Symbolic nature of a Christian Existence according to Ricoeur and Chauvet

Ivana Noble 

In this article I am going to explore ways of interpreting a Christian existence, as proposed by two major French contemporary thinkers, Paul Ricoeur and Louis-Marie Chauvet. But, perhaps, I should warn the reader right at the beginning, the title were misleading if it would rise expectations that I am to offer expositions on what a Christian existence is. My interest has to do more with a question: How to exist as Christians? The question which provoked Ricoeur and Chauvet to offer their reflections. I will argue that if we know the "how" to exist as Christians, the "what" of a Christian existence may fall into place.[1] The "how" to exist as Christians, then, is a combination of understanding and acting, where both takes place within communication with God, with the world in which we live, with other people as well as with different layers of ourselves. Both Ricoeur and Chauvet lead us to the realm of hermeneutics, as they relate the question of how to exist as Christians to how to interpret a Christian existence. This is where the notion of a symbolic nature of the subject matter comes into place. In order to make it possible for ourselves and for others to exist as Christians, we need to interpret this existence, and to interpret it in a way, as David Tracy says, which discloses truth ‘of genuinely new possibilities for human life'.[2] In other words, we must ask: What must appear in every good interpretation of existing as a Christian? And how are the possibilities of a new meaning and truth disclosed in it?[3] Ricoeur with his background in a Protestant tradition considers the difference between idol and symbol as tools of communication, while Chauvet, being a Roman Catholic theologian, emphasizes the sacramental dimension of our communication with God and with each other. In this article I first clarify employed terminology, then examine Ricoeur's notion of a "redescription" of a world, which moves from an idol to a symbol, then Chauvet's hermeneutics of a sacramental mediation, and finally consider where their approaches are compatible and may benefit from each other insights.

1. Symbol and sacrament

If we trace etymological roots of the word symbol, first we encounter a Greek verb µ , which is translated as to talk, to think, to meet or to contribute. This employment of µ places the concept to the heart of human communication. Symbols are to indicate more than one meaning - e.g. in the early Greek life - two halves of the same coin exchanged at the sale of land indicated the binding of two people in a contract. From there Stephen Happel in The New Dictionary of Theology develops a working definition: ‘A symbol is a complex of gestures, sounds, images, and/or words that evoke, invite, and persuade participation in that to which they refer.'[4] Happel continues: ‘This definition places symbols at one end of a spectrum of human communicative devices that extends from the most conventional signs (mathematical symbols, symbolic logic, stop signs) to the most polyvalent images of psychological, moral and religious values (dream symbols, narratives of guilt and innocence, the law of Moses, and the cross of Christ).'[5] Symbols are differentiated from signs. Signs give information, or offer direction. Symbols convey a plurality of meaning. Signs are constructed by social agreement, like traffic signs. Symbols emerge from the drama of human experience, like darkness and light, or water and oil. Happel states: ‘With their roots in our biological life, symbols direct our thoughts, desires, and actions, making pre-reflective demands on our psyches.'[6] The plurality of meaning conveyed by symbols comes from their place in our process of knowing, where "images" of our five senses at every level of consciousness give content to our perception. The symbols can reach to our non-conceptual patterning of the sensible world, where they enable us to name our experiences, and to engage our affective, intellectual and moral developing capacities. Thus Happel concludes that ‘Human beings are symbolic creatures'[7] and as such they are capable of creating as well as deforming human culture:

‘Drawn by the pleasure of new insight, participants in symbols actualize, however briefly, the word the word disclosed by the metaphoric juxtapositions. They become what they imagine. As a result, symbols are not only crucial for the development and decline of the self, but also significant for the establishment of communal experience. Symbols can lead us towards self-transcendence, but can also fixate the confusions of self-destruction and social bias.' (998)

To understand symbols is to act in a different way, to "transcend" the limited and limiting horizon of ourselves. Yet, as Happel points out, symbols can also be tools of communicating a distorted reality, with all negative consequences, offer a participation in this distorted reality, ways of ordering experience and making sense, which involves distorted values, and contribute to a change of one's acting from better to worse. To use an example, we can look at a symbol of nation in Nazi Germany, or at a symbol of working class in former communist countries, or to be more up to date, at a symbol of success in the adverts of our consume culture. They offer a transformed insight, participation in a new stage of affairs, and invite to act in accordance with the "world" they represent as the best world, or in the worse situation, as the only world. Yet, these symbols are not lasting, as the distorted reality is not "another" reality, but a distortion of the one reality, which has its powers for regeneration.[8]

