292 deep freedomconceptions of our good and of our identity. To say that it is religious is
also to recognize the disproportion between the disputable reasons to
embrace it and the decisive consequences that result from its adoption.
If no social regime can be neutral among accounts of our humanity
and of our good, with the result that politics must be ultimately religious,
no religion that fi nds inspiration in the motives and goals discussed in
the previous chapter can abandon society to its own devices. Th ree forces,
above all others, work to give any such religion a po liti cal content.
Th e fi rst force is the eff ort to deepen and to radicalize the dialectic of
transcendence and immanence that has been the hallmark of all the
higher religions, representative of the three orientations to existence
discussed earlier in this book. From the standpoint of this dialectic, the
social regime— the formative institutional and ideological structure of a
society— matters both because it helps make us who we are and because
it must not be allowed to have the last word over what we can become.
It must enable us to make a practical success of social life. It must, how-
ever, also permit us, indeed encourage and empower us, to reinvent ev-
ery piece of its institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions.
Th e second force is the demand to establish such arrangements and
assumptions on a basis acknowledging the truth about our mortality,
our groundlessness, and our insatiability. Th e reverse side of our pow-
ers of re sis tance and transcendence is our ineradicable fi nitude and ig-
norance, our condemnation to death, and our longing for an absolute
that we cannot possess and incessantly project onto unworthy objects.
Th e po liti cal consequences of such an acknowledgement are no less mo-
mentous for being in the fi rst instance negative. No regime can claim to
be authorized by the ultimate ground of existence (because there is none
that we can grasp), or to count on the patience of the deathless (because
we are not they), or to trade on our contentment with par tic u lar advan-
tages and roles (because no advantages and roles suffi ce to the beings
that we are).
Th e third force is the revolutionary idea of our individual and collec-
tive escape (without the illusions and perversions of Prometheanism)
from the evil of belittlement, falsely mistaken for an irreparable fl aw in
the human condition: the enhancement of life now, rather than in a
historical or providential future from which we remain estranged. Th e
po liti cal transformation of society is not the whole of the overcoming