Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time, the time between Candlemas and the 40 days of Lent, which begins this week on Ash Wednesday. Today is the Sunday next before Lent.
In the past, this Sunday was also known as Quinquagesima. The calendars of the Church of Ireland and many other churches marks today as Transfiguration Sunday, reflecting today’s Gospel reading. In some places it is still known as Shrove Sunday, just as Tuesday next is known in many places as Shrove Tuesday.
The Carnival of Venice (Carnevale di Venezia) takes place at this time of the year, each year. This year, it began last Saturday [3 February 2024] and it ends at midnight on Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday [13 February] or Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
We spent two days in Paris last week, and so, during these 11 days in Ordinary Time, my reflections each morning are drawing on the lives of 11 French saints and spiritual writers.
As this series of reflections began eight days ago, I admitted I am often uncomfortable with many aspects of French spirituality, and that I need to broaden my reading in French spirituality. So, I have turned to 11 figures or writers you might not otherwise expect. They include men and women, Jews and Christians, immigrants and emigrants, monks and philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, and even a few Anglicans.
Later this morning I hope to be at the Parish Eucharist in Holy Trinity Church, Wolverton. But, before the day begins, I am taking some quiet time early this morning for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, A reflection on a French saint or writer in spirituality;
2, today’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
French saints and writers 9, Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur, 1913-2005:
The French philosopher and theologian Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur (1913-2005) is best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. He was the last survivor of the mighty generation of French philosophers – including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre – born before World War I.
He is immensely influential in philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, social theory and many other disciplines. He revolutionised the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.’
Paul Ricœur was born on 27 February 1913 in Valence, Drôme, a son of Léon ‘Jules’ Ricœur (1881-1915) and Florentine Favre (1878-1913). His was a family of devout Huguenots. He was an infant when his mother died and was only two when his father, a sergeant in French army during World War I, died at the beginning of the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915 – his body was not found until 1932.
He was a war orphan and was raised in Rennes by his paternal grandparents Louis Ricœur (1856-1932) and Marie Sarradet (1856-1928), and by his father’s sister, Juliette ‘Adèle’ Ricœur (1892-1968).
As a child, his penchant for study was fuelled by his family’s Protestant emphasis on Bible study, and he was bookish and intellectually precocious. He discovered philosophy while he was at the Lycée de Rennes (now Lycée Émile-Zola de Rennes), where he studied under Roland Dalbiez (1893-1976).
Ricœur graduated in 1932 and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1933-1934. In Paris, he attended the Friday gatherings held by Gabriel Marcel, who introduced him to Edmund Husserl. He also joined the Esprit magazine, founded by Emmanuel Mounier. He completed a thesis for his diplôme d’études supérieures, equivalent to an MA, in 1934.
His first publication, ‘L’Appel De L’Action, Réflexions D’Un Étudiant Protestant’ (‘A Call To Action, Reflections Of A Protestant Student’), was published in a journal for ‘Christian revolutionaries’ in 1935, when he was 22. He was never to lose his commitment to problems of action, and his Christian faith gave stoical steadiness to an existence that was not always easy.
During World War II, Ricœur’s army unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent five years as a prisoner of war in Oflag II-D. He looked back on his experience as a prisoner of war without bitterness, describing it as ‘extraordinarily fruitful’ because it had allowed him to devote himself to the study of German philosophy. During that time, began to translate Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I, and Kant and Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers always remained the guiding lights of his thought.
After World War II, Paul Ricoeur taught for three years at the school in Chambon sur Lignon, a centre for Protestant Resistance activity in the Haute-Loire, and where 600 Jewish children were saved from deportation by André Trocmé (1901-1971) and his wife Magda Trocmé (1901-1996) and their wider circle.
Ricœur taught at the University of Strasbourg from 1948 to 1956, the only French university with a Protestant faculty of theology. He received his doctorate in 1950 with a minor thesis translating Husserl’s Ideas I and a major thesis that was published as Philosophie de la Volonté I: Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire’ (‘Philosophy of the Will I: The Voluntary and the Involuntary’).
Ricœur soon acquired a reputation as an expert on phenomenology. He took up a position at the Sorbonne as the Chair of General Philosophy in 1956. At the Sorbonne, he wrote three major works: Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (1960), and Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965). Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ricœur during those years in the early 1960s.
From 1960 onwards, his philosophy took on a new direction : previously he had been working on phenomenology, but after that date he started to study hermeneutics, dealing with structuralism in particular.
He founded the Department of Philosophy in the newly created Nanterre University in 1964. Nanterre was intended as an experiment in progressive education, and Ricœur hoped he could create a university free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes. He warned of ‘a national cataclysm’ if the government should fail to carry out a major social reform in the near future.
Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings in May 1968. He saw these events as the cultural revolution of an industrial society that did not know any longer where it was going or why. He was elected dean of Nanterre in 1969, but resigned in March 1970 after riots in which 187 student were wounded in clashes with police. He left Nanterre convinced he had been politically manipulated.
Ricœur taught briefly at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, before moving to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where from 1970 to 1985 he held the John Nuveen chair in Philosophical Theology, previously held by Paul Tillich.
In The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (1975) and his three-volume Time And Narrative (1983-1985), he tried to work out an understanding of subjectivity which would ‘replace the ego, master of itself, with the self, disciple of the text.’
Ricœur gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1985-1986, published as Oneself as Another (1990). This work built on his discussion of narrative identity and his continuing interest in the self.
Time and Narrative secured Ricœur’s return to France in 1985 as a notable intellectual. His late work was characterised by a continuing cross-cutting of national intellectual traditions.
