Jeffrey Bloechl completed his Ph.D. at the K.U. Leuven, Belgium. He has written, edited, and translated books and essays in the areas of contemporary European philosophy, philosophy of religion, and fundamental ethics. He is also founding and series editor of "Levinas Studies. An Annual Review," published by Duquesne University Press. Dr. Bloechl is currently working on separate projects studying the conceptions of language, body, and ego in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, and the themes of voice and subjectivity in late twentieth century philosophy, theology and literature. Dr. Bloechl will be on leave during the 2005-2006 academic year, which he will spend as Visiting Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center for Intensive Psychotherapy, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Liturgy and Co-affection:

Jean-Yves Lacoste's title makes the reasonable suggestion that we attempt to think the relation with God together with thinking about the relation with other people, and more precisely at the level of mood and feeling. As his text unfolds, we are also required to heed the conditions defining the context for this exercise. In Lacoste's work, this means, above all, recognizing the greater emergence of what we might call the secular dimension of our humanity, [1] but also dealing with new and sophisticated forms of thought willing to ground themselves entirely there. His approach to this two-fold challenge is bent specifically toward what is sometimes called philosophical anthropology, which has recently become the provenance of thinkers no longer interested in the possibility of a religious dimension there. Formulated positively, Lacoste is concerned to reassert an argument for the religious dimension of our humanity, but without ignoring the depth and sophistication of analyses which do not properly acknowledge the human relation with God.

This places a great deal of Lacoste's work, including an important strand of "Liturgy and Co-affection," close to a problem that certain theologians and philosophers of religion have kept on the agenda, at least in France, since the late 19th century. In his thesis that human nature, for each and all of us, includes an openness toward God, we hear an echo of Henri de Lubac's great and controversial Surnaturel. But in Lacoste's willingness to hold that religious (or supernatural) dimension apart from the secular dimension that would entail our natural existence in the world, we may also detect some reticence about the "intrinsicist" position sometimes attributed to de Lubac[2]. I can not confidently say whether Lacoste understands himself to extend de Lubac's project, or whether he considers his position intrinsicist or extrinsicist with regard to this matter of a properly religious dimension of our humanity. However, this does appear to be an important underlying concern, and at any rate, it has been in its light that I have been able to offer these few reflections on his "Liturgy and Co-affection."

One benefit of studying Christian theology through the lens of Heidegger's philosophy is a heightened awareness of the difficulty that theology has had, and perhaps always will have, freeing itself from any number of distortions owed to the simple fact it must think from within space and time -from within the limits of a world. At an immediate level, this is hardly something that a theologian will need Heidegger to understand: experience of God, we know, must always be experience by a living person, here and now, and this is already enough to raise the possibility of forgetting that God as God is also infinitely greater than God here and now -though of course this is not necessarily a matter of choosing one over the other. But this is not the level that has concerned Heidegger. In an early discussion of theology which he saw fit to include in his 1967 collection Wegmarken ("pathways": this relation to theology will have been one mark along the way that became Heidegger's subsequent path), Heidegger focuses on the relation of biblical faith and its self-interpretation to the concepts employed in that work. Can Christian theology have begun to think without employing concepts already cast in a pre-Christian context? Can those concepts have made their way into Christian thought without elements unsuited to their new task also clinging to them? Heidegger, for one, is circumspect, and offers phenomenology as a possible antidote: phenomenology, he says, can provide a "corrective for the ontic and, in particular, pre-Christian content of basic theological concepts."[3]

Deciphering this statement leads us directly to the most fundamental movements of Heidegger's work. We know from Being and Time (ı 4) that his use of "ontic" designates that which makes a being the being that it is, as distinct from all others. Among beings (Seienden), the one which we are, Dasein, has the ontical character of understanding being (Sein). Dasein understands being as beings, or better, as a world and everything in it. Precisely this is the ontical distinctiveness of Dasein: it is ontological; it can ask about the meaning of being, and even before that has a pre-thematic understanding of being in and as beings. This is crucial: we, as Daseins, have always already understood being in a particular way, have always already constituted the meaning of being in terms of a particular configuration of beings into a world replete with things, tools, ideas, and so forth. And this is always already the world in which Dasein lives. Accordingly, when Heidegger says that Dasein is "being-in-the-world," he is in the first instance drawing attention to the fact that being must not be mistaken for a being, but also laying bare the existential root for any way of ordering a world, experiencing space and time, and so forth. Turning to Christian thought, Heidegger's statement may thus be heard in response to the thought that theologians may thwart their own attempt to articulate the specifically Christian way of being by employing concepts that are simply unsuited to the task. Phenomenology can help theologians maintain the necessary vigilance by providing the basis for a clear conception of Christian being-in-the-world, so that it is possible to recognize what does not belong there. In Heideggerian terms, the life of faith must be understood as that form of being-in-the-world which is toward God. The difference between being-in-the-world, as the universal condition of Dasein, and being-in-the-world-toward God, as a condition specific to the life of faith thus lays the basis for a more worked out account of precisely what distinguishes the latter, and in turn for an informed scrutiny of concepts taken into theological reflection.

