SOPHIA (2017) 56:15–31

DOI 10.1007/s11841-017-0576-y

Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist: Hart’s

Theological Criticism of Marion

Bradley B. Onishi 1

Published online: 23 February 2017

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Abstract In 2013, the first reader of Jean-Luc Marion’s works appeared, Jean-Luc
Marion: The Essential Writings, meticulously edited by his friend and colleague Kevin
Hart. Yet, if the appearance of volume marked Marion’s status as France’s most
influential living philosopher, Hart’s Kingdoms of God marks the beginning of a
systematic theology long in the making. In addition to serving as the prologemenon
to his planned systematics, the work also serves to differentiate Hart’s phenomenolog-
ical theology from Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and doctrine of revelation
through the rendering of what Hart calls the basilaic reduction, on the basis of which
Hart builds a twofold theological criticism of Marion. He first criticizes Marion’s claim
that revelation can gain phenomenological status like ordinary phenomena, and second
contests the notion that revelation is always characterized by a saturation that bedazzles
its receiver. I explore each thinker’s approach to the relationship between philosophy
and theology, using their engagements with the works of Jacques Derrida and Karl
Barth as points of comparison in order to contextualize Hart’s theological criticisms of
Marion. I conclude by arguing that Hart’s, rather than Marion’s, approach to the
relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of
the second generation of the Btheological turn^ of French phenomenology.

Keywords Kevin Hart . Jean-Luc Marion . Phenomenology . Theological turn . Derrida .

Barth . Kingdoms of God

In 2013, the first reader of Jean-Luc Marion’s works appeared, Jean-Luc Marion: The
Essential Writings, meticulously edited by his friend and colleague Kevin Hart.1 Yet, if

1
Kevin Hart, ed., Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013).

* Bradley B. Onishi
Bradley.b.onishi@gmail.com

1
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA
16 B.B. Onishi

the appearance of volume marked Marion’s status as France’s most influential living
philosopher, Hart’s Kingdoms of God2 marks the beginning of a systematic theology
long in the making. In addition to serving as the prologemenon to his planned
systematics, the work also serves to differentiate Hart’s phenomenological theology
from Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and doctrine of revelation through the
rendering of what Hart calls the basilaic reduction, on the basis of which Hart builds a
twofold theological criticism of Marion. He first criticizes Marion’s claim that revela-
tion can gain phenomenological status like ordinary phenomena, and second contests
the notion that revelation is always characterized by a saturation that bedazzles its
receiver. In what follows, I explore each thinker’s approach to the relationship between
philosophy and theology, using their engagements with the works of Jacques Derrida
and Karl Barth as points of comparison in order to contextualize Hart’s theological
criticisms of Marion. I conclude by arguing that Hart’s, rather than Marion’s, approach
to the relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns
of the second generation of the Btheological turn^ of French phenomenology.

Hart, Derrida, and Deconstruction

From Trespass of the Sign 3 to Kingdom’s of God, Hart engages phenomenology,

deconstruction, and literary criticism as helpful tools for his constructive theological
project. In terms of the relationship between philosophy and theology, for Hart the
surprising relationships that have developed between Christianity and phenomenology,
and Christianity and poststructuralism, are best understood in terms of their shared
structural concerns, such as the desire to resist metaphysics, the theme of the apophatic,
and making manifest often hidden phenomena, rather than their attempts to think
religion anew.
This approach is manifest in Hart’s seminal Trespass of the Sign (1988), where Hart
reckons with Derridean deconstruction in order to enable theology to cleanse itself
and prevent itself from falling into metaphysics. Hart clarifies in the Preface to the
first edition of Trespass of the Sign that his interest ‘is in bringing deconstruction
into conversation with Christian theology rather than confirming Derrida’s individ-
ual programme,’ 4 because ‘What is remarkable in Derrida’s work is his persistent
translation of local thematic concerns into structural questions, and these inevitably
touch on Christianity.’5 Trespass of the Sign is, among other things, an investigation
into how deconstruction provides a way to ‘trace and circumscribe metaphysics
within theology.’ 6 Moreover, deconstruction is not, according to Hart, an attack
upon religious belief, but as a ‘critique of theism,’ an attack aimed at ‘the use to
which BGod^ is put’ but not one that makes any claim to the ‘reality of God.’ 7 In

2
Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Hereafter cited in text.
3
Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 2nd Ed. (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2000).
4
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxiv.
5
Hart, Trespass, xxxiv.
6
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxv.
7
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, p. 27.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 17

other words, even if at first glance religious belief may seem to be an obvious
target for deconstruction, Hart argues that deconstruction would have its eyes
solely on the metaphysical elements that contaminate such belief. Thus, in his
view deconstruction is not an attack against theology but an answer to the
‘theological demand for a Bnon-metaphysical theology^.’ 8 Mirroring the ap-
proach to phenomenology offered by Kingdoms of God, in Trespass of the
Sign, Hart maintains that deconstruction is neutral when it comes to question of
whether or not God exists, and is instead a strategy aimed at uncovering and
attenuating the metaphysical presuppositions of any text or system, including
theological ones.
As I have explored elsewhere, 9 in Trespass of the Sign, Hart applies this
strategy by drawing out the difference between theion and theos, which he
credits to Aristotle, who believed that metaphysics is the study of ‘being qua
being.’ 10 Heidegger provided insight into Aristotle’s formula by pointing out
that metaphysics can be either a questioning of Being as such, or a study of
beings as a whole. Aristotle calls the latter ‘theology’ because, according to
Hart, ‘the quest is for the ground of beings as a whole, and as this highest
ground is known in Greek as the theion, this enterprise is to be called
Btheology^.’ 11 Therefore, it could be more accurately called theiology, since it
is the attempt to understand the existence of all beings through an organizing
and constitutive being—the study of all beings through their founding principle
and cause, theion. In this sense, the criticism of metaphysics or onto-theology
attacks a certain type of metaphysics that interprets Being through a highest
being [theion]. Heidegger’s and Derrida’s criticisms of metaphysics, which
include attacks on theology, are not, in Hart’s mind, directed at Christian
theology as such, but at theiology, wherever and however it may manifest
itself: ‘Thus when Heidegger and Derrida talk of metaphysics as theology, or
about the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics, they are making claims
about philosophy’s internal logic and historical destiny, not about its relations—
historical or conceptual, overt or covert—with religion.’ 12 Hart argues that
although Christian theology may often degenerate into this type of metaphysics,
when it does so it is not properly theological. Deconstruction discloses meta-
physical elements in theology and thereby prevents the theiological from
contaminating the theological
Overall, Hart’s early reading of Derrida is theologically motivated. His purpose is
not to confirm Derrida’s thought in itself, but to forge a pathway to a non-metaphysical
theology through insights gleaned from deconstruction. By contrast to his contempo-
rary John Caputo, Hart does not see deconstruction as a means for qualitatively
changing theology. Instead, it is a tool utilized for protecting it.

