48 beyond wishful thinking
toward a humanized social world capable of overriding the meaning-
lessness of the cosmos by the human creation of meaning in a network
of social roles. In a third direction, they described a course of decisive
and salvifi c divine intervention in human history.
Diff erent in almost every respect, these conceptions nevertheless
agreed in off ering their adherents consolation for the incorrigible fl aws
in our circumstance. In one way or another, they presented a vision of the
world and of our place within it that robbed those fl aws of much of their
horror. Th ey did so, however, with the following diff erence. Th e two
orientations that required from the faithful the greatest change in their
way of life— the ones that I have called the overcoming of the world
and the struggle with the world (exemplifi ed respectively by early Bud-
dhism and by the Semitic monotheisms)— made the most radical
claims, the ones most at variance with our ordinary experience of
those tormenting facts. In one case, they denied the ultimate reality of
the phenomenal world of change and distinction that is the scene of
our suff ering. In the other instance, they represented human history
as enveloped within a narrative of divine creation, intervention, and
redemption.
By contrast, the view that demanded relatively less by way of redi-
recting the conduct of life, and consequently less as well of an abrupt
break with the established worldly ethic— the humanizing creation
of meaning in a meaningless world, developed through an elaborate
account of what we owe one another by virtue of the social roles that
we perform— did not require so stark a denial of our apparent condi-
tion. Th ere is nothing in this humanizing response that justifi es us in
dismissing the reality of death, of groundlessness, of empty and insa-
tiable desire, of the disproportion between the largeness of our natures
and the smallness of our circumstances. Instead of a dismissal, it off ers
us a reprieve, by way of a step back into a world of our making.
It is as if there exists a secret correspondence between how radi-
cally we are asked to change our lives and whether we must be prom-
ised, in return, freedom from death, groundlessness, and insatiability.
Th e transformative will receives encouragement and guidance from a
vision of the world assuring us that, with regard to what is most terrify-
ing and incomprehensible in our existence, everything will or can be to
the good.