brian-robinette a gift to theology

A GIFT TO THEOLOGY? JEAN-LUCMARION’S ‘SATURATED

PHENOMENON’ IN CHRISTOLOGICALPERSPECTIVE

BRIAN ROBINETTE

Saint Louis University, St. Louis, USA

Jean-Luc Marion has recently established himself as one of the most important andtheologically fertile thinkers within the phenomenological tradition. With his study of‘the gift’ and ‘the saturated phenomenon’, Marion presents a challenge to theology torethink revelation in its surprising givenness, as exceeding the boundaries often set upin advance by metaphysics and a priori anthropological foundations. This paperexamines Marion’s mature thought, particularly within the perspective of Christol-ogy. The paper argues that Marion’s phenomenological style of reflection, as adaptedto theology, is deeply contemplative and markedly Johannine in sensibility. As astrategy for theology, the phenomenological style gives to it important incentives andskills for reading off God’s self-revelation in Christ in its surprising and counter-intuitive beauty. Marion’s challenge/gift to theology is, however, in need of abalancing emphasis, one that appears too infrequently in his work: the ethical-prophetic dimension of the Christ event. In view of keeping both the mystical andprophetic poles of theology closely linked, the paper argues that just as beauty is a keycategory for saturated phenomena, so too is the reality of suffering and evil. However,whereas beauty invites a humble receptivity to and contemplative enjoyment of thegift, the inscrutable reality of suffering and evil, which so often exceeds comprehen-sion, touches off a critical and practical response. In broadening the study ofsaturated phenomena to include the refractory character of experience, especially thatwhich threatens humanity, Marion’s valuable contributions to theology require acomplementary emphasis from those narrative-practical Christologies that highlightthe prophetic aspects of the tradition.

In recent years, Jean-Luc Marion has steadily positioned himself asperhaps the most important phenomenologist of his generation. With thepublication of his Etant donne: Essai d’une phenomenology de la donation(1997), Marion has reached a formidable moment in his study of the gift,givenness and ‘the saturated phenomenon’, making his work a majorforce to reckon with in both philosophy and theology.1 That bothphilosophy and theology are within Marion’s sights has led tounderstandable controversy, since some regard his phenomenologyof the in-visible, im-possible and in-finite as no longer properly

r The author 2007. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2007. Published byBlackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ,UKand 350Main Street,Malden,MA 02148, USA.

HeyJ XLVIII (2007), pp. 86–108

‘phenomenological’, i.e., in the tradition of Edmund Husserl andMaurice-Merleau Ponty. While some may detect an illicit ‘theologicalturn’ in his work, others may find the task proper to theology itselfcompromised by an unwarranted imposition of philosophy. Marionhimself has repeatedly asserted the independence of his phenomenologi-cal inquiries, even if he acknowledges that phenomenology, as a style ofthinking, is operative in his more explicitly theological works. Whether ornot his interpreters and critics can accept this distinction (and I do, withsome qualifications), it still remains for theology to continue engagingMarion’s thought as it has built upon and advanced from his earlier, andnow widely-known, Dieu sans l’etre: Hors-texte (1982).

Presupposing the (licit) mutual influence betweenMarion’s theologicaland philosophical writings, I intend here to explore his analysis of the‘saturated phenomenon’ from a theological point of view, particularlywithin a christological perspective. This latter determination is consistentwith Marion’s own analysis of the Christ event as the ‘saturatedphenomenon’ par excellence. As we shall see, such an analysis will reveala deeply contemplative and aesthetic style of thinking, exhibiting, in apost-modern idiom, a distinctively Johannine sensibility. Herein lies itsgreat value, for too often have the mystical and aesthetic dimensions ofChristology remained subordinate to metaphysical and functionalChristologies. Primary theology is doxological – a performative discoursewhich responds to the saturating givenness of Christophany throughpraise and contemplation. This is to take seriously, as Marion puts it, the‘pragmatic use of language’, by which he means its liturgical vocation. Infact, Marion opposes this liturgical vocation to correlational strategies inChristology, an opposition that in my estimation needs some rethinking.Indeed, I shall argue that those strategies that take on the saturatingphenomena of negativity – that is, the overwhelming reality of evil andsuffering in our world – and do so on a narrative-practical basis, areChristologies that just as emphatically direct us to the performativecharacter of theological discourse, but in its ethical-prophetic dimension.While there are opportunities to develop the ethical character of Marion’swork, it is in need of much greater punctuation than his work currentlythematizes. I am pursuing, therefore, a deeper integration of the mysticaland the prophetic, the sacramental and the critical, as two inseparablepoles within Christology.2

I. IDOL, ICON AND THE PRIMACY OF GIVENNESS

By now, many English-speaking theologians are familiar with Marion’simportant work, God Without Being.3 Part philosophical analysis andpart theological exploration, Marion mounts here a meticulous critiqueof onto-theology: the identification of ‘God’ and ‘Being’. Onto-theology

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begins with the premise, allegedly self-evident, that God is Being as such,the first cause, the causa sui. This ‘God’, by producing finite beings, can beenvisaged or read off from them, since finite beings share in the Being ofthe Absolute. Through the link of causality or analogy, the ultimate termcan be surmised through the comprehension of its effects. God functionshere as the ultimate term within an a priori set of coordinates. Whether interms of the cosmological arguments of classical metaphysics, or, morerecently, in terms of grounding the subject, God becomes circumscribedwithin a predetermined horizon. As so much modern theology hasimbibed the ‘turn to the subject’ – speaking of God as the AbsoluteSubject, the end term of the subject’s transcendental desire – the effect isthe same, according to Marion: ‘God’ becomes thinkable on the basis offormal conditions pre-established by the thinker, thereby becoming thethinker’s Idol.

The Idol, for Marion, is the end point of a human gaze, which,although aiming towards the divine, ends up staring at its own gaze inhypostasized reflection. The Idol is not transparent to what is beyond it,but remains opaque, secure. Vicious circularity characterizes the gazeupon the Idol, be it a physical object or a concept. The seer can neverultimately escape the fascination of its own productions, since what isseen is its desire reified. Molded into the idea of the Absolute Subject,God becomes a cipher for the human subject. The subject now becomesthe limiting aperture by which God may be thought. Rene Descartes andImmanuel Kant are the most obvious figures bearing Marion’s critique;but even Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics cannot avoid suchidolatrous imposition. For while his ‘ontological distinction’ intends toset free the ‘question of Being’ frommetaphysics, the ‘question of God’, ifasked at all, can only be approached subsequent to the analysis ofDasein.4

For Marion, the upshot of metaphysics as it runs its course through latemodernity can be found in the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach, for whom‘God’ finally becomes recognized as the projection of the human subject.5

The ‘marches of metaphysics’ leads to the ‘death of God’, which, as itturns out, coincides with the ‘death of the subject’ in our own epoch ofthought. In point of fact, the ‘God’ of metaphysics and the modern‘subject’ are so bound together in onto-theology that the rethinking of theone will demand the rethinking of the other – indeed, the rethinking of‘the Other’. This rethinking demands a decisive break with Being as thedeterminative horizon for speaking of God.

The God of Christian revelation is, as Saint Paul expressed, foolishnessto philosophical wisdom.6 Cutting across expectation, subverting theforeseeable, it is disruptive and counter-intuitive. To think God ‘withoutBeing’ is not to cease thinking or philosophizing, but to allow thoughtitself to be penetrated and disturbed by the free, revelatory gift of God, asit gives itself. ‘God can give himself to be thought without idolatry onlystarting from himself alone: to give himself to be thought as love, hence as

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gift; to give himself to be thought as a thought of the gift’.7 As Marionthinks God as gift, as unsuspected agape overflowing all thought, heexpressly appeals to the likes of Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure whoprioritize the self-diffusive Good over Being. God gives Being to beings.8

Being itself is determined by the anterior freedom of the one who gives.This anteriority of freedom reveals the infinite ‘distance’ between Godand beings, a distance not traversable by thought. And yet, through thedistance, revelation finds us. It finds us in the startling self-bestowal ofGod in Christ, the image (or Icon) of the invisible God. The directionaldifference is decisive: in the Idol, we aim at the divine, but end up gazingat ourselves; in the Icon of Christ, our own gaze is reversed by the divinegaze who envisages us.9 As we shall see, this theology of Christ as Icon isthe ‘saturated phenomenon’ par excellence, where God’s self-givingexceeds vision with a light so overwhelming that it becomes a darkness:or, what Pseudo-Dionysius describes as ‘dazzling darkness’.

