“To be or not to be—that is indeed the first and indispensable question for everything and everyone, and for man in particular.  But with respect to Being, does God have to behave like Hamlet?”

—Jean-Luc Marion

            Ontotheology is a term that has come into vogue in contemporary French philosophical theology.  This form of theology stems from Martin Heidegger’s work with ontology (although later we will see Heidegger’s own critique of ontotheology).  Since ontology is the study of the categorical nature of reality[1], ontotheology uses Being as a lens through which to speak categorically of God.  Can one speak of God without addressing God’s existence or without speaking of God as a being?  Perhaps not.  If God exists then it is necessary that God should be.  However, human language has an inherent tendency to make a double affirmation at this point.  Not only does our language make a claim about God’s being; it also makes a claim about Being’s divinity, or at least the possibility of Being’s attaining to divinity[2].  If theology is not careful as it speaks of God’s existence then it allows itself also to create a category (Being) in which to categorize God.  Such a God is no longer the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, nor the God of the prophets Amos and Isaiah, nor a God concerned with justice and holiness: this God is not Yahweh, but the God that emerges in Christianized Neoplatonism[3].

            By deconstructing ontotheology, theology opens itself toward that which is coming.  It refuses to allow theology to possess, delineate, control or manipulate that which is given in the Logos.  This open, receptive posture frees theology from the transcendental categories pressed upon it by the modern project.  It frees theology from Heidegger’s ontology.  Rather than being abstracted from Being, removing oneself from Being, criticizing or revoking Being—freedom from Being allows Being “to be”, apart from any constraints placed upon it by human thought.

            One final word about deconstruction:  Deconstruction, engaged in its proper activity, is not an eternal reduction of referents.  It is more properly described as an ‘armed neutrality[4]’ which refuses to allow us to rest comfortably within our logical deductions[5].  According to Caputo, it is a perverse idea to understand deconstruction as something which traps us within an endless spiral of meaninglessness.  Rather, deconstruction strives to maintain the transcendence of the ‘other’.  It seeks to free thought from a categorized God.  It will not accept either “A” or “not-A” as a foundation on which to stand, but it “stands” on the shifting ground of the betweeness of “A” and “not-A”.  That is to say, it is at home in the relation of opposites.  Deconstruction is not an exercise in logical inconsistency, but it recognizes the existential necessity of the relationship.  And there is no relationship where there is no Other.

Icon/Idol:

            Marion discusses two modus operandi for being: idolatrous or iconic[6].  Both are mutually exclusive.  An idol, for Marion, is that which captures my gaze as I look upon it.  It dazzles me and seeks to capture my attention.  It hides the invisible[7] and, for me, becomes that alone which is visible—the first visible. Contrary to the idol, the icon does not seek my gaze.  It acts as a liason which redirects my gaze to that which lies beyond itself.  Within the icon I encounter a face “whose invisible intention envisages [me][8].”  That is to say, my gaze is not captured or returned to me, as in an idol.  Rather my gaze envisages nothing (that is to say that it encounters the invisible), but is itself envisaged.  It is not accidental that the word “envisage” literally implies “to give face to.”  The face that meets me in the icon calls me beyond myself.  It summons me to enter into the depth of the infinite encountered in the icon.  This will have great significance when we discuss the anthropological presuppositions which develop out of Marion’s theology later in the paper.

For Marion, theology itself functions either as an icon which moves the theologian outside of herself, or as an idol, which draws the theologian deeper into herself.  Again, theology may function iconically so as to transgress the very words and so to arrive at the Word of theology, or it may function idolatrously speaking boisterously about that which it knows not.  This is a pretension on the part of idolatrous theology.  It claims (directly or more subtly) to speak words of absolute knowledge, never imagining that as it engages in this blasphemous activity that it has related itself exclusively to the idol.  Closing itself off to the transcendent, it has become the slave of the idol[9].  Although theology remains dazzled by the magnificence of God, it nevertheless seeks to possess this God through scientific analysis and objectification.  It ultimately consigns the Divine to the measure of the human gaze[10].  Any attempt to speak of God without a sense of trembling before the Word of which theology feebly tries to speak, is a betrayal of God’s transcendence—a destruction of God’s otherness.  It is an attempt to measure, humanize and domesticate God.

