Foreword

Almost forty years ago I dared to claim “that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.”¹ I still hold to that claim, with one reservation: there is neither anything as difficult, nor indeed as painful as theology, where one must embark directly onto the high seas, unfathomable and without end—duc in altum (Luke 5:4). In his early days Barth was already warning anyone who would dare to take this path: “Every human work is a draft, a preliminary labor, and this is especially the case for a theological book!”² All the books that I have produced I have completed like a cyclist making the climbs in a mountain stage, with training and method, strength and endurance, cunning and will; but none has cost me so much, nor held me back as long as this book, precisely because there has never been an ascension that was so hard, or so beautiful.

In fact, before the delivery of this version in French, which I hope is the final one, I first had to publish two initial sketches in foreign languages, contrary to custom. When the University of Glasgow honored me with the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures in 2014, I began a first series of studies that resulted, in 2016, in a first publication, Givenness and Revelation.³ Then the invitation from the University of Regensburg to occupy the Papst Benedikt XVI–Gastprofessur chair, in the spring of 2018, led me to return to the whole enterprise in a version published that same year under the title Das Erscheinen des Unsichtbaren. Fragen zur Phänomenalität der Offenbarung.⁴ In fact, ever since my book The Visible and the Revealed, which already collected some older sketches and attested to an obsessive theme, I had begun to confront the question of Revelation. Or rather, of the phenomenality of revelation in general, and thus of biblical Revelation in particular—unless it was the reverse: Revelation as such opening the case of the phenomenon of revelation within common phenomenality. I plunged into this long-distance odyssey, starting from a seminar for the “Chaire Dominique Dubarle” at the Institut Catholique de Paris (2011–16), continuing throughout my teaching at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago (especially the seminars from 2013 to 2019), and culminating during a trimester when I was invited by the Autonomous Theology Faculty at the Université de Genève (2018).

For as long as one avoids venturing into the theological domain, there is nothing easier than to denounce the deficiencies of theologians (too often I gave in to this puerile ritual). But as soon as one takes a first step in theology; as soon as one stops hovering around theology as if it were a reservation of primitives, strange and open, defenseless (like all the kindly atheists do, fearing neither God nor man, frolicking in the theological domain in order to plunder a few treasures from which to draw some small change); as soon as one goes to theology in a serious way, that is, in realizing that one must hear a question there, and respond to it in person—only then does one measure its real difficulty—a difficulty of knowledge, first of all. While in philosophy it is enough (unless one sets up ignorance as a methodological principle, as is often done in the analytic tradition) to know the Greek, Latin, French, English, and German texts (and Italian, as well), in theology it is necessary to enter into the biblical text in all its languages and, in order to do this, explore at least a little the Christian “Talmud” (as Levinas put it), the Fathers, both Latin and Greek. Thus one must follow the history of dogma, the authors of the Middle Ages (high and low), the metaphysical turn of modern theology (the easiest for a historian of philosophy), and, finally, the spiderweb of the theology of the last two centuries, subtle, full of traps, and indispensable.

But the real difficulty lies elsewhere, literally in the elsewhere. A novelist or a poet knows what he is talking about and can hope that his readers know it as well, even if he must set it out for them in his own words. A philosopher, if he truly talks about something and not merely about another text (which is not so often), can appeal to an experiential verification of his thesis; of course, he must reconstruct this experience in order to make it accessible to a competent reader; but the experience can, in principle, become the field for a discussion in common, or even a shared conviction. The theologian does not have this recourse. Not that he cannot invoke an experiential verification of what he is arguing; on the contrary, he knows perfectly well where to find it: in liturgical practice, the sacraments, communal and personal prayer, in short in the life of the Church in the widest sense. But he cannot know if he himself is correctly and fully attaining this experience, nor if his readers can do so better than he. To write a line of authentic theology exposes one to a tremendous interrogation and a radical doubt. Not about that of which one speaks, but about the one of whom one speaks. A good theologian does not doubt the existence of God (which in fact makes no sense), but his own existence (which is more than uncertain); he does not doubt the mystery that he is aiming at, but the rise of his aim, his own loftiness of view. He knows what he is aiming at, if only because he is drawn there and follows its rising and descending slope. But he also knows that he is still aiming too low, with an impetus that falls short and, as the cyclists say, that he is going to “hit the wall” or “blow up.”⁵ And if dogma remains a formulation subjected to eschatological rectification, all the more so for the theological statement. There is no theology without development because no theology can totally accomplish the hermeneutic of the infinite. The theologian avoids sinking into bad philosophy (unknown to itself) or ideology (which wants to remain ignorant of everything outside itself) solely on the condition of becoming convinced of this. The theologian knows that he still cannot say very well what he sees, nor see very well what he aims at, but that he must at least aim at it the best he can. His holiness measures his accuracy. But he knows that this situation not only is in no way abnormal, but that it alone preserves him.

My own aim is summed up here quite simply in a few questions. (Pt. I) Why did the first centuries of the (best) Christian (and moreover Jewish) theology never use anything that falls under the modern concept of “Revelation”? (Pt. II) Why was this modern concept (in its essentials) constructed only polemically by metaphysicians and in contrast to what they understood by “reason”? (Pt. III) Why not instead privilege a concept of Revelation that would start from the phenomenality of that which unveils itself or rather uncovers itself, from that which reveals itself among phenomena? (Pt. IV) Could it be that the principle of the synoptic gospels, “nothing is veiled (κεκαλυμμένον) that will not be uncovered (ὃ οὐκ ἀποκαλυφθήσεται, revelabitur), or hidden (κρυπτὸν) that will not be known (ὃ οὐ γνωσθήσεται),” already puts into operation a privileged mode of phenomenality? (Pt. V) Is this uncovering summed up by the commonly held meaning of “monotheism,” or does it imply its reinterpretation, beginning from the trinitarian communion? (Pt. VI) I have pushed the attempt as far as I can, and thus I knows its limits. They are those that Nicholas of Cusa pointed out perfectly: “Trusting in your infinite goodness, I have ventured to surrender myself to rapture in order to see you, who are invisible, and the unrevealable vision revealed (ut viderem te invisibilem et visionem revelatam irrevelabilem).”⁶

I want to express my gratitude to the institutions that enabled me to conduct this work—the University of Chicago, the Institut Catholique de Paris, the University of Glasgow, the University of Regensburg, the University of Geneva—and to the students and listeners who supported me with their patience and their questions, and the longtime companions, who will recognize themselves in the pages that follow. I bear responsibility for the errors and insufficiencies; the rest, which does not belong to me, will take care of itself.

J.-L. M.

May 2020

Notes

1. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1.

2. Karl Barth: “Nur Vorarbeit ist alles menschliche Werk, und ein theologisches Buch mehr als jedes andre Werk!” Der Römerbrief (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1922), vi. English translation: The Epistle to the Romans, translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 2–3, modified.

3. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

4. Jean-Luc Marion, Das Erscheinen des Unsichtbaren. Fragen zur Phänomenalität der Offenbarung, trans. Alwin Letzkus (Freiburg im Brigau: Herder, 2018).

5. But it is important to guard against “going through the window”: that is, to stop on the steepest slope, to get off the bike and claim to have reached the summit; such simplification of the question to fit the partiality of the answer leads to crossing out the question, to scaling it back to fit the chosen answer, in short to rationalizing defeat in order to justify it. This serves fairly well to define heresy, a facile excuse for the failure to reach the goal that seeks to deceive others into believing that the summit was not higher than the point where you threw in the towel.

6. Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei XVII. 79, in Opera omnia, vol. 6, ed. Adelaida Dorothea Riemann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 63; English translation: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 270.