overcoming the world 79ing and embodiment of the higher, hidden reality. No step- by- step re-
making of earthly reality could prepare society, under such a dispensa-
tion, for the reign of spirit other than an incessant reverence, expressed
through prayer. Such a reverence supposedly signals the surrender of
the epiphenomenal world to the real one.
It is true that Plato envisaged the government of society by phi los o-
phers informed by a metaphysic representing the phenomenal and his-
torical realms as shadows of the archetypes of true being. However, this
government ruled only in a book, never in the reality of power. Noth-
ing in the book explained how or why such a power reversal would take
place. What remains, instead, is a thought experiment, an exercise in
wishful thinking, designed to jump over the abyss between the ad-
monitory parables of the philosophical dreamers and the harsh reali-
ties of an unchanged world.
Just as the religion of the overcoming of the world is unable to sup-
port in fact the destruction of barriers within humanity, because its
quietism reduces the this- worldly signifi cance of its message, so too, for
the same reason, it is incapable of supplying an eff ective substitute for
the lordly ethic of honor and dominion. Th e otherworldliness of the
priests ends in the de facto ac cep tance of a division of labor between
the world renouncers and the world rulers. To Caesar what is Caesar’s:
almost everything. To the other world, a testimonial, within this world,
that ordinarily threatens no this- worldly interest but lives alongside it
in submissive or anxious retreat.
If, however, the focus of the ethic that is to take the place of lordship
and honor shift s from reverence and renunciation to generosity and fel-
low feeling, even if off ered from on high, without the perils of personal
love, grounds for a struggle with the world begin to emerge. (Th ey
emerged most notably in the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism, in the
devotional or bakhti forms of Hinduism, and in the mystical counter-
currents within the Semitic mono the isms, which brought them closer
to the religion of the overcoming of the world.) Th en the moral basis for
a division of labor between the ruler- warriors and the priests-
philosophers starts to crumble, and a vision capable of speaking to all
humanity takes form.
Th e trouble is that the eff ort to enact this vision through a reshaping of
social relations inspired by the ideal of a world- embracing sympathy is