Читать книгу The Religion of the Future - Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Страница 7

Death

Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our natures; our circumstances regularly subject us to belittlement.

Religion has been both an attempt to interpret the meaning of these irreparable flaws in the human condition and a way of dealing with them. It has told us that everything is ultimately all right.

However, everything is not all right. A turn in the religious consciousness of humanity would begin in an approach to these defects that abandoned the impulse to deny them. Religion would cease to console us for these frightening facts. Our hope might survive, changed.

Life is the greatest good. With life come surfeit, spontaneity, and surprise: the capacity to see more, make more, and do more than all the social and conceptual regimes in which we move can countenance. In the face of all constraint, the experience of life is an experience of a fecundity and a fullness without foreordained limits.

We exceed immeasurably the social and cultural worlds that we build and inhabit. There is always more in us, in each of us individually as well as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in them. There is always more that we have reason to value and power to produce than any of these orders of life, or all of them together, can contain.

The principle that applies to the organization of society and culture applies as well to thought and discourse. No method, no system of procedures of inference and modes of argument, no apparatus of reasoning in any one discipline, or in all disciplines combined, can do justice to our capacities for insight. We can always discover more than our established practices of inquiry can prospectively allow. Vision exceeds method. Method adjusts retrospectively to suit vision.

We are unlimited, or infinite, with respect to the practical and discursive settings of our activity. They are limited, or finite, with regard to us. Our excess over them is what, in a traditional theological vocabulary, we call spirit.

Everyone dies anyway. The response of nature to our experience of fecundity, of amplitude, of reach over circumstance and context is to decree our death. The finality of this annihilation, in contrast to the vibrant presence that preceded it, is the first and fundamental reason why death is terrible. The good that is the highest, preceding all others and making all others possible, is the good that will be most definitively destroyed.

Our fall toward death is surrounded on every side by tokens of the wasting of life. At any given moment on our planet, as Schopenhauer reminded us, countless living creatures tear one another apart the better to live a while longer. We are unable to distinguish our situation from theirs as much as we would like. Science teaches that death forms part of the continuance of life. However, what is necessary for the species is fatal to the individual.

The hour of death comes sometimes with agitation and suffering, and sometimes with resignation or even in sleep. Some people report, from near death experiences, that they see a great light. However, there is no great light, other than in the minds of some of the dying. According to certain conjectures, they perceive such a light because the brain is starved of oxygen, or because there is stimulation, as life wanes, of the temporal lobe, as if the body, on the very verge, were to play a final trick on us.

Regardless of whether death is resisted or accepted, its aftermath follows a regular course. The body is now a corpse. It becomes first rigid, then bloated. It soon rots, stinks, and begins to be devoured by vermin and bacteria, unless it is promptly burned. From having been revered, it turns into an object of revulsion.

So life ends in a strange sacrifice. Each of us is brought to the altar. This time, no angel stays Abraham’s hand. What is the point of the sacrifice, and what faith does it serve? It is an incident in a cult the secrets and purpose of which remain forever closed to us.

It is all the more terrifying to know that those whom we love most will be brought to the same altar, and offered in the same sacrifice, sometimes under our eyes. In their death we see what we can only imagine for ourselves: the annihilation to which we are all doomed confirmed, as love proves powerless to sustain the life that love may have given.

The terribleness of death becomes clear as well from another vantage point: the perspective of consciousness and of its relation to the world. The experience of life is an experience of consciousness. The mark of consciousness is to present a complete world: not just how I see, feel, and think about myself, but a whole world centered on me, extending outward from my body. For consciousness, everything that exists, or that has existed, or that will exist exists only because it plays a part in this mental theater of mine. Beyond the perimeter of its stage, there is no world, and there is no being.

Continuity of consciousness, embodied in an individual human organism, is what we mean by a self. The experience of selfhood is the experience of consciousness associated with the fate of the body and persistent over time, until the body fails and dissolves. There are no human beings for whom the world fails to be manifest in this way as extending outward, and backward and forward in time, from the conscious and embodied self.

We come to learn that this view of the world is an illusion. We correct the illusion, or compensate for it, but only theoretically; that is to say, by telling ourselves that the world is not in fact the way in which we will continue to experience it.

Death not only brings the conscious self to an end; it also shows, in definitive and incontrovertible form, that the representation of the world as extending outward in space and time from the self was false from the outset. The dead person will not be there to see the demonstration of his error, but the survivors will register what has happened. Each of them will know what awaits him.

With the end of consciousness, it is not just the conscious self that disappears forever; it is the whole world that perishes, as it existed for consciousness. The events and protagonists that filled it all vanish suddenly, in the instant of death, unless their disappearance has been foreshadowed by the ruin of the mind.

The person may flatter himself that he has recorded his experience of the world in lasting words. We know, however, that such records bear only a distant relation to the flow and richness of conscious life; at best, they select from it, or use it, translating it into a language that hardly resembles the real thing. The world of the conscious self cannot escape to the page; it remains trapped in the dying body, which sucks it into the grave and into nothingness.

No afterlife, of the kind promised by the religions of salvation, can—or, if it can, it should not—console us for our mortality. An afterlife would not suffice to give us back our bodies; we would need to be given back the time of the historical world: the struggle and the connection with other people in a time that is irreversible and decisive. To be restored to our bodies and made forever young without being reinstated in the time of history would be to suffer the torture of an eternal boredom. For this reason, portrayals of a paradise of eternal life in the salvation religions remain unconvincing and even repellent. They offer us the shell of immortality without granting us what makes life irresistible.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visionary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die.

The frightfulness of death wears another face, alongside its annihilating relation to the good of life and to the experience of consciousness. This third face of the terrors and evils of death has to do with not with its destruction of consciousness and of life, when it occurs, but rather with its effect on conscious life as each of us lives it.

We can best understand this effect in the form of a dilemma. One horn of the dilemma is what happens when we face death. The other horn is what happens when we fail to face it.

To face death squarely and persistently, without help from the feelgood theologies and philosophies that abound in the history of religion and of metaphysics, is to look straight at a sun that Pascal assured us, with reason, cannot be long observed without danger. It is to live in fear of the incomprehensible and awful end before us.

However, to contrive to forget that we will die—to turn wholly away from death or at least as far away from it as we can—is to risk losing the most powerful antidote to a life of routine, convention, conformity, and submission—to a somnambulant life, which is to say, to a life that is not fully possessed and that exhibits only in diminished form the attributes of life: surfeit, spontaneity, and surprise. It is the prospect of death that gives life its decisive, irreversible shape and makes time, our time, full of weight and consequence. Aroused by the awareness of death, so closely connected to the sentiment of life, we can conceive an existence of striving and resist the automatisms, the habits, the endless little surrenders that rob us, by installments, of the substance of life.

As we confront this dilemma, we have reason for hope. If we were able fully to awaken to life and to grasp its qualities and possibilities, we might be just as overtaken by a paralyzing sentiment as if we held death firmly in our line of vision. That each of us was snatched out of nothingness before being returned to it (or promoted, according to some of the historical religions, to the perpetual ordeal of an uneventful timelessness) is an enigma of the same order as the riddle of mortality. It is also a fortune so great that it may be as hard to consider steadily as our fall toward death. Life, too, seen for what it is, or can become, would be a sun blinding us through an exultation that might paradoxically inhibit our ability to seize its benefits.

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and the awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky, in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to an end.

Groundlessness

We are unable to grasp the ground of being, the ultimate basis for our existence in the world as well as for the existence of the world. We cannot look into the beginning and end of time. In our reasoning, one presupposition leads to another and one cause into another. We never reach the bottom; the bottom is bottomless.

The root experience of groundlessness is astonishment that we exist, that the world exists, and that the world and our situation in it are the way they are rather than another way. The way they are seems to bear no relation, other than a relation of indifference, to our concerns. Indeed, on the concern that overrides all others—attachment to life—nature is not simply indifferent; it is unforgiving. It has condemned each of us to destruction.

There is nothing in what we can understand about the workings of nature, when we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by cowardice, self-deception, wishful thinking, and power worship, that encourages us in the pursuit of our loves and devotions, or even provides a basis on which to understand their place and value in the history and structure of the universe. Thus, astonishment is accompanied, in the core experience of groundlessness, by awareness of the incomprehensibility, and of the sheer alienness, of the world in which we find ourselves.

Consider two distinct aspects of this experience: speculative groundlessness and existential groundlessness. It is the latter that counts as an ineradicable flaw in the human condition. Its significance, however, becomes clear only when it is seen against the background of the former.

Speculative groundlessness goes to the limits of what we can hope to discover about the universe and about our place in its history. Existential groundlessness has to do with the limits to our ability to overcome the disorienting implications of an inescapable fact: we play a part—a tiny, marginal part—in a story that we did not, and would not, write. We can edit that story marginally, but we cannot rewrite it. In fact, we can barely understand it; we survey it only in fragments. Consequently, our decisions about what to do with our brief lives can have no basis outside ourselves. We are, in this sense, ungrounded.

The most salient feature of the world is that it is what it is rather than something else. The most ambitious projects of understanding of the world are those that seek to explain why it must be the way it is and could be no other way and even why something exists rather than nothing. If these endeavors had any merit or prospect of success, our speculative insight into the world might provide a response to our existential groundlessness. They do not.

Suppose, for example, that we seek to list certain features that would make one world more probable than another, enlisting in this effort the semblance of a calculus of probability. We might, for example, imagine that a full universe, with a great richness of manifestations, is more probable than a meager one. It is an idle speculation.

The observed universe is, so far as we know or could ever know, the only universe, although it may have predecessors. The idea of a multitude of other universes is not evoked by any observation, nor could it be, for these other universes would have no causal communion with ours. It is merely designed to fill a hole in certain scientific theories (such as in string theory in contemporary particle physics) that make many universes possible and therefore find it convenient to imagine all of them actual. With only one actual universe, and with no basis other than the limitations and predilections of the human mind to distinguish possible and impossible universes, we lack the conditions for a well-formed estimation of probabilities.

We come to recognize speculative groundlessness by facing the interminable and contestable character of the presuppositions on which all knowledge and belief rest. Every claim about the world relies on assumptions, and each layer of assumptions on further layers of assumptions. We cannot justifiably bring this layering of presuppositions to a halt by an appeal to self-evidence, for example, to the self-evident status of the axioms of Euclidean geometry. Our sense of self-evidence remains parasitic on our perceptual apparatus, which evolved in our embodied organisms to serve limited, practical goals.

Our more comprehensive claims about the world have an irreducible pragmatic residue. If we cannot bring the chain of our presuppositions to an end by an appeal to self-evidence, we can nevertheless justify the conditional forms of understanding with which we are left by invoking the predictions and initiatives that they inform, motivated by particular interests. The hard core of speculative groundlessness is the existence of intractable limits to our natural knowledge of the natural world. Science, equipped with technology, extends these limits, but it does not abolish them. With its help, we continue to view the world from the vantage point of our embodied minds.

The failure of the ontological argument for the existence of God in the history of Western philosophy and theology is a particular expression of a wider problem.¹ Nothing in the character and content of what we have discovered about nature alters the brute facticity of the world: the world just happens to be one way rather than another. If there is only one universe at a time, its most important attribute is that it is—that it just happens to be—what it is rather than something else.

When we put aside the fictions of a metaphysical imagination determined to overstep the bounds of understanding, usually in the service of an effort to reassure us and to reconcile us to our lot, we encounter the dominant undertaking of modern science from Galileo and Newton to today: to discern the immutable laws governing nature, expected to be written in the language of mathematics. The unified understanding of these laws would then fix the outer limit to our comprehension of nature. There are, however, two grave limitations to this approach to the most general features of reality.

The first limitation is that its methods are suited to the exploration of parts of nature rather than of the universe as a whole. What one might call the Newtonian paradigm of scientific inquiry studies parts of reality, regions of the universe. In each of these regions, it distinguishes stipulated initial conditions marking out a configuration space within which phenomena change according to laws that can be expressed as mathematical equations. What is an initial condition at one moment may become an explained phenomenon at another. The scientist-observer stands outside the configuration space in the timeless position of God.

This approach fails when it is applied to the universe as a whole. Yet it is precisely knowledge about the universe as a whole (rather than about patches of space-time) that we require to defeat or to circumscribe speculative groundlessness. When the subject matter is cosmological rather than local, the distinction between initial conditions and explained phenomena within a configuration space cannot be maintained. The observer can no longer imagine himself as standing outside the boundaries of the configuration; there is nowhere outside the universe to stand. He cannot observe or prepare copies of the states of affairs that he investigates; there is only one universe, or at least one observable universe, at a time.

