66 – Towards the Unknown

Editorial

Levinas is a revisionist within Judaism. Born in Lithuania, he inherited the Talmudic tradition of the anti-mystical Mitnagged movement that opposed the popular affective and immediate piety of Hassidism. He rethought this Talmudic tradition after the Holocaust, in which Lithuanian Jewry was eliminated. A third of Lithuania’s population including Levinas’ family was killed. While the holocaust led some Jews and Christians to atheism, Levinas did not accept the atheism of those ‘whose idea of God was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes and penalties or forgave faults, and in His own goodness treated men as eternal children.’ He says, | have to ask these people: with what kind of underendowed demon, what kind of magician did they people their heaven, if they now declare that heaven is empty? And why are they still searching, under this empty heaven, for a world that is rational and good.

This kindergarten deity was an Aunt Sally of the Most High (El Alyon), the Unknowable Infinity and Abyss (Ein Sof) of Rabbinical Judaism, of which all idols are prohibited. God is not a being, is not present or absent, can neither be said to exist or not exist, but is ‘other’, ‘beyond being’, ‘otherwise than being’, otherwise than Platonic/ ontological understandings of metaphysics. This view is not heretical within Judaism, for, as Levinas reminds his readers, the rabbinical tradition has not defined itself by ‘orthodoxy’, requiring Jews to believe the right thing, but by ‘orthopraxy’, by right action. For Levinas then, one cannot think of God, as this would reduce God to an object of thought, making an idea of God into an idol. One can only respond to God (d Dieu, where adieu means Goodbye) as encountered in one’s neighbour in need, whose countenance calls me to responsibility.

It is precisely because we have said goodbye to the idea of a God who answers human needs, like a demon magician, that Infinite responsibility lies with humankind. So all that can be indicated about God must now be expressed through our ethical response to the other person.

Levinas argues that Judaism must be ‘A Religion for Adults’, in a paper by the same title (Une religion d’adultes, 1957). This religion is entirely ethical.

He does not mean a cultic community of rituals, but taking Lactantius’ etymology of religion from re-ligare (where ligare means ‘to bind’), religion is about the bond to my neighbour in need, a religion in which I am responsible. The material needs of my neighbour are witnessed in his face, in Emmanuel Levinas the appeal (prier, prayer) of his countenance and this is my calling to responsibility, calling me beyond what is known. It is my ethical response before the face of the stranger that makes the world rational and good.

As a philosopher, Levinas is a critic of Western philosophical tradition. How was it possible that a country like Germany with a great philosophical culture could commit genocide, or his once-respected teacher, Heidegger, have Nazi sympathies? The failure of philosophy relates to its characterisation of the individual, the human ‘subject’, as independent and self-sufficient (which he calls a ‘bourgeois spirit’ in philosophy that ‘nourishes the audacious dreams of a restless and enterprising capitalism’). This philosophically-minded ‘subject’ seeks to understand the world, but in so doing reduces the world to comprehension, to knowledge, and relates only to what is known. It seeks understanding before action.

Against this Levinas argues that it is my neighbour that constitutes me as a subject, not an independent sof 66 July 2004 subject but one already contracted to the other person, constituted as responsible for my neighbour’s needs. I will never fully understand another person, and should not relate to what I do know about them (that she is a mother, or black, or an immigrant, or unemployed, and therefore somehow without a legitimate call on my charity), but accept that there is more to a person than I can ever know, and it is the otherness of the other person that calls me to responsibility.

Levinas’ revision of religion and philosophy has inspired me and provided a turning point for me.

Levinas’ notion of an absolute and unconditional responsibility for the other does not go far enough in ethical responsibility, in that he does not consider wider political questions, such the Palestinian context of Israel, for example. He also inherits imperial assumptions, so his idea that (Western) philosophy is a universal discourse leads to Levinas’ racist attitudes towards the people of Asia, who do not share Hebraic or Hellenic thinking. Also, Levinas does not consider wider ethical issues, such as our relation to the environment, animals and future generations. But in spite of his many shortcomings, Levinas has enabled me to make a transition from devoting my attentions to the ‘mystical’, to recognising the importance of the ‘ethical’.

From my confirmation, as an Anglo-catholic altar boy age 9, to beyond my training for ‘the priesthood’ of Anglican ministry, I sought the deus absconditus of mysticism. This fitted well with a critical approach to scriptural texts and history, which I learned as an undergraduate. It fitted well too with parts of a Sea of Faith radical theology, which, like mysticism, both rejected the ‘kindergarten deity’ of many Christian hymns and also denied all that could be said of God, even His existence. This search for God, an amor intellectus dei, appeared to be a life’s work and attracted me to monasticism (and Thomas Merton), though a more ascetic order appealed than the camp and gentlemanly Community of the Resurrection, with which I trained. I began to learn some NeoPlatonism there though, which supported a via negativa theology and spirituality of self-denial. It led me to a philosophical theology where the sublime and atheism meet, while I was a clergyman in university chaplaincy work. In all, such matters obsessed me for over twenty years, while questioning my ‘vocation’. But more important than the quest for mystical or intellectual ‘knowledge’, Levinas’ thinking - and his compelling insistence - has shown me the need for ethical action, the calling to responsibility (as if before God, but as if in the absence of God). He has made me realise that much talk about God’s existence, by devoting energies to comprehension, simply avoids responsibility, just as much as affective devotion internalises such energy. So, although liberal and radical theology can be liberating, releasing one from the bonds of oppressive ideas of God, such ideas can become ends in themselves if they do not lead to action, to an ethical response. :

I now complete my time as editor of SOF, and at the same time my doctorate on Levinas, but it is not because the questions fail to interest me. The questions, rather, are endless and infinite, but there are more urgent ethical priorities, an infinite number of them, and to some of these I now feel I should turn. I move to a yet unknown future, which feels rather like launching out in a coracle after the example of a certain Irish and Celtic tradition of monasticism. But I hope it will be one that will respond to the urgent environmental needs that affect us all, by both living simply and working towards developing a sustainable environment.

I thank those who contributed to the magazine during my editorship, with informative and reflective articles, and those who read it. I wish it and its readers well for the future.