Ricoeur and the wager of interreligious ritual participation

ABSTRACT

Ricoeur’s proposal to understand the encounter between religions as a practice of ‘linguistic hospitality’ has appealed to many interreligious scholars. Usually, religious texts are at the heart of interreligious hermeneutics, turning Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality into a practice of interreligious cross-reading (e.g. Scriptural reasoning, comparative theology). Recently, due to the influence of material and ritual scholars, the textual focus of interreligious hermeneutics has been criticized. Two criticisms are prominent. First, the assumption that understanding religious otherness is best mediated via language and texts leads (inter)religious scholars to minimize the ‘non-textual’ practices in religious life. Second, interreligious interpreters mistakenly assume that they can read all meaningful action and ritual performances, especially as texts. This assumption leads to a textualization of the world and does not take into account that there might be other ‘vehicles of intelligibility’ apart from texts. In this article, I explore to what extent the criticisms raised against Ricoeur’s interreligious hermeneutics are fair. I have learned from Ricoeur the importance of mediating between seemingly opposed positions, and I seek to follow his example in this article.

KEYWORDS:

• Ricoeur
• interreligious hermeneutics
• ritual studies
• inter-rituality

Introduction

The encounter with the religious other is an encounter with foreign meanings that to a greater or lesser degree is removed from our horizon of familiar meanings. As many interreligious scholars have pointed out, the challenge is to build hermeneutical bridges between what comes naturally to us (our own religious language) and what is foreign (the language of the religious others). If the other is utterly Other, incommensurable, and incomprehensible, then it will simply not be possible to find a way to relate to her: the other does not speak to us, does not beckon us, and in the final analysis remains meaningless. However, if the other and her tradition are too similar, too much in continuation with what is already known, then she will neither allure nor succeed in redirecting our attention.¹ Any dialogue between religions requires ‘hermeneutical agency.’² As Richard Kearney puts it, ‘[t]he challenge […] is to acknowledge a difference between self and other without separating them so schismatically that no relation is possible.’³

Several interreligious scholars have turned to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur to further examine the process of building hermeneutical bridges between religious traditions.⁴ Especially Ricoeur’s proposal to understand the encounter between religions as a practice of ‘linguistic hospitality’ has appealed to many a scholar in the field. The image of the interreligious scholar, who moves back and forth between religious ‘languages’ and as a go-between tries to establish meaningful communication, is, to the mind of many interreligious scholars, particularly apt. Usually, religious texts are at the heart of interreligious hermeneutics, turning linguistic hospitality into a practice of interreligious cross-reading or inter-texting (e.g. Scriptural reasoning, comparative theology). By venturing into the textual world of the other, interreligious readers become vulnerable to the superabundance of textual meaning and learn to think differently. In this practice of interreligious translation, processes of familiarization and defamiliarization alternate: what is strange is made more familiar and what is familiar is made strange. The potential outcome of this process is a reconfiguration of one’s own tradition as well as that of the other.

Recently, especially under the influence of ritual and material scholars, the textual focus of (inter)religious hermeneutics has come under critique. Two criticisms (which I will further unpack below) stand out. First of all, the assumption that understanding religious otherness is best mediated via language and texts leads (inter)religious scholars to minimize the ‘non-textual’ practices in religious life. This results in a forgetfulness of the fact that the reading of texts is only a relatively small fraction of religious life as it is lived by adherents.⁵ The textual focus limits our capacity to make sense of the religious other and her tradition in all its complexity.⁶ Second, interreligious interpreters mistakenly assume that they can read all meaningful action and ritual performances, especially as texts. This assumption leads to a textualization of the world and does not take into account that there might be other ‘vehicles of intelligibility’ apart from texts.⁷ Some interreligious scholars are asking if we should not complement inter-texting with some form of inter-riting in which we would transpose ourselves to the ritual realm of the religious other and her community to do as they do.⁸

The criticisms of the dominance of text hermeneutics in (inter)religious studies raise several fundamental questions about what it means to understand and how we come to understand something/someone. How do we enable a deep learning across religious traditions? Do texts provide the most obvious means to understand religious others? Should we not rather move in the direction of a hermeneutics of ritual, which builds on a non-textual, bodily understanding of the religious other enabled through ritual participation?⁹ And to what extent can we transpose the method of reading the texts of others to engage in their symbolic practices?

Ricoeur has been faulted for being one of the main exponents for the so-called tyranny of the text in (inter)religious studies.¹⁰ Not only do texts play the lead part in his hermeneutics, but what is more, he also argued that hermeneutics ought not be limited to the written documents of our culture but ought to be extended into the realm of human action. In his article, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,’ he explores to what extent the ‘notion of text can be [considered] as a good paradigm for the so-called object of human sciences’ and to what extent we may ‘use the methodology of text-interpretation as a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of human sciences.’¹¹ For those scholars critical of the textualization of human sciences in general and (inter)religious studies more specifically, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics symbolizes the problem of the ‘hungry’ metaphor of the text and the way it limits, or even distorts, our understanding of religious phenomena.¹² Whenever the textual focus of (inter)religious studies would be thematized, Ricoeur would be named, referenced, and criticized.

As a Ricoeurian and an interreligious scholar who has been involved in the ritual turn in interreligious studies, I feel compelled to ask how Ricoeur’s interreligious text hermeneutics relates to this emerging argument in favor of a hermeneutics of inter-rituality? It is not my intention to somehow save Ricoeur from his critics. However, as someone who has found Ricoeur a particularly interesting and nuanced conversation partner, I do want to explore to what extent the criticisms raised against Ricoeur are fair. I have learned from Ricoeur the importance of mediating between seemingly opposed positions, and that is what I will do in this article. Some (inter)religious scholars, among whom are those who regard Ricoeur and hermeneutics as an embodiment of the tyranny of the text, may remain unaware of what Ricoeur may contribute to a hermeneutics of inter-ritual performance. In this article, I therefore intend to do three things.

First of all, I will highlight what Ricoeur contributes to interreligious studies, thereby focusing especially on his text hermeneutics, ethics of translation, and practices of narrative hospitality. Next, I will continue by exploring some of the main criticisms that are raised against a text-oriented hermeneutics. In the third part of this article, I return to Ricoeur to assess to what extent the criticisms raised against the ‘tyranny of the text’ also affect his text hermeneutics and to identify what nevertheless may be a Ricoeurian contribution to a hermeneutics of ritual performance. Though the way Ricoeur extends his text hermeneutics to human action (and cultural performances such as ritual practices) is not without its problems (which I will certainly highlight), I nevertheless argue that his hermeneutical philosophy may actually help to better understand some of the opportunities and difficulties related to interreligious ritual participation.

Ricoeur and his hermeneutics of interreligious hospitality

Though Ricoeur did not systematically reflect upon the meeting between religions, his philosophy offers a framework that encourages a thorough reflection on the challenges presented by the encounter between religions. Some of the key terms of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy that are especially important in view of interreligious hermeneutics are (1) translation, (2) distanciation, and (3) appropriation as expropriation. Weaving these different terms together what we come up with is a hermeneutics of interreligious hospitality.

Translation and the model of linguistic hospitality

Ricoeur draws an analogy between religions/cultures and languages.¹³ In his reading, belonging to a particular religion is comparable to speaking a particular language with its specific rhythm, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. This analogy is multilayered and points to several assumptions that undergird Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.

First of all, Ricoeur emphasizes that there is no such thing as language in general, just as there exists no such thing as religion in general. Language, as is the case with religion, always comes in particular forms: Dutch, French, English, and so on and of course there exist different dialects or regional differences within one language. Particular languages are never some kind of monolithic wholes but are marked by internal differences. Linguistic plurality is twofold, one could argue: internal (within one language) and external (between languages). Here, Ricoeur adds another thought, pointing at the fluidity and hybridity of languages, and, by extension, religions. There are no pure languages, that is, languages that are somehow unaffected by traces of otherness (and the same holds true for religious traditions), languages are rather living ‘entities’ that change over time and continue to develop. Some words or idioms die; others show an incredible resilience to change; and new words and expressions emerge from novel experiences or from encounters with other languages and cultures. Commenting on Ricoeur Angelo Bottone says, ‘…all cultures or languages [and I would add religions] are hybrid, mixed or creolised.’¹⁴

Second, Ricoeur characterizes our human condition as after Babel: our human condition is inevitably marked by plurality. To his mind, we should relinquish any nostalgic dream of returning to a time when all human beings spoke the same language and belonged to the same culture. After Babel, human beings who want to understand those who speak another language, belong to another culture, or are committed to another religion, have no choice but to engage in translation. Confronted with a text written in another language, there really are but two options – either one translates in an effort to convey the meaning of the text to a new audience, or one refrains from doing so and that text remains sealed off and in fact incomprehensible and meaningless.

