 One consequence of the triumph of humanism and rationalism, he believed, was that most moderns have simply forgotten what gods were. And he returns repeatedly to the term ‘god’ to bring out its sense as a power we serve which makes us speak, and guides our actions. In one particularly pithy formulation, which neatly captures the thrust of the new thinking’s insistence upon God and Man as two irreducible subjects of historical predications, he says that ‘God and Man is a reciprocal letter exchange’ (1968, 23). Restated in thoroughly secular terms and from our side, the forces we surrender to in our lives make us what we are; we become what we serve; what we sacrifice ourselves to, makes us.