“4 Phenomenological Christian tradition a like turning occurs, consisting in a self-giving, in faith to God’s limitless sovereignty and grace, which engenders a new spirit of trust and joy that in turn frees the believer from anxious self-concern and makes him or her a channel of divine love to the world. However the official Christian conceptualisation of this, in the doctrine of the atonement, presents the transformation as a result of salvation rather than as itself constituting salvation. A distinction is drawn in much developed Christian theology between justification and sanctification, the former being a change of juridical status before God and the latter the resulting transformation of our moral and spiritual condition. As sinners we exist under a just divine condemnation and a sentence of eternal punishment, but Christ's sacrifice on the cross on our behalf cancels our guilt so that we are now counted as innocent in God’s sight. The divine justice has been satisfied by Christ's death and the faithful are now clothed in the righteousness of their saviour. As a consequence they are opened to the re- creative influence of the Holy Spirit and are gradually sanctified — the fruits of the Spirit being ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’ (Galatians 5:22). According to this official doctrine the transformation of human existence embodied in these new qualities of love, joy and peace is secondary to the juridical transaction of Christ’s atonement for human sin. However that doctrine is only one possible way - the way that was promoted by the powerful influence of St Paul - of understanding the joyful consciousness of being accepted by God’s grace and empowered to live a new life of outgoing love towards one’s neighbours. But whereas the various forms of atonement doctrine - centring in different stages and strands of Christian thought on the idea of defeating or cheating the devil, on the medieval conception of ‘satisfaction’, on a penal- substitutionary model and on an exemplary model - are theoretical constructs, the new reconciled relationship to God and the new quality of life arising within that relationship are facts of experience and observation. It is this reality of persons transformed, or in process of transformation, from self-centredness to God- centredness that constitutes the substance of Christian salvation. It is, I think, clear that in the teaching of Jesus himself, in so far as it is reflected in the synoptic gospels, the juridical conception was entirely or almost entirely absent. Virtually the whole weight of Jesus’ message came in the summons to his hearers to openSalvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 45 their hearts now to God’s kingdom, or rule, and to live consciously in God's presence as instruments of the divine purpose on earth. It is true that as Jesus anticipated his death at the hands of the Jerusalem authorities he related it to the traditional belief that the blood of the righteous martyr works for the good of the people (Mark 10:45). But there is no suggestion in Jesus’ recorded teaching that the heavenly Father’s loving acceptance of those to whom he was speaking was conditional upon his own future death. In the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), for example, the father - who clearly represents the heavenly Father — is ready to forgive his erring son and to receive him back as a beloved child as soon as he is truly repentant. There is no addendum to the effect that the father, because he is just as well as loving, must first punish either the prodigal himself or his other son before he can forgive the penitent sinner. Again, the words of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ presuppose a direct relationship to the heavenly Father in which men and women can ask for and receive God's forgiveness for their sins and are expected in turn to forgive one another. But Jesus’ teaching was not simply a vivid picturing of the ‘amazing grace’ and re-creating love of God. It was at the same time a profoundly challenging call to a radical change (metanoia), breaking out of our ordinary self-enclosed existence to become part of God’s present and future kingdom. The summons was away from a life centred in the self and its desire for possessions, wealth, status and power to a new life centred in God and lived out as an agent of the divine love. Such a challenge cut through the normal web of self-concern, requiring a choice between the true quality and style of life, found in a free and perhaps costly response to God, and spiritual death within a stifling shell of self- concern. ‘For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it’ (Mark 8:35). With the progressive deification of Jesus within the developing faith of the church the earthly lord became exalted into the heavenly Christ, virtually occupying the place of God, so that St Paul, expressing his own form of God-centredness, could say ‘It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). Both in the teaching of Jesus, then, and in the practical consciousness of Christians the reality of salvation is the transition from ego-domination to a radically God-centred life. The function of the official theories of salvation, according to which Jesus’46 Phenomenological death constituted an atonement for human sin, has been to provide a theoretical framework within which to understand this profound shift in human consciousness. But the reality of Christian salvation is no juridical abstraction but an actual and concrete