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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been talk of a return of religion in Western societies - the very societies that were regarded by many people as undergoing an irreversible process of secularization. Paul Ricoeur's philosophical writings on religion are contemporaneous with this movement of secularization and return, while at the same time his work complicates the schema. In Ricoeur's view, religion is part of the universe of convictions in which subjects live concretely, convictions that deserve to be heard and placed under the lights of argumentation and discussion.
For Ricoeur, religion is the other of philosophy, the non-philosophical par excellence. He did not write a systematic philosophy of religion, but he wrote extensively about religion as a meeting place for language and conviction. The essays in this volume, written between 1953 and 2003, attest to the coherence, richness, and variety of Ricoeur's secular and philosophical approach towards religion. They range over the problem of guilt, the legitimacy or otherwise of Freudian, Marxist, and other critiques of religion, the relation between experience and language in religious discourse, the study of biblical hermeneutics, the nature of religious belief, and reflections on sacrifice, gifts, and debt. Ricoeur draws on religion to think, while not neglecting the analysis of religion itself.
These texts by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy and theology and to anyone concerned with the enduring role of religion in the modern world.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Editor’s Introduction
Notes
Note on this Edition
I Guilt, the Intersection of Philosophy and Religion
1. Tragic Guilt and Biblical Guilt
I. Finitude and Guilt
II. “Tragic Fault”
III. “Biblical Sin”
IV. Subterranean Affinities
Notes
II Confronting the Modern Critique of Religion
2. Freudian Psychoanalysis and Christian Faith
I. Rules for Reading Freud
II. Religion and Instinct
III. Religion and Fantasy
IV. Value and Limits of the Psychoanalysis of Religion
Notes
3. The Hermeneutics of Secularization. Faith, Ideology, Utopia
Introduction: Secularization as a Hermeneutical Question
I. The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology
1. For an analysis of levels
2. The ambiguities of the concept of ideology
3. The ambiguities of the concept of utopia
II. Faith Between Ideology and Utopia
1. Caught in the alternative
2. Critique of the alternative
3. Beyond the alternative
Notes
III Hermeneutics of Religious Language
4. Manifestation and Proclamation
I. Phenomenology of Manifestation
II. The Hermeneutics of Proclamation
III. Towards What Mediation?
Notes
5. The Interpretive Narrative. Exegesis and Theology in the Narratives of the Passion
I. From Kerygma to the Narrative
II. Narrative Articulation
III. Sketch of the Literary Analysis of the Narratives of the Passion in the Gospel of Mark
Notes
6. Experience and Language in Religious Discourse
I. Difficulties of a Phenomenology of Religion
II. Interlude: The Great Code
III. The Bible, a Polyphonic Text
Notes
IV The Kantian Line
7. Theonomy and/or Autonomy
I. Thinking Theonomy
II. From Theonomy to Autonomy
Notes
8. Religious Belief. The Difficult Path of the Religious
I. The Capable Human Being, the Addressee of Religion
II. The Difficulties of the Religious
III. Consequences
Notes
V Final Dialogues on the Overabundance of the Gift
9. “Considerations on the Triad: Sacrifice, Debt, Grace.” According to Marcel Hénaff
I
II
III
Notes
10. Paul the Apostle. Proclamation and Argumentation. Recent Readings
I. Proclamation and Rupture
II. Aporetic Transition
III. Strategies of Argumentation
Notes
Origins of the Texts
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Religion for Thought
Writings and Lectures, Volume 5
Paul Ricoeur
Texts selected, presented, and annotated by Daniel Frey
Translated by Kathleen Blamey
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as La Religion pour penser. Écrits et conférences 5 © Éditions du Seuil, 2021
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6554-2 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6555-9 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025932150
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Editor’s Introduction
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been talk of a return of the religious in Western societies, the very ones that sociologists in the 1960s considered to be entering into an inescapable process of secularization. The evidence is contradictory, for the influence of religious institutions on society and personal practices continues to fall, while at the same time we are witnessing a revival of religious identities and demands in the public space. Spanning fifty years, Ricoeur’s philosophical work is contemporaneous with this movement of secularization in Western societies, but also with this, at the very least equivocal, “return” of the religious. His work itself complicates all the schemata, all the simplistic explanations by being neither religious nor detached from religion. Indeed, if Ricoeur did not wish to apply the term of Christian philosopher to his work – this cannot be overemphasized – he did on occasion call himself a “Protestant philosopher”;1 above all, he never concealed the Christian inspiration of several themes in his thought. Some vigorously reproached him for this, others were pleased by it: a contradictory reception, which confirms that both sides sought first to justify themselves, in other words, to vindicate their personal position with respect to religion. Religion, like politics, belongs to those domains where study teaches us as much about the subjects of the investigation as about the object itself.
In these circumstances, the concern with personal positioning can form a barrier to a good understanding of Ricoeur’s work with respect to religion, for those who condemn this reference to Christian tradition just as those who approve it have not always taken just measure of the very specific relation binding his philosophy to religion. Beginning in the 1940s, as a young philosopher in the school of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Paul Ricoeur attempted to trace a via media between the philosophical recognition of a revealed truth – readily recognized by the former – and the claim to encompass in one’s vision all religions, for which he reproached the latter, who (like Don Juan) embraces all myths without adhering to any of them. The fact that he did not recognize himself as a Christian philosopher did not prevent Ricoeur from maintaining that one cannot think of religion except on the basis of a religion, which for him is the Judeo-Christian religion tracing its roots to the Bible – the philosopher, from the outset, turning his back on classical metaphysics, following Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804) in this, but also Karl Barth (1886–1968), in particular by giving up any investigation into the so-called “proofs” of the existence of God.
