1 Introduction
As recursivity is a vital element of tradition processes that are a necessary element of religion, the formally transcendening process connected to it should become the subject of further conceptual scrutiny.1 This leads to a discussion of the decisive code of religious communication, the distinction of transcendence and immanence (TID) that already played a role in the discussion on the key concept of tradition.
There are many reasons why transcendence has a bad name in the field of cultural and religious studies. For some, the notion seems an epitome of ‘Westernness’, thus rendering it completely unsuitable for purposes of description, analysis, explanation, and comparison of non-European or non-Christian religions.2 To argue for a notion of transcendence as a key concept of the study of the dynamics of religions might, therefore seem challenging. The heuristic potential of the notion, however, seems to me unnecessarily wasted if the notion thus disappears entirely from the scholarly discourse on religious phenomena and the history of religions, even though the critique of it has been well-founded in places.
In my view, the scholarly discussion of the concept of transcendence within the study of religion suffers from a major misunderstanding: scholars fail to account for the manifold gradual distinctions of the concept. Consequently, there is a kind of topological uncertainty as to which level of abstraction which concept is to be employed most adequately.3 The notions of transcendence and immanence that are commonly employed operate on both abstract and concrete levels of description. A notion of transcendence might be considered too abstract if it rests on ontological or metaphysical ideas, such as the distinction between ‘Here’ (Diesseits) and ‘Hereafter’ (Beyond, Jenseits). It is similarly too concrete if it is associated solely with the idea of a ‘transcendent’ God as to be found in the Christian tradition. Both notions generate methodical problems with regard to their applicability: one may criticize both its universal validity and its ‘orientalist’ consequences found in its imperialistic attitude towards the phenomena in question.
The descriptive potential, however, is founded in the fact that transcendence is an intrinsically relational notion that makes sense only regarding the distinction between immanence and transcendence and its diverse forms or possibilities of application. As William Franke puts it, we tend to “[…] polarize us into proponents and detractors with regard to one term or the other; in fact, there is hardly any sense in speaking of ‘immanence’ except in contrast to ‘transcendence.’ The terms form a correlative pair.”4 Distinction, however, does not mean rigid separation. It is only valid as a contrast when it can unfurl its descriptive and explanatory potential on both object language and metalanguage level.
The following considerations are intended to elaborate a concept of the transcendence/immanence distinction that may be operationalized in the examination and description of religious phenomena. It is thus not intended to define or examine a philosophical concept, although philosophical ideas are used to illustrate the concept. Furthermore, the concept of the TID suggested here is intended to provide a tool that may serve in the process of comparison of phenomena, especially religious/religioid phenomena. It may well be the case that certain phenomena may even be identified as being religious/religioid by means of this comparison. As such, the examination of the transcendence/immanence distinction becomes a method of discerning, at which point phenomena turn phenomena that may be fruitfully labeled as ‘religious’.
Hence, the question remains of how to use the transcendence/immanence distinction in a relevant comparison and in a valid description of the process of the evolution of religion. To give a very condensed preview of the theories employed: the argumentation is intended to establish the TID as:
the primary religious code (Luhmann)
a process that is mediating and infinite, dynamic and creative (A.N. Whitehead).
a form of semiosis (C.S. Peirce) and a process of contrasting (A.N. Whitehead), as suggested by the process underpinning the distinction between transcendence and immanence.
Here, the assumption of Peter Slater’s still holds true: “[W]hat interests us, in the dynamics of religion, is the nature of the transcending process rather than the nature of some transcendent entity.”5 Therefore, it is these semiotic processes that trigger the emergence of a religious field, and it is processes of transcending that may be used to compare religious traditions. As usual, a contact-based approach prevails here as well, for it is in situations of contact that these semiotic processes become most obvious, via object language reference or critique. The emergence of a specified TID can be attributed to situations of contact between religious traditions.
In the following, I shall first establish the TID as a suitable tertium comparationis between traditions. To do so, I present a three-level model of the TID, comprising basic, formal, and specific transcendence. To define the levels of basic and formal transcendence, I will employ Raymond Tallis’ and Benjamin Schwartz’s considerations. After that, I am going to analyze three textual cases. The first is taken from ancient Chinese material, the second from colonial North America, and the third examines theological speculations from early modern central Europe. In all three cases, object language authors employ the TID in religiously relevant narratives. Furthermore, I would like to specify the TID-based process of transcending with reference to the process of semiosis, and to introduce the Whiteheadian notion of contrast for the explication and further refinement of the TID. Finally, I give some hints on the role of situations of religious contact in the process of transcending.
2 Transcendence/Immanence in Comparison
One of the key challenges for the KHK research project Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe has been to identify suitable tertia comparationis, which enable scholars to systematically compare religious traditions.6 Though concepts such as ‘tradition’ or ‘secrecy’ are considerably less contested as tertia comparationis, the twin concepts of transcendence and immanence present themselves as promising candidates.7
The concept has played a significant role in the work of the KHK, particularly in the context of questions related to religious terms that are characterized by a dichotomous structure or, as a less abstract example, in the case of a comparative study on journeys and passages that start in the realm of the “here and now” and lead to a wondrous, “transcendent” space, evoking, as it were, a spiritual ascent.8 Moreover, the KHK has critically discussed the widespread and dubious characterization of China as a “culture of immanence” as opposed to ‘Western’ “cultures of transcendence.”9 In some sense, the Chinese tradition, thus, became a test case for the possibility of fruitful application of ‘Western’ scholarly vocabulary.
The present lines are written to both develop and critically engage with the thesis that the TID enables us to gain a comparative perspective on different religious traditions and helps explain the emergence of the religious field. To criticize, however, the hypothesis has to be established. In operationalizing the transcendence/immanence distinction, I assume that religion constitutes itself through the very act of declaring or approaching something as “religious.” In language borrowed from the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it can be said that religion, thus, occurs as communication and that this communication is processed in the form of the transcendence/immanence distinction. The TID is the religious primary code (Primärcode). In this definition of transcendence, there is nothing ‘sublime’.10 Religion transcends the everyday experiences of the Lebenswelt. Transcendence means to observe the world as if from outside. Accordingly, communication is religious if the immanent is considered from the viewpoint of transcendence, meaning that both immanence and transcendence mutually presuppose each other.11 The code is strongly associated with the distinctions between known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, visible and invisible, knowledge and non-knowledge, public versus secret knowledge, and finally, exclusion and inclusion. Religion makes religious sense through the application of the transcendence/immanence distinction. The occurrence of this primary code allows the characterization of a text, a situation, or a space as ‘religious’. Thus, if we find traces of the TID in object-linguistic self-descriptions, we can use these self-reflective conceptualizations as a starting point for the development of specific, material-based metalanguage. This, in turn, provides ample opportunities for empirical studies.
In the following, I would like to follow Volkhard Krech’s ideas on the relationship between religion and transcendence to elaborate further on a model of the TID. Religions provide a special way of dressing and dealing with contingency by means of a duplication of reality that is based upon the distinction between transcendence and immanence.12 Thus, a certain interpretative pattern is established that guides both theoretical religious knowledge and religious practice, both as possible ritual and conduct of life. On the psychological level, the pattern can also determine moods, motivations, and evaluation systems; on the material level, it provides objects and particular bodies with a certain aura.13 The same can be said about the very basic categories of human insight, time, and space. According to Krech, ‘religion proper’ is concerned with the problem of how to mark transcendence that cannot be represented in everyday experience through immanent means. That is, how to transform the unavailable into something available or the unsayable into something sayable. Religion has to represent the transcendent by immanent signs, thus maintaining it in the communication of society and preventing it from evaporating as a social fact.14 Religious communication, therefore, is mainly concerned with the transcendence/immanence distinction, mediating permanently between two spheres that are distinct by definition.15
3 The Basic Structure of the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction
One challenge in examining the transcendence/immanence distinction lies in the fact that unlike other notions the KHK members have examined, the concept consists of a binary (dichotomic) but interrelating distinction, thereby introducing the idea of Wechselwirkung (interaction) as well as of process. Hence, one does not examine a noun as a concept but rather a verb. The tertium comparationis, in this case, is a creative process—it consists of ways of dealing with the TID as an instrument for coping with contingency (Kontingenzbewältigung).
The TID is not only to be found in religious contexts. Intellectual and cultural history provides further cases that could be described and analyzed through the TID. In philosophy, for instance, the basic interactive dynamic of the transcendence/immanence concept is exemplified in the Aristotelian notion of the Unmoved Mover, as found in his Metaphysics Book
One may argue that the leveled development of the TID might be traced with regard to the history of concepts, meaning that the evolutionary aspect plays a role in the explication of the notion(s) of ‘transcendence/immanence’. In antique and medieval times, the Latin noun transcendentia appears in practical contexts, such as in land surveying and rhetoric, indicating the transition from one argument to another. In this early period, the word was not yet used to indicate something beyond the human capacity. The fully developed distinction in this sense does not appear earlier than in early twentieth-century Neo-Scholasticism. However, the related verb transcendere or transcendens acquired this meaning in theological speculation, as can be seen in the works of Augustine. In his Confessiones, Augustine describes a spiritual ascent that he experienced together with his mother Monica shortly before her death in Ostia.18 Through discussion of the prospects for a future eternal life as opposed to the life of this world, and through contemplation of the life of the saints, Augustine and his mother were able to transcend the limits of their minds and obtain a short vision-like experience of higher knowledge on a higher level of existence:
At length we came to our own souls and passed beyond them to that place of everlasting plenty, where you feed Israel for ever with the food of truth. There life is that wisdom by which all these things that we know are made […] And while we spoke of the eternal wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it.19
Augustine describes the process of transcending here as requiring a strenuous effort that granted but a momentary glimpse of another sphere, thus laying stress on the distinction between the world here and the world beyond. In a space of everlasting plenty, any limitations and, thus, all differentiations were gone. In the works of Pseudo-Dionysios Areopagita, to transcend means the intellectual effort of transcending even affirmation and negation and, ultimately the principle of contradiction.20 Here, the idea of transcending is connected to the self, which has to be referred to in order that it can be transcended. Therefore, even with regard to the history of concepts, the process expressed by the notion of transcendere seems to be a more promising candidate for a diachronic and synchronic examination.
On a very elementary level, the distinction between immanence and transcendence indicates a spatial relation, namely, through the transgression of borders implied in the process of transcending, thus establishing a threefold structure of ‘there’ and ‘here’ and the ‘border’. The border mediates between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, as part of a dynamic process of interrelation. This transgression is not to be explicated as an anthropological constant or metaphysical speculation but rather as a semantic or semiotic necessity, a necessity that is moreover characterized by indeterminate creativity. Transcendence, thus, can be considered as immanent to actual beings: “Every actual entity, including God, is a creature transcended by the creativity which it qualifies,” as Whitehead put it.21
Regarding the process of transcending, the counter-concept of immanence is exemplified in mathematical consequence. Perhaps formulated in deliberate opposition to Christian theology, Spinoza’s notion of substance famously employed an idea of stern immanence: “Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens” (Ethica I Prop. XVIII). Herein, there is no concept of time or space involved save the inadequateness of the human apparatus of perception: everything is ‘given’ ‘here’ ‘at once’. However, the very ‘adventure of immanence’ cannot do without some basic transcendence, as elaborated in the following.
The dichotomic structure of the transcendence/immanence distinction enables its basic function as mediation. It does so via contrast: the transformation of unspecific or absolute complexity into specific complexity. As such, the distinction indicates the processual unity of the contradiction, leading to a unity of opposites. This internally processed basic unity (as Wechselwirkung) makes religious assertions guided by the transcendence/immanence distinction religiously meaningful, as something completely unrelated to another would not ‘make’ any sense. It may be added that the ‘internal’ process of the immanence/transcendence distinction is supported and intensified in correlation to the complexity of the environment of the system introduced by the distinction. In Luhmann’s terms, the difference in complexity will change when the complexity of the prevailing system is increased, and the complexity of the relevant environment will correlate.22 ‘Visible’ expressions of this process might be the emergence of evermore sophisticated critiques of religion and evermore rigid notions of transcendence that religious thought produces in answer to those critiques.
4 Metaphors of Transcendence
With regard to non-Western religious traditions, the attempt to establish the transcendence/immanence distinction as a key concept for the study of religion may appear problematic. In literature, the notion of ‘transcendence’ as inseparably connected to the ‘Western’ idea of religion is even styled as the paramount obstacle to a proper understanding of non-Western cultures or religions.23 The present approach, however, lays great emphasis on not dealing with transcendence alone but rather examines transcendence and its necessary counterpart, immanence. To be more precise, it examines the relation and interplay between transcendence and immanence as a distinction of a certain kind and, as a process, the process of transcending.24
The main obstacle to a fruitful operationalization of this conceptual pair often seems to be that the metalanguage used to describe their relationship is either too abstract or too specific. It is too abstract when meta-physical associations are evoked, such as the distinction between ‘here’ (Diesseits) and ‘hereafter’ (Jenseits). It is too specific when it is constricted to the notion of an other-worldly God in the sense of the Christian or Protestant tradition.25 An analytic operationalization is thus obliged to find a middle way between these two extreme possibilities. On the one hand, premature ontologizations are typically considered to be lacking general relevance; on the other, employing the transcendence/immanence distinction in a more specific way may raise fears of Orientalism—the suspicion that ‘Western’ concepts are being dubiously applied to non-Western traditions.
However, Kant’s famous redefinition of the notions of transcendence and immanence in his Critique of Pure Reason (A 296) indicates a few important considerations. Kant defines ‘immanent’ as being ‘within the limits (of experience)’ and transcendent, with a certain derogative intent, as ‘to fly over (überfliegen) the limits’.26 Thus, transcendence (or, rather, a transcendent maxim) forces us to tear down markers of limitation and to acknowledge a new territory without demarcation. It orders us to overcome boundaries.27 Later in his work (A 643) he defines ‘immanent’ more visually as ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ (einheimisch), as opposed to ‘over the top’ or ‘high-flying’ (überfliegend) use of transcendent ideas.28 Here, the metaphors used emerge as the most important elements of Kant’s definitions, evoking an idea of a spatial sphere as well as a certain dynamic movement connected to the notions. Transgressing one’s borders (limits)—or remaining within them—thus, might be tentatively identified as the guiding metaphor of the transcendence/immanence distinction.
