Conceptual idolatry and the priority of being

Marion finds in all metaphysical considerations of the Christian God the failure to think God first through God's own revelation; instead, metaphysics always presupposes being in its conception of God and thereby thinks being prior to God. This is not a failing of univocity alone but of all thinking bound by metaphysics.Footnote ³

He starts by elaborating idolatry in the context of human reason. He first distinguishes between the idol and the icon, which are not different beings but ‘two manners of being for beings’.Footnote ⁴ When the divine is made manifest in the realm of visibility through the signa (i.e. what signifies the divine), then what is visible, in its mode of visibility, ‘maintains with the divine a rigorous and undoubtedly constitutive relation: the manner of seeing decides what can be seen’.Footnote ⁵ Here Marion begins by emphasising that the human gaze, in whatever mode of visibility, determines the being of the being that it perceives. This gaze constitutes the idol.

An idol, then, is that which is an unwitting and deceptive slave to the human gaze. The idol ‘captivates the gaze only inasmuch as the gazeable comprises it’.Footnote ⁶ Although the icon turns the gaze away from its own tendency to set the terms for what can manifest, the idol establishes the human gaze's priority, allowing the ‘gazeable’ to comprise the idol's manifestation. The idol is a ‘mirror that reflects the gaze's image, or more exactly, the image of its aim and of the scope of that aim’.Footnote ⁷ In this way, the idol ‘consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze’.Footnote ⁸ In the end, idolatry thus ‘freezes in a figure that which vision aims at in a glance’, and it gives only ‘the gaze gazing at itself gazing, at the risk of seeing no more than its own face’.Footnote ⁹ Or, to use theological language, a gaze incurvatus in se.

He then applies this definition of idolatry to human intellection, which harbours the ‘conceptual idol’. He sees the classical use of ‘concept’ as a case of the idolatrous gaze, especially when conceptualisation applies to the divine. He defines ‘concept’ thus:

In the same way that the idol confines the divine to the capacitas and aims of the human gaze, the concept delimits the intellectual space in which the divine may appear. When a ‘conception of the divine’ fills this space, the concept of the divine is validated. But here, just as in the case of the idol, this validation proves only to be an ‘invisible mirror’ of the conception and the capacitas of the human intellect. So, when ‘a philosophical thought expresses a concept of what it then names “God,” this concept functions exactly as an idol’.Footnote ¹¹ Conceptual idols have appeared and reigned throughout western thought, the two most prominent being the causa sui of metaphysics and the moralischer Gott of Kant and Nietzsche.

Every enterprise of human thought that takes the concept of God as its starting point thus enacts a ‘regionalism’. By this, Marion means ‘that for the term, by definition undefined, of God [i.e. the genuine term for God], the concept substitutes some precise definition [emphasis added], “God,” over which, through the determining definition, understanding will exercise its logic’.Footnote ¹² The thinking following from the concept works itself out according to the parameters of the concept set forth, all while leaving the actual God untouched. Now, the concept ‘God’ is not an illusion. It is genuine as an expression of what human thought thinks of the divine. But nevertheless, the divine God – as God, or at least as God self-disclosing Himself – is never addressed whenever we begin from the concept. God is substituted from the beginning by ‘God’.

Marion aims to localise this idolatry of the concept in a specific place. Rehearsing Heidegger's own analysis of ontotheology, he states that ‘the theo-logical pole of metaphysics determines, as early as the setting into operation of the Greek beginning, a site for what one later will name “God”’; and therethrough God arises in philosophy ‘less from God himself than from metaphysics, as destinal figure of the thought of Being’.Footnote ¹³ This ‘thought of Being’ is the representation of the Being of beings as the causa sui. The causa sui allows metaphysics a space to think of a transcendent divinity, but this space is also severely restricted to efficient causality.Footnote ¹⁴ Here conceptual idolatry is at play, for metaphysics allows the site for God to manifest by its setting of foundational parameters, but thereby it limits the space for the concept of God, thus returning the gaze of the concept back upon itself. In turn, the conceptual space reflected upon the capacitas of human intellect does not allow either being-itself (as anything but efficiency) or God-Himself (as anything but causa sui) to manifest.

