Reverence

In this realm, our attitude is most fully manifest.

This realm is hard to name. "Glorify", "worship" and "honour" have all been used for it, but none of those properly expresses its unique character. "Devotion" I have reserved for overall attitude rather than any specific realm. Revere seems least misleading, though it fails to express the warmth.

Reverics is often called "theology" (from Greek theos = god), but this is misleading; we cannot study God, we can only study attitudes to him.

Reverence should be open to the beyond (sublime) because nothing within the world is an adequate object for it. That is, it should be directed, not to anything within the world, but beyond it, to God.

My ontology allows a realm to have multiple roots but it seems that in reality this is true only of reverence, in which the various mutually independent strands of culture are gathered together and directed towards our ultimate goal.

Reverence's three roots can be understood as follows. Reverence is:

Gratitude toward the world's donor.

Commitment toward the world's liege-lord.

Appreciation of the beauty created by the world's decorator.

Those roots could be traced further back through the lower realms all the way down to action, but these three are the immediate ones.

Revericians. Reverics, the study of reverence is for many purposes just like the study of any other modality. Its practitioners may be called revericians. As in other fields, there are academics and consultants.

Academic revericians are traditionally called "theologians", and consultant revericians "ministers of religion", but these terms are misleading.

Like any other specialist, a consulting reverician may charge for his services. The organisation of the delivery of and payment for this service, and what office (if any) a reverician should hold in a congregation, are matters of expediency, not of principle.

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