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13. ETHICS AND PREDESTINATION IN AUGUSTINE AND LEVINAS
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ethics and predestination in augustine and levinas Thomas J. J. Altizer Emmanuel Levinas is perhaps our most purely non-apocalyptic or antiapocalyptic thinker, one absolutely distancing his thinking from that apocalypse or new age released by the uniquely modern realization of the death of God. This is a distancing so absolute that it must go beyond any possible primordial condition to the absolutely pre-primordial, and a passivity so total as to bear no marks of passivity itself. This is as radical a project as has occurred in our world, and it inevitably evokes other horizons and other worlds. Perhaps the most revealing of these is the Augustinian revolution in the ancient world, a revolution giving birth to that center or subject of consciousness which became an ultimate ground of a uniquely Western culture and consciousness, or that very center that the thinking of Levinas so deeply intends to subvert or reverse. The clearest dimension of Levinas’ thinking is arguably its unveiling of the purely aethical condition of the world it confronts, a world that is unquestionably our world, a world that can be understood as a consequence of the death of God. While it is true that Levinas resists the language of the death of God, it is nonetheless true that, if only all too indirectly, he profoundly understands the consequences of the death of God, consequences so deeply ending ethical thinking and an ethical consciousness that only a truly revolutionary move could recover ethics, a move demanding a truly new and ultimately pure thinking. Here there is a genuine parallel between the thinking of Levinas and that of Augustine, who encountered a pagan world that he could know as the very opposite of the new world of Christianity, a pagan world that in this perspective is an absolutely aethical world, and one impelling a revolutionary new thinking. While Augustine was un230 13 der the influence of the Neoplatonism of Eastern Christian thinking, he nonetheless profoundly transformed that thinking and did so as the first truly Pauline thinker, so that it is not until Augustine that a fully biblical thinking occurs theologically , and one decisively establishing a new Western consciousness, a consciousness that became the very center of a new Western world. There has been no greater philosophical revolution than one establishing the center of consciousness as the center of thinking itself. This is the Augustinian revolution, and while unrecognized in our philosophical world, it is profoundly recognized by Hegel, who is deeply Augustinian in creating a philosophy of an absolute self-consciousness, although Hegel is deeply anti-Augustinian in knowing absolute self-consciousness as Absolute Spirit. This is possible only because Hegel is the first philosopher of the death of God, but he knows that death as an Augustinian or reverse Augustinian thinker, for he knows it as occurring in the depths of self-consciousness and as a fulfillment of that third or apocalyptic age inaugurated by the advent of Christianity. Nietzsche, too, can be understood as an Augustinian or reverse Augustinian thinker, and not only in his understanding of predestination as eternal recurrence but also in his understanding of the death of God, a death of God that is the ultimate apocalyptic event, and one bringing history to an end. Augustine is most ambivalent or most elusive as an apocalyptic thinker, and this despite the fact that he is the most influential apocalyptic theologian in Western history. It is the concluding books of his City of God that have most deeply shaped Western apocalyptic theology, and just as this work inaugurates a genuine thinking that is a historical thinking, it thereby inaugurates an apocalyptic philosophy and theology of history that is consummated in Hegel and Nietzsche. Hegel and Nietzsche are our greatest historical thinkers, but each is so as an apocalyptic thinker. Here history itself is inevitably an apocalyptic history, a history not only culminating in the death of God but ultimately grounded in that absolute kenosis or absolute self-negation or absolutely reverse or inverted will to power that are the very opposites of everything Levinas understands as passivity. If Augustine is the philosophical discoverer of the will, then it is Levinas who most purely unthinks the will, an unthinking that is simultaneously the unthinking of apocalypse, or the unthinking of that apocalypse released by the death of God. It is all too significant that the theological orthodoxies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike arose in a negation or reversal of apocalypticism...