Crossing the Rubicon

The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology

Emmanuel Falque, Reuben Shank

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823269891
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

In France today, philosophy—phenomenology in particular—finds itself in a paradoxical relation to theology. Some debate a "theological turn." Others disavow theological arguments as if such arguments would tarnish their philosophical integrity, while nevertheless carrying out theology in other venues. In Crossing the Rubicon, Emmanuel Falque seeks to end this face-off. Convinced that "the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes, " he proposes a counterblow by theology against phenomenology. Instead of another philosophy of "the threshold" or "the leap"—and through a retrospective and forward-looking examination of his own method—he argues that an encounter between the two disciplines will reveal their mutual fruitfulness and their true distinctive borders. Falque shows that he has made the crossing between philosophy and theology and back again with audacity and perhaps a little recklessness, knowing full well that no one thinks without exposing himself to risk.

PART I

Interpreting

1

Is Hermeneutics Fundamental?

In this crossing of the Rubicon, the trumpets first sound in homage to Ricoeur. Yet I will conclude with an accepted and even affirmed gap between his hermeneutics and the approach advanced here. Any tribute to a master must reflect his greatness as well as his limitations, at least in the context of a legacy to be both received and transformed. Of course, one could proceed with pure and simple repetition. Ricoeur’s concept of distanciation, however, may be productive at this juncture, prompting the declaration that the times have changed and that one must orient oneself anew. After all, the “long way” of linguistics, philology, or semiotics is no longer so significant today. I will inquire whether a Catholic-inspired hermeneutic may continue to refer theologically and philosophically to textuality alone, or whether it must not also address the body and the voice as the source of its renewal (see Chapter 2). Further, even if they are irreducible, confessional ties—Protestant Christianity for Ricoeur or Judaism for Levinas—create conceptual distances. A critical approach, in the sense of judgment or of bringing under scrutiny (krinein), is thus essential. It must be equal to the task of discerning what remains to be preserved at the heart of the tradition, yet cannot be repeated. To honor the thought of an author, however famous and prolific, is not to reiterate it, but to extend it or even reconsider it from another vantage point. A hermeneutic is fundamental only insofar as it is grounded in a mode of existence adequate to its object. In this way, it would have the merit of teaching us at the very least to better differentiate ourselves—but most importantly, to identify ourselves more precisely.

This chapter will question the validity of the grounds of textual hermeneutics for our thinking today as well as its contemporary retrieval, nearly word for word, in theology and even in philosophy. I will respond to the breakthrough of a hermeneutics that might be called fundamental. This latter predicate as well as the chapter title is obviously inherited from Levinas’s contributions in his confrontation with Heidegger.¹ Chapter 1, “Is Hermeneutics Fundamental?” will first probe Ricoeur’s Protestant hermeneutic, centered on the meaning of the text. Second, it will investigate Levinas’s Jewish hermeneutic, shaped by the body of the text. This initial study will thus create a space in Chapter 2, “For a Hermeneutic of the Body and the Voice,” for the possibility of a Catholic hermeneutic, anchored this time in corporeality as the center and heart of the activity of interpretation. This argument is patently not a matter of a quarrel between confessions, even less between religions. In reality, what matters is the kind of relation that grounds the interpretation of the message—mediation of the text or exposition of the body. This initial, fundamental orientation is usually not interrogated, or at least tends to be accepted without question.

Gregory the Great’s phrase at the beginning of his Homilies on Ezekiel is widely known: “Scripture grows with its readings” (Scriptura cum legentibus crescit).² This claim may offer hermeneutes and even contemporary phenomenologists a way to breathe new life into biblical interpretation as it struggles to renew itself. The profound purport of the phrase calls neither for the proliferation of readers nor for their transformation in order to bring the text’s fecundity to fruition. Readers do not grow in reading scripture. The opposite is true: scripture grows as it is read. In other words, the biblical text frames a unique and exemplary relation between reader and text. Whether understood as an ego or appropriation that ultimately always maintains its primacy, I am not the one transformed by reading the text. Rather the text itself grows by virtue of my reading; it lives from my life, rather than exclusively my living from it. Certainly, to make of the text a “Living [Being],” even a body capable of growing and experiencing with us a sort of intercorporeality, is astonishing. Paul Claudel, however, does not hesitate to affirm, “[the Bible] is a living being that grows and develops before our eyes.”³ Henri de Lubac also, reflecting on Origen, asserts:

