of the future.
The forms of belief and of conduct characteristic of this religious orientation respond to the common and fundamental concerns of the past religious revolutions: most notably, the tearing down of the barriers within humanity and the supersession of the ethic of the strong and of their lordship over the weak. However, although they address these aims and hold out the tantalizing prospect of satisfying them, they cannot in fact achieve them. The fundamental reason for this inadequacy is simple: we cannot change the world or ourselves by standing and waiting. We can do so only by acting.
The overcoming of the world is not closed to a horizon of action; it has regularly served as the basis for an ethic of inclusive fellow feeling and compassionate initiative. However, it cannot inspire and inform a sustained program of transformation of the social order without being false to its central message. It must treat history as a nightmare from which we seek to awake rather than as the stage of our salvation.
The denial or demotion of the reality of the historical world has as its practical consequence an accommodation to the social order that exists within this world. A priestly or philosophical class performs in this order a high but limited role. It connects the this-worldly reality of the established arrangements to what is supposed to be a realm of higher value and reality. The practices of the Indo-European peoples assign a place to the priests and philosophers alongside, not against, the rulers and warriors. Some versions of these beliefs in Hinayana and especially in lamaist Buddhism have been frankly theocratic, demanding to turn spiritual authority into worldly power, but only the better to subordinate the supposedly shadowy realm of historical experience to a source of truth beyond time. They have never had cause to view the reconstruction of society as the place where the work of salvation must begin.
The occasional exercise of theocratic power in this tradition has confirmed rather than contradicted the claim that it lacks, by virtue of its central message, any program for the reform of social life, other than the subordination of economic activity to the incantatory foreshadowing and embodiment of the higher, hidden reality. No step-by-step remaking of earthly reality could prepare society, under such a dispensation, for the reign of spirit other than an incessant reverence, expressed through prayer. Such a reverence supposedly signals the surrender of the epiphenomenal world to the real one.
It is true that Plato envisaged the government of society by philosophers informed by a metaphysic representing the phenomenal and historical realms as shadows of the archetypes of true being. However, this government ruled only in a book, never in the reality of power. Nothing in the book explained how or why such a power reversal would take place. What remains, instead, is a thought experiment, an exercise in wishful thinking, designed to jump over the abyss between the admonitory parables of the philosophical dreamers and the harsh realities of an unchanged world.
Just as the religion of the overcoming of the world is unable to support in fact the destruction of barriers within humanity, because its quietism reduces the this-worldly significance of its message, so too, for the same reason, it is incapable of supplying an effective substitute for the lordly ethic of honor and dominion. The otherworldliness of the priests ends in the de facto acceptance of a division of labor between the world renouncers and the world rulers. To Caesar what is Caesar’s: almost everything. To the other world, a testimonial, within this world, that ordinarily threatens no this-worldly interest but lives alongside it in submissive or anxious retreat.
If, however, the focus of the ethic that is to take the place of lordship and honor shifts from reverence and renunciation to generosity and fellow feeling, even if offered from on high, without the perils of personal love, grounds for a struggle with the world begin to emerge. (They emerged most notably in the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism, in the devotional or bakhti forms of Hinduism, and in the mystical countercurrents within the Semitic monotheisms, which brought them closer to the religion of the overcoming of the world.) Then the moral basis for a division of labor between the ruler-warriors and the priests-philosophers starts to crumble, and a vision capable of speaking to all humanity takes form.
The trouble is that the effort to enact this vision through a reshaping of social relations inspired by the ideal of a world-embracing sympathy is pushed in contradictory directions by the view of ultimate reality that informs it. This view affirms the deep unity of suffering humanity and indeed of all living creatures. In contesting the firm boundaries of the self, it provides a basis for benevolent action in universal selfhood. However, in denying or diminishing the significance of what goes on in both the historical time of societies and the biographical time of individuals, it undermines the reasons, and obscures the guideposts, for transformative action. It takes humanity to the threshold of struggle with the world and leaves men and women there, with an emotion but without a program.
Criticism: the school of experience
Having addressed the overcoming of the world by the light of the shared goals of the religious revolutions that resulted in the major orientations to existence discussed here, consider now this approach to existence by the standard of its psychological reality and stability: its connection with our most deep-seated dispositions. Viewed from this perspective, its flaw is its war against life, life as it really is, manifest in the living individual and the mortal organism.
The denial of the reality of the individual self is a denial of death. It is also an anticipation of death, as if we could rob death of its terrors by foreshadowing right now the dissolution of the self into universal mind. Death is denied by a series of connected, self-fulfilling prophecies that are to free us from the cares and distractions of mortality and to put us in communion with a reality that the decay of our mortal bodies cannot corrupt.
Life, however, fights back. We cannot protect ourselves in this way against death without diminishing or devaluing our dealings with the world and with the people around us, which is to say, without suppressing life. It is as if the way to redress the irremediable flaws in our existence were to have less existence. We transport ourselves out of the coils of our alienated existence into a universal experience, without the dangerous boundaries, of embodiment and time, in which we seem to find ourselves encased.
In the realm of practical action, the consequence at the limit is a progressive disengagement. If our struggle to be free of the subjugating and depersonalizing perils of intimate connection remains at odds with our recognition of the need to affirm and to develop ourselves through connection, then the solution to this contradiction in the requirements of personal existence is to lengthen our distance from both sides of this polarity. We shall still be able to recognize our kinship with our fellow creatures, but we shall do so from a distance, the distance of a benevolence offered from a superior position, with the double privilege of higher place and limited exposure, without danger of rebuff or disappointment. We shall give up the attempt to form connections that diminish the conflict between the value and the danger of attachment to others. We shall not see in personal love among equals, and in the social arrangements that spread its influence to broader parts of our experience, the supreme instance of such a reconciliation.
Our need to engage in a particular society and culture for the sake of self-construction and of fidelity to our beliefs threatens to result in our surrender to the ideas and standards of other people. Our refusal to surrender drives us into an isolation that denies us means for productive action in the world. The solution that the overcoming of the world proposes to this second contradiction among the requirements of a strong self in society is to withdraw into an inner citadel.
Under the terms of this solution, we renounce the effort permanently to change the relation between spirit-limiting structure and structure-defying spirit by creating societies and cultures that enable us to engage more and to surrender less. We lose hope in the possibility of developing institutions and practices that weaken the contrast between the ordinary moves we make within a framework of established arrangements and assumptions and the extraordinary moves by which we change that framework. Instead, we place our hope in another realm of value and reality, one in which worldly power
