Abstract
Philosophical West meets liturgical East in Liturgical Theology after Schmemann. Author Brian A. Butcher offers a selective but erudite study of the thought of a major contemporary Western philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, in conversation with (not exclusively) Orthodox liturgical theology “beyond” that of its foremost modern figure, Alexander Schmemann. Over the first seven chapters, B. displays a mastery of key elements in Ricoeur’s prolific writings, drawing on his foundational work on symbol and metaphor, and focusing on his essays on religion and later works on narrative selfhood (primarily Figuring the Sacred, Oneself as Another, and Memory, History, Forgetting). Along the way, B. elucidates how these may be brought to bear particularly on essential questions in contemporary liturgical theology and how they converge with the dialectic of kataphaticism and apophaticism in Orthodox theology and liturgy. In the eighth chapter, B. demonstrates the fruits of this dialogue through an incisive reading, aided by Nicolas Denysenko, of the “Service of the Great Blessing of the Waters” (GBW) celebrated in the Byzantine Rite on the Feast of the Theophany (the text of which, provided in an appendix that follows a brief “Conclusion,” is worth examining in advance of reading Chapter 8).
Those familiar with Ricoeur’s work know that it is notoriously difficult to systematize or summarize, and B. makes no pretense of doing either. Rather, drawing on his own as well as other theological interpretations of Ricoeur (e.g., John van den Hengel, Dan Stiver, David Klemm), B. provides a welcome guide to those aspects particularly germane to issues regarding liturgy and sacrament: “the attributes and functions of symbol, metaphor, and narrative; the conflict engendered by interpretive pluralism; the dialectic between history and historiography; the manner in which personal and communal identity develop in time” (2), to name a few. In the second chapter B. gives an entrée into the Ricoeur–liturgy dialogue with judicious critiques of two Western theologians who have undertaken similar tasks, Joyce Ann Zimmerman (Roman Catholic) and Bridget Nichols (Anglican), allowing their uses of Ricoeur to investigate liturgical concerns like hermeneutics, text and performance, subjectivity-objectivity, and spirituality. This serves as a springboard for his own approach to Eastern liturgy.
B.’s guiding question is “how to construe the liturgical faculty of l’homme capable—how to discern in such a one the form of Schmemann’s homo adorans,” or, conversely, “how liturgy, as an instantiation of Ricoeur’s axiom that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought,’ manifests homo capax as specifically homo capax Dei” (59). B.’s ensuing treatment mines numerous concepts that could make up a Ricoeurean glossary for their liturgical riches: the surplus/impertinence of meaning in symbol and metaphor, meaningful action and text, history and fiction, the hermeneutical arc, the narrative/mimetic arc, the naming of God and the polyphonicity of scriptural genres, the summoned subject, the polyphonic self, ontological vehemence, memory, attestation and truth, the capable human being.
Though quite a few remain evocative and uncut, B.’s expeditions uncover many gems. Among these is the proposal that the “historicizing inclinations” of the Antiochene school “enjoin upon the worshiper the arduous labor of remembering,” in contrast with the focus on theōsis in the Alexandrian school, “as nourishing our capacity for promising” (17). Another is the reminder that “the Eastern Christian perspective would not see biblical faith as conveyed apart from its cultivation within the liturgical act” (46). Finally there is his proposal that the dynamics of metaphor illuminates the dialectic of the via positiva and the via negativa (“the kataphatic . . . already implies the apophatic to the extent that its polyphonicity resists conceptual circumscription” [103]).
Chapter 5, “The Summoned Subject,” is arguably the cardinal chapter. It argues that Ricoeur’s confrontation of the “world in front of (the scriptural) text” (with its multiplicity of genres that name God, e.g., law, prophets, wisdom in the Tanakh) with the “world of the reader” provides a “pattern [that] allows us to stencil the shape of selfhood envisioned by the genres of the liturgy” (120). Continuing a thread begun earlier in asking which hermeneutic arc, “life-liturgy-life,” or “liturgy-life-liturgy,” may be more appropriate (39), B. contends that “the self is . . . dispossessed by the liturgy even as it is possessed, for it is brought to the point of ever beginning again” (128). The implications for spiritual and pastoral theology are considerable.
As much as B. has packed into this work, it would have been interesting to see more of Ricoeur’s treatment of translation and of narrative as threefold mimesis incorporated into the analysis of the GBW. How, for example, does configuration/mimesis2—which differs for author and reader—translate into examining a ritual configuration that brings about refiguration for those celebrating this service, who are in some ways offering its “world” for others while in other ways receiving it?
B.’s style is, like Ricoeur’s, quite concentrated and deliberate. As when reading Ricoeur, much is presupposed and demanded of the reader, yet the return is ample indeed.