change from sinful self-centredness to self-giving love in response to the divine grace. If within ecclesiastical Christianity this has been partially obscured by the atonement doctrine, in the mystical life of the church it has been open and explicit. The mystical journey moves from the cor curvatus in se through a painful process of re- orientation to a total self-giving to God, finally returning to the world in loving service. The character of this path, as the approach to a God-centredness so complete that it is sometimes described in the language of union, is evident throughout Christian mystical literature. We shall be looking more closely at aspects of mysticism in Chapters 10.5 and 16.5, but for our present purpose it will suffice to refer to the accounts in Evelyn Underhill’s classic study. Describing the mystic path, she speaks of ‘the definite emergence of the self from “the prison of I-hood’’’ ({1911] 1955, 195), the ‘giving up of I-hood’ (317) and ‘that principle of self-surrender which is the mainspring of the mystic life’ (223); and says that ‘a lifting of consciousness from a self-centred to a God-centred world, is of the essence of illumination’ (234). Describing that unavoidable stage of the path known as the Dark Night of the Soul, she says: The act of complete surrender then, which is the term of the Dark Night, has given the soul its footing in Eternity: its abandonment of the old centres of consciousness has permitted movement towards the new. In each such forward movement, the Transcendental Self, that spark of the soul which is united to the Absolute Life, has invaded more and more the seat of personality; stage by stage the remaking of the self in conformity with the Eternal World has gone on. In the misery and apparent stagnation of the Dark Night - that dimness of the spiritual consciousness, that dullness of its will and love - work has been done; and the last great phase of the inward transmutation accomplished. The self that comes forth from the night is no separated self . . . but the New Man, the transmuted humanity, whose life is one with the Absolute Life of God. (1955, 402) Within Christianity, then, the concrete reality of salvation is theSalvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 47 transformation of human existence from a sinful and alienated self-centredness to a new centring in God, revealed in Christ as both limitless claim and limitless grace. The experience of salvation is the experience of being an object of God’s gratuitous forgiveness and love, freeing the believer to love his and her neighbour. 4 ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH AND MUSLIM TRADITIONS In Judaism the hope of redemption from present evil into a radically better state has always been corporate rather than purely individual, and always the hope for an event within, even if it be the final event within, earthly history. It has been the expectation of a social and ethical as well as spiritual transformation, affecting, the future of Israel and of the world. This hope began with the great prophets of the axial age. A prophetic voice, whose words have become part of the book of Amos, foresaw God’s new age of peace and justice on earth (Amos 9:11-15).” Hosea likewise looked beyond impending disaster to a time of divine forgiveness and renewal (Hosea 14:4-8). First Isaiah, another prophet of immediately impending doom - in the very concrete form of the Assyrian invasion of Judah -, also spoke of the future birth of an ideal king (Isaiah 9) in whom in the coming time the people who walked in darkness will see a great light. Again, Jeremiah, the most pessimistic of the prophets, spoke of a future new covenant when ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people . . .’ (Jeremiah 31:33). But it is Second Isaiah who gave the hope a cosmic dimension in the thought of a new age, which Eliade refers to as a ‘universal transfiguration’,* to be established by God’s power (Isaiah 51). This thought developed in later Jewish apocalyptic writings into the image (familiar also in the New Testament) of the two aeons, the present evil age and God’s new age to come. Gershom Scholem has shown that the older idea that the Jewish apocalyptic ended with the coming of Christianity is mistaken (1971b, ch. 1). Rabbinic apocalypticism has continued, sometimes more and sometimes less prominently, down to today. That the reality of God implies an eventual messianic redemption has been affirmed by many leading Jewish thinkers (for example,48 Phenomenological Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Soloveitchick) although also questioned today by some - for example, David Hartman (1985, ch. 11). But the hope for a new age, the Kingdom of God on a transformed earth, which arose in the axial period, has ever since been a part of the Jewish religious outlook, sometimes vividly and centrally and sometimes lying in the background of consciousness. Islam does not use the concept of ‘salvation’ and does not think of the human condition in terms of a ‘fall’ involving a guilt and alienation from God that can only be cancelled by a divine act of atonement. However, the Qur’an does distinguish radically between the state of islam — a self-surrender leading to peace with God - and the contrary state of those who have not yielded themselves to their Maker and who are therefore in the last resort enemies of God. The state of islam, then, is the Muslim analogue of Christian and Judaic salvation and of Hindu and Buddhist liberation. It is the Muslim