Beyond atheism and atheology: The divine humanism of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Is the divine a meaningful and indispensable element of moral responsibility? Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics have brought new expression to the question of God and the Good. Contemporary engagements with Levinas’ provocation, however, have generated a morass of contrary judgments and enigmatic explications, including praise and criticism for its atheology, secular transcendence, and crypto-religious conceit. The essay takes issue with secular and atheistic interpretations of Levinas, arguing that his mature ethics offer a philosophical species of divine humanism, one that justifies the indispensable significance of the divine for moral responsibility. It examines the philosophical problems that lead to the creation of new phenomenological descriptions for divine transcendence, and it sheds light on the seemingly erratic scattering of divine names—infinite, third person, trace, immemorial past, absence, beyond being, illeity—as improvisational orchestrations for God at the margins of moral responsibility.