Dehellenisation and Jewish Thought (Buber, Levinas, Derrida) in the Modern World

In his notable Regensburg Address of 2006, Benedict XVI discussed the intense dehellenisation that has been taking place to philosophy and most notably theology since the Reformation. He particularly mentions Adolf von Harnack who argued that the Catholic Church represented a perversion of the original gospel message taught by Jesus as a result of the accumulation over the centuries of philosophical and theological elements that were heavily influenced by Greek thought.¹ Harnack, using historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, attempted to strip away these elements to return to, as he saw it, the original Jesus and his original message.

Benedict called for a reflection on this process of dehellenisation. He notes that “[t]he New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit” and that as a result a certain inseparable marriage had taken place between biblical and Greek thought. Although, as he says, “there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures”, it would be imprudent to discard everything that originated from that time, as Harnack attempted to do, because a lot of Greek influence on our faith has been enriching and has opened up for us a deeper meaning of it. In this respect, he particularly points out the use of reason in the realm of faith: reason and faith are inseparable and that it is man’s obligation to think rationally on such matters. 

What Benedict says may be true. But his insinuation that a certain marriage between Greek and biblical thought had taken place, is interesting because it states that a second realm outside of the Greek is present in our faith: a Jewish one. This is in fact what the Church teaches: namely, that our faith is built on Judaism. We took the Old Testament in its entirety and grafted the New Testament onto it. The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate on The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions states this: “[the Church cannot forget that] she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles”.² Indeed, Christianity is a fulfilment of Judaism, it builds on Judaism, it unpacks Judaism and lets it flower. Judaism is central to our religion. As John Paul II said during his visit to the great synagogue of Rome in 1986: “For us, the Jewish religion is not an external phenomenon but belongs in some way to the internal reality of our religion”. 

The assertive dehellenisation process that Benedict talked about in 2006 has also been taken up by Jewish thinkers in recent times. But since this process is attempting to recover the core of ancient Jewish wisdom, which is the core of our faith, there is nothing misguided in considering what this thought has to offer because it could enrich our Christian faith with dormant ideas that we have perhaps neglected or not noticed yet. 

This post, therefore, is going to present what contemporary Jewish thinkers, inspired by ancient books such as the Torah, have been proposing in the realm of philosophy and theology. Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas will first be introduced. Jacques Derrida will follow with his criticisms and contributions to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Susan Handelman will also be discussed around her perceptions of the Jew/Greek dichotomy. Then, a discussion will be presented on what these contemporary Jewish thinkers are proposing and how it fits into the modern world and our Church. Finally, the post will be concluded accordingly. 

Since this is a very long post, I’ll provide here a table of contents so that you can jump to a particular section as you see fit. Also, every footnote can be hovered over to view its contents so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page each time you wish to read something additional.

Martin Buber and the Two Types of Faith

Martin Buber in the first part of his book “Two Types of Faith”³ goes back to St Paul and suggests that he instigated a completely different outlook on faith that stands in stark contrast to how faith was understood by the Jewish people that preceded him. Buber argues that the Hebrew word for faith, emunah, conveys a more personal aspect towards God. That is, when I have faith (emunah) it is built first and foremost on the fact that “I trust someone, without being able to offer sufficient reasons for my trust in him”.⁴ In other words, emunah is immersed in a relationship of trust and hence is more a state of contact where one engages one’s entire being to accept that which one acknowledges to be true.

When writing in Greek, Paul used the term pistis for faith. Buber posits that by using this word, Paul loses the entire relationship dimension of emunah and creates an understanding of faith that now rests more upon reason rather than one’s entire being. Buber says that from St Paul onward faith became more of an acknowledging of certain doctrines to be true such that faith became an act rather than a status. So, rather than trusting someone, I now only need to acknowledge things to be true to be regarded is having faith.

This difference between the two types of faith is significant. In the first type, as Buber argues, man finds himself; in the second, man is converted to it such that “[t]he man who finds himself in it is primarily the member of a community whose covenant with the Unconditioned includes and determines him within it; the man who is converted to it is primarily an individual, one who has become an isolated individual”.⁵ Hence, with Paul an entire realm of faith is lost. Buber argues that this realm is lost as a direct result of the hellenisation of faith. Firstly, the term pistis loses the context in which emunah is used in books such as the Torah and the way Jesus would have used it; and secondly, the act of accepting articles of faith and holding them henceforth to be true is of Greek origin.⁶ 

Whether St Paul did not comprehend the original meaning of emunah, as Buber asserts, is debatable. Numerous works have been published to argue that St Paul was more Hebrew than Greek  and hence had a grasp of the fullness of the Jewish faith.⁷ This fullness can be perceived in his  works when they are taken in their entirety and when Paul’s intentions and reasons for writing to the Gentiles are also considered.⁸ This discussion, however, can be put aside because one thing is for certain: subsequent readings of the New Testament by the Gentiles, who would not have had the Hebrew background of Paul, would have more easily overlooked the richness of emunah. Even to this day, it can be safely stated that the root meaning of pistis is not known by the average Christian.