form of the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness. For the Qur’anic summons is to turn to God, giving oneself in total self- surrender to Allah, the merciful, the gracious. An influential contemporary orthodox Muslim writer, Badr al-Din Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah al-Zakashi, says that ‘those who hear in [the Qur’an] the words of the Truth [God], they become annihilated before Him and their attributes effaced’ (Ayoub 1984, 25). The believer is to say, with Abraham, ‘I bow (my will) to the Lord and Cherisher of the Universe’ (Qur'an 2, 131). In Zafrulla Kahn’s translation of Surah 2, 132: ‘live every moment in submission to Allah, so that death whenever it comes should find you in a state of submission to Him’. From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular. The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God’s absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy. And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God’s will. It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour. Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah (‘in the name of Allah’); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah (‘if Allah wills’). Thus life is constantly punctuated bySalvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 49 the remembrance of God. It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam. Within this holistic conception the ‘secular’ spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience. Thus the Islamic way of life includes, in principle, the entire culture and organisation of a society. There is no distinction between church and state: the nation is a theocracy in which God’s will is to be done in every aspect of life. It is needless to say that actual Muslim societies, as human communities involved in all the ambiguities and conflicts of historical existence, have only very partially exemplified this ideal of life lived in total obedience to God. Nevertheless the insistent demand of the Qur’anic revelation is to turn from human self-centredness to an individual and communal life in obedience to God’s commands, as revealed in the Qur’an and expounded in the Shariah. And the islam, or God-centred existence, embodied in this earthly pattern is a life at peace with God, trusting in his mercy and compassion and hoping beyond this world for the joys of paradise. This transformation of human existence by the total surrender of the self to God, basic to orthodox Islam, is further highlighted in Islamic mysticism. Indeed, the two central Sufi concepts are dhikr, God-consciousness, and fana, which is a total re-centring in God leading to baga, human life merged into the divine life or (in R. A. Nicholson’s phrase) ‘everlasting life in God’ ([1914] 1963, 19). Expounding the Sufi path, Seyyed Hosein Nasr says: Sufism uses the quintessential form of prayer, the dhikr or invocation, in which all otherness and separation from the Divine is removed . .. Though this process of transforming man’s psyche appears gradual at first, the dhikr finishes by becoming man’s real nature and the reality with which he identifies himself. With the help of the dhikr ... man first gains an integrated soul, pure and whole like gold, and then in the dhikr he offers this soul to God in the supreme form of sacrifice. Finally in annihilation (fana) and subsistence (baga) he realizes that he never was separated from God even from the outset. (1980, 37-8) Fana is thus a radical transformation from self-centredness or50 Phenomenological self-rule to God-centredness or divine rule, involving a total self- naughting. The ninth- and tenth-century Sufi master Junayd of Baghdad described it by saying that ‘the creature's individuality is completely obliterated’ and he is ‘naughted to self’ (Zaehner 1961, 166). As one of the greatest of the Sufi mystics, the thirteenth- century Jalal al-Din Rumi, wrote, ‘No one will find his way to the Court of Magnificence until he is annihilated’ (Mathnawi, V1:232 -— Chittick 1983, 179). For ‘With God, two I's cannot find room. You say “I and He says “‘I’’. Either you die before Him, or let Him die before you’ (Mathnawi XXV:58 - Chittick 1983, 191). The human I must give itself totally to the divine I. But this ‘annihilation’ is not of course a ceasing to exist. Beyond the death of the self comes its resurrection in a transformed state. This is baga, union with the divine life. ‘The spirit became joyful through the Hess I’ (Mathnawi, V:4127, 39 — Chittick 1983, 193). Thus the human being lives, and lives in fullness of energy and joy; but it is now the divine life that is being lived in and through the life of the fully surrendered servant of God. Thus whilst the Hindu saint attains to unity with the eternal reality of Brahman, or to a complete self-giving to the divine Person, by a path of detachment from the false ego and its concerns; and whilst the Buddhist saint, by overcoming all thought of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, attains to the ego-less state of Nirvana or to oneness with the eternal Buddha nature; and whilst the Christian saint can say ‘It is not I, but Christ who lives in me’, the Sufi saint likewise gives himself to God so totally that al-Hallaj could even utter ana ‘I-hagg, ‘I am the Real’ (Arberry 1979, 59-60; Nicholson [1914] 1963, 149-50). This was the all too easily misunderstood affirmation that he had given himself to God in perfect islam so that God had taken over his life. He was saying in effect ‘It is not I, but Allah