Third, the predicament of those who choose to translate is complex and full of tension. As Ricoeur points out, the translator functions as a go-between, moving back and forth between the two languages to which he is dedicated and committed: he wants to do justice to both and avoid mistranslations and misinterpretations. Serving two masters, the translator always runs the risk of being accused of betrayal even though he is pursuing faithfulness. If the translator is too committed or too loyal to the original language of the text in an effort to copy the original somehow in the translation, the result will most likely be that the text does not speak to its new audience. The text remains foreign. If, on the other hand, the translator is guided solely by his maternal language, he runs the risk of being ‘overly creative’: the translation does not do justice to the original and its meaning is lost too. Translation, whether it is between languages, cultures, or religions, is a task that may only be carried out by people who are able to cope with its intrinsic tensions and who are willing to construct a meaningful whole out of what first seems utterly strange and foreign.

Fourth, and adding to the perilous predicament of the translator, translations often meet with resistance, even to the extent that statements about untranslatability are dramatically exclaimed. Most often, Ricoeur argues, such dramatic claims flow from a desire for perfection and purity, which goes together with a denial of the way one’s own language has already been marked and affected by otherness. Some would also argue that languages, religions, and cultures are so particular and so unique that translating them cannot but amount to contamination and loss of meaning. Translation, so the critique goes, almost always leads to a watered down version of the original. Ricoeur uncovers the deeper motivations underlying these and other resistances to translation. He shows how, behind a ‘deep respect’ for the particularities of languages, religions, and cultures, xenophobic and hosophobic tendencies nevertheless are lurking. One sets out to keep one’s own language pure. This self-sufficiency has secretly nourished ‘numerous linguistic ethnocentrisms, and more seriously, numerous pretensions to the same cultural hegemony.’¹⁵

Suspicious about massive claims about untranslatability, Ricoeur urges translators to accept that there is no such thing as a perfect translation: ‘the original will not be duplicated by another original.’¹⁶ Translation can never result in an identical equivalence because there is no reservoir of meaning that can be pulled out of one context and inserted into another without changes in meaning. However, ‘to dismiss the validity of translation because it is … never perfect is absurd.’¹⁷ Rather, translators need to undergo a work of mourning in which they let go of the paralyzing illusion of a perfect translation so that they (and their readers) may come to experience the enrichment of a good (enough) translation which emerges as a real possibility from practices of linguistic hospitality, ‘where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.’¹⁸ In the final analysis, Ricoeur emphasizes that an imperfect translation is always better and preferable to no translation at all. Despite all its shortcomings, it succeeds at least in bridging two worlds, thereby opening people to new horizons of meaning. Furthermore, one should not be obsessed by the inevitable loss of meaning; one should always have an eye for the gain in translation. Like any interpretation, translation is an imaginative reconstruction, and as a reconstruction it brings forth new layers of meaning. It develops new semantic resonances, makes unexpected allusions, and points to surprising new possibilities. Certainly in the context of interreligious translation, this is important. Believers who are prepared to see the alienating process of translation through, and are thus prepared to dress their own religious language in the ‘clothes’ of a strange religious language, can discover new, unexpected layers of meaning.

Last but not least, Ricoeur returns to the notion of untranslatability. While he strongly opposes the massive claims of untranslatability, which to his mind conceal tribal inclinations, in his notion of ‘equivalence without identity,’ he actually acknowledges that there is always something that resists translation, a residue, a remainder, an unsaid. There will never be a perfect match between the original and the translation. However, the gap that remains points to the irreducible otherness of what is other; it reminds the translator that difference cannot be reduced to sameness.

Distanciation as a key notion in Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics

Building on his analogy between language, religion, and culture, Ricoeur hints at the possibility of applying his model of linguistic hospitality to the encounter between religions. Such interreligious hospitality would revolve around texts and ‘language under the guise of texts.’¹⁹ It may be expected that this would result in various practices of reading and comparing religious texts that belong to different traditions. These texts can include sacred scriptures, their authoritative commentaries, or more philosophical or mystical treatises. In any case, from a Ricoeurian perspective, reading and comparing religious texts across different traditions is the best way to do justice to some of the intricate complexities of strange traditions, and to really delve deeply into their different layers of meaning.

Many if not most people would almost naturally associate the aim of interreligious understanding with dialogical practices. It is the face-to-face, so the reasoning usually goes, which creates a context of mutuality and reciprocity that produces respect and recognition. In the back-and-forth between conversation partners, it is always possible to ask new questions, to probe deeper, and to double check if one’s understanding of the other matches the self-understanding of that other. In the face-to-face engagement, the stranger is transformed into a neighbor or even a friend. In sum, dialogue is about building bridges between self and other, and understanding is intertwined with overcoming distance, at least to a certain extent. Ricoeur, however, even though he has come to be known as the philosopher of all dialogues,²⁰ argues that dialogical situations, where one is in the presence of the other, can sometimes limit understanding. Not only do dialogues have the character of a fleeting and situational event (and I will unpack this below), moreover in a dialogue:

[t]he subjective intention of the speaking subject and the meaning of discourse overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to understand what the speaker means and what his discourse means. The French expression vouloir dire, the German meinen, and the English, “to mean” attests to this overlapping. It is almost the same thing to ask, ‘What do you mean?’ and ‘What does it mean?’²¹

The fact that in dialogue, the meaning of discourse is determined (and limited) to what one’s interlocutor means, may actually limit the task of interpretation to that of understanding the speaker. Different from most philosophers, Ricoeur does not regard distance as the problem to be overcome; he rather stresses the hermeneutical function of distanciation.²² Rather than it being a problem, he sees it as an opportunity: distanciation enables semantic innovation (and not loss of meaning).²³

According to Ricoeur, a text is discourse fixed in writing. As it is fixed, it avoids the rather fleeting and situational nature of oral discourse. This fixation enables one to return time and again to the text in an effort to retrieve its meaning. In addition to this fixation, texts are characterized by a threefold distanciation: (1) vis-à-vis the original author; (2) vis-à-vis the original context; (3) vis-à-vis the original audience. This threefold distanciation gives texts a certain autonomy and enables texts to have a continuing relevance and meaning long after the original author has passed away (and we can no longer ask her what she intended to say), long after the original context that gave rise to the text has disappeared, and long after its original readers have left the scene. This threefold distanciation bestows a text with a semantic autonomy, enabling it to speak in changing contexts, to address novel audiences, and to respond to various concerns.

Going against the romantic hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, according to whom understanding a text is about understanding its genius, Ricoeur argues that not only is it impossible to retrieve the intentions of a long-gone author, he also points out that this impossibility is really a possibility. Since what the text signifies is no longer bound by what the author meant, the text enters into the realm of interpretation and is open to multifarious readings. Or, in Ricoeur’s words, the text possesses ‘horizons and scopes of significance wider than those belonging to any given set of authors.’²⁴

Next, Ricoeur points out that texts are also distanced vis-à-vis their original sociocultural context of production and its situational concerns:

In the same manner that the text frees its meaning from the tutelage of the mental intention, it frees its reference from the limits of ostensive reference. For us, the world is the ensemble of references opened up by the texts. Thus we speak about ‘the world’ of Greece, not to designate any more what were the situations of for those who lived them, but to designate the non-situational references that outline the effacement of the first and that henceforth are offered as possible modes of being, as symbolic dimensions of our being-in-the-world. For me, this is the referent of all literature; no longer the Umwelt of the ostensive references of dialogue, but the Welt projected by the nonostensive references of every text that we have read, understood and loved. …Here again the spirituality of discourse manifests itself through writing, which frees us from the visibility and limitation of situations by opening up a world for us, that is, new dimensions of our being-in-the-world.²⁵

Again we see how distanciation may work as a liberation. It enables texts to cross borders, whether the latter are historical, cultural, or religious, thus opening up the possibility of interreligious reading.

