Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists
Series on Philosophy, Psychology and Theology
ISSN 2067 – 5690
Volume
13
, Number
1–2
/
2025
33
THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE
Theodor DAMIAN
1
Abstract
. About transcendence, human reason itself speaks, taking into account
the fact
that reality itself is inconceivable. Yet once aware of that, it helps man to re-enter the house
of being, to cultivate the ontological hope in the possibility of returning to the origin, to
place
the
soul
at
the
top
of
the
hierarchy
of
any
values,
to
see
in
history
and
in
the
continuous present its definitive role, because, as Saint-John Perse says, recalling Hegel,
"there is no other history than that of the spirit." Hence the need to discern between what
passes
and
what
remains,
between
Heraclitus
the
Ephesian
and
Parmenides
the
Eleatic,
therefore between the permanence of passing and the permanence of the essence, of being.
The logic of transcendence should not need lawyers to argue in its favor. Man only needs to
realize
that
his
soul,
his
consciousness,
are
a
piece
of
the
transcendent,
a
constitutive,
structural, ontological, transcendental element, hence his longing for the transcendent as in
a kind of
abyssus abyssum invocat.
Keywords
: society, church, secularization, transcendence, technology, God, existence
DOI
10.56082/annalsarsciphil.2025.1.33
Introduction
Seeing
the situation of the contemporary world, of the Western word in
particular, we rightly ask ourselves how it came to this. Collective and individual
aggressiveness,
relativization
of
values,
existential
confusion,
exacerbated
individualism, indifference to the suffering of the other, as a person or as a group,
perversion of conscience, abandonment of principles, unapologetic opportunism,
subjective
interpretation
of
what
the
common
good
means,
ideological
radicalization, hatred, intolerance, resentment, rancor, poisoning of interpersonal
relationships,
disintegration
of
the
family,
loss
of
faith,
addictions
and
vices
transformed into virtues, uncontrolled liberalism, narcissism, conflict and political
instability, corruption, victimization, etc.
One of the main causes of this decline, according to the observations of
many
analysts,
is
the
secularization
of
society,
where
the
Christian
faith,
the
Church,
was
pushed
from
the
center
to
the
periphery,
becoming,
from
an
influential and normative institution, a private and optional choice. And when God
becomes an individual option, the place from which man removed him must be
filled with something else, usually with a false ego, in the sense of man’s moving
1
Professor
Emeritus
of
Human
Services
and
Education,
Ph.D.,
Metropolitan
College
of
New
York,
60
West
Street
New
York,
NY
10006,
USA,
member
of
the
Academy
of
Romanian
Scientists.
34
Theodor
Damian
from modesty to arrogance, and of the well-known expression “full of self”. But
the
cult
remains.
Having
moved
from
theocentrism
to
anthropocentrism,
man
continues the act of worship, only now it is about the cult of the self, the cult of
the human person.
As
the
Church
no
longer
has
a
normative
function
in
society,
people
formulate their own norms according to the vision of the world and life that they
embrace.
The
statistics
on
religious
affiliation
are
evocative
in
this
sense.
According to one of them, in the second decade of the 21st century, the number of
Americans, for example, identifying as Christians fell from 75% to 63% and 3 in
10 identify as “none”, meaning they are either atheists or agnostics, or other types
of “none”.
With local variations the situation is similar in other countries in Western
Europe. For instance, most people in the Netherlands today have never visited a
church, and one in 10 of those who still identify as Catholic say they don't believe
in
God,
according
to
the
Catholic
Archbishop
of
Sydney,
Australia,
Anthony
Fisher, who wrote about the situation in the Catholic Church.
2
Speaking of another
place, the Basque country in Spain, he reports that there the men are “delivering
their wives to Church each Sunday and waiting for them in a bar.”
3
Post-Christian society and modern technology
The
separation
between
church
and
state
and
church
and
culture,
in
particular after Enlightenment, which led in the West to a full-blown secularism
that
intended
to
abolish
religion
altogether,
determined
some
social
theorists
already by the 1930’s to begin speaking about a post-Christian society. This type
of secularization went hand in hand with the process of disenchantment
4
where
people were encouraged to find enchantment in something else.
When God is killed, as Nietzsche reported in the madman's story through
which the German philosopher in fact criticized man's position
coram Deo,
before
God, God's place is taken by an idol, and in Nietzsche's telling, this idol is man
himself, who is then incapable of doing God's job. The metaphor is clear: man
wants
liberation
from
the
divine
authority
considering
it
too
restrictive
for
his
current views about life and world and that leads him to a false existence, one of
dream and irreality, as Simone Weil put it.
