La interpretación bíblica en la obra de Paul Ricoeurhermenéutica filosófica y exégesis

Abstract

This research on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and biblical exegesis is undertaken by tracing his biography and his intellectual career, from his birth in Valence (France) in 1913 to his death in Paris in 2005. Paul Ricoeur's works on biblical hermeneutics and contributions by the main authors who have had a fruitful debate on this subject with him are taken into consideration. This dissertation is divided into six chapters. Chapter I covers Paul Ricoeur's biography, his studies, and, once he graduated, his early teaching career. If the author's education played an important role in shaping his character, his involvement in the Second World War was equally relevant. In 1939 Ricoeur was mobilised and in 1940 he was taken prisoner and sent to a Nazi prison camp. This experience left a personal mark on him and had an impact on his own philosophical reflections on the issue of evil. His philosophical development was shaped by Emmanuel Mounier's personalism, Karl Jaspers' and Gabriel Marcel's existentialism, Freud's psychoanalysis and Husserl's phenomenology. He embraces Schleiermacher's hermeneutic heritage, father of the discipline, and that of Wilhelm Dilthey, who pioneered the process of opening up texts to a historical understanding, together with Heidegger and Gadamer, the two major figures of the 20th century, both of whom agree that all understanding must be mediated by interpretation. In Chapter II the issue of religious language is explored. Ricoeur delves into Freud's work and psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic approach that opens up the symbolic and oneiric universe present in biblical language, as well as in mythical narratives, among other discursive modes. Chapter III is devoted to the analysis of biblical discourse and literary genres, focusing on the LaCocque-Ricoeur debate on biblical interpretation. To analyse religious identity, an exegesis of the texts of St. Paul is carried out, along with contributions by other authors, where we can perceive a bias in his particular interpretation of the Christian message, which will mark the exegetical line of the Pauline school. In chapter IV we explore philosophical hermeneutics and biblical exegesis, paying particular attention to the relationship between hermeneutics and faith, as studied by Ricoeur, and also to the question of exegesis as a philosophical problem and to the hermeneutics of witnessing. In chapter V we address the question of mythical, symbolic and metaphorical interpretation in the Bible, starting with the Adamic myth, symbols, notions of sin, guilt and forgiveness - constructed through symbols and other figures of speech - and Ricoeur's metaphorical hermeneutics. Lastly, in chapter VI, the hermeneutics of biblical creation is presented, also by means of art inspired by the texts of the Bible and based on Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory. This dissertation is not only a study of Ricoeur's hermeneutical and exegetical theory, but also an exercise of present-day application, faithful to the spirit advocated by Ricoeur of thinking based on his work