The Phenomenon of God: From Husserl to Marion

John P. Manoussakis

Abstract.This essay is an attempt towards a phenomenology of God. The leading

question in our analysis will be whether God could be given to consciousness
as a phenomenon. First, we go back to Husserl and to his formulation of the
possibility of phenomenality. Then, the discussion proceeds to the innovative
reappropriation of Husserlian phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and his
notion of the saturated phenomenon. Finally, I propose that God can ap-
pear only through an inverted intentionality, such as it is exemplified in
certain divine manifestations recorded in Scripture, in the techniques of de-
picting the divine in icons, and finally, in the human person.

Nur zu Zeiten ertgt gttliche Flle der Mensch.

Hlderlin, Brod und Wein, 7

ej t m k fainomnwn t blepmenon gegonnai . . .

Paul, Epistle to the Hebrews, 11:3

T
he field where philosophical thinking runs the greatest risk of
losing itself (but also, the field where it receives the greatest
promise to regain itself ) is that which concerns the question of
God. The thought of God is, par excellence, that which does not belong to
thought1 : the idea of God goes beyond the horizon of thinking and ex-
hausts the abilities of thinking. And yet, the thought of God, as a question
and as a problem posed to philosophy, is raised always within philosophi-
cal thinking, which it endlessly confronts.
The thought of God: what brings forth such a thought if not thinking
itself? There are instances in the history of philosophy when the phrase the
1
Perhaps we should rethink the idea of infinity, which for Descartes becomes suf-
ficient evidence for the existence of God, as precisely that which comes from Godnot
infinity, but the idea itself. Since any idea, insofar it is given, is evidence of its giver, in
this case (if not in every case), it is evidence of God. The etymology of the word seems to
suggest as much: an da (from den, the aorist of the verb rw, to see) is an appear-
ancewhat appears is not autochthonous to the mind but its origin is elsewhere, a point
outside of and beyond us.

2004, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 1

54 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

thought of God is understood mostly as an objective genitive: in those

cases, the thought of God is my thought about GodGod is nothing more
than the object of that thought. Indeed the objectification of God is symp-
tomatic of the inability of metaphysics to think God precisely as the possible
impossibility of thought, that terminal point where thought needs to jump
lest it fall.
In a sense, for metaphysics God (that is, the idea of God) appears
always within the mind; appears, so to speak of course, because within
the mind nothing can really appear. When one reads what philosophers
have to say about God, one is often left with the impression that philoso-
phy (or at least that tradition whose constitution Heidegger criticized as
onto-theo-logical) believes only in the human who creates God in his
image and his likeness (Gen. 1:27). That thought of God is nothing else
but the masqueraded thought of man about himself. It is a thought that,
after Aristotle, is doomed to think itself. Could we, however, dare to imag-
ine a thinking that does not contain the thought of God, but comes
face-to-face with Him? Could we ever imagine a case where God is not
situated within the mind but appears to it? An appearance in which con-
sciousness finds itself surprised by Him who suddenly appears? Could we,
in other words, think of the phenomenon of God? What could such a phe-
nomenon possibly be like and how could it be given to consciousness? Could
it ever be possible for the I to have an experience of God?
Jean-Luc Marion recently posed the very same question in a paper
entitled The Saturated Phenomenon. 2 In the wake of Marions publica-
tion a number of articles have appeared, all of them symptomatic of the
perplexity that the thinking of the (im)possibility of the religious phe-
nomenon was destined to cause. Some bore witness to the originality of
Marions thought even when he engages in a close reading of Husserl and
Kant; others questioned the accuracy of this reading which was not, for
their taste, faithful enough. And yet others did not see it as a way of
thinking at all, but rather as a transvestite theology which poses, or so
they tell us, as phenomenology, a theologywith an agendathat dare

