A Phenomenology of Revelation: Contemporary Encounters with Saint Ignatius Loyola The enduring legacy of Saint Ignatius Loyola is that he experienced the passing of God in his everyday life, and showed the way for others to discern this passage and live accordingly. This extraordinary understanding of the possibility of a truly personal relationship with God is a beacon of hope for the ordinary person who, not drawn to a contemplative commitment, still longs to be caught up in the love that is promised as the meaning and dynamism of Christian existence. Moreover, it affirms unequivocally the value of the secular, not as that to be defined negatively against what is apparently sacred, but as the locus of God’s care and concern, and the sphere of God’s activity. In 1956, Karl Rahner argued that the Spiritual Exercises were deserving of greater theological consideration, and it is my view that this is still the case, not least in terms of their theological recontextualisation for today.1 This is particularly so with regard to the question of revelation, or more precisely, with regard to the more general problem of the gap between religious experience as it is construed within the framework of spiritual reflection, and revelation as it is articulated theologically. This question assumes a particular urgency from the contemporary contexts in which we find ourselves. In an academic context, to speak of revelation is frequently to exclude oneself immediately from the possibility of serious philosophical or other conversation. And in many Western cultural contexts, the idea of belief in God on the basis of revelation is greeted with incredulity. To put the issue plainly: what is needed is a way of thinking about revelation which permits some kind of credible dialogue about it to take place within contemporary thought and culture. My argument here is that recent developments within French phenomenology allow for this kind of dialogue, and that Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises are a useful lens through which this can both be illustrated and explored further in the experience of everyday life.2 1 Karl Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church (London: Burns and Oates, 1964), 84-6. 2 Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph, ed. and trans. Louis J. Puhl (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968). Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 1 23/2/17 Revelation and Religious Experience There are good reasons to reinforce the distinction between religious experience and revelation; after all, as Jean-Yves Lacoste observes: “experience … is not self-evidently a theological datum,” and we are wise to be cautious in our readings of religious experience.3 Moreover, when in the Christian Church we understand all revelation to have its apex in the incarnation of God’s Word in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word who speaks everything of God, so that we understand everything before or since to be the unfolding of what has already been spoken, we commit ourselves to the echoing or recognition of that Word in our experience rather than to the possibility of a novel experience of revelation as such.4 Nevertheless, if we are to take Dei verbum seriously, and to believe that revelation is always God’s self-revelation, then we must understand revelation in relational terms, and relationships depend on personal experience. We might consider much of the contemporary emphasis on personal experience to be misplaced, but we will have missed something essential to Christian faith if we do not appreciate that unless God speaks to us in the depths of experience, we will not have tasted God’s love, and if we do not taste this love, there will be no reason at all to pursue it. It is not enough that that I hear God’s Word spoken in general terms; I must hear it addressed to me directly, and that requires not only the repetition of the kerygma but also and especially that Word speaking in the specific circumstances and shape of my own life—God speaking to me. One of the key difficulties we encounter when we try to speak about revelation is to think through its actual character. While Christians believe that God wants to communicate with humanity and has so communicated, particularly in the history of the Jewish and Christian traditions, the disjunction between the divine and the human poses particular difficulties for the whole notion of something like revelation. It is easy to repeat the biblical injunction that 3 Jean-Yves Lacoste, La Phénoménalité De Dieu: Neuf Etudes (Paris: Cerf, 2008). Study III. I am indebted to Oliver O’Donnell for the use of his draft translation of this text. Nevertheless, Dermot Lane noted some years ago: “a religious experience … may be described as a revelatory experience of God.” Dermot Lane, The Experience of God: An Invitation to do Theology (New York: Paulist, 1981) 41. 4 “Revelation is a mode of religious experience, while our experiences of the holy as judging, assisting, addressing, and the like, all have a revelatory element. One cannot therefore draw a hard and fast line between experience and revelation, but in practice it is desirable to keep theses two formative factors distinct in our theological thinking. We do not normally dignify our day-to-day experiences of the holy by the name of ‘revelation,’ and no theology properly so called could be founded on private revelations, for, as has been stressed already, theology expresses the faith of a community.” John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1977; repr., 2003), 8. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 2 23/2/17 “for God, all things are possible,” even if they are not possible for human beings (Mark 10:27 NRSVCE), yet this can mean that we do not take sufficiently seriously our human context and the fact that God does not appear as such within it.5 Avery Dulles’ now classic systematisation of revelatory models and his exploration of revelation as “symbolic mediation” have been very important.6 Nevertheless, his expressed anxieties about the possibility of an “ecstatic encounter with God that has no explicitly doctrinal content” actually go to the heart of the issue. 