The Religion of Humanity
Its past, its dubious present, its eventual future
Sri Aurobindo’s The Ideal of Human Unity, first published in the philosophical review Arya between September 1915 and July 1918, contains a chapter which in later publications appeared under the heading “The religion of humanity.” While the idea of a religion of humanity exists today only in such vapid belief systems as “religious (or ethical) humanism” and “religious naturalism”,1 when Sri Aurobindo wrote this chapter it still was a thing.
The idea of a religion of humanity was originally conceived and espoused by the French philosopher and mathematician Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of positivism. It was subsequently embraced by the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). As a religion with neither God nor the supernatural, it succeeded in uniting both believers and non-believers against Comte. Few religious people wanted a religion without God, and few atheists wanted a religion.
“The true believer of positivism,” Comte wrote: “regards life as a continuous and earnest act of worship; worship which will elevate and purify our feelings, enlarge and enlighten our thoughts, ennoble and invigorate our actions.” The positivists actually set up a whole system of prayers, hymns, and sacraments. As these were all largely inspired by Catholic worship, the religion of humanity came to be characterized as “catholicism without Christ,” to which the positivists replied that it was “catholicism plus science.”
If Comte was admired, it generally wasn’t for his ambition to be le Grand-prêtre de l'Humanité. While Nietzsche, for instance, placed Comte himself at the summit of the scientific spirit’s emancipatory movement, he thought that with his religion of humanity he had gone off the rails. With the weariness of approaching old age, Comte had just stopped thinking.
A significant aspect of Comte’s religion was the distinction between three communities: the family, the State (the polis or civitas of ancient writers), and the Church. The State is made up of families, the Church is made up of states. Each community is based on different kinds of ties. While family ties are affective, the ties that unite the Church are intellectual. One might thus be led to believe that Comte was a partisan of a global worldly or temporal (thus political) power, whereas the contrary was the case: The centralizing power of the Church was to be entirely spiritual. This, however, only makes sense if the essential difference between a spiritual consciousness or power and the mere intellect is recognized; it doesn’t make sense if “intellectual” and “spiritual” are used interchangeably.
Having been lauded by Nietzsche as “that great honest Frenchman beside whom, as embracer and conqueror of the strict sciences, the German and English of this century can place no rival,” Comte eventually failed to keep up with developments in science, refusing to follow the new literature in the interest of mental hygiene. He went so far in this respect as to wish to select only one hundred books for his positivist society and burn all the rest. So much for his emphasis on human progress.
At first glance, the attraction of a self-styled utilitarian rationalist such as John Stuart Mill to the sentimental religiosity of Comte’s Religion of Humanity seems peculiar, if not downright bizarre. Yet Mill’s lifelong embrace of this “real, though purely human religion” was one of the few consistencies in his philosophical career. Under Comte’s influence, Mill came to believe that the long-awaited and “inevitable substitution [of Humanity for God] is at hand.”
As Comte was indignant at being categorized with the dogmatic atheists, so Mill would insist that utilitarian ethics and the Religion of Humanity were “more profoundly religious” than anything previously called by that name. Mill, like Comte, was convinced that the “human” morality and religion he offered was vastly superior to any that had heretofore governed mankind.
Mill was aware that to many minds an exclusively intramundane religion such as he proposed would seem little more than a vulgar Epicureanism. He responded to such potential critics by pointing out that there are limits to the pursuit of present enjoyment: “The carpe diem doctrine ... is a rational and legitimate corollary from the shortness of life. But that because life is short we should care for nothing beyond it, is not a legitimate conclusion.” Needless to say, by “beyond” Mill did not mean beyond the temporal or terrestrial realm but merely beyond the present time. Human beings are to live for the future of the human species. They are, Mill insisted, quite capable of caring for things which they will never live to see. Combined with its indefinite capability of improvement, the life of the human species
offers to the imagination and sympathies a large enough object to satisfy any reasonable demand for grandeur of aspiration. If such an object appears small to a mind accustomed to dream of infinite and eternal beatitudes, it will expand into far other dimensions when those baseless fancies shall have receded into the past.
