The sovereignty of revelation: On Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of revelation

Introduction

Paul Ricœur’s preoccupation with the notion of revelation characterizes his entire œuvre in direct and indirect ways. As his career began in the 1940s and reached the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can consider him a representative of the interest of contemporary philosophy in the notion of revelation during a significant period of our recent past. As outlined in a different article, the phenomenological movement from the beginnings to its latest developments is fittingly described as a complex philosophical endeavor to conceive and interpret the idea of revelation understood variously by different phenomenological authors. This feature of phenomenology parallels the crucial role the notion of revelation plays in contemporary theology (Baillie, 1956; Dulles, 1992; Latourelle, 1967; Mezei, 2021b).

Ricœur emerged as a phenomenologist in his early writings (Ricœur, 1950, 1967). Only gradually did he develop his distinctive hermeneutics which has made him one of the leading figures of hermeneutical philosophy from the 1960s. Both as a phenomenologist and a hermeneutician, Ricœur showed interest in the central subject of revelation, without, however, having produced a single overarching work on the topic. Yet in a few central writings of his, Ricœur focuses on the question of revelation and gives us a key to his understanding of this problem and its connections to other ideas in his thought (see Roy, forthcoming; Gregor, 2019). As soon as we outline his basic understanding of revelation, we recognize some fundamental problems which call for a proper treatment. In this article I propose, firstly, an introduction to the phenomenological problem of revelation. Secondly, I offer a summary of Ricœur’s views of revelation. In particular, I elaborate his hermeneutics of revelation as testimony. In the critical part I show, thirdly, that the immediate givenness of revelation cannot be supplanted by a hermeneutics of mediation. This point leads us to the understanding of the central importance of what I term radical revelation (Mezei, 2017).

The problem of revelation in phenomenology

As László Tengelyi (2010) argues, phenomenology applied from its naissance what several authors termed ‘methodological atheism’. To support this claim, Tengelyi uses Dominique Janicaud’s text (1991), which suggests that phenomenology departed its original framework of the dedicated analysis of the apparent and changed to the analysis of the inapparent, the subject matter of theology. For Janicaud, this change was in some sense inappropriate or at least non-phenomenological. Tengelyi agrees with this point, while he also praises the contributions to the so-called theological turn of phenomenology by such authors as Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion (Tengelyi, 2010).

However, the thesis of ‘methodological atheism’ as the description of the fundamental stance of phenomenology both in the historical and thematic senses seems to be an overstatement. From its beginnings, i.e. the work of Franz Brentano, the theological interest has been the deep layer of phenomenology (Mezei and Smith, 1998). While Edmund Husserl seems to avoid this problem in his early writings, his later works make it obvious that he was preparing to develop a kind of theological interpretation of phenomenology not only in the sense of a universal and meaning-constituting teleology but on a more fundamental ontological level as well (Ales Bello, 2009). This interest – in spite of reservations (Housset, 2010) – can be reliably demonstrated in Husserl’s writings and correspondence (Held, 2010; Walton, 2012). The awareness of the importance of the theological problematic in phenomenology has been confirmed also by the works of the subsequent generations of phenomenologists beginning with Emmanuel Lévinas through Maurice Merleau-Ponty to, precisely, Paul Ricœur (Ricœur, 1949; see also Gregor, 2019: 94–110).

Deeper than the historical trajectory there lies the metaphysical problematic of phenomenology. As opposed to the view of Janicaud, the main concern of phenomenology has always been the nature of reality in itself and in its manifestations. By definition, phenomenology faces the problem of the ultimate design of reality, traditionally the terrain of specific metaphysics, i.e. philosophical theology (Sokolowski, 2010). While some phenomenologists from the classical period, such as Dietrich von Hildebrand or Edith Stein, identified this ultimate design in a way close to, or even overlapping with, traditional understandings of theism, others, such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, or Gabriel Marcel, sought new conceptions to understand the ultimate design by reformulating, even reforming traditional theological approaches. Merleau-Ponty describes his own project as a renewing of the problem of the sacred (Merleau-Ponty, 1963: 46). As Jacques Derrida pointed out in one of his influential essays (Derrida, 1978), Lévinas offered an interpretation of phenomenology that remains unintelligible without the proper understanding of the theological background behind the polemics against Husserl and Heidegger. It is then hardly surprising that during the second half of the twentieth century a generation of phenomenologists emerged that took the responsibility of facing the problems traditionally dealt with in theological frameworks (Dahl, 2011; Steinbock, 2012). This tendency, which is continued today, challenges Tengelyi’s suggestion that the theological interest in phenomenology was limited merely to a certain period in its history and to only a few philosophers (Mezei, 2021a).

This does not mean that the influence of atheism did not play an important role in some developments of phenomenology. Marxism, existentialism and structuralism, later critical theories and deconstruction undermined the plausibility of the theological problematic in various ways (Thao, 1985; Tormey and Townshend, 2006). In phenomenology itself, works such as those of Marc Richir or Claude Romano point to a non-theological configuration of phenomenological problems (Richir, 1995; Romano, 2009, 2019). Yet the most influential generation of phenomenologists from the 1970s readdressed the problem and developed new ways to counter the non-theological approaches. Among the thinkers of this movement, we must mention Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Emmanuel Falque. Their theological interest, quite different from one another, is rooted in the fundamental problematic of phenomenology discussed, reformulated, and reshaped in their writings. They demonstrate not only that the original problematic of phenomenology has always been open to the form and content of theological insights, but also that such insights could be reorganized in well-developed proposals as to the rethinking of the traditional theological problematics in new ways (Bornemark and Ruin, 2010; Sokolowski, 2006), even in the fashion of ‘liberating the theological’ in phenomenology (Falque, 2018: 132–134).

One of the attempts of such a reorganization is what I term apocalyptic phenomenology (Mezei, 2017: 229–293). This phenomenology is apocalyptic in the sense of focusing on the ultimate problem of reality in terms of absolute disclosure (apocalupsis) deeply intertwined with the problematic of the traditional notion of revelation. By deconstructing the notion of revelation, it is not an empty space we face but, as among others Ricœur also emphasized, the pre-theological dimension of reality. Positive theological forms emerge from this pre-theological dimension (Ricœur, 1980: 96). We can also say that this dimension is the Lebenswelt of revelation where the pre-theoretical understanding of the positive theological notions of revelation is formed. This understanding can be termed prototheological with respect to Husserl’s efforts to flesh out the layer underlying our theoretical understanding (Mezei, 1997).

This elementary notion of revelation refers to what is traditionally identified as the apocalyptic moment, i.e. the unmasking of the ultimate design of reality not only in the form of various phenomena but more importantly in a direct and radical uncovering. This makes the ultimate design of things apparent in a paradoxical way entailing both hiding and manifesting as well as a certain dialectical unity of the two moments. The one that conceives this paradoxical unity becomes in a certain sense part and parcel of the process of the uncovering as the addressee of the disclosure of reality, an addressee conceiving itself in terms of ‘the universal a priori of correlation’ (Husserl, 1970: 159), or in terms of the ultimate Trinitarian relationship of reality (Mezei, 2017: 224–228). Apocalyptic phenomenology is the continuation of the traditionally central interest of phenomenology both in the ultimate design of reality and in the understanding of this design by way of further developing the main insights of theology.

What we cannot say is that the ‘methodological atheism’ of phenomenology, at least among eminent phenomenological thinkers, ever meant anything more than a kind of externalism of some authors merging phenomenology and various extra-phenomenological fields, such as psychology, anthropology, or political theory. This is not to deny that, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre, who at the start of his career defined himself as an atheistic phenomenologist, is not an important figure in early French phenomenology. However, Martin Heidegger’s supposed atheism is certainly a problem more complex than what a simple description, such as the one Sartre offered on it, could properly handle (Sartre, 1956). It is more appropriate to describe Heidegger’s thought as an overall rethinking and reformulating of the original impetus of phenomenology to readdress the problem of the ultimate design of reality (Fritz, 2021; Mezei, 2019). Lévinas, on the other hand, offered a profoundly theological debate against classical phenomenology attempting to demonstrate the central characteristic of the phenomenological problematic (Lévinas, 1969). Finally, philologists of phenomenological works repeatedly offer interpretations to support the view of the importance of ‘methodological atheism’. However, in most of such cases the genuine understanding of the problematic is not satisfactory, as shown, for instance, by Held (2010).

Further considerations of this debate cannot be elaborated here (for more detail see Falque, 2018). It may have become sufficiently clear, however, that the problematic can be approached and described from the theological point of view in a fashion that exposes not only the roots of phenomenology in theological problems (Geyser, 1923) but also in the sense of phenomenology’s important proposals about the rethinking and reshaping of the theological problematic, such as the problem of revelation (cf. Mezei, forthcoming).

Ricœur and phenomenology

Paul Ricœur stands at the crossroads of such developments (Davidson and Vallée, 2016). Because of his original philosophical orientation (for instance, Ricœur, 1949), Ricœur demonstrates the interest of phenomenology in the subject of religion. However, owing to the development of his thought from the 1950s, he shows an overall reinterpretation of phenomenology along the lines of the emerging philosophy of hermeneutics and the influence of structuralism of the same period. I outline his understanding of phenomenology on the basis of his text of 1974 (Ricœur, 1974; see also Ricœur, 1981).

According to Ricœur, phenomenology and hermeneutics presuppose each other. They form a hermeneutical circle where the one element, phenomenology, refers to the other element, hermeneutics, in a fashion which is not only the matter of the relationship between disciplines but also a relationship between fundamental philosophical attitudes. Phenomenology is understood by Ricœur in terms of the lack of all mediation, explanation, or Auslegung, whereas hermeneutics embodies the principle of explanation or interpretation (also termed ‘distance’ by Ricœur). To use a simpler formula, Ricœur claims that phenomenology is the expression of the principle of immediacy; hermeneutics, however, is the expression of the principle of mediation. These two principles are to be understood in their mutually presupposing character in what is ultimately a hermeneutical procedure. In other words, it is hermeneutics that defines the relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Ricœur does not deny the importance of the principle of immediacy; he emphasizes, however, that we do not have access to immediacy pure and simple; we only possess an indirect conception of directness intrinsically hermeneutical. Immediacy is never immediately given; even the notion we possess of it is mediated by hermeneutics.

Ricœur’s understanding of phenomenology was shaped by his translation of Husserl’s Ideas and a monographic work on Husserlian thought (Ricœur, 1950, 1967). Yet his criticism of Husserl’s philosophy in the text referred to above is not directly based on the Ideas but on Husserl’s Nachwort zu meinen Ideen (Husserl, 1930). This is understandable, because in this afterword – composed for the 1930 edition of the original publication of 1913 – Husserl succeeds in summarizing in a clear fashion the main points of a vision he himself calls ‘transcendental idealism’. However, a thoroughgoing reading of the Nachwort makes it clear that what Ricœur understands by idealism, the ego, subjectivity, intentionality, and the phenomenological method of the epoche do not fully correspond to the meaning of Husserl’s text. In spite of the traditional, Kantian as well as phenomenological vocabulary, Husserl’s ‘transcendental idealism’ is not identical with an abstract intellectualism based on a Cartesian dualism opposing the mind and the world (for Kant, see Vetö, 1998 I: 305–311). Husserlian transcendentalism aims at offering an overall view of the mind and the world, subject and object, intentionality and method, a view rooted in the only possible form of understanding, i.e. the understanding of the subject (Husserl, 1970: 189, ‘The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it’). In general, Husserl’s philosophical view can be termed cognitive or idealist monism, in which the real world, including the really existing human individual, is an aspect of the ideal whole in the phenomenological sense. In this monism, knowledge is always based on the notion of cognitive identity as expressed in the notion of intentionality. In intentionality, the object and the subject are unified in the common structure of the overarching correlation the nature of which is purely cognitive or ideal. Even the material of such a correlation is of the same kind for Husserl, i.e. ideal or purely cognitive; the material world is merely the counterpart of the non-theoretical or everyday attitude of the subject (a criticism of this standpoint was offered by Ingarden, 1975).

For Ricœur, intentionality is never subsumed into a unified structure of correlation in the act of cognition, and certainly not into a correlation of the idealist kind. Instead, Ricœur emphasizes the dualism of the subject and the object and, as a matter of course, the unbridgeable distance between them. In Ricœur’s argument, if we conceive closeness or identity, or if we know of intuition as the fundamental form of understanding, we do that exclusively in the context of the hermeneutical form of interpretation, i.e. in a dualistic fashion. It is always the hermeneutical context in which we find ourselves in our cognition and being; and only in this context do we possess a kind of understanding which never reaches fullness. It seems that not even this hermeneutical situation is in need of a direct understanding; it is always a hermeneutics of hermeneutics that we are called to carry out. However, this is a contradiction, because in such a way not even the unified meaning of hermeneutics can be given. The method of hermeneutics may legitimately emphasize the processes of mediation, distance, or dualism. Yet in order to apply this method, the meaning of hermeneutics should be given in a direct and unambiguous way.

Whoever follows this summary may see the problems involved in Ricœur’s strong emphasis on mediation, distance, or, on the disciplinary level, hermeneutics. Fundamentally, it is a logical contradiction to claim that immediacy is by definition inaccessible for us and can only be given in various forms of mediation. Moreover, Ricœur seems to be the perfect target of Husserl’s criticism of ‘naturalism’ explained in the Nachwort. Negatively, naturalism – in Husserl’s sense – refers to the misunderstanding that phenomenology offers a naïve description of natural processes of the external world as if this world and its processes were indeed existing ‘out there’ and not as the counterpart of the naïve or everyday attitude of the subject. Husserl goes even further in his understanding of naturalism and claims that the realization of an a priori realm as what underlies the naturalistic attitude still counts to be a more subtle form of naturalism, as the a priori realm itself is construed with respect to the naturalistic realm, i.e. in terms of dualism. Positively, naturalism is the denial of the self-contained phenomenological realm of understanding with its universal eidetic typology and emphasis on the meaningful unity of such a typology. This meaning springs forth, methodologically, from the phenomenological epoche and reduction leading us from our natural existence to the meaningful ontology of being. If this is idealism, as Husserl in fact terms it, it is never idealism in the sense of ‘a philosophically specific thesis’ (philosophische Sonderthese), but ‘universal idealism’ (Husserl, 1930: 561). It seems that Ricœur mistakes Husserl’s universal idealism for a Sonderthese, i.e. for a dualistic idealism which does not eliminate the natural world as its counterpart. As opposed to this dualistic idealism, ‘universal idealism’ for Husserl is idealist or cognitive monism.

In the Nachwort, Husserl refers to the beginning of this universal idealism in the works of Locke and Hume. He argues that their psychological idealism was due to a mistaken naturalism. As clarified in a different writing, psychological naturalism is the consequence of the incorrect notion of perception as an inner man’s writing on a ‘white paper’, as Locke’s famous simile has it (Locke, 1690: 37). According to Husserl, the epistemological model of the ‘white paper’ entails an infinite series of subjects producing signs in an infinite series of pieces of white paper without ever arriving at a proper, i.e. direct and subject-based, understanding. If there is no intuitive or direct understanding of a thing, if there is only an infinite series of pieces of blank paper, we never reach understanding properly so-called. We remain trapped in a mathematically infinite series without the proper notion of the series itself. We are, thus, caught up in naturalism (Husserl, 1930: 564; 1956: 102–103).

Husserl explains that phenomenology is based on the ultimate intuition of the subject, an intuition which cannot be formally overridden by non-subjective interpretations. The main reason for this is that by discarding subject-based, direct or intuitive knowledge as opposed to some structural interpretation we need to understand the latter; understanding, however, is subject-based, direct, and intuitive. Understanding is necessarily my understanding, and all kinds of interpretation are in need of such an understanding in order to be used at all. However, by subjectivity and the ego, by transcendentalism and idealism Husserl does not mean the dimension of the natural subject. His phenomenology is based on the recognition that an empirical subject, as I am here and now, is able to function at the transcendental level, i.e. at the level of inclusive validity for all possible and factual subjects. Even in our natural attitude, understanding functions in such a way, though we may not be directly aware of it. By thinking or using a system of signs we presuppose the validity of logic, a certain grammar or form which cannot be seen as a natural product; in order to understand logic and grammar as a natural product we need to presuppose a non-natural, non-psychological, non-real dimension of logic and grammar as the context of their validity. Phenomenology applies the method of the epoche and the reductions in order not only to presuppose the non-real dimension but to demonstrate systematically the transcendental character of such a dimension, i.e. the character phenomenology discovers and explains.

Ricœur’s criticism of Husserl’s idealism is formulated in the perspective of a naturalistic epistemology translated into the terms of textual hermeneutics. For Ricœur, it is not the natural world that serves as the ultimate basis of his supposed realism but rather the culturally existing textual dimension, the ‘context’, i.e. the realm of written, oral, and even digital texts. In this way, instead of a traditional physical, psychic, or anthropological naturalism, Ricœur offers contextual naturalism in which the cultural (historical and material) existence of written and printed texts is given as the context in which our understanding, ultimately our understanding of textual reality, occurs. It is an important point, explained by Ricœur, that phenomenology needs hermeneutics, even textual hermeneutics; however, it is a logical fallacy not to see that by insisting at the overall importance of this presupposition we logically need a third point of view from which both ‘phenomenology’ and ‘hermeneutics’ (in Ricœur’s sense) can be interpreted. It is a further logical fallacy to reduce Husserl’s idealism to an abstract idealism (to a Sonderthese) which is certainly not Husserl’s meaning, not even a plausible interpretation of his works.

One example demonstrates the way Ricœur interprets Husserl. In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl (1966) uses the expressions Eigenheitlichkeit, Eigenheitssphäre in the sense of the transcendental idea of the absolute and self-contained reality of the ego – not of any empirical ego but the ego all our knowledge presupposes and instantiates in its functioning. Eigenheitlichkeit or Eigenheitssphäre is the absolute point of reference expressed in all empirical egos and their egoical functions (either in an implicit or an explicit sense of the latter). The Eigenheitssphäre for Husserl is the ontological and epistemological core of reality, and its discovery, description, exploration, and teleological fulfillment is the historic task of phenomenological philosophy.

While Ricœur read Husserl’s writings in the original German, he used translations of some of the works as well, such as the first French translation of the Cartesian Meditations (published in 1931; cf. Husserl, 1966). In this publication, Husserl’s term Eigenheitlichkeit is translated as appartenance (‘belonging to’; cf. Husserl, 1966: 77). Ricœur was certainly aware of the fact that Eigenheitlichkeit is not properly translated as appartenance. In his translation of Husserl’s Ideas, Ricœur translates Eigensein as être propre, Eigenwesentliches as l’essence intime, and Eigenheit as singularité (Husserl, 1950: 108, 247, 281). In the index of the same work, Ricœur gives the following translations: eigen, Eigenheit, Eigenschaft, Eigensein, Eigenwesen, Eigentümliches: propre, spécificité, propriété (qualificative), être propre, essence propre, trait caractéristique, distinctif (Husserl, 1950: 522).

However, it seems that the first French translation of the Cartesian Meditations proved to be instructive for Ricœur. In the text Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, as in many other writings of his, Ricœur views Eigenheitlichkeit through the glasses of appartenance and understands it as referring to the notion of ‘belonging to’. Obviously, it is not only the French translation of the Meditations that exerted such an influence on Ricœur’s interpretation. More important for him was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of Zugehörigkeit, ‘belonging-to’, a central hermeneutical term that suggests that human understanding takes place necessarily in the context of the world of written and printed texts (Gadamer, 1990: 90, 106, 134, 167 etc. See also Gadamer, 2006: 73, 87 etc.).

In Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Ricœur’s reading of the Husserlian Eigenheit-lichkeit in terms of appartenance amounts to a criticism of the principle of immediacy of phenomenology and, at the same time, an emphasis on the eminent role of hermeneutics (i.e., on distance, structure, and context). Of course, the meaning of Zugehörigkeit could also be read in terms of ‘the universal a priori of correlation’ (Husserl, 1970: 159), i.e. in terms of the dimension of the Eigenheitssphäre conceived by the immediate knowledge fundamental in phenomenology. Yet it is theoretically also possible to understand the genuine realm of the ultimate design of reality as a sphere of belonging-to, a subjectless structure of natural relations. This latter is not Husserl’s view, because his guiding idea is the absolute importance of the organizing center of knowledge and reality, that is, the central function of the transcendental ego. This ego is instantiated by the empirical ego of the philosopher, while logically the latter is never identical to the former. Rather, the empirical ego – as a real historical and cultural being – is logically entailed by the absolute organizing center of the transcendental ego. When Ricœur interprets this center not only in terms of a logically understood appartenance, but more importantly as the historical-cultural context in which subjectivity or the ego plays no significant role, he does not only commit a logical mistake, but opens a new horizon of interpretation of historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which we arrive at a certain understanding. This understanding is never absolute and needs to be further developed and contextualized in hermeneutically elaborated ways by producing, discussing, and interpreting various texts.

Ricœur’s main target in such interpretations is ‘the arrogance of consciousness’ (Freud, 1981: 39; Ricœur, 1965: 496; 1980: 96). He signifies by this expression not only a criticism of Husserl’s emphasis on the inevitable role of the transcendental center of understanding, but rather the empirical I of the philosopher arrogating to itself a decisive role in gaining knowledge. It is a difficult question to answer if and how any knowledge is possible without a subject knowing itself and its objects. Ricœur nevertheless seems to suggest that self-identity is not only superfluous in understanding but rather a moment we need to dispose of as soon as possible. Behind the thesis of the egoical arrogance the historically more developed forms of the ultimate sinfulness of all human selves are becoming visible (Ricœur, 1986). Such a sinful human self is in need of intervention, either from cultural structures or even by a divine agency. This is how the importance of divine revelation emerges in this context and allows us to see the importance of a proper understanding of revelation in Ricœur’s hermeneutics.

The hermeneutics of revelation

Ricœur’s interpretation of phenomenology defines his understanding of the problems of religion, including the central problem of divine revelation. At the beginning of his career Ricœur showed sympathy to the existentialist approach to theological questions influenced by authors such as Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers (Ricœur, 1948). When he begins his explorations of hermeneutics, he reads Martin Heidegger’s works, which initiated the hermeneutical turn of phenomenology during the 1930s (Heidegger, 1977). For Heidegger, hermeneutics is based on the characteristic understanding of Dasein with its situation in the world, an understanding described by Heidegger as a circle rooted in the Dasein’s radical finitude (Heidegger, 1977: 10, 203). The existentialist movement, inspired especially by Sartre’s writings, offered a naturalistic reading of Dasein. Despite Heidegger’s careful explanations in his Letter on Humanism (Heidegger, 1976), a kind of naturalistic existentialism marked not only Heidegger’s French reception, but even more his idea of a hermeneutical phenomenology. This explains Ricœur’s move from an existentialist understanding of phenomenology to a naturalistic hermeneutics. The defining factor in this development was Emmanuel Lévinas’s work (Ricœur, 1995).

Lévinas’s main works, especially Totality and Infinity, can be read as a thoroughgoing criticism of Husserl’s transcendental idealism and, at the same time, Heidegger’s Dasein-centered thought (cf. Lévinas, 1974 and the strongly critical Derrida, 1978). The most important point of Lévinas’s criticism is the emphasis on otherness or, as he terms it with a less than felicitous term, infinity. As opposed to the totality of subject-based philosophies, the philosophy of otherness does not allow a reduction of the other, even the absolute Other, to any kind of understanding inasmuch as understanding, for Lévinas, is naturally directed to the annihilation of otherness. The face of the other human being, the ‘face’ of divine infinity, cannot be conceived, because thereby one would destroy this otherness, the root not only of philosophical but also historical and political totalitarianism (Lévinas, 1974: 22). Lévinas’s thought, even if paradoxical, shows the way to the subjectless formalism of structuralism in sociology and theories of knowledge. Their emphasis on formal systems, structures, and mechanisms supported the efforts to understand reality without the human center and, at the same time, to develop a systemic connection between historical and dialectical materialism and hermeneutics (Thao, 1985; Tormey and Townshend, 2006).

Ricœur’s hermeneutics stands under the influence of these attempts, especially the undermining of the self-contained character of human subjectivity by the ‘masters of suspicion’ (Ricœur, 1970: 33) and the emphasizing of the defining reality of natural-cultural structures (Ricœur, 1991: 444). In the further development of Ricœurian hermeneutics, temporality becomes the most important point of reference. As explained in Time and Narrative, the nature of time is reflected in human narratives the main function of which is the construction of meaning (Ricœur, 1983). Narratives are based on ontological time, while also forming the specific time of narration by which identities are produced. These identities are first of all cultural symbols, i.e. abstract unities condensing narrative experience. The unity of narration for the subject, as Ricœur explains it in his later work, is narrative identity, in which the ontology of time is interpreted as the subject matter of the identity of the self in the form of another. The self is never an originally given absolute identity but intimately intertwined with the other so that the self is never ‘another me’ but rather a ‘self as another’ (cf. Ricœur, 1992: 3, 326).

The problem of revelation can be seen in the broader context of Ricœur’s œuvre. However, in his works from the 1980s, Ricœur abandoned the efforts to develop a hermeneutical theory of revelation, while keeping some of the most important methodological results of his earlier analyses, such as the importance of a non-egological and polysemic hermeneutics, an elaborate ‘detour through an interpretation of the contingent signs that the absolute gives of itself in history’ (Ricœur, 1980: 149). His most important writings on revelation from the 1960s and 1970s were collected and published in an English translation by Lewis Seymour Mudge (Ricœur, 1980). In the introduction to this volume, Mudge explains the intrinsic importance of a ‘hermeneutics of testimony’ in Ricœur’s work (Ricœur, 1980: 1–40). In his answer to the introductory remarks, Ricœur insists on the specific importance of his pre-1980 works, including the works on testimony, i.e. revelation. At the same time, he acknowledges that his ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ takes ‘the long route’, ‘the hermeneutical “detour”‘, i.e. it offers a theory of revelation applying hermeneutical means (Ricœur, 1980: 9, 13). Based on the emphasis of his pre-1980 writings, it may be said that even if Ricœur abandoned the notion of revelation in his subsequent works, the main tools he had applied to the understanding of that notion remained decisive in his later works as well (cf. Ricœur, 1992: 112 ff.).

It is in this context that Ricœur developed his interpretation of revelation. First, Ricœur wants ‘to carry the notion of revelation back to its most originary level, the one […] I call the discourse of faith or the confession of faith’ (Ricœur, 1980: 74). Second, he investigates this notion of revelation on the basis of the literary forms of the Tanah: the prophetic, the narrative, the prescriptive, the wisdom, and hymnic discourses. The central form of these genres is prophetic discourse; and while Ricœur defined revelation in a different context in terms of ‘the discourse or the confession of faith’, now he points out that revelation is fundamentally ‘the speech of another behind the speech of the prophet’ (Ricœur, 1980: 75). Ricœur conceives revelation as inspiration and suggests that even the other forms of revelation are derived in some sense from prophetic discourse. In general, religious discourse is to be investigated by taking into consideration the prophetic discourse, i.e. ‘the speech of another’ in its various forms. In these ‘pretheological expressions’ […] ‘God is the one who is proclaimed, invoked, questioned, supplicated, and thanked. The meaning of the term God circulates among all these modes of discourse, but escapes each one of them’ (Ricœur, 1980: 96). As he writes, ‘instead of having to confront a monolithic concept of revelation, which is only obtained by transforming these different forms of discourse into propositions, we encounter a concept of revelation that is pluralistic, polysemic, and at most analogical in form […]’ (Ricœur, 1980: 75). Revelation, thus, does not disclose God entirely but only in certain respects, fundamentally in an analogical form. Philosophy’s role in understanding revelation is thus limited. As Ricœur tells his readers: ‘If God speaks by the prophets, the philosopher does not have to justify His word, but rather to set off the horizon of significance where it may be heard’ (Ricœur, 1980: 97).

