religious revolution now 239Th e practice of religious revolution
Despite the vast diff erences in their vision of reality as well as in their
proposals for the conduct of life, the higher religions have shared a for-
mula for historical success: a set of practices that has helped account for
their continuity and diff usion. In each instance, a single individual
played the decisive part of found er. (Judaism was only a partial excep-
tion, given the role of Moses.) Always a man, he appeared as a teacher
or prophet, oft en in a peripheral region of an empire. He neither pre-
sented himself as an acolyte of imperial authority nor openly defi ed it.
He left his relation to it ambiguous, while calling for a fundamental
transformation in the ways of life that it supported or permitted, and
above all in the consciousness and attitudes of its subjects. Again with
the partial exception of Judaism (a religion that became a people) and
of Christianity, insofar as it began as dissidence within Judaism, the
founding prophet delivered a message not confi ned to any one nation
or state. He addressed his message to all humanity. Astonishingly, it
was heard by many peoples.
Th e teachings of the found ers of the higher religions developed in
the contrasting directions that I have examined in the earlier parts of
this book. In each of these spiritual orientations, there was a paradig-
matic experience of the sacred in which only a relatively small number—
the enthusiasts among those who received the message— shared. Th is
experience of the sacred represented a direct encounter— as direct as
our earthly condition can allow— with the dialectic of transcendence
and immanence resulting from the denial of sanctity to nature. Others—
those who could not count themselves among the holy— shared in this
experience in a diluted form, at a remove. Th ey sustained their faith by
attention to doctrine and ritual and by respect for the symbolic signifi -
cance of certain practices, understood and used as gateways of access to
the sacred.
Like the category of religion itself, the practice of religious revolu-
tion varies with the content of the faith. If we can single out no perma-
nent part of our experience as religious and relate it to other parts of
our existence, according to a changeless pattern, we must also expect
the practice of religious revolution to change according to the program