Finding Grace with God. Rose Ellen Dunn
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discovers the unconcealment—the uncovering—of Being.
Heidegger suggests that Dasein is always already in truth and untruth, uncovering and covering, unconcealment and concealment:
The fact that the goddess of truth who leads Parmenides places him before two paths, that of discovering and that of concealment, signifies nothing other than the fact that Da-sein is always already both in the truth and the untruth. The path of discovering is gained only in krinein logō, in distinguishing between them understandingly and in deciding for the one rather than the other.111
Phenomenology—as λέγειν τὰ ϕαινόμενα (letting something be seen or apprehended straightforwardly)—accompanies Dasein in this process of discovery by allowing the paths to be seen straightforwardly and by describing these paths such that Dasein is able to distinguish between the two. Phenomenology is, for Heidegger, “the [process of] allowing the most proper concern of thought to show itself.”112 It is the process through which Dasein engages in κρίνειν λόγω: distinguishing and reasoning between the possibilities of discovery and concealment, and choosing, with understanding, the path of truth.
Following Being and Time, the later phenomenology of Heidegger continued to explore the path of truth as ἀλήθεια, or unconcealment, but with a slight variation—with a turn, or Kehre. As Heidegger describes this, “the reversal between Being and Time, between Time and Being, is determined by the way Being is granted, Time is granted.”113 For the later Heidegger, this process of granting—the “Es gibt”—is “the lighting-up of the self-concealing [that is proper to] the process of coming-to-presence.”114 Heidegger is turning from the resoluteness of Dasein (Entschlossenheit) to the releasement of Dasein (Gelassenheit) in response to the lighting-up and coming-to-presence of Being. Dasein’s truest calling is to wait—to while—in the stillness of a meditative repose for the lighting-up of Being.
Heidegger likens this stillness to that of the rose in the poetry of Angelus Silesius: “humans, in the concealed grounds of their essential being, first truly are when in their own way they are like the rose—without why.”115 The beauty of the rose in its blooming is “a pure arising on its own, a pure shining.”116 Dasein, through the stillness of meditative thinking, opens itself in releasement to the gathering presence of the pure arising and shining of Being. For Dasein, it is a matter of choosing paths through which thinking can respond to the coming-to-presence of Being. As Heidegger asks, “are we obliged to find paths upon which thinking is capable of responding to what is worthy of thought instead of, enchanted by calculative thinking, mindlessly passing over what is worthy of thought?”117
Phenomenological Theology
Dominique Janicaud argues that it is precisely this kehre, this turning of Heidegger’s later phenomenology, that has given rise to the theological turn of contemporary French phenomenology and the subsequent “rupture with immanent phenomenality.”118 Does this represent, however, a transgression of the phenomenological method, or does transcendental phenomenology itself express, as Dermot Moran suggests, “the inner essence of religion”?119 Jean-Yves Lacoste argues that phenomenology inherently accesses more than immanent phenomenality: “there is no perception of the visible without a co-perception of the invisible . . . perception grasps— Auffassung—simultaneously the visible and the invisible.”120 The transcendental consciousness of Husserlian phenomenology and the event of Alētheia in Heidegger’s later phenomenology are simultaneously visible and invisible. In these moments of co-perception, there is an opportunity to describe the immanence of the transcendent.
As Jeffrey Bloechl very succinctly asks, “What will it mean for phenomenology to seek an understanding of divine transcendence only within the limits in which it presents itself to be seen?”121 Bloechl continues by suggesting that “[o]ne can only investigate the form of life that makes such a confession [of faith in God], and ask whether elements of it might testify to a dimension beyond capture within any horizon.”122 Religiousness, for Heidegger, arises out of a factical religious life experience which results in a fundamental comportment of the religious person to life: “The hope that Christians have is not simply faith in immortality, but a faithful resilience grounded in Christian factical life.”123 It is this “experiential comportment to God [that] gives direction to the specifically religious constitution of ‘God’ as a ‘phenomenological object’” and, as Heidegger continues, “the determinations of the sense of this—that is, of the ‘absolute’—are to be discovered only in the specific structures of the constituting experience.”124 These constituting experiences are often described through means of texts. As the following chapters turn specifically to the text of the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke, this text will be interpreted through phenomenology as, borrowing Heidegger’s words, the description of an “experiential comportment” to the divine.
36. “The wonder of all wonders is the pure I and pure consciousness” (Husserl, Ideen III, §12, p. 75). See also Husserl, Ideas III, §12, p. 64.
37. “Of all beings, only the human being, called upon by the voice of being, experiences the wonder of all wonders: that beings are” (Heidegger, “Nachwort,” 307, emphasis in original). See also Heidegger, “Postscript,” 234.
38. Laycock, “Overview of Phenomenological Theology,” 1–2.
39. Ibid., 2.
40. Ibid., emphasis in original.
41. See Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn.”
42. Janicaud, “Theological Turn,” 17.
43. Dermot Moran provides a helpful and concise history of “phenomenology” prior to Husserl in the editor’s introduction to The Phenomenology Reader, 9–12.
44. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §1, p. 2. See also Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, §1, p. 44: “so habe ich damit den Anfang der absoluten Erkenntnisarmut erwählt.”
45. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §62, p. 151, emphasis in original. See also Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, §62, p. 177: “als den Sinn auslegen, den diese Welt für uns alle vor jedem Philosophieren hat und offenbar nur aus unserer Erfahrung hat, ein Sinn, der philosophisch enthüllt aber nie geändert werden kann.”
46. This characterization was proposed by Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink. See Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 65–66; see also Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, 10. See Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, for a correspondence to representative publications, including: the first stage, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891); the second stage, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1910–1911) and Ideas I (1913); the third stage, Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), and Crisis of the European Sciences (1936).
47. See Smith, Husserl, 33–35. Smith argues that Crisis of the European Sciences belongs to this fourth stage.
48.