god — love — revelationwhich both exceeds and surpasses any measure in their paradoxical
nature.^38
For Marion, the possibility of God as saturated phenomenon par
excellence, as absolute experience of givenness, as a release of God from
metaphysical, idolatrous thinking, is also an original access to God’s
phenomenality and givenness. He performs two operations, saving the
thought of God from what he takes to be the limitations of both
Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology: the reduction of the
given to the structure subject-object (Husserl) and the reduction of
the given to Being — Ereignis as the cipher of the phenomenality of
Being, which for Marion is not an original givenness because it remains
subjected to a preliminary condition, to the ontological difference and,
thus, to the irreducible relationship between Being [Sein] and being
[Seiende].
However, nothing could be more telling than what Marion writes
at the end of Le phénomène érotique, where God appears, for the first
time in the book, in His Transcendence not according to Being, but
as a phenomenon of love, donation of love, as the pure and perfect
form of love, placing Himself at an infinite distance from the men
whose way of loving is defective:
Dieu ne se révèle pas seulement par amour et comme amour; il se révèle
aussi par les moyens, les figures, les moments, les actes et les stades de
l’amour, de l’unique et du seul amour, celui que nous aussi pratiquons.
[... ] A une infinite différence près. Quand Dieu aime (et il ne cesse en
effet jamais d’aimer), il aime simplement infiniment mieux que nous. [... ] La plus haute transcendance de Dieu, l’unique ne le déshonore pas,
ne tient pas � la puissance, ni � la sagesse, ni même � l’infinité, mais �
l’amour. [...]
Dieu nous précède et nous transcende, mais en ceci d’abord et surtout
qu’il nous aime infiniment mieux que nous n’aimons et ne l’aimons.
Dieu nous surpasse au titre de meilleur amant.^39
38. The visibility of God as invisible is emblematic of this paradoxical phenome-
nality, so that we say that God is not looked at, but revealed.
39. Le phénomène érotique, 340–342.