Biblical humanism and its relevance to the humanities

ENMorality is always a teaching. Parents, teachers and religious leaders have always taught morality - by example and exhortation - to their sons and daughters, students, co-religionists and the world at large. This is how one learns morality. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), the Lithuanian born French Jewish philosopher, does something different, something perhaps more difficult. He teaches morality to the intellectual elite, to those who all too often and all too proudly have become our new “cultured despisers of religion.” He teaches those who might think themselves too intelligent, too sophisticated, too cultured for the common imperatives and well known strictures of “ordinary” morality. Whether they dismiss the authority of morality as “self-incurred immaturity,” “bourgeois superstructure,” “grammatical error,” “infantile internalization,” “mass delusion,” “slave mentality,” “physiological weakness,” or some other derisive reduction, Levinas aims to show them - at the highest levels of intellect and spirit - that morality is a matter for adults, intelligent adults included.