The Image of Jesus in the Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch

Abstract

Does Jankélévitch identify the Source of creation with that thorne-crowned one of the nonsense of the cross? It seems that Jankélévitch is not only very close to the teaching of the church, but also identifies himself with its most important element, the redeeming death of Christ. And this is not only valid for the young philosopher before the War, but also for the mature thinker in the years following the Holocaust, the author of the Moral philosophy.
But in his writings an existence defined by the gaze directed to God, or simply the existence in front of him, coram Deo, is not an ontological basis that makes everything possible and is an inexhaustible source of love for every virtue, but – strangely – a competitor for the attention and love directed to man. He does not recognize the drama of the cross as the infinite, divine repository of the solidary love of anyone humiliated and tormented. He also does not see the prayer as a possibility and gift of grace of a personal relationship with the Quod which is able to refill the easily emptying spiritual reserves of the commitment to the starving and persecuted. Jankélévitch’s hyperbolic ethics cannot be rooted in the soil of eternity.