first common element of the three major religious orientations—overcoming the world, humanizing the world, and struggling with the world—is the rejection of cosmotheism: the identification of the divine with the world. The divine was separated from the world and then placed in relation to it. With this rejection, there began a dialectic of transcendence and immanence that has ever since been central to the religious history of humanity.
For the overcoming of the world, the divine is the underlying, unitary being, of which the time-drenched phenomena and all individual selves are less real expressions. Such reality as they have, they enjoy on loan from the one, real being and possess only to the greater or lesser extent that they participate in that being.
For the humanization of the world, the transcendent divine is personality and the invisible bond among persons. This sacred force can become immanent, to a greater or lesser extent, in the roles, rituals, and arrangements of social life. By establishing social and cultural regimes that organize our relations to one another in conformity to a conception of our humanity, we create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.
For the struggle with the world, as originally exemplified by the Semitic monotheisms, the divine is the transcendent God, conceived at first in the category of personality. This God seeks us, his creatures. He does his saving work in our imperfect history. The transactions between God and mankind, conceived on the model of the interactions among individuals, are the means by which we ascend to a higher life, smashing, one by one, all idols—including the established forms of society and culture—that divert us from our ascent.
There is a basic ambiguity in the rejection of cosmotheism. This ambiguity touches, in its variations, all other aspects of the past religious revolutions. The issue is whether the separation between the world and the divine is merely a shift of view or also a transformative project. Does it suffice to change consciousness, or must we also change the world if we are to establish, in place of cosmotheism, the dialectic of transcendence and immanence?
A second shared attribute of these revolutionary spiritual orientations is their insistence on providing a response to the problem of nihilism aroused by awareness of the flaws in our existence, in particular by our mortality and our groundlessness. By nihilism in this context I mean the suspicion that our lives and the world itself may be meaningless: that they may bear no meaning capable of being translated into the idiom of human concerns. The combination of mortality and groundlessness threatens to reduce existence to hallucination.
The need to deal with nihilism helps explain why each of these spiritual directions anchors an imperative of life in a metaphysical representation of the world. To be sure, only one of the three—the overcoming of the world (exemplified by the religion of the Vedas and by Buddhism)—can be comfortable with metaphysics, appealing as it does to the conception of a hidden, underlying reality. The other two must have trouble with metaphysics. The humanization of the world (of which classical Confucianism represents the most important example) is an anti-metaphysical metaphysics, which places its hope in the power of society and culture to secure meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. The struggle with the world (of which the Semitic salvation religions represent the most radical and influential expressions) cannot readily make peace with metaphysics (despite the ancient and yet unfinished flirt with Greek philosophy) because it affirms the superiority of the personal over the impersonal, and views the transcendent God and his dealings with mankind under the aegis of the category of personality. Where the personal takes priority over the impersonal, and history over timeless being, the metaphysical representation of reality remains at a disadvantage. Only a metaphysic of the personal and of the historical, if it could be formulated, would do.
Nevertheless, both the humanization of the world and the struggle with the world attempt, within and beyond metaphysics, to provide an account of our place in the world that not only supplies a guide to life but also defeats the threat of nihilism. Under the overcoming of the world, we devalue the superficial or illusory experience of individual selfhood and phenomenal distinction and make contact with the one true being. This communion supplies the ground that we lacked, even as it robs death of its sting. Under the humanization of the world, we secure meaning in human life by informing the practices and arrangements of society with our power to imagine the experience of other people. This imaginative empathy makes possible the integrity of a self-sufficing human world in a universe indifferent to our concerns. Under the struggle with the world, in either its sacred or secular forms, we enter a path of ascent promising to increase our share in the attributes that we ascribe to God. Each of these reactions to the threat of nihilism encounters characteristic difficulties, as I later show.
In one way or another, these anti-nihilistic messages convey the message that everything is fundamentally all right with the world or will be all right in the end. But for everything to be all right does it suffice to receive reality in the right way, with a correct understanding and attitude, or must we change the world—and ourselves within it—cumulatively and in a particular direction? Is the struggle with nihilism an argument, such as a metaphysician might have with a skeptic, or is it a campaign of resistance, such as a general might wage against an enemy with vastly superior force?
A third common element of the higher religions resulting from the religious revolutions of the past is the impulse to affirm the shallowness of the differences within humanity by contrast to our fundamental unity: the differences of caste, class, race, nation, gender, role, and culture. The point is not to deny any measure of reality to these differences or to claim that they are bereft of moral and social consequence. It is to recognize that they pale in comparison to our fundamental unity. The basis of this unity lies not only in our physical constitution but also and chiefly in our predicament: a predicament shaped by our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our difficulty in overcoming the disproportion between who we are and how we must live. To be justified, any division within humanity must deepen and develop the unity of mankind. Otherwise, it deserves to arouse suspicion and to be torn down. Until it is torn down, it should be disregarded in our most important choices and conceptions.
Most of the major world religions were authored and disseminated in societies marked by a strong hierarchical segmentation. Prominent among these societies were the agrarian-bureaucratic states that represented, until the present age of world revolution, the most important political entities in the world. In the Indo-European species of this segmentation, there were three major ranks in the social order: those who guide and pray—the priests and philosophers; those who govern and fight—the rulers and warriors; and those who work, produce, and trade—everyone else. To this hierarchical division in the ordering of society there corresponded a hierarchical division in the ordering of the soul: the rational faculties that place us in communion with the supreme order and reality, whether viewed under the aspect of cosmotheism or of its rejection; the action-oriented impulses that inspire vitality; and the carnal desires that pull us toward particular sources of satisfaction. These two hierarchies, in society and in the soul, support each other.
Part of the religious revolution consisted in denying the ultimate reality and authority of such an ordering of ranks within humanity. As a result, any parallel hierarchical division in the soul was left ungrounded in a sacrosanct organization of society. To that extent, it became more open to challenge and revision. The possibility arose of an inversion of values, by which the supposedly lower faculties could come to play a subversive and prophetic role in the building of the self, if only by robbing the person of some of his defenses against other people.
Once again, there is an ambiguity. Is the unity of mankind to be affirmed only as belief or is it to be secured through a reorganization of society? The Stoic—to take a form of belief only loosely related to the connected religious revolutions of the past—could affirm in his heart the fundamental similarity of master and slave without defying the institution of slavery. For him, it might have been enough to show the other—slave or master—an empathy resulting from the recognition of their fundamental similarity.
For the votary, however, of any of the religious orientations shaped
