Delashmutt 2009

Modern Theology 25:4 October 2009
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
PAUL RICOEUR AT THE FOOT OF

THE CROSS: NARRATIVE IDENTITY
AND THE RESURRECTION OF
THE BODY moth_1556 589..616
MICHAEL W. DeLASHMUTT
Introduction
As noted by theologian Dan Stiver, one of the most remarkable synergies
between theology and philosophy in the late twentieth century was the
simultaneous and seemingly separate emphasis upon a holistically under-
stood and embodied self which arose in both realms.1 The purpose of this
article is to reconcile the image of a holistically understood and embodied
philosophical anthropology indicated by Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative
identity” with the theological anthropology that is implied by Christian
personal eschatology and proleptically realized in the bodily resurrection of
Jesus of Nazareth. Ricoeur once noted that the “ ‘language game’ of narration
ultimately reveals that the meaning of human existence is itself narrative.”2 I
believe that Ricoeur was correct in his assertions regarding the significance of
narrative and I hope here to demonstrate that his philosophical anthropology
offers to theological anthropology a means of understanding the self which is
compatible with Christian orthodoxy.
Although Ricoeur was not a Christian philosopher, he was a philosopher
who belonged to the Christian faith and his work explored and engaged with
themes that are significant to theology.3 Theologians and biblical scholars
alike have found in Ricoeur’s body of work considerable material for reflec-
tion and, in my own sub-discipline of practical theology, Ricoeur’s philoso-
phy has had particular influence in the burgeoning field of theological
Michael W. DeLashmutt
University of Exeter, Department of Theology, Peter Lanyon Building Cornwall Campus Penryn,
Cornwall TR10 9EZ UK
m.w.delashmutt@exeter.ac.uk
© 2009 The Author

Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
590 Michael W. DeLashmutt
reflection.4 Yet despite his personal beliefs or his popularity, I do not wish to
treat Ricoeur as a crypto-theologian whose true confession has somehow
been obscured by phenomenological bracketing or who can only truly be
understood through a re-reading in the light of faith. Instead, in this article I
admit from the outset that I am reading Ricoeur as a theologian myself, and
I intend to apply his philosophy for expressly theological ends. I will make
use of Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity in order to develop an escha-
tologically durable theological anthropology which can be explicated
through narrative.5
I initially came to Ricoeur because I was searching for a way of describing
the self which addressed the problem of the material reduction of conscious-
ness6, which made sense of the influence exerted upon the self by culture, the
other, arts, religion and time, and which could provide a meaningful con-
temporary metaphor for the soul, without the messy problem of mind-body
dualism. In Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of selfhood”7 I found a robust philo-
sophical anthropology which resonated with Christian theology on a number
of levels. As will be discussed in this article, narrative identity presents a self
which is intrinsically ethical (in that subjectivity is always partially consti-
tuted by a practical concern for the other) and exceedingly plastic (in that it
allows for the subject to meaningfully navigate the concordant discordance of
the lived life). Moreover, narrative identity resonates with the practice of
spiritual autobiography in the Christian tradition—evinced in this article by
an examination of the confessed self of St Augustine of Hippo.
Yet although narrative identity may well resonate with Christian theology,
I have struggled to understand how a self which is inscribed through narra-
tive can persist beyond death. Although narrative identity offers a notion of
selfhood which clearly gives meaning to an agent’s actions through time and
allows for the self to be refigured and perhaps configured through its
complex web of encounters (with stories and others), ultimately narrative
identity does not exceed the finite limits of the lived life. Central to the
construction of a narrative self is the presupposition that one’s identity is
composed of a beginning (arche) and ending (telos).8 Thus, this phenomeno-
logically rich description of selfhood is ever determined by the reality of its
own finitude (its telos).
Perhaps there is a dialectic between one’s arche and one’s telos which
produces, as its synthesis, a sense of hope for the life to come. But this
synthesis, this hope, is beyond what can be considered in a phenomeno-
logical analysis of the self. In Christian theology, the product of this dialec-
tic is the promised hope of the eschaton which is proleptically realized in
Christ’s resurrection from the dead. As such, it would appear that Christian
theology and Ricoeur’s narrative identity can only be reckoned as compat-
ible insofar as the range of hermeneutic phenomenology (the lived life) and
range of theology (ultimate concern) are kept distinct and maintained. Yet
I believe that narrative identity can indeed contribute to a theological
© 2009 The Author
Paul Ricoeur at the Foot of the Cross 591
understanding of selfhood, despite the apparent limits of the phenomeno-

logical method.
In what follows, I will provide a brief introduction to Ricoeur’s concept of
narrative identity as drawn from my reading of Time and Narrative and
Oneself as Another. I will identify four aspects to narrative identity which I
understand to be central to Ricoeur’s philosophical project: the nature of
narrated temporality; the concept of identity as sameness and identity as
difference; the importance of character and otherness; and the centrality of
human finitude and embodiment. To demonstrate the compatibility of nar-
rative identity with Christian orthodoxy, I will bring my reading of Ricoeur
into dialogue with the confessed self of St Augustine. Given the influence
which Augustine exerted upon Ricoeur’s thought, it should come as no
surprise that Augustine’s confessed self and Ricoeur’s narrative identity are
analogous concepts. However, I hope to show that there are facets of Augus-
tine’s anthropology which may help to clarify my theological reading of
Ricoeur. In particular, I hope that by reading Ricoeur through Augustine, I
can more clearly exemplify how narrative identity can offer Christian theol-
ogy an eschatologically realizable self, which can be seen as consistent with
creedal belief in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
The final section of this article will examine how Ricoeur himself
approached the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. I will note how
Ricoeur explored the problem of personal finitude and the narrative subject
vis-à-vis the hope for personal resurrection. As will become clear, the symbol
of the eschaton (as differentiated from telos) offers to a Ricoeurian-influenced
theological anthropology a durable hope in the impossible-possibility of
persisted identity after the finite horizon of the lived life has been exceeded.9
Paul Ricoeur: Subjectivity and Narrative Identity

