“Dispossession”: the movement of hermeneutics and prayer in Paul Ricoeur and Rowan Williams

Abstract

I argue here for a constructive relationship between the philosophical discipline of hermeneutics, and the theological practice of prayer. The justification for this claim is the use of the same word “dispossession” and cognate ideas in Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, and in Rowan Williams on integrity in theological language in the context of an account of prayer and contemplation. Dispossession, in both instances, speaks of an emptying of the self—ultimately the self-as-subject—in order to encounter the other—the text, or God. Dispossession, for both Ricoeur and Williams, is a crucial mode in which the self is played upon (by the text or God), and in both hermeneutics and prayer involves a necessary relinquishing of the self.

In order to focus this argument, in the first Section, I consider Immanuel Kant’s idea of prayer, the nearness of the role of hermeneutics to his notion, and reveal how both Ricoeur and Williams can be seen to be reacting—whether consciously or unconsciously—against Kant’s approach. It is true, as I will discuss, that hermeneutics and prayer have been linked before—but only prayer in relation to Scriptural hermeneutics. In affirming and deepening that claim to hermeneutics more widely, therefore, a fresh case is made about the nearness of spiritual practice and philosophical method. What is at stake is to assert a far wider role for the contribution of theology, and theological practice, to the practice of reading more generally.

Wary of beginning in too circular a manner, I nevertheless need to give a preliminary answer to the question: what does “hermeneutics” mean? The complexities in the history of this question will be touched upon with more care later in my argument. Hans Frei once made the rather droll remark that: “[h]ermeneutics, by and large, is a word that is forever chasing a meaning.”¹ However, for the purposes of introducing my theme, it is fitting to open with one of Ricoeur’s best working definitions:

hermeneutics is the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts. So the key idea will be the realization of discourse as a text.²

Hermeneutics as “theory of meaning” is too flat a definition. Rather, Ricoeur’s definition asks, how does the understanding operate in relation to texts, how does the understanding operate as it interprets? Discourse qua text develops this further: a text realises a dialogic situation, recognising the respective positions of reader, speech and listener. “Text” itself is a term which attracts careful argumentation from Ricoeur, not least in his essay for Gadamer’s Festschrift “What is a Text?” “[A] text,” he writes, “is any discourse fixed by writing.”³

There is a second matter—less definitional, more programmatic—which ought to alarm readers of the opening statement of my thesis. Drawing any analogy between philosophical discipline and religious practice requires caution. True, Pierre Hadot has initiated a new and fruitful seam of scholarship demonstrating that the ancient “practice” of philosophy was indeed more like a way of life.⁴ However, it’s rarely “so easy”—in the words of Alain Thomasset—and runs the risk of illegitimacy, because “there is a subtle dialectic” that operates, whether “between poetry and religious experience or language,” or “between modern hermeneutics and the Christian tradition.”⁵ I am conscious that the thesis of this article brings three different forms of discourse into play: hermeneutics, and the approach to a text; theological language, and the integrity of its reference; and prayer. Each form of discourse, rightly, has their own parameters. Indeed, Ricoeur famously sought to keep philosophy and theology at arm’s length, developing the Kantian paradigm of the symbol for precisely this end.⁶ The movement in both hermeneutics and prayer might look similar because of the use of the same term—“dispossession”; but their aims, and the constituent roles of the parties to hermeneutics and prayer (text/self/God), are not necessarily the same. Indeed, it is something of an established enlightenment paradigm to pit philosophy against praxis, as if the goal of the former was cerebral activity, and the goal of the latter was imprecise emotionalism. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the recently published Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics contains no single mention of prayer.⁷

That said, in one sub-discipline of hermeneutics, hermeneutics and prayer have been held together for millennia without apparent contention (the more precise case for a “constructive relationship” between the two is new in this article). It is an ancient and abiding tradition to hold that prayer is essential for Biblical hermeneutics. It goes all the way back, arguably, to St. Luke. The author of the third Gospel (the story is unique to Luke) has Cleopas and another disciple only understanding once Jesus has both explained Scripture, and blessed and broken bread (Luke 24.27, 30–31).⁸ The Greek word usually translated “explanation” in this context is “διερμήνευσεν” (diermēneusen—the aorist indicative of διερμηνεύω (diermēneuō) meaning “to interpret” or “to explain,” or even “to translate”)—the word from which we derive “hermeneutics.” And the Greek word for Jesus’ blessing of the bread is “εὐλόγησεν” (eulogēsen)—a Jewish form of prayer. On the road to Emmaus, hermeneutics and prayer belong together just as happily as word and sacrament.⁹ The tradition of prayer and Biblical hermeneutics was then handed down most notably through Origen,¹⁰ is important to the Reformers, and has enjoyed something of a modern renaissance, with Karl Barth,¹¹ the scholarship of Kevin Hart,¹² and even Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self.¹³

This article makes the bolder claim, however, that the practice of prayer has an analogical relationship to the practice of hermeneutics more broadly. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that without a prayerfulness (as I will go on to define) before any text, our reading is impoverished, or, perhaps more clearly, constricted. I am therefore seeking both to affirm and to move beyond the less contentious prayer and biblical hermeneutics relationship; and also to do so with more methodological precision, so as to substantiate an argument rebutting the enlightenment paradigm of philosophy against praxis.

