longer favour, though he recognizes their legitimate worries: the distinction (not separation) between natural and supernatural orders, the necessity of critical (not decadent) metaphysics for theology, and the value of Aquinas’s analogy of light, as correctly interpreted (not caricatured). For Aquinas, explains Lawrence, Christian belief has less to do with accepting revealed propositions and more to do with “sharing the truths by which Christians live through love’s pressure on intelligence.” The post-Vatican II context of theology attends ever more earnestly to this pressure. Discussing Bernard Lonergan’s work, Lawrence explains the primacy given to the interpersonal reality of love in the dynamics of faith and belief. Where Augustine recognized Jesus at Calvary overcoming evil with good, theology’s new context makes the same historical dynamics of revealing and redemptive love the site for true speech about who this self-­ communicating, unknowable God is (1 John 4:8).

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The hermeneutical problem of application confronts any theologian who participates in a religious tradition that recognizes Scriptural revelation.4 How can the tradition account for the historically embedded meaning of revealed texts on the one hand, and address the power of the text to speak to later generations and in vastly different contexts on the other? Is the unfolding of history a mute platform for the Scriptural dynamics of revelation and interpretation, or does the future itself play a part in the proper sense of the revealed text? The final three essays of the volume appropriate and reply to these questions in creative ways. Maria Dakake’s essay explains how the Qur’an self-referentially addresses its own interpretation and how different reading strategies effectively modify the time of the revelatory text. She notes distinctive tensions. The Qur’an speaks about its own use of metaphor and symbol, suggesting the importance of uncovering its meaning, but the Qur’an also clearly warns against misreading its verses and signs. Its revelatory status seems to forbid rather than invite interpretation. A compelling problem arises: the Qur’an states that it contains ambiguous verses, and this presses theology to reconcile this “purposeful ambiguity” with the text’s expressed intention of “bringing clear truth and exposing falsehood.” Where predominant strategies appeal to the authority of the original context (including text, the Prophet and his contemporaries, and immediately succeeding generations), effectively locating the revelation of the Qur’an in the past, Dakake points to a shift in the text’s revelatory time by closely reading a key verse (3:7) where the Qur’an seems to admonish those who seek to interpret its ambiguities. Rather than forbidding interpretation, Dakake explains how the Qur’an does the opposite. It proscribes the very attempt to close off authoritative interpretation. She recognizes in the multivalent uses of a crucial term (ta’wil) a strategy that connects literal, historical meanings with new, spiritually generative readings, the latter neither superseding nor nullifying the former. In short, the interpretation of verses unfolds over time and in light of what the events of human history reveal. On Dakake’s reading, the Qur’an recognizes “the fulfilment of the original purpose of revelation not in its immediate context, but in the future.” Peter Ochs explains how the multi-valued logic of Scriptural reasoning in rabbinic Judaism’s reception of Tanakh allows for affirmation of the reality of revelation without reifying its predicative content as “given.” The logic creates space in this realism for the interpretive creativity of historically embedded exegetical traditions. Ochs uses the semiotics of C.S.  Peirce to diagram the relation. He distinguishes revelation’s indexicality (i.e., knowing that God speaks independently of anything humans can manufacture) and its iconicity (i.e., the content of what God says as ventured in human judgment) and identifies the danger of idolatry in uncritically assimilating predications to the otherwise indescribable force of the speech. But Ochs also cautions against reducing the meaning of revelation to a humanly 4  Describing application as the fundamental hermeneutical problem, Gadamer discusses the problem of application in terms of the orientation of effective historical consciousness to a fusion of horizons, see Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuuum, 2000) 307.

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constructed story; these predications are neither “subjective” nor “objectively given,” he writes. “They are this third something: the intimate, intricate, dynamic interaction between the God who speaks and the community that hears.” For Ochs, the rabbinic logic of revelation suggests that faithfulness refuses to overwhelm indexicality with iconicity. It preserves the apophatic in the communal dynamics of reception. Rather than imply quietist surrender, the mediation of revelation in history demands active commitment: exegesis, debate, conversation, engaged study, unflinching attention to minority opinions, to unresolved questions and competitions among schools, and to textual multivocity. The community’s questions and struggles  – and especially the catastrophe it endures  – stimulate this process. As Ochs remarks, “a pair of images dominates the history of rabbinic Judaism even more than a text: the Burnt Temple (70-71 CE) and Jerusalem razed and salted (135 CE).” Such catastrophes serve as prototypical heuristics in the community’s ongoing, historical process of recreating itself under the pressure of revelation. The final chapter in the volume offers the kind of comparative theological engagement with “strange texts” that Brecht discusses in her essay. Francis Clooney explains how to read “revelation” across the boundaries of Christianity and the West and in the context of ancient Indian hermeneutics known as “Mimamsa.” The first part of his essay introduces this elaborate system of interpretation. He describes it as “akin to case law reasoning” and explains how it aims to demonstrate the harmony between words and sacrificial actions in the voluminous corpus of the ancient, Sanskrit Vedas. Attributed to Jamini (c. 300–200 BCE), the core text of Mimamsa includes 2700 short statements spread over 12 books. Clooney effectively illuminates the characteristics of this hermeneutical system by discussing three interpretations of a case in Book IX.  He draws out how differently Scriptural revelation functions in this context. It does not give us new information about extra-textual realities, or rely on recourse to transcendent authority for its power. It focuses rather on the details of skilled interpretation. Quite literally, Mimamsa locates revelation in the text and suggests that it reshapes its audience both in the sacrificial arena as well as in ordinary living. As Clooney writes, for Mimamsa, “hermeneutics is revelation.” The second half of Clooney’s essay explores the comparative possibilities. He draws similarities between Mimamsa on the one hand, and rabbinic exegesis and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language on the other. He turns to Christianity and creatively rereads three gospel stories in light of his reading of Mimamsa. He explains how Mimamsa teaches us “to look for the sharp edge of a story where it most powerfully hits the reader and commands decision,” and in a way that refuses to go outside the text for the reading. Its interpretive strategy seeks no recourse with social context, history, or authorial intent (either human or divine). In short, Mimamsa urges us to stay with the text and read carefully. Clooney writes: “While we may instinctively, inevitably, turn to history, worry about urgent social issues, and measure scripture by its aptness for certain kinds of inner experiences, Mimamsa reminds us that we ought still return to the text, lest we end up engaging in a hermeneutics that is at best only occasionally or selectively submissive to revelation.”

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Where liberal theology tends to embrace historical study and treat religious pluralism as more opportunity than threat, Clooney’s study in many ways resonates more with postliberal sensibilities. It recommends a return to the text. The slight irony here perhaps offers a fitting note with which to end this introduction and begin this volume. As readers will discover, the essays here are less committed to models and genres as they are to the critical edge of the theme, exploring the complex interactions of revelation and hermeneutics.

References Gaillardetz, Richard. 2016. ‘The Pastoral Orientation of Doctrine.’ In Go into the Streets! The Welcoming Church of Pope Francis, ed. P. Thomas, S.J. Rausch, and Richard R. Gaillardertz, 74–80. New York: Paulist Press. Hart, Kevin. 2003. 'The Experience of Nonexperience.' In Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, 188–206. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God Without Being, 158. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. The Possible and Revelation. Trans. Christina M.  Gschwandtner. In The Visible and the Revealed, 1–17. New  York: Fordham University Press. German original: 1988. Phänomenologie und Offenbarung (trans. R. Funk). In Religionsphilosophie Heute: Chancen und Bedeutung in Philosophie und Theologie, ed. Lois Halder, Klaus Kinezler and Joseph Möller. Düsseldorf: Patmos. ———. 2016. Givenness and Revelation. Trans. Stephen E.  Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McElwee, Joshua J.  2015. ‘Catholicism can and must change, Francis forcefully tells Italian Church gathering.’ National Catholic Reporter. https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/ catholicism-can-and-must-change-francis-forcefully-tells-italian-church-gathering. Accessed 18 Feb 2019. Möhler, J.A. 1971. Symbolik v.2, 726. In Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine, xiii. New York: Corpus.

Part I

Givenness and Interpretation

Chapter 2

The Hermeneutics of Givenness Jean-Luc Marion

Abstract  Hermeneutics is very often taken for granted: every statement, and by derivation, every fact or phenomenon, would have to be interpreted. This remains obvious, indeed. But, precisely because it looks obvious, we cannot avoid the question asking why it is so. And an answer may remain puzzling, as we could imagine that any correct formulation or description would need no additional commentary to be understood univocally. This could even define the utility of a correct use of language. However, notwithstanding the array of philosophical emendations of daily language (by grammar as well as semantics), we have all experienced that this univocity remains beyond our reach. Here, we suggest that hermeneutics becomes compulsory because the intuition of what gives itself overflows most of the times, if not always, what shows itself and what can be explained or understood by concepts. The excess of the intuition on the concept allows, more than that, asks for a hermeneutics. Therefore, far from a phenomenology of givenness forbidding hermeneutics, it opens its broad and unescapable field. Keywords  Phenomenology · Hermeneutics · Givenness · Intuition · Interpretation

2.1  The Objection of an Obstruction One question is always repeated in phenomenology, from various angles—that of knowing if one can, and if one must, admit an irreducible, whatever it may be. This interrogation first arises, as we have seen,1 from the reduction itself. But it also arises, as an aftershock, from what the reduction brings forth—perhaps. For the reduction, even by its operation and radicalization, makes evident, be it only by Translated by Sarah Horton.  See Marion (2016), Ch. I.

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contraposition, the possibility, even the necessity, of an exception, of an irreducible. Whether it is understood as a particular phenomenon that is, in the end, ­non-­reduced,2 or whether it directly concerns the operation of the reduction itself,3 this very indecision highlights the sole question: what end results from the reduction, to what does the reduction bring back the things when it transposes them into phenomena? Indeed, the identification of the possible irreducible is not self-evident. A rather long polemical tradition has, at least since Cavaillès, assimilated phenomenology into a philosophy of consciousness, even a philosophy of intuition, in opposition to a supposedly strict, rigorous, and sober philosophy of the concept (but can there be a concept without consciousness, be it only the consciousness of that very concept?); in this case, and consequently, phenomenology’s supposed irreducible would consist in the intuition originarily perceived by consciousness. Thus approximately defined, givenness at once elicits an inevitable double reticence. —The first is due to its factual character, imposed de facto and always already achieved: the given, whatever it may be, indeed admits of no exception; the de facto given is always already there, or rather always already here, as close as possible, we are straightaway caught in it, our feet in it, enmeshed unto nausea in the horror of the ground4 that glues us to it. Even our very experience of nothingness, supposing, besides, that we have ever really had one, already supposes a given, however small one imagines it to be, which in advance retains and contains us. The given therefore opens all experience, but as it opens it in advance and in fact, in that sense it closes it because it decided it before and without us, imposes it on us, makes us late from the beginning, orients it for us, conditions it for us and rations it for us without giving us any reason why. The beginning belongs to the given, and that beginning decides the end. With the given, from the beginning, we see the end, we are finished, in every sense of the term.5 Whence the inevitable, even automatic, reflex of rationality: thinking and understanding will consist in recusing the de facto authority of the given, deconstructing it and suspending it in order to regain the initiative of deduction and reestablish another beginning, that of the a priori, conquered after the fact like an inauguration in reverse: all the less given, all the more thought. The duty of negativity requires undoing that simple de facto authority of the given to substitute for it the de jure authority of an a priori, whatever it may be, provided that it manages to regain the given within the voluntary legitimacy of the concept.

 As with the question of God, as I suggested in Marion (2012), Ch. 10 (reprint of Marion 2006).  Which I have, in a sense, established: see Marion (2016), Ch. I. 4  Marion here alludes to Mallarmé’s sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (“The virginal, vivacious, and beautiful today”), of which the first tercet reads: “Its whole neck will shake off that white agony/By space inflicted on the bird that denies it,/But not the horror of the ground where the plumage is caught.” (My translation.) “Tout son col. secouera cette blanche agonie/Par l’espace infligé à l’oiseau qui le nie,/Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris” (Mallarmé 1998). For a less literal but more poetic translation, see “The virginal, vibrant and beautiful dawn” in Mallarmé (1994). [Translator’s note.] 5  Note that “nous sommes finis,” translated above as “we are finished,” could also mean “we are finite.” [Translator’s note.] 2 3

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The second reticence follows and gravely redoubles the first. If in addition givenness in fact proceeds by intuition (and an opaque sensible intuition), then it defies all explanation and all discursive justification. Not only can givenness account for its intuition by its brute fact, but it defends this brute fact by the opacity of the elementary sensible idea: a clear and obscure idea; for, as Descartes noted, an idea can be clear (“[…] menti attendenti praesens et aperta,” [1964, 22] present and open to the attention of the mind), without however becoming clear, that is, precisely distinguishing itself from other sensible ideas to present itself clearly as such (“[…] ab omnibus aliis ita sejuncta et praecisa, ut nihil plane aliud, quam quod clarum est, in se continat”, “[…] so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” [1964, 22/208]6). The sensible imposes itself (s’impose), but it is not posited (se pose) as such: a color appears, but without giving the criteria that define it and therefore without distinguishing itself from another; I say that this is red, and others can agree with me about this judgment (barring any eye diseases), and we can even distinguish it from other colors (yellow or blue), but neither they nor I can say what this red shows concerning red, this red as such, in short, what it signifies in itself. Summed up in the sensible intuition, the given remains mute regarding itself, it closes access to its brutal fact, refuses itself to identification, to differentiation, and therefore finally to signification. Without signification, the given, henceforth only sensible, therefore remains blind [aveugle], seeing nothing, but above all giving nothing to be seen, like a windowless room [pièce aveugle], camera obscura, invisible and without light—finally insensible. The given therefore could not, especially if it doubles itself in a sensible given, ensure phenomenality. As such, mute and blind, a pure, indefinite “this,” it becomes insensible, without any sense. Whence, doubtless, the recurring complaint that denounces the fetishism of the given and calls to hermeneutics for aid in order to, according to a critic’s smug expression, restore the supposedly violated rights of “a phenomenology deflowered of the purity of givenness” (Sebbah 2001, 307).7 For the so-called “pure” givenness would impose “[…] a certain form of quietism,” for which it would henceforth only be a question of “showing, describing, and no longer [of] arguing, giving reasons” (Thomas-Fogiel 2015, 279, 281 ff.)8 To the pure but dumb givenness, rational discursivity, the giving (rendu) of reasons, therefore hermeneutic endurance, should respond. This objection was introduced as obvious by undisputed specialists in hermeneutics, foremost among whom are counted J. Grondin9 and J. Greisch.10 It was therefore also largely taken up by public opinion, to the point of finding an echo

6  Whenever two page numbers are separated by a slash, the first refers to the original-language edition of a work, and the second to the translation. [Translator’s note.] 7  [My translation. —Trans.] 8  [My translation. —Trans.] 9  See Grondin (1993a), ch. IV (reprinted from Grondin 1992). 10  See Greisch (1991) and Greisch (1995).

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among theologians.11 But reading one of its most recent formulations, one sees at once the limit of this objection: “The real touchstone of the phenomenology proposed by Being Given is this unconditioned universality of givenness, from which nothing is excepted and which renders obsolete, in particular, the necessity of any recourse to hermeneutics” (Serban 2012, 88, emphasis added).12 —And yet the entire question consists precisely in knowing whether, “[…] the unconditioned universality of givenness” being admitted, it does for all that “[…] rende[r] obsolete” the “[…] recourse to hermeneutics”: for, finally, no analytic link immediately joins the two terms, and one does not see how givenness as such would forbid hermeneutics, nor why it would not rather call for it, even demand it. The objection here supposes exactly what it would first be necessary to prove: the incompatibility of phenomenality’s resources with the differentiated assertion of its figures of sense. This incompatibility could be conceived only if givenness straightaway furnished an objectifiable phenomenon, one therefore constituted by a univocal sense, which would neither tolerate nor require any interpretation, being already included in a determinate signification or a closed concept. But does givenness always, even ever, give such an object with a univocal sense? Is givenness conflated with the efficient causality that produces a finished object? Is giving equivalent to placing an object beneath a gaze or to having it at hand? Who does not see that, thus reduced to production and efficiency, givenness would no longer give anything, precisely because it would no longer give but would produce, without retreating before that facticity as if it were a matter of violence or impropriety? And yet—and here lies all the difficulty—the very facticity of givenness still remains absolutely to be determined as such. It remains to interpret its neutrality. Henceforth, it remains to understand what Husserl’s “breakthrough” towards givenness manifests—unless we leave it aside, as if it were either a marginal thesis of the venerabilis inceptor (an implausible hypothesis) or (stranger still) the deviant invention of an epigone. At the very least, Heidegger had, for his part, recognized givenness and, starting in 1919, had clearly designated it as such—neither as an all-­ purpose slogan nor as a myth for conflating everything, but as a question to decide in terms of phenomenality. And he asked: “What does ‘given’ mean? ‘Givenness’? This magic word of phenomenology and ‘stumbling block’ for others” (Heidegger 1992, 5/4).13 Thus givenness arises less as an answer than as a question, less as a final argument than as a pending indecisiveness; take the rule posited by Kant—all knowledge supposes an intuition because only the intuition enjoys the privilege of “giving”—it remains to define what this givenness signifies. In other words, it remains also and first to define what it does not mean, that with which it is not

 See Tanner (2007); then Gagey (2010).  [My translation. —Trans.]—Recently, Christina M.  Gschwandtner has provided an excellent review of the debates concerning the supposed lack of hermeneutics since Being Given (see Gschwandtner 2015, 14–24). 13  [Translation modified. —Trans.] On the neo-Kantian context of this diagnosis, see my study in Marion 2012, Ch. II–III. 11 12

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c­ onflated. For givenness does not produce like an efficient cause, nor is it confined to sensible intuition, because it is not conflated even with intuition in general.

2.2  Givenness, Not Intuition In a reversal of its common understanding, we must not conceive of givenness as a de facto authority but as a de jure authority, or rather conceive that the fact of the given suffices to assure to this given the full status of a phenomenon: everything that shows itself shows itself because it gives itself. In this sense, the fact of givenness should be considered as a law. Husserl does not let any ambiguity linger about this de facto and, indissolubly, de jure character of such a norm: “Absolute givenness is an ultimate. […] On the other hand, to deny self-givenness in general is to deny every ultimate norm [alle letzte Norm], every basic criterion that lends sense to knowledge” (1973, 61/45).14 Thus the problem of a pure knowledge can be resolved only “[…] in the sphere of givenness, which provides the ultimate norms because it is absolute [in der Sphäre der letztnormierenden, weil absoluten Gegebenheit]” (Ibid., 76/53). Why indeed here describe givenness with the label absolute? Because givenness cannot be said to be relative or partial, since it constitutes the norm and the criterion of all presence, of all factuality, and of all actuality, which in return are judged only in relation to it. Factuality, actuality, and presence are measured only in relation to givenness, which alone fixes their level and degree. Thus even the difference between the regions of the world and of consciousness, which everything separates (immanence/transcendence, certainty/contingency, absolute/relation, etc.), to the point that one can describe it as “impassable,” is nevertheless still unfurled within the sole givenness: “Hence we hold fast to the following: while it is an essential property of givenness [zum Wesen der Gegebenheit] through appearances that none gives (gibt) its subject matter “absolutely” rather than in a one-sided display, it is an essential property of immanent givenness [der immanenten Gegebenheit] to also give an absolute [ein Absolutes zu geben]” (Husserl 1976a, 102/79).15 Whatever “the most cardinal difference that is given [es gibt], that between consciousness and reality,” may be, it is nevertheless an “intrinsic difference in the kind of givenness [der Gegebenheitsart]”(Ibid., 96/74),16 a difference referred to givenness, measured according to its norm and contained within its horizon. Givenness proves to be absolute because it relies on nothing else for its criterion, but all the rest is measured by reference to it. With each given, it is certainly a matter of a fact, of a fait accompli  “Absolute Gegebenheit ist ein Letztes. […] Anderseits die Selbstgegebenheit überhaupt zu leugnen, das heißt alle letzte Norm, alles der Erkenntnis Sinn gebenden Grundmaß leugnen” (Husserl 1973, 61). 15  [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. —Trans.] I will not retrace D. Franck’s convincing demonstration (Franck 1981). 16  [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. —Trans.] 14

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that admits no contestation; but givenness, in each given, constitutes more than a fact: it takes the ultimate measure of that fact, which it calibrates according to its norm. The given imposes itself as a fact, but givenness (as ultimate, absolute givenness) establishes the norm of this fact. Thus Husserl insists on the de jure authority of givenness, de jure as a norm and as an originary norm: “[…] each intuition giving [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge [jede originär gebende Anschauung [ist] eine Rechtsquelle der Erkenntnis]” (Ibid., 52/74).17 Or even: “The original source of all legitimacy [Urquelle alles Rechte] lies […] in the originary evidence or in the originary givenness motivating those positings [in der originären Evidenz, bzw. in der sie motivierenden originären Gegebenheit]”(Ibid., 346/280–281). One could say that the de facto intuitive evidence (which is thus supposed to be originary) finds its norm (lets itself be measured) and therefore also its justification (to appear) as a fully de jure phenomenon in the givenness that accounts for it still more originarily. This passage from the simple fact of the given to the right that givenness confers on it should be all the less surprising as it is in fact brought about by the reduction, by the operation that brings what the natural attitude indistinctly experiences back to the real givenness content of its various givens.18 “We are convinced that these experiences [Erfahrungen], even when reduced, retain their sense and legitimacy [Sinn und Recht auch als reduzierte behalten]. […] So, too, we apprehend the absolute legitimacy [das absolute Recht] of the immanently perceiving reflection […]” (Husserl 1976a, 184/144).19 The norm of givenness, as applied in multiple ways by the reduction, suffices henceforth to disqualify its identification with sensible intuition. Moreover, this hypothesis is refuted straightaway by a correct reading of the Logical Investigations I: Husserl’s initial “breakthrough” consists in recognizing not only that intuition is not confined to sensibility (it can and must be extended to the eidetic and the categorical) but that intuition itself is valuable only inasmuch as it implements a givenness, a more original givenness since it also encompasses signification.20 It is only on these conditions that one will avoid bringing down to the

 [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. —Trans.]  See Marion (2016), Ch. I, §4. 19  “Wir überzeugen uns, daß diese Erfahrungen Sinn und Recht auch als reduzierte behalten, und in genereller Wesensallgemeinheit erfassen wir das Recht so gearteter Erfahrungen überhaupt, ebenso wie wir parallel damit das Recht auf Erlebnisse überhaupt bezogener Wesenserscheinungen erfassen. So erfassen wir z. B. das absolute Recht der immanent wahrnehmenden Reflexion” (Husserl 1976a, 184). 20  See Marion 2004, Ch. 1. See also: “Immediately seeing—not merely sensory, experiential seeing but seeing in general, i.e., any kind of consciousness that gives something in an originary fashion—is the ultimate source of legitimacy of all rational claims. [Das unmittlebare ‘Sehen’ (noein), nicht bloß das sinnliche, erfahrende Sehen, sondern das Sehen überhaupt als originär gebendes Bewußtsein welcher Art immer, ist die lezte Rechtsquelle aller vernünftigen Behauptungen]” (Husserl 1976a, 44/36). [Translation modified. —Trans.] Or: “For the geometer, however, who investigates […] not actual relationships but essential relationships, the discernment of an essence is, in place of experience, the ultimately justifying act. [Für den Geometrer aber, […] der nicht Wirklichkeiten, sondern Wesensverhalte erforscht, ist statt der Erfahrung die Wesenserschaung der letztbegründende Akt]” (Ibid., 21/18–19). 17 18

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level of “a bad intuitionism” “the only genuine intuitionist philosophy, phenomenology” [Husserl 1956, 171/246, 182/260).21 In his way, which is certainly essentially other, Heidegger provides a warning rather similar to Husserl’s. Givenness can be defined neither by sensible intuition, nor by intuition, nor by anything that falls within the horizon of objectness or thingness. And if givenness can be thought only by contrast to these determinations, which seem so self-evident that one does not suspect that they mask it, then accessing it is possible only starting from itself and itself alone, contrary to production, efficiency, and sensible intuition, all figures of subsistent presence. One cannot insist too strongly on the reliability of the diagnosis that led Heidegger, from his first Freiburg seminar onward, to interrogate the notion of givenness; for what do we understand by the designation es gibt? That only German here keeps givenness in view (geben, gegeben), while French and English dissimulate it straightaway under the thick evidence of localization (il y a, there is), reinforced by the two auxiliary verbs, at once betrays the difficulty of accessing that which it concerns: that all that happens would happen by givenness. Heidegger, far from seeing this as evident (like most of his contemporaries, following Natorp), discerns its radically enigmatic character: Gegebenheit intervenes, but how? “Is there even a single thing when there are only things? Then there would be no thing at all, not even nothing, because with the sole supremacy of the sphere of things there is not even the ‘there is’ [es gibt]. Is there the ‘there is’?” (Heidegger 1987, 62/52).22 Simply put, it does not suffice to say “it gives, es gibt” to think and carry out a givenness, since with this term and this syntagma, one stops within the “sphere of things,” where, precisely, their presence persists because it does not happen through them but is produced, fabricated, and installed by an efficient cause, which straightaway annuls the simple possibility of the least “it gives, es gibt.” In order that “it give,” it does not suffice to say it; one must conceive it and therefore carry it out. In other words, according to a student’s note, “Gibt es ein “es gibt”, wenn es nur ein “es gibt” gibt?” (cited in Kisiel 1993, 42) —“Does it give an ‘it gives,’ when and if it gives only an ‘it gives’?” Put another way, givenness and the es gibt disappear or dissolve as long as one devalues them as a pure and simple production of things (in the sense of objects that are already constituted and have a univocal sense). I was able to discuss elsewhere whether the passage in fine to the Ereignis did not dissimulate or cross out too quickly the enigmatic indetermination (“enigmatic It [rätselhaftes Es]”) of the es, of it that gives, by bringing it down to the level of an “indeterminate power [unbestimmte Macht]”—exactly, moreover, as do the current

 [My translation. Here the page numbers refer to the German and French editions respectively, as no English translation exists. My translations of all quotations from Husserl’s Erste Philosophie largely follow the French, which Marion quotes, but at times deviate from it to more accurately render the German. —Trans.] 22  “Gibt es überhaupt eine einzige Sache, wenn es nur Sachen gibt? Dann gibt es überhaupt keine Sachen; es gibt nicht eimal nichts, weil es bei einer Allherrschaft der Sachsphäre auch kein ‘es gibt’ gibt. Gibt es das ‘es gibt’?” (Heidegger 1987, 62). 21

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translations, il y a or there is.23 But it nevertheless remains that Heidegger, from the beginning, here marked an essential point and opened a real breakthrough: the originary arises from givenness, or more exactly arises as givenness, as the giving given. But all the difficulty consists in conceiving this given as such, as giving itself, and not as a thing in the mode of an object that, for its part, neither gives nor gives itself but finds itself produced, finds itself made, and at best persists in abandonment. What, and above all how, does the “it” give? What does this word [mot] “it gives” mean? And moreover, which word gives? How and by what right would a word give? Could it not rather be that “it” which gives does not give qua this word, “it” (which does not and cannot mean anything), but qua the word, that only the word, qua itself, gives? “If our thinking does justice to the matter, then we may never say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives [es gibt]—not in the sense that words are given by an ‘it,’ but that the word itself gives. The word itself is the giver. [daß das Wort selber gibt. Das Wort: das Gebende]” (Heidegger 1985, 182/88).24 Givenness here keeps the last word because the word alone gives and because givenness is fulfilled in speech [parole]. Thinking strictly, about givenness there is nothing to say because one will never say anything save starting from it and it alone. Certainly, one must not speak of it, because it alone speaks. But thereby it does not close the discussion; it opens it. It gives the word [parole]25—and everything else. Thus understood [entendue] (supposing that we know therefore how to hear [entendre] it, listen to it, and answer it), givenness would not only have the right to the word [parole], but it alone would legitimately call to it, far from closing our mouths, like a de facto authority that causes nothing but silence around itself. And then how would we not sense an entirely other relation between givenness and hermeneutics than that which the banal and supposedly commonsense objection does not cease to repeat? Could it not be that hermeneutics, far from disappearing with givenness (or making it disappear in order to begin speaking), awakens only in answering the word that fulfills it?

2.3  The Construction of the Myth Before envisioning such a reversal of the situation, we should understand how the given could have seemed (and often still seems) to forbid hermeneutics, what absurdity could have hidden the obvious fact that givenness would free interpretation. This absurdity in fact lets itself be very well recognized by the name with which the

 See Heidegger 2007, 22/16–17. On the passage from the es [gibt] to Ereignis, see ibid., 24 ff./19 ff. 24  I am here taking up a suggestion from Gondek and Tengely (2011), 165 ff. 25  The French expression donner la parole, here translated literally as “give the word” means “to give the floor,” that is, to allow someone to speak. Note also that parole, unlike mot, refers to the spoken word and can at times (as above) be translated as “speech.” [Translator’s note.] 23

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metaphysical critique has saddled its radical incomprehension of givenness—the “myth of the given.” That the given is immediate, and yet that it gives an object already prepared for theoretical knowledge—such is the contradiction presupposed by the “myth of the given,” but also by its ceaselessly repeated critique: “[…] the concept—or, as I have put it, the myth—of the given is being invoked to explain the possibility of a direct account of immediate experience” (Sellars 1997, 58).26 Thus understood, the given is first characterized as non-mediated, according to “[…] the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy” (Ibid., 13)27; and it is thus conceived as a sense datum28 in the sense of classical empiricism (Locke). Hence it inevitably attracts an obvious objection: in order to be an incontestable and certain given, it must remain an immediate impression, but such an immediate, perfectly subjective given therefore does not yet offer an object, constituted and reconstituted at the level of the reason, but remains (and must remain) below any epistemological validity, since if it gained the slightest epistemological validity, it would lose its irrefutable immediacy (Ibid., 16).29 But this same given would, at the same time as it is immediate, also be non-dependent, self-sustaining; noninferential knowledge (Ibid, 69 ff.).30 Whence Sellars’s definitive argument: such a given cannot be constituted straightaway by itself but receives its validation from a constitution and therefore attests to a contingent dependence, according to its happening within an epistemological becoming. —This double objection is unified in Quine’s unified refutation: the connection between the supposed, immediate data (what x is at the instant t, in the place p, etc.) and an elementary proposition (according to the semantic rules) can never be ensured, except by a composition—I would say a constitution, which is inevitably mediated. A strict reductionism cannot be conceived without a constitution (Quine 1951). In other words, to speak like Neurath, there is no immediate protocol statement: “The fiction of an ideal language composed of neat atomic statements is as metaphysical as the fiction of Laplace’s spirit” (Neurath 1932, 206/91). Or even: “There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components” (Ibid.,  This text was first given as a lecture in London: “The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Philosophy of Mind,” 1956. 27  Two remarks in passing: why speak here of Hegel rather than of Kant? And why describe givenness in particular with the label “philosophical”? 28  Here and elsewhere, the words “sense datum” or “sense data” appear in English in the original text. [Translator’s note.] 29  Which indicates the dilemma well: what is sensed is a particular, so the sensible remains without status for the understanding; but in order for what is sensed to also become understandable, it must have the status of an object, so it would no longer be immediate or particular. 30  As for the last characteristic that Sellars criticizes, namely, that the given remains necessarily non-conceptual, it is disqualified in advance by the Husserlian discovery of the givenness of significations, of the vision of essences, and of categorial intuition. [The words “self-sustaining; noninferential knowledge” appear in English in the original text. —Trans.] 26

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206/92).31 This critique of the “myth of the given” thus makes manifest a definition, precise but contradictory, of this given: it would conjoin on the one hand the immediacy of a sense datum, an immediacy confined to intuition, which would itself be restricted to sensible intuition, and it would amount to an affect that would be purely subjective, individual, indubitable by its very incommunicability (reserved to private [privé] language, and therefore in fact deprived [privé] of language); and on the other hand, it would benefit from the epistemological validity of a first object, an atom of intelligible evidence, therefore mediately constituted. Does the critique of this “myth”—the given as the contradiction of an immediate object—have the slightest historically documented support, or is it literally a matter of an invented “myth,” a fictitious adversary for the purposes of shadow boxing (so frequent in analytic philosophy)? For once, it seems possible to identify the adversary. Locke indeed imagined combining the two contradictory properties in a supposedly unified concept of the idea. —From one perspective, the idea, provided that it is determined, offers “[…] steadily the sign of the same object,” “[…] stands for whatsoever is the object of understanding” (Locke 1988, 13, 47). Not only does the sensible idea re-present (stand for the presence of) some object (“The idea is the object of thinking”), but also an external object (“[…] external, sensible object,” “[…] external, material things as the objects of sensation”) (Ibid., 104 [twice], 105).32 It is self-evident that such an epistemological qualification of the idea (thought substitute for the real individual external object) demands of the object its mediated constitution according to the elementary concepts of objectivity: the idea of the object stands for the object itself, outside the thought for which it provides the norm and rule. —Yet from a second perspective, this same idea claims to always keep its immediacy, which is indeed supposed to ensure for it a certainty that is absolute as a moment of the flow of thought and that, in this sense, is indubitable. The idea is thus made immanent to thought: no knowledge (apart from that of God!) is more certain than “[…] whatever our senses have immediately discovered to us” (Ibid., 261)33—to the point that this immediate immanence of the idea to thought remains valid without any consideration of the nature of the object in question: “Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea” (Ibid., 134). This inscription of the idea in the immanence of thought goes so far that the very incomprehensibility of its process changes nothing: “It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that

 [Emphasis follows the German text rather than the English translation. —Trans.]  See: “[…] the ideas first in the mind, ‘tis evident, are those of particular things […], from the ordinary and familiar objects of sense” (Ibid., 595, emphasis added)—but nothing is less evident than (i) that the first ideas are already ideas of objects, (ii) that these ideas are of singular and sensible objects. One thus names evident that which one cannot demonstrate, and which one does not even feel a need to verify, so much does one take it as established. 33  “[…] it is plain to me, we have a more certain knowledge of the existence of God, than of anything our senses have not immediately discovered to us” (Ibid., 621). 31 32

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s­ omething doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it” (Ibid., 630, emphasis added). The tension between these two definitions of the idea could possibly be resolved only if one linked them together, like the two faces of the phenomenon, like on the one hand the lived experience (appearing) and on the other hand the intentional object (that which appears, in outline); but it would then be necessary to deploy nothing less than the entire “wondrous property” that allows perception to become “a perception of something”34 (Husserl 1976a, 204/162); in short, it would be necessary to define the idea on the basis of the intentionality of consciousness and “[…] its remarkable ‘of,’” (Husserl 1976b, 162/159) an undertaking completely foreign to Locke, as is proven by his doubling of knowledge into two types of ideas, so totally heterogeneous that their labels idea and quality35 become perfectly equivocal. Indeed, the perception of a thing is strictly divided, for Locke, into secondary “sensible qualities” and “insensible primary qualities,” which are radically opposed. First because sensible qualities are only “imputed” to things, without constituting “resemblances of something really existing,” whereas the “primary and real qualities” of bodies “are always in them.” Next, one notes that sense data, the only “sensible qualities,” occupy only a secondary place, whereas the place of “primary qualities” amounts precisely to that which is not sensible in “objects,” namely “bulk, figure, extension, number, and motion” (Locke 1988, 140).36 Thus (i) in sensible perception itself, the sensible is not first but second; (ii) on the contrary, what becomes first is the ensemble of what Descartes named the material naturae simplicissimae,37 that is, pure concepts that ensure a definition as abstract and immaterial as possible of Aristotle’s indeterminate matter, in order to reduce it to the extension of geometers; (iii) moreover, the supposed “primary qualities” doubtless owe their priority over “secondary qualities” precisely to the fact that they no longer involve anything sensible and (iv) that they consist only in quantities, or rather in quantification operators of the sensible; such that (v) not only does the object of sensible perception itself no longer involve anything sensible38; (vi) but only the effects of that object on the perceiving subject become, for that subject and that subject alone, sensible. It is necessary to conclude from this not only that Locke’s analysis of sense data is inconsistent and incapable of thinking even a hint of the slightest given, but also, paradoxically, that his doctrine of “primary” and “secondary” qualities validates strictly and to the letter the objections addressed to the

 [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. – Trans.]  “Idea” and “quality” appear in English in the original text. [Translator’s note.] 36  See Locke (1988), 143. 37  Descartes (1965, in particular VI and XII). See Marion (2015) and Marion (1991). With this notable difference that Locke keeps “solidity” among the primary qualities, whereas Descartes reduces it, under the name of “hardness,” to a secondary quality. (Descartes 1964, Pt. II, §4). 38  “[…] insensible parts,” “[…] single imperceptible bodies” (Locke 1988, 135, 136). 34 35

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“myth of the given.” Locke deserves and justifies the critique of this “myth” to the very degree that he did not think the given.39 The critique of the “myth of the given” vanquishes [vainc] its adversary, but it does not convince [convainc] because the adversary in question is not the “given” but the phantom, the substitute, even the opposite of the given, at least such as Husserl thought it and bequeathed it to the phenomenological tradition. It remains that the critique of this non-object negatively informs what the given could want to lead us to think [donner à penser]. And first, since the “myth” straightaway posits the given within the horizon of the object (and it matters little here that this object is already constituted or yet to be constituted, since it is a matter of a being included in advance in the manner of Being of Vorhandenheit, of substantial permanence, of support for objectifying knowledge),40 we retain from it the positive conclusion: the given can be thought only in opposition to the object’s mode of Being, which it does not yet constitute and in which it is not necessarily called to end; as soon as objectness appears, with its characteristics and its demands, the given has already disappeared. The given can be thought only in its irreducibility to objectness. The critique was indeed right to reproach the given for its lack of objectivity, for it arises and endures as such only insofar as it escapes objectness. But this resistance to and restraint concerning objectness precisely qualify it as given.

2.4  The Critique of Immediacy But the critique of the “myth of the given” attributes to it a second property—indispensable for marking its contradiction—namely, that its objectivity would remain just as immediate. In this the critique rediscovers an assumption widely admitted in the most common readings in phenomenology: the strength and the weakness of the given are due to its immediacy, and proposing givenness as a “fourth principle” amounts to making immediacy (and even intuition) a principle. And yet from the point of view of a rigorous phenomenology, we should uphold the paradox that it

 Husserl’s diagnosis of Locke says nothing else: “Consciousness, be it the seemingly simplest perception or having-consciousness-of without the slightest attention focused on anything, is never an empty possession of something, as if the subject quite simply had, in this case, his intentional objects in his pocket [seine intentionalen Gegenstände wie in einer Tasche eben bloß darin hätte]” (1956, 110/157). [My translation. —Trans.] See: “For whoever once learned what a genuine description was, the blindness of soul towards the proper essence of consciousness in all these universal and particular figures is revealed in that Locke’s descriptions (like those of his successors), could never extend to a correctly real description and analysis, namely by following the real parts and connections, because they again and again misinterpret [immer wieder mißdeuten] the intentional implications, which are seen, by nature inseparably and in a certain manner necessarily, as real implications” (Ibid., 112/139). [My translation. As before, the page numbers refer to the German and French editions. —Trans.]. 40  Let it suffice here to refer to C. Romano’s definitive demonstration (Romano 2010), in particular the whole of Ch. 19. 39

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belongs precisely to the given to not give itself immediately, and above all not in the immediacy of sense data—even though it gives itself in perfect facticity, or rather because it gives itself as an unconditioned and originary factum. A first argument comes to us from Husserl. “The psychological phenomenon in psychological apperception and objectification is not really an absolute givenness, rather, only the pure phenomenon, the reduced phenomenon” (Husserl 1973, 7/64).41 Or even: “One must get especially clear on the fact that the absolute phenomenon, the reduced cogitatio, does not count as an absolute givenness because it is a particular, but rather because it displays itself in pure seeing after the phenomenological reduction as something that is absolutely self-given [eben als absolute Selbstgegebenheit herausstellt]” (Ibid., 56/42).42 As long as the phenomenon comes still and only from lived experience, therefore as long as it bears the character of immediacy, it remains doubtful, indeterminate, and therefore not yet actually given. For it does not suffice to make itself sensed and felt to be given: as an example that is as trivial as it is famous reminds us, the color of a tie, which varies from red to green or blue depending on whether the light comes from the artificial lighting of the store or the natural day of the street, therefore does not suffice to offer a sure and identifiable given; it would first be necessary to reduce it, either by bringing it back only to natural light or (if one admits that strictly speaking there is no fixed natural light that could be a referent) to a standard light (defined by a chosen, given wavelength). Thus the sensed and felt do not as such become an absolute and indubitable given, but only once they are submitted to the reduction, that is, inasmuch as they are mediated.43 This mediation does not, however, add another component to the sensed-felt (such as, for example, a category, a concept); but mediation brings it back, possibly by elimination, by distillation as it were, brings back that which  “Nicht das psychologische Phänomen in der psychologischen Apperzeption und Objektivation ist wirklich eine absolute Gegebenheit, sondern nur das reine Phänomen, das reduzierte” (Husserl 1973, 7). 42  “Eben das muß man sich ja zur Klarheit bringen, daß das absolute Phänomen, die reduzierte cogitatio uns nicht darum als absolute Gegebenheit gilt, weil sie Einzelheit ist, sondern weil sie sich im reinsten Schauen nach der phänomenologischen Reduktion eben als absolute Selbstgegebenheit herausstellt” (Ibid., 56). See also: “In the case of a singular cotigatio that lies before us, say a feeling that we are experiencing, we could perhaps say: it is given. But we could by no means dare to state the most universal proposition the givenness of any reduced phenomenon is an absolute and indubitable givenness—die Gegebenheit eines reduzierten Phänomens überhaupt ist eine absolute zweifellose» (Ibid., 50/38.). And: “Only through a reduction, which we shall call a phenomenological reduction, do I acquire an absolute givenness that no longer offers anything transcendent” (Ibid., 44/34.). 43  Eugen Fink clearly confirms this point: “In this context ‘givenness’ thus does not signify beingat-hand and lying before one, for instance, in the way things are given, are there, as objects of natural worldly experience; but it means possible accessibility through the unfolding of the phenomenological reduction”—to the point that if, as is almost always done outside phenomenology, one misguidedly identified the “given” with immediate sensible intuitiveness, it would be necessary rather to call the veritable phenomenon a non-given: “The ‘object’—or better, the objects—of constructive phenomenology are not ‘given.’ The theorizing directed to them is not an ‘intuitive having given’ [‘anschauliches Gegebenhaben’], it is not ‘intuitive’[‘intuitiv’]; but […] is ‘non-given,’ this theorizing is constructive.” (Fink 1988, 63–64/57, 63/56). In other words, a sensible intuition does not suffice to give a phenomenon; a reduction is necessary. 41

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seems apparently given to that which, in it but not straightaway, truly appears in the end; such that the reduction mediates it in order to recognize in it that which does not cease to give itself absolutely and in person, to the point of managing to re-­ give itself. This obviously does not mean that the given, because it is mediated and not only felt in intuition, should for all that be constituted as an object. Let us consider, to understand this, a second argument, which comes from a precise interrogation by Heidegger. “The problem-sphere of phenomenology is thus not immediately and simply pre-given [unmittelbar schlicht vorgegeben]; it must be mediated [vermittelt werden]. What does this mean: something is simply pre-given? In what sense is something like that at all possible? And what does this say: something must be mediated, first of all, “brought” to givenness? [allererst zur Gegebenheit “gebracht” werden]?” (Heidegger 1992, 27/23). The interrogation here therefore bears without ambiguity on the nature of the given, of the given as such, of the given in advance, always already de facto achieved; how can we not conceive of this givenness simply as the fact of bearing [porter], of bringing [apporter] the thing to the presence of the fact? How can we not devalue givenness as a simple provision [apport] and transport [transport] of an object (in the sense in which Husserl warned that one does not come with one’s intentional objects “in one’s pocket”)? What “mediation” should intervene for a given to give itself, without production or provision according to objectness? Here an analysis intervenes that is very simple in appearance but that one should take as a paradigm, so decisive was it for the young Heidegger. “The naïve consciousness, […] instead of deliberating upon what is immediately and primarily given, already assumes too much and makes far too many presuppositions. What is immediately given! Every word here is significant. What does ‘immediate’ mean? [statt sich darauf zu besinnen, was unmittelbar gegeben ist. Was unmittelbar gegeben ist! Jedes Wort is hier von Bedeutung. Was besagt unmittelbar?]” (Heidegger 1987, 85/66). Asked otherwise: where does immediacy play out? Let us consider a case, the closest and most banal case for a class [cours] actually in progress [en cours]—the case of a professor speaking while standing behind his lectern; let us ask what of this the students perceive; in other words and more exactly, what phenomenon appears to them, what phenomenon gives itself to them? And yet, contrary to the assumptions of constructivism and the prejudices of empiricism, it is not sense data, improper immediates, derived and abstract immediates, that are given: the immediate given never consists in the color of the wood, nor in the real size of the lectern, nor in the details of its form, nor in the effects that the morning light produces there, nor in the resonance of the sounds of the voice, etc. Nothing of all that appears first, or more exactly all this appears (or better: will appear) later, thanks to the mediation of that which appears first, that which appears to me as the professorial lectern itself: “the lectern is immediately given to me in the lived experience of it [im Kathedererlebnis]”(Ibid., 85/66, emphasis added),44 the lectern itself, as a signification, anterior to the sensible lived experiences and independent 44

 See also ibid., 70–73/56–58.

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of them. The immediate consists in a signification, which mediates all the lived experiences that it alone qualifies to appear and that, without it, would give nothing to be seen. Let no one object with the case of a spectator who, by hypothesis, is entirely foreign to that signification; for even he who does not know what a lectern, or a class, or a professor, or listening students, or a university are and therefore does not know what they signify would, however, still immediately see a signification; doubtless another one (that of a ceremonial podium, of a celebration totem, of a call to rally, or of a collective emblem, etc.), but there would always first and immediately be given to him a global signification [Bedeutung],45 within which alone could sense data, identifiable a posteriori, mediately and abstractly then take on their place and sense. Only the phenomenon endowed with signification, the phenomenon mediated by its own signification [propre signification], gives itself in the proper sense [sens propre] (the reduced sense). Only what happens by itself, therefore with its proper sense, mediated by the reduction (Husserl) or by its own signification (Heidegger), gives itself, unless the proper signification [signification propre] achieves de facto and de jure the most radical reduction possible—that of the thing to itself. It is necessary, therefore, to envision “the problem of givenness” (Heidegger 1992, 127/100)46 as an enigma, which situates it outside the common dichotomies of naïve consciousness: neither immediate in the sense of the sense data of subjective impressions, nor mediate in the sense of the objectness constructed for the understanding. It is not a matter of choosing between terms that are all inadequate, nor even of finding an intermediate solution to this “problem.” It would indeed be better to know how to “fail to correctly ‘resolve’ it,” if its “enigmatic character [Rätselhaftigkeit] itself put us on the path of original understanding [Verstehen],” original because it is anchored in Being-in-the-world itself. Once again, it is necessary to hear the question, “What does ‘given’ mean? ‘Givenness’? This magic word of phenomenology and ‘stumbling block’ for others,” and therefore to remain within the enigma (Ibid, 5/4).47 The indetermination of the given perhaps offers its only correct determination, that which distinguishes it from everything that follows, sense data, objects, knowledge, offshoots of its event.

45  “a meaning […], a moment of signification [eine Bedeutung, ein bedeutungshaftes Moment]” (Ibid., 72/58). See my more detailed analysis in Marion (2012), Ch. 3. 46  For “[a]nd then once again: the original region is not expected to be given, it may first have to be won” (Ibid., 29/24). See: “The original region is not given to us. We do not know anything about it from ‘practical life.’ It is far from us. We must bring it nearer to us methodologically” (Ibid., 203/153). In other words, the given depends on an approach, on a mediation, even on a practice. Which one, if not that of hermeneutics? 47  [Translation modified. —Trans.] Admitting that the given remains an indeterminate but insoluble question: that is what resurfaces in holism and contextualism. It does not suffice to recuse this “given” too often and too clearly in order to be quits with it: denial, in the end [à force], reinforces [renforce] (see Benoist 2011, for example 14, 90).

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2.5  Interpreting, or the Response to the Call Thus that which gives itself does not give itself immediately, as the sensible was supposed to give itself, but it gives itself straightaway as a signification, and this signification itself reduces the sense data, in order to subordinate them to itself and confer on them, possibly and certainly mediately, their sense and status. If the sense data prove to be, at a certain point, given, it will be only on the basis of a signification, which will have brought them forth by decomposition and after the fact [après coup], after the blow [après le coup] of its originary apparition. In short, one will not say that sense data are given immediately and then mediately allow signification, but that signification arises straightaway and then mediately allows sense data. We are always as if surrounded by the uninterrupted arising of the appearing that gives itself, but this appearing gives itself in the form and outlines of a signification: I do not perceive a pure sound, but the murmur of a mountain stream (even of this river), the sound of a motor (and of this automobile); I do not perceive the color yellow (which one, moreover?), but this small section of this wall, not this blue, but that of Klein or of Cézanne; I do not perceive the taste of wine, nor even of a varietal, but that of this burgundy or of this coast, of this climate, of this producer, of this year, etc. In all cases, I perceive only if a signification opens the field to the mature appearing of pure sensations; and that is why the thing appears only ever as an outline—because the signification, straightaway achieved and visible for the spirit, must most of the time (at least in the case of common-law phenomena) wait for the outlines, always partial and to be completed, to come take their place there and little by little validate it. Such a reversal of the order of givenness requires, therefore, that the given, in the sense of sense data, have no immediate phenomenal validity, that it not yet open as such to phenomenality, because it depends on a signification— whether anterior (as in Heidegger’s example) or still awaited (as in Husserl’s description). Henceforth, can one restrict oneself to the agreed-on relation between givenness and hermeneutics, that which the supposedly commonsense objection does not cease to repeat—the given, if it imposes itself of itself, forbids hermeneutics? Can one still admit the agreed-on refutation that pronounces in favor of the “myth of the given” because the given cannot impose itself as an object (for no object appears immediately)? Could it not be that hermeneutics, far from disappearing with givenness (or making givenness disappear in order to begin to speak), awakens only through responding to the enigma of sense data by the discovery of their signification? Hermeneutics then becomes an enigma rather than a ready-made solution that one would have only to summon to exit from the impasse of the given. Indeed, the “enigmatic character” of the given, neither immediate nor mediate, comes, according to Heidegger, from the understanding [Verstehen], which itself, as an existential linked to the “situation [Befindlichkeit]” comes from the “existential constitution of the Being of the ‘there’ [Sein des Da-].” Thus conceived, “[h]as not Dasein’s Being become more enigmatic […]? It has indeed. We must first let the full enigmatic character of this Being unfurl itself, even if all we can do is come to a more genuine

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breakdown over its ‘solution’ […]” (Heidegger 1963, 148/188).48 For any question of interpretation [Auslegung], including that of the given, depends in its turn on this Verstehen and therefore shares with it the same “enigmatic character.” The first caution is to not resort to hermeneutics as the universal solution for determining the sense of the given, as if hermeneutics were self-evident and fell from the intelligible heaven onto a given that was, for its part, obscure and problematic; for the act of interpretation is no more self-evident than is the reception of the given, of which it shares the “enigmatic character.” For, since it happens that hermeneutics does not operate on objects, nor on sense data, it never consists in a pure and simple free interpretation (in the sense of a bicycle’s free wheel turning idly), which by an arbitrary authority would modify at will the sense of the appearing of the thing itself. Such an attitude does not come from hermeneutics, but would rather define its worst deviation, ideology. Ideology certainly interprets, but always for the prosecution: the ideologue knows better than anyone, therefore better than the thing, its signification; he knows that every “Titoist” is a “Trotskyist,” that is, a “Hitlero-­ fascist,” that every ci-devant is a counterrevolutionary, that every “Jew” is a mortal enemy of the “Aryan” and every “Crusader” a mortal enemy of the “believer”—as he knows that bourgeois science is opposed to Marxist or National Socialist science. Ideology can go so far as to persuade the victim that he has not five but six fingers on each hand, for it manages to convince itself of this. Ideology practices an absolutely free and perfectly active hermeneutics and thus accomplishes the worst (and in its view, the best) of what the will to power can dream—reducing everything to its evaluation. Thus one should not oppose interpretation and transformation (“The philosophers have only interpreted [interpretieren] the world in various ways; the point is to change [verändern] it” [Marx 1982, 1033/5]), for, especially in the case of Marx, interpreting is already equivalent to transforming since, moreover, no transformation would remain possible without an interpretation to explain and thereby justify it. As elementary as it remains, this reminder allows us to grasp that hermeneutics cannot be defined simply as the science of interpretation. For it is not for hermeneutics, in contrast to ideology, a matter of finding a sense (no matter which, as long as it reveals itself as useful) for that which requests interpretation; it is a matter of finding the sense that that which requests interpretation requests for itself. The sense that hermeneutics (re-)finds for what it interprets does not come from the ego but from the thing itself awaiting interpretation; the ego less fixes a sense for that which awaits one than it receives a sense from that which awaits one. The sense of that which requests interpretation comes to the interpreter, rather than the interpreter finding it, inventing it, or imposing it. One cannot imagine any activity of the ego-hermeneut with regard to a matter that would be passive for interpretation. In a sense, the ego must remain passive in order to receive the sense that suits exactly that which requests interpretation; the sense comes actively to the interpretable, of itself, the interpreter needing only (as with musical sense) to let unfurl itself that which is implicitly available in and suggested by the given itself.

48

 [Translation modified. —Trans.]

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The sign that the sense brought forth by interpretation correctly suits what requested it consists rather in the sudden disappearance of the interpreter, whose wisdom fades all the more as it becomes useless, since from now on the given disposes by and in itself of the sense that was given to it. The givenness of sense, of its sense, the given’s sense, implies (as does all givenness of any gift whatsoever) the retreat and the disappearance of the giver (in this case, the interpreter). Thus hermeneutics practices on the given a givenness of sense, of its sense, of a sense appropriated from the given in such a way that the given, instead of returning to anonymity and remaining in occultation, decisively frees itself in its manifestation. Hermeneutics does not give, by fixing it and deciding it, a sense to the given but each time lets it unfurl its proper sense [sens propre], that is, that which makes it appear as itself, as a phenomenon that shows itself in and by itself. The self of the phenomenon regulates, in the final analysis, the whole givenness of sense: it is not a matter of the ego constituting a given as an object, but of letting come to the phenomenon its own sense [propre sens], discovered rather than invented, recognized [reconnu] rather than known [connu], by the temporary intervention of the ego. The sense that hermeneutics brings forth arises not so much from the hermeneut’s decision as from the phenomenon itself, of which the hermeneut remains the discoverer and thus the servant, never the author or the owner. The phenomenon shows itself in the degree to which the hermeneut recognizes in the given the sense of that given itself and effaces himself. The proof of a correct hermeneutic shows itself in that the authority of the interpretation must end by shifting from the interpreter to the interpreted. Gadamer has clearly exposed this structure of reciprocal interpretation in the two following arguments, among others. —The first may be called “fusion of horizons.” Namely, the aporia of historical science [Historie] noted by Nietzsche: history either destroys the horizon of that which it interprets by understanding it on the basis of the interpreter’s horizon, or else it destroys itself there by abolishing its own horizon of interpretation in the horizon of that which it interprets. This can occur in three modes: monumental history, which imposes the horizon of the past on the interpreter’s present; critical history, which imposes the modern interpreter’s horizon on that of the past interpreter; and antiquarian history, which confines itself to juxtaposing them by impotence. Nietzsche asks a question: “To what degree does life need the service of historical science?”; and he denounces a danger: ending up with only a critical history without any serious concerns (“without need [ohne Not]”), an antiquarian history without any respectful piety (“without piety [ohne Pietät]”), and a monumental history that knows only a grandeur it can no longer achieve (“[…] who recognizes greatness but cannot himself do great things [(…) der Kenner des Großen ohne das Können des Großen]”) (Nietzsche 1966, 225/72). More radically, argues Gadamer, one cannot admit as unsurpassable the conflict of horizons that Nietzsche takes as the de facto point of departure. De jure, a hermeneutic becomes correct only if the two horizons meet and even, as it were, fuse. “Hence the horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past. There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather understanding [Verstehen] is always the fusion

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of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves” (Gadamer 1960, 289/305).49 But this fusion itself—this is the second argument—supposes a reciprocal approach between the given (here, the past horizon) and the phenomenon (here, the present horizon); how are we to define this reciprocity, which will double the interpretation by the hermeneut with the interpretation of the hermeneut himself? “Thus we return to the conclusion [Feststellung] that the hermeneutic phenomenon too implies the originariness of dialogue and the structure of question and answer [die Ursprünglichkeit des Gesprächs und die Struktur von Frage und Antwort]. That a text handed down by tradition becomes the object of interpretation means already [bereits] that it puts a question to the interpreter. Thus interpretation always [stets] involves an essential relation to the question that is asked of the interpreter. To understand a text means to understand this question. But this takes place, as we showed, by our attaining the hermeneutical horizon” (Ibid., 351/363, emphasis added).50 Historical interpretation, which in the end results in the interpretation of texts, is a matter of a dialogue: “For the dialectic of question and answer that we demonstrated makes understanding appear to be a reciprocal relation of the same kind as dialogue [das Verhältnis des Verstehens als ein Wechselverhältnis von der Art eines Gespräches]. It is true that a text does not speak to us in the same way as a Thou. We who understand it must ourselves make it speak. But we found that this kind of understanding, ‘making the text speak,’ is not an arbitrary procedure that we undertake on our own initiative but that, as a question, it is related to the answer that is expected in the text” (Ibid., 359/370).51 Thus the question (which asks for the sense of the given) receives this sense, which will make the given show itself, only as the answer—an answer that therefore does not come, in the final analysis, from the interpreter but from the interpreted, from the text. “Thus the relation of question and answer is, in fact, reversed [hat sich…umgekehrt]” (Ibid., 355/366).52 The sense

 See: “Understanding a tradition undoubtedly requires a historical horizon, then. But it is not the case that we acquire this horizon by transposing ourselves into a historical situation. Rather, we must always already have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation. For what do we mean by ‘transposing ourselves (Sichversetzen)’? Certainly not just disregarding ourselves (Von-sich-absehen). This is necessary, of course, insofar as we must imagine the other situation. But into this other situation we must bring, precisely, ourselves. Only this is the full meaning of “transposing ourselves. If we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, for example, then we will understand him—i.e., become aware of the otherness, the indissoluble individuality of the other person—by putting ourselves in his position” (Ibid., 288/304). 50  [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. —Trans.] See: “The historical method (historische Erkenntnis) requires that the logic of question and answer be applied to the historical tradition (geschichtliche Überlieferung)” (Ibid., 352/ 364). 51  [Translation modified to follow Marion’s wording more closely. —Trans.] 52  Which J. Grondin confirms literally: “Hermeneutics rests upon dialogical foundations: To interpret a text means to enter into dialogue with it, direct questions to it, and allow oneself to be questioned by it.” To the point that “comprehension is experienced […] as the result of a dialogical game of question and answer” (1994, 74, 117). [I have modified the translation of the first quotation, and that of the second is entirely my own. See Grondin (1993b), 98, 179, the edition Marion cites. —Trans.] 49

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given to the given is from now on a matter of the sense that the given recognizes as its own, of the answer. Thus hermeneutics depends on the structure of question and answer, that is, in my nomenclature, on the structure of call and response,53 therefore on the structure of the given, based on the visible: hermeneutics itself constitutes a—particular and exemplary—case of the play between what gives itself and what shows itself, between the call of the given and the response (by the sense) of what shows itself there. Whence this first thesis: hermeneutics must be understood following the understanding of the given, in the form of the call and response. Far from hermeneutics exceeding givenness or substituting itself for it, it is unfurled in it, as a case of the original relation between what gives itself and what shows itself.54

2.6  Interpreting, Reducing Itself Obviously, if hermeneutics finds its whole place and its whole legitimacy in its function of answering the question that the given poses, by fixing for it its proper sense, we must no longer speak of a hermeneutic status of phenomenology (as if the latter were inscribed in the former as one of its derivations) but must recognize the radically phenomenological status of hermeneutics: hermeneutics constitutes one of its essential operations, just like intentionality, reductions, and constitution, and only thus does it keep its full authority. This implication becomes fully intelligible if one returns to the analysis in which Heidegger thinks interpretation [Auslegung], as and starting from the understanding [Verstehen], and not the reverse. For the interpretation by Dasein of a worldly being presupposes the understanding of Dasein by itself and results from it. Indeed, understanding, or rather being able to understand, something never first consists in transforming the sense of a subsistent object or in attributing a new sense to it, in short in interpreting otherwise the Vorhandenheit of an object. In that case, one would give way to an appearance, that of the unconditional anteriority of the apophantic as, which restricts itself to making an objective substratum evident by a predication, or in other words, to illustrating a “subject” by changing one of its attributes. This appearance is doubled by an aporia: changing one attribute into another is supposed to bear on the thing itself, whereas it is, however, brought about only verbally, by a simple assertion [heraussagen]; we must, therefore, admit between the ontic variation and the verbal assertion, which are, however, likewise  “Answer” and “response” translate the same French word, réponse. I here employ these two different English words because “question and answer” and “call and response” are already established phrases in translations of Gadamer and Marion respectively. [Translator’s note.] 54  Thus I consider that I have finally answered Jocelyn Benoist’s earlier interrogation: “[…] it seems to me that the conversion of your phenomenology into a phenomenology of the call leads you inevitably towards a hermeneutic, for which, however, I see no place in your thought” (Benoist 2001, 101). [My translation. —Trans.] 53

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heterogeneous, a supposed validation (a Geltung in Lotze’s sense). In fact, there results from this abstract montage only the irreducible and incomprehensible duality between two absolutely heterogeneous terms, the predicative assertion on the one hand, purely logical and signitive, and the intraworldly and actual phenomenon on the other, without the slightest phenomenological validation of their connection. The failure of the connection between the logical and the ontical is due to the incapacity to define the sense of Being for the one and the other respectively, senses of Being that are never brought forth as long as one confuses the interpretation by Dasein of a (subsistent) being of the world with the more original interpretation of Dasein by itself in view of its concern and its care; in other words, as long as one stops at the “[…] levelling of the primordial ‘as’ of circumspective interpretation to the ‘as’ with which presence-at-hand is given a definite character […] [Nivellierung des ursprünglicher “Als” der umsichtigen Auslegung zum Als der Vorhandenheitsbestimmung].” In this case, hermeneutics, which disregards its originary status as the interpretation of Dasein by itself, is brought down to the level of a simple platitude, an arbitrary and illegitimate assertion of something about something [Aussage] (Heidegger 1963, 158/201). And yet interpreting [auslegen] first means understanding [verstehen]; and understanding, at least in its phenomenological (and therefore logical) legitimacy, supposes on the contrary the Being-possible, the radical possibilization of Dasein, such that it is only by first orienting itself toward the future; for the Möglichsein first has the status of an existential of Dasein, and not at all of a modality or a category of non-daseinmäßig being (where it is only a matter, when it comes to possibility, of a simple, not-yet-actual contingence). Far from the (positive) indifference of free will, Dasein frees itself for its ownmost possibility, even though it properly is only in the mode of a project [geworfen]. It is here a matter of a “sight” and not of a “vision,” according to a distinction that Mallarmé also made: “Yes, on an isle the air had charged /Not with visions but with sight/The flowers displayed themselves enlarged/Without our ever mentioning it” (“Prose for des Esseintes,” Mallarmé 1994, 46, emphasis added).55 This is an important distinction, for vision bears on what the sensible eye sees or what insensible perception represents of the subsistent object, in short on something of the world; while sight [vue], that sight by which Dasein is dazzled [en prend plein la vue], marks the opening of its gaze, once attained, after a long effort, the beautiful sight, the sight as far as the horizon, where it can see everything and does not stare at anything in particular, where it rather locates itself in the space thus opened by sight. It sees its own sight in the sight of the horizon and opens in it as itself: it is illuminated to its own eyes, understands itself and sees itself: “We must, to be sure, guard against a misunderstanding of the expression ‘sight (Sicht)’. It corresponds to the ‘clearedness [Gelichtetheit]’ which we took as characterizing the disclosedness of the ‘there’ (Heidegger 1963, 146–147/187).

 “Oui, dans une île que l’air charge/De vue et non de visions/Toute fleur s’étalait plus large/Sans que nous en devisions.” (“Prose pour des Esseintes” in Mallarmé 1998, 95, emphasis added).

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Thus understood, hermeneutics [Auslegung] never bears first on a text (vision of its sense) nor even on the intra-worldly being to which the text refers, but on the understanding [Verstehen] opened to and by the possibility of Dasein. Hermeneutics proceeds from the sight of the interpreter on the avenue of its possibility. Thus in the situation, which is however still unappropriated [uneigeintlich], of the wieldable being [zuhanden] there is no pre-given [vorgegeben], no piece, no fragments (Ibid., 150–151/191–192), in short, no “given” according to sense data, but always already sense, that character of Dasein and not the property of an intra-worldly being. “Meaning is an existential of Dasein, not a property attaching to beings, lying ‘behind’ them, or floating somewhere as an ‘intermediate domain’” (Ibid., 151/193).56 Henceforth, it becomes clear that the apophantic “as” presupposes and stems from the existential “as” by a backlash: “The primordial ‘as’ of an interpretation [ερμηνεια] which understands circumspectively we call the ‘existential-­ hermeneutical “as”’ in distinction from the ‘apophantical “as”’ of the assertion” (Ibid., 158/201).57 Is there not, however, some vicious circle here? For does sense come from Dasein (as in ideology) such that it no longer arises from the phenomenon as its appropriated signification that imposes itself on the interpreter, on Dasein? In fact, there is indeed a circle, but it is in no way vicious, and rather than avoiding it, we must take care to enter it correctly. Moreover, it is less a circle than a relation or, more exactly, what Gadamer names reciprocal speech [parole, Gespräch], the play of question and answer. Indeed, if hermeneutics (of the thing) originates in the understanding (of itself by Dasein), this understanding always means pre-­ understanding, and therefore Dasein’s opening to its possibility: “As the disclosedness of the ‘there’, understanding [das Verstehen] always pertains to the whole of Being-in-the-world” (Ibid., 152/194). Dasein’s possibility plays out in and by Being-in-the-world, for its Being is at stake only because Dasein itself brings itself into play in the world. Thus between the sense of Dasein and the signification of each being, the understanding [Verstehen], such as it permits interpretation [Auslegung], plays out in the “structure of question and answer” (Gadamer). But such a “structure” does not come from nowhere: it belongs to the game of call and response, such that one glimpses how hermeneutics can hinge on the question of givenness. If indeed the reception and the identification of the given imply that this given always remains to be interpreted as a phenomenon endowed with signification, then the hermeneutic instance sets the place of the given because it sets itself there. It is necessary to understand hermeneutics itself in charge of this reception and this identification of the given. Whence the final stage: knowing not only how to hear (interpret) hermeneutics itself, but how to hear it such that it hears (and well understands what concerns) the given.

 [Translation modified. —Trans.] This “sense [meaning], Sinn” corresponds exactly to what Heidegger had first described, in 1919, as “signification, Bedeutung” (see above, §4). 57  “Das ursprüngliche ‘Als’ der umsichtigen Auslegung (ερμηνεια) nennen wir das existential-hermeutische ‘Als’ im Unterschied vom apophantischen ‘Als’ der Aussage” (Ibid., 158).

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2.7  Giving Itself, Showing Itself: The Gap The given does not give itself immediately (or mediately either, moreover) as an already-constituted object. For the given does not yet show itself through the simple fact that it gives itself: this necessary condition does not suffice. Certainly, the phenomenon shows itself only if it happens as a given, but it does not suffice that it happen as a given for it to appear as showing itself, in full phenomenality. Since Being Given, of which this was one of the conclusions, I have emphasized that “[…] if all that shows itself must first give itself, it sometimes happens that what gives itself does not succeed in showing itself” (Marion 1997, 425/309).58 The given shows itself only in its reflection, in its reflexive return, in short, in the response to the adonné,59 who sees it, but only insofar as he receives himself from this given. In other words, “[p]recisely because the principle ‘What gives itself shows itself’ remains intact, it becomes possible to observe the finitude of phenomenality in the realm of givenness. For what gives itself shows itself only insofar as it is received by the gifted [adonné], whose proper function consists in giving in return that the given show itself […]” (Ibid., 426/310). But if the given gives itself as a call, if it shows itself only in the response to the adonné, and if the adonné remains, by definition, finite, then what shows itself also remains, for its part, late and in the background in relation to what gives itself. The resistance of the adonné fixes the limit, each time variable, of the transfiguration of what is given into what shows itself; its resistance, like that of the filament that in the lightbulb encloses the current’s power in order to restore it as a luminous radiance, brings to light, in the impact that it manages to retain, the given’s arising. Genius, to take up Kant’s thesis, consists only in a greater resistance to the given, which by holding it back more strongly allows a greater manifestation of what gives itself. Before the flux of the given, genius sets up a screen that displays the visible and becomes the jewel case holding the monstration. The finitude of the manifestation (of the auto-monstration of the phenomena) is brought out, by contrast, against the infinity of the obscure givenness of what still remains out of sight: “I am therefore obsessed by what I cannot or don’t want to let show itself. A night of the unseen, given but without kind, envelops the immense day of what already shows itself” (Ibid., 438/319). The gap between what gives itself and what shows itself from it irremediably characterizes the phenomenality of givenness because it results directly from the finitude of the adonné.

 And already in §18: “For if all that gives itself shows itself, not all gives itself univocally” (Ibid., 250/178). [Translation modified. —Trans.] 59  The French word adonné means to be given over, devoted, or even addicted to something. It contains within itself the words don (gift) and donné (given), etymological connections which are unfortunately impossible to render in English without sacrificing either meaning or brevity. While the translations “the one who is given over” or “the given-over one” would preserve both the basic sense of the word and its relation to donné, given, they are regrettably clunky. Therefore, as the original French adonné has already entered some English-language discussions of Marion, I have chosen to preserve it here. [Translator’s note.] 58

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Whence the obligatory place and function of hermeneutics: hermeneutics manages the gap between what shows itself and what gives itself, by interpreting the call (or, often, the intuition) by the response (the concept or signification). Intuition, given and received, remains blind—shows nothing yet—as long as the adonné does not recognize its signification or significations (or concepts) that will allow a fully de jure phenomenon to show itself there. The hermeneutic power of the adonné therefore measures, in the final analysis, the possibility for what is given to show itself, in short it calibrates the scale of the phenomenalization of givenness. Not only does “[…] the unconditioned universality of givenness” not “[…] rende[r] obsolete […] the recourse to hermeneutics”,60 but conversely, a phenomenology of givenness lets phenomena appear as givens only to the degree to which is exercised within it a hermeneutics of the given as shown and showing itself, as visible and seen by an adonné. Nothing appears that does not pass via its interpretation; every interpretation is achieved in the manifestation of what appears. Hermeneutics is not added to phenomenology because, without signification, the given would postpone its monstration. Day comes to the given only by its hermeneutic.

2.8  Hermeneutics of the Gap In fact, my essays on the phenomenology of givenness have ceaselessly had recourse to the offices of hermeneutics.61 Let us here highlight four of its interventions. In the first place, the call is necessarily defined, as I have said, by its sensible and/ or semantic anonymity. Hermeneutics is therefore required straightaway. —First the call can be produced without any physical sound. This does not prevent some (adonnés) from recognizing it even (and sometimes precisely) in the silence of sounds. In other words, in silence, some hear something like voices, like a presence in the breeze of the evening, in the unsaid of the silence of the sea. In what does this interpretation of the unheard as a call consist? Whether it is borne out or disappoints (it matters little at this stage of the analysis), interpretation always consists in the recognition of an intention happening to the adonné, who assigns it to himself as coming for him. This assigning of the signal (whether sonorous or otherwise, silent or visible) is in no way extraordinary: we accomplish it each time we, in the racket of  See supra, §2.1.  See, among other texts, Marion (1997), §23: “The hermeneutic […] of the event […]” (319/229); §26: “The event, unforeseeable according and counter to quantity, comes to pass by passing over the I, which yields to an infinite hermeneutic and lets itself be encompassed by it” (369/267); §30: “Far from underestimating the most recent advances in phenomenology—hermeneutics, difference, auto-affection, and the gaze of the Other—I am only trying to confirm them by assigning each a precise site within givenness” (441/321–322). Marion (2001): reply to J.  Greisch and J. Grondin (39 n. 1/33 n. 3); on the hermeneutics of the event (43/36–37 and 135/112–113); “The Icon, or the Endless Hermeneutic” (the title of ch. 5, 125 ff./104 ff.); “Hermeneutics to the Infinite” (ch. 5, §5), etc. Marion (2005): ch. 4, “‘Christian Philosophy’: Hermeneutic or Heuristic?” Marion (2001): ch. 5, “The Unforeseeable, or the Event,” §30 “The Double Interpretation.”

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an urban crowd, in the continuous rumble of the flux of sounds pouring out in a waiting room or at an airport gate, interpret one of these background noises, refrains, announcements not as fuss but as calls, then as calls destined for this or that other, then for me. This assumption of a noise (or of a silence) as destined for me can deceive me: I hear a first name or a last name, I turn around or I run to the information desk, to discover that it was a homonym or a mishearing. But in every case, it was necessary that I well and truly interpret this confused and confusing sound as a call for me. I therefore hear the call in and by my interpretation: I had to determine that there was a call and determine myself as its recipient; only then will the response, be it a denial, be permitted. And only my interpretation of the call will permit this response, thus confirming the rule that the call makes itself heard only in the response, which decides not only the content of the call but first its actuality (or its illusory character). This hermeneutics of the call corresponds exactly, moreover, to that of the gift. For the phenomenon of the gift does not begin without interpretation: contrary to exchange and commerce, which exempt me from any interpretation and straightaway signify to me that there is indeed an already-available object to exchange, sell or buy (it is displayed in a store) at a price (fixed or to be negotiated, it matters little) with a patent (though possibly illusory) use-value and utility, no being or object offers a gift in itself. It can be a matter only of the raw state of a thing, of something lost, placed at random, without any intention that destines it for anyone whomsoever; it is first necessary to notice it and decide if it is an abandoned or lost object, to be taken to the lost and found—which is decided by interpretation. And even once one has decided that it is indeed a thing that has been made available and is destined for someone to receive it as a gift, it is still necessary to interpret which givee could legitimately benefit from it (the bottle of champagne in the hotel room, the fire extinguisher in the hallway, the rose in the vase, etc.): is it a “commercial gesture” or a personal intention, and towards whom? The response alone will make the gift, but the response will be made only by dint of interpreting each moment of the proposal of the gift like so many increasingly precise and, in a sense, increasingly risky intentions. And this interpretive risk increases with the grandeur and dignity of the gift. To the point that the gift par excellence—that which an adonné makes of himself to another adonné, the erotic phenomenon—the entire plot (which one cannot, moreover, reduce to a process of seduction, but which extends to the entire duration of its phenomenality according to erotic temporality, which fidelity measures) hinges on an uninterrupted series of coherent interpretations that reinforce each other, or incoherent ones that destroy each other. In the second place, what is true of the phenomenon in general, with the call that the gift and every given imply, is all the more true of the saturated phenomenon. In this case, intuition not only completely fills what the intentional signification aimed at regarding the objective phenomenon (the proof of adequate truth), but also it exceeds what the concept presumed regarding signification, such that the phenomenon escapes any foresight, to the point of becoming impossible to aim at [invisable], if not invisible [invisible] (thus the sublime, the infinite, the face, the flesh, the event, the idol, etc.). Or, to say it like Mallarmé, we should admit that this saturated

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phenomenon “[w]as growing too large for our reason.”62 Henceforth, the height of the giving wave requires that one assign to it, in order to retain it, several concepts or significations. Here hermeneutics intervenes: not only to invent or rather find again the missing significations, but first to admit that they are missing and that it is no longer a matter of a common-law phenomenon, knowable as an object and being in the mode of objectness [Vorhandenheit], but of a saturated phenomenon that can manifest itself and therefore be known only as a non-object. For the gap, in fact never completely closed, between the saturating intuition and the rarity of conceptual significations must, for want of being filled, be traveled along by the invention of several, if not of all possible, interpretations of the intuition. Let us note, moreover, that Husserl identifies this possibility. First by admitting that the constitution of a phenomenon can be unfolded indefinitely, each of the intuited outlines complicating the noema, then each of the other inter-subjective constitutions (it would be better, moreover, to say inter-objective) reinforcing that complication, to the point that the teleological dimension of the process endlessly puts off the final constitution of the object, which is, in a sense, always to come. Next by admitting that the temporal constitution of the object can, by dint of extending and complicating itself, end by “exploding [explodieren]” (1976a, 339/275–276, 347/281–282, 373/303). The “explosion” could define the rupture of the limits that the concept, or the concepts, try (and must try) to impose on the excess of the giving intuition. This possible “explosion” must therefore be understood positively, as the crossing of the ideal limit of the adequation of the two faces of phenomenality. The inadequation of the noesis to its noema (in Levinas’s sense) is generalized and becomes from now on the rule of saturated phenomenality. One can also generalize what I have advanced concerning the face of the other, in other words the saturated phenomenon of the icon, where “[…] the face of the other person requires […] an infinite hermeneutic” (Marion 2001, 152/126). The saturation of certain phenomena opens, therefore, a doubled field to hermeneutics, which takes up again the function that constitution can no longer assume within the limits of simple objectness: signification intervenes with an essential lateness, and the phenomenon remains haloed with a border of conceptual imprecision that doubtless will never fade. This imprecision does not, however, imply any unintelligibility or irrationality, since it attests a reserve of rationality and intelligibility still to come—a phenomenality that comes to mind because it is temporalized. Hermeneutics, by deploying it in the time of invention, transforms the (saturated) phenomenon from an object into an event. In the third place, hermeneutics finds itself in charge of considering a new difficulty, inevitable because it results directly from its previous function: how can we distinguish between the degrees of intuition, in other words the poor phenomena,  “O Spirit of litigation, know/When we keep silent in this season/The stem of multiple lilies grew/Too large to be contained by reason.” (“Prose for des Esseintes,” Mallarmé 1994, 47, emphasis added). [The alternate translation given in the text of the last line of this verse is my own and is more literal. —Trans.] “O sache l’Esprit de litige/A cette heure où nous nous taisons,/Que. de lis multiples la tige/Grandissait trop pour nos raisons.” (“Prose pour des Esseintes,” Mallarmé 1998, 95, emphasis added.)

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the common-law phenomena, and the saturated phenomena? And moreover, is it necessary to distinguish the three cases as so many fixed categories, definitely distinct and always irreducible? Or rather, should we not envision transitions from one to the other, such that saturation is not restricted to exceptional and marginal cases, possibly disqualifiable or legitimately placed outside the norms? In fact, this interrogation, as obvious as it seems, still remains dependent on the metaphysical paradigm of a schema of phenomenality; it presupposes that between the degrees of saturation are fixed, as in a triptych or in the septet of a prism, suddenly and clearly, borders closing regions, with no crossing or transition (in the sense in which Husserl severed the consciousness-region and the world-region). And yet, as I have at least tried to establish, it is necessary to admit the gradualness of saturation, since the same intuitive given can end by showing itself (phenomenalizing itself) as more or less saturated, according to the hermeneutic that takes sight of it. Thus for sight, three horizontally superposed bands of different colors can cause to appear the simple signification of an object (a national flag) or a saturated phenomenon (an abstract composition by Rothko). For hearing, the same sound can transmit a univocal object (like the brief signal of a piece of information, of a message, reduced to their signification) or a musical melody (a concert without words, or without intelligible words, because without any univocal signification). For touch, the same hardness can indicate the resistance of an object before the advance of my hand or the smoothness of the marble of a Greek column. For taste, the same liquid can be objectively summarized by the chemical formula for its elaborate composition in an oenological laboratory or “rejoice the heart of man” to the point of giving him, with the spirit [esprit] of the wine, the wit [esprit] that he perhaps does not have. For smell, the same aromas can be summarized by the objective formula according to which the chemist produces industrial odors or deliver perfumes “that sing the transports of soul and of sense” (“Correspondences,” Baudelaire 2015, 17).63 Between objectness and saturation the crossing never ceases, which renders banal saturation itself, which can arise out of the poorest situations.64 And yet the crossing from a poor phenomenality to a saturated (and saturating) phenomenality does not depend on the pure and simple given, but on the manner in which the adonné receives it, experiences it, and expresses it—in short, the manner in which he knows how to interpret it. This interpretation itself varies with the talent, the upbringing, also the courage, in short the resistance that the adonné can, each time, deploy to receive the given. Such a resistance—which, in one sense, consists precisely in not resisting, but rather in enduring the insistence of the given—comes from hermeneutics. The saturated phenomenon demands a hermeneutic, in which the existential as agrees to expose itself to the counter-experience, and therefore to  “Qui chante les transports de l’esprit et des sens.” (“Correspondances,” Baudelaire 1961, 11). One can, moreover, read all of Baudelaire’s poetry as an extraordinarily subtle search with an eye to transforming into saturated phenomena that which, to other, prosaic eyes, offers only objects, and sometimes the most disordered ones. It is thus, for instance, with the five variations on “Wine” or those on fragrances (including tobacco). 64  See Marion (2005), Ch. 7. 63

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wage a fight against the inevitably objectifying interpretation, dictated by the apophantic as; and these two interpretations are also articulated in an inversely proportional manner. And who decides on and exercises this hermeneutic conflict, if not the adonné? One sees how little the adonné should be conceived as passive and submissive before the given, for its part the hermeneutic agent par excellence. “The devoted [adonné] is in no way passive, since by her response (hermeneutic) to the call (intuitive), she, and she alone, allows what gives itself to become, partially but really, what shows itself” (Marion 2010, 181/143). The passage from a poor or common-law phenomenon to a saturated phenomenon belongs, by full right, to hermeneutics. Finally, the exercise of hermeneutics is required to establish a fourth distinction, that which separates all phenomena into objects or events and which, as well, transforms the object into an event, or the reverse. We will here follow Heidegger’s analysis, when he establishes, with the example of the hammer, the difference between the phenomenality of the subsistent being [vorhanden] and that of the being ready-­ to-­hand [zuhanden], and marks the possible transition from the one to the other (Heidegger 163, 157/199–200, 361/412–413). The ready-to-hand does not appear as such, and not as a subsistent being, by a real modification of its properties, but by the new role that he who uses it makes it play in the world; its new aspect, its new appearing depend so little on its real properties that it can happen that those properties either have no relation to the use of this ready-to-hand or even prevent it. Thus the hammer, as a real object, depends on its wielding and not the reverse: one can hammer with all sorts of hammers, of all forms, some permitting one to hammer in a certain manner (the mason’s hammer sculpts stone, instead of beating in nails), but one can also hammer without a hammer; thus with a stone, with some piece of metal, of hard wood, etc.; for it is the act or the intention of the hammerer that makes the hammer, and hammering makes the thief.65 This is moreover, why one can make oneself a hammer (or any other tool): one indeed always makes the first tools without tools because the use precedes the tool. The use of a being therefore implies a new definition of its phenomenality: its real properties (physical and chemical, intrinsic, objective, so-called primary qualities, etc.) are bracketed, or at least revised by and subordinated to the finality that use imposes. The being, seen as ready-to-hand, becomes an improvised being (in the sense of an improvised weapon). And yet, as Heidegger emphasizes, in order to see the hammer as a wieldable being ready-to-hand rather than as an inert substance, it is a matter of bringing the existential “as” into play there, the “as” of the Dasein open to the world, who sees it as he uses it, in a radical hermeneutic. One manages to conceive of the reversal of a phenomenon from the objectness of a first aspect into its secret eventality by generalizing this analysis. Certainly the phenomenological characters of the object (the complete conceptual definition, foreseeability, repeatability, etc.) are opposed to those of the event; but because they

 This phrase alludes to the French saying “L’occasion fait le larron,” which means “Opportunity makes the thief.” [Translator’s note.]

