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Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man
Does the philosophy of Martin Heidegger represent the emergence of a secular anthropology that requires religious thought to redefine the religious dimension in human existence? In this critical response, Lacoste confronts the ultimate definition of human nature, the humanity of the human. He explores that definition through an analysis of the “absolute” as a phenomenological datum.
Lacoste establishes a conception of human nature that opens possibilities for religious experience and religious identity in view of Heidegger’s profound challenge. He develops a phenomenology of the liturgy, and subjects the categories of “experience,” “place,” and “human existence” to careful examination. Making a strong case for the affective nature of religious experience, he sides with Schleiermacher against Hegel in associating religion with affectivity rather than logic. Such affectivity, he claims, can be more rational than reason as framed in Hegelian logic.
Lacoste establishes a conception of human nature that opens possibilities for religious experience and religious identity in view of Heidegger’s profound challenge. He develops a phenomenology of the liturgy, and subjects the categories of “experience,” “place,” and “human existence” to careful examination. Making a strong case for the affective nature of religious experience, he sides with Schleiermacher against Hegel in associating religion with affectivity rather than logic. Such affectivity, he claims, can be more rational than reason as framed in Hegelian logic.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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October 29, 2018
This book is about the liturgical existence of humans living in the midst of the phenomenal world Lacoste likes to characterize repeatedly as the "chiaroscuro," the world of matutinal time where beings appear in the variety of shades in the play of light and darkness ("the chiaroscuro is an essential characteristic of our worldliness" (87)). If ontology is fundamental, everything appears in chiaroscuro in the matutinal light. In contrast to this proposition, Lacoste proposes liturgical existence kept in vigil at night, in vespers, into the dawn of the next day. If the mode of existence in the phenomenal world is characterized by care (as in Heidegger), the liturgical existence is maintained in the mode of vigil, the eschoological awaiting for the future in which time is not characterized as dasein's temporality--in which dasein's future is said to be "coming-toward oneself from one's most peculiar possibility" (Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 265)--but as "restlessness" and "patience" in the mode of being-before-God, coram Dei. Liturgy "subordinate[s] care to restlessness and facticity to vocation" (85). The time of liturgy ("the kairos of liturgy" (81)) is the time of "an exposition to the Absolute [God]" (87), which is to be distinguished from the chronos of the world. (Kairos means "due measure," "the right time for action," "the critical moment," "the right point.") Lacoste writes:
The "eschatological I" in the time of kairos is restless (the Augustine's term) because God does not yet entirely take told of the world. The eschatological I is still subject to the laws of history and politics in which one exists in "our past pacts with evil" (96) and in all too often forgetfulness of God ("We have ourselves all made pacts with evil and forgotten God" (98)). We can never rid of our "empirical I" that for Lacoste includes the transcendental I of Husserl and the ecstatic existence of dasein in Heidegger ("The laws that govern the life of consciousness in the world cannot be transgressed; the I [le moi] cannot cease to be determined as an opening onto the world" (62)); or, "... being-in-the-world and being-before-God are thoroughly intertwined" (68). Then, how does "the eschatological I" exist in the world? What is the mode of "being-before-God" (65, coram dei) possible in the midst of being-in-the-world? To put it in the classical theological terms, how does the church, which is not of the world, exist in the world? Lacoste answers: marginally and inchoately. Duplicity is inevitable in the "liturgical unhappiness of consciousness" (70, the partially Hegel term), requiring the eschatological vigilance in the midst of the vicissitudes of the world.
