On Religious Awe

“Religious awe is not, as it is often deemed to be, a contingent human development, an attitude that we encounter among other attitudes in ourselves and from the world. It is not, as it has often been held to be, the mere product of man’s original need, helplessness and ignorance which will ‘wither away’ in a well-appointed Marxist society or in a civilization built on science. None of the fundamental emotional attitudes of men and animals – those picked out by such salient names as ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘hatred’, ‘disgust’, admiration’, ‘emulation’, etc. – are mere facts of nature. All have not only definite ‘constitutions’, in which their various traits hang together in a necessary or near-necessary manner, but there is also something inevitable about their emergence in a living and conscious being.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 78-9.