Having defined the concept of symbol as will be used in this article, let us move to the concept of sacrament and sacramentality. The English word sacrament comes from Latin sacramentum, by which Tertullian translated the Greek word µ . This concept is found in the Scriptures, but in a wider sense than refering to a ritual. In the Septuagint, Wisdom literature in particular, employs the word µ , when it speaks of God's saving actions in history and their eschatological dimension.[9] In the synoptics µ refers to ‘the secrets of the kingdom of heaven'[10], which jesus reveals through the parables, in Paul to Christ, who reveals Father's will to save and to restore all creation through the death and resurrection of his Son.[11] What is interesting, that when the New Testament texts speak of baptism, and eucharist, they do not use the word µ . This term in reference to rituals is employed first by by the Apostolic Fathers in polemic agains Gnostics and Manichees.[12] B. Cooke's definition of sacranments reflects the riches of the meaning of the word. He says that sacrament is not something which would primarily refer to religious actions. ‘"Sacrament" includes much more than liturgical rituals; as a matter of fact, it touches everything in our life that is distinctively human.'[13] Our human and religious experience is a constant point of reference. Cooke emphasizes that it took many centuries for a systematic explanatory definition of sacraments, and that they were first practised, and only then explained, and yet with the difficulty, because the point of sacraments is that they cannot be fully defined or explained, as they mediate a mystery of God's salvation.[14] Cooke insists that the sacraments make sense only in a wider context of what he sees as living sacramentally: ‘By the use of such symbols (words, gestures, artistic creations, etc.) We make ourselves present to one another, we share ourselves and our histories and our inmost feelings; we form human community ...We exist sacramentally.'[15] Cooke's approach emphasizes the horizontal dimension of sacraments, which, of course, cannot be isolated from the vertical one, from the communication with God. But even here, we are taken from any ambition to extend our encounter with God to an extra-human realm. We are led to Jesus Christ, God-man, as the primordial sacrament, where we are invited to relate to Christ's humanity.[16] Jesus is proclaimed as the embodiment of reconciliation, the church, then, as a locus of reconciliation, when the empasis is ‘on those visible situations in which the Church and the members of the Church give evidence in their actions and lives of God's grace and reconciliation.'[17] Osborne's Christological method, as he says, ‘begins with Jesus in his humanity as a sacrament, and only then proceeds to the Church as fundamental sacrament, and only then to the individual sacramental rituals.'[18] Bernhard Häring widens this perspective and in a contrast ascribes sacramentality to the whole of creation - through Christ, of which the church is to be a sacrament. He states that there is an eschatological dimension of "becoming" included. Indeed, the church fails to be the Lord's mystical body every day, is divided, self-rihteous and unrighteous at the same time, making shame to the Father, forgetting her Lord Jesus and suppressing the Spirit, yet cannot shake off herself the foundational seal: to be, to become the sacrament of God's love. Of the sacramentality of all creation he speaks as follows:

‘In all-embracing openness to the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anguishes, the experiences of all of mankind and with a strong sense of continuity, Catholic theology, hand in hand with the pastors, has to work for a convincing synthesis that brings the best of tradition home in order to help people to find the integration of faith and life...It is my conviction that a profound fidelity to the biblical vision of creation and redemption can enable us to present a sacramental model of the Church as well as of Christian life in a way that can overcome the gap between worship and morality. To this end I give great attention here to the sacramentality of all creation, of the "signs of times", and to the sacramentality of the human person as "image and likeness of God". The seven sacraments of the Church will be envisaged only after having considered how in Jesus Christ all things and events, but especially Christ-like persons and communities are tangible signs of God's loving, creative and redeeming presence.'[19]

This notion of sacrament, which relates the liturgical celebration to the whole of our relationships and actions and their impact is vitally important to be kept in mind, when we explore Chauvet's hermeneutics of a sacramental mediation. To repeat the point, let me finish this part with a quatation from Michael Barnes:

‘The whole of Christian living, in short, is seen to be sacramental through and through. This is not, however, to subscribe to some quasi-pantheistic sacredness dimly discernible "behind" natural appearances, but to say that at a variety of levels, from solemn ritual celebrations to the banality of human interchange, the suffering and the risen Lord is seen in faith to be present. Christian tradition has long recognized in the sacraments effective signs of God's presence within the world. Nowadays the emphasis has shifted dramatically to the saving encounter with the person of Christ as the sacrament, the visible sign of God's self-giving, who imparts to all creation its revelatory value. ...the tradition of practice based on the seven sacraments emerges in a new light: not so much a series of separate rituals as different aspects of the single and continuous engagement of God with the whole of creation. ...But, whether they [the different emphases] are concerned with the proclamation of the Word, with the celebration of the Eucharist, or with the earthy poetic vision of Hopkins, all are linked by one conviction. God is not an occasional visitor, interrupting the dark story of human tragedy with occasional flashes of brilliant light. Any spirituality, which ignores the signs of transcendence in the world - those revealed in a privileged moments ordained by the Church and those more distantly apprehended in the joy and sadness of people of all faiths and none - will lack the power to transform ordinary human living.'[20]

