"If the Resurrection is resurrection from the dead, all hope and freedom are in spite of death"
About this Quote
Ricoeur rigs the sentence like a trapdoor: if you take Resurrection seriously as resurrection from the dead - not metaphor, not mood, not “renewal” - then hope stops being a therapeutic attitude and becomes a defiant wager against the one outcome nobody negotiates with. The line is designed to block the modern escape route where religious language gets “saved” by being softened into psychology. He’s forcing a fork in the road: either the claim is about death itself, or it’s about something easier.
The phrase “in spite of death” is the tell. Ricoeur isn’t offering the cheap consolation that hope cancels mortality; he’s insisting that any real hope has to pass through death’s authority and still refuse its final word. Freedom, in that frame, isn’t mere choice or self-expression. It’s the capacity to act, commit, and love under conditions that make those acts look irrational - because everything ends. This is why the Resurrection matters to him as a philosophical provocation: it exposes how much of our “freedom talk” depends on quietly pretending death is an abstraction.
Context matters. Ricoeur wrote in the long shadow of the 20th century’s mass death and ideological fraud, and he was a Christian thinker wary of both naive piety and cynical demystification. The sentence carries that double resistance: no spiritualizing away the corpse, no surrendering meaning to nihilism. It’s not certainty he’s selling; it’s courage - a grammar for hope tough enough to keep speaking when the grave is still there.
The phrase “in spite of death” is the tell. Ricoeur isn’t offering the cheap consolation that hope cancels mortality; he’s insisting that any real hope has to pass through death’s authority and still refuse its final word. Freedom, in that frame, isn’t mere choice or self-expression. It’s the capacity to act, commit, and love under conditions that make those acts look irrational - because everything ends. This is why the Resurrection matters to him as a philosophical provocation: it exposes how much of our “freedom talk” depends on quietly pretending death is an abstraction.
Context matters. Ricoeur wrote in the long shadow of the 20th century’s mass death and ideological fraud, and he was a Christian thinker wary of both naive piety and cynical demystification. The sentence carries that double resistance: no spiritualizing away the corpse, no surrendering meaning to nihilism. It’s not certainty he’s selling; it’s courage - a grammar for hope tough enough to keep speaking when the grave is still there.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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