In its use of metaphors, Fritz Stolz’ short article in the Metzler Lexikon Religion on ‘Transzendenz’ is also significant.29 Here, transcendence is associated with an inaccessible space that lies beyond the immediately accessible and differentiated region of reality. Moreover, this space is vertically characterized as more fundamental (grundlegender).30 Differentiation and the transcendent space beyond are therefore opposed. These spatial metaphors are further qualified by the notion of ‘border’ or ‘limit’ (Grenze) between the accessible and the inaccessible, which, for Stolz, is important for any usage of the notion of transcendence in religious studies. Essentially inaccessible, the space beyond can only be an object of permanent asymptotic convergence. Stolz stresses the particular relationality of the border-meditated spaces by pointing out that there is a vertical and vectorial hierarchy implied, as the relation between the space here and the space beyond is always an asymmetric one. Transcendence, therefore, is related to the idea of limited space. Of course, the mutually limiting spaces do not allow general statements for every religious tradition. Rather, one has to face blurred limits. What is important, nevertheless, is that transcendence may be localized31 and that the ideas of space involved here are further qualified, in particular as regards their interrelation.
Following Thomas Tweed’s metaphoric, religions “interpret limits and promote crossings.”32 The spatial metaphors of ‘limit’ and ‘crossing’ indicate a process of transcending that may well be two-directional, back and forth, simultaneously far away and as near as possible.33 The crossing of space that is internally differentiated is closely linked to the idea of transcendence.34 Any expression of a transcending process is thus dependent on spatial metaphors. Spatial metaphors link processes of transcending to the perceivable world, covering a vast array of possible expressions, from concrete locations (mountains, islands) and relational expressions (in/out) to directional terms (here/there).35 As it seems, transcendence/immanence can be associated with spatial metaphors and, perhaps, as a consequence, with processes of movement that involve an asymmetric relation and ideas of borders as mediating elements.36 Transcendence, as Luhmann states, is, first of all, a directive, indicating a transgression of borders.37
5 The Three-Level Model of Transcendence
Considering the possible ‘Western’ origins of the concept of the transcendence/immanence distinction, it is important to refrain from generalizing definitions of these terms. It is also important not to generalize negations, such as the assumption that these distinctions per se cannot be found in non-Western traditions. Instead, it is more promising to focus on the question of how the dynamic transcendence/immanence distinction can be operationalized for comparative research, or rather, how this distinction can be successfully established as a tertium comparationis in religious studies. Unsurprisingly, taking a specific or theologically elaborated form of the TID as a point of reference for comparison is unlikely to generate fertile results. Rather, we require a bottom-up approach guided by a formal understanding of transcendence.
Attempts to produce such a bottom-up approach have been made, often by scholars of the supposedly non-transcendent non-Western cultures. In sinology, for instance, highly productive attention has been paid to the formal structure of the notion rather than its content. As Benjamin I. Schwartz argues in a 1975 article titled The Age of Transcendence, a formal understanding of transcendence denotes a process that can be described as standing back and looking beyond. Taking his point of departure from a discussion of the theorem of the ‘axial age’ and the question of possible influences between cultures, Schwartz points at the ‘strain towards transcendence’ in ‘axial movements’ and explains his notion of transcendence as follows:
What I refer to here is something close to the etymological meaning of the word—a kind of standing back and looking beyond—a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond. It is symbolized in the Hebrew tradition by Abraham’s departure from Ur and all it represents, by the Buddha’s more radical renunciation, by Confucius’ search for the source of jen within and the normative order without, by the Lao Tse book’s strain toward the nameless Tao, and by the Greek strain toward an order beyond the Homeric gods, by the Socratic search within as well as by Orphic mysteries.38
There can be no doubt that, at least for Schwartz, this notion of transcendence bears some intercultural and comparative potential as he observes its presence from East Asia to Europe.39 It is present whenever human beings act upon their potential to step back from their everyday life and to look upon their circumstances in a self-reflective or even self-critical manner. Transcendence thus indicates self-reference. Alternatively, we can say that the introduction of a notion of transcendence can be regarded as indicating a rudimentary second order observation.
This idea may well be applied to the supposedly purely ‘immanent’ cultures, such as China. As Heiner Roetz has shown, this self-referential formal transcendence is the very basis of ancient Chinese philosophy—Daoism, Legalism, and, particularly, Confucianism. The emergence of formal transcendence was triggered by a special kind of contact situation, namely an experience of general political crisis that affected all fields of society:
Political, social, and economic changes, the breakdown of the established order and the dissolution of the Zhou kingdom in a series of upheavals and wars shook the established worldview based on the religion of Heaven and the code of propriety […] of the Zhou. […] There is no philosophy of ancient China that would not be shaped by the experience of this crisis. All of them begin to look beyond the existing horizons of thought and to rethink ‘norms and standards,’ detaching themselves from the past and all hitherto accepted authorities and making the step towards ‘transcendence’ that according to Karl Jaspers constitutes the ‘axial age’.40
Thus, the self-referential transcendence manifested in Confucianism is an expression of the crisis of the Zhou tradition that led it to challenge and question rather than the expression of a self-contained and utterly conservative tradition itself.41
Schwartz’s suggestion that a formal notion of transcendence should be employed and hence used to describe and analyze corresponding phenomena thus does not seem to be utterly misleading.42 However, the transcendence/ immanence distinction examined here may already seem too abstract and theoretical. In this conception, it appears to be an experience that could only happen to intellectual elites, an experience too far removed from everyday experience and practice of non-elite people. To proceed towards operationalization, this formal criterion of the identification of processes and the “conscious” reflexivity of second-order observation that is implied is too demanding. As an alternative starting point and a necessary supplement to formal transcendence in the sense of Schwartz, we must take yet another step back and begin with an examination of basic forms of human expression, such as speaking and gesturing. This is not to say that the formal understanding of transcendence in the sense of standing back and looking beyond should not play a role. Rather, formal transcendence should be considered as an important stage within a larger process of transcending, which might itself culminate in ontological notions of the here/hereafter distinction or perhaps a “categorically different” God as the very negation of all human efforts per se, as in dialectical theology or the Buddhist distinction of lokottara and laukika.43
The level of formal transcendence is of particular significance and interest for scholarly study and it is at this level that the emergence of metalanguage from object language may be observed.44
Following Schwartz’s idea, an evolutionary model of the process of transcending may be elaborated. To construct this model, Schwartz’s formal notion of transcendence and the well-known specified notion of transcendence, as found in, for example, Christian theology, must be complemented by yet another notion of transcendence that may serve to discern the starting point of the process. To connect the process of transcending to everyday experience, a very basic concept of the transcendence/immanence distinction must first be deployed. This forms the basis for the more complex, “stronger,” specific concepts of transcendence, which are usually associated with specific religious traditions.45
The close association between the notions of religion and specified transcendence must thus be relaxed and disentangled. The notion of transcendence is not to be interpreted in terms commonly associated with (particular) religions but, instead, as the emergence of a form of reflexivity and criticism that transcends activities associated with the daily necessities of human beings. The process of transcending does not start within the field of religion proper but rather prior to its emergence.46 The focus on specified transcendence, as in Christian theology, often distracts from these phenomena. There are decisive levels of transcendence to be located ‘in-between’ the extremes.47
Therefore, what needs to be captured by the model are examples of ‘pre- religious’ processes of transcending—in my terminology, basic transcendence. Borrowing a term from the work of Georg Simmel,48 these examples can be described as religioid phenomena that serve as the material for examination.49 Religioid material is conceptually connected to religious material proper insofar as it carries the potential to develop into religion but does not necessarily have to develop in that specific direction.50 It should be noted here that the temporal priority of the religioid is merely a possibility of the course of historical development rather than a necessity.51 There is, however, a systematic priority that makes the religioid a conditio sine qua non for religion proper. The presence of religioid material can be related to the process of the transcending of the immanent that takes place in life in general. Here, Simmel stressed the idea that transcendence is immanent to life.52 Accordingly, as an essential part of life, this immanent transcendence leads to new stages of life—stages that are, in turn characterized by particular forms of transcending, or rather, by the application of the TID.53
Engaging with religioid material in empirical studies enables scholars to describe and analyze possible points of change. Through such, they are able to systematically discern occasions on which a process of transcending, employment of the transcendence/immanence distinction, becomes religion. It may also be used to compare phenomena without having to rely on religiously specified forms of transcendence, which defy comparability. In the case of the transcendence/immanence distinction, on the level of basic transcendence the material to be examined consists primarily of (human) action (speaking, pointing at, gesturing). Due to its inherent dynamic structure, the transcendence/immanence distinction might here permit an examination of an ‘internal’ process of the concept itself.
Therefore, the process of transcending that such analyses would try to capture can be structured in three main stages: basic transcendence, formal transcendence, and specific (‘religious’) transcendence. Basic and formal transcendence make up what can be termed the religioid sphere. In phenomenological terms, the idea is to measure and examine the “religioid space” before starting with an examination of religion proper.54 Here, basic and formal transcendence constitute the pre-religious sphere that may but does not have to, develop into specified religious transcendence. As usual, the three levels have to be considered as mere analytical distinctions that do interrelate in praxis. For example, certain object language level expressions of basic transcendence might be interpreted in terms of specific transcendence if there is an elaborated doctrinal theology.
The basic form of transcendence might be described as follows by relating it to basic human actions in general.55 According to Raymond Tallis, in his book Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence, the most basic concept of transcendence is found in the process or gesture of pointing.56 The pointing finger, however, is nothing more than the most obvious gestural expression of the act of pointing, which can be performed by various bodily gestures—a shift of the head, gazing into the distance, and so on. The decisive point is the following: pointing at means abstracting from one’s own body through bodily means. By doing so, the pointer virtually creates a mutually shared world: “Pointing is a means of indicating a transcendent world—general, hidden, and shared—and takes us decisively out of our solitary, transient bodies, subject to the laws of nature.”57 The gesture, thus, displays a considerable creative power. One should add that it even relieves one from taking one’s person as the grounding starting point of the deixis. The simple, deictic act of pointing at, verbalized in deictic expressions such as “(over) there,” introduces that which is separated from the self as “the other.” Co-originally, this very act also creates the “here” (perhaps “the self”) and the mutually shared “world,” a world that encompasses both the “there” and the “here.”58 Spatial metaphors, therefore, play a decisive role from the very beginning of the transcending process.59 What is more, the ‘self’ or ‘one’s body,’ is something that is pointed at rather than something pointing. It is only apprehensible in a deixis. Within deixis, a system is established that is dependent on the situation itself, namely, the material circumstances of someone pointing at a deictic center. The act of pointing at is an act of decision, specification, and direction, as it is impossible to point at nothing in particular.60 It should, therefore, be stressed that the establishment of a deictic center in the process of pointing is not to be equated with the body of the one pointing. The center exists solely in the deictic situation—an individual may easily point at their own head or otherwise establish a deictic situation of pointing at one’s own body. Pointing, therefore, is the precondition of the body being chosen as a theme.
Pointing at establishes another triadic structure related to the field of social communication: they who point at something, that which is pointed at, and the individual who is shown something by the act of pointing.61 It draws attention both to the person showing and the person who is shown something. Pointing at can, thus, be understood as the possibility of going beyond oneself and, through the generation of a horizon of perceptual insight, returning to oneself as the origin of this possibility. The act of pointing is a basic yet still complex transcending process. In itself, it actually creates the subordinate possibility of standing back and looking beyond.62 It introduces the possibility of observation by objectivation. “Any entity, thus intervening in processes transcending itself, is said to be functioning as an ‘object’.”63 The process involved so far is transcendent to the entity in question, relatively speaking. At this stage, a form of transcendence has been established. It still has to be examined how and why this particular TID is transformed into a general TID.
However, pointing at is an interconnected process that establishes a triadic relationship, which, in turn, creates an active form of making sense of the world. The introduction of a basic concept of transcendence (“there” [object]), it should be mentioned, goes along with a basic concept of immanence (“here” [subject]). As such, both concepts enter a tense interrelationship (“the world”) in distinction. This relationship is not necessarily a strict and dichotomous distinction. Rather, we are dealing with a variety of possible interdependencies.
The employment of a basic form of the transcendence/immanence distinction (‘indicating’, deixis) on the object language level might be used as a starting point for examination in various religious traditions. It is here, in the act of deixis, that materiality and embodiment are brought into play: “Pointing is the most blatant example of ‘deixis’, a property that connects signs with the material circumstances in which they occur. It seems to be the place of intersection between the carnal, and, consequently physical, space and the abstract space of discourse.”64 Pointing, thus, is a form of spatial crossing. Everyday transcendence has the potential to develop into a transcendence of everyday life. As a consequence, when it comes to comparative research in religious studies related to the TID, the guiding research question should not be whether or which “strong” specific transcendences (“Gods”) exist in this or that tradition but how the process of transcending emerges and proceeds.65 It should be asked when it is that systematically relevant points are reached where basic transcendence turns into formal transcendence (pointing at becomes pointing out) and formal transcendence turns into specific transcendence and is articulated as such.66 It should be noted that this conceptualization is not meant to insinuate an evolutionary process in which “basic” transcendence equals “primitive” forms of religion, and specific transcendence refers to more elaborate religious phenomena. The scholarly interest regarding the TID is not confined to historical processes but should be focused on observing the processing of “religioid material.”
6 The Process of Transcending: Cases from Ancient China, the New World, and Medieval/Early Modern Europe
To look for processes of transcending that can be described following the three-level model seems to be a promising approach to non-European source material. Their examination may lead to a further qualification of the processes. Thus, object language cases in which formal and, perhaps, specified transcendence emerge from a basic transcendence/immanence distinction might illustrate the model best. In some cases, there is also object language reflection on the very process of transcending, such as in the case of theological speculation, for example, in Nicolas of Cusa.
