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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2020
Theologians have recently shown interest in the work of Irish metaphysician William Desmond. A prevailing antimetaphysical sentiment may, however, discourage others from engaging his work. To allay concerns, this article brings Desmond into conversation with Jean-Luc Marion on the topic of divine revelation. The purpose is twofold. First, for those wary of metaphysics, this essay demonstrates that Desmond's metaxology evades Marion's critique and, more importantly, shows how the two thinkers share a “familial intimacy.” Despite the opposition between metaphysics and phenomenology, this intimacy renders them companion thinkers. Second, this companionship is theologically beneficial to Desmond. With Marion as guide, we consider how the concept of divine charity can be added into Desmond's metaphysics in what I call the passio caritatis, or “passion of charity.” The article concludes by suggesting how undergoing the passio caritatis effects a theological expansion of Desmond's metaphysics and puts it at the service of theological reflection.
1 Desmond's talk is the basis for two chapters in The Voiding of Being: “Saturated Phenomena and the Hyperboles of Being: On Marion's Postmetaphysical Thought” and “Being True to Mystery and Metaxological Metaphysics.” See Desmond, William, The Voiding of Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019)Google Scholar.
2 See Simpson, Christopher Ben, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Simpson, Christopher Ben, William Desmond and Contemporary Theology, eds. Christopher Ben Simpson and Brendan T. Sammon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Simpson, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern, 94.
4 Ibid.
5 Desmond, William, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), xiGoogle Scholar.
6 See Desmond, William, God and the Between (Malden, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 281–340CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Kosky, Jeffery L. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 235–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See the foreword to Duns, Ryan, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond's Quest for God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Köhler-Ryan, Renée, Companions in the Between (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2019)Google Scholar.
9 Marion treats revelation at several points. See Being Given, 234–47; Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berrand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); Marion, Jean-Luc, Believing in Order to See, trans. Gschwandtner, Christina M. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. In Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction, 132–34, Robyn Horner admits disambiguating Marion's small-r “revelation” from divine “Revelation” is complicated. For my purposes, “revelation” describes those events of divine disclosure through which faith arises, upon which theology reflects, and to which theology responds. For his reflections on revelation, see Desmond, William, “Godsends: On the Surprise of Revelation,” in Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 91, no. 1 (2016): 8–28Google Scholar.
10 Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), in The Documents of Vatican II, (Strathsfield: St Paul's, 2009), §2.
11 Dei Verbum, §5.
12 Marion, Jean-Luc, The Idol and Distance, trans. Carlson, Thomas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Marion, Jean-Luc, God Without Being, trans. Carlson, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gschwandtner, Christina, Reading Jean-Luc Marion (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. In later works, Marion expands this terminology to include the phenomena of art and the human other. See, for instance, Marion, Jean-Luc, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. Smith, James K. A. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Betz, John, “After Heidegger and Marion: The Task of Christian Metaphysics Today,” in Modern Theology, 34/4 (2018): 566–97, esp. 583CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Marion, Jean-Luc, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Gschwandtner, Christina and others (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 51Google Scholar. This should be read in light of Being and Time §6, “The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology.”
15 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
16 Ibid., 56.
17 Ibid., 72.
18 Marion, The Idol and Distance, 13.
19 Marion, God Without Being, 14.
20 Ibid., 21.
21 Ibid., 24.
22 Ibid., 19.
23 Ibid., 209.
24 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 35.
25 Ibid., 66.
26 Ibid., 47.
27 Betz, “After Heidegger and Marion,” 589.
28 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 48.
29 Marion, In Excess, 53.
30 Marion, Believing in Order to See, 98.
31 He introduces this in Being Given, 225–47. He has continued to develop the idea as seen in The Visible and the Revealed, 18–48 and 119–144; Marion, In Excess, 30–53; and Marion, Believing in Order to See, 87–101.
32 Masterson, Patrick, Approaching God: Between Phenomenology and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 15Google Scholar.
33 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 51. Shane Mackinlay takes Marion to task on this score: can there ever be said to be any adequation to God? Marion needs, it would appear, a more robustly developed understanding of faith (fides qua). See Shane Mackinlay, “Eyes Wide Shut: A Response to Jean-Luc Marion's Account of the Journey to Emmaus,” in Modern Theology 20, no. 3 (July 2004): 447–56.
34 Ibid., 60. See also Dei Verbum §5.
35 Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 66.
36 Marion, God Without Being, xxvi. This should not be read, as one reviewer observed, that Marion acknowledges metaphysics as valid. It is more that he absolves Aquinas from doing metaphysics as Marion understands it. I wonder if Marion's isn't a persuasive redefinition of metaphysics. Metaphysics can be practiced in many ways: Aristotle, Hegel, Aquinas, Rahner, and Desmond were metaphysicians, but they did not do metaphysics in the same way. I think it licit to challenge certain practices of metaphysics and to jettison ontotheological practices, but I am not keen on throwing out metaphysics with the ontotheological bathwater.
37 Fritz, Peter Joseph, “Karl Rahner's Theological Logic, Phenomenology, and Anticipation,” in Theological Studies 80, no. 1 (2019): 57–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have tried to build on Fritz's work in Duns, Ryan, “Beneath the Shadow of the Cross: A Rahnerian Rejoinder to Jean-Luc Marion,” Philosophy and Theology 28, no. 2 (2016): 351–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003b5.