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invert them, they answer them and can be reversed into them. For the same being can cross over from the status of an object to that of an event, just as an event can take on the status of an object; it suffices to understand its temporality, either according to the permanent present (that is, by a metaphysical abstraction of the crossing and an arbitrary maintaining of the “now”) or else according to the future in advance (that is, by an anticipation of what happens, surpassing all foresight by the one to whom it happens). Such a reversal engenders two possible interpretations of the same being; but these two interpretations themselves suppose a double postulation of the existential “as,” and therefore a radical hermeneutic decision. Doubtless this distinction of the two modes of phenomenality in general also admits of other characteristics. “But the essential remains: the distinction between the modes of phenomenality (for us, between object and event) can be joined to the hermeneutical variations that […] have (ontological) authority over the phenomenality of beings” (Marion 2010, 304–305/199).66 The phenomenology of givenness therefore manages the gap between what gives itself and what shows itself, the stake of which fixes the self of the phenomenon, only by the exercise of a properly phenomenological hermeneutics.67

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1961. In Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and C. Pichois, vol. I. Paris: Pléiade. ———. 2015. Les Fleurs du mal. Trans. Eric Gans. New York: Spuyten Duyvil. Benoist, Jocelyn. 2001. L’Idée de phénoménologie. Paris: Beauchesne. ———. 2011. Eléments de philosophie réaliste. Paris: Vrin. Descartes, René. 1964. Principia philosophiae, in Œuvres complètes, vol. VIII-1, ed. C.  Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin. English edition: Descartes, René. 1985. Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1965. Regulae ad directionem ingenii, in Œuvres complètes, vol. X, ed. C.  Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin. English edition: Descartes, René. 1985. Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1., Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fink, Eugen. 1988. VI.  Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1: Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre. Dordrecht: Kluwer. English edition: Fink, Eugen. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans. Ronald Bruzina. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Franck, Didier. 1981. Chair et corps chez Husserl. Paris: Minuit. English edition: Franck, Didier. 2014. Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl. Trans. Joseph Rivera and Scott Davidson. New York: Bloomsbury.

 [Translation modified. —Trans.]  Thus I am in accord with C. Romano’s thesis: “[…] genuine hermeneutics is phenomenology and phenomenology is only achieved as hermeneutics” (Romano 2010, 874/485.) 66 67

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr. English edition: Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method, 2nd ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Gagey, Henri-Jérôme. 2010. La théologie entre urgence phénoménologique et endurance herméneutique. Recherches de Science religieuse 98 (1): 31–57. Gondek, Hans-Dieter, and Làszlo Tengely. 2011. Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Paris: Hermann. Greisch, Jean. 1991. L’herméneutique dans la “phénoménologie comme telle”: Trois questions à propos de Réduction et donation. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 96 (1): 43–63. ———. 1995. Index sui et non dati. Les paradoxes d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Transversalités 70: 27–54. Grondin, Jean. 1992. La phénoménologie sans herméneutique. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2: 146–153. ———. 1993a. L’Horizon herméneutique de la pensée contemporaine. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1993b. L’Universalité de l’herméneutique. Trans. Jean Grondin. Paris: PUF. ———. 1994. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gschwandtner, Christina M. 2015. Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1963. Sein und Zeit, 10th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. English edition: Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1985. Das Wesen der Sprache. In Unterwegs zur Sprache, G.A. 12, ed. Friedrich-­ Wilhelm von Hermann, 149–204. Frankfurt: Klostermann. English edition: Heidegger, Martin. 1971. The Nature of Language. In On the Way to Language, 111–138. Trans. Peter D. Herz. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1987. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Kriegsnotsemester, 1919), G.A. 56/57, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel. Frankfurt: Klostermann. English edition: Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. New York: Continuum Press. ———. 1992. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (WS 1919/20), G.A. 58, ed. Hans-Helmut Gander. Frankfurt: Klostermann. English edition: Heidegger, Martin. 2012. Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/1920. Trans. Scott M.  Campbell. New  York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2007. Zeit und Sein. In Zur Sache des Denkens, G.A. 14., ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, 3–30. Frankfurt: Klostermann. English edition: Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Time and Being. In On Time and Being, 1–24. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1956. Erste Philosophie I, Hua. VII, ed. Rudolf Boehm. Leuven: Husserl Archives. French edition: Husserl, Edmund. 1972. Philosophie première I. Trans. A.-L. Kelkel, Paris: PUF. ———. 1973. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua. II, ed. Walter. Biemel. Leuven: Husserl Archives. English edition: Husserl, Edmund. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Boston: Kluwer. ———. 1976a. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I, Hua. III, ed. Karl Schuhmann. Leuven: Husserl Archives. English edition: Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy I.  Trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1976b. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Hua. VI, ed. Walter Biemel. Leuven: Husserl Archives. English edition: Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Locke, John. 1988. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H.  Nidditch, 6th ed. London: Oxford University Press. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1994. Collected Poemes: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Henry Weinfeld. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. In Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Marchal, vol. I. Paris: Pléiade. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. Questions cartésiennes: Méthode et métaphysique. Paris: PUF. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 1999. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Trans. John Cottingham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation, rev. ed. Paris: PUF. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: PUF.  English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. In Excess: Studies In Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2004. Réduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie, 2nd ed. Paris: PUF. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 1988. Reduction and Givenness. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2005. Le visible et le révélé. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 2008. The Visible and the Revealed. Trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2006. L’irréductible. Critique 704–705: 79–91. ———. 2010. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 2015. Negative Certainties. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. Figures de phénoménologie. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2015. Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes: Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae, 5th ed. Paris: Vrin. English edition: Marion, Jean-Luc. 2017. Descartes’s Grey Ontology: On Cartesian Science and Aristotelian Thought in the Regulae. Trans. Sarah E. Donahue. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press [forthcoming]. ———. 2016. Reprise du donné. Paris: PUF. Marx, Karl. 1982. Thesen über Feuerbach, Thèses sur Feuerbach. German and French translation in Karl Marx, Œuvres, vol. III, ed. M. Rubel. Paris: Pléiade. English edition: Marx, Karl. 1965. Theses on Feuerbach. Trans. W. Lough. In Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1845–47, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers. Neurath, Otto. 1932. Protokollsätze. Erkenntnis 3(1): 204–214. English edition: Neurath, Otto. 1983. Protocol Statements. In Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. Robert S.  Cohen and Marie Neurath, 91–99. Dordrecht: Reidel. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben. In Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. In Werke, vol. 1, ed. Karl Schlechta, 209–286. Munich: Carl Hanser. English edition: Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. In Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, 57–124. Trans. R.  J. Hollingdale. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Quine, William van Orman. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Philosophical Review 60: 20–43. Romano, Claude. 2010. Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard. English edition: Romano, Claude. 2015. At the Heart of Reason. Trans. Michael B.  Smith and Claude Romano. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sebbah, François-David. 2001. L’épreuve de la limite: Derrida, Henry, Lévinas et la phénoménologie. Paris: PUF. Sellars, W.S. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Serban, Claudia. 2012. La méthode phénoménologique, entre réduction et herméneutique. Les Etudes philosophiques 100 (1): 81–100. Tanner, Kathryn. 2007. Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology. In Counter-Experiencees: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart, 201–231. Notre-Dame: South Bend. Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle. 2015. Le lieu de l’universel: Impasses du réalisme dans la philosophie contemporaine. Paris: Seuil.

Chapter 3

Whose Word Is It Anyway? Interpreting Revelation Shane Mackinlay

Abstract  Intrinsic to the concept of revelation is that it comes to a subject from beyond. Numerous thinkers have emphasised that any compromise to the absolute nature of this transcendence would entail a compromise to the revelatory character of revelation. However, for revelation actually to occur, there must be some sort of appearing to a subject; that which is transcendent must enter the immanence of experience. Such an entry into immanence could suggest that any occurrence of revelation is impossible by definition because it compromises the absolute character of revelation’s transcendence and entails a self-contradiction. One way of responding to this concern is to prohibit interpretation of revelation, ensuring that revelation is received with precisely the transcendent character with which it is given. However, this would result in any and every transcendence being welcomed as revelation, solely on the basis of its transcendence. As Richard Kearney argues, such an approach gives us no way of distinguishing between angels and demons. It is also possible that some experiences of revelation may be subjective projections rather than divine revelation. Therefore, it is very important that a means of distinguishing different experiences of transcendence be identified. There have been two main approaches to this task of critical assessment and selection. First, one can appeal to authority, which offers clarity, but depersonalises and generalises the personal and particular character of revelatory experience. Since Descartes, such appeals are largely discredited as uncritical. Alternatively, Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes an ongoing, provisional,

An earlier version of parts of this essay appeared as “Discerning the Transcendent,” Doctrine and Life 67, no. 4 (April 2017): 37–47. S. Mackinlay (*) Catholic Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_3

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critical hermeneutics in his discussion of dialogue and conversation as models for human understanding. This essay explains how Gadamer’s approach might be applied to the reception of revelation, arguing that his approach allows us to preserve the essential character of both revelation and human experience. Keywords  Marion · Critical hermeneutics · Revelation · Interpretation · Counter-experience In John’s gospel, during Jesus’ discourse at the Last Supper, he tells Philip: “The words I speak are not my own” (John 14:10). Jesus is referring to his closeness to the Father, such that in seeing and listening to him, his disciples know and see the Father (John 14:7). In other words, Jesus reveals the Father to his disciples. Jesus asserts that their finite and limited experience of him is actually an experience of the absolute character and transcendence of God. When the disciples listen to Jesus, something of the beyond is opened to them; even though they experience his words in the immanent present of their experience, his words do not belong to that immanence, but to the transcendent. However, the very manner in which the disciples receive Jesus’ words shapes what is heard and gives the disciples some claim to ownership of it. Furthermore, once they have heard his words, they can take them as their own. Thus, Jesus’ words have been set down in multiple versions in the Christian scriptures, and continue to be unendingly debated, pondered, reasserted, transmitted and interpreted. This is the vulnerability of revelation. Once the transcendent is opened to the immanent, its absolute character is compromised; it is subject to the same debates, translations and refashioning as any other expression. Can this be done without it collapsing into the immanent? On what authority is the transcendent treated as part of the immanent? Whose word is it anyway? This chapter commences by observing some tendencies in the way that transcendence is experienced in our contemporary secular world, highlighting that transcendence has perhaps been individualised more than it has been banished. I then briefly review a range of recent French phenomenological thought in which transcendence is evident, focussing particularly on Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of saturated phenomena. Marion proposes these saturated phenomena as a way of resolving the dilemma inherent in revelation of how the transcendent can appear in the immanent. However, in order to maintain the absolute character of transcendence, he severely limits the scope for interpretation of revelation. This constraint worries Richard Kearney, whose concerns I then outline about the critical need for discernment in relation to experience of the transcendent. I endorse Kearney’s view that such discernment must be hermeneutic, and I conclude by proposing three principles for critical interpretation drawn from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

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3.1  Secularism, Plurality, Transcendence In his magisterial work, A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor sets out an analysis of both the process leading up to secularism as we know it and also the characteristics of that secularity.1 He analyses this in terms of what he describes as the “immanent frame” in which we operate and the way that it develops, particularly through modernity, describing a way of seeing the world that excludes transcendence and that is self-enclosed and self-sufficient – where transcendence is superfluous (2007, 539–93). However, this is not a simple story of the banishing and exclusion of religious belief. In Taylor’s account, this process is better described as religious belief being privatised, so that it becomes very much an individual commitment that is an optional extra, rather than a feature that is held in common as part of a culture. This privatisation changes the conditions of belief and correlates to a growth in both the diversity of the commitments that people have and also the mobility of those commitments. Religious faith, along with other commitments, has a mobility that involves an unbundling from the ‘package deal’ that would have been more characteristic of earlier times where the village was the context for human life. The village provided a complete social and cultural context: it delivered not just beliefs, but also family, friends, recreation, work, health care and other social services. These various elements were combined in a single bundle that provided everything together. Taylor describes our contemporary experience as an ‘unbundling’ of those involvements. This unbundling does not necessarily entail the loss of those particular commitments and involvements, but is more about a growing diversity and mobility of the commitments that we have. They no longer come as part of a single package. So a person might be involved with a job, a sporting club and an internet discussion group, which are not only in quite different places geographically, but which also have no overlap in membership or shared interests. The result of this unbundling is the replacement of what Taylor describes as a ‘porous self’ with a ‘buffered self,’ where there are multiple separations within an individual, compartmentalising the various commitments that we have (2007, 37–42). That buffering obviously has a major impact on religious faith and on social and institutional structures such as churches. No longer does a single community provide an individual with social, family and educational connections alongside a shared religious belief. However, while this situation is clearly a very different context for belief, it doesn’t necessarily indicate a loss of belief. Taylor’s account describes a much more complex picture than that. Our contemporary situation is one that Graham Ward describes in terms of its focus on individual experience, to the point that we might even call it 1  Taylor distinguishes three types of secularity, focussing his analysis on the third of these: (1) a separation of Church and State, in which social activity is divided into various autonomous spheres (political, educational, economic, etc.) that operate solely with values that are internal to themselves, without reference to God or ultimate reality; (2) a decline in religious belief and practice; (3) a shift “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith … is one human possibility among others” (2007, 2–3).

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­hyper-­individualist (2015, 20f). His description picks up something of the modern shift that we see beginning perhaps most clearly in Descartes, where there is a shift from beliefs and attitudes being passed on through the generations, to each individual and his or her reason being regarded as a radically new starting point. This shift in focus is not only a realignment from a stance of belief to one of secularisation and a disenchanted world, but also a transition from a world that is structured around institutions to one that focuses on the individual and on the individual’s experience and reason. So it is not just church affiliation that is affected by this hyper-individualist focus, but also involvement with other community-based institutions like political parties, trade unions and so on. As Ward says: “People want to experience and to experience themselves experiencing. They want immediate affect whether that be through speaking in tongues and prophesying or extreme sports” (2015, 20). The focus here is on the individual and his or her experience as an individual. Grace Davie, a British sociologist of religion, adopts a different description of this same phenomenon when she talks about faith in our time as “believing without belonging,” where commitments are purely personal and individual, without those commitments being translated into or relying on institutional commitments and involvement (1994).

3.2  Philosophical Accounts of Transcendence In that context of individual commitments, which are in some respects multiplied and even enlarged, it shouldn’t be surprising that a commitment to transcendence doesn’t simply disappear. It continues to be apparent not only in individual belief, but also in manifestly scholarly domains, perhaps particularly evident in French phenomenology of the last 50 years. Dominique Janicaud notoriously laments this resilience of transcendence in French phenomenology in his somewhat polemical book, The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology (2000; French: 1990). In Janicaud’s view, this turn is very clear – and very unwelcome, because he believes that it betrays Husserl’s restriction of phenomenology to “phenomenal immanence” (35) and uses “phenomenology … as a springboard in a quest for divine transcendence” (70). Janicaud focuses his critique particularly on tendencies that he sees in Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-­ Louis Chrétien and Michel Henry. Emmanuel Levinas is an obvious place for Janicaud to begin, with his focus on the face of another person, who imposes him- or herself as a figure of the infinite, one who is other than me, who comes from beyond me and is the starting point for my experience of myself. According to Levinas, the fundamental nature of the self that I discover is that I am one on whom a transcendent ethical demand is placed, encapsulated in the highest possible ethical demand: Thou shalt not kill (1969, 199). Supplanting the individual’s reason that was Descartes’s starting point, Levinas begins from the other who transcends me and imposes demands on me from beyond.

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This other is not so much individuated in an invitation to personal relationship, but is much more an impersonal figure that is characterised by its transcendence and infinity. Michel Henry speaks with great drama of the intense interiority of the individual’s experience of absolute Life, which he very deliberately capitalises. He describes the original immediacy and immanence of sensation and affection in our experience of flesh as the self-revelation of “Life,” which makes possible any subsequent openness to a world. Early on in Henry’s work there is a sense of the individual’s own life, the life of the self, but as his thought progresses his description of Life suggests something that clearly transcends the individual and provides the context for experience, such that the individual is part of Life, and almost subsumed into it. His account of “the flesh’s generation in absolute Life” places absolute interiority in relation to absolute Life, which is its source (2015, 119–25). Jean-Louis Chrétien, describing a similar dynamic to Levinas, reflects extensively on the call from beyond that always comes first, so that we experience ourselves as responding rather than initiating. Our fundamental experience is never of installing ourselves as the origin, but rather of discovering ourselves in response to a call which precedes and transcends us (2004). Janicaud’s final target is Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, in which Marion introduces his well-known theory of “saturated phenomena.” These are phenomena that transcend us and impose themselves on us from beyond, in a way that overwhelms our capacity to receive them and to conceptualise them, leaving us unable to incorporate them into our immanence. He asks: Why should intuition be restricted to “mere equality” (2002a, 190)? This equality was the maximum that Husserl allowed in a phenomenon, in what he called “adequation,” where the phenomenon gives adequate intuition to completely fill the intention or concept with which we direct our consciousness towards the phenomenon. Marion’s question to Husserl is to ask why mere adequation should be the maximum. What precludes there being intuition that goes beyond equality with intention? Why can’t intuition ever exceed intention? Such a phenomenon, he says, would be “saturated” with intuition. Marion believes this is much more than a theoretical possibility and demonstrates this by describing four examples of saturated phenomenon, each of which imposes itself on us from beyond, on its own terms, in a way that transcends our consciousness: events, paintings, flesh and the face (2002a, 228–33). Divine revelation is the final saturated phenomenon that Marion discusses, describing it as saturated to the second degree, by which he means that it is saturated in all four ways at once (2002a, 235). More recently, Marion has made a significant addition to this theory by talking about saturated phenomena as a banal paradigm (2007). Thus, rather than seeing them as an extraordinary exception to our everyday experience, we should regard our ordinary experience as a reduction of these saturated phenomena to something more manageable. While this everyday reduction is a completely reasonable approach for practical purposes, Marion suggests that the paradigm we should be remembering is a transcendence that comes upon us and imposes itself on its own

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terms, exceeding our concepts and intentions. When we experience phenomena as objects that we can grasp, then they are reduced and limited instances of these saturated phenomena. Marion first introduces the concept of saturated phenomena at the conclusion of a 1988 essay, “The Possible and Revelation” (2008). He presents this concept as a way of responding to the inherent dilemma posed by the difficulty of conceiving how revelation might be possible. The essay begins with a provisional definition of revelation as “where an authority that is transcendent to experience nevertheless manifests itself experientially” (2). This definition sets up a conceptual dilemma. On the one hand, if transcendence remains genuinely transcendent, it is difficult to see how it could enter into the immanence of experience. In this case, God’s word would clearly belong to God, but there would be no revelation  – or only a “Schwärmerei” that “would be expelled from metaphysical rationality” (Marion 2008, 2). On the other hand, if the transcendent is encountered in the immanence of experience where, along with other experiences, it is subject to conditions of possibility such as the principle of sufficient reason, it would thereby become our word and surrender its claim to be revelatory of anything beyond that immanence (Marion 2008, 2). Or, as Kevin Hart puts this pole of the dilemma: “To say that God can be experienced is to have assumed that the divine offers itself as a phenomenon, and this runs counter to everything you know about the proper usage of the word ‘God’” (Hart 2005, 72). In Marion’s account, the solution to this dilemma lies in phenomenology. Husserl and Heidegger each take a critical step towards this solution. Husserl’s contribution is to insist that the givenness of a phenomenon has precedence over any limits imposed by the conditions of experience. He rejects Kant’s limitation of intuition to the sensorial, broadening intuition to include the categorial and asserting the priority of given intuition in his “principle of all principles, that every originarily giving intuition is by right a source for cognition; that everything that originarily offers itself to us in ‘intuition’ … is to be taken simply as what it itself gives” (Husserl 1982, §24, 44; trans. modified, Husserl’s emphasis). Thus, whatever is given to experience has legitimacy as a phenomenon, without being limited by any conditions that cognition might impose on experience. This principle means that transcendence only needs to be given in order to be a phenomenon, even if it exceeds the boundaries of immanence. Marion describes this as a “breakthrough [that] opens the imperial road of access to the things themselves inasmuch as phenomenology attains the received phenomenon as it gives itself without prerequisites … Phenomenology liberates possibility and hence opens the field possibly even to phenomena marked by impossibility” (Marion 2008, 5). Following Husserl’s “broadening of phenomenality,” revelation must at least be recognised as a possible phenomenon for consideration (Marion 2008, 6). Heidegger’s contribution to the solution begins by reiterating Husserl’s broadening of phenomenality, affirming the priority Husserl gives to appearance over metaphysical categories: “As much appearing, so much being” (Husserl 1960, §46, 103; Heidegger 1962, §7, 60). Heidegger then radicalises this broadening of phenomenality by including Being itself in the domain of phenomenality, even though it is

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not itself a being and therefore from an ontic perspective is nothing. As Marion describes it, Being is a phenomenon that “gives itself inasmuch as it gives nothing, indeed gives the nothing” (Marion 2008, 6). Heidegger’s insistence that Being appears only in withdrawing opens up what he calls a “phenomenology of the unapparent” (quoted in Marion 2008, 6). This in turn makes it possible to conceive of revelation as a phenomenon that is simultaneously “in experience” but “invisible and indirect, hence transcendent to experience” (Marion 2008, 7). Thus, Marion argues for the possibility of transcendence appearing as a phenomenon in the immanence of experience. However, he cautions that if this results in revelation being reduced to “givenness in presence,” revelation would be limited by pre-conditions imposed on it by phenomenology (2008, 8; Marion’s emphasis). The key presuppositions he identifies are the constituting subject whose lived experience it is (whether as Husserlian ego or Heideggerian Dasein) and the horizon of appearance (2008, 8–12). Marion’s solution to these limits is to propose two modifications to phenomenology, to accommodate phenomena such as revelation, which, as infinite, “transgresses the dimensions of Erlebnis” that are set by “the I in its finitude” (2008, 9). First, there are various phenomenological approaches that decentre the I by conceiving it otherwise than as a constituting origin of experience.2 Second, he suggests that we should conceive of the horizon’s role differently. While the horizon can be varied,3 the appearance of phenomena always requires a horizon of some sort. To allow for the necessity of a horizon, but avoid that horizon becoming a limit, Marion proposes that revelation appears on a horizon by saturating it, rather than by being contained in its a priori limits (2008, 15). The result of these two modifications is his concept of saturated phenomena, a key idea that is first introduced in this essay from 1998, and then developed at length in later works (e.g., 2002a, b). If measured in terms of Husserlian adequation, the intuition given in these phenomena “offers neither as much nor less than but infinitely more than intention, hence than the significations elaborated by the I” (2008, 16; Marion’s emphasis). Saturated phenomena such as revelation would therefore “escape constitution [by the I], [for they] saturate the horizon” (2008, 16). Marion’s analysis leads him to affirm that while God cannot be experienced as intentional object, it is nevertheless possible to encounter God in an experience that might better be called “the experience of nonexperience” (Hart 2003, 191; quoting Maurice Blanchot) or “counter experience” (Marion 2007, 401–4). In this sort of experience, intentionality does not operate in a way that constitutes an object; rather, Marion invokes Levinas’s description of “consciousness that flows against the

2  Marion cites three examples of how such a decentring might be conceived: the immanent and originary passivity of self-affectivity (Michel Henry), the self-givenness of originary flesh prior to the distinction between immanence and transcendence (Didier Franck), and the inversion of intentionality when the face of another imposes an ethical injunction on the I (Emmanuel Levinas) (Marion 2008, 14). 3  Marion argues that there already examples of a variety of horizons in different phenomenologies: “objectivity (Husserl), Being (Heidegger), ethics (Levinas), the fleshed body (Merleau-Ponty), etc.” (Marion 2008, 14; translation modified).

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c­ urrent, overturning consciousness” (Levinas 1968, 58; translation modified; quoted in Marion 2002c, 82). Thinking about our (non)experience of transcendence in these terms goes a considerable way to resolving the dilemma about revelation set out by Marion, as it allows for the transcendent to appear in immanent experience without being subjected to the conditions of experience that would exclude its transcendence. Rather than God being constituted as an object, according to the general pattern of experience, in a (non)experience of God, Hart describes many of the familiar characteristics of experience as being subverted: “As absolute subject, God … comes to us not as experience but in experience: not as that which we can appropriate, render proper to consciousness, but rather as a mystery that passes through our lives, a disturbance that opens our ways of being, doing, and thinking to quite other perspectives and that cannot be positively identified by introspection” (Hart 2005, 80–81).

3.3  The Need for Discernment Thinking about revelation in terms of Marion’s saturated phenomena or Hart’s nonexperience allows us to make considerable progress in addressing the conceptual difficulties of the transcendent appearing in immanence. The “mystery” or “disturbance” of a saturated phenomenon “that cannot be positively identified” prevents it from being grasped as an object, and so it thereby retains its transcendence. However, a further difficulty arises. It is questionable whether a phenomenon’s resistance to being grasped as an object is a sufficiently reliable justification for identifying such a phenomenon as divine revelation. While a (non)experience of God would undoubtedly be disturbing and mysterious, many other experiences could be equally disturbing and mysterious, including the wide range of individualised experiences of transcendence referred to earlier in this chapter, such as the face of another, Life, or a call from beyond. No intrinsic characteristic of the divine justifies us positing that it is the only transcendence that could give rise to a disturbing otherness that exceeds our immanence. Levinas identifies this excessive and transcending character as essential to the experience of every other simply because of its alterity. Marion himself describes a wide range of saturated phenomena alongside revelation. Likewise, Kant considers such overwhelming experiences, though far more neutrally, in terms of the sublime, which can give rise to awe not only because of its wonder, but also because of its terror. It is clear that we can be overwhelmed by a variety of experiences, not just by the divine. However, attempting to distinguish between these experiences is inherently problematic. A phenomenon that appears without being governed by the conditions of experience is certainly transcendent to the subject, but such a phenomenon cannot be known as an object and therefore cannot be evaluated in itself. If these overwhelming phenomena cannot be judged, the one who receives them is vulnerable to deceit and even to harm. If the saturated phenomena described by Marion impose themselves on their own terms in a way that is dazzling and beyond any measure,

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then the question arises: How do we have any idea what they are? This becomes especially problematic in relation to the divine transcendent. Richard Kearney points to this need for discernment particularly clearly, suggesting that in the absence of such discernment, Marion presents a “celebration of blind, mystical rapture” (Kearney 2001, 33). If a phenomenon is dazzling and beyond what we can see, how can we tell what it is? Answering that question matters, because we need to be able to tell the difference between the divine and its opposites: “Who is it that speaks when God speaks from the burning bush? … the danger … is that of an alterity so ‘other’ that it becomes impossible to distinguish it from monstrosity – mystical or sublime” (Kearney 2001, 33f). Kearney’s concern expresses a very healthy caution about encounters with transcendence that are experienced by an individual as divine. Such experiences should be regarded as ones that might be revelation, but might equally be an experience of something that is not at all divine or life-giving. One of the recurring issues for mystics through the ages is that while many experiences might be overwhelming and rapturous, that characteristic by itself is not sufficient to indicate that the experience comes from God. If anything, the more overwhelming and entrancing an experience is, the more possibility there is for beguilement and deception. The scriptures are mindful of this danger also, with Deuteronomy cautioning against false prophets who try to seduce the people with “omens or portents” (Deuteronomy 13:1) and Saint Paul warning that “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). Similarly, Saint John exhorts his community to guard against deception: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Echoing Saint Paul, the medieval mystic and doctor of the Church, Saint Teresa of Avila, regularly stressed the importance of attentiveness and discernment if we are to avoid deception, because “the devil at times can transform himself into an angel of light” (1976: The Book of her Life, §14.8; cf. The Interior Castle, I.2.15, II.1.6, V.1.1; The Way of Perfection, 38.2). Congruent with this concern, one of the enduringly relevant insights of Saint Ignatius of Loyola is his set of 22 rules for the “discernment of spirits,” which offer guidance for judging about where a spiritual experience comes from and how it should be responded to (1996, nn. 313–36). In the Protestant tradition, Martin Luther emphasises the authority and certitude of individual believers, who are illuminated directly by the Holy Spirit rather than relying on the pronouncements of the hierarchical church. However, he too is deeply concerned by the possibility of deception and the importance of discernment, as Susan Schreiner sets out in some detail (2003). In our own time, with its privatisation of religious belief, there tends to be even less connection to community resources and expertise that could test and validate individual experience. Kearney addresses the same issue in a broader context, reflecting on the tension between hospitality and suspicion whenever we encounter a stranger, who is by definition unknown and other. Inspired by the biblical injunction to care for widows, orphans and strangers (cf. Deuteronomy 10:18; 16:11, 14; 26:12; 27:19; Jeremiah 22:3; Zechariah 7:10), should we welcome such a figure from beyond just because

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it is a stranger, just because it overwhelms us, just because it is awesome and ­transcendent? Or should we approach it with suspicion, attempting to examine and assess it? Not every stranger is divine. There is the other who kills and the other who brings life. The other who loves and the other who lies. The knock on the door may be the Lord (qua host) inviting us to a feast or (qua guest) seeking entry to our home; but it may also be a psychotic murderer, a torturer come to inflict pain on innocents, a rapist bent on violating loved ones. … While some others bring peace, other others bring crusades, pogroms, and genocides, claiming to have God on their side. The examples are too legion to ignore … There is always a discernment to be made … history tells of many who did not choose wisely or well – those who invoked the voice of God to prosecute heinous atrocities. Even in our own so-called civilized time horrific acts have been carried out by crazed people who claim to hear a voice from God: Jim Jones, David Koresh, Charles Manson, Osama Bin Laden … the list goes on. … This is why so many of the great saints and mystics, who claimed to hear holy voices or receive holy visitations of divine eros, scrupulously insisted upon disciplined criteria of discernment, chief among them being the distinction between the divine visitor who brings compassion and counterfeits who bring confusion. (Kearney 2009, 45–47)

Apart from the risk of deception, the absence of discernment gives rise to a further problem. If the transcendent and overpowering nature of an experience is sufficient to give it authority, then there is no way to judge between competing revelations. Various individuals will have experiences that can each claim the same intensity of appearance and affect, such that the individual identifies it as coming from God. However, the content of these experiences can be widely divergent, mutually contradicting one another and thereby undermining their own authority. In our hyper-­individualist context, the multiple experiences can only be set alongside one another, creating a cacophony akin to the Tower of Babel. To avoid deception, and escape the cacophony of rival claims, a strategy is needed for assessing transcendent experiences. This entails some form of critical interpretation and selection. A prudent interpreter exercises judgement judiciously and cautiously in the most straightforward of cases. In cases where the transcendent and possibly the divine is at issue, that caution is even more necessary. It could even be argued that interpretation is a priori impossible in the case of revelation, because this would require not only that revelation is experienced immanently, but also that it is an experience about which a critical judgement can be made. Such a judgement returns the subject to the centre, even if not as constituting origin. From this centre, the subject can be characterised as standing in judgement over an experience that is thereby treated as an object. At this point, the “counter experience” or (non)experience of revelation comes much closer to resembling other experiences. Therefore, it becomes questionable whether revelation remains transcendent and, if the absolute character of that transcendence is compromised, whether it should any longer be regarded as revelation. As Saint John of the Cross points out, God is always hidden from our experience: “However surely it may seem that you find, experience, and understand God, because he is inaccessible and concealed you must always regard

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him as hidden, and serve him who is hidden in a secret way” (1991, Stanza 1, §12, 420). A failure to recognise this difficulty risks making a judgement that at best distorts the divine, or is even about a characteristic of oneself rather than something that pertains to the transcendent. Such a distortion or projection would correspond to Marion’s description of idols in his early works, where he contrasts them with icons, such that an idol is an experience of my own desire, reflected back to me as in a mirror: “In the idol the human experience of the divine precedes the face that the divinity assumes in it … The idol reflects back to us, in the face of a god, our own experience of the divine” (Marion 2001, 5–6). Any attempt at judgement of the transcendent risks reducing it to the immanence of experience, and thereby stripping away an essential characteristic of its transcendence. One way of avoiding these risks is by appealing to authority, whether that be the authority of an eminent individual, an institution, or a canonical text such as the bible. This allows for a subject to draw on a critical judgement about a (non)experience of the transcendent without requiring that transcendent to be contained in the subject’s own immanence. However, such an appeal to authority would return us to a pre-Cartesian naivety in which judgement is replaced by reliance on “accustomed opinions” that are handed on through the generations (Descartes 1990, First Meditation, 95). Of course, while having recourse to authority might be an enticingly straightforward strategy, it would not actually remove the need for critical interpretation. Instead, it would transpose this judgement from assessment of the experience itself to assessment of rival authorities. Moreover, even once an authority was chosen, there would still be a need to determine which of that authority’s judgements about experiences in general apply to this particular experience. More seriously again, turning to an external authority would compromise the very experience that we are seeking to judge. Part of what makes the (non)experience of transcendence overwhelming and excessive for the recipient is that it is deeply personal. Even in a communal setting, it is not experienced as shared or generic, but is directed towards me. This personal and individual imposition on me is what leads Levinas to redescribe subjectivity as responding to an experience of infinite ethical demand on me by submitting myself in a deeply personal and unsubstitutable way: Me voici! (Here I am!) (1985, 97). Similarly, it leads Marion to redescribe the subject as adonné, the one who is received along with that which is given to me (2002a, 248–319). If the (non)experience of transcendence is considered in a general way that abstracts from this distinctive mineness, it would be stripped of the fundamental characteristics with which it presents itself.

3.4  Hermeneutic Resources for Discernment I propose that a more effective approach to assessing the (non)experience of transcendence is through a critical and modest hermeneutics of the phenomenon in its actual appearing, undertaken in dialogue with others who propose interpretations of

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it. Kearney points in this direction when he sketches the dilemma posed by the sudden onset of a mysterious stranger or transcendence, and indicates that hermeneutics offers a crucial resource for developing a response to it (2009, 47, 198f). He is clear that such a response is not only a subsequent reflection on the significance of an event that has already occurred, but also affects the way we see the event in its actual happening, “extending from embodied prereflection to critical reflection” (2009, 47). Whenever Kearney refers to discernment, he describes it as being hermeneutic and insists that it both does and should operate in the very appearing of phenomena – how they actually appear to us – even if that appearance is excessive and overwhelming (2004, 12; 2001, 33–34; 2009, 198f). Here he differs explicitly from Marion, who restricts interpretation to following after appearing, when we try to make sense of an appearance that has already happened (Marion 2002a, 211, 229; b, 33, 36, 123f, 126). However, while Kearney goes to great lengths to emphasise the importance of hermeneutic discernment, and is very convincing in his argument, he gives little indication of how to do it or of the criteria on which such discernment might rely. I believe that Hans-Georg Gadamer can make a significant contribution at this point. The difficulty with applying discernment to transcendence is that this transcendent context calls into question the validity of judgements, which are necessarily immanent. If we wish to see a transcendent phenomenon in its transcendence, perhaps we should refrain from imposing immanent judgements on it. Gadamer sets up a similar difficulty when he proposes that tradition is an indispensable element of the hermeneutic circle of understanding. As his critics object, by granting such authority to tradition, which lies beyond us, Gadamer undermines the capacity for a subject to assess that tradition. Thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas argue that we should be much more critical in the way that we judge the interpretation we receive from tradition, rather than naïvely adopting its view (cf. Mendelson 1979). Of course, by inverting Gadamer’s emphasis, Habermas risks losing any place for tradition or other authorities from beyond us, with the final word belonging to the immanent reason of the recipient. I think that in Truth and Method Gadamer already provides the raw material for an approach that gives a place to both the transcendent authority of tradition and the immanent exercise of reason. However, he only indicates this in a preliminary way, rather than developing it fully. There are three key insights arising from Gadamer’s thought, which I would propose as fundamental to making cogent critical judgements about interpretations that go beyond mere opinion while still maintaining the authority of a transcendence such as tradition. These features will characterise any understanding guided by Gadamer’s approach, and they are particularly helpful in considering claims about the appearance of divine transcendence in revelation. First, we must acknowledge that any interpretation is always a provisional step in “an infinite process” that “is never finished” (Gadamer 1989, 298). We can never access an absolutely true, correct, original or definitive interpretation or claim to truth. This modesty is required of any hermeneutic judgement, as interpretations are always made from a particular viewpoint and their objectivity is therefore compro-

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mised by the subjective characteristics of that context. However, modesty is ­particularly important when a judgement is being made about a (non)experience of the transcendent, rather than about an experience that is immanent to the subject. If a subject were to claim definitive status for a judgement about transcendence, this would be incompatible with the nature of transcendence as absolutely beyond the subject. However, caution about making definitive judgements does not entail abstaining from any judgement whatsoever. A modest and provisional judgement can still be made, provided that it remains open to question and provided that we are mindful that it can never be an exhaustive assessment of the phenomenon. Second, this provisionality of our judgements requires a commitment to an ongoing critical examination of any interpretation at which we arrive. Any staging post that is reached along the way must itself continue to be critically examined, with a particular eye for “hidden prejudices,” so that “fresh sources of error [are] constantly excluded” (Gadamer 1989, 270, 298). Gadamer insists that we are always still on the way: “the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices” (306). This is the case whether we are putting forward a critical view about an interpretation we have received in a tradition, or whether we are discerning our stance in relation to a phenomenon that presents itself as revelation. Third, the critical examination of interpretations and judgements is not something that can or should be done by an individual subject in isolation from others. Interpretation is something that is best done in dialogue, in a conversation that enters into the perspective of other horizons rather than just juxtaposing rival claims as though they are divided by an abyss. In Gadamer’s analysis, if each interlocutor is wholly contained within their own horizon, conversation is not possible. Rather, the conversation envisaged by Gadamer involves recognising that rival claims are concerned with the same shared subject matter, which in itself is the basis for at least an overlapping of horizons. Such a conversation presumes that “human life … is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon” (1989, 304). When argument about shared subject matter is conducted in dialogue, it goes beyond an adversarial statement to bring rival interpretations together, and it thus leads to a far more compelling and critical examination of those claims (1989, 303). This aspect of Gadamer’s thought is particularly challenging in our time of unbundled commitments, where we affirm the prerogative of each individual to assess their own experience. Taken together, these three insights in Gadamer’s thought represent a carefully balanced approach, which acknowledges that we always interpret out of a tradition, while qualifying the authority of that tradition by insisting on critical and ongoing judgement conducted in dialogue. These judgements allow us to make meaningful and well-founded assessments of rival interpretations, even though they insist on modest and provisional claims that avoid definitive and absolute positions. In the case of a (non)experience of divine revelation, such interpretative judgements are critical for assenting to its status as divine and distinguishing it from other experiences of transcendence that might be just as overwhelming. While the introduction

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of these immanent judgements qualifies any absolute claim to immediate and unambiguous encounter with the transcendent, they remain modest and provisional judgements, and they therefore refrain from simply reducing that transcendence to the immanence of experience

3.5  Conclusion So, to return to our opening question: Whose word is it anyway? Any simple answer to this question omits an essential element of our experience and risks losing sight of the complexity of the phenomenon. Revelation must be God’s word, by definition; it can only disclose the transcendent if it comes from beyond the immanent. However, as revelation appears in experience, it enters into the immanent, it is interpreted already in the way it is received, and it then becomes subject to ongoing interpretation alongside other experiences. Indeed, revelation requires such interpretation if there is to be discernment between the transcendent that is recognised and responded to as divine, and any other transcendent. Such interpretation is the responsibility of each recipient, in a community and tradition of interpreters, modestly recalling that each judgement is provisional. Perhaps, rather than asking who owns the word, we might be better to approach the question of ownership from the other direction: each word has a history, to which all its interpreters contribute, and in which they belong.

References Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2004. Call and Response. In The Call and the Response. Trans. Anne A.  Davenport. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, no. 33, 5–32. New  York: Fordham University Press. French original: 1992. L’appel et la réponse. Philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Davie, Grace. 1994. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. Descartes, René. 1990. Meditations on First Philosophy: A Bilungual Edition. Trans. and ed. George Heffernan. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Latin original: 1641. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. German original: 1960. Warheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeutik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Hart, Kevin. 2003. The Experience of Nonexperience. In Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, 188–206. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. The Experience of the Kingdom of God. In The Experience of God, ed. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, 71–86. New York: Fordham University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper-Collins. German original: 1927. Sein und Zeit. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Henry, Michel. 2015. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Trans. Karl Hefty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. French original: 2000. Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair. Paris: Seuil.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. German original: 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie. In Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser. Gessamelte Werke (Husserliana), vol. I. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F.  Kersten. Collected Works, vol. 2. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. German original: 1950. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenolgischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Edited by Walter Biemel. Gessamelte Werke (Husserliana), vol. III/1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Ignatius of Loyola, Saint. 1996. Spiritual Exercises. Trans. Joseph A. Tetlow. New York: Crossroad. Latin original: 1548. Janicaud, Dominique. 2000. The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology. Trans. Bernard G. Prusak. In Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud et al., 16–106. New York: Fordham University Press. French original: 1990. Le tournant théologique de la phenomenology. Tiré à part. Paris: Éditions de l’éclat. John of the Cross, Saint. 1991. The Spiritual Canticle. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, REV. ed., Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilo Rodriguez, 461–630. Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Spanish original: 1627. Kearney, Richard. 2001. The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion. Philosophy Today 48: 12–26. ———. 2009. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer. French original: 1961. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. French original: 1982. Ethique et infini. Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard et Radio France. ———. 1998. A Man-God?. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 53–60. New York: Columbia University Press. French original: 1968. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Trans. Thomas A.  Carlson. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, no. 17. New York: Fordham University Press. French original: 1977. L’idole et la distance: Cinq études. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2002a. Being given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey L.  Kosky. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. French original: 1997. Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2002b. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, no. 27. New York: Fordham University Press. French original: 2001. De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Perspectives critiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2002c. The Intentionality of Love. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. In Prolegomena to Charity, 71–101. New York: Fordham University Press. French original: 1983. ———. 2007. The Banality of Saturation. Trans. Jeffrey L.  Kosky. In Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart, 383–418. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. French original: 2005. La banalité de la saturation. In Le visible et le révélé, 143–82. Paris: Cerf. ———. 2008. The Possible and Revelation. Trans. Christina M.  Gschwandtner. In The Visible and the Revealed, 1–17. New  York: Fordham University Press. German original: 1988. Phänomenologie und Offenbarung (trans. R. Funk). In Religionsphilosophie Heute: Chancen und Bedeutung in Philosophie und Theologie, ed. Lois Halder, Klaus Kinezler and Joseph Möller. Düsseldorf: Patmos.

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Mendelson, Jack. 1979. The Habermas-Gadamer Debate. New German Critique 18 (Autumn): 44–73. Schreiner, Susan. 2003. Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Problem of Deception in Martin Luther and Teresa of Avila. In Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, 118–137. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Teresa of Avila, Saint. 1976. Collected Works. 3 vols. Trans. Kieran Kavanagh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Spanish originals: c. 1563–77. Ward, Graham. 2015. Embedding Theology. Colloquium 47: 14–25.

Part II

The Phenomenality of Revelation

Chapter 4

Revelation as a Problem for Our Age Robyn Horner

Abstract  Redolent with the idea of supernatural intervention in the everyday, the notion of revelation rarely figures in the public imagination. If it is considered at all, it is often dismissed as implausible in educated society. I suggest that this is because revelation is considered first as a matter of belief rather than as a question of experience. Revelation presents a problem for our age in three, interconnected ways. Culturally, revelation has become both unintelligible and unimaginable; in lives largely bounded by the immanence of the world, the concept of revelation seems arcane or anachronistic. Philosophically, revelation resists the kind of analysis that we readily identify with many Western philosophical approaches; there is little place for a concept of revelation linked to the particularity of religious traditions. Theologically, revelation is often understood as a set of things that have to be believed, things seemingly bearing no relation to present experience. In all three cases, belief or lack of belief becomes an obstacle to the very possibility of revelation. I will argue here that revelation can be a meaningful possibility and that we have to allow for that possibility within experience, even as we affirm its impossibility as experience at the same time. Keywords  Marion · Lacoste · Religious experience · Secular age · Revelation When we use the phrase in a theological register, what sense can we begin to make of ‘divine revelation’ in contemporary, Western societies?1 If we consult the OED, the first two meanings listed for revelation are: “the disclosure or communication of knowledge, instructions, etc., by divine or supernatural means,” and “an instance or 1  I use ‘contemporary’ here in the same sense that I will use ‘modern,’ to mean “Modern; of or characteristic of the present period; esp. up-to-date, ultra-modern.” Oxford English Dictionary, “Contemporary, Adj. And N.” (Oxford University Press).

R. Horner (*) Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_4

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experience of this; something disclosed or communicated by divine or supernatural means.”2 Revelation is redolent with the idea of the miraculous; moreover, if it is considered at all, it is often dismissed as implausible in educated contexts. Culturally and philosophically, revelation has become unintelligible, unbelievable, and unimaginable—a remnant of a past way of being in the world that was subject to immense, uncontrollable powers and invisible forces of good and evil. Even Christians—for whom revelation is evidently not considered impossible tout court—frequently understand revelation to be something belonging primarily to the past. Commonly identified with the canon or events of the Bible, and often with long, authoritative tradition/s of interpreting these books, God’s revelation is something to be believed—or not. Atheists, on this account, are persons who choose not to believe, and much ink has been spilled over precisely the point of whether or not belief in a transcendent divinity who reveals is reasonable for those of us who live in the contemporary world. I appreciate that the whole notion of something like revelation sometimes seems to make little sense in modern life. At the same time, I argue that this is not because it is a relic of the past, but because it is invariably considered first as a matter of belief/s rather than as a question of experience. This is not to say that belief is irrelevant to the question of revelation, but only to suggest that when the issue of belief becomes primary, the possibility of revelation can too easily be placed out of bounds in advance of all questioning. Belief or lack of belief becomes an obstacle not only to the possibility that God has spoken, but also to the far more engaging and existentially important possibility that God speaks now. In fact, the Christian witness is to a God who communicates, and not only communicates, but is in dialogue with humanity, a point underscored by the theologians of Vatican II: “Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col. 1;15, 1 Tim. 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (see Ex. 33:11; John 15:14-15) and lives among them (see Bar. 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself.”3 If we begin with the question of whether or not to believe in God, or with what should or should not be believed, then the idea of revelation has little purchase in experience. To use a pale but perhaps helpful analogy, to determine in advance whether or not one believes in love is of no significance until one finds oneself loving or being addressed in love. This is why the question of belief in God—or beliefs about God—cannot be the first question, even if it is not the last question. An important matter to clarify straight away is how we are to understand ‘experience.’ In current English usage, experience can be understood in terms of “the actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge”; “the fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event”; or “knowledge resulting from actual observation or from what one has

 “Revelation, N.” (Oxford University Press).  Vatican II Council, “Dei Verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” (1965), section 2.

2 3

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undergone.”4 These usages reflect aspects of a diversity of meanings encountered in the etymology of experience or in other languages, where a range of words is ­available to express what English has to convey with just one. While I consider the belief/experience distinction and problem with regard to revelation to hold true at the level of common life, within an academic context, I am thinking of experience in a specialised way. I use experience to refer to what happens at that point of opening in the world which is a given instance of life. Experience takes place in intentionality, which means it takes place as a ‘consciousness of,’ but not only a ‘consciousness of’ which is intellectual, thetic or discursive—experience can also be affective, volitional, or axiological, for example. While experience is inherently related to consciousness, I do not mean to imply that consciousness has ultimate priority, as though by its acts of constitution it were responsible for creating the world. Experience is always and already enworlded: Heidegger’s equivalent to my “point of opening” is Dasein, being-there, which undergoes experience. So, I use experience to mean either what affects us consciously (German Erlebnis, French vécu, both of which are translated as ‘lived experience’) or what is undergone or gone through (German Erfahrung, French expérience). At the same time, I want to complicate the sense of experience as ‘ex-peri-ment,’ because when it comes to the question of revelation, it needs to be tested, but cannot be tested as if it were to yield results that are empirically available. Since, by definition, God cannot be an object of consciousness, to speak of God’s revelation requires us to think carefully about how revelation and experience might engage. An ‘experience of revelation’ is not something that can be reduced to the theoretical contents of consciousness, although it necessarily still bears a relationship with consciousness. Returning to the example of love, the loved one never appears as an object (or if he or she does, then we can be certain it is not love). As Bruce Dawe observes in poetry, love “adds another otherness to others”; we do not master the loved one in theoretical knowledge, yet love affects us in experience (Erlebnis).5 Using the other sense of experience (Erfahrung) we could consider revelation to be experiential in that which takes place as a trial or test. The biblical narrative of Jacob wrestling with the Angel (Gen 32:22–31) offers a rich example. In any case, in this chapter I argue that revelation is a meaningful possibility and that we can reasonably allow for that possibility within experience, even as we affirm its impossibility as experience at the same time. Revelation affects or interrupts the one upon whom it lays its claim, and it is only in being drawn to and accepting that claim that the one who is addressed can begin to appreciate its nature as revelation. In this chapter I set out three ways in which the idea of revelation has become a problem in contemporary life. I then offer a way forward by means of phenomenol-

 Oxford English Dictionary, “Experience, N.” (Oxford University Press).  Bruce Dawe, Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954–2005, 6 ed. (Docklands, VIC: Pearson Education Australia, 1979/2006). 4 5

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ogy, which has been mooted as a helpful means of approaching what is given to experience, not only for philosophy but also for theology.6

4.1  Revelation as a Cultural Problem 4.1.1  A Secular Age In many Western cultures it appears we have moved from a situation where a creedal (especially Christian) commitment was part of the cultural “furniture,” so to speak, to one in which it seems that such a commitment makes absolutely no sense for most people, and most especially not for the young. Moreover, it seems that this situation has come about over the last decades with the descent of a kind of cultural amnesia, which makes the whole question of formal religious commitment so remote as to be almost unthinkable. How valid is this sense? We find an attempt to articulate it in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, where his central question is why it seems so difficult “to believe in God in many (milieux of) the modern West, while in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to.”7 It is widely acknowledged that the place of religion in Western societies has changed, although exactly how and why it has changed are still matters for intense academic debate. As Taylor observes: “Everyone can see that there have been declines in practice and declared belief in many countries, particularly in recent decades; that God is not present in public space as in past centuries; and so on for a host of other changes. But how to understand and interpret these changes may not be evident.”8 If we listen to some of the loudest voices in the conversation about whether or not religion has a place in modernity—those of the so-called “new atheists”—we could be convinced that religion is dying an inevitable death in response 6  For more detail on this approach, see Robyn Horner, “Jean-Luc Marion and the Possibility of Theology,” Culture, Theory and Critique 52, no. 2 (2011); “What Does the Gift Reveal?,” Louvain Studies 39, no. 3 (2016); “Words That Reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the Experience of God,” Continental Philosophy Review, no. 51 (2018). While I see this line of enquiry to be potentially very fruitful for both philosophy and theology, such a reading is frequently rejected by philosophers who argue that philosophy of religion is simply another form of theology. On this point, Thomas Knepper writes: “But it is also due to the fact that philosophy of religion can look more like philosophical theology—not a (relatively) religiously neutral examination of reason-giving in the religions of the world, but an overt apologetic for (or against) the reasonableness or value of some particular kind of religion. This, then, is the great irony of contemporary philosophy of religion: at the time when it thrives most, it offers least to the academic study of religion (which thrives all the more).” Timothy D. Knepper, “The End of Philosophy of Religion?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 1 (2014): 123; in response, see Bradley B. Onishi, “The Beginning, Not the End: On Continental Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies,” ibid.85 (2017). 7  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 539. 8  Ibid., 427.

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to processes of modernisation.9 This helps to explain why the admission of ­traditional religious belief in Western cultures of today is so often met with incredulity; belonging to a church, once a sign of social conformity in many Western countries, is now seen to be distinctly counter-cultural, and not in the sense that to be counter-­ cultural is hip. Yet the “subtraction” model of secularisation—the model that Taylor identifies and criticizes—gives in too readily to assumptions about our social context(s).10 While membership of institutional religious traditions has clearly decreased in the West, religion has not disappeared as such.11 Modernity does not simply equate to the loss of religious traditions. Sociologists still wrestle with continued, strong engagement in institutional religion in the United States (or lack of it in Europe).12 There is widespread recognition of the phenomenon of increased religious pluralisation, evidenced in census data from many Western countries.13 We are also faced with what is arguably a phenomenon of religious resurgence, or at least, a renewed presence of religion in the public square.14 This is evident, for example, in the heightened visibility of Islam in the West, or of the Christian churches in debates over same-sex marriage and euthanasia. It is also visible in the emergence of new religious movements.15 José Casanova argues that the only truly meaningful definition of secularization is that it consists in the functional differentiation of institu-

9  “Placing the New Atheists within the ongoing debate about secularization sheds light on this new ‘movement’ and will ultimately show that the New Atheists are not necessarily products of secularization but are, instead, purveyors of it. The typically belligerent, impassioned, and overly hostile tropes of the New Atheism’s Four Horsemen—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—show that religion has retained an extraordinary amount of power in the modern world. If we lived in a secular world, their writings would be trite and unnecessary.” Michael Ian Borer, “The New Atheism and the Secularization Thesis,” in Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Boston, MA: Brill, 2014), 125. 10  Taylor, A Secular Age, 22. 11  The weakened position of traditional religious communities is referred to in the “de-intensification” theory, noted in Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas, “Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretative Anthology,” (2000). 12  See Grace Davie, Europe, the Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002); “Is Europe an Exceptional Case?∗,” International Review of Mission 95, no. 378/379 (2006). Yet cp. Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72, no. 3 (1994). David Voas and Mark Chaves, “Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?,” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 5 (2016): 1520. 13  See Peter L.  Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). 14  Philip Gorski et al., “The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society,” in The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, ed. Philip Gorski, et al. (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2012), 2. José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig J Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64. 15  On new religious movements, see, for example, Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko, The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015).

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tional religion from secular spheres of interest.16 On Casanova’s account, secularization simply means that institutional religions decreasingly exert power over many dimensions of our daily lives. Taylor seeks to show how it is that “we [have] come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order,” an order that he calls “the immanent frame.”17 The critical shift in sensibilities for Taylor occurs between an externalized sense of religion—one reflecting individual embodiment in the social that invites ritual, public participation, within a world characterized by “enchantment”—and an internalized sense, which invites more individualized, autonomous, personal commitment, but which eventually leads to disenchantment.18 He goes so far as to argue “that the drive to personal religion has itself been part of the impetus toward different facets of secularization.”19 In Taylor’s view, religion moves from being a matter of shared experience to a matter of personal belief.20 The movement he describes—away from what is perceived as superstition and towards what is perceived as a greater rationality—he also understands as a type of impoverishment, a loss of a particular way of being in the world.21 This movement marks a separation between the natural and the supernatural. God becomes remote from the world, and eventually, entirely absent from an immanent sphere that is completely self-sufficient. Taylor argues that many people live within this immanent frame in such a way that the possibility of transcendence is excluded and all value is seen to be exhausted by that immanence.22

4.1.2  The Post-secular While Taylor speaks of a secular age, Jürgen Habermas conceives of Western contexts outside the US as “post-secular.”23 He describes the post-secular as a “change in consciousness” that is linked with an awareness of the continuance of religion despite its predicted demise; the fact that religious organizations have some influence in public debate on significant issues; and the presence in Western societies of immigrants who have different cultural (and religious) values.24 As Habermas conceives the post-secular, it is characteristic of societies where “religion maintains a  José Casanova, “Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective,” The Hedgehog Review Spring and Summer (2006): 7. 17  Taylor, A Secular Age, 543. 18  “Western Secularity,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40. 19  Ibid., 41. 20  Ibid., 41, 44. 21  Ibid., 42. 22  Taylor, A Secular Age, 544. 23  Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25 (2008): 17. 24  Ibid., 20–21. 16

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public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground.”25 It can be understood as a disturbance of a secular consciousness by the religious rather than its overcoming; since the post-secular belongs neither to the secular nor to religion as such, it disturbs both ways—not only does it interrupt the secular, but the ­post-­secular is also not simply the return of religion as we once knew it (if we ever did). This possibility heightens the coherence of post-secular theory.26

4.1.3  Believing and Remembering Of all the understandings of the place of religion in our times, however, I find the sociological discussion by Danièle Hervieu-Léger to be one of the most compelling.27 Hervieu-Léger argues that religion is a way of believing, and that “the process of secularisation is above all a process of reconstructing belief.”28 This thesis can be used to illuminate why beliefs can function to undermine religious traditions in contemporary contexts. Hervieu-Léger maintains that religious institutions no longer have control over what she describes as the “symbolic activity of individuals.” The symbols used by individuals to make meaning are frequently drawn from traditional religions, but they are increasingly withdrawn from their meaning-­ contexts and reused with completely different inflections. Various newly constructed symbolic systems can be called “secular religions,” which, in turn, have an impact on the construction and reconstruction of traditional religions. Drawing from the theory of Maurice Halbwachs, Hervieu-Léger argues that religious groups rely on memory for their self-definition and identity formation: “In the case of religious memory, the normativity of collective memory is reinforced by the fact of the group’s defining itself, objectively and subjectively, as a lineage of belief.”29 The lineage of belief is what enables new generations to perpetuate a future for the religious community, that is, by drawing from tradition, each genera Ibid., 21.  We should note that his detractors perceive his theory to be divorced from reality. Sociologist James A.  Beckford, for example, is deeply skeptical about Habermas’s claims. Identifying six clusters of usage for the term “post-secular,” he maintains that none of these is sufficient to explain the force of what is happening in contemporary societies James A. Beckford, “S.S.S.R. Presidential Address Public Religions and the Postsecular: Critical Reflections,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 1 (2012): 8, 13. 27  Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 28  “The question of religious modernity is above all one of the ways of believing”; “modernity has deconstructed the traditional systems of believing, but has not forsaken belief. Believing finds expression in an individualized, subjective and diffuse form, and resolves into a multiplicity of combinations and orderings of meaning which are elaborated independently of control by institutions of believing, by religious institutions in particular.” Ibid., 70, 74. 29  Ibid., 125. 25 26

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tion not only shapes a present identity from the past but also propels itself into the future.30 What has come about in modern societies, however, is the fracturing of memory. Those traits we recognize as distinctively modern: individual autonomy, rationalist thinking, and the independence of social institutions from religion “denote,” she says, “the end of societies based on memory.”31 In modernity, individuals are able to belong to multiple groups simultaneously, and do not always form identity in relation to any one particular group, which promotes the “limitless fragmentation of individual and group memory.”32 Mass communication radically redistributes elements of group memory, both expanding their reach and departicularising them. Under the increasingly unbearable weight of what Hervieu-Léger calls “image-fed information,” the circulated elements of memory become disconnected and no longer make any sense.33 All this underlies what Hervieu-Léger describes as the force of change: “Change, which is a function of modernity itself, has resulted in modern societies being less and less able to nurture the innate capacity of individuals and groups to assimilate or imaginatively to project a lineage of belief.”34 Hervieu-Léger claims that this felt disconnection from the lineage of belief is not simply a result of any failure of the attempt to pass on knowledge, but of a radical “collapse” of collective memory, meaning that an individual can no longer link “what comes before and his or her own actual experience.”35 This description of the lack of a capacity for individuals to recognize themselves in the lineage of the religious community is what makes Hervieu-Léger’s theory, in my view, powerfully explanatory. It helps us to understand, for example, how within the space of even one generation, children and adults can become completely alienated from religious belief. Regular ritual practice and religious knowledge are not sufficient to preserve religious memory under the pressure of the fracturing effects of plural belonging. For this reason, Hervieu-Léger’s theory can be linked with the theory of detraditionalization, which refers to a process wherein traditions and traditional identities are no longer easily or automatically handed down in families or by means of broader social structures, such as religious institutions.36 For example, Linda  “The question of secularization here takes on a new form, namely that of the possibility, and plausibility, of a group being able, within a context of memory reduced to fragments and made instantaneous, to recognize itself as a link in a chain of belief and entrusted with the task of extending that chain into the future.” Ibid., 130. 31  Ibid., 127. 32  Ibid., 128. 33  Ibid., 129. 34  Ibid., 123. 35  Ibid., 130. 36  “Detraditionalization, as the word implies, marks a rethinking of attitudes and a diminution of established institutions, structures and practices in the sense that they no longer shape our behaviour and influence us as once they did. In particular, within advanced industrial societies, organized religion, political authority, class, the family and other forms of common life are regarded as having been exposed to ‘detraditionalizing’ influences or forces…. As a result, in a variety of ways, 30

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Woodhead observes of the rise of “no religion” in Britain that it has come about “largely because of children ceasing to follow the religious commitments of their parents.”37 One of the few comprehensive studies of detraditionalization was published in 1996; nevertheless, detraditionalization is largely considered there on the basis of the process to which it corresponds—individualization. Paul Heelas defines detraditionalization as involving “a shift of authority: from ‘without’ to ‘within’,” and posits two readings of the theory: the radical thesis (where tradition declines to the point of having little meaningful role in individuals’ lives), and the coexistence thesis, where detraditionalization occurs at the same time as “tradition maintenance, rejuvenation and tradition-constuction.”38 The latter reading corresponds more readily to a situation understood in terms of pluralization rather than secularization.39 It is feasible to argue, I suggest, that detraditionalization only becomes apparent at an (always indeterminate) tipping point, when other influences, often multiple, combine to disrupt strong spacial and temporal bases of tradition-transmission.40 In many modern, Western contexts, where individuals are subject to potentially powerful forces of tradition disruption—such as globalization, social media, marketing, ease of international travel, high levels of education, and so on—we have reached that tipping point, or in many cultures, we are well past it. Why does it feel like the idea of revelation makes no sense in contemporary Western culture? In the discussion thus far, I have drawn from a number of theoretical assessments of the situation in the West with regard to religion. My point, here, is not to engage in a properly sociological discussion, but to draw from aspects of current theory to “test the sense” of my guiding question, and it seems to me that this sense is actually borne out in the theory. Institutional religious commitment has ceased to make sense for many people in the West, especially young people, and in such contexts, the idea of revelation easily becomes the object of derision—if not (perhaps more seriously) the subject of indifference. The very possibility of divine revelation no longer connects with their experience.

the relevance of these traditional institutions appears to be waning, and with it their authority and status.” Paul Hopper, Rebuilding Communities in an Age of Individualism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 29. 37  Linda Woodhead, “The Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority,” Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016): 249. 38  Paul Heelas, “Introduction: Detraditionalization and Its Rivals,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 2, 3. 39  See Peter L.  Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L.  Berger (Washington, DC/Grand Rapids. MI: Ethics and Public Policy Center/Eerdmans, 1999); The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. 40  On the spatial aspects of detraditionalisation, see Timothy W.  Luke, “Identity, Meaning and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

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4.2  Revelation as a Philosophical Problem The second part of the problem of revelation is the way in which its possibility as experience is frequently excluded from the realm of contemporary academic discourse. This is because questions of revelation are often seen to belong to the discipline of theology, which is always particular to a tradition and cannot easily be generalized. The existence of religious plurality is inevitably a problem for the notion of religious truth, and tends to lead to the view that any particular theological instance of revelation is partial—at best—or arbitrary, and necessarily the product of beliefs that cannot be substantiated—at worst.41 If revelation can be considered at all within the domain of philosophy, then, this is normally only the case if it is considered in its possibility as natural (or general) revelation rather than special revelation.42 Moreover, as Jean-Luc Marion argues, revelatory phenomena have often been excluded altogether from legitimate consideration by philosophy (and the university more generally) on the basis of their apparent failure to accord with the principle of sufficient reason.43 Put simply, and speaking for the most part, it appears that one cannot be an intelligent, rational person and at the same time take the concept of revelation seriously. We can see this in various accounts bearing on the relationship between philosophy and theology, in view of what Kant famously called “the conflict of the faculties” emergent in modernity.

4.2.1  The Great Divorce A popular article by Nick Trakakis poignantly demonstrates the desire to keep separate the tasks and methods of philosophy from those of theology. Trakakis argues that philosophy begins in a genuine search for wisdom and truth, a search that intrinsically entails no restrictions on the scope of the questioning. Theology, he argues, presumes belief—not only belief in God, but also belief in what a particular religious tradition asserts of God.44 For this reason, he claims that the questioning undertaken by theology cannot truly be open. Trakakis maintains: “even those who  On this question of religious plurality, however, see the innovative approach proposed by Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, “The Finality of Christ and the Religious Alternative,” Theological Studies 78, no. 2 (2017). 42  Evidently, there are exceptions. See, for example: Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? (Oxford; New York: Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43  Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 2. 44  “Part of the reason for Heidegger’s separation of philosophy and theology lies in his view that philosophy is more radical in nature than theology. Theology, on this picture, does not allow for radical or genuine questioning: if we start from a position of faith, then our questioning or seeking begins by already having found what it searches – namely, God. …… Philosophy, by contrast, must consist in honest questioning, really following inquiry or evidence wherever it leads.” N.N. Trakakis, “Why I Am Not Orthodox,” ABC Religion and Ethics (2015), http://www.abc.net. au/religion/articles/2015/12/07/4367489.htm 41

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subject Christian beliefs to critical scrutiny give the impression at least of already having made up their minds before their ‘inquiry’ has begun.”45 Now, it is true that the theologian has particular commitments that could affect the scope of possible questioning. At the same time, the philosopher, too, brings particular commitments to the search for wisdom, which might include a presumption of atheism.46 Trakakis actually allows that there are “no metaphysically neutral starting-points in philosophy.” Yet he suggests that amongst theists who philosophize, there is little evidence of openness to the truth beyond the limits of their religious truth claims. Thus, he argues, “religious commitment [i]s incompatible with philosophy.” However, to begin philosophical reflection already committed to the untruth of revelation, of whatever stripe, is as much a hindrance to the search for truth as naïve belief. In a very thoughtful and finely crafted response to Trakakis, Richard Colledge explores the deeper commitments always and already at work in any philosophical (or theological) reflection: “so much of what we passionately maintain on the basis of the weighty tools of rational argumentation are things that we already cared about previously. As such, while the tools of argumentative reason are used to defend them, these come too late to explain why we hold such views in the first place.”47 It is clear that many will come to philosophy from within Taylor’s “immanent frame,” and following a broadly Kantian trajectory, modern philosophy has become less and less able to speak of (divine) transcendence. On the one hand, we see this emergent in attempts to establish positively the limits of reason; on the other hand, we see it in various characterizations of our finitude, characterizations that ultimately reveal reason, too, to be an exercise of faith.48 This second approach allows us to conceive in the current situation a potentially different relationship to obtain between philosophy and theology.

4.2.2  ‘Returning’ to Religion Especially within European philosophy, a “return to religion” has been identified in recent decades. To make some sense of its emergence, I will draw schematically from the work of Jacques Derrida, although I could have begun my consideration in many other places.

 Ibid.  Anthony Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience, ed. Merold Westphal, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 6. 47  Richard Colledge, “Intellectual Assent and the Value of Disagreement: A Response to Nick Trakakis,” ABC Religion and Ethics (2015), http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/12/22/4377227.htm 48  Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18, 44–5, 63–4. 45 46

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In an early essay titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida questions the idea of a theoretical structure built around a centre, or “transcendental signified,” that cannot form part of that structure.49 When Derrida refers to a centre, we can understand him to mean an organising principle, or ground, and he is seeking to show that while we tend to think of such principles or grounds as being independent from what is organized, they are actually inevitably recuperated within that organization. Thinking about this in terms of language, we could say that there must be a ground for a linguistic structure to guarantee its meaningfulness, and in its simplest form, this ground would be the correspondence between words and reality—we must be able to affirm that words reflect a meaning that is shared in order to make sense. Yet words do not refer intrinsically to things but only to other words that help to define them, as we see in any dictionary. We do not need to subscribe to idealism to affirm that what is real is shaped by our perception of it and the context within which we find ourselves. To cite the well-known example, the Coke bottle falling from the plane into the midst of the Kalahari bushmen in The Gods must be Crazy (1980) is a sacred object, and not (for them) a symbol of a multinational corporation or a vessel for a caffeinated beverage. The disjunction between what the bottle means for the film’s audience and its meaning for the film’s protagonists is the basis of the comedy. Meaning is not ultimately determined by something extrinsic to it but is a result of decisions we make about it in our various contexts. There is actually no ground independent from what is grounded, and so there is a sense in which grounds are determined rather than determinative. Grounds function only insofar as we choose (usually unthematically) to suspend our disbelief in them. Derrida argues that the condition of possibility for meaning—that is, “eidos, archē, telos, energia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth”—is not available to us as such.50 In other words, the founding point of reference for meaning that we imagine to be entirely outside the structure of language serves both as the condition of possibility for any meaning, and the ultimate condition of impossibility for absolute meaning: if it is outside the structure, it cannot be known as such (we only have language with which to express the limits of language). Structure has no centre, or at least, the centre (the “central signified, the original or transcendental signified”) “is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.” There is no end to ­possible meaning, although this does not preclude us from making judgments about what is more or less meaningful in a given context. In philosophy, metaphysics is the system on which the search for ultimate truth is often based; theology frequently depends on it for its articulations, most often implicitly. It is to the flawed nature of the system of metaphysics that Derrida points, although he is not the first to do so. Nietzche recognizes that our truth claims are

 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279. 50  Ibid., 279–80. 49

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frequently grounded on no more than individual will. Heidegger is responsible for an understanding of “metaphysics as onto-theology” to mean that we typically ground metaphysics in what we name “be-ing” (what it means to be) but often end up confusing be-ing with an absolute being (God) whose being founds beings (which brings it back to the terms of the system we use to think).51 Derrida recognizes the extent, however, to which we can only observe the flaw in the system while still using the language of the system. “There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.”52 Having recognized the intrinsically constructed nature of metaphysics, Derrida and a number of other thinkers focus on the problem of thinking alterity, observant that within our systems of thought there is always an excess (or difference) that escapes the system. More often than not, this is approached from the perspective of finite immanence—immanence in Taylor’s sense that there is no dreaming of a reality behind or beyond the world—yet with an interest in what cannot be accounted for in systems or economies: the other person, the self, and concepts such as the gift, forgiveness, invention, hospitality, and so on. Derrida argues that while metaphysics cannot refer us to a presence beyond itself, it is, nevertheless, exceeded by the erasure of this referral.53 This is what he calls “différance”—what is produced by the fact that meaning is always different from itself, and the ultimate closure of meaning is always deferred. Différance is both transcendent (it cannot be made present) and transcendental (it forms the condition of possibility for any meaning, but also the condition of impossibility for complete meaning). On Derrida’s account, it seems that we are faced with two alternatives, or “two interpretations of interpretation,” in relation to our search for a ground: either we persist in believing in an absolute ground, or we think of it as an illusion.54 However,  “Metaphysics thinks of beings as such, that is, in general. Metaphysics thinks of beings as such, as a whole. Metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground-giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of the all that accounts for the ground, that is, of the All-Highest. The Being of beings is thus thought of in advance as the grounding ground. Therefore all metaphysics is at bottom, and from the ground up, what grounds, what gives account of the ground, what is called to account by the ground, and finally what calls the ground to account.” Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969/2002), 58. 52  Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280–81. 53  “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972)), 65–67. See also Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 12ff. 54  “The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.” Writing and Difference, 292, 293. 51

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Derrida himself urges that it is not a question of choosing: “there can be no question of choosing because both of our options spring from the same enabling condition, namely différance.”55 Derrida sees in theology—even and especially in negative theology, which denies what we might predicate of God—a constant desire to recuperate the God of whom we (do not claim to) speak.56 There is a particular sense, then, in which much of our (philosophical) thought is theological in so far as it has a fundamental commitment to a singularity of meaning, to resting on a ground that would necessarily exceed it.

4.2.3  Revelation as the Ethical Relation Despite the ways in which Derrida brings a powerful critique to the theological desire to situate its claims in God’s revelation of (the) truth, Derrida’s work has actually been utilized in constructive conversation within Christian discourse.57 Against this, however, it has also been argued that Derrida’s work is essentially atheistic in character. Martin Hägglund, for example, argues that the logic of Derrida’s thought simply must lead us to this conclusion.58 A different way forward is suggested in the work of Hent de Vries, who argues that Derrida’s notion of “religion” can be seen (positively) to interrupt philosophy. De Vries emphasizes Derrida’s reading of the instability of religion as a category, maintaining that “many figures of thought can readily be perceived as religious.”59 Various elements of religious traditions emerge in new and diverse contexts, serving the purpose, he argues, of “illuminat[ing] the unthought, unsaid, or unseen of a philosophical logos that, not only in the guise of modern reason, but from its earliest deployment, tends to forget, repress, or sublate the very religio (relegere, religare, or relation without relation, as 55  Positions, 29. “At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifer/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity, etc.)—to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, presents beneath every accident or event, self-present in its ‘living speech,’ in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)—become nonpertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called … the ‘transcendental signified’.” 56  “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). More recently, the essay appears in volume 2 of Psyche: Inventions of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 57  Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 2nd. ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 58  Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 59  Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5.

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Emmanuel Levinas and, following him, Derrida would have it) to which these motifs testify.”60 With reference to Levinas, de Vries invokes an understanding of religion that is an ethical relation and has nothing to do with what Levinas calls “réligions positives”—traditional religions that might be referred to in various institutional identities.61 However, de Vries declares early on his own atheistic point of departure. He perceives traditional religions to be violent in essence, and proceeds from the premise that the commitments of revealed theology are methodologically excluded from consideration in philosophy. So, he writes: “needless to say, … a turn or return to religion could not consist in naively invoking the religion of the Church Fathers or in perpetuating some theologia naturalis or metaphysica specialis in a new guise. Neither unreflecting faith—revealed theology of whatever nature—nor onto-­theology seems an option still available to ‘us …’.”62 De Vries’ work thus wields its own violence from the beginning, with a declaration that his approach shares certain premises with the rationalism and methodological atheism of the philosophy of religion in its phenomenological, hermeneutical, and analytical guises.” In his very thinking of the religious, then, the particularity of any religious tradition is subjected to a new force of totalization. De Vries’s approach—which shares, as he says, “the speculative and dialectical impetus of negative dialectics and (negative) political theology”—models a discourse that is strangely parasitic on (largely Christian) theology without any of its commitments.63 While religion interrupts philosophy, therefore, it is not a religion that many theologians will recognize.

4.3  Revelation as a Theological Problem Turning to theology ‘proper,’ there are at least two issues currently contributing to the problem of thinking revelation. The first issue regards the extent to which theologians themselves accept the ramifications of the type of philosophical critique of revealed theology offered above. Is theology inevitably theiology, thinking God as being, first cause or transcendental signified? Does the theological movement beyond both affirmation (kataphasis) and negation (apophasis) to the mystical (via eminentia) inevitably lead to a recuperation of God in metaphysics? This typically leads to two types of responses.

 Ibid., 5–6.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 77. 62  Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xii. 63  Ibid., xiii. 60 61

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4.3.1  Inverting the Paradigm According to the first type of response, some theologians assert that theology is not—and should not be made so—subject to the conclusions of a philosophy that culminates in the nihilistic writhings of late modernity. This is exemplified in the work of those associated with the movement known as “radical orthodoxy.” At the very beginning of Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank warns: “The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol ….” What Milbank proposes is a complete reversal of the perspective from immanence, such that immanence is thoroughly irradiated by transcendence. Milbank argues that the exercise of autonomous, secular reason leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is no ultimate meaning other than the meaning one chooses for oneself. Nietzsche is right, he claims, in perceiving that reason in this sense is no more than the will to power. However, Milbank maintains that the alternative is to risk an ontology that is ultimately meaningful, where reason is made truly reasonable because it is supplemented by “true desire and faith.”64 What this means is that theology—specifically Catholic theology—assumes quite a different profile than that of being one disciplinary specialization amongst others. “Being a participation in God’s thinking, as Aquinas has it, theology is not especially about any ‘thing’ at all and has no proper domain of its own. It is rather the divine science of everything that we can but fragmentarily grasp in the glancing difference that it makes to every single thing or proposition.”65 In other words, Milbank embraces not only the possibility of securing ultimate meaning but also the possibility of Christian universalism. While he admits a difference between God’s knowledge and ours (human beings only “fragmentarily grasp” God’s workings in creation), he essentially proposes that Christian faith enables a “God’s eye view,” something that would certainly trouble his detractors, including those admitting anything like an historical consciousness.66

 “Preface to the Second Edition,” John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), xviii. 65  “Radical Orthodoxy and Protestantism Today: John Milbank in Conversation.,” Acta Theologica 37 (Supplement 25) (2017). 66  Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/ Lonergan Research Institute, 1973), xi, 124, 81, 301–02; “The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness,” in A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.  F. Lonergan, S.  J., ed. William F.  J. Ryan and Bernard J.  Tyrell (London: Darton, Longman & Todd), 3. 64

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4.3.2  Theology Does Not Reify Being According to the second type of response, many theologians argue that the kind of understanding of theology criticized by philosophy is really based on a fundamental misunderstanding.67 They argue that Thomas Aquinas does not understand being in a univocal sense, so that theology cannot be seen to ‘pull itself up by its own bootstraps.’ Moreover, they argue that the theological methodology of analogy has been overdetermined by philosophers of difference. We see these points exemplified in Marion’s engagement with Thomism. In view of Heidegger, Marion writes: “in and beyond the scholastic notion of metaphysics, the onto-theo-logical constitution … brings out the ultimate concept of ‘metaphysics’ by recognizing its unity in the intersecting conciliation of the ground (by beings as such) with the ground in the mode of causality (by the supreme being).”68 It is in this mutual grounding that all philosophy is implicated, and we are thus able to think the modern (epistemological) culmination of metaphysics by way of the principle of sufficient reason.69 Does Marion understand all metaphysics to be onto-theo-logical or metaphysics only as it emerges during modernity?70 This becomes a difficulty insofar as the exact nature of the problem that metaphysics as onto-theo-logy poses is at issue. In Heidegger’s critiques of metaphysics, it is evident that the entire history of Western philosophy is in view, and Marion seems to accept this characterization.71 Yet we

 Brian J. Shanley, “Saint Thomas, onto-Theology, and Marion,” The Thomist 60, no. 4 (1996); Declan Lawall, “Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and an Alleged Category Mistake Involving God and Being,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2009). 68  Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 52. 69  “Understood as metaphysics, philosophy is accomplished by continually (from Descartes to Hegel) radicalizing the implications of the principle of sufficient reason: all that is (being, étant) exists to the extent to which a causa (actuality) sive ratio (concept) gives an explanation either for its existence, for its nonexistence, or for its exemption from any cause.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, 2. 70  John Milbank argues for a division between “theo-ontology” (which “denotes both the Aristotelian-Platonic-Hebraic compound that reigned up till Aquinas”) and “onto-theology” (“post-Avicennean and Scotist philosophy based rigorously on the priority of ontology over the question of the origin of being, which leads to the reduction of God to an ontic idol as the supreme, infinite instance of a univocal being-in-general”). He argues that there is an ambivalence in Marion’s work between these two concepts of metaphysics, or rather, between whether it is one or both that need to be rejected. See John Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 255. Verhack observes that Marion “locat[es] the center of gravity of onto-theology historically in modern thought….” Ignace Verhack, “Immanent Transcendence as Way to ‘God’: Between Heidegger and Marion,” in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 108. 71  See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 43–44, 46–49; Identity and Difference, 48–51, 55–56, 58; 67

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need to bear in mind the fundamental differences between Marion and Heidegger in terms of what is at stake. Marion’s overriding concern is that the supreme being that functions to sustain this system is nothing more than an idolatrous representation of God, whereas Heidegger is concerned with a misreading of being.72 As a consequence, in Marion’s work there is a constant questioning of whether or not God is appropriately thought or named according to being or highest value. This enables him to argue that Heidegger is still bound by metaphysics in his inability to free God from being.73 Most significantly, from a theological point of view, the use of being as the “most proper name” for God is what is behind Marion’s early accusation that Thomas is implicated in onto-theo-logy. In response to great theological outcry, Marion’s first retraction of this accusation (1991), allows that Thomas does not actually think being in terms of common being (leaving open the question of his use of other approaches to being, and the possibility of analogy).74 This is reinforced in his second, more extensive retraction of his criticism of Thomas (1994/5), where he argues that if being is God’s most proper name, then it names what is utterly unknowable and bears no connection with our ontic or ontological determinations.75 From this perspective, all metaphysics is caught up in onto-theo-logy only to the extent that God has been thought as highest being and or according to being as what meets human understanding. This also accords with his later reading of Augustine.76 Marion’s treatment of the unknowability of God’s being and his reading of analogy can appear as nothing more than what some theologians might already suggest, although it might reasonably be claimed that his actual understanding of analogy relies on equivocity to such an extent that the thread of analogy is effectively broken.77 I would suggest that this is so despite Christina M. Gschwandtner’s argument that “[Marion’s] theology and his phenomenology precisely are attempts to recover

Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, ed. John D.  Caputo, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 13–16. 72  The Idol and Distance, 17. 73  God without Being, trans. Thomas A.  Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xxii, 72. 74  That is, because Thomas uses being as the primary divine name. Ibid., 73–83, xxii-xxiv. 75  Jean-Luc Marion, “Thomas Aquinas and onto-Theo-Logy,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 65–67; ibid. See also Laurence Paul Hemming, Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 127ff. 76  Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford:: Stanford University Press, 2012), 414. 77  On the question of Thomas’ thought of being, see, for example, John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 140ff., 283; Tony Kelly, “The ‘Horrible Wrappers’ of Aquinas’ God,” Pacifica: Journal of the Melbourne College of Divinity 9 (2) (1996); John Martis, “Thomistic Esse – Idol or Icon? Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being,” ibid., no. 1. On the question of Marion’s understanding of analogy, see Lawall, “Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and an Alleged Category Mistake,” 43.

