Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [442]
The history of the term has been well discussed in Benson Saler’s interesting monograph, Conceptualizing Religion.21 From Saler’s discussion, the importance of a notion of transcendence to many twentieth-century theorists of religion becomes entirely clear. But what is not entirely clear, either in the form Balkin discusses transcendence or the form that previous scholars like W. C. Smith or Karl Jaspers did, is whether the term “transcendence” can be adequately defined. It plays off of Platonic notions of the forms and also Christian theological descriptions of God, who must be greater than the universe and hence transcend it. Not all values are transcendent but some may be-values like truth or justice or, in religion, let us say, salvation (which receives a great deal of attention in Christianity) or justice (which receives more attention in Judaism) or submission to the will of God (which receives more attention in Islam). In Balkin’s terms, confidence in the existence of transcendent values is itself a transcendent value, as the confidence itself cannot ever be fully demonstrated. So transcendence is a kind of recursive variable.
In the West we tend to express transcendent values with the metaphor of divine agency. God defines justice through the Torah covenant for Jews; He makes salvation available to the faithful for Christians; He allows humanity to submit to His greatness and mercy in Islam. In the great Asian religions, transcendence is often signified by inscrutability: “the Tao (way) that can be uttered is not the real Tao,” says the Tao te Ching in its first statement. Confucianism believes it cannot be fully understood by any one person or in any single instantiation. One cannot reach Moksha (liberation) merely by trying to understand it with the discursive mind but must meditate on it. By claiming that the mind cannot understand or comprehend a value, these systems are affirming transcendence in the values named as “inscrutable.” All of these are ways of suggesting transcendence in traditional vocabularies. Yet, positing the existence of transcendence is itself a transcendent value, as we cannot be entirely sure that we have not just happened on a culturally important symbol that will lose its importance when translated into another culture or time. But they are functional to us as definitions even if they point only to the phenomenon in culture. And they are functional to us in society, if they do help us value and emulate some positive norm, even if we must always fall short of attaining it.
Most of our formulations of transcendence are combinations of high ideals with images that fail to express transcendence as time goes on. For example, the Grail legend encompassed a great many of the characteristics of transcendence. For the society that produced it, the Grail represented an ideal of courtly love, sexual innocence, religious fervor, endurance, and devotion, all represented narratively. Yet, today many would argue that its devaluation of women, sexuality, and ordinary existence could be seen as a real failure of human potential. Though we seem still to be able to appreciate some aspects of its symbolization, even when it is presented by, let us say, an intolerant, anti-Semitic man like Richard Wagner in his opera Parzifal, we certainly say that we only appreciate the artistic achievement in and of itself and decry the social context that we recognize is behind it.
In the same way, one might argue that the special laws of Judaism have outlived their usefulness. Some would contest Christian notions of salvation