6.1 Ancient China: Ascending a Mountain and Becoming Immortal
As a first example of a process of transcending, I turn to early China.67 As an influential part of sinological scholarship argues, the region seemingly lacks a specified transcendence in the common understanding of this term.68 However, there are some notions to be found in the sources that do suggest a relationship to transcendence and processes of transcending. For instance, one term often associated with transcendence in ancient China is xian, written as
The translation refers to a process of ascending the human beings who are denoted with this term perform.73 By 300 CE, the term had become a marker of accomplishment, designating a more or less final status attributed to an individual.74 Moreover, Campany justifies his translation by opposing the Hall/ Ames thesis, intending “transcendence” not in the philosophical sense defined by them, “but in a more concrete and metaphorically grounded sense of ‘going beyond,’ ‘surpassing in status, excellence, and/or power,’ or ‘ascendance over.’”75 In order to avoid the fallacy of not taking the manifold gradual distinctions of the concept into consideration, Campany relies on grounded and concrete ways of transcendence, i.e., basic ways of employing the TID (that may be treated formally in object language sources).
Here, it is important to notice that the xian-seekers of early Medieval China are not socially distant figures, but rather, in their quest for transcendence, emerge from the midst of society and are essentially related to the surrounding society insofar as they refer to and are dependent on the communal setting and the public response of their endeavor. Though mainly (but not exclusively) to be found on the level of the official classes, there was keen interest in transcendents and the associated process of transcending at all levels of early medieval Chinese society.76 The cultural values and religious institutions to which they presented alternatives brought them “back to earth.”77
However, Campany’s translations and those of others indicate a certain relationship that is significant for the process of transcending in question. They bear metaphorical potential as expressions of spatial relations. It is the relational aspect that is furthermore qualified in definitions of the notions found in object language material.
There are some early definitions of the term xian that verify Campany’s translation, in particular with regard to their spatiality. In the early second century comprehensive dictionary, the Shuowen Jiezi (‘Explanation of Simple and Compound Graphs’), it reads: “Xian means long life, to leave (depart) as a xian” (
In the Shiming (‘Explaining Names’) dictionary, believed to date from around 200 CE, the notion is defined as follows: “Xian means to become old without dying. Xian means to move (qian
A further useful indication to scrutinize the meaning of the term is Wang Chong’s (27–100 CE) encyclopedic collection of critical essays, the wide-ranging classical text Lunheng (‘Disquisitions’ or ‘Discourses Weighed in the Balance’; first published in 80 CE). Here, xian is glossed with the notion of ascension to Heaven:
Huang Ti was a votary of Tao, and subsequently, as they say, rose to Heaven. If his subjects wanted to honour him, they ought not to have styled him Huang, but ought to have given him a title implying his ascension as an immortal.82
The examination of the source material often shows a significant combination of ‘spatial’ and ‘intensifying’ dynamics in processes of transcending.83 Here, the process of transcending may be described, on the one hand, as a spatial shift (climbing a mountain) becoming finally an ontological transformation (rising to Heaven) and, at the same time, on the other hand, as a shift from primitive forms of transcending (reaching out for things) to elaborate ones (becoming immortal, spiritual ascension). Basic, formal, and specific forms of the TID, thus, seem to interrelate.
Now, sources from ancient China recount many anecdotes concerning immortals and the attempts of mortal people to reach this state of being. These sources relate immortality to a process of transcending that involves an ascent, not only regarding spirituality but also quite materially an ascent as the process of moving up, a process that is inevitably associated with a mountain. One finds examples of this specific relation in Sima Tan’s (d. 110 BCE) and Sima Qian’s (died around 86 BCE) Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, finished around 94 BCE), and here, in chapter 28 of the work, the Treatise of the Feng and Shan Rituals (Fengshan shu).84 These examples are associated with the contemporary emperor Wu (141–87 BC) of the Han dynasty.85 This emperor acted as a cultic reformer, famously driven by his personal striving for immortality and his interest in reconsidering the relationship of heaven and earth and the role of man.86 The Grand Historian describes the first years of his rule as follows:
When the present emperor first came to the throne, he showed the greatest reverence in carrying out the sacrifices to the various spirits and gods. In the first year of his reign (140 BC), because it had been over sixty years since the founding of the Han, and the empire was at peace, the gentlemen of court all hoped that the emperor would perform the Feng and Shan sacrifices and change the calendar and other regulations of the dynasty.87
The emperor’s interest in cultic matters, however, was not unproblematic. There is a certain tension between transcendence and empire as a system of relations to divine powers transcended by withdrawing from the divine-human exchange, resulting in a incompatibility of roles of ruler and transcendent.88 Within the following examples, nevertheless, a significant parallel is drawn between the present ruler and the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) also mentioned in the Lunheng-quote, the creator of the state and primogenitor of all Chinese rulers, and, in fact, the only ancient figure “reputed to have managed to become, as ruler, a transcendent.”89 The mountain in question is a concrete place, the Taishan, one of China’s sacred mountains.90 The Feng and Shan sacrifices were exceptional performances as “the most solemn of imperial rites,”91 addressing Heaven and Earth respectively, as an attempt to bridge the roles of emperor and transcendent.92 The Feng ritual was part of a series of mountain offerings, which allowed for both a more political and a more religious interpretation.93 On the one hand, the rites asserted sovereignty over the Emperor’s territories and proclaimed his triumphs to gods and men. On the other hand, the rites were also a performed pursuit of immortality.94 The Shiji affirms this interpretation by quoting an aged scholar, Master Ding of Qi, who explicitly hints at this connection: “The word feng indicates the concept of immortality.”95 The word, thus, is pointed out as indicating a special state normally beyond the reach of humans, formally transcending the practice performed there on the mountains. In any case, the rituals were considered as matters of great importance and dignity that only the worthiest emperors may perform. As the Shiji notes:
Among those who have received the mandate of Heaven and become rulers, few have been blessed with the auspicious omens telling them that they are worthy to perform the Feng and Shan sacrifices. When these are carried out, there is none among the countless spirits who does not enjoy pure offerings.96
The Shiji repeatedly stresses the particularity of the rituals, not at least by pointing out that they were seldom performed.97 This means that the emperor Wu did not in fact know how to perform them correctly as his advisors gave him different, difficult instructions on how to execute the ritual.98 However, he finds the ritual a necessity that must be performed and thus be institutionally reestablished, for the sake of his dynasty and for himself.99
The first anecdote related in the Shiji concerns a speech given by a magician or master of esoterica (fangshi).100 Li Shaojun was a self-declared expert not only in the techniques for dealing with ghosts and spirits, but also an initiate in the worship of the God of the Fireplace and further well-acquainted with the methods of how to become immortal.101 The fangshi were, thus, very likely to (formally) highlight the transcending potential of certain practices. Li Shaojun, or rather, Li the Youthful Lord, is considered to be the most important of the fangshi, notorious in historical works but represented positively in later Daoist texts.102 Li may have had a claim to be transcendent himself, given the extreme longevity attributed to him and the striking disjunction between his apparent and actual age. Accordingly, displaying his intimate knowledge of matters of the glorious past, Li Shaojun told the emperor:
By making offerings to the Spirit of Furnace, the Yellow Emperor reached things. He reached things and cinnabar transmuted into gold. He made vessels for eating and drinking out of the gold and he prolonged his timespan, by finally meeting the immortals of Penglai Island in the sea. After that, he performed the Feng and Shan ceremonies (on the Taishan mountain) and he did not die. This was the Yellow Emperor, indeed.103
If you sacrifice to the fireplace you can call the spirits to you, and if the spirits come you can transform cinnabar into gold. Using this gold, you may make drinking and eating vessels, which will prolong the years of your life. With prolonged life you may visit the island of Penglai in the middle of the sea. If you visit them and perform the Feng and Shan sacrifices, you will never die. This is what the Yellow Emperor did.104
The way to immortality, transcending human limitations, the master of formula points out, includes alchemical means and a journey to significant places.105 Here, in Li Shaojun’s account, the process of ascending/transcending is associated with certain places, notably Mount Tai and the mysterious Penglai islands. The latter is conspicuously described elsewhere as also being a mountain.106 Climbing up the mountain and performing the ritual there appears in these extracts as a necessary precondition of the final defiance of death, which has been prepared for through the proper use of alchemical material.107 By doing so, the imperial adept is able to transcend mankind’s common condition and transform longevity into immortality.
At least according to the Shiji, this final goal is not described as being categorially out of reach, as it is connected to concrete places, Mount Tai and the Penglai Islands. The process of transcending is always related to space. In the case of Penglai, the Shiji reports that on several occasions, rulers sent out servants to find them. However, although the islands could be seen, none of the messengers was ever able to reach them, as they represent a place beyond that cannot be reached by a mere mortal.
men were sent from time to time to set out to sea and search for the islands of Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou. These were three spirit mountains which were supposed to exist in the Gulf of Bohai. They were not very far from the land of men, it was said, but the difficulty was that, whenever a boat was about to touch their shores, a wind would always spring up and drive it away. In the past, people said, there had been men who succeeded in reaching them, and found them peopled by fairy spirits who possessed the elixir of immortality. All the plants and birds and animals of the islands were white, and the palaces and gates were made of gold and silver. Seen from afar, the three spirit mountains looked like clouds but, as one drew closer, they seemed instead to be down under the water. In any event, as soon as anyone got near to them, the wind would suddenly come and drag the boat away, so that in the end no one could ever reach them.108
The spatial characteristics of the islands given here are of great importance. Though the islands are reported to be located not far from the human sphere in a concrete place, nevertheless, they cannot be reached or even perceived properly. On one occasion, they are associated with the sky as clouds; on another occasion they seem instead to be submerged in water. The islands, populated with wondrous animals and displaying overwhelming riche and the elixir of immortality with them, are protected from everyday access.109 The places of the immortals are, in object language description, kept secret. Though visible and it is claimed to be obtainable, they are not directly accessible. Only adepts are able to see the goal and further act as guards of the secret ways to travel there.110 The distinct sphere of the transcendents, thus, is mediated by secrecy in its paradoxical way of being known to be unknown.111
Thanks to this quality of being known as unknown, the places of the transcendents remain a goal to be sought, although all efforts are likely to be disappointed. Qin Shihuang sent youths and maidens in his stead, as he was unlikely to reach the island himself. The youths blamed the wind as an excuse for their failure: “‘We were unable to reach the islands,’ they reported, ‘but we could see them in the distance!’”112 As all texts insist, although the islands were unreachable, they could still be glimpsed—or pointed to, in the terminology of transcendence. Some years later, in times of the Han emperor Wu, the islands seemed to have become even more unreachable, though they were still located close by:
The men who had been sent to sea in search of the island of Penglai reported that it was not far away, but that they had as yet been unable to reach it because they could barely make out the emanations which indicated its location.113
The second example is closely related to the first. As the emperor Wu became more desperate owing to his failure to reach immortality and the poor performance of his magicians, another figure, the ‘man of Qi’ Gongsun Qing, appeared at the court. In his deposition to the emperor, the magician Gongsun Qing114 referred to a revealed tablet/mysterious passage that he claimed to have inherited from his master, Lord Shen, who, in turn, had received it from his immortal teacher, Master An Qi.115 Questioned by the emperor, Gongsun Qing replied as follows:
Master Shen was a man of Qi who was friendly with the immortal, Master Anqi, and from him he received the words of the Yellow Emperor. He possessed no writings, but only a cauldron inscription which said: “When the Han dynasty comes to power, the months and days shall fall the same as they did at the time of the Yellow Emperor.” It further said: “The sage of the Han shall be the grandson or great-grandson of Gaozu. A precious cauldron shall appear and he shall commune with the spirits at the Feng and Shan sacrifices. Of all the seventy-two rulers who attempted the Feng and Shan, only the Yellow Emperor was able to ascend Mt. Tai and perform the Feng!” Master Shan told me, “The ruler of the Han shall also ascend the mountain and perform the Feng, and when he has done this, then he will become immortal and will climb up to heaven!”116
Obviously, the story told, and the advice given to the emperor hit a nerve. As Gongsun Qing suggests, the times of the immortal Yellow Emperor and that of the Han dynasty paralleled each other significantly, making the Yellow Emperor an example to be followed for the current Han ruler, the great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty, Han Gaozu (256–195 BCE). This is particularly crucial in the case of the actions to be taken in order to become immortal, or rather, a transcendent. Making a transcendent of the Han emperor, the master of formula, points out, requires climbing a mountain and performing a ritual there. To a certain degree, the three-level model of transcendence is present in Gongsun Qing’s story. The mountain, as a particular place, is of special importance to this process, as Gongsun Qing in his speech to the emperor, emphasizes. It is the place to meet the spirits:
In the world there are eight famous mountains, three of them in the lands of the barbarians and five of them within China. The five in China are Mt. Hua, Mt. Shou, The Great Room, Mt. Tai, and Mt. Donglai. The Yellow Emperor often visited these five mountains and met there with the spirits.117
Obviously not without a personal stake in the matter, Gongsun Qing additionally stresses that in pursuing the goal of becoming a transcendent, there is also stubbornness and some degree of ruthlessness required. Hence, occasional drawbacks and failures should not be laid at the door of the advising magician. The successful Yellow Emperor again sets the example to be followed:
At times the Yellow Emperor made war, and at times he studied the arts of becoming an immortal, but he was distressed that the common people criticized his ways and so he beheaded anyone who spoke ill of the spirits. After 100 years or so he was able to commune with the spirits.118
The inspired Han emperor understandably reacted to Gongsun Qing’s account of the concrete prospects for immortality with great enthusiasm. He started a process of ritual reform and performed the Feng and Shan rituals on the mountain in the following years. His ascension, the performance of the rituals, and his return from the mountain were largely secret. The emperor was accompanied by only a single attendant, who was conveniently stricken with a sudden and violent illness and died shortly after.119 Thus, the difference between the world of normal men and the sphere the emperor yearned for is once again apparent.
