Читать книгу Finding Grace with God - Rose Ellen Dunn - Страница 7

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

—Salutatio Angelica

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

—Mary, Luke 1:46–48

The text of the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke narrates the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary—an extraordinary visit in which Mary receives a divine message calling her to be the mother of the son of God.1 Greeting Mary, the angel Gabriel immediately suggests that Mary is surrounded with divine grace and divine presence—“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). As Mary is initially perplexed by this greeting, the angel reassures her: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God” (1:30).2 Gabriel brings the announcement that God desires Mary—a young woman, a virgin betrothed to Joseph—to bear a child, a son: “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus” (1:31). This child, the angel announces, “will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High” (1:32). Mary responds with a question: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (1:34).3 Emphasizing again the active presence of the divine, the angel responds: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (1:35). Gabriel continues, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (1:37). With words that would later become a symbol of perfect discipleship, Mary answers: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (1:38).

In this book, I will suggest that the text of the Annunciation is infused with possibility: Mary, filled with grace, is beckoned by the divine into possibility; responding in grace, she in turn beckons the divine into possibility. Transgressing the limits of language, this possibility slips into apophasis—into a moment of Gelassenheit: a mutual “letting-be” or releasement of Mary and the divine into a mystical union of love. This work of unfolding the possibilities present in the Annunciation is facilitated through a hermeneutical phenomenology that interprets this text as a theopoetic reflection on the relationship between the divine and the human. Since this interpretation is primarily phenomenological, it begins with a discussion of the foundational phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and then moves to the more recent work of several French phenomenologists, including Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry. The interpretation of the Annunciation is then expanded through the philosophical work of Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida. Finally, the phenomenologies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger provide a means to discuss the text of the Annunciation as theopoesis. Through this phenomenological framing, these chapters interpret the Annunciation as a theopoetic text that describes an event of Gelassenheit springing from a mutual gift of love between the divine and the human.

Marian tradition is replete with interpretations of the Annunciation that focus on the perfect obedience and submission of Mary; she is often seen as the pure and blessed handmaiden of God, “alone of all her sex,” an unattainable symbol of perfection.4 Feminist theorists object that the tradition of an obedient and submissive Mary reinforces the patriarchal oppression of women. As Elizabeth Johnson observes, “This construal of Mary the obedient handmaid legitimates the idea that women’s virtue lies in being receptively obedient to the authority of males, be they divine or human.”5 Simone de Beauvior suggests that in the narrative of the Annunciation, “For the first time in human history the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority. This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin.”6 Mary Daly argues that Mary’s role “is utterly minimal . . . She bears the Son who pre-existed her and then she adores him.”7 Daphne Hampson’s feminist theology criticizes the Mary of “biblical religion” by observing that “Biblical religion is not about Mary, who is wholly peripheral, but about Christ. Furthermore, Mary is scarcely a woman whom women today might be expected to find to be a symbol who represents them. She fulfils a typically female role: she is the one who receives from a God conceived as male. That is to say she conforms to the masculinist construction of femininity.”8

Feminist theologians, struggling with traditions that emphasize feminine submission to masculine authority, set the stage for new interpretations of the Annunciation that seek to reclaim a voice for Mary as a strong character.9 As Johnson argues, “Luke’s gospel narrative of the annunciation presents a powerful example of a young girl’s positive response to the invitation of God operating within history.”10 Johnson’s theological interpretation situates Mary within the communion of saints—within “the grace of the living”—where, she observes, to “call Mary blessed is to recognize the blessedness of ordinary people who are called to participate in the work of God in our own day.”11

Grounding their hermeneutics in the experience of marginalized women in Latin America, Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer seek to retrieve from the biblical texts a vision of Mary as an agent—as a special revelation—of the Kingdom of God; Gebara and Bingemer see Mary as “a ‘worker’ in the harvest of the Kingdom, an active member of the movement of the poor, as is Jesus of Nazareth.”12 Gebara and Bingemer insist that the fruit of Mary’s womb is the birth of a people committed to the restoration of divine justice in the world, a justice that brings liberation to the poor: “Mary, collective figure, symbol of the faithful people from whose womb emerges the New Creation, unfolds before human beings all their infinite horizons with their indescribable possibilities.”13

