183
need liberation from the imperialistic knowledge of liberty would have to appear as unthinkably irrational. Otherwise, the call of holiness would simply be sublated back into the knowledge of power. Irrationally, Levinas claims that prior to cognition, analysis, categorization, or application is justice. Ethical knowledge is received as a gift by faithfulness. Knowledge that is saving cannot be by works.
184
Further, revelation itself is conceived of as operating in an individualistic model. In Levinas, the Other is as much of an individual as the Same. Therefore, the actors in Levinas’s ethical drama are numerically singular. Smith too has noted the absence of the church or even an interpretive community in his early works of FoI and ST.154 Recall Smith’s confession that he had in mind the isolated Protestant, alone in her prayer closet during these early works.155 Smith’s
acknowledgements of these shortcomings suggest that the function of revelation requires community. I would press further and state that language, knowledge, and revelation require communion.156
In his work on the grammatical origins of meaning, Bourdieu argues that “the most rigorously rationalized law is never anything more than an act of social magic which works.”157 Bourdieu’s point is that meaning is a function of a social economy and never strictly just the rules of grammar or dictionary definitions, no matter how far back one travels in the
etymologies. The meaning of words is authorized by communities. The more tightly one wishes to define a term, the more homogenously regulated the community must become. Bourdieu uses the example of the term ‘group,’ which in mathematics has a very narrow meaning, much narrower than that same term has in the general populace.158 That narrow meaning is possible only because of the high bar that regulates how one may join the community of mathematicians.
154 Smith, Fall, 8. Smith, “Continuing the Conversation,” 216.
155 Ibid.
156 Given that modern community, defined here as a voluntary association of likeminded individuals, is itself based in a prior commitment to the individual, I use the term ‘communion’ to denote a fundamental commitment to relationality instead.
157 Bourdieu, Language, 42.
158 Ibid., 40.
185
Arguably, Smith’s project in ST is to tightly regulate the use of ‘concept.’ If Bourdieu is right, then Smith’s project could succeed only in a small, highly regulated community. Of course, philosophers and theologians rarely aggregate into likeminded groups. Regulation happens here more at levels of commitment (e.g., to the poor; to divine sovereignty) rather than definitional ones. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Smith’s concept of the ‘concept’ becomes the only legitimate one, carrying with it a set of norms that regulate spiritual, religious, and theological practices. Yet, this is what Smith seems to think must happen if theology and philosophy are to avoid the type of violence he eschews.
Recall that Smith’s larger project was to examine the conditions of the possibility of philosophy and theology. Levinas’s bold project was arguably the establishment of a new
starting point for philosophy and a new foundation for epistemology.159 There is something prior to or before knowledge, which is the relationship of our being encountered by the Other. This relationship reveals a transcendent obligation that we have described as holiness. Rather than knowledge then emerging out of my will or my liberty or the Cartesian assertion of my self, a mode of epistemological voluntarism in which I decide for myself what the good or the true is for me,160 rather than that basis of knowledge, the call of holiness becomes the basis for knowledge. This call of holiness demands my faithfulness, my sanctification. Peperzak noted
159 “. . . transcendence, when taken seriously . . . cannot be respected unless by a thought that overcomes the totality of physis, and, in this sense, is metaphysical” (Peperzak, Other, 131). In this metaphysics, which might be
considered novel in the history of Western philosophy, it is the relation of the Other to the Same that is the mode of transcendence. This relation becomes the primal horizon of meaning. It is important, for this horizon of meaning, that the Other be in a position of height, indicating a non-reciprocal, irreversible relation of inequality. I cannot command the Other, who always already commands me.
160 “To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom” (Levinas, Totality, 45).
186
that this is not a novel idea. We find a similar notion in Nicholas Malebranche, who argued that
“all knowledge of finite things is in reference to the idea of the infinite, which serves as their foundation, and that this ‘ultimate knowledge’ is of a different structure and quality.”161 The metaphysics from which Levinas is working is based on a ‘logic’ or structure of eschatology. It is to that topic that we now turn.
161 Peperzak, Other, 66.
187 CHAPTER 4
The Daughter of Time?
“If experience changes in the course of time, then knowledge is a daughter of time.”1
“Jesus, whose body is to be broken and whose blood is to be shed, is not just a sign. He is more than a sign.”2