Uploaded February 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
John Zizioulas and Emmanuel Levinas on Totality, Otherness, and the Possibility of Communion
Emmanuel Levinas provocatively claimed that “All philosophical thought rests on pre-philosophical experiences” (Ethique et infini). This influence is often unconscious and available only retrospectively but nonetheless threatens the neutrality of phenomenological reflection. The paper considers the possibility of communion with the Other as pre-philosophical religious commitment manifest in the phenomenological. The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s sees in Levinas an attractive path for ontology to move beyond totality and Heidegger’s reduction of the “Other to the Same”. Levinas’s account of otherness frees human beings from totality, yet the Other constrains the self. Zizioulas finds in Levinas’s ‘I’ constituted by encounter with the Other an account consonant with early Christian understandings of the person. Zizioulas criticizes Levinas on the possibilities for verticality and relationship in philosophical terms but ultimately along confessional lines. For Levinas, one approaches God only through ethical praxis directed to the neighbor as Other. For Zizioulas, liturgy is the realization of otherness and communion both with the human and divine Other. Phenomenology helps to articulate rather than arbitrate this division.
Revd Matthew Dunch SJ is doing a DPhil in the Theology and Religion Faculty at Oxford, exploring spiritual pedagogy. He has a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago, where he explored challenges to empathic understanding posed by radically divergent bodily conditions of interlocutors, particularly those caused by disability. He earned Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees (as well as their eccelsiastical analogs the Bachelor of Theology and License of Theology) at Regis College at the University of Toronto. His theological work focused on the relationship of mysticism and ethics. He taught philosophy for three years at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. His teaching included courses in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. He also developed service learning ethics courses centered on homelessness and outsider art.
John Zizioulas and Emmanuel Levinas on Totality, Otherness, and the Possibility of Communion
Emmanuel Levinas provocatively claimed that “All philosophical thought rests on pre-philosophical experiences” (Ethique et infini). This influence is often unconscious and available only retrospectively but nonetheless threatens the neutrality of phenomenological reflection. The paper considers the possibility of communion with the Other as pre-philosophical religious commitment manifest in the phenomenological. The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s sees in Levinas an attractive path for ontology to move beyond totality and Heidegger’s reduction of the “Other to the Same”. Levinas’s account of otherness frees human beings from totality, yet the Other constrains the self. Zizioulas finds in Levinas’s ‘I’ constituted by encounter with the Other an account consonant with early Christian understandings of the person. Zizioulas criticizes Levinas on the possibilities for verticality and relationship in philosophical terms but ultimately along confessional lines. For Levinas, one approaches God only through ethical praxis directed to the neighbor as Other. For Zizioulas, liturgy is the realization of otherness and communion both with the human and divine Other. Phenomenology helps to articulate rather than arbitrate this division.
Revd Matthew Dunch SJ is doing a DPhil in the Theology and Religion Faculty at Oxford, exploring spiritual pedagogy. He has a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago, where he explored challenges to empathic understanding posed by radically divergent bodily conditions of interlocutors, particularly those caused by disability. He earned Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees (as well as their eccelsiastical analogs the Bachelor of Theology and License of Theology) at Regis College at the University of Toronto. His theological work focused on the relationship of mysticism and ethics. He taught philosophy for three years at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. His teaching included courses in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. He also developed service learning ethics courses centered on homelessness and outsider art.
