18
PARTISAN REVIEW
belief in individual immortality-whether it be
the immortalfty
of
the soul or, more importantly,
the
resurrection of the body-lost its
politically binding force. Now indeed "it was inevitable that earthly
posterity should once again become the principal substance of hope,"
but it does not follow from this that, as John Baillie maintains in
The Belief in Progress,
this new attitude was "essentially a redisposi–
tion of the Christian ideas which it seeks to displace." What actually
happened is that the problem of politics regained that grave and
decisive relevance for the existence of men which it had been lacking
since antiquity because it was irreconcilable with a strictly Christian
understanding of the secular. For Greeks and Romans alike, all dif–
ferences notwithstanding, the foundation of
.a
body politic was
brought about by man's need to overcome the mortality of human
life and the futility of human deeds. Outside the body politic, man's
life was not only and not even primarily insecure, i.e., exposed to
the violence of others; it was without meaning and dignity because
under no circumstances could it leave any traces behind it. That was
the reason for the curse laid by Greek thinking on the whole sphere
of private life, the "idiocy" of which consisted in its being concerned
solely with survival, just as it was the reason for Cicero's contention
that only through building and preserving political communities
could human virtue attain to the ways of the gods. In other words,
the secularization of the modern age once more brought to the fore
that activity which Aristotle had called
athanatidzein,
a term for
which we have no ready equivalent in our living languages. It can
mean, as it certainly did in early Greece, the immortalization of
oneself through famous deeds and the acquisition of immortal fame;
it can also mean the addition to the human artifice of something
more permanent than we are ourselves; and it can mean, as it did
with the philosophers, the spending of one's life with things im–
mortal. In any event, what the activity required w.as an imperishable
space guaranteeing that "immortalizing" would not be in vain.
To us, who have been accustomed to the idea of immortality
only through the lasting appeal of works of art and perhaps through
the relative permanence we ascribe to all great civilizations, it may
appear implausible that the drive toward immortality should lie at
the foundation of political communities. To the Greeks, however,
the latter might very well have been much more taken for granted