Ricœur and André LaCocque, Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary, were co-authors of Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies.
His last major work was Memory, History And Forgetting (2000). Ricœur and Jaroslav Pelikan shared the John W Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences in 2004.
Ricœur remains one of the most influential French philosophers of the 20th century, despite the disadvantage of his religious conviction at a time when philosophy was often seen as hostile to religion.
His key term was hermeneutics, meaning the art of interpretation. ‘The symbol sets us thinking,’ in Ricœur’s famous phrase: we were not so much the creators of our symbols as their creatures, and philosophy was our ever-incomplete attempt to discern their multiple meanings. The purpose of thinking was not to gain knowledge, but to learn to consider the world in the light of our irremediable ignorance.
Ricœur is regarded by many as the principal authority on hermeneutics in the 20th century. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation of texts, and so plays an important part in Biblical scholarship.
Ricœur’s theory of interpretation is itself dependent on deeper convictions about what it means to be a human being, about how human beings relate to God, and about what evil is and where it comes from. He is central to discussions about what it is to be human, about the distinction between finitude and evil, and about the distinctive Christian approach to humanity that comes from the doctrine of creation, the doctrine that human existence is created with a purpose.
Ricœur mediates between the finitude of an individual perspective and the universality of the truth, and seeks to hold these two in tension. My universal beliefs are not universally demonstrable.
Ricœur identifies different approaches to the interpretation of the Bible, disagreements, diversity, interpretive plurality, the distinction between finitude and evil, limitation and the finitude of individual perspectives, distinctive readings of the Bible, misreading the Bible, misinterpreting, misunderstanding, and reading in a distorted way. He discusses how the doctrine of creation can work to transform our understanding of what it means to be human, created by a good God.
Ricœur exhibits a humility that is rare among his contemporary intellectuals and thinkers, and he is regarded as an irenic thinker who does not disparage or demean other scholars without avoiding controversial or difficult questions.
Ricœur realised that the study of philosophy would constantly bring challenges and threats to his faith. His faith was fearless in the face of everything that threatened to undermine and destroy it. He was convinced that philosophical conflicts called not for hasty resolution or dogged defensiveness, but for sincere and anguished contemplation. It was necessary to ‘grant equal rights to rival interpretations’, and philosophy would perish if it took the easy path of opting for one side or another of the essential dilemmas of existence.
The aim of all Ricoeur’s work – 20 books and 600 essays in all – was to teach us to feel the full force of authentic intellectual discomfort. His central insight is that understanding depends on interpreting texts that mediate the meaning of and nourish our existence – especially poetic and religious texts that foster memory, faith and hope. Understanding comes from situating ourselves ‘in front of’ texts that display the full range of human possibilities and capacities.
He liked to quote the ending of Georges Bernanos’s novel, Diary Of A Country Priest (1936): ‘It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself … the ultimate blessing would be to be able to love oneself humbly, just like any other suffering member of Christ.’
Over a span of 50 years, Ricœur was in the habit of visiting Taizé regularly. He once said in Taizé: ‘for me, the liturgy is not simply action; it is a form of thought. There is a hidden, discreet theology in the liturgy that can be summed up in the idea that “the law of prayer is the law of faith”.’
Paul Ricœur married Simone Lejas (1911-1998) in 1935, and they were the parents of five children. He died at home at his home in Châtenay-Malabry, on 20 May 2005, aged 92, and is buried in Châtenay-Malabry. He left his library in his will to the Faculté de Théologie Protestante de Paris.
Mark 9: 2-9 (NRSVA):
2 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
Today’s Prayers (Sunday 11 February 2024, the Sunday next before Lent):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Ash Wednesday Reflection.’ This theme is introduced today by the Revd Jessie Anand, Chaplain, USPG:
‘Ash Wednesday gives meaning to our Lenten journey. A dramatic way with ashes on our forehead on this special day provokes in everyone the remembrance that we are dust and to dust we shall return. In my church, the ashes we use come from the previous year’s palm crosses. Ashes bring to our minds humility, simplicity and mortality.
‘In India where I grew up, the essence of the 40 days reminded me of “the crucified Jesus on the Cross” daily at 12 noon. Whenever we heard the church bell ring at 12 noon, we needed to stop whatever we were doing and stand up to spend two minutes in silence to remember the suffering of Jesus on the Cross. Jesus’ passion and His mission are the driving force for our reflection on these days. In my local church in India, a Hundi box will be given on Ash Wednesdays. We are encouraged to put money in the Hundi box whenever we abstain from our food. This box will be given on Good Friday to support the needy. Giving up a meal generates space to repent and to practice generosity.
‘Ash Wednesday is a good reminder to connect with the Lord individually through ashes, church bells, Hundi boxes, and to encourage people to share their life stories and pray for/with one another. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of discernment, and it helps us to develop spiritual insights in our Christian journey.’
The USPG Prayer Diary today (11 February 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
Make in us new and contrite hearts, O God,
that we turn our money into bread for our neighbour
as we journey towards Easter,
and prepare to kneel at the foot of the Cross.
The Collect:
Almighty Father,
whose Son was revealed in majesty
before he suffered death upon the cross:
give us grace to perceive his glory,
that we may be strengthened to suffer with him
and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Holy God,
we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ:
may we who are partakers at his table
reflect his life in word and deed,
that all the world may know his power to change and save.
This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Holy God,
you know the disorder of our sinful lives:
set straight our crooked hearts,
and bend our wills to love your goodness and your glory
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflection (Thomas Merton, 1915-1968)
Continued Tomorrow (Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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