2. Ricoeur's symbolic "redescription" of a world

In the Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur proposes that modern hermeneutics ‘entertains the project of a revification of philosophy through contact with the fundamental symbols of consciousness.'[21]They are not alien to philosophy, according to Ricoeur, as ‘they are already in the element of speech.' They ‘rescue feeling and even fear from silence and confusion; they provide a language for avowal, for confession;' even, ‘in virtue of them, man remains language through and through.'[22] They lead us to the world of immediacy, and yet, it was precisely the immediacy, which create obstacles for a modern mind, when it was presented as a realm where a critical thinking was not allowed to enter. Thus critical mind reduced the immediacy in order to gain space for itself. Ricoeur follows this process and sees himself as participating in the stage, where the ‘children of criticism ...seek to go beyond criticism by means of criticism, by a criticism, which is no longer reductive but restorative.'[23] Ricoeur, thus speaks of three stages, the "first na vité" or the "primitive na vité", the pre-critical stage, which is dominated by the immediacy of belief. To exist as a Christian in this stage, seems to be easy, as the world is full of a non-problematic meaning, God is in everything, God speaks to us, acts in our lives and through our lives, we have a language to speak about it, to invite others to participate in this world of faith, immediacy and meaning as well. Perhaps, this stage is well known to people who had a strong conversion experience as adults. Yet this paradise of childhood, this oriented space, where we know where things are, is not lasting, as we experience tensions and conflicts, doubts arise, and we have to reevaluate the identity of our image about reality and to distance from the non-problematic faith, immediacy and meaning, as we find ourselves disoriented. This stage is called by Ricoeur "a loss of naivity" or a "hermeneutics of suspicion". It is the time of critical thinking. Ricoeur's main interest, however, lies in how to pass from this stage of adolescence to the third stage, which according to him, accomplishes a hermeneutical circle: ‘We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.'[24] This stage is called a "second na vité" and ‘aims to be a postcritical equivalent of the precritical hierophany.'[25] This is a stage of regaining the immediacy of the first na vité, yet without abandoning critical thinking. Both previous stages are integrated and challenged, as one enters a reoriented space, but no longer in a non-problematic way, it is a space where aporias are present, and yet do not distance us from the contact with reality, from belief, immediacy and the plentitude of meaning. Ricoeur says that ‘the second na vité would be a second Copernican revolution: being which posits itself in the Cogito has still discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the wholedoes not cease to share in being that challenges it in every symbol.'[26] Michael Kirwan summarizes, ‘Ricoeur's own theory of interpretation is conceived ...as a patern of the self going out of itself (into language) and returning to itself (in the appropriation of meaning)'.[27]

In The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics Ricoeur offers a distinction between an idol and a symbol as related to how we understand the basic Christian categories. On the example of the word Father he shows that if we allow our image to become a description of a supposed reality, we destroy it:

‘Biblical faith represents God, the God of the prophets and the God of the Christian Trinity, as a father; atheism[28] teaches us to renounce the image of the father. Once overcome as idol, the image of the father can be recovered as symbol. This symbol is a parable of the foundation of love; it is the counterpart, within a theology of love, of the progression that leads us from simple resignation to poetic life. I believe that such is the religious meaning of atheism. An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin to speak.'[29]

We can see this need of death of idle in the context of Ricoeur's project as presented in the Symbolism of Evil. To take Ricoeur's argument further, we can say that a struggle to remain within the boundaries of the first na vité at the expense of abandoning critique, the struggle which we can still see in our churches, turns symbols into idles. Ricoeur's symbolic redescription of a world, where we can exist as Christians, then, has to do away with the desire to live within a safe world of univocal meaning, which can be determined either by a church institution or by a community of believers claiming that they refer to "the" meaning of the Scriptures, or to "the" perspective of God, as if such positions were available to us humans. Ricoeur explores further the themes of self-reflection and self-deception, of the conflicting interpretations, rules of metaphorical and narrative language, the otherness around as well as within ourselves. Also a biblical interpretation and the challenge of working out the language for the sacred remain among his long term interests.[30] They contribute from different angles to examination of a symbolic discourse and its dialectic. He examines how it is possible to speak of a meaning of poems, narratives, and literary or philosophical essays in order not to violate their language, and the form of life they represent. In his concept of discourse he relates even and meaning, and arrives at understanding of language as ‘the process by which private experience is made public.' He states further: ‘Language is the exteriorization thanks to which an impression is transcended and becomes an ex-pression ... There the solitude of life is for a moment, anyway, illuminated by the common light of discourse.'[31] But language is not a world of its own. Ricoeur emphasizes that ‘It is not even a world. But because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations, and because we orient ourselves comprehensively in those situations, we have something to say, we have experience to bring to language.'[32] Thus by intention we point toward the extra-linguistic. The dialectic of event and meaning, is then developed as an inner dialectic of the meaning of discourse. Ricoeur speaks of meaning as "sense" and as "reference": ‘To mean is what the speaker does. But it is also what the sentence does.'[33] A sentence can make sense in terms of being coherent, but only a speaker uttering this sentence can refer to about what it is said, to the world, in which he lives. And this leads to Ricoeur's ultimate criterion of language as discourse: ‘Discourse in action and in use refers backwards and forwards, to a speaker and a world.'[34] J.M. Valdés summarizes that ‘Discourse "cannot fail to be about something"; "poetic texts speak about the world. But not in a descriptive way..."'[35] For Ricoeur, then, literature "redescribes" the world for its readers. However, this "redescription" is done by a language of metaphor and symbol. They help us to avoid the illusion of an absolute language or of absolute meaning. Ricoeur insists that a "message" contained in literature has a capacity to carry more than one meaning. This distinguish works of literature from scientific works, whose significations, according to Ricoeur, are to be taken literally.[36] Metaphor is for Ricoeur a touchstone of cognitive value of literary works. Their domain is in semantics. Understanding of symbol develops in Ricoeur's writings.[37] In the Interpretation Theory he states:

‘Within the symbol, ...there is something non-semantic as well as something semantic, it follows that a better hypothesis would be to approach the symbol in terms of a structure of double-meaning, which is not a purely semantic structure, which, as we shall see is the case with metaphor. ...the symbol will allow us to extend our theory of signification by allowing us to include within it, not only verbal double-meaning, but non-verbal double-meaning as well.'[38]

The semantic moment in symbol bears literal as well as figurative meaning. The non-semantic moment represents the power, which does not pass over completely into the articulation of meaning. It signifies and refers to the divine transcendence on one hand, on the other hand, to the sacred attested by everything that is. Ricoeur speaks both of God's transcending every attempt of our grasp, of the numinous, the other; and of a religious man's vision of the world, where the sacred is present in the fertility of the soil, the vegetative exuberance, the flourishing of the flock or fertility of the maternal's womb. And he shows that symbols come into language to the extent that the elements of the world themselves become transparent. They have roots in the power of being as well as in tradition.[39] Ricoeur's symbolic redescription of a world where we can exist as Christians, thus, leads to the continuity of tradition, and yet varied multitude of meaning. It involves a desire for and an openness to the critical immediacy, where God is allowed to be other than our images of "him", and, yet, present. It is not a nostalgic longing for the lost world of the first na vité, where everything had its fixed place, but a wager. We have to risk losing the security of the immature ideas in order to be able to encounter reality anew, fresh, in order to understand who we are and who God is when the idle of both dies.

3. Chauvet's hermeneutics of sacramental mediation

Chauvet's approach, similarly to that of Ricoeur, starts with a critique of imprisoning reality into all explaining schemes. Chauvet's critique is addressed to metaphysic and he argues for a methodological shift in contemporary theology, from the metaphysical to the symbolic. Chauvet is aware that metaphysical tradition of the West cannot be reduced to one approach, but he speaks about a variety of diverse forms of the philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks, which is named "metaphysics". At most we can speak of a "family resemblance" of the unconscious logic underlying these approaches, namely that they aim at explaining the totality of being, which Chauvet identifies as onto-theology. He accepts that the best of these approaches were aware of their own conceptual limits, and did not think that we can describe being "as it is".[40] Rather, metaphysics and onto-theology are methodological concepts, showing the main interests of these approaches and depicting the foundational ways of thinking. To move from the metaphysical or from the onto-theological, then, is not to move from one meta-theory to another, but rather to understand a change of an ‘epistemological terrain for our thinking activity. Chauvet recalls Marin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as the ‘ongoing confusion between the entity and Being' [41]. This, however, is to be examined not as a failure, but as an event, which proceeds ‘"from a revelation of being," but it has remained "unaware" of this revelation'.[42] What is to be overcome is an understanding the reality of being as a ‘stock-in-trade', where each thing, in order to "be" real, is to be explained. Then, instead of crossing metaphysics out, it is to be related to the very source of its life, ‘the truth of Being'.[43] Being is not an entity - a "beingness", rather it is a non-thing, it ‘never ceases to hide within a difference which constitutes it',[44] it faces human beings, we are thrown into Being.[45] From Emmanuel Levinas Chauvet takes a critique of the obsession with "identity", and a turn of attention, where the the Other is constitutive for the subject and gives it its lost identity.[46]

Critique of metaphysics provides Chauvet with tools when he enters the main field of his interest, sacramental theology.[47] Sacramental theology, according to him runs two risks, one of becoming narrow legalism, the other of being abstract speculation: ‘Like every branch of theology, it must negotiate constantly between conceptual knowledge (without which it would no longer be theology, and therefore constructed discourse - "science" as the scholastics call it) and symbolic non-knowledge (without which it would no longer be respecting the mystery of God)...it must not forget to derive the concept from its living source: the symbols deployed by liturgical action.'[48] Chauvet asks, why the symbolic aspect, which is so necessary for sacramental theology, has been often ignored:

‘The initial question of the present study may be formulated as follows: How did it come about that, when attempting to comprehend theologically the sacramental relation with God expressed most fully under the term "grace," the Scholastics (and here we will consider only Thomas Aquinas) singled out for privileged consideration the category of "cause"?'[49]

In other words, why their approach was dominated by the conceptual knowledge, the need to explain how is God related to its creation and vice versa, at the expense of the symbolic non-knowledge, which Chauvet considers in terms of hermeneutics of mediation. He takes insights from philosophy of language as well as from Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalyses, and relate them to the symbolic communication of grace, which aims at restoring faith and its basic attitudes of gratitude and generosity, which lay at heart of sacramental theology.[50] In the symbolic order held by Chauvet, grace is an irreducible gift, grace comes first, it is ‘always preceding and necessitated by nothing', it is not justified, it is not reduceable to any "value", whether conceptual, physical or moral. A way to grace is also a way towards Heideggerian Being, it is spoken in terms of a fundamental openness, ‘an attitude of listening and welcome toward something ungraspable by which we are already grasped; ...a gracious attitude of "letting be" and "allowing oneself to be spoken" which requires to renounce all ambition for mastery.'[51]