At this point, Marion, like Heidegger before him, recognises a need to think God beyond metaphysics. He states,

An explicitly Christian theology must think ‘starting from God alone’, without the foundation-setting of metaphysics or even the barest concept.

There is one concept, however – the barest of concepts – most problematic for this theological goal, just because it is the barest and thus most universal: being. Being is anterior to every thought about God because, in the context of Heideggerian ontology and even perhaps thinking as such, the ‘is’ accompanies every thought.Footnote ¹⁶ And because the ‘is’ must accompany each thought, including a thought of God, this entails, for Marion, a failure to think God starting from God alone. Even Heidegger's attempt to think being qua being – without recourse to a metaphysical idolatry that obscures both the thought of being and God – succumbs to a second idolatry, for it thinks it must get an ontological understanding of being before it can move on to an ontic question about God. Here Marion repeats Heidegger's declaration: ‘Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought’ – and this anteriority of the ‘truth of Being’ makes even a post-metaphysical being inadequate for genuine thinking about God.Footnote ¹⁷

We should pause here and dwell on why the ‘truth of Being’ is so anterior for Heidegger and was so throughout his career. For doing so will align Heidegger's thought with the scope of the rest of the philosophical tradition, as well as the later discussion of univocity in this essay. If there is one thing Heidegger takes for granted in his early career, it is the universality, inevitability and constitutive relation of being, Sein, in human Dasein. According to Sein und Zeit, Dasein ‘is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it’.Footnote ¹⁸ And, as Marion cites a later lecture of his, ‘human Dasein is a being with the kind of being to which it belongs essentially to understand something like Being’.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet this is just an assumption of what Aristotle writes in Metaphysica B and of what Thomas writes in the Summa, both of which Heidegger cites in Sein und Zeit: ‘being is the most universal of all’, and ‘an understanding of Being is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends in beings’.Footnote ²⁰ To put it in a too simplistic sense, but one that is fitting for the following consideration of Duns Scotus: one always uses ‘is’ to state, it is raining, or, the truck is red, or even, God is, and every time there is an unstated, assumed comprehension of being therein. This is not an issue of the analogy or univocity of being but rather its universal primacy in thought, which applies to Aristotle, Thomas and Heidegger no less than to Scotus.

Therefore, Marion finds a final idolatry in Heidegger. For in his case, we must ‘admit the absolute phenomenological anteriority of Dasein, as comprehension of Being, over all beings and over every regional ontic investigation’.Footnote ²¹ The phenomenological anteriority of being – regardless of whether one finds it obvious or mysterious – ‘implies theologically an instance anterior to “God,” hence that point from which idolatry could dawn’.Footnote ²² In the end, human Dasein's being precedes its thinking of God.

How, then, to achieve the thought of God without being? This is Marion's project throughout the rest of the work, which I will only outline where it is relevant to Duns Scotus’ doctrine of univocity. Marion is aware that his broad condemnation of the anteriority of being ‘may in fact render thought on the whole immediately impossible’.Footnote ²³ How can thought, let alone the thought of God, escape the anteriority of being? This escape can only come in the effort that aims to think ‘God without any conditions, not even that of Being, hence to think God without pretending to inscribe him or to describe him as a being’.Footnote ²⁴ God, in this case, must work as ‘that which surpasses, detours, and distracts all thought, even nonrepresentational. By definition and decision, God, if he must be thought, can meet no theoretical space to his measure…’Footnote ²⁵ The goal, then, is to think God not only outside the confines of metaphysics but also outside the confines of being, that is, the classification that God is a being, must be a being, or manifests Himself only as a being.