Nonetheless, liturgy is a subversion of, bracketing of, or violence to the being-in-the-world: "Liturgy contests our being-in-the-world and subverts it" (65); "Liturgy is the bracketing of being-in-the-world" (76, the partially Husserl term); "[w]e have defined liturgy as the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter" (39); or, "[l]iturgy contests our being-in-the-world and subverts it" (65). How does liturgy subvert being? By way of "entr' acte" (67, 73) or "between acts" (73; or "entr'acte" or "entracte" (meaning "between the acts" or "the intervals"). ("Entr'acte" can mean a pause between two parts of a stage production, synonymous to an intermission, but it more often (in English) indicates a piece of music performed between acts of a theatrical production. Wikipedia.). Liturgy does not replace work and labor that fuels the world but poses momentary and intermittent divergence. Liturgy is divertissement. Under the prestigious title of opus Dei ("the work of God" with the objective genitive, 78), liturgy might seem useless: "Liturgy is the absence of work [oeuvre]" (79). It could be a waste of time: "We have better things to 'do' than to pray, and when we pray, we actually 'do' nothing" (73); "... he who prays makes himself symbolically absent from the world and wishes to take definitive leave of the dialectics that [according to Hegel] make up history" (54). Liturgy sets itself apart from work and labor and from the time of the world. Time (in the sense of chronos) stands still; and nothing happens in the liturgy. No event or beings appear in liturgy. The world is bracketed in the liturgy in two ways: in terms of place or topos and time: "Liturgy is a nonplace [...]." "... liturgy is symbolically constituted as a 'nontime'... (83).
If the ancient Greek temples, according to Heidegger, harbor the world arising from the earth's reserve, the church sets itself apart from the world while still existing in the world. The narthex stands in between the sanctuary (the Holy of the Holies) and the world. It holds the place in tension of the what the classical theology calls 'already and not yet.' Christ (the fullness of God) has come and is yet to come; we live in the "unhappy" time of the "in-between." The church as a place symbolizes this eschatological tension, thus subverting the worldly sense of the place: "The church does not ... put itself forward as a space established for definitive existence, and its narthex does not separate the unhappiness of history from the happiness of the eschaton" (37). If the Greek temple harbors the world arising from the dark reserve of the earth (to which the mortals return), the church stands in-between the time of the 'already and not yet.' The Holy of Holies is not completely sealed off by the northex. In fact, it is exposed to the world through the northex. Thus, the church subverts the Greek sense of the place as the dwelling of mortals in the company of gods held together in the simultaneous unity and tearing apart of the fourfold (as described by Heidegger in his essay "The Thing" and "The Origin of the Work of Art." Lacoste writes: "liturgy comes to break the circular return from world to earth and from earth to world" (32). The figure of the pilgrims offers another "symbolic subversion of place" (30). The pilgrimage or the xeniteia (Peter Brown's term referring to a "bedouinization" of Christian asceticism (29)) does not belong to a particular place "because every place appears to him as world, and he is struck by the foreignness of his presence everywhere" and "because every land offers itself to him as a homeland" (30). The world is both home and not home for the pilgrim: "[the pilgrim monk's] cell is for him but a place, not a residence he has built in which to live" (31); "the liturgical experience prevents man from dwelling peaceably on the earth" (31); "[t]he relation to place he establishes is ... a relation of indifference" (32); "the earthly formally represents the non-place in which liturgy symbolically brackets topology" (32).
(Note the symbolism of the pilgrims and the church here. They are not metaphors for Lacoste but concrete physical reality, like the icons, that symbolically subverts the logic of the world. Do icons not subvert being, not as metaphors but as symbols? Icons as symbols are not representative art work; because they bring the spiritual reality to the physical objects, subverting and bracketing the phenomenality of being or of the work of art, the chiaroscuro of the world.)
In the kairos of liturgy the chronos of the world is subverted so as to confer "an absolute beginning," where "our past pacts with evil" may receive absolution, where "the dawn of a new day and the resumption of our worldly tasks" may begin anew (94). How is this possible? The time of liturgy is the time for the "remembrance of God." God is not and cannot be recalled from the past into the present, like any other things in our memory. Such memory is not what we invoke when we pray in memory of the living, the dead, and the saints during the liturgy; or when the robber asks Jesus to "remember" him hanging on the cross next to Jesus' (Luke 23: 42). Remembering is not the work of our consciousness but that of God. We pray that God would remember the living, the dead, and the saints. When the Orthodox Christians pray, "May his or her memory be eternal," we are not praying so that the memory of the dead will last in the annals of history but in the Book of Life.