Ricoeur was a notable interdisciplinary thinker and his philosophical anthro-
pology was influenced by subjects ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis,
hermeneutics, and literary theory, to biblical studies, theology and philoso-
phy. His early work from the 1960s and 1970s explored issues in anthro-
pology (Freedom and Nature, Symbolism of Evil, and Fallible Man) and
hermeneutics (the collected essays of Conflict of Interpretation). In anthropol-
ogy and hermeneutics, Ricoeur addressed issues related to human finitude,
the nature of language, and the limits of human freedom. This theoretical
foundation contributed significantly to his later endeavours in narrative iden-
tity. His great work from the 1980s (Time and Narrative) concludes in its third
volume by offering a solution to the dialectic of self-identity as sameness and
self-identity as temporal difference by articulating a concept he calls narra-
tive identity.10 Though narrative identity is only given a scant five pages in the
conclusion of Time and Narrative, it eventually becomes the foundation for his
later philosophical anthropology. The concept is developed subsequently in
© 2009 The Author
his 1986 Gifford Lectures (from which the 1992 volume Oneself as Another was
derived) and later in the 1988 essay in Espirit, “L’identité narrative”.
For Ricoeur, narrative identity is the product of a hermeneutics of selfhood
which interrogates an agent’s actions in the world and creates from reflection
upon these actions a meaning-rich description which is enshrined in narra-
tive.11 It is in action that the human self is constructed, but apart from
narration such actions may appear episodic and discordant. To overcome this
fragmentation, Ricoeur asserts a thematic unity of human action which seeks
to describe not only action itself, but the cause of action. This cause is found
in the answer to the question “Who is acting when I act?” According to
Venema the answer to this question, for Ricoeur, can only be found in nar-
rative: “[n]arrative brings to language the diversity of human action by
submitting it to the unifying and intelligible order of the story.”12 The narra-
tive self is constructed from an amalgam of fictional/factual sources through
the exercise of imaginative self-reflection, resulting in the refiguration and
configuration of the self.13 The subject and its actions in the world are the
objects of reflection and the components of the narrative.14
Narration recognises (and articulates) that the self is placed within a tem-
poral and physical context, and it is aimed at reconciling the tension between
the objective-self (socially and physically embodied) and the subjective-self
(psychologically and spiritually constituted). Ricoeur does away with the
self-transparent autonomous subject of Descartes’ idealism of the cogito and
shatters the idealised transcendental ego of Husserl and Heidegger. Through
his appropriation of a Kantian metaphysic, Ricoeur denies immediacy of
being, by positing that being is only accessed through a “detour” into the
objective world of religious, cultural and social structures which are “read”
as the subject’s surrounding context. Moreover, a narrated self is one which
is capable of navigating the concordant/discordant nature of the lived life
through the mimetic cycle of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.
This is to say that one’s self-identity is ever re-read and re-constituted in light
of one’s re-interpretation of the past and one’s re-orientation towards a fictive
future. For Ricoeur, one’s being is always dominated by and refigured
through one’s sense of becoming. The discordant and various episodic com-
ponents of life are formed into a cohesive and meaningful whole by being
joined together to create an overarching story of the self. Narrative identities
are stories written with a remembered past, a floating present, and a projected
future. Thus narrative provides a thematic unity of action, through the self’s
contextualized description of agency through time. With this in mind,
Ricoeur can confidently say that narrative identity allows the subject to rec-
ognise herself through the stories she tells.15
Narrative Temporality
Because narrative seeks to give meaning and voice to one’s action in time, a
clear understanding of temporality is fundamental to narrative identity. In
© 2009 The Author
Time and Narrative, rather than attempting to uncover the nature of time,
Ricoeur sought to uncover time’s meaning. Although he deduces that there
are essentially two conceptions of time which one finds in Classical and Early
Christian literature (cosmological time from Aristotle’s Physics and psycho-
logical time from Augustine’s Confessions), he posits a third definition of
temporality which can be seen as a synthesis of the two—narrative time.
Narrative time is arrived at by asking “What is time’s function?” rather than
“What is time’s nature?” By “interweaving”16 narrative time through cosmo-
logical and psychological time, narrative temporality becomes the means by
which psychological time and chronological time are given their meaning. At
its simplest, narrative temporality means that one can only know time insofar
as one can articulate both the experiences and the transitions of time through
language. It is not cosmological time as such, but the experience of time in the
spatio-temporally located body that Ricoeur claims as secondary to “psycho-
logical” time, per se. To this end, cosmological time is truly the more abstract
conception of time, in that it is the fictive stage which we presuppose in order
to tell our more temporally involuted tales of the self.
Narrative time is always framed as “time for” in that it describes the
temporal setting of human action and agency. Narratives—fictional or his-
torical—are constructed because they testify to human actions. A narrative
identity which is structured with a beginning, a middle, and an end mani-
fests the human not as an object, but as a kept word in all the discordant and
episodic facets of the lived life. As Ricoeur emphasizes in Time and Narrative:
“The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world
. . . time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the
manner of narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it
portrays the features of temporal experience.”17
The concept of narrative time allows Ricoeur to achieve one of his great
hopes for narrative identity: finding a connection between the reading of
narrative texts and the articulation of narrative identities.18 It is in narrative
identities that the “aporetics of time and the poetics of narrative correspond
to each other in a sufficient way.”19 In terms of the temporal-identity, there is
no phenomenological difference for Ricoeur between one’s experience of
time within of the fictive “world” of the text and one’s experience of time
within the factual “world” of the self. It is as if to say that as one loses one’s
self in the process of reading literature and falls into the spell of well-crafted
narrative, the imaginative experience of being caught up into the plot of the
fictive world is akin to the experience of narrative time, as experienced in the
spatially located body.
Psychological time and cosmological time converge within narrative tem-
porality and allow memory, myth and story to become as constitutive of the
self as objective physical experiences. Ricoeur’s phenomenology of time
relies upon a Kantian understanding of temporality, which undermines
Newtonian time and asserts that time only exists inasmuch as it is
© 2009 The Author
experienced. Narrative temporality, as a synthesis of psychological and cos-

mological time, offers one a meaning-laden alternative to the mute passage of
time evidenced by the two principal alternative views. Historicity only gains
meaning by way of the imaginative narration of temporal experience, giving
form to the stretching-along of life, from birth to death.
Identity and “Emplotment”

It would be in keeping with Ricoeur’s background as a philosophical reader
of literary texts to see this turn towards narrative temporality as a turn
towards the language of plot. In this sense, narrative time is a way of articu-
lating the literary development of story in the context of one’s own lived-life.
The concept of plot, “establishes human action not only within time . . . but
within memory,”20 and, as such, expresses identity through both fictive and
factual representations of time. Plot is the active means by which the
temporally-expressed narrative identity is situated in the world and the
hermeneutical context for the reading of one’s identity. Hermeneutics, in this
context, is far more than just the reading of texts. It is also the examination of
the worlds which narrative opens up. “It is by an understanding of the
worlds, actual and possible, opened by language that we may arrive at a
better understanding of ourselves.”21 A hermeneutical approach to self-
understanding has far-reaching implications for the recovery of meaning
within one’s life. One discovers the answer to the question, “Who am I?”
through a constant process of reinterpretation by which the past, present and
future are taken up and reread by continuous “describing, narrating, and
prescribing.”22 Inasmuch as a character in a fictional narrative only retains a
consistent identity in the reader’s mind through the reader’s reflections on
the character’s literary beginning and presumed end, so too is one’s own
narrative identity constructed through the re-telling of one’s own life-story.
“A narrative can link the past with the future by giving a sense of continuity
to an ever changing story of the self.”23 Of course, narrative temporality only
describes one set of co-ordinates upon which the narrative self can be located.
Narrative identities can be contextualized on two axes: a horizontal axis,
which describes the self’s cultural and social world, and a vertical axis, which
corresponds to the self’s experience of time. The narrated life is plotted (for
Ricoeur, in the sense of a literary plot, though I am tempted to also under-
stand this in the sense of a point on a Cartesian grid) somewhere inside this
social/temporal matrix. There is fluidity within the fictive nature of “emplot-
ment” which prohibits either temporality or sociality from becoming the
dominant force in self-narration. In order for the self to be understood (either
by oneself or another), the concordant/discordant narratives evinced by
social-identity and temporal-identity need to be read through a set of herme-
neutics, which are attentive to the self’s context. The construction of either the
social-identity or the temporal-identity may include both the historical
© 2009 The Author
elements of sociality and temporality (interactions with the other over time)
and also one’s fictional encounter with narrative, myth and story.
Identity as Sameness and Identity as Difference

Subjectivity is a matter of sameness and difference; the self must stay consis-
tent over time whilst also being open to constant change. Just as when
reading a novel one expects to recognise the identity of a character from the
novel’s beginning to its end, so too should one’s own identity retain a degree
of familiarity throughout the changes of life. From the outset of Oneself as
Another, Ricoeur describes this dialectic of constancy and changeability as a
dialectic of identity as sameness (idem) and identity as selfhood (ipse).24 In the
simplest of terms, idem-identity can be understood in terms of similarity
(“re-identification of the same”), or as a substitute (“X and Y wear the same
dresses”), or in terms of continuity of characteristics (“the uninterrupted
continuity in the development of a being between the first and the last stage
of its evolution”), or finally in terms of an object’s permanence over time.25
Idem-identity is social, objective, and ethical. It is the self to which others
relate—the forward facing self of representations who is called into ethical
relationships and who can function as the object of another’s gaze. Taken
alone, idem is pure simulacrum; it is the image of a self which exists exclu-
sively for the benefit of the other. The purpose of ipse-identity is to trouble the
waters of idem-identity. Ipse interrupts the permanence of idem-identity by
confronting the various permutations of sameness with the question of
agency. Ipse asks the question of “who is this substitute?”, “who possesses this
set of characteristics?”, and “who is this entity that exists in time?” Articulat-
ing this question of “who is this agent?” and moreover, the task of situating
this agent within the notion of sameness, is the role of narrative identity.26
The self is made up of both idem-identity (the social, objective, and ethical
self) and ipse-identity (the psycho-spiritual, subjective and temporal self).
Reading identity thusly, as a composite of both idem and ipse, undercuts the
temptation to found identity purely on the principle of selfhood or purely on
the principle of sameness.27 Indeed, Ricoeur asserts that to rely solely on
sameness as identity is to deny the experience of temporality and the cer-
tainty of finitude. The dialectic of idem and ipse acknowledges the overlay of
temporality upon the self’s drive to maintain a sense of constancy. That
element of self which remains constant, according to Ricoeur, is character.28
Character and Otherness

In the same way that Ricoeur borrows the notion of “plot” from literary
theory and applies it to the construction of a self over time, so too does he add
a degree of multivalence to our reading of the word “character”. A character
in a narrative is identifiable throughout one’s reading of a text even though
the processes of plot and the nuances of reading change the reader’s percep-
tion of the character over time. It is the author’s sense of responsibility to the
© 2009 The Author
reader which ensures that the character remains identifiable throughout the
reader’s encounter with the text. The maintenance of character becomes an
ethical obligation on the part of the author directed towards the reader. When
applied to the idea of the narration of one’s own identity, character describes
that aspect of one’s self which remains constant, self-referential and identi-
fiable through time. Character is that which is maintained for the benefit of
the other.
Of course, the constancy of character is not to be confused with immuta-
bility. Though our identities may remain consistent throughout the course of
life, we are still persistently bombarded by change brought about by contact
with the world and with the other. Indeed the role of the other within
narrative identity is two-fold. Though the other may offer the opportunity for
personal change, the other is principally regarded by Ricoeur as the starting
point for ethical responsibility because I maintain self-constancy expressly for
the benefit of the other. Though this may seem to reiterate a Gadamarian
binary (the “I” exists only for the “Thou”), Ricoeur goes beyond Gadamer by
making care for the unknown other (the third-person as opposed to Gadam-
er’s preference for the second-person) the foundation for the maintenance of
constancy of character over time. The self exists through the experience of
care for this other, regardless of whether the other is within or beyond the
I-Thou binary.29 “[S]elf constancy is for each person that manner of conduct-
ing himself or herself so that others can count on that person.”30 Truly, alterity
is at the very heart of selfhood.31
Finitude and Embodiment

