HeyJ XLVI (2005), pp.

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A NEW APOLOGIA: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORK OF JEAN-LUC MARION
CHRISTINA M. GSCHWANDTNER

University of Scranton

Apologetics can recover a theological legitimacy, as a style of phenomenology of the mind laboring at conversion. It therefore progresses toward its goal to reach Love by love only by becoming useless (as regards arguments) little by little, for nally love alone, and not discourse, can go to the place where apologetics claims to lead. Evidence and Bedazzlement, Prolegomena to Charity

Much of Jean-Luc Marions work hovers on the borderline between philosophy and theology, and he has been most often criticized for his supposed confusion of these two disciplines. The question of God is central to his work and is one that concerns him from beginning to end of his corpus: whether he is considering the status of God within the Descartes, whether he is attempting to free metaphysical system of Rene God from the language of being, to speak of the innite distance between the divine and the human, to delineate a God of charity or abundant selfgiving, or whether he is opening phenomenology to the possibility of a phenomenon of revelation and describing the saturating givenness of grace and forgiveness. He nds it perfectly natural to be moving without reticence away from the territory of familiar philosophy in order to traverse phenomenology as well as the most straightforwardly christological theology.1 In this paper I seek to delineate the relationship between philosophy and theology in Marions work.2 I outline the various ways in which he describes their connection and argue that these different articulations come together in viewing theology consistently as the superior discipline and in interpreting the task of philosophy as a primarily apologetic one. Transgressing the border between philosophy and theology, or even treating of traditional theological topics within a technical philosophical discourse, does not have to imply, of course, that one has explicitly thought of the relationship between the two disciplines. At times one has the impression that such is the case for Marion, since he seems

r The Editor/Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

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particularly adept at offending people from both disciplines. Theologians and philosophers of religion such as Wayne Hankey, Georges Kalinowski, Kenneth Schmitz, and Jean-Yves Lacoste, have repeatedly chided him for his heavily phenomenological language or condemned him for being too Heideggerian.3 John Milbank has been especially harsh in some of his criticism, claiming that Marion seeks to be both Barth and Heidegger at once or calling his phenomenological reduction illusory and arbitrary, concluding in a long summary of Marions phenomenology somewhat uncharitably that none of this makes very much sense.4 Philosophers, such as Dominique Janicaud and John Caputo, often react similarly to his religious terminology, feel like they are being high-jacked by theology and nd phenomenology subverted and misguided by Marions apparently theological aims.5 Janicaud, for example, complains that in Marion phenomenological neutrality has been abandoned in a theological veering [which] is too obvious, while Hent de Vries suggests that Marion is not so much interested in philosophys freedom with respect to the theological but is instead motivated by exegetical possibilities and theological decisions.6 Theology and philosophy often seem to merge into one in Marions work, to the chagrin of almost all of his readers. It would already, then, be interesting to examine these transgressions, to gure out more specically how philosophy and theology interact and are married in Marions work and what their precise relationship might be. I nd even more fascinating, however, what Marion himself actually says about their relationship, especially as one compares this to what he does. My central question in this paper, therefore, is this second one: How ought philosophy and theology relate according to Jean-Luc Marion? How does Marion himself describe their relationship? Yet in explicating what Marion says about the distinction and relationship between the two disciplines we will see that these suggestions about how philosophy and theology are to relate actually also delineate well how Marion himself negotiates the boundary between the two. They are thus not only a theoretical reection on the division between the two disciplines but do actually inform and describe his practical outworking of their relationship. In his published work, I nd three different though complementary explanations about the relationship between philosophy and theology, roughly corresponding to Marions three projects: Cartesian studies, theology, and phenomenology. All three are mentioned on the last pages of his essay Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology. He speaks here of the need to overcome metaphysics and get beyond its stiing restrictions. Phenomenology is able to accomplish such overcoming of metaphysical language and is therefore eminently helpful for theology. In the last two pages he explicates what this new situation at the end of metaphysics would mean for the relationship between philosophy

