ABSTRACT
Among many other philosophers of religion, Levinas understands the content of the religions of the book to be not faith in an unseeable divinity or unforeseeable end, but acts of justice in daily life. “The realm of religion is neither belief, nor dogmatics, but event, passion, and intense activity.”2 These acts open onto eternity in a completely ethical understanding of transcendence. “Ethics is not simply the corollary of the religious but is, of itself, the element in which religious transcendence receives its original meaning.”3 For all of its association with transcendence, justice is also markedly immanent, for this justice assumes shape in the world, in social relations, in the intersubjective relation. “The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face…It is our relations with men…that give theological concepts their only signification.”4 This is not an easy romanticism; to the contrary, the commitment to this understanding of justice is informed by a deep sense of the terrors of history. Levinas tells the story of Leon Blum who wrote in his prison camp that he could not accept that the judgment of his historical present, the triumph of Nazism, could prevail in the end: “A man in prison continues to believe in an unrevealed future and invites one to work in the present for the most distant things, of which the present is an irrefutable negation.”5 But we must not understand this “unrevealed future” as the entry of God into the world: “One only comes into relation with what is other, infinite and transcendent when we interact with another human being in their specificity.”6 Social justice is also transcendent in the sense that no experience gives rise to the idea of justice or confirms it: the good do not prosper for their goodness and evil is not defeated insofar as it is evil. Rather, the world shows itself to us so often as a battlefield of warring self-interests that the Hobbesian imaginary that presupposes this endless conflict has given rise to the various forms of contractual theory that have dominated liberal political theory ever since. Nonetheless, this craving for the simplest (and most difficult to achieve), notion of justice is at the core of religious sensibility.7 This justice that is beyond economic, retributive, and absolute delimitations, whose only guarantor is transcendence, can be only registered paradoxically as utterly immanent, in human acts of goodness. Not a justice that controls a primordial war for scarce goods, this justice is figured as
generous, an ever-flowing abundance: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-24).