All stories come to an end and all narrative identities presuppose finitude. By
reinterpreting temporality in terms of plot, Ricoeur presupposes a finite end
to one’s own narrative identity. A life viewed as a narrative is a life which
possesses a past, a present and an anticipated finite future. Finitude, the very
fact which gives the future-oriented imagination of narrative identity a tem-
poral grounding, is itself that which signals the end of identity as such. Like
the “thrownness” of (B/b)eing in Heidegger, which is ever speeding to its
completion as being-towards-death, finitude within the lived-life of Ricoeur’s
philosophical anthropology is partially constitutive of the self’s identity.
It appears that between his early philosophical anthropology, Fallible Man,
and the later Oneself as Another how Ricoeur understood the nature of fini-
tude and the role played by finitude shifted in a subtle way. The former text
frames finitude in terms of existential finitude, wherein finitude is not a
source of human existence but a product of a triad of affirmation, difference
and mediation which is experienced in a triad of knowing, acting and feeling.
In Oneself as Another existential finitude still plays a significant role, but
added to this is also a concern with the nature of bodily finitude, wherein the
death of one’s body (not solely the end of one’s being) is referred to as the
ultimate end of the lived life.
© 2009 The Author
Existential Finitude
Repeating Kant, Ricoeur asserts that we are “finite rational being[s]”32 As
such, finitude and the awareness of finitude serves as the boundary-marker
of “originating affirmation” and “existential difference”.33 As boundary,
however, finitude is the product of affirmation and difference and not the
cause. By arguing that finitude is the limit rather than cause, the anthropol-
ogy presented at the conclusion of Fallible Man responds to the finite nature
of life with a surprising optimism. Awareness of the reality of humanity’s
propensity to fall into evil and destruction plays a central role in informing
the nature and limit of human being. The negating role of finitude holds at
bay any naïve affirmation of being as an endless given and as a result allows
for the in-breaking of one’s experience of the infinite within the finite. Fini-
tude, as limit, creates a space for the experience of the infinite.
In Fallible Man this infinite is manifested in “Eros”, which “shows that this
aim, which is immanent to the function of man, is happiness anticipated in a
consciousness of direction and belonging.” Thinking, acting, and feeling
correspond to an in-breaking into existence of a Joy that exists in spite of
finitude: “originating affirmation is felt here as the Joy of ‘existing in’ the very
thing that allows me to think and to act. . . .”34
Thus, finitude places a limit upon existence which both vitalizes the expe-
rience of life (making it more precious, more transitory)35 and simultaneously
provides the “categories of human limitation” which bring to mind the
reality of existential finality. Humanity is thus a “mixture of originating
affirmation and existential negation. Man is the Joy of Yes in the sadness of
the finite.”36
Bodily Finitude
In practice, the existential finitude of the narrative identity is correlated with
physical frailty (the frailty and proneness to death of my own physical body).
Although it would seem tempting to view narrative as a kind of textual
reductionism of the self, the emphasis placed by Ricoeur upon finitude and
the situation of the subject within its embodied context refutes the idea that
the narrative self is purely linguistic. Therefore, narrative selves are only
plotted within the temporal/social matrix when they exist as bodies within
the world. The flesh both delimits the domain of one’s inner-psychical life
and provides the boundary from which one’s ethical responsibility for the
body of the other emerges. The body furthermore reminds the subject of her
temporality, as it is the clearest sign of her immanent finality. Yet despite the
body’s persistent changing over time, there remains an “uninterrupted con-
tinuity between the first and the last stage in the development of what we
consider to be the same individual.”37 This finite body is my own body and
my identity’s grounding in this finite body results in the finitude of my
identity.
© 2009 The Author
The relationship between narrative identity and the finite body is most
clearly explored in Ricoeur’s discussion of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons,
in both the fifth study of Oneself as Another and L’identité narrative. For
Ricoeur, the self which exists as a narrative construct is a bodily agent who
acts within time. Even though Ricoeur’s understanding of identity centres on
the question of “Who am I?”, endemic to this question is a further question of
agency (“Who is acting when I act?”). Ricoeur will argue that the sameness of
an entity’s agency persists through time, even though that entity changes in
the process.38 One’s own actions and one’s own agency are purely restricted
to one’s body. No one can act in my place, because no acting agent—other
than myself—acts when I act. Furthermore, no “other” can possess my body,
because the very act of designating this body as my body expresses a degree
of agency which precludes the operation of any other.39
Parfit, a material reductionist, argues that a “person’s existence only con-
sists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of
interrelated physical and mental events.”40 Rather than approaching the
question of subjectivity by asking “who” questions (“Who am I and who is
acting when I act?”), Parfit is concerned with “what” questions (“What am I
and what is acting when I act?”). In the selection from Reasons and Persons
addressed by Ricoeur, Parfit seeks to illustrate the reducibility of identity to
the physical body by proposing the science-fictional scenario of mind/body
replication (the “multiple bodies” problem). Parfit suggests a scenario
wherein multiple copies of one’s body and mind are created by a replication
machine. According to his argument, because the mind/body is the nexus of
identity, regardless of how many copies of “me” are made all copies share the
same identity and all copies are authentically “me”. If the question of sub-
jectivity can be answered by asking “what” questions, Parfit’s material reduc-
tion is correct in its logic. However, Ricoeur argues that any replication of an
agent’s body (inclusive of the mind) results in the creation of multiple sepa-
rate entities which possess multiple separate ends. When one attempts to
answer the question of subjectivity by answering “who” questions, the plu-
rality of voices responding “me”, problematizes any simple reductionism of
the subject to the mind/body nexus.
In terms of narrativity, though these copies may all share the same
narrative-past (i.e., all copies share with me my memories and experiences),
each copy would possess its own unique conclusions. The multiplication of
bodies, which results in the multiplication of agents and agency, also results
in the creation of entirely separate narrative identities which bring with them
an infinite array of destinies. If it were possible, the copying of a body would
be tantamount to the creation of a separate narrative identity.
In Parfit’s hands the purpose of the “multiple bodies” problem is to articu-
late, through the absurdity of this science-fiction scenario, the priority of our
materiality: our sense of self is purely physical. In Ricoeur’s hands, however,
the absurdity of the problem takes on another dimension. We are physical
© 2009 The Author
beings, to be sure, but physicality is only one aspect of one’s identity. Epiphe-
nomenal to material embodiment is a sense of agency qua narrative. Out
from, and in addition to, my body is the story of my acting self. I am the one
who acted, who acts, and who will act, and this acting constitutes the plot of
the story that I tell about my life. Identity is therefore the combination of
my acting identity (my ipseity) alongside my identity as similarity (idem-
identity). “Who am I?” is answered by that agent who exists in this body and
who is able to identify itself within time. Ricoeur does not refute Parfit’s
analytical and logical account of personhood by simply attacking his logic.
Rather, his is a critique of the scope of Parfit’s analysis. Namely, identities are
composed of more than just minds/bodies existing within one point in time.
A narrative identity is an identity that exists in the remembered past, the
narrating present, and the imagined future.
Ricoeur in Dialogue with Augustine