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and theology.7 He insists that the God he has discovered in his analysis of excess and saturation is still the God of the philosophers and scholars and not the biblical God. The mode of manifestation in phenomenology comes very close to the idea of revelation in theology, yet there is no confusion between phenomenology and revealed theology. There is no such confusion because, on the one hand, phenomenological analysis can only think a phenomenon par excellence as a possibility of donation but makes no judgment about a real experience of this donation which remains in the domain of theology: Between phenomenology and theology, the border passes between revelation as possibility and revelation as historicity. There could be no danger of confusion between these domains. On the other hand, although phenomenology can approach the donation of the face, it cannot and must not understand that face as a face of charity; when the being-given turns to charity (the loved or loving being, the lover in the strict sense), phenomenology yields to revealed theology exactly as the second order, according to Pascal, yields to the third. Here again, no confusion could creep in. Marion therefore concludes that on this path which phenomenology shows beyond metaphysics the rational thought of God, which philosophy cannot forget without losing its own dignity, or even its mere possibility, nds at least a certain coherence. Phenomenology opens the way toward a renewed articulation of the thought of God in a coherent and convincing fashion. Three ways of describing the relationship between philosophy and theology are thus suggested in the nal paragraphs of this article. First, theology and philosophy are related to each other just as Pascals thought of charity is to that of Descartes metaphysics. This is a distinction between philosophy and theology as one of second to third order. Second, phenomenology speaks of the possibility of the same phenomenon of which theology proclaims the actuality and historicity. The two disciplines converge upon each other in the question of God or revelation by approaching the gap between them from opposite sides. Third, the bedazzling evidence of charity allows for a different kind of evidence, one that would give the thought of God a certain kind of coherence. It can thus function as a new and different version of apologetics. All three articulations seek to delineate the boundary between philosophy and theology in a complementary fashion. Let us thus examine them more carefully by looking at each individually.

I. SECOND AND THIRD ORDER

Marion makes the rst distinction between philosophy and theology early in his works on Descartes.8 This distinction is one between Cartesian philosophy (or specically metaphysics/ontology) and revealed theology.

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He actually sees in Descartes refusal to engage in theological thinking, and his concomitant refusal to elevate eternal truths to a divine and innite status, a conrmation of Descartes commitment to keep the two disciplines separate and not to think of God with the tools of philosophy. He carries the distinction further with his use of Blaise Pascal in this context. Pascal, as Marion shows, is a good and faithful Cartesian in his more geometrical works. Yet, Pascal nds Descartes useless and uncertain in certain other areas, namely more theological ones. Pascal revives the medieval theory of the three concupiscences: of eyes, mind and heart, and reformulates them as three ways of knowing or seeing. The rst order, that of the eyes, examines the natural world and knows it through sense experience and exploration. The second order, that of the mind, knows the world in a much more technical and strictly philosophical sense. It employs rigorous method in order to arrive at evidence. It is thus a thoroughly Cartesian metaphysical thinking. The second order in a sense invalidates the rst one. It is so much superior to it, that the rst seems simple-minded and insufcient in comparison. It devoids it of truth and locates truth (as certainty) in the realm of philosophy. Pascal juxtaposes to this a third order, that of the heart or the will. In this third order, at which one arrives only through a kind of Kierkegaardian leap, one sees the second order with the eyes of faith or charity. Thus from this (theological) perspective, traditional philosophy (or metaphysics) seems banal and useless. One no longer knows with ones mind, but with ones heart and thus loves. This is the order of charity and it renders void or meaningless the second order of philosophical discourse. Each new way of seeing is invisible to the prior order and goes beyond and displaces its manner of perception. Philosophy (or specically Cartesian metaphysics) is far superior to simple bodily perception and cannot be understood by it. In a heightened fashion, theology or the order of charity is far superior to metaphysics and cannot be imagined or understood by its reasoning: Thus, charity provokes the world, seen rst in its two natural orders, to be soaked, tinted, and redrawn in the unthinkable and unexpectedly visible colours of its glory or its abandon. Beneath the bright and iridescent light of charity, the world appears in all its dimensions, according to all its parameters, with all its contrasts in short, in truth (MP, 313). The three orders differ in kind and always remain incommensurable to each other. The superior order(s) remain(s) invisible and incomprehensible to the inferior one(s). The order of charity displaces and overcomes the order of metaphysics. Theology can thus here transgress philosophy and render it irrelevant by its superiority. Theology gets beyond metaphysics in a way that philosophy does not and cannot. Theological discourse speaks of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, not that of Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Heidegger.