This, it seems to me, is close to how Lacoste has read Heidegger, and indeed perhaps why he continues to read Heidegger. Heidegger's philosophy will have provided us with an admirable account of living in a world, but this does not yet say anything about what might define the specifically Christian life which does exist in the world, but without supposing that that existence makes up all that a person is. Lacoste himself probes that other dimension under the heading of "liturgy," his concept for the logic of being-toward-God. The magnitude of his concession to Heidegger raises at least one preliminary question: if we accept only the arrival of a complete rationality capable of speaking within the limits of our worldly existence, and if we also suppose that theology is somehow capable of entering into discussion with it, then what would be the status of the language and concepts that do not belong exclusively to either interlocuter?

II

The appearance of the term (co-)affection in Lacoste's title signifies a wish to debate the question of human personhood, or what he prefers to call our "humanity," against what has sometimes been argued in the name of either ego or self. This is the obvious intention of the concise paragraphs on Husserl and Heidegger, who moreover prove much closer than hasty readings might lead one to believe. What Husserl experienced as a persistent obstacle to transcendental reflection, Heidegger embraced as an inner truth of the hermeneutics of facticity: already before thinking sets out to verify an essence, an eidos, it is already directed by a particular orientation, which is to say animated by a particular mood. The locus of Heidegger's Dasein is a "mineness" (Jemeinigkeit) that turns up in anxiety at a death that can not be taken over by someone else. Perhaps it is moving too quickly to say that this "mineness" is lost upon the Husserl who concerned himself above all with the "ego" that comes into view when he steps back to study intuition and intention, but it does seem evident that Heidegger was much quicker to believe that there is no way to purge thinking of the most profound elements of existence (and here too lies the difference between Husserl and Heidegger on the "reduction" to apriori conditions: Husserl would have the ego practice it; Heidegger witnesses it befalling Dasein). It is along this line that Heidegger appears to break from Husserl by way of what can only be called an immanent critique of phenomenology such as he found it, and indeed the 1925 course on the history of the concept of time makes this claim explicitly.[4] A second question for Lacoste might ask whether his effort to go still deeper than Heidegger, beneath or before the "mineness" of Dasein, to a liturgical relation with God anterior to existence in this world, could be understood as a further instance of this same style of immanent critique. That said, it must be admitted that the question might better be posed to others

(J.-L. Marion, M. Henry) who are more avowedly concerned with yet another founding of phenomenology. And in any event, it is only marginal to the central concerns of "Liturgy and Co-affection."

Heidegger's move to structures of existence anterior to the ego is filled out in his attention to the theme of affectivity. In Being and Time, everything is centered on the manner in which anxiety brings to the surface a pervasive, underlying sense of being not-at-home, Unzuhause. In contrast, later essays, beginning with the studies of Hılderlin, educe a feeling of serenity that comes in poetic dwelling, signalling a harmony with the elements, and more deeply a being-at-home on the earth. In the present context, it is already enough to underline this difference.[5] In the end, whether the early Heidegger says that we are always either fleeing from our anxiety or else resolutely facing it, or the later Heidegger says that we are always to some degree either alienated from the serenity of poetic dwelling or else somehow releasing ourselves into it, he leads us on a search for the basic mood where we may feel our primordial condition. Anxiety and serenity are Heidegger's candidates for what he sometimes calls a Grundstimmung, and it is this that Lacoste seeks for the specifically Christian way life.

What does this have to do with our relations with one another? We may take our cue once again from Heidegger, this time when says that one effect of anxiety is to uproot a person from all other structures of existence, including being-with others. It is true that the other person is always there -even during anxiety -but my anxiety is my own, just as the death it announces I my own, and upon recovering from it I now know that my togetherness with others must be understood in terms of the fact each of us shares the condition of dying his or her own death. This sort of conclusion is no doubt also necessary with regard to the later Heidegger's notion of serenity.

If, then, it is true that Heidegger's notions of Mitsein and Mitdasein stand for the fact of a co-existence always already built into Dasein's existence, it may be asked whether Heidegger does not thus affirm the primacy of self-relation over relations with others. In anxiety or serenity, it is the singularity of Dasein's own existence that shows up, and if the world where Dasein finds itself is indeed shared, this sharing must nonetheless be among a plurality of such singular Daseins. It is this plurality that Levinas has sometimes characterized, no doubt with some excess, as "atomistic."

