Jean-Louis Chrétien is a major figure in what Dominique Janicaud named and attacked in 1991 as the “theological turn” in recent French phenomenology. This trend, whose best-known representative is Jean-Luc Marion, rejects any approach to phenomenology that limits it to a description of objects of consciousness, to the exclusion of all questions of real existence, or limits it to that which appears before the finite horizon of the subject. Rather, we can experience a mysterious other in a way that both transcends objectivity and alters us as experiencing subjects. The other cannot be excluded from phenomenological description. Thus in the essay “The Wounded Word: Phenomenology of Prayer” (1992), Chrétien describes prayer as “an event wherein what is invisible to myself illuminates me in a fashion phenomenologically different from a conversation with myself or an examination of consciousness.” The word of prayer is “wounded” in the sense that “an other is silently introduced into my dialogue with myself, radically transforming and breaking it.”
Under the Gaze of the Bible, published in French in 2008, is a collection of eight lectures and essays on reading the Bible as the inspired word of God. The second chapter, “Allowing Oneself to Be Read Authoritatively by the Holy Scripture,” is thematically central. In a sense, any great work of literature “reads us” in that we measure ourselves by it, and it sheds new light on our lives. But to read the Bible as the inspired word of God, which can be done only in prayer, is to stand naked in the presence of God, in the absolute truth which God is and reveals. It is to “allow ourselves to be read by the gaze that it directs toward us” (10). It is “a kind of wounded reading” (x) because it costs us something of ourselves.
No one who is familiar with French phenomenology can read Chrétien on the Bible's gaze (regard) without thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre's section on le regard in Being and Nothingness, in which the other's “gaze” or “look” steals us from ourselves and freezes us to the spot, as in Sartre's example of being caught peering through a keyhole. Sartre thought the gaze of God would be like that, were there a God, but for Chrétien, “the word of God not only reveals me to myself in my ugliness; it also invites me to get free from it and shows me how to do so” (16). It does not freeze me to the spot but frees me to move beyond it; it does not steal me from myself but gives me to myself. But how can a gaze be an invitation? It is because “the Light is identical to the Word” (103). Think of Augustine, who discovers the light of God's Word in book 7 of the Confessions but cannot stand in the light until he responds to the call of the Word to read the word in book 8. Tolle, legere, “Take up and be read,” could be the motto of Chrétien's book.
This reference to Augustine points to another feature of Chrétien's reading of the Bible: though the Bible is like a letter addressed directly to me, now (13–14), I am never alone in reading it. The word comes to me through a multitude of translators, copyists, and commentators, who do not distance me from the word's immediacy but instead incorporate me into a chorus or symphony orchestra (3) of those who at once hear and interpret. In Chrétien's orchestra, Augustine is clearly the concertmaster, with Karl Barth, Origen, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, and Kierkegaard the other leading instrumentalists.
Though Under the Gaze of the Bible appears in a series titled Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, it contains no explicit treatment of phenomenological methodology. Rather, it is a series of meditations on the act of reading the Bible and on biblical themes (wisdom, teaching, joy, hope, and testimony) by a philosophically formed believer for whom the Bible is the word of God. Chrétien's meditations, especially the more popular essays, such as those on joy and hope, can thus be read with profit by readers unschooled in or uninterested in academic philosophy.
