ABSTRACT
In his early and groundbreaking works, The Idol and Distance and God without Being, Jean-Luc Marion retrieved the mystical theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, thus furthering the Heideggerian critique of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, while also liberating God from the status of an idolatrous concept that serves the needs of the human ego. As metaphysics is a nebulous term, even within philosophical circles, it is useful here to revisit what then metaphysics has meant for Marion in his prior work and identify key aspects of what he finds problematic about it. Ironically, Marion's insistence that idipsum refers primarily to God's immutability creates one of the greatest problems for his argument, as it is precisely mutability which distinguishes all of the beings of the world from Being itself. The resolution of metaphysical problems not only helped Saint Augustine to be delivered from the errors of Manichaeism, but they also aided Augustine in coming to the Christian faith.