To remember God is to invoke Him, to go back to the origin, to the immemorial past (as Levinas would say): "The man who prays provides himself with access to the originary" (95). He stands in "[the] relation to the Absolute" (95), as liturgy enables him to traverse distance "from the origin" and "from the beginning" (95): "But liturgy annuls the distance [from the origin] by subordinating our commerce with world and earth to our relation to the Absolute and [from the beginning] by proposing the field of signification that Kierkegaard contemplated in the concept of 'repetition'" (95). Liturgy traverses the distances from God and one's ethical distance from the fellow humans. This happens "when the Absolute comes or inter-venes [vient ou inter-vient] between our wrongdoing and ourselves" (96). In the kairos of liturgy held in vigil of the night, "[having l]ed toward the originary, we can recognize that we are unambiguously promised to good rather than to evil; and if the Absolute is known to us as a God who forgives, this symbolic irrelevance can find itself combined with an absolution of our past pacts with evil" (96). The God who is invoked in the liturgy is the Christian God of forgiveness and of absolution. Lacoste's description of God's intervension in absolution ("the presence of the Absolute at Golgotha" (96)) reaches the article of faith and thus borders on the edge of philosophy. He writes:
If, as Levinas says, ontology runs up against death, liturgy subverts death as dasein's extreme possibility, which is "not to be out striped," as Heidegger insists. In contrast, Lacoste poignantly asks: "Are we to exist for God or for death?" (66). We cannot claim, as Paul does: "O death, where is your sting?" Death is inevitable. But even if death is inevitable, it does not have the last word: "The chiaroscuro of the world tells us that we can indeed exist in the presence of God, but without this presence annulling the rule of death" (66); "... so long as liturgy remains in the margins of experience--and that is its historical determination--the difference between being-toward-death and being-before-God must remain" (66). We live in the time of duplicity, in-between time of the 'already' and 'not yet': "Our duplicity actually maintains an essential link with the chiaroscuro of the world" (65-66). Death cannot overcome our being-before-God.
Lacoste rejects Levinas's insistence on the primacy of ethics: "Ethical exigency is not in evidence in a primary way" (72). There is no separation between the ethical and the phonemonal: "ethics is an fact involved within the chiaroscuro of the world" (75). But liturgy interrupts the order of the world and provides the possibility of a new beginning. Liturgy precedes ethics:
The first part of the book mainly interacts with Heidegger. Lacoste interacts with Hegel in the second part of the book.
If the visibility of the church's presence recalls the claim that the Absolute holds over us, it nevertheless is our dwelling place only at intervals, when we accept that our time is the kairos of the encounter with God, and no longer the chronos that is the measure of our presence in the world" (36).The kairos of liturgy is the time of intervals that subverts and interrupts the time of the world: chronos.
The "eschatological I" in the time of kairos is restless (the Augustine's term) because God does not yet entirely take told of the world. The eschatological I is still subject to the laws of history and politics in which one exists in "our past pacts with evil" (96) and in all too often forgetfulness of God ("We have ourselves all made pacts with evil and forgotten God" (98)). We can never rid of our "empirical I" that for Lacoste includes the transcendental I of Husserl and the ecstatic existence of dasein in Heidegger ("The laws that govern the life of consciousness in the world cannot be transgressed; the I [le moi] cannot cease to be determined as an opening onto the world" (62)); or, "... being-in-the-world and being-before-God are thoroughly intertwined" (68). Then, how does "the eschatological I" exist in the world? What is the mode of "being-before-God" (65, coram dei) possible in the midst of being-in-the-world? To put it in the classical theological terms, how does the church, which is not of the world, exist in the world? Lacoste answers: marginally and inchoately. Duplicity is inevitable in the "liturgical unhappiness of consciousness" (70, the partially Hegel term), requiring the eschatological vigilance in the midst of the vicissitudes of the world.