The second limitation of the dominant practice of natural science as a model of cosmological inquiry is that it assumes a historically provincial view of how nature works. It pictures the relatively settled and cooled-down universe. In this universe, the constituents of nature, as described by the standard model of particle physics, are unchanging and, for all practical purposes, eternal. States of affairs can be clearly distinguished from the laws governing them. We can think of the laws of nature as the indispensable warrants of all our causal explanations, and of causal connections as particular instances of the workings of these unchanging laws. The range of the adjacent possible is tightly drawn: the ways in which, and the extent to which, some things can turn into others.

What science has already discovered, however, suggests that nature did not, and does not, always appear in this form. It has another, fiery and unsettled variant, in which it presented itself in the very early history of the universe and may present itself again. In this variant, what we now think of as the elementary and eternal constituents of nature did not yet exist, or were not organized distinctly, as they now are, as a differentiated structure. The laws of nature may not have been distinguishable from the states of affairs that they governed. Indeed, causal connections or successions may not have assumed a law-like form at all. The susceptibility of the phenomena to transformation may have been much greater than it subsequently became in the relatively settled and cooled-down universe that the science founded by Galileo and Newton takes for granted.

When we cast aside feel-good metaphysics, with its disposition to claim more than we can pretend to know, recognize the incompleteness of that scientific tradition as a basis for thinking about the universe, and nevertheless attend to the revolutionary empirical discoveries of twentieth-century science, we reach a view reaffirming our speculative groundlessness rather than overcoming it. According to this view, everything changes sooner or later: the types of things that exist as well as the regularities connecting them. Change changes. Causal succession, rather than being simply a construction of the mind, is a primitive feature of nature. It sometimes exhibits law-like regularity (in the relatively settled, cooled-down variations of nature), and sometimes fails to exhibit it.

What there is then at the limit of our understanding is not a universe that could not be other than it is, or a framework of timeless laws. What there is is impermanence, which we also call time, and which Anaximander described some 2,500 years ago at the beginning of both Western science and Western philosophy: “All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another, according to necessity … under the dominion of time.” Nothing in this view explains away our speculative groundlessness. On the contrary, everything converges to make its meaning both more precise and more acute.

The world has a history, extending backward and forward in time, even beyond the present universe. No final system of laws could tell us what this history was, or will be, or must be; the regularities of the nature are the products of this history even more than they are its source.

When we come to understand this history much better than we now do, we shall still be confined to play a tiny part in it. It remains foreign to our concerns. Its message continues to be that nothing is for keeps, and that everything turns into everything else.

What about us? That is the question lying at the heart of the problem of existential groundlessness. A response to our existential groundlessness would make sense of our situation in the world in ways that provide guidance for the conduct of life and for the organization of society. We may first seek outside ourselves a basis for an orientation to existence in our general understanding of the world and of our place in it. If such an understanding yields no clues, we are driven back on ourselves: on our biographical and historical experience and on our self-understanding. The question then becomes whether the very lack of a grounding outside ourselves can be turned into an incitement and a justification for our self-grounding.

Only if all these attempts fail are we then left face to face with our existential groundlessness. In every instance, a response to the threat of existential groundlessness must take account of the most frightening aspect of our situation: that we will die. If such a response cannot show us how we are to achieve eternal life, it must suggest at least the beginnings of an approach to how we are to live, given our mortality, our manifest human nature or the human nature that we can bring about, our fundamental needs and desires, and the intractable limits to what we can hope to discover about the world and about our place within it.

The problem of existential groundlessness can be restated simply: all attempts to ground an orientation to existence in an understanding of the world tend to fail. To say that they must forever fail would be to make an unjustifiable claim about the future of human insight and initiative. What we have to instruct us is the history of our struggles to deal with the threat of existential groundlessness, in the space in which philosophy passes over into religion.

Consider three families of efforts to manage this threat. They are the three major spiritual options, dominant over the last two millenniums, that I explore in the next three chapters of this book. The consequences of this survey can be succinctly summarized. The better the news, the less reason there is to believe it. The more credible the news, the less satisfactory it is as a response to the perplexities and anxieties motivating the experience of existential groundlessness.

There appears to be an adverse sliding scale, which opposes our desire to see things as they are to our search for encouragement as well as for guidance. Moreover, even the more credible positions on this sliding scale, the ones that least require us to assent to the unbelievable, are unsatisfactory; if they do not tax our credulity, they nevertheless make light of our powers of resistance and self-transformation.

The most encouraging, and the least believable, news is that we have a friend in charge of the universe. That is the news delivered by the Semitic monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our friend made both the world and us. He did so out of an abundance of his creative, life-giving love. We are formed in his image. Not satisfied to make us, and stand aside, he has a plan for our salvation. In the implementation of that plan, he may even, according to one version of this narrative, have become incarnate in a man a couple of thousands of years ago. He calls us to eternal life and to participation in his being and requires that we change how we live and deal with one another. A community of the faithful will uphold and spread this good news.

This message is not without its terrors. Our spiritual freedom creates the risk that we may fail to heed the message and follow the path. We may be cut off and suffer estrangement from him. Like our salvation itself, this separation may become irreversible and eternal. Nevertheless, the view that we have a friend in charge of the universe is the best news that we could expect to receive, given our impending death and apparent groundlessness. He is the ground of being, and particularly of our being. In him we hope to overcome death.

The trouble is that belief in this narrative may be hard to achieve or to sustain. If it is not simply acquiescence in the conventions of a family and of a culture, it must be the result of undergoing certain experiences. Although these experiences violate our ordinary beliefs about the workings of nature, they may impose themselves on us with compelling if not irresistible force. However, apart from the matter of whether we should allow ourselves to be overwhelmed in this way (in view of our tendency to mistake wishful thinking for insight), we may simply, despite all efforts, not undergo such experiences. Having undergone them, we may fall out of them.

More particularly, reception of the good news requires us to suspend disbelief in a story of redemption from death and groundlessness that presents us with three sets of difficulties. Call them the scandals of reason. The first scandal is that we must accept a sudden and radical interruption of the regular workings of nature, as distinguished from the transformation of everything into everything else and from the change of change. The second scandal is that particular individuals and events have a privileged part to play in a narrative of salvation for all mankind: only the particular plot conveys the universal message. The third scandal is that we must not allow ourselves to be demoralized by the formidable objections that can be leveled against each of the main candidates for an idea of God, from the very standpoint of the belief systems in which this idea plays a certain role: God as person, God as impersonal being, and God as neither person nor being—an unnamable negation. When we are not in the self-induced grip of either social convention or religious enthusiasm, we may conclude that the good news is too good to be true.

A second family of responses to our existential groundlessness, of which the teachings of Buddha and the philosophy of the Vedas are the most important examples, emphasizes the impermanence of all the kinds of being—the natural kinds, as they are sometimes called—through which nature momentarily presents itself, and therefore as well of all the regular relations among these types of beings. Under the changing disguises of nature, it discerns changeless and unified being. This radical impermanence suggests that not only is all phenomenal distinction, including distinction among selves, illusory, but that time itself is only “the moving image of eternity.”

Our sole reliable grounding, according to this view, is the one that enables us to disentangle ourselves, through insight and striving, from the coils of the phenomenal world and to increase our participation in the underlying one reality: the reality of being. Such is also the route to an inclusive compassion, seeing beyond the shallow and ephemeral divisions among us and within the world.

Death confirms, with respect to our embodied existence, the truth of impermanence. It signals our return to the ground of being, from which we never truly departed. Thus, the responses to death and to groundlessness have the same source and work in the same direction.

Here is news that is not as good as the news about our friend the creator and master of the universe and his plan to rescue us from death and groundlessness. It bears a loose resemblance to the outcome of the argument about speculative groundlessness, the view prophesied by Anaximander: “All things originate from one another and vanish into one another, according to necessity, … under the dominion of time.” A major difference may lie in the rejection of the reality of time, often albeit not invariably associated, in this tradition of thought, with the devaluation of phenomenal distinction and of the distinction among selves. If time is illusory, so is history, and our worldly engagements turn out to be either paths without goals or goals without paths.

To accept this way of dealing with our existential groundlessness, we would have to begin by denying or by devaluing the reality of the manifest world and of time. It is one thing to affirm the thesis of impermanence. It is another to diminish the reality of the impermanent so long as it exists. It is in this respect that the news is incredible.

Then, we would have to entertain our merger into hidden and unified being as a substitute for our embodied and individual existence. In exchange for the unique self, we are offered the one mind constitutive of the world. Who would accept such a trade if he could avoid it? It is in this regard that the news is disheartening.

The disadvantages of the exchange are aggravated by the practical consequences of following the road marked out by the approach to reality informing it. Despite the basis that it offers for the assertion of an encompassing kinship with other people, and indeed with the whole of reality, and notwithstanding the call to compassionate action that it may inspire, its fundamental proposal is that we put the phenomenal and temporal world in its place. We are to discount its authority and reality, the better to achieve communion with the one being.

By conforming to this recommendation, we place the theoretical antidote to the experience of groundlessness at odds with the most reliable practical antidote that we have. For if the sense of the dream-like character of existence has any effective remedy, the cure lies in our engagements and attachments rather than in self-help through metaphysics. Nothing can better reconcile us to life than more life. It forms part of the peculiar character of this approach to the world, however, to cast doubt on the (ultimate) reality and authority of the phenomenal and temporal world, the world of history and of distinct human agents, in which such engagements and attachments flourish.

A third approach to our existential groundlessness, illustrated by the teachings of Confucius (as well as by many strands in Western secular humanism), begins from a wholly different point of departure. It accepts our speculative groundlessness but refuses to see it as implying our existential groundlessness. It proposes that we ground ourselves by building a culture and a society bearing the mark of our concerns and fostering our better selves.

The great spectacle of nature is, according to this view, meaningless. We can hope to master a small part of it and to make it serve our interests. We cannot, however, bridge the chasm between the vast indifference of the cosmos and the requirements of humanity. All that we can do is to create a meaningful order within an otherwise meaningless cosmos.

Our best chance of establishing such an order is to refine who we are and how we deal with one another. We can do so through a dialectic between the rules, roles, and rituals of society and the gradual strengthening of our powers of imaginative empathy: our ability to understand the experience of other people and to minister to their needs. By performing our obligations to one another, as chiefly defined by the roles we perform in society, we can secure the humanized structure that nature denies us.

The best among us, those in whom the power to imagine the experience of others has been most developed and the disposition to minister to their needs most pronounced, will no longer need rules, rituals, or roles to guide them in the conduct of life.

This view makes two mistakes that compromise its prospect of disposing of the problem of existential groundlessness: a mistake about society and history and a mistake about the self. The mistake about society and history is to credit any particular social regime with the power to accommodate all the experiences that we have reason to value, or represent the authoritative setting for the discharge of our obligations to one another. Because no social regime can be incontestable, none can hope to provide a grounding for human life that could make up for the grounding that nature denies us.

The mistake about the self is to depreciate a truth about humanity that is revealed in the third irreparable flaw in the human condition (which I next discuss): our insatiability. We demand of one another, as well as of the social and cultural worlds that we build and inhabit, more than we and they can offer. The advancement of our most fundamental material and moral interests regularly requires us to defy and to revise any settled plan of social life. The ultimate source of this power of resistance and defiance is that there is more in us, individually as well as collectively, than there is, or ever can be, in such regimes. We depend on others to make a self, but fear dependence as subjugation: the making and the undoing of the self have similar sources.

It follows from our conflicted relation to the structures of social life, as well as from our ambivalent relation to one another, that the improvement of society cannot amount to the self-grounding of humanity. It will not, unless we deceive ourselves or collude in our own enslavement, assuage the anguish of existential groundlessness.

The provisional conclusion is that none of the ways in which the major civilizations of world history have attempted to prevent speculative groundlessness from turning into existential groundlessness succeed. They are defective as theory, however, only because they are also defective as practice. Their practical consequences reveal their theoretical deficiencies.

