In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

201 eight Kierkegaard Beyond Onto-theology to Love of God For Levinas, as we have seen, there is only the slightest hint of cosmological transcendence. The focus is entirely on epistemic and ethical transcendence , and the thesis is quite clear: transcendence is fundamentally an ethical or personal matter and epistemic transcendence is its necessary condition. Only that which exceeds comprehension retains enough alterity to put my freedom in question. Only that which is beyond intentionality by enacting an inverse intentionality in which I am no longer the Sinngeber, the origin of meaning, can call me to responsibility. Only the voice that escapes my vision, or perhaps turns my gaze into hearing (‘‘the face speaks’’), occupies the height that deserves the name transcendence. It is the human other, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, who speak to me from this height, unconstrained by my horizons, which they nevertheless interrupt and invade. God does not appear as an independent agent in this scene, which is why cosmological transcendence leaves the barest trace on the radar screen. So Levinas, whose whole thought can be said to focus on the problem of transcendence, is of no direct help in our inquiry into the nature of divine transcendence. Given the power of his account of transcendence and Ethical and Religious Transcendence 202 its crucial link to the self-transcendence of ethical responsibility, that’s a pity. But perhaps we can find him helpful after all by asking how it would look if, instead of substituting the neighbor for God, as he does, we reverse his reversal and try to think God as the voice that addresses us from on high. My thesis in this chapter is that that is exactly what we find in Kierkegaard,1 that Levinas’ account of ethical transcendence provides a splendid heuristic for reading Kierkegaard’s account2 of religious transcendence because the two have the same structure. Talk of cosmological transcendence takes place in abstract, metaphysical categories that all too easily (but not necessarily)3 lend themselves to ontotheological thinking. Talk of ethical and religious transcendence is inescapably personal and, as such, resists onto-theological games and gestures. The mediating link is epistemic transcendence. It can be expressed in abstract, impersonal categories such as finite and infinite, capacity and incapacity, containment and excess. But the moment it goes beyond mystery to revelation, or links mystery essentially to revelation (since only God knows God and our knowledge of God depends on what God tells us), the pantheistic doctrine of mystery (as in Plotinus) is decisively left behind in an essentially interpersonal account of our knowledge of God. Revelation is an asymmetrical I-Thou relation in which the Thou has precedence over the I. This opens the door to an interpersonal religious transcendence in which the cognitive dimension with its dialectic of unconcealment and concealment is teleologically suspended in relations of obedience, trust, worship, and fellowship. *** In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio presents the religious relation as faith. In other words, faith is his name for self-transcendence in the face of divine transcendence. At the very outset he sharply distinguishes faith from knowledge, at least from that knowledge thought to be the highest by the best and brightest of his culture, namely speculative philosophy, a.k.a. the system or science (FT 5–8). Were it not for the satirical disrespect he shows for the latter, it might seem that he is invoking Plato’s divided line, in which pistis 1. Looking back, we can see that such address is what Spinoza and Hegel eliminate from their accounts of ‘‘revelation’’ and what Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Barth include in theirs. 2. By ‘‘Kierkegaard’s account’’ I mean the collection of accounts he presents for our consideration, sometimes pseudonymously, sometimes in his own name. Following his wish, I shall attribute the pseudonymous works to the pseudonymous authors. 3. In theistic contexts, cosmological transcendence is understood in terms of a personal Creator, and the causal and cosmic dimensions rightly find their telos in communion and covenant, where the impersonal is aufgehoben in the personal and the onto-theological project pales into insignificance . The affirmation of creation is not the attempt to render the world intelligible in accord with the principle of sufficient reason but the identification of the one who is worshiped. ‘‘Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth’’ (Ps. 124:8). [3.17.184.90] Project MUSE (2024...

Share