Texts reach their autonomy in one more sense, namely in the way they are distanced from their originally intended audience. As with any kind of discourse, written discourse is addressed to someone. The author writes with an audience in mind. That is, as Ricoeur acknowledges, the foundation of communication. However, different from oral discourse that is addressed to an ‘interlocutor equally present,’ ‘what is written is addressed to the audience that it creates itself…. The vis-à-vis of the written is just whoever knows how to read.’²⁶ Thus, a text potentially has a universal set of addressees. Elsewhere, I have concluded the following about this threefold distanciation and its relevance for interreligious hermeneutics:

Because of the process of distanciation, the text enters the realm of interpretation. The autonomous text is not a historical relic or a fossil, but a living entity with potential relevance for contemporary readers. Because of its semantic autonomy, a text can be decontextualized in such a way that it can also be recontextualized. The most important question is no longer what the text used to mean but what it means today. Ricoeur’s text theory challenges the idea that insiders are the only true possessors of their tradition and hence the only ones authorized to read and interpret their religious texts. Because of the fourfold process of distanciation, a strange religious text can disclose its meaning to attentive readers, even if they do not belong to the community for which the text was originally meant. In view of interreligious hermeneutics, the importance of the distanciation of the text should not be underestimated.²⁷

The dynamics of appropriation as expropriation

Above I mentioned how hermeneutics is usually associated with the challenge of overcoming the distance between what is foreign and familiar. I explained how Ricoeur questions this ‘definition’ of hermeneutics by pointing out the hermeneutical function of distanciation. Just as the translator should let go of the paralyzing desire to duplicate the original, one should not mistake understanding a text with knowing the mind of the original author. Distanciation, as described above, liberates the text so that it can enter into the realm of interpretation, allowing the readers of today, who belong to a different sociocultural and religious context, to appropriate the meaning of the text anew.

Appropriation is an ambiguous notion. When understood as an effort to comprehend the other, to grasp the meaning of difference, and to make what is foreign familiar, it may actually reveal a deeper lying desire to totalize strangeness or (as Levinas would put it) reduce otherness to sameness.²⁸ There is a potentially violent flavor to appropriation (think of the current discussions about cultural appropriation). Critical theorists have pointed out that when hermeneutics is first and foremost about making the strange familiar, it risks lapsing into some form of interpretive imperialism. That is why processes of familiarization need to be alternated with process of defamiliarization and alienation. Anthony Thiselton explains this as follows: ‘Defamiliarizing entails re-reading what had appeared familiar or ordinary in a context that transposes it into the no-longer familiar and no-longer ordinary, to produce reappraisal by shock.’²⁹

In a similar vein, when Ricoeur speaks about appropriation, he rather seems to mean expropriation, highlighting the way the ‘reader’ is being redescribed and transformed in and through the hermeneutical process. In a way, the text, or better still, the world projected by the text, is powerful and speaks to the reader and potentially challenges her. The possibility of transformation requires an attentive reading, the crux of which is that the reader surrenders to the influence of the text and thereby becomes vulnerable to the possibilities projected before the text, even to the extent of inspiring a radical life change. Reading is not about projecting one’s own expectations onto the text, but rather about being receptive to the world of the text, that is, the world projected by the text. Because the text does not belong the realm of the situational (as is the case with oral discourse), it has the capacity to unfold a possible world which speaks to our imagination. The text, Ricoeur would say, does not evoke ‘what is’ but rather what could be, or an ‘as if,’ thereby interrupting what we take for granted. Again we see how Ricoeur points at the productive notion of distanciation, and by extension, alienation, and defamiliarization. We can call this the distanciation of the self from itself. David Kaplan explains this as follows:

Reading transforms us as a result of the appropriated meaning of a text. When I ‘lose myself’ in a good book, I really do lose myself in an important way. ‘It is in allowing itself to carried off towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself’ (HHS 191). To appropriate the meaning of a text, we must first let go and relinquish the illusion that subjectivity alone confers meaning. Reading is a transformative experience in which we gain ourselves as we lose ourselves…. Reading serves as a potentially critical function by displacing the illusions of subjectivity and by transforming the experience of the reader, who encounters new, different, possibly better worlds…. Interpreting texts may broaden our horizon of experience, change our self-understanding, and transform who we are, how we live, and how we act in the world.³⁰

In this way, hermeneutical appropriation is not the expression of imperialism or colonization but of detachment and letting go. The attitude of the interpreter to the text is a listening one. In his article ‘Naming God,’ Ricoeur explains this attitude as follows: ‘Listening excludes founding oneself…. The movement toward listening requires giving up (desaissement) the human self in its will to mastery, sufficiency, and autonomy.’³¹ Understanding means ultimately to understand oneself before the text, that is to say, to receive from the text an enriched and enlarged understanding of self and other. Affirming the power of the text to project a possible world, Ricoeur however does recognize that any interpretation/appropriation will also be a reconfiguration or an imaginative reconstruction of the text. In this reconfiguration, the reader and her autobiography will affect the way the text is understood and received as meaningful. To my mind, this too explains the conflict of interpretations of which Ricoeur often speaks. Every translation is different, as is every interpretation.

In line with the hermeneutical tradition of which Ricoeur is a major proponent, many interreligious scholars abide by the idea that religious texts are the primary and most stable means through which religious meaning is communicated and shared over generations. That is why they are regarded as the most obvious hermeneutical access to understanding another tradition. The focus on texts, at least as seems to be the consensus, would provide access to some of the subtlest and most nuanced rationales developed in various traditions. Reading a foreign religious text ‘initiates an encounter with the other, and involves the reader in hearing and understanding a specific other voice, not just the generic “world religions.”’ It would enable one to do justice to some of the intricate complexities of strange traditions and to really delve deeply into its different layers of meaning.³² Thus, interreligious scholars operate as go-betweens: as interreligious translators, they move between different religious worlds as projected by various texts in an effort to build bridges between them. Practices of cross-reading are understood as a sort of laboratory in which believers open themselves up to the other and learn to see that there exist other ways of being-in-the-world. By venturing into the world of the other, our imaginations can think differently, and our practical lives can find rejuvenating new orientations.³³

Interreligious hermeneutics and the ‘tyranny’ of the text

However, productive the practices of comparative cross-reading may be, under the influence of material and ritual scholars, the textual focus of interreligious hermeneutics has recently been criticized. There is a growing concern that the focus on religious texts may unduly limit our understanding of religious others and their traditions. Increasingly, interreligious scholars are examining how their focus on the comparative study of texts blinds them to the non-textual practices of religions, that is, ritual practices. Today, several interreligious scholars are asking if interreligious understanding may also be mediated ritually, for example, via ritual participation rather than via cross-reading.³⁴ There is a sense that inter-riting (as distinct from inter-texting) would allow one to reach a deeper understanding of the religious other and his tradition. Interreligious scholar John Maraldo explains this as follows:

The word hermeneutics refers historically to a discipline focused on texts and on language under the guise of texts. The word interreligious refers foremost to interaction between so-called world religions. But when religion is confined to the aspects of traditions that are globally represented, when the interaction between them is restricted to linguistic understanding, and when hermeneutics is supposed to guide this understanding of language as it becomes focused in texts, then a lot is left out. There are notable aspects of religion that have nothing to do with texts and little to do with language, and there are religious interactions between people who do not represent world religions or their various sects. If reflection on possible mutual understanding between identifiable different religions is the aim of interreligious hermeneutics, then an alternative sense of understanding is called for.³⁵

Instead of reading the texts that presumably are at the heart of another tradition, would it not make sense to rather engage in ritual performances, and do as others do? To examine this new trajectory (and how it relates to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics), let me first further unpack two of the main criticisms levied against interreligious hermeneutics as primarily focused on texts.³⁶ Only when we fully grasp some of the more fundamental problems related with the so-called textual bias of (inter)religious hermeneutics, may we understand the novelty of this ritual turn.³⁷

First criticism: the focus on texts and the way this creates blind spots in interreligious studies

First of all, one should not forget that to this day, several religions and cultures exist in which texts do not figure at all or do not figure prominently. Because of the literary bias, non-textual religious traditions, that is, oral traditions, are often overlooked. Different from those religions which revolve around a body of texts, they do not belong to the group of ‘world religions’ that have universalizing power. These non-textual, oral traditions do not figure prominently in interreligious studies.