Early on, this religion appeared to the philosopher as an injunction to reflect on the will. From the time of The Voluntary and the Involuntary, his doctoral dissertation in 1950, he put into parenthesis – performing a phenomenological epochē – the transcendent God named in biblical texts, in order better to describe the will as the fundamental possibility of the human being, in connection with the involuntary, which followed the voluntary like its shadow.2 Neither God nor moral failure was to interfere, therefore, in the study of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary, even if from the very start the philosopher referred laterally (but firmly) to Edenic innocence as the reality that the evil will had made inaccessible, without, however, obliterating it. In Ricoeur’s eyes, evil is what should not exist, so that the fault is the absurd par excellence: an act lacking necessity. Already in the introduction to The Voluntary and the Involuntary, the philosopher announced that a Poetics of Freedom (never written) would conclude The Philosophy of the Will. It was to have opened the parenthesis and brought Transcendence into appearance as that which regenerates the servile will. And Ricoeur asks: “Might not the philosopher take exception to introducing the absurd on the pretext that it is dictated by a Christian theology of original sin? Yet if theology opens our eyes to an obscure segment of human reality, no methodological a priori should prevent the philosopher from having his eyes opened and henceforth reading man, his history and civilization, under the sign of the fall.”3 A profound question, which would be deepened ten years later in Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (books 1 and 2 of Finitude and Guilt). The philosopher designates hermeneuticshere, more precisely, as the philosophical method that will enable his thought to encompass the figures of innocence and goodness offered to the imagination by the power of symbols and myths. It is here that Ricoeur recognized the “mythico-poetic function”4 understood as the power of the creative imagination which will be extended – with The Rule of Metaphor (1975) – to the entire field of poetic language. This, then, raises a difficulty in Ricoeur’s philosophical approach to the religious: as strange as it may seem, it seeks to avoid the philosophical debate (notably in Anglo-Saxon philosophy) over the reality to which religious statements refer, by placing in parenthesis the question of their truth, even though these biblical texts – in fact – call upon a form of authority with respect to their readers. The trouble is, more precisely, that Ricoeur’s approach considers religious language as one form of poetic language among others, all the while underscoring its function of liberation: this has to do with regenerating a will incapable of doing what is right, essentially a religious theme inherited from Kant as much as from the apostle Paul, and tirelessly meditated on by Ricoeur in his writings on religion.
From this, doubtless, springs a certain “equivocalness” in Ricoeur’s work considered as a whole, which clashes in the post-war climate dominated by the figure of Sartre (1905–1980), where everyone was expected to declare obedience to the strict dividing line between those who believe in heaven and those who do not, to paraphrase Aragon. Don’t think that Ricoeur didn’t choose: he did, in his own way. After his dissertation, the writings in his capacity as professor of philosophy are clearly devoid of religious intention: none of the master works that would later confer upon him international recognition (The Rule of Metaphor, Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another, Memory, History, Forgetting) specifically concerns religion. The very word is absent from all the titles of his works, without exception. In fact, the philosophy of Ricoeur is not religious. But this has not prevented him from carrying thought to “the frontiers of philosophy”5 toward the religion that Ricoeur has always held – by virtue of a very Protestant habitus – to be the non-philosophical par excellence. What primarily defines religion for Ricoeur is, in fact, being the other of philosophy, placed under the sign of the dispossession of the self, the non-mastery of the subject. There is in his work no better definition of religion.6 He did not produce, moreover, any philosophy of religion, in the sense of a systematic philosophical undertaking entirely devoted to religion, as we find in Kant or Hegel (1770–1831). He did, of course, propose remarkable readings of the Kantian and Hegelian endeavors, but it has been the constancy with which Ricoeur has explored these frontiers of philosophy and religion over more than half a century of philosophical labor that has brought him recognition, all over the world, as one of the most important thinkers in the domain of religion.
Let us go back to the question of the “return of the religious.” In what way might Ricoeur’s work shed light on our current situation, in which contradictory signs are seen to coexist, at once a retreat from and a return of the religious in constant mutation? In the fact that his work distinguished – without, however, explicitly thematizing this – two types of relation to the religious which it itself practiced, referring to two possible modes of laïcité, perhaps a typically French notion, inherited from the conflictual history of religion in France. We have to go back here to the 1950s to see that a process of “laïcisation” was undertaken very early on in Ricoeur’s philosophy.7 Already in 1952, when he presided over the Protestant Federation of Instruction, the philosopher was seeking “a laïcité that was neither anti-religious, nor for all that skeptical or abstentionist.”8 He was calling more specifically for distinguishing a “laïcité of abstention,” which is that of the State and public education, from a “laïcité of confrontation,” which, in civil society, allows convictions to be expressed in a space of open discussion. Over forty years later, in Critique and Conviction (1995), Ricoeur reaffirmed this distinction between the two faces of “laïcité” coexisting in modern society. He called once more for the recognition, alongside state laïcité, of the existence of an “active, dynamic, polemical laïcité, tied to the spirit of public discussion” – understanding that, for him, beyond the “overlapping consensus” of John Rawls (1921–2002), “which is necessary for social cohesion,” one must accept “the fact that there are unresolvable differences.”9 In Ricoeur’s eyes, religion is indeed part of this universe of convictions in which subjects live concretely – convictions that deserve to be heard, placed under the lights of argumentation and discussion. Far from according a benefit to the most assertive beliefs, Ricoeur reminds us that a democratic society has nothing to fear from the exchange of best arguments. You will have noticed that in the passages cited, Ricoeur does not use the concept of “secularization.” It is precisely because to “sécularisation” he preferred the term “laïcité,” which we have opted for here, as it is at once proper to Ricoeur’s work and to the French context. In applying to his work this very distinction between a laïcité of abstention and another of confrontation, the two modalities of “laïcité” are made comprehensible – of which only the first is well known in French public space.
