Ethics and predestination in Augustine and Levinas

ENEmmanuelI Levinas is perhaps our most purely non-apocalyptic or anti-apocalyptic 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.