to the idea of a transcending and redemptive God who reveals to mankind, through his prophets, the path of its salvation. The will to take a stand in the commitment of existence in a particular direction, despite the apparent absence of adequate grounds on which to do so, and then to insist that the whole of individual life and social experience be penetrated by the vision informing such a commitment, sets religion apart.
According to these present, past, and future-oriented standards, to count as religion a set of enacted beliefs or belief-informed practices must have three characteristics.
A first characteristic of religion is to respond to the incurable flaws in our existence: our movement toward death, our inability to place our existence in a definitive context of understanding and meaning, and the emptiness and insatiability of our desires, to which we are wrongly tempted to add (wrongly because we can redress it) the disproportion between the force of our circumstances and the reach of our nature. Whether the response offered by religion to these defects is one that robs them of their sting or on the contrary acknowledges them unflinchingly remains an issue at stake in the unfinished history of religion.
The beliefs that comprise a religion may represent a more or less oblique answer to those terrors and sufferings. The answer, however, must never be so indirect that it cannot be understood by the believer as responding to these sufferings and terrors in ways that engage the will as well as the imagination.
However, religion has almost never cordoned these problems off from the rest of experience and addressed them in isolation. A religious vision has consequences for every aspect of existence: no part of individual or social life is so prosaic or so technical, none so this-worldly or unreflective, that it cannot be influenced and penetrated by a religious orientation.
If in the midst of our ordinary affairs we stop to think about the intensity of life and the certainty of death, of life and death unexplained in a universe whose ultimate contours, origin, and future we are unable to grasp, all the while tormented and aroused by our desires and conscious of a power that we are unable adequately to deploy before our decline and annihilation, we may experience our existence as a hallucination. We turn away in dread from this delirium into our affairs, into the devotions of our attachments and engagements. We hope that they will absorb and rescue us.
Religion is neither the awareness of the delirious nature of our consciousness nor the turning away from the delirium into our everyday business. It is the cognitive and volitional position that we take with respect to a circumstance in which we seem compelled to choose between these two attitudes. No wonder that its development has taken place under the shadow of the temptation to console.
The consolation has characteristically taken a double form in accordance with the twofold nature of religion as both belief and practice. As belief, it has been a way of representing our situation that reads this situation as less terrifying than it seems to be. As practice, religion has been a set of collective activities and individual habits that enables us to cast a spell on ourselves: to quiet not only our empty and insatiable desires but also our anxiety about our mortality and our groundlessness. A story about how everything can or will be all right becomes part of a fix we place on ourselves.
The work of consolation, however, has consequences for the substance of our view of the world and for the direction of our activity within the world. The work may be compatible with one level of enlightenment and emancipation but incompatible with the next level: compatible with the enlargement of vision and the freedom from prejudice achieved by the religious revolutions that gave rise to the three approaches to life considered here but incompatible with the further revolution that we may need now.
Nothing in the history of religion is harder to overcome than the impulse to reassure us about the irremediable flaws in life. The difficulty is aggravated by the need to rely on ideas that are, by the very nature of our groundlessness, contestable and fragmentary. It is if, by a strange paradox, we could put an end to wishful thinking only by a practice of thought overreaching what we can hope to understand.
A second characteristic of religion is that it relates an orientation to life to a vision of our place in the world. The link between orientation and vision provides a kind of answer to the incorrigible defects in our circumstance. The answer recognizes the defects as more or less real, and more or less susceptible to redress or response. It interprets their implications for the conduct of life.
The vision acquires its power to guide because it addresses what is most disturbing in our existence: that we must die although we feel that we should not; that we seem unable, by the light of the understanding, to place our lives in a reliable context of meaning; that we always remain at the mercy of desires that are both empty and unlimited and that pursue us until our final end; and that little or nothing that we can do with our lives seems adequate to our context-transcending powers. The position that we take with respect to these problems acquires prescriptive authority. It enjoys such force both because of their intrinsic importance and because the way in which we deal with them has consequences for every other aspect of our experience.
The distinction between the is and the ought, between description (or explanation) and prescription, has force with respect to views about part of our experience. However, it ceases to be feasible and legitimate when we must deal if not with the whole of our experience at least with its general contours, with the limits that give it its disconcerting and mysterious shape.
Any account of the irremediable defects in our experience will have a pragmatic horizon. We cannot infer from such an account a canon of rules and standards by which to conduct ourselves. It will nevertheless orient our lives in some directions and away from others. It will appear to us to be invested with the power of an existential imperative.
Conversely, any such imperative will presuppose or imply a way of dealing with the major flaws in our existence. Our practiced view of how to live will reveal better than our professed doctrines how we understand our situation in the world and what we make of its defects. Only when we shift the focus from the whole of a situation to a region of our experience, only when we begin to address discrete problems and to parse isolated arguments, will the distinction between the is and the ought again start to make sense.
An analogy helps clarify the problem. In the tradition of physics inaugurated by Newtonian mechanics, no distinction carries greater weight in the structure of explanation than the difference between the initial conditions of a set of phenomena to be explained and the laws of motion governing the workings or the change of those phenomena within a certain configuration space. The laws fail to determine the initial conditions. These conditions may, nevertheless, be explained by other laws. From the standpoint of the relevant laws, the initial conditions are factitious and stipulated givens.
When, however, we try to generalize this style of explanation from a part of the phenomena to the whole of the universe—from mechanics to cosmology—the distinction between initial conditions and law-like explanation breaks down. There is no outside, from the vantage point of which we could stipulate the initial conditions as starting points for the operation of the laws.
What is good, by way of explanatory style, for the part is no good for the whole. It is just this sort of breakdown through generalization that occurs when we try to impose the distinction between the is and the ought on the enacted beliefs that deal with our existence as a whole and with its most basic defects. We call such action-oriented and comprehensive beliefs religion.
A third characteristic of religion is that the imperative of life, rooted in a vision of the world, responsive to the incurable defects in our existence, requires us to commit our lives in a certain direction. It requires us to commit our lives without having what, by the prevailing standards of rational discourse, could ever be an adequate basis on which to do so. Neither the evidence of the senses nor the application of our reasoning, within any established discipline or method or outside all particular methods and disciplines, can suffice
