-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
1/15
Towards a Levinasian understanding of Christian ethics:Emmanuel Levinas and the phenomenology of the Other
George Drazenovich
THE good life has classically been understood as the state of being (dasein)(1) in which one livesjoyfully in the fullness of ones humanity. We do not always experience ourselves as living, in an
existential way, the good life. Still we have some kind of primordial notion of it. The true life,
writes Emmanuel Levinas, is absent. But we are in the world.(2) Our yearning for happiness
Levinas terms metaphysical desire. Metaphysical desire is a positive, personal one; part of
subjective human experience founded on the idea of infinity. (Totality and Infinity) does present
itself as a defense of subjectivity, but it will apprehend the subjectivity not at the level of its purely
egoist protestation against totality, nor in its anguish before death, but as founded on the idea of
infinity.(3) The idea of infinity is neither an abstract intellectual construct nor an impersonal
ideal springing from an apprehension of need. Nor is metaphysical desire a desire to return to a
prior ontological state. Such an understanding of desire would be nostalgia for the same (our own
horizon). The metaphysical desire does not long to return, for it is a desire for a land not of ourbirth, for a land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland and to which we shall
never betake ourselves. The metaphysical desire does not rest upon any prior kinship.(4) Instead
it is a transcendent human desire for meaning rooted in the existential experience of human
relationships that seeks the Other (that Levinas sometimes renders using the Biblical imagery of
Stranger) in the face of the other. To begin with the face as a source from which all meaning
appears, the face in its absolute nudity ... is to affirm that being is enacted in the relation between
men, that Desire rather than need commands acts. Desire, an aspiration that does not proceed
from a lackmetaphysicsis the desire of a person.(5)
The desire is for that which is Other. Maintaining the alterity of the other is an important aspect
of Levinas metaphysical understanding. We deprive the other of its alterity when we distinguish
being from existent. Being, which is without the density of existents, is the light in which existents
become intelligible. To theory as comprehension of beings the general title ontology is
appropriate.(6) Ontology inasmuch as it concerns itself with grasping the universal truth of
things (being) apart from the plurality and density of actual existents prevents us from maintaining
the others alterity. Consequently, ontology creates a self-contained system (the same) that resists
any intrusion that would call forth from us an existential response. Here (ontology) theory enters
upon a course that renounces metaphysical Desire, renounces the marvel of exteriority from
which the Desire lives.(7) Allowing the Other to disrupt the at-homeness(chez-soi) of our own
horizon is ethics. It is not simply a medium by which we abstract from existents the truth of their
being and grasp them in their primordial sublimity separate from their density, but is an existential
response accomplished through ethics. Ethics is the spiritual optics ... The work of justicethe
uprightness of the face to faceis necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be
producedand vision here coincides with this work of justice. Hence metaphysics is enacted
where the social relation is enactedin our relations with men. There can be no knowledge of
God separated from the relationship with men. The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth,
and is indispensable for my relation with God.(8) Levinas is interested in developing a
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
1
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
2/15
phenomenology of the Other, and resting all other structures on the ethical response. The
establishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is, of the relationship of man to man
signification, teaching, and justicea primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all the
other structures rest (and in particular all those which seem to put us primordially in contact with
an impersonal sublimity, aesthetic or ontological), is one of the objectives of the present work.(9)
(referring to Totality and Infinity).