The importance of this section of the paper is to remind us to walk humbly as we proceed.  Indeed, Marion follows Wittgenstein in giving this advice to theology: “Theological speech feeds on the silence in which, at last, it speaks correctly[11].”  True theology remains a prayer.  Our words may not precede the Word of God.  The only hope of theology is to allow its words to be spoken by the Word; to allow the Word to become once more incarnate—this time in our language[12].  It is interesting that even Jesus did not speak on his own, but spoke only what the Father gave him to speak[13].

Domesticating the Divine:

            Theology found itself in an awkward predicament during the Enlightenment.  Thanks to Descartes, everything had now been thrown into doubt.  The intellectual community found itself obliged to rigorously rethink their doctrines.  Science began to contest long held theological beliefs.  For the first time in fourteen centuries, theology found itself on the defensive to a powerful opponent.  William Placher describes how this defensive posture led theology to attempt to speak of God in the language of the Enlightenment[14]. 

Theology is the discipline which has been encountered by the wholly Other and now seeks to speak meaningfully of that Other.  However, theologians have long confessed that human language does not have the categories and human beings do not have the wisdom to adequately speak of the transcendent.  During the seventeenth century, this admission became a source of embarrassment in the face of the Enlightenment project that sought to clarify human knowledge by submitting it to rigorous examination.  Therefore theology searched for ways to speak of God that would be acceptable to the rest of the intellectual community.  While this kept theology in the intellectual ring with science for the short-term, the long-term affect was the loss of divine transcendence and a growing discontent among Western Christians[15].  The mystery and otherness of God was replaced with scientific analysis and objective definitions that cannot answer the existential dilemmas of human society.  This statement is not a bemoanment of the death of romanticism, which had a long-standing affinity with the mysterious.  Rather, it is a bemoanment of the death of God, the affects of which have become tragically apparent in our own time.

            While medieval theologians spoke of God as the source of Being, they were able to do so with a degree of fear for they knew that they knew not what they said.  Aquinas himself was acutely aware of theology’s inability to speak of the being of God, and preferred rather to discuss the ways in which God does not exist[16].  Placher suggests that Aquinas never developed a metaphysical understanding of God, but rather developed a system of metalinguistic rules to remind us of how inadequate our language is to speak of the Divine[17].  However, their posterity have not had as much luck in continuing their conversations of God.

            One of the issues that Marion deals with in God Without Being is God’s relation to Being.  Certainly if God exists, then by definition, God must somehow be.  Having said that, Marion spends most of the book clarifying exactly what it means for God to be.  According to Sartre existence must proceed essence[18]. For instance, creation’s existence is determined by its relation to Being.  Nor is it enough merely to exist, but one must exist as an authentic human being.  Only then does life have definition.  It is one of the central concerns of human life and thought.  The possibility of death looms over human life and affects it so greatly that thinkers in the line of Heidegger have taught that death is actually that which determines one’s life. 

Human life is concerned with Being.  Philosophy has at least two branches of thought devoted solely to Being: Ontology and metaphysics.  But is God concerned with Being?  “Does Being define the first and highest of the divine names?  When God offers [Godself] to be contemplated and gives [Godself] to be prayed to, is [God] concerned primarily with Being?  When [God] appears as and in Jesus Christ, who dies and rises from the dead, is [God] concerned primarily with Being[19]?”  Another way to approach this question is to go back to the idol and icon.  If we agree with Marion’s assessment that the idol and icon define two modes of being then we must ask ourselves if God does actually participate in one of these two modes?  I would argue that God participates in an iconic mode of being, but in the opposite sense that creation does.  God is not that which gazes into the icon; God is that which gives the icon—God is that which appears in the icon and gives face to the icon. 

            Human beings depend first and foremost on Being (even the term, human beings, carries this connotation).  One must be before one can live, move, love, cry, think or labor.  Does Being define the Divine life this same way?  Most thinkers have succumbed to the temptation to think of God’s being in the same manner as their own.  Marion suggests that theology has erred at this point.  For God, that which is fundamental to God’s “life” is not Being, but Love (Agape).  Before God is, God loves, and God is only as God embodies Godself[20].  That is to say, God’s being is dependent on God’s love.  God is because God loves.  Further, for human beings, life is sustained by swallowing up, consuming, acquiring, taking into oneself.  God’s life is one of kenosis: that supreme giving away of oneself that is manifest in agape[21].  Moltmann attempts to say something similar when he says that God is Godself only when God loves.  God does not have the choice of being love and not being love[22].   However, Moltmann’s theology follows the pattern of Hegelianism, and leaves love dependent upon being.  By giving ontological precedence to Being, Moltmann is ultimately unable to differentiate between God and creation because God’s relationship to Being is no different from creation’s relationship to Being.  Because most contemporary thinkers find themselves in the same conceptual patterns as Moltmann, God remains less than Other.

