From Idol to Icon: The Problem of Divine Naming in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Naming the divine exposes a structural tension: language makes the transcendent intelligible only by confining it within humanly constructed measures. Jean-Luc Marion identifies this risk as conceptual idolatry, opposing the conceptual idol to the icon, a sign that directs the gaze beyond itself rather than arresting it. This article adopts Marion’s distinction not as a genealogical claim but as a heuristic framework for examining how different traditions navigate the limits of naming, tracing how the divine name shifts from a restrictive boundary to an open threshold across three registers: philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation. Two dimensions emerge from this typology. Philosophical negation, rooted in Greek thought and Christian apophaticism, dismantles the predicative structure that produces the conceptual idol. Name and letter mysticism and repetitive invocation, drawing on Jewish and Islamic letter mysticism and the invocatory practices of dhikr, mantra, and Hesychasm, converge instead on a different mechanism: semantic exhaustion, the progressive suspension of a word’s referential function through sustained rhythmic repetition. By placing these practices in dialogue, the article identifies structural affinities that are difficult to see from within any single tradition’s own resources, suggesting that this convergence reflects an independent structural response to a shared linguistic aporia rather than doctrinal borrowing.

1. Introduction

The attempt to articulate the divine exposes a foundational tension: language renders intelligible, but it confines whatever it names within boundaries and definitions. To name God as “merciful,” “powerful,” or “infinite” is to attribute meanings derived from creaturely experience. God becomes intelligible, but this intelligibility imposes a limitation: the divine is reduced to what the naming subject can grasp and measure. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology identifies this structural risk as conceptual idolatry, the tendency of theological concepts to arrest the divine within a humanly constructed reflection rather than opening toward what exceeds all measure.

Marion’s account of this tension has been extensively examined within the context of Christian apophatic theology and Western metaphysics (Carlson 1999; Westphal 2007; Zachhuber 2023). Yet, across doctrinally and historically diverse frameworks, comparable tensions arise. Even traditions lacking an explicit apophatic vocabulary confront the difficulty of naming what exceeds all names. These traditions do not address the difficulty only in theory; they also respond through ritual and invocatory practices. These practices have been studied from historical, ritualistic, and psychological perspectives (Bashir 2011; Geels 1993; Schimmel 2011; Staal 1996), and the theoretical dimensions of the naming problem have been examined with considerable depth in the broader literature on mystical language and ineffability (Franke 2007; Hart 1991; Jones 2016; Katz 1992).1

This article’s contribution lies in distinguishing three modalities through which traditions respond to the naming crisis: philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation. These are not universal stages of mystical development but selected analytical lenses for comparing how different traditions negotiate the limits of naming. Marion’s idol/icon distinction serves here as a shared analytical framework across these three registers, in which the word can be transformed from a boundary into a threshold, from an instrument that arrests the divine to a counter-gaze that opens toward it. It thereby extends existing scholarship on the long-standing problem of divine naming and the comparable responses across traditions, for which Marion’s work offers a distinctively phenomenological possibility of comparative examination, not as a claim of historical dependence but as a heuristic vantage point.

The analysis proceeds as follows. The first section establishes the theoretical and methodological framework, presenting Marion’s threefold structure of idol, saturated phenomenon, and icon, and specifying the conditions under which his categories are applied comparatively. The second traces the philosophical and theological conditions that Marion’s framework presupposes and retrospectively illuminates as the ground of the conceptual idol, reading Ancient Greek philosophy and the Christian apophatic tradition through his idol/icon distinction. The third offers a comparative analysis of three modalities through which diverse traditions respond to the structural aporia of divine naming: philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation. A concluding section draws together the article’s findings and reflects on the limits and implications of the comparative reading.

2. Theoretical and Methodological Framework

To move beyond the traditional metaphysical limitations that reduce the divine to a rational construct or a philosophical object, this article adopts the phenomenological tools developed by Jean-Luc Marion within his project of overcoming metaphysics. While Marion’s project engages critically with Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics, it moves beyond Heidegger’s being-centered framework toward a theological ground that positions the divine as pure givenness [la pure donation], independent of any conceptual presuppositions. Marion identifies this conceptual confinement as onto-théologie: the tendency of both philosophy and theology to define God as Being [Dieu comme l’être] or causa sui (Marion 2002b, Dieu sans l’être/God Without Being; 2012, pp. 34, 106). By moving beyond these objectifying and being-centered reductions, he offers a radical ground for the analysis of theological phenomena through phenomenological givenness. Marion establishes givenness as the absolute and constitutive principle of phenomenology, contending that a phenomenon’s showing itself [se montrer] is only possible insofar as it gives itself [se donne]. Givenness is not a cognitive construct, as posited in classical metaphysics, but a reality that precedes both objectification and categorization within the horizon of Being (Marion 1998, Étant donné/Being Given; 2002a, pp. 7–71). To decouple the divine from the strictures of the metaphysics of presence, Marion introduces the distinction between the conceptual idol [l’idole conceptuelle] and the phenomenological icon [l’icône phénoménologique] (Marion 2012, God Without Being, pp. 7–8). Through this move, the phenomenon recovers its inherent right to show itself solely insofar as it gives itself (Turcan 2013, p. 217).

According to Marion, the idol is a phenomenal limit that arrests the gaze, imprisoning it rather than directing it toward the distance of the transcendent (Marion 2002a, Being Given, pp. 229–30). The idol renders the divine measurable according to human cognitive capacity and, in this sense, functions as a measure of comprehension. Just as an aesthetic idol scales the divine down to human existential limits, a theological concept evaluates God based on human capacity, freezing what should remain invisible within an invisible mirror (Marion 2012, God Without Being, p. 29). Consequently, conceptual idolatry is the very act of reducing God to the measures of reason. The status of an object as an idol stems not from its material composition or its essential qualities, but from the restrictive structure of the observer’s gaze: this act of looking, which halts at the surface and seeks to encompass the object in its entirety, fabricates the idol as the direct product of a captivated gaze [l’idole se fabrique du regard captivé] (Marion 2012, God Without Being, p. 10; Turcan 2013, p. 218).

If the conceptual idol arrests the gaze, the saturated phenomenon [le phénomène saturé] shatters the conceptual mirror entirely. Marion frames the naming problem not as a lack of manifestation, but as an excess. He observes that traditional epistemology constructs the phenomenon upon a shortage of intuition [pénurie d’intuition], neatly balancing the relationship between concept and intuition. In contrast, in the case of a saturated phenomenon, intuition overflows the capacity of the concept so that the mind becomes bedazzled [ébloui] by the sheer density of sensibility (Marion 2002a, Being Given, p. 204). Divine reality thus manifests as the impossibility of possibility: an unconditioned givenness that saturates every experiential horizon, ultimately rendering the conceptual apparatus impoverished (Wallenfang 2013, p. 862). The ineffability of God, therefore, stems not from a phenomenal void but from a surplus of intuition [surcroît d’intuition] (Marion 2002a, Being Given, p. 197); the concept simply shatters under the weight of this intensity. Consequently, apophatic theology must be read not as a mere withdrawal of knowledge, but as an acute awareness of conceptual saturation.

