becoming more human by becoming more godlike 353of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. It must reaffi rm our
desire to live for the future as beings not determined by the present
conditions of their existence. It must represent a fi ght nevertheless to
escape estrangement from the highest good, life, which we can possess
only in the present moment.
Th ese themes set points of departure for the religion of the future.
Th ey generate no rules to tell us whom we should cast into the sea when
the boat is sinking under its weight, or how we should solve any of the
other conundrums that occupy the time of those who think that rule-
books and casuistry can compensate for lack of vision in deliberating
what to make of life.
Th e ambitions that we have been taught to cultivate by the tradition of
the struggle with the world present us with two distinct but related
problems. One of them has a familiar but misleading description in the
history of the West. Th e other is at once pervasive and unspoken.
Th e familiar problem is the one that is inadequately described as the
reconciliation of Christian love with pagan greatness. Th e idea that our
ability to imagine and to accept other people, in personal love and in the
higher forms of cooperation, has pre ce dence over altruism in the or ga-
ni za tion of the moral life is central to the Christian faith. However, it is
equally basic to all that is deepest and most powerful in the secular cul-
ture of the West and in the programs of po liti cal and personal liberation
that have resonated throughout the world over the last two centuries.
What we are inclined to call the pagan idea of greatness need not be
pagan at all. It can be another name for the exercise of our power to
turn the tables on our arrangements and presuppositions. Rising from
tutelage to a higher life, we conceive the aim of changing the nature as
well as the content of our frameworks of existence and of thought so
that we may cease to live as exiles in the world, and no longer obey in-
stitutions and doctrines that insult the condition of embodied spirit.
Our eff orts at solidarity are penetrated and transformed by our re-
bellion against belittlement and by our longing for the infi nite, which
changes their nature and redirects their course. Connection among
beings who can accept their allotted social stations, credit the dogmas
of the established culture, and fi nd closeness in sameness or conver-
gence is one thing. Solidarity among people who believe themselves to