After quoting my remark that communion with the divine is the ultimate purpose of education, Dave introduces his own view that such communion is just another way of describing our communion with one another. My primary objection is philosophical. The reason I refuse simply to collapse the command love God into the command love thy neighbor is because I am aware that humanity as a whole created itself just as little as I created myself. When we say God, we are speaking above all else of the difference between the creator and the creature. Communion with God as creator as what essentially towers above us opens up the possibility of transcendence.
Transcendence means above all self-transcendence.
This does not mean running away from the world, but transforming our relationship to it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sphere of morality, which seems to be the center of Dave s concern. Morality demands self-sacrifice. As Plato argued in the Republic , self-sacrifice is possible only when we come to the realization that while we can belong to the abiding Good, it can never belong to us. Even as it offers itself to us in an act of participation and communion that grounds our being, it withholds itself from us.