More Ricoeur, this time on death and narrative

As for death, do not the narratives provided by literature serve to soften the sting of anguish in the face of the unknown, of nothingness, by giving it in imagination the shape of this or that death, exemplary in one way or another? Thus fiction has a role to play in the apprenticeship of dying. The meditation on the Passion of Christ has accompanied in this way more than one believer to the last threshold.' Oneself as Another, p. 162

By 'fiction', Ricoeur isn't saying 'it's made up': rather, he is pointing to the literary features of the account.

Philosophy and Theology

I have to say Paul Ricoeur's Gifford lectures published as Oneself as Another ranks among the most difficult books I have ever tried to read.

But I was interested to read in the first chapter to the book how Ricoeur sees his largely philosophical work in relation to theology. He had, he said, written a couple of more explicitly theological chapters, but does not include them in this book.

He is adamant that he doesn't want his philosophy of the self to be seen as a crypto-theology. It is certainly the case that he discovers all these conceptual difficulties and problems that seem to be suggestive of a theological resolution. Does not the philosophy of the self point us inevitably to the need for some kind of divinity? This is the move he wants to resist

And, what's more, he doesn't want to see it the other way around: theology as taking the place of philosophy. Theology doesn't give the 'ultimate foundation' (rationally speaking) that philosophy strives for but can never attain. That would be stretching theology to do work it isn't designed to do:

If I defend my philosophical writings against the accusation of crypto-theology, I also refrain, with equal vigilance, from assigning to biblical faith a cryptophilosophical function which would most certainly be the case if one were to expect from it some definitive solution to aporias that philosophy produces in abundance... (p. 24)

No: theology does not answer the questions that philosophy has raised. The irretractable problems that a philosopher discovers are not susceptible to a theological answer. The problems remain, and remain to be addressed by philosophy. What he has instead from theology is assurance, which is to be taken by faith. This is how he puts it:

The dependence of the slef on a word that stripsit of its glory, all the while comforting its courage to be, delivers biblical faith from the temptation, which I am here calling cryptophilosophical, of taking over the henceforth vacnt role of ultimate foundation. In turn, a fiath that knows itself to be without guarantee...can help philosophical hermeneutics to protect itself from the hubris that would set it up as the heir to the philosophies of the cogito (ie Descartes) and as continuing their self-foundational claim. (p. 25)

What is 'the self' anyway?

In his monumental work Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur makes a distinction between the two major meanings of the word ‘identity’ in terms of the Latin words idem or ipse.[1] Idem-identity has the sense of ‘sameness’. Under this definition, a person’s identity can constituted from matrices or horizons that stem from comparison to others. So, I identify with those who are the same as me and over against those who are different. On the other hand, ipse-identity invites an understanding of identity in terms of ‘selfhood’. As an identity, the self ‘has to be reflexively made’.[2] Self-identity refers at the outset to the one I am speaking about when am able to speak self-consciously about myself. It is already an indication of self-awareness, a capacity for ‘seeing’ oneself. We might describe it as a mental gaze at one’s own reflection in a mirror. This self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding. The very notion of oneself invites one on a quest to discover or make sense of who it is one is talking of when one refers to oneself.

If I am to make sense of myself, I need a point of reference or comparison. I must be able to trace in some way a coherence, a pattern in this entity I name ‘self’. Time offers that to me in two ways: firstly, by an act of remembering I can trace my own actions and experiences across time. I can begin to see patterns of cause and effect; to makes sense of motivations and intentions; to have feelings of nostalgia and regret; and so on. In other words, I begin to see my own narrative emerging, the story of my self. In turn, secondly, I can begin to exercise my other mental faculty relating to time, my imagination, and to project into the future the next stages in the emplotment of my life.

To persue this invitation to understand oneself, then, suggests that it is a narrative that is needs to be understood – in Ricoeur’s terms, the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. It is true to our experience of embodiment to think this way, too: that we are not selves known in abstract, as if we are static types, but rather that we are revealed, to others as well as to ourselves, as characters in a sequence of causally related events. We notice then of course that were are not, even in this moment of reflexivity, cut off from the phenomenal world – but rather, thoroughly situated within in it. In other words, this reflexive sense of identity finds its expression in the form of a narrative. That is what our memories do for us: they narrate the self into identity, interpreting the past for us and projecting out of that past a future, the open horizon to which our personal history is moving.[3] Story is a remarkable mnemonic device. In fact, personal identity takes this narrative form because of its inherently historical nature.