Second, even in the case of those religious traditions which consist of a textual body that is studied and reflected upon (e.g. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism), it can still be debated if texts are at the heart of these traditions. An argument can be made that texts are only of secondary importance compared to the ritual practices which revolve around material objects and occur in sacred (or other) spaces. As various philosophers of religion have pointed out, the way one actually learns to speak a religious language is by learning to perform rituals in an appropriate way. Religious knowledge is first and foremost a knowing how (a certain skillfulness) before it is a knowing that. This primary religious language

concerns the most tangible forms in which the religion is manifested: … people bow and kneel, stride through the aisle, smell the incense, sing the psalm in the choir, enter the holy place. Cerebral, speculative words like grace, redemption, predestination, and eschatology do not belong to this primary religious language but to (secondary) theological language.³⁸

Religious traditions are not first and foremost textually transmitted, rather the process of handing down tradition happens both bodily and textually. On this point, Courtney Bender says:

Habit, comportment, language, emotion, and so on are naturalized through the ongoing, daily disciplining of the body in specific ritual events and in multiple social interactions. The thoroughly socialized body inhabits a world in which it knows how to move, and does so in such a way that its movements appear thoroughly natural and transparent. We are given practices “in almost the same way that we are given our native language, which we master fluently long before we begin to study grammar.”³⁹

In addition to the former reflection, those religious scholars who focus on religious texts often consider ritual practices as merely expressive of beliefs that were formulated textually beforehand.⁴⁰ Even stronger, rituals are considered to be a symbolic enactment of texts. The assumption is that qua content, they do not really add anything new; they simply bring beliefs, and the texts that contain those beliefs, to life. Rituals, in this sense, do not really add any ‘content,’ and hence there is no need to study them. Such a textualist understanding of ritual is contradicted by many ritual scholars, liturgical theologians, and philosophers of religion who point out that rituals do not merely express already existing beliefs; rather, participating in ritual activities can sometimes generate new thoughts and bring about change in tradition. As Nicole Boivin puts it: ‘Ritual can be a very creative act that does not just express or represent but actually does something; it can alter understandings, bodies or the world itself, as understood by human beings.’⁴¹ The ritual practices of religious communities may be opportunities for the ritualist to actually consider the relations between ‘God, man, and nature.’ To limit interreligious hermeneutics to practices of cross-reading may lead one to miss out on the creative potential of ritual performances.

Fourth, when one focuses on religious texts, that is, written statements made by sages and theologians, seers, and teachers, ‘one actually zooms in on high tradition rather than on lived religion.’⁴² High tradition points to the ‘textual-legal’ side of religion (the laws, doctrines, etc.), which is usually male dominated and often claims to represent the unchanging core of a tradition as it is handed down from one generation to another. The key players in this process are intellectual representatives who develop sophisticated philosophical and theological commentaries on the core beliefs and sacred scriptures. The concerns of intellectual representatives and what they deem important are not necessarily what occupies the minds and bodies of ordinary believers. When we construe our understanding of another religious tradition based on their texts, it may be very far removed from what people actually believe and practice. As Goody points out:

For example, while Hindus may recognize spirit cults, Hinduism does not. Christianity more deliberately excludes magic, but to many Christians, alternative beliefs have been as much a part of their world-view as alternative medicine to many a hospital patient.⁴³

Again one must ask, when we are involved in interreligious hermeneutics, what are we actually trying to understand, whether beliefs, texts, and orthodox theologies, or religion as it is lived. Both are important projects, but one should not conflate them.

Fifth, and subsequently, critics argue that there is a connection between a literary bias and the tendency to reify religions as clearly defined wholes that revolve around beliefs as they are written down in texts. When religions are studied under the guise of texts, ‘one inevitably imposes a degree of uniformity, consistency and univocal stability.’⁴⁴ This presumed uniformity, consistency, and stability may conceal the inner plurality, yes the even messy nature of religions and the often-conflicting beliefs and practices of their adherents; but it certainly conceals the way claims to authority and orthodoxy are produced and reproduced.⁴⁵ The assumption is that focusing on texts ‘marginalizes and suppresses the heterogeneity of religions expression.’⁴⁶

By contrast to the textual focus, a ritual turn in interreligious studies would hold the promise of drawing attention to embodied religion, that is, religion as it revolves around bodily practices and how the body is a site of (inter)religious learning. Furthermore, it would shift attention away from the ‘official’ and authoritative voices, whose role it is to ‘protect’ or at least represent the doctrinal heart of tradition to religion as it is lived with all its messiness and ambiguity. At the same time, it may also highlight how rituals function as creative sites where new religious insights are generated.

Second criticism: the textualization of the world and the limits of applying the ‘model’ of the text to cultural performances

The critique against the dominance of texts, however, goes beyond the mere fact that the place texts occupy in (inter)religious studies does not match their significance in lived religion. On a more fundamental level, critics also object to the way human scientists (read cultural anthropologists, religious scholars, sociologists, and so on) have turned to the text as a model to understand various forms of human action. Under the influence of hermeneutics (and Ricoeur is often named in this regard), the world is being textualized, even to the extent that everything becomes like a text that can be read and interpreted. Tomas Csordas argues that

…textualism has become, if you will, a hungry metaphor, swallowing up all of culture to the point where it becomes possible and even convincing to hear the deconstructionist motto that there is nothing outside the text. … It has come to the point where the text metaphor has virtually … gobbled up the body itself…. I would go so far as to assert that for many contemporary scholars the text metaphor has ceased to be a metaphor at all and is taken quite literally.⁴⁷

We have grown accustomed to the pervasiveness of metaphor of the text: to understand becomes equated with reading or seeing (now I understand, now I see) and to not grasp the truth is to be blindfolded. We speak about the narrative of our lives of which we ourselves are both the readers and the authors or about the need to decipher certain actions by asking what they mean. The critics point out that this metaphor of the text is problematic in the way that it reduces a variety of human phenomena to one and the same format, that is, that of the text; and it also reduces understanding to one and the same format, that is, that of reading. That there are other ‘vehicles of intelligibility’ and other hermeneutical approaches possible is not seriously considered. Let me name a couple of problems and their remedies.

First of all, underlying this metaphor of the text seems to be an anthropology which regards the human person first and foremost as someone who thinks by using his mind. Even though several hermeneutical philosophers strongly objected to Descartes’ res cogitans, it would seem that the Cartesian tradition still lurks around the corner. The assumption that reading is a model for what it means to understand reveals the continued power of the ideal of the human person as a disembodied mind. What remains underexplored is how understanding is always and necessarily embodied. We understand the world through our bodies; or better still, we make sense of the world through our bodies and through our senses. We learn the difference between warm and cold, nearby and far away, caressing and hitting, hunger, desire, and satisfaction – all through our bodies. Through the body, we establish relations and build bridges (or establish boundaries between the self and the other).⁴⁸

Second, and building on the previous reflection, when one upholds ‘reading’ as the most appropriate way to study another religion and to enable interreligious understanding, one more or less engages only one of the human senses, namely vision. Of all the senses, vision is the one that allows for the most distance between the scholar and the object under scrutiny (subject/object). As Fabian writes,

[v]ision requires distance from its objects; the eye maintains its “purity” as long as it is not in close contact with “foreign objects”. Visualism, by instituting distance as that which enables us to know, and purity of immateriality as that which characterizes true knowledge, aimed to remove all the other senses and thereby the body from knowledge production.⁴⁹

The way the body and the other senses are involved in knowledge production, especially or certainly in the religious realm, is masked.⁵⁰ Whereas a textual paradigm privileges distance, detachment, and disclosure as ways of knowing, for example, ‘knowledge means rising above immediacy,’ in a hermeneutics of ritual performance, the focus is rather on ‘immediacy, involvement, and intimacy as modes of understanding, e.g. the primordial meaning of knowledge as a mode of being-together-with.’⁵¹ Learning through the body, as is central in ritual action, is about getting involved (e.g. in a Roman Catholic church): moving the body spatially, touching the icon, smelling the incense, eating the host and drinking the wine, prostrating the body, singing the song, listening to the sermon, standing up and sitting down, holding hands, crossing oneself, etc. Doing so, one becomes part of a shared as if, the meaning of which one gradually comes to grasp. Clearly, reading ought not to be projected as the model of all human understanding, just as the text is not an appropriate format for all human action. Understanding is not about creating a certain distance, but rather about becoming involved as a practitioner. That is not only the case for the ‘native believer’; it should also be the case for the interreligious scholar who tries to understand the other.

