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58 four Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence Levinas’s essay ‘‘God and Philosophy’’ is contemporaneous with Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence and develops theological implications of the argument left largely unthematized in what we might call the magnum opus of Levinas II.1 He purports to set the God of the Bible over against ‘‘the philosophical discourse of the West’’ and its interpretation of rationality; and he taunts ‘‘rational theology’’ for accepting ‘‘vassalage’’ to philosophy’s claim to be ‘‘the amplitude of an all-encompassing structure or of an ultimate comprehension ’’ that ‘‘compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy’’ (GP 153–54).2 We are reminded of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology. In an earlier essay, Levinas had evoked that critique by speaking of ‘‘the notion of God, which a thought called faith succeeds in getting expressed and introduces into philosophical discourse’’ (PE 62). In onto-theology, on Heidegger ’s account, ‘‘the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy , of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters into it.’’3 For theology to seek the imprimatur (censorship ?) of onto-theologically constituted metaphysics would be to sell its soul and its birthright simultaneously. For the ‘‘god of philosophy’’ is religiously Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence 59 useless. ‘‘Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.’’4 The scenario sketched by Levinas in which it is faith that introduces the notion of God into philosophy suggests the interruption of the latter’s complacent hegemony by a double alterity. First, faith is presented as a thought, challenging the notion that philosophy has a monopoly on meaning and intelligibility. Second, the God who is introduced into philosophical discourse by this interloping outsider has come to the party uninvited. This God is not at the beck and call of philosophy’s project of episteme or Wissenschaft in accord with the principium reddendae rationis. So it is not surprising that throughout the essay, this God (along with the human face we always find between ourselves and deity) is presented as a disturbance to philosophical thought, even the ‘‘absolute disturbance’’ of ‘‘an absolute alterity’’ (PE 64). This God is the philosopher’s stone, to be sure, but ‘‘a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense ’’ (Isa. 8:14, 1 Peter 2:8 KJV) rather than the keystone or the cornerstone of the temple of Being as Presence. But (to return to ‘‘God and Philosophy’’), while the taunt that rational theology stands in vassalage to philosophy again evokes Heidegger’s critique, it does not merely echo it. In the first place, the problem with rational theology is not its Seinsvergessenheit. ‘‘If the intellectual understanding of the biblical God, theology, does not reach to the level of philosophical thought, that is not because it thinks of God as a being without first explicating the ‘being of this being,’ but because in thematizing God it brings God into the course of being. But, in the most unlikely way . . . the God of the Bible signifies the beyond being, transcendence’’ (154). The issue is transcendence, not the ontological difference.5 Second, rational theology tries to take divine transcendence into account ‘‘with adverbs of height applied to the verb being; God is said to exist eminently or par excellence.’’ For Heidegger, to speak of God as the Highest Being is the first step toward onto-theology. But Levinas asks, ‘‘And does not the modality which this adverb . . . expresses modify the verbal meaning of the verb to be to the point of excluding it from the thinkable as something inapprehendable, excluding it from the esse showing itself, that is, showing itself meaningfully in a theme?’’ (GP 154; cf. 159). In other words, does not the metaphor of height deconstruct the ontological totality rather than constitute it onto-theologically?6 What is the ontological totality that needs to be deconstructed if transcendence is to prevail over immanence, if the other is to avoid reduction to the same, if the God of the Bible is to escape the vassalage that rational theology accepts? In this essay Levinas describes it in terms of four themes against which he wages a sustained polemic: (1) being as manifestation, (2) meaning as thematization, (3) the present as the time when being becomes manifest as thematized meaning, and...

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