Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952-)
The doctor slaps the baby; she cries. Thus commences a life of breathing. Whether breathing consciously or unconsciously, she acts: contracting diaphragm and intercostal muscles, she lifts the rib cage, increasing the volume of the thorax and, thereby, of the lungs. This increased volume results in decreased air pressure within the lungs. Since nature abhors a vacuum, air (which always already surrounds her nasal and oral passages, awaiting such a vacuum) rushes to fill the lungs: she inhales. By relaxing the muscles, she decreases lung volume. The air obeys its preference for low pressures and vacates the body: she exhales. She invites the breath, which nonetheless arrives of its own accord. Further, she is first provoked and taught how to invite the breath by another: the doctor, from whom she receives the capacity to invite. Who, then, is responsible for the breath? She herself? The doctor (whose own breath precedes him as well)? The air? In a similar contradiction, breath makes speech possible, but speech also makes breath possible, since breath necessarily arrives in a first cry. Which accounts for the other? Likewise, who accounts for them both? And who accounts for my faith?
In “Wounded speech”, Jean-Louis Chrétien addresses the indissociable interrelation and intersubjectivity of many apparent dichotomies: listening and speaking, asking and receiving, individual and community, and call and response. He examines these relationships by way of an analysis of prayer. For him, prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, for it alone opens up the religious dimension within which sacrifice, Eucharist, and other religious experiences take place; each presupposes prayer. Prayer is difficult to describe, however, for it takes many forms; further, it is difficult to describe prayer phenomenologically without positing the existence of the being to whom the believer prays, thereby lapsing into metaphysics. Chrétien manages these difficulties by limiting his study to prayer as an act of speech, asking what role speech plays in this act.
In the act of prayer, a person manifests herself to a being in whom she believes, but whom she cannot see. Prayer is an act of presence to the invisible, an anthropophany (a manifestation of man). This act of presence involves utter, unreserved self-exposure; it concerns the body’s posture, gestures, location, and the whole range of voice and emotion. As for the involvement of spirit, it would be counter-phenomenological to assume that the purest manifestation of the spirit is nonvocal (as some opponents of prayer assume), so instead of discounting voice as spiritually essential to self-manifestation in prayer, Chrétien asks these questions: “What are the functions of speech in prayer? What is the importance in prayer of (familiar) address? Why give voice to it”?[1]
Regarding the third question, one objection often raised is that, if God is omniscient, he need not be told anything. The objection is correct; speech in prayer, then, functions not to teach God, but to teach and act upon us. “My speech rebounds on to myself and affects me . . . much more [than usual] in so far as it is not aimed at me”.[2] In a spoken act of request, we confess God as giver and dispossess ourselves of pride; we can only be dispossessed of pride in this way by making a request, which further requires that we speak to someone else. Speaking, then, in the context of prayer, causes me to take up new beliefs about who God is and who I therefore am. One’s self-manifestation to an invisible other in prayer thus becomes a manifestation of oneself to oneself through the other.[3]
Spoken prayer relates to truth partially through truth statements it affirms. In saying “Our Father”, I affirm my own sonship (God is my Father), the history of salvation (God has become my Father), the Trinity (I pray to a Father who has a Son, and among them is a shared Spirit), and ecclesiology (God is not only My Father, but Ours). Since performing a prayer involves making such implicit statements, does prayer require that we already affirm what is true before we begin, or is prayer itself a struggle for truth? One common objection to prayer rejects both possible answers to this question: if we are corrupt, our requests are unjust and merely defer any possible repentance, but if we are virtuous through our own acts, we need not pray. To answer this objection, Chrétien points out that prayer is an encounter, which is a type of event. Events necessarily recompose us; every event is “epoch-making”.[4] Whoever truly stands before God by addressing God confesses the divine holiness and is in this event dispossessed of all beliefs about her own holiness. Only in the encounter of prayer does one learn that one does not know how to pray.
This is an important claim. Negative theology, by contrast, claims that we know prior to praying that we cannot pray (because we cannot adequately posit who God is); this is what keeps us from praying, and our perpetually frustrated attempts to do so are the primary way in which we know God. Consider Chrétien’s counterargument by analogy to the process of muscle growth: only by pushing the body to muscle failure, to its limits, does the body become convinced enough of its frailty compared to the tasks it now believes it will again face as to devote precious resources to growing new muscle tissue. Likewise, neuron connections develop in my memory only when I struggle unsuccessfully to recall some piece of information. Only in experiencing this failure does the brain begin seeking a way to locate and connect the information to my request, sometimes suddenly surprising me later on by bringing the desired fact to my attention. For Chrétien, prayer that truly breaks through our limits can only arise after we have dwelt in and suffered through failed attempts to pray. In fact, every prayer begins with a kind of struggle to truly address God and have something to say to God. As a result, prayer is always thankful; it always thanks God for the gift of itself, which we were theretofore incapable of producing. It thanks God for the very ability to turn towards God. Our receipt of this ability presents itself as a preliminary answer to the foremost request within every prayer, the request for the ability to turn to God.
