America's Young Theologian - The Life and Theology of Dan Morehead

Walking to Emmaus: Musing with Marion about the Agency Behind the Happenings

[A friend asked me to respond to Jean-Luc Marion's article, “They Recognized Him; And He Became Invisible To Them” (Modern Theology 18:2 April 2002) 145-152. The following is written in conversation with Marion's piece, which can be downloaded here.]

Marion asks his reader, “Why do we believe so badly in God, and so little in Christ?” (145), and then quickly sketches what he takes to be a common but blasphemous response. The inadequate response (held by “the majority of...experts, scholars, philosophers, and even some theologians”) goes something like this. “[W]e believe...because...we decidedly lack intuitions that would allow us to validate some [statements or concepts], and risk rejecting others” such that faith compensates for “faulty intuition, almost as a way to verify the concepts experimentally.” Or said differently, “I want to hold as true that which does not offer intuitive data sufficient to impose itself by itself” (145).

According to Marion this is blasphemy on two grounds. First, this makes the individual a singular actor excluding God from the stage of agency. Second and logically following the first, “God and Christ become in this context either impotent…or perverse judges (who, in masking themselves, expose me to unbelief by condemning me to a faith without reason)” (146).

Marion’s corrective, argued with illustration from the Emmaus story, is this: “It might be that we should believe not in order to recapture a lack of intuition, but rather to confront its excess in relation to a deficiency of statements and a dearth of concepts”(146).

Marion’s introductory question, “Why do we believe so badly in God, and so little in Christ?” find its parallel in the Emmaus story in relation to the failure of the two disciples to recognize their teacher. ‘Their eyes were kept from recognizing him,’ but by what exactly? Marion answers arguing that:

In fact, they kept themselves from recognizing him. Why were they denying the evidence? Not because it was deficient—it wasn’t lacking in the slightest—but because it contradicts their entire comprehension (their miscomprehension, or at the least, their pre-comprehension) of a phenomenon that is nevertheless patently beneath their eyes, and in their ears. (147)

Marion uses the analogies of game and language:

They see nothing—in the sense that one see nothing in a game of chess if one does not know how to play; they hear nothing—in the sense that one hears nothing (except noise) in a conversation if one does not know the language in which it is being conducted. (147)

Jesus, the Christ, God’s Logos, “the exegete of God” (John 1:18), endeavors to provide the unseeing disciples with the conceptual framework that they might see. This is equivalent to saying that he provides them the hermeneutic, a hermeneutic which can only be divinely given, allowing them to see all of the Scriptures as they refer to him alone such that their superabundant intuitional data finds a home in an adequate conceptual framework.

Marion sees this matching, the always already present superabundant data (which if Marion was arguing from a larger biblical context could have been further argued by referencing the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans) with the given conceptual framework, to occasion the shared experience which the disciples later discuss: “Did not our hearts [and thus our minds] burn within us while he talked to us on the road in such a way as to open to us the [concepts of the] Scriptures?” (149).

So what has Marion done? In answer to his initial quandary, his response is that “[f]aith does not compensate, either here or anywhere else, for a defect of visibility: on the contrary, it allows reception of the intelligence of the phenomenon and the strength to bear the glare of its brilliance” (150). In Marion’s scheme, the visibility of God’s Revelation, of which the Incarnation is preeminent precisely because it is the hermeneutical key to its own (and every) phenomenon, necessitates a divinely-given interpretation.

Marion asks and answers one more question: “why does this phenomenon [the Resurrected Jesus] disappear at the very instant in which it finally becomes visible—visible because believable” (151)? Here Marion offers both a missiological and (what might improperly be called) an ontological answer. “First, because the issue now is not, or is not only, to see him, but to show him ‘to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem’ (v. 47)” (151). The missiological answer basically argues that Jesus’ disappearance allows space for “all to receive the significations that allow them to see that which the intuition offers, without rendering it manifest again” (151). Said differently, Jesus’ physical absence which most definitively proceeds from the Ascension, allows for a multiplicity of signs which “make visible [their] phenomenon” (150). The eyes of the disciples were opened when Jesus stayed with them and ‘taking the bread, he said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them.’ They recognize him (or, said differently, match his given concept to their pre-existing phenomenal experience)—a “recognition in the sign (in the signification in action) of the breaking of bread,” “[w]hich the disciples accept as the strict equivalent of their own phenomenal experience” (150). Jesus provides the means “to think that of which they have sensible intuition” (151). Not disconnected from the first answer, Marion argues that Jesus disappears at the moment of recognition because “such a phenomenon, pre-eminently saturated, cannot be touched (John 20:17), nor even contemplated in this world which, in this time, does not ‘have the space’ to contain the significations that would have to be ‘written’ (John 21: 25)” (151-2). Taken together Marion’s arguments seem to be this: all creation, all Scripture is God’s revelation, a revelation which both needs and points to Christ and is now capable of being seen as such on the basis of the presence and actions of Jesus which alone contains both the necessary concept and phenomenon. However, the overwhelming coincidence of this concept and this phenomenon is precisely what this world cannot, in this time, ontologically contain, thus Jesus disappears, but leaves behind tangible signs which overcome “the difficulty in believing [which] is explicitly equivalent to a difficulty in believing what one sees already but does not admit” (151).