7 It is difficult to link revelation and experience: theologically, because it is often considered that there is ultimately too much at stake in doctrine for revelation to be considered as a genuinely personal encounter, and philosophically, because we simply cannot think God according to the manner of beings or even of being itself. It is for this reason that the work of our eminent co-presenter, Jean-Luc Marion, is so important: by seeking to give a phenomenological account of revelation, he highlights—both theologically and philosophically—the nature of experience, and opens a way forward for thinking revelation that is neither solipsistic nor excluded in principle from academic discourse. Some insights from recent French philosophy Marion argues that philosophy relies on the principle of sufficient reason to determine in advance what kinds of phenomena are possible to consider. 8 This approach excludes revelatory phenomena. In contrast, by means of thinking based on a phenomenological reduction to givenness—that is, working on the principle that there is no principle that should exclude whatever gives itself to consciousness—Marion maintains that revelatory 5 “How can an experience of absolute transcendence be constituted by human consciousness without violating the very principle of givenness that makes the field of transcendental experience and its universal structures possible in the first place?” Michael F. Andrews, "How (Not) to Find God in All Things: Derrida, Levinas and St Ignatius of Loyola on Learning How to Pray for the Impossible," in The Phenomenology of Prayer, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 195. 6 Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992). 7 “[S]ome prominent theologians, whose numbers are apparently growing, identify revelation as an ecstatic encounter with God that has no doctrinal content.” Avery Dulles, Catholic Doctrine: Between Revelation and Theology, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1999), 83. See also Lieven Boeve, "Revelation, Scripture and Tradition: Lessons from Vatican Ii’s Constitution Dei Verbum for Contemporary Theology," International Journal of Systematic Theology 13, no. 4 (2011): 431, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00598.x.“Time and again, it would appear that the dialogical principle at the heart of the concept of revelation develop d at Vatican II is truncated and conceived as unilateral and asymmetrical. The potentially renewing – or interrupting – impact of such dialogue is thus restrained because of the possible risk of a too far-reaching adaptation or renewal and a loss of continuity.” 8 Jean-Luc Marion, "The Possible and Revelation," in The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Dulles, "Catholic Doctrine: Between Revelation and Theology." Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 3 23/2/17 phenomena can be given in their possibility. Their actuality as revelatory is a matter, however, for theology to discern. Marion relies for this argument on his development of the concept of the saturated phenomenon, where what is given to consciousness in intuition is so excessive that any attempt to meet it with a corresponding intention can only fail, or at best, signify very incompletely. In his more recent work, he will speak of this as a “negative certainty.”9 Revelation is a special type of saturated phenomenon, because it incorporates each of four other types he has identified: the event, which saturates by its quality (being unforeseeable and unrepeatable); the idol, which saturates by its quantity (its excessive visibility); flesh, which saturates by relation (it is absolute); and the icon, which saturates by modality (it is resistant to all constitution).10 As Marion writes: “what is experienced in revelation can be ♣ summed up as the powerlessness to experience whatever it might be that one experiences….”11 Let us try to give an example of such a phenomenon from a biblical text: the story of the Woman with the Haemorrhage, which I take from Luke’s Gospel (Luke 8:43-48). Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her haemorrhage stopped. Then Jesus asked, “Who touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.” When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”12 When we contemplate this scene, what is given to us? First, we see a woman, but we see her only as she tries to remain hidden. Nameless throughout the narrative, the woman’s illness makes her repellent. Even if we cannot yet see the inevitable stain of her disease on her clothes, we are given its characteristic smell, 9 Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), §21, pp.199-212. ( Section taken verbatim “Religion and Violence: New Phenomenological Perspectives” IJPS submission.) 11 Marion, "The Possible and Revelation," in The Visible and the Revealed, 9. 12 The version at Mark 5:24-34 has only slightly less detail. While it would be preferable to take the pericope as a whole (that is, to include the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter), this is not possible in the paper. 10 ♣ Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 4 23/2/17 and the stigma of her uncleanliness hangs like a pall around her. While she apparently believes that Jesus can heal her, she evidently feels she can only approach him anonymously. Jostling in the crowd, her stench undoubtedly competes with all the surrounding smells of an ancient town, and she stands a chance of momentarily disguising her approach. Her healing reportedly takes place as soon as she touches the fringe of Jesus’ clothes. The Jesus we are given in this narrative is characterised by strangeness. The description of his feeling power having gone out from him is just plain odd to the modern ear, and appears even stranger as his evident powerfulness contrasts with his apparent lack of awareness of who has touched him. If we have been educated to any degree about Jesus’ context in ancient Palestine, we might see him in terms of a culture where wonder-workers are relatively commonplace. His complete otherness to the contemporary mind makes him resistant to the gaze. Jesus’ question, however, brings him sharply into personal focus. Who touched me? Not only the woman and others in the crowd, but also we, the hearers of the narrative, are brought into the sphere of his address. Peter’s response is logical but dismissive; Jesus’ insistence on the point (“someone touched me…”) begins to draw he and the woman together in a different way. Her givenness in the narrative is altered at this stage: the