rosa maria lupo5. A possible dialogue
I will, very briefly, try now to draw some conclusions that seem to me
to be strictly connected to the theme of this study. Marion has never
concealed his Catholic faith; he has never repudiated his friendships
in the Catholic world, within which, of course, he has often found
profound attention paid to his thinking, and all of this at a time when
the philosophical panorama after Heidegger has suggested the as-
sumption of an atheistic attitude, frequently without a proper under-
standing of Heidegger’s silence about God.^40 But Marion’s Catholi-
cism does not mean that his description of the phenomenal structure
of Revelation has validity only if one assumes the theological presup-
positions, contents of faith, and dogmas of Catholic theology.
Marion’s thinking locates itself in the intersection between faith
and philosophy. In this way, it is not at all a dogmatic position, and,
in my opinion, occupies a very central place in the investigation of the
relationship between philosophy and religion precisely because his
operations are strictly phenomenological. Revelation is not a figure or
a way of opening that concerns Christianity only. Where a religious
discourse on God begins, we always find a revelation to guarantee this
discourse; there is always a reference to an otherness that is invocated
as an origin, to a transcendence to which one becomes witness.
The fact that Marion distinguishes the duty of phenomenology
from that of theology is very interesting, because he resolutely says
that investigating Revelation’s content is the work of theology and not
of phenomenology, and the help which phenomenology offers is the
possibility of clarifying the structure of the phenomenon of Revelation,
without touching upon the doctrinal content of faith.
We know very well that in the history of thinking the relationship
between religion and philosophy, or rather between theology and
philosophy, is characterized by the difficulty each have in respecting
each other within their own spheres. The tendency of each to capture
- In this regard it is important to note Marion’s initial quotation from
Heidegger: “S’il m’arrivait encore d’avoir � mettre par écrit une théologie — ce �
quoi je me sens parfois incité — alors le terme d’être ne saurait en aucun cas y in-
tervenir. La foi n’� pas besoin de la pensée de l’être,” Dieu sens l’être, Paris: Arthème
Fayard, 1982, 5.