Nothing Is Impossible for God

In this chapter Marion speaks of the miracle as what we think to be impossible although it actually takes place. The miracle is about what really occurs but seems impossible, not about a logical contradiction, but about an event (it is hence about faith in the event). Christ’s death is the end of any possibility; his resurrection the miracle of the event of the impossible. The miracle puts faith into play. Metaphysics excludes possibility (and sees it as opposed to actuality). Phenomenology frees the possibility of phenomena. The Resurrection becomes the paradigm for any miracle. It appears outside the horizon and displaces or suspends it by saturating our gaze. This saturated phenomenon constitutes the I.

On the Eminent Dignity of the Poor Baptized

Marion criticizes the distinction between clerics and laity, which turns the layperson into a militant defender of the faith and ignores the priestly function they already have in virtue of their baptism. It turns clerics into officials dependent on the laity instead of the ones who administer the sacraments. The two kinds of priesthood (baptismal and presbyteral) are linked. We must convert ourselves and the world. The priest calls the assembly together only in the Name of Christ. The priest is in service of the community, helping the baptized to grow into Christ. We become Christian only through imitation of Christ. The proper role of the baptized Christian is to communicate Christ to the world by converting himself.

The Invisible Saint

Sanctity cannot be experienced or claimed; thus the saint is always invisible. Only someone who has returned from the dead can witness to it. The paradox of holiness reproduces that of death. God’s utter alterity is holiness, what cannot be aimed at. Holiness marks the realm of God’s very phenomenality as unreachable invisibility. The saint operates in the paradox of the order of charity.

“They Recognized Him and He Became Invisible to Them”

Using the Gospel account of the resurrected Christ’s encounter with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, Marion argues that faith is not about making up for a lack of intuitions, but about the fact that our concepts fail to grasp the abundance of intuitive given. The disciples cannot and do not want to understand; they have no concepts for grasping what presents itself as fully given. Christ must provide the hermeneutic, which ultimately occurs in the gift of the broken bread. Christ as the logos gives them his meaning.

Transcendence par Excellence

This chapter argues that while God is defined in manifold ways, only love is an appropriate name for the divine because it alone does not reduce God’s transcendence. God transcends us as best lover. God loves to the point of death, even those who do not return such love. God loves without measure. The highest summons of transcendence is to love unconditionally. We are called to love as God loves.

The Formal Reason of the Infinite

Proceeding from the realization of a kind of universality of the infinite present in most sciences, Marion develops a notion of the infinite as incomprehensibility, which he shows to be a defining and positive feature of the infinite. The infinite absolutely surpasses us. But this applies not only to the divine, but also to humans: humans are gods inasmuch as they bear the divine image and as a painting is called after the master who executed it. Christians have a responsibility to preserve this incomprehensibility of the other. We should never objectify the other, but instead defend the irreducibility of humanity as essentially incomprehensible and inexpressible in concepts.

The Phenomenality of the Sacrament

Marion argues that the sacrament as an issue of revelation has a particular phenomenality. He examines three main theological models for the sacrament and argues that in all three the phenomenality of the sacrament turns out to be one of self-givenness in utter abundance and abandonment. The phenomenon of the sacrament gives itself as pure gift and can hence serve also as the ultimate paradigm for the phenomenality of all phenomena.

Faith and Reason

In this chapter Marion claims that faith and reason are not opposed to each other, as is often supposed, but faith has its own rationality, namely unfolding the reason of the “logos” as the gift of love. Christians have a duty to rationality. Modernity reduces everything known to objects and hence leads to nihilism. We must exercise a “greater reason,” namely a rationality of the flesh and of love, which gives Christ’s logos to the world as gift. As Christians we must hand on the love we have received. Such love is unconditioned and enables both true self-knowledge and genuine knowledge of the other.

The Recognition of the Gift

The truest and most important phenomena remain invisible but are given phenomenologically as gifts. The gift requires a phenomenology of the invisible. To know God is to receive the gift of love, as the experience of the Samaritan woman who encounters Christ at Jacob’s well illustrates. The gift is always unconditioned and recognized only in and through Christ. Thus, the Eucharist is the very paradigm of the gift, a perfectly given gift, and Christ the gift par excellence.

The Future of Catholicism

Catholicism has an ethical role in contemporary culture as raising questions about norms and practices in order to preserve the dignity of the human being. The Church must give the Word (Christ) to the world. Man as absolute principle (in Descartes, Kant, and Hegel) becomes a means to an end. The “I” treated as absolute subject of knowledge becomes an object. The I cannot be the source of values or knowledge (man reverts to himself); this devalues the I. Man transcends man. Instead of objectifying man as an object of knowledge, we must “recognize” man as created in the image of God (which assures man’s essential unknowability). Christians must “keep the vigil of the unknowable.”