39 Desmond, William, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 Ibid., 253.
41 Desmond, William, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Desmond, William, “Augustine's Confessions: On Desire, Conversion and Reflection,” in Irish Theological Quarterly 47, no. 1 (March 1980): 24–33, esp. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Renée Köhler-Ryan writes on Augustine's influence in “An Archaeological Ethics: Augustine, Desmond, and Digging back to the Agapeic Origin,” in Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy After Dialectic, ed. Thomas A. F. Kelly (New York: Ashgate, 2007).
42 Desmond, William, Perplexity and Ultimacy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 11Google Scholar.
43 Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, trans. Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 91.
44 Desmond, God and the Between, 128–34.
45 Ibid., 132.
46 Ibid., 132.
47 Betz, “After Heidegger and Marion,” 576.
48 See Desmond, God and the Between, 59.
49 Marion, Believing in Order to See, 116.
50 Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, 168; see Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). In The Erotic Phenomenon Marion perpetrates with love the crime he charges metaphysics with: univocal reduction. He begins by writing, “Univocal, love is only told in one way” (5). He concludes with claiming God practices “the logic of the erotic reduction as we do” and insists that “God loves in the same way as we do” (222). Desmond challenges this reduction, in The Voiding of Being, 222–23. Christina M. Gschwandtner addresses this as well in Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 100–23.
51 William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 219.
52 Desmond, Perplexity and Ultimacy, 231.
53 Patrick Gardner, “God and the Between,” in William Desmond and Contemporary Theology, 165–190, esp. 168.
54 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 152–153.
55 William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Press, 2012), 14.
56 Desmond, Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, 87.
57 Ibid., 91.
58 Marion, In Excess, xxi.
59 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, 44 (emphases in original).
60 Desmond, “Godsends,” 23.
61 Ibid., 25–28.
62 Desmond, The Voiding of Being, 195.
63 Ibid., 202.
64 Paul Camacho, “Philosophy and Excess: William Desmond and Jean-Luc Marion on Being True to Mystery,” in Philosophy and Excess, 1–9, esp. 8, https://www.academia.edu/9605077/Philosophy_and_Excess_William_Desmond_and_Jean-Luc_Marion_on_Being_True_to_Mystery.
65 Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth, “Review of William Desmond and Contemporary Theology,” New Blackfriars 100, no. 1089 (2019): 619–20, esp. 620Google Scholar.
66 Desmond, God and the Between, 282.
67 Ibid., 301.
68 Ibid., 303.
69 Ibid., 327.
70 Marion, Jean-Luc, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, trans. Kosky, Jeffrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 313Google Scholar.
71 Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion, 226.
72 See Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 71.
73 Ibid., 115 (emphasis in original).
74 Ibid., 99 (emphasis original).
75 Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, 166.
76 Horner, Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction, 66.
77 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, 66–79.
78 Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion, 230.
79 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, 71.
80 Ibid., 71.
81 Ibid., 72.
82 Ibid., 77. It is worth mentioning that Marion's hermeneutics has been challenged by critics like Richard Kearney. In a dialogue with Marion, Kearney raises the question of the hermeneutical status of the saturated phenomenon. Marion's privileging of Revelation as irrégardable would seem to defy interpretation. Revelation must be accepted as it reveals itself to be. Yet, for Kearney, there is no reception of any phenomenon that is not interpreted. Kearney, Richard, “A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion,” Philosophy Today 48/1 (Spring 2004): 12–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Mackinlay, Shane, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
83 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 80–81.
84 Ibid., 82.
85 Ibid., 64.
86 Ibid., 114.
87 Ibid., 75.
88 Marion, Believing in Order to See, 112. For criticism, see Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion, 94–103.
89 O'Connor, Flannery, “Revelation,” in O'Connor: Collected Works (New York: Penguin, 1988), 637Google Scholar.
90 Ibid., 640.
91 Ibid., 646.
92 Flannery O'Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the South,” in O'Connor, 864.
93 O'Connor, O'Connor, 654.
94 Desmond, “Godsends,” 27.
95 Desmond, William, The Intimate Universal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
96 Ibid., 418.
97 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2019), 10.6.9.
98 Marion, Givenness and Revelation, 99 (emphasis in original).
99 Ibid., 82 (emphasis in original).
100 Bryan Massingale, “The Assumption of White Privilege and What We Can Do about It,” National Catholic Reporter, June 1, 2020, https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/assumptions-white-privilege-and-what-we-can-do-about-it.
101 FitzGerald, Constance, “The Desire for God and the Transformative Power of Contemplative Prayer,” in Light Burdens, Heavy Blessings, eds. Mary Heather MacKinnon, Moni McIntyre, and Mary Ellen Sheehan (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 2000), 216Google Scholar.
102 Massingale, “The Assumption of White Privilege and What We Can Do about It.”
103 FitzGerald, “The Desire for God and the Transformative Power of Contemplative Prayer,” 218.
104 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Major Works, ed. Phillips, Christine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134Google Scholar.