Language enable us to ex-press and, according to Chauvet, makes ‘the "corporality" of the faith'[52] possible. Language constitutes "a place", where we come into being. In this context Chavet speaks of ‘the triple body which makes us into believers': first, the social body, the Church with its network, interpretation of history, life and the universe; second, the traditional body, which within the Church supports the whole of ritual, through references to the words and deeds of Christ attested by the apostolic witness of the Scriptures; third, the cosmic body of a universe received as the gift of the Creator, from which symbolic elements of water, bread and wine, oil ... are recognized as a "sacramental" mediation of God's acting in the Spirit.[53]

Chauvet emphasizes the "materiality" of faith as a contrary to what he calls ‘a nostalgia for an ideal and immediate presence to oneself, to others, and to God.'[54] Faith, to be a Christian faith, must give a seal, a character on one's body, the character testifying the belonging to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, in the body of the Church, by means of participating in her tradition receiving and offering the universe as a gift. In this light he interprets the story of disciple going to Emmaus.[55] Here he starts with a key question: ‘How does one pass from non-faith to faith?'[56] In order to arrive at an answer Chauvet analyses the structure of the turn-around, the transformation that gradually takes part in the disciples in that story:

‘In the first section of the story (vv.13-17, up until their first stopping on the road), the two disciples have in effect abandoned their mission; in turning away from Jerusalem, they are also in effect turning their backs on their previous experience with Jesus. They talk 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. Consequently, their eyes are "kept from recognising him"; their spirits, like their eyes, are shut. For that matter, everything is shut. They have allowed themselves to be sealed up together with the dead body of Jesus in the constricted place of his death, the sepulcher, whose mouth has been blocked with a huge stone. Their past is dead; in any case, it has no future.'[57]

Chauvet points to a transition from a dualistic to a triangular relation, when, instead of speaking to each other in a close circle, they open themselves to a stranger. He enters into a conversation with them, and let them name their situation, let them tell their story. He first appeals to their memory, then makes a link with the Scriptures: ‘remember... slow of heart all that the prophets have declared ...everything ...must be fulfilled',[58] and offers a rereading of all the Scriptures.[59] Chauvet says, ‘Instead of holding forth with self-assured pronouncements on God, one must begin by listening to a word as the word of God. The reference to the Scriptures as a third agency plays a role that is of capital importance here. In allowing Jesus to open the Scriptures for them, the two disciples begin to enter into an understanding of the "real", different from what they previously thought evident.'[60] They urge the stranger to stay, and in his breaking bread, when his word becomes flesh, their eyes begin to open, they recognise the stranger in his radical strangeness. But their eyes open to an emptiness, he vanished from their sight. But it is emptiness full of presence. The disciples recognize the Risen Lord, they receive it as a gift of the good news and return it as a gift in terms of Christian witness. Chauvet emphasizes that one is not possible without the other. Then Chauvet states: ‘In the last analysis, faith can exist only if it expresses itself in a life of witness.'[61]

Which insight does Chauvet gain for his sacramental theology here? His approach is called topological, as he emphasizes the "topos", the place where the sacramental is present, and heavily relying on Luke, Chauvet develops the sacramentality of the Church as the symbolic mediation of Christ. Chauvet's topological interpretation, nevertheless, does not lead to an uncritical glorification of the Church. Inspired by Derrida and Levinas, Chauvet finally claims: ‘Those who reject the Church in order to find Christ by themselves misunderstand [Christ has departed]... But those who live too comfortably in the Church also misunderstand it: they are then in danger of forgetting that the Church is not Christ and that if, in faith, it is recognized as the privileged place of his presence, it is also, in this same faith, the most radical mediation of his absence. ...The Church radicalizes the vacancy of the place of God.'[62] The blank space of God, then, Chauvet calls the ‘anti-name of God, the Spirit, ...which, while fully of God's very self, workd to subvert in us every idolatrous attempt at manipulating God (whether at the conceptual, ethical or ritual level...)'.[63]

Chauvet's sacramental rewriting of Christian existence takes symbolic theology into where our faith meets our bodily existence. Chauvet spoke of this in his understanding of the disciples facing the absence of God full of presence, which is now mediated in their corporality, as well as in his elaboration of alterity and the whole concept of creation as a gift, received and offered. He repeats throughout his book that ‘The corporality constitutive of human beings is the place of God.'[64] This is where we are given a share in faith, where we learn gratitude and generosity. There is, however, one less attractive feature of Chauvet's approach, namely the fact that his understanding of a Christian existence does not accept any other relation to God then mediated by the Church. In Chauvet hermeneutics of sacramental mediation we do not find a freedom for a prophet or for a mystic as a ballance to his Church-based corporality. We do not hear that besides our epicletic bond with the Spirit, the Spirit also blow where it wishes. This weakness needs to be complemented by other approaches, but there is also a contribution, which Chauvet can make by his relating of a symbolic understanding to a sacramental understanding, and emphasizing, that to understand is to participate.

