A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur

Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious

Religious Belief The Difficult Path of the Religious PA U L R I C O E U R Dear friends, In agreeing to this title for my address to this prestigious group of conferences for 2000, I chose to add to it a more problematic subtitle: ‘‘the difficult path of the religious.’’ I propose, under the aegis of this heading, to transform certain objections and accusations addressed to believers into intimate difficulties for their belief itself. It is in particular the threats of intolerance and violence contained in religious belief that I want to confront , by calling upon the resources of self-criticism that the intelligence inherent in such belief is able to mobilize. Capable Man, Recipient of the Religious To begin, I would like to answer the question that I take to be a precondition to the entire discussion. The question is as follows: what is the recipient of the religious message and thus the bearer of religious belief? In other words, in which area of my existence am I touched by the religious problematic? I answer this: it is in my desire to be, in my capacity to exist, that the arrow of the religious comes to hit me. I have adopted in my works on philosophical anthropology a condensed expression that serves as a heading for detailed analyses, the expression capable man. Under this expression I gather all the figures of power and impotence, as indicated by linguistic constructions using the auxiliary verb can. Power is the whole of what I can do; impotence, the sum of what I cannot. In the broad sense 27 of the word, it is about an approach to the human phenomenon in terms of acting and suffering, of praxis and pathos. This is why I readily designate the human as an acting and suffering being. I will briefly point out the major divisions under which I place the examination of his capacities and incapacities. I will thus give an idea of the extent of the problems of the capable man. Four key headings deserve to be considered: a) the capacity for speech of a speaker who can say something about something to somebody; b) the capacity for action of an incarnated agent able to produce changes in the world, to bring events about; c) the capacity for recounting of a historical subject in search of identity in time; d) finally, the capacity for imputation of a moral subject responsible for the acts in which she recognizes herself as the true author. Under each of these headings there are incapacities, specific impotencies that correspond to the capacity to speak, to do, to tell, and to impute to oneself the responsibility for one’s own acts. Of course it is such a being of power and impotence— such a capable man—who is the recipient of the religious message. I propose to introduce the religious problematic as did Kant in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, starting from a meditation on evil. We will see in a moment that this is but one entry point into what one could call the negative facet of the religious phenomenon. But this approach has the advantage of making the religious appear at the heart of the problematic of the capable man. It is indeed to a specific incapacity that the religious offers an answer, a word: the incapacity to do the good oneself. That which is called bad will, captive free will, servant-will is about an easily identifiable experience: it is felt as an intimate binding of oneself by oneself . This experience that Pascal, before Kant, called ‘‘the misery of man’’ inscribes itself into all the other modalities of weakness, of vulnerability, that make the capable man a fragile being, and, thanks to a mysterious failing, a guilty man. That the religious problematic is moreover likely to reach us through experiences of abundance will readily be granted once the positive facet of the religious is brought to light. But the exaggeration engendered by a meditation on ‘‘radical evil’’ in the Kantian manner has the advantage of making the religious appear from the direction of a fault, of a defect, of a break, beyond which the happy continuity between the new capacities engendered by the religious and the more fundamental capacities constitutive of the human being could be restored. In order to prevent any misunderstanding relating to this entry into the religious by way of the dark side...