In this way, Scripture seems like a first incorporation of the Logos. He who is by nature invisible can be seen and touched in it, as if in the flesh that he was then to assume; and reciprocally, this flesh is a letter that makes him readable to us.⁴

It could not be clearer. Writing [l’écriture], at least when it is biblical (but perhaps not exclusively so), is a life that addresses itself to a life. It is a Living Being that turns toward a living being or, in my perspective, a body that speaks to a body. If there is a hermeneutic in a Catholic mode (I will explain later what I mean by “Catholic”), it will be not only of the text but also of the body, and not of speech alone but also of the voice.

I will thus investigate the possibility of arriving at the body without remaining attached to textuality and of finding our life in the Bible rather than making the Bible live in us. This inquiry is most urgent today. Having rightfully deployed its conceptual treasures, textual hermeneutics seems to be gasping for air—not for lack of fresh elaborations, but because it waits for its release from the stranglehold of the text. Phenomenological description has, at least de jure, the capacity to set it free. As I already noted, one of the premises of the present treatise is that:

The excessive attention to the support or mediation sometimes kills that which it supports or conveys: the often-unsayable meaning of experience, which it still seeks to describe.⁵

Let us be on our guard, however. This is not the opening to a trial of intentions; quite to the contrary. Philosophical hermeneutics—Ricoeur’s certainly, but also Gadamer’s—rendered and still renders service to theology in ways that we cannot not deny or even denounce. Indeed, the syntagm of hermeneutical theology has become the vestibule through which one must necessarily pass. Historical reasons suffice to justify the close collaboration between hermeneutics and philosophy as well as theology, corroborating its function of “transversality.”⁶ Furthermore, the hermeneutical relief in theology as in philosophy had perfectly legitimate motives, at least in its day.⁷

§4. The Hermeneutical Relief

The Hermeneutical Relief in Theology

The hermeneutical relief follows the pattern of the “four senses of scripture.” Hermeneutics returns afresh to an examination of the plurality of interpretations. Moreover, it too consists in a historical reappropriation of various models of philosophy by theology.

The letter teaches “that which took place” (littera gesta docet), allegory “that which you are to believe” (quid credas allegoria), the moral sense (tropological) “that which you are to do” (moralis quid agas), the anagogical sense “that towards which you must tend [or extend?]” (quod tendas anagogia).⁸

The Dominican Augustine of Dacia, a contemporary of Aquinas, wrote this celebrated summary of the four senses of scripture around 1260. His statement can serve as a guide to trace the context and signification of the hermeneutical renewal when it arose and was in full swing at the beginning of the 1970s in France, now over forty years ago.

In 1975, when Ricoeur published his famous text “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics” (later included in From Text to Action under the heading “For a Hermeneutical Phenomenology”), textual exegesis in its theological articulation appeared in some ways to have run out of steam.⁹ It had already exhausted all the resources of the historical-critical method, which after all had been entirely justified on its own grounds. Attention to the referents and to the sources introduced an increasingly diverse set of traditions (Yahwist, Elohist, priestly) and of events (Exodus, Exile, David’s Court) to the reading of the scriptures. Consequently, what takes place in a given situation is what primarily counts—that is, the gesture at the level of the letter (littera gesta) or the literal sense. Paradoxically, the historical-critical method did not aim to reproduce what took place as it took place or as it is written. Rather, it sought to indicate what took place in terms of the means or other circumstances of the act of writing, which suffice to explain how and why it was written in this way and not otherwise. Still, a considerable step had been taken. Genesis could be understood finally as a “myth” precisely because it did not take place as it was written but because other accounts or places explain that it was written in such and such a way and not in another (for example, in comparison to the Babylonian myths). No explanation, however, was given for the function of the myth itself. With the historical-critical method, the attachment to the referent remained always essential, in fact self-evident, even if the referent itself had changed. The reader is no longer immediately facing the letter of the text in its location in the text, but the place and the context where the text was written and from which it can be explained. It is noteworthy that pastoral ministry has also carried out this exegetical approach, remarkably so in France, convinced that any faithful person who has undergone Christian and theological formation is wise enough to distinguish between the various sources, to bring to light the distinct contexts, and to rearrange the texts.