One of the means by which I will test narrative identity’s suitability for
Christian theological anthropology is by examining it in contrast to the
storied-self of St Augustine of Hippo. Augustine plays an important role in
Ricoeur’s project and, undoubtedly, the confessed self of Augustine was
instrumental in shaping Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative identity.
Although Augustine uses the more classically theological language of body
and soul, I hope below to illustrate that in practice, the confessed self
described by Augustine resonates with the narrated self in Ricoeur.
The importance of St Augustine of Hippo for Christian reflection upon
personal identity cannot be overstated. Undoubtedly he is one of the most
profound and pivotal figures in the history of Christian thought, and his
understanding of selfhood has been broadly applied throughout the history
of the Church, with both positive and negative consequences. Augustine’s
Confessions are commonly believed to have been the first work of autobio-
graphical writing in the western tradition.41 Though we may not be able to
ascribe to Augustine the genesis of the modern notion of personhood, we can
infer from his introduction to the genre of autobiographical literature that
Augustine placed an original emphasis upon the value of the storied-self. For
Augustine, life—and not inconsequentially his own life—was something of
value, something that was worth being retold, and retold not only for the
benefit of his audience, but for the benefit of the one retelling as well.
The type of life which Augustine writes in the Confessions is an amalgam of
corporeal and spiritual experiences. When Augustine describes his life (and
later in the text when he reflects on the mechanisms of such description) he
does so by employing the language of body and soul—which is not surpris-
ing for one so embedded in neo-Platonic metaphysics. For Augustine, the life
of the body and the life of the soul are two functionally distinct, yet onto-
logically undifferentiated, domains of the lived-life. Whereas the body is
restricted in its experience to the physical world—inasmuch as it can only
© 2009 The Author
seek after other material/physical objects—the soul, through the memory,

can experience both the physical and spiritual worlds. According to Augus-
tine the body is more complex in form when compared with the soul, but the
soul is more robust in terms of function when compared with the body.42
Augustine’s functional dualism reflects what I consider to be a prototypi-
cal form of phenomenological analysis. Augustine appears to identify,
through the language of body and soul, the distinct domains of experience
which comprise the lived-life. To the concept of “soul” Augustine ascribes
the multifaceted and multidimensional activity of the inner-life and to the
concept of the body he assigns the experience of the physical life which is
instantiated within the material world. But why then, if internal and exter-
nal are understood as an inextricable whole, is it necessary for Augustine to
place priority upon the former over the latter? As intimated above, for
Augustine’s reflexive turn to be efficacious for the creation of identity, the
mechanism of reflexivity—which is to say internal imaginative reflection—
must be given as significant a role in the creation of a life as would be the
real-time process of living life itself. It is within this internal world that
Augustine observed the capacity to call forth past states which allow for the
creation of a concordant life story from the memory’s discordant holdings.
Interior reflection leads to the mnemonic retelling of the physical, external
life. Reflection in Augustine is the inner-world’s descent into itself (or to
borrow from De Vera Religione, noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. in interiore
homine habitat veritas—“Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself.
Truth dwells in the inner man.”43). Augustine demonstrates this reflexive
turn by refiguring his own life through confessional re-narration. His Con-
fessions is more than a history; it is a religiously fictionalised autobiography
which provides a privileged glance into Augustine’s life through the refract-
ing prism of confessional belief.
Confessional Refiguring
Through Confessions Augustine relays to the reader his various movements
within the ancient Roman world, his various relationships with family, lovers
and friends, and further details of his factual life. In addition to the merely
factual Augustine, Confessions uniquely also introduces the reader to Augus-
tine’s inner psychic-world. He tells the tale of his inner struggle, his loves,
losses, opinions, and the inner-workings of his mind and memory. Yet what
makes this autobiography a true refiguring of his life, is the continued pres-
ence of confessional reinterpretation throughout the movements of this work.
Couched between the discordant episodes of his autobiography are passages
which reach from his extant retelling into his prior experience through bursts
of psalmic declaration.
Augustine tells us the story of his life, but does so confessionally,
through a language that attests to the then-invisible—yet now-present—
© 2009 The Author
providential hand, which from the imaginative perspective of faith was

always alongside Augustine throughout his entire life. For example, in Book
Four of Confessions, Augustine retells the painful experience of the loss of a
close childhood friend:
My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only
death. My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque
abode of misery. All that we had done together was now a grim ordeal
without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there
to be seen. I hated all the places we had known together, because he was
not in them and they could no longer whisper to me “Here he comes!” as
they would have done had he been alive but absent for a while. I had
become a puzzle to myself . . .44
Yet without warning, the narrative moves from straightforward autobio-
graphical retelling, to a confessional re-interpretation of the past, first in light
of his prayerful re-narration of the past:
But now, O Lord, all this is past and time has healed the wound. Let the
ears of my heart move close to your lips, and let me listen to
you. . . . Truth, so that you may tell me why tears are sweet to the sor-
rowful. Can it be that though you are present everywhere, you have
thrust aside our troubles. You are steadfast, constant in your self . . .45
But then subsequently, the event is yet again reframed in light of more
properly theological confession:
In this world one thing passes away so that another may take its place and
the whole be preserved in all its parts . . . entrust to the Truth all that the
Truth has given to you and nothing will be lost. All that is withered in
you will be made to thrive again. All your sickness will be healed. Your
mortal body will be refashioned and renewed and firmly bound to you,
and when it dies it will not drag you with it to the grave, but will endure
and abide with you before God, who abides and endures for ever.46
He continues in this pattern throughout the whole of the work. Should he
retell a particularly positive event, the story is completed by an expression of
thanksgiving. If he describes a particularly sinful episode in his life, he
follows this by couching the event in mournful repentance or thanksgiving
for forgiveness:47
I will love you, lord, and thank you, and praise your name, because you
have forgiven me such great sins and such wicked deeds. I acknowledge
that it was by your grace and mercy that you melted away my sins like
ice.48
Clearly, Augustine’s Confessions is not the relaying of a life-story in the strict
modernist notion of historical autobiography. Augustine reads the story of
© 2009 The Author
his life through the language of his nascent belief and calls into being a
reinterpretation of his life through religious-narrative language.49 In so doing,
he overcomes the discordance of a life fraught with change, by implementing
an overarching hermeneutic, which reads his life by way of a greater context.
Odd as it may sound, Augustine is creating Augustine through a confessional
refiguring of the past.
Narrative Anamnesis
By remembering and refiguring, Augustine embodies the creative and poetic
act of anamnesis, which is rooted in the sacramentality of the Christian tradi-
tion—“Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remem-
brance of me.”50 Not only does the liturgical and sacramental life of the church
enact the remembrance of Christ’s passion and resurrection, but it also radi-
cally contextualises this miracle of redemption into the life of the participant
in liturgy and the communicant at the table by making Christ present to us in
bread and cup. As in Augustine’s example, radical contextualisation leads to
a profound awareness of one’s own place within the Divine economy of
salvation:
You know how stupid and weak I am: teach me and heal me. Your only
Son, in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, has
redeemed me with his blood. Let not the proud disparage me, for I am
mindful of my ransom. I eat it, I drink it, I dispense it to others, and as a
poor man I long to be filled with it among those who are fed and
feasted.51
In the earliest Eucharistic prayers, anamnesis led the church into a confes-
sion of what was understood to be the crux of the rite: “remembering . . . we
offer”.52 This would seem to indicate that sacramental remembrance leads to
sacramental offering. Hearing the story of redemption, the church in turn
actively participates in the rite by giving back to God the staples of the table
(bread and wine made by human hands). As the church hears the story of its
redemption from the pulpit and receives the broken and poured-out signs of
its salvation on the paten and in the chalice, so too does the church offer back
to God her own story of redemption and her own broken and poured out life
of service.
The manifold layers of remembrance present in Christian worship are
demonstrated by the confessed self of Augustine who imaginatively remem-
bers the works of God in Christ on his own behalf, and so approaches
self-knowledge in light of his confessed self. This is, in the language of
Ricoeur, “narrative refiguration” and points to the fact that the self “does not
know itself immediately, but only indirectly, through the detour of cultural
signs of all sorts, which articulate the self in symbolic mediations that already
© 2009 The Author
articulate action . . . narrative mediation underlines this remarkable aspect

about knowledge of the self as being an interpretation.”53
Is Augustine’s Identity a “Narrative” Identity?

