Salvation and Creation. On the role of Forgiveness in the Completion of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy

In the general introduction to the first part of his Philosophie de la Volonte, Le volontaire et l’involontaire ([1950] 1966) Paul Ricoeur writes that the phenomenological or ‘pure description […] of the Voluntary and the Involuntary’ is ‘constituted by bracketing’ two things: first the fault, which is essentially a perversion of the pure nature or the essence of human willing; and second ‘Transcendence which hides within it the ultimate origin of subjectivity’. Evil, the condition of brokenness or the reality of the fault, asks for an empirical description (and as Ricoeur will discover subsequently: a hermeneutics) of concrete myths and symbols. He will remove this first bracketing in the second part of his Philosophy of the Will and in the long ‘series of detours’ of his hermeneutical writings. The second bracketing, however, will turn out to be much more difficult to remove. It demands a ‘poetics’, which would threaten Ricoeur’s effort to separate his Christian faith from his ‘autonomous’ philosophizin...