The textual hermeneutic that Ricoeur brought to life offered the relief that exegesis and theology in the late 1960s did not anticipate or no longer expected. The text itself—and the text by itself—is a world. This is the claim underlined by “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” (also first published in 1975) where writing or more specifically literature “may abolish all reference to a given reality.”¹⁰ Distanciation consists in a triple reduction or epoché: emancipation from the one who wrote the text (the author), emancipation of the one who receives the text (the reader), and emancipation of that to which the text refers (the referent). All that remains then is what Ricoeur calls “the autonomy of the text”:

[D]istanciation is not the product of methodology and hence something superfluous and parasitical: rather it is constitutive of the phenomenon of the text as writing. At the same time, it is the condition of interpretation.¹¹

This is another huge step forward. The great virtue of theological hermeneutics is to have drawn out its implications. The notion of the world of the text bestows autonomy upon the text and thus produces its semantic unity: in this way, the text is self-sufficient in its referential function.

My thesis here is that the abolition of a first-order reference, an abolition effected by fiction and poetry, is the condition of possibility for the freeing of a second-order reference, which reaches the world not only at the level of manipulable objects but at the level that Husserl indicated by the expression Lebenswelt [life-world] and Heidegger by being-in-the-world. . . . For what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world.¹²

The world of the text means that in effect the text is world-forming; as such, one could say that it “worldifies.” I have maintained that the concept of “life-world” is Husserl’s great legacy to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Yet I will show that this gain comes with a loss particular to a so-called “Protestant” hermeneutics. It results in the detachment and absolute autonomization of writing relative to speech and also to the body and the voice, which support all writing.

To this concept of world and as a consequence of distanciation, Ricoeur then adds, not as an appendix but as a defining moment, “the appearance of the subjectivity of the reader” and “the appropriation (Aneignung) of the text, its application (Anwendung) to the present situation of the reader”: in short, he propounds the capacity “to understand oneself in front of the text” and of “exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self.”¹³ The text takes me for an object or, more accurately, for its principal subject. I am its addressee, although I will never reduce it to my singular personality as its recipient. Indeed, as a reader, “I find myself only by losing myself.”¹⁴ But the purpose of the loss is first and foremost that I find myself or that I am found by the text, such that in the end, I remain still the addressee, even the object, of this writing addressed to me. “The text is the medium through which we understand ourselves. [The] appearance of the subjectivity of the reader . . . extends the fundamental characteristic of all discourse, that of being addressed to someone.”¹⁵ In appropriating the text, I am appropriated, albeit first by disappropriating myself of myself. In order always and minimally to constitute “me as myself,” the other of the text constitutes me as “another myself.”¹⁶

We see, or at least should sense it now. Textual hermeneutics frees us from the methodological fetters of historical-critical exegesis. It finally becomes possible to read or to reread the text for itself, independently of its sources. The text necessarily says something to me by its saying the very same thing or perhaps even saying something else—only as long as its correct understanding gives rise to my appropriation. In this instance, pastoral practice also confirms the developments of hermeneutical theology, and vice-versa. The Word [Parole], or rather the text, is no longer studied in the objectivity of a given history. Consciousnesses in their intersubjectivity, struggling to tell each other their stories, share the text—to risk the presently, altogether overused verb “share.” The text’s world-forming effect for me can also be a world-forming effect for others. As a result, we face the numerous deviations known to arise in the incessant projections of oneself into th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Opening
• Part I: Interpreting
• Part II: Deciding
• Part III: Crossing
• Epilogue: And Then . . . ?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index