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a new version of a doctrine of analogy.”78 My reading is reinforced by a line in Marion’s discussion of the conditions of onto-theo-logy, where he suggests that being might be thought as “an inconceivable esse, without analogy.”79 Marion highlights the failure of the language of transcendence to reach its mark.80 Theologians would undoubtedly agree that the language we have available to us is obviously limited; the doctrine of the analogy of being (where infinite being is approached by way of analogy to the proportionality of finite being) is, precisely, an attempt to respond to these conditions. It is not a question, however, of being able to oppose two values, one finite, one infinite, as though they were still somehow on the same plane (that is, as they both enter into the realm of being).81 Here, the insight of Laurence Paul Hemming in his discussion of Thomas Aquinas on analogy might be helpfully appropriated and reapplied. Hemming observes that Thomas’s under78  Christina M. Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 129. While I do not concur with all of Lawall’s conclusions I am inclined to agree with him on the degree of equivocity between terms in Marion that makes it doubtful whether Marion is able to make use of the analogy of being at all. 79  Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. De surcroît: études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001, 145. Emphasis added. 80  Heidegger, Being and Time, §31. I am indebted to Shane Mackinlay for drawing my attention to this passage. Yet cf. Marion’s own reference to §32 of Being and Time, at Marion, “From the Other to the Individual,” 144. See also Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 96–97. John Martis explains the issue in simple terms: “In ways refused by a deconstructive dispensation, phenomenology, still confident of the encounter with the ‘thing itself’, embraces the possibility that consciousness can encounter both the selfsubject and the other. This encounter takes place in that realm of intelligibility or pre-intelligibility where an object is determined, or at least sought, in terms of its essence. By ‘its essence’ is classically meant ‘the essence of its being’, ‘being’ in turn connoting the more or less substantial underlay of ‘isness’ shared by existent ‘entities’…. Extra-ontological phenomenology significantly revises the classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, proposing instead that, in its most important encounters – with the other human as such, and with the self as such – consciousness finds itself attending to other than objects or entities as such. Its engagement in these cases occurs, often unnoticed by itself, in a dimension other than being: behind it, or around it, or in excess of it. As leading proponents of this new account, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion have borrowed from phenomenology before leaving home. As for Husserl, so, with variations, for Levinas and Marion: the existence of objects is determined in and as their givenness to consciousness, in satisfaction of the objectification for which consciousness strives. However, for Levinas and Marion, when the represented object is itself another consciousness, this givenness exceeds any objectification by consciousness, so that the presence of another to myself always precedes and exceeds the ‘is’ or ‘what’ of ‘what it is’ to my consciousness.” John Martis, “The Self Found Elsewhere: Phenomenological Faith Meets Deconstructive Doubt,” Pacifica 22 (2009): 199–200. 81  Lawall argues, for example, that “Aquinas has worked out a method of excess that is located within the language of being, and I believe that Marion has navigated the challenge from Aquinas’s thought only by interpreting Aquinas idolatrously, to borrow Marion’s own phrase.” Lawall, “Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and an Alleged Category Mistake,” 47. As will become apparent, it is not the thought of Thomas Aquinas that is ultimately at issue (especially as he is read by Laurence Paul Hemming). The question concerns whether or not we have to remain “within the language of being.” To defy that language obviously results in a challenge to intelligibility, but that is precisely the point.

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standing of analogy as proportionality “is very weak—so weak, that it cannot bear any ontological consequences.”82 Marion tries to take seriously that we cannot draw God into the ontological plane, and severs the self-assurance of language in its referral—we do not know for certain—when we name God—who we name.83 Theologians might continue to refer to infinite being (and by means of analogy, think in terms of a continuous discontinuity), where Marion generally prefers to think “without being,” in order to emphasise complete discontinuity and to avoid any notion of God’s somehow inhabiting a ‘world behind the world.’ Now, while we may get the impression that it is primarily the thinking of God as being that is at issue for Marion, there is also the question of the modern innovation of naming God as self-causing cause. Marion both ascribes this innovation to Descartes and uses it to exempt Thomas more irrevocably from the charge of onto-­ theo-­logy.84 Metaphysics is onto-theo-logy most truly in its modern sense: “ … perhaps God does not enter truly into metaphysics before Descartes seizes him in it, since it is only with the causa sui that a different primacy—onto-theo-logical—subjugates nameless and incomprehensible transcendence.”85 Further, the mere fact that being comes up is not enough to establish an onto-theo-logy.86 Summing up our consideration of the first issue, that is, as to whether or not theology is subject to the critique of metaphysics as onto-theology, many theologians tend to think not. However, it is one thing to contemplate how one might speak of God on the basis of a natural theology—it is quite another to make a claim that one knows the mind of God on any particular issue. This is where the stakes are raised with regard to the question of revelation. For, as much as theological language is qualified in all sorts of ways, invariably it gets translated into dogmatic pronouncements. It becomes possible to ‘know’ the truth, without hesitation, and the victims of that truth have every right to wonder in what revelation consists and how it takes place. These victims have to live with their experience in silence.

 Hemming, Postmodernity’s Transcending, 129.  See particularly chapter 6 of Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. This is not a simple restatement of nominalism, for it is not a question of denying God, but of the power of intentionality to conceptualise what “God” might mean, and hence the power of language to represent meaning. In Marion’s case, the name God is uttered in hope, but without being able to show that it meets any concept. 84  On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 142–43. 85  On the Ego and God, 160. 86  In Excess, 145. Curiously, despite this emphasis, we observe Marion’s claim in In the Place of the Self  that Augustine is not a metaphysical thinker because he does not think God according to being, not because he does not name God causa sui. Augustine “does not ask the question of being, or even that of the existent, … does not thus name God starting from being, or even the being par excellence, … does not speak the language of the categories of being, or begin from the first amongst them, ousia, … does not ask about a first foundation, or look for it in the least subject (that one understands as a substrate or an ego), does not belong to metaphysics, either explicitly or implicitly.” In the Place of the Self, 9. See also the detailed discussion in chapter VII. 82 83

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4.3.3  Theology of Revelation In this light, the second issue for theology that must be considered concerns the thinking of revelation as such. While revelation is obviously a central theological concern, it assumes a prominent theological profile only relatively late in history, that is, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. In scripture, prophets and angels are seen to mediate the communication of God’s will, and it seems that this is how revelation is understood for much of Christian history. In the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, for example, revelation is considered primarily in relation to prophecy: new knowledge is given by God to the prophet, which by a co-operative act of judgment, becomes revelatory: “the prophets do not see in the Divine essence Itself the things they do see, but that they see them in certain images, according as they are enlightened by the Divine light.”87 Thomas, however, is also concerned with how the ordinary person can come to know God, and we could construe this, in its own way, as a thinking of revelation. The “object” of faith is God, both materially (as that which is known—the “First Truth,” that is, God, and other things “bearing some relation to God”) and formally (as “that whereby it is known”).88 Thomas observes: Two things are requisite for faith. First, that the things which are of faith should be proposed to man: this is necessary in order that man believe anything explicitly. The second thing requisite for faith is the assent of the believer to the things which are proposed to him. Accordingly, as regards the first of these, faith must needs be from God. Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man’s knowledge, unless God reveal them.

He goes on to add that the assent of the believer also comes from God, “since man, by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God.” At the same time, that assent is truly personal: “to believe does indeed depend on the will of the believer: but man’s will needs to be prepared by God with grace.”89 Thomas is decisive that the object of faith is not apprehended “as it is in itself.”90 In faith, the intellect is moved by the will (itself inspired by God) “to assent … to that which is believed.”91 Those things that are believed are not seen  Thomas, The Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Latin-English, trans. Dominican Fathers of the English Province, Latin-English ed., Summa Theologiae (NovAntiqua, 2008), 2a2ae.173.1. 88  Ibid., 2a2ae.1.1. On Aquinas and faith, see John I.  Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially at chapter 6. See also the critique of Jenkin’s argument in Brian J.  Shanley, “Review: Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. By John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997,” The Thomist 63 (1999). See also Gregory W.  Dawes, “Religious Studies, Faith, and the Presumption of Naturalism,” Journal of Religion and Society 5 (2003). 89  Thomas, St, 2a2ae. 6.1. 90  Ibid., 2a2ae.1.2. Further, it is not comprehended: ibid., I.12.7. 91  Ibid., 2a2ae.1.4. “Now the act of faith is to believe…, which is an act of the intellect determinate to one object of the will’s command.” Ibid., 2a2ae.4.1. 87

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by the intellect (in the sense of demonstrated to it) but are known “by the light of faith which makes [the faithful] see that they ought to believe them ….”92 The things known in this way by faith “surpass human reason.”93 In the Summa Contra Gentiles, we learn that while faith is a type of knowledge, it is knowledge that is accepted without concomitant understanding, in a relationship of trust. Faith is the “assent [of the person] to things proposed to him by another, which himself he does not see.”94 At Trent and Vatican I, the magisterial thinking of revelation is caught up in the debate on ecclesial authority. The theology of revelation shaped by the events of the Reformation is thus defined chiefly in terms of who can control it.95 Vatican II marks a turning point in that regard. If we compare the two documents on revelation—De fontibus revelationis (DFR), produced in anticipation of Vatican II, and Dei Verbum (DV), produced out of the Council itself—we can see something of the difference that Vatican II makes to a more fully articulated theology of revelation. In DFR, revelation, which is characterized as God’s speech, comes to us first by means of the prophets, and then by means of Christ and the Apostles. Christ “revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven” and commanded that they be spread throughout the nations. Revelation is depicted in terms of doctrinal content and its interpretation or explanation, whether that has been transmitted orally or by means of scripture.96 Yet as we know, the bishops ultimately chose to reject DFR and went the way of developing a totally new document. In contrast with DFR, DV shifts from an emphasis on revelation as doctrinal content to revelation being, first and foremost, God’s self-communication as the basis for a relationship with humanity.97 Joseph Ratzinger’s commentary underscores the extent to which this is a major shift: instead of revelation being considered primarily “‘a store of mysterious supernatural teachings,’” Ratzinger here considers revelation as “‘a true dialogue which

 Ibid., 2a2ae.1.5.  Ibid., 2a2ae. 6.1. Cf. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith, 196. 94  “In the knowledge that is of faith, though there is high perfection on the part of the object so apprehended, there is great imperfection on the side of intellect, for intellect does not understand that to which it assents in believing. In the knowledge of faith the will has a leading part: for the understanding assents by faith to the things proposed to it, because it wills to do so, without being necessarily drawn by the direct evidence of truth. He who believes, yields assent to things proposed to him by another, which himself he does not see: hence the knowledge of faith is more like hearing than seeing.” Thomas, Of God and His Creatures, ed. Joseph Rickaby (Lexington, KY: Veritas Splendor Publications, 2012), III.40.1–3. 95  John F.  Haught, Mystery and Promise: A Theology of Revelation (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1993), chapter 2. 96  De fontibus revelationis, translated by Joseph Komonchak, available at https://jakomonchak. files.wordpress.com/2012/09/de-fontibus-1-5.pdf (accessed March 26 2018). 97  Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), in Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, vol. 1 (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co., 1988) 750–65. Hereafter DV. 92 93

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touches man in his totality’.”98 In DV there is continuing emphasis on the ways in which revelation is at work in scripture and tradition, but there is also reference to the capacity to recognize God’s engagement in history, and the interplay between revelatory events and their proclamation. Christ is understood as the fullness of revelation. We do not need to imagine that DV is novel in the sense that God’s disclosure to humanity has never before been considered to be personal, and in the way of Vatican documents, there are multiple voices at play in the document. However, it represents a watershed in the theology of revelation. Avery Dulles’ Models of Revelation assumes a particular significance in the subsequent literature on revelation because of the typologies that he develops.99 Dulles explains that the dominant way of thinking about revelation has been as the direct communication of doctrine—the propositional model. According to this model, God is understood to have offered to the Apostles and others direct insights about Godself through the Holy Spirit, which is sometimes imagined as a kind of divine dictation.100 With this model, Jesus’ words in the Gospels are very important, although scripture as a whole is seen as the locus of divine speech. However, the scriptural transmission of divine ideas is invariably supplemented by tradition; scripture is, in fact, a type of tradition, which is authoritatively interpreted by the Magisterium. This means that while revelation as “the Word of God” is located in scripture, dogmatic pronouncements of the teaching Church can effectively be accorded revelatory status as the “authentic interpretation of the Word of God.”101 Working across Christian traditions, Dulles then conceives revelation to be understood in a number of other ways: through historical events; through inner experience (symbols and images, moods and feelings constructive of a relationship between God and the person); as dialectical presence (addressing humanity through the Bible and inspired preaching); and through new awareness (enabling humanity to reach new levels of consciousness and experiencing the divine presence there). Bringing elements of each type together, Dulles’s work culminates by addressing some of the problems that any thinking of revelation in the modern world must face: to avoid too simplistic an account of God’s engagement with humanity, he speaks of symbolic mediation as the means of our encounter with God. Richard Gaillardetz explains what has now become a theological commonplace: “as embodied c­ reatures, the primary way in which we come to know our world is through symbols. We learn  Joseph Ratzinger, “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Origin and Background,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, 5 vols., ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967–69), vol. III, 155–98, at 172, quoted in Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catherine E.  Clifford, Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press, 2012), 33–34. 99  Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, Rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992). 100  We might compare, in this regard, some accounts of the Qu’ran as God’s word. See David Marshall, Communicating the Word Revelation, Translation, and Interpretation in Christianity and Islam: A Record of the Seventh Building Bridges Seminar Convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rome, May 2008, ed. David Marshall and Seminar Building Bridges (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 68, which cites the Qu’ranic sura 26:192–96. 101  This position is expressed in chapter II of DV. 98

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through language, concepts, images, and metaphors. It is through these symbols that God is able to ‘mediate’ the sharing of divine life that is the substance of revelation.”102 A later paper by Dulles, however, complicates his view of revelation. His expressed anxieties at the Catholic Theological Society of America meeting of 1999 about the possibility of an “ecstatic encounter with God that has no explicitly doctrinal content” (which he has earlier foreshadowed, we might suggest, in his “inner experience” model) goes to the heart of the issue.103 On the one hand, Dulles articulates in Models a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which revelation is not simply doctrine transmitted by means of a (Magisterial) reading of tradition— including the scriptural tradition. On the other hand, his reaction to those contemplating the relationship of revelation to experience suggests that he understands the propositional view of revelation to be primary, particularly insofar as it reveals the limits of doctrine and debate. Dulles’s chief target in the 1999 paper appears to be Roger Haight, who had written in 1990 that revelation is chiefly to be understood as encounter: “There are no revealed doctrines as such, for revelation is a personal encounter with a personal God and not an historically relative interpretation of that encounter in the form of an objective proposition.”104 In Haight’s understanding of revelation, we can see a possible working out of the emphasis so prominently included in DV, that revelation is primarily God’s self-revelation. Yet in the anxiety within Dulles’ response, we begin to see one of the chief difficulties involved in a Christian thinking of revelation. It is problematic to link revelation and experience: theologically, this is so because it is often considered that there is ultimately too much at stake in doctrine for revelation to be considered as a genuinely personal encounter, and philosophically, it is so because we simply cannot think God according to the manner of beings or even of being itself. Lieven Boeve comments incisively on the situation after the Council where “time and again, it would appear that the dialogical principle at the heart of the concept of revelation developed at Vatican II is truncated and conceived as unilateral and asymmetrical. The potentially renewing—or interrupting—impact of such dialogue is thus restrained because of the possible risk of a too far-reaching adaptation or renewal and a loss of continuity.”105 Once again, experience and its potential wisdom is silenced. It is possible, of course, that we have pushed the word revelation beyond its usual usage. As John Macquarrie once observed, “we do not normally dignify our

 Gaillardetz and Clifford, Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II, 35.  “[S]ome prominent theologians, whose numbers are apparently growing, identify revelation as an ecstatic encounter with God that has no doctrinal content.” Avery Dulles, “Catholic Doctrine: Between Revelation and Theology” (paper presented at the Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, 1999), 83. 104  Roger Haight, Dynamics of Theology, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Paulist, 2001), 83. 105  Lieven Boeve, “Revelation, Scripture and Tradition: Lessons from Vatican II’s Constitution Dei Verbum for Contemporary Theology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 13, no. 4 (2011): 431. 102 103

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d­ ay-to-­day experiences of the holy by the name of ‘revelation’.”106 While this is true, it seems to accord mainly with a view of revelation understood as doctrine. Ordinary persons certainly do not claim very regularly that God has revealed something to them with definitive content that should be propositionally formulated, or if they do, we tend to view them with a great deal of suspicion. Yet we would hope that God reveals Godself to those same people every day in prayer, and through that prayer, that they would gain deeper insight into the nature of God and the challenges presenting themselves in the world. In theology, the working hypothesis is that God can be known—even though it is well recognized that God can only be known to the extent that God is unknown. The point, then, remains: revelation is understood within Catholic thought chiefly in two ways, as content and as relationship. Revelation is currently a problem for theology because while it is fundamentally relational, it is predominantly and habitually conceived as propositional. To revert to the categories I used at the beginning of this reflection, revelation is seen to be more about belief than experience. This insight has all sorts of practical implications. First, the way God reveals Godself in relationship sometimes enables the critique of doctrine. Historically, to take just a couple of simple examples, the positions of the Church on slavery and the death penalty have changed as Western society has changed. A new critical consciousness arises. If we can speak about something like “the development of doctrine,” then it is fair to assume it comes about by means of God’s self-revelation in new contexts, requiring new perspectives, insights, and formulations. The debate with regard to remarried people receiving communion could well be a current case in point. Second, to emphasize doctrine as the central element of Christian life contributes to the communication of a sense of unreality about God. Recalling the current cultural situation where the idea of revelation simply makes no sense for many people, we can see how the thousands of daily decisions that are taken in the name of God’s revelation can appear bizarre in modern culture, to say the least. The restatement of the requirement for Eucharistic hosts to contain gluten is a topical example. That is neither to say that there are no reasons at all for making these decisions, nor that there not is a significant role for doctrine in the critique of experience, but only to say that the time is past when one can appeal uncritically to a propositional view of revelation to found them.

4.4  ‘Turning’ to Theology with Phenomenology None of the ways we have considered of understanding the relationship between theology and philosophy is sufficient to sustain an adequate thinking of revelation. According to the first philosophical way, it is the starting point that is all wrong: any commitment to revelation is seen to cloud the purest instincts of

 John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1977; repr., 2003), 8.

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p­ hilosophy. If there is truth, it is not to be found in the particularity or partiality of any religious tradition. According to the second philosophical approach, a ‘return to religion’ may well reveal something to philosophy, but only if it is purged of any thought of (divine) revelation. Both ways assume secularist understandings of the world, that is, they assume something like the immanent frame that Taylor describes. Considering the theological perspectives, it is difficult to affirm that human beings have access to a ‘God’s-eye view’ or that theological understanding escapes the clutches of metaphysics completely. Yet, each of these points helps us focus the issue for revelation more precisely. In a detraditionalized and plural world, God’s revelation is just not the obvious answer for the questions that many people raise. The problem for those who see things differently is that there is no point beginning otherwise or elsewhere than in that detraditionalized and plural world of their experience. This is the argument propounded by Emmanuel Falque: Christians, too, live in a secular world and share experiences in common with atheists as well as other persons of ‘no religion.’ Christian reflection, then, must begin from the position of our common humanity: “if philosophy is ‘fundamentally atheist,’ in that it questions the strictly finite modalities of our Being-there (Heidegger), it is in such a position that the believer also must find himself or herself, with the proviso that one accepts, at least from a heuristic point of view, that we come to picture for ourselves first of all simply the incarnation of a man rather than the image of a God.”107 What is needed in theology and philosophy, Falque maintains, is an approach taking the experience of finitude and immanence seriously. There is no other way forward than one grappling constantly within the finite horizon that forms the boundaries of the human condition. Our focus thus moves from questions of belief or unbelief (inevitably characterising the first two ways) to questions of experience, and our way of proceeding, phenomenologico-hermeneutical.

4.4.1  The Theological Turn and Phenomenology The so-called “theological turn” within French phenomenology in the late twentieth century relates to a number of thinkers, including Falque, Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste.108 Husserlian phenomenology is the study of what gives itself or appears to consciousness (intentionality) as it opens onto the world, as consciousness ‘of’ some object, thing, essence, state of affairs, or event—and of how it is given (in presence,

107  Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 13. See also ibid., 34–35. 108  In what follows, I draw from Robyn Horner, “Towards a Hermeneutic Phenomenological Methodology for Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 22.2 (2018): 153–173 and “Words that Reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the Experience of God,” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2018): 169–192.

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memory, imagination, anticipation, and so on).109 It is concerned, then, with experience as it is ‘lived,’ not in terms of discrete psychological data, but in terms of essential structures. Yet phenomenology is not merely a question of the identification and description of phenomena as and how they appear. Phenomena appear within contexts, are embedded in history and culture, and are described using available language; phenomena do not appear in a vacuum and can signify or be meaningful only within such contexts, history, culture and language.110 As Heidegger perceives, phenomenology is inevitably a hermeneutic task.111 Any description always and already involves interpretation; seeing is always seeing as. Moreover, as Levinas argues, intentionality is not only thetic, but also axiological, affective, and so on.112 That phenomenology is hermeneutical does not mean that it relinquishes its aim to bring to lucid description “the things themselves.”113 The first step in phenomenological method is to apply the epochē, which means to bracket what Husserl calls “the natural attitude.” This is the pre-critical view that already makes presumptions about what is or is not, which has already made judgments about matters under investigation. While the epochē is sometimes thought of (including by Husserl himself, at least initially) as the phenomenological reduction, the reduction comes to be understood by Husserl as a second step: effectively, we could liken phenomenological reductions to a series of lenses placed over what appears so that particular types of phenomena can come into view more fully. The degree to which phenomenology can engage with theology has been extensively debated.114 Many critics of their engagement argue that Husserl himself forbids it, since the epochē is understood to be the bracketing of all transcendence, including and especially the transcendence of God.115 Yet Søren Overgaard reminds

 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), §32. 110  Hence the need for a genetic phenomenology. See Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), §§34ff. 111  See Heidegger, Being and Time, II.7c. See also Claude Romano, At the Heart of Reason, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 485. 112  Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne, 2nd ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 43. 113  Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N.  Findlay, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 1970/2001), 168. 114  Dominique Janicaud, Le Tournant Théologique De La Phénoménologie Française (Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991); La Phénoménologie Éclatée (Combas: Éditions de l’éclat, 1998). These texts are available in English as Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, ed. John D.  Caputo, trans. Bernard G.  Prusak, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’: After the French Debate, trans. Charles N.  Cabral (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 115  Husserl, Ideas I, §58, p.134. Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’, 17. Janicaud is not unaware that a commitment to atheism could simply invert a commitment to theism and thus risk the neutrality of the phenomenological approach. However, by accepting an understanding of methodological atheism that narrows the field of phenomenology to what appears in sensible experience, he undercuts the whole genius of phenomenology. 109

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us that the focus of phenomenology is on the phenomena in their appearing, unencumbered by our prior expectations as to what can appear (or not).116 We find this approach exemplified by Jean-Yves Lacoste in The Appearing of God, where he maintains that it is a matter of allowing “things, persons, and events [to] appear from themselves according to the logic proper to their appearance,” rather than according to their adherence to any predetermined disciplinary guidelines or according to a decision taken in advance.117 It might be better to describe phenomenology as agnostic, rather than atheistic, in its approach.

4.4.2  Lacoste and the Paradoxical Phenomenon Lacoste argues that philosophy and theology are interested in common problems, including God and revelation.118 Following Heidegger’s concern that we should move beyond metaphysics to “thought” and his notion that thinking is linked with thanking, Lacoste asks whether the theologian—as one for whom a prayer of thanks is always preeminently necessary—is “the one whose work most evidently disposes him [sic] to thinking.”119 So, while theology is beholden to tradition in a way that philosophy is not, and while not all that is theological will also be philosophical, Lacoste argues that the thinking that is demanded of each discipline cannot be strictly demarcated: “We can therefore lose all interest in knowing which discipline we are practising when we take an interest in God and in the things of God: we will simply be judged by the power of what we say.”120 One might expect that Lacoste’s use of the later Heidegger to support the relatedness of theology and philosophy in their task of “thinking” might be at odds with Heidegger’s overall philosophical approach, which seems to be atheistic in its subordination of theology to fundamental ontology. In Marion’s critique of Heidegger, he maintains that Heidegger idolatrously subjects God to the Seinsfrage.121 Moreover, in his later works, Heidegger concerns himself with thinking “the Fourfold”—an unashamedly pagan meeting point of “earth, sky, divinities and mor Søren Overgaard, “How to Do Things with Brackets: The Epocēh Explained,” Continental Philosophy Review 48, no. 2 (2015): 180. 117  Jean-Yves Lacoste, The Appearing of God, trans. Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 17, ix. 118  From Theology to Theological Thinking, trans. W. Chris Hackett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 70–71. 119  Ibid., 81. See also the comments in Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Response to Gschwandtner, Hart, Schrijvers and Hackett,” Modern Theology 31, no. 4 (2015); Joeri Schrijvers, “Introduction,” ibid.: 674. 120  Lacoste, Theology to Theological Thinking, 190. Trans. modified. See the discussion of this work in Chris Hackett, “What Is Called Theological Thinking?,” Modern Theology 31, no. 4 (2015). 121  Jean-Luc Marion, “The Metaphysical Situation of the Discourse on Method,” in René Descartes: Critical Assessments, ed. G. J. D. Moyal (London/New York: Routledge, 1991). 116

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tals.” Yet Lacoste suggests that Heidegger is primarily interested in the question of experience—whether this is Christian or pagan—rather than in Christianity as such.122 While it is clear that Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is “methodologically atheistic,” this is to be understood in the sense that it is an attempt to describe experience starting from finitude, rather than making any pronouncements on the question of God.123 In Lacoste’s work we are situated within the Heideggerian horizon of “world” (or “earth”), opening onto phenomena—including objects, beings, things, persons and events—in their various modes of appearing. While the sacred belongs within this horizon, we will not find God amidst the sacred.124 It is precisely for this reason that Lacoste discerns a need to transgress the horizon of the mundane. He does so by means of what he calls the “liturgical” reduction (or more commonly, “liturgy,” by which he does not mean rites of worship). Liturgy “appears as a certain bracketing of world and earth”; it is “life lived before God … not at the measure of Dasein or the mortal”; “the facts, gestures and sayings of people in the presence of God (coram Deo).”125 On this account, the liturgical reduction does not bring God into view as such, but means simply that the world ceases to be our determining horizon.126 Lacoste also claims that liturgy consists in “exposition” before God, by which he means both “an experience of surplus grounded in divine donation” and also “an unveiling that we ourselves must undertake.”127 This unveiling is accomplished without the horizon of the world being breached, by the refusal to allow that horizon to be determinative.128 Yet, what might “an experience of surplus grounded in divine donation” look like? At this point, many critics of the theological use of phenomenology would emphasise Husserl’s insistence that God is absolutely transcendent and can never be made the object of a phenomenological reduction.129

 Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Préface à L’édition ‘Quadrige’,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, ed. Richard Kearney and Joseph S. O’Leary (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Quadrige, 2009), 22. 123  Ibid., 11. 124  Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être en danger (Paris: Cerf, 2011), 117–18. 125  Le monde et l’absence d’oeuvre et autres études (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 16–17; Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 174; Recherches sur la parole (Louvain: Peeters, 2015), 202. 126  Experience and the Absolute, 24. 127  Ibid., 34, emphasis added. 128  Ibid., 35. 129  “What concerns us here, after merely indicating different groups of such rational grounds for believing in the existence of an extra-worldly ‘divine’ being is that this being would obviously transcend not merely the world but ‘absolute’ consciousness. It would therefore be an ‘absolute’ in the sense totally different from that in in which consciousness is an absolute, just as it would be something transcendent in a sense totally different from that in which the world is something transcendent. Naturally we extend the phenomenological reduction to include this ‘absolute’ and ‘transcendent’ being. It shall remain excluded from the new field of research which is to be provided, since this shall be a field of pure consciousness.” Husserl, Ideas I, 134. 122

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Lacoste entirely agrees that God cannot be made the object of consciousness. At the same time, he observes: “God can be present to us in the life of the affection. It is a matter of common sense that God, or the ‘divine God’ stands at a critical distance from any affective purchase we may have. It is also self-evident that his presence to the affections is not a parousia. To put it as bluntly as possible: God’s phenomenality cannot be understood unless we understand that God transcends God’s phenomenality.”130 Lacoste speaks of “paradoxical phenomena,” and he often understands such phenomena to be known to us through the affect rather than the intellect.131 To refer to knowledge in the affective (and antepredicative) domain, he frequently uses the verb connaître, which emphasises familiarity rather than propositional or discursive thought.132 Lacoste also speaks of them in terms of nonexperience (and nonknowledge).133 “Non-experience in cause, in effect”—he writes—“is not the pure and simple annulment of all experience (the experience of knowledge [le savoir] survives affective unknowing [l’inconnaissance]), but a precise mode of experience: an experience that does not possess what we would like to possess, from which all enjoyment is refused, which is presented in this way as a poor experience ….”134

4.4.3  Marion and the Saturated Phenomenon It will be recalled from the introduction to this chapter that Marion insists modern philosophy rejects revelatory phenomena because they do not accord with the principle of sufficient reason—quite simply, they are impossible. The principle requires that we are able to provide reasonable grounds for thought, yet Heidegger famously rereads it through the lens of Angelus Silesius: when faced with the question of why the rose blooms, the response is that “it blooms because it blooms.”135 Marion criticises Kant’s reliance on the principle of sufficient reason to act as a limit on the possibility of phenomena.136 In contrast, Marion proposes that there may be ­phenomena given otherwise than according to this horizon of possibility. He main Lacoste, The Appearing of God, 38.  Ibid., 79. 132  Lacoste agrees that this is his approach, although his usage is inconsistent. See Robyn Horner, “Words That Reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the Experience of God,” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2018): 177. 133  Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 141. 134  “Quand je parle de Dieu,” in Dieu en tant que Dieu: La question philosophique, ed. Phillipe Capelle-Dumont (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 226. 135  Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 35, 41. 136  Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 182. 130 131

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tains that philosophy has no prima facie right to exclude from its consideration the possibility of revelatory phenomena.137 By means of a thinking based on the phenomenological reduction to givenness—that is, working on the principle that there is no principle that should exclude whatever gives itself to experience from being given—Marion maintains that revelatory phenomena can be given in their possibility. Their actuality as revelatory is a matter, he considers, for theology (rather than phenomenology) to discern.138 The technical means Marion proposes for the appearing of phenomena that might otherwise be considered impossible has to do with how they are given to intentionality. To put this very briefly, within the doublet of consciousness (intuition and intention) Marion argues that particular phenomena are given to intuition in such a way (as ‘content’ of a sort) that they cannot be delimited by the intentional aim (the intentional aim being that which identifies and makes sense of that content). He calls such phenomena “saturated,” and they are characterized by their excessiveness with regard to consciousness, an excessiveness that makes univocal interpretation impossible.139 As saturated, Marion identifies phenomena including the event, the idol (or the painting), the icon (or the face of the other), flesh, and revelation (as a type combining the previous four).140 While Marion tends to privilege ‘seeing’ in phenomenology, he often speaks of the saturated phenomenon in terms of hearing (“the call”), and on at least one occasion he identifies revelatory phenomena that are felt and not seen, noting that we might respond to them in fear, or fascination.141 Using the terms of experience—which are central to the present investigation— Marion writes: “what is experienced in revelation can be summed up as the powerlessness to experience whatever it might be that one experiences.” He notes specifically with regard to Erlebnis that “the I in its finitude cannot register all that happens to it as a lived experience of consciousness. What is revealed is not necessarily experienced, because it transgresses the dimensions of Erlebnis. … the revealed imposes itself precisely because it cannot be experienced.”142 In other words, revelation provokes what we might otherwise call an interruption to experience, or an experience upon which there is no object to settle. If it is possible to use the word without invoking its Heideggerian resonances, we might say that the (non)-experience of revelation is not unlike the experience of anxiety, in that there is no thing upon which it can rest. It is here that we begin to see that context is a powerful factor in making meaning of experience, and with context comes the role of the interpreting community.

 Ibid., 6 and passim.  Ibid., 236. 139  Ibid., for example, 229. 140  Ibid., 225–47. 141  Marion, In Excess, 161–62. 142  The Visible and the Revealed, 9. 137 138

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In sum, from Marion’s point of view, revelation would take place in experience as excessive; from Lacoste’s point of view, revelation would take place in experience that is unable to be enjoyed or possessed. Marion allows that such experience is sometimes affective (experienced in fear or fascination, for example), although he often approaches saturated phenomena by means of the failure of (theoretical) intention. Lacoste, on the other hand, more consistently emphasizes that God reveals Godself within affective intentionality, appearing in experience by means of a sense of familiarity rather than by (theoretical) knowledge.

4.4.4  Romano and the Event A third perpective on phenomena not able to be constituted as entities, this time from a thinker less invested in theological concerns, offers a helpful comparison. Claude Romano has written extensively on the nature of “the event.”143 Romano takes the view that events are not trivial happenings, but are characterized by their capacity to transform the world of the one who undergoes them. He uses the example of bereavement to illustrate both the non-ontic and impersonal nature of events (events happen without apparent agency, to anyone or everyone), and at the same time, their potential to be world-changing for the particular one who undergoes them at any given point. To be more specific: “an event is nothing other than th[e] impersonal reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world—a reconfiguration that occurs in a fact and by which the event opens a fissure in my own adventure.”144 It is apparent from this characterization that it is possible to speak meaningfully of what is neither an object nor a thing, and that comes about without our being able to identify any personal agency at its origin, yet has a profound impact in the experience of the one who undergoes it. The event happens and affects us, but at the same time it exceeds all vision and understanding. While it is not Romano’s intent to apply this thinking to revelation, it is not difficult to perceive how it could help us to make sense of the relationship between revelation and experience.

4.4.5  The Place of Faith On the basis of examples such as the three I note above, I argue that revelation can potentially be given to experience, even if we cannot exclude the importance of context for its recognition and the hermeneutics needed to test such an experience for meaning. But of course, what next becomes crucial is how one responds in and  In English, see especially: Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Event and Time, trans. Stephen E.  Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 144  Event and World, 31. 143

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to the experience. Here is where the question of belief rightfully returns, although I prefer to use ‘faith’ here to make clear that I am not yet speaking about religious beliefs. I noted earlier Marion’s mention of the possibility that saturated phenomena may be experienced in fear or fascination. There is a long pedigree, however, for a theology that takes as its starting point what appeals to us in love before prompting any question of faith or attempt at understanding. Augustine is an obvious case, and his thought on love is emphasised by both Marion and Lacoste. In the 2014 Gifford lectures—later published as Givenness and Revelation— Marion contests the taking of an epistemological approach to revelation, claiming in accord with Dei Verbum that “the clearly non-epistemological intention of revelation aims to manifest God in person; God’s intention is not so much to make himself known as to make himself re-cognized….”145 He compares aletheia (unconcealment, which Marion associates with natural theology) and apokalypsis (uncovering, which Marion associates with the eschatological meaning of revelation), and writes: “in a situation of revelation (apokalypsis, uncovering), knowing is the same as loving, which is the contrary of the situation of truth (alētheia, unconcealment), where knowing means seeing and knowing directly ….”146 He thus argues that apokalypsis allows for a non-metaphysical understanding of revelation. Summing up a tradition that includes William of St Thierry and Pascal as well as Augustine, Marion observes: so the condition of the possibility of uncovering [découvrement] is no longer assured by the conditions of possibility of the experience of finite objects (namely critique, the principles of metaphysics, clear and distinct ideas, evidence that is certain), but by charity [love], which henceforth plays the role of a condition of knowledge of that which, for finite reason, continues to appear as inaccessible and impossible, or better: unthinkable, at least if one accepts it as impossible.147

He then goes on to quote a definition of revelation from Augustine as that which draws us.148 In a similar way, Lacoste speaks of God’s self-disclosure as appealing to our freedom. It is proposed rather than imposed on us, self-evident rather than evident, becoming known only in the very response made in love.149 For Lacoste, revelation

 Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27. 146  Ibid., 45. 147  Ibid., 38–39. 148  “‘Ista attractio, ipsa est revelatio—This revelation itself is what draws.’” ibid., 39. “Revelation assumes a plot, in which the attraction acts first on the will, which then makes the reason choose to see what it would otherwise not will to see. Seeing is the result of the decision to see, and this decision, made by me, nevertheless comes to me from elsewhere. I must make the decision to make a decision, will to be willing, in order to arrive at seeing. Revelation comes to me from elsewhere. (b) Nevertheless, the attraction holds as revelation only because it allows seeing Jesus as the Christ, that is to say, as the Son of the Father, as the visibility of the invisible.” Ibid., 41. 149  Lacoste, The Appearing of God, 77. 145

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affects us in experience, and a response of faith made in love is ultimately the condition for our knowledge of it. Strangely enough, there is much in this view that could remind us of Derrida. Reflections on faith occur in many contexts in Derrida’s work, but he often considers faith in the context of reason, and in terms of the Kantian opposition between faith and knowledge. In broad terms, for Derrida, faith is the condition of relation: “that is why,” he says, “I constantly refer to the experience of faith as simply a speech act, as simply the social experience ….”150 Faith is the condition of possibility for any reason at all, but since faith is also reason’s condition of impossibility (reason cannot be purely reasonable), it is a quasi-transcendental.151 While Augustine and others see love as the prerequisite for knowledge of God, Derrida sees faith as the prerequisite for reason. Moreover, Derrida also considers the notion that revelation is known through its effects.152 This would lead us to look for revelation not from heaven, but in personal experience, in the world around us, and especially in those who have been affected by it and who live out its effects in their daily lives. In short, if it is the case that revelation no longer makes sense in contemporary life, perhaps it is because it has been locked for too long in the language of beliefs and made unavailable to experience; perhaps it is because of a diminished sensitivity to its impression in the affect, and perhaps it is because its effects are no longer visible in the persons who proclaim it as knowledge.

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Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 2000. Le monde et l’absence d’oeuvre et autres études. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2004. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan. New  York: Fordham University Press. Expérience et absolu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. ———. 2009. Préface À L’édition ‘Quadrige’. In Heidegger et la question de Dieu, ed. Richard Kearney and Joseph S. O’Leary, 727. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Quadrige. ———. 2011. Être en danger. Paris: Cerf. ———. 2012. Quand je parle de Dieu. In Dieu en tant que Dieu: La question philosophique, ed. Phillipe Capelle-Dumont, 214–235. Paris: Cerf. ———. 2014. From Theology to Theological Thinking. Trans. W. Chris Hackett. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2015a. Recherches sur la parole. Leuven: Peeters. ———. 2015b. Response to Gschwandtner, Hart, Schrijvers and Hackett. Modern Theology 31 (4): 676–683. ———. 2018. The Appearing of God. Trans. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawall, Declan. 2009. Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and an Alleged Category Mistake Involving God and Being. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83 (1): 23–50. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Totalité et infini. La Haye: Nijhoff, 1961. ———. 1995. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. André Orianne. 2nd ed. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. 3rd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1970. Lonergan, Bernard. 1973. Method in Theology. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/ Lonergan Research Institute. Lonergan, Bernard. The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness. In A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrell. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Luke, Timothy W. 1996. Identity, Meaning and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression. In Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris, 109–133. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Macquarrie, John. 1977. Principles of Christian Theology, Rev. ed. London: SCM. 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991a. God without Being. Translated by Thomas A.  Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1982. Rev. ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. ———. 1991b. The Metaphysical Situation of the Discourse on Method. Trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon. In René Descartes: Critical Assessments, ed. G.J.D. Moyal, 28–49. London/ New York: Routledge. ———. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, ed. John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham University Press. L’idole et la distance. Paris: Grasset, 1977. ———. 2002a. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Étant donné. Essai d'une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. ———. 2002b. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. De surcroît: études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. ———. 2002c. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press. Prolégomènes à la charité. 1986. 2nd ed. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1991. ———. 2003. Thomas Aquinas and onto-Theo-Logy. Trans. B Gendreau, R Rethy and M Sweeney. In Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, 38–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2007. On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press. Questions cartésiennes II: Sur l’ego et sur Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). ———. 2008. The Visible and the Revealed. Trans.  Christina M.  Gschwandtner and others. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2012. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Trans. Jeffrey L.  Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Au lieu de soi. L’approche de Saint Augustin, 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008. ———. 2016. Givenness and Revelation. Trans. Stephen Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, David. 2011. Communicating the Word Revelation, Translation, and Interpretation in Christianity and Islam: A Record of the Seventh Building Bridges Seminar Convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rome, May 2008. Ed. David Marshall. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Martis, John. 1996, February. Thomistic Esse  – Idol or Icon? Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being. Pacifica: Journal of the Melbourne College of Divinity 9 (1): 55–68. ———. 2009. The Self Found Elsewhere: Phenomenological Faith Meets Deconstructive Doubt. Pacifica 22: 198–214. McEntee, Rory, and Adam Bucko. 2015. The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living. Maryknoll: Orbis. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2007. The Gift and the Mirror. In Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart, 253–317. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2017. Radical Orthodoxy and Protestantism Today: John Milbank in Conversation. Acta Theologica 37 (Suppl 25): 43–72. Onishi, Bradley B. 2017. The Beginning, Not the End: On Continental Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (1): 1–30. Overgaard, Søren. 2015. How to Do Things with Brackets: The Epochē Explained. Continental Philosophy Review 48 (2): 179–195. Romano, Claude. 2009. Event and World. Trans. Shane Mackinlay. New York: Fordham University Press. L’Événement et le monde, 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. ———. 2013. Event and Time. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press. L’Événement et le monde, 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. ———. 2015. At the Heart of Reason. Trans. Michael B.  Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Au coeur de la raison. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Schrijvers, Joeri. 2015. Introduction. Modern Theology 31 (4): 637–640. Shanley, Brian J. 1996. Saint Thomas, onto-Theology, and Marion. The Thomist 60 (4): 617–625. ———. 1997. Review: Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. By John I.  Jenkins, C.S.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Thomist 63 (1999): 314–19. Steinbock, Anthony. 2007. Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Ed. Merold Westphal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Swinburne, Richard. 2008. Was Jesus God? Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2011. Western Secularity. In Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 35–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas. 2008. The Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Latin-English. Trans. Dominican Fathers of the English Province. Summa Theologiae. Latin-English ed.: NovAntiqua. ———. 2012. Of God and His Creatures, ed. Joseph Rickaby. Lexington: Veritas Splendor Publications.

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Trakakis, N.N. 2015. Why I Am Not Orthodox. ABC Religion and Ethics. Published electronically Updated 9 Dec 2015 (First posted 7 Dec 2015). http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/12/07/4367489.htm. Vatican II Council. 1965. Dei Verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. Verhack, Ignace. 2003. Immanent Transcendence as Way to ‘God’: Between Heidegger and Marion. In Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl, 106–118. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Voas, David, and Mark Chaves. 2016. Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis? American Journal of Sociology 121 (5): 1517–1556. Woodhead, Linda. 2016. The Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority. Journal of the British Academy 4: 245–261. Woodhead, Linda, and Paul Heelas. 2000. Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretative Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 5

Revelation and Kingdom Kevin Hart

Abstract  Aquinas’s introduction of the notion of revelatio in the Summa theologiæ begins to edge out Augustine’s idea of illuminatio. By the late fourteenth century “reuelacion” has entered English. Only beginning with Vatican I is there mention of revelatio, however, and Vatican II offers a different sense of the concept: it is Christ manifesting himself, not the content of Scripture. In effect, theological epistemology has become phenomenology. Jesus’s self-manifestation does not occur within the horizon of the world; rather, it takes place within the horizon of the Kingdom. What is revealed in Jesus’s preaching is the coming of the Kingdom in our exercise, as second nature, of ἀγάπη. This coming is unlike that of stable phenomena: the Kingdom is multi-stable, here yet to come, within yet without, weak yet strong, and so on. Revelation, properly understood after Vatican II, is the uncovering of the Kingdom in all its various facets. Keywords  Revelation and kingdom · Vatican II · Horizon of kingdom · Multi-­ stable phenomena · Self-manifestation of Jesus The word “revelation,” often taken these days to be essential to understanding Christianity as practiced in the West, is in fact a fairly recent addition, as these things go, to the vocabulary of the faith. Augustine writes of illumination, not revelation, and in his hands the concept is sufficiently encompassing to give him a rich theological epistemology, one that allows for fallen humans to require the light of God in order to grasp natural and divine truths.1 Medieval Latin theologians respond 1  See Augustine, Letters 100–155, trans. Roland Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. Boniface Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2003), II/2, letter 120, 10. It should be pointed out, however, that Augustine also held that reason can attain to knowledge given by divine authority, if it is sought within the context of belief. See his On Free Choice of the Will, trans., intro. and notes Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1993), II. 2.

K. Hart (*) The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_5

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intensely to Augustine, clarifying and developing his understanding of how the divine light illumines the soul. To read Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141) is to be reminded how little theological epistemology changed over 700 years, and to read Bonaventure (1221–74) is to see how staunchly the teaching could be defended, even at a late stage.2 Not that thought of light could not also nourish intellectual independence: think also of Robert Grosseteste’s De Luce (1225), which shifts the discussion from epistemology to ontology, proposing that light is a unifying principle of all that is.3 Augustine teaches that our vision has three modes — corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual — and Christian life is finally oriented to seeing the Triune God as illuminated by Jesus as his life and teaching are testified in Scripture. To achieve this vision is difficult; it requires us to cultivate, through Grace, intellectus (what the Greeks called νοῦς), and not to remain at the level of corporeal or even spiritual vision, which yields respectively sententia and scientia but not sapientia.4 We can gain the last only by a conversion of the mind, from the lower function, pars inferior, to the higher function, pars superior, from looking out to looking within, where the Triune God grants us, in no more than a flash, a vision of his wisdom.5 Only in the thirteenth century do we find illuminatio being nudged aside in theology by revelatio, and that is because of a newfound confidence, gained through the reading of Aristotle, that some reliable knowledge can be attained solely through the natural light of reason, while another sort of knowledge, even more trustworthy because it comes to us from God, must be given to us. And only in the late fourteenth century do we find the word reuelacion appearing in English. It is this word we must foreground if we are to understand how we English-speakers think, talk and write about the Christian revelation. How did “reuelacion” get to England, and why in the late fourteenth century? The word appears to come from the Old French revelacïon, and that derivation might incline one to look at vernacular manuals that sprung up before and after Lateran IV (1215). Friar Lauent’s Somme le roi (1279) would be a prime example,

 See Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, The Works of Saint Bonaventure, IV, ed. Zachary Hayes (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1992), q. 4. 3  See Hugh of St Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deffarrari (1951 rpt. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), I. 10. 2, and Robert Grosseteste, On Light, trans. and intro. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942). 4  See Augustine, The Trinity, trans., intro. and notes Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine, I/5 (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 15.10. 5  Augustine discusses the lower and higher functions of reason in the first paragraphs of the twelfth book of The Trinity. What he calls “the loftier reason” [sublimior ratio] is, for him, the imago dei, and it is properly directed to the contemplation of God, The Trinity, XII.2. In the middle ages, the distinction is rephrased as ratio inferior and ratio superior. See Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Ratio superior et inferior: Un cas de philosophie chrétienne,” Laval théologique et philosophique, I: 1 (1945), 119–23. 2

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especially since it was translated twice into Middle English.6 Yet almost all these books, including the Somme, are concerned with moral theology, specifically with penance and confession. One does not find much attention to dogmatic theology, as it came to be called, in any of them.7 We are more likely to find an answer to our question if we turn to John Wycliffe whose translation of the Bible (1382–95) gives us the first English uses of the word. Consider his rendering of Rom. 16: 25, for example: “Forsooth to him, that is mighty to confirm you by my gospel, and preaching of Jesus Christ, after the revelation of mystery [ἀποκάλυψιν μυστηρίου] holden still, that is, not showed, in times everlasting.”8 In treating ἀποκάλυψιν μυστηρίου as he does, he retains the Vulgate’s rendering of the Greek as revelationem mysterii. Tyndale did not follow Wycliffe. His version of Rom. 16: 25 runs as follows: “To him that is of power to stablisshe you accordinge to my gospell and preachinge of Iesus Christ in vtteringe of the mistery [ἀποκάλυψιν μυστηρίου] which was kept secret sence the worlde begane.” Yet the King James edition (1611), which hews so often to Tyndale, reverts to Wycliffe (and his sense of the Vulgate) in this instance: “the revelation of the mystery.” Before the King James edition of Scripture, however, the meaning of “reuelacion” as either the act of supernatural communication or the content of what is communicated (especially the revelations in the last book of the New Testament) was firmly in place. One finds it in Gower’s Confessio amantis (1386–90) and in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1385?).9 Thereafter, it slowly becomes an accepted part of the language of faith in English-language devotion and reflection. As likely an explanation as any for the appearance of “reuelacion” in English is that it comes as a vernacular translation from the Vulgate of Paul’s Greek by way of Old French. Theologically, of course, Thomas Aquinas is the pivot for the shift from illuminatio to revelatio. No sooner than he begins to speak in his own voice in the Summa theologiæ do we find him talking of revelatione divina.10 Yet the statement immediately calls for two caveats. The first is that, when he comes much later in the prima pars to discuss human intelligence, he does so in the context of engaging Augustine’s theological epistemology and hence illuminatio.11 And the second is that his talk of 6  See Édith Brayer et Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie, ed., La Somme le roi par Frère Laurent (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 2008), and Two Middle English Translation of Friar Laurent’s “Somme le roi”: Critical Edition, ed., Emmanuelle Roux (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010). 7  See Leonard E.  Boyle, “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology,” The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 39. 8  Wycliffe also uses “reuelacion” in his translation of Gal. 1: 12. 9  See Wycliffe, The English Bible, Rom. 16: 25, Gower Confessio amantis, 8: 49, and Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 366. Many further references may be found in the Middle English Dictionary. 10  Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 1a. q. 1, responsio. 11  Aquinas begins the Summa theologiæ 1a q. 1 with an extensive use of the word revelatio but not mention of illuminatio. It is only later in the prima pars that he turns to illumination. See Summa theologiæ, Ia q. 85 art. 6 ad. 1.

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revelatio is threefold: Scripture, sacra doctrina, and prophecy. The proper order of these three things is essential to an understanding of how he uses the word. First and foremost, for Thomas it is Scripture that reveals God’s teaching; it supplies the rule of faith.12 The light of natural reason can grasp some things essential to the faith — that there is only one God, for example — but the content of this general revelation, as Thomas calls it, is also given in special revelation (Deut. 6: 4), which also tells us all manner of things that the human mind cannot grasp unaided. Second, and intimately tied to Scripture, is sacra doctrina, which is the content of what God teaches in Scripture as distilled by the Church in its exercise of the magisterium. And third there is prophecy, in which knowledge of future particulars is communicated by angels to persons whom God has disposed by Grace to be appropriate recipients of what is told.13 It is immediately apparent that Thomas’s idea of revelation as divine communication needs to be weighed carefully. Communicare, drawn from communis, has the sense of imparting something to another, and hence has two elements, transmitting and sharing. In English, over the centuries, the former element has come to have the upper hand, so much so that Walter Pater laments that we use the word “communicate” as transmitting without retaining an awareness of rendering common.14 Yet if we return to the sixteenth century, when the Latin sense was closer to the life of the English word, it was the element of commonality that prevailed. To be sure, for Thomas the knowledge of how we may be saved, which God has shared with us, must be imparted to us in the first place. Scripture and sacra doctrina are special revelation: God has disseminated his plan to all the baptized who hear Scripture proclaimed, who hear preaching about it, and who partake in the sacraments, especially holy communion. We need to distinguish this rendering common of truths and realities from the means by which they are imparted. The Holy Spirit inspires chosen individuals and makes them instruments of the divine will, transmitting the holy word in a manner that the person who is the vehicle of that message is free to choose and that reflects his language, time and place. And, as we have seen, angels disclose what will come to pass to individuals whom God designates. In thinking about the distinction, we need to put aside any confusion that might arise from Thomas’s notion of created Grace; it is not something fashioned by God and then transmitted to us but rather a change in our being, an unmerited sanctification, that comes about through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who is uncreated Grace, and by its illumination allows us to participate in the divine life.15 If we look ahead to the first of the three modern ecumenical councils, that of Trent (1545–63), we do not find any use or mention of the word revelatio in the discussion of Scripture, despite the authority that Thomas had for the Fathers of the Council. Instead, the operative terms are “saving truth, and moral discipline” [salutaris veritatis et morum disciplinae], and these things are comprised by “the written  See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, II-II, q. 1 art. 9, ob. 1.  See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, II, q. 172 art 2 responsio. 14  See Walter Pater, “Style,” Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1895), 13. 15  See Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, II-I, q. 110 art. 2. 12 13

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books, and the unwritten traditions” [libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus], those books being the Vulgate and held to have God as their author. Things are different at the next ecumenical council, Vatican I (1870). In the second chapter of Dei Filius the Fathers confirm what was said at Trent while using the very word that had become important to Thomas and adding an adjective to make his meaning abundantly clear: “supernatural revelation” [supernaturalis revelatio] is contained in “the written books and unwritten traditions which have come down to us” [libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus. . . ad nos usque pervenerunt], the written books once again being those in the Vulgate. They are not sacred by virtue of ecclesial authority but, as at Trent, because “they have God for their author” [Deum habent auctorem].16 Tradition, in both councils, is regarded as somewhat static, and in Vatican I revelation is conceived as de facto propositional. Only by assenting to those propositions one can be “a sharer of divine blessings” [ad participanda scilicet bona divina]. A sense of revelation as imparted by God precedes the sense of what is shared by the faithful. In Dei Verbum (1965), the Fathers of Vatican II, the third and most recent ecumenical council in my sequence, shade their understanding of revelation somewhat differently from their predecessors at Vatican I, even though the Fathers of both earlier councils are cited and affirmed. Conciliar rhetoric always tends to suggest agreement and steady development of doctrine, not innovation or sudden change. Dei Filius is quoted in paragraph six: “He chose to share with them those divine treasures [ad participanda scilicet bona divina] which totally transcend the understanding of the human mind.” Yet paragraph seven attends to the important role of “sacred tradition,” the living nature of which becomes a main theme of the constitution, while paragraph twelve indicates a relaxation of emphasis to do with the propositional nature of revelation, presumably brought about by the pressure exerted by the lower and higher criticisms after they were sanctioned in Divino afflante spiritu (1943): “However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us [nobiscum communicare voluerit], should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.” Indeed, “deeds and words” are seen to have “an inner unity” (2), especially in Jesus himself: “Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself [praesentia ac manifestatione]: through His words and deeds” (4). We have passed from revelation as propositional to Christ as revelation. Indeed, the sense of “revelation” in play at Vatican II is self-revelation. Theological currents running from thinkers as diverse as G.  W. F.  Hegel and Karl Barth have finally converged in Rome, of all places. Although those framing Dei Verbum do not use this language, we have quietly slipped from theological epistemology to phenomenology. ∗



 Dei Filius, ch. 2.

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After Vatican II, then, revelation is regarded as a matter of Christ manifesting himself in and through the Father and the Holy Spirit. This manifestation is complete and absolutely singular, yet it has various modes: Christ’s person, his preaching, his presence in the sacraments, the testimony of scripture, and so on. Dei Verbum does not evoke the early ecumenical councils but prefers to speak more generally of the “close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture” (9). In truth, it is a gradual and fraught dialogue that passes through various Christological formulations, “from below” in Paul’s letters and the Synoptic Gospels to “from above” in John. It goes by way of Second Adam, Wisdom or Logos Christology, and negotiates various controversies in the formative centuries before Christ’s identity with God could be maintained without compromising monotheism and before the relations between the human and divine natures of Christ could be properly understood by way of the communicatio idiomatum. We pass from the title “Son of God,” which does not imply divinity, to “God the Son,” which most certainly does.17 We find our way to God the Son by following the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, whose words and deeds have an inner unity just as there is a final unity of the two Christological titles. Continued reflection on these unities allows the Church of Vatican II and beyond to maintain and extend the tradition of sacra doctrina without interruption while also affirming the pre-thetic dimension of revelation. The faith is not to be narrowly conceived as an objectivist exercise of affirming a series of propositions, such as those in a creed or catechism; more fundamentally, it emerges from and is sustained by one’s lived experience of Jesus in Scripture, proclamation, prayer, and sacrament. One cannot dismiss or sideline these propositions, for a good many of them are to be found in Scripture and have been regarded as verbal manifestations of the divine that called for clarification by way of creeds (I John 5: 7, for example). Keeping all this in mind, we might say that it was Karl Rahner whose theology most finely expressed the spirit of Dei Verbum at the time. One finds there a unity of “experience of God,” regarded as non-thematic, and subscription to creed: a unity of what he calls transcendental and categorical revelation.18 If Rahner’s theology has become less and less satisfying in recent decades, it is less to do with Vatican II’s theology than with aspects of his more technical expression of his sense of it. Except for his later, more spiritual writings, it often seems that his theology requires revelation to pass through a prism of philosophy in order to be identified, and that the “supernatural existential” restricts the freedom of human beings and God alike. More particularly, his theology, which begins in a bold reading of Summa theologiæ 1a q. 84 art. 7, allows itself to be guided by questions that belong to a 17  The title “Son of God” is found in both testaments with respect to angels, kings, and other persons favored by God, and does not imply divinity. That the Son is equal to the Father and the Holy Spirit is stated only with the integration of Christology and Trinitarian Theology, and appears in Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 and the Quicunque Vult, which is no earlier than the late fifth century. 18  See Karl Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” Theological Investigations, 18: God and Revelation, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 189–210.

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theological epistemology and to be insufficiently open to thinking the manifestation of Christ in its own terms. To uncover the meaning of that manifestation one must attend to the intentional horizon that establishes itself when one looks to Jesus, a horizon shared by all believers, and that, in our attempts to explicate it, constitutes the life world of Christianity. Let us take these two words, “intentional” and “horizon,” one at a time. To turn one’s attention to Jesus is to want to think of him and perhaps also to want to say something about him; it need not presume faith, not even an act of faith, since it can be a pre-intending, based on what others before me or around me have intended with respect to him. I might have only a signitive intention toward Jesus by virtue of reading about him or looking at an image of him: it will be empty. Yet I might claim to have an intuitive intention of him (as “personal Lord and Savior,” for example), and that state of affairs can be modalized: I might begin to doubt my experience when moving from one church to another or by subjecting my views to biblical or philosophical criticism or by coming to think that my prayers have not been answered. More important than Jesus being regarded as significant by virtue of an intentional relation is the precise way in which he is intended: as desired, as loved, as trusted, as feared, and so on. We may do so with him set in the past (in the Holy Land about 2000 years ago), conceived as present (in κῆρυγμα or sacraments), or understood as eternal (as the exalted Christ at the right hand of the Father). Of course, no one ever has an intentional rapport with Jesus outside a context; he appears, if he does, only within a horizon. There are vast differences between regarding Jesus in the inner horizon of what more I can learn about him through study or prayer and in the outer horizon of how he connects with other persons, “great religious leaders” or important figures in Second Temple Judaism, say. For one thing, only with regard to the former might the horizon be saturated with intuition.19 What if we view Jesus within the horizon of horizons, that is, the world itself? This is certainly possible: in principle, one can do that with any person who has ever lived. Yet Jesus does not appear significant in “the world,” for he made very little impression on it in his day, living as an itinerant rabbi in a far flung province of the Roman Empire, and dying the cruel and ignominious death of a criminal. Still less does Jesus appear if we figure the world in terms of a general thesis, the positing of it as factual or true being.20 Instead, his deeds and words are insistently related to something very different, what he calls “the Kingdom of God” [βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ]. How do we find that Kingdom? Not by neutralizing the general thesis. That operation, commended by Husserl, will reveal to us that the “natural attitude” is an abstraction from our concrete lived experience. And if one is a believer, it may allow Jesus to appear, not merely as one object among others but as an intentional object: desired, loved, worshipped, and so  I allude to Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of “saturated phenomena.” See my edition of his work, The Essential Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 20  See Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosopy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2014), § 30. 19

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on, in the context of prayer, reception of sacraments, or anticipation of the life of the world to come. Even so, he will appear only within the limits of our gaze. I want to suggest that Jesus stands out only when we view him within the horizon of the Kingdom that he preached, which itself can be understood only within the horizon of his Judaism, which includes the enthronement psalms, the Targum of Isaiah, and the title “King of the Jews” [βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων]. It has been figured and refigured in any number of political-religious programs in the Common Era.21 Important as they are, those programs must be bracketed in order for us to see Jesus manifesting himself in his words and deeds in his own day. There is a limit to how much we can say about this Jesus as historical — that is, as coming into focus through the lens of modern historiography, which is wholly contained within the natural attitude  — but there is much more to say about this Jesus as testified by those who followed him before or after his death. Of course, we must go to the oldest stratum of testimony in the New Testament, which I take to be I Cor. 15: 3–5, with a widely accepted date of about 35 CE, 3 or 5 years after the death of Jesus.22 This early creed, which pre-dates Paul’s letters, reads as follows: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [i.e., Peter], then to the twelve” (RSV). Testimony, here, turns on intentional experience of Jesus as messiah — the very concept of “messiah” being revalued by the Easter encounter with Jesus — resulting in the new life one enjoys in and through hope that his resurrection from the dead presages our own resurrection. What is not said here, however, is why Christ was raised from the dead: it was because he was obedient in his preaching of the Kingdom unto death. The resurrection does not only bring Jesus back to life, it also vindicates the preaching of the Kingdom and exalts it as the one “way of life” that pleases God and that leads to salvation. Jesus’s self-­ revelation after death points us to the Father, to be sure, but also to what he preached before his death. We who are still living are to find the Father in and through what was said before the Father raised him on the third day. If we follow this train of thought, we can find another way of thinking the heritage of Vatican II. We can see Jesus enjoining us, by way of parable and deed, to pass from “the world” to that which is anterior to it, “the Kingdom.” We do not render Jesus immanent to our consciousness; instead, we are directed to what which has had a claim on us since before the creation of the world. We can find Jesus of Nazareth in our gaze or our glance; we can even find him as value (as “Christ” or even as “God’s Son”). Yet in doing so we miss his particular mode of self-revelation, and the radical confrontation it imposes. For that, we must find ourselves in his gaze, which comes in hearing his parables and in meditating on his acts.

∗

 See Bruce D. Chilton, ed., The Isaiah Targum, vol. 11 of The Aramaic Bible (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987), 49, 62, 77, 102. 22  See C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 16, and N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 966. 21

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The self-revelation of Jesus is co-ordinate with his claim to bring salvation to those who believe him to be the Christ. This is not self-evident. For Paul Tillich, for instance, thought about salvation triggers the Christ symbol, as he calls it.23 More generally than in Tillich’s theology, this way of thinking, prepared for by Martin Kähler and the tradition that answers to him, of which the name of Rudolf Bultmann can stand as a sign, the Jesus of history is less important than the Christ of faith, and one’s experience of salvation is more telling religiously than the original self-­ revelation of Jesus in the Holy Land and the continuing quest to understand it. The other side of this pietism is perhaps even more familiar. Kant supplies us with a clear example: the salvation that Jesus offers is no more than a regeneration of one’s moral character, brought about through the exercise of practical reason, with Jesus himself being no more than an ideal that God brought into the world to quicken our ethical consciousness.24 This Kingdom is a moral commonwealth. In the former situation, Jesus is taken out of the world; in the latter, he remains only in the world. Yet both views, the primacy of the experience of salvation and the refiguring of salvation in moral terms, are hard to square with the evidence of the Gospels. In Luke 10: 27, for example, a lawyer asks Jesus what he needs to do to gain eternal life. Jesus asks him what Torah says about the matter. The lawyer specifies the mitzvot for attaining this life by combining Deut. 6: 5 and Lev. 19: 18 (and adding one term to them): “You shall love the Lord your God [ἀγαπήσεις κύριον τὸν θεόν] with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (RSV). It is worth noting that the lawyer’s response to Jesus is a reprise of revelation. Now “revelation” for the Jews is gala, which means to uncover or expose, and which, since the LXX, is usually translated into Greek by ἀποκάλυψις. Jewish revelation is an uncovering of commandments, written or unwritten, by a divine person and not of a divine person. Moses may speak with YHWH “mouth to mouth” but is not allowed to see him on pain of death (Num. 12: 8, Exod. 33: 20). Early Hebraic anthropomorphisms of the deity are mostly rejected, one main sign of that exercise being the exclusion of the Book of the Battles of Yahweh from the canon; and the so-called theophanies of the Tanakh are best read either as angelic manifestations or as the Lord God revealing himself in and through an angel who bears his name (e.g., Exod. 23: 21). Christian revelation, as understood since Vatican II, is by contrast the self-manifestation of a person, a Son of God who finally becomes recognized as God’s Son. “He is the image of the invisible God [εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου]” we are told in Col. 1: 15, which was probably written by one of Paul’s followers. Yet this person is no static image; he speaks and acts, the two activities being mutually supporting. Jesus does not speak only of the Kingdom, but all that he says and does

 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Digswell Place: James Nisbet and Co., 1968), II, 174.  See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. with intro. and notes Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, with an essay by John R. Silber (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), III. vii – IV. Part i.

23 24

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contributes to our understanding of it. More, as Origen has ventured, and as Benedict XVI has affirmed, he is αὐτοβασιλεία, himself the Kingdom that he preached.25 We may well doubt that the Kingdom, as Jesus preaches it, is a natural phenomenon as liberal versions of Christianity have often urged it to be. Kant’s doctrine of the Kingdom as established through the performance of rational duty, or Ritschl’s teaching that it is a human work of love, misses something essential.26 It is that the Kingdom must be revealed not merely in order to bring an idea of it, at the right time, into positive history but in order that it be known at all. Torah was given to the Jews, and Jesus brings it to light in his exchange with the lawyer by placing radical love, ἀγάπη, front and center. If we are to grasp what Jesus means by the Kingdom we need to keep four main things in mind: it concerns the Father, the relation of the Father and the Son, our relation with the Father through the Son, and our relations one with another. Let us approach this fourfold understanding of the Kingdom by way of the lawyer’s answer to Jesus. We may inherit eternal life if, first of all, we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Each person is to have a primary relation with God, one that brooks no condition. But what is this God? The lawyer’s answer will not tell us. And we need an answer if we are to love him, especially if we are to love him at the very limit of human love. Jesus commands our attention precisely because he answers that question. He does so in several of his parables. He does not merely call God the father of Israel, as one finds in Hos. 11: 1, for example; rather, he says that God is his father, declaring an intimacy with him. (The expression can be found in Sir. 23: 1, and also in fragment 1 of 4Q372 of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the psalm of Joseph.) The metaphor is taken up extensively in testimonies about Jesus in the New Testament, and it repays great attention, especially when it appears in the words given to him. If we read the central parable in which Jesus speaks of a father (Luke 11: 15–32) with care, we find a structure of double revelation in play: God is like a father, but unlike any father we might have known. The parable calls for infinite meditation in part because we can never terminate the play of “like” and “unlike.” No matter how long that play continues, though, it does so in a situation in which God has become concrete for us: he comes into focus for us, if he ever does, not simply as father but as the father of Jesus. It has been said, principally by those who read Joachim Jeremias a little hastily, that when Jesus calls God Abba, we are to hear a tiny child’s trust of his father.27 This claim cannot withstand much pressure, for the Greek translation used by Mark and Paul alike of the Aramaic is πατήρ, “father,” not παππας, 25  See Origen, Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei, 14.7.10 and 14.7.17, and Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 49. 26  See Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans. Hugh Ross Mackintosh (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1900), § 48. 27  See Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, n. trans. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), § 7. Jeremias distances himself from the claim that in using the intimate word Abba Jesus is adopting a little child’s relationship to his father on p. 67.

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“daddy.”28 The absolutely singular bond between Jesus and God that the Church came to identify over many controversies is to be thought along other lines, specifically by the passage from “Son of God” to “God’s Son” that has already been noted. Certainly the fatherhood affirmed by Jesus is not restricted to his relationship with God, even if it is an absolutely singular relationship. We are to be included as well, each time uniquely, in and through faith in him having that relationship. We can be children of the father as well precisely by following the second part of what the lawyer says: “and [love] your neighbor as yourself.” Let us go back a little and pass more slowly, with theological reflection, over this same terrain in three steps. First, the root idea of the Kingdom is indeed love, though in a very particular sense. It is not ἔρως, for sexual passion can be excited only by very particular people we meet. Nor is it φιλία, for friendship can be shared only with a limited number of souls. Nor is it στοργή, for we cannot love each and every other person as we do our family. Rather, the love is ἀγάπη, which for us, fallen creatures, runs contrary to nature. Certainly we cannot love as God loves, for he is love and for us love is something we do. Yet we see how Jesus loves, because he is human as well as divine, and we can follow his practice. Those who significantly narrow the gap between being and doing with respect to love we call “saints.” With respect to God, the ground of ἀγάπη, for most people, is justice long before it is intimacy; and that gap too is one that can be narrowed for most people only by much prayer and the changes that come with much prayer. With respect to one another, the ground of ἀγάπη, as we see with Jesus, is compassion. Now we may feel compassion for someone we see but we often have to overcome natural self-interest in order to follow through and act on that impulse. This is one reason why we are commanded to love the neighbor. For most of us, only after long practice in following a commandment can love of neighbor become second nature, and that is because the neighbor does not ask for ἔρως, φιλία, or στοργή, and because we are usually not disposed to offer it in any case. Such practice, and only in Grace, enables us to love the neighbor, and even ourselves, in and through God. At heart we approach the imago dei in the other person, not something in his or her appearance or character that we like. Second, the Kingdom appears as a multi-stable phenomenon. It is here yet to come, within yet without, coming in strength while also the smallest of things, visible yet invisible, ordinary yet extraordinary. What is uncovered as anterior to the world cannot be fitted together as something we can master, no matter how much practice we devote to it. The Kingdom can be contemplated, but it never can be contained within us; it remains a challenge to how we live. Our approach to God is infinite, as the Church came to see, first with Gregory of Nyssa and then with many others.29 We are always and already in relation with God because he is our father, but that relationship needs to be acknowledged and then acted upon. This 28 29

 See Mark 14: 36, Rom. 8: 15, and Gal. 4: 6.  See Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, II. 89.

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father does not grow old and pass away, and so our entire lives are to be devoted to him, in a tenderness that can grow and in a spirit of obedience that has no reprieve. The metaphor “father” specifies the nature of the intentional relations we are to have with God while making it plain that the one with whom we are to experience that relationship exceeds any human father in lifespan, patience and love. The transformation of one’s being in that relationship, what Thomas calls “created grace,” is within, but cannot be restricted to an inner life of sanctity. We are commanded to look outside, not just to lovers, friends and family but to the neighbor, the first comer, who has a claim on us irrespective of desire or contract. The Kingdom comes not only with large deeds, which God initites and oversees, but also in a touch, a smile, a word in season, a helping hand. Third, Jesus is the datum and the genitive of revelation. He is the one who uncovers the Kingdom and is himself the Kingdom that he uncovers. While it has been foreshadowed in the history of Israel, and in particular by the prophets, the Kingdom is proclaimed in its fullness only by Jesus. The meaning of Deut. 6: 5 and Lev. 19: 18 is made manifest in a concrete manner; it is not given as a thesis about living naturally in the world (viz. an ethics or a politics) but as an experience of what precedes the world, i.e., how to live in a way that is pleasing to God understood as one’s father. Parables give eidetic insight into how to live in obedience to God and in shalom with one another, but they never stablize into a set of canons as to how one might live. Not even a far larger group of parables would supply us with sufficient profiles of the Kingdom so that we could say we know exactly what it is and all that it asks of us. Jesus points, and if we have eyes to see we will see. What is uncovered in and through those parables, sayings, and acts, is precisely Jesus’s unity with the Kingdom. The love we are to practice with respect to our father and our neighbor is made manifest in how he lives, up to the point of obedience to death, if need be.

∗

Revelation is precisely the uncovering of the Kingdom, as it can be on earth and, more faintly, how it will be in heaven. Jesus’s ministry was to lead us back from “world” to “Kingdom,” a movement that never goes entirely within but that requires us to be in relation with God and with one’s fellow human beings. Far from being a break with or a re-orientation of Torah, Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom is an uncovering of its meaning, one that could be achieved only in and through someone who enjoys an absolutely singular intimacy with God. To preach this Kingdom is to go against the interests of the world, which are always finally self-interests; it is to live in the shadow of the cross. Yet the Father raised Jesus on the third day, and in doing so also raised the preaching of the Kingdom, which had been vilified and terminated as foolish on the cross along with the one who preached it. The resurrection of Jesus is the vindication of the Kingdom, and the first sign of its eschatological significance, which is new life for those who trust in him and what the Father has done for him. The Kingdom begins to be uncovered for us not when Jesus appears in our gaze but when we are constituted, made manifest, in his. Our faith is based not on bringing Christ into the presence of our consciousness but, rather, in trusting that he holds us close to himself.

Chapter 6

“A Whole Habit of Mind”: Revelation and Understanding in the Christology of St. Cyril of Alexandria William C. Hackett

[T]here is much more in [Patristic theology] than a mere question of the meaning of words. It brings us close to a whole habit of mind and thought about the relation of this world and things in this world to the ‘world to come’. –Dom Gregory Dix

Abstract  The most proper intellectual relation to God is personal address, yet theology is required to think and speak God in the third person. How to span that gap between the first person order of revelation and the third person order of hermeneutics? St. Cyril of Alexandria’s path of negotiating this difficulty involves discerning the implications for human rationality of faith’s encounter with Christ, the “Image of the invisible God,” in Scripture and liturgy. Through an examination of his “kenotic” Christology, this article endeavours to understand St. Cyril’s exemplary path of negotiation between hermeneutics and revelation in order to recommend it to contemporary theology. Keywords Revelation · Hermeneutics · Cyril of Alexandria · Eucharistic Christology It is a commonplace, especially in light of Patristic thinking, to say that Christology, in order to be understood, must be experienced. For believers, to whom this commonplace matters, this experience normatively occurs in the liturgical act called “Eucharist.” For them, thinking about God can only be a product of a lived e­ ncounter

For Robert Louis Wilken W. C. Hackett (*) Belmont University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_6

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with God. Theo-logy is rooted in doxa-logy. Bultmann once set this in relief by a famous distinction: though humans may speak by divine authorization—“of/from” God (von Gott), in our necessary theoretical objectifications we inevitably speak beyond our authority—“about/over” God (über Gott).1 In our day of hyper-­ instrumentalized ratiocinations, it is all the more important to recall the particular exigencies of the Christian task of speaking about God. The following essay proposes that this issue has been addressed in ages past. We find help, for example, in the “sacrifice Christology” of St. Cyril of Alexandria. We will proceed in three essential steps, expressed here in the form of theses: 1. For Cyril, theology—the penetration of human intelligence into the disclosure of the divine glory—finds its first condition in a participation in the sacrificial act of divine self-exegesis, which is the liturgy of the Church. 2. Cyril’s Christology is based on a Eucharistic “reduction” that enacts a mode of seeing that focuses by means of two nodes of dense intelligibility, enfleshment and self-emptying. 3. Cyrilline orthodoxy is based on an experiential mode of vision that gives rise to proper theoretical reflection through a kenotic incarnation of reason in the textured opacity of images. Against this background, we will foreground a fourth demonstration: 4. The intellectual practice that corresponds to the sensible manifestation of divine glory in Christ is less one of classical philosophical allegoresis than of using Scriptural images to give flesh to thought. An examination of this exemplary patristic intellectual practice outlines a Christological account of reason, the image of “the Image of the Invisible God” (Col 1.15).2 This paradoxical reason involves a material habituation of intellect that corresponds to the peculiar exigency of theological speech identified by Bultmann. The concrete events of revelation, meditated on in faith, break open finite, world-­ bound rationality from within, drawing it into the divine sphere, not through a flight from this world but rather by immersion in the image. Step (1) In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Cyril raises a profound question about the relation of Eucharistic and ecclesial unity: “We are still seeking to understand how to discover that we also are one, both corporally and spiritually, among ourselves as well as with God… [B]y means of a single body, his own, he blesses those 1  See Rudolph Bultmann, “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden? (1925) in Glauben und Verstehen 1: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1933, 26–37. 2  In the following I make consistent use of two scholarly anthologies with commentary, which form the touchstones of contemporary theological study Cyril’s thought in the English-speaking world: N.  Russell, Cyril of Alexandria. London: Routledge, 2000 and J.  A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010.

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who believe in him thanks to the mystic communion and thus make themselves con-corporal (Eph. 3:6) with him and each other.”3 In the Eucharist, Christians share in the life-giving flesh of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, who joins them to the Father in a liturgical exchange of the heavenly (body/blood) and earthly (bread/wine). As God and mortals are made one, so is the primordial rift of heaven and earth healed and a “New Heavens and New Earth” is inaugurated where the created flesh of the resurrected Christ communicates the divine life. The “mystic communion” communicates to the human community the divine unity by reconciling human persons to the one God through the flesh of Christ. In this context, Cyril’s famous development of the Pauline Adam/Christ typology that forms a major thematic expression of his conception of deifying flesh by henosis is an elaboration of what he sees in the Gospel of John: a paradoxically glorifying kenotic incarnation that reaches its apogee-nadir in the Cross.4 For Cyril, Christ, the Second Adam, is the Great High Priest who offers himself as a spotless sacrifice. The meaning of the Incarnation, he says, is unintelligible apart from the sacrifice of the Cross, the origin of humanity’s great thanksgiving (eucharistia) to God on the altar of the world. Commentator L. Welch observes that for Cyril “the sacrifice offered by the second Adam is the apex of the kenosis and hence the high point of the Incarnation.”5 He suggests that the most important passage of the entire commentary is that pertaining to John 19.30 (“When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said ‘It is finished’, and he bowed his head, giving up the spirit.”). Here Cyril explains that the depths of the divine mysteries are fully revealed only at Christ’s death. This passage makes clear that this sacrifice, eucharistically experienced, is the key to Cyril’s mode of approach to the interpretation of Scripture. The events of sacred history, culminating in the full revelation of God’s love unto death on the Cross, manifest the ultimate exegesis of who God is, as in Ex. 3:23: “I am/will be who I am/will be”: “I will show you who I am.”6 For the bishop of Alexandria, the divine self-showing in sacred history is brought to culmination in the Church’s “unbloody worship,” sharing in the “life-giving blessings” of Christ’s sacrificial flesh.7 Let us confirm with Welch Cyril’s concrete theological starting point: the believer’s liturgical participation in the glorifying kenosis of the divine Son into a historical death culminating in the resurrection of his flesh. Divine kenosis is the condition for human henosis. This starting point requires an articulation of the Incarnation in 3  Commentary on John 11.11, Patrologia Graeca (PG) 73, 556D-557D.  See M.-O.  Boulnois, “L’Eucharistie, mystère d’union chez Cyrille d’Alexandrie”, Revue des Sciences Religieuses 74 (2000), 148. 4  PG 75, 1273B, 1325C-1328B. See also On the Unity of Christ, trans. John McGuckin. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 64, 105–6. 5  L. Welch, Christology and Eucharist in the Early Thought of Cyril of Alexandria. NY: International Scholars Press, 1993, 18. 6  See Bernard Meunier, Le Christ de Cyrille d’Alexandrie: L’humanité, le salut et la question monophysite. Paris: Beauchesne, 1997, part 1 (“Les deux Adam”), 27–100. 7  Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, PG 77, 113D (McGuckin, 270).