woman comes into full view, and her selfhood erupts in her testimony: she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. In responding to Jesus, she herself becomes visible—as one who confesses (and thus brings to manifestation) Jesus’ power to heal. At this point, we also see Jesus himself more clearly as a person, as he addresses her, not only with authority, but also with tenderness and compassion: Daughter, your faith has made you well. Yet with these words, Jesus declines the identity of a healer or wonderworker; he ascribes the healing to her faith, and in doing so, invites our further questioning about his identity. In almost the same moment, however, both she and we are gently dismissed from him: go in peace. We can use Marion’s categories—themselves inversions of Kant’s categories with regard to the possibility of experience—to analyse the narrative. Doubtlessly, it takes place as an event. We are unable to give an adequate account of its quantity or dimensions: it is Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 5 23/2/17 “unforeseeable,” “not exhaustively comprehensible,” and “not reproducible.”13 In terms of quality, the scene functions technically as an idol: there is too much to see, which means that what we see of it is always too little. In terms of relation, we are not able to determine a reason for what has happened to the woman and Jesus’ part in it; we cannot explain it in terms of causality. And in terms of modality, the given is invisible: while the woman witnesses to Jesus, we see neither the healing nor his divinity as such. We are left with a question, then, which is whether or not to trust this woman, to believe her. Is this a revelatory text? Am I addressed by it, now? In proposing an example of a saturated phenomenon, I selected something biblical to make my way forward a little simpler. By asking about the personal resonances of the text, I sought to link it with contemporary experience. But I drew from the canon, which is considered to be revelatory, and any personal resonances there were or are could be considered “revelatory” in a secondary or derivative sense. 14 It is, indeed, possible to encounter Jesus in a prayerful reading of a text, but what I mean to get at this evening is a thinking of revelation that enables this aspect of personal encounter to be interrogated more fully. Marion gives us very powerful descriptions of how the saturated phenomenon gives itself to experience. When I refer to “experience,” of course, I do not mean that the saturated 13 Marion, Being Given, 207. I am thankful to Shane Mackinlay for drawing my attention to precisely these elements of Marion’s description, in Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 132. I note Christina M. Gschwandtner’s insight that there is some slippage between Marion’s categories, and that “the event,” for example, could and does often describe all types of saturation as an overall type. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 25-6. I also take on board her criticisms about the absolute nature of the saturated phenomenon as Marion describes it; however, this is appropriate when we attempt to speak of phenomena of revelation. See also Mason M. Brock, "Saturated Phenomena, the Icon, and Revelation: A Critique of Marion’s Account of Revelation and the “Redoubling” of Saturation," Aporia 24, no. 1 (2014). “While the experience of God may be more glorious, infinite, or incomprehensible than the experience of the other, this doesn’t give us any concrete phenomenological distinctions between the two. Again it comes down to the fact that Marion has not provided a phenomenological way to differentiate between the experience of God and the experience of the human other, except that one is grander or more infinite than the other. Apart from that broad gloss, the phenomenological approaches both to revelation and to the icon seem essentially the same” (36); “perhaps the inability to substantially differentiate between the icon and revelation says a lot more about God than it does the short - comings of phenomenology” (37). 14 It is in this way that I understand John Macquarrie when he writes: “A revelation that has the power to found a community of faith becomes fruitful in that community, and is, so to speak, repeated or re-enacted in the experience of the community, thus becoming normative for the experience of the community. Yet only because the primordial revelation is continually renewed in present experience can it be revelation for us, and not just a fossilized revelation….” Macquarrie, Principles 8-9. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 6 23/2/17 phenomenon is reducible to the Husserlian Erlebnis, or “lived experience” of consciousness. Instead, the recipient or “gifted one” (l’adonné) receives what runs counter to experience, and this gifted one “resists” it in such a way that he or she brings the saturated phenomenon to light. As Marion says: “the receiver, in and through the receptivity of ‘feeling,’ transforms givenness into manifestation….”15 The given impresses itself on the receiver without appearing as an object to be theoretically constituted; it is the effect (or “feeling”) of the given that is primary.16 He specifies that “‘feeling’ does not result from the ‘thing’ as its effect, [or] double it as its appearance, but … shows it as its one and only possible apparition….” In other words, the effect is the appearance. Yet this apparition or manifestation is at once “hidden from the gaze,” that is, from object constitution.17 To quote Marion again: “this presentation implies reception in ‘feeling,’ and it aims precisely at showing for thought, manifesting for a consciousness, forming for vision what, otherwise, would give itself to the blind.”18 Not only does l’adonné make the given visible in this transmutation, but the very act of transmutation makes l’adonné him or herself visible. This provokes a double visibility, which happens in the response made by l’adonné to the given (or “the call,” in the sense of “call and response”), and the making visible of l’adonné in the process.19 I turn now to examine very briefly an important contribution to this discussion that can be drawn from the work of Lacoste. In La Phénoménalité de Dieu, Lacoste observes that if we are to know God, it will be in the domain of affection: “God can appear,” he writes, “not in theophany but in the modest form of a presence felt.” By presence, Lacoste cannot mean the coincidence of meaning and being, since he has just described phenomenologically the experience of a knowing that is always dependent on the memory or the anticipation of what is not present. Moreover, he is at pains to point out that an affective knowledge does 15 Marion, Being Given, 264. When it comes to the givenness of a saturated phenomenon, Marion specifies that this will impact upon the receiver as a call. Marion, Being Given, 266. 