5
In this context one can ask whether the
emancipation
from
God
and
from
religion
was
indeed
one
from
dream
and
irreality and the beginning of a real existence, or exactly the other way around.
6
2
Anthony Fisher, “The West: Post or Pre Christian?”, in
First Things,
Nr. 330, February 2023, p. 20.
3
Ibidem,
p. 24.
4
Ibid.,
p. 20.
5
Simone Weil,
Waiting for God,
Harper and Row, New York, 1951, p. 159.
6
Theodor Damian,
Implicaţiile spirituale ale teologiei icoanei [The spiritual implications of icon
theology],
Eikon, Bucureşti, 2003, p. 20.
The Need for Transcendence
35
The
philosopher
Emil
Choran
described
this
situation
in
sharp
words.
“Man,”
he
says,
“accumulates
irreality
and
delights
himself
in
falsity,
in
an
irrational tendency towards gigantism. What throws us into action is our debility
and inadaptability.
7
The war against God is madness. It is not by mistake or happenstance that
Nietzsche chose a madman to talk about the killing of God. Disenchanted with
who he is, man wanted to assume an identity that did not fit him, like wearing
expensive and beautiful clothes that are in fact too tight. Today this kind of desire
for a new identity is found in the hope placed in technology. As Alexander Dugin
writes, in Michael Millerman's presentation, “the history of liberalism is one of
false
liberation
from
collective
identities
and
extended
sources
of
authority,
culminating in man's attempt to liberate himself from gender identity and human
identity
in
favor
of
cyborgs,
artificial
intelligence
networks,
and
products
of
genetic engineering.
To be free in the liberal way is at last to liberate the human being from
himself.
Individual
freedom
leads
to
the
destruction
of
man.”
8
The
cyborg
as
man's
dream
of
acquiring
immortality,
of
reaching
bodily
transcendence
by
becoming
a
virtual
being
altogether
reflects,
in
a
sense,
Plato's
disdain
for
the
physical body considered to be the soul's prison and from which the soul has to
escape.
We already live in
a form
of metaverse as more and more of our lives,
labor, leisure time, spending, wealth, happiness and relationships go online. They
will exist online.”
9
Technology is becoming the “iron cage,” to use Max Weber's expression,
from which it is more and more difficult to escape because it makes us feel good.
As the saying goes: the most dangerous prison is the one in which you are made to
feel good. You will never want to get out.
Looking at our lifestyle today, Theodor Adorno states that we are living in
“the
false,
and
there
is
no
right
living
in
the
false.”
10
It
looks
like
we
are
condemned to living in the false.
The cyborg enchantment for a new identity and new existential condition
represents a major target in science and technology. “It raised the expectation in
7
Emil
Cioran,
The
Temptation
to
Exist,
transl.
from
French
by
Richard
Howard,
Quadrangle
Books, Chicago, 1970, p. 15.
8
See Michael Millerman, “Alexander Dugin explained,” in
First Things,
Nr. 330, February 2023,
p. 46.
9
Mary Harrington, „Surviving the Metaverse,” book review for
The Metaverse and How it Will
Revolutionize Everything,
by Matthew Ball, Norton, New York, 2022, in
First Things,
Nr. 330,
February 2023, pp. 51-52.
10
See
Claire
Richters,
“Glimpses
of
Light
from
Enlightenment's
Prison,”
book
review
for
A
Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity,
by Peter E. Gordon, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, in
The Hedgehog Review,
Vol. 26, Nr. 1, Spring 2024, p. 155.
36
Theodor
Damian
some
quarters
that
cutting-edge
research
in
brain
imaging,
simulation
capacity,
and
artificial
neural
networks
will
soon
make
possible
the
transfer
of
an
individual's entire mental life - thought, sensation, memory, emotion, psychology -
from
his
physical
brain
to
an
exceedingly
complex
computer
file”
[...]
that
is
“mind uploading,” “the perennial dream of achieving immortality.
11
Of course, a
hard problem remains, and that is called consciousness!
As one can see, the consumption society dominates man, it consumes him
physically and in particular spiritually. In life's problems, man looks for help to
machines,
becomes
dependent
on
them
to
the
point
of
reification.
In
this
phenomenon of dehumanization, technology becomes idol and the idol becomes
monster,
as
Abraham
Heschel
warns.
