Actual infinity, freedom and modern theology

The proposed article examines the connections of the concept of actual infinity with the concepts of freedom, personality and philosophical and theological constructions in the Middle Ages and modernity. In the first part, the author analyzes Kant’s concept of freedom, showing that it implicitly implies actual infinity: human freedom is able to overcome all possible sensual inclinations. Kant’s postulate of freedom is on a par with the postulate of the existence of God: human freedom reflects the image of the infinite power of the Creator of the world. In medieval theology, speculations about actual infinity mainly concerned the question of the possibility for God to create an actual infinity. As the author shows, the related distinction of the degrees of the infinite goes back to Dionysius the Areopagite. In the philosophy of E. Levinas, the European philosophy Socratic-Platonic line of cognition is understood as a kind of imperialism of reason, striving to reduce everything Other to the Same. Ethically, this poses the problem of an adequate meeting with Another. A true meeting with Another is possible, according to Levinas, only as a meeting with a Face. Moreover, under this Face, both man and God can be thought of the same way. The face of Another is an actual infinite phenomenon, not expressible in any grid of a priori categories. The modern Catholic theologian J.-L. Marion, who works in the tradition of philosophical phenomenology, identifies among the phenomena those for which there is no corresponding conceptual design: historical events, Kant’s concept of the sublime, the concept of actual infinity, etc. Marion calls such phenomena saturated. The phenomenon of Another and the phenomenon of religious Revelation also belong to them. The connections established by modern phenomenology between theology and the concept of actual infinity in science once again testify to the religious root of the latter.