Orion Edgar orionedgar@mac.

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Seeing as Communion:
Merleau!Pontys embodied phenomenology of vision and the Trinitarian ontology of John Zizioulas
Paper originally presented at The Centre of Theology and Philosophy conference on The Soul, St Annes College, Oxford 28th June1st July 2013

I aim to show here how Merleau!Pontys account of vision "which situates us as subjects al! ways already involved in a world that transcends us, on which we depend for the possibility of our existence, and yet in which we have freedom#, and the ontology of flesh which he develops on the basis of it, may be transformed by a theological transfiguration. Explaining how Merleau!Pontys fundamentally relational account of seeing, and of being, responds to the Cartesianism which he thinks remains hidden in modern thought, I will bring it into dia! logue with John Zizioulas development of the personalist ontology of the Cappadocian fa! thers developed in Being as Communion, bringing philosophical and theological terms into a mutually enlightening intertwining. Merleau!Pontys phenomenology begins in a developing account of perception: for him there is no doubt that to understand vision correctly we must find a way of speaking about the soul.1 Martin Jay contrasts Merleau!Pontys version of Phenomenology to his friend Sar! tres obsessive hostility to sight, saying that this may plausibly be called a heroic attempt to reaffirm the nobility of vision on new and firmer grounds than those provided by the dis! credited Cartesian perspectivalist tradition.2 It is certainly the case that Merleau!Ponty does not hesitate to treat vision as paradigmatic for perception, bucking the trend of anti! ocularcentrism in twentieth!century French thought.

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It is the soul that sees and not the eyes, Descartes said in order to get rid of the little images fluttering through the air. The evolution of modern physiology shows that this expression must be taken absolutely literally and turned back against Descartes himself. It is the soul which sees and not the brain; it is by means of the perceived world and its proper structures that one can explain the spatial value assigned to a point of the visual field in each particular case. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, translated by Alden L. Fisher (London: Methuen, 1965), 192. 2 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 298.
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Merleau!Pontys theory of vision builds on work in psychology, which he thinks makes in! evitable a reconfiguration of the understanding of vision.3 He rejects the idea that percep! tion can be broken down into atomic sensations, which would be built up into perceived objects either according to some principle in the world itself "as in empiricism# or according to a fundamentally interior, mental principle "as in what he calls intellectualism#. Drawing on the Gestalt psychologists, but quickly going far beyond them, he argues that there can be no such thing as sensation$that perception is always!already structured in a way that gives it meaning.4 In his essay entitled The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Conse! quences he makes the claim that meaning and signs are the form and matter of percep! tion, insisting that the matter of perception is always pregnant with its form.5 Perception does not present things as a simple surface, but always also offers some intima! tion of their depths: things are always signs at one level or another, and meaning bursts forth in them. Seeing, for Merleau!Ponty, is bound up with my bodily imbrication with the world: it is never purely passive, but its activity is not a matter of subsuming experience under a con! cept; it is rather a matter of my living and breathing and moving around in a world of which I am a part but which always transcends me. This always involves what he calls a perceptual faith: because the world is not given to me in a series of pure experiences, I have from the first to assent to it, to give myself to it, to perceive at all. For him
there is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given. And these two elements of perception are not, properly speaking, contradictory.6

Sight, understood in these terms, is not the passive reception of light, as if the eye were simply a window into a mechanistic brain; nor is it a seeming representation of an outer world "which may or may not finally exist# in the realm of the soul. Rather, it is the living contact of the human person, soul and body, with a material world whose depths are inti! mated "but not laid bare# on the surface of things. There is more to the world than meets the eye, not because of the possibility of illusion, but because the visible world by its very
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences, trans. James M. Edie, in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp.1242, 12. 4 This is the project of Merleau-Pontys Magnum Opus and his best-known work, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), which he summarizes in The Primacy of Perception. 5 The Primacy of Perception, 15. 6 The Primacy of Perception, 16.
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visibility situates the perceiver in a complex of relations, necessarily hiding its invisible "or more!than!visible# depths. The world exceeds any anticipation I can have of it: it surprises me, affects me; and this is not simply a passive show, but a thick reality in which I am engaged. There is a sense in which this is inevitably narcissistic, indeed Merleau!Ponty notes that there is a fundamen! tal narcissism of all vision7: but it would seem that visual perception always also contains the seeds of an overturning of this narcissism, inasmuch as it cannot but see in the other a real presence which exceeds me. So he writes in the late work Eye and Mind
Visible and Mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body.8