IN this paper I propose that a Levinasian postmodern understanding of ethics is a hermeneutic
that is authentically rooted in the Spirit of Christ and as such is one that Christians can and have
embraced. For example, Amy Hollywood in studying Meister Eckhart and the Beguine mystics,
Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete argues that Eckhart provided an apophatic (un-
saying) ethics in contrast to the action oriented and rule based moralities prevalent among his
contemporaries. (10) Whereas the penitential system then emerging among the mendicant orders
and Aquinas rule- and virtue-based ethic insist that any human action can be evaluated
according to a code or rule, Eckhart apophatically unsays ethical prescriptions, arguing that the
just human being is the one who has detached him or herself from all creaturely things, including,
presumably, humanly determined moral codes.(11) The dogmatism and fundamentalism that has
developed periodically in Christian history is a reactive movement against being open to the
presence of the Other and has resulted in violence, wars and a mistrust of plurality. These
reactions turn the saying of our salvation history into the said of static formulations and
totalizing systems. That such movements occurred within Christianity is ironic, as the New
Testament, unlike the Old, does not attempt to legislate. As Walter Rauschenbusch points out, the
New Testament is rather the expression of a Spirit that entered humanity and fashions our actions
by the free compulsion of moral ideals. (12) In our time we require new wineskins for the new
wine of our age. In the Modern era the Church has been grappling with finding a philosophy that
can serve as an adequate ancilla theoligiae. While it is true that no ones system of philosophy has
ever matched everybodys experience of reality, the need to move past some of the totalizingRational systems of the Enlightenment is being felt with greater urgency. There has been
openness to phenomenology in the Catholic Church due in large measure to Pope John Paul IIs
influence. Still, the Church remains anxious about what they see as the loss of the kind of
Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy that supports natural law theory. Recently theNational Catholic
Reporterreported that if the natural law basis for the teaching is lost, the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith fears, then the ban on birth control, or abortion, or cloning can appear as
simply Catholic rules that could be changed, as opposed to moral truths upon which all people
of good will can agree. This subject of natural law was hugely important in the assembly, a
source said. The eclipse of natural law in some Catholic moral thinking was a constant theme
brought up by the bishops, the source said. It erodes the basis for conversation among peoplewho do not share the faith. The Congregation is not planning a document on this subject,
sources toldNational Catholic Reporter, but instead hopes to encourage a serious dialogue between
philosophers and theologians in Catholic universities and other venues.(13)
The openness of the Church at this moment following the aggriomento of the Second Vatican
Council requires a serious prophetic voice that can read the signs of the time. Such prophecy
needs to be couched in theological and philosophical paradigms rooted in philosophical methods
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
2
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
3/15
that assist us in facilitating the kind of Christian humanism envisioned by philosophers like
Maritain, supported by the Council and reflexive with contemporary experience. In Crossing the
Threshold of Hope Pope John Paul II signals a reception to the currents of post-modern thought by
forwarding Emmanuel Levinas as a philosopher of dialogue suggesting that we find ourselves with
Levinas very close to St. Thomas, but the path passes not so much through being and existence
(classic metaphysics) as through people and their meeting each other through the I and the
Thou.(14)
For Levinas it is precisely in the free ethical response to the other in the world that our selfhood
emerges. The absolutely other (God) does not at all limit our freedom, it calls it to responsibility,
founds it and justifies it. The same is a term that Levinas uses to refer to our intellectual thought
systems that are disrupted and destabilized in the encounter with the Other. The Other, precisely
because it is other and absolutely alterior, stands outside of our own self-same system here
below. This relationship with the other puts into question the spontaneity of ones destiny
allowing for human change, resiliency and organic growth throughout life. This dynamic, the
dynamic of revelation is not a harsh one. The phenomenological method brings us closer to the
things themselves by positing direct experience of the other as prior to comprehension and
language. Levinas writes, The essential contribution to the new ontology can be seen in its
opposition to classical intellectualism. To comprehend the tool is not to look at it but to know how
to handle it. To comprehend our situation in reality is not to define it but to find ourselves in
affective disposition. To comprehend being is to exist. All this indicates, it would seem. a rupture
with the theoretical structure of Western thought. To think is no longer to contemplate but to
commit oneself; to be engulfed by that which one thinks, to be involved. This is the dramatic event
of being-in-the-world.(15)
This being-in-the-world is founded on the notion of subjectivity and the Other. The entire notion
is taking on greater dynamism and yet the articulation remains elusive. Isaiah writes Truly you
are a god who hides yourself (Isaiah 45:15). In the essay Transcendence and Height Levinaswrites. The Other resists my attempt at investiture, not because of the obscurity of the theme
that it offers to my consideration but because of the refusal to enter into a theme, to submit to a
regard, through the eminence of the epiphany.(16)
It is not that the religious theme is obscure per se, it is that the language which articulates it refuses
to be captivated. Simone Weil had an important insight into this notion. She realized that in the
context of Christian religious doctrine a certain plurality of language was important and that the
Church while having a necessary and important function as the keeper of dogma cannot force
language. But she is guilty of an abuse of power when she claims to force love and intelligence to
model their language upon her own. This abuse of power is not of God. It comes from the
natural tendency of every form of collectivism, without exception, to abuse power.(17) In ourage, phenomenological vocabulary and methodologies are the aptest language available to us. By
way of ethical conception, Levinas phenomenology of the Other offers the kind of language and
conceptions that can assist us in articulating our lived Christian experience in our post-
Christendom and postmodern world.
The neo-Scholastic revival advanced by Maritain and Gilson, while adding fresh insights and
exciting vistas to what had been the static Suarezian styled Thomism so dominant in Catholic
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
3
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
4/15
philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has not resonated as widely as many in the
Church would like. Consequently the need to find other interpretative methodologies is current.
