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Updated: June 9, 2025
What is it that makes it possible for one human being to "live into" the experience of others who lived long ago, and for the present to conquer and alter the past? How can we account for the eternal trait in thought, for the unchanging laws of logic, for the consistency of moral ideals, and their transcendence over flesh and immediate circumstances?
The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man the need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naïve and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us.
Especially on the contemplative side of life, education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's function within the universal plan.
The originality of the great musician or painter consists in just such transcendence of accepted formulae; this is why he invariably encounters opposition and obloquy from the learned conventional pedants of his time.
The German wishes to get at nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian, stop at conventions. The root of the problem is in the question of the relations between God and the world. Immanence or transcendence that, step by step, decides the meaning of everything else. If the mind is radically external to things, it is not called upon to conform to them.
At the same time this "otherness" of God, while it is the condition, is not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in the Divine goodness.
And in the broader sense of the term Shakespeare's form was precisely proportionate to his genius, though it is seen rather in the transcendence of his poetry and the management by which his persons are swept along on their own characters than in those more obvious elements of form structure of plot, the subservience of dialogue and incident to the dramatic purpose, and all the minor probabilities and proprieties.
In one sense, therefore, the whole sensible and spatial World is real. At least it is actual; and it affords us the materials from which we construct our scheme of phenomena, and by which the kinetic process of Reality is denoted and conceived. The question ever and anon occurs to us How upon this view can we solve the problem of transcendence?
It may be that this Divine Essence, if adequately aroused, may exert an absolute transcendence over material things and lift humanity to a God-like plane. "What we call man," wrote Emerson, "the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself.
It is here to give coherence and unity to the objects of the understanding, "to finish and crown the whole of human knowledge." Experience of transcendence thus becomes impossible. As Professor McGiffert in The Modern Ideas of God says: "Subjectively considered, religion is the recognition of our duties as commands of God.
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