The hapless servant, however, was not the only victim of the emperor’s urge to become a transcendent. Several magicians who failed him suffered severe punishment. Moreover, and most significantly, the emperor was willing to sacrifice fundamental aspects of traditional social requirements to achieve his goal. Even filial piety, the kinship-based cult of the dead, and the importance of family in Chinese culture stood no chance against his desire to transcendence, marking the tension between families and immortals:120
When the emperor heard this, he gave a great sigh and said, ‘Ah! If I could only become like the Yellow Emperor, I would think no more of my wife and children than of a castoff slipper!’ He then honored Gongsun Qing with the position of palace attendant and sent him east to wait upon the spirits at the Great Room, Mt. Song.121
Transcending, here, also involves transcending social conventions and social constraints. The emperor is not willing to elevate his family to his prospected status but would rather cast them aside regardless. The search for longevity and, ultimately, immortality conflicts against the very basis of Chinese society: “In early medieval China, dying was an event that set off a chain of specific social and ritual processes. Not dying, therefore, amounted to absenting oneself from those processes and from the larger system that sustained them.”122 In this sense, becoming divine is thus a product of discontinuity.123
Though Emperor Wu was all too willing to follow Gongsun Qing’s advice to become immortal, the failures of his previous magicians and the tricks they employed to fool him also rendered him skeptical about the miraculous events Gongsun Qing claimed to have witnessed. Gongsun Qing, therefore, had to justify his approach to the emperor, arguing to him that there is a special state of mind required to approach the path to immortality:
‘Are you sure you are not trying the same sort of trick as Shaoweng and Luan Da?’ the emperor asked. ‘The immortals do not seek for the ruler of men,’ replied Gongsun Qing. ‘It is the ruler who must seek for them! Unless one sets about the task with a liberal and open-minded attitude, I am afraid the spirits will never appear. When men discuss spiritual matters, their words are apt to sound wild and irrational, but if these matters are pursued for a sufficient number of years, the spirits can eventually be persuaded to come forth!’124
According to Gongsun Qin, the process of transcending from necessity starts from the immanent sphere, exemplified by the desire of the ruler of men to seek immortals. He also makes an open mind the precondition for the very possibility of contacting beings who are not objects to everyday perception, thus acknowledging the possibility of the other showing itself in the immanent sphere.125 It is a process of standing back and looking beyond what the magician advocates, a process that transcends everyday perception. Despite the fact that the authors of the Shiji, in general are skeptical about the magicians described and about the validity of their claims, the inclusion of the advice they gave represents a significant series of ideas concerning the possible ways of reaching a transcendent place or sphere by immanent means.126 Moreover, their advice and claims were taken seriously by those around them—at the very least, by the Emperor.
The examples of the magicians Li Shaojun and Gongsun Qing as related in the Shiji are of specific relevance for the examination of the process of transcending as they paradigmatically combine the forms of the transcendence/ immanence distinction. Regarding the three-level model of the TID, the account benefits from a formal analysis. By climbing up a mountain, an individual may reach for the status of a transcendent.127 We may interpret the mountain as a sign of a processing and directed movement, indicated by the word ‘up’ that suggests itself.128 Accordingly, the directed movement ‘up’ at the same time presupposes a movement ‘down’ as a contrast, as well as a relationship between ‘up/down’. Regarding the TID, the roughly triangular shape of the mountain can be explicated as manifesting the directions ‘up’ and ‘down’ and their relationship, expressing a movement to a certain place that is qualified by directions.129 These directions, however, are necessarily relative to a certain standpoint (‘up from here’ and ‘down from here’). The role of spatial metaphors within the object language description of processes of transcending becomes most obvious when the function of mountains as indicative elements in religious narratives is observed.
Basic transcendence, thus, denotes a threefold processual structure comprising an interrelation of directions/directives. This might be, for example, the directive ‘up’ and ‘down’, but at a more elementary level, this could be the distinction of ‘here’ and ‘there’. Formal transcendence as the process of standing back and looking beyond denotes the particular ascription of certain notions to the process of basic transcendence. This ascription is performed on the object language level by a self-reflective individual. In the case of the Han Emperor Wu, the notion of immortality is related to the process of ascending, or, specifically, performing an act of basic transcending in moving ‘up’ the mountain (from ‘here’). The directives ‘up’ and ‘down’ serve as primary or basic metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson involved in the process of transcending, thus indicating the formalization of basic transcendence.130 Formal transcending here is not yet religious, but it provides the religioid model form131 of transcending, which may be filled with religious meaning. Puett correspondingly describes, “[t]he practices they [texts of self-cultivation] espoused are to be used not to gain understanding or control of this world but to transcend it.”132 Here, the process of transcending is taken one step further, from the status of formal transcendence that allows for knowledge and control to a realm beyond. The directions of ascension, vertical symbolism, movements of climbing and elevating, and the importance of height in the description of early Christian visions of heaven are corresponding phenomena.133 Such a specified transcendence might be ascribed to the emperor who, by ascending, becomes an immortal (and, perhaps, a god)—though the permeability of the human and the divine sphere clearly differs in this case from other notions of religiously specified transcendence, such as in Christian negative theology.134
In retrospect, key figures in the events surrounding Emperor Wu’s religious reforms were indeed imbued with religious meaning by later religious traditions. The fangshi portrayed in the Shiji, above all, Li Shaojun, are often considered as important figures for the proto-history of Daoism as an institutional religion.135 Accordingly, in Daoist history, the words of explanation uttered by the two fangshi or masters of formula Li Shaojun and Gongsun Qin, in retrospect may be identified as the original scenes of Daoist religion, the turning points of formal into specified transcendence.136 Their practices and ideas can be described as the religioid material that developed into a specified religion. Fangshi practices were incorporated into the Daoist canon, and fangshi cosmology is a source for Daoist cosmology.137 Generally, I would argue that there are no particular turning points at which one level of transcendence becomes another in concrete historical development, but rather only gradual changes that slowly transform one level into the other. There are, however, such well-defined turning points in the retrospection of the tradition in question that may be used in the scholarly description of processes.138
The Shiji cases, however, also show that the distinction between basic, formal, and specific transcendence is an analytical distinction. Within the material to be examined, the three forms are simultaneously present and closely intertwined. Accordingly, this fact shows that it is not adequate, in order to discern its potential as a tertium comparationis, to start one’s examination of the TID by employing and looking for specified transcendence. To examine religions, one has to examine the way people show (something). The instances of the religioid—basic and formal transcendence—provide a systematic starting point for the examination of processes of transcending in diverse cultures, ultimately leading to discernable religious traditions with a fully semantized notion of the TID.
6.2 Crossing the Ocean and Performing a Process of Transcending: William Bradford on the Pilgrim Fathers
The spatial, geographical, and ‘intensifying’ aspects of transcending processes are not restricted to early Chinese material. Alexandra Cuffel, for instance, has analyzed cases of religious contact in early modern Jewish contexts in Ottoman-ruled Palestine that combine spatial movement and transformation. Having coined the notion of ‘religious translocation’ for this process, Cuffel examines basic geographical translocations, passing between the world of spirits to the world of the living and vice versa, and even a movement between religious affiliations and the transmigrations of souls.139
These translocating, transcending processes are also addressed in the ‘Western’ tradition. Here, they are also linked to movement. Spatial metaphors are similarly prominent. Transcending, however, does not necessarily involve mountains but can also involve the sea, as the search for the Penglai Islands shows. It also happens not just to individuals but also to groups or communities of people. And, of course, it does not only happen in Asia or Europe but also elsewhere.
A telling example is found in the case of William Bradford (1589/90–1657),140 a weaver by profession but better known as a passenger of the Mayflower and later governor of the New Plymouth colony, in which post he served intermittently from 1621 to his death. Born in Yorkshire and orphaned at a young age, Bradford joined the Puritan community of Scrooby and left England with them for Holland at the age of eighteen. From September to November 1620, he took part in the legendary journey aboard the Mayflower, was a signatory of the Mayflower Compact, was one of the original members of Plymouth Colony, and became, moreover, its first and paramount historiographer. The mythical significance of the journey for later American self-understanding is mainly down to Bradford’s written account of it. It is celebrated by American historians and literary scholars “[a]s a touchstone for our national mythology, as a central historical document, and as our first great work of literature,” thus rendering it “the most important work of the seventeenth century.”141
As a religiously engaged writer of a particular history, Bradford was deeply involved in the doctrinal struggles of his time. Not least, his works manifest the drive for self-understanding of a religious group that felt challenged by its environment. In his book Of Plymouth Plantation (written between 1630 and 1647), Bradford describes the geographical shift that had taken place, the concrete event of the voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers to America, as an intensifying process of transcending.142 Within his account, Bradford performs an act of formal transcendence through his reflections on the journey and the descriptions, reasons, and conclusions he gives about it.143 This may be concluded from the (theological) motifs and model forms Bradford employs in his narrative. Bradford’s exegetical reading of the Bible within the narrative becomes a history that transcends factual events and provides them with religious meaning.144
The story is about a particular community of Puritans, characterized by its special relationships towards God and the wider world. The community, as Bradford relates, emerged out of necessity, and existed in tension with its environment to an extent that resulted in personal hardships for its members. Supposedly, in reaction to King James I’s religious politics, Bradford’s Puritan community chose to break with the official church.145 Bradford describes the process of demarcation as follows:
So many therfore of these proffessors as saw ye evill of these things, in thes parts, and whose harts ye Lord had touched with heavenly zeale for his trueth, they shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, and as ye Lords free people, joined them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in ye fellowship of ye gospel, to walke in all his ways, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensewing historie will declare.146
Regardless of whether Bradford’s claims of persecution in England are valid, the description of the existential state he gives concerning the members of his group is of great significance. In Bradford’s account, his community is a collective body that exists in a particular dynamic state, as they are intended to be a fellowship of the gospel who walk in the ways of the Lord as the Lord directs them to. As the following narrative shows, they are walking in a quite literal sense. The dynamic process that underpins the community is also a process that intensifies as it continues, as it is physically, emotionally, and spiritually challenging, bringing hardships to the community.147 Hence, Bradford describes the history of the community as building to a climax, as the challenges and hardships culminating in the community’s experiences in the New World.148
In the fourth chapter of his book, Bradford elaborates on the inducements toward taking the journey “Showing ye reasons & causes of their remoovall.” As instructed by the ‘grave mistress experience’, following long consideration and not due to any ‘new-fangledness’, the idea of removing to some other place became dominant within the community.149 The primary reason behind the decision to move, as Bradford argues in the introductory first chapter of his book, was a current danger: Satan’s primordial, ongoing, everlasting wars against the Saints.
It is well knowne unto ye godly and judicious, how ever since ye first breaking out of ye lighte of ye gospell in our Honorable Nation of England, (which was ye first of nations whom ye Lord adorned ther with, affter yt grosse darknes of popery which had covered & overspred ye Christian worled,) what warrs & opposissions ever since, Satan has raised, maintained, and continued against the Saincts, from time to time, in one sorte or other.150
These wars were manifested in the suppression of religious liberty in their home countries, in the dangers of physical persecution and, not least, in the danger of being spiritually seduced by the evil temptations present in their current environment.151 Of course, this self-image is modeled after a Biblical model form that provides the description with transcendental significance. Bradford, accordingly, makes use of the Anglo-Saxon myth of migration152 and “describes the exodus of the Pilgrim Fathers through England, Holland, and America as the ultimate test of faith in divine Providence that the English Israel must undergo.”153
In Bradford’s account, the faith-testing challenges the pilgrims would face started well before their famous crossing of the Atlantic. The Puritan Separatists, later the Pilgrim Fathers, having publicly refused allegiance to any institutional authority on their journey from Scrooby Manor, where their first congregation was formed, proceeded to the Dutch Republic, first to Amsterdam and then to Leiden:
[B]y a joynte consente they resolved to goe into ye Low-Countries, wher they heard was freedome of Religion for all men.154
Here, after a nine-month stay in Amsterdam, they established a place for themselves at ‘Stink Alley’ in Leiden.155 However, the religious tolerance of their new place of residence also presented some severe drawbacks to Bradford’s communities, as they were confronted with other communities that they saw as threatening their spiritual well-being. Though admittedly, they did not suffer institutional persecution in the Dutch Republic, Bradford takes great pains in describing the situation with reference to the situation of the Israelites in Egypt.156 Ultimately, the aims of Bradford’s community reveal a significant spatial dimension. Explaining the reasons for the idea ‘of remoovall to some other place’, Bradford lists the hardships of their present place as unlikely to allow the community to prosper, the untimely decrease in its members due to the hard conditions and a general atmosphere that made them feel as though they were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, the few youth of the community fought in vain against the temptations of their environment, thus endangering their spiritual well-being and causing grief to their parents. According to Bradford, there was another, yet still more important reason behind their decision to go:
Lastly, (and which was not least), a great hope & inward zeall they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for ye propagating & advancing ye gospell of ye kingdom of Christ in those remote part of ye world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for ye performing of so great a work. These, & some other like reasons, moved them to undertake this resolution of their removal; the which they afterward prosecuted with so great difficulties, as by the sequell will appeare.157
In Bradford’s account, the ‘great hope and the inward zeal’ represent an urge toward transcendence that operates in conjunction with the physical journey to the New World. Hence, the future Pilgrim Fathers were (creatively) driven by the hope of contributing to a transcending process that would qualitatively change them via their own physical transfer to some distant shore.
Their special ontological status is stressed by Bradford in his account of the departure from the Netherlands. Here, in the lines that earned Bradford’s group the name of the Pilgrim Fathers, the ‘pleasant city’ of Leiden is rhetorically opposed to the transient state of the departing travelers:
So they lefte ye goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12. years; but they knew they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to ye heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quited their spirits.158
Titling the community here as pilgrims, Bradford makes use of a Biblical model form derived from Hebrews 11, 8, and 13. He thus relates his community and their future journey to the status of the patriarchs of the Old Testament, who went out without knowing where they did go,159 yet saw the promised land ‘afar off’,160 and accepted their fundamentally transient existential status.161 Bradford here employs a strongly specified TID, and in his work, the city of Leiden is implicitly juxtaposed and contrasted with the city of God as the final destination of all (self-)transcending pilgrims.162 Tearing their eyes away from the goods and pleasures of the world and instead lifting them up to heaven makes the journey of the pilgrims a transcendental endeavor. They overcome the world for the sake of a heavenly space beyond, which directs their spirit toward the ‘dearest country’, the ultimate place of the pilgrim’s longing.163
Thus, the process of crossing the ocean becomes the experiential expression of an ontological concept concerning the status of the religious individuals and the religious group involved, a concept that is developed by employing a specific form of the TID. The three levels of the model, thus, can be identified in Bradford’s object language account. By reflecting on the journey, Bradford points out that the transitional process of moving between ‘here’ (Europe) and ‘there’ (the New World) might, or rather should, be interpreted in terms of the specified TID—the earthy and the heavenly city and the transient state of the pilgrims between them. This is a model to him that is prefigured in the biblical text in the exemplary role played by Abraham in the Letter to the Hebrews. The physical act of crossing, therefore, is ascribed with a specifically religious sense.164
The journey itself, however, was far from being a surefire success. It was neither pleasant nor easy, and was fraught with dangers both physical and emotional. The travelers faced an abundance of challenges and inconveniences that Bradford characterizes as tests of their spiritual integrity. The parting from Holland was itself emotionally depressing and sorrowful.