who lives in me’. Islam, then, is human surrender to God expressed outwardly in the ways detailed in the Shariah and inwardly in an individual self-giving which reaches its ultimate point in fana and baga, when the divine life is lived through a human life. Islam is thus very clearly a form of the transformation of human existence from self- centredness to Reality-centredness.Salvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 51 5 TWO POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS In tracing the transformative character of salvation/liberation within the different world traditions I have given prominence to the mystical element in each case. Indeed Hinduism and Buddhism as totalities are sometimes characterised as inherently mystical in contrast to the prophetic religions; and it is apparently in the more mystical strands of Christianity and Islam, as also of Judaism, that spiritual transformation is most clearly focused. And so it might seem that the theme of salvation/liberation as the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness is a conception of mystical rather than mainstream religion. This would however, I think, be a misunderstanding. I shall recommend using the term ‘mysticism’ to refer to those forms of religious experience in which the transcendent ‘information’ that is transformed into outer visions and auditions or inner unitive experiences reaches the mystic’s psyche directly rather than being mediated through the world (see Chapter 10.5). But it is within the experiential spectrum as a whole, both mystical and mediated, that the transforming power of religion is felt. Religious institutions and their cultic activities depend for their vitality upon the streams of religious consciousness and emotion that flow through them, although they can persist as external structures even when their inner spiritual life is at a low ebb. Thus the institutional history of a religious tradition is not synonymous with the story of its experiential heart. It is true that Christianity is strongly institutionalised, even to the extent of being identified as an historical reality with the church. And Islam is equally strongly self-identified with a visible form of communal life patterned after the Shariah. This is no doubt why in these cases the mystical element has developed as a relatively distinct strand, marginalised by the main institutional and communal body of the tradition. Hindu religious experience, on the other hand, is characteristi- cally mystical, It does of course have its elaborate institutional expressions within family life and the public ceremonies. But so much importance is given to the inner quest for liberation and to the guru (who is above all a spiritual practitioner) that in this tradition the mystical-experiential element has never become separated out as distinct or peculiar. And the same is true, perhaps even more strongly, of Buddhism. But despite this difference between the highly institutionalised and the less52 Phenomenological institutional traditions, religious experience is the vital life-blood flowing within each. And when we recognise the essential role of the experiential aspect of religion in all its forms we are no longer tempted to think that the human transformation which it can effect is in any way secondary or peripheral. Another possible objection comes from contemporary feminist Christian theologians, who are today contributing major and sometimes startling insights which it would be a serious mistake for others to ignore. One such insight is relevant to the view of salvation/liberation as the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness. The idea of a shift from worship of self to worship of God is reflected in the ancient Christian doctrine that the basic sin is pride, or self-assertion against our creator, and that salvation involves the overthrow of the proud ‘’ in humility and self-abasement. According to St Augustine, ‘We had fallen through pride .. . We cannot return except through humility’ (Faith and the Creeds, iv:6 ~ Burleigh 1953, 76; compare Of Free Will, Ill:xxv - Burleigh 1953, 76), and the theme has continued through the ages, its most usual contemporary form being in the identification of sin with self-centredness or self-enclosedness — for Pannenberg, for example, Ichbezogenheit in contrast to Weltoffenheit ([1962] 1970, ch. 1; compare 1985). The feminist critique of this strand of Christian thought is that self-assertion is not the basic human temptation but rather the characteristic male temptation; and that its female counterpart, within the existing patriarchal world culture, is different. In societies which have been basically patriarchal (even when sometimes legally matriarchal) women have been condemned to a secondary and dependent role as ‘help-meets’ whose approved virtues have been other-regarding love, sacrifice, and self- fulfilment in the service of the family. As Valerie Saiving Goldstein argued in an important pioneering article, the specifically feminine dilemma is the opposite of that of the male: The temptations of women as women are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms of sin — ‘feminine’ not because they are confined to women or because women are incapable of sinning in other ways but because they are outgrowths of the basic feminine character structure - have a quality which can never be encompassed by such terms as ‘pride’ and ‘will-to-power’. They are betterSalvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 53 suggested by