Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, November 13 2024
On November 13th 2024 in the Alvaro del Portillo Lecture Hall of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the ROR promoted a day of study in honour of Professor Jean-Luc Marion (Académie française and Accademia dei Lincei), who was present at the proceedings, on the theme “Quelques Théses pour un concept de Révélation”. The speakers Andrea Bellantone (Institut Catholique de Toulose) and Robert Wozniak (Pontifical University John Paul II), where introduced and moderated by Gennaro Luise, Vice-Dean of the Faculty and member of the ROR.
Bellantone wanted to bring attention to the urgency of thinking about Revelation: our being ‘human’ depends on it. We are, in fact, based on our capacity to receive, that is, it is in the act of receiving that we receive ourselves: to receive and to receive oneself but, also, to receive “is” to receive oneself. The constitution of man is the way we receive our origin. Evil, on the other hand, is to conceal our receptivity.
If the whole of human experience is composed of multiform experiences involving time, space, the body, and relationship, phenomenology is the description of experience and has as its object ‘the how of receiving’. In this perspective the ego is not at the centre, in fact experience comes to us from ‘elsewhere’. The giving of the phenomenon, however, cannot be received except through the abandon. Receptivity is then suspended from a fundamental option. The phenomenology of the relation introduces a gap, which implies understanding that experience comes to us from being decentred and from this perspective opening up to receive it. The paradox inherent in this approach to reality lies in the idea of ‘taking the initiative of losing the initiative’, a kind of kenotic movement in which the ego loses its primacy, to lose itself in order to receive. The attempt to think from elsewhere, then, means adopting an a posteriori perspective.
This approach in Marion’s vision gives us an enlarged and by no means compromised rationality. As Bergson also pointed out, the risk of knowledge by concepts is never to go ‘beyond’, to build closed systems.
To place oneself before revelation therefore implies accepting the paradox and placing oneself before it. Revelation, as the essence of phenomenality, cannot be unambiguous; on the contrary, it places us in front of immensity against all reductionism. Clearly in this context another pivotal element to consider is resistance. Revelation and resistance proceed together, because of the disproportion that revelation always carries within itself.
Wozniak, on the other hand, wanted to draw attention to the fact that, while phenomenology can become a tool for thinking about Revelation, it must not be allowed to become a stranglehold, a method that ends up compressing the breadth of receptivity before the revealed datum. The phenomenology of experience, therefore, rather than a method must constitute itself as an ‘open’ vehicle or proposal of a generative structure that manages paradox and experience together.
But can phenomenology, aimed at understanding the mere manifestation of being, really constitute a key to understanding dogma? In other words, can one think dogma from a phenomenological perspective?
The answer is yes, if phenomenology opens itself to the perspective of ‘vision’, since dogma in itself is a ‘school of vision’. From this perspective, phenomenology can certainly be considered a method of investigation. On the other hand, dogma itself is not a pure, exquisitely theoretical concept but is in itself grounded in the actual experience of witnesses. Dogma as a school of vision is, in fact, integral participation in the experience of salvation.
For Marion, dogma and revelation constitute phenomenological figures. If dogma can be considered a ‘school of vision’, phenomenology can be a suitable tool for thinking about it, if it is considered an ‘open method’. Von Balthasar and, with him, Romano Guardini already opened up the possibility of thinking of phenomenology as a method of approaching dogma and Revelation. Benedict XVI spoke of dogma as a ‘way forward’. There remains only one need to watch over: to always be ‘beyond the phenomenon and the foundation’.
