This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsive to the commitments that define who I take myself to be. Leading a satisfying life is not to achieve a state of consummation but to be engaged in what I do and put myself

The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die—that our lifetime is indefinite but finite—can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities.

What I call religious faith, then, is characterized by the attempt to convert us from our secular faith, since this faith makes us vulnerable to irrevocable loss. To have religious faith is to disown our secular faith in a fragile form of life. Religious faith holds that our ultimate aim should be to transcend the finitude we share.

By the same token, however, the knight of faith does not have any real sense of finitude, since he takes the sting out of every loss and removes any lethal force from experience. He may claim that he is wholeheartedly committed to his wife and son, but he only dares to love them by renouncing his care for their fate in the world. Regardless of what

living religious faith is rather achieved through a double movement, where you renounce the cares that follow from being finite and instead place your trust in God. Even though you are starving, you believe that you will be nourished, even though you are dying, you believe that you will live forever, and even though you are killing your son, you be

The life that emerges has not always been (it is coming to be) and will not always be. The experience of beauty is therefore a stab in the heart, and he is seized by the desire to hold on to everything that will not last: “Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.” Seized by this desire, he has the

because of his religious faith Abraham is deprived of the ability to care for Isaac, in the sense of being responsive to what happens to him.

Through memory we can prolong precious periods of happiness, “keeping the time alive”; through artistic creation and the rearing of children we can make our legacy live on beyond our own death; through community with others, political commitments, and the care for a sustainable society we can extend a sense of purpose far beyond the duration of our

Rather than being seen as the meaningful conclusion of a life and as the ascent to eternity, death comes to be regarded as the meaningless interruption of a life. This leads Weber to the conclusion that the commitment to earthly progress makes our lives meaningless rather than meaningful: “Because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is mea

you and your beloved did not believe that your lives were finite, neither one of you could take your lives to be at stake and there would be no urgency to do anything with your time. You could never care for yourselves, for one another, or for the commitment that you share, since you would have no sense of fragility. By the same token, you could fe