ABSTRACT
David Tracy writes that God is infinite love. Tracy traces the history of ideas, identifying moments when God, conceived as infinite, intersects with ethics. The arc drawn by Tracy begins with Plotinus (204/5–270), who first conceives of God as the infinite One, the dynamic source of all reality, but impersonal, uncaring, and ineffable. Tracy then focuses on Gregory of Nyssa (335–95). Unlike Plotinus’ss infinite One, Gregory’s Christian God is infinite love. For Gregory, Christians who live ethical and spiritual lives of authentic freedom (their chief attribute since they are imago dei) move out of themselves (ecstasis) toward ever-greater loving desire for God and love of neighbor. Tracy’s retracing of history ends with the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who, unique in his time, developed an ethics of the infinite. For Levinas, the Other (person) makes an infinite moral claim on us. Tracy brings Levinas in conversation with Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa because, by comparing them, he argues that we may discern a distinctive ethics of the Infinite. He hopes that attention to the concept of the infinite will become standard in theological ethics because God, as infinite, opens, rather than resolves evil and tragedy.
