struggling with the world 187the last two centuries; the consequent confi nement of would- be left ists
and progressives to the work of humanizing a regime that they fi nd
themselves unable to reshape; and the pieties of the conventional secu-
lar humanism, succeeding the dangerous illusions of romanticism. Th e
real form of this orientation to existence, the character of its presence
in history, is the one defi ned by these many and cumulative surrenders.
In this way, its votaries have tried to adapt the message to the world
rather than to adapt the world to the message.
Th e adepts of these disoriented and submissive versions of the
struggle with the world may protest that the failure of the message to
be realized more fully, through the replacement of the beliefs and
arrangements that contradict it, represents no objection to the doc-
trine. Given the disparity between the message and the reality of so-
cial life, the solution is simply to sweep aside, one by one, all the re-
straints and compromises that prevent the uncompromising translation
of these secular and sacred doctrines into a way of thinking and of
living as well as into a form of social or ga ni za tion. According to this
response, the complaint of disparity between doctrine and reality,
rather than presenting an objection, has the validity of the doctrine
as its premise.
Th is response fails to take into account the two connected senses in
which the peaceful coexistence of the teachings of the struggle with the
world with ways of thinking and forms of life that contradict it reveals
a defect in this approach to life.
Th e radicalization of the message of the struggle with the world, in
opposition to the beliefs that negate its assumptions, as well as to the
arrangements that frustrate its promise, would result in a reinterpreted
orthodoxy that few or none of the would- be orthodox now recognize as
their own. Th e suppressed twin orthodoxies of spirit and structure and
of self and others confl ict with the prevailing beliefs of believers and
disbelievers alike.
Th e sacred or secular versions of the struggle with the world can be
rescued from their compromises and surrenders only by being inter-
preted in ways shocking to their adherents. Th e diff erence between
radical interpretation and radical reconstruction of the doctrine
hardly matters in this context. Christianity, viewed by some and even
by Jesus himself as the consummation and fulfi llment of Judaism,