struggling with the world 193dence and engagement. It is rather the projection of our greatest good
into the future and the inadequate connection of that future to what we
in fact possess: the present.
Belated paganism fails to deal with the problem at its source. In-
stead, it attacks something more basic and general: the dialectic of en-
gagement and transcendence, embraced as the chief device of our as-
cent to a greater life. In abandoning this device, at the instigation of
belated paganism, we cease to be oriented to the future. However, we
fail to overcome our estrangement from the present. Th e reason why we
fail is that belated paganism undermines, more than the orientation to
the future ever could, the conditions of presence and vitality. Th ese
conditions depend on the dialectic between engagement and transcen-
dence, which the higher religions placed at the center of our experience
and consciousness when they rebelled against the identifi cation of the
divine with the cosmos.
Th e second commonplace and misguided response to the experience
of estrangement from the present moment is Prometheanism. (See the
discussion of Prometheanism in Chapter 1.) By Prometheanism, I mean
the denial of our frailty, or the attempt to compensate for it, by gaining
power. If Prometheanism is to count as a response to an estrangement
resulting from the projection of our supreme good into the future, the
power that it seeks cannot be simply the collective empowerment of
humanity, achieved in historical time. It cannot, for example, be the
power that humanity acquires, according to Karl Marx, through the de-
velopment of the forces of production and ultimately through the over-
coming of class society. It must be a power that the individual can hope
to wield in his own lifetime. It must therefore be his power, and he must
be able to enjoy it over other people as well as over nature.
Th e Promethean off ers no sacred or profane narrative of our collec-
tive accession in providential time to life eternal or in historical time to
a larger earthly existence. What he off ers is power now. Th rough power
now, he hopes to overcome the estrangement from the present moment
that is the sickness of the struggle with the world.
Prometheanism amounts to a false solution to the problem of es-
trangement from life in the present. In the fi rst place, it is a false solu-
tion because it begins in the impulse to bridge the impassable rift s in
human life. If it does not deny them literally, it seeks to overshadow