HeyJ XLVIII (2007), pp.

86108

A GIFT TO THEOLOGY? JEAN-LUC MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON IN CHRISTOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

BRIAN ROBINETTE

Saint Louis University, St. Louis, USA

Jean-Luc Marion has recently established himself as one of the most important and theologically fertile thinkers within the phenomenological tradition. With his study of the gift and the saturated phenomenon, Marion presents a challenge to theology to rethink revelation in its surprising givenness, as exceeding the boundaries often set up in advance by metaphysics and a priori anthropological foundations. This paper examines Marions mature thought, particularly within the perspective of Christology. The paper argues that Marions phenomenological style of reection, as adapted to theology, is deeply contemplative and markedly Johannine in sensibility. As a strategy for theology, the phenomenological style gives to it important incentives and skills for reading off Gods self-revelation in Christ in its surprising and counterintuitive beauty. Marions challenge/gift to theology is, however, in need of a balancing emphasis, one that appears too infrequently in his work: the ethicalprophetic dimension of the Christ event. In view of keeping both the mystical and prophetic poles of theology closely linked, the paper argues that just as beauty is a key category for saturated phenomena, so too is the reality of suffering and evil. However, whereas beauty invites a humble receptivity to and contemplative enjoyment of the gift, the inscrutable reality of suffering and evil, which so often exceeds comprehension, touches off a critical and practical response. In broadening the study of saturated phenomena to include the refractory character of experience, especially that which threatens humanity, Marions valuable contributions to theology require a complementary emphasis from those narrative-practical Christologies that highlight the prophetic aspects of the tradition.

In recent years, Jean-Luc Marion has steadily positioned himself as perhaps the most important phenomenologist of his generation. With the publication of his Etant donne: Essai dune 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 major force to reckon with in both philosophy and theology.1 That both philosophy and theology are within Marions sights has led to understandable controversy, since some regard his phenomenology of the in-visible, im-possible and in-nite as no longer properly
r The author 2007. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

87

phenomenological, i.e., in the tradition of Edmund Husserl and Maurice-Merleau Ponty. While some may detect an illicit theological turn in his work, others may nd the task proper to theology itself compromised by an unwarranted imposition of philosophy. Marion himself has repeatedly asserted the independence of his phenomenological inquiries, even if he acknowledges that phenomenology, as a style of thinking, is operative in his more explicitly theological works. Whether or not his interpreters and critics can accept this distinction (and I do, with some qualications), it still remains for theology to continue engaging Marions thought as it has built upon and advanced from his earlier, and now widely-known, Dieu sans letre: Hors-texte (1982). Presupposing the (licit) mutual inuence between Marions theological and philosophical writings, I intend here to explore his analysis of the saturated phenomenon from a theological point of view, particularly within a christological perspective. This latter determination is consistent with Marions own analysis of the Christ event as the saturated phenomenon par excellence. As we shall see, such an analysis will reveal a deeply contemplative and aesthetic style of thinking, exhibiting, in a post-modern idiom, a distinctively Johannine sensibility. Herein lies its great value, for too often have the mystical and aesthetic dimensions of Christology remained subordinate to metaphysical and functional Christologies. Primary theology is doxological a performative discourse which responds to the saturating givenness of Christophany through praise and contemplation. This is to take seriously, as Marion puts it, the pragmatic use of language, by which he means its liturgical vocation. In fact, Marion opposes this liturgical vocation to correlational strategies in Christology, an opposition that in my estimation needs some rethinking. Indeed, I shall argue that those strategies that take on the saturating phenomena of negativity that is, the overwhelming reality of evil and suffering in our world and do so on a narrative-practical basis, are Christologies that just as emphatically direct us to the performative character of theological discourse, but in its ethical-prophetic dimension. While there are opportunities to develop the ethical character of Marions work, it is in need of much greater punctuation than his work currently thematizes. I am pursuing, therefore, a deeper integration of the mystical and the prophetic, the sacramental and the critical, as two inseparable poles within Christology.2

I. IDOL, ICON AND THE PRIMACY OF GIVENNESS

By now, many English-speaking theologians are familiar with Marions important work, God Without Being.3 Part philosophical analysis and part theological exploration, Marion mounts here a meticulous critique of onto-theology: the identication of God and Being. Onto-theology

88

BRIAN ROBINETTE

begins with the premise, allegedly self-evident, that God is Being as such, the rst cause, the causa sui. This God, by producing nite beings, can be envisaged or read off from them, since nite beings share in the Being of the Absolute. Through the link of causality or analogy, the ultimate term can be surmised through the comprehension of its effects. God functions here as the ultimate term within an a priori set of coordinates. Whether in terms of the cosmological arguments of classical metaphysics, or, more recently, in terms of grounding the subject, God becomes circumscribed within a predetermined horizon. As so much modern theology has imbibed the turn to the subject speaking of God as the Absolute Subject, the end term of the subjects transcendental desire the effect is the same, according to Marion: God becomes thinkable on the basis of formal conditions pre-established by the thinker, thereby becoming the thinkers 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 in hypostasized reection. The Idol is not transparent to what is beyond it, but remains opaque, secure. Vicious circularity characterizes the gaze upon the Idol, be it a physical object or a concept. The seer can never ultimately escape the fascination of its own productions, since what is seen is its desire reied. Molded into the idea of the Absolute Subject, God becomes a cipher for the human subject. The subject now becomes the limiting aperture by which God may be thought. Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant are the most obvious gures bearing Marions critique; but even Martin Heideggers critique of metaphysics cannot avoid such idolatrous imposition. For while his ontological distinction intends to set free the question of Being from metaphysics, the question of God, if asked at all, can only be approached subsequent to the analysis of Dasein.4 For Marion, the upshot of metaphysics as it runs its course through late modernity can be found in the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach, for whom God nally becomes recognized as the projection of the human subject.5 The marches of metaphysics leads to the death of God, which, as it turns out, coincides with the death of the subject in our own epoch of thought. In point of fact, the God of metaphysics and the modern subject are so bound together in onto-theology that the rethinking of the one will demand the rethinking of the other indeed, the rethinking of the Other. This rethinking demands a decisive break with Being as the determinative horizon for speaking of God. The God of Christian revelation is, as Saint Paul expressed, foolishness to philosophical wisdom.6 Cutting across expectation, subverting the foreseeable, it is disruptive and counter-intuitive. To think God without Being is not to cease thinking or philosophizing, but to allow thought itself to be penetrated and disturbed by the free, revelatory gift of God, as it gives itself. God can give himself to be thought without idolatry only starting from himself alone: to give himself to be thought as love, hence as

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

89

gift; to give himself to be thought as a thought of the gift.7 As Marion thinks God as gift, as unsuspected agape overowing all thought, he expressly appeals to the likes of Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure who prioritize 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 innite distance between God and beings, a distance not traversable by thought. And yet, through the distance, revelation nds us. It nds us in the startling self-bestowal of God in Christ, the image (or Icon) of the invisible God. The directional difference is decisive: in the Idol, we aim at the divine, but end up gazing at ourselves; in the Icon of Christ, our own gaze is reversed by the divine gaze who envisages us.9 As we shall see, this theology of Christ as Icon is the saturated phenomenon par excellence, where Gods self-giving exceeds vision with a light so overwhelming that it becomes a darkness: or, what Pseudo-Dionysius describes as dazzling darkness.

