Morality and Salvation

Abstract

From the essential pre–conditions of morality, let us first turn our attention to the permeating conditions imposed upon it by the distributive character of the self-referent roots of durational emanation. In Natura creata the perfect mutuality which I have called ‘eternal cornmunitas’ is not merely tentative, contingent, and normative, but throughout its entire amplitude constitutive, necessary, and essential. In ‘this present life’ of emanational privation, of durationally corrigible defect, mutuality remains normative as morally constitutive, but conatively tentative and contingent. In mystical religion, perhaps, a man is alone with God, ‘born again,’ and trans-moral; in morality each man faces relation with co-creanda of every grade of perfection under the mutual alienation of distributive self-reference which, in their measures, variously infects, or may infect, them all. Thus, his other may be alienated from him not merely by his own self-reference, but self-alienated, so that the emendation of his own defect must, sub specie durationis, be accommodated to the self-reference, more or less emended, of the other, in accordance with, and in part constituting, a durational moral order. Love towards one’s enemy, for example, is not properly expressed by non–resistance to, or appeasement of, him.