What is it that makes a human being?

Jean-Luc Marion, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and also at the University of Chicago, was not so long ago elected to the French Academy, an event that is also described by the French as joining the company of the Immortals. Previously you have given brief accounts of the most discussed living philosophers from Agamben to Zizek. What do you think of Marion?

The work by him that I found most worth reading is called the Erotic Phenomenon. It deals with one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy: What is it that makes a human being human? The classical traditional answer was: Thinking. Karl Marx said it was working. Wittgenstein said it was language. Marion suggests that it is loving.

Marion is generally considered to be the deepest interpreter of the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, but he holds that Descartes was wrong in concluding that "thinking" was the activity by which "I", or the self, came into being.

Marion thinks that other animals and even more computers are better in some aspects of thinking than human beings. Human knowledge never succeeds in capturing that which makes me myself, but only that which makes me the kind of being that I am, namely a human being. It is only in the exchange of love that I am individuated. A human self is constituted only when one person comes to be loved by another.

Marion, now 64 but who always appears elegantly dressed and invariably wearing a bow-tie, joins only two other philosophers, Michel Serres and Renè Girard (originally a Professor of English Literature), under the famous cupola of the Academie Francaise.

He gives a very carnal account of love, which may not be all that surprising since he was a Prize-winning athlete, and even now is considered in France to be an authority on American baseball, which he keenly follows when in Chicago.

Because he gives such great importance to the body in the making of the human being, he quite logically takes fleshly contact to be of the essence of love. He also holds that love is a univocal term; that is, he rejects the opposition that had been historically set up between eros and agape, or profane and sacred love.

Do you think Pope Benedict XVI was influenced by Marion when he wrote his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est in which he also presents the theological virtue of charity as in continuity with erotic love?

It is very probable. Marion was from the start a principal collaborator of the journal Communio, which was founded in 1975 by Hans Urs von Balthasar and none other than Joseph Ratzinger.

Actually, Marion from his youth onwards, was a close friend in the Parish Centre of Montmartre of Jean-Marie Lustiger, the priest of Jewish-Polish origins who later became Cardinal Archbishop of Paris.

Marion is supposed to have been the chief counsellor of the Cardinal who surprised many Frenchmen with his vigorous support of the secular state. Incidentally, Marion has a younger brother who is a priest in the diocese of Nanterre and upholds very original standpoints that sometimes are considered to be neo-conservative.

Jean-Luc himself is known, however, mostly for his rejection of the traditional ways of proving the existence of God which he regards as pseudo-scientific. He holds instead that God can be discovered rather through the deep and detailed analysis of the experience of love.

Thus, meditation shows that, in realising their love, lovers bind themselves with oaths that are not merely verbal. Moreover, there will be no necessity for these oaths to be continually renewed if only God can be called upon as a witness. Thanks to God, love acquires the dimension of eternity.

Does this last consideration not take us away from the realm of philosophy to that of theology?

Marion seems to think that faith will be generated as the result of probing the experience of love between human beings following the method that Husserl proposed in order to explore appearances without pre-suppositions, so-called phenomenology.

Faith will then come fully into its own if one moves from consideration of love between human beings to that of love between man and God. If one accepts the very carnal account of human love given by Marion and that this fleshly meaning is the only one allowed for every kind of love, it follows that human love of God would be impossible and unthinkable without the Incarnation.

Because it is possible to share in the death and resurrection of Christ's Body through the Eucharist, this common meal is the effective sign of our unity in love through the Son with the Father in the Spirit.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.