The body inheres in the world, and it cannot exceed its own perspective on things. But just because of this it can acknowledge that other perspectives exist, that its own perspective is partial and not total, that the one world exceeds all perspectives on it. In this sense his ac! count of seeing is deeply intersubjective, and this intersubjectivity cannot be reduced to in! ternal perspectives but must be negotiated in the world.9 This is all in contrast to a philosophy and psychology which are still, Merleau!Ponty thinks, built on Cartesian assumptions, and which assume something like a Cartesian ac! count of the soul. The soul may be shrunk to a pure point in empiricism, becoming a simple absence in materialism, or expanded to the dimensions of the universe in intellectualism; but all these remain forms of Cartesianism.
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Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139. 8 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp.159190, 163. 9 He writes: If I consider my perceptions as simple sensations, they are private; they are mine alone. If I treat them as acts of the intellect, if perception is an inspection of the mind, and the perceived object an idea, then you and I are talking about the same world, and we have the right to communicate among ourselves because the world has become an ideal existence and is the same for all of usjust like the Pythagorean theorem. But neither of these two formulas accounts for our experience. If a friend and I are standing before a landscape, and if I attempt to show my friend something which I see and which he does not yet see, we cannot account for the situation by saying that I see something in my own world and that I attempt, by sending verbal messages, to give rise to an analogous perception in the world of my friend. There are not two numerically distinct worlds plus a mediating language which alone would bring us together. There isand I know it very well if I become impatient with hima kind of demand that what I see be seen by him also. And at the same time this communication is required by the very thing which I am looking at, by the reflections of sunlight upon it, by its color, by its sensible evidence. The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real for every subject who is standing where I am. The Primacy of Perception, 17.
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In The Embodied Eye, David Morgan ex! amines the shift of visual cultures through examples of the work of Al! brecht Drer:10 the first is from his cycle of woodcuts called the Small Passion, an image of the resurrected Jesus appearing to Thomas, guiding his hand to the wound in his side, showing how for Thomas to truly see was to touch; the second is from a treatise on measure! ment, showing a draughtsman using a crude tracing device, a visual grid placed between him and his object, a woman lying on a table, with a corresponding grid on the desk before him, onto which he traces her image. In the change from Drers earlier pas! sion cycles and the image of Thomas Albrecht Drer, Incredulity of St. Thomas, from Small Passion, 1511, woodcut. touching the risen Christ, to the later work from his Treatise on Measurements, showing the artists technical means of capturing the fleshy appearance of a woman in a flat! tened representation via a tracing device, the aim in some ways remains the same: both are about faith! ful representation.11 But what this means changes$in the early Albrecht Drer, Tracing device, 1525, from Treatise on Measurements, 1538. work faithful representation "of things unseen# means engagement of the viewers in the depth of the image: emotional, political, liturgical, and eschatological; in the latter image it means carefully accurate engagement with the surface of things, and essentially with their look, reduced to the pattern of light as it enters my eye and appears on my retina.