The next day, the wind being faire, they wente aborde, and their friends with them, where truly dolfull was ye sight of that sade and mournfull parting; to see what sighs and sobs and praires did sound amongst them, what tears did gush from every eye, & pithy speeches peirst each harte.165
The ships they had engaged were leaky, obliging the travelers to return to England having proceeded a mere hundred leagues beyond Land’s End. They were finally forced to leave one vessel behind—and with the ship, they abandoned those who were more skeptical about the possible success of the journey. Prominent among these deserters was the captain of the ship, who was accused by Bradford of playing up the bad condition of the ship in order to free himself from his contract owing to his “self-love and fears, as he forget all duty and former kindness.”166 Thus purified from reluctant or otherwise diabolical elements, the pilgrims continued their journey “now all being compacte together in the one ship.” Here, the final nonconformist element, a “proud & very profane” sailor who harassed and cursed the sea-sick passengers, died from an illness and was thrown overboard by “a spetiall worke of Gods providence.”167 The temptation of returning to England after a series of storms and bad weather was resolved by ‘committing themselves to the will of God’ to continue their perilous and storm-ridden journey. Having delivered themselves into the hands of the Lord—as Bradford suggests—the remainder of the journey witnessed the death of only one traveler,168 and also saw the miraculous rescue of a passenger (“a lustie yonge man”) who fell overboard. The man later on became “a profitable member both in church & comone wealthe.”169 Nearly drowning in the water, here, serves as an indicator of rebirth by means of a vehement and insistent baptism.170 The journey thus gains further transcendent significance: as a trial for the pilgrims and as a purification and rebirthing process. It is a manifestation of commitment to divine providence and, thus, to the divine sphere, as opposed to the perilous conditions of the earth.
The transcending process embodied in the journey, and with it, the transcending ontological status of the passengers, is maintained even after the final landing on the American continent, about which “they were not a litle joyfull.” Bradford’s description of the arrival of the travelers on the shore of the new world is quite famous:
Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper element.171
Thus, the very possibility of crossing the ocean is attributed to God’s will as the travelers here are not in touch with their ‘proper element’, the earth. The earthy beings thus had to overcome or were made to overcome, their physical and spiritual restrictions that relate to the biblical fact of their creation from earth. They transcended their status through being forced to travel amid an alien and hostile element that is far from being ‘firm and stable’. The Pilgrim Fathers’ shaking knees and their troubled sense of balance after a long and demanding journey on the ocean are used by Bradford to illustrate the very physical impacts of their journey with regard to the transcending process of crossing the ocean directed by the prospect of the heavenly city. Falling on their knees to bless the Lord, however, transcends the physical lack of capacity the pilgrims had at that moment. To Bradford, the gesture expressed a transcendent reality, man’s directedness towards God manifested in a gesture of deepest gratitude.172
Despite their safe arrival, not all was well. Though they had, in fact, reached a (already well-known) comparatively good harbor that provided favorable conditions for future settlement, they had not reached the safe harbor they longed for.173 Bradford makes it very clear that the transcendental crossing of the ocean did not relieve the pilgrims of their physical and worldly needs. To underline the significance of this insight, even his narrative comes to a standstill that is both astounded and astounding. Their physical condition and situation were desperate, as “perhaps the most widely quoted and anthologized passage of colonial American literature”174 impressively suggests:
But hear I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amased at these poore peoples presente condition; and so I thinke will the reader too, when he well considers ye same. Being thus passed ye vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation […], they had now no freinds to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure.175
In employing this narrative pause, Bradford explicitly stands back and looks beyond and forces the reader of his account to do likewise. The act of formal transcending has significant effects. The vast ocean and the sea of troubles faced beyond it are put into a close metaphoric relation, Bradford underlines the perturbed state of being the travelers had to pass in order to reach another shore where they could perform their spiritual goal. Bradford stresses this state by emphasizing the separation between the pilgrim’s present existence and their former life, a separation that forms another distinction between a present ‘here’ and a past ‘there’ which has been transcended:
If they looked behind them, ther was ye mightly ocean which they had passed, and was now as a maine barr & goulfe to separate them from all ye cvill parts of ye world.176
Separation, here, has become a threatening physical reality to the Separatist Puritans. On the new shore, however, there are no resources to refresh their emotional and bodily state. Rather, nature itself seems opposed to them, and the inhabitants of the New World would rather “fill their sids full of arrows than otherwise.”177 The testing of the passengers continues. To accentuate this impression, Bradford “shows a marked tendency to uglify the New World by making it resemble the deserts, the wildernesses, and other hellish places found in the Bible.”178 Their condition even outdoes the hardships of the religious heroes in Biblical narrative, Paul’s shipwreck on Malta from Acts 27 and 28, that serves as the ever-present reference, or rather, model form, for Bradford’s account.179 Even the apostle and his shipwrecked company encountered a kinder welcome than the miserable travelers, thus religiously intensifying the transcending process they have performed and continue to perform. The hostile environment offered no solace for them, so they continued their process of transcending, thus overcoming their physical misery:
And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of ye cuntrie know them to be sharp & violent, & subjecte to cruell & feirce storms, deangerous to travill to known places, much more to serch an unknown coast. Besids, what could they see but a hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & willd men? and what mutituds ther might be of them they knew not. Nether could they, as it were, goe up to ye top of Pisgah, to vew from this wilderness a more goodly cuntrie to feed their hops; for which way soever they turnd their eyes (save upward to ye heavens) they could have little solace or content in respecte of any outward objects.180
Bradford’s story of transcending conspicuously features no mountains. However, the travelers’ situation here is characterized by the model of Moses, who, from the mountaintop of Pisgah, could see the Promised Land but could not reach it. The Pilgrims do not have the benefit of that vision. They are, so to speak, flatly in-between, indicating promise and rigid prohibition. The transcendental process goes on. Thus, the passengers of the Mayflower remain passengers, in a permanently transcending state. To Bradford, there is no arrival for the pilgrims. Instead, they are always on the move. In his description, the land they arrived in resembles more a worldly hell than a terrestrial paradise. However, all these means he employs are, in fact intended to stress the TID and the process of transcending that a proper religious person of that community must perform.181 In doing so, they are enabled to counteract “the slippings of their profane sense of self.”182 Transcending the individual self to become a part of a transcending community is yet another of the transcending processes associated with the Pilgrim’s transatlantic journey.183 As José María Rodríguez García notes: “To be sure, Bradford was more interested in having his community repeat the errand of the Old Testament prophets than he was in paving the way for the doctrinal arrival at the Terrestrial Paradise, the New England Canaan […] For the Plymouth Governor, the American sojourn signified primarily an intermedial stage in the long journey of preparation for his community’s spiritual (rather than physical) arrival at the Promised Land.”184
With the last lines of the ninth chapter of On Plymouth Plantation, Bradford even transcends the time of his narrative, turning to a vision of the future that encompasses not only the possible reactions to his report but also anticipates a legacy by which the afterworld might model its future attitude and action.185 This attitude is in itself fashioned after biblical model forms:186
May not & ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this willderness; but they cried unto ye Lord, and he heard their voice, and looked on their adversitie, &c. Let them therfore praise ye Lord, because he is good, & his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of ye Lord, shew how he hath delivered them from ye hand of ye oppressour. When they wandered in ye deserte willderness out of ye way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie, & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before ye Lord his loving kindness, and his wonderfull works before ye sons of men.187
Although later commentators have hinted at the supposed decline of Bradford’s narrative capacity after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers had been described (again with some reference to Hamlet: “Bradford’s history begins magnificently, diminishes into a tedious account of unsorted administrative details, and ends, uncompleted, in silence.”188 ) the process of transcending through contrasts that is employed by Bradford to structure his account can be expected to continue, potentially forever.
Bradford’s book provides an object language narrative on the basis of a specified TID. Basic transcendence is expressed in spatial shifts that are pointed out in the narrative (formal transcendence) or interpreted as being essentially related to the doctrinally specified TID. This is achieved in the sense that the specified transcendent sphere can only be reached via a permanent process of transcending, represented as travel. The preeminence of spatial metaphors is once again obvious in his presentation of the perilous crossing of the ocean. The different analytic levels of the TID are here intermingled within a story that claims, in the first place, to be a historical account.
6.3 Transcending the Walls of Paradise—the Role of Human Language in Nicholas of Cusa’s Concepts of God
The third example stems from medieval Europe as it was perched on the verge of the early modern or rather, the Renaissance.189 In this example, the very processuality of transcending that is triggered by the employment of the TID is addressed. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the process of transcending is that according to reflective object language religious thinkers, the process of transcending cannot be concluded. There is no stage at which transcendence as such is reached—reaching it would be self-contradictory and, thus, would not be transcendence. Rather, transcending is characterized by its very indeterminability. This insight has twin results, for it is both a humiliation and a motivating challenge to the reflective human mind.
On a very sophisticated object language level, one instance of this indeterminability is found in Nicholas of Cusa’s search for an adequate name of God, or rather, a notion of the divine. According to him, the name of God is only to be approached asymptotically by an intensifying process of trial and error due to the insurmountable ‘walls of paradise’ (murus paradisi). Through this metaphor, Cusanus (1401–1464) illustrates the insurmountable limits of the human mind, characterized by this tendency to process via distinctions. An adequate notion of God can only be reached asymptotically by continuously transcending (transcendenter) rational limitations.
Hence, the persistent philosophical thorn in the intellectual flesh of Nicholas of Cusa was the search—or, in his words, pilgrimage—for an adequate concept and name of God.190 Cusanus, during his investigation (formal transcending) of a concept of specified transcendence, employs a spatial metaphor of movement (pilgrimage). Philosophically interesting as it may be, his philosophical project founded on a religious basis has political significance in addition to its theological implications, for it explicitly discusses the possibility of religious concordance. If one could find the true name of God, Nicholas claims, religious diversity would become much less dangerous. Cusanus’ ideas are, therefore, triggered and strongly motivated by situations of religious contact.
Unfortunately, Nicholas’s sublime aims prove a mission impossible for limited human intellectual capacity. In his 1453 religious multilogue De pace fidei, Nicholas describes both the human longing for God’s true name and the problems associated with his hunt:
You, then, who are the giver of life and of existence, are the one who is seen to be sought in different ways in different rites, and You are named in different names; for as You are [in Yourself] You remain unknown and ineffable to all.191
God’s true name, being identical with truth, is a shared desire of all, as the perception of truth is happiness itself. He who gives life is often called upon and is named in many different ways, but all of them are unsuccessful—at least if you share the magical conviction that naming an object gives as well power over it.
In his research, Nicholas follows a traditional intellectual pattern. Concerning the limits of human thinking, Thomas Aquinas seems to have anticipated Cusanus’ results. To Aquinas, the ultimate insight into God is to recognize that one does not know God. “Illud est ultimum cognitionis humanae de Deo quod sciat se Deum nescire” (de potentia, q. 7, a. 5, ad 14). The unrecognizability itself is God.192 But there is another important point here. To use Schwartz’s term, there is always the persistent search for transcendence in reflective human beings. God’s unrecognizability is not the end of human efforts and action. Despite this, there remains the dire longing for understanding in all humans. For Nicholas, mankind is united in longing for him,193 united in the ‘pursuit of happiness’194 —and this could be the basis for a concordance of religion and politics.195
To Nicholas, philosophical reflection, as a conscious or formally transcending process of standing back and looking beyond, can be of much practical help here. As man’s finest ability, philosophy is mainly concerned with the conceptualization of his environment. In all his work, the leading question of all human research is, ultimately, the question of God, who resists all meek attempts of human beings toward conceptual explication. Though Nicholas, in his best moments seems to grasp a glimpse of conceptualization and, thus, arrives at the mere possibility of theo-logy, such momentary insight is overcome at the next instant by God’s overwhelming inexplicability. “Adverte igitur […] quam clara atque brevis est theologia, sermone inexplicabilis […].”196 Though theology is clear and short, it is not explicable in words. Nicholas explains this with a very skeptical-sounding statement:
That it is neither the case that He is named or is not named nor the case that He both is named and is not named. Rather, whatever can be said disjunctively or conjunctively, whether consistently or contradictorily, does not benefit Him (because of the excellence of his infinity), so that He is the one Beginning, which is prior to ever thought formable of it.197
God is beyond even the conjunction of being named and not being named, as he is the primary principle. This reflection on the name of God leads Nicholas, himself as cardinal of the Church, directly to the audacious statement that being itself cannot be attached to Him, as He is beyond this contradiction.
Rational thinking truly reached rock bottom in Nicholas’s description. However, it is precisely at this point that philosophical fortune turns and rational thinking transcends itself. Nicholas celebrates the turning point enthusiastically: his De visione dei reads:
And You, O Lord, who are the Nourishment of the full-grown, have encouraged me to do violence to myself, because impossibility coincides with necessity. And I have found an abode wherein You dwell unveiledly—an abode surrounded by the coincidence of contradictories. And [this coincidence] is the wall of Paradise, wherein You dwell. The gate of this wall is guarded by a most lofty rational spirit; unless this spirit is vanquished the entrance will not be accessible. Therefore, on the other side of the coincidence of contradictories You can be seen—but not at all on this side.198
Here, contemplating on the coincidence of impossibility and necessity, we find a key term that will prove to be of decisive importance for Nicholas: vis.199 It is the force, a process, that turns against the user in a very special way, thereby overcoming his most esteemed ability of rational thought (altissimus rationis). However, it is also the way to gain intellectual nourishment, or rather, to transcend the walls of paradise (murus paradisi).200
As expected, Nicholas employs a strong form of a specific transcendence/immanence distinction expressed via a liminal spatial metaphor. An insurmountable wall is erected between God and human understanding, and it is guarded by pure reason itself. However, is silence the only possible reaction to this situation? No, for Nicholas shares Proclus’ opinion that God is beyond every theology as he is beyond silence.201 To modify Wittgenstein: Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man immer wieder reden. Therefore, the way of language is still open; it is in fact the only path. However, without denying reason, the wall cannot be transcended.