In response to this conceptual overflow, Marion introduces the phenomenological icon as the countermovement to the idol. By inverting the intentional structure of the idol, the icon preserves the distance of the transcendent. While the idol freezes and reflects the gaze back upon itself, the icon is a threshold that allows the gaze to pass through it and rebound toward infinity. It functions not as an object to be observed, but as a counter-gaze that envisages the subject and transforms the beholder into a witness. The icon recognizes no measure other than its own infinite excessiveness [démesure]. Whereas the idol scales the divine to fit the human gaze, the icon presents a visible face that continuously reveals the invisible, opening an abyss that the human eye can never exhaust (Marion 2012, God Without Being, p. 21). In Rivera’s terms, this phenomenological framework enables a specific mode of subjectivity that is dilated or middle-voiced (Rivera 2023, p. 4), facilitating the reception of givenness through an act of self-expansion. The iconic logic, the counter-gaze that opens rather than arrests, serves as the interpretive key for reading the contemplative practices examined in this article, for the icon operates not only discursively but performatively. Iconic language manifests as a discourse that preserves the distance and alterity of the divine without reducing it to an object.

Marion’s critique of Heidegger’s ontological framework becomes visible against the backdrop of the iconic structure. For Marion, Heidegger’s early framework reduces the infinite to a finite conceptual measure: it establishes Being as the ultimate horizon within which even God must appear, effectively subordinating the divine to the logic of Dasein (Marion 2012, God Without Being, pp. 34, 73–75). Heidegger’s later reflections on the gaze in the 1942–43 Parmenides Lectures help clarify what is at stake in Marion’s account of the idol. Here, Heidegger explicitly distances authentic theoria from the constructs of the representing human subject, defining the θεά as the aspect of Being that actively looks into beings (der Anblick des Seins, der in das Seiende hereinblickt): not an arrangement manufactured by the observer, but a receptive relation into which Being itself places human essence (Heidegger 1992, GA 54, p. 219). For Marion, the later Heidegger’s recognition of this receptive relation does not resolve the onto-theological problem, as the idol is produced whenever any conceptual framework substitutes itself for the reception of pure givenness. Nevertheless, this Heideggerian turn illuminates precisely what is at stake structurally in Marion’s critique: an idol arises when the human mind replaces a receptive orientation with a representational one, fixing and measuring the divine according to its own cognitive horizon. It should be noted that the structural parallel between Marion’s idol and Heidegger’s θεά represents our own analytical extension rather than a connection Marion himself explicitly draws; nonetheless, it makes visible the ontological stakes of his critique. In other words, Marion’s icon may then be understood as radicalizing Heidegger’s θεά into a contre-regard: a counter-gaze that envisages and transforms the subject who receives it, opening onto a pure givenness that no metaphysical or representational gaze can arrest.

Marion’s conceptual apparatus was forged within Western metaphysics and Christian theology. The transposition of his categories to diverse religious traditions therefore carries methodological risks. To apply a Marionian lens to these traditions is not to claim that his categories map onto their indigenous ontologies without remainder, nor does it suggest that these traditions would naturally identify themselves using his specific phenomenological vocabulary. Indeed, Marion’s concepts of the idol, the saturated phenomenon, and the icon are not purely neutral analytical tools; they are rooted in a specific theological genealogy. To pretend otherwise would itself constitute a reductive gesture. This risk does not make comparison impossible, but it does define its limits. The comparison pursued here concerns structure rather than doctrine. The common ground this article identifies is not that Hinduism, Buddhism Judaism, or Islam share Marion’s theological conclusions, but that each tradition, in its own terms, confronts an analogous structural aporia: finite language tends to objectify what exceeds it, and certain contemplative practices emerge precisely as responses to this tendency.

This comparative approach need not conflict with Steven T. Katz’s influential constructivist account, which holds that mystical experience is irreducibly shaped by tradition-specific conceptual frameworks (Katz 1992, pp. 3–42). Rather than examining the phenomenology of mystical experience itself, the present analysis focuses on the structural features of sacred language: how different traditions diagnose the risk of conceptual idolatry and develop responses to it. This limited scope allows for formal structural comparison without requiring claims about the commensurability of mystical experience across traditions.

Marion’s categories are therefore deployed not to impose a Western Christian framework onto other traditions, but to render this structural convergence visible, while remaining attentive to the irreducible differences that separate these traditions from one another and from the philosophical context in which Marion’s thought is embedded. The article also makes certain analytical extensions beyond what Marion himself explicitly argues, using his categories to illuminate structural patterns that Marion does not himself apply to these specific contexts; such extensions are offered as structural illuminations rather than representations of Marion’s own reading. It should also be noted that the traditions examined here are not treated as exhaustive representatives of their respective fields, nor does the article claim to offer comprehensive philological or historical analyses of each. They are selected precisely because they isolate, with clarity, the formal mechanisms this article seeks to examine: the structural risk of conceptual idolatry and the diverse ways in which different traditions respond to it. Consequently, this article should be understood as a comparative phenomenological reading that tests the interpretive boundaries of Marion’s framework against material it was not originally designed to address. Before examining these cross-traditional responses, however, it is necessary to trace the philosophical and theological conditions that Marion’s framework presupposes and retrospectively illuminates as the ground of the conceptual idol, conditions that his framework transforms even as it depends upon them.

3. The Philosophical Roots of the Problem of Naming

Apophatic theology could not have formulated its central paradox, that to speak of the unspeakable is itself a form of speech, without the philosophical apparatus furnished by Ancient Greek thought. The conceptual tools through which Christian mystical tradition articulated its most radical insights were already in tension with themselves in Parmenides, Plato, and Plotinus: a tension that apophatic theology would inherit, deepen, and partially transform. Read through Marion’s idol/icon framework, this inherited tension reveals its structural logic: the gradual emergence of conditions under which every naming of the divine risks becoming a conceptual idol, and the first tentative movements toward what Marion names the iconic threshold.

3.1. Language and Being: The Structural Production of the Idol

The conceptual idol is a structural product of language, having its deepest root in the structural bond between language and being. This bond first becomes apparent in Parmenides, who, it must be noted, does not speak of a personal God but of Being itself; yet his ontology establishes the foundational linguistic laws that apophatic theology would later inherit. Fragment B3 establishes a radical bond between thought and the determined order of being: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι (Diels and Kranz 1960, DK28 B3). While this fragment has a notoriously contested interpretive history ranging from a strict identity [thinking and being are the same] to a co-belonging [for the same thing is for conceiving as is for being] (Coxon 2009, p. 58), any of these readings implies that to think is inevitably to bring whatever is thought within the horizon of determination. Fragment B8 makes this structural limitation explicit: ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἔστι νόημα/οὐ γὰρ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν,/εὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν (Diels and Kranz 1960, DK28 B8) [the same thing is for conceiving as is cause of the thought conceived;/for not without Being, when predications have been asserted of it,/will you find the cause so as to conceive of it] (Coxon 2009, p. 74). If the divine must be thought within the metaphysical tradition, it is inevitably drawn into this ground and reduced to its measures. Heidegger illuminates this structural necessity with precision: in Plato and Aristotle, the word becomes logos in the sense of assertion (Bei Platon und Aristoteles, die den Beginn der Metaphysik sagen, wird das Wort zum λόγος im Sinne der Aussage), initiating a history in which logos becomes the constitutive measure of what can appear and be said (Heidegger 1992, GA 54, p. 113). When the word is constituted as assertion, every statement places its object under the structure of predication: to say is to determine, and to determine is to measure. Read through Marion’s framework, logos as assertion is precisely the structure that produces the conceptual idol: imprisoned within the presence-bestowing limits of predication, any discursive statement about the transcendent constructs an invisible mirror wherein the mind reflects its own cognitive measures onto the divine (Marion 2012, God Without Being, pp. 73–75).

Plato anatomizes this structural entanglement of language and Being across several dialogues. In the Cratylus, Socrates demonstrates that names are imperfect, conventional, or unstable instruments that can at best point toward the forms but never grasp them directly, meaning that the highest realities must ultimately be approached without linguistic mediation (Plato 1997, para. Cratylus, 439a–d). In the Sophist, Plato demonstrates that the very possibility of speech structurally depends on the weaving together of forms [συμπλοκή εἰδῶν]. By redefining that which is not, not as the contrary of being but as the nature of the different, the dialogue reveals that all kinds blend with and pervade one another. Because that which is necessarily shares in the different, any named entity is implicated in relations of otherness, establishing that meaningful discourse relies entirely on the interplay between what a thing is and what it is not (Plato 1997, para. Sophist, 257a–259e). Consequently, language cannot operate outside the horizon of presence: as the first hypothesis of the Parmenides concludes, the one [τὸ ἕν] admits neither name nor account [οὐδ᾽ ἄρα ὄνομα ἔστιν αὐτῷ οὐδὲ λόγος] (Plato 1997, para. Parmenides, 142a); naming becomes possible only at lower ontological levels, where unity dissolves into multiplicity (Proclus 2014, On Plato’s Cratylus, para. 32, 19–25; Stamatellos 2007, p. 66). This linguistic limitation reaches its theological apex when Plato confronts the supreme principle, where a strict distinction between the traditional gods and the absolute source must be maintained. Socrates in the Philebus expresses a fear when it comes to naming gods. This fear is structurally distinct from the ontological barrier encountered regarding the supreme principle, such as the Demiurge of the Timaeus, whom it is impossible to declare unto all men (Plato 1997, para. Timaeus, 28c), or the Idea of the Good in the Republic. By positioning the Good not as being but as beyond being [ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας], “superior to it in rank and power [πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει]” (Plato 1997, para. Republic, 509b), Plato adopts a meontological approach: the ultimate source cannot be arrested within the limited structure of the forms it produces (Rogozinski 2024, p. 416). Read through Marion’s framework, the Idea of the Good functions as the philosophical precursor to the saturated phenomenon: it gives itself with a surplus of intuition [surcroît d’intuition] that fractures the encompassing capacity of the mind. It also marks the point at which the structural conditions for conceptual idolatry become fully visible. What Plato’s beyond being and essence already implies, though it cannot yet fully articulate, is a structural consequence: when what gives itself exceeds all conceptual containment, language can only respond by withdrawing what it asserts.

That language must retract rather than assert before inexhaustible givenness finds its most radical philosophical articulation in Plotinus. The absolute simplicity of the One [to Hen] admits no determination by any relation or predication, for it precedes the very duality that predication requires (Perl 2007, pp. 6–8). As Being emanates from the One and unfolds into multiplicity, language can function only within this realm of multiplicity: to name the One is to draw it back into the structural duality it fundamentally precedes. Even the name One is not a definition but marks a structural admission of failure: “we say what it is not; what it is, we do not say” [λέγομεν ὅ μὴ ἔστιν· ὅ δέ ἐστιν, οὐ λέγομεν] (Plotinus 1984, Enn. V.3.14; Greek text: (Henry and Schwyzer 1959, Tomus II)). The One is not merely beyond description but beyond the very structure of intentionality that description presupposes. Read through the concept of the saturated phenomenon One gives itself with a surplus of intuition so great that every concept brought to receive it, is shattered (Gschwandtner 2014, p. 21; Marion 2002a, Being Given, pp. 199–212). The apophatic withdrawal, understood as Plotinus’ insistence that language must retract every statement it makes about the One, is therefore not a failure of knowledge but a structural necessity produced by this very excess. Read through Marion’s framework, this is an early philosophical encounter with what theology would later call divine saturation: a givenness so inexhaustible that no concept can serve as its adequate vessel.

The philosophical conditions that the Christian apophatic tradition would inherit are now fully in place: not merely the structural tendency of language to produce idols, but the structural necessity of their dissolution before what exceeds all conceptual measure. But the philosophical conditions did not pass into the Christian tradition untransformed. What the Christian mystical tradition brought to this inheritance was a theological motivation that Marion locates not primarily in the Neoplatonic lineage but in the Biblical critique of idolatry itself (Marion et al. 2020, From Idolatry to Revelation). Within this framework, as Horner notes in interpreting Marion, no human construction, conceptual or material, can attempt to contain the divine without functioning as an idol that betrays its true measure (Horner 2007, p. 62). Marion does not render the Neoplatonic inheritance absent; Pseudo-Dionysius draws so deeply on Proclus and Plotinus that his apophatic gesture is unintelligible without them (Perl 2007, pp. 5–10). But the theological stakes are reoriented as the idol is not merely a philosophical error but a religious transgression, and its dismantling is not merely an intellectual exercise but an act of fidelity to a divine that exceeds all human measure.

3.2. Approaching the Icon: From Negation to Praise

When the structural aporia inherited from Greek philosophy meets the Christian theological conviction that no human construction can contain the divine, it transforms into an explicit theological condition: every name used for God must be both affirmed and retracted, for every name situates the divine within a horizon of meaning that inexhaustibly exceeds it. This double necessity finds a systematic articulation in Pseudo-Dionysius. In the opening movement of the De Divinis Nominibus, he establishes the radical limit of theological speech: concerning the super-essential and hidden divinity, one must not dare to say or even conceive anything beyond what has been divinely revealed, for the divine itself remains inaccessible to all beings [Περὶ ταύτης οὖν, ὡς εἴρηται, τῆς ὑπερουσίου καὶ κρυφίας θεότητος οὐ τολμητέον εἰπεῖν οὔτε μὴν ἐννοῆσαί τι παρὰ τὰ θειωδῶς ἡμῖν ἐκ τῶν ἱερῶν λογίων ἐκπεφασμένα] Read through Marion’s framework, this warning is a radical boundary against the ontological imprisonment produced by logos-as-assertion: every predication of the divine, “God is good,” “God is powerful,” freezes what inexhaustibly exceeds all measure within a humanly constructed category. The naming of God as “darkness” [γνόφος] should therefore be understood not as an absence but as a theological expression of saturation: not a void but an excess so luminous that it blinds, a “ray of darkness” in which what is most hidden shines most radiantly [ἐν τῷ σκοτεινοτάτῳ ὑπερλάμποντα], so that the mind is bedazzled rather than illuminated (Pseudo-Dionysius 2012, I.1, PTS 36, p. 142). Michael Sells’ concept of “unsaying” captures this logic with precision: apophatic discourse is not merely a form of theology that negates certain propositions but a specific mode of speech in which language is forced to renounce its own constitutive claim to determine what it names (Sells 1994, p. 16). Vladimir Lossky argues that negative theology in this sense is not a second path opposed to positive theology but a more foundational movement that makes visible language’s limits and its inadequacy before transcendence (Lossky 1957, p. 25).