2
Jean-Luc Marion, The Saturated Phenomenon, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Philoso-
phy Today 40 (Spring 1996): 10324 (all subsequent page references in the body of the paper
are to this version of Marions text); reprinted in Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology
and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, Thomas A. Carlson,
and Jeffrey L. Kosky (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), Part II: Phenomenology
and Theology, at 176216. The theme of the saturated phenomenon was reworked by Marion
and incorporated into sections 21 and 22 of his tant donn (Being Given, trans. Jeffrey L.
Kosky [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], 199221).
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 55

not say its name 3 and that turns its readers into catechumens. 4 For
these critics, Marion has to plead guilty for proposing an abominable
reduction which only ravages the reduction of phenomenologys found-
ing fatherreduces religion to theology and which , as though this
were not enough, particularizes religion . . . as quite Christianat best,
monotheistic, and at worst, down right Catholic. Marion is therefore
pronounced guilty of theological colonialism. 5 (!)
From the time that phenomenology ceased to be a method of thinking
and became the inherited property of a school with its bylaws and self-
proclaimed police, we all run the risk of being summoned in front of the
tribunal of the judge who would then read with a resonant voice the age-
old accusation: he introduces new gods to the city and he corrupts the
youth (Apol., 26c and 23d). For todays Anytoses and Meletoses, the fact
that for Marion God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God
who Jesus dared to call Abba, that is to say, the God of the tradition
within which Marion grew up, lives and writes (as if it could have been
otherwise), that fact amounts to a betrayal of rigorous science. For such
thinkers, it seems, phenomenology ought to have been, to borrow Thomas
Nagels expression, the view from nowhere!

I.

The Possibility of the Phenomenon and the Phenomenon of the Possibil-

ity. Let us leave aside for the moment the possibility (if any) of a
phenomenology that operates from nowhere (without a place to stand
there is no horizon to see because any seeing is always a seeing-as), and let
us examine the principal issue here, that is, the possibility of the phe-
nomenon. That possibility is famously defined in Husserls principle of
all principles:
that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of
cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its personal
actuality) offered to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what

3
I am echoing here, in disagreement, Dominique Janicauds criticism as it is laid out
in idem, The Theological Turn of French Philosophy, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, which
forms Part I of Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, 16103, in particular 5066.
4
Ibid., 27.
5
So James K. A. Smith, Liberating Religion from Theology: Marion and Heidegger
on the Possibility of a Phenomenology of Religion, International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 46 (1999): 1733, at 234.
56 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is

presented there.6

There are two simultaneous gestures in this principle that need to be

taken in a Chalcedonian manner, that is, without division, but also, with-
out confusion. The first is the question of the possibility of the phenomenon;
anything has the right on its own to present itself to my consciousness and
this presencing alone, its very appearance, is sufficient reason for a phe-
nomenon to be accepted as such. The second gesture, which runs in parallel
with the first and makes it possible, is precisely the question of the phenom-
enon of the possible itself; what gives anything sufficient reason to appear
and makes that appearance possible is a zone of reason within which each
phenomenon, in order to be such, needs to make its appearance. The ques-
tion concerning the possibility of the phenomenon, Marion writes, implies
the question of the phenomenon of possibility (103). What Husserl says
epigrammatically in the principle of all principles is (1) that with no in-
tuition given to intention there is no possibility for any phenomenon to
appear, but also (2) that with no intention to receive this intuition there is
no phenomenon of any possibility of an appearance. The one is grounded
in the other.
And that seems to be the core of the problem, a problem that was
radicalized when phenomenology undertook the so-called turn to the-
ology. Previously it seemed to make some sense that in order for something
to appear it has to appeal to my intentional horizon and thus it has to
be grounded on the constituting I. Soon, though, one realizes that such
grounding means (whatever the appearing thing might be: objects, con-
cepts and fellow humans alike) that the appearing phenomena are all seen
by the I in some kind of symmetry to its own self, a symmetry that indi-
cates, even further, a kind of appropriation. Thus the world becomes a
private spectacle for consciousness, a consciousness that is also the abso-
lute director and the exclusive audience of this performance. Husserl
himself was aware of the grave objection that already arises here, the
objection that, as he writes in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation, the meditat-
ing I will eventually become nothing more than a solus ipse.7 In the ipseity
of the I, thus understood, where the I reigns self-same and autistic, there

6
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenologi-
cal Philosophy, Book One, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1983), 24, 44
(italics in the original).
7
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 42, 89. All subsequent page refer-
ences to Husserls Cartesian Meditations are from this edition.
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 57

