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On Authority

1. The primal ontic source of all authority can only be reality itself, even as its primal noetic source can only be common human experience. What is somehow authorized by experience of reality as corresponding to it or agreeing with it is insofar authoritative; what is not thus authorized is insofar not authoritative.

2. If reality is "what we in some way find ourselves obliged to take account of" (William James), it may be said to include both ultimate and immediate reality, the first being everything that we have to take account of in the vertical dimension, or existential aspect, of our experience; the second, all that we must take account of in the horizonal horizontal dimension, or empirical aspect, of our experience. Thus ultimate reality includes everything that we experience nonsensuously -- ourselves, others, and the whole of which we and others are all parts -- while immediate reality includes everything about this threefold reality that we can also experience through our senses.

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7. But no religious tradition is constituted as such simply by its primary authority or formal norm and whatever secondary authorities or norms it in turn authorizes or norms. Any authority, properly so-called, is and must be authorized by a source beyond itself, just as any norm in the proper sense can only be, in the theological term, a "normed norm" (norma normata), even if what norms it, although the source of its normativeness, is not itself a norm in the same proper sense. Therefore, any religious tradition is also constituted -- indeed, is constituted, first of all! -- by an explicit primal source of authority and therefore of normativeness as well. To be sure, the primal source of a tradition's authority insofar as it is authorized is reality itself as experienced -- more exactly, ultimate reality as experienced in its meaning for us (cf. I, 3). But ultimate reality in its
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meaning for us, even as in its structure in itself, remains merely implicit and cannot function as the primal ontic source of authority for any religious tradition except through some explicit primal ontic source of authority corresponding to it, or agreeing with it, in its Ineaning meaning for us. This explicit primal ontic source of a tradition's authority is the explicit self-understanding/ understanding of existence constituting it as a religious tradition whose claim to decisive authority, and thus also to be the formally true religion, is a valid claim. As such, a religion's explicit primal ontic source of authority is itself authorized -- namely, by ultimate reality itself functioning as the implicit primal ontic source of all religious and existential authority. And yet, although it is indeed thus authorized, it is not, in the proper sense, an authority, not even the (i.e., primary) authority, for its religious tradition. For although any religious authority, properly so-called, is itself also a source of authority, the converse statement is false: not every source of authority is itself also an authority in the proper sense of the term.

8. If a religion's implicit primal ontic source of authority, being ultimate reality itself in its meaning for us, must, in the nature of the case, be transcendental, its explicit primal ontic source can, for the same reason, only be historical. This means, among other things, that, although both sources -- implicit/ transcendental and explicit/ historical -- have a constitutive significance with respect to the religion of which they are the authorizing sources, only the first source, not the second, has a constitutive significance with respect to human existence and its authentic possibility, the significance of the second source in this respect being not constitutive, but representative only. Thus, although a religion's explicit primal ontic source is uniquely constitutive of it as a religion, even it is at most representative of the meaning of ultimate reality for us, which is constituted solely and sufficiently by ultilnate ultilmate reality as such in its structure in itself.

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