The same structural necessity takes a different form in Aquinas, where the paradox encounters a boundary that does not resolve it but renders it more precisely manageable. The conceptual necessity arising from the thought of God meets, within Scholastic logic, the recognition of a structural inadequacy: “Now we cannot know what God is, but only what he is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which he does” (Aquinas 1964, Article ia. 3,1). The mind preserves God’s alterity to the extent that it removes God from its own conceptual molds, yet this removal itself operates within the inherited philosophical tradition; Aquinas speaks through Dionysius, as Dionysius does through Proclus and Plotinus. The theory of analogy emerges at this point as a means of managing the inherited paradox: language speaks of God neither univocally nor equivocally but establishes only an analogical bond, maintaining the possibility of intending toward the divine without reducing it to the measures of the mind (Aquinas 2006, Article ia. 13,5). Analogical language thus occupies the threshold between the idol and the icon: it acknowledges the saturation of the divine concept while maintaining the necessity of speech, curtailing the authority of predication without abandoning language entirely.

What these two moments share is a predominantly idol-dissolving orientation: both retract, limit, or qualify what language asserts about the divine. Clearing the ground is not yet the iconic opening. What Dionysius and Aquinas approach through negation and analogy, however, the tradition begins to enact through a different register: praise.

What Marion’s reading of Dionysius reveals is a dimension that apophatic negation alone does not capture: in the De Divinis Nominibus, the divine names are not merely dismantled but hymned, addressed in a mode that neither claims to define nor refuses to speak, but orients language toward what exceeds it without pretending to contain it. Marion identifies this discourse of praise as the point at which apophatic theology begins to move beyond idol-dissolution toward the iconic threshold: language no longer asserts or negates but offers itself as a gesture of address, preserving the divine’s alterity precisely by relinquishing its claim to determination (Carlson 2001). The discourse of praise does not produce a concept of God; it enacts an orientation toward what no concept can arrest.

The hymnic register is already audible in the first chapter of the De Divinis Nominibus, where the super-named Goodness [ἡ ὑπερώνυμος ἀγαθότης] is “hymned and named from all beings” [ἐκ τῶν ὄντων ἁπάντων … ὑμνεῖται καὶ ὀνομάζεται] as the “all in all” (Pseudo-Dionysius 2013, I.7 PTS 33, p. 120). Its systematic resolution, however, belongs to the concluding chapter, “Concerning the Perfect and the One,” which the prologue’s prohibition only opens. There the two movements are held in a single act. On the one hand the Godhead is radically nameless—“there is no name of it nor word, but it is set apart in the inaccessible” [οὐδὲ ὄνομα αὐτῆς ἔστιν οὐδὲ λόγος, ἀλλ’ ἐν ἀβάτοις ἐξῄρηται]—hymned as monad and triad yet neither, as known by us. On the other, this namelessness issues not in silence but in praise: “in order that we may truly hymn” [ἵνα … ἀληθῶς ὑμνήσωμεν] the super-united and divinely fecund, “we name the super-named” [τὴν ὑπερώνυμον ὀνομάζομεν] with the very names it exceeds. Dionysius then makes the decisive specification: we do not apply even the name of Goodness to God “as though it fitted,” but “out of a longing to conceive and to say something of that ineffable nature, we first consecrate to it the most revered of names” [πόθῳ τοῦ νοεῖν τι καὶ λέγειν περὶ τῆς ἀρρήτου φύσεως ἐκείνης τὸ τῶν ὀνομάτων σεπτότατον αὐτῇ πρώτως ἀφιεροῦμεν] (Pseudo-Dionysius 2013, XIII.3 PTS 33, p. 229). The divine name is here neither predicate nor definition but consecration—an offering made of desire [πόθος], not a measure taken of an object. This is precisely the structure Marion names the icon: language that does not arrest its object but turns toward it, the name surrendered as praise rather than retained as comprehension. What the opening of the treatise prohibits, its conclusion performs: naming becomes a hymn that gives the name away.

The movement is pushed to its most radical limit when the paradox no longer arrives from outside thought but unfolds from within the very concept of God that the mind constructs. Every conceptual God produced by the mind is, as Eckhart recognizes, the greatest obstacle to the true God; the idol must be shattered not only externally but from within thought itself. His famous prayer in the sermon Beati pauperes spiritu renders the structural consequence unavoidable: “Therefore I pray to God to make me free of God” [Her umbe sô bite ich got, daz er mich ledic mache gotes] (Eckhart 1971, Pr. 52 DW II, 502,5f.; Eckhart 2009, p. 424). Marion’s critique of the conceptual idol finds its most radical theological equivalent in the sermon Renovamini spiritu mentis vestrae: “God is nameless, for no one can say anything or understand anything about Him” [Got ist namloz, wan von ime kan niemant nit gesprechen noch verstan] (Eckhart 1976, Pr. 83 DW III, 441,1f.; Eckhart 2009, p. 463; Kearney 2001, pp. 72–73). Naming necessarily renders God an object; yet even to dismantle this object, one must resort to language, and so the paradox becomes a total structural aporia. As Johannes Tauler articulates in his Sermons, what God does in those depths of the soul He has touched directly no one can say, and even one who has experienced it must remain silent; if you choose to speak, God must remain silent (Tauler 1985, p. 38). Silence here is not ignorance but the bedazzlement of saturation.

This dissolution does not leave the subject unchanged. Denys Turner’s concept of “apophatic anthropology” completes the structure: it is not only God who becomes unspeakable before the limit of predication but the very subject who encounters that limit. The ground of the subject who loses both language and concepts before the divine becomes equally nameless and inexpressible (Turner 1995, pp. 140–41). The subject is no longer an observer encompassing an object but a witness being transformed by the counter-gaze of what gives itself. This is the closest the Christian apophatic tradition comes, in its discursive and theological register, to what Marion names the icon: a mode of reception in which the gaze no longer constitutes its object but is itself reconstituted by what exceeds it.

Yet this proximity is not arrival. The discourse of praise names the iconic movement; Eckhart’s radical self-dissolution approaches its threshold. But the enactment of the iconic movement, its realization in embodied, temporal, and performative practice, remains to be examined. It is precisely this question, how the movement from conceptual idol to iconic threshold is not only named and approached but enacted, that the following section addresses through a comparative analysis of three traditions whose responses to the naming crisis take shape not only in theological argument but in the lived practice of sacred language.

4. The Structural Aporia of Divine Naming: Three Responses

Traditions that confront the question of divine naming repeatedly encounter a common difficulty: language that begins as an attempt to speak of the divine risks becoming a form of conceptual possession, arresting what it names within the limits of what the naming subject can comprehend. How different traditions respond to this difficulty is the subject of the following sections. Viewed through Marion’s idol/icon distinction, three analytically distinct yet historically overlapping modalities become legible across these traditions: philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation. These correspond, respectively, to the level of the proposition, the ontology of the sign, and the level of embodied, temporal practice). Rather than successive stages in a universal development, these are different ways of engaging a structural tension each tradition negotiates in its own doctrinal and ritual terms, and they may appear separately, coexist within a single tradition, or reinforce one another. Throughout, Marion’s idol/icon distinction serves as a limited comparative vocabulary, not as a claim that these traditions anticipate or depend upon his phenomenology, but as a heuristic framework for identifying a recurrent formal pattern: the tension between language that arrests the divine within a conceptual measure and language that opens toward what exceeds all measure.