such items as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossipy sociability, and mistrust of reason — in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self. (1960, reprinted in Doniger 1962, 165; see also Dunfee 1982) From this point of view the characteristic female sin is not self- assertion but self-abnegation and failure to achieve authentic selfhood; and the function of divine grace is not so much to shatter the assertive ego as to support a weak ego towards true self-realisation. For half the human race salvation will not bring a change from, but on the contrary a change to, self-centredness! In considering the implications of this feminist analysis I suggest that we have to distinguish between, on the one hand, the large- scale historical reality of the male domination of the species, resulting in the social and structural repression of women, and on the other hand the distorted individual psychic developments which this has produced. Because of the effects upon them of patriarchal cultures — according to this feminist analysis ~- many women have ‘weak’ egos, suffer from an ingrained inferiority complex and are tempted to diffusion and triviality. But it would clearly be an over-simplification to assume that ego-weakness is confined to women and is synonymous with having been patriarchalised. The general sapping of the female ego in male- dominated societies is closely paralleled by, for example, the general sapping of the black male ego in white-dominated societies — not only in the colonial past but in South Africa and, residually but still powerfully, in the United States and Europe today. Both forms of oppression are massive social phenomena that distort innumerable lives. And quite apart from the effect of these vast structural influences, at the level of individual psychology many males, white as well as black, have come as a result of external pressures or through their own inner psychic development to see themselves as inferior or unworthy. On the other hand there are many women, past and present, with ‘strong’ egos, capable of powerful self-assertion and with notable achievements to their name, by no means trapped in triviality and diffusion. This distinction between ego-weakness as a phenomenon of54 Phenomenological individual psychology and the pervasive cultural forces, both sexist and racist, which are among its large-scale causes, enables us to see more accurately the implications of this feminist insight. In so far as anyone, female or male, lacks the ego-development and fulfilment necessary for a voluntary self-transcendence, the prior achievement of self-fulfilled ego may well be necessary for a true relationship to the Real. For in order to move beyond the self one has first to be a self. This means that the contemporary women’s liberation movement, as a part of the larger movement for human liberation, is in the front line of salvific change in our world today. For every kind of moral evil works against human liberation: this indeed is what constitutes it as evil. And feminist theologians are pointing out that patriarchalism is a major such evil that has hindered and retarded, and continues to hinder and retard, the soteriologial process. At this point we are close to the wider political and economic issues of salvation/liberation in the world today, to which we shall come in Chapter 17.3. Notes 1. Kabir (1915] 1977, 49. 2. Hare 1965, 233. 3. Cf. Keith Ward: ‘Religion is primarily concerned with the transformation of the self, by appropriate response to that which is most truly real’ (1987, 153). 4. Raghavan Iyer points out the affinity between the Kantian moral philosophy and karma-yoga (1983, 71). 5. George Eliot, in her novel Middlemarch, expressed this fact in a memorable simile: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle that produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person . . . (George Eliot [1871-2] 1964, 258) 6. Concerning this Jewish assumption of the time see John Downing (1963). For further examples see D. C. Matt (1983, 19). . Some scholars today regard this passage in Amos as an interpolation from the post-exilic period: e.g. Hans Walter Wolff (1977, 350-3). xSalvation/Liberation as Human Transformation 55 Others however see it as authentic: e.g. Gerhard von Rad (1965, 138) and Klaus Koch (1982, 11:69-70). . Eliade 1982, 250. However, some scholars today see Isaiah’s vision of the future as purely nationalistic, rather than universal, and would accordingly regard Eliade’s words as exaggerated.4 The Cosmic Optimism of Post-Axial Religion All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. (julian of Norwich)! 1 COSMIC OPTIMISM. Each of the great post-axial streams of religious experience and belief has been shown to exhibit a soteriological structure: a recognition of our human moral weakness and failure or of the pervasive insecurity and liability-to-suffering of all life; the proclamation of a limitlessly better possibility arising from another reality, transcendent to our present selves; and the teaching of a way, whether by ‘own-power’ spiritual discipline or the ‘other- power’ of divine grace, to its realisation. They are thus centrally concerned with salvation or liberation or, in Martin Prozesky’s alternative term (1984), ultimate well-being, and they all affirm a transcendent Reality in virtue of which this is available to us. Thus each in its own way constitutes a gospel, offering good news to erring and suffering human beings. We can express this abstractly by saying that