Love and Justice in Reinhold Neibuhr's Prophetic Christian Realism and EmmanuelLevinas's Ethics of Responsibility: Treading Between Pacifism and Just-War Theory

Love and Justice in Reinhold Neibuhr's Prophetic Christian Realism and Emmanuel
Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility: Treading between Pacifism and Just-War Theory

Author(s): Andrew Flescher
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 61-82
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205656
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Love and Justice in Reinhold

Neibuhr's Prophetic Christian
Realism and Emmanuel Levinas's
Ethics of Responsibility:
Treading between Pacifism and

Just-War Theory*
Andrew Flescher / Providence, Rhode Island
I. INTRODUCTION
Reinhold Niebuhr's prophetic Christian realism arguably represents one

of the most fully developed compromises between pacifism and just-war
theory of the twentieth century, even if it is one that challenges the funda-
mental suppositions on which both of these alternatives are based. As

formidable an opponent to using nonresistance as a means to effecting
social change as one might encounter in postwar America, Niebuhr was
at the same time an insistent broadcaster of the indispensability of the
Matthean ideal of love for Christian ethics. Indeed, among the reasons
for still reading Niebuhr is that his view remains, almost all on its own, a
distinctively Christian via media to the problem of countering societal
oppression and injustice, a problem that is more commonly met either
with appeals from thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas and the late John
Yoder to see the Christian's task as other than trying to take charge of
* I have benefited enormously from the insights and suggestions of professors and graduate students in the department of religious studies at Brown University. I would particularly
like to thank John P Reeder, Jr., and Jung Lee, both of whom graciously provided me with
extensive comments after reviewing earlier versions of this article, as well as Wendell Dietrich, under whom I gained the conceptual resources to cast these two thinkers in comparative perspective. Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of the
Journal of Religion for their helpful criticisms of a former draft.
? 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2000/8001-0004$02.00
61

the world's political power games' or with responses from less sectarian
Christians who, in the face of injustice, insist that justice administered
through violence or nonviolent resistance is the only adequate execution
of Christian love under the circumstances.2
Both pacifism and just-war thinking represent coherent responses to

the problem of radical injustice, for both approaches clearly delineate the
nature of those actions that responsible Christians will have to undertake
in order to see to its eradication. Pacifists adamantly confront hate with
a policy of love conquers all, or they opt out of any political arena in
which social efficacy demands the use of violence.3 Just-war theorists out-
line carefully, in the name of love and respect for all persons, the conditions under which intervention in the form of combat is justified and
the constraints within which such measures can be introduced. Christian
realism, in contrast to both of these approaches, makes a considerably

more ambivalent use of the notion of love, understanding the second love
commandment, for example, to be a fundamental and cogent Christian
norm, which is at the same time insufficient on its own and unrealizable
in history. Thus, Robin Lovin tells us in his recent book that Niebuhr
1 For example, see Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio: Trinity
University Press, 1975), and Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneap-
olis: Winston, 1985); John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972), and The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
2 There is a vast amount of literature on just-war thinking as well as many debates that
are internal to the camp. In spite of this variety, however, I think it is fair to say, with Lisa
Cahill, that just-war thinkers share in common a recognition of the possibility of the legiti-.
mate use of violence for the sake of the natural dignity and value of all persons and for the
sake of the common good generally (see Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship,
Pacifism, and Just War Theory [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994], pp. 197-198, 238). At various
points below, I take Paul Ramsey to be representative of the Christian just-war camp, not
only because of his well-known exchanges with Niebuhr on the question of how one ought
to conceive of Christian love once the resort to violence is sanctioned but also because his
idea that the use of force can, under certain circumstances, be an expression of mutuality
is accommodating to so many versions ofjust-war thinking (see, e.g., Paul Ramsey, Christian
Ethics and the Sit-in [New York: Association Press, 1961], p. 102).
3 The former kind of pacifist can be referred to as a "prudential" pacifist while the latter
can be referred to as a "witness" pacifist. Prudential pacifists do not accept realist assumptions about the inevitability of violence in society, suggesting, on the contrary, that just as
violence begets violence and perpetuates humanity's sorry natural existence, so does love
beget love and represent an alternative to that existence. Witness pacifists are often willing
to grant realists the dire prognosis they offer about the human condition, but they are
unwilling to accept it as a good enough reason to justify evading their duty to undergo the
hardship entailed in the commandment to love one's neighbor, which they see as the very
crux of the Christian discipleship. To be fair, however, I should note how tenuous the distinction between the two strands actually is. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a good example of
a pacifist who integrated both strands in his thinking (see A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr, ed. James M. Washington [San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1986], esp. pp. 19-20, 39-40, 632).
62
Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

weaves a complex relationship between Christian narrative and moral life. The
uncompromising moral demands which Jesus makes in the Gospels are a necessary corrective to the shortcomings of rational ethics, which too easily becomes a
justification of existing interests, rather than a motive to create new ways to resolve conflicts. But Jesus' ethic will not work for us in any simple way. If the
tendency to self-justification in rational ethics gradually erodes the demands of
the moral life, an uncompromised Christian ethics threatens to demolish them
outright, erasing the distinction between moral concern for the neighbor's good
and a blind zeal to make the will of God prevail.4
For Niebuhr, while agape-properly construed as no less exacting than

self-sacrificial love5--is not supplanted by justice neither is it to be regarded as a self-sufficient social ethic. The strategy of the cross, by itself,
is blind, for its implementation in a pure form results in the unwitting

exploitation of its true adherents, leaving only the case of those who,
through appeal to their vocation, deliberately look away from the world
and its political predicaments. However, when love fails to remain the
critical overseer ofjustice, the calculated and what Lovin calls "rationalistic" structures ofjustice, intended to guarantee the prevention of tyranny
in society, quickly transform into tyrannical instruments themselves.
Notwithstanding the interpretive difficulty of making adequate sense

of the role that love, or what Niebuhr calls the "impossible possibility,"6
plays in Christian ethics as well as the disparate criticisms launched

against Niebuhr by both pacifists and just-war thinkers-all of which
ought to be addressed before one accepts Christian realism as a viable
social ethic-Niebuhr's attempt to denounce simultaneously the idleness
of pacifism and the (perhaps unintended) eagerness ofjust-war thinking
is immediately appealing. This is because it offers the Christian a way of
safeguarding his conviction that it is love, and not something institutionally established, that founds the ethical relation among persons without
stripping him or her of the ability to betray this prior relation as a last
resort by overriding the presumption against violence when the lives of
innocents hang in the balance. As opposed to pacifism, which recognizes
only love as a viable, governing Christian ethic, or just-war thinking,
which "accepts war as an offshoot of the love command,"' Niebuhr's compromise leaves love dependent on, but critically distant from, justice,
4 Robin Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), p. 92.