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David Morgan, The Embodied Eye, Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2012) pp. XXXX 11 The Embodied Eye, 456.
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For Morgan, the earlier work is the icon of a visual regime in which seeing is tantamount to touching and both are a firm basis for believing.12 Descartes is right that seeing de! pends on faith. But he configured this in terms of an argument: that a good god would not allow us to be deceived by an evil demon. Faith overcomes doubt. But in a world of flesh, the faith involved in perception is not a propositional faith but the primordial faith of our engagement with the world$faith grounds doubt, makes it possible, makes it intelligible. The Cartesian philosophy "and the new visual regime which is suggested in Drers second image# gives expression to the universal temptation for the person to view the material world as a limitation on their self!asserting ego, viewing the external world as a foreign out! side, on which I look as an observer whose reality is somehow elsewhere, installed in an eter! nity which is ultimately indifferent to the created world. I make a god of myself, and in so doing I misconceive both myself "as an isolated and self!subsistent observer# and God "as an infinitised version of this self#. The way we construct sight is bound up with our idea of the soul, and thus with the body; and the understanding of the connections between soul and body always has implications for theology properly speaking, that is, for what we can say about God. Sartres construction of the gaze as alienating, objectifying, and hostile to freedom derives from an essentially Deist theology of God as all!seeing eye, which reduces the visible world to mechanism and makes of the soul a pure negativity opposed to the facticity of the body. But for Merleau!Ponty, vision is no longer of a world which stands over against the soul, when the world is not at the end of our touch but rather the world in which we are entwined.13 Like Sartre, Merleau! Pontys interest is not first of all the theological implications of this "though he was attuned to them, and he knew the debt his ideas owed to Christian Theology, as well as his differ! ences from orthodoxy#.14 Thus the soul which is the subject of sight is not the abstract Cartesian mind but rather a reality much broader than the mind. Human persons are not simply embodied souls or en! souled bodies, constituted by an inner mental reality somehow adhering to an outer world; instead they are determined in terms of their relation to that world, to the personal others
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The Embodied Eye, 40. Eye and Mind, 178. 14 In a crucial passage (for our purposes) of The Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes To tell the truth, Christianity consists in replacing the separated absolute by the absolute in men. Nietzsches idea that God is dead is already contained in the Christian idea of the death of God. God ceases to be an external object in order to mingle in human life, and this life is not simply a return to a non-temporal conclusion. God needs human history. As Malebranche said, the world is unfinished. My viewpoint differs from the Christian viewpoint to the extent that the Christian believes in another side of things where the renversement du pour au contre takes place. In my view this reversal takes place before our eyes. And perhaps some Christians would agree that the other side of things must already be visible in the environment in which we live. By advancing the thesis of the primacy of perception, I have less the feeling that I am proposing something completely new than the feeling of drawing out the conclusions of the work of my predecessors. The Primacy of Perception, 27.
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whom they encounter there, and to the other other, who is recognised at its source and as its end, when we understand the always!already of the world as a gift given by a creator God, and ourselves as creatures. In Being as Communion John Zizioulas offers a parallel to the Sartrean Body in his account of the human body in its biological hypostasis
The body, which is born as a biological hypostasis, behaves like the fortress of an ego, like a new mask which hides the hypostasis from becoming a person, that is, from affirming itself as love and freedom. The body tends towards the person but leads finally to the individual.15

This ambiguity of the body, which tends towards community and personhood "though this tendency is diverted towards isolation and individualism# can be resolved in the other direction if we refuse the Cartesian disintegration of soul and body for an account of the ful! ly enfleshed person; an account which avoids the Cartesian lacuna between the soul and the rest of creation, which can put the body in relation to all things, seen and unseen.16 But must this philosophical move lead to a refusal to acknowledge the Christian God as the one who sees all? In The Vision of God, Nicholas of Cusa spells out what it means to conceive God as all! seeing in a way which avoids that totalising perspective of Cartesian sight "which leads to a conception of God as if he occupied an infinitised panopticon#, of God as pure power and his sight as a mode of surveillance, which links voir with pouvoir and savoir in twentieth! century French thought.17 Nicholas, when he sent this little book to the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Tegernsee, sent with it an icon, with reference to which he begins his writing to them.18 It is a Veronica, an image of the face of Christ, which is omnivoyant: that is to say, from wher! ever one looks at it, it seems to be looking directly back at the viewer. And, Nicholas says, it looks back as if it looked on none other.19 The gaze of God "in Christ# is not totalising, does not reduce reality to a geometry viewed from a single point somehow above all its planes; rather the vision of God holds together the universal sight of God with the absolutely particular: so that gaze never quitteth any, but it taketh such diligent care of each one who findeth himself observed as though it cared on!

