Finding Grace with God. Rose Ellen Dunn

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.

      1

      Introducing Phenomenology

      Husserl and Heidegger

      Das Wunder aller Wunder ist reines Ich und reines Bewußtsein.

—Edmund Husserl36

      Einzig der Mensch unter allem Seienden erfährt,

      angerufenvon der Stimme des Seins,

      das Wunder aller Wunder: daß Seiendes ist.

—Martin Heidegger37

Beginning with the foundational thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, this chapter will introduce phenomenology as a philosophical method and will suggest that the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger inherently provide possibilities for a phenomenological theology. In his introductory chapter to the 1986 volume Essays in Phenomenological Theology, Steven Laycock describes phenomenological theology as an “inchoate discipline” and an “uncharted philosophical terrain” that seeks to “articulate the sense of the Divine from the matrix of prearticulate experience.”38 Phenomenological theology is, Laycock continues, a discipline that conducts “an original phenomenological investigation of a specific ‘region’ of experience,” namely, the experience of the divine.39 More precisely, for Laycock, “phenomenological theology is the specific phenomenology of God.”40 In a more recent debate, however, phenomenology, and French phenomenology in particular, has been criticized for taking such a “theological turn,” and precisely for this opening onto the invisible—the transcendent.41 Dominique Janicaud argues that this opening is a transgression of the phenomenological method; it presents, for Janicaud, “a rupture with immanent phenomenality.”42 In this chapter, I explore the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger and consider the inherent possibilities in their work for the development of a phenomenological theology that opens from an immersion in the phenomenal world of the visible “things themselves” onto the invisible world of the transcendent.

      Edmund Husserl:

      Transcendental Phenomenology

Phenomenology as a discrete philosophical method was first fully developed by Edmund Husserl.43 As a philosophical system, Husserlian phenomenology is a descriptive science, working to describe what appears to consciousness in the manner in which it appears to consciousness. It is presuppositionless: the phenomenologist begins “in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge” and focuses on what is given directly through experience.44 For Husserl, “phenomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience—a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter.”45

Husserl’s lifework is traditionally thought of as developing in three stages: first, his early philosophical work with psychologism (1887–1901); second, the development of descriptive phenomenology (1901–1913); and third, phenomenology as transcendental phenomenology (1913–1938).46 Other scholars characterize Husserl’s thought in four stages: psychologism, (1891); the critique of psychologism (1900–1901); transcendental phenomenology (1913); and the final work on the transcendental I as immersed in the everyday social reality of the life-world (1935–1938).47 Still others think of Husserl’s development in terms of two major stages: pretranscendental and transcendental.48 It is primarily the final stage of transcendental phenomenology that will be discussed in this chapter.

Phenomenology,