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    Raschke - From Religion to Faith - JCRT 4.1

    From Religion to Faith: Levinasian Ethics and the Grammar of Address

    Carl A. Raschke
    University of Denver

    Terrible Spirit, your discourse has smitten me to the ground.

    —Johann Gottlieb Fichte

    The theoretical question of ‘religion’ is essentially that of ‘divinity,’ what the Greeks from Homer through the early Church fathers understand as ho theos, that which ‘shines forth.’ That question belongs appropriately neither to ‘theology’ nor to philosophy. It is not a question ‘about’ God, whatever that token may indicate in a ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘multi-traditional’ sense. Nor does it cycle within the orbit of what in these later decades has acquired the non-descript classification of ‘religious studies,’ or ‘the study of religion.’ It is a question that can only be posed in the breach. The query itself assaults the lattice of significations that girds the discourse we in the Occident have come to know as ‘questioning.’ It pries open a space; it constitutes a style of 'criture that is equally a means of ‘erasure’, giving us an epiphany of darkness that has nothing to do with the lucidity of the proposition, representation, or statement which the theoretical mind anticipates.

    > With you inspiring me I shall be affirming true things, which by your will I draw out these words. For I do not believe I give true exposition if anyone other than you is inspiring me. You are the truth, but every man is a liar.[1]

    Notes

    Carl A. Raschke is professor of religious studies at the University of Denver and senior editor of the Journal for Religious and Cultural Theory. His major books include The End of Theology (The Davies Group, 2000), Fire and Roses: Postmodernity and the Thought of the Body (SUNY 1996), The Engendering God (Westminster Press, 1995), Painted Black (Harper Collins, 1990), Theological Thinking (Scholars Press, 1988). He is the author of over 200 popular and scholarly articles on subjects ranging from postmodern religious thought to computer-mediated education to new religious movements. He is formerly president of the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains Region of the American Academy of Religion and an editor of several series with the American Academy of Religion. He is also a well-known national media personality.

    ’ 2002 Carl Rasckhe. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/04.1/raschke/

    1. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 296. ↩︎

    2. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p. 107. ↩︎

    3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans Max M’ller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), p. 104. ↩︎

    4. Husserl, p. 107. ↩︎

    5. Husserl, p. 110. ↩︎

    6. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martin Nijhoff, 1987), p. 49. ↩︎

    7. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 52. ↩︎

    8. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 52. ↩︎

    9. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 53. ↩︎

    10. Rene Descartes, The Meditations, trans. John Vietch (London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), p. 248. ↩︎

    11. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 54. ↩︎

    12. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 54. ↩︎

    13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh PA: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), p. 211. ↩︎

    14. Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1999), p. 276. ↩︎

    15. Emmanuel Levinas_, Entre Nous:_ On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 137. ↩︎

    16. Entre Nous, p. 137. ↩︎

    17. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 149. ↩︎

    18. Totality and Infinity, p. 281. ↩︎

    19. This point is emphasized by Hans-Dieter Gondek, Cogito and S’paration, in Sarah Harsym (ed.), Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 30. ↩︎

    20. Levinas writes that ‘for Descartes, the idea of God is innate to the soul, and I am more certain of God than of myself: the finite is known against the background of the infinite. The intellectual priority of the infinite is henceforth added to its ontological priority.’ Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 65. ↩︎

    21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 134. ↩︎