The Roman Church, while not fully prepared to embrace a postmodern ethos, clearly recognizes
postmodernity as a style of thought that holds some promise in terms of being able to articulate
contemporary experience. In 1998, Pope John Paul II wrote in the encyclical letterFides et Ratio:
One thing however is certain: the currents of thought which claim to be postmodern merit
appropriate attention. According to some of them, the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and
the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where
everything is provisional and ephemeral.(18)
Freedom from the boundaries of categorical thinking is a major characteristic in both postmodern
and phenomenological philosophy as well as apophatic theology. A Levinasian understanding of
Christian ethics, being open to the face of the other who solicits us in the face-to-face encounter is
a methodological process, a psychosocial disposition, and finally a theological direction. I will
explore each of these areas shortly.
The trajectory of Levinas metaphysical grounding of ethics as human response is characteristic
of the Hebraic emphasis on social relationship over philosophical abstractions characteristic ofthe Hellenic mind predominant in classic Christian philosophy. Pre-existing the disclosure of
being in general taken as a basis of knowledge and as meaning is the relation with the existent
that expresses himself; preexisting the plane of ontology is the ethical plane.(19) Levinas
apophaticism then is a Jewish one in the sense that it takes the form of having the face-to-face
social encounter be free of captivation. The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us. And it is
only man who could be absolutely foreign to merefractory to every typology, to every genus, to
every characterology, to every classificationand consequently the term of a knowledge finally
penetrating beyond the object.(20) Each individual is literally free and unique in themselves,
resistant to being captivated in the vortex of our ego and self same systems. The nakedness of
the face is not what is presented to me because I disclose it, what would, therefore be presented tome, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in a light exterior to it. The face has turned to
meand this is its very nudity. It is by itself and not by reference to a system.(21)
Phenomenological methodological conception
Existential and phenomenological currents dominate contemporary Christian theology and
philosophy. The methodological, systematic development of what we understand as
phenomenological, postmodern deconstruction has its genesis in Martin Heidegger. Historically,
Heidegger suggests that Kants basic ontological orientation remained that of the Greeks, in spite
of all the distinctions which arose as a consequence of Kants mode of inquiry. To arrive at the
true concreteness of the things themselves it is necessary to carry through the process of
destroying the ontological tradition.(22) To accomplish this deconstruction, Heidegger developed
the phenomenological method of investigation. The expression phenomenology signifies
primarily a methodological conception. The expression does not characterize the what of the
objects of philosophical research as subject matter, but rather the how of that research. The more
genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines
the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
4
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
5/15
way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call
technical devices, though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines.(23) To
the things themselves signifies a this worldliness inherent in phenomenology and in Levinas
phenomenology of the Other. Understood phenomenologically worldliness is profoundly
incarnational. Eternity is collapsed into the presentthe eternal now moment. Grace conceived
of phenomenologically is somehow always and everywhere present at the very heart of human
existence.(24) Worldliness and worldhood are major themes in phenomenology and explicitlydefined by philosophers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Levinas casts worldliness as the chez-
soi. That is, we are at home with things and are happy for the fulfillment of those needs. That
which we live from here below is enjoyment (jouissance) of the other by the same. What we live
from does not enslave us; we enjoy it. Need cannot be interpreted as simple lack, despite the
psychology of need given by Plato, nor as pure passivity, despite Kantian ethics. The human being
thrives on need; he is happy for his needs.(25) There is no fatal orientalism, no negative
soteriology in Levinas philosophical meditation. The world is what is given to us. The expression
is admirably precise! The given does not to be sure come from us, but we do receive it ... The
world offers the bountifulness of the terrestrial nourishment to our intentionsincluding those of
Rabelais; the world where youth is happy and restless with desire is the world itself. It takes formnot in an additional quality inhering in objects, but in a destination inscribed in its revelation, in
revelation itself, in the light.(26)
Our desire for meaning, the land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland is
met by the Other whose trace is found in response to the diverse beings we encounter. For Levinas
beings are in and inseparable from Being. In the world the other is indeed not treated like a
thing, but is never separated from the thing.(27) Unlike the Hegelian dialectic, the other is not
like an allergy that needs to be assimilated into a systematic synthesis. The relationship is instead
positive. It evokes an ethical response. The relation with the other as face heals allergy ... But the
relation is maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity. The resistance of the
other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical ... I donot struggle with a faceless god, but I respond to his expression, to his revelation. The response
to life is one that no interiority can avoid. Indeed the response precedes the reflection.