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our works, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

There is an unequal relation between our groundlessness and our mortality. The latter is a more fundamental defect in the human condition than the former. If we enjoyed eternal and perennially rejuvenated and embodied life in historical time, our inability to discern the ground of our existence might not seem so daunting. We could always hope to make progress later on, in discovering the ground of our existence. We would always be brought back to the concerns arising out of the next moment of existence. Our groundlessness might seem what it does to some philosophers: a theoretical curiosity. It would, in the terms of the preceding argument, amount to a merely speculative rather than an existential groundlessness. Although it would remain baffling, it would lose much of its terror.

If, however, we did understand the ground of existence, our understanding might or might not assuage our fear of death. Whether it would or not would depend on our conclusions. There are understandings that might calm our fears: those, for example, that assure us that a friend of ours is in charge of the universe, that he has given us life, and that he will deliver us to death only to endow us with yet higher life but also those that invite us progressively to submerge ourselves in the self-making and the self-perfection of impersonal being. We have many reasons desperately to want one of these views to be true.

A central issue in the history of religion is whether it will remain content to perform the role of providing the consolation that we desire. A subsequent issue is what we are entitled to hope for if we cannot rest assured in the expectations that those consoling beliefs hold out for us. Both issues form major concerns of the argument of this book.

We must die without grasping reasons for our existence other than those fragments of necessity and chance that scientific inquiry suggests to us. It does not seem that the growth of scientific knowledge ever would or could alter this circumstance. If there is one universe or many, if the universe is eternal or time-bound, if it had a beginning in time or began together with time, we would simply have different ways of expressing a riddle that we would remain powerless to solve.

Insatiability

Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.

Our insatiability is rooted in our natural constitution. Human desires are indeterminate. They fail to exhibit the targeted and scripted quality of desire among other animals. Even when, as in addiction and obsession, they fix on particular objects, we make those particular objects serve as proxies for longings to which they have a loose or arbitrary relation. We force the limited to serve as a surrogate for the unlimited. This misalliance, revealed most starkly in our obsessional and addictive behavior, carries over to our entire experience of wanting and seeking.

The retreat or vagueness of biological determination in the shaping of our desires opens space for the working of four forces that, together, make our desires insatiable.

A first root of insatiability is the imprinting of the dialectic of embodiment and transcendence on the life of desire. We suffer when desire goes unsatisfied and, when it is satisfied, we are briefly relieved of pain. Our desires, however, are unlimited in both their number and their reach. The moment of dissatisfaction is soon followed by other unrequited wants. Contentment remains a momentary interlude in an experience of privation and longing that has no end.

How could it be different? No narrowly directed set of desires defines our natures. Hence no particular satisfactions can leave us lastingly at ease. The problem with the particular desires and the particular satisfactions is that they are particular and that we, in a sense (the sense of our excess over all the social and conceptual regimes that we engage), are not.

A second root of insatiability is the social construction of desire. Our desires lack a predetermined content. To a large extent, we get the content from one another; our desires represent a kidnapping of the self by society. This commandeering of desire by other people makes the content of desire seem empty, as if it always remained on the periphery of the self, as if it never penetrated the inner and empty core of the personality. We stand forever ready to exchange one invasion of the self by society for another.

A third root of insatiability is the prominence among our desires of those that by their very nature can never be satisfied by most people most of the time. We want from one another acceptance, recognition, and admiration as well as things and power. In particular, we want from one another what every child wants from every parent: an assurance that there is an unconditional place for him the world. No such assurance is ever enough, because every assurance is both ambiguous and revocable. Even if we can accumulate enough of scarce material resources, we can never get enough of the even scarcer immaterial ones. What is given to one man is taken from another, so that we find ourselves in a circumstance of perpetual dissatisfaction. Only love, freely given but easily destroyed, could free us for a while from this endless yearning.

A fourth root of the insatiability of desire is that we seek, in the satisfaction of our desires, not just to rid ourselves of the pains and privations to which they refer but also to supply a response to both death and groundlessness. A man may seek to become rich because he cannot become immortal or because he cannot find any more reliable grounding for his existence. This ceaseless metonymy, this trading of the ultimate for the homely, is bound to disappoint him.

There is a common element in these sources of insatiability. We cannot access the absolute, the unconditional, the unlimited. Therefore, we try to get it from the limited. We are unable to convince ourselves that, despite our mortality and our groundlessness, everything is all right. Therefore, we use whatever material and immaterial resources we are able to obtain to compensate for the fundamental defects in life that we are powerless to redress. We can never achieve enough acceptance from one another. Therefore, each of us continues the hunt for more tokens of assurance that there is an unconditional place for him in the world. We cannot restrict our strivings to a limited set of objects and goals. Therefore, we walk a treadmill of desire, satisfaction, boredom, and new desire, and take from others the cues that we are never adequately able to give ourselves.

The result is exposure to a free-floating anguish that it has been the aim of much of religion, philosophy, and art to quiet. Speculative thought and religious practice, enlisted in the cause of self-help, have often served as devices by which we cast a spell on ourselves the better to free ourselves from the sufferings of insatiability. From them we garner the stories about the cosmos and our lives within it that make the spell seem to be a reception of the deepest truths about the world.

At the center of the experience of insatiability lies the emptiness of human desires: their indeterminacy in comparison to the desires of other animals. This negativity influences even those drives—for food and for sex—that most clearly tie us to the rest of the animal world but that, in the human being, have an unfixed, inclusive, and roaming quality.

The emptiness of desire appears under two main aspects: it is mimetic (to use René Girard’s term), and it is projected (to use Karl Rahner’s term). The preceding discussion has already suggested how each of these traits of desire plays a part in the genealogy of insatiable desire. Together, they help clarify the nature of our insatiability.

Because our desires are empty, the void will be filled up by other people. To a large extent, we desire what those around us desire. Their desires contaminate us; they take us over. This takeover establishes a basis for both competition and cooperation, according to both the content of what is desired and the range of social alternatives available for its pursuit.

If we failed to resist the imitative character of desire, even as we surrender to it, we would not be the context-shaped but context-transcending individuals who we are. We would not be the beings whose relations to one another are shadowed by an inescapable ambivalence because they seek connection without subjugation and who understand, however darkly, that “imitation is suicide.” There is no making of selves without connection in every domain of our existence, and there is no connection, in any realm of experience, without the risk of loss of self. “Accept me but make me free” is what every human being says to another.

This conflicted relation both to the others and to the organized contexts of life and of thought takes place in the midst of a struggle for the fulfillment of our desires, desires that we discover to be not really ours. They came to us largely from the influence of others. Unless we can somehow criticize these borrowed desires, change them, and make them ours, our ambivalence to other people and our resistance to the context are powerless to free and to empower us. Therefore it is not only to other people that we are ambivalent; it is also to our own desires because they are ours and not ours. This confusion enters into the experience of insatiability and endows it with its tortured and desperate quality.

It is widely believed that these complications are the result of a historically specific set of developments in society and culture, associated with the ascendancy of democratic, liberal, and romantic ideals in some societies over the last few centuries. The truth, however, is closer to being the opposite: it is the power of these fundamental experiences of the self, which no regime of society and culture can entirely override or suppress, that accounts for the irresistible seductions of these forms of life and consciousness. The prophetic voice in politics and in culture would fall on deaf ears if it failed to find an ally in the innermost recesses of the self.

Desire is projected as well as mimetic. It is projected in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it always yearns for something beyond its immediate and manifest object. This something beyond shares in the quality of the unlimited, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. Thus, desire is projected in the sense that it projects forward beyond its visible horizon. On the other hand, however, the something beyond remains remote and obscure. We approach it, almost always, by indirection, mistaking it for something tangible and accessible, the proximate and visible object of our longing. Thus, desire is projected in the sense that we project the hidden absolute onto a manifest, contingent, and all-too-particular object.

In obsession and addiction, the disproportionate and even capricious bond between the hidden horizon of the unlimited and the paltry surrogate for it becomes extreme and paradoxical. It is, however, only the limiting case of a pervasive feature of the life of desire. In boredom, we experience directly the failure of the particular objects of desire, and of the habits and routines surrounding their pursuit, to hold our interest by engaging our capabilities. In every quarter, the phenomenology of desire bears the mark of our insatiability and reveals its connection with our powers of transcendence, with our longing for the infinite.

The projected quality of desire shows, as well, how our insatiability relates to our mortality and our groundlessness. The brevity of life lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we continue to seek one unworthy object after another, each the proxy for the unreachable horizon of that which could satisfy us. The terrors of death grow in the imagination with the expenditure of life on this equivocal chase.

Our uncertainty about the grounding of our existence (or rather the failure of all the available proposals to ground it) leaves us without a route by which to go from the tangible and defective particulars that we can grasp to the intangible and indiscriminate absolute that we voicelessly seek.

We have not understood our insatiability until we have formed a view of whether and under what conditions we might overcome it. In describing insatiability as an incurable defect in the human condition, I mean to claim that we cannot escape it, not at least without prejudice to the attributes that make us human and that might make us more human by making us more godlike.

Consider first the suggestion that in certain societies and cultures men and women cease to experience desire as insatiable. Insatiability would then be a local rather than a universal feature of human experience. Those who study savage societies from the vantage point of the ideas that have been dominant in modern anthropology often represent those societies as marked by a theology of immanence and a pragmatics of sufficiency.

The theology of immanence, in contrast to the spiritual beliefs that have been dominant since the religious revolutions of the first millennium B.C., places the sacred or the divine squarely within the natural as well as the social world. It thus provides no basis for a personal or impersonal divinity transcending what is manifest in this world in which we find ourselves. If our insatiability has theological or cosmological presuppositions, these presuppositions are denied by such a view of the world.

The pragmatics of sufficiency forms men and women who work only to uphold a certain customary form of life. When they have done so, they stop working. They do not allow themselves to be driven by an impulse toward relentless striving and accumulation. The character of their experience of life in society guards them—so the argument goes—against the ordeal of insatiability.

The question can then be presented squarely: Are we the beings who become insatiable only when we depart from the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency? It is true that there is a history of desire, as there is a history of ideas informing desire. This history, however, is not aimless or random. It does not converge to a single end. Nevertheless, it has directions. Its directions are not to be mistaken for the scales of divine justice. However, they reveal, in the course of time, who we are and what we can become.

The restraints imposed by the theology of immanence and by the pragmatics of insufficiency inhibit the development of our powers: not just of our powers of production but also of all our powers of invention and innovation. They prevent us from pressing against the limits of the practices, institutions, and assumptions about human association that hold all our interests and ideals ransom. They require us to treat one structure of life and thought—the established one—as our definitive and authoritative home in the world. We cannot do so, however, without pretending to be more like the other animals than like gods.

The falsehood of this pretense is prefigured by the irrepressible element of uncertainty about what the established regime of life and of thought is, and about how this regime is to be understood and upheld as circumstances change and conflicts arise. No real society can fully conform to such a script. No real individual can be made into the passive performer of the lines that the script assigns to the occupant of each social role. If he does not defy the script openly, he will nevertheless rewrite it secretly. The falsehood of the pretense is further confirmed by the irreversibility of any departure from this supposed Arcadia. No people and no individual could ever return to this Eden, once having experienced the advantages as well as the troubles of its disruption.

The revolutionary changes that are associated with the rejection of both the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency have aroused, and will continue to inflame, all humanity. Their influence, despite all calamities and reversals, will appear as a force that is irresistible and providential not only because it empowers us but also because it reveals us to ourselves.

If the variations of society and culture cannot save us from our insatiability, can some of our initiatives as individuals nevertheless shield us against it? Can we not have in love and in work experiences that wholly absorb us, modify or even suspend our sense of the passage of time, without depriving us of consciousness, and interrupt the cycle of unrequited desire?

Indeed, we can, if we are both lucky and wise, but only for a while. The work will come to an end, and no longer represent for its creator what it represented in the throes of creation. The love, ever tainted by ambivalence, will cease to waver only if it ceases to live. The work and the love will be seen to be the particular engagement and the particular connection that they are, and we will continue to seek, absurdly and inescapably, something that is not just one more particular. Our reprieves from insatiable desire will be momentary; our insatiability will remain as the lasting undercurrent of our experience, thrown into starker relief by its remissions.

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as we are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

Belittlement

“The true sorrow of humanity consists in this;—not that the mind of man fails; but that the course and the demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires; and hence that, which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused.” So wrote the poet Wordsworth, describing what we may be tempted to mistake for a fourth irreparable flaw in the human condition.

No feature of our humanity is more important than our power to go beyond the particular regimes of society and of thought in which we participate. We can always do, feel, think, or create more than they bless, allow, or make sense of. The fecundity and amplitude of experience outreach all the formative limitations imposed upon it.

