Celebrating Being There: A Review of Welcoming Finitude

In her introductory remarks to Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (New York: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2019), Christina M. Gschwandtner engages over a century of phenomenological discourse, emphasizing more recent developments and thinkers, and how these will inform her philosophical analyses of liturgical experience. She prepares us for what follows in due course: a critical analysis of the “experience and meaning of liturgy” and “opening new paths for thinking about religious experience more broadly” (29). What emerges is a compelling presentation of the salient features of phenomenology from Husserl, through Heidegger, to the thought in contemporary French phenomenology in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chretien, Emmanuel Falque, Michel Henry, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with productive references to American phenomenologist Anthony Steinbock, and the great hermeneuts, Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Further, Gschwandtner brings her critique of these thinkers to bear on this timely and useful study of the structures and modes of the human experience of the liturgical event.

To fulfill her commitment to address an audience of liturgical theologians, phenomenologists and informed Orthodox in the Preface (xi-xx), most chapters begin with a theological perspective on an aspect of liturgy, which is then followed by a general description of a particular liturgical practice, cycle, or event, leading to a discussion of certain phenomenological thinking which provides a springboard to her own careful analysis of the liturgical matter at hand. The topic of each chapter, moreover, is a conceptual area of interest to phenomenology. Seven chapters form, therefore, the heart of this work: 1) Temporality; 2) Spatiality; 3) Corporeality; 4) Sensoriality; 5) Affectivity; 6) Community; 7) Intentionality.

Chapter 1, “Temporality,” exemplifies the broad approach to the phenomenological focal points taken in the book. Gschwandtner begins with a colorful quotation describing “the height of Orthodox liturgical experience: ‘…The resurrection of Christ is a high festival in the whole Christian world, but nowhere is it so luminous as in Orthodoxy….’” She notes laconically, “Not only does liturgy take a lot of time, but much of it is concerned with time” (31). Her argument moves swiftly to a discussion of the problem of time in liturgy, the tension between quotidian, seasonal, cyclical time, and chronological time, clock time (the march of minutes and hours), calendar time (the march of days), linear time. Liturgical theologians struggle with the paradoxes presented by anamnesis and anticipation, by a lived past, an experience of the liturgical present, and by an eschatological future. Heidegger’s Being and Time makes an expected appearance here, used to outline the human experience of time as not fundamentally chronological, but as an ‘ek-static’ temporality (38), where past and future uncannily always arrive in the present. Moving the phenomenological description forward, she cites Lacoste’s distinction between kairos and chronos: the former governing liturgical, eschatological experience, and the latter our mundane experience of our day to day world. Before throwing down her gauntlet, she concedes that Lacoste’s analysis (as he himself insists) does not focus on “actual liturgical practices” but on “fundamental structures…of human existing vis a vis the Absolute.”

Gschwandtner takes Lacoste with a grain of salt. She will not buy any facing of any Absolute “unless we look to the reality of religious experience that might suggest such a possibility” (41). She presses on to a productive face-off of the “tension between memory and anticipation” of the liturgical theologians and the insights provided by the phenomenological investigations she has just outlined. For example, she finds Cuneo’s strictly linear understanding of time wanting, while rehabilitating Heidegger’s dismissal of “theological accounts of time” in a provocative rewriting of Sorge into her own phenomenology of liturgical time. “In the experience of liturgy, past and future become present, but not as recreations or reenactments of historical events, but as liturgical events that are experienced ‘now,’ appropriated by our experience of the event in the liturgical moment” (43). We have an interest, a concern for liturgical anamnesis and eschaton, and while we do not create these de novo, or unfold ourselves into the past or future, we do indeed participate in the “possibility” (46) that we “become dispossessed” in the swerve of the elements and movements of liturgy (46). Nowhere is this clearer, for Gschwandtner, than in the kairological flow of fasting and feasting, a pairing that provides an undergirding for all the analyses that follow, here and in subsequent chapters. Fasting and feasting, guilt and contrition, repentance and celebration, wound and healing, light and darkness, sound and silence mark the time of liturgy as it does the liturgical year. Without denying the march of chronological time, she describes the experience of liturgical time, not as Lacoste’s ‘added time,’ but as a time outside of calendars and clocks, or at least time alongside them. She can speak of a thickening of time at moments of feasting, without, for example, speculating on time dilations as they are known to physics (47). Indeed, by maintaining a clear distance between her ontological concerns and the concerns of the ontic disciplines, she leaves no room for any slippage from phenomenological depiction to mere interested, scientific inquiry.

