The rue d’Ulm in the centre of Paris, a small almost insignificant street close to the Parthenon and the Jardin de Luxembourg, houses one of the most important and prestigious academic institutions in France: the École Normale Supérieure. Founded in the first decade of the 19th century with entrance by a nationwide competitive examination, it has educated many of the leading 20th century French intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are just a few of those selected in a nation-wide competitive examination to be schooled here. In 1969, when considerable student unrest still remained in Paris following the May riots a year earlier, Jean-Luc Marion, then 21, took up his place there. At an institution which had played an enormous role in disseminating the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger in post-War France, Marion began to work for his agrégation de philosophic. It was a time of les enfants terribles in French philosophy: when structuralism was gaining ground through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes; when Althusser was attempting to rewrite Marxism; when Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things) could enter the French best-sellers list; and Derrida launched, in the three books published in the same year, his deconstructive assault. Lacan and Derrida both gave seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (as Marion does now). The influence of German Idealism and its critics, Nietzsche and Heidegger, have remained throughout Marion’s philosophical work.

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the first theologians to take seriously the force of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a whole, which means he takes seriously Heidegger’s claims about the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In other words, when in the work of Martin Heidegger the whole of metaphysics is thrown into question, any and all of its determinations become “questionable”, that is, worthy of being questioned. Marion concedes the impact this may have for theology.

This study concerns itself with how Jean Luc-Marion attempts in the work God Without Being to speak of God after Martin Heidegger’s claims for the overcoming of metaphysics. This arises as a question about the extent to which Jean-Luc Marion has been attentive to what Heidegger says. Marion appeals to an accepted philosophical reading of Heidegger in order to inaugurate a fresh theological reading of Heidegger. Underlying this study is the view that Marion is insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Heidegger’s thinking.

In order to show how this is so in the limited space available here, I propose to undertake a re-reading of two of the key texts upon which Marion rests for his case against Heidegger in God Without Being, with, I hope, surprising results for Marion’s project. Finally, I wish to conclude with some more general remarks about the Icon, which may at least point us in the direction of a more constructive reading of Heidegger’s work.

I

A gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?

This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.

What reflections might occur to a veteran student of the works of St Thomas Aquinas after reading Jean-Luc Marion’s remarkable book God without Being? Of course, it is not primarily about the thought of Aquinas. But we are persistently encouraged to reject an approach to the question of God which thinks in terms of a concept of ‘Being’, in favour of an acceptance of the reality of God in an economy of ‘Gift’. Thus, one is certainly sent back to the text of Aquinas with provocative questions. For myself, I have to say that I was prompted first of all to return to the magnificent account in the Summa Theologiae of the epistemology of the beatific vision (Section I)—not that Marion himself discusses it (he doesn’t), but his whole approach is a reminder of the radical ‘theocentricity’ of Aquinas’s thought. Next, it proved interesting to compare Marion’s approach with philosophy of religion in the English-speaking context (Section II). Much else might be mentioned, no doubt, but, given that context, the intelligibility of speaking of God either with or without reference to ‘Being’ could not but become questionable (Section III).

I

Question 12 of the Prima Pars must be one of the finest in the Summa Theologiae. Composed in 1266-67, when St Thomas was teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome, it has no precedent or exact parallel in the rest of his work, although of course he treated the same material in several different places.