280 religious revolution nowcontemporary particle physics represents a down payment on a com-
prehensive account of the fundamental and permanent structure of
reality.
To fi nd alternatives to the project of classical ontology, we need to
go, in the history of Western philosophy, to some of the pre- Socratics
or to a few of the phi los o phers of the modern West. We need to evoke
the Anaximander who wrote: “All things originate from one another,
and vanish into one another, according to necessity,... under the do-
minion of time.” Or we need to appeal to Pascal, to Kierkegaard, to
Bergson, or to twentieth- century phi los o phers of action and personal-
ity, within or outside Christianity, like Blondel and Levinas. Th ese have
not been the philosophical tutors of Christian orthodoxy.
What is the place of the human person in the world as described by
classical ontology? What room remains in such a world for the trans-
formation of reality, from top to bottom, by means of the dramatic in-
teractions between God and humanity? Th e infl uence of the program
of classical ontology has persisted in the subsequent history of Western
philosophy. It has oft en overshadowed and corrupted the expression of
Christian faith.
For it is part of the metaphysical impulse of Christianity, as an expres-
sion of the struggle with the world, to affi rm the inclusive reality of time
and the ascendancy of the personal over impersonal being. No structural
division of the world lasts forever. Moreover, it is not impersonal being
but rather our dealings with one another as well as with those we have
with God, conceived on the model of personal encounter, that represent,
in this religion, the decisive events in the trajectory of mankind.
Th e compromise with society and the embrace of Greek philosophy—
in par tic u lar, of the project of classical ontology— have overshadowed the
evolution of Christian orthodoxy. Th ey have done so to such an extent
that no one can know for sure what Christianity without them would
amount to.
Th ey are nevertheless unacceptable: they work to undermine the in-
tegrity, and to suppress the effi cacy, of the twin ideas that represent the
most important legacy of Christianity to the religion of the future: the
ideas of self and others and of spirit and structure explored earlier in this
book. It is true that those ideas are also present in the kindred religions
of Judaism and Islam as well as in the secular programs of personal or