is no room for the Other. The Other suffers injustice and violence, and if
the Other under consideration happens to be the wholly Other, the Other
par excellence, then things become all the more complex. To ground the
groundless and to limit the limitless, to reduce the infinite to finite pro-
portionswhat else can better describe sheer madness? If God is to remain
God (that is tout autre, as Derrida has put it) and not to become an idol
erected by my perception and imagination, He needs to prevent Himself
from appearing altogether, He needs rather to safeguard His aloofness, so
to speak, the height of heights that Levinas so often ascribes to Him or, as
others have phrased it, the right to refuse to appear, [the] right to pre-
serve itself as transcendent and thereby maintain its identity. 8 Thus, the
possibility of a religious phenomenon, the possibility of God to appear,
is rendered impossible; God Himself is (the) impossible. Anything more
would amount to an attempt to reduce the otherness of the Other to the
sameness of the same.
And yet this reduction is precisely what Husserl adopts as his strategy
in order to show that transcendental phenomenology would not degener-
ate into a transcendental solipsism! A reduction to ones own ownness. One
can hardly imagine a bolder and more baffling movement. Paul Ricoeur
sheds some very helpful light on this issue when he writes:
for the sense Other is drawn from the sense me because one
must first give sense to me and to my own in order then to give
sense to the Other and to the world of the Other. There is some-
thing alien (tranger) because there is something own (propre),
and not conversely. 9

The emphasis, I believe, in Ricurs comment should not be placed merely

on the precedence that the ownness takes over the otherness, but rather
in the much more important dependence of the latter on the former, a de-
pendence that, furthermore, is inconvertible. If there is an Other there it is
because there is first an I here and not vice versa. That dependence, when
applied to the problematic of the possibility of Gods phenomenality, simply
means that if God (insofar as he remains the wholly Other) is ever given a
chance to appear, this would be because of me. God, as the ultimate religious
phenomenon, is in need of the human self as this very lieu that gives place to
God. Every human self, thus, is understood as the sacred topos of Gods

8
James K. A. Smith, Respect and Donation: A Critique of Marions Critique of
Hussel, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 52338, at 534.
9
Paul Ricur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Eduard G. Bollard
and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 119.
58 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

epiphany. I understand that a statement like thisan anathema for some

cannot go without some explanation. We will have to take up the thread of
our thoughts from the beginning then, and repose the question of the possi-
bility of Gods phenomenality within the methodology of phenomenology.
Possibility as such in Husserl is essentially governed by imagination.
The possibility of the possible to appear within the intending horizon of
my consciousness is determined by the modality of the as if.10 That is, the
border limits of possibility coincide with the borders of the subjects imagi-
nation. Such a conclusion would immediately mean that everything that
falls outside the farthest limits of my imagination is to be understood pre-
cisely as the impossible. The impossible, then, has zero possibility ever to
appear to me, since it cannot find a ground within either my actual or my
imaginary experience, and thus it has to be excluded from phenomenology
proper. The impossible is, therefore, the non-phenomenon, the a-phanton.
That is where the problematic of Gods phenomenality is situated. In
the case of God, the possibility of His possible appearance itself has to appear
within the limits of a horizon (and that is what horizon means: the limit),
a horizon, furthermore, that by necessity is always mine, the horizon of the
meaning-constituting I. Everything outside this horizon is thus not only un-
imaginable and impossible but also meaningless. I will have to somehow see
God in order to have His appearance registered as experience. I will have to

10
The Second Mediation opens with the following remarks: When we take into con-
sideration that, for each kind of actual experience and for each of its universal variant
modes (perception, retention, recollection, etc.), there is a corresponding pure phantasy,
an as-if experience [Erfahrung als ob] with parallel modes (as-if perception, as-if reten-
tion, as-if recollection, etc.), we surmise that there is also an a priori science, which confines
itself to the realm of pure possibility (pure imaginableness) and, instead of judging about
actualities of transcendental being, judges about <its> a priori possibilities ( 12, 27
8). In the Third Meditation, the relationship between possibility and imagination becomes
more explicit: On this side a new universal concept of possibility arises, which, as mere
imaginableness (in a phantasying, as if something were), repeats in modified form all the
modes of being, starting with simply certainty of being. . . . The prefigurative intuition of
this verifying fulfillment furnishes actualizing evidencenot indeed of the being, but of
the possible being [Seinsmglichkeit] of the content in question ( 25, 589, italics in the
original). In the Fourth Meditation, the development of the notion of the possible reaches
its climax by a simple sentence that inverts a long philosophical tradition that goes as far
back as Aristotles primacy of actuality over possibility. Husserl writes: In itself, then, the
science of pure possibilities precedes the science of actualities and alone makes it possible,
as a science ( 34, 72). An echo of such an important conclusion is to be found in
Heideggers Being and Time where, a few words after a reference to Husserl, he writes:
Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by
seizing upon it as a possibility (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh
[New York: SUNY Press, 1996], 7, 34).
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 59

