religious revolution now 219the connection between the idea of love and the idea of the infi nite. In
this manner, they loosened the stranglehold of any formulaic road to
salvation.
Th e fi rst requirement of our ascent to a greater life is to accept the
truth about our circumstance and to reject consolation. Th e truth is the
antidote to any such formula, for thinking and for salvation, pressed
upon us by false philosophy and false religion.
Th e denial of death, groundlessness, and insatiability, in which the
higher religions have in diff erent degrees been complicit, is a falsehood
whose destructive consequences are not limited to the advocacy of a re-
strictive recipe for insight or salvation. It inhibits, as well, the full recog-
nition and expression of our defi ning attribute of engagement and tran-
scendence. A being that did not face the certainty of death, that was not
plunged into insuperable ignorance over the conditions of its existence,
and that did not want more than he could ever have would not be the be-
ing for whom no structure of society or of thought is ever enough.
If he could grasp the framework of existence and fi nd an object capa-
ble of quieting his desire, he could take these two discoveries as the basis
for an all- inclusive ordering of thought and of life. What Hegel named
the endless labor of negation would cease to be necessary. What I have
called the Hegelian heresy would turn out to be vindicated by the facts of
the matter. If he could escape death, at least the death of his earthly self,
his existence would lose the fateful and irreversible concentration upon
which the dialectic of transcendence and engagement depends.
A second reason for which the ac know ledg ment and ac cep tance of the
defects in the human condition are central to any future religion is that
such awarenes can awaken us to life now. Th e fear of death, the shadow
of nihilism, and the force of insatiable desire arouse us from the sleep-
walking, the state of diminished consciousness, in which our lives may
otherwise be consumed. Spinoza wrote that a wise man’s thoughts are
directed to life rather than to death. However, by averting our attention
from the ephemeral and dreamlike character of our existence, we lose
the most powerful instrument with which we can hope to resist sur-
render to routine, repetition, and petty compromise. Death- bound, dis-
tracting ourselves with the diversions that enable us to forget or even to
deny our mortality, and forgetful of the mysterious character of our