40 beyond wishful thinkingTh e common element in past religious revolution
Th e religions and philosophies that became the bearers of the three
orientations to life that I next explore shared something signifi cant in
common notwithstanding the im mense diff erences among them. What
could be common among early Buddhism (as an instance of overcom-
ing of the world), early Confucianism (as an example of humanizing
the world), and the Near Eastern salvation religions: Judaism, Christi-
anity, 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 radi-
cally diff erent ways but they also prescribed starkly diff erent responses
to the fl aws in our condition. So diff erent 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 con-
tending with it. Nevertheless, fi ve shared and connected impulses over-
rode these real diff erences. All fi ve were marked by an ambiguity— at
the bottom, the same ambiguity in fi ve diff erent aspects. Its resolu-
tion helps defi ne the agenda of a religious revolution of the future.
A fi rst 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 identifi cation of the divine
with the world. Th e divine was separated from the world and then placed
in relation to it. With this rejection, there began a dialectic of transcen-
dence 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, uni-
tary 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 per-
sonality and the invisible bond among persons. Th is 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 or ga nize our relations to one another in conformity to a