It is a great joy and honor to be invited to this symposium, and I wish publicly to congratulate Joseph Rivera for an outstanding contribution to philosophical theology. Having closely followed Rivera’s development in the field, including his standard-bearing work on Michel Henry, it is especially exciting for me to see Rivera’s constructive proposals reach a new pitch in Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience.

It is one of the great merits of the book that Rivera’s treatment of his subject combines a generosity of spirit with incisive critique. The quality of long-form exposition blends seamlessly with sure-handed analysis, and together they culminate in an inspiring account of a “sacramental worldhood” that draws phenomenological styles of first-person inquiry into the realm of metaphysics. The latter’s more speculative mode of reflection, however lightly worn, is deemed crucial by Rivera for exploring the fuller range of our actual human experience. Chastened by phenomenological approaches, metaphysics can nevertheless help us cultivate further capacities for questioning and judgment, including the question “Why is there something at all?”—a question that induces its own kind of mood and sense of the world (203). If Henry, Marion, and Lacoste exhibit strong reservations toward traditional metaphysics, Rivera nevertheless wishes to press the seminal contributions of these figures into service of an expanded metaphysical sensibility (broadly Thomistic in this case) that has the Eucharist as its beating heart.

In my estimation, it is the development of Lacoste’s “co-affection” where Rivera’s constructive work most brightly shines. Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and with a foray into studies of “joint attention,” Rivera manages to endorse Lacoste’s strong eschatological orientation while rooting it more firmly in shared embodied practices. It is not a capitulation to a representational metaphysics to affirm the “real presence” of eucharistic gathering, and neither does such an affirmation mute the “not-yet” thrust of eschatological anticipation. There is no uncritical “empiricism” at risk here. And yet, as Rivera puts it, the mystical body’s “collective intentionality,” its “joint attention . . . cultivates a focus on the economy of the sacrament of the eucharist, offers access to the community’s mood of faithful expectation” (224). Lacoste may not grant transubstantiation a place in phenomenological theology, but Rivera insists we can—and must. Eucharistic experience “invites a tempered joy, rooted in the mood of faith, nourished by a promise, and communicated and reaffirmed by performative gestures that implicate the whole body” (226). With the Eucharist shaping the horizon of our experience, we not only live as a pilgrim people on the way to an eschatological destiny, but we are invited to “simply enjoy the liturgy as given” in contemplative abidance (229). The outstretching of desire is here grounded, without being weighed down or falsely immanentized, by a grace-filled inhabitation of eucharistic community that transposes our sense of the world.

I am quite taken by Rivera’s effort here and wish to sketch out three lines of questioning by way of eliciting a response. The first concerns the role of desire. Rivera clearly accepts an account of human desire as constitutively open to God. There is a transcendentality to desire that endows the intentionality of consciousness with an excess (i.e., Augustinian “restlessness”). Here, Rivera parts company with Henry especially by insisting on the ecstatic character of human desire. There is certainly a role for the enstatic depth dimensions of auto-affection, and Henry is unparalleled in the phenomenological tradition for illuminating these dimensions. But the desire that throws us open to the world, with all the intersubjective resonance this implies, is the same desire that exceeds every worldly horizon unto God. We must affirm both at once, the worldly and the eschatological, with the latter enfolding and transforming the former. And both (the worldly and the eschatological) bind us inextricably with others. It is not just that I desire thusly; my desire is bound up with the desire of others, and so there can be no accounting of desire’s transcendentality that regards intersubjectivity a secondary or auxiliary matter. Rivera calls this “eschatological empathy,” which I like very much, and he appeals in key places to the dynamic of “joint attention” in human relations by way of support (95, 97, 224).

In my view, the intersubjective dimensions of human desire, both worldly and eschatological, can be further illuminated by appreciating the mimetic character of human desire. No contemporary thinker has done more to explore mimetic desire than René Girard, and I know that Rivera has at least some acquaintance with this French thinker who, though not a philosopher or theologian in a strict sense, worked along the borderlands of these disciplines as a literary theorist and anthropologist. The main point in invoking Girard here is not to have Rivera assess Girard’s work as such but to have him comment on the significance that mimetic desire might play in his own efforts to elaborate a “sacramental worldhood”—one where co-affectivity plays such a significant role. If we accept the thesis that human beings desire according to the desire of others, and that we are inducted into the human life-world through the incorporation of others’ desires, then how might this understanding confirm, enhance, or perhaps even complicate one of the main aims of this book, which is to account for the “collective action and social intention” of “eucharistic knowledge born of the group’s heart” (223)? In other words, how might a robust sense of the shared provenance of human desire—one that includes extraordinary capacities for cooperation as well as the strong inclination toward rivalry and conflict—help us better understand what eucharistic practice is actually doing as a gathering, reconciling, and sending practice?

