Literature & Theology, Vol. Æ!. No. Æ, June Æ!!", pp. "#æ–Æ!

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doi:10.1093/litthe/frl015

THE ECONOMY OF THE GIFT:

PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC
REDESCRIPTION OF REALITY
W. David Hall

Abstract
This essay takes Paul Ricoeur’s use of the phrase ‘‘economy of the gift’’ as an
opportunity to explore the relationship between theology, ethics, and poetic
redescription. A primay focus is Ricoeur’s juxtaposition of the golden rule
and the love command, the manner in which these two are poetically related
by biblical discourse, and what this means for theological ethics. This focus
offers the opportunity to explore some of the more radical implications
of Ricoeur’s claims about the poetic, redescriptive function of religious
discourse, implications that were not adequately addressed by Ricoeur
himself.

IN ONE of his occasional articles on a topic of theological interest, Paul

Ricoeur wrote:

It is this commandment [to love one’s enemies], not the golden rule, that seems
to constitute the expression closest, on the ethical plane, to what I have called the
economy of the gift. This expression approximating the economy of the gift can
be placed under the title of a logic of superabundance, which is opposed as an
opposite pole to the logic of equivalence that governs everyday morality . . ..
Detached from the golden rule, the commandment to love one’s enemies is not
ethical but supraethical, as is the whole economy of the gift to which it belongs.
If it is not to swerve over to the nonmoral, or even the immoral, the
commandment to love must reinterpret the golden rule and, in so doing, be itself
reinterpreted by this rule.1

In this passage, Ricoeur offers the reader a number of enigmatic expressions,

but the most enigmatic of all, and the one about which he is centrally
concerned here, is the notion of an ‘economy of the gift’.2 What could
Ricoeur have meant by economy of the gift? At the level of general reflection,
it is at least difficult to think the ideas of ‘economy’ and ‘gift’ together.
In a passage that has now become iconic, Adam Smith explained economic
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190 W. DAVID HALL
transactions as such: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.’3
I do not rely on the benevolent disposition of my local grocer when I buy my
milk, but rather on his/her interest to corner as much of the local market as
possible by providing prices that are competitive with the other local grocers.
I bank on the assumption that the grocer’s self-interested actions will work
out to my benefit in the form of lower prices and greater availability of the
things I need or want.
A gift, on the other hand, is something quite different. A gift is something
that is given to another out of generosity, without an interest in return,
without the concern for reciprocation. Indeed, ideally it is precisely out of
the benevolence of the giver that the gift is proffered. Intuitively, economy
and gift have little in common and, in fact, seem diametrically opposed.
So, what can Ricoeur have meant by the phrase ‘economy of the gift?’
In what follows, I take Ricoeur’s use of this strange idea as an opportunity
to reflect on the relationship between theology, ethics and poetry. The most
immediate reward for this engagement is a greater understanding of the
relationship between theology and ethics: theology—and here I follow
Ricoeur in highlighting Jewish and Christian theological reflection—lends
to ethical discernment a dimension that extends beyond simple moral
reciprocity. A ‘supramoral’ dimension of ethical consideration is characterised
by the biblical ideal of love: love of God, love of neighbour, finally love of
enemy. It is precisely in the confrontation between the moral ideal of
reciprocity and the supramoral ideal of love that Ricoeur’s expression of an
economy of the gift rises to meaning. But this exploration of the economy of
the gift opens fertile directions for exploring poetic function of religious
discourse in revealing God. I will begin by addressing aspects of Ricoeur’s
hermeneutical thought that offer the possibility for an understanding of what
he may be aiming at. Next, I will explore what the preceding analysis tells us
about the nature of ethical decision informed by Jewish and Christian
theological ideals. I will conclude by examining the possibilities opened for
theology by conceiving biblical texts as a species of poetic discourse.

