This essay reflects the basic theoretical perspective of a three-volume work-in-progress entitled Transformation: Its Theory and Practice in Personal, Political, Historical, and Sacred Being, being written under the auspices of the Center of International Studies, Princeton University. The first volume draws upon discoveries of archetypal patterns of human relationships, dramas, and ways of life in order to analyze the crucial connections and disconnections between these four aspects of our being, to explore the process of transformation, and to clarify the justice or injustice of the basic choices open to us. The second volume systematically analyzes alternatives to transformation before the modern age and now. It also analyzes the violence of order and the violence of change, the intrinsic limits to violence in transformation, and the causes and dynamics of deformation. The third volume analyzes strategies of transformation, including how to tell a genuine guide of transformation from a false one, and how to create a community based on transforming love.
2.
I have greatly benefited from discussions with my students in courses linking personal and political transformation, and comparing Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and contemporary American experience in separating and linking the sacred and the political. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues who have commented helpfully on the present draft, particularly David Abalos, Ilai Alon, Henry Bienen, Amy Guttmann, Stanley Kelley, Anne Norton, Carole Pateman, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, Paul Wapner and Cynthia Perwin Halpern.
3.
There exists one mode which at times and to some degree suspended or limited these five emanational responses: entering into the direct bargaining of trade. This path is often restricted to those outsiders regarded at the same time as lesser breeds (Jews, overseas Chinese) or if engaged in by neighbors adhering to different sources of emanation, restricted to special market places or days. This partial exception may for a time render the other responses dormant, but these may be reawakened at any time to disrupt trade as well.
4.
“We have got to get where we can run a foreign policy without a committee of 535 telling us what we can do,” said President Reagan, referring solely to senators and representatives, and making no mention of the power of the rest of the people (New York Times, May 22, 1985).
5.
What is also new in our time is the persistent dissolution of the concrete manifestations of all archetypal relationships within any archetypal drama in the service of emanation or incoherence. In the larger work reflected in this essay, I demonstrate that whenever we seek to experience (or observe) relationships in which continuity and change, collaboration and conflict, and the achieving of justice are simultaneously at stake, there exist in all human societies and in all of human history only eight such archetypal relationships, each qualitatively different in its capacity for and its enactment of these five faces. Their concrete manifestations now dissolve again and again. For works which apply both archetypal relationships and archetypal ways of life to the analysis of contemporary problems, see AbalosDavid, Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) and Manfred Halpern, “Four Contrasting Repertories of Human Relations in Islam: Two Pre-Modern and Two Modern Ways of Dealing with Continuity and Change, Collaboration and Conflict, and the Achieving of Justice,” in Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, edited by BrownL. CarlItzkowitzNorman (Princeton; The Darwin Press, 1977), pp.60–102.
6.
If one is to find philosophers who focused on all four, interconnected faces of transformation—personal, political, historical, and sacred—one must go back at least to Mulla Sadra (died 1641) and al-Farabi (died 950).
7.
JungC. G., Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1976.
8.
I have not spoken of countries which call themselves “People's Democracy.” Where people have little or no power, however much is given to them or done to or for them, there is not yet power of and by the people.
9.
Translated and quoted by PagelsElaine, “The Orthodox Against the Gnostics: Confrontation and Interiority in Early Christianity,” in BergerPeter L., The Other Side of God (New York, 1981), pp. 64 and 66.
10.
An interpretation drawing upon Wilfred Cantwell Smith's The Faith of Other Men (New York: The New American Library), 1965, pp.57–59.
