becoming more human by becoming more godlike 409
incomparably precious time of our lives. Th rough the projection of
something higher into a future that we are unable to grasp, we transfer
the life that we surrender to a time in which we shall never live. Be-
tween our somnambulance and our anxiety, we start to bury ourselves
alive, all the time nursing the hope of a profane or sacred resurrection
in which, in our heart of hearts, we have long stopped believing. Pass-
ing between the tropisms of character and conformity to circumstance
and seeking consolation in our present- denying fantasies, we collude in
the destruction of the good that we would have most reason to prize
and to preserve. Shaken by the terrors of death, we anticipate death by
the manner in which, as mummies and as fantasists, we continue to
live. To rescue us from this condition and to reaffi rm our claim to the
highest prize, life while we live it, are central concerns of the religion of
the future.
Th e beginning of a response lies in addressing the role of repetition in
our experience. To surrender to the compulsions of character and the
compromises of circumstance is the hallmark of mummifi cation. Th e
two sides of mummifi cation have in common the ascendancy of repeti-
tion over experience. Th is ascendency threatens to rob life of its dis-
tinctive traits of surfeit, fecundity, and spontaneity.
Yet Kierkegaard was right in seeing an all- out war against repetition
as a campaign against existence. Repetitions or ga nized and brought
under the light of a conception defi ne the institutional and ideological
structure of a society and the habitual dispositions to do the good that
we call virtues. Th ere is no life— and no collective existence— without
repetition.
An unlimited antipathy to repetition is a feature of what, in an
earlier discussion of the relation between spirit and structure, I
named the Sartrean heresy. One moment of this heresy was that of
the mystical and monistic elements within the Semitic religions of
salvation. For these countercurrents to the orthodoxies of the Near
Eastern religions, the road to salvation passes through endless nega-
tion. Paradoxically, these tendencies also represent the whole world as
constitutive, albeit not exhaustive, of God: not, however, the world in
tangible and diff erentiated form, only the world as a unity beyond all
diff erentiation.