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Marion himself has taken such a Pascalian stance in several of his works. His relationship to Heidegger in many ways mirrors that of Pascal to Descartes: faithful when it is appropriate and when technical terminology is necessary, yet intensely critical and iconoclastic in other places (especially those having to do with God). God without Being, Idol and Distance, and to some extent even Reduction and Givenness are attempts to reach a third order of charity beyond the metaphysical constrictions of Descartes, Nietzsche, Ho lderlin, Husserl, and Heidegger. Marion acknowledges as much in his introduction to the English translation of Being Given where he criticizes this earlier stance as incomplete.9 Yet despite this recent censure, the relationship of philosophy and theology as one of second to third order, is one that he mentions repeatedly and often presupposes. For example, in an article presented on the occasion of a conference entitled The Question of Christian Philosophy Today at Georgetown University, held 24 to 26 September 1993, Marion examines the possibility of Christian philosophy.10 Taking his departure from Etienne Gilson, he proposes that Christian philosophy must be more than hermeneutic, that it must actually serve a heuristic function for contemporary phenomenology. Gilson had suggested that Christian philosophy happens whenever revelation works as an auxiliary tool for philosophy, in that Christian philosophy gives a radically different interpretation to certain issues than non-Christian philosophy (p. 249). This interpretation of Christian philosophy as essentially hermeneutical Marion nds unsatisfying for several reasons. First, as a mere hermeneutics of concepts or realities also and already explored by strict philosophy, Christian philosophy becomes secondary, derivative, even elective in comparison with one instance, philosophy, the only original and inventive one (p. 252). It would thus not truly be philosophy. Secondly, due to such limitations, Christian philosophy as hermeneutics becomes suspect, arbitrary, and relative. One might well choose another interpretation over the one of Christian revelation. In that case, there would be no Christian philosophy but only a Christian interpretation of philosophy (p. 253). Thirdly, the distinction required by Gilson between philosophy and theology or nature and grace (the known and the revealed) becomes impossible to make hermeneutically, because interpretation precisely requires a close correlation between content and interpretation. Marion wants to push Gilson in another direction by interpreting the auxiliary function heuristically instead of hermeneutically. If Christs death and resurrection have truly made all things new, then revelation introduced realities and phenomena into the world, which never had been seen or known there before (p. 254). The proper domain of theology is charity or love. Charity, however, apart from dening the domain of theology, also has effects on the horizon of rationality (p. 255). Marion

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appeals here explicitly to Pascals third order and turns it into a paradigm for the relationship between theology and philosophy, where theology is clearly superior to philosophy: Charity, the supreme order, thus remains invisible to the esh and to the spirit, to powers and to sciences (p. 255). Charity gives new phenomena to knowledge. Revelation is able to offer perfectly rational phenomena to philosophy, although they belong to charity and are as new as it is (p. 255). These phenomena are introduced by Christian revelation into philosophy and they would be invisible to philosophy without this revelation. The phenomena of revelation therefore do not remain relegated to theology but are, in fact, given to philosophy, to knowledge with a merely natural light. Marion points out that as a consequence, between theology (supernatural) and philosophy (natural), Christian philosophy would introduce a mix: a knowledge that would discuss under natural light facts discovered under supernatural light. He admits that all the difculties of this paradox are concentrated into one: the mix of natural and supernatural, or of revelation and philosophy, does not respect the distinction of the orders. Christian philosophy compromises theology as much as philosophy, because its concept is contradictory (p. 256).11 Christian philosophy, to speak with the earlier categories, is located in the space between the two orders, attempts to cross and bridge them and thus hangs suspended uneasily above the chasm between the two disciplines. Marion next attempts to mark a careful delineation between the three disciplines he has distinguished in this article. He denes theology as concerned with the objects of revelation directly and only through faith, philosophy as dealing with the facts, phenomena and statements accessible to reason, and Christian philosophy as that which nds and invents phenomena and introduces them from the realm of faith into that of philosophy, from the order of charity into that of reason (p. 261). Philosophy, then, deals with matters of reason, while theology is concerned with matters of faith or love. Christian philosophy serves as the messenger between the two and allows for a bridge of the chasm between them by making theological phenomena available to philosophy. As in Pascal, for Marion these are more than mere objects but different modes of reception. Phenomena discovered and experienced by faith can also be examined by reason when Christian philosophy bridges the gap between them. Marion insists that only by interpreting Christian philosophy in this way can hermeneutics also become valuable and useful, when otherwise it would remain simply arbitrary. In its heuristic function, charity discovers and introduces new phenomena into the world itself and the conceptual universe, which are saturated with meaning and glory, which ordain and eventually save the world. Charity does not interpret through and as an ideology, because it gives the world greater reality and grandeur than the world pretends to have by itself (p. 261). In this privileging of a charity that speaks from an order

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beyond simple matter and reason, Christian philosophy also is able to contribute to the overcoming of metaphysics (and its end) and to the liberation of phenomenology. Marion therefore does not simply adopt Pascals distinction between the two orders, nor does he only employ it as a way of dening the difference between philosophy and theology, but he even suggests a transition between their innite distance and incommensurability by positing this possibility of Christian philosophy. Philosophy and theology may investigate the same phenomena, if they are discovered by revealed theology and then formulated and introduced into philosophy by Christian thought. The task of Christian philosophy should be heuristic: it should discover new phenomena (presumably in the realm of theology) and give even abandon them to the realm of philosophy after having investigated them rigorously with the tools of the current philosophy. When such new phenomena have been discovered and introduced into philosophy, they can obviously be examined within both disciplines. How would one then uphold the distinction between the disciplines in regard to these particular phenomena? Marion seeks to answer that question by making a distinction between possibility and actuality.