I . G I F T O F M E TA P H O R A N D E C O N O M Y O F N A R R AT I V E

While we are led intuitively to oppose gift and economy, this intuition is
misleading. At least, since the publication of Marcel Mauss’ anthropological
study The Gift, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to think the terms
‘economy’ and ‘gift’ apart from each other. Mauss argued that it is not the
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 191
case that gift and economy are diametrically opposed, as we might suppose.
He claimed, in fact, that exchange systems based on mutual gift giving precede
and are the basis for modern, abstract, market economic systems.4 Still others,
following in Mauss’ footsteps, state the relationship more pointedly. Claude
Lévi-Strauss, for instance, credited Mauss for recognising that gifting is
not a completely altruistic, disinterested activity, but he criticised Mauss for
failing to recognise the true nature of gifting: to initiate, in a veiled fashion,
a relationship of exchange. The gift disguises the true motives of those
engaged in economic exchange.5 More pointedly still, Pierre Bourdieu
suggests that gift and economy are both examples of social practices through
which systems of domination/authority are established and maintained.
In other words, both gift exchange and free market economic exchange are
economic practices, broadly construed. Both are employed to garner a share
of the material and/or symbolic capital that improves one’s lot in the given
social hierarchy.6
At the other end of the spectrum are those who oppose the connection
made between gift and economy. Jacques Derrida was among the most vocal
critics of Mauss and others in this regard. Derrida did not claim that the gift
is unrelated to exchange; Mauss’ great insight stands: gift and economy are
related. But, he argued, they are related only as mutually exclusive concepts.
‘One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this
relation to economy, even to money economy. But is not the gift, if there
is any, also that which interrupts economy?’7 The advent of the gift, if such
exists, interrupts the very possibility for a calculation of return, hence the
possibility of economy. Gift stands as the irreducible (and impossible) other
of economy, fundamentally an aneconomic phenomenon.
Like Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion seeks to preserve the gift from falling into
economy, but without reducing it to the impossible other of economy.
Marion argues that the gift can be disconnected from the horizon of
economic relations once it is reduced to pure givenness, i.e. through the triple
phenomenological bracketing of givee, giver, and given object. Through this
bracketing the gift reveals itself, shows itself, as that which gives itself as gift.
Once the gift is so reduced, i.e. once it is understood within a phenomenology
of givenness, it becomes the principal mode of the apparation of all
phenomena: ‘The exclusion of exchange and the reduction of transcendencies
finally define the gift as purely immanent. Givenness characterises it
intrinsically, not longer extrinsically . . .. This being done, we will observe
a decisive point: the way in which the gift gives itself coincides exactly
with the way in which the phenomenon shows itself.’8 In a similar way,
Calvin O. Schrag argues that gift is other than economy. However, Schrag
attempts to set gift and economy in a relationship of ‘transversality’ which
‘exhibits the interrelated sense of lying across, extending over, contact without
192 W. DAVID HALL
absorption, convergence without coincidence, and unity without strict
identity’.9 The gift is the transcendent other of economy which breaks in,
disrupts and reorients it.
Given the complexity of these viewpoints, what could Ricoeur possibly
have meant by the phrase economy of the gift? He was hardly unaware of the
history of scholarship on the idea of the gift that stretches from before
Mauss and Levi-Strauss into the present with Bourdieu, Derrida, Marion
and Schrag, among others. Either the gift is of a piece with economy and
‘economy of the gift’ borders on tautology, or the gift is radically (impossibly)
aneconomic and ‘economy of the gift’ is absurd. The fact that Ricoeur
presented the idea with little explanation, as if it were unproblematic and
unencumbered, makes its presence all the more jarring. There are, however,
resources in Ricoeur’s thought that lend some perspective to this odd
predication of an economy of the gift.
The first place to look in uncovering the meaning of Ricoeur’s strange turn
of phrase is his theory of metaphor. On Ricoeur’s understanding, metaphor
functions on the basis of an ‘impertinent predication’: the metaphor presents
the hearer/reader with an absurdity at the literal level of the statement;
the metaphor therefore requires a suspension of the literal meaning so that
a figurative, and truly novel, meaning can emerge. Ricoeur argued that
metaphor is ‘a semantic event that takes place at the point where several
semantic fields intersect. It is because of this construction that all the words,
taken together, make sense’.10 The use of metaphor is a literary/rhetorical
strategy that plays on predicative impertinence in order to produce new
meaning.
This theory of metaphor gives us some initial purchase on the meaning
of the phrase ‘economy of the gift’. It is possible to think of gift and economy
as two distinct conceptual realities which function, or become meaningful,
on the basis of two different semantic fields. Unlike Bourdieu, Ricoeur was
reticent about consigning the gift to the field of economic practices. There
is reason to preserve the difference even if the difference is not clear cut
in practice. The gift has a linguistic, conceptual and semantic context that is
distinct from economic relations. We have, then, two disparate semantic fields
that cannot be thought together except as distinct realities, or perhaps more
accurately, cannot be thought except together as distinct realities. In lumping
gift and economy together, perhaps Ricoeur was playing on the intersection
of semantic fields to see what gifts of meaning arise. But, what meanings
are we gifted with? In answering this question, we can look to Ricoeur’s
understanding of the referential economy of narrative.
The move from metaphor to narrative is a natural one in Ricoeur’s oeuvre.
The two function as partners, so to speak, in the production of semantic
innovation, one dealing at the level of rhetorical tropes and figures of
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 193
discourse, the other at the level of literary genres and the synthesis of plots.
And, narratives function on the basis of a conflictual encounter similar to the
one that drives metaphor: the exchange of narrative discord and concord in
the synthesis of the plot. As Ricoeur understood it, a narrative plot, fictional
or otherwise, is a configuration of events. In the case of fiction, this is an
uncontroversial claim: a fictional narrative tells a story by composing
the event-filled lives of its characters into a complete work. Within the
plot, there are the twists and turns that move the plot toward its final
conclusion. Another way of putting it is that the plot transforms discordant
events, i.e. the twists and turns, into a concordant whole by the end of the
narrative, at least in the case of the realist novel. Just as the metaphor gives
new meaning through the impertinence of attributes at the literal level of the
statement, narrative offers new possibilities for consideration through the
introduction of discordant events which are brought into concord through
the narrative economy of the plot. The narrative therefore functions like an
extended metaphor.
The narrative plot is, then, a configuration of events that is engaged in the
act of reading. In reading a narrative, the reader becomes ‘contemporaneous’
with the narrative; the reader is invited to inhabit the story. This
understanding led Ricoeur to propose the idea of a ‘threefold mimesis’ that
is enacted in the engagement with the narrative. Ricoeur coined the term
mimesis" to signify the expectations, biases and prejudices the reader brings
to the text; these aspects necessarily affect how the reader interprets the
narrative and serve as what he calls a narrative ‘prefiguration’. By mimesisÆ,
he referred to the narrative configuration of the plot itself. The narrative
‘offers itself ’ to be interpreted by the reader and, in so doing, opens
‘the kingdom as if ’: the narrative offers the reader a world that s/he can
inhabit as if it were reality. In other words, the narrative offers a possible
world, and a world of possibilities, that the reader can try out imaginatively,
on a trial basis. The narrative—fictional or otherwise—is a space of
imaginative variation that gives rise to new thoughts and possibilities.
Finally, Ricoeur discussed mimesis$, or ‘refiguration’, as the event whereby
the narrative invites the reader to reconsider his/her existence ‘in light of the
narrative’.
Through this threefold mimesis, the narrative ‘produces’ reality. Put
differently, the narrative is genuinely productive of meanings by virtue of the
refiguration of possibilities and the invitation to the reader to inhabit and/or
adopt those possibilities. This, Ricoeur argued, is a function of poetic texts
in general, understood in the broad sense of imaginative literary constructions:

To understand these texts is to interpolate among the predicates of our situation

all those meanings that, from a simple environment (Umwelt), make a world (Welt).
194 W. DAVID HALL
Indeed, we owe a large part of the enlarging of our horizon of existence to poetic
works. Far from producing only weakened images of reality . . . literary works
depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the
virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by
emplotment . . .. For some years now I have maintained that what is interpreted
in a text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might
project my ownmost powers. In the Rule of Metaphor, I held that poetry, through
its muthos, redescribes the world. In the same way, in this work I will say that
making a narrative [le faire narratif] resignifies the world in its temporal dimension,
to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the
poem’s invitation.11

This understanding of the function of poetic literary constructs offers the path
of least resistance to an understanding of what Ricoeur meant by economy
of the gift.
This narrative approach tells us much about the idea of an economy of the
gift because of the point at which this idea entered Ricoeur’s conceptual
vocabulary: in his account of the theological (and primarily Christian)
narrative of salvation history. Ricoeur was not a theologian, and never claimed
to be one. He characterised himself as a philosopher who listens seriously to
the Christian message. As a hermeneutical thinker, Ricoeur was always
interested in the primary texts of this tradition, and he typically approached
them as a special case of poetic literary constructions. The Christian narrative
of salvation history, as Ricoeur conceived it, is a ‘secondary’ theological
discourse that is constructed over the foundation of what he calls ‘originary
expressions’ of religious experience found principally scattered throughout the
biblical texts. These originary expressions form a ‘polyphonous’ discourse that
functions to ‘name’ God. In other words, the biblical texts are a collection of
literary genres and theological traditions from a range of different time periods
that attempt to give expression to the experience of the holy; these texts are
not univocal in their expressions but diverse. The narrative texts name God
differently than the prophetic texts, which in turn name God differently than
the wisdom literature. Nonetheless, they together serve to name God in the
fundamental attributes of creator and redeemer. But what is the status of these
names? How do they function?
In order to gain some perspective on what Ricoeur was doing, here
I propose a brief detour through the ideas presented by Calvin O. Schrag.
Like Ricoeur, Schrag’s attempts to come to grips with the nature of the
divine lead him to focus on the character of the gift, but in a more
pointed fashion. The issue for Schrag is the possibility of reconceiving
God outside of metaphysics and ontotheology, which in his estimation have
collapsed. Like Ricoeur, he turns to narrative as the productive mode in
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 195
which the presence of God becomes manifest. Addressing the failure
of negative theology to finally break its moorings to a failed metaphysics,
Schrag states:

The ontological problematic in negative theology is compounded with a

semantic and epistemological problematic . . .. Set within the framework of
a search for the proper names of the Deity, negative theology is unable to avoid
the semantic and epistemological quandaries of an undecidability of meaning
and indeterminacy of reference. What is required is a shift of focus away from
a preoccupation with naming to the disclosing function of narration. Names will
indeed continue to play a role in our discourse about both our neighbor and our
God, but names do not comport meaning in and of themselves, decontextualized
from the stories that we tell about the entwined discourse and action that make
up the fabric of our communicative praxis.12

He argues that narration is disclosive of the presence of Deity independent of

metaphysics or ontology. This presence is disclosed in two fundamental
modes: ethics, as presented in the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, and sacrament,
representative of the ideas of Jean-Luc Marion. While Schrag is appreciative
of Marion’s sacramental approach, particularly the distinction he draws
between ‘icon’ and ‘idol’, he suggests that Marion may himself fall into a
more pernicious idolatry by making the Church, and particularly the
ecclesiastical representative, the bishop, the sole means of access to this
sacramental presence. Thus, it is the ethical presence that Schrag
favours: narrative is disclosive of the ethical character of God ‘otherwise
than being’.
This is, I think, what Ricoeur was aiming at when he discussed the narrative
naming of God. ‘Creator’ and ‘Redeemer’ are less proper names than ethical
presentiments of the character of divinity. They do not name God’s being as
much as they express God’s appearing. Citing Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur
asserted that ‘all religious symbolism aims at joining the two ideas of a cosmic
order and an ethical order. And not just joining them, but reconciling them
in the face of the menace of their breakup that evil represents’.13 For Ricoeur,
a notion of the giftedness of existence takes shape against the backdrop of this
naming of God. Existence unfolds within a range of significations that extends
from creation, the symbolic centre of the originary gift of existence, to final
redemption, the symbolism of the gift of unknown possibility; creation
and redemption are, in turn, claims about an ethical presence at the heart
of cosmic order. The foundation for this symbolic spectrum is the God
narratively named as the source of both. This connection between gift and
ethics deserves more attention.
196 W. DAVID HALL
I I . N A R R AT I V E , M O R A L I M A G I N AT I O N A N D E C O N O M Y O F T H E G I F T