5 Reinhold Niebuhr makes this claim repeatedly throughout his writings (see, e.g., "The
Ethic of Jesus and the Social Problem," in Love and Justice, ed. D. B. Robertson [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957], p. 33).
6 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1935), p. 80.
7 Cahill, p. 230.
63

seeing the two as complementary while at the same time totally irreduc-
ible to one another.
While the arguments in defense of Christian realism as an alternative

to pacifism and just-war thinking abound in Niebuhrian scholarship, not
enough attention has been paid to what can be said in favor of an ethic
that features the kind of irresoluble tension between love and justice that
is so essential to Niebuhr's way of thinking. If anything, this feature is
presented in the literature as a drawback. Niebuhr's own defenders, for
example, have observed that the prophetic element in his writings coheres with his ruthlessly commonsense manner of tackling political matters only if his overall proposal is regarded as a dispositional ethic.8 The
concern is that Niebuhr can insist both on love's persistently strenuous
burden (against just-war theorists) and on the empirical judgment that
violence and injustice are endemic to society at the collective level
(against pacifists) only at the price of conceding the fact of love's qualified
influence on the socially engaged moral agent.

In this article, I attempt to rescue Niebuhr's dualism from the implications of this reading through correlating the insights of prophetic Christian realism with those that emerge from what might seem to be an odd
source: the work of Niebuhr's Jewish contemporary, Emmanuel Levinas.9
His "doctrine of substitution," according to which I am responsible even
for the transgressions I myself suffer at the hands of the oppressor, might
seem to lend itself to an ethic of self-renunciatory love as stringent as that
of any thoroughgoing pacifist.' While Levinas does not speak of an ethic

of love, much less contrast love to justice in the way that Niebuhr does,
his account of one's a priori responsibility for the other, which entails both
nonresistance and self-sacrifice, is analogous to Niebuhr's understanding

of love. In spite of the centrality of the primordial command of the other's
gaze in Levinas's ethics of responsibility, however, it cannot be overstated

that Levinas, no less than Niebuhr, is motivated by the conviction that it is
necessary to avoid holocausts at all costs. Thus, there are occasions when
Levinas condones the use of violence, albeit a violence that prompts us,
if we are responsible, to loathe and exhibit remorse for the role we play
8 For example, see Dennis McCann, Christian Realism and Liberation Theology: Practical Theologies in Creative Conflict (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981), p. 93.
9Although Niebuhr died in 1971, over twenty years before Levinas did, and although
Niebuhr is a distinctively modern moral theorist while Levinas, many have argued, is a
postmodern antitheorist, both thinkers, utilizing the conceptual resources from their respective religious traditions, passionately responded-in remarkably parallel ways-to the
same historical event (the Holocaust), which would profoundly influence their ethical views
throughout the course of their scholarly careers. It is in this sense that I regard the two as
contemporaries who can be cast in historical comparative perspective.
10 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 87, 98 ff.
64

in its advent." According to Levinas, justice, which may entail the use of
violence, is justified by the entry of a third party who interrupts the inti-
mate encounter between self and other. Yet, like Niebuhr, Levinas main-
tains thatjustice alone risks becoming transformed into injustice. Through

elucidating Levinas's explication of the moral value in acknowledging the
confounding effect that love or responsibility must have on justice-even
as justice signifies the limiting of responsibility--I hope to offer a fresh

way of rescuing prophetic Christian realism from the lingering charge
that the Niebuhrian compromise suffers from an incorrigible tension that
undercuts its own aims.
In the first part of the article (Secs. II and III), I clarify Niebuhr's own
statement and defense of his middle position and subsequently ask

whether his ideal for our ethical relations (i.e., agapeistic, self-sacrificial
love) is stable enough to avoid collapsing into a version ofjust-war thinking, as pacifists attest it will and as just-war thinkers would be happy to
grant. In the second part (Secs. IV and V), I attempt to remedy the gaps
in Niebuhr's approach by appealing to the work of Levinas, who shares
both Niebuhr's sentiments against the ineptitude that pervades a social
ethic of nonresistance and his revulsion to the callousness typical of many
nonpacifist positions but who, through his painstaking and explicit establishment of the infinite responsibility that we bear for the other, manages
to retain his distance from the just-war camp. I conclude with some brief
reflections on a connection that can be perceived between the normative
ambivalence that is so unique to Niebuhrian and Levinasian ethics and
the virtue of contrition-a virtue that is, I argue, insufficiently espoused
in either pacifism or just-war thinking.
II. A NIEBUHRIAN DEFENSE OF PROPHETIC CHRISTIAN REALISM
Niebuhr's explanation of the relationship between love and justicewhich, due to their radical irreducibility to one another, ought not to be
construed as a synthesis-is significantly influenced by the Kierkegaardian notion that consciousness of one's mortal finitude is a presupposition
of Christian faith. The self that is true to itself, the one that is a "concrete"
self, contends Niebuhr, realizes that it is a "creature of infinite possibilities
'~ Levinas has in fact admitted that he is not a pacifist. He implies as much in the final
chapter of Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence and during the last of his interviews con-
ducted with Philippe Nemo and published in Ethics and Infinity (trans. Richard A. Cohen
[Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985]). I deal with the former below. For an explicit admission on the part Levinas to this effect, see Jeffrey Dudiak, "Structures of Violence, Structures of Peace: Levinasian Reflections on Just War and Pacifism," in Knowing
Other-Wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality, ed. James H. Olthius (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1997), p. 168.
65

which cannot be fulfilled within the terms of his temporal existence.""2
Niebuhr's difficulty with religious idealism is that it is a rushed and implausible attempt to overturn the human predicament of sin, which, at
the collective level, inevitably manifests itself in the emergence of unjust
institutions and oppressive governments. For Niebuhr, these evils are as
ineradicable on the whole as they are worth repelling individually. The
question for Niebuhr is whether, having rejected religious idealism because of its failure to be socially efficacious,13 he can still keep love on a
par with justice by avoiding a version of just-war thinking that deprives
love of its critical function.'4 Once pacifism is rejected for practical reasons, how can love, if it is interpreted to be irreducibly separate from
justice, be considered to be anything more than a recommendation, advice appropriately ignored under dire circumstances? According to prophetic Christian realism, love plays an ongoing role in the thinking of any
agent attempting to follow a just course of action. It is love, for example,
that justifies coercion through violence but only if the one who uses violence remains as impressed by its foreseeably ugly consequences as he is
persuaded by its necessity. Niebuhr's answer to the above question, then,
is that the coercive agent, in order to be just, must remain the loving
agent full of self-reproach. This is how love functions to keep justice oriented toward love. Thus does Niebuhr think that he can insist, against
just-war theorists, that justice ought not simply to be regarded as a trump
that takes precedence over love when it becomes necessary to resort to
coercion. Justice, rather, must remain in persistent tension with that
which it contradicts. Pacifists accuse Niebuhr of paying lip service to an
ideal of love that disappears during the most vital moments, while justwar thinking implies that he needlessly posits an idea of justice that contradicts love. To what extent does Niebuhr's own statement of his middle
position absolve him of these charges?

