Apophatic Aspects of Theological Conversation

Ivana Noble 

1. Introduction

In this paper I am going to explore the contribution of the apophatic tradition to contemporary theological conversation. I employ a method called the apophatic way, which is to a degree a Greek alternative of the Latin via negativa. I say "to a degree", because there are also striking differences between these two methods, which are significant for my exploration. While the via negativa is rooted more in speculative thinking and is concerned with what cannot be said, mainly in the area of what cannot be said about God,[1] the apophatic way comes from a tradition of contemplative thinking, and emphasizes not only what cannot be said, but also what kind of conversion is needed so that we will move from living in a lie to living in truth, from forgetting our roots to rediscovering them in our memory, from being separated from communion with God and with other people to being included.[2] Contemporary interest in negative theology often does not appreciate the differences between the Western and the Eastern approaches.[3] It is predominantly concerned with what cannot be said about God, or in other words, where our speech about God ceases to be helpful. Yet, the negative has also liberating aspects, and this is where my interest lies, in the ability to subvert the definitive descriptions, the clearly divided relations of power, the captured and controlled presence or absence of God. The liberating negative, as will be shown, opens and guards spaces for conversation, for communication.

My paper starts with patristic theology, in order to emphasize the long roots of the subject. The first part examines the apophatic method which we find in Gregory of Nyssa, and elaborates on the aspects which can provide a contemporary theological conversation with the liberating negative. In the second part I look at the appropriations of the liberating negative among contemporary western theologians, Jean-Pierre Jossua, Jean-Luc Marion and Louis-Marie Chauvet in particular.

2. The Apophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa (c.330 ‑ c.395) is best known for his contributions, along with his brother, Basil, and their friend, Gregory Nazianzen, to the Trinitarian formulations of the Council of Constantinople. However, my main concern in what follows is another aspect of Gregory s theology. I wish to consider Gregory s understanding of apophaticism, which developed as a response to two key controversies of his time, one with Eunomius (d.394/5), a representative of radical neo-Arianism,[4] the other with the late teaching of Origen (c.185 ‑ c.254), who was previously a source of great inspiration for Gregory. Here Gregory formulated his teaching on God s infinity on the one hand and the infinite progress of humanity on the way to God on the other. Before examining these areas, let me first offer a definition of the apophatic way I associate Gregory with.[5]

The word apophatic , in Greek , comes from , which has two basic meanings, namely revelation and negation .[6] The apophatic way, then, includes both of these meanings. It is a complement and a critique of the kataphatic way, the "positive" symbolic content of theology, and as such the apophatic way questions all our concepts of God, ourselves and the world. It negates definitive descriptions in order to open windows for transcendent revelation and for immanent conversion, both of which are necessary for the human journey towards God and for communion with God.[7] Such an understanding of apophaticism, of which Gregory is a significant proponent, stems from the Greek Fathers, from the tradition of the Alexandrian school, in particular Origen and Clement, and emphasises the infinity and incomprehensibility of God. As such it is firmly rooted in biblical exegesis, and careful not to claim any sort of higher knowledge, but rather is seen as a complementary discourse.[8]

Gregory's notion of God's infinity developed in opposition to Eunomius's argument that God could be be perfectly known by human reason, provided it knew the definitive name of God and held a correct doctrine. This, according to Eunomius, meant naming God the Ungenerated and recognising, thus, his one single supreme essence. The Son of God , then, was created by the Father and not of his essence and neither was the Spirit, who was created in turn by the Son. Gregory s reply, Contra Eunomium (c.382) is heavily tied up with his defence of the Constantinopolitan position on the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. But in it, Gregory also argues strongly that to call God unbegotten, or ungenerated Being, is not the definitive way of naming God and does not give us access to God's essence, as this is, indeed, something beyond our reach.[9] Over against this designation, he says that the most important attribute of God is his infinity,[10] as it does not betray the fact that our knowing God always includes leaving behind what we think we have grasped and moving beyond that.

When we come to the second polemics, which gave rise to Gregory's understanding of the infinite progress of the human soul on the journey towards God, we have to be aware that there are different starting points. Gregory s relationship to the tradition of the Alexandrian school and in particular Origen is a great deal more complex. Much of Gregory s theology was influenced by these sources. He took from them the allegorical interpretation of scripture, their teaching on human freedom (with its denial of any form of determinism), and the concept of eschatological hope when all will be well in God.[11] However, in one area Gregory found himself in disagreement with Origen. This was over Origen s idea of a cyclical cosmos, where the soul becomes sated with contemplation of God and falls back into created matter once again, to begin the process of returning to God. It is effectively a version of reincarnation and Gregory rejects it.[12] This doctrine of Origen led Gregory to develop his own response which was based on the concept of epektasis.[13] With this Gregory refers to the constant striving and straining of humankind on the never‑ending journey towards God, which does not end even after resurrection, but, rather, enters into a new phase.