A second line of development flows from the one I’ve just sketched, but now asks Rivera to offer comment on other practices that might accompany or enrich eucharistic worldhood. And here I am thinking about the stress Rivera gives throughout his work to affectivity, or the “domain of the heart” (4). In a most interesting endnote, Rivera indicates that his own approach to phenomenological theology contrasts with the approach adopted by Kevin Hart, who takes literary form, especially metaphor and narrative, as central to its manner of proceeding (18, n. 4). Opting instead for a focus on religious experience, givenness, and embodied practice, and citing the work of Anthony Steinbock as a nearer parallel to his own, Rivera nevertheless notes that his and Hart’s approach are not mutually exclusive. I found myself struck by this characterization, mainly because I would like Rivera to say more about what he finds at stake in noting this contrast of approach. No doubt it has something to do with the interlocutors he has chosen for his project, especially Henry and Marion; but the charting of this path in phenomenological theology, no matter the selection of interlocutors, seems especially important for Rivera to advance. Why is that so important? What is potentially lost or underdeveloped when our focus is more squarely placed on metaphor and narrative? And how might the charting of this path in phenomenological theology complement (or perhaps be fruitfully challenged by) the kind of the approach adopted by Hart?

Now if I may introduce a final line of development here, I would like to make a brief appeal for non-discursive forms of prayer and ask Rivera for further comment. Given his sustained interest in “nonconceptual affection”—one that does not spurn conceptuality but situates it in its rightful place—I wonder if Rivera might say more about contemplation in the apophatic mood. Inquiry into contemplative practice of this sort would seem especially relevant to a phenomenological theology that wishes to challenge a metaphysics of representation and its presumption as the true model of experience. Here I am thinking of the way of stillness and silence: of releasing intentionality’s predominance in the field of experience to allow a more capacious, luminous, inclusive, and fruitfully “empty” awareness to emerge. Such awareness is not disembodied or impersonal but allows the felt sense of one’s whole being to be unimpeded by discursive thought. If this is a “detached” awareness, in the sense that it does not cling to this image or that feeling, it is in fact an utterly “beholding” awareness that is rendered open to the mystery of God, just as it is. The Cloud of Unknowing author (to refer to only one voice in the “affective-Dionysian” tradition) speaks of “a loving stirring and a blind attention only to the bare existence of God himself,” such that all attempts to know God through representation are released in sheer receptivity.1 Again, this prayer tradition is by no means quietist, and neither will we find in its authentic forms any advocacy of dualism or mystical acosmism. (The Cloud author in fact works with a coherent metaphysics of creation, as his Book of Privy Counseling makes especially clear.) But what we do see is a movement from more “active” forms of prayer that depend upon the cultivation of images and concepts to “contemplative” forms that dispose the whole human person to God’s ineffable mystery in naked trust. This movement is not just in one direction but an oscillation and growing fluidity between them, as The Cloud author also makes clear.

There has been a great deal of “buzz” around apophasis in philosophical and theological quarters over the past several decades, but it seems to me that the greater share of this discussion leaves the actual practice of silence underdeveloped. (This is even more characteristic of the cottage industry around “mysticism” and “mystical theology,” which often seems bent upon substituting talk about unusual experiences, personalities, or the “im-possibility” of experience for the life of contemplative sobriety.) And so, while Rivera has rightly focused his work on eucharistic practice, and the communally embodied shape it assumes, I invite him to consider the ways contemplative practice of the non-discursive variety, which takes on a communal and embodied shape when properly integrated in Christian life, can assist in the way of life his philosophical theology charts. No doubt his earlier work on Henry is quite relevant here, but the specific prompt I’ve formulated here might present a new opportunity now that he has reached a further threshold in his ongoing constructive work.

I have not had an opportunity to meet Joseph Rivera, nor am I familiar with his work. So I was very interested to review his latest book, Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience, which, I was surprised to find, echoes concerns very close to mine. In this book of essays, Rivera establishes a background of key phenomenological concepts to support his examination of aspects of the work of Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Yves Lacoste. One of the strengths of this book is the pedagogical character of its expositions of key concepts like mood, affection, and above all horizon, which is highlighted with painstaking care and set in the context of its many concrete implications. Rivera’s discussions extend, notably (and admirably), to the analytic tradition, which he incorporates fairly into his discussion while making a case for the phenomenological alternative. The constructive aspect of Rivera’s argument rests on his evaluation that Henry, Marion, and Lacoste play a “zero-sum game,” rejecting seeking escape from the horizon of the world and our concrete human experience (8). And yet, after his analyses of the philosophers from many different angles, Rivera spent comparatively little time defending his reasons for rejecting them. I found myself quite clear about Rivera’s opinion, but a little in the dark about precisely why we should be compelled to agree. The result is that this book leaves me with a number of places where I would be glad to enter discussion with its author, especially to hear a more fleshed-out account of Rivera’s own alternatives.