17 Marion, Being Given, 264. 18 Marion, Being Given, 265. 19 “The given, as a lived experience, remains a stimulus, an excitation, scarcely a piece of information; l’adonné receives it, without its showing itself ... I will risk saying that the given, unseen but received, is projected on l’adonné (or consciousness, if one prefers) as on a screen; all the power of this given comes from crashing down on this screen, provoking a double visibility.” Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 49-50. 16 Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 7 23/2/17 not imply an understanding that grasps the totality, but instead, is knowledge by means of acquaintance or recognition. The fact that the heart can sense God’s absence and presence at the same time is the cornerstone of all interpretation of so called “religious” experiences. God is not felt more than he is unfelt. To know that he eludes the always possible domination of feeling is to respect his transcendence. Anticipations of his eschatological presence, that is to say, of his parousia, can certainly be conceded to privileged witnesses. But in the everyday context to which our experience of God, or quasiexperience, belongs we should be satisfied with a radically non-eschatological presence.20 That God is known by means of the affect makes sense of the belief that God is known as love; as Lacoste tells us: “only if we perceive God as loveable can we perceive God at all.”21 While Lacoste allows the possibility that God is felt as event in experience and so draws us in love, in much of his work, and more commonly, we find ourselves dealing with the situation where God does not seem present to the believer at all. This is exemplified in his discussion of the Eucharist. Having underscored the importance of the affect in recognising the event, Lacoste explains that in the Eucharistic event, one might not feel anything, save the feeling that one does not feel, which he calls a “wound of experience.” Lacoste argues, however, that not feeling is itself a way of feeling, which occurs where belief “is accompanied by an ‘I feel that I do not feel’,” or perhaps by a sense that “what I do not feel could (and hypothetically should) be felt.” This felt lack is particularly so in view of those words and acts accompanying the Eucharistic elements, which “recall,” as he says, “the exact nature of the gift.” 22 # In the celebration of the Eucharist, the spoken words authoritatively name what is given—the Eucharistic gift, yet this is not a phenomenon that is perceived with the senses, even if reference is made to it in the phenomena of the sacramental things. What is felt, then, is the gap between the phenomenon of the given and the phenomenon of the sacramental gift, an experience of non-experience, which we can distinguish from Marion’s counter-experience. Joeri Schrijvers explains the double nature of this non-experience: on the one hand, I experience my non-experience through experiencing a certain lack, and on the other, I experience that which is lacking from this non-experience. I 20 Lacoste, La Phénoménalité De Dieu, 51. Lacoste, La Phénoménalité De Dieu, 92-3. 22 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être En Danger (Paris: Cerf, 2010), 110-12. # Text taken from Religion and Violence: New Phenomenological Perspectives, IJPS submission 20160201. 21 Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 8 23/2/17 experience a lack of experience and that which is lacking from experience. In other words, I experience simultaneously that God does not come to experience and I experience that what I am experiencing is not God.23 At this point, believer and non-believer alike would appear to have the same experience, which is to say, an experience whereby there is no ready assurance of God’s presence and where the gap in experience is open to interpretation. To sum up the contributions of Marion and Lacoste to a thinking of revelation: both allow that God gives Godself to be felt in experience. For Marion, that felt givenness can be transmuted into a showing by means of the recipient, although it will never be expressed exhaustively. For Lacoste, while it may be that God is felt as present, for most believers, this will be what he calls a “radically non-eschatological presence” rather than an anticipation of “eschatological presence.” More often than not, we will experience the non-experience of God, and we will be left to discern whether this is an experience of the holy or whether we are deceived by the sacred.24 Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises We turn now to consider the possible contribution of the Spiritual Exercises to a re-thinking of revelation along these lines. Ignatius is a great believer in the value of examining experience, particularly as feelings emerge in the course of that experience. In this process of examination, he believes not only that it is possible to know God’s will, but also that what we come to know in discerning God’s will is God. However, if we are to undertake the discernment process authentically, we must put our own interests completely aside, with the development of a personal quality that Ignatius describes as “indifference.”25 He looks carefully at what is given, in its very givenness, without any pre-commitment as to its origins 23 Joeri Schrijvers, An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 155. Cp. Andrews, "How (Not) to Find God in All Things: Derrida, Levinas and St Ignatius of Loyola on Learning How to Pray for the Impossible," in The Phenomenology of Prayer, 204-5. “prayer may be defined as the experience of a nonpresence. Such a ‘nonpresence,’ however, must either be something or nothing. If prayer is the experience of something, then nonpresence is and can be manifest to consciousness either thematically or nonthematically. But if prayer is the experience of nothing, then nonpresence is merely nothing and therefore not experienceable; prayer cannot experience a ‘nonpresence’ that is nothing. This distinction, I submit, is vital to understanding the play of presence that lies at the heart of phenomenological analysis: Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” 24 Lacoste, Être En Danger, 119. 