religious revolution now 243than the one that we now possess, yet unfl inching in its recognition
that we go to our deaths under the shadow of the impenetrable enigma
of our existence, consumed by longings that we are able neither to sat-
isfy nor to escape, and sustained by joys in the midst of our dreams and
torments.
In the third place, with respect to its program, it demands what none
of the religious revolutions of the past have had: a vision of the cumula-
tive transformation of society that cannot be reduced to obedience to a
defi nitive formula or blueprint and that is therefore incompatible with
the religion of the law. Th e imperative of the marriage of visionary
teaching with exemplary action is mirrored in the characteristics of
such an argument for the reconstruction of society. It is not architec-
ture: a fi nished scheme, such as we might profess to fi nd in a body of
sacred law. It is music: a succession of steps. Its two most important
features are that it mark a direction and that it indicate the initial
steps by which, in a par tic u lar circumstance, to begin moving in that
direction.
It wants not only to replace one set of institutional arrangements
and cultural assumptions by another but also and above all to change
over time the character of the institutional and conceptual order that
we inhabit so that we may engage it without surrendering to it. In this
way, our life in society becomes less of an exile and of an imprisonment
in a world that remains hostile to the condition of embodied spirit.
In the fourth place, it seeks to expunge from the exercise of our pow-
ers of re sis tance to the immediate institutional or conceptual context of
our lives the burden of estrangement from the present moment. It rec-
ognizes in such estrangement the squandering of our most certain
good. Th e practical consequence of this eff ort is to make it unwilling to
await the arrival of this good in the historical or providential future. It
insists on experiencing this enhancement of life, in however fragmen-
tary and inchoate a form, now.
It must therefore be prodigal in the invention of personal and social
experiments that translate that future into the present and convert liv-
ing for the future into a way of living in the present as beings whose
horizon of action and insight is not limited by their present circum-
stances. Some of the most important such experiments are those that
connect the re orientation of life to the reor ga ni za tion of society: for