But with this opportunity to pose a question to the author, it seems more interesting to set aside debates of interpretations by close readings of select passages and instead directly raise the big-picture question I had while reading this text: what is the central problem Rivera really means to address with this project? The major theme the book returns to again and again is the “metaphysics of representation,” and the conceptualist, intellectualist, solipsist master ego of modern philosophy that underpins it. The conclusion affirms the large part of this text is concerned to show how “a conceptual system in which representational consciousness plays the chief role does not do justice to the world-horizon’s unity with our subjectivity” (237). It is fitting, then, that Rivera wants us to embrace the continuity of the horizon of experience, and that he do so by emphasizing the self as affective, embodied and immersed in a world and a community.

But if all this is the case, why not keep the discussion in the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger where he begins, perhaps adding a little Gadamer or Merleau-Ponty? Henry, Marion, and Lacoste have certainly contributed to tearing down the “arid and lifeless metaphysics of representation” (8), but this is not how Rivera directs his engagement with them. As the subtitle proclaims, he is interested in their “spiritual themes.” Why? I can’t help but think that there are easier ways to reject representationalism in community, embodiment, or feeling than “eucharistic phenomenology.” Go to a Taylor Swift concert, for example—you’ll find an embodied celebration of affections and feelings, and an intense, devout (even fanatical) community to belong to. Or follow your local sports team. If you prefer less populist refinements, go to a museum; Henry, Marion, and Lacoste continually return to the importance of paintings. But paintings are almost entirely absent from this book. Instead, Rivera wants to speak about “sacramental phenomenology.” It is not obvious to me that this solution responds most directly to the primary problem. By extension, the problem which spiritual practice does aim to provide a solution for seems to be only a minor area of concern in this book. To put it more directly: is the problem representationalism? Or separation from God? Is liturgical or sacramental practice a solution because it saves us from our intellectualism, or saves us from our sins? (But “sin” or “evil,” is mostly lacking from this book; at most we get a frictionless “ethics.”)

This uneasy juxtaposition appears explicitly on the very first page, where Rivera states that spiritual practices challenge “(i) the metaphysics of representation, (ii) the overly intellectual and disembodied formation of or lack of community yielded by modernity, and (iii) the deficit of concrete and worldly purchase noticeable in some theological responses to these problematics, such as I locate in part in Henry, Marion, and Lacoste” (ix). All of these things are important and valuable goals. But laying them right next to each other like that only highlights for me that these are two separate things. What joins the specific problems of representation (i–ii) to theological responses (iii—noting here that the “theological” and “spiritual” are doing similar work in this book)? What do we gain from the overlying of these issues? I fully agree with Rivera that representationalism is a major problem. I fully agree that that to work against it demands a return to embodiment, feeling, affection, practice, community. I also agree that spiritual practices can help with this, particularly practices like the eucharist (a particular focus of his) or the icon (a special focus of mine). I am very sympathetic to nearly all of his problems; they are questions I struggle with, too, in my own work. But is it sufficient to look at spiritual practices at the level of embodiment, affection, practice, and community?

Perhaps a better match of problem and solution can be found on p. 8, where Rivera suggests that by arguing for the continuity of one, single horizon, a “sacramental phenomenology” will serve as the solution to an “empirical world opposed to a spiritual world.” It’s funny Rivera should pair these two; this reflects almost exactly a duality that is often heard by Orthodox thinkers talking about icons. Leonid Ouspensky, for example, discusses the icon as an image that portrays a “spiritual world” through its special symbolic language, while Western representational painting portrays a merely “carnal,” “sensuous” world reduced to a flattened empirical experience.1 This view illustrates precisely the kind of two-worlds model that Rivera wants to reject. An image is an image, he might respond; we encounter any image in the same horizon of experience whether it portrays Christ or Louis XVI. For, as he explains in my favorite lines of the book, “the terminology of boundary is inappropriate” for the horizon of experience, which is necessarily constituted as an infinite, indefinite flow (30). If I understand Rivera properly, the mistake made by Ouspensky is exactly what he wants to correct in the French thinkers he nevertheless draws from. I’m not sure that this is quite a fair characterization of what they are doing.

