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Being Is Double Being is double Jean-Luc Marion and John Milbank on God, being and analogy Nathan Edward Lyons B. A. (Adv.) (Hons.) This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy School of Philosophy Australian Catholic University Graduate Research Office Locked Bag 4115 Fitzroy, Victoria 3065 1st March 2014 i ABSTRACT This thesis examines the contemporary dispute between philosopher Jean-Luc Marion and theologian John Milbank concerning the relation of God to being and the nature of theological analogy. I argue that Marion and Milbank begin from a shared opposition to Scotist univocity but tend in opposite directions in elaborating their constructive theologies. Marion takes an essentially Dionysian approach, emphasising the divine transcendence “beyond being” to such a degree as to produce an essentially equivocal account of theological analogy. Milbank, on the other hand, inspired particularly by Eckhart, affirms a strong version of the Thomist thesis that God is “being itself” and emphasises divine immanence to such a degree that the analogical distinction between created and uncreated being is virtually collapsed. Both thinkers claim fidelity to the premodern Christian theological tradition, but I show that certain difficulties attend both of their claims. I suggest that the decisive issue between them is the authority which should be granted to Heidegger’s account of being and I argue that it is Milbank’s vision of post-Heideggerian theological method which is to be preferred. I conclude that Marion and Milbank give two impressive contemporary answers to the ancient riddle of “double being” raised in the Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s “Parmenides,” a riddle which queries the relation between absolute First being and derived Second being. Their contrasting solutions cohere with the wider goals of their respective intellectual projects and correspond to the concerns of their respective interlocutors within Continental philosophy. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their guidance, support and friendship over the two years that I worked on this thesis. My thanks go firstly to Nick Trakakis, Chris Hackett and Kevin Hart for steering my project, for their generosity in conversation and willingness to read such awful drafts. Thanks also to Jeff Hanson and Chris Jacobs-Vandegeer for wise and creative suggestions, and to John Milbank for so generously discussing his work and commenting on mine. I am grateful to the Australian Catholic University for granting me an APA scholarship, without which I could not have taken up full-time research, and especially to the ACU librarians who did wonders in retrieving so many obscure documents for me. James Piggott’s meticulous proof-reading and universal enthusiasm was a great help. I am particularly indebted to my friend Andrew Cooper, with whom I have wandered philosophical paths for some years now, for his intellectual companionship, constant encouragement, good advice and good humour—I look forward to many more years of thinking the great thoughts. Above all I am grateful to my wife, Kate. We married just a few weeks before I started this project and since then she has gracefully put up with innumerable dull monologues about being and beings, she has been a source of endless delight, support and inspiration, and she still explains my research better than I can. This thesis is dedicated to her. iii He himself is the only thing that really is, if you understand what I mean. - The Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s “Parmenides” iv CONTENTS Introduction: A debate about double being 1 1. God without being: An exposition of Jean-Luc Marion’s account of double being 21 A. Heidegger’s Second and Denys’ First 22 B. Marion’s doctrine of analogy 41 C. The perplexities of Marion’s Thomism 66 Conclusion: First without Second 75 2. God with being: An exposition of John Milbank’s account of double being 77 A. Milbank’s God “with” being 78 B. Milbank’s doctrine of analogy 86 C. First “beyond being”? 101 D. The perplexities of Milbank’s henology 108 Conclusion: Second with First 120 3. Disputes 123 Dispute #1: Analogical attribution 125 Dispute #2: Double being 140 Dispute #3: Theology after Heidegger 163 Conclusion: Interpreting the debate 183 Appendix 201 Bibliography 203 v ABBREVIATIONS Works by Jean-Luc Marion DMP On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-Theo-Logy in Cartesian Thought. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. GWB God Without Being: Hors-Texte. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. I&D The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Fordham University Press, 2001. “TA&OT” “Thomas Aquinas and Onto-theo-logy.” In Mystics: Presence and Aporia, edited by Christian Sheppard and Michael Kessler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Works by John Milbank BR Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. London: Routledge, 2003. BSO Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People. Malden: Blackwell, 2014. SM The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. TST Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Vico 1 The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, 1668-1744, Part 1: The Early Metaphysics. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991. Vico 2 The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, 1668-1744, Part 2: Language, Law and History. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992. Works by Thomas Aquinas SCG Anderson, James F., Vernon J. Bourke, Anton Pegis, and Charles J. O’Neil, trans. Thomas Aquinas: On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles. 4 vols. New York: Hanover House, 1955. vi ST Daniel J. Sullivan, ed. Thomas Aquinas: The Summa Theologica. Translated by The Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Williambenton: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952. Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION A debate about double being Quite accidentally, in a remote Italian monastery in the early 1870’s, one of the most curious texts in the history of Western thought was discovered. Unknown for millennia, without an autograph and only partially preserved, it became known as the Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s “Parmenides.1 Its fragmentary palimpsests were in hand for just a few decades—long enough to produce a critical edition of the Greek text—before slipping history’s grasp once again when they were destroyed by fire at the University of Turin in 1904.2 The anonymous third century text is particularly intriguing because it appears to be the first moment in the Western tradition where God is identified with being, overturning the Platonic orthodoxy of the One ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας,3 and anticipating the scholastic theologies of esse.4 The final sentences of 1 Though various possibilities have been floated, the author of the text remains unknown. Pierre Hadot’s watershed argument for Porphyry in Porphyre et Victorinus (Études augustiniennes, 1968) has been criticised but remains influential. Some now argue for a pre-Plotinian author, while others judge that the text is too ambiguous and best left anonymous. See Kevin Corrigan “Platonism and Gnosticism: The Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides, Middle or Neoplatonic?,” in Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts, ed. John Turner and Ruth Majercik (Society of Biblical Literature, 2000) and the essays collected in John Turner and Kevin Corrigan, eds., Plato’s Parmenides and Its Heritage Vol. 1, History and Interpretation from the Old Academy to Later Platonism and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 2011) for a thorough discussion of the scholarship. Whatever the particulars of authorship, the fact that the earliest identification of God with being was almost certainly the conjecture of a pagan philosopher is an irony that will not be lost on readers of Étienne Gilson. 2 See Gerald Bechtle, The Anonymous Commentary on Plato’s “Parmenides” (Bern: Verlag P. Haupt, 1999), 17–21 for a brief account of the textual history. 3 See John Rist, “Mysticism and Transcendence in Later Neoplatonism,” Hermes 92, no. 2 (1964): 213–225; Rein Undusk, “Infinity on the Threshold of Christianity: The Emergence of a Positive Introduction 2 Fragment V make the novel proposal: Behold whether Plato does not seem to speak in riddles, because the One, which is ‘beyond substance’ and beyond being [ἐπέκεινα οὐσίας καί ὄντος] on the one hand is neither being nor substance nor activity [ἐνέργεια], but on the other hand acts and is itself pure act, so that it is also the being before being [τὸ εἶναι τὸ πρὸ τοῦ ὄντος]. By participating in it the other One receives a derivative being [ἐκκλινόμενον τὸ εῖναι], which indeed is to participate in being. Thus, being is double [διττὸν τὸ εῖναι]: the one exists prior to being, the other is brought forth from the One which is beyond, the absolute being [τοῦ εἶναι τὸ ἀπόλυτον] and as it were ‘idea’ of being, participating in which some other One has become existent, with which the being which is produced by it is yoked...5 The Commentator is wrestling with the “riddle” implicit in Plato’s corpus concerning the kind of existence enjoyed by the first principle. On the one hand—and here the Commentator alludes to the Good beyond being in the Republic VI and the first hypothesis of the Parmenides (137c-)—Plato says that the One must be located outside Concept Out of Negativity,” Trames 13, no. 4 (December 2009): 328–36; Mark J. Edwards, “Christians and the Parmenides,” in Plato’s Parmenides and Its Heritage Vol. 2, Its Reception in Neoplatonic, Jewish, and Christian Texts., ed. John Turner and Kevin Corrigan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 189–98. Some readers also find a certain identification of the One with being in Plotinus (who may or may not predate the A.C.)—see, for example, Kevin Corrigan, “Essence and Existence in the Enneads,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed.
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