8
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, xxxv.
9
Bradley B. Onishi, BThe Beginning, Not the End: On Continental Philosophy of Religion and Religious
Studies,^ Journal of the American Academy of Religion (April 28, 2016), doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw032.
10
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 77.
11
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 77.
12
Hart, Trespass of the Sign, 282.
18 B.B. Onishi

Hart’s Phenomenological Theology

Examining Hart’s early engagement with Derrida in Trespass of the Sign provides a
lens for understanding how he structures his phenomenological theology in Kingdoms
of God. In brief, we can say that, on the one hand, Hart resists translating the specificity
of Christian revelation into a universal hope for the Kingdom, as John Caputo does
through his Derridean ‘theology without theology.’13 On the other hand, Hart maintains
the theological limitations of phenomenology for providing evidence for Christian
revelation in ways critical of Marion’s phenomenological theologia naturalis. Instead,
he uses phenomenology as a tool for explaining how Jesus transposes his listeners from
worldly logic to the logic of the Kingdom. Phenomenology has no authority over the
content of Christian theology, nor does it provide a philosophical standard for revela-
tion. It is a means for clarifying the transition from the world to the Kingdom.
In ‘Phenomenology of the Christ,’ Hart sets forth the departure point for his
phenomenological theology:

A phenomenological theology would begin with Jesus as phenomenon, given to

us in scripture, with a determinate material core, as seen, heard, questioned,
believed in, and rejected; and detailed attention would have to be given to his
relations with his followers and critics, his styles of teaching, his understanding of
the Sabbath, his prohibition of oaths, his sense of purity laws, his exorcisms,
healings, miracles, and inevitably his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascen-
sion. (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 144)

As a theologian, even, or especially, a phenomenological one, Hart’s interest is not in

the historical Jesus, but in the ‘testified Jesus’ to whom the community of the faithful
responds and adheres. Thus, his theology begins with the Jesus of the Gospels.
The usefulness of phenomenology for approaching the testified Jesus is evident in
‘The Manifestation of the Father,’ in which Hart provides a detailed reading of the
Parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15. His phenomenological reading of the
parable hinges not on ‘historical reason,’ but learns from phenomenology’s ‘principle
of principles, and so makes no pre-judgment about the status of evidence. In phenom-
enology, the evidence that counts is Evidenz, the making evident of something, and no
rules are set in place to limit what makes itself evident’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p.
130). The ‘principle of principles’ states: ‘everything originarily…offered to us in
intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within
the limits in which it is presented there’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 130). Hart is
interested in what ‘eidetic possibilities’ the parable gives to the reader, and how these
are possibilities are made manifest, not the historical or logical reasons for believing the
parable is revelatory:

No judgment is made in phenomenology about the right and wrongs of belief or

non-belief with regards to what scripture tell us. Phenomenology merely allows
the full range of Evidenz to be received, and when reading a text it may take a

13
John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2006).
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 19

great many readings for it to be received. Each reader is given eidetic possibilities
in the parable; no reader is asked in phenomenology to realize them or not to
realize them in his or her own life. (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 130)

Clearly, phenomenology is not the standard that theological reasoning must bear, nor
does it have any sort of theological authority. It is a means by which Hart can explain
the revelation of God to humanity through, and as, Jesus the Christ.
The questions now become: What does Hart believe is ‘offered to us in intuition’ in
the Gospels? And how is it offered? Hart addresses these through the formulation of the
basilaic reduction. Contemporary phenomenology has focused significant attention to
widening the phenomenological reductions of Husserl and Heidegger in order to
address once excluded phenomena. The most influential example is Jean-Luc Marion’s
third reduction, which operates according to the rule, ‘as much reduction, as much
givenness.’14 According to Marion, the reduction of givenness, by contrast to Husserl’s
reduction to transcendental consciousness or Heidegger’s reduction to Being, enables
phenomena to appear which saturate the intuition and thereby give themselves before
they appear. All three of these reductions seek to open a field wherein intuition can be
offered the widest possible phenomena—they reflect an ever-widening lens through
which phenomena can phenomenalize, or in Marion’s view, give themselves.
By contrast, Hart argues that through the parable Jesus ‘leads us from using a
worldly logic—one involving exchange, honor, law, and convention—to using a divine
logic, one based on compassion and forgiveness’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 131). In
doing so, the testified Jesus of the Gospel opens the possibility of passing from the
‘world’ to the Kingdom:

In telling a story, Jesus brackets everyday life and its worldly logic in order to
lead those who hear him to a deeper place. So epoché and reduction: but not a
reduction from transcendence to immanence of transcendental consciousness, as
Husserl taught, or a reduction from beings to being, as Heidegger proposed, or
even a reduction from both to givenness, as Marion commends....We pass from
‘world’ to Basileia, from every inflection of ‘world…to ‘Kingdom.’… (Hart,
Kingdoms of God, p. 131)