Nonetheless, liturgy is a subversion of, bracketing of, or violence to the being-in-the-world: "Liturgy contests our being-in-the-world and subverts it" (65); "Liturgy is the bracketing of being-in-the-world" (76, the partially Husserl term); "[w]e have defined liturgy as the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter" (39); or, "[l]iturgy contests our being-in-the-world and subverts it" (65). How does liturgy subvert being? By way of "entr' acte" (67, 73) or "between acts" (73; or "entr'acte" or "entracte" (meaning "between the acts" or "the intervals"). ("Entr'acte" can mean a pause between two parts of a stage production, synonymous to an intermission, but it more often (in English) indicates a piece of music performed between acts of a theatrical production. Wikipedia.). Liturgy does not replace work and labor that fuels the world but poses momentary and intermittent divergence. Liturgy is divertissement. Under the prestigious title of opus Dei ("the work of God" with the objective genitive, 78), liturgy might seem useless: "Liturgy is the absence of work [oeuvre]" (79). It could be a waste of time: "We have better things to 'do' than to pray, and when we pray, we actually 'do' nothing" (73); "... he who prays makes himself symbolically absent from the world and wishes to take definitive leave of the dialectics that [according to Hegel] make up history" (54). Liturgy sets itself apart from work and labor and from the time of the world. Time (in the sense of chronos) stands still; and nothing happens in the liturgy. No event or beings appear in liturgy. The world is bracketed in the liturgy in two ways: in terms of place or topos and time: "Liturgy is a nonplace [...]." "... liturgy is symbolically constituted as a 'nontime'... (83).
If the ancient Greek temples, according to Heidegger, harbor the world arising from the earth's reserve, the church sets itself apart from the world while still existing in the world. The narthex stands in between the sanctuary (the Holy of the Holies) and the world. It holds the place in tension of the what the classical theology calls 'already and not yet.' Christ (the fullness of God) has come and is yet to come; we live in the "unhappy" time of the "in-between." The church as a place symbolizes this eschatological tension, thus subverting the worldly sense of the place: "The church does not ... put itself forward as a space established for definitive existence, and its narthex does not separate the unhappiness of history from the happiness of the eschaton" (37). If the Greek temple harbors the world arising from the dark reserve of the earth (to which the mortals return), the church stands in-between the time of the 'already and not yet.' The Holy of Holies is not completely sealed off by the northex. In fact, it is exposed to the world through the northex. Thus, the church subverts the Greek sense of the place as the dwelling of mortals in the company of gods held together in the simultaneous unity and tearing apart of the fourfold (as described by Heidegger in his essay "The Thing" and "The Origin of the Work of Art." Lacoste writes: "liturgy comes to break the circular return from world to earth and from earth to world" (32). The figure of the pilgrims offers another "symbolic subversion of place" (30). The pilgrimage or the xeniteia (Peter Brown's term referring to a "bedouinization" of Christian asceticism (29)) does not belong to a particular place "because every place appears to him as world, and he is struck by the foreignness of his presence everywhere" and "because every land offers itself to him as a homeland" (30). The world is both home and not home for the pilgrim: "[the pilgrim monk's] cell is for him but a place, not a residence he has built in which to live" (31); "the liturgical experience prevents man from dwelling peaceably on the earth" (31); "[t]he relation to place he establishes is ... a relation of indifference" (32); "the earthly formally represents the non-place in which liturgy symbolically brackets topology" (32).
(Note the symbolism of the pilgrims and the church here. They are not metaphors for Lacoste but concrete physical reality, like the icons, that symbolically subverts the logic of the world. Do icons not subvert being, not as metaphors but as symbols? Icons as symbols are not representative art work; because they bring the spiritual reality to the physical objects, subverting and bracketing the phenomenality of being or of the work of art, the chiaroscuro of the world.)
In the kairos of liturgy the chronos of the world is subverted so as to confer "an absolute beginning," where "our past pacts with evil" may receive absolution, where "the dawn of a new day and the resumption of our worldly tasks" may begin anew (94). How is this possible? The time of liturgy is the time for the "remembrance of God." God is not and cannot be recalled from the past into the present, like any other things in our memory. Such memory is not what we invoke when we pray in memory of the living, the dead, and the saints during the liturgy; or when the robber asks Jesus to "remember" him hanging on the cross next to Jesus' (Luke 23: 42). Remembering is not the work of our consciousness but that of God. We pray that God would remember the living, the dead, and the saints. When the Orthodox Christians pray, "May his or her memory be eternal," we are not praying so that the memory of the dead will last in the annals of history but in the Book of Life.
