78 overcoming the worldits program to what we are like and can turn ourselves into. Finally, I
take up the aspirations to which this form of consciousness is almost
entirely blind, and pass judgment on it from the anticipated standpoint
of the religion of the future.
Th e forms of belief and of conduct characteristic of this religious
orientation respond to the common and fundamental concerns of the
past religious revolutions: most notably, the tearing down of the barri-
ers within humanity and the supersession of the ethic of the strong and
of their lordship over the weak. However, although they address these
aims and hold out the tantalizing prospect of satisfying them, they
cannot in fact achieve them. Th e fundamental reason for this inade-
quacy is simple: we cannot change the world or ourselves by standing
and waiting. We can do so only by acting.
Th e overcoming of the world is not closed to a horizon of action; it
has regularly served as the basis for an ethic of inclusive fellow feeling
and compassionate initiative. However, it cannot inspire and inform a
sustained program of transformation of the social order without being
false to its central message. It must treat history as a nightmare from
which we seek to awake rather than as the stage of our salvation.
Th e denial or demotion of the reality of the historical world has as its
practical consequence an accommodation to the social order that exists
within this world. A priestly or philosophical class performs in this
order a high but limited role. It connects the this- worldly reality of the
established arrangements to what is supposed to be a realm of higher
value and reality. Th e practices of the Indo- European peoples assign a
place to the priests and phi los o phers alongside, not against, the rulers
and warriors. Some versions of these beliefs in Hinayana and espe-
cially in lamaist Buddhism have been frankly theocratic, demanding to
turn spiritual authority into worldly power, but only the better to sub-
ordinate the supposedly shadowy realm of historical experience to a
source of truth beyond time. Th ey have never had cause to view the
reconstruction of society as the place where the work of salvation must
begin.
Th e occasional exercise of theocratic power in this tradition has con-
fi rmed rather than contradicted the claim that it lacks, by virtue of its
central message, any program for the reform of social life, other than
the subordination of economic activity to the incantatory foreshadow-