The direction of our attention and our participation in loftier identities has been classically and traditionally construed as something culminating in, say, “one nation under God,” reaching its pinnacle in the transcendent and ultimate good, conceived as an active relationship, a covenant, an active state of celebration or worship. Each level of identity takes its direction from the level above, with the final guiding hand attributed to the divine itself, that which points to Eden, or the Promised Land, or the Heavenly Jerusalem, or to the Eternal Heaven. That Divinity is “the love that moves the sun and the stars”—that creates, for the purpose of love, with truth.
Such a “hypothesis” (and it is not in truth a proposition akin to a hypothesis, but a definition of the uppermost level in a hierarchy of value) is a bridge too far for most, but the alternative is an identity with no final unity, the cascade of fragmentation across time (that is the death of God), emergent anxiety as a result of the beckoning of multiple forces, weakening of character, both individual and social, and the hopelessness attendant upon lack of clear direction.
And that is not all: when what is uppermost is abandoned, what is properly subsidiary becomes paramount: so the political, for example, or the economic, or the whim itself, becomes the Highest Goal, and God devolves, at best, into Caesar—or worse.
Without the final non-rational, ecstatic and transcendent move into that which cannot be contained, some lesser aspect of identity will inevitably transform itself into a false idol. Hence the replacement of theology with its shallow pretender, ideology, and rise of all the hell attendant on such degeneracy.
Differentiated, hierarchical identity, with its distributed responsibilities and rights, provides precisely the meaning that renders ideology and its falsehoods unattractive, and the adventure sufficiently compelling to justify the tragedy of life.
–from Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven