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza notes that feminist biblical scholars read the texts searching for a feminine voice of liberation, in order to transform biblical interpretation through a “hermeneutics of re-vision [which] investigates biblical texts for submerged meanings, lost voices, and authorizing visions.”14 Schüssler Fiorenza proposes that a feminist hermeneutic might rightly be “sophialogical”—one that seeks to recover the words of “Wisdom-Sophia” in the biblical text.15 For Schüssler Fiorenza, “Divine Wisdom-Sophia, as G*d the Creator and Liberator, is not exclusive of other religious traditions but is at work among all peoples, cultures, and religions. She teaches justice, prudence, and well-being . . . She embraces creation in its living beauty and manifold variety and delights in its wonders. Divine Wisdom encompasses and sustains everything and everyone.”16 Schüssler Fiorenza suggests that traces of Wisdom-Sophia are present in the image of Mary.17

Beverly Gaventa seeks to retrieve from “glimpses” of Mary in biblical and extracanonical texts a portrayal of Mary “as a model for all Christians.”18 For Gaventa, Mary, as disciple, prophet, and mother, is portrayed in the gospel as vulnerable, as reflective, and as a witness: “What we do have in these glimpses of Mary are some important aspects of what it means to be a disciple of Christ: living with vulnerability, reflecting with care on the advent of Jesus Christ, and witnessing God’s actions in the world.”19

From a feminist philosophical viewpoint, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva creatively exemplify alternative readings of the text of the Annunciation. For Luce Irigaray, the event of the Annunciation is an advent of the divine, reaching incarnation in a relationship of attentive love as two subjects—Mary and the divine—share the gift of breath.20 In the text of the Annunciation, Irigaray finds the possibility to understand Mary as a model for the incarnation of feminine divinity.21 Through her (re)reading of the narrative of the Annunciation as an encounter between two subjects, Irigaray develops a rich understanding of Mary as a divine manifestation participating in the incarnation of divinity—and becoming divine herself—by sharing an attentive love with the divine. Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” offers a creative psychoanalytic interpretation of the conception of Jesus.22 She considers the ambivalence of the Virgin Mary as a religious and cultural symbol, and the direct consequences this symbol brings to representations of the maternal body. Kristeva proposes that the pregnant maternal body—with its undifferentiated fusion of mother and child, of subject and Other—is the appropriate foundation for a heretical ethics (a “herethics”) of love. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” explores the significance of the Virgin Mary—as a symbol that is saturated with meaning—with an intermingling poetic reflection on her own experience of birth and motherhood.

The interpretation of the Annunciation that I develop in the following chapters is facilitated through a philosophical hermeneutic that employs an interdisciplinary interweaving of phenomenology, theology, and feminist philosophy. In biblical studies, this interpretation is somewhat untraditional as it creates a space within the discipline for constructive theological and philosophical work with a particular biblical text. In the field of phenomenology, this manuscript, through an active and engaged interdisciplinarity, extends even further its inherent theological possibilities.

