religious revolution now 205Th e hesitation between escaping the world and changing it that
marks the higher religions has two distinct sources. One source reaches
beyond religion: compromise with the real social forces prevailing in
the societies in which these religions have taken hold. Th e other
source remains within religion: the dialectic between the immanence
and the transcendence of the divine, the most important common
feature of the approaches to existence taken by the religious revolutions
of the past.
As they have become worldly infl uences, the religions of transcen-
dence have had to reckon with established regimes and dominant in-
terests. Th e result has been a marriage of spiritual vision and temporal
power enabling the former to modify the latter only because the latter
holds the former hostage. Th e forms of consciousness in a Eu ro pe an
feudal society, for example, resulted from a marriage between the so-
cial, po liti cal, and economic realities of Eu ro pe an feudalism and a Chris-
tian vision of life. Th e formula for such a marriage has been endlessly
repeated, by each of these religions, always and everywhere.
Legalism—faith as obedience to sacred law— may then appear to
serve as an antidote to such an accommodation. However, this antidote
is administered at a terrible price: the worldly cost of the suppression of
plasticity and the spiritual cost of denial of the incompleteness and the
defectiveness of every institutional structure. Th e relation between the
spiritual charge and the worldly one lies in the abandonment by legal-
ism of the commitment to create an institutional regime that has the
attribute of corrigibility. We cannot establish an order free from defect
by making it conform to the pre- established formulas of sacred law. We
can, however, develop over time a regime that facilitates the recogni-
tion and the correction of its fl aws. Th e eff ort to create such a regime
off ers an alternative to the twin evils of legalism (the idolatry of a par-
tic u lar structure) and romanticism (the war against all structure).
If the pressure to compromise with the real social forces of the day is
one source of the hesitation of the world religions between changing
the world and escaping it, a second source has been failure to recognize
the true home of the dialectic between transcendence and immanence.
We are its home. To the believer in the theologies or the philosophies of
these religions, transcendence and immanence have to do with the re-
lation of a personal or impersonal divine to the world.