II. POSSIBILITY AND ACTUALITY

When Marion employs the terminology of second and third orders he usually seems to think of philosophy as metaphysical (even though, as we have just seen, that is not always the case). He begins to draw more careful distinctions when he speaks of philosophy specically as phenomenology, since he sees phenomenology as getting beyond the boundaries and restrictions of metaphysics. When describing the relationship between phenomenology and theology, Marion much more often speaks of a distinction not between two orders, but between possibility and actuality. Of what phenomenology indicates the possibility, theology can conrm the actuality. While phenomenology can show that a phenomenon of revelation is possible and what its phenomenality would be, if it were to appear, it can never conrm that such an appearing has actually taken place or say anything about its actuality. Phenomenology can think about the possibility of a phenomenon of revelation only, but never about God as such, or the actuality of such a revelation, or the question of whether revelation has taken place historically. This is the case because phenomenology always deals with what is radically immanent, never with the transcendent, which is excluded through the reduction. Since phenomenology always works under the assumption of reduction, it can make absolutely no claims about what is outside of it, what is true as such. Only theology (and only revealed theology) can deal with the actuality of revelation and, in fact, in order to do theology, such actuality

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is assumed. Here Marion seems to interpret philosophy as a kind of tool for investigating theological phenomena. It is useful as a tool, but certainly cannot ever transgress its own boundaries and attempt to grasp what it is examining. Marion explicates this the most clearly when dealing with the fth saturated phenomenon, that of the second degree, which sets forth the phenomenon of revelation.12 In his phenomenological project, he has outlined four different saturated phenomena that surpass anything we might be able to grasp. Our consciousness is thus overwhelmed by this excessive intuitive experience. Such saturation of experience may happen in four respects: according to quantity, such as the unpredictable and innitely complex historical event; according to quality, such as the dazzling brilliance of a painting; according to relation, such as the absolute intimacy of my own esh; and according to modality, such as the utter difference and dignity of the face of another person. A phenomenon of revelation, however, saturates our horizon not merely in one respect, but in all four of them at the same time: it is thus excessive in terms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality at the same time. Marion employs the Christ gure as an illustration of such a revelatory encounter. He goes to great pains to distinguish this possibility of revelation from the actuality of Revelation, marking the distinction between them even by capitalizing the one and not the other. He insists that his point is not to investigate the status of theology in phenomenology but rather a possible gure of phenomenality in which saturation reaches its maximum level (BG, p. 234). His enterprise is directed at liberating possibility in phenomenality and toward freeing it from reductive limits. The paradox of paradoxa, the saturated phenomenon par excellence, remains a mere possibility. Nothing can be said about its effectivity [effectivite ] or its actuality. Phenomenology can never decide whether revelation has actually taken place, but it can indeed investigate whether revelation is possible and what gure a phenomenon of revelation might take on were it to appear. To determine the ontic status of a revelatory phenomenon is and must always remain only the task of theology.13 It is thus possible, according to Marion, to distinguish clearly between revelation and Revelation. While the one is a mere possibility which may be examined as a phenomenon by the philosophical exercise, the other is a historical fact which has very little to do with phenomenology. Theology is outside of and exceeds phenomenology. Phenomenology has no claim on it and no right to judge its contents. It functions primarily as a method of investigating the data given to it and such data might be religious or theological. Marion concludes this chapter on the phenomenon of revelation by insisting again that his project has been solely an enlargement of phenomenology and that it has nothing whatsoever to do with justifying the factuality of Revelation. Nor was it even the primary