The first modality was already mentioned with respect to his purely philosophical works: here, the concern is to abstain from basing rational arguments on the very convictions that nevertheless brought him to choose his initial main themes (for example, in his dissertation, the intrinsic tie linking subject, fault, and transcendence). As a professional philosopher and as teacher, Ricoeur, therefore, held himself to the strict observance of the principle of “laïcité.” Although he had a keen knowledge of theology, even introducing many readers to the works of Rudolf Bultmann (1886–1976) and Jürgen Moltmann (born in 1926), whose work he commented on during the period of The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), he never taught theology, either at Chicago, where he succeeded the theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1975) and taught from 1970 to 1992, or at the Faculté libre de théologie protestante in Paris, where he taught for many years, without remuneration. He himself stressed this in an interview with Olivier Abel (born in 1953): “I do not teach anything else in a denominational university, such as the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, than what I have taught at the Sorbonne or at Nanterre.”10 This form of expression is truly in accordance with the French acceptation of laïcité understood as neutrality, the right and duty of abstention.
The other modality of Ricoeur’s work is more striking in a France that often confuses the neutrality of the State – the guarantor of freedom of conscience, declaring that it lacks competence in matters of religion – with incompetence pure and simple whenever religion is involved, even the social condemnation of religion, of all religions. The fact that laïcité as such is not a conviction, but the valued principle freely authorizing all convictions, this is not easy to make understood, at a time when freedom of conscience and expression are suffering the blows of religious fanaticism, as during the attacks of October 2020. It is nevertheless essential to clearly mark (including within and at the summit of the State) the distinction between the right of free expression and a presumed duty to promote anti-religious caricatures whatever the cost. Our reference to recent events is not gratuitous, for laïcité of confrontation was indeed, in Ricoeur’s eyes, what made him consider that religions in general possessed the rights of members of society. It is also what offered him in particular the right to oppose the secularization of society, Christian convictions as a Christian intellectual – but not as a representative of a community group or a Church – which he reinterpreted by means of his philosophical culture and his method of thinking. Certain of his early texts belonging to this “laïcité of confrontation” are clearly part of his philosophical work, such as those reprinted in History and Truth, which, moreover, gave rise to certain qualms he did not attempt to hide: “I hesitated to include the essay on ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’ because it goes much further than the others (with the possible exception of the essay entitled ‘The Socious and the Neighbor’) toward a profession of Christian faith and thereby breaks a certain modesty which to me seems essential to philosophical dialogue. … Personal integrity, however, here required that I deal directly with the issues.”11 As a result, during the same period, Ricoeur employed a phenomenological epochē with respect to the transcendent God named in biblical texts and directly named this God in his writings as a militant intellectual within the movement of social Christianity.
After this, Ricoeur would be careful not to include essays of this sort in his strictly philosophical works. He would, nevertheless, continue to allow them to appear in various theological publications, even directing readers of his major works to the most philosophical among them.12 Frans Vansina’s systematic inventory of his bibliography attests to this: Ricoeur, a lecturer of untiring generosity, never truly stopped delivering religiously engaged essays, intended for publications one could define as religious, even as he ever more clearly marked the separation between his philosophical work and his personal convictions, going so far as to state in a well-known passage concluding his preface to Oneself as Another (1990) that all his philosophical work is placed under the sign of a methodological agnosticism – being, as such, “without an absolute.” Since his work has come to an end, other texts by Ricoeur have reappeared on our tables or on our screens, in large part thanks to the work undertaken within the Fonds Ricoeur (the Ricoeur Foundation):13 with respect to those that deal with the religious phenomenon, it is up to the readers to determine which texts belong to the philosophical approximation of the religious (like “Freedom in the Light of Hope” in The Conflict of Interpretations) and which others are the result of Ricoeur’s militant Christian writings.
This work has been done for the ten texts – all outstanding – presented here. They are intended to illustrate the broadly diverse forms taken in Ricoeur’s philosophical approach to religion and correspond to the first modality described, academic and “laïque.” With one exception: the 1965 lecture “Freudian Psychoanalysis and Christian Faith.” It was important, in fact, to provide an illustration of a philosophical approach to the religious that displays religious convictions and belongs to a laïcité of confrontation. All the other writings and lectures in this volume, in contrast, maintain the requirement of distancing with respect to his religious convictions, which the philosopher willingly adhered to.
As in the third volume of Writings and Lectures, the organization of the texts is at once thematic, methodological, and chronological.
“Tragic Guilt and Biblical Guilt” (1953) is an essay in comparative mythology placing face-to-face two narratives of guilt, its representation in Greek tragedy and its figuration in the biblical myth of origins recounted in Genesis. The biblical roots of Ricoeur’s anthropology of finitude – developed in Fallible Man (1960) – are brought to the fore with particular clarity, while a perceptive commentary of several great tragedies unfolds, a commentary centered on the ambiguity of a deliverance in the tragic or of the tragic (conversely, he notes the tragic element in the narrative of the temptation of Adam and Eve). In addition, it is in this text that Ricoeur explicitly employs the concept of “phenomenological reduction” to religious symbols (biblical and Greek), in this way, marking a phenomenological epochē with respect to the confessional intention of religious texts.14
In “Freudian Psychoanalysis and Christian Faith” (1965), Ricoeur participates in a study group composed of psychoanalysts, psychologists, and theologians. He readily includes himself in the Christian public he is addressing, to the point of speaking repeatedly, as a militant, of “our faith.” Synthetic and suggestive, the essay takes into account the lengthy reading of Freud undertaken in the wake of the two volumes of Finitude and Guilt, leading to Freud and Philosophy in 1965 and to the writings on psychoanalysis reprinted in The Conflict of Interpretations (the last two of Ricoeur’s books in which religion occupied an important place – even a final one – in the overall philosophical system). At this point in his work, his reading culminated in a response to the psychoanalytic critique of religion: it is precisely in confronting the latter and in accepting certain justified critiques that the philosophical approach to religion is presented by Ricoeur as an alternative reading of the religious phenomenon. It then culminates in the notion of faith, which Ricoeur (after Barth) opposes to the notion of religion; faith being precisely for Ricoeur what becomes of religion when it passes through the fire of both the external critique of the masters of suspicion and internal self-critique. The lesson the philosopher retains from his reading of Freud is fundamental: the religious myth does not stem only from a vestigial imaginary stage; it does not refer to an archaic fantasy, but to the invention of an initial language in which man expresses his own origin. The same symbols are capable of referring neurotically to the infantile, to the regressive phase, to the archē, and to a progressive movement, to the telos. What is at stake is overcoming the archaic fantasy, moving (as Leonardo did, according to Freud himself) from the regressive fantasy to the creative symbol. Here, we discover a dialectical approach to religious symbolism, sensitive to the archaic and regressive character of the religious imaginary, but equally concerned with bringing about the recognition of the heuristic import of symbols as they enable humanity to express its origin. For Ricoeur, to say for instance that God is the Father in itself signifies nothing, if one does not also say that the symbol of paternity requires the divine in order for its bounty of human riches to unfold.
