Within Continental philosophy of religion and the theologies inspired by it, there has been much discussion of the supposed “overcoming” of metaphysics and ontotheology.Footnote 1 While not normally considered a key figure in this regard, the French sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet's theological method is inspired by these discussions, and he indeed articulates his fundamental theology of the sacramental in the wake of Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics.Footnote 2
Chauvet is concerned with how metaphysics and ontotheology lead one to understand God's relation to human beings in terms of causality, and thereby distort the discussion through a “passion to master the truth,” which is always understood statically and conceptually.Footnote 3 One must work, therefore, at eradicating such patterns of thought, though he claims that fully overcoming them is “an unachievable task.”Footnote 4 Rather, Chauvet proposes that we continually work through our metaphysical ways of thinking by always striving to go back to the forgotten nature of Being as a call that requires human response, rather than something standing outside of human beings as an object to be grasped. The context wherein we learn both to work through our metaphysical thinking and to hear the call of Being is the symbolic network of the church, particularly through the liturgy.
Such an approach is, however, not without problems, not the least of which is the fact that it seems a rather tall order for our liturgies to fill. While Chauvet's theological method rightly emphasizes the human element in sacramental mediations, his method does not adequately address how and to what extent this human element can serve to corrupt the mediation of the liturgy itself and, thereby, fail to effectively “work-through” metaphysical thinking. While this criticism has already been made, I offer a different take on it by focusing on an expansion and deepening of the hermeneutical dimension of Chauvet's work.Footnote 5 I conclude by suggesting that Chauvet's model succeeds only if liturgy is placed in a framework of dialogue, a framework I adopt from Chauvet himself, though slightly repositioned. Nevertheless, before arriving at these points, it is first necessary to present Chauvet's understanding of the working-through of ontotheology and metaphysics.
“Working through” Ontotheology with Chauvet
Insofar as the true nature of Being should be that of a call requiring human response, Chauvet notes that human beings must undergo a “conversion” whereby they renounce “convok[ing] and measur[ing] being starting from the awareness of self,” and thereby “‘decenter’ themselves from themselves, and henceforth understand themselves as always-already infused with the call of being.”Footnote 6 This speaking of a “call” leads us to acknowledge the importance of language, understood as “the house of being where humans live and thereby ex-ist.”Footnote 7 Human beings are now to be regarded as “shepherds of Being” rather than “Rulers of all entities,” meaning, “they exist only when spoken by language and thus only when summoned and convoked by Being, which, in the mediation of language, attracts them as it withdraws and comes into presence in the very movement that conceals it.”Footnote 8 In other words, Being is mediated to us by means of language, but this revelation is never done without an accompanying movement of concealment.
This double movement is related to Chauvet's understanding of the truth of Being as a playful back-and-forth between event and arrival. The truth of Being is revealed through the event. When the event arrives, however, there remains an excessiveness that even the event cannot capture. The moment of truth, then, is a moment of simultaneous revelation and concealment. For Chauvet, this “conciliation between the Event and the Arrival” is “nothing other than tracing the Difference ‘back to its essential origin.’”Footnote 9 This origin is the “‘essence of being’ as ‘the Play itself’; that of ‘being considered as starting from the difference.’”Footnote 10 This play between event and arrival, presence and absence, is a kind of continual teasing, though eventually metaphysics lost sight of the playful intentions of Being and instead clung to Being's representations. Ultimately, this led to Being “being ‘reduced to the presence of an available foundation.’”Footnote 11
In order to prevent this, we are required to take a “step backwards,” a “jump” into the difference,” so as to “advance by going back towards this original place where metaphysics has its abode, the play of being in which it has been engaged from the very beginning.”Footnote 12 This act of letting go of the desire for foundations is a task that is never completed, for “we must not conceive of the ‘root’ or the ‘foundation’ of metaphysics as something restricted to a single location, such as an object somewhere outside us”; rather, we must remember that this foundation “is everywhere, it lives within us.”Footnote 13 This is why the key to working through ontotheology is not a simple and singular “solution”; rather, it is “a certain manner of living within the metaphysical tradition, or recalling it, this time, however, by thinking its unthought essence.” Footnote 14
This is ultimately to recall that not only is metaphysics “the very business of thought”; it is “the very business of thinkers themselves, always questioned by metaphysics because they are involved in it.”Footnote 15 Humans naturally desire objectivity in the sense of seeing each external thing as an object to be known and grasped. This natural desire points to the necessity of the hermeneutical circle, that is, the circle “where questioners pose questions only to the extent that they have already understood, by anticipation, the questioned—because the questioners are contained within the questioned.”Footnote 16 The hermeneutical circle “corresponds to the very nature of the ex-istance of human beings who cannot comprehend themselves except in relation to the tradition which lives within them,” a tradition that opens them to the future insofar as that future is “always-already anticipated in their reading of the past.”Footnote 17
Conversion, then, needs hermeneutics in order to continually bring us face-to-face with the fact that we do, in fact, need to be converted. It helps us, ultimately, to get back to the original game underlying metaphysics, a game of continual teasing between presence and absence, and thus to the place of difference. In the end, the act of thinking must begin “from the uncomfortable non-place of a permanent questioning,” and thinkers must “give up all ‘calculating thinking,’ all ‘usefulness,’ and learn to think starting with this ecstatic breach that a human being is.”Footnote 18 This is, however, an “unachievable” task, indeed “a task whose very essence is its incompleteness”—an incompleteness that implies that our thinking must never close in on itself, and always remain open to the other and the different who serves to remind us of our being in difference, our living in the breach.Footnote 19
All of these insights lead Chauvet to highlighting the importance of mediation, that truth and reality always stand in need of something other than themselves in order to come to us. For Chauvet, this leads to a discussion of the symbolic order as the place of mediation, and thus the place of this working-through of metaphysics and ontotheology.
