ABSTRACT
The body has a long and significant place in the articulation of phenomenological enquiry, beginning with the observations of Husserl, but with traces also to be found in the work of his teacher Franz Bretano. Equally, the centrality for Christian theology of the body in the Incarnation – that is, the assuming of flesh by the divine to become God incarnate – cannot be overestimated (notwithstanding attempts over the millennia to downplay its importance). It is also as an embodied self that the liturgical or praying subject [orant] prays coram Deo. Thus the body – whether that of the individual, the corporate body of the Church or the unique body of Jesus Christ, remembrance of whom is celebrated in the liturgy – is of central importance, representing the essence of our expressive capabilities and providing the ground of language and meaning. Truth is ‘articulated and shaped within a specific form of life’; language is ‘organic and linked to subjectivity’. Mankind cannot conceive of ‘a self without language’, nor of ‘a completely subjective language’ which is not linked to the body.1 Kant’s identification of finitude and receptivity – in which the finite rational being does not create the objects of its representation but receives them – is expanded upon by Ricœur who sees the body primarily as the medium that mediates appearance, rather than simply giving rise to the experience of finitude.