4.1. Philosophical Negation: Dissolving the Idol

The conceptual idol that Marion’s framework identifies, the arrest of the divine within the limits of what the naming subject can grasp and measure, has its structural root in a specific assumption about how language operates. This phenomenological diagnosis converges, from a different theoretical direction, with what Richard H. Jones identifies as the ‘mirror theory of language’: the implicit assumption that grammatical status dictates the ontic status of referents and that naming captures what it names (Jones 2016, pp. 208–10). Language that should open toward the transcendent instead arrests it within a humanly constructed mirror. A comparative analysis of mystical traditions reveals that resistance to this mirroring dynamic is not the exclusive insight of Christian phenomenology. Similar tensions emerge in traditions whose doctrinal settings differ sharply.

The Upanishadic tradition arrives at the same structural aporia directly. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad describes the encounter with Brahman (bráhman, the accent falling on the first syllable) as the point at which both words and the mind turn back, unable to reach it: “Before they reach it, words turn back, /together with the mind; /One who knows that bliss of brahman, /he is never afraid” (Matilal 1992, p. 143; Olivelle 2008, Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.4, the verse recurring at 2.9)2. This is not merely a claim about the limits of human vocabulary but a precise diagnosis: language operates through the subject–object duality inherent in all predication, and this duality is precisely what the encounter with Brahman dissolves. Because the mechanics of language inherently depend on establishing similarities, differences, and relations, words are structurally incapable of capturing an absolute that exists as an indescribable, self-luminous unity of pure consciousness (Scharfstein 1993, p. 79). The Kena Upaniṣad presses the point further, locating Brahman not as an object that speech might reach but as the very condition that makes speech possible: “Which one cannot express by speech, /by which speech itself is expressed—/Learn that that alone is brahman, /and not what they here venerate” (Olivelle 2008, Kena Upaniṣad 1.5, p. 227).3 As Jones observes, the Maitrī Upaniṣad articulates the same aporia from the other direction, describing a mode of knowledge that is undivided, without action, cause, or effect, and therefore without speech, incomparable, and indescribable (Jones 2016, p. 206, on Maitrī Upaniṣad 6.7). The dissolution of subject–object structure does not merely render language inadequate; it reveals language’s constitutive limitation as a mirroring apparatus. Any attempt to predicate properties of the Absolute necessarily re-establishes the duality that the encounter dissolves and, in doing so, produces a conceptual idol.

The most widespread response across traditions is philosophical negation: the systematic dismantling of positive characterizations of the ultimate through denial. Rather than constituting a homogeneous strategy, however, negation takes structurally distinct forms across the traditions, each marking a different kind of rupture with the predicative logic that produces the conceptual idol. The first and most broadly distributed form involves stripping positive predicates away one by one. Its clearest formulation in the East Asian context appears in the Dao de Jing: “The Dao that can be spoken [dào kě dào] is not the constant Dao; the name that can be named [míng kě míng] is not the constant name” (ch. 1). Names arise only when objects enter opposition; “beauty” and “ugliness” constitute each other through contrast (ch. 2). The Way is prior to all such oppositions and is therefore prior to all names; it is nameless [wúmíng], not as a privation but as an excess of simplicity that no name can capture without falsifying (ch. 32, 37). To name the Dao is to arrest it within the very logic of differentiation it transcends4.

Like the Dao de Jing, the Advaita Vedanta tradition reaches a structurally analogous diagnosis through a different metaphysical path. For Śaṅkara, in his Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, terms such as “Brahman” and “self” (ātman) do not function as direct designations of an object but as conceptual superimpositions (adhyāsa) projected onto the real (satya) by a cognitive framework conditioned by root-ignorance (avidyā). Brahman is precisely what predication cannot reach: “the senses have, according to their nature, only external things for their objects, not Brahman” (Śaṅkara 1890, I.1.2, trans. Thibaut, SBE 34, p. 19; Jones 2016, pp. 203, 225). Even apparently neutral characterizations, Brahman as reality, consciousness, and bliss, function not as positive descriptions but as negations of their opposites: “reality” negates unreality, “knowledge” negates materiality, and “infinity” negates limitation (Olivelle 2008, Taittirīya-upaniṣad 2.1.1; Jones 2016, p. 225). The process is one of negation, culminating in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad formula neti neti, “not this, not that” (Olivelle 2008, Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6, 3.9.26, 4.2.4), which strips away in serial fashion every predicate the mind might attach to the Absolute. As Bimal Krishna Matilal states, this method functions not as a denial of Brahman’s reality but as a methodological warning: any description, once affirmed, must be negated to prevent the mind from mistaking the linguistic sign for its referent (Matilal 1992, p. 153).

Negation proceeds by systematically attributing properties to the ultimate and then withdrawing each attribution as inadequate, operating within the predicative structure it critiques while using that structure to reveal its own limits. The same logic surfaces in the Jewish and Islamic philosophical traditions: in Maimonides’ negative theology, every positive attribute predicated of God is understood as a negation of its opposite, so that no predicate, however abstract, can capture a divine essence radically incomparable to created things (Maimonides 1956, I. LVIII–LXII).5 The Islamic doctrine of tanzīh proceeds by the same logic of systematic retraction, a movement concentrated in liturgical form in the shahāda, where the negation lā ilāha clears every false predication before illā Allāh arrives not as a positive definition but as what survives the clearing (Yurdagür n.d., p. 472).6

Where the first form of negation operates within the predicative structure by stripping away its content, a second and more radical form refuses the predicative structure itself. Madhyamaka Buddhism, in Nāgārjuna’s formulation, represents this strategy. The fourfold negation refuses not only affirmation and negation but their combination and their mutual exclusion: the ultimate reality is neither such as it is, nor not such as it is, nor both, nor neither (Nāgārjuna and Kalupahana 1986, ch. 18:8). Nāgārjuna himself acknowledges the logical consequence: if all metaphysical theses are empty, then the thesis that all theses are empty is itself unsayable; it can be shown, not stated (Matilal 1992, p. 155). The ultimate negation refuses to play the language game at all, not because the transcendent is absent, but because the language game’s structural presuppositions, the subject-predicate relation, the principle of non-contradiction, and the assumption that naming designates an essence, are all incapable of reaching what they purport to designate.

Philosophical negation operates not only through the serial withdrawal of predicates or the refusal of predicative structure, but through a third form: the deliberate intensification of the predicative crisis to the point of cognitive shock. The Zen tradition develops this strategy through the koan, a non-discursive pedagogical device, such as Ummon’s response “Kanshiketsu! (a dried shit stick)” when asked “What is Buddha?” (Yamada 2015, 21(102)), which is specifically designed to block the road of thinking and induce an immediate, non-conceptual realization. As Bernard Faure discusses, such sudden utterances work to subvert the very syntax in which the inquiring subject remains trapped. Rather than offering a discursive answer, the koan unsettles the dominant categories of cognition through an abrupt, almost comic incongruity, dismantling the conceptual structures the mind builds to grasp reality (Faure 1991, pp. 44–47). Where neti neti denies predicates within a logical framework, the koan ruptures the framework itself, exposing the impossibility of capturing the transcendent in any predicative form. The Jain tradition formalizes a parallel insight through the concept of avaktavya, the “ineffable,” a specific logical status wherein an entity cannot be predicated as simply “existent” or “non-existent” due to the simultaneous affirmation and denial of conflicting attributes. Jaina ontology posits that a “real” possesses both permanence and impermanence as integral aspects of its essence (Umāsvāti et al. 1994, 5.29–31).7 These traditions thus converge on a single realization: the ultimate is not merely beyond positive description but beyond the logical structure that makes predication possible in the first place. The conceptual idol is not dismantled by finding more precise words but by demonstrating that predication itself, in any form, is structurally incapable of reaching its purported referent.

