38 beyond wishful thinkingTh e three responses to the fl aws in our existence that I have
mentioned— call them overcoming the world, humanizing the world,
and struggling with the world— took shape in the thousand- year period
extending from some time before the second half of the fi rst millen-
nium before Christ to some time aft er the fi rst half of the fi rst mil-
lennium aft er Christ.* Th e religious and moral orientations that have
dominated the life of the great civilizations took on at that time their
identities.
Such were the religious revolutions of the past. Th ey gave rise to reli-
gions that I shall call the world religions, or the religions of transcen-
dence, or the higher religions. Th ey are world religions because their
voice, although louder in some civilizations than in others, has been
heard in every civilization for many centuries. Th ey are religions of
transcendence because they are all marked by a dialectic between the
transcendence of the divine over the world and the immanence of the
divine in the world. Th ey are higher religions because, from the stand-
point of the philosophical and theological argument of this book, they
represented a breakthrough to a form of insight and power denied to
paganism or cosmotheism, the identifi cation of the divine with the cos-
mos, against which they rebelled. When I refer to the inventions and
innovations that produced the three approaches to existence that I next
study— the dominant spiritual alternatives available to mankind over
the last two and a half millenniums— I shall call them, by shorthand,
the religious revolutions, or revolution, of the past.
My argument is philosophical and theological; it is not a thesis in the
comparative- historical study of religion. Insofar as it is philosophical, it
* See the note at the end of this book about Karl Jasper’s idea of an Axial Age and
the writings that have taken this idea as a point of departure. Th e note opposes
the historical presuppositions and claims, as well as the philosophical intentions,
of the view developed here to those that have been advanced under the banner of
the theory of the Axial Age. For the moment, it is enough to say that nothing in
the argument of the early parts of this book, concerning the religions and philoso-
phies representative of the three major orientations to life ascendant over the
last two thousand years, should be read in the context of the thesis of the Axial
Age. My aims and assumptions not only are diff erent from those that have largely
inspired this literature; they also stand, in many respects, in direct confl ict with
them.