Incarnation's "Hidden Dimension" Is Seen "Without the Grid of a System"

A member of the School of Community, Giorgio, reflected on the recent session by commenting:

"Today, while thinking about last SoC, which I enjoyed a lot, this thought came to my mind:

We are made for the infinite,
but we are stuck in our finitude.

Thanks God, the Word (the infinite) became flesh,
so ... we have a chance! "

To me that means that when we, who are finite, awaken in our life to the infinite, we meet Christ, that infinite being, who has become finite (emptied himself) in order to be with us.

The nature of incarnation (the spirit in flesh) is at the heart of religion, for that is how we experience our faith. Here is what the translator of Emmanuel Levinas' Nine Talmudic Readings (her name is Annette Aronowicz) says about Levinas' understanding of religion:

"What strikes me as central to Levinas's perception about the nature of religion is his insistence upon the utter ordinariness of what we are accustomed to call the transcendent. We have just seen this in Levinas's translation of the word "God," which always derives its meaning from ordinary human activity, as, for instance, in his statement in "Judaism and Revolution" that the love of God reveals itself in the employer's negotiation about the wages and working hours of his employees. [Levinas says:]

'As little as I have ever understood the exact meaning of the expression 'the opening up of the soul in its love of God,' I ask myself, nonetheless, whether there isn't a certain connection between the establishment of working hours and the love of God, with or without the opening up of the soul. I am even inclined to believe that there are not many other ways to love God than to establish these working hours correctly, no way that is more urgent.'

Aronowicz goes on:

"This statement should certainly not be taken to mean that one's love of God results in moral or ethical behavior. Rather something else is going on. 'The ethical is not merely the corollary of the religious but is, in itself, the element in which religious transcendence receives it original sense.' [cite omitted] In other words, it is in our interactions with our fellow human beings as such, quite independently of any love of God these individuals may or may not profess, that the love of God may appear or lie hidden. The remark 'Man would be the place through which transcendent passes' should remind us that the ordinariness ot which Levinas draws our attention, the ordinariness of saying 'after you' as we sit at the dinner table or walk through a door, is, in the end, not that ordinary, for it is the potential passageway of that which is most extraordinary.

"Unlike Rudolf Otto, the famous theologian and historian of religions, whose Idea of the Holy has had tremendous impact on our perception of religion in this century, Levinas refuses to situate the transcendent, what Otto called the 'Wholly Other' in some realm apart from our daily interactions, in a privileged experience accessible only to a few. For Levinas, the transcendent is part and parcel of our most taken-for-granted activities. It is not something 'extra' that occasionally intrudes upon our world. Levinas quotes Franz Rosenzweig (whose view of religion is reflected in all Levinas's Talmudic commentaries, as well as in his philosophical words) as saying that 'the division of men into those who are religious and those who are not does not go far. It is not at all a question of a special disposition that some have and others do not. . . .' Rather, for Rosenzweig, as indeed for Levinas, religion is a matter of the living relations that all human beings engage in.

"I have italicized the world 'living' because Levinas here and in his second essay on Rosenzweig associates life with the moment in which the specific person overcomes 'the immobility of concepts and frontiers' to come into relation with what is other, infinite, and transcendent. This happens when he interacts with other human beings in their specificity, without the grid of a system. Thus, 'life in this precise sense, living -- is religion.' The realm of religion, then, is 'neither belief, nor dogmatics, but event, passion, and intense activity.'

"Levinas's formulation of the religious dimension may seem to many to be irreligiousness itself, for here, as elsewhere, his approach is thoroughly secular. There is no 'other' world besides the one we all live in, and there is no eternity outside time. Yet one cannot emphasize enough that this secularization is not a claim that, in the end, there is 'merely' the world and 'merely' history. For this world and these times contain, in Levinas's view, a hidden dimension, something infinitely more than we might expect, which remains hidden even when it reveals itself, and the relation to which makes human life what it is. It is this play between the ordinary and the extraordinary -- or, perhaps better put, this ability to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary and to point to the ordinariness of the extraordinary -- that the reader can expect to see in the Talmudic commentaries."

"In this redefinition of religion, Levinas is, of course, not alone. Various thinkers of the last centuries -- Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Buber, and Rosenzweig himself, to mention just a few well-known names -- have, each in his own way, sought to convey the full scope of the religious dimension. Levinas resembles some in this list more than others, but all, I think, share in the effort to redraw the lines separating sacred from secular and, thus, to point to the relation with that which is transcendent in the midst of our most banal activities, even if this relation is not immediately visible to an eye interested in surfaces or, as Levinas often says, in the letter."

Levinas, a Jew, and Christians, I think, are close in thinking of incarnation as an experience of the sacred in the singularity of each moment of the secular. Jewish faith sees the infinite, the transcendent, in the secular as its hidden dimension, observable to eyes that see. We agree, seeing in our day to day world our meeting place with Christ. This is Christ's perennial incarnation, in our ordinary, finite, secular/sacred lives.