The specific basis for the claim is that the terminus ad quem of both Ricoeur’s hermeneutic notion of “appropriation,” and also Williams’s requirements for “theological integrity” culminating in theology’s account of prayer, adopt the same word: “dispossession.”¹⁴ Dispossession, in both, refers to a movement, where the subject wilfully divests itself in the relevant discourse. It is a letting-go. Whilst the discourses may be different, then, this article asks whether the associated movement is the same. Another way of approaching the question would be to say it asks a Heideggerian Wie not a Wass: I am arguing about the “how” of hermeneutics and prayer (their operations and processes), not the “what” (an abstract and static scientific analysis).

What is at stake, then, is not just freshly to observe a certain nearness of thought—as if theology could in its cautiousness restrict itself to shuffling secondary voices around on deck (as interesting as that might be for the initiated): a nearness between Williams and Ricoeur, between Ricoeur and the many Patristic authors who attended to the propinquity of prayer and Biblical interpretation, between Ricoeur and Barth alongside his more obvious conversation partners Heidegger and Gadamer.¹⁵ What is at stake, rather, is to draw attention to a subterranean feature of theology and theological practice capable of confronting philosophy; or, at least, to confront using that most subtle and idiosyncratic of means: through the humility of penitence. Prayer, prex, also “begs” before any text (“I pray in aid”).¹⁶ All hermeneutics is impoverished without a posture of “prayerfulness”—within that double meaning—before the relevant text. Might prayer, too, be equally impoverished without a concomitant hermeneutic—explanatory, revelatory, translating—posture?

In the principal Sections of this article, I will critically consider and contrast the two “dispossessions”—of Ricoeur and Williams. First, I consider some of the difficulties of translation (diermēneuō, again) relating to Ricoeur’s essay “Appropriation.” “Appropriation” does not mean what in English we would normally associate with that term—an acquiring. Rather it refers to the process of understanding the other as subject, a reception. And it is within this hermeneutic process where Ricoeur develops the idea of “dispossession.” Second, I set out how Ricoeur’s hermeneutic “appropriation” does function. And third, I show how Williams addresses theological integrity (how our speech about and to God avoids concealment and the retention of power), using the resources and discipline of prayer and contemplation. The conclusion can then answer the question, are the two “dispossessions” the same “movement,” and even if not, what interdisciplinary light do the common features in both shed on the other?

But before turning to Ricoeur, I want first to assess the notion of “prayer” in Kant, and the role of hermeneutics within Kant’s “prayer.” My case is that Kant’s denuded “spirit of prayer,” and hermeneutics functioning in relation to it like a moral explainer, is something which both Ricoeur and Williams seek to combat, whether expressly or implicitly.¹⁷

1. Silent “prayer” as moral formation

From many perspectives, Kant’s account of prayer in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason is a travesty.¹⁸ For Kant, prayer is a “pseudo-service.” If conceived as an inner ritual as a means of grace, it “is a superstitious delusion (fetish-making).”¹⁹ Kant’s “prayer” is to be wordless, rite-less, apparently God-less, and only for moral improvement. But what is at stake for the purposes of this article is not simply the question of whether prayer survives Kant’s attack on positive as opposed to natural (moral) religion—as important as that question is. Rather, what we can observe is how a personal hermeneutics—self-interpretation, perhaps—becomes the central feature for Kant’s prayer. Hermeneutics, that is, if put to work for moral upbuilding. And this sets the context for the accounts of Ricoeur and Williams, because, in their own disciplines, both want to combat Kant’s position. In fact, I argue here, both Ricoeur and Williams choose to combat Kant with the same weapon—dispossession.

We need a brief characterisation of Kant’s “spirit of prayer,” and in particular how it differs from what he thinks of as “traditional” prayer, before we can see the necessary role for hermeneutics which Kant forges within it. The negative framing Kant secures for his “spirit of prayer” can be seen in three ways—it is against speech, against emotions, and even against Scripture. Ultimately, what the “spirit of prayer” achieves, when combined with its necessary hermeneutic posture (for which, we will see in this Section, the important Kant scholar Stephen R. Palmquist argues), is the securing of the sentient but solitary subject, grasping at moral uprightness.

