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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
A liturgical existentialism attempts to situate Christian spirituality in view of a post‐Heideggerian world. To this end, French phenomenologist Jean‐Yves Lacoste has undertaken what is perhaps the most sustained analysis of Heideggerian existential phenomenology from a theological‐mystical point of view, and this paper highlights his major achievement: the liturgical reduction. Certainly existentialism, after Heidegger, makes the “world” an object of inquiry, and yet Lacoste's reduction is problematic precisely because it privileges an ascetic spirituality that desires to “bracket” the world. Both the temporality and topology of the liturgical reduction are exposed to view in order to show that a liturgical existentialism properly conceived, does not bracket the world, but is realized carefully in and through the world‐horizon itself.
1 Lacoste, Jean‐Yves, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Raftery‐Skehan, Mark (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 41Google Scholar.
2 See Marion, Jean‐Luc, God without Being: hors‐texte, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; also see the second edition which added a chapter exonerating Aquinas from onto‐theology; God without Being: hors‐texte, revised edition, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
3 See Lacoste, , Note sur le temps:essai sur les raisons de mémoire et de l’espérance (Paris: PUF, 1990)Google Scholar; Lacoste, , originally Expérience et Absolu: Questions disputeés sur l’humanité de l’homme (Paris: PUF, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar). See the following collections of essays: Lacoste, , Le monde et l’absence d’oeuvre (Paris: PUF, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lacoste, , Présence et parousie (Genève: Ad Solem, 2006)Google Scholar; and Lacoste, , La phénoménalité de Dieu: neuf etudes (Paris: Cerf, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 It is interesting to acknowledge that in Note sur le temps the reduction is originally entitled the “theological reduction,” which is subsequently re‐named as the “liturgical reduction” presumably to emphasize that the reduction is not just a theological act of reflection but specifically a spiritual practice. See Lacoste, Note sur le temps, p. 122.
5 Lacoste puts to work the liturgical reduction for the purpose of liturgical purgation. In accord with Husserl's ambitions to bracket the world and uncover the constituting power of pure consciousness (which eventually led to transcendental idealism) Lacoste symbolically brackets the visible topology of being‐in‐the‐world so as to unveil the night of the non‐place, as we shall see momentarily. It is important to bear in mind at this juncture, however, that Lacoste affirms Heidegger's insight that the world constitutes the fundamental structure of the self. He is more Heideggerian than Husserlian and thus not a transcendental idealist. For more on Husserl's reduction, see Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book—General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Kersten, F. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, §32, “The phenomenological epoché”
6 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1962), p. 33Google Scholar.
7 For more on Lacoste's correlation of liturgy to “everything that embodies the relation of man to God” see Experience and the Absolute, p. 22.
8 For an excellent overview of the anti‐institutional nature of theological existentialism so common in many of the religious existential figures from Kierkegaard forward, see, Pattison, George, Anxious Angels: a Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (London: Macmillan, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Lacoste, Expereince and the Absolute, p. 40.
10 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 87.
11 For more on the “four‐fold” characteristic of Heidegger's interest in the sacredness of the earth, see Heidegger, , “Building Dwelling Thinking,” trans. Hofstadter, Albert, in Poetry, Language, Thought, (New York: Harper Modern Classics, 2001), pp. 141–61Google Scholar.
12 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 2.
13 See for example McGinn, Bernard, “Vere tu es Deus absconditus: the Hidden God in Luther and Some Mystics,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds., Davies, Oliver and Turner, Denys, pp. 94–114 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
14 Lacoste recognizes a long mystical apophatic tradition from Pseudo‐Denys to Jean of the Cross. See for example his illuminating essay, “La connaissance silencieuse: des évidences antéprédicatives à une critique de l’apophase” in Présence and Parousia, pp. 117–44.
15 See Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 20, 34, 87, 101, and 175 for example.
17 Heidegger, Being and Time,§16.
18 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 416.
19 The description of Dasein as being‐in‐the‐world is therefore an indictment on the Cartesian, Kantian and Husserlian notions of interior consciousness or constituting subjectivity. Heidegger overcomes what he perceives to be a rather long‐standing, but poorly conceived, philosophy of the ego when he writes, “the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one's booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it.” Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 89.
20 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 11.
21 Unlike the Thomistic doctrine of analogia entis or its contemporary inflection of Neo‐Transcendental Thomism, Lacoste draws an essential distinction between natural and supernatural or the profane and sacred. Insisting on the stark distinction between the visibility of the world and the darkness of faith, Lacoste opts, not for anlogia entis, but for the term “alliance” to describe how the Christian dwells “toward” God (être‐vers) in an alliance with the Cross while always remaining in the world. Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, pp. 79–80.
22 For his detailed reading of Being and Time on just this point, see Lacoste, “Existence et amour de Dieu: sur une note d’“Être et Temps,” in La phénoménalité de Dieu, pp. 111–32, especially 119–20.
