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Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Milbank
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Extract

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.

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Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 76 , Issue 895 , July 1995, pp. 325 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

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3 Réduction et Donation, 1–13, 130ff.

4 Ibid., 1–63, 163–210.

5 Ibid., 183–4

6 See Heidegger, Martin, ‘What is Metaphysics’ and ‘Letter on Humanism’ in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, David Farrell (Routledge, London, 1977) 93–110Google Scholar, 213–67; On Tune and Being, trans. Stambaugh, Joan (Harper and Row, New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

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9 Marion, Jean–Luc, ‘L'Interloqué’ in Who Comes after the Subject, ed. Cadava, Eduardo et al (Routledge, London, 1991) 236–46Google Scholar.

10 Phillip Blond has maintained this point in several unpublished lectures and private conversations. See also Benoist, Jocelyn, ‘Husserl: au–delá de l'Ontothéologie?’ in Les Études Philosophiques 4 1991, 433–458Google Scholar.

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13 God Without Being, 48 and Jean–Luc Marion, ‘De “La Mort de Dieu” aux Noms Divins: L'ltinéraire Théologique de la Métaphysique’ in Vergote, L'Étre el Dieu, 103–130, p. 130.

14 Jean–Luc Marion, ‘Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relève for Theology’, unpublished paper delivered in the Cambridge Divinity Faculty, June 1993.

15 Ibid, and see Prolégomènes, 45–67, 71–78; Réduction et Donation, 249–302.

16 Marion, Jean–Luc, Sur le Prisme Métaphysique de Descartes (P.U.F. Paris, 1986) 14–43Google Scholar. But see also Jean–Francois Courtine, Suarez et le Systéme de la Métaphysique (P.U.F. Paris, 1990) 484–495 who argues against Marion that the Regulae, not the Meditations, give Descartes' ontology, such that the determination of the ens as the transparently knowable has priority over the cogilo. If Marion's diagnosis here is incorrect, this would accord with his giving too little weight to how modem ontology based on univocity of Being transforms our notions of finite being, not just divine being, as I argue later in this article.

17 See L'Idole et la Distance, 15–45.

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43 This was precisely Marion's own earlier argument against Levinas. See L'ldole et la Distance 264–9.

44 Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I, 8.

45 See Dieu el L'Etre: essays by Harl, Nautin, Madec and zum Brunn, 87–167; L'Etre el Dieu, ‘Epilogue’ by Dominique Bourg 215–244; Dubarle, Dominique, ‘Essai sur l'Omologie Théclogale de St. Augustin’ in Dieu Avec l'Etre (Beauchesne, Paris, 1986) 167–258Google Scholar.

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52 Reduction et Donation, 304.

53 Marion, Sur le Prisme Métaphysique de Descartes, 338–69; Vincent Carraud ‘La Génealogie de la Politique: Pascal’ in Communio no IX. 3. May–June 1984, 26–37.

54 S.T. II II Q. 35. a3. resp. Marion cites this passage (God Without Being, 135) yet does not reflect that if, for Aquinas, accidie is essentially boredom about Charity (the gift) as much or more than it is boredom about being, then the sensation of melancholy or awareness of vanity is not neutrally ‘transitional’ in Christian thought as it could be for paganism. It is rather the intrusion of sin under the mask of reflectiveness and profundity.

55 God Without Being, 3.

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58 See J–L. Marion ‘Le Phenomene sature’ in Phénoménologie et Théologie, 79–128. Also my unpublished paper, ‘On the sublime subject of Modernity.’

59 See Detienne, Marcel, Les Maîtres de la Verité dans la Grèce Archaique (Maspero, Paris, 1967)Google Scholar; Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Qu'est–ce que la Philosophie (Eds. de Minuit, Paris, 1991) 38–60Google Scholar. See also Catherine Pickstock's unpublished essay ‘Socrates goes outside the City: Writing and Exteriority’.