Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy by Christina M. Gschwandtner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy by Christina M. Gschwandtner Tamsin Jones Christina M. Gschwandtner. Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy. Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought Series. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 308 pp. This is a brilliant book. One does not usually begin a book review with such a blunt statement, but that is the most significant point of this review. Reading Gschwandtner’s Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy would reward a number of different audiences—Eastern Orthodox thinkers, theologians and liturgists, religious studies scholars invested in the analysis of lived religion, and, especially, French phenomenologists. The work moves between the worlds of contemporary phenomenology and Orthodox liturgy with a fluency that few other than Gschwandtner could master, despite her expressions of humility (1). (While already a tenured professor in philosophy, Gschwandtner spent her sabbatical earning a PhD in theology at Durham.) The result is a richly detailed and comprehensively researched analysis of Orthodox liturgy through the lens of phenomenology, in which Gschwandtner not only illuminates aspects of the liturgy but also demonstrates deficiencies in phenomenology as it has developed thus far. She examines different aspects of Orthodox liturgy through the topoi of temporality, spatiality, corporeality, sensoriality, affectivity, community, and intentionality. Gschwandtner constructively brings to light the ways in which the discourses of phenomenology and Orthodox liturgy might enrich each other. For instance, in terms of temporality, there is a tension within the liturgy “between anamnesis (memory) and eschaton (anticipation)” (35). Gschwandtner points to some erroneous analyses of the temporality of liturgy that try to resolve this tension through a literalist interpretation in which statements such as “today is the day that . . .” are read to mean on this present day Christ is re-sacrificed, betrayed again, or presently ascending to heaven, etc. Instead, Gschwandtner employs Heidegger’s phenomenological temporality in order to elucidate how we “enter” into a specific time in liturgy, one that “concerns” us and in which we participate: “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). At the same time, however, liturgy can correctively expand on Heidegger’s conceptualization of time as too focused on “my” time and, thus, too individualistic. Liturgical temporality, on the other hand, recalls the memory of Christ and the saints and anticipates the coming of a heavenly community; it broadens out beyond one’s own personal time to create a time that individuals can enter into but that is not dependent upon an individual to construct it. Along the same lines, Gschwandtner considers the question of liturgical intentionality—particularly the tension between a view of liturgy as primarily a manifestation and disclosure of God and a view of liturgy as primarily concerned with the ethical formation of its participants (172)—to demonstrate ways in which phenomenology can both be helpful to, and corrected by, an analysis of liturgy. She argues that liturgy is fundamentally a human endeavor, one that does not proceed from God, is not given by God, but instead “is oriented toward God” (183). [End Page 143] What appears, or is made manifest in the liturgy, is the human person in community in a “posture of expectation, desire and preparation” (184). For example, when Basil of Caesarea prays in the “anaphora” that the bread and wine be manifest as the body and blood of Christ, this is less an ontological claim than it is a description of the worshippers’ intentionality. In this way, a phenomenological analysis of what is being experienced in liturgy displays structures of intentionality that ready the ground for a possible encounter with God without claiming to prove God’s presence as manifest therein (184). Part of Gschwandtner’s argument aims to critically correct a tendency of French phenomenology to be simultaneously too parochial and, ironically, too broad. By drawing on primarily Catholic concepts and practices in a phenomenological analysis of human experience, Marion, Lacoste, Falque, et al., run the risk of conflating theological claims with phenomenological ones and of rendering universal human experience of...