Finding Grace with God. Rose Ellen Dunn
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sense of joy in the over-full exuberance of the gift of possibility that is spontaneously born when the divine enters into relation with the maternal archetype as embodied in Mary. If the hermeneutics of suspicion works to remove false and tribal gods, what we can call the “hermeneutics of grace” opens out, in fact, is opened out by, the radiant light of the divine material maternal (Kristeva). The angel Gabriel’s annunciation of Mary’s “ontological” transformation is a gifting of divinity that in turn is offered to all persons for whom the maternal is a congenial route to the infinite source of meaning under the constraints of finitude.
Rose Ellen Dunn has masterfully refined phenomenological method and applied it to religious experience in subtle and compelling ways, avoiding imposing alien (heteronomous) material onto the phenomenal fields of her descriptions of the gifting of the sacred. Theologians can benefit from her non-doctrinal treatment of the self-showing of the divine, while philosophers can learn much about how phenomenology and ontology require each other if religious experience is to receive a proper “space” within which to be grasped and assimilated. The Annunciation is not confined to a once-and-for-all moment in history but is a structure of being that both supports and lures us forward into the primal not yet.
Robert S. Corrington
Drew University
Acknowledgments
In giving thanks, the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is.
The heart, thus giving thought and thus being memory, gives itself
in thought to that to which it is held.
—Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?
This book is the culmination of my doctoral studies at Drew University, and I gratefully acknowledge the professors with whom I worked on this project. Thank you to Professors Robert Corrington, Charles Courtney, Catherine Keller, and Stephen Moore for their encouragement, insights, and the many engaging conversations we shared as we carefully thought through this phenomenological analysis together. I extend special thanks to Robert Corrington for his work as my dissertation advisor, for his generous foreword, and for his continuing friendship.
Thank you to my colleagues at Drew University for the many friendships that so enriched my experience of graduate school and formed the intellectual community in which my work thrived and came to fruition. At Drew I found engaging conversation partners, supportive colleagues, and lasting friends.
My thanks also go to my editors at Wipf and Stock for their encouragement throughout this project as well as their work in bringing the manuscript to publication. I am thankful to Fordham University Press for their permission to include a revised and expanded version of my essay, “Let It Be: Finding Grace with God in the Gelassenheit of the Annunciation,” published in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, as chapter 4 of this book.
Finally, I am deeply grateful for my family, who instilled in me a love of learning and who encouraged me throughout my graduate studies. I give very special thanks for my wonderful daughters—Glenna Caitlin, Alanna Rose, and Fiona Brigid—whose love holds my heart and gathers my world.
August 15, 2013
Feast of the Assumption
Introduction
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