Again, he acknowledges this seems impossible at first glance, given being's total hegemony in human discourse. But even within this hegemony, he claims God can act as that which ‘surpasses, detours, and distracts all thought’.Footnote ²⁶ From within the anteriority of being that is impossible for humans being qua human being to escape, God arises to challenge and relativise such anteriority. God, to be God, must arise in thought as the unthinkable – yet how can the unthinkable arise in thought? Marion contends ‘we can only think [God] under the figure of the unthinkable, but of an unthinkable that exceeds as much what we cannot think as what we can’.Footnote ²⁷ The thought of God as the unthinkable occurs first within the realm of thought and then is proven unthinkable in terms of its excess. By ‘excess’ Marion means, ‘the unthinkable enters into the field of our thought only by rendering itself unthinkable there by excess, that is, by criticizing our thought’.Footnote ²⁸ In this respect, God does not disappear as a concept but enters into conceptuality, yet only as a criticism thereof, indifferent to and overflowing of conceptuality's parameters, capacitas, and idolatrous gaze. This is not a negating criticism, but a criticism from what is far greater than the boundaries that human thought sets for it, from what manifests so wholly to human thought that thought can never succeed in putting a stop to it.Footnote ²⁹

This excess leads Marion to consider Love (ἀγάπη) as the best designation for God, for Love defines best this nature of total and abundant Self-giving: ‘what is peculiar to love consists in the fact that it gives itself… loves without condition, simply because it loves; [God] thus loves without limit or restriction’.Footnote ³⁰ In short, God loves before He is, because God is free of all limitation, condition and restriction; but, again, not in any mere negative sense, but such that God first gives Himself to thought, even while surpassing it. Love thus suffices for Marion's goal of thinking God according to His own revelation, as it prioritises God as Self-Giver, as the Gift Who gives Himself to thought. By first thinking God as Gift-Giver, we may succeed in thinking God qua God by God's own revelation.

With regards to being, thinking God first as Love reckons with the inevitability of God's entering into the concept, and therewith the seeming anteriority of being, while still setting God before this anteriority by proving His excess of it. This entails an ‘indifference to be’. God may be – or He may not. In either case, God precedes the being which He deems to take upon himself or not. For a being to be able to do so, this would mean the being (here God) precedes being-itself, or, as stated earlier, the comprehending of being implicit in every human thought. Here comes a reversal of roles: God ‘comprehends our Being of beings, in the sense that the exterior exceeds the interior, and also that the understanding is not confused with the understood – in short, that the comprehending diverges from the comprehended’.Footnote ³¹ Thus a space opens between the understanding and the understood that keeps human thought from swallowing up its object into its own comprehension – a space Marion famously signifies, literally, by crossing God out with an X.

This is a difficult point to understand. The constraints of this essay do not allow me to go into detail about all the ways Marion claims that through the phenomena of proclamation of Scripture, the moment of the Eucharist, and the encounter with icons, God is not expelled from being but rather re-orients Himself anterior to being by critical excess. This excess arises out of the Self-giving of God Himself, the God Who wholly gives with a total freedom that includes even His entrance into the realm of ‘idolatrous thinking’, but only as free from its constraints. For Marion, it is crucial that Christian theology, against all philosophy and much of the classical theological tradition, must begin with the divine name of God as LoveFootnote ³²: for God does not first have to be before He gives (Himself). In turn, all discourse can only follow from the priority of encounter with this Self-giving Love. Marion concludes, ‘love is not spoken, in the end, it is made. Only then can discourse be reborn, but as an enjoyment, a jubilation, a praise’.Footnote ³³

Either this point is difficult, or it just totally fails to match his earlier criticisms of conceptual idolatry. For how could the theologian return to the naivete of jubilation and praise when the regulatory concept – and God, even when crossed-out, is a regulatory concept in Marion's case – functions foremost as criticism, albeit ‘excessive’? As Laurence Hemming argues, Marion's attempt to cordon off Christian theology (in particular that of Thomas Aquinas) from the spectre of the history of ontotheology has ‘thereby incapacitated [him] from showing how the God of revelation and the world to whom God is revealed go together… [For his] stress on the separation of esse commune and esse divinum is construed in an exclusively negative sense’.Footnote ³⁴ Further, Gregory Schufreider criticises that, ‘needless to say, Marion prefers icons to idols; although I would argue that, working from his own definition of the difference, it can be shown that all icons presuppose a certain idolizing of the incomprehensible’.Footnote ³⁵