II. THE SATURATED PHENOMENON

Marions analysis of the saturated phenomenon manifests a style of thinking, a rigorous practice, not the workings of a system. It entails a process of perceptual and intellectual purgation in which the phenomenon, any phenomenon, is considered in its sheer givenness or selfpresentation.10 Back to the things themselves: Edmund Husserls injunction calls for a description of phenomena as they give themselves to intuition. A kind of therapeutics, phenomenology proceeds by dismantling or clearing away (through reduction) those restrictions imposed in advance that would limit or misconstrue the givenness of phenomena.11 Marions work is deeply indebted to Husserl; and yet, Marion argues that Husserl didnt go far enough. His work, though a breakthrough, remained too conditioned by the transcendental philosophy of Kant, wherein the subject does not simply receive but constitutes phenomena in the subject-object relation. More particularly, Marion questions Husserls commitment to a denition of truth stressing conceptual adequation (adaequatio).12 Marions forceful counterpoint asserts that conceptual activity, far from being adequate to phenomena, is overwhelmed or saturated by their givenness to intuition. For Kant, as for so much modern thought, all knowledge is coconstituted by the a priori conditions of the knower. A phenomenon may give 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 the other makes its appearance. What is possible is already dened by and ordered to the power of knowing. Now, Marion in no way suggests that there are no limits to human perception and knowing, quite the contrary. But he is deeply troubled by the way in which Kant and, indeed,

90

BRIAN ROBINETTE

metaphysics in general has stated the conditions of possibility in advance. In particular, Marion is troubled by Kants valorization of the knowable over the unknown, the conditions of possibility over the impossible, the visible over the invisible. One can preliminarily see therefore a structural parallelism between the rigor of phenomenological reduction as developed in his later work and the apophatics deployed in his more theologically thematic work. Just as phenomenality overows (rather than simply conforming to) the capacities of the subject, so too is God revealed in a way that cannot be anticipated or adequately comprehended by any a priori horizon established by the would-be addressee.13 The saturated phenomenon, according to Marion, refers to the impossibility of attaining knowledge of an object, comprehension in the strict sense, not from a deciency in the giving intuition, but from its surplus, which neither concept, signication, nor intention can foresee, organize, or contain.14 In other words, the impossibility of achieving denitive conceptualization of a phenomenon, no matter what it is a painting, a piece of music, a tobacco box on a table, an historical event, a memory, or the advent of the Christ is a result, not from a lack in the phenomenon given, but from its excess as it oods intuition. Whereas so much modern thought has regarded sensible intuition as the sort of raw material for conceptual abstraction, so that concepts achieve a nality and stability in their apprehension of the object, Marions work inverts the order. The I, as one who thinks and names, does not constitute objects so much as being a one who is constituted by them. In his more recent work, Marion spends considerable effort sketching aesthetic experience as illustrative of saturated phenomena. Interestingly, Kants study of the sublime provides Marion a crucial starting point. Whereas Kant typically regards intuition the weaker in arriving at conceptual knowledge, aesthetic experience is said to engulf the power of thought, so that the representation of the imagination furnishes much to think, but to which no determinate thought, or concept, can be adequate.15 Marion comments: [T]he impossibility of this conceptual arrangement issues from the fact that the intuitive overabundance is no longer exposed within rules, whatever they may be, but overwhelms them; intuition is no longer exposed within the concept, but saturates it and renders it overexposed invisible, not by lack of light, but by excess of light.16 The phenomenality of the beautiful form, say, a painting, is not truly apprehensible as a thing, as something ready-to-hand, but opens up 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 of course apprehend it as a thing (subsisting, ready-to-hand), but it is precisely not this that opens it to me as beautiful; it is that I live its meaning, namely its beautiful appearing, which has nothing thinglike to it, since it cannot be described as the property of a thing, demonstrated by reasons, or hardly even

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

91

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

But what seems extraordinary here, a work of art, is actually paradigmatic. Take, for example, an event of history. In considering what caused the First World War, we nd no shortage of explorable factors or means to explore them geographic, demographic, economic, technological, ideological, etc. Troops of archivists and the curious have elaborated this information; squads of researchers have treated it and organized it into objects; generations of historians have interpreted it in terms of so many causes and systems of possible and often probable causes . . . . But it is precisely this overabundance that forbids assigning it a cause, and even forbids understanding it through a combination of causes. It is not that such an event prohibits explanatory discourse or assigning to it various meanings. Marion is simply asserting that no concept is adequate to the phenomenon at which it aims. The event saturates its capacities, giving rise to an ever-emergent complexity of perspectives and meanings. In the interaction and unanalyzable intrigue of innitely converging causes, such an historical event indeed, any historical event is a saturated phenomenon.18 Marion also strikes powerful ethical keys in his sketches as he engages the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. The face of another human person is saturating in its givenness. Visible, yet invisible in its irreducible depths, the face is a rupturing forth of alterity. The Other is no manipulable thing, something to be comprehended-through-representation under a generic category, such as humanity, ethnicity, gender or nationality. To reduce the Other to strict visibility is to manufacture an Idol; or, to use Levinas language, to subsume the Other within a totality an essentially violent act.19 In confrontation with Heideggers fundamental ontology and undoubtedly his silence/complicity during the Nazi reign of Germany Levinas asserts the face of the Other as incomprehensible in terms of Being. It cannot be regarded subsequent to (and thus ordered to) the analysis of Dasein. The face breaks in upon my ipseity through an unintelligible distance, in the curvature of space. The dynamic of this disruption demands the language of revelation. The face is innite, 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 to the Other, who is gift. This is to think otherwise than Being, or outside the subject. Ethics, not ontology, is therefore the rst philosophy for Levinas. In his (not always uncritical) adoption of Levinas thought, Marion asserts 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 must respond . . . . I have therefore received (and suffered) a call [un appel]. The face makes an appeal [un appel]; it therefore calls me forth as gifted.20