II. THE ‘SATURATED PHENOMENON’

Marion’s analysis of the ‘saturated phenomenon’ manifests a style ofthinking, a rigorous practice, not the workings of a system. It entails aprocess of perceptual and intellectual purgation in which the phenom-enon, any phenomenon, is considered in its sheer givenness or self-presentation.10 ‘Back to the things themselves’: Edmund Husserl’sinjunction calls for a description of phenomena as they give themselvesto intuition. A kind of therapeutics, phenomenology proceeds bydismantling or ‘clearing away’ (through ‘reduction’) those restrictionsimposed in advance that would limit or misconstrue the givenness ofphenomena.11 Marion’s work is deeply indebted to Husserl; and yet,Marion argues that Husserl didn’t go far enough. His work, though abreakthrough, remained too conditioned by the transcendental philoso-phy of Kant, wherein the subject does not simply receive but constitutesphenomena in the subject-object relation. More particularly, Marionquestions Husserl’s commitment to a definition of truth stressingconceptual adequation (adaequatio).12 Marion’s forceful counterpointasserts that conceptual activity, far from being adequate to phenomena, isoverwhelmed or saturated by their givenness to intuition.

For Kant, as for so much modern thought, all knowledge is co-constituted by the a priori conditions of the knower. A phenomenon maygive itself to me, but only through a limited aperture, through a ‘keyhole’,if you like, in which my capacities as a knowing subject condition how theother makes its appearance. What is possible is already defined by andordered to the power of knowing. Now, Marion in no way suggests thatthere are no limits to human perception and knowing, quite the contrary.But he is deeply troubled by the way in which Kant – and, indeed,


metaphysics in general – has stated the conditions of possibility inadvance. In particular, Marion is troubled by Kant’s valorization of theknowable over the unknown, the conditions of possibility over theimpossible, the visible over the invisible. One can preliminarily seetherefore a structural parallelism between the rigor of phenomenologicalreduction as developed in his later work and the apophatics deployed inhis more theologically thematic work. Just as phenomenality overflows(rather than simply conforming to) the capacities of the subject, so too isGod revealed in a way that cannot be anticipated or adequatelycomprehended by any a priori horizon established by the would-beaddressee.13

The ‘saturated phenomenon’, according to Marion, refers to ‘theimpossibility of attaining knowledge of an object, comprehension in thestrict sense’, not ‘from a deficiency in the giving intuition, but from itssurplus, which neither concept, signification, nor intention can foresee,organize, or contain’.14 In other words, the impossibility of achievingdefinitive conceptualization of a phenomenon, no matter what it is – apainting, a piece of music, a tobacco box on a table, an historical event, amemory, or the advent of the Christ – is a result, not from a lack in thephenomenon given, but from its excess as it floods intuition. Whereas somuch modern thought has regarded sensible intuition as the sort of ‘rawmaterial’ for conceptual abstraction, so that concepts achieve a finalityand stability in their apprehension of the object, Marion’s work invertsthe order. The ‘I’, as one who thinks and names, does not constituteobjects so much as being a one who is constituted by them.

In his more recent work, Marion spends considerable effort sketchingaesthetic experience as illustrative of saturated phenomena. Interestingly,Kant’s study of the sublime provides Marion a crucial starting point.Whereas Kant typically regards intuition the weaker in arriving atconceptual knowledge, aesthetic experience is said to engulf the power ofthought, so that the ‘representation of the imagination furnishes much tothink, but to which no determinate thought, or concept, can beadequate’.15 Marion comments: ‘[T]he impossibility of this conceptualarrangement issues from the fact that the intuitive overabundance is nolonger exposed within rules, whatever they may be, but overwhelms them;intuition is no longer exposed within the concept, but saturates it andrenders it overexposed – invisible, not by lack of light, but by excess oflight’.16 The phenomenality of the beautiful form, say, a painting, is nottruly apprehensible as a thing, as something ‘ready-to-hand’, but opensup to me in a manner of unsuspected appearing and inexhaustible depth:

[T]o see it as a painting, in its own phenomenality of the beautiful, I must ofcourse apprehend it as a thing (subsisting, ready-to-hand), but it is precisely notthis that opens it to me as beautiful; it is that I ‘live’ its meaning, namely itsbeautiful appearing, which has nothing thinglike to it, since it cannot bedescribed as the property of a thing, demonstrated by reasons, or hardly even

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be said. What is essential – the beautiful appearing – remains unreal, an ‘I knownot what’, that I must seek, await, touch, but which is not comprehensible.17

But what seems extraordinary here, a work of art, is actuallyparadigmatic. Take, for example, an event of history. In consideringwhat ‘caused’ the First World War, we find no shortage of explorablefactors or means to explore them – geographic, demographic, economic,technological, ideological, etc. ‘Troops of archivists and the curious haveelaborated this information; squads of researchers have treated it andorganized it into objects; generations of historians have interpreted it interms of so many causes and systems of possible and often probablecauses . . . . But it is precisely this overabundance that forbids assigning ita cause, and even forbids understanding it through a combination ofcauses’. It is not that such an event prohibits explanatory discourse orassigning to it various meanings. Marion is simply asserting that noconcept is adequate to the phenomenon at which it aims. The eventsaturates its capacities, giving rise to an ever-emergent complexity ofperspectives and meanings. In the ‘interaction and unanalyzable intrigueof infinitely converging causes’, such an historical event – indeed, anyhistorical event – is a saturated phenomenon.18

Marion also strikes powerful ethical keys in his sketches as he engagesthe thought of Emmanuel Levinas. ‘The face’ of another human person issaturating in its givenness. Visible, yet invisible in its irreducible depths,the face is a rupturing forth of alterity. The Other is nomanipulable thing,something to be comprehended-through-representation under a genericcategory, such as humanity, ethnicity, gender or nationality. To reducethe Other to strict visibility is to manufacture an Idol; or, to use Levinas’language, to subsume the Other within a ‘totality’ – an essentially violentact.19 In confrontation with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology – andundoubtedly his silence/complicity during the Nazi reign of Germany –Levinas asserts the face of the Other as incomprehensible in terms ofBeing. It cannot be regarded subsequent to (and thus ordered to) theanalysis of Dasein. The face breaks in upon my ipseity through anunintelligible distance, in the ‘curvature of space’. The dynamic of thisdisruption demands the language of revelation. The face is infinite,reversing my gaze in a ‘counter-experience’, so that I am now a ‘witness’.I receive my ‘me’, not through self-constitution, but in my hospitality tothe Other, who is gift. This is to think ‘otherwise than Being’, or ‘outsidethe subject’. Ethics, not ontology, is therefore the first philosophy forLevinas.