Buber is therefore correct to say that hellenisation has taken something away from our faith – or at least it has made something more difficult to ascertain, especially when one reads the New Testament in a superficial way and disconnected with the traditions and contexts associated with the Old Testament. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the effects of hellenisation have been present in the Church from its very outset. 

Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and the Other

In his book “I and Though”⁹, Martin Buber also initiated a new philosophy, referred to sometimes as the philosophy of dialogue. The main thesis of this philosophy is that man has two radically different attitudes towards other men and things. One attitude is characterised as an experience, the other as a relation. 

The former attitude, the one characterised by experience, is always one of superficiality. It is an encounter with another thing or person devoid of its potential fullness. Such an encounter is one in which “[m]an travels over the surface of things and experiences them”.¹⁰ Man here does not take an object’s entire existence into consideration but reduces it to a collection of aspects. For example, I can view an object or person from the vantage point of scientific laws, external aesthetics, achievements, and the like. Buber refers to this attitude as I-It; namely that me, my I, treats the other person or thing as an It. 

In contrast to the I-It attitude is the I-Thou relation. Here, my I allows for the entirety of the other object/person such that a relation is formed rather than an experience. In a relation, the infinite inherent in any thing or person is given respect: “In each we look towards and are aware of the eternal, of Thou”.¹¹ I do not try and conceptualise a person, I do not try and think about him by analysing him in metaphysical categories or in relation to other things in the world.¹² In fact, I do not use any categories at all nor any thought processes when establishing such a relation. The I-Thou attitude is primordial, originary. It is spoken and initiated before any intellectualisation or thematisation has taken place and, most importantly, it engages one’s entire being. 

In an experience, we have no part in the world. Experiences take place at the centre of our consciousness and as a result, we have no role in the forming of the world: “The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is “in him” and not between him and the world that the experience arises”.¹¹ Experience is one-sided. In a relation, however, we step out of ourselves, we allow the other object to be in its entirety and engage with it according to its dignity. In consequence, we enter into dialogue with this being. 

Emmanuel Levinas took up Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and gave it his own reworking in more ways than one, especially in the context of dehellenisation. In his work “Totality and Infinity”¹³ he discusses war and conflict and attributes their fundamental cause to be Western philosophy, which is founded on Greek thought. He states that Greek thought gives the tendency to universalise or totalise at the expense of individual identities. When we group people into categories such as nationality, religion, and social status, we do violence to the individuality of each person. The potential for I-Thou relations is lost in this violence and wars, being an example of one universal (e.g. an ideology) attempting to impose itself on another, are an effect of such a totalisation.¹⁴ 

In the realm of Western philosophy, Levinas was particularly critical of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He saw Heidegger’s submitting of all objects to a relational system (e.g. the fourfold) as such an example of violent holism.¹⁵ Martin Heidegger, then, and Western philosophy in general, suppresses the transcendence or the infinite inherent in the individual (that he termed “the Other”) by propagating totalisation (that he termed “the Same”). 

Levinas looked intently at the Same and the Other and the relationship between them. The Other was something closely related to Buber’s I-Thou relation with some significant differences. The Other is the Thou of Buber, in the sense that it is a primordial relation with my I preceding any thematising or intellectualising, a relation that incorporates the entire being of the I. The Other is likewise something external to the I, something that is outside of the self and that resists all forms of sublation into consciousness or any other form of totalising. Alphonso Lingis has observed¹⁶ that in this respect the Other is like an individual substance but in the strictest way possible. That is, the Other is a substance that is not dissolved into any system of thought. It is an autonomous substance closed off in itself. Here, Levinas does not deny that objects are part of relational systems, he just posits that inside these systems they are like concrete entities or islands to themselves – and that this aspect of reality is neglected by Greek thought.¹⁷  

The relation, however, between the I and the Other is not symmetrical, as Levinas suggested that Buber claimed it to be.¹⁸ Whereas Buber saw the I and the Thou participating equally in a reciprocal relationship of dialogue (a co-presence), Levinas saw an encounter with the Other as immediately calling upon responsibility towards it. It is as if the Other stands like a high tower before the I, like a master that demands duty towards it. In Levinas, there is undoubtedly an asymmetry in this relation, based on the aspect of commitment.¹⁹ 

In this respect, Levinas saw the ethical preceding any other form of thought or philosophy (e.g. metaphysics). The originary event concerning the Other and the responsibility it imposes on the I should precede and direct all other forms of thought or aspects of human life such as politics. Levinas hence created a new point of orientation founded on a primordial relation between human beings – this for him is the first philosophy. 

