The lure of the transcendent

Transcendence—basically, the human experience of a higher and deeper reality somehow hidden in our everyday existences, but giving hints of itself in certain circumstances—is a constant phenomenon across time and cultures. Transcendence is at the heart of every religious tradition I know. It is the reason for so much religious artistic expression—beauty is a link to the divine realm.

But transcendence is an issue for a secular society. In materialist terms, it is some kind of illusion—that is, a real experience, of course, but one with false intimations that it grants any form of knowledge. You might as well get high on drugs. Without any form of supernatural existence, what could transcendence be about? Without transcendence, however, secular life seems diminished.

Recently, I came across three accounts of transcendence in one day, which illustrates both the ubiquity of the phenomenon and the challenge it presents. I am writing a book about the work and thought of the great constitutionalist of the mid- and late 20^th century, Charles L. Black, Jr. Black participated in the litigation of Brown v. Board of Education, which ended Jim Crow. He was also an opponent of early forms of originalism.

Black told the story that one day, as he was on his way to a class dealing with the technicalities of Congress’s implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, with a head full of statutory section numbers, he happened to look up, into the sky, “the sky as the Indians of Connecticut must have seen it before the white settlers came” in its limitlessness.

And somehow, very suddenly, all this illimitable expansiveness and lofty freedom connected within me with the words I was tracing from the Fourteenth Amendment through the statute books—“privileges or immunities of citizens,” “due process of law,” “equal protection of the laws.” And I was caught for a moment by the feeling of a Commonwealth in which these words had not the narrow, culture-bound, relative meaning we are able to give them in the “real” world, but were grown to the vastness that is germinal within them.

Suddenly, Black was transported to another realm. It was, in the name of the book in which he told the story, an “Occasion of Justice.”

Black paid a price for this reference to mysticism in print. Some fellow law professors scorned it.

That same day, I read the New York Times columnist David French’s account of the reaction of members of the Mormon faith to the attack on its church in Grand Blanc, Michigan, which killed four people. The shooter died at the scene. David Butler, a Mormon, started an online fundraising campaign, for the wife and young child the shooter had left behind. In a few days, it had raised more than $300,000.

French’s point was that at a time of national despair, there is hope. He illustrated this by a reference to a transcendent moment in Return of the King, the final volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Sam and Frodo are alone in Mordor, the land of Sauron. Their quest to destroy the One Ring is failing. Surrounded by evil, isolated in deep darkness, all hope seems to be slipping away. But then Sam looks up in the sky.

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains,” Tolkien wrote, “Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

There is profound truth in those words. It reflects the fundamental nature of hope. It’s rooted in eternal truth — as the Book of John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” — but it’s also unexpected. It can arise in the most unlikely of circumstances in the most terrible of times.

Then, to top it off, I read Adam Kirsch’s review of Charles Taylor’s new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. I have Taylor’s book, but it’s pretty slow going.

Kirsch quotes a description of the human experience of transcendence, called there “fullness” from Taylor’s earlier book, A Secular Age:

Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be….

Our highest aspirations and our life energies are somehow lined up, reinforcing each other, instead of producing psychic gridlock.

No one can doubt the inspirational power of these moments of transcendence. That is why we listen to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., telling us “I have a dream” at the Washington Monument in 1963. It is why we reread Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is why we go to the symphony, or read poetry.

The problem for secularists is that Our Religions could account for such experiences. They were glimpses of deeper truth. But, as Kirsch points out, in “the secular West today, educated people distrust those kinds of stories.”

Taylor argues in Cosmic Connections that experiences of transcendence are still valid and that some modern poetry is a record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

Kirsch’s objection to that is not the claim that transcendent experiences happen. They plainly do. And they contribute to our values and creativity. The question is, however, do such experiences “give us any information about objective reality, the cosmos that exists outside our minds”? Kirsch raises the possibility that such experiences might be purely subjective. They seem to be telling us of truth. Certainly, Black, French and Taylor believe this. But, Kirsch concludes that this might be false: “Cosmic connection can be a metaphysical error without ceasing to be an anthropological truth.”

Kirsch points out that other poets, during the same modern period, came to a different conclusion—that such truths are absent:

A study of modern poetry that focused on Giacomo Leopardi, Matthew Arnold, and Wallace Stevens, rather than Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Eliot, would yield a very different definition of poetic truth-telling than Taylor’s—one that finds consolation not in intimations of transcendence but in the resolute recognition of its impossibility.

I suspect that most readers of OnlySky agree with Kirsch. I don’t. But I want to point out that skepticism is not so easy to maintain. Kirsch himself is writing about “truth-telling”—in this case, he means telling the truth that there is no truth.

But a real materialist would just shrug at such talk, one way or the other. Would just shrug at the question whether the experience of transcendence is real or subjective. We experience transcendence the same way we experience everything else. The ultimate truth of the world is not a materialist concern.

Kirsch is concerned that people are making a metaphysical mistake thinking transcendence is a source of real knowledge. That concern implies it is important that we believe only true things. But why would it be important in a materialist world that people believe the truth? If their beliefs ease their way in the world, what difference would it make?

As the hard-edged atheist John Gray argues in Seven Types of Atheism, a lot of secularists are metaphysical in orientation—actually quite close to religious traditions and actually arguing about heresy. That seems to be the case here with Kirsch. But the point is, if there really is truth, then maybe there really is transcendence as well. Just because we cannot explain it, does not mean it is not really there.

The tension between Taylor and Kirsch over whether transcendence is an ontological error is more than a philosophical disagreement over the fundamental nature of reality. It is also a prefigurement of a debate within the non-religious world over the future of secular civilization. Taylor, who is himself religious—a committed Catholic—is trying to lay the groundwork for a secularism that, while rejecting gods and miracles, is open to the rich mystery of the universe. This position used to be called “spiritual but not religious” before that movement petered out, at least in any organized sense. Taylor believes that spirituality is validated by reality.

Kirsch, on the other hand, is arguing in favor of a kind of tragic materialism. Humanity has a longing for meaning, but there is no meaning to be had. We are misfits in reality. We try to make our own meaning, but the universe is quite indifferent to our efforts. History, too, is just one thing after another. Constitutional democracy had its run. Now the totalitarians are ascendant.

That is the political aspect to their difference. There are reports in the media that Gen Z, especially Gen Z men, are returning to religious life. That religion tends to be conservative and evangelical Christianity, or whatever the equivalent may be in other religious traditions. This return may be more political than theological—a kind of tribalism.

What are young people looking for? Bracken Arnhart, a pastor at Hope Church in Texas, says they “are looking for leadership, they’re looking for clarity, they’re looking for meaning.” Daniel Williams, a professor at Ashland University, writes that they have a “longing for purpose, community and transcendence.”

Where can these things be found? At the moment, the choice for young people is religion or nothing much.

Taylor is looking to a future with a third option—non-religious life infused with beauty and hope. Such a secular life might even be organized in some ways, with its own rituals, community and aesthetics. It would be a secularism quite close to religious traditions, but not religious—literally spiritual but not religious.

But before such a secular option becomes possible, it will have to make an intellectual beachhead in secular thought—in forums like OnlySky. The Taylor-Kirsch disputation is a first step toward that beachhead. We’ll find out soon enough if there is room for such a secular alternative.