For Gregory God cannot be understood as a composition in human terms. Rather, God must be understood precisely in terms of an infinity (the immediacy, that is, the unmediatedness of God), within whom are inner relationships and inner communication. Furthermore, this inner life of God, although it remains unbounded by time and space, is not something which is therefore totally alien to creation. For we can experience its effects on us, such as mercy, goodness, love. This ability to experience the effects of God s infinity leads Gregory to posit that we are enabled to participate infinitely in God s infinity.[14] To this participation in God s infinity, though, we must necessarily bring our createdness, with all its implications of bodily existence rooted in particular times and spaces. Thus, the infinite human journey is one which involves both this mediatedness and the challenge posed to it by the participation in the infinity of God. It is through this encounter between the mediated and the unmediated that spiritual progress is made.

In this context Gregory also considers the nature of human and divine communication. He sees communication as related to the inner life of God. Even if in principle knowledge of that inner life is beyond us, we are included into it. Gregory wants to maintain the fundamental difference between human and divine communication, but he differs here from later Western thinkers like Aquinas. Gregory does not explain the difference by means of analogy,[15] he simply states the incompatibility, which can be bridged from God's side, as God enters into relationship with us, as God reveals his plans, his actions and himself to us. It is the gift, which does not remove the paradox, a knowledge of the unknowability, a seeing of the unseeable, a grasping of the still ungraspable.

3. Appropriation of the apophatic elements in contemporary theology

In this part I intend to look at three French thinkers: Jean‑Pierre Jossua, Jean‑Luc Marion, Louis‑Marie Chauvet. All three are involved in a critique of traditional metaphysics, or onto‑theology .[16] With Jossua I will look at how the theme of apophaticism is present in the main features he identifies as necessary for living the life of a witness to the good news of the Gospel. From Marion I will take the critique of conceptual idolatry and the notion of theology as a discourse grounded in a gift. Finally, Chauvet will provide an analysis of the symbolic order within which he situates the possibility of human conversion.

3.1 Jean‑Pierre Jossua, The Condition of the Witness

The first negative moment we find in Jossua's book The Condition of the Witness is rejecting the notion of a Christian faith as a flight from the world. To do this is to ignore, if not reject, the Biblical tradition, which sees salvation as rooted firmly in the actual human existence. It is real people, who encounter Jesus as he moves around Galilee, who experience his healing acceptance, and who come follow him. Thus, to be Christian is to be human:

‘Ultimately, "Christian" is never more than an adjective: it is applied to one and the same integral human subject who, on becoming a believer, can be considered and named from the perspective of faith. It is not that being human and being a Christian are purely and simply identical: there are aspects of Christian experience which at particular moments go beyond what humanity understands by living, which is historical and even go beyond every intrinsic possibility of our species. However, these aspects are realised in human beings, so human beings must be capable of them, and that includes the unique achievement, unprecedented for a man, of being Son of God!'[17]

There are two ways of interpreting Jossua. Superficially it would be possible to detect in him a return to the Protestant Liberalism of Harnack, the brotherhood of Jesus and the fatherhood of God.[18] So, when he writes, for example ‘Brotherhood, gentleness, service, forgiveness, contagious peace, the purity of a tranquil heart, a concern for human dignity and justice, seem to me to represent the better things of this earth ‑ provided that they are not based on the fear of pleasure and the rechanneling of aggression',[19] we might, with the possible exception of the exceptive clause at the end, be reading any exponent of fin‑de‑si cle liberal Protestantism.

