A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment

By Jean-Luc Marion and Stephen E. Lewis

A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transcends national boundaries, social identities, and linguistic differences. Marion insists that Catholic universalism, with its core of communion and community, is not an outmoded worldview, but rather an outlook that has the potential to counter the positivist rationality and nihilism at the core of our current political moment, and can help us address questions surrounding liberalism and religion and what is often presented as tension between “Islam and the West.” As an inviting and sophisticated Catholic take on current political and social realities—realities that are not confined to France alone—A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226691398

Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris–Sorbonne Paris IV, Dominique Dubarle Professor of Philosophy at the Institut catholique de Paris, Andrew T. Greely and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a member of the Academie française.

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A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment

A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment

Jean-Luc Marion

Translated by Stephen E. Lewis

With a Foreword by Kevin Hart

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68461-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75829-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69139-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226691398.001.0001

Originally published in French as Brève apologie pour un moment catholique, © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2017.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marion, Jean-Luc, 1946– author. | Lewis, Stephen E. (Stephen Evarts), translator. | Hart, Kevin, 1954– writer of foreword.

Title: A brief apology for a Catholic moment / Jean-Luc Marion ; translated by Stephen E. Lewis ; with a foreword by Kevin Hart.

Other titles: Brève apologie pour un moment catholique. English

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020040353 | ISBN 9780226684611 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226758299 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226691398 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church—France. | Catholic Church—Apologetic works. | Church and state—France. | Laicism—France. | France—Religion.

Classification: LCC BX1530.2 .M37513 2021 | DDC 261.20944—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040353

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Foreword by KEVIN HART

Address: The Cross without the Banner

Catholic and French

Laicity or Separation

The Utility of Communion

Envoy: A Catholic Moment

General Index

Index of Biblical Passages

Footnotes

Foreword

Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia.

It is common in France, unlike the United States, for philosophers to engage the social and political issues of the day, and for the media, including publishing houses, to give them space to do so. We think of the volumes of Sartre’s Situations, his many interviews, even the iconic 1970 photograph of him selling copies of the banned newspaper La Cause du Peuple. We think of Merleau-Ponty’s unofficial role as manager of Les Temps Modernes, his political columns for L’Express, and his essays in Humanisme et terreur (1947). We think of Derrida’s criticisms of the Apartheid policies of the South African government, his protests against the death penalty, his work for GREPH (Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement Philosophique), and his commitment to the Jan Hus association. And we think of many others whose voices sometimes have been heard in the public sphere, not least of all Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy. And all this long before we get to philosophical provocateurs such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Onfray.

Until now, no one would have thought to include Jean-Luc Marion in this list. For some of his readers, he is first and foremost a historian of philosophy, someone with two specializations, one French and one German: the age of Descartes and Pascal, and the first maturity of phenomenology, the age of Husserl and Heidegger. For other readers, he is preeminently an original philosopher, best known for his Étant donné (1997) and further elaborations of what he calls saturated phenomena or the paradoxes. And for still others, he is a Christian theologian with a decidedly philosophical bent, author of Dieu sans l’être (1982) and its subsequent refinements up to and including D’ailleurs, la Révélation (2020). Now, though, this image of Marion will change, if only a little. With Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (2017), Marion appears as un philosophe engagé, not in order to affirm one or another social or political position in any narrow sense but to question the ways in which Catholics are viewed in France, to investigate the line that since 1905 has legally separated the practice of religion and the functioning of the State there, and to propose the possibility, indeed the urgency, of a Catholic moment in French culture to come.

Not that Marion has written a popular book, let alone one that relaxes the demands of thinking philosophically. We find Marion reflecting, in a phenomenological manner, on the nature of the gift, on the problem of other minds, as formulated by Husserl and Levinas, and asking us to follow him in making reductions so as to allow phenomena properly to manifest themselves. We find him focusing on the paradoxes involved in the idea of separating Church and State and teasing them out so as to make the issues at hand as clear as possible. We also encounter him, as a historian of ideas, reminding us that we inherit the word religion from the Enlightenment, and telling us that, considered from within, Christianity is not a religion. Once again, we hear him speaking of the end of metaphysics, and of how important it is for Christians to understand the liberation for faith that comes with this closure. Some of Marion’s readers will be surprised to find him centering his understanding of nihilism, which actually goes back to some of his earliest writings, on the connection of the I and power. And most surprisingly, perhaps, we hear Marion speaking, perhaps for the first time in a book, about the nature of community.