12
This
dehumanization,
in
Nicolas
Berdyaev's
view,
brings
man
to
bestialization,
a
process
that
will
end
in
the
deification of the bestial.
13
The loss of the mystery
The illusion of a new existential enchantment by which man abandons his
objective
reality
produces
“a
fracture
of
being,”
as
Cioran
puts
it,
14
and
is
explained by A. Dugin when he writes about the essential difference between man
as an individual and man as a human person: “The individual is the product of
subtraction of the personality from the human being, the result of liberation of the
human unit from any bonds and collective structures.
15
Individualism, which, according to Robert Bellah's report in the bestseller
Habits of the Heart,
published in 1985, became a main feature of life in America
already in the last decades of the 20th century, generating many types of crises, is
a departure from man's ontological destiny. The ontological structure of man is
trinitarian as he was made in God's image, the tri-une God’s image, whose main
characteristic is loving communion.
The Western civilization's decline, which mirrors the revolt against God,
the abandonment of the sacred or the chasing of the sacred from the profane, the
demythologization
of
God
and
of
the
Bible,
and
the
loss
of
Tradition,
of
the
mystical
tradition
as
well,
and
in
particular
due
to
modern
rationalism
and
the
misperceived irreconcilable conflict between religion and science, caused man to
lose “the mysterious ground of existence” that Heidegger believed we are capable
to be moved by.
16
11
Martha Bayels, “The Character of Tragedy,” in
The Hedgehog Review,
Vol. 26, Nr. 1, Spring
2024, pp. 62-63.
12
Abraham Heschel,
Who Is Man,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1965, p. 86.
13
Nicolas
Berdyaev,
The
Fate
of
Man
in
the
Modern
World,
Ann
Arbor
Paperbooks,
The
University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1963, p. 27.
14
Emil Cioran,
op. cit.,
p. 37.
15
Michael Millerman,
op. cit.,
p. 43.
16
Martin Heidegger, “The Fourth Political Theory,” cf. Michael Millerman,
op. cit.,
p. 45.
The Need for Transcendence
37
Thus, man has become a prodigal son who has lost his direction and the
sense of existence. This wandering now leads him directly to a desert of despair
that can only
have two
endings:
suicide (as in
Nietzsche’s madman
who killed
God) or returning home, to God, because, as Pavel Florenski warns, ultimately,
there will be no other choice for humanity but Holy Trinity or madness.
Going back to God implies a conscious restoration of the mystery, a re-
enchantment of the world, a return to the un-demythologized traditional values,
with constant awareness not to fall into traditionalism, as Jaroslav Pelikan warns
when he defines Tradition as the living faith of the dead and traditionalism as the
dead faith of the living.
We speak of modernity as generally beginning with the Age of Reason, in
the
Middle
Ages
and
augmented
by
Enlightenment,
when
the
major
disenchantment
with
religion
took
place. Yet
from
the
disenchantment
point
of
view,
modernity
actually
began
with
Adam
and
Eve
being
disenchanted
in
paradise
by
Satan
who
portrayed
to
Eve
the
Edenic
existence,
where
man
represented
the
untainted
image
of
God,
as
an
injustice. Thus,
Satan
stirred
in
Adam
and
Eve's
hearts
a
feeling
of
disenchantment
about
their
condition
and
about God, leading them into disobedience and based on a kind of inner revolt,
asking themselves why weren't they equal to God. Not happy with who they were,
with their identity, they wanted to be like God. So, Satan enchanted them with an
illusion which led to the fall from their existential condition in paradise.
Therefore, the solution
of man's estranged
condition
is
the return to
the
sacred,
to
God,
to
the
origin.
It
is
in
its
origin
that
the
power
of
a
thing
lies,
according to Mircea Eliade, that is the mythical time,
illud tempus,
the time of the
sacred, which can be reached through rituals that re-connet (re-ligo, religion) man
with God.
The axiological confusion
What Satan did to Adam and Eve was to plant in them the seed of pride, of
vanity that led to questioning the original order of the world and to wanting to
order it according to their own desires and understanding, as if they understood
the world, the universe. That was their sin, as sin is defined by the Church Fathers
as an error of thinking. That was the first axiological confusion, which is mirrored
in our society today, where each one wants to order the world according to his
own ideas.
Quot capita tot sensus,
the Latin saying goes (as many heads, so many
opinions).