However, setting off the ‘horizon of significance’ is still an important task defined as the ‘philosophy of testimony’ (Ricœur, 1980: 97). Ricœur’s main reference here is the theologically inspired philosophical works of Jean Nabert (1881–1960). Ricœur also praises Hans-Georg Gadamer’s central term of Zugehörigkeit as the defining notion in his hermeneutical approach. Ricœur uses Gadamer’s term to clarify that hermeneutics, including the hermeneutics of revelation, is to investigate the historical circumstances of the texts that testify God’s revelation, i.e. the Bible. The philosophy of revelation turns out to be a historical-critical investigation of biblical texts in such a way that a certain philosophical analysis is added to the claims of various biblical scholars. One of the main points of Ricœur’s analysis is that if there is true testimony, there is also false testimony, and we have to define them with respect to one another. It is part and parcel of our finite existence that we are exposed to this difficulty, while the solution is not clearly explained. There is a certain room for freedom in this respect, because revelation, in its genuine form, is a ‘nonviolent appeal’ (Ricœur, 1980: 95). This is perhaps the most important Ricœurian philosophical point so far: beyond the biblical literary forms, beyond ‘the speech of another behind the speech of the prophet’, revelation appears as an appeal that excludes intellectual compulsion, ‘violence’. In this way, the Spielraum of hermeneutics of revelation is secured.

In another writing on revelation, Ricœur investigates the notions of revelation as given in the New Testament (Ricœur, 1980: 119–154). Here, Ricœur faces the most important distinction with respect to testimony: on the one hand, testimony appears to be a narration given by witnesses about external events. A significant part of the New Testament fits in with this first kind termed ‘narration-testimony’. On the other hand, there is the other kind of ‘confession-testimony’, which contains the confession, i.e. the subjectively unquestionable description of an experience, most importantly the experience of the absolute (Ricœur, 1980: 119, 120).

With respect to narration-testimony, Ricœur describes its juridical sources: ‘Testimony is a dual relation: there is the one who testifies and the one who hears the testimony’ (Ricœur, 1980: 80). He points out that the original context of juridical testimony is the trial. ‘We only give testimony where there is a dispute between parties who plead one against the other and thus it involves a trial. This is why testimony always arises as proof for or against – for or against parties and their claims’ (Ricœur, 1980: 125). Narration-testimony in its juridical form entails a decision in matters of justice and, consequently, it entails a loser and a winner in trial. Nevertheless, as the archetypal trials of our traditions show, the one that formally loses in the trial may prove to be the genuine testimony of truth, as the fate of Socrates or Jesus demonstrates. While we read the testimonies made against them, the real testimony is given in their unjust death sentence. It is at this point that narration-testimony changes: what appeared to be a standard process of testifying (with roots in the Old Testament, cf. Deut 19:15) turns out to be a paradoxical trial in which the real witness is the one claimed to be worthy of death. The trial, ultimately, creates an unbridgeable gap between popular testimony (leading to the acquittal of Barabbas, cf. Matt 27:21) and genuine testimony (leading to punishment, death, and resurrection, cf. John 11:25).

This paradoxical twist in narration-testimony guides us to testimony as confession. Confession is testimony of a more original kind. The New Testament presents more than one description of confession-testimony. ‘Eyewitness testimony’ presents the mediating form between narration and confession. An eyewitness has its decisive experience of an event, an experience just as reliable as the impressions of the external world. An eyewitness relates external events not as an objective occurrence but as an experience of the subject involved in the experience. This form leads us to the even more reliable form of witnessing, i.e. the testimony of ‘the faithful and true witness’ (Rev 3:14) that Ricœur considers the next level of confession-testimony. ‘The faithful and true witness’ is Christ himself; his faithfulness and truth are given in his immediate relationship to what he bears witness to, i.e. God’s revelation. Confession-testimony gains thereby a deeper dimension: it is the expression not only of an external event witnessed by the observer but rather a genuinely immediate testimony containing in itself the defining feature of truth. Ricœur does not stop at this point and refers to an even stronger form of confession-testimony, represented again by Christ in the New Testament, the form of self-witnessing. In self-witnessing we transcend the duality of testimony characteristic of the other forms. Here, the witness bears witness of himself. As Jesus says in the Gospel: ‘I am one that bear witness of myself’ (John 8:18). On the other hand, self-witnessing is also put into a context, since ‘The Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me,’ while ‘ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape’ (John 5:13). In other words, self-witnessing is not monolithic. While it has a self-contained character, it also possesses an inner structure which is dual (with reference to the inner witnessing of the Father) or even Trinitarian (with reference to the coming of the Comforter; John 15:26).

In this way, confession-testimony turns out to be what we may term absolute testimony (Ricœur, 1980: 120). Absolute testimony transcends the external structures of giving testimony of something to someone and enters the personal structure of testimony of someone to someone, which turns out to be absolutely non-mediated in the final analysis. While Jesus in the Gospel emphasizes the role of the ‘works which the Father hath given me to finish’ (John 5:36), he even more strongly emphasizes the immediate witnessing of the Father, i.e. a structure lacking all external points of reference – ‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9). Absolute testimony is absolute self-reference that transcends external relationships and points merely to the witness as the ultimate confirmation of testimony.

Ricœur’s hermeneutical approach to divine revelation must face at this point the challenge of immediacy. It is obvious in the Biblical texts that narration-testimonies are not self-contained but refer in various ways to confession-testimonies; and it is even more evident that confession-testimony is based on absolute testimony without additional confirmation other than the content and form of the testimony itself. The paramount expression of absolute testimony is the series of I-sayings of Jesus (for instance, John 14:6), so significant in the thought of Michel Henry (2003). Absolute testimony points to absolute revelation with no separate role of external structures of mediation. Even the notion of revelation in an analogical sense remains problematic inasmuch as in order to understand an analogy one has to understand in a direct fashion the analog or source of the analogy, i.e. what is analogically expressed in an external structure, a figure, a sign, or a symbol (for the importance of symbols, see Ricœur, 1983: 57). This creates a problem for thinkers who emphasize the decisive role of mediation.