Since Rivera has acknowledged that the eucharistic inspiration for his “sacramental phenomenology” is by no means an exclusion of other spiritual practices, I don’t think he would object if I frame my problem with the sacred image (without limiting ourselves to icons in the strict “Orthodox” sense). Fine art is a perfect test case for my central question, in fact, since it moves us beyond the representationalist paradigm, plunging us into the world of embodiment, affect, community, and so on. And indeed, often times, aesthetic and liturgical experience may coexist, before the frescoes of Hagia Sophia or attending a Bach Mass. But not always, and it is important we understand this difference. What in Rivera’s account would set apart the restorative experience of fine art from a sacred or spiritual art, an “aesthetic” from a “liturgical” experience, if you will? An initial answer might be content. This would work to distinguish my earlier parallel between Taylor Swift and Divine Liturgy, but with images, it is a bit trickier. Certainly, King Louis XVI is a political figure; Christ is not. But paintings of Christ are found in church and in the Louvre. Is it a place then? There are too many in-betweens for this to be a real answer: one’s home, for example, might contain both art and sacred images. Is it community, perhaps? But there are many believers at the Louvre, and tourists in many churches. Is it our shared action or practice? I think this is finally starting to get at an answer. But what is this action, exactly? We can kneel to propose, we sing around campfires, we light candles on birthday cakes, we kiss pictures of loved ones, so these acts themselves are not enough to distinguish anything.

The answer I’ve found, at least, locates this difference in the act of prayer: if we pray or perform actions before sacred images, it is because we intend them as a communication to a God who we believe is really listening. When reading Rivera’s book, I found many passages about embodiment, affection, community, practices, in short, about what it feels like to be in the world. But, despite the many examples of sacramental phenomenology (I still don’t understand what this term concretely means), I did not find a clearly developed account of prayer as such, the direct act of placing ourselves before God. This matters, because the worth of an aesthetic encounter with the image is measured by the quality of my experience. In a liturgical encounter of the image, however, the quality of my experience may be good, and may be bad, but this is simply not the point. If prayer means to place oneself “coram Deo” (Lacoste) or before the countergaze of God (Marion), it matters more that I am genuinely presenting myself to God and that God receive me than how I feel about this experience praying, or even what specific modes of practice and community and mood and affection will help me to enact it. (Note that I did not say they don’t matter; I trust Rivera will agree with me that we must avoid becoming reactionaries in our shared desire to reject reactionaries). How would Rivera explain this difference?

Let’s return again to his preferred inspiration of the Eucharist, and consider a 1963 letter in which J. R. R. Tolkien proposes to his son a spiritual exercise:

“Make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffing or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children—from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn . . . Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people.”2

Admittedly, Tolkien could be a bit of a grumpy old man, but history has proven the excellence of his aesthetic sensibilities. Despite this, Tolkien knew the difference between an aesthetic event and a prayer, to the point of even seeking out a practice what we might call a “liturgical reduction.” Does Tolkien want to take us “outside” experience? In a way yes, and in a way no. No, since Tolkien is obviously having an embodied affective experience, one he has vividly described: he is irritated by the priest’s self-importance and judgmental of the congregation’s irreverence. Far from a liturgical community united in shared joy and empathetic affection, these people seem to care very little about prayer or about God or about the others around them, something Tolkien finds repugnant. And yet, what he feels or sees is not the point and does not negate the value of his prayer. To the contrary: his spiritual exercise of placing himself here, to pray in circumstances he knows he will dislike and in a mood of perfect grumpiness, is precisely an act of faith that to place himself before God matters more than what currently is taking place in the horizon of his experience.

This, to my reading, is some of what Lacoste is getting at in Experience and the Absolute in his account of the ascetics who learn to place themselves before God even at the margins of human existence. Lacoste does not want us to reject worldly experience when we come before God, he simply wants to reject any anthropological, subjective measure of this experience. Thus his admitted inspiration from John of the Cross, who understood that God can work in the bloom of joyful devotion, the depths of despair, and the dryness of simple boredom. While Rivera reads Lacoste’s liturgical bracketing as a Gnostic negation that seeks to escape human experience (cf. 185), I think Lacoste is doing something else: our experience isn’t escaped when we pray, it’s just that when we pray, it’s not the point. After all, it is not just Hegel that is targeted in this text, but Schleiermacher. And Schleiermacher, like Rivera, was a strong opponent to any kind of over-intellectualizing or conceptualism of faith, and like Rivera, put a strong emphasis on the importance of affections and feelings in prayer. Does Rivera’s emphasis on continuity have enough to guard against this counter-extreme, a temptation which seems just as powerful for us in a religious culture tending to “moralistic therapeutic deism”? Would he support Tolkien’s spiritual exercise as a “dilation” of the horizon (another fantastic image Rivera uses here), or critique it as a Gnostic rejection of the joyful fullness of experience? What, specifically, would help us to discern between these two possibilities?