In such pluralism, based, among others, on an ever more subjective notion
of human rights, confusion is to be expected. As Joseph E. Davis writes, with “the
normative
pluralism
of
our
situation,
it
is
hard
to
achieve
stability
or
practice
38
Theodor
Damian
consistent
truthfulness
where
so
many
other
values,
often
incompatible,
are
in
play and none can necessarily claim precedence over the others.”
17
It appears that Descartes was right when he considered that less laws and
rules will bring more stability in a society.
18
Less rules would allow people to see
better
the
essential,
the
common
denominator,
that
is
the
common
good
in
a
society. The confusion of values makes one live in illusion, like in the patristic
example where Avva tells his disciple: Light is reflected on a wall. Don't venerate
the wall! Pay attention to the light.
19
The issue of values is also related to education, and one place where that is
evident
is
the
school
curricula,
from
grade
education
to
the
university,
where
disciplines belonging to humanities, including classical
languages, for example,
are taught less and less, with a visible tendency of their elimination from the study
programs in the detriment of character formation and of a solid general culture. As
Michah
Mattix
observes,
“education,
now,
understands
itself
primarily
as
a
problem solving and knowledge acquiring enterprise. It trains students in the use
of a single voice. Such an education is barbaric, no matter how developed it may
be.”
20
That single voice is represented by science and technology in particular.
Yet
these
fields,
without
the
balance
of
humanities,
are
vulnerable,
just
like
Einstein said about science and religion: science without religion is lame; religion
without science is blind.
When Emil Cioran wrote that “the mode of knowledge man chose is an
offense,
a
criminal
intention
toward
creation
before
which
he
stands
as
its
self
proclaimed destructor,”
21
he referred to the primordial situation when God forbade
Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. Yet that bad choice can be seen as an
echo in the type of knowledge man chooses today.
This situation has direct and powerful implications on the moral order in
society, on the values man chooses and how he chooses them. A paraphrase of a
Romanian proverb would say: tell me what values you choose and I will tell you
who you are.
The relativization of values and moral decline, where God is no longer the
supreme value, allowed man to also lose his place in the top of the hierarchy of
values as being the image of God. In other words, man is no longer the supreme
value
after
God.
He
was
replaced
by
what
man
does,
desires,
creates.
The
17
Joseph E. Davis, “The Basis of Everything: The Fragility of Character in a Truth-Challenged
World,” in
The Hedgehog Review
, Vol. 26, Nr. 1, Spring 2024, p. 90.
18
René
Descartes,
Discourse
on
Method
and
Meditations
on
First
Philosophy,
Fourth
Edition,
Hackett, Indianapolis, IN, 1998, pp. 10-11.
19
Anthony DeMello,
One Minute Wisdom,
Double Day, New York, 1986, p. 33.
20
Michah Mattix, “The Integrity of Poetry,” in
First Things
, Nr. 330, February 2023, p. 30.
21
Emil Cioran,
op. cit.,
p. 42.
The Need for Transcendence
39
machine,
for
example,
is
becoming
more
important
than
man.
Or,
if
man
is
important, that is in the sense of his ego and less, or not at all, in the sense of
special appreciation and consideration of man as human being, of humanity.
That decline is partially reflected in situational ethics, where whatever one
does is justified by the context, by the situation. That is similar to some cases in
the process
of confession, where one goes to
the priest
and is
supposed to
tell
one’s sins and wrongs, and while doing that, starts explaining each transgression
in its context in order to offer extenuating circumstances and receive less penance
or get an easier absolution.
It is also like knowing precisely the divine commandment “you shall not
lie,” formulated simply, clearly, strongly as well, and the liar would say: yes, but
...
in that particular situation...; and then, there is another situation, and so on, ...
and this is how lying becomes a habit. That is one way in which the reversal of
values happens when a new normal arrives. For example, in today's world, truth is
no
longer
a
generally
accepted
moral
categorical
imperative,
which
is
why
the
term post-truth society or age is now in use. That determined William Damon, a
psychologist
teaching
at
Stanford
University,
to
write
that
we
live
in
a
dysfunctional
period
of
social
change
in
which
an
essential
commitment
to
truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed,
22
the sociologist Joseph E. Davis to
state
that
in
contemporary
life
“the
evidence
of
growing
dishonesty
is
overwhelming,”
23
or James C. Rahn to express concern about the moral order in
American life:
“In America today,” he
writes,
“there is
no coherent,
much less
operative ethics within either the public sphere or private life.”
