Abstract
In this paper, I examine the place of material nature with regard to the liturgical thought of both Jean-Yves Lacoste and Jean-Luc Marion. I contend that, in both cases, the analysis of the place of spatiotemporal reality and material nature is deficient, and I look to the possible contributions of the Russian Orthodox writers Theophan the Recluse and Pavel Florensky toward a fuller phenomenology of both liturgy and nature. I hold that the two open up the possibility of a fundamental continuity between so-called earthly life and religious experience. I thus attempt to develop an ecophenomenological nuancing of the accounts of both Lacoste and Marion in conversation with the thought of Florensky and Theophan.
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Notes
- 1.
Lacoste 2004, 19: “Before the world reveals to us that we are these without feeling at home, and before the earth offers itself as shelter, dwelling place, and homeland, world and earth comprise the double secret of place.”
- 2.
Ibid., 21.
- 3.
Ibid., 34–37. “Between the world of life and the liturgical field there is, then, a cognitive delay. We have no immediate way of knowing what would grant legitimacy to liturgy: according to the Husserlian concept, life is atheistic. And, in a way, the world of life is what must be overcome so that man can face God” (103). “Atheism is never simply nor in the first place a theoretical problem: it is first what is a priori to existence” (105).
- 4.
Ibid., 49.
- 5.
Ibid., 34.
- 6.
Ibid., 46.
- 7.
Ibid., 30–31.
- 8.
Ibid., 87.
- 9.
Ibid., 46.
- 10.
Ibid., 77–80 on vigil; on corporeality, 37–38.
- 11.
Theophan the Recluse 2001, 29–30.
- 12.
Ibid., 34–36.
- 13.
Heidegger 1993, 108: “But if the nothing becomes any problem at all, then this opposition does not merely undergo a somewhat more significant determination; rather, it awakens for the first time the proper formulation of the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings. The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings.”
- 14.
Marion 1998, 169–187.
- 15.
Ibid., 188.
- 16.
Marion 2002a, 53.
- 17.
Ibid., 222.
- 18.
Ibid., 225. Cf. Marion 2013.
- 19.
Ibid., 222–223.
- 20.
Ibid., 227: “The saturated phenomenon in the end establishes the truth of all phenomenality because it marks, more than any other phenomenon, the givenness from which it comes.”
- 21.
Ibid., 189.
- 22.
Ibid., 220–221, 228–232. Cf. Marion 2002b.
- 23.
Ibid., 215.
- 24.
Florensky 1996, 46.
- 25.
Ibid., 59.
- 26.
Ibid., 63.
- 27.
At this would be unable to be gazed upon simply because it would thus be subject to the myriad psychosocial detritus that Florensky refers to, thus subject to the constitution of the lifeworldly I that Marion critiques, thus subject to the pall of death and the vicissitudes of facticity that Lacoste laments.
- 28.
Florensky 1997, 207–210, 228–230.
- 29.
Ibid., 254.
- 30.
Ibid., 236.
- 31.
- 32.
Marion and Carlson 1994.
- 33.
Florensky 1996, 165.
- 34.
As regards the theological knowledge so discussed by Lacoste 2004.
- 35.
This goes doubly for the supposed “phenomenology” of the liturgy: it almost goes without saying that, short of Florensky’s discussing the wood-and-paint iconostasis, little of what has come before has much to do with the typical layperson’s set of experiences of the liturgy. Cf. Gschwandtner 2014.
- 36.
Cf. Gschwandtner 2014.
- 37.
Marion 2002a, 189.
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DuPée, C.A. (2019). Sight and Sacrament: The Place of Nature in Religious Experience. In: Louchakova-Schwartz, O. (eds) The Problem of Religious Experience. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21575-0_12
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