Nothing separates, perhaps, he who believes from he who does not believe, except this: not reasons, of course, not some certainty (as if it were a matter of some sort of nervous or magic influx, near fanaticism or unconscious stupidity), but merely believing despite the belief that one does not believe. To believe in Love, and that Love loves me in spite of my belief that “I don’t have faith”; in other words, to put more confidence in the Love that is given than in our deficient will; to compensate the distrust in oneself with trust in God; to prefer the immensity of the gift proposed (at the risk of failure to receive it through lack of capacitas) to the certainty of assumed impotence (at the price of suicide by a self-satisfaction resigned to nothingness); to make up one’s mind in favor of the infinite that one cannot master or possess rather than the dandy’s impotence; to risk abandon to the overabundance of a gift, instead of immobilizing oneself in the idiocracy of scarcity.
Jean-Luc Marion, from Prolegomena to Charity. (New York: Fordham UP, 2002) p. 64
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