Figuring the Sacred by Paul Ricœur

First published: Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1995, edited by Mark I. Wallace and translated by David Pellauer

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; essays; hermeneutics; theology

Core issue(s): Faith; good vs. evil; hope; knowledge; love; scriptures

Overview

Figuring the Sacred, edited and introduced by Mark I. Wallace, includes essays published between 1971 and 1992 by Paul Ricœur, former professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School and a winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences. The collection is divided into five parts: an examination of the nature of religious discourse; resolution of conflicting philosophical positions on religion held by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995); critical analysis of the polyphonous nature of different biblical literary genres; hermeneutical and phenomenological arguments about hope, evil, and the narrative of self-identity; and homiletics that convert recondite metaphysical arguments into principles for everyday moral action. The inconclusiveness of Ricœur’s dialogic mode of argument and his use of abstruse philosophic and semiotic terminology can conceal from all but the most determined readers his profound views on religious belief.

In the first part of Figuring the Sacred, Ricœur establishes the importance of discourse analysis in interpreting Judeo-Christian tradition inasmuch as that tradition arises from the interlaced faith of different communities whose particular languages and idioms give enduring meaning to religious belief. Linguistic analysis is especially important because of the value the Bible places upon the Word. However, Ricœur rejects any structuralist “cult of the text” because the infinite partial meanings of scripture make, in fact, ontological references to the sacred. “To see the world as sacred is at the same time to make it sacred, to consecrate it.” Using the concept of a Heilsgeschichte (salvific history) found in the work of Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971), Ricœur celebrates the tensions created by the apparent incongruities of the Bible, for instance, between narrative and prophecy. Stated simply, these tensions, generated by the use of “limit-expressions,” force a suspension of belief in reality and leave holy scripture open to perpetual interpretation. Ricœur builds upon the work on comparative religion of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), who observed that manifestations of the numinous are not described directly in primordial belief systems but are instead represented in hieratic rituals simulating the sacred through “a logic of correspondence.” However, in Judeo-Christian tradition, the sacred becomes textual through divine proclamations that shatter the logic of the cosmos, creating an epoché through which humans are freed to envision the Kingdom of God. Similarly, parables in the Synoptic Gospels also use limit-expressions, which rely on a protean symbolism not rooted in nature but in “the heuristic function of fiction.” The mythopoetic dimensions of the Bible should not be read as mistaken explanations of how things really are but instead as inventive explorations of how things might be, opening human consciousness to possible other realities.

In the second part of the collection, an essay on Kant raises the question of whether the purpose of a philosophy of religion is to establish a speculative idea of God or to create a practical realization that will allow for human freedom and thus moral action. For Kant, the former is rejected as a transcendental illusion. Wallace observes that Ricœur is sympathetic to Kant’s position because he wants to preserve the “figurative modes of religious discourse.” Christ as a symbol for the moral imagination gives Christians hope, out of which the rational will of humanity can combat evil. The kenotic hypostasis of God as the Suffering Servant, appropriated in Pauline justification by faith, evokes in humanity “the moral vision of the world.” Ricœur shows in a following essay how the symbolism of Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung (1921; The Star of Redemption, 1970) also creates the conditions for a “figuration of morality.” The Star of David is both the form, or Gestalt, and the face of God, evocative imagery that explodes pretensions to absolute knowledge of the divine but also the hegemony of empirical objectivity. Speaking about creation, revelation, and redemption then becomes a way of experiencing the miraculous. However, as a counterpoint to the totalizing system-building of Rosenzweig, the concluding essay of the section focuses on Lévinas’s subjectivist concept of Christian testimony. Using philosophical perspectives provided by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Jean Nabert (1881-1960), Ricœur argues against Lévinas’s position that ethics occurs outside the realm of ontology. Care for the Other is a “summons” from the universe that exists before human consciousness.

The third part of Figuring the Sacred is aptly subtitled “The Polyphony of Biblical Discourses.” Here Ricœur maintains that different modes of biblical expression speak to different dimensions of Christian meaning; an imaginative structuralist exegesis—a “depth semantics”—can be used to move toward that meaning. Theological argument must be built upon a hermeneutic interpretation of the enduring discourses within Jewish and Christian faith. Whatever the Bible’s historical basis, its many layers of evolving interpretation receive meaning from their intertextual whole, arising from the biblical narrative in a manner that does not elucidate kerygma but renders it enigmatic. Likewise, the aporetic nature of the Synoptic parables, for instance—the wicked husbandmen or the sower and the seed—demolishes any self-righteous certitude about religious understanding one might harbor.

The “festival of meaning” that is the Bible’s message is explored in the fourth group of essays, which deal with theological issues such as God and evil. All boastful efforts to arrive at a totalizing explanation of the narrative of Christianity are broken by the wisdom of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations, which indict the vanity of human knowledge. The aporias of life experience demand a hopeful wager from the believer instead of fixed conviction. As a moral agent, the individual is free to act on conscience to the summons of the community and the divine but at the same time is limited to act within the symbolic system that gives the individual consciousness in the first place.

The concluding part of Figuring the Sacred focuses on the moral life demanded by Ricœur’s philosophy. The essays explore how Jesus’ commandment to love one’s enemies, guided by “the logic of superabundance,” stands in tension with commands to treat others with reciprocal justice, “the logic of equivalence.” In spite of the inexplicable evil of such events as the Holocaust, which no theodicy could rectify, Ricœur uncovers a biblical message that all human beings are codependent within a benevolent creation. This moral attitude must be understood with humility as taught by the Passion of Christ, the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah, which offers not unequivocal truth but a theophanic sign of God’s love.

Christian Themes

Ricœur challenges the desacralized world of modernity, rejecting the existentialist religiosity of Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) or Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), who would make desacralization a part of Christian kerygma. However, Christianity is not averse to a sort of desacralization of holy scripture inasmuch as Christianity does not privilege the original language of the text, be that Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic. Thus, biblical text gives Christians endless potential for interpretation, and holy scripture should not be frozen by exegetical orthodoxy. Ricœur’s religiosity, however, is not rooted in any radical individualism or subjectivist idealism. The self finds identity and meaning only through a hermeneutical phenomenology that looks outside itself to social and cultural institutions, where the life of the spirit is being objectified and where the Christian uncovers the meaning of being-in-the-world-with-others. Christians construct self-understanding by facing the summons from the community to lead an ethical life.

Sources for Further Study

Fodor, James. Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur and the Refiguring of Theology. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995. A critical effort to appropriate the philosophy of Ricœur into Christian theology.

Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur. Library of Living Philosophers 22. Chicago: Open Court, 1995. Includes an intellectual autobiography by Ricœur, scholarly articles about all aspects of Ricœur’s philosophy, and a bibliography of works by and about Ricœur.

Kearney, Richard. On Paul Ricœur: The Owl of Minerva. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. A clear and concise examination of the philosophy of Ricœur, followed by five dialogues between Kearney and Ricœur over central concepts of his method.

Lowe, Walter James. “The Coherence of Paul Ricœur.” Journal of Religion 61 (October, 1981): 384-402. A provocative exploration of the Calvinist and Lutheran implications of Ricœur’s thought.

Wall, John. Moral Creativity: Paul Ricœur and the Poetics of Possibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. An argument built on the philosophy of Ricœur that moral life is possible only through human creativity.