Phenomenology and Ritual Practice

Abstract

This paper highlights several problems in the contemporary phenomenological analysis of religious experience in Continental philosophy of religion, especially in its French iteration, as manifested in such thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Emmanuel Falque, and others. After laying out the main issues, the paper proposes a fuller investigation of religious practices, such as liturgy or ritual, as a fruitful way to address some of the identified limitations. The final section of the paper assesses what questions remain and how one might draw on existing resources in these thinkers to push a phenomenological analysis of religious practices further in ways that broaden phenomenology of religion beyond its current somewhat narrow strictures and commitments.

Embodied world construction: a phenomenology of ritual

“…Marion's philosophy has at times been criticized for veering into theology (Smith (1999); Janicaud (2000); Gschwandtner (2019)). Yet, Marion will insist that in articulating the characteristics of saturated phenomena he is not making a metaphysical claim about transcendent reality but simply outlining a possible phenomenon.…”

“…This partly relates to the ethical concern raised by James K. A. Smith that Marion ‘effects a certain levelling of the plurivocity of (global) religious experience and forces it into a rather theistic, or at least theophanic, mold’ (Smith (1999), 23). Moreover, even when one's focus is restricted to the Catholic experience of the Eucharist, Marion's approach is markedly individualistic, focused on a singular person's experience of the sacrament (Gschwandtner (2019), 51). When we widen our analysis to the experiences of a whole congregation, there is no way to tell what each person experiences – although as Bruce Lincoln surmises, we may ‘guess these range from deep reflection and strong commitment to bewilderment and indifference’ (Lincoln (2005), 65) 17…”