Towards a Levinasian understanding of Christian ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the phenomenology of the Other.

The good life has classically been understood as the state of being (dasein) (1) in which one lives joyfully in the fullness of one's 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 our birth, 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 lack--metaphysics--is 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 other's 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 justice--the uprightness of the face to face--is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced--and 'vision' here coincides with this work of justice. Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted--in 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 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 justice--a 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 one's system of philosophy has ever matched everybody's experience of reality, the need to move past some of the totalizing Rational 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 II's 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 the National Catholic Reporter reported 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 people who do not share the faith." The Congregation is not planning a document on this subject, sources told National 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 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 one's 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 Levinas writes. "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 our age, 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 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 letter Fides 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 of the 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 me--refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification--and 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 to me, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in a light exterior to it. The face has turned to me--and 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 Kant's basic ontological orientation remained that of the Greeks, in spite of all the distinctions which arose as a consequence of Kant's 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 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 present--the 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 explicitly defined 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 intentions--including those of Rabelais; the world where youth is happy and restless with desire is the world itself. It takes form not 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 do not 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 it's 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 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 Tyrrell's form of Modernism nor in Levinas' reflection of ethics, and not being, as fundamental for metaphysics. What is "dispensed with" is reflection on ideal concepts, not original experience. In fact, as Oliver Davies comments on Levinas' later work Otherwise 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 Christianity's 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 virginity--all 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 Berdiaev, 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, 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 Father's 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 government's 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 whereby the 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 the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal in 2004, I examined this issue in my own field of community mental health in a paper entitled "Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Provincial Mental Health--a 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 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 and products 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 we're involved in, actually, a humorous but tragic kind of never ending search for new needs in people, because systems that grow 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 psychiatry's 400 diagnoses is the 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 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 one's 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 his supreme 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 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 by another 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 Plato's Ideas while at the same time affirming the goodness of creation. Far from 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, fuelled 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. Rahner articulated 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 one's own subjectivity. Michael Casey points out that tradition is assailed from both the left and the right. He writes, "The left attacks it because the past is identified with the forces of conservatism; it is understood, to use Margaret Mead's 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 ideology--which 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 personal originality 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 Shawn 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 law's anthropology is so hyperteleological that the wonder before creation, and before one's 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 been--is now.

Notes

1. Dasein is a German term that is used extensively by Heidegger to explain the existence that anything has. It refers to the way a particular thing has of existing. It is in this sense that the term dasein is helpful in describing the state of being happy. It is a deliberate existential understanding as opposed to a theoretical way of understanding being.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense University Press, 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, "Eckhart's 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 World--Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 31.

13. John Allan. "The Word From Rome" National 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 University Press, 1969), 201.

20. ibid., 75.

21. ibid., 75.

22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, (New York, NY: Harper and 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 University Press, 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 University Press, 1969), 201.

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

30. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquense University Press, 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 and Emmanuel Levinas" Eckhart 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 Credendi--A 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 on Religious Freedom. (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1966), 15.

37. Bruce E. Levine, "A Commonsense Rebellion: An Epidemic of Mental Illness? Or a Curious Revolt" Adbusters # 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), man's 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 University Press, 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 and Frank Tobin. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1986), 296. I replaced Frank Tobin's translation "servants and hired hands" to Reiner Schurmann's translation of "serfs and mercenaries" as the latter, in my view more closely approximates the radicality implied within the text.

49. Reiner Schurmann, Wandering Joy--Meister Eckhart's Mystical Philosophy, (Great Barrington, MA: Lindsfarne Books, 2001), 93.

50. ibid. 85

51. Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation--The 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: The Seabury Press, 1978), 29.

53. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings. trans. Annette Aronowicz. (Bloomington, Indiana:University Press, 1990), xxii.

54. Jeffrey Stout, "Tradition in Ethics," From Christ To the World--Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey. (Grand Rapids. MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 61.

55. Michael Casey, Sacred Reading--The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Ligouri, Missouri: Ligouri/Triumph, 1996), 71-72.

56. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings. trans. Annette Aronowicz. (Bloomington, Indiana:University Press, 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 University Press, 1969), 306.