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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2022
Jean-Luc Marion is often interpreted as a thinker of the purely invisible and apophatic, in tension with the rich forms of mediation found in Christian practice. I will challenge these assumptions through a close reading of one of Marion's rare concrete examples, the “icon”— not his philosophical use of the term, but the holy image that initially inspired it. Marion defines the sacred image by its “transparency,” “self-effacement,” or “kenosis.” This seems to indicate that the icon must cancel itself out to make room for God, an iconoclastic attitude with troubling consequences for the believer who prays to the icon and for the rest of the finite world. By rigorously developing Marion's understanding of this word “kenosis,” I argue that, counter to initial impressions, this account of the sacred image is deeply faithful to the essential aspects of the Byzantine icon understood as a “window into heaven.”
1 John Damascene, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997), Oration III.21; PG 1341a-b.
2 Paraphrased from John Damascene, On the Divine Images, Florilegia to Oration 1, 39.
3 See Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25–29.
4 See Gschwandtner, Christina M., Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. This position is also confirmed by a close reading of Marion's 2004 essay, “The Banality of Saturation,” included in The Visible and Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 119–44.
5 See Marion, Jean-Luc, La croisée du visible (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991)Google Scholar, trans. James K. A. Smith as The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Hereafter cited in English (CV), then French (CdV). Marion has also considered the icon in his early essay, “Fragments sur l'idole et l'icône,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84, no. 4 (1979): 433–45, and a more recent essay, “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen: Nicholas of Cusa's Contribution in De visione Dei,” trans. Stephen E. Lewis, The Journal of Religion 96, no. 3 (July 2016): 305–31.
6 Jodie McNeilly, “The Moving Icon: Critically Seeking the Aesthetic in Marion and Finding a Phenomenological Alternative with Husserl,” in Breached Horizons, the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, and Steve G. Lofts (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), 125.
7 Barber, Charles, “Defacement,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 56 (2010): 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 I am grateful to Kyle Kavanaugh for sharing with me an early draft of his translation of this text by Falque, Emmanuel, “The All-Seeing: Fraternity and Vision of God in Nicholas of Cusa,” trans. Kavanaugh, Kyle H. and Aspray, Barnabas, Modern Theology 35, vol. 4 (October 2019): 787Google Scholar.
9 Fritz, Peter Joseph, “Black Holes and Revelations: Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion on the Aesthetics of the Invisible.” Modern Theology 25, no. 3 (July 2009): 433CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 CV, 78/CdV, 139.
11 CV, 60/CdV, 109.
12 CV, 62, 86–87/CdV, 111, 152–53.
13 The latter of the chapters in question, “The Prototype and the Image,” was originally written for a colloquium held at Collège de France to celebrate the 1200th anniversary of Nicaea II. F. Boespflug and N. Lossky, eds., Nicée II, 787–1987: Douze siècles d'images religieuses (Paris: Cerf, 1987).
14 John Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror,” in Counter Experiences: Reading the Work of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 272.
15 Barber, “Defacement,” 107.
16 Graham Ward, “The Beauty of God,” Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 52; see also Graham Ward, “The Theological Project of Jean-Luc Marion,” in Post-Secular Philosophy, ed. Philip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 232; Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 222.
17 Ward, “The Beauty of God,” 49.
18 Ward, “The Beauty of God,” 40–41n7, 49.
19 Kathryn Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology,” in Counter Experiences: Reading the Work of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 224.
20 Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology,” 225.
21 See Schrijvers, Joeri, “On Doing Theology ‘After’ Ontotheology: Notes on a French Debate,” New Blackfriars 87 (2006): 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 See Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 117n25; Kearney, Richard, “A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion,” Philosophy Today 48 (2004): 12–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Graves, Adam, “Before the Text: Ricoeur and the ‘Theological Turn,’” Studia Phaenomenologica 13 (2013): 359–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shane MacKinley, Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), takes this argument to a questionable extreme, whereas Gschwandtner shows a more measured criticism in Degrees of Givenness.
