Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Seventeen: Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce

s e v e n t e e n eucharistic imagination in merleau-Ponty and James Joyce Richard Kearney some of my best memories of Gerald Hanratty are of various conversations , when i was a student and later a colleague of his at university College Dublin, on the philosophy of religion. His passion for interdisciplinary research, spanning philosophy, theology, history, and the arts, was infectious, and i always guarded a deep admiration for his generous method and imagination. i offer the following reflections on the “eucharistic imagination” in phenomenology (merleau-Ponty) and literature (James Joyce) in homage to such an inspiring mentor and friend. merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Flesh Husserl blazed a path toward a phenomenology of the flesh when he broached the crucial theme of embodiment in Ideas ii, a theme largely ignored by Western metaphysics since Plato. this may seem strange 415 416 Richard Kearney given that almost fifteen hundred years of the history of metaphysics composed what Gilson called the “Christian synthesis” of Greek and biblical thought. But metaphysics (with some exceptions) managed to take the flesh and blood out of Christian incarnation, leaving us with abstract conceptual and categorical equivalents. it would take Husserl and the modern phenomenological revolution to bring Western philosophy back to the flesh of prereflective lived experience. Husserl himself, however, for all his talk of returning us to the “things themselves,” remained caught in the nets of transcendental idealism and never quite escaped the limits of theoretical cognition. Heidegger took a step closer to the flesh with his existential analytic of “moods” and “facticity,” but the fact remains that Heideggerian Dasein has no real body at all: it does not eat or sleep or have sex. it too remains, despite all its talk of “being-in-the-world,” captive of the transcendental snare. While scheler made sorties into a phenomenology of feeling and sartre offered fine insights into shame and desire, it was really only with merleau-Ponty that we witnessed a credible return to the flesh—and not just as cipher, project, or icon but as flesh itself in all its ontological depth. Here at last the ghost of Cartesian and Kantian idealism is laid, as we finally return to the body in all its unfathomable thisness. it is telling, i think, that merleau-Ponty chose to describe his phenomenology of the sensible body in sacramental language, amounting to what we might call—without the slightest irreverence—a eucharist of profane perception. in the Phenomenology of Perception (1944) we read: Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, provided that they are inwardly prepared, in the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance , but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a form of communion.1 eucharistic imagination in merleau-Ponty and James Joyce 417 this is a bold analogy for an existentialist writing in France in the 1940s, a time when close colleagues like sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus considered militant atheism as de rigueur. merleau-Ponty goes on to sound this eucharistic power of the sensible as follows: “i am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. if the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.”2 We shall have occasion to refer below to numerous idioms of eucharistic empathy in the work of James Joyce. suffice it for now to note the curious paradox that precisely when merleau-Ponty traces the phenomenological return all the way down to the lowest rung of experience (in the old metaphysical ladder, the sensible) he discovers the most sacramental act of communion, or what he also likes to...