4. Conclusion

Now, let me summarize in which sense Ricoeur and Chauvet speak of a symbolic interpretation of a Christian existence, where their approaches overlap, where they differ, and how they can enrich each other.

For both, Ricoeur and Chauvet, critique is a starting point. Ricoeur criticizes a loss of immediacy, meaning and faith in a culture, where a critical thinking dominates, and he ‘seek to go beyond criticism by means of criticism', which is not ‘reductive but restorative,'[65] opens up possibilities of a second, critical immediacy, of the world in which we can once again find our ways round, yet with an awareness that these are not the only ways with absolute quarantees. Chauvet's critique is directed to metaphysics and to onto-theology, basically to any attempts to explain the totality of being. He emphasizes that a thing in order to be real does not have to be explained. We need to be related to the very source of life, to allow reality of being to be revealed.[66]

Ricoeur emphasizes that an idle has to die so that a symbol can live, and relates this to any attempt of the absolutisation of language or of meaning. Christian existence is a symbolic existence, which we communicate in a symbolic language. In the symbolic language, there is something verbal and something non-verbal, and even the non-verbal has a double meaning.[67] It is just impossible to pin a single meaning down and say, it is the only right meaning. Ricoeur speaks of a semantic moment in symbol, that bears literal as well as figurative meaning, and the non-semantic moment, which cannot be fully articulated. It signifies and refers to both divine transcendence and divine immanence, to the awesome inexpressible mystery and to the sacred present in every element of our life. Chauvet's contrast is less striking, it is not an idle and symbol, but conceptual knowledge and symbolic non-knowledge. He says that without conceptual knowledge, there will be no theology as a science, and without symbolic non-knowledge, there will be no respect for the mystery of God. But the former has to find its life in the later, and not vice versa.[68] Thus, Chauvet employs the concept of symbol in a more restricted way that Ricoeur, and different modes of knowing are not placed within the symbolic, as with Ricoeur. And, although, a Christian existence is in its roots a symbolic existence, it needs also the non-symbolic science.

Both Ricoeur and Chauvet accord in emphasizing that to exist as Christians is to express ourselves in the life of witness,[69] and that this life involves a dialectic between the presence and the absence of God, a dialectic expressed in a multitude of ways. They even agree that the non-symbolic place of God has to remain empty, or otherwise while leaving the symbolic we would be entering the idolatrous. The continuity of truth-disclosure has to grow from the continuous contact with the reality of being, and from a symbolic expression within tradition. Ricoeur's wider concept of symbol, is perhaps more useful for spelling this out. Chauvet, at least, emphasizes, that any scientific theological reflection, must grow from the pre-conceptual non-knowledge.

Finally, Ricoeur operates primarily in a philosophical terrain, and from there he comments on theological themes. Chauvet employs insights from philosophy for a theological reflection. Therefore, where Ricoeur does remain silent, Chauvet speaks of grace as an irreduceable gift, which lays at roots of the symbolic order, the gift of the ‘ungraspable by which we are already grasped', which leads to a ‘gracious attitude of "letting be" and "allowing oneself to be spoken" which requires to renounce all ambition for mastery.'[70] The gift, which language enable us to ex-press and, makes ‘the "corporality" of the faith'[71] possible. As was stated before, Chauvet very strongly emphasizes the materiality of faith, faith incarnated in our bodily existence, faith embodied in the Church and communicated through the Church's sacramental mediation. For him faith is primarily participation. Ricoeur states that language constitutes "a place", where we come into being. And yet for him most of our being is dominated by solitude, not by corporality. Symbol is not materialised in a sacrament, in the way it is for Chauvet. The community of the Church is not the mediator of this materialisation, as it is in Chauvet. For Ricoeur faith is primarily orientation, which grows from the experience of the critical immediacy, the desired second na vité. In this context Ricoeur says that the ‘Language is the exteriorization thanks to which an impression is transcended and becomes an ex-pression ... There the solitude of life is for a moment, anyway, illuminated by the common light of discourse.'[72] While Chauvet emphasizes the need to belong, Ricoeur speaks of the need to risk, to wager. It is possible to recognise the heritage of the protestant and the catholic traditions behind these approaches, and it is also possible to see the need of their complementarity.

[1] I take this formulation from F.J. Laishley, who states: ‘Put it differently, my interest has mainly been in "how" of communication, the method, rather than in the content as such. The latter seems to me to fall into place when the former is understood.'(‘A Preface' to Passion for Critique: Essays in Honour of F.J. Laishley. eds. H.B. Browne & G. Griffith-Dickson, Síť, Praha, 1997:15.

[2]Tracy, D., The Analogical Imagination, SCM, London, 1981:67.

[3]Hermeneutical method as applied by Tracy has a practical advantage and a theoretical weakness, it 'is dependent upon the assumption that "classics" - understood as those texts, events, images, persons, rituals and symbols which are assumed to disclose permanent possibilities of meaning and truth - actually exist' (Tracy, 1981:68).

