Marion and Theology is part of the series Philosophy and Theology, which spans philosophers and theologians from Adorno to Žižek. Unlike Adorno and Žižek, however, Jean-Luc Marion has written explicitly theological as well as philosophical works. Christina Gschwandtner, who is trained in both fields, aims to show the unity of Marion's project as “a theology or even as a kind of spirituality” (1). The organization of her book is marvelously tight: six twenty-two-page chapters, each divided into four subsections, all sandwiched between a seven-page introduction and a seven-page conclusion.
Gschwandtner begins with Marion's early critique of Descartes, whose univocal language in reference to God and creatures abolishes divine transcendence. Descartes stands at the origin of Western onto-theo-logy (named by Martin Heidegger, but not, in Marion's view, wholly overcome by him), in which God is identified as the supreme being among other beings. In her second chapter, Gschwandtner explores the contrast between an idol and an icon, as developed in God Without Being (1982), Marion's best-known work in English translation. Descartes’ concept of God is an idol. An idol, though it may express accurately a given age's image of the divine, stops the viewer's gaze and dazzles it. “In the case of the icon,” however, “the gaze is stopped by…a gaze or aim beyond the actual image….We find ourselves being gazed at” (33). The modern “death of God” is really the death of idols, but Nietzsche and even Heidegger, in Marion's view, supplant the old idols with new ones.
Gschwandtner's middle two chapters reach to the center of Marion's phenomenology. Aiming to be faithful to the fundamental imperative of phenomenology to “return to the things themselves as they actually appear” (55), Marion, like Heidegger, criticizes Husserl for reducing phenomena to intentional objects (objects of consciousness) before a transcendental subject. But Heidegger, Marion says, limits phenomena to appearing as beings. We must begin not with objectivity or being but with givenness, attending to phenomena as “they give themselves in the very way they give themselves” (58). There are “poor” phenomena, such as a pair of scissors, which can be grasped fully in a concept, and “saturated” phenomena, such as a gaze exchanged between parting friends, which give themselves in such a way as to surpass our ability to make conceptual sense of them. The saturated phenomenon “imposes its own rationality and constitutes the one experiencing it as its witness” (63). At the limit of saturated phenomena is divine revelation, which “defies all our categories at once” (64).
From the saturated phenomenon, Gschwandtner proceeds to Marion's analysis of the gift. To be receptive to the saturated phenomenon is not to be passive; it requires giving oneself over to the phenomenon, like a host's reception of an honored guest or a virtuoso's faithfulness to a score. It requires discipline, effort, devotion. Givenness and receptivity thus reach their “apex” in love (88). The most complete love is “kenosis: complete self-surrender on behalf of the other” (94). This is how God loves; to receive God in turn calls for “self-abandon to the other” (95).
Gschwandtner's last two chapters begin with Marion's treatment of faith and reason and proceed to classical theological topics such as the Eucharist and the Trinity. The revelation of Christ is a revelation of logos and hence of rationality. It is not the rationality of metaphysics but “a rationality of love that unfolds the reasons of love,” Pascal's reasons of the heart (98). It is thus opposed to modern nihilism, which turns all values into objects in order to enable us to become “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes, quoted, 99). The Eucharist is the supreme example of the gift and of the saturated phenomenon. In it, “Christ and ultimately God…appear, yet only in kenotic fashion, thus in perfect givenness” (116). In turn, to receive it is to “accept the abundant gift of love, to become incorporated and transformed within it and, in response, to give oneself as a similar gift of love” (117). The final chapter summarizes Marion's Gifford Lectures of 2014, published as Givenness and Revelation, which concludes in a phenomenology of the Trinity. “The Trinity is phenomenologically accessible” (135) if we attend to the experience wherein the gift of the Spirit positions and enables us to “see the face of Christ and to discern there the invisible gaze of the Father” (137).
Marion does not give us a phenomenology of religion, in the manner of Gerardus van der Leeuw, but rather a phenomenology of God as God is revealed in Christ and the church. He develops the rationality of faith not by interpreting it through an extrinsic philosophical system such as those of Aristotle or Kant but by way of “an unfolding of the logos, of God's reason as it is revealed in Christ” (145). Gschwandtner provides a comprehensive introduction to Marion's phenomenology while showing its integral link to his theology. She takes Marion on his own terms, venturing a criticism just once (of Marion's treatment of paternity as the paradigm of selfless giving), and at times she lapses hermetically into Marionese (“The anamorphosis of faith repeats the Trinitarian anamorphosis,” 133–34). But on the whole her treatment of Marion, though demanding, is lucid. A theologian or an advanced student who wishes to learn about Marion's project could well begin with this excellent book.