First, Kant’s prayer is silent—silent contemplation, even. Observing formulas—i.e. liturgies—can have no claim on “the” divine will. They are only effective in stimulating a moral disposition within the subject, and thus should not be required of anyone qua moral duty.²⁰ Prayer, here, is being envisaged narrowly: merely “declaring a wish.”²¹ Such a prayer is baseless and illogical if the wish is requested “to a being who has no need of any declaration regarding the inner disposition of the wisher.”²²

Second, feelings which follow such baseless words are themselves of no utility. Adoration, for example, is, pejoratively, a “sinking mood, in which the human being is as it were nothing in his own eyes”²³—a significant apparently casual comment when compared with Ricoeur and Williams in due course. The feelings involved entail the denigration of personal moral improvement into “courtly service in which the expressions of humiliation and glorification are, as a rule, all the less morally felt the more verbose they are.”²⁴

Third, in subverting “traditional” prayer, Kant’s “spirit of prayer” also subverts Scripture. 2 Corinthians 3.6 has the well-known aphorism: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Positing the account of “traditional” prayer as “the letter,” and his new account of the “spirit of prayer” as “the Spirit,” Kant writes: “the spirit of prayer alone should be sufficiently stimulated within us, and … its letter … should finally fall away. For the letter [i.e. ‘traditional’ prayer] … rather weakens the effect of the moral idea.” To what end? “[P]rogressive purification and elevation of the moral disposition.”²⁵

Kant is not just being obtuse, here. There is in fact a wider subversion at work. The context for Paul’s comment “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” refers specifically to epistemology and faith. The source for these, however, is not man’s transcendental consciousness—of course not—but God himself:

Such is the confidence [Πεποίθησιν (pepoithēsin)—trust, Fiduciam] that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent [ἱκανοί (hikanoi)—sufficient, adequate to express, qualified] of ourselves to claim [λογίσασθαί (logisasthai)—reckon, think, calculate] anything as coming from us; our competence [ἱκανότης (hikanotēs)] is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Cor. 3.4-6)

In Paul’s account, competence only comes from God. We are, in fact, incompetent to make any claim for and on behalf of ourselves. Even our confidence—like faith—is not our own: it comes “through Christ.” By contrast, in Kant’s account, the human subject is the only one competent to pursue the “spirit of prayer.” The Copernican revolution as it pertains to prayer entails transforming prayer into a quest for personal morality. We are not left with “silent contemplation” as I suggested at first, but rather “silent meditation,” “silent meditation for moral upbuilding,” even.²⁶ It is not so far from here to Feuerbach’s anthropological location of prayer within the projections of the individual.²⁷

With this brief characterisation of Kant’s “spirit of prayer,” we can already see the strong contrast which an account of the “dispossession” of the self in hermeneutics and prayer will bring. The telos of Kant’s spirit of prayer concerns moral activity, “a sincere wish to please God in all our doings and nondoings, i.e. the disposition, accompanying all our actions, to pursue these as though they occurred in the service of God.”²⁸ Kant’s “as though,” I argue, is not casual, but significant. Perhaps it is not painting this position in too exaggerated terms by saying self-delusion, or at least carelessness as to the question of the existence of God, is necessary in order to foster this “spirit of prayer.” The “spirit of prayer,” for Kant, is quite literally self-centred. It is the very opposite of the movement of dispossession we will encounter later in this article. “The human being,” Kant writes “only seeks to work upon himself.”

God is carefully removed from the orbit of Kant’s “spirit of prayer.” For sure, as Palmquist would argue, Kant is mounting a rigorous case from within his own epistemological transcendentalism.²⁹ In that sense prayer is, indeed, recovered from delusion or illogicality. But one has to accept the premise in order to follow Kant.

What “the spirit of prayer” needs, then, is a hermeneutic to help explain itself into moral uprightness. This is the case, seeking to defend Kant’s prayer against its critics, made by Palmquist. The title of Palmquist’s essay to which reference already has been made is, in fact, “Kant’s Critical Hermeneutic of Prayer.” Hermeneutics and prayer. For Palmquist, Kant is not out to deconstruct, but rather to reinterpret. He is a true hermeneut of prayer (if not of scripture):

Far from categorically denying the value of prayer, Kant is making an essentially hermeneutic point: the value of prayer depends on how the devotee interprets his or her actions. Only for those who interpret prayer “as an inner formal service of God and hence as a means of grace” does it thereby become a form of false religion. Why is it false? Because the devotee in this case is detaching the act of praying from the moral core that gives it its ultimate value as a religious act. Instead of using prayer (an essentially nonmoral act) as a stimulus to live a better life, the devotee uses it as an excuse to avoid his or her genuine moral responsibilities, in the hope that prayers can stand in as a substitute for a moral life.³⁰