The Symbolic Order as the Place of Working-Through
Chauvet's starting point is that “reality is never present to us except in a mediated way,” that is to say, “constructed out of the symbolic network of the culture which fashions us.”Footnote 20 “This symbolic order,” he continues, “designates the system of connections between the different elements and levels of a culture,” be they “economic, social, political, [or] ideological,” that is, “a system forming a coherent whole that allows the social group and individuals to orient themselves in space, find their place in time, and in general situate themselves in the world in a significant way.”Footnote 21 In short, the symbolic order is a system by which we come to articulate our identity in the world, though, of course, “there always remains an inexpungible residue of signifiers to which we can never give adequate meanings.”Footnote 22 Just because we have made a world that makes sense, in other words, does not mean that we can claim that this world has universal significance or can survive without interacting with other worlds of meaning.
While Chauvet would maintain that the object we perceive “is always-already a constructed object,” this should not lead us to think that the symbolic order is itself wholly subjective.Footnote 23 This is true because human beings are not confronted with a tabula rasa, but, instead, with “a world always already filled with signification, always already ordered, always already socially filled out.”Footnote 24 The human subject is not the master and creator of the symbolic order, but, rather, “there is no emergence of subjects without the subjugation of each of them to this law, this cultural agreement which is the symbolic order.”Footnote 25 Without this, subjects regress “into the imaginary and neurosis because one fixates on bits or fragments of the world, which—now—… become ‘in-significant.’”Footnote 26
This fact of being confronted with a world already full of signification points also to the fact that the world can be said to be “created” by the word.Footnote 27 This is not a secondary point for Chauvet, but instead points to the fact that this creative dimension of language, more than just offering creative meanings to entities, also has a fundamental-existential dimension: language creates the subject.
In order to explain how language does this, Chauvet appeals both to linguistics and to psychoanalysis. His linguistic viewpoint is based here on his reading of Émile Benveniste and Edmond Ortigues, and begins with an emphasis that “every discourse is ‘dependent upon the I who states itself there.’”Footnote 28 This simply means that, for all discourse, the subject who is speaking (I) “is a permanent condition of meaning for the entire discourse because nothing has meaning that does not concern humans conscious of their presence in the world as speaking and acting subjects.”Footnote 29 The linguistic I, however, is not a monodimensional entity, for it “has two ‘values’ at the same time: as the ‘content of the pronouncement,’ it is the subject of the verb; as the ‘author of the pronouncement,’ it is the subject of the discourse.”Footnote 30 Furthermore, and more importantly: “This I is not conceivable without a YOU, the reversible partner of the I, so that ‘to be whole, the category of person requires the reversibility of the relationship’ between the I and the YOU in the discourse.”Footnote 31 This is not the end, however, as if to say that the essence of discourse consists only in an I and YOU conversing endlessly and, with versatility, continually trading places as I and YOU. To do so is “to deteriorate into a dual relation of mirror images,” engaging in a discourse that is completely disconnected from “the influence of a third agent—the social and cosmic world.’”Footnote 32 Beyond this there is also the necessary presence of the “impersonal IT, the linguistic mediation that permits the I (in its relation with the YOU) to open itself to the universal.”Footnote 33
Chauvet is able to draw important consequences from this rather abstract analysis. First, the YOU and I are not to be seen as two completely separate entities, but, rather, the reversible nature of the I and the YOU in discourse is seen as quite paradoxical, for on one level it “occupies the position opposite the I, from which, as a consequence, it is the most different,” yet it is “also the most similar to the I since it designates the interlocutor,” a position that each speaker in turn is able to take.Footnote 34 This strange or paradoxical position is only possible with a third, the IT, which is “the social and universal Other under which both the I and the YOU abide,” and which, ultimately, “permits them, spoken as they are by the same culture, to ‘understand one another.’”Footnote 35
The relationship and difference between the I and the YOU is no longer one that should be understood metaphysically, that is, “according to the (meta)physical scheme of distance-separation.”Footnote 36 Difference, rather than being seen as a lack or as something negative, becomes something much more positive. For “if what is most different (I-YOU as opposite and radically other) is also what is most similar (YOU as the reversible of the I),” then we can see anthropological difference not as a “distancing which attenuates or even cuts communication but rather as an otherness which makes it possible.”Footnote 37 All in all then, difference becomes conceived of not as an obstacle to a supposedly transparent truth, but as the place where truth happens through the “play” of difference. The difference between interpretations, then, becomes the very locus of subjectivity and knowledge. The symbolic network thus allows us to gain a positive understanding of difference, an understanding that shows us how we are supposed to learn to live within the metaphysical tradition.