Perhaps Rivera has already subtly hinted at a response in one of the many different facets of this text, but a direct answer to this question would make it clearer to me what sets apart a “spiritual theme” from the many other ways of combatting a metaphysics of representation, and what problem, specifically, a spiritual investigation is attempting to combat.

We never leave our heroes. Even as we strive to formulate our own thoughts, construct arguments, and take positions, they always stand behind us. Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Yves Lacoste are the heroes of Joseph Rivera’s Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience. They serve as guides on the path of philosophical-theological inquiry into the world—the horizon of our existence. Yet, they are not to be blindly followed. Instead, they provoke us to adopt a critical-constructive approach to thinking.

An academically institutionalized individual, acquainted with the joys and sorrows associated with the contemporary university, might immediately raise the question (followed by a verbose debate) of whether the book in her hands represents work in philosophy or theology. I commend Rivera’s decision to reject this flawed question (following Lacoste, who sees little sense in the theological-philosophical divide). I refrain from adding to these formal, never-ending debates. Instead, I choose to adhere to the heroes and their ideas upon which we construct our own intellectual endeavors.

My hero is Jan Patočka, a name never mentioned in Rivera’s book. It’s no surprise! Patočka, known for his assertion that “the philosopher never helps the theologian,” is not typically associated with discussions of “sacramental phenomenology.” Yet, as I engaged with Rivera’s Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience, my thoughts frequently turned to the Czech phenomenologist—one of the last protégés of Husserl, a student of Heidegger, who tragically passed away in 1977, long before debates about the theological turn or the “wide open” phenomenology set the agenda.

In 1936, Patočka published his work “The World as a Philosophical Problem.” Remaining faithful to his mentor, who highlighted the loss of the Lebenswelt in The Crisis of European Sciences, Patočka remained committed to questioning and probing the world as the horizon of our existence, up until his mature works of the 1960s and 1970s. His aim, as correctly noted by Paul Ricoeur, was to propose an original solution to the question of meaning, given and revealed “for us” in the world, while avoiding the pitfalls of both metaphysical objectivism and relativistic subjectivism. The scholarly literature on Patočka dubbed this project “a-subjective phenomenology.” Although I believe this offers a promising avenue for dialogue with one of Rivera’s major arguments regarding being affected by the horizon interpreted as the condition sine qua non of being human, I defer this discussion to a later study (with footnotes, block quotes, and all academic apparatus . . .).

Returning to the theme of the world as the horizon of our experience, Eugen Fink once suggested that despite its breathtaking development in modernity, science has never truly grasped the world. The focus on beings (Seiendes) within science prevents the scientific explorer from perceiving the whole; the preoccupation with the objective causes the loss of the horizon of our experience, as Rivera aptly phrases it. The same charge, I would suggest, can be brought against theology.

Theology typically explores divine revelation as something objective, that is, as something positively given and received (thus talking in the register of the metaphysics of representation). Theology is therefore tempted to overlook the phenomenality of that which is deemed to be divine revelation. In other words, theology neglects the horizon where God’s manifestation to human beings and human openness to transcendence take place. Worse still, theology sees the world as an external rather than internal problem so fails to see it as a challenge to its own thinking. Rivera not only acknowledges this problem but places it at the center of his project. Somewhat paradoxically, we discover this acknowledgment in an endnote toward the end of the book, where the author openly states, “. . . I do want to find a voice in which theology can speak on its own terms that is both intelligible and meaningful to those outside of seminary and the church” (209n3). Allow me to translate these words into the form of questions: How can theology practice faithfulness to being in the world? And conversely, how can theology redirect its attention to the world as a theological problem?

Elsewhere, at that time regrettably unaware of Rivera’s profound work, I argued that theology lacks the concept of the world and that a phenomenology attuned to religious themes and questions might offer a helpful perspective in recognizing, analyzing, and addressing this deficiency. If I interpret Rivera’s book correctly, I believe we share this perspective. The detailed analysis of sacramental phenomenology (as represented by Henry, Marion, and Lacoste) is not merely intended to add pages to the study of “spiritual themes” in these significant French authors. Rather, it lays the groundwork for further developing arguments that concern both theology and phenomenology in their respective intersections and overlays. I consider it a significant contribution of Rivera’s that the debate has been liberated from the endless circling of questions such as: Has the theological turn occurred? Should it have occurred? What, indeed, has happened? His decision to focus on what truly matters is a great merit of the work (and we can only hope it will inform the further debate in the field).

