drazenovich, george -towards a levinasian understanding of christian ethics

7/31/2019 Drazenovich, George -Towards a Levinasian Understanding of Christian Ethics

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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

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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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.


26. Emmanuel Levinas, existence and existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978),39.

27. ibid. 39.



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29. George Tyrrell,Lex CredendiA Sequel to Lex Orandi, (London:Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 54.


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.


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.


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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).



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drazenovich, george -towards a levinasian understanding of christian ethics

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