Strictly speaking, the symbols of creation and redemption and the

presentiment of giftedness that they give rise to are not ethical, but
‘supramoral’, as Ricoeur puts it. This supramoral quality becomes more
manifest as the gift is exposed to the idea of moral reciprocity, i.e. as it comes
into contact with economic rationality in its moral manifestation of justice.
If we take the golden rule as the most general practical expression of moral
justice, we can recognise in this rule a dimension of economic rationality
broadly conceived as reasoning that functions on the basis of a calculation
of returns, reciprocation, or, as I will say shortly, a logic of equivalence. At its
most basic, the golden rule asserts that I ought to perform the good for others
that I would like for myself; one might suggest that there is, implicit in this
statement, a hope that the good I perform might be reciprocated by the other,
though this is not explicit. The supramoral quality of the biblical symbols of
creation and redemption is manifest in the fact that they reveal existence as
a gift that cannot be reciprocated. The God who is poetically named in the
narratives of creation and redemption is the God with whom humans cannot
hold reciprocal relations; the gift of existence, original and redeemed, cannot
be returned to the giver. These two ideas—supramoral gift of existence and
moral economy of the golden rule—operate as the two semantic fields that
Ricoeur sought to bring together in the notion of an economy of the gift.
This notion finds initial expression, therefore, in the exchange between two
biblical ideals that seem entirely opposed to each other: the golden rule and,
what Ricoeur conceived as the supramoral expression of the gift, the love
command.
Before I can address the manner in which these two ideals conspire to give
rise to an understanding of the economy of the gift, however, it is necessary
to pause and explore, once again, the configuring power of poetic literary
constructs. In his writings on the issue of religion, Ricoeur always privileged
religious discourse over religious experience. This is not to say that the religious
is more a linguistic phenomenon than an experiential one; Ricoeur
withheld judgment on this question: ‘What is said is only this: whatever
may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language,
it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it
on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression.’14 Ricoeur also
privileged written discourse over spoken discourse. Again, this was principally
for methodological reasons. Interpretation is less an issue in the situation
of speech; if there is a question of meaning, I am free to ask my interlocutor
what s/he intends. The speaker has, among other things, the benefit of
ostensive reference to make his/her point clear. Such is not the case for
written discourse, most especially when the writer is no longer available for
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 197
questioning. This is quintessentially the case for Ricoeur’s example of the
originary expressions of the encounter with the holy, the Jewish and Christian
biblical texts. The claim that the engagement with the text requires the detour
through interpretation because of lack of direct referential markers to ground
meaning does not, however, entail the stronger claim that the text lacks all
referential markers. In fact, Ricoeur argued that texts do employ reference in
revolutionary ways that make them fundamentally important carriers of
meaning. Texts do this by first suspending the immediate ostensive reference
of the face-to-face encounter, and with ostensive reference, the author’s
original intention in composing the text; while the author’s intention
need not be irrelevant, it is no longer the deciding factor in determining
the text’s meaning. Through this double suspension of immediate reference
and authorial intention, the written discourse becomes an autonomous entity
which projects a world of possibilities ‘in front of itself ’. Through the
confluence of literary structures—plot, literary and rhetorical figures,
intertextual reference, etc.—the text appeals to the reader. We have already
encountered this tendency above in our discussion of the interaction between
mimesisÆ and mimesis$: the narrative presents the reader with a world of
possibilities and invites him/her to inhabit that world. What the reader
engages, then, through the hermeneutical interaction with the text is what
Ricoeur called the ‘world of the text’ or the ‘issue of the text’.
Ricoeur’s ultimate interest was what the text engenders in the imagination
through the act of reading, and here we impinge on some of the more
revolutionary aspects of his thought. He wished to unfold the hermeneutical
aspects of what Immanuel Kant called the ‘productive imagination’. Kant
discussed the productive imagination as a form of norm-governed invention
(i.e. the imagination functions on the basis of schema that determine the
bounds of imaginative variation) and as a power that gives form to human
experience (i.e. the productive imagination takes the ‘raw data’ of experience
and synthesises them into a meaningful structure).15 Ricoeur paraphrased
Kant to mean by the productive imagination, among other things, ‘the power
of redescribing reality’.16 The writing and the reading of fiction manifest,
in Ricoeur’s estimation, the hermeneutical dimension of the productive
imagination: ‘Fiction is my name for the imagination considered under
this double point of view of rule-governed invention and a power of
redescription.’17
Somewhat surprisingly, at least on an initial pass, Ricoeur saw this work of
redescription of the productive imagination to be closely linked to the
originary expressions of the experience of the holy at work in the biblical
texts. These biblical texts then function as a powerful redescription of reality;
when the reader engages these texts in a serious manner s/he is asked to
198 W. DAVID HALL
consider reality from the perspective of this redescription and, in fact, to
participate in the power of redescription.

. . . I would like to consider the act of reading as a dynamic activity that is not
confined to repeating significations fixed forever, but which takes place as a
prolonging of the itineraries of meaning opened up by the work of interpretation.
Through this first trait, the act of reading accords with the idea of a norm-
governed productivity to the extent that it may be said to be guided by a
productive imagination at work in the text itself. Beyond this, I would like to see
in the reading of a text such as the Bible a creative operation unceasingly
employed in decontextualizing its meaning and recontextualizing it in today’s
Sitz-im-Leben. Through this second trait, the act of reading realizes the union of
fiction and redescription that characterizes the imagination in the most pregnant
sense of this term.18

To read the biblical texts is to participate in the redescription of reality

initiated by the text and completed in the reader. What the texts offer to the
imagination is, among other things, a moral redescription of reality brought
about through the interaction of the ideal of the golden rule and that of the
love command.
Once again, the golden rule is, in Ricoeur’s estimation, the most general
account of justice and the foundation of the moral concern for reciprocity.
Indeed, he favoured the golden rule over more formal principles like
Kant’s categorical imperative because it institutes a ‘norm of reciprocity’ that
pays attention to the concrete aspects of action: acts, actors/suffers and effects.
‘The most remarkable thing . . . in the formulation of this rule is that the
reciprocity demanded stands out against the background of the presupposition
of an initial dissymmetry between the protagonists of the action—a
dissymmetry that places one in the position of agent and the other in that
of patient. This absence of symmetry has its grammatical projection in
the opposition between the active form of doing and the passive form of
being done, hence of suffering or submission’.19 Again, the golden rule is
the moral expression, par excellence, of the economic concern to equalise
relations. The golden rule commands that I extend the good actions I desire
for myself to the other; implied is the expectation that s/he recognises the
same principle and responds in like manner. The good I perform for the
other I expect in return. There need be nothing cynical in this recognition.
It is simply the case that just relations conform to a logic that is economic
in the broad sense.
The commandment to love one’s neighbour presents us with a very
different ideal. At first, it seems that the love command is simply a restatement
of the golden rule; am I not commanded to love the neighbour as myself ?
However, the biblical texts, particularly the Christian gospels, place a wrinkle
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 199
into this commandment by extending the category of neighbour to include
also one’s enemies. Thus, the love command demands that we forgo
reciprocity, at least once the category of neighbour is extended as far as ‘those
who persecute you’ (Matt. 5.44). In what way, however, is this the practical
expression of the gift? To some extent, the biblical symbols of creation and
redemption fund a sense of the abundance of life that can afford the extremes
of solicitude demanded by the love command. They redescribe reality in terms
of plenitude such that love of neighbour is not a risk, but an appropriate
response. This plenitude, indeed extravagance, of life is well expressed in the
gospel of Matthew:

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of
the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by
worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about
clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor
spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of
these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and
tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — of little
faith? Therefore do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we
drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these
things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things
will be given to you as well. (6.25–33 NRSV)

This abundance that characterises the giftedness of existence cannot

be reciprocated, but it can find expression in an outpouring of life
that demands nothing in return. In other words, the generosity that
flows out of the symbol of an ever-renewed and ever-renewing
creation affords the possibility of the extremes of love of enemy. The love
command becomes the practical outpouring of a life that sees itself in
light of this symbol.
These two biblical ideals ultimately give rise to competing underlying
‘logics’ that Ricoeur designated the ‘logic of equivalence’ and the ‘logic of
superabundance’. Ricoeur spoke of the golden rule as the practical application
of the logic of equivalence, the love command as the competing logic of
superabundance. At the level of practical reason, the logic of equivalence
appears to be superseded and suspended by the logic of superabundance once
love of the enemy demands that we forgo reciprocity. This was really the crux
of Ricoeur’s presentation of the economy of the gift; in the attempt to
reconcile these two, Ricoeur strove to bring meaning to the idea of an
economy of the gift.
200 W. DAVID HALL
In articulating this clash of logics, Ricoeur turned to a particular narrative,
what we might call a root narrative in Christian salvation history, the
gospel of Matthew’s ‘sermon on the mount’. The demands to turn the other
cheek, to offer the cloak as well as the coat, to walk the second mile, to lend
without expectation of return seem to contradict, indeed to overturn,
the concern for reciprocity demanded by justice. This confrontation is
amplified by the verses which introduce these sayings: ‘You have heard that
it was said, ‘‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’’ But I say to you . . .’
(Matt. 5.38–42). This ‘But I say to you. . .’ introduces a rule for extravagant
action, undergirded by a logic of superabundance, which seems to bring the
concern for equivalence to an end, just as, in Jacques Derrida’s estimation,
the gift exists only as the moment of immoderation, unmeasurability and
disproportionality that interrupts and disrupts economy. Ricoeur argued,
however, that these two logics do not contradict each other; rather they serve
as mutual correctives.20 At this point, the practical import of the biblical
redescription of reality comes to fruition.
The logic of equivalence that serves to establish moral justice at the same
time threatens the perversion of justice: while the ‘spirit’ of the rule guards
against undue self-interest, there is nothing in the rule itself to guard against
the tendency to pervert it in the interest of individual utility. The rule
to treat others as you would like to be treated too easily succumbs to the
calculation of personal interest: ‘how must I act toward others to get what
I want?’ Worse still, there is nothing inherent in the golden rule to
combat the desire to return evil for evil. The golden rule, left to its own,
can be used to support a utilitarian calculation or a reactive reciprocity of
retribution. Equally perverse and immoral, the demand to forgo reciprocity
encountered in the superabundant logic of the love command too easily
inclines toward a misinterpreted self-degradation in the face of the object
of love. The vulnerable in society are made to bear the brunt of a ‘love’
that leaves physical and emotional scars, and too often on claims of
biblical precedent: a woman ‘cherishes’ her husband by remaining submissive
in the face of beatings; children ‘honour’ their parents by remaining quiet
in the face of physical and emotional neglect; the slave obeys his master
as a show of love for God. In other words, equivalence inclines toward
self-interest, superabundance toward self-negation without the correcting
effect of the other.
Within the symbolic spectrum that names God as creator and redeemer,
existence is presented as a gifted affair: existence is a gift of an original and
ever-renewing creation; its redemption is the gift of final reconciliation,
at least within the bounds of Christian understanding. The corrective moral
impetus of the economy of the gift is grounded in a preexistent awareness,
poetically configured by the biblical texts, of the giftedness of existence.
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 201
Within this poetic redescription of reality, love is not the antithesis of
reciprocity, but its principal expression: imagination is opened to the
possibility that love of neighbour is the appropriate response to a love of
which I am the beneficiary. At the same time, the fact that one is the
beneficiary of love preserves against the misinterpretation that love demands
self-negation. As a creature, one is heir of the assertion of value that Genesis
attaches to all creation, and hence worthy of respect. Love is a response to this
inheritance, not a denial of it.
Ricoeur’s treatment of the economy of the gift has served as a sort of test
case for addressing the manner in which he used figurative and poetic
discourse to reap theological ends. In the final section of this paper, I will offer
some more general reflections on the place of the poetic in Ricoeur’s
understanding of the religious.

