religious revolution now 235salvation by embedding religious freedom in a denser, broader struc-
ture of po liti cal and economic freedom. If necessary, however, he can
hope to win salvation despite the denial of religious, po liti cal, and eco-
nomic freedom. Salvation is achieved ultimately in a relation of the
soul to God that does not depend on any par tic u lar institutional settle-
ment in society. Th at the individual be loved by God and love him in
return, regardless of the cruelties of society and of the injustices of the
world, is the chief concern of the religion of the heart.
Th e religion of the law deals with the relation of the personal to the
po liti cal by submitting both personal and po liti cal experience to a
formula— the formula of the sacred law. Th is formula places a strangle-
hold on the dialectic of transcendence and of immanence, reducing its
implications for both society and the self to a submission that is in-
tended to be a liberation.
Th e religion of the heart addresses the relation of the personal to the
po liti cal by turning the po liti cal into a mere backdrop to the personal.
However, man does not thereby cease to live in society. Most of the
time of his life is consumed in engagement with a world robbed of
sanctity and bearing only a tenuous connection to the work of salva-
tion. Religion assumes an ecstatic character; it becomes the exception
to an experience of life, constituted on an entirely diff erent basis. It has
no comprehensive program for the or ga ni za tion of society and rests
content if the temporal power respects certain beliefs regarding the
person and the family, such as the prohibition of abortion or the indis-
solubility of marriage. Th e religion of the heart fails to honor the re-
quirement that spirit penetrate the world. Its world abandonment is a
form of despair preventing us from becoming at once more godlike and
more human in our earthly circumstance.
It may seem that the many mixed or intermediate arrangements that
have emerged in the history of the salvation religions point to a way of
dealing with the connection between the personal and the po liti cal that
dispenses with the dogmas and shackles of theocratic legalism without
accepting the privatization of the religious sublime. In fact, however,
each of these compromises turns out to be an attenuated version of ei-
ther the religion of the law or the religion of the heart.
For example, the main line of the Jewish religion, developed in the
aft ermath of the destruction of the Temple, was chiefl y a religion of the