For the same reasons and in the same sense, no social role in any society can do justice to any individual human being. No scheme of social organization can accommodate all the activities that we have reason to value or all the powers that we have cause to exercise and to develop. This excess over the determinate circumstances of existence should excite in the mind the idea of our greatness, or of our share in the attributes that some of the world religions have ascribed to God.

Nevertheless, the ordinary experience of life, although punctuated by moments of joy, which may be sustained and prolonged by our engagements and attachments, is one of blockage and humiliation. The persistent disproportion between our context-transcending powers and the objects on which we lavish our devotions threatens to turn existence into an ordeal of belittlement. “In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,—between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.” “So each man,” wrote Emerson, “is an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself.”

The extremes of economic deprivation and social oppression to which most of mankind has been condemned for most of history make this ordeal seem all the more bitter and inescapable. If, however, we look beyond the surface of life, we see that not even the privileged, the powerful, the gifted, and the lucky are free from the burdens of belittlement. For these burdens result universally from the recurrent, shaping incidents of a human life. Even a man whose circumstances and fortune have shielded him from deprivation and oppression must face these trials in three successive waves in the course of his existence.

First, at the beginning he must be driven out of the sense that he is the eternal center of the world. He must come to understand not only that he is just one among countless many but also that he will soon be nothing. Even if he allows himself to be persuaded that he will gain eternal life, he cannot regain the illusion of being at the center.

Later, he must resign himself to taking a particular course in life, if indeed the course is not imposed on him by the constraints of society. If he resists committing himself to such a course, he does not become universal; he merely becomes sterile and sick. However, the consequence of the particularity of the course of life is to open a rift between who we ultimately are and know ourselves to be and how we must live. The individual knows himself darkly to be more, much more than his outward existence reveals. Instructed by the world religions and, today, by the democratic and romantic creeds, he may even feel that he is entitled to scale the heights of experience and vision because he has unplumbed depths. That, however, which he knows himself ultimately to be he is unable to express in a course of action in the world. The result is that existence becomes an ordeal of self-distortion and self-suppression. It is not the tragedy of Hamlet alone; it is every man’s pain.

He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments.

It is crucial to a moral and political vision, and therefore as well as to any religion, that it mark in the right place the division between the inalterable circumstances of existence and the alterable arrangements of society. To represent flawed and revisable ways of organizing social life as inescapable is the characteristic form of superstition about society and history: the illusion of false necessity. The consequence of such illusion is to help entrench a particular ordering of society against challenge and transformation. It is to leave our ideals and interests hostage to the institutions and practices that represent them at a particular moment, and thus as well to inhibit our efforts to reconsider their meaning. A contemporary example of such institutional fetishism is the unwarranted identification of the abstract ideas of a market economy or of representative democracy with a particular, path-dependent way of organizing markets and democracies.

To deny the inescapable features of existence—death, groundlessness, and insatiability—is to commit no less grievous an insult against ourselves. In failing to confront them, we cease to awaken to a greater life from the sleepwalking of compromise, conformity, and the petrified self. We seize upon devices and stratagems that divide and enslave us under the pretext of empowering us.

Our susceptibility to belittlement is a persistent and pervasive feature of our experience. However, it is not, like mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, an irreparable defect in human life. It allows for a range of response, both individual and collective, in biographical as well as historical time. It is, consequently, not to be mistaken for a fourth incurable deficiency in the human condition.

Just what we can and should do about our susceptibility to belittlement, as individuals and as societies, is crucial to the course of life and to the advance of humanity. Our struggle with the threat of belittlement can easily be misdirected. One such false direction seeks to avoid or overcome belittlement by holding before us false hope of escaping our mortality, our groundlessness, or our insatiability. Another mistaken path accepts a particular established, or proposed, regime of society or of thought as the definitive template for our triumph over belittlement. The most important disorientation of all fails to see how the conduct of life may preserve us from the evils of belittlement, so long as we are not overwhelmed by the frailties of the body and the cruelties of society. It regards belittlement as no more avoidable than death.

What we are to do about our susceptibility to belittlement has always been a theme in the religious consciousness of humanity. For the more than twenty-five hundred years that witnessed the emergence, spread, and influence of the present world religions, it has, however, remained largely a subterranean theme. An argument of this book is that it should now become a central and guiding concern.

The generic antidote to belittlement is empowerment, collective or individual. There are principal false forms of individual and collective empowerment: a species of each that now exercises commanding influence. They are not false in the sense that they fail to increase the power of the species or of the individual. They are false in the sense that, despite their contribution to our empowerment, they cannot keep their promises; they fail to repair our susceptibility to belittlement, as it must be faced by each man and woman in the course of life. I call the chief false collective remedy to this evil the romance of the ascent of humanity, and the chief false individual remedy Prometheanism.

The romance of the ascent of humanity and Prometheanism fail as responses to the perils of belittlement, or respond to them at an intolerable cost to the enhancement of life. Nevertheless, each of them resembles another direction of response that does indicate the path by which we can hope to triumph over belittlement. The development of these better counterparts to the errors of Prometheanism and of the romance of the ascent of mankind is one of the main aims of this book.

Here is a rendering of the romance of our ascent. Humanity rises. Its rise is not inevitable, not at least in the more guarded and realistic versions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, two philosophers of this romance, were not so circumspect.) We the human race, the species, have already gone far to diminish our haplessness before nature. When we depended completely on her, we used to worship her. Now we have built great civilizations. We have formed, through science and technology, instruments with which to extend our powers and to prolong our lives. We have created opportunities for many more people to have much more time to explore the secrets of the universe as well as the workings of society and of the mind. All these achievements are only a beginning. The watchword of the romance of the ascent of humanity is: you have not seen anything yet.

We used to believe in a pre-established harmony, a foreordained convergence, between the institutional conditions of our material and of our moral progress: the development of our powers of production and innovation and the disentanglement of the possibilities of cooperation from the rigid schemes of social division and hierarchy that have weighed on them in all the historical civilizations. We no longer take such a convergence for granted. However, we are entitled to hope that there is an area of possible overlap, a zone of potential intersection, between the arrangements that can help make us richer and more powerful and the arrangements that can help make us freer.

Some day, if we learn to restrain our hatreds and our wars, we shall escape our corner of the universe. We shall establish presence far from our earthly home. Our powers will assume measures and forms that to us now would be unimaginable. Although we will not achieve eternal life, we shall live not only longer but also much better. Our successors will look back on us and wonder how the human race could ever have been so fragile, so powerless, and so confined.

We, their precarious forerunners, can look forward and share in the vision and in the joys of this rise. We are entitled to hope that all the good that we do to one another and to ourselves will live on, as part of the adventure of mankind.

This romance of ascent supplies a response to our trials of belittlement that is inadequate in two distinct ways. It is, in the first instance, inadequate because unless the individual can share in his own lifetime in this rise, he casts himself in the role of instrument of the species, as if we were ants rather than human beings. We allow biographical time to vanish within historical time, or make it figure only as a period of servitude, even when our indenture is voluntary. We become estranged from the supreme good, indeed the only good that we ever really possess: life in the present.

Augustine said that all epochs are equidistant from eternity. What are we to tell the individual who, in a scheme like those of Comte or of Marx, happens to have been born far before the consummation of history? That the miseries of slave society or of the capitalist sweatshop were necessary to the emancipation of an unborn humanity? The positive social theorist, or the philosopher of history, who believes that he has uncovered the hidden script of historical necessity may profess no interest in such an anxiety. The individual, however, who has resorted to the ascent of humanity as a response to the trials of belittlement must ask himself how the future empowerment of the species makes up for his present subjection. If he has come to understand that history has no such script and that although the future rise of the race is possible, it is neither inevitable in its occurrence nor foreordained in its content, his dissatisfaction will be all the greater.

The romance of the ascent of mankind is inadequate, in the second instance, as a solution to the problem of our susceptibility to belittlement because its true and hidden attraction comes from another, largely unacknowledged quarter. Under cover of being a response to belittlement, it is in fact also an answer to death. If we cannot bring ourselves to believe the metaphysic (which I call in this book the overcoming of the world) according to which the distinct existence of the self, and indeed the entire phenomenal and temporal world, are less real than the unified and timeless being from which all emanates and to which all returns, we can nevertheless persuade ourselves to accept a weaker version of that doctrine.

According to this version, we are indeed the real individuals that we seem to be, living in a historical world that is also for real. We shall have to accept death and the dissolution of the body to which consciousness remains tied. We shall nevertheless survive in the onward rush of emergent humanity.

I, the individual, however, will not survive. The future glories of the human race will not elate me now, nor its future absurdities and savageries now cast me down. Each of us can indeed work, out of love or ambition, for the unborn. Only a fool, bent on consolation, no matter what the cost in self-deception, would find in our sacrifice to them rescue from death.

Once the specter of this secondhand immortality vanishes, the romance of the ascent of the human race loses much of its luster. It loses it not only as a compensation for death but also as a cure for belittlement. What we do must make us greater now, even at the price of abruptly shortening the life in which this greatness is manifest. All true greatness may be sacrificial. However, as the beneficiaries of sacrifice, those who have yet to live enjoy no priority over the living.

As a response to the risks of belittlement, rather than as a vision of the future capable of inspiring and informing action in the present, the romance of the ascent of humanity must fail. It performs in this role the part of an illusion that is related to a moral and political truth. The truth to which it is related is that we diminish our susceptibility to belittlement now by beginning to reorganize society now.

We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.

The aim guiding and unifying all these initiatives is the cumulative reformation of the institutions and practices of society in the service of the ideal that was ever paramount for the progressives and leftists: not equality, whether of outcomes or of opportunity, but greatness, the greatness of the ordinary man and woman, the discovery of light in the shadowy world of the commonplace, which is the defining faith of democracy. To this marriage of the effort to lift up the ordinary lives of ordinary people with the method of institutional experimentation and reconstruction I give the name deep freedom.

Deep freedom, rather than the romance of the ascent of humanity, is the collective answer to the problem of belittlement. Because it is within our power to move in the direction of deep freedom, we must never mistake our susceptibility to belittlement for an irreparable defect in human existence, alongside our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.

Deep freedom offers a legitimate and effective antidote to belittlement. It is also an incomplete one. It has the present, as well as the future, for its terrain. It builds in the penumbra of the adjacent possible, and demands down payments on its dreams. However, like every social construction, it calls on many minds and many wills. It evolves in historical, not in biographical, time. It is not within the purview of the individual, no matter how powerful, to direct. It cannot replace a change in the conduct of life: a change of heart, a change of consciousness, a change in the orientation of existence.

• • •

Prometheanism is what I call the most influential individualist response to the evil of belittlement. Its core is the idea that the individual can raise himself beyond the plane of ordinary existence in which the mass of ordinary men and women allow themselves to be diminished. He can do so by becoming the radical original that he already inchoately is and by turning his life into a work of art. To say that he turns his life into a work of art is to affirm that he raises it to a level of power and radiance at which it becomes a source of values rather than a continual exercise of conformity to values that are imposed on him by the conventions and preconceptions of society.

As with the romance of the ascent of humanity, the text is reacting to belittlement but the subtext is dealing with mortality. Prometheanism beats the drums in the face of death. By exulting in his powers, above all in his power to fashion himself and to become a creator of value, the individual fails to achieve literal deathlessness; he remains condemned to the annihilation of the body and of consciousness. Nevertheless, he may hope to achieve the next best thing to immortality; he lives, among men and women who remain below, on a lower rung of the ladder of existential ascent, as if he were one of the immortal gods. The clearest sign of this election—in truth, a self-election or a self-crowning—is change in the experience of time. It is our absorption in activities that, without denying our mortality and finitude, suspend for us the oppressive passage of time. Thus, we have a taste of eternity without leaving our mortal bodies.

I name this view Prometheanism by poetic license, for in so calling it I do injustice to Prometheus. He stole fire from heaven to give it to humanity. These Prometheans steal fire to give it to themselves.

It is a position that was given voice by Nietzsche more than by any other thinker. Rousseau and Emerson approached it, but never surrendered to it. The professors of philosophy now like to call it moral perfectionism, only to contrast what Henri Bergson called the morality of aspiration to the morality of obligation. Both its insights and its illusions escape them. Its revealed enemies are not the stunted ethics of duty but rather conformity and belittlement. Its hidden enemy is death.

