Brian Hamilton

Marion and Denys: On Praise and Doctrine

The discourse of praise—which functions as a third way, beyond signification and negation even while Marion renounced any such thing as a third way earlier in the chapter (L’idole et la distance, 150)—overcomes the aporia of linguistic inadequacy by simultaneously stressing anonymity and polyonomy “as two banks of the same distance” (186). Anonymity, even used as a name, serves as an icon of the invisible, of the anterior distance of God and at the same time of excess. But anonymity, by an inversion of the category of speech itself, becomes also “praise as…” which celebrates the divinity with an infinity of names. “Because anonymous, one and the same meaning-lessness [in-sensé] gives rise to an infinity of praises—thus distance, now ensured of its irreducibility, can be endlessly traversed” (ibid.).

Endlessly traversed, however, according to a certain theological rigor—not destroyed but indeed ensured by the passage into distance. For only the logia delivered through distance are logia that come as gifts, immediately mediating the Logos, rather than words of our own devising. Thus the Scriptures are “the sole foundation that might validate a discourse on the Logos, because they issue from it” (181). Marion thus foreshadows the eucharistic hermeneutic he will outline in Dieu sans l‘être, where he will add to the point that the Logos can be only spoken by the (Scriptural) logia that the (Scriptural) logia can be only be interpreted from the point of view of the Logos: the hierarchical circle of immediate mediation. (The possibility of a ‘hierarchical circle’ shows Marion’s consistency here—he does not forgo his insistence that Denys’s hierarchy is not to be imagined according to the ‘vulgar’ and ‘political’ model currently understood in the term.)

So the beginning of the discourse of praise does not mean the end of theological rigor or the possibility of error, because even the infinite names are multiplied according to the word handed down. Denys: “We are raised up to the enlightening beams of the sacred scriptures, and with these to illuminate us, with our beings shaped to songs of praise, we behold the divine light, in a manner befitting us, and our praise resounds for that generous Source of all holy enlightenment, a Source which has told us about itself in the holy words of scripture” (DN 1.3.589B). Our praise, though forever multipliable, is by no means arbitrary; rather, we are “shaped to songs of praise” by repeating and demonstrating the wisdom of Scripture which leads us to a union with God far superior to anything we could otherwise accomplish. “This is why we must not dare to restore to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed“ (DN 1.1.588A). But that is a big ‘apart from,’ which sustains the practice of theology and without which union with the divine would be impossible. Apophasis thus does not render doctrine impossible, but provides the conditions for it: repetition and demonstration of the biblical praise of God. These are the divine names themselves given by the divinity—thus they forever elude us (by excess), and thus they forever continue shaping us into beings capable of orthodoxy, beings capable of the right praise of God.

23 April 2007 |
tags: Denys, Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Theology