Jean-Luc Marion Quotes on God
Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being (1982) and Being Given (1997) develop the most influential contemporary phenomenology of religion. The principal thesis is that the metaphysical concept of God as supreme being — Aquinas's ipsum esse subsistens, the causa sui Heidegger criticized as the God of onto-theology — substitutes a philosophical idol for the God of biblical revelation, and that the proper philosophical access to the divine reality is through the analysis of the saturated phenomenon: phenomena (the event, the work of art, the icon, the flesh, the gift, revelation) in which intuition exceeds intention rather than falling short of it. The framework develops the Husserlian phenomenological program in directions Husserl himself did not pursue, and engages closely with Levinas and the post-Heideggerian French phenomenological tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“God gives Himself to be thought outside of being.”
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Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“Love does not have to be in order to give itself.”
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“What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.”
p. 3 -
“The gaze strains itself to see the divine, to see it by taking it up into the field of the gazeable. The more powerfully the aim is deployed, the longer it sustains itself, the richer, more extensive and more sumptuous will appear the idol on which it will stop its gaze. ... In this stop, the gaze ceases to overshoot and transpierce itself, hence it ceases to transpierce visible things, in order to pause in the splendor of one of them.”
p. 11 -
“Any access to something like "God," precisely because of the aim of Being as such, will have to determine him in advance as a being. The precomprehension of "God" as being is self-evident to the point of exhausting in advance "God" as a question.”
p. 43