Finally, it should be noted that a characteristic of Levinas’s thought surrounding the Other is that the infinite realm of the Other emerges upon confrontation with a person’s face and then in the direct speech of communication. Each face is unique and it is this uniqueness and a face’s exteriority that orders and ordains us towards the call of responsibility. 

Levinas and the Jewish Tradition

Levinas in bringing attention upon the infinite realm that an encounter with the Other produces, is inherently drawing upon Jewish tradition. Several times he has stated the need to translate this tradition into the language of philosophy: “I would say… that philosophy can use religious experiences, but then it is already a Septuagint, which translates them into Greek. And, if you wish, the work of the Septuagint remains unfinished.”²⁰ He is explicitly stating here that in his works he is trying to translate the wisdom in ancient scriptural writings into the language of philosophy and academia.²¹ 

Indeed, when one reads through “Totality and Infinity” one cannot help but notice the frequent references to religion, holiness, and monotheism that were inspired by the Hebrew Bible. For example, when referring to the face as commanding responsibility, the terminus of the responsibility is often quoted by Levinas as being the widow, the orphan, and the stranger – these figures are repeatedly mentioned in the Old Testament when God commands us to do good unto the other.²² And one of the fundamental expressions said in the face is “you shall not commit murder”²³ (murder here understood more in the totalising sense rather than physical)²⁴ – an obvious reference to one of the Ten Commandments. One cannot also help but notice him marvelling at the miracle of creation that the I is a part of:  “The marvel of creation … results in a being capable of receiving a revelation, learning that it is created, and putting itself in question. The miracle of creation lies in creating a moral being”²⁵.²⁶ Likewise, Levinas’s placing an importance on the face as a gateway to the infinite can be traced back to Exodus where it describes how God was due to pass before Moses: “You cannot see my face ;for man shall not see me and live… and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (Ex 33:20-23). Although Moses could look at God’s back, His face was something that he could not even glimpse at – the gateway to the infinite here would have been too much for him to endure. 

Undoubtedly, Levinas’s philosophy is distinctively Jewish. In fact, Oona Ajzenstat, president of the Continental Philosophy in a Jewish Context Group, devoted her PhD research²⁷ to the question of the nature of the relationship between Levinas’s philosophy and his religion. She particularly examined Levinas’s usage of images and ideas as being inspired or directly quoted from the Bible, Kabbalah, and Talmud. Her conclusion on the matter was that “Levinas’ Jewishness is at the core of his philosophy.”²⁸

Jacques Derrida and his Thought

Jacques Derrida was also a Jewish philosopher who undertook a certain dehellenisation of Western thought. Like Levinas, he saw philosophy up until now to be fundamentally Greek:

“The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source… the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophise, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium”

Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 2005), 81.

In this sense, all manner of thinking and even questioning is of a Greek nature: “But not only what is in question – philosophy – is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek.”²⁹ Hence, for Derrida it was important to go back to the origin of philosophy and scrutinise what we have up until now taken for granted to see if this has been placing limitations on our thinking. In this sense, he attempted a “deconstruction” of Greek thought; that is, he broke it down to understand how specific parts of philosophy might be affecting the whole of Western thought. 

In his undertaking of a deconstruction of Greek philosophy, Derrida took particular notice to the philosophy of Levinas. He elaborated on many of his ideas as well as critiqued some of them. This is especially apparent in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” which is entirely devoted to a commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of Levinas’s thought. 

Derrida goes along with Levinas with his idea that to live for the Other is the highest good and he agrees with him that the likes of Heidegger and Hegel are neglecting this Other and the infinity inherently present in it. In commenting on this matter Derrida develops the criticisms of the metaphor of light that Levinas alludes to in his essay “Existence and Existants”.³⁰ 

As Derrida states, the metaphor of light has been entrenched in the tradition of Western thought since the time of Plato. In Plato’s Cave³¹, only shadows existed. When a prisoner escaped, he recognised the origin of the shadows as being light and ascertained the goodness of it. Darkness as the opposite of light, became subordinated to it. It followed upon light in time and was perceived to be a corruption of it, or rather a lack of it. Darkness and light were certainly not equal entities. 

