May 25, 2010 | To hear an excerpt from the interview with Jean-Luc Marion, click the play button on the audio player at the right of this screen. The audio clip is an excerpt from the following edited interview, and is also available free on iTunes U.

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world’s leading philosophers and theologians. He did doctoral work in philosophy with Jacques Derrida and also learned from such theologians as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Marion teaches at the Sorbonne in his native France and is the Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of a number of books, including “The Erotic Phenomenon” and “The Idol and Distance.”

He was elected as an immortel by the French academy in 2008 -- an honor previously held by his friend, the late Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.

Marion was interviewed by members of the class “Writing as a Christian Practice” at Duke Divinity School along with fellow class guest David Van Biema, former religion writer for Time magazine. He spoke about the potential application of some of his work to Christian leadership. The audio clip is an excerpt from the following edited interview.

Q: There is great suspicion today towards people and institutions of power. What would a Christian account of power be?

Not being a minister or priest, I’m not in a situation to answer your question. I was fortunate enough to be close to people who have exactly shown what Christian leadership should be. I met Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger in 1968 at the Sorbonne. We were close friends until his death. I learned a lot from him about Christian leadership.

Christian leadership implies seeing the situation from the point of view of God. The temptation is always to see the situation as a non-Christian leader could see it, just adding some other concerns directly connected to the issues you are interested in. You see the general landscape the same way as any CEO or any advisor to the president would. The Christianity of your leadership remains in the periphery. If you do that, you are done. Because you will say what anyone could say, and do as anyone would do: take care of the special interest of your church or your corporation.

Lustiger made a difference because he saw the history of modern France in a very different way than any political leader (though he was asked to advise at least two presidents of France). He reached out very boldly. For instance, he used to say that there is no de-Christianization of France. Why? Because France was never completely Christian. Contrary to Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, there was no moment in the history of France where the self-consciousness of the nation overlapped exactly with Catholicism. The relation of the French nation with Catholicism has always been one partly of conflict, partly of misunderstanding, with each trying to use the other.

Leadership is the ability to see the detail of social-political life very concretely. In a very famous text by Pascal in his “Pensées,” we see the doctrine of the three orders. The three orders are three points of view.

From the first point of view you see the world as visible, according to bodies, matter and the visible world. In that order, the leaders are the king, the president, the CEO of a corporation, the banking system and so on.

The second order is the order of the spirit. This is the invisible world of rationality. It includes the sciences, philosophy, art and literature. You can be completely unknown in the first order and be the leader in this second order. For example, Archimedes was a prince in the family of a king in Sicily, but he was really a leader as a mathematician. Mathematicians, like Einstein, are the kings of this second order.

The third order is charity, love or what art understands. In that order the saints, lovers and Christ are kings.

The lower orders are not seen by the upper orders. The president of the United States is not supposed to be a scientist or a saint. He has a job as president of the United States, period. The second order does not see the third, but sees itself and the first order. The first two cannot see the third order, but the third can see what is going on in the first two.

The question of ecology and global warming is a typical case. The second order is asked to judge what the first order has done. We would prefer that the second order be unanimous, which is not exactly the case. But let us take for granted that there is a unanimous position of the second order about global warming. In that case, the second order can be the judge of the first order.

The same is true for the third order. It can be the judge of the two first orders, which appear in a special light to the third order.

Christian leadership should be something like that. The point is not to tell the two orders what they should do or think, but to explain to them what they are doing or thinking, which they are not aware of. The meaning of what they do is different than what they imagine.

Q: Lustiger’s rethinking of the question of the de-Christianization of France doesn’t sound like looking at it “from God’s point of view.” It might have been proposed by a historian or a sociologist.