I I I . P O E T RY A N D T H E O L O G Y

That Ricoeur saw a profound connection between poetic expression and

religious discourse is without question. For the most part, however, he was
unwilling to follow this insight to its most radical conclusions. Indeed,
Ricoeur frequently displayed discomfort in addressing theological matters,
and more particularly, the possible theological presuppositions behind his own
philosophical project. There is reason, however, to press Ricoeur’s insights
a bit farther that he might have been willing to do himself. This final section
will attempt to do just this.
Recall that Ricoeur posed the love command as the practical manifestation
of the gift symbolised by the creation-redemption spectrum. That the
narratives of creation, and perhaps even more so redemption, are ‘fictitious’,
i.e. not literally true, does not impede one from interpreting his/her own life in
light of this description of reality. The lack of literal verity of the biblical
narratives, parables, prophesies, etc., was never a problem for Ricoeur. Much
of his thought about the religious was an attempt to refute simplistic, literalistic
and fundamentalist treatments of the biblical texts. While biblical discourse is
not literally true, it is not meaningless. In Ricoeur’s mind ‘fiction’ has never
been reducible to ‘untrue’; in many cases, fiction and the poetic in general is
‘more true’ than fact. The poetic gives rise to a dimension of meaning that is
simply not available at the level of non-poetic, descriptive, apodictic, ordinary
language expressions. The genius of religious discourse, a genius it shares with
poetry in general, is its power of redescription. Description; the religious, like
the poetic, is revelatory because of this power.
But if the symbolic discourses of creation and redemption are not literally
true, if they are poetry, what of the foundation upon which they are inscribed?
If creation and redemption are merely poetic fictions, does the God who is
202 W. DAVID HALL
biblically named as creator and redeemer actually exist? Here, Ricoeur
equivocated and, to my mind, stepped away from exploring the more radical
implications of his own ideas: in a sense, he answered this question both ‘yes’
and ‘no’. In doing so, he came close to falling into the kind of fundamentalist
assumptions that he criticised elsewhere. I quote Ricoeur one last time at
length:

[I]t seems to me that this referential function of poetic discourse [i.e. that second
order, symbolic reference let loose by the suspension of direct reference] conceals
a dimension of revelation in a nonreligious, nontheistic, nonbiblical sense of the word,
yet a sense capable of furnishing a first approximation of what revelation in the
biblical sense may signify. To reveal is to uncover what until then remained
hidden . . .. Revelation, in this sense, designates the emergence of another
concept of truth than truth as adequation, regulated by criteria of verification and
falsification: a concept of truth as manifestation, in the sense of letting be what
shows itself. What shows itself is each time the proposing of a world, a world
wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities. Hence, naming God, before
being an act of which I am capable, is what the texts of my predilection [i.e. the
biblical texts] do when they escape from their authors, their redactional setting,
and their first audience, when they deploy their world, when they poetically
manifest and thereby reveal a world we might inhabit.21