In his (not always uncritical) adoption of Levinas’ thought, Marionasserts that to be a ‘me’ is to respond to a call or a summons. ‘For as face,he faces me, imposes on me to face up to him as he for whom I mustrespond . . . . I have therefore received (and suffered) a call [un appel]. Theface makes an appeal [un appel]; it therefore calls me forth as gifted’.20


Phenomenology discloses an order of manifestation which reverses thatassumed by transcendental analysis: ‘relation here precedes individual-ity’; ‘the interloque, resulting from a summons, is taken and overwhelmed(taken over or surprised) by a seizure’; ‘I receivemy self from the call thatgives me to myself before giving me anything whatsoever’; ‘my soleindividuation or selfhood is found only in the facticity imposed on me bythe word originarily heard from the call, not pronounced by myself’.21

The contemplative ‘letting be’ in the aesthetic encounter is isomorphicwith the ‘letting be’ of the Other – not as indifference, but as radicalreceptivity to his/her self-disclosure and call. Just as beautiful phenom-enality invites a ‘living into’ beyond representation, so does the origi-narity of the Other call me to a praxis of hospitality and responsibility. Aswe shall see presently, the saturating phenomena of divine revelation,evident most emphatically in the Christ event, is such that it can only bereceived in its self-presentation. The order of manifestation disclosed byphenomenology already prepares us for Marion’s rigorous prioritizationof revelation in its surprising otherness. Christ, the Icon of God, is theface and visibility of the Father, but an excessive visibility beyond allnomination. The Christ event is a manifestation in which the form of thebeautiful is absolute, but also ethically demanding, since it involves theapostolic mission of becoming Christic. It is to these christological themesthat we now turn.

III. THE CHRIST EVENT:

THE ‘SATURATED PHENOMENON’ PAR EXCELLENCE

Marion’s christological thought is deeply Johannine. Contemplative andaesthetic in sensibility, it prioritizes above all else the revealing Christevent, in which the invisible God, through the Logos, enters intophenomenality in a way that is counter-intuitive, even shocking, yetenrapturing and beautiful. David Tracy speaks of the meditative thinkingin John’s Gospel as accentuating ‘manifestation’ and ‘giftedness’.22 Aprimary locus for so much mystical theology, John’s narrative unfolds asa hymn, a ‘verbal icon’, its prologue a ‘sacred oratorio’ in which ‘even theharsh reality of the cross becomes a manifestation of glory and grace’.23

Marion privileges an aesthetics of sight; and, just as John’s Gospel revealsa contrapuntal interplay of light and darkness, kenosis and exaltation,so does Marion’s rendering of the Christ event concentrate uponthe crossing of visibility and invisibility in the form, the Icon. TheseJohannine overtones are most unmistakable as Marion speaks of‘a phenomenon saturated to the point that the world could not acceptit. Having come among its own, they did not recognize it; having comeinto phenomenality, the absolutely saturated phenomenon could find noroom there for its display. But this opening denial, and thus this

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disfiguration, still remains a manifestation’.24 This fascinating passagehighlights several important elements of Marion’s analysis of the Christevent, which can be treated under four aspects.25

First is its unforeseeable and immeasurable character. The Logosbecoming flesh cannot be aimed at, anticipated or calculated. Althoughthe culmination of God’s self-revelation and the fulfillment of salvationhistory, God becoming human in this way, under these circumstances,exceeds and even subverts expectation. Although the fulfillment ofprophecy, Christ’s advent is still surprising, irreducible to the sum of allprophecies.26 He was put to death, after all, not recognized among hisown, as John declares. As the crucified messiah – itself an unimaginableidea – Christ is both the fulfillment of messianic anticipation and itsdramatic refiguring. For in the rejection of the Christ we find the extremeparadox of God’s agapic love, a love that loves us even in the face ofviolent denial. The non-recognition of the Logos is a result, not from alack in the revelation itself, but in the ignorance or willful denial of itsintended recipients. Even so, and precisely here, the cross becomesunprecedented victory, humiliation exaltation. For it reveals theabsolutely free gift of God’s love, which arrives not so much on themerits of those who are its recipients, but of its own accord and calling.Agape is excessive, non-proportional. Borrowing from Paul Ricoeur, itmanifests a ‘logic of superabundance’ rather than a ‘logic of equivalence’– summoning the Christian to love beyond mere proportionality byloving those regarded as unlovable, even (and perhaps especially) one’senemies.27 No metaphysics can anticipate or comprehend the kenoticGod of the cross who gratuitously traverses the absolute difference ofGod and creature. God’s revelation simultaneously manifests anunimaginable intimacy and an infinite distance, proximity and absolutealterity. In the Icon of Christ, the ‘image of the invisible God’, visibilityand invisibility meet hypostatically, yet are not confused.28 Metaphysicswould surmount this alterity ‘from below’, as it were. It would seek tomake the invisible visible on its own terms. But this would get the order ofmanifestation precisely backwards. Revelation, in point of fact, finds us.29

Secondly, the saturated phenomenon of Christ cannot be borne orabsorbed, but produces ‘bedazzlement’ for sight.30 Whereas formetaphysics the object conforms to the transcendental structure of theknower – or, if it doesn’t, is regarded poor in phenomenality – the Iconsaturates sight in the intensity of its phenomenality. The Icon overwhelmsthe power of perception and knowledge, its unbearable light producingperceptual darkness. As in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where suddenillumination to unadjusted eyes creates blindness, so is Christ’smanifestation one that appears, in its excess, as an absence – negativetheophany. This paradox of presence and absence, according to Marion,is most evident in the resurrection narratives of the Gospels.31 As often asthe risen One is encountered, he is mis-identified, a stranger. The women


at the empty tomb are said by Mark to be alarmed at what they see – orwhat they do not see: a body. ‘He is risen, he is not here’, they are told;terror and amazement seize them (Mark 16:6–8). In Luke’s Emmausstory, the disciples encounter the risen One in the breaking of the breadwith a stranger. Once recognized, the stranger disappears from sight(Luke 24:13–35). John’s account includes Mary Magdalene’s confusionof Jesus with a gardener, no less (John 20:15). And upon his finalcommission to the disciples, the risen Christ promises to be with themuntil the end of the age, and forthwith parts from them, ‘ascending’ intoheaven from view (Luke 24:51). What these mysterious narratives revealso poignantly, claims Marion, is the ‘bedazzlement’ of Christophany.Because the excess ‘cannot be borne by any gaze that would measure upto it (‘objectively’), it is perceived (‘subjectively’) by the gaze in thenegative mode of an impossible perception, the mode of bedazzlement’.32

In other words, perceived absence is the subjective correlate to theobjective surplus of givenness.

Bedazzlement is a key idea for Marion. It naturally corresponds withJohn’s juxtaposition of light and darkness. But it is also rooted in themystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, whose work, argues Marion, isfar from the formless mysticism of pure negation, but enraptured by theunbearable givenness of Christophany:

To suppose that manifestation coincides with obscurity in Denys because, as istoo often repeated, the Christ occupies only a secondary, superficial role, wouldhere be a misinterpretation. For that which finds its ‘paradoxical face’(R. Char) on the face of Christ, in order there to dazzle with a blindingevidence, is nothing less than the distance of imparticipable participation. It ison the face of Christ that, par excellence, vision is exhausted in sustaining with ablinking gaze the darkness that makes up bedazzlement.33

Hans urs Von Balthasar, who describes Dionysius as the most aesthetictheologian of the Christian tradition, also figures prominently inMarion’s theology of bedazzlement, indeed his thought as a whole.34

‘The form of Christ’, declares von Balthasar, ‘appears in the world withsuch a plenitude of meanings’ that it ‘necessarily has on man the effect ofan overwhelming superabundance and, hence, of a darkness from excessof light’.35 Marion’s account of ‘absence’ is therefore markedly differentfrom other post-modern renderings. In the thought of Jacques Derrida,for example, absence suggests emptiness, a dry desert, where desire yearnsfor something yet to come, but mourns over a something not yet given.There is, as John Caputo puts it, a ‘messianic indeterminacy’ in Derrida’sinterminable waiting for the gift.36 For Marion, however, this ‘absence’ isdue, not to a lack in givenness, but in the incomprehensibility of itsfullness. Only through a conversion is the perceiver gradually able to bearwhat is emphatically given, just as the disciples on the road to Emmausundergo perceptual accommodation to Christophany (‘were our hearts

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not burning?’).37 This contemplative mood seeks to behold the form ofChrist through the radical dispossession of a subject who would makedemands on him. In its phenomenological key, Christology is a purgativeway, a ‘letting be’ of the actuality and completeness of revelation. Caputois correct, therefore, in identifying Marion’s phenomenology of givennessas nourished by a Catholic sacramental imagination, a taste for mysticaltheology, and a theologia gloriae. For all of their shared interests,Marion’s ‘hypergivenness’ is highly contrastive with Derrida’s ‘never-givennesss’, which Caputo characterizes in this manner: ‘But for Derridathe sense of the ‘‘unapparent’’ is drawn not from this Catholic theology ofperception but from a more Kantian and Protestant notion of the Ideaand from an ultimately Jewish distrust of all images, whether idol oricon’.38 Marion’s Hallelujah is met with Derrida’s eschatological ‘Whenwill you come?’39 This contrast, if somewhat simplified, will neverthelessbecome instructive for us momentarily as we consider the need forcomplementingMarion’s thought with a more pronounced prophetic anddialectical sensibility.