post-axial religion embodies a cosmic optimism. It affirms the ultimate goodness from our human point of view, or to-be-rejoiced-in character, of the universe. William James was therefore, | believe, right when he formulated the two basic elements of what he called the religious hypothesis. First, religion ‘says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak’; whilst religion’s second affirmation is that ‘we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (1905, 25-6; compare [1902] 1960, 464). James’ temporal metaphor, ‘throwing the last stone’, is 56Post-Axial Cosmic Optimism 57 appropriate. For post-axial religious optimism does not affirm the goodness of our earthly life in its present untransformed state. On the contrary, at this point the post-axial faiths have been typically negative and in that sense pessimistic. In a very general sense we can even say that archaic religion ~ even though with ample exceptions — was optimistic and world-affirming whilst the new insights of the axial age brought a wave of world-denial and a widespread sense of the hollowness, transitoriness and unsatisfactoriness of ordinary human existence. This immediate pessimism is however linked with an ultimate optimism. Life was recognised to be pervaded by suffering, its satisfactions fleeting and unreliable, the human will trapped in sin; but at the same time a limitlessly better possibility was affirmed, on the basis of the experiential insights of the great religious figures, and a path traced out to its realisation. A structure of reality was proclaimed in virtue of which the limitlessly better possibility is indeed available to us. It is really there, waiting to be grasped or received or attained. And so the cosmic optimism of the post-axial religions is a vision of the ultimately benign character of the universe as it affects us human beings, and an anticipation in faith that the limitlessly good possibilities of existence will finally be realised. There is thus an essential temporal, and hence teleological or eschatological, dimension to this optimism. It is the present ‘blessed assurance’ that, in the words of the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, in the end ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ (1978, 124).? This dimension of religious thought seems to have emerged within the intensified temporalisation of human consciousness in the axial period. 2 THE TEMPORAL CHARACTER OF EXPERIENCE The other animals appear to live almost entirely in the present moment. Thus Friedrich Kimmel says that ‘the main difference between animal and human life is the complete lack of time consciousness in the former’ (Kiimmel 1966, 50). Of course the higher mammals learn from their past experiences; but they probably only have occasional flashes of conscious recall of particular incidents. Again, they can take account of the immediate future - for example, when the hunting animal anticipates the58 Phenomenological movement of its prey. But normally and for the most part, it would seem, they live either in the present moment of experience and action or in a state of somnolence. This is not the case, however, at the human level. We normally experience the present in relation to both past and future. Recollection and anticipation colour our present awareness. For although the future does not yet exist, psychologically it is as real and important as the past. ‘A subjective future is supposed’, writes a psychologist, ‘in all our activities. Without a tacit belief in a tomorrow nearly everything we do today would be pointless. Expectation, intention, anticipation, premonition and presentiment - all these have a forward reference in time. Our entire psychic life is permeated with the hope of things to come. Implicit in all our actions are plans, however vague and inarticulate, for the future . . .’ (Cohen 1966, 262; compare Maxwell 1972). It is this temporal dimension that opens up the distinctively human level of meaning. For example, I am at the time of writing sitting comfortably on the sun-deck of my house in Southern California on a warm January morning. Although there are moments of pure enjoyment of the present moment, entirely without reference to past and future, yet more generally my situation, as I am conscious of it, has an essential temporal aspect. It cannot be adequately described in purely non-temporal terms as simply a static tableau. Not only is the remembered past implicit in the present, giving it basic intelligibility, but anticipations of the future also enter into it. For in writing these pages I am trying to get something clear in my own mind. But I am not doing so as though I were the only person in existence and as though there were to be no future in which to continue to interact with others. If | were the only person in the world I should probably have no philosophical motivation; for philosophy is essentially a dialectical and hence social activity. One philosophises within a community of people who are interested in trying to get things clear, with whom one can share one’s own attempts and amongst whom there are many other such attempts going on, so that all these different endeavours can interact with and, one hopes, correct and assist one another. So my situation has as part of its description that I am formulating thoughts of which I hope to receive criticism, in the light of which I propose to work further, intending eventually to have something to share with a wider community of people who are engaged in the same general quest.