becoming more human by becoming more godlike 419live, or diminish life, if we fail to fi ght against the limits of such
contexts.
We are condemned to be both insiders and outsiders if we wish to
affi rm the good of existence. Th e experience of single- minded engage-
ment in a task, or of wholehearted love for another person who is our
equal and who can rebuff as well as accept our love, may make time
seem to stop for a while. Th e normal course of existence, however, re-
quires reckoning with the limits of the circumstance, relentlessly en-
forced, even upon the most privileged, by the established regime of so-
ciety or of thought. Only by contending with this confi nement, and by
doing so under the shadow of mortality, groundlessness, and insatia-
bility, do we awake to life.
Th e second point at which the disciplines of the overcoming of the
world confl ict with the demands of re sis tance to mummifi cation lies in
the attitude to the realities of time and distinction, including the dis-
tinction among selves, in the real, historical world. We are hostage to
our endeavors and connections. Th ey in turn are held ransom to events
beyond our control. What may matter most to us, including the fate of
the people whom we love most and of the tasks that we most prize, may
lie beyond the span of our lives. Th e view of happiness suggested by the
overcoming of the world teaches that these threats are unreal because
time, distinction, and in de pen dent selfh ood are themselves unreal, or
less real than hidden and unifi ed being.
For the beliefs that the religion of the future takes over from the
struggle with the world, however, the threats are all too real, and it is
their denial that represents an illusion inimical to existence. Our over-
coming of estrangement from life in the present must not have this illu-
sion as its premise. It must convert living for the future, a real future, in
a real world of time and distinction, into a way of living in the present
as an agent who can always outreach, in thought and experience, the
present circumstances of his existence. Th ese convictions fail to supply
our search with a direction, but they make the search possible and en-
dow it with its life- giving importance.
Th e humanization of the world provides a response of a diff erent
order to the evil of mummifi cation. It does so on the basis of its funda-
mental tenets and commitments: the creation of meaning and order in
an otherwise meaningless world, in which nature is alien to our human