Per Caritatem

Reading Augustine with Marion: A Postmodern Ressourcement

By Bret Saunders, doctoral student, University of Dallas

For the sake of space, I must assume my readers know something about one of the most profound philosopher/theologians at the turn of this century, the French Catholic-postmodern author, Jean Luc-Marion, currently at Chicago and the Sorbonne.  The topic of the relationship between a great ancient and a great contemporary thinker would be worth studying at any time, but it is especially interesting in the case of Augustine and Marion, since this relationship is taking an interesting turn at present.   Until the last several years, Marion had rarely engaged Augustine directly except for several essays[1] and a handful of footnotes.  Following Von Balthasar, he preferred to develop his unique phenomenological theology in conversation with Augustine’s Eastern, near-contemporary, Dionysius the Aereopagite.[2] But as Marion turned from larger issues-Descartes and “onto-theo-logy,” theology after the “death of god,” the limits of phenomenology-to focus on love, the self, and the extent of self-knowledge, he interacted with Augustine directly.[3]

This “turn” means that the relation of Marion to Augustine must for now be somewhat speculatively posed.  However, I can make some general comments starting from Marion’s use of Neoplatonism.  Put broadly, it is the impetus toward negative theology, divine transcendence and creaturely participation that draws Marion toward Dionysius and Augustine.  In the spirit of Vatican II’s conservative wing, in opposition to but also in dialog with Levinas, Derrida and Altizer, Marion has attempted to develop a Catholic postmodern theology from these Christian Neoplatonic patristics and 20^th century phenomenology.  This ressourcement offers a double benefit: by reading the fathers according to the methods and concerns of phenomenology, Marion makes new connections and finds new meaning in familiar texts, texts often obscured by the surreptitiously modern readings of Neo-Scholasticism; conversely, Marion develops from these sources a phenomenology/theology of revelation and creation, a third way between modernity’s idolatrous blasphemy (Descartes and the theologians of “pure nature”) and postmodernity’s idolatrous silence (Heidegger).   I will now take a few short steps down this path . . .

Participation and Incomprehensibility in Marion’s (Augustinian) Philosophy of Religion

Marion’s work on Augustine to date concerns a theological-phenomenology of the self.  The early article on “the word capacitas in Augustine” is linked with the 2005 article on “the privilege of unknowing”[4] in that both describe a receptive, dependent, participating self in direct opposition to the active, (self-)determining self of modernity.[5] For Augustine, I am only myself insofar as I know myself in God, that is, receive myself from him.  Capax, capacitas is governed by a receptive semantic; it signifies the creatures ‘capacity’ to be filled by or participate (partem capere) in the Creator.[6] By contrast  Marion’s early interest in Augustine on this point stems from his far more extensive work on Descartes, who follows Suarez in altering the meaning of capax/capacitas to signify an active power of the self to know itself fully and to fully determine and know its objects.  Descartes borrowed this new acceptation from Suarez’s theology of “pure nature.”[7]

In the 2005 article, Marion probes the Confessions in support of a philosophy of religion centered around the incomprehensibility of man.  For Augustine, because man is the image of the incomprehensible God, he cannot determine himself or know himself fully but must be revealed to himself: “No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him.”[8] Marion sums up his thesis in this essay as follows: “[M]an appears to himself as a phenomenon that he cannot constitute, because he exceeds the field of every horizon and of every system of categories.  Which can be formulated as: man appears to himself as a saturated phenomenon.”[9] Here Marion shows how he reads the Neo-platonist Augustine phenomenologically, as part of a critique of modern (positivist) anthropology and the (secular) postmodern deconstruction of religion: just as the phenomenon of revelation-God or man considered as the image of God-”saturates” or “exceeds” the horizons of traditional phenomenology (whether Husserl’s “intuition” or Heidegger’s “being”), so for Augustine the “vast, infinite abyss” of memory exceeds the mind’s “narrow grasp” (Conf. 10.8.15), like the “eternal ideas” as the standards of truth and beauty and God himself exceed the created beings who participate in Him.[10]

Notes

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[1] See “La saisie trinitaire selon l’Esprit de saint Augustin.” Résurrection 28 (1968), 66-94; “Distance et béatitude. Sur le mot capacitas chez saint Augustin.” Résurrection 29 (1968), 58-60; “De la divinisation a la domination: etude sur la semantique de capable / capax chez Descartes.“ Revue Philosophique de Louvain 73 (1975), 262-293.

[2] In The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas Carlson (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2001), 139-195.

[3] A collection of essays on Augustine, Au lieu de soi-même (“In [the] Place of the Self”) will be published this Fall.  But  Marion’s “Augustinian turn” appears already in “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing” (in The Journal of Religion 85 (2005), 1-24) and  The Erotic Phenomenon [trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007)].  The latter alludes to Augustine on pp. 41, 42, 54, 71, 75(?), 87, 92, 95, 108, 114, 121, 128, 132, 135, 142, 144, 146, 182(?), 194, 195.  To give just one example: Marion employs Augustine’s “use/enjoyment” distinction on 127-8 to characterize the lover’s relation to the beloved as to a “flesh” instead of to an object.

[4] See fn. 1.

[5] And also of Heidegger, for which see Marion’s “The Final Appeal of the Subject” in John D. Caputo ed., The Religious (London: Blackwell, 2001), 131-44.

[6] See Confessions 10.8.15, wherein Augustine highlights the need of divine illumination for self-knowledge: “I myself do not grasp (capio) the whole that I am.”

[7] See “What is the Ego capable of?  Divinization and Domination: Capable/Capax“, in Cartesian Questions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 67-95.

[8] Conf. 10.5.7 (trans. Maria Boulding [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997], 241).

[9] “Privilege,” 23.

[10] I warmly thank Cynthia Nielsen for the opportunity to ‘participate’ in this online conversation.