25 Hence, in the “First Principle and Foundation” (number 23) of the Spiritual Exercises we read: “Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.” The need for indifference is noted throughout the Exercises. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 9 23/2/17 or meaning. Any judgment about its divine quality is delayed until what appears in feeling has been examined, especially in light of context, earlier factors or later responses. In this way, we might consider Ignatius a proto-phenomenologist. Two sections of the Exercises are immediately relevant to the question of how God communicates with us: the three ways of “making a choice of a way of life,” commonly known as the “election” (numbers 169-177), and the “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits” (especially numbers 316-317, 330 and 336). Many will be familiar with the three modes of election. To summarise: the first experience of election occurs “when God our Lord so moves and attracts the will that a devout soul without hesitation, or the possibility of hesitation, follows what has been manifested to it.” In the second mode, the choice is arrived at because “… much light and understanding are derived through experience of desolations and consolations and discernment of diverse spirits.” Finally, when the soul is in a state of “tranquility,” other means of arriving at a determination are needed, such as weighing up the pros and cons of the situation. While all three modes are relevant, it is the first mode that is of special interest to us now. What does Ignatius mean by the first mode? As many have said before me, the text is unhelpfully brief and in many ways equivocal. It is not clear, for example, whether what has been made manifest is the “Lord so mov[ing] and attract[ing] the will,” or some further revelation specific to the course of action. Rahner and other commentators, such as Jules Toner, agree that it is a matter of the communication of God’s will within the will of the person as he or she is drawn to something specific.26 Many commentators make much of the self-authenticating nature of this mode of election; however, Toner believes that it must be subject to further critical examination in order to be confirmed.27 In this way, Toner views the three modes of election as one. Rahner also sees the three modes as inherently connected, but unlike Toner, sees the first mode as the basis for the other two, providing 26 Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, 94. Jules J. Toner S.J., What Is Your Will, O God? A Casebook for Studying Discernment of God's Will, 4: Original Studies Composed in English (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995), 11. 27 “[T]he first-time experience, even with its spontaneous certainty of what God wills, is only data for a discernment by critical reflection on it. By such reflection, the person who has the experience can arrive at a critically validated reflective certainty or a critically justified doubt about the unreflective certainty.” Jules J. Toner S.J., Spirit of Light or Darkness?, 3: Original Studies Composed in English (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995), 11. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 10 23/2/17 the ultimate standard for all discernment. 28 He also views the first mode as “a divine revelation … whether it belongs to public revelation or is a ‘private revelation’.” 29 In contrast, Dulles claims that it is private revelation, underscoring its rarity with reference to its occurrence in the lives of the great saints.30 This reminds us that for Dulles, experience of God as the ineffable is really the prerogative of the mystics and not of the everyday believer. While it is revelatory in character, the first mode of election is not beatific. The working of God that Ignatius describes is in the will, although Rahner maintains that this, too, is a type of knowledge.31 Now, Toner distinguishes firmly between the will and the affect, defining this aspect of the first mode as “a volitional tendency towards something to be done, a conative act of will,” while in parenthesis emphasising that it is “not a feeling of consolation in the affective sensibility” and stressing that “not a word is said about spiritual consolation.”32 This is written in an attempt to make clear his disagreement with Rahner, who reads the whole notion of election in light of the “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits,” and so interprets the first mode in terms of the experience of God’s intimacy offered in the Consolation without Previous Cause, or CSCP, against which it can be tested in terms of its consolatory quality, origins and indubitability.33 28 “The first method is the ideal higher limiting case of the second method and the latter itself includes the rationality of the third as one of its own intrinsic elements.” Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, 106. 29 Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, 107. 30 Avery Dulles, "Finding God's Will," Woodstock Letters 94 (1965): 142. 31 “ … in the Exercises Ignatius candidly assumes that a man has to reckon, as a practical possibility of experience, that God may communicate his will to him. And the content of this will is not simply what can be known by the rational reflection of a believing mind employing general maxims of reason and faith on the one hand and their application to a definite situation that has also been analysed in a similar discursively rational way, on the other.” In the footnote, Rahner continues to explain: “That does not mean that the contrary of this kind of knowledge which, according to our interpretation of the Exercises, is not in every case sufficient for knowing God’s will, is ‘feeling’, ‘instinct’ or something similar, contrary to or apart from the intellect. It is, rather, a thoroughly intellectual operation of the ‘intellect’, in the metaphysical, scholastic sense of the word, in which it is capable of apprehending values. Only it is not cognition of the rationally discursive and conceptually expressible kind but an intellectual knowledge which is ultimately grounded in the simple presence to itself of the intrinsically intelligible subject which in the very accomplishment of its act has knowledge of itself, without that contrast of knower and known which holds when it is a question of those objects that are known by adverting to a context of sensory perception and imagery….” Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, 94, 94-5n. 32 Toner S.J., What Is Your Will?, 11. 33 “K. Rahner highlights the Exercises as a method for making a supernatural, existential decision based upon an experienced concord or discord which occurs when a person’s choice is savored in the presence of his central, God-evoked religious stance which becomes thematic as CSCP.” Harvey Egan, The Spiritual Exercises Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 11 23/2/17 Ignatius describes the CSCP in paragraph 330: God alone can give consolation to the soul without any previous cause. It belongs solely to the Creator to come into a soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly into the love of His Divine Majesty. I said without previous cause, that is, without any preceding perception or knowledge by which a soul might be led to such a consolation through his own acts of intellect and will.34 To understand what is meant by the CSCP, we must first gain some appreciation of what Ignatius means by “consolation.” In paragraph 316, he states: “I name it consolation when some inner motion is prompted in the person of such a kind that he begins to be aflame with love of his creator and Lord and, consequently, when he cannot love any created thing on the face of the earth in itself but only in the creator of them all.” He specifies further: consolation can come in love that moves to the expression of tears over sin, or Christ’s passion, or something else ordered to the praise and service of God; it is also “every increase of hope, faith, or charity,” and “every inward gladness….”35 What we have with spiritual consolation is a wide range of affective responses. It can come from God, or from elsewhere. When consolation is God-given, it is distinguished by the intense love felt at its base and by having God as its sole aim.36 Spiritual desolation, in contrast, which never comes from God, is understood by Ignatius as a feeling of being “separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord” (317).37 Without entering more fully into the debate between Rahner and Toner, we might ask whether it is nevertheless possible that feelings of consolation might pertain to the first mode of election. While Toner is right that Ignatius does not mention consolation in this instance, in the immediacy of God’s movement and attraction in the will, it is hard to imagine that this could be undergone otherwise than as a moment of consolation. For the soul that is open and drawn to the love of God, God’s nearness would necessarily be felt as and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon, Series Iv: Study Aids on Jesuit Topics (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Resources, 1976), 16-17. CSCP is the acronym for “consolación sin causa precedente.” 34 th Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 330. On “tears” as characteristic of 16 Century Spanish thinking on authentic prayer, see Elena Carrera, "The Emotions in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Spirituality," Journal of Religious History 31, no. 3 (2007). 35 Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 316. Emphasis added. 36 Toner emphasises the need to understand consolation as strictly spiritual. Toner S.J., Spirit of Light, 17. 37 This is not because God inflicts desolation or ever moves away from us; the felt distance from God that Ignatius describes constitutes real lack to those who genuinely desire God: “When one is left in desolation, he should be mindful that God has left him to his natural powers to resist the different agitations and temptations of the enemy in order to try him. He can resist with the help of God, which always remains, though he may not clearly perceive it. For though God has taken from him the abundance of fervor and overflowing love and the intensity of His favors, nevertheless, he has sufficient grace for eternal salvation” (320). Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 12 23/2/17 welcome. This enables us to reconcile—more fully than Toner is able to do—both first time election and CSCP by means of the oft-quoted passage from the letter to Teresa Rejadell: It often happens that our Lord moves and forces us interiorly to one action or another by opening up our mind and heart, that is, speaking inside us without any noise of voices, raising us entirely to His divine love, without our being able to resist His purpose, even if we wanted.38 In this letter, we find a fuller description by Ignatius of the nature of the experience of God’s self-revelation in personal intimacy—opening up mind and heart; speaking without noise; raising into love; communicating an irresistible purpose. Extremely difficult to determine is what Ignatius means by “without previous cause.” Harvey Egan suggests that the phrase should be placed in the context of the whole exercises, to mean that it relates to grace “not previously asked for.” 39 However, if it is to be argued that spiritual discernment is not an activity strictly limited to exercitants—in other words, that it is possible to “find God in all things,” and not to limit God’s self-giving in grace to those choosing a way of life—then it is hard to maintain that the CSCP should only be seen as occurring within the meditations, prayers and disciplines of the Spiritual Exercises. 40 Moreover, it seems strange that an exercitant should have set a limit on what he or she expects from any given meditation. I am thus inclined to take Ignatius’ words at face value here, to suggest that “previous cause” refers to the capacity of the person to have produced the intense consolation that is given in this situation. We could agree with Egan that “without previous cause” means “out of all proportion” with what has gone before (without 38 Letter to Teresa Rejadell, letter 4 in Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean, eds., Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1996), 133-34; Jules J. Toner S.J., A Commentary on Saint Ignatius's Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, Series Iii: Original Studies Composed in English (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982), 313. 