Abstract
Michel de Certeau’s work questions the theological discipline surrounding language. Although Certeau does not directly elaborate a theory of theological language, his intellectual project addresses the approaching crisis of the Church in the post-Vatican II era as a symptom of the broader crisis of culture and institutions in the West. This implies an archaeology of the erosion of language and its yet-unexplored possibilities. This progressive awareness of the epistemological consequences of the 14th-century nominalist rupture involves the desontologized language (mainly, but not only, that of Tradition); a complex and fruitful analysis of modern mystical language (dialogical and relational), which continues to problematize the subsisting vestiges of clerical theological language (non-dialogical and patriarchal); and a theoretical and practical vindication of the ordinary language, which opens up enormous possibilities for a theology and spirituality capable of taking cultures and everyday life as the place where a believing subjectivity emerges in our contemporaries.
1 Introduction
“To go through theology in the direction of other places in order to return to it with a different perspective”1 aptly describes Certeau’s theological gesture, as Joseph Moingt points out in the introduction to the special tribute issue of the journal Recherches de Science Religieuse, entitled “Voyage mystique”, published in November 1988. Certeau certainly goes through theology towards other disciplines, as the human sciences (linguistics, ethnology, history, and psychoanalysis) play a fundamental role in his work. Rethinking the questions he poses to theological languages involves going in the direction of mystical discourses, but that is not all, since these cannot be dissociated from his analyses of the post-Vatican II crisis of the Church within the broader cultural and institutional crisis in Western Europe, which crystallized in May ’68. Certeau’s archaeology of this crisis includes the study of modern mystical language as a symptom of the epistemological rupture of modernity and an analysis of the erosion of contemporary religious and political language. This archaeology allows him to open up a serious and enthusiastic reflection on the language of ordinary people, challenging and questioning both the human sciences and theology as a discourse on God.
In this contribution, we explore some of the questions that Michel de Certeau poses to religious language in crisis, questions that still seem relevant, or are perhaps more relevant than ever. We will then examine the challenges that mystical language raised in the 16th and 17th centuries and that it continues to raise in theological language today. The hypothesis we wish to put forward is that the fruitfulness of the questions and challenges Certeau poses to theological languages is directly linked to the notion of “cultural communication”.
2 The Crisis of Religious Language
Certeau opened the issue dedicated to La foi en Jésus Christ,2 with the article “Expérience chrétienne et langages de la foi”, published in April 1965 in issue 46 of the Revue Christus. A few months before the end of the Second Vatican Council, he analysed the devaluation of the words of the Church’s tradition, which were becoming increasingly ‘closed’ or opaque to most Christians. The reason for this is that, little by little, many believers are experiencing a disagreement “between their spiritual experience and the signs they are given to express it”.3 The bond between experience and the language of tradition is cracking. “A rupture is revealed between what they say and what they are”.4 Certeau took up this theme as the great task of theology in his article “L’articulation du ‘dire’ et du ‘faire’. La contestation universitaire, indice d’une tâche théologique”5 (1970).
At the same time, Certeau perceived the depth of this break by delving into Surin’s 17th-century mysticism. The question of “communication”6 was thus a fundamental key to his diagnosis of the communicational rupture made manifest by May ’68, his analyses of modern mysticism and the crisis of religious language.
Certeau points out that a certain vocabulary is becoming detached from the experience of Christians, without there being anything objectively Christian to replace it.
This is undoubtedly a crisis that the Church has known whenever the cultural system of an entire period has been turned upside down, such as by the powerful wave of Enlightenment on the threshold of the modern era, born of the troubled depths of an experience at odds with official, intellectual or institutional language, but destined to bring with its flow astonishing renewals. The malaise among Christians today is also a symptom of a general crisis. Religious vocabulary and symbols are part of the transformation of culture; they are sticking to a language that we are becoming aware is no longer our own.7
In his view, the crisis of the Church in the mid-1960s could not be detached either from a problem of language or from the mutation of a cultural system. Religious symbols, the language of tradition, are inseparable from culture because they are a fact of culture. In other words, any religious language capable of expressing faith is subject to the law of historicity.8 Thus, spiritual experience cannot remain “outside the language of the time”, or outside its “cultural situation”.
