146 struggling with the worldmeant Aristotle and his successors, but few have pursued the radical
implications of this contrast for the way of thinking about the faith.
Th e infl uence of the project of classical ontology has served as the back-
drop to traditions of natural science and of social theory persisting in
the search for laws beyond time and history.
If the fi rst philosophical misfortune suff ered by the struggle with the
world was the marriage of theology to ontology, the second was the ac-
cep tance of a metaphysical view affi rming the existence of two separate
regimes in the world: one governing human experience (or, for the be-
lievers, the relation of humanity to God); the other, controlling non-
human nature. Th e distinction between the two regimes has oft en been
held, by those who accept it, to reach within each individual human
being. Non- human nature is present, as the body, within each of us. Or
rather, according to this view, it is the human self that is present, as a
stranger, in its own mortal body.
Th e core idea of the two regimes stands out by contrast to the con-
ception that it negates: the thesis that, as Spinoza argued, there can be
only one regime in the world. If there is a single regime, it matters all
the more how that regime is to be characterized.
Th e program of classical ontology is in manifest tension with the
presuppositions and claims of the struggle with the world in any of its
forms. Th e idea of the two regimes displays no such obvious contradic-
tion with the premises of this approach. Moreover, the more familiar
statements of the notion of the one regime (including Spinoza’s own)
have contradicted those premises, both by affi rming the existence of an
eternal structure of the world (in much the same spirit as classical on-
tology) and by proclaiming the rule of a universal necessity. Yet if we
look more closely, we see that the doctrine of the two regimes does
cause endless trouble for the teachings of any form of the struggle with
the world. Th e opposing view, of the one regime, can and should be
developed in a manner conforming to the vision of reality that this ap-
proach to existence demands.
Th e teaching of the two regimes cannot be blamed on the ancient
Greeks. It was as foreign to their ways of thinking as it was to the phi-
losophies that have been dominant in the course of Indian and Chinese
history. However, it has exercised so great an infl uence on the course of