Universality is thus founded upon the ethical response which takes the form of dialogue. Thus I
cannot evade by silence the discourse which the epiphany of the face opens ... The face opens the
primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no interiority permits avoiding. It is that
discourse that obliges the entering into discourse, the commencement of discourse rationalism
prays for, a force that convinces even the people who do not wish to listen and thus founds the
true universality of reason.(28)
There is a hesitancy to enter into reflection on Ideal concepts in both Levinas and classic Catholic
Modern theologians like George Tyrrell. Tyrrell noted, When we say, first holiness and then
truth we are speaking of the truth of explicit understanding which is attained by after-reflection
on that truth which is always implicit in holiness and quite inseparable from it.(29) Levinas
writes, [Ethics] is not limited to preparing for the theoretical exercise of thought which would
monopolize transcendence.(30) In recent times the phenomenological method has found its most
well known Christian theological expression in the voice of Karl Rahner. Rahner, however, was
still close to the Heideggerian ontology criticized by Levinas when it came to his critique of the
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
5
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
6/15
kind of Modernism current in Catholic circles in the early twentieth century. Rahner wrote what
is called modernism in the classical understanding lives by the conviction that the concept or
reflection is something absolutely secondary in relation to the original self possession of existence
in self-consciousness and freedom, so that reflection could also be dispensed with.(31) Such a
criticism might well be leveled against Levinas and the entire postmodern school. However,
reflection is not dispensed with in either classic modernism, at least Tyrrells form of Modernism
nor in Levinas reflection of ethics, and not being, as fundamental for metaphysics. What isdispensed with is reflection on ideal concepts, not original experience. In fact, as Oliver Davies
comments on Levinas later workOtherwise than Being, The principal theme of Otherwise than Being
can be summarized as an exploration of the relation between a non-ontological transcendence (or
what Levinas calls saying) and the realm of consciousness, representation and being (the
said). (32) Rahner clearly saw this problem writing,
The tension between original knowledge and its concept, which moments belong together and yet
are not one, is not something static. It has a history in two directions. The original self-presence of
the subject in the actual realization of his existence strives to translate itself more and more into
the conceptual, into the objectified, into language, into communication with another ...
Consequently in this tension between original knowledge and the concept which always
accompanies it there is a tendency towards greater conceptualization, towards language, towards
communication, and towards the theoretical knowledge of itself. But there is also a movement in
the opposite direction within this tension. One who has been formed by a common language, and
educated and indoctrinated from without, experiences clearly perhaps only very slowly what he has
been talking about for a long time. It is precisely we theologians who are always in danger of
talking about heaven and earth, about God and man with an arsenal of religious and theological
concepts which is almost limitless in its size and proportion. We can acquire in theology a very
great skill in talking and perhaps not have really understood from the depths of our existence what
we are really talking about.(33)
The challenge for Christians in embracing the kind of plurality necessary for a Levinasian ethic is
that Christianitys spirit is a unifying one. The way around this impasse is by drawing a clear
distinction between spirit and representation. As George Tyrell wrote, It was the spirit, rather
than the body, of New Testament Christianity that passed over to the Gentiles, and began there its
work of leavening that great syncretism of all the religions of the Empire into a vast catholic,
world embracing Church. Much that was a scandal to the Jew was congenial to the Gentile. The
notions of a plurality of Divine persons; of an incarnate God; of a theotokos; of a deity slain and
risen; of sacraments and mysteries; of asceticism, world flight, and consecrated virginityall
these notions and the catholic idea itself were familiar to him.(34) Notwithstanding the unifying
character of the Christian spirit, plurality is not contrary to it. Plurality is something that can and
needs to be fully embraced. Universality, the great contribution of Christianity to the world has
always been difficult to articulate and live. The unity we seek is a spiritual one. As it is spiritual, it
is individuated as the human race is individuated. Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian existentialist
philosopher eloquently articulated the positive character of plurality within the one Church of
Christ writing, The selfsame and eternal Truth of the Christian Revelation is individualized in
different races, nations, personalities. The absoluteness of Christian Truth is in no way contrary
to an individuation of this kind. There are no excluding oppositions between the universal and
the individual. The universal and the individual have herein a concrete sameness. The absolute
Truth of Christianity has a human recipient. The human element is not passive but rather active,
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
6
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
7/15
and it reacts with a creativity different to that which is revealed from above. It creates a
multiplicity of forms. And in this should be seen nothing bad. There are many mansions in my
Fathers house [John 14:2].(35)
On the level of practice a Levinasian understanding of Christian ethics is embraced by grounding
meaning in the subjects self-presence and affirming the need for individuation and subjectivity.
The following analysis might help in fleshing out the notion of subjectivity in a more practical
fashion.
The Training of Subjectivity (Psychosocial Dispositions)
Subjectivity requires both a workable cognitive paradigm and a reordering of social institutions
such that institutions serve the individual in his or her aspirations and desires. John Courtney
Murray recognized the inversion that was occurring in Catholic social teaching away from the
notion of the state being the entity by which individuals derive their identity, to the notion that
the safekeeping and promotion of ... rights is governments first duty to the common good.(36)
Such an inversion is clearly part of the existential ethos articulated by Kierkegaard, supporting
concrete spiritual subjective presence, as opposed to abstract universal entities as the location for
meaning.
