We see good in our lives all the time, but we know that the particular goods we experience are partial and perishable. In essence, worship is submission to a transcendent Good. But I would argue that worship is the act of submission to ideal ends, which hold value precisely because they are higher than actually existing things, and therefore cannot pass traditional tests of truth, which call for a correspondence to reality. People tend to equate worship of God with belief in God, and often see literalists and fundamentalists as the most devoted of all. This criteria for judging religion would appear to be irrational, both to rationalists and to those who cling to faith. Thus religions should be judged, according to Santayana, according to whether they were good or bad, not whether they were true or false. Religion failed only when it attributed literal truth to these imaginative ideal ends. According to Santayana, religion was an imaginative and poetic interpretation of life religion supplied ideal ends to which human beings could orient their lives. Marxists have a similar view of religion, seeing promises of an afterlife as a barrier to improving actual human life.Īnother view was taken by the American philosopher George Santayana, whose book, Reason in Religion, is one of the very finest books ever written on the subject of religion.
One famous atheist, Sigmund Freud, argued that religion was an illusion, a simple exercise in “wish fulfillment.” According to Freud, human beings desired love, immortality, and an end to suffering and pain, so they gravitated to religion as a solution to the inevitable problems and limitations of mortal life. Of course, atheists don’t even believe in an impersonal God. It is no surprise that most scientists who believe in God tend more to the view of an impersonal God, because their whole life is dedicated to examining the reality of the cosmic order, which seems to operate according to a set of rules rather than personal supervision. The division between those who believe in a personal God and those who believe in an impersonal God reflects the division between the transcendent and immanent view of God. Theologians refer to transcendence as one of the two natures of God, the other being “ immanence.” Transcendence refers to the higher nature of God and immanence refers to God as He currently works in reality, i.e., the cosmic order. But the transcendent cannot be directly seen, and one cannot prove the transcendent exists. It is easy to see that rocks and plants and stars and animals and humans exist. The odd thing about transcendence is that because it seems to refer to a striving for an ideal or a goal that goes above and beyond an observed reality, transcendence has something of an unreal quality. And while the behavior of the Greek gods was often dubious from a moral standpoint, the Greek gods were still regarded as the givers of wisdom, order, justice, love, and all the institutions of human civilization. The Greeks depicted their gods as human, but with perfect physical forms. In my previous essay on ancient Greek religion, I pointed out that areté, the Greek word for “excellence,” was a central idea of Greek culture and one cannot fully appreciate the ancient Greek pagan religion without recognizing that Greek devotion to excellence was central to their religion.
excelling, surpassing also the condition or quality of being transcendent, surpassing eminence or excellence.” The reference to “excellence” is probably key to understanding what “transcendence” is.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “transcendence” as “the action or fact of transcending, surmounting, or rising above. ( The New Catholic Encyclopedia in 1967 finally did have an entry on “transcendence.”) Astonishingly, the fifteen volume Catholic Encyclopedia(1907-1914) did not even have an entry on “transcendence,” though it did have an entry on “transcendentalism,” a largely secular philosophy with a variety of schools and meanings.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes several references to transcendence, but it’s not completely clear what transcendence means other than the infinite greatness of God, and the fact that God is “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable.” For those who value reason and precise arguments, this vagueness is unsatisfying. You may have noticed number of writings on religious topics that make reference to “transcendence” or “the transcendent.” However, the word “transcendence” is usually not very well defined, if it is defined at all.
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