200 religious revolution nowposition. Each of the Semitic mono the isms denied sanctity to nature
and affi rmed the oneness of the transcendent God. Each combined this
affi rmation with a radical defense of the impulses that are common to
the religions representative of the three orientations. Each took to baf-
fl ing extremes the contrast between the universality of its message and
the particularity of the plot through which this message was revealed
to a few, in a par tic u lar place and time, to be later conveyed to all hu-
manity. Each described this plot in a closed canon of sacred scriptures,
the better to make clear, by narrative, precept, and parable, the path of
salvation. Each drew with disconcerting clarity, again and again, the
line between saving orthodoxy and damning heresy. In this spirit,
each entered into ardent and sometimes violent confl ict with all other
religions, including their sister religions of salvation. Th ese creeds
have repeatedly conceived the astonishing project of reforming all of
social life in conformity to their vision and, in the instances of Juda-
ism and Islam, to their sacred law, notwithstanding the spiritual dan-
gers of legalism.
Th e profane versions of the struggle with the world have been no less
intransigent and subversive, in both their po liti cal (democracy, liberal-
ism, socialism) and their personal or romantic expressions. Penetrating
almost every country in the world over the last two and a half centu-
ries, they have helped inspire world revolution and delivered a mortal
blow to the forms of consciousness and of life established on founda-
tions antagonistic to their message. When their attitude has been ex-
plicitly revolutionary, they have put a formula of institutional recon-
struction, of defi ance to the routines of society and culture, in the place
of a scriptural faith. When they have judged themselves bereft of a clear
view of the path of social reconstruction, they have been content to
improve life, especially for the most disadvantaged, under the estab-
lished institutional settlement. At these times they have sought inspira-
tion in the private sublime: in an adventurism of the imagination with-
out tangible consequence for the arrangements of society.
It is to the activity of these or ga nized religions and secular faiths
that we must chiefl y credit one of the main bases for the religion of the
future: the aim of expanding our share in the divine attribute of tran-
scendence and of ascending to a greater life, without allowing this as-
cent to be corrupted by the denial of our frailties and the seductions of