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They didn't throw out tradition, but they did see through it. They understood that the great religions are basically local dialects of a universal language.
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That's an excellent way to put it, Andrew - "local dialects of a universal language."
However, the key to this vision of the transcendent unity of religions is the capacity for what the Sufis call
fana, the passing away of identification of consciousness with the personal ego.
The exoteric's resistance to this idea, since it does indeed involve THE death experience, prevents that breakthrough which allows for the perception of the universal oneness of religions.
Or as Blake would put it, one requires the capacity to throw one's spectre into the lake.
Most of humanity identifies with its spectral self, and has no desire to surrender it, along with its associated identifications. So the personal investment with "my" religion and the "one way" of fundamentalism continues as ever.
As I said earlier, many Sufis were executed (martyred) for claiming union with the Godhead, which to ego-identified exoteric orthodox believers sounds like nothing less than blasphemy.
And had Blake lived in the Middle Ages, or even the Renaissance, he would almost certainly have died for his identification of God with the Imagination. Giordano Bruno died because of his pantheism.
I was thinking about this today - the evolution of human consciousness may be seen in terms of a progression of death experiences - from the infant narcissist we die (or abandon this primal identification) into mother/family identity, from family identity we die into the social group, from the social group or tribe we die into national identity, from nation-identity we die into world-consciousness. Each of these transition points - the early ones usually well-marked by ritual in old cultures - is a type of the death experience. We "let go" of one identity and find another, wider identity. Life itself, our birth, actually begins with a death experience:
Birth’s another kind of death –
a fetus-killing rush of breath
And from exoteric religious identity we die into esoteric religious identity - the transcendent unity arrived at via the experience of
fana. Or if not
fana itself, at the very least we need the intuition that there is a reality of Being beyond the ego-identity. That there is something in us which is deathless, and which is the possession of ALL beings - as the Buddha says.
But no can can force anyone into a transcendence they resist. So it is not as simple as a mere acceptance of the mystical vision - acceptance of a doctrine among equal doctrines. You can't sermonize exoterics into esoterics. To break from a narrow reading of religion requires the capacity for self-surrender, or
fana, which is a psychological/ontological issue.
Sorry if I am ranting again, but I find this stuff fascinating.