Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion

Chapter 14: The Absent Threshold: An Eckhartian Afterword

14 The Absent Threshold: An Eckhartian Afterword John O’Donohue Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophy of God has the excitement, clarity, and danger of something that has issued from the source. On the one hand, it has the imaginative warmth of a poetic sensibility that mines the silence in order to overhear the inner echoes of the transcendent and pierces the visual for tracings on the invisible. On the other, his thinking has the urgency of a blade that wants to cut the divine free from the metaphysical netting of conditional, reflexive thought. He wishes to make a clearance for undreamed dimensions of God to appear —free, unfiltered, and unframed by the constructive strategies of consciousness and intentionality. By invoking the majesty and autonomy of its true source, he wants to coax thought beyond its ‘‘native ’’ matrix of reflexivity. In this way he hopes to free a space for the ineffable novelty of God to dawn. Marion pushes phenomenology beyond its own constructs; indeed, he challenges it to lay bare a horizon for the undreamed. This is an ancient strain in philosophy and theology; it finds perhaps its classic exposition in the thought of Meister Eckhart. This chapter will explore Meister Eckhart’s evocation of the divine and his ‘‘methodology’’ of clearance. Its purpose is not to contrast Marion and Eckhart but to see what light we might garner about Marion’s An earlier version of this article appeared in The Eckhart Review (2003). I thank the editors for their courtesy. 258 project through recalling this tradition in general and, in particular, the poetic and speculative brilliance of Eckhart’s piercing thought. Within the whole Western philosophical tradition there is no voice like the voice of Meister Eckhart. He constructed an utterly unique thought-world. He pushed thinking to its farthest boundaries, made it descend to the depths where the origin is opaque and ascend to the high summits where there is nothing but light. He put his eye to the earth at an amazing angle. What he glimpsed and managed to bring to word still fascinates us with its vitality, severity, and beautiful danger . His texts are real presences. To make their acquaintance is to begin a subversive and transforming thought adventure. After a time the texts cease to be mere objects of analysis or understanding. They begin to assume their own autonomy and, indeed, subjectivity. Often you feel that the texts are actually reading you or, at other times, that they have become wilderness guides luring you away from every domesticated domain of belief and thought. These are wilderness texts for any mind that has become in the least haunted by the Divine . In the Timaeus, Plato claims that all thought begins in the recognition that something is out of place. The rupture between Being and consciousness arises in human subjectivity. Philosophical thought is the conceptual theater where this primal conversation between Being and consciousness unfolds and thematizes itself. Subjectivity is the place where Being becomes articulate. Subjectivity is eternally restless because it is the intimate threshold where duality awakens. Indeed , experience could be characterized as the arena where duality unfolds and engages itself. Subjectivity is that threshold between known and unknown, light and darkness, past and future, memory and possibility, language and silence, here and there, this and that, before and after, time and eternity, human and divine. The ongoing and creative tension between these oppositions is what animates experience and awakens the philosophical quest and question. Eckhart ’s thought is fascinating in the ways in which he thinks the threshold. He offers a dynamic of transfiguration where the threshold is subsumed in a more inclusive actuality. The concept of threshold belongs to a family of concepts that name and order the outer edges of experience. The concept of limit indicates an end point. It may not be possible to go any farther; the limit suggests regions that remain out of reach. The frontier is a line that suggests limit but does contain the sense of an Outside that begins The Absent Threshold 259 here; and while it may be out of reach, it does at least touch against the frontier. There is some sense, too, in which the notion of frontier almost invites the challenge to go beyond it. Boundary is a contour of given, appropriate, or chosen endings. The threshold is more than a boundary, frontier, or limit. It...