            It is as if in our will to power we speak of God as if God were something that could be thought, grasped or spoken of.  We strive too hard to make theology a ‘respectable’ discipline by remaking “God” (the God of Being, the moral god) in our own image.  To borrow from Kierkegaard, there are too many “assistant professors” running around out there speaking of this “God”, ex-pressing and analyzing this idol, as they pursue their own political ends—their own will to power.  In the attempt to make a name for themselves, they try to somehow find a way to categorize God, so that they can keep these “God categories” in a drawer somewhere that obtainable and usable when the need arises.  Marion insists that “God” must cease to be a categorical name.  In Sartre’s words, “The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.”  It therefore becomes Marion’s goal to free “God” from the quotation marks surrounding God—to liberate God from metaphysics, and ultimately from the “Being of beings”[23]. 

            To do this, Marion turns oddly enough to Heidegger.  He quotes an extensive passage from a Zurich lecture in which Heidegger staunchly asserts that Being is not a proper category for theology at all.  One of the gentlemen in attendance asked if Heidegger believed God and Being were identical.  I will quote a selection from Heidegger’s response:

            One could not be more reserved than I before every attempt to employ Being to think theologically in what way God is God.  Of Being, there is nothing here to expect.  I believe that Being can never be thought as the ground and essence of God, but that nevertheless the experience of God and of [God’s] manifestedness, to the extent that the latter can indeed meet [humanity], flashes in the dimension of Being, which in no way signifies that Being might be regarded as a possible predicate for God[24].

Although God’s activity in the world and among human beings takes on the form of being, Heidegger maintained that God actually transcends Being.  Human beings are dasein; God is radically Other.  Humanity’s essence is grounded in Being, but God’s essence, for Marion, is love.

            When theologians become forgetful of this and equate God and Being, Marion says they are no longer doing theology, but theiology[25].  Theiology is a type of metaphysical or Hellenistic science devoted to the study of the Being of beings.  It is this discipline that falls victim to Feuerbach’s poignant attack on the projected God.  The Being of beings is no other than the projection of our own societal hopes and ideals which manifest themselves in cultural religious institutions.  Therefore when Kant speaks of God as the goal and guarantor of reason, he does not speak of God, but of the human person.  Likewise when Hegel speaks so eloquently of God (so eloquently in fact that even today the princes of Germany remain spellbound) as that absolute spirit that exists eternally within itself, moves eternally out of itself and eternally returns to itself, he is not speaking of God, but of nature and cosmos as they are perceived and rationalized by humanity.  Schleiermacher, perhaps least of all, speaks of God when he defines God as the source of our absolute dependence, but speaks only of human will to power[26]. Theology itself cannot be anything other than a response to divine revelation as it is manifest in the person of Jesus Christ.  Theology cannot be anything other, because to be other would be just that—to be other than theology.

            Let’s look once more at theiology before we move on.  Theiology has as its object the Being of beings.  Therefore, theiology begins with being and according to Thomas Aquinas, being [ens] is indeed the proper object of the human mind[27].  It is the first thing conceived by the mind.  It is not insignificant that the word proper has its roots in the French propre and the Latin propri meaning “one’s own, owned as property[28].”  Likewise, Descartes’ indubitable foundation was “I think therefore I am.”  At the deepest level of human thought is Being.  Finally, in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger suggests that thought/thinking unfolds the relation of Being to the essence of humanity in its fullness[29].  Hence, because it is the proper object of the mind, because it belongs to the mind, it is impossible for this to be the object of theology.  This desire for intellectual domination may be described in terms analogous to an intellectual lust.  Theological language, if it is to be theology, must tremble as it speaks of God.  It must be hoisted by the strength of humility.  For that which is possessed by the human intellect is not the God of the prophets, nor the God of the apostles. 

