struggling with the world 191Th e fi rst response, a belated paganism, is to repudiate the dialectic of
presence and transcendence that lies at the center of all the higher reli-
gions, including those that represent the struggle with the world. It is to
sacrifi ce transcendence to presence. Th at is the path of a celebration of
the manifest world. It is ordinarily disguised in one of the philosophi-
cal vocabularies developed by the other two orientations: the overcom-
ing of the world or the humanization of the world. Th e second response,
Prometheanism, is to escape from our estrangement and homelessness
into an attempt at empowerment and self- deifi cation. It denies our
frailty. It refuses to recognize or to accept the irreparable fl aws in the
human condition. It replaces estrangement with power worship.
Belated paganism denies the most fundamental fact about our hu-
manity. It lacks the naive force of the religious life preceding the up-
heavals of the thousand years that saw the emergence of the higher
religions and the three approaches to existence that I here consider.
Prometheanism perverts transcendence by interpreting it as power
over other people. Once we reject both these responses, we are left with
the task of either repairing or replacing the struggle with the world, the
overriding spiritual work that our historical circumstance has as-
signed us.
A seemingly easy escape from the burden of transcendence and from
the consequent threat of homelessness is to rid ourselves of our dis-
tance from the present moment and to exult in the radiance of the
manifest world. An explicit example in contemporary thought is the
late philosophy of Heidegger. It is as if the terrifying exercise of Being
and Time— the relentless confrontation with death, groundlessness,
and insatiability— and the arousal from our sleepwalking, our dimin-
ished life, that such a confrontation may make possible, had been de-
signed only to seal our subsequent surrender to the existing world.
Once disillusionment with politics is complete, nothing seems to be
left other than to worship the cosmos in its splendor: to worship it not
as the varied, factitious, and evolving structure that it is but rather as
Being, hidden behind the metamorphoses of nature. Th e surrender to
the world is no less complete for being described in the terms of a specu-
lative panentheism or monism, falsely presented as the overcoming of
pagan metaphysics rather than as its continuation.