The founders of the great, durable religions of the world were not philosophers. The intuitions that our deeds will be judged when time has run its course, or that our deeds are indeed judged in the course of time and constantly rebound upon us, life by life, or that the path of the Tao is inscribed into cosmic reality, are not philosophical, metaphysical, or properly ethical insights. Nor are they “theological”: These are not prophetic illuminations following upon God’s self-revelation, or rational reflections upon that self-revelation. They are, rather, the result of our religious awareness, putting out its feelers and blindly making contact with some umbral, barely seen reality. Our religious sense does not make a rational analysis of the real (philosophy), nor does it reflect in faith upon God’s self-revelation (theology).
Moses met God at the burning bush, outside, in daylight. Jesus was transfigured in a display of colors shining too bright for the disciples’ eyes to bear. Theological reasoning is reasoning that is illuminated by baptism, and for that reason it operates in the sunlight. Philosophy operates in the light, too—under the little lights of our own minds.
The religious sense seems to work underground, in the dark, like the ancient, pre-historic cave painters. The Cave was, of course, Plato’s great metaphor for those who do not know the Sun of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and who therefore live in the shadows, regarding pale imitations of the “real world” outside as the real deal. Along with Homeric poetry, cave paintings would be Plato’s idea of fake news. But the sunlit reason to which Plato urgently recalled his contemporaries is not the only way of seeing truth. The religious sense does not use its own lights, like philosophy, and nor does it willingly share in the light of Another (of God), as theology does.
Rather, the religious sense sees the shadows left by the light of revelation, and sometimes glimpses some outline of reality. There is and will be a last judgement, as Muhammad prophesied; the laws of Karmic punishment and reward indicate the interweaving of fate and free-will in human action; and the roads of the Tao are the pilgrim’s authentic camino way from here to paradise.