Augustine depicts with great clarity the power of confessional re-
interpretation when applied to personal identity. His confessed self is an
example of a narrative identity which anticipates Ricoeur’s philosophical
anthropology at a number of points. For both Augustine and Ricoeur, iden-
tity is formed in light of fictional (or confessional) re-narration. Like the
narrative self proposed by Ricoeur, Augustine’s identity is partially consti-
tuted by the fictional world of texts read.54 Through reflection upon the
actions and events of his past life, in light of his present faith (which itself
finds origins in a hermeneutics of scriptural texts and theological practices),
Augustine is an example of how narrative identity allows the self to be
recognised through the stories told about the self.55 To this end, Augustine
exemplifies how confessional re-narration, by providing an overarching story
of the self, resiliently accommodates change and can aid in giving meaning to
the discordant and episodic nature of life. Yet it would seem that in Augus-
tine’s example, religious conversion is more than just episodic discordance.
Conversion, for Augustine, appears to be the defining event of the storied
life. It is the radical reorientation of the self away from its own self-interests
and towards the Love of God.56
How can the interruption of character described by Augustine be
explained in terms consistent with narrative identity? What is it about some
stories which, when taken up and read, appear to radically challenge self-
hood and eclipse one’s obligation to the other in light of an in-breaking of an
apparently more authentic iteration of the storied-self? To answer these ques-
tions, we must explore the aspects of Ricoeur’s work which deal with his
philosophy of religion and touch upon the potency of certain myths to evoke
an excess of meaning which, as we shall see, exceed the limits of one’s own
finite sense of self. I will argue below that it is the power of myth to radically
transform the self which is the means by which one’s narrative identity may
be expressed in a way that resonates with Christian eschatological hope and
accounts for the changing sense of selfhood indicated by radical conversion.
Ricoeur’s Gifford lectures (from which Oneself as Another was derived),
included two lectures relating to the religious or theological dimension of the
self.57 In the subsequently published, “The Summoned Subject in the School
of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation”, Ricoeur hints at how religious
conversion can be seen as the response of the self to the summoning of the
Divine. Applied within the Christian tradition, conversion is understood as a
transformation into the glory of the risen Christ.58 A Christian is someone
who “discerns ‘conformity to the image of Christ’ in the call of conscience.”59
For Ricoeur this means that moral and ethical actions become interpretations
© 2009 The Author
of one’s own actions in the world in light of what is seen as the norm
provided by “the image of Christ.” This is an important observation by
Ricoeur, but one which he fails to relate to his extant philosophical
system.
Previously I noted that for Ricoeur, self-constancy of character was main-
tained out of a sense of care for the other. In “The Summoned Subject” this
constancy of character is maintained (for the converted Christian) in light of
the image of Christ as represented by the moral-sense of the converted
conscience. Therefore, whereas narrative identity is, in general, concerned
with maintaining constancy for the sake of the other, this concern ceases to be
ultimately normative for the converted. For the converted, the demands of
constancy are interrupted by the introduction of the texts, norms, and tradi-
tions of the summoning-one into the life-story of the one-summoned. Thus
for the Christian, the encounter with the summoning call of Christ makes the
re-narration of self (in the light of faith) the primary demand of selfhood. I am
more fundamentally bound to making the story of my life in the form of the
one who offers this summoning call, than in the form of constancy of char-
acter as required by my obligation to the other. This is not to say that the other
is ignored or that, for the Christian, self-identity is eclipsed by this summon-
ing call. Rather, the interruption of the summoning call precedes my sense of
responsibility to the other (in terms of self-constancy). The summons of
Christ may disrupt what was previously a narrative marked by constancy
of character, but seen in the light of his call, the disruption of character is
rather a restoration of character to a more authentic state. The self summoned
by Christ is a self whose constancy is measured by the encounter with
Christ.60
Conversion, in terms of narrative identity, is a fundamental change in
narrative context and a call for radical self-interpretation in light of one’s
encounter with the faith of the one who summons. It is the interruption of
one’s own conception of idem-identity by the ipse-identity of the Divine. It is
the overturning of my understanding of identity as sameness by the agency
of divine selfhood. For Ricoeur,
If salvation is a word-event, the communication of this word-event does
not take place without an interpretation of the whole symbolic network
that makes up the biblical inheritance, an interpretation in which the self
is both interpreter and interpreted.61
By encountering the God who is revealed in the texts and practices of the
tradition to which one is converted, one’s conversion is evidenced by a
re-reading of the entire story of one’s life. Having been summoned into this
relationship with the Divine, the temporal structure of one’s narrative is
likewise interrupted. The narrative self’s past is now re-interpreted in light
of the conversion event (in the case of Augustine, the concupiscent life is
not lauded but condemned) and one’s future telos is eclipsed by the
© 2009 The Author
promised eschatological destiny of the self. Conversion changes the context

in which my narrative is read by altering my reading of the past, changing
my experience of the present, and re-orienting my anticipation of the
future.
Although conversion may radically change the phenomenological self, is
one’s anticipation of the future that is implied by the eschaton anything more
than a fiction? Despite offering a holistically understood and embodied
philosophical anthropology, how can we speak of the storied-self’s transfor-
mation from finitude to infinitude (if that is the right term)? Ricoeur asserts
that, “narrative constructs the durable character of an individual, which one
can call his or her narrative identity . . .”62 Below I will seek to demonstrate
that this “durable character” may well be consonant with a sense of durabil-
ity which is in keeping with Christian eschatological hope in the resurrection
of the body.
Hope, Eschatology and the Problem of the Risen Christ

The final words ascribed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “This is the end—for me the
beginning of life,”63 reflect the ambiguous relationship which Christian the-
ology has with personal death. Death is not something to be scorned, rejected,
or postponed for an indefinite amount of time. Christian eschatology para-
doxically calls death a defeated foe and embraces death as the transition into
life eternal. Indeed, unlike the Hebrew Bible which lauds mythic longevity as
a sign of divine blessing,64 Christianity needs death for the transformation
that is a transfiguration of the fleshly body.
The relationship between the created and its creator bespeaks the fact that
all life is in the hands of God and the act of ultimate trust in God is the
surrender of one’s life to the providence of the Divine will. As intimated by
Bonhoeffer, the Christian reaction to death is one of victory over death.
Pauline eschatology hails the mystery of imperishablity for those in Christ for
whom “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15.55).
Death is made impotent because it has been conquered by Christ’s own
movement through death to resurrection. Paul admonishes his readers to
follow Christ’s example and express confidence in their own fate through
death. Not only in Christian theology but in Christian worship also, the
victory of Christ over death is praised, specifically because of the efficacy of
Christ’s work for the one singing his praise. The Scriptures which make up
the Pascha nostrum (1 Corinthians 5.7-8; Romans 6.9-11; 1 Corinthians 15.20-
22) professes that the sacrificial work of Christ on the Cross which is validated
by his resurrection from the dead brings about the death of death. “The death
that he died, he died to sin once for all . . . So also consider yourselves dead
to sin . . . Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who
have fallen asleep.” Moreover, “since by a man came death, by a man has
© 2009 The Author
come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in
Christ shall all be made alive.”65
Can a narrative identity, which is lived in full awareness of the limitations
of finitude, enjoy the hope which is expressed in Christian theology? A
narrative identity may be able to praise Christ for his work of offering victory
over death, but without a means of overcoming infinitude, such an acclama-
tion would merely be a claim of existential freedom or of imagined hopeful-
ness.66 In what follows I will illustrate the means by which narrative identity
makes sense of the resurrection of the body by discussing how Ricoeur
handles the question of identity in the context of the resurrection narratives
of Jesus.
The Identity of the Risen

[T]he meaning of Christ and the meaning of existence . . . mutually decipher
each other.67
According to Christian orthodoxy, the eternal Son of God, the Second Person
of the Trinity, took on human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, becoming fully
human whilst remaining fully divine. The doctrine of the hypostatic union
asserts that Jesus’ identity as the Divine Son of God and Jesus’ identity as the
human son of Mary are indissolubly the same. Furthermore, this identity
remains the same from his virgin birth to his crucifixion and from his resur-
rection to his ascension. It is this same fully human and fully divine Jesus
who is, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “seated at the right hand of the
father”. Jesus on the Cross is the same as the living Lord of the Church.68
Somehow, Jesus exceeded the limitations of finitude by moving from birth,
to death to resurrection. It may not seem unusual for the Divine to exceed
finitude, but in this case we must assume that it is equally Christ’s humanity
and his divinity that were raised on Easter morning and, as such, in his
humanity he acts in solidarity with the whole of humanity, anticipating the
bodily resurrection of all. After all, Christ is the “first born from the dead”
(Col. 1.18) and in the context of the Colossians hymn this ascription clearly
has eschatological and soteriological implications (Col 1.22). Christian hope
for the eschatological persistence of personal identity (“the resurrection of
the dead and the life everlasting”) is founded upon a belief that Jesus’ own
victory over death signals the “death of death” for the world and the over-
shadowing of the experience of one’s personal death.
There are two aspects of the Christ event which require explication in order
for narrative identity to suitably function in orthodox theology: (1) we must
be able to attempt to determine if narrative can facilitate a move from the
finite to the infinite; (2) we must explain how it can be that the identity of
Jesus, on the Cross, is the same as that of Christ on Easter morning, without
encountering the “multiple bodies” problem.
© 2009 The Author
Jesus and the Rupture of Finitude