Now, what stands out for present purposes in Palmquist’s reading of Kant is that prayer is intrinsically linked to a hermeneutic act. Prayer’s “value” depends on how the pray-er (simultaneously? after the event?) interprets the act itself. If prayer is interpreted morally as a life-stimulus then that combination of prayer, hermeneutics and moral action renders prayer effective. If, however, prayer is interpreted as a means of grace “and hence” as a substitute for moral action (a lazy eighteenth-century dichotomy, if this is indeed Kant’s position), then that combination of prayer and hermeneutics renders prayer as the delusion and fetish of which Kant speaks. Hermeneutics and prayer here go hand in hand: it concerns the human-self seizing or grasping at her own moral endeavour, and claiming it for her own. This, after all, Kant says, is all the Lord’s Prayer demands!³¹

But whilst hermeneutics and prayer do indeed go hand-in-hand in this account, it is also clear which of the two hands holds the whip: hermeneutics. Apparently it doesn’t matter that hermeneutics appears to have superiority over the act itself: this would tend to give a licence to any ex post facto justification. By giving hermeneutics the whip hand, contrary to what Palmquist says, in fact Kant has categorically denied prayer any value. Nor does it matter, apparently, who is in judgment about the correctness of the hermeneutical assessment to be undertaken: the court of moral public opinion? Have we in fact lost hermeneutics here and found an Enlightenment Pelagianism instead?

So, with this exposition of Kant’s prayer, we take with us some themes and questions which provide critical context for the central claim of this article concerning Ricoeur and Williams’s hermeneutics and prayer. There is a question of the relatedness between prayer and morality. Prayer itself for Kant holds little intrinsic value; it is a means to an end—what moral actions prayer aids the self in being inspired to accomplish. Hence prayer need not, indeed ought not, be spoken, or follow set liturgies. It ought to avoid emotion. And it acts to substantiate the epistemological supremacy of the individual, an argument provocatively made by citing a passage from Scripture which points in the opposite direction. To be effective at all, prayer needs hermeneutics. As we move to consider Ricoeur and Williams, then, our eyes will be newly opened to the fact that, whilst in most cases Kant’s conclusions have been reversed by Ricoeur and Williams, the fundamental structure remains. Hermeneutics and prayer do indeed go hand in hand. But in order further to surmount that claim, there are, first, some issues of translation (διερμηνεύω (diermēneuō), again) to address.

2. Translating “appropriation”

In the Introduction, I showed a certain circularity in the inevitable question: what does “hermeneutics” mean? I then proposed to adopt Ricoeur’s definition: “the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts.”³² In order to appreciate Ricoeur’s “dispossession” in the context of hermeneutics, however, we need some more precision. To approach the meaning of the word “hermeneutics” itself brings the entailments of the interpreter. The Verstehen tradition—Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and thence to the likes of Gadamer and Heidegger, acknowledges the interpreter’s position. For instance, with Schleiermacher, the process is to understand the author better than he did himself (which still implies the interpreter’s interpretative abilities). And, with Heidegger, the process entails the interpreter’s “thrownness,” geworfenheit, the state of already having been placed in the world.

But translation is also, as I have shown, part of διερμηνεύω (diermēneuō). And we have our own issues of translation to confront: what did Ricoeur himself actually mean by the word “appropriation”—“the appropriation of meaning”? We need to answer this question because it is within Ricoeur’s own answer that the movement of dispossession becomes critical.

Let’s start with what he says:

“Appropriation” is my translation of the German term Aneignung. Aneignen means “to make one’s own” what was initially “alien.” According to the intention of the word, the aim of all hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance and historical alienation. Interpretation brings together, equalises, renders contemporary and similar. This goal is attained only insofar as interpretation actualises the meaning of the text for the present reader. Appropriation is the concept which is suitable for the actualisation of meaning as addressed to someone.³³

Straightaway there is an apparent slippage in meaning. Ricoeur does not directly explain the meaning(s) of Aneignung, but immediately sets out its cognate verb, Aneignen. There are multiple “translations” happening simultaneously.

First, the text of this essay came from a lecture course, which seems to have been given in English, apparently while Ricoeur was newly in post at Chicago.³⁴ The word “appropriation” therefore is Ricoeur’s translation of the German direct into English, neither his native tongue.³⁵

Second, while the essay “Appropriation” makes most fertile use of Gadamer and his notion of the “play” of the text, Aneignung is undoubtedly Heidegger’s word in the context of hermeneutics.³⁶

Third, what does Aneignung mean? Well, literally, “appropriation,” but also, “acquisition” (so far so like English (and French)!), but also “learning.” Like Ancient Greek, German has the facility to compound prepositions with nouns. These do not necessarily keep recognisable meanings, but they can provide hints. In this case—An and Eignung are suggestive. Eignung means “fitness” as in “suitability” or “aptitude.” An intensifies Eignung such that, if compounded, there could be the sense of “towards fitness,” “onward-” or “to fitness/aptitude.” We could take Aneignung, therefore, in the context of hermeneutics, as “towards aptitude [of interpretation].”