While I would not go so far as Schufreider, I agree that Marion so succeeds in arguing against being-as-such that, using the very polemic against the ‘idolatrous gaze’, one may criticise the very ‘icons’ of God's Self-revelation as themselves no more than other instances of idolatry. Only faith – which is particular to an individual and granted by grace in the absolute mystery of God's Providence – not just the sheer fact of anteriority of God by God's excessive Self-revelation, may take the icon in good faith (as a Christian may) rather than in bad faith (as Schufreider does). This faith is contingent, no less so than God's own self-revelation as articulated by Marion. But if a theologian does not recognise this contingency of faith, the bad-faith critic may simply call out her icon as an instance of a projected, negative ontology, whereby the intellectual gaze justifies itself precisely through its projected (apparently blinding) vision of what exceeds its sight.Footnote ³⁶ But how can we account for this contingency of faith? As Hemming notes, Marion has so split off God's revelation from the world that now the one who was once of the world, the Christian theologian bearing faith, can no longer account for that revelation in the world.

To summarise: Marion criticises all metaphysics and even post-metaphysics, not Duns Scotus alone, for thinking being anterior to God. The anteriority of being is a problem for all human thought, insofar as being is problematic for thinking God as God. Properly thinking God demands thinking God first as Self-giving Love, who can enter and exit out of our comprehending of being in freedom by the excess of His own revelation. It should be clear by now that Marion's critiques of metaphysics exceed the standard debate over analogy and univocity of being. Unlike Radical Orthodoxy, Marion is not defending a doctrine of analogia entis. He is radically questioning the primacy of being in theology overall, a primacy to which even Thomists and the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy would succumb. Yet his critique of the primacy of being extends so far that it throws into deep suspicion his attempt at a positive thinking of God's revelation.

Duns Scotus’ doctrine of univocity in light of the primacy of being

Now I will interpret Duns Scotus’ doctrine of univocity in light of Marion's own attempt to think God qua God. This context requires a somewhat different and more provisional interpretation than the prevailing defences of Duns Scotus’ univocity. While I think both Thomas Williams’ and Richard Cross’ defences far exceed my own in logical terms, I do not find in either the basic insight I find in Duns Scotus’ doctrine of the univocity of being. That insight is the Thomasic maxim cited earlier: ‘an understanding of being [ens] is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends in beings’.Footnote ³⁷ To that primacy of being, I add two similar maxims: ‘whatever received is received in the mode of the recipient’, and ‘knowledge is regulated according as the thing known is in the knower’, for ‘the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower’.Footnote ³⁸ Both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, as good scholastic theologians, agree on these principles. To analogise these principles to Marion's critique, the scholastic theologian accepts that all thinking is confined to the ‘gaze’ of the ‘mode of the knower’. And being, since it is the most primary and universal concept, is a sufficient foundation, a ‘gaze’, for thinking through the transcendentals that regulate the mode of knowing.Footnote ³⁹ Therefore, Scotus is not revolutionising so much as crystallising the premises of scholastic thought into one doctrine of univocity. Scotus argues that the concept ‘being’ accompanies every human conceiving, and further, this concept must be univocal between God and human beings. And even further than Thomas, since human beings must have the concept of being in every conception as an utterly basic concept, there is no way for this concept to be treated as anything but univocal.

The most crucial material for much of this interpretation lies in Scotus’ overall framing of metaphysics. I will begin there and then interpret his doctrine of univocity in light of this framing.

Like the other scholastics, Duns Scotus agrees ‘that the first object of our intellect is being (ens)’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Being holds this primacy through both ‘commonness’ [communitas] and ‘virtuality’ [virtualitas]: ‘every per se intelligible either essentially includes the notion of being [i.e. commonly] or is contained virtually or essentially in something that essentially includes being’.Footnote ⁴¹