Thirdly, according to Marion’s analysis, Christ’s appearance destabi-lizes all categories of analogy and disrupts the competence of language.Christ’s kingdom, which is ‘not of this world’, although ever irruptingwithin it, pluralizes our horizons of perspective upon him who delivers it.He neither conforms to our categories, nor do the christological titlesfinally manifest his essence. Citing the end of John’s Gospel, where we aretold that the whole world cannot contain the books necessary to describeall that Jesus accomplished, Marion points to the plurality of the Gospelsand the manifold christological titles as textual traces of excess. If thecanon is closed, it remains inexhaustible, as each Gospel:

offers a new horizon in order to welcome a new aspect of the one and onlyparadox. In this context, the fact that Christ can receive a plurality of names,none of which says his essence, does nothing more than reproduce the propertyof God himself of admitting all names and refusing each of them – the propertyof summoning an infinity of nominative horizons in order to denominate he whosaturates not only each horizon, but the incommensurable sum of thehorizons.40

The multitude of scriptural genres, the diversity of titles, and theincommensurability of the Gospels taken together undoubtedly createproblems for critical exegesis. But no independent historical substrate canbe extracted. No harmonization of the Gospels is ultimately possible,even if it were desirable. For Marion, this pluralization of horizons doesnot lead to undecidability or despair over scripture, quite the contrary.Viewed post-critically, and in recognition of the semantic surplusinvolved in all interpretation, the plurality in scriptural testimony istheologically pregnant. In the multiplication of textual bodies, whicharise only in the space created by the withdrawal (‘ascension’) of


Christ’s risen body, we witness the inexhaustibility of their ultimatereferent. Again, Christ’s proximity also manifests distance. Marionmost certainly affirms the authority and normativity of scripture; but he iscareful to make a distinction between the Christ event and its textualtraces, between the Logos and logoi. Therefore, the theologian does not‘aim at the text but, through the text, at the event, the referent’.41 Indeed,this is the extreme pleasure in theology, that it transgresses the text.Theological writing ‘always transgresses itself’ in the mode of prayer.42

‘Prayer performs distance’.43 It renounces the compulsion to beconceptually adequate to its referent and enters into the play and ek-stasis of praising the unnamable.44 And with this, we arrive at theology’sliturgical vocation.

Rather than attempting to make God or the Christ comprehensiblethrough acts of predication, theological language is above all praise andprayer. It is not primarily conceptual representation (which wouldsuggest a ‘metaphysics of presence’); nor does it entail the systematicdenial of concepts in de-constructionist indeterminacy. Marion points tothe ‘third way’ of mystical theology, the way of linguistic performance(or what he describes as ‘de-nomination’). This is to shift the focus from atheoretical understanding of theological language to a practical one.Because the givenness of revelation is excessive to intuition, giving rise to,yet overwhelming the concept, thought is driven to ek-stasis – ‘standingoutside’ itself in praise. Doxology performs self-displacement, emptiesitself of its idolatrous ambitions, and becomes transparent (Iconic) to itsunnamable referent. This highlights what Marion describes as ‘theliturgical function of all theo-logical discourse’.45 Christology is, in thissense, much more a poetics of description than an explanatory discourse.It seeks to ‘read off’ the event of God’s self-gift in Christ – as it gives itself,in its surprise, in its bedazzlement. It is a beholding of the Christic form inits incomprehensible glory. The Johannine and Balthasarian themescould hardly be more evident.

Christology is not just descriptive, however. It is inscriptive. To doChristology is participatory; as such, it is not so much to name as it is tobe named. Again, the reversal of intentionality is fundamental tounderstanding Marion’s point. It is not the gaze of the subject takingprecedence here, but precisely the opposite: of being faced and named bythe Icon of God. To speak of the ‘name above all names’ is to be given anew name in liturgical praxis. This occurs preeminently in baptism.46

In baptism, the catechumen is inscribed by the Name of a God whoseexcessive self-givenness is triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Baptismdoes not grant the baptized a ready-made and stable idea about God.It is a sacramental performance in which God is lived into by the receptionof a given identity in Christ. ‘The Name – it has to be dwelt in withoutsaying it, but by letting it say, name and call us. The Name is not said,it calls’.47

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This theme of ‘the call’, already discussed above, brings us to thefourth and final aspect of Christ as the saturated phenomenon parexcellence, which also highlights some of the ethical possibilities ofMarion’s work. Whereas metaphysics tends to think first the subject’s apriori structure of knowing, and then only subsequently the Other asintelligible to that structure; phenomenology reverses the order, assertingthe priority of the Other who regards me and calls me into a relation ofhospitality and responsibility. The Levinassian themes here are striking.The face of another human person is not, strictly speaking, intelligible orrepresentable as a quasi-object. The face of the Other is a visibility whoseinvisible excess saturates my capacity to comprehend and objectify. In myregarding of the Other, my gaze is reversed in a ‘counterexperience’. I donot just see, but see the Other who sees me. My ‘me’ arises as a gift fromthe Other, individuation a response to an anterior call. One can of thinkof this priority of givenness in endless ways: the fact that I am born of anOther, given frommaternity and paternity; that I am embodied, taking onand imbibing the flesh of the world; that I dwell in a world of languagethat precedes me and, in a real sense, speaks through me; that I inhabit amyriad of social and cultural (and for the Christian, ecclesial) bodies thatshape the possibilities and contours of my self-determination.

This priority of givenness means that Christian selfhood is a responseto a call, and ultimately to a radical mission. Christ, ‘the face’ of theinvisible God, reverses my intentionality and makes me a witness to him.In Christ’s calling of disciples, Marion notes the frequent reversal ofvalues – metanoia. In the story of the rich young man, who allows himselfto be measured by the gaze of the Christ, the reversal is acute: ‘[T]heirregardable gaze adds a saturation of saturation – sell your goods‘‘whatever they might be’’ and ‘‘give [the proceeds] to the poor’’. The lasttype of saturating implies its redoubling: one must not only respect thegaze of the poor . . . and, doing that, come to stand before theirregardable gaze of Christ; one must also annul all possession and alloriginarity in order to ‘‘give [oneself] to the poor’’, therefore to the firstamong them’.48 Again, the contemplative ‘letting be’ manifests anapostolic structure. The self-dispossession necessary for beholding theform of revelation in its beauty is the very disposition enabling hospitalityto the Other, to the poor in this particular instance. It would be wrong,therefore, to consider Marion’s emphasis on givenness as an inundationto the point of stupefaction and ethical ineptitude. Far from making mea bystander – for this is not what ‘witness’ means – the saturatingphenomenon of Christ means that ‘to be’ Christianly is to be an ‘actor ofcharity’.

