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418 becoming more human by becoming more godlike

the inordinate infl uence of self- interest. Th ey share with Pontius Pilate

the desire to be blameless: to tell how we are to pay the bills, acquit our-

selves of our obligations, and come out with clean hands. Th ey amount

to a shriveled residue of Christianity, not only without the cross but

also without the transformation. Th ey are inimical to the enhancement

of life, which is the animating goal of the struggle against the mummy.

A more formidable rival to the ideas underlying re sis tance to mummi-
fi cation, as well as to the attitudes that this re sis tance inspires and on
which it draws, are the orientations to existence arising out of the over-
coming of the world and the humanization of the world. Th ey are not
mere philosophical speculations; they remain permanent and danger-
ous options in the spiritual path of mankind. Th ey bear a closer and
more interesting connection with the fi ght against mummifi cation
than the abstractions of the moral phi los o phers.
Th e approach to life called in this book the overcoming of the world
urges us to disentangle ourselves from the coils of illusion the better to
share in the life or being of the underlying, single reality and to recog-
nize our kinship with every part of the manifest world. Th e point at
which this approach overlaps the struggle against mummifi cation is
the value that it gives to the virtues of purifi cation: simplicity, enthusi-
asm, and attentiveness. It provides a metaphysical basis for the requisite
kenosis: the emptying out by which we distance ourselves from the pe-
ripheral the better to grasp the central. Th e acute awareness of partici-
pation in hidden and unifi ed being that it requires off ers a good in the
present, not just a promise of greater good in the future, even as it tends
to deny or diminish the reality of time. Th e compassionate action that
it demands exacts from its adherents a willingness to defy the worldly
impediments to our rise to this higher level of existence. In all these
ways, the disciplines of the overcoming of the world converge with the
campaign against mummifi cation as I here defi ne and defend it.
Th ey part with this campaign, however, in at least two ways crucial
to the conduct of life. First, they diverge in the value that they place on
the end goal of serenity. Th ere is no life, or no enhancement of life,
without turmoil. Th e reason lies in the implications of some of our most
important attributes. We can affi rm life only by throwing ourselves
into par tic u lar social and conceptual contexts. However, we cease to