Fourth, what of Ricoeur’s suggestion, “Aneignen”?³⁷ This, too, carries the sense of appropriation, within, as Ricoeur rightly says, “to make one’s own.” The ontological freight of Aneignen does seem to be something of a departure from Aneignung, however.

Fifth, and finally, it is worth remarking how unhelpful “appropriation”—whether in English, German (any of the proffered options) or indeed French—is for Ricoeur’s purpose, as Ricoeur himself admits!³⁸ Granted, as I quoted above, for Ricoeur, “the aim of all hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance and historical alienation. Interpretation brings together.” Yet the process by which that “bringing together” occurs in the reader, what Ricoeur actually thinks the movement—or, as he says, “operation”—of hermeneutics to be, is the very opposite of what we might think of by “appropriation” in the sense of “acquiring.” It is “a letting-go,” and “dispossession.”³⁹ How can hermeneutics simultaneously “appropriate”—“to make one’s own,” and “let-go”—to “dispose-of”? It is to Ricoeur’s “dispossession-as-appropriation,” then, that we now turn.

3. Ricoeur’s “dispossession”: towards aptitude

To introduce Ricoeur’s hermeneutic notion of “appropriation,” and the role of “dispossession” within it, we could do worse than to start with Shakespeare. Needing little introduction is As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (II.vii). In the Prologue to Henry V, the audience is invited to “make imaginary puissance … ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings … turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass.” The invitation is not for the audience to assimilate for themselves what is happening in front of their eyes, but to recognise and accept their own involvement within a drama which is already unfolding. We are invited, in other words, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, to suspend disbelief.

To make this connection is not mere fancy.⁴⁰ Ricoeur opens “Appropriation,” by writing: “[t]o understand is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation.”⁴¹ This is not just the recognition of Gadamerian “horizons,” but it certainly does involve Gadamer’s notion of “play.”⁴²

Ricoeur adopts Gadamer’s “play” from a more general category of aesthetics, and applies it to the more particular “play” of text.⁴³ Play, for Ricoeur, is the “mode of being of appropriation.”⁴⁴ “Play,” in other words, itself “has its own way of being” which “[t]ransforms those who participate in it.” The order of priority of subjectivity implied in “play” demotes the player: “[t]he subject of aesthetic experience is not the player, but rather what ‘takes place’ in play.” In fact, play invites “the subjectivity” of the player to “forget itself,” not unlike Coleridge’s formulation.⁴⁵ This enables, for Ricoeur, a very Shakespearian (and indeed Classical) coup de théâtre: “[w]hoever plays is also played.” The “player” in ‘play’ qua text, for Ricoeur, is both author and reader. The “author” is played. She puts herself “on stage,” and hence is given in “representation.”⁴⁶ The “reader,” too, is “played.” She is “invited to undergo an imaginative variation of his ego.”⁴⁷ The reader, by virtue of the posture of reading, is an “imaginary ‘me’, created by the [text] and participating in the [textual] universe.” The work/play itself is what “has constructed the reader in his role.”⁴⁸

In this way, we can already see that hermeneutics has upended itself from a posture of subject-reinforcing interpretation (Ricoeur refers explicitly to Descartes, Kant and Husserl in this context⁴⁹), to that of forgetfulness and becoming the object of the play of the text’s subjectivity. Ricoeur highlights three such errors which are already exposed: “a surreptitious return to the Romantic pretension of recovering … the genius of the author”; the attempt slavishly to receive a text giving “primacy” to “the original audience”; and finally, “subsuming interpretation to the finite capacities of understanding of the present reader.”⁵⁰ We must get away from hermeneutics as a form of “subjectivism,” Ricoeur argues: rather, “the subject must be submitted to a critique.”⁵¹

But the “critique” of the subject in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics reveals the real movement of hermeneutics: “[r]elinquishment.” What is especially pertinent in the context of our discussion of hermeneutics and prayer, is that, for Ricoeur, this “letting-go” can only occur in the context of revelation. “Relinquishment,” Ricoeur argues:

is a fundamental moment⁵² of appropriation and distinguishes it from any form of “taking-possession.” Appropriation is also and primarily a “letting-go.” Reading is an appropriation-divestiture.⁵³ How can this letting-go, this relinquishment, be incorporated into appropriation? Essentially by linking appropriation to the revelatory power of the text we have described as its referential dimension. It is in allowing itself to be carried off towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself.⁵⁴