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goal of his investigation to show the possibility of a phenomenon of revelation, but rather to push phenomenology to its limits and carry the denitions and resources of phenomenology as far as they will go (BG, pp. 24647). This particular depiction of the relationship between philosophy and theology is the most clearly performative (instead of merely descriptive or prescriptive). It characterizes exactly what Marion seeks to do in his phenomenological work. Much of Being Given and In Excess have precisely as one of their primary aims to establish the possibility of saturated phenomena, and especially that of the supremely and paradoxically saturated phenomenon of revelation. Much of Marions explanation regarding the distinction between possibility and actuality was actually made in defence of his work, especially to the late Dominique Janicaud who was particularly bothered by Marions importation of God, charity, and similar religious terminology into the realm of phenomenology. Such phenomena, for Janicaud, cannot appear, because they are by denition excluded through phenomenological method. Marion thus seeks to justify the essentially philosophical and phenomenological nature of his project and refrains from making any explicit statements about God or theology and their respective truth or validity.14 He does move further in the direction of theology, however, in his more recent work, In Excess. Not only does he hint at theological themes at the end of each chapter at times quite explicitly but he also includes a brief section entitled: Concerning a Use of Givenness in Theology. Having clearly established the distinction between phenomenology and revealed theology in Being Given, he apparently assumes that some guarded statements of theological content are now acceptable and that his philosophical loyalties are no longer in doubt. He is therefore able to begin to bring the two disciplines into renewed conversation, while insisting that the distinction between the domains, objects, and methods remains absolute, but . . . the rst can shed some light on the second without destroying it or being destroyed (IE, p. 28). He reiterates more emphatically that phenomenology is useful for theology, because its phenomena are experienced and revealed and their phenomenality should thus be examined with the categories he has provided. Revelation always assumes a kind of phenomenality, is experienced as a phenomenon. It should therefore be investigated with the tools of phenomenology.15 Consequently, Marion advocates a stronger employment of phenomenological method and categories in theology. At the same time he suggests that it might be fruitful for philosophers to reect upon the [theological] meaning of givenness in phenomenology. The two disciplines are thus again moving closer together in these nal remarks. And although Marions phenomenological work aims to be decidedly philosophical, a theological concern still seems to hover in the background which insinuates that much of this work is nally done in service of the higher

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theological aims. Phenomenology is useful for theology, may become a possible method for its actual content. Fundamental categories in phenomenology (e.g., givenness) in some veiled sense derive from theology.

III. A NEW APOLOGIA

Janicauds worries are not without substance, then, especially when one examines a third gure that Marion employs for depicting the relationship between philosophy and theology. Most prominently in the article Evidence and Bedazzlement, included in Prolegomena to Charity (but in a less explicit fashion also in several other articles), Marion explores the possibility of a recovery of Christian apologetics that may bridge the gap between the second and third orders, between possibility and actuality. He begins by differentiating between what he calls constraining [contraindre] and convincing [convaincre].16 Apologetics should not force rational acknowledgment of truth [to constrain reason], but rather prepare the way for a possible decision of the will [convince the will]. To renounce apologetics completely is to become anti-intellectual and comfortable and implies complete loss of identity for a Christian. Instead a new kind of apologetics must be recovered:
The aim would no longer be (but has this ever been the goal?) to develop an argumentative machine, which would claim, like well-executed propaganda, to force an intimate conviction by force of reasons, or rather of popular slogans, an approach that testies more to a will to dominate and strengthen an apparatus, than to a gesture of love revealing Love. Rather, the aim would be the external expansion of what shapes, lifts, and incites dogmatics from the depths of itself, or rather from the depths of what convokes and institutes it: the tremendous and incompressible dunamiB tou yeou that exposes its explosion in liturgy, contemplation, and dogmatic theology, in order to be carried on naturally in apologetics, supposing of course that a perfect, humble, and poor availability toward the Spirit of God poured out in our hearts is natural (PC, p. 55).

Marion thus seeks to guard against any kind of apologetics that would become violent and dominating. His goal is to nd a balance between reason and love. While apologetics is indeed rational in that it removes objections of reason to faith, it is simultaneously loving in that it reveals Gods self-emptying and humble love. This is an apologetics of kenosis which parallels the very nature of the Christian faith and God: The Christian faith would of course have nothing to win by advancing itself with such a train of reasons and arguments, because poverty and selfdenial bet its fundamental humility (PC, p. 53). The point of this apologetics cannot be to convince through rational argument, to prove something beyond the shadow of a doubt. Instead it is an invitation to

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love and is itself rooted in love. It seeks to convince not the mind but the will. Marion insists that
so long as the will does not freely will to love, apologetics has gained nothing. Consequently, in not recognizing the most decisive factor, an apologetics that means to be absolutely demonstrative would, by its very success, be condemned to the most patent failure . . . . Only the will can allow itself to be convinced, and all constraint of reason by reasons remains totally heterogeneous to it, remains on the threshold and decides nothing. Apologetics, in using reasons alone, can, in the best of cases, constrain reason; but even in this event, it will not for all that convince the will, and will fail in its duty at the precise moment when it believes it is fullling it (PC, pp. 5758).

