94 humanizing the worldIt remains far from off ering a full- fl edged po liti cal and moral program.
It does, however, describe the starting point of such a proposal.
Th is program may at fi rst seem not to exemplify the fi rst and most
fundamental attribute of those religious revolutions: the establishment of
a dialectic between the transcendence and the immanence of the divine
in the world. For the overcoming of the world, the transcendent divine is
impersonal and unifi ed being, in which the beings that populate our phe-
nomenal experience must fi nd ultimate reality and value. For the hu-
manization of the world, it is the experience of personality itself, dwelling
in our social experience but never exhausted by it or reducible to it.
Here is an idea of transcendence that is neither identical to the ex-
pression of transcendence in the Semitic religions of salvation nor en-
tirely foreign to that expression. In those religions, the narrative of
transactions between God and humanity represents a deepening and a
reevaluation, rather than a cancelling out, of our experience of person-
ality and of personal encounter. God himself is represented in the cat-
egory of personality; the dangers of anthropomorphism stand balanced
against the stratagems of the analogical imagination.
Th at is a sketch of the humanization of the world as a long- standing
option within the religious history of humanity, presented in its core be-
liefs and without regard to the varieties and specifi cities of its evolution.
Th e most comprehensive and infl uential example of this orientation
is the teaching of Confucius, as presented in the Analects. Th e subsequent
tradition of neo- Confucianism oft en departed from this tradition by
trying to ground the reformation of society in a metaphysical view of
the cosmos. In this respect, it resembled the Hellenistic philosophies that
connected a practice of self- help against the fl aws in human life to a view
of the world.
Th inkers sympathetic to this tradition have oft en tried to ground it
in a metaphysical doctrine rather than to conform to the discipline of
an anti- metaphysical metaphysic. None have succumbed to this temp-
tation without paying a price damaging to the force of this response to
the world. Th e price lies in the need to make the metaphysical concep-
tion shape the existential imperative— the message about how to live;
otherwise the pretense of inferring the latter from the former will seem
an empty gesture.