Third, several commentators point out that when one tries to ‘read’ a ritual like a text, one is focused primarily in deciphering its structure and internal coherence; how all the parts of the ritual performance interconnect so as to construct a meaningful whole. From this perspective, it is not unusual that the ritual is regarded as an enactment of a ritual script, in which the structure of the ritual is described in detail. To read a ritual like a text is, according to the critics, to be involved in a process of homogenization or reification; you treat the ritual as if it is a fixed whole, that it like a text has undergone a last redaction, as a consequence of which its content is now complete and final. Inevitably, one imposes upon the ritual performance a certain uniformity and univocality which does not necessarily do justice to the performed ritual, which may ‘mean’ very different things to different ritualists involved. This focus on coherence leads one to downplay the creative, interactive, dynamic, and messy aspects of ritual behavior, as well as the fact that may be the ritual is not all that coherent, and may be the ritualist is more involved in one part or the ritual and less in another.

Toward a hermeneutics of ritual performance

Kevin Schilbrack sums up the critique of the tyranny of the text by saying:

Hermeneutics lets us read rituals, on an analogy with texts, as meaningful, communicative activities, a valuable and almost unavoidable approach for contemporary academics, but if a hermeneutics of performance is not developed, the analogue of ritual to text threatens to drain ritual of its sensuous and performative elements.⁵²

In light of this, we can better understand why several interreligious scholars have moved away from their almost exclusive focus on reading and comparing religious texts and broadened the scope of their interest so as to include symbolic practices that revolve around bodily performances. They are thinking of an alternative approach to understanding, that is, a hermeneutics of ritual performance.

This hermeneutics takes its root in what they call the embodiment paradigm. According to Schilbrack

[F]rom [the] perspective [of the embodiment paradigm], the body is not simply a passive object on which cultures write their variable meanings, but is also that source from which one engages the world. Here the body is the very condition of subjectivity and the prereflective ground of self and culture…. This paradigm holds that physical activities are not only resources for a mind’s or a culture’s symbolizing but are also exploratory, inquiring, investigative…. [It draws attention to] the mind in the body.⁵³

Building on the embodiment paradigm, religious practices do not simply enact or express certain beliefs, but rather there is thinking through rituals. Body and mind are intertwined just as action and thoughts are fused together, the outcome of which is a sort of a performative reflexivity. Understanding is generated through practice. As a consequence, if we want to understand, we will have to become performers ourselves and will have to come to a practice of ritual participation or inter-riting so that we can learn to understand by doing as others do.⁵⁴ If interreligious interpretation is about crossing-over and moving between religious ‘worlds,’ then why not consider rituality as a primary access to a strange religious world, why not consider living as others live, doing as others do, experiencing the world as others experience it, making sense of it through our senses … and start our hermeneutics from there? As I have explained elsewhere, in the realm of prayer, meditation, and ritual, there is nothing more eye-opening than seeing people from another religious tradition enact their faith in an embodied way. Entering the sacred space of another religious community and being shaped by their rituals creates the possibility of deeper interreligious understanding rooted in real religious life. To illustrate this thought, consider what John Maraldo says about intermonastic dialogue as an expression of ritual participation:

The understanding that takes place in such intermonastic dialogue is first and foremost an understanding of the religious life of the other, and this understanding comes about by living that life as fully as possible during the prescribed period of time. It occurs by doing what the other does. The religious life of the other does not function as an object to be grasped intellectually or empathically. Rather it is appropriated as a daily practice. Practicing is the form that understanding takes here. What is exchanged in this sort of ‘dialogue’ is defined by a set of practices rather than a viewpoint on doctrines. To translates this experience into the domain of language, we could say that in such practice the dialogue partner learns to speaks as his or her own words the words learned from the other.⁵⁵

The understanding that generates from ritual participation is an understanding of religious life, and this is an understanding that comes about by enacting and imitating part of that life. It is an understanding that emerges from doing as the other does. Here, meaning is not accessed via explanation, but through practice, and this actually mirrors the way religious knowledge is acquired also within religious communities.⁵⁶

Both the twofold critique raised against the textual focus of (inter)religious hermeneutics and the constructive alternative of developing a hermeneutics of ritual performances raises the question: What does this mean in view of Ricoeur’s significance for interreligious hermeneutics? As a Ricoeur scholar, I have to ask if Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics is indeed part of the problem? Does the critique as developed above also pertain to his work and if so, to what extent? At first glance, things do not look good.

Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics reconsidered

In his work, Ricoeur pays little or no attention to ritual performances, and he did not engage in any conversation with those who were critical of the so-called literary bias. As far as I know, he never wrote about symbolic practices and the central role they play in religious life. Apart from the fact that he was greatly attracted to the rich liturgical life of Catholicism – something we know from the interviews in which he speaks about his visits to Taizé – his hermeneutics, as he himself admits, is first and foremost a text hermeneutics. His hermeneutics of religion revolves around texts and language: ‘Whatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression.’⁵⁷ Texts are for him the most obvious place to start when one tries to understand a religion. In this regard, Scott Holland is right when he says that Ricoeur’s ‘radical Hugenot Protestantism – where the Word-event is central – whispers through all his theory.’⁵⁸ A further element that it is noteworthy in this regard is the fact that he associates ritual as a form of sensible experience with the lure of ‘immediacy, effusiveness, intuitionism,’ which he contrasts with the mediation of language.⁵⁹ As we know from his philosophy of religion, he strongly resists any claim to immediacy in the religious realm. For interreligious scholars invested in a ritual turn, Ricoeur is not an obvious conversation partner. Even stronger, he seems to be part of the problem. What is more, Ricoeur sets out to extend his text hermeneutics and his notion of the text, as described above, to meaningful human actions, such as cultural performances. This would imply that meaningful human action may be treated, or better still, read, and interpreted in a similar way as texts pur sang. They are text-like, which means that they have similar traits and characteristics as those we discussed earlier, even to the extent that we can say that a cultural performance has a certain autonomy vis-à-vis its actor(s), its context, and audience. In brief, cultural performances also undergo the effects of distanciation and can be read like texts.

It cannot be denied that Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics, and especially his article ‘The Model of the Text,’ has contributed to the textualization of the world, and via such influential scholars as Clifford Geertz, it has certainly reinforced the assumption among (inter)religious scholars that texts provide the most appropriate hermeneutical access to other traditions.⁶⁰ Many of the critiques formulated against the textual focus of religious and interreligious hermeneutics also hold true for Ricoeur; and indeed, he may be designated as one of the pacesetters of the textual turn in the study of religion and by extension in interreligious studies. Though I agree that there are several problems with Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics, I do think that it is worthwhile to scrutinize Ricoeur’s actual argument and to place it within his broader oeuvre so that we can come to a more nuanced judgment.⁶¹ There are, as I will show, good reasons why it makes sense to continue to use his thought as a resource to confront some of the challenges involved in the ritual turn in interreligious hermeneutics. What does Ricoeur actually say?

The model of the text

As I explained above, Ricoeur gives five criteria for what constitutes a text (i.e. written discourse as distinguished from oral discourse). To his mind, these criteria likewise apply to cultural performances, such as rituals. The first criterion is that of fixation. Texts, through their fixations, save oral discourse from its fleeting nature. Second, texts, because of a process of distanciation, are somewhat disconnected from the original intention of the author (what the text means now is not the same as what its original author meant to say). A similar distanciation is at play with regard to the original context of the text; different from oral discourse, the context of written discourse is not the situation created by ostensive reference. Rather, the text projects a possible world. Also, with regard to the original audience, Ricoeur explains how distanciation opens up the text to a universal range of readers. Last but not least, he points out how reading is a dialectic between text and reader, between appropriation and disappropriation. According to Ricoeur, these criteria hold true for meaningful human action, for example, rituals; they are text-like and are marked by similar process of distanciation.⁶²

Speaking about the objectification of action, Ricoeur argues,

in the same way as the fixation by writing is made possible by a dialectic of intentional exteriorization immanent in the speech act itself, a similar dialectic within the process of transaction prepares the detachment of the meaning of the action from the event of the action.⁶³

Meaning, whether pertaining to discourse or action, can be distinguished from its particular occurrence as a spatiotemporal event. Meaningful human action not only undergoes a process of fixation but also of autonomization so that its meaning is detached from its original actors, original situation addressees. Let me quote Ricoeur here at length:

(1) In the same way that a text is detached from its author, an action is detached from its agent and develops consequences of its own. This autonomization of human action constitutes the social dimension of action. An action is a social phenomenon not only because it is done by several agents in such a way that the role of each of them cannot be distinguished from the role of others, but also because our deeds escape us and have effects we did not intend…. [H]uman deeds become ‘institutions’, in the sense that their meaning no longer coincides with the logical intentions of the actors. The meaning may be ‘depsychologized’ to the point where the meaning resides in the work itself. … (2) An important action … develops meanings that can be actualized or fulfilled in situations other than the one in which this action occurred. To say the same thing in different words, the meaning of an important event exceeds, overcomes, transcends, the social conditions of its production and may be reenacted in new social contexts. Its importance is its durable relevance, and in some cases, its omnitemporal relevance. (3) Finally, … the meaning of human action is also something that is addressed to an indefinite range of possible ‘readers’. … That means that like a text, human action is an open work, the meaning of which is ‘in suspense’. It is because it ‘opens up’ new references and receives fresh relevance from them, that human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations that decide their meaning…. Human action, too, is opened to anybody who can read.⁶⁴

According to ritual scholar Joyce Ann Zimmerman, ritual is one specific kind of meaningful human action to which Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics can be applied, because ritual is a good example of what Ricoeur calls the fixation of human action. ‘Rituals,’ so she states, ‘are rule-governed; they are executed according to a written or an unwritten set of rules.’⁶⁵ Because of these rules, rituals can be repeated again and again. Here too, ritual meaning goes beyond what it was original intended to mean, just like the meaning of the text is detached from its authorial intention. What is more, not only may rituals be reinterpreted in view of new historical contexts which provoke specific questions, challenges, and concerns, but it also means that one cannot pin down the meaning of a ritual easily. Like texts, the meaning of ritual ought not to be sought in the intentional of its performer(s) (i.e. the world before the text), nor should the meaning of the ritual be sought merely in its structure (the world of the text); rather, the meaning of the ritual is to be found in the world it projects or proposes (the world in front of the text), a world which we might inhabit. This world is not the world as we know it (our situational context) but rather interrupts that our familiar world so as to project a world that could be, thereby at once appealing to our imagination. In ritual, a world unfolds, which is not projected unto the ritual by the ritualist, but rather presents itself as the ritualist allows herself to be carried away. While the ritualist is doing the ritual, the ritual is doing something to the ritualist. What potentially happens is an enlargement of the ritualist. What is more, rituals potentially have the power to redescribe or to refigure the world of those involved. However, since the reader who appropriates the text differs from time to time and context to context and place to place, so to the meaning of the text that is appropriated will be different.⁶⁶ These different interpretations/appropriations keep the text/ritual alive.

The lasting value of Ricoeur to a hermeneutics of ritual performance

In what follows, I want to argue why Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics, and especially his analogy between text and human action (read ritual) may, despite some of the problems discussed earlier, nevertheless offer rich potential to enable a move from inter-texting to inter-riting. To that end, we must place Ricoeur’s model of the text in his larger oeuvre. I will focus my attention on a couple of criticisms of the textual bias: (1) the hungry metaphor and (2) the reification of meaning.

Ricoeur and the all-pervasiveness of hermeneutics

In comparing human action, and ritual performance more specifically, to texts, I think that Ricoeur wants to highlight that all human action is symbolically mediated, structured, and articulated in signs, rules, and norms. Thus, they are already part of an ongoing process of meaning giving which precedes them. There is no such thing as reality as such or immediate experience or unmediated emotions, or for that matter action, that is not already symbolically structured and constituted.⁶⁷ As human beings, we are part of a web of meanings within which human life is framed and which immediately allows people to understand certain symbols and symbolic gestures.⁶⁸ In that sense, the human condition is hermeneutical, and the world presents itself as a field of superabundant meaning to be interpreted within a sociohistorical cultural framework. Where Csordas speaks of the text as a hungry metaphor, Ricoeur would rather argue that In principio fit interpretatio. Human beings are born in a web of meanings and are involved in an ongoing process of interpretation, and from a Ricoeurian perspective, there is no reason to suspect that that process should stop at the threshold of the ritual realm. On the contrary,

to understand a ritual action, as Ricoeur once says – the elevation of the host in a Roman Catholic Mass, the serving of the unleavened bread at a Passover Seder – is to understand the meaning of the ritual, which in turn implies an entire system of beliefs, values, and institutions.⁶⁹

Two remarks are relevant here: two that side with Ricoeur, one that points out a limitation of his hermeneutics.

First of all, it is important to realize that in emphasizing the all-pervasiveness of hermeneutics, Ricoeur objects to claims of ‘experiential immediacy.’ In line with our Babelish condition, it will not be possible to somehow circumvent symbolic mediation and grasp this or that phenomenon as it is, that is, in all its pureness. Even when one would highlight the experiential nature of ritual performance, Ricoeur would still emphasize that ritual experience too is mediated symbolically. This is relevant especially for interreligious scholars who would participate in the rituals of others in an effort to experience what religious others experience. There is a sense (though this should not necessarily be the case) in which ritual participation may be motivated by some sort of romantic hermeneutics, as if by doing what others do, one might experience what others experience and thus feel what others feel. From a Ricoeurian perspective, this bespeaks a desire for fusion, which would lift or at least limit the hermeneutical distance between self and other and thus bypass interpretation and symbolic mediation.⁷⁰ Ricoeur has always ‘vigorously resisted the word “experience”, out of distrust of immediacy, effusiveness, intuitionism; [he has] always favored, on the contrary, the mediation of language and scripture….’⁷¹ To those who engage in inter-rituality in an effort to experience what others do, Ricoeur would say (and this is what he means with the all-pervasiveness of hermeneutics) that there is no such thing as pure and unmediated experience, and he would be critical of their desire for immediacy.

However, Ricoeur does not only take issue with romantic hermeneutics; when he highlights the all-pervasiveness of hermeneutics, I also take him to be critical of a merely scientific approach to texts and human actions, which would limit itself to what he calls explanation. Of course (and I have not mentioned this before), any hermeneutics must attend to (i.e. analyze and scrutinize) the particular characteristics of a text/action. Observation and description are part of this phase. In case of ritual action, we explore (1) the kind of ritual that is performed, (2) the space in which the ritual is performed, (3) the time when the ritual occurs, (4) the ritual objects used, (5) the sound and language employed and produced, (6) the roles of the ritualists, and (7) the actions performed.⁷² Next to description, various other critical analyses may be introduced: a power analysis of the ritual (addressing questions of how this or that ritual reinforces of subverts the status quo), a sociological analysis (pointing at how the ritual enhances group coherence), a historical–critical approach (tracing back the roots of the rituals), etc. To understand, one must explain. However, to social scientists, ritual scholars, or interreligious scholars who think that their task is finished by explaining a phenomenon, Ricoeur would say that they have stopped halfway. Understanding is about appropriation and that entails asking what does a text/ritual mean; what world does it project, and how does that world challenge, interrupt, and possibly transform the way we, as interpreters, look at the world as we know it? By applying his text hermeneutics to cultural performances like rituals, Ricoeur is challenging interpreters not to stop short, but to go all the way as befits the human condition, and to ask what does it mean. Explanation and understanding ought to be engaged in ‘a collaborative dialogue.’⁷³ For the interpreter that means moving beyond the critical analytical gaze which keeps the text/ritual performance at a certain distance to assume a more engaging stance, in which he is exposed to the world projected by the text. To engage in a hermeneutical process involves a risk, or as Ricoeur would put it, a wager – that of surrendering to the ‘text’ and that of allowing oneself to be redescribed by the text. In discussing the wager of interpretation, Lindsay Jones says the following:

There is then, as Ricoeur would say, a kind of wager at stake here insofar as, in order to reap any benefit, participants must surrender a measure of their independence and commit themselves to serious consideration of the alternatives that are presented in the closed world of the architectural event. Making explicit use of the analogy between play and understanding, Ricoeur explains that anyone who would ‘stand apart from the game in the name of a non-situated objectivity’ would understand nothing.⁷⁴

Let me just add one more reflection. One of the important criticisms raised against the ‘textual’ bias of interreligious hermeneutics is that to read a text and to perform a ritual are two very different actions, and two very distinct ways of reaching understanding. That is true. It is quite different to read a text versus to perform a ritual, for all the reasons mentioned in the second part of this article. To equate understanding to reading, as Ricoeur does, misses out to a great extent on the way understanding is embodied, that is, happens through the body and the use of all of its senses (touch, smell, hearing, etc.). As Richard Kearney would have it, hermeneutics is carnal, and the textual focus does not grasp how understanding happens through experience and through the body. However, I do want to point out that Ricoeur does not depict the reader as someone ‘in control of the text’, rather the attitude of the interpreter is an attitude of vulnerability and answerability to the text.⁷⁵ Though I understand how reading a text is more ‘distanced’ from performing a ritual which involves the entire body (and I will come back to this below), I do not think that one does justice to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics by saying that it privileges detachment. Appropriation as reading is also about allowing oneself to be redescribed by the text and the world projected by the text. I think, at least in this sense, that the attitude of reading may be likened to that of performing a ritual, in which a shared as if is projected.