There are contemporary cultural phenomena, encouraging us to rest in abstract universal entities
that is frustrating the kind of growth necessary for our liberation that we need to pay attention to
and critique. We are moving towards increasing institutionalization and dehumanizing
bureaucracies in response to the increasing anxiety caused by the dissonance that inevitably
precedes the emergence of a new cognitive paradigm. Bruce Levine defines institutionalization as
the establishment of large, bland, standardized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, authoritarian, coercive,
manipulative, expansionistic, and impersonal entities. (37) As a culture, we need to order our
institutions in a more humanistic fashion in order to facilitate the possibility of freedom wherebythe individual can express their subjectivity such that we can glance in ever-increasing richness the
truth. It all happens as though the multiplicity of persons ... were the condition for the fullness of
absolute truth, as though each person, through his uniqueness, ensured the revelation of a
unique aspect of the truth, and that certain sides of it would never reveal themselves if certain
people were missing from mankind.(38)
In each of our various contexts, it is useful to reflect ethically on our own institutions and
organizations in order to examine whether or not they are operating in a human fashion. In a
paper being published in thePsychiatric Rehabilitation Journalin 2004, I examined this issue in my
own field of community mental health in a paper entitled Psychosocial Rehabilitation and
Provincial Mental Healtha Dialogue. In it I propose that it is not only our understanding of
persons that needs to shift but additionally our conception of community needs to be viewed in
such a manner to ensure that our work is tending towards its regeneration. John McKnight, who
has worked with communities and neighbourhoods throughout Canada and the United States
and directs a program in community studies at Northwestern University, believes that a human
service economy based on needs hides a very different but essential landscape. That landscape is
the organic community out of which emerges care and healing. He thinks that people are
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
7
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
8/15
becoming aware in their bones that hospitals cannot simply produce health, nor schools
education, nor police departments safety. Experience has taught them, he says, that communities
can only regenerate from within.(39) McKnight examines human services in order to see
whether or not they are speaking and acting in a holistic, humanistic fashion. To begin, he defines
a community, as a group of persons who understand themselves as citizens responsible for and
accountable to their neighbours. Community is not about technicians fixing problems that
disrupt the social order. We do not create community by inventing all kinds of services andproducts for consumer consumption. Community subsists in the concrete presence of persons
who understand themselves as citizens first. A citizen is one who has a vested interest in the well-
being of the community as it impacts on his or her immediate family and/or friends. It is the
recovery of a sense of citizenship, not clienthood that should be driving our service. McKnight
observes that one of the harms structurally built in to human service interventions aimed at
making clients of our service is that people will become known by their deficiencies not their
gifts and active citizenship will retreat in the face of professional expertise; and services will
aggregate to form total environments.(40) Regrettably this phenomenon has developed as a
consequence of the current and past direction of human services. So were involved in, actually,
a humorous but tragic kind of never ending search for new needs in people, because systems thatgrow have to find new needs and impute them to people, and the problem with that is it is always
at the cost of diminished citizenship. So that as these systems of service colonize your life and my
life, saying that we are bundles of needs and there are institutionalized services there to meet the
needs to make us whole, to make us real, what we become is less and less powerful. Our citizen
capacity and our gifts get lost and forgotten, so that there is I believe, a relentless struggle between
associational ways and system ways, and what we have seen in our time is the ascendance of
systems over associations.
The work of social reform, moving towards community based associations over grand systems, is
very much a part of the work of justice, ground in ethics that needs be undertaken with clear
intentionality. As Levine points out, Underlying many of modern psychiatrys 400 diagnoses isthe experience of helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation and
dehumanization. Consider the schools, government, health care organizations, media and
corporations. Ask yourself: do these institutions promote: enthusiasm or passivity, community trust
and confidence or isolation and fear, self direction, or institutional direction, diversity and
stimulation or homogeneity and boredom, human pride or machine efficiency, citizens or
consumers, human scale or mass scale society.(41)
Just as subjectivity needs to be facilitated in a broader social fashion, it also requires a
psychological method for that training. One such method is the existential style of psychotherapy.
