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378 becoming more human by becoming more godlike

By reinventing courage to change ourselves, we create the basis for a

solidarity that is not predicated on belittlement.

Virtues of purifi cation

A second set of virtues had no place in the philosophical and religious
traditions that preceded the revolutionary emergence of the higher reli-
gions. Nor does it have a place today in the crypto- paganism common
among the moral phi los o phers, including the ones who profess to be
Christians. When these virtues are taken into account at all, they are
viewed from the single- minded perspective of the commitments to al-
truism and to ethical universalism: that is to say, from the standpoint
of our obligations to other people. Th ey are not seen, in their depth of
emotion and experience, as valuable in their own right or as require-
ments for the development of a higher form of life. Th us, for example,
the altruist or the ethical universalist will admonish us not to consume
a disproportionate share of the non- renewable resources of the earth
only because he views our prodigality as an illegitimate taking from
the poor and the unborn.
Th e problem addressed by the virtues of purifi cation is the belittle-
ment resulting from our failure to distinguish the central from the pe-
ripheral in existence and our consequent absorption in concerns that
separate us from ourselves and divert us from the enhancement of life.
Th is absorption in the peripheral amounts to an aspect of the dimin-
ished experience of life that it must be the purpose of our self- overthrow
to overcome.
Self- absorption inhibits the exercise of our power of transcendence
over the structure of society, thought, and character. By imprisoning us,
it weakens our ability to receive the impressions of the manifest world
and to identify the transformative possibilities in our circumstance.
Openness to such impressions is inseparable from willingness to resist
and transgress the institutional, conceptual, and psychological schemes
shaping our ordinary experience of life.
Th e double and connected loss of the power to transcend and of the
power to see more amounts to an attack on the condition of embodied
spirit. It interrupts our ascent to a greater life. Th is connection between