Prayer “does not begin, it responds”; as we become unsure of our own rightness in prayer, we are assured that in prayer alone our speech can struggle for truth and become upright.[5] We invite God to rend our closure toward God; we rage against that within us which does not want to call out to God, against the rage within us. We become aware of our selfish reasons for praying, and we bring these too before God. Thus, prayer cannot distinguish between authentic and inauthentic motivation, and we always pray both because we are clean and because we want to be made clean. God rends my self-enclosure and my inauthenticity, my sinful nature, precisely when I address God. Taken as an address, “My God” does not mean “the God who is mine” (although we do sometimes use it in this way), but “the God whose I am, to whom I belong unreservedly” (as in “my king” or “my community”).
Chrétien here takes a stance contrary to that of negative theology, which holds that God can only be addressed aright in negative descriptions which renounce the possibility of personal address. In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, Derrida claims that “To speak for nothing . . . is not to speak to no one”.[6] And yet, for him, one must do so in such a way that “The promise of which I shall speak will have always escaped [the] demand of presence”.[7] Against this, Chrétien claims that only in familiarly addressing the Other (and thereby positing certain attributes of the Other, which are surely incorrect, at least initially; in speaking for something) do I truly acknowledge the Other’s otherness, ownness, non-objectness. By doing so, I invite the Other, God, to become present, and God does. What Chrétien holds in common with Derrida is that, for both of them, God cannot become present in the world as an object we can control. Chrétien adds to this that God can manifest Godself in the world: not as an object, but through our own words and actions. We speak and see that God has spoken in us, or we act and discover that we have been altered from without. As with negative theology, this makes what we do learn about God difficult to put into words or doctrines (i.e., objects) apart from the experience of the prayers themselves. For Chrétien, objects alone cannot be familiar, and selves alone can be familiar. Familiar address, then, maintains rather than violates God’s transcendence, thereby fulfilling the goal of negative theology (maintaining God's transcendence) in a positive way. Even to stand in silence before this transcendence, as negative theologians propose is the sole appropriate form of worship, is a positive act with an addressee, not a privation of speech, as only speech can fall silent, and it is only provoked to fall silent in the presence of someone else. Only in saying You is the I “laid open to all that it cannot master”.[8]
Prayer, then, is “an ordeal, an undergoing of God, a suffering of God, a theopathy . . . a prey to its addressee”.[9] We address speech to the divine capacity to listen, which is always already vigilant and requires no call to attention. All we seek to hide, to justify, to excuse, is laid bare before the omniscient silence we address; in lieu of any particular spoken reprimand from the divine, we suffer all imaginable accusation, rejection, and exposure. This trauma (from Greek, literally “wound”) arises insofar as we address God and permit our inward confinement to be broken, creating an opening into the circle of speech and dialogue. Our speech not only responds to God’s listening, but consists itself in listening; only by speaking to God do we fully attend to God, i.e., listen to God. Only by thus redirecting one's listening can one cease listening to the murmuring turmoil of one’s own inner monologue. By listening to God in speech, we also listen to the new selves we have thereby become, to what we really want to say beyond our murmuring. This quality of making us listen to ourselves extends to speech in general. E. M. Forster pithily captures this idea in his question: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say”?[10] By speaking, I “see what I say”: by manifesting myself outwardly, not only others, but I, too, learn what I think. On the other side of the event, my surprise at what I have done resembles my surprise the moment after having thrown a punch in a fight: Did I really just do that? Was that me? It is now. My thoughts become my own by being articulated and concretized in language, which is inherently public and shared.
As we listen to God by speaking to God, God speaks to us by giving us desire for God, and God does so through our own speech. The newfound desire which we could not previously access is, as mentioned, an answer to the prayer which precedes the prayer, but it is also God’s self-disclosure to us. I do not miraculously hear some other voice apart from my own; I miraculously hear the voice of another welling up within my own voice.[11] I continue praying in the hope that God will more fully inhabit my words and that my new desire for God will transform the desires behind my requests so that it may be more truly said that it is God who is praying in me.