Intentionality, freedom and responsibility are a key component in existentially rooted
psychological methodologies supported by psychiatrists like Victor Frankl. Meaning is a
transcendental process. It emerges out of self-conscious awareness of self and the spiritual other
united in a dialectical process occurring at the level of subjective consciousness. It is characteristic
of both existential psychology and phenomenologically rooted theology to locate this meaning
and purpose solely within the subject. Self-transcendence understood from a psychological
perspective is not only our freedom but is simultaneously a response-in-action. Frankl put it well:
What is the meaning of life? I made this inversion in my first book,Arzlich Seelsorge, when I
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
8
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
9/15
contend that man is not he who poses the question, What is the meaning of life?, but he who is
asked this question, for it is life itself that poses it to him. And man has to answer to life by
answering for life; he has to respond by being responsible; in other words, the response is
necessarily a response-in-action. While we respond to life in action we are also responding in
the here and now. What is always involved in our responses is the concreteness of a person and
the concreteness of the situation in which he is involved.(42)
The eternal now moment, the here and now as Frankl puts it, is where selfhood begins to take
on its character and shape. Levinas writes, A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a
destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present.(43) Facilitating the
creation of social and intellectual space for freedom is necessary in order to open ourselves to the
solicitation of the other in the present moment. In Levinas freedom and responsibility are
intertwined and inseparable. It is precisely in the free ethical response to the other that our
selfhood emerges. The absolutely other does not at all limit the freedom of the same, it calls it to
responsibility, founds it and justifies it. (44) The relationship with the other puts into question the
spontaneity of ones destiny; allowing for human change, resiliency and organic growth
throughout life. This dynamic is not a harsh one. The Other precisely reveals himself in his
alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.(45)
The positing of the ethical response as the foundation upon which all other structure rest has
theological implications in terms of embracing a negative or apophatic theology as far as
understanding revelation. Levinas writes, Revelation is discourse; in order to welcome revelation
a being apt for this role of interlocutor, a separated being, is required. Atheism conditions a
veritable relationship with a true God ... A relation with the Transcendent free from all
captivation by the Transcendent is a social relation ... It is here that the Transcendent, infinitely
other, solicits and appeals to us ... His very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in
the face of the Stranger, the widow, the orphan. The atheism of the metaphysician means,
positively, that our relation with the Metaphysical is an ethical behavior ... God rises to hissupreme and ultimate presence as correlative to the justice rendered unto men.(46)
Theological Directions
In the Christian tradition, there is precedent for viewing ethics in such a manner. By way of the
primacy of the ethical Eckhart said, He who understands my teaching about justice and the just
man understands everything I say.(47) The coming revelation of God, eschatology, the trace of
the Other, is not the introduction of a teleological system nor the orientation of history. It is a
response formed without image and without mediation. Meister Eckhart in one of his sermons
says The just person seeks nothing in their works. Those that seek something in their works or
those who work because of a why are (serfs and mercenaries). And so if you want to be
transformed by and transformed into justice, have no [specific] intention in your works and form
no why in yourself, either in time or eternity, either reward or happiness, either this or that.
Such works are in fact, dead. Even if you form God within yourself, whatever works you perform
for a [specific] purpose are all dead, and you ruin good works ... It is a characteristic of creatures
that they make something out of something, while it is characteristic of God that he makes
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
9
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
10/15
something out of nothing. Therefore if God is to make anything in you or with you, you must first
have become nothing. Hence go into your own ground and work there, and the works you work
there will all be living. This is why he says, the just lives. Because he is just he works, and his
works live.(48) As Schurmann comments, The just man no longer looks for support elsewhere;
nor does he let his acts be determined by external precepts. If he strove for conformity with
exterior laws, his acting would simply be legal. The just man who acts out of intimate assimilation
with justice is just in the same way that the reflection of a beautiful face is beautiful; totally byanother and yet totally in itself.(49) For Eckhart the desire for a land not of our birth, for a land
foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland as Levinas described metaphysical
desire is characterized by a radical dissimilarity between God and creatures. All creatures are
mere nothingness. I do not say that they are small or anything at all: they are mere nothingness.
This dissimilarity is absolute. God is completely alterior. Schurmann writes that from the history
of doctrines, this entire theme of nothingness and dissimilarity can easily be traced back to the
Bible and Augustine. When Eckhart speaks of unglicheit, the country of dissimilarity he can claim
either the authority of the regio dissimilitudinis in Augustine or that of the foreign land in the
psalms. (50) This dissimilarity does not lead to a fatal world-denying gnosis. Christianity has
always had a place for Platos Ideas while at the same time affirming the goodness of creation. Farfrom neglecting the world or seeing it in a dichotomous framework as so many neo-Platonist and
Gnostics did, Eckhart saw creation as the utterance of God. The Father speaks the Son from his
entire power and speaks him in all things. All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses
and reveals God but the existence of a stone does the same and people often recognize more from
the actions than from words.... All creatures may echo God in all their activities. It is, of course,
just a small bit which they can reveal.(51) In a similar fashion, Levinas sees the world as
containing the trace of the other.