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which the eternal Logos unites with flesh in order to restore all people to unity with each other and with God.8 The fruit of this soteriological starting-point in a community of bodies ripens into theological expression in Cyril’s famous phrase, “one incarnate nature of God the Word.”9 Any deviation from this simple conviction puts salvation, an act of divinizing henosis, in jeopardy. Step (2) N.  Russell observes that “enfleshment and kenosis are fundamental concepts underlying Cyril’s Christology.”10 We have seen above that theosis and henosis ought truly to be added to this list—soteriological and sacramental terms that are intrinsic to his account of Christ. Divinizing henosis through enfleshing kenosis would be the appropriate phrase. If the flesh is, indeed, the “hinge of salvation,”11 it is also the hinge of theological reason. We must try to make this clear. The eleventh of Cyril’s twelve anathemas against Nestorius demonstrates his conviction that a rational division of the natures results in the separation of Christ’s flesh from the life-giving divinity: If anyone does not confess that the Lord’s flesh is life-giving and the very-own flesh of the Word of God the Father, but says it is the flesh of someone else, different from him, and joined to him in terms of dignity, or indeed only having a divine indwelling, rather than being life-giving, as we have said, because it has become the personal flesh of the Word who has the power to bring all things to life, let him be anathema.12

For the flesh to be “life-giving” it must simply be the flesh of one divine Person who is “given in a material fashion.”13 Otherwise the Eucharist is non-salvific for it is communion with a mere human nature. Hence the question of the body of Christ in the Eucharist becomes central to understanding Cyril’s theoretical Christology. Crucially, Cyril grounds this conception of incarnate mediation of divinity in biblical terms, the “high priestly” activity of Christ, in which the unity of his humanity with the divinity in his one Person makes his sacrifice acceptable to the Father. As Cyril expresses it, investing reason with Scriptural images: Christ is “vested in the robes of divinity as God and offering priestly service as man.”14 Believers’ understanding of both the “unfathomable” unity of Christ and the communicatio idiomatum flow directly from this Eucharistic “reduction” (to use an apt term from a contemporary philosophical lexicon) of their thetic comprehension  PG 77, 113B (Ibid. 36).  Emphasis mine. This slogan, ultimately originated in the writings of Apollinaris. Cyril, in his day, wrongly understood it to be from Athanasius. 10  N. Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 41. Cf. Jo 1.14 and Phil 2.6-11, respectively. 11  Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis 8.2 (PL 2, 852). 12  The Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, PG 77, 121D (McGuckin, 275). Emphasis mine. 13  McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 187. 14  On the True Faith, to the Princesses Pulcheria and Eudokia, 28, PG 76, 1369 B-C(see also E. Pusey, Works of S. Cyril, 7 vols. Oxford: 1868, 7.313). See Brian E. Daley, S.J. “‘One Thing and Another’: The Persons in God and the Person of Christ in Patristic Theology” Pro Ecclesia 15.1, 41 and Boulnois, “L’Eucharistie, mystère d’union chez Cyrille d’Alexandrie,” 160. 8 9

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of the kenotic enfleshment of God. Reflecting on Cyril’s first substantial response to Nestorius, De Recta Fide, in which he explicitly connects the Incarnation with the Eucharist, A. McGuckin comments: “[The book’s] two great consecutive ideas are firstly that if it is not God who personally effects our salvation as the subject of the incarnation then salvation is rendered ineffectual and the whole point of Christianity is lost; and secondly that a double-subject Christology which divorces the man from the God in Christ makes void the church’s hope and experience of redemption in and through the Eucharist, since the Eucharist is a life-giving sacrament precisely because it is the very flesh of God himself.”15 These two points, a soteriological, kenotic Christology and a Eucharistic extension of the Incarnation-sacrifice of God, are inseparable for Cyril.16 The inscrutability of the henosis is a sign of its divine provenance. This union is, first, participated in through a Eucharistic communion and, second, witnessed to in theological speech.17 Faith therefore has the character of a kind of vision that must mature from an experiential encounter with the ineffable on the human plane of materiality into fitting theoretical expression. But how? Step (3) A Eucharistic or sacrifice Christology is the condition for Cyril’s key distinction between, on the one hand, the perception of Christ in faith, in which Christ is irreducibly “one incarnate nature after the union,” and, on the other, theoretical abstraction, a recognition of two natures, which, however true (as in the Antiochene language of “association” to describe the relation), is merely the finite mind’s attempt to reach the dazzlingly marvelous divinizing union of God and man in the flesh of Christ.18 It is at least as early as 420, a number of years before the Nestorian controversy, that Cyril makes the distinction. In his paschal homily for that year, Cyril already rails against those who divide the natures of Christ.19 He says that it is monais tais ennoiais, “only in the mind,” that we can consider the natures divided. The mere mind cannot ‘grasp’ God, much less the Word made flesh. For this the mediation of a material body is needed.  McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 39.  See Ezra Gebremedhin, Life-Giving Blessing: Inquiry into the Eucharistic Doctrine of Cyril of Alexandria. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1977; Meunier, Le Christ de Cyrille d’Alexandrie, 179–94. 17  Cf. his third letter to Nestorius, paragraph 7, PG 77, 121A, quoted in McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, 270. 18  See André de Halleux, “La distinction des natures du Christ ‘par la seule pensée’ au cinquième concile œcuménique”, Mélanges D. Staniloae, Sibiu, 1993, 311–319, and “Le dyophysisme christologique de Cyrille d’Alexandrie”, Logos. Festschrift für Luise Abramowski, Berlin 1993, 411–428. 19  Sources Chrétiennes vol. 392 (PG 77, 568-72); St. Cyril of Alexandria, Festal Letters 1-12, ed. John J. O’Keefe. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, 137–53. St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, 2 vols., ed. Joel Elowsky. Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013, vol. 1, 1.9, 96a, 4-74, Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 106, and Boulnois, “L’Eucharistie, mystère d’union chez Cyrille d’Alexandrie,” 166–7. 15 16

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Appealing to John 1 (“the Word was made flesh”), Cyril demands that Christians believe that the Logos, in the act of incarnation, truly made human flesh his own. Most importantly, as a divine act, the manner of the union is wholly beyond conceiving, only perceptible in the phenomenology of faith that we named above. Any rational division of two natures is only an epistemological abstraction from the concrete encounter with the incarnate Logos. The acknowledgement of the diversity of natures, if made the starting point in Christology, veils the Eucharistic (kenotic-­ henotic) truth of the Incarnation. In other words, it is a step away from the living, present and saving Christ, a rationalizing attempt to grasp the divinity, to circumscribe God by human power and finally, therefore, a sort of demonic parody of the incarnation in which—as performed in the Eucharist—God paradoxically makes himself graspable (to the body), though in a wholly ungraspable way (to the mind).20 Cyril’s thinking seems acutely redolent of Tertullian’s famous claim that the irreducibility to human cogitation of the divine assumption of flesh is a sign of its divine truthfulness.21 The vision afforded by this perspective makes further sense of Cyril’s constant and seemingly anachronistic attribution of Arianism to Nestorius. The latter de facto makes the same religious error as Arius did previously by not allowing the concrete events of revelation to break open human rationality from within. What we can see in Cyril (which reverberates throughout the Patristic tradition) is the new intellectual horizon opened by divine revelation. It transforms human reason from within, not by means of abstract speculation in a dizzying ascent to a divine stripped of any signification, but rather by kenotic immersion in the symbols of Scripture, an intellectual imitatio Christi.22 The Eucharistic reduction of visible material elements to invisible divine flesh imparts new vision. As we will now examine more carefully, the images of Scripture impart new speech to a tongue otherwise mute with religious awe at the mystery of this union. Step (4) Cyril’s Christology attests powerfully to an evidently crucial dimension of Patristic exegetical practice with nominal similarity to pagan philosophical methods of interpretation: Christian allegoresis, the interpretation of the Hebrew text through the principle of Christ, is only an upshot of a more primary operation of using the text to interpret the lived encounter with Christ in ecclesial existence. We will see this through three controlling images that govern Cyril’s “sacrifice hermeneutic.” The image of the soul and body often follows Cyril’s discussion of the unity of Christ with the Eucharistic elements, as well as that of the intrinsic unity of the two

 The same phenomenological distinction is made again in the First and Second Letters to Succensus, bishop of Dioceasarea, written after the Formula of Reunion, as well as in the Letter to Eulogius. 21  De Carne Christi V.4. 22  This may be considered a principle in the Pseudo-Dionysius as well. See Daniel Cohen, Formes théologique et symbolisme sacré chez (Pseudo-)Denys l’Aréopagite. Brussels: Ousia, 2010. 20

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natures in Christ.23 When we perceive a man we see before us one living creature: we do not see a being in two parts, body and soul; this division is a product of rational abstraction. The same is true with Christ: when believers read about his crucifixion in the Gospel, they see there, on the cross, God in the flesh; and when they taste the bread and wine, they unite with the same incarnate Son. This common philosophical image, in Cyril’s case, can be traced back to Plotinus, although it was virtually ubiquitous in antiquity to describe the relation between the divine and material elements of the cosmos.24 For Plotinus the “undescended” soul cannot share in the sufferings of the body, although it perceives the sufferings of the body; hence it suffers in an unsuffering way: it is apathe pathe. Cyril’s application of this philosophical image to Christ pushes it to the breaking point: the “suffering unsufferingly” of the divine Word is the suffering of God in the flesh. No abstraction will reach the truth: neither, on the one hand, the truth that divinity is impassible, nor, on the other hand, the truth that the flesh that suffered is the fully human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, the revealed truth terminates conceptually in an antinomy. In the words of the (Cyrilline) fifth ecumenical council: “One of the Trinity has suffered for us” in his flesh.25 Cyril transforms other images as well.26 The image of the iron and fire, for example, can be traced back to the Stoics and enters the Christian tradition through Origen. Cyril makes it central, as Apollinaris before him.27 In his treatise On the Unity of Christ, Cyril begins with a programmatic philosophical statement on the priority of “feeble images” over mental cerebrations to signify divine things: He suffers in his own flesh, and not in the nature of the Godhead. The method of these things is altogether ineffable, and there is no mind that can attain to such subtle and transcendent ideas. … The force of any comparison falters and here falls short of the truth, although I can bring to mind a feeble image of this reality which might lead us from something tangible, as it were, to the very heights and to what is beyond speech.

Confronted by this utterly new datum, conceptual reason becomes wholly inept to its usual task and must give way to the newly discovered power of images, which are found to contain a metaphysical density that the abstractive process of  Both his third letter to Nestorius, 7-9 and his Scholia on the Incarnation, 8 draw the Eucharistic unity and the incarnational unity together vis-à-vis this image. See M.-O. Boulnois, “Le modèle de l’union de l’âme et du corps dans les débats christologiques: les débuts de la controverse nestorienne,” Annuaire. Résumé des conférences et travaux, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, tome 117 (2008–2009), EPHE 2010, 205–215; and “Le modèle de l’union de l’âme et du corps dans la controverse nestorienne sur l’union des deux natures dans le Christ,” Annuaire. Résumé des conférences et travaux, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, tome 118 (2009–2010), EPHE 2011, 157–175. 24  Plotinus, Enneads 3.6.1-4. 25  Canon 10 of Constantinople II (553). 26  See Steven McKinion, Words, Imagery and the Mystery of Christ: A Reconstruction of Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology, Brill, Boston, 2000. 27  For Apollinaris’ use, cf. fr. 128 (H. Leitzmann, ed. Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule. Texte und Untersuchungen, 1904); for Cyril’s cf. his Commentary on Luke, 22 (PG 72, 909 B), 130-1. 23

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c­ onceptualization, in its pursuit of transcendent mastery of its object, loses. Cyril re-centers his discussion of divine impassibility by introducing the image that promises to remain where conceptual reason collapses into contradiction: It is like iron, or other such material, when it is put in contact with a raging fire. It receives the fire into itself, and when it is in the very heart of the fire, if someone should beat it, then the material itself takes the battering but the nature of the fire is in no way injured by the one who strikes.

The image helps us understand the paradox that God suffers unsufferingly—like the fire in red-hot iron struck by the blacksmith’s hammer. “This is how you should understand,” Cyril continues, the way in which the Son is said both to suffer in the flesh and not to suffer in the Godhead. Although, as I have said, the force of any comparison is feeble, this brings us somewhere near the truth if we have not deliberately chosen to disbelieve the holy scriptures.28

Reason may explicate the image, but it can never surpass its power to carry the mind to the truth of revelation. The revelation of impossibility, that of the incarnate God who remains God, of the God who suffers without suffering, of the God whose flesh becomes bread on the altar, reveals conceptual reason’s profound weakness. Reason cannot grasp what the image manifests. Conceptual reason may be expanded by tarrying with God in a kenotic descent that forges a new union with material images in order to bring the mind into the dazzling regions “somewhere near the truth.” And yet it never outstrips the image. Just as God is made visible, tangible, in the flesh of Christ, so also does the image contain the uncontainable fullness of the truth. The exercise of Christian intelligence on revelation, what we may call sacred hermeneutics, must shatter on the shores of the image. In this rationality recognizes both its finitude and the wonder of God’s acts. Cyril’s preferred image, even more than the iron and fire, is that of the coal and fire, which is derived directly from his exegesis of Isaiah 6.6-7. In the second part of Against Nestorius, Cyril uses this image “to discern the mystery” of the union, an intellectual task sanctified by the kenotic submission of reason to the priority of images, in imitation of the divinity’s kenotic submission to the flesh. The work of theology, as far as Cyril is concerned, is precisely this practice of clothing reason in the garment of Scripture in order to approach the region of divine truth. In the famous commissioning scene from the opening section of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the prophet has a theophanic vision of God on his heavenly throne: In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple (v. 1)…. I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips; and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (v. 5)!

In response to Isaiah’s lament at his own destruction upon seeing Uncreated Life, a seraph took “a coal that was burning” from the altar in heaven and touched it to the prophet’s mouth, declaring that now his sins were forgiven. For Cyril this coal set 28

 On the Unity of Christ, 130-1 (PG 75, 1357C). Emphasis added.

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within the human mouth that makes it pure is Christ himself: “He is compared to a coal because he is conceived as being from two things which are unlike each other and yet by a real combination are all but bound together in unity. For when fire has entered wood, it transforms it by some means into its own glory and power, while remaining what it was.”29 The fire engrosses and transforms the coal completely without changing itself at all. The coal is consumed by an unchanging living fire, incorporating its properties, and thereby comes to realize its very coal-nature, which only its union with the fire can bring about. Just like the heat-emitting coal, the flesh of Christ communicates the divine life-giving energies. The image of course is Eucharistic: the symbols of bread and wine, under liturgical conditions, are engulfed by their new signification of the Body and Blood of God. Cyril also expounded this image in his earlier Commentary on Isaiah: “Now the coal is by nature wood, only it is entirely filled with fire and acquires its power and energy.”30 Here Cyril adds that the relation between the coal and fire is fitting since the miracles in the Gospel demonstrate that Christ “has energies most appropriate to God operating through his own flesh.” Just as the coal has taken on the properties of the fire, and so can communicate the purifying properties of the fire to the prophet, so also the flesh of Christ has received the capacity to communicate the life-giving powers of the divine nature. Just as in the modality of image does the divine truth paradigmatically reach our understanding, so also do life-giving powers of the divinized humanity of God reach us in our humanity. In Isaiah’s hekhalot theophany the angel touched the coal to the prophet’s lips. Cyril’s Christian interpretation asks in response: “Then how will he touch our lips?” He answers: “When we acknowledge belief in him.”31 Or, as he puts it in Against Nestorius, quoted above, when we “choose not to disbelieve the Scriptures,” allowing, instead, their images to clothe our naked reason.32 The coal touched to the prophet’s mouth foreshadows the life-giving flesh of Christ, and thereby becomes the divinely given words in which to enrobe the human reason that seeks to peer through the kenotic sacrifice upon the majesty of God whose robe of glory fills the heavens.

∗

The kenotic henosis of the divine Word with flesh reverses the relation of flesh to the source of life: naturally and normally, flesh is made alive by being ensouled through the breath of God. And consequently the flesh could be conceived merely  Against Nestorius, II.33, PG 76, 61B (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, p. 143). For a discussion see McKinion, Words, Imagery and the Mystery of Christ, p. 207. 30  Commentary on Isaiah, 1.4, PG 70181 C (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, p. 77). Commentary on Isaiah vol. 1, trans. Robert Charles Hill. Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2008, 25–6. 31  Commentary on Isaiah, 1.4 (PG 70181 D); Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, p. 77. Cf. the Commentary on the Gospel of John, I. 14 (PG 73, 160 C). 32  Cyril develops this image further in his Scholia on the Incarnation (McGuckin, 301-2) and in On the Unity of Christ, pp. 130–1, 132–3; Sources Chrétiennes 97, ed. M. Durand. Paris: 1964. 29

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as a medium, an instrument of spiritual communication even to be discarded, instead of, for Cyril’s Christian intelligence, a primary site of union. In Christ it is the flesh that gives life to the communicant’s soul, for it takes on the properties of divinity for the sake of humanity. This Christological principle is the key to understanding the cosmic sacramentality of orthodoxy after Cyril. The kenotic henosis also reverses the normal ascent of reason “from better known to lesser known,”33 from particular to universal, stretching reason precisely through a self-emptying kenosis in the image. The Eucharistic “conversion of the gaze” that allows reason to approach the mystery of God’s ineffable union with believers, in their humanity, is a way of seeing that anticipates the vision of the Last Day when the material world of flesh will no longer veil the invisible God, but like the coal, alive with fire, is replete with divine doxa. What M.-O.  Boulnois has said, therefore, about Cyril’s Trinitarian theology applies to his sacrifice Christology: “More fundamentally, it is often found that he prefers the universe of images, always open to multiple significations, to that of the concept, which encloses reflection in a definition.” She continues: “Very often therefore words with image-value replace more abstract concepts, even outside any metaphorical context. The image is no longer then only the rhetorical form making possible the establishment of a comparison with a second term but instead becomes the substitute for a concept.”34 It is as if, under the supreme intellectual pressure of revelation, Cyril must find another solution to the paradox of scientific knowledge than the one proposed by Aristotle: what is clear and primary in itself is posterior and lesser known to us (the ineffable union of God with humanity) while what is lesser known and posterior in itself is prior and more clear to us (our worldly rationality, joined to material experience, incompetent to penetrate the mystery of the union). To reach the better known in itself from the vantage of the better known to us, Cyril follows the direction that divine revelation has indicated, in a glorifying kenosis of reason that receives eyes from tasting the Eucharistic sacrifice and a tongue from seeing the images of Scripture as divine words. In this synesthetic participation of the whole person in the living revelation of Christ are found the principles of the hermeneutics of Christian intelligence. ∗



To summarize what we have said in a phrase, Cyril’s fundamental distinction between abstract and concrete intellective visions deriving from out of his debate with Nestorius responds (as it were) to Bultmann’s acknowledgment of the crucial ambiguity found in thinking “about” God with which we began. If the work of the logos, theoretical conceptualization, is to trade in concepts, this profession nevertheless requires the skill or habit of ceaselessly returning our conceptuality to that religious origin from which it springs, which is the revolving hermeneutic between Scripture and Eucharist that is the restless site of faith’s encounter with Christ. 33 34

 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I 71b33-72a5.  Boulnois, La Paradoxe Trinitaire, 114.

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To conclude, there is a biblical background complementary to this intellectual procedure of Cyril in St. Paul’s concept of logike latreia, “rational worship.” The logike latreia of Ro 12.1 is tied to the doxology that concludes the previous chapter, 11.33-36, in praise of the sophias kai gnoseos theou, “wisdom and knowledge of God.” What ties this “rational worship” to the doxology of divine wisdom is paradoxical: the “offering” of the believer’s “body” as a “living, holy and well-pleasing sacrifice” to God (12.1). The Eucharistic overtones are hard to miss. It forms the liturgical milieu of intellectual service to the divine mystery. As a whole, this intellectual service of the logos that begins and ends in doxology takes a kenotic form for St. Paul as the famous hymn of Philippians 2.5-11 suggests. “Let the same [habit of] mind (phroneistho) be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God (en morphe theou), did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself (heauton ekenosen morphen), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness…35

St. Paul also speaks of “the mind of Christ” (noen christou) elsewhere (1 Cor 2:16) as a habit of thinking correlated to true “wisdom” (sophia: possessed by God alone, and those to whom God discloses it), the principle of which is the capacity to discern the final unveiling (apocalypsis) of the Creator’s will in the paradoxical glorification of the Messiah in the crucifixion (v. 7-8). Cyril’s hermeneutic of revelation picks up here, so to speak, attempting to define the paradoxical contours of Christian intelligence. Readers of the entire hymn know that the katabasis of the divine Word, which goes all the way through death, is revealed, by means of an unforeseeable act of salvation from the invisible Father, to be the initial disclosure of a continuous, deepening expression of a glorifying anabasis that manifests what St. Paul calls elsewhere “the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus” (2 Cor 4.6). The “habit of mind” orienting a total human disposition—expressed in the verbal phroneistho—is tied to the revelation of divine glory: it is a way of thinking that perceives the disclosure of divine glory (kabod/doxa) in the evacuated (or kenotic) form of the Cross and which thinks from it, and in thinking from it, “sees” within and through it, passing, as he says elsewhere, “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3.18): “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror are being transformed into the same image…” (2 Cor 3.18). Here St. Paul is speaking of the discernment of the glory of God manifest in Jesus Christ through the proleptic witness of the Pentateuch, which involves a transforming vision of the principally, though hidden, Christological form of the Scriptures. This glorification through the image reflected in the mirror of Scripture involves a redemption of the mind (see vv. 14-15). The Cyrilline hermeneutics of the image we have examined above may be understood as an explication of this principle. Paul, we could say, is sketching a

 2.5-7, NRSV.

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philosophical program for attaining the wisdom of God—which, if he had used the word, he would perhaps have called “theology.”36 A full elaboration would include 1 Cor 1-3 (on the wisdom of God in the foolishness of the Cross coincident with the foolishness of man), 2 Cor 10.3-4 (on waging intellectual warfare), as well as the prologues of Ephesians and Colossians (exemplifying an orthodox gnosis). This Pauline porch opens onto the wide panorama of what has been called the “philosophy of the Church Fathers,”37 of which the thought of Cyril of Alexandria is a particular case. I will give the last word to a complementary witness to the same “kenotic” conversion of rational praise from the Latin tradition. I am thinking of St. Augustine from the end of his treatise On the Trinity. The theory should be familiar, but what does the North African philosopher leave us to contemplate? “This trinity of the mind,” he says, “is not really the image of God because the mind remembers and understands and loves itself, but because it is also able to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made. And when it does this it becomes wise. … To put it in a word, let it worship the uncreated God. It is after all written, Behold the worship of God is wisdom (Jb 28.28). … For this is called man’s wisdom in such a way that it is also God’s. Only then is it true wisdom; if it is merely human it is hollow.”38 In a similar vein Pseudo-Dionysius said that those who do not understand the Scriptures “do not understand our way of doing philosophy.”39 For his part, Cyril says: “when people have come to believe, the power of learning naturally follows.”40 The kenotic doxa-logical turn of “theo-logy” designates the aftermath of a bomb placed within history by the hands of a man come from the eschatological beyond (cf. Jn 3.13). Like a Trojan horse the Image that visibilizes the invisible Father destructs from within the human search for wisdom. Its blueprint for the reconstruction involves a long-term project. Its instrument: a reason informed by revelation for which image englobes concept and flesh communicates the life of God. The aim of this imperial conquest of earth by heaven is just as radical: to make some poor thinking-flesh on the far material fringe of the spiritual cosmos fit for the doxa of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come—things into which “angels long to look” (1 Pet 1.12).

 On the term “theology” to name the new Pauline priority granted intellectual reflection on the disclosure (apocalypsis) of divine wisdom in the Cross in service to the ekklesia, see the argument undergirding N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2 vols.). NY: Fortress Press, 2013. 37  See H. Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. 38  On the Trinity XIV.4.15, PG 76, 61B. 39  On Divine Names 640A, PG 73, 576D. 40  Commentary on John, 4.2, 360d (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 114). 36

Part III

Transforming Ways of Being in the World

Chapter 7

Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love Werner G. Jeanrond

Abstract  In this essay, I reflect on the hermeneutical predicament of all references to revelation. Any adequate treatment of revelation must attend to the necessary linguistic/symbolic mediation of religious experience in general and of transcendence in particular. Hence, in a first move, I reflect on different hermeneutical options and on the overall significance of hermeneutics for theological thinking. In a second move, I discuss the challenge of a hermeneutics of love capable to treat not only of difference but also of radical difference. In a third and final move, I offer some conclusions for Christian praxis and theology faced with the challenges of both globalisation and religious pluralism. Keywords  Revelation · Hermeneutics of love · Religious experience · Symbolic mediation

7.1  Human Communication and Hermeneutics The belief that God has revealed God-self in our human world links the event of God’s self-disclosure firmly to the conditions of human understanding and communication. Human insight into divine revelation is at once limited by language and made possible thanks to language, our Logos. There is no way for us on this side of death to bypass our hermeneutical predicament. Every effort to understand God and God’s self-communication in history leads us to consider our hermeneutical possibilities and limitations. Already the admission that we need hermeneutics in certain situations points to the fact that understanding is not always the self-evident outcome of human interaction. Understanding does not always happen automatically. Rather human communication

W. G. Jeanrond (*) Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_7

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occurs on different levels of complexity: While an instruction of how to use an appliance or a life jacket intends to reduce communicative complexities as far as possible, a poem requires a higher level of semantic complexity in order to generate a certain density of expression. Depending on circumstances, communication makes use of different levels of density and linguistic conventions, which together are able to steer the reception of what is to be communicated.1 It is the understanding self, the subject, which invests her subjectivity into the communicative process and thus first initiates this process. In certain communicative situations, therefore, subjectivity and objectivity ought to be as congruent as possible, while in other language games successful communication may result from a dynamic tension between subject and object. The crucial question is how much subjectivity is needed in a specific communicative situation in order to strive for and, in the best scenario, to reach some measure of objectivity in the act of communication. Similarly, with regard to divine revelation in history we must ask how much human subjectivity needs to be invested in order to grasp aspects of God’s self-disclosure. The insight into the role of human subjectivity in hermeneutics has nothing to do with the issue of relativism. A phenomenology of understanding inevitably leads to an appreciation of the necessity of subjectivity in the act of understanding. How that which is understood might then become effective and how it might be assessed is a different matter. That our subjectivity allows understanding to emerge is a fact. How that which is understood is to be dealt with depends on our particular capacity for discernment. Once the foundations of the communicative process are disclosed, this discernment can be examined in detail. In this article I wish to explore, first, the conditions of theological understanding and revelation in some detail. Which linguistic processes are conditioning theological hermeneutics and which measure of subjective involvement do they call for? Second, inspired by Paul Ricœur’s approach to the concept of revelation, I shall reflect on the nature of human participation in the manifestation of divine revelation. Third, I shall contrast two prominent paradigms of theological hermeneutics that originally emerged from the Yale and Chicago schools of theology. Finally, I shall examine the potential of a hermeneutics of love for dealing with the challenge of otherness and radical otherness.

7.2  Hermeneutics and Revelation: The Challenge of Language It would be misleading simply to speak of the theological hermeneutics. Rather the point is to establish more precisely which kind of hermeneutics may be needed in theology. Discussing different theological methods helps us to appreciate the sig1  I gratefully acknowledge the editors’ permission to make use here of some parts of Jeanrond 2014.

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nificance given to hermeneutics in particular theologies. The crucial question is this: does theology call either for a special theological hermeneutics or for a general (philosophical) hermeneutics? Karl Barth and his numerous followers have been eager to subordinate hermeneutical considerations to a well-defined understanding of divine revelation in Scripture. They have known the content of revelation already before the very process of communicating with biblical texts has started, even though it is this very process that first enables understanding of revelation through the interpretation of biblical texts. We believe in and with the Church that Holy Scripture as the original and legitimate witness of divine revelation is itself the Word of God. (Barth 1956, p. 502)

This creed must precede theological exegesis and reflection. Hence, Barth could say that theology is always “under” the Bible. When the Scriptures become for us the Word of God, divine revelation, then this is itself a miraculous event of God’s freedom. It can only be accepted in faith (cf., Barth 1956, p. 506). Outside this faith and the Word which has called for faith there is no firm ground. The Bible itself is and remains a human book and as such it is fallible, yet it is a book which witnesses to God’s transcending Word. The presence of the Word of God transforms the reality of the book, but this transformation does not mean that it is by the power of the book that revelation actually happens. The authority of the Bible is grounded in the fact that this revelation can happen, but the event of revelation is God’s free activity and not the Bible’s. Barth supported this insight with his doctrine of the Holy Spirit: “the witness of Holy Scripture is therefore the witness of the Holy Spirit” (Barth 1956, p. 538). The only appropriate response to the event of revelation is obedience (Barth 1956, p. 543), and the church as the community under the Word of God must therefore be a church of obedience (Barth 1956, p. 575f.). Ultimately, for Barth, God must remain the subject who interprets us. As God speaks in history, God interprets history. According to this order, the human activity called for here is not an appropriation of the Word of God, but a way of corresponding best to it while submitting to being interpreted by the Word of God. Thus, “revelation is not a predicate of history, but history is a predicate of revelation” (Barth 1956, p. 58). In other words, for Barth and like-minded theologians human subjectivity in the process of understanding is subordinated to assumed objective revelatory facts. Here we can identify a kind of hermeneutics of revelation, which attempts to undercut the essential linguisticality of theological communication. Thus, in the beginning is no longer any expression of logos, language, but a manifestation of revelation which is independent of the actual word and which always already has predetermined any future understanding of the word (cf., Jeanrond 1994, pp. 130–32). Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœur, Claude Geffré, David Tracy, Edward Schillebeeckx and other theologians and philosophers have defended the insight into the essential linguisticality of all human text-understanding. In Gadamer’s words: “Being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1989, p. 474). The resulting hermeneutics may be called a hermeneutics of signification. In this hermeneutics, the linguistic signs and symbols first

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of all mediate an access to the meaning of texts  – oral and written. We humans communicate through linguistic forms, i.e. through texts. There is no text-free access to any sort of revelatory knowledge. Hence, we must reflect on how this ­communication through texts happens in detail (cf., for example, Jeanrond 2005 and Jeanrond 1994). Which are its possibilities, limitations and specific problems? Thus, theology must choose: does it wish to engage in a hermeneutics obedient to its own theological premises, i.e. a theological hermeneutics? Or does it wish to participate in the search for appropriate hermeneutical insights in co-operation with all other disciplines thus engaged and to develop a fuller consciousness of its own fundamental hermeneutical constitution? Answering this question of the relationship between theology and hermeneutics confronts us immediately also with the anthropological presuppositions of theology. Whereas a theological hermeneutics mistrusts human communication and wishes to attend directly and obediently to divine communication, somehow bypassing human communication and mediation, a theology facing up to its hermeneutical condition will be interested in divine communication as it happens through the active participation of human beings. Both types of theology affirm transcendence and appreciate the possibility and freedom of divine revelation, yet they conceptualise them in different ways, and that, obviously, has important consequences for theological thinking. Of course, in spite of Karl Barth’s in my eyes somewhat uncritical theological hermeneutics, I take his protest against the claims of a purely historical-critical exegesis seriously, i.e. against biblical interpretation that is exclusively concerned with historical facts and causes emanating from biblical texts and that thus neglects the theological potential and communicative explosiveness of these texts. I share Barth’s challenge to the historical-critical exegetes to become more critical in their thinking (Barth 1978, p. xii), though I do not accept his approach to theological hermeneutics. The alternative between a theological hermeneutics interested in disclosing and a priori securing the theological dimensions of biblical texts, on the one hand, and a philosophical hermeneutics which a priori rejects any disclosure of theological dimensions in a text as unscientific, on the other hand, seems to me to be false. That is why I am arguing in favour of a critical hermeneutics prepared to take seriously the theological potential of texts without therefore subordinating our critical faculties to this process. I understand the role of hermeneutics in theology as the critical and self-critical art of text-interpretation. The artistic dimension of hermeneutics has been emphasised repeatedly in philosophical and theological discussions since the Enlightenment, because hermeneutics is always more than mere method, precisely because it necessarily involves a subjective moment (see Schleiermacher 1986, pp. 74 and 76). Moreover, hermeneutics must never be reduced to some kind of universally valid technique. Gadamer was among the most influential campaigners against attempts to reduce hermeneutics to a universally applicable method. Instead, he was concerned with disclosing and understanding the hermeneutical nature of philosophical thinking.

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The hermeneutics that I characterise as philosophic is not introduced as a new procedure of interpretation or explication. Basically it only describes what always happens whenever an interpretation is convincing and successful… For, understanding is more than the adroit application of a skill. It always harvests a broadened and deepened self-understanding. But that means hermeneutics is philosophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy. (Gadamer 1981, pp. 111–12)

Interestingly enough, Gadamer demonstrated these philosophical insights with the help of examples from text-interpretation. That is why his hermeneutical programme could more easily be identified (or misunderstood) as a method of interpretation. He defended himself as follows: As an old philologist I may be forgiven for having exemplified all of that with the help of “being-in-relation-to-the-text”. In truth the hermeneutical experience is totally enmeshed in the general nature of human praxis which includes essentially, though in secondary fashion, the understanding of what is written. Hermeneutical experience extends as far as the intellectual beings’ willingness to engage in conversation may conceivably reach. (Gadamer 1980, p. 314 – my translation)

In spite of Gadamer’s brave effort, the tension between a general hermeneutical reflection, on the one hand, and a hermeneutical methodology for particular disciplines concerned with understanding (such as theology, jurisprudence, literary criticism, psychology, art history, musicology etc.), on the other hand, cannot be sublated precisely because our general hermeneutical insights are always gained in the actual struggle with concrete hermeneutical challenges. Therefore, a critique of Gadamer’s anti-methodological attitude, such as the one presented by Paul Ricœur, is indeed necessary. Nevertheless, we should not overlook that Gadamer’s protest against any sort of instrumentalisation and objectification of hermeneutics also raises a valid concern. His work, whose chief concern it was to shed light on the hermeneutical constitution of human existence, had stressed the staunch and dynamic relationship between self-understanding and text-understanding. Understanding must always be thought of in terms of a fusion of two horizons, in our case the horizon of the understanding subject and the horizon of the text calling to be understood. Gadamer tried to grasp the dynamics of understanding with the help of the concept of play (Spiel) in order to highlight the fact that the process of understanding is always kept going by concrete subjects and that their interaction can never be fully programmed or anticipated in advance (cf., Gadamer 1989, pp.  101–34). Already Friedrich Schleiermacher had concluded that “approximation” (Annäherung) was the only realistic goal of any hermeneutical effort (Schleiermacher 1986, p. 95). The total understanding of complex texts is not a realistic aim. Schleiermacher named the two poles of text-understanding “grammatical interpretation” and “psychological/technical interpretation”. For him “grammatical interpretation” referred to the linguistic or material aspect of linguistically mediated understanding. And the strangely sounding (for us post-Freudians) expression “psychological interpretation” was to refer to the necessary subjective aspect of understanding. At times, Schleiermacher also talked about “divination” or the divinatory aspect of understanding (Schleiermacher 1986, p. 96). This concept was to point to the necessarily personal aspect of any understanding (cf., Jeanrond 1994, pp. 44–50).

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In spite of differences in detail, Schleiermacher and Gadamer agree that genuine understanding requires the involvement of human subjects and must not be reduced to automated processes. Understanding is not a knowledge produced by engineers, but the work of human persons in concrete circumstances. Both hermeneuts gained their hermeneutical insights from the praxis of interpreting literary, philosophical, and theological texts, i.e. texts composed with a certain level of communicative density. Paul Ricœur went a significant step further than his famous predecessors on whose work he built his own hermeneutical thinking. In greater detail than Schleiermacher or Gadamer, Ricœur considered the textuality of texts, including the more precise identification of the genres through which we communicate in literary or theological contexts. Moreover, Ricœur stressed the autonomy of the text, i.e. the fact that knowledge of the author or of the original conditions of text-production may not be necessary for understanding a text. Hence, Ricœur shifted the interpretative attention to those dimensions that characterise a text as a work, a work that calls for understanding more than for identifying the author’s intention or original conditions in which the text came into being. Understanding the text as a work rehabilitates the text as text and guards it from dissolution into its constitutive parts, i.e. sentences or words. A text is always more than the sum of its parts. Of course, the parts forming a text may well be identified, explained and assessed, but the whole of the text always calls for more than such detailed attention. It demands interpretation and as such a holistic approach on the part of the interpreting subject. Hence, any interpretation of complex texts calls for a holistic approach to the textuality of the text (cf., Jeanrond, 1994, pp. 70–77). Obviously, communicative competence and linguistic attention are very important for text-interpretation; but they cannot replace the necessarily subjective moment in any interpretative act. It is the human subject that configures the overall projection of the text as a whole. Thus, Ricœur at once overcame Gadamer’s anti-­ methodological attitude and further sharpened the art of interpretation by widening its horizon now to include linguistic connectivity, i.e. how linguistic signs allow a text to emerge in the eyes of a reader. Moreover, following Gadamer and Schleiermacher, Ricœur stressed the significance of interpretation for the interpreting subjects themselves. “Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-­ understanding by means of understanding others” (Ricœur 1974, p. 17). Every act of text-interpretation requires not only an attentive understanding, but also competent, critical and self-critical explanation on its way toward a deeper appreciation of the text as text. Repeatedly Ricœur attempted to describe the dynamics and principal openness of the act of interpretation: at first, he distinguished different levels of naïveté in order to emphasise the fact that we as interpreters cannot escape from our naïveté, that is, from our necessarily limited perspectives of understanding. Similarly, Gadamer had spoken about the constructive role of our prejudices or pre-understandings when we interpret texts. These pre-understandings need to be addressed and worked through, but we can never fully overcome them; they are in fact integral to our capacity for textual understanding. In his later publications, Ricœur spoke of three levels of mimesis: prefiguration, configuration, and

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refiguration. These levels of mimesis call for respective attitudes in interpretation (cf., Ricœur 1984–1988). The critique of ideologies must always be a part of these considerations. Here, Ricœur was in agreement with Jürgen Habermas (cf., Jeanrond 1994, pp. 67–8). Elsewhere I have attempted to take these reflections further in order to grasp more fully the objective and subjective aspects of textual communication and their co-operation in the act of interpretation (Jeanrond 1994, pp. 78–119). For the present investigation, two further thoughts are important: a first thought concerns the recognition of the dialectics of text-production and text-reception. Every text is composed in a specific genre, which in turn can also be recognised and understood as such by its recipients. Moreover, every text is composed in a particular (personal, time- or group-specific) style. In the process of communication, the genre and style of a text fuse communicative conventions and particular stylistic aspects into a new whole (Jeanrond 2005, pp. 73–128). Sometimes we recognize offences against generic conventions, such as in the Absurd Theatre tradition (e.g. Hildesheimer, Beckett, Ionesco et  al.), where precisely the breakdown of a communicative convention is staged in order to generate a dramatic intensification. However, such breaches of conventions receive their dynamics from ordinary communicative conventions and the expectations associated with them. Style functions in a similar way: we normally recognize stylistic breakdowns rather quickly. In sum, text-interpretation happens in terms of the disclosure of text-genres and text-styles through respective reading genres and reading styles. In every instance, cultural patterns and personal, subjective linguistic applications are related to each other – both in acts of text- composition and in acts of text-reception. Following the philosopher Manfred Frank, we could say that language always functions as  an “individual universal”, although I would rather speak of a personal universal (cf., Frank 1977). A second thought touches on the notion of interpretation itself. We have seen in Ricœur that every act of interpretation includes some form of understanding, however naïve it may be, which in turn ought to be accompanied by efforts of critical and self-critical explications of the text in question. However, I wish to argue that every act of interpretation implies even a third dimension, which I have called assessment (Deutung in German) (Jeanrond 2005, pp.  64–72). Ultimately, the meaning of the text must be assessed and discerned. Here we are dealing with the aspect of interpretation that Schleiermacher termed divination, which means the Gesamtentwurf, and which the interpreting subject brings about. Wishing to perceive of the text in terms of a larger proposal of meaning (Sinn) implies an act of will that highlights the moral responsibility of the interpreter. In the process of interpretation we always already relate to what we understand – we may reject it in total or in parts, we may consider it critically, or we may accept it. At this junction we need to widen our horizon to include the importance of the community of speakers/writers and hearers/interpreters in which every interpreting subject has always already been communicatively shaped and is at home. Language is a dynamic institution which provides us with a shifting number of genres of text-­

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production and of text-reception and which encourages us to develop our own ­communicative style depending on the particular structures and hierarchies of power at work. We owe to our respective communicative communities that we can become thinking, speaking and interpreting subjects in the first place. Hence, language meets us always as a gift. Our subjectivity is never independent or autonomous; rather it is always already communicatively mediated. In view of this fact we must emphasise anew that human subjectivity is possible thanks to a shared language, i.e. to some measure of linguistic objectivity. Moreover, we need to stress that every communicative action potentially changes and transforms our linguistic possibilities, and that communication is made possible in the first instance through the language tradition that meets us. In the beginning is and remains the Logos (John 1,1) – the linguistic act of mediating meaning. Place, history and language are the categories of our being.2 They limit us, but at the same time, they enable the transformation of our communicative community.

7.3  Revelation and Hermeneutics: The Event of Manifestation How could we approach afresh the concept of revelation in the light of a critical and self-critical hermeneutics? Moreover, how could we rethink the concept of revelation in response to the Enlightenment claim that reason, properly understood, will make revelation ultimately superfluous? Paul Ricœur offers a way forward by proposing “to recover a concept of revelation and a concept of reason that, without ever coinciding, can at least enter into a living dialectic and together engender something like an understanding of faith” (Ricœur 1980, p. 73). This means that, for Ricœur, revelation is neither a purer, more primitive state of reason, nor is it eventually to be swallowed up into some super-concept. Rather, and this is the remarkable result of his philosophy of reflection, revelation is treated sui generis.3 Ricœur locates the most originary level of revelation in the discourse of faith or the confession of faith. Thus, he attributes philosophical significance to this non-­ speculative form of discourse insofar as the discourse of faith may challenge philosophy and vice versa without, however, allowing one form of discourse to swallow the other. As examples of the discourse of faith, Ricœur lists five genres of biblical writing: prophetic discourse, narrative discourse, prescriptive discourse, wisdom discourse, and hymnic discourse. And he insists that “the literary genres of the Bible do not constitute a rhetorical façade which it would be possible to pull down in order to reveal some thought content that is indifferent to its literary vehicle”

2  In a properly Kantian way, I should state: “space, time and language are the categories of our being”, although, curiously enough, Kant did not explore the category of language in his philosophy. 3  In this section I am developing some earlier reflections published in Jeanrond 1998a.

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(Ricœur 1980, p.  91). Hence, he emphasises the theological importance of both form and content. “The religious ‘saying’ is only constituted in the interplay between story and prophecy, history and legislation, legislation and wisdom, and finally wisdom and lyricism” (Ricœur 1980, p. 92). However, once one acknowledges the particularity of biblical genres, one can no longer reduce all forms of biblical texts to a single category of revelation culminating in the filtering out of a certain propositional content. Instead one must acknowledge a “polysemic and polyphonic concept of revelation” (Ricœur 1980, p. 92). Ricœur’s attempt to provide a new heuristic base for revelation  – and thus to attribute fresh credibility to appeals to revelation from a critical philosophical perspective – is, however, not an attempt to take a detour behind the Enlightenment critique of doctrinal and dogmatic systems. The classical theological hubris must not be replaced by a new philosophical hubris. Rather, Ricœur wishes to move forward by accepting the need of a public and critical conversation on all appeals to revelation, without however allowing the dissolution (or translation) of religious discourse into a new form of tyranny, now executed by philosophical systems. Moreover, Ricœur defends the plurality of forms of religious discourse and, as a result, he encourages a new discussion of the meaning and significance of biblical texts which communicate human experiences of divine presence, absence and action in history. Ricœur’s approach to revelation has nothing whatsoever to do with a concept of literal inerrancy or with a concept of biblical theology searching for dogmatic sentences which would then be able to sum up the theological content of Holy Scripture. For Ricœur, “revelation can never constitute a body of truths which an institution may boast of or take pride in possessing” (Ricœur 1980, p. 95). Ricœur’s concept of revelation, first of all, provides a way out of the reduction of an uncritical Enlightenment belief in the final victory of reason over revelation. Secondly, it avoids the dilemma of an administrative defence of revelation as a mere depositum. And thirdly, it opens for a critical discussion of biblical revelation outside of narrow confessional confines. Thus, it does not accept the sublation of revelation into reason, administration or fideism. Instead, Ricœur approaches revelation in terms of a hermeneutical limit experience emerging from a human praxis of interpretation at the boundary between faith and reason (Ricœur 1980, p. 93). Moreover, he invites a broader and more dynamic understanding of truth beyond traditional concepts of truth in terms of adequation and verification. The truth which revelation discloses is the truth of manifestation (Ricœur 1980, p. 98).4 In the context of biblical interpretation Ricœur exemplifies the emergence of revelation by pointing to the potential of poetic discourse. Such a discourse suspends the standard descriptive function of language. “It does not directly augment our knowledge of objects”, instead it alone 4  Cf., also Charles Taylor’s defence of “the idea that stories give us an understanding of life, people, and what happens to them which is peculiar (i.e., distinct from what other forms, like works of science and philosophy, can give us), and also unsubstitutable (i.e., what they show us can’t be translated without remainder into other media).” (Taylor 2016, p. 291)

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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. (Ricœur 1980, 101)

Therefore, Ricœur argues that it is “in this sense of manifestation that language in its poetic function is a vehicle of revelation” (Ricœur 1980, 102). Hence, he can understand revelation as the power of breaking through and as an opening of new worlds in front of the text. In sum: “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” (Ricœur 1980, p. 104). What is the epistemological status of such a concept of revelation? Is revelation here reduced to the autonomous subjectivity of the reader? Ricœur wishes to counter such a possible reduction by suggesting the category of “testimony” as the most adequate way of developing a new way of human self-understanding characterized now in terms of belonging-to or participation-in. He agrees with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s insights into the linguistic mediation of all Dasein. “Reflection is never first, never constituting – it arrives unexpectedly like a ‘crisis’ within an experience that bears us, and it constitutes us as the subject of the experience” (Ricœur 1980, p.  107). With regard to text-interpretation, participation emerges as a possibility because of the texts which, due to their distanciation from their original conditions of composition, now open new occasions of appropriation to the reader. In view of this necessary sharing of all reflection in the prior dialectic of participation and distanciation, “recourse to testimony occurs in a philosophy of reflection at the moment when such a philosophy renounces the pretension of consciousness to constitute itself (Ricœur 1980, p. 110). Hence, testimonies, such as in the biblical or poetic writings and traditions, allow the human being who is prepared to suspend the striving for self-creation to encounter her or his own sense of dependence in the form of a limit experience of the absolute through contingent signs. Although Ricœur’s concept of revelation was developed in the context of biblical interpretation, I wish to argue that it can inspire even a more comprehensive theological notion of revelation: There is no human access to divine revelation outside of the human communicative and hermeneutical predicament. All manifestations of revelation – in history, in Scripture, in rituals and other experiences – are communicative events which result from human participation. In sum: all revelation is mediated manifestation of the divine in human conditions. Thus, Ricœur shares with Karl Barth a sense for the event character of revelation, although he differs with Barth on the appreciation of the hermeneutical conditions of and the subjective involvement in this event.

7.4  The Hermeneutical Paradigms of Yale and Chicago Theology must decide whether it is prepared to face this hermeneutical condition and the necessity of a subjective involvement in revelation. Or, in the aftermath of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck of the so-called Yale school of theology, it might

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wish to restrict itself to one particular language game while tolerantly or ignorantly letting other language games exist outside of its orbit (cf., Jeanrond 1993; Jeanrond 1998b). A decision in favour of one’s own inward looking theological and ecclesial communicative context shuts out any struggle with the other and with otherness more generally and thus limits the human experience of transcendence. Of course, Lindbeck, Frei and followers have also been engaged ecumenically, but first after the establishment of their fundamental self-understanding in their own religious community inspired by obedience to biblical revelation (see Frei 1992, pp. 87–91; Lindbeck 1984, pp. 32–41). However, they have not promoted a larger, global perspective of wrestling with the universal dimension of being human and its theological significance. Instead their brand of theological hermeneutics remains focussed on its very own group-specific interpretative horizons and biblical interests. Hence, the debate between the erstwhile schools of Chicago and Yale on the proper horizon of interpretation does also concern the discussion of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in theology and hermeneutics. Yale theologians determined the theological horizon with regard to the specificity of the group, whereas Chicago theologians and philosophers, such as David Tracy and Paul Ricœur, pursued a universal horizon. Both schools were engaged in interpreting the self-revelation of God in Scripture and human experience: Yale more with regard to inner-Christian dynamics and inner-Christian pluralism, Chicago more with regard to the global discourse on God. In Chicago, one was convinced that the Christian interpretation could learn from the public and global discourse in as much as the global discourse on a pluralistic understanding of God could benefit from a Christian horizon of interpretation. In the words of David Tracy: Whatever else it is, any Christian theology is finally and radically theocentric. This insight into the universal character of the divine reality that is the always-present object of the Christian’s trust and loyalty is what ultimately impels every theology to attempt publicness. For God as understood by the Jewish, Christian and Muslim believer is either universal in actuality or sheer delusion. Theology in all its forms is finally nothing else but the attempt to reflect deliberately and critically upon that God. (Tracy 1981, p. 51)

Yale was engaged in a hermeneutics of revelation, Chicago in a hermeneutics of signification. Yale was primarily concerned with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Chicago with God’s self-revelation in all human history including in Jesus Christ. 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.5 This in turn demonstrates that the choice of one’s model of interpretation is never neutral, and that the resulting theological discourses only in a limited sense can ever claim to be objective. 5  “Conversation in its primary form is an exploration of possibilities in the search for truth. In following the track of any question, we must allow for difference and otherness… Otherness and difference can become, however, genuine possibility: the as other, the as different becomes the as possible.” (Tracy 1987, pp. 20–21. Original italics)

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However, there is one further important difference between both hermeneutical paradigms: Yale expected from theological interpretation a deepened understanding of Christian faith in God’s disclosure in Jesus Christ as revealed in Scripture. Hence, hermeneutics for Yale refers first and foremost to biblical hermeneutics in the service of christology (see also Vanhoozer 1998, pp.  464–5). Here a preliminary fundamental-­theological decision was taken in favour of a specific norm, and the horizon of theological hermeneutics was defined accordingly. “Intratextual theology redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text” (Lindbeck 1984, p. 118). Any struggle with the otherness of the other, i.e. with other Christians, with other interpreters of Scripture, with the radical otherness of God and the otherness of one’s own emerging self, was thus already limited from the beginning to the boundaries of one’s own tradition. In Chicago, one expected from a hermeneutically conscious theology a larger Auseinandersetzung (struggle) with the other. The act of interpreting Scripture, tradition and human experience could not happen in a narrowly defined Christian inner-space, but in a global horizon of religious praxis. Here aspects of ideology critique entered more naturally, even with regard to Christian claims to tradition, which always are in need of critical and self-critical examination. Questions concerning the structures of power in Christian communication, the construction of gender, the criteria of exclusion of all kinds of others, the recognition of different interpretative perspectives and different interpretative competences, all of these questions touch upon the assessment and appreciation of the necessary degree of subjective interpretation in every linguistically mediated witness to God’s revelation in our universe. Ultimately, what is at stake here is the significance of human experience for the interpretation of the theological dimensions of our universe. Our discussion of subjectivity and objectivity concerns both the macro-­ hermeneutical tasks of interpreting the world and the micro-hermeneutical tasks of interpreting the texts (and symbols) of our religious traditions. Both hermeneutical labours are interdependent with regard to the determination of an appropriate horizon of theological thinking. On every level, understanding requires a struggle with otherness. The praxis of love seems to me to offer the most appropriate path of approaching difference and radical difference in any act of relating – to other texts, symbols and traditions as well as to human and divine otherness.

7.5  The Need for a Hermeneutics of Love In view of the different historical and contemporary approaches to human and divine love, it would appear to be problematic to introduce love into the academic discussion in general and into the hermeneutical discourse in particular. Why use a concept so obviously plagued by difference, otherness and misunderstandings? And what has revelation to do with love?

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It is not easy today to widen our understanding of love beyond the frequent reductions of love to mere sentiment and the romantic experience of a couple. However, already in these reductions we can observe important aspects of love, which, of course, would need to be considered and discussed within a broader phenomenology of love. Such a phenomenology is beyond the scope of this article (for a broader discussion of the concept of love see Jeanrond 2010). Therefore, a few big strokes must suffice here: all human love is embodied; it expresses a desire to be in close relationship with other persons/subjects; it participates in a long history of human efforts to come to terms with otherness; it is always socially and linguistically embedded; it is gendered; it is intimately linked to human efforts to understand the process of becoming a self; it ultimately transcends mere attitude and emotion by entering into larger networks of relationality. Love refers, then, to complex and dynamic human developments which all in one way or another concern human encounters and relations with otherness. In spite of all the problems associated with attempts at understanding “love”, I cannot think of another concept equally able to express the potential of dynamic and transformative networks of relationships in which women, men and children are engaged. The centre of love is the recognition of relational subjectivity and its potential for enabling experiences of transcendence and revelation. Every communal concern for adequate interpretation of texts, traditions and self-understandings must struggle with the recognition of the respective other (cf., Saarinen 2016). Such recognition is the business of love and outside of love there cannot be any genuine revelation of the God who is understood to be love (1 Jn 4, 8 and 16). While empathy describes an attitude of one person toward another, love signifies a mutual (though not necessarily symmetrical) relationship with other subjects in which some sort of union or unity is desired without, however, the need to minimise or negate existing differences. Hence, love is not only able to preserve difference in a constructive way; rather love lives of the very otherness of the other, which is the one to be loved. Otherness and difference provide the fertile ground for the development of love and any related revelation (see here also Marion 2016, pp. 36–42). Love does not demand that we like the other. Rather the biblical love command urges us to recognise and accept the other as other. Thomas Aquinas rightly stressed that the command to love one’s enemies has nothing to do with bringing about some form of intentional harmony of feelings. We cannot force ourselves to like our enemies. But we are asked to love them (for a discussion of Thomas’s approach to love, see Jeanrond 2010, p. 80). Hence, love does not need to be uncritical with regard to the emotions. Love comprises affective, cognitive, critical and self-critical dimensions of relationship. Love is more than mere attitude (such as solidarity) and more than mere feeling (such as feelings of happiness or unhappiness). Love concerns relation, more precisely, a network of relationships. It includes my relationships to other people, to nature and the universe, to God as the radical other, and to my own emerging self (cf., esp. Jeanrond 2010, pp. 19–23). Love, then, is not primarily concerned with a relationship that strives for total agreement or even harmony. Nor does it merely seek a deeper understanding of

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existing differences. A hermeneutics of love does not aim either at a universalist hermeneutical access or at a relativist hermeneutical access to human communication and religious revelation. Rather, a hermeneutics of love is concerned with the dynamic encounter of persons and with their openness toward transcendence and transformation. In other words, revelation is the culmination of a hermeneutical process open to the dynamics of love. Such a description of a hermeneutics of love immediately connects to the old hermeneutical insight that understanding is always also engaged in the interaction between persons seeking to understand the manifestations of otherness, on the one hand, and of their own horizon, their world, and their selves, on the other hand. Gadamer’s dictum, cited above, that being which can be understood is language, does not lose any of its value, but needs to be complemented by the insight that understanding always already includes encounter and relationship and that human relationships always comprise forms of communicative and symbolic action. Thus, the spectrum of hermeneutics reaches much wider than to mere text-interpretation. Hermeneutics touches all forms of communicative expression of which we human beings are capable. A hermeneutics of love enlarges the object of understanding beyond the written word, which, as discussed above, used to be Gadamer’s preferred hermeneutical object. He never ceased to emphasise that the human relationship to the world was fundamentally linguistic and therefore somewhat comprehensible. As a result of this insight into the linguistic character and intelligibility of our relationship to the world, Gadamer asserted that hermeneutics was “a universal aspect of philosophy, and not just the methodological basis of the so-called human sciences” (Gadamer 1989, p. 476 – original italics). “Understanding, then, does not consist in a technical virtuosity of ‘understanding’ everything written. Rather, it is a genuine experience (Erfahrung) – i.e., an encounter with something that asserts itself as truth” (Gadamer 1989, p. 489). However, Gadamer’s hermeneutics remained chiefly interested in the self-disclosure of truth and not so much in the manifestations of difference or otherness and their demands arising from such acts of disclosure. Looking for a concept of praxis able to support both the disclosure of truth as well as the recognition of difference and otherness, I cannot find a better one than love. For, precisely in the praxis of love, that is to say in the act of opening oneself for the transformation of self and other emerging within a complex act of relationship, in this praxis we can see the concurrent appearance of both the disclosure of truth and the manifestation of difference (cf., Jeanrond 2012, pp. 190–93). Paul Ricœur already recognized this potential of love when he wrote about love in The Course of Recognition (Ricœur 2005, pp. 222–25). Not as a mere emotion, but in connection with justice, love supports mutual recognition without, however, insisting on any symmetrical reciprocity. That means, in love I can accept the other, the otherness of the other, and I can relate both to the self of the other and to my own self (as other). Ricœur did not develop a hermeneutics of love, but he appreciated the significance of love for the process of relating to self and other in respect and mutual recognition.

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Communities, traditions, religions, and institutions as such cannot love. Only subjects are able to love and in this way to participate in the construction of larger networks or bodies of love. At best, communities, traditions, religions, and institutions transmit constructive approaches to and principles and challenges of love to the emerging subjects of love. The entry ticket into the networks of love is respect for the other and for one’s own emerging self. However, respect does not need to imply full agreement with the other. Every inter-human encounter contains the potential for a relationship of love, for the development of communities of understanding in which one does not only look for an intensification of the relationship but also for an examination of the manifestation of truth and of criteria for its interpretation – both, of course, accompanied by critical and self-critical measures. However, the hermeneutics of love does not only affect the macro-hermeneutical task of interpreting the world and the subject’s emerging self, but also the micro-­ hermeneutical task of text-interpretation. Is the reader of a biblical text prepared to accept the potential confrontation with truth and its otherness in the act of text-­ understanding? The hermeneutical struggle with texts that promise a manifestation of truth requires concrete acts of love since the text represents the ‘other’ that calls the interpreting subject actively to engage in its unfolding of sense with the help of attention, respect and openness to transcendence and transformation. Moreover, attention here implies acts of recognition of the text’s semantic complexity, of its textual strategies of communication as well as the interpreter’s self-critical examination of her choice of appropriate reading strategies and styles. Interpreting a complex text thus will always remain a labour of love. This brief outline of a hermeneutics of love must suffice here for demonstrating the significance of love for the necessarily subjective and thus pluralistic task of theological interpretation open to the process of divine-human revelation. The different interpretations of Scripture, tradition and experience can serve the community of disciples of Christ as long as they recognise and take seriously other and different interpretations and invite their participation into a global dialogue of love. The most important norm of theological thinking, then, is love – once again not in terms of liking this or that interpretations, but in terms of the much more challenging and often painful attempt to take part in the transformative process of a common search for truth in a transparent conversation characterised by mutual recognition, respect, engagement and justice. In the tradition of Christian interpretation of Scripture, the central position of love has often been emphasised. The apostle Paul (cf., 1 Cor 13) and Augustine,6 for instance, saw love as the most important norm of human hermeneutical activity. However, love as the God-given virtue of discipleship has also often been misrepresented, misused and distorted. Instead of accepting love as the God-given grace of 6  “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way.” Saint Augustine 1958, 30. See also Jeanrond 1994, pp. 22–26.

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encounter with the other, with the self, and with God and God’s creation, sometimes love has been reduced to a mere object of belief demanding assent rather than a dynamic and potentially transformative engagement. Or love was raised to the level of a criterion of exclusion: so in the slogan that only Christians possess proper love. Thus, even theologies of love as powerful examples of the at times intricate effort to construct religious identity at the expense of others require critical attention. Since the time of Martin Luther the slogan “Christian love” has replaced references to a Christian praxis of love. Søren Kierkegaard, Anders Nygren, Karl Barth and Eberhard Jüngel, to name just a few thinkers, all have redefined love in terms of a specifically Christian virtue (see Jeanrond, 2010, pp. 100–34). Here we encounter a Christianity convinced to be the only genuine religion of love, whereas the Jewish tradition (like Islam) has been more or less brutally disowned in this respect. Such a monopolising understanding of love is even more surprising in view of the fact that the synoptic gospels portray Jesus as quoting directly from the Torah when explaining the dual love command and thus confirming that the entire Scriptures celebrate God’s creative and reconciling gift of love. These examples may illustrate how much religious and ecclesial traditions have understood and defined themselves in opposition to “others” and how much they have attempted to ground their own identities on the exclusion of those others. Too often, those others have been excluded from the process of searching for forms of authentic communication of truth and have been deprived of a larger horizon of love. A priori exclusion of others from the process of interpreting Scripture, tradition and experience amounts to a perversion of love into its opposite, namely indifference for or rejection of others. Here the other is no longer of interest for the very effort to approach truth. Hence, we must ask: can one seriously search for God, who is the radical other, pray to God and love God while at the same time one ignores God’s creative, revelatory and transformative presence in all the other subjects of love?

7.6  Conclusion In this article I have attempted to present some outlines for a hermeneutics of love which would allow us to take seriously both subjectivity and objectivity in the dynamic and potentially transformative process of theological interpretation. Such a hermeneutics could encourage us no longer to consider the necessary pluralism of interpretation as a threat to faith, truth and church in our increasingly globalising context. If love were considered the most important praxis in our search for truth, then with great joy and enthusiasm Christians could approach the tasks of interpreting the Bible, the tradition and the different manifestations of divine revelation, and their own critical and self-critical understanding of human experience in the various and shifting contexts of their lives. Of course, even the praxis of love requires critical and self-critical examination. Love is not a Christian invention or possession. Rather Christians like all other

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r­ eligious persons and communities are charged to reflect every day afresh upon the challenge of how best to approach human otherness, God’s radical otherness, divine revelation and human transformation, which could be ignited through loving acts of recognition. Hence, love needs to be embraced as a praxis in which all human beings are called to participate. Every exclusion of subjects from the global praxis of love leads to injustice and to the distortion of the God-given praxis of love and related revelation (cf., here also Ward 1994, pp.  340–43). The transcending and transformative power of love is always revolutionary. How could a hermeneutics of love be otherwise?

References Augustine, Saint. 1958. On Christina Doctrine. Trans. D.W.  Robertson, Jr. New  York/London: Macmillan/Collier Macmillan. Barth, Karl. 1956. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 1/2: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Trans. G.T. Thompson and H. Knight. Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark. ———. 1978. Der Römerbrief [1922]. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Frank, Manfred. 1977. Das individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und-interpretation nach Schleiermacher. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frei, Hans W. 1992. In Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1980. Replik. In Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, 283–317. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1981. Reason in the Age of Science. Trans. F.G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. ———. 1989. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward. Jeanrond, Werner G. 1993. Theology in the Context of Pluralism and Postmodernity: David Tracy’s Theological Method. In Postmodernism, Literature and the Future of Theology, ed. David Jasper, 143–163. Houndsmills/London: Macmillan Press. ———. 1994. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. London: SCM Press. ———. 1998a. The Significance of Revelation for Biblical Theology. Biblical Interpretation 6 (1998): 243–257. ———. 1998b. Correlational Theology and the Chicago School. In Introduction to Christian Theology: Contemporary North American Perspectives, ed. Roger A.  Badham, 137–153. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. ———. 2005. Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking. Trans. T.J. Wilson. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. ———. 2010. A Theology of Love. London/New York: T&T Clark. ———. 2012. Theological Truth from the Perspective of an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love. In The Question of Theological Truth: Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, ed. Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin, 181–195. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. ———. 2014. Faith and Language: Hermeneutical Reflections. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 90 (2014): 323–339. Lindbeck, George A. 1984. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2016. Givenness and Revelation. Trans. S.E. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ricœur, Paul. 1974.  The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1980. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Ed. Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia: Fortress. ———. 1984–1988. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Trans. D. Pellauer. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Saarinen, Risto. 2016. Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. 1986. General Hermeneutics. In The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, 72–97. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tracy, David. 1981. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: Crossroad. ———. 1987. Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. 1998. Is There a Meaning in this Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Garnd Rapids: Zondervan. Ward, Keith. 1994. Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World’s Religions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chapter 8

Embodied Transactions Mara Brecht

Abstract  Like hermeneutical theorists, comparative theologians accentuate subjectivity as an important part of interpretation and understanding, including interpreting revelation in one’s home tradition, as well as the traditions of others. Feminist scholarship offers resources for deepening these accounts of subjectivity by raising critical, interconnected questions about the practical conditions of life that shape subjective experience, the perceived recipient of revelation, and what constitutes revelation itself. This essay adds to the feminist discussion by turning to the work of feminist-pragmatist philosopher Shannon Sullivan, who herself builds on John Dewey. Sullivan argues for a dynamic, circular, and mutually constituting relationship between physical bodies and environments. As humans, our bodies transact with the surrounding world, and we are informed by those exchanges. Though frequently obscured from view, both literally and figuratively, the body is deeply involved in how one interprets and understands. This essay argues that engaging revelation across religious boundaries presents opportunities that go well beyond the theological—creating pathways for disrupting the seemingly stable categories of race and gender. Keywords  Revelation · Feminist hermeneutics · Comparative theology · Embodiment Some commentators on comparative theology, along with some comparative theologians, criticize the discourse of comparative theology for its resistance to theorize philosophically about its methods. But for many comparative theologians, prioritizing actually doing comparative theology, rather than just talking about it is a distinct advantage, or at least a necessary effect of the project.1 Despite a split among 1  In the second part of this essay, I discuss two of the most prominent voices calling for comparative theology to incorporate hermeneutical theory more intentionally into comparative work. These perspectives can be found in Marianne Moyaert’s (2011) monograph, Fragile Identities: Towards

M. Brecht (*) Department of Theology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_8

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s­cholars interested in comparative theology, the field seems to agree that philosophical hermeneutics offers rich resources for building comparative theology’s theoretical infrastructure, primarily because the fields of comparative theology and hermeneutics form a sort of natural alliance. Like hermeneutical theorists, comparative theologians accentuate subjectivity as an important component of interpretation. Thinking about subjectivity, however, needs to go beyond the mere reading of texts and move off of the abstract page, and into the concrete, embodied experience of lived reality. If any theology of revelation, whether comparative or not, operates with a two-dimensional understanding of the perceived recipient of revelation, and thus revelation itself, it cannot adequately attend to the focus of its theological concern. It is my contention that comparative theologians will deepen their hermeneutical methods only by adding depth to how they conceptualize subjectivity. This requires going beyond mainline hermeneutical theorists (such as Gadamer and Ricoeur), who tend to overlook—or at least not explicitly emphasize—the embodied dimension of human experience, thus constructing a two-dimensional subject. Drawing on the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and the feminist comparative theologian, Michelle Voss Roberts, I argue that it is only in the particularity of embodied experience that revelation is rendered meaningful. Because revelation is received not by disembodied minds, but by actual people—who are fully embodied, situated in time and place, and shaped by economic, social, and racialized identities—comparative theologians need to draw on theoretical frameworks that are adequate to these conditions of human experience. Shannon Sullivan’s feminist-­ pragmatist framework for embodiment allows me to formulate a theory of subjectivity to help comparative theologians direct their attention to the transformations of subjective identity and lived reality that might emerge from reading “strange texts.”2

a Theology of Interreligious Hospitality and Paul Hedges’ (2016) essay, “Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics: A Gadamerian Approach to Interreligious Interpretation.” By arguing for the necessity of incorporating hermeneutics into comparative theology, Moyaert and Hedges respond indirectly to Francis X. Clooney’s assertion that “it is crucial that comparative theology be practised, and not merely described in theory or with respect to method” (Clooney 2007, 663). Additionally, Kristen Beise Kilbinger’s (2010) essay “Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology” (in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, edited by Francis X. Clooney), Gavin D’Costa’s (2009) monograph Christianity and the World Religions: Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religion, and Stephen J.  Duffy’s (1999) essay “A Theology of the Religions and/or a Comparative Theology?” also address questions related to the proper relationship between comparative theology and discourses that are methodologically self-conscious and self-revealing (even if not explicitly hermeneutical in focus). At stake in these various conversations is whether theorizing about method threatens to eclipse or promises to accentuate the focus of theological concern. 2  The research for this publication was conducted while holding the Patrick and Barbara Keenan Visiting Chair in Religious Education in the Faculty of Theology, University of St. Michael’s College. I am grateful to St. Michael’s College for the generous support provided me as Keenan Chair. I am also grateful to my colleague Reid B. Locklin for his insightful feedback on this essay, as well as to Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer for his adept editorial direction.

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8.1  M  any Revelations: An Old Problem and a “New” Solution Has God revealed Godself in multiple places at multiple times, and is that revelation continuous? The question isn’t new but has an especial intensity as globalization makes even remote parts of the larger world come into ever-closer proximity. “It is difficult,” Karl Barth wrote in the mid-twentieth century, “to find any time or place when it was not thought that the voice of the deity had been heard and that it ought to be asserted and its meaning investigated.” In other words, religious people around the world, throughout history say they’ve heard the voice of God, and then do their best to figure out what’s been said. With awareness of this universal phenomenon, Barth raises the question: “The Veda to the Indians, the Avesta to the Persians, the Tripitaka to the Buddhists, the Koran to its believers: are they not all ‘bibles’ in exactly the same way as the Old and New Testaments?” (Barth CD I/2, §17.1). Are various scriptures all sources of God’s revelation? Barth is playing rhetorical devil’s advocate with his question. For Barth, to use the term revelation is to affirm that the message is God’s authentic self-offering and self-manifestation, which can only be initiated by God and only known to people because God has enabled them to do so. In and through the working of the Holy Spirit, Barth argues, some people—Christians—receive the gift of revelation. And so the Vedas and the Tripitaka are not revelation in the way the New Testament is. Likewise, while vast numbers of people throughout history may have thought they heard the voice of God, this does not make it so.3 Barth’s rationale turns on a purely

3  To keep my example straightforward, I’ve flattened Barth’s argument somewhat, though not at the expense of his main point. At issue for Barth is “true religion.” Barth wrestles with whether Christianity is one species of the genus religion. True religion is defined by the genuine presence of God’s revelation, which is objective, particular, and divine in nature (which is to say, not human). On this definition of revelation, Barth concludes, only Christianity can be called “true religion.” An important nuance here is that all religion—including Christianity—is “unbelief.” That is, there is nothing intrinsically good about Christianity, or any religion, in Barth’s mind. Christianity is only “good” because it happens to be the locus of God’s revelation. In an effort to rescue Barth’s theology from being cast as trenchantly exclusivist—and dismissed for being so, J. A. Di Noia argues that Barth has been misread and misunderstand on the question of salvation for non-Christian. In fact, Di Noia reminds us, Barth encourages Christians toward “modesty and tolerance” and sees Christians as just as at risk if not more as non-Christians when it comes to God’s judgment (Di Noia 2000, 252–253). That these components of Barth’s theology are overlooked is due in part to the fact that Barth’s theology of religion has been misunderstood as a theology of religions; that is, according to Di Noia, Barth’s theology aimed to address the concept of religion generally rather than the reality of lived religions (244). Further, Di Noia writes, scholars have not appropriately understood how Barth construes the relationship between revelation and religion, in which revelation has absolute priority (248). Other factors also contribute to mis-readings of Barth. First, he was of a generation of theologians who were less concerned with interfaith issues than they were with secular culture, and the challenges secularism presented to Christianity. This results in an inadequately developed theology of religion (Greggs 2008, 77). Secondly, there’s a translation issue at play. The standard English translation of Barth’s essay on religions—titled, in English, “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion,” uses the English word “abolition” for the

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theological concept: grace. In grace, God’s message is given and received. It is a singular and particular event, not a universal one. Other modern thinkers, especially those versed in the philosophy of religion, take analogously stringent positions on the possibility of multiple traditions “having” revelation and, by extension, on the value of reading the “strange texts” of non-Christian religious traditions. Harold Netland, for example, maintains that revelation has propositional content and, thereby, epistemic value (Netland 1999, 126). If the revelatory propositions held by two different religious communities mutually contradict, they cannot both be true (Netland 1999, 233). Netland does not claim (strongly) that if Christian revelation contradicts the revelation of other traditions, then this nullifies the truth-value of all non-Christian claims. However, he does argue (less strongly) that a Christian is justified in making judgments about the truth-value (or lack thereof) of non-Christian religious claims, if that he or she is justified in accepting Christian claims as true (Netland 1999, 195). Regulated by theological commitments and philosophical norms, thinkers like Barth and Netland understand there to be a qualitative difference between Christian revelation and the revelation presumed by other faith traditions. Whether they desire to explore worlds of non-Christian faiths or not is beside the point.4 The name of Jesus Christ is not spoken by other religions, and so the “revelation” belonging to other religions bears no authority. By contrast, a new generation of comparative theologians hold out hope that exploring the worlds of revelation offered by non-­ Christian religious traditions is a theologically fruitful endeavor. Before getting to an analysis of why some theologians see theological value in looking beyond Christian revelation while others cannot, I must first offer a brief word on the kind of comparative theology under investigation in this essay: Contemporary comparative theology—what Reid B. Locklin and Hugh Nicholson call the “new” comparative theology, a discourse that emerged in the late twentieth century as a “critically self-conscious [approach] to the study of religion after ‘religion’” (Locklin and Nicholson 2010, 490). The quotation-marked term “religion” denotes the generic concept of religion, assumed by scholars since the Enlightenment to be a universal phenomenon of human existence. This notion of religion has been critiqued, deconstructed, and—in many cases—rejected by a number of postmodern scholars, as Locklin and Nicholson reveal. New comparative theologians take

German Aufhebung. Garrett Green argues that this “single prominent mistranslation,” published in G.T. Thompson and Harold Knight’s Church Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 1956), crucially contributes to a “caricature of Barth’s theology” as both narrowly exclusivistic and overly laudatory of Christianity (Green 2006, 5). Green proposes “sublimation” as a better translation of Aufhebung, and one that is more appreciative of the whole of Barth’s theology. 4  Netland explicitly affirms Christian efforts to engage with non-Christian religious traditions, and sees them as being good and valuable. However, Netland doubts the extent to which revealed truth can be found outside Christianity, and so the value of engaging across traditions is ethical rather than epistemological in nature.

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into account the postmodern critique of religion, and define their method with full awareness of the problems of universalizing “religion.” Distinctively, new comparative theologians embrace “normative commitment” as an animating part of their project, rather than an obstacle (Locklin and Nicholson 2010, 490). Nicholson elaborates some other markers of the field. The new comparative theology resists generalizations about religious traditions, and so does not regard particular texts or communities as representatives of the larger traditions. It also recognizes the importance of “correlating interreligious theological reflection with the practice of interreligious dialogue” (Nicholson 2010, 58–59). And, perhaps most intriguingly for hermeneutics, comparative theologians of the new generation intentionally seek to “abide in the field of tension between openness and commitment” rather than “defuse” that tension (Nicholson 2010, 62). The new comparative theologians revel in the tension between what they consider to be revealed in their own traditions and what is considered to be revealed in other traditions, allow them to move in a direction that both Barth and Netland inhibit. Werner G. Jeanrond offers an explanation for why by contrasting two divergent hermeneutical approaches: a hermeneutics of revelation and a hermeneutics of signification. Barth and Netland employ a hermeneutics of revelation. Their “well-defined understanding of divine revelation” dictates what may be approached as revelation. An effect of this hermeneutic is, as Jeanrond puts it, that human subjectivity is “subordinated to [their] assumed grasp of revelation” (Jeanrond 2013, 73). This hermeneutics, in Jeanrod’s estimation, “basically mistrusts human communication and wishes to defer directly to divine communication” (Jeanrond 2013, 74). A competing form of hermeneutics—that of signification—presupposes the hermeneutical condition of human existence, and the priority of subjectivity in understanding. Meaning, including the meaning of God’s revelation, is mediated through linguistic signs and symbols (Jeanrond 2013, 73–74). Because linguistic signs and symbols are fundamentally human in nature, we can only “get” to divine revelation by “going through” the human, and by investing our subjectivity into the communicative process (Jeanrond 2013, 72). Signification hermeneuts tend to be globally-­ oriented, situating Christian scripture within a wider horizon of religious scriptures. Globally-oriented theologians, Jeanrond asserts, are “convinced that the Christian interpretation could learn from global discourse” (Jeanrond 2013, 81). Insofar as comparative theologians seek to understand their faith afresh through engaging with another tradition, comparative theologians can be seen as a globally-oriented group who presuppose a hermeneutics of signification. As the next section will show, presupposing a certain hermeneutic is not the same as theorizing about hermeneutics.

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8.2  H  ermeneutics and Comparative Theology: Natural Alliances and New Directions Leading scholars in the new comparative theology prioritize the actual reading of texts (Schreiter 2016, 46). Francis X. Clooney is a paradigmatic representative of the new comparative theology. He is well known for resisting evaluative claims of Christianity’s relationship to the religions and deferring questions of truth, which I take to be hallmarks of “doing” theory in theology. I offer just two widely cited statements from Clooney to illustrate this point. In Theology after Vedānta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (1993), Clooney writes, Engagement in a comparative theological reading which draws upon two (or more) Texts eventually leads to a confrontation with [the question of] truth… Though the questions become increasingly compelling the more one reads—what is the increasingly complex reading project for? what truth does one discover—I nevertheless begin by defending a deferral of a response to them. (187)

Nearly two decades later, in his short, pedagogically-attuned book, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (2010), Clooney maintains this line, If judgments are to be made, they will more likely pertain to the comparativist herself and the meaning of her own faith. Comparative theology is not primarily about which religion is the true one, but about learning across religious borders in a way that discloses the truth of my faith, in the light of their faith. (15–16)

Clooney consistently commits first and foremost to reading texts carefully, not to constructing theoretical models of how to do so or pressing the readings to serve as evidence for a theological position. While Clooney and others in the new generation don’t explicitly theorize about hermeneutical theory, hermeneutics nevertheless hums continually just under the surface. Comparative theology, Marianne Moyaert claims, is inherently hermeneutical insofar as it “rests on the assumption that it is both possible and meaningful to read strange religious texts” (2011, 171). Magdalen Lambkin sums up the hermeneutical undergirding of comparative theology when she asks, “Can religious practitioners make use of the scripture of another tradition in a manner that both affirms the religious value of that scripture for them and appreciates the tradition from which it comes?” (Lambkin 2011, 103). Comparative theologians implicitly answer in the affirmative. Still, even while comparative theologians avoid theorizing about why and how its practices are possible, comparative theological projects bear the “hermeneutical fingerprints of various authors,” as Moyaert says (2011, 169). Moyaert and Paul Hedges are two of the strongest voices calling for comparative theologians to articulate hermeneutical structures to support their work. Hedges suggests fertile resources in Gadamer while Moyaert finds them most robustly in Ricoeur.

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Hedges takes the position that Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory can explain in philosophical terms what is happening in comparative theology, provide it with a rationale, and justify its methods (Hedges 2016). Both Clooney and Gadamer reject the idea of a detached neutral observer, a key link between them. For Clooney, there is no detached, neutral observer because the primary purpose of doing comparative theology is to grow in faith. Comparative theologians are thus inherently situated in a faith tradition, invested in their own spiritual development, and intentionally enter into comparative reading aware of their subjective experiences as persons of faith. For Gadamer, a detached neutral observer does not exist, because we can never abandon our prejudices nor escape our horizon (Hedges 2016). Hedges thinks this natural alliance between Clooney and Gadamer could be deepened further, were comparative theology to express an explicitly hermeneutical foundation. For one thing Gadamer helps us understand our partiality. Partiality, in Hedges’s view, acknowledges that people can explore other religious points of view while remaining situated in their own; it is another way of talking about openness, a basic prerequisite for doing comparative theology (Hedges 2016). Gadamer could thus help comparative theologians develop a full account of partiality as openness. Likewise, Gadamerian hermeneutics would allow comparative theologians to make sense of—and defend—their warrant for engaging in interreligious translation, unlocking new meanings and insights that go beyond the original meaning of a text while not “doing violence” to the other (Hedges 2016). Like Hedges, Moyaert also highlights an affinity between the hermeneutical account of subjectivity and that assumed by comparative theology, but with a focus on Ricoeur. To begin, Ricoeur sees people as inherently incomplete and vulnerable. Embracing vulnerability, rather than rejecting it, allows people to be open (Moyaert 2014, 37–40). Openness-through-vulnerability, to Moyaert’s mind, is compatible with the comparative enterprise, which she believes upholds the “cultivation of vulnerability as the crux of doing theology” (Moyaert 2014, 171). In a spirit of openness, the comparative theologian moves along Ricoeur’s well-­ known hermeneutical arc. The arc is defined by three interpretative moments—first naiveté, critical analysis, appropriation of second naiveté—onto which Moyaert maps the comparative theological exercise. In the pre-critical stage, the comparative theologian guesses at the meaning of the strange text from within her own theological horizon. Moving to critical analysis, the comparative theologian holds the text out as an object of study, and engages appropriate methods of analysis to understand it in new ways. Finally, she turns back to herself, arriving at the moment where the comparative readings offer “new opportunities of understanding [herself]” (Moyaert 2011, 174). The comparative theologian can at this point self-reflectively ask: What does the text mean for me? How am I enlarged and reoriented, theologically, by what I have learned? (Moyaert 2012, 44). Moyaert too finds places where comparative theology is not just in concert with hermeneutical theory, but sees gaps that could be filled and joists that could be reinforced by it. Specifically Moyaert identifies the first stage of Ricoeur’s arc as an opportunity for more intentional reflection and theorizing (Moyaert 2012, 43). Comparative theologians would benefit from acknowledging and answering why

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questions: Why did the comparativist choose this particular text to read? Why was the comparativist drawn to study this religious community in the first place? To work through questions like these is necessarily to foreground hermeneutics in theology. How one answers these questions will reveal a great deal about the commitments that already inform and situate the comparative theologian, even before she begins comparing.5

8.3  Subjectivity as a Way into “Strange Texts” Hedges and Moyaert make convincing cases as to how hermeneutics can enhance comparative theology, both identifying subjectivity as an area for critical reflection. Subjectivity—our lived human experience, which is mediated by language and situated in time and space—is central to both discourses, and a well-developed area of discussion in hermeneutics. Jeanrond, for example, observes that in spite of all their differences Schleiermacher and Gadamer agree that interpretation cannot be reduced to a mechanical process: “Understanding is not a knowledge produced by engineers, but the work of engaged human persons.” Ricoeur joins the chorus by stressing “the significance of interpretation for the interpreting subject her- or himself” (Jeanrond 2013, 77–78). While Hedges and Moyaert are hopeful about the resources Gadamer and Ricoeur offer, I contend that comparative theology needs to go beyond traditional hermeneutical discourse to round out its understanding of subjectivity. Although Hedges and Moyaert helpfully identify hermeneutical lacuna in comparative theological work—specifically by pulling into focus “openness”—their operative assumptions about the self-who-is-open lead us down a blind alley. Hedges and Moyaert do not sufficiently encourage comparative theologians to press on o­ penness 5  My intention in this section is not to conflate hermeneutics and the theology of religions. These are two separate discourses that serve different ends, for different audiences. However, there are important connections between hermeneutics and the theology of religions, as convincingly explained by a number of scholars. Hedges argues that it is either “naïve or problematic” for comparative theologians to say that they do not presuppose a particular theology of religions; to Hedges’ mind, the comparative enterprise depends on a “…a judgement about the possibility of learning from the religious Other” (Hedges 2012, 1123–1124). Such a judgment is decidedly hermeneutical. Likewise, Kristin Beise Kiblinger draws attention to the theology of religions-based presuppositions that comparative theologians rely on and the hermeneutical priorities attached to them. Though she affirms comparative theologians’ “determination to keep the bulk of their energy on the direct exploration of others’ material,” Kiblinger criticizes their collective tendency to gloss over the hermeneutical implications of their work. As she writes, “we cannot skip over getting clarity on our theological presuppositions about the other and just jump into the practice of reading because so much hangs on how we read” (Kiblinger 2010, 25). Stephen Duffy too sees a clear link between hermeneutics and the theology of religions. Of comparative theologians, he writes, “they can do their work only by entering the hermeneutical circle [...] consciously or unconsciously, [bringing] to their work a specific pre-understanding, a prior set of postulates drawn from their own faith and from their tradition and its theologies” (Duffy 1999, 112).

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as an embodied quality. Indeed acknowledging one’s partiality and embracing one’s vulnerability are steps toward understanding openness, but rather than just framing openness primarily in terms of perspective, we must also analyze openness in terms of power dynamics. For this reason, I propose that comparative theologians draw on resources from feminist theory and phenomenological analysis, a proposal for which I will develop in this essay’s final constructive section, in order to foreground the importance of embodiment and power in the work of comparative theology. To prepare, I excavate insights from two important feminist voices—one in a monological hermeneutical space (biblical studies) and the second in a dialogical hermeneutical space (comparative theology).6 I set these insights in conversation with discussions in intercultural hermeneutics, defined by Schreiter as “critical reflection on interpretation as it occurs across cultural boundaries” (Schreiter 2016, 41). The scholarly work of feminist biblical scholarship and comparative theology, along with the intercultural hermeneutic insights, allows me to highlight what happens when the spectrum of who receives and interprets revelation is widened and its location shifted. Straightforwardly put, these scholars uncover the critical point that who does something changes what is done.

8.3.1  Insights from a Monological Hermeneutical Space I’ll first offer a much abridged overview of hermeneutics in contemporary biblical studies, what I characterize as a monological hermeneutical space—a space wherein interpretation takes place within a single religious context. That will provide a broader context for my main interlocutor here, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Biblical scholars, especially those with theological commitments, engage with hermeneutical theory, in part, to counterbalance the ascendancy of historical criticism in biblical studies. Historical criticism investigates the “world behind the text,” including the cultures and circumstances that produced the text (Schneiders 2016, 10). Sandra M. Schneiders explains, “Historical criticism has a built-in propensity for eternal regress. The answer to every historical question poses a new question about the even more remote history” (Schneiders 2016, 9). 6  By “monological hermeneutical space” I mean to describe a scholarly area that focuses on only one religious tradition, while dialogical hermeneutical space is meant to indicate a discipline that focuses on multiple religious traditions. Of course, the “monological” work of New Testament scholars, for example, engages many and diverse sources that are “outside” of Christianity (including Jewish, non-Christian, Greco-Roman ones). However, their primary focal point is a single— though not monolithic nor homogenous—tradition: Christianity. While New Testament exegesis should—in principle—bring Christians to authentically encounter “the other” (namely, ancient Israel) and thereby disrupt theological monologue, Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter convincingly argue that, through the centuries, Christian theology has domesticated and taken over Israel’s story, such that Christians no longer encounter the “otherness” of Israel’s story and continue in a theological monologue (Jennings 2010, 255; Carter 2008, 148).