24
The seriousness of the human situation
If someone were to paint a picture or make a diagram of the history of
human
civilization
and
try
to
interpret
current
realities,
taking
into
account
the
historical
context
and
possible
future
perspectives
with
special
regard
to
the
worrying
discrepancy
between
morality
and
technology,
including
the
fantastic
possibilities of AI, he or she would have more than enough reason for alarm.
That
is
why
Abraham
Heschel
expresses
himself
so
bluntly
when
he
speaks of the frightening seriousness of the human situation.
25
In equally blunt terms, Emil Cioran, observing “man’s thirst for adventure
and infamy,”
26
draws attention to the weakness of human nature, especially in the
22
William
Damon,
The
Death
of
Honesty,
Hoover
Institution,
January
12,
2012
(https:www.hoover.org/research/death=honesty).
23
Joseph E. Davis,
op. cit.,
p. 90.
24
James
C.
Rahn,
„The
Necessity
of
Networks:
The
Case
of
William
Wilberforce
and
the
Clapham Sect,” in
The Hedgehog Review,
Vol. 26, Nr. 1, Spring 2024, p. 114.
25
A Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 13.
26
Emil Cioran,
op. cit.,
p. 56.
40
Theodor
Damian
struggle with the self and the consequences of this. “As long as we are incapable
of conquering our deficiencies,” he says, “we have no choice but to cultivate them
and enjoy them,”
27
leaving the reader to realize for himself where the cultivation
of defects, imperfections, sins in theological terms, can lead, and what the final
outcome may be.
Of course, the future can only be gloomy, considering how the world is
structured into “the miserable and the rich,” as Eminescu put it in a poem, and
looking at the tendency of the few rich who can buy everything for themselves,
compared to the rest of the world, who receive what they need by the portion, just
as much as those who have will decide to allow them. Therefore, the future, with
all its promises, is completely uncertain, even for those who imagine that they can
buy it. In this context, the words of the American businessman Arnold H. Glasow
are meaningful: “The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we are
ready for it.”
This state of insecurity combined with modern man’s fear of death and the
impossibility of overcoming existential contrasts brings us back again and again
to
the
fundamental
question:
Who
is
man?
In
this
sense,
the
philosopher
and
theologian Abraham
Heschel
also
asks:
“Isn’t
our
entire
civilization
built
on
a
false interpretation of what man is?”
28
Where, when and how did the idea, the tendency
to have
to the detriment
of
being,
take root in the human soul, or rather, took
possession
of the
human
soul, or how did we reach the existential confusion, where
being
is understood by
having?
Without
answering
this
question,
in
his
work
To
Have
or
To
Be,
Erich
Fromm offers interesting reflections, but without seeing a light at the end of the
tunnel,
because
he
says
skeptically:
"in
order
to
understand
a
thing,
man
must
have it; and having it, he destroys it.
29
That
is
why
Oscar
Wilde
said
that
there
are
only
two
tragedies
in
the
world: one consists in the fact that man cannot obtain what he wants and the other
in the fact that man obtains. This, in the end, is the real tragedy.
30
The illusion
And another tragedy is when man identifies himself with what he has and
with
what
he
does,
not
understanding
the
qualitative
existential
difference
between
these
things
and
as
such
losing
his
royal
dignity
of
origins.
Thus,
becoming
profane,
always
external
or
marginal
to
things,
even
if
he
falsely
27
Ibidem,
p. 138.
28
A. Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 5.
29
Erich Fromm,
Avoir ou être,
R. Laffont, Paris, 1981, p. 35.
30
See A. Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 87.
The Need for Transcendence
41
identifies
with
them,
he
ends
up
being
an
agent
of
disintegration.
When
he
manages to enter them, he does so like a worm that enters a fruit and destroys it.
31
This situation leads Karl Barth to exclaim: "Man, as we know him in this
life, is an impossibility. This man, before God, can only die."
32
The
vain
sensation
of
omnipotence
makes
the
man
separated
from
the
Almighty live in illusion, to indulge in appearances and then even to believe that
they define him. Instead of living as if he were to die the next day, he lives as if he
were
immortal.
Appearances
deceive
not
only
others,
but
even
himself.
They
actually hide his vulnerability, his weaknesses, his inner poverty. And when you
have
lost
the
authentic
and
ultimate
meaning
of
your
existence,
of
destiny
and
destination
and
you
go
through
life
like
a
“messenger
who
has
lost
the
message,”
33
life
is
lived
sideways,
or
as
Victor
Frankl
says,
man
lives
in
an
“existential vacuum.”