If we were to assume that a narrative identity was consigned to finitude, and
if we were to apply the structure and limitations of such a narrative identity
to the passion of Jesus, we would be forced to conclude that the narrative
identity of the human Jesus must have ended on the cross. If narrative
identity expires upon the realisation of its finite teleology, then there would
be no possibility of continuation of life after death. In this light, the appear-
ance of an identity after the resurrection signals the creation of a new and
entirely different entity which, though qualitatively identical with Jesus,
would be quantitatively and thus ontologically differentiated from him (see
the “multiple bodies problem” above). As logical as this position may seem,
it is less than palatable to orthodox Christian faith and it smacks of Docetic
claims that Christ’s post-resurrection identity somehow differs from the
crucified man.
The question of Christ’s persisted identity from death to resurrection is one
as old as the resurrection story itself. The interactions between the disciples
and Thomas and Thomas and Christ in John 20 speak to the puzzling ques-
tion of ontological continuity between Jesus before and after his resurrection.
Christian confession in the self-same identity of Christ is an expression of the
founding language of the Christian kerygma—this man Jesus through means
divine and human conquers death and bears within his resurrected body the
promises of one’s own freedom from death.
Ricoeur reads Easter as a symbol which exudes such an overwhelming
surplus of meaning that it ruptures finitude with promise. The hope for (of)
history is a hope in the pledge of a promise. The “not yet” of the promise
expresses history in terms of a tension, which is the guiding principle of
Ricoeur’s interpretation of the New Testament.69 The promise at the heart of
the New Testament, and indeed the entire Christian kerygma, is the Resur-
rection. Likewise in Ricoeur, the Resurrection is tantamount to an eschato-
logical hope that finds its greatest manifestation in the “death of death . . . the
Resurrection of all from the dead.”70 The Resurrection is the “. . . pledge of all
divine presence in the present world.”71
If we recall how finitude was employed as a boundary limit for existence
rather than as a cause of existence by Ricoeur in Fallible Man, the resurrection
narratives would seem to indicate the possibility for this boundary to be
overcome. I believe it is important to recognise that overcoming this bound-
ary cannot be understood as a side-stepping or avoidance of finitude. Indeed,
if we take some liberty with Ricoeur’s insistence upon the hermeneutics of
selfhood being constituted through various “detours” through experiences,
texts, and critique, I would argue that a Ricoeurian reading of the Resurrec-
tion is arrived at through the detour of finitude and indeed death. Eschato-
logical hope is not hope in mythic longevity, nor is it hope in the avoidance
of suffering and finitude. For existence to have meaning, the boundary of
finitude must still function as telos. After all, humanity could no longer be
© 2009 The Author
defined as the “Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite”72 if resurrection

overshadowed or negated finite existence. However, if resurrection is
attained by way of a detour through finitude, that is, by exceeding or ruptur-
ing finitude through the surplus of meaning conveyed by the Resurrection of
Christ, then humanity’s teleological finitude leads through to humanity’s
eschatological infinitude.
In this light, it makes sense for Ricoeur to describe the kerygmatic Jesus as
a true creation ex nihilo—that is a creation from nothing, or from the grave.
That the risen Lord is the self-same crucified Jesus is dependent upon the
“word of the Risen One: ‘It is I, the same.’ ”73 His radical attestation of being
is an attestation of infinitude after the final actualisation of finitude in death.
He is infinite being that emerges from finite being.
The consequence of Jesus’ attestation of self-same identity, for the one who
reads these narratives or who encounters this being, is the development
within oneself of a hermeneutics of the resurrection. One must respond to
this in-breaking of the infinite into the finite by seeking the meaning of the
resurrection and not necessarily the mechanics of the resurrection. To inter-
rogate the resurrection by way of a hermeneutics of the resurrection is to
“reinstitute the potential of hope, to tell the future of the Resurrection.”74
The attestation of Christ’s continued identity (“It is I, the same”) is suffi-
cient grounds for hope in the durability of identity. The one who claims to
have ruptured through finitude proves the durability of his identity by
asserting his identity to us. Hope in the resurrection, and the ensuing call for
a new “hermeneutics of the resurrection”, results in a total re-appraisal of
one’s existence in light of the resurrection claim. I would argue that in
practice this would imply that one’s own understanding of the finitude viz.
narrative plot must be reconsidered in the face of eschatological hope.
Indeed, just as Augustine’s conversion necessitated that his life’s narrative be
refigured in the light of his encounter with the God of Scripture, so too does
a hope in the resurrection of Jesus re-orientate the narrative fabric of one’s
own narrative identity.
Rather than asking if the nature of the resurrected Christ is the same as the
crucified Jesus, and rather than analyzing the feasibility of the resurrection in
terms of the finite limits of being, Ricoeur prefers to bracket the spiritual or
soteriological significance of the resurrection in order to consider its existen-
tial import. Much like how Ricoeur preferred to understand the meaning of
time rather than the nature of time or to ask after the “who” question of
subjectivity rather than the “what” question of subjectivity, Ricoeur wants to
consider the meaning of resurrection rather than the mechanics of resurrec-
tion. The important question that one asks in light of the resurrection of
Christ is “Who is this resurrected one, for me?”, thus echoing Melanchthon’s
dictum: “To know Christ is to know his benefits.”
The meaning of resurrection is found primarily in the language of an
incongruous hope, and “hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the
© 2009 The Author
living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the
sign of the cross and death.”75 The only response to this hope is a complete
re-ordering of the self and the entire re-framing of one’s own narrative in
light of the possibility of the “wisdom of the Resurrection.” To know of this
hope, to hear of this resurrection, is to be irrevocably changed:
This logic of surplus and excess is as much the folly of the Cross as it is
the wisdom of the Resurrection. This wisdom is expressed in an economy
of superabundance, which we must decipher in daily life, in work and in
leisure, in politics and in universal history. To be free is to sense and to
know that one belongs to this economy, to be “at home” in this economy.
The “in spite of,” which holds us ready for disappointment, is only the
reverse, the dark side, of the joyous “how much more” by which freedom
feels itself, knows itself, wills to conspire with the aspiration of the whole
of creation for redemption.76
Just as one is left at the end of a text hoping for a continuation of the plot,
imagining what would life be like for the characters after those final pages, so
too does hope enrapture the narrative imagination and allow the self to
conceive of a surplus within history that transcends and exceeds time. The
capacity for hope within a transformed sense of narrative temporality
appears to give us a glimpse of eternity itself.
A Durable Hope
The Christian is called to live according to a “freedom in the light of hope”,
which is the reinterpretation of personal existence in the light of the Resur-
rection of Christ. The narrative of my own life, community, and family, is
reinterpreted through hope in my own future experience as anticipated by
the resurrection of Christ. “In this sense a hermeneutics of religious freedom
is an interpretation of freedom in conformity with the resurrection inter-
preted in terms of promise and hope.”77 The two narratives, that of my-own-
life and that of my-faith-life, are interlaced, calling for a hermeneutics of the
Resurrection which allows for a reinvigorated reading of my own present
and future existence. Death may be the end of finitude, but it is not the end
of my-own-life’s existence. Christ’s resurrection ruptured the seemingly-
never-ending cycle of finitude and allows my own life to be read through
hope in the Resurrection. Eschatological hope accepts the reality of finitude,
but retains a “passion for the possible,”78 which is a hope for a future that is
not at the cost of historicity.
Though future-orientated, eschatological hope directly informs one’s
activities in the world at present, as well as one’s ongoing construction of the
self. Freedom from death becomes the freedom of death, as death signals the
eschatological rupture from finitude into the future Being of Christ. The
characterization of the resurrection as a “passion for the possible,” implies
that this passion (within the subjective life) is lived out through hope in the
© 2009 The Author
New Creation. Hope for the New Creation manifests itself in temporality by
a call for “social and political justice” which is “a reconciliation which itself
demands to be inscribed in the recapitulation of all things.”79
The victorious message over death lauded by the Christian kerygma speaks
to the changing of horizons within a narrative identity. No longer is a narra-
tive restricted to the limitations of the finite, when it is opened to the infinite
possibilities anticipated by the stories of Christ’s own resurrection. This is not
to say that life is made less precious or less meaningful because the boundary
of finitude is exceeded.80 Finitude still exists as a limit, but it is a limit which,
in hope, may be exceeded. If being is itself always an affirmation opposed to
nothingness, as William Schweiker has stated regarding Ricoeur’s work, the
resurrection of Christ “is the eschatological event that is the affirmation of
being in spite of evil. It is the ultimate answer to the most serious question, of
time and narrative.”81
The Ricoeurian hermeneutic and phenomenological anthropology dis-
cussed above offers to Christian theological anthropology a self which is
fallible, but not unredeemably so; finite, yet not confined to finitude; incom-
plete in its knowledge of self and other, but always narrating itself through a
reflexive process of prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. For
Ricoeur, “selfhood [is] a task to be performed, not a given that awaits passive
reception by the subject.”82 The task of creating the self may never truly be
complete, but this failure to attain to a true image of the self opens up the self
to the power of imagination expressed by religious hope and symbol, and in
the symbol of the Resurrection (the symbol par excellence) durable hope may
be found.
Conclusion
Amid all the flux of changing relationships, different periods of life, developing
and diminishing capacities, gains and losses, tragedies and triumphs, there is
that which remains secure, held in the mind of God.83
Between the death of a human being, which is by definition the end from which
he cannot return, and what we term “resurrection” there is no common
measure.84
This article has attempted to reconcile Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthro-
pology with a Christian theological anthropology that conforms to the
christological and eschatological criteria of the resurrection of the body.
Perhaps the task of bringing theology and philosophy into dialogue over
eschatology reflects von Balthasar’s admission that there is no common
measure between human death and the resurrection. Moreover, it could be
that many of the difficulties which have been identified in this article
conform to the limits of a philosophical anthropology hinted at by Robert
Jenson, who notes that “neither a true escape-soul nor some Christian
© 2009 The Author
hybrid, nor any other posited anthropological entity, can bridge the gap
[between death and the resurrection]. It can be bridged not by anything
humans are in themselves but only by and in God.”85 Fundamentally, the
challenge of bringing Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology into dialogue
with Christian theological anthropology is one of bringing a phenomeno-
logically rich account of subjectivity into contact with a form of subjectivity
which is constrained by its grounding not in experience of the world but in
the summoning call of the Divine. A Christian theological anthropology
must not take as its starting point the reduction of identity into the con-
stellation of the mind/body nor exclusively the reduction of identity into
the stories told by the self about itself. Rather, fundamentally constitutive of
a theological anthropology is the summoning call of the Divine-Other who
brings the self into being and calls this self into relationship. It is God, and
God alone, who is solely responsible for ensuring the “durability” of this
self in and through time. Again, Jenson is informative here: “The continuity
between death and resurrection is that the person is ‘with Christ’ in the
resurrection and before it.”86
The self of Christian theological anthropology is one which is first called
into being by a Word which is mediated by the telling of myths and stories,
enacted by the practices of liturgy and charity, and passed on by a commu-
nity of faithful who are likewise called by the Divine. This Word is summa-
rized by Christ’s affirmation, “It is I, the same,” and so represents the
ultimate attestation of being in the face of finitude. The foundation for the
hope which I strive for in imagining the durability of my own narrative
identity through death is a hope that, like Christ, I may truly be recognizable
to myself and to the other. This is possible because through the surplus of
meaning in the Christ event, the finite limit of the body no longer serves as
the limitation of being.
Through the summons to faith, one’s narrative identity is opened to the
divine meta-narrative wherein one’s own idem-identity becomes radically
challenged by its encounter with the Divine ipseity. Thus, the story of the
self is no longer predicated upon my own telling, my own constant
re-formulation of identity over time. Rather, the arche and telos of finite
existence are overshadowed by the eschatological nature of true being real-
ized by the Resurrected One. The identity of the individual becomes incor-
porated into the narrativized identity of the risen Christ. This is most
dramatically encountered through the sacramental rite of baptism, where
election meets individuals in a significatory action that anticipates their
earthly life and its end in death, linking them to the future of God and his
salvation that has been manifested already in Jesus Christ. For this reason the
life of Christians becomes a repeating of what is done in the sign of baptism.
The election of the Christian into the eschatological life in God places signifi-
cantly formative pressures upon the construction of the individual notion of
self. For those whose narratives reside in Christ, one’s present life is ever
© 2009 The Author
informed by the hope-filled destiny of the individual, which is caught up into