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By contrast, hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the “world in front of the text,” which refers to “what the text produces when text and reader interact” (Schneiders 2016, 11). Biblical scholars using hermeneutical theory undertake what Schneider calls existential translation: the work of translating “religiously normative texts into the lives of the people for whom they are religiously normative” (Schneiders 2016, 9).7 While hermeneutically-attuned biblical scholars place special emphasis on drawing out the existential purposes of the biblical text, they do not necessarily reject the project of historical criticism. Following Schleiermacher, who stressed the importance of understanding the author for discerning a text’s meaning, and Gadamer, who shifted attention to the role of the reader, hermeneutical theorists are sensitive to both production and reception as historically-situated phenomena (Pilarski 2011, 17). What is more, hermeneutically-attuned biblical scholars use historical analysis to inform their ultimate purpose of providing existential translations, as the following example of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza will demonstrate. Schüssler Fiorenza’s groundbreaking work in biblical interpretation and feminist theory begins with the assertion that a new paradigm is needed to see the Bible as a source of revelatory truth. She names this new paradigm a feminist critical hermeneutics of liberation (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 30). Schüssler Fiorenza first lays out four models of biblical interpretation. She distances herself from the first two, the doctrinal model and the positivist historical exegetical model, and mines the third and fourth for resources to create her own. These are the dialogical-hermeneutical model and liberation theological model. The dialogical-hermeneutical model of interpretation relies on methods of historical investigation and reflects on the interaction between text and community in both production and reception, paying particular attention to the political aspects of those interactions. In other words, the dialogical-hermeneutical model explores both the historical investigation and existential translation tasks of the biblical interpreter. The liberation theological model contests the alleged objectivity and value-­ neutrality of interpretive scholarship, and shows how the interests of the dominant group are often served by the meanings they claim from the text. The model is exemplary for defying the doctrinal and positivist historical models (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 5–6). Schüssler Fiorenza combines elements of these two models to produce a feminist critical hermeneutical model, thus demanding a whole new way of reckoning with the Bible. It is not enough for feminists to say that the Bible has been problematically interpreted by patriarchal readers. It is not enough to study the patriarchal

7  To be sure, there are biblical scholars who use primarily historical-critical tools and who are also concerned with existential questions, and vice-versa. Schneiders presents this typology in order to highlight different priorities and points of emphasis made by biblical scholars, not to suggest that these are mutually exclusive alternatives. To complete the picture of her typology: The third element of the hermeneutical triad used by biblical scholars is the “world of the text.” This refers to the internal workings and dynamics of the text and is methodologically accessed through literary criticism.

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world from which the Bible emerges and show how it derives its androcentric elements. The problems of patriarchy are not just in how the Bible was produced, nor only in how it has been interpretatively received. Schüssler Fiorenza holds that the New Testament texts are faith responses to a concrete historical situation (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 33). The texts themselves cannot be taken as “trustworthy evidence of human history, culture, and religion” because they are thoroughly formed by a patriarchal culture. The biblical interpreter must go beyond the texts to reconstitute the historical world that formed them (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 29). There is no essentially good kernel to be abstracted from an androcentric husk. And so Schüssler Fiorenza’s work is devoted to retelling the story of Christian origins, so as to keep alive the “dangerous” memories of patriarchal oppression and women’s suffering, while at the same time reclaiming stories of women’s power and leadership that shaped the early Christian church (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 35–36). She therefore lifts up women’s suffering as the fundamental standard for theologically evaluating the Bible. When reading the Bible through this liberationist interpretative paradigm, the scholar’s job is to uncover and reject those texts that oppress, alienate, abuse, and subordinate women, while simultaneously recovering the elements of the texts—as well as extra-textual traditions—that honor and liberate women (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 32–33). Epistemological issues—Who knows? How do they know? What is the standard for knowledge?—lie at the heart of Schüssler Fiorenza’s theory of biblical interpretation. The feminist critical hermeneutical model privileges a certain set of subjective experiences, namely those characterized by suffering and silencing, for recognizing and evaluating revelation. Women’s experiences become the very standard by which revelation qualifies as revelation as the focus shifts from inwardly looking at the Bible alone to looking at the disciples as a community of equals (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, 34). In other words, the material conditions of women’s experiences determine not just how revelation is read, but in fact what it is. Schüssler Fiorenza gives two key insights useful for thinking about how comparative theologians can best conceptualize subjectivity. First, Schüssler Fiorenza reveals that subjectivity is not just a concept that scholars use to understand how texts are produced and read, but a tool to shift the material, lived conditions of groups of people. By interpreting the text according to her critical model, Schüssler Fiorenza offers women and other marginalized Christians access to a world (perhaps) previously experienced as off limits to them or out of step with their reality. She resources women with the capacity to see the New Testament as a “source of revelatory truth [while also a source of] patriarchal subordination and domination,” thereby empowering Christian women to reclaim the suffering and struggles of their foremothers, and to use the Bible as a way to keep alive those memories—the very memories it served to create. Schüssler Fiorenza facilitates women’s work to change

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the terms of their religious communities, both by re-writing their history and by re-­ defining the very revelation around which the community is organized.8 Schüssler Fiorenza’s second insight is that subjectivity needs to be constructed as a profoundly communal phenomenon. A woman reading the Bible is not just a woman reading the Bible. She is a woman in a community of women, formed by the history of women, who shares in the burdens (and power) of that community. The interpreting subject is real, material and embodied, and never abstract. In his recommendations for future directions in theological hermeneutics, Jeanrond calls for hermeneutical theorists to “widen our horizon to include the importance of the community of speakers and interpreters in which every interpreting subject has always already been communicatively shaped and feels at home” (Jeanrond 2013, 80). Schüssler Fiorenza models how to do just this—how to create a rich sense of the subject as a person-in-community. When applying these insights to a dialogical hermeneutical space—a space where interpretation takes place across religious and cultural boundaries—the political dimensions of interpretation stressed by Schüssler Fiorenza become all the more acute. Andreas Nehring calls for intercultural hermeneutical theorists to interrogate the contexts in which interpretation takes place, and to pay special attention to the structural issues that influence interpretation and subjectivity (Nehring 2011, 384). He raises contextual questions such as: What are the economic and political conditions under which interpretation takes place? How are cultural and religious identities represented by the ambient context—does the interpreter work with, or against, such representations? He also raises a set of questions specific to identity and the characterization of subjectivity: How are cultural identities formed? What are the means to formulate identity positions convincingly? What is the influence of intercultural encounters on the formulation of identity positions? How are subject positions determined? … How do people relate to religious texts to formulate subject positions? (Nehring 2011, 387)

8  Consider, by way of example, Schüssler Fiorenza’s discussion of Gospel resurrection stories, which come in two forms: the empty tomb tradition, associated with women, and the visionary experience tradition, which authorizes men as arbiters of Christological truth. Though the New Testament reports both traditions, the visionary experience tradition has taken precedence, according to Schüssler Fiorenza, and has become the main referent point for Christian resurrection theologies. Why? Recall that Schüssler Fiorenza’s hermeneutical method presupposes that the Bible is a source both of revelatory truth and patriarchal domination. On her reading, the tradition relativizes Mary’s visit to the tomb so as to not challenge male primacy (Schüssler Fiorenza 2004, 124), a primacy which is (not incidentally) afforded by the visionary experience story tradition. Keeping both resurrection stories in view, we see how the Gospel functions at once to subordinate women and to be revelatory of women’s special witness to Christological truth. Schüssler Fiorenza encourages women to reclaim the empty tomb as an ambiguous and originating space—a place where Christians may witness to suffering without celebrating it, and where proclamations that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ were vindicated. In making this move, she also urges women to embrace their agency to define the terms of Christian revelation, to keep alive the memories that the patriarchal tradition seeks to repress, and to transform spaces of death (Schüssler Fiorenza 2004, 124–125).

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Even if not fully answerable, keeping Nehring’s constellation of questions in view is a means to resist a flattened, two-dimensional account of the interpreting subject, something to which Schüssler Fiorenza is also fully committed.

8.3.2  Insights from a Dialogical Hermeneutical Space Of course, feminist biblical scholars like Schüssler Fiorenza are not the only theological scholars to complicate the picture of subjectivity. This happens in dialogical hermeneutical spaces as well, most intriguingly in the work of feminist comparative theologians. Michelle Voss Roberts confronts the field with challenging questions about women’s representation in the comparative enterprise. As a constructive feminist theologian, Voss Roberts is deeply invested in dismantling hegemonies, engaging difference meaningfully, and advancing women’s flourishing. She brings these feminist commitments fully to bear on her work as a comparative theologian. Although Voss Roberts recognizes a natural overlap between her chosen fields— feminist theology and comparative theology (they “find common ground with a shared interest in the particular”) she suspects that how comparative theologians have defined themselves inevitably contributes to overlooking “women’s voices and texts” (Voss Roberts 2010, 114–115). As Voss Roberts points out, “women have not featured prominently as the subjects of comparison” (Voss Roberts 2008, 643). This is due to the fact that the theologies and spiritual practices of women have rarely been considered to represent the tradition (either by scholars or by practitioners), and so “women’s difference from androcentric norms implies deviance and inauthenticity” (Voss Roberts 2010, 116). Furthermore because comparative theologians position themselves as “insiders” who reflect on the “insider viewpoints” of other religious traditions, they keep marginalized voices on the margins, even if unintentionally (Voss Roberts 2010, 115). Albertina Nugteren raises questions of comparative theology with like-minded concern. Regarding how Clooney frames the project of comparative theology, Nugteren notes, “The terms ‘we,’ ‘us,’ ‘ours,’ and ‘our own’ abound. Who is addressed and included here? Who feels self-evidently enclosed by these references?” (Nugteren 2011, 151–152). While her concern is directed to the question of whether faith-identity need be a prerequisite for doing comparative theology, one hears resonance with Voss Roberts’ unease about comparative theology being a discourse of insiders speaking to insiders. To come at these matters in a slightly different way, both Voss Roberts and Nugteren are forcing the questions: To whom do we presuppose revelation is available? Who do we imagine is the interpreting subject of familiar texts? And of strange ones? With appreciation for comparative theologians’ interest in positioning themselves as “insiders” who gain access to the “inside” of other traditions, Voss Roberts introduces Patricia Hill Collins’ phrase “outsiders within” as a meaningful way to widen the spectrum of subjects who are included in the comparative project.

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“Outsiders within” describes “persons on the margins of discourse and the underside of power relations” (Voss Roberts 2010, 116). A greater incorporation of women, as paradigmatic “outsiders within,” will enable comparative theologians to achieve a more comprehensive definition of theological traditions (Voss Roberts 2008, 643). Not only are “outsiders within” valuable for “challenging our definitions of traditions and theology,” but “outsiders within” might also rightly describe how comparative theologians themselves come to relate to their traditions, by virtue of undertaking serious comparative reading (Voss Roberts 2010, 115–116). In short, Voss Roberts wants to make the subjects of comparative theology a little less clearly delineated. The strength of Voss Roberts’ challenge to comparative theology turns on an insight that, to my mind, coheres with Schüssler Fiorenza’s hermeneutical model. She writes, “engagement with feminist theology must mean more than to ‘add women and stir’” (Voss Roberts 2010, 123). With this comment, Voss Roberts rejects a troubling form of reasoning that parallels what Elizabeth Spelman calls “additive analysis.” Additive analysis, also referred to as “the ampersand problem,” plagues (white) feminist theory. These terms illustrate how (white) feminist theorists tend to conceive of identity—its various layers and the relationships between them—in such a way as to preserve the normativity of a single identity. For example, if I attempt to explain women’s experiences of sexism by drawing comparisons with racism and classism, I end up “obscuring the racial and class identity of those described [or presumed] as women” whose experience of sexism I am trying to explain (Spelman 1988, 115). That is, the presumed subject of sexism does not, at base, experience racism and classism, since these are framed as “additional” to the root experience of sexism. And so, sexism is conceived, however unintentionally, as a thing that “belongs” to economically-stable white women. Likewise, if comparative theology incorporates engagement with women’s religious thought and practice in addition to the work it already does, it will only reinforce the character of comparative theology as belonging to the insiders of traditions. But Voss Roberts offers a way out. Voss Roberts does not call for the voices of women, the marginalized, the “outsiders within” to supplement the ongoing work of comparative theology, but instead to reconfigure the discourse and its methods. Privileging the “outsider within” promises to nullify the problem of additive analysis. Voss Roberts concludes her discussion on a note of hope for comparative theology as a discourse organized around the “outsider within”: “We can inquire how marginal subjects accommodate, survive, and resist hegemonies; and we can bear witness of the theological implications of their practices” (Voss Roberts 2010, 126).9 If we read Voss Roberts alongside Schüssler Fiorenza, Voss Roberts’ injunction to “bear witness” carries more weight than just holding alive a memory. Instead, it is the condition of the ­possibility of reconstituting the stories we tell about what our religious traditions

9  As Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza exemplifies, it is possible for monological spaces to be organized around “outsiders within” as well.

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are and what gives them life, as well as shaping the futures for “outsiders within” anew.

8.4  Embodied Subjectivity When feminist theorists like Schüssler Fiorenza and Voss Roberts theorize about how subjective experience affects how one reads and interprets revelation—of familiar texts and strange ones, they pay close attention to the conditions under which subjective experience is formed. My interest is to investigate how we conceive of subjectivity in relation to corporeality, material reality, and embodiment. More specifically, I suggest that religious identity be understood as a habit of bodying, and one which exists at the confluence of other habits of bodying, including race and gender. To accomplish this theoretical work, I use the work of feminist-pragmatist Shannon Sullivan who herself builds on John Dewey’s philosophical foundation. The point of this part of the essay is pragmatist in spirit. My aim is to frame comparative theology as a practice that shifts how we experience and use our religious “habits of bodying” in order to shift habits of race and gender. In other words, shifting religious habits can be the “first mover” in a chain of other shifts.

8.4.1  The Habits That Make Bodies Bodies, according to Dewey, are composed of habits. Dewey defines a habit as a predisposition to act in and transact with physical, social, political, and natural environments in specific ways. It is a pattern of response to environmental conditions. We acquire our habits from our communities and the environments in which we exist. By definition, we are blind to these predispositions. We enact them without being aware of them. (It is possible to become aware of our habits and even to change them, as both Dewey and Sullivan argue and I will address later.) By routinely and unconsciously enacting a set of habits, a person becomes that set of habits. This is a strong account of habit. We are more than just creatures of habits: We are our habits. Sullivan uses the helpful example of driving a manual transmission to ease her readers into the theory (Sullivan 2001, 92). When a driver has the habit of operating a stick shift—when she can genuinely be called a manual driver—she does not need to think about how to shift gears or to pause before doing so. Instead, the actions come automatically. If she does have to pause or think, she—by definition—does not yet have the habit of driving a manual. She cannot be called a manual driver. To be sure, being able to drive a manual transmission is a shallow aspect of who a person is. “Who a person is” is a common-sense, straightforward way of talking about

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identity, one that I recommend using here.10 Identity terms (manual driver, automatic driver, black, white, woman, man, Christian, Muslim, etc.) serve as short-­ hands for the meanings that bodies, formed by habits, convey. There are a number of more rooted and fundamental layers of identity that are given life by habit in the very same way as driving a manual. Sullivan explores gender and race as embodied habits that form identity, and, thinking with her, I consider religious identity (that is, Catholic-Christian, Sunni-Muslim, etc.) to be an embodied habit that intersects with racialized and gendered identities as well. Gender, Sullivan argues, is a habit of bodying. She uses the word “bodying” to accentuate the active and progressive nature of habituated embodiment (Sullivan 2001, 30). Gender is not just a label or a static marker, but instead a habituated activity or performance. Consider these examples. Public transportation users will likely be familiar with the phenomenon of “manspreading,” which is the male practice of spreading his legs as wide as possible to take up as much of the subway bench or bus seats as possible. Most men may not even notice when they are “manspreading,” just as many women may not be aware of their tendency to cross their legs when they sit down, particularly when in the company of others. Manspreading and leg-­ crossing are both habits of gendered bodying that, at first glance, may seem inconsequential or harmless (though not to the person looking for a seat on the bus!). And yet, it is in the very minutiae of how we use and experience our bodies that identities, like gender, are configured and, by extension, that the quality of lived existence is regulated. Moving to the idea that habit is a form of transaction, Sullivan explains that Dewey’s is a “transactional” account, a word intended to convey exchange. In this case, the exchange occurs between bodies and environments (physical, social, political, and natural). Sullivan elucidates, “Habits are formed in and through an organism’s transactions with its various environments” (Sullivan 2001, 34–35). Bodies are shaped by their environments. Because transactions are not unidirectional, environments are shaped by the bodies that exist in them. Environments are not just the backdrop for bodies, but are “partners” in making bodies what they are. At the same time, environments do not determine what bodies are, but neither are they unaffected by bodies. Capitalist America exemplifies a political-economic environment with which bodies transact. I, as an American, am predisposed to interact with my capitalist environment in a particular way. As such, everything seems to me—even if unwittingly—available for sale; it’s only a matter of finding the right price. That I tend to treat objects (including services provided by living beings) as goods to be purchased and consumed is, in part, due to the environment in which I, as a material body, exist. (And, on Sullivan’s theory, I only realize this to be the case when my habit is disrupted somehow, perhaps by a shift in the environment in which I transact; for example, I visit a different type of political-economic environment.) I, as a material  While Sullivan’s theory engages questions around identity, and floats around defining identity, her primary interest is not to explicate this famously slippery concept. I introduce the word identity as a straightforward way of talking about how we understand persons.

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body, also strengthen this political and economic environment by purchasing and consuming objects as though they are goods. An exchange exists between consumer-­me and my capitalist environment. I am created by this environment, but I also sustain and reinforce capitalist-America by abiding by its norms. Race, like gender, is also a habit of bodying. Racialized embodiment arises from how a person transacts with her environment, which means that a person’s “race” (or better, how a person is racialized) is constituted by others’ perceptions of and reactions to her (Sullivan 2006, 159), both at the interpersonal and institutional or social level. Transactional in nature, the habit of race is both afforded socially and corporeally experienced and lived. As Sullivan states, “Race is not a veneer laid over a racially neutral core of a person. It is not something that can be eliminated by the conscious decision not to have a race or the rational understanding that biologistic conceptions of race have no scientific validity…” (Sullivan 2001, 162). Sullivan, due to her social location and racialization (a location and racialized identity that I share), is most interested in using these ideas to help her explore whiteness. How white bodies occupy—some might say dominate or control—mainstream spaces is one of the most salient features of the habit of whiteness. Because mainstream environments have been ordered by and filled with whites historically, whites are enabled to transact freely with those environments, whereas bodies-of-­ color are inhibited from doing so. Whites extend their license for “free transaction” to non-mainstream (that is, non-white) spaces as well. Sullivan calls this the “ontological expansivism of whiteness”: the habit of viewing all spaces as available for white inhabitation (Sullivan 2006, 144). This marks another point to which I will return. Habits of whiteness, such as moving through spaces freely, constitute my experience as a white body. In turn, my white body conveys a set of meanings about where I am entitled to go and what empowers me to do so. When I enact the habits of whiteness, I not only communicate these meanings to those around me, I also “deepen the grooves” of the habits of previous (white) generations, into whose lineage I am habituated. Habit, in its very nature, is a conservative structure that resists change (Sullivan 2006, 36–37). Even still, because habits are transactional, they are fungible. “As transactional participants in meaning,” Sullivan writes, “human organisms often help secure existing habits and cultural customs, but they are also capable of transforming them” (Sullivan 2001, 40). We needn’t be held hostage by our habits nor be imprisoned by our environments.

8.4.2  E  mbodied Religious Identity at the Confluence of Other Identities To review, Sullivan shows how there is a very tight circle between cultural environment and habit: From our cultural environment, we learn our habits, and our habits feed our culture. The habits we enact are comfortable and familiar to us, Sullivan

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states, because they are us (Sullivan 2001, 96). And it is by our habits, that we form and express our sense of who we are—our identity. Under a transactional understanding of identity, it is fallacious to break one’s identity apart into discrete parts. A strength of transaction theory is that it controverts additive analysis and nullifies the ampersand problem. No “element” of identity exists first or independent of any other “element” of identity, nor of the environment in which a person is situated. Different aspects of a person help create and contribute to other aspects of a person, and the world itself influences how the co-constituting formation occurs (Sullivan 2001, 20–21). Religious identity, I propose and develop more fully below, needs to be understood under this rubric as well. Key for my purposes is that transaction theory ought to drive theological analysis rather than supplement it. We cannot understand the lived realities of religion in the abstract, and thus apart from embodied environments, which—importantly—are always and inevitably shot through with power. We must instead begin with environments and attend to how religion is lived out by persons within those embodied contexts. To readers trained in feminist thought, the points made here may not seem particularly innovative. Third-wave feminists have long pointed out the intersectional nature of identity. Yet there are some distinctive features to Sullivan’s way of thinking that are worth drawing out before moving my proposal forward. First, the pragmatically-­based theory is directed toward its potential for changing lived experience. The end of the theory is not to describe, but to enact change. Second, because habits are brought about by transaction with environment, the way to shift habits is to shift how that transaction happens or to shift environments, or both. And because layers of identities are interlocking, making transactional shifts around one habit of bodying may produce a change in another habit of bodying. Third, because the theory focuses on embodiment, the greatest potential for effecting change comes through focusing on the body and what it communicates through its exchange with the world. That the theory centers on embodied communication appears to be in tension with both comparative theology and hermeneutics, which are heavily textually focused and linguistic in nature. I will elaborate more on this point in the next section but, in my view, this fact does not present a problem, but instead generates a productive tension with comparative theology and hermeneutics. Religious identities are embodied and habituated. While I do not have the space to develop a full conceptual framework here about the habits that give rise to religious identity per se, it is still possible to maintain that religious identities are inseparable from racialized and gendered habits of embodiment. Thus the identity terms “Catholic-Christian” and “Sunni-Muslim” connote religious habits of bodying that always and only exist at the confluence of other forms of habituated embodiment. Further, extrapolating from Sullivan’s theory, we can see how a certain religious habit serves to create certain habits of gender and race as well.

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The work of Willie James Jennings enables me to explicate one example of how a religious and racial identity converge, and indeed produce each other. Jennings stands at the forefront of contemporary Christian theologians who call for Christianity to recognize its entanglement with racism. He argues that the theological imagination inherited by Western Christianity is indissolubly related to the legacy of colonialism, and it is out of colonialism that our colloquial racial categories, “white” and “black,” emerge. The colonialist project was justified by the aim to convert native people to Christian faith, which “inscribe[d] a new reality for black flesh” (Jennings 2010, 27). By divine right, white colonialists interpreted all racial identities to be “on a trajectory toward an endless becoming organized around white bodies” (Jennings 2010, 61). Jennings explains, “Europeans enacted racial agency as a theologically articulated way of understanding their bodies in relation to new spaces and new peoples and their new power over those spaces and peoples” (Jennings 2010, 58). Whiteness, Jennings maintains, became (and remains) the “rarely spoken but always understood organizing conceptual frame” of Christianity, wherein “blackness is the fundamental tool of that organizing conceptuality” (Jennings 2010, 25). There is therefore a “racial calculus deeply embedded” in the Christian theological vision (Jennings 2010, 275). At its core, the theological environment that shapes Christians is one that positions bodies along a spectrum of race-based salvific possibility. If one accepts this history of Christianity as the primary “transacting” environment for Christian identity formation—or even entertains it as a hypothetical possibility—this carries significant implications. Christians habitually transact with the world and its people in a such a way as to affirm this racial calculus and—if blind to this predisposition— they also deepen the grooves of the calculus. Recall that Schüssler Fiorenza and Voss Roberts insist on paying attention to the conditions that give rise to subjective experience, and how those conditions shape our reading habits. If the condition informing Christian subjectivity is a deeply racialized one, what does this mean for Christianity’s encounter with difference, including how Christian theologians interpret “strange texts”? Reading across religious boundaries is an inherently racially-inflected exercise. (And, as Voss Roberts shows, it is also gendered, though I have left that aside here.) If Christian identity is bound up with whiteness, as Jennings contends, this means that comparative theologians need to be especially aware of the white habit of ontological expansiveness—the habit of transacting freely with any and every environment. I have argued along similar lines elsewhere that, more than being an obstacle, the racially-inflected nature of comparative interpretation should be an impetus for the work, and an opportunity to uncover, and disrupt, how racialized identity functions therein (Brecht 2016). The question is, to what extent can comparative theology make us aware of the habits of bodying that are bound up in religious bodying?

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8.4.3  C  omparative Theology as a Gateway to Somaesthetic Practice There is no way around habit. Because bodies are composed of habits, the best we can do is replace some habits with others; habits can never be eliminated (Sullivan 2001, 95). Which habits do we maintain and which do we break? In what new ways do we habituate ourselves, and by what means? Sullivan offers a few clues into how we might bring about change to our habits of bodying—recall that the purpose of this way of thinking is not primarily to theorize but to improve transactional relationships between bodies and their environments (Sullivan 2001, 170). Occupying disparate habitual roles is one way to shift transactional relationships. Sullivan uses the example of her experience of being a woman and a philosophy professor. There is a constant friction between the habits of those embodied roles. “Constant conflict wears on the rigidity of both habits,” writes Sullivan, “and demands a reconfiguration of them” (Sullivan 2001, 106). Hypothetical construction is another way to shift transactional relationships. Hypothetical construction Sullivan defines as the “deliberate activity that works to disrupt the habitual, nonconscious ways by which one approaches and understands others as one transacts with the world” (Sullivan 2001, 76). While we cannot simply will that our bodies convey different meanings to the world, we can work to become more reflective about our habits—tweaking and adjusting them ever so slightly— such that they may evidence an expanded set of meanings to the world (Sullivan 2001, 77). By offering a new set of meaning for one’s body, new possibilities for transactional relationships are awakened. Both disparate habitual roles and hypothetical construction can be starting points for somaesthetics, which is the work of caring for and trying to improve bodily existence (Sullivan 2001, 118). Somaesthetic practice seeks to re-educate the body. Sullivan offers three guidelines for this work: First, somaesthetics requires us to be critical about what the body means, and what its implications are. That is, we must “read” habits with a critical eye to their power dynamics. Second, somaesthetics requires that we re-conceptualize how consciousness, effort, and agency function in the work of changing a body’s habits. That is, somaesthetics encourages us to see that we have some measure of agency over our bodily habits. And third, somaesthetics presupposes a dynamic, communal process, not an atomistic or individualistic one, to re-educate one’s body (Sullivan 2001, 123). My hope is to show how comparative theology may deliver a Christian to somaesthetic practice. I do not contend that comparative theology is, in itself, a somaesthetic practice, but rather that it may be a gateway to it. Comparative theologians do not use the language of “disparate habitual roles” or “hypothetical construction,” just like they do not explicitly invoke hermeneutical theory. Nevertheless, what comparative theologians do—what they embody—looks very much like occupying disparate habitual roles and undertaking hypothetical construction. James L. Fredericks’ reflections on comparative method are helpful for explaining the correspondence I envision between comparative theological engagement, on the one

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hand, and the experiences that are preparatory for somaesthetic work, on the other. Fredericks is a leader in naming dialogue and friendship as the necessary handmaidens to comparative theology. Comparative theologians work by looking microscopically at an aspect of a religion. This close examination forces comparative theologians to learn and understand that tradition “on its own terms” (Fredericks 2004, xiii). Doing this, in Fredericks’ experience, generates risk and creates disorientation and unease. This is not something to be backed away from, for Fredericks believes that Christians are called to “openness to the unforeseen and uncontrollable” (Fredericks 1998, 166). He asserts that only theologies that “place Christian self-understanding at risk” are capable of enriching Christian faith (Fredericks 1995, 520). Comparative theologians invite risk by being founded on dialogue, a practice which he compares to improvisational art forms, which are at their best when “things are no longer in our control” (Fredericks 2002, 202). While Fredericks’ comparative theological insights are the result of careful and laborious scholarly work, his work is animated by interreligious friendships forged in dialogue. Dialogue and friendships are closely aligned—even entangled—with his comparative method, and he seems to promote a dialectical relationship between the two. The comparative theologian strives for dialogical accountability, which Clooney describes as remaining committed to the practices, beliefs, and rituals of one’s faith tradition while at the same time honoring another’s practices, beliefs, and rituals (Clooney 2007, 661). Another way of framing this, as well as the risk that Fredericks describes, is through Sullivan’s language of disparate habitual roles and hypothetical construction. For Sullivan, occupying disparate habitual roles erodes the rigidity of each role, and hypothetical construction is a way to disrupt one’s ordinary habits so as to become aware of them. Comparative theologians already accept the idea that their work sheds light on the theological habits of Christians, including the habit of working monologically. By engaging comparatively, by seeking dialogical accountability and embracing the vulnerability that comes with risk, comparative theologians reveal the tendency of Christian theologians to not do these things—to remain on one side of the valley, to invoke the imagery used at the beginning of this essay. My proposal is that comparative theologians ought embrace the opportunity to shed light on the embodied habits of Christians, not just the theological ones. Engaging comparatively in the way of the new comparative theologians demands more than studying texts side-by-side from the comfort of the library. While the books and essays comparative theologians write may emerge from studying texts side-by-side in the library, there is a whole constellation of embodied activities that allows for this study in the first place, all of which are enabled (or restricted) by racialized, gendered, and classed habits of bodying: language acquisition, travel to remote places as well as ethnic enclaves within one’s home city, shared prayers and meals with other practitioners, smelling other places of worship, sitting in other holy sites, listening to music and chanted prayer, and—as Fredericks highlights time and again—forming friendship and having dialogues. Even those who only engage comparative theology primarily through undergraduate teaching report an

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array of embodied activities that accompany their pedagogical work: site visits, film screenings, conversations with local religious leaders, role playing (see Brecht and Locklin 2016). While these embodied exercises support the textual, interpretative of comparative theology, they are by no means ancillary to it. The live, embodied activities chronicled above force comparative theologians to transact in new environments, and ideally remind theologians of their bodies, how they inhabit the world in particular ways, and how power operates in their various transactions. Like the manual transmission driver borrowing a friend’s automatic car who finds her left foot depressing a ghost clutch at the same time she brakes with her right, new environments disrupt the automaticity of our habits. We are shaken into awareness of our predispositions. What was familiar becomes strange, which Sullivan sees as the precondition of real communication across bodies (Sullivan 2001, 75). And, if Schüssler Fiorenza is to be heeded, comparative theologians must do more than just be shaken into awareness, they must act in response and, possibly, shift accepted ideas about what “counts” as revelatory. For example, comparative theologians can juxtapose their readings—which emerge from transacting in new environments and disrupting “ordinary” theological habits—with the work of scholars like Willie James Jennings so as to create pathways for revealing layers of identity previously closed off. My whiteness may seem to me a fixed feature of my lived experience, while I regard my Christian identity as something that changes over time—growing and developing, ebbing and flowing. Embracing its risks, I come to comparative theology with the aim of growing my Christian faith—strengthening this feature of my identity—and contributing to its “flow.” Learning with comparative theologians has proven to be a powerful way to shed light on my self-understanding as a Christian. By taking Sullivan and Jennings to heart, comparative theology also proves to be a powerful way of shedding light on the layers of myself that are in many ways more apparent and external (such as my whiteness) and more inaccessible for being so. When I consider Hedges’ Gadamerian-question, “What is the nature of my partiality?” I realize that an answer isolating just one layer of myself is disingenuous. When I pose Moyaret’s Ricoeurian-question, “What brings me to this place of comparison reading in the first place?” I realize motivations may be generated less by my intellectual interests than by the habits of my bodying. I have made the following points: 1. Comparative theology can benefit from more deeply engaging hermeneutical theory, specifically around questions of subjectivity. This involves questions such as: Who interprets? How does their lived experience shape their interpretations? How is their embodied reality affected by their interpretations? 2. Feminist theologians demonstrate the value—or better, the necessity—of prioritizing subjectivity in the hermeneutical work of reading revelation, internally and across traditions. Paying attention to whose voices are interpreted and who interprets matters. It creates an opportunity for re-defining the terms of religious traditions, makes room for a wider spectrum of voices to participate, opens

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a­ venues for a new future for those invested in the work, and breaks the hold of one set of interpreters and interpretations. 3. Lived experience is embodied. Embodiment is constituted by habits, which are strong but also able to be shifted, changed, and replaced. Race and gender are two significant habits of bodying that shape how people understand their lived experience. Religious identity is embedded in these and other habits of embodiment. 4. Religious identity is a feature of identity widely seen as much less body-­ dependent, much less “given,” than race and gender. If one wants to shift habits of race and gender, examining the habits of religious embodiment through comparative theology may present a powerful way of accessing the seemingly inaccessible, a risk perhaps not unlike crossing a deep ravine by way of a little used bridge. The courageous work of intentionally disturbing one’s comfortable habits can also be the work of becoming an “outsider within”—a subjective position from which the fullness of revelation be taken in and known.

References Barth, Karl. 1936–1977. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 4 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Brecht, Mara. 2016. Soteriological Privilege. In Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin, 85–97. New York: Routledge. Brecht, Mara, and Reid B. Locklin. 2016. In Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin. New York: Routledge. Carter, J. Kameron. 2008. Race: A Theological Account. New York: Oxford University Press. Clooney, Francis X. 1993. Theology After Vedānta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. Comparative Theology. In The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. Kathryn Tanner, John Webster, and Iain Torrance, 653–669. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Di Noia, J.A. 2000. Religion and the Religions. In The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster, 243–256. New York: Cambridge University Press. Duffy, Stephen. 1999. A Theology of the Religions and/or a Comparative Theology? Horizons. 26: 105–115. Fredericks, James L. 1995. The Incomprehensibility of God: A Buddhist Reading of Aquinas. Theological Studies 56: 506–520. ———. 1998. Interreligious Friendship: A New Theological Virtue. Journal of Ecumenical Studies 35: 159–174. ———. 2002. Conference on Pure Land Buddhism in Dialogue with Christian Theology. Buddhist Christian Studies 22: 201–202. ———. 2004. Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity. Maryknoll: Orbis.

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Green, Garrett. 2006. Introduction: Barth as a Theorist of Religion. To Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion. Translated by Garret Green. New York: T&T Clark. Greggs, Tom. 2008. Bringing Barth’s Critique of Religion to the Inter-Faith Table. Journal of Religion 88: 75–94. Hedges, Paul. 2012. The Old and New Comparative Theologies: Discourses on Religion, the Theology of Religions, Orientalism and the Boundaries of Traditions. Religions 3: 1120–1137. ———. 2016. Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics: A Gadamerian Approach to Interreligious Interpretation. Religions 7. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7010007. Jeanrond, Werner G. 2013. Subjectivity and Objectivity in Theological Hermeneutics: The Potential of Love for Interfaith Encounter. Al-Banyān: Journal of Qur’ān and Hadith Studies 11: 71–91. Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kilbinger, Kristin Beise. 2010. Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology. In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, 21–42. New York: T&T Clark. Lambkin, Magdalen. 2011. Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutic of Scripture: Problems and Possibilities. In Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe: Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik, and Judith Gruber, 103–128. New York: Rodopi. Locklin, Reid B., and Hugh Nicholson. 2010. The Return of Comparative Theology. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78: 477–514. Moyaert, Marianne. 2011. Comparative Theology in Search of a Hermeneutical Framework. In Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe: Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik, and Judith Gruber, 161–186. New York: Rodopi. ———. 2012. The Theology of Interreligious Dialogue: From Soteriological Openness to Hermeneutical Openness. Modern Theology 28: 25–52. ———. 2014. In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters. Lanham: Lexington Books. Nehring, Andreas. 2011. On the Communication of Sacred Texts: Intercultural Comparison or Intercultural Encounter. In Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe: Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik, and Judith Gruber, 381– 396. New York: Rodopi. Netland, Harold. 1999. Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Quest of Truth. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing. Nicholson, Hugh. 2010. The New Comparative Theology and the Problem of Theological Hegemonism. In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, 43–62. New York: T&T Clark. Nugteren, Albertina. 2011. Entitled to Understand: A Critical Look at Comparative Theology. In Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe: Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik, and Judith Gruber, 149–160. New York: Rodopi. Pilarski, Ahida E. 2011. The Past and Future of Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics. Biblical Theology Bulletin 41: 16–23. Schneiders, Sandra M. 2016. Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II: Emerging Forms of Intercultural Hermeneutics. In Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, ed. Anthony Godzieba and Bradford E.  Hinze, 3–17. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Schreiter, Robert J. 2016. Emerging Forms of Intercultural Hermeneutics. In Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, ed. Anthony Godzieba and Bradford E. Hinze, 40–55. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. 1983. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Continuum.

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———. 2004. Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology. New York: Continuum. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon. Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habit of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Voss Roberts, Michelle. 2008. Flowing and Crossing: The Somatic Theologies of Mechthild and Lalleśwarī. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76: 638–663. ———. 2010. Gendering Comparative Theology. In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, 109–128. New York: T&T Clark.

Chapter 9

Into the Blue: Swimming as a Metaphor for Revelation Michele Saracino

my sole pastime, my only sport, was the purest of all: swimming. It seems to me that I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element. My body becomes the direct instrument of my mind, the author of its ideas. To plunge into water, to move one’s whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love. (Charles Sprawson (2012-08-29). Paul Valéry from Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (Kindle Locations 1245–1250). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition).

Abstract  There are few entities in the cosmos that convey an analogous sense of God’s mystery and awesomeness. Water is one of them. In this essay, I discuss the spirituality of water and water-related practices. Specifically, I look to what swimmers do when they get a feel for the water as a model for approaching and understanding revelation. I begin my essay with a discussion of the gravity of water, and then move to an analysis of water-related religious rituals, elaborating mostly on the water traditions in Judaism and Christianity, including Mikveh baths and baptism. Next, I explain the practice of swimming as an exercise that can open us to a deeper respect for the environment, enhance our embrace of divine revelation, and connect us in richer ways to others. Swimmers are trained to get a “feel for the other.” They develop this feel through learning how to navigate hydrodynamic drag, which is the resistance to the physical movement of their swimming stroke caused by the surrounding fluid. As I build this analogy between water/creator and swimmer/creature, I explain how getting a feel for God and others, like when a swimmer works through drag, involves being open to improvisation in which we are called to relinquish damaging patterns of relating to others, mourn those ways, and create spaces M. Saracino (*) Manhattan College, The Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_9

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for a more flourishing life. Finally, I discuss how opening ourselves to improvisation and mourning allows us to relate to all others with empathy and grace. Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, as well as Leslie Jamison, an American novelist and essayist, are important interlocutors here. Keywords  Revelation · Swimming as metaphor · Otherness and relationality Plunge into the water. Wet and cold, I propel myself forward through this fluid other. The gentle wake of the water caresses my cheek, shoulder, and leg. Suspended in a dreamlike state, I feel weightless; and anything seems possible. Before long, the dream ends and my lungs tighten, compelling me to breathe. After a short rendezvous with air, I am submerged in water once again. I want to return to the dream; but something feels different. It is difficult to decide whether the water is invigorating, irritating, or both. The voluptuous other shocks my system and summons me to vigilance. It refuses to retreat. If I want to get to the other side, I need a strategy for dealing with the mysterious entity flowing around me. I recall in my mind’s eye all the tips of how to swim more efficiently. Each stroke demands that I pay attention to the changing aspects of the aquatic other. The way it moves—pushing and pulling on me, affects my ability to progress. In order to find my way, I work toward developing a feel for the water. In what follows, readers are asked to consider that like when swimming, “we live our lives in the middle of things.”1 Whether in the middle of a relationship with God or with another other, we find ourselves immersed in our desires for love and in our fears of failure, hoping for a better future and grieving for losses of the past. And similar to with swimming, we are called to maneuver this middleness with a blend of intentionality and improvisation—to get a feel for the water. In his work on aesthetics, George Steiner describes this predicament of being in the middle in terms of a “Saturday” experience: “But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity.”2 After the work of Friday and before the celebration of Sunday, there is Saturday, the liminal position of being as being in the middle, where grace and possibility abound. In a paradox of sorts, being there in the Saturday presents as an event of mourning. It is a space and moment in the opera of our everyday lives to let go of the past and prepare for the future. For deep relationships to develop with others, we need to be open to loss and change. Mourning in this sense has value and even virtue by allowing an individual to make adjustments and be transformed by the other.

1  Sherry Turkle. “Introduction: The Things That Matter,” in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 6. 2  George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 232.

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Although engaging any other is analogous to being submerged in water, arguably, swimming as a metaphor is uniquely suited for revelation because like water, the divine is uncontrollable and as much of a mystery. Instead of pretending we can know God entirely, or that we can master the relationship with God, we need to develop ways to deal with the mysterious divine other who calls us to grace and love. Like the swimmer who works on getting a feel for the water in order to swim more efficiently, the believer must learn how to get a feel for God in order to flourish. With all its promise, swimming as a metaphor for revelation is far from perfect. First of all, it requires an appreciation of ordinary embodied experience as a potential site of revelation. To be sure liturgical moments, such as prayer and the sacraments, are opportunities for engaging God; nonetheless, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint experiences outside of our religious horizon as windows into revelation. Even if one agrees that everyday happenings are potential frames for interpreting revelation, then the question becomes, which of our specific mundane experiences are most relevant to theological exploration? Is it possible for a sport or exercise, like swimming, which is at times competitive, to be a place where we can find insight into how God opens to us, giving way to grace and empathy? This really becomes problematic if one envisions in their mind’s eye an Olympic swimmer splashing down the lane, determined and breathless, or the open water swimmer in the seascape who deliberately pulls down the arms and legs of other swimmers to get ahead in the race. It somehow seems wrong for revelation to be conflated with competition. To this point, that is not what is being suggested here. Instead, the broader process of swimming, that is to say, how the swimmer develops stroke technique in order to get a feel for the water, is the focus. Like with swimming, when dealing with God and all others, individuals would do well to acquire techniques and approaches that are neither necessarily aggressive nor completely submissive, rather that defer to and work with the other. Similar to swimming, specifically when the swimmer plunges into the water and is engaged in the middle of a swim, encountering the other is about learning to respect and love the other without a sense of certainty and safety, and being open to all that lies ahead. There is another reason why swimming as a metaphor for revelation is less than perfect and may even make some uncomfortable, namely because at various points in this essay, water takes on a symbolic status. Admittedly, in these pages, ethical concerns about our current global water crises are never assessed, including that of water pollution, scarcity of water, and so on. In a world in which so many are without clean drinking water, it may seem morally wrong to ponder something as frivolous as swimming. Put simply, one could ask if one’s moral compass becomes skewed when the significance of water and all related ethical water issues become obscured by a metaphor? These are important issues; and surely, in no way is this essay an attempt to deny or even downplay these problems. On the contrary, what’s written here is an effort to demonstrate just how important water and all other others are in our lives. In his book The Blue Mind, marine biologist Wallace Nichols suggests that doomsday scenarios about climate change, overfishing, and other issues related to environmental degradation are not the only way or necessarily most productive way

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for emphasizing the importance of water. For Nichols, scholarship only related to these subjects results in one feeling overwhelmed, potentially forcing some individuals to shut down emotionally and spiritually, and ultimately leaving some feeling paralyzed and powerless to do anything or imagine otherwise. As an alternative, Nichols urges his readers to tell good stories about water in order to change attitudes toward it and themselves: “We need to tell a story that helps people explore and understand the profound and ancient emotional and sensual connections that lead to a deeper relationship with water. The Blue Mind story seeks to reconnect people to nature in ways that make them feel good, and shows them how water can help them become better versions of themselves.”3 Reflecting on the practice of swimming is a modest effort at such a Blue Mind story. If after considering swimming as a metaphor for revelation, one’s perspective on water and our global water crisis shifts, that is wonderful, and even more, a graced moment. However, here my primary aim is to explore new interpretations of the creaturely encounter with the divine, and what’s more, to envision better relationships with all others.

9.1  Full Disclosure Writing on this particular aquatic metaphor for revelation blends my interest in contemporary continental philosophy with my passion for swimming. I began swimming regularly at my local health club several years ago after undergoing minor knee surgery. I desired a change in my fitness routine, wanting to reinvent myself, so to speak. The first few times in the lap pool were strange and awkward. I had entered a new community with rules about swim caps, swim times, and lane etiquette. There was a steep learning curve to swimming on a regular basis, in other words, in making it a ritual. However, once learning the guidelines, I was freed up to embrace the experiences of being in the water. And now, each time I take the plunge, all those distractions fade away. Something spiritual happens. It is not always pleasurable. In fact, most of the time it is unsettling; and that is the exact frame used here for approaching our relationships with God and others. These relationships are unsettling because we dwell with others in the middle of things. Like entering a party that is already underway, in which guests already are mingling, the wine is running out, and the inside jokes are established, we are thrust into relationships. Things are in process; so much so that everything that is revealed to us needs to be engaged as part of the middle, as a Saturday experience. We enter relationships with others with a sense of agency and intentionality, all the while knowing that we have limited control and are expected to improvise. Coincidentally, my favorite day to swim is Saturday. Usually the most strenuous workout of the week, I muddle through Saturday swims with hopes of finishing. The 3  Wallace J. Nichols, The Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014), 257–58.

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epitome of in-between-ness, the Saturday swim arrives after a long week of work, school, family responsibilities, and unforeseen problems. Like with my swim, Saturday—the actual day, promises hope for renewal and transformation. Saturday is the moment to let go and begin again. It is a day of mourning all that went wrong and trying to recreate all that has gone right. Beyond surviving the metaphorical Friday, if one desires to flourish on Sunday, they need to learn ways to embrace Saturday by being thrust into the middle. Following Steiner’s words on Saturday, we all might benefit from inhabiting that physical, emotional, and spiritual space for a while. After all, being in the middle and developing a feeling for the other is not about controlling the other and the situation of encounter; rather it is about being undone and opened by the other. Judith Butler, an American philosopher, describes this process of being undone by otherness in her work, Giving an Account of Oneself: “To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, be claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-­ sufficient “I” as a kind of possession.”4 Giving oneself over to the unpredictability of the Saturday breaks free of the often unfulfilled expectations for certain outcomes or rewards in relationships with the other, perhaps creating an opening for deeper, previously unfathomable relationships—for things not hoped for.

9.2  Submitting to Submission Christian believers in many ways have to resign themselves and make peace with being in the middle, that is to say, with residing in the Saturday with the other. I used to cringe at the word resign as it seemed to me to reek of failure and despair. To resign oneself to something connotes that a person is giving up on a desired outcome. We are supposed to be in control of things and use our minds and bodies to get things accomplished with efficiency and skill. So resignation seems to be admitting that we don’t have control or power. What’s more, in contemporary, global capitalist culture, “giving up” is looked at in terms of weakness. Don’t give up. No pain, no gain. We have all heard these mantras and probably others as well. They are harmless in and of themselves. In fact, in many cases challenging oneself to reach and even overcome limits has its benefits. However, the pressure to push beyond limits also has a shadow side; particularly, it does not allow for human beings to reveal how vulnerable they truly are. Jean Vanier, a Canadian Catholic thinker and humanitarian devoted his life to struggling against this modern problem of avoiding creaturely vulnerability. As founder of L’Arche, a global network of residential communities where traditionally “abled” and “disabled” people live in Christian fellowship, appreciating the other’s humanity and gifts, Vanier attests to the grace of vulnerability in all relationships.

 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 136.

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For Vanier, vulnerability is an invitation to enter into communion with God and ­others. In his work, Becoming Human, Vanier describes how each one of us is called to open to our vulnerability and to imagine our limits as ways to connect with God and others. While there exist significant cultural pressures to be independent, in control, and knowledgeable about everything and anything, according to Vanier, these pressures leave us with what he calls a “false” sense of self whereby our freedom closes us in on ourselves. In order to “become human” we have to risk this pretense of being free for ourselves only and embrace the liminality of relationships with all types of individuals and communities.5 Thinking through the work of Vanier and others like him, one might consider resignation not as a simple act of giving up because of laziness or inadequacy. On the contrary, in some situations, giving up on the ideal of mastery and control is the courageous and painstaking thing to do. It is the realization that there is a limit to all good intentions and all acts of freedom. A sense of resignation, which eschews all futile hopes of omniscience and perfection is not a bad thing; in fact, it can be freeing. For Christians, in the opera of everyday life, God opens to creatures in a free, kenotic event; and, believers are challenged to respond, to learn, to love, and to submit to the other in the murky middle, without knowing how it is going to end. This means giving up on the idea of certainty and success in one’s encounters with the divine, yet still remaining there anyway. What we are left with is an opportunity to respond to the other in the moment, by improvising and opening to empathy. Hans Urs von Balthasar in his description of revelation alludes to a similar sort of giving oneself over to God, submitting oneself to the mystery of the divine other. For Balthasar, God “is not simply someone who is seen but, rather, he is always someone who, in man’s interior vision and experience is believed, someone to whom one must surrender.”6 Like with the term resignation, the language of surrender and submission may be too strong for some when speaking about the unfolding drama between creature and creator. This is particularly relevant since von Balthasar’s theology is enmeshed in essentialist gendered language, where the feminine is glorified as submissive. For him, being receptive is the esteemed position for the Christian believer, and is framed in feminine language. For those invested in gender justice inside and outside of ecclesial structures, any conflation of the feminine with submission is oppressive and damaging. If, and I realize this is a big if, we could strip the gender issues away, one may be able to find the language of surrendering to the other to be fruitful, reminding the Christian believer that hoping for mastery in any relationship is arrogant and just plain self-sabotage, as there is always a limit to our knowing the other. In being present in an encounter and bearing witness to the difference of the other, one does not necessary submit blindly and give up all agency, but recognizes the need for change in light of the other. As we

5  For more on the promise of vulnerability, see Jean Vanier, Becoming Human ((Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998). 6  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Revelation and the Beautiful,” in Word and Revelation: Essays in Theology I (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 430.

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submit, we mourn all pretenses of safety and mastery in encountering the divine in order for something richer to emerge. One reason why Balthasar uses this surrender rhetoric is because he wants to maintain the mystery and “hiddenness” of revelation. For Balthasar, in revelation there is always something more than what is apparent—a surplus to what we see. He writes: “In a flower, a certain interior reality opens its eye and reveals something beyond and more profound than a form which delights us by its proportion and colour.”7 Relating revelation to a musical aesthetic analogy, he further illustrates the limits of knowing and the hiddenness of the other: “A whole symphony cannot be recorded on a tape that is too short. Naturally, the image of Christ cannot be fully taken in as can a painting; its dimensions are objectively infinite, and no finite spirit can traverse them.”8 The idea of hiddenness or partiality of knowing is not a way to avoid defining revelation. In fact, it is a reminder of what it is—mysterious, awesome, changing, overflowing, and indomitable. Once we forget that, we are in trouble, because it allows for the reduction of God and our relationship with God to become projections of individualistic desires and pathologies. Other thinkers have emphasized the importance of letting go of the possibility of knowing the other as a static entity, and being transformed instead by a fluid experience of engaging difference. For example, post-Shoah thinker, Emmanuel Levinas dedicated his entire life’s work to emphasizing the unknowability of the other. For Levinas, “Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger [l’Etranger], the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi]. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site. But I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him, without genus. We are the same and the other.”9 Levinas illustrates the radical alterity of the one who calls us to an encounter. Even with our desire to know, control, or consume the other, the other escapes our grip. The other cannot be contained, and hence everything is uncertain in proximity to the other. In such a relationship, we are called to abandon all pretenses of knowing the other because they only diminish the gravity of the relationship. Giving up on the pretense of knowing is trying to say the least. Many of us have found comfort and solace in a sense of knowledge—as unreal as it is—and giving it up is hard emotional and spiritual work. That loss needs to be respected for a new sense of being with the other to emerge. In other words, it is okay and even good to mourn the pretense of objective knowledge because it is a true loss. Jean-François Lyotard is another contemporary continental thinker who was troubled by the problematic effects of attempting to contain or mute otherness. For Lyotard, language is a grand oppressor which works to reduce otherness to concepts and tools. Striving to find moments that defy and disrupt language, Lyotard pin-

 Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 444.  Ibid., 512. 9  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 39. 7 8

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points what he calls the figure to be an instance which transgresses the dominating gaze of mastery, which is for Lyotard, linguistic discourse. The figure is a trace or designation of the “overload of potential” or surplus which refuses to be swallowed up by linguistic determinism and/or the gaze of the Enlightenment subject.10 In thinking about revelation through the lens of bodily experience, we can imagine God disclosing godself to creation as a figure, which resists our mastery. Like the encounter in which swimmers have with the water, in encounter with the divine, for Christian believers, there is no room to swallow up the other. In her book, Nine Ways to Cross a River, Akiko Busch struggles against the allure of mastery and control of the other as she explains how being in water is akin to embracing the uncertainty of life, Saturday time, and everyday submission. For Busch: “There are people, I know, who are apprehensive about swimming in rivers exactly because they cannot see and cannot know what’s beneath them. But for me on this summer morning, to tread water lightly above the vestiges of these wrecks, their spilled cargo, and all the debris they have left is full of promise and possibility, reaffirming the fact that we live with the unknown in everything we do.”11 Like with swimming, once we submit to the unknown, grace is possible and the mystery of God’s meeting with us imaginable. All of us probably have a sense of the perils of thinking one can master the other. For me, this lesson dates back to my childhood. I can remember going boating with my father, and him telling me that I had to have respect for the water. What he meant was not a blind obedience, but a realization about the unpredictability and ultimate unknowableness of much of the ocean. He did not want me to be cavalier around water and end up getting hurt. When we were on the water, I needed to know that if the tides changed, we would need to adjust our course. If there were boaters in our path, we would need to respect their space. This is the best description I have of submitting to submission. In water and in the midst of revelation, we need to give ourselves over to the reality that we are in the presence of a fluid and unpredictable other who calls us to develop a different type of knowing—more of a feeling knowledge for the gravity of the other and the precariousness of the relationship.

9.3  The Weight of Water As the Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu has asserted: “In this world there is nothing more yielding than water, yet attack it with strength and you cannot conquer it.”12 Don’t let its softness and malleability deceive, water’s force and changeability make it the ultimate other to engage. As such, water is the symbol of the Dao—the source  Jean-François Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse,” in Toward the Post-Modern, eds. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 13. 11  Akiko Busch, Nine Ways to Cross a River: Midstream Reflections on Swimming and Getting There from Here (New York, Bloomsbury, 2007), 6. 12  Lao Tzu (2010-08-05). Tao Te Ching (p. 78). Kindle Edition. 10

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of all things. Here, water is imagined as the medium of everything in the middle. Water is the iconic other that demands our submission. One only needs to think of ritual handwashing in Islam, bathing in the Ganges River for Hindus, and pouring libations in African traditional religions to get a glimpse into the weight of water in our collective spiritual imagination. In Christianity, water becomes prominent in the sacrament of baptism. In the Gospel of Mark, one reads about Jesus’ baptism: “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”13 Poignantly Jesus is just one of the many baptized. In a closer reading of the text, it is interesting to note that Jesus is not shown to take over the ritual and steal the show from John. In its place, he relinquishes the spotlight to John, deferring to other. In this particular moment, water functions as the site of hospitality in addition to transformation. The river is a space to make room for the other’s, in this case John’s, talents and desires. One might even claim that submission in the Markan gospel occurs through one deferring to the other and the openness to change. While, according to Christian tradition, baptism for both infants and adults is a sacrament of purification and spiritual healing, it cannot be reduced to the erasure of original sin alone. The power of God’s grace is not a one-time act. Like water, it undulates. It comes in waves. It buoys us in times of joy and weighs us down in times of brokenness. Ordinarily, we find ourselves someplace in the middle. As such, while each believer has one baptism, the promises are on-going, serving as reminders of the fluidity of being human in the midst of God and others. One can find even more examples of the gravity of water in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Judaism. The power of the flood in the Book of Genesis is an undeniable instance of the force of water, in which the creator drowns most of creation in a single act: “The flood continued forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.”14 In this text, water represents simultaneously as a place of destruction and rebirth. In other parts of the Hebrew scriptures, nonetheless, water presents an unambiguous place of solace and healing. One only needs to reflect on the Book of Micah: “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression…. He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our inequities under

13 14

 Mark 1:4–5 NRSV.  Gen 7:17–22 NRSV.

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foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”15 The reader is presented with an image of a magnanimous creator that submerges all that is holding us back into the sea. The mystery of the big blue creates a space to imagine that redemption and grace are possible in the midst of deep woundedness. All we need to do is let it go into the sea as God ordains. This connection between water and mercy in Micah carries over to the Jewish ritual of Tashlich, which is observed during Rosh Hashanah. Tashlich is celebrated by throwing bits of bread into a body of water, such as a stream, pond, or even larger body of water. The individual symbolically casts off their sins by throwing bread; and their sins are washed away by the flow of the water. There is a dynamic nature to this ritual, through the physical movement of throwing with one’s arm and a spiritual movement of letting go of all negative feelings with one’s heart. What’s more, there is a communal dimension to this in that members of the community gather together to perform this ritual, and often socialize after. Tashlich is an event of relinquishment and submission in which one gives up all their sins and regrets in order for healthier relationships to unfold. Water is the place of fresh starts, of hope, forgiveness, joy, and love. In some situations, when an individual feels guilty about their behavior, a ritual such as this allows them to love themselves again or for the first time and open themselves to deeper relationships with God and others. Although there are a multitude of references to water and water rituals in Judaism, one of the more evocative rituals is Mikveh, in which an individual is immersed completely in water. Mikveh baths, which are often taken in designated baths in synagogues, are deemed necessary in special circumstances, including but not limited to converts to Judaism, women after their menstrual cycle, observant Jews around Yom Kippur, and even to cleanse pots and pans in observance of kosher laws. Clearly there is an emphasis on cleansing and purity in this ritual, so much so that some have critiqued Mikveh baths as being antiquated, patriarchal, and even misogynist. Some question why a woman’s body needs to be cleansed after menstruation, or put more simply, wonder what’s so dirty about women’s bodies? Others, nevertheless, have retrieved the practice as a vehicle for personal empowerment. Rabbi Sue Ann Wasserman describes how ritual bathing helped in the healing of her friend and religious studies scholar Laura Levitt who was raped. Wasserman argues that the Mikveh is an apropos ritual for personal healing for many reasons, including: “The natural waters remind us of the constant intermingling presence of the Creator in our own lives … and water itself is cleansing, supportive, and life sustaining.”16 This bricolage of water symbols and rituals among the world’s religions illustrates how water, like the divine, is woven throughout our lives. When bathing, swimming, treading, or dunking in water we are in an intimate dance with the viscous other. In the middle of something which exerts force, yet still allows for agency,

 Mic 7:18–19 NRSV.  Laura Levitt and Sue Ann Wasserman, “Mikveh Ceremony for Laura,” http://www.ritualwell. org/ritual/mikveh-ceremony-laura (accessed on April 13, 2016). 15 16

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we are in a complex process of intentionality and improvisation. Getting a feel for the water, others, and God makes real the possibility of transformation, in which one relinquishes and mourns a former sense of being for a healthier and more life-­ giving existence.

9.4  Getting a Feel for the Other Getting a “feel for the water” is common parlance among swimmers and refers to the strategies for engaging the water’s force and fluidity in order to swim as quickly and efficiently as possible. Seemingly a solitary activity, swimming really is never just about the individual swimming, but always is a social activity that unfolds in relation to a fluid other. The swimmer enters the water and there is already a flow happening. The swimmer’s job is to engage that flow in the most strategic and efficient ways possible. Importantly, there is a cyclical nature to swimming, in that each swim stroke has a work aspect, a recovery aspect, and then the swimmer repeats them again. The work aspect largely occurs when the swimmer’s hand enters the water. This is when the catch is made, and water is moved through an effort to propel oneself forward. Next is a recovery aspect to the stroke, when one’s hand exits the water and lets go of all the strain of pushing and pulling, gearing up for the next entry. In an ideal situation, after recovering, and before reentering their hand into the water, the swimmer strategizes to fix their stroke based on bodily feedback gained from swimming the previous stroke. Put simply, with each swim, and even with each stroke, the swimmer makes adjustments in relation to the previous movement, all in an effort of getting a feel for the other. A first step in getting this feel is acknowledging the challenge of hydrodynamic drag. This is the resistance to the physical movement of the swimming stroke caused by the surrounding fluid. Put plainly, when one’s hand enters the water and attempts to push through it, the water opposes the motion, in other words, causes drag. Swimmers practice drills and employ equipment such as paddles, bands, and buoys, in order to learn how to work with and around that friction, so they can move faster and more efficiently. While some are content splashing around and just getting their body to move in the water, more intentional swimmers log many hours in the pool, lakes, rivers, and oceans to better their technique. They work on their stroke and their breathing all in an effort to deal with hydrodynamic drag. When trying to interpret revelation, believers experience an analogous form of drag—an affective friction that complicates the sacred scenario. Perhaps the believer feels like they should have it all together, meaning that they should have their life and their relationships with God and others in order. We look at media images of relationships or even the ones around us, and sure there are snapshots of some pretty horrific entanglements, but still there is a glamorization of many others. From the outside looking in, other people seem to have their lives together. This perception can cause anxiety, making one feel that they are not good enough to be loved by God or anyone really. This is related to the illusion that others are perfect; and to

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be loveable like them, we need to be perfect too and downplay any feelings of vulnerability. What we realize when we look deeper is that everyone experiences challenges in relating and loving. We all have drag. This reality needs to be acknowledged, so we have the strength to work through our more trying faith experiences and interpersonal relationships. Drag manifests in other ways as well. It could be the case that drag manifests in a compulsion to direct others as to how to feel about God, or this or that, in an attempt to erase any uncertainty and ambiguity of the situation. In faith relationships, this sense of drag could be conceptualized as a false knowing about the content of the revelation. While feeling knowledgeable and in control of the other offers a temporary safety, relieving us from the fluidity of the Saturday experience— from the not-knowing and the vulnerability that accompanies being submerged in the middle of things—it fails to open us to the mystery of the other and to a deeper connection with them. In addition to navigating drag, whether in the pool or in everyday life, we are constantly negotiating our embodied selves in space, honing what clinicians and others refer to as our proprioceptive sense. Proprioception can be defined as an awareness of one’s body in relation to the environment without looking, rather just by sensing. Clinicians explain that through a complex process of neuro-feedback, we know where our body and body parts are in space and can move our bodies and body parts in space with seemingly little effort. For example, if we want to grasp something, our proprioceptive sense, or what some have called our “sixth sense” allows us to shift and shape our fingers and hands to make the move with relative ease. Importantly, the proprioceptive sense is often unnoticed because humans develop proprioception unconsciously and take for granted their ability to move and adapt to their spatial surroundings. Generally, the only times one pays attention to proprioception is when an individual displays an underdeveloped proprioceptive sense or when someone is suffering from an injury. Here it is being suggested that knowing where we are in relation to another—where our body and body parts are in space—is an additional way to develop a feel for the other. Moreover, swimming is emphasized as a sport that encourages one to be vigilant about where their body is in space, because even a small shift of position could influence the efficiency of the stroke. Ultimately, the more one can get a feel for the water by knowing where they are in relation to the other, the more successful and pleasurable the swim will be. Reflecting analogically on proprioception and neuro-feedback in swimming, can open up new ways of relating to God and others. Like the predicament of the swimmer who attempts to get a feel for where they are in connection with the water and relies on neuro-feedback to make helpful moves, Christians must become aware of their position in relationship to other believers, as well as nonbelievers. Realizing one is in a community with others who have different priorities and need their own space is neither commonsense nor natural, and comes easier for some than others. It is not our sixth sense. Yet, in an age of religious pluralism, the need to be aware of others in our midst is of the utmost importance;

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so one needs to practice the skills to be with others. For believers, this practice unfolds by paying attention to the dynamics of the other and by embracing the middle as a place of opportunity to grow. Not all Christians would agree, of course. For many, belief is about certainty and assurance; and so becoming conscious of one’s position in relation to others is more a matter of assertion and defense rather than negotiation and attentiveness to the dynamics of others. Here I am arguing that certainty is a pretense, a hindrance, and a blind spot when it comes to engaging God. While there is nothing wrong in being confident in one’s relationship with another, there is something problematic in assuming that confidence and trust in the other is the same as knowledge and mastery of the other. Since our knowledge of the divine is always partial and as the divine is always beyond that which we imagine, then for the fullest of engagement with God to unfold, we need to respect that mysterious reality. Feeling for the other acknowledges this complexity, not so one occupies a posture of unbridled relativism, rather so one submerges themselves in the mysterious relationships with God and others.

9.5  Faith as Fluid Arguably, submitting to God’s presence in one’s life requires not only practice in getting a feel for the other, but also a willingness to embrace relationships and life as improvisational. In her work, Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson, a writer and cultural anthropologist, discusses the power of improvisation. Describing how many feel overwhelmed by everything that is going on in life, at school, work, and home, Bateson asserts that we too often feel as if we have to “juggle” it all. The reasons for this urge to juggle are simple: we assume that in order to be good and loveable we must be in control of everything and able to handle it all on our own. So we keep everything moving at once. We force life to happen. However, from Bateson’s perspective, this juggling act can overwhelm us and prevent us from leading a flourishing life. This sounds a lot like Vanier’s thought on the impact of trying to be perfect to the point that it thwarts genuine freedom. As an alternative to conceptualizing one’s approach to life in terms of juggling, Bateson urges readers to frame the fluidity of life as an opportunity to “compose” a life.17 Composing involves being attentive to what is going on and being open to change. Since we can neither anticipate nor master the outcome of everything, we have to act on our feet and improvise. For swimmers, submerged in the midst of this murky fluid other, vigilance and improvisation are the keys to survival and perhaps even flourishing. Such is the case for ordinary people as well, including Christian believers. “Wandering” is another way of speaking about the improvisation necessary for living with others. In his work, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run

17

 Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989).

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the World and Why Their Differences Matter, Stephen Prothero explains how wandering is a distinct aspect of Daoism, a feature that challenges Western traditions including Christianity on issues of sin, redemption, and happiness: “The Western monotheisms portray wandering as punishment— something you get after you bite the apple (Adam and Eve) or kill your brother (Cain). In Daoism (or Taoism), however, wandering is opportunity rather than punishment.”18 Wandering here represents a freedom to be for self and others in ways not previously imagined. Prothero writes: “To be lost in the maze of social conventions and ritual propriety, led around by the noose of norms and ‘the normal,’ is to be alienated from yourself, from other people, and from the environment.”19 Thinking of our engagement with the cosmos in terms of wandering entails surrendering to the unknown. It demands an openness to risk, taking chances with others, and even being wrong. Improvisation and wandering both have the possibility of a huge payoff, namely that of living with others in a way so rich and life-giving, but they also involve the cost of being vulnerable to the needs and expectations of the other. For the thinkers mentioned here, the payoff exceeds the cost. To dwell in the Saturday demands a strong constitution. But it is a strength that opens us to the richest gifts of love with God and others. Clinical psychologists also endorse engaging life in an improvisational and wandering way. Psychologist, Robert J. Lifton, invokes the legend of Proteus, Homer’s sea god who changes form in order to exemplify how human beings deal with transformations during their lives. With each instance of joy, pain, and even traumatic suffering, individuals are altered. Reflecting on the malleability of the human person in relation to “unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties,” Lifton coins the notion of the protean self.20 Like with swimming, at every moment of our lives we are called to navigate shifting boundaries—we are protean and in the middle of things. When we give ourselves over to the reality that we are always in the middle of things—that our world is always fluid—then we can compose a life that is more open to God’s grace as well as sensitive to the needs of all others. In improvising by being open to protean life, then one is anything but submissive. Instead, one expresses their agency by saying yes to a relationship with the other that is mysterious and precarious. This surrender involves acknowledging the loss of a false knowing and loving, so a deeper relationship with the other can emerge. This surrender involves loss, because when we submit to the fluidity of our situation with the other, we are faced with the empty space of where our certainty once dwelled. We must acknowledge and mourn this loss before we can move toward a healthier relationship.

 Stephen Prothero (2010-04-06). God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World— and Why Their Differences Matter (p. 279). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 19  Ibid., 280. 20  Robert J.  Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1. 18

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9.6  Mourning as a Faithful Response to Revelation The term mourning bears some explaining because in many ways it is burdened by negative connotations, conjuring sad images of women dressed in black, wailing over the loss of their loved ones. For some, grief and mourning are too hard to bear, so much so that they avoid condolence calls and skip funerals. So why in the world would anyone endorse the possibility of mourning as a good thing or as an opportunity to love as it is being offered here? For one, mourning is a movement, a response to the other, and a refusal to remain closed in on oneself in a narcissistic way. It is an act of grace that recognizes the place and needs of the other. What’s more, mourning recognizes the hiddenness of the other and our not knowing of their entirety. Being aware that we are always in the middle of things, groping without mastery, and with glimpses of feedback, gives way to the possibility of mourning and transformation, by encouraging us to shed that which is holding us back and reorienting us to be open for the possibilities ahead. As we strategize in the midst of drag, hone our proprioceptive sense, and improvise in the face of the things not hoped for, we are letting ourselves mourn our old ways of thinking, doing, and feeling in order for greater possibilities to unfold. Mourning occurs, at least metaphorically, in swimming, when the swimmer’s hands are in the water and when the swimmer realizes that they have to stop applying pressure one way and apply something otherwise in order to move forward. It involves giving up on mastering the element of water and instead paying attention to the process of engaging the water, even creating new muscle memories in the midst of stubborn and unhelpful ones. Mourning for the swimmer unfolds in the split-second before they make the necessary adjustment to swim better and stronger. Similarly, mourning occurs for the believer when one realizes that they need to give up on old patterns and misguided feelings about having mastery over the divine other as well as controlling what others feel about God. The believer mourns because they have to change by giving up a pattern of relating, a feeling, a wish, or a sense of self and/or other, so they can move on. In life, in our interactions with others, we are constantly engaged in mourning. With every stage of their child growing up, parents mourn the old relationship, they mourn the illusion of things staying the same. The work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on death, dying, and grief has become a standard in the academy for reflecting on the work of mourning from clinical and even literary perspectives. Decades before, Sigmund Freud, explicated the benefits of mourning over melancholy. For Freud, melancholy is a truncated version of mourning. It is grief gone awry. Melancholy causes one to become stuck in a narcissistic state, festering “like an open wound,” while mourning supports the individual in pushing to move on.21 Here the reader is asked to consider that in order to be in 21  Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 253.

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communion with God, one must embrace mourning. To mourn involves giving up on the sense that everything needs to be perfect, that we are in control, and that dominating the other will bring us peace. It is what we do when we plunge into the water or any encounter with another really. Turning again to Daoism, mourning takes shape in one’s letting go of entanglements and becoming one with the Tao. Already alluded to, water is an important symbol in this Chinese religion, for right living: “The person of higher virtue is like water, benefiting the ten thousand things without struggle. It rests in the lowest places near the Tao.22 Renouncing hubris, pride, ego, and status, that is to say, to become “malleable as ice when it begins to melt,” one becomes one with the Dao.23 Being fluid in this way involves a mourning, becoming okay with change and loss, ultimately free to move on to one’s recovery, and then to begin anew with the next stroke. In Christianity, mourning in relation to the other is a central trope. Here the biblical passage of the Rich Young Man comes to mind. When asked what he needs to do to have eternal life, Jesus explains his bottom line to this young man, “‘If you wish to be perfect, go sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”24 Most striking here is that the rich young man feels a loss. Living a virtuous path is really hard. It causes uncomfortable feelings, such as fear, sadness, and resentment. All Christians as they learn to live with and like God are called to grieve like the rich young man, not in a perpetual state of mourning, but in a realization of just how much things are going to change in order for something greater to be realized.

9.7  From Mourning to Empathy This approach to revelation, one which defers to the other to the point of submitting to the mystery of the relationship, and in doing so learns about deep love, is a lesson applicable to all relationships, including the ones between human beings and even between humans and non-human creatures. In our everyday interpersonal interactions, opportunities arise for us to relinquish and mourn the fiction of fully knowing the other and still staying in the relationship anyway. At times, the most genuine response to the other is just being there as a witness to their fears and hopes in a sort of a revelatory silence. We can sense this in Balthasar’s work, in which he understands the figure of love as the event/form which “remains incomprehensible unless it is interpreted in terms of God’s love” and “seizes us.”25 For Balthasar, the

 Lao Tzu (2010-08-05). Tao Te Ching (p. 8). Kindle Edition.  Ibid., p. 15. 24  Matt 19:21–22 NRSV. 25  Balthasar, Love Alone (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 48. 22 23

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figure of love cannot be reduced to one person’s gaze, one’s experience, or one’s narrative. Rather the figure must remain other and really be understood as other only in terms of God’s love. The figure is spatially, temporally, and linguistically free from an individual’s claims of control and mastery. When we allow ourselves to be disrupted by the other, true love emerges. We can only allow ourselves this opportunity if we acknowledge the loss of our old ways of being. Only then, by opening ourselves to the possible of mourning, are we enabled to relate to all others in a new way, with love. To be sure, mourning encourages us to relate to all creatures with empathy. A complicated idea, empathy manifests when we stay with the other, relating to them in a dance of intentionality and improvisation, even if our being there catapults us out of our comfort zone. Empathy emerges when we give up all desire to master the other, and risk our physical, emotional, and spiritual safety to remain in the relationship. When we are empathetic, we attempt to get a feel for the other without making any claims to the other’s status or identity. In fact, empathy emerges when we relinquish power over another, mourn that power, and let the other have an impact on us. This type of cathartic posture was discussed above in our reflections on swimming and the divine-human encounter. We all have occasions to show empathy in our daily lives with other creatures, to the sick, the needy, to those lonely, and even to those who have different perspectives on life than we do. Empathy is needed now more than ever as the world seems so divided about politics, religion, and the fate of creaturely existence. Often in hearing the term empathy or in wishing we are shown empathy, what we are hoping for is that the other proves their love for us by feeling our pain or knowing the dark corners of our psyche. That, for many, is the great test of commitment and sign of their devotion. However, an American essayist and novelist, Leslie Jamison, in her work The Empathy Exams demonstrates a deeper sense of empathy that resonates with much of what has been said here relative to loving the other without mastering the other. In the essay, “the Empathy Exams,” which reflects the title of her book, Jamison admits that for the larger part of her life she had defined empathy as feeling another’s pain. However, her perspective on being in relationship with others was transformed when she underwent a couple of medical interventions, including an abortion and cardiac surgery. During these trying events, Jamison searched for comfort and the assurance from the people around her, including her physicians, family, and boyfriends. Not surprisingly, at first she felt disappointment for they did not seem to know exactly what she was going through. That non-­ knowing felt like distance to her, and even a rejection of her. She wanted her loved ones to show they cared for her by feeling what she felt. As previously discussed, nevertheless, such knowing and mastery of another is just an illusion. And when this artifice is unveiled, which undoubtedly it always is, one or the other feels like a failure. As the essay unfolds, Jamison eventually has a change of heart and mind as her boyfriend, Dave, reveals to her a higher purpose for empathy, namely just being there. Jamison writes: “Dave doesn’t believe in feeling bad just because someone else does. This isn’t his notion of support. He believes in listening, and asking questions, and steering clear of assumptions. He thinks

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i­magining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it. He believes in humility.… I remember lying tangled with him, how much it meant—that he was willing to lie down in the mess of wires, to stay there with me.”26 Dave teaches her about the grace of the Saturday in which one is thrust into a fluid relationship with the other, in which neither party knows everything about the other and stays there anyway. Throughout this essay, an argument has been made about the virtue of inhabiting the middle of things. Whether it’s the middle of one’s murky, fluid relationship with God, or with a fellow creature, in order to move forward one must get comfortable with the Saturday experience. Ultimately, when turning our awareness to our reception of God or another creature, we are called in a modest way to submission. Submitting to submission does not entail giving up agency, rather such submitting frees us from the pressure to be in control over all and know everything. We are always in the middle, in a long distance swim which demands both intentionality and improvisation. Being here is not comfortable for us. In fact, it takes practice to dwell in the middle. Just like the swimmer needs to improvise and give up bad habits and practice new ones for the sake of the swim, each one of us is called to improvise as we struggle to find our way through this murky middle with God. Our freedom is always engaged in improvisation. In the middle, we are called to relinquish damaging patterns of relating to others, to mourn those ways, and create space for a more flourishing life—to be open to what is being revealed and witness to the mystery of what is not. Revelation demands our witness in the murky middle and by doing so posits all sorts of ramifications for human freedom and brokenness. We meet God in the murky middle; and in order for that meeting, that encounter, and that revelatory moment to be its fullest, we are called to witness to it with a respect for its alterity and mystery. Anything else reeks of hubris and fear. It takes extreme courage to say either privately or publically that one does not know everything about the intentions of the other and chooses to remain in the relationship anyway. However, that is what we are called to do in our most intimate of relationships. Whereas, our relationships with other humans can offer more of a sense of knowledge of the other than our relationship with the divine, in both cases, there is a limit to our certainty. Yet we are called to stay, work, improvise, and love. Water, like the relationships in our everyday life, is fluid and mysterious; and as such the image of the big blue ocean captures the challenges that so many of us face. Our world, our lives, our relationships, our schedules, our situations, our emotions, and so on are constantly changing. In order to make good choices—positive, life-­ giving decisions, in this fluid landscape we need to develop a feel for our surroundings. It isn’t enough to say something is right and something is wrong—we need to understand the context—get the feel for the situation. Water is the medium through which creatures navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity of existence. Furthermore, water becomes transformative when it manifests as an impetus for letting go of

26

 Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 20–21.

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certainty and status, and giving oneself over to being in the middle. If we refuse to embrace our existence of being in the middle, we risk drowning, for we will not have the skills to survive. Our hopes at survival and flourishing require a feel for the other. It is there, in the murky middle that God meets us. It is there in the murky middle that we meet the other. Being open to the middleness of revelation invites us to be open to the Saturday-ness of all our relationships by asking questions, exposing our vulnerability, and knowing the limits of our knowledge about the other—yet staying there anyway. I catch a glimmer of this reality of the grace-filled middle each time I take the plunge. With each stroke I realize I am in the presence of something other. I cannot dominate it. I bear witness to its alterity. Just by being with the awesome other, grace emerges. Perhaps true communion is recognizing the other as other and still remaining there with them anyway. I use to think that communion meant a melding together of two entities into something new. Swimming has taught me that a more empathetic sense of communion is being there in the murky middle with the other, not knowing where I end and the other begins, and bearing witness to the possibility of things neither hoped for nor imagined, yet life-giving all the same.

Chapter 10

Revelation as Sharing in God’s Self-­Understanding as Absolute Love Frederick G. Lawrence

Abstract  A proper understanding of revelation has to explain the possibility of sharing in God’s self-understanding without prejudice to the apophatic dimension of human participation in God’s redeeming love. In Part I, the teachings of Vatican I’s Dei Filius and Vatican II’s Dei Verbum on revelation understood as sharing God’s self-understanding as Absolute Love precedes the proposal that the nature/supernature distinction highlights the gift-character of revelation. Part II applies the analogy of light to contrast the light of faith and of prophecy with Jesus’s ineffable light of vision to explain how Jesus as paradigmatic prophet communicates God’s self-­ understanding as Absolute Love in human terms as an ‘outer word’, while his life, death, and resurrection make the ‘inner word’ of the Holy Spirit available to all humankind. Part III explains the shift from faculty psychology to intentionality analysis to reformulate the cognitive aspect of revelation in order to illumine the primacy of interpersonal love in human living, and the distinction between faith and belief. Part IV, with the example of St Augustine’s conversion and the insights of Raymund Schwager and René Girard, uses Lonergan’s soteriology to explain the redemptive aspect of revelation, and once again emphasizes that in receiving and understanding revelation, we still do not fully understand and know the mysterious nature of God. Keywords  Revelation and Vatican II · Lonergan · Girard · God’s self-­understanding · Redemption

F. G. Lawrence (*) Theology Department, Boston College, Newton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_10

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10.1  Introduction In order to explain how the Christian community receives and accepts divine revelation in the spirit of theology’s new context, we have to go beyond the statement in Hebrews 11.1 that framed St Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on faith in the Summa theologiae: est autem fides sperandorum substantia rerum argumentum non aparentum [faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen].1 And so we begin our reflections on revelation as a share in God’s self-understanding as absolute love by citing a definition by late English Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe’s in Exploring the Catholic Catechism: “Faith is a divinely given disposition of the mind by which we begin to share in God’s understanding of himself. In faith, we think of the history of humanity and our own life story as centered on the love of God for us as revealed in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh.”2 Indeed, Aquinas’s treatment of caritas as friendship encompasses both the fact that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ “wills all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2.4), and the recognition that “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship [koinonia, communio] of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor 1.9). Thus, out of unbounded love for his Triune nature as agapē (1 John 4.8), God draws all creatures according to their own dignity back to himself as end3 in a movement responding to this original event of love, so that by creation, election, and incarnation, the Triune God enters into intimate companionship and communication with human beings: societas, convivere, conversatio.4 That is what revelation is all about.

