The spiritual praxis that has enriched so much of our collective history, the practices of prayer, meditation, lectio divina and the whole structure of private and public worship, has been, in the Western tradition, inextricably linked to the Judaeo-Christian idea of our creatureliness — the notion that our very existence is shaped by a creative power, source of all goodness, truth and beauty. This theistic framework is not the only possible framework for spirituality: both the writers under discussion flirt intermittently with the Buddhist notion of anatta — the idea that the self is an illusion and that there is nothing beyond a constant flow of impermanent conditions that arise and pass away. But it is no easy task to graft such ideas on to the ethical rootstock of Western spirituality. For one thing, it is far from clear how a worldview based on detachment and oceanic merging into the impersonal void could support anything like a morality of unconditional requirements that calls us to orient our lives towards the Good.

We need, as Comte-Sponville rightly concedes, fidelity to the tradition that shaped us. But part of that tradition condemns intellectual pride and calls us to humility. A little humility may be enough to allow us to make the short step from fidelity to faith. We need the humility to accept that we cannot create our own values, or pick and choose the rootstock from which our fragile moral sensibilities have sprung. Instead of embarking on the project of "saving God" by replacing him with the naturally and humanly shaped world, it is perhaps time, even at this late stage, to acknowledge that it is we ourselves who need saving, and that the salvation cannot be entirely of our own making.