The critique of religion is also the subject of “The Hermeneutics of Secularization. Faith, Ideology, Utopia” (1976), treated here with greater distance; it is the first of four contributions to the colloquia organized by Enrico Castelli (1900–1977) reprinted in this volume. Similar to all those he himself was keen on re-publishing, Ricoeur’s contribution unites the requirements of the colloquium and his ongoing investigations, which at that time concerned ideology and utopia. This time, religion is considered from the standpoint of its social dimension: in the context of the secularization of public symbolical systems, faith is secularized in assuming for itself the Marxist critique according to which religion authorizes the injustice of inequalities by turning to a future world where justice will reign. Conversely, the utopian self-understanding of faith seeks to view the absolute itself as a force of rupture here and now. And yet, faith is not only ideology, and utopia also has its pathologies. Ricoeur objects to Marx (1818–1883) that “a critique of religion borrows a substantial amount of its energy from the religious sources of our ethical convictions concerning dignity, freedom, equality, justice” (p. 61). The critique of religion is thus itself the fruit of the secularization of convictions stemming from Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Just as the Freudian critique did not determine what religion might be positively, the Marxist critique denounces what is distorted in religion without being able to judge beforehand what constitutes it fundamentally: “Unmasking is not constituting” (p. 60). It is, then, finally impossible to oppose “too easily … faith and religion” (p. 62), for faith gives rise to ideology in forging the identity of the community of faith, while utopia is a modern rediscovery of the eschatological dimension in originary faith. This is why, in the title of the text, faith is not placed between ideology and utopia, but precedes them: it is ideological and utopian, but “has deeper roots” (p. 62) than this dialectic, allowing it to escape the alternative ideology/utopia identified here – as a hypothesis – as the fate of secularization.
The following section contains essays on the hermeneutics of religious language. “Manifestation and Proclamation,” Ricoeur’s contribution to the 1974 Castelli colloquium on the sacred, serves as a milestone between The Symbolism of Evil and Freud and Philosophy, where Ricoeur was still readily employing the category of the sacred, and biblical hermeneutics in his approach to religion, which, in the end, he would definitively privilege. This is the reason why this text (with a minor adjustment in the chronology) is the opening of the biblical section, which logically includes the largest number of texts. The opposition between a phenomenology of the manifestation of the sacred and a hermeneutics of the proclamation of the word is strongly affirmed, before being tempered, and finally overcome. At the beginning, the opposition is frontal: Ricoeur starts from the recognition of the symbolic character of the sacred belonging to the cosmos; it is thus not the product of the invention of language as in the kerygma (the proclamation of the biblical God). Along the way, Ricoeur sketches out a typology of biblical literary genres (in connection with his work in progress on metaphor), which will continue to expand. The opposition between manifestation and proclamation will then be tempered, until it is overcome in a very Hegelian dialectic, with moreover an explicit (if not precise) reference to The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). In this original essay, Ricoeur works to avoid too readily following the slope, which would lead him to give up the notion of the sacred, seeking instead to see in the biblical kerygma a reversal of the symbolism of the sacred rather than its abolition. It remains nonetheless that his biblical hermeneutics will continue to be centered around the specificity of religious language, which is to reveal, to manifest a “new dimension of reality” (p. 77), and thus of existence.
“The Interpretive Narrative. Exegesis and Theology in the Narratives of the Passion” (1985) is a little-known text. Here, Ricoeur leaves behind the general theory of biblical interpretation in order to engage on an equal footing with the exegetical-theological debate over the narrative weight of the first Christian kerygma. Following Time and Narrative (1983–1985), he relies on the resources of literary and semiotic analysis which enable him to approach the narrative of the Passion in its very specificity: this is a narrative interpreting a kerygma relating to the fact that “it was necessary” for Jesus to be delivered over, the Christological proclamation being thus inscribed in a most remarkable narrative strategy. After a lengthy prelude invoking the great authors of narrative analysis, Ricoeur delivers an exegesis, at once personal and yet clearly marked by the Passion narrative in Mark. He highlights the unbelievable invitation proposed to the reader of this Gospel to find in the very negativity of the narrative of the Passion the grounds for a confession of faith, which in the absence of the disciples – who have fled – the Roman centurion is the only one to utter. A masterful lesson of exegesis, this text offers a profound reading of the oldest Gospel, all the more valuable as Ricoeur focused on the writings of the Old Testament much more often than on those of the New Testament.