10.2  C  hristian Tradition on the Scope and Content of Christian Revelation 10.2.1  T  he Perspective from Vatican I’s Dei Filius to Vatican II’s Dei Verbum The New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews (1.1-2) teaches that revelation involves an economy: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed  Any brackets inserted throughout this text are the author’s additions or comments.  Herbert McCabe, Exploring the Catholic Faith. A Guide through the Basics (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2008), 56–57. 3  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 23, art 1: “… cum … sit aliqua communicatio hominis ad Deum secundum quod nobis suam beatitudinem communicat …”; Eberhard Schockenhoff, “The Theological Virtue of Charity (IIa IIae, qq. 17–22,” in The Ethics of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Stephen Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002) 246–8. 4  See the article by Joseph Bobik, “Aquinas on Communicatio, the Foundation of Friendship and Caritas,” 64 The Modern Schoolman (November, 1986), 1–18. 1 2

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heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” Similarly, the Letter to the Ephesians (3.9) speaks of “the economy of the mystery which from eternity has been hid in God who created all things.” The First Vatican Council’s Dei Filius expressed the core of the Church’s authoritative teaching on revelation in a rather comprehensive statement. First, “By natural reason man can know God with certainty, on the basis of his works,” appealing perhaps anachronistically to Letter to the Romans 1. 19-20—as if St Paul had carefully studied St Thomas Aquinas’s so-called “Five Ways.” Ironically perhaps, Dei Filius’s intent was to oppose rationalist and semi-rationalist notions of revelation, but, presupposing abstract conceptions of ‘right reason,’ the Council fathers insisted that as a matter of principle (de jure), there is natural knowledge of God. Herman Pottmeyer interprets Dei Filius’s statement not to mean that sinful human beings could actually reach a true understanding and affirmation of God without the help of God’s grace, but that human nature is open to God’s completely undeserved, unearned, and so gratuitous divine self-gift, and that this gift is not extrinsic to integral human becoming and perfection.5 Dei Filius continues: But there is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possibly arrive at by his own powers: the order of divine Revelation.6 Through an utterly free decision, God has revealed himself and given himself to man. This he does by revealing the mystery, his plan of loving goodness, formed from all eternity in Christ, for the benefit of all men. God has fully revealed this plan by sending us his beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

To contrast Vatican II’s Dei Verbum with Vatican I’s Dei Filius and by way of a transition to an account deeply influenced by a more strictly evangelical orientation, we note that the most recent edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart’s entry under ‘Offenbarung’ confines this term to the aspect of God’s revelation of himself as true love in the communication of the Crucified One as Risen’s saving truth and his call to discipleship and witness.7 The RGG article adheres closely to the New Testament where any distinction between natural and supernatural orders of creation taken for granted by Dei Filius would be anachronistic. To be sure, this account reflects both biblical and patristic expressions of the reality, if not exactly the concept, of revelation.

5  Hermann J. Pottmeyer, Der Glaube vor der Anspruch der Wissenschaft. Die Konstitution ‘Dei Filius’ des I. Vatikanischen Konzils (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 168–204. See also, Bernard Lonergan, “Natural Knowledge of God,” A Second Collection, edited by William F.J.  Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 117–133. 6  Dei Filius: DS 3015. 7  See Christoph Schwöbel, art. Offenbarung, II. Religionsphilosophisch, 3. Die Diskussion über den Offenbarungsbegriff im Rahmen der kirchlichen Theologie, Religion in Geschichte un Gegenwart, Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, Vierte, völlig new bearbeitete Auflage, Hgg. Hans Dieter Betz, Don S.  Browning, Bern Janowski, Eberhard Jüngel, Bd. 6 N-Q (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 465.

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10.2.2  Y  ves Congar’s Retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s Evangelical Roots As representing the best of Catholic theology prior to the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965), I refer to a book8 by Dominican theologian Yves Congar, who reflects the Thomist theology typical of Le Saulchoir’s recovery of St Thomas’s thought from neo-Thomist captivity by integrating the treasures yielded by biblical and patristic ressourcement into the thrust of a theology that took the nature/supernature distinction for granted and yet remained open to the biblical and both Greek and Latin patristic approaches to revelation. For Congar, then, God’s contingently and freely shared comprehensive revelation is due to God’s infinite and overflowing goodness: Biblically and traditionally speaking, the great stages [in revelation] are the following: the natural creation; the Word first addressed to the People of God, then decisively as incarnate; and finally, the perfect revelation of God in his heavenly kingdom. One can recognize God’s three manners of being present to his creation: the presence of his immensity, via his causality; of his grace, when God is given as an object of knowledge and of love, yet at a distance; and of ultimate glory. Each of these stages involves an initiative of God; and in every case they are linked, one to the other, the last presupposing the second, and the two others presupposing the first. God, who ordered these manners in this way, views the conditions and the preparations within the final term of a unique purpose.9

Congar stresses that every stage of divine revelation is simply for the sake of God’s glory, so that God’s freely willing them is not because God has any need or lack. Thus, the revelation of the finite universe, “is evidently a matter of [God’]s external glory,” which embraces human beings, made in the image of God, who are in principle10 naturally proportionate to understanding and knowing God’s presence or communication as long as it occurs in all that is conditioned intrinsically or extrinsically by space and time. God’s external glory also includes God’s bestowing a created share in uncreated light proper to the angelic realm unconditioned even

8  Yves-Marie Congar, O.P., La Foi et la Théologie, Le Mystère Chrétien, Théologie Dogmatique (Paris: Desclée, 1962), 8–9: Reflection on the meaning of the initiative taken by God (of the sort to which the Bible bears witness) to constitute relationships with his creation leads to the following conclusions: that it is one work, but it includes diverse projects and different stages; it presents itself both as one design and, therefore, as a process in the course of whose realization, the end is accomplished by a unique term… That term is one of perfect interiority [or union/communion], without either fusion or confusion. The stages involve an ever more intimate communication, with the understanding that God always is entirely present in whatever he does, and that the differences regard only the effects. 9  Congar, La Foi et la Théologie, 9. 10  To hold that knowledge of being proportionate to whatever is conditioned by space and time also includes the capacity to understand and affirm the existence of God only de jure (or in principle) is to affirm that human beings are open to the disproportionate (and so supernatural) gift of God’s love. Hence the undeserved, unmerited, and utterly gratuitous gift of God’s love is in no way extrinsic to being human; but it in no way denies that de facto human beings need God’s grace to imperfectly yet correctly understand and affirm God’s nature and existence.

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extrinsically by space and time and to human beings, who are extrinsically but not intrinsically conditioned by space and time. As for God’s internal glory, according to Congar, God possesses “in himself in the perfect knowledge which he has of himself and which he expresses in his eternal Word, which is also his Son … only one uncreated reflection of his glory, It follows that everything by which we come to know, is “an exterior and created reflection of that glory.”11 For Congar, the eternally proceeding Word of God “is the principle and end of the religious covenantal relationship,” because “[n]ot only are the multiple revelations summed up in Jesus Christ”, but also, Congar continues: “If the role of the prophets is to locate the events of history and the human situation in the light of God’s plan, Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of the prophetic role: he does not disclose just one element of God’s design, or the meaning of just one event, but the complete design, the absoluteness of the covenant relationship, the ‘mystery’ (Rom 16. 25-27; Eph. 3.3-6; Col. 1.25-27).” God enters into solidarity and communion with the totality of the human race by the mission of the Word incarnate together with the mission of the Spirit; not only does God take part in the historical self-constitution of human beings, but also “the consummation of the covenant relationship is nothing less than our divinization, or more exactly our divinizing communion in the mystery of God.” Moreover—and this is a salient point—“God would not be able to be revealed as a communion of Persons when he revealed himself as Creator”—what Aquinas, adopting a Dionysian motif, called the exitus creaturarum a Deo. To illumine the central link between the divine missions and the reditus to God, Congar says that the reditus is realized as “a communion of human persons in the Communion of Divine Persons.”12 In sum, the Trinity is revealed in the Missions of the Son and the Spirit, because the reditus supposes the engagement of God himself as its efficacious principle. And as the glory of God corresponds to his revelation, it is assured by the work of the incarnate Word, and rendered by human beings “to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.” … If Christ is thus the perfect revealer of the mystery, it is because his teaching is, in the most absolute sense, proper to God.13  Congar, La Foi et la Théologie,10–11.  Congar, La Foi et la Théologie, 14, 39. 13  As Congar, La Foi et la Théologie, 15–16, elaborated the point: 11 12

The Scriptures proclaim an eschatological unveiling that is no longer a revelation in speech or in words, but a final disclosure of realities which we hold to exist in our belief (Heb 11.1). In the entire gamut of terms signifying “revelation,” the New Testament speaks of the revelation of Christ Jesus (apok: Lk 17.30; 2 Thess 1.7; 1 Cor 1.17; 1 Pt 1.7, 13; phaner: Col 3.4; epiph: 1 Tim 6..14; 2 Tim 4.1, 8; ophtheseta: Heb 9.29), and of his glory (apok: 1 Pt 4.13; 5.1; epiph: 1 Jn 3.1-2). This glorious revelation is about to be revealed to us (Rom 8.18). There will be a revelation not only of each one’s works and of ecclesial service (1 Cor 3.13), but also of who we are. The glory of God will be revealed in us, and will be poured out upon all creation, which longs for that revelation (Rom 8. 18-19; cp 5.2; Rev 21.23). The final perfection of the process seen from the beginning is no longer expressed in terms of “disclosure,” “unveiling,” but of “epignosis,” or perfect knowledge (1 Cor 13.12) and of “vision” (the same, but without precision concerning the object of the vision, see 1 Jn 3.3, and compare Mt

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10.2.3  The Perspective of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum Vatican II’s Dei Verbum highlights once again that revelation is God’s self-­ communication. Its treatment de revelatione ipsa draws out four characteristics proper to the Christian doctrine of revelation from the Bible and tradition. The first characteristic of revelation indicates that in all God does, God not only acts, but also communicates and reveals himself within the totality of salvation history from creation through Incarnation to eschaton. The second characteristic of revelation claims that God’s self-manifestation is the fruit of overflowing love, which, through all the challenges constantly emerging in human history, impels humanity to come near and enter into communion with him as the ground of an ever-present share in the divine life, and the goal of eschatological fulfillment. That the Christ-event provides not only the scope and content of revelation but also its basic and central dynamism is the third characteristic. Thus, Dei Verbum reiterates that revelation is fulfilled and completed by the Incarnation of God’s Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that what allows human beings in the darkness of sin and death to experience God as giving us salvation and eternal life is the unsurpassable proximity between God and human beings epitomized by Jesus’s death and resurrection. The fourth and final characteristic (implicit in the first three) stresses that deeds and not words alone are integral to God’s revelation. In short, then, for Dei Verbum Jesus is the principle of revealed love. Revelation therefore communicates the gift of God’s love that transforms the entire human condition understood as encompassing the totality of world-process in the creation of the universe—the natural revelation—that extends from undifferentiated energy to atomic, chemical, botanical, and zoological realities into the unfinished history of humankind. That God wills the salvation of all human beings (2 Tim 2.4) implies that the goal of God’s gift of revelation is the constitution of a communion of persons that reflects the very Trinitarian life, which is itself a communion of divine persons. Thus, an analogy exists between the life of the three persons of the Trinity and life in the eschatological communion of humankind known as the mystery of the church universal. The tradition attributes to the “inner word” of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost the creation of a communion of persons—“an image of the life of the Triune God”—that anticipates the renewal of all creation on the last day. If the gift of the Holy Spirit is one indispensable dimension of revelation, the “outer word” expressed in Christ Jesus—the incarnate meaning of whose death and resurrection is both realized and symbolized in the Eucharist—is the other indispensable

5.9; Heb 12.14; Rev 22.4). It is a matter of an immediate knowledge, “face to face,” without the mediation of a created sign, and unrestricted (“as he is”). To the extent that it is possible for finite beings, for the comprehensores ever to fully comprehend … God will enable our knowledge of himself and of his design to conform perfectly to what it is.

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d­ imension of revelation, because the meaning communicated in the Paschal mysteries is constitutive of the Christian community.

10.3  T  he Cognitive Function of Meaning and the Distinction Between Nature and Supernature The condition of the possibility of the human and historical community’s being constituted by common experience, common understanding, common judgments of fact, common judgments of value, and common decisions and commitments is that revelation also requires a cognitive dimension. Thus, revelation as communicative, constitutive, and cognitive is an intrinsic element in what St Thomas Aquinas articulated as “the whole Christ,” which includes all humanity with Christ as its head.14

10.3.1  B  eyond Both Extrinsicism and Reductionism: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth on the Gift of Revelation and the Pre-Vatican II Consensus In the pre-Vatican II era, albeit in very different ways, such leading theologians as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth advocated the Christocentric notion of revelation precisely as framed by the doctrine of the Triune God. Balthasar saw the affinity between Catholic teaching and the later Barth’s insight into the relationship between the Word of God and the Word of Man.15 He saw that once Barth had solidly overcome the Kulturprotestantismus without the polemical interpretation of God’s being totality aliter of his Epistle to the Romans, he was acknowledging that Christ Jesus is the ground of the natural revelation,16 and that nature is both open to, even though not intrinsically demanding, earning, or deserving the gracious bestowal of God’s personal love, and is indispensable to precisely the gift character of God’s sharing of Godself. This is true both of God’s kenotic readiness to become man and to empty himself even to death on the Cross (Phil 2.7), and of the eschatological realization of the Kingdom of God.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q 2, a 8.  See Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, Douglas Horton’s translation of Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Harper Torchbook, 1957) and The Humanity of God (1960). 16  In Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth. Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie, (Köln: Jakob Hegner) Balthasar argued that even Barth’s analogia fidei presupposes the distinction between nature and supernature, not least in holding the Chalcedonian doctrine of “two natures united in one and the same,” by which the Incarnation exists as the pure instance of grace as God’s unmerited favor. 14 15

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The theology of revelation has now, more than ever perhaps, to pay attention to the first phase of revelation in God’s free creation of the universe as a whole out of nothing (ex nihilo sui et subjecti) and through the Word (as in the prologue to John’s Gospel), which constitutes a finite participation in the intelligibility, truth, goodness, and beauty of God as One. As stressed so forcibly by Simone Weil,17 who echoes Maximus the Confessor earlier on, attention to the intelligibility, truth, and goodness of the world is a school for the attentiveness that is identical with prayer. In our day, surely a worshipful reception of this glorious revelation of the Triune God ought to include attaining a verified understanding of the created universe through the natural and human sciences, valuing the created cosmos, and caring for its manifold ecologies. As regards revelation’s eschatological dimension, the anakephalaiosis of all things in heaven and on earth (Eph 1.10), according to Balthasar and Barth—especially human existence and the realization of the image of God in us—centers on and culminates in the unity of divinity and humanity in Christ who grounds a universal communion with the Triune God, and constitutes the ultimate communication to human beings of God’s absolute and unconditional love for every one of us. Christian believers have come to realize that Christ Jesus is God’s concrete command, which is always personal. Commenting on Karl Barth, Balthasar wrote that discipleship of Christ corresponds to life in Christ; and as we have to respond to the existence of Christ Jesus, we are imitators of God (Eph 5.1). Such imitation and discipleship of Christ do not follow from an ethical demand, but flow from the reality already fulfilled in the person of Jesus and his utterly foolish, even seemingly absurd (amour fou), love on the Cross. We owe our obedience to Jesus and his command of love.18 The point of stressing this harmony between Barth and Balthasar is that the latter’s grasp of the analogia entis is fully compatible with Karl Barth’s analogia fidei, inasmuch as it rejects the extrinsicist position that Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange defended against Maurice Blondel by overstressing the difference between correct use of the analogia entis in theology from the analogia fidei. When correctly understood, the theoretical distinction between created nature and God’s self-­ communication in history does not place God’s unmerited favor upon a finite Procrustean bed; instead it highlights the gift-character of God’s sharing with humankind his infinite love “poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5.5) as mediated by his Son, Christ Jesus, true God and true man. Unsurprisingly, Barth told Balthasar that the two shared much more in common in their theology than separated the them. Indeed, in one of his final seminars on Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, while the elderly Barth joked about the Council’s language of ‘adhering to the vestiges’ of previous authoritative Church teachings, his reception of the document was extremely positive.

 Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Waiting for God, translated by Emma Crawford (New York: Harper Colophon, 1973), 105–116. 18  Balthasar, Karl Barth, 246. 17

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10.3.2  T  he Eastern Orthodox Rejection of the Nature/ Supernature Distinction With respect to issues surrounding revelation and the cognitive function of meaning, the Greek Fathers and Eastern Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Solov’ev, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, and more recently, John Zizioulas19 have focused upon a sophianic20 and cosmic vision of created materiality’s being united with the divine through the unfolding of history under the aegis of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ Jesus. This approach, while sympathetic, bypasses the distinction made by the medieval Western tradition between natural and supernatural orders of creation as distinct but not separate. Many, if not most contemporary theologians such as John Milbank expressly oppose this notion of the relation between nature and grace.21 Milbank argues (in an apparent contradictio in adjecto) that since nature already participates in the grace of God, there can be no such distinction. I suppose that in all likelihood what underlies the contemporary tendency to abandon the nature/grace distinction is the widespread prejudice against metaphysics as misunderstood. A corollary of that prejudice is, I fear, a prejudice against distinctions. Even so, theological opponents of this specific distinction continue performatively to assume something like this very distinction. For instance, if they hold that communion in God’s love is in fact rooted in the union of divinity and humanity in Christ, then in order for that union to have any clear meaning, divinity and humanity have to be really distinct, in the simple sense that one is not the other.22 To be sure, those who oppose the nature/supernature distinction do so with the basically correct feeling that the two orders ought not be separated. If, however, nothing that we can perceive, understand, and judge correctly is meaning John Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). 20  Rowan Williams, A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (London: SPCK Press, 2013), 54: “There is a drawing depicting the iconography of Hagia Sophia, in which the female mother figure holds a crown over the head of Christ, which is said to be an interpretation of Proverbs 4. 7-9: Get wisdom, / and whatever else you get, get / insight. / Prize her highly, and she will / exalt you; she will honor you if you / embrace her. / She will place on your head a fair / garland; / she will bestow on you a / beautiful crown.” In Sergii Bulgakov. Towards a Russian Political Theology, edited with commentary by Rowan Williams (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), Williams provides a helpful sketch of the ‘Sophia’ approach to philosophy and theology (and the controversies surrounding it among Orthodox thinkers) in one of his introductory commentaries to one of the articles he anthologized in that work, “Unfading Light (1917),” 113–131. 21  See John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). 22  As a matter of fact, metaphysics correctly understood is not the dreaded Onto-theologie, but just the homely task of explaining the conditions of the possibility of (or ground of truth for) the notional and real distinctions we consistently make in order to understand reality. The difficulty surrounds the fact that in what lends the most significant distinctions (such as, e.g., between body and soul) the aura of being suspect is the fact that their intelligibility and truth are not adequately imaginable. The meaning of such distinctions tends always to be imagined in spatial terms as one thing outside of another (cp. Gilbert Ryle’s ghost in the machine); as a result the distinctions tend to be reduced in people’s minds to separations that, of course, are not tenable. 19

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fully natural, then the givenness of God’s love does not make sense as a freely given gift. And so I am more than suggesting that the distinction between nature and grace, as in fact implied by the giving of Torah in the Old Testament and the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus in the New, is integral to understanding divine revelation.

10.3.3  T  he Theorem of the Supernatural and the Vertical Finality of the Created Cosmos When Bernard Lonergan says that “a plurality of essences has an upthrust from lower to higher levels” in an attempt to rescue what he called vertical finality (as distinct from both the horizontal finality proportionate to created essences conceived as isolated, and the absolute finality of all creation to God) from what he called “the mists of Aristotelian science,” he in fact began to explicate in a more differentiated manner what is implied by the realism of the divine-human communion for which God willed to create the universe. Vertical finality, he said, is most conspicuous to one who looks at the universe with the eyes of modern science, who sees subatoms uniting into atoms, atoms into compounds, compounds into organisms, who finds the patterns of genes in reproductive cells shifting, ut in minore parte, to give organic evolution within limited ranges, who attributes the rise of cultures and civilizations to the interplay of human plurality, who observes that only when and where the higher rational culture emerged did God acknowledge the fullness of time permitting the Word to become flesh and the mystical body to begin its intussusception of human personalities and its leavening of human history.23

Because the core of God’s revelation is our share in God’s unconditional love, Lonergan (who was using the scholastic terms then prevalent in the pre-Vatican II Western church in a more valid and updated way) explained that “a concrete plurality of rational beings have an obediential potency [read: natural openness and desire] to receive the communication of God himself: such a communication is the mystical body of Christ, with its head in the hypostatic union, its principal unfolding in the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit by sanctifying grace, and its ultimate consummation in the beatific vision.”

10.4  R  eceiving Divine Revelation: Counter-Positions and Positions During the post-Reformation and especially the post-Enlightenment era, the Catholic doctrine of revelation was dominated by its penchant for ‘arguments from reason’ to stress the logical ideal of knowledge rooted in Aristotle’s Posterior  Bernard Lonergan, “Finality, Love, Marriage,” Collection, CWL 4, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 21–22.

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Analytics, which taught that in order to be apophantic and apodictic one must deduce certain truths from true, certain, and necessary premises. This tendency to regard revelation exclusively in terms of propositional truth and rigorous inferences from certain premises infected nineteenth and early twentieth century’s post-­ Tridentine theology, apologetically oriented manuals (Konklusionstheologie), and even catechisms. This was due in part to the shift away from the medieval “technique of the quaestio” to the Counter-Reformation and Counter-Enlightenment “pedagogy of the thesis” in a novel discipline known as “dogmatic theology.”24 Although the use of ahistorical loci theologici as a handy way of “proof-texting” is often said to be ‘intellectualist,’ in reality, however it was actually ‘conceptualist’ because it habitually tended to focus on concepts or terms and to neglect the questions and acts of understanding (attained only in relation to images within concrete historical contexts) that give rise to concepts. Accordingly, one might suppose that despite the centuries and cultures that separate them, the word, ‘justice,’ means the same thing whether used by the Old Testament, Plato, St Thomas Aquinas, or Thomas Hobbes.

10.4.1  Overcoming the Deficits of Ahistorical Orthodoxy In modern times ahistorical orthodoxy has promoted the conflict between the gospel and an uninquiring possession of dogma, which goes hand-in-hand with the misleading analogy that Christian belief is a matter of accepting revealed propositions in the church’s deposit of faith, instead of sharing the truths by which Christians live through love’s pressure on intelligence implicit in Aquinas’s doctrines of the lumen fidei, of fides caritate informata, and of the complementarity of fides quā and fides quae. And so the act of faith in divine revelation cannot be compared to withdrawing money from a bank,25 because revelation is grounded in God’s self-communication of his unconditional love for humankind and cannot be reduced simply to warrants for the certainty of propositional truths. Unfortunately, these caricatures of belief in revelation became something of a hallmark of what Hans Urs von Balthasar criticized in his essay on “integralism;”26 and they have been rightly criticized in the post-Vatican II era. Such grave misunderstandings, however, have been accompanied by further misgivings about the church’s need to reach adequately differentiated definitions in response to the ques Bernard Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” A Second Collection, 57.  Hence the immense popularity among theologians of the “banking analogy” for learning used by the Brazilian educationalist, Paolo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 26  Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Integralismus. 1. Grundsätzliches,” in Neue Zürcher Nachrichtung 59, Beilage Christliche Kultur 27, nr. 44, 23 (November 1962) [also in Wort und Wahrheit (Wien) 18 (1962) 737–740]; “Integralismus. 2. Beispiele” in Neue Zürcher Nachrichtung 59, Beilage Christliche Kultur 27, nr. 44, 30 (November 1962) [also in Wort und Wahrheit (Wien) 18 (1962) 740–744]. 24 25

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tions raised by erroneous teachings. The technical terms in conciliar definitions, such as homoousios instead of homoiousios at Nicea (325  CE) or hypostasis, of which there is asserted to be one at Chalcedon (451 CE), are only used heuristically: they are meant to avoid misunderstandings by naming more adequately and precisely what is still only imperfectly known about the Trinitarian and Christological mysteries of faith. To be sure, even in cases where faith has been apprehended in a less reductionist and restrictive manner, it often still seemed that the acceptance of revelation was too detached from a realization both of God’s universal salvific will and of the central reality of the communal reception of a share in God’s unconditional and so absolute love for all human beings. This situation surely played a part in motivating Pope St John XXIII’s convocation of a ‘pastoral’ rather than a ‘dogmatic’ Ecumenical Council, about which Lonergan commented in his paper, “Pope John’s Intention”: Alive, personal, communal, the word of God is also historic. As the old covenant, so also the new names a dispensation, an economy, an ongoing disposition of divine providence both emergent in human history and carrying it forward to an ultimate, an eschatological goal. With its origins in the distant past and its term in an unknown future, its scope extends to the ends of the earth and its mission to all men. Once more, there comes to light the complete inadequacy of attempting to begin from doctrines and then attempting to flesh them out into living speech, when it is living speech that, from the start, alone can be at once concrete and alive, interpersonal and communal, historical and ecumenical.27

10.4.2  T  homas Aquinas on the Light of Faith and of Prophecy in Relation to Theology In Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, Lonergan noted that against the so-called Latin Averroists, Thomas “never thought of debating whether intellectual light is immanent or transcendent. Indeed, when he argued that agent intellect was immanent, he was arguing for an identification of agent intellect with the ground of intellectual light. He was able to frame his conclusion in this fashion: ‘Unde nihil prohibet ipsi lumini animae nostrae attribuere actionem intellectus agentis; et praecipue cum Aristoteles intellectum agentem comparet lumini’.”28 Furthermore, the agent intellect first elicits questions for understanding (quid sit?) and during inquiry it illumines the phantasm in order, first, to grasp the quiddity (form or essence) in order, second, to formulate what it understands in concepts; it then elicits questions  Bernard Lonergan, “Pope John’s Intention,” A Third Collection, edited by Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 228. 28  “And so nothing prevents our attributing the action of agent intellect to the light of our soul itself; and especially since Aristotle compares agent intellect to a light.” (Translated by the editors of Verbum; see footnote 25.) In Understanding and Being Lonergan said, “… St Thomas says, we judge things by the eternal reasons not in the sense that we take a look at the eternal reasons, but in the sense that the very light of our intelligence is a created participation of the uncreated light that is God himself” (390), citing Summa theologiae, 1, q. 84, a. 5 c. 27

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for reflection (an sit?), and in the process of critical reflection it illumines the evidence so that the one checking to grasp if the hypothesis is warranted by sufficient evidence to determine whether the warrants are sufficient to judge Yes, No, Probably, Possibly regarding the truth of its understanding. As Lonergan makes clear, for Aquinas “intelligible light is seen, not as an object, but ‘in ratione medii cognoscendi’.”29 In other words, the lumen is that by which we understand and judge; and in general, “The act whereby we apprehend the truth about something … is not within our own power, for it takes place in virtue of some light, natural or supernatural.”30 The details of Aquinas’s refutation of the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle’s teaching on the relationship between the human agent intellect and the divine nous do not concern us here. All this is by way of stressing St Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that intellectual light enables (1) an understanding of the intelligible in matter, (2) an understanding of matter as open to analogy regarding what transcends matter, and (3) the divine identity with intellectual light itself. This account depends upon an explicitly metaphysical analogy of being that is based on the centrality of the wonder that desires intelligere/understanding, and whose object is everything that exists (reality, being) in the precise sense that it is not confined to any genus or species (Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 7; Summa contra Gentiles 2, c. 98, §9). Nevertheless it is still commonly claimed by many Catholic theologians that St Thomas Aquinas’ emphasis on propositional truth and deduction is a consequence of his adaptation of Aristotle’s notion of scientia subordinata in order to conceive theology (sacra doctrina) as a science. Due to the intervening influence of Baroque scholasticism and especially of the Jesuit, Francisco Suárez, their complaint is probably based upon caricature. Thus, syllogisms are treated as nothing more than an “instrument for exhibiting the grounds of the judgment in the conclusion: if the premises are true, then the conclusions must be true.” Bernard Lonergan pointed out in contrast that both Aristotle and St Thomas understood that in the quest for an intelligentia fidei the “syllogism is also an instrument for developing understanding,” as seen in “Aristotle’s lengthy discussion of the syllogismos epistemonikós …”31 According to the caricature Aquinas’s theology focuses on either “a set of propositions or even a set of truths instead of the reality of God: but Aquinas wrote, Deus est subjectum hujus scientiae [Summa theologiae 1, 1, a. 7]”.32 However, as quaerens intellectum theology does not directly seek true and certain propositions and inferences but a possibly relevant understanding of God and the revealed mysteries: “Now precisely because understanding is quo est omnia fieri, its object is not any restricted genus of being but being itself. Because its object is being, it is 29  [‘under the aspect of a medium of knowing’] Super I Sententiarum, d. 3, q. 4a. 5 sol. See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL 2, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 90–91. 30  Summa theologiae, I-II, q 17, a 6. 31  Lonergan, “Theology and Understanding,” Collection, 117–118: “God is the subject of this science.” 32  Lonergan, “Theology and Understanding,” Collection, 117.

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impossible for understanding to be fully in act without being God.” Lonergan goes on to clarify that, our present impossibility of participating in God’s understanding of himself implies that any understanding that we do attain is negative, that is, a refutation of objections or a grasp of the absence of inner contradiction. On the other hand, though we do not understand God in any positive fashion, this does not imply that we do not understand revealed truth in any positive fashion. In the very question in which the gift of understanding in this life is affirmed to be a matter of understanding that we do not understand God, there is also the statement, “… with regard to what is proposed to faith for acceptance, there are two requirements … The first is that intellect should penetrate or grasp it; and this pertains to the gift of understanding …” [Summa theologiae 2-2, 8, 7, a 2c].33

Freed from caricature, Aquinas’s theology as a scientia subordinata means: “(1) that the subject of theology is not a set of propositions or a set of truths but a reality, (2) that theology itself is an understanding, for science is a process towards a terminal understanding, (3) that this understanding is not of God himself, for then the science would not be subalternated but subalternating, and (4) that an understanding of revelation cannot be adequate, for the revelation is about God, and God himself is not understood.”34 Lonergan always stresses that St Thomas’s intelligentia mysteriorum aims at rationes convenientiae i.e., appropriate hypotheses, and not certitudes. The fact that the later, more logically oriented Duns Scotus as well as William of Occam objected that Aquinas’s arguments are non probant bears witness to this significant point. Therefore, Aquinas’s analogy of light is precisely a hypothetical understanding. It corresponds in Thomas’s thought to his metaphysical analogy of matter so that the greater degree in which a being is conditioned by matter (space and time), the lesser degree of light is essential to that being. Thus, among created and finite realities, (I) sub-human nature, including everything intelligible that is intrinsically conditioned by matter (i.e., space and time); (II) human beings, created in God’s image and likeness, and therefore as both intelligible and intelligent and so only extrinsically conditioned by matter since their capacity to understand a reality adequately is limited to the quidditas rei materialis; (III) angelic beings, which are intelligent and not conditioned by matter even extrinsically, yet, as created entities, have a beginning and exist in aevum as distinct from either eternity or time; and finally, (IV) God as the one uncreated and absolutely unconditioned being whose essence is identical with his act of existence, and as Uncreated Light is a subsistent act of understanding love. Thomas Aquinas adopted St Augustine’s notion of light in order to work out a theory of the imago Dei by which the human mind is a “created participation in uncreated light.” Thus, the light of intelligence supplements Aquinas’s reception of Aristotle’s account of the ‘agent intellect,’ that (1) by illuminating phantasms brings about the insight so that the intelligible species moves the ‘possible intellect’ from potentially understanding to actually doing so. As a result, the identity of “intellect 33 34

 Lonergan, “Theology and Understanding,” Collection, 118–119.  Lonergan, “Theology and Understanding,” Collection, 119.

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in act” and “the intelligible in act” can express the possibly relevant answer to the question quid sit? in the verbum (i.e., concept, definition, hypothesis or guess). Still more importantly, St Augustine’s insight into the link between human internal light and veritas inspired Thomas to realize how only light as ‘a created participation in Uncreated Light’ can explain the agent intellect’s illumination of the evidence in the process of responding to the question an sit? To ascertain whether what has been understood and expressed in the verbum’s simple apprehension is actually relevant, the light of reason enables reflective understanding to assess the sufficiency (or not) of the evidence by grasping the virtually unconditioned (i.e., verifying that the conditions that have to be contingently fulfilled for the guess or hypotheses to be true have as a matter of fact, or contingently been fulfilled). This reflective understanding elicits the verbum complexum of judgment, which is not simply a synthesis of concepts. Lonergan wrote that “no synthesis of concepts, of itself, constitutes a judgment,” so that “[j]udgment is, not synthesis, but positing or rejecting synthesis.”35 Nevertheless, although the integrity of the one judging is crucial for making correct judgments, the positing or rejecting that proceeds from the reflective act of understanding’s grasp of the sufficiency/insufficiency of the evidence, is not a decision. St Thomas’s statement that verum et falsum in mente, bonum et malum in re means that judgment regards the knowledge of concrete, actual existence, and is irreducible to a simple entailment of a reality’s essence or nature (quidditas) that may motivate one to make a decision. As Lonergan explained, [I]f one asks for the ontological cause of the knowledge of existence, clearly one must appeal to the existence of the thing immanent in the thing. On the other hand, if one asks for the cognitional reason justifying our claim to know existence, that reason is a true judgment of the type, This exists. For truth is the medium in which being is known; truth formally is found only in judgment; and existence is the act of being.36

Aquinas’s analogy of light transcends the analogy of being that is proportionate to our capacity to understand and affirm, including the created universe and the natural knowledge of God potentially attainable de jure, even though actually attainable only in virtue of God’s saving gift of his love. Natural revelation, then, corresponds to the light of intelligence. The prophetic and apostolic revelation handed down by the church corresponds to the light of faith; and revelation as culminating in the eschatological beatific vision or ‘knowledge of God as we are known by God’ corresponds to the light of glory. Because the created intellect is potens omnia fieri, it is a ‘created participation in uncreated light’; and as human beings desire to know everything about everything, they naturally desire the highest good, which means that they long for the attainment of essential (or quidditative) knowledge of God. However, since human beings can only attain quidditative or essential knowledge of realities contingently existing in matter or conditioned intrinsically or at least extrinsically by space and time, the fulfillment of humankind’s natural desire absolutely transcends the human capacity 35 36

 Lonergan, “Insight: Preface to a Discussion,” Collection, 149.  Lonergan, “Insight: Preface to a Discussion,” Collection, 150.

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to attain knowledge by the light of intelligence or of reason. It follows that because the fulfillment of the natural human desire is de facto a supernatural mystery, we can only know about it as such through the gift of revelation. And in our pilgrim state we need the supernatural gift of the light of faith to receive and accept this knowledge. In the end, what is revealed to us eschatologically (i.e., the “knowing as we are known” of 1 Cor 13. 12) cannot be attained without the supernatural gift of the light of glory. Each of these absolutely supernatural gifts of light ultimately derive from God’s completely undeserved and unmerited and therefore utterly free gift of self-­ communication traditionally known as grace. It follows that St Augustine’s statement that “God can create us without us but he cannot save us without us” implies this utterly communicative aspect of grace. The gift of God’s love, like human love, has to be disclosed by God and received and accepted by us in virtue of God’s gift of his love bestowed upon us. In relation to the light of faith needed to receive the divine revelation of truths unknowable by the light of unaided intelligence and reason alone, St Thomas conceived faith basically as what we call belief: an assent to a truth one has not ascertained for oneself by one’s immanent operations but assents to because motivated by trusting in the final analysis in the word of someone who knows the truth first-hand. And so belief presupposes prior judgments of fact and value regarding both the credibility of the one sharing the truth, and the worthwhileness of believing the truth being shared. Applying this analysis of belief to the act of faith in divine revelation, the performance of these prior judgments of (what have come to be called) ‘credibility’ and ‘credentity’ ground the believer’s decision to assent to (or make a judgment regarding) what is revealed as true. In the case of the revelation of supernatural truths, the lumen fidei or the light of faith is the condition of the possibility of making these judgments that precede the decision to believe, deciding to assent to the revealed truth, and the mind’s assent to the revealed truth itself. Thus, the analogy of light provides one dimension underlying Herbert McCabe’s reference to the “divinely given disposition of the mind by which we begin to share in God’s understanding of himself.” The light of prophecy proper to the role of the prophets and inspired authors is intimately related to Thomas Aquinas’s insistence upon the priority of the literal sense of Scripture over and above the spiritual, moral, and anagogical senses,37 because the literal sense is based on the intention of God, the author. Rowan Williams says trenchantly that “this intention is primarily manifest in events, not in the text itself, for God can communicate through the material processes of the world’s history, while human beings can only organize words to convey their meanings.” According to Aquinas, “particular things are handed on in sacred teaching …  Summa theologiae I, q 1, a 10c: “Illa ergo prima significatio, qua voces significant res, pertinet ad sensum, qui est historicus, vel literalis.” [Hence, that first signification, by which words signify realities, pertains to the sense, which is historical, or literal.] Cited by Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 47.

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to declare the authority of those living persons through whom divine revelation proceeds to us,” which is to say, those figures who have been given the light of prophecy in order to enact or communicate the purposes of God.38

10.4.3  T  he Light of Glory and the Revelatory Role of Christ Jesus Thomas Aquinas’s analogy of light helps us to make sense of McCabe’s apparently exorbitant phrase, “we begin to share in God’s understanding of himself.” The light of glory is the final piece of Aquinas’s analogy of light. It is the condition of the possibility of the eschatological revelation, the beatific vision. But here we also make a shift from the link between the reception of revelation to the quintessential revelation communicated in the dramatic story lived by God incarnate in Christ Jesus.39 If, following Aristotle’s definition of a plot, a story is a set of actions and passions heading towards a point, Lonergan’s “Existenz and Aggiornamento” provides a significant clue to the meaning of Jesus’s story: “Christ in his humanity did not will means to reach an end, but possessed the end, the vision of God, and overflowed in love to loving us …”40 Lonergan spoke more at length on this in his course on Christology, the English translation of whose Latin text ad usum auditorum is The Incarnate Word: Living on this earth, Christ had human knowledge both effable and ineffable, besides his divine knowledge. As a beholder [i.e., one who ‘possessed the end, the vision of God’], he immediately knew God by that ineffable knowledge which is also called beatific [i.e. what Congar spoke of as the ‘eschatological revelation called the light of glory’], and in the same act, though mediately, he also knew everything else that pertained to his work. As a pilgrim [i.e. one ‘who overflowed in love to loving us’], however, he elicited those natural and supernatural cognitional acts which constituted his human and historical life.41

 The preceding quotation from the Summa theologiae I, q 1, a 2 ad 2: Singularia traduntur in sacra doctrina … ad declarandum auctoritatem vivorum per quos ad nos revelatio divina processit.” I am indebted to Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” 47, for the ideas in this paragraph. 39  Rowan Williams in “Postmodern Theology and the Judgment of the World,” in Postmodern Theology. Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, edited by Frederick P. Burnham (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco, 1989), 96, makes a statement, the implication of which will be taken up later in this paper: “The words and work of Jesus demand choice for or against him; they force to the light hidden directions and dispositions that would otherwise never come to view, and thus make the conflicts of goals and interests between people a public affair. The inner rejection of one’s own identity as God’s creature and the object of God’s love, the violence done to human truth within the self, becomes visible and utterable in the form of complicity and rejecting of Jesus.” 40  Lonergan, “Existenz and Aggiornamento,” Collection, 230. 41  Lonergan, The Incarnate Word, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 8, translation by Charles C. Hefling, Jr of 3rd edition De Verbo Incarnato published by the Gregorian University in 1964, edited by Robert M. Doran and Jeremy D. Wilkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 573. 38

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Lonergan’s claim that “Christ as God exercises divine knowledge,” is related to the fact that as “the one undivided Christ had two natures without confusion, so also he exercised without confusion two natural operations divine and human.” The claim that Jesus is a pilgrim is based on the belief that “Christ is ‘perfect in humanity, true man [composed] of rational soul and body, consubstantial with us as regards his humanity, like us in all things apart from sin.”42 Possessing the end, then, Christ as beholder living on this earth “knows God immediately.” This phrase contrasts our need to gain knowledge through our senses and imagination with the fact that all Jesus knows by the light of glory and the vision of God or beatific vision he is able to know through the mediation of the divine essence. Hence, the highpoint of revelation as God’s self-communication occurs in and through the drama of Jesus’s existence translated into the human terms of a first-century Palestinian Jewish idiom, and in this way constitutes the effable knowledge drawn from his Jewish tradition both written and oral. Through the many things Jesus suffered and did in all his interpersonal encounters and situations, he needed to ask and answer questions for intelligibility, truth, and value, and to exercise the self-correcting process of learning (just as the rest of us do) in order to figure out gradually the appropriate words and deeds, speeches and actions needed to communicate the mysteries of divine revelation. According to friend and former colleague, Charles Hefling, appropriating the Trinitarian presuppositions of Jesus’s mission of communication entails reaching the kinds of understanding at stake in the epitome of God’s self-communication that occurs in Christ Jesus, insofar as the man Jesus, by his words and deeds, by his death and resurrection, has made effable or expressed in fully human terms the ineffable mystery of God’s absolute and unconditional character as Love. To understand the mystery of the act of creation, one would have to be God; to understand the mystery of the gift of charity as “motivated by the love of God, by the gift of the Spirit who is God, an understanding of what it is to be God and of what it is to be ‘proceeding Love’ in God would be necessary. Again, … to understand [Christ’s human nature’s] being united to and by the eternal Word who is God, an understanding of what it is to be God and of what it is, in God, to be ‘spoken’ is required.”43 Lonergan’s expression, ‘ineffable knowledge,’ then, is equivalent to what McCabe called ‘God’s self-understanding.’ Beyond all prophecy, beyond even the knowledge of Moses, Jesus expressed “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived.” Beatific knowledge as unimaginable, and therefore not susceptible of being known quidditatively by any human mind other than that of Jesus, may perhaps be most helpfully compared to mystical knowledge, which is also described as immediate insofar as it transcends images and concepts. According to traditional teaching, then, the pilgrim people ‘in Christ Jesus’ seek to attain the vision of God, but Jesus the pilgrim is the pure instance of grace in  Lonergan, The Incarnate Word, 663.  Charles C. Hefling, Jr., “Revelation and/as Insight,” The Importance of Insight. Essays in Honour of Michael Vertin, edited by John J. Liptay, Jr. and David S. Liptay (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 105.

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human history; he is the only human being who possesses the beatific vision by which we “will know God as we are known by God, face to face” (1 Cor 13.12). The fact that from the moment he began his human life Jesus did not know in human terms the meaning of his beatific knowledge because that unfathomable knowledge is utterly immaterial accords with the profound impulse motivating the Eastern Christian tradition’s insistence on the apophatic starting point for knowing God as incomprehensible mystery. Because of this apophatic dimension, Jesus had to ‘start from scratch’ in learning how to communicate the meaning of the absolute and unconditional love of God for every human being to humankind. So Lonergan’s statement, “Christ in his humanity did not will means to reach an end, but possessed the end, the vision of God,” means that the Word incarnate made history in Jesus’s dedication to communicating to humankind in effable human terms the mystery of his primordially human, yet ineffable, share in ‘God’s self-understanding’. Only if one were oblivious to the fact that, precisely because the vision of God is supernatural and, utterly unlike ordinary human knowing by being absolutely unconditioned by space and time, could one coherently suppose that eschatological gift of the beatific vision violates either the principle that “Christ is like us in all things, apart from sin,” or the principle of God’s incomprehensibility as beyond the human capacity to understand exhaustively.

10.4.4  T  he Holy Spirit’s Role in the Communicating and Receiving of Revelation St Paul states the basic Christian teaching of how, in the personal encounter with Jesus, we receive a share in divine revelation as God’s self-understanding as absolute love (I Cor 2.7-13); and because the Father through the Son sends the Spirit, St Paul declared in Romans 5.5, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” So the following passage from I Corinthians spells out the implications of this for revelation: But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. … But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (Is. 64.4)—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. 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 from God. And we speak of those things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

Christians believe that the Spirit who “searches everything, even the depths of God” is the Spirit through whom God revealed to us his mysteries as the “spirit of revelation” (Eph 1.17) granted to all believers. A more developed Trinitarian theology teaches that the mission of the Holy Spirit is not merely to lead us to the Incarnate Word by way of instructing and guiding people; as St Paul also says, the

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Spirit sent into human hearts by the Father through the Son transforms us by the graces of conversion, justification, and sanctification. The Holy Spirit transforms us by forgiving our sins (Jn 29.23), indwelling us (Jn 17. 26), liberating us (2 Cor 3.17-18), and making us adoptive children of the Father (Rom 8.14-17, Gal 4.6-7), brothers and sisters of Christ, and temples of the Spirit (1 Cor 6.19). Everything the Holy Spirit does supports our claim that the Spirit also brings about what McCabe says regarding that “divinely given disposition of the mind by which we begin to share in God’s understanding of himself.” McCabe also wrote: “In faith, we think of the history of humanity and our own life story as centered on the love of God for us as revealed in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh.” And so St Paul writes in 2 Cor 4.6, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus.” Yves Congar tells how the Holy Spirit enables Christians to receive a share in God’s self-understanding: The Lord or the Holy Spirit disposes the heart, and opens the ears (Act 16.14; 1 Thess 1.6; Col 4.3). In other words, to the objective revelation there corresponds the subject called to faith. From this viewpoint, which is that of God’s operation giving the power of understanding and thus making his Word actual for each person, the revelation is continuous and coextensive with the history of the Word. Jesus, who has the power to reveal to whom he wills (Mt 11. 27 par.), incessantly makes the Father known (Jn 17.20).

Congar goes on to recall Augustine’s theme of the “interior master” (De Magistro c. 11-14; Conf. IX, 9 (32): “docente te magistro intimo in schola pectoris”), and to speak of the interior anointing by the Holy Spirit (I Jn 2.27), and then refers to St Augustine (Conf. X, 23.34) on the theme of the hardening or of blindness of the heart, which we will discuss later.44 The Holy Spirit bestows upon receivers of revelation the lumen fidei or light of faith. Lonergan summarizes what our quotations from First and Second Corinthians say about the complementarity of the missions of Word and Spirit, “Without the mission of the Word, the gift of the Spirit is a being-in-love without a proper object; it remains simply an orientation to mystery that awaits its interpretation. Without the invisible mission of the Spirit, the Word enters into his own, but his own receive him not.”45

10.5  T  he Analogy of Light: From Faculty Psychology to Intentionality Analysis Lonergan’s Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas explores the retrieval of the fact that Thomas had performed a phenomenology of the operations in his own conscious intentionality based on what he deemed to be the accuracy of Aquinas’s psychology.  Congar, La Foi et la Théologie, 16–17.  Bernard Lonergan, “Mission and Spirit,” A Third Collection. Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, edited by Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 32.

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In his Summa theologiae Thomas had expressly told his readers that “… anyone can experience this in himself, that when someone tries to understand something he forms some images for himself, by way of examples, in which he may as it were have an insight into (inspiciat) into what he is striving to understand” (I, q. 84, a. 7c); and “… the human soul understands itself by its understanding, which is its proper act, perfectly demonstrating its power and its nature” (q. 88. A. 2 ad 3m). However, Aquinas did not fully thematize his performance, because “performance must precede reflection on performance, and method is the fruit of that reflection.” As a man of his time, “Aquinas had to be content to perform.”46 In Insight (completed in 1954, published in 1957),47 Lonergan transposed what he’d learned from Aquinas about cognition into terms compatible with modern science and history by means of what he discovered (in spite of the fact that he had still used the language of faculty psychology to express himself) only later in the 1960s to be intentionality analysis. When the moving viewpoint availed itself of a more rigorously phenomenological method, it unleashed a stream of further developments in his thought regarding greater clarity with respect to feelings as intentional responses to value, and in realizing the primacy of love in overall human development. These new discoveries enabled Lonergan to differentiate and expand his account of the fourth level of conscious intentionality initiated by questions for deliberation and responded to by felt apprehensions of value and judgments of value as integrating, yet fully distinct from, judgments of fact.48 Then he was in a position to make the distinction between faith as the fallout regarding values due to falling in love with God and belief as assent to truths disclosed by those one trusts.

10.5.1  T  he Transposition into the Perspective of the Primacy of Love Perhaps no outcome of Lonergan’s later, more capacious account of the fourth, existential level of human conscious intentionality was more significant than the way it enabled him to go beyond the hitherto rather one-sided emphasis on the cognitive  Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, 10. It should also be mentioned that due to the ongoing reception of the works of Aristotle in the Latin West from Islamic and Jewish sources and commentaries, of which both in the Scholastic discipline of lectio for scriptural interpretation and in the speculative discipline of disputatio constantly made use, Aquinas was compelled to express what he found through introspective reflection in a metaphysical language that is incompatible with phenomenological thematization, because key terms in metaphysical psychology such as soul, potencies or faculties, and habits are the deduced conditions of the possibility of the operations of sensing, understanding, and judging, which are empirically accessible to conscious interiority, and so are not able to be experienced directly. 47  Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 48  In Insight, the level of responsibility that stressed the consistency between one’s knowing and choosing was virtually a subset of the third level regarding judgments of fact. 46

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aspect of human development that involves a life-long synthesis of organism, psyche, and intelligent consciousness.49 His recognition of the marital, social, and religious dimensions of love in Method in Theology (and in writings leading up to and following the 1972 publication of Method) led to his elaboration of two vectors of human development: the vector from below upwards involving experience, understanding, judgment and decision entered a process of mutual mediation by a vector from above downwards, now regarded as the prior vector of human integration because it massively conditions the one from below upwards. The vector from above begins with the transformation of falling in love: the domestic love of the family; the human love of one’s tribe, one’s city, one’s country, mankind; the divine love that orientates man in his cosmos and expresses itself in his worship. Where hatred only sees evil, love reveals value. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out, no matter what the sacrifice involved. Where hatred reinforces bias, love dissolves it, whether it be the bias of unconscious motivation, the bias of individual or group egoism, or the bias of omni-competent, short-sighted common sense. Where hatred plods around in ever narrower circles, love breaks the bonds of psychological and social determinisms with the conviction of faith and the power of hope.50

Lonergan’s mature phenomenology of feelings as apprehending a hierarchy of values (vital, social, cultural, personal, religious) transcended the three questions about what we are doing when we think we are knowing (cognitional theory), why doing that is knowing (epistemology), and what do we know when we do it (critically grounded metaphysics) that had so dominated his methodology. Suddenly the link between authenticity and love takes center stage. In the following section, which unfolds the implications for the notion of revelation of this radical breakthrough, we have chosen to let Lonergan’s words speak for themselves since they express his mature thinking more concisely and perspicuously than we are capable of doing. We have seen that revelation as God’s self-communication is focused upon the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus as making effable in human terms the ineffable knowledge that is obviously not a matter of theoretical speculation. For years Lonergan had adhered to the dictum Nihil amatum nisi praecognitum (nothing is loved unless it is first known). But as the epigraph for the Grammar of Assent—a book Lonergan has said influenced him greatly—St. John Henry Newman had used the maxim of St Ambrose, ‘Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.’51 As Lonergan regularly began to quote Newman’s motto, “Cor ad cor loquitur” (which he translated, “love speaks to love”52), it became clear 49  Lonergan, “Genetic Method,” Insight, 484–507; Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul) J.A. Smith, trans, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 535–603; and Eric Voegelin, “Man in Society and History,” Published Essays 1953–1965, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 11, edited with an Introduction by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 191–2. 50  See Bernard Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 100–109, at 106. 51  “God has not been pleased to bring about the salvation of his people in dialectic.” 52  Lonergan, Method in Theology, (New York: Herder, 1972), 113.

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that the symbol of the heart—as explicated, for example, in Karl Rahner’s meditation on it in relation to the Sacred Heart devotion,53 Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Heart of the World,54 and Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Heart55—signaled a turning point in Lonergan’s theological method and his Trinitarian theology. The first crucial shift involved moving to the foreground what had tended to remain rather in the background of his writings, namely, that conscious intentionality is turned toward the world and other persons: It turns out, however, that the priority of cognitional theory is only relative, and the priority of cognitional operations qualified. The cognitional yields to the moral, and the moral yields to the interpersonal. To make a sound moral judgment one has to know the relevant facts, the possibilities, the probabilities; but with those conditions fulfilled, the moral judgment proceeds on its own criteria and towards its own ends. Again moral judgments and commitments underpin personal relations; but with the underpinning presupposed or even merely hoped for, interpersonal commitment takes on its own initiative and runs its own course.56

Lonergan’s second major change of mind came with his breakthrough to the notion of value57: In Insight the good was the intelligent and the reasonable. In Method the good is a distinct notion. It is intended in questions for deliberation: Is this worthwhile? Is it truly or only apparently good? It is aspired to in the intentional response of feeling to values. It is known in judgments of value made by a virtuous or authentic person with a good conscience. It is brought about by deciding and living up to one’s decisions. Just as intelligence sublates sense, just as reasonableness sublates intelligence, so deliberation sublates and thereby unifies knowing.58

 Karl Rahner, “‘Behold This Heart!’: Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” and “Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” “Theological Investigations, Vol. III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life,” translated by Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 321–352. 54  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979). 55  Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2007). 56  Lonergan, “Variations in Fundamental Theology,” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965– 1980, CWL 17, edited by Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto), 247. 57  Bernard Lonergan, “The Notion of Value,” and “Judgments of Value,” Method in Theology, 34–41. 58  Bernard Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” A Second Collection, 277. See also “Variations in Fundamental Theology,” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980: “[A] distinction may be drawn between sublating and sublated operations, where the sublating operations go beyond the sublated, add a quite new principle, give the sublated a higher organization, enormously extend their range and bestow upon them a new and higher relevance. So inquiry and understanding, stand to the data of sense; so reflection and checking stand to the formulations and hypotheses of understanding; so deliberating on what is truly good, really worth while, stands to experience, understanding, and factual judgment; so, finally, interpersonal commitments stand to cognitional and moral operations” (248). 53

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The third major shift occurred when Lonergan worked out the link between feelings as intentional responses to values59 and being in love, whether referring to love of intimacy as in friendship and marriage, or of community, neighborhood, or nation, or love of God. As a result, in Method in Theology he recognized that “the question of God is considered more important than the precise manner in which the question is formulated, and our basic awareness of God comes to us not through our arguments or choices but primarily through God’s gift of his love.”60 Religious experience, then, is a dynamic state of being in love with God that is conscious (i.e., an experience) but not necessarily known (which would require understanding and judging in addition to the inner experience of God’s love). Religious experience is conscious, and Lonergan explains that it occurs: … on the fourth level of intentional consciousness. It is not the consciousness that accompanies acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. It is not the consciousness that accompanies inquiry, insight, formulating, speaking. It is not the consciousness that accompanies acts of reflecting, marshaling and weighing the evidence, making judgments of fact or possibility. It is the type of consciousness that deliberates, makes judgments of value, decides, acts responsibly and freely. But it is this consciousness brought to a fulfillment, as having undergone a conversion, as possessing a basis that may be broadened and deepened and enriched but not superseded, as ready to deliberate and judge and decide and act with the easy freedom of those who do all good because they are in love. So the gift of God’s love occupies the ground and root of the fourth and highest level of man’s intentional consciousness. It takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae.61

As Lonergan wrote in another place: [D]ecisions point not only outwardly to our practical concerns but also inwardly to the existential subject aware of good and evil and concerned whether his own decisions are making him a good or evil man. But beyond all these, beyond the subject as experiencing, as intelligent, as reasonable in his judgments, as free and responsible in his decisions, there is the subject in love. On that ultimate level we can learn to say with Augustine, amor meus pondus meum, my being in love is the gravitational field in which I am carried along.62

A fruit of these foundational breakthroughs with respect to the fourth level of consciousness’s relationship with the good and values that led to his acknowledgment of the primacy of love was Lonergan’s reformulation of the psychological analogy for the Trinity: The psychological analogy, then, has its starting point in that higher synthesis of intellectual, rational, and moral consciousness that is the dynamic state of being in love. Such love manifests itself in its judgments of value. And the judgments are carried out in decisions that are acts of loving. Such is the analogy found in the creature. Now in God the origin is the Father, in the New Testament named ho Theos, who identified himself with agape (I John 4: 8,16). Such love expresses itself in its Word, its Logos,

 Lonergan, “Feelings,” Method in Theology, 27–34.  Bernard Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” A Second Collection, 277. 61  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 106–107. 62  Lonergan, “Variations in Fundamental Theology,” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965– 1980, 216.

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its verbum spirans amorem, which is a judgment of value. The judgment of value is sincere, and so it grounds the Proceeding Love that is identified with the Holy Spirit.63

Significantly, “the two processions that may be conceived in God … are not unconscious processes, but intellectually, rationally, morally conscious, as are judgments of value based on evidence perceived by a lover, and the acts of loving grounded on judgments of value.”64 Here are the implications of Lonergan’s reformulation of the psychological analogy in which God as Love has the priority: The two processions ground four real relations of which only three are really distinct from one another; and these three are not just relations as relations, and so modes of being, but also subsistent, and so not just paternity and filiation but also Father and Son. Finally, Father and Son are eternal; their consciousness is not in time but timeless, their subjectivity is not becoming but ever itself; and each in his own distinct manner is the subject of the infinite act that God is, the Father as originating Love, the Son as judgment of value expressing that love, and the Spirit as originated Love.65

Because the religious experience of falling in love with God is a matter of conscious awareness, but not at first one of knowledge,66 it occurs in (what Lonergan came to call) the world of immediacy. “Before it enters the world mediated by meaning, religion is the prior word God speaks to us by flooding our hearts with his love. That prior word pertains, not to the world mediated by meaning, but to the world of immediacy, to the unmediated experience of the mystery of love and awe.”67 However, according to the Christian understanding of revelation, religious experience also happens in the world mediated by meaning.68 “The self-communication  Lonergan, “Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,” A Third Collection, 93.  Lonergan, “Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,” A Third Collection, 93. 65  Lonergan, “Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,” A Third Collection, 93–94. 66  See Bernard Lonergan, “The Dehellenization of Dogma,” A Second Collection, 29. See also The Triune God: Systematics Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 12, translated by Michael G. Shields, edited by Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 215–217: 63 64

It is one thing to be conscious, but it is quite another to know, through knowledge in the proper sense, that one is conscious. To be conscious belongs to everyone, for consciousness is simply presence of mind to itself. This self-presence is effected by the very fact that our sensitive and intellectual nature is actuated by both apprehending and desiring. It does not matter what object is apprehended or desired, since we as conscious subjects consciously apprehend and desire different things. Nor do we become conscious by adverting to ourselves, since consciousness is on the side of the adverting subject and not on the side of the object adverted to. But when this adverting to ourselves is done, we begin the second step, namely, knowing that we are conscious. For one who is conscious places oneself on the side of the object inasmuch as one understands and conceives consciousness and truly affirms that one is conscious. But unless we define what consciousness is, and unless we truly affirm that we are conscious in the sense of the definition, we do not attain knowledge, properly speaking, of our own consciousness. 67  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 112. 68  The ‘world of immediacy’ indicates human conscious intentionality’s direct awareness (though not necessarily focal or foregrounded) of the data of the senses or the data of consciousness; the ‘world mediated by meaning’ indicates human conscious intentionality’s direct awareness of

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of the divinity in love”69 is not only communicative and constitutive; it also plays a cognitive role, as we see in the words of the simple children’s song Karl Barth is said to have recited when asked by a theologian at the University of Chicago to summarize his theology: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The priority of love is foremost, and God wants everybody to know it. As Hans Urs von Balthasar expressed it: God is love; but it is as man that He has chosen to demonstrate this fact; and this is why it is uniquely to Christ that the two precepts of love can be fused into one single precept. … This is equivalent to saying that God, in revealing his face to man, has also revealed to man his own proper human likeness. There was no need for God to make use of man in order to reveal himself; but if he determined to do so, and did so by an in-humanization, then all the dimensions of human nature, known and unknown, are to be assumed and utilized to serve as means of expression for the absolute Person. And so the Christian religion, while remaining sociologically only “one” religion among others, should necessarily coincide with total humanism, and it is only by this title that it can be recognized as fully catholic.70

As Lonergan expained, this outward and ‘in-humanized’ Word, … has a constitutive role. When a man and a woman love each other but do not avow their love, they are not yet in love. Their very silence means that their love has not reached the point of self-surrender and self-donation. It is love that each freely and fully reveals to the other that brings about the radically new situation of being in love and that begins the unfolding of its life-long implications.71

10.5.2  R  eceiving Revelation: The Distinction Between Faith and Belief As we have already pointed out, pre-Vatican II discourse, including Lonergan’s, labored under the sway of an overly defensive posture vis-à-vis the Protestant Reformation and European Enlightenment. It tended almost exclusively to stress images, symbols, or words, and its mediate (or indirect) awareness (although, again, not necessarily in a thematized manner) of what the images, symbols, or words signify. To illustrate the difference, contrast the early Husserl’s endeavor to isolate acts of “pure perception” with Heidegger’s turn toward language (or linguistic phenomenology), so that while pure perception may rarely occur, normally human conscious intentionality is present to the world as symbolic, or ‘languaged,’ worded, and spoken —which includes intersubjectivity, intersubjective meaning, artistic, literary, incarnate meaning, gestures, and such like—; hence the significance of the “as-structure” for hermeneutic phenomenology. 69  Lonergan, “Mission and Spirit,” A Third Collection, 31. 70  Hans Urs von Balthasar, “God Has Spoken in Human Language,” in The Liturgy and the Word of God (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1959), 33–52. 71  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 113, whence I quote footnote 15: A. Vergote, “La liberté religieuse comme pouvoir de symbolization,” in L’Hermeneutique de la liberté religieuse, edited by E. Castelli, Paris: Aubier, 1968, pp. 383 ff. The presence of another person takes one out of a purely epistemological context. The words he speaks introduce a new dimension to meaning. See also Gibson Winter, Elements for a Social Ethic, New  York: Macmillan, 1968, pp.  99 ff., applying G.H. Mead on the social origins of meaning.

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faith as an assent to the truth—a far cry in both tone and intent from a discourse that places revelation in the context God’s avowal in Jesus’ life death and resurrection of unconditional love for humankind. As a result, even today, when many people say ‘faith’ in a religious context they probably mean ‘belief’—holding propositions as true whose veracity depends upon the authority of the one revealing, instead of upon one’s own conscious understanding and judging; and the truths so believed are dogmas or doctrines, terms which in the post-Enlightenment world have taken on the pejorative connotations of prejudice and superstition. Christians often naturally reacted to this by reframing the initium fidei in terms of rational argumentation— operating on the propositions that enter into the praeambula fidei (preambles of the faith).72 In terms of both evangelical import and a more concrete and phenomenological account of the Glaubenszugang or appropriation of the faith, it becomes clear that receiving God’s gift of his love cannot be a matter of people’s having been reasoned into loving. “The apologist’s task is neither to produce in others nor to justify for them the gift of God’s love.”73 Instead of logical propositions, phenomenology focuses on the pre-propositional, preverbal, pre-judgmental, pre-conceptual, thus opening the way to the admission of how beside the point ‘critically grounding’ love is. As soon as he recognized this, Lonergan stopped concentrating on the analysis fidei because “in religious matters love precedes knowledge and, as that love is God’s gift, the very beginning of faith is due to God’s grace.” Then “[o]ur capacity for moral self-transcendence has found a fulfillment that brings deep joy and profound peace. Our love reveals to us values we had not appreciated, values of prayer and worship, or repentance and belief.”74 All these developments allowed Lonergan to distinguish ‘faith’ from ‘belief,’ and to define faith as “the knowledge born of religious love.” He explained what he meant by ‘knowledge born of love,’ in this way: Of it Pascal spoke when he remarked that the heart has reasons which reason does not know. Here by reason I would understand the compound of the activities on the first three levels of cognitional activity, namely, of experiencing, of understanding, and of judging. By the heart’s reasons I would understand feelings that are intentional responses to values; … Finally, by the heart I understand the subject on the fourth, existential level of intentional consciousness and in the dynamic state of being in love. The meaning, then, of Pascal’s remark would be that, besides the factual knowledge reached by experiencing, understanding, and verifying, there is another kind of knowledge reached through the discernment of value and the judgments of value of a person in love.75

72  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q 2, a 2, 3m: The existence and unity of God “are not articles of faith but preambles” [“non sunt articuli fidei sed praeambula ad articulos”]; see Guy de Broglie, “La vraie Notion thomiste des ‘praeambula fidei,” Gregorianum (1953), 345–389, on the changed conceptualization of this notion in the seventeenth century; “The Preambles of Faith,” in A Theology Reader, edited by Robert W. Gleason (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 105–114. 73  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 123. 74  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 122–123. 75  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 115.

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Lonergan therefore calls faith ‘the eye of being in love with God’ which is prior to belief since, as a love-inspired transvaluation of values, faith is the phenomenologically verifiable condition of the possibility for belief in the truths revealed by God.

10.6  R  evelation and Sin, Evil, and Redemption: ‘Love Alone Is Credible’76 Until now our treatment of the notion of revelation can almost be said to be in harmony with the theme of theosis, a term coined by Gregory of Nazianzus, meaning deification. The cosmic import of deifying effect of Christ’s death and resurrection was reemphasized first in relation to Christological controversies by both Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, and later on in relation to debates about Christ’s human will by Maximus the Confessor; and ever since then it has become a central feature of Eastern Orthodox theology and spirituality. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) attempted to save the doctrine for the Orthodox tradition from the extremes during the Hesychastic controversy having to do with blurring of the distinction between the creature and the uncreated God (in a reformulation of Maximus the Confessor’s perhaps more intelligible interpretation) that distinguished between God’s essence as unknowable and unable to be shared in, and his energies as uncreated, fully divine, and yet knowable precisely because participating in it is deification. The notion of deification, though preserved in the Western tradition, became less important due to Augustine’s with anti-Pelagian animus. The Pelagians wanted to stress moral reform, and downplayed the indispensability of the prior need for grace. Almost single-handedly Augustine reoriented the Western Catholic thinking about human relationship to God by a focus on sin (especially in the sense moral impotence by which a gap opens up between a person’s natural freedom and their effective freedom) and grace (namely, the saving or redeeming grace liberates human beings from moral impotence). This provoked the Western attempts to differentiate between two orders, distinct but not separated, within the whole of God’s creation: a natural order proportionate to the human capacity to attain knowledge and choice concerning realities, situations, etc., that are conditioned by space and time within an evolving and emergently probable universe, and the equally integral yet disproportionate human desire for an infinite fulfillment implied by Augustine in Confessions 1.1.1: “quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” [“you have made us for (or toward77) you and our heart is restless until it rests in you”]. Augustine stated famously in regard to the problem of grace  The marvelous title of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s personal favorite of his own books, Glaubhaft ist Nur Liebe, (Sammlung Christ heute) (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1963), the translation into English of which is Love Alone is Credible, or Only Love is Credible. 77  Augustine’s formulation may have been influenced by the Latin Bible, with which his readers would have been familiar, and which rendered the act of God as creating humans “toward [his] image,” (ad imaginem). 76

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vis-à-vis nature was: “God can create us without us but he cannot save us without us.” No wonder then that Etienne Gilson once said that Augustine did not have a theory of the free will, but instead a theory of the freed will because the issue in Confessions, Books I-IX—noverim te, noverim me (that I may know you, O God, that I may know myself) turns on his need to be freed from his disordered desires (concupiscentiae), a need only resolved by the mediation of the delectatio victrix brought about by Jesus Christ, the Son of God’s gratia salvans (healing or saving grace. Against the Pelagians Augustine argued that divine grace plucks out the heart of stone and substitutes the heart of flesh of the sinner, who neither deserves nor is able to bring about such a change, so that God operates in us without us. Then, in relation to a heart of flesh that is still weak and imperfect, grace strengthens us in answer to our prayer, God operates to initiate us into the spiritual life by giving us good desires, and cooperates to perfect us, helping us perform in accord with them. The Western concentration on sin and grace gave rise to the question that the Orthodox tradition of deification seems to have been less concerned to answer: namely, if everything was freely given by God, why is everything not grace? This question, which was answered in the West by the distinction between nature and grace is centered upon the redemptive aspect of revelation. For indeed, biblical revelation tells us not only of human fallibility but also of the primordial fall that has become an ongoing legacy—the panoply of human sin and evil that requires the restoration (apokatasis [Acts 3.21) of reality in accord with the purpose of God. If they had not been revealed by God, human beings could not know the mysteries hidden in God; and they have in fact been revealed in the self-communication of God in love, which, in Lonergan’s words, “resides in the sending of the Son, in the gift of the Spirit, in the hope of being united with the Father.”

10.6.1  The Revelation of Sin and Evil We have tried to describe how this revelation enters into the consciousness of human beings, but we still need to say how this share in God’s self-understanding reaches us in spite of the historic distortions caused by sin rooted in the egoism of individuals, group egoisms, and the overconfident short-sightedness of common sense that corrupts human culture with conflicting ideologies and “inflicts on individuals the social, economic, and psychological pressures that for human frailty amount to determinism. It multiplies and heaps up the abuses and absurdities that breed resentment, hatred, anger, violence.”78 In the words of the late poet, Philip Larkin, “Man hands misery on to man.”

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 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 117.

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What Lonergan called the ‘objective surd of sin’ or the ‘social surd,’ and what Eric Voegelin termed “pneumopathology,”79 spreads contagiously throughout human populations by way of the emotional pressures socially and culturally mediated internally, which breed alienation from oneself and from others, and result in the experience of one’s existence as ‘betrayal,’ insofar as one’s lack of authenticity and moral renunciation involve not just falsehood but a massive lie. In Book X, chapter 41 (66) of The Confessions, St Augustine prays concerning Truth and the Lie: “You are the truth who preside over all things. In my greed, I did not want to lose you, but together with you I wanted to possess a lie, just as no one wants to speak falsehood such that he himself does not know the truth. Thus did I lose you, because you disdain to be possessed together with a lie.” Earlier in that Book, chapter 23 (34), which is a meditative exegesis on the conditions of the possibility of the twists and turns of his life from birth until the immediate aftermath of his conversion that had been narrated in the first nine books, St Augustine wrote a passage on love of and hatred of the truth. Here the Bishop of Hippo illustrates how what Lonergan named the sublation of the head (i.e., consciousness as experiencing, understanding, and making judgments of fact) by the heart (consciousness as deliberating, making judgments of value, deciding, and acting), amounts to a transition from concern with factual truth as expressed in propositions to concern with the truth of existence. In responding to the question “why is it that ‘truth engenders hatred’” in spite of “lov(ing) the happy life, which is simply joy grounded on truth?” Augustine links the head’s truth and falsehood or error to the ‘heart’s’ truthfulness and lying or mendacity when he points out that we can “hate the truth for the sake of the object which [we] love instead of the truth.” The terrible result is that we “love truth for the light it sheds;” but we “hate it when it shows [us] up”—reprehends, reproves us—“as being wrong.”80 We are what we are because of what we have been and done. We are responsible for having given in to disordered love of self by deciding to act against what we know would be true to our natural desire to live in harmony with what we are still aware of as good. Our wish to be the center of the universe instead of being faithful to the One who is the center of the universe leads to the destruction of ourselves and of others; and regularly we do not want to take responsibility for being and doing these things, so we easily fall into the habit of rationalizing these decisions and deeds. The pure and unrestricted desire to know the truth and be in harmony with the highest good gets displaced by the desire to be known. Our illusions about our The political philosopher Eric Voegelin (who had narrowly escaped from the Nazis in Vienna after the Anschluss) used the term borrowed from Schelling to distinguish the disease of the spirit (as estrangement from the spirit) from what may usually be understood by the term, ‘psychopathology,’ in the context of a lecture delivered on the occasion of having been invited to give a Vorlesung at the University of Munich (since published as Hitler and the Germans). The lecture “The German University and German Society” is an analysis of the conditions enabling Hitler’s regime, published in Published Essays, 1966–1985 Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, edited by Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 6. 80  See St Augustine, Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: University Press, 1991), 119–200. 79

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selves, by which we entertain selfish fantasies about the rightness of our desires for comfort and pleasure (the libido concupiscendi), and our ambitions for power (the much more serious libido dominandi) can turn our moral renunciations into the living lie of sin. As Lonergan wrote, “Sin is the source of evil in this world insofar as this world is a human creation and a human product. It involves an objective surd and that surd is stopped, it is absorbed, only insofar as there is suffering. Suffering is, as it were, the absorption of the surd of sin.” The truth of this is clear: throughout history, people have not needed Machiavelli to tell them that anyone who tries to live in accord with what ought to be rather than with the deformations that actually exist “will work their own ruin.” When people “appeal to any conceivable scheme of justice, how could you set that right without causing an equal amount or even more of further suffering?”81 To be sure, that is the typical way for people to rationalize taking revenge for the atrocities they have suffered. And yet, as Lonergan said, “Christians know from the incarnation, from the life that the Son of God chose to lead on earth, that he chose suffering and death, and his suffering and death were results of sin. They were the results of sin, the sin of Judas, the sin of the leaders of the people, the sin of the Roman governor who did a shabby job of justice. According to the New Testament, they’re the sins of the world: it wouldn’t have been part of the divine plan to allow sin so to rise against the God-­ Man were it not for the sins of all the world.”82 Now we have to think more clearly about what and how the saving death of Jesus, the only person who lived his entire mortal life for love, communicates its unsurpassable meaning and value. There has been a highly unfortunate tendency to use misunderstandings of St Anselm’s account of atonement to promote the notion that, as a point of justice, God so required a vengeful restitution due to the sins of humanity that he ordered the ignominious death of his Son on the cross. And there have also been attempts such as that of German political theologian Jürgen Moltmann in The Crucified God83 to employ symbolic language about intra-­ Trinitarian relationships between the Father and the Son to stress the solidarity of God with sinful humanity. As fellow political theologian Johann-Baptist Metz once told me, Moltmann’s symbolic interpretation of the meaning of the cross in that book assumes too much knowledge about what is happening within the Trinity. Surely, Moltmann was responding to what Lonergan called the need to “discover the dynamic images that … possess in the sensitive field the power to issue forth not only into words but also into deeds”84; and he was trying to follow the admonition  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 375  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 328. 83  Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God. The Cross of Christ as the Foundation, translation by R.A. Wilson and John Bowden of Der gekreuzigte Gott,19732 (London: SCM Press, 1991. JohannBaptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann collaborated on Faith and the Future. Essays on Theology, Solidarity, and Modernity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1995) which is a collection of essays by each author (9 by Metz and 12 by Moltmann) with a Preface written by both authors. 84  Lonergan, Insight, 585. 81 82

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in the tenth of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach to stop just interpreting history and to change history instead. We believe that Lonergan’s generalized empirical method has helped him to make distinctions about the human psyche and consciousness that provide a more scriptural way of understanding of divine revelation’s communication of the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus that is no less relevant for political theology. To begin with, then, Lonergan wrote in The Triune God: Systematics: We are conscious in two ways: in one way, through our sensibility, we undergo rather passively what we sense and imagine, our desires and fears, our delights and sorrows, our joys and sadness; in another way, through our intellectuality, we are more active when we consciously inquire in order to understand, understand in order to utter a word, weigh evidence in order to judge, deliberate in order to choose, and exercise our will in order to act.85

Now the first way of consciousness is related to what Lonergan in “Mission and Spirit” called “the passionateness of being,” which “has a dimension of its own: it underpins and accompanies and reaches beyond the subject as experientially, intelligently, rationally, morally conscious.” Filling in the picture, Lonergan adds: Its underpinning is the quasi-operator that presides over the transition from the neural to the psychic. It ushers into consciousness not only the demands of the unconscious vitality but also the exigencies of vertical finality. It obtrudes deficiency needs. In the self-actualizing subject it shapes the images that release the insight; it recalls evidence that is being overlooked; it may embarrass wakefulness, as it disturbs sleep, with the spectre, the shock, the shame of misdeeds. As it channels into consciousness the feedback of our aberrations and our unfulfilled strivings, so for the Jungians it manifests its archetypes through symbols to preside over the genesis of the ego and to guide the individuation process from ego to the self. As it underpins, so it accompanies the subject’s conscious and intentional operations. There it is the mass and momentum of our lives, the color and tone and power of feeling, that fleshes out and gives substance to what otherwise would be no more than a Shakespearian “pale cast of thought.” As it underpins and accompanies, so too it overarches conscious intentionality. There it is the topmost quasi-operator that by intersubjectivity prepares, by solidarity entices, by falling in love establishes us as members of community. Within each individual vertical finality heads for self-transcendence. In an aggregate of self-transcending individuals there is the significant coincidental manifold in which can emerge a new creation. Possibility yields to fact and fact bears witness to its originality and power in the fidelity that makes families, in the loyalty that makes peoples, in the faith that makes religions.86

This second way of being conscious, which links ‘the passionateness of being’ with intersubjectivity and solidarity as also animated by vertical finality, brings out the priority of the social over the individual. However, St Paul declared that these dimensions of being human individually and collectively exist under what he called “the reign of sin,” or the probability of sin:

 Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, translated by Michael G Shields, edited by Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 139. 86  Lonergan, “Mission and Spirit,” A Third Collection, 29–30. 85

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But here we meet the ambiguity of man’s vertical finality. It is natural to man to love with the domestic love that unites parents with each other and with their children, with the civil love that can face death for the sake of one’s fellowmen, with the all-embracing love that loves God above all. But in fact man lives under the reign of sin, and his redemption lies not in what is possible to nature but in what is effected by the grace of Christ.87

The probability of sin is heightened enormously when: … [t]o the simpleminded sins of greed there is added the higher organization of sophistry. One must attend to the facts. One must deal with them as in fact they are and, as they are irrational, obviously the mere dictates of reason are never going to work. So rationalization enters the inner citadel. There is opened a gap between the essential freedom all men have and the effective freedom that in fact they exercise. Impotent in his situation and impotent in his soul, man needs, and may seek redemption, deliverance, salvation.88

More light has also been cast on this historic probability of sin by the insight René Girard expressed in the neologism ‘interdividuality’89 (something Lonergan also examined from a different perspective in terms of dramatic, individual, group, and commonsense biases). For Girard, the fact of interdividuality goes hand in hand with his account of human desires as mimetic, either for good or for evil. Evil mimesis, as either acquisitive or appropriative, incites mimetic rivalry, victimization, and ultimately, scapegoating. Lonergan remarked that in the life of Jesus “[t]here are the rather violent denunciations of the Pharisees”: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8.44). Since we become caught up in sin, this denunciation is true of all of us, to one degree or another.

10.6.2  The Revelation of the Law of the Cross Lonergan’s discussion of the dynamism that is crucial to Jesus’s enactment of the law of the cross is what Augustine in the Enchiridion spoke of as the miracle of overcoming evil with good.90 Lonergan calls this a ‘law’ because it expresses the  Lonergan, “Mission and Spirit,” A Third Collection, 30.  Lonergan, “Mission and Spirit,” A Third Collection, 31. 89  René Girard, “Book III: Interdividual Psychology,” Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Research undertaken in collaboration with Jean Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 283–431. 90  St Augustine, “XI. What Is Called Evil in the Universe Is But the Absence of God,” Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, Introduction by Thomas S. Hibbs, translated by J.B. Shaw (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Gateway Editions, 1996), 11: “And in the universe, even that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with evil. For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good out of evil.” 87 88

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intelligible, historical pattern of redemption and reconciliation articulated in the scriptural narrative of fall and redemption: There are two solidarities: a first in Adam through sin to death; a second in Christ through death to resurrection. Adam sinned, and through his sin death entered into the world. The death was threefold: there was the spiritual death of the loss of sanctifying grace in the soul; there was the metaphorical death, the curse of Adam, so vivid to us today in the host of the moral and physical evils of the world; finally, there was the material death of the grave where dust returns to dust. Now Christ, the Son of God, knew not sin; still he died, but only to rise again; and as he died for the remission of sin, so he rose again to give us grace (Romans 4:25).91

Raymund Schwager wrote at length about the drama of Jesus’s public life from its beginning as the preacher from Nazareth who in announcing the proximate eruption of the reign of God, called God his Father, and regarded his enemies (sinners) with unconditional readiness to forgive them. He proclaimed a faith that, because it can move mountains, can overcome the walls of separation between human beings and reconcile all enmities. The situation of radical decision in which Jesus put his opponents did not lead to their conversion. Instead his challenge unleashed a completely different reaction. The forces of lies and violence that he had laid bare struck back upon his very self. He was condemned by lies and violently brought to trial, and so turned into a bearer of sins or a scapegoat. In response to the violence threatened and suffered he did not retaliate with violence. Despite his rebarbative preaching, in his own actions he remained utterly bound by the message of love of enemy and freedom from violence. As the victim of violence he prayed to his Father for his enemies. Suffering and dying he raised the claim that his God, even in the face of the supreme injustice and murderous violence, always remains the God of freedom from violence and love of enemies: “When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1 Pet 2.23). The one who judges justly uttered his judgment by the fact that he raised the one crucified from the dead. This judgment for the one crucified, however, was not directed against his enemies. God instead stood by the very one who interceded for his opponents. In this way the ‘heavenly Judge’ himself had—without any reservations—defined himself as a God of freedom from violence and of love of enemies. For this reason he sent the Risen One with his message of peace back to his disciples. Since they—because they had gained greater insight—had become especially guilt-ridden due to their infidelity, the words of Easter peace—“Peace be with you” (Jn 20.21)—proved themselves to be, above all, words of forgiveness. From another perspective, Lonergan wrote on the same Paschal mystery: [T]he resurrection of Christ is presented in the New Testament as the work of God the Father. It is the Father who raised the Son from the dead. On the one hand, you have the work of man, as sinning; on the other hand, you have the work of God, raising his Son from the dead. … And that work of the Father is an illustration of those words of St Paul in the eighth chapter to the Romans: to those who love God all things work for good. [“We know

91

 See Bernard Lonergan, “The Assumption and Theology,” Collection, 66–80 at 71.

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that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8:28)]92

In Lonergan’s De Verbo Incarnato, the “Theses 15 to 17” elaborate the two central ideas for understanding redemption, satisfaction, and the ‘just and mysterious law of the cross.’93 The first is Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of charity on the analogy of friendship (philia) based on Aristotle’s treatise,94 and especially, the aspect of my friend as dimidium animae meae (“half my soul”). According to Lonergan, “Love involves a quasi identification.” Here there comes to the fore that type of being conscious through our sensibility, as we undergo rather passively what we sense and imagine, our desires and fears, our delights and sorrows, our joys and sadness connected above with the “passionateness of being” that underpins, accompanies, and overarches human consciousness as inquiring, reflecting, and deliberating. Lonergan glosses this in a more evangelical manner: When two people are in love their thoughts are about us—what are we going to do, what do we need? It is all spontaneously so. There is a quasi identification involved. And in the fact that God became man as our savior, there is that same manifestation of love, and it is that aspect of love, of God’s love for mankind in the full sense of loving—a self-giving, to which we respond with a self-giving—that there is in charity something way beyond any ethical structure that can be based on the pure desire to know. It presupposes an advance made by God as a lover, in the full sense of loving, and it means … our response in which we love one another because we love God—and if we don’t love one another we don’t know God, in the words of St John’s epistle. [“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (I Jn 4.7-8).]95

The second notion central to understanding this experience of Jesus on the cross is the act of contrition in the sacrament of Reconciliation/Repentance. The central experience, mediated by our sympathy with the sufferings of our friend Jesus, is the experience of compunction, which flows from a sorrow for one’s sinfulness motivated by love. Late friend and former colleague, Matthew Lamb, has suggested that the Risen Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father is an “upper quasi-operator” affecting us as elemental meaning96 at the threshold of conscious awareness.