This metaphor of light became the core idea in which the world submitted itself to the light of reason. Darkness is ignorance, light is knowledge as well as enlightenment and truth. Descartes would, for example, say that only the light of reason can give truth beyond doubt;³² and Kant would similarly say that truth cannot escape the light of reason.³³ Derrida, however, following upon Levinas, says that the world is not entirely intelligible; that there are aspects of reality where the light of reason cannot reach – this pertains especially to the other person who has an infinitness associated with him. In the metaphor of light, what is being assumed is that only what can be seen by light exists. But reality should be conceived more as darkness where light can only reach small sections of it. And in the midst of this darkness or infinity, are unexplored selves, with me included. 

So, when one allows for the existence of darkness as an equal entity to light, one allows for a true experience of the otherness of the other.³⁴ Without such a respect for this darkness of reality, one does violence to people, as Derrida says here: “the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. The ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and techno-political possession.”³⁵ Hence, when acknowledging darkness in philosophy, we become humbled before objects – in darkness people lose their graspability and avoid the bane of the Same. 

As was stated earlier, Derrida did criticise Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics”. For example, he says that Levinas claims to desire to break free from Western philosophy “as if from oppression itself”.³⁶ In attempting to do so, he interrogates it initially and opposes its categories only to return to them later in his work do push his position. In other words, he makes use of concepts that he rejects in order to destroy them – he presupposes them while opposing them. And therefore, he also presupposes the Greeks. Derrida claims that this is inevitable since Levinas is trying to do philosophy, and the language of philosophy is Greek. The deconstruction, then, is that Levinas is actually also a Greek. However, as Derrida argues, Levinas has taken a step in the right direction with his dehellenisation because his thought “fundamentally no longer seeks to be a thought of Being and phenomenality”³⁶ but as something concerned with otherness and the face that escapes phenomenality. 

Derrida also criticised Levinas’s prioritising of speech over writing. He tied this criticism to an overall critique of Western philosophy that prioritises one element over another in certain dichotomies or polarities that are inherent in our language and thinking. This criticism was an extension of the criticism of the metaphor of light (as discussed above):

Western thought, says Derrida, has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities: good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs. culture, speech vs. writing.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Translator’s Introduction, p. x.

The problem, says Derrida, is that the latter term is always seen as a corruption of the former rather than being held in opposing tension.³⁷ In this respect, Levinas, gave privilege to speech over the written word because of the speaker’s presence to the listener. Derrida goes on to say that giving a higher priority to writing would in fact fit more into Levinas’s idea of the encounter with the Other as other, which is more of an encounter with absence as opposed to presence and immediacy.³⁸ 

Derrida and The Jewish Tradition

Like Levinas, Derrida is also considered by many to be a representative of Jewish thought.³⁹ His process of deconstruction, for example, is seen as being parallel to the way the rabbis approached the Torah. But most significantly, his emphasis on the precedence of the written word over the spoken is acknowledge as being inspired by his ideas of God who was an absence rather than a presence. Moreover, in rabbinic Judaism there is the tradition of Torah from Heaven (Torah min Hashamayim). This is a midrash, mystical tradition that states that the Torah was written in heaven and available to God before it was dictated to Moses. For example, in a Tannaitic story one can find the following text: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘The daughters of Zelophehad’s daughters speak rightly (Numbers 27:6) for that is how the whole episode is written before Me in heaven’.”⁴⁰ And then there is also the testimony of the sage Rabbi Akiva (referred to as the “Chief of the Sages” in the Talmud):

No one should read from the Torah without first rehearsing it two or three times, for even concerning the Holy and Blessed One, who gives the power of speech to all His creatures, and who had the whole Torah spread out before him as a single document, we learn: ‘Then He saw and spoke it; He prepared it and searched it out,’ and only afterwards ‘spoke it to man’.

As quoted in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generation, ed. and tr. by Gordon Tucker (Continuum, NY:2007), p. 331.

Susan Handelman and Jewish Logic

In her book “The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory”, Susan Handelman also draws a strong line of separation between the Greek and Jewish worlds. This time, however, in the field of interpretation. Handelman attempts to show that Western interpretation methods are solely founded on the Greek propensity to separate words from being. From the times of Plato and Aristotle a word has named and signified a thing – this is in line with the meaning of the term for ‘word’ in Greek (onoma), which is synonymous with ‘name’. A word, therefore, points to an external reality. And when it does, attention is steered away from language towards ontology or a purely rational system of signs. In this sense, the status of words is depreciated.⁴¹ Similarly, Western interpretation follows Aristotle’s logic based on subject-predicate relations between two terms. This scientific mode of deduction is the ideal form of all judgement and reasoning. Every declarative statement is either true or false according to its conformity with reality. The relations between propositions in this logic are not examined.