Niebuhr frankly acknowledges, with just-war theorists, that the goals
ofjustice-which he defines as economic, racial, and ethnic equality1512 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, 2 vols. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), 1:170.

13 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1932), p. 264.
'~ Paul Ramsey is a good example of a just-war thinker who maintains that love and justice ought not to exist in critical tension. Because Ramsey regards love, at base, as the
growth of a community of equals, he also maintains that the love commandment encompasses means that redirect political groups to meet this end, including war if necessary
(see "Reinhold Niebuhr: Christian Love and Natural Law," in his Nine Modern Moralists
[Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962] p. 135, and War and the Christian Conscience:
How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961],
pp. 6 if).
~5 Reinhold Niebuhr, "Christian Faith and the Natural Law," in Robertson, ed. (n. 5
above), pp. 48, 50.
66

are not only not served by the "moral man's" individualistic ethic; they
are also thwarted by it. Thus, his realism would seem to commit him to a
kind of resignation about the likelihood of peace ever being loving or
achieved without the coarse calculation and balancing of interests. Yet
justice, according to Niebuhr, approximates love. In his view, the steadying of political powers, though probably achieved through coercive means,
paradoxically brings human beings closer to true brotherhood. In this
manner, grace is related to nature partly as fulfillment and partly as negation.'6
That justice contradicts love is not hard to comprehend. In the name
of justice, peace is achieved through coercion, and trust and mutuality
through the calculation of conflicting interests. Acts of justice are performed with the expectation that they will be reciprocated. For this reason, true justice-that is, love-remains unrealized in history."' The critical issue that confronts Niebuhr is how justice, as it is practiced in history,
can result in anything more than justice. Would not the transition from
history to the eternal, from justice to love, ultimately require a qualitative
and absolute leap of the sort that Soren Kierkegaard suggests?18 It is significant that Niebuhr does not espouse the Kierkegaardian bias against
approximation. In his view, love and justice, while working against one
another, also need each other. That is, they interact dialectically. Justice
approximates as it contradicts love in history, while love represents both
the fulfillment and negation of justice at the end of time. Justice must be
coupled with love so as not to lose sight of its present objectives; love
needs justice if it is ever to be realized in the future.
Interpreting Niebuhr's understanding of how eternity transcends time
without rendering temporality otiose involves making sense of Hegel's
double predicate, "fulfills yet negates" (in German, expressed by the verb
aufheben), which is also Niebuhr's phrase of choice for describing how
love relates to justice.'9 "The achievements of justice in history," writes
16 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2:245.
17 Niebuhr, "Christian Faith and the Natural Law," pp. 48-49. Niebuhr often uses "justice" to mean a kind of mutual love, which, as opposed to love that is strictly sacrificial (e.g.,
Niebuhr's understanding of agape), is proper to humans relating in larger communities.

While Niebuhr is clear that sacrificial love cannot be sustained for any extended period of
time, agents who are repeatedly self-sacrificing can, from time to time, bring about the
conditions of mutual love. As Niebuhr explains, "Mutuality is not a possible achievement if
it is made the intention and goal of any action. Sacrificial love is thus paradoxically related
to mutual love; and this relation is an ethical counterpart of the general relation of superhistory to history" (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2:69).
18 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to "Philosophical Fragments," ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1992), pp. 381-85, 574 ff.
19 For example, "Love is both the fulfillment and the negation of all achievements of
justice in history" (Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics [n. 6 above], p. 80). Aufheben
67

Niebuhr, "may rise in indeterminate degrees to find their fulfillment in a
more perfect love and brotherhood, but each new level of fulfillment also
contains elements which stand in perfect contradiction to love."20 According to Niebuhr, justice obtains when one acts ceaselessly to resolve
conflicts of interest in an equitable manner. The solutions reached, however, are temporary since these victories, in the final analysis, must be
judged against the larger objective of achieving mutual trust among disparate parties. The process of weighing and balancing interests recurs
again and again. Meanwhile, love, on this account, serves to prevent us
from settling for the victories earned in the realm ofjustice. While a pure
ethic of love cannot be realized in the present, the ideal itself-precisely
because it is unrealizable--has enormous pragmatic value to the extent
that it serves as the transcendent measuring stick by which to judge our
distance from the ethical utopia of full human fellowship. Thus, Niebuhr
maintains that love, in remaining distant from justice, is able to contribute
to justice by preventing its practitioners from becoming complacent or

self-righteous. Love shows those who do merely what is just what they
lack by way of self-reflection and self-criticism. While unrealizable itself,
love is therefore always present as an ideal that shapes justice.21
Still, more needs to be said about the value of a love that cannot itself be
sustained for more than brief periods. Is homage to love as an impossible

possibility merely lip service? Niebuhr thinks not, and for support, he
draws on certain fundamental suppositions of the Christian faith that he
thinks have traditionally prevented Christians from succumbing to a pessimistic outlook, even in the modern era. Niebuhr contends that the kingdom of God is both here and not yet. Continuing the tradition of Ernst
Troeltsch, he writes: "The Kingdom is not of this world, yet its light illuminates our tasks in this world and its hope saves us from despair. The
Christian faith stands between the illusions and the despair of the world;
can also mean "approximates and contradicts." If one opts for this translation, then it is
more appropriate to use justice as the subject of the sentence.
20 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (n. 12 above), 2:246.
21 Niebuhr thinks that the judgment that love cannot be considered a viable social ethic
can be explained conceptually. Given the ineluctability of egocentrism in history, we must
concede the necessity of engaging in the process of calculating interests so as to promote
societal equality. Since calculating interests presupposes first distinguishing among interests, it is the just and not the agapeistic agent who does the work of a socially engaged
Christian ethics, for loving agapeistically entails that all distinctions between recipient and
benefactor must be transcended. One who loves agapeistically cannot speculate on how to
manipulate structures of power without establishing his own position vis-A-vis those powers.
The struggle for equality, e.g., requires distributive principles that will direct reform. In
Niebuhr's framework, love resists the articulation of distributive principles due to its freeflowing, spontaneous nature. Another way of putting this is that, in Niebuhr's view, love
cannot fulfill justice's distributive function because love is not egalitarian in the sense that
justice is.
68

it is particularly an antidote to the illusions which are stubbornly held in
defiance of the facts in order to save men from despair."22 What Niebuhr
means is that the Christian's faith affords him occasions to act as if the
kingdom has arrived, during which the kingdom-of-God perspective is