What we have in narrative is a binding together of word and event: the event is described and given coherence by the application of the shape and categories of narrative. Narrative applies a causal and teleological form to events as we experience them; though this is not altogether arbitrary. The sequentiality of events invites the search for causal links between them. This is something we recognize even in our own bodies: as they change over time, collecting scars and wrinkles, we experience in ourselves the results and effects of our experiences. This is not to say that our narrating of the events of our experience is the final truth about them; or, that every account that we give of events we have experienced is absolutely comprehensive. It is the tracing of a path through a forest as best we can: though we do no see every tree in the forest, and though at times the going is rough, and we lose our bearings, we still are able to make our way. Though there is difficulty, there is not incoherence, necessarily.

If ipse-identity requires narration, then it also draws the self into realm of the ethical. This is for two reasons. One the one hand, the realisation that we are actors and agents, who may participate and contribute to the chain of causality. As selves in time, we are immediately in the position of asking what it is we are going to act in a way that it is consistent and coherent with our conception of our self-identity. How are my actions going to make sense as coming from me, as being ‘mine’? Insanity is a way of describing someone whose actions do not emerge from some evident sense of self – a judgement even the insane person might make as they find themselves unable to answer the question ‘why did you do that?’

The second point is not unrelated: the notion of the self is also an invitation to pursue the ‘true’ or perhaps ‘authentic’ self. The corollory of this that individual must have, or develop, some conception of the good by which to judge the self that might emerge. Yet, with the turn of the self to the good does not come an automatic description of the good. So, if the chosen measure for self-realisation is ‘authenticity’, for example, then the concept must be given some relatively substantial account if the authentic self is to be recognised when it appears. Which is to say: the hermeneutics of the self orients the self to the pursuit of the good, without also giving thereby a definition of what the good is. That discovery remains to be made; or, that revelation remains to be given...

[1] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2.
[2] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity : Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 3.
[3] George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology : Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), p. 107.

Rowan Williams on Maurice Wiles

Yesterday I went to a cafe and read an essay that Williams wrote in 1993 on his former Oxford colleague Maurice Wiles. In the 1970s, Maurice Wiles made quite a stir by challenging the incarnation, among other orthodox Christian doctrines.

The essay represents an intriguing generational shift, however. Williams is highly critical (in a very polite British way of course!) of Wiles because, in his re-appraisal of Christian doctrines, Wiles applies a kind of Kantian 'abstract universalist rationalism.' Williams, the child of the 60s, and more of a neo- Nietzchean, suspicious of power claims and special interests, wants to question this whole method: why is this rationalism immune from critique? What methods can settle the legitimacy of doctrinal claims? Even though Wiles claims to have recovered a pre-dcotrinal Jesus, he has done so by de-historicising and universalising him. Williams rightly disputes this procedure:

If Jesus is constitutive for Christian language about God and for the present reality of the believer’s relation to God, in such a way that what is said, done, and suffered is strictly unintelligible without continuing reference to Jesus in a more than historically explicatory way, doctrine will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence (or presence-in-absence, if you want to nuance it further) of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace. The disagreement is not over whether doctrinal utterances are or are not to be received uncritically, but over whether any kind of critical method can settle the legitimacy of the distinctively doctrinal enterprise itself as generally conceived by Christians, an enterprise resting as it does on the conviction, variously and often very confusedly articulated in our primary texts, [note the doctrine of scripture here! MJ] that our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth. Kritik can look hard at those conceptualities, with a wide variety of suspicions; but not all Wiles’s reasoned eloquence should persuade us that it is in a position to disallow the underlying unsettlement of our thought: the question, ‘What is it that is true of Jesus of Nazareth that would make some sense of the Church’s commitment to new imaginings of God and humanity and of the possibility of new relation to God and humanity?’ I believe that this is in fact the question that arises from taking with full seriousness the notion of parable which Wiles finds so attractive – an event which interrupts us and compels us to take up new positions by showing us quite unexpectedly where and what we are in respect of an unforeseen reality set down before us; something more than an extended simile. Wiles is far from insensitive to this priority of krisis over Kritik; but how can his model of doctrinal criticism allow it its proper weight?

The answer is no! See how Williams gets from Ricoeur this idea of parable interrupting and compelling new and unforeseen ideas: and how vague Williams is because he is speaking of what may yet come about in an unpredictable way.

Ricoeur on punishment

Reading Ricoeur has been very stimulating, though at times he comes accross almost as a naive thinker. He says this in a touching essay about the excess of grace, called 'the Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God':

...are we not invited to discern even in the most just punishment, the disquieting countenance of wrath and vengeance? It is good that, goaded by the paradoxes of Jesus we would distrust our better works. But it is not only a question of distrust Does not the more positive way become for us deliberately to orient punishment to improvement rather than expiation? Because on which side is the gospel? Is it on the side of the vengeance of society or on the isde of the rehabilitation of the culpable?