The personalism and subjectivism, fueled by phenomenological methodologies and directions has
yielded abundant fruit. One sees the emergence within science and medicine of the human
person being understood holistically rather than mechanically or technologically. Rahnerarticulated the demonstrability of a holistic interpretive understanding writing In the fact that
man raises analytic questions about himself and opens himself to the unlimited horizons of such
questioning, he has already transcended himself and every conceivable element of such an
analysis or of an empirical reconstruction of himself. In so doing this he is affirming himself as
more than the sum of such analyzable components of his reality. Precisely this consciousness of
himself, this confrontation with the totality of all his conditions, and this very being-conditioned
show him to be more than the sum of his factors.(51) We must bear in mind that subjectivity
understood from a Levinasian perspective is not a private universe, a sealed interiority, but an
unparalleled attention, a response to what is outside, the most outside of which is the other
human being. (53) Certainly God but additionally history also stands outside of ourselves.
Although history ought not constitute the totality of understanding, we do need to stay connected
to the living streams of our tradition. Traditio can be distinguished from traditum in that traditio is
understood as the mode of transmission itself while traditum is the actual handing down of
something from generation to generation. (54) Traditio therefore can be understood in a
phenomenological manner. Tradition curbs, trains and moulds ones own subjectivity. Michael
Casey points out that tradition is assailed from both the left and the right. He writes, The left
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
10
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
11/15
attacks it because the past is identified with the forces of conservatism; it is understood, to use
Margaret Meads term, as coercive rather than instrumental. It imposes its own way of viewing
situations and responding to them so that development is blocked. On the other hand, memory is
rejected by the right because it is subversive to the status quo; memory knows another time. It
relativizes the present and so can offer an alternative to current ideologywhich may be why J.B.
Mertz speaks about the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ.(55) In reference to interpretation of
the Torah, Levinas writes: What allows one to establish a difference between a personaloriginality brought to the Book and the pure play of amateurs (or charlatans) illusions is a
necessary reference of the subjective to the historical continuity of interpretation, is the tradition
of commentaries that cannot be ignored under the pretext that inspiration come to you directly
from the text. A renewal worthy of the name cannot circumvent these references, just as it
cannot circumvent the reference to what is called the Oral Law.(56) The Christian tradition
approaches with similar reverence natural law. However, the interpretation of natural law in our
day has its own limitations in terms of facilitating an Levinasian ethic that needs to be critiqued.
As Mike Sean Winters noted, Natural law has produced a very act-centered morality, a kind of
Catholic utilitarianism, when the historical role of Catholicism has always been to insist on the
transcendence of the human person, on the belief that utility is not the ultimate criteria for
human choices. Yet natural laws anthropology is so hyperteleological that the wonder before
creation, and before ones fellow creatures, that is proper to the soul is lost, and the relationships
that follow are diminished in their richness, their humaneness. Surely the most important thing to
know about the human person from the story of Genesis is that we are created in the image and
likeness of God, and it is that belief which, through the centuries, has been the surest bulwark
against dehumanization.(57) That notion needs to be amplified and can be assisted through
Levinas hermeneutic that it is not the last judgment, but each judgment in time wherein morality
is found. One sees the emergence within science and medicine of the human person being
understood holistically rather than mechanically or technologically. The removal of the ground of
natural law, or the delightful lapse of the ontological order, does create a sense of instability.However, it is precisely that instability which is necessary to shake us out of our complacency and
call us into the world, the existentiall, in which we live; where the other meets our Desire. Morality,
actually, living a just and happy life is the consummation of a life viewed through the optics of
ethics. Ethics is not understood theoretically but in terms of a living, holistic response to life.
We require a fresh vocabulary to couch our experience. I have suggested in this essay that a
phenomenological vocabulary rooted in a Levinasian ethic is one such vocabulary, conception and
methodology that can assist us. Levinas concludes Totality and Infinity by writing that transcendence
or goodness is produced as pluralism. The work of justice and peace is not a political conception
identified with the end of combats that cease for want of combatants, by the defeat of some and
the victories of others, that is, with cemeteries or future universal empires. Peace must be my
peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other, in desire and goodness, where the I
both maintains itself and exists without egoism. It is conceived starting from an I assured of the
convergence of morality and reality, that is, of an infinite time which through fecundity is its
time.(58) That time is, as it has always beennow.
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
11
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
12/15
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
12
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
13/15
NOTES
1. Dasein is a German term that is used extensively by Heidegger to explain the existence that anythinghas. It refers to the way a particular thing has of existing. It is in this sense that the term dasein is helpfulin describing the state of being happy. It is a deliberate existential understanding as opposed to atheoretical way of understanding being.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 33.
3. ibid., 26.
4. ibid., 34.
5. ibid., 299
6. ibid., 42.
7. ibid., 42.
8. ibid., 79.
9. ibid., 79.