The sacramental character of this argument may not be apparent to some, since Marion’s argument leans toward, but does not make explicit the sacramental mode that he is presenting. That this is so can be seen beyond the contours of Emmaus narrative which already display the manner in which the disciples’ recognition is brought about through the signification in action, the breaking of the bread. Marion explicates how Jesus’ gestures function to “have himself recognized as the one who he was among them,” or “to constitute the intuition, maddening for as long as it remained bare, into a complete phenomenon” (151). Further, when Marion speaks of a fittingness [convenance] stronger even than a necessity (149), he stands in the long Catholic sacramental tradition which speaks of necessitas convenientiae, the necessity of suitableness, which understands sacraments to be the most appropriate manner of dealing with humanity, creatures who are both spiritual and corporeal.

Why is this important to point out? Simply because Marion’s argument requires it. As already seen, Marion’s initial question was about the relationship between faith and reason, a relationship which he argues cannot be construed as faith compensating for a lack of present intuitional data. As he argued, to do so would overemphasize human agency so as to make God either impotent or perverse. Yet, arguing that what is lacking is not proper intuitions, but the proper conception does not place human beings in a more able position. One following Marion’s corrective is not pressed into a faith without reason, but rather must contend instead with a reasonable faith but one beyond the reach of human agency; humanity is still lost amidst bare intuitions. The poverty is one of conceptual framework. The shift is one away from human agency (where faith is “imagining what one does not see”) to divine agency, a giving of that which allows humans to admit what they do in fact already see (151). His argument has not moved from a diagnosed epistemological inability to ability, but rather a movement away from improperly anthropocentric faith-as-creation to a more adequate faith-as-gift. This begs the question, however, of how that gift is given. This comes “neither from the bare texts, nor from the obscured ideas of men, but from the perfect adaptation of the thoughts of God (recorded in the Scriptures) to the acts of God (gesta Christi offered to our intuition), which manifest in a perfect phenomenon “the mystery hidden for ages in God [...] the manifold wisdom of God’ (Ephesians 3:9-10)” (149). This adaptation is made possible by the incarnation but neither immediately nor necessarily so, since even those who were among, or even disciples of, Jesus still needed Jesus’ conceptual gift to allow this adaptation. “When he comes among us—though he comes, or rather precisely because he comes—, we, who are his own people, cannot ‘grasp him, understand him’ (John 1:11)” (148). The presence of Jesus and the ontological inability of the world, in this time, to hold the overwhelming coincidence of God’s concept and phenomena, which in Marion’s argument is evidenced by Jesus’ disappearance, does not, however, relegate humanity to utter blindness. Rather, the physical presence of Jesus makes humanly possible the position of coming-to-see, or coming-to-believe that which is always already seen, even if the full gift, the full adaptation of concept to phenomenon cannot be contained. It becomes clear, then, that this process, this coming-to-see, can only be effected through God’s agency, “first of all through [physical] gestures, and then words” (151) which allow for all phenomena to begin to be narrated as christocentric, which is to say theocentric. “The opening of the meaning, and thus of the mind...is decided in and by ‘the Scriptures’, taken not as pure letters, but as the recording of significations established by God in order to constitute the intuitions of his incarnation in a full and wholly complete phenomenon of Revelation” (151). Marion has thus shifted the focus from faith as the blasphemous reification of human agency to Jesus’ divine gift which is himself. This gift makes possible the possibility of humanity being taught by sacramental significations. However, to more fully substantiate his argument Marion should make explicit that the order of discovery or reception is the reverse of the order of giving or precession, that is to say, Marion should state that it is only through receiving the sacramental significations himself that he has come to see and argue thus.

Daniel R. Morehead
27 September 2005
L’Arche Washington, DC