The Jewish field of interpretation, however, is different. The Hebrew counterpart for word (davar) means ‘word’ as well as ‘thing’. The disruption between the name of a thing and its being is non-existent here. Reality and true being is in the word. The word is where the realm of meaning lies. For example, the text of the Torah is represented by Rabbis as the image of God: as God is inexhaustible, so is the Torah. The Rabbis, according to Handelman, do not try to find a being that points outside of the Torah, but treat the Torah as a being and attempt to find the multiplicity of truths inherent in it. This piece of text as quoted by Handelman in her book summarises this notion neatly:

When Rabbi Meir came to Rabbi Ishmael and gave his profession as a scribe [of the Torah] the latter required of him the utmost care, “for if you leave out a single letter or write a single letter too much, you will be found as one who destroys the whole world”.

(Eruv. 13a)

Indeed, text is a world to itself. So, in interpreting text, the Rabbinic form of interpretation uses a different logic. This logic is more pluralistic, indeterminate. Aristotle’s logic (and that of Western thought) is in the realm of “is” that points to a separate reality; Rabbinic is in the more playful “as if”. The former is restricted to a scientific reasoning or form of deduction; the latter suspends Aristotle’s logic and can enter more into the realm of poetry, metaphor, rhetoric, metonymy, and the like. Using such a different logic where the primary reality is linguistic opens up an entirely different world of interpretation. 

Discussion of Jewish Thought and the Church

Having presented a brief overview of Jewish interpretation and contemporary thought, a few over-generalisation or simplifications might be observed. Buber in “Two Types of Faith” realises that his divide between the faith of emunah and pistis is not an all-encompassing divide. Christianity with its reliance on Greek thought is not solely about articles of faith, and Judaism does not always follow the more personal faith of emunah. Very frequently the two camps can cross over: “When I treat the two types of faith… I do not mean that Jews in general and Christians in general believed thus and still believe… Each of the two has extended its roots into the other camp also”.⁴² For example, Buber notes articles of faith from the Jewish tradition (Sanhedrin X), which stipulate that one cannot share in eternal life without believing in three categories: the resurrection of the dead, the heavenly origin of the Torah, and the belief that God has an interest in earthly affairs.⁴³ And in Christianity, we know that from articles of faith (pistis), and hence reason, a relationship (emunah) can proceed. St John of the Cross argues for this: 

The articles and definitions of the faith are called silvered surfaces. In order to understand these words and those that follow, we must know that faith is compared to silver because of the propositions it teaches us, the truth and substance it involves being compared to gold. This very substance which we now believe, hidden behind the silver veil of faith, we shall clearly behold and enjoy hereafter; the gold of faith shall be made manifest”.

John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, XII.⁴⁴

What Buber does is limit the two faiths as being classic examples of faith in the early periods of the religions of Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, he concludes that faith understood as emunah has a greater propensity to engage one’s entire being in faith.⁴⁵ Stating that the entire faith of Christianity is shallow like he presented the pistis of Paul would be an over-simplification. 

We can find, however, cases of over-simplification or over-generalisation in a few of the other Jewish authors presented in this post. Handelman, for example, draws a clear line between Jewish and Greek (and hence Western) interpretation. She presents the two traditions as mutually exclusive. Recent scholarship, however, is showing more and more how Rabbinic Judaism had used the ideas of the Hellenistic civilisation for its own purposes. And also, on the reverse side, how parts of the New Testament reflect hermeneutical techniques very similar to later rabbinic midrash – the exegetical method, for example, in Matthew and Luke, appears to be very Jewish.⁴⁶

Likewise, to say that a separation of word and being does not exist in Jewish tradition could also be an exaggeration. The Sifre to Deuteronomy states the following: “If you wish to know Him who by His word created the world, study aggadah, for by doing this you will come to know Him who by His word created the world and you will cling to His ways”.⁴⁷ Here we can see the notion of the word pointing to an external reality.