In its own context, this point is quite complicated. However, I will glean a very simple consequence of it which will show that Duns Scotus is arguing every intellection of an object requires the concept of being, even when granting the actual being of the object is quite different from the intellecting act. When an intelligible includes the notion of being ‘essentially’ or ‘commonly’, it is an intelligible composite of, or in common relation with, universal and material substances – and there is no further ado. It is clearly intelligible that, say, the concept of Socrates as a rational animal would include the concept of being essentially in each of the categorisations of ‘rational’ and ‘animal’. But it gets trickier when we try to intellect an intelligible wholly by and of itself; for example, when we are trying to understand Socrates qua Socrates, in his haecceity. Duns Scotus grants that it might not be clear how being could be understood within a haecceity which denotes an ultimate difference of that thing from all others. But he maintains that, even when we are trying to understand something in its haecceity, the notion of being is still ‘contained virtually’. For all ‘genera and species and individuals, and all the essential parts of genera, and uncreated being, include being quidditatively [essentially]; but all ultimate differences are included in some of these essentially’, and ‘all the properties of being are included virtually in being and what falls under being’.Footnote ⁴² In short, even haecceity and ultimate differences relate to being virtually.

This is a metaphysical point – and a quite difficult one for most of us who are not used to a scholastic idiom. But it also has an epistemic-ontological point of consequence. And it is a very simple point that risks repetition, but in order to understand Marion's contention against metaphysics (and Duns Scotus), I must dwell on it further. In every conception of a being, the concept of being must be included. This does not mean that being-itself is necessarily and essentially common between the two beings. There can be a great difference between the two beings regarding their respective actual being. And here we may even include attempted intellections of haecceity, of thinking things per se apart from all other being, including our own. But for intellection (i.e. for a being to be ‘intelligible’ at all), a being must be apprehended as either including a commonality of being in quid – and this is communitas of being between our thinking in metaphysical categories and the intellected being – or the being apprehending the being whose being is uncommon to it must apprehend it virtually, in accompaniment with a concept which does have this commonness of being – and this is virtualitas. To return to my earlier point on scholastic maxims: either an intellected being must actually be as it is received in the mode of the knower, or it must be known virtually, i.e. received in the mode of the knowing recipient. And for us humans, this mode will always be the univocal term of being. Duns Scotus is not making an insidious claim compared to other medieval thinkers. He is asserting a most basic principle: being, ‘is’ – the human intellecting ‘is’ – irreducibly accompanies every thought of a being, by necessity of how intellection works. To quote Andrew LaZella, ‘being is a concept of pure determinability’,Footnote ⁴³ and as such it precedes every specific determination, even the narrowest determinations of things in their ultimate difference from everything else.

This premise is crucial for the definition of univocity, and it is how I think the argument for univocity proves most successful. Duns Scotus begins with the question ‘whether God is naturally knowable by the intellect of the wayfarer’.Footnote ⁴⁴ He refines this question with a quick dismissal of negative theology. It is pointless to distinguish that we cannot know what God is, because ‘negation cannot be known except through affirmation’, and anyway, ‘nor are negations our greatest loves’.Footnote ⁴⁵ So, we must seek ‘after the underlying notion that this negation is understood to be true of’, and at bottom this notion must be affirmative.Footnote ⁴⁶ So, there must be some ‘affirmative concept that is first’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the ontological context, we must seek after

He is seeking after the barest concept that allows the intellect to grasp an affirmative concept of God, leaving out all questions of His essence or existence but pursuing an utterly basic, simple affirmation that lets all further intellection about Him to follow. He thus concludes his introduction by refining the first question: ‘whether the intellect of the wayfarer could naturally have any simple concept in which simple concept God is conceived’.Footnote ⁴⁹

This question already puts him in an advantageous position for his debate over analogy and univocity. For he clarifies that he is not looking for a necessarily robust concept. He is reaching a bit deeper: there must be an utterly basic concept underlying whatever affirmation or negation we further make of a concept. This anticipates his most successful contention against analogy, because he is not discounting analogy but instead arguing it does not go deep enough to reach this utterly simple concept undergirding any analogical proposition we make.