This is, however, only half of the story of Chauvet's analysis of the potential of the symbolic order in this regard. The breach of the subject is also explained by an appeal to Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, which also shows how the subject is “cleft in two because of the threefold structure of the linguistic subject outside of which the subject cannot develop.”Footnote 38 Chauvet bases his reflections on Jacques Lacan's description of the Mirror Stage in infantile development, that is, the stage wherein the child begins to notice his/her reflection in the mirror and, importantly, can associate what s/he sees with her/himself. This stage of development, however is also experienced as an alienation insofar as the child can begin to experience him/herself as “the captive of its mirror image,” a situation which, if not moved beyond, can result in the child being trapped in a cycle of narcissism.Footnote 39
The only way to prevent this is for the infant to “see itself in the mirror as a subject, that is, as forming a symbolic unity of an order other than its reflected body.”Footnote 40 The way that this happens is none other than through language insofar as the first stage in breaking out of this cycle is the child hearing his being addressed by his name. Through this, there grows an awareness of an identification between who s/he perceives herself to be and the name she is called; there dawns, indeed, an awareness that the s/he, while being mirrored in the perceived image, also exceeds that very image. An awareness of the I, then, leads to an awareness of an irreducible interiority that is not reducible to the image—yet the image is the mediation of this interiority insofar as the linguistic act of being named, which leads to subjectivity, happens only through the child recognizing her- or himself in the reflected image and connecting her or his selfhood with what she or he sees and hears. The child begins, ultimately, to grow in awareness that what she is is more than what she sees reflected in the mirror—she belongs, in fact, to a symbolic order that puts her into relation with difference. This means further that the subject that emerges here is internally divided insofar as there is a difference between the self as perceived through the reflection and the self as forming part of a larger symbolic whole. Paradoxically, however, it is “precisely this lack-in-being, that saves the subject” from drowning in the waves of its own narcissism, and is “the law of language, the law of culture, which anchors the subject by dividing it.”Footnote 41
Chauvet complements his Lacanian reading with an appeal to Sigmund Freud's understanding of the Oedipus complex, whereby he is able to articulate his notion of symbolic deprivation. This notion is related to the fact that the child is enjoined by the object of his desire to continually defer the attainment of what is desired. This then leads him to posit, following Claude Lévi-Strauss, that “the prohibition against incest is ‘the only one among all the rules that has a universal character’ and for this reason ‘does not constitute simply one rule among others but rather constitutes … the fact of the rule itself.’”Footnote 42 This rule is seen as the very foundation of the human community itself insofar as it is seen as “a law of deprivation to force a disconnecting from any relation with the immediately coveted object.”Footnote 43
In order to become truly human, then, “we must renounce to be everything, to have everything, and right away.”Footnote 44 This renunciation of our rampant desire is identified as a work of mourning, finding “in the Oedipal experience its decisive structural moment.”Footnote 45 Be that as it may, this act of renunciation “is never fully achieved or achievable”; there is in each of us a narcissistic child being continually reborn.Footnote 46 This all leads Chauvet to acknowledge that “the subject's conquest of its liberty and truth is never achieved once and for all”; rather, “it is effected by an unending process of costly ‘working through’ (Durchärbeitung [Freud]).”Footnote 47
Nevertheless, the process is not a simple path that we can follow to an objective destination—that is, to have worked through our metaphysical and ontotheological thinking once and for all. The goal or “treasure,” in this process, notes Chauvet, is “nothing but the slow self-change whereby the subject succeeds in producing fruit as a result of the painful plowing and tilling of the field of its desire.”Footnote 48
The working-through of our innate desire to think metaphysically and ontotheologically means that we “consent to never being able to leave mediation behind,” and that we give up all pretentions of laying claim to a possession of the Real.Footnote 49 Humans, in other words, are no longer the strong, confident, and fully centered entities bequeathed to us by modernity, but are, rather, subjected to the rule of difference, which is nothing other than the rule of the symbolic and mediated order. We must learn to control the ever-present desire for foundations and, instead, inhabit the simultaneously creative and tensive space of difference.
The Liturgy as the Place of Working-Through
It is to completely misunderstand Chauvet if one thinks that this whole process of “working-through” is something that happens in the abstract, or behind our desks or in our reading chairs. For Chauvet, this process's importance is not strictly philosophical but is instead related to the creation of Christian disciples who have a relationship with the God who is both necessarily mediated by yet also exceeds the structures of the visible church. For Chauvet, the mediation par excellence is the fundamental sacrament of the church itself, which is understood as supporting the church's own symbolic network and structure of Christian identity that is itself made up of the three interrelated components of Scripture, Sacrament, and Ethics.Footnote 50 These three elements, contained within and sustained by the fundamental sacrament of the church are to be seen as the structuring components of Christian identity, and thus the structuring components of the life of faith. Faith itself is understood as coming into a relationship with a presence that is not “present” to us in the same way that objects are, and is therefore not something that we as fully centered subjects can have and possess.
Nevertheless, the mediating of this presence takes a proper liturgical form insofar as it is through the sacramental liturgy that the content of the faith we have received (Scripture) takes on flesh in our bodies, and thereby compels us to verify the faith we have appropriated by ethical witness and action (ethics). The liturgy is, in other words, central in Chauvet's theological method as a whole, for it is “the place of deployment of sensible figures which enables the believer to negotiate a structural relationship with God.”Footnote 51 The liturgy is, in short, not only necessary in order to hear the word of God and then give it a body; it is also the place from whence we are sent to go out into the world in loving ethical service to our brothers and sisters.
The liturgy can do this, however, only if the mode of the relationship with God we come into is such that it is understood in the nonfoundational, open, and non-neurotic way we have described above. The liturgy, through “its visual, auditory, and tactile figures,” is “conducive to the creation of a ‘good distance’ with God” that makes God neither wholly immanent nor transcendent.Footnote 52 It is the role of good liturgy, then, to allow the “managing of a double tension” in one's relationship with God, that is, “a ‘spatial’ tension between presence and absence, between positive theology and negative theology,” as well as a “‘temporal’ tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet.’”Footnote 53 This points to the “fundamental function of the liturgy”: “to allow the believer to live between two tensions, namely, of a good distance in one's relationship to God and to assume the ‘between-time’ of eschatology.”Footnote 54 The liturgy should, then, in other words, help us to come into a relationship with God that is not ontotheological and thereby much more reflective of the eschatological “already-not-yet” nature of time and history.
Such a view of the liturgy is, however, not so evident—least of all for many Christians who approach the liturgy as a kind of “guarantee” of God's presence in a way that would seem to deny God's simultaneous absence. Because of this Chauvet notes that the liturgy understood in this way can be perceived as “an invitation to mourning,” especially for those who falsely see the liturgy as “a place of a formidable imaginary hold on God.”Footnote 55 Nevertheless, for Chauvet, the true nature of the liturgy is “a call for abandonment,” and it is for this reason that Chauvet can go so far as to refer to the liturgy as “a kind of ‘negative theology in act.’”Footnote 56
The Liturgy as “Negative Theology in Act”
If we understand the working through of ontotheology and metaphysics as the cultivation of a disposition wherein we let go of our desire to conceptually capture God and instead allow our hearing of God's word, sacramentally appropriated, to invite us to a proper becoming that includes a necessary moment of ethical witness, it seems natural to find in the liturgy a kind of “training ground” wherein we are given the means of cultivating such a disposition. Nevertheless, this work is always “oriented to action—the symbolic action of communication—and not that of speculation.”Footnote 57 Liturgy sends us out to the other, not inward to ourselves.