92

BRIAN ROBINETTE

Phenomenology discloses an order of manifestation which reverses that assumed 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 receive my self from the call that gives me to myself before giving me anything whatsoever; my sole individuation or selfhood is found only in the facticity imposed on me by the word originarily heard from the call, not pronounced by myself.21 The contemplative letting be in the aesthetic encounter is isomorphic with the letting be of the Other not as indifference, but as radical receptivity to his/her self-disclosure and call. Just as beautiful phenomenality invites a living into beyond representation, so does the originarity of the Other call me to a praxis of hospitality and responsibility. As we shall see presently, the saturating phenomena of divine revelation, evident most emphatically in the Christ event, is such that it can only be received in its self-presentation. The order of manifestation disclosed by phenomenology already prepares us for Marions rigorous prioritization of revelation in its surprising otherness. Christ, the Icon of God, is the face and visibility of the Father, but an excessive visibility beyond all nomination. The Christ event is a manifestation in which the form of the beautiful is absolute, but also ethically demanding, since it involves the apostolic mission of becoming Christic. It is to these christological themes that we now turn.

III. THE CHRIST EVENT: THE SATURATED PHENOMENON PAR EXCELLENCE

Marions christological thought is deeply Johannine. Contemplative and aesthetic in sensibility, it prioritizes above all else the revealing Christ event, in which the invisible God, through the Logos, enters into phenomenality in a way that is counter-intuitive, even shocking, yet enrapturing and beautiful. David Tracy speaks of the meditative thinking in Johns Gospel as accentuating manifestation and giftedness.22 A primary locus for so much mystical theology, Johns narrative unfolds as a hymn, a verbal icon, its prologue a sacred oratorio in which even the harsh reality of the cross becomes a manifestation of glory and grace.23 Marion privileges an aesthetics of sight; and, just as Johns Gospel reveals a contrapuntal interplay of light and darkness, kenosis and exaltation, so does Marions rendering of the Christ event concentrate upon the crossing of visibility and invisibility in the form, the Icon. These Johannine overtones are most unmistakable as Marion speaks of a phenomenon saturated to the point that the world could not accept it. Having come among its own, they did not recognize it; having come into phenomenality, the absolutely saturated phenomenon could nd no room there for its display. But this opening denial, and thus this

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

93

disguration, still remains a manifestation.24 This fascinating passage highlights several important elements of Marions analysis of the Christ event, which can be treated under four aspects.25 First is its unforeseeable and immeasurable character. The Logos becoming esh cannot be aimed at, anticipated or calculated. Although the culmination of Gods self-revelation and the fulllment of salvation history, God becoming human in this way, under these circumstances, exceeds and even subverts expectation. Although the fulllment of prophecy, Christs advent is still surprising, irreducible to the sum of all prophecies.26 He was put to death, after all, not recognized among his own, as John declares. As the crucied messiah itself an unimaginable idea Christ is both the fulllment of messianic anticipation and its dramatic reguring. For in the rejection of the Christ we nd the extreme paradox of Gods agapic love, a love that loves us even in the face of violent denial. The non-recognition of the Logos is a result, not from a lack in the revelation itself, but in the ignorance or willful denial of its intended recipients. Even so, and precisely here, the cross becomes unprecedented victory, humiliation exaltation. For it reveals the absolutely free gift of Gods love, which arrives not so much on the merits of those who are its recipients, but of its own accord and calling. Agape is excessive, non-proportional. Borrowing from Paul Ricoeur, it manifests a logic of superabundance rather than a logic of equivalence summoning the Christian to love beyond mere proportionality by loving those regarded as unlovable, even (and perhaps especially) ones enemies.27 No metaphysics can anticipate or comprehend the kenotic God of the cross who gratuitously traverses the absolute difference of God and creature. Gods revelation simultaneously manifests an unimaginable intimacy and an innite distance, proximity and absolute alterity. In the Icon of Christ, the image of the invisible God, visibility and invisibility meet hypostatically, yet are not confused.28 Metaphysics would surmount this alterity from below, as it were. It would seek to make the invisible visible on its own terms. But this would get the order of manifestation precisely backwards. Revelation, in point of fact, nds us.29 Secondly, the saturated phenomenon of Christ cannot be borne or absorbed, but produces bedazzlement for sight.30 Whereas for metaphysics the object conforms to the transcendental structure of the knower or, if it doesnt, is regarded poor in phenomenality the Icon saturates sight in the intensity of its phenomenality. The Icon overwhelms the power of perception and knowledge, its unbearable light producing perceptual darkness. As in Platos Allegory of the Cave, where sudden illumination to unadjusted eyes creates blindness, so is Christs manifestation one that appears, in its excess, as an absence negative theophany. This paradox of presence and absence, according to Marion, is most evident in the resurrection narratives of the Gospels.31 As often as the risen One is encountered, he is mis-identied, a stranger. The women

94

BRIAN ROBINETTE

at the empty tomb are said by Mark to be alarmed at what they see or what they do not see: a body. He is risen, he is not here, they are told; terror and amazement seize them (Mark 16:68). In Lukes Emmaus story, the disciples encounter the risen One in the breaking of the bread with a stranger. Once recognized, the stranger disappears from sight (Luke 24:1335). Johns account includes Mary Magdalenes confusion of Jesus with a gardener, no less (John 20:15). And upon his nal commission to the disciples, the risen Christ promises to be with them until the end of the age, and forthwith parts from them, ascending into heaven from view (Luke 24:51). What these mysterious narratives reveal so poignantly, claims Marion, is the bedazzlement of Christophany. Because the excess cannot be borne by any gaze that would measure up to it (objectively), it is perceived (subjectively) by the gaze in the negative mode of an impossible perception, the mode of bedazzlement.32 In other words, perceived absence is the subjective correlate to the objective surplus of givenness. Bedazzlement is a key idea for Marion. It naturally corresponds with Johns juxtaposition of light and darkness. But it is also rooted in the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, whose work, argues Marion, is far from the formless mysticism of pure negation, but enraptured by the unbearable givenness of Christophany:
To suppose that manifestation coincides with obscurity in Denys because, as is too often repeated, the Christ occupies only a secondary, supercial role, would here be a misinterpretation. For that which nds its paradoxical face (R. Char) on the face of Christ, in order there to dazzle with a blinding evidence, is nothing less than the distance of imparticipable participation. It is on the face of Christ that, par excellence, vision is exhausted in sustaining with a blinking gaze the darkness that makes up bedazzlement.33