Apologetics is thus not ultimately about convincing by rational argument but about opening a space where the will may make a choice not against, but other than, reason. Again here philosophy is portrayed as concerned with reason or the mind and theology with love or the heart. The passage from the one to the other is marked by love. Only the reasons of the heart, which are those of love or charity, can reach beyond the reasons of the mind. The task of apologetics is to bring us to that point: To make God known to reason, if the will does not want to acknowledge him, serves no purpose, except to confuse the wills ill will (in the strict sense). Apologetics aims only to lead man to this precise point and this unavoidable debate: to leave the will sufciently free of itself (and without a loophole in the rational discussion) to admit that the love of God, God as love, is to be loved voluntarily or refused (PC, p. 60). Indeed, only love, and the will that loves, is able to reach God. Apologetics therefore tries to bridge the gap between philosophy and theology by removing all obstacles to belief with philosophical rigour. It is in the service of theology but uses the methods of philosophy. Its goal ultimately is to point to the place where the will must make a decision. Marion concludes: Thus, apologetics in no way has as its function the lling of the abyss of the voluntary decision for or against Love, by some conceited expansion of arguments; such a function would be meaningless and contradictory (PC, p. 61). Instead, apologetics culminates at the threshold of Love, which only love can cross with an unbalanced step that singularly starts us off, and which is often experienced as a fall (PC, p. 62). So the gap between philosophy and theology that apologetics seeks to close is not one of reason but of commitment. It is not that theology must be explained or proven or made rational, but that it requires a decision of abandonment to its call. Apologetics must therefore ultimately lead to our being bedazzled by the glamour of this overwhelming love. It is not interested in providing proofs for a theory but in teaching us to love. We have come here full circle, as Marion connects this exercise of the will to submit to the compelling bedazzlement of love to Pascals move to the third order of charity (PC, p. 59). Although this article does not speak explicitly of the distinction between the two disciplines of philosophy and

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theology, it does describe well the function Marion sees philosophy playing in the discourse of faith. While surely not all philosophy is to be construed as an apologia for faith in this sense, it seems to me that Marions philosophy, especially his phenomenology, does indeed function in this manner. This is particularly obvious in his most recent works In Excess and Le phenome`ne erotique, that although almost entirely philosophical/phenomenological, both end on theological notes.17 In Excess does so at the end of every chapter, while Le phenome`ne erotique is more or less silent of God until the nal two pages. In both books, then, the philosophical reection nally leads to the very brink of theology. The nal pages of In Excess, for example, wonder: How, without resorting to a meaningless and even mad paradox, can the excess of giving intuition in the case of God be considered plausible? (IE, p. 161). Marion has clearly sought precisely to make this case as plausibly and as coherently as possible. He responds that the excess of intuition in the case of God is experienced both in terms of terror at the divine incomprehensibility and as the obsessive questioning that always returns to this topic beyond our grasp. He asks, apparently rhetorically at this point, how could the question of God dwell within us too deeply as much in our endeavouring to close it as in our daring to open it if, having no concept that could help us reach it, an intuition did not fascinate us? (IE, p. 162). Our doubts about God are thus removed as themselves evidence of the divine phenomenon. Furthermore, culminating in his most recent book, Marions three projects [Cartesian studies, theology, phenomenology] all point in the direction of love and seek to open the path toward it. Both his theology in its essentially kenotic character and his phenomenology in its saturated form intend not only to make possible thought about revelation but to compel us toward its acceptance in love. He sees it as his own task to give a new account of what it means to be loved, which for him is a far more fundamental question than that of abstract (Cartesian) certainty. The question of assurance, of whether somebody loves me, is for him the fundamental question of todays lost society. In following Marion along the path of the erotic phenomenon, we recognize in the end God as the only true lover: In the end, I discover not only that an other loves me before I love him, thus that this other plays the lover long before me, but especially that this rst lover, from always, is named God (PE, p. 341). It is only in these nal pages that we realize that everything we have read about the erotic phenomenon before has led us to this point. Marion thus appears to hope that for the reader all rational obstacles to faithful abandonment to this loving God have been abolished. In both his most recent works, then, he practices what he had described in the earlier article as the renewed apologetic task of the Christian philosopher. Marion articulates three ways of describing the relationship between theology and philosophy: as the third order (of charity) superseding the