see Him either with the senses of my body or in the free play of my imagi-
nation. Why? Because these are the only two ways that any Otherincluding
the wholly Othercan possibly appear to me. To continue with my reading
of the Fifth Cartesian Mediation, the reduction to the sphere of ownness,
which was Husserls first step toward the opening of consciousness to the
presence and experience of the Other, becomes, a few pages later, incarnated
to my body:
Let us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere. Pri-
mordially reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere pertaining
to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which, as primordial,
is of course only a determining part of myself: an immanent tran-
scendency. Since, in this Nature and this world, my animate organism
is the only body that is or can be constituted originally as an animate
organism (a functioning organ), the body over there, which is never-
theless apprehended as an animate organism, must have derived this
sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism. . . . It is
clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within
my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve
as the motivational basis for the analogizing apprehension of that
body as another animate organism ( 50, pp. 1101).

But it is not only the sphere of perception (or apprehension in this case)
that, through appresentation and the analogous pairing of bodies, can give
me a hint into the otherness of the other. In the sphere of imagination also
I can, through free variation, expose myself to possibilities that open up
the mode of otherwise: If I were there which soon comes to take the propor-
tions of an If I were the Other:
As reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily organism (in my
primordial sphere) has the central Here as its mode of givenness;
every other body, and accordingly the others body, has the mode
There. . . . By free modification of my kinesthesias, particularly
those of locomotion, I can change my position in such a manner that
I convert any There into a Here. . . . I do not apperceive the other
ego simply as a duplicate of myself and accordingly as having my
original sphere or one completely like mine. I do not apperceive him
as having, more particularly, the spatial modes of appearance that are
mine from here; rather, as we find on closer examination, I apper-
ceive him as having spatial modes of appearance like those I should
have if I should go over there and be where he is ( 53, pp. 1167).
60 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The analogical apprehension of the Other reminds us of the analogia entis

of St. Thomas Aquinas, but that is exactly where the problem lies: I cannot
apperceive God analogically in the same way that I see the (human) Other,
since such apperception will do injustice to God due to the fundamental
asymmetry that exists between me and God. To mention just one example
in order to illustrate the difficulty: I have a body that allows me, by anal-
ogy, to experience the Others perception of his/her body. God, however,
is bodilessan observation that, no matter how self-evident it may sound,
nevertheless poses the following crucial questions. How can I, a finite con-
sciousness, perceive the infinite? In which ways, if any, could the I have an
intuition of the infinite, the impossible, the unimaginable? In which mode
could the infinite give itself to my intention? There is a passage from the
book of Kings that may give us some answers to these questions:
Then the Lord said to Elijah: Go outside and stand on the moun-
tain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by. A strong and heavy
wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord
but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an
earthquakebut the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earth-
quake there was firebut the Lord was not in the fire (I Kings
19:1112a).

What we have in this description is a paradigmatic case of failure in achiev-

ing the necessary adequation between intention (Elijahs expectation to see
God passing by) and intuition (the appearance of God that is given no-
where). The possibility of the phenomenon needs the underlying
phenomenon of possibility. Without the matching of these two modes,
Husserl insists, there is no evidence produced: the Lord was not there and
Elijahs intentionality remains unfulfilled. God did not give Himself there,
where He was most expected: the strong wind, the earthquake, the fire. In
the scriptural story God appears at last but in a way that signals the para-
dox, and the impossibility perhaps, of His manifestation: After the fire
there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face
in his cloak (I Kings 19:12b13). God therefore appears and yet He re-
mains nevertheless imperceptible. A tiny whispering sound of wind, a breeze
in other words, is precisely what passes unnoticed, that which does not
announce itself. It signifies a bare minimum of givenness. And yet, even in
this way, it must be something harmful enough for Elijah, the scripture
tells us, to hide his face in apprehension.
There is a series of questions involved here that we can start untangling
beginning with the scriptural passage just cited. If one looks in the Bible for
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 61