Sri Aurobindo’s chapter on the religion of humanity begins with these words:
A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanity. The intellectual religion of humanity ... is the shadow of a spirit that is yet unborn, but is preparing for its birth.
Here is how Sri Aurobindo described this intellectual religion in June 1918, five months before the end of World War I:
The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit. No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation....
No injunctions of old creeds, religious, political, social or cultural, are valid when they go against its claims. Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idols, must not be allowed to make claims contrary to its ethical temperament and aim, for science is only valuable in so far as it helps and serves by knowledge and progress the religion of humanity....
One has only to compare human life and thought and feeling a century or two ago with human life, thought and feeling in the pre-war period [i.e., up to 1914] to see how great an influence this religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted as a constant intellectual and critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of the thing that is and an unflinching champion of the thing to be, faithful always to the future, while orthodox religion allied itself with the powers of the present, even of the past, bound itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as a moderating but not as a reforming force.
Moreover, this religion has faith in humanity and its earthly future and can therefore aid its earthly progress, while the orthodox religions looked with eyes of pious sorrow and gloom on the earthly life of man and were very ready to bid him bear peacefully and contentedly, even to welcome its crudities, cruelties, oppressions, tribulations as a means for learning to appreciate and for earning the better life which will be given us hereafter. Faith, even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles, and this religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively much of what it set out to do. It to some degree humanised society, humanised law and punishment, humanised the outlook of man on man, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service of mankind, encouraged everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal expressions....
True, if we compare what is with what should be, the actual achievement with the ideal, all this will seem only a scanty work of preparation. But it was a remarkable record for a century and a half or a little more and for an unembodied spirit which had to work through what instruments it could find and had as yet no form, habitation or visible engine of its own concentrated workings. But perhaps it was in this that lay its power and advantage, since that saved it from crystallising into a form and getting petrified or at least losing its more free and subtle action....
To Sri Aurobindo, the true religion of humanity was a thing yet unborn. What was it to be? And what stood in the way of its birth? The principal enemy of the idea or religion of humanity
is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. These it could for a time soften, modify, force to curb their more arrogant, open and brutal expressions, oblige to adopt better institutions, but not to give place to the love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and man. For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim of all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and life.... Till that is brought about, the religion of humanity remains unaccomplished. With that done, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity can be real and secure. If it is done, that outward unification may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means....
As even today, over a century later, it is far from done, the catastrophic means remain a distinct possibility.
That “the one necessary psychological change” entails the elimination of egoism is obvious, but just as obviously it cannot merely consist in it. At the time Sri Aurobindo commenced his series of articles on human unity, he wrote to the Mother that he intended
to proceed very cautiously and not go very deep at first, but as if I were leading the intelligence of the reader gradually towards the deeper meaning of unity—especially to discourage the idea that mistakes uniformity and mechanical association for unity.
Nothing is said about a supramental consciousness of which our mental consciousness is but “a final action” [LD 250]. Nothing is said about an involutionary descent by which the individuals of a realm beyond the terrestrial lose sight of their mutual identity, nor about an evolutionary ascent by which the conscious beings emerging in the terrestrial realm gradually recover their true Self—the one Conscious Being which experiences its inherent Quality/Delight and creatively expresses it through a multitude of conscious beings. What needs to be introduced at this point is merely the reality of a soul and its distinctness from ego—from the knot which centralizes the experiences and activities of a separative consciousness.
The intellect and the feelings are only instruments of the being and they may be the instruments of either its lower and external form or of the inner and higher man, servants of the ego or channels of the soul.... Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal ego. When the ego claims liberty, it arrives at competitive individualism. When it asserts equality, it arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore the variations of Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it constructs an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of fraternity is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature. All that it knows is association for the pursuit of common egoistic ends and the utmost that it can arrive at is a closer organisation for the equal distribution of labour, production, consumption and enjoyment.