In a fascinating study of Christ’s ascension, Marion writes that‘Christ’s departure allows for performing of the instructions in fullresponsibility, but the instruction to love has the disciples do the verything that Christ accomplished; the disciples become the actors of charity,


no longer passive and obtuse spectators of Jesus’.49 In other words, thiswithdrawal, this absence is a new kind of presence – not on the order ofideas, but on the order of praxis. Resurrection and ascension manifest‘distance’ and the space for apostolic repetition, wherein the disciples,now friends of God (John 15:15), may accede to a Christic persona:

[W]hen Christ ‘took a distance’ from the disciples, he clearly became more, andnot less, present to them. Why? Because ‘with a great joy’ – the very jubilationof Christ blessing the Father (Zgallia0sato, Luke 10:21) – the discipleshereafter accomplish the very blessing of Christ: they no longer watch Christblessing, like indiscreet spectators (Luke 10:23); from now on, they themselvesbless, as Christ blessed . . . . Like the body of Christ, his gesture becomesinterior to them – constitutes them and creates them anew. Therefore, just asthe invisibility at Emmaus did not hide the body of Christ (rather, it gave itperfectly), the withdrawal to a distance in the Ascension does not interrupt theeconomic action of Christ: Christ acts with and by virtue of the blessing of hisdisciples; he is forever working with them.50

And so, just as Marion highlights prayer and praise (rather thantheoretical representation) as first order Christology, we have here arelated pragmatics: to do as Christ through the praxis of self-expenditurefor the Other, in blessing the Other.

IV. THE CHALLENGE OF THE GIFT:

PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITIQUE

I now return to my original question: Is Marion’s analysis of the‘saturated phenomenon’, particularly within a christological perspective,a gift to theology? In answering ‘yes’ to this question, I intend to qualifyhis critique of certain theological approaches while also drawing greaterattention to a range of saturated phenomena that too infrequently appearin his writings, particularly that of negativity and suffering. This lattermove will highlight the importance of more deeply integrating themystical (contemplative) and the prophetic (critical) dimensions oftheology.

In the first place, Marion issues a powerful call for self-critique in muchcontemporary theology. He clearly challenges all ‘correlational’ types oftheology – be they historical-critical, existential, transcendental, herme-neutical, or liberationist – since in their attempt to ‘correlate’ the Christevent with some ‘situation’, the analysis of the latter may place conditionsupon the former, molding revelation, so Marion would say, to some apriori horizon.51 Can a Christology so premised avoid looking into thewell (to borrow Albert Schweitzer’s analogy) only to see the fascinatingreflection of its own gaze? One may argue that such is to some extentinevitable, no matter how phenomenologically exacting the undertaking.One may even argue that such is vital, if in need of proper understanding:

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for not only is the Christ event itself contextualized of historical necessity– what else would the affirmation of Christ’s humanity mean? – but onprecisely theological grounds we would have to say that the logic ofincarnation demands its ongoing contextualization and lived encultura-tion in human history. And yet, Marion’s phenomenological reductionshould disturb all glib self-assurance about such approaches – without, inmy view, ultimately denying their rightful place and validity.

Revelation is not simply immanent or symmetrical to the recipient. It is‘Iconic’, and as such maintains ‘distance’ precisely in the midst of itsproximity. In its excess, Christophany is counter-intuitive and bedazzling,often reversing expectation, calling us always to be hearers first. Thechallenge Marion presents, then, is a call to the challenge of revelationitself. As a style or strategy, and not as a foundational theology,phenomenology provides theology enticements and skills for ‘readingoff ’ the event of revelation in its self-presentation, rather than privilegingthe kind of explanatory or ‘scientific’ approach that has characterized somuch theology since its scholastic configuration. A ‘revealed theology’, asopposed to a ‘metaphysical theology’, is contemplative, a studied ‘lettingbe’, and rooted in a theory of perception in which the givenness ofrevelation’s form is received through attestation. This prioritization ofrevelation and the descriptive vocation of theology (as proclamation anddoxology) closely associates Marion with Karl Barth and, of course, vonBalthasar. ‘Why’, Marion asks, ‘do [theologians] not undertake, orundertake so little (Hans Urs von Balthasar remains here insufficient andexceptional), to read phenomenologically the events of revelationrecorded in the Scriptures, in particular in the New Testament, insteadof always privileging ontic, historic, or semiotic hermeneutics’?52 Appealis made here for a more ‘intratextual’ or self-referential theology, onemore idiomatically biblical, more attendant to the narrative character ofChristian understanding. The theologian, writes Hans Frei, inhabits abiblical ‘universe of discourse’ and seeks to ‘put the reader in the middleof that world, instructing him in the use of that language by showing himhow – extensively, and not only by stating the rules or principles of thediscourse’.53 The goal is not primarily the ‘translation’ of the Gospel intoanother (presumably more intelligible or credible) framework, but to helpthe reader/participant become more adept at imagining, thinking andspeaking within the dynamic world the Gospel generates. It is we who areto be translated.

This kind of ‘post-metaphysical’ or ‘post-critical’ approach possesses adeep affinity for much ‘pre-modern’ theology as well. While engaging thelikes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, Marion frequentlydraws upon the patristic and mystical theology that monastic theologywould inherit in its growing distinction from the scholastic theology ofthe universities. Opportunity lies here for the retrieval of a contemplativemood in theology, where revelation can be regarded, not only under the


rubric of the True or the Good, but the Beautiful. This retrieval isessential to a faith rooted in incarnation, sacrament and embodiment.Christology follows a ‘logic of manifestation’, where the evidential beautyof incarnation compels and enraptures in the saturating givenness of itsform. This will mean that what is beautiful cannot be marginalized onlyas a matter of ‘taste’, but must register at the highest levels of theologicalthinking, inasmuch as God’s very self-communication affirms –‘hypostatically’, no less – the enduring reality of the form (resurrectionof the body).54 Consequently, the mystical night of apophasis is anythingbut an absconding from the sensible or the worldly, anything but arenunciation of mediation, but the necessary corollary to the surplus oflight in kataphasis. The meditative thinking of Marion’s work cantherefore be an invaluable resource for refiguring the modern separationof content and form, thought and aesthetics, theology and spirituality.55

Marion’s work highlights the essentially performative character oftheological discourse. In the first instance, theology is a practice, a ‘publicwork’ of praise – in a word, liturgy. It is fundamentally participatory,operating on the order of symbol, narrative, sacrament, and rite – allgiving rise to the concept, but saturating it. Only on a secondary level,when we reflect upon symbolic performance, do we have a theology of amore (explicitly) hermeneutical and explanatory character. This is not todeny a critically-reflective dimension to liturgical practice itself, but onlyto acknowledge that in its secondary (and thus derivative) mode,theological reflection and its employment of assorted methodologiesconstitute an indispensable role in ongoing self-critique and communica-tion. Now, Marion himself nowhere makes this distinction. Indeed,Marion courts an untenable extreme: of not affirming the rightful place ofsecondary theology. But hermeneutical and critical theologies on asecondary level are not inherently idolatrous in ambition or consequenceif by this it is assumed that they procedurally substitute some ulteriorhorizon for the givenness of revelation. Granted that correlationalstrategies typically attempt some ‘fusion of horizons’, it is inaccurate toassert that this presumes symmetry between the two poles. Hermeneuticaland critical strategies can actually provide powerful means for givingcritique to our tacit idols, allowing the disruptive character of revelationto be heard. One might think for example of how certain strains ofhistorical-criticism have recently retrieved the eschatological andapocalyptic matrix of Jesus’ life-ministry, thereby challenging andcorrecting the immanentist and a-historical tendencies of existentialhermeneutics. Or consider the resultant recovery of Jesus’ Jewishness,which had for so long been suppressed by a hidden or explicit anti-Semitism, with consequences we know only too well. Or, finally, considerhow the critical-hermeneutics of liberation theology has opened our eyesagain to Jesus’ titanic struggle with ‘the powers’ that represent thestructural realities of sin, and therefore the social and historical reality of

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the Kingdom of God as Jesus sought to instantiate it – this against a long-standing tendency to privatize sin and salvation.

