God and the Caducity of Being: Jean-Luc Marion and Edith Stein on Thinking God :: Philosophical Philosophy God Papers

immortal and the Caducity of Being Jean-Luc Marion and Edith Stein on Thinking GodABSTRACT Jean-Luc Marion claims that God must no longer be thought of in terms of the traditional metaphysical category of Being, for that reduces God to an all too human concept which he calls Dieu. God must be conceived outside of the ontological rest and outside of the question of Being itself. Marion urges us to think of God as love. We wish to argufy Marions claim of the necessity to move au-del de ltre by arguing that Marion presents a very limited understanding of Being he interprets the Being of God as causa sui. The thought of Edith Stein will be employed in order to bring out a fuller sense of the metaphysical notion of the Being of God. Stein offers us a rich backdrop against which we can interpret more traditional readings of God as Being, thereby intriguing Marions claim of the caducity of Being. Traditionally, metaphysics was viewed as consisting of three distinct but related componen ts cosmology, ontology and theology. Cosmology dealt with the being of the natural world conceived as a universe whereas ontology dealt with the being of the particular thing in the cosmos qua its own being. Theology was the investigation of the being of God naturaliter, that is, without exclusively appealing to the truths of Revelation. In his masterful work, God Without Being, Jean-Luc Marion launches a profound challenge to the tradition of metaphysics in general, and more specifically, to the related field of metaphysical theology. Marion claims that God must no longer be thought of in terms of the traditional category Being, for that reduces God to an all too human concept which he calls Dieu. In a sense, a violence is do to God and our understanding of God, for we seriously delimit that which by nature is indeterminable. Drawing upon an Heideggerian-inspired notion of the phenomenological Destruktion, Marion maintains that God must be thought outside the ontological differen ce and outside the very question of Being itself. In so doing, we free ourselves from an idolatry wherein we reduce God to our own all too narrow abstract schemes. Marion urges us to think God in light of St. Johns pronouncement that God is love (1 Jn 4,8). He believes that love has not been thought through in the metaphysical tradition. Thinking love through will lead the philosopher to a more accurate understanding of God as unlimited bestower/gift.