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

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.


"If 'God is love,' then God loves before being."   March 24, 2001
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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.