overcoming the world 87
and routine in which we gradually cease to live, at the cost of accepting
a higher level of vulnerability, and seek so to live that we may die only
once.
We can do so in another way by changing, in the light of an icono-
clastic attitude to the social and conceptual settings of our existence,
our relation to one another. We can then more readily recognize one
another as the context- transcending beings that we secretly know our-
selves to be, rather than as placeholders in a social and cultural
order— an order that not only shapes our life chances but also teaches
us how to think and feel and treat one another by virtue of the roles we
perform in that order. Th us may a change in our relation to our cir-
cumstances become a change in our relation to other people, not auto-
matically or necessarily, but by the joint eff ort of the imagination and
the will.
A thesis of this book is that this vision of the possibilities of human
life stands in an especially intimate relation to the third of the three
world- historical religious traditions that I here discuss: the one that I
call the struggle with the world. Another thesis, however, is that the
advance of this vision is largely incompatible with the present forms of
the religious and secular beliefs and practices with which that vision
has been historically associated; thus the need, and the chance, for a
revolution in the religious experience of humanity.
Th e religion of the overcoming of the world is an adversary of
such a revolution, by virtue both of how it asks us to understand our
situation and of how it calls us to act. Th e understanding discour-
ages us from engaging in the successive confrontations with society,
culture, and ourselves that are required to advance this undertaking.
Th e call takes us in a direction that is opposite to the one we must
pursue to achieve the needed religious revolution. It does so at the
very outset of its proposals to the self by teaching the individual to raise
a shield against suff ering and change when his fi rst task is to cast his
shield down.
Nevertheless, the overcoming of the world is not simply a superseded
moment in the religious history of humanity. It gives voice to a perma-
nent possibility of religious experience. It will live again in other forms,