Until now, Marion’s writing has largely been in the genres of the treatise, the essay, and the interview. Here, though, he engages—briefly, as he says, and perhaps for the one and only time—in apologetics. The genre of the apology is well known to anyone who has studied Greek philosophy, the New Testament, or the Fathers of the Church. The Greek word ἀπολογία combines λόγος (speech) and ἀπο- (from) and means a speech given in defense or justification of one’s views. We think of Plato’s Apology, which presents Socrates’s eloquent self-defense against the charges of impiety and corrupting the young in Athens in 399 BCE. And we think of the apostle Paul, before King Agrippa II and Festus, Procurator of Judea, defending himself against the charges of the high priest and some elders. When allowed to speak, Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense (Παῦλος ἐκτείνας τὴν χεῖρα ἀπελογεῖτο) (Acts 26:1). Doubtless we recall also some early Church writers who defended the faith before emperors, judges, and pagan philosophers, the greatest work of this kind being Origen’s Contra Celsum (c. 248). And we should recall that recourse to the apology has been made by major Christian theologians in modern times. First, there is Schleiermacher’s stirring Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), in which the great liberal Protestant theologian proposes a defense of religion against its cultured despisers in Berlin by way of four speeches. And second, there is John Henry Newman’s elegant bandaging of his wounds at the hands of Charles Kingsley, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Against whom does Marion wish to defend himself and others like himself? And how does he conduct his defense?

First of all, Marion seeks to defend French Catholics against their fellow countrymen who seek to criticize, discount, devalue, or deride them for their beliefs and their acts. For it is often declared, especially in the media (and sometimes by philosophers as well as journalists), that they represent a danger to an otherwise healthy secular culture; that they choose badly when it comes to politics; that they fall prey to superstition when, as every educated person surely knows, God is dead; that the churches are empty in any case, and so Catholics have no base; and that they do not think well because they are constrained by the dogmas of the Church. Against these charges, Marion says to his fellow French Catholics, Be not afraid!, quoting John Paul II just after he was elected pope in 1978. (The pope in turn was quoting Jesus reassuring the disciples when they did not recognize him and thought him to be a ghost as he walked across the water [Matthew 14:27].) Like any good philosopher, Marion unpicks the claims of those he is obliged to oppose. What seem to be missiles leveled against the faithful turn out to be no more than cartoon spooks.

Catholics are not a danger to the Republic, Marion argues: they are, and always have been, the most useful of people in a state, as Justin Martyr declared in his First Apology (155–57 CE) (4.65), and certainly have not sought to transgress the law, promulgated by the Third Republic, that established a separation of Church and State (December 9, 1905). Indeed, separation of clerics and laity is a long-standing Christian division: no wonder French Catholics have not opposed the law of 1905. (It remains to be seen, Marion reflects, whether Muslims in France will do the same.) Catholics, like any other group of citizens, are entitled to vote for whichever political candidates they believe to be the best to represent them. Nietzsche’s affirmation God is dead in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) is hardly clear in its meaning, and certainly it does not make literal sense if one has the slightest understanding of what God means for Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Are the churches empty, as journalists like to say? Not at all: one finds many Catholics of all ages at Mass on Sundays, and there never was a time or a place when the churches were full to the brim or when there was universal recourse to the sacraments. Each ecclesial age has its troubles, and ours is not as badly off as others have been. And if even progressive Catholics, including Pope Francis, respect dogma, it is because they have good reasons for doing so, not to mention a duty to do so. Besides, one might add, if one wishes to criticize people for being uncritically beholden to dogmas, one could not do better than look to the far left or the far right.

Having identified and disarmed (or at least blunted) the criticisms aimed at Catholics, Marion proposes to encourage the faithful and to offer another way of viewing them, one that is far and away more hopeful, and that will perhaps nourish the Republic in time