religious revolution now 237distinction between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and to de-
mand a commitment of existence for which the rational grounds must
always be insuffi cient, and with the consequence of requiring us to
place ourselves, dangerously, in the hands of others— such are the dis-
tinctive marks of religion, deployed as a historical category. What we
call philosophy may share in the nature of religion, but only insofar as
it bears these marks. Philosophy, however, has rarely been willing to
bear all of these marks, if only out of fear of forfeiting its claim to in-
voke the authority of rational argument.
By this standard, the change for which I here argue is indeed a change
in religious vision, not simply or mainly a shift in philosophical atti-
tudes. However, there is another, also important sense in which the
reason to call this change religious is open to challenge. Th e lesson of
history— that is to say of the history of the two and a half thousand years
in which the present world religions (including Buddhism and Confu-
cianism) have held sway— suggests that these religions have succeeded
in the world only by satisfying certain conditions: reliance on a scrip-
tural canon, or ga ni za tion of a community of belief, and, oft en, identifi -
cation of this community of belief with a people: if not a nation, a set of
nations. It is by fulfi lling these requirements, as well as by exemplifying
the attributes previously described, that a form of experience becomes a
religion, in the sense in which the faiths exemplifying the three major
orientations to existence discussed here are religions. It is in this way
that the message and the movement diff er from philosophy and poetry.
Th e satisfaction of these historical requirements for the development
of a religion generates, however, a tragic contradiction. It is necessary,
for the practical success of a religion, to satisfy them. However, in every
instance, payment of the worldly price has been made at the cost of a
powerful restraint on the development of the vision animating the reli-
gion in the fi rst place. Vision is sacrifi ced to compromise: compromise
with the established social world and with its established powers and
habits of mind.
Th e religion of the future cannot and should not pay this price, for
reasons that I shall explore. It cannot meet those practical conditions
and remain faithful to the motives and aspirations inspiring it. Indeed,
the sacrifi ce of vision to compromise required by those conditions is
part of the reason for new religious revolution. In refusing to satisfy