(Originally written February 28, 2007 in Book 13)
Pg. 46 Transcending Outward or Toward the Beyond
Transcending to the "outward" realm is the pressing beyond one's self by searching to the outermost limits of one's being.
"God or the Transcendent is found at the uttermost extremity of human experience" (46).
The Circumference of All Things
Meister Eckhart: "God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (46).
God has no boundaries and man can transcend outward to God and never reach a limit.
The "Beyond" or the "out there" are good ways of describing outward transcendence.
The Transcendent is somewhere beyond and man must go beyond himself to reach it.
Reaction to the God up there or out there:
Rudolf Bultmann states that referring to God up there or out there is holding onto a mythological conception of reality. Bultmann feels that by demythologizing God makes the true meaning of God's mystery clear. He contends that the demythologization of the Bible is not to make religion more acceptable to modern men, but to make the Christian faith clearer to modern man.
Bultmann rejects the objectification of God by showing God in the determined worldview of modern science.
He holds that God acts in ways that are hidden and to try and un-hde his actions is to objectify God.
Bultmann did not intend to deny the possibility of transcendence, but that God is active in human personal, existential experience in ways that are unobservable.
Bultmann advocates for an eschatological transcendence.
Transcending Toward the End
Christianity radically changed the nature of time by sanctifying it through the Incarnation.
The Death of God
"G.W.F. Hegel wrote that God is dead and Friedrich Nietzsche took it seriously" (49).
Thomas J.J. Altizer contends that God died when he became Incarnate. If Christ is identical with God, then heaven was emptied of God when Christ came to Earth.
Altizer sees God as a dialectical process rather than an existent being. "God is a historical and dialectical process which can come to realization only by negation" (51).
Altizer claims retrospective and vertical transcendence are impossible. He seemingly advocates eschatological transcendence.
One must transcend forward in the movement of history.
The Secularization of Christianity
Theology must be anthropological: "God cannot be found beyond the world but only in other persons" (53).
We can no longer speak meaningfully of God or the Transcendent.
Religion can be secularized and humanized by being understood in completely human forms.
Transcending toward a center:
The Primitive Mythical Center of Life
The center served as a doorway to God in preliterate religions.
The primitive religious man sought to center himself where the Sacred breaks through.
The Mystical Center of the Universe
Mysteries often speak of God as the Center of all things.
Becoming union with the center of God is the goal of transcendence to the center.
The Center in the Divine Milieu
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls God the Center of the Universe and that man should plunge into God. He must seek "to be united while remaining oneself" (55).
Transcending toward the Depth or Ground
Mystics have sought the Divine in the depth of their souls for a long time.
Robinson's God Within
John A.T. Robinson argued that God cannot be "up there" as a sky or High God. He states that the spatial way of picturing God is a stumbling block rather than aid to belief in God.
Robinson does not seek to replace a transcendent God with a pantheistic and purely immanent one. He simply seeks to remove symbolism of spatial language in religion to make it more relevant.
Instead of speaking about the Transcendent up there, people ought to speak of the transcendent depth of God in relationships.
God and the Subconscious
Since Freud it has been common to closely associate the subconscious with the Transcendent or to render them identical.
Carl Gustav Jung saw God as the idealization of one's own self-image and thus, to know self is to know God and to know God is to know self.
Transcending in a circle
Transcendence by Eternal Recurrence
Atheism does not necessarily deny all transcendence. Nietzsche even needed to transcend. He complained about the "unbearable solicitude of life without God" in a letter from July 2, 1885.
Conceptually, Nietzsche was never theistic or pantheistic; but, existentially, he related traditional self-transcendence with a type of his own: the "willing the eternal recurrence of the same state of affairs" (59).
Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' is the only way of overcoming utter nihilism.
Life is not fleeting, it is eternally recurring.
Transcendence by Eternal Absurdity
Albert Camus did not want to negate God or appeal to God. He wanted to live on what he knew and that alone.
Camus seeks transcendence in rebelling against nihilism in affirmation for he cyclical nature of one's absurd life.
There is a self-determined and self initiated transcendence byron the absurdity of one's life in an absurd universe. One can transcend a personal nihilism, but nothing else.
Religious experience always involves transcendence.
Transcendence goes seven ways:
1) Backward to the origin - primitive man's transcendence
2) Upward to the highest possible reality: Neo-Platonism
3) Outward - mystical transcendence
4) Inward - mystical transcendence
5) Forward to the final end - modern demythologized transcendence
6) Downward to the Ground of all - modern demythologized transcendence
7) Circular - those who deny religion
Religious experience has many dimensions. It is more broader than theism.
Humans are incurably religious.
A human must transcend.
The truly religious man seeks reality in transcendence.
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