“Experience and Language in Religious Discourse” (1992) opens with the project of a phenomenology of religion. Ricoeur judges this to be possible inasmuch as it concerns religious sentiments marking the opening of the subject to an Other and, correlatively, releasing the subject from its claim to autonomy. In fact, in the correlation between this call from an Other and the response given by the religious subject, the term “response” does not have the epistemological sense it can have in the correlation question–answer. Ricoeur thinks that here again the phenomenology of religion will have to assume the form of a hermeneutics of a single religion: because of this epochē it will deserve to be termed phenomenological. The comprehension of the religious, even in imagination and in sympathy, is always rooted in and mediated by a religious tradition, which is akin to a given language within the various possible languages. As always in Ricoeur, the contingent fact of being situated within a given religious tradition is assumed, with the aim of verifying the understanding this anchoring permits. What is more, the subject has then to accept no longer being the origin of meaning… Now, it is precisely because it decenters the subject in relation to the kerygmatic discourse of the Bible that Ricoeur turns here to his reading of Northrop Frye’s (1912–1991) The Great Code (1982). The latter confirms what the philosopher has always maintained, perhaps in a less explicit form: on the one hand, only poetry manifests the power of language; on the other hand, biblical poetics, for which Frye demonstrates its typological coherence, does not aim at any external reality, so that it is the reader who constitutes the sole exteriority in the face of this centripetal language: “language, poetic in itself, becomes kerygmatic for us” (p. 117). The third stage in this course marks a return to the home of biblical theology, in the work of Paul Beauchamp (1924–2001), who, in the first volume of L’Un et l’Autre Testament, moves back to the rabbinical structure in the Torah, the Prophets, and other writings. The four circles described in the first part (respectively, those of the divine word and writing, of the community and writing, of writings and tradition, and the subject in the face of one’s religious tradition) then find their expression, at once precise and synthetic, ending in a long note opening the analysis in the direction of the economy of the gift.
The binomial of the next two essays illustrates the tremendous importance of Kant’s work in Ricoeur’s approach to the religious. “Theonomy and/or Autonomy” (1994) performs a twofold conceptual labor intended to distinguish theonomy from heteronomy and to propose a new conception of autonomy. On the one hand, the biblical Decalogue, the model of theonomy, stems from an alliance freely uniting the human and the divine Other, following the model of love which obliges and, even more deeply, in the definition of God as love. On the other hand, autonomy does not mean self-sufficiency, if it is true that the subject must still be capable of obeying the law, or, what amounts to the same thing, capable of a good will, which is presupposed in Kantian morality as well as in the ethics of discussion in Karl-Otto Appel (1922–2017) and Jürgen Habermas. In this way, Ricoeur attempts here to articulate his reading of Kant’s moral philosophy in line with Kant’s philosophy of religion.
“Religious Belief. The Difficult Path of the Religious” (2001) is the fruit of a lecture series of the University of all Disciplines (Université de tous les savoirs). It is symptomatic that the invitation to Ricoeur for this grand series of lectures, taking place over the course of the entire year 2000, concerned the subject of belief. Linking up, perhaps, with the civic motivation of the organizers, Ricoeur tackles the difficulties proper to the religious, notably to the reflexes of intolerance it inspires. Without disavowing the entrance into the religious field by the question of guilt, which we saw was present at the time of his early approach to the religious, Ricoeur places it in tension with the luminous side of religion, centered on the liberation of human kindness, also presented as early as The Philosophy of the Will. This liberation passes through a meditation on the symbolic imaginary (here, on the Christic symbol of the man pleasing to God), through the belief/trust in the words of biblical witnesses, and finally through the ecclesiastical community foreign (ideally!) to the logic of domination. From this perspective marked by a Kantianism fully assumed, in which the pair theonomy–autonomy is still central, Ricoeur turns to the study of a violence specific to religion, through the intervention of the Girardian analysis of mimetic rivalry and the phenomenon of the scapegoat. Ricoeur will go further than René Girard (1923–2015) by suggesting, based upon Schelling (1775–1854), that there is a properly religious object of mimetic violence, in religions’ claim to sole possession of the source of life: it seems as though the capacities of reception of the various religions have always been lacking in relation to “the excess of the fundamental” itself (p. 155).
The volume concludes with two essays written shortly before Paul Ricoeur’s death. Each in its own way displaying the philosopher’s capacity to be open to readings on religion other than his own, they return one last time to the superabundance of the gift, which in theological terms is called “grace,” against a backdrop of questions of justice. The 2004 text “‘Considerations on the Triad: Sacrifice, Debt, Grace.’ According to Marcel Hénaff” (born 1942) opens a debate with the author of The Price of Truth (2002). Going well beyond the reading of an anthropologist, Ricoeur delivers a second-order reflection on three religious objects, namely sacrifice, debt, and grace. It is evident from this that the sacrifice – the gift that is costly and in being offered is destroyed – has not completely disappeared from our symbolic universe, since it is present as suffering endured. As for the debt, it also subsists in our modern representations inasmuch as it is conceived not as a fault, but instead as a debt of life: this offers the opportunity for Ricoeur to repeat that his “personal mythology” is centered on the idea of a “first gift” (p. 169) impossible to repay – as grace, even if the thinker does not conceal Kafkaesque paradoxes that this term can lead to in the long cultural memory of the West.
“Paul the Apostle. Proclamation and Argumentation. Recent Readings” (2003) is not only one of the final studies by Ricoeur concerning religion. It is also the testimony, as late as it is essential, confirming the importance the philosopher attributed to Pauline writings, within the Bible he read and consulted from an early age (“For a long time I went to read early,” he jokingly wrote) [“Longtemps je m’y suis penché de bonne heure”] (p. 172). It is, moreover, a masterful orchestration of other readings of the Pauline epistles, proposed by Stanislas Breton (1912–2005) in 1988, Alain Badiou (born 1937) in 1997, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) in 1999, and Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) in 2000. The first part, devoted to the kerygmatic dimension of salvation through faith and the rupture it represents with respect to Jewish tradition and to the Greek world, is centered on Badiou’s reading, whose accuracy Ricoeur repeatedly hails. The transition to the side of argumentation in the Pauline discourse comes under the aegis of Agamben, restoring to this discourse its messianic dimension, masked by the fact that Jesus Christ has become a “quasi proper” name (p. 181). Ricoeur then follows the line of the opposition between the law and faith, leading to the aporia of the law made effective by the very faith that goes beyond it … an aporia that the apostle, however – and this is the very substance of Ricoeur’s text – intends to base on a four-fold argumentation. First, the argument based on the rewriting of the Hebraic tradition starting from Abraham rather than Moses, then the argument based on the allegorical hermeneutics inherited from Philo which founds this rewriting inasmuch as through it (according to Taubes) Paul outbids the figure of Moses. The third form of argument is Paul’s self-representation intended to legitimize his apostleship, which Ricoeur also sees employed in the “me” of Romans 7 – a passage that was interpreted in a completely different way in The Voluntary and the Involuntary as the universal expression of the “drama of a divided man.”15 The final argument is the universalizing strategy (neither Jew nor Greek) championed by Badiou, which, according to Ricoeur, should not outstrip the others as it perhaps leads beyond the proclamation–argumentation link toward an eschatological dimension that foils all representation: “It was inevitable that we would leave vanquished from this unequal combat with the text” (p. 199). Despite the rhetorical argumentation of the epistles, readers are wounded – like Jacob fighting the angel – by what in the text itself robs them of the victorious mastery of meaning, in which Ricoeur recognized the criterion of the poetic text in general, and of the religious text in particular.