In Levinas, also, we can witness a possible over-simplification of matters. As stated earlier, Levinas claims that a fundamental cause of wars and conflicts is to be found in Western philosophy’s habit to universalise or totalise at the expense of individual identities. The violence, as he claims, inherent in this philosophy spills into our everyday lives. In response, he created an ethics before First Philosophy. It can be argued, however, that pointing the finger at Greek philosophy in such a way is a gross misjudgement. Human nature and life in general is much more complex. As they say: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The further one ventures into the higher echelons of society, the more one perceives this. The power of thought, philosophy, and good in general dwindles easily before the lustre of the temporal. Undoubtedly, philosophy influences society⁴⁸ but the act of universalising seems too abstract an action to be blamed for conflicts. Perchance, Levinas was still in shock at the horrors of the atrocities he witnessed first-hand and was desperately trying to find a solution for humanity. That may be the case. Either way, it can be argued that this particular criticism of his towards Western thought is distant from everyday life. 

Despite the over-simplification of the Jew/Greek divide of Handelman’s and Levinas’s distance to everyday life, there is no doubt that Jewish thought has something distinct to offer. Benedict in Regensburg called for a reflection on the dehellenisation process currently in vogue. By referencing Harnack, he was perhaps indicating that the Greek world has much to give and one should not discard it entirely –  otherwise we might be left with something narrow like the one-dimensional Jesus of Harnack. One definitely should not disregard the immense good that our civilisation has reaped from the assimilation of Greek thought. 

But Greek language is not neutral. It inevitably draws those that use it to its thought. It would be fair to say that hitherto the Christian world has focused too much on the Greek at the expense of the Jewish. The fact that it took until Vatican II for a certain rapprochement between the Church and the Jews to take place is indicative of how much this is the case. The other spouse in the Jew/Greek marriage has been neglected – and we have lost out immensely in this. Buber rightly points out that pistis does not convey directly what emunah does. Not many Christian people would know the original meaning of the word for faith let alone the context in which it was used. One can only begin to imagine how much else we are depriving ourselves of by not being acquainted with the roots of our religion. It is a travesty in many respects. 

What may also be a travesty is the Church not recognising how much success Jewish thought is having in the secular world today. The likes of Levinas and Buber are known, referenced, and discussed world-wide. Martin Buber, for instance, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times and Nobel Peace Prize seven times. It appears as though these thinkers are doing something right. 

It is true that some parts of their thought may not be compatible with Christianity. Their extrapolation from Jewish tradition may not be without errors. This would need to be investigated. The first thing that comes to mind in this respect is Derrida’s claim of writing taking precedence over speech and whether this can be placed in accord with the Incarnation being the spoken Word of God. Not all rabbinic schools, however, would agree with Derrida on this point, either. And Handelman’s presentation of Jewish interpretation would also need to be investigated in light of Vatican II’s document Dei Verbum and how Scripture ought to be interpreted, namely in the literal and spiritual sense.⁴⁹ However, there is nothing in Dei Verbum that states that a different logic cannot be applied to hermeneutical exegesis. And if the Jewish interpretative method as presented by Handelman is an integral and intrinsic element of Jewish tradition, then since we have grafted our faith on this tradition, it ought to at least be given consideration – especially considering, as stated above, that this distinct form of interpretation is capable of introducing a new world to the reader. 

But there is undoubtedly an immense part of Jewish thought that is compatible with Christianity – this is to be expected considering its influences. The attitude of love towards neighbour and the cosmos, which constitutes the core of Christian faith and the foundation of our values, shines through Jewish thought. And as has been highlighted, this thought is having immense success in the contemporary secular world. Thomism, traditionally regarded as the philosophy of the Church⁵⁰, has been trying for centuries to steer contemporary thought out of its focus on the consciousness and the self into external reality.⁵¹ But not many are heeding this message. Predominantly because nobody outside of the Church understands the language of Aquinas any more; and also because when experience is attempted to be analysed in a thomistic framework, it frequently results in the argument, although logically coherent, looking forced or awkward.⁵² But Levinas has caught the attention of the academic world in this respect. For example, in his essay on Soren Kierkegaard he states: “Exteriority cannot match human inferiority”.⁵³ To project this message he has used the language employed by contemporary thinkers such as Heidegger and Husserl (even if he was critical of them). 

Moreover, Levinas has smuggled in a certain regard for the material world, which is also an aspect of our reality being partially overlooked by the philosophies of the mind. The Church has been attempting to bring the material world back into thought for a long time and likewise unsuccessfully. In Levinas, the face, the gateway to the infinite, is from the material world; it is our actual face that is this and not some idea or concept of the mind. The material world is important, it influences us immensely, it gives us joy as well as causes suffering and is capable of opening us to the immaterial world – Levinas has conveyed this, even if in a straightforward fashion.