Since this work is so engaged with phenomenology, chapter 1 begins with an introduction to the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The chapter considers the possibilities in their work for the development of a phenomenological theology opening from the world of visible phenomena to the invisible world of the transcendent. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method leads the experiencing subject from the experience of a phenomenon, through a reflection on the experiencing I, to the transcendental I and the transcendental consciousness. Although much of Husserl’s phenomenology suspends—or brackets—the transcendence of God in human experience, there are indications in his later writings of an openness of the transcendental I to the divine as the ideal telos of the intersubjective community of the transcendental We. Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology describes and interprets the appearing and self-showing of Being, as well as the openness of Dasein (the human person) to Being. In his later writings, Heidegger begins to emphasize the experience of Gelassenheit—the openness or releasement of Dasein in response to the lighting-up and coming-to-presence of Being. Heidegger inherits this understanding of Gelassenheit from mystical theology and, while Heidegger’s understanding of the releasement of Dasein to Being is primarily secular, it is analogous to the experience of releasement to the divine that is described in mystical theology. This chapter also introduces Dominique Janicaud’s argument that the turning of phenomenology to theology is a transgression of the phenomenological method.23 Janicaud argues that recent French phenomenology is distinguished by “a rupture with immanent phenomenality,” a rupture caused by the “opening to the invisible, to the Other, to a pure givenness, or an archi-revelation.”24 The “theological turn” of phenomenology is more fully addressed in chapter 3, where I argue that phenomenological theology is a development—rather than a transgression—of phenomenology.

Chapter 2 introduces the hermeneutical phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, with particular attention given to Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics. At the center of Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutic is the question of possibility: the question of how the human person is a possible reality continually created and recreated by the generative word of the biblical text. This chapter, following Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, will consider the text of the Annunciation as the disclosure of possibility—as “religious faith as expressed in language.”25 For Ricoeur, the “fundamental theme of Revelation is this awakening and this call, into the heart of existence, of the imagination of the possible.”26 Biblical interpretation summons the reader to the possibility of “new modes of being-in-the-world.”27 This summons, Ricoeur suggests, is the kerygmatic proclamation that is present in the biblical text calling the reading community into possibility; this is a proclamation that must be reinterpreted in each new context. In using a phenomenological hermeneutic, this chapter will explore new possibilities for reading the text of the Annunciation as an “awakening” and a “call” into divine possibility that both address and constitute the self.

Situated in, and fully engaging the “theological turn” of phenomenology, chapter 3 introduces the phenomenologies of Jean-Louis Chrétien and Michel Henry. Chrétien’s phenomenological description of the call and the response, as well as his phenomenology of prayer as a response to the divine call, provides creative possibilities for interpreting the divine call and Mary’s response in the text of the Annunciation. For Chrétien, the human person is continually beckoned into subjectivity through the call that is ever present in the world; Chrétien, in decidedly theological language, affirms this call as a declaration of divine love: “The world in its entirety merely forms one immense declaration of love, the declaration which the God who is Love makes to us.”28 Through the call, the human person is gathered into divine love, and through the response, becomes the manifestation of that love in the world. Henry’s phenomenology of life and his insistence on immanence as the essence of transcendence, contributes to an interpretation of the Annunciation as the celebration of human life as being-in-divine-life. Using the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart, Henry develops a philosophy of Christianity that suggests the divine is manifest—and is experienced by the self—through the auto-affectivity of life. The self-manifestation of the divine, for Henry, is the sheer givenness of an absolute self-revelation of divine life. Henry’s philosophy of Christianity is a radical phenomenology affirming, in the words of Meister Eckhart: “God engenders himself as myself [Dieu s’engendre comme moi-même].”29

Chapter 4 develops an interpretation of the Annunciation as a moment of Gelassenheit through a theoretical framework that interweaves a phenomenological theology with the work of Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida. Luce Irigaray’s feminist philosophy provides a way to think about Mary as a gendered subject, as an example of a feminine incarnation of divinity. Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers a means to consider the mutual gift of possibility that is given in the text of the Annunciation. Derrida’s interpretation of testimony and apophatic prayer invites further thought on the text of the Annunciation as well as the text of the Magnificat. With this theoretical framework in place, this chapter explores an interpretation of the Annunciation as an event of Gelassenheit—as an event springing from a mutual gift of love and overflowing with possibility.