Evaluated through Marion’s idol/icon distinction, these different forms of negation enact the dismantling of what Marion calls the conceptual idol: the arrest of the divine within the limits of a humanly constructed category. In refusing the fixation of the gaze that would freeze the transcendent into a manageable object, they are structurally analogous to the apophatic movement in Christian theology from Pseudo-Dionysius onward. Yet here a critical distinction asserts itself. Philosophical negation can dissolve the idol, but dissolution alone does not open toward the icon. Marion’s tripartite structure makes this clear: the idol is the first moment, but the icon is not simply the absence of idolatry. The icon is a counter-gaze, an active reception of givenness that transforms the very subject who receives it. Negation, however thoroughgoing, remains within the orbit of the conceptual: it operates by denying predicates, refusing predicative structures, or disrupting predicative frameworks, but in each case the operation is constituted by its relation to what it negates. The mirroring logic is rejected, but the mirror itself, the framework of subject facing object, remains in place. Nāgārjuna may refuse the language game; but refusal is not yet the iconic opening that Marion describes as la donation, the pure givenness that no gaze, metaphysical or theological, can arrest. This is not a failure unique to these traditions; it is an inherent limit of any purely discursive response to the naming crisis. The question that emerges at this threshold is whether the dissolution of the idol must terminate in silence, or whether it can open toward a positive iconic movement. Name and letter mysticism responds to this question not by abandoning the apophatic withdrawal but by carrying it further: the recognition that no concept can capture the divine is preserved, while the word itself is reconceived as a threshold of givenness rather than discarded.

4.2. Name and Letter Mysticism: From Sign to Iconic Threshold

The forms of philosophical negation examined thus far share a governing movement: confronted with a divine that overflows every concept, they subtract, stripping predicates, refusing predicative structure, or rupturing its framework through paradox and shock. What they do not produce is an account of how language might respond positively to this overflow: not by withdrawing from the word but by reconceiving what the word is and does. If the divine exceeds any single name, then no name can serve as a definition. But a name might still serve as a threshold, opening toward what exceeds it without claiming to contain it. This is the logic shared by the traditions examined here: the sign is reconceived not as an instrument of cognitive arrest but as a surface through which what exceeds all measure can disclose one of its faces. Where philosophical negation responds to divine inexhaustibility by subtraction, name and letter mysticism responds by transformation: the name is not removed but reconfigured, converted from a mirror that reflects the mind’s cognitive limits back onto the divine into a conduit through which what exceeds all comprehension can arrive.

Within the Jewish tradition, the problem of naming the divine does not remain at the level of philosophical reflection but becomes a matter of explicit linguistic discipline and religious law. The commandment against misusing the name of God (Exodus 20:7; JPS 2023) and the prohibition of false swearing by the divine name (Leviticus 19:12; JPS 2023) establish the scriptural ground for this discipline. The rabbinic tradition extends this into a more radical position: the Tetragrammaton was effectively withdrawn from ordinary discourse altogether. As the Babylonian Talmud records, the divine name was transmitted by the sages to their students only once every seven years (b. Kiddushin 71a; Steinsaltz n.d.), while its full pronunciation was reserved exclusively for the High Priest, once a year, during the Yom Kippur ritual in the Holy of Holies (m. Yoma 6:2; b. Yoma 39b; Steinsaltz n.d.). A further structural distinction was institutionalized between the written and spoken name: the Tetragrammaton is written as YHWH (yod-heh-waw-heh) but read aloud as Adonai. The Talmud marks this distinction by noting that in this world the Name “is written with yod and heh yet read as alef-dalet [Adonai],” whereas in the world to come it will be read as it is written (b. Pesahim 50a; Steinsaltz n.d.). This legal discipline is not grounded in a claim that the Name fails to refer; it is grounded in the opposite recognition: the Name carries more than ordinary discourse can sustain. The prohibition is the institutional acknowledgment of saturation: the Name is held apart not because it is empty but because it is inexhaustibly full.

The Talmudic discipline preserves the Name by withholding it; the Kabbalistic tradition preserves it by transforming it. The same recognition of saturation now deepens into a systematic theology of the letter. Here language is no longer a transparent instrument of reference but a constitutive element of divine reality: the Sefirot themselves are described as vessels (kelim) that receive the divine influx and transmit it to the lower worlds without containing or exhausting it (Idel 1988a, pp. 141–42). This can be read through Marion’s notion of saturation: what gives itself through these vessels exceeds any concept the recipient brings to receive it. Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah carries this logic. His practice centers on the pronunciation of divine names and the rhythmic combination of letters in elaborate permutations. During rhythmic recitation, the letters are systematically stripped of their conventional syntactic and semantic functions. This atomization of the divine Name into its constituent acoustic elements is, as Idel identifies, the most distinctive characteristic of Abulafia’s method (Idel 1988b, p. 19). What this accomplishes is a targeted semantic exhaustion: not the disappearance of sound or ritual force but the progressive weakening of the word’s ordinary referential function. The letters cease to arrest the gaze at the surface of a humanly constructed definition; freed from the burden of signification, they become open to what cannot be signified. This is the movement from idol to icon enacted at the level of pure sound: what the letter opens toward saturates the acoustic event without being contained by it.

What happens when a finite form is asked to bear an infinite disclosure? The Quranic narrative of Moses at the mountain stages exactly this question. When Moses asks to see God directly, the divine response redirects his gaze to the mountain: if it holds its place when the divine self-disclosure (tajallī) strikes, Moses will see. The mountain does not hold. It crumbles to dust, and Moses falls unconscious (Qur’an 7:143). Read through a Marionian lens, the mountain can be understood as the finite form that attempts to hold and contain what overflows all finite containment. Its shattering is not a failure of the divine to appear but the necessary consequence of any form’s attempt to receive an inexhaustible givenness directly. What survives the mountain’s collapse is not silence but voice: God continues to speak to Moses after the mountain falls. The divine names become, in this reading, the form through which what cannot be directly beheld can nonetheless arrive: not containers that shatter under the weight of inexhaustible givenness, but thresholds through which it passes without being arrested. The Islamic mystical tradition does not lack an ontological appreciation of the letter; on the contrary, it possesses its own robust science of letters (‘ilm al-ḥurūf). As Flaquer notes in the context of Ibn Arabi’s thought, this science functions as a “true grammar of creation,” where the world itself is conceived as a two-faced parchment: one side facing the divine Names and the upper world, the other facing the material realm (Flaquer 2023). In this framework, just as in Kabbalah, the letter is not an arbitrary conventional sign but the very locus where the divine command crosses into manifestation.