The hermeneutics of performance and the notion of fixation

An important critique vis-à-vis Ricoeur is that his model of the text would do injustice to the dynamic and eventful nature of rituals. Rituals happen now and here, and the focus of any kind of hermeneutics of ritual performance should be on its vivid and active nature as it occurs in reality. Some ritual scholars aver that the process of textual fixation goes together with decontextualization and universalization. When applied to rituals, the latter not only become too static but also uprooted and even abstract. The critiques suggest that to really understand ritual, one must attend to the local rather than to the universal, to the particular rather than to the universal/generic.

It is true that the fixation and autonomization of human action – and ritual performance – detaches the meaning of the action from the event of the action. While I think that Ricoeur would agree with this criticism, he would point out that this detachment is precisely what allows the ritual to enter into the realm of interpretation. By focusing solely on the local, the particular, the contextual, one risks reducing this or that ritual to some exotic practice that may be performed by this or that religious community in this or that concrete setting, but why would it matter to others, who belong to another tradition and live in another context. As I said in my introduction, if a religious phenomenon is too strange, too different, too particular, or even too local, it might very well become meaningless, not worth our further attention. When the focus is on intimate contexts, the local and historical, the knowledge yielded cannot be generalized.⁷⁶ It therefore runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. If its meaning cannot transcend its context of origin at all, it will not speak to others, and the opportunity to build hermeneutical bridges is lost. In this regard, I think Manuel Vasquez has a point when he says that

…the lived religion perspective places a heavy emphasis on micro-descriptions and self-reflections, running the danger of failing to connect localized practices to the larger context in which they are embedded, which includes national, transnational, and global economic, political, cultural and environmental process.⁷⁷

Though one may have problems with the decontextualization brought about by textualization, as an interreligious scholar, I am appreciative of the way this analogy between ritual and text enables a process of interreligious hermeneutics in which ritual performances of other religious communities may be meaningful to others.

Like a text, a human action is an open work, the meaning of which is in suspense. It is because it “opens up” new references and receives fresh relevance from them, that human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations which decide their meaning.⁷⁸

From this perspective, I would say a Ricoeurian approach, with its sensitivity to conflicting interpretations (even within one community) or different readings, actually enables us to appreciate the superabundance of the ritual performed and the subsequent variety of interpretations that emerge therefrom. The semantic autonomy of the ritual does not, to my mind, lead to reification but could allow for an appreciation of the diversity of lived experience. So from this perspective, I would embrace Ricoeur’s main claim in ‘The Model of the Text,’ because it opens up ritual performance to hermeneutical exploration and to meaningfulness, also for those who are outsiders to the religious community in which the ritual is performed. For interreligious scholars involved in the ritual turn, this is particularly important: thanks to the process of textualization, rituals too may become a site of interreligious learning.

Next, I am also especially appreciative of the way the productive distanciation so central to Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics gives rituals a certain semantic autonomy so that their meaning unfolds in the dynamic between the ritual and the performer. The ritual has a power to project a possible world that is appropriated differently by different performers. In my ‘understanding,’ this interaction between performer and ritual avoids reducing the meaning of the ritual to some kind of idealized intention of the religious community (the official meaning the ritual is meant to express) as well as reducing the meaning of the ritual to the subjective intentions (and experiences) of the ritualist. Though he does not say this explicitly, I think that Ricoeur would be sympathetic to the idea that human beings are not only textually constituted but also ritually. Just as with reading texts, participating in foreign rituals may broaden the imagination, enabling the interreligious ritualist to enter into the world of the other. Though Ricoeur, to my knowledge, never participated in the rituals of another tradition, he was actively involved in the Catholic liturgical community of Taizé. About his experience, he says the following:

Je suis reconnaissant à la liturgie de m’arracher à ma subjectivité, de m’offrir, non mes mots, non mes gestes, mais ceux de la communauté. Je suis heureux de cette objectivation de mes sentiments eux-mêmes; en entrant dans l’expression cultuelle, je suis arraché à l’effusion sentimentale; j’entre dans la forme qui me forme; en reprenant à mon compte le texte liturgique, je deviens texte moi-même, orant et chantant. Oui, par la liturgie, je suis fondamentalement dépreoccupé de moi-même…. Voilà le dépaysement salutaire qui remet le moi dans la communauté, l’individu dans l’histoire et l’homme dans la création.⁷⁹

Is this not similar to the defamiliarization that occurs in the practice of linguistic hospitality?

Conclusion: interreligious scholars as go-betweens: the things lost and gained

In the first part of this article, I made reference to Ricoeur’s ethics of translation. Linguistic hospitality may function as a model to think through some of the ethical and hermeneutical challenges of interreligious encounters. What I appreciate especially in this model is the way it refrains from depicting an idealized image of the meeting between ‘religions.’ Rather, Ricoeur helps us to face the real challenges and even resistance one may encounter when one engages in practices of interreligious translation. What is more, he emphasizes that there is no gain without loss. There are no perfect translations, only imperfect ones, but the latter are still worth so much more than the alternative of insulation.

Ricoeur, like so many interreligious scholars, has a preference for reading texts. Indeed, his hermeneutics is first developed as a text hermeneutics. It cannot be denied that his philosophical training, as well as his Protestant background, has certainly influenced his focus on texts. Though he later broadened his text hermeneutics so as to include meaningful human action and had a major impact on the human sciences, I think that it is fair to say that Ricoeur himself regarded texts (whether religious or other) as the best means to interpret human phenomena. The fact that he never engaged in an in-depth hermeneutics of, for example, a particular religious ritual corroborates this point. Nevertheless, I have also tried to point out that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has much to offer to a ritual turn in interreligious studies. Though such a ritual turn takes Ricoeur into a direction he may not have envisioned, I am convinced that it is worthwhile to continue the conversation with his work.

Last but not least, texts, or better still the meanings of texts, because of their semantic autonomy, can be ‘extrapolated from their local, cultural context … and divorced from their actual historical circumstances and manifestations.’⁸⁰ Texts can break through boundaries and may speak to a variety of audiences; their meaning may transcend the context from which they emerged. In that sense, the argument continues, texts are disembodied and disembedded and therefore abstract and universalizable. However, religious practices, as some scholars contend, are not fixed and stable but rather are fleeting in nature. One would do an injustice to their creative dynamism by reading them as a text. A hermeneutics of performance needs to attend to the local, the particular, the moment, and to these particular ritualists, who in a playful, imaginative, and creative way perform rituals and make meaning happen.⁸¹ The immediacy of the moment needs to be addressed, not the transcendence of the local. For interreligious scholars, this critique is particularly important, since the focus on the text is said to have contributed to the reified and bounded understanding of world religions. Reorienting one’s attention to ritual practices through the lens of a hermeneutics of performance therefore might lead interreligious scholars to better appreciate the fluidity and hybridity of (individual and collective) religious identities.

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Notes on contributors

Marianne Moyaert

Marianne Moyaert is the Fenna Diemer Lindeboom Chair of Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue at the VU University Amsterdam. She published recently In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters (2014) and as editor (with J. Geldhof) Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue (2015).

Notes

1. Knitter, Jesus and the Other Names, chapter 1.

2. Hustwit, Interreligious Hermeneutics, 49.

3. Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 9.

4. Moyaert, “In Response to the Religious Other,” 2014; Matern, Zwischen kultureller Symbolik und allgemeinerWahrheit, 2008; Garcia, “On Paul Ricoeur,” 72–87; Kearney, Anatheism, 2010; Taylor, “Hospitality as Translation,” 11–21.

5. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 15.

6. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies, 80.

