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162 struggling with the world

can be readily married to the vision lying at the center of the struggle

with the world. It is also the view of reality that we have most reason to

credit in the light of what we have discovered (despite the metaphysical

blinkers through which we continue to see the discoveries of science)

about the workings of nature.

For the believer, such a thoroughgoing temporal naturalism is incom-

plete. Th e image of evolving nature that it proposes must be completed

by another story about the saving work of God and the response that

this work elicits, or fails to elicit, from the human will. However, super-

naturalism requires then only one miracle (the envelopment of nature

within a higher reality) rather than three miracles (the breaking of the

natural order, the breaking of the human order, and the separation of

the human order from the natural one). A temporal naturalism of this

kind has, as well, for the believer the decisive advantage of off ering an

approach within which he can more readily make sense of the idea of

the self as embodied spirit. Th e anti- naturalist dualism of the doctrine

of the two regimes undermines this view of our humanity.

Spirit and structure

Th e conception of embodied spirit yields an approach to the institutions
and discourses shaping us. To defi ne this approach is further to elabo-
rate the conception. At the same time, it is to begin to describe the prac-
tical consequences of the struggle with the world for the conduct of life
and the or ga ni za tion of society.
Th is view of the relation of self to structure, however, remains so
foreign to the most infl uential ideas about society that it can be stated
only with diffi culty; the very words with which to express it carry the
weight of associations that work against it. It is an orthodoxy with few
friends and fewer theoreticians. Th e doctrines that have deviated from
it, in one or another direction, have spoken more loudly, even in the
societies in which the struggle with the world has been the most infl u-
ential approach to existence.
Th ere are two such principal heresies. According to the custom of
patristic theology, I here give them the names of individuals: the Hege-
lian heresy and the Sartrean heresy. Each of them, however, has repre-