Accordingly, the overt defect of Prometheanism is its denial of the claims of solidarity in the making of the self. No man makes himself. We are made by the grace of others, through connection with them, in every realm of existence. Because every connection threatens us with loss of freedom and of distinction, even as it may give us the self that we have, or can develop, our dealings with others are fraught with an inescapable ambivalence, the other side of the mimetic character of desire.

The idea that the triumph of the individual over belittlement must take place against the backdrop of a distinction between a small number who become artificers of their own lives and creators of value and a hapless mass that sinks back into conformity and enslavement entangles the winners as well as the losers, the powerful as well as the powerless, in anxious vigilance to uphold or to undermine the arrangements of this dominion.

The specific nature and consequence of such a denial of our dependence upon others becomes clear when we compare Prometheanism to its precursor in the history of moral sensibility, the heroic ethic, prestigious and even predominant, in the cruder form of an ethos of martial valor and self-assertion, in many of the societies in which the present world religions arose. The hero imagines himself ennobled by a task of indisputable worth, often requiring the commission of acts of violence prohibited within the confines of normal social life. It is a theme retaken, in the romantic vision, by the artist in bourgeois society, who subverts the ideals and attitudes supporting the established social regime.

The hero flatters himself that his preeminent worth results directly from such acts rather than from the approval of his nonheroic fellows. In this belief, he is deceived. The heroic task is designed by them and for their benefit. His craving for their approval and admiration is aroused rather than assuaged by the extremity of his actions.

Prometheans imagine that they can solve this problem in the heroic ethic by becoming the inventors of their own selves and thus as well of their own values and tasks. In so thinking and acting, however, they fail to acknowledge the inability of the individual to make or to rescue himself, and the contradiction between the enabling conditions of self-assertion. They also disregard the empty and mimetic character of desire, and the limitations of any attempt to overcome it.

The greatest and fundamental mistake of Prometheanism, however, is its hidden program: to overwhelm, through power and power worship, through the raising up of the strong self over the weak herd, the irremediable defects in our existence, death first among them.

The cure for insatiability, according to the Promethean, is to direct desire inward, to ourselves. Only the infinite self, towering over circumstance, can quench our desire for the absolute, which the believer sought mistakenly in the love of a God who was only the alienated projection of his own self. By such a projection, the believer leaves enslaved what the Promethean proposes to unchain.

The remedy for groundlessness is to ground oneself through successive acts of creation of a form of life for the design of which no man need apply to his fellows. From this self-grounding, forms, values, and practices will result, cleansed of conformity to the social regime. How is this self-creator to know what to create? He will discover himself through non-conformity to his society and resistance to his time. Having discovered himself, he will become, by that same struggle, himself.

The antidote to death, the most important concern of Prometheanism, is a surge of creation. The objects of creation are the elements of such an inner-directed and self-grounded form of life. The aim is to act as if we were not the hapless and inconsolable creatures that we seem to be. It is acceleration and empowerment in the face of an imminent dissolution. It is to fill existence with activities that make time stop.

Prometheanism fails above all because it lies to us about the human condition. Like the religions that it despises, it is a lullaby: a feel-good story, and an effort to arouse the will, in its confrontation with circumstances that the will is unable to alter.

The self-deception has a price. The cost is to undermine the very good of life that it affects to prize. It does so by discrediting the context-bound engagements and attachments on which the quickening and heightening of life depend. It does so as well by treating truth—the truth about our situation in the world—as subsidiary to power. Because the fables to which Prometheanism resorts misrepresent our existence, they cannot guide us in the enhancement of life.

It is the irreparable flaws in existence that help give our lives their shape and potential. It is their terrors that awaken us from the slumber of conformity and bring us to the encounter with time. In turning away from them, we make the mistake of supposing that we can become more godlike by becoming less human.

Like the romance of the ascent of humanity, Prometheanism is a falsehood that resembles a truth, a dead end easily mistaken for a path. The falsehood is power worship, the subordination of solidarity to self-reliance, and the failure fully to recognize and to accept the incurable defects in the human condition. The truth is that the enhancement of life is our chief interest. In the pursuit of this interest, we must seek to die only once. What this purpose implies for the way in which we live, and in which we deal with ourselves as well as with one another, and for the relation of this way of living to the reorganization of society are among the major topics of this book. The commitment to die only once inspires a certain way of escaping belittlement. It also guides a response to each of the incidents in the course of life that threaten to make us accept belittlement as the corollary of finitude: our early expulsion from the center of the world, our confinement to a particular trajectory and station, and our threatened encasement and slow dying within a shell of character and compromise. The enhancement of life is central to what I here call the religion of the future.

The approach to existence that results from this argument does not deny the relation of morals to politics. The vision informing it can be enacted only to the extent that we move toward the ideal of deep freedom and embrace the institutional changes that the achievement of this ideal requires. The political program of deep freedom has consequences for the reconstruction of society in the present, not just in a remote future. Nevertheless, it is a collective task that advances or fails in historical time, not in the biographical time in which as individuals we must live and die. The less far we go in the transformation of society, the greater is the weight that must be borne by self-transformation.

The vital distinction to be drawn between the insuperable limitations, of mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, and the corrigible defect of our susceptibility to belittlement helps make clear my aims in this book.

My argument has two central themes. The more we reflect on them, the better we understand them to be aspects of the same conception.

The first theme is the relation between our acceptance of death, groundlessness, and insatiability and our rejection of belittlement, for each of us and for all mankind, as both an individual and a collective task, a moral and a political endeavor.

The second theme is the nature and direction of a religion of the future. The religion of the future (if, for the reasons I later invoke, we may call it a religion) is to be created through a series of innovations different in method as well as in content from those that generated the world religions of today, themselves the products of religious revolutions that spread through the world over a thousand-year period, long ago. It is also a religion about the future. It concerns the bearing of the future on the present. It calls us to live for the future as a way of living in the present, as beings uncontained by the circumstances of our existence.

The statement and enactment of such an orientation to life offer our best hope of overcoming belittlement without deceiving ourselves about death, groundlessness, and insatiability. The two themes of the book are two sides of the same reality.

Religion and the flaws in human life

With respect to these flaws in the basic circumstance of existence, everything will never be all right. A simple way of understanding what religion has been in the past and what it can become in the future is to plot its position with respect to this fact.

Imagine three moments. In a first moment, the irremediable defects of our existence do not even come into view. People are concerned chiefly to contend with their dependence on nature, which threatens at each moment to crush them. The point is to deflect the threat and to tell a story about the world that instructs us in the execution of this task. The frightening fundamentals of our existence seem less pressing than the need to do something about the imbalance between the power that nature exercises over us and our power to protect ourselves from nature and to use it to our benefit.

In a second moment, when we have achieved some measure of freedom from complete dependence on nature and developed further the high cultures that offer accounts of our place in the cosmos, the basic flaws in our existence come to the center of our consciousness. We embrace beliefs that put these flaws in a larger context: a context that gives them meaning and shows them to be less terrifying than they appear to be. We assure ourselves that we will find decisive help against the terrors and the realities of death and of groundlessness, that we will be freed from the torment of vain desire, and that we will find a way to live, now and hereafter, that can bring our circumstance-bound existence into accord with our circumstance-transcending identity.

It would be perverse to reduce the religious orientations that have emerged in world history to so many incantations against the fear that the unfixable deficiencies in our existence will always arouse in us. Nevertheless, without appreciating this element in these orientations, it is hard to make sense both of what they have and of what they have not said and accomplished.

In one such line of religious belief and experience, we devalue the reality of the manifest world of change and distinction, affirm the unity of mind and nature, seek to submerge ourselves within real and hidden being, dismiss death as if it were powerless to touch our essential bond to this one and undying being, and nourish in ourselves the serenity and the universal fellow feeling that such a view of the world may help inspire.

In another direction of faith, we step back from the abyss of groundlessness and mortality, of diminished life and tormented desire, into a social world of humanized social relations, focused on what we owe one another by virtue of the roles that we occupy. We eschew metaphysics in favor of solidarity, internalized in each of us as an ethic of self-denying service. The social creation of meaning in a meaningless world becomes our watchword.

In yet another mode of consciousness, we come to think that a divine friend of ours is master of the universe that he created; that he has intervened and will intervene in history on our behalf; and that his intervention has already rescued us, and will continue to save us, from the otherwise unbridgeable rifts in our existence.

A religion offering us no assurance that everything is all right would differ from what religion has been, so far, in history. It would amount to a third moment in the history of our spiritual experience. The major spiritual orientations to the world, prominent over the last two and a half thousand years, assure us that, appearances notwithstanding, everything will indeed be all right. We shall be able to redress the flaws in our existence—our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our susceptibility to belittlement—or, at least, to rob them of their terrors. Without some such faith, it may seem, life, our life, would remain both an enigma and a torment, and could cease to be a torment only insofar as we contrived to forget the enigma. Nothing could attenuate the sufferings of these wounds other than our absorption in life in our connections and engagements.

The chief point of religion, it may seem, is to prevent such a result. In religion we would find a rescue on the basis of a vision, a reason for hope, achieved through an appeal to realities that counterbalance and override the force of those evils.

The trouble is that the antidotes supplied by the historical religions may all be fanciful: wishful thinking dressed up as a view of the world and of our place within it, consolation in place of truth. The religion of the future should be one that dispenses with consolation. It should nevertheless offer a response to the defective character of our existence: not just a set of ideas but an orientation to the life of the individual and the history of society. It should show us to what hopes we are entitled once we have lost the beliefs in which we once found reassurance. The disposition to acknowledge our situation for what it is would signal a change in the history of religion.

A simple criterion of advance in the history of religion is that our future religion would cease to take as its maxim the attempt to make the irremediable defects in our existence seem less real and less frightening than they in fact are. To mark the path of a religious evolution defined by this standard is one of the goals of this book.

This criterion of progress in religious beliefs is, however, far too vague to mark a definite trajectory. It needs to be supplemented by a view of the religious revolutions that took place in the past and of the religious revolution that can and should take place in the future. I address the nature of the contrast between the past and the future religious revolutions in greater detail later in this book. Something of the contrast should be stated right now, the better to make clear the intent of my argument.

The three responses to the flaws in our existence that I have mentioned—call them overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world—took shape in the thousand-year period extending from some time before the second half of the first millennium before Christ to some time after the first half of the first millennium after Christ.² The religious and moral orientations that have dominated the life of the great civilizations took on at that time their identities.

Such were the religious revolutions of the past. They gave rise to religions that I shall call the world religions, or the religions of transcendence, or the higher religions. They are world religions because their voice, although louder in some civilizations than in others, has been heard in every civilization for many centuries. They are religions of transcendence because they are all marked by a dialectic between the transcendence of the divine over the world and the immanence of the divine in the world. They are higher religions because, from the standpoint of the philosophical and theological argument of this book, they represented a breakthrough to a form of insight and power denied to paganism or cosmotheism, the identification of the divine with the cosmos, against which they rebelled. When I refer to the inventions and innovations that produced the three approaches to existence that I next study—the dominant spiritual alternatives available to mankind over the last two and a half millenniums—I shall call them, by shorthand, the religious revolutions, or revolution, of the past.

My argument is philosophical and theological; it is not a thesis in the comparative-historical study of religion. Insofar as it is philosophical, it does not amount to philosophy of religion in any familiar sense, because the discourse with which it experiments is itself religious, in the ample sense of the concept of religion that I propose later in this chapter. Insofar as it is theological, it is a kind of antitheology, because it sees all our ideas of God—as person, as being, or as non-person and non-being—as incoherent and unusable. It cites the religious revolutions of the past, but only for the purpose of gaining clarity about the path of a religious revolution in the future. It refers to the world religions, but only to the extent that they exemplify the three major orientations to life that I consider and criticize.

The religion of the future must break with these orientations. Above all, it must rebel against the ground that they share in common. If it finds more inspiration in one of them than in the others, it must nevertheless learn from the criticism of what it repudiates.

Any religion expressing the turn to transcendence embraces contradictory elements. It will always be found to be closely related to one of the major approaches to existence that I discuss in the early parts of this book. If it were equally related to several of them, it would convey a muddled message. If it rejected the assumptions that are shared by these three approaches, it would represent something different from what these religions have in fact been. Each of the higher religions has nevertheless always also reckoned with aspects of the approaches that it rejects. Moreover, none of the orientations to life that form the subject matter of the next three chapters of this book speaks with a single voice, the voice of a single religion. Each has become an enduring spiritual option, available to any man or woman, anytime and anywhere. Each has spoken through the apparatus of different doctrines, stated in distinctive vocabularies.

