Abstract
As a Protestant writing in the second half of the twentieth century in western Europe, Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) could not ignore the recent legacy of theological liberalism despite his predominant philosophical interests. Although he did not share the “classical” liberal interest in Christology, Ricoeur was intensely concerned with the problematics of anthropology, hermeneutics, and hence biblical interpretation. These are all closely related to his notion of fallibility as the possibility of the existence of moral evil in the constitution of humanity, in close connection with some fundamental issues such as myth, symbolism, symbolism of evil, human reality, freedom, and transcendence. The significance of Ricoeur’s idea of fallibility is presented mainly in connection with contemporary radical Catholicism and especially with reference to the works of Edward Schillebeeckx. Ricoeur’s concept of fallibility and its satellite notions—myth, symbolism of evil, human reality, freedom, and transcendence—are analyzed in close relationship to Schillebeeckx’s anthropological idea of humble humanism. Then Ricoeur’s notion of fallibility is compared to Don Cupitt’s philosophical nonrealism, which posits the existence of God as merely a conceptual reality embedded in man’s consciousness.
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Notes
See also Steven H. Clark, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 1991), 32.
David F. Klemm, “Philosophy and Kerygma: Ricoeur as Reader of the Bible,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 65.
See Olav Bryant Smith, Myths of the Self: Narrative Identity and Postmodern Metaphysics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 138.
Theodoor Marius van Leeuwen, The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), 22.
Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), xli.
For details of the relationship between fallibility and man’s ontological structure, see John B. Thompson, “A Response to Paul Rcoeur,” in Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39.
Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 2003), 10.
Phillip Stambovsky, Myth and the Limits of Reason (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 60ff
See Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23. Here is what Rcoeur has to say about the idea of fault in connection with mythology: “Fault … is not a feature of fundamental ontology similar to other factors discovered by pure description … motives, powers, conditions and limits. Fault remains a foreign body in the eidetics [imagery, n.a.] of man…. The passage from innocence to fault is not accessible to any description, even an empirical one, but needs to pass through a concrete mythics. Thus the idea of approaching the empirics of the will by means of a concrete mythics was already formed, but we did not then realize the reasons for this detour. Indeed, why can the ‘passions’, which affect the will, be spoken of only in the coded language of a mythics? How are we to introduce this mythics into philosophic reflection? How can philosophic discourse be resumed after having been interrupted by myth?” Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xli–xlii.
Patrick L. Bourgeois, Extension of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1975), 63.
See John Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.
Dan R. Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 54.
John B. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44.
See also Andrew Tallon, Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 89–90.
For details about the concept of “bad will,” also in connection with Ricoeur, see Frank K. Flinn, “The Phenomenology of Symbol: Genesis I and II,” in Phenomenology in Practice and Theory, ed. William S. Hamrick (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof Publishers, 1985), 227.
For the connection between fallibility and knowledge in Ricoeur, see Thomas W. Ogletree, “Christian Social Ethics as a Theological Discipline,” in Shifting Boundaries, ed. Barbara G. Wheeler and Edward Farley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 234.
Patrick L. Bourgeois and Frank Schalow, Traces of Understanding: A Profile of Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 19.
Henry Isaac Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 54–55.
David E. Klemm, “Searching for a Heart of Gold: A Rcoeurian Meditation on Moral Striving and the Power of Religious Discourse,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (London: Routledge, 2002), 102–3.
For details, see Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 61.
Details of Rcoeur’s view of finitude can be found in Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 156.
Eugene T. Long, Twentieth Century Western Philosophy of Religion, 1900–2000 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 431.
Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 161.
For an analysis of alienation in Ricoeur, see Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids, MN: Eerdmans, 1976), 28.
See also William David Hall, Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 2007, 66.
David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 213–14.
William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 100.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective (London: Continuum, 2004), 118.
See also Richard Kearney, “Ricoeur,” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 444.
Ursula King, Religion and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 80.
