180 struggling with the worldWe cannot dispense with the dialectic of repetition and novelty if we
are to become more human by making ourselves more godly.
Th e dangerous and deluded quest for self- grounding through love
represents a perverted form of the unlimited desire for the unlimited,
and in par tic u lar of the quest for defi nitive recognition and assurance
that is an integral feature of love, as understood and experienced in this
approach to existence. In a half- Christianized society (or more gener-
ally in societies infl uenced by the Semitic monotheisms), it is a perver-
sion suggested by the blasphemous identifi cation of the human lover
with the divine one.
Th e view of self and others that best expresses the central ideas of the
struggle with the world is thus besieged on all sides by heresies claim-
ing to represent the sacred or the secular versions of this approach to
existence. In Christianity, it is overshadowed by the mistaking of love
for altruism, or by the dismissal of love, in the sense in which I earlier
defi ned it, as an experience inferior to altruism. In the secular cultures
of these same societies, the view of the relation of self to others that I
have described as the secret orthodoxy about self and others is chal-
lenged by the heresy of romanticism. Th is heresy reveals despair about
our power to change the world— the large world of society, as well as
the small world of our dealings with others— so that it may become
more hospitable to the incarnate and context- shaped but also context-
transcending beings that we are. It is only with diffi culty that the vision
of our relation to other people for which I have here spoken resists these
errors and delivers its astonishing message.
Twin orthodoxies suppressed
What is the relation between these two suppressed orthodoxies, the
one about self and others and the one about spirit and structure?
Th e shared basis of both is the conception of the self as embodied
spirit, engaged in context and transcendent over context. It must be
also, however, the acknowledgement of the irreparable defects in hu-
man life: mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. Th e sacred ver-
sions of the struggle with the world, products of the breakthroughs that
produced the higher religions, resist recognizing these fl aws in our