adopted.23 At such times, humans are able to give of themselves boundlessly, before sin corrupts this impulse. But sin cannot corrupt the ideal
itself. So, implies Niebuhr, it is the Christian's memory of his capacity for
self-renunciatory love that endures even when such love must give way
to justice in order to maintain peace. Ultimately, however, the Christian
cannot settle for anything less than the ideal, of which he continues to
remain acutely aware by virtue of the lasting memory of his tentatively
enjoyed respites from a nature corrupted by sin. It is in spite of his nature, then, that the Christian's outlook remains prophetically oriented toward his destiny. Having experienced what it is to love agapeistically,
having had a glimpse of the kingdom of God, the Christian is able to
administer justice responsibly. It is by virtue of remembering what his
or her destiny is, for example, that retributive justice does not slip into
vindictiveness.24 In terms of the ramifications of this position for the
pacifism-versus-just-war debate, the appeal to Christian realism becomes
a reminder of the importance of not dispensing with either side's critique
of the other. In the very act of stressing the inability of pacifists to reckon
with the realities of egocentricity and the will to power that constantly
characterize the unfolding of human history, for instance, Niebuhr asserts that we still need pacifists to remind us "that the relative norms of
social justice, which justify both coercion and resistance to coercion, are
not final norms." Without the agapeistic ideal, he insists, we will come to
"accept the warfare of the world as normative, become callous to the horror of war," and "forget the ambiguity of our own actions and motives
and the risk we run of achieving no permanent good from this momentary anarchy in which we are involved."25 In spite of the untenability of
pacifist presumption against all forms of coercion and violence, just-war
thinkers, avers Niebuhr, would be wrong to dismiss the importance of the
thorn in their side that pacifists embody.
Niebuhr addresses the difficult question regarding the degree to which
22 Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Hitler-Stalin Pact," in Robertson, ed., p. 80.

23 Reinhold Niebuhr, "Christian Faith and Natural Law," p. 54.
24 Ibid.
25 Reinhold Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1940), pp. 5, 31. I became aware of these passages through reading Richard Miller's Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism and the Just-War Tradition ([Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991], esp. pp. 107-08). Miller's reflections on Niebuhr's sensitivity to the importance
of the persistence of the pacifist critique of just-war theory despite Niebuhr's rejection of
pacifism are particularly insightful.
69

man has access to the kingdom of God with a subtlety reminiscent of the
Augustinian middle course between the Pelagian and Manichaean errors.
Human beings are free but not so free that they can ever solve the mystery of evil that enslaves them. The temporal and the eternal converge
only momentarily, when the kingdom-of-God perspective is adopted. But
the agent's memory of this encounter founds love's enduring influence
on the moral agent in two critical ways: (1) it serves to inform justice
before justice does its work and (2) it serves as a corrective of justice
when, due to its use of coercive means, justice threatens to become as
tyrannous as the injustice that it seeks to prevent. Love informs justice by
contributing something to the meaning ofjustice, namely, a consciousness

of its transitory nature; justice alone cannot sustain our obligation to attend to others. Love corrects justice by inundating the self with the feeling that it should repent for having resorted, albeit necessarily, to the use
of coercive means, means that are potentially the very same instruments
of injustice. A justice ill informed or uncorrected by love is a justice that
self-defeating. Love, it is true, cannot be made to be a self-sufficient ethic
through appeals to justice, for love is and remains an absolute standard

that cannot be relativized through a method that compromises its realization. To the degree that justice approximates love, the burden to inform
and correct justice lessens by just that much.
Niebuhr's own defense against obvious pacifist and just-war critiques
of his position can now be summarized. To the well-known pacifist charge
that prophetic Christian realism dilutes its understanding of true morality for the sake of the good of society,26 Niebuhr would insist that even
though the fulfilling/negating effect (aufheben) that love has on justice
manifests itself fully at the end of time, it is an ideal that has practical
utility in the present. To the premise that acknowledging the empirical
fact of humanity's penchant for combat and conflict resigns one to accepting, with just-war thinkers, the essentially practical nature of social
ethics and the compatibility of love and justice,"2 Niebuhr would respond
that such a solution fails to recognize the existence of a human destiny
alongside human nature. In both cases, the defense of the middle position relies on a Niebuhrian recourse to an impossible possibility that neither overestimates the extent of human freedom, as do pacifists, nor confuses freedom with justice and the balancing of interests, as do just-war
thinkers. It is time to look a bit more critically at this impossible possibility.
26 Yoder, e.g., makes this claim (see The Priestly Kingdom [n. 1 above], p. 78).
27 Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience (n. 14 above), p. 6.
70

III. IS THE NIEBUHRIAN COMPROMISE TENABLE?
To claim that agape is incompatible with the policies of social justice and
yet argue that it cannot be left behind in favor of an ideal of justice that
is simply concerned with the equal distribution of power and goods is to
attempt a delicate balance. Timothy Jackson, who is attracted to what he
calls Niebuhr's "exquisite, sometimes tortured ambivalence" about establishing love's encounter with justice, is right to point out that Niebuhr's
dualism appears to depend on a corresponding contrast between the religious and the secular.28 The concern is that agape is construed as a religious ethic while justice manifests itself in the institutional resistance to
political forces that lead to the abuse of power in society. "Religious" is
used pejoratively in this sense and is synonymous with "naive," "otherworldly," and "antirational." The problem that arises for Niebuhr's ethics
is that love becomes associated with the religious sphere, and the religious
sphere is decreasingly utilized as a resource for purposes of procuring
conditions of equality in the real world. As a result, the phrase "impossible possibility" sounds either like a platitude that violates the law of
noncontradiction or like a trivial truth that tells us nothing new about
what we ought to do in response to our human predicament. Consider
the following worst-case interpretations of "impossible possibility," presented syllogistically:
A. "Impossible Possibility" as Contradiction
i) God, who knows best and wishes the best for humankind, has commanded us
to love. (Love is an ideal that one may not complacently put off into the future
without both betraying that one's faith is immature and denying the providential
design that is evident in the commandment to "love thy neighbor.")
ii) Love ought not to be an ideal on which one acts in history. (Since human
history reveals the inevitably high degree to which finitude and sin enter into
all human actions and attitudes, love, which makes no exceptions to the rule of
nonresistance, is an ethically inappropriate response in the political arena.)
iii) Therefore, God has commanded us to do that which we can see we ought not
to do. (Humans should try to realize the ideal of love in the present as an expression of their faith and at the same time realize the futility in so doing given the
ideal's irrationality.)
According to this interpretation, the impossible possibility, even as an

ideal, is absurd and counterproductive. It is not above but against reason.
We are reminded of the Kierkegaardian "halt," of the offended would-be
28 Timothy Jackson, "Christian Love and Political Violence," in The Love Commandments,
ed. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Uni-
versity Press), p. 188.
71

believer who in the end cannot accept that one man (Christ) has entered
into and changed history by lifting human kind out of it.29
But even this conclusion, which would recommend love were it not
for its prudential futility, is not as pessimistic as the second uncharitable

interpretation of "impossible possibility," which, in essence, does not even
acknowledge love as a possibility:
B. "Impossible Possibility" as Trivially True
i) Love is the choice of absolute freedom. (Love is the only absolute, final structure of freedom, and therefore it is the quintessential possibility.)
ii) We are only ever relatively free. (Because humanity is egocentric, we always
think in terms of distinguishing and protecting our well-being. As a result, society
finds itself in a continual state of war that can be resolved only through choosing
between relatively tragic options.)
iii) Therefore, love is literally the impossible possibility. (Love is not really our
option.)
Love, according to this interpretation, is literally unavailable as an ethical

option to agents who act within history. Given the obviousness of the assumption that agents are only ever relatively free, an ethic that makes
normative recommendations on the assumption that agents can be absolutely free will be prescriptively inadequate.
As we have seen through his allusions to the role of the kingdom of
God in history (i.e., when agents adopt the kingdom-of-God perspective),
Niebuhr tries to work his way out of the pessimism intrinsic to the above
scenarios by distinguishing between our trying to live up to the ideal of
love and our merely heeding the ideal. While the former is futile, the
latter is of indispensable importance. Indeed, suggests Niebuhr, human
awareness of the ideal motivates, rather than detracts from, the fulfill-
ment of a less ambitious ethical goal, namely, the approximation of the

ideal of love through justice, which, to be sure, is ajustice that is informed
and corrected by love.