Appropriation and revelation; letting-go and eyes being opened. Ricoeur could not be more emphatic. “The link between hermeneutics and revelation, is, in my view, the cornerstone of … hermeneutics,” that is, “a hermeneutics which seeks both to overcome the failures of historicism and to remain faithful to the original intention of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics.”⁵⁵ This is Ricoeur’s answer, then, to the three errors identified earlier. In respect of the first error, of attempting to recover the genius of the author, he writes: “appropriation does not imply any direct congeniality of one soul with another.” In respect of the second, interpretation is not governed by the original audience’s understanding, because any text can have any reader (this is a product of distanciation—the other side of the dialectic with appropriation). In respect of the third, most significantly, appropriation does not make itself subject to the finite capacities of the subject-reader. Instead, through the text’s “projection of a world,” or “the proposal of a mode of being-in-the-world,” appropriation “is the process by which the revelation of new modes of being … gives the subject new capacities for knowing himself.”⁵⁶ The reader is not the one who “projects himself,” but “is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.”⁵⁷

So, in the movement of the text towards the reader in providing new capacities, and new modes of being in the world, appropriation is the reader’s “letting-go” in order to receive. Appropriation “ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of … It implies instead a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego.” The self, as Ricoeur coins it, is generated by the text—in contrast to the ego which “claims to precede” it. Appropriation generates new self-understanding, so long as the interpretation in question “satisfies the injunction of the text.”⁵⁸

Dispossession is the key term that I am drawing upon—sitting alongside “relinquishment,” and standing opposed to the supremacy of the subject in Kant’s hermeneutics. Ricoeur coins the neologism, “appropriation-divestiture” to try and clarify the semantic confusion of the title’s noun. Hermeneutics is not an exercise in rehabilitating the genius of the author, nor the context of the first reception of the text, nor in asserting the dominance (and limitations) of the reading subject. Instead, hermeneutics in Ricoeur’s “appropriation” subjects itself to the new mode of being presented—revealed—in the world of the text. To perform this letting-go means “allowing” oneself “to be carried off towards the reference of the text,” indeed, towards “the revelatory power of the text.”⁵⁹

4. Williams’s “dispossession”: towards integrity

Rowan Williams’s essay “Theological Integrity” is, first and foremost, an essay about theological language.⁶⁰ Characteristically, however, in the end, prayer and contemplation are revealed as being the most potent paradigms for theological language.⁶¹ Theological language is demonstrated (or assumed) to be directed to God, whether expressly (as prayer or as liturgy), or implicitly. In liturgy, theological language “attempts to be a ‘giving over’ of our words to God.”⁶² More implicitly, in an oblique reference to Prosper’s maxim lex orandi lex credendi, Williams ends Part I of the essay: “[t]he integrity of a community’s language about God… is tied to the integrity of the language it directs to God.”⁶³ How so? He begins Part II:

Language about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God: it is in this way that it becomes possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of, that which makes the human world a moral unity.⁶⁴

Thus, profoundly (if somewhat obliquely): “[s]peaking of God is speaking to God.”⁶⁵ Indeed, Williams seeks to interweave the discourse of theological language and religious practice. Prayer, for Williams, is central to the preservation of integrity in any religious practice. Even as “theology is the untangling of the real grammar of religious practice, its subject matter is,” therefore, “humanly and specifically, people who pray. [Theology]”—not hermeneutics (as in Palmquist’s Kant)—“seeks to make sense of [this] practice.”⁶⁶ The task of this Section, therefore, is to understand more nearly how Williams’s “surrendering” in prayer of both language and the subject operates. Because here, too, we find the language of “dispossession,” of “letting-go,” and, even, “appropriation.”

Answering the problematic of his title, Williams opens “Theological Integrity” by asking: “[w]hat makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’?”⁶⁷ The notion he strikes upon is “concealment.” Concealment in discourse “forecloses,” it prevents “the possibility of a genuine response,” it “presents to the hearer a set of positions and arguments other than those that are fully determinative of its working.” Thereby, concealment in discourse “steps back from the risks of conversation—above all from those two essential features of conversation, the recognition of an ‘unfinished’ quality in what has been said on either side, and the possibility of correction.”⁶⁸ There are some questions of linguistics which Ricoeur (or, for instance, Habermas) might ask here. For instance, can it ever be said that discourse and the intentions within it are naked—unconcealed? Discourse always proceeds on a range of what Ricoeur would recognise as noetic and noematic levels, some of which are communicable, some of which are not.⁶⁹

Nevertheless, looking epistemologically and ontologically at this early position which Williams has reached—in the way of a Kant or Ricoeur, perhaps—an implication is that concealment, first, has the effect of securing an untroubled subject within conversation—the ego in Ricoeur’s typology. This has political dimensions (as indeed with the unanswered question for Kant of “who is the judge of prayer”). “[I]t is manifestly a political matter,” for Williams, because concealment involves the “retention of power.”⁷⁰ Second, as Ricoeur would recognise, “concealment” forecloses the possibilities of the mode of being in the world presented by a text; distanciation is sold short by concealment.