 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 376.   These theses in Bernard Lonergan’s De Verbo Incarnato (Rome: Universitas Pontificia Gregoriana, 1964), 445–593, have been published in English together with a hitherto unpublished ‘Supplement on the Redemption’ written after the publication of the third and last edition of the Latin text ad usum auditorum as The Redemption, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 9 translated by Michael G.  Shields. Edited by Robert M.  Doran, Jeremy D.  Wilkins, and H.  Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 94  See especially Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a1-29. 95  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 377. 96  Lonergan, Method in Theology on ‘elemental meaning’: “… the meaning of an experiential pattern is elemental. It is the conscious performing of a transformed subject in his transformed world. The world may be regarded as an illusion, but it also may be regarded as more true and more real. We are transported from the space in which we move to the space within the picture …” (63). “… symbols have their proper meaning. It is an elemental meaning, not yet objectified, as the meaning 92 93

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Balthasar reminds us as well that Jesus as manifested in the Book of Revelation with the wounds still present on his risen body shows that in the end our Judge in the Last Judgment is also our Victim. How can one refuse his forgiveness?97 From a complementary perspective, Girard wrote, “The Resurrection is not only a miracle, a prodigious transgression of natural laws. It is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion. By contrast to the latter, it is a power not at all hallucinatory or deceptive. Far from deceiving the disciples, it enables them to recognize what they had not recognized before and to reproach themselves for their pathetic flight in the preceding days. They acknowledge the guilt of their participation in the violent contagion that murdered their master.”98 And in Lonergan’s words: In the death and resurrection of Christ we have the tremendous symbol of Christianity that interprets for us the meaning of life. The Christian knows that if the master has suffered, there is nothing incongruous in his own suffering; and he knows that as the master rose again, so the Father is able to transform, to make all things work unto the good. That understanding of the meaning of human life is mediated to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as through a symbol, an image, is something on which our intellectual and moral and spiritual lives can develop, and in their development see more and more of its profundity. And that is God’s expression of himself to us.99

At the center of revelation then, is the incarnation as a first expression of God’s self-­ donation to us, and to all humanity. The gift of the Holy Spirit—the love poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is given to us (Rom 5.5)—as Lonergan tells us, “is the personal self-donation of God to the individual soul, and that is charity on God’s side, and at the same time it is the infusion of charity … That gift … sets up a further good of order in this world, which is the mystical body of Christ and his church. So just as this self-giving of God is something that lies beyond … any possible exigence of human nature or conclusion of man’s thinking about the world— loving in the full and intimate sense of the word involves a free initiative—so this mystical body of Christ is a further, higher integration of human living. It is the transition from the civitas terrena that can be constituted by a pure desire to know, to the civitas Dei that is founded on the love of God and the self-revelation of God.”100

of a smile, or the meaning in the purely experiential pattern in a work of art. It is a meaning that fulfills its function in the imagining or perceiving subject as his conscious intentionality develops or goes astray or both, as he takes his stance to nature, with his fellow men, and before God. It is a meaning that has its proper context in the process of internal communication in which it occurs, and it is to that context with its associated images and feelings, memories and tendencies that the interpreter has to appeal if he would explain the symbol” (67). 97  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” with a short discourse on Hell, translated by Dr. David Kipp and Rev. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 90–91. 98  René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 189. 99  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 376. 100  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 380–381.

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10.7  Conclusion At the beginning of this paper I quoted Herbert McCabe’s definition of faith in Exploring the Catholic Faith: “Faith is a divinely given disposition of the mind by which we begin to share in God’s understanding of himself. In faith, we think of the history of humanity and our own life story as centered on the love of God for us as revealed in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh.” Now at the end of the paper I quote him again: “By the revelation of grace, [Aquinas] says, we are joined to God as to an unknown, ei quasi ignoto conjungamur (ST Ia, q 12, a. 13 ad 1). God remains the mystery which could only be known by God himself, a sharing which for us in this world is not knowledge but the darkness of faith.”101 So too, according to Lonergan: What God is—the answer to the question, Quid sit Deus? What is God—is something we do not know. We don’t know God by his essence in this life. We have only analogous knowledge of him. But that has been God’s revelation of himself to us, and insofar as in humility and simplicity we accept things as they are, we can advance to a knowledge of God and an intimacy with God that will leave us convinced that what, as philosophers, we may call his wisdom and his goodness are in truth wisdom and goodness—surpassing wisdom and surpassing goodness.102

 Herbert McCabe, “The involvement of God,” God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 41–2. 102  Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 376–377. 101

Part IV

The Future of Revelation, Propositions (Revisited), and Close Reading

Chapter 11

Ta’wīl in the Qur’an and the Islamic Exegetical Tradition: the Past and the Future of the Qur’an Maria Massi Dakake

Abstract  The Qur’an addresses the issue of its own interpretation, and in doing so, both expands and limits the exegetical possibilities open to Muslim commentators. Many Qur’anic verses are irreducibly multivalent, and the Qur’an repeatedly describes itself as speaking in metaphor and symbol, suggesting the necessity of human interpretive effort in arriving at its meaning; at the same time, it sternly cautions against the human misreading of its “signs” or verses. Despite this warning, the openness of Qur’anic language and imagery invites different interpretive approaches and has led, since earliest Islamic times, to the development of a vibrant tradition of Islamic exegesis (tafsir), which includes theological, legal, philosophical, and mystical commentaries. Taken collectively, these works significantly expand the range of potential meanings of the Qur’anic verses. However, many influential works of Islamic exegesis aim to provide a limited set (or even a single) legitimate interpretation of the individual Qur’anic verses, in an effort to discourage the continued exploration of the text’s meaning for later readers. In this essay, I explore this paradoxical situation, and argue that the Qur’an itself suggests that its own meaning may continue to develop or be revealed over time. Keywords Ta’wīl · Islamic exegesis · Revelation and Islam · Future of the Qur’an

In the Abrahamic religions, scriptures are understood to have their origins in extraordinary historical moments of divine irruption into human history. The divine word or divine voice enters into the human realm to present a radical challenge to the status quo, exposing the human moral errors that lay beneath the false beliefs, empty rituals, and unjust social structures of communities that have become too certain of themselves. The force of scripture’s moral challenge and critique was certainly M. M. Dakake (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_11

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meant to shock its original audience out of its moral complacency, but it is often powerful and penetrating enough to remain deeply challenging even to the contemporary communities who continue to read and recite it. And yet as “disruptive” and radical as these scriptures were intended to be for their original audiences, they must also form the spiritual and moral basis for stable religious communities with rational theologies and established, normative practices. It has been one of the primary tasks of exegetical work to normalize, rationalize, and systematize scriptural teachings, containing their disruptive potential, while preserving the latent power they have to continually inspire their readers. This latent power of scripture’s more challenging passages, however, has also sometimes provided an opening for more mystical and even revolutionary readings of scripture; and indeed, some interpretive approaches to scripture have sought to return to these passages to rekindle their original fire for the purposes of radical personal or political transformation. In this way, scriptural exegesis has the potential both to restrain the power of scripture itself, and to infuse it with new energy and meaning, such that it regains its initial spiritual power and its ability to transform society and the individual in new and very different contexts. Both approaches can be found in the diverse tradition of Qur’anic commentary, and the tension between them often turns on the way in which, and the extent to which, the meaning of these scriptures is understood to be embedded in their historical contexts. The more fully scripture’s moral challenges are viewed as directed at historical protagonists and villains living in unique (and unrepeatable) moments in a distant past, the more securely their “disruptive” potential can be contained. Although in this article we will focus specifically on exegetical work, the relationship between scriptural texts and the historical contexts of their emergence is a concern for all scholarly approaches to the Abrahamic religious traditions, including historical criticism and secular hermeneutics, as well as confessional exegesis. The Bible presents its moral teachings largely, although not exclusively, through a series of narratives, which are arranged (in both the Tanakh and in the Christian Bible— each in its own way) to give the reader a sense of the chronological development of the divine-human relationship in the context of a teleological sacred history. The Qur’an, by contrast, is composed of a series of divine communications addressed to Muhammad and his contemporary interlocutors in Mecca and Medina. These communications generated not only a new scripture, but also a new and distinct religious community, while also guiding this community by responding directly to its queries and uncertainties, and challenging its opponents. Given that many Qur’anic verses are, in effect, divine responses to a set of historical questions posed by the community around Muhammad, knowledge of the questions that prompted the responses found in the Qur’an, as well as the historical circumstances in which the exchange took place, are germane—in some cases, crucial—to understanding the meaning of the verses that were revealed in response. In either the Biblical or the Qur’anic case, the profound relationship between scripture and history raises questions about the degree to which scriptural teachings are separable from, or transcend, their particular historical contexts—and are thus universal—and about the importance of history itself as a partner in, or as an ongoing arena for, God’s r­ evelatory activity or “meaning-making” in the present and the future as well. The Qur’an views not only the verses of scripture

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and the wonders of the natural world, but also the lessons of history as revelatory “signs,” for example encouraging its readers to contemplate as a warning the fate of earlier peoples who had failed to take the prophets seriously, or to fulfill their ritual or moral obligations.1 But do such exhortations suggest that the Qur’an considers the full course of human history, even the unfolding of history after the time of the prophets (of course, Muslims consider Muhammad to be the last prophet), to be a source of religious guidance, or at least a means of deepening or enriching the understanding of scriptural revelation—if not a source of “revelation” in the strict sense?

11.1  The Qur’an and Its “Past” A Jewish Studies colleague of mine recently commented that while secular scholarship on the Tanakh is largely concerned with its past, that is, with questions of who authored which books and when, what was the redaction process for different parts of the Tanakh, and how can various books or passages be situated in particular historical or geographic contexts, etc., scholarship from within the Jewish tradition is concerned with its future, that is, with looking toward the horizon of meaning in the text and the ways in which it is to be realized or fulfilled in a contemporary age. In some ways, a similar situation pertains in the case of the Qur’an. Much of Western, secular scholarship on the Qur’an is focused on its historical emergence, its origins, influences, geographical, temporal, and cultural context, its process of canonization, and so forth. For such scholars the Qur’an is an important subject of study because it forms part of a history, a “past,” and is inextricably and usefully related to that past: knowledge of the historical context of the Qur’an’s emergence in the seventh century Near East is understood to be crucial for understanding the true meaning of the text; while the text itself offers subtle and enigmatic clues about the historical period of its emergence.2 As Western scholarship finds increasing evidence that the Qur’an (pace the once influential revisionist thesis of John Wansbrough3) was indeed a seventh century text, and as the manuscript evidence continues to point to 1  See, for example, Qur’an 7:59–163, which references the Biblical accounts of Noah, Lot, and Moses and Pharaoh, as well as the Arab prophets Hūd, Sālih, and Shu`ayb as examples of prophets whose warnings went unheeded, resulting in terrible divine punishment. See also Qur’an 2:65–66 and 7:161–167, where the Israelites are punished for neglecting to observe the ritually prescribed Sabbath. 2  A collection of some of the most contemporary research in this line of inquiry can be found in the work of Angelica Neuwirth; see especially, Angelica Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai and Michael Marx (eds.) The Qur’an in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’anic Milieu, Brill, 2011. See also the work of Gabriel Said Reynolds (The Qur’an in its Historical Context, Routledge, 2014). For a revisionist approach to the Qur’an’s emergence in its historical context, see G.R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 3  John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History, Oxford University Press, 1979, where the author asserts that the canonical Qur’an was not established until the mid-ninth century, nearly two centuries after the traditional Islamic dating of the composition of the official `Uthmani codex of the Qur’an around 650.

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the existence of the Qur’an as a defined, written text very nearly when Islamic tradition asserts that it was codified in the mid-seventh century,4 secular scholars can feel increasingly comfortable with considering the Qur’an as a piece of “documentary evidence” for the history of the seventh century. Near East. At the same time, knowledge of the historical and cultural context of the seventh century Near East is seen as all the more indispensable for uncovering the most authentic interpretations and understanding of this text. The scholarly preoccupation with discovering and documenting the emergence of the Qur’an as a canonical text in its earliest historical context reflects a concern that the theological discussions and exegeses of the text that developed in traditional Muslim literature represent a religious and doctrinal lens that obscures the earliest and therefore most authentic versions or interpretations of the text. If one relies too heavily on these later exegetical sources, it might compromise the text’s historical usefulness by representing it in a manner that allows it to conform to the established Islamic doctrinal principles and legal norms of a later time. Because the Qur’anic text is, for purely secular scholars, a necessarily historical and historically bounded document, rather than a living font of religious guidance—a text produced by human beings who are always and inevitably products of the time and place in which they live, rather than one revealed by a God who transcends time and space— its only “authentic” meaning is the meaning it had for its original author(s) and audience. Any later interpretative enterprise applied to the text is, by definition, not truly “authentic.” Obviously, such an approach to the scripture is at odds with traditional Muslim views of the Qur’an as revealed by a transcendent divine author in the context of, and for the guidance of, a sacred community, whose theological beliefs and principles are understood as deriving directly from this scripture (even if they developed over time), rather than as a false lens through which the text’s original meaning is somehow distorted. The study of the Qur’an is different from that of the Tanakh, however, in that much of the religious scholarship on the Qur’an is also concerned with its “past” (albeit in a different way than that found in secular approaches)—that is, with the context of the Prophet’s life in which the text was revealed and with the earliest layers of Islamic commentary on the text. For many (although certainly not all) Muslim

4  A good number of folios and partial Qur’anic manuscripts dating to the seventh century have been found or recovered with only minor variations from the text as we have it today, most of which can be attributed to developments in Arabic orthography. See Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergman, “The Codex of a companion of the Prophet and the Qur’an of the Prophet,” in Arabica, 57 (2010), pp. 343–436; Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi, “San’a’ 1 and the Origins of the Qur’an” in Der Islam, 87 (2012), pp. 1–129; and Francois Deroche, La Transmission ecrite du Coran dans les debuts de I ‘islam: Le Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, Brill, 2009.Most recently, two folios of a Qur’anic manuscript have been discovered in the University of Birmingham Library collection (see http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33436021 for the initial report on the discovery) that have been radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 with the upper end of this date range being largely consistent with Muslim accounts of the production of the `Uthmānī codex, the first official collection of the Qur’an in a bound book which Muslim traditions holds was the basis of all later copies of the Qur’an.

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religious scholars, as for the secular scholars, the true meaning of the Qur’anic text must be located in—or at least take as its starting point—the historical context of the period of its revelation. This is especially the case given Muslim belief about the particular manner of the Qur’an’s revelation, in which many verses were reportedly revealed as answers or directions to Muhammad in response to contemporaneous issues faced by himself or his early community. Because the Qur’an itself provides little to no context for its verses, nor a full historical background for its accounts of pre-Muhammadan prophets, a central task of almost all Muslim exegesis is to describe, in as much detail as available from other, non-Qur’anic sources, the particular historical situation or referent for various Qur’anic verses: from the genealogical, geographical, and narrative details that fill out the elliptical Qur’anic accounts of past prophets, to the contemporaneous situation of Muhammad and his followers when individual verses or passages were revealed (the “reasons/occasions for revelation”, asbāb al-nuzūl). Traditional Qur’anic exegesis (tafsīr) is also concerned with the “past” in the sense that the earliest generations of Muslims— Muhammad, his immediate community and generation, and the two succeeding generations—are typically considered to be the most reliable sources of authoritative interpretation of the Qur’an.5 Until the twentieth century, most major Qur’anic commentaries, especially within the mainstream (non-mystical) tradition, explicitly grounded their own discussion of Qur’anic verses in the transmitted teachings of these early authorities. In what follows, we will examine what the Qur’an itself has to say about its own interpretation. The Qur’an is a highly self-referential scripture, giving itself multiple names, discussing its relationship to past scriptures, and commenting on the manner of its revelation and its inimitability, among other things. Its description of its own verses as “signs” and its assertion that it speaks in parables already suggest the active role and necessity of human interpretation in bringing forth its full meaning. Our primary focus here, however, will be on the multivalent Qur’anic term “ta’wīl,” which is used in the Qur’an and in the broader Islamic tradition to refer to the interpretation of revelation, but which, in its Qur’anic usage, also suggests the possibility of revelatory meaning developing over time, and in the course of human events.

5  This hierarchy is at least implicit in many classical works of Muslim Qur’anic exegesis (with the exception of certain mystical or esoteric commentaries), insofar as the exegetes tended to include relevant Prophet hadīth reports that related to the verses they were commenting upon, where they existed, and to rely heavily on reports from the early generations of Islamic religious scholars as a basis for their own commentary. This hierarchy is explicitly articulated, however, in the work of the fourteenth century Islamic scholar, Ibn Taymiyya; see Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddimah fi usūl al-tafsīr (ed. Abū `Abdallah al-Dānī b. Munīr Al Zahwī), Beirut: al-Maktabah al-`Asriyyah, 2009, pp. 77–91.

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11.2  Qur’anic Exegesis: Tafsīr and Ta’wīl Two Arabic words are usually used to denote the project of explaining and commenting upon the Qur’anic text: tafsīr and ta’wīl. Both words appear in the Qur’an, although tafsīr, meaning simply “explanation,” appears only once, and not with the technical meaning of the interpretation of revelation.6 Ta’wīl, which literally means to return something to its origin, appears seventeen times in the Qur’an, where it often seems to mean precisely “interpretation” of some kind, for example of a divine revelation or of a dream. But as we shall see, this term has a significantly wider semantic range in the Qur’an itself. The terms tafsīr and ta’wīl seem to have been used more or less interchangeably to denote Qur’anic exegesis in the earliest history of this genre, insofar as both terms appear in the titles and subtitles of early Qur’anic commentaries (including both exoteric and more esoteric varieties),7 as well as in hadīth and akhbār reports attributed to the Prophet and his Companions.8 However, the two terms eventually become partially distinct from one another. Sometime during or after the tenth century, tafsīr becomes the technical term that denotes the genre of Qur’anic exegesis in its broadest sense—an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of different interpretive approaches to the scripture, but guided by some general principles (e.g., verse-by-verse or passage-by-passage commentary that follows the textual order of the written Qur’an). By contrast, ta’wīl takes on a narrower connotation and is increasingly associated with esoteric, symbolical, and allegorical interpretation, particularly of verses that admit several possible meanings. Some forms of ta’wīl continued to be more widely accepted than others in the tradition; for example, ta’wīl might refer to the common practice of giving metaphorical interpretations of anthropomorphic verses or else verses whose literal meaning would appear to bring them into conflict with other Qur’anic statements or certain Islamic

6  Qur’an 25:33: “And they come not to thee [Muhammad] with any parable, but that We bring to thee the truth and a better explanation, (tafsīr).” In this case, the tafsīr, in the simple sense of “explanation”, refers to God’s ability to refute through revelation the false arguments and assertions of Muhammad’s opponents (see commentary by C. Dagli in Nasr, et al., The Study Qur’an, HarperOne, 2015, p. 896). 7  For example, the early and largely exoteric commentary authored by al-Tabarī (d. 310) is entitled Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āyā al-qurʾān, and his near contemporary, al-Māturīdī called his exoteric commentary Ta’wīlāt ahl al-sunnah; while the early esoteric commentaries of al-Tustarī (d. 283) or al-Sulamī (d. 412) are generally referred to simply as Tafsīr al-Tustarī and Tafsīr al-qur’an, respectively. 8  Interestingly, the relative frequency of the terms ta’wīl and tafsīr in works of hadīth is the opposite of what we find in the Qur’an, in that the term tafsīr is used more frequently than ta’wīl in hadīth traditions, and several major collections of Sunni hadīth have chapters entitled, Kitāb al-tafsīr, that deal with Prophetic or Companion commentaries on Qur’anic verses. However, we do find the term ta’wīl used as well, and perhaps most notably in the famous hadīth wherein the Prophet beseeches God to teach his companion Ibn `Abbās (who is perhaps the most prolific source of exegetical reports in the genre of Qur’anic exegesis), “wisdom and the ta’wīl of the Book” (see Ibn Mājah, Sunan, Liechtenstein: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000, K. al-Muqaddimah, h. 171).

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theological principles.9 In Shi’i exegesis, however, ta’wīl often meant assigning highly symbolic interpretations to various Qur’anic terms and phrases in order to read them as veiled references to specifically Shi’i religious figures or concepts, a practice that was naturally unacceptable to the Sunni majority. In some mystical traditions, and especially in Shi’ism, the term ta’wīl is often juxtaposed with tanzīl (lit., “descent”), referring to the literal words of the Qur’an as they descended verbatim from God to the Prophet.10 The particular significance of the tanzīl/ta’wīl binary in Twelver and Ismaili Shi’i traditions is linked to the Shi’i belief that while the Prophet Muhammad was uniquely responsible for the historical transmission of the Qur’an’s tanzīl—its literal words, the Shi’i Imams are responsible for the ongoing transmission of its ta’wīl—its inward and symbolic meaning.11 Given that tanzīl means literally “descent” and ta’wīl a “return to the origin”, the rhetorical binary suggests a set of complementary vertical movements, whereby divine meaning descended like a metaphorical “rope”12 into the human realm via the revealed words of God, conveyed verbatim through their tanzīl (descent) upon the Prophet. Human beings, or at least certain human beings (usually the Shi’i Imams), could then use this “rope” as a means of ascending upward toward higher and more sublime levels of spiritual meaning through the process of ta’wīl, with the aim of reaching the “origin” of meaning residing with God, himself.13 The term ta’wīl, however, displays an even broader range of semantic association in the Qur’an, where it refers in several places to the ultimate unveiling of the significance of a dream or a divine command or warning, or else to the final resolution, outcome or consequence of a series of events. In this way, the Qur’an itself suggests that ta’wīl refers to the understanding of words or events as they will come to be known, in the future, rather than to a mode of understanding rooted in the t­ ransmitted 9  See, for example, the Sunni theologian, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the term ta’wīl in Qur’an 10:39, where he points to the importance of ta’wīl (figurative or metaphorical interpretation) as a means of avoiding confusion regarding Qur’anic verses whose outward, literal meaning would seem to be mutually contradictory (see Fakhr al-Dīn al-Razī, Mafātih al-ghayb (20 vols.), Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-`Ilmiyyah, 2009, v. 17, pp. 76–80). 10  Later commentary titles reflect the association of ta’wīl with more inward or esoteric meanings, and are often contrasted with “tanzīl” to make for poetic rhyming titles. For example, al-Baydawī (d. 685) entitled his commentary: Anwar al-tanzīl wa-asrar al-ta’wīl (The Lights of Revelation and the Secrets of Ta’wīl) and al-Nasafī (d. 710) named his exegetical work: Madārik al-tanzīl wa haqa’iq al-ta’wīl (The Senses of Revelation and the Realities of Ta’wīl). 11  This Shi’i tradition is based largely on a hadīth found in canonical Shi’i collections of hadīth, as well as some Sunni collections attributed to the Prophet as follows: “Truly among you there is one who will fight for the Qur’an’s ta’wīl just as I have fought for its tanzīl, and that [person] is `Alī ibn Abī Tālib [the Prophet’s cousin and the first Shi’i Imam].” (See Muhammad b. Mas’ūd al-`Ayyāshī, Kitāb al-Tafsīr, (2 vols., ed. Hāshim al-Rasūlī al-Mahallātī), Qum: `Ilmiyyah, 1961.v. 1, pp. 15–16). 12  The Qur’an itself occasionally uses the metaphor of a rope to describe the connection of some kind between God and humanity, see Qur’an 3:103, 112. 13  See, for example, Toby Mayer, Keys to the Arcana: Shahrastani’s esoteric commentary on the Qur’an, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 104–108, as well as Mayer, “Traditions of Esoteric and Sapiential Qur’anic Commentary” in Nasr et al., The Study Qur’an, HarperOne, 2015, pp. 1660.

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teachings of the past. This Qur’anic usage further suggests that the meaning of certain divine statements or providential events must unfold or develop over time, and thus cannot be known in their full or ultimate significance until some later date. In these Qur’anic instances, the term ta’wīl is frequently glossed by exegetes as “the final point (al-muntahā)” or “the final outcome (al-`āqibah),” rather than simply as “interpretation” or “explanation”. The rhetorical juxtaposition of ta’wīl with tanzīl in certain mystical or Shi’ite Islamic exegetical traditions suggests ta’wīl as a metaphorically vertical and inward process of ascending toward more sublime spiritual meanings of the literal words of scripture. However, the use of the term ta’wīl in the Qur’an itself as a reference to ultimate ends, in combination with its basic etymological meaning of “returning something to its origin,” suggests ta’wīl as a process that takes place along a horizontal, temporal axis that is oriented toward a future “unveiling of meaning” whose ultimate terminus is also, simultaneously, its point of origin. The notion that a Qur’anic verse has not one, but multiple, perhaps even indefinite levels of meaning is well established as a rhetorical claim in Islamic religious writing and scholarship from early times. The Qur’an itself asserts, self-­referentially, that it includes ambiguous or multivalent verses, and in a classical poetic image, states that “if all the trees on earth were pens, and if the sea and seven more added to it [were ink], the Words of God would not be exhausted.” Such inexhaustibility cannot simply be attributed to the literal words of the Qur’an, or to the literal, plain-­ sense meaning of those words, both of which are obviously finite.14 Additionally, there are many well-known reports attributed to early Prophetic companions and authorities about the Qur’an’s many levels of meaning. One such report, with a number of slightly different recensions attributed to at least two early authorities states that there are four meanings to every Qur’anic reading (harf) or verse: an outward and an inward meaning (or exoteric and esoteric), a defining limit (hadd)— usually understood to mean the limits of meaning circumscribed by the possibilities of Arabic grammar and etymology—and a “high point” or “look-out point” (muttala`).15 This tradition provides a fascinating image that evokes a walled castle,  Qur’an 31:27; see also a similar image in 18:109: “Say, “If the sea were ink for the Words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the Words of my Lord were exhausted, even if We brought the like thereof to replenish it.” There is a debate about the meaning of the “words of God” or “words of my Lord” in these verses. One line of interpretation claims that the phrase refers to God’s capacity for creating (as He is said to create through the spoken command, “Be!”—see Qur’an 2:117; 3:47, 59; 6:73; 16:40), which can go on endlessly without exhausting or depleting God in any way. Another interpretation, however, and one favored by the tenth century exegete al-Māturīdī, is that it refers to all of the meanings or interpretations contained with the divine words of God’s revelation or scripture. See Abū Mansur Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Māturīdī, Ta’wīlat ahl al-sunnah, commentary on 31:27. 15  This hadīth is attributed in slightly different form to both the early companion and authority on the Qur’an, `Abdallah b. Mas`ūd and to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, `Alī b. Abī Tālib. For a discussion of this tradition and its different attributions and interpretations, see Kristin Zahra Sands, Sufi Commentaries on the Qur’an, Routledge, 2006, pp. 8–13; and Toby Mayer, “Traditions of Esoteric and Sapiential Qur’anic Commentary” in Nasr et al., The Study Qur’an, HarperOne, 2015, pp. 1660–1662. 14

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which has within it both open, public spaces (the “outward”) as well as secret and private interior rooms (the “inward”). Like the castle’s exterior wall, the defining limit (hadd) of a verse’s literal words establishes the sovereign boundaries of meaning for the verse, while also offering a secure vantage point from which one might speculate about more “distant” spiritual meanings on the horizon. One might not be able to make out these more distant meanings with certainty or full clarity, but from the stable and protective basis of the verse’s fixed or defined meaning (its hadd), one could safely contemplate and ponder the deeper or more sublime meanings that lay beyond it. However, these diverse ways of approaching or conceiving of exegetical work on the Qur’an, enriched as they are by the broad semantic resonance of terms related to exegesis in the text of the scripture itself, should not make us lose sight of the fact that, at its core, there is something theologically problematic with the idea of human beings offering commentary on the words of God, which the Qur’an is, of course, for Muslims. Who, after all, can claim the authority to know “what God really means” in the many ambiguous passages of the Qur’an? The Qur’an itself tells us that God speaks to people in parables and metaphors, but who has the right to decide when God is speaking literally and when He is speaking metaphorically? Who is willing to suggest, in particular instances, that the Qur’anic verses don’t really mean what their literal words and phrases seem to mean—words and phrases that Muslims believe were chosen and spoken by God directly? And if one makes the claim that the Qur’an cannot be understood without the efforts of human interpretation and commentary—no matter how authoritative or inspired that human being might be— does it not suggest that an omniscient and omnipotent God was somehow unable to make himself clearly understood without such assistance? It is theologically problematic, of course, to say that an omnipotent God is incapable of anything, let alone of making himself understood in the scripture which declares itself to be “a clear book”16 and a “book in which there is no doubt.”17 So if there is ambiguity in the Qur’an (and the Qur’an itself states explicitly that it contains ambiguous verses), then this ambiguity must have some divine purpose. But how, precisely, can such purposeful ambiguity be reconciled with its expressed purpose of bringing clear truth and exposing falsehood? This set of theological dilemmas is not lost on Muslim scholars, although they tend to address the problem of interpretation not so much in theological terms (in the manner we have laid out above), but rather as a set of procedural and epistemological issues concerning who is qualified to interpret the Qur’an, and which texts are considered authoritative resources for the interpreter. Theological questions are avoided, in other words, largely by reference to notions of authority—starting with the authority of the Prophet, which is beyond question for Muslims and endorsed by

16 17

 See Qur’an 12:1; 26:2; 43:2; 44:2.  Qur’an 2:2.

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the Qur’an itself,18 and by extension his contemporaries, and the immediately ­succeeding generations, who can reasonably be assumed to possess the most proximate knowledge of the Qur’an in its original context and reception. But there remains good reason for many to feel uneasy about the prospect of human beings interpreting the Qur’an at all, particularly given the Qur’an’s own stern warning against the dangers of ta’wīl in Qur’an 3:7—a verse that has served and continues to serve as a formidable Qur’anic constraint upon its own interpretation by human beings: He it is Who has sent down the Book upon thee; therein are signs determined, they are the Mother of the Book, and others are ambiguous/multivalent (mutashābihāt). As for those whose hearts are given to swerving, they follow that of it which is ambiguous/multivalent, seeking temptation (fitnah) and seeking its interpretation (ta’wīl). And none know its interpretation (ta’wīl) save God and those firmly rooted in knowledge.19 They say, “We believe in it; all is from our Lord.” And none remember, save those who possess intellect. (3:7).

This verse quite clearly suggests that a pursuit of ta’wīl is characteristic of those with “swerving” hearts, and those who desire fitnah—a term that means spiritual temptation as well as the breakdown of moral and social order. Moreover the verse asserts that the ta’wīl of the Qur’an is known only to God, and perhaps to those “firmly rooted in knowledge.” As if this warning in the Qur’an itself about the possibility and dangers of interpretation were not sufficient, there is also a well-known Prophetic hadīth asserting that whoever explains the Qur’an according to his own opinion (tafsīr bi’l-ra’y) will have his seat in Hellfire; here it is the word “tafsīr” rather than ta’wīl that is used, but its proscription against interpretation by individual opinion is an implicit endorsement to rely, not upon one’s own interpretive efforts, but upon authoritatively transmitted exegetical material from the Prophet and earlier generations of scholars. Thus both the Qur’an and Hadīth seem to warn against engaging in ta’wīl (understood to mean interpreting the Qur’an beyond its literal meaning) and tafsīr when it is not properly guided by legitimate (i.e., early) authorities. Such endeavors, these sacred texts suggest, put one at risk of both fitnah in this world and Hellfire in the next. It is perhaps understandable, then, that it came to be widely accepted that only commentary derived from the Qur’an itself (that is, one verse making clear the meaning of another verse) or from well-attested, transmitted reports from the Prophet, or more commonly from his companions and their

 See Qur’an 3:132: “And obey God and the Messenger, that haply you may receive mercy”; as well as 33:21: Indeed you have in the Messenger of God a beautiful example for those who hope for God and the Last Day, and remember God much; as well as Qur’an.” 19  The particular rendering of the verse given here indicates that in addition to God, there are also human beings “firmly-rooted in knowledge” who know at least something of the ta’wīl, or interpretation of the Qur’anic verses, including the ambiguous or multivalent ones. Another rendering, which is based on an equally valid reading of how one punctuates the verse, and indeed is the most common reading in the modern period is as follows: “…And none knows its interpretation save God. Those who are firmly-rooted in knowledge say, “We believe in it…” The commentary of Muhammad b. Jarīr al-Tabarī, (Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āyā al-qurʾān, Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1998, v. 3, pp. 231–254) includes reports from companions and early scholars that support one reading or the other, and a fuller discussion of the issue can be found in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātih alghayb, v. 7, pp.144–155. 18

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successors (all of which could fall under the category of “explanation through authoritative transmission,” tafsīr bi’l-ma’thur, which was favorably contrasted with tafsīr bi’l-ra’y, or “explanation by opinion”) was to be accepted as the most valid means of understanding the Qur’an.

11.3  T  he Importance and Limitations of a Hermeneutics of the Past Given the rather stern warnings against individual interpretation of the Qur’an, and the consequent desire to ground interpretation in established sources, the Prophet’s companions and successors (the first few generations of Muslims) became enshrined, so to speak, as the authoritative commentators on the Qur’an, and with good reason, in many ways. There are words, idiomatic phrases, and discourses in the Qur’an that would remain entirely obscure to later readers without the linguistic information and historical context provided by the reports of the early generations of Muslims. The classical commentaries and Islamic religious sciences that explain and contextualize the verses have been considered indispensable for any accurate understanding of the Qur’an throughout most of the history of Islamic exegesis (only being discounted and in some cases almost entirely dismissed by certain modern commentators, beginning in the twentieth century).20 But one problematic effect of what many, especially today, consider to be an excessively heavy or exclusive reliance on these authoritative, early exegetical reports is that it tends to overly historicize a scripture that, in many ways, seems to insist on the ahistorical, or transhistorical, nature of its religious message. We have already noted that the events surrounding the Qur’an’s revelation in the life of Muhammad and the history of his nascent religious community are not described in any detail in the Qur’an itself, and even its narratives of pre-­ Muhammadan prophets—which constitute the Qur’an’s sacred “pre-history”—are not set in historical context. Unlike similar accounts in the Bible, Qur’anic accounts give us little indication of date, place, or historical circumstance for the prophetic accounts it relates. Absent a clear historical trajectory or geographical context for the prophets mentioned in the Qur’an, figures such as Noah, Moses and Jesus, as well as the Arabic prophets Hūd and Sālih are presented as engaged in a human struggle against falsehood, evil, idolatry, and vice that transcends both time and place. Their various struggles are, in an essential way, the same struggle—an idea driven home by the intentionally parallel and even formulaic way in which some of these prophetic stories are told, making the unmistakable point that the failings of the prophets’ recalcitrant peoples are the failings of all peoples; the temptation toward the world and away from God is a temptation that exists in all human

 For a discussion of various modernist approaches that challenged the traditional, and traditionheavy method of composing tafsīr, see Massimo Campinini, The Qur’an: Modern Muslim Interpretations (trans. Caroline Higgit), Routledge, 2008, esp. pp. 9–20, and 91–122.

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c­ ommunities. The struggles of earlier prophets presage those of the Muhammad himself, and their retelling in the Qur’an served, the exegetes often assert, to personally console, instruct, inspire, and encourage the Prophet Muhammad in his own religious mission. In this way, the Qur’an brings Abraham, Moses, and other prophets into conversation with Muhammad across centuries and millennia. The Qur’an is not concerned with telling us when Moses died, or who Abraham’s grandfather was, how the prophet Shu’ayb is connected to Moses, or precisely where the Arab prophets, Hūd and Sālih, lived. The lack of historical detail about the prophets serves to focus the Qur’anic audience’s attention on their common message and mission, and their very human struggle to deliver God’s word. Nonetheless many early commentators seemed eager to oblige Muslim historical curiosity, and thus in the commentaries we find the stories of the prophets authoritatively “historicized”: genealogies are presented that connect the prophets historically and biologically to one another, descriptions of geographical and temporal locations for the prophetic figures are specified (or speculated about),21 and broader situational and historical context is provided into which the more sparse and elliptical Qur’anic references to the prophets and their successive missions can be embedded and thus comprehended as a narrative. Some premodern scholars did express concern about giving too much religious weight to these additional details not provided by the Qur’an itself. It is well known, for example, that the influential fourteenth century exegete, Ibn Kathīr, sought to avoid including in his Qur’an commentary additional narrative details that were based solely on Jewish or Christian sources (israiliyyāt),22 although he made use of them in his separate collection of prophetic stories,23 which was intended for more popular consumption. Other commentators argued that determining the specific historical context or reference for a given Qur’anic account—context that was often facilitated by reference to Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition, but sometimes appeared to be sheer speculation—should not be given too much importance. For example, in his commentary on the beginning of Sūrat al-Isrā’, which speaks of two destructive attacks upon the ancient Israelites (often understood to be references to the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī notes that the specific historical references of these verses are obscure and cannot be known with certainty, but that such knowledge is not necessary for understanding the intended moral message of those verses.24 Some modern exegetes have become even more skeptical of such narrative

 See, for example, Maria Dakake’s summary presentation of the Islamic exegetical tradition’s efforts to genealogically and historically flesh out and connect the prophets whose stories are told in a series of short, formulaic accounts in Sūrah 7: Sūrat al-A’rāf, vv. 59–163, as found and discussed at various points in the accompanying commentary in Nasr et  al., The Study Qur’an, pp. 429–437. 22  Ibn Kathīr, Ismā’il b. `Umar, Tafsīr al-Qur’an al-`azīm (4 vols., ed. Abd al-Qadir al-Arna’ut, Damascus: Dār al-Fīhā’, 1998. 23  Ibn Kathīr, Ismā’il b. `Umar, Qisas al-anbiyā’, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-`Ilmiyyah, 2008. 24  Fakr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātih al-ghayb, v. 20, pp. 124–126; see also Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qur’an al-`azim, v. 3, pp. 37–38. 21

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expansions upon the Qur’anic references to the prophets because the additional narrative details may derive primarily from Jewish and Christian sources, or because the legendary and fanciful nature of some of the material seems speculative and unnecessary and/or opposed to the more rational approach to scripture and the Islamic tradition in general that many Islamic religious intellectuals wanted to take beginning in the twentieth century.25 There is another problem, however, with an excessive hermeneutical reliance on a verse’s original historical context and/or granting primary or exclusive authority to interpret Qur’anic verses to the religious scholars and authorities of the early centuries of Islam. Such an approach has the tendency to obscure for the contemporary reader, especially the Muslim reader, the continuing immediacy and urgency, even the power, of the Qur’anic message. The Qur’an’s transhistorical or metahistorical approach to prophetic narrative, along with the broad and universal nature of the audience to whom it is addressed (it addresses not only Muslim believers, but Jews and Christians explicitly in places, and more generally “human beings”, al-nās, or the “Children of Adam”), and its explicit and repeated call to this diverse audience to contemplate and reflect on its verses constitute some of the most unique and compelling features of Qur’anic discourse and rhetoric. These stylistic features suggest a scripture that is meant to create a personal, dynamic, and engaging experience for its audience—not only collectively, but also individually—rather than a scripture that is accessible only through the mediating lens of established authorities from the past, or one that is delimited in its significance by its relation to a particular historical context. Even classical commentators, who considered knowledge of historical context to be vitally important for understanding key passages of the Qur’an, were clear that just because a Qur’anic verse may have come in response to a singular and specific historic event did not mean that its significance was limited to that particular situation. This idea that has been articulated in different ways in the modern period. For example, the twentieth century Islamic scholar, Fazlur Rahman, famously formulated the “double-movement theory,” which asserts that understanding the full meaning of a Qur’anic verse is a two-step process, juxtaposing past and present historical contexts.26 He argued that one should first seek to discover the meaning of a verse in the specific historical context in which, and for which, it was revealed, as transmitted in the reports of early authorities and commentaries. By considering the original intention of the verse as it responded to a particular historical situation in the life of Muhammad and the early community (the first movement), one would be able to discern the verse’s core religious principle, which could then be applied to new, and contemporary, contexts (the second movement). This theory has been quite influential in the field of contemporary Qur’anic exegesis, particularly for  See discussions found throughout Sayyid Qutb (d. 1963), Fi Zilāl al-Qur’an, Beirut: Dār al-Shurūq, 2009; for example, see his discussion the level of detail needed concerning the Qur’anic account of Adam’s temptation in the Garden, v. 1, pp. 59–60. 26  Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition, University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 5–6. 25

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more progressive approaches to interpretation,27 but it is not without its shortcomings. Most problematically, it leaves in place the binary distinction between past and present interpretations that is always liable to yield to the short-sighted hermeneutical route of ignoring, delegitimizing or abandoning the one in favor of the other. It also does not promote a holistic approach to the tradition of Qur’anic commentary in which contemporary interpretations continuously build upon earlier ones through critical and constructive engagement. The traditional warnings against free interpretation and interpretation according to individual opinion are not without value. Even if the Qur’an may have many meanings, as the Islamic tradition repeatedly attests, it cannot just mean anything and everything. The proper situation of a verse in its historical context and the clear delimitation of the linguistic possibilities of the verse’s literal words are critical for avoiding serious misunderstandings in the case of certain verses, and more broadly as a means of ensuring that interpretations always remain tethered to the words of the Qur’an itself, even though they may stray rather far from a plain-sense reading. But historical contextualization does necessarily have to have a restrictive effect on interpretation. Rather, there are examples of traditional commentaries, such as that of the Andalusian Ibn `Ajībah (d. 1809), which combine a discussion of the historical context of a verse and/or an analysis of the linguistic or grammatical possibilities of its Arabic words or phrases, based on the reports of early commentators, with more speculative (in this case, mystical) readings. Here, the more exoteric discussion of language and historical context often serves to ground or “anchor” the verse’s interpretative possibilities in a way that promotes the further elaboration of its possible meanings, while also helpfully (but not unnecessarily) circumscribing it; this allows the original text to continue to be semantically and spiritually generative for the author, while avoiding the danger or appearance of interpretive anarchy. The Qur’an itself offers us a salient image for this kind of organic relationship between the original or “root” meaning of a “word” and its indefinite (but not unlimited) interpretive possibilities in 14:24–25: A good word is as a good tree: its roots firm and its branches in the sky / It brings forth fruit in every season, by the leave of its Lord. And God sets forth parables for mankind, that haply they may remember. Just as a tree that is “firm” in its roots is healthy enough to generate and sustain new “fruit” year after year and season after season, so too, an approach to the Qur’an that is “firmly-rooted” in its historical and linguistic context can provide a stable and healthy basis for the ongoing intellectual and spiritual process of generating new interpretive “fruit” as the times and “seasons” change. Beyond the useful and necessary historical information and linguistic analysis the early and classical commentators provide, they also offer their own critical analysis of some early sources or competing interpretations, as well as their own unique  See, for example, references to, and applications of, this methodological approach in contemporary feminist analyses of the Qur’an, including Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 13, 31, 53, and Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interprtations of Islam, University of Texas Press, 2002, p. 23.

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insights, as pious Muslim scholars who themselves engaged deeply and personally with the Qur’an. The analyses and personal interpretations of these early commentators are, of course, inevitably influenced and circumscribed by their own historical context. They write against the background of the social norms, scientific knowledge, and intellectual assumptions and “conventional wisdom” of the period in which they lived, which differs considerably from that of contemporary Muslim exegetes of all perspectives, and in many ways. But in a healthy intellectual tradition, the views and analyses found in the works of influential earlier scholars are critically engaged and selectively incorporated or amended as the discipline progresses over time. Too often in the recent history of Islamic exegesis, modern or contemporary exegetical writing (whether presenting their work as formal or informal approaches to interpreting the Qur’an) tends to dismiss the intellectual history of the tradition, or else jump over many centuries of continuous exegetical writing, seeking only the reports or opinions found in the very earliest works as raw material to be reworked and retrofitted to modern intellectual and exegetical exigencies. The Qur’an itself, we hope to argue, offers hints at a more organic hermeneutical approach to its own words and verses, one that can both act as a check on more extreme interpretations by keeping hermeneutics rooted in the Qur’an’s literal and historical meaning, and also allow for the possibility of growth and development.

11.4  Ta’wīl as the Unfolding of Meaning over Time In thinking about the relationship between the historical context or meaning of a Qur’anic verse and its interpretative possibilities in later contexts, we should return to a more extensive examination of the polysemic quality of the word ta’wīl as it is found both in the Qur’an and in the Islamic exegetical tradition. It is useful to begin, I think, with a consideration of the way the terms tafsīr and ta’wīl are explained and delineated by the early (tenth century) theologian and Qur’an commentator, al-Māturīdī, in the introduction to his Qur’ānic commentary, Kitāb Ta’wīlāt al-Qur’ān (or Ta’wīlāt ahl al-sunnah). Al-Māturīdī defines tafsīr as the explanation of Qur’ānic verses based upon established knowledge, particularly the transmission of exegetical reports from the Prophet’s companions. Because tafsīr is concerned with understanding the literal meaning of Qur’anic expressions and the historical context of their revelation, he argues that it has to be based upon the transmitted teachings of the Prophet and his Companions, who possessed unique knowledge of these matters by virtue of their being present when the Prophet initially received the revelation. For this reason, tafsīr (specifically defined in this way) according to one’s own opinion is unacceptable, as it has to be based upon facts known only to contemporaries of Muhammad during the period in which he received the revelation, as transmitted by the earliest generations of Muslim religious scholarship. But according to al-Māturīdī the same concerns do not apply to ta’wīl, which refers to the attempt to discover the interpretation of verses that admit of multiple meanings (wujūh), and for which no definitive meaning can be claimed. He

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r­ eferences the basic etymological meaning of the word, defining it as the “explanation of the ultimate ends of a matter (bayān muntahā al-amr)”,28—that is, an explanation of the distant, rather than literal or immediate, interpretive possibilities of a given verse. Although he considers ta’wīl to be a legitimate and religiously worthwhile endeavor (this is what he titles his commentary after all), no single interpretation, and no definitive statement about the ultimate, intended divine meaning of verse can be made through ta’wīl.29 In other words, ta’wīl is a speculative endeavor, aimed at discovering increasing depth and breadth of meaning in the Qur’an, but neither intended nor capable of producing certainty or interpretive finality. It is the process of seeking—but never being able to claim to have reached—the furthest interpretive possibilities of a verse, which ultimately lead one back to its “origin”— an origin that lies, in principle, with God. Thus the search for meaning through ta’wīl is, from a human perspective, indefinite, in that it does not have a terminal point that can be reached through human contemplative or intellectual effort. To practice ta’wīl properly then, is to seek meaning without the expectation of achieving interpretative closure or completion. One could say that while al-Māturīdī understands tafsīr as an intellectual pursuit, that is “backward-looking” insofar as it relies entirely on the transmitted traditions of authorities from the past, ta’wīl is very much oriented toward the indefinite future, toward an ever-advancing horizon of understanding that can never be reached, allowing for a seemingly inexhaustible unfolding of possible but not certain meanings.30 It is important to note that al-Māturīdī is not alone in this understanding. In fact, most early commentators who wrote prior to the development of ta’wīl as a word associated primarily with esoteric, mystical, or symbolic exegesis (or even eisegesis), frequently gloss it as the final end or realization of something in its Qur’anic context, rather than as “interpretation” in either a basic or a more esoteric sense. Al-Raghib al-Isfahani, who compiled one of the earliest comprehensive lexicographies of Qur’anic terms, notes in his discussion of the term ta’wīl that its basic etymological meaning concerns the  See Abū Mansūr Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Māturīdī, Ta’wīlat ahl al-sunnah, Istanbul: Dār al-Mizan, 2005, v. 1, p. 3. 29  Ibid., pp. 3–4. 30  It is important to note as well that in opening his commentary with this discussion of tafsīr and ta’wīl, while also titling his Qur’an commentary Ta’wīlat ahl al-sunnah, al-Māturīdī seems to signal his own hermeneutical methodology in the commentary: While he includes reports of early authorities, which he considers to be the business of tafsīr, specifically, he (unlike other wellknown contemporaneous commentators, such as al-Tabarī) does not seem to grant it excessive importance, for example, expending little ink on recording the lengthy authoritative chains of transmission (asānīd) that are typically expected to accompany the reports transmitted from earlier authorities. At the same time, he engages confidently in interpretation based on his own personal analysis of the verses, although often adding the phrase “Allāhu `alam (God knows best)” after his interpretive discussion, indicating the impossibility of any human being finding certainty of meaning through his own intellectual efforts. See Walid Saleh, “Rereading al-Tabarī through al-Māturīdī: New Light on the Third Century Hijri” in Journal of Qur’anic Studies, v. 18, no. 2 (2016), pp. 180–209. More preliminary remarks about these characteristics of al-Māturīdī’s hermeneutical method can be found in Ahmad Mohmed Ahmad Galli, “Some Aspects of al-Māturīdī’s Commentary on the Qur’an” in Islamic Studies, v. 21, no. 1 (1982), pp. 3–21. 28

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notion of returning to the root or source of something (rujū` ilā’l-aṣl), but similar to al-Māturīdī, says that ta’wīl can mean to “return something to the point of its furthest intention, with regard to either knowledge (i.e., the knowledge it conveys) or its actualization (radd al-shay’ ilā al-ghāyat al-murādah minhu `ilman kāna aw fi’lan).”31 More importantly, this forward-looking understanding of ta’wīl is foundational to the Qur’an’s own usage of the term in diverse contexts. As we have discussed above, ta’wīl in the Qur’an means not only interpretation, but also “outcome,” “fulfillment,” or “future realization.” In most of the Qur’anic passages where it is found, the word encompasses both semantic resonances, for even in those places in the Qur’an where ta’wīl seems to most directly mean “interpretation,” it is almost always an interpretation that involves a future realization, such that the ultimate meaning of a divine revelation or command only unfolds gradually over the course of time, or can only be understood in light of future events that serve to clarify the full divine intention and purpose behind it. In the understanding of ta’wīl specifically as esoteric interpretation, the unfolding divine meaning in the Qur’an takes place vertically, in the ascent of the individual toward higher levels of meaning, or through an intensification of one’s understanding of a verse through sincere reflection and contemplation, which opens the door to deeper and more hidden levels of meaning. By virtue of this “ascent” or intensification a person may become “deeply rooted in knowledge” rāsikhūna fi’l-`ilm, another symbolically vertical movement that is connected in verse 3:7 with those (besides God himself) who know the ta’wīl of the ambiguous verses. Yet this notion of a vertical process of uncovering “higher” or “deeper” levels of meaning is not explicitly Qur’anic in origin, and is not reflected directly in the Qur’anic usage of the term, where it almost always refers to the unfolding of the meaning of revelation, not vertically, but horizontally over time, or to the fulfillment of the original purpose of revelation not in its immediate context, but in the future. Let us examine some Qur’anic examples to clarify the point, before revisiting the most well-known usage of ta’wīl in Qur’an 3:7—the context in which the term is most decisively, and problematically, associated with non-literal interpretation of the Qur’an. For a good example of a verse in which ta’wīl is associated both with the interpretation of revelation and with the future, we can look at a passage in Sūrah 7: The Heights. This sūrah was revealed toward the end of Muhammad’s time in Mecca—a difficult period in his life, as he and his followers faced increasing harassment from the Meccan pagans. The sūrah as a whole contains multiple accounts of peoples destroyed for their disbelief and the persecution of their prophets whom God had sent to them for guidance. In context, the accounts are meant as a threat to the Meccans who were in the process of doing the same to Muhammad, as they continued to reject the message of the Qur’an. In verses 52–53 of this sūrah we find the following warning addressed, according to most commentators, to the Meccan

 Al-Rāghib al-Isfahanī, Mu`jam mufradāt alfāz al-Qur’ān (ed. Nadm Mar’ashli), Beirut: Dār al-Kātib al-`Arabi, 1972, pp. 26–27.

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pagans rejecting Muhammad and the Qur’anic revelations (the “Book”) that he was receiving: We have indeed brought them a Book, which We have expounded with knowledge, as guidance and mercy for a people who believe. Do they wait for anything but the full disclosure (ta’wīl) thereof? The day when its full disclosure (ta’wīl) comes, those who forgot it beforehand will say, “The messengers of our Lord indeed brought the truth!...

In this passage, ta’wīl (here translated as “full disclosure”) could be understood to mean the interpretation of the “Book” (i.e., the Qur’an) that has been sent to them via the Prophet Muhammad. Some commentators note that the essence of the verse’s criticism of the pagans is that they rejected the Book even before they understood its full meaning, and that they would not necessarily be any more inclined to believe in it once its full meaning was revealed. Other commentators, however, indicate that it is not the interpretation (ta’wīl) of the Book in general that is intended here, but rather the full realization specifically of the warnings and threats that the Book issues regarding those who fail to heed and aid the prophets who are sent to them, or to believe in the messages given to them.32 In other words, it chastises those who refuse to believe in the Book’s warning about future divine destruction and punishment, and who will only believe once this destruction has been realized and come to pass—at which point it will be too late, as the verse suggests.33 Thus here ta’wīl clearly refers both to the interpretation or understanding of revelation, as well as to the future fulfillment of the divine threats it contains. The term ta’wīl seems to have a similar multivalence in the well-known Qur’anic story of Moses and Khidr—the unnamed (in the Qur’an) and mysterious divine servant who outrages the law-abiding prophet Moses as the former carries out God’s inscrutable and at times violent will.34 In the story, Moses seeks Khidr’s permission to follow and learn from him, but Khidr is reluctant to accept Moses’s request, arguing that Moses does not have the “patience” to bear with him. Khidr eventually agrees to allow Moses to follow him, but only on the condition that Moses not ask any questions. The mysterious figure eventually shocks Moses by inexplicably scuttling the boat of some poor people who had were ferrying them across the river, and then killing a seemingly innocent young boy. Moses is unable to contain his astonishment and horror at these apparently depraved acts, and demands an explanation, but is reminded twice that he has pledged not to question Khidr. Having agreed to ask no further questions, Moses continues to travel with Khidr until they reach a town where, hungry and tired from their journey, they ask the inhabitants for some food. They are rebuffed and driven out of town; but on their way out, they come upon a crumbled wall, which Khidr stops to rebuild. Given that the townspeople had

 Al-Rāzī, Mafātih al-ghayb, v. 14, pp.  78–79; see also Mahmud b. `Umar b. Muhammad alZamakhshari, al-Kashshāf `an haqā’iq ghawāmid al-tanzīl wa `uyūn al-aqawil fi wujūh al-Ta’wīl (4 vols., ed. Muhammad `Abd al-Salam Shahin, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-`Ilmiyyah, 1995, v. 2, p. 105. 33  See Tabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, v. 5, p. 266. 34  The story is found in Qur’an 18:60–82. 32

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shown them no hospitality, Moses is perplexed as to why Khidr would perform this act of unrequited kindness, and tells him that he could have demanded payment for his services. Upon hearing this, Khidr tells Moses that the two must part, but before leaving him, Khidr says he will inform Moses of the “ta’wīl of what he was unable to bear patiently”35—that is, the meaning of his seemingly preposterous actions. He explains that the boat was scuttled to prevent its being commandeered by a tyrannical king who was coming to seize all boats; that the boy was killed because he would have grown up to become an evil man, and he wished to spare the boy’s pious parents that heartache; and that he rebuilt the wall so that two orphan boys in the town would eventually be able to reclaim their inherited treasure buried below the rubble. What is most important for our argument here is that the ta’wīl or “interpretation” Khidr offers for his actions only make sense in light of future events, of which even the great prophet Moses had no knowledge, and for the eventual revelation of which, he was unable to wait “patiently.” This is a slightly different context from the one discussed above, where the interpretation (ta’wīl) of a divine warning communicated through revelation refers to the future acutalization of its threatened punishment—a threat and a punishment that were conceptually understandable, but would only be known with certainty through their future realization. In the case of Moses and Khidr, the actions of Khidr seem morally repugnant, or at least illogical (in the case of the wall), and can only be understood as the will of a just God when viewed retrospectively from the perspective of future events, through which they can be comprehended as providential and just. Only God and his servant (Khidr), gifted with extraordinary knowledge from God himself, know the future, however, and thus the ta’wīl of these (and by implication, other) inexplicable events in a world providentially controlled by a just and rational God are known only to him. Finally, we look at the use of the word ta’wīl in Sūrat Yūsuf (Sūrah 12), where we find a similar multivalence for the term (as it means here both interpretation and final realization), and similarities to the two earlier examples we have just discussed. In Sūrat Yusuf, the word ta’wīl occurs several times, always relating to the interpretation of dreams, which is curiously referred to in the text as the ta’wīl of “ahādīth”—a word that means both words/reports, but also “events.” In the beginning of the sūrah, Joseph has a dream in which he sees eleven stars, the sun, and the moon prostrating before him. Joseph relates his dream to his father, Jacob, who offers no interpretation of the dream, but predicts that God will eventually teach Joseph the interpretation of dreams (or lit., “events” ta’wīl al-ahadīth). It is not until the conclusion of the story, when Joseph’s brothers, along with his father and mother, arrive at the court in Egypt and bow down before him that the meaning of his dream becomes clear, as the incredible turn of fate it portended was finally both explained and realized. “This is the ta’wīl of my vision (ru’yā)!” Joseph triumphantly exclaims to his father.36

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In this story, ta’wīl can be understood as referring to an unfolding of meaning in the sense of a realization in actuality of what had been a potential promise or threat (similar to its usage in 7:52–53 above), as well as to the unfolding of meaning in the sense that a seemingly inexplicable divine act or communication is revealed to be providential in light of future developments (as in the case of Moses and Khidr). But in the Joseph story, the use of the term ta’wīl also suggests that divine communication contains layers or levels of meaning that develop and deepen over the course of time and future events. When Joseph first recounts his dream in the narrative, the interpretation does not seem terribly cryptic: Joseph has eleven brothers, and the image of eleven stars bowing down to him in his dream would seem to indicate (even without knowledge of the dramatic events that would follow) that Joseph possesses a certain spiritual or worldly superiority vis-a-vis his brothers, or perhaps that he will eventually become the family’s leading member or patriarch. Indeed, in the Qur’anic account, this seems obvious to his father, Jacob, who warns him not to tell his brothers, for fear of their jealousy. These initial, but rather vague or general, indications of the dream’s meaning are, of course, not false in the context of the story itself. Joseph does hold a position of spiritual superiority over his brothers in the Qur’anic (and Biblical) account, he does surpass them in his father’s affections, and he does eventually become the patriarch of Jacob’s line. But at this early point in the story, Joseph does not know, and could not possibly know, the fuller meaning of his dream—namely that he would attain a position of authority in the wealthy and powerful, but foreign land of Egypt, and that his family, after many years, would come from Canaan and literally bow before him. This “ultimate” meaning of his dream, which until it came to pass could scarcely have been imagined, was only disclosed to him many years in the future. While Joseph and Jacob at the beginning of the story may have correctly apprehended something of the meaning of Joseph’s dream and its symbolic suggestions for his future destiny when it was first revealed to them, they could only know its ultimate significance and the circumstances of its literal realization in the future, that is, through the unfolding of an elaborate and complex series of events. It is ironic, but also telling, that in the story, Joseph is given the ability to interpret the dreams of others (his two fellow prisoners and the king), but he is entirely unable to “interpret” his own dream. Despite being a prophet with a divinely bestowed gift for dream interpretation, he apparently cannot know the fullest meaning and final outcome of his own dream. He must await the revelation of its ultimate meaning as it is finally disclosed through a series of unforeseen and unforeseeable events. Thus in this case, as in the case of Moses and Khidr, the Qur’an indicates that even prophets are unable to know the full significance or ultimate providential intention of the divine commands or communications bestowed upon them; even the prophets must wait for the unfolding of events over time to know the full meaning of revelation.37  See multiple places in the Qur’an (6:158; 7:71; 9:52; 10:20, 102; 11:122; 32:30; 52:31) where the Prophet, in the context of delivering a threat of divine punishment, is instructed to tell his opponents to “wait”, and that he is waiting along with them for the final realization of God’s judgment and punishment in the future.

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If the Prophet Muhammad, as he repeatedly insists in both the Qur’an and the Hadīth, had no knowledge of future events,38 then it is reasonable to argue that even he did not necessarily possess a full understanding of the meaning of the verses revealed to and through him, as at least some of aspects of the meaning of these verses might only be revealed in the future course of events. Later developments that post-date Muhammad’s lifetime might bring to light further interpretations of at least certain Qur’anic verses that Muhammad’s contemporaries or near contemporaries could not possibly have comprehended. In other words, while the Companions and earliest generations of Muslims may have a unique and unrivaled authority to transmit the meaning of certain Arabic terms in the Qur’an, or information about the specific historical circumstances in which a verse was revealed, or about the Prophet’s reaction to, or implementation of, a particular Qur’anic verse, that same verse may have embedded within it meanings that will only become apparent in the future as historical events for which they might have a particular relevance unfold horizontally across the plane of human time. It is easy to think of some relatively non-controversial examples of the possibility of such readings. Several passages of the Qur’an, for example, warn human beings against walking exultantly or behaving tyrannically on the earth (17:37, 10:23) or transgressing against the “balance” set by God in his creation (55:7–8); others chastise those who are wasteful or prodigal “in the earth” or when they harvest its crops (5:32; 6:141). A contemporary reader might rather naturally read those verses as commands to treat the earth and the natural world gently and humbly, to be careful not to let human activities and technology upset the “balance” of the natural order, and to be sparing in the treatment of the earth’s resources. In the midst of the twenty-first century crisis of global climate change, such meanings almost immediately suggest themselves to readers of the Qur’an in a way that could scarcely have been understood by premodern exegetes, who lived in a world that simply could not imagine human activity potentially rendering the earth devoid of thousands of life forms, or making it uninhabitable. Thus premodern exegeses of Qur’anic warnings about “upsetting the balance” set by God or being “prodigal” in the earth do not even hint at such environmentalist or conservationist readings. Rather, they interpret such warnings as prohibitions against committing actions that would upset the metaphorical “balance” of social or interpersonal justice—an interpretation, we should emphasize, that is well-warranted, given the Qur’an’s clear concern with social justice issues. But does the preponderance (indeed unanimity) of premodern interpretations of these verses as relating to social justice preclude the legitimacy of modern, environmentalist readings of these verses among contemporary Muslims who see a basis for their environmental ethics inscribed in their sacred  See Qur’an 7:187; 79:42–45; see also the well-known “hadīth of Gabriel” in which the Prophet affirms to the visiting Angel Gabriel and before his gathered followers, that he has no knowledge of “the Hour”, that is the future apocalypse and final ends of things in al-Bukhārī, Muhammad b. Ismā’il, Sahīh al-Bukhārī (ed. Abū Shu`ayb al-Karmī), Riyad: Bayt al-Afkār al-Dawliyyah, K. al`ilm, h. 50 and Muslim, Abu’l-Husayn b. Hajjāj, Sahīh Muslim (ed. Abū Shu`ayb al-Karmī) Riyadh, Bayt al-Afkār al-Dawliyyah, K. al-īmān, h. 9, 10.

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scripture?39 Conversely, does the striking relevance of such verses to contemporary environmental concerns preclude the legitimacy of earlier readings provided by those without knowledge of these environmental issues, which have only emerged relatively recently in the course of human history? I have tried to demonstrate here that the Qur’an itself suggests an approach to its own interpretation and exegesis through its use of the multivalent term “ta’wīl” that would discourage either of these extreme positions. Rather, it suggests that new understandings or applications of its own words and passages can exist alongside earlier ones as part of a process of horizontal unfolding, of continuous “meaning-­ making” that many believers consider to be one of the most powerful aspects of the encounter with scripture. As in the case of Joseph, what may have been earlier understandings of his dream—simply that he was privileged over his brothers in some way or more beloved of his father—would not have been wrong, just incomplete. As Joseph’s narrative progresses through an unlikely series of events, he gains an increasingly clearer understanding of the unique spiritual destiny the dream portended for him, until the narrative reaches its final conclusion when the dream is realized in a far more literal manner than could have been earlier imagined. But the ultimate realization or fulfillment of his dream in a literal way many years later in Egypt does not delegitimize or nullify what may have been his (or his father’s) earlier understanding of the dream’s meaning, for Joseph’s ultimate position as his brothers’ lord and master in Egypt is but an intensification of his position as favored son over them in the eyes of their father.

11.5  Conclusion As the genre of Qur’anic exegesis developed, particularly after the tenth century, the term ta’wīl became most commonly associated with esoteric, mystical, and even eisegetical readings of the Qur’an. While the term was adopted by both Twelver and Ismaili Shi’is as a reference to knowledge of the hidden meanings of Qur’anic verses as taught or inspired by their imams, it was sometimes used pejoratively outside these circles to dismiss exegetical approaches to the Qur’an that were considered to be sectarian, heterodox, or wildly speculative in nature. For those who held conservatively to the view that Qur’anic exegesis had to be primarily or even exclusively based in reports from the earliest Muslim scholars, any kind of

 For important work on environmental ethics from an Islamic perspective that draws on Qur’anic statements about nature or the earth, see for example, Ibrahim Ozdemir, “Toward an understanding of environmental ethics from a Qur’anic perspective” in Richard Foltz, Frederick Denny and Azizan Hajji Baharuddin (eds.) Islam and Ecology, Harvard University Press, 2003, as well as the recent “Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change” issued in 2016 and signed by many leading figures in the Islamic community. The text of this declaration invokes many Qur’anic passages related to nature and can be found at: http://www.ifees.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/climate_declarationmMWB.pdf

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s­ peculative or independent interpretive effort outside of these transmitted reports was highly suspect if not illegitimate. Yet such conservative views that seek to establish a defined and essentially “closed” canon of authoritative interpretations of the Qur’an is not consistent with the guidance the Qur’an gives about its own interpretation, either explicitly (through repeated calls to its general audience to ponder and reflect on its meaning) or implicitly, through references to the inexhaustibility of God’s words, or (as we have tried to show here) through its multivalent use of the term “ta’wīl.” We may now revisit Qur’an 3:7 and its warning about ta’wīl. If we understand the term ta’wīl as it is found in this verse—the term the Qur’an itself uses for the interpretation of divine revelation—to refer more specifically to the unfolding of a Qur’anic verse’s interpretation and significance over time, and in light of what is “revealed” to human beings through the ongoing course of events in human history, then indeed, as Qur’an 3:7 attests, none knows the ta’wīl of the Qur’an but God, for none possesses the requisite knowledge of future developments. By rereading the term ta’wīl in Qur’an 3:7 in a manner more consistent with its range of meaning in the Qur’anic text itself, the warning in Qur’an 3:7 about those who “pursue” or “desire” the ta’wīl of the Qur’an would refer, not to those who attempt to discern new, non-literal or esoteric meanings in the text, but rather to those who would assert that a complete understanding of a verse’s meaning and significance has already been reached—that is, to argue that interpretive closure has been achieved in a way that makes all further speculation dangerous or deviant. If read in this way, the error the verse points to is not the effort to contemplate and find new or hidden meaning in the verses, but on the contrary, the desire to claim that no such new or hidden meanings exist or can be found, and thus to question the legitimacy of continuing to ponder and reflect upon Qur’anic verses—an endeavor the Qur’an itself repeatedly encourages.40 Reading the term ta’wīl in this way is more consistent with the Qur’an’s own hermeneutical suggestions, and it neither proscribes the discovery of new and spiritually generative—even radically inspiring—readings emerging in the context of new historical developments or situations, nor privileges newer readings in a way that supersedes or necessarily delegitimizes earlier ones. Rather, it suggests the possibility that all these meanings can theologically be considered as part of the full or complete meaning of the verse that reveals itself gradually over time, and whose terminal point is, as Qur’an 3:7 asserts, known only to God.

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 See, for example, Qur’an 4:82; 7:175–176; 16:43–44; 38:29; 47:24.

Chapter 12

The Logic of Revelation Peter Ochs

Abstract  No longer trusting the once-dominant disciplines of reasoning in the modern academy, contemporary discussions of theology often turn to tradition- or experience-based sources of religious knowledge. While applauding the turn, for example to scripturally grounded theology, I argue that this should not entail a turn away from all logic-based disciplines of reasoning. The genres of modern reasoning that merit postmodern criticism—foundationalist and other types of reductive reasoning – are all informed by two-valued, disjunctive logics. Many classic and medieval scriptural commentaries are informed, however, by non-disjunctive disciplines of reasoning that may be formalized, today, in any of a range of multi-valued logics. There is therefore no justification for extending postmodern suspicions of disjunctive disciplines of reasoning to non-disjunctive disciplines. By way of illustration, I introduce a semiotic method (the “Logic of Revelation,” LR) for diagramming patterns of non-disjunctive reasoning in practices of tradition-­ based, scriptural theology. An analyst may, of course, lack reasonable evidence for attributing such patterns to a given project of theological writing. The detailed work of this chapter is to illustrate the kind of reading and modeling that provides reasonable evidence. According to LR, patterns of non-disjunctive reasoning are specific to a given sub-tradition of practice. I therefore illustrate LR through the case of classic rabbinic reasoning about scripture (midrash) as examined by a set of contemporary rabbinic scholars. Rabbinic reasoning adopts revealed words as its first premises and prototypically attends to catastrophic loss as context for its innovative, midrashic interpretations. Keywords  Midrashic interpretation · Logic of revelation · Catastrophic loss · Multi-valued logics

P. Ochs (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_12

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For a Jewish philosopher to examine revelation and hermeneutics after modernity and after the Shoah is to examine in a certain manner and not just about a certain subject matter. It is to examine “after” a family of specifically modern logics has displayed its failures to serve as an adequate, let alone reliable, vehicle for Jewish reasoning after revelation. The way I identify these logics is correlative to the logic I invoke as an adequate and reliable alternative. I identify the former as the modern West’s practices of “two-valued propositional logics.” I identify the latter as a significantly broader family of logics that inform “three valued,” “multivalued,” “relative/relational,” “quantum” and “probabilistic” reasonings/inquiries. I identify “revelation” with what the rabbinic tradition calls mattan torah, “the Giving of Torah,” and I assume Torah makes itself available as a subject-of-and-guide-to reasoning when identified with Tanakh, or “Scripture,” as received, enacted, and interpreted in the unfolding tradition of limud torah, or “scriptural study, commentary, and performance.” In this essay, the term “logic” refers to what the pragmatist and semiotician Charles Peirce calls a logica utens: the not-immediately-evident patterns of reasoning that authorize and discipline any practice of inquiry. It is, in other words, immanent logic. After modernity and after Shoah, the immanent logic of Jewish reasoning after revelation is examined most efficiently through the kind of semiotics that is compatible with multivalued logics but not with two-valued logics. Within the history of Christian philosophic-theological discourse, such a semiotics emerges in the tradition of inquiry that begins in Augustine’s transformation of Stoic logic into a logic of Scripture and that achieves its most refined theo-philosophic expression in the Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot and its most refined formalization in the philosophic work of Charles Peirce. In a time after the postmodern critique of modern foundationalisms, academic philosophical theology has come to display both greater freedom and less clarity, greater fidelity to traditions of Scripture and less fidelity to the disciplines of reasoning with Scripture. Within this intellectual clime, revelation gains greater legitimacy as a subject for academic theological inquiry, but disciplines of reasoning lose authority. I was happy to see the demise of disciplines that tended to discourage Scripture-based theology or to remove such theologies from their settings in commentarial traditions. But I had not anticipated current tendencies to discourage logical discipline altogether, as if postmodern criticism left theologians with a stark disjunction: either foundationalism (and the rational/logical disciplines that inform it) or inquiry unconstrained by any generalizable discipline of reasoning. My goal in this chapter is to recommend logical disciplines that are appropriate for Scriptural and tradition-based theologies. I will suppose that, for a logic of revelation (LR), first premises are words revealed to some language community. For this chapter, I consider the one case of words revealed to the people of Israel: words of scripture or Tanakh. While we may speak in general terms of “a logic of scripture,” such a logic is made known, or “scribed,” by way of a particular language community as addressee. Shall I therefore say that the subject of this chapter is the Logic of Tanakh? Not directly, because, according to LR, first premises are received only with respect to second premises,

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which indicate how first premises will be received within the language community of Israel. If I write about LR by way of the people Israel’s reception, there remain many levels of reception that I have yet to identify. I am introduced to LR only by way of the classic rabbinic reception of Tanakh, emerging in the late second temple period and articulated through the literatures of Mishnah, Talmud and midrash over the first six to seven centuries of the Common Era. I am therefore introduced to LR by way of what we my label RLR, the “Rabbinic Logic of Revelation,” and the reception extends through a chain of more focused sub-logics, from Talmud and midrash to Gaonic logic, medieval philosophic, early and then late modern European and so on. I will not burden readers with more details of the lineage to which I am attached; I will only note that I write out of a contemporary community of Jewish-­ rabbinic readers that are identified by such names as “Jewish textual reasoners,” “post-liberal Jewish philosophers,” “rabbinic pragmatists or semioticians,” and so on. For the rest of this chapter, I will let RLR stand for the much more delineated corridor through which my community of readers walks to and from its Torah. For RLR, in sum, second premises identify worldly conditions for the reception of first premises. To this point, I am writing as if my logical model were the syllogistic of Aristotle’s later work. To some degree this is in fact what I mean to say, since RLR is a measure of reasoning. In this sense it is also appropriate to think of the worldly life of a rabbinic or Jewish community as setting conditions for such reasoning. We should, however, not overdraw this analogy. Aristotle’s students may make use of the syllogism to reduce the seemingly endless complexity I have attributed to the worldly reception of Tanakh. Were I to identify this reception with a “second premise,” Aristotle’s students would have good reason to think I have subverted their efforts. I will therefore let go of this syllogistic analogy, hoping that readers will retain it somewhat in mind. Readers should keep it in mind because rabbinic readings of Tanakh are indeed reasonings: but only “somewhat” in mind, because RLR informs a reasoning that is not typically brought to full clarity and distinctness in Aristotle’s manner. The primary work of this chapter is to characterize rabbinic scriptural hermeneutics as a contemporary effort to diagram elemental features of classical rabbinic reasoning. But let me offer disclaimers. By “classical rabbinics” I mean only an illustrative, contemporary reading of certain texts of Mishnah, midrash, Talmud. By “classical rabbinic reasoning” I mean a contemporary account of certain rabbinic practices of scriptural reading and interpretation, both legal (halakhic) and homiletic (aggadic). I take pains to label these practices “reasonings,” because I trust that Aristotle (to take one example of a fine western reasoner) ought to let me do this. For Aristotle, after all, first premises of reasoning cannot themselves be products of reasoning (or else we would be guilty of circular reasoning). While scriptural reasoners may debate with Aristotle about different disciplines for moving from premise to premise (Aristotle tended to privilege a two-valued propositional logic; RLR employs a multivalued logic), the most telling debate would be about which kind of premises come first. Euclid may have this or that mathematical axiom; RLR has revealed scriptural texts.

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To introduce RLR is, therefore, to diagram patterns of classical rabbinic reasoning, which is a reasoning out of scripture. Here is a sampling.

12.1  Revelation as Revealing First Premises From the perspective of RLR, I will identify the term “revelation” with a network of rabbinic tropes about divine communication to humanity, including mattan halakhah l’yisrael (“the giving and gift of Torah to the people Israel”), geulah (redemption), giluy shekhinah (“revelation of the divine presence”), dibbur (divine “speaking-word”), davar (a created “thing” or “spoken-and-speaking word”), Tanakh (the Bible), torah she b’khtav (“the written Torah”), and torah she b’al peh (“the oral Torah”). Respecting the brevity of this chapter, I examine only a sample of these tropes: those that address mattan torah as God’s spoken-word (dibbur) to the people Israel. By way of disclaimer, I am not suggesting that every good scholar should agree with me or that the rabbinic sages would necessarily recognize what I am calling RLR. As I present it, RLR is a hybrid account whose elements mark points of relation between classical rabbinic discourse and contemporary approaches to multi-valued logic.

12.1.1  The Reality of Revelation For RLR, what we call “revelation” fills, by analogy, the medieval philosophic conditions for realitas, or that which is real because it is independent of what we may think, believe, or desire.1 Revelation is a prototype of that which is independent of our thought or will. As Charles Peirce argues, this does not imply that reality precludes what we may, after the fact, characterize as intelligence, will, or desire; it simply arises for us independently of our activities of intellect and will.

12.1.2  Indexicality as Mark of the Reality of Revelation By what form of knowing may we recognize revelation as real? Let us, for the moment, identify “judgments” as instruments of such knowing, and let us accept conventional efforts to diagram judgments in propositional form: where a proposition predicates some characteristic of something indicated by the subject of the proposition. In these terms, if revelation is real, then our knowledge of it would 1  I follow Peirce’s reading of realitas as “that which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have these characters or not”: Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers Vol. 5 Par. 430, eds. Charles Harteshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1934, 1935).

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predicate reality (as defined above) of that which is indicated by the subject of a judgment. But how does revelation appear as the referent of such a judgment? For RLR, revelation makes its appearance only by way of the evidence of the five senses. If so, the judgments we are discussing must be empirical judgments, whose subjects refer to sensory/perceptual events. But how would judgments of sensation/perception function as evidence of revelation? If I report “I saw the bush aflame and it was not consumed,” is that a sensory/perceptual judgment? If so, how does it deliver evidence of revelation? If not, then the event would not be sensory/experiential. In a moment, I will illustrate what I take to be the classic rabbinic solution to this apparent dilemma. But first I will introduce the semiotic distinction that I believe best clarifies the logical implications of the rabbinic account. I make use of Peirce’s theory of signs, or semiotics, as an instrument for drawing diagrams of patterns of reasoning (as well as other kinds of relation). I use the term “logic” to refer to such diagraming, so that “logic” and “semiotics” serve the same function, which is strictly instrumental. Peirce defines a sign as a thing that, for some person (or practice or language), refers to something else: S refers to T for some P. Following this definition, Peirce identifies 144 classes of sign. For our purposes, I will introduce only two classes: what he calls “indices” and “icons” (indexical and iconic signs). Peirce writes that an icon is a sign that refers to its object by way of some manner of imitation or similarity: the way, for example, the statue of a general on a horse may be taken to resemble that general (when on that horse). Peirce characterizes an index as a sign that refers to its object, not by any similarity, but as displaying the direct consequence of the force or action of that object: the way, for example, a weathervane indicates the wind direction because it is pushed that way by the wind. Following Peirce, I diagram the predicates of empirical judgments as iconic and the subjects of such judgments as indexical. In this way we can envision a judgment whose subject predicates nothing of its object but serves only to mark the effects of its object. What kind of judgment would fulfill this form? Not a judgment like “the cat is black,” because the subject “the cat” names its object by predicating something of it (as if the judgment predicated something of a predicate!). The judgment would, instead, be something like “there is a black cat.” In case readers associate the term “there” with some predicable characteristic (such as “there” as opposed to “here”), we may restate this more radically as “— is a black cat.” In this way, the subject of an empirical judgment serves strictly as a means of drawing the listener’s attention to that which merited some predication. Returning to RLR, let me explain why I brought you through these semiotic details. Diagraming RLR in terms drawn from Peirce’s semiotics, the reality of revelation is displayed through its indexicality, while its meaning is displayed through a community’s real-time readings of what it means to them (its iconicity). In these terms, RLR diagrams “a revelation” as the otherwise non-iconizable event to which a witness’s (or a witnessing community’s) attention is forcibly drawn. The reality of the event is measured by the force of its interrupting the witness’s attention, rather than by anything the witness later thinks or says about the event, even if “later” is only microseconds after the interruption. Claims that “it is a bush of flame yet not consumed!” or “it is He on a throne!” or “it is pure light!” give evidence of

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human responses to the event, not to the event itself. This is one way we may diagram the rabbis’ account of the empirical reality of revelation. By way of illustration, consider this passage from the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, a Tannaitic midrash on the book of Exodus, offering both legal and homiletical interpretations.2 “…The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name” (Ex 15:3). Is it possible to say this? Is it not written “Do I not fill heaven and earth, says the Lord?” (Jer. 23:24). And “…One would call to me and say holy, holy, holy” (Is 6:3). And “Oh Lord, God of Israel, there is none like You…” (II Chron. 6:14) And “Behold the glory of the God of Israel…” (Ezek. 43:2). What then is the intent of “a man of war?” Because of your love [the love He has for you, Israel] and because of your holiness, I shall sanctify my name through you, as it is written “For I am God and not a man… The Lord is his name” (Hosea 11:9): it is with His name that He wars, and He has no need of any of these appurtenances.3

12.1.3  Predication as Non-given: The Danger of Idolatry For RLR, revelation is misread when any witness to the fact and reality of revelation is identified with any predications of the character of that revelation: in our semiotic terms, when the indexicality of revelation is assimilated to its iconicity. The witness to revelation knows that God has spoken but not what God has said. To claim what God has said or revealed is to predicate something of the revelation. The revelation is there for some reason, and no reason will be disclosed until witnesses venture some reading of what the revelation says or means. Note, however, that witnesses must venture this; it is not simply given. As noted above, the force of revelation is displayed through its indexicality, but its meaning is disclosed only by way of predications. Does this mean meaning, and perhaps religion itself, is strictly a humanly constructed story about what may have happened when God spoke in history? For RLR, the answer is, no, these predications are neither “subjective” nor “objectively given.” They are this third something: the intimate, intricate, dynamic interaction between the God who speaks and the community that hears. The story of this interaction—which is not simply told, but unfolds—is the religion of this community, and God is there and the human community is there and the human never knows precisely what element of the conversation is fully God’s or only of these humans. Later, we will comment on another dimension of the reality of revelation: not the reality of the event, alone, but the reality of the fruits of this conversation between revealer and receiver. For now, our lesson is of the necessary humility of the receiver. Exodus introduces a less gentle way of urging this humility. “You shall not make yourself an idol or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (see Ex 20:4). There is no place for attributing the reality of revelation to that which bares any likeness of any kind.

2  Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael II, trans. Jacob Z.  Lauterbach (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004). 3  Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael II 15:3.

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In the semiotic vocabulary we introduced above, “to make a likeness” is to signify something iconically. In other words, Exodus warrants Israel’s reading revelation on Sinai as indexical sign of a divine voice. For some sages, the voice, as Torah, might be associated with “black fire on white fire,” the outpouring of all the Hebrew graphemes of the five books of Moses. But, if so, what message would these graphemes deliver to Israel? What would they mean or command? Answers to these questions will emerge, but they are not given. The biblical and rabbinic critique of idolatry shares a logical form with Peirce’s critique of what he considers Cartesian foundationalism. This is what Peirce considers the Cartesian effort to identify some judgment of “what is” as utterly self-­certain: whether it is the Cartesian judgment that “I think, therefore I am,” or the assumption by twentieth century logical positivists that knowledge would be impossible if we did not recognize certain “protocol sentences” that introduced our elemental perceptions of the world. Peirce argued that these efforts errantly attribute the indexical force of a sensory/perceptual judgment to whatever a person may predicate of those judgments some microsecond later. For Peirce, indexical force is a mark of the bare fact that the world forces itself on us. However much our instincts and habits may guide our actions forcibly, that force is different from the indexical object of empirical judgments. Peirce is no nominalist. He will offer another way to evaluate habit’s contribution to our knowledge of reality, but that knowledge must be distinguished from the knowledge gained by way of indexicality. Peirce’s critique of efforts that confuse indexicality and iconicity is analogous to the biblical critique of idolatry. This analogy bears our notice.

12.2  “Say to” (dibber l’): Revelation as Relational From the perspective of RLR, no predications of revelation are “given”; they are offered, instead, to someone somewhere. In the Five Books of Moses, revelation as mattan torah is signaled by the directionality of God’s speaking: God speaks to (dibber l’). Exodus is prototypical: “God called to him (vayikra elav) out of the bush” (Ex: 3:4); “the Lord said to Moses (vayomer hashem lel-moshe)” (Ex: 4:4).