Yet this would remain a superficial reading of Jossua. His book is not just about the nice side of Christianity, for to be a witness (martyros) is not simply about what is nice , but about the possibility of rejection, of suffering, of failure. Rather, we can see Jossua as being much more closely related to the apophatic tradition of Gregory. The quotation above shows how important it is for Jossua that we are human beings ‑ we do not come to(wards) God despite our humanity but because of it, through it. This journey is one in which we travel as mediated and limited yet as infinitely blessed, bringing our humanity into God (and Jossua quotes the old Patristic dictum That which is not assumed is not saved ). Jossua in his language echoes themes which were considered in Gregory's accounts of our journey towards God, which does not remove the difference between the adiasthematicity of God and diasthematicity of us creatures,[20] but precisely allows us to bring all our creatudeness into God. Jossua emphasizes that this full embracing of humanity, in all its variety and with all its challenges is something which we see in Jesus of Nazareth, and from this angle he reads the story of God becoming a man. He says that among the things which make Jesus of Nazareth an unforgettable figure is his ‘acceptance of the other as he or she is, no matter what. Here we find pity ‑ an admirable word, degraded by condescension, rejected by wounded pride; but it is the word which expresses total understanding, total solidarity with the suffering of our kin'.[21]

In Jossua, then, the apophatic element resides in his rejection of conceptual schemes of reality as the first referent to discuss the relationship between God and humanity. It is all too easy to become tied to the scheme and lose sight of the real person and indeed the real God who are in fact the bedrock of our reality. If we want to take incarnation seriously, and be witnesses of the incarnated God, we also have to take on ourselves the risk of history and humanity, the risk of the real relationships and situations we encounter, and thus allow a conversion to reality to happen, which ultimately is a conversion to God.

3.2 Jean‑Luc Marion and the critique of conceptual idolatry

We can start our investigation of Jean‑Luc Marion by drawing attention to his use of the concept of epektasis which we saw previously in Gregory, who himself took it from Philippians 3:13. This striving towards God plays an important role also for Marion, even if he emphasizes more its eschatological dimension - an anticipation of the future, which is concretely lived.[22] Marion employs the concept of epektasis when he speaks about the eucharist, which, according to him ‘constitutes the first fragment of the new creation', and which ‘anticipates what we will be, will see, will love... facing the gift that we cannot yet welcome, so, in strict sense, that we cannot yet figure', and he concludes with a quotation from Proust: ‘In this way, "sometimes the future lives in us without our knowledge of it".'[23]

The reason for this in Marion is also closely linked to one of Gregory s themes, especially in his anti‑Eunomian works, namely the critique of absolute concepts. Gregory rejected Eunomius fixing on unbegottenness or uncreatedness as the absolute names for God, as if in calling God unbegotten all that could be said about God had been said. Marion does not fix on this concept but his critique is perhaps even more radical. For he criticises the very concept of Being. This echoes Lossky's definition of apophaticism, where he emphasizes that in following this way, ‘One finally excludes being itself. God is none of all this;'[24] he states. Marion argues that being runs the risk of becoming an idol for us. It is possible to forget the infinite depths of God and ignore it or seek to reduce it to something manageable by applying the concept of being . With that, we hope to define or measure the dimensions of God ‑ God is like other being, only infinitely so. However, that Marion is, perhaps unwittingly, operating in the same apophatic tradition as Gregory is clear from the way in which he distinguishes the idol from the icon:

‘in the idol, the reflex of the mirror distinguishes the visible from that which exceeds the aim...; in the icon, the visible is deepened infinitely in order to accompany, as one may say, each point of the invisible by a point of light. But visible and invisible thus coexist to infinity... The invisible of the icon consists of the intention of the face. The more the face becomes visible, the more the invisible intention whose gaze envisages us becomes visible. Better: the visibility of the face allows the invisibility that envisages to grow.'[25]

And the problem with the idol is this: ‘[it] places its centre of gravity in a human gaze; thus, dazzled as it may be by the brilliance of the divine, the gaze still remains in possession of the idol, its solitary master'.[26] In other words, the infinite transcendence and otherness and incomprehensibility of God is reduced to the finite and ultimately false security of the known.

It is not just sight that enables us to (not)know God, but also language. One of Marion s key arguments is that, paradoxically, any attempt to speak about God in definitively constructed propositions will always end up in the disappearance from our conversation of silence: ‘[t]he surprising thing, therefore, is not our difficulty in speaking of God but indeed our difficulty in keeping silent'.[27]

So, if the human condition is one which is prone to idolatry, how are we to set about freeing ourselves from this temptation? What is necessary, for Marion, is ultimately a conversion, a line, which was present in Gregory and which Lossky summarizes as follows: ‘in His own nature He is the unknowable. He "is not."But here is the Christian paradox; He is the God to whom I say "Thou," Who calls me , Who reveals Himself as personal, as living.'[28] For Marion this conversion is from one of seeking to talk about God to one where, in silence, God is allowed to speak, to reveal himself. And when God is allowed to do this, then the human being is allowed to accept this revelation as gift and respond adequately to the giver, in charity and in holiness. ‘In short, theology cannot aim at any other progress than its own conversion to the Word'.[29]