The liturgical experience can indeed be said to engender a kind of attitude of negativity with regard to God's transcendence and mystery, but this negativity should not be understood in an internalized or “intellectual” way, which is where Chauvet thinks that things began to go awry in the apophatic tradition.Footnote 58 For example, in the liturgy we proclaim that God is thrice holy, or “in the highest,” or we call to mind the various orders of angels surrounding God's throne in the eucharistic preface, but these descriptions are not intended to be understood primarily as a kind of “raw material” out of which we can construct grand theological theories. They are, contrarily, orientated to “the symbolic experience,” that is, an experience of creative appropriation that always ends with the moment of ethical witness and response as a “verification” of the gift we have received.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, before we can appropriate and respond, we have to receive God's word, and that can happen only if we abandon our supposed claims of mastery, and instead allow ourselves to be “mastered,” as it were, by the mediation of the liturgy. In the end, the liturgy is nothing other than “the symbolic space of a fundamental passivity which is the dispossession of the subject.”Footnote 60 The liturgy, in other words, is the place where the modern subject becomes decentered so that she or he can receive the gift of God's word, which, if appropriated, becomes a grace working in and through the subject.
In coming to justify the liturgy as such a space, Chauvet relies on three criteria that he derives from the shape of the liturgy itself—namely, the priority of the “we” to the “I” in the structure of the majority of the prayers, the “precedence” given to tradition, and the priority of “exteriority” over “interiority.”Footnote 61 One could say that the first two criteria testify to the creation of “a liturgical habitus throughout the course of the centuries,” which reminds the individual subject that his or her needs or experience are not what matters most when it comes to liturgical prayer.Footnote 62 For example, the fact that the prayers of the liturgy are mostly formulated in the first-person plural includes all members of the assembly in the content of the prayers, whether a participant “wants” to be included or feels emotionally connected to the prayers being recited, or not. For example, the collect for the thirtieth week in Ordinary Time asks God to “increase our faith, hope, and charity” and to “make us love what you command” whether or not our personal moods, needs, and dispositions are really attuned to this request.Footnote 63 In a similar way, the liturgical rhythms of the seasons along with liturgical gestures all likewise point to the fact that the subject stands secondary to the logic and rhythm of the liturgy itself.
The third criterion—the priority of the exterior to the interior—has to do with the process of hearing, which opens the way both to the development of a proper disposition of “detachment” and, potentially, to appropriation. The majority of the liturgy—certainly since the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council—is recited or chanted in an audible tone of voice. This fact leads Chauvet, following Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenology of prayer, to note that the priority of this external vocalization of liturgical prayer is tied to the logical appropriation: “By reciting, I am quoted to appear by what I say and before what I say.”Footnote 64 In other words, by reciting something out loud, we are no longer called before what is said; we actually hear ourselves saying it in our own names—even if the request is not something that we would normally say. Quoting John Cassian's discussion of the monastic praying of the Psalms in choir, Chauvet notes that one is indeed singing them “‘as if one is their author,’” and that “in this sense, praying the psalms is less a matter of interpreting them and more one of being interpreted by them.”Footnote 65 Liturgical prayer, then, by privileging the external over the internal in the matter of recitation, not only encourages the prayer or reciter to do something, but assumes that she or he is also hearing something, and by that hearing something is being done to him or her: she or he is becoming decentered, and by that decentering, a person is enabled to enter into a symbolic space where the faith can be bodily appropriated (sacrament), which then leads to the gift's verification in ethical praxis (ethics).
An Approach Partially Positive
In summing up, one could say that in Chauvet's method of “working through” ontotheology and metaphysics, what is most important is to live in the breach, that is, the symbolic space that is opened up to us when we allow the liturgy to decenter us. By living in this space, we learn to live “in a mature proximity to absence,” which allows us to cultivate a proper relationship to God that sees the faith as a threefold dynamic process (Scripture-Sacrament-Ethics) rather than as an objectified conceptual content.Footnote 66 We “work through” ontotheology, then, when we enter into the symbolic universe of the church that happens by way of our liturgical participation. The internal “logic” of the liturgy works to decenter us, not for its own sake, or in order to render us passive before a power and immensity that overwhelms us, but to decenter us for something—namely, for offering back to God the return-gift of our ethical witness that results in the continual building up of a body of brothers and sisters in the world.
One of the more obvious positive dimensions of this approach is that, in contrast to some other approaches to overcoming ontotheology from a more Derridean-deconstructionist nature, it takes the particularity of the Christian tradition quite seriously—even the things that might seem to be rather mundane (liturgical gestures, colors, etc.).Footnote 67 Rather than seeking to do away with the elements of Christian particularity in order to find a supposedly “pure” kernel of authentic Christian truth, Chauvet's approach forces us to “work through” the elements of our particularity, realizing that we cannot just simply wipe them away in order to arrive at a “purer” form of Christianity, for such a form of Christianity has never and never will exist. We work through our metaphysical Christian “baggage,” but like any good psychotherapist will tell you, the baggage always exists in one form or another even after we have worked through it. Like an addiction to gambling or alcohol for recovering addict, the propensity for metaphysical thinking will always remain wedded to the Christian theological tradition, able to raise its head at any moment. Christians should always work on cultivating the attitudes necessary for a mature proximity to absence whenever we speak of God's presence and thereby position ourselves in the symbolic space of receiving God's communication, appropriating it bodily, and then verifying it by the return-gift of our ethical action. Nevertheless, we must realize that “old habits die hard,” as it were: just to think we have “arrived” at this mature proximity to absence is to admit that we still have quite a way to go. Furthermore, the disposition to think metaphysically is not something that can ever be gotten over once and for all, for the “baggage” of this way of thinking sits entrenched in our collective ecclesial subconscious, ready to come to the surface when we are not properly on guard—a situation that occurs somewhat regularly thanks to our human finitude, not to mention the presence of sin.
Such an advantage aside, there is a disadvantage to such a methodology that is discussed in what follows.