The problem with this solution, however, is that it utilizes eschatological concepts (e.g., "kingdom of God," "absolute freedom") to establish an
ideal that is to be the primary influence on humanity's ethical calling in
history. One wonders how much practical use these concepts will have
during a time that is before eternity. Justice is always implemented in
history. As such, there are definite limits on the extent to which it can
effectively be informed or corrected-or transcended-by a love (an "impossible possibility") that, Niebuhr so frequently tells us, is proper to eternity. One wonders if, in his view, love comes to function within history as
29 Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 23 ff.
72

a kind of myth or symbol. This concern speaks to the very heart of the
prudential pacifist's critique of the use of violence as a means to eradicating violence: once violence is condoned, it almost immediately has severe
consequences, becomes further intensified, and proceeds to resolve itself
of its own momentum, if for no other reason than that there can be no
stronger real force than itself to contravene its ensuing effects. This is
why pacifists are more likely to construe self-sacrificial love as a weapon,
or at least as a powerful tool, than as a myth or a symbol.30 This observation about the use of violence is ironically confirmed by just-war thinking.
As Michael Walzer puts it, "war is hell," which makes a war waged justly,
when that path is chosen, all the more "morally urgent to win.""'
Niebuhr's overall view, though clearly an alternative to pacifism that is
more sensitive to the horrors associated with the use of violence than are
contemporary just-war positions, still suffers from a lack of emphasis on

the kind of agapeistic, nonreciprocal love that stands in utter defiance of
the use of violence; it remains an alternative to pacifism that promises to
ignite real change by temporarily borrowing pacifist "illusions" for its own
purposes.32 The difficulty is that the more self-conscious we become of

such "illusions"-as realists think we should-the more we question their
relevance to the formation of real-world policies, impeding their transformative effect. What is needed to rehabilitate the kind of compromise
suggested by Niebuhr's via media is an account of agapeistic love-in

precisely the self-sacrificial sense that Niebuhr understands it-to function as an unmistakably nonmythological deterrent to war and violence.
What I have in mind would be consistent with a social ethic in which
nonviolent resistance, and especially violence, are options that are available to us as a last resort but cannot be regarded as permanent or in some
sense enduring in history. In the next two sections, I argue that Levinas
supplies such a remedy by retaining the tension between love ("responsibility") and justice that is so important to Niebuhr's social ethics without
making an appeal to a time beyond history that would render problematic the role that love plays in this settlement.
IV. RESPONSIBILITY AND JUSTICE IN LEVINAS'S ETHICS OF ALTERITY
Levina's phenomenological metaphysics places him squarely within the

tradition of continental philosophy, and he certainly does not present any
ethical theory. It would not be unreasonable, however, to argue that much
so Again, Yoder is a good example of a thinker who adopts such a strategy (see The Priestly
Kingdom, p. 61).
s~ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New
York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 110.
32 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (n. 13 above), p. 277.
73

of his later corpus, beginning with his second major work, Otherwise than
Being; or Beyond Essence, can be used in the service of constructing a social
ethic, even if Levinas himself did not intend his philosophical writings to
be used for that purpose.3 John Davenport, for example, recently has
referred to the Levinasian nonsymmetrical self/stranger relationship as a
"protoagapeistic" concern, "formally similar" to that of positive Christian
neighbor love in at least two respects: (1) it assumes that our fundamental
responsibility for others is not chosen but is, rather, assigned to us as a
condition of our being in the word, and (2) it insists that this responsibility is unconditional and indifferent to concerns of reciprocity.34 These
premises, contends Davenport, are axiomatic for any ethics of agape.
Regardless of whether this unilateral conception of other regard, as
Davenport puts it, is constitutive of the term "agape" across the board, it
certainly conforms to a Niebuhrian understanding of the law of love as
self-sacrificial and potentially subject to exploitation. Levinas, like Niebuhr, conceives of our responsibility for others as a boundless self-giving.
His fundamental conviction is that when ethics rests on the reciprocal
consideration of duties, on the mutual exchange of affections, or, indeed,
on any requisite understanding of what counts as right or wrong, we are
too late in responding to the other. The time that elapses between our
consideration of the deed we will perform on behalf of the one who needs
our help and the accomplishment of that deed is seen as an evasion of
responsibility. But Levinas does not merely argue that we should be responsible before we think of it. His position is much stronger. We are
constituted as responsible selves. Indeed, contends Levinas, it is responsibility that marks the starting point of our very existence. Levinas's account of the way we are discloses the way we ought to be. Compassion is
not an act of the autonomous will that must overcome its human nature;
it is the fulfillment of the essential, subjective demand. Responsibility, ac-
cording to this view, is not the assumption of responsibility. Rather, it is

an accountability for a negligence for which I could not possibly have
33 The ethical implications of Levinas's philosophy are only now starting to receive the
well-deserved attention that his metaphysics has received since the beginning of Levinasian
scholarship. Still, it is important to note that Levinas himself does not purport to be doing
social ethics and that what I offer below is therefore as much a construction using Levinas
as it is an interpretation of Levinas.
34 John Davenport, "Levinas's Agapeistic Metaphysics of Morals: Absolute Passivity and
the Other as Eschatological Hierophany," Journal of Religious Ethics 26, no. 2 (Fall 1998):
336-37, 342. Davenport proceeds to argue against this Levinasian construal of neighbor
love due to its lack of emphasis on the role of reciprocity in this understanding. While I
find Davenport's insights pertaining to the connection between Levinas's thought and
Christian ethics very instructive, it should be apparent that I do not share his critical atti-
tude toward this normative view.
74

been the cause but that I can nonetheless not afford to ignore. It is unfulfillable, ontologically necessary, and infinite.
If there are Christian ethicists whose extreme versions of neighbor love
match that of Levinas, there are none who surpass him in this regard.35
For in Levinasian ethics, my responsibility for the other, conveyed repeat-
edly in the hyperbolic language of "debt" and "persecution,"36 ultimately