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John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 51. Merleau-Pontys working title for the book which he had begun writing when he died, Le Visible et Linvisible, also seems to be an allusion to these words from the Nicene Creed. 17 Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, translated by Emma Gurney Salter (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007). 18 Evelyn Underhill, Introduction, in The Vision of God, pp. viixvii, xixii. 19 The Vision of God, 34.
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ly for him, and for no other, and this to such a degree that one on whom it resteth cannot even conceive that it should take care of any other.20 God in Godself remains unseen, beyond all images, behind the wall of Paradise, not to be captured in human constructions, uncircumscribed by the limit of human perception. God can be seen, as God gives himself, where his image is installed, in those icons of God found in human faces, and, if Nicholas is to be believed, in the depths of the whole created order, whence His essence penetrates all things. If the matter of perception is always preg! nant with its form21 it points, in a sense, to the one who gives it form as creator and who is the ultimate end of things. The question of seeing God is bound up with the question of see! ing itself: and seeing rightly, looking with love, always involves, in part, seeing God, insofar as God by his grace communes with us and with his creation. The everyday experience of sight, of seeing things, of seeing people, offers intimations of this true seeing in which it participates from the first; but sinful nature is always ready to domesticate sight, to collapse icons of Gods presence into idols of full self!presence. Where we learn to see truly, we are drawn into communion, through things, through persons, with Christ through whom and by whom they are made, and in whom all things are held together, to God who is all in all. Thus the God who transcends the visible world is not a noumenal reality inaccessible from the world of phenomena and known only by a kind of rarefied faith totally abstracted from the visible world; rather God is the transcendence beyond things in whom the transcendence within things participates. Bodies in a world without flesh cannot be bodies in the full sense at all; they are pure sur! face, lifeless things going through the motions of mechanism. But sensing bodies "if they are not constituted by ghosts trapped in a great machine#, bodies that truly see, make the whole world flesh, because their interiority is not a pure interiority divorced from the world but rather an interiority in this world, a depth which is revealed not just as a possibility of my own existence but as a dimension of the whole of existence. Matter is laden with meaning, and the possibility of material creation understood as a sort of dialogue between the creator and created souls opens up. For the perceiving soul, if the visible creation is reduced to brute materiality, there is no I, no God, and ultimately no world, no objects at all. But if sight gives me to myself as a bodi! ly seer, I emerge as a relation to the world. It is true that I could conceive this world solip! sistically as a relation determined by myself at its centre. But the way I stand in relation to other centres of relation, to other persons, seems to thwart this. Then, I could conceive the world as flesh determined by its relation to all perceivers. But subsequently the ground of
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The Vision of God, 56. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 15.

this sum of relations is revealed in its source in the primary relation of the communal world to the communal being of God, and the perceiver, now given as a human person, under! stands himself as a being given by God. This gift, the giving in which God gives me to my! self, cannot be fully refused; but it is not inevitable that it be fully received. As John Zizioulas shows us, personhood is both historically grounded and eschatologically determined22$the soul sees in a world which cries out for communion, and the psuchikos body "the animated body inhering in a world of flesh# must, to be fully itself, become pneu! matikos, must be re!centred in relation to God.23 For Merleau!Ponty, every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or completion by us of some extraneous intention or, on the other hand, the complete ex! pression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition, so to speak, of our body with things.24 This communion is in fact hampered by the prejudices of a thought which lays claim to autonomous self!presence, a thought we have claimed has its genesis in a kind of idolatry. Merleau!Pontys ontology of flesh draws us into a communion with the world, and for Zizioulas, the substance of God has no ontological content apart from communion; a communion through which the world that we belong to exists, and into which we may be drawn as we recognise the sacramental presence of the God who is love expressing his love for us in the very matter of creation. So the living, seeing body!subject of Merleau!Pontys philosophy, the biological hypostasis of Zizioulas thought, must bring perception as this coition of our body with things to consummation by being re!born as an ecclesial hypostasis, by entering fully into communion. In Zizioulas terms, it is in baptism, where the biological hypostasis becomes an ecclesial hy! postasis, as it enters into communion, that the gift is received, where the person becomes ful! ly a person by receiving their personhood as given in relation to God, by putting to death the claim to existence as an object, as a self!sufficient thing, and being re!born. And for him,
Man appears to exist in his ecclesial identity not as that which he is but as that which he will be; the ecclesial identity is linked with eschatology, that is, with the final outcome of his existence.25

