Reading Augustine's De Trinitate Through Jean-Luc Marion a DI
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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Deciphering the Gift of Love: Reading Augustine’s De Trinitate through Jean-Luc Marion A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Theology and Religious Studies Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Andrew Staron Washington, D.C. 2013 Deciphering the Gift of Love: Reading Augustine’s De Trinitate through Jean-Luc Marion Andrew Staron Director: Brian V. Johnstone, C.SS.R., S.T.D. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a new appreciation for how the gift of love traverses the distance between the intended signification of the Trinity and the impossibility—for us—of that very signification. Part I explores the promise of recent scholarship (e.g. that of L. Gioia, M. Hanby, P. Kolbet, L. Ayres) and interprets De Trinitate not as a metaphysical modeling of the Trinity in se, but as an rational study of the limits of theological signification. When read in light of Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between hermeneutics and conversion, and emphasizing the missions of the Son and Spirit, De Trinitate offers an exposition of the soteriological transformation of the human person toward remembering, understanding, and loving God. Part II considers the gift of love in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. Supported by his concept of the saturated phenomenon, Marion offers a rigorous description of the gift of love as advancing according to its own reason and approaching not a conceptual abstraction, but a particular beloved. This gift divests the ego of its self-groundedness, inviting instead a understanding of the subject that is responsive to givenness and love, a subject that is gifted and devoted: the adonné. This rationality of love illuminates the key tension in Marion’s work as one between the indetermination and limits of phenomenology and the particularity and excess demanded by the phenomenon of love. Part III is the site of the convergence of Marion’s phenomneology with Augustine’s own understanding of love’s significance to trinitarian revelation. Marion’s erotic reduction offers to De Trinitate an iconic description of the love by which God’s self-revelation is mediated to us. The responsive love of the adonné sharpens Augustine’s concept of the human being as made to the image of God and marks the revelation of the Trinity in the making possible what would otherwise be impossible for us: our advance in love. In turn, De Trinitate provides for Marion the revealed name by which God might be called upon in and through the particularity of love: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This dissertation by Andrew Staron fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in Systematic Theology approved by Brian Johnstone, C.SS.R., S.T.D., as Director, and by Chad Pecknold, Ph.D., and Tarmo Toom, Ph.D., as Readers. ___________________________________ Brian Johnstone, S.T.D., Director ___________________________________ Chad Pecknold, Ph.D., Reader ____________________________________ Tarmo Toom, Ph.D., Reader ii To A.J., Lucia, and Felicity— Gifts initiating my love. iii Satisfy your demand for reason always but remember that charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity. ~ Flannery O’Connor, letter to Alfred Corn, June 16, 1962 iv CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii INTRODUCTION 1 Part I: A Reading of De Trinitate and “the pressure of God’s love upon human intelligence” 16 INTRODUCTION: THE FAILURE OF DE TRINITATE 17 CHAPTER ONE CARITAS IS THE RES: THE LANGUAGE OF CONVERSION AND THE HERMENEUTIC OF LOVE 29 Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and the Conversion of the Soul 30 Signum and Res 38 Ordered Love 55 CHAPTER TWO BOOKS I-IV: THE REVELATION OF GOD IN SALVATION HISTORY 76 CHAPTER THREE BOOKS V-VII: NAMING GOD 100 The Limits and Necessity of Naming 102 Substance, Relation, and the Substance of the Argument 105 Naming God through the Gift of Love 121 CHAPTER FOUR BOOKS VIII-XV: THE GIFT OF LOVE TO THE IMAGE OF GOD 141 Nothing by Way of Signs Alone 143 How Augustine’s Analogies Mean 156 Through Healed Creation to Healing Creator 163 CONCLUSION TO PART ONE 183 Bridging (rather than abridging) Distance 184 Part II: Jean-Luc Marion and the Question of the Unconditioned [God?] 189 INTRODUCTION: [FOR]GIVING THEOLOGY ITS GROUNDLESSNESS 190 The Paradoxes at the End of Metaphysics 196 Thinking the Unconditioned and Opening to Theology 213 v CHAPTER ONE MARKING EXCESS: THE SATURATED PHENOMENON 219 The Event 220 My Flesh 233 The Idol 237 The Icon 250 CHAPTER TWO THE IMPOSSIBLE GIFT 273 Always Already in the Middle: L’adonné 274 The Gift: Impossible? 