23 See Tamsin Jones, A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 109–10, 118, 165; see also Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness, 157–59.
24 Gschwandtner has especially emphasized this point in a number of places, from early articles, “Praise—Pure and Personal? Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenologies of Prayer,” in Phenomenology of Prayer, ed. B. E. Benson and N. Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, 168–81), to more recent ones such as, “Marion's Spirituality of Adoration and Its Implications for a Phenomenology of Religion,” in Breached Horizons, 205–07.
25 See Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror,” 307–08.
26 John Damascene, On the Divine Images, Oration 1.11; PG 94 1241b.
27 CV, 80/CdV, 142–43.
28 CV, 80/CdV, 142–43. See also Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 58. See Nietzsche's notebook entry “end of 1870–April 1871” in vol. 3/3 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 207.
29 CV, 81/CdV, 143.
30 See Jean-Luc Marion, Courbet, ou la peinture à l’œil (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 194–95.
31 See Mark Guscin, Image of Edessa (Leiden: Brill, 2009) for variants on this Eastern Christian analogue to the Western veil of Veronica story.
32 Marion explains this point most notably in CV; see also Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Marion, In Excess; and Jean-Luc Marion, “What We See and What Appears,” trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner, in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 152–68.
33 CV, 67/CdV, 121. See also Marion, God Without Being, 9–11. But note the development of this term: in Marion's early work, the “idol” is spoken of as an inappropriate way of speaking about God; by CV, it is considered an appropriate way to speak about aesthetics.
34 There is much more to say here about Marion's particular ideas on aesthetics and how the visible image relates to different levels of “invisibility,” but my interest is strictly in the kind of image that can serve as an icon; for more discussion on these questions, see Cristian Ciocan, “Entre visible et invisible: les paradigmes de ‘image’ chez Jean-Luc Marion,” in Jean-Luc Marion: Cartésianisme, phénoménologie, théologie: actes du colloque international, les 19 et 20 mars 2010 à Budapest, ed. Sylvain Camilleri and Adam Takacs (Budapest, Hungary: l'Institut français de Budapest, 2010), 93–113. Other helpful sources include Fritz, “Black Holes,” Gschwandtner, “Art and the Artist,” in Degrees of Givenness, and Potter, Brett David, “Image and Kenosis: Assessing Jean-Luc Marion's Contribution to a Postmetaphysical Theological Aesthetics,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79, no. 1–2 (2018): 60–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Marion, Courbet, ou la peinture à l’œil, 195–96, translation and emphasis mine. Jean-Yves Lacoste raised this same problem of the visibility of the face with respect to painted icons as well, in his early article, “Visages: Paradoxe et gloire,” La Revue Thomiste 35, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 1985): 561–606.
36 See Marion, In Excess, 76–77.
37 Marion, In Excess, 75–76; in Being Given, 267, Marion suggests that “the portraits painted by Cézanne or Picasso close men's faces by leading them back to mineral or animal nature.”
38 Marion first discusses these terms in Being Given, 232–33, and further develops them in In Excess, 104–27. Both texts develop the idea of an “icon” as the “saturated phenomenon,” that is, a phenomenon whose intuition exceeds our intentional grasp and thus overturns objective, conceptual mastery. The “idol” as a dazzling aesthetic experience is another variety of saturation. This precise formulation of saturation, however, is not yet present in CV. Written between 1985 and 1987 and first published in 1991, CV stands as a midpoint between Marion's earlier work, where the “icon” refers to a way of God's appearing (especially L'idôle et distance, 1977, and Dieu sans l’être, 1982), and his later phenomenological breakthrough, notably in Étant donné, first published in 1997.