To remember God is to invoke Him, to go back to the origin, to the immemorial past (as Levinas would say): "The man who prays provides himself with access to the originary" (95). He stands in "[the] relation to the Absolute" (95), as liturgy enables him to traverse distance "from the origin" and "from the beginning" (95): "But liturgy annuls the distance [from the origin] by subordinating our commerce with world and earth to our relation to the Absolute and [from the beginning] by proposing the field of signification that Kierkegaard contemplated in the concept of 'repetition'" (95). Liturgy traverses the distances from God and one's ethical distance from the fellow humans. This happens "when the Absolute comes or inter-venes [vient ou inter-vient] between our wrongdoing and ourselves" (96). In the kairos of liturgy held in vigil of the night, "[having l]ed toward the originary, we can recognize that we are unambiguously promised to good rather than to evil; and if the Absolute is known to us as a God who forgives, this symbolic irrelevance can find itself combined with an absolution of our past pacts with evil" (96). The God who is invoked in the liturgy is the Christian God of forgiveness and of absolution. Lacoste's description of God's intervension in absolution ("the presence of the Absolute at Golgotha" (96)) reaches the article of faith and thus borders on the edge of philosophy. He writes:
The God who intervenes incognito in the nonplace of liturgy can easily be recognized, by whose for whom this nonplace opens up a space for his intervention, as he who can grant the wonder of a new beginning [recommencement]. Liturgy cannot compel him to do anything. His grace does not have to come to consciousness and become an affective certainty [as in Husserl's intuition]. But whether his presence is sensible or not (this is of absolutely no import whatsoever), the guest of the liturgical vigil can--alone--resolve the unhappiness caused by the tension between the eschatological I and the empirical I and by the failure to be human made manifest to us when, in the nocturnal inoperativity of prayer, we confess to not having borne the burden and the heat of the day. Freedom cannot liberate itself [as Levinas would agree]. Although liturgy does not confer on us the grace of a transfiguration, it is nevertheless the exemplary site of an existence reconciled both with itself and with the Absolute. The new day that concludes the liturgical vigil must be understood as the gift of the beginning given once again: the symbolism of the origin leads to the reality of a starting point, to the reality of a space opened to a freedom capable of willing, and indeed of doing good (96-97, italics mine).By traversing the distance between oneself and the Absolute, by returning oneself back to "the originary," the vigil (held in the nonplace of liturgy and kept in the inoperative prayer) enables one to begin anew, to be no longer tangled up in the past, the present, and the future of the worldly consciousness (i.e., dasein): "Night follows day and heralds the dawn" (95).
If, as Levinas says, ontology runs up against death, liturgy subverts death as dasein's extreme possibility, which is "not to be out striped," as Heidegger insists. In contrast, Lacoste poignantly asks: "Are we to exist for God or for death?" (66). We cannot claim, as Paul does: "O death, where is your sting?" Death is inevitable. But even if death is inevitable, it does not have the last word: "The chiaroscuro of the world tells us that we can indeed exist in the presence of God, but without this presence annulling the rule of death" (66); "... so long as liturgy remains in the margins of experience--and that is its historical determination--the difference between being-toward-death and being-before-God must remain" (66). We live in the time of duplicity, in-between time of the 'already' and 'not yet': "Our duplicity actually maintains an essential link with the chiaroscuro of the world" (65-66). Death cannot overcome our being-before-God.
Lacoste rejects Levinas's insistence on the primacy of ethics: "Ethical exigency is not in evidence in a primary way" (72). There is no separation between the ethical and the phonemonal: "ethics is an fact involved within the chiaroscuro of the world" (75). But liturgy interrupts the order of the world and provides the possibility of a new beginning. Liturgy precedes ethics:
... the first request that must be made of God... is for forgiveness. It is for this reason that the liturgical night must be interpreted, not simply as a last act, but--just as the last morning heralds the Parousia--also as the dawn of a new day and the resumption of our wordly tasks. To put it another way without using metaphor, liturgy participates in a logic of beginning or renaissance [du commencement ou du recommencement] (94).A new dawn of ethics intermingled with work, labor, politics, and history begins with the vigil held in the evening into the next morning.
The first part of the book mainly interacts with Heidegger. Lacoste interacts with Hegel in the second part of the book.
August 24, 2019
It would probably be 5 stars if I understood it better. What I understood I got a lot out of.
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