281 CHAPTER THREE A LOVE THAT BEARS ALL THINGS 307 The Erotic Reduction 310 The Reduction to Love 321 Advancing in Love 330 CHAPTER FOUR APPRAISING THE GIFT OF LOVE 352 Idolizing Excess? 353 An Ungrounded Decision? 365 On the Condition of Unconditionality? 380 CONCLUSION TO PART TWO 395 Part III: [What] We are Given in Worship 399 CHAPTER ONE A BEGINNING GIVEN IN ADVANCE 400 Finitude Toward the Idol or Icon 407 The Overcoming of “Overcoming Metaphysics” 417 The Saturation of Truth by the Gift of Love 438 CHAPTER TWO PRAISING THE TRINITY THAT GOD IS 448 CONCLUSION TO PART THREE 478 BIBLIOGRAPHY 482 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If theology cannot teach and lead us—and all the disciplines and their practitioners—by being itself the art of charity, then it is not worth doing. Theology, more than any other, is a creditory discipline: after all, we are all debtors, and our one task is to bring credit to the faith that teaches us that in theology, as in life, you are only as good as what you give away. ~ Pete Candler, “On Credit and Debt in Theology” I thank my committee. Brian Johnstone, C.SS.R, willingly took on the direction of this project in its early stages and asked the right questions of it until the end, encouraging and challenging me as needed. Tarmo Toom and Chad Pecknold generously lent their time and talent to sharpen my reading of Augustine. The initial momentum for this work came from Thomas Schärtl’s nuanced questioning and enthusiastic urging. I thank my teachers. Theresa Sanders, Frank Ambrosio, Vince Miller, and Tom King, S.J., inspired me to stretch my vision to glimpse those things of which I had previously been unaware. Jean-Luc Marion, beyond his obvious contribution to this work in providing a significant part of its foundation and approach, encouraged me to look to De Trinitate to further understand the gift. To Bill Loewe I owe whatever precision of theological reflection I might have. I thank the generosity of a stranger. Jeffrey Kosky shared with me an early draft of his translation of Au lieu de soi, which guided my own interpretation of Marion’s thought and allowed me to complete this dissertation far earlier than I otherwise would have. I thank my friends. Regis Armstrong, OFM, Cap., and Jim Sabak, OFM, advised, aided, and rallied me as often as necessary. Writing along with me, Stuart Squires offered the consolation that comes from a shared hope. I thank my family. Doug and Therese have never hesitated in their faith in my work. My brother, Jeff, inspires my persistence and devotion. My parents, Ray and Gina, urged me to seek God in a dedication to the church and family, and taught this dedication by example. My children, A.J., Lucia, and Felicity continue to be the gifts that quicken my love. And my wife, Andrea, gives me the particular incarnation that allows it all to make sense. vii INTRODUCTION “To say and mean ‘God,’” writes David Tracy, “is what must drive all theology, whenever, wherever and whoever speaks.”1 But as theology’s own impetus and reason, the saying and meaning “God” is therefore also fundamentally the way of proceeding of each particular theologian, whoever he or she is. God is said or meant not by an impersonal intellectual discipline, but by particular women and men who find themselves always already in the middle of this way, always already responding to this restless drive. Whenever and wherever we say “God,” we hope, too (or better, especially), to mean not the idea, image, or model of God, but God—we hope to mean the God who creates, saves, and sustains us.2 Because in saying “God” we hope to mean God, no theologian speculating amidst the heights of the discipline’s discourse can long ignore the question of how we say and mean God—how we name that which 1 David Tracy, “God, Dialogue and Solidarity: A Theologian’s Refrain.” The Christian Century 107 (1990), 904. 2 By using the first person plural throughout Part One, I hope it might remind that as a reader of De Trinitate, I assume the posture of membership in both the human species created by God and the community to which Augustine wrote, i.e. the church. Augustine writes not so much to me as an individual but to me as part of a we. 1 2 reveals its name as that which is beyond every name. Therefore no theologian, Jean-Luc Marion relatedly observes, “can remove himself from the question of the names of God” and each must face the difficulty of “naming the unnameable, and naming it as such.”3 Ever before us is both the question of this name and the impossibility of this naming. Ever before us is both the question of how we name God and the impossibility of our doing so sufficiently, each standing upon the further question of how we call upon God by that impossible name.