39 CV, 75/CdV, 133.
40 CV, 65/CdV, 115.
41 CV, 83–84/CdV, 147–49.
42 CV, 86/CdV, 152.
43 Emmanuel Falque, “The All-Seeing,” 760–87.
44 Falque never lays out these criteria clearly or systematically, as his strategy is to identify elements of Cusa's description that do not accurately fit a Byzantine icon (by Falque's own reckoning—his definition does not seem to be based upon any particular theological or aesthetic authority). His primary points of contention are as follows: any icon (a) must be a direct representation of Christ himself—thus ignoring the icons of saints, angels, and major events from Scripture or church history; (b) must be omnivoyant—to his credit, Falque rightly points out that omnivoyance is found in other aesthetic traditions as well, but he does not recognize that not all Byzantine icons possess it; (c) must make the invisible visible by an inverse perspective that exclusively pulls us toward it, completely unsettling our subjectivity—but inverse perspective is only one among several perspective strategies to create a visual relation in Byzantine icons; (d) must not be placed on walls outside strict ecclesial settings—to me, the most perplexing of Falque's claims. Even if we ignore the fact that this is inaccurate (Byzantine icons have often been placed on walls outside churches, including the famous Chalke gate!), it seems very odd to claim that the icon's identity would be negated simply because of where a group of Roman Catholic monks decide to place it.
45 See Georges Didi-Huberman, L'image ouverte: Motifs d'incarnation dans les arts visuels (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2007); Georges Didi-Huberman, “Les théologies entre l'idole et l'icone.” Encyclopédia Universalis-Corpus, vol. 3 (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1989), 65–73.
46 Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), 84.
47 Jean-Luc Nancy, Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2–4.
48 C. A. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 7.
49 Maximos Constas, The Art of Seeing: Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2014), 22.
50 Denny, Christopher, “Iconoclasm, Byzantine and Postmodern: Implications for Contemporary Theological Anthropology,” Horizons 36, vol. 2 (Fall 2009): 202–03Google Scholar.
51 CV, 60–61/CdV, 109. Unless otherwise noted, I will be citing from Smith's English translation as it stands, apart from an occasional parenthetical insertion of the original French.
52 CV, 62/CdV, 111.
53 CV, 75/CdV, 133.
54 CV, 86–87/CdV, 152–53.
55 See Ward, “The Beauty of God,” 40–41n7, 49.
56 I cite here the English translation of the original Greek found in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:135–36. Marion repeats these words on CV, 68/CdV, 123, following C. von Schönborn's French translation in L'icône du Christ (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1976), 143, and adds in the original Greek phrases, which I have included here. Note that contrary to Marion's citation, the text is indeed from the Horos and not the canons, and can be found in Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, ed. XXXVI (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), n600. The chapter in question, once again, was originally written for a colloquium on Nicaea II.
57 CV, 69–70/CdV, 124–25.
58 CV, 73/CdV, 130–31, translation modified.
59 See Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 3–4.
60 In short, Marion seems to be disregarding the visible image, while the iconoclasts want to destroy it. The iconoclasts are still operating in a mimetic mode, where the visible is in competition with the invisible, intensified by their very narrow and totalizing view of the image. Marion leaves the mimetic plane, as we have seen, and thus the visible neither effects iconicity nor prevents it.
61 CV, 62/CdV, 111.
62 CV, 63/CdV, 112–13.
63 Tamsin Jones, “Dionysius in Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion,” Modern Theology 24, vol. 4 (October 2008): 749; see also Andrew Prevot, Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crisis of Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), which discusses at greater length the relationship between Marion and Balthasar, and Brett David Potter, “Image and Kenosis,” which focuses on the influence of Balthasar on Marion's account of art.
64 See Marion, Jean-Luc, “À partir de la Trinité,” Communio 40, no. 6 (2015): 23–38Google Scholar. It is worth noting that the core insights of this article have been taken up at several key moments of Marion's D'ailleurs, la révélation (Paris: Grasset, 2020). I will nevertheless focus here on the 2015 text which is directly centered on this problematic.
65 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 27–28.
66 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 28.
67 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité.”
68 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 23; my emphasis.
69 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 25–26.
