religious revolution now 201self- idolization. Yet it turns out that we cannot advance in the pursuit
of this purpose without overstepping the limits of these projects of sal-
vation and liberation, and indeed of all past religions.
What are the next steps in the progress of this unfi nished spiritual
revolution? Th e contemporary followers of the sacred and profane ver-
sions of the struggle with the world have been unable to answer this
question. Th at is why this orientation to existence now appears in the
paradoxical position of being both ascendant and lost, both strong and
weak. It is strong because in one or another of its forms it exercises un-
matched infl uence in the world. It is weak because its adherents no
longer know how to revive and continue it.
Insofar as it is lost as well as ascendant, weak as well as strong, it re-
news, in the absence of another religious revolution, the opportunity
for the other two spiritual orientations— the overcoming of the world
and the humanization of the world— to reassert themselves as perma-
nent and attractive spiritual options. So they do, not only as explicit
doctrines but also as inexplicit forms of experience and of vision.
We must reinvent the struggle with the world to keep it alive. Th e
reinvention would begin by elucidating the metaphysical assumptions
of this approach to the problems of life: its view of the singular exis-
tence of the world, of the inclusive reality of time, of the possibility of
the new, of the openness of history, of the depth of the self, and of the
reversal of values. Th e reinvention would persist in the development of
the truncated or suppressed orthodoxies regarding the relation of self
to structure and of self to others. It would inform a vision of change of
both self and society. At some point, such a remaking of the sacred or
secular teachings of the struggle with the world might begin to look
like another moment in the history of our spiritual experience. It would
do so most clearly to the extent that the ideas informing it began to
move beyond the common ground of the religious revolutions of the
past: the ground marked out by the fi ve shared themes that I earlier
listed.
Will what seemed to be a rescue and reinvention then begin to ap-
pear as a revolutionary replacement of what the would- be reformers set
out to preserve? Will it in eff ect be a new religion, not just a religion
with a diff erent content but also a religion in a diff erent sense? Th e in-
sistence on viewing our susceptibility to belittlement as a corrigible