Revolution is return, and return is religion. The reverse also holds true: religion is return, and return is revolution.

Full acceptance of the everyday overfill of days would require (from re-, plus quaerere, “to ask, to seek)”, not a one-time, once-and-for-all revolution, but a permanent, ever-ongoing one, as it were, an everyday ever again new revolution to match the everyday ever again newness of every new day.

If we attend carefully to the single meaning that might gather and bind together all three traditional derivations of religion, we might be given to think that religion itself, properly so named, is this: the repetitive practice of return to the divine.

What is religion, and what might it have to do with revolution, either positively or negatively?

Nature was once the dimension of the sustaining, overwhelming, and ineluctable. Nature is no longer that dimension, and metaphysical substitutes for nature have proved unreliable. I

Joyce does more than merely describe a unique, cosmic snowfall; he writes a story that is one.

Under the technological attitude the whole of nature (including man, insofar as he is conceived to belong to nature) for the first time becomes manifest as a field open to human organization and control. Nature appears as in principle subject to mastery, and science and technology become the means of establishing man's dominion over nature—the goal already clearly envisioned by Descartes. Knowledge becomes the means for achieving mastery; knowledge, that is, becomes technological. Nature, in turn, is to be known in order to be controlled.

Although, under the theoretical attitude, the dimension of the sustaining, overwhelming and ineluctable has been dislocated from nature to the metaphysical, still, societal institutions serve to establish a relationship between man and that dimension. The way to that which inescapably sustains and yet overwhelms man is not yet blocked. However, with the emergence of a new transformation of basic attitude (and, hence, of the life-world itself), a transformation beginning with the Renaissance and the birth of modern science, and which might be called the transformation to the “technological attitude,” a more nearly irreparable dislocation occurs of that dimension which nature once was.

Social institutions are the proven paths of man's life in the world. They are lines of communication and mediation between man and nature. The institutions of society, like the habits of the individual, are the avenues of man's goings in the world. Even the most esoteric religious doctrine remains in these avenues; it remains oriented toward the “practical” in that sense.

At the level of the life-world, nature is the ambiguous dimension of the overwhelming, the inescapable, and the sustaining, all in one. It is sustaining: It surrounds, pervades, and supports man. It is overwhelming: It constantly threatens, and occasionally without warning engulfs, man. It is inescapable: Both as sustaining and overwhelming, nature is ineluctable.