Tuesday, October 27, 2020

A Forceful, Original, Simple Reason

 I missed it when the news came out a few weeks ago, but Jean-Luc Marion has been rewarded the 2020 Ratzinger Prize for lifetime achievements in theology. I've talked briefly about his phenomenological account of what he calls 'saturated phenomena' before.

From his essay, "Faith and Reason", in the collection, The Visible and the Revealed:

The love revealed by the Word, hence by the Logos, is deployed as a logos, hence as a rationality. And a rationality in full right, because it allows us to reach the closest and the most internal phenomena, those experienced by the flesh which intuition saturates. If the Revelation of Christ had shown only that, namely, that love has its reason, a forceful, original, simple reason, which sees and says what common reason is missing and does not see, it would already have saved, if not humans, at least their reason. But Christ has not only shown the logic of love, he has demonstrated and proven it in facts and acts by his passion and his resurrection.

[Jean-Luc Marion, "Faith and Reason", The Visible and the Revealed, Gschwandtner et al., trs., Fordham University Press (New York; 2008) p. 152.]