a note on the three orientations 453sources of the orientation that I call the struggle with the world, when
they were what they were, rather than meta phorical or allegorical scouts
for the ancient or modern enemies of obscurantism and despotism.
Th e historical period of the relevant changes, although it begins at
the same time with the rise of the Jewish prophets, has no clear end, or
an end that takes place much later than the closure of the Axial Age.
When I refer to the religious revolutions of the past, I have in mind the
spiritual innovations generated over the more than one thousand years
from the formation of prophetic Judaism to the prophetic activity of
Muhammad. Th e gates of prophecy, however, have never been closed:
the dynamic of innovation continues to this day within each of these
orientations. Th e most important instance of such innovation has been
the development, in the last few centuries, of the revolutionary, secular
projects of emancipation, both po liti cal and personal, within the
broad tradition of the struggle with the world.
Th e picture of the common ground of the three orientations, formed
against the background of these criteria of selection, diff ers from the
one suggested by the four themes that are central to the argument
about the Axial Age. It shares with that argument the emphasis on the
turn to transcendence, or rather to the dialectic between transcendence
and immanence, and on the radical novelty of the forms of conscious-
ness that arose on this basis. Th e revolutionary mono the ism of the
Pharaoh Akhenaten, for example, does not qualify because it was as-
serted in the context of a reaffi rmation of the theology of integration
(Ma’at) of man in the cosmic order.* On the other hand, many a failed
religion, like Manichaeism, not only exemplifi ed the turn to transcen-
dence but also associated it with all the features characterizing the
shared agenda of these spiritual innovations.
Th e joint patrimony of the three orientations lay in the combination
of a dialectic between transcendence and immanence with the devalua-
tion of divisions within society— divisions that had become extreme in
the agrarian- bureaucratic empires in which, with the partial exception
of ancient Judaism, these religious inventions fi rst emerged; with the
rejection of the predominant ethic of manly valor in favor of an ethic of
* See Jan Assmann, Ma’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichket im Alten Aegypten, 1990.