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struggling with the world 151

tors, never from the inside, as context- shaped but nevertheless world-

making agents.

Th ere are two major objections to the idea of the two regimes. To be

forceful, each of these objections must have both a theological and a

philosophical weight.

Insofar as each of these objections is theological, it criticizes the doc-

trine of the two regimes as contradictory to the struggle with the world.

Because the struggle with the world can be understood in both a sacred

and a secular register, the sense of theological is loose and does not

presuppose belief in an interventionist God: the point is that, in this

sense, regardless of any merits that the doctrine of the two regimes may

have, it cannot be squared with the aims and presuppositions of this

approach to existence.

Each of these objections, however, also has a philosophical force: it

counts by appeal to the facts of the matter, even in the eyes of those who

are uncommitted to the struggle with the world. Only if an objection

has both a theological and a philosophical signifi cance can it deliver a

powerful blow against the idea of the two regimes. However, in the de-

velopment of each objection, it is important to understand what in the

argument is philosophical and what theological, and with regard to the

theological, what applies to the sacred and what to the profane versions

of the struggle with the world.

I call these two objections the argument about arbitrariness and anti-

naturalism and the argument about near emptiness and false content.

Th e argument about arbitrariness and anti- naturalism. Th e Cartesian,
Kantian, and historicist waves of the doctrine of the two regimes trans-
late a view of the limitations of insight and power into an idea of the
division of the world; they convert epistemology and anthropology into
ontology. Th eir procedures are like those of a man who fi nding that his
sight extends to a hundred meters imagines the world to be divided
into two parts: the part before and aft er this horizon. Th e nominalist
wave seems to represent an exception to this criterion of division. It so
appears, however, only because its focus falls on the conversation be-
tween our powers and the power of God— the realm of grace— from
which spiritless nature, beyond, remains excluded. It too, however,