The argument in the book moves deliberately and persuasively through each chapter. Were I to find an instance where the discussion seems problematic, I would look to the final chapter, “Intentionality.” Because the matter of intentionality is generally of great interest to phenomenologists, and the term itself is a technical one, designating as it does the fundamental move of pointing the gaze at what is given to consciousness, I found myself confused at a few junctures where it seemed to me unclear how the technical meaning of the term was not collapsing on the colloquial sense, where intention is what someone might bring to a celebration of liturgy—what a particular someone might intend to experience, or intend to happen.

Marion has borrowed the term “anamorphosis” from art history and criticism to describe a structure of the given, how givenness can position a recipient to better receive what gives itself into phenomenalization—influence the intentional aim. Gschwandtner had briefly touched on this idea in her discussion of excess and sensoriality (chapter 4, 118—the term “anamorphosis” appears here only; it is not indexed), but shuts down any role here. Yet, she does not hesitate to affirm “we can phenomenologically examine how liturgy shapes intentionality” (183). Because she will not drop 'anamorphosis' on liturgy’s doorstep, perhaps out of a distaste for grandiosity or simply from a dislike of mere speculation, her move here is toward hermeneutics, which by this point in her argument has become thematic. For Gschwandtner, liturgy references religious events, personages, even the eschaton; but liturgy is itself none of these things. If it shapes the intention, it does so not by a describable anamorphosis, but through its texts and gestures that unfold within the space and time of the liturgical moment, mediated through the human bodies that move through it with all their affect and senses. Liturgy is the horizon of all liturgical phenomenality, not some horizon of love, or hope, or fear, or anxiety, or even the body, against which givenness might appear. 

Gschwandtner proceeds in a distinctively understated manner to a thorough analysis of each philosophical topic. Her discussion of 'hospitality' underscores a unifying theme of the whole book, which demonstrates how liturgy welcomes human finitude, how it prepares a way for human limitation, foibles, imperfection and predicament to its possibilities, despite such finitude’s confrontation with its own most, the possibility of impossibility, the place of the end of possibilities, the burning concern with the end, a being-toward-death. I cannot help but understand her here as showing us not only how the world of liturgy opens up our own being-in-the-world, how liturgy “thickens” time, but how our very finitude gets a little fatter, too, and opens upon a finitude that is more welcoming than it might have been had it recourse only to the march of calendars and clocks, the nine to five’s of offices and shopping carts.

Welcoming Finitude is a fine addition to the tradition of phenomenological inquiry of religious experience that begins with Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life and continues today in contemporary French philosophy of religion, and French phenomenology in general. Without denying the ambitiousness of her project overall, I find Gschwandtner’s approach even-handed and sobering in a field of over-arching claims for the extraordinariness of phenomena in general and for religious experience in particular. I anticipate the book will prove to be both a powerful reference tool (the copious and meticulous notes are exhaustive, as is the bibliography) and another platform for her already strong voice in philosophy. The author has kept her promise to speak to a large audience in, for the most part, plain English. Students (and I mean this term very broadly) of liturgy, theology, phenomenology, religion will find it a welcome addition to their reading lists and libraries. While at times written specifically for an Orthodox audience, any Christian, especially Roman Catholics, will appreciate the rigor of the book’s method; indeed, anyone interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of religious experience will find Welcoming Finitude quite hospitable, and not without a noticeable conviviality.