[4]Happel, S., ‘Symbol', in The New Dictionary of Theology. ed. J.K. Komonchak, M. Collins, D.A. Lane, Gill & Maccmillan, Dublin, 1990: 997.

[5]Happel, 1990:997.

[6]Happel, 1990:997.

[7]Happel, 1990:997; this theme is developed by Bernard Lonergan, who defines a man as the "symbolic animal":'Traditionally man was defined with abstract generality as the zoon logikon, the animal rationale, the rational animal. More concretely today he is regarded as the symbolic animal, whose knowledge is mediated by symbols, whose actions are informed by symbols, whose existence in its most characteristic features is constituted by a self-understanding and by commitments specified by symbols.' (Lonergan, B.J., ‘First Lecture: Religious Experience', in A Third Collection. Paulist, Mahwah, N.J. , 1985: 115)

[8]To express this theologically, grace is in a fundamental sense constitutive for reality.

[9]Cf. Wis 6:22; Dan 2: 28,47.

[10]Cf. Mt 13:11; Mk 4:11; Lk 8:10.

[11]Cf. 1Cor 2: 1-10; Rom 16: 25-26; Col 1: 26-27; 2:2; 4:3; Eph 1: 9-10; 3:3-12; 1Tim 3:16.

[12]See K.W. Irwin, ‘Sacrament', in The New Dictionary of Theology. eds. J.K. Komonchak, M. Collins, D.A. Lane, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1990, 910-922.

[13]Cooke, B., Sacraments and Sacramentality. Twenty Third Publications, Mystic, Connecticut, 1985:2.

[14]K.B. Osborne states: ‘one did nots start witha generic name, sacrament, nor a generic theory, sacramental theology, and then develop an understanding of Baptism, Eucharist , etc. Rather one starts with individual rites, Baptism, Eucharist, and only in the most gradual way did a unifying "theology of sacraments" develop.' (Sacramental Theology: A general Introduction. Paulist press, new York, Mahwah, 1988:24.) R.A. Duffy in his Introductory chapter on ‘Sacraments in General' identifies life of the church as a source of sacramentality. In other words, to speak of sacramentality is to speak of sacraments, and : ‘To speak of "sacraments" in a general way is to deprive them of their normal setting, the liturgical life of the church.' From there we can describe ‘the shared characteristics of all sacramental actions and thus indirectly note the unique purpose of individual sacraments. Liturgy' according to Duffy, ‘is a more encompassing term than sacrament and refers to the whole range of actions and words of praise and thanksgiving that the church gives to God. Sacraments are highly focussed action-words within this larger liturgical context.' (In Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, vol. II, ed. by F. Schüssler Fiorenza and J.P. Galvin, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1991, 183-210: 183)

[15]Cooke, 1985: 54.

[16]Osborne points out: ‘Only Jesus in his humanity is a sacrament; to apply sacramentality to his divinity is toying with subordinationism.' (1988: 47)

[17]Osborne, 1988:37.

[18]Osborne, 1988: 47.

[19]Häring, B., The Sacraments in a Secular Age: A vision in depth on sacramentality and its impact on moral life, St Paul Publications, 1976:1-2.

[20]Barnes, M. ‘Editorial' to Spirituality and Sacramentality, The Way Supplement 1999/94: 8.

[21]Ricoeur, P., Symbolism of Evil. Beacon Press, Boston, 1967: 351.

[22]Ricoeur, 1967:350.

[23]Ricoeur, 1967: 350.

[24]Ricoeur, 1967: 351.

[25]Ricoeur, 1967: 352.

[26]Ricoeur, 1967: 356.

[27]Kirwan, M., ‘Theological Hermeneutics II: Ricoeur, Jeanrond, Tracy', A lecture for the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Prague, 21^st April 1999.

[28]Atheism, which, according to Ricoeur, has a religious meaning, and is thus, worth examining, is represented by Nietzscheand Freud. Ricoeur states: ‘atheism is not limited in meaning to the mere negation and destruction of religion, but ...rather, it opens up the horizon for something else, for a type of faith that might be called ...a postreligious faith or a faith for a postreligious age. ...it looks back toward what it denies and forward toward what it makes possible.' ( Ricoeur, P., The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Northwestern University Press, Evaston , 1974:440).

[29]Ricoeur, 1974:467.

[30]These interests are reflected in Ricoeur's main works: Fallible man (1965), Symbolism of Evil (1967), Freud and Philosophy (1970), Conflict of Interpretations (1974), Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976), The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation and meaning in Language (1977), Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980), Hermeneutics and Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Acts and Interpretation (ed. J.B. Thompson, 1981), Time and Narrative (3 volumes, 1983-5), Oneself as Another (1992), Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1992).

[31] Ricoeur, P., Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 1976:19.

[32] Ricoeur, 1976:20-21.

[33]Ricoeur, 1976:19.

[34]Ricoeur, 1976:22.

[35]Valdés, J.M., ‘Ricoeur', in The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. eds. M. Gorden and M. Kreiswirth, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, London, 1994, 623-625: 624. The quotation is from Ricoeur, 1976: 36-36.