10. Amy Hollywood, Eckharts Apophatic Ethics,Eckhart Review No. 10 (Spring 2001), 36.
11. ibid., p.36.
12. Walter Rauschenbusch, Social Ideas in the New Testament, From Christ To the WorldIntroductoryReadings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey. (GrandRapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 31.
13. John Allan. The Word From RomeNational Catholic Reporter. (Vol. 3 No. 25: 2004). http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word021304.htm
14. John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. (Alfred A. Knopf: Canada, 1994), 36.
15. Peperzak, A., Critchley S. & Bernasconi, R. ed. (1996).Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings.Bloomington IN:Indiana University Press, 1996), 4.
16. ibid., 13.
17. Simone Weil, Waiting For God, trans. Emma Craufurd, (New York, NY: Harper and Row Publishers,1951) p, 99.
18. John Paul II,Fides Et Ratio (September, 1998): #91. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fideset-ratio_en.html
19. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 201.
20. ibid., 75.
21. ibid., 75.
22. Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, (New York, NY: Harperand Row Publishers, 1962), 49.
23. ibid., 50.
24. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 19 (New York, NY: Crossroads, 1981), 143.
25. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 114.
26. Emmanuel Levinas, existence and existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978),39.
27. ibid. 39.
28. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 201.
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
13
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
14/15
29. George Tyrrell,Lex CredendiA Sequel to Lex Orandi, (London:Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 54.
30. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 29.
31. Karl Rahner,Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych,(New York, NY: The Seabury Press, 1978), 10.
32. Oliver Davies Beyond the Language of Being: A Comparative Study of Meister Eckhart andEmmanuel LevinasEckhart Review No. 9 (Spring 2000), 37.
33. Karl Rahner,Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych,(New York, NY: The Seabury Press, 1978), 16.
34. George Tyrrell, Lex CredendiA Sequel to Lex Orandi, (London:Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 51.
35. Nikolai Berdiaev, Unifying Christians of the East and the West, translated by Fr Michael Knechten (August,1925). http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Sui-Generis/Berdyaev/essays/unifying.html
36. John Courtney Murray, War, Poverty, Freedom: the Christian Response, vol. 15 Concilium: The Declaration onReligious Freedom. (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1966), 15.
37. Bruce E. Levine, A Commonsense Rebellion: An Epidemic of Mental Illness? Or a Curious RevoltAdbusters # 41 (May/June 2002).
38. Emmanuel Levinas,Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz. (Bloomington, Indiana: University
Press, 1990.), xvi.39. CBC, Community and its Counterfeits. Ideas 3, 10, 17 January 1994. ID 9407. (Toronto, Ontario: The
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994)
40. ibid., 5
41. Bruce E. Levine, A Commonsense Rebellion: An Epidemic of Mental Illness? Or a Curious Revolt,Adbusters # 41 (May/June 2002).
42. Victor Frankl, (2000), mans search for ultimate meaning. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 29.
43. Emmanuel Levinas, existence and existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978),99.
44. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 197.
45. ibid., 150.
46. ibid.., 78.
47. ibid., 92.
48. Bernard Mcginn,Meister Eckhart Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard Mcginn, trans. By Bernard Mcginn andFrank Tobin. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1986), 296. I replaced Frank Tobins translationservants and hired hands to Reiner Schurmanns translation of serfs and mercenaries as the latter,in my view more closely approximates the radicality implied within the text.
49. Reiner Schurmann, Wandering JoyMeister Eckharts Mystical Philosophy, (Great Barrington, MA:Lindsfarne Books, 2001), 93.
50. ibid. 85
51. Matthew Fox,Passion For CreationThe Earth Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, (Rochester, Vermont,Inner Traditions International, 2000), 59 (Sermon 1)
52. Karl Rahner,Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. (New York, NY: TheSeabury Press, 1978), 29.
53. Emmanuel Levinas,Nine Talmudic Readings. trans. Annette Aronowicz. (Bloomington, Indiana:UniversityPress, 1990), xxii.
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
14
-
7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics
15/15
54. Jeffrey Stout, Tradition in Ethics,From Christ To the WorldIntroductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed.Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey. (Grand Rapids. MI: William B. EerdmansPublishing Company, 1994), 61.
55. Michael Casey, Sacred ReadingThe Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Ligouri, Missouri: Ligouri/Triumph,1996), 71-72.
56. Emmanuel Levinas,Nine Talmudic Readings. trans. Annette Aronowicz. (Bloomington, Indiana:UniversityPress, 1990), xxii.
57. Michael Sean Winters, How To save the Church: The Betrayal,New Republic Online, (05.06.02).
58. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense UniversityPress, 1969), 306.
Cross Currents > Winter 2005
15