Hans urs Von Balthasar, who describes Dionysius as the most aesthetic theologian of the Christian tradition, also gures prominently in Marions theology of bedazzlement, indeed his thought as a whole.34 The form of Christ, declares von Balthasar, appears in the world with such a plenitude of meanings that it necessarily has on man the effect of an overwhelming superabundance and, hence, of a darkness from excess of light.35 Marions account of absence is therefore markedly different from other post-modern renderings. In the thought of Jacques Derrida, for example, absence suggests emptiness, a dry desert, where desire yearns for something yet to come, but mourns over a something not yet given. There is, as John Caputo puts it, a messianic indeterminacy in Derridas interminable waiting for the gift.36 For Marion, however, this absence is due, not to a lack in givenness, but in the incomprehensibility of its fullness. Only through a conversion is the perceiver gradually able to bear what is emphatically given, just as the disciples on the road to Emmaus undergo perceptual accommodation to Christophany (were our hearts

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

95

not burning?).37 This contemplative mood seeks to behold the form of Christ through the radical dispossession of a subject who would make demands on him. In its phenomenological key, Christology is a purgative way, a letting be of the actuality and completeness of revelation. Caputo is correct, therefore, in identifying Marions phenomenology of givenness as nourished by a Catholic sacramental imagination, a taste for mystical theology, and a theologia gloriae. For all of their shared interests, Marions hypergivenness is highly contrastive with Derridas nevergivennesss, which Caputo characterizes in this manner: But for Derrida the sense of the unapparent is drawn not from this Catholic theology of perception but from a more Kantian and Protestant notion of the Idea and from an ultimately Jewish distrust of all images, whether idol or icon.38 Marions Hallelujah is met with Derridas eschatological When will you come?39 This contrast, if somewhat simplied, will nevertheless become instructive for us momentarily as we consider the need for complementing Marions thought with a more pronounced prophetic and dialectical sensibility. Thirdly, according to Marions analysis, Christs appearance destabilizes all categories of analogy and disrupts the competence of language. Christs kingdom, which is not of this world, although ever irrupting within it, pluralizes our horizons of perspective upon him who delivers it. He neither conforms to our categories, nor do the christological titles nally manifest his essence. Citing the end of Johns Gospel, where we are told that the whole world cannot contain the books necessary to describe all that Jesus accomplished, Marion points to the plurality of the Gospels and the manifold christological titles as textual traces of excess. If the canon is closed, it remains inexhaustible, as each Gospel:
offers a new horizon in order to welcome a new aspect of the one and only paradox. 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 property of God himself of admitting all names and refusing each of them the property of summoning an innity of nominative horizons in order to denominate he who saturates not only each horizon, but the incommensurable sum of the horizons.40

The multitude of scriptural genres, the diversity of titles, and the incommensurability of the Gospels taken together undoubtedly create problems for critical exegesis. But no independent historical substrate can be extracted. No harmonization of the Gospels is ultimately possible, even if it were desirable. For Marion, this pluralization of horizons does not lead to undecidability or despair over scripture, quite the contrary. Viewed post-critically, and in recognition of the semantic surplus involved in all interpretation, the plurality in scriptural testimony is theologically pregnant. In the multiplication of textual bodies, which arise only in the space created by the withdrawal (ascension) of

96

BRIAN ROBINETTE

Christs risen body, we witness the inexhaustibility of their ultimate referent. Again, Christs proximity also manifests distance. Marion most certainly afrms the authority and normativity of scripture; but he is careful to make a distinction between the Christ event and its textual traces, 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 be conceptually adequate to its referent and enters into the play and ekstasis of praising the unnamable.44 And with this, we arrive at theologys liturgical vocation. Rather than attempting to make God or the Christ comprehensible through acts of predication, theological language is above all praise and prayer. It is not primarily conceptual representation (which would suggest a metaphysics of presence); nor does it entail the systematic denial of concepts in de-constructionist indeterminacy. Marion points to the third way of mystical theology, the way of linguistic performance (or what he describes as de-nomination). This is to shift the focus from a theoretical 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 standing outside itself in praise. Doxology performs self-displacement, empties itself of its idolatrous ambitions, and becomes transparent (Iconic) to its unnamable referent. This highlights what Marion describes as the liturgical function of all theo-logical discourse.45 Christology is, in this sense, much more a poetics of description than an explanatory discourse. It seeks to read off the event of Gods self-gift in Christ as it gives itself, in its surprise, in its bedazzlement. It is a beholding of the Christic form in its incomprehensible glory. The Johannine and Balthasarian themes could hardly be more evident. Christology is not just descriptive, however. It is inscriptive. To do Christology is participatory; as such, it is not so much to name as it is to be named. Again, the reversal of intentionality is fundamental to understanding Marions point. It is not the gaze of the subject taking precedence here, but precisely the opposite: of being faced and named by the Icon of God. To speak of the name above all names is to be given a new name in liturgical praxis. This occurs preeminently in baptism.46 In baptism, the catechumen is inscribed by the Name of a God whose excessive self-givenness is triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Baptism does 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 reception of a given identity in Christ. The Name it has to be dwelt in without saying it, but by letting it say, name and call us. The Name is not said, it calls.47