70 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 33. This is hinted at in CV, but in a few lines that are very dense and cryptic; see CV, 84–85/CdV, 148–50.
71 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 36.
72 CV, 58/CdV, 104.
73 See for example CV, 46–54, 81–83/CdV, 85–98, 147–50.
74 CV, 61, 78/CdV, 109, 139.
75 CV, 76/CdV, 136.
76 This qualification is added the first time this passage appears in the book, at CV, 60–61/CdV, 109, which is referred to in full in footnote 51; the following chapter uses an abbreviated form that omits the qualification, CV, 78/CdV, 139.
77 CV, 73/CdV, 128, translation modified.
78 CV, 74/CdV, 130. Here Marion's language seems quite close to the wound of the image spoken of by Georges Didi-Huberman, L'image ouverte, and Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Frances (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 92.
79 Ibid., 60–61/CdV, 109, emphasis mine. This sense is mitigated in the original, as the French reflexive often has a more passive connotation than the active reflexive of English.
80 Ibid., 78/CdV, 139.
81 Of course, if Christ gave freely, he did not eagerly launch into his death; one must certainly consider with prudence exactly how far, and exactly in what way, a kenotic image, or any kenotic thing, ought to expose itself to violence. See Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990); Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing,” in Swallowing a Fishbone?: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996): 82–111; and Papanikolaou, Aristotle, “Person, Kenosis and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation,” Modern Theology 19, no. 1 (January, 2003): 41–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is also worth pointing out Marion's essay “Evil in Person,” where he suggests that absorbing evil is precisely the way that Christ can block and vanquish it, in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 8–11.
82 Marion, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham, University Press, 2001), 166, which Robyn Horner explains in Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction, (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 54–57. Marion's words here serve as an illustration of the title of section §15 in which this text appears, the “Immediate Mediation” of God, a phrase that Marion takes up from Balthasar in his reading of Dionysius the Areopagite. Rémi Brague's “La structure de l'apostolicité: la médiation immédiate” with J.-M. Vignolles, Résurrection 45 (1975): 59–77, theologically sketches out the implications of this same patristic, isomorphic structure.
83 Marion, Idol and Distance, 166.
84 Marion, “À partir de la Trinité,” 29–31.
85 “Charity reveals that the Father gives himself in and as the Son, that the prototype opens in and as the visible. But these kenotic transitions never testify to anything but charity. Thus, they can only appear for the one who surrenders to them, according to the same kenotic transition by which charity is offered in a paradox.” CV, 85/CdV, 150, translation modified.
86 CV, 64/CdV, 114.
87 Marion is even more explicit about this in his paper on Nicolas of Cusa, saying that a repeated aesthetic praxis can open “a new way of behaving,” or habitus, that can dispose us more consistently toward the right; see “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen,” 308. For Marion, aesthetics at its highest stage is more than mere spectacle and can prepare both the viewer and the image for prayerful encounter with the Divine. Ian Rottenberg offers one possible explanation of how Marion's account of aesthetics itself can suggest to us such a practice, in Rottenberg, Ian, “Fine Art as Preparation for Christian Love,” Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 2 (2014): 243–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brett David Potter gives a good overview of some of these issues as well in “Image and Kenosis.”
88 Marion, Reprise du donné (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), 43.
89 Marion, “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen,” 315–16.
90 Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology,” 225.
91 John of the Cross, “Ascent of Mount Carmel,” 2.5.6, in The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2017). This also echoes a patristic image often used by John Damascene: the iron that seems to become one with the fire.
92 John of the Cross, “Ascent of Mount Carmel,” emphasis mine.
93 Marion, The Idol and Distance, §15, “Immediate Mediation,” especially 159n38; see Brague, “La structure de l'apostolicité: la médiation immediate.” This isomorphic framework also supports the Orthodox belief that the icon has a kind of “hypostatic” or “exemplary” character in its action that exists in parallel to the holiness of the saint. See especially Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity, 13, 18.
94 Marion, The Idol and Distance, 166.