becoming more human by becoming more godlike 385pair of virtues of divinization. Of them, little need be said because
much has been said earlier in this book.
Openness to the other is what the doctrine of the relation of self to
others teaches. Th e religion of the future takes this view over from the
struggle with the world and pursues it free of the equivocations that
surround it in that tradition. Its supreme form is personal love among
equals rather than benevolence off ered from on high or from a dis-
tance. Its more diff use expressions, outside the circle of our closest at-
tachments, are communities cemented by diff erence rather than by
sameness and the higher forms of cooperation, or ga nized institutionally
in the practices of production, politics, and civil society. Its work is the
same as its presupposition: attenuation of the confl ict between our
need for other people and our need to escape the jeopardy in which
they place us.
Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral conse-
quence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. Th e religion
of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world,
and radicalizes it. Th is virtue acts out the human truth of our relation
to the settled contexts of our life and thought. Th at they are ephemeral
and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and
insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, indi-
vidually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts
giving us per sis tent reason to rebel against structures.
In rebelling against them, we must seek to change their character as
well as their content: their relation to our structure- defying freedom. If
we surrender to them and allow them to have the last word, rather than
keeping the last word for ourselves, we interrupt our attempt to increase
our share in the attributes of divinity. We cease to be fully human.
Th e degree to which a conceptual or social regime seizes its partici-
pants and reduces them to the condition of being its puppets depends
on the character of that regime as well as on the powers of insight that
these would- be puppets have developed, with the support of the regime
or in defi ance of it. However, no matter how far an established institu-
tional or conceptual order has gone in entrenching itself against chal-
lenge and change and in surrounding itself with the aura of a specious
necessity or of unquestionable authority, it cannot in fact suppress ex-
periences that contradict its assumptions. Nor can it erase the history