34
Such a situation makes another philosopher conclude that
“man is absurd,”
35
and hence, of course, the absurdity of our world foreseen by
Nietzsche when he portrays the courage of the shamelessness of killing God or by
Jean Paul
Sartre
(No Exit)
when he
warns about the
consequences
from which
there is no escape when man without God builds a false destiny that leads him to a
wrong destination.
Although an atheist, Sartre writes this play about an essential theological
concept, namely hell, an existence in a state of total and irreversible separation
from
God,
which
confirms
A.
Heschel's
conclusion
that
“the
opposite
of
the
human is not the animal, but the demonic.”
36
The remaking of the image
Theologically speaking, the cause of the human drama must be sought in
the
beginning.
Something
happened
sometime,
somewhere.
Man,
made
as
a
deiform creature, endowed with freedom of choice, aroused the envy of the devil.
The
devil,
suggesting
to
man
to
break
God's
commandment
by
eating
the
forbidden fruit, advising him that in this way he would be like God, thus pushing
him towards a false divinization, actually caused his dehumanization.
Being the image of God, man had the consciousness and the awareness of
the
ultimate
belonging
(“Our
Father
who
art
in
heaven”),
a
consciousness
rediscovered in man by the divine Logos incarnate in history. This belonging is
31
Cioran,
op. cit.,
pp. 36-37.
32
Karl
Barth,
The
Word
of
God
and
The
Word
of
Man,
translated
and
with
a
new
preface
by
Douglas Horton, Harper, New York, 1957, p. 140.
33
A. Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 119.
34
Victor Frankl,
Man's Search for Meaning,
Third Edition, A Touchstone Book, Simon Schuster,
New York, 1984, p. 111.
35
Diogenes Allen,
Philosophy for Understanding Theology,
John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1985, p.
249.
36
A. Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 101.
42
Theodor
Damian
the only one that gives meaning to existence because it is its basis. The exit from
the
image,
a
fracture
in
being,
as
Emil
Cioran
would
say,
can
only
survive
partially, in an illusion of existence, as the part cannot survive separated from the
whole, that kind of path leading to total extinction, like a spark that jumps out of a
flame.
So, if we know the cause, we can think of a solution. In this case, as the
cause has to do with religion, the solution must also come from there. In other
words, the restoration of the image of God in man, the reestablishment of human
existence
on
the
eternal
values
that
relate
to
the
knowledge
of
God
and
submission to the imperatives of the relationship with Him, are meant to free man
from the embarrassment of his present condition. Embarrassment because “we are
the greatest miracle on earth and yet we do not understand it.” “Religion,” says
Abraham Heschel, “depends on what we do with this ultimate embarrassment.”
37
This is embarrassment, because we are an unanswered question, because
we
don't
understand
the
"why"
of
things,
our
existence
being
an
extraordinary
thing, a miracle in itself, because we received as a gift a life for which we paid
nothing, or as Bryan Magee says, we are given all “these possibilities [...] without
our fully understanding
them. We
are awe stricken by our situation. We are so
small
in
everything
compared
with
what
there
is,
and
so
ignorant.
Mystery
surrounds us on every side. And our destiny is not in our hands [...] We cannot
explain life itself or within life, consciousness and love.”
38
The logic of transcendence
In the universe and in our lives, if we look closely, everything speaks of
transcendence.
Our
world
has
no
value
except
in
its
relationship
with
the
transcendent.
39
This relationship humanizes man, maintains him in his authentic condition
and has the implicit effect of humanizing his world. Otherwise, as a philosopher
warns, existence without transcendence is a way of being where things become
idols, and the idols – monsters,
40
and these, in the end, will devour those who
created them, will devour their worshipers.
About transcendence, human reason itself speaks, taking into account the
fact that most of reality is “unconceptualizable” for us,
41
or rather, reality itself is
inconceivable.
Once
aware,
it
helps
man
to
re-enter
the
house
of
being,
to
cultivate the ontological hope in the possibility of returning to the origin, to place
the
soul
at
the
top
of
the
hierarchy
of
any
values,
to
see
in
history
and
in
the
37
Ibidem,
p. 113.
38
Bryan Magee,
Ultimate Questions,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2016, pp. 46-47.
39
Theodor Damian,
op. cit.
p. 137.
40
A. Heschel,
op. cit.,
p. 86.
41
Bryan Magee,
op. cit.,
p. 85.
The Need for Transcendence
43
continuous present its definitive role, because, as Saint-John Perse says, recalling
Hegel, “there is no other history than that of the spirit.” Hence the need to discern
between
what
passes
and
what
remains,
between
Heraclitus
the
Ephesian
and
Parmenides
the
Eleatic,
therefore
between
the
permanence
of
passing
and
the
permanence of the essence, of being.
