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The [[Jewish ]] commandment which prohibits [[images ]] of God is the obverse of the [[statement ]] that relating to one's [[neighbor ]] is the only terrain of [[religious ]] [[practice]], of where the divine [[dimension ]] is [[present ]] in our lives — "no images of God" does not point towards a gnostic [[experience ]] of the divine beyond our [[reality]], a divine which is beyond any [[image]]; on the contrary, it designates a kind of [[ethical ]] hic Rhodus, hic salta: you [[want ]] to be religious? OK, prove it here, in the "works of [[love]]," in the way you relate to your neighbors... [[Levinas ]] was therefore [[right ]] to emphasize how "[[nothing ]] is more opposed to a relation with the face than ‘contact' with the [[Irrational ]] and mystery."* [[Judaism ]] is anti-gnosticism par excellence. We have here a nice [[case ]] of the [[Hegelian ]] [[reversal ]] of reflexive determination into determinate [[reflection]]: instead of saying "God is love," we should say "love is divine" (and, of course, the point is not to conceive of this reversal as the standard [[humanist ]] platitude. It is for this precise [[reason ]] that [[Christianity]], far from standing for a [[regression ]] towards an image of God, only draws the consequence of the Jewish iconoclasm through asserting the [[identity ]] of God and man — or, as it is said in John 4:12: "No man has ever seen God; if we love one [[another]], God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." The radical conclusion to be drawn from this is that one should [[renounce ]] the very striving for one's own (spiritual) salvation as the highest [[form ]] of egotism — according to Leon Brunschvicg, therein resides the most elementary ethical lesson of the West against the Eastern spirituality:

The preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of [[self]]-love, a trace of [[natural ]] egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious [[life]]. As long as you [[think ]] only salvation, you turn your back on God. God is God, only for the person who overcomes the temptation to degrade Him and use Him for his own ends. (DF, 48)

So what [[about ]] the Buddhist [[figure ]] of bodhisattva who, out of love for the non-yet-enlightened [[suffering ]] humanity, postpones his own salvation to [[help ]] [[others ]] on the way towards it? Does bodhisattva not stand for the highest [[contradiction]]: is not the implication of his gesture that love is higher than salvation? So why still call salvation salvation?

1. Levinas, Emmanuel, Difficult [[Freedom]]: Essays on Judaism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins [[University ]] Press 1997, p. 9.

* [[Jews, Christians and other Monsters]]. ''[[Lacanian ]] Ink''. Volume 23. Spring 2004. pp 82-99. <http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII5.htm>