World Without Transcendence – Background

A friend of mine is not well.  It’s a chronic problem, and when it kicks up, it hurts — significantly.  My friend is also a Christian, and though he’d be quite happy to be free of pain, he wrote me that while he had it, until it could be banished, he was offering it up, asking that it be joined to the sufferings endured by Jesus Christ, for the benefit of other immortal souls.  (He’s a generous guy.  He could, quite legitimately, have offered it up for the benefit of his own soul.)  My prayers are that he need not do so for long.

Here behind the lines, this kind of acknowledgment of the transcendent used to be much more common than it is now.  I’m not speaking at the distant past; I’m speaking of my own life span.  (Well, okay, not the very distant past, at any rate.)  Having been raised a Catholic, I was informed that in this life, suffering happened and when it did, while we had to endure it, this offering was a good thing indeed to do with it.  Now not everyone, not even every Christian, took that view.  But no one thought we were somehow weird or deranged for thinking that way.  Compared to them, we were just different, and we did something they didn’t.  Today — not so much.

You don’t hear much of a kind of thing today, even (sadly) among Catholic.  And, if you really want to shake things up at a coffee gathering or cocktail party, then mention the concept in conversation.  The reaction will probably be rather like what you could expect were you to announce that you’ve just tested positive for type A H1N1 influenza.  To allude to the transcendent is to invite very sharp and negative reaction indeed.

How did it come to this?  I only ask the question because it is not at all impertinent.  I don’t have an answer, though I’ve encountered lots of theorizing as to how it came to be.  The theories I’ve encountered have been diverse, and the overwhelming majority of them share a common trait.  They ignore considerations pertinent to the existence of the transcendent.  For my part, my answer is the same as the one Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg gave to Kaiser Wilhelm II in answer to the question of how, in 1918, things had come to such a state.  “My God; if only we knew.”

So I’m not going to be concerned about a history lesson, and certainly not about a psychobabble laden treatise on how the transcendent became banished.  But I do want to look at what, it occurs to me, have been some of the things that have come along in tandem with the banishment.  I contend that the banishment either brought about, or facilitated the coming about of these things.  And none of these things has been particularly good.

At the risk of jumping ahead, I want to close with what is, I think, and encouraging thought.  Transcendence does not imply either distance or detached isolation.  It certainly does indicate a state of being beyond, a condition that cannot be contained in a temporal and material construct.  Yet it logically can still be — it is, I’d say — part and parcel of a whole that includes the temporal and material. And like terms in mathematics that approach a limit, it can be as close to the temporal and material as we wish consider it, because it is indeed very close.  That’s the good news.  Humans have not succeeded, through their ignoring it, to abolish the transcendent.  And the way things can sometimes get here, behind the lines, that’s something for which we can all be thankful.