The world as the horizon of our experience is presented as the central question. If we take Rivera’s intention to “find a voice in which theology can speak” beyond its immediate confines seriously, we must inevitably arrive at the conclusion that our primary concern today, irrespective of whether we identify ourselves as philosophers or theologians, is not so much the rationality of our arguments (to match the challenge of modern science), but rather the credibility of our thought. And of course, the question of credibility does not diminish rigorous thinking. This is precisely where phenomenology becomes an instructive tool. In a sense, Rivera echoes the gesture already made by Jan Patočka, albeit unnoticed, in his essay “Christianity and the Natural World” from the 1970s. The phenomenological critique of the loss of our experiential world and the critique of the metaphysics of experience (for which Henry, Marion, and Lacoste provide robust intellectual equipment) reveal the theological dimension of the world, which is understood as a philosophical problem.

When we focus solely on the world observed, created, and represented in the laboratory; when we depict the world as the sum of natural laws and the totality of beings, we not only deprive ourselves of subjective experience but also of a certain capability of being human. Patočka speaks of the loss of vertical thinking (which I am tempted to translate with the word “transcendence”). Henry, Marion, and Lacoste endeavor to reintroduce affective thinking of excess and re-establish the experience of the absolute into our being-in-the-world marked by finitude. What I admire about Rivera’s books is that he corrects his predecessors and openly acknowledges, right from the beginning, that one extreme—reducing the world to the field of empirical observation—does not inevitably result in rendering the subject entirely passive in reception. Rivera’s sacramental phenomenology, in his own words, “remains faithful to the sacramental character of the world” (8).

Alors . . . the philosophical problem becomes a theological problem; or, to phrase it differently, the two appear to be two sides of the same coin. This, if I interpret the book correctly, is one of the main author’s points. As a theologian, I am eager to delve further into this for a simple reason: accepting the world as a theological problem has far-reaching consequences for the discipline of theology (which has not yet fully developed the concept of the world) and for Christian existence in the world.

“The only experience of God we have is our human experience,” says Emmanuel Falque (another name which represents a promising dialogue partner to Rivera). We possess and inhabit bodies. We live suspended between birth and death, experiencing finitude. Theology, cognizant of this peculiar human condition, must transcend being merely a cheap consolation offering a metaphysical resolution to life’s struggles.

If Rivera is correct, and I believe he is, and all theology takes place on the horizon of human experience (i.e., the world), we must reconsider the very task of theological thinking. Perhaps, theology is not primarily about the knowledge of God but rather about openness to the possibility of God’s presence in the world and individual existence experiencing this subjective experience coram et cum Deo.

I wonder if following Rivera would lead to a fundamental reevaluation of certain concepts we habitually discuss in theological departments as if they were self-evident. For instance, let us consider the Eucharist, which plays a major role in Rivera’s book. We are accustomed to viewing the Eucharist as the real thing, the object of representation. However, after pondering sacramental phenomenology, it appears to me that we should regard the Eucharist as the mystical body, while the real body represents the church—the space and the sole place where the Eucharist occurs. It is this visible, concrete, endowed, worldly community that serves as the precondition for the mystery.

And we need not stop there. Theologically, this transforms not only our ecclesiology, sacraments, and ecumenism, but also our overall conception of faith. Philosophically, we can perceive Christian existence not merely in terms of religion (as another religion competing with others) but as a distinctive mode of being-in-the-world; an existential way of inhabiting the world.

My question is whether this path of theological thinking is accurate. Am I justified in utilizing Rivera’s project in this manner, or do I distort the author’s intention? How can we make our theological voice (not so much great again but) heard again; how can we regain credibility? In Rivera’s book, I find a prolegomena to a grammar for discussing “theological things” while remaining faithful to this world; I wonder how the author reflects on the possibility of the next step (if there is one . . .).

For nearly a century, continental philosophers in Germany, France, North America, and elsewhere have debated how phenomenology can or should be related to theology. Is contemplating a limitless horizon that opens onto the mystery of God valid or invalid, helpful or unhelpful for phenomenological research? Is the interpretation of religious practices, texts, beliefs, and experiences part of phenomenology’s purview—and, if so, what are the rules governing such an interpretation? In this debate, Joseph Rivera sides with those who see a deep synergy between phenomenology and theology. Building on his 2015 study, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry,1 his new book, Phenomenology and the Horizon of Experience, continues to develop and defend this position. In both works, he explores phenomenology’s relationship with a type of theology that is shaped by Christian spiritual and sacramental practices, but in this new work he broadens his discussion by treating Michel Henry together with Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste and by pursuing new lines of inquiry with respect to each thinker.

