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1- Just as there are two realities (the waking world and the mythic realm) so there are two complementary principles, which can be described as the human law and the sacred law. The human law is the social contract, the general agreement between human beings as to righteous behavior. The sacred law is a spontaneous response, a sense of awe and reverence before the numinous power, which carries an implication of divine command.
It is part of the doctrine of the Catholic religion that mankind has an inborn moral sense, an inner compass given by God. However, the social contracts of different cultures are as distinct from each other as can be imagined, or so they appear to be on the surface at least. Why is this so? If mankind truly has an inborn moral sense, then why do some cultures have such customs as honor killings, vendettas between family groups, slavery or human sacrifice? Are some cultures simply morally corrupt, deviating from a single divine standard? Or is there no standard at all, but only custom, arbitrary and meaningless at the core?
A basic understanding of the social contract may have some usefulness as far as it goes, but it assumes that the human law is all there is to morality, and I don't believe that to be the case. Consider our reaction to the world we live in, the primal forces faced by our most distant ancestors:
Heat lightning on a mountain ridge in almost total darkness. The blue emptiness of the desert sky. The black gulfs of the ocean. These things, though also natural forces, have something else in common- they encourage, they generate, a sense of reverence and sacredness. Man first feels the urge to worship because of forces like these.
Vast openness and limitlessness; a sense of awe. The feeling born in us from these hints of eternity is morally neutral in and of itself. No one would think to speak of the desert as good or evil except by way of analogy. And yet there are moral implications.
We naturally feel that there are ways of living and thinking that bring us closer in kind to this awesome freedom, this unfathomable abundance and power, this world without end. There are also ways of living and thinking that make us smaller, that shrink us spiritually and mentally, that take us further from the source.
All that which brings us closer to the source is, by its nature, something holy. All that which pulls us further away is what is meant by "sin." The world numbers among the righteous some of its very worst sinners, and fails to recognize holy men. From this we can see that there are two separate laws- the social contract regulating interactions between humans, and something very much more fundamental. The distinction here is an exact parallel to the division between the waking world and the mythic realm, and just as in that other distinction, the two worlds are in fact one world. The question of how they can be reconciled into a functional whole, a way of life with intrinsic meaning, is answered for me by the Balance of Forces, "the esoteric and the exoteric in opposition and unity."
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