As Graham Ward rightly notes, there lurks a danger in Marion’sthought of evading all hermeneutical questioning and self-critique. Tospeak of revelation ‘as it gives itself’ may in fact hide, but now moreeffectively, the very kind of idolatrous imposition the theologian wouldseek to unmask. Ward asks whether strict intratextuality – or at least thepretense to it – forms a self-validating structure, leaving virtually no spacefor the kind of self-critique in theology that effectively operates in therealm of hermeneutics and analysis.56 We might take a cue from Marionhimself, therefore, and argue that the plurality of horizons generated bythe saturated phenomenon of the Christ event gives rise to a creative andmutually corrective plurality of theological genres, tasks and methods. IfMarion’s challenge/gift affirms the need for a sustained phenomenolo-gical moment in theology, I regard this challenge as a gift to the extentthat it is supplemented/complimented with the challenge of criticalhermeneutics. ‘Distance’, as Marion understands this, needs a moreserious engagement with the hermeneutical function of ‘distanciation’.57

V. THE SATURATED PHENOMENA OF SUFFERING AND EVIL:

THE MYSTICAL-PROPHETIC OPTION AS ‘THIRD WAY’

I want to finally return to the ethical possibilities of Marion’s work,possibilities in need of significant development. If Christology of the firstorder is praxis, then the analysis provided above suggests that this praxisis not only doxological in character but also ethical. That Marion drawsupon the work of Levinas is our signal here. Articulated in a mystical-cum-prophetic discourse, Levinas writes that the encounter of the Other‘is a dazzling, where the eye holds more than it can hold; an ignition of theskin that touches and does not touch that which, beyond the graspable,burns . . . . The negativity of the In- of the Infinite – otherwise than being,divine comedy – hollows out a desire that could not be filled . . . . A desirewithout end, from beyond Being: dis-interestedness, transcendence –desire for the Good’.58 This desire for the Good is an eschatologicaldesire, a tensive, electrically charged yearning (‘insomnia’) for justice.Can we speak here of an internal link between mystical self-dispossessionand justice for the Other?

It is a striking fact that amid his diverse sketches of saturatedphenomena Marion says very little about the saturating phenomena ofloss and grief, suffering and evil, violence and exile. Although not entirelyabsent from his work,59 the experience of radical negativity might well bethe kind of saturated phenomenon that when more thoroughly analyzeddisplays a dynamic much more dialectical in character. EdwardSchillebeeckx has described such phenomena as ‘negative contrast


experience’. Evil, death and suffering – particularly massive innocentsuffering – are refractory for thought. They flood and overwhelm theconcept, disrupt our metaphysics, baffle our attempts to constructdurable theodicies and universal theories of history. ‘There is, in point offact, unmeaningful history; there is non-sense in our history; violence, lustfor power, coveting at the expense of others, enslavement and oppression– there is Auschwitz, and goodness knows what else in the private sphereand in our own personal life. All of that does indeed fall outside the‘‘logos’’ which the historian [or metaphysician] looks for in history – somuch the worse for the varieties of concrete historical experience!’60

The Kantian categories of understanding that structure, if only as afoil, Marion’s sketches are surely no less subject to saturation by the kindsof phenomena that preoccupy Schillebeeckx. Must we not also speak ofnegative bedazzlement, the fragmentation of horizons, the traumatizingof a language that cannot properly name the radical mystery of sufferingand evil? Schillebeeckx discerns in negative contrast experiencesunmistakable and distinctive traits. Whereas the aesthetic encounter isenrapturing, ‘goal-less’, and playfully expansive; suffering touches off acritical, cognitive force for its overcoming. The former invites con-templative lingering; the latter urgency for transformation. The former isrooted in manifestation; the latter is dialectical in its yearning for a time‘to come’, freedom from what assails it.

Although Schillebeeckx speaks more explicitly in epistemologicalterms and freely uses the language of ‘experience’ – Marion’sphenomenology is not an epistemology, nor does he often use experientiallanguage – he nevertheless discovers in negative contrast experience amanner of givenness not subject to further reduction:

[They] form a basic human experience which as such I regard as being a pre-religious and thus a basic experience accessible to all human beings, namely thatof a ‘no’ to the world as it is . . . . This experience is also more certain, moreevident than any verifiable or falsifiable ‘knowledge’ than philosophy and thesciences can offer us. Indignation (which is certainly not a scientific term) seemsto be a basic experience of our life in this world.61

In its shock and ‘unpredictable landing’ (Marion), my suffering, or mybeing-witness to the suffering of others, issues a call for decision andresponse. It ‘hollows out a desire’ for the Good (Levinas). If sufferingis something ‘undergone’, putting those who experience or witness it intoa state of passivity, it nevertheless bears a critical cognitiveforce. Eliciting indignation and protest – ‘No, it should not be thisway!’ – there irrupts within it a ‘negative and dialectical coming to con-sciousness of a desiderium, a longing, and of a question about meaning‘‘on its way’’ ’, indeed, a ‘craving for well-being or ‘‘making whole’’ ’.62 Itthrows open an indefinable future and charges the present witheschatological anticipation.

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The root of the prophetic-critical imagination is found here, arguesSchillebeeckx. It is also here where Derrida’s ‘When will you come?’ findsits urgent legitimacy. If for Marion the unnamable Name of God inspiresthe ‘third way’ of mystical theology as performed in contemplation andliturgy, for Derrida this Name inspires the ‘third way’ of a different kindof performance: an ethico-political pursuit of justice, which is always yet-to-come.63 No account of ‘absence’ that speaks only of excessive positivityis therefore sufficient. Where, in this rendering, would there be anyrightful place for lament, grief and protest? Where, in this theologiagloriae, is there a place for a thoroughgoing theologia crucis? TheJohannine-manifestory temperament ofMarion’s work needs more of theeschatological-prophetic (‘not-yet’) tension found in other strains of theJudeo-Christian tradition, i.e., the lamentation and protest of a Jeremiahor Job, the Markan yearning for parousia, Paul’s shattering proclamationof the cross, etc. ‘Christianity lives in and by the paradigmatic power ofboth manifestation and proclamation’, writes David Tracy. It is ‘areligion which includes both a prophetic-ethical-historical defamiliarizingfocus and power and a mystical-metaphysical-aesthetic transformed andtransformative enveloping ground’.64

The task for Christology is therefore not only attestation to theincarnation in praise, not only a contemplative beholding of thebedazzling ‘form’ of God’s self-giving. It is this, but it is also a criticalremembrance of the life-praxis of Jesus of Nazareth, whose life-ministryfills out this ‘form’ with a distinctive historical and narrative shape.Importantly, many narrative-practical styles of Christology are just aswary as Marion about the limitations of metaphysical styles, and just asadamant about Christology’s performative character. Suffering andinjustice may never be domesticated by conceptual representation, butthey may be confronted, if only in fragmentary fashion, through thepraxis of liberation. In the life-ministry of Jesus, says Schillebeeckx, wefind ‘a non-theoretical but practical prolepsis or anticipation of the newworld’ for those ‘without salvation, to those who are suffering andoverwhelmed, even to the dead’.65 This is a practical theodicy whichseeks not to flinch from the saturating phenomena of negativity but toovercome it to the extent possible, in view of an (im-possible)eschatological future that disrupts by breaking-into the present.Narrative-practical Christologies opt for a ‘thick description’ of Jesus’story, putting the hearer/listener inside its world. But it highlights the self-implicating character of a story, which was nothing if not about theradical confrontation with the structural powers of sin, oppression,suffering, and injustice. Such a story only gains its ‘sense’ by being ‘livedinto’, by being done in apostolic repetition:

Reference to what is actually done here and now is an essential part of thebiblical view of memory . . . . [T]he revolutionary critical epistemological value


of the memoria passionis Christi, which presents a challenge to the world andsociety . . . is communicated by the living Christian community, that is, by thecontemporary church itself, in so far as it is an active memoria passionis of therisen Lord . . . and in this respect is a living remembrance of Jesus whichovercomes suffering.66

