Customer Reviews

God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism)

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Let me admit first off that Marion's "God Without Being" is a difficult read; I admit this despite the fact that, when I first read it, my brain was well steeped in the work of Derrida, Heidegger, Levinas, and many others into and out of whose discourses Marion constructs his own argument. There are large chunks of the essay that still puzzle me, but the clarity of the ultimate movements will not be lost on the attentive reader. Theology is wasting its time, Marion claims, when it appears primarily as apologist for an existing God, for the most important thing about God is not first that God lives, but that God gives.

Beginning with an interrogation of what he will later term "the ontological impediment" (this very pre-occupation with systematizing or explaining God's being or God-as-Being), Marion contests that this very focus on ex-planation (with its aggressively outbound prefix) prevents one from being capable of acting as receiver (with all its quietly centripetal connotations) and thus betrays one of the most basic theological aims: speaking of "the gift that Christ makes of his body," Marion reminds us that "a gift, and this one above all, does not require first that one explain it, but indeed that one receive it" (162).

The book's back cover refers to this move as one that resituates God in the realm of agape, or Christian charity, rather than in the realm of Being. Marion does indeed speak of agape, but I think that the tidy and perhaps overly theoretical ring of the word would give way, if he had his preference, to the plain, everyday notion of "giving" to which he turns at the most powerful moments of "God Without Being." Because for Marion the gift of Christ is already a very physical fact ("in a word," he says, "the Resurrection remains historically verifiable" [193]), the messy physicality of giving seems to me truer to his reinscription of God than does the theological purity of agape.

The deeply Catholic background of Marion's work, while not in the least a detractor, may make the book slightly less accessible for those not familiar with many tenets of or ongoing debates within the Catholic theological tradition; this was certainly a difficulty for me, but not an insoluble one. And the framing of the essay as a working out of one's own faith, from the "Envoi" to "The Last Rigor," allows the impact of Marion's address to operate perfectly coherently on a logical level, but even more so on an individually emotional level.

Readers interested in theology and postmodern recontextuatlizations of it--and even, perhaps, in the reconciliation of these two terms--will find in Marion's "God Without Being" a very satisfying if not moving experience.

This review starts out with a bit of perplexity: there are two works in this book, 1) God Without Being, and 2) Hors-Texte. "Hors-Texte" translates, literally, as " 'outside the text,' the unpaginated plates added to the end of a book." My question here is, what is the relationship between these two works? My guess is that they are to be read together: Hors-Texte gives a place for the embodiment of (the) God Without Being. This embodiment takes place ("place" being here an intentionally spatial reference) in liturgy and the eucharist: God gives God's self outside of, after and beyond the text. This book functions as a work of theology (Marion is Roman Catholic) but can also function as a work in the philosophy of religion: religion is not something textual, so much as it is embodied in real time and real space.

Marion, however, is not a theologian or philosopher of religion who seeks to arrive at a conception of God (or, for that matter, religion) that justifies a particular philosophy. Hence, he breaks fully with Enlightenment rationalists who seek a God that does little more than justify their own ideas of autonomy: for Marion, God is not the unmoved mover who must be before he loves. Rather, God loves before being: it is God's love which gives place to the Being of beings.

This understanding of God as agape is a break, however, not only with so-called rationalists, but with scholasticism and late modern/post-modern thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Marion works off of both Nietzsche and Heidegger but also criticizes them for not giving a place to a God who loves before being. Nietzsche's twilight of the idols is nothing more than the twilight of particular idols: atheism is simply the refusal to believe in a particular *conception* of God, not God as such (although few, if any, atheists would ever admit to this). Similarly, Heidegger's subsuming God to the predicates of Being is equally misguided and blind; in the end, both Nietzsche and Heidegger commit a type of idolatry. For Marion, theology ought to be iconic: We only "see" God between the "halftimes of our idolatries", he writes.

This God who exceeds our prior conceptions - that is, the predicates of Being - is not the God of metaphysics (onto-theology as Marion, following Heidegger, asserts). Rather, he is the God of unknowing: in short, revelation. Marion turns to the great mystics of the Church, particularly Dionysius the Aeropagite (aka Pseudo-Dionysius) and his mystical theology. There is something wonderfully raw about this; Marion's call to return to an understanding of God who loves outside of and beyond our ability to comprehend and inscribe in books finds its fullest expression in liturgy, lived and acted with/in/by bodies. Hence, God Without Being culminates in incarnation: Christ, in the Church, and in communion.