7. Sullivan, “Putting an End to the Text as Primary,” 52.

8. Heim, “On Doing as Others Do,” 19–33.

9. Cornille, “Introduction: On Hermeneutics in Dialogue,” xv.

10. Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, 127.

11. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” 142.

12. Csordas, “Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology,” 146.

13. Ricoeur, On Translation, 23–24.

14. Bottone, “Translation as an Ethical Paradigm,” 225.

15. Ricoeur, On Translation, 4.

16. Ibid., 5.

17. Steiner, After Babel, 134.

18. Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.

19. Maraldo, “A Call for an Alternative Notion of Understanding 89.

20. Garcia, “On Paul Ricoeur,” 72.

21. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” 148.

22. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 75–88.

23. Here, Ricoeur differs from Gadamer for whom distanciation has a pejorative meaning. Ricoeur translates Gadamer’s notion of alienation as distanciation aliénante. See Gert-Jan Van der Heiden, “Distantiatie in de hermeneutiek van Paul Ricoeur,” 279.

24. Clooney, “Why the Veda Has No Author,” 675.

25. Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the text,” 149.

26. Ibid., 150.

27. Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 175.

28. Moyaert, “Levinas, Interreligious Dialogue and the Otherness,” 61–190.

29. Thiselton, Thiselton on Hermeneutics, 319.

30. Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 36.

31. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 224.

32. Clooney, “When Religions Become Context”, 35.

33. Ricoeur’s model of linguistic hospitality resonates with two existing interreligious practices, which both revolve around religious texts: comparative theology and scriptural reasoning. Both of these interreligious practices take root in the assumption that reading and comparing religious texts across different traditions are the best way to do justice to some of the intricate complexities of strange traditions and to really delve deeply into its different layers of meaning. In line with the hermeneutical tradition of which Ricoeur is a major advocate, comparative theologians as well as scriptural reasoners abide by the idea that religious texts provide the most suitable means to enable interreligious understanding. ‘[A]s forms of a careful and discerning reading of religious texts, they [are] examples of how an empathetic use of the imagination can bridge the gap between religious worlds of discourse.’ See Special issue: ‘Interreligious Reading After Vatican II: Scriptural Reasoning, Comparative Theology and Receptive Ecumenism,’ Modern Theology 29 (2013).

34. Moyaert, “Introduction,” 1–16; O’Donnell, Remembering the Future, 2015; Laksana, Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices, 2014; Farwell, “Not Two with Christ, 2015.

35. See note 19 above.

36. The focus on texts as the privileged study object of (inter)religious scholars has a long and complex history. Several scholars have already endeavored to unravel this complex history by developing a systematic genealogy of the literary bias and how it has affected (inter)religious studies. They point out how certain Christian (and more specifically Protestant) and Enlightenment prejudices have impacted the way that the study of other religions as well as the study of interreligious interactions has developed in academia since the nineteenth century. In his study Orientalism and Religion, Richard King sums this history up by saying: ‘The Protestant Reformation in Europe placed a great deal of emphasis upon the importance of the written word of scripture as the key to the understanding of Christianity as well as a stress upon the individual’s relationship to God. When this was conjoined with mass production and distribution of printed texts and increased literary rates, the possibility of reading the Bible for themselves became a viable option for a substantial minority of the population. This process has, of course, continued unabated since the eighteenth century onwards and has led to the creation of a highly literate culture in the so-called developed nations. Such historical circumstances have resulted in a particularly text-oriented approach to knowledge in the modern west’ (King 1999: 62). King and other scholars have pointed out that this history resulted in quite strong biases, the effects of which continue to this day in (inter)religious studies, and which may actually limit or even distort the religious phenomena we are trying to understand. The focus on texts, or better the literary bias, as King calls it, actually clusters with other prejudices resulting in a concept of religion that privileges spirituality over materiality (e.g. particular statues, clothes, buildings, and so on), transcendence over immanence, universality over particularity, reason (or a certain conception of what is reasonable) over emotion, mind over body, and so on. The primacy of written texts as the privileged object for the study of religion often goes hand in hand with condescension for material and ritual practices revolving around the body. It is not uncommon that such practices were seen as belonging to the realm of popular religion. Religion comes to be understood as being in principle an ‘inward,’ ‘private,’ and even ‘invisible’ phenomenon.

37. For a genealogy of the literary bias of (inter)religious studies see Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 1993; King, Orientalism and Religion, 1999; Engelke, A Problem of Presence, 2007.

38. Van Herck, “Een primaire religieuze taal?” 172.

39. Bender, “Practicing Religions,” 285.

40. Sullivan, “Putting an End to the Text as Primary,” 41–59.

41. Nicole Boivin, “Grasping the Elusive and Unknowable,” 274.

42. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 33.

43. Goody, The Logic of Writing 21.

44. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, 64.

45. Bender, “Practicing Religions,” 274.

46. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, 68.

47. See note 12 above.

48. Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 16.

49. Fabian, “Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited,” 98–99.

50. Bado, “The Body-in-Practice as the Ground of Negotiation,” 122.

51. Conquergood, “Beyond the Texts,” 26.

52. Schilbrack, “Introduction,” 13.

53. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 34.

54. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 101.

55. Maraldo, “A Call for an Alternative Notion of Understanding,” 109–110.

56. Ibid.

57. Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 35.

58. Holland, How Do Stories Save Us? 132.

59. Ricoeur quoted in Kearney “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 56.

60. See also the publication Arweck and Collins (eds.), Reading Religion in Text and Context, 2006, which explicitly mentions Paul Ricoeur and his article ‘The Model of the Text,’ to explain ‘the very strong tradition supporting the principle that a culture (a religious group in this case) can be read.’ Peter Collins and Elisabeth Arweck, “Introduction,” 1–16, 4.

61. Ricoeur’s thought has had a great influence on the human sciences, even to the extent that Fredric Jameson states that ‘the objects of the study of the human sciences … constitute so many texts we decipher and interpret.’ Jameson, “The Ideology of the Text,” 205.

62. ‘The strong programs in contemporary cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 1998; Alexander and Sherwood 2002; Smith 1998; Edles 1998; Jacobs 1996; Kane 1997; Somers 1995; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1996; Sewell 1985) have followed Ricoeur’s philosophical demonstration that meaningful actions can be considered as texts, exploring codes and narratives, metaphors, metathemes, values, and rituals in such diverse institutional domains as religion, nation, class, race, family, gender, and sexuality. It has been vital to establish what makes meaning important, what makes some social facts meaningful at all.’ Alexander and Mast, “Introduction: Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice,” 2.

63. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” 151.

64. Ibid., 152–155.

65. Zimmerman, Liturgy and Hermeneutics, 17.

66. Pellauer, Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, 61.

67. Ricoeur, “The Symbolic Structure of Action,” 176.

68. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1, 57.

69. Dowling, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, 10.

70. Sometimes this desire takes on quite problematic forms. I am thinking of the practice of Christians celebrating seder meals in an effort to experience what Jesus experienced by doing what he (presumably) did during his last supper. For a critique of this practice, see Marianne Moyaert, ‘Christianizing Judaism: On the Problem of Christian Seder Meals,’ in Emmanuel Nathan & Anya Topolski, Is there a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective (De Gruyter, 2016), 137–163.

71. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 139.

72. Grimes, The Beginnings of Ritual Studies, 1–7. Let me give some examples:

What shape is the space? What size is it? How is the place oriented? What direction does it face? Do up and down, left and right, back and front have values associated with them? What hierarchies does the space facilitate? What and how many objects are associated with the ritual? What are their physical dimensions, shape, weight, and color? What is done with the object? What happens to it before and after the ritual? At what time does the ritual occur – night, dawn, dusk, midday? What other concurrent activities happen that might supplement or compete with it? On what date that the ritual occur? At what season?

73. Treanor, “Mind the Gap,” 71.

74. Jones, The Hermeneutics, 53

75. As Fabian writes, ‘vision requires distance from its objects; they eye maintains its “purity” as longs as it is not in close contact with “foreign objects”. Visualism, by instituting distance as that which enables us to know, and purity of immateriality as that which characterizes true knowledge, aimed to remove all the other senses and thereby the body from knowledge production.’ Fabian, “Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited,” 98–99.

76. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live in?

77. Vasquez, More Than Belief, 254.

78. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” 155.

79. Ricoeur, “Postface,” 249–50.

80. King, Orientalism and Religion, 69.

81. Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” 187.