Our appreciation of what philosophy is at any given historical moment, how it is understood by its practitioners and derided by its critics, is helped by examining its relationships with what are commonly called theology and religion. The stories of the relation between philosophy and religion and between philosophy and theology are complex and lengthy. Frankly, the more we understand of these tales, the better would be our grasp of Levinas's references to religion and God and his penchant for using theological and religious expressions to refer to the face and the ethical. Both topics are present early in Levinas's writings. Long before Totality and Infinity, he could say: “The absolute which supports justice is the absolute status of the interlocutor. His modality of being and of manifesting himself consist in turning his face to me, in being a face. … This is not at all a theological thesis; yet God could not be God without first having been this interlocutor.” These words come from 1954. They raise the question: how is God related to the face-to-face and its ethical import if their relationship is not a theological matter, if, that is, God is not a divine commander and ethics is not constituted by His commandments? Even at this early stage Levinas struggled to articulate how his insight about the central importance of the face-to-face and responsibility is related to God and religion.