Rivera and I are on the same side of this debate. Neither of us is persuaded by Dominique Janicaud’s contention that the “theological turn” in (French) phenomenology—which starts with Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas and is further developed by Henry, Marion, and Jean-Louis Chrétien, to name a few—is something illegitimate.2 Both of us seek to retrieve positive insights from such theologically attuned phenomenologists. My prioritization of Chrétien’s responsorial phenomenology in Ch. 3 of Thinking Prayer and my critical discussion of Henry’s reception of Meister Eckhart in Ch. 3 of The Mysticism of Ordinary Life may suggest some slight differences in perspective between Rivera and myself, but broadly speaking I think we are on the same page.3 Given this common ground, there is much that we could discuss.

Here I want to focus on a few places where Rivera objects to aspects of Lacoste’s work that I am inclined to defend. Although his critiques of Lacoste vary, they largely revolve around a suspicion of his asceticism. The worry seems to be that, by advocating a liturgical anticipation of the eschaton and a symbolic subversion of being-in-the-world, Lacoste does not sufficiently appreciate the theological and ethical significance of embodied, communal presence. He seems to value detachment, withdrawal, and passivity at the expense of experience, connection, and action. At least, that is the impression that Rivera leaves.

For example, Rivera contends that “Lacoste’s eschatological interpretation of embodied religious experience does not allow for ecstasy or subjective euphoria, either individually or collectively. So radical is Lacoste’s focus on eschatology that he will assert the ‘not-yet’ of the future abolishes all sacramental economies of presence” (224). With these strong words, Rivera suggests that Lacoste’s orientation toward the eschaton and critical distance from the here-and-now leads him to discount the valuable experiences of divine presence that are given in prayer and sacramental life.

Rivera’s argument against Lacoste takes on a more ethical tenor in other places. He asserts, “The church for Lacoste (and this is important) is not a political or social body visible within the world nor the place of ethics and justice but rather a place of contemplative security, the home of passive grace, not work” (225). On this account, Lacoste would seem to encourage a detached mode of ecclesial existence that is concerned only with a vertical divine relationship and not with any moral obligations or actions toward others. Lacoste’s church would be a nonethical and inactive space of “withdrawal” (228) from the urgent demands of history and society. Along with an absence of justice, Rivera perceives an inattention to love. He writes, “Love understood as an act of agency carried out in the world fundamentally challenges Lacoste’s conception of peace and repose. . . . The more passive or inoperative one is, the more one retreats from love as such—this is the logical implication of Lacoste’s emphatic celebration of passivity” (184).

In addition to questions about Lacoste’s apparent allergy to religious experience and ethical objections to his supposed idealization of passivity, Rivera also expresses doubts about the coherence of Lacoste’s thinking, insofar as he seems to deny agency and presuppose it at the same time. Rivera argues that “a contradiction is plainly in view here on Lacoste’s part . . . That is, the deliberate choice to adopt the ascetic disposition necessarily assumes agency on the part of the subject—even while the nocturnal play of the ascetic’s vigil undermines agency” (183). While Rivera has many positive things to say about Lacoste’s work as well, his critiques—if fair—would be devastating.

I maintain that Lacoste deserves another hearing. First, there is the fact that he does not merely speak on his own but gives voice to a lengthy tradition encompassing early Christian monks such as St. Benedict, medieval apostolic witnesses such as St. Francis of Assisi, and early modern contemplatives such as St. John of the Cross. Lacoste’s proposed kenotic anthropology has a venerable history. In his major works, such as Experience and the Absolute, which I cite below, he draws on this Christian spiritual tradition to contest certain salient features of modern philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology. At stake, then, is not just what to think about Lacoste as an individual theorist with a particular proposal but how the larger contest between rival traditions vying for intellectual hegemony in Christian culture, which his work represents, is to be sorted out. Rivera acknowledges Lacoste’s sources and his disputes with modern thinkers. I mention them here only to indicate some of the reasons why I am inclined toward a more sympathetic interpretation of Lacoste.