The wall thus signifies the essential interrelatedness of the transcendence/ immanence distinction. This interplay triggers the process of thinking. In his book on Cusanus, Karl Jaspers explains the decisive function of the forbidding wall of paradise for human thinking:
A wall encompasses the divine sphere, insurmountable for us. But the Beyond takes effect; it is present by giving ground for everything. We flounder if we try to break through it but we experience the wall as a sign of divinity which holds us.202
Hence, as the unnamable Name of God is the most significant object of investigation, it is also an indication of how to transcend the wall of paradise. Thus, what could be more promising and attractive than the possibility of regaining paradise through philosophical thinking?
Reaching the wall is not the end of human effort but rather the beginning of philosophical insight, which is directed toward the process of transcending itself rather than content. Surprisingly enough, it is the interplay between attempt and failure that Nicholas considered to be significant and to provide worthwhile intellectual work. Cusanus does not embrace skepticism or nihilism as a result of his philosophy but rather points insistently at the dynamic relationship of assertion and negation, or rather, of both theologia negativa and theologia affirmativa as the true basis of human thinking in general. Theologia negativa and Theologia affirmativa coincide in the permanently transcending philosophical theology, for which Cusanus coined the term docta ignorantia. In concordance with the ideas of one of his most estimated predecessors, Ramon Llull, Nicholas intends to sketch a methodology for research in general, an ars generalis, drafted as a dynamic process.203 Thinking means trial and error, as well as challenge and response. It follows that the tragic failure of human existence lies in the tendency to stand still (without looking beyond), thus halting the process of transcendence.204 Knowledge is not managing one’s intellectual property but the very process of research; and hence, it is restlessness and agitation.205 It is the unending process of transcending.
Cusanus, as an actor on the object language level, deals with the problem posed above by introducing a fictitious situation of religious contact. In his dialogue, De deo abscondito between a pagan (Gentilis) and a Christian (Christianus) participant, the ‘conceptive’ power of God’s non-conceptability is strongly stressed:
Pagan: But is He ineffable? Christian: He is not ineffable, though He is beyond all things effable; for He is the Cause of all namable things. How is it, then, That He Himself, who gives others a name, is without name?206
The interplay of assertion and denial in thought work formally asserts a special kind of concept or notion to be used here in order to continue transcending. All statements and concepts concerning God must maintain the contradictory balance of negation and affirmation. They cannot be used for definitions but merely as indications of a process that both transcends and allows further human philosophical or theological speculation. Thus, the unity of God as the ‘notion of notions’ is the precondition for the search.207 In fact, a new language is needed to transcend human inadequacy.208 Language is the ladder that leads human thinking to divine spheres. As a consequence, conceptual experiments to Nicholas are not mere idle linguistic games. Rather, these experiments gain ontological significance by leading human thinking to transcend itself by a process of perpetual approximation. Nicholas, in reflecting on the name of God, therefore, does not promote a self-sufficient system of true assertions as the final goal of human knowledge but rather a methodologically derived opening for various ways of transcending one’s own limits.209
Accordingly, the status of language and concepts in Nicholas’ thinking cannot be overestimated. As Kurt Flasch states, to Nicolas, being is language.210 The special status of man as a Deus secundus was founded on the fact that man was created to be the image of God, mirroring God’s creativity.211 This state manifests itself in man’s linguistic ability and his potential to create concepts, which leads to a whole ‘universe of vocabulary’ (Vokabeluniversum).212 However, Sine mente non fit conceptus.213 An important conclusion can be drawn from this first god-related anthropological definition. Formally, notions and concepts are figural indications of God’s creative powers; they are not identifications of objects. Man’s creative power in devising notions represents the one notion that enables and grounds this power while not being any subject to this power, for God is absolutus and removed from the sphere of human intellect. Semiotically speaking, man’s utmost intellectual power consists of creating, reading, and working with signs, which, nevertheless, allows gathering knowledge of the one thus indicated.214 To Cusanus, knowledge is semiosis. We only know the signs, but we also know that they are Signs of the Light (signa lucis).215 Human reason is only, but also not less than, a reflection of divine action in creating things: conceptio divinae mentis est rerum productio; conceptio nostrae mentis est rerum notio.216 The notion of God does not signify God directly, but by permanently transcending itself, signifies his creative power and thus indicates him indirectly. However, as only an indication, it also points at its own inadequacy.217 Being a deus secundus, man analogously creates notions, which nevertheless approximate the truth by transcending themselves, this being the higher form of theologia affirmativa, that is, transcensus. Creating notions, therefore, operatively enables transcendence. Notions are regulative principles for both human understanding and human action. Reasonable action is working with and on notions in order to create a new basic system of notions.
The requirements of such a language are explicated by Nicholas in his dialogue Idiota de sapientia:
For if I am to disclose to you the concept that I have of God, then if my locution is to be of help to you, it must be such that its words are significative—so that in this way I can lead you (through the meaning- of-the-word which is known to us both) unto what is sought.218
There is a certain power to words (vis vocabuli) that can lead the searching mind on its way. The indicative power of certain words is thus much more important than their meaning. In metaphysical terms, for Nicholas, it is completely misleading to look for the meaning of the key terms and notions as they have quite another function in the process of philosophizing. Though it is surely better to examine the context of the word and provide a contextual meaning rather than looking for definitions of its content, the key idea of Cusanus’ philosophy will still be concealed. The point is that the basic notions have no meaning, but it is still a fallacy to conclude that they are senseless and, therefore, ought to be abolished from any responsible philosophy. Basic notions are essentially functional. The vis vocabuli Nicolas points at is the formal power of indicating and, thus, transcending the common use of language. Jan Bernd Elpert has identified the overall motto of Cusanus’ intellectual efforts as ad deum per vim vocabuli.219 Metaphysical notions, as with all basic notions and especially the notion of God as the notion of notions, are formal indications. If God is the final goal of research, then corresponding science must be linguistically based, which is both the easiest and most adequate way forward. “Unde haec est sermocinalis theologia, qua nitor te ad Deum per vim vocabuli ducere modo quo possum faciliori et veriori.”220 The ‘power of words’ guides the human mind by transcending it.221 The shortness and clarity of the affirmative theology (theologia sermocinalis) result from the simplicity of the complicated Word (of God).
Closely related to the creative power of human beings concerning notions is the impositio nominis of man, based on Genesis 2,19. It is thus important to God to see Adam in his naming competence. Naming God himself becomes a matter of Visione Dei.
In his work, Nicholas repeatedly experiments with the vis vocabuli with reference to God’s name. In a 1441 sermon, he expounds his rather demanding idea of what a name should accomplish. A name should be the perfect basis for understanding the object named, leading to full insight.222 To fulfill such a demand, an authority is needed to guarantee the insight, which is not itself subject to the process of naming—and that is nothing else than God’s unnamable name. Therefore, every finite name is only a name in the proper sense of the word if it is an image of the divine name.223 As a consequence, every possible name functionally indicates God’s name: every name is an explication (explicatio) of the complicated (complicatio), infinite name. Every name is God’s, and every name is of God. For Nicholas, this insight brings with it a philosophical duty to experiment with indicating names, which must be transcended.
The experimental nature of his writings has a strong impact on their particular form. Nicholas developed a special literary technique to express the formal intention of his work. One could describe the literary form of his texts as written spiritual exercises of transcending, which begin in everyday observation—for example, with a spoon (idiota de mente), a portrait (de visione dei), children at play (de ludo globi), or even syllables or letters (de possest). Accordingly, there is little secrecy in Cusanus’ thinking, but rather, he shows the unnamable within the obvious224 —a practical reference to the Letter to the Romans 1,20.225 In his writings, Cusanus performs a process of transcending, taking everyday experiences and objects of daily routine as his starting point. He claims that these experiences, practices, and objects essentially transcend themselves, thus indicating a way to the higher and, ultimately, the highest forms of transcendence.
To Cusanus, through transcending, simple everyday material becomes religioid material and, ultimately, religious material through an unlimited process. Usually, Cusanus takes his starting point of research in daily life, that is, here, in ordinary philosophical language. The common name Deus as used in philosophical treatises is not adequate, but it might be used as a starting point for further reflection due to its intellectual popularity:
For we do not call true the statement that ‘God’ is His name; nor do we call that statement false, for it is not false that ‘God’ is His name. Nor do we say that the statement is both true and false since His simplicity precedes both all namable things and all unnamable things.226
On the other hand, due to the anteceding primacy of God’s Name, the word Deus might be used as a sign of God’s actions thanks to its etymology: Nicholas states that Deus originally stems from the Greek word
In almost all of his writings, Cusanus transcends the usual theological language and courageously experiments with neologisms. Such linguistic creativity aroused the anger and suspicion of his contemporaries, who accused him of Anti-Aristotelism or attempting to destroy all possibility of scientific knowledge—rather than of heresy, as might have been expected. The word possest, which appears in a 1459 dialogue De possest, combines the indefinite posse with the finite est and is the linguistic sign for the notorious coincidentia oppositorum. Interestingly, the coincidentia is not indicated by mathematical figures as in De docta ignorantia, but rather in language and grammar itself. This complication in God’s name indicates the ‘super’-rational coincidence of absolute possibility and highest reality—thus linguistically challenging the custodian of reason at the walls of paradise. Other weapons in this struggle to transcend are posse fieri (in De venatione sapientiae) and posse ipsum. In one of his last texts, the Compendium (1463), Cusanus considers posse to be the most promising candidate for his transcending efforts.
One of the more famous proposed names of God, developed by Nicholas later in his life, is the non-aliud. In his text Directio speculantis seu de li non aliud he gives a definition of the non-aliud that would make any hard-boiled logician of modern times burst into tears: “Not-other is no other than Not-other” (‘non aliud’ est non aliud quam non aliud). As a metaphysical assertion, this is tautological and notoriously senseless, thanks to a modern understanding that closely connects words to a concept of meaning.228 For Nicholas, nevertheless, this sentence was a big step in understanding the transcending function of God’s name for conceptualizing the human mind. Explicating its complicity, he firstly indicates that a correct reading of the sentence does not have the form ‘A equals A equals A (A = A = A)’, but rather it should be read ‘A is A pointing at A (indicating itself) (A
If the same thing repeated three times is the definition of the First, as you recognize [it to be], then assuredly the First is triune—and for no other reason than that it defines itself. If it did not define itself, it would not be the First; yet, since it defines itself, it shows itself to be triune. Therefore, you see that out of that perfection there results a trinity.229
Tautologies are only senseless if they are taken to be equations; in metaphysical contexts, they indicate self-reference, which allows the transcendence of both language and thinking.230 In his philosophical work, Nicholas Cusanus tries over and over again to establish a conceptual language of formal transcendence.231 The philosopher, in search of God’s name is continuously standing back and looking beyond his own conceptual abilities, thus permanently transcending the notions used and modifying them through the reflective process.
All of Nicholas’ efforts are intended to develop a dense and short formula as a linguistic sign that would open itself for the self-explication of the Complicated, God himself. The names of God are conceptual blank spaces where the epiphany may take place, thus transcending human thinking to a Visione dei—a vision of God in the double sense of grammar. The names are expressions of a phenomenology that conceptually allows the only phenomena worthwhile to show itself. The truth cannot be reached through the medium of language, but language becomes the medium of truth if rationality is transcended through experimentation with notions.
7 Transcending and Semiosis
How can the unending process indicated by the transcendence/immanence distinction be scientifically captured? How can it be modeled and conceptualized? On a systematic level, it might be suggested that this processing of religioid material can be analyzed as a form of semiosis. Not only is semiosis also considered to be indeterminable, but the process of transcending also reflects the process of signs (Zeichenprozeß, Zeichengeschehen) in general.232
The three-level model elaborated above does not suppose an evolution of transcendence from a more primitive to a more elaborate form over the course of a historical process but rather characterizes the attempt to observe religioid material in its internal (systematic) processing. This does, however, not exclude an examination of the history of the notions of transcendence and immanence as a historical development. We could systematically examine the process of transcending as semiotics, with its basic process one of semiosis. By applying semiotics, one might hope to find the answer to the question of when, within the transcending process, the point is reached where one’s material interprets itself—that is, when object language itself introduces second-order observation or a metalanguage. This is also important for the dynamics of religion, for here, the material becomes a ‘dynamic object’: something that generates a chain of immediate objects or signs in the form of interpretations or commentaries.233
In semiotic terms, the main questions concerning the three-level model of transcendence are as follows. When is a point reached in the process of semiosis at which the material provides interpretations of itself? An answer to this question would provide the starting point for analysis within the religious tradition under consideration. In simple terms, when is metalanguage introduced on the object linguistic level? When and under what circumstances does second-order observation occur? When and under what circumstances are existing relationships between transcendence and immanence approached as religious relations? It must be stressed again that this approach is systematic and not historical in nature. The systematic self-reference and self-identification of religion per se has to be distinguished from the process of formation of individual religions and the demarcation processes by which religions distinguish themselves from one another.
Semiosis, meaning the action of any kind of sign, involves the action of three elements (‘subjects’), namely sign, object, and interpretant. This three-way influence is manifested in the transcendence/immanence distinction, even on the level of basic transcendence (here, there, world). Semiosis, as a process of signs, normally produces new qualities and capacities, such as ideas of formal or even specific transcendence, thus performing an evolutionary function in cosmology or, rather, in cultural history that may include the history of religions.
My assumption is that the evolutionary process regarding transcendence is basically semiotic in nature. One can show this with reference to the basic notion of transcendence. As Raymond Tallis has elaborated, the gesture of pointing (at) can be used for the exploration of everyday transcendence.234 To point at (something) overcomes the boundaries of one’s own body and establishes a commonly shared world. First of all, transcendence is an indication of direction. The simple indexical, or rather, deictic expression ‘(over) there’ does not only introduce ‘the other’, the things separated from oneself but at the same time introduces the relational ‘here’, one’s own things. This is not to forget the common frame, the world or context of indication, which comprises ‘there’ and ‘here’, the one pointing, the thing pointed at, and the one to whom something is shown by pointing. So, pointing contains the potential to transcend oneself and, by introducing a common horizon (of understanding), to return to ‘oneself’ as the origin of the assigning process. Therefore, basic transcendence establishes a primordial triad in an interrelated process. It introduces basic concepts of transcendence, immanence and their associated interplay. The gesture of ‘pointing at’ introduces a complex transcending process that makes it possible to step back and look beyond. Generally speaking, it introduces the concept of space, which is, by definition, transcendent or transcending space.235
The space established here is furthermore qualified as a product and expression of sign-processes. As Tallis put it: “We are unique in having a public domain, a place in which truth and falsehood emerge. This domain is first of all stitched together by joint attention made explicit through signs, foremost among which is the gesture of the index finger.”236 The inner coherence of the transcendent space is mediated by signs based upon deixis.
