specific character of the religious revolutions of this long historical period as the combination of changes of attitude with a series of narratives and worldviews. The worldviews and narratives differed starkly. In one direction they devalued the phenomenal world of time and distinction, and asserted the higher reality of unified and timeless reality. In another direction, they offered progress toward a humanized social world capable of overriding the meaninglessness of the cosmos by the human creation of meaning in a network of social roles. In a third direction, they described a course of decisive and salvific divine intervention in human history.
Different in almost every respect, these conceptions nevertheless agreed in offering their adherents consolation for the incorrigible flaws in our circumstance. In one way or another, they presented a vision of the world and of our place within it that robbed those flaws of much of their horror. They did so, however, with the following difference. The two orientations that required from the faithful the greatest change in their way of life—the ones that I have called the overcoming of the world and the struggle with the world (exemplified respectively by early Buddhism and by the Semitic monotheisms)—made the most radical claims, the ones most at variance with our ordinary experience of those tormenting facts. In one case, they denied the ultimate reality of the phenomenal world of change and distinction that is the scene of our suffering. In the other instance, they represented human history as enveloped within a narrative of divine creation, intervention, and redemption.
By contrast, the view that demanded relatively less by way of redirecting the conduct of life, and consequently less as well of an abrupt break with the established worldly ethic—the humanizing creation of meaning in a meaningless world, developed through an elaborate account of what we owe one another by virtue of the social roles that we perform—did not require so stark a denial of our apparent condition. There is nothing in this humanizing response that justifies us in dismissing the reality of death, of groundlessness, of empty and insatiable desire, of the disproportion between the largeness of our natures and the smallness of our circumstances. Instead of a dismissal, it offers us a reprieve, by way of a step back into a world of our making.
It is as if there exists a secret correspondence between how radically we are asked to change our lives and whether we must be promised, in return, freedom from death, groundlessness, and insatiability. The transformative will receives encouragement and guidance from a vision of the world assuring us that, with regard to what is most terrifying and incomprehensible in our existence, everything will or can be to the good.
What religion is, or has been
In addressing the major spiritual orientations to have emerged over the last two and half millenniums and in presenting a view of what can and should succeed them, I use the contested concept of religion.
We in the West today are accustomed to define religion having in mind chiefly the Near Eastern religions of salvation: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such a view organizes the concept of religion around the idea of a transcendent and interventionist God and the truth revealed by him to humanity. It disregards the objections that have led some students of two of these religions—Judaism and Islam—to reject the term religion altogether.
It also excludes two of the three major orientations that have represented, for about two thousand years, the chief spiritual alternatives available to humanity. It fails to include the overcoming of the world insofar as this approach to existence rejects, as the example of Buddhism shows, the notion of a personal deity. It does not apply to the humanization of the world to the extent that, as the example of Confucianism suggests, this response to our circumstance puts a this-worldly spiritualization and moralization of social relations in the place of a partnership between human will and divine grace.
I call all three approaches to existence that I explore here, as well as the spiritual and intellectual movements that have represented and developed them, the world religions, the religions of transcendence, or the higher religions. I treat the Semitic monotheisms or salvation religions as the original and most influential form of one of these approaches: the struggle with the world. This usage requires elucidation and defense of the disputed concept of religion.
In contemporary religious studies, the idea of religion lies under a cloud of suspicion. In a move characteristic of the situation of social and historical thought today, this idea is criticized as a historical construction, and a relatively recent one at that. The construction is often said to be modeled on Protestant Christianity and to suffer the influence of Protestant beliefs about the actual or desirable relation of Christian faith to the rest of social life. Such beliefs first won influence in early modern Europe. The word religion gained broad currency, as a way to designate both communities of faith and their creeds, only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under Protestant influence. The earlier uses of the word and of its cognates had been narrower and more selective; ritual practice had been their chief connotation.
The move to repudiate the term religion betrays a characteristic confusion. This confusion should not be allowed to bar deploying the concept of religion, so long as we are clear about the meaning that we choose to give to it and the uses to which we intend to put it. The advantages of the concept of religion over any rival category for use in argument like the one that I conduct in this book are palpable and decisive.
No human practice has an unchanging core. If our practices are historical and mutable, and open to revision, addition, and subtraction, there cannot be such an essence of religion any more than there can be an essence of law, of art, or of science. Religion is not the name of a stable entry in an encyclopedia of human activities. No such encyclopedia exists. The experience of which it forms part can be carved up in different ways. Its commonalities and continuities are those of a history: a history of reorientations and of stabilizations.
If practices lack essences, the words that we use to designate them are even more mutable in meaning. There is hardly a word of any consequence in the labeling of our enacted beliefs that has not suffered successive conversions of meaning, or not had origins suspect to those who later appropriate them to a changed use. What matters is clarity of purpose on the part of the converters of meaning, not fidelity to the assumptions of the dead.
Every revolution in the beliefs and activities that we now call religious is bound to change our idea of what religion is. If the same principle applies to the practice of natural science, constrained as it is by the reach of our scientific equipment, the discipline of its mathematical expression, and the pressure exerted by the inherited agenda of scientific problems, it must apply in spades to the practices we call religion, which labor under none of these constraints.
When we were terrified by nature, and sought to placate gods who represented natural forces and who were not unequivocally on the side of any supreme good or reality in the world, and when we sought from such gods only the protection of our worldly welfare, our worship of the invisible powers meant something different from what would later be called religion. The scope and nature of what we now call religion changed when we began directly to address the implications of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability; envisioned a higher realm of reality or value above or within us; and sought to enhance our share in the life of that higher order, thus transforming rather than merely protecting ourselves. This emergent set of practices and beliefs shares no common essence with the first set. What it shares with it is a history, rooted in the circumstance, the struggles, and the discoveries of mankind.
For the purpose of my argument here, the concept of religion has three advantages over any manifest rival. The first advantage regards the present; the second, the past; the third, the future.
The present-regarding advantage is that the idea of religion comes already laden by its history, which is also our history, with two connotations that are central to the intellectual perspective from which I propose to engage the past and future of comprehensive orientations to existence. The first connotation is that of the need to take a position, to commit our lives in one direction or another, even when
