becoming more human by becoming more godlike 427a formula we can materialize in a machine. Countless millions remain
condemned to do the work that machines could perform. Th e most
important use of the machine, however, is to save our time for that
which we have not yet learned how to repeat.
Th e life of the virtues shows a similar dialectic. Th e virtues are ha-
bitual predispositions to do the good. If, however, the virtues were no
more than habits, even if directed to right ends, they would signal the
surrender of experience to routine. Th ey would serve mummifi cation
rather than acting to dissolve the mummy. In the religion of the future,
we come to see these habitual predispositions as means by which to af-
fi rm in daily life the truth that there is more in each of us than there is
in the structures of society and of thought that we inhabit.
Th e virtues of connection take on a preparatory meaning and cease
to be the centerpiece of the moral life. As they dethrone us from our
self- centeredness, they prepare us for a life of searching, in which we
are rescued, rather than doomed, by our dependence on other people.
Th e virtues of purifi cation draw us to the parts of our experience that
are least susceptible to being made formulaic; by disengaging us from
the peripheral, they equip us to resist the context. Th e virtues of divin-
ization are habits against habits and against structures.
Th ese last virtues present the most diffi cult problem in the vision
animating the campaign against mummifi cation: the relation of tran-
scendence to solidarity, of greatness to love. We must defy structures to
respect people and to make ourselves more fully into the structure-
transcending agents that, in our actual historical circumstance, we
only dimly are. However, no defi ance of structure is achieved without a
threat to solidarity (although muffl ed in the higher forms of coopera-
tion), and no greatness is a substitute for love.
In all these domains, the task is to change the nature and place of
routine and repetition in our experience. Routine— expressed in the
part of the mind that has not yet become imagination, in machines that
do for us what we have already learned how to repeat, and in virtues
that turn strivings and ideals into habits— comes to serve our raising
up to a higher state of vision and being. To make war against repetition,
as romanticism desires, is to reject life, for there is no life without rep-
etition. Nevertheless, to abdicate re sis tance to the infl uence of repeti-
tion in our experience is to accept a diminished life. Th e solution to this