Ricœur sees this problem and attempts to argue that even absolute testimony is in need of external structures in its expression and understanding, structures mediating the immediate givenness of revelation. His argument has some force, because we indeed need to conceive revelation in our concrete physical, natural, cultural, and intellectual situations. What remains unsolved is the underlying logical problem of the possibility of mediating the immediate without losing immediacy. Ricœur avoids the answer to this basic problem by claiming, in a rather exaggerated fashion, that we must ‘choose’ between ‘the philosophy of absolute knowledge’ and ‘the hermeneutics of testimony’ (Ricœur, 1980: 153). The core of this dilemma for Ricœur is not between methodologies, such as logical intuitionism as opposed to a polysemic hermeneutics, but rather between the ‘the finitude of consciousness’ and ‘absolute knowledge’ (which is refused to consciousness, cf. Ricœur, 1980: 149). Even if we know about absolute testimony, we are in a situation in which only a hermeneutics, i.e. a relative contextualization, may give us access to the absolute. We do not possess absolute knowledge (Ricœur, 1980: 147), and if we know of such knowledge, i.e. we possess information of absolute testimony, we find ourselves in a hermeneutical situation without which absolute knowledge leads us to ‘Gnosticism’ (Ricœur, 1980: 139).

Before I investigate this dilemma, I call attention to an important point in Ricœur’s description of absolute testimony. Not only narration-testimony is given in the context of trial. Even more importantly, it is absolute testimony that appears in the form of a trial. This is the central message of the New Testament – not only of the gospels but also of The Book of Revelation that describes the ultimate trial of all things ultimate. In the final section of this article, I will attempt to understand the importance of the problem of trial with respect to absolute testimony.

Radical revelation

I have tried to describe Ricœur’s hermeneutics of testimony in such a way that the main points of the author become visible. Ricœur offers a complex approach to these points not only in the texts I referred to but also in other works of his which deal with similar problems, such as the problem of human will, the experience of evil, or the intricate relationship between identity and difference in what is conceived as the self (cf. Gregor, 2019: 111–139). By outlining the core problematic of his understanding of divine revelation I do not claim to have undercut his underlying conviction about the impossibility of a philosophy of immediacy with respect to divine revelation. All I wish to do is to challenge this standpoint by pointing out some of the important problems involved in his views. For this reason, I call attention to the notion of ‘radical revelation’ and see its relationship to Ricœur’s hermeneutics of revelation (Mezei, 2017).

The central content of the notion of radical revelation is that the fact of the immediate givenness of revelation cannot be supplanted by any theoretical or methodological tactic. Revelation is the self-expression of the absolute and so it cannot but be absolute in the full sense of the word in itself as well as in all its relations. Absoluteness is falsely conceived if seen in isolation from anything. While the absolute is absolutely transcendent with respect to everything, it is also absolutely immanent in itself and in everything; otherwise, it would not be absolute per se. A ‘limited absolute’ is a contradiction in terms; if it is denied absolute access to itself and to everything else, it is a false absolute. Thus it is unavoidable to say that a ‘limited absolute’, a ‘one-sided infinity’ – an ‘infinity’ so often met in works on ‘otherness’ – is pseudo-absolute related to the notion of Hegel’s ‘bad infinite’ (Hegel, 2010: 111–113). Such a notion represents an idolatrous version of genuine absoluteness. There is a stubborn logical problem in denying the absolute presence of absoluteness in everything (cf. Acts 17:28). For as soon as one possesses the notion of absoluteness, one is supposed to understand this notion in some way. To understand this notion is to have a connection to the notion in such a way that may be described as paradoxical but cannot be consistently denied. To claim that one does not have access to this notion is self-contradictory – even if, as I emphasize, to conceive the notion turns out to be paradoxical in more than one way (cf. Derrida, 1978: 140).

The notion of radical revelation refers to the unlimited and non-limitable absoluteness of divine revelation as the absolute self-disclosure of the absolute, a point Ricœur (1980: 120) acknowledges. This fact does not entail the following. First, it does not entail that if we are aware of the absolute, we are aware of it in the full possible sense; it only entails that we have a formal awareness of the absolute while the full content of the absolute remains unintelligible for us. In this way charges of a supposed ‘Gnosticism’ are refuted (Ricœur, 1980: 91). Second, the unlimited absoluteness of revelation does not entail that revelation lacks structures, i.e. a system of relations ‘in’ and ‘outside’ itself. On the contrary, the absoluteness of revelation entails a complex structure of revelation both in itself and in its relation to our knowledge. I have termed this complexity of revelation ‘the ramifications of revelation’ and pointed out that it can be conceived in the form of a circular movement (Mezei, 2017: 342). However, in all these ramifications the immediate givenness of revelation remains intact. Immediacy cannot be questioned, because by questioning it we presuppose it. Our awareness of this immediacy is, nevertheless, more problematic, because while we know of this immediacy, this knowledge is only formally absolute: it certainly lacks a ‘grasp’ of the absolute in a material sense. To put it in the traditional way: while we know of the absolute (per se) we do not know it in itself (in se). This situation is still paradoxical given the fact that by denying the immediacy of the absolute in any sense we logically contradict ourselves.

Ricœur suggests that ‘We must choose between the philosophy of absolute knowledge and the hermeneutics of testimony’ (Ricœur, 1980: 153). However, this is a false alternative originating in a series of misunderstandings. This is a false alternative in the logical sense, because to choose between two things we need to know both elements to the extent that a choice can be made. In order to choose meaningfully ‘the hermeneutics of testimony’ we must know in some way what Ricœur terms ‘absolute knowledge’; but if we know absolute knowledge, we also understand it in a certain sense. In this case, however, it is logically not possible to dispense with absolute knowledge, i.e. to choose something else, because absolute knowledge comprises all possible and actual knowledge. Secondly, even if we choose the hermeneutics of testimony, we cannot but presuppose the fact of absolute knowledge and even base our deliberations on it. The hermeneutics of testimony, in whatever way we construe it, remains logically dependent on absolute knowledge, i.e. the fact of the absolute immediacy of revelation. From this it follows that it is certainly viable to explain the hermeneutics of testimony in all its forms but thereby we keep as our reference the immediate givenness of revelation.