This is well said: a Christian ethics of punishment must stem from the evangel of mercy, surely... And yet, Western society is speeding fast away from this logic.

Ricoeur on Narrative Theology

Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

At the end of his article 'Biblical Time' Ricoeur, asserting that the strands of the OT combine to produce a very complex notion of 'time', critiques the proposal for a kind of narrative theology:

...the project of a merely narrative theology is a chimera. What it fundamentally fails to understand is first the primitive overlapping of narrative and law in the Torah, then the dialectic between the whole of tradition as prescriptive as well as narrative with prophecy and its eschatological indication. Next, a simple narrative theology misses the deepening of the transitory character of historical accomplishments through the immemorial time of wisdom, and, finally, and most important of all, the powerful recapitulation of all these figures of time in the 'today' of the hymn.'

See, the bible is not just a narrative: it's a musical. At one and the same time, you have a particular history, and a universal history of the world; you have action and commentary on that action; you have the past sung into the present, and the future promised. He's spot on, but I can't help feeling that Reformers knew this already. Certainly, my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy has been saying this for years. Still it is nice to have someone with Ricoeur's street cred saying the same thing.

Ricoeur on Biblical Time

Ricoeur points out that the dichotomy between so-called Greek time (as circular) and Hebraic time (as linear) is facile and won't hold. He then goes on to describe 'biblical time' in terms of the intersection of the different literary genres within the scriptures and their perceptions of time.

So:

The instruction issuing from the successive legislations, unified under the emblem of Sinai and Moses, colors the narratives themselves. These narratives, under the pressure of the prescriptive, become narratives of the march of a people with God under the sign of obedience and disobedience.

He calls this the 'narrativisation of ethics and the ethicisation of narratives'. What has this to do with time, especially? Well:

...the law qualifies not just the event of its giving but all the narratives in which this giving is encased, in such a way that the founding events become events that do not pass away but remain.

Ricoeur on the exegesis of Gen 1

Photo: Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland.

Ricoeur's essay on exegesis relies the planting of two poles of interpretation which he says are indispensible. First, there is the genetic approach of von Rad et al. Second, there is the structural approach of Schmidt. Ricoeur says that in the case of Gen 1 the structural approach actually draws attention to the genesis of the text: by observing irregularities within the structure the way in which previous texts have been incorporated into the work becomes evident. Interpretation then is the 'act of the text itself on itself'. Already in the text interpretation has begun. The notion of interpretation, says Ricoeur, is 'an act of the text insofar as the text has a direction, a dynamic 'sense'. To interpret is to place ourselves in 'its sense'. I find this emphasis on the text as opposed to the author or the reader extremely interesting, because it draws the exegetes attention to the right place.

All well and good: only his account of the genetic method (of discerning layers of sources and editing in the text - the bread and butter of biblical criticism for years) rests on speculation after speculation after speculation. Certainly, if we could say with confidence that such-and-such a formula represents such-and-such a tradition which the later author/editor has both critiqued and incorporated into this new text, then we may find ourselves enlightened. The basic fact is that there is no agreement amongst scholars as to the arrangement of the source material and the composition of the text. So how much use is it really?

Ricoeur on Manifestation and Proclamation

Ricoeur's article 'Manifestation and Proclamation' is a virtuoso performance, it must be said. The essay aims to deal with a polarity/tension between what he calls 'manifestation', which has to do with the phenomenology of the sacred, and arises from the study of religions; and 'proclamation', which is shaped by (largely Protestant) biblical scholarship whose project is demythologisation. Can a hermeneutic of proclamation extricate itslef from a phenomenology of the sacred? Can kerygma annihilate the sacred?

Put simply (I'll try!): on the side of manifestation, which refers to most religious experience and forms, the world is itself an enchanted place replete with symbols that correspond to our humanity. The sacred is experienced non-verbally, powerfully and mysteriously. Ritual is used not only to reflect the sacredness of the world but even to consecrate it.

On the other side, Ricoeur charts the Hebraic turn against the Canaanite cults and idols and toward the proclaimed word. In Hebraic faith the word outweighs the numinous: not that the numinous is absent (think Sinai etc) but just that it is secondary to the law that is given from that point. Ritual is also there, but loses its power of correspondence with the natural world. And there is a turn to the historical and ethical - no longer is the natural cycle of seasons the basis for the experience of time.

Of course, this kergymatic turn, with its polemic against religion, is consummated in the gospels and in the teachings of Jesus. Well, at least, you could read them that way...