Acceptance of this Word, of its revelation, according to Marion, is possible only when we acknowledge it as a gift and respond in thanks to the giver. So it is not surprising that at the heart of Marion s work is a reflection on the eucharistic role of theology.[30] Compared to Gregory, Marion is more concerned with the community than with the individual. For him the community is always engaged in a journey (always and necessarily in some sense unsuccessful or at least incomplete) towards an encounter with the face of the Lord.[31] And here the notion of epektasis returns. For this journey is indeed always incomplete, the receiving community does not have (never will have) the final full presence of God under its control. To do this would be to reduce God again to an idol.[32] To accept God in his fullness is to relinquish all hope of ever encountering God in his fullness. Receiving of the gift transforms us, but it does not destroy either the otherness of the giver or the reality of human spatio‑temporal existence. It is not that in the moment of receiving the gift we are temporarily removed from the limits of human existence, but rather that we bring our createdness to God and it is that createdness which receives the gift. Here again Marion and Gregory are in close agreement.

The danger always remains that in attempting to name God or to conceptualise God, God is somehow made smaller, reduced to a more manageable reality , which will serve as an excuse to escape from our actual day to day reality. But the gift is not about escape, but about entering into the holiness and charity of the given moment:

‘The eucharistic presence comes to us, at each instant, as the gift of that very instant, and, in it, of the body of the Christ in whom one must be incorporated. The temporal present during which the eucharistic present endures resembles it: as a glory haloes an iconic apparition, time is made a present gift to let us receive it in the eucharistically given present.'[33]

So, the journey of conversion (what Gregory calls spiritual progress") is stressed, the impermanency of the traveller in place of the permanency which no longer perceives any need for conversion. We have received the first gift, of sustenance on the journey, but not the second, if gift it is, of a final and permanent resting place where all striving is over.

3.3 Louis‑Marie Chauvet and human conversion within a symbolic order^[1]

As with Marion, Chauvet is concerned with a critique of any attempt to imprison reality within conceptual schemes.[34] He argues that there is a tendency on the part of metaphysicians to understand being as their stock‑in‑trade. But in doing that they are prone to forget that being is also an event in which something is revealed to us and that therefore the event is one which remains dynamic. The underlying reason for this dynamic is, according to Chauvet, grace, which he sees as irreducible, ‘always preceding and necessitated by nothing'[35] Heavily influenced by Heidegger, he speaks of being as a fundamental openness, ‘an attitude of listening and welcome towards something ungraspable by which we are already grasped;... a gracious attitude of "letting be" and "allowing oneself to be spoken" which requires to renounce all ambition for mastery'.[36] The symbolic language which we need to talk about being will have to include the features of being mentioned above.

Thus it is that Chauvet gets to his symbolic order, one based on grace, and within which our existence is situated. Lossky, from an Orthodox perspective, speaks of the dialectics between the apophatic and kataphatic traditions. Chauvet, from a Western perspective, says much the same thing using, however, the language of the presence and absence of God. For him, this dialectic plays a crucial role in our conversion on the journey towards God, as it does for Gregory.

In order to illustrate this point, Chauvet has recourse to the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. In his interpretation the key question is ‘How does one pass from non‑faith to faith?'[37] As Gregory did with Moses,[38] Chauvet here uses a narrative theology, or at least a theology based on a concrete story. Thus, his speculation can be rooted in a particular experience. He is especially interested in how this conversion happens. The disciples on the road are in the sealed tomb where they think Jesus s dead body lies. They have abandoned hope, abandoned all they had experienced previously. They are people without a future.[39]

The first feature of conversion is the transition from a closed relationship between two people to an open one involving three. The two open themselves up to a stranger. He enters into a conversation with them, and lets them name their situation, lets them tell their story. He first appeals to their memory, then makes a link with the Scriptures: ‘remember.... slow of heart, all that the prophets have declared, everything must be fulfilled [40] and offers a rereading of all the Scriptures.[41] Chauvet says, ‘Instead of holding forth with self‑assured pronouncements on God, one must begin by listening to a word as the word of God. The reference to the Scriptures as a third agency plays a role that is of capital importance here. In allowing Jesus to open the Scriptures for them, the two disciples begin to enter into an understanding of the real , different from that which they had previously thought evident'.[42] They urge the stranger to stay, and in his breaking of the bread, when his word becomes flesh, their eyes begin to open, they recognize the stranger in his radical strangeness. But their eyes open to an emptiness, he has vanished from their sight. But it is an emptiness full of presence. The disciples recognise the Risen Lord, they receive it as a gift of the good news and return it as a gift in terms of Christian witness. Chauvet emphasises that one is not possible without the other. Here he is in close agreement with Jossua:: ‘In the last analysis, faith can only exist if it expresses itself in a life of witness'.[43]