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

97

This theme of the call, already discussed above, brings us to the fourth and nal aspect of Christ as the saturated phenomenon par excellence, which also highlights some of the ethical possibilities of Marions work. Whereas metaphysics tends to think rst the subjects a priori structure of knowing, and then only subsequently the Other as intelligible to that structure; phenomenology reverses the order, asserting the priority of the Other who regards me and calls me into a relation of hospitality and responsibility. The Levinassian themes here are striking. The face of another human person is not, strictly speaking, intelligible or representable as a quasi-object. The face of the Other is a visibility whose invisible excess saturates my capacity to comprehend and objectify. In my regarding of the Other, my gaze is reversed in a counterexperience. I do not just see, but see the Other who sees me. My me arises as a gift from the Other, individuation a response to an anterior call. One can of think of this priority of givenness in endless ways: the fact that I am born of an Other, given from maternity and paternity; that I am embodied, taking on and imbibing the esh of the world; that I dwell in a world of language that precedes me and, in a real sense, speaks through me; that I inhabit a myriad of social and cultural (and for the Christian, ecclesial) bodies that shape the possibilities and contours of my self-determination. This priority of givenness means that Christian selfhood is a response to a call, and ultimately to a radical mission. Christ, the face of the invisible God, reverses my intentionality and makes me a witness to him. In Christs calling of disciples, Marion notes the frequent reversal of values metanoia. In the story of the rich young man, who allows himself to be measured by the gaze of the Christ, the reversal is acute: [T]he irregardable gaze adds a saturation of saturation sell your goods whatever they might be and give [the proceeds] to the poor. The last type of saturating implies its redoubling: one must not only respect the gaze of the poor . . . and, doing that, come to stand before the irregardable gaze of Christ; one must also annul all possession and all originarity in order to give [oneself] to the poor, therefore to the rst among them.48 Again, the contemplative letting be manifests an apostolic structure. The self-dispossession necessary for beholding the form of revelation in its beauty is the very disposition enabling hospitality to the Other, to the poor in this particular instance. It would be wrong, therefore, to consider Marions emphasis on givenness as an inundation to the point of stupefaction and ethical ineptitude. Far from making me a bystander for this is not what witness means the saturating phenomenon of Christ means that to be Christianly is to be an actor of charity. In a fascinating study of Christs ascension, Marion writes that Christs departure allows for performing of the instructions in full responsibility, but the instruction to love has the disciples do the very thing that Christ accomplished; the disciples become the actors of charity,

98

BRIAN ROBINETTE

no longer passive and obtuse spectators of Jesus.49 In other words, this withdrawal, this absence is a new kind of presence not on the order of ideas, 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, and not less, present to them. Why? Because with a great joy the very jubilation 0 of Christ blessing the Father (Zgalliasato, Luke 10:21) the disciples hereafter accomplish the very blessing of Christ: they no longer watch Christ blessing, like indiscreet spectators (Luke 10:23); from now on, they themselves bless, as Christ blessed . . . . Like the body of Christ, his gesture becomes interior to them constitutes them and creates them anew. Therefore, just as the invisibility at Emmaus did not hide the body of Christ (rather, it gave it perfectly), the withdrawal to a distance in the Ascension does not interrupt the economic action of Christ: Christ acts with and by virtue of the blessing of his disciples; he is forever working with them.50

And so, just as Marion highlights prayer and praise (rather than theoretical representation) as rst order Christology, we have here a related pragmatics: to do as Christ through the praxis of self-expenditure for the Other, in blessing the Other.

IV. THE CHALLENGE OF THE GIFT: PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITIQUE

I now return to my original question: Is Marions analysis of the saturated phenomenon, particularly within a christological perspective, a gift to theology? In answering yes to this question, I intend to qualify his critique of certain theological approaches while also drawing greater attention to a range of saturated phenomena that too infrequently appear in his writings, particularly that of negativity and suffering. This latter move will highlight the importance of more deeply integrating the mystical (contemplative) and the prophetic (critical) dimensions of theology. In the rst place, Marion issues a powerful call for self-critique in much contemporary theology. He clearly challenges all correlational types of theology be they historical-critical, existential, transcendental, hermeneutical, or liberationist since in their attempt to correlate the Christ event with some situation, the analysis of the latter may place conditions upon the former, molding revelation, so Marion would say, to some a priori horizon.51 Can a Christology so premised avoid looking into the well (to borrow Albert Schweitzers analogy) only to see the fascinating reection of its own gaze? One may argue that such is to some extent inevitable, no matter how phenomenologically exacting the undertaking. One may even argue that such is vital, if in need of proper understanding:

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

99

for not only is the Christ event itself contextualized of historical necessity what else would the afrmation of Christs humanity mean? but on precisely theological grounds we would have to say that the logic of incarnation demands its ongoing contextualization and lived enculturation in human history. And yet, Marions phenomenological reduction should disturb all glib self-assurance about such approaches without, in my 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 its proximity. In its excess, Christophany is counter-intuitive and bedazzling, often reversing expectation, calling us always to be hearers rst. The challenge Marion presents, then, is a call to the challenge of revelation itself. As a style or strategy, and not as a foundational theology, phenomenology provides theology enticements and skills for reading off the event of revelation in its self-presentation, rather than privileging the kind of explanatory or scientic approach that has characterized so much theology since its scholastic conguration. A revealed theology, as opposed to a metaphysical theology, is contemplative, a studied letting be, and rooted in a theory of perception in which the givenness of revelations form is received through attestation. This prioritization of revelation and the descriptive vocation of theology (as proclamation and doxology) closely associates Marion with Karl Barth and, of course, von Balthasar. Why, Marion asks, do [theologians] not undertake, or undertake so little (Hans Urs von Balthasar remains here insufcient and exceptional), to read phenomenologically the events of revelation recorded in the Scriptures, in particular in the New Testament, instead of always privileging ontic, historic, or semiotic hermeneutics?52 Appeal is made here for a more intratextual or self-referential theology, one more idiomatically biblical, more attendant to the narrative character of Christian understanding. The theologian, writes Hans Frei, inhabits a biblical universe of discourse and seeks to put the reader in the middle of that world, instructing him in the use of that language by showing him how extensively, and not only by stating the rules or principles of the discourse.53 The goal is not primarily the translation of the Gospel into another (presumably more intelligible or credible) framework, but to help the reader/participant become more adept at imagining, thinking and speaking within the dynamic world the Gospel generates. It is we who are to be translated. This kind of post-metaphysical or post-critical approach possesses a deep afnity for much pre-modern theology as well. While engaging the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, Marion frequently draws upon the patristic and mystical theology that monastic theology would inherit in its growing distinction from the scholastic theology of the universities. Opportunity lies here for the retrieval of a contemplative mood in theology, where revelation can be regarded, not only under the