If Jewish thought is to be considered by the Church, it will undoubtedly be a challenge for Her. A new way of thinking will need to commence and definitely a new way of undertaking theology. A move from being and presence would need to take place towards alterity, which would involve a move of giving priority to the ethical over the ontological. A change like this would not be trivial. As Glenn Morrison argues: “Doing theology with Levinas is both possible and impossible” because it seems as though talking in the realm of ontology in theology “is a road we must take or at least fall into”.⁵⁴ But Levinas et al. is a language that contemporary minds are speaking – and Vatican II demands that we learn to speak the languages of the contemporary world to spread the message of the Gospel. 

Hence, it is worth exploring this road. But not just for the world around us – also for the Church Herself, too. A different way of theologising could be beneficial for the Church because from a different perspective perennial truths of the Church can be presented in a different light. For example, Morrison in his article “The (im)possibilities of Levinas for Christian Theology”, building on the theology of aesthetics of von Balthasar, shows how the language of alterity can be used to articulate God’s glory, beauty, goodness, truth, and unity as ethical transcendence. In doing so, he illustrates how a Levinasian theology can conceive of the Resurrection from a different angle.²⁵ Similarly, in a separate article entitled “Emmanuel Levinas and Christian Theology”⁵⁵, Morrison shows how Levinas can throw new light on other mysteries of our faith such as the Eucharist and cosmology. Morrison’s work, therefore, appears to be a cautious step in the right direction. But this work of examining what Jewish thought can bring to our Church seems to be in its embryonic stage. 

Conclusion

This post has presented what contemporary Jewish thinkers, inspired by their Jewish tradition, have been proposing in the realm of philosophy and theology. Their work is part of the modern trend of dehellenisation that Benedict XVI discussed and asked for a reflection of in his Regensburg address of 2006. In this context, the thoughts of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida were briefly presented as was Susan Handelman’s discussion of rabbinic interpretation methods. It was shown that Jewish thought is distinct in its treating of the Other, infinity, and has at its disposal a different form of logic to that of Aristotle. Since the Christian faith has its roots in Jewish tradition, there is nothing misguided in considering what it has to offer, despite its obvious attempts to sever ties with Greek-influenced Western philosophy and theology. 

The next sections of the post presented some weaknesses of what Levinas and Handelman have been discussing as well as potential incompatibilities of contemporary Jewish thought with the Christian faith. Emphasis, however, was placed on the success in the secular world of this thought, which highlights identical values to Christian ones, and how this success has not been emulated by Catholic thinkers. The post finally discussed how it would be beneficial for the Church to explore the possibility of utilising Jewish thought in Her own sphere. This may prove beneficial for Herself as well as the world, not to mention the possibility of strengthening relations between Jews and Christians.

