Meditation on Ritual

Rever: Revista de Estudos da Religião 5:100–107, 2005

This essay looks at recent theory of ritual. It argues that an overemphasis on texts in the study of religion has led to a misleading analysis of ritual as a symbolic site of meaning. On the other hand, attempts to study ritual on its own terms, primarily by attending to formal elements, suggest that the study of ritual is separable from the study of religion. At the same time, this work promises to give ritual studies a more central role in the study of religion.

Religions, 2015

Contemporary philosophy of religion is often focused, at a theoretical level, on the epistemic value of religious doctrines, and at a practical level, on the possible impact of organized religion on secular society and politics. However, the cultic dimension of religion, such as prayer, religious service, ascetic practices, and other rituals, is considered as completely "irrational" and incomprehensible from a secular perspective and therefore often neglected by postmodern philosophy. The paper intends to call into question this rather simplistic interpretation by retracing the historical origins of the devaluation of religious symbolism in occidental thought, which culminates in Kant's philosophy of religion. We then shall analyze to what extent certain paradoxical aspects of Habermas' view on religion can be interpreted as consequences of the dilemma brought about by the Kantian dichotomy between man as moral subject and man as natural, sensible being. In a third step, we shall develop an alternative, phenomenological interpretation, which does not consider religious practice as a primitive, irrational phenomenon but as a proto-ethical schematism that aims at integrating the sphere of pure practical reason into the rhythmic structure of living, embodied consciousness.

International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2018

As a postscript to this special issue, the author reflects on the difference between religion and ritual by drawing a comparison with culture and nature. In the same way that culture and nature are entangled yet distinct, so too religion and ritual are best understood as a paradoxical configuration of spiritual deliberation and unconscious desire. It is argued that religion and ritual exceed and depend on each other in equal measure as the organism explores new modes of living.

International Journal for The Psychology of Religion, 2012, 22, 89-92

Religions, 2021

This paper outlines a strain of French Spiritualism, a philosophical tradition extending from Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, and Jules Lachelier to their reception in the work of Maurice Blondel and his protégé Henry Duméry. In receiving and transforming this tradition, Blondel and Duméry have helped to provide a distinct philosophical paradigm in philosophy of religion, capable of providing insight into the spiritual nature of the human being, both in how spirituality relates to the advanced stages of religious culture in addition to its primitive presence in spontaneous action. As a tradition consecrated to the study of human consciousness, and the operations of the mind [l’esprit], the French spiritualist tradition provides a rich conceptual matrix for analyzing the nature of human thinking and its relationship to action. In such an analysis of human thought, Maurice Blondel set up a moral psychology and metaphysical anthropology, highlighting how the consciousness of the human...

1996

Ritual is a representative topos of both disciplines. We do not understand it as a text but a way of life in which the realization of Beauty and Good is leading to the Truthful. In this transformative process one experiences "being struck by the abyss", experience of giving to the Unknown, allowing being taken by it. In this "being-in" is the evidence of the ritual; "being-out" of it is the presumption of possibility to articulate it. Talking "happens" always from the position of the one "standing out". Therefore, the ritual as a text appears to us as a "reading without the Other", con-versing without a collocutor. To converse without a collocutor is a mere sounding of the Unessential. The momentariness of ritual encounter as the deepest dimension of "showing itself" is also a dimension of its disappearing. Attempt in catching it means its death. Only in the death of the ritual, anthropology and science of religio...

Ritual, 1987

This article first appeared in the First Edition (1987) of the Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade,, v. 12, pp. 405-422, and is reproduced here as it was reprinted without changes (aside from a bibliographic update) in the Second Edition (2005), ed. Lindsay Jones, v. 11, pp. 7833-7848. It first presents a definition of ritual as it appears in religious contexts, and then surveys the various theoretical approaches that have dominated academic study, developing out of this an analysis that seeks to do justice to the multivalent and multileveled nature of religious ritual itself.

Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 1997