Daniel Frey
Notes
1
See Daniel Frey, “Paul Ricoeur, philosophe et protestant,”
Esprit
, no. 439, 2017, pp. 62–72.
2
See Daniel Frey, “Paul Ricoeur, ou la religion comme
epochē
,”
Alter. Revue de phénoménologie
, no. 28, 2020, pp. 133–48.
3
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary
, tr. E. Kohák (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 25. See also Daniel Frey, “On the Servile Will,” in
A Companion to Ricoeur’s
The Symbolism of Evil, ed. S. Davidson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books [Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur], 2020), pp. 52–66.
4
Freud and Philosophy
, tr. D. Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 544.
5
This is the subtitle of
Lectures 3
, published by Le Seuil in 1994.
6
The only definition of religion given in this volume is borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1926–2006). See pp. 62–3.
7
We develop this hypothesis in our monograph devoted to religion as it was viewed in the philosophy of Ricoeur, in which we pay particular attention to the philosophical stakes of Ricoeur’s action of putting into parenthesis the claim of religious texts to state truths (
La Religion dans la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur
, Paris: Hermann, 2021).
8
“Les propositions de paix scolaire de la revue
Esprit
,”
Foi-Éducation
, no. 19, 1949, p. 7.
9
Critique and Conviction
, tr. K. Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 128.
10
Olivier Abel,
Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Ellul, Jean Carbonnier, Pierre Chaunu. Dialogues
(Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2012), p. 35.
11
History and Truth
, tr. C. A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 7.
12
In
Du texte à l’action
(Essais d’hermeneutique II) (Paris: Seuil, 1986) p. 133; at the end of his text “Hermeneutique philosophique et hermeneutique biblique,” Ricoeur refers to a number of theological references, including “Biblical Hermeneutics,”
Semeia (Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics
), no. 4, 1975, pp. 27–148. These references do not appear in the English translation.
13
In collaboration with the University of Paris, Letters and Sciences, the Ricoeur Foundation republishes in digital form Paul Ricoeur’s articles and courses. See “Fonds Ricoeur, publications choisies et archives numériques,” Omekas.OBSPM.fr and our presentation of this project on the site fondsricoeur.fr.
14
See Daniel Frey, “Imagination and Religion: The Myth of Innocence’,” in
Fallible Man
, ed. Scott Davidson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books [Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur], 2019), pp. 3–18.
15
Freedom and Nature
, op cit., p. 21.
Note on this Edition
The “Writings and Lectures” included here contain the complete texts as they were published by Paul Ricoeur. The only modifications consist in correcting typographical errors and manifest mistakes that occurred in the original publications. The transliteration of terms or foreign phrases (Hebrew, Greek, German) and translations have been added on their first occurrence, in brackets. Except when stated otherwise, the notes on the texts are from Ricoeur. The reader will find in the notes made by the present editor, marked (Ed.), referrals to the main works of the philosopher, bibliographical references omitted by the author, as well as commentary.
Carla Canullo (University of Macerata) provided precious assistance for diverse bibliographical references for texts 3, 5, and 7: allow us to express to her here our deepest gratitude. We also want to recognize all the colleagues with whom we have discussed the various aspects of Ricoeur’s writings: Olivier Abel (EHSS, Institut protestant de théologie), Marc Boss (director of the Fonds Ricoeur), Gilles Marmasse (University of Poitiers), Johann Michel (EHESS, Fonds Ricoeur), not to mention our colleagues Madeleine Wieger and Karsten Lehmkühler (University of Strasbourg, UR4378). We also thank Olivier Villemot, who was in charge of the documentary resources of the Fonds Ricoeur, as well as Jean-Louis Schlegel, who accompanied the work of this edition.
D. F.
IGuilt, the Intersection of Philosophy and Religion
1Tragic Guilt and Biblical Guilt
I. Finitude and Guilt
No anthropology can be realized, nor perhaps even begin to take shape, if it does not include the problem of guilt. Contemporary reflection on human finitude would suffice to confirm this. As Heidegger states, the being (Sein) which is there (da) manifests itself “proximally and for the most part” in the mode of inauthenticity and fallenness.1 Each of the themes raised by this philosophy of finitude – themes of the body, choice, communication, perception, temporality – is presented in the mode of alienation before being manifested in the truth of finitude. The initial dissimulation of the structures of finitude confirms the fact that the problem of guilt accompanies the problem of finitude like its shadow and that the truth of finitude is inseparable from the veracity of guilt. This is not a feature exclusive to the most tormented, even the most despairing of philosophies. The rationalist tradition itself is marked by questioning over the enigma of fault, continually stifled, yet continually re-emerging. The same Socrates who proclaimed that no one knowingly does evil is never successful in pulling his interlocutors away from the false attractions of language, from pretensions of mastery. His trial and his death are the response of the guilty logos to the ironic logos that vainly sought to restore the innocence of speech.