In his article “La parole du croyant” (1967), Certeau diagnosed that theological language was becoming an obstacle to communication.9 Thus, the fact that there is a religious crisis linked to a more global language crisis is one of the symptoms of a “cultural crisis” linked to an “irreversible mutation”,10 a “global evolution”.11
Certeau, in his article “Apologie de la difference” works on the crisis of religious language by presenting it as a “schism between the forms of modern consciousness and the socio-cultural language of faith”,12 the cause of which is said to be the narrowness of the boundaries of Christianity. The schism manifests itself in “two different ways of feeling, perceiving and thinking”,13 which means that Christian discourse separates itself from the ordinary language of man. The reason for this isolation could be found in the mental narrowness that locates the Church in a small cultural and social space of human experience, losing or overlooking other dimensions of the human: scientific research, culture, art, work —in short, everyday life, which would take off as a research object a few years later. As a result of this confinement, the Christian conscience tends to become “more superficial” and, consequently, the language of faith becomes “abstract”, “unreal” or irrelevant to our contemporaries. This narrowing of boundaries leads to bilingualism, the phenomenon in which two cultures and two mental systems are juxtaposed, forcing believers to speak two languages: one to refer to their religious experience and the other to talk about life outside the religious sphere. The complexity, which Certeau underlines incisively and lucidly, lies in the fact that the “religious outlook” becomes “a residue”, “beyond all scientific language”,14 a “folklore”. This position banishes the meaning given by religion from any kind of common language, from any scientific language spoken by our contemporaries, and postulates its truth in a place where there is a kind of vacuum of thought.
3 Nominalism and the Desontologisation of Language
Certeau was not content to merely analyse the crisis of theological language in the 1960s. His aim was to read this crisis archaeologically,15 considering first the epistemological consequences of the nominalist shift, particularly the spread of William of Ockham’s nominalism, which dissociated the word from the thing. This shift catalyzed the collapse of a theory of symbolism that supported the epistemological edifice of Christianity during the Middle Ages. He revisits the rupture between a theological language still attached to an ontology that refers words to the essential realities or truths behind them and a long history of language that, for centuries, has recognised that words distance themselves from the immutable and imperishable things they are supposed to represent.16 This rupture catalysed the transition from a regime of Christendom17 to modernity. He is not alone in this line of analysis; to name but a few of the most significant names in the debate, Hans Blumenberg18 in 1966, and Louis Dupré19 and Charles Taylor20 a few years later, also explored this path.
In his article “Mystique au XVIIe siècle”, Certeau postulates a link between mysticism, nominalism, and the “dechristianisation of a language”.21 The shift of the word ‘mystical’ from an adjective (mystical body, mystical theology) to a noun (the mystical, mysticism) in the 17th century, as an “experimental science”, reflects a challenge to the ability of language to convey the meaning of the Absolute, and thus reveals the inherent flaw in the language of tradition and in all language. Certeau points out that one possible cause of this phenomenon is nominalism, which “holds revealed language to be certain because it is revealed, but [it] tends to deny the possibility of a certain and personal confirmation of its truth”.22 Similarly, in his analyses of Jean-Joseph Surin’s theological and philosophical23 context in the 17th century, Certeau blames nominalism for the exile of the supernatural from language.24
What strikes Certeau most about the “Ockham moment” in The Mystic Fable I is the uncertainty produced in the field of knowledge by the notion of Potentia Dei absoluta and its corollary, the progressive desontologisation of language. The centrality of spiritual experience as the sole certainty of knowledge, established at the dawn of modernity, is the result of this theological and philosophical shift that Certeau so lucidly grasped. Thus, the originality of his analysis, compared with others of his time, lies in underlining the intrinsic link between nominalism, spiritual experience, and the birth of linguistics.25
Certeau’s assertion regarding the weakening and rupture of an epistemology supported by medieval symbolism (allegoria in factis) and, one might say, by medieval ontology (analogia entis) highlights the somewhat naive nature of attempts to resist an inescapable epistemological process.