Duns Scotus finds this simple concept to be the univocal, primary concept of being. He defines univocity thus:

Two criteria decide whether a concept is univocal. First, the concept must have sufficient unity so that to say, for instance, God is and God is not would be a contradiction. The second is that it acts as the middle term of a syllogism that unites two extremes. Socrates is a man, and all men are mortal, and therefore Socrates is mortal. This is makes the connections between these statements intelligible in the first place. To repeat LaZella's terms, the univocal concept here acts as a concept of ‘pure determinability’ that allows any determination to happen at all.

Duns Scotus then argues that the concept of being meets these criteria in the intellection of God. He states,

He uses as an example the debate among various ancient philosophers over what the first principle is and what attributes it has: fire, water, God, created or uncreated, infinite or finite, etc. But everyone agreed that, whatever this first principle is, it is a being. Through every change of conception of the first principle – from fire to water to a finite God to an infinite God, etc. – ‘the first concept certain… the concept one had about being, would not be destroyed but preserved in the particular concept that was proved…’.Footnote ⁵² In every different concept of whatever the first principle would be, the notion of it as a being persists. This is because, as Labooy puts it, being is a ‘wafer-thin’ concept: it is ‘that what does not imply a contradiction, being as that what is apt to be… [it is] the frontier guard between the realm of meaning and that of meaninglessness’.Footnote ⁵³

Here is where Duns Scotus’ argument against analogy comes in. Having argued that whatever is conceived must be conceived as a being, he contends that the concept ‘being’ in relation between the conceiver and the conceived must be univocal, not analogous. Suppose this relation was only similar, which means there were actually two different concepts, being (B1) and being (B2), that resemble each other quite closely. Either there is no more-basic concept underlying them, in which case it is impossible to put them in comparison at all, and we have equivocity (i.e. unintelligibility); or it is possible to compare these two, but to compare them and prove how similar they are, we must then posit something which they share on the basis of which they are similar. Whatever this is, therefore, it must be univocal. And since being is the first object of the intellect and is irreducibly simple, this concept of being (B) can serve as that univocal basis. Below every supposed difference in being that one can call an ‘analogy of being’, one can reach a most basic, simply-simple concept (B) upon which to compare the analogies.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Duns Scotus, this ‘wafer-thin’, simply simple concept is being.

Now, again, Duns Scotus’ univocity does not disregard analogy in all other cases thereafter, and he does not even posit that the actual being of the two in relation is univocal. The ‘wafer-thin’ concept of being is seen by some as allowing all further comparison and therewith dissimilarity between the being of the two in relation. As Labooy states, ‘Scotus holds that we need the univocal concept of ens in order to be able to express the enormous difference between [B1] and [B2]’.Footnote ⁵⁵ And for Labooy, this extremely limited commonness is beneficial for our thinking about the divine. Providing the ‘semantic ground that makes it possible to speak about the divine’, univocity grants ‘a very limited discursive knowledge of God, by which we can express His infinite alterity’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In sum, the univocity of being is a distillation of the scholastic maxims – that an understanding of being (ens) is necessary in every conception of a being and that being is the first object of the intellect – into the basis of the possibility of religious language about God. For Duns Scotus, the univocal concept of being in its barest, ‘wafer-thin’ scope is inevitable in any conception of a being as a being. But for him and his followers, univocity is not only inevitable but good, for it acts as the basis from which we may then distinguish the great differences between God and creatures. In short, Duns Scotus’ univocal concept of being could be described just as: intelligibility, and as that intelligibility which then allows all further difference.

Marion's treatment of Duns Scotus

Let's turn now to the few places of Marion's implicit and explicit treatment of Duns Scotus’ positions in God without Being. In light of Marion's analysis of ‘conceptual idolatry’, it is difficult not to concede that Duns Scotus falls precisely within this critique. It is more difficult, however, to argue that univocity – however ‘idolatrous’ it is – is not inevitable. For it seems impossible to conclude otherwise than that a concept of being in this barest form must accompany every comprehension of a being. Scotus is not so much deviating from a once-apophatic scholastic doctrine of analogy as he is bringing the underlying premise of metaphysics, indeed human thought, to the fore.

