440 becoming more human by becoming more godlike
living for real in the moment. By this turn, religion becomes something
diff erent from what it has usually been in the history of humanity: an
eff ort to console us for our death and groundlessness, if not to explain
them away, and an attempt to quiet insatiable desire by fi xing it on
an object— God, being, or the sacrosanct experience of personality—
representing the absolute for which the self longs.
Th is reckoning with the reality of our situation is the turn of pure
terror, by which we put away religion as consolation to seek religion as
a response to existence informed by a more comprehensive view of re-
ality. Th e terror amounts to an overthrow of the guarded and resigned
self by itself. Call this part of the proposal the overthrow.
A second element in this view of a future religion is the re orientation
of the conduct of life. Th is part of the argument is the heart of the mes-
sage, presented here in two of its many possible forms: a conception of
the virtues and a response to certain formative incidents in an ordinary
human life. Both versions of the message are animated by the same idea
of the person as embodied spirit. Both remain faithful to the view of
spirit and structure and of self and others for which I have argued:
the suppressed and truncated orthodoxies that the religion of the fu-
ture inherits from the salvation religions as well as from democracy,
romanticism, and the other secular projects of po liti cal and personal
liberation.
Th is view is a moral conception, but not an ethical theory in the con-
ventional sense of academic moral philosophy. It deviates from the
path of that philosophy in form as well as in substance. Its aim is not to
lay down rules, or to show how we can acquit ourselves of our obli-
gations to others the better to appear blameless before the tribunal of
conscience. It refuses to take as its guiding concern the taming of our
selfi shness, although it does assign a central place to the relation be-
tween vitality and solidarity. Its attention is focused fi rst and foremost
on the enhancement of life, so much so that it may seem not to be a
moral view at all. Nevertheless, its implications for our beliefs about
how to live soon become apparent. Call this part of the proposal the
transformation of the self, or simply the transformation.
A third element in this account of the teachings of a future religious
revolution is its proposal for the reformation of society: a direction, not
a blueprint, described here in the vocabulary of the present and with