39 “[I]f a consolation is given in such a way that it was not previously asked for, that is out of proportion to ‘what I want and desire,’ that it transcends the grace expected from the meditation at hand and draws the exercitant wholly into God’s love, then we have the consolation without previous cause. We agree … that the consolation cannot be causeless, … that it is an uncreated cause, and … that it is ‘without conceptual object.’ Egan, Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian Horizon, 35. 40 In the Foreword to Egan’s book, Rahner writes: “one should certainly not evaluate this ‘consolation without previous cause’ as a singular mystical phenomenon open only to a select few, but as the foundation and highpoint of ‘normal’ Christian life.” Rahner in Egan, Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian Horizon, xv. In this regard, I also note Dulles’ gloss of Rahner: “The method of discernment of spirits is thus closely related to what Rahner calls the "fundamental formula of Ignatian spirituality"—the finding God in all things. This, in Rahner's view, is simply "the persistent putting into practice of that supernatural concrete logic of discovering the will of God through the experimental test of consolation." The affective logic of the second-time election, therefore, is inseparably connected with the characteristically Ignatian synthesis of contemplation and action which has always been a mark of Jesuit spirituality.” Dulles, "Finding God's Will," 149. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 13 23/2/17 limiting that to a specific request).41 And I agree with Rahner and others that the disjunction between the capacity of the person to “be led to such a consolation through his own acts of intellect and will” and the experience of the consolation can be read in terms of an experience that has content but no conceptual object.42 Rahner theorises that in the CSCP, an object of consciousness fades to reveal the ground of subjectivity, present to consciousness in a way similar to that in which consciousness is present to itself, which is to say, at once revealed as imageless or as mystery. Philip Endean draws our attention to the fact that in considering such an experience of God, Rahner echoes the words of Bonaventure: “and then, in truth, they feel rather than know.” 43 It is in their exploration of 41 Ignatius does not say “uncaused,” (as Egan does) and I wonder whether we are over-interpreting him to read this passage in terms of Aristotelean causality. 42 Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, 135. 43 See Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011); Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality. In chapter 2, “Immediate Experience of God,” Endean quotes Rahner’s 1978 writing “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit” (18-19): “There has to be here an encounter with God which ‘versatur in pure intellectualibus’. Now, it must be said also that this is an awkward and easily misunderstood expression of Nadal’s: today it can easily be misinterpreted along the lines of an Enlightenment intellectualism or rationalism. But all it refers to is how this experience of God was imageless.” At the same time, Rahner observes in the same text: “Ignatius is, in a very singular way, on the most familiar of terms with God. For he has gone beyond all visions, whether real (such as seeing Christ or the Virgin etc. as present) or based on images and likenesses, and he is now taken up with what is purely intellectual, with the unity of God.” Endean also notes Rahner’s quoting from Bonaventure (25): “In their regarding there is no image formed of a creature. And then, in truth, they feel rather than know.” See also 28: “‘If God touches this deepest point of the soul from within, informing it as it were,’ Rahner concludes, ‘the apex affectus will be able to have an awareness of this immediate union of love, without the intellect thereby becoming active.’ At the deepest level of the self, deeper than intellect or will, there is God.” Note Bernard Lonergan’s comment: “Have you read Rahner on St. Ignatius and consolation without a cause? Well. That sort of thing I would call an experience of God.” Quoted in Gordon Rixon, "Bernard Lonergan and Mysticism," Theological Studies 62, no. 3 (2001): 489-90. Rixon’s article is quite moving in his description and analyses of Lonergan’s attempts to come to grips with the mystical. Of the developed form of Lonergan’s thinking of these questions in Method in Theology, Rixon observes: “Lonergan describes religious experience as ‘being in love with God … without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations,’ [Method 105-6] the proper fulfillment of the human person’s unrestricted capacity for self-transcendence” (490).” Later on the same page, he clarifies: “to affirm that the dynamic state of being in love with God is conscious is not to affirm that it is known, clarifying that consciousness is simply experience whereas knowledge is a compound of experience, understanding, and judging”; “Lonergan is careful here not to associate religious experience immediately with the empirical, intellectual or rational levels of consciousness. Religious experience is immediate; it remains most fundamentally an experience of mystery.” But one of Rixon’s most interesting discoveries is the influence that Rahner’s work on Ignatius, through Egan, had on his growth of understanding. On 492-3n2 he quotes a letter where Lonergan describes the way in which Egan’s explanation of the CSCP enables him finally to understand, not only by means of the “anthropological turn, the turn from metaphysical objects to conscious subjects” but also that the Ignatian examen “might mean not an examination of conscience but an examination of consciousness….” See also his quotation of Lonergan on 494n57: “Has consolation got a content? Yes. It has a content but it hasn’t got an object; this is Rahner’s way of putting it.” Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 14 23/2/17 this feeling rather than knowing that Marion and Lacoste offer a rich way of thinking through the Ignatian experience.44 Recapitulation To rephrase my key question, if revelation is authentically described in Christian tradition as the action of “the invisible God,” who, “out of the abundance of … love speaks to [us] as friends,” then how does this communication take place? 