the being of God.87
Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology offers Christian theology a language
that is filled with notions of surplus, symbol, narrative, and self that give
further dimension to our existing concepts of grace, faith, soul and promise.
He lends to theology a new language for speaking of the promises of God
and the response to these promises which we as individuals experience. What
is clear is that his rich description of narrative identity gives Christian the-
ology a new way of explicating the power of hope to captivate the imagina-
tion and reorient the stories that we tell about ourselves to the story that we
encounter in the person of Christ, the logos of God.
NOTES
1 Dan Stiver, Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), p. 160.
2 Paul Ricoeur in Richard Kearney, Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers: the
Phenomenological Heritage: Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Stanislas Breton,
Jacques Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 17.
3 Though Christian theological themes play into his work, faith is often bracketed out from
philosophy. This is most clearly the case with his Oneself as Another. The book, published in
1992, reflects his 1986 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. In the lectures,
Ricoeur engages explicitly with Christian theological themes, which were omitted from
the published work. The final two lectures, “The Self in the Mirror of Scripture” and “The
Mandated Self” are most easily accessed in Mark I Wallace’s (ed.) Figuring the Sacred as “The
Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation” (pp. 262-275)
and “Pastoral Praxeology, Hermeneutics, and Identity” (pp. 303-314), respectively. See Mark
I. Wallace, ed., Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 1995).
4 See Elaine Graham, Heather Walton, and Frances Ward, Theological Reflection: Methods
(London: SCM Press, 2005).
5 I believe that there is a distinction between philosophy and theology which stems from the
former’s hope for presupositionless reason and the latter’s admission to a priori faith.
However, though philosophy and theology may be distinct, it seems endemic to the Chris-
tian tradition to read philosophy, for good or ill, with theological eyes.
6 See Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
7 Henry Isaac Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the
Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 4.
8 An early discussion of the arche/telos dialectic can be found here: Paul Ricoeur, “The Herme-
neutics of Symbols,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 330–334.
9 As Don Ihde comments regarding Ricoeur: “Hope is the ‘answer’ to evil; and the ‘logic’ of
hope must be a renewal of contemporary eschatology in which the symbols of hope are
elicited from a progressive interpretation of polysemic word. Hidden in the present is the
promise of the future.” “Editor’s Introduction”, Paul Ricoeur: The Conflict of Interpretations,
ed. James M. Edie, Northwestern University studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. xxii.
10 The difference between these two understandings of self will be explored in further detail
below.
11 I am much indebted here to a reader of an early version of this manuscript, who addressed
the need to emphasize agency as the central facet of the narrative self. In the background of
Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative and then explored most fully in From Text to Action [Paul
© 2009 The Author

Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1991)], Ricoeur argues that it is human action which is both given meaning in
narrative and that which gives content to narrative. By attending to the meaning of actions,
Ricoeur develops a “practical hermeneutics”.
12 Venema, Identifying Selfhood, p. 92.
13 Self-reflection, which focuses on the contextual locale of the object within culture, is an
altogether different thing from introspection. Accordingly, “reflection is not introspection;
for reflection takes the roundabout way via the object; it is reflection upon the object”
whereas introspection is purely interested in the subject alone. See Paul Ricoeur, Fallible
Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1986), p. 18.
14 Domenico Jervolino, “Gadamer and Ricoeur on the hermeneutics of praxis,” in Paul Ricoeur:
The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. anonymous (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), p. 67.
15 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols., vol.
3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 247.
16 Ibid, p. 245.
17 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. David McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols., vol.
1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 3.
18 Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” Philosophy Today Vol. 35 no. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 73-81; at
p. 73.
19 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p 274.
20 Paul Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection
& Imagination, ed. M. J. Valdes (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 110–111.
21 Ricoeur in an interview with Kearney: see Richard Kearney, Dialogues With Contemporary
continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological heritage: Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert
Marcues, Stanislas Breton, Jacques Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.
45.
22 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 140.
23 David Rasmussen, “Rethinking subjectivity,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed.
R. Kearney (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), p. 164.
24 Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, pp. 2–4. I believe that the dialectic is most clearly elucidated in
L’identité narrative, and it is from the English translation of this article that I will cite.
25 Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” p. 74.
26 Ibid, p. 76.
27 By contrast, according to Richard Kearney, the dialectic of idem and ipse is a rereading of an
Aristotelian metaphysic through the epistemology of Heidegger. See Richard Kearney, ed.
Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), pp. 44–45. In
David Ford’s analysis of Ricoeur’s dialectic, idem answers the “what and why” questions of
identity whereas ipse answers the “who” questions of identity. See David F. Ford, Self and
Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 87.
28 The dialectic of idem and ipse underpins the role of otherness in Ricoeurian narrative identity
and helps to explain why in Ricoeur and in my commentary here on Ricoeur, words like
“self” and “subject” are favoured over “person” or (unmodified) “identity”. The notion of
“self” in Ricoeur’s French (soi), as he notes in the introduction to Oneself as Another, is a
reflexive pronoun which, as in English, implies reciprocity (the self is a self for something/
someone else). Likewise, the language of subject or subjectivity equally implies the existence
of some other which summons my sense of self into relation (subjects are subjects in
relationship to an other). In contrast, both person and identity are less defined by their
relational contexts. Person belies its Greek relation, hypostasis—a substantive reality which
is differentiated from an other. Likewise the use of identity can also imply differentiation, as
is the case of computer programming where an identity variable is one which is used to
uniquely distinguish one object from another. The vagaries of personal and reflexive
language highlight the doubled nature of subjectivity. I am my own and I am another’s.
My responsibility to both self and other begs the question of ethics, recognisability and
constancy.
29 For more on Ricoeur’s concept of the summoned subject (and his use of a Lévinasian ethic
of alterity) see, Paul Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the
Prophetic Vocation,” in Figuring The Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I.
Wallace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 262–275. Although the other is central
© 2009 The Author

