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By Paul Ricoeur
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1995. 340 pp. $24.00.
Paul Ricoeur-French Huguenot, Barthian Christian, European intellectual, now Emeritus at the Divinity School, University of Chicago-is an inescapable voice in the intellectual life of the West. For those who already are conversant with his work, this collection of twenty-one essays, mostly previously published, offers a continuation of a lively, probing conversation. For those not yet initiated into this probe of the inscrutable, this collection is as good a place as any from which to take the plunge into Ricoeur. Those who do so should be forewarned that Ricoeur's work is remarkably dense, deeply coded, and relentlessly demanding. But of course, the gains are more than commensurate with the demands.
The three terms of the subtitle-religion, narrative, imagination-refer to the themes that have long preoccupied Ricoeur, as he has thought beyond any of his contemporaries about how the mystery of God inhabits, in ambiguous but decisive ways, the lived historicality of human life. The cunning title word, "figuring," alludes to the problematic around which Ricoeur works and the hermeneutical enterprise that is at the heart of his writing. "The sacred" is indeed directly engaged in our life and in the life of the world but not in ways that permit direct access or control. Thus, "figuring" is the tricky, delicate, artistic human operation of knowing and seeing and telling that which ultimately resists our knowledge, our vision, and our utterance. These essays, ranging over a broad spectrum of subjects over a long period of time, show Ricoeur addressing afresh his recurring themes, extending them in daring ways. One of the important values of this volume is an extended introductory essay by Mark I. Wallace (Swarthmore College),...