23 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 29.
24 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 80.
25 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 82.
26 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 28.
27 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 156.
28 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 162.
29 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 177ff. This celebration of the weakness of the Cross finds allies in other contemporary phenomenological renderings of Christology, ones which take on a more prophetic/ethical tonality. This is especially evident in John Caputo's recent work on the “weakness of God,” which gives way to a radical ethics of social justice. See Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Equally, Stanislas Breton utilizes the symbolic power of the Cross to call into judgment the power of the strong in favor of the weak. See Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans., Jacquelyn Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). While Lacoste would not divorce the Cross from ethics/justice, the liturgical reduction he advances is a type of spirituality that privileges the “ascetic self” as preparatory work for praxis. For commentary on ethics as a second order praxis, see Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 70–80; also for an Lacoste's critical engagement with Levinas’ claim that ethics is first philosophy, see, “Ethique et Phénoménologie” in Présence and Parousie, pp. 231–256.
30 Lacoste, Notes sur le temps,§92, “De l’être‐vers‐la‐mort a l’hoirzon de la croix.”
31 Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, p. 208.
32 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 174.
33 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 89.
34 Jean‐Yves Lacoste, “Plus qu’existence et être‐en‐danger,” in Presence et Parousie, pp. 145–68, reference on p. 164.
35 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 33.
36 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 34.
37 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 152.
38 My transcendental “I” is liturgically disoriented, more precisely, reversed, as I become the object of the gaze of the divine subject. Much like Jean‐Luc Marion's ‘Gifted’ (l’adonné), Lacoste's liturgical existentialism argues that the ascetic's subjectivity is eliminated insofar as his identity is given by the Absolute subject's givenness—the ascetic is the screen upon which God manifests the not‐yet in the already. This parallels Marion's notion of the subject as l’adonné. See, Jean‐Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 248 ff. Lacoste speaks of the gift in the context of subjectivity, see Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 157. Joeri Schrijvers performs the service of drawing out the connection between Lacoste and Marion on this point, see his excellent article, Schrijvers, , “Ontotheological Turnings? Marion, Lacoste and Levinas on the Decentering of Modern Subjectivity,”Modern Theology 22 no.2 (2006): pp. 221–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 For more on the liturgical structure of anticipation, see Lacoste, “La phénoménalité de l’anticipation,” in La phénoménalité de Dieu, pp. 133–57.
40 Heidegger maintains that Dasein is existential because it is “world‐forming” insofar as the animal is “poor in world” and the stone “without world.” See Heidegger, , Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. McNeill, William and Walker, Nicholas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), §42 ffGoogle Scholar.
41 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 310.
42 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
43 Heidegger, Being and Time,§50. For more on how Heidegger's existential interpretation of death differs from the biological understanding of death as simple “termination of life” or “stopping”, see Being and Time,§48.
44 Lacoste explicitly links liturgical existence to cenobitic and eremetic monasticism. See, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 31 and 175.
45 See for example, Lacoste, “Existence et amour de Dieu,” especially pp. 117–20.
46 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, pp. 44 and 54.
47 Lacoste, Notes sur le temps, pp. 69, 74, 201.
48 Kevin Hart, “The Liturgical Reduction”Josephinum Journal of Theology 15, no.1 (2008): pp. 43–66, especially pp. 64–66.
49 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 44.
50 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 145.
51 See for example, Lacoste, “Petite phénoménologie de la fatigue” in Présence and Parousie, pp. 309–322.
52 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 163.
53 St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. and ed., Peers, E. Allison (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2008), book 1, 13, 1Google Scholar.
54 This is Lacoste's phrase in his earlier work, Note sur le temps, p. 190. Lacoste does discuss an intersubjective dimension of non‐experience with the term “co‐affection,” though it remains underdeveloped in his overall project. See Lacoste, , “Liturgy and Coaffection,” in The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response, eds., Hart, Kevin and Wall, Barbara (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp.93–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 174.
56 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 177.
57 Lacoste, “‘Resurrectio Carnis:’ Du savoir thélogique à la connaissance liturgique,” in La phénoménalité de Dieu, pp.205–27.
58 Lacoste, “Resurrectio Carnis,” p. 227.
59 Lacoste, “L’apparaître du révélé: sur le clair‐obscur,” in Présence et parousie, pp. 323–38.
60 Chrétien, Jean‐Louis, The Ark of Speech, trans., Brown, Andrew (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Augustine, , City of God, trans. Dyson, R.W. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15, 1Google Scholar.
62 Augustine writes, “But the Heavenly City knows only one God Who is to be worshipped… Because of this difference, it has not been possible for the Heavenly City to have laws of religion in common with the earthly city. It has been necessary for her to dissent from the earthly city in this regard, and to become a burden to those who think differently.” Augustine, City of God, 19, 17.
