beyond wishful thinking 45
adepts had always claimed on its behalf. Th ey recognized, with greater or
less clarity, the psychological and moral contradiction lying at the heart
of the martial and heroic ethic. Th ose who aspire to be their own cre-
ations, 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. Th e ends
to which their heroic striving is devoted are supplied adventitiously, from
the outside. Th ese ends are the conventional concerns of a par tic u lar so-
ciety or culture. Instead of breaking bonds, they bind.
A close connection has always existed in the higher religions be-
tween the repudiation of the heroic- martial ethic and the affi rmation of
the unity of mankind. For one thing, divisions and hierarchies estab-
lished within the great states of world history were under the guardian-
ship of the caste of warriors and rulers. For another thing, the ethos of
valor and vengeance was patently connected with the ideals and inter-
ests of a narrow part of humanity: of the rulers over the ruled, of fi ght-
ers 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 sacrifi cial 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 sacrifi cial impulses that formed part of the
background of attitudes and ideas from which these analogous revo-
lutions emerged were transformed. Th e erotic element underwent
what the vocabulary of a later age would call sublimation: transmuted
from the physical to the spiritual. Sacrifi ce ceased to be focused on an
animal or human victim on which the collectivity could expend its
fear, its anxiety, and its rage. Th e burden was taken up, for Christian-
ity, by the incarnate God himself, and in every one of these connected
religious revolutions transformed into an ideal of self- sacrifi ce 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 Confu-
cian jen. Nevertheless, the common elements were thick as well as thin:
they arose from transformative insight into the link between the
moral primacy of sacrifi cial love or fellow- feeling and the visionary