Ricœur recognizes this situation by pointing out that the genuine notion of truth is not truth as correspondence but truth as original manifestation (Ricœur, 1980: 96). From this, however, it follows that revelation is given above all as original manifestation. It is a consequence of this insight that original manifestation as absolute immediacy cannot be supplanted by mediating forms or contents of hermeneutics. Inasmuch as we talk about revelation, we logically presuppose the absolute immediacy of revelation in its paradoxical fashion with respect to our knowledge of it. This paradox, however, never eclipses the fact of the immediacy of revelation.

At this point we can return to Ricœur’s assessment of phenomenology as the philosophy of immediacy. It is clear that, logically speaking, no hermeneutics is able to supplant, eclipse or annihilate the fact of immediacy. The false alternative between ‘absolute knowledge’ and ‘hermeneutics’ can be detected here as well. All kinds of explanation presuppose and apply ‘original affirmation’ (Ricœur, 1980: 120), i.e. immediate knowledge or insight; any hermeneutics is based on, uses and applies what is given in the immediate knowledge of phenomenology. Inasmuch as phenomenology is the conceiving of essences, hermeneutics is derivative of phenomenology just as explanation is derivative of understanding, and understanding is derivative of insight. If we say we offer an explanation, we also have to say what we explain, because an explanation is always an explanation of something. Husserl’s criticism of Locke is valid here: an infinite series of inner men putting signs on the white paper of the soul never leads to understanding properly so-called. Understanding as the immediate presence of what is conceived remains the ultimate presupposition of all kinds of hermeneutical maneuvering (Husserl, 1930: 555).

In a similar sense, radical revelation is immediately given in its formal fullness in all kinds of explanation of the testimony of revelation. Absolute revelation has a structure, and it also has historical and cultural instantiation; however, structure and instantiation do not replace the absoluteness of revelation; they instantiate or exemplify it. Absolute revelation is expressed in the concrete because what is absolute is necessarily concrete at the same time. Given the fact of its unlimitedness, absoluteness entails the concrete embodiment or incarnation of the absolute. This concreteness of the absolute is necessarily registered in the historical sense. As a historical fact it expresses the concrete embodiment of absolute revelation. The term ‘radical revelation’ signifies this central feature of divine revelation.

There remains an important point to understand in Ricœur’s hermeneutics of revelation. He refers to the process of trial as a necessary feature of testimony. In narration-testimony, the trial is narrated; in confession-testimony the trial goes deeper and challenges the validity of a confession. In the absolute sense, nevertheless, the trial also takes an absolute form. This latter is difficult to conceptualize, because our understanding of a trial is bound to the examples we know of the real world; Ricœur mentions as examples the trials of Socrates and Jesus. These historically registered forms of trial, however, only instantiate the notion of an absolute trial which does not occur in Ricœur’s works. This is what I have endeavored to describe by the notion of refusivum sui (Mezei, 2017: 255–258). The absolute trial takes place absolutely and it is realized by what is traditionally described in terms of kenosis or, in Hebrew mysticism, tzim-tzum (Jonas, 1987). In a more genuine form, this can be conceived as the self-denial of the absolute to validate itself absolutely. The absolute rejects its own absoluteness so that what is not absolute can be born and evolve. Bonum is not only diffusivum sui (self-spreading), but more originally it is refusivum sui (self-denying, cf. Varga, 2020). That is how the ramifications of revelation can evolve and lead back to their original point of departure.

Nevertheless, to conceive the principle of refusivum sui in terms of naturalism would be a misunderstanding. What takes place in the process of refusivum is an absolute movement in which various elements coincide. The meaning of refundo (from which we have the participle refusivum) means both ‘to withdraw’ and ‘to refund’ (for more details see Mezei, 2017: 256). This semantic relation points to the fact that the principle of refusivum sui expresses both a self-withdrawal (in the kenotic sense) and a self-reparation or self-fulfillment. We can distinguish the two moments conceptually and even recognize a certain structure in them – a structure in which it is always self-fulfillment that defines the context of self-withdrawal; or it is always the absoluteness of the absolute that defines its own relativity. Yet we also conceive that these moments absolutely coincide in such a way that immediacy defines mediation in the absolute sense. To express this point in terms of Ricœur’s writings, it is phenomenology that defines the circle of hermeneutics in its entirety and details. No hermeneutics, as philosophy of mediation, can supersede phenomenology as philosophy of immediacy. On the contrary, phenomenology remains the core, the basis, the point of departure, and the fulfilment of hermeneutics.

Radical revelation is never supplanted by the ramifications of revelation in all its temporal, historical and cultural forms; it remains the core of all kinds of explanation of revelation. To use again one of Ricœur’s phrases, a ‘detour through an interpretation of the contingent signs that the absolute gives of itself in history’ (Ricœur, 1980: 149) – in spite of what Ricœur suggests – never deposes the absolute in its ultimate and direct radicality. Thus, we do not have to choose between the absolute knowledge of revelation and the hermeneutics of testimony. Rather, it is necessary that we connect these two aspects to each other so that we can be aware of the radical newness intrinsic to revelation (cf. Mezei, 2021a). It is this newness that unites otherness and sameness in revelation. The kind of thought that discloses this correlation is termed apocalyptic phenomenology (Mezei, 2017: 229–293), a phenomenology that explores the important insights of Miklos Vetö on the newness of revelation (Vetö, 2006: 221). Based on the notion of absolute novelty, apocalyptic phenomenology is able to highlight the genuine ‘sovereignty of revelation’, a point emphasized by Paul Ricœur (1980: 114).

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