Marion himself recognises this problem in his treatment of Aquinas alongside Duns Scotus in the first edition of this work. He argues that, because for Aquinas being is the first and proper object of the intellect as primarily intelligible,

Both Aquinas and Dun Scotus agree that being [ens] is the primary conception of the intellect. And both, as Marion asserts, conceive of this primacy as ‘depending on the primacy of a conception of the understanding and of the mind of man’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It follows that Aquinas has already set the foundation for the Scotist conclusion ‘that the ens, result of a concept because first of a human (in via) apprehension, remains univocal for “God” as well as for all other beings’.Footnote ⁵⁹ But note: this primacy of the ens is not the primacy of the ens itself, or even esse, of being-itself. Rather, it is the primacy of the ens as intelligibility, as the ‘human gaze’ of conceptualising, to use Marion's language.

In the second edition of this text, which appends the essay ‘Thomas Aquinas and Onto-Theology’, Marion shifts his critique from Aquinas to Duns Scotus.Footnote ⁶⁰ He writes, ‘the univocal concept of being implies, requires, and achieves, both in fact and in right, the inclusion of God in metaphysics’.Footnote ⁶¹ For ‘metaphysics’, with being (or entitativeness, as Marion puts it here) as the prime object of the intellect,

Duns Scotus thus brings to the fore what all other metaphysics makes implicit: a domination of the comprehension and conceptualisation of being – the idolatrous ‘gaze’ of the intellect – in its thinking about every being, even the highest being, God, even and precisely in granting God this privileged status.

The failed semantic defence of univocity

Marion and Duns Scotus seem to stand at an impasse. On the one hand, Duns Scotus’ argument for the necessity of a bare, ‘wafer-thin’ concept of being seems inevitable. On the other hand, Marion – aware of this apparent inevitability – is willing to depart from it to argue for a rigorously theological thinking. He is frank to set the terms:

In short, we may either pursue conceptual thinking, through which we will achieve ‘God’, a concept that is only the invisible mirror of the conceptual gaze, or we may pursue theology, through which we achieve God through worship but depart from all objectivising, conceptual thought.

It seems either Marion is right and Duns Scotus wrong to prioritise the concept of being, or Duns Scotus is right and Marion wrong to put such suspicion on conceptuality. Or perhaps the two positions are simply incommensurable, given their far different assumptions and aims, Marion to a kind of Barthian restriction of all religious language to the revelation of God and Duns Scotus to the scholastic confidence in natural knowledge of God. In this case, the wayfarer would side with whomever she aligns her assumptions and aims. The stakes and directions of this choice show just how radical and important the impasse is; the choice decides how the wayfarer will do all theology thereafter. Some today tend to dismiss previous generations’ agonising over theological method, but this impasse should quiet any easy dismissals. Marion is right: method, in science, decides everything. And choice of method is indeed a radical choice.

I do not know if there is any room for discussion beyond this point. However, I will at least mention the prevailing semantic defence of univocity, which Labooy uses in his defence of Duns Scotus against Marion, and why I think it is not adequate to Marion's critiques. With this argument, I hope to show that the impasse remains.

It is now common to argue that for Duns Scotus, univocity is a semantic not ontological theory. Being-itself is not univocal between God, humanity and all other beings; rather, only the concept of being is univocal. The concept itself is only an intra-mental reality allowing the mental relation of one being to another. The crucial proof for this position is Duns Scotus’ own commentary on Aristotle's point that ‘equivocations lie hidden in a genus’: ‘This is not equivocation in the logician's sense, which involves positing diverse concepts [which yet allow one concept of being that can be abstracted from them], but in that of the ontologist, because there is no unity of nature in such a case.’Footnote ⁶⁴