Yet is brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. These three things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race....
Sri Aurobindo next takes up an ancient theme from the treasure throve of Indian wisdom. As I wrote in this post, we are like puppets on strings, yet we are also, or can become, the puppeteer. Arjuna has decided not to fight. Instead of welcoming his conversion to pacifism, Krishna paints him a vivid picture of the disgrace that would befall him should he actually refrain from fighting. “Vain is this thy resolve, that in thy egoism thou thinkest ‘I will not fight’; thy warrior nature shall appoint thee to thy work.”
Arjuna has two options. Either he will fight because shame of being judged a coward, a disgraced knight-in-arms, will make him fight, or he will fight because it is the thing to be done, because it is what the sole Power at work in the world wants him to do. Either the turmoil of his emotions will drive him like a cork on a choppy sea, in rage, fear, or despair, or he will have the joyful experience of being an instrument in the hands of the Divine, forever safe and at peace. Much the same applies mutatis mutandis to societies and the world as a whole. (In the following paragraph I have emphasized the corresponding part.)
If the present unsatisfactory condition of international relations should lead to a series of cataclysms, either large and world-embracing like the present war [of 1914–1918] or, though each more limited in scope, yet in their sum world-pervading and necessarily, by the growing interrelation of interests, affecting even those who do not fall directly under their touch, then mankind will finally be forced in self-defence to a new, closer and more stringently unified order of things. Its choice will be between that and a lingering suicide. If the human reason cannot find out the way, Nature herself is sure to shape these upheavals in such a way as to bring about her end. Therefore,—whether soon or in the long run, whether brought about by its own growing sentiment of unity, stimulated by common interest and convenience, or by the evolutionary pressure of circumstances,—we may take it that an eventual unification or at least some formal organisation of human life on earth is, the incalculable being always allowed for, practically inevitable....
The saving power needed is a new psychological factor which will at once make a united life necessary to humanity and force it to respect the principle of freedom. The religion of humanity seems to be the one growing force which tends in that direction ... but its present intellectual form seems hardly sufficient....
A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development.
A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded....
In another series of articles published in parallel with The Ideal of Human Unity, originally titled “The Psychology of Social Development” and subsequently published as The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo proceeded less cautiously than in writing The Ideal of Human Unity. The following passages are from two chapters originally written in March and April 1918 and revised sometime around 1937 (emphases are mine):
It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone create a perfect human order. It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords. A deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it.... It is in the soul that it must find its roots.... For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the unique godhead in each man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race....
This is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a better human society to a far-off date in the future evolution of the race. For it means that ... an inner change is needed in human nature, a change too difficult to be ever effected except by the few. This is not certain; but in any case, if this is not the solution, then there is no solution, if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind....
A decisive turn of mankind to the spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards the heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are attainable at first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the race. And that beginning may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever, as did the development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its potentialities and all its structure....
The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment upon earth, not only in heavens beyond, which after all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore regard the life, mind and body ... as first instruments of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpose. It will believe in their destiny and help them to believe in themselves, but for that very reason in their highest and not only in their lowest or lower possibilities. Their destiny will be, in its view, to spiritualise themselves so as to grow into visible members of the spirit, lucid means of its manifestation, themselves spiritual, illumined, more and more conscious and perfect....
In the final chapter of The Life Divine, written in 1940 (soon after the start of World War II), Sri Aurobindo’s warnings are more explicit:
At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. But what is demanded by this change is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation.
It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches a point where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the veil against which they are straining. What is necessary is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. That trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis in human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling that there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. [LD 1096–97]
Are we finally there? I hope so, but I also doubt it. The United States are currently sleepwalking into authoritarianism. With regard to Europe, the political philosopher Pierre Manent has hit the nail on the head. In Seeing Things Politically (St Augustine’s Press, 2015), he debunks the “European religion of Humanity,” which “draws its credibility from political conditions it is itself incapable of creating.”