other occasions of divine manifestations one can find a whole variety of them.
Let us take the example of the Pentecost as it is narrated in the Acts of the
Apostles. God appears there in a totally different way from the gentle whis-
pering wind in Elijahs cave; although it is again a wind, this time it is a
strong, driving wind that is heard throughout the city as it breaks down
from the sky suddenly and violentlya violence that is further implemented
by the tongues of fire (Acts 2:23). It seems then that God can choose from
a whole repertoire of epiphanies, from an idol to an icon, and from a trace to
a saturated phenomenon. None of these, however, will ever give us the entire
God-phenomenon as such, in that all of the theophanies to be found in Greek,
Judaic or Christian sources, no matter how opaque or elusive, are made pos-
sible by means of an if or an asthat is, they are made possible by means of
hypothesis, imagination, representation, significationall of which are
modalities operated by the I. Revelations and apparitions of God, saturated
or otherwise, still have to be perceived somehow and by someone. They have
to be seen and felt somatically (to return to the Husserlian principle), they
have to become incarnated in certain figures, schemes, colors, sounds and
smells if they want to be epiphanies at all (epi-phany is what appears
(phainesthai) to or upon someone and thus, is still a phenomenon). Prophets
and mystics speak of their apocalyptic visions in metaphors, in similes and in
narrations, that is, they process them through language in order to be experi-
enced by them and communicated to others. All of these, though, constitute
horizons, conditions as they are, that exclude the possibility of any pure,
unconditional giving of God.

II.

The Saturated Phenomenon. Phenomenology, however, ought to allow

only one exclusion and that is the exclusion of exclusion. This seems to be
Marions wager throughout The Saturated Phenomenon, where he takes
the decisive step to invert the Husserlian model and thus to envisage a
phenomenon saturated with intuitionthat is, an intuition which exceeds
and overwhelms any intention:
Having arrived at this point, we can pose the question of a strictly
inverse hypothesis: in certain cases still to be defined, must we not
oppose to the restricted possibility of phenomenality a phenomenal-
ity that is in the end absolutely possible? To the phenomenon that is
supposed to be impoverished in intuition can we not oppose a phe-
nomenon that is saturated with intuition? To the phenomenon that
is most often characterized by a defect of intuition, and therefore by
62 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

a deception of the intentional aim and, in particular instances, by

the equality between intuition and intention, why would there not
correspond the possibility of a phenomenon in which intuition would
give more, indeed immeasurably more, than intention ever would have
intended or foreseen? (112)

And a few paragraphs later he gives a more detailed definition of what we

should expect a saturated phenomenon to be: it will therefore be invisable [11]
according to quantity, unbearable according to quality, absolute according
to relation, and incapable of being looked at [irregardable] according to
modality (113). One can legitimately object to this parade of negations
that push phenomenology, and along with it all human experience, to its
limits by asking: Does anything remain to be seen, perceived or experi-
enced? And how can we go ahead and live our life once we take a look at
this deserted scene, saturated as it is, with excess? Indeed, we cannot live.
Thou canst not see my face, for no man shall see me and live (Ex. 33:20).
This is an age-old question, a dream saturated with agony, an anxiety that
has haunted the prophets vision: Who may abide the day of His coming,
and who shall stand when He appeareth? (Mal. 3:2). Accordingly, it would
be hard to imagine someone surviving the overwhelming confrontation with
the excess of the saturated phenomenon. Marion himself is aware of this
danger, as he recognizes a certain degree of blinding caused by the intensity
of the unbearable spectacle (114). In this way, an unconditional, horizonless
experience of God can become the only possible impossibility since, if it
were ever to take place, it would result in an absolute vanishing of the
subject. Elijah hid his face and so did Moses; perhaps they knew better.
Thus, if God is ever to appear, He has only two options: either to be re-
duced to the modalities of the as and the if, conditioned by the subjects
imagination and experience, or to appear unconditionally in all His exces-
sive glory but at the subjects own risk.

III.

Inverse Intentionality: the Gaze of the Other. I believe there must be a

third way, a third possibility, a chiastic point where the two extremes cross
paths. And I take my hint from Jean-Paul Sartre. In Sartres phenomeno-
logical analysis of the look we witness a reversal of the fundamental principle
of seeing. Given the fact that every look is reciprocal, Sartre writes, when I