100

BRIAN ROBINETTE

rubric of the True or the Good, but the Beautiful. This retrieval is essential to a faith rooted in incarnation, sacrament and embodiment. Christology follows a logic of manifestation, where the evidential beauty of incarnation compels and enraptures in the saturating givenness of its form. This will mean that what is beautiful cannot be marginalized only as a matter of taste, but must register at the highest levels of theological thinking, inasmuch as Gods very self-communication afrms hypostatically, no less the enduring reality of the form (resurrection of the body).54 Consequently, the mystical night of apophasis is anything but an absconding from the sensible or the worldly, anything but a renunciation of mediation, but the necessary corollary to the surplus of light in kataphasis. The meditative thinking of Marions work can therefore be an invaluable resource for reguring the modern separation of content and form, thought and aesthetics, theology and spirituality.55 Marions work highlights the essentially performative character of theological discourse. In the rst instance, theology is a practice, a public work of praise in a word, liturgy. It is fundamentally participatory, operating on the order of symbol, narrative, sacrament, and rite all giving rise to the concept, but saturating it. Only on a secondary level, when we reect upon symbolic performance, do we have a theology of a more (explicitly) hermeneutical and explanatory character. This is not to deny a critically-reective dimension to liturgical practice itself, but only to acknowledge that in its secondary (and thus derivative) mode, theological reection and its employment of assorted methodologies constitute an indispensable role in ongoing self-critique and communication. Now, Marion himself nowhere makes this distinction. Indeed, Marion courts an untenable extreme: of not afrming the rightful place of secondary theology. But hermeneutical and critical theologies on a secondary level are not inherently idolatrous in ambition or consequence if by this it is assumed that they procedurally substitute some ulterior horizon for the givenness of revelation. Granted that correlational strategies typically attempt some fusion of horizons, it is inaccurate to assert that this presumes symmetry between the two poles. Hermeneutical and critical strategies can actually provide powerful means for giving critique to our tacit idols, allowing the disruptive character of revelation to be heard. One might think for example of how certain strains of historical-criticism have recently retrieved the eschatological and apocalyptic matrix of Jesus life-ministry, thereby challenging and correcting the immanentist and a-historical tendencies of existential hermeneutics. Or consider the resultant recovery of Jesus Jewishness, which had for so long been suppressed by a hidden or explicit antiSemitism, with consequences we know only too well. Or, nally, consider how the critical-hermeneutics of liberation theology has opened our eyes again to Jesus titanic struggle with the powers that represent the structural realities of sin, and therefore the social and historical reality of

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

101

the Kingdom of God as Jesus sought to instantiate it this against a longstanding tendency to privatize sin and salvation. As Graham Ward rightly notes, there lurks a danger in Marions thought of evading all hermeneutical questioning and self-critique. To speak of revelation as it gives itself may in fact hide, but now more effectively, the very kind of idolatrous imposition the theologian would seek to unmask. Ward asks whether strict intratextuality or at least the pretense to it forms a self-validating structure, leaving virtually no space for the kind of self-critique in theology that effectively operates in the realm of hermeneutics and analysis.56 We might take a cue from Marion himself, therefore, and argue that the plurality of horizons generated by the saturated phenomenon of the Christ event gives rise to a creative and mutually corrective plurality of theological genres, tasks and methods. If Marions challenge/gift afrms the need for a sustained phenomenological moment in theology, I regard this challenge as a gift to the extent that it is supplemented/complimented with the challenge of critical hermeneutics. Distance, as Marion understands this, needs a more serious 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 nally return to the ethical possibilities of Marions work, possibilities in need of signicant development. If Christology of the rst order is praxis, then the analysis provided above suggests that this praxis is not only doxological in character but also ethical. That Marion draws upon the work of Levinas is our signal here. Articulated in a mysticalcum-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 the skin that touches and does not touch that which, beyond the graspable, burns . . . . The negativity of the In- of the Innite otherwise than being, divine comedy hollows out a desire that could not be lled . . . . A desire without end, from beyond Being: dis-interestedness, transcendence desire for the Good.58 This desire for the Good is an eschatological desire, a tensive, electrically charged yearning (insomnia) for justice. Can we speak here of an internal link between mystical self-dispossession and justice for the Other? It is a striking fact that amid his diverse sketches of saturated phenomena Marion says very little about the saturating phenomena of loss and grief, suffering and evil, violence and exile. Although not entirely absent from his work,59 the experience of radical negativity might well be the kind of saturated phenomenon that when more thoroughly analyzed displays a dynamic much more dialectical in character. Edward Schillebeeckx has described such phenomena as negative contrast

102

BRIAN ROBINETTE

experience. Evil, death and suffering particularly massive innocent suffering are refractory for thought. They ood and overwhelm the concept, disrupt our metaphysics, bafe our attempts to construct durable theodicies and universal theories of history. There is, in point of fact, unmeaningful history; there is non-sense in our history; violence, lust for power, coveting at the expense of others, enslavement and oppression there is Auschwitz, and goodness knows what else in the private sphere and in our own personal life. All of that does indeed fall outside the logos which the historian [or metaphysician] looks for in history so much the worse for the varieties of concrete historical experience!60 The Kantian categories of understanding that structure, if only as a foil, Marions sketches are surely no less subject to saturation by the kinds of phenomena that preoccupy Schillebeeckx. Must we not also speak of negative bedazzlement, the fragmentation of horizons, the traumatizing of a language that cannot properly name the radical mystery of suffering and evil? Schillebeeckx discerns in negative contrast experiences unmistakable and distinctive traits. Whereas the aesthetic encounter is enrapturing, goal-less, and playfully expansive; suffering touches off a critical, cognitive force for its overcoming. The former invites contemplative lingering; the latter urgency for transformation. The former is rooted 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 epistemological terms and freely uses the language of experience Marions phenomenology is not an epistemology, nor does he often use experiential language he nevertheless discovers in negative contrast experience a manner of givenness not subject to further reduction:
[They] form a basic human experience which as such I regard as being a prereligious and thus a basic experience accessible to all human beings, namely that of a no to the world as it is . . . . This experience is also more certain, more evident than any veriable or falsiable knowledge than philosophy and the sciences can offer us. Indignation (which is certainly not a scientic term) seems to be a basic experience of our life in this world.61

In its shock and unpredictable landing (Marion), my suffering, or my being-witness to the suffering of others, issues a call for decision and response. It hollows out a desire for the Good (Levinas). If suffering is something undergone, putting those who experience or witness it into a state of passivity, it nevertheless bears a critical cognitive force. Eliciting indignation and protest No, it should not be this way! there irrupts within it a negative and dialectical coming to consciousness of a desiderium, a longing, and of a question about meaning on its way , indeed, a craving for well-being or making whole .62 It throws open an indenable future and charges the present with eschatological anticipation.