See also Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 239. Here is Ricoeur’s explanation: “It may be objected that the choice of this perspective is arbitrary, that it is, in the strong sense of the word, a prejudgment; such is not the case. The decision to approach evil through man and his freedom is not an arbitrary choice but suitable to the very nature of the problem. For in point of fact, evil’s place of manifestation is apparent only if it is recognized, and it is recognized only if it is taken up by deliberate choice. The decision to understand evil by freedom is itself an undertaking of freedom that takes evil upon itself. The choice of the center of perspective is already the declaration of a freedom that admits its responsibility, vows to look upon evil as evil committed, and avows its responsibility to see that it is not committed. It is this avowal that links evil to man, not merely as its place of manifestation, but as its author. This act of taking-upon-oneself creates the problem; it is not a conclusion but a starting point. Even if freedom should be the author of evil without being the root origin of it, the avowal would place the problem of evil in the sphere of freedom. For if man were responsible for evil only through abandon, only through a kind of reverse participation in a more radical source of evil than his freedom, it would still be the avowal of his responsibility that would permit him to be in contact with that root origin.” Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlvi–xlvii.
See also Ernest Keen, Depression, Self Consciousness, Pretending and Guilt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), 90.
See, for details, Patrick Downey, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 106.
For a good analysis of Ricoeur’s myth of the fall, see Thomas L. Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical and Theological Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 146.
See, for further details, Rosalyn W. Berne, Nanotalk: Conversations with Scientists and Engineers about Ethics, Meaning, and Belief in the Development of Nanotechnology (London: Routledge, 2005), 267.
Also check Anthony C. Thiselton, Thiselton on Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, MN: Eerdmans, 2007), 48. For Ricoeur, “the limitation of an ethical vision of evil and of the world is already signified in the ambiguous structure of the myth of the fall: by positing evil, freedom is the victim of an Other. It will be the task of philosophic reflection to recapture the suggestions of that symbolics of evil, to extend them into all the domains of man’s consciousness, from the human sciences to speculations on the slave-will. If ‘the symbol gives thought,’ what the symbolics of evil gives to thought concerns the grandeur and limitation of any ethical vision of the world. For man, as he is revealed by this symbolics, appears no less a victim than guilty.” Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlix.
See David M. Rasmussen, Symbol and Interpretation (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974), 43.
Andrew Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 2005), 255.
Also see Paul Varo Martinson, A Theology of World Religions: Interpreting God, Self and World in Semitic, Indian, and Chinese Thought (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishing, 1987), 107.
Dan R. Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 26.
See also Stephen David Ross, Inexhaustibility and Human Being: An Essay on Locality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 137.
See also Paul Gifford, Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature: Deciphering Eros (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 45–48.
Jeffrey W. Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Onto-theological Condition (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 104.
See Charles A. Kelbley, Introduction to History and Truth: Essays, by Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), xix.
For details about transcendence and immanence in Ricoeur, see Richard L. Lanigan, Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenological Theory of Existential Communication (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Verlag, 1991), 93.
Scott Lash, Another Modernity, a Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 158.
Cf. Richard Freadman, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 318.
Aloysius Rego, Suffering and Salvation: The Salvific Meaning of Suffering in the Later Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx (Leuven, BE: Peeters, 2006), 325.
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ, the Christian Experience in the Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1990), 31–32.
Marguerite Abdul-Masih, Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Frei: A Conversation on Method and Christology (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 88–89.
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1963), 64.
These experiences have authority; see Kathleen McManus, Unbroken Communion: The Place and Meaning of Suffering in Edward Schillebeeckx (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 34.
See Erik Borgman, Edward Schillebeeckx: A Theologian in His History (London: Continuum, 2004), 210.
Edward Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 56.
Edward Schillebeeckx, Church, the Human Story of God (London: SCM Press, 1990), 5–6.
John Westerdale Bowker, The Sacred Neuron: Extraordinary New Discoveries Linking Science to Religion (London: IB Tauris Publishers, 2005), 188n19.
Don Cupitt, Sea of Faith: Christianity in Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 251.
Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 96–97.
See, for details, Don Cupitt, Creation out of Nothing (London: SCM Press, 1990), 129.
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© 2010 Corneliu C. Simuţ
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Simuţ, C.C. (2010). Radical Christian Thought in Mid Postmodernity. In: Traditionalism and Radicalism in the History of Christian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113145_6
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