206 religious revolution nowTh e world as nature, however, is indiff erent to our concerns. Its ulti-
mate enigmas are impenetrable. Th e dialectic of transcendence and
immanence is a reliable truth only when interpreted as part of an ac-
count of our own constitution. It is we who, in every domain of exis-
tence, are both shaped by social and conceptual contexts and incapable
of being defi nitively contained by them. It is we who exceed all the fi nite
circumstances of our existence. It is we who therefore face the problem
of depending upon structures, whether of society or of thought, that can
never make room for all the forms of experience, of association, or of
insight that we have reason to value and power to achieve.
Th e denial of sanctity to nature was followed in the religions of tran-
scendence by the projection onto the cosmos of a dialectic that properly
regards our own nature. In Buddhism as well as in the other philoso-
phies of the overcoming of the world, this dialectic took the form of a
contrast between a phenomenal reality that was to be devalued or dis-
missed and the one, true, and hidden being. For such a view, transcen-
dence implies world renunciation, compatible, as in Mahayana Bud-
dhism, with an inclusive compassion toward all who are caught in the
travails of illusion and of suff ering.
In the religions of salvation, the dialectic of the transcendence and
immanence took the form of the conversation between the saving work
of a transcendent deity and the fl awed response of his humanity to his
grace. Th e individual was recognized to be embodied spirit and to share,
by analogy, in the transcendence of God over nature. However, the
view of the dialectic between context dependence and context tran-
scendence as central to our humanity could never be fully developed so
long as our attempt to become more godlike remained in the shadow of
a divine plan, or a plan of history, in the execution of which we re-
mained mere accomplices.
Only in the early teachings of Confucius (before the development of
neo- Confucian metaphysics) and in our secular campaigns of po liti cal
and personal emancipation was there occasion to give the dialectic of
transcendence and immanence an uncompromisingly human form.
However, in Confucian teaching this eff ort was circumscribed by the
failure to develop a view of the mind and of society that would ac-
knowledge the implications of our powers of transcendence and relate
our respect for persons, as structure- transcending and role- resisting
agents, to the need to deny defi nitive authority to all established roles