Naturally, Ricoeur's Hegelian heart desires the mediation between these two poles. So, he reads the parables as reintroducing the sacred in a new way. While the modern scientific world is evidence of the victory of the proclamatory world view, for Ricoeur, 'humanity is simply not possible without the sacred'. It is possible that with the word comes a reaffirmation of the sacred? Is it not true that the evangelical message also comes with a manifestation, as the NT charts it? Ricouer quotes John's gospel - 'he came to dwell among us, and we saw his glory...'. As he says: 'philosophy and evangelical preaching give a second wind to archaic symbolism'.

I am an iconoclast at heart: and yet, there is something insufficient about this that Ricoeur highlights. Having been challenged and overcome as idolatrous, the symbolism of the sacred is then resumed and transformed by the kerygma. The kerygma does not achieve a demythologisation, but rather a remythologisation. After all, it is a message about miracles! Ricoeur concludes:

In truth, without the support and renewing power of the sacred cosmos and the sacredness of viatl nature, the word itself becomes abstract and cerebral. Only the incarnation of the ancient symbolism ceaselessly reinterpreted gives the word something to say, not only to our understanding and will but also to our imagination and our heart; in short, to the whole human being...Must we not confess, therefore, that the hope to see the faith in the word outlive the religion of the sacred is really vain and that the end of the word as well as of the hearing of the word is bound to some new birth of the sacred and its symbolism, beyond its death...? [NB what a French way to end an article, with an aporetic question!]

While clearly prioritising the word, the Reformers notably saw ritual and ceremony as an accomodation by God to our humanity (though it was also potentially dangerous of course)...

Ricoeur on 'distanciation'

Paul Ricoeur, whose thought looms large in Rowan Williams' recent lecture on Scripture, offers this on hermeneutics:

A work of discourse, as a work of art, is an autonomous object at a distance from the authorial intention, from its initial situation.. and from its primitive audience. For this very reason it is open to an infinite range of interpretations. There is room for interpretation because the recovery of the initial event of discourse takes the form of a reconstruction starting from the structure and the inner organisation of the specific modes of discourse. In other words, if hermeneutics is always an attempt to overcome a distance, it has to use distanciation as both the obstacle and the instrument in order to reenact the initial event of discourse in a new event of discourse that will claim to be both faithful and creative.

So, this process, of both using and overcoming the hermeneutical gap, is generative of the new event of discourse, namely interpretation: which of itself, for Ricoeur (as for Williams), is potentially revelatory.

Ricoeur recurrs

We had quite a deal of fun chewing over a Paul Ricoeur quote about history and fiction.

In his article he argues that the history and fiction intersect in the way they refer to the 'real' world.

Our ultimate interest when we do history is to enlarge our sphere of communication: that is, to encounter that which is different to us. But this requires an imaginative act, which is, to suspend your own conditions and desires and assumptions, in order to be communicated to.

'My contention...is that it is in this exchange between history and fiction and between their opposite referential claims that our historicity is brough to language.'

Ricoeur

"Could we not say that by opening us to the different, history opens us to the possible, while fiction, by opening us to the unreal, brings us back to the essential?"

What could he mean?

Narrative Logic: sequence vs pattern

Temptation is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom.

What do I mean by 'narrative logic'? ‘Narrative logic’ indicates the ‘patterns of order which are proper to story rather than to discursive reasoning’ Richard B. Hays, "The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11" (Thesis (Ph. D.), Scholars Press, Emory University, 1981., 1983), p. 223

Stories are composed of actions and events order to one another by reference to time. To view the story as a unity, each subsequent event must be intelligible in relation to what preceded it. It can be surprising; or the intelligibility may not be obvious immediately; but the events must show some kind of fitness. Ricoeur’s way of putting this is to say that narrative conclusions must be, rather than deducible, acceptable. The follow a ‘particular directedness’ that propels them forward to a conclusion – though of course we need to follow it to the conclusion because it is only from that point of view that we can ultimately judge the acceptability of the sequence. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," Semeia no 13 1978 (1978): p. 182

That is not to say that there isn’t a ‘logic’ to the way stories proceed, of course. Rather, it is almost a truism to say that successful narratives do possess an explanatory power that resonates – profoundly so – with the human experience of events.

Ricoeur goes on to develop his analysis of the logic of narratives by claiming that all narratives combine two aspects, one of which is chronological and one of which is non-chronological. The first he calls the ‘episodic dimension’, by which he means to indicate the way in which narratives throw up the question of ‘and then’? – that is, ‘what happened next’? Simultaneously, however, telling a story is also about construing ‘significant wholes out of scattered events’, attempting to grasp the series of events as a unity – its ‘configurational dimension’, as Ricoeur labels it. Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," p. 183-4 Ricoeur observes then that narratives combine both sequence and pattern – though, it must be said that these two elements exist somewhat in tension with one another:

‘this structure is so paradoxical that every narrative may be seen as a competition between its episodic and its configurational dimensions, between its sequence and its pattern.’