It is not immediately clear why Ricoeur wished to distinguish between a

non-religious, non-biblical form of revelation and a properly religious and biblical
revelation. The closest he came to offering a justification was to state that
biblical discourse is religiously revelatory because its subject matter is God,
while poetic discourse in general is not limited to naming God. But this is not
a very satisfactory answer. He seemed to introduce the distinction religious
and non-religious precisely to avoid addressing the nature of the God who is
named figuratively by discourses that seem to function like poetic, fictional
discourses in general.
Ricoeur cannot be blamed for succumbing to the impulse to separate off
the biblical texts from poetic discourse in general. He did not invent the
distinction, and, not being a theologian, he was likely not comfortable
overturning it. What might happen, however, if we take his insight that
religious discourse poetically names God and jettison the notion that religious
texts are different from non-religious ones? There are reasons to be concerned
about this proposition. Foundational claims about the divine nature serve
to restrict imagination; in essence they authorise a particular naming of God.
De-authorising (de-authorialising) these foundations could definitely make
religion an unstable force; it might take the religious out of our control. This
might be precisely what is needed, however. After all, if we have an authorised
set of names for God, if we can limit and control the name of God,
 PAUL RICOEUR’S POETIC REDESCRIPTION 203
does this not place God under our control, make God subservient to our
wishes? This, theologically construed, is idolatry.
Modern theology is full of voices that have urged us to think beyond the
inherited categories we use to conceive God. Paul Tillich called us to take
courage and to transcend theism—the conception of God as a being among
beings, the attempt to trap God within the shallow categories of our own
understanding. Karl Barth warned us not to mistake our own projects, the
gods to whom we have constructed the tower of Babel, as the God
who confronts us in the word of divine righteousness. And, more recently,
Jean-Luc Marion has brought to our attention the idolatrous nature of the
God of Being. The true God, the God without being, is beyond Being.
Perhaps, it is time to recognise God as ‘otherwise than being’ as Schrag would
have us consider. Ricoeur’s ethical and theological redescription of reality
brought about by the poetic dimensions of religious discourse, if taken to its
more radical conclusions, may disclose this God to us without trapping it in
the metaphysical and ontological categories we are striving to shed.
There is reason to be concerned about the ramifications of abandoning
the foundations, of giving free reign to our naming; it could result in
a cacophonous, chaotic confusion. Then again, it could offer us an image of
regenerate humanity that is bigger than our sectarian biases and cultural–
political bigotry. It could result in the regeneration of theological discourse
that is truly informed by the gift, in a discourse about transcendence that
breaks into and disrupts our preconceived notions and idolatrous tendencies.
There is, at the very least, reason to hope.

Centre College, "!! W. Walnut Avenue, Danville, KY ª!ªÆÆ, USA

REFERENCES
1 2
Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Ethical and Theological
Considerations on the Golden Rule’’ in
Mark I. Wallace (ed.) Figuring the Sacred:
Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans.
David Pellaur (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1995), pp. 300–01. Revisions for this article
3
were completed shortly after Ricoeur’s death,
and it is with some sorrow that I have had
to go through and change my analyses of
4
his thought to the past tense. My hope is
that these reflections do justice to breadth
and depth of his work. I am accutely aware
that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Ricoeur took up this this topic again,
and in a similar vein, more recently in
History, Memory, Forgetting, trans.
Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004),
pp. 479–86.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 26–27.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions
of Exchange in Archaic Studies, trans.
W.D. Halls, introd. by Mary Douglas
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
204 W. DAVID HALL
5 17
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker
(London: Routledge, 1987).
6
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice,
trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford
18
University Press, 1990).
7 19
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit
Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1992), p. 7.
8 20
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward
a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans.
Jeffrey L. Koskey (Stanford: Stanford
University, 2002), p. 115.
9
Calvin O. Schrag, God as Otherwise Than
Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University,
2002), pp. 40–41.
10
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-
Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of
Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny,
Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1977), p. 98.
11
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1,
trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), pp. 80–81.
12
Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being,
pp. 87–88.
13
Ricoeur, Ethical and Theological Considera-
tions on the Golden Rule, p. 299.
14
Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Philosophy and Religious
Language’’ in Mark I. Wallace (ed.)
Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative,
and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer
21
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 35.
15
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement,
trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1987), pp. 265–300.
16
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, pp. 66–71.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘The Bible and the
Imagination’’ in Mark I. Wallace (ed.)
Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative,
and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 144.
Ibid., p. 145.
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans.
Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1992), p. 219.
Schrag’s idea of transversal relationship is
instructive here. Similar to Ricoeur, he
suggests that the gift is theologically
understood properly in the command to
love the neighbour without concern
for reciprocation. Schrag then argues
that the gift traverses conceptions of
justice and democracy as a corrective:
‘‘Justice itself becomes transfigured and
transvalued by dint of the presence of
the gift. So we have a justice that is no
longer simply symmetrical and reciprocal.
It is now justice informed and vitalized
by asymmetry, as is also the democracy,
which is the socio-political expression
of justice. Admittedly, this is a justice
and a democracy that is yet to come. It
has an eschatological orientation. . .. The
gift of love as the asymmetrical dimension
in all justice and democracy is the future
as the possible. But the future as the
possible is that which can be preenacted
in our communicative praxis as the
moment that announces both the logos
and the kairos’’ (Schrag, God as Otherwise
Than Being, 142).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Naming God’’ in Mark I.
Wallace (ed.) Figuring the Sacred: Religion,
Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David
Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1995), pp. 222–23, emphasis added.