One could easily show that guilt belongs to the initial situation presupposed by every philosophical itinerary: the shadows in the Platonic cave, the alogos logos [unreasonable reason] of the passions in Stoicism, precipitation and prevention as the basis for error in Descartes, the presumption of sensibility which, according to Kant, produces the transcendental illusion, the alienation underlying the misfortunes of history according to Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx – so many figures marked by unique and fundamental guilt.
What follows in this study will show that the experience of guilt concerns not only the initial situation of a philosophical itinerary, but constitutes one of meditation’s ongoing lessons and is incorporated into the most fundamental determinations of self-consciousness: it structures, so to speak, our understanding of the human being.2 Finally, it is impossible to thematize separately the two anthropological notions of finitude and guilt. One of the tasks involved in understanding human beings is to comprehend the dialectical relation of these two notions.
My working hypothesis is that these two notions conceal two irreducible “negativities,” two radically different manners of lacking being. Finitude includes a moment of negativity – omnis determinatio negatio3 – but one that is perhaps neither unreasonable nor sad: I am not the other, I am not all of humankind, I am not everything, I am not God, I am not even identical to myself. On the other hand, guilt introduces a nothingness of a different sort, which does not constitute finitude, but alters it, muddles it, alienates it: this is the true irrational, the true sadness of the negative – perhaps the sole absurdity. Yet, strangely, these two “nothings” – for reasons that will appear to us more clearly later – tend almost invincibly to merge with one another, to crash into one another in an equivocal philosophy of diseased finitude; whether this is called weakness, misery, distress, absurdity, this human infirmity is first displayed as the lack of distinctness between finitude and guilt, limitation and wickedness. This can easily be shown by the history of the problems of error and the passions. The dialectic that is to develop these two themes conjointly and as polarities will have to account at one and the same time for the necessity of distinguishing them and for the resistance of experience to this distinction.
Now, just as we are about to undertake this task, dominating an “empiricism of the will,” an aporia of method stands in the way; this aporia complicates the aporia that constitutes the problem itself. A thousand reasons converge to make guilt a philosophical problem, and yet it is a problem that resists incorporation into philosophy. Not only does it stem from mythical consciousness – which is nothing out of the ordinary, since all philosophical problems have this type of origin; this awareness has been an acknowledged fact, since Auguste Comte, among French sociologists and phenomenologists of religion. However, this problem preserves a mythical structure which it carries into the heart of philosophy. The genesis of the irrational, it seems, cannot be produced philosophically, cannot be displayed reflectively, except in a representation that binds it irrevocably to a sense, an image, and a narrative. Thus, we arrive at the following paradox: a philosophy of finitude can remain healthy only if it results in a dialectic of finitude and guilt; but reflection can undertake this dialectical analysis only if it “recharges” itself, so to speak, through contact with the myths of guilt.
This is a serious difficulty for a philosophy that attempts to remain faithful to the tradition of rationality, of critical intelligibility, by which it is defined. We shall return to this problem of method, precisely in the example of guilt, after diving back into the problem of the world of myths.
The first discovery we carry back from this dive is that the world of myths is not homogeneous: our consciousness – at least our Western consciousness – includes two contrary images of guilt. This is of the greatest importance for our problem: for it is on the level of myths that we are solicited, on the one hand, to distinguish fault from the original creation, as an accident that has occurred, as a fall posterior to the institution of humanity, and, on the other hand, to consider guilt to be a misfortune, even a malediction that sticks to humanity and locks in a destiny. The first, mythical consciousness is ambivalent; on the one hand, it recounts the irruption of guilt in finitude; on the other, it crushes guilt onto finitude in an indivisible destitution.
The tragic vision of guilt – the “tragic fault” – on the one hand and the “biblical” vision of guilt – “biblical sin” – on the other will provide us with the two poles of this ambivalence. And yet, the tragic fault often comes quite close to merging with biblical sin, and biblical sin also often has a very disturbing tragic resonance: “I have hardened the Pharaoh’s heart …” (Exod. 10:1).
II. “Tragic Fault”4
The admirable choruses of Greek tragedy – and especially those of Aeschylus – reveal to us that the tragic spectacle, the tragic emotion are also a source of meditation and knowledge; thus, the chorus in Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia trilogy, cries out: “Zeus: whatever he may be, if this name pleases him in invocation, thus I call upon him. I have pondered everything yet I cannot find a way, only Zeus, to cast this dead weight of ignorance finally from out my brain … . Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our pleasure we are temperate. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace comes somehow violent” (Ag. 160–83).
Suffer in order to understand, pathei mathos. Through this understanding, tragedy is ready to be taken up into reflection, offered as a substantial treasure to meditation. Karl Jaspers was right to see in this a “tragic knowledge” which philosophy could take as its “organon.”5
The myths of Greek tragedy set before us an “enigma” that will be at the center of our interrogation as a whole: the enigma of inevitable fault.
In tragedy, the hero falls into fault, as he falls into existence. He exists as guilty. Greek tragedy confines existing and failing to the category of the ineluctable; everything Oedipus does to avoid parricide and incest pushes him more surely into it. The tragic is, first, this indivisibility, this lack of distinctness between finitude and guilt. However, the lack of distinctness is still only the “phenomenon” of the tragic, its manifestation in the human being. The indivisibility of being-human and being-guilty rests on an implicit theology. The secret of tragedy is theological; and this theology has as its core the problematic of an “evil god” – this is the key to tragic anthropology.
This is why I have chosen the myth of Prometheus as my main theme; the central question of Prometheus Bound is to know who Zeus is – who is this transcendent who drives the passion of Prometheus, the Titan, who loved humanity too much, the passion of Prometheus crucified. Prometheus Bound places us before the “evil god,” at once divine and satanic.