11
Sic; the term is a neologism coined by Marion. As Jeffrey Kosky explains, Invisable,
from viser, designates that which cannot be aimed at, meant, or intended (J.-L. Marion,
Being Given, 363 n. 41).
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 63

see the Other there is always the possibility to be seen by the Other as well.
As far as I see the Other, like this man who passes by the benches in a
public park, or as this beggar at the corner of the street, I see him or her as
an object. The other becomes really Other only at the crucial moment that
I am seen by the Other. When I cease seeing the Other and allow him or her
to see me (in a wonderful exchange of reciprocal gazes), then the Other
leaves the realm of a thing among other things and regains his or her status
as a subject in relation and communion with me. 12 Then, when what I do
not see stands higher than what I see, then the Other is allowed to appear. 13
The look of the Other surprises us. It forces us to become suddenly
aware of ourselves: First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective
consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most often
described: I see myself because somebody sees me.14 In the look of the Other
it is not only the Other who is given to us, but in the most paradoxical way,
our very own self becomes apparent.
Thus the ego undergoes a split into the constituting I and the consti-
tuted Me. The first two possibilities of Gods appearance that we have
already described above appealed to the constituting I and are regulated
by it. There, I am the subject and God is expected to appear as the object
of my consciousness, either in the mode of the as if or as a saturated
phenomenon. In the third possibility of Gods appearance, the one that is
opened up by the look of the Other, it is God who acts as the subject to
whom the I appearsyet this I appears, no longer as the constituting I,
but rather as an I that has been put into the accusative, that is, as the
constituted Me.

12
For Sartre the Other as he or she appears to me through the look that looks-at-me
is the best resistance against the solipsistic argument: This resistance indeed is based on
the fact that the Other is given to me as a concrete evident presence which I can in no way
derive from myself and which can in no way be placed in doubt nor made the object of a
phenomenological reduction or of any other poc (J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes [New York: Washington Square Press, 1956], 3623).
13
The possibility of being-seen-by-the-Other is already implicit in the Fifth Carte-
sian Mediation. As Husserl moves from the single monad to the intersubjective communion
of monads, he notices that it is the Other as well that perceives me as I perceive him, as
Other: If, with my understanding of someone else, I penetrate more deeply into him, into
his horizon of ownness, I shall soon run into the fact that, just as his animate bodily
organism lies in my field of perception, so my animate organism lies in his field of percep-
tion and that, in general, he experiences me forthwith as an Other for him, just as I
experience him as my Other ( 56, 12930, italics in the original). Note that the develop-
ment of all culture and society is based on this simple reciprocity of looks and experiences
between an I and an Other alone.
14
J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 349, italics in the original.
64 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Could this, then, be a third way that will allow God to appear without
compromising His otherness but also without endangering the subject?
Could we think of a phenomenology where the I does not look and does not
see but experiences the Others look? When the I instead of seeing is seen,
when it discovers itself caught in the horizon of God, when it is the I that
appears to God and not God that appears to the I? Could it be then, that I
can finally see God even if it is with eyes shut?
I am, thus, able to gaze upon Gods countenance, but only as videre
videor 15 or even better, as videntem videre. 16 As far as we remain within
the realm of videre we are seeking to see God by reproducing the modal-
ity of intelligere (comprehension): to see is to know, and our claim to see
God is the masqueraded desire of our failing attempt to know God. To
see God, however, in the moment of being seen ( videor) by Him, means
to pass from the mode of intelligere to that of sentire: to feel God as one
feels someone when touched. We cannot touch something without, at
the same time, by the very same gesture, being touched back. In the touch
there is an irrevocable reciprocity that surpasses by far any evidence pro-
duced by seeing. A reciprocity that offers us a knowledge more secure
and indubitable than any conceptual abstraction. A reciprocity that situ-
ates the knowledge of the Other back into my body and, by means of this
body, the distance from the Other is somehow bridged and the difference
from the Other becomes less.
Perhaps this explains the uneasiness that we often feel when we look
at an icon. The uneasiness that comes from the realization that He has
seen us even before we looked at Him, that it is His gaze that first ad-
dresses us and not ours turned on Him, and that this gaze, a piercing gaze
that springs forth from the enlarged eyes and penetrates our bodies, will
follow us as we go through our days. Our choice of referring to the icon

