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.
A 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.