Distinguishing Sacred and Religious in Search of Ricoeur’s “Authentic Dialogue"

In Paul Ricoeur’s prescient 1961 essay, “Civilization and National Cultures,” we find a prophetic backdrop for the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in Paris. Ricoeur wrote, “Human truth lies only in this process in which civilizations confront each other more and more with what is most living and creative in them. Man’s history will progressively become a vast explanation in which each civilization will work out its perception of the world by confronting others….No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue.” (Italics is mine for emphasis)  (Ricoeur, Civilization and National Cultures, in History and Truth, p. 283) 

We face a dreadful urgency about Ricoeur’s challenge, because ideological polarization and violent expressions of religious and ethnic cultural differences have made the shared goal of an authentic dialogue highly improbable. Was Ricoeur being naïve when he asserted in 1961, “I am convinced that a progressive Islamic or Hindu world in which old ways of thinking would inspire a new history, would have with our European culture and civilization that specific affinity that all creative men share.” (p. 283) Today the expressions of Islamic dress code or Sharia law are sources of regressive legislation rather than authentic dialogue. 

Ricoeur’s commitment to critical engagement is anchored in his equally persistent embrace of humanism. “Yes, I believe it is possible to understand those different from me by means of sympathy and imagination….” (p. 282) When we dismiss the demand of the Other without any attempt to sympathize and imagine by choosing democracy over religion, then Ricoeur’s challenge of an authentic dialogue remains a lost opportunity. 

Ricoeur’s vision is neither naïve nor eschatological, but requires a reconsideration of his hermeneutics especially as used in our current understandings of  “…our art, literature, philosophy and spirituality…” (emphasis is mine)(283). This paper will accept Ricoeur’s challenge and argue that a distinction between sacred and religious permits a different framing of that authentic dialogue in today’s polarized and fractious discourses. Using Ricoeur’s work on religious language, as well as scholars like Pellauer, Kepnes, and Godin among others, I will argue that distinguishing between sacred and religious provides a means of accessing both sympathy/empathy and imagination in our discourse and provides the encounters of different cultures with a Ricoeurian yearning for human truth.