15
See, for example, Descartess argument about the piece of wax (cera) (in Meditationes
de Prima Philosophia, 2931) which concludes as follows: Fieri enim potest ut hoc quod
video non vere fit cera; fieri potest ut ne quidem oculos habeam, quibus quidquam videatur; sed
fieri plane non potest, cum videam, sive (quod jam non distinguo) cum cogitem me videre, ut
ego ipse cogitans non aliquid sim. Simili ratione, si judico ceram esse, ex eo quod hanc tangam,
idem rursus efficietur, videlicet me esse (uvres de Descartes, VII [Paris: Librairie Philosophique
Vrin, 1957], 33.916).
16
The expression belongs to Hans Urs von Balthasar, from his analysis of the mystical
visions experienced by St. John of the Cross (see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the
Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Style, trans. _____
[San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983], 126). A similar expression is to be found in a classi-
cal example of theophany, that of Dionysus in Euripides Bacchae, where the god appears as
r n r nta (470).
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 65

at this point of our discussion is far from being accidental. Artistically, it

has been noted, the icon embodies this turn from the point of seeing to
that of being seen in a unique way. This turn is aptly expressed by a shift
in perspective whose technical name, umgekehrte Perspektive, suggests as
much: the inverse or inverted perspective. 17 To the inversion of the classi-
cal phenomenological model corresponds the inversion of the classical
representational perspective. The model that the iconic technique inverts
is the one that the Renaissance had mastered: the background of the paint-
ing is delineated by a horizontal line into which every point vanishesthus
the false impression of depth takes effect. Anything close to the observer
assumes its real-life dimensions, but to the extent that it distances itself
away from that privileged point of view, it is engulfed by the voracious
distance that yawns between the viewer and that remote horizon. The
icon, on the other hand, projects this horizon outwards, behind and be-
yond the viewer toward whom it always extends itself. There is
nothingno horizonto be seen behind the depicted person in the icon,
because the horizon is now on the other side, our side. By relocating its
perspective, by exteriorizing it, the icon demands not to be seenif any-
thing, it is the icon that sees. The icon, strictly speaking then, refuses to
be the object of our observation (it is not accidental that an icon invari-
ably depicts a subject, that is, a person). The icon denies our claim to turn
it into an object for our eyes; rather, it is weas accusative uswho ap-
pear to the icon and not vice versa.
Since at least the early 1980s, Marions work has been decisive in help-
ing us to endow terms like icon and idol with a distinctive value in the

17
The term was coined by the Russian theologian and philosopher Pavel Florensky
(see Pavel Florensky, Against Linear Perspective, in Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905
1940, ed. Catriona Kelly [London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002], 705). I am here
greatly indebted to Nicholas Constas who introduced me to the thought of Florensky and
generously shared with me his thoughts on the impact that Florenskys work could have on
current philosophical thinking. For an excellent description of this unique technique as
well as its historical and theoretical genealogy, see Nicholas Constas, Icons and the Imagi-
nation, Logos 1 (1997): 11427 and Gary M. Gurtler, Plotinus and Byzantine Aesthetics,
The Modern Schoolman 66 (1989): 27584. To cite only one example from Gurtlers analy-
sis: Classical perspective achieves its affect by foreshortening, making some line of a scene
shorter than they really are to produce the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface.
The result is significant, freezing the world at one point of space and time. One becomes,
as it were, fixated in only one of the infinitely numerous possible points of view. On the
other hand, by abstracting from the specificity of time and space, the inverse perspective
presents a timeless quality that takes the viewer out of the isolation of his particular mo-
ment and into the presence of the eternal. Instead of one point of view, the whole of reality
is included (at 275).
66 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

philosophical currency. The opening chapter of his God Without Being18

announces that icon and idol disclose a phenomenological conflicta
conflict between two phenomenologies (GWB 7). Both terms signal two
manners of being for beings (GWB 8), two rather antithetical ways ac-
cording to which a being appears to be. Their difference is spelled out by
Marion as follows: Whereas the idol results from the gaze that aims at it,
the icon summons sight in letting the visible . . . be saturated little by little
with the invisible (GWB 17, my emphasis). Anticipating, thus, his later
analysis of the saturated phenomenon, 19 he writes of the icon not only as
that mode of visibility that presents the invisible (while remaining such),
but also as the precise inversion in the mode of seeing (akin to an inverted
intentionality): [T]he gaze no longer belongs here to the man who aims as
far as the first visible, less yet to an artist; such a gaze here belongs to the
icon itself, where the invisible only becomes visible intentionally, hence by
its aim. . . . The icon regards us, it concerns us . . . (GWB 19, emphasis in
the original).20

IV.