to the “summoned self”, Ricoeur does not give the other as extensive a role in the construc-
tion of the self as does Levinas.
30 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 165.
31 Although I argue that the maintenance of one’s character out of an obligation to the other
creates, for Ricoeur, an ethical framework which is at the foundation of selfhood and
sociality, Ricoeur’s ethical project (his “little ethics” in the seventh, eighth and ninth studies
of Oneself as Another) is not limited by or restricted to alterity. Rather, this obligation to
maintain one’s character for the other is only the groundwork for a more defined systematic
ethics which places into dialogue the teleological concern for pursuing the good life in
Aristotelian ethics with the deontological Kantian tradition of conforming to moral norms.
Ibid., p. 170.
Narrative identity, and the act of reflecting upon one’s narrative identity, is the means by
which one can successfully analyse the nature of one’s ability to pursue the Aristotelian
good life and conform to a sense of Kantian moral norms. “On the ethical plane, self-
interpretation becomes self-esteem. In return, self-esteem follows the fate of interpretation”
(Ibid., p. 179). This is expressed in the binary of self-esteem and self-respect, where self-
esteem seems to correspond with one’s ethical obligations to the good life and self-respect
is one’s ability to conform to moral norms. Yet even though it may appear that, given the
emphasis given to self-reflection (practically attained by refiguring one’s narrative identity),
this does not imply that Ricoeur’s ethics represent a move away from the obligation to the
other which was expressed so clearly in study six of Oneself as Another or in the “Summoned
Subject”. Rather, the refiguring of the narrative is itself a means of viewing the self as
another.
What are the practical results of this ethics? As Ricoeur states in the beginning of his study,
“The autonomy of the self will appear then to be tightly bound up with solicitude for one’s
neighbour and with justice for each individual.” (Ibid., p. 18). The goal of the “little ethics” is
to produce an ethically aware self whose reflections upon the actions that comprise the
narrative life create a self which is both consistent in identity and consistent in actions. It is
a self which, with respect to others, desires to pursue “solicitude” and “justice”, which is to
say to live the good life, for oneself and for the other, within the context of just institutions.
32 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, p. 136.
33 Ibid., p. 135.
34 Ibid., p. 137.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., p. 140.
37 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 117. Permanence in time, as Ricoeur calls it, is akin to an oak
tree remaining the same tree from acorn to timber, or like the constancy of one’s own DNA
as a marker of one’s sameness, even though the body may change.
38 Ibid., p. 125.
39 Ibid., p. 33; p. 60.
40 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 211.
41 Quotes from Augustine’s Confessions are taken from: Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1961).
42 Augustine, Confessions. 10.vi.
43 Augustine, De Vera Religione, 72.
44 Augustine, Confessions, 4.iv.
45 Ibid. 4.v.
46 Ibid. 4.xi.
47 Contrast the conclusion of 2.vi with the introduction of 2.vii. Here the sin of stealing is
directly followed with praise for forgiveness.
48 Augustine, Confessions, 2.vii.
49 Indeed, this would seem to be further illustrated by the very structure of Augustine’s
Confessions itself, which reflects two stories of creation by fiat. Confessions is traditionally
divided into two parts, with the first containing Augustine’s autobiography and the second
containing his reflections upon the Genesis creation myth. It is as if by juxtaposing the two
stories, Augustine is highlighting the correlation between the divine creation through the
word, and Augustine’s own self-creation through language. In the same way that in part one
Augustine retells his own story from his own knowledge of the past, we see in part two that
© 2009 The Author

God creates the cosmos by retelling its story from God’s foreknowledge of cosmic history.
In both creation stories there is the cycle of purity, fall, and redemption, which for Augustine
reflects the triadic fabric of cosmological existence.
50 Luke 22.19: τουτο ˆ στιν τ σωμα
ˆ mou τ πρ μων ˆ didmenon τουτο
ˆ ˆ ες τ ν
ποιειτε
μ ν ν μνησιν .
51 Augustine, Confessions, 10.lxx.
52 From the “Anaphora of Hippolytus” in Cipriano Vagaggini, The Canon of the Mass and
Liturgical Reform, trans. Peter Coughlan (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), p. 27.
53 Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” p. 80.
54 It should be noted in the creation of the narrative self, in my Ricoeurian reading of Augus-
tine, that in drawing one’s identity from the wells of personal history and fiction, the
imagination is employed in both instances as the foundation for self-identity. Moreover,
every narrative (not just autobiographical narrative) is such a configuration and possibly a
refiguration of the self.
55 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 247.
56 Augustine, Confessions, 8.xii.
57 See note #3 above.
58 Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject”, pp. 267–268.
59 Ibid., p. 274.
60 I would argue that for Christian theology, the extent to which this encounter implies a
changing sense of teleology cannot be overstated. To be sure, one’s sense of ethical teleology
(what constitutes “the good life”) is re-oriented through the summons, but more germane
to this project, the nature of one’s sense of personal telos (as finitude) is likewise challenged.
It would seem that in light of the eschatological claims of Christian theology, which view the
eschaton as the culmination and full restoration of creation, that self-constancy which is
maintained in the light of eschatological hope must be in part determined by one’s antici-
pation of the perfected eschaton. Thus, though within my relationship to others, my life—
after conversion—is seen as being radically different, in reality self-constancy is still
maintained, albeit in the light of a hoped for perfected state. This may well be how one can
begin to explain “sanctification” within the context of a narrative identity.
61 Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject”, p. 274.
62 Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity”, p. 77.
63 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York, NY:
Macmillan, 1967), p. 225.
64 See Melchizedek in Genesis 14 for but one example of mythic longevity.
65 Pascha nostrum in “Morning Prayer Rite II”, Book of Common Prayer (New York, NY: Seabury
Press, 1979), p. 83.
66 Narrative identity can only suitably function within Christian theology if we ardently
maintain a monistic anthropology. This is say, if resurrection of the body is somehow not a
resurrection of one’s own body or the continuation of one’s own agency within the embod-
ied context of one’s own action, then narrative identity ceases to offer a complimentary
doctrine of humanity for theology. Any form of substantive dualism (mind/body or body/
soul) problematizes my proposed relationship between Ricoeurian narrative identity and
theological anthropology. In recalling Ricoeur’s answer to the multiple bodies problem in
Parfit, even if my body could be raised it would seem to signify the creation of a wholly
other embodied agent.
67 Paul Ricoeur, “Preface to Bultmann,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge,
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 52.
68 Paul Ricoeur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis
S. Mudge, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 163.
69 Ibid., p. 158.
70 Ibid., p. 159.
71 Ibid.
73 Ricoeur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” p. 159.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., p. 162.
76 Ibid., p. 164.
© 2009 The Author

77 Ibid., pp. 159–160.

78 Ibid., p. 160.
79 Ibid., p. 165.
81 William Schweiker, “Imagination Violence, and Hope: A Theological Response to Ricoeur’s
Moral Philosophy,” in Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur, ed. David E.
Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), p.
214.
82 Wallace, Figuring the Sacred, p. 4.
83 John Habgood, Being a Person: Where Faith and Science Meet (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1998), pp. 227–228.
84 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, trans. Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1990), p. 50.
85 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Triune God, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), pp. 367–368.
86 Ibid., pp. 366–367.
87 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T.
& T. Clark, 1994), p. 438.
© 2009 The Author


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Modern Theology 25:4 October 2009

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

PAUL RICOEUR AT THE FOOT OF

© 2009 The Author

understanding of selfhood, despite the apparent limits of the phenomeno-

Paul Ricoeur: Subjectivity and Narrative Identity

experienced. Narrative temporality, as a synthesis of psychological and cos-

Identity and “Emplotment”

Identity as Sameness and Identity as Difference

Character and Otherness

Finitude and Embodiment

Ricoeur in Dialogue with Augustine

seek after other material/physical objects—the soul, through the memory,

providential hand, which from the imaginative perspective of faith was

articulate action . . . narrative mediation underlines this remarkable aspect

Is Augustine’s Identity a “Narrative” Identity?

promised eschatological destiny of the self. Conversion changes the context

Hope, Eschatology and the Problem of the Risen Christ

The Identity of the Risen

Jesus and the Rupture of Finitude

deﬁned as the “Joy of Yes in the sadness of the ﬁnite”72 if resurrection

informed by the hope-ﬁlled destiny of the individual, which is caught up into

© 2009 The Author

© 2009 The Author

© 2009 The Author

© 2009 The Author

77 Ibid., pp. 159–160.

© 2009 The Author

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