Finding Grace with God. Rose Ellen Dunn
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Finding Grace with God
A Phenomenological Reading of the Annunciation
Rose Ellen Dunn
Foreword by Robert S. Corrington
Finding Grace with God
A Phenomenological Reading of the Annunciation
Copyright © 2014 Rose Ellen Dunn. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Pickwick Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13: 978-1-62032-616-9
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-395-0
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Dunn, Rose Ellen.
Finding grace with God : a phenomenological reading of the annunciation / Rose Ellen Dunn ; foreword by Robert S. Corrington
xiv + 136 pp. ; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 13: 978-1-62032-616-9
1. Philosophical theology. 2. Phenomenological theology. 3. Philosophy and religion. 4. Feminist theory. I. Corrington, Robert S., 1950–. II. Title.
BT40 .D86 2014
Manufactured in the USA
An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Let It Be: Finding Grace with God through the Gelassenheit of the Annunciation,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, 329–48, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Copyright © 2010. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Bible quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Bible quotations marked SBLGNT are from the SBL Greek New Testament. Copyright © 2010 Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software.
To Glenna Caitlin, Alanna Rose, and Fiona Brigid
Foreword
The reader is holding in his or her hands a brilliant work that accomplishes an interdisciplinary interweaving of phenomenology, theology, and feminist philosophy. To address each of these adequately would require far more space than is traditionally allocated to a foreword, so I will focus more on the first of these aspects, that of phenomenology. What makes this work so important and impressive is that it not only carefully exhibits the different phenomenological frameworks of Husserl and Heidegger, but also, and with equal skill, examines the more recent French phenomenologies of Ricoeur, Henry, Marion, Janicaud, and Chrétien as they compare and contrast to the German antecedents, but then goes on to show how both traditions serve to open out the depth-meanings of the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke.
Not only is Rose Ellen Dunn a gifted and empathic exegete of the German and French phenomenological traditions, she is also a formidable practitioner of the craft of phenomenology itself, knowing full well the issues of bracketing and the reductions required to position the self so that it can truly allow the phenomena of the Gospel text to show themselves from out of themselves alone. Thus she is rare in that she can work as both a historian of the phenomenological movement and as a full working phenomenologist of religion. In the latter capacity she has had to argue, against Janicaud, that the “theological turn” of some French phenomenology is not a betrayal of the “purity” of a “neutral” phenomenology, but a legitimate extension of the method of the disclosure of religious phenomena as they occur within the human life-world, i.e., not as an alien or forced false consciousness that blunts its way into consciousness from a heteronomous “outside.”
Of course, finding the potencies of religious consciousness isn’t easy, and there is an appropriate place for the hermeneutics of suspicion at the commencement of one’s phenomenological query. Rose Ellen Dunn notes that, for Ricoeur, the three great masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, remain compelling insofar as they help us to discard those pathologies to which a false religious consciousness is prone to fall victim. But beyond that there is a hermeneutics of restoration that lets genuine religious phenomenal traits interact with consciousness. On the other side of suspicion is what Marion calls the “gift,” where richly saturated phenomena surround and permeate the self with a grace-filled givenness.
Ricoeur is important for Rose Ellen Dunn for his broader hermeneutic horizon that bases his phenomenology on the temporal fluidity of texts. Instead of a Husserlian focus on intentionality and its objects (noesis and noema), which retains a lingering Cartesian dualism, Ricoeur stresses the already thereness of the Self in intertextuality and narrative that is temporally thick before the individual Self enters into it. In different language: first there is the text, then there is the Self made more fully into a Self by that text.
The central phenomenologist for Rose Ellen Dunn is Martin Heidegger, both early (Sein und Zeit) and late. Her exegesis of his texts is superb and grasps the astonishing subtlety of his careful delineations of Dasein, Being/beings, time, hermeneutic as opposed to transcendental phenomenology (Husserl), immanent transcendence, thrownness, attunement, the event, and so on. But above all, she finds the deepest phenomenological treasure in Heidegger’s use/experience of Gelassenheit, variously translated as “letting be” or “openness to the mystery.” In the attunement of Gelassenheit the Self (Dasein) finds the clearing (Lichtung) where there is no felt need to “know why,” just a sense of the sheer being of the worldhood of the world and what is in it, e.g., the rose that needs no “why.”
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology is designed to correlate the givenness of what shows itself with its meaning for Dasein. The phenomenon is never just a bare given, but is always a given as. Nor is hermeneutical phenomenology a passive lingering with an inert given. Rather, it moves with the text’s own inner rhythm, namely its proclamation of an event that calls the text into being in the first place. She puts it precisely:
In other words, a hermeneutical phenomenology allows the proclamation—the attestation—of the text to light up in unconcealment from the text, describes the proclamation, and then, through interpretation, discloses possibilities for the enactment of the proclamation. Through this hermeneutic, the text and the interpreter are simultaneously open(ed) to possibility.
In other words, the text, as temporally shaped narrative and identity-giver (Ricoeur), moves its interpreter into the spheres of (pulsating) possibilities that are the “not yet being” (Ernst Bloch) for Dasein and its communities.
Further, she masterfully unfolds the folds (unfoldings/enfoldings) within the Heideggerian project as it holds-forth a numinous “place” for the life of the religious Self. The use of the metaphor of “folding,” with its subalterns of “unfolding and enfolding,” moves us into the realm of “theopoesis,” where the richness of the finite/infinite intertwinings is manifest in a kind of ecstatic phenomenology that celebrates the divine possibilities of the Annunciation.
In a few concise pages, Rose Ellen Dunn exhibits and elucidates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the visible and the invisible and their mutual co-foldings that leave traces of the invisible within our experience of sense perception. She states: “Once given, the invisible, in a sense, possesses us: the musician becomes the music, the dancer becomes the dance; the idea remains with us. We are enfolded into the invisible as the invisible unfolds through us.” The invisible becomes visible in its own way as what Husserl long ago called the “co-present.”
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