Such an interpretation enables one to see that his goal is not to deny Christian individuals or communities the ability to name their experiences of divine presence in the context of prayer or sacraments. Rather, by qualifying this presence as pre-eschatological or non-parousiacal, he aims to question the adequacy of certain accounts of a religious a priori that, in his view, wrongly imply that the definitive meaning of existence is given within the initial conditions of human experience. Two such accounts are provided by Heidegger, who not only thinks of the initial conditions of human experience in terms of the “world” of care, anxiety, and being-toward-death but also, thanks to the influence of Friedrich Hölderlin, in terms of the “earth” that manifests itself through the pagan sacredness of Being and the poetic speaking of mythological gods. Another such account is provided by G. W. F. Hegel, who argues for a realized eschatology in the absolute knowledge of the sage. Friedrich Nietzsche’s voluntarism is likewise in Lacoste’s sights. These modern deifications of the abstract conditions of subjectivity are what Lacoste seeks to dislodge by advancing similarly philosophical articulations of Christian modes of liturgical relation to God.

Lacoste does not deny but in fact directly affirms God’s presence in history, specifically a presence given through Christ’s incarnation and sacraments and available in some heightened instances through “certain forms of mystical experience.”4 He thinks that this presence provides a personal knowledge of God that can cultivate “real joy.”5 He simply insists that this presence must be distinguished from Parousia—that is, from the definitive revelation of the meaning of existence. Contra Heidegger, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Lacoste submits that the definitive is not something we can grasp within the initial conditions of human experience that are disclosed to us phenomenologically. He argues that such conditions blend goodness with evil, joy with suffering, the positive with the negative in a “chiaroscuro” that forestalls an unambiguous vision of God. He grants that such conditions are inescapable prior to death, that they shape our experiences of space and time, and that they constitute our facticity, but he believes that the question of our empirical being and the question of the definitive meaning of our lives are different.

The chiaroscuro of the initial conditions of human experience explains, as well, Lacoste’s critical response to Levinas, which in turn reveals something about how Lacoste might respond to Rivera’s ethical concerns. Lacoste is not convinced that the face of the other, which Levinas argues is given in our primordial sociality, communicates the moral demands of God with the clarity that Levinas assumes it does. Lacoste suggests such clarity requires an evaluative interpretation of our ambiguous worldly situation. He contends that liturgy, the posture whereby one symbolically subverts the world in anticipation of the kingdom of God, provides a clarifying vantage point on our moral responsibilities and failings and establishes a firmer ground for ethics than any phenomenology could offer—even one focused on the face. He concedes that the act of prayer seems to take us away from urgent ethical tasks, but he says it does so for an ethical purpose: “We have better things to ‘do’ than to pray, and when we pray, we actually ‘do’ nothing. But the world from which liturgy diverts us is not a world over which goodwill reigns, and, at bottom, it is this world from which we must take leave, in a meantime, so as to discover our responsibilities in the world.”6 In passages such as these, Lacoste clarifies that the momentary liturgical suspension or reduction of the world is not an abandonment of it but a symbolic departure that implies—and prepares for—a more ethically engaged return.

Lacoste’s discourse of passivity functions similarly to Levinas’s. It does not suggest any inability or unwillingness to act but rather a grounding of the ethical agent in a divine excess that gives it meaning and direction. By surrendering to God, we do not lose our capacity for courageous acts of love but gain it. Lacoste explains, “Action is subordinate to passivity—or, more exactly, to its possibility.”7 What I take Lacoste to mean here is that passivity, specifically a certain radical availability to God, is not the opposite of moral activity but its very foundation. Transcendental passivity enables empirical action. Resisting Heidegger’s account of being as an event of appropriation (Ereignis), along with the acquisitiveness that characterizes global consumerism, Lacoste highlights the Christian life of voluntary poverty. He concludes, “In rejecting the solicitations made to him by a reality given over to appropriation, [man] gains freedom.”8

Read in these ways, Lacoste’s thought is not dismissive of particular religious experiences, and it is neither immoral nor incoherent. It is not a caricature of world-hating asceticism but rather a much-needed critical perspective on our morally flawed world and certain philosophers who want us to believe that, in its basic conditions, it constitutes something ultimate. The peace Lacoste desires is not a state of apathy vis-à-vis vulnerable human lives but a hope for a divine kingdom in which they will be welcomed. His asceticism keeps religious experience from becoming idolatrous, while clarifying in ethically significant ways that we are not yet in possession of a factual utopia. His retrieval of Christian ascetical traditions helps him demonstrate that phenomenology cannot provide what theology does, namely a prayerful relation to that divine horizon (or lack of horizon) which exceeds phenomenological competence. At the same time, his knowledge of phenomenology helps him discover new layers of meaning in such traditions, which of course do not escape the emplacement and temporalization of existence.

This, then, is my defense of Lacoste’s asceticism. I believe it resonates with many of Rivera’s overarching aims in his phenomenological-theological work, and I hope it will stimulate some fruitful conversation.