In the following pages, I explore the internal architecture of these major spiritual options—overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world. I do so with the intention of going beyond them, not with the aim of making claims about the distinctive doctrines and singular histories of the particular religions that have expressed them. Here, the historical allusions remain ancillary to a philosophical and theological argument. The argument is chiefly concerned with the choice of a direction. I call this direction the religion of the future.

The common element in past religious revolution

The religions and philosophies that became the bearers of the three orientations to life that I next explore shared something significant in common notwithstanding the immense differences among them. What could be common among early Buddhism (as an instance of overcoming of the world), early Confucianism (as an example of humanizing the world), and the Near Eastern salvation religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (as the earliest and most powerful expressions of the struggle with the world)?

Not only did they represent the place of man in the world in radically different ways but they also prescribed starkly different responses to the flaws in our condition. So different were these responses that they may seem, with some reason, to exhaust the major possibilities, our possibilities, not of ways of representing the world but of ways of contending with it. Nevertheless, five shared and connected impulses overrode these real differences. All five were marked by an ambiguity—at the bottom, the same ambiguity in five different aspects. Its resolution helps define the agenda of a religious revolution of the future.

A first common element of the three major religious orientations—overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world—is the rejection of cosmotheism: the identification of the divine with the world. The divine was separated from the world and then placed in relation to it. With this rejection, there began a dialectic of transcendence and immanence that has ever since been central to the religious history of humanity.

For the overcoming of the world, the divine is the underlying, unitary being, of which the time-drenched phenomena and all individual selves are less real expressions. Such reality as they have, they enjoy on loan from the one, real being and possess only to the greater or lesser extent that they participate in that being.

For the humanization of the world, the transcendent divine is personality and the invisible bond among persons. This sacred force can become immanent, to a greater or lesser extent, in the roles, rituals, and arrangements of social life. By establishing social and cultural regimes that organize our relations to one another in conformity to a conception of our humanity, we create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

For the struggle with the world, as originally exemplified by the Semitic monotheisms, the divine is the transcendent God, conceived at first in the category of personality. This God seeks us, his creatures. He does his saving work in our imperfect history. The transactions between God and mankind, conceived on the model of the interactions among individuals, are the means by which we ascend to a higher life, smashing, one by one, all idols—including the established forms of society and culture—that divert us from our ascent.

There is a basic ambiguity in the rejection of cosmotheism. This ambiguity touches, in its variations, all other aspects of the past religious revolutions. The issue is whether the separation between the world and the divine is merely a shift of view or also a transformative project. Does it suffice to change consciousness, or must we also change the world if we are to establish, in place of cosmotheism, the dialectic of transcendence and immanence?

A second shared attribute of these revolutionary spiritual orientations is their insistence on providing a response to the problem of nihilism aroused by awareness of the flaws in our existence, in particular by our mortality and our groundlessness. By nihilism in this context I mean the suspicion that our lives and the world itself may be meaningless: that they may bear no meaning capable of being translated into the idiom of human concerns. The combination of mortality and groundlessness threatens to reduce existence to hallucination.

The need to deal with nihilism helps explain why each of these spiritual directions anchors an imperative of life in a metaphysical representation of the world. To be sure, only one of the three—the overcoming of the world (exemplified by the religion of the Vedas and by Buddhism)—can be comfortable with metaphysics, appealing as it does to the conception of a hidden, underlying reality. The other two must have trouble with metaphysics. The humanization of the world (of which classical Confucianism represents the most important example) is an anti-metaphysical metaphysics, which places its hope in the power of society and culture to secure meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. The struggle with the world (of which the Semitic salvation religions represent the most radical and influential expressions) cannot readily make peace with metaphysics (despite the ancient and yet unfinished flirt with Greek philosophy) because it affirms the superiority of the personal over the impersonal, and views the transcendent God and his dealings with mankind under the aegis of the category of personality. Where the personal takes priority over the impersonal, and history over timeless being, the metaphysical representation of reality remains at a disadvantage. Only a metaphysic of the personal and of the historical, if it could be formulated, would do.

Nevertheless, both the humanization of the world and the struggle with the world attempt, within and beyond metaphysics, to provide an account of our place in the world that not only supplies a guide to life but also defeats the threat of nihilism. Under the overcoming of the world, we devalue the superficial or illusory experience of individual selfhood and phenomenal distinction and make contact with the one true being. This communion supplies the ground that we lacked, even as it robs death of its sting. Under the humanization of the world, we secure meaning in human life by informing the practices and arrangements of society with our power to imagine the experience of other people. This imaginative empathy makes possible the integrity of a self-sufficing human world in a universe indifferent to our concerns. Under the struggle with the world, in either its sacred or secular forms, we enter a path of ascent promising to increase our share in the attributes that we ascribe to God. Each of these reactions to the threat of nihilism encounters characteristic difficulties, as I later show.

In one way or another, these anti-nihilistic messages convey the message that everything is fundamentally all right with the world or will be all right in the end. But for everything to be all right does it suffice to receive reality in the right way, with a correct understanding and attitude, or must we change the world—and ourselves within it—cumulatively and in a particular direction? Is the struggle with nihilism an argument, such as a metaphysician might have with a skeptic, or is it a campaign of resistance, such as a general might wage against an enemy with vastly superior force?

A third common element of the higher religions resulting from the religious revolutions of the past is the impulse to affirm the shallowness of the differences within humanity by contrast to our fundamental unity: the differences of caste, class, race, nation, gender, role, and culture. The point is not to deny any measure of reality to these differences or to claim that they are bereft of moral and social consequence. It is to recognize that they pale in comparison to our fundamental unity. The basis of this unity lies not only in our physical constitution but also and chiefly in our predicament: a predicament shaped by our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our difficulty in overcoming the disproportion between who we are and how we must live. To be justified, any division within humanity must deepen and develop the unity of mankind. Otherwise, it deserves to arouse suspicion and to be torn down. Until it is torn down, it should be disregarded in our most important choices and conceptions.

Most of the major world religions were authored and disseminated in societies marked by a strong hierarchical segmentation. Prominent among these societies were the agrarian-bureaucratic states that represented, until the present age of world revolution, the most important political entities in the world. In the Indo-European species of this segmentation, there were three major ranks in the social order: those who guide and pray—the priests and philosophers; those who govern and fight—the rulers and warriors; and those who work, produce, and trade—everyone else. To this hierarchical division in the ordering of society there corresponded a hierarchical division in the ordering of the soul: the rational faculties that place us in communion with the supreme order and reality, whether viewed under the aspect of cosmotheism or of its rejection; the action-oriented impulses that inspire vitality; and the carnal desires that pull us toward particular sources of satisfaction. These two hierarchies, in society and in the soul, support each other.

Part of the religious revolution consisted in denying the ultimate reality and authority of such an ordering of ranks within humanity. As a result, any parallel hierarchical division in the soul was left ungrounded in a sacrosanct organization of society. To that extent, it became more open to challenge and revision. The possibility arose of an inversion of values, by which the supposedly lower faculties could come to play a subversive and prophetic role in the building of the self, if only by robbing the person of some of his defenses against other people.

Once again, there is an ambiguity. Is the unity of mankind to be affirmed only as belief or is it to be secured through a reorganization of society? The Stoic—to take a form of belief only loosely related to the connected religious revolutions of the past—could affirm in his heart the fundamental similarity of master and slave without defying the institution of slavery. For him, it might have been enough to show the other—slave or master—an empathy resulting from the recognition of their fundamental similarity.

For the votary, however, of any of the religious orientations shaped by the spiritual revolutions that gave rise to the present world religions, the question unavoidably arose as to whether this unity could simply be affirmed as a thesis or needed to be carried out as a program. As a thesis, it would require a change of attitude: a different way of performing within the established roles and arrangements rather than a path to their reshaping. As a program, it might demand the radical reconstruction of the established social arrangements.

A fourth shared feature uniting the spiritual innovations that produced the world religions and the approaches to existence that they exemplify was their attack on the authority and the ascendancy of a prevailing ethic: the ethic of heroic virtue, of power worship, of triumph of the strong over the weak, of winning in every worldly contest, of vindictive reassertion of one’s place with regard to others, of glorious recognition, renown, and honor, of manly pride. In each of the civilizations and states within which these religious orientations arose, this heroic and martial ethic was associated with a particular class or caste—the rulers or fighters. The link was especially strong within the structure of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires that formed the most important setting for the emergence of the world-historical religions.

In addition to being the characteristic ethos of a caste or status group of warriors and rulers, this moral vision was also associated with young men. “Disrespect me and I will kill you” was its refrain. The struggle for recognition can easily be translated into a prescriptive conception: into a view of what makes life most valuable and into an account of the way in which the moral interests of the ruling caste were bound up with the practical interests of society.

The religions and moralities fashioned by these spiritual innovations were unanimous in their rejection of this ethos. When they did not denounce it as evil, they nevertheless refused to grant it the primacy that its adepts had always claimed on its behalf. They recognized, with greater or less clarity, the psychological and moral contradiction lying at the heart of the martial and heroic ethic. Those who aspire to be their own creations, in the name of an ideal of self-possession and self-construction, turn out to be all the more dependent on the approval of others. The ends to which their heroic striving is devoted are supplied adventitiously, from the outside. These ends are the conventional concerns of a particular society or culture. Instead of breaking bonds, they bind.

A close connection has always existed in the higher religions between the repudiation of the heroic-martial ethic and the affirmation of the unity of mankind. For one thing, divisions and hierarchies established within the great states of world history were under the guardianship of the caste of warriors and rulers. For another thing, the ethos of valor and vengeance was patently connected with the ideals and interests of a narrow part of humanity: of the rulers over the ruled, of fighters over workers, of men over women, of the strong over the weak.

What the religious revolutionaries proposed to put in the place of heroic pride and vengeful self-assertion was a sacrificial ethic of self-bestowal, of disinterested love: the agape of the Septuagint, the jen of the Analects, the world-renouncing self-abandonment of the Buddha. Both the erotic and the sacrificial impulses that formed part of the background of attitudes and ideas from which these analogous revolutions emerged were transformed. The erotic element underwent what the vocabulary of a later age would call sublimation: transmuted from the physical to the spiritual. Sacrifice ceased to be focused on an animal or human victim on which the collectivity could expend its fear, its anxiety, and its rage. The burden was taken up, for Christianity, by the incarnate God himself, and in every one of these connected religious revolutions transformed into an ideal of self-sacrifice as the price and the sign of a sympathy no longer bound by blood or even proximity.

It would be obtuse to collapse ideas as far apart in their visionary content and in their moral implications as Christian agape and Confucian jen. Nevertheless, the common elements were thick as well as thin: they arose from transformative insight into the link between the moral primacy of sacrificial love or fellow-feeling and the visionary anticipation of the unity of mankind, asserted against the shallow and transient divisions within humanity.

The result was a radical reversal of values: more than a rejection of the ethic of the class/caste of rulers and warriors, a turning upside down of it. That this inversion might be tainted, as Nietzsche would come to argue, by the resentment of the weak against the strong, did not annul one of its central promises: to turn self-sacrifice into self-empowerment, and to make it part of a response to the irremediable defects in our existence.

There was in this turn, as in all the others, an ambiguity. Was this love to be a fleshless benevolence handed down from on high and from a distance, by the enlightened or the saved to the unenlightened and the unredeemed, with sacrifice but without inner risk? Or was it a love that required from the lover that he unprotect himself and accept a heightened vulnerability? To the extent that it was the former, it might represent the continuation of the power impulse in the ethic of valor and vengeance, in even more potent and more twisted form, as Nietzsche saw: the practice of altruism confirming the superiority of the benevolent will without ever placing the agent in intimate jeopardy or acknowledging his need for the supposed beneficiary of his self-sacrifice. If, however, it was the latter, it required from the lover much more than altruism: the imagination of the other person, the unprotection of the self and the recognition of its need for the other, the acceptance of the risk of rebuff or failure.

It may not be immediately apparent how this ambiguity related to the ambiguities besetting the other shared features of these religious revolutions, but it did. As a substitute for the ethic of honor and valor, benevolence given from a distance and from on high represented a turning upside down rather than a reinvention. As the will to power persisted, under the disguise of this inversion, little radical transformation of the self was required. The old impulses took new form, as the weak turned their weakness to advantage against the strong. However, the substitution of this guarded altruism by a risky love among equals was a wholly different project. It did require a radical transformation of the self. In so doing, it raised the question of the changes in the arrangements of society and culture that might help strengthen the conditions for such a self-transformation.