The Need for a More Critical Theological Hermeneutics
Advantages aside, one could also say that Chauvet's approach in working through ontotheology and metaphysics trusts too much in the ability of ecclesial and sacramental mediations to engender the kind of healthy proximity to absence that we have been discussing. Particularly, one notes that Chauvet's reliance on the liturgy as the place of this working-through and as a place of “abandonment” displays a certain level of naïveté about the ability of the liturgy to accomplish this, especially insofar as the liturgy can also be experienced by people as a hindrance to coming into relationship with God. The reason for this is related to the fact that liturgical symbols themselves can become corrupted and in need of reform and renewal—a fact that Chauvet's approach does not seem to adequately acknowledge.
This critique has been already made by Vincent Miller, who noted that “Chauvet emphasizes the consequences of being ‘spoken’ to the detriment of the activity of ‘speaking,’” and that Chauvet, in his overemphasis on “mediation” fails to “adequately address important dimensions of human existence that are at work in the handing on of the Christian faith” besides this.Footnote 68 This points ultimately to the need for a hermeneutics of suspicion that is extended to sacramental mediations themselves. Miller focuses his critique by noting that Chauvet does not offer any “resources to evaluate symbols that have become distorted,” and that “it seems that it would favour the continuation of a distorted practice because that is what has been handed on in the tradition and has formed the identity of generations of Christians.”Footnote 69 This then leads Miller to accuse Chauvet of not properly accounting “for cultural and historical changes,” a fact related to his “inadequate and naïve account of the origin of historical change.”Footnote 70 Ultimately, “the Christian church and its sacraments are not purely divine entities; they exist within human society and culture and are thus susceptible to its shortcomings.”Footnote 71 An overly idealized notion of the church and sacraments hovers over Chauvet's entire theological approach, it seems, and while its logic does provide a sensible means of working through ontotheology, the price one has to pay is a bit too high, particularly if one encounters sacramental mediations that have become corrupted by various forms of ideology.
To deal with these criticisms, Miller suggests using Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory and deepening language's creative potential through an appeal to Paul Ricoeur. Miller finds Habermas’ theory provides “important insights into the broader context of the human symbol world and highlights the hegemonic influence of political and economic forces upon it.”Footnote 72 To illustrate this, Miller notes Habermas’ disagreement with Hans-Georg Gadamer about how to account for change within a given tradition. Habermas believed that “Gadamer had succumbed to an ‘idealism of linguisticality’ which did not adequately address the fact of language's dependence on social processes.”Footnote 73 For his part, Habermas “used historical materialism to show that language is influenced both by systems of domination and [by] the organization of social labour and vice versa,” and if we speak of a “happening of tradition” or “mediation” it is always “relative to the systems of labour and domination.”Footnote 74
After highlighting the advantages of utilizing Habermas to articulate the way a mature human subject could relate to symbols and language, Miller then turns to Ricoeur's understanding of metaphor as providing another tool to further elucidate this. Miller notes that for Ricoeur, metaphor is “presented as a semantic innovation,” which results in the “creation of new meanings by expanding the boundaries of the linguistic system in question.”Footnote 75 Metaphor, so understood, enables one “to transcend the limits of the sign system of one's own language,” and by so doing brings “two unrelated signs together in tension to express something that has no directly translatable equivalent in the given language.”Footnote 76
Whereas the contributions of Habermas are related to a human subject's encounter with structural factors that serve to ideologically distort symbols, the use of Ricoeur is related to dealing with interactions on a more interpersonal level. Ricoeur, on my understanding, offers the possibility that a new shade of meaning may come forth from an encounter with difference that not only is applicable to what is new and different, but also reveals that the difference has been a component of what was already “known” all along. The result is not only an expanded horizon of truth; it also reveals that difference itself is a constitutive component of any conceptual knowledge. Concepts are thus redefined as being open-ended, able to be interrupted, challenged, and broken open by the encounter with difference. Metaphors thus possess an “ontological vehemence” that fulfills this interruptive function, constantly helping what is old, known, and “tried and true” to be broken open, to reveal a plethora of shades of meaning.Footnote 77
Metaphor, of course, must be properly placed and understood within the rest of Ricoeur's hermeneutics, as for Ricoeur the end result of symbols and metaphor is to be, as Ivana Dolejšová describes it, a “symbolic ‘redescription’ of the world.”Footnote 78 Recalling Ricoeur's discussion of the movement from the first to the second naïveté at the conclusion of The Symbolism of Evil, we note that for Ricoeur the “first naivete” is understood as a “primitive naivete” wherein we have—or we think we have—an “immediacy of belief.”Footnote 79 In other words, the first stage of coming to understand something is characterized by taking things at face value: God exists; the world is good; human beings are free. Nevertheless, such a childish naïveté cannot last long, especially as conflicts and questions begin to arise. “As we experience tensions and conflicts,” Dolejšová notes, “doubts arise, and we have to re-evaluate the identity of our image of reality and to distance ourselves from non-problematic faith, immediacy, and meaning, as we find ourselves disoriented.”Footnote 80 It is at this stage of disorientation and questioning that we arrive at the moment of “criticism” whereby we interpret our symbols “so that we can hear again.”Footnote 81 This interpretive criticism is the moment of hermeneutics whereby “the symbol's gift of meaning and the endeavour to understand by deciphering are knotted together”: the symbol gives a meaning, in other words, but that meaning has to be appropriated hermeneutically.Footnote 82
Before moving on to describe how Ricoeur understands the movement from critical hermeneutics to the second naïveté, it seems appropriate to explore this moment of hermeneutics a bit more. In a later interview with Richard Kearney wherein he discusses the way one can change symbols and narratives that have become corrupted, Ricoeur notes that we should not simply change individual narratives, for to do this is to “reduce [a] culture to its explicit functions,” and thereby delude ourselves into thinking that a “culture is wholly transparent.”Footnote 83 Rather, we must go deeper, down to what he calls “the hidden nucleus which determines and rules the distribution of these transparent functions and institutions.”Footnote 84 This nucleus he identifies as “the foundational mytho-poetic nucleus of society,” the analysis by which “a society comes to a true understanding of itself.”Footnote 85 This foundational myth should not be confused with one of the functional narratives of society, but is actually the fact that society is founded on language as creative and therefore includes an appeal to poesis and metaphor.Footnote 86 Timo Helenius makes the important observation that for Ricoeur this mytho-poetic “essence of culture enables self-recognition in cultural objects,” and this implies that ultimately “the quest for finding the essence of humanity rests on symbolization, or, put differently, on mytho-poetic creativity.”Footnote 87 Our various cultural objects—including our functional narratives—should be then interpreted as “symbols of liberating human creativity that is essentially poetic.”Footnote 88 Nevertheless, this movement of liberating creativity that takes us to the mytho-poetic nucleus can be expressed only in limited, culturally conditioned forms, and therefore we need hermeneutics in order to evaluate them properly.