4 The Fable: a Word that Engenders Another
“Spirituality, insofar as it is an expression, recognises an articulation of language with that which is Impossible to say, and is therefore situated in that boundary area where ‘what we cannot speak about’ is also ‘what we cannot not speak about’”.26 This boundary area is the place of the other; a place that is both impossible and necessary. This boundary area refers, on the one hand, to the famous last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and, on the other hand, to the Acts of the Apostles: “We cannot not speak” (Acts 4:29). For Certeau, “both propositions can be held at the same time”,27 but not at any price. This is the whole problem of mystical language and the interstitial space in which Certeau’s thinking is situated. Is it not also the central problem of all theological language?
Certeau’s research on mystical language invites us to take a transversal look at four discursive practices: “the link between this “modern” mystics and a new eroticism, a psychoanalytic theory, historiography itself, and the “fable” (which relates simultaneously to orality and fiction)”28. To what extent do these four discursive practices problematize theological languages? It seems to me that at least the dialogue with the disciplinary fields implied by these discourses continues to nettle – rather by a kind of deficit – a significant part of theological discourse today.
The word fable comes from the Latin fari (phêmi in Greek), which means to speak. Fable refers to a non-place where speech is born. A speech that sets in motion and engenders a new speech that is ‘other’, sometimes disturbing and almost always subversive, like any emerging otherness. “Now, Jesus Christ is a fable: a kind of fable that must make subsequent productions possible”.29 With these words, Certeau challenges an over-confident Catholicism. He wants to move away from what he calls an “ontological model” that refers to a certain kind of Christian thought that considers itself to be “a closed scientific discourse”, because “the Gospel can no longer be anything but text, fable”.30 It eludes any place of knowledge established by a corpus of truths. Fable refers to something more modest and humbler. To speak of Christianity as a fable forces us to make room for an otherness mediated by the obligatory recourse to fiction, for the metaphor of “that truth which has the appearance of a lie”.31 In other words, Certeau re-establishes the place of fiction32 as an obligatory element of any language of faith. Fiction is thus the condition of possibility for a poetics. It opens a space for saying and writing, thus allowing the birth of a discourse and establishing a framework capable of representing a dialogue.
The defeat of medieval symbolism, which marked the unity of the Middle Ages, saw the opening of two directions that completely changed the relationship with language. The first, typical of theological discourse, recovers the already ‘deorbited’ statements of a moribund system and transforms them into propositions that can be hierarchically organized according to a certain order of truth. The second, typical of mystical discourse, emphasizes the “act of enunciation” as the foundation of faith. Fiction thus played a fundamental role in the production of mystical discourse in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its function was to temporarily replace the cosmos, which, before the collapse of medieval symbolism, served as the language of God. At a time when the presence of God is becoming opaque in the world, or even withdrawing from it, it is fiction that provides the possibility of the beginning of speech, unattached to either being or the real.33 The subject, the speaking subject, a problem at the heart of Certeau’s studies of mystical language, can only emerge from this space opened up by fiction.
Mystical language enables Certeau to show the extent to which the word is wounded beyond any kind of ontological logic, like the language of “mourning”, which must produce the effects of an absence that cannot be grasped by a language rendered impotent by the collapse and the increasing opacity of signs.34 In order to communicate and evoke the absent Other, the mystic will strive to elaborate a language capable of saying, or at least suggesting, what cannot be said by conceptual discourse. Thus, for Certeau, it is clear that “in contradistinction to “theo-logy”, dis-course on God, which it parallels, mystics is a “manner of speaking””.35 These ways of speaking tell the story of the mystics’ struggle with language. For theologians, this distinction cannot be overlooked so easily.
5 Some Challenges Posed by Mystical Language to Theological Languages
As Certeau rightly points out, “mystics is the Trojan horse of rhetoric within the city of theological science”.36 We should remember that the Trojan horse was the artifact used by the Achaeans to enter the fortified city of Troy. Taking it as a sign of victory, the Trojans brought the horse inside the city, unaware that it contained several enemy soldiers who then killed them and opened the city gates. The question then is: what gates has mystical language opened or is opening onto the fortified city of theological language?