The logic of transcendence should not need lawyers to argue in its favor.
Man
only
needs
to
realize
that
his
soul,
his
consciousness,
are
a
piece
of
the
transcendent, a constitutive, structural, ontological, transcendental element, hence
his
longing
for
the
transcendent
as
in
a
kind
of
abyssus
abyssum
invocat.
Theologically
speaking,
as
man
is
the
image
of
God,
the
great
abyss
calls
the
small, or the small yearns for the great, for the source. Therefore, as long as this
tendency is natural and logical, opposing or even ignoring it is unnatural or, better
said, against nature.
In this sense of the ontological tendency towards God, St. Augustine also
expresses
himself:
“You
have
made
us
for
yourself,
O
Lord,
and
my
soul
is
restless until it rests in you.”
42
But the search for God would not take place if God
were
not
already
in
man.
That
is
why
the
patristic
adage
says:
you
cannot
go
towards God if you do not already depart from Him; or also Blaise Pascal in the
dialogue that God has with him: “You would not seek Me if you had not already
found Me.”
The longing for God
The longing for God and the restless search are beautifully and poetically
illustrated by Lucian Blaga: “Where are you Elohim / We wander troubled and
unwillingly / Through the elements of the night we spy on you / We kiss the star
under
our
heels
in
the
dust
/
And
we
ask
about
You,
Elohim
//
We
stop
the
sleepless
wind
/ And
we
test
you
with
our
nostrils,
Elohim
/
We
stop
strange
animals through spaces / And we ask them about You, Elohim”
(Ioan is torn in the
wilderness).
Longing implies a past, lived experience. You cannot miss something you
have
not
seen,
heard,
or
experienced.
We
miss
a
place
because
we
have
been
there; people, because we have had dealings with them; a piece of music because
we have heard it once and liked it. In general, longing is associated with positive
states
of
mind:
pleasure,
joy,
peace.
You
don't
miss
a
terrible
suffering,
a
degrading experience, just as you don't miss death because you didn't experience
it.
This longing characterizes human life, it is felt, directly or indirectly, more
or less consciously, in a vague, indefinite or more concrete form, a fact that, again,
confirms man as a religious being, as Mircea Eliade explains.
42
Saint Augustine,
Confessions,
Penguin Classics, New York, 1961, p. 21.
44
Theodor
Damian
The longing for God is also based on the fact that after the primordial fall,
out of His love for man, God did not throw man into chaos, into non-existence,
into
the
nothingness
from
which
He
made
everything,
nor
at
an
unbridgeable
distance, abolishing the possibility of any contact, but, on the contrary, instead of
throwing him out altogether, He
settled
him (!)
near the place
from which he was
expelled, as the Scripture states: “And expelling Adam, he
settled
him
near
the
garden
of
Eden”
(Genesis
3,
24,
emphasis
added).
43
One
should
note
here
the
meanings of the expression “to settle”: tenderness, care, love. And He placed him
nearby,
that is, however, somewhere close, in order to reaccept him as soon as the
conditions
for reintegration
were met,
but
also
for him to
keep the longing
for
origins, for God, burning.
So, man is compatible with transcendence because he is the image of God
in
his
spiritual
part,
as
the
great
philosophers
of
the
world
affirm,
from
Parmenides
and
Plato,
passing
through
Jesus
Christ
and
Paul
of
Tarsus,
to
contemporaries.
We
have
something
within
us
from
beyond
us,
as
Maurice
Merleau-Ponty
also
observes
when
talking
about
language
when
he
says
that
although it transcends us, we still speak. It also happens with our existence: we
are
part
of
the
Being
beyond
us.
We
are
mortal
and
yet
we
share
in
Being.
According to the reflection of the English philosopher Bryan Magee, “we humans
are partially in this world and partially not. The fact that the self is not found in
Nature may explain the widely held conviction that a self is not an object or a
thing, and therefore cannot be justifiably treated as such,”
44
which also confirms
the highest dignity of the human being.
Dwelling on the transcendent
The
transcendent
dimension
of
the
human
person
also
emerges
from
a
conversation
between
Bishop
Theophilus
of Antioch
(2nd
century)
and
an
atheist
who, contesting the existence of the soul, also asked for evidence of the existence of
God. To this, the Bishop says: Show me your man (in you) and I will show you God.
