struggling with the world 145is valued, it is valued less on its own account than as a road to the
higher reality of the impersonal, as in Plato’s Symposium. Even when,
as in Aristotle, friendship is acknowledged to be a source of value, with
a moral architecture of its own, its value pales in comparison to the
summit of human experience: the sharing of a superior mind in the
quiet and the light of the impersonal divine.
Such a view cannot be reconciled with the uncompromising mes-
sage of the salvation religions about the superior importance and real-
ity of the personal. It is a message that they share with the approach to
existence that I have called the humanization of the world. Th e secular
voice of the struggle with the world did more than embrace this mes-
sage; it began to pursue it to more radical extremes in its implications
for the reshaping of our moral and po liti cal experience.
Th e other side of the insult delivered by the project of classical on-
tology against the presuppositions of the struggle with the world is its
denial or diminishment of the reality of time and thus as well of the
historical time in which our sacred or secular ascent, as a species and as
individuals, takes place. If, as classical ontology supposes, there is an
eternal repertory of natural kinds, governed by timeless laws or arche-
types of being (even if, as in Aristotle, being is activity, and each being
defi ned by characteristic powers and their recurrent exercise), the reach
of time must be diminished and its reality compromised. Moreover, if
we, human beings, are one of these permanent natural kinds, all that
we can hope for is to establish a moral and po liti cal order making the
best of our situation. We cannot hope for a fundamental change in our-
selves and our circumstance, only for a containment of the evils that
beset us from outside us and from within us.
It is astonishing that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers could
ever have looked for guidance to such an understanding of the world.
Yet they did. Th e troubled marriage of Christian theology with Greek
philosophy has continued for a thousand years. Th ose who have urged
divorce have been, in every epoch, save only for the present one, minor-
ity voices, whether, to take only the example of the Lutheran Reformed
Church, they spoke as outsiders like Kierkegaard or as insiders like Har-
nack. (In Judaism and in Islam the advocates of such divorce have long
carried greater weight.) Many have contrasted, with Pascal, the God of
Abraham to the God of the phi los o phers, by which they have usually