Might one say that the Zeus of Prometheus Bound is an exception in the work of Aeschylus and not the manifestation of what is most profoundly secret in the tragic? I find the exposition of this tragic theology, precisely, in Aeschylus’ Persians. We know that this tragedy celebrates not the victory of the Greeks at Salamis, but the defeat of the Persians. Now, how was the Athenian able to step past his victory and, through tragic compassion, participate in his enemy’s catastrophe? Because his enemy, in the person of Xerxes, appeared to him, not simply as an evil person justly punished – this would have made the work only a patriotic drama – but as an exemplary man crushed by the gods. Xerxes is a manifestation of the mystery of iniquity: “The start of all our sorrows, mistress, was the appearance from somewhere of an avenging demon (alastōr) or evil spirit (kakos daimōn)” (Persians, 353–54). “O cruel divinity (stugnē daimōn),” cried out the old queen Atossa, “how you have beguiled … the minds of the Persians!” (472–3). And the Chorus: “O you god (daimōn) who has caused such toil and grief, how very heavily you have leaped and trampled on the entire Persian race!” (515–16). (One will note the various translations in French of daimōn by M. Mazon: dieu [god], destin [fate], divinité [divinity]. The Greek language itself oscillates between daimōn, theos [god], theoi [gods], tuchē [fortune], atē [fault]. No doubt, this evasive theology is impossible to set out, since, in order to express its original incoherence, discourse itself would have to be dismantled, plunged into darkness, as Plotinus says about the thought of non-being, of “illusory essence.”) “How very heavily you have leaped and trampled …”: here is a man, victim of a transcendent aggression. The fall is not that of the man, rather in a sense it is being that falls upon him: images of the net, the trap, the bird of prey descending on the chick all belong to the same cycle of fault-misfortune. “What mortal man can escape” (Persians, 93). Evil as ictus [blow, attack] … This is why Xerxes is not only the accused, but also the victim. This is also why tragedy is not a work of denunciation and ethical rectification, as comedy can be; the exegesis of moral evil is so much a part of its theological exegesis that the hero is shielded from moral condemnation and offered to the pity of the chorus and the spectator.
Thus is anxiety – the phobos of tragedy – originally linked to the anger of the gods, following the beautiful title of Gerhard Nebel’s book.6
It seems to me that this theology of the Persians is the best introduction to Prometheus Bound. Kakos daimōn is the key to the Zeus of Prometheus. But the slight and discrete intuition of the Persians takes on gigantic proportions here as it integrates two elements of a theogony. The first is the theme of the genealogies of the gods (Uranus, Cronos, Zeus); this theme is taken up by the epic, but tragedy converts it into the tragic of the divine. Gods, born out of struggle and doomed to pain, possess a kind of finitude, one suited to immortals. The divine has a history: the divine becomes, through anger and suffering. The second element lies in the polarity of the Olympian and the Titan. The Olympian emerges victorious against a chaotic and even chthonic background represented by the fires and rumblings of Etna in Aeschylus’ symbolic vision – “hundred-headed Typhon.” The sphere of the sacred, therefore, includes the polarity of night and day, the passion of the night and the law of the day, in Karl Jaspers’ terms. The kakos daimōn of the Persians is enriched by both of these strains: historical pain and the abyss of the Titans. No doubt this is the same theology, though unthematized, underlying the drama of the Oresteia and the ethical terror embodied in it: this chain of cruelty, where crime engenders crime and in which the Erinyes appear, plunges into a fundamental evil, deep in the nature of things. Erinyes is, if I may say, guilt-inducing, because she is the guilt of being.
It is this guilt of being to which Aeschylus gives a physical form in the Zeus of Prometheus Bound.
To heighten this guilt of being, Aeschylus presents it in contrast to the innocence of a benefactor to humanity. We will explain later in what way Prometheus signifies something other than the innocence of man – raised up into that of a philanthropic spirit; it is not by chance that he, too, is a Titan. At least, he is also this: the innocence of the destiny of man, a destiny greater than the life of each mortal. He is the benefactor; he suffers for having loved humanity too much. Perhaps his autonomy is also his weakness, his fault; but first it is his generosity. And Prometheus proclaims his innocence, like Job in the Old Testament. We must not forget that the fire he gives to humanity, as Louis Séchan has recently shown in his book Le Mythe de Prométhée, is first the fire of the hearth, the fire of the cult of domesticity, which will be lit each year from the communal fire and carried back to the home. This is the fire that gives meaning to the fire of the arts and crafts, even to the fire of reason and culture. Being-human is summed up in this fire, in our dynamism, and this is so in a twofold sense: fire marks the break with the immobility of nature and the bleak repetition of animal life. It also marks the conquering intentions of a being who has acquired mastery of things, of animals, and of human relations. It is noteworthy in this regard that the myth reached its tragic maturity at the moment when Aeschylus, taking him over from Hesiod, raises the figure of Prometheus above the double-dealing of a “bumpkin’s big mischief,” in Séchan’s words, to the tragic grandeur of a suffering savior.7 It is the philanthropic Prometheus who is tragic, for it is from his love that his misfortune stems, as does that of humanity.
Here, one would have to evoke the gripping spectacle of this passion of man according to Aeschylus:8 Prometheus, dragged by Bia (Violence) and Cratos (Power), bound to the rocky cliff, and reduced to the power of speech alone. Throughout the entire performance, he does not move, and before him, as before Job, pass the figures of his friends, annoying visitors, and first of all Oceanus, the cowardly courtesan: “Know yourself and change to a new pattern of behavior.” Oceanus represents here the figure of explanatory theodicy, a non-tragic figure par excellence, for he has not risen to the moment of challenge.
It seems to me that we find in Io, the young woman transformed into a cow and the victim of divine lust, the culmination of Aeschylus’ tragic theology – his theology, but not his anthropology, as we shall see. We have to imagine the power of this scene and its violent contrasts. He, the Titan, riveted to his rock, above the empty orchestra; she, the madwoman, bursting onto this vast plain, chased by the gadfly; he nailed, she wandering; he virile and lucid, she a woman broken and alienated; he active in his passion – and we shall see what action – she pure passion, pure witness to divine hubris.
