As part of the Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur series, Adam Graves’ The Phenomenology of Revelation in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur undertakes an analysis of the core problems and issues surrounding the role of revelation within phenomenological discourse. Graves holds that there is strictly no such thing as a phenomenology of revelation, rather, the concept of revelation is approached by phenomenologists in one of two distinct manners, from either a radical or a hermeneutical stance. From the outset, Graves provides a clear description of the phenomenological method as envisaged by Husserl and taken up by later thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, tracing the inception of phenomenology’s turn to the theological—the theological turn—back to Heidegger’s 1928 lecture, “Phenomenology and Theology.” Graves contends that Heidegger’s lectures on religion were formative to the existential framework of Being and Time; Heidegger’s fundamental ontology could not have been constructed without this early theological influence (45). Hence, it is Heidegger’s thought that serves as the well-spring for the recent interest in the phenomenology of revelation. Graves surveys how the concept of revelation has always played a significant role in phenomenological discourse, yet this role has been complicated by a philosophical/theological binary: the opposition between reason and revelation. In placing Heidegger in dialogue with Marion and Ricoeur, Graves provides the reader with a close reading of the attitudes of Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur toward revelation, elaborating on each of their own personal philosophical concerns and commitments. In addition, Graves succeeds in providing a valuable contribution to the scant scholarly literature that exists on Ricouer’s own contribution to the theological turn (ix).

While the role of revelation has a long history tracing back to Biblical times, Graves situates his analysis in the history of revelation as found in Enlightenment thought and how this history informs an understanding of revelation in twentieth century Continental philosophy. Arguing that the Enlightenment’s hyperfocus on reason lends itself to a narrow interpretation of the role of revelation, either by reducing the content of revelation to supplement principles of reason or by dismissing revelation entirely as an unnecessary means of attaining knowledge (Truth), Graves demonstrates how later nineteenth century Continental philosophers became suspicious of this Enlightenment ideal; phenomenology in particular offered a necessary challenge to the Enlightenment project such that today, in phenomenological circles, the question has come full circle: to what extent can “the scope of philosophical discourse [be] broadened so as to accommodate or include revelation, or at the very least a philosophical figure of revelation?” (xxvi).

Graves’ primary claim is that phenomenologists have taken one of two approaches to revelation, either a radical stance or a hermeneutical stance, and that these approaches reflect more broadly on a division within phenomenology itself, primarily concerning the role of language (6). Whereas both strands conceive of revelation as taking place before the text, it helps to clarify that the radical phenomenologist understands the adjective, anterior, in its temporal sense while the hermeneutical phenomenologist understands it spatially. Graves holds that the radical stance, represented (implicitly) by Martin Heidegger and (explicitly) by Jean-Luc Marion, begins with the phenomenological reduction—a stepping back from, or bracketing of, the phenomena of experience. The radical approach attempts to overcome metaphysics, specifically the language of metaphysics, by holding that revelation is taking place prior to objectivity and language itself (Heideggerian destruktion). As language thematizes objects and experiences in a re-presentation that moves away from primal, originary experience, it is “Only by returning to the very origin of speech, to its beginning or its ‘primordial sources,’ can we be certain to have attained a standpoint that is free of any such metaphysical contaminations” (6-7). Yet, as Graves will detail, the radical focus on philosophical rigor leads to insurmountable problems of contamination and cross-contamination that divest meaning from the phenomenon of revelation—material and linguistic content are ‘purged’ of any and all theological determinations, resulting in a “pure” phenomenon of revelation that is, as Graves’ claims, completely attenuated, “resulting in a failure to adequately address the content of the very phenomenon they sought to describe” (197).

Graves contends that the hermeneutical stance, represented by Paul Ricoeur (although it too can be traced in Heidegger) avoids the above pitfalls of the radical approach, in its engagement with material texts and their symbols and metaphors—the content of revelation—more fully. The hermeneutical approach characterizes revelation as taking place in front of texts that are situated historically, culturally, and linguistically. Ricoeur’s conception of revelation “unites a hermeneutical theory of the text with a phenomenological theory of world (or of being-in-the-world), thereby enabling a more genuine engagement with the concrete historical, linguistic, and textual content of revelation” (149). It is this hermeneutical stance that Graves claims is an “indispensable” supplement to a radical approach to revelation, which otherwise runs into the grave problems stated above. Graves also sees the “essential difference between these two approaches” as concerning not only “the relation between revelation and language, [but as reflecting] contrasting attitudes toward historical, linguistic and textual mediation in post-Husserlian continental philosophy more broadly” (x).