A fifth common characteristic of these religious revolutions lay in their ambiguous relation to the real world of power and of states in history. Each of these orientations to life exemplified by the religions originating from these spiritual upheavals has been a two-sided ticket.

One side of the ticket admitted the individual to join a triumphal procession: a culture or a collectivity, embraced by a civilization and by a state, of which it formed a guiding or even established doctrine. By using the ticket, the individual joined the winners, even when the doctrine was one that claimed to exalt the losers. Participation in a community of belief, supported by worldly power and accredited by cultural authority, established a union among the believers that transcended both kinship and social station.

The other side of the ticket authorized the individual to escape from the nightmare of history and the savagery of society into a realm of inner experience in which other standards held. Even the humanization of the world (as in Confucianism), with the central value that it placed on the moral logic of our engagement in society, offered the individual refuge from the verdict of history: an inner life that would be proof against the seductions of worldly power and the demons of worldly failure.

The two-sided ticket, of admission and escape, is essential to understanding the immense effect exerted by the spiritual approaches arising from these religious revolutions. To understand these religions in the spirit of this two-sided ticket meant, however, to diminish the transformative significance of their teaching. At every point, there was another option: to tear up the two-sided ticket, of admission and escape, in favor of a progressive attempt to change both self and society and to widen our part in the attributes of divinity. It is at once the most general and the most explicit form of the same ambiguity touching all the other shared characteristics of these spiritual orientations, the most influential in the history of mankind.

We can best understand the specific character of the religious revolutions of this long historical period as the combination of changes of attitude with a series of narratives and worldviews. The worldviews and narratives differed starkly. In one direction they devalued the phenomenal world of time and distinction, and asserted the higher reality of unified and timeless reality. In another direction, they offered progress toward a humanized social world capable of overriding the meaninglessness of the cosmos by the human creation of meaning in a network of social roles. In a third direction, they described a course of decisive and salvific divine intervention in human history.

Different in almost every respect, these conceptions nevertheless agreed in offering their adherents consolation for the incorrigible flaws in our circumstance. In one way or another, they presented a vision of the world and of our place within it that robbed those flaws of much of their horror. They did so, however, with the following difference. The two orientations that required from the faithful the greatest change in their way of life—the ones that I have called the overcoming of the world and the struggle with the world (exemplified respectively by early Buddhism and by the Semitic monotheisms)—made the most radical claims, the ones most at variance with our ordinary experience of those tormenting facts. In one case, they denied the ultimate reality of the phenomenal world of change and distinction that is the scene of our suffering. In the other instance, they represented human history as enveloped within a narrative of divine creation, intervention, and redemption.

By contrast, the view that demanded relatively less by way of redirecting the conduct of life, and consequently less as well of an abrupt break with the established worldly ethic—the humanizing creation of meaning in a meaningless world, developed through an elaborate account of what we owe one another by virtue of the social roles that we perform—did not require so stark a denial of our apparent condition. There is nothing in this humanizing response that justifies us in dismissing the reality of death, of groundlessness, of empty and insatiable desire, of the disproportion between the largeness of our natures and the smallness of our circumstances. Instead of a dismissal, it offers us a reprieve, by way of a step back into a world of our making.

It is as if there exists a secret correspondence between how radically we are asked to change our lives and whether we must be promised, in return, freedom from death, groundlessness, and insatiability. The transformative will receives encouragement and guidance from a vision of the world assuring us that, with regard to what is most terrifying and incomprehensible in our existence, everything will or can be to the good.

What religion is, or has been

In addressing the major spiritual orientations to have emerged over the last two and half millenniums and in presenting a view of what can and should succeed them, I use the contested concept of religion.

We in the West today are accustomed to define religion having in mind chiefly the Near Eastern religions of salvation: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such a view organizes the concept of religion around the idea of a transcendent and interventionist God and the truth revealed by him to humanity. It disregards the objections that have led some students of two of these religions—Judaism and Islam—to reject the term religion altogether.

It also excludes two of the three major orientations that have represented, for about two thousand years, the chief spiritual alternatives available to humanity. It fails to include the overcoming of the world insofar as this approach to existence rejects, as the example of Buddhism shows, the notion of a personal deity. It does not apply to the humanization of the world to the extent that, as the example of Confucianism suggests, this response to our circumstance puts a this-worldly spiritualization and moralization of social relations in the place of a partnership between human will and divine grace.

I call all three approaches to existence that I explore here, as well as the spiritual and intellectual movements that have represented and developed them, the world religions, the religions of transcendence, or the higher religions. I treat the Semitic monotheisms or salvation religions as the original and most influential form of one of these approaches: the struggle with the world. This usage requires elucidation and defense of the disputed concept of religion.

In contemporary religious studies, the idea of religion lies under a cloud of suspicion. In a move characteristic of the situation of social and historical thought today, this idea is criticized as a historical construction, and a relatively recent one at that. The construction is often said to be modeled on Protestant Christianity and to suffer the influence of Protestant beliefs about the actual or desirable relation of Christian faith to the rest of social life. Such beliefs first won influence in early modern Europe. The word religion gained broad currency, as a way to designate both communities of faith and their creeds, only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under Protestant influence. The earlier uses of the word and of its cognates had been narrower and more selective; ritual practice had been their chief connotation.

The move to repudiate the term religion betrays a characteristic confusion. This confusion should not be allowed to bar deploying the concept of religion, so long as we are clear about the meaning that we choose to give to it and the uses to which we intend to put it. The advantages of the concept of religion over any rival category for use in argument like the one that I conduct in this book are palpable and decisive.

No human practice has an unchanging core. If our practices are historical and mutable, and open to revision, addition, and subtraction, there cannot be such an essence of religion any more than there can be an essence of law, of art, or of science. Religion is not the name of a stable entry in an encyclopedia of human activities. No such encyclopedia exists. The experience of which it forms part can be carved up in different ways. Its commonalities and continuities are those of a history: a history of reorientations and of stabilizations.

If practices lack essences, the words that we use to designate them are even more mutable in meaning. There is hardly a word of any consequence in the labeling of our enacted beliefs that has not suffered successive conversions of meaning, or not had origins suspect to those who later appropriate them to a changed use. What matters is clarity of purpose on the part of the converters of meaning, not fidelity to the assumptions of the dead.

Every revolution in the beliefs and activities that we now call religious is bound to change our idea of what religion is. If the same principle applies to the practice of natural science, constrained as it is by the reach of our scientific equipment, the discipline of its mathematical expression, and the pressure exerted by the inherited agenda of scientific problems, it must apply in spades to the practices we call religion, which labor under none of these constraints.

When we were terrified by nature, and sought to placate gods who represented natural forces and who were not unequivocally on the side of any supreme good or reality in the world, and when we sought from such gods only the protection of our worldly welfare, our worship of the invisible powers meant something different from what would later be called religion. The scope and nature of what we now call religion changed when we began directly to address the implications of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability; envisioned a higher realm of reality or value above or within us; and sought to enhance our share in the life of that higher order, thus transforming rather than merely protecting ourselves. This emergent set of practices and beliefs shares no common essence with the first set. What it shares with it is a history, rooted in the circumstance, the struggles, and the discoveries of mankind.

For the purpose of my argument here, the concept of religion has three advantages over any manifest rival. The first advantage regards the present; the second, the past; the third, the future.

The present-regarding advantage is that the idea of religion comes already laden by its history, which is also our history, with two connotations that are central to the intellectual perspective from which I propose to engage the past and future of comprehensive orientations to existence. The first connotation is that of the need to take a position, to commit our lives in one direction or another, even when our grounds for taking one position rather than another may seem inadequate to persuade anyone who has not shared the same experience by which we came to our belief. In this domain, we cannot stop, as we do in science, at the boundaries of knowledge that we can hope to defend by readily available and widely accepted argument and evidence. We must take a stand, implicitly if not explicitly, whatever the limitations of our insight. A person who professes to take no such position will be shown by the course of his existence to have taken one in fact.

The second connotation of the concept of religion is that the vision in the name of which we take such a stand cannot be cabined in any department of experience. It has implications for every feature of the conduct of life and of the organization of society. Those are mistaken who object to the concept of religion (in its application, for example, to Islam or to Judaism) on the ground that it separates a religious and a non-religious sphere of existence. The main line of belief and action in all the orientations to existence explored here moves against any such separation.

The privatization of religion, especially in part of the history of Protestant Christianity, is, from this standpoint, an exception to a tendency that has been dominant in all these approaches to existence for much of their history: the demand to touch and to transform, in the light of their message, every facet of human action. Even in Protestantism a contrast between a religious and a non-religious part of experience has been anomalous. It characterized much of Protestant spirituality and theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it gained an afterlife in the United States, given the predominant political and constitutional doctrines, in that country, about the place of religion in a pluralistic society. However, it was foreign to Luther as well as to Calvin. Much of the most influential Protestant theology of the last hundred years has been in rebellion against this bias, characteristic of the middle period in the history of Protestantism.

Similarly misguided is the view that a separation of the religious and the non-religious is regularly associated, at least in a Christian context, with the idea of a Church. For a Christian, the Church is primarily the community of the faithful, sustained by the presence of divine spirit and engaged in the transformation of every aspect of human life. It is only secondarily an organization. The validity and the meaning of the doctrine of the apostolic succession have been a source of division among Christians almost since the beginnings of Christianity.

It is also important not to mistake the contrast between the religious and the secular for the distinction between the orders of grace and of nature, which gained force in the nominalist Christian theology of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and has beset Christianity ever since. Later in this book, in exploring the direction of a religion of the future, I use the opposing words sacred and profane to mark a contrast different from the contrasts between religious and secular as well as between grace and nature. Sacred and profane distinguish a vision that sees our ascent to a higher life as enveloped in a narrative of transactions between a transcendent God and his human creatures from a vision dispensing with any such story.

Any distinction between a sphere of private life and devotion penetrated by religious faith and a remainder of existence on which faith has no purchase negates a defining impulse of the religions of transcendence: not just of those that worship a creative God—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but also of Buddhism and Confucianism, and indeed of all the spiritual orientations that broke with cosmotheism. That distinction is the operational meaning of secularization. What we chiefly mean by secularization is not that people have ceased to believe in some version of the dialectic between transcendence and immanence but rather that they see whatever such belief they do hold as inapplicable to much of existence. Such a distinction between the domain of religion and the realm of a secular residue, in fact most of everyday life and social order, impoverishes religious experience. To say that the category of religion presupposes or implies such a division between the part of life in which religion takes an interest and the part to which it remains indifferent is to look at religion from the perspective of its enemies and to take the world religions as tools in their hands.

There is no good reason to acquiesce in such a reversal. The suggestion that the term religion has been irremediably compromised by the Protestant beliefs shadowing its wide adoption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is abdication of our freedom to say what we mean. Such an abdication sacrifices something deep and enduring (the shared characteristics of the orientations to existence that have prevailed over the last two and a half millenniums) to something local and short-lived (the privatization of religion in the middle period of Protestantism). Why should Kant, Schleiermacher, and Madison determine, from their graves, how we use our words?

Expunged of this confusion, the historically contingent concept of religion, even if we employ it to designate only the living reality and the discontinuous history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, would already suggest the seemingly paradoxical sum of two connotations: a commitment that exceeds its grounds, or a vision that goes beyond its reasons, demands to penetrate the whole of existence and of society. No concept that we took out of a book, or devised in the study, would be likely to exhibit such a startling and improbable combination, vital to my inquiry and to my proposal.

The past-regarding advantage of the concept of religion is that it offers a ready-made imaginative space in which to compare the major comprehensive and practical orientations to existence over the last twenty-five hundred years. I claim that, as a matter of historical fact, three such approaches to life have commanded, above all others, the attention of mankind during this long historical period. Each of these approaches has an internal conceptual order: a moral and a metaphysical logic. The historical instances of belief and of practice that have exemplified these orientations to existence have common, non-trivial characteristics, of form and of substance, despite the immense differences, of substance as well as of form, distinguishing them. In an earlier section, I explored the extent to which they share a program for society and for the self. In this section, I discuss the degree to which they can all be understood as instances of a similar practice. I call this practice by the conventional name religion, modifying the conventional idea of religion in the double light of a thesis about the past and an intention concerning the future.