Imagine, as an example, a conceptually innocent baby performing the gesture of pointing. By doing so, through the threefold processual structure of there, here, and the combination of there and here, the ‘world’ is established. By examining this gesture of pointing, an observer may point out that something like a semiotic structure comprising transcending elements is established. As a possible further step, the pointing child may be furthermore qualified through the ascription of religious sense. The pointing child might, therefore, be pointed out to have religious meaning, such as in the case of Baby Jesus pointing at his mother or the shepherds.
8 TID and Contrast
It is no secret that the assumption that the TID is a necessary feature of all religions has a Luhmannian background, hailing from Niklas Luhmann’s assumption that the transcendence/immanence distinction is the primary code of religious communication. With the following considerations, I intend to open up a new and hopefully fruitful perspective on that idea.
Several dichotomies found in object language material might be examined as cases of basic transcendence, such as the dialogical I-thou relation, the temporal Present-Future (or Present-Past), or even logical p and non-p. To me, the most interesting point stems from an observation Kianoosh Rezania made in a 2016 KHK meeting. It concerns a relationship between relations, i.e., the relationship of the TID to the relationship between unity and manifoldness or the one and the many. It is the observation that the process of transcending heads towards indifference in the sense of non-differentiation.237
Therefore, as the notion of ‘transcending’ indicates, one is well advised to interpret the relationship not only as a distinction, but also as a process. And if the notion of process arises, in philosophical discussions one inevitably turns to Alfred North Whitehead.
Whiteheadian ideas played a salient role in the considerations of dynamics and stability outlined earlier in this volume.238 Concerning the relationship between dynamics and stability, Whitehead suggested that it might be described as an elliptic stability of dynamic bipolarity that combines the physical and the metal pole of every actual occasion (entity). That the parts of a bipolar relation only ‘make sense by mutual reference’ does not merely say that they are not explainable without the other, but rather that the process between them, the mutual reference, generates meaning (as interpretation or expression), and therefore is the birthplace of sense. The introduction of emphasis, valuation, and purpose (meaning) means the introduction of intensification. The integration of the mental and the physical pole provides a concrescence that may be characterized as an axial rotation; it is not only the mind informing the body but also the ongoing repercussions of the information. This may lead to ‘ideal forms’ that may be used as schemes or model forms (potentials) in realizing self-formation, for example, in self-reflection. On the TID itself, Whitehead accordingly notes:
Immanence and transcendence are the characteristics of an object: as a realized determinant it is immanent; as a capacity for determination it is transcendent, in both rôles it is relevant to something not itself.239
As a matter of fact, I would like to introduce the notion of contrast, as found in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, to the TID model in order to describe the threshold zones between the three forms of the TID more adequately. Transcendence and, above all, the notion of transcending work via contrast. To adopt the notion of contrast from Whitehead’s thinking is intended to further explicate the idea of guiding dichotomic codes and their role in the description of the phenomena, above all, the role of the transcendence/immanence distinction, considered to be the primary code of religious communication.
According to Whitehead, religion’s main problem “is to link finitude to infinitude,” as he puts it in one of his dialogues recorded by the journalist Lucien Price.240 Religion’s main task, therefore, may be described as mediating something that is expressed in terms of difference. Thus, it is a relationship of contrasts. This task makes religion a worthwhile subject for philosophical reflection. Shortly after this statement, Whitehead talks about the central problem of modern philosophy, which is, in turn, the old Platonian question of “how to relate the one and the many.”241 To me, this seems to be the same structural problem religion both faces and seeks to answer: how to deal with contrast. On the object language level, contrast can be introduced to separate and relate the human and the divine sphere. William Bradford, in On Plymouth Plantation, makes repeated use of the contrast between God and men regarding power, thus exalting God’s majesty and, at the same time, man’s dependence and directedness towards that supreme majesty as an ontological fundamental.242
In Process and Reality Whitehead introduces the notion of contrast as a fundamental, and hence, relationships are abstractions.243 To Whitehead, relational religion, therefore, would be contrasting religion. The relations of affirmation and negation are no more than the most important contrast. Contrast is not to be confused with incompatibility, as contrast means the particular relation between contrasting elements. Therefore, the notion of contrast as a category expresses “Modes of Synthesis of Entities in one Prehension, or Patterned entities,”244 including the possibility of “an indefinite progression of categories, as we proceed from ‘contrasts’ to ‘contrasts of contrasts’, an on indefinitely higher grades of contrasts.”245 Cusanus, for instance, describes the process of transcending as a process of contrasting contrasts, such as logical contradiction. Processes of contrasts, therefore, do not unfold merely in a linear way but in many directions, allowing for diversity of perspective. But this also means that as a transcending contrast, a contrast can only be perceived if it is contrasted against another contrast, i.e., by a contrast of contrasts that, in turn, can be contrasted themselves and so on. The concept of transcending, thus, does not necessarily relate to a distinction between two fixed spheres246 but rather is linked to contingent contrasts that are dependent on other contrasts.247
The processual emergence of a meta-contrast allows the emergence of a reflective sphere (expressing, examining) directed toward the first contrast—hence, the emergence of what we call formal transcendence via contrasting the first contrast. Basic and formal transcendence, thus, are more closely connected than expected. To give an example, the contrast of black and grey is needed to contrast the contrast of black and white in order to denote it as a contrast.
Now, what are the advantages of introducing this notion? As such, the notion of contrast, on the one hand, allows the acknowledgment of the mutual interdependency of the contrasted. It expresses their close interrelation in the distinction, as opposed to an idea of pure opposition. On the other hand, it permits the possibility of gradual distinction as there are quantitatively and qualitatively higher and lower levels of contrast.248 For example, the color black may contrast with white, but it also contrasts with grey. Darker and brighter greys themselves present another form of contrast. Third, each contrast is a whole, an ‘entity’ of its own, that as such is part of the process and not only as a combination of the things contrasted. This is due to Whitehead’s basic systematic assumption that the combination of actual entities (nexus) is itself an actual entity.249 Edward Shils, in his book on Tradition, elucidated this process with reference to T.S. Eliot: “T.S. Eliot once said that the literary tradition is changed by what every important work which has incorporated the tradition adds to it. ‘The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; in order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, value of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.’”250 Novelty is the production of new contrasts—or to relate it to the overarching task of the KHK: the dynamics of the history of religion rely on transcending contrasts. To Whitehead, the contrast increases intensity,251 thus contributing to the third aspect of dynamics.252 And what could be more of a contrast than an other met in a contact situation? The intensity of contact situations is dependent on the contrasts employed in the situation in question.
Thus, the social reality of phenomena that may be interpreted as religious and their basic contrasting dependence on their environment is a vital element of the phenomenon in question itself. This holds not at last true for processes of transcending. For the Chinese transcendent, xian, Campany stresses “[…] that practitioners of transcendence arts performed their ascetic selves before, and in self-conscious contrast to, many others who surrounded them, sought them out, and took a keen interest in their doings (performance implies audience); that, despite their stereotype as solitary and isolated, they were, in fact, public figures who functioned in society as holy persons and who did so largely by virtue of their insistence on their difference from others […].”253 The new self of the practitioner as a transcendent is contrasted against the old self-set amid the social environment that is simultaneously the acknowledging body of the new status and the process of transcending leading to it.
Another advantage of the notion might be the following. As I demonstrated in ‘Dynamics and Stability’, Whitehead provides us with a theory of the bipolarity of process, of how the physical (‘enjoyment’) and the conceptual (‘appetition’) sphere are related. As such, this idea introduces the concept of the elliptic stability of bipolarity.254 This idea is further relevant for understanding formal transcendence, and particularly the basic structure of self-reference, introducing the possibility of a second-order observation.
The notion of contrast is closely related to the idea of process. Whitehead states that “along the route of the life-history there is a chain of contrasts.”255 This holds true for individual entities as well as for collective ones. By transcending oneself via contrast, one progresses. By doing so, it dynamically establishes a stability of the chain of interpretation, which is itself one of the forms of the relationship between dynamics and stability.256
In his philosophy of culture and knowledge, published in 1933 under the programmatic title of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead states that harboring contrast provides progress. Without it, a tradition is ‘in full decay’. The “real contrast of what has been and what may be” is the trigger for process, stimulating the “vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past.”257 What happens here is the self-examination (self-reference) of a tradition triggered by contrast, thus transcending oneself in reflection and, as a consequence, also in action as an adventurous enterprise—perhaps to the Promised Land or the Kingdom of God in specific transcendence.258 The adventure of ideas consists of the search for new contrasts or occasions of transcendence.
The real contrast of what has been and what will be introduces another perspective the KHK has dealt with—the question of time or temporal transcendence in relation to the model of the TID that mainly uses spatial metaphors. The concept of contrast connects tradition and the transcendence-immanence distinction.
In order to reformulate the process of transcending with regard to the idea of the one and the many: in processes of transcending, manifoldness is integrated as compatible contrasts into positively conceived information, and that is information as both a datum to recognize and a formation of a horizon of understanding. This self-ordering process is performed in order to prevent incompatibilities.259 In Whitehead’s terms:
God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast.260
The notions of God and the World, though indispensable for Whitehead’s theory, which inaugurated a whole branch of process theology, should not be our main concern. Rather, it is the process described here that interests us: contrast transforms or transcends diversities into process by means of guiding conceptual assumption: in this case, ‘God’/transcendence and the ‘World’/immanence. The TID is, therefore, a contrast to overcome, to end all contrasts, and, thus, headed toward non-differentiation. It concerns a relationship between relations, the relation of the TID, and the relation of unity and manifoldness, or the one and the many. Therefore, one may observe that the process of transcending heads towards indifference is a form of non-differentiation, as Kianoosh Rezania suggested.261 This idea is also found in Luhmann’s description of the transcending process—transcendence indicates the unity of differences on a higher level.262
In conclusion, I would like to link the previous considerations on the TID to a concrete event in the KHK’s work. As a matter of fact, I think that the interpretation of the TID in the Whiteheadian sense is in accordance with some of the criticism of the programmatic TID some speakers of the 2017 September conference of the KHK have articulated, above all, Magnus Schlette.263 In his commentary, Schlette rightly argued for a differentiated interpretation of the transcendence/immanence dichotomy.264 The TID is more than a mere contradictory opposition, as in the logical p and non-p, but also covers contrary and subcontrary opposition. To interpret the TID as a Whiteheadian contrast takes this graduation of difference into account, thus elaborating on the idea of the “Matryoshka principle” of the TID that Licia Di Giacinto has stressed.
As a matter of fact, Schlette answered this claim by raising an important idea concerning the role of (symbolic) language even within deictic (or indexical) processes found on the level of basic transcendence. These are considered to be proto-symbolic processes, as “Full-fledged indexicality requires symbolic language.”265 This is even more the case for the level of formal transcendence, where symbolic language allows sense to be made of that which is not restricted by the indexical boundaries of the here and now and, thus, allows self-reference by means of contrasting possible and real worlds. Schlette suggests calling this transcendent immanence “meaning an immanence that is qualified by the capability of transcending it towards the hypothetical.”266 From here, reflection on something that is, perhaps by definition, not the subject of direct reference may take place, establishing the possibility of ‘religious transcendence’ that may be called immanent transcendence: the awareness of transcendent immanence. Hence, in our terms, this is also a reflection of immanent transcendence, a contrast of contrasts. A possible medium for such processes would be the great mythical narratives. Having thus described the emergence and the interaction of the immanent and the transcendent by means of the possibility of symbolic communication, one is able to define Transcendence (with a capital T)267 as a higher level (grade or contrast) of formal transcendence. Here, another self-reflective turn takes place, producing the insight that the symbolic means of conceptualizing the transcendent may be insufficient. This, in turn, deals with the development of what in the Christian tradition is called negative theology, which serves as a medium for the incommensurable Transcendence. Other participants of the conference, namely Walter Young, posed the question of agency in this process. Agency cannot be restricted to human beings but is rather focused on symbolic communication of language or notions as such.268
The entangledness of the diverse levels of the TID must be stressed, and above all the entangledness of formal and specific transcendence. To add, it must be remembered that the levels of the TID are analytical distinctions only, and in the phenomena, they constantly interact. Hence, there is not only the entangledness of formal and specific but also the entangledness of formal and basic, specific and basic transcendence. A picture of Baby Jesus pointing may serve as an example of this co-presence of the analytically distinguished levels. Nevertheless, I would agree with Schlette that formal transcendence, the capability and performance of self-reflection, plays a paramount role in the process of the TID, which has yet to be further elaborated.
9 Conclusion: Transcending, Contrast, and the Dynamics of Contact
The level at which the process of transcending becomes a specified transcendence is far from being decided. In fact, most transcending processes are located on the levels of basic and formal transcendence. However, it can be safely assumed that when religions actually encountered one another in history, the question of how to deal with the transcendence-immanence distinction gained semantic urgency. That is to say; those interreligious encounters produced a semantic space of “controversial commonality,” in which the relationships of transcendence and immanence may become ever more marked. It might additionally be asked whether the very process of demarcation, based upon the basic ‘here’—‘there’ distinction, might be interpreted semiotically as an expression of the (formal) transcendence-immanence distinction (‘we’—‘they’), as well as the elaboration of general notions (such as ‘religion’), in order to capture and thus transcend the other on a common linguistic level.269
Interreligious contact can be an inducement for a specific religion at a specific time to embrace a concept of specific, religious transcendence. It is here that, according to object language descriptions, the ‘real’ transcendent God might be set against others, perhaps the worldly ‘pagan’ ‘demons’ that were formerly known as ‘gods’.270 What is more, even the processes involved in a religious contact situation, recognizing, identifying, interpreting, translating, rejecting, or adapting, might be described with regard to the presence of the transcendence-immanence distinction. The problem of comparison is not only a sole product of the scholar’s search for an appropriate meta-language. Religious traditions themselves also relate to others and compare, struggling for the correct interpretation of the phenomenon with regard to their ideas and notions about themselves. Accordingly, the very act of comparison, performed on the object language level, is in itself an employment of the TID and a distinctive form of the process of transcending. It is also the point at which metalanguage may develop suitable notions derived from metalinguistic considerations of the available object language to handle a situation of contact.271
Perhaps one might even argue that the final absolute transcendence of the divine, as found in medieval theological speculation, has to be examined as a result of a transcending process—a result of constant self-reflection and multifolding of observations to a higher and higher order. This process is triggered by critique, whether voluntary or involuntary. Thus, the process leads to a seemingly paradoxical result: the more critique, the more absolute (and distinct) the transcendent, but also the stronger the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent, the ‘here’ and ‘there’. In his theory of religion, Whitehead describes the interrelationship of the twain as follows: “But just as the kingdom of Heaven transcends the natural world, so does this world transcend the kingdom of heaven. For the world is evil, and the kingdom is good.”272
Accordingly, one has to look for semantic concretions of the three concepts of transcendence (basic, formal, specific) within object language. Promising candidates may be any type of binary (complementary) oppositions or contrasts that are pointed at and reflected upon. As the Kantian definition and the Chinese examples related to certain places (borders, mountains) and movements (crossing, ascending) show, the metaphorology of the distinction has to be taken into consideration as well. It might even be argued that the very employment of metaphors as such indicates the presence of formal transcendence and, accordingly, of religioid material.