extends to my "substitution" for him, in which I undergo complete alienation of my ego and am consequently thrust back upon my own flesh and
blood."3 This is characterized as an irreversible obsession. Not only can it
not occur to me that my neighbor might not consider my needs as I consider his, but mathematically speaking, I always have one more burden
than my neighbor: "In the responsibility which we have for one another,
I have always one more response to give; I have to answer for [the other's]
very responsibility.""38 This is a relationship against all logic. According to
Levinas, I am so obsessed with my task that I can hardly measure up to

it. I can only do my best, knowing that I will inevitably fail. Nonetheless,
it is this feeling of inadequacy, this feeling of always falling short of my
infinite responsibility, that keeps me responsible and staves off complacency. "The least intoxicated and the most lucid humanity of our time,"
remarks Levinas, "has in its clarity no other shadow, in its rest no other
disquietude or insomnia than what comes from the destitution of others."39 The more I answer the other's command, the more I am respon-
35 A good example of a Christian ethicist whose radical view of other regard rivals that of
Levinas is Anders Nygren. Nygren conceives of agape and justice as diametrically opposed,
interpreting the former as extreme self-sacrificial love (see Agape and Eros, pts. 1 and 2,
trans. Philip S. Watson [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], pp. 66 ff., esp. p. 70). Nonetheless, even Nygren's language is not as exaggerated as Levinas's. Levinas contends that the
self is accused and persecuted by the face of the other, which commands. The self holds
itself accountable for the other's misdeeds, no matter how severe and regardless of whether
they come at the self's expense. Upon encountering the other, the self divests itself of all
enjoyment and all shelter. Immobilized by its complete passivity, the self is laid bare to the
other's approach without having any option to escape. Levinas-in defiance of the Heideggerian telos of "being-for-the-self"-describes the condition of this occurrence, that is,
"proximity," as the incarnate "exposure to wounding and to enjoyment, and exposure to
wounding in enjoyment, which enables the wound to reach the subjectivity of the subject
complacent in itself and positing itself for itself" (Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence [n.
10 above], p. 64). He characterizes this wound as a physical pain that leaves the body in
exile from itself. It is thus that we find ourselves, in the most literal sense possible, existing
for others. The best analysis of which I am aware in terms of bringing clarity and contextualization to the distinctive senses that Levinas gives to "accusation," "persecution," and related terminology is presented by Robert Gibbs in Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas
([Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992], esp. chap. 9).
36 Levinas, Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence, pp. 63 ff.
37 Ibid., pp. 75-76.

38 Ibid., p. 84.
39 Ibid., p. 93.
75

sible and, paradoxically, the more my debt increases. My responsibility is
"infinity as an infinition of the infinite, as glory."40 "Glory," to be sure, is
other than the comfort that obtains from knowing that a battle has been
won on behalf of the forces of right. It is not the feeling that I have done
or continue to do the right thing. Glory, rather, is the giving of myself to
the other in every moment, ceaselessly berating myself for not having
given enough.
The relationship between self and other that has just been described
could hardly be any more asymmetrical or any more counterintuitive to
conventional ways of thinking about human interaction. It could not stray
any further from the tenets of distributive or retributive justice. Yet, in
Levinasian ethics as in Niebuhrian ethics, the ethical ideal of infinite obli-
gation has limits in practice. How these limits are revealed will be very
important for determining what kind of recommendations are implied in
a Levinasian view relative to pacifism and just-war theory, for as we will
see, such limits function more as a part of the larger ethical task than as
a temporal (real-world) contradiction and approximation of an eternal
(mythical) ideal. According to Levinas, justice results from a third party's
encounter with a prior confrontation already taking place, making it the
only adequate expression of this third's love for the initial two whom he
encounters. Thus, as opposed to the dualism proper to prophetic Chris-
tian realism in which love and justice are understood as distinct but
equal, in Levinasian ethics, justice is both part of and subordinate to responsibility. It is for the sake of responsibility, and not in spite of it, that
justice is sanctioned. Still, it is important to emphasize that Levinas is

no pacifist.
While he would consider the option ofjustice to be a limiting of responsibility, Levinas recognizes its highly significant, though historically contingent, role in ethics as the check against oppression, domination, and
exploitation in society. The need for justice can be explained on the individual level. I am forced into justice by the empirical fact of my not being
able to restrict my day-to-day encounters with the other whose gaze occupies my attention. The entry of a third upsets the intimacy of that former
encounter. I become conscious of the fact that the other who has just
accused me is now in debt to the new party who has arrived. I acquire
self-consciousness for the first time; I now start to think about the other
in relation to myself. In so doing, I become aware of notions of fairness,
equality, and my stake in humanity, which unites us all. Levinas explains:
"The act of consciousness is motivated by the presence of a third party
alongside of the neighbor approached. ... There must be ajustice among
40 Ibid.
76

incomparable ones. There must then be a comparison between incomparables and a synopsis, a togetherness and contemporaneousness. ... But
being must be understood on the basis of the being's other. To be on the
ground of signification of an approach is to be with another for or against
a third party, with the other and the third party against oneself, in
justice.'"41
It is still for the sake of the other that I resort to justice (truly as last
resort). However, now I am no longer captured by the unique and radically unpredictable gaze of the other I encounter but rather by the recollection of countless helpless others to whom I was once exposed. With
the entry of the third, the extreme asymmetry between my responsibility
for the other and the other's responsibility for me (the disparity of which,
if I am truly responsible, I have not considered until now) requires reciprocity in the sense that I can begin to consider my needs and the needs
of the third. Writes Levinas: "The ego can, in the name of this unlimited
responsibility, be called upon to concern itself also with itself. The fact
that the other, my neighbor, is also a third party with respect to another,
who is also a neighbor, is the birth of thought, consciousness, justice and

philosophy.'"42 The intimacy of the encounter between self and other cannot be sustained at the societal level. Levinas enforces this point elsewhere: "The third party is other than the neighbor, but also another
neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other, and not simply his fellow...
'Peace, peace to the neighbor and the one far-off' (Isaiah 57:19)-we now
understand the point of this apparent rhetoric. The third part introduces
a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until
then went in one direction. It is itself the limit of responsibility and the
birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice?"43
It is beyond my control that I cannot adequately divide my infinite
obligation among two or more. The limiting of my responsibility, however,
is sanctioned by the idea of responsibility itself, which calls for its own
restriction. In justice, the other temporarily loses his or her unique alterity from the point of view of the one who now has more than one other
on whom to look. I am finite and can be responsible for the other without
failing to attend either to the third or to myself, who now, "thanks to
God," also become others too.44 I must humbly assume some distance and
decide how to divide my attention, knowing that now more than ever I
will fall short of my initial responsibility. For Levinas, social justice is the
result of others coming to this conclusion alongside me.
41
42
43
44
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 158.
77