The future-regarding advantage of the idea of religion is the most significant in the argument of this book. Given that a historical construction about historical realities, such as the concept of religion, lacks a fixed reference or a stable essence, it should not be surprising that it has a pragmatic horizon. The meaning that we give to it should depend on what we propose to do with the activities and beliefs that at a given time we use it to describe. What this form of experience has been until now matters chiefly by virtue of its bearing on what it can and should become: on what we should do with it, and turn it into.

I view the past and the present of what I call religion in the light of an idea about its future: the concept of religion must be large enough to accommodate the transformation for which I argue as well as the most important approaches to life to have marked the history of humanity over the last two and a half thousand years. It must make room for the full array of the religious revolutions that resulted in the three positions considered here. It must include the two of those three positions that dispense with the conception of a transcendent God, locked in an embrace with the humanity that he created and that he has saved, or will save, through his engagement in human history. It must, however, also have space for the religious revolution that is needed next.

That a concept of religion can be inclusive enough to perform these multiple roles and yet exclude enough of neighboring areas of belief and action to prevent its descent into emptiness may seem unlikely. Yet that it can be adequately inclusive and exclusive in this fashion and to these ends is just what I next claim. The vindication of this claim can lie only in the execution of the argument.

What this idea of religion chiefly excludes is philosophy and, by extension, art and politics. The three orientations that I explore and the one that I propose to succeed them are not simply philosophies or worldviews, as these conventional concepts have generally been used. They are not mere philosophies or worldviews, even when they make no appeal to the idea of a transcending and redemptive God who reveals to mankind, through his prophets, the path of its salvation. The will to take a stand in the commitment of existence in a particular direction, despite the apparent absence of adequate grounds on which to do so, and then to insist that the whole of individual life and social experience be penetrated by the vision informing such a commitment, sets religion apart.

According to these present, past, and future-oriented standards, to count as religion a set of enacted beliefs or belief-informed practices must have three characteristics.

A first characteristic of religion is to respond to the incurable flaws in our existence: our movement toward death, our inability to place our existence in a definitive context of understanding and meaning, and the emptiness and insatiability of our desires, to which we are wrongly tempted to add (wrongly because we can redress it) the disproportion between the force of our circumstances and the reach of our nature. Whether the response offered by religion to these defects is one that robs them of their sting or on the contrary acknowledges them unflinchingly remains an issue at stake in the unfinished history of religion.

The beliefs that comprise a religion may represent a more or less oblique answer to those terrors and sufferings. The answer, however, must never be so indirect that it cannot be understood by the believer as responding to these sufferings and terrors in ways that engage the will as well as the imagination.

However, religion has almost never cordoned these problems off from the rest of experience and addressed them in isolation. A religious vision has consequences for every aspect of existence: no part of individual or social life is so prosaic or so technical, none so this-worldly or unreflective, that it cannot be influenced and penetrated by a religious orientation.

If in the midst of our ordinary affairs we stop to think about the intensity of life and the certainty of death, of life and death unexplained in a universe whose ultimate contours, origin, and future we are unable to grasp, all the while tormented and aroused by our desires and conscious of a power that we are unable adequately to deploy before our decline and annihilation, we may experience our existence as a hallucination. We turn away in dread from this delirium into our affairs, into the devotions of our attachments and engagements. We hope that they will absorb and rescue us.

Religion is neither the awareness of the delirious nature of our consciousness nor the turning away from the delirium into our everyday business. It is the cognitive and volitional position that we take with respect to a circumstance in which we seem compelled to choose between these two attitudes. No wonder that its development has taken place under the shadow of the temptation to console.

The consolation has characteristically taken a double form in accordance with the twofold nature of religion as both belief and practice. As belief, it has been a way of representing our situation that reads this situation as less terrifying than it seems to be. As practice, religion has been a set of collective activities and individual habits that enables us to cast a spell on ourselves: to quiet not only our empty and insatiable desires but also our anxiety about our mortality and our groundlessness. A story about how everything can or will be all right becomes part of a fix we place on ourselves.

The work of consolation, however, has consequences for the substance of our view of the world and for the direction of our activity within the world. The work may be compatible with one level of enlightenment and emancipation but incompatible with the next level: compatible with the enlargement of vision and the freedom from prejudice achieved by the religious revolutions that gave rise to the three approaches to life considered here but incompatible with the further revolution that we may need now.

Nothing in the history of religion is harder to overcome than the impulse to reassure us about the irremediable flaws in life. The difficulty is aggravated by the need to rely on ideas that are, by the very nature of our groundlessness, contestable and fragmentary. It is if, by a strange paradox, we could put an end to wishful thinking only by a practice of thought overreaching what we can hope to understand.

A second characteristic of religion is that it relates an orientation to life to a vision of our place in the world. The link between orientation and vision provides a kind of answer to the incorrigible defects in our circumstance. The answer recognizes the defects as more or less real, and more or less susceptible to redress or response. It interprets their implications for the conduct of life.

The vision acquires its power to guide because it addresses what is most disturbing in our existence: that we must die although we feel that we should not; that we seem unable, by the light of the understanding, to place our lives in a reliable context of meaning; that we always remain at the mercy of desires that are both empty and unlimited and that pursue us until our final end; and that little or nothing that we can do with our lives seems adequate to our context-transcending powers. The position that we take with respect to these problems acquires prescriptive authority. It enjoys such force both because of their intrinsic importance and because the way in which we deal with them has consequences for every other aspect of our experience.

The distinction between the is and the ought, between description (or explanation) and prescription, has force with respect to views about part of our experience. However, it ceases to be feasible and legitimate when we must deal if not with the whole of our experience at least with its general contours, with the limits that give it its disconcerting and mysterious shape.

Any account of the irremediable defects in our experience will have a pragmatic horizon. We cannot infer from such an account a canon of rules and standards by which to conduct ourselves. It will nevertheless orient our lives in some directions and away from others. It will appear to us to be invested with the power of an existential imperative.

Conversely, any such imperative will presuppose or imply a way of dealing with the major flaws in our existence. Our practiced view of how to live will reveal better than our professed doctrines how we understand our situation in the world and what we make of its defects. Only when we shift the focus from the whole of a situation to a region of our experience, only when we begin to address discrete problems and to parse isolated arguments, will the distinction between the is and the ought again start to make sense.

An analogy helps clarify the problem. In the tradition of physics inaugurated by Newtonian mechanics, no distinction carries greater weight in the structure of explanation than the difference between the initial conditions of a set of phenomena to be explained and the laws of motion governing the workings or the change of those phenomena within a certain configuration space. The laws fail to determine the initial conditions. These conditions may, nevertheless, be explained by other laws. From the standpoint of the relevant laws, the initial conditions are factitious and stipulated givens.

When, however, we try to generalize this style of explanation from a part of the phenomena to the whole of the universe—from mechanics to cosmology—the distinction between initial conditions and law-like explanation breaks down. There is no outside, from the vantage point of which we could stipulate the initial conditions as starting points for the operation of the laws.

What is good, by way of explanatory style, for the part is no good for the whole. It is just this sort of breakdown through generalization that occurs when we try to impose the distinction between the is and the ought on the enacted beliefs that deal with our existence as a whole and with its most basic defects. We call such action-oriented and comprehensive beliefs religion.

A third characteristic of religion is that the imperative of life, rooted in a vision of the world, responsive to the incurable defects in our existence, requires us to commit our lives in a certain direction. It requires us to commit our lives without having what, by the prevailing standards of rational discourse, could ever be an adequate basis on which to do so. Neither the evidence of the senses nor the application of our reasoning, within any established discipline or method or outside all particular methods and disciplines, can suffice to provide such a basis.

Our faculties, our methods, our sensory access to the world all address aspects and fragments of our experience. They shadow and extend the range of our actions. No matter how extensive their subject matter or scope of application may become, they never lose their fragmentary and restricted character. In religion, however, we must take a position with respect to the limiting and shaping features of our experience as a whole. For this task, our equipment is, by its very nature and origin, inadequate. Nevertheless, the need to do what we will always be unprepared to accomplish is inescapable.

If the position to take were only cognitive, we might be able to take no position at all. However, it is not merely cognitive; it goes to our need to form an attitude, implicit and unelaborated if not explicit and fully formed, to the most disturbing and perplexing aspects of our condition. We will have an attitude, whether we want to or not and whether or not we are fully conscious of the ideas informing it. In arriving at such an attitude, however, we are condemned to cognitive overreach: we must stake the course of our lives on suppositions whose grounds fail to do justice to the gravity of their implications and to the scope of their claims.

This paradoxical feature of our situation—our need to enlist the most fragile ideas in support of the most important decisions—is the half-truth in Pascal’s account of faith in God as a wager: a bet that pays off fabulously if it succeeds and that leaves us no worse off than we otherwise remain, death-bound in the darkness of a godless world, if it fails. The truth in this account is that we must take a stand—a fateful stand—without having such grounds as we might demand even for decisions of much less consequence. The falsehood is the suggestion that the spirit in which we take such a stand could or should mimic the calculus of the gambler. It is not about a particular benefit or cost (although the Jansenist focus on salvation and damnation might make it seem so); it is about the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives, as viewed from the outside, from the perspective of their defining limits, for what goes on inside our existence, for the way we live.

This inescapable cognitive overreach, imposed on us by our circumstance, is what the vocabulary of the Semitic monotheisms calls faith. To suit the purpose at hand, a conception of faith must not depend on the distinctive tenets of each religion. It must acknowledge the two sides of faith: risking and trusting.

The risking side of faith is the consequence of the unavoidable overreach: the stand without grounds that could ever suffice to justify it by the lights of the criteria that we apply to our decisions of more limited scope. However, such overreach is also prophecy, and self-fulfilling prophecy at that. The vision that results in an imperative, on a basis that is always dubious, prompts us to act, individually and collectively. By our actions we change the world in the light of the vision; thus, the self-fulfilling aspect of the prophecy.

However, we do not change the world at will; we only bring it a little closer to the prophetic message and to its imperative of world transformation. The world resists the prophecy. This resistance tests the truth of the faith. It is an always ambiguous test, but a test nevertheless.

The trusting side of faith has to do with the consequences of this cognitive exorbitance for our relations to other people, including our dealings with God, when we represent him in the mode of personal being. Because the actions undertaken in the light of religious ideas concern matters of ultimate significance, but at the same time are bereft of adequate grounds for belief, they amount to an adventure. In this adventure we become relatively more vulnerable to others; in one sense or another, we are forced to lift our shields. To put ourselves in other people’s hands on account of our beliefs, or in the hands of God when our relations with him are represented by analogy to our relations with other people, and to do so in a way that must seem reckless by the standards of our worldly calculations, is one of the marks of faith.

The risking and the trusting sides of faith are inseparable. The element of trust shows that the risk is never just about a conjecture, however grand, concerning our place in the world: it reveals its meaning in its implications for our connections with other people. The element of risk shows that what we make of such connections remains entangled in our understanding of the limits to our existence and to our insight.

To see religion as the mode of experience defined by these three attributes is to understand why we suffer a perpetual temptation to treat many other forms of practice and of thought—philosophy, art, and politics—as substitutes for religion. It is also, however, to grasp why they are unable to perform this surrogate role without violence to them and to us.

Philosophy may deal with the penumbra of what lies beyond our achieved knowledge. It may wrestle with the insoluble contradictions that arise when we try to overstep the bounds of sense and of understanding. Nevertheless, when it abandons or dilutes the requirement of reasoned justification, it loses direction as well as force.

Art may conjure up the flaws in our condition, and promise a happiness lying beyond them, through some resolution that we can achieve right now despite them. When it tries to reproduce the link between a vision of the world and an imperative of existence that lies at the heart of religion, it degenerates into didacticism. It then degrades its transforming power.

Politics, represented and conducted in a visionary voice, may relate the reordering of society to a view of the ascent of humanity. Notwithstanding the potential scope of our political beliefs and aspirations, no program for social improvement is capable of bearing the full weight of our ultimate anxieties about us. If made to do so, the result is likely to be mystification in the service of oppression.

Religion has no unchanging essence, any more than philosophy, art, or politics. Like them, it is a historical construction and part of the self-making of humanity. Nevertheless, as we have constructed it and as it has constructed us, it cannot without danger and illusion be replaced by these other forms of experience. We must reckon with religion, and decide what to make it of it: what to turn it into, now.