Abstract
‘Transcendence’, as indicating beyondness, is a very general idea which waits to be given specific meanings in specific contexts. It is perhaps most commonly used in contrast to immanence. However I am not here focussing upon that polarity but am using the term to refer to the characteristic in virtue of which the divine, the ultimate reality is said to be other and ‘greater’ (in an Anselmic rather than a spatial sense) than the physical universe. The area of discourse is thus that occupied by the debate between naturalistic and what we can, for want of a better term, call transcendental understandings of the universe. The medievals used the term ‘supernatural’ here, but that word has today shrivelled in meaning to indicate the occult, ghosts, spirits, magic spells and the like. And so I shall speak of transcendence, and of the Transcendent as that which, according to the religions, transcends the multiple forms of discharging energy constituting the natural or physical universe.
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Notes
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: Edward Arnold, 1918), pp. 47–8.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, vol. 3 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 172–3.
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1993), p. 41.
Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth, Report on the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 35.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 175.
D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1970), pp. 48–9.
See also his Religion Without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), Chapters 8–9.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 193.
Rupert Brooke, ‘Heaven’, in 1914 and Other Poems (Solihull: Helion Books, 1993), pp. 19.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 6.54.
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© 1997 The Claremont Graduate School
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Hick, J. (1997). Transcendence and Truth. In: Phillips, D.Z., Tessin, T. (eds) Religion without Transcendence?. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25915-1_4
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