beyond wishful thinking 41conception of our humanity, we create meaning in an otherwise mean-
ingless world.
For the struggle with the world, as originally exemplifi ed by the Se-
mitic mono the isms, the divine is the transcendent God, conceived at
fi rst in the category of personality. Th is God seeks us, his creatures. He
does his saving work in our imperfect history. Th e transactions be-
tween 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 so-
ciety and culture— that divert us from our ascent.
Th ere is a basic ambiguity in the rejection of cosmotheism. Th is am-
biguity touches, in its variations, all other aspects of the past religious
revolutions. Th e issue is whether the separation between the world and
the divine is merely a shift of view or also a transformative project.
Does it suffi ce to change consciousness, or must we also change the world
if we are to establish, in place of cosmotheism, the dialectic of transcen-
dence 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 fl aws in our existence, in par tic u lar 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. Th e combination of mortality and ground-
lessness threatens to reduce existence to hallucination.
Th e need to deal with nihilism helps explain why each of these
spiritual directions anchors an imperative of life in a metaphysical repre-
sen ta tion of the world. To be sure, only one of the three— the overcoming
of the world (exemplifi ed by the religion of the Vedas and by Buddhism)—
can be comfortable with metaphysics, appealing as it does to the con-
ception of a hidden, underlying reality. Th e other two must have trou-
ble with metaphysics. Th e 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.
Th e struggle with the world (of which the Semitic salvation religions
represent the most radical and infl uential expressions) cannot readily