In shifting the focus from the ontology of the individual letter to the theology of divine names (al-asmā’ al-ḥusnā), however, the Islamic mystical tradition arrives, read through a Marionian sense, at its iconic threshold through a structurally distinct path. While Kabbalistic letter mysticism anchors the gaze in the saturated density of the letter itself, the Islamic mystical theology of the divine names proceeds from the phenomenological recognition of structural insufficiency. No single name can encompass the divine essence. Ibn Arabi’s analysis makes this logic explicit: each of the ninety-nine names discloses a particular dimension of divine manifestation without becoming coextensive with the divine reality itself (Katz 1992, pp. 13–14; Salih 2010, pp. 82–83). As William C. Chittick observes, every divine name carries within it the trace of its own inadequacy, pointing toward what it names while acknowledging that what is named exceeds the naming (Chittick 1989, pp. 33–34). The plurality of the divine names is therefore not a problem of ontological multiplication but the linguistic trace of an inexhaustibility that no single predicate can arrest. The ninety-nine names do not converge on a complete, closed description of the divine; they radiate from an inexhaustible center that overflows each of them. This is why the theology of al-asmā’ al-ḥusnā is not reducible to the purely apophatic strategy: where tanzīh responds to divine inexhaustibility by retracting positive determinations, the theology of divine names responds by multiplying iconic thresholds, each of which opens onto what exceeds it.

Within the framework of givenness that Marion’s analysis establishes, both the Kabbalistic letter and the Islamic mystical theology of the divine names enact the movement from idol to icon that philosophical negation identified but could not complete. Philosophical negation dissolved the idol by refusing predication; what it could not produce was the icon’s positive counter-gaze. What the traditions examined here share is a reconception of the name’s function: the letter or name no longer arrests the gaze upon a definition; it becomes the point at which what exceeds it shows one of its faces: not what the practitioner looks at, but what looks back through the act of attention, directing the gaze beyond what any concept can contain. As Idel’s analysis suggests, the Kabbalistic letter achieves this by becoming constitutively tied to what it opens toward; as Chittick’s reading of Ibn Arabi suggests, the Islamic mystical theology of the divine names achieves it by carrying its own inadequacy as the very condition of its openness. In both cases, the word does not define the divine but opens toward it.

4.3. Repetitive Invocation: Enacting the Iconic Threshold

Where philosophical negation addresses the conceptual idol by refusing predication and name mysticism by transforming the ontological status of the sign, both operate at the level of structure: what language is and what it does. The reorientation of the word as a threshold of givenness rather than a measure of comprehension raises, at this point, a question that extends beyond the theoretical register: what enacts this threshold in practice? Repetition is not the only, or universally central, performative response to the naming crisis; the performative dimension of mystical life could be pursued across many other registers. Rather, the present analysis isolates repetitive invocation as one especially visible and cross-traditionally recurrent mechanism through which sacred language suspends its ordinary referential function; specifically, practices in which a name, sacred word, or name-like syllable is repeated until its ordinary referential function is suspended, and the relation between practitioner, sign, and referent is thereby transformed. Within the specific context of the naming crisis examined here, the Marionian framework makes this mechanism legible as a shared formal pattern across three traditions whose doctrinal connections to one another are not direct and whose historical paths remain largely independent: Sufi dhikr, Tantric mantra practice, and the Hesychast Jesus Prayer. Each converges on the sustained, rhythmic repetition of a sacred word until its ordinary semantic function is gradually exhausted. This independent convergence is itself the finding that the present section seeks to understand, not as a consequence derived from the strategies examined above, but as a comparative pattern that those strategies allow us to read. In each case, repetition performs what the preceding approaches pointed toward but could not enact: the movement from idol to icon at the level of embodied, temporal practice.

That mystical language can serve a transformative rather than descriptive function has been observed across many traditions. What demands closer attention is the precise mechanism through which repetition accomplishes this transformation. In everyday discourse, repetition reinforces meaning: the reiterated word becomes more firmly attached to its referent, its conceptual content solidified through use. In invocatory practice, however, the dynamic is structurally reversed. As Robert A. Yelle demonstrates in his analysis of ritual language, the repetitive use of sacred formulas operates as a deliberate erosion of ordinary signification: the word’s referential function is not reinforced but progressively suspended through sustained rhythmic recitation (Yelle 2003, p. 100). Through semantic exhaustion, the name is gradually emptied of its capacity to arrest the gaze upon a mental construct and becomes instead a transparent threshold through which attention passes, orienting the practitioner toward what cannot be named. Repetition, in this sense, is not the stabilization of meaning but its dissolution, not the reinforcement of the idol but its wearing-through. In Islamic Sufi practice, this mechanism is traceable with clarity. Al-Ghazālī’s account of dhikr maps the progression from vocal recitation to its dissolution: the practitioner recites ceaselessly until the movement of the tongue ceases and it seems as if the word flows over it of itself, and finally until every trace of the word is erased from the tongue and the heart alone perseveres in the devotional exercise (Hisamatsu 2024, p. 4). The practitioner does not analyze the theological content of the divine name; the name Allāh or Hū is repeated until its function as a determinate predicate recedes from active cognitive grasp, not necessarily its affective or relational charge, which recitation may intensify rather than diminish. What remains, as Ibn ʿAṭā Allāh describes, is the simple invocation: a pure act of presence no longer mediated by the cognitive grasp of a concept (Salih 2010, p. 83). This is the movement from idol to icon in its most direct form: the word that once served as a mirror of the mind’s constructs becomes a transparent threshold through which what gives itself can arrive.

This dissolution, however, does not terminate with the name alone. At the furthest point of the dhikr process, a dimension emerges that distinguishes it from mere linguistic technique: the dissolution of the practitioner’s own subjectivity. Conceptualized in Sufi thought as fanāʾ, this effacement of the self accompanies and deepens the dissolution of the name. As Applebaum’s phenomenological analysis demonstrates, the dissolution of subject-object duality in dhikr aims at a unitive experience simultaneous with the transformation and effacement of the objectifying self (Applebaum 2025, p. 13). This is the dissolution of the idolizing gaze at its most radical: not only does the conceptual idol dissolve, but the subject whose gaze produced it is itself relinquished. Dhikr at this depth does not merely transform language; it transforms the one who speaks.

A structurally parallel yet doctrinally distinct movement appears in the use of mantras in Hindu and certain Buddhist traditions. Where dhikr is name-centric and relational, grounded in the Abrahamic logic of divine address and response, mantra is sound-centric, oriented toward the constitutive resonance of primordial syllables rather than toward a personal divine interlocutor. As Yelle demonstrates, the most common formal device in Tantric mantra practice is the systematic reduplication and phonetic exhaustion of sacred syllables, bīja sounds such as oṃ, hūṃ, and phaṭ, which carry no prior referential content to begin with and whose power derives precisely from their semantic opacity rather than from any referential content (Yelle 2003, pp. 10–12, 78–80). The repetition of oṃ does not accumulate meaning; it suspends the referential function of language altogether. The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad renders this movement with precision, tracing how the syllable Aum exhausts all states of consciousness, moving through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep until it reaches the fourth state, which is beyond all predication, neither inward nor outward, neither knowing nor unknowing (Olivelle 2008, Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad). Sound, in this account, is not the opposite of silence but its necessary passage: the mantra does not terminate in meaning but opens onto the cessation of the conceptual world. In Marion’s terms, the mantra moves from the logic of the idol, the sound as a cognitive measure of experience, toward the logic of the icon: a threshold through which what gives itself arrives from beyond the practitioner’s intentional horizon.