This coition of our body with the things leaves open a space for the recognition of our per! ception as a communion not only with a fleshly world but with God; the fleshly seer who is this coition demands to be brought to consummation.
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The ecclesial hypostasis reveals man as a person, which, however, has its roots in the future and is perpetually inspired, or rather maintained and nourished, by the future. The truth and the ontology of the person belong to the future, are images of the future. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 62. 23 1 Cor. 15:44; cf. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003), 347356, for an enlightening discussion of what Paul means by these two words. 24 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 373. 25 Being as Communion, 59.
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The human being really does exist as a person, as an ecclesial hypostasis, not simply in virtue of her participation in the communion of the Church as brute fact, but by virtue of entry into the kingdom of God which is already and not yet. In the liturgy we see things$one another, all the saints, the bread and wine "that which God has given and human hands have made#, not from a unified spatial perspective but from our own place within it$we see how our own lives participate in eternal truths, we see things under the aspect of eternity. This is not to say that we see our lives and our work recede into insignificance against the massive weight of the world and the infinity of God: just the opposite, we see their place in Gods eternal purposes, we see one another, and all things, with the eyes of Gods love, which is to say we see them sub specie regnii, under the aspect of the kingdom, determined by their es! chatological significance. For Zizioulas, the eucharist is first of all an assembly "synaxis#, a community, a network of relations in which man subsists in a manner different from the biological as a member of a body which transcends every exclusiveness of a biological or social kind.26 We do not seek to reduce this to seeing, of course: to understand seeing correctly we must refuse any reduc! tion; but seeing through the eyes of love, seeing in a way that fulfils and exceeds the sight of fallen humanity, plays its part in this communion. For John Milbank, Merleau!Pontys philosophy gives us a decapitated Catholic theology in which God incarnate is only incarnate and incarnate everywhere.27 It is certainly the case that the generalized ontology of flesh cannot carry us all the way to God. But I want to ar! gue that a robustly bodily ontology, an ontology of flesh, with its insistence on our imbrica! tion with a world which is shot through with transcendence, gives us something which is rather akin to the iconographical tradition in which Jesus ascension is represented by his feet disappearing from the top of the image: the being of God in the heavenly realm remains hidden, behind Cusas wall of paradise, inaccessible to intellection; but intimations of God in the visible, incarnate world point the way there, and can only make full sense in them! selves through this pointing. John Zizioulas shows how Athanasius, in his insistence that the Son is of one being with the Father, transformed the idea of substance and brought, for the first time, relation into ontology. He writes:
To say that the Son belongs to Gods substance implies that substance possesses almost by definition a relational character. [] If Gods being is by nature relational, and if it can be signified by the word substance, can we not then conclude almost inevitably that, given the ultimate character of

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Being as Communion, 61. John Milbank, The Soul of Reciprocity Part Two: Reciprocity Granted. Modern Theology 17:4 (2001), pp. 485505, 504.
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Gods being for all ontology, substance, inasmuch as it signifies the ultimate character of being, can be conceived as communion?28

In this theological transformation, Merleau!Pontys ontology of flesh can be brought into resonance with a properly Trinitarian theology which refuses to divide relation from sub! stance, and which gives us a passage into the orthodox ontology which acknowledges the God who is love at the source of things.
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Being as Communion, 8384.

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