© Mark K.Spencer, Quaestiones Disputatae -Vol. 1 No. 2 (Spring 2011) An Ethical Neoplatonism: Bonaventure and Levinas in Dialogue Mark K.Spencer Among the salient features of many strands of Neoplatonic thought are the presentation of being as having a hierarchical and participatory nature, and the idea of the Good beyond all being. Created beings are seen as emanating from the One, which stands at the apex of the hierarchy of creatures, and which is characterized by Dionysius and his medieval Christian followers as God and as the self-diffusive Good beyond all being. God is irst and fore- most the self-diffusive Good, and because of this He creates all creaturely beings. Bonaventure takes up this picture of the structure of creation in his Journey of the Soul to God. There he describes how creatures, having come forth from God, the fountain of goodness, participate in Him by their very existence and bear a trace of Him as His self-expression. By contemplating this trace we can ascend the hierarchy of beings to the contemplation of the God. This pattern of ascent to God is a familiar one in Christian theology and mysticism, as well as in non-Christian Neoplatonic thought. It provides both an ontology—the hierarchy participating in God, and an ethics—a guide to the good life as the retracing of the course of emanation to contemplation of God, as well as a model of perfect goodness in God’s self-outpouring. This model of ontology and ethics leading to rest in God has been attacked in the contemporary period by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who nevertheless draws on a version of the Platonic idea of the Good be- yond being. Levinas contends that any system which is founded on knowl- edge or which aims at rest is problematic. He holds that knowledge reduces the alterity of other persons and things to representations produced by the self, and that knowledge can only be exercised legitimately in the service of justice. Prior to all knowing, he claims, is the ininite ethical demand of the Good encountered in others: I would not even care to know anything were I not irst called and obligated by the other. 1 He furthermore claims that my deepest desire is not for rest in the Ininite Good, but for service to the Good 1 Levinas’ ethics is almost always expressed in the irst person in order to show that I am the one who is irst and foremost obligated by the ethical call of the Good; I follow this convention in this paper.