218 religious revolution nowsolace, especially solace for our greatest terror— the fear of death,
against the background of our groundlessness— negates the most cer-
tain and most terrible fact about our situation in the world. By off ering
us what we most fi ercely desire— eternal life— religion discourages all
the safeguards against wishful thinking that we have established against
the blandishments of self- deception. Th e conversion of philosophy
into an eff ort defi nitively to defeat the threat of nihilism— the anxiety
of groundlessness— turns the understanding against itself. If we could
establish the framework of our existence by procedures similar to those
that we employ in natural science, we would not be the unaccommo-
dated beings who we are. We would not need to exercise the prerogative
of thinking, at the uncertain limits between the knowable and the un-
knowable, about what matters most.
Th e perversion of religion and the corruption of philosophy go hand
in hand. Th ey reinforce each other, and put consolation and pretense in
the place of insight. Th ey are especially to be feared when they work in
direct alliance, as they oft en have, under the disguise of the partnership
of faith and reason. Th e most important consequence of the failure to
confront the truth about our condition is the reduction of the path of
ascent— of the way in which we may increase our share in attributes of
divinity, including the attribute of knowledge of the whole— into a re-
strictive formula.
In corrupt philosophy, the formula is a method by which we fl atter
ourselves that we can reason our way out of the condition of ground-
lessness, and fi nd by pure thought (as Schopenhauer said of his philos-
ophy) a defi nitive solution to the problems of existence. If only we cling
to a certain method of reasoning, and follow its steps to a certain meta-
physical (or anti- metaphysical) conclusion, we shall, they wrongly sup-
pose, be able to attain clarity about the whole of our situation.
In perverted religion, the formula is a set of sacrifi ces, practices, or
laws, which if only obeyed in the proper frame of mind open the way to
salvation. Th e sacrifi cial victim was replaced, in the history of religion,
by sacramental practice, formulaic prayer, and sacred law. It was the
special dignity of Christianity, as well as of the mystical countercur-
rents within Judaism and Islam, that they affi rmed from the outset, and
never completely abandoned amid the evils of their social and concep-
tual compromises, belief in the primacy of spirit over law as well as in