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 by the spiritual revolutions that gave rise to the present world religions, the question unavoidably arose as to whether this unity could simply be affirmed as a thesis or needed to be carried out as a program. As a thesis, it would require a change of attitude: a different way of performing within the established roles and arrangements rather than a path to their reshaping. As a program, it might demand the radical reconstruction of the established social arrangements.
A fourth shared feature uniting the spiritual innovations that produced the world religions and the approaches to existence that they exemplify was their attack on the authority and the ascendancy of a prevailing ethic: the ethic of heroic virtue, of power worship, of triumph of the strong over the weak, of winning in every worldly contest, of vindictive reassertion of one’s place with regard to others, of glorious recognition, renown, and honor, of manly pride. In each of the civilizations and states within which these religious orientations arose, this heroic and martial ethic was associated with a particular class or caste—the rulers or fighters. The link was especially strong within the structure of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires that formed the most important setting for the emergence of the world-historical religions.
In addition to being the characteristic ethos of a caste or status group of warriors and rulers, this moral vision was also associated with young men. “Disrespect me and I will kill you” was its refrain. The struggle for recognition can easily be translated into a prescriptive conception: into a view of what makes life most valuable and into an account of the way in which the moral interests of the ruling caste were bound up with the practical interests of society.
The religions and moralities fashioned by these spiritual innovations were unanimous in their rejection of this ethos. When they did not denounce it as evil, they nevertheless refused to grant it the primacy that its adepts had always claimed on its behalf. They recognized, with greater or less clarity, the psychological and moral contradiction lying at the heart of the martial and heroic ethic. Those who aspire to be their own creations, in the name of an ideal of self-possession and self-construction, turn out to be all the more dependent on the approval of others. The ends to which their heroic striving is devoted are supplied adventitiously, from the outside. These ends are the conventional concerns of a particular society or culture. Instead of breaking bonds, they bind.
A close connection has always existed in the higher religions between the repudiation of the heroic-martial ethic and the affirmation of the unity of mankind. For one thing, divisions and hierarchies established within the great states of world history were under the guardianship of the caste of warriors and rulers. For another thing, the ethos of valor and vengeance was patently connected with the ideals and interests of a narrow part of humanity: of the rulers over the ruled, of fighters over workers, of men over women, of the strong over the weak.
What the religious revolutionaries proposed to put in the place of heroic pride and vengeful self-assertion was a sacrificial ethic of self-bestowal, of disinterested love: the agape of the Septuagint, the jen of the Analects, the world-renouncing self-abandonment of the Buddha. Both the erotic and the sacrificial impulses that formed part of the background of attitudes and ideas from which these analogous revolutions emerged were transformed. The erotic element underwent what the vocabulary of a later age would call sublimation: transmuted from the physical to the spiritual. Sacrifice ceased to be focused on an animal or human victim on which the collectivity could expend its fear, its anxiety, and its rage. The burden was taken up, for Christianity, by the incarnate God himself, and in every one of these connected religious revolutions transformed into an ideal of self-sacrifice as the price and the sign of a sympathy no longer bound by blood or even proximity.
It would be obtuse to collapse ideas as far apart in their visionary content and in their moral implications as Christian agape and Confucian jen. Nevertheless, the common elements were thick as well as thin: they arose from transformative insight into the link between the moral primacy of sacrificial love or fellow-feeling and the visionary anticipation of the unity of mankind, asserted against the shallow and transient divisions within humanity.
The result was a radical reversal of values: more than a rejection of the ethic of the class/caste of rulers and warriors, a turning upside down of it. That this inversion might be tainted, as Nietzsche would come to argue, by the resentment of the weak against the strong, did not annul one of its central promises: to turn self-sacrifice into self-empowerment, and to make it part of a response to the irremediable defects in our existence.
There was in this turn, as in all the others, an ambiguity. Was this love to be a fleshless benevolence handed down from on high and from a distance, by the enlightened or the saved to the unenlightened and the unredeemed, with sacrifice but without inner risk? Or was it a love that required from the lover that he unprotect himself and accept a heightened vulnerability? To the extent that it was the former, it might represent the continuation of the power impulse in the ethic of valor and vengeance, in even more potent and more twisted form, as Nietzsche saw: the practice of altruism confirming the superiority of the benevolent will without ever placing the agent in intimate jeopardy or acknowledging his need for the supposed beneficiary of his self-sacrifice. If, however, it was the latter, it required from the lover much more than altruism: the imagination of the other person, the unprotection of the self and the recognition of its need for the other, the acceptance of the risk of rebuff or failure.
It may not be immediately apparent how this ambiguity related to the ambiguities besetting the other shared features of these religious revolutions, but it did. As a substitute for the ethic of honor and valor, benevolence given from a distance and from on high represented a turning upside down rather than a reinvention. As the will to power persisted, under the disguise of this inversion, little radical transformation of the self was required. The old impulses took new form, as the weak turned their weakness to advantage against the strong. However, the substitution of this guarded altruism by a risky love among equals was a wholly different project. It did require a radical transformation of the self. In so doing, it raised the question of the changes in the arrangements of society and culture that might help strengthen the conditions for such a self-transformation.