Being Wounded: Finitude and the Infinite in Jean Louis Chrétien and Gregory of Nyssa

Abstract

AbstractWounds appear throughout the writings of Jean‐Louis Chrétien and Gregory of Nyssa. Most well known in Chrétien's corpus is his description of prayer as a “wounded word,” a phrase that seeks to describe an ungraspable dimension of phenomenal life in which the contingency and groundlessness of finitude appear as gifts. Gregory, in turn, draws upon the language of wounding in the Song of Songs to describe the soul's ascent to God. The first two parts of this essay bring to light how, for both writers, woundedness characterizes human finitude and describes encounters with the infinite. The third part turns to Chrétien's phenomenology of touch and Gregory's account of Macrina's scar, taking up the question of how the wound of finitude relates to wounded flesh. While both writers use the language of woundedness to describe a reality that both precedes and opposes historical violence, it remains that the power of this language flows from historical and physical wounds. The final pages argue that in drawing upon while seeking to oppose such wounds, this image represents not a liminal case but the complexity and contingency that attends theological speech which—the image of the wound reminds—is of the flesh.