Within the Christian tradition, Hesychast practice offers what may be the most paradoxical instance of this movement. Its classic theological defense belongs to Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), the Athonite monk and later archbishop of Thessalonica, whose Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (1338–1341) answered philosophical objections to the practice (Palamas 1983). The Jesus Prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” is practiced through unceasing repetition coordinated with the rhythm of the breath, progressively descending from vocal recitation to mental recitation to what the tradition calls the prayer of the heart: a state in which the formula is no longer actively produced but has, in the Hesychast idiom, descended into the heart itself (Hisamatsu 2024, pp. 6–7). The practice is fundamentally imageless: the Name acts not as a cognitive definition but as a pure presence, a threshold rather than a representation (Ware 1986, p. 21). Through synchronized breath and repetition, the practitioner enacts what the tradition describes as hesychia, stillness: the quieting of the objectifying mind and its replacement by a mode of attention no longer directed at a construct but oriented toward what exceeds all constructs.

What distinguishes Hesychasm from both dhikr and mantra is its explicitly incarnational grounding. The name invoked is not a divine attribute or a primordial syllable but the name of a historical person, Jesus Christ. Yet this specificity does not diminish the iconic movement; it deepens it. The personal name, endlessly repeated, ceases to function merely as a referring identifier and becomes an act of address, a turning toward rather than a fixing upon. This is why Hesychasm occupies an exceptional position within the Christian tradition: where the via negativa from Pseudo-Dionysius through Eckhart responds to the naming crisis through philosophical negation, Hesychasm responds through performative invocation, placing it structurally closer to dhikr and mantra than to the theological tradition from which it doctrinally emerges.

The irreducibility of these traditions to one another must be acknowledged here. To equate them entirely would risk committing precisely the form of conceptual idolatry this article has sought to analyze: the reduction of irreducible difference to a single manageable category. Dhikr is name-centric and rooted in Quranic revelation; mantra is sound-centric and tied to Vedic ontology; Hesychasm is breath-and-heart-centric, anchored in Christian incarnational theology. Their epistemological and doctrinal foundations differ at every significant point. What the present analysis identifies is not an identity but a structural parallel: in each case, a different theological path arrives at the same formal operation, the use of sustained repetition to exhaust the semantic function of the sacred word until what remains is not a concept but an orientation. The comparison does not claim doctrinal or ontological identity; its claim is substantive at the structural-functional level. It reveals a shared phenomenological logic without collapsing the irreducible particularity of each tradition. This formal convergence is not a single identical mechanism but an umbrella term for two related routes by which repetition suspends ordinary referential language: in dhikr and the Jesus Prayer, a name’s pre-existing referential function recedes from active cognitive grasp; in mantra, a syllable that begins outside ordinary reference altogether is kept there, repetition foreclosing the accretion of borrowed conceptual content rather than exhausting content that was already present.

Thomas Merton, reflecting on contemplation from within the Christian tradition, articulates a movement that resonates across all three: contemplative knowledge knows by unknowing, and in the very act of speaking takes back what it has said, denying what it has affirmed (Merton 1961, p. 1). This self-negating quality of contemplative knowledge is precisely what dhikr, mantra, and Hesychasm enact performatively rather than discursively: in each tradition, sound is the necessary passage to silence; the word is the path through which wordlessness becomes possible.

Read through Marion’s framework, what these practices share is a concrete enactment of the movement from idol to icon through the specific mechanism of temporal exhaustion. The word is not abandoned, as in the silence of philosophical negation; it is not ontologically reconceived, as in name and letter mysticism. It is worn through. Repeated until its capacity to arrest the divine within a conceptual construct is dissolved, the word ceases to function as a mirror of the mind’s cognitive measures and becomes a threshold of givenness. As Palamas illustrates, through this repetition the practitioner is eventually ravished beyond all objects and all objective thought. The semantic exhaustion reaches a point where the mind does not pray a definite prayer, but “finds itself in ecstasy in the midst of incomprehensible realities” (Palamas 1983, p. 38). The idol is not argued away but used away; and in being used away, the word accomplishes what argument and conception alone cannot: it opens toward what gives itself without conceptual mediation, transforming language from a boundary into an opening, from a definition into a direction.

5. Conclusions

The naming crisis is not only a theoretical problem for philosophical theology. It extends into the semiotics of the sacred sign and, ultimately, into the temporality of embodied practice.

Philosophical negation operates at the level of the proposition, dismantling the predicative structure that produces the conceptual idol. Name and letter mysticism operates at the level of the sign’s ontology, reconceiving the word as a threshold rather than a mirror. Repetitive invocation enacts the iconic threshold in an especially explicit temporal and embodied form, though the other two modalities are neither purely descriptive nor without their own practical enactments. Each responds to a dimension of the naming crisis that the others address less directly. The third dimension, semantic exhaustion, the progressive weakening of the word’s referential function through sustained rhythmic repetition, names a mechanism distinct from the silence of apophatic withdrawal and from the ontological reconfiguration of the sacred sign. The idol, in this case, is not argued away but used away: worn through the sustained application of the very word that was at risk of becoming a conceptual measure. Across traditions, the formal operation of semantic exhaustion does not belong to any single doctrinal inheritance but emerges wherever the sacred word is submitted to a discipline of sustained repetition.

Marion’s idol/icon distinction is generative beyond the Christian theological context in which it was forged. The structural tension it identifies, between language that arrests the divine and language that opens toward it, captures something real about how sacred language functions across traditions that would not recognize themselves in his phenomenological vocabulary. This is not to say that his categories map without remainder onto these traditions; the iconic movements of dhikr, mantra, and Hesychasm are grounded in theological logics, Quranic revelation, Vedic sound ontology, Christian incarnation, that do not mirror Marion’s account of givenness and counter-gaze. His distinction illuminates structural affinities that are difficult to see from within any single tradition’s own resources: it functions heuristically rather than genealogically.

The breadth of the comparative scope entails a corresponding limitation in depth: what is gained in structural visibility is offset by what is necessarily left unexamined in the internal complexity of each tradition. The parallels identified are formal rather than substantial; they isolate mechanisms without claiming to exhaust the traditions that exemplify them. What remains open is a set of questions: whether these formal parallels indicate structural features of religious language as such or contingent convergences between historically independent traditions; and whether Marion’s phenomenological framework might itself be modified, extended, or corrected by sustained engagement with the non-Christian materials examined here.

Speaking of the divine risks producing an idol: this remains structurally unavoidable. But the traditions examined here point beyond this: the word that arrests can also open; the sign that reduces can also be reconfigured as a threshold; the name that defines can be worn through until what remains is not a definition but a direction. Philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation do not escape the structural risk of conceptual idolatry. They demonstrate that this risk is not the last word language can speak about the divine. The idol and the icon are not two different words but the same word: arrested in one case, opened in the other. What the traditions examined here demonstrate is that this opening is possible, that the word need not remain a mirror of the mind’s construction but can become a direction, a threshold, a way through.