In being spoken aloud and thereby made external, prayer becomes public, even if I am the only witness; as self-manifestation, prayer must be made external. When we pray using words, but silently, we still transform our thoughts into something public, language. My thoughts become words of which I am aware, creating a separation between "I" and "that of which I am aware"; by becoming words (objects of consciousness), my thoughts leave me and become external to me whether or not I speak them aloud to others. We pray before others; others involve themselves in our requests, and we in theirs; even when we pray privately, we acknowledge that we pray as part of a living Body (even alone, we say “Our Father”). Prayer blurs distinction between private and collective action: “Solitary prayer is only ever, as it were, a provisional detachment from collective prayer . . . and collective prayer . . . is rooted in the act proper to each of them”.[12] In prayer we discover a unique mode of community through speech.In light of this communal aspect of prayer, it is not at all antithetical to the “authenticity” of prayer to use prescribed words; in praying psalms, for instance, one lets oneself be interpreted by the psalm, remembering one’s own trials (to explain those in the psalm) and anticipating the fulfillment the psalm will take in one’s own changed life. This new embodiment of the psalm makes it one’s own. Chrétien goes so far as to say that we cannot help but pray in place of and on behalf of all others, of all creation which cannot pray; in showing oneself to the invisible, one opens an eyehole in which one cannot help but also see the invisible God and show God not only oneself but all that is visible.
What are the implications of this analysis of prayer for phenomenology? Chrétien maintains that we can intend and to some degree intuit content which does not appear in the world, God, and that the intention and intuition thereof are precisely the way in which God appears (or is heard) in the world. His account resembles Marion’s typology of the gift: by making the addressee of speech invisible, all components of speech (speaker, addressee, and semantic content) are called into question and reconstituted in such a way that speech becomes possible. We begin as self-enclosed sinners who cannot see God and have nothing to say to God (and so we lack all three components of speech). Yet this surfeit of impossibility alone results in prayer. The very preponderance of obstacles causes the break by which we enter the hermeneutical circle. If we could hear God some other way than through our own or other’s voices and actions in the world, then prayer would be truly impossible. There would be no wound, no lack into which a call could enter. But how could anything which is not manifest in the world manifest itself in any way other than through what is already in it? How could God enter us except through ourselves? How could God enter our minds if not through our own thoughts? Chrétien elegantly describes the leap into speech without recourse to analytic principles of adequate communication or to Hirschean or any other foundational structures of interpretation. His description also helps to explain a problem in Husserlian intentionality: how do we intend what we have not already intuited? Or, to conjure an even older problem: how do we learn what we have not already learned? The element of "always-already" in the eternally precedent call means that we have already intuited and learned, but not by way of an object. This precedence cannot be explained using the traditional visual metaphor for knowledge, so Chrétien develops a new aural metaphor (hence his focus on voice). He further shows that these two metaphors are inextricably intertwined; we "see" God through our speech, and we "hear" God by making our speech into an object of our consciousness.
Chrétien describes this process, this wounding by the call of what was in us, in a way in which, paradoxically, both we and God are inseparably co-responsible for what ensues. This may suggest a “third way” between extreme Calvinism and extreme Arminianism. All possibility to respond comes from God, yet we may or may not choose to respond, and this coming-from-God arrives only if we do respond and arrives through our own willed speech. God underlies our acts of faith, but does not coerce them; if we choose to pray, God may meet us there. This would reject the belief of Calvinism that God chooses who will act in faith (and that our desire for God, for those of us who have it, precedes our actions), and it rejects the belief of Arminianism that we are actively responsible for our desire of God. This is certainly an oversimplification of both positions, but Chrétien's aural metaphor for knowledge seems to offer new resources to both traditions. Chrétien suggests that, insofar as prayer finds and gives thanks for and on behalf of all creation, the kingdom of God arrives through our prayer: “The human voice becomes a place in which the world can return to God”.[13] This suggests a third way between the alleged “social gospel” and the evangelical gospel of individual substitutionary atonement. The "social gospel" (as its opponents explain it) profanes God by claiming that we can do God's work of saving the world on our own; in the individual atonement gospel (as its opponents explain it), we selfishly remove ourselves from those in need as we anticipate God restoring the world in the future in some way apart from our own actions. In the "third way" that suggests itself through Chrétien (and which I can only claim to gesture toward), we and God are, again, co-responsible for the renewal of creation, God through us and we through God, just as our speech and breath are responsible for one another and we and God are responsible for them both. This new creation may arise, then, in similar cooperative fashion to the first creation, in which we first gained breath. All over again, in the divine silence which follows and completes God’s command, “Let there be light”, all creation listens to God by singing God's praise, the praise God sings through it, and thereby finds its voice.
[1] Chrétien, Jean-Louis, "Wounded speech", trans. Andrew Brown, in The Ark of Speech (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
[2] Ibid., 21.
[3] Ibid., 22.
[4] Ibid., 23.
[5] Ibid., 25.
[6] Derrida, Jacques, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials", trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold G. Coward and Toby Foshay (New York: State University Press, 1992), 76.
[7] Ibid., 84. Derrida has numerous points of agreement with Chrétien; for instance, Derrida writes on page 98 that “the power of speaking and of speaking well of God already proceeds from God". We can thus consider Chrétien to build on and develop unique resources within the tradition of negative theology.
[8] Chrétien, Ark, 27.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), chapter 5.
[11] Chrétien, Ark, 29.
[12] Ibid., 34.
[13] Ibid., 36.
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