406 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeTh e way in which the individual engages the circumstance is shaped
according to a series of compromises and restraints that clip the
wings of fantasy, including his fantasies of escape and empowerment.
He resigns himself to the shell of routine and repetition. At that mo-
ment, mutilation turns into mummifi cation. Failing in hope, he wastes
life.
Th ere is, however, another side to mummifi cation. Th e self becomes
fi xed in habits of mind and behavior. At the limit, this hardened self,
just as does a social role, provides a script, instructing the individual
how to think, feel, and act. It destroys the spontaneity and surprise that
fi gure among the marks of life. It substitutes for the indefi nite self, with
its restless longings and non- conformity to circumstance. If it was once
only a mask, the mask becomes the face. When Heraclitus said that
character is destiny, he described this calamity as an ineradicable part
of the human condition. Its place in the experience of life is, however,
less an inalterable fate than it is the consequence of a way of living and
of a view of our place in the world.
According to an idea that readily occurs to us, there is no calamity.
Th e person may be too rigid (and rigidity may shade into what the psy-
chiatry of the present day calls the obsessive- compulsive disorder), or
the personality may be defi cient in the integration and ordering of its
contrasting impulses (as, at the extreme, in hysteria and schizo phre-
nia). In a mode of thought reminiscent of the ethics of Aristotle, char-
acter would be a happy medium between these destructive extremes.
Th e hardening of the self, however, is already manifest in what this
reassuring eudaimonism takes to be a happy medium. No one acquires
such an ordering of the self and plays his ordered self as if it were a mu-
sical instrument without having surrendered to it— his frozen self, his
character— a large part of his humanity. No one achieves this harmony,
except by a narrowing of the horizon of experience. Th e evil of extreme
rigidity and compulsion is presaged in the phenomenon that Heraclitus
described as the fate of every human being. Th e question presented in
this aspect of the religion of the future is what we are to do about it,
other than describe it as the way things are and to accept it as part of
our destiny.
Th e two sides of mummifi cation— resignation to the roles that we
perform in a par tic u lar social station and surrender to the character as