56 beyond wishful thinkingto grasp, all the while tormented and aroused by our desires and con-
scious of a power that we are unable adequately to deploy before our
decline and annihilation, we may experience our existence as a halluci-
nation. We turn away in dread from this delirium into our aff airs, into
the devotions of our attachments and engagements. We hope that they
will absorb and rescue us.
Religion is neither the awareness of the delirious nature of our con-
sciousness nor the turning away from the delirium into our everyday
business. It is the cognitive and volitional position that we take with re-
spect to a circumstance in which we seem compelled to choose between
these two attitudes. No wonder that its development has taken place
under the shadow of the temptation to console.
Th e consolation has characteristically taken a double form in accor-
dance with the twofold nature of religion as both belief and practice. As
belief, it has been a way of representing our situation that reads this
situation as less terrifying than it seems to be. As practice, religion has
been a set of collective activities and individual habits that enables us to
cast a spell on ourselves: to quiet not only our empty and insatiable
desires but also our anxiety about our mortality and our groundless-
ness. A story about how everything can or will be all right becomes
part of a fi x we place on ourselves.
Th e work of consolation, however, has consequences for the sub-
stance of our view of the world and for the direction of our activity
within the world. Th e work may be compatible with one level of enlight-
enment and emancipation but incompatible with the next level: com-
patible with the enlargement of vision and the freedom from prejudice
achieved by the religious revolutions that gave rise to the three ap-
proaches to life considered here but incompatible with the further rev-
olution that we may need now.
Nothing in the history of religion is harder to overcome than the
impulse to reassure us about the irremediable fl aws in life. Th e diffi -
culty is aggravated by the need to rely on ideas that are, by the very na-
ture of our groundlessness, contestable and fragmentary. It is if, by a
strange paradox, we could put an end to wishful thinking only by a prac-
tice of thought overreaching what we can hope to understand.
A second characteristic of religion is that it relates an orientation to
life to a vision of our place in the world. Th e link between orientation