By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The axial religions all agree in claiming to disclose what is authentic and therefore what is true and right. Accordingly, each of them, by its own claim, not only provides means for understanding oneself authentically and therefore knowing what is true and doing what is right, but itself is such a means.
The same is true of the explicit primal source by which each of the axial religions is authorized: it, too, is a means—for the religion in question, indeed, the means, the decisive means—of understanding oneself authentically and therefore knowing what is true and doing what is right.
This explains, then, the threefold classification of all such means as belong to each religion as either secondary, in the case of the means the religion provides; primary, in the case of the means the religion itself is—and primal, in the case of the means by which the religion itself, together with the means it provides, is explicitly authorized.
1 February 2004; rev. 10 December 2008
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