paul ricoeur, solicitude, love, and the gift
religion within the philosophy of spirit. But at what cost? The cost,
exactly, of reducing religion to a gnosis, that is, to a wisdom that ignores
its rules, that ignores what is figurative in abstract thought. Then it is
necessary to a philosopher to tell religion what it is without knowing
it. Thus I find that there is more violence in this integration of religion
with philosophy than in the recognition of their specificity and the
specificity of their intersections.^64Conclusion
Towards the end of his life, in perhaps what was one of his very last
interviews with Richard Kearney, Ricoeur remarked: “I am not sure
about the absolute irreconcilability between the God of the Bible and
the God of Being (understood with Jean Nabert as ‘primary affirma-
tion’ or with Spinoza as ‘substantia actuosa’).”^65 This would not appear
to be a retraction of his previous work on philosophy and religion, or
“religious philosophy,” as such a statement would take his own further
explorations in quite a different direction from traditional metaphys-
ics with its attempted reconciliations between Athens and Jerusalem.
Unfortunately, Ricoeur did not live long enough to undertake such
further explorations. It is in his later work on love, however, that the
magnanimous heart and spirit that informed Ricoeur’s long itinerary
in both philosophy and religion became most apparent. His constant
references to the gift in its different manifestations in his final works
are also revelatory. It seems that whenever Ricoeur reaches the limits
of whatever philosophic reflection and speculation can expound, and
something more than the merely human is required, the gift is intro-
duced. It is emblematic of a further resource and the token of a mys-
tery that exceeds explanatory powers. At times, then, Ricoeur seems
to teeter on the brink of toppling into religion. Yet it seems finally that
he is reluctant to impose his own Christian allegiance and, as a result,
- Ibid., 688. Ibid., 688.
- Ricoeur, “On Life Stories (2003),” 169. Ricoeur expands further on this in-
sight: “If the mainstream and official tradition of Western metaphysics has been
substantialist, this does not preclude other metaphysical paths, such as thse lead-
ing from Aristotle’s dunamis to Spinoza’s conatus and Schelling and Leibniz’s no-
tions of potentiality (puissance),” ibid., 166.