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

103

The root of the prophetic-critical imagination is found here, argues Schillebeeckx. It is also here where Derridas When will you come? nds its urgent legitimacy. If for Marion the unnamable Name of God inspires the third way of mystical theology as performed in contemplation and liturgy, for Derrida this Name inspires the third way of a different kind of performance: an ethico-political pursuit of justice, which is always yetto-come.63 No account of absence that speaks only of excessive positivity is therefore sufcient. Where, in this rendering, would there be any rightful place for lament, grief and protest? Where, in this theologia gloriae, is there a place for a thoroughgoing theologia crucis? The Johannine-manifestory temperament of Marions work needs more of the eschatological-prophetic (not-yet) tension found in other strains of the Judeo-Christian tradition, i.e., the lamentation and protest of a Jeremiah or Job, the Markan yearning for parousia, Pauls shattering proclamation of the cross, etc. Christianity lives in and by the paradigmatic power of both manifestation and proclamation, writes David Tracy. It is a religion which includes both a prophetic-ethical-historical defamiliarizing focus and power and a mystical-metaphysical-aesthetic transformed and transformative enveloping ground.64 The task for Christology is therefore not only attestation to the incarnation in praise, not only a contemplative beholding of the bedazzling form of Gods self-giving. It is this, but it is also a critical remembrance of the life-praxis of Jesus of Nazareth, whose life-ministry lls out this form with a distinctive historical and narrative shape. Importantly, many narrative-practical styles of Christology are just as wary as Marion about the limitations of metaphysical styles, and just as adamant about Christologys performative character. Suffering and injustice may never be domesticated by conceptual representation, but they may be confronted, if only in fragmentary fashion, through the praxis of liberation. In the life-ministry of Jesus, says Schillebeeckx, we nd a non-theoretical but practical prolepsis or anticipation of the new world for those without salvation, to those who are suffering and overwhelmed, even to the dead.65 This is a practical theodicy which seeks not to inch from the saturating phenomena of negativity but to overcome 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 selfimplicating character of a story, which was nothing if not about the radical confrontation with the structural powers of sin, oppression, suffering, and injustice. Such a story only gains its sense by being lived into, by being done in apostolic repetition:
Reference to what is actually done here and now is an essential part of the biblical view of memory . . . . [T]he revolutionary critical epistemological value

104

BRIAN ROBINETTE

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

VI. CONCLUSION

Walter Brueggemann has written memorably of the fundamental relationship between criticizing and energizing in the biblical tradition. Prophetic criticizing assails the pretensions to immediacy and ideological totality by embracing the negative and expressing grief. So the prophet speaks his grief at the lack of resolution. He cannot cry enough.67 And yet, this No! can itself either wither or become ideological itself if separated from doxologys Yes. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.68 Powered by his study of the saturated phenomenon, we have in Marions christological thought a compelling challenge to the management of 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 and prayer as primary theology. If his critique of what we are calling secondary theology is overplayed, this will not diminish its value for aiding the retrieval of the contemplative and aesthetic dimensions of the christological enterprise. But the sustainability of this achievement will come only if we emphatically include in this third way the (no less) primary theology of prophetic-ethical praxis. The study of the saturated phenomenon is itself of sharp relevance here, since the realities of evil, suffering and death (negative contrast experience) utterly saturate thought and explanatory discourse, tearing open a space for prophetic grief, yet setting into motion an eschatological desire for the Good. Marions insistence on the performative character of Christology in doxology nds here a complementary insistence that such performance be more deeply rooted in the selfimplicating story of Jesus of Nazareth, whose life-ministry demands this more dialectical and confrontational stance towards the powers of sin, suffering and evil. Christology must therefore resolve to ever pursue both poles of its mystical-prophetic option.

Notes
1 While a number of Marions volumes and articles have contributed to his phenomenological project, the following three volumes form a trilogy that function together, generally speaking, as historical investigation, systematic presentation, and topical elaboration

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

105

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.: Stanford University Press, 2002); and In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner & Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). 2 I am specically making appeal here to the mystical-prophetic option in theology as framed by such theologians as David Tracy, Edward Schillebeeckx, Johannes Baptist Metz, and Gustavo 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. 6173. 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 reected return, of a thought that renounces venturing beyond itself, into the aim of the invisible, (ibid., p. 30). Even a-theism is idolatrous; indeed a double idolatry, for it identies God with some image or concept (Being, Ultimate Cause, Absolute Subject, etc.) only to declare its demise while deliberately foreclosing the very possibility of the invisible. For more on the death of God movement in philosophy, see Marions 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 to the precedence of the gift over Being, hence nally 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, see Being Given, pp. 6270. For a brief summary of important themes explored in Being Given, see Jean-Luc Marion, Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift, in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 12243. 11 [I]f in the realm of metaphysics it is a question of proving, in the phenomenological realm it is not a question of simply showing (since in this case apparition could still be the object of a gaze, therefore a mere appearance), but rather of letting apparition show itself in its appearance according 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 seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself(Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], p. 58). 12 Jean-Luc Marion, The Saturated Phenomenon, in Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 18589; Reduction and Givenness, chapter 2; Being Given, pp. 1027. 13 Such parallelism will naturally raise the question about the relationship between phenomenology 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 (not so subtly, some might say) an array of theological commitments. While this is an important question, our present purposes do not permit us to wade into the ongoing debate here as framed most notably by Dominique Janicaud; see his The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology, in Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, pp. 16103. For a helpful overview of the problem, see Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), and also her more recent JeanLuc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005]. See also, Christina M. Gschwandtner, A New Apologia: The Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion, Heythrop Journal, 46: 3 (2005), pp. 299313. We can briefly state here that Marion emphatically denies his phenomenology functions covertly as theology or apologetics. If one may speak of the possibility of revelatory phenomena whilst doing phenomenology, to speak of its actuality is to enter into the terrain of revealed theology (Being Given, pp. 71ff., 11415, 23436, 296ff., 367 n. 90; see also Jean-Luc Marion, Metaphysics and Phenomenology: 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