The tenuous relationship between philosophy and theology is characterized by Heidegger as a relationship between two types of science: theology as an ontic-positive science and philosophy as an ontological science. The purview of philosophy is Being-as-such, and therefore hence takes priority over all the ontic sciences including theology. Heidegger's logic is later identified by Jacques Derrida as the logic of presupposition. This logic “entails a hierarchical relation between ontic and ontological sciences” (40). By extension, revelation is claimed by Heidegger to be subordinate to revealability. Graves offers a novel reading of Heidegger’s logic to keep ontology uncontaminated by and autonomous from theology as more complex than this, as theology nonetheless appears to provide a “guide (or even a foundation) for Heidegger’s ontological science” (45). Heidegger’s concern over a potential accusation that his ontology might be contaminated by ontic content (the material content of revelation) moves him to carry out a preservation of said ontology by a purification of the phenomenon of revelation. Yet as Graves observes, in wanting to distance himself from any theological bias, Heidegger’s account of revelation has instead been “co-opted” by his ontological account. Herein lies what Graves insightfully identifies as the problem of counter-contamination—theology is thus divested of its revelatory content: “Revelation begins to resemble Being as such and … theology begins to resemble phenomenology” (66). In order to uphold a standard of philosophical rigor and avoid the criticism that his conception of revelation was motivated by theological considerations (whereby the ontic contaminates the ontological), Heidegger instead tries to incorporate revelation as part of his phenomenological project, and in so doing “counter-contaminates” the phenomenon of revelation (whereby the ontological contaminates the ontical), which “poses a problem (perhaps even the problem) for the phenomenology of revelation qua revelation” (55).

Whereas Jean-Luc Marion attempts to break with the Heideggerian account of revelation, particularly in the claim that Heidegger has confined God’s revelation to the horizon of Being, which amounts to “an idolatrous conception of revelation,” Marion nonetheless repeats the same grave error as Heidegger in his “misguided desire” to adhere to standards of philosophical rigor, what Graves (following Derrida) has previously identified as a “logic of presupposition” (99). Graves claims that to avoid the criticism that his own philosophical project contains a theological contamination, Marion portrays an account of revelation as “pure” givenness, divested of material content: “devoid of any reference to the historical, linguistic, and textual richness of revelation in its religious or theological acceptations” (107). Marion’s privileging of an indeterminate content of revelation is attributable to a kind of counter-contamination, claims Graves, whereby the philosophical contaminates the theological. Whereas Heidegger faced the contamination, i.e., the presence of unwanted theological presuppositions within his ontological project, Marion faces the contamination, or presence, of “a certain philosophical bias” upon his phenomenology of revelation (115). As Graves significantly notes, in both Heidegger and Marion’s accounts of revelation, the methodology of both thinkers prevents them from fully exploring the content of revelation “in its textual-linguistic dimensions” (111). Graves compels the reader to envision how to unravel this “distorted and attenuated conception of Revelation” and remedy this imbalance (115).

In juxtaposing Paul Ricoeur’s approach to revelation with that of Marion and Heidegger, Graves hopes to underscore the overlooked implications of Ricoeur’s phenomenological understanding of revelation; particularly, how the hermeneutical approach offsets the problems of radical phenomenology discussed above. Graves interprets Ricoeur’s account as beginning “with the interpretation of language … with texts, symbols, documents, signs of a particular tradition, a particular language, a particular discourse” (178). On this reading, revelation takes place before the text; hermeneutics is a mode of reflection that informs phenomenology and thus, Ricoeur opens a range of possibilities for a phenomenology of revelation, given that in Ricoeur’s account there is no hierarchy between the ontological and the ontic. Rather, “in Ricoeur, the play between the theological and the philosophical is best understood in terms of a mutual enrichment, rather than in terms of an illicit contamination” (148, 172).

Graves’ book on the phenomenology of revelation is invaluable for those interested in a deeper study of the complex interrelation between philosophy and theology as found in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur. Graves succeeds in situating the development of the theological turn in a wider historical context, while raising an important concern about the project of phenomenology itself. At the outset of his endeavor, Graves contends that “each of the philosophers” he places in dialogue with one another “employ phenomenology in a common quest to free revelation from the jaws of an enlightenment [sic.] project that sought to exclude the possibility of revelation altogether or to reduce the content of revelation to … reason… [each] sought to undermine the enlightenment’s claim that reason is autonomous and wholly transparent to itself” (4, xxvi). Yet Graves’ analysis demonstrates how both Heidegger and Marion, and to some extent Ricoeur, seem ensnared by the concern for a pure philosophy, which is an Enlightenment ideal. Each arrives at an understanding of revelation tainted by their overarching concern with neutrality and philosophical rigor, such that the content of revelation is—as Graves himself claims—emptied of meaning. Graves’ work raises the question of whether the phenomenological project has therefore succeeded in “pass[ing] beyond the modes of thought rooted in enlightenment [sic.] paradigms,” or whether this is indeed possible (5). By extension, Graves’ work itself at times falls prey to its own charge of contamination and counter-contamination by way of upholding the binary opposition of reason or revelation, while claiming to move beyond said opposition (see 162, 189, 198, 202). At stake is nothing less than Graves’ own question posed at the outset of his work: “will any phenomenological description of revelation be doomed from the start?” (15). In order not to answer in the affirmative, Graves must hold the “mutually productive tension, both … reason and revelation” that has informed Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach to revelation (202–3). In fact, more needs to be risked in thinking through a phenomenology of revelation.