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Footnotes

1. For a response contemporary to Harnack see Alfred Firmin Loisy, The Gospel and the Church (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1902) who argued that Christianity would have died had it not taken on the form it did in first century Palestine.
2. Vatican II, Nostra Aetate, 4.
3. Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, tr. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1951).
4. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 7.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid., 7-15.
7. Buber himself mentions in the foreword to Two Types of Faith that his friend the theologian Albert Schweitzer, established that Paul ‘has his roots in the Jewish world of thought, not in the Greek’.
8. See also CCC 109-111 and especially 113: “Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church”. According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records”.
9. Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Ronald G. Smith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1950).
10. Ibid., 5.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. “If I face a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things”, Ibid., 7.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979).
14. Ibid., Totality and Infinity, 21-33.
15. For a more in-depth discussion of Levinas’s critiques of Heidegger, see Graham Harman, “Levinas and the Triple Critique of Heidegger”, Philosophy Today 53.4 (2009): 407-413.
16. Alphonso Lingis, “A Phenomenology of Substances,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 505-522.
17. As Graham Harman rightly notes, it is very likely that Heidegger understood that we deal with individual entities, as Levinas points out, and that these objects are not entirely subsumed in a totality of meaning. But what is important to focus on is not what Heidegger or other Western philosophers undoubtedly must have known “only what they openly honored and welcomed into their thinking. And it is Levinas, not Heidegger, who makes sufficient room in philosophy for individual beings”.
18. Whether Buber actually claimed symmetry in the I-Thou relation in this respect is a matter of debate. One could argue that Buber is looser in his understanding of I-Thou and hence incorporates all forms asymmetry, including those specified by Levinas. For example, Buber does mention that when entering into an I-Thou relation, the self is affected (cf. Buber, I and Thou, 67). If the I-Thou is to be understood in a weaker sense, this would entail, then, the affect of responsibility/duty.
19. It should be noted that Levinas had other criticisms of Buber’s I-Thou relation. For example, he did not accept Buber’s assertion that an I-Thou relation can also be had with nature (cf. Emannuel Levinas, “Dialogue with Martin Buber” in Proper Names, (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 34). Such an understanding of the I-Thou relation was too broad and did not carry with it the significance of inter-personal encounters opened up by confronting a face. Another criticism by Levinas was that Buber asserts that the I-Thou relation cannot be consistently maintained because an entering of any aspect of the temporal world into an I-Thou relation immediately downgrades it to I-It. This would mean that the call of the face (which itself is embedded in the temporal world) for everyday acts of compassion (e.g. the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked) would not be incorporated in I-Thou. But these physical considerations, as Levinas argues, must constitute an essential relation. For a discussion of this criticism see Sean Hand, Routledge Critical Thinkers – Emmanuel Levinas, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 57; and Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco & Maurice Friedman, “Dialogue and Differences”, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2004), 7.
20. As quoted in Jill Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 129.  See also:  Sandor Goodheart, The Prophetic Law,  (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 224.
21. Robert J. S. Manning, “Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard: Religious Prophets of Non-Violence”, The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (1, no. 1), 2017.
22. cf. Psalm 10:14 (God helper of the fatherless) & 68:5 (God as defender of widows); Exodus 22:21-24 (commands to the people of God to not mistreat or oppress strangers and not take advantage of a widow or an orphan); Deuteronomy 10:18 (God defends the cause of the fatherless, widow and orphan. We are to love the strangers and fear the Lord.); and many, many more.
23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.
24. “The Other, whose exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him in which I stand, marks the end of powers.” (Levinas, Ibid., 87).
25. Ibid., 89.
26. Robert J. S. Manning, “Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard: Religious Prophets of Non-Violence”, 31-33.
27. Oona Ajzenstat, “Levinas’ Prophetic Ethics: His Use of the Sources of Judaism”,PhD diss., 1999.
28. Ibid., 14.
29. Ibid., 35.
30. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, tr. A Lingis. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).
31. cf. Plato, Republic (514a–520a).
32. Rene Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy.
33. “Nothing can escape our notice; for what reason produces from itself cannot lie concealed, but must be brought to the light by reason itself, so soon as we have discovered the common principle of the ideas we seek”, Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1^st edition), 1781.
34. cf. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 31.
35. Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics, 91.
36. Ibid., 82.
37. Harold G. Coward “”Speech Versus Writing” in Derrida and Bhartṛhari”, Philosophy East and West 41:2 (1991), 142-143.
38. Derrida gave priority to the written word for other reasons, too. For example, he saw writing as coming logically before speech because speech presupposes the fully fledged grammar in writing without which speech could never develop into language.
39. Not everyone is convinced of Derrida’s Jewish influences, however. As Derrida himself once stated: “It turns out that I don’t know Hebrew, or very little, I have a very poor knowledge of Jewish history or the texts of Jewish culture” – as quoted in Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, tr. by Peretz Kidron (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 11; who then concedes: “Derrida proves his Jewish identity neither by laying tefillin (phylacteries) nor by fasting on Yom Kippur, nor by having his sons [by his non-Jewish wife] circumcised; rather, he proves it by the experience of absence, by the experience of the Jewish abyss, by the death of his Jewishness, by its nullification” (Ibid., 34)
40. As quoted in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generation, ed. and tr. by Gordon Tucker (Continuum, NY:2007), p. 331.
41. Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 4.
42. Ibid., 11.
43. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 41.
44. See also the works of the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky.
45. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 9.
46. David Stern, Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism,  (New York: State University of New York Press, 1984), 196.
47. Sifre to Deuteronomy, 49, as quoted in David Stern, Moses-cide, 198.
48. cf. Leo XII, Aeterni Patris.
49. cf. Dei Verbum and CCC 101-141.
50. See John Paul II, Sapientia Christiana, no. 80; John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 42-44; Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris; and also the Code of Canon Law: “There are to be classes in dogmatic theology, always grounded in the written word of God together with sacred tradition; through these, students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher” (Code 252, §3)
51. For example, prof. Piotr Jaroszynski devotes an entire chapter to this topic in his book Ethics: The Drama of the Moral Life, (New York: St Paul Publishers, 2003).
52. cf. John F. X. Knasas, “A Heideggerian critique of Aquinas and a Gilsonian reply.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, 58.3 (1994): 415-439.
53. Emannuel Levinas, “Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics” in Proper Names, 70.
54. Glenn J. Morrison, “The (im)possibilities of Levinas for Christian Theology” in Responsibility, God and Society: Theological Ethics in Dialogue (2008), 4.
55. Glenn J. Morrison, “Emmanuel Levinas and Christian Theology”, Irish Theological Quarterly, 68.1 (2003).