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Emmanuel Levinas and the Problem of Meaningless Suffering: the Holocaust as a Test Case
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Johann Baptist Metz has exhorted Christian theologians to discard “system concepts” in favor of “subject concepts” in their theologizing. This revisioning of Christian theology recovers the primacy of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the individual from totalizing doctrinal formulations and systems that function, for Metz, without reference to the subject. In short, a revisionist Christian theology in light of the Holocaust recovers the preeminence of the inviolability of individual human life.
How can such a revisioning be accomplished in the realm of Christian spirituality? This article will utilize the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to assert the primacy of ethics as “first philosophy” replacing ontology, and by implication the ontological foundations undergirding Christian spirituality, with the ethical relation. Such a relation is the basis for a new Christian spirituality that posits the primacy of merciful and compasionate action in the face of conditions of life in extremity.
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References
1 Delbo, Survivor Charlotte, “Arrivals, Departures” in Rittner, Carol and Roth, John K., eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993), 60.Google Scholar
2 Metz, Johann Baptist, “Facing the Jews: Christian Theology after Auschwitz” in Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler and Tracy, David, eds., Concilium, 175 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), 27.Google Scholar
3 Yet Delbo writes: “How did I manage to extricate myself from [Auschwitz] when I returned? What did I do so as to be alive today? People often ask me that question, to which I continue to look for an answer, and still find none” (Delbo, Charlotte, “Days and Memory” in Roth, Rittner and, eds., Different Voices, 330Google Scholar).
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6 Ibid., 22; emphasis in original.
7 Langer, Lawrence, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982), 127.Google Scholar
8 Admittedly, the term “spirituality” evokes a wide variety of meanings. Michael Downey identifies four “levels” of spirituality: “a fundamental dimension of human being; the full range of human experience as it is brought to bear on the quest for integration through self-transcendence; the expression of insights about this experience; a disciplined study” (see his Understanding Christian Spirituality [New York: Paulist, 1997], 43Google ScholarPubMed). I am focusing on ethical responsibility as a means of self-transcendence that seeks relationship with God through the enactment of care for the other. It is important to note that my focus in no way means to reduce the general term “spirituality” to the ethical relation. However, I believe that such a focus does deserve a concentrated articulation in a post-Holocaust milieu. I am also writing on the assumption that all spiritualities are conceived on the basis of some prior sense of the nature of human subjectivity.
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26 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Substitution” in Hand, Sean, ed., The Levinas Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989,) 89.Google Scholar This essay is the main chapter in the most mature statement of his thought, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).Google Scholar
27 See Terrence Des Pres' discussion of psychoanalytic studies which make such interpretative claims, claims of which he is quite critical on 56-57 of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
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33 Ibid., 91.
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42 Ibid., 109.
43 Survivor Olga Lengyel as quoted in Pres, Des, The Survivor, 47.Google Scholar
44 The following illustration is taken from Paldiel, Mordecai, Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 131–32.Google Scholar
45 Ibid., 132.
46 Ibid.
47 Such a transformed notion of human subjectivity would have to be undergirded by a similarly transformed theological anthropology.
48 See note 8, above.
49 See Ethics and Infinity, 92, where Levinas declares: “In the access to the face there is certainly also access to the idea of God.”
50 I have often been asked whether I am suggesting that people quit their jobs in order to devote themselves to such practice full time. My answer has always been a resounding “no!” I am not advocating any shift in professional or vocational commitment. I am advocating a transformed understanding of human subjectivity, as explained above, and a recovery of the realization that God is encountered in the face of the suffering other. I enact my ethical responsibility wherever my professional and vocational commitments place me in the world.
51 The important question of the complicity of members of Christian denominations in allowing the Holocaust to occur must not overshadow the fact that many Christians devoted themselves tirelessly to the rescue of Jews without regard for the consequences. But the examination of Christian complicity must be the topic of another essay.
52 See Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews, chap. 8, “The Significance of the ‘Righteous’ Deeds,” for his profile of the rescuer.
53 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Ethics as First Philosophy” in Hand, , ed., The Levinas Reader, 85.Google Scholar