Finally, the conclusion to this manuscript interprets the text of the Annunciation as theopoesis—as a theopoetic reflection on the enfolding and unfolding of divinity. In thinking toward a phenomenology of theopoetics, I first explore a theopoetics of en/unfolding through the phenomenology of perception developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work provides an example of en/unfolding through sensible perception. Through our participation in the chiasmic intertwining of perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests, perceiver and perceived cross and intertwine—each participating sympathetically with/in the other—in the rhythm of perception. Perception unfolds as perceiver and perceived enfold one another: “My perception is the impact of the world upon me and the catch of my gestures toward it.”30 Language arises then as the expressions of the embodied perceiving subject since perception—always unfinished—“gives us a world to express.”31 While the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is not itself theological, his understanding of language and his brief discussion of religious faith provide the possibility for interpreting theological language as expressive speech—as a creatively unfolding language that intertwines with and in the world as “language capable of conveying the relations of religious life.”32 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language is further interpreted through Heidegger’s poetic understanding of the “without why” of the concealing and unconcealing of Being; and the constructive theology of Catherine Keller contributes to a theological exploration of divine enfolding and unfolding. This book then concludes with a reflection on the Annunciation as theopoesis.

The significance of this work lies in its creative juxtaposition of phenomenology, theology, and feminist philosophy, and the opening of biblical interpretation toward theopoetics through a hermeneutics of grace. Reading the narrative of the Annunciation in conversation with these disciplines opens this text to new interpretive possibilities. As Merleau-Ponty asks, “what if language expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves? By that which it does not ‘say’ as by what it ‘says’?”33 Through phenomenology, this manuscript is attentive to “threads of silence”34 in the text, developing an interpretation of the text of the Annunciation as a description of a mutual gift of Gelassenheit that, following Ricoeur, continually awakens and calls the reader into “the imagination of the possible.”35 One “possible” that can be imagined through a theopoetic interpretation of the Annunciation is an awakening and a call into an extraordinary gift of life—a gift that is given through the grace of Gelassenheit.

1. See Luke 1:26–38. Unless otherwise noted, biblical texts are cited from the NRSV. Greek New Testament texts are cited from the SBLGNT.

2. Cf. the Greek: Μὴ φοβοῦ, Μαριάμ, εὗρες γὰρ χάριν παρὰ τῷ θεῷ. This manuscript plays with the translation of the Greek word χάριν as “grace” as well as “favor”: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God.”

3. Cf. the Greek: Πῶς ἔσται τοῦτο, ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω; literally: How can this be, seeing that I do not know a man?

4. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.

5. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 26.

6. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, 160.

7. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 85. See also Daly, Pure Lust.

8. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 74.

9. See Johnson, Truly Our Sister, for a very helpful and detailed history of Marian interpretation.

10. Ibid., 26.

11. Ibid., 308.

12. Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, 37.

13. Ibid., 174.

14. Schüssler Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures, 11.

15. Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word, 180.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Gaventa, Mary, 131.

19. Ibid. See, further, 72–74.

20. Cf. Irigaray, Marine Lover, 177.

21. Cf. ibid., 168.

22. See Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” and Kristeva, Tales of Love.

23. See Janicaud, “Theological Turn.”

24. Ibid., 17.

25. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 37, emphasis in original.

26. Ricoeur, “Two Essays,” 224.

27. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94.

28. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 141.

29. Henry, “Phenomenology of Life,” 252. Henry is quoting from Meister Eckhart.

30. Merleau-Ponty, “Perception of the Other,” 137. See also Merleau-Ponty, “La perception d’autrui,” 191: “ma perception est impact du monde sur moi et prise de mes gestes sur lui.”

31. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 56. See also Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, 79: “Puisque la perception même n’est jamais finie, puisqu’elle ne nous donne un monde à exprimer” (emphasis in original).

32. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 175. See also Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, 358: “langage capable de porter les relations de la vie religieuse.”

33. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 45. See also Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect,” 56: “Mais si le langage exprime autant par ce qui est entre les mots que par les mots? Par ce qu’il ne ‘dit’ pas que par ce qu’il ‘dit’?”

34. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 46. See also Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect,” 58: “les fils de silence.”

35. Ricoeur, “Two Essays,” 224.