It seems to us that the first door Certeau opens to theological language concerns the desontologising consequences of nominalism, crystallised in mystical language, which charms theology with a kind of impudent epistemological omnipotence.
It [theology] postulates, in any case, a readability of the existential: it assumes that its words are capable of being the transparency and the gift of things, the unveiling of essential values, and the emergence of history’s truth. Compared to the lucid withdrawal of the human sciences towards the activities that determine their products, compared to what is also scientific modesty, this pretension of theology would only be immodesty.37
Thus, the impudent nature of theological language is linked to its installation in an epistemological horizon where we still claim to have direct access to the real, or where ontological reminiscences are still present, when we think – for example – of the adage about the continuity of tradition without the relevant problematization. For Certeau, it is clear that the ontological proposition is excluded from any contemporary scientific discourse that analyses phenomena in terms of their production and the definition of their own rules. Thus, unlike theological language, mystical language is the expression, on the one hand, of the wound and the nostalgia caused by the absence of the real and, on the other hand, of the absence of the ecclesial body, which dissipated and disappeared with the Reformation and the advent of modernity. The result is a language that is more vulnerable, less sure of itself, and more open to a poetics driven by the need for a fiction capable of opening possible conversations with the ineffable. It seems to us that this outlines a possible path for contemporary theological language, linked to the possibilities opened by a narrative theology.
The second door – in our opinion – that mystical language opens onto the fortified city of theological language is linked to the question of “places of enunciation”.
The mystic movements would concern themselves precisely with the institution of new sites of utterance (“retreats,” ecclésioles, holy towns, “orders,” “monasteries”) in which to restore (re-form) the social space that is the necessary condition for saying to take place.”38 In the current context of crisis and profound recomposition of Christianity in the West, manifest in its growing “exculturation”, diverse paths to secularisation, and the abuse crisis, we need to ask ourselves what the new “places of enunciation” that make reform possible are. What are the reforms of the social space that allow the Church to speak? It seems to us that one of the places from which a new voice is emerging is the experience of pain by those who survived abuse committed in ecclesiastical contexts and those working on reparing such abuse. New shoots of hope are emerging from a crisis that symptomatically reveals the collapse of an ecclesiological system that Pope Francis has described as clericalism. This clericalism, according to Certeau, had already been amply targeted by the mystics:
In a word, we could say that mysticism is a reaction against the appropriation of truth by those clerics who became professionals from the 12th century onwards. It favors the enlightenment of the illiterate, the experience of women, the wisdom of madmen, the silence of children; it opts for the vernacular over academic Latin. It maintains that the ignorant are competent in matters of faith. Mysticism is the authority of the crowd, a figure of the anonymous making an indiscreet comeback in the field of academic authorities.39
A second social space enabling expression may be linked to the resistance experienced by women in the Church. We are well aware that this resistance is linked to the gap between women’s incorporation into the public and political spheres in the 20th century and their still tenuous place in the decision-making and ministerial spheres of the Church, which are certainly associated. More and more voices in the Church are stressing the need to move towards greater complementarity. With regard to the sexual difference between men and women highlighted in modern mystical language, the paradigm of which was provided by the 16th century Carmelite, Certeau states: “It takes two (masculine and feminine) for the new language to be born. That language is not celibate (it is neither theological nor clerical)”.40 Certeau insists on this point, asserting perhaps his strongest critique of theological language. “From the celibate and/or patrilinear genealogy of theological language we must distinguish the origin of the mystic manners of speaking, characterized by the sexual difference and by a precedence of the mother”.41 Certeau does not develop these elements systematically, but this does not mean that he does not leave fundamental intuitions to be pursued on the level of current theological epistemology. Is not this one of the points where the heart of the current sexual abuse crisis in the Church and the wreckage of a certain theological language converge? It seems to us that there is an urgent need to examine these three components of theological language (celibate, patriarchal and eminently clerical) on the basis of a social and cultural history of theology capable of mobilizing the resources of contemporary linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of language. It is not just reactive work that will enable us to break the deadlock, but also a slow dialogue with the human sciences. Perhaps this is the challenge and the risk that we too must take.
