248 religious revolution nowpo liti cal as well as spiritual rule over a society that continued to be no
less divided and hierarchical than many of the societies in which Bud-
dhism had no presence.
Th e message of Judaism aft er the destruction of the Temple allowed
for the preservation and renewal of the religion of the Covenant, ex-
punged of its cultic- sacrifi cial element, in communities of faith and of
discourse devoted to the law and resigned to powerlessness or
statelessness.
Th e message of Islam was interpreted as an invitation to wed law
to power. It took conformity to the law, manifest in the reformation of
society, as the fundamental sign of obedience to the divine will and
submission to that will as the fi rst requirement of piety. In Islam as in
Judaism, the mystical traditions of the Kabbalah and of Sufi sm gave
central place to the bond between the one true God and the individual
believer, alone in his defective earthly state.
Th e message of Christianity was married under duress, as well as by
conviction, to the dominant interests and the established arrangements
of each historical epoch. Th is forced marriage took place under the eyes
of a universal or a national church determined to coexist, to reciprocal
advantage, with the temporal powers of the world. Alternatively, the
Christian message was rendered private, and consigned to the conscious-
ness of an individual. Despite his fallen state, he hoped to share, thanks
to the redemption, in the eternal life of God.
In each of these instances, the accommodation of the message to the
world was not orchestrated according to the demands of a doctrine.
Th e compromise was shaped by the way in which the religions of tran-
scendence have fulfi lled and combined the three conditions of worldly
presence and infl uence that I have listed: the scriptural canon, the or-
ga ni za tion of the community of belief, and the identifi cation of a faith
with a people. For the struggle with the world, given its core idea of
ascending to a higher life through transformation of the self and of so-
ciety, such temporizing was inherently more questionable and danger-
ous than for the other spiritual orientations. For Christianity, in par tic-
u lar, given its rejection of legalism as a shortcut to the reconciliation of
message and world, it was more troubling than for a version of Judaism
or of Islam that had accepted the religion of the law as a step toward
salvation, if not as a proxy for spirit.