Deconstructing Onto-theo-logy:

            In part we have already begun the process of deconstructing onto-theo-logy through our critique of theiology as that which is concerned with the Being of beings.  In order to continue from here it is necessary to further define what it is that we can think and what we cannot think in relation to God.  God is not merely the highest Being for if that were the case, then there would be no qualitative difference between God and humanity.  Essentially God and humanity would be the same and we would speak only of a quantitative difference.  This quantitative difference is what Marion refers to as the ontological difference—a difference in degrees of being.  Therefore, if we are to think God we are required to think even beyond the ontological difference and how are we to think of that which is qualitatively different in all respects from we ourselves?  The danger of thinking beyond the ontological difference is that we may be left unable to think at all.  But is it all that absurd to be unable to think the Wholly Other[30]?  We have already decided that that which is the object of thought is nothing but a reflection of and the possession of the thinker.  But God exceeds as much what cannot be thought as what can be thought.  For that which I cannot think is still the subject of my thought and therefore remains thinkable[31].  Aquinas also affirms that the more one comes to understand God, the more one realizes that God eludes anything the mind can grasp[32].

            In contrast to reason stands revelation.  It is in contrast to reason because it does not originate in human thought and has no dependence on reason or logic.  Far from being irrational, revelation expands our category of the rational.  Let me put it this way: While reason and logic are grounded in human cultural-linguistic systems, revelation originates outside of culture and language and only then does it enter the cultural-linguistic world.  It is therefore in a position to critique culture and reason.  According to Karl Barth, the fact that revelation is not tied to the human intellect is exactly what gives revelation its unique authority[33].

            Further, while reason attempts to nail things down and demarcate the object of thought inside the realms of logic and category, revelation maintains a deep and overriding intellectual humility.  Caputo refers to revelation in terms of a quasi-transcendental condition that takes on no being itself, but is only a movement from the source of revelation to the receiver of that revelation.  In this way, it is analogous to language itself.  It remains in the betweenness of locutor and hearer.  Revelation may seem in this way to be slippery or unfoundational.  This is so only because of the humility of revelation which realizes that it is “too poor and impoverished, too unkingly, to dictate what there is or what there is not[34].”

            With this in mind we turn to the biblical revelation of God, a revelation that seems to permit a paradox between the Old and New Testaments.  Beginning in the Old Testament we are encountered with a God who cannot be contained, a God who is active, radically free and wholly other.  In this revelation we are confronted by the God who names Godself as, “I will be what I will be[35].”  Even in the name of God is paradox.  Marion says that in this name we are given the Being of beings and also that One who transcends Being to the point of the denegation of Being.  In Marion’s own words, “Being says nothing about God that God cannot immediately reject[36].”

            In the New Testament revelation presents us with the God who is incarnate in a human person, a God who is Emanuel, a God who has face and a God who is nailed to a cross.  In the Old Testament God’s relation to Being is one of paradox and we are left with and incomplete understanding of what it means for God to be.  In the New Testament revelation takes on a personal form and we find what it means for God to be.  We find in New Testament revelation a God who seems indifferent to Being.  Jesus Christ is crucified, dead, ceases to be.  He is forever the Crucified One.  Despite that, or perhaps in spite of that, Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and is also the Living One.  It is as if death and life have no authority over Jesus.

            In Romans Paul describes for us the faith of Abraham, “the father of us all, as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations.’  Facing [God] in whom he believed, the God who gives life to the dead and who calls the non-beings as beings (kalountoς ta mh onta wς onta)[37].”  The kalountoς is indifferent[38] to that which it addresses.  This shifts the orientation of the human subject who receives the call off of themselves and onto God.  Consider the man who cried out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief[39].”  One’s life does not depend on one’s own effort, labor, righteousness or faith, but only upon the call of God that embraces even those without life[40].  Consider the words of Jesus in John, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes [the one] who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; [that one] has crossed over from death to life.  I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live[41].”  The world leaves these individuals dead, faceless and nameless, but God goes to them and embraces them in their non-being.  For God Being becomes vanity.  God looks with indifference upon this ontic difference.

            Let us further consider the passage in I Corinthians where Paul instructs the Corinthian believers to “Consider your call (thn klhsin umon).  There were few among you who were wise according to the flesh, few who were powerful or well born.  But God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, God chose the weak things of the world to confound the strong.  God chose the ignoble things and the contemptible things and also the non-beings, in order to annul the beings (ta mh onta, ina ta onta katarghsh)—in order that no flesh should glorify itself before God[42].”  Again, God is indifferent to the ontic difference.  God chooses even those who are not to use as if they were.  The fact that the wise and strong are, does not insure them against non-being, for God may use those that are not to annul that which is.  In the end, being is ultimately defined as openness to the call or address of God.