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second one (of reason), as the theological actuality of which phenomenology indicates the possibility, and of both as united in the apologetic task of articulating the question of love. All three of them indicate theology as the superior discipline and see philosophy as either method for or pathway toward theology. Furthermore, despite all philosophical caveats, ultimately they all seem to want to lead us toward Christian faith: to outline possibilities for which faith can provide actualities, to lead us to the brink of an order of reason that allows for a leap of the will, to give us a glimpse of the dazzling light of charity that invites us toward its embrace. In the nal pages of Prolegomena to Charity Marion suggests that the gift of the Christian theologian to philosophy might be a new articulation of love:
To know following love, and to know what love itself reveals Pascal called it the third order. In this context, the theology of charity could become the privileged pathway for responding to the aporia that, from Descartes to vinas, haunts modern philosophy access to the other, the most faraway Le neighbour. It is doubtful that Christians, if they want seriously to contribute to the rationality of the world and manifest what has come to them, have anything better to do than to work in this vein (PC, p. 168).

This, of course, precisely denes Marions most recent work on the erotic phenomenon. This is indeed the vein in which Marion has been working and it is this goal he pursues in his work. Marions own philosophy, then, is meant to remove all obstacles on the path toward faith and to present it as convincingly as possible. The ultimate concern of Marions project, in other words, is an apologetic one: an invitation to love the God of abundant and bedazzling self-giving.

Notes
1 Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, translated by Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. xi. Henceforth cited as PC. 2 Of course, this is a rather difcult exercise in that theology and philosophy are obviously dened and delineated differently by different people. We will at the same time have to gure out what philosophy and theology mean for Marion. Essentially he makes two clear distinctions for each concept: Philosophy can either refer to metaphysics traditional philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger or to phenomenology contemporary philosophy and indeed the only kind that Marion nds worth calling philosophy. Theology can also refer to two kinds: to natural theology one that Marion rejects and that he sees as refuted by Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and revealed theology the speaking about God that does not attempt to limit the divine but speaks from the way in which God reveals Godself. Theology, in Marion, almost always refers to this second idea. 3 For example: Wayne J. Hankey, Theoria Versus Poesis: Neoplatonism and Trinitarian Difference in Aquinas, John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion and John Zizioulas, Modern Theology ta15: no. 4 (1999), pp. 387415; Georges Kalinowski, Discours de louange et discourse me opagite et Thomas dAquin, Rivista di Filosofia Neo Scolastica 73 (1981), physique: Denys lare ` Dieu en laimant: Philosophie et the ologie de J.-L. pp. 399404; Jean-Yves Lacoste, Penser a Marion, Archives de Philosophie 50 (1987), pp. 24570; Kenneth L. Schmitz, The God of Love, Thomist 57: no. 3 (1993), pp. 495508.

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4 John Milbank, Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics, in: The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 37. Idem, The Soul of Reciprocity, Part One: Reciprocity Refused, Modern Theology 17: no. 3 (2001), p. 345, p. 351. 5 Dominique Janicaud makes most of his criticism of Marion in the context of examining the status of contemporary French phenomenology in: Le Tournant theologique de la phenomen ditions de lE clat, 1991) and La phenomenologie eclatee (Combas: ologie franc aise (Combas: E ditions de lE clat, 1998). The rst treatise is translated in the following collection: Dominique E tien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and Janicaud, Jean-Franc ois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chre Paul Riur, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). John D. Caputo has written a whole host of articles that include critical comments on Marions work. His comments are strongest in his earliest articles and more guarded in his recent work. See, for example: How to Avoid Speaking of God: The Violence of Natural Theology, in Eugene Thomas Long (ed.), Prospects for Natural Theology (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), pp. 128150; God is Wholly Other Almost: Difference and the Hyperbolic Alterity of God, in Orrin F. Summerell (ed.), The Otherness of God (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 190205; Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 185222; The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God, in Philip Goodchild (ed.), Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 4258. 6 Janicaud, Theological Turn, p. 68; Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 60. 7 Jean-Luc Marion, Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology, Critical Inquiry 20: no. 4 (1994), pp. 57291. All quotations within the next paragraph are found on pp. 59091. 8 Marion examines Descartes white theology [white because whitened out/refused] in: Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1991). He pushes his argument further in On Descartes Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) [henceforth cited as MP]. The section on Pascal concludes this work in a chapter entitled Overcoming. The explication of the three orders can be found on pp. 289322. 9 Within the text of God without Being, Marion seems to regard the book as mostly, or even tant donne he refers to it strictly, theological. Yet in his recent introduction to the translation of E as a primarily philosophical book (with the exception of the last two chapters): The critical portion of this essay was accomplished within the eld of philosophy, but I could not, at that time, glimpse its constructive side (access to charity) except through recourse to theology (hence the second part, Hors-texte). Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. x [henceforth cited as BG]. He goes on to speak of Being Given as an advance beyond this theological recourse in the earlier work. 10 Jean-Luc Marion, Christian Philosophy: Hermeneutic or Heuristic? in Francis J. Ambrosio (ed.), The Question of Christian Philosophy Today (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), pp. 24764. All in-text references in the following paragraphs refer to this article. 11 Marion suggests several such phenomena that have been introduced by revelation: the phenomenon of the human face seen in and by love, history as a concept, the icon, belief in the Kantian sense. Once these various phenomena have been discovered (or given by revelation), they are handed over to reason and become proper objects of philosophy. They have become facts and can thus be interpreted (and subverted) also by non-Christian philosophers. According to Marion, most philosophers in the history of philosophy have been inuenced in this way by Christian philosophy (Heuristic, pp. 25760). 12 The phenomenon of revelation is examined especially in y24 of Being Given (pp. 23447). The sections on the other four saturated phenomena are suggested on pp. 199233 of Being Given and explicated in much greater detail in chapters 25 of In Excess. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, translated By Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Henceforth cited as IE. 13 He describes this the most explicitly in an extensive footnote: Phenomenology describes possibilities and never considers the phenomenon of revelation except as a possibility of phenomenality, which it would formulate thus: if God manifests (or manifested) himself, he will make use of a paradox in the second degree; Revelation (of God by himself, theo-logical), if it

