Saintliness is Primordial in the Human Being

A question was addressed to Levinas:

Q.: Somebody wrote that the ethical responsibility you speak of is abstract and devoid of concrete content. Does that seem a valid critique to you?

E.L.: I have never claimed to describe human reality in its immediate appearance, but what human depravation itself cannot obliterate: the human vocation to saintliness. I don't affirm human saintliness; I say that man cannot question the supreme value of saintliness.

In 1968, the year of questioning in and around the universities, all values were 'up for grabs,' with the exception of the value of the 'other man,' to which one was to dedicate oneself. The young people who for hours abandoned themselves to all sorts of fun and unruliness went at the end of the day to visit the 'striking Renault workers' as if to pray. Man is the being who recognizes saintliness and the forgetting of self. The 'for oneself' is always open to suspicion.

We live in a state in which the idea of justice is superimposed on that initial charity, but it is in that initial charity that the human resides; justice itself can be traced back to it. Man is not only the being who understands what being means, as Heidegger would have it, but the being who has already heard and understood the commandment of saintliness in the face of the other man. When it is said that at the origin there are altruistic instincts, there is the recognition that God has already spoken. He began to speak very early. The anthropological meaning of instinct!

In the daily Jewish liturgy, the first morning prayer says, 'Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who giveth the cock knowledge to distinguish between day and night.' In the crowing of the cock, the first Revelation: the awakening to the light.