Seeking the Sacred as an Act of Idolatry: Emmanuel Levinas, Transcendence, and an Argument for the Desacralization of Medicine
Janetta Tansey, M.D., Ph.D., Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor, University of Iowa
Levinas expresses that the identification of an act, event, or object as Sacred is idolatry, in two senses: It is an ontological claim that Being has immediate relation to the Divine, which he rejects, and it is a representation of the Divine as that which can be thought. Both are totalizing activities of the Ego. “The Infinite is non-thematizable, gloriously exceeds every capacity, and manifests . . .its exorbitance in the approach of a neighbor . . . it cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter” (Otherwise than Being).
If the Named/Naming-as-Sacred is idolatrous, we are invited to critical reflection on claims that patient care is a sacred act, therapeutic relationship is a sacred space, and the medical vocation is a sacred calling. A Levinasian perspective demands a full-stop, arguing that these signifiers are the golden calf—created and owned, fully finite, and always mute.
Drawing on Levinas’s language, this paper deconstructs Medicine as being neither Sacred nor Holy. This does not violate its integrity as a deeply pleasurable and meaningful kind of egological work—a humanizing of exteriority and a created dwelling place in the natural order for our needs. But Levinas challenges the long-standing practice in confessional bioethics to reify Medicine with religious language, as if God inhabits its activities. In dramatic contrast, Levinas espouses an atheistic posture in egological work as a precondition for the distinctive, separate, and true religious experience: “The rigorous affirmation of human independence, of its intelligent presence to an intelligible reality, the destruction of the concept of the Sacred, entail risk of atheism. That risk must be run. Only through it can man be raised to the spiritual notion of the Transcendent . . . it is a great glory for God to have created a being capable of seeking Him from afar, having experienced separation and atheism” (Difficult Freedom).
Is it time to desacralize Medicine, both for our freedom in the natural world, and for the Good of the genuine religious experience? The author suggests that even confessional traditions that embrace the Divine as immanent might pause to consider Levinas’s adjurations about idolatry when ideas about the Sacred become totalizing or inextricably linked with moral posturing and self-referential justifications.
In conclusion and for discussion, the physician-author will draw on 20 years of working with colleagues in existential crisis, suggesting that these crises often occur from a failure to afford Medicine its proper status as pleasurable work, or a special (and false) identification of medical practice as a sacred activity, or the interference of idolatrous beliefs with genuine religious experience. Levinas gives guidance: The Good is known, elegantly and irresistibly, from the commanding gaze of the Other. This event—this saying—is as independent of Medicine as Medicine is independent of the Sacred and Holy. The deliberate desacralization of Medicine not only tears down the idols, but releases humans to their created purpose and powers, in both the natural and religious domains.
Levinas expresses that the identification of an act, event, or object as Sacred is idolatry, in two senses: It is an ontological claim that Being has immediate relation to the Divine, which he rejects, and it is a representation of the Divine as that which can be thought. Both are totalizing activities of the Ego. “The Infinite is non-thematizable, gloriously exceeds every capacity, and manifests . . .its exorbitance in the approach of a neighbor . . . it cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter” (Otherwise than Being).
If the Named/Naming-as-Sacred is idolatrous, we are invited to critical reflection on claims that patient care is a sacred act, therapeutic relationship is a sacred space, and the medical vocation is a sacred calling. A Levinasian perspective demands a full-stop, arguing that these signifiers are the golden calf—created and owned, fully finite, and always mute.
Drawing on Levinas’s language, this paper deconstructs Medicine as being neither Sacred nor Holy. This does not violate its integrity as a deeply pleasurable and meaningful kind of egological work—a humanizing of exteriority and a created dwelling place in the natural order for our needs. But Levinas challenges the long-standing practice in confessional bioethics to reify Medicine with religious language, as if God inhabits its activities. In dramatic contrast, Levinas espouses an atheistic posture in egological work as a precondition for the distinctive, separate, and true religious experience: “The rigorous affirmation of human independence, of its intelligent presence to an intelligible reality, the destruction of the concept of the Sacred, entail risk of atheism. That risk must be run. Only through it can man be raised to the spiritual notion of the Transcendent . . . it is a great glory for God to have created a being capable of seeking Him from afar, having experienced separation and atheism” (Difficult Freedom).
Is it time to desacralize Medicine, both for our freedom in the natural world, and for the Good of the genuine religious experience? The author suggests that even confessional traditions that embrace the Divine as immanent might pause to consider Levinas’s adjurations about idolatry when ideas about the Sacred become totalizing or inextricably linked with moral posturing and self-referential justifications.
In conclusion and for discussion, the physician-author will draw on 20 years of working with colleagues in existential crisis, suggesting that these crises often occur from a failure to afford Medicine its proper status as pleasurable work, or a special (and false) identification of medical practice as a sacred activity, or the interference of idolatrous beliefs with genuine religious experience. Levinas gives guidance: The Good is known, elegantly and irresistibly, from the commanding gaze of the Other. This event—this saying—is as independent of Medicine as Medicine is independent of the Sacred and Holy. The deliberate desacralization of Medicine not only tears down the idols, but releases humans to their created purpose and powers, in both the natural and religious domains.