172. Walsh, Bill Viola, 219.
173. This Western concept of the picture as seen through a window contrasts significantly with that in the East, as art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy showed and whose writing Viola studied; in the latter, a different model of seeing “neither freezes the images in a moment of time nor fixes it ‘out there’ as an object, but reflects it back into the space of the viewer’s mind.” This observation is made by, and cited from, David Jasper in his essay on Viola’s Messenger, in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 189.
174. Marion, Idol and Distance.
175. Marion, God Without Being, 10.
176. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Completed Works, 332.
177. Walsh, Bill Viola, 207.
178. See in this context Jonkers and Welten, God in France, 190–91.
179. Ibid., 158.
180. Ibid.
181. Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 60–61.
182. Jonkers and Welten, God in France, 192–93.
183. Kearney, Anatheism, 15.
184. Viola, Reasons for Knocking, 103, 105, 198–202.
185. Walsh, Bill Viola, 53.
186. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 27–29.
187. Kearney, Anatheism, 8.
188. Ibid., 219.
189. See Bychkov and Fodor, Theological Aesthetics After Von Balthasar, 192.
190. Walsh, Bill Viola, 52.
5 The Secret Tongue of the Heart
Some Final Remarks
So how, in the end, does one speak of God, a god who is not the result of theoretical constructions or psychological desires? How do we acknowledge and find meaning in the summoning soliciting gaze of the Other? Doesn’t the apophatic gesture set up too much distance, too radical a separation between us and the divine? “Negative theology,” as Jacques Derrida has claimed, “means (to say) very little, almost nothing, perhaps something other than something. Whence its inexhaustible exhaustion. . .”191 For Derrida, in Sauf le Nom (1993), the question, much like for our apophatics, is how we may save the divine “name” by refusing to articulate its content; his answer, however, is a kind of mystical atheism. Moreover, as Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller argue with respect to apophatic mysticism, “This transcendence smacks of indifference (and so, ethically, of quietism) in the face of the needs, desires, and unjust sufferings of an embodied life.”192
We can, I think, circle back to Kant one last time to consider the conjoining of ethics and aesthetics toward what I’ve called an ethical sublime, a sublime now not in relation to nature but in relation to others and to oneself. Compellingly, Kant had argued in his earlier treatise Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime:
But what if the secret tongue of the heart speaks in this manner: “I must come to the aid of that man, for he suffers; not that he were perhaps my friend or companion, nor that I hold him amenable to repaying the good deed with gratitude later on. There is now no time to reason and delay with questions; he is a man, and whatever befalls men, that also concerns me.” Then his conduct sustains itself on the highest ground of benevolence in human nature, and is extremely sublime, because of its unchangeability as well as of the universality of its application.193
Marion’s God Without Being, we said, was an attempt to think God without or beyond the language of being or ontology. “Traditional metaphysical language,” Christina Gschwandtner argues, “that has been used to speak of God is inadequate to such a task.”194 It is this critique of onto-theology that perhaps links Marion most closely to his former teacher Derrida (and the idea of presence sous rature), and to the failure of classical metaphysics generally. For Marion, such efforts to designate God philosophically as ultimate being not only fail by their inadequacy in speaking of a divine, but can even be considered idolatrous.195 God cannot be an object of human knowledge, subordinate to the epistemological demands of a knower. Such a knowing ego which grounds all reality within a “metaphysics of presence” involves the notion that the world can be divided into such subject-object relations; it posits a world made up of objects the attributes of which, and therefore names and descriptions, can be predicated. Hence, Marion’s language of incomprehensibility, blinding light, saturation and excess, which diverges from Derrida and his deconstructionist acolytes as fullness does from emptiness.
Central to Marion’s phenomenology is the concept of the saturated phenomenon, the spilling over of all bounds of content which conveys something of God, and it is that surplus which can be tied directly to our extended reading of the Kantian “sublime.” Marion’s saturated phenomenon is, as John Caputo has glossed it, “the idea that there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts [such as conscious efforts at conceptualization . . .] aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded—or saturated.”196 Marion, then, can be situated within our earlier discussion of the (im)possibility of “naming” God—not, as the postmoderns would have it, in the sense of the inexhaustible self-depletion of language, but rather in the sense of apophaticism’s “excess of meaning.”
Marion posits a phenomenality that is “saturated” or fulfilled—abundant phenomenon. This means it does not depend on my orientation or my intentionality or my interpretation. It blinds me, overriding my intentionality. Marion characterized it as an excess: again, I am blinded; there is too much light. On a similar note, “the spiritual light,” wrote St. John of the Cross, “is so bright and so transcendent that it blinds . . .”197 And this of course has roots in that most Platonic of images, the “dazzling darkness” experienced by the released prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave, as there his ascent toward the excess of brilliant light is so jarring as to cause pain and darkness—the price of contemplation of the “light” of truth. Darkness here is the excess of light, rather than its absence; Gregory of Nyssa called it “luminous darkness.” And St. Paul asserts, in 1 Timothy 6:16, that God “dwells in unapproachable light.”
Metaphysics for Marion is itself idolatrous precisely because it circumscribes the divine by a concept, a concept that supposes it can define—and thereby limit—God. And the notion of excess or saturation is not unlike the initial disappointment the mind experiences in the Kantian sublime wherein one is confronted with the limits of finite consciousness. In an interview with Richard Kearney, author of The God Who May Be, Marion speaks of this sense of disappointment:
The very experience of the excess of intuition over signification makes clear that the excess may be felt and expressed as disappointment. The experience of disappointment means that I marked an experience which I cannot understand, because I have no concept of it. So the excess and the disappointment can come together.198
This “disappointment” is the situation of encountering something without having the possibility to understand it. We must come to realize that it is an invitation not to comprehension, but to participation.
But, still, is God/the Divine Other too transcendent, without possibility for relationship? This is the question or critique Richard Kearney puts to Marion. Kearney argues instead for a revelation of God that doesn’t speculate about Being or ontology but rather remarks on the experience of plenitude, and therefore the idea of a God of possibility and promise—a more hopeful notion than that which he imputes to Marion as “a divinity so far beyond-being that no heurmeneutics of interpreting, imagining, symbolizing, or narrativizing is really acceptable,” and where “God’s alterity appears so utterly unnameable and apophatic that any attempt to throw heurmeneutic drawbridges between it and our finite means of language is deemed a form of idolatry.”199 Such negative, apophatic theology, Kearney claims, denies any possibility of narrative imagination, such that “the divine remains utterly unthinkable, unnamable, unrepresentable—that is, unmediatable.”