Integrity in discourse, then, is the reverse of this concealment. It permits “answers … response and continuation … collaboration” through demonstrating its lack of finality.⁷¹ “And it does all this,” Williams continues:

by showing in its own working a critical self-perception, displaying the axioms to which it believes itself accountable; that is to say, it makes it clear that it accepts, even within its own terms of reference, that there are ways in which it may be questioned and criticized.⁷²

In other words, just like Ricoeur’s “Appropriation,” the subject in discourse must invite and submit itself to a “critique,”⁷³ an ontological but also hermeneutical exercise. Where does the power of judgement lie in this critique (the question we asked of Palmquist and his account of Kant’s hermeneutic of prayer)? Not, for Williams, any earthly moral agent, but God himself. Theology avoids totalising speech which conceals its inevitable incompleteness “by showing in its workings what is involved in bringing the complexity of its human world to judgement before God; not by seeking to articulate or to complete that judgement.”⁷⁴

How is this “bringing before God” manifest in theological discourse? Williams, remarkably, sounds both Ricoeurian and also Kantian notes in answering this subsequent question. In terms, first, of the Ricoeurian (and Heideggerian): for Williams, theological discourse takes as its mode of being in the world—takes as its text—“a story of response to God in the world and the world in God, the record of Israel and Jesus.” It is this “story” itself, then, which, in Ricoeur’s terms, “creates a frame of reference,” which allows the reader of that “story” “to be carried off towards the reference of the text.”⁷⁵ In terms, second, of the Kantian: we recall in Kant’s “prayer,” that the attitude of the “spirit of prayer” should result in the “progressive purification and elevation of the moral disposition.”⁷⁶ So, too, in Williams, by inhabiting the mode of being in the world represented by the text of the story of God and of Israel and Jesus, “imperfect, distorting responses to God … generate their own re-formation, as they seek”—progressively—“to conform to the reality of what it is and was that called them forth.”⁷⁷

This is the movement associated with Williams’s prayer. Liturgy and prayer are quintessential examples of the self being “carried off towards the reference” (per Ricoeur) of the “story of response to God in the world and the world in God” (per Williams). That story is the “play” in which we, the players, are played. Using language to participate in that play is “a ‘giving-over’ of our words to God.” Liturgy and prayer “surrenders itself to God.”⁷⁸ But this movement applies more widely than liturgy and prayer. The movement of surrendering needs to be the feature of any language that purports to be theological, in order that it is “possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of.”⁷⁹ This, then, is the justification for the remarkable statement: “[s]peaking of God is speaking to God.”⁸⁰

How does this “surrendering” in theological language occur? Through two forms of linguistic humility: the language of repentance and the language of sacrifice. We have already approached repentance, first, through the notion of self-critique, the critique of subjectivity, perhaps. Williams develops this further: “religious discourse must articulate and confront its own temptations, its own falsehoods … not in narcissism but in penitence.”⁸¹ This pertains not only for “this or that specific conclusion” of the discourse itself, but also the question of the “adequacy or appropriateness of” its style—“its whole idiom.”⁸² There is to be a penitence, in other words, which affects the formal aspect of the language as much as its reference.

Second, the linguistics of sacrifice, and finally to “dispossession.” Theological language must “lose control.” There is “cost to us” in trying to accommodate something in our language which is “irreducibly other than itself.”⁸³ Our speech “must on no account absorb” that irreducibility “into itself.”⁸⁴ This would fall into the third error identified by Ricoeur in hermeneutics of “subsuming interpretation to the finite capacities of understanding of the present reader.” And, of course, the refusal of any such absorption is a refusal, too, of Kant’s “spirit of prayer” within the bounds of reason. Instead, language about and to God must “articulate the sense of answering to a reality not already embedded in the conventions of speech.”⁸⁵

How is that “sacrifice of praise” best articulated in relation to its impact on the self, for Williams? Through “dispossession.” Turning to the liturgies of baptism and eucharist, Williams continues:

words and actions are given over to be moulded to the shape of a moment in history … Here the action of praise necessarily involves evoking a moment of dispossession, of death, in order to bring the novum of God into focus: baptism speaks … of a loss … eucharist enacts a breaking.⁸⁶

Understood in this way as the movement of “dispossession,” theological language, prayer, and worship—as much as hermeneutics—enacts the appropriate posture of the self in discourse, or the self-standing before a text. “Praise of God” ought not simply to “collapse back upon itself as a mere articulation of religious emotion,” in other word’s Kant’s subject standing forth with moral uprightness. Rather, “it involves ‘the labour, the patience and the pain of the negative’”—a neat description of the posture of hermeneutics, let alone prayer—“a dispossession in respect of what is easily available for religious language.”⁸⁷

