382 becoming more human by becoming more godlikein a human being. If genius rather than thinking better sees more, atten-
tiveness enables the attentive to share in the experience of genius.
Attentiveness, however, is not only a prize; it is also a fi ght. Its disci-
pline is the fi ght against prejudice: the inescapable prejudice that every
set of methods, presuppositions, and categories embodies. We cannot
do without them; we need them to make sense of our experience. In
surrendering, however, to any one version of them, we lose all prospect
of extending our vision, and retreat from our universal share in the
power of genius. To resist them, even as we use them, is a defi nition of
transcendence in the domain of perception and of thought. Th us, the
connection between transcendence and objectivity, which penetrates
and unifi es the virtues of purifi cation, appears as well in the inner
structure of attentiveness.
Virtues of divinization
Th e virtues of connection and of purifi cation create the basis for a third
set of virtues, which in turn modify their nature and eff ect. Th ese virtues
lack any counterpart in the ancient eudaimonism. Among the world reli-
gions, they have no secure place, other than in the Christian conception
of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Even there, however,
an important change is required. Love takes the place of agape. Th e axis
of hope becomes the relation between living for the future and changing
our experience of life in the present, from which we are no longer to be
estranged. Faith appears with its human face: fi rst, as the need to com-
mit our lives in a par tic u lar direction without ever having adequate
grounds for such a commitment and, second, as the impulse to put our-
selves into the hands of others to honor that commitment.
Th e problem to which the virtues of divinization respond is the one
that the religion of the future takes as its fi rst inspiration: the correc-
tion of our belittlement, the overcoming of the gap between our self-
understanding as embodied spirit and the ordinary circumstances of
existence, the striving to extend our share in the attributes of the divine
that are accessible to us while renouncing the infi nite powers and the
eternal life that are denied to us.