Moral Value of the Care for the World in Yourcenar’s Anthropology

Commenting on the ethical dilemma which forces humanity to choose between its survival and the extinction of all resources, an extinction that it has provoked, and yet that only itself can check. Marguerite Yourcenar stresses the moral necessity to judge, to establish an axiological hierarchy that would rank homo sapiens among all other creatures, one that would favour such characters who would be the most intense, the most lucid or the most heroically simple of all. An ethical and conciliatory mission is assigned to Literature: to resist the forces of chaos threatening the order of the world.