What distinguishes the basilaic reduction as a theological reduction from the

philosophical reductions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Marion is ‘the counter-
intentionality in which the parable confronts us’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 149). It
is not that the parable gives itself as a phenomenon that saturates the intuition, thereby
countering its intentionality, as in Marion’s phenomenon of revelation (which I will
consider below). Rather, the parable ‘stirs us to look and to see something that we
cannot see by our own efforts. So there is no first move in which we suspend the natural
attitude and, by passing to transcendental consciousness, constitute God—make him
present—as he appears on our intentional horizons’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 149).
According to Hart, what is given through the parable is something intuition could have

14
Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology,
trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 203 (translation slightly
altered).
20 B.B. Onishi

never made manifest apart from the revelatory reduction of Jesus’s story: ‘what seems
to make up life for us, to be a rich totality, is suspended and we are led back to
something that lays claim on us (before these things take hold)’ (Hart, Kingdoms of
God, pp. 150–151). Hart thus recognizes with Husserl that God, or God’s Kingdom,
cannot be reduced by even the ‘subtlest’ or most cunning phenomenologist:

Phenomenological theology, as I propose it, would therefore run in quite the

opposite direction to that of most classical phenomenology. Husserl tells us that
we cannot bring God to consciousness because his mode of transcendence
exceeds all intentional rapports. He is correct in his reasoning but misses the
opportunity to see that we are reduced, not God. (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 152)

According to the basilaic reduction, instead of us reducing the revelation of God,

God reduces us, because Jesus brings phenomena to bear on his listeners that could not
have been given or phenomenalized apart from God’s self-giving of himself.
Moreover, not only are we reduced, but Jesus is the phenomenologist who performs
the reduction. As the revelation of God, according to Hart, Jesus ‘is held to have
revelatory authority, and this situation obtains because only Jesus is one with the Father.
All other parables are, as Barth says, secular parables of the Kingdom; they may
generally point us to it but only Jesus can reveal it to us’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p.
136). The Father remains hidden, but Jesus’s reduction brings to the ‘horizon of
appearing…the kingly rule of the Father, what Jesus calls the Basileia’ (Hart, Kingdoms
of God, p. 144). By envisioning Jesus as the unique revelatory phenomenologist of the
Kingdom, the one through whose unity with the Father the Kingdom is
phenomenalized, Hart realizes that one must accept that Jesus is the revelation of
God in order to for such a reduction to take place. As I will argue, by contrast to
Marion, Hart is uninterested in providing philosophical evidence for such authority,
since in his view ‘Most Christians, however, make an act of faith on the basis of
testimony that has become concrete in the context of a community and a tradition, and
not just on a possibility that comes into view’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 142). Hart’s
engagement with philosophy is always executed in order to theologize better, as
Emmanuel Falque would say.15 His interest is not in laying the philosophical grounds
for faith, but in articulating the structure and contours of how faith works in relation to
God’s self-revelation:

Yet Christianity is finally not a matter of bringing God to presence in human

consciousness but rather of allowing oneself to come into the presence of God,
the two modes of ‘presence’ being quite different, one a matter of presence to
consciousness, cashed out (if one can) as knowledge, and the other a matter of
agape. If taken alone, as a relentless hunger for proof or experience of God, the
quest to make God present leads to pride or conceptual idolatry, while the trust
that we are present to God is the very meaning of ‘faith’ (fides qua). (Hart,
Kingdoms of God, p. 147)

15
See, Emmanuel Falque, Passer le rubicon : Philosophie et théologie : essai sur les frontières (Bruxelles:
Editions Lessius, 2013).
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 21

Hart’s deep engagement with phenomenology enables him to articulate the giving of
revelation in Jesus as the phenomenality of the Kingdom, whereby the Father remains
hidden, but nonetheless ushers the faithful into his presence. What results is that ‘God
has become thinkable for us, not as an extraordinary item in reality, or even the ground
of reality, but as given in and through a story of the Basileia…To call God BFather^ is
to know him by way of a relation, not as a being or an essence’ (Hart, Kingdoms of
God, p. 146). On Hart’s account, on the basis of faith one might, and can, see eidetic
possibilities revealed in the Jesus of the Gospels that lead one back from the world to
the Kingdom, but the vision of such possibilities and the faith on which such vision is
possible are not philosophically legitimated through the Jesus of the Gospels, nor
through Hart’s phenomenological theology. They are possibilities conditioned by God’s
self-giving.
Before coming to Hart’s criticisms of Marion, it is important to point out the
Barthian resonances in Hart’s approach to revelation. In the Preface to the 2000 edition
of Trespass of the Sign, Hart explains that when his fellow university students gravi-
tated toward Neo-Orthodoxy they considered his ontological realism out of place.16 He
recounts that during a fellowship year at Stanford he quite often read Hegel in the
morning and Barth after lunch. Yet, Hart criticizes Barth for limiting the role of the
human subject in the God-human relationship and dismisses the enduring impact of
Barth on his theology by explaining that by turning to continental philosophy and the
mystical traditions. ‘I had slipped away from the neoliberalism of my education,’ Hart
writes, but ‘without being tempted to embrace neo-orthodoxy.’17 In his view, even if
Barth had showed him the mistake of viewing God ‘through the lens of metaphysics,’
he left him behind for Derrida, Blanchot, Lévinas, and other philosophers on one hand,
and Augustine, Dionysius, Eckhart, and other mystics on the other hand.
However, Hart’s approach to revelation in Kingdoms of God echoes of Barth’s
theology in that Hart maintains that God ‘We cannot figure God as phenomenon,’
even if God reveals his Kingdom through Jesus. Instead, God’s revelation is always
simultaneously a revealing and a re-veiling ‘in order to preserve his holiness and to
safeguard us against its blinding presence’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 136). Barth
takes a similar approach in Dogmatics II.1, ‘We can ask only about its concrete
possibility as definitely present already in its actual fulfillment.’18 Hart reiterates this
statement in his introduction to Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, where he
maintains that God is not an ‘eidetic possibility,’ but, ‘an existential reality in which one
finds oneself confronted by God.’19 Even if Hart engages ‘secular’ philosophy in ways
to which Barth would most likely object, Hart maintains that theology begins with the
revelation of God through Jesus Christ, a revelation in which God never becomes a
human possibility, that is to say a phenomenon in the philosophical sense, but in which
he reveals himself by veiling himself. Barth articulates this clearly in Dogmatics I.1:

In dogmatics the Church has to measure its talk about God by the standard of its
own being, i.e., of divine revelation. Its talk about God, however, is that of the
16
Hart, Trespass, x.
17
Hart, Trespass, xv.
18
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Volume 2, Part 1: The Doctrine of God (London:
Bloomsbury T and T Clark, 2004), p. 64.
19
Kevin Hart, BIntroduction,^ to Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, p. 29.
22 B.B. Onishi

intrinsically godless reason of man which is inimical to belief. At every point,

therefore, dogmatics is a struggle between this reason of man and the revelation
believed in the Church.20

Like Barth, Hart argues that revelation is ‘completely new,’ a disruption of human
possibility, and thereby a discontinuation of truth in the scientific and philosophical
senses (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 68). Theology is at its core a means of clarifying
how to understand God’s revelation in light of its dissonance with human thought. Even
if Hart employs phenomenology for such a clarification, it is in order to help with the
‘struggle’ of reflecting on the confrontation between revelation and reason, rather than
as a theological standard or authority.

Marion and Derrida on the Limits of Phenomenology

Whereas Hart uses Derridean deconstruction as a theological tool, Marion confronts

Derrida’s thought as a significant barrier in the formulation of the phenomenon of
revelation. Their rivalry is iconically exemplified in the 1997 roundtable at Villanova
University, where the two men laid out different approaches to the ‘gift’ based on their
respective understandings of the limits of phenomenology, experience, and knowledge.
The debate was significant for numerous reasons, the most important of which was the
foregrounding of the divergence between Derrida’s poststructuralist, thanatological
reading and Marion’s more theologically and phenomenologically inclined
interpretation.
For Derrida, the gift signifies a description of the paradoxical desire to experience
the impossible. Echoing of Heidegger’s thanatology, Derrida speaks of the gift as the
inexperienceable and unknowable condition of desire: ‘What I am interested in is the
experience of the desire for the impossible. That is, the impossible as the condition of
desire.’ 21 Such desire is paradoxical, because if the gift appeared as such it would
foreclose the loop of desire altogether. In his mind, the gift does not exist as such, but
nonetheless ‘I never concluded there was no gift.’ 22 The gift is thinkable, but
inexperiencable and unknowable, and thereby totally heterogeneous to phenomenolog-
ical identification:

… the famous distinction that Kant made between knowing and thinking for
instance. The gift, I would claim, I would argue, as such cannot be known; as
soon as you know it, you destroy it. So the gift as such is impossible....The gift as
such cannot be known, but it can be thought of....But there is something in excess
of knowledge.23

20
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, Volume 1, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God
(London: Bloomsbury T and T Clark, 2004), 28–29.
21
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, David Wills, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 72.
22
Jacques Derrida, BOn the Gift,^ in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J.
Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 60.
23
Derrida, BOn the Gift,^ p. 60.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 23

Following Heidegger, Derrida maintains death is the impossible possibility that

gives makes each human irreplaceable. Thus, gift, figured in terms of death, is always
desired but never experienced, because to experience it would be to negate the
condition for the desiring subject. In this sense, the inexhaustible desire for the
impossible is generated by its insurmountable distance.
If Derrida’s approach to gift as the impossible is characterized by a ‘generous’
lack, as Thomas Carlson calls it, Marion’s is constituted by an overwhelming
excess. 24 Marion maintains, ‘We can describe the gift outside of the horizon of
economy in such a way that new phenomenological rules appear. For instance, the
gift or the given phenomenon has no cause and does not need any.’25 Distinct from
ordinary phenomena, the phenomenological rules of the gift ‘are completely
different from those that are applied to the object or to the being.’ 26 In order to
make room for the appearance of such phenomena, Marion attempts to redraw the
boundaries of phenomenology through a phenomenology ‘without horizon,’27 by
which he means a phenomenology not limited by Husserl’s transcendental reduc-
tion or Heidegger’s ontological reduction. According to Marion’s third reduction,
‘as much reduction, as much givenness,’28 certain phenomena give themselves in a
way that overwhelms intuition, thereby making them invisible to it. They exceed
the limitations of the human’s ability to intuit or comprehend them. Instead of
being constituted by human intuition, these ‘saturated phenomena’ constitute the
subject through an overwhelming surplus of givenness.
Thus, saturated phenomena are those that appear apart from any dependence on or
relation to a human horizon, reconstituting the conditions of experience and knowledge
in the process, as Marion outlines in Being Given: ‘I must describe the characteristics of
a phenomenon that, in contrast to the majority of phenomena, poor in intuition or
defined by the ideal adequation of intuition to intention, would receive a surplus of
intuition, therefore of givenness, over and above intention, the concept, and the
intended.’ 29 When a saturated phenomenon gives itself, the subject is overwhelmed
and bedazzled. Instead of constituting the phenomenon, the ‘I’ is constituted, trans-
formed from the active ego to the passive adonnée, or the gifted:

The interloqué suffers a call so powerful and compelling that he must surrender
(s’y rendre) to it, in the double sense of the French s’y rendre: being displaced and
submitting to it. Thus he must renounce the autarchy of self-positing and self-
actualizing. It is insofar as altered by the originary hearing that he acknowledges
himself possibility identified. The pure and simple shock [Anstoss] of the sum-
mons identifies the I only by transforming it without delay into a me ‘to whom.’30

24
Thomas A. Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Naming of the Human (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 206.
25
Jean-Luc Marion, BOn the Gift,^ in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J.
Scanlon, (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 63.
26
Jean-Luc Marion, BOn the Gift,^ p. 62.
27
Marion, BOn the Gift,^ p. 66.
28
Marion, Reduction and Givenness, p. 203.
29
Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 199.
30
Marion, Being Given, p. 268.
24 B.B. Onishi

In this way, that which constitutes or founds the self is presented to the self,
rather than constituting the subject through its absence, as in Heidegger’s
analysis of Dasein’s Being-towards-death: ‘Receiving himself from the call that
summons him, the gift is therefore open to an alterity, from which the Other
can be lacking but who thus appears all the more.’31 On Marion’s account, the
Other’s seeming absence is really its presence, wrought by an excess of
givenness.
According to Marion, the openness to alterity revealed by the possibility of
saturated phenomena opens phenomenology to phenomena that exceed or satu-
rate human intuition, including those that possibly come from beyond the
Kantian limits of space and time. Those familiar with Marion’s work know
this leads directly to the phenomenological possibility of revelation. For Mar-
ion, there should be no surprise that ‘one inquires after God’s right to inscribe
himself within phenomenality,’ but rather that ‘one should be stubborn…about
denying him this right’ and further that ‘one is no longer even surprised by this
pigheaded refusal.’ 32 On his reading, the phenomenon of revelation is that
phenomenon which ‘concentrates the four types of saturated phenomena’ there-
by saturating saturation. Revelation is the paradox of paradoxes or the ‘possi-
bility of impossibility.’33
Yet, with regard to the giving of revelation, Marion is clear that phenomenology
must somehow remain the possibility of impossibility, but not, in phenomenological
terms, an actuality:

Nevertheless, the phenomenon of revelation remains a mere possibility. I

am going to describe it without presupposing its actuality, and yet all the
while propose a precise figure for it. I will say only: if an actual
revelation must, can, or could have been given in phenomenal apparition,
it could have, can, or will be able to do so only by giving itself according
to the type of the paradox par excellence—such as I will describe it.
Phenomenology cannot decide itself if a revelation can or should ever
give itself, but it (and it alone) can determine that, in case it does, such a
phenomenon of revelation should assume the figure of the paradox of
paradoxes.34

As Marion’s readers are well aware, in his mind it is philosophically possible to

describe the possibility of revelation as saturated phenomenon, even if it is philosoph-
ically impossible to attest to the actuality of such a revelation. In both Being Given and
in the transcript from the roundtable with Derrida, Marion is clear that his phenome-
nology of givenness remains free of theological presuppositions, which he says would
‘ruin’ his phenomenological project.35

31
Marion, Being Given, p. 269.
32
Marion, Being Given, p. 243.
33
Marion, Being Given, p. 236.
34
Marion, Being Given, p. 235.
35
Marion, BOn the Gift,^ p. 70.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 25

Revelation and Givenness

One of the enduring questions surrounding Marion’s account of the excess of givenness
and saturated phenomena is how such phenomena give themselves if their excess
renders them invisible to intuition. 36 If humans can’t hear the high-pitched sound of
a dog whistle, how can they witness the blinding light of revelation? And can this
question be answered without recourse to theology? Marion provides his most
sustained answer to these questions in Revelation and Givenness, the published
transcript of his 2014 Gifford Lectures. 37 While serving to answer critics who claim
he has not provided a sufficient answer as to how one receives the giving of saturated
phenomena, Revelation and Givenness also serves as a window into Marion’s under-
standing of the relationship between philosophy and theology. As I have suggested,
Marion has been consistently clear that his phenomenology relies on no theological
basis. His account of saturated phenomena in general and the phenomenon of revela-
tion in particular are, according to him, part of the ever-widening scope of phenome-
nology during the last half century.
However, this has not prevented him from articulating the theological ramifications
of his phenomenology. David Jasper and Ramona Fotiade are accurate when they say
that Revelation and Givenness ‘arises from an initial reappraisal of the tension between
Bnatural theology^ and the Brevealed knowledge of God^ or sacra doctrina.’38 On one
hand, throughout the lectures, Marion maintains that it is possible to conceive of
revelation philosophically as a transgression of the limits of Kantian reason. 39 This
clearly sets him on the theological side of those, such as Karl Barth and his former co-
editor of Communio, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who maintain that knowledge of
revelation is a matter of faith, not science, and thus cannot be apprehended on the
basis of natural reason. Following Augustine and William of St. Thierry, according to
Marion, one is first drawn to revelation on the basis of love, not reason. Love’s
attraction ‘acts first on the will, which then makes the reason choose to see what it
would otherwise not will to see.’40 In a manner resonant with the apophatic theology of
his early The Idol and Distance,41 Marion argues that once love has shaped the will to
believe, one can receive, or see, phenomena that would not appear otherwise: ‘no one
can see that which is uncovered (apokalypsis) unless he believes it; but no one can
believe if he does not will it, and no one can will unless he loves what he believes and
wills to will.’ 42 Leaving aside questions surrounding the electionist tones of this
passage, it is clear that for Marion revelation is available only to those whose will
has been converted by the attraction of love, which means those who do not believe