The Person. Icons are only one example of how and where we can expe-
rience the look of God. It is also to be found in every other fellow human
that we encounter in our everyday life. The wholly Other (tout autre la
Derrida) is incarnated into this Other. 21 His or her face bespeaks the au-
thority of Gods look, the same inexhaustible quality that comes from beyond
and challenges our actions: it is the face of the Other that prohibits the
crime and demands respect. Marion attests to an affinity between the icon
and the face: The icon opens in a face . . . One even must venture to state
that only the icon shows us a face (in other words, that every face is given as
18
J.-L. Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1991). Hereafter cited parenthetically as GWB, followed by the
page number.
19
See also Marions comments regarding the crossing out of Gods name: We cross
out the name of God only in order to show ourselves that his unthinkableness saturates our
thoughtright from the beginning, and forever (GWB 46, my emphasis).
20
See also Marie-Jos Baudinets remarkable article, The Face of Christ, the Form of
the Church, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michael Feher,
Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 14955.
21
A claim that Levinas would never accept: The Other is not the incarnation of
God (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969], 79), since [f ]or a Jew, incarnation is neither possible
nor necessary (idem, Difficult Freedom: Essays in Judaism, trans. S. Hand [Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990], 15).
 THE PHENOMENON OF GOD: FROM HUSSERL TO MARION 67

an icon) (GWB 19). Hence the interchangeable usage of the terms eikon
(icon) and prosopon (face, person) in patristic theology. 22
The face of the other creates that space where relations take place. It is
not an accident, then, that Husserl, as soon as he opens the discussion to
the analysis of transcendental intersubjectivity, abandons the terminology
of the monad, a term that, after Leibniz, describes the subject as always
laden with its past and already pregnant with its future, and adopts that of
the person. Paul Ricur aptly registers this change:
It also appears that the person is completely constituted only at this
level [of transcendental intersubjectivity], which represents a source
of interiorization for these cultural worlds. Thus, the person, in
Husserl, is synonymous neither with the ego nor even with man
(Husserl always speaks of man in relation to the psyche, consequently
still on the naturalist level). Rather, the person is correlative to the
community and its habitual properties.23

Community is the mode of existence of the person and, accordingly, a per-

son exists only insofar it belongs to a community. But how can the look of
the Other be related to the communal existence of the person? A person
essentially designates a being that is open to the Others look. To fully com-
prehend this intrinsic relation between the mode of being-a-person and the
mode of being-seen-by-the-Other, one need only refer to the etymology of
the Greek word prosopon (prswpon). As we have discussed elsewhere, 24 the
term prosopon (the Greek equivalent for person) denotes a self open to the
look of the other and, even more, a self who is constituted by that look.
Personhood is not a once-and-for-all given that we individually possess,
but rather a process of creation occasioned by a continuous and mutual
exposure to the Other.

V.

When we speak of the intrinsic link between the person and the look,
we are not doing so in a figurative manner but rather ontologically: there is
an impact that the look of the Other has on us that concerns our very

22
See for example the phrase prswpon gr st ka ek n Uj to Patrj by
Procopios of Gaza (ca. 538) in his Commentary on Genesis (Migne vol. 87, 361 A).
23
Paul Ricur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, 138, my emphasis.
24
For a more detailed exposition of the phenomenology of personhood, see my
article From Exodus to Eschaton: On the God Who May Be, in Modern Theology 18:1
(2002): 95107.
68 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

being. An impact that assumes immense proportions when we come to

God as the Other who looks at us. By way of a conclusion, we will briefly
note some considerations of the phenomenon of Gods look.
Insofar God is a personal God (that means, first of all, God of per-
sons, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but also a God that
exists as the Trinitarian communion of Persons, that is, as Father, Son and
Holy Spirit), He cannot appear but in a personal mode as well. We have
seen that every effort to seek Gods givenness among various intuitions or
by means of an intuition that will correspond or even exceed my intention
amounts to seek God ontically, as a thing among things; it also amounts to
an attempt to turn God into an object that the I will eventually know or
possess. However, the only way to know God and the only way for God to
know me is not as a being (ontically), but as a person (ontologically)a
person with whom I have (and He has) a relationship. On the other hand,
we have also seen that it is possible for God to appear in the experience of
His look in me. In this way, I have an experience of God as the invisible
gaze that sees but is not seen. Strictly speaking, then, God appears while
He remains invisible; He appears, nevertheless, in me and only in me, a
fact that indicates that, insofar as I am the Other for God, an Other that
He can look at and be in relationship with, God is in need of me as the
horizon that possibilizes His (otherwise impossible) appearance. The hu-
man self, and ttherefore every human self, is understood as the sacred place
of Gods epiphany. 25

Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

25
I wish to thank Nicholas Constas, Richard Kearney, and an anonymous referee of
the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly for their helpful remarks.