God Who Comes to Mind: Emmanuel Levinas as Inspiration and Challenge for Theological Thinking

From the beginning, Levinas' thought was received not only by philosophers but also by theologians. But his thought is very radical and represents both a challenge and an inspiration for theology. The article aims to see where the challenge and inspiration might lie. Levinas's basic question is how finite thought can think an infinite and transcendent God. Levinas develops the phenomenology of the Idea of the Infinite and interprets Descartes' idea of God as a practical desire. For Levinas, the relation to God is intrinsically linked to the relation to the Other. It is an attempt to characterize an autonomous ethical subjectivity whose autonomy, however, does not begin with the subject but in the Other, in whom the presence of God is always already manifest. This description of the subject corresponds to the human being as understood in Christian theology.