This conversion does not aim at removing the experience of absence or emptiness or of not being able to grasp , but neither does it make that its highest point. As with Gregory's critique of Eunomius, it is not a question of the negative being better than the positive, replacing one hegemony with another. Rather it is the recognition that the privileged place of his presence is at the same time the most radical mediation of his absence.[44]

This fact Chauvet applies to the Church as the corporal expression of Christianity. Too often the Church or Christians have sought to witness to the gospel, to the truth of salvation, to the gift of faith, as something which they have and which others do not have. Thus, we become the masters, the possessors of the answer to those who may or may not realize that they have a question. But at the heart of what Chauvet is arguing is that we remain always witnesses of some(thing) which we cannot have. And this is precisely what is constitutive of grace. We are enabled to belong by grace but grace also means that the dynamics of belonging is such that we do not have (and radically, that is to say, definitively do not have) that to which we belong. We witness to it, and our witness is to that towards which we move, not that within which we already are.

4. Conclusion

In conclusion, then, I wish to draw together some of the apophatic aspects of theological conversation. The basic need which has been clear in different ways in Gregory, Jossua, Marion and Chauvet is for permanent conversion. As in the New Testament,[45] also here the conversion - metanoia, is more than a single movement, single action. It is a part of the whole of our communication with God as well as with people and with the whole of creation. Such communication includes all human activities, their glory, as well as their subjection to a falling away from what they could be, subject to hamartia, sin, a failure to hit their target, to achieve their objectives.

This conversion of communication is needed in several areas. First, as we have seen, there is a fundamental need to recognize that none of us is the owner of the mystery we talk about. There is no them and us in this sense. Neither theologians nor Christians in general are the controllers and owners of the Christian message, and even less of the mystery of God become human in Jesus Christ. We all participate in the mystery, but we cannot hope to give a definitive account of it. All we can (but also therefore what we must) do is witness to it.

Secondly, there is the need to remember that we are on this journey towards God, experiencing this epektasis, this striving and straining for God. But this straining and striving is not some temporary state, which would be overcome when we get better. It is at the heart of what it is to be human, and what it is to be human does not end with death. Our journey towards the infinite otherness and transcendence of God is itself a never‑ending one, one of progress with others on the way, but never arriving, as the disciples on the road to Emmaus never really get home. Every moment of recognition, of seeing, is a moment of non‑recognition, of not‑seeing. The journey continues without end.

Finally, there is a time for speaking and a time for being silent. Of the first we are perhaps already sufficiently aware. But of course communication, if it is to be communication and not simply one way information transfer, must involve dialogue. And dialogue means silence on one side while there is talking on the other. So, if we are not to silence others and not to silence God, we must learn ourselves to keep silence, and in so doing, we may also learn to talk.[46]

[1]In Aquinas the negativity is related to the deceptions that human knowledge as such is liable to (see Summa Theologiae I-II, q.q, a.8) and to the disjunction between knowing corporeal matters and spiritual matters (see Summa I, q. 84, a.6)

[2]Here we find the three Platonic principles, katharsis, anamnesis, and methexis implicitly present. For anamnesis see Plato, Meno 81; Phaedrus 92.A; for katharsis see Sophist 229.d; 231.e; for methexis see Parmenides 229.d. References are taken from Plato: Collected Dialogues including Letters. Eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton UP, Princeton N.J., 1996.

[3] To a degree we can say that the Eastern approach is inspired by the Platonic philosophy of essence and its emphasis on the participation in the divine essence, while the Western is inspired by the Aristotelian philosophy of categories with the emphasis on the relationships of causality in our existence. Yet this distinction is inadequate when it comes to Augustine and thinkers inspired by him, such as Bonaventure. There we have a Western version of Platonism. Also Western mystics, such as Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, subvert the simple distinction.