45 It seems to me that God’s givenness to the individual, as Ignatius describes it, can readily be framed in terms of the saturated phenomenon, particularly insofar as it is experienced as a felt pressure, the communication of which transmutes an altogether excessive intuition into an intentional showing. We can describe this using the various typologies of saturation: revelation happens as an event (quite literally, “without previous cause”); metaphorically, as an idol (in this circumstance, it is not so much that there is literally too much to see, but that any concept ascribed to it will be inadequate; as flesh (it happens internally to me, and while there remains in principle a distinction between self and God, such a distinction cannot be “felt,” since I am feeling the felt without any sense of its being exterior to me—it is absolute); and as icon (there is nothing to see—I am present to God, rather than God present to me beatifically). Needless to say, in the transmutation of the saturated phenomenon into words and other symbols of revelation, we recognise a hermeneutic act that takes place in the context of a specific religious tradition and is tested by the community of that tradition. If we use Lacoste’s language instead of Marion’s, we could describe the Ignatian experience in terms of non-eschatological presence, a felt presence that is a kind of knowledge in terms of acquaintance or recognition rather than a concept. We can see here a helpful way of 44 And here we break from Rahner (and Lonergan) explicitly. As Andrews comments: “if prayer constitutes the condition of possibility of the appearing of a ‘nonappearance,’ then, in terms of the givenness of pure transcendence, the goal of the Exercises might best be described not in terms of a traditional metaphysics of presence.” Andrews, "How (Not) to Find God in All Things: Derrida, Levinas and St Ignatius of Loyola on Learning How to Pray for the Impossible," in The Phenomenology of Prayer, 201. Andrews refers to the analysis of the Spiritual Exercises by Roland Barthes, and especially the way in which the exercitant “is cut off from the perfection of language, which is assertive closure…” (203-4). Andrews continues: “such a nonphenomenal experience of a (non)presence corresponds significantly to what Jacques Derrida describes in terms of the phenomenology of the gift” (204). 45 Vatican Council II, "Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation," accessed August 24, 2009. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_deiverbum_en.html. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 15 23/2/17 thinking about the tension between revelation as once-and-for-all, already given, and revelation as meaningful self-revelation to the individual: in revelation as it unfolds personally, I recognise the God who approaches me as the God of the tradition, while coming to know that God in a uniquely interpersonal way. There are a number of other aspects of Ignatius’ work that could very readily be explored in this respect, and I am regretful that time does not permit us to do so here. These include: the question of what relationship, if any, Lacoste’s “experience of non-experience” bears to the Ignatian understanding of consolation and desolation; the process of Ignatian discernment with respect to establishing the authenticity of any consolatory experience; and thinking through parameters for the legitimate role of the imagination in phenomenological meditation on scripture or the experience of prayer. Moreover, while we have only just begun to translate the Ignatian experience of God’s self-revelation into terms we might use within the academy, we have not yet considered if there is more that we can say in relation to meaningful dialogue within contemporary culture. The Ignatian search for God “in all things” has an ongoing relevance with regard to the recent cultural emphasis on personal experience. This is even more the case as it relates to individual “feelings,” especially if these can be sensitised in critical and reflective ways. But it is made more complex by the question of the extent to which we take seriously that our context today is not one where Christian faith can simply be projected onto a range of human experiences in an attempt to pre-empt their fullest meaning. A great challenge, in other words, will be to live out the Ignatian search in genuine dialogue with people who begin their searching from a different place.46 But all this opens onto much more than I can say here. 46 See, for example, Didier Pollefeyt and Jan Bouwens, Identity in Dialogue: Assessing and Enhancing Catholic School Identity. Research Methodology and Research Results in Catholic Schools in Victoria, Australia (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014). D. Pollefeyt & J. Bouwens, “Dialogue as the Future. A Catholic Answer to the 'Colourisation' of the Educational Landscape,” available at http://web.cecv.catholic.edu.au/projects/identity/ISS_Pollefeyt_articles_book.pdf. English translation of the Dutch article: Didier Pollefeyt, "Dialoog Als Toekomst. Een Katholiek Antwoord Op De Verkleuring Van Het Onderwijslandschap," in Dialoogschool in Actie! Mag Ik Er Zijn Voor U?, ed. P. Keersmaekers, M. van Kerckhoven, and K. Vanspeybroeck (Antwerpen: Halewijn / VSKO / VVKHO, 2013). Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 16 23/2/17 LIST OF WORKS CITED Andrews, Michael F. "How (Not) to Find God in All Things: Derrida, Levinas and St Ignatius of Loyola on Learning How to Pray for the Impossible." In The Phenomenology of Prayer, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, 195-208. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Boeve, Lieven. "Revelation, Scripture and Tradition: Lessons from Vatican Ii’s Constitution Dei Verbum for Contemporary Theology." International Journal of Systematic Theology 13, no. 4 (2011): 416-33. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00598.x. Brock, Mason M. 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A Casebook for Studying Discernment of God's Will. 4: Original Studies Composed in English. St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995. Robyn Horner, Australian Catholic University Page 18 23/2/17