rosa maria lupoconceiving God and the religious-theological experience of thinking
about Him.^6
Concerning the philosophical way of addressing the question of
God, it is also interesting to remark, in accordance with Xavier Zubiri’s
analysis, that even forms of atheist thinking are correlated with the
problem of God, because the decision not to have anything to do with
such a question, or not to accept God’s existence always implies that
one has assumed a precise position and therefore has given an answer
to the problem. In the introduction to El hombre y Dios Zubiri clearly
shows that it is impossible for an atheist philosophy to free itself from
confrontation with the question of God. Rather, atheism and
agnosticism represent alternative ways of dealing with this question,
as they meet the need to make a decision about the phenomenon of
God by choosing, respectively, either to deny it or to suspend the
question.^7 Even more, a philosophy which opens itself to God as its
- Although one cannot find an exact correspondence between the religious way
of referring to God and the rationalistic way of theology, it is in any case interest-
ing to see how these two paths to an experience of God stay in front of each
other in a non-parallel way. While religious faith does not need theological sup-
port, i.e. the help of rationality, it is necessary for theology to believe in the God
about whom it discusses. Even the forms of negative theologies (for example that
of Dionysius the Aeropagite, which keeps silent about God’s essence) arrive at this
result not through faith, but through a rational process. - Cf. Xavier Zubiri, El hombre y Dios, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984, 11–13.
Three points are interesting in Zubiri’s introductory considerations. He recog-
nizes immediately that he wants to consider God in the sense of “divine reality”
and not from the specific point of view of a particular religion like Christianity.
Then he explains that God is only the “title of a problem” which can have differ-
ent solutions: theism (a positive solution), atheism (the negative solution) and
agnosticism (a suspending solution). What defines theism, atheism, and agnosti-
cism as solutions to the same problem is properly that for all three forms it is not
enough to have a “state of belief; ” they need, in addition, an “intellectual justifi-
cation.” He affirms that the problem of God is a constitutive question of the hu-
man condition as such. This problem in itself is therefore properly “teologal” — and
not “teológico” — in the sense that human existence implies this question in a for-
mal and constitutive way. In this sense, the human dimension is itself “teologal,”
i.e., structurally open to the divine reality and to its experience. These are three
important aspects because: 1) Marion’s position offers the possibility to explore
the experience of God as such: even if Marion’s God is “the Catholic God,” what