[36]See Ricoeur, 1976: 45.

[37]Ricoeur in the Interpretation Theory refers to his earlier writings, The Symbolism of Evil and Freud and Philosophy in particular, where he defined his hermeneutics directly by means of symbol, and states that now he wants to take first more linguistics into account, that leads to his emphasis on a double-meaning of symbol, as used in the lecture. See, 1976, 45-46.

[38] Ricoeur, 1976: 45-46.

[39]Ricoeur, P., Time and Narrative. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984: 70. S. M. Levi points out that in Ricoeur the narrative identity ‘develops through the interplay of what he calls "sedimented models of life account (typologies of literary genre, e.g. myths, popular stories, tragedies) and our imaginative re-interpretation of textual givens, narrating our own story against the backdrop of traditional forms.' (Levi, S.M., ‘Suffering and Post-Modern Consciousness: The Imaginative Appropriation of Tradition in Contemporary Culture', Anglican Theological Review, 1998 (LXXX:3), 320-337: 327)

[40] Chauvet shows examples of this awareness of the limints, as he mentions Plotinus's notion of oion ("such as"), the quasi ("such as") of the Latin thinkers, or Thomas's esse ("being"), which also plays a critical role. See Symbol and Sacrament: A sacramental reinterpretation of Christian existence. The Liturgical Press, Collegeville MN, 1995:8.

[41]Cf. Heidegger, M., Le retour au fondement de la métaphysique, Q.1, 29 , in Chauvet, 1995:47.

[42]Cf. Heidegger, Le retour, Q.1: 24, in Chauvet, 1995:47.

[43]Cf. Heidegger, Le retour, Q.1, 24-25, in Chauvet, 1995: 47.48.

[44]See Heidegger, Contribution to the Question about Being. 1955, in Chauvet, 1995:49.

[45] For Heidegger to overcome metaphysics is finally to make metaphysics possible. Chauvet prefers to move into speaking about symbolic theology.

[46]Chauvet sees a double-sidedness of Levinas's approach, and although partially acceps its emphasis on the alterity, he accords with the following critique presented by Derrida : ‘None have struggled more vigorously than E. Levinas to liberate themselves from the Greek logos and to challenge the Greek tradition from the view point of the Jewish; that is to challenge Being (impersonal, anonymous, violent reducer of otherness to the totality of the same) with the Other (pure eruption and rupture bursting through the "Face," the unifying pretensions and the ultimately totalitarian essence of the Greek logos).' ( Derrida, J., "Violence et métaphysique," in L'écriture et la différence. Seuil, Paris, 1967:196; in Chauvet, 1995:46)

[47]Louis-Marie Chauvet is a professor of Sacramental Theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris, among his books and articles are Du Symbolique au Symbole. Essai sur les sacrements (Paris 1979), Symbole et Sacrement. Une relecture sacramentelle del'existence chrétienne (Paris, 1987), co ed. Liturgy and the Body (Concilium 1995/3) Illness and Healing (check)

[48]See Chauvet, L.-M.‘The Liturgy in its Symbolic Space', Liturgy and the Body, Concilium 1995/3, ed. L.-M. Chauvet and F.K. Lumbala, SCM, London; Orbis Books Maryknoll, 29-39: 36-37.

[49] Chauvet, 1995:7.

[50] ‘the communication of grace is to be understood, not according to the "metaphysical" scheme of cause and effect, but according to the symbolic scheme of communication through language, communication supremely effective because it is through language that the subject comes forth in its relations to other subjects within a common "world" of meaning. It is precisely a new relation of places between subjects, a relationship of filial and brotherly and sisterly alliance, that the sacramental "expression" aims at instituting or restoring in faith.' (Chauvet, 1995:139-140)

[51]Chauvet, 1995: 446.

[52]Chauvet, 1995: 152.

[53]See Chauvet, 1995:152.

[54] Chauvet, 1995:154. In this Chauvet is a true son of Aquinas, who argued for mediated presence of God against Bonaventure's immediate presence. However, unlike Aquinas, Chauvet disregards the other position, without exploring its possibilities.

[55]Cf. Lk 24: 13-35.

[56] Chauvet, 1995: 161.

[57]Chauvet, 1995: 167.

[58]Lk 24, 6.25-27.

[59]See Lk 24: 44-45.

[60]Chauvet, 1995:168.

[61]Chauvet, 1995:164.

[62] Chauvet, 1995: 177.178. He also points out that the Church's mediation of Christ is a mediation of God's kenosis. See 1995: 509.

[63]Chauvet, 1995: 517.

[64]Chauvet, 1995: 531.

[65]Ricoeur, 1967: 350.

[66]See Chauvet, 1995: 47.48.

[67] Ricoeur, 1976: 45-46.

[68]See Chauvet, Liturgy and the Body, Concilium 1995/3: 36-37.

[69]Chauvet, 1995:164.

[70]Chauvet, 1995: 446.

[71]Chauvet, 1995: 152.

[72] Ricoeur, 1976:19.