This element of Heidegger's thinking is also conceded in Lacoste's essay, though once only as an account of existence, of the secular dimension of our humanity. If I have understood Lacoste properly, what Heidegger has not seen or discussed, and what must be brought back into the open, proves to be a vision of plurality already familiar to the theological tradition. The stated intention is to reflect on the experience of prayer, which we should remember is always already communal, even if it often occurs in silence or solitude. To live in the presence of God is simultaneously to inhabit the world as sons and daughters of God. According to the most elementary structure of Christian kinship, filiality and fraternity imply one another. We should not mistake this statement about structure as a claim about the acts that permit us to see it. Nothing in Lacoste's argument prevents him agreeing that the gestures and formulae of prayer can be empty, yielding experiences that are all too worldly. Yet some occasions -and some seems to be enough to carry the argument -do admit experiences opening beyond the world, to God, or what philosophers call the "Absolute." This means that we humans are, at least potentially, capable of welcoming the self-revelation of God from beyond the shared world. There is in us, beneath our worldly existence but without cancelling it (one prays in the world, according to certain movements and gestures, etc.), a liturgical dimension that completes our humanity in being toward-God.

"What is this 'we' that prays?" Lacoste answers the question at a level anterior to the pre-theoretical intersubjectivity investigated in Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation, but also anterior to the pre-thematic mit interpreted in Being and Time, ıı 25-27. As a question of affectivity, and indeed of a Grundstimmung, Lacoste speaks of the disclosure of being-toward-God in the Christian mood of pressentiment. English seems not to provide us with an especially apt translation for Lacoste's intention with this word, but the eschatological context suggested by an expression like being-towards-God puts us on the right track. Anterior to both the impossibility of being at home which conditions the early Heidegger's notion being-in-the-world and to the possibility of a homeland which conditions the later Heidegger's notion of dwelling, each of us is radically open to a God whose creative act has marked us with a foretaste of his Second Coming. In a moment, it will be necessary to ask about the form of thought that would make such a proposition without returning to the narrow physics of efficient causality so vulnerable to even the crudest of charges against "onto-theology." How, in other words, does this thought of "foretaste" not imply a God who simply moves us to move back toward Him?

III

Much of Lacoste's essay also reminds us of how terribly fragile experience of God is -how constantly subject to recuperation into a logic that is precisely not liturgical. The reflective Christian will recognize this immediately: this world makes undeniable claims on us, and we are pulled from a life patterned on the will of God into a life patterned on the configuration of the here and now. Lacoste's approach to this fact remains close to good Augustinian theology, but also Heideggerian philosophy. On one hand, "foretaste" is his placeholder for an attunement to God that Augustine tends to develop in terms of divine appeal. On the other hand, Heidegger's philosophy requires him to develop this as an appeal reaching us upstream from both the world and the earth, and indeed upstream from the difference between them. Anterior to the difference between homelessness and being at home, there is the pure passivity which alone can receive an appeal from beyond time and space. And yet, as beings who inhabit time and space -who ceaselessly temporalize and spatialize -we are bound, by nature, to always imperil that deep passivity. This can not fail to reprise the language of authenticity, where it is always a matter of acting for or against primordial conditions. In this particular case, the alternative seems exceptionally difficult, since the very condition one must choose (passivity) would be immediately falsified by any act of choosing. Lacoste certainly knows this, and draws a lesson once more from Heidegger: in "Liturgy and Co-affection," the sort of thing Heidegger's Bremen lectures said about the "danger" of our technological configuration (Gestell) of knowledge is applied to the broader plane of worldly knowledge of any kind (a plane which, for all of that, Heidegger himself certainly does not fail to reach).[6]

One thing about these latter propositions does seem evident: whatever the nature and success of liturgical authenticity, attempts to achieve it will presuppose some event of awakening to God. Returning for a moment to the theme of a plurality anterior to intersubjectivity and co-presence, such an encounter would not only shake one loose from every worldly attachment, but it would also mark the possibility of living in a community which is not yet made up of a group of subjects, let alone a sum of individuals or citizens. With regard to this communal relation, the aforementioned "danger" merits the word violence: truly peaceful community is rooted outside the world of rivalry and exchange, whose violences are all the more dangerous for not only injuring one's neighbor but also causing us to forget the proper depth of a call to charity. Here, the point is not to elevate liturgy over responsibility so much as to preserve their difference, as one of mutual invigoration.[7] Of course, the idea of harmony between love of God and love of neighbor is hardly new, but with the arrival of liberation, feminist, and nativist currents in Christian theology one can scarcely pretend that its meaning is either univocal or even evident.