Tillich makes the statement that it is the nonbeing in God that makes God a living God.  In other words, the “No” that God overcomes in Godself gives meaning (being, life) to the divine “Yes”[43].   But this is what Marion is arguing against.  God should certainly not be seen as a synthesis of Being and Nothing.  God’s “Yes” and “No” are not dependent.  There is neither anything nor nothing for God to overcome, for it is a matter of indifference to God[44].  

What revelation finally says about God is that God is God.  God is radically free both in a negative sense, free from any external forces, and in a positive sense, free to be what God will be.  If there is anything that revelation gives us to say about God, it may be that God is love.  Marion says that agape is not something that is known, but it is that which gives itself.  Agape itself crosses Being “with a cross that no mark of knowledge can demarcate[45].”  The cross stands in opposition to Being, holding a question mark against it and it is agape that emerges from the opposition.  As God confronts humanity there is a dichotomy between that which transcends Being and that which is constituted by Being; as that which gives of itself and that which draws into itself.  It is agape that emerges.  There is a fundamental gap between the human person and the Triune God.  If the Scriptures had not told us that we were created in the imago dei, we never would have conceived of it.  There is an infinite distance (or perhaps différance) between God and humanity[46].   Agape reaches across this gap, annuls this gap and it does so because only agape precedes being.  Agape annuls the gap, embracing non-being and calling it to life.  God loves sans being[47].

Anthropology:

            Marion’s anthropology is based in his doctrine of the idolatrous/iconic mode of being.  A person exists in the world either idolatrously, by projecting an image of themselves upon the world, or iconically, by allowing the invisible to be “projected” upon them.  Idolatry eventually produces vanity and boredom: vanity because one is continually gazing back upon oneself and boredom because nothing new or significant emerges out of a continuous self-gaze.  In contrast to this, the one who opens oneself to the invisible (through the visible icon) is continually being transformed by that within the invisible that envisages the human being.

            Earlier we mentioned the face encountered in the icon: a face that envisages humanity.  This constitutes a radically new doctrine of the imago (eicon) dei.  In Marion’s work, we are given being through the image of God that confronts us in the invisible face in the icon[48].  We are imaged, envisaged and utterly given: not our own, we were called forth from non-being.  As one gazes upon the icon, one’s gaze is moved beyond oneself.  One’s gaze is taken up into the “invisible gaze that visibly envisages [that one][49].”  As the gaze is taken up into the invisible gaze, subjectivity is left behind for that moment.  It is as if the I has finally encountered the Thou that can never be an object to it—as if the I exists because of the gaze of the Thou[50]. 

            The self that is given in this encounter with God is a self as a relation.  Although it is easy to interpret Kierkegaard’s self relation as an existential individualism, in actuality Marion’s text echoes Kierkegaard’s own.  The self the relation that relates itself to itself is given its being in the response to God’s address[51].  God’s call addresses that which is non-being and says to it “Be for me what I have given you to be.”  So long as the self relates itself to this given self, it is.  The “sickness unto death” (Marion would say “unto non-being”) emerges when the self attempts to realize and assert the being of God on one’s own.  This act is traditionally known in theology as sin[52].

            Therefore the self emerges out of the transcendent address of God.  Without transcendence then anthropology is caught in the humanistic, existentialism envisaged by Sartre.  It would remain a self condemned to be free, existing only so long as one fulfills one’s own plans for life, and struggling to orient oneself in an infinite universe without a center[53].  This is the life of the one consumed by consumerism, striving to acquire more and more possessions until even God becomes something to be possessed.   This is the

life that lived in the struggle to escape death.  Because the ultimate struggle is against death, such a life is ultimately oriented towards that which it seeks to escape.  Failing to escape, it eventually succumbs to death giving itself over to non-being. 

            Death reigns in human life only because the gap between consumerism and kenosis is allowed to remain.  When that gap is annulled by agapic self-giving, then life is no longer concerned with death.  The ontic difference becomes insignificant and non-being is no longer a threat.  It is only because God exists without existing, that God is sans being, that transcendence of this gap is possible.  Should theology seek to annul the sans, then it succeeds only in affirming the gap—that is, in affirming death. 

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists…The whole proecess of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of inbestigation exists…I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence.  For example, I do not demonstrate that a sonte exists but that something which exists is a stone…since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence…With regard to factual being, to speak more or less being is meaningless.  A fly, when it is, has just as much being as the god; with regard to factual being” (Fragments 40-41).