Essays on Biblical Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur
Chapter 2: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation
I. THE ORIGINARY EXPRESSIONS OF REVELATION I will begin on the side of revelation and my first remarks will be
4. WISDOM DISCOURSE
For Jesus, the Law and the Prophets were summed up in the Golden Rule from Deuteronomy: "So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the meaning of the Law and the Prophets"
(Matt. 7:12). In this sense, the Sermon on the Mount proclaims the same intention of perfection and holiness that runs through the ancient Law.
It is this intention that constitutes the ethical dimension of revelation. If we consider this instituting function of revelation we see how
inadequate the idea of heteronomy is for circumscribing the wealth of meaning included in the teaching of the Torah. We see also in what way the idea of revelation is enriched in turn. If we may still apply the idea of God’s design for humans to it, it is no longer in the sense of a plan that we could read in past or future events, nor is it in terms of an immutable codification of every communal or individual practice.
Rather it is the sense of a requirement for perfection that summons the will and makes a claim upon it. In the same way, if we continue to speak of revelation as historical, it is not only in the sense that the trace of God may be read in the founding events of the past or in a coming conclusion to history, but in the sense that it orients the history of our practical actions and engenders the dynamics of our institutions.
are those limit-situations spoken of by Karl Jaspers, those situations — including solitude, the fault, suffering, and death — where the misery and the grandeur of human beings confront each other. Hebraic wisdom interprets these situations as the annihilation of humans and the
incomprehensibility of God — as the silence and absence of God. If the question of retribution is so acute here, it is so to the extent that the discordance between justice and happiness, so cruelly emphasized by the triumph of the wicked, brings to light the overwhelming question of the sense or nonsense of existence.
In this way, wisdom fulfills one of religion’s fundamental functions which is to bind together ethos and cosmos, the sphere of human action and the sphere of the world. It does not do this by demonstrating that this conjunction is given in things, nor by demanding that it be produced through our action. Rather it joins ethos and cosmos at the very point of their discordance: in suffering and, more precisely, in unjust suffering.
Wisdom does not teach us how to avoid suffering, or how magically to deny it, or how to dissimulate it under an illusion. It teaches us how to endure, how to suffer suffering. It places suffering into a meaningful context by producing the active quality of suffering.
This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom. If we take the denouement of this book as our guide, could we not say that revelation, following the line of wisdom, is the intending of that horizon of meaning where a conception of the world and a conception of action merge into a new and active quality of suffering? The Eternal does not tell Job what order of reality justifies his suffering, nor what type of courage might vanquish it. The system of symbols wherein the revelation is conveyed is articulated beyond the point where models for a vision of the world and models for changing the world diverge. Model of and model for are rather the inverse sides of one indivisible prescriptive and descriptive symbolic order. This
symbolic order can conjoin cosmos and ethos because it produces the pathos of actively assumed suffering. It is this pathos that is expressed in Job’s final response:
"Then Job answered Yahweh, I know that you are all-powerful:
what you conceive, you can perform.
I am the man who obscured your designs With my empty-headed words.
I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand,
http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showchapter?chapter_id=1772 (12 of 39) [2/4/03 3:05:02 PM]
on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.
(Listen, I have more to say,
now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.) I knew you then only by hearsay;
but now having seen you with my own eyes, I retract all I have said,
in dust and ashes I repent. (Job 42:1-6)
What did Job "see"? Behemoth and Leviathan? The orders of creation?
No. His questions about justice are undoubtedly left without an answer.
But by repenting, though not of sin, for he is righteous, but by repenting for his supposition that existence does not make sense, Job presupposes an unsuspected meaning which cannot be transcribed by speech or logos a human being may have at his disposal. This meaning has no other expression than the new quality which penitence confers on suffering.
Hence it is not unrelated to what Aristotle speaks of as the tragic pathos that purifies the spectator of fear and pity.
We should begin to see at what point the notion of God’s design — as may be suggested in different ways in each instance, it is true, by
narrative, prophetic, and prescriptive discourse — is removed from any transcription in terms of a plan or program; in short, of finality and teleology. What is revealed is the possibility of hope in spite of. . . . This possibility may still be expressed in the terms of a design, but of an unassignable design, a design which is God’s secret.
It should also begin to be apparent how the notion of revelation differs from one mode of discourse to another; especially when we pass from prophecy to wisdom. The prophet claims divine inspiration as
guaranteeing what he says. The sage does nothing of the sort. He does not declare that his speech is the speech of another.
But he does know that wisdom precedes him and that in a way it is through participation in wisdom that someone may be said to be wise.
Nothing is further from the spirit of the sages than the idea of an autonomy of thinking, a humanism of the good life; in short, of a
wisdom in the Stoic or Epicurean mode founded on the self-sufficiency of thought. This is why wisdom is held to be a gift of God in distinction to the "knowledge of good and evil" promised by the Serpent. What is more, for the scribes following the Exile, Wisdom was personified into a transcendent feminine figure. She is a divine reality that has always
http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showchapter?chapter_id=1772 (13 of 39) [2/4/03 3:05:02 PM]
existed and that will always exist. She lives with God and she has
accompanied creation from its very beginning. Intimacy with Wisdom is not to be distinguished from intimacy with God.
By this detour wisdom rejoins prophecy. The objectivity of wisdom signifies the same thing as does the subjectivity of prophetic inspiration.
This is why for tradition the sage was held to be inspired by God just as the prophet was. For the same reason, we can understand how prophecy and wisdom could converge in apocalyptic literature where, as is well known, the notion of a revelation of the divine secrets is applied to "the last days." But intermingling in no way prohibits the modes of religious discourse — and the aspects of revelation which correspond to them — from remaining distinct or from being held together only by a tie of pure analogy.