Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) - Softcover

Marion, Jean-Luc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082327585X ISBN 13: 9780823275854

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Faith and reason, especially in Roman Catholic thought, are less contradictory today than ever. But does the supposed opposition even make sense to begin with? One can lose faith, but surely not because one gains in reason. Some, in fact, lose faith when reason is not able to make sense of the experiences of our lives. We very quickly realize that reason does not understand everything. Immense areas remain incomprehensible and irrational, which we abandon to belief and opinion.
Soon we definitively renounce thinking what that has been excluded from the realm of the thinkable. Ideological nightmares arise from this slumber of reason. Thus, the separation between faith and reason, too quickly taken as self-evident and even natural, is born from a lack of rationality, an easy capitulatin of reason before what is supposedly unthinkable. Rather than lose faith through excessive rationality, we often lose rationality because faith is too quickly excluded from the realm that it claims to open, that of revelation. We lose reason by losing faith.
Examining such topics as the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly, this book spans the range of Marion’s thought on Christianity. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, structured according to the logic of the gift that calls forth a response of love and devotion through kenotic abandon.

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches Continental Philosophy of Religion at Fordham University. She is the author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics; Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments about God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham); Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion; and Marion and Theology, besides articles and translations at the intersection of phenomenology and religion.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082327585X
• ISBN 13: 9780823275854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192