Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion

Chapter 4: Glory, Idolatry, Kairos: Revelation and the Ontological Difference in Marion

4 Glory, Idolatry, Kairos Revelation, and the Ontological Difference in Marion Felix Ó Murchadha The terms of the title—glory, idolatry, kairos—are Christian, not Greek, if we understand Greek as the Greek of classical philosophy. Kairos is a Greek word meaning the opportune moment, but prior to Christianity it had little philosophical significance1 ; idolatry comes from eidolon, which in Plato means a deceiving image but in Christianity comes to mean false gods; glory—gloria—translates dōxa, a philosophical term that, however, is used in a new way to translate the Hebrew kabod. Thus, these very terms themselves point to a turning , a movement of thought that characterizes Christianity; one can say of them, as Heidegger does of the transformation of the meaning of parousia: ‘‘the otherness of the Christian life experience is evident in this conceptual transformation.’’2 These terms refer to phenomena that are at the core of Christian revelation: to the appearance of God (glory), the danger of false appearances (idolatry), and the time of that appearance and of the history of salvation (kairos). The issue here is of an appearance that breaks into this world, so it is not of this world, but yet shows itself in this world. It is this concern that characterizes Marion’s phenomenology of donation. His account of saturated phenomena—of paradoxa—concerns that irruption of strangeness in the world which both breaks with appearances (paradox ) and yet gives itself as appearance (glory, dōxa).3 Against such critics as Janicaud4 it must be insisted, however, that here what is at issue is not a blurring of the distinction between phi69 losophy and theology as much as a recognition of the philosophical fruitfulness of traditionally theological phenomena (cf. ED, 326/BG, 234). Faced, therefore, with the terms glory, idolatry, and kairos, philosophy must insist on taking account of these phenomena in its own terms, that is, in relation to their compelling nature. This amounts to a question of authority. The claims of revelation to authority cannot be compelling in a philosophical sense; rather, the phenomenon of revelation needs to be taken up as a phenomenon.5 At one stroke, the question of authority is displaced; the hermeneutics of Scripture must allow itself be justified by phenomenology. Once the phenomenological legitimacy of hermeneutics is posed, then Scripture is opened up to philosophical, and not solely theological, investigation. At the same time the tension between Athens and Jerusalem—to give the two sides of this polemos their proper names—must not be covered over. This tension lies at the source of what is at issue in Marion’s encounter with Heidegger’s account of the ontological difference . To be clear: there can be no question of placing Heidegger in the ‘‘Athens camp’’ and Marion in the ‘‘Jerusalem camp’’: Heidegger was himself strongly influenced by Christianity, and Marion is still working within the parameters of Greek thought. Nevertheless, there are critical decisions—decisions that arise out of crises in thought—that color thinking so as to locate it in a certain position along the lines of tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The decision concerns nothing other than what counts as a phenomenon. Greek thought—in its classical form—posits a correspondence between the human mind and the principle of things, and even in the Hellenistic period the fallibility of this correspondence alone is at issue. The pathos of wonder immediately leads to the question of grounds, hence of that which is the same between thought and being. Christian thought calls such correspondence into question. The glory of God is precisely that to which no correspondence is possible, and that for a fundamental reason: because God reveals Himself in the world as beyond the world. Now, if that is so, does this not mean that the very unity of philosophy is threatened (i.e., that the principles of what is are challenged with an exception, one that concerns that which is most at issue in philosophy)? Or, to put the question in relation to Marion and Heidegger, can there be an exception to the ontological difference? If there can be, then the sameness of thought and being is superseded, thinking is liberated from being, and a place for faith is philosophically underscored by reference to phenomena that 70 Givenness and God point beyond any account in terms of nature, understood in the widest sense. This chapter can do no...