Are finite and infinite love the same?

Erich Przywara and Jean-Luc Marion on analogy and univocity

Robert Duffy

pp. 25-39

in: Bruce Ellis Benson (ed), Evil, fallenness, and finitude, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion claims that human love and divine love have the same essential structure. The only difference between them is that our love is finite, while God's is infinite. In the first part of this chapter, I explain Marion's account of love as given in The Erotic Phenomenon. In the second part, I argue that his account of the relation between finite and infinite love faces two difficulties. First, it produces a paradoxical result: if finite and infinite love have the same essential structure, then infinite love is impossible. Second, for this reason Marion's account fails to preserve divine transcendence. In the third part, I turn to Eric Przywara's account of analogy in Analogia Entis. I argue that Przywara's account allows us to preserve Marion's insight into the paradoxical structure of love, without thereby running into absurdity or compromising divine transcendence.

Cited authors

Przywara Erich

Marion Jean-Luc