6 Conclusions
Certeau posits a genuine confrontation between mystical language and theological language. “In itself, all language is total, the mystical as well as the scholastic”.42 Congar had carried out a similar operation in his article Langage des spirituels et langage des théologiens,43 but without truly setting them in opposition. At the time of writing La fable mystique I, Certeau was far more critical of theology than in his previous writings.
For there is theology wherever hermeneutics reduces the diverse figures of time to “the same.» Any theology eliminates the irreducibility of differences by the production of a “tradition,» that is, by defining an “essential” that clerical knowledge singles out, claims as its own, and regards as the common denominator of an oceanic plurality.44
We can ask ourselves what theology he is referring to. Is it 20th century theology while speaking of 17th century theology? Although his analysis centers on the debate between theology and mysticism in the 17th century (via Fénelon’s apology for the spirituals), Certeau seems to find in it a common denominator for what theology or theological discourse is. Indeed, in the same chapter, he stresses that the rupture between words and meaning that mystical language manifests, and “this was intolerable to theologians who thought they could hold onto things of the spirit with words, thus guaranteeing an institutionalization of meaning”.45 The echoes of Lubac’s theological method are clear: he investigates the diversity of words, their journey through time, and ends with the production of a unity: tradition. It may be that Certeau reads theology primarily through the prism of Lubacian theology, as if there were no other interesting theological attempts to be seen in his time, as if all theologies were incapable of opening up to a hermeneutics of the other.
Clearly, Certeau does not base his theology on the classical sites of Christian tradition. He cannot do so after diagnosing the collapse of the body. He is obliged to do otherwise because this collapse means that Christian discourse is no longer articulated on a body that provides authoritative references in a priestly manner (magisterial definitions, canonical texts, recourse to patristics or scholasticism). It is experience that he places at the center, experience mediated by language. That is why highlighting its theological relevance means understanding a way of thinking that is permeated by the “theological”,46 which questions and traverses the cultural and the human in all their complexity. The “theo-logical” is found almost everywhere in his intellectual project, but as a reading that is often deferred or biased. What is most important to him is to penetrate the difference that emerges at the heart of the world, by working on the space of the everyday. The theological, as distinct from theology, is also born of the loss of the body.
Certeau poses an alternative to a Christianity that is turning into mere folklore: a reaching out to the world, piercing the present in its plural complexity by participating in the language of all people. “Faith never ceases to have to recognize God as different, that is, as present in regions (cultural, social, intellectual) where he was thought to be absent”.47 In fact, he invites us to turn our theological gaze towards the languages that still speak at the heart of culture: the places of resistance and strangeness as well as the language of the “ordinary man” with his tricks and tactics. Being Christian is then expressed in a “style” that must alter the thickness of a social body. The world and everyday life are transformed into places of interaction by a Christian praxis under the sign of hospitality.
It must be said that Certeau leads us out of a naïve spiritual and theological attitude. This attitude – which is extremely dangerous because of its sectarian or totalitarian tendencies – has a background or proprium of spiritual experience, and consequently also of theological discourse, totally detached from its world and its cultural environment. In this way, he opens our eyes to the constitutive bridges between social language and spiritual experience. He confronts us with the ‘interferences’ and ‘coherences’ of a shared structure, the source of a common language, the possibility of cultural communication.
Biography
Carlos Álvarez, a Chilean Jesuit, holds a doctorate in theology from the Centre Sèvres-Facultés jésuites in Paris and in history from the Instituto de Historia de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on the theological thought of Michel de Certeau and Henri de Lubac, as well as the intellectual history of the Jesuits in Chile, particularly in relation to the development of social Catholicism in the twentieth century. He currently teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and conducts research at the Alberto Hurtado University’s Institute of Theology and Religious Studies.