36
See, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2014); and Matthew I. Burch, BBlurred Vision: Marion on the Possibility of
Revelation,^ in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67, no.3 (June 2010), pp. 157–171.
37
Jean-Luc Marion, Revelation and Givenness, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016).
38
David Jasper and Ramona Fotiade, BJean-Luc Marion: A Reflection,^ foreword to Marion, Revelation and
Givenness, v.
39
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 32.
40
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 41.
41
Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York, NY: Fordham
University Press, 2001).
42
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 45.
26 B.B. Onishi

cannot receive it. This is an affront to human reason, but one Marion is comfortable he
has explained by way of the saturated phenomenon. If one does not receive the excess
of the saturated phenomena, it doesn’t mean it’s not there; it might mean that the subject
has yet to be converted to a witness who can receive it.
In the second lecture, Marion openly juxtaposes his account of revelation to Barth’s.
In Dogmatics II.1 Barth explains the reception of revelation through his famous
analogia fidei in ways that would seem to foreshadow Marion’s:

Therefore, we can find it, not in a place where to some degree we already have
and take it for ourselves, not in an already existent analogy, but only in an
analogy to be created by God’s grace, the analogy of grace and faith to which
we say Yes as to the inaccessible which is made accessible to us in incompre-
hensible reality.43

By contrast to an analogia entis, which claims revelation and Being fall on the same
continuum, thus reducing God to Being in ways objectionable to both Barth and
Marion, the analogy of faith recognizes the inaccessibility of revelation apart from
faith, as Marion argues:

This logical figure of phenomenality and experience that contradicts the condi-
tions of experience of course cannot keep us from thinking of the radical
description of Revelation that Karl Barth as theologian made widely known:
the auto-manifestation of God by himself enters into the experience of men like a
suddenly falling rock, undoing everything with its impact.44

For Barth, to posit the knowledge of the Word as ‘a generally demonstrable religious
capacity of man’ is to exit the domain of theology for the domain of anthropology:

If we apply it to what we in our vocabulary call the doctrine of the Word of God it
means that the real knowledge peculiar to man as such. If we accept this principle,
then the answer to the question of possibility that now concerns us is to be sought
in anthropology, and it is a secondary matter whether we follow the actual
anthropology of Schleiermacher and his school or one more congenial to our
age such as that of M. Heidegger.45

Marion reiterates this same point when criticizing Bultmann and Heidegger, accus-
ing them of limiting revelation to the horizon of Dasein’s Being:

In 1929, Bultmann merely draws the consequences of the phenomenological

definition of theology given by Heidegger in 1927. As Christian religion remains
regional by relation to the analytic of Dasein, faith must be understood as a
tonality of Dasein: ‘Faith is a mode of existence of human Dasein.’ Revelation
hence cannot be understood as the communication of information to Dasein (thus

43
Barth, Dogmatics II.1, p. 85.
44
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 57.
45
Barth, Dogmatics I.1, p. 193.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 27

of other intentional objects) but only as a participation in an event, that of faith

itself. Revelation is confused with ‘the existence of that Revelation has encoun-
tered.’46

Just as Barth contends, Marion argues that this model of revelation forces God to
become ontologically captive to a human horizon. It is a criticism of the analogy of
Being in a phenomenological context:

On the one hand, if the thought of revelation is subjected to the phenomenolog-

ical requirement of being reduced to the immanence of lived experience (or to
modes of existence), hence to the I (or to Dasein), then the revealed is confined to
revealed lived experience (faith, etc.), without any possibility of receiving the
revealed revealing itself. Or, on the other hand, if thought claims to remain open
to revelation as such, it must be liberated from its immanence in the I (or in
Dasein). Because it institutes the I (or Dasein) as the originary instance of
phenomenality, the very concept of reduction damages the possibility of revela-
tion as such.47

For both Barth and Marion, revelation cannot be traced to a ‘religious capacity’ or
‘existential grounding’ of the human because to do so would be to confine revelation to
‘immanence of the I.’
Yet, despite these deep resonances with Barth’s approach to revelation, Marion
wants to radicalize the Swiss Theologian’s approach by confronting the question of
the manifestation of revelation by ‘mastering the possibility of a phenomenality of
saturated phenomena.’ 48 Unlike Barth, who was satisfied with a theology that main-
tained the ‘auto-manifestation of God…like a suddenly falling rock, undoing every-
thing with its impact,’ 49 Marion wants to explain how such a seemingly impossible

46
Jean-Luc Marion, BThe Possible and the Revealed^ in The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), p. 10. Marion’s criticism of Bultmann in this passage makes Emmanuel Falque’s
association of Marion with Bultmann seem somewhat strange: BFar, then, from all the Balthasarian or
Rahnerian tradition, which does not renounce a certain objectivity of revelation (probably due to the Hegelian
and Thomist tradition in theological matters), a unique theologian—Rudolph Bultmann—is linked here with
the thesis put forward by the author, for he too is a phenomenologist by way of being a disciple of Martin
Heidegger.^ Emmanuel Falque, BLarvatus Pro Deo: Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology and Theology^ in
Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University
Press, 2007), p. 193. Here, Falque associates Marion with Bultmann due to their respective treatments of
Heidegger. He later explains this association with Marion’s disinterest in the historical event of the resurrection
in favor of a Bultmannian existential resurrection of spirit: ‘Marion, like Bultmann, having become a
phenomenological disciple of Heidegger, and beyond Husserl, can nevertheless no longer accord his faith
to an objectivity of revelation that, if it is not destroyed by ‘doubt’ (Descartes), is at least suspended in the
epoché (Husserl)’ (p. 194). The passage quoted above contradicts Falque’s argument. Marion cannot accept
Bultmann’s appropriation of Heidegger due to the way in which Bultmann’s Heideggerian theological method
employs the horizon of Being as its fulcrum. In contrast to Falque’s statement, the task of Being Given is to
explain the possibility of an event such as the Resurrection taking place. Marion’s project resembles Barth’s
rejection of historicism as a means of guaranteeing faith, rather than Bultmann’s attempt to translate the
theological understanding of the Resurrection of the Christian tradition into an authentic, existential re-birth
via Heidegger.
47
Marion, BPossible,^ p. 10.
48
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 59.
49
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 57.
28 B.B. Onishi

event is possible, and he takes such an explanation to be a theological, not philosoph-

ical, task:

Thus in theology, the question does not consist in knowing whether Revelation
contradicts the conditions of finite experience—this contradiction characterizes it
analytically, by definition and a priori—but I conceiving how it contradicts them,
and how it nevertheless succeeds in perfectly and definitively being manifested.50

By giving this account of the reception of revelation, Marion is trying to bridge the
gap between his philosophical account of the possibility of revelation and what he takes
to be the actual reception of Revelation by the Christian believer, something he believes
Barth failed to do.51 Without ‘mastering the possibility of a phenomenality of saturated
phenomena,’52 it is impossible, on Marion’s reading, to answer the theological question
of how revelation manifests itself as a contradiction of finite experience. In other words,
without a philosophy of revelation, a theology of revelation is insufficient. We must not
forget that a main goal of Marion’s phenomenological project is to demonstrate
philosophically the possibility of revelation, and thus his formulation of the phenom-
enon of revelation is in some sense a new theologia naturalis that aims to demonstrate
the plausibility of belief in God.53 In this sense, Marion’s radicalization of Barth is an
attempt to bridge the contours of a revelation-centric theology with the apologetic task
of natural theology.

Hart’s Criticism of Marion’s Phenomenology of Revelation

If Hart gives a phenomenological account of the specific way that Jesus opens up the
alterity of the Kingdom in contrast to logic of the world, Marion gives a more general
account of the possibility of revelation, as well as how one might come to see revelation
when and where others—even trained phenomenologists—see nothing.54 If one does
not see what Marion sees, the latter can in one breath point to the phenomenological
possibility of revelation, effectively demonstrating the plausibility of it, and in the same
breath explain theologically why faith is required to receive revelation in the first place.
The philosophical explanation prevents him from the charge of theologizing phenom-
enology; the theological one accounts for how the Christian attests to the actuality of
receiving God’s self-giving. Overall, and perhaps paradoxically, Marion wants to
account for why some witness—on the basis of love—to the legitimate philosophical

50
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 58.
51
BThe phenomenon shows itself, then, from itself and in itself, because and in as much as it gives itself in
person from itself. From a synthesized or constituted object, it transforms itself into an event. Such a
transformation, such a passage from one form to another, can happen within the strict field of philosophy,
and phenomenology aims at nothing other than describing such phenomena in general that veer from object to
event^ (Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 48).
52
Marion, Revelation and Givenness, p. 58.
53
See, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?: Arguments for God in Contemporary Philos-
ophy, (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 105–124.
54
For a helpful discussion of the infamous claim by Jocelyn Benoist, an atheist, that where Marion sees
revelation he sees nothing, see Introduction to Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 29

phenomenon of revelation, which is, however, accessible only through the conversion
of the will.
Hart’s criticism of Marion’s approach to revelation is theological and twofold. First,
he criticizes Marion’s claim that revelation can gain phenomenological status like
ordinary phenomena. Second, he counters the idea that revelation always bedazzles
its receiver, and thus whether revelation is always a matter of saturation. Overall, Hart’s
criticisms rests on the theological approach to revelation constituted by the basilaic
reduction, which contrasts Marion’s philosophical reduction of givenness.
In the Introduction to Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, Hart maintains that
through the saturated phenomenon ‘Marion therefore seeks to bridge the abyss between
the Enlightenment and Barth’s theology of revelation from the side of Fichte and Kant.’
55
In order to support this claim, he cites a conversation with Marion wherein the latter
explains that for him revelation ‘can acquire phenomenological status and match other
kinds of phenomena,’ which means that ‘the distinction between the field of philosophy
and the field of theology, the Blimits^ between them in the meanings of Kant and
Fichte, could be bridged to some extent.’56 Hart counters by pointing out that a Barthian
‘would object that revelation partly reveals and partly re-veils God, and that this
concealment is more primitive than our not being able to view an aspect of a
phenomenon.’57 Hart is the Barthian objector.
As outlined above, Hart’s basilaic reduction is a theological reduction because the
eidetic possibilities offered through scripture and ecclesial tradition are not possible
apart from them. Their revelatory character enables a ‘special mode of manifestation,
one that cannot be prompted by way of epoche and reduction, but that is given only by
the God who himself does not appear (John 6:46)’ (Hart, Kingdoms of God, p. 141).
Moreover, Jesus is the ‘manifestation of the Father,’ who remains hidden. He is both
the revealed and the phenomenologist who performs the reduction, making it possible
for his followers to transition from worldly logic to the Kingdom of the hidden God.
Barth puts it this way: ‘The pre-question to theology—to revelation—cannot act as that
which differentiates between the false gods and the true God. In this endeavor, even in
his most seriousness, man is only confronted with himself. He cannot escape the trap of
projection.’58 For Hart, revelation is not first, or also, a phenomenological possibility. It
is a theological reality testified to on the basis of faith. So when Marion asserts that ‘any
kind of revelation, if there are other claims to revelation—can acquire phenomenolog-
ical status and match other kinds of phenomena,’59 Hart worries that Marion has first
outlined revelation as a phenomenological possibility—something like a general phe-
nomenology of religious revelation, one more at home in the study of religion than
dogmatics—and then filled in the structure with Christian contents.
By contrast, for Hart it is necessary to speak first and always theologically of
revelation. There can be no prior philosophical outline. Both its content and contours
are constituted by its existential reality. In terms of Barth’s concern that natural
theologians, and by extension Bultmann and Heidegger, reduce revelation to a religious
capacity of the human being, Hart points out that Marion’s attempt to bridge the
55
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
56
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
57
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
58
Barth, Dogmatics II.1, pp. 90–91.
59
Hart, Essential Writings, p. 28.
30 B.B. Onishi

phenomenological possibility of revelation and the existential reality of Revelation bind

the latter to a worldly phenomenological possibility, albeit an extreme one. The
philosophical attempt to radicalize Barth ends up, on Hart’s reading, betraying the
Barthian impulses of Marion’s theological account of revelation.
This leads to his second criticism of Marion’s approach to revelation. According to
Marion, revelation is the saturated phenomenon par excellence, the bedazzling possible
impossibility that transforms the subject from ego to witness. Yet, what if the revelation of
Christ is not always dazzling? Can a seemingly ordinary experience be a revelatory one?