Just as in the movement between the first naïveté and the moment of hermeneutics, Ricoeur notes here that one is compelled to go down to this nucleus when faced with “boundary situations such as war, suffering, guilt, death, etc.” that trigger “a fundamental existential crisis.”Footnote 89 Nevertheless, when faced with such crises we should continue to creatively and imaginatively use language to attest to a truth and reality, which, by definition, still manage to elude our grasp. Indeed, as Ricoeur notes in From Text to Action, we recall that such a relationship with the real is such that while “the power of a text is to open a dimension of reality,” this “implies in principle a recourse against any given reality and thereby the possibility of a critique of the real.”Footnote 90 Such a real is best attested in poetic discourse, wherein “this subversive power is most alive.”Footnote 91 The stories that we tell, in other words, constitute the path of creative-imaginative redescription that is nothing other than “the creation of a mythos, of a ‘fable,’” which “is the path of mimesis, of creative imitation.Footnote 92 It is, in the end, this path that brings out the “subversive power of the imaginary” that critiques any ideology, which, by claiming to have a hold on the real, quells this imaginative process of mimesis.Footnote 93
This movement wherein we then attest to the truth without claiming to fully grasp or encapsulate it could also be seen as the moment wherein we move to the second naïveté, that is, the moment wherein we realize and accept that the only way to believe or to come to truth is via hermeneutics.Footnote 94 In the second naïveté, we have finally become adults after we have passed through the simple childhood of the first naïveté and the rebellious adolescence of hermeneutics. It is a space of openness and unanswered questions, contradictions and tensions. Nevertheless, as Dolejšová notes, “it is a space where aporias are present, and yet do not distance us from the contact with reality, from belief, immediacy and the plenitude of meaning.”Footnote 95 We have passed, in other words, from a childlike faith that was founded on the naïve assumption of immediacy and transparency to an adult faith where we realize that faith is a complicated business mixed with a whole gamut of human and structural factors that make faith an ambiguous mixture of human and divine elements. Nevertheless, we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that a kind of “pure” faith would exist if we would eliminate all of the “contaminating” mediations—an adult faith is to live in the tensive space of hermeneutics without thinking that, through these hermeneutics, we can somehow deconstruct and toss away the messiness of the mediations without, thereby, tossing away faith itself. A child lives thinking he can communicate directly with reality unmediated; an adolescent realizes that the reality he is dealing with is complicated, throwing the suppositions of his childhood into question; an adult learns to live in the breach, to realize it is just as deluded to live with childlike faith as it is with an adolescent “rage against the machine.” One must live and work through the messiness of mediations in order to come into a relationship with reality, which, even though deprived of its original childlike innocence, still attests to the real.
Referring this discussion of Ricoeur back to Miller's critique, it seems that we can perhaps note a bit of an inconsistency. While noting that Ricoeur's theory of metaphor can help to reveal language's creative potentiality, helping a mature human subject deal creatively with difference, Miller does not adequately place this notion within the totality of Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and instead places it alongside Habermas’ critical lens, which emphasizes language's contamination by structural ideologies.Footnote 96 Such a move seems to amount to a focusing on what Ricoeur referred to as individual “functional” narratives rather than allowing conflicts to push us to the mytho-poetic nucleus of our society, which reminds us of language's poetic and metaphorical nature. In being pushed to this level, we are not deluded into thinking that a culture can ever be fully transparent, that structural ideologies can be fully or easily swept away, but rather we are compelled to go to the roots of our own identity, to the place of creative speaking and imagining wherein we learn to work through any ideology that would claim a transparent hold on reality.
Applying Insights to Chauvet
In applying these insights to Chauvet's project, particularly to the problematic lack of a critical hermeneutics with regard to corrupted mediations, it seems that the hermeneutical circle could be a good heuristic tool, particularly as Chauvet himself (as we have seen) already appeals to this structure. Indeed, we can say that the moment of first naïveté relates to the metaphysical/ontotheological way of conceptualizing the divine; then comes the hermeneutical interruption of this certainty by an appeal to psychoanalysis, anthropology, and other human sciences; finally, we arrive at the second naïveté wherein we are able to live in close proximity to absence without, thereby, thinking that the absence is a completely God-less, purposeless void. However, we arrive at the second naïveté when we allow God to speak to us, and this can occur only in the symbolic universe of the church and particularly through the church's liturgy. Yet it is important to note that the liturgy and sacraments are not confined merely to the level of learning to speak anew in the second naïveté, but also open onto what Chauvet refers to as a third naïveté.Footnote 97 This third naïveté is what places the Christian liturgy on an eschatological horizon where, through the power of the Holy Spirit, which was let into the world through the whole of the paschal mystery, our work of building up a body of brothers and sisters in the world is given a hope-filled eschatological depth.