Europeans may think that they are natural citizens of humanity because they have no need to defend themselves, because they do not need to take responsibility for their own defense. Europe as a whole can conceive itself as the avantgarde of a pacified humanity because the United States is still taking responsibility for the defense of Europe. The European religion of Humanity, then, rests ultimately on American force.
In his foreword to Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age (Encounter Books, 2018), Manent characterizes this religion in the following terms:
Looking at human things from the perspective of one’s own community ... is intrinsically wrong because it amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. Looking at human things in terms of the imminent or growing unification of mankind, of what is common to all human beings ....is intrinsically right and “progressive.... What makes humanitarianism or the religion of humanity so alluring is that it gives its adepts the certainty of doing good as well as the feeling of being good, all the more so because in the world of fellow-feeling, most of the doing lies in the feeling.... When “being good” seems to be synonymous with being a human being and acknowledging that “the other” is a human being too, how can you bring distinctions and arguments into the debate? How can you even reason? How can you not see that a bridge is good and a wall is bad?
Both Mahoney and Manent are Christian apologists aiming “to dispel the confusion brought about by this meretricious religiosity.” The real confusion, here in full display, is that between uniformity and the true spiritual unity, which encompasses diversity.
But Manent is right about the dependence of Europe’s security on American force. It is easy to wear the mantle of pacifism while Uncle Sam safeguards your peace. What if Putin’s puppet Trump returns to power in 2025? How rude might that awakening be? How dire might the consequences be?
For information about religious humanism see here, here, and here. About ethical humanism you can inform yourself here and here. For the overarching category of religious naturalism there are too many web sources to be listed but see this useful summary. There is even a Handbook of Religious Naturalism (edited by Donald A. Crosby and Jerome A. Stone, Routledge, 2018).
Naturalism in any of its forms is, as philosopher John Hick has argued quite convincingly, “very bad news for humanity as a whole” (The Fifth Dimension, Oneworld Press, 1999). According to theologian John F. Haught (Is Nature Enough, Cambridge University Press, 2006), “naturalism is now so entrenched in science and philosophical faculties around the globe that it constitutes one of the most influential ‘creeds’ operative in the world today.” Those adherents Haught calls “sunny” naturalists “hold that nature’s overwhelming beauty, the excitement of human creativity, the struggle to achieve ethical goodness, the prospect of loving and being loved, the exhilaration of scientific discovery—these are enough to fill a person’s life.”
My two cents: if everything is nature, as naturalism holds, then saying so is less informative than saying that everything is cottage cheese. For we know the meaning of “cottage cheese” while “nature” in this context has no meaning at all. The term owes its meaning to the opposition between nature and something that transcends it, as does the denial of anything beyond nature. What naturalists claim is, of course, that everything is governed by laws, with the possible exception of some quantum-mechanical randomness. In view of the inability of the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics to account for the events that is serves to statistically correlate, this is patently absurd.
A religion without the religious or, in the words of Lovejoy, a goodness without the good [TGCB, p.82]. This seems to be the exact reverse of the medieval mindset, and the fatal continuation of the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment, which has in fact never for once receded in the last 300 years. If this were our only hope, then there would be no hope. Sri Aurobindo has correctly pointed out our high predicament in his latter and, I presume you meant “more cautious”, remarks.
The same has been repeated by many over the XXth century. I will quote extensively. Some of the views (Dewey for example), I obviously do not entirely subscribe to.
