The statement and enactment of such an orientation to life offer our best hope of overcoming belittlement without deceiving ourselves about death, groundlessness, and insatiability. The two themes of the book are two sides of the same reality.
Religion and the flaws in human life
With respect to these flaws in the basic circumstance of existence, everything will never be all right. A simple way of understanding what religion has been in the past and what it can become in the future is to plot its position with respect to this fact.
Imagine three moments. In a first moment, the irremediable defects of our existence do not even come into view. People are concerned chiefly to contend with their dependence on nature, which threatens at each moment to crush them. The point is to deflect the threat and to tell a story about the world that instructs us in the execution of this task. The frightening fundamentals of our existence seem less pressing than the need to do something about the imbalance between the power that nature exercises over us and our power to protect ourselves from nature and to use it to our benefit.
In a second moment, when we have achieved some measure of freedom from complete dependence on nature and developed further the high cultures that offer accounts of our place in the cosmos, the basic flaws in our existence come to the center of our consciousness. We embrace beliefs that put these flaws in a larger context: a context that gives them meaning and shows them to be less terrifying than they appear to be. We assure ourselves that we will find decisive help against the terrors and the realities of death and of groundlessness, that we will be freed from the torment of vain desire, and that we will find a way to live, now and hereafter, that can bring our circumstance-bound existence into accord with our circumstance-transcending identity.
It would be perverse to reduce the religious orientations that have emerged in world history to so many incantations against the fear that the unfixable deficiencies in our existence will always arouse in us. Nevertheless, without appreciating this element in these orientations, it is hard to make sense both of what they have and of what they have not said and accomplished.
In one such line of religious belief and experience, we devalue the reality of the manifest world of change and distinction, affirm the unity of mind and nature, seek to submerge ourselves within real and hidden being, dismiss death as if it were powerless to touch our essential bond to this one and undying being, and nourish in ourselves the serenity and the universal fellow feeling that such a view of the world may help inspire.
In 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