another direction of faith, we step back from the abyss of groundlessness and mortality, of diminished life and tormented desire, into a social world of humanized social relations, focused on what we owe one another by virtue of the roles that we occupy. We eschew metaphysics in favor of solidarity, internalized in each of us as an ethic of self-denying service. The social creation of meaning in a meaningless world becomes our watchword.
In yet another mode of consciousness, we come to think that a divine friend of ours is master of the universe that he created; that he has intervened and will intervene in history on our behalf; and that his intervention has already rescued us, and will continue to save us, from the otherwise unbridgeable rifts in our existence.
A religion offering us no assurance that everything is all right would differ from what religion has been, so far, in history. It would amount to a third moment in the history of our spiritual experience. The major spiritual orientations to the world, prominent over the last two and a half thousand years, assure us that, appearances notwithstanding, everything will indeed be all right. We shall be able to redress the flaws in our existence—our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our susceptibility to belittlement—or, at least, to rob them of their terrors. Without some such faith, it may seem, life, our life, would remain both an enigma and a torment, and could cease to be a torment only insofar as we contrived to forget the enigma. Nothing could attenuate the sufferings of these wounds other than our absorption in life in our connections and engagements.
The chief point of religion, it may seem, is to prevent such a result. In religion we would find a rescue on the basis of a vision, a reason for hope, achieved through an appeal to realities that counterbalance and override the force of those evils.
The trouble is that the antidotes supplied by the historical religions may all be fanciful: wishful thinking dressed up as a view of the world and of our place within it, consolation in place of truth. The religion of the future should be one that dispenses with consolation. It should nevertheless offer a response to the defective character of our existence: not just a set of ideas but an orientation to the life of the individual and the history of society. It should show us to what hopes we are entitled once we have lost the beliefs in which we once found reassurance. The disposition to acknowledge our situation for what it is would signal a change in the history of religion.
A simple criterion of advance in the history of religion is that our future religion would cease to take as its maxim the attempt to make the irremediable defects in our existence seem less real and less frightening than they in fact are. To mark the path of a religious evolution defined by this standard is one of the goals of this book.
This criterion of progress in religious beliefs is, however, far too vague to mark a definite trajectory. It needs to be supplemented by a view of the religious revolutions that took place in the past and of the religious revolution that can and should take place in the future. I address the nature of the contrast between the past and the future religious revolutions in greater detail later in this book. Something of the contrast should be stated right now, the better to make clear the intent of my argument.
The three responses to the flaws in our existence that I have mentioned—call them overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world—took shape in the thousand-year period extending from some time before the second half of the first millennium before Christ to some time after the first half of the first millennium after Christ.2 The religious and moral orientations that have dominated the life of the great civilizations took on at that time their identities.
Such were the religious revolutions of the past. They gave rise to religions that I shall call the world religions, or the religions of transcendence, or the higher religions. They are world religions because their voice, although louder in some civilizations than in others, has been heard in every civilization for many centuries. They are religions of transcendence because they are all marked by a dialectic between the transcendence of the divine over the world and the immanence of the divine in the world. They are higher religions because, from the standpoint of the philosophical and theological argument of this book, they represented a breakthrough to a form of insight and power denied to paganism or cosmotheism, the identification of the divine with the cosmos, against which they rebelled. When I refer to the inventions and innovations that produced the three approaches to existence that I next study—the dominant spiritual alternatives available to mankind over the last two and a half millenniums—I shall call them, by shorthand, the religious revolutions, or revolution, of the past.
My argument is philosophical and theological; it is not a thesis in the comparative-historical study of religion. Insofar as it is philosophical, it does not amount to philosophy of religion in any familiar sense, because the discourse with which it experiments is itself religious, in the ample sense of the concept of religion that I propose later in this chapter. Insofar as it is theological, it is a kind of antitheology, because it sees all our ideas of God—as person, as being, or as non-person and non-being—as incoherent and unusable. It cites the religious revolutions of the past, but only for the purpose of gaining clarity about the path of a religious revolution in the future. It refers to the world religions, but only to the extent that they exemplify the three major orientations to life that I consider and criticize.
The religion of the future must break with these orientations. Above all, it must rebel against the ground that they share in common. If it finds more inspiration in one of them than in the others, it must nevertheless learn from the criticism of what it repudiates.
Any religion expressing the turn to transcendence embraces contradictory elements. It will always be found to be closely related to one of the major approaches to existence that I discuss in the early parts of this book. If it were equally related to several of them, it would convey a muddled message. If it rejected the assumptions that are shared by these three approaches, it would represent something different from what these religions have in fact been. Each of the higher religions has nevertheless always also reckoned with aspects of the approaches that it rejects. Moreover, none of the orientations to life that form the subject matter of the next three chapters of this book speaks with a single voice, the voice of a single religion. Each has become an enduring spiritual option, available to any man or woman, anytime and anywhere. Each has spoken through the apparatus of different doctrines, stated in distinctive vocabularies.
In the following pages, I explore the internal architecture of these major spiritual options—overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world. I do so with the intention of going beyond them, not with the aim of making claims about the distinctive doctrines and singular histories of the particular religions that have expressed them. Here, the historical allusions remain ancillary to a philosophical and theological argument. The argument is chiefly concerned with the choice of a direction. I call this direction the religion of the future.
The common element in past religious revolution
The religions and philosophies that became the bearers of the three orientations to life that I next explore shared something significant in common notwithstanding the immense differences among them. What could be common among early Buddhism (as an instance of overcoming of the world), early Confucianism (as an example of humanizing the world), and the Near Eastern salvation religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (as the earliest and most powerful expressions of the struggle with the world)?
Not only did they represent the place of man in the world in radically different ways but they also prescribed starkly different responses to the flaws in our condition. So different were these responses that they may seem, with some reason, to exhaust the major possibilities, our possibilities, not of ways of representing the world but of ways of contending with it. Nevertheless, five shared and connected impulses overrode these real differences. All five were marked by an ambiguity—at the bottom, the same ambiguity in five different aspects. Its resolution helps define the agenda of a religious revolution of the future.
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