The hard bright rationality of ancient Greece and the dark wisdom of the Bible and its God

Emanuel Levinas was apt to compare the hard bright rationality of ancient Greece had triumphed only by attacking and desecrating the dark wisdom of the Bible and its God.


But human existence, according to Levinas, was really about idleness and passivity rather than striving and strife, and it found its true expression not in activism but in selfless vigilance and unfocused insomnia – an egoless anonymity beyond the reach of language or philosophical analysis.