It appears, then, that in spite of the relative priority Levinas gives to
the notion of responsibility, the tension between love and justice that is
so prevalent in prophetic Christian realism is also present in the ethics of
alterity. Responsibility seeks its expression in justice even though justice
is the limiting of responsibility. At the same time, notes Levinas, it is self-
sacrifice, inequality, and the surplus of my duties that justifies equality,

justice, and the birth of my rights.45 To forget that whatever is done is
done always for the sake of responsibility is not only to undermine the
initial face-to-face relation; it is to oppose it. This is why Levinas insists,
almost dogmatically, in Otherwise than Being and in his later writings that
the only morality is a morality of kindness.46 One must never think in

terms of justice however necessary justice may seem to be as a response
on a particular occasion. This speaks to the very point of the Levinasian
rhetorical strategy of using hyperbole to convey the demand of the other:
when the topic of justice finally does arise, as it inevitably must, the
reader is left still thinking about responsibility.
V. THE LEVINASIAN VIA MEDIA
Whereas Niebuhr's realism suggests a pessimism that makes one question

the degree to which the impossible possibility is an accessible resource in
social ethics, Levinas's ethics of responsibility is more optimistic; it makes
love and the spirit of love both real and mandatory in every sense.47 These
disparate orientations correspond to each thinkers' rejection of pacifism

and just-war theory. Niebuhr's rejection of pacifism, for example, is explained as a contradiction of love even though it is necessary due to the
futility of a social ethic based on religious idealism. Levinas's rejection of
pacifism, however, is an affirmation of love even when it entails the corrupt structures of resistance or violence. In a corresponding manner, Niebuhr's rejection ofjust-war theory depends on emphasizing a future eter-
nity that is brought to bear on the human condition in time while
Levinas's rejection rehabilitates from "a past more profound than all that
I reassemble by memory" a notion of human essence that pervades all
possible interaction with others in the present.48 Both thinkers, in explicitly acknowledging the occasional need to implement the instruments of
justice in order to counter violence, establish their distance from all forms
45 Ibid., p. 159.
46 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 154.
47 The difference can be explained in part by referring to each thinker's respective religious tradition. Niebuhr's emphasis on the Christian doctrine of original sin and its implications for the human condition is diametrically opposed to Levinas's introduction of a notion
of original goodness in which we rejoice in our vulnerability.
48 Levinas, Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence (n. 10 above), p. 88.
78

of pacifism. Only Levinas, however, fully divorces himself from potential
associations with the just-war camp by avoiding any mention of a perspective that is imaginatively to be adopted by agents who can only act as if
they are free to exercise the option of love. On the contrary, Levinas not
only understands responsibility as possible but also upholds it as an existential fact of the human condition even as it takes form in history to
include justice. Indeed, according to Levinas, we both exist in and cannot
escape from our difficult freedom.
The difference between Levinas and Niebuhr becomes clearer if we
examine the influence of their eschatological views on their respective

ethics. According to Niebuhr, we are always to heed the ideal of love, but
we can only approximate love in history. The eschatological condition of
the ideal impinges on the formation of human communities, ensuring
that the future can break into the present only on a limited basis.49 Thus,
the occasional resort to violence, which in Christian realism is justified
by reason, must ultimately be characterized as a kind of resignation or
concession to the present situation. Niebuhr concurs with just-war thinkers that we ought to manage our expectations; as part of our tragic condition, there will be justified exceptions to the presumption against war.
Levinas, however, does not characterize the limiting of responsibility, including the necessary use of force, as something to which we ought to
resign ourselves; it is, rather, one facet of responsibility more broadly con-
ceived. We are already responsible; the

free but whether we will acknowledge
the eschaton is a not a future time but
in the ... sense of lying beyond being"
question is not when we will be

our freedom. Thus, for Levinas,
is, as Davenport puts it, "futural,
and the linear, teleological pro-
gression toward the end of history.50 To conceive of a life lived in freedom,
as does Levinas, is also to embrace a critical attitude about justice. To be

specific, it is to feel acutely the discomfort associated with the resort to
violence and to remain optimistic about its immanent elimination.
I propose that just at the point where Niebuhr's realism begins to betray its own commitment to possibility by frankly acknowledging the lim-
its of human finitude, it behooves the Niebuhrian to consider what Levinas has to say about infinity, a notion that, in its eventual extension to
the idea ofjustice, is surprisingly and importantly accommodating to the
formulation of a social ethic intended to govern real-world human interaction. In prophetic Christian realism, love informs and corrects but, due
to its impossibility, cannot found justice. As a result, justice exists in a
condition that is conducive to the perpetual postponement of its eventual
4 Cahill (n. 2 above), p. 245.
50 Davenport (n. 34 above), p. 356. For more on Levinas's eschatology, see Brian Schroeder,
Altared Ground: Levinas, History, and Violence (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 141 ff.
79

transformation. Because justice contradicts love each time it approximates it, justice participates in a never ending chase, always vulnerable
to forgetting its goal and becoming one with its means of fulfillment. It is
in this sense that Christian realism remains one step removed from justwar theory. This danger is prevented from coming to pass in Levinas's
ethics because of the overriding idea of infinite obligation to the other,
which-though ultimately extending to equality and reciprocity among
all others-remains hierarchically structured so as never to afford these
derivative notions any conceptual autonomy.
The Niebuhrian can consult Levinas, furthermore, without dispensing
with the dialectical relationship between love and justice that is credited in
prophetic Christian realism for establishing humanity's progress through
history. Indeed, it is no less the case for Levinas than Niebuhr that justice
requires its own continual revision, for just as the point of justice in prophetic Christian realism is to approximate love, in the ethics of alterity,
justice becomes injustice if it fails to seek constantly its original source. In
both cases, justice doubles back on itself, as it were, to prevent itself from
becoming less than justice. Levinas poignantly articulates the consequences of the modern tendency to employ a justice that fails to be critically reflexive in this regard. He exhorts:
Violence, even when it is inevitable and just, dearly and nobly paid for by the
danger or death involved, can cost nothing by itself. The ordeal that should have
come from its immorality is dulled by the heroism in which it shows up and in
which souls seek and find their salvation. The modern world has forgotten the
virtues of patience. The rapid and effective action to which everyone is committed
for a single moment has furnished the dark gleam produced by the inability to
wait and suffer. But the glorious deployment of energy is murderous. We must
recall these virtues of patience not so as to preach a sense of resignation in the
face of revolutionary spirit, but so that we can feel the essential link which connects the spirit of patience to true revolution. The revolution comes from great
pity. The hand that grasps the weapon must suffer in the very violence of that
gesture. To anaesthetize this pain brings the revolutionary frontiers to fascism.51
It is unfortunate that we would ever need to resort to justice, but it would
be tragic, notes Levinas, if we forgot that justice is a last resort. Justice,

while immoral, is often the only moral response. Levinas, very much like
Niebuhr, resists the watering down of the moral ideal while at the same
time solemnly recognizing that social encounters marked by the entry of
third parties may alter its means of fulfillment. By appealing to the virtues of patience, Levinas reminds us that we are not to believe that love
is rendered defunct when violence is made necessary. Remaining patient
is painful because it entails a consciousness of the gap between what we
51 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 155.
80

are and what we could otherwise be. True revolution involves engaging
in a struggle to bring about the latter.
Levinas's ethics of alterity adds a sense of resistance to the resignation
indicative of prophetic Christian realism, for it stands as an explicit

rather than tacit critique of just-war thinking. To that extent, Levinas's
view is perhaps not as realistic as Christian realism. But neither is it as
idealistic as religious idealism, and, thus, in the final analysis, it is a view
that, when heeded in all its complexities, would have just as good a record
as that of realism with respect to countering exploitation in society. One
can conclude that it is a view that improves on Niebuhr's via media by
moving away from the middle toward the side of pacifism. As such, it
would seem to be a view that has many of the benefits of pacifism without
incurring pacifism's major cost.

