Guilt, Confession, and Forgiveness: From Methodology to Religious Experiencing in Paul Ricœur’s Phenomenology

My approach to religious experience in Paul Ricœur’s phenomenology of religion consists in the primordial hypothesis that the basic question of phenomenology can be formulated by virtue of the reality of the experienced thing. The aim of the essay is to show the way Ricœur connected the phenomenological and hermeneutic problematics of Being to the fundamental ethical dimension of phenomenological ontology, that is, the way the fundamental ontology of phenomenology essentially belongs to individual religious questioning. Based on the two poles of the investigation, I will focus on the questions of (1) how religious experiences reflect on reality and (2) how the methodology of phenomenology leads to the wider ontology of theology. According to my hypothesis, the two divergent approaches to religious experiences find their source in the phenomenological reflection on reality, and this reality, in view of the substantially nonreal experience of religiosity, urges the creation of a new ontology in the gift of revelation.