[4]Gregory opposed the heresies of both Arius and Eunomius. Arius's claim that there is an essential difference between the ungenerate nature of the Father and generate nature of the Son (refused in 321 - and opposed by the Council of Nicea in 325) is radicalised by Eunomius's assertion that the'ungenerate' is not only the fundamental characteristic of God, but also God's essence (ousia). Eunomius brought a form of negative theology, which claimed superiority to the affirmative theology because of it's privileged knowledge of the negative name of God.

[5]For a more detailed argument for placing Gregory within the apophatic tradition, see my paper ‘The Apophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa', given at the conference Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis organised by the Centre for Biblical Studies in Prague, 31 October-3 November 2001, which will be published in the conference proceedings. The analysis of Gregory's position in this article is partly taken from there.

[6] The word revelation comes from , while the word negation from µ .

[7]See Lossky, V., Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY, 1978: 32-33.

[8] As Lenka Karf kov argues, ‘Gregory does not wish to develop a system of apophatic theology only in the sense of private or negative statements, as we can find with the Arians. Gregory explicitly rejects Eunomius's "technology" of negative statements as meaningless and says that positive statements have generally a priority over the negative ones.' (Karfíková, L. Řehoř z Nyssy [Gregory of Nyssa]. Oikúmené,Praha, 1999: 186.)

[9]See Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium libri I et II. Ed. W. Jager, GNO II, Leiden, 1960, 3-311: II.3.

[10] Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium: I. 673.

[11]We find in Gregory a similar position to Origen's teaching on apokatastasis, namely that all will be well in God in the end, which included the conversion and inclusion of everything and everyone, including all people, but also all the dark forces, even Satan. Gregory's position runs on similar lines, but, perhaps, as it remained less explicit, it avoided condemnation, which Origen's teaching on apokatastasis did not.

[12]In this Gregory keeps with the anathema of Constantinople, which we know from the Edict of Justinian in 542. See Karfíková: 25.

[13]This concept Gregory takes from Phil 3:13: " µ " - striving toward that which is coming to it.

[14]See Karfíková: 195.

[15]See G.J. Hughes's analysis of Aquinas's analogical language in ‘Aquinas and the Limits of Agnosticism', in The Philosophical Assesments of Theology. Ed. G.J. Hughes, Search Press, Kent & Georgetown University Press, Washington, 1987, 37-63.

[16]By onto-theology are meant the approaches, which aim at explaining the totality of being.

[17]Jossua, J.P., The Condition of the Witness. SCM, London, 1985: 36.

[18] See, von Harnack, A., What is Christianity? Williams & Norgate, London, 1904: 305. A. Loisy critisized this position as a ‘sentimental-filial confidence in God, the merciful Father.' (Loisy, A., The Gospel and the Church. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1976: 14-15.

[19]Jossua: 33.

[20]Diasthematicity is the term used by Gregory with reference to creation. By it he means spreading through time, moving from the past to the future. God is for Gregory adiasthematic; uncircumscribed by time.

[21]Jossua: 34.

[22]See Marion, J.-L., God Without Being. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 1991: 174..

[23]Marion: 174; he quotes Proust, M., A la recherche du temps perdu. Pléiade, 2, Paris, 1954: 639.

[24]Lossky: 1978: 32.

[25]Marion: 20.

[26]Marion: 24.

[27]Marion: 55.

[28]Lossky: 1978: 32.

[29]Marion: 158.

[30]See Marion: 163.

[31]See Marion: 165.

[32]Within this discussion Marion situates his critique of the theory of transubstantiation, see Marion: 168.

[33]Marion: 175.

[34]Yet, in contrast to Marion, Chauvet does not hold a strong category of presence, but rather a dialectics presence-absence, see Van den Bossche, S., ‘God Does Appear In Immanence After All: Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenology as a New First Philosophy for Theology', in Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context. Eds. L. Boeve & L. Leussen, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2001: 325-346.

[35]Chauvet, L.-M., Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence.The Liturgical Press, Collegeville M.N., 1995: 446.

[36]Chauvet: 446.

[37]Cauvet: 161.

[38]See Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses. Paulist Press, New York, Ramsey, Toronto, 1978.

[39]See Chauvet: 168.

[40] Lk 24: 6. 25‑27.

[41] See Lk 24: 44‑45.

[42]Chauvet: 168.

[43]Chauvet: 169.

[44]See Chauvet: 509.

[45]See Mt 4:17; Mk 1:15; L 13:3; 15:7; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 17:30; etc.

[46]This point is elaborated in my book Accounts of Hope: A Problem of Method in Postmodern Apologia.Peter Lang, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, 2001.