Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Let It Be: Finding Grace with God through the Gelassenheit of the Annunciation

 Let It Be: Finding Grace with God through the Gelassenheit of the Annunciation R O S E E L L E N D U N N Who listens to the Annunciation that Mary makes? To the memory or the experience she attests? The excess to a certain God who speaks through her? luce irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche In this essay I read the narrative of the Annunciation as a text that describes a phenomenological event, an event in which there is a manifestation of the divine to an experiencing subject. Using the understanding of releasement that flows from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius to Martin Heidegger, I propose to create a theoretical framework for interpreting the Annunciation as a moment of releasement, or Gelassenheit. Since this reading is primarily phenomenological, the essay will begin with a discussion of the theological possibilities present in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. These possibilities will then be interwoven with the work of Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida. Luce Irigaray’s feminist interpretation of the Annunciation provides a foundation for thinking about Mary as a gendered subject, an example of a feminine incarnation of divinity. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers a means to think about the gift of possibility that is given in the event of the Annunciation. Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of prayer and testimony invites further thought on the speech of the Annunciation as well as the speech of the Magnificat. With this theoretical framework in place, I explore an interpretation of the Annunciation as an event of Gelassenheit which springs from a 330 兩 l e t i t b e: f i nd i n g g r a ce w i th g o d mutual gift of love. This essay will suggest that the text of the Annunciation is infused with possibility. Filled with grace, Mary is invited by the divine into possibility; responding in grace, she in turn invites the divine into possibility. Grace, springing from the desire of the divine as well as the responsive desire of Mary, draws both Mary and the divine into the very possibility that it creates—the possibility for an intermingling of the self and the divine in a mystical union of love. Transgressing the limits of language, this possibility slips into an apophatic moment of Gelassenheit, a mutual ‘‘letting-be’’ or releasement of both Mary and the divine, which then overflows into the song of the Magnificat. PHENOMENOLOGY A ND THE THEOLOGICAL: HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger provides possibilities for thinking theologically as a phenomenologist. Although much of Husserl’s phenomenology suspends, or brackets, the question of the transcendence of God, there are suggestions in later manuscripts that Husserl himself allowed for an openness of the Transcendental I to the divine. As Richard Kearney observes, ‘‘The God of Husserl’s phenomenology is . . . a God of an intuition so deep that it surpasses and overflows all our intentions . . . a God of testimony and empathy, of suffering and action, of passion and compassion.’’1 The manifestation of the divine to an experiencing subject is, even for Husserl, an experience of excess, and of possibility. Husserl’s phenomenological method begins with the experience of the life-world. Phenomenology, for Husserl, is a descriptive science: the task of phenomenology is to describe what appears to consciousness in the manner in which it appears to consciousness. ‘‘I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space,’’ Husserl observed, ‘‘endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it.’’2 The phenomenological method intuitively leads to the description of what Husserl calls the ‘‘wonder of all wonders’’: the pure I and pure consciousness (‘‘Das Wunder aller Wunder ist reines Ich und reines Bewußstein’’).3 In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl suggested that ‘‘the subjective Apriori precedes the being of God and the world, the being of everything , individually and collectively, for me, the thinking subject. Even r ose e l le n d un n 兩 33 1 God is for me what he is, in consequence of my own productivity of consciousness.’’4 In Husserlian phenomenology, any understanding of God must be intuited through a manifestation of God to the experiencing subject in the absolute...