Clearly, for Chauvet, the hermeneutical endeavor does not extend to the level of this particular mediation as thoroughly as it does to others, though he has good reason to hold to such a position. Chauvet notes that the liturgy, particularly through the metaphors it has preserved in its lex orandi, has served to preserve the lex credendi from being completely overtaken by Scholastic and modern attempts to reduce faith to metaphysical categories. Chauvet goes so far as to praise the liturgy's “conservativism which allowed ancient metaphorical expressions of the celebration to reach us,” even as theological language became more academic and less grounded in the church's liturgical praxis.Footnote 98 These ancient liturgical metaphors thus kept attesting to a “presence” of God that “was not an ‘available presence’ in the Gnostic mode, but a presence in the mode of ‘passage’ between the yesterday of the cross and the tomorrow of the Parousia.”Footnote 99 It is, in short, the repository for a kind of sacramental memory that sits in the tensive eschatological time between the already and the not-yet, proclaiming, “This is my body” just before it calls to mind the Parousia in the anamnesis.Footnote 100 The mediation of the liturgy, then, is characterized by a “happy conservatism” that “serves the ‘negative theology in act,’” which Chauvet attributes to the liturgy insofar as “it leaves open a vacant space which allows the negotiation of a communion within a healthy distance to God and toward God.”Footnote 101
Perhaps, then, Chauvet is correct in not submitting the liturgical mediation to the same level of critical hermeneutics as he would the schemes of metaphysical thinking. These criticisms, in fact, are made in service to his primary theological concern, which is to “afford the sacraments their rightful place in the life of Christians,” a place that does not trap them in a conceptual idolatry, but fuels them for action and witness in the world.Footnote 102 The working through of ontotheology, then, is not for its own sake: it is to enable Christian believers to come into a correct relationship with God, which always occurs sacramentally/liturgically and ecclesially. Metaphysicians and ontotheologians are enjoined, as it were, to go to church and pray the liturgy properly, and this will then lead to their moving from the first to the second naïveté. But is it really that simple?
It seems more likely that the obstinate ontotheologian will find more reasons to stay in his first naïveté than to move beyond it, especially if one takes into account that the liturgy requires human beings to do it. The liturgy, indeed, just does not fall out of the sky, its metaphors waiting only to be properly heard by the participants, to compel them to give up their metaphysical concepts. The liturgical metaphors have to be recited by either a priest or the assembly, and there is no guarantee that these individuals have moved to the place of living in the mature proximity to absence that Chauvet advocates.Footnote 103 Indeed, especially insofar as the homily could be preached by such a person, the notion that the prayers of the liturgy attesting to a “negative theology in act” could be allowed to function in the way Chauvet claims seems to be more than slightly naïve.Footnote 104
There has to be, in short, a way to hermeneutically interrupt the sacramental mediation itself in a manner that does justice to the fact that the liturgical metaphors themselves are often deployed by individuals who operate according to the conceptual schemes of metaphysics that Chauvet rightfully rejects. Such an interruption needs to go beyond the merely functional and penetrate the mytho-poetic nucleus, which reminds us that our languages have to reveal new shades of meaning and open onto new possible worlds. In conclusion, we offer a preliminary model of how the presence of otherness could serve to interrupt the sacramental mediation, prompting the liturgical actors to reach down to that mytho-poetic nucleus, and dare to dream new possibilities that serve to break open their conceptual horizons.
The Interruption of the Other and the Working-Through of Metaphysics
In coming to conceptualize what the interruption of the other would look like, it is important to emphasize that its necessity is a thoroughly theological one: it is God who interrupts because God has revealed Godself as s/he who interrupts.Footnote 105 Lieven Boeve notes, for example, that this is true insofar as “the God professed by Christians repeatedly breaks open narratives of human beings and communities, including narratives about Godself,” a fact attested to in many scriptural narratives from Exodus to Jesus’ own “continuing interruption of closed narratives.”Footnote 106 The theological functioning of the category of interruption finds its paradigm in the paschal mystery, for “God interrupts the closing of Jesus’ narrative by the religious and political authorities and radically opens it.”Footnote 107 The narrative of the Risen One is one that is not closed even by death, and therefore “following Jesus means engaging the challenge of the other who interrupts our narratives,” interrupts our certainties that what we think we know about God is fully determined and closed.Footnote 108 Chauvet, for his part, includes a narrative of such an interruption when he describes the movement from nonfaith to faith—namely, the narrative of the apostles on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).Footnote 109
In the first part of the story (vv. 13-24), the two disciples, whom we can understand as representing the community of the church, are portrayed as defeated and inward looking. They are portrayed as talking “between themselves, each a sort of mirror-image of the other, tossing back and forth the same expression of a definite postmortem on the failed mission of their Master.”Footnote 110 The Master and Teacher was dead; the movement they had devoted their lives to was, in their eyes, completely over and destroyed. The two are portrayed as existing in a closed circle that serves only to reinforce their supposed certainties: there is no way to salvage the movement, it died along with its Master.
Then, all of a sudden, a stranger shows up next to them. One can imagine that he probably walked for a bit listening to the gloom and doom being talked about secretly, with a bit of irony and humor. Then at verses 25-26 comes the moment of interruption: “Oh how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (NAB). Chauvet describes this moment as “characterized by a transition from a dualistic relation to a triangular relation: instead of speaking to each other, in a closed circle, they open themselves to this stranger who has joined them.”Footnote 111
One can further imagine that this was not an episode that went over very well with the disciples, who believed themselves to be in the position of knowledge. Who was this strange yokel? “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” (Luke 24:18) Nevertheless, they are portrayed as listening to this stranger, as “he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures (Luke 24:27)—namely, that the Son of God must be condemned, killed, and raised by God on the third day. This is a place that they could not have arrived at on their own; indeed it is not possible as long as they “keep the initiative in the discussion and thereby remain in a position of knowledge,” thinking they “know all there is to know about Jesus of Nazareth.”Footnote 112
This leads Chauvet to then state that “faith requires an act of dispossession, a reversal of initiative”: they must hear and receive a word that comes to them from the other.Footnote 113 It is also important to note here that the other doesn't just show up speaking on his own initiative; rather, he comes to them interpreting the Scriptures. For Chauvet, the Scriptures play the role of “a third agency,” enabling the disciples “to enter into an understanding of the ‘real’ different from what they previously thought evident”: maybe they didn't know everything about Jesus after all.Footnote 114 The other, then, is occupying the role of hermeneut, interpreting the tradition and, thereby, challenging the interpretations of the supposed “experts.” The other challenges, then, but she uses resources from within the tradition to break open the tradition itself.