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Congar, Yves : La mission dans la théologie de l’Église, in: Missionnaires pour demain. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf 1968.
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The other authors and titles included in this issue are: Yves Camus, Croire et vivre en Jésus Christ; Jacques Guillet, Genèse de la foi chez les apôtres; Joseph Moingt, Connaître le Père dans le Fils; Henri Holstein: Dieu est fidèle; an old text by Jérôme Nadal, L’œuvre de Dieu; Jacques Hallaire’s Chronicle, Ils parleront de nouvelles langues; and also an article by de Certeau with the title Expérience chrétienne et langage de la foi, which opens the number.
De Certeau, Expérience chrétienne et langages de la foi, p. 147.
De Certeau, Expérience chrétienne et langages de la foi, p. 147.
De Certeau, L’articulation du “dire” et du “faire”.
“Michel de Certeau has made communication the core of a new approach to mystical texts [...] The study of mysticism will therefore focus on the conditions of its enunciation: the mystical text is seen as the place where the speaking subject is inscribed”. (“Michel de Certeau a fait de la communication le noyau d’une nouvelle approche des textes mystiques […] L’étude de la mystique portera donc sur les conditions de son énonciation: le texte mystique est considéré comme le lieu où s’inscrit le sujet parlant”.) Goujon, Prendre part à l’intransmissible, p. 160.
De Certeau, Expérience chrétienne et langages de la foi, p. 150.
“In each spirituality, the essential is not somewhere else, outside the language of the time. It is this very language that the spiritual man takes seriously; it is there, in this cultural situation, that his desire and his risk ‘take shape’; it is through him that he finds God and still seeks him, that he expresses his faith, that he simultaneously experiences a dialogue with God and with his real brothers.” (“Dans chaque spiritualité, l’essentiel n’est pas un ailleurs, extérieur au langage du temps. C’est ce langage même que le spirituel prend au sérieux ; c’est là, dans cette situation culturelle, que ‘prennent corps’ son désir et son risque ; c’est par lui qu’il trouve Dieu et le cherche encore, qu’il exprime sa foi, qu’il expérimente simultanément un entretien avec Dieu et un entretien avec ses frères réels”). De Certeau, Cultures et spiritualités, p. 46.
“The paradox lies in the following: a word, which used to be an affirmation of someone’s existence, becomes for us a cause of unease and an object of doubt; a word that was part of interlocution becomes for us an obstacle to communication and the site of a breach between us and within us.” (“Tel est le paradoxe : une parole, qui était affirmation de l’existence de quelqu’un, nous devient une cause de malaise et un objet de doute ; une parole qui était interlocution nous devient un obstacle à la communication et le lieu d’une faille entre nous et en nous”). De Certeau, La parole du croyant, p. 131.
De Certeau, La parole du croyant, p. 135.
De Certeau, La parole du croyant, p. 135.
De Certeau, Apologie de la différence, p. 85.
De Certeau, Apologie de la différence, p. 85.
De Certeau, Apologie de la différence, p. 85.
He appropriates Michel Foucault’s term ‘archaeology’ to describe his own way of making history. “Archeology was the way by which I sought to specify the return of a repressed, a system of Scriptures which modernity has made into an absent body, without being able to eliminate it. This ‘analysis’ allowed me also to recognize in current labors a ‘past, accumulated’ and still-influential labor […] This lacuna, a mark of the place within the text and the questioning of the place through the text, ultimately refers to what archeology designates without being able to put in words: the relation of the logos to an arché, a ‘principle’ or ‘beginning’ which is its other”. De Certeau, The writing of history, p. 14.
“Two centuries of linguistic analyses have shown that language dos not make manifest the presence of things, no longer yields presences, and no longer produces a world of transparence. Rather, it is an organized place that allows things to happen.” De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, p. 30.
Yves Congar defines Christianity as “une Église reconnue par les pouvoirs publics, exerçant son autorité et son action sur l’ensemble de la population, sûre d’elle-même, consciente d’être l’unique arche de salut dans le déluge universel”. Congar, La mission dans la théologie de l’Église, p. 11 et seq.
Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Jean-Claude Monod, “Métaphores et métamorphoses: Blumenberg et le substantialisme historique”.
Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture.
Taylor, The Secular Age.
De Certeau, Mystique au XVIIe siècle, p. 287.
De Certeau, Mystique au XVIIe siècle, p. 286.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, I, p. 97, p. 100. De Certeau, “Histoire des jésuites”, pp. 168. 281–285.
“The extraordinary is suspect, not only for reasons of prudence or discernment, but by the very effect of a doctrine, of nominalist origin, that exiles the ‘supernatural’ from language, constitutes the ‘natural’ as an autonomous order, and thus considers everything experiential to be necessarily natural”. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable II, p. 117.
De Certeau/Giard, L’ordinaire de la communication.
“la spiritualité, en tant qu’elle est une expression, reconnaît une articulation du langage sur l’Impossible à dire, et elle se situe donc en cette limite où « ce dont on ne peut pas parler » est également « ce dont on ne peut pas ne pas parler »”. De Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre, p. 45.
Salin, Michel de Certeau et la question du langage.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 3.
De Certeau, La fable mystique, Samedi 28-10-72, Groupe TAV, p. 2.
De Certeau, La fable mystique, Samedi 28-10-72, Groupe TAV, p. 2.
De Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, p. 291.
“by fiction we understand that which is substituted (provisionally) and represents (contradictorily) the cosmos that served as a language for the speaking creator. This figuration of space is also, then, located at the threshold of the mystic discourse. It opens, in an imaginary mode, a held for the development of this discourse. It makes a theater of operations possible.” De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 188.
“Beautiful is what being does not authorize, what is valid without being accredited by the real. Thus ‘Beauty’ in Mallarmé, identical to ‘Belief’, is pure beginning.” De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 197.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 144 et seq.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 113.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 114.
“Elle [la théologie] postule, en tout cas, une lisibilité de l’existentiel : elle suppose à ses mots la capacité d’être la transparence et le don des choses, le dévoilement de valeurs essentielles et l’émergence de la vérité de l’histoire. Par rapport au lucide retrait des sciences humaines sur l’activité qui détermine leurs produits, par rapport á ce qui est aussi une pudeur scientifique cette prétention de la théologie serait seulement de l’impudeur.” De Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, p. 201.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 122.
“D’un mot, on pourrait dire que la mystique est une réaction contre l’appropriation de la vérité par les clercs qui se professionnalisent à partir du XII siècle. Elle privilégie les lumières des illettrés, l’expérience des femmes, la sagesse des fous, le silence de l’enfant ; elle opte pour les langues vernaculaires contre le latin académique. Elle maintient que l’ignorant a compétence, en matière de foi. La mystique, c’est l’autorité de la foule, figure de l’anonyme qui fait un retour indiscret dans le champ des autorités académiques”. Interview avec Michel de Certeau. Le nouvel observateur, 25 septembre 1982), 110, cited in: Chartier, Au bord de la falaise, L’histoire enter certitudes et inquiétudes, p. 162.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 135.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable I, p. 135.
“De soi, tout langage est total, le mystique comme le scolastique”. Michel de Certeau, Mystique au XVIIe siècle, p. 290.
Congar, Langage des spirituels et langage des théologiens, pp. 15–34.
De Certeau, The Mystic fable I, p. 111.
De Certeau, The Mystic fable I, p. 110.
Certeau’s theological gesture echoes Pierre Gisel’s notion of ‘the theological’. “He [Pierre Gisel] makes ‘the theological’ the point of a theology that wants to penetrate the heart of the human rather than stop at the purely supernatural, just as he is interested in the religious as the trace left in the social by a religion that has disappeared from society”. (“Il [Pierre Gisel] fait du théologique la pointe d’une théologie qui veut pénétrer au cœur de l’humain au lieu de s’arrêter à du surnaturel pur, de même qu’il s’intéresse au religieux comme à la trace laissée dans du social par une religion disparue de la société”.) Moingt, Du théologique comme principe de subversion, p. 89.
De Certeau, L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence, p. 17.