There is a deeply ecclesial dimension to Marion's work. The Eucharist is celebrated within the life of the community collective whose local leader (the bishop!), as the central servant-celebrant, is the theologian extraordinaire. It is this embodiment that stands on the threshold of Hors-Texte (quite literally, as this discussion takes place immediately before the second part of the book, Hors-Texte).

Marion writes with a rare combination of intellectual rigor, philosophical learning and appreciation, and a deep spirituality. The icon, ever opposed to the idol, directs our gaze beyond its own presence and to the God (Theos) that is beyond the text, but nonetheless gives Himself - loves - in the Word (Logos), which all theology (from the Greek words "Theos" and "Logos"!) writes towards and is, at its height, converted to.

This is not an easy book to read (particularly if you have little or no background in late/post modern philosophy), but it is well worth the effort. Rarely does a book really give itself to the reader as a key to looking more deeply and seeing more clearly, but for those with eyes to read and ears to hear, they may are likely to find themselves moving beyond the text and into an embodied, liturgical practice, celebrating the Word that all words, at their best, look and are converted to: not on their own, but because of the Word's self-giving to words.

In God without Being, French Theologian Jean-Luc Marion offers a controversial thesis about how to think God with categories, including the category of Being. Beginning with an important and enlightening distinction between the idol and the icon, Marion goes on to argue that most "conceptual" understandings of God (i.e., causa sui, prima causa, moral god, etc.) actually constitute idolatries, because they essentially limit the divine to the scope of the human gaze. This is, in Marion's view, the quintessential manufacture of God in the image of humans.

In following chapters, Marion attempts to develop an account of God's self-revelation that would allow us to avoid the traps of conceptual idolatry and think "God without being." For this project, Marion settles on the notion of "giveness" (French: "donation"). In Marion's view, we can think of a God free of all categories (including the category of being) only if we think of God as pure gift--a gift given without any horizon except the gift itself (phenomenologists take note). To flesh out this concept of giveness (i.e., the God who trangresses Being), Marion introduces the notion of love--an idea which, in his view, is still conceptually free enough to allow us to think God without inevitably falling into idolatry. Thus, with the God who "gives" himself as "agape," Marion believes he has found a way of thinking of God without recourse to the category of being--and more importantly, without the erection of a conceptual idol.

This text is profound in every sense of the word and merits numerous rereadings. In fact, anyone who wants to be conversant with "cutting-edge" Christian theology at the beginning of the 21st century will need to know this book well.

That said, Marion's language is often dense and, quite frankly, obscure. The sentences are long and jargon-filled, and the precise structure of his arguments is not always clear. In any case, however, God Without Being merits the attention it has received. A close, reflective reading will not go unrewarded.

Adam Glover

In this tome heavily influenced by Continental theology and philosophy, the author argues that true love theology needs to abandon all metaphysics of the subject. It needs to embrace a revelation-based strategy for Christian love theology, not requiring any co-relational stance between theology and modernity. God's revelation of love is a pure gift beyond reason and incomprehensible. Marion's conversation partners in this book include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.

Theology is only proper when done within the horizon of God's own self-revelation as agape. While God exists, Marion does not believe that one ought to ascribe being to God. "Under the title, `God Without Being,'" explains Marion, "I am attempting to bring out the absolute freedom of God with regard to all determinations, including, first of all, the basic condition that renders all other conditions possible and even necessary - for us, humans, the fact of Being" (xx).

While for humans it is necessary to be in order to love, "God is love" comes before "God as Being." God's primary theological name is charity, and in this sense Marion's enterprise is postmodern and similar to Derrida. Marion concludes by suggesting that what can be known about God comes only in so far as God gives Himself as a gift, the "gift gives only itself."

Thomas Jay Oord

Marion, in this wonderful book, posits a God who is beyond Being. He first discusses the difference between an idol and an icon. An idol reflects the gaze of being back to him or herself. Idols are inherently limited by the essence and mind of the being who sees and/or thinks of them. Icons, on the other hand, provide the transcendent a face through which to gaze at being. Through this gaze, being is changed. Nietzsche and Heidegger show us that various conceptions of "God" are but idols. The moral god is a product of human ideals. The metaphysical god of the first cause is another reflection of human limitation. Even the god of Being is not the true God as Heidegger contends. Therefore, Marion understands that God loves prior to being. Love transcends contingent categories and is purely given. God is pure agape and is made known through revelation in the icon of Jesus Christ. As God gazes back at being, vanity is reversed. God is revealed through the eucharistic presence that is the source of theology.

This book is difficult to read. However, the reader who struggles through will be rewarded. When all is said and done, Marion offers a thoroughly Christian account of the divine in a philosophically rigorous way.