This is not the end of the story, of course, because at this point the disciples still don't realize that the one doing the talking is actually Jesus. The disciples realize this only when, after they have invited him inside to stay with them, he took, blessed, and broke the bread. At that point, “their eyes were opened and they recognized him,” though at that very moment of recognition “he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31). Chauvet notes that the eyes of the disciples “open on an emptiness,” but it is “an emptiness full of a presence.”Footnote 115 The story shows that “in the time of the Church in which our story takes place, Jesus the Christ is absent as ‘the same;’ he is no longer present except as ‘the Other.’”Footnote 116 When we recognize Jesus, then, we cannot see his body; we can touch it only as mediated to us through the Scriptures enfleshed in the sacraments, and leading to the creation of a new family of brothers and sisters through ethical action.
The structure of faith, then, while based on the hearing of a word, is, interestingly, dependent on a word that is spoken by someone perceived to be a stranger, an other. The other, however, by referring back to the Scriptures and then by breaking the bread affirms that the place of faith is, indeed, the church, but it is a church that has been interrupted by the other who has come to turn that ecclesial world on its head.Footnote 117 The other, in short, interrupts concepts that have become closed, deconstructing their certainty, and showing that truth is a matter of disclosure leading to ethical response. The presence of the other, in short, compels us to work through our metaphysical concepts, accepting their partial nature, and remaining open to an otherness that always manages to catch us off guard.Footnote 118
An Interruption at the Heart of Mediation Itself
As we noted above, the structure of faith that Chauvet sketches for us is both amenable to and inspired by Ricoeur's movement from the first to the second naïveté. What we can now say, however, is that the hermeneutical moment that leads one through this process is prompted by an other who comes from the outside, unrecognized and not included. Such an assertion, while not explicitly articulated by Chauvet, seems to be amenable to the third naïveté, wherein he positions the sacramental liturgy insofar as the eschatological horizon of liturgical prayer is connected to a future to come, uncontainable, and unpredictable: “Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour; go out to meet him and say, ‘tell us, are you He that should come?’”Footnote 119
Indeed, this other is unrecognized and is presumably even perceived by the apostles as being, if not a direct threat, a “poor misguided outsider” who has to be taught the truth about Jesus of Nazareth. This outsider then is so bold as to interpret the tradition to the supposed experts—so convincingly, that after some time the disciples invite the stranger to stay the evening with them, where he fulfills his hermeneutical exegesis by breaking the bread and, thereby, vanishing from sight, revealing the vacant space of God's presence.Footnote 120 The unrecognized, unexpected other is the one who comes to the church and brings her to faith, and this is a faith that is oriented to witness and ethical service to the world.
We should also keep in mind that this interruption took the form of a dialogue. The stranger shows up and engages the disciples in a dialogue, a playful back-and-forth of asking questions and listening to their “expert” answers. The moment of interruption comes in the course of this dialogue, and the disciples are portrayed as being silent listeners until they approach the village and ask the stranger to stay with them. The church, then, allows itself to be engaged in dialogue, and through this dialogue becomes more and more hospitable to the point that the one perceived as the most outside is invited inside. Footnote 121
The seeming monologue by the stranger could be understood as him providing a whole supply of new predicates to what they took to be a closed matter: the dead one is the Living One; a god of unassailable and untouchable impassibility is the God who bled, died, and was raised; and on top of all of this, the tradition itself is what points to this.Footnote 122 The disciples don't immediately know what to do with this new information, yet they are compelled to invite the stranger in and continue to learn from him. Yet after the bread is broken, the disciples realize that the stranger was the Lord, and that he is now present as physically absent himself, but taking on flesh in the unknown other. At this moment, the disciples—who had been forced to come into contact with the mytho-poetic space of dialogue and difference—are ready to emerge into the second naïveté, finally using a metaphor to describe the experience: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures for us?” (Luke 24:32) The viability of this metaphor is shown in the fact that its proclamation is not the end of the story; rather, it is the beginning of witness and mission: “So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem … then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:33, 35).
Liturgy as the Place of Encounter with Otherness and the Working-Through of Ontotheology
All of this leads us to the conclusion that the liturgy should be seen as a place that is always open to the interruption of an otherness who comes to challenge certainties and thereby keeps our concepts open. We recall that for Chauvet the episode of Emmaus portrays the coming to authentic faith, and that this is always a faith mediated ecclesially, sacramentally, and, therefore liturgically. Taking into account the critique we have here articulated, this should then lead us to understand the liturgy as a place that should be the privileged place for encounter with an otherness that challenges us. Liturgy should not, then, be a wholly comfortable and manageable affair; rather, it should include the possibility of being interrupted by forms of otherness that challenge us to reevaluate our comfortable concepts.
Practically speaking, this sometimes might take the form of an affluent parish intentionally bringing speakers to provide witness and testimony to contexts that are marked by a vastly different socioeconomic situation. It could and should also involve the local parish priest himself not shying away from homilies that bring out elements of Catholic social teaching that would challenge a particular parish's bourgeois ideals and comfortable middle-class existence. It could also take the form of a parish community engaging the otherness in its own midst in the form of individuals who are divorced and remarried or living in a same-sex partnership. How many of our parishes allow such individuals to hermeneutically interpret the tradition from their experience, allowing that interpretation to interrupt the parish's comfortable quiet existence? How many of our parishes allow the Table of God's word and body to be accessible to as many people as possible, and how many instead see the Eucharist as “a prize for the perfect”?Footnote 123
Only then can the liturgy function as the place where we work through our metaphysical and ontotheological concepts, the place where we learn to live in a healthy proximity to absence. The presence of an otherness that challenges our conceptual surety forces us to think of new ways to address this otherness. This presupposes, however, that this otherness is allowed to be welcomed home into the liturgical assembly in the same way that the disciples welcomed the stranger to spend the night with them. This makes for vulnerability to be sure, but it is a vulnerability that has been shown to us in the life of the Lord we gather to worship. We allow the other to tell us her story out of the gospel and tradition, welcoming her to the table, to share in the breaking of the bread, attesting to the uncontainable breadth of the reign of God, to which our liturgy sacramentally points.