As Cross argues, ‘for Scotus, the concept as such is a vicious abstraction… that does not correspond to any real extramental property of a thing’.Footnote ⁶⁵ There must be a radical split between the concept of being and being-itself to allow a genuine distance between God and the creature, indeed even the creature and creature, who share a univocal concept of being. Restriction of univocity to a semantic theory then shows, as Cross argues, that ‘Scotus’ theory is as apophatic as Aquinas’’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For when ‘we claim that things “are” in the same way, we are saying no more than that they fall under the same vicious abstraction. We are not saying anything at all about the way in which they “are” in extramental reality’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Labooy agrees, arguing Duns Scotus’ theory of simple concepts (of which being is the simplest) ‘is a semantic instrument, not coinciding with an ultimate ontological grid. Semantics and ontology are unlinked’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Holding to univocity as semantic only, however, would not answer Marion's concerns for idolatry mentioned above but simply accept them without reservation. Although my interpretation might suggest so at first glance, Marion's critique of the anteriority of being is not simply anti-ontological. He is concerned with how this anteriority transfers straightaway into the ‘gaze’ of the conceptualising intellect. The very problem of the concept is not only that it carries out some ill-fated hegemony of being, but that it brackets off a genuinely extramental existence from thinking and never approaches a genuine being, or, for that matter, being-itself. By bracketing off the semantic claim to reality, the concept puts in its place what I would call a pseudo-ontology: ‘being’ instead of being, or in the case of the divine, ‘God’ in place of God. But if the goal is to think God as God (or being as being, for that matter), then Marion, at least, would not be satisfied at all by resting content with that semantic restriction.

From the philosophical side as well, Heidegger would call this semantic restriction a most flagrant example of the omission of being-itself. To call being ‘the most universal and emptiest concept’ enforces a ‘dogma’ ‘which not only declares the question of the meaning of Being superfluous, but sanctions the omission of questioning it’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The semantic defence only helps sanction the omission of asking about the meaning of being. Just as Marion is not content with remaining at the level of the conceptual God, Heidegger could not remain at the level of conceptual, viciously abstract being. Such omission does not guard genuine extramental reality or ontology, as Cross and others may think, but only replaces it with an ossifying pseudo-ontology – to use Marion's language, a willing reflection of the human gaze back upon itself.Footnote ⁷⁰

In short, the semantic defence fails because it ignores and thereby accepts the first form of idolatry against which Marion contends. Whether Duns Scotus is ‘as apophatic as Aquinas’ is not at issue, for, according to Marion, Aquinas as much as Duns Scotus conceives the primacy of the ens as ‘the primacy of a conception of the understanding and of the mind of man’.Footnote ⁷¹

Labooy argues that the semantic nature of univocity does not prove so idolatrous, because the restriction of univocity to semantics sets a difference between ‘understanding and, on the other hand, encompassing knowledge; or, in Latin, intelligere and comprehendere’.Footnote ⁷² He contrasts the ‘usurping form of rationality’ in the modern concept of knowledge, which phenomenology rightly opposes, to Duns Scotus’ more reserved doctrine of knowledge that ‘did not think that “the whole of reality was rationally transparent”’.Footnote ⁷³ Instead, he contends that the doctrine of univocity gives a ‘lasso’ of our ability to name something that reaches much farther than the ‘lasso’ that reaches for what we can know. In short, the nameable extends beyond the knowable. Therefore, ‘if we name an object, it is not automatically within our “gaze”, pace Marion’.Footnote ⁷⁴

To this distinction, I must first note that Heidegger, Marion and others might still argue that univocity nevertheless sets the stage for the historical collapse of the difference between semantics and epistemology and ontology; even the more reserved scholastic form of rationality still serves as a predecessor for the modern ‘usurping form of rationality’.Footnote ⁷⁵ But it is not clear at all that this difference between the nameable and knowable ultimately holds for Duns Scotus anyway. He partakes in (what contemporary phenomenology would call) obvious ontotheology in some sections. He states that

Note that this is how a metaphysical enquiry about God works, not a semantic enquiry. And as a metaphysical enquiry, it does not defend him against Marion's critique of metaphysics as a whole. For in this case, the formal idea leads the way throughout and is never dispensed with, even with the removal of every supposed ‘imperfection.' And thus the ‘gaze’ of the concept holds.

In summary, Marion's condemnation of conceptual idolatry does apply to Duns Scotus’ doctrine of univocity, even if one tries to restrict univocity to the semantic. The semantic defence fails, because whether we like it or not, the semantic simply stands in for ontology – and stands as the poorest of ontologies, at that.