becoming more human by becoming more godlike 381settlement, it may, at the height of transformative ambition, help
change the quality as well as the content of the established structure.
It may contribute to a subsequent circumstance in which part of the
reformation— of its enlargement of the penumbra of the proximate
possible, of its weakening of the power of the dead over the living—
passes into the routinized, post- reformation society.
So it happens with enthusiasm. Some part of the system of ordinary
experience melts away in the heat of that time- suspending joy. But what
happens next? When the enthusiasm recedes, will the lasting shape of
experience have been changed? Will some part of the attributes of en-
thusiasm have entered into our ordinary existence? Th e legacy of en-
thusiasm, at the height of its transformative power, is conversion to life
in the present and avoidance of death before death, in the long prose of
day- to- day life.
Th e phenomenology of religious, artistic, or po liti cal enthusiasm
can easily be misinterpreted as a revelation about the world when it is
in fact a revelation about our humanity. Misunderstood in this way, it
can serve as an inducement or an excuse to worship the radiance of be-
ing (as in the later philosophy of Heidegger). Such is the message of a
paganism that would reverse the religious revolutions of the past. Our
task, however, is not to reverse them but to advance yet further in the
direction in which they have taken mankind.
A third virtue of purifi cation is attentiveness. Attentiveness com-
pletes the work of simplicity and of enthusiasm. It is their consumma-
tion and their reward. Th rough the virtue of attentiveness, we turn to
the manifest world and approach the ideal of a mind on which nothing
is lost. Th e perceptual immediacy of the world in childhood, celebrated
by the poet as a lost paradise, is recaptured by the grown man as in-
tensifi ed and discriminating vision. An aspect of the recovery of this
immediacy is our capacity to recover the sense of the strangeness of
what appears to be natural as well as of the excess of nature over es-
tablished thought.
If simplicity and enthusiasm serve chiefl y as instruments by which we
cease to be in thrall to context, attentiveness describes principally our
relation to the reality beyond the self and its contexts of society, thought,
and character. Our relative openness to the promptings of the manifest
world is a mark of embodied spirit and a sign of the enhancement of life