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takes place, will assume the phenomenal gure of the phenomenon of revelation, of the paradox of paradoxes, of saturation in the second degree. To be sure, Revelation (as actuality) is never confused with revelation (as a possible phenomenon) we scrupulously respect this conceptual difference by means of its graphic translation. But phenomenology, which owes it to phenomenality to go this far, does not go any farther, and must never decide on the fact of Revelation, nor on its historicity, nor on its actuality, nor on its meaning. It must not do so, not only out of concern to distinguish knowledges and to delimit their respective regions, but rst because it in no way has the means to do so: the fact (if there is one) of Revelation exceeds the scope of all science, including phenomenology; only a theology, and on condition that it lets itself be constructed starting from this fact alone (K. Barth or H. U. von Balthasar, more, no doubt, than R. Bultmann or K. Rahner), could eventually reach it. Even if it had the desire to do so (and, clearly, such was never the case), phenomenology would not have the power to turn to theology. And one must know nothing of theology, of its procedures and its problematics, even simply to envisage this unlikelihood. (BG, p. 367). 14 As mentioned in the introduction, Dominique Janicaud has repeatedly interpreted Marions work as heavily theological and claims that even Marions phenomenology is a kind of negative propaedeutic to his theology. Marion refers repeatedly to Janicauds criticism in this work and at times attempts to refute it (more often he simply rejects it). He nds that Janicaud addresses only what Marion precisely has not said (BG, p. 328). Reduction and Givenness is a strictly philosophical work without a word of theology and explicitly puts the question of God vinas who, Marion claims, makes far more explicit use of in brackets (as opposed to Le theological and biblical themes in his philosophical arguments). He objects to Janicauds citing him out of context and making him say the opposite of what is clear in the text. Marion particularly strongly rejects the insinuation that he is engaged in a negative phenomenology which only prepares the path for a return of theology. He is not introducing a transcendental God or metaphysics into the phenomenological project because he is fully committed to the Husserlian reduction of all transcendence to a greater degree even than Husserl himself, since he wants to push this reduction to its furthest and absolute limit (BG, p. 72). Revealed theology not only has absolutely nothing to do with metaphysics, a point that Janicaud does not recognize, but also cannot and will not enter into phenomenology. Marion nds that Janicauds criticism overall makes no sense, but is the mere caricature of the theological strawman which he himself invents (BG, p. 74). 15 He had already suggested something like this in an earlier article: Aspekte der Religionspha nomenologie: Grund, Horizont und Offenbarung, translated by Rudolf Frank, in Alois Halder, Klaus Kienzler und Joseph Mo ller (eds.), Religionsphilosophie heute: Chancen und Bedeutungen in Philosophie und Theologie (Du sseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1988), pp. 84103. dition. De la Diffe ` la Charite (E rence, 1986, 16 PC, p. 57. The French refers to Prolegome`nes a 1991), p. 75. 17 Jean-Luc Marion, Le phenome`ne erotique: Six meditations (Paris: Grasset, 2003). Henceforth cited as PE.