12. God Does Appear in Immanence after all: Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenology as a new First Philosophy of Theology
Sijn Van Den Bossche (p325)
Limits to the paper (p325). The relational, that something is to me cannot become the absolute, what something is as-such; being cannot escape the subject/object relation (p326); Etant Donne, the distinction between the idol and the icon; an idol is the best humans can make of God, the mirror image of the transcendental ego; idolatry is always self idolatry (p327) whereas reality is a screen through which another gazes at us (p328); summary of Etant Donne (p329-30).
Phenomenology is atheist; whereas science and metaphysics seek to demonstrate indubitablilty, phenomenology only shows; it does not occupy itself with what precedes immanence, it studies only the appearance of the thing in its phenomenon (p330), a thing then only appears in auto-staging; so it is the method which directs itself against every method, including its own watching, it is contra method, like a police officer clearing the space for a following phenomenon. After discussing Heidegger and Husserl where reality starts with ourselves; but the more reduction, the more givenness; (p331); the process of reduction (p332); the ordinary painting that gives itself to the viewer not in words (p333); but its being is not in-itself but in every different time we view it; art considered in its effect (p334-5).
Derrida on gift (p336); God becomes rationally possible through immanence preceding the human gaze, as opposed to being an idol 'created' by that gaze (p337).
So how does the painting give itself (nb, giving not in single quotes - KC)? Search for phenomena cross horizons instead of being inscribed in them, an appeal to intuition and intention which coincide, in mathematics in zero, but every object should be saturated with its surplus of intuition over intention ((p338-9), reverses the Kantian categories by which we judge and know: quantity, quality, relational, modal; four saturated phenomena: event exceeds quantity; the idol exceeds quality; flesh/chair has no relational; the Icon constitutes the god into its witness.
Four reverse paradigms gathered in Christ. Jesus cannot be circumscribed, surveyed, supported, is absolute and cannot be gazed at (p340). His person saturates the four Kantian categories; Jesus in quantity and quality (p341); according to relation, modality (p342) "Jesus Christ is the historical paradigm of the maximal self-giving of the whole reality, or of the phenomenon of the type of revelation." (p343)
Autonomy must surrender to heteronomy; God does not belong to the 'self' of our reality but is radically other. Theological reason is universal reason, it is intellectually right, the only way of thinking (p344). This assertion of "logic from the other" relies on the Resurrection; he reconciles the God of Abraham and the philosophers, the theologies of rationalism and revelation. Marion lets god, remaining invisible, appear for reason, back to Vatican I's "Natural knowledge of God" (p345). Conclusion (p346).