Whether it must dazzle us is a question that calls for discussion, not least of all for
anyone who accepts the sharp distinction between the icon and the idol as
delineated in Dieu sans l’être. We think of the transfigured Christ as dazzling
(‘and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light,’ Matt.
17:2 KJV), yet the resurrected Christ does not always dazzle those to whom he
appears. Thins of the disciples on the road to Emmaus who at first do not
recognize the risen Christ and see him as an entirely ordinary…60

Hart makes a point that philosophers of religion such as Anthony Steinbock and
Marion’s former student, Emmanuel Falque, have consistently made for some time
now: Marion’s formulation of the phenomenon of revelation seems to bind it to
saturation, and thus to an extraordinary experience, thereby excluding ordinary, poor,
and quotidian phenomena from revelatory status, as Steinbock explains:

True, Marion has accounted for how phenomena reveal, but he has not accounted
for how otherwise poor phenomena can remain on the one hand poor proper, and
on the other hand, how they reveal in and through their own proper ‘poverty.’
They simultaneously present themselves and reveal what is other than them-
selves.61

This is a direct consequence of Marion’s determination to account for the possibility

of revelation phenomenologically. The theological price of transgressing, or at least
stretching, Husserl’s principle of principles by formulating the plausibility of phenom-
ena that do not appear to intuition because of their saturation of it is a doctrine of
revelation that has difficulty accounting for the revelatory potential of seemingly in-
excessive phenomena. As Emmanuel Falque has argued, Marion’s commitment to the
extraordinary and the apophatic seems to leave behind the ordinary and kataphatic.62

Conclusion: Hart, Marion, and the God Question

From Trespass of the Sign to Kingdoms of God, Hart’s approach to the relationship
between philosophy and theology has been more conservative than Marion’s. He views
60
Hart, Essential Writings, pp. 28–29.
61
Anthony J. Steinbock, BThe Poor Phenomenon: Marion and the Problem of Givenness,^ in Words of Life:
New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York,
NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 126.
62
Emmanuel Falque, Le combat amoreux (Paris : Broché, 2014), pp. 19–25.
Marion: Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist 31

the philosophies of Husserl, Blanchot, Derrida, and other non-believing philosophers as

outside voices that provide a needed critical perspective on, among other things, the
logic of revelation and the Kingdom of God. However, he neither looks to them as
resources for qualitatively transforming theology, nor as obstacles to overcome in order
to radicalize phenomenology in the service of natural theology. In Kingdoms of God
and other recent publications, he criticizes his colleague and friend for the first time.
What is the significance of his subtle, yet forceful Barthian criticism of Marion?
Over the last four decades, philosophy’s ‘turn to religion,’ along with the ‘theolog-
ical turn in French phenomenology’ has compellingly returned the ‘God question’ to
philosophy. Just when it seemed God was dead, at least philosophically, God was
resurrected by the radical phenomenologies of Lévinas, Marion, Henry, and others,
along with the poststructuralist religion without religion of John Caputo. This had led to
great interest in the relationships among continental philosophy, religion, and theology,
spawning the sub-field of continental philosophy of religion in the process.63 However,
in recent years a new generation of philosophers has voiced concern that the philo-
sophical interest in God may come at the price of the particularity of Christian (or
Jewish) revelation.64 In other words, if in light of the secularist spirit of the sixties and
seventies, Marion’s generation understood the defending the plausibility of belief in
God as be the most pressing philosophical issue for a religious person, then a new
generation is concerned with protecting the singularity of religious traditions in light of
the renewed interest in God and theology.
Hart’s Kingdoms of God is an articulate, subtle work in this vein. It is important to
remember that Barth’s scathing criticism of liberal theology and natural theology came on
the heels of decades of attempts to correlate Christianity to modern culture. His ‘Neo-
Orthodoxy’ was an influential reaction to modernity—an unflinching commitment to the
revelation of Christ in the face of modern culture, historical criticism, and scientific
advancement. We might view Hart’s criticism as a careful postsecular reiteration of this
theological approach in the context of the return of the ‘God question’ to post-War
continental philosophy. In light of the ongoing attempts to articulate a God without Being,
a non-onto-theological theology, a theology without theology, and the phenomenality of
God, Hart’s phenomenological theology is unwaveringly committed to accounting
for the structure and reception of revelation without apologizing for the faith that
enables it. Unlike Marion and many others, his main concern is not defending the
faith, but for articulating the theo-logic of Jesus’ invitation to the Kingdom of
God. While it may be tempting to read it as a theologically conservative model in
a time of radical hermeneutics and even more radical phenomenologies, in terms
of its demarcation between philosophy and theology, and its clear recognition of
the differences between revelational authority and philosophical authority,65 Hart’s
phenomenological theology is more likely a sign of the things to come for
continental philosophical theology, than a vestige of times past.

63
See Onishi, BThe Beginning, Not the End.^
64
J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister, eds., Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion:
Toward a Religion With Religion (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012).
65
J. Aaron Simmons, BContinuing to Look for God in France: On the Relationship Between Phenomenology
and Theology,^ in Words of Life, p. 27.
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