12.2.1  P  redications of Revelation Appear as Consequences of the Worldly Conditions of Revelation In the case of mattan torah, predications appear in relation to the space-time specificity of the reception history of God’s spoken-word to Israel.4 It is a predicate of God’s spoken-word as indexically independent and at the same time relationally 4  Please recall the disclaimers I offered earlier. I am not offering any comprehensive, synchronic account of this reception history, but only a sampling from out of the perspective of RLR.

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predicative. For example, when God calls to “Moses,” as narrated in Exodus 3, the call comes from out of a bush that was “all aflame.” It was the bush Moses saw while caring for the flock in Horeb. When, as narrated in Exodus 4, “the Lord said to Moses,” it was after Moses was told to cast a rod on the ground and it became a snake. Or, as narrated in Numbers 4 when “the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron,” it was “on the first day of the second month in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt,” in the context of their taking a census of the community of Israel. In all these cases, those who receive the revelation of God’s speaking-word, receive it as given to someone or some community in some worldly setting. In these biblical narratives, the reader sees Moses or Aaron receiving and responding to divine speech in terms of some context of their lives and Israel’s life. In the rabbinic accounts we will examine below, sages interpret biblical narratives in the context of specific occasions of life in the rabbinic period, and the sages also instruct their disciples to do the same in the context of their own lives.

12.2.2  R  evelation Is Received by Human Language Communities (Without Precluding Other Modes of Creaturely Reception) As mattan torah, revelation is received by the community of Israel (without precluding other analogous communal receptions). The Exodus prototype is of course God’s speaking torah to the people of Israel: the divine word is offered to Moses, Aaron, and all the other prophets strictly on behalf of Israel (and on behalf of God’s purposes for humanity). Thus, for example, the Mekhilta: So you also find, that the patriarchs and the prophets offered their lives in behalf of Israel. As to Moses, what did he say: “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not blot me, I pray the, out of the book which thou hast written” (Ex. 32:32).5

Max Kadushin, my revered teacher, read this passage as illustrating the “merit of Israel” (zekhut yisrael): the prophets did not receive God’s word for their sake, but for the sake of the community of Israel. Kadushin points to these words of the Mekhilta two pages later: “The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the Land of Egypt, saying. (Ex. 12:1) …. R.  Akiva says, Saying means: Go and say to them [Israel]; since it was only for their sake that he was speaking with him.”6 Kadushin comments that, “According to R. Akiva, were it not for Israel, the Dibbur [spoken-­ word] would never have come to Moses.”7 I learn that, for RLR, the spoken-word is offered for and to the language community to whom God speaks.

 Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael I, p. 10 on 12:1  Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael I, p. 10 on 12:1. 7  Max Kadushin, A Conceptual Approach to the Mekilta (Binghamton: Binghamton University Press, 2001 [origin. 1969]), 59. 5 6

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12.2.3  A  s Mattan Torah, Revelation Displays and Enacts Relations Between God and Israel Including torah (instruction, of various specific kinds), kabbalat torah (receiving torah), mitzvah (commandment), chok/mishpat (varieties of law and ordinance), bitachon (promise), lshmoa/l’shmor (attention/hearing/obedience), asiya (doing by both God and Israel), ahavah (love, by both), sicha (discussion by both), limud/l’lamed (learning and teaching), and prayer and blessing of many types. I will not seek to illustrate all of these, but only the overall principle that God’s speaking to the community of Israel entails God’s entering into reciprocal relations with the community. God commands, instructs, loves. Israel loves, prays, and does: studying God’s word to uncover its command for each generation.

12.3  D  ibber, davar (Speaking, Spoken-Thing): Revelation as Event-Relation to Creation How is it that words spoken by the God who creates all and knows all, beyond the ken of any human community, can be received and acted upon by members of a finite human community? For RLR, the rabbinic answer is signaled by the Hebrew letters of the grammatical root (shoresh) of one of the primary words for “speaking”: d-b-r.8 Different conjugations of the root word display different received meanings. In the preceding section, we read dibber l’ as “speaking to,” implying “revealing to.” Here, we introduce the term davar and read it as a verbal noun signaling a product of speaking or of “having spoken.” Appearing in both rabbinic and modern Hebrew, davar is commonly translated as “thing” and as “subject or topic of conversation.” An illustration from rabbinic literature (Sotah 28b) is davar she yesh vo da’at lishol, “something that has the capacity to question” (identified with a rational creature) as contrasted with davar sh’eyn vo da’at lishol, “something that lacks the capacity to question” (identified with a non-intelligent creature).9 In modern Hebrew, examples include karoh davar b’shmo, “to call a thing by its proper name”; or davar k’shehu l’atsmo, the modern Hebrew translation of Immanuel Kant’s term “thing in-itself.” In the terms introduced in Sect. 1 above, davar refers at once to a “thing” as the un-predicated object of an indexical sign and to the particular “subject of conversation” when members of some group talk about that thing by way of empirical judgments that predicate this or that of the object. For RLR, these indexical and iconic signals must be logically and ontologically distinguished and yet must always be linked in some way. The telling message of RLR is that we must not claim that there

 In different conjugations, “b” is vocalized as either “b” or “v.”  Cf. Bamidbar Rabbah s. #11.

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is some determinant thing out there with respect to which different people or different groups offer different subjective accounts. Instead, we must attribute to the thing out there (as indexical object) an indefinite range of probable characteristics, so that there is an indefinite range of probably true predications of that thing, each one of which displays an epistemic and an ontological relationship that includes the thing and the knowing community. The general lesson is that these relations are real and, thus, that we should refer to at least two modes of reality. There is the reality of the indexical object (the undeniable event that something is encountered) and the modes of reality that include iconic predications (what we will call the emergent reality of any one of a range of probable relations that includes what we take to be “that thing.”)

12.3.1  Creatures as Things Let us ask the question again, how is it that God’s spoken-word can be received by finite human communities? Our study of the root word d-b-r signals the irreplaceable role of creation in the activity we call revelation. In mattan torah, God’s speaking-­to Israel is always already God’s speaking to creation: dibber l’ maaseh b’reshit (“God speaks to the order of creation”), which entails dibber l’b’riot, “speaking to creatures.” My interpretation of RLR is to identify “creatures” (briot) with d’varim/ dibberot (things as spoken words).

12.3.2  Revelation as Relation of God to God’s Word Let us then ask the question a third time. How can we finite creatures receive and make reliable judgments about words from the God who creates all? The implication of 3.1 is that, in speaking to us, God is speaking to God’s spoken word. Of many possible lessons, I will draw only one for our immediate discussion: that another way to appreciate the probable reality of our reception of God’s word is that, beyond the indexical moment of revelation, this reception displays a relation between God and an element of God’s own created world. We might thereby consider three modes of reality: what we call the indexical reality of an event of revelation, the predicative reality of our emergent relation to the characteristics, and the reality of revelation’s relation to the creator. To examine this third mode of reality would bring us to a dimension of theological discourse that falls outside the purview of this chapter: inquiry into the relation of God’s speaking creation to God’s speaking Torah. Nevertheless, we should keep this mode in mind as an unspoken context for our following words about the first two modes. A primary illustration is a blessing that appears in the traditional morning prayer service: barukh she amar v’haya ha-olam, “Blessed is the one who speaks and the world is.” In the terms of RLR, the blessing recognizes creation as God’s active speaking-word.

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12.4  P  eshat (“Plain Sense” Reading) and derash (Interpretive Reading) We turn to the central question of this chapter: what, in RLR, are the primary patterns of reading what God speaks to Israel and of reasoning about the meaning and consequences of that speaking? Within the limits of a brief chapter, we will consider only a selective prototype: the rabbinic distinction between plain sense and interpretive reading. For RLR, plain sense reading is associated with what the sages term torah she b’khtav (“the written torah,” or bible); interpretive reading is associated with torah she b’al peh (“the oral torah,” or the rabbinic reception of the written torah). There are different kinds of derash or interpretive reading, including midrash (legal interpretation) and midrash halakhah (homiletical interpretation).

12.4.1  Plain Sense Is Given but Non-predicative For RLR, what we are calling the indexicality of mattan torah (its signifying the reality of God’s voice) cannot be associated with what we are calling its iconicity (its predicable meaning). But how is this possible, if mattan torah is identified with the biblical words themselves? The surprising answer is that the indexicality of torah may be associated with all of its Hebrew graphemes (the black fire on white fire mentioned earlier) but not with any predicable meaning. This means that the meaning of plain sense cannot be what some call literal sense, understood, for example, as the elemental story line of the uninterpreted narrative. It cannot, furthermore, be associated with the “consensual” or “traditional” or “commonly ­understood” biblical account.10 The peshat is no account at all: instead, it presents the elemental conditions for offering any predication or interpretive meaning. In this strict account of indexicality, to read predication into the plain sense is to risk idolatry: what, in Section #5, we will call the sin as well as the error of assimilating the revealed graphemes to any humanly constructed predication of any kind. As noted earlier, this does not mean that, once having delivered Torah, God leaves Israel on its own to ferret out the meaning of God’s word. Derash is a human activity, but it is undertaken through intimate and ongoing relationship to the God who speaks. In the terms of RLR, derash is not a subjective meaning, but a probable display of the divine word in one of its real relations to the created world.

 See The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation, ed. with introduction and commentaries Peter Ochs (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1993). Repr. Ed.: Wipf & Stock: Eugene, Oregon, 2008.

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12.4.2  D  erash, Interpreted Meaning, Is Predicative, Relational, Historically Conditioned, and it Is Authoritative Only When and Where It Is Articulated 4.2 introduces our primary answer to this chapter’s primary question about how the rabbinic sages read and interpret God’s spoken-word. The answer will be displayed through lessons drawn from the following illustrations from classical rabbinic texts. Illustration #1: Avot d’Rabbi Natan11 A pair of images dominates the history of rabbinic Judaism even more than a text: the Burnt Temple (70–71 CE) and Jerusalem razed and salted (135 CE). How could the religion of Israel survive the loss of its Temple and priesthood, whose daily sacrifices atoned for Israel’s sins and thus maintained Israel’s covenantal obligations? How could the Jews continue to trust in God’s promise to maintain the divine covenantal obligations? And how could they trust the words of Torah that delivered the terms of the Covenant? The following midrash from Avot de Rabbi Natan displays a dominant rabbinic understanding: that rabbinic Judaism itself was the answer. After the Destruction of the Temple, Rabban Yochanah ben Zakkai once walked near Jerusalem with his disciple Rabbi Yehoshuah. Looking at the Temple in ruins, Rabbi Yehoshuah said, “Woe for us; the place that atoned for Israel’s sins has been destroyed!” Rabban Yochanah ben Zakkai replied, ‘Do not fear, my son. We have another way of gaining such atonement: enacting deeds of loving kindness, as it is written, “I desire loving kindness, not sacrifices” (Hos. 6:6).12

While this midrash comes from late in the rabbinic period, it reflects generations of meditation on how Israel’s covenant would survive the second Destruction of Israel’s Temple. In its plain sense, the Torah instructs Israel to worship God through sacrifices offered in the Temple, but Israel’s prophets had already extended the covenantal meaning of sacrifice to include acts of loving kindness. Through midrashim like this one, the rabbis claimed only to further extend the prophets’ meaning. Taking on the mantle of Ezra, they re-taught the Written Torah and reinterpreted its commandments in the context of their own day. In the process, they also transformed the meaning of a scribal priesthood. In the Second Temple period, the scribes remained a minority among Temple priests, whose primary concern was with Temple sacrifices. After the fall of the Second Temple, however, rabbinic practice eventually replaced all forms of priestly behaviour, replacing scribal work with Torah study and interpretation, and sacrificial work with the works of prayer and loving kindness through which Israel’s Covenant would be renewed and maintained.

 Some of the following words are excerpted, with alterations, from Peter Ochs, “Recovering the God of History: Scriptural Life after Death in Judaism and Christianity,” in Jews and Christians, People of God, eds. Carl E.  Braaten and Robert W.  Jenson (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003): 114–147. 12  From Avot d’Rabbi Natan (11a), the translation is adapted from Jules Harlow, ed., Siddur Sim Shalom, (New York, 1985), p.15. 11

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Illustration #2: Mishnah Avot (1.1)13 Codified during the second century c.e, after the Destruction of the Second Temple, the Mishnah represents what we might call the rabbinic book of the covenant: an authoritative sampling of how the biblical covenant was reformulated by the first generations of rabbinic sages. Redacted as a book of re-interpreted commandments (halakhot), the Mishnah also includes what we might call ethical statements, as well as other forms of religious wisdom. One small tractate, Pirke Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers,” hereafter Avot), is of special interest, since it collects ethical statements that would be useful for guiding the transformation of one set of covenantal rules into another. The sages inserted Avot into the traditional prayer book as a set of special readings for afternoon Shabbat services between Pesach and Rosh Hashanah. Each reading customarily begins with this midrash: All Israel have a portion in the world to come, as it is written, “Your people shall all be righteous; they shall possess the land forever; they are a shoot of My own planting, the work of My hands in which I shall be glorified” (Isaiah 60:21). (Sanhedrin 10:1)

The midrash dramatizes the paradoxical setting of rabbinic Judaism we already examined in Illustration #1. Taking poetic license, we might imagine Rabban Yochanah ben Zakkai reading Isaiah as he gazes, like Rabbi Yehoshuah, on the ruins of the Temple. ‘We are all righteous?!’ he might ask, “We will possess this land?” “We are God’s own work!?” The realities of Exile and Destruction seem clearly to contradict the prophecy and thus the terms of the Covenant. But the midrash offers a simple no to the apparent contradiction: no, the Torah does not mislead; it is referring to the world to come, when all Israel shall be righteous, shall inherit this land, shall glorify God. This one line of interpretation displays a complex argument. The Torah speaks for every time in the past and not just one; each time displays different aspects of covenantal life, whose full meaning appears only through the series of all such eras, from the beginning to the end of days; glimpses of that end time enable the sages to read the Torah of their time out of the Torah of a past time; and midrash exemplifies this type of reading. But when is a midrashic re-reading legitimate and authoritative? As if to answer this question, each weekly reading from Avot highlights a set of ethical sayings that could also serve as a set of rabbinic guidelines for reinterpreting the Covenant in one’s own day. The first reading, from the beginning of Avot, sets the stage for all the rest: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it down to Joshua, Joshua transmitted it to the elders, the elders handed it to the prophets, and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly (the Sanhedrin, or Legislature, of the early Second Temple period)” (Avot 1:1). This genealogy establishes the priestly and prophetic authority of the rabbis. The transmission of Torah that begins with Moses – and that omits the line of priests, who maintained the scrolls of Torah in the Temple – ends with the Men of the Great Assembly. It then extends, through the rest  Some of the following words are excerpted, with alterations, from Peter Ochs, “Covenant,” in Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide, eds. Nicholas de Lange and Miri Freud-Kandel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 290–300.

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of Avot, to all the founding generations of rabbinic sages. This means that the genealogy also establishes the authority of the rabbinic teachings that follow. The second text of Avot, for example, delivers a teaching of Simon the Just, one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly, that the world stands on three things: Torah, worship, and loving kindness (Avot 1:2). The teaching suggests not only that prayer and charitable acts are as important as studying words of Torah, but also that the words of the Written Torah that was maintained by the priests also contain something new: the oral Torah through which the sages of each generation uncover the directives of the written Torah to their generation. The Destruction of the Second Temple did not, therefore, break the chain that links all Israel to the prophecies of Isaiah and Moses. It did, however, mark the end of one formulation of the covenant and the beginning of another. For the rabbis, Simon the Just already displayed the rules of this new formulation in the middle of the Second Temple period. The new world of rabbinic Judaism will stand, like the world of the Mosaic Covenant, on Torah, but this is the oral Torah of the rabbis, as well as the written Torah of the prophets. It stands on worship, but this is the “service of the heart,” or prayer (Taanit 2a), rather than the service of Temple sacrifice. And it stands on “acts of loving kindness,” which are commandments of Torah, but as the sages of each generation interpret them, rather than as they may appear only in the explicit words of the Bible. Illustration #3: Sifra Bechukotai The early midrash collection, Sifra, includes a broad range of legal, or halakhic, midrashim. One of them comments on the Exodus passage, “These are the rules (chukim) and the judgments (mishpatim) and the laws (torot) which God gave on Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses” (Ex. 20:1). Sifra comments: “The chukim”  – these are the Midrashot; “and the mishpatim”  – these are the rulings (dinim); “and the torot” – this teaches that two Torot were given to Israel, one in writing and one orally. Said R. Akiba: And were [only] two torot given to Israel? Many torot were given to them, as it is written, “This is the torah of the whole offering,” “This is the torah of the meal offering,” “This is the torah of the guilt offering,” … “Which God gave,” – between Himself and Israel – Moses merited to be made an emissary between Israel and their Father in Heaven. “On Mount Sinai, by the hand of Moses” – this teaches that the Torah was given with its rules and details and explanations (halakhot, perushehem, vedikdukehem) through Moses from Mount Sinai.

The contemporary Talmudic scholar, David Halivni offers the following commentary: We may interpret the “two torot” as the written Torah and the Torah of interpretation. Perushim and dikdukim connoted human exegetical and judicial activity to Tannaitic authors. Thus, the statement, “Two torot were given to Israel, one in writing and one orally,” may indicate that an Oral Torah was, and is, given to Israel by means of exegesis and interpretation – which would be in keeping with the spirit of the Tannaitic times, as we shall see. In the same vein we may also explain the last portion of this passage – “that the Torah was given with its rules and details and explanations by Moses from Mount Sinai…This entire Midrashic passage might actually define what it meant to be such an emissary in the view of the early Sages: namely, to be able to perceive and deliver to the people the halakhot,

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dikdukim and perushim – the interpretations and the rulings – emanating from the revealed, scriptural Torah.”14

Lessons Learned for RLR Lesson #1: The classic rabbinic literature, from Mishnah to Talmud and the accompanying collections of midrash, collects rabbinic interpretations that are not only instructive for everyday life in a given community but also remain instructive as heuristic prototypes for all future generations. The text from Avot d’ Rabbi Natan illustrates how observing the remains of Israel’s destroyed Temple could stimulate efforts to reinterpret the biblical economy of “atonement.” Deeds of loving kindness may replace the sacrifice of animals. This substitution remains instructive for Jewish religious practice today. For Halivni, the Sifra’s reading of Ex. 20 recommends how, today as well as in classical rabbinic times, interpretive readings of scripture require disciplined efforts of exegetical and judicial rereading. As we will discuss below, Halivni notes that other rabbinic scholars, from the classical period to today, learn different lessons from the Sifra. Out of the contexts of their specific politico-religious practices, they may read the “two torot” as separately revealed, so that a jurist or rabbinic leader could claim access to oral Torah without the mediation of exegetical interpretation. For RLR, the lesson to be learned is that rabbinic interpretations may be instructive beyond their local contexts: individual jurist/leaders may choose to treat antecedent rabbinic interpretations (oral Torah) as if they bore the authority of the written Torah, generating sharply different schools of Torah as law and as instruction. We will have more to say in Lesson #4. The texts from Mishnah Avot function like those from Avot d’ Rabbi Natan, illustrating the prototypical context for distinguishing peshat from derash. At the same time, Avot recommends a much more detailed warrant for derash, inserting the rabbinic sages into the elemental genealogy of those who receive the Torah that God spoke to Moses. Lesson #2: For RLR, midrash is stimulated prototypically by some form of catastrophic loss, of which the defining prototype, narrated in Illustrations #1 and #2, is the Destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing Diaspora. Midrash is stimulated secondarily by customary changes in conditions of everyday life that call for legal and homiletic adjustments within the frame of prior interpretations. Prototypical midrashic activity emerges when adjustment is no longer sufficient: when homiletic and legal imagination is challenged to reimagine rather than more modestly apply/revise the meanings of received rabbinic understanding. Lesson #3: As response to catastrophe, midrash both rewrites what may have appeared to be received tradition and reassures the Jewish community that this apparent rewriting is a reaffirmation of the singular and unchanged written Torah. Illustrations #1 and #3 are prototypical, each narrating the enduring authority of the written Torah across Israel’s encounters with catastrophe and with what might  Excerpted from David Weiss Halivni, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah, ed. with commentary Peter Ochs (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 93.

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otherwise appear to be the utter destruction of Israel’s religion. In both texts, priestly practices in the temple reappear as rabbinic practices of torah (here rabbinic study in midrash), avodah (priestly work, here understood as rabbinic prayer) and gemilut hasadim (“deeds of loving kindness,” a new rabbinic term for biblical human and divine acts of caring for others). Lesson #4: the written and the oral Torah do not display two different traditions of understanding the divine word. Instead they display the defining difference between the letters through which God speaks to Israel (the black on white graphemes of the plain sense) and the instructive meaning of those words when received by Israel in a given time and condition. Halivni is a major contemporary proponent of this element of RLR. He argues, against a competing direction in both classical and modern rabbinic scholarship, that what is oral in Torah refers, not to antecedent sources of scriptural authority, but to the perennial activities of reading, exegesis, and scholarly/juridical debate through which the written Torah yields its commanding voice for each generation. As illustrated in the text from Sifra, the rules, judgments, and laws through which Israel enacts divine commands refer, not merely to discrete objects out there in the world (what we have called objects of indexical signs), but also to the ongoing processes and social institutions through which divine instruction enters into the minute details of everyday life. Lesson #5: A given community or generation’s interpreted meaning tends to become what we may call the “interpretive plain sense” for a subsequent generation. Metaphorically, we might say that the children have learned from the parents how to read the meaning of God’s spoken word. We analysts, as well as those sages within the parent’s generation, may perceive midrashic or interpretive layers of that spoken word. For RLR, what I label interpretive plain sense refers to the capacity of received knowledge to act, initially, as if it were the literal authority of God’s spoken word but then, in case of subsequent catastrophe, to display its interpretive dimensions. In this way, received knowledge of Torah includes both the one and only plain sense and the midrashic work of prior generations. When the “children’s” generation is called, God forbid, to midrashic work, then, sages of that generation tend to be called to two different stages of work. In the first stage the received instructions and interpretations are re-heard in the way the classic rabbis re-heard the graphemes of scripture. In the second stage, which means in the face of more horrible catastrophe, such latter day sages may be called to more radical rereading: praying in the name of the primordial graphemes to renew whole traditions of received interpretation. I do not presume that my revered teacher, Halivni, would distinguish these two dimensions of midrash as radically as I do. His commentary on the text from Sifra may therefore serve to illustrate both dimensions: the rabbis’ exegetical and judicial activities apply to every day halakhic and homiletical judgments as well as to judgments offered in extreme circumstances. If I put his commentary to somewhat more radical use, it is in part because of what I have observed in his life story. After the Shoah, his more traditional Talmudic exegesis acquired not only a new dimension of scientific text analysis, but also a new interpretive intentionality overall: what at

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times he calls tikkun hamikra, “repairing Scripture.”15 In his words, “we long for the unadulterated word of God.”16

12.5  P  agam (“Maculation,” Error and Sin): The Case of dochok (“Forced Reading”) or halakhah l’moshe misinai What guarantees the “accuracy” of midrash? How do we—we members of Israel or we observers of any tradition of revelation—trust that God’s spoken word animates the interpreted sense in any community and in any generation? For RLR, this question is analogous to the question of freedom in God’s creation. Does the creator lend us such freedom? And should the creator do so? Are we to be trusted? My observations of Halivni’s life and work contribute to these principles of RLR: a presumption of human failing, of human incapacity to receive the divine word independently of human finitude and thus the possibility of failing. In the focal case of mattan torah to Israel, human failure wounds our capacity to know the divine will by way of direct reception of the written Torah, alone. The same failure necessitates Israel’s embrace of divine speaking as both command and invitation to unending interactive engagement with God: exegetical-juridical study of the divine spoken-­ word within the give-and-take of the study-community, as well as prayerful searching for place- and time-specific instruction in how that spoken-word is to be performed. The phrase halakhah l’moshe misinai, literally a “law given to Moses on Sinai,” appears in the later generations of the Talmudic authors – beginning with the amoraim –as an explanation of the source of some rabbinic legal rulings (halakhah). When debating different readings of different legal texts from the bible, the sages most often cite the warrant either of some chain of reception (where Rabbi R received a ruling from Rabbi Y) or of a mode of inference (where Rabbi R reached his conclusion by reasoning according to some exegetical principal). Halivni notes that, seldom in the early generations of scholars, but more frequently in the later generations, a certain sage will defend his reading by claiming it was halakhah l’moshe misinai, meaning he received it from an oral tradition descending directly from Moses. What does this mean? When they appear in the later generations of sages, Halivni reads such claims as efforts to replace the dialogical process of rabbinic study and argument with the direct authority of some sage. In these cases, which appear even more so through the medieval and modern period, Halivni argues

 See Breaking the Tablets, 53–72. To be sure, his life before the Shoah was also the life of a child prodigy in Talmud; his life after was that of a mature scholar. The lesson I appear to learn may therefore be overstated. I rest, nonetheless, with a perception of his devotion to tikkun, Repair, as a mark (an indexical sign) of rupture rather than of scholarly maturation, alone. 16  Breaking the Tablets, 53. 15

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that appeals to “Torah from Sinai” are analogous to claims of personal revelation or of an effort to seek legal justification for some sages’ self-authorization. Halivni speculates that such efforts mark periods where individual sages fear lack of authority over a given Jewish community, periods when the local community may appear to lack sufficient rabbinic learning to comprehend subtler reasons for legal rulings or lack the training to recognize and counter a religious leader’s given efforts for self-justification. Halivni suggests that, as the exegetical ploy becomes more habitual, it functions as an instrument for forms of local heterodoxy or, more simply, of efforts to short circuit the longer route of legal reasoning among peers. To this point, Halivni may appear to identify the practice of halakhah l’moshe misinai simply as one of several strategies in rabbinic argumentation, or as a curiosity or, at worst, as a display of human vanity. Reading through Halivni’s critical commentary on the Talmud, however, as well as his more general, English-language summaries, one begins to hear a more ominous judgment: that halakhah l’moshe misinai gradually erodes the elemental disciplines of rabbinic scriptural exegesis and halakhic argument and decision-making. Is it possible that Halivni has simply vilified a competing school or tendency in rabbinic Judaism? No, not according to the textual evidence that he has brought, read in light of RLR. Halivni argues that the prototype for rabbinic Judaism is displayed in the work of the earlier generations of rabbinic scholars: the Tannaim or “Teachers” who suffered the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E (or suffered its recent memory) and, in its shadow, restored biblical faith by articulating what appeared to be radical re-­ readings of the Bible’s plain sense. For Halivni, the piety and genius of the Tannaim was to restore the authority of scripture by continually re-reading it in schools and circles of study in which God and rabbinic sage as well as each company of rabbinic sages daily renegotiated and renewed scripture’s meaning and force in everyday life. For Halivni this continual give-and-take17 among study partners, and between the author of revelation and those who receive it, sustains the living World in the face of societal and worldly changes. He argues that prophetic exegesis within the biblical canon already displays elements of such a give-and-take. It would already have been evident to Israelite editors and jurists that the relatively brief canons of written Torah presume the reader’s access to the precedents and received practices with respect to which the scriptural word would become instructive for worldly behavior in each context of life. But each prophetic editor and jurist feels pressed to warrant readings beyond the plain sense, generating, in Halivni’s words, An unprecedented, inventive reading of the written Torah, through which subtle indications and coded references to laws not explicit in the Scriptures were discovered. Early traces of such an effort may be discerned in the Hebrew Bible itself [for example, II Chronicles 35:13] …. Both scriptural and unwritten law were continuously brought to bear upon new circumstances and situations, generating still more extra-scriptural law that called for grounding in the written Torah. Verses were linked by means of Midrash to the Law as it moved in the life of the people and in the minds and memories of the religious leaders, giving the impression, and the assurance, that the details of the covenantal way of life ema-

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 masan umattan (in Hebrew), shakla v’tarya (in Aramaic).

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nated directly from the scriptural text of the covenant itself.18 In this way, differences of opinion were resolved with regard to the fine points of observance, and discrepancies among various factions or schools of practice were resolved, or at least debated, through readings of the written Torah and efforts to discern its subtle signs and allusions.19

Halivni looks to the work of Ezra as a primary illustration of the earlier stages of midrash-like reading: As introduced in Ezra 7:10 – “And Ezra had set his heart to seek (l’drosh) the Law of the Lord” – l’drosh means to engage in exegetical interpretation, and this is the first time that we find the combination of words derash and Torah. Previously, l’drosh had only the more general meaning of “ferreting out” or “seeking,” as when Rebecca’s two children “struggled in her womb…. And she went to inquire (l’drosh) of the Lord” (Gen. 25:22). In Ezra and Nehemiah, l’drosh acquires the additional meaning of textual exegesis.20

Readers may now recognize this chapter’s account of RLR as compatible with much of Halivni’s reading of midrash-like exegesis within the Second Temple period as well as throughout much of the classic rabbinic period – with the strong exception of later rabbinic tendencies to foreshorten the interactive activity of midrash. For Halivni, appeals to halakhah le moshe mi-sinai are primary symptoms and sources of this foreshortening. As expressed in Revelation Restored,21 Halivni’s concern is not with occasional appeals to halakhah l’moshe misinai, but with the increasing tendency of rabbinic jurists to make such appeals in the later rabbinic period and then increasingly through the medieval and modern period and today. He notes such tendencies, for example, among Amoraim residing in Palestine from the third century on.22 The tendencies grow much greater in the post-Talmudic period, when “exegesis was curtailed, and virtually no new laws appeared that were based upon scriptural exposition. The loss of exegesis as a source of law was balanced by the rise of halakhah l’moshe misinai. The tendencies expanded the medieval period, when Rashi (d. 1105) “saw in every… halakha a sign of Sinaitic revelation.”23 Saadya Gaon (d. 942) declared that the rabbis’ fixed calculation of the calendar was itself given to

18  Halivni cites the Jerusalem Talmud, Shekalim, Chap. 6, at the end of the halakhah, for evidence of how the sages likened this reading to the written Torah: “just as in the intervals between two great waves in the ocean there are many small waves, so it is between each of the words in the Torah, there are many exactitudes and signifiers of the Torah.” 19  Halivni, Breaking the Tablets, 101–103. 20  Halivni, Breaking the Tablets, 54. 21  David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997). 22  He notes, for example, that both Talmuds cite Rabbi Yochanan and Rava as identifying laws of weights and measures with Halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai (Revelation Restored, 57) and he conjectures “that this increasing inclination toward ascribing all oral tradition to Halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai on the part of the early Palestinian Amoraim was motivated by the desire of the students of R. Judah the Prince to enhance the authority of the Mishnah. The Mishnah, unlike the midrashim, is detached from scripture… and therefore requires a different form of support” (59). 23  Revelation Restored, 65.

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Moses on Sinai.24 But the strongest tendencies overall appear in post-medieval times: R. Chaim of Volozin (d.1821), for example, believed that all genuine pilpul found in Talmud and subsequent commentaries were given to Moses on Sinai,25 and such claims typify judgments by heads of ultra-Orthodox schools (roshe yeshivah) today. And what is the overall danger? Reading Halivni’s arguments from the perspectives of RLR, I would summarize the dangers as follows: • Replacing the work of exegesis with belief in unmediated revelation. • Replacing the give-and-take of debate and conversation among rabbinic teachers and jurists with the top-down declarations of individual religious leaders. • Replacing engaged study of scripture and the long history of scriptural commentary with the presentation and reception of recent doctrines, accompanied by the affirmation of single lines of antecedent authorities. • Isolating individual Jewish schools or communities and their leaders from the give-and-take of text-based debates that cross the boundaries of such schools and communities. • Gradually covering-over what the classical sages tended to expose and promote: minority opinions, unresolved competitions among different schools, textual multivocity and unresolved textual problems and ethical/religious choices. Replacing these with unchallenged opinions and smoothed-over arguments and proof texts on behalf of such opinions. • Gradually covering-over the conspicuous role of creaturely finitude and human failing in the rabbinic reception of mattan torah, along with presumptions of human freedom and of human responsibility to engage energetically and diligently in the unending search for the force of God’s word in each new life setting. Replacing these with obedience to the authority or even quasi-divinity/sacrality of religious leaders. In the semiotic terms introduced earlier, errant tendencies to argue halakhah l’moshe misinai are analogous to efforts to assimilate indexicality and iconicity or, in other words, to substitute creaturely (including individual rabbinic) judgments for those of the divine speaker. In philosophic terms these are the efforts of foundationalism (claiming one sees the thing-itself out there): in theological terms, the errors of sin and idolatry (rebelling against divine authority by presuming one’s capacity to know God’s will clearly and distinctly). RLR: Reasoning After Revelation in the Face of Catastrophe I return to the distinction I either imposed on Halivni’s account of midrash or observed in his practices of writing and teaching over many years: a distinction between the rabbis’ everyday halakhic and homiletical judgments and the judgments they offer in extreme circumstances. For my reading of RLR, I will retain this

24 25

 Revelation Restored, 70.  Revelation Restored, 71.

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distinction and relabel it in terms of our overall semiotic distinction between indexical and iconic signification. When identified with everyday scriptural interpretation, midrash refers to an activity of traditional discourse and teaching in which reality is present but hidden as it is in the world around us. In Halivni’s words, paraphrased, classical rabbinic exegetical and juridical work is a response to divine command; both God and human are present in it, but one cannot tell at any time which reading merits divine approval and which displays human failings. In the terms of our semiotic account, the work of midrash in everyday life lacks indexical signs of the reality of revelation, beyond the veiled indexical dimensions of the biblical book or Torah scroll before us. We cannot, furthermore, measure the reality that would be displayed in the fruit of the long term process of engagement of which this activity of scriptural exegesis is a brief moment. If no crisis looms, I trust that the healthy Jewish/rabbinic community need not search for such measures: the faces of scripture and of study partners or fellow congregants should suffice. In the face of catastrophe, however, scriptural words do not speak alone, nor do study partners, congregants, or received traditions that previously enlightened all of these. Here the mark of catastrophe is itself the other side of revelation’s indexicality; suffering and loss know their own realities. Here, midrash is either a sign that our redeemer lives or something to do while we wait. We may not of course know which is which in the short run. But what is real in this engagement of spoken word and broken community will be shown in the long run. Should the community live again, and pray again, and receive these spoken words then there is a narrative about how we may have seen God’s face even if the narrative is retained now as a memory. Epilogue The Lord continued, “I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters … I have come down to rescue them… I will send you.” Moses said, “Who am I that I should go?”… He said, “ehyeh imach, I will be with you.” (Ex. 3)

To illustrate the rabbinic theology of divine pathos, Michael Fishbane notes how the homilist of Exodus Rabbah (XXX.24) rereads Isa. 56:1, “For My salvation is near to come (ki qeroba yeshu’ati lavo).” The homilist “begins with the philologist’s observation: “Scripture does not say ‘your salvation’ (second person plural) but ‘My salvation.’ And he adds: “May His name be blessed!” For were it not [so] written [in scripture], one could not say it…. [The derash continues] “If you [Israel] does not have merit, I shall perform [the salvation] for My own sake…; for … as it were, as long as you are in trouble, I am with you, as it says [in Scripture: Ps. 91:15]: I am with him (Israel) in trouble” (‘imo anokhi be-tzarah).26

 Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 27–28.

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Chapter 13

Revelatory Hermeneutics: How to Read a Gospel, in Light of Mīmāṃsā, India’s Greatest Interpretive Tradition Francis X. Clooney SJ

Abstract  This essay engages the relationship between revelation and hermeneutics by reflection on an influential Indian system of hermeneutics known as Mīmāṃsā, “intense investigation” of ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts of ritual practice. I take up six points in order. First, we can learn to think anew about hermeneutics and revelation by learning from Mīmāṃsā, which is interesting for the detailed rules of interpretation it proposes, and because it stands in a two-way relationship to Vedic revelation, namely: formed by revelation and formative of how revelation is identified and understood. Second, I introduce specific Mīmāṃsā hermeneutical practices, highlighting interpretive rules characteristic of Mīmāṃsā. Third, I note how this mode of reading offers a hermeneutics arising from a distinctive, older corpus of revelatory (oral) texts, hymns used in ritual performance, plus prescriptions about ritual performance (including those hymns). Fourth, Mīmāṃsā was instrumental in reshaping how revelation was understood and construed, as a reordering of ordinary life meanings and experiences, a revelation preferring instead immanence in the details. Fifth, granting that Mīmāṃsā was influential in many contexts, including the realm of religious and secular law, I note specifically how Vedānta, grounded in the late Vedic texts known as the Upaniṣads, has aptly been called the “latter Mīmāṃsā” (uttara mīmāṃsā), because it extends Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics to new texts in reflection on a transcendent reality beyond the texts. Sixth, I reflect on how we—modern scholars, writing in the contemporary West—can find in Mīmāṃsā an illumination of insights important to the Christian tradition, differences in culture, religion, and hermeneutics notwithstanding. Keywords Mīmāṃsā · Indian hermeneutics · Comparative theology · Revelation · Ritual practice

F. X. Clooney SJ (*) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-L. Marion, C. Jacobs-Vandegeer (eds.), The Enigma of Divine Revelation, Contributions to Hermeneutics 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_13

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13.1  Mīmāṃsā: A Distinctively Indian Hermeneutics We learn by comparison, and our notions of revelation and interpretation are no exception. We may think of ourselves as receiving a superlative and incomparable revelation, but even so, we receive it according to our capacity to receive, and so cannot avoid interpreting it. Even our modes of interpretation are open to comparison, and may open ways either to compare what are held to be revelations in different traditions, or shed new light on one or another given revelation. To understand the relationship of interpretation and revelation, we do well to look farther afield, outside the heritages of Judaism, Christianity, and the West in general. If we opt to make our comparative learning explicit and professional, it is important to avoid the flaw of imbalance, by which we place a complex and mature representation of our own tradition alongside an abbreviated or simplistic representation of the other tradition’s hermeneutics, postulated for the sake of quick comparison. And so, in order to contribute to this widening of our resources regarding revelation and interpretation, in this essay I shed light on the relationship between revelation and hermeneutics by introducing one sophisticated interpretive system of ancient India known as Mīmāṃsā.1 “Mīmāṃsā” (“intense investigation”) is an inquiry into the meaning of texts, the purpose of actions, and the harmony of the two that proceeds by rules of intense and self-sufficient close reading. As much as possible, the work of Mīmāṃsā occurs within the bounds of any particular Vedic text that is at a given moment the subject of interpretation, and without added appeals to knowledge drawn from outside the text in question. Mīmāṃsā arose in the work of weaving a coherent interpretation across a voluminous body of texts and practices in the Sanskrit language, a canon of Vedic words and sacrificial actions that date back more than 3000 years in its oldest parts, preserved in various family and priestly traditions. The Vedic texts were recited and passed down over millennia, and enacted in sacrificial performance, in accord with patterns and habits of various families and in various locales. Mīmāṃsā’s arduous inquiries were not needed to perform the rites. Performers most of the time already knew what to do, having learned it from the previous generation. But the goal of Mīmāṃsā was to understand that action, and see the deeper harmony in the texts and rites. As a school of learning and way of thinking, Mīmāṃsā has been characterized as a desire and effort to know in proper measure, engagement in intense reflection, and enquiry into the meaning of the Vedic words and practices. Given the age and complexity of the sacrifices and texts, these are at first sight often rather incompletely harmonious with one another, and Mīmāṃsā’s work is to defend the revelation by showing that the words and actions are always coherent and clear in their import.2

1  For an overview of Mīmāṃsā, see my “Mīmāṃsā as Introspective Literature and as Philosophy,” The Encyclopedia of Indian Religions (Springer Publishing, forthcoming). 2  See also Francis X. Clooney, “Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā to the Dream of a Global Hermeneutics,” Musings and Meanings: Hermeneutical Ripples… (2016). Edited by Nishant Alphonse Iruyadason. Christian World Imprints and Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, pp. 135–151.

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Accordingly, in Mīmāṃsā Sūtras I.1.1, the purpose of Mīmāṃsā is stated as a matter of knowledge, the “inquiry into dharma,” a mundane and supermundane cosmos rightly attuned to the texts and actions of the Vedic sacrificial order. It attends to and resolves difficult cases in sacrificial interpretation, where clarity and coherence are questioned, in order to show that the Vedic corpus of texts and rites is coherent and non-contradictory, always reasonable when understood properly. In this harmony we find the dharma, which is not so much an entity or body of positive teachings as rather that deeper harmony, revealed in the work of careful reading; and in this Vedic hermeneutics, once we understand what we hear and read, we are commanded to act in certain ways, and thus are addressed by Vedic revelation. According to Mīmāṃsā, revelation is near at hand, inscribed in the texts (oral, written), which comprise the Veda. When accurately detected and properly understood, that revelation-in-the-text reshapes its intended audience not only in the sacrificial arena, but also in the mundane world as well, changing how the intended actors act there, in preparation for and as formed by sacrificial action. By this understanding of revelation, scripture—the oral and written word—is to be thought of as weighted with authority, without being assigned the duty of giving us new information about realities beyond this world. Rather, rules governing action—right reading, right acting—form the substance of revelation. If one does not come away from a Vedic text with a clear sense of what to do, one does not yet understand the text, and the revelation is obscured by its own words. Without appeals to revelation as content, or a revealer as author or voice, the reader is nevertheless, as enactor of the text, living the revelation in the interpreting of the text, interpreting the world in light of the text, and then doing that to which one is obliged. The core text is the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras attributed to Jaimini (c. 300–200 BCE), a set of 2700 short statements or fragments of debate (Sūtras) serving as mnemonic devices, spread over 12 books containing altogether 60 chapters. Altogether, these mark off as many as 900 cases of sacrificial case law, difficult instances where it is uncertain how to read and apply one or another text, or consequently understand the web of sacrifices and related texts. These are discussed at length in Śabara Swāmin (writing his influential commentary on the Sūtras a few centuries after Jaimini), and more extensively still in commentaries such as those of Kumārila Bhāṭṭa (c. 700), the most influential thinker of the tradition after Jaimini and Śabara.3 In the course of their deliberations, the Mīmāṃsā thinkers took care to state the strongest positions on either side of the matter; the decision in favor of one of those interpretations had to be justified by the better reasons. At stake was the intelligibility of settled ways of doing things.4 3  Although Jaimini is named in relation in a number of ancient Indian traditions, we can say very little about him as the author of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. Śabara and Kumārila are known to us from their expansive commentaries on Jaimini’s Sūtras. 4  See Francis X.  Clooney, “Madhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons as Exemplary Mīmāṃsā Philosophy.” The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2017, pages 577–497. See also my essay, “Difficult Remainders: Seeking Comparative Theology’s Really Difficult Other,” How to Do Comparative Theology, edited by Francis X.  Clooney and Klaus von Stosch. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2017, pages 206–228.

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The 12 books of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras are not organized by conceptual theme or in accord with the order of a particular Vedic text, nor even by the treatment of particular sacrifices taken up one by one. Rather, various kinds of problems are allocated to the various books and treated according to rules capable of resolving ambiguities in text and practice: authority in the form of injunctions (vidhi), commendatory statements (arthavāda), and other forms of Vedic speech (Book I); distinction (bheda) among kinds of actions, including sacrifices, gifts, etc. (Book II); the accessory status (śeṣatva) of certain sacrificial entities, agents, and actions in relation to other such entities, for the sake of harmony in ritual wholes (Book III); the value and need to decide which actions are done for the sake of the sacrifice (kratu-artha), and which are for the sake of the sacrificer (puruṣa-artha), since this determination will make clear how such actions are to be coordinated and prioritized (Book IV); respect for the order (krama) in which we find actions in a rite, even if there is no explicit injunction that the order has to be followed (Book V); norms and exceptions regarding sacrificial eligibility and competence and the limited scope of particular actions (adhikāra) (Book VI); the transfer of details (atideśa) from an amply described sacrifice to one merely sketched or named, by explicit statements and by statements inferred with reference to the names of various sacrifices, etc. (Book VII); special cases of transfer (Book VIII); the modification of rites (ūha) by the changing of the name of deities receiving the offering, materials offered, invocations doubled or reduced, (Book IX); the barring (bādha) of no longer relevant details from adapted rites (Book X); the intentional common performance (tantra) of subordinate actions, performed once but helping in multiple rites (Book XI); the incidental help (prasaṅga) offered to a main rite by subordinate rites, performed for the sake of one sacrifice but in fact helpful in several (Book XII). In the cases that comprise the Sūtras, at stake are rules that seem contradictory, incomplete, or not apparently inapplicable. Such doubts prompt rigorous analysis aimed at articulating the pertinent right rules in the right order, so as to honor tradition and familiar practices as much as possible. Detail is to be explained, not generalized out of existence. It is in this detail-specific relatedness that the intellectual core and theological heart of Mīmāṃsā lies. By this process Mīmāṃsā resolved problems arising in Vedic interpretation, and disclosed the harmony that revelation presumes. The technicalities of these rules of interpretation, complicated enough that later commentators labor hard to state them properly, will matter today only to the small field of Mīmāṃsā experts and to the (slightly) wider field of those engaged in the comparative study of religious law. They are also too technical to yield handy generalizations for the sake of those wishing simply to know something about Hindu views of revelation and revelation’s content. And yet in Mīmāṃsā, fresh light is shed on the theme of this volume, since here we see an inextricable confluence of hermeneutics and revelation, neither intelligible without the other. Revelation lies in

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the detail, and revelation is accessible not as received content, but in the work of skilled interpretation.5 For contemporary theologians and philosophers ready to not limit our understanding of hermeneutics and revelation to the hermeneutical traditions of the Christian West, there is hardly a system one can imagine more refreshingly different, demanding but quite accessible to reason, and potentially rewarding than Mīmāṃsā.

13.2  Hermeneutics at Work Explanation of these matters proceeds best in the Mīmāṃsā manner, by way of case studies. Here I offer just one example, the first cases in Book IX which, as noted above, pertains to the modification of rites.6 Modification is at issue when texts and practices have to be extended from a first adequately described sacrifice to sacrifices signaled by textual clues to be derivative. These latter sacrifices are often more complex than the original, and are rarely fully described. Which details carry over from an original to a modified, dependent sacrifice is the question operative in Book IX. Jaimini states a guiding thesis at the start of Book IX: The sacrificial action is primary, because it happens due directly to the injunctive word. Hence acts preparing the sacrificial materials are motivated by that primary action, and occur for its sake. (IX.1.1)

Action matters most, and it gives purpose and finality to the items playing a role in the action, such as, for example, things and words, human agents of the action, the deities who benefit from the action, the fruits of the action, etc. Jaimini’s thesis generates three interpretations, elaborated by Sabara and then elaborated by later commentators. The first version of the case is straightforward. Madhava, the medieval commentator who in the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons7 succinctly distills and gets to the heart of each of the 900 cases, suggests that IX.1.1 may simply hearken back to a question considered earlier in the Sūtras: Are the details of the oblation, the fire oblation, and the soma sacrifice, there for the sake of the sacrifice, or for the sake of what eventuates as new, without precedent (a-purva) from the action of sacrifice? The decision on this has already been made in the seventh chapter, and is here recollected.8

5  There are, indeed, preliminary matters in the first chapter of the first book that pose some striking presuppositions: Sanskrit is eternal, and the relation between words and referents innate; the Vedic texts are authoritative regarding matters that cannot be known by perception or reason; the Veda has no author, but only a beginningless succession of teachers of the text. Such matters are fascinating and even startling, of course, but they occupy a very small portion of the Sūtras, which are for the most part given over to arguing small cases of sacrificial detail. 6  See also my exposition of Book III.5, on remainders, in “Difficult Remainders.” 7  The Jaiminīya Nyāya Mālā by Mādhavācārya (1297–1388). 8  Translations from Madhava’s Garland are my own.

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Madhava thus refers back to the basic principle set forth in the first case in Book VII.1, where the need and possibility of transfer had been established: Does the instruction regarding the fore-sacrifices, etc., pertain to all sacrifices (that might be derived from the original), or only in the immediate context?

A first position, posed for the sake of argument, suggests that extensions are automatic, and additional thinking is not required: Due to connection with the general idea, “to sacrifice,” the instruction pertains to all, and so the transfer of details need not be reflected upon here. (IX.1.1 first interpretation of the first case)

By this prima facie view, there is no need for an additional and special rule by which details from an archetypal rite would be transferred to other, derivative sacrifices. Similarity and habits of practice confirm that such details apply in every relevant context, in accord with ritual common sense. Countering this thesis, the final and favored conclusion insists that the integral coherence of the archetypal rite differs from that of the derivative rites, and so the intelligibility of each must be understood before applications are made. In each case, this governing intelligibility pertains to what is novel, unprecedented: a-­purva.9 This novelty is something new that comes into existence by the right performance of a complete sacrifice, when all the parts fit together and serve a single scripturally mandated purpose. To detect this coherence and discern how it comes about is also to determine the relationship in detail between the earlier and the later sacrifices, the archetype and the ectype, and accordingly which details from the one ought to carry over to the other. There is nothing mechanical about extending or replicating this intelligibility, which must be discerned by criteria of textual clarity, usefulness, aptness, harmony, etc. Since intelligible order and practice must be discerned in each case, the deliberations of VII (about extending details from one sacrifice to another) and then IX (about changing some of those borrowed details) are both required.10 Details can be combined, borrowed, or dropped, but not without informed judgments in each case. The second interpretation of the first case in IX.1 is prompted by another kind of observation. If the first interpretation holds, there is no need merely to repeat here what was already established in VII. If the return to the topic is not merely repetitious, something new and different must be at stake. A new question is therefore introduced, asking whether preparatory acts are to be performed as stated even when the material—the object of the preparation—has changed and preparations

9  On this complex idea of apūrva, see Chapter 7 of Clooney, Thinking Ritually: Retrieving the Purva Mīmāṃsā of Jaimini. De Nobili Research Series. University of Vienna. 1990 10  The conclusion to VII.1’s first case had already argued this point: “Because the subsidiary and primary acts are in harmony with distinct apūrvas in the primary, at first they are to be taken as belonging in just those specific contexts. Hence a consideration of the transfer of details must be undertaken.” See also Francis X. Clooney, “Pragmatism and Anti-Essentialism in the Construction of Dharma in Mīmāṃsā Sūtras 7.1.1–12,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, no. 5 (2004): 751–768.

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fitting to that material (threshing, cooking, washing, etc.) no longer pertain: if ­heating in a pan is a ritual preparation of (melted) butter, must the gold coins that substitute for the butter also be heated? By common sense, we would immediately say no. But which is more important: that the substance become hot, or that the action of heating take place? Are preparatory acts helpful due to what they do to the objects prepared, or as prescribed sacrificial actions that help ex officio, regardless of the object’s proper nature? If the former, the implication is that in the absence of certain objects, certain preparatory acts are useless and not to be done. If the acts are pro forma and required, their effectiveness is unaffected. In this way is highlighted a tension between what things are, and what their usefulness is, according to authoritative words effective in particular contexts. Madhava’s Garland explains the relationship between proper form and preparatory actions in this way: rice has a proper form, but the rice in question here is just a means, part of a web of actions. That fact takes priority, on the simple ground that its being the means to the apūrva has not been ruled out: As for the winnowing, is the proper form of rice intended, or not? Since rice is explicitly mentioned, it is intended. It is the fact of an appropriate means that is intended, because the possibility that its overall contribution is to the apūrva (rather than to changes in the rice) has not been ruled out. (IX.1 second interpretation of the first case)

And so, attention is not to be shifted away from the preparatory action’s evident contribution to the overall work and intelligibility of the sacrifice; what things are in themselves does not take precedence, so even if an action seems superfluous or out of place, it should still be performed. Even if rice can be winnowed, but the action of winnowing does nothing for a liquid or a metal substance, the action may still have a part to play, and so may carry over. The third reading of the first case is posed as follows by Parthasarathi Misra, author of the Light on the Instructive Scriptures (Sastradipika). Even granting that the various dharmas enacted by the preparatory actions are for the sake of the apūrva and may not in any perceptible way change the material substance figuring in the action, the prima facie view is that even if the apūrva is the final cause, the performing of the sacrifice is the immediate concern, and thus the criterion of details’ inclusion or not. The Mīmāṃsā conclusion is that this cannot be the case. All the subordinate acts participate directly in the inclusive intelligibility of the apūrva, and from it derive their intelligibility. That which is to be accomplished is cognitively also the immediate cause, the occasion, for all preparations. Their purposefulness is rationalized in terms of the apūrva, and in that sense they are caused or occasioned by the apūrva which should be held in mind when either longer term or immediate intelligibility comes to mind. Even if nothing explicit is said in this regard, what is decided regarding the objective situation ultimately relates to the apūrva. All three readings of this first case confirm the determinative role of apūrva in governing the transfer of details. Overall intelligibility and finality make the whole cohere. In subsequent cases, the analysis moves on to more familiarly theological

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topics: the role of the gods and of heaven as possibly alternate realities determinative of what a sacrifice is for and how it proceeds.11 The subsequent cases in IX.1 ask whether the worshipped deities are the givers of its fruits and thus the primary agents of the effectiveness and meaningfulness of sacrifices, and so too whether a pragmatic sacrificer’s goal, the happiness of heaven or some other reward, is determinative of the value of a sacrifice. Instead of these, it turns out that the inner intelligibility of the sacrifice that is leads to something truly new, apūrva, marks intelligibility and meaning. As a final cause, the apūrva encompasses the non-material but effective internal intelligibility and finality of sacrifice itself. Since this apūrva insures the efficacy of sacrifice, transactions with the gods are then ranked merely as parts of the external form of any given sacrifice. But does the apūrva outrank the deities, who are so obviously key to the sacrifice, as praised and as receivers of offerings?12 The third case (Sūtras 4–5) asks about gods and their role in certain subsidiary rites, and the rewards that accrue: There are these mantras: “We have come to heaven and to heaven we have come,’ and ‘May I be victorious through the victory of Agni (the fire god),” etc.13 Are heaven and the deity the prompting cause here – or rather, what is enjoined?

Heaven (the promised reward) and Agni (the fire deity propitiated here) seem obviously to be at the center of attention in certain sacrifices at least, motivating the action, and such may be construed from the words of the mantras. The rejoinder again returns the focus to the apūrva, “since even the subsidiary rites are in need of the apūrva,” that is, play a role by adding something new, known from scripture, that would not otherwise be carried out to good effect. The deity and result are merely static part of the performance. Though prominent, they do not by their presence or incentive guarantee the effectiveness of the sacrifice, in either its primary or subsidiary rites. Rather, it is the action that matters, and it is the apūrva that guarantees the efficacy of the sacrifice as a whole. The fourth case (Sūtras 6–10) focuses on the status of the deity, as if to respond to skeptics still unconvinced by the postulation of an intelligibility not centered on the deity to the sacrifice is offered. Here the question is, “Is the propitiation of a deity the final cause of a sacrifice, or the apūrva?” A common sense perspective

 “Discerning Comparison: Between the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons and Catholic Theology,” in The Past, Present and Future of Theology of Interreligious Dialogue. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday, editors. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2017. See also, “Devatādhikaraṇa: A Theological Debate in the Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta Traditions,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 16 (1988), 277–298; “What’s a God? The Quest for the Right Understanding of devatā in Brahmanical Ritual Theory (Mīmāṃsā,)” International Journal of Hindu Studies I.2 (1997) 337–385. 12  The second case (Sūtras 2–3) asks whether the preparations of materials and persons involved the sacrifice are for the sake of those materials and persons, and not the larger purpose, the apūrva. It seems by common sense easy to recognize that those things and persons are the intended recipients of the action. The rejoinder is that since the materials and persons contribute to the apūrva, then too their preparations contribute, albeit at a remove, to the sacrifice. 13  As translated by James Benson in Mahadeva Vedāntin, Mīmāṃsānyaysaṃgraha: A Compendium of the Principles of Mīmāṃsā (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 594.

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points to the deity, since the deity “gives the fruit.” The rejoinder states that the deity is still secondary “with respect to what is enjoined,” namely, the fruitfulness grounded in the apūrva. Madhava is rather abrupt here, referring back to the second case in II.1, where it was declared that the apūrva causes the fruit of the sacrifice to emerge simply from the action, without any intermediate work on the part of the deity, who is secondary with respect to the inner obligatory force of a sacrifice. The activity of worship, and the fruits resulting from the sacrifice—and by extension, all we might add about the history of sacrifice, the personality of deities, the nature of earthly and supernatural rewards—provide only the external and visible form of sacrifice. But the essential coherence and intelligibility lead back to the injunction that prompts the action. It is from within the text, and within the inner workings of a sacrifice as a whole and its individual parts, that a sacrifice comes to be, commanding the attention of would-be performers. This is the revelation, known entirely inside the text rightly interpreted.

13.3  Hermeneutics Is Revelation Mīmāṃsā offers a sophisticated hermeneutics arising from and ordered to a coherent Vedic revelation manifest in its words and practices. Vedic hermeneutics, such as we find par excellence in Mīmāṃsā, does not replace revelation, as if revelation reduces to an endless series of interpretations, but the revelation subsists in the interpretative process that disentangles obscure texts, marginalizes side issues, and allows the revelatory heart of a text to shine forth. Vedic hermeneutics is Vedic revelation. Mythic frameworks and philosophical postulations aside, revelation is not from somewhere else, nor does it point us to some other reality beyond Vedic words and actions. It is perceptible, plainly heard and seen, in the text, as heard or read. It does not require a special language that speaks of things beyond ordinary experience. Only actions depart from ordinary reality, since sacrifice is about doing ordinary things differently: revelation lies in the ordering of things, when things are done rightly and differently. The right interpretation of the text discloses the revelation and clears the way for its efficacy. That interpretation’s authority comes from nowhere else, but is rather grounded in the Vedic word and action, which secures its own right reading in accord with textual cues that are always present. Revelation thus curbs the curiosity of interpreters, turning interest back to what is heard in the recitation, read on the page. Generalization is always a problem, lest meaning gain independence from the particulars. While some Mīmāṃsā commentators defend this hermeneutics against unsympathetic outsiders by turning to more general linguistic, grammatical, and epistemological issues, such moves are secondary when measured by the standard of Mīmāṃsā’s commitment to the entire set of cases that make up its site for interpretation.

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13.4  From Mīmāṃsā to Other Hermeneutics: Reading with the Rabbis and Wittgenstein Where does this Mīmāṃsā identification of revelation with hermeneutics leave us when we think of (re)turning West, to more familiar conversations on hermeneutics and revelation? Mīmāṃsā offers a distinctive view of revelation, widely influential in ancient India and with parallels in Buddhism and Jainism.14 It is rather different indeed from most interpretations familiar to Christians. If we want to think freshly about hermeneutics and revelation, and value new interpretations of revelation beyond the limited store available in the Christian and modern Western traditions, Mīmāṃsā is a prime candidate for our attention. Can we really find in Mīmāṃsā new insights productive in and for the Christian tradition, as if to suggest that a Christian hermeneutics of revelation too might adhere so closely to the Biblical texts? In the following pages, I suggest how to think about the direction such a contribution might take. First, to clear the way and rule out less helpful analogies, I very briefly place Mīmāṃsā exegesis next to Rabbinic exegesis, and next to the Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both give us guidance on the discipline and virtue of close readings that do not rely on larger postulations about extra-textual content for revelation. If we seek religious texts sharing a similar commitment to the negotiation of meaning by way of a language of rules, an eschewal of larger meanings attached to a sacred text as if from outside it, Rabbinic exegesis comes to mind. Here too we find an investigation of large interpretive issues not apart from, but deep inside the details of sacrificial practice, taken up as a set of standard examples. Rabbinic tradition’s uncompromising commitment to the text helps us better to understand Mīmāṃsā’s intense textual reasoning. Jacob Neusner has explained the kind of thinking the Mishnah offers us, so densely connected as it is with the details of pluriform material religion, hardly ever stepping away from detail: While the Mishnah may be properly read as philosophy formed out of arguments set forth through lists and the hierarchization of the things that are listed, the document certainly does not make abstract philosophical points or ordinarily express its principles in explicit generalizations. All points concerning classification, for example, are made through talk of pots and pans, of menstruation and dead creeping things, of ordinary water which, because of the circumstance of its collection and location, possesses extraordinary power. The compositions of the Mishnah speak of the commonplace corpse and ubiquitous diseased person; of genitalia and excrement, toilet seats and the flux of penises, of stems of pomegranates and stalks of leeks; of rain and earth; of wood, metal, glass and hide. And these are treated not as symbols or even as examples but are made to carry the full weight of discourse.15

 See Thinking Ritually, Chapter 6.  Jacob Neusner, Judaism as Philosophy: The Method and Message of the Mishnah. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 55.

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The emphasis on discrete details is impossible to avoid. Neusner is not hesitant to push home the main point: “I cannot imagine less fertile ground for the seed of abstract theorizing on the nature of things. The Mishnah therefore provides an extreme example of how practical logic and applied reason come to expression and are worked out solely through the nitty-gritty of ordinary and everyday life.”16 He speaks later again to the way that matters at the heart of scripture can be probed for deeper meaning without being rendered abstract and merely conceptual: What the sages of the Mishnah accomplished was the recasting of facts supplied by or derived from Scripture. They re-formed the facts into problems exemplary of principles. When people reread the facts about concrete things and find them exemplary of abstract principles, the concrete things lose their practicality altogether. What now matters is relationship, not material reality. What is at stake here is the classification of things in relation to one another, not the consideration of the thing on its own.”17

Attention to rabbinic reading and reasoning opens a way to think differently about hermeneutics and revelation, and consequently to recognize in Mīmāṃsā a surprising kindred spirit. Such analogies with rabbinic reading and reasoning are invitations to think differently about philosophy, hermeneutics, and then too about Mīmāṃsā as an interpretation of revelation that sees itself as internal to the revelation itself. Learning from readers of Mishnah shows how modern readers, willing to engage in reading practices that take precedence over theory, can similarly approach Mīmāṃsā texts such as the Garland.18 The determination to remain inside the world of the text and to resist generalizations based on theory keeps Mīmāṃsā and Mishnah very far apart, distanced by their particularities, each resolutely protective of its own turf. And yet, ironically, this self-preservative instinct makes them kin, bound together by the very intention to remain separate. We can benefit also from noticing how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations eschews theory, sees writing as a set of exercises, and compels us to read in a certain way, in order to get beyond standard philosophical dead-ends.19 As Maria McGinn observes in Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, Understanding Wittgenstein’s method and its connection with the form of the text is the key to understanding the Investigations… Wittgenstein himself emphasizes over and over again that it is a method or a style of thought, rather than doctrines, that characterizes his later philosophy. It is, moreover, his insistence that his philosophical aims do not involve him in

 Judaism as Philosophy, p 55.  Neusner, 76. 18  The preceding paragraphs are in part drawn from “The Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā to the Dream of a Global Hermeneutics,” Musings and Meanings: Hermeneutical Ripples… Edited by Nishant Alphonse Iruyadason. Christian World Imprints and Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, pp. 135–151. 19  On Wittgenstein, see also my essays, “The Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā” and “Madhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons as Exemplary Mīmāṃsā Philosophy,” and “Reading with Wittgenstein: Resistant, Particular, Poetic,” Chapter 4 of Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters. (University of Virginia Press, 2019, pages 105–117). 16 17

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putting forward ‘any kind of theory’ (PI 109) that makes the question of method, and of how to read his remarks, such a difficult one, for it suggests that we cannot approach the book in the usual way, with a view to finding and extracting the views which are expressed in it.20

Wittgenstein, like the Mīmāṃsā thinkers, resists theory because it threatens to divert attention from what is actually said, and direct it instead to easier and more general topics that obscure the underlying concrete cases. It is reading, learning in the particular, which must be honored, if thinking is to be clarified and false problems dissipated. What McGinn says of Philosophical Investigations might just as well be said of Mīmāṃsā: “These investigations of how a part of our language works are invariably subtle and complex.”21 Philosophical Investigations is not a Mīmāṃsā treatise, to be sure, but like key Mīmāṃsā texts it too expects a kind of “surface reading” in obedience to rules the text proposes, with a deferral of abstraction and of distraction that shift our attention from what we are actually reading. What is revelatory, or illuminating, is right on the page in front of us, and we become skilled in interpretation, we become able to see through the text into what is revealed by it, in it.22

13.5  V  edānta’s Mīmāṃsā Hermeneutics of a Revelation Beyond the Text That Mīmāṃsā downplays revelations about things and persons outside the text is not unique to Mīmāṃsā, but is nevertheless relatively uncommon even in India. Most traditions and schools honor some extra-textual reality, often a supreme deity who may also be the author of the text. Most famously, the Vedānta schools of

 Maria McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. New  York: Routledge, 1997, 10. 21  She continues: how these investigations constitute “a means to unravel philosophical problems can only properly be understood by looking at how his method works in practice.” (13) Accordingly, working through the examples is not an accidental feature of the work, since “by using these techniques [Wittgenstein] attempts, not a systematization of the rules that govern our use of words, but an evocation of the distinctive patterns of use that characterize our employment of them; it is by making ourselves aware of these distinctive patterns of use that we clarify the grammar of our concepts.” Thus, Wittgenstein wants “to make us aware of the clash between our philosophically reflective idea of how a concept works and the way it actually functions;” he wants “to draw our attention to the profound differences in the patterns of use that characterize the different regions of our language.” (McGinn, 14) 22  This is not the place to explore the literature on Wittgenstein and theology, which is of course a large field. But we can at least note books such as Anthony C. Thiselton’s The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (1980) (and particularly the last chapter, “Wittgenstein, “Grammar,” and the New Testament,” Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein (1986), and Stephen Muhall’s The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (2016). 20

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i­ nterpretation, taking articulate shape after the Brahma Sūtras23 of Bādarāyaṇa (perhaps fifth century) seek to balance very close reading, in the style of Mīmāṃsā, with claims about an ultimate reality, brahman (sometimes equated with the supreme self, ātman). The Upaniṣads are understood not simply to give us rules for performance or even to chart a route of transformative learning, but also to tell us about brahman. From a Vedānta perspective, the world of sacrifice is “mere” performance, unless sacrifice is in some way propaedeutic to higher knowledge. Given the performative and non-speculative commitments of the Mīmāṃsā system, the Vedānta effort to use the same hermeneutical principles24 is difficult, requiring both an intense interest in the text and a bold move beyond the text. Texts have to be read very closely and carefully, and respected as possessed of insights we cannot get elsewhere, if the reader is later on to get usefully beyond texts. Vedānta still finds its way to the universal by close reading, confident in the capacity of texts to state effectively their revelatory message without appeals to historical and social context or to validation in the inner experience of the reader (or student). Both hermeneutics and textual revelation are thus stretched rather far indeed. But since what we need to know, in order get beyond words and know brahman, is given by text, revelation still abides in the hermeneutics of revelation, as it were waiting to be disclosed, right there on the page, by close reading.25 The possibilities and tensions are clear right at the opening of the Brahma Sūtras.26 I.1.3 has been read in two ways: “Because [brahman] is the source of scripture”—or, conversely, “Because scripture is the source [of knowledge about brahman].” By either interpretation, the Upaniṣads remain intimately linked to brahman, given their mutual dependence; in classical Vedānta, it is still only through the Upaniṣads that we learn about brahman. I.1.4 asserts the reliability of the Upaniṣads in telling us about brahman: “But it (can be inquired into), due to  Also known as the Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, in recognition of the fact that they follow up the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras of Jaimini. 24  See the list given earlier in this essay. 25  Although it is not possible to delve deeply into Vedānta hermeneutics, we can in general terms usefully compare the four books of the Brahma Sūtras with the 12 books of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. Each book has a particular exegetical focus. The first focuses on texts regarding brahman (and ātman) as treated with clarity or only indirectly in texts expository of the nature of brahman. The second deals with contestations of the meaning of the texts about brahman, either by kindred traditions within the Vedic fold or by skeptics outside it. The third turns to the practice of meditation: the dispassion that prompts meditation, the object of meditation and the nature of the meditator, the possible summation of qualities used in meditation gleaned from various texts, and clarification regarding accessories helpful to the practice of meditation. The fourth considers the liberation of the living being; the northern path after death; the attainment of brahman, and the world of brahman. See Francis X. Clooney, “The Principle of Upasamhara and the Development of Vedānta as an Uttara Mīmāṃsā” in Studies in Mīmāṃsā, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 279–297 (1994). 26  The opening of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras (“Next then, the inquiry into Dharma”) is exactly parallel to the first of the Brahma Sūtras: “Next then, the inquiry into brahman.” I.1.2 (“Whence (the world’s) birth, etc.”) indicates that while brahman is a difficult and rare object of inquiry, it is not entirely unknown, since the order and intelligibility of the world indicates that there is an intelligent, ordering source for it. 23

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c­ oherence.” That is to say, there is a single coherent teaching about brahman explicit or implicit in the varied and diverse Upaniṣadic texts, and so the hermeneutical quest for a coherent interpretation of the teachings on brahman is necessary and will be necessarily fruitful, if properly pursued. The work of the entire first book of the Brahma Sūtras is to demonstrate this coherence in the face of seeming contradictions and instances of unclarity. The second book defends it in the face of rational hesitations and against the impression that the truth of revelation might be known without appeal to the Upaniṣads. Other ancient Indian thinkers, and even many more recent Vedānta thinkers, have sought to know the ultimate reality apart from texts, but Vedānta in its classical form adheres to close reading, and pursues a Mīmāṃsā-style investigation of the small and subtle intricacies of texts, decoded with increasing clarity regarding their theological grammar. One can see through the world and beyond it, as one sees through the text and beyond it. Information beyond the text, from the world, reasoning and experience, and even history, inevitably inform the interpretation of the Upaniṣads, but nevertheless, the texts remain in an important way self-sufficient. Vedānta, as “Mīmāṃsā-plus,” is thus a bridge that enables us to consider whether and how Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics can plausibly aid Christians in freshly and very closely re-­ reading the Gospels: even a revelation about a reality outside of texts can still be tantamount to a hermeneutical practice that stubbornly locates the necessary meaning, such as transforms lives, right there in the text.27

13.6  Reading the Gospels after Mīmāṃsā The Christian commitment to God, creation, and a grand narrative of salvation history recorded in texts, along with Western commitments to historicity and the modern deference to personal experience, are of course rather distant from Mīmāṃsā’s worldview and practices. So we must take up the still harder work of imagining how a Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics might affect our reading of Biblical texts and what we expect to derive from the reading. Certainly, there is no inevitable, perfectly plausible bridge from Mīmāṃsā to modern forms of Biblical interpretation that have tended to be distinguished by attention to historical context and in relation to extra-­ textual considerations rather than in terms of more narrowly conceived performative dynamics. Hermeneutical differences between Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics and the bulk of modern Biblical hermeneutics are theologically significant as well, given that Christian theology took a philosophical turn in order to explore the nature of God, the nature of creation, human sin and human freedom, etc., and given that God is in 27  On Vedānta as a uttara or latter Mīmāṃsā, see my essay, “On the Style of Vedānta: Reading Bhāratītīrtha’s Vaiyāsikanyāyamālā in Light of Mādhava’s Jaiminīyanyāyamālā,” in the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta, edited by Ayon Maharaj (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming.)

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a theologically real sense the Bible’s author. Such considerations find little resonance in Mīmāṃsā, even if some of its inheritors, such as certain schools of theistic Vedānta, do ground the authority of revelation in divine omniscience and intention. Still, both Hindus and Christians engage in arduous intellectual work to study and understand revelation—rather than simply hearing it or obeying it—and this work both defers to a body of scripture that is ostensibly unchangeable, even while re-­ signified over and again in the hermeneutic process. Mīmāṃsā’s de facto identification of revelation with its hermeneutics can aid us in recovering a sharper, more faithful practice of closely reading Biblical texts for the sake of their core meaning and purpose, without any necessary or quick turn to matters of wider context. It can inspire a retrieval of the literal meaning as integral to an immediate, reliable, and powerful practice of engaging revelation directly. Several Mīmāṃsā practices will not be entirely unfamiliar to the Christian reader, as least as recognizable amid a wider repertoire of interpretive principles and strategies. First, scripture is adequately interpretive of itself, such that appeals to historical context are secondary; one does not need to be a historian or cultural studies expert in order to be confronted and changed by a Bible passage heard in church on Sunday. Second, revelation occurs in the interaction of reader and text. Mīmāṃsā urges us to allow this encounter to be particularly close up and intense, so that subjectivity is subordinate to rules of interpretation that rise above individual predilections. Third, a sacred text is not revelatory when it gives information or confirmation regarding things we already know from other sources; it is not a verbal support system for what is learned from other disciplines, but rather, insofar as it is revelatory, generative of new ways of thinking of ourselves as agents in the world, after the work of study. Fourth, the revelatory core of every (smaller or larger passage) lies in directing the reader to think and act in particular ways that while conceivable, would not be otherwise recognized as important. Fifth, given a text’s self-­ expressiveness, one does not need to give undue importance to authorial intentions. Sixth, reading scripture enables us to move from interpretation of scripture to interpretation of life, sometimes by certain individual and communal actions, and other times by applying in the world ways of reading and acting that originated in sacrificial practice. The revelatory effect is to get us to do something. Seventh, preaching (even if this practice has no place in Mīmāṃsā) takes on a particularly intense exegetical focus, and not just because preachers ought to draw on sound exegesis. Rather, once a text has been studied simply and austerely, without distractions, it can do its work, even aside from additions or improvements achieved by appeals to other literature, philosophy, anecdotes, etc.

13.7  What a Mīmāṃsā Reader Might Look for in the Gospel According to John The study of Mīmāṃsā directs readers toward a certain manner of focused, one might say “literalist” reading that devotes its energies to reading and re-reading the text, for the sake of instruction on what to do, while eschewing abstraction and the

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shift to extra-textual resources. Mīmāṃsā encourages us to affirm that access to revelation lies in a hermeneutics that is patient, careful submission to what a text says, even apart from historical context. To illustrate what is at stake here—and in lieu of a much larger project (for I write as a lifelong reader of the Gospels, and preacher on them, but by no means as a professional scripture scholar—I turn briefly now to just three chapters from the Gospel of John (that figure prominently in the Lenten season): John 4 (the Samaritan woman), John 9 (the man born blind), and John 11 (the raising of Lazarus). In each case, we have a compelling, good story, equipped with notable characters, action and rich dialogue. In each, readers are invited to find their place and play parts. Regarding each, much information about first century Christianity and the social context of the Gospel will be appreciated. Each narrative too can be taken as inviting us to explore our own experience, or the historical context, or the incipient theology arising from the text as received into the life of the Church. But also in every case, Mīmāṃsā tells us, the words of the chapter sufficiently and effectively and without reliance on extra-textual contexts or reader’s imagination, provide direction for the faithful reader, challenging her or him to act in a certain way. The incremental study of such passages, one after the other—case by case—intensifies the realization that revelation puts the listener/reader on the spot. In John 4, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well. We are of course invited, as we hear the account, to place ourselves in the story, be it as the woman, or the people of the town, or one of the disciples, and to find ourselves unexpectedly confronted, and unexpectedly liberated by encountering Jesus. Although such acts of spiritual imagination are salutary, the Mīmāṃsā view would be rather to look to the odd side-drama also told by John, about the disciples, who missed the scene and are as if often the case notable mainly for their incomprehension. They are marginal to the main story of the chapter. Even in getting bread, they are secondary, reliant on the work of others, from the sowing to the baking. Jesus’ sharpest, instructive word – the kind the Mīmāṃsā exegete would look for – points to their mistaken naiveté about their own mission and the conditions of their effectiveness: Do you not say, “Four months more, then comes the harvest”? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.’ (4.35–38)

That is: what you—disciples, and readers—have to do is simply to finish what others have already done. Even at the moment, as Jesus instructs his disciples, the work of God is being done. Jesus is speaking even as the Samaritans are on their way out to meet him, as the words before and after this passage indicate: “They left the city and were on their way to meet him” (4.30) and, due to the woman’s words, “So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them” (4.40). The apostles are clueless to what is happening around them, even as Jesus speaks. As Mīmāṃsā might put it, the point is to detect the heart of the chapter where it engages and pushes into action the reader who otherwise might be lulled by the beauty and

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grandeur of the story, as if a mere spectator: “Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” Then act accordingly! In John 9, the same possibilities of context and imagination apply. The man born blind grows wise even after his eyes are opened. He sees, and he finds his voice and asserts what he knows – and sees – to be the truth, all the way to a full confession of Jesus: “Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him.” He becomes a true disciple. Conversely, the leaders of the people are heading the other way. They grow increasingly obstinate, refusing to accept the shocking change that had occurred in the man, finally exposed in their stubbornness, blindness—and thus in the sin enveloping them, even when they had attributed it to the man himself. Instructed by Mīmāṃsā to look for the sharp edge of a story where it most powerfully hits the reader and commands decision, we can certainly learn from the man’s insistence on what he knows, and the leaders’ obstinate refusal to admit what they see. We also do well to turn to his parents. When interrogated by the leaders— “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” (9.19)—they have to decide whether to tell the truth and risk expulsion, or to play it safe by shifting the onus back to him. They do the latter: “Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself,” because they are afraid of excommunication. (9.21) They play it safe, and then they disappear from the story and are heard from no more. Like them (and the leaders), we too were not there at the moment of transformation. But we see the obvious after-effects of it, and must decide whether to speak truthfully of what we have heard and seen. The report of what has happened, which puts the parents on the spot, now puts the reader on the spot, either to accept the risk that comes with hearing the word, or to turn aside. In John 11, we are again drawn into a narrative with many wonderful turns and insights, and the path of imaginative participation is attractive. Here too, Mīmāṃsā guides us to find the point of greatest challenge posed to us. John wants us to decide how we are judged by what we hear. Informed by a Mīmāṃsā sensitivity to the beginnings and endings of passages, which clue us in regarding what is most important, we attend very closely to Thomas and Caiaphas. At the beginning of Chapter 11, Thomas is perplexed like the other disciples about what is going on—is Lazarus sick or dead? Are we going or not? Is this dangerous or not? He makes a bold choice: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (11.16) At the end of the chapter, Caiaphas makes a more cynical choice. Like the apostles in Chapter 4, and the parents in Chapter 9, he was not there to see what Jesus did; he only heard about it. But he gets to the heart of the matter in his instruction to the other leaders: “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” This peculiarly accurate ­prophecy—based on hearsay, others’ eyewitness reports, and calculations about what is pragmatically possible—is the real ending of the story of the raising of Lazarus, rather than what happens at the tomb. It triggers the denouement, hastening the death of Jesus. Whereas some become believers because of the raising of Lazarus (11.45), others report the scene to the leaders, who are ultimately implicated: “from that day on they planned to put him to death.” (11.53) From a Mīmāṃsā perspective,

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good reading always implicates the reader: does the miracle draw us into the circle of believers, or rather locate us among those intent upon killing Jesus? With respect to all three chapters, a Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics presumes that we are not merely informed or edified by the stories, but rather confronted with a decision as to where we fit in, and what we ourselves are to do. Mīmāṃsā tells us that each chapter, if it is revelatory, is adequate to the task of challenging us, without the need for more, outside information, etc.28 Each passage is sufficient to the task of putting us on the spot. We may indeed learn from these great narratives and their invitation to enter into them experientially, but from a Mīmāṃsā viewpoint, the real point is always the crisis revelation exposes: our mistaken view that the good news waits and depends on us; our refusal to take sides in the stark new world created by the transformations Jesus instigates; our mistaking the life-giving power of Jesus for a comforting story we can safely secure in the past, rather than seeing it as making us choose between life and death. The situation of these scenes is far removed from Mīmāṃsā, but the point is the same, the challenge to do.29 That we should do, and how we are to do, is all there in the text. The revelation yields its meaning in the interpretive process, by close reading, and no amount of supplementary information or insight adds up to that revelation. That scripture gets the reader to act differently is its real revelatory contribution, not important events or wise teachings. If we then see that the point of interpretation is to make clear where that challenge to action lies, then our repertoire for reading the New Testament is, if not significantly altered, expanded to include a deeply textual, “in-the-text” manner of inquiry that moves issues of experience and historical contexts in a secondary position.

13.8  In Conclusion: Revelation as Hermeneutics The goal of this essay has been to draw India’s Mīmāṃsā tradition into our conversation on revelation and hermeneutics, and to indicate something of its intense power. Revelation subsists in the work and workings of language; it is accessible only in submission to the grammar of the text before us. Learning from Mīmāṃsā prompts us to draw more closely together the reality of revelation and the work of hermeneutics. Properly understood, revelation revises our relation to the world of our ordinary lives. It changes how we live in this world by telling us to act differ This is so even if some portions of a revelatory scripture, even whole chapters, may be insufficient on their own, and require reading in a larger context, such a set of chapters. Thus, for example, chapters 14–17 of John, the Last Supper discourse, might arguably require being read as a unit. 29  I do not wish to exaggerate the uniqueness of the contribution of Mīmāṃsā to Christian hermeneutics and the Christian reading of the Gospels. The Veda and the hermeneutics of the Veda are quite different from those of the Gospels, and Christians will always read the Gospels in other ways too; but is this not true regarding every hermeneutical approach to scripture? 28

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ently, in obedience to revelation. But for this to happen, we have to be reading very carefully. In this sense, hermeneutics is revelatory. Something new is revealed about the world in which we live, if we read scripture with an admission of its power to reorient how we read our ordinary reality. The rules then become the substance of revelation, yet the rules subsist in the sacrificial practice. Moreover, the reading changes the reader in a specific way, that she or he is able then to “read the world” and negotiate it by the same hermeneutical wisdom that arose in engaging the text. Without relying on appeals to revelation as content, or a revealer as author or voice, or cues from cultural contexts, the reader is nevertheless, as enactor of the text, living the revelation even as she interprets the text, and then interprets the world in light of the text. In the hermeneutics arising from the Vedic corpus—in the Veda as it thinks and interprets itself—revelation happens, amid the work of dedicated and close human reading and interpreting. Authors, divine or human, in a strict sense have nothing more to add to the words we find in scripture. A Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics can be taken to promote a more intensely text-focused reading of Biblical texts that steps away from issues of social context and history, and even attention to the author of the text, human or divine, turning instead to a greater reliance on the text as written. No amount of pondering or praying matters as much as reading carefully; no amount of contextual research or concern for the burning issues of the day excuses us from that reading. While we may instinctively, inevitably, turn to history, worry about urgent social issues, and measure scripture by its aptness for certain kinds of inner experiences, Mīmāṃsā reminds us that we ought to return to the text, lest we end up engaging in a hermeneutics that is at best only occasionally or selectively submissive to revelation. While the Christian exegete will have many other modes of interpretation available, this intrusion of an ancient Indian mode of interpretation promises helpfully to shake up the entire interpretive process, placing the canon of revealed texts once more at the core of what we honor as revelation.