Marion rides the cutting edge of both theology and philosophy. He is a postmodern in the most brilliant sense of the word and already seems to be leaving such philosophers as Derrida and Foucault behind. Much like Kant and Heidegger, Marion is creating his own system and lingo- philosophers and theologians alike need to become familiar with his thought. This is a fantastic book and will undoubtedly take its place in the western cannon of philosophical thought.

Jean-Luc Marion's text is a destruction and deconstruction of philosophical idols. His thesis is fairly simple but profound: discourse on "being," that God before all else has to be (2). This is not yet the problem, however. As metaphysics developed, God become confused with being. Eventually, theologians and philosophers found that God was conceivable to the degree that metaphysics understood him. In short, metaphysics limited God (34). How then does one speak of God? Does suggesting that God is without being mean that God doesn't exist? No, for Marion suggests that before God "is," he gives. He comes to us in the Eucharist.

Marion rightly notes that philosophical talk about God is often idolatrous. Metaphysics created God after its own image. This leads into Marion's discussion of the "idol and the icon." (The next 150 pages are remarkably dense.) Marion starts off well but it is hard to see how he doesn't beg the question and also what he is actually trying to say. I like his discussion on "the icon." At surface level it is a good meditation on Christian aesthetics. But one gets the impression that Marion is not using "icon" in the sense that the Orthodox use it (though at times he is). Marion says the idol's gaze is wrong because it freezes on the watcher, but the icon is actually looking at him who is looking at me. The icon's gaze pierces reality. Okay, I agree but how is this statement not begging the question? Marion never made it clear how the icon's gaze doesn't deconstruct back to the idol's gaze.

Marion later moves into a moving discussion on Christian hermeneutics. More so than most theologians, Marion is keen to the challenges that Derrida and Nietzsche pose to Christianity--and to the opportunities available. The problem is the "gap" between text and reality. One can read of the Easter "event," but one is only reading of it. One is still removed from the event. A Christ-hermeneutics, however, bridges the gap between text and reality in the Eucharist (150). A fascinating discussion with much passion and promise, but one wishes that Marion would have spent more time on this.

Conclusion
This book started off well with references to Gilson's work on "Being" as well as other moves in Thomism. And the thesis is sound and simple enough. But even those readers who are well-read in philosophy will wonder what Marion is trying to say. This book could have easily been 80 pages long and the reader would not be at a loss. Marion spent too little time on the clear parts and too much time on the dense parts (without making them clearer). Still, there are many good meditations and it is worth re-reading parts of the book.

I'll be the dissident here, and not allow Marion's preoccupation with the torturous perplexities (mysteries? come on) of Catholic rites to go by, unnoted. Maybe uncharitably, they drove a fatal stake through the heart of this work and acted to my ears (not Catholic, post-religious) as esoteric, obscure, code-laden nuisances, distractions and degradations of a very important theme: God Without Being.
I picked up this book (from Amazon.com) as part of a project of study on Marion. His work on probing givenness as primordial is seminal and offers a huge step toward reorienting our discernment to originary and generative moments. I hoped that this work would directly and thoroughly address the notion of Godness in all its forms (theistic and atheistic) and provide something like a successor to Schelling's God before God. Instead this ends up being a repositioning of sectarian rites, especially the Eucharist. Enough said.
This book seems more like an insider''s epistle to the priests (and bishops, apparently) of his training. It feels to me as though it was offered in order to reassure and explain how his truly radical philosophical work need not be taken as ingratitude (in the manner of Descarte's or Galileo's confessions), as irreligiosity, or, perish the thought, heresy.
As a non-Catholic (or as one for whom this brand of sanctity has no resonance whatsoever), I have no idea how the multiple inversions and transpositions he has to effect will set with his theological mentors.
Really,, I have to ask, who among those who share Marion's philosophical trajectory has any need for a Eucharist, and for those who do, why on earth would such an apology suffice? I come away from this book with the feeling of being present at the inquisition that condemned Meister Eckhart, hearing this great epochal spirit trying to edify the deaf, elevate the immovable and elucidate the blind. Wouldn't it be the case that those for whom the Eucharist is still at stake gain nothing from these tortured permutations because their faith and charity is well in effect? And wouldin't it also be the case the for those who dispense this rite, it is a matter of power, and so faith and charity are not at issue? In either case, isn't the being of God precisely what they invoke? Who is he talking to? Clearly, not the choir.
I hope this volume helped Marion confess his faith, but those seeking a sense of a new orientation to the human endeavor would benefit more from other works by him, such as Being Given (especially) and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena.
My three stars testify to my deep appreciation of this man's epochal work.