How is this “dispossession” best characterised? Once again, in terms which, in bearing comparison with Ricoeur, sound a quietly combative note with Kant. “Dispossession,” Williams writes, “is … the suspension of the ordinary categories of ‘rational’ speech.” The single inverted commas for “‘rational’” are Williams’s. Could he be thinking of “religion within rational bounds”? Just as Ricoeur has done before him, Williams then moves more squarely against Kant’s Copernican revolution: “at a more pervasive level,” Williams continues, dispossession “is a dispossession of the human mind conceived as central to the order of the world.”⁸⁸

Dispossession evokes, therefore, for Williams, “the most radical level of prayer”—contemplation.⁸⁹ Sounding his most resonantly Ricoeurian note, Williams characterises this form of prayer as “a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world.”⁹⁰ “Appropriating vulnerability” stands alongside Ricoeur’s “appropriation as letting-go”—“appropriation-divestiture,”⁹¹ “Aneignung- dépouiller.” The “appropriation” in both instances is negatively-capable: there is dispossession as opposed to acquisition. Both “appropriations” eschew the propulsion of ego into theological discourse, into prayer, into hermeneutics. Rather, appropriation in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, and Williams’s language of prayer, requires the movement of dispossession.

Whilst both occur with the same movement, then, there is a distinctive quality, however. The dispossession in Ricoeur is a “divesting,” a “letting-go,” an unclothing, even. However, in Williams, the “dispossession” is more clearly of the pretence of power, or of the dominance of the subject. Williams’s “dispossession” involves the embrace or at least the recognition and acceptance of brokenness, of finitude, and of death, even.⁹²

It is in this sense, therefore, that Williams can conclude, programmatically, that theology—not hermeneutics—“seeks to make sense of” prayer, understood as “the practice of dispossessed language ‘before God.’”⁹³ But, as Williams has already said, words about God simply are already words to God. Theology itself, therefore, if and when manifesting integrity, is “the practice of dispossessed language ‘before God.’” And with the same movement, as I have shown, hermeneutics is the linguistic practice of the dispossessed self “before texts.”

5. Conclusion

This article has taken a “risk of conversation,” within Williams’s meaning.⁹⁴ That is, it has introduced and begun a conversation between Ricoeur and Williams, and introduced and begun a conversation concerning the philosophical discipline of hermeneutics and the posture adopted in the Christian tradition of prayer. I have not claimed, here, to have given the final word on this interdisciplinary connection, just as there is no real evidence that Williams was thinking of Ricoeur when he wrote “Theological Integrity,” nor is there likely to be any evidence that Ricoeur was implicitly thinking of prayer when he wrote about hermeneutics.

Equally, in embarking on this interdisciplinary venture, of bringing hermeneutics and prayer into conversation, an attempt has been made, like the best hermeneutics (as Ricoeur would say), “to bring together, equalise, render contemporary and similar.”⁹⁵ The posture of prayerfulness, of dispossession or of appropriating vulnerability, is the posture of Ricoeur’s hermeneut, whose eyes are opened by the appropriation of the revelation of the reference in the text itself. Similarly, the posture of hermeneutics, of encountering a new mode of being in the world in the play of the text, is the posture of Williams’s prayerful encounter of God, where one’s mouth, in response, is made to express language that cannot conform, because of the irreducible otherness of that which it speaks.

Kant’s contribution to this conversation has been to clarify and draw out key movements in both Ricoeur and Williams, more often than not by their contrast, but sometimes also by their similarity. One can see, for instance, put positively, the “spirit of prayer” as a form of quiet contemplation, eschewing “mere” words for their deceptions, mere liturgies for their impoverished substitution of grace over action. For sure, Kant does not answer the “prayerfulness of hermeneutics”; but, as Palmquist demonstrates, there certainly is a proposal in Kant of a hermeneutical posture alongside prayer, notwithstanding the rather worrying unanswered questions which such a posture provokes. Indeed, Kant’s “prayer” manifests the opposite of “dispossession,” a grasping of the self into moral endeavour.

Hermeneutics is impoverished without a posture of “prayerfulness” before the relevant text. Whilst we might argue, with Williams, that theology is the hermeneutic instrument of prayer—not “hermeneutics”—prayer does, nevertheless, go hand in hand with hermeneutics, with διερμηνεύω (diermēneuō), in the revelatory reference which comes through the dispossession of the self before a text and before God. To read and to pray is to be played. But the promise is to have our worlds enlarged by the reaching out of that which plays us.

Footnotes