“But this revolution in mankind's political organization can be brought about only as a consequence of a far more radical and more profound revolution, a revolution in our fundamental ideas and ideals. For a true and lasting peace, a religious revolution is, I am sure, a sine qua non. By religion, [..] I mean the overcoming of self-centredness, in both individuals and communities, by getting into communion with the spiritual presence behind the universe and by bringing our wills into harmony with it. I think this is the only key to peace, but we are very far from picking up this key and using it, and, until we do, the survival of the human race will continue to be in doubt.” (A. Toynbee, Religion: A Perennial Need?, 1971, p.66-67)
“Man has increased his material power to a degree at which he has become a menace to the biosphere's survival; but he has not increased his spiritual potentiality; the gap between this and his material power has consequently been widening; and this growing discrepancy is disconcerting; for an increase in Man's spiritual potentiality is now the only conceivable change in the constitution of the biosphere that can insure the biosphere -and, in the biosphere, Man himself- against being destroyed by a greed that is now armed with the ability to defeat its own intentions.” (A. Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth, 1975, p.575)
“And then, when Man's mind has reached the limits of the scientific study of human affairs, perhaps this chastening intellectual experience may re-open an avenue leading to Religion along a new line of approach which, if humbler, will be spiritually more promising. [..] In these circumstances it might be forecast that, in the next chapter of the World's history, Mankind would seek compensation for the loss of much of its political, economic, and perhaps even domestic freedom by putting more of its treasure into its spiritual freedom, and that the public authorities would tolerate this inclination among their subjects in an age in which Religion had come to seem as harmless as Technology had seemed 300 years back.”
(A. Toynbee, An Historian Approach to Religion, 1952, p.238,246)
“A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. [..] Even if it be asserted, as it is by some religionists, that all the new movements and interests of any value grew up under the auspices of a church and received their impetus from the same source, it must be admitted that once the vessels have been launched, they are sailing on strange seas to far lands. [..] The conception that "religious" signifies a certain attitude and outlook, independent of the supernatural, necessitates no such division. It does not shut religious values up within a particular compartment, nor assume that a particular form of association bears a unique relation to it. Upon the social side the future of the religious function seems preeminently bound up with its emancipation from religions and a particular religion.”
(J. Dewey, A Common Faith, 1934, p.49, p.61-62)
“We see concretely that the world is lost if it does not recover, through a spiritual revolution, a transcendent end that is nonetheless immanent, already present, an end the presence of which should be perceptible also in the rarefied world of techniques. [..] In a civilization that no longer knows what life is, the most useful thing that Christians can do is precisely to live, and the life held in faith has a remarkably explosive power. We no longer realize it, because we no longer believe in anything but efficiency, and life is not efficient.”
(J. Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, 1948, p.58, p.61)
“Rome conquered the world when it had freed itself from all religions. The same is happening, only to a greater extent, among the Christian nations. They all share in common an absence of religion and consequently, despite internal dissension, are united in one federate band of criminals where theft, plunder, debauchery, individual and mass murder are performed without the slightest pang of conscience and even with utmost self-complacency [..] Some do not believe in anything and are proud of it. Others pretend to believe in what for their own advantage they have persuaded the masses to believe in beneath the guise of faith. The rest, the great majority of the population, accept as faith the hypnotism excercised over them and slavishly submit to everything demanded of them by their non-believing rulers and persuaders. And these persuaders make the same demand as has always been made by Nero and his like, who have tried somehow to fill the emptiness of their lives: the satisfaction of their senseless and over-abundant luxury.” (L. Tolstoy, What Is Religion?, 1902, p.103)
“Religions commit suicide when they find their inspirations in their dogmas. The inspiration of religion lies in the history of religion. By this I mean that it is to be found in the primary expressions of the intuitions of the finest types of religious lives.” (ANW, Religion in the Making, 1926, p.129)
“But it may be that a new Christian world will begin through an immanently transcendent Christ. It would be anachronistic to return to the middles ages. Perhaps taking our cue from Shinran's effortless acceptance of the grace of Amida, we will find the true God in the place where there is no God. From the perspective of present-day global history, it will perhaps be Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the new historical age. But if it too is only the conventional Buddhism of bygone days, it will merely be a relic of the past. The universal religions, insofar as they are already crystallized, have distinctive features corresponding to the times and the places of the races that formed them. While each thus partakes of the essence of religion, none has exhausted it. The religion of the future, I think, will evolve in the direction of the immanently transcendent rather than the transcendently immanent.” (NK, Last Writings, 1945, p.121)