VI. CONCLUSION
At the end of Love Your Enemies, Lisa Cahill laments the increasing ease
with which nonpacifists justify making exceptions to the presumption
against war and violence, and she even suggests that the virtues of compassion and mercy may not have survived the just-war project.52 Writes
Cahill:
What might have originally begun out of an inquiry as to the practical meaning
of discipleship became distorted. Needed today is a way to move away from the
focus on the atypical and back to the foundational Christian moral sensibilityunity with and in Christ-while still allowing the realization that the foundational
gospel commitment is lived socially and historically. Treating the right of selfdefense, even when exercised on behalf of an innocent victim, as the point of
departure has a way of insidiously shifting the foundation of the discussion to a
different view of the moral life from that embodied in the gospel.53
Is it the fate of all nonpacifist positions to devolve into an ethics based

primarily on the assertion of interests rather than on love, mercy, and
compassion? How might one doing social ethics engage the issues of war
and reconciliation while also accommodating Cahill's concerns? If I have
interpreted them correctly, then Niebuhr and Levinas may surprisingly
turn out to be guides for such a constructive undertaking, not only with
respect to Christianity but also with respect to other religious and moral
traditions.
The roles that self-sacrificial love and responsibility play in the thinking
of Niebuhr and Levinas can be of considerable value for constructing a

social ethic insofar as these concepts remind us to be self-critical even
52 Cahill, p. 239.
55 Ibid.
81

when it seems clear that we are doing the right thing. Or, stated differently, such concepts remind us that the right thing to do, the moral thing
to do, is to feel contrite about whatever it is we actually do. The special

appeal of Levinas and Niebuhr in our time, I think, lies in their responsiveness to the social issues that arise in a world in which horrible things
happen. Both thinkers suggest that we can never become so used to tragedies caused by human evil that they cease to shock as they recur through-
out history. But neither can we deny their presence. The only solution to
countering the seemingly endless parade of injustices is ambivalently doing what we must while anguishing over our actions almost as soon as we
produce them.
There is value in retaining a sense of moral dissatisfaction about the
necessary resort to violence, that is, in feeling contrite about the harm we
cause to our oppressive enemies.54 Neither pacifism nor just-war thinking

creates a special place for the virtue of contrition. Pacifists bypass having
to feel contrite by willfully exempting themselves from the messiness that
invades all human interaction; backers ofjust-war theory emphasize the

efficacy of their actions at the expense of forgoing a self-consciousness
about that in which they engage. The former are naive about the potential for man to escape the full registry of human horrors while the latter
risk becoming numb to these horrors.
Niebuhr and Levinas argue that in this life, we can neither avoid (in)justice nor fail to despise its baseness. If we are truly loving and responsible, we will be made to feel uneasy, indeed frustrated, by our work. We
therefore ought not to interpret the repelling of injustice in society as a
victory, for such self-congratulation diverts our attention from the surplus
of society's oppressed and the scarcity of attention currently being given

to them. Neither thinker denies that it is possible to narrow the gap between this surplus and scarcity, but we can never count on this, much less
regard any noticeable change as the fruit of our labors.
54 I should clarify that it is important to distinguish contrition from feelings of guilt and
remorse. Contrition, as I am using the term, refers to an agent's capacity to retain a sense
of inadequacy with respect to his own actions from a more demanding moral point of view.
82

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Love and Justice in Reinhold Neibuhr's Prophetic Christian Realism and Emmanuel

Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility: Treading between Pacifism and Just-War Theory

Love and Justice in Reinhold

Realism and Emmanuel Levinas's

Treading between Pacifism and

Reinhold Niebuhr's prophetic Christian realism arguably represents one

mental suppositions on which both of these alternatives are based. As

The Journal of Religion

of Christian love under the circumstances.2

Both pacifism and just-war thinking represent coherent responses to

the constraints within which such measures can be introduced. Christian

realism, in contrast to both of these approaches, makes a considerably

HarperCollins, 1986], esp. pp. 19-20, 39-40, 632).

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

For Niebuhr, while agape-properly construed as no less exacting than

is blind, for its implementation in a pure form results in the unwitting

Notwithstanding the interpretive difficulty of making adequate sense

plays in Christian ethics as well as the disparate criticisms launched

Press, 1995), p. 92.

The Journal of Religion

ible to one another.

While the arguments in defense of Christian realism as an alternative

violence and injustice are endemic to society at the collective level

influence on the socially engaged moral agent.

of any thoroughgoing pacifist.' While Levinas does not speak of an ethic

nonresistance and self-sacrifice, is analogous to Niebuhr's understanding

gaze in Levinas's ethics of responsibility, however, it cannot be overstated

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

tains thatjustice alone risks becoming transformed into injustice. Through

as justice signifies the limiting of responsibility--I hope to offer a fresh

statement and defense of his middle position and subsequently ask

II. A NIEBUHRIAN DEFENSE OF PROPHETIC CHRISTIAN REALISM

University Press, 1997), p. 168.

The Journal of Religion

position absolve him of these charges?

York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), 1:170.

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

Niebuhr's understanding of agape), is proper to humans relating in larger communities.

The Journal of Religion

to justice by preventing its practitioners from becoming complacent or

sustained for more than brief periods. Is homage to love as an impossible

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

kingdom has arrived, during which the kingdom-of-God perspective is

Niebuhr addresses the difficult question regarding the degree to which

22 Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Hitler-Stalin Pact," in Robertson, ed., p. 80.

The Journal of Religion

contributing something to the meaning ofjustice, namely, a consciousness

through appeals to justice, for love is and remains an absolute standard

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

According to this interpretation, the impossible possibility, even as an

versity Press), p. 188.

The Journal of Religion

for its prudential futility, is not as pessimistic as the second uncharitable

Love, according to this interpretation, is literally unavailable as an ethical

ment of a less ambitious ethical goal, namely, the approximation of the

and corrected by love.

Love and Justice in Niebuhr and Levinas

contemporary just-war positions, still suffers from a lack of emphasis on

purposes.32 The difficulty is that the more self-conscious we become of

suggested by Niebuhr's via media is an account of agapeistic love-in

Levina's phenomenological metaphysics places him squarely within the

York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 110.

32 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (n. 13 above), p. 277.