A journal of academic theology

Levinas and Christian Mysticism after Auschwitz

An ethics of disinterested goodness governs the testimony of Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi and Jean Amery. For Emmanuel Levinas, ethical goodness such as we find in Levi’s and Amery’s disinterested testimony to the German people leaves the only possible trace of the divine. Levinas proceeds to dismiss mysticism as an interested, self-serving, a-ethical search for God. The article proposes that Christian mysticism can embody Levinas’s ethics of disinterestedness if it is understood as an analogizing ethical grasp of the divine.

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