He who does not believe in God, nevertheless has Him in the depths of his
being,
which
is
why
Jesus
Christ
said
it
in
general:
“The
kingdom
of
God
is
within you” (Luke 17:21). It must only be discovered, but one cannot discover it
when
one
is
scattered
abroad.
For
the
one
who
discovers
it,
however,
God
becomes the center around which he gravitates and on which he bases his life, the
transcendent source of the meaning of existence.
He who believes advances, pushed by his own courage of faith, towards
ever
new
possibilities
as
Emily
Dickinson
says
meaningfully:
“I
dwell
in
possibility”. But the believer would say even more: I dwell in the transcendent, or,
43
See: Brenton English Septuagint; Blue Letter Bible; Septuaginta-die-bibel.de; Biblia sau Sfânta
Scriptură, Bucureşti, 2008, 2023.
44
Bryan Magee,
op. cit.,
p. 48.
The Need for Transcendence
45
I live in the Resurrection, contrary to the Heideggerian concept of
Sein zum Tode
(existence
towards
death),
yet
transfigured
for
the
Christian
into
Sein
zur
Auferstehung
(existence towards Resurrection).
However, even
Sein zum Tode
is sometimes interpreted not as a fatality,
not as a condemnation, but as a possibility for a new beginning, for a re-rooting in
Being,
45
a process also understood by Maurice Zundel when he said that “man is
not yet, he must become. This is the primary objective of our hope.”
46
Theologically speaking, however,
becoming
is a way towards the origin,
towards
God,
but
through
people,
a
fact
which
takes
us
into
the
territory
of
morality, the man next to me being my transcendence as Roger Garaudy writes:
47
“I do not define myself fully except in relation to the other person, to all people in
the totality of their history and culture.”
48
So,
everything
is
relationship,
and
any
relationship
is
an
encounter
that
gives new meaning to life, of course, the encounter with God, the great encounter,
being the one that gives life its full, total meaning.
In today's world, however, although metaphysics is the profound source of
morality, this is not a main concern in academic circles, observes the American
professor James C. Rahn.
49
The secularization of society is considered to be one of the causes of this
uprooting,
due
to
which
the
narcissism,
the
individualism
of
modern
man
has
become
an
increasingly
visible
characteristic.
Reflecting
on
this,
Simon
Weil
demanded imperatively: “Let man empty himself of his false divinity.”
50
Hence
the need for authentic self-reflection or inquiry according to the Socratic advice,
but also the Pauline exhortation, the need for kenosis, of emptying, of detachment
from the fabricated personality and the return to the one created in the image of
God. This type of becoming will transform the mirror man, in which he always
sees only himself, into the window man, through which he always sees others and
God, according to the inspired metaphor of Martin Luther King, and will lead to
an expansion of morality, just as technology is expanding, otherwise we need to
question where it will get without the compulsory and necessary moral dimension.
Conclusion
As
Walter
Brueggemann
says,
it
is
time
to
realize
that
it
is
vitally
necessary for us to make that the praise, the doxology, our obligation and delight,
45
Michael Millerman,
op. cit.,
p. 44.
46
Marc Donzé,
La pensée théologique de Maurice Zundel,
Editions du Tricorne, Editions du Cerf,
Genève, 1980, p. 73.
47
Roger Garaudy,
Parole d’homne,
D. Laffont, Paris, 1975, p. 148.
48
Ibidem,
p. 53.
49
James C. Rahn,
op. cit.,
p. 115.
50
Simone Weil,
op. cit.,
p. 159.
46
Theodor
Damian
to have them become the ultimate vocation of the human community
51
because,
as A. Heschel also notes, if the world will perish, this will happen not due to a
lack of information, but due to man's lack of appreciation for his neighbor,
52
for
the image of God present in every person. It thus draws our attention to the need
for
Spirit
and
spirituality,
because
matter
awaits
the
transfiguring
action
of
the
spirit
53
or,
as
St. Augustine
warns,
"he
who
is
not
spiritual
even
in
his
flesh
becomes carnal even in his spirit".
54
We believe what we want to believe, but then we become what we believe.
That is why it is important what we choose, it is important to pay attention to the
divine advice for us to choose life (Deuter. 30, 19), that is, the path to the royal
dignity of the human person, to its fulfillment in God. And even if sometimes this
path seems difficult or impossible, Christ specifies that He is the way, that with
God nothing is impossible, or as a patristic saying puts it, when the way seems
impossible to you, make the impossible a way.
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