106

BRIAN ROBINETTE

stylistically homologous, they are not (nor can they be) substantively the same without compromising each discipline. Thomas A. Carlson, in my view, gets it right when he states: At this level the structure of Marions phenomenological vision and the structure of his theological vision are strikingly similar, if not isomorphic . . . . Such isomorphism would not mean, as many argue or assume, that Marions phenomenology is really or only an indirect means to advance his theology. It could mean, however, that Marions theology and phenomenology inform one another in more subtle and complex ways than Marion himself sometimes wants to allow, (Converting the Given to the Seen: Introductory Remarks on Theological and Phenomenological Vision, Translators introduction to The Idol and Distance, p. xxxi). 14 Jean-Luc Marion, In the Name, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo & Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 3940. Italics added. This essay is substantially the same essay, In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It, as found in In Excess, pp. 12862. 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951) p. 157. 16 Marion, The Saturated Phenomenon, pp. 1967. 17 Marion, Being Given, 46. See also Marions phenomenology of painting in his remarkable essays The Idol or the Radiance of the Painting (In Excess, pp. 5481) and in his The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 18 Marion, Being Given, pp. 1678. One is reminded here of Leo Tolstoys postscript to War and Peace, perhaps the most imaginative attempt to understand war in literature: Why did millions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it was clear to each of them that this could not benet 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 of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in one purpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserve to be called the cause (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louis & Aylmer Maude [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942], p. 1359). 19 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Innity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). 20 Marion, Being Given, p. 267. 21 Ibid., pp. 26771. 22 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 285. Tracy is inuenced here by Paul Ricoeurs study of manifestation and proclamation in religious language (see his Manifestation and Proclamation, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], pp. 4867). 23 Ibid. On Johns Gospel as a source for mystical theology, see Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, pp. 7483; Maurice F. Wiles, The Spiritual 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 Johns Prologue: He [the Logos] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world 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 understanding outlined by Kant: quantity, quality, relation and modality (The Saturated Phenomenon, pp. 197216; Being Given, pp. 199221). 26 Marion, Being Given, p. 236. 27 Ibid., pp. 889. See Paul Ricoeur, The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God, in Figuring the Sacred, pp. 27983. 28 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, pp. 8385. For more on this hypostatic relation of proximity and distance, see Marions study of Pseudo-Dionysius Christology in The Idol and Distance, pp. 15162. 29 Marion, God Without Being, pp. 1002. See also Jean-Luc Marion, The Intentionality of Love, in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 71101. See also Marions more recent work on love which returns to important themes developed in Prolegomena to Charity (Le phenome`ne erotique: Six meditations [Paris: Grasset, 2003]. 30 Marion, Being Given, p. 237.

MARIONS SATURATED PHENOMENON AND CHRISTOLOGY

107

31 Ibid., p. 238. See also Jean-Luc Marion, They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them, Modern Theology, 18: 2 (2002), pp. 14552. 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 von Balthasar named the areopagitic feeling of distance, and which he comments on by seeing in it a distance which preserves, wahrende, (p. 155, n. 32). See Von Balthasars key essay on Psuedo-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). Marion acknowledges here also the profound inuence of von Balthasars study of Maximus the Confessor in his Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley, S.J. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003]). 35 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, I: Seeing the Form, 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 and Marion, in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, p. 209. 37 What blindness interprets as a simple obscurity must be understood at base as a bedazzlement, in which, in the revelatory gure of Jesus Christ, the Father enters into an absolute epiphany, though ltered through nitude. If blindness sees nothing there and does not even suspect bedazzlement, the fault lies not with revelation, but with the gaze that cannot bear the evidence. In effect, if what reveals itself is always summed up in Love, then only the gaze that believes, and thus only the will that loves, can welcome it. Thus only the conversion of the gaze can render the eye apt to recognize the blinding evidence of love in what bedazzles it, (Jean-Luc Marion, Evidence and Bedazzlement, in Prolegomena to Charity, p. 66). This underscores how for Marion revelation is manifestory or self-evidential, not something to be apologetically secured. On the other hand, this essay allows for a limited and pedagogical role for apologetics as a kind of preparation for the gazes conversion. This allowance deects the charge of mere subjectivism, even if faith cannot be manufactured by, nor indeed rest upon, any rational foundation (ibid., pp. 678). 38 Caputo, Apostles of the Impossible, pp. 207, 209. 39 Ibid., p. 219. 40 Marion, Being Given, pp. 23940. 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 ones hand at theology requires no other justication 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 theological writing is played in distance, which unites as well as separates the man writing and the Word at hand the Christ. Theology always writes starting from an other than itself. It diverts the author from 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 what he knows, in view of what he wants, but in, for, and by that which he received and in no case masters (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 signies the very operation through which the mind exposes itself to the unthinkable as unthinkable, advancing without any mask toward the unthinkable that no longer conceals its (in)visibility; not only does it not proceed idolatrously, but it proceeds to the disqualication of idols, in order to nd in that very disqualication the beyond of any disqualication (ibid.). 45 Marion, In the Name, p. 38. 46 Ibid., pp. 378, 467. 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 to Excess: Imagining God Without Being, Theological Studies, 56 (1995): pp. 318. For similar thoughts on Jesus disappearance as the space for ecclesial, textual and ethical manifestation,

108

BRIAN ROBINETTE

see Michel de Certeau, How Christianity is Thinkable Today? in The Postmodern God, pp. 142 58. See also Graham Wards fascinating study, drawn explicitly from de Certeau, of the displaced body of Christs ascension in his Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. pp. 97116. 50 Ibid., pp. 1367. 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. 1589. Italics mine. 54 If there were no such thing as the resurrection of the esh, writes von Baltahsar, then the truth would lie with gnosticism and every form of idealism down to Schopenhauer and Hegel, for whom the nite must literally perish if it is to become spiritual and innite. But the resurrection of the esh vindicates the poets in a denitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to possess the innite within the nitude of form (however it is seen, understood or grasped spiritually) is right (Seeing the Form, p. 155). 55 For more on the modern split between spirituality and theology, content and form, and contemplative 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 Graham Ward, The Theological Project of Jean-Luc Marion, in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 22939. 57 I am here referring to Paul Ricoeurs insistence on the necessity for explanatory and critical moments 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. 7588. 58 Emmanuel Levinas, God and Philosophy, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo, 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. 9196. Here, however, the analysis pertains mostly to the suffering that befalls me, rather than the other. 60 Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: 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 of hospitality than with mystical or negative theology, (Caputo, Apostles of the Impossible, pp. 220221, n. 19). For Caputos more extended study of Derrida in this vein, see his The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 64 Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 21415. 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 inuence of Johan Baptist Metz is unmistakable here. See his Faith in History & Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1980), esp. pp. 10018. 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 the gratuitousness of Gods love; prophetic language expresses the demands this love makes. The followers of Jesus and the community they form the church live in the space created by this gratuitousness and these demands. Both languages are necessary and therefore inseparable; they also feed and correct each other, On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. OConnell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), p. 95.