240 religious revolution now
of the revolution. It is, however, an untested conjecture: up to now there
has been only one wave of religious revolutions in history: the wave
that produced the major approaches to life and the religions that repre-
sent them. As a result, there is only a single case on which to build a
view of the relation between program and practice in religion.
Any distinction between those aspects of religious revolution that
are more lasting and those that are more ephemeral (albeit on the scale
of millenniums rather than of centuries) must therefore be speculative.
It must look for justifi cation to an understanding of how change takes
place in domains of social life other than those that we characterize as
religious.
If we consider the matter in this light, the methods of the prophetic
found ers of the present world religions cease to serve as reliable models.
Th ey represent adaptations to the social and cultural conditions of the
ancient agrarian- bureaucratic empires, or of their satellite states, in
which these faiths emerged. Th ey may fail to show the way to a practice
of radical religious innovation now.
By the standard of how transformative action occurs anywhere, the
most lasting and universal aspect of the method that those religious
revolutionaries practiced lies in the combination of visionary teaching
with exemplary action.
Teaching about the conduct of life is visionary when it is inspired by
a view of a life greater or better than our present ideas and experience
allow. Th e visionary teacher sees a form of insight and above all of life
that established constraints deny us— an untried opportunity of exis-
tence. Th e vision of this opportunity confl icts with both our accustomed
ways of thinking and our established ways of acting. It cannot therefore
be justifi ed prospectively by the acknowledged standards of justifi ca-
tion, rooted as they are in settled arrangements and habits of mind. It
can be defended only retrospectively; the standards that would make
sense of it come aft er, not before, its formulation.
Schopenhauer remarked that a talented man is a marksman who hits
a target that others cannot hit; a genius is a marksman who hits a target
that others cannot see. Visionary teaching shares in the quality of genius.
However, its aim is to change our life: our way of being in the world.
If visionary teaching is the fi rst lasting element in the practice of the
religious revolutionaries, exemplary action is the second. We must see