Applied to the most fundamental level of experience and meaning, the language of peace and peril makes no sense apart from the notion of a relation transcending world and earth. In short, the root of the argument and the justification for the critique are ultimately eschatological. As a matter of our "humanity," only the notion of a soul that desires God before and beyond this world and its desires supports the claim that those worldly desires fuel a life that is violent and an understanding that is dangerous. It is here that one might ask about the way a certain conception of our humanity is affixed to a certain conception of God, such that that humanity transcends the natural order and that God is more than an ulterior efficient cause. I have understood Lacoste's argument to evade the usual difficulties simply by respecting the classical theological doctrine of analogy between the meaning of the divine 'Object,' as it gives itself to experience, and the human 'subject' who is capable of receiving and understanding the experience. Furthermore, what seems to get that exercise started, and no doubt maintain it along the way, is a basic phenomenological commitment to stay close to acts and intentions such as they show themselves to us. At this juncture, nothing stands in the way of reprising discussion of the alleged theology-phenomenology differend, but a more interesting question might go in search of the physical horizon of the traditional doctrine of theology. It is well known that Husserl already hoped to supplant the physics of foundations with an epistemology of manifestation, of phenomenality. Would theology after Husserl, and all the more after Heidegger, make this same turn? The question is, of course, impossibly massive.

Leaving the foregoing to one side, I do not wish to pass over one eminently phenomenological theme that Lacoste's essay makes impossible to ignore: should we not think more about the liturgical gaze that would open itself to God before and outside our relation to world and earth? Virtually all of phenomenology, and certainly including Heidegger, has insisted on the impossibility of a pure gaze, a gaze not encoded by some particular horizon -and yet if the eschatology set forth by Lacoste does not actually state a claim for the real existence of this very thing in human life, it certainly does entertain it as a proper and meaningful ideal. Of course, "Liturgy and Co-affection" calls us to address this question to a feeling rather than to a gaze, thus to the domain of affectivity rather than representation. It would thus be better to say that we seem attuned to God in advance of any possible interference or distraction, and if that attunement is proper to our humanity then not even interference and distraction truly extinguish it. Because we are exposed to God before we are exposed to being and beings, our relations with being and beings are never more than surface clutter that leaves intact a deeper bond. The idea that foretaste arises from a greater depth than any attachment to either world or earth agrees with the Augustinian thesis that one draws closer to intimacy with God to the degree that one empties oneself of all the things of this life. In this context, Augustine himself does not hesitate to take up the language of purity: "quid est coram Deo, nisi conscientiae puritate?" (Sermon XVI). Phenomenology, I have recalled, has long resisted such a possibility. If we nonetheless grant phenomenology the right to speak for the structures and experiences belonging to our worldly existence, theology would seem obliged to present itself, at least in the intellectual climate Lacoste evokes, first of all in the mode of denial or dissent. What would count most could be said least often and with greatest effort -and not only because these would be profound themes. Theology would have to know itself as the most untimely of practices, committed first of all to defying every presumption that an unworldly gaze or mood is one that is therefore unintelligible.

-Jeffrey Bloechl College of the Holy Cross Worcester, Massachusetts

[1] Lacoste rarely uses this word "secular," seeming to prefer terms better suited for discussion with phenomenology. One finds this, for instance, in the initial pages of his Expırience et Absolu (Paris: P. U. F., 1994), where the ego is defined by a deep "inherence" anchoring us in the world which we tend to accept as the essential environment of all meaning. The text goes on to argue for a more originary non-inherence hidden or buried behind the ego and its trappings.

[2] The terms "intrinsicist" and "extrinsicist" come from Maurice Blondel. The former designates the view that desire for the triune God is natural, whereas the latter designates the view that we are possessed of a distinctly natural end and a distinctly supernatural end.

[3] M. Heidegger, "Phınomenologie und Theologie" (1927), in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), p. 32. Needless to say, one may attempt to answer such questions in the affirmative, holding the theology can remain entirely free of such contaminations. According to Hart and Maraldo, Heidegger himself flirts with this view, perhaps under the influence of Bultmann, but also Barth. See M. Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, trans. and ed. J. Hart and J. C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), Part II, ı 6 of the Commentary, pp. 108-112.

[4] Cf. M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena, ı 11, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 102-107.

[5] As it happens, for Lacoste himself, early Heidegger and late Heidegger are separated only by a hiatus in a single pathway. For close discussion, see ıı 2-5 of Expırience et Absolu.

[6] Perhaps this use of the Heideggerian Gefahr is not evident in the published text of "Litugy and Co-affection." It was an explicit feature of the oral presentation, as well as in discussion afterward.

[7] The argument is not absent from "Liturgy and Co-affection," but stated more explicitly in Expırience et Absolu, ı 29, pp. 92-93.