Jean-Luc Marion tests the limits of logic: love is a given

Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. By Jean-Luc Marion (translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky). Stanford University Press, 384 pp., $24.95 paperback.

WHEN JEAN-LUC MARION'S God without Being first appeared in translation in 1991, it was immediately clear to many that here was a new and prophetic voice in theology and philosophy of religion. Since then Marion's influence has continued to increase. David Tracy helped introduce him to the English-speaking (particularly American) theological world, and he soon became a permanent visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He has also become a visiting professor in the philosophy department at Boston College in addition to teaching at the University of Paris.

Marion is first and foremost a philosopher, and his academic credentials are primarily those of a Descartes scholar. Increasingly, though, philosophers' interest in Marion has been directed toward explicitly religious works like God without Being. Certainly that religious interest was the primary reason for Marion's being invited to speak (and also participate in a discussion with Jacques Derrida) at the first Religion and Postmodernism conference at Villanova University in 1997.

The prophetic voice is usually a challenging voice, and Marion challenges basic assumptions of theology and philosophy. He does this in writing that is tough going, often technical and theoretical. Even though very practical concerns lie just beneath the surface, sometimes they're not easy to see. If the formula for becoming a "famous French philosopher" is that of demonstrating sheer brilliance, then Marion has the formula down pat having learned it well from his teacher Derrida. Being Given is, in this respect (and many others), simply dazzling: it is a work of tremendous depth and highly original thought although hardly the sort of book one picks up casually and immediately understands. Moreover, Marion's thought is not merely inspired by phenomenology (which to many is difficult enough already) but propelled by startling revisions of some of its most difficult notions, particularly "givenness."

How does Marion challenge our thinking and practice? One might answer that question by pointing to three themes running throughout Marion's thought--idolatry, the gift and love. These themes are so closely linked in Marion that it is impossible to discuss one without the others. Marion's reflections on them are distinct in how he combines phenomenological and theological concerns so that theology (or, more accurately, revelation) becomes primary. Like the prophet who directs attention away from himself to the prophetic message, Marion wants to move away from focusing on the receiver--a focus that he thinks characterizes virtually all philosophy and theology--to that of the sender.

It is no coincidence, then, that the theme of "givenness" is central to his thought, and also that Being Given stands as the summation of his thinking to date. In relentlessly pursuing this theme, Marion is certainly not alone. In effect, he takes over the prophetic mantle of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who draws attention to the ways in which the "other"--particularly the widow or orphan--disturbs our self-centered world and moves us to action. Levinas was a deeply religious thinker whose Judaism was always implicit in his philosophy (and explicit in his Talmudic commentaries). The Roman Catholic Marion, however, expressly turns to scripture, often giving breathtaking readings of familiar passages that question the very orientation of both philosophy and theology.

Some of the most remarkable of these readings are found in God without Being, a text concerned first and foremost with idolatry. In an earlier text, The Idol and Distance, Marion affirms Nietzsche's famed account of the death of God, but takes it in the opposite direction of the "death of God" movement of the 1960s. For Marion, that death is not the death of a living "god" but the death of the "god of the philosophers." Such a death signifies the end of any theology or philosophy (or, more technically, metaphysics) that assumes the possibility of categorizing or properly naming "God." Like Nietzsche, Marion sees both philosophers and theologians as often "idolatrous" in the sense of creating God in their image and postulating God as the highest "being."

In God without Being, Marion explores various ways of thinking of God as "beyond being." He begins by drawing a marked contrast between the idol and the icon, a contrast for which he finds scriptural support. Whereas the idol is something that merely reflects our gaze, the icon points our sight to something beyond it and thus to something beyond ourselves that we cannot master. The ultimate "icon" is Christ himself, whom Paul describes in Colossians 1:15 as "the image [eikon] of the invisible God." Marion works this out practically by saying that theology is "done" in the Eucharist. Just like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, it is at the moment when the bread is broken that we finally "see." As he puts it, "the Word intervenes in person only in the eucharistic moment."