VI. CONCLUSION

Walter Brueggemann has written memorably of the fundamentalrelationship between ‘criticizing’ and ‘energizing’ in the biblical tradition.Prophetic criticizing assails the pretensions to immediacy and ideologicaltotality by embracing the negative and expressing grief. ‘So the prophetspeaks his grief at the lack of resolution. He cannot cry enough’.67 Andyet, this ‘No!’ can itself either wither or become ideological itself ifseparated from doxology’s ‘Yes’. ‘Doxology is the ultimate challenge tothe language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discoursein which energy is possible’.68

Powered by his study of the saturated phenomenon, we have inMarion’s christological thought a compelling challenge to the managementof revealed reality through the serious ‘play’ of doxology. The ‘third way’he proposes energizes theological discourse as a performative and‘mystical’ discourse, thereby reinstating the rightful place of liturgy andprayer as primary theology. If his critique of what we are calling secondarytheology is overplayed, this will not diminish its value for aiding theretrieval of the contemplative and aesthetic dimensions of the christologicalenterprise. But the sustainability of this achievement will come only if weemphatically include in this ‘third way’ the (no less) primary theology ofprophetic-ethical praxis. The study of the saturated phenomenon is itself ofsharp relevance here, since the realities of evil, suffering and death(‘negative contrast experience’) utterly saturate thought and explanatorydiscourse, tearing open a space for prophetic grief, yet setting into motionan ‘eschatological desire for the Good’. Marion’s insistence on theperformative character of Christology in doxology finds here a comple-mentary insistence that such performance bemore deeply rooted in the self-implicating story of Jesus of Nazareth, whose life-ministry demands thismore dialectical and confrontational stance towards ‘the powers’ of sin,suffering and evil. Christology must therefore resolve to ever pursue bothpoles of its ‘mystical-prophetic’ option.

Notes

1 While a number of Marion’s volumes and articles have contributed to his phenomen-ological project, the following three volumes form a trilogy that function together, generallyspeaking, as historical investigation, systematic presentation, and topical elaboration –

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respectively, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology,trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Being Given:Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Sanford, Cal.: StanfordUniversity Press, 2002); and In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner &Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

2 I am specifically making appeal here to the ‘mystical-prophetic’ option in theology asframed by such theologians as David Tracy, Edward Schillebeeckx, Johannes Baptist Metz, andGustavo Gutierrez, among others.

3 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

4 Ibid., pp. 61–73.5 ‘[A]s L. Feuerbach says exactly, ‘‘man is the original of his idol’’ – man remains the original

locus of his idolatrous concept of the divine, because the concept marks the extreme advance,then the reflected return, of a thought that renounces venturing beyond itself, into the aim of theinvisible’, (ibid., p. 30). Even a-theism is idolatrous; indeed a ‘double idolatry’, for it identifies‘God’ with some image or concept (Being, Ultimate Cause, Absolute Subject, etc.) only todeclare its demise while deliberately foreclosing the very possibility of the invisible. For more onthe ‘death of God’ movement in philosophy, see Marion’s earlier work, The Idol and Distance:Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

6 Marion, God Without Being, p. 89.7 Ibid., p. 49.8 ‘Gxd gives Being to beings only because he precedes not only these beings, but also the

gift that he delivers them – to be. In this way the precedence of Being over beings itself refers tothe precedence of the gift over Being, hence finally of the one who delivers the gift over Being’(ibid., p. 75).

9 Ibid., p. 21.10 ‘Givenness’, or donation in the French, translates the German Gegebenheit of Husserl, and

denotes the priority of what is given to the consciousness that would receive it. For more on this,seeBeing Given, pp. 62–70. For a brief summary of important themes explored in Being Given, seeJean-Luc Marion, ‘Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift’, in Postmodern Philosophyand Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press,1999), pp. 122–43.

11 ‘[I]f in the realm of metaphysics it is a question of proving, in the phenomenological realmit is not a question of simply showing (since in this case apparition could still be the object of agaze, therefore a mere appearance), but rather of letting apparition show itself in its appearanceaccording to its appearing’ (Being Given, p. 8). Or, as Heidegger memorably puts it: ‘Thus‘‘phenomenology’’ means aophainesthai ta phainomena – to let that which shows itself be seenfrom itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’(Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie & Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], p. 58).

12 Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘TheologicalTurn’: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press,2000), pp. 185–89; Reduction and Givenness, chapter 2; Being Given, pp. 10–27.

13 Such parallelism will naturally raise the question about the relationship betweenphenomenology and theology – whether and to what extent the former functions as a kind of‘pre-theological’ enterprise; or, under the pretense of philosophical autonomy, it smuggles in (notso subtly, some might say) an array of theological commitments. While this is an importantquestion, our present purposes do not permit us to wade into the ongoing debate here as framedmost notably by Dominique Janicaud; see his ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenol-ogy’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, pp. 16–103. For a helpful overview of theproblem, see Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits ofPhenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), and also her more recent Jean-LucMarion: A Theo-logical Introduction [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005]. See also, ChristinaM.Gschwandtner, ‘A New ‘‘Apologia’’: The Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy in theWork of Jean-Luc Marion’, Heythrop Journal, 46: 3 (2005), pp. 299–313. We can briefly statehere that Marion emphatically denies his phenomenology functions covertly as theology orapologetics. If one may speak of the possibility of revelatory phenomena whilst doingphenomenology, to speak of its actuality is to enter into the terrain of revealed theology (BeingGiven, pp. 71ff., 114–15, 234–36, 296ff., 367 n. 90; see also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Metaphysics andPhenomenology: A Summary for Theologians’, in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader,ed. Graham Ward [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], pp. 279-96). While these two projects can be


stylistically homologous, they are not (nor can they be) substantively the same withoutcompromising each discipline. Thomas A. Carlson, in my view, gets it right when he states:‘At this level the structure ofMarion’s phenomenological vision and the structure of his theologicalvision are strikingly similar, if not isomorphic . . . . Such isomorphism would not mean, as manyargue or assume, thatMarion’s phenomenology is ‘‘really’’ or ‘‘only’’ an indirect means to advancehis theology. It could mean, however, that Marion’s theology and phenomenology inform oneanother in more subtle and complex ways than Marion himself sometimes wants to allow’,(‘Converting the Given to the Seen: Introductory Remarks on Theological and PhenomenologicalVision’, Translator’s introduction to The Idol and Distance, p. xxxi).

14 Jean-LucMarion, ‘In the Name’, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo &Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 39–40. Italicsadded. This essay is substantially the same essay, ‘In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It’, asfound in In Excess, pp. 128–62.

15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner PublishingCo., 1951) p. 157.

16 Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, pp. 196–7.17 Marion, Being Given, 46. See also Marion’s phenomenology of painting in his remarkable

essays ‘The Idol or the Radiance of the Painting’ (In Excess, pp. 54–81) and in his The Crossing ofthe Visible, trans. James K.A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

18 Marion, Being Given, pp. 167–8. One is reminded here of Leo Tolstoy’s postscript to Warand Peace, perhaps the most imaginative attempt to understand war in literature: ‘Why didmillions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it wasclear to each of them that this could not benefit any of them, but would be worse for them all.Why did they do it? Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes ofthis senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in onepurpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserve to becalled the cause’ (Leo Tolstoy,War and Peace, trans. Louis & AylmerMaude [NewYork: Simon& Schuster, 1942], p. 1359).

19 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).

20 Marion, Being Given, p. 267.21 Ibid., pp. 267–71.22 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism

(New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 285. Tracy is influenced here by Paul Ricoeur’s study of‘manifestation’ and ‘proclamation’ in religious language (see his ‘Manifestation and Proclama-tion’, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed.Mark I. Wallace [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], pp. 48–67).

23 Ibid. On John’s Gospel as a source for mystical theology, see Bernard McGinn, TheFoundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, pp. 74–83; Maurice F. Wiles, TheSpiritual Gospel: The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1960).

24 Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, p. 208. Compare this language with John’sPrologue: ‘He [the Logos] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet theworld did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. . . . The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ (1:10-11, 5).

25 These four aspects subvert (through excess) the four determinations of understandingoutlined by Kant: quantity, quality, relation and modality (‘The Saturated Phenomenon’,pp. 197–216; Being Given, pp. 199–221).

26 Marion, Being Given, p. 236.27 Ibid., pp. 88–9. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God’, in Figuring the

Sacred, pp. 279–83.28 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, pp. 83–85. For more on this hypostatic relation of

proximity and distance, see Marion’s study of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Christology in The Idol andDistance, pp. 151–62.

29 Marion, God Without Being, pp. 100–2. See also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Intentionality ofLove’, in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press,2002), pp. 71–101. See also Marion’s more recent work on love which returns to importantthemes developed in Prolegomena to Charity (Le phenomene erotique: Six meditations [Paris:Grasset, 2003].

30 Marion, Being Given, p. 237.

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31 Ibid., p. 238. See also Jean-LucMarion, ‘‘‘They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisibleto Them’’’, Modern Theology, 18: 2 (2002), pp. 145–52.

32 Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, p. 201.33 Marion, The Idol and Distance, p. 157.34 Even in his early The Idol and Distance, Marion indicates his reliance upon the ‘concept of

distance, which commands all of the present work, with reference to that which H. Urs vonBalthasar named ‘‘the areopagitic feeling of distance’’, and which he comments on by seeing in ita ‘‘distance which preserves, wahrende’’’, (p. 155, n. 32). See Von Balthasar’s key essay onPsuedo-Dionysius in his The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Clerical Styles,trans. A. Louth, F. McDonagh & B. McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984). Marionacknowledges here also the profound influence of von Balthasar’s study of Maximus theConfessor in his Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. BrianE. Daley, S.J. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003]).

35 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, I: Seeing theForm, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), p. 645.

36 John D. Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida andMarion’, in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, p. 209.

37 ‘What blindness interprets as a simple obscurity must be understood at base as abedazzlement, in which, in the revelatory figure of Jesus Christ, the Father enters into anabsolute epiphany, though filtered through finitude. If blindness sees nothing there and does noteven suspect bedazzlement, the fault lies not with revelation, but with the gaze that cannot bearthe evidence. In effect, if what reveals itself is always summed up in Love, then only the gaze thatbelieves, and thus only the will that loves, can welcome it. Thus only the conversion of the gazecan render the eye apt to recognize the blinding evidence of love in what bedazzles it’, (Jean-LucMarion, ‘Evidence and Bedazzlement’, in Prolegomena to Charity, p. 66). This underscores howfor Marion revelation is manifestory or self-evidential, not something to be apologeticallysecured. On the other hand, this essay allows for a limited and pedagogical role for apologetics asa kind of preparation for the gaze’s conversion. This allowance deflects the charge of mere‘subjectivism’, even if faith cannot be manufactured by, nor indeed rest upon, any rationalfoundation (ibid., pp. 67–8).

38 Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible’, pp. 207, 209.39 Ibid., p. 219.40 Marion, Being Given, pp. 239–40. See also ‘On the Gift’, p. 69; and ‘The Saturated

Phenomenon’, p. 207, n. 40.41 Marion, God Without Being, p. 148.42 ‘[T]heological writing always transgresses itself, just as theological speech feeds on the

silence in which, at last, it speaks correctly. In other words, to try one’s hand at theology requiresno other justification than the extreme pleasure of writing. The only limit to this pleasure, in fact,is in the condition of its exercise; for the play from words to the Word implies that theologicalwriting is played in distance, which unites as well as separates the man writing and the Word athand – the Christ. Theology always writes starting from an other than itself. It diverts the authorfrom himself (thus one can indeed speak of a diversion from philosophy with all good theology);it causes him to write outside himself, even against, since he must write not of what he is, on whathe knows, in view of what he wants, but in, for, and by that which he received and in no casemasters’ (God Without Being, p. 1).

43 Marion, The Idol and Distance, p. 162.44 Prayer ‘announces itself as the operative concept within the critique of all idols of the

divine, including the conceptual: representing nothing, it signifies the very operation throughwhich the mind exposes itself to the unthinkable as unthinkable, advancing without any masktoward the unthinkable that no longer conceals its (in)visibility; not only does it not proceedidolatrously, but it proceeds to the disqualification of idols, in order to find in that verydisqualification the beyond of any disqualification’ (ibid.).

45 Marion, ‘In the Name’, p. 38.46 Ibid., pp. 37–8, 46–7.47 Ibid., p. 42.48 Marion, Being Given, p. 241.49 Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Gift of a Presence’, in Prolegomena to Charity, p. 141. Anthony

Godzieba points to the ethical and interpersonal dimension of ‘distance’ in his ‘Ontotheology toExcess: Imagining God Without Being’, Theological Studies, 56 (1995): pp. 3–18. For similarthoughts on Jesus’ ‘disappearance’ as the ‘space’ for ecclesial, textual and ethical ‘manifestation’,


see Michel de Certeau, ‘How Christianity is Thinkable Today?’ in The Postmodern God, pp. 142–58. See also Graham Ward’s fascinating study, drawn explicitly from de Certeau, of the‘displaced body’ of Christ’s ascension in his Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. pp.97–116.

50 Ibid., pp. 136–7.51 Marion, God Without Being, p. 143.52 Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy’, in In Excess, p.

29.53 Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1992), pp. 158–9. Italics mine.54 ‘If there were no such thing as the resurrection of the flesh’, writes von Baltahsar, ‘then the

truth would lie with gnosticism and every form of idealism down to Schopenhauer andHegel, forwhom the finite must literally perish if it is to become spiritual and infinite. But the resurrectionof the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allowsus to possess the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood or graspedspiritually) is right’ (Seeing the Form, p. 155).

55 For more on the modern split between spirituality and theology, content and form, andcontemplative thought and instrumental rationality, see Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity:An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

56 GrahamWard, ‘The Theological Project of Jean-LucMarion’, in Post-Secular Philosophy:Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 229–39.

57 I am here referring to Paul Ricoeur’s insistence on the necessity for explanatory and criticalmoments in the whole hermeneutical act. See his ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’,in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey & John B. Thompson(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 75–88.

58 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. BettinaBergo, ed. Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1998), p. 67.

59 See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Flesh or the Givenness of the Self ’, in In Excess, esp.pp. 91–96. Here, however, the analysis pertains mostly to the suffering that befalls me, ratherthan the other.

60 Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (NewYork: Crossroad, 1995), p. 614.

61 Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (New York:Crossroad, 1996), p. 5.

62 Schillebeeckx, Jesus, p. 622.63 ‘The name of God for Derrida has a prophetic, not a mystical, force, and is more Jewish

than Christian, more religious than theological, more concerned with the ethico-politics ofhospitality than with mystical or negative theology’, (Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible’,pp. 220–221, n. 19). For Caputo’s more extended study of Derrida in this vein, see his ThePrayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1997).

64 Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 214–15.65 Schillebeeckx, Church, p. 176.66 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New

York: Crossroad, 1990), p. 820. The influence of Johan Baptist Metz is unmistakable here. Seehis Faith in History & Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith(New York: Seabury, 1980), esp. pp. 100–18.

67 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001),p. 51.

68 Ibid., p. 18. Gustavo Gutierrez puts it this way: ‘Mystical language expresses thegratuitousness of God’s love; prophetic language expresses the demands this love makes. Thefollowers of Jesus and the community they form – the church – live in the space created by thisgratuitousness and these demands. Both languages are necessary and therefore inseparable; theyalso feed and correct each other’, On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans.Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), p. 95.

108 BRIAN ROBINETTE

brian-robinette a gift to theology

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