20th century AD

Christian Century, August 23, 2005 by Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Ricoeur recovered the cognitive significance of forms of language like metaphor (The Rule of Metaphor) and of forms of literature like narrative (Time and Narrative). This recovery is potentially as important as the Reformers' recovery of the original languages of the Bible.

A second contribution is more subtle. It has to do with Ricoeur's personalism, his treatment of persons in terms not of substance but of "capability": the power to choose, to do and to suffer. Ricoeur marveled at this, our "only human freedom" (Freedom and Nature). Embodied and hence embattled, we finite creatures persistently harbor infinite desires and wishes. Narratives matter precisely because they recount and enjoin those actions that unite human projects and worldly events. We begin to grasp the measure of human freedom, then, in the stories and histories that record human-being-as-act.

The artist Paul Klee wanted to see the world anew, like a child: "I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing." The apostle Paul, reborn, wanted to know nothing but Jesus Christ. Ricoeur, like his namesakes, found a way of seeing that meaning and hope restored to an age marked by what yet another Paul (Tillich, Ricoeur's predecessor at the University of Chicago) called the anxiety of meaninglessness.

THE WORLD, for Ricoeur, was made up of all the books he had read, known and loved. It was this world, projected or refigured by these texts, that was the object of his second naivete--not the present world (that way lies madness the frenzy of market and media and militarism) but a prospective world in which we may hope.

Ricoeur presented a new grammar of assent in a world where criticism and cynicism held sway. Fostering the ability to affirm and to attest to something one can believe in with all one's heart is a prodigious accomplishment. Ricoeur was a philosophical Moses who traveled through and beyond the desert of modern criticism and who enjoyed not only a glimpse but a long look at the promised land before dying. But how far did he see?

When relating philosophy to theology, Ricoeur typically preferred to respect boundaries rather than attempt a creative mediation. His philosophy begins in wonder but stops just short of worship. His philosophical discourse approximates a number of Christian doctrines: creation, fall, even redemption. His recent work on forgiveness comes breathtakingly close to the notion of justification by faith. What finally intrigued him about the Bible was not its morality (he rejected the economy of retribution typical of the first naivete) but its eschatology, its hopeful expectation of something other, and better, yet to come. Ricoeur's Pauline, Protestant philosophy bears witness to a more-than-moral order characterized by an economy of the gift and a "logic of superabundance"--in a word, grace.

Yet at one point--for confessing Christians, the crucial point--Ricoeur's approximation falls short, even fiat. Easter, he thought, means that Jesus conquered death by serving others, who by serving others in turn become his historical "body" (Critique and Conviction). Here, as a witness to the resurrection, Ricoeur the philosopher can muster only a lisp rather than an exultant cry ("He is risen!").