religious revolution now 221goals, it has served the same purpose of rescuing us from common-
place and compromise, from routine and repetition. It was used to
combat what in the twentieth century came to be described as an inau-
thentic existence, an existence lived under the compulsion of collective
formulas remote from the innermost concerns of the self. We are to be
brought away from Pascal’s divertissement or Heidegger’s Zerstreuung
by the apprehension of the terrifying truth about our circumstance.
Nothing in this awakening, however, determines what may follow it.
Arousal from our sleepwalking may be followed by one outcome or by
another. It cannot do the work of a settled faith or stand in the place of
a religious program.
A third reason for the importance of an ac know ledg ment of the fl aws
in the human existence to the religion of the future is that it helps pre-
vent the affi rmation of life and the overcoming of estrangement from
degenerating into Prometheanism: into self- deifi cation and power wor-
ship. Th e cult of will and of lordship has as one of its premises the de-
nial of all weakness. No weakness is more fundamental than the one
that is imposed on us by the inescapable restraints of death, darkness,
and unlimited longing.
To face the truth about these restraints, not just as a theoretical idea
but as a permanent feature of consciousness, is to prepare a remedy
against Prometheanism. By the custom of the ancient Romans, a slave
stood behind the “triumphator”— the magistrate or general riding in
triumphal procession— and whispered into his ear: memento mori (re-
member that you will die). In this way, the victor was brought back to
the awareness of his mortality and prevented from mistaking himself
for a god. So it is with us.
Occasions and sources of religious revolution
Having suggested points of departure for a religious revolution, I now
consider a series of related questions about the circumstances, the
sense, the scope, and the distinctive forms and practices of such a
change in our spiritual life. Th is discussion serves as a bridge between
the analysis, in the preceding pages, of the starting points of that