The introduction of the TID is not reduced to situations of contact of two or more distinct religions. Intrareligious contact and contact with other social spheres have to be transcended as well. However, the contact of religious traditions might still have a certain preeminence, for it is, above all, interreligious contact that triggers an experience of contingency within one religious tradition. All of a sudden, the traditional and unquestioned conduct of life is put into question by the presence of the other. The experience of contingency demands an answer that re-establishes certainties by (spatially) moving them to another, transcendent sphere. The experience of the other also prompts the integration of the other into a semantic field that can be controlled conceptually. Here, the other, as a manifestation of an external second-order observation, becomes transcendent. For example, there might be an introduction of an orthodox-heterodox distinction in order to integrate the other into an overarching worldview by removing it from one’s own sphere. Religious contact, thus, might induce a double movement (more immanence/more transcendence) that causes the intensification of both.273
As regards the three-level model of the TID, the ‘borders’ between the various forms of transcendence could be regarded as indicative markers of the influence of situations of contact on the process of transcending. Contact situations may trigger both a transgression of borders and, subsequently, densification of religious meaning. These contact situations are, here, not reduced to situations of two religious traditions meeting but also comprise occasions of internal critique, of critique performed by another societal field. In his study of the Chinese transcendents (xian), Campany refers to such situations of contact, even claiming that antagonistic contact lies in the very structure of the kind of transcendence expressed by the ancient transcendents: “The shapers of the tradition of xian-seeking postulated transcendence as a goal beyond the here-and-now, and, […] they also located access to it in secret methods over which they claimed exclusive control. Antagonism with other sorts of power-wielders and other roles in society—indeed, with all who had not been vouchsafed access to the methods—was therefore built into the very nature of the quest for xian-hood.”274
The dynamics of contact, therefore, cannot be described with reference to the theory of impetus. Rather, it refers to a process of conceptual transcending. Religious traditions in contact do not correspond to the laws that govern the changing movement of solid objects. Employing the TID in comparison, religious actors are instead involved in the process of realizing a new contrast. That is, they transcend the basic reckoning of the other tradition and, thus, formally transcend by a process of self-reflection. The process of contrast here is a bipolar movement of realization that is both objectification in the sense of making something real and the conceptual grasping of the object as an object to realize.275 The contrast itself introduces a new relational (actual) entity that may be employed in corresponding contact situations (i.e., the contrast of two religious traditions will play a role in other situations of contact in which both traditions are involved). Religious traditions in contact do not mutually repulse. They are not billiard balls that bounce off each other and change direction.276 Rather, they are contexts of indication that generate new unities via transcending self-reflection, including the contact situation itself, which re-enters into the recursive process. Comparison is the introduction of a new contrast into the self-referential process. The involvement of the realized contrast in a further process of contrasting stabilizes a dynamic tradition that now may relate to ‘itself’ in the past.277
A first version of this chapter was elaborated over the course of a working group of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (KHK) on the Transcendence/Immanence Distinction (Licia Di Giacinto, Tim Karis, Volkhard Krech, Knut Martin Stünkel) in 2016. During the academic year 2016/2017 with the overarching topic of the TID, parts of the paper were presented repeatedly in the meetings and workshops of the KHK.
See William Franke’s concise analysis in the preface to his volume on Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy: “‘Transcendence’ is one of those words like ‘God,’ or perhaps even ‘love’ or ‘freedom,’ that divide us into believers and nonbelievers. For some, it alludes to what underwrites the significance of all our discourses and lends certain of them an especially high degree of meaningfulness. For others, it infects discourse generically and undermines its validity and ability even to make sense, at least in cases where belief in transcendence takes priority and is given prominence. It is remarkable how the most decisive but intractable debates in virtually all fields of study typically can be understood as versions of this divide, which tends to fissure fundamental approaches to knowing in almost any domain.” William Franke, “Preface,” in Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy, eds. Nahum Brown and William Franke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), IX.
Compare the chapter on the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Franke, “Preface,” IX.
Peter Slater, The Dynamics of Religion. Continuity and Change in Patterns of Faith (London: SCM Press, 1979), 64.
See Volkhard Krech, “Dynamics in the History of Religions—Preliminary Considerations on Aspects of a Research Programme,” in Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe: Encounters, Notions and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Volkhard Krech and Marion Steinicke. DHR 1 (Leiden: Brill 2011), 57f. Also compare Krech’s later article. Volkhard Krech, “From Religious Contact to Scientific Comparison and Back: Some Methodological Considerations on Comparative Perspectives in the Science of Religion,” in The Dynamics of Transculturality, Transcultural Research—Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context, eds. A. Flüchter and J. Schöttli (Cham: Springer, 2015).
On the challenge of selecting tertium comparationis, see also Oliver Freiberger, “Elements of a Comparative Methodology in the Study of Religion,” Religions 9, no. 38 (2018): 8.
The corresponding movement of descent, however, indicating a similar transcending process seems to be considerably older than ascent in some cultural traditions. “[D]escents to the underworld already occur in Homer, but an ascent to heaven is not attested in our Greek sources before the fifth century, and in Israel not before the book of Ezekiel,” and “narratives about descents already preexisted Homer, even if we cannot say for how long.” It is even the case that descents decisively influenced the ideas about ascents: “1 Enoch was not only a pivotal text for descents to hell, but also proved highly influential for ascents to heaven.” Jan N. Bremmer, “Descents to Hell and Ascents to Heaven in Apocalyptic Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptical Literature, ed. John J. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 341, 344. On the tradition of katabasis in the ancient Mediterranean, see also Guy G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom. Esoteric Traditions and the Rise of Christian Mysticism (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005), 169–183.
The KHK conducted a 2011 workshop “Transcultural Perspectives on Immanence and Transcendence,” which focused on ‘immanent transcendence’ as a possible transcultural resource of critique.
On the supposed theological roots of the distinction in Luhmann’s thinking Christoph Kleine reminds us: “Luhmann repeatedly notes that he uses ‘transcendence’ in a non- theological way, entirely disconnected from religious semantics. ‘Transcendence’ in his theory is simply the horizon of an appresented indeterminability that emerges as soon as communication takes place. Because every communication in every social system be necessity selects between what is chosen (presented) and what is rejected or ignored (but still appresented), it produces an indeterminate remainder. The special social function of the religious system is to deal with this fundamental communicative operation of differentiating between the presented and the appresented.” Christoph Kleine, “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft: Geht das zusammen?,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 24 (2016): 48–49.
“Zur Bezeichnung der beiden Werte des religionsspezifischen Codes eignet sich am ehesten die Unterscheidung von Immanenz und Transzendenz. Man kann dann auch sagen, daß eine Kommunikation immer dann religiös ist, wenn sie Immanentes unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Transzendenz betrachtet. […] In der Einheit des Codes setzten beide Werte einander wechselseitig voraus. Erst von der Transzendenz aus gesehen erhält das Geschehen in dieser Welt einen religiösen Sinn.” Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 77.
See Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, 89. Compare Krech, Die Evolution der Religion, 20: “Religion ist dasjenige gesellschaftliche Subsystem, das für die ultimative Bearbeitung von anders nicht bestimmbarer Kontingenz mithilfe der Unterscheidung Immanenz/Transzendenz zuständig ist.”
See chapter on Attraction.
See Volkhard Krech, Wo bleibt die Religion? Zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 41. On the relation of representation and transcendence with regard to a concrete case see Thomas Jurczyk, “Representation of Transcendence. The Armenian Letter ‘On the Image Fighters’ from the Seventh Century CE,” Entangled Religions 5 (2018): 97–98.
See Krech’s working hypothesis on religion. “[Religion] wendet die Unterscheidung von Transzendenz und Immanenz an und bearbeitet durch sie den Umgang mit—zumindest tendenziell—als unverfügbar und unhintergehbar Geltendem im Unterschied zu Verfügbarem und Disponiblem. Die Differenz von Transzendenz und Immanenz liegt religiöser Kommunikation zugrunde, doch die Konkretion dieser Unterscheidung variiert diachron und im interkulturellen Vergleich.” Krech, Wo bleibt die Religion?, 42.
On the discovery of transcendence in metaphysical thought see Jens Halfwassen, “Zur Entdeckung der Transzendenz in der Metaphysik,” ZiF-Mitteilungen 2 (2002).
If one might compare (as Eric Osborn does) the Unmoved Mover to “a magnet in an armchair,” the attractive potential of the basic distinction becomes obvious (Eric Osborn, Tertullian, first Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 88).
Compare also the chapter on Space.
“et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israhel in aeternum veritate pabulo, et ibi vita sapientia est, per quam fiunt omnia ista […] et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis.” Augustine, Confessions I: Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 113 (IX/10), trans. Pine-Coffin, 197.
See Jens Halfwassen, “Sur la limitation du principe de contradiction chez Denys,” Diotima 23 (1995): 46–50.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York/London: The Free Press, 1979), 88.
Niklas Luhmann, Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 17.
On the Chinese case, see Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China. Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 93 f.
For an application on ‘non-Western’ material see for example Carmen Meinert “Beyond Spatial and Temporal Contingencies: Tantric Rituals in Eastern Central Asia under Tangut Rule, 11th–13th C.” in Buddhism in Central Asia ii: Practices and Rituals, Visual and Material Transfer, eds. Yukiyo Kasai and Henrik H. Sørensen (Leiden: Brill, 2022) and Dylan Esler, Effortless Spontaneity: The Dzogchen Commentaries by Nubchen Sangye Yeshe. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 28 f.
See Dalferth’s description of this specified form of the transcendence-immanence distinction: “Divine transcendence is more radical than ontological transcendence and hence accessible only in a purely negative way: we know that we can know anything true only because of it, but we also know that we can never know this truth as such. At best we can know that we cannot know the truth but only some inkling of it according to the principle that the differences are greater than the similarities. We are tied to the ignorance of our immanence and can never penetrate into the transcendence of divine truth.” Ingolf Dalferth, “The Idea of Transcendence,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, eds. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 149.
The metaphor is not purely an idiosyncrasy of Kant’s in the context of transcendence, as an example from medieval China shows: “The bird—so light, swift, beautiful, and free, and possessed of the ability to fly—was a primary Chinese symbol of the soul and of transcendence. As such, it figures in funerary art and in literature as well. A person who has ascended to transcendence was termed a ‘feathered person,’ in recognition of a bird-like capacity for flight not possessed by ordinary, unenlightened mortals.” Suzanne E. Cahill, Transcendence & Divine Passion. The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 92.
“Wir wollen die Grundsätze, deren Anwendung sich ganz und gar in den Schranken möglicher Erfahrung hält, immanente, diejenigen aber, welche diese Grenzen überfliegen sollen, transzendente Grundsätze nennen. […] Grundsätze, die uns zumuten, alle jene Grenzpfähle niederzureißen und sich einen ganz neuen Boden, der überall keine Demarkationen erkennt, anzumaßen. […] Die Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes […] sollen bloß von empirischen und nicht von transzendentalem Gebrauche sein. Ein Grundsatz aber, der diese Schranken wegnimmt, ja gar sie zu überschreiten gebietet, heißt transzendent.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raimund Schmidt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), 336.
“Denn nicht die Idee an sich selbst, sondern bloß ihr Gebrauch kann, entweder in Ansehung der gesamten möglichen Erfahrung überfliegend (transzendent), oder einheimisch (immanent) sein […].” Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 605.
Fritz Stolz, “Transzendenz,” in Metzler Lexikon Religion. Gegenwart—Alltag—Medien. Vol. 3 Paganismus-Zombie, eds. Christoph Auffarth, Jutta Bernard, and Hubert Mohr (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 525.
“Transzendenz ist ursprünglich ein philosophisches Konzept, welches von dem unmittelbar zugänglichen, differenzierten Bereich der Wirklichkeit einen dahinter liegenden, grundlegenderen Raum unterscheidet.” Stolz, “Transzendenz,” 525.
See Meinert, “Beyond Spatial and Temporal Contingencies,” 319.
Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, A Theory of Religion (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 138.
See Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 158.
On liminality, see Volkhard Krech, “Dimensionen des Religiösen,” in Handbuch Religionssoziologie, eds. Detlef Pollack, Volkhard Krech, Olaf Müller, and Marcus Hero (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), 72–73.
On other possible spatial metaphors from Tibetan sources see Esler, Effortless Spontaneity, 38.
On the spatial inside/outside distinction between the two ‘spaces’ of the immanent and the transcendent world in Plato’s allegory of the cave, see Dalferth, “The Idea of Transcendence,” 148.
“Transcendence is for now the provision of a direction and it refers to a crossing of boundaries. But from the outset, territorial boundaries are not what are meant (even when places are being ‘sacralized’) but rather boundaries to the unattainable, boundaries not only outside but also within the society one is starting from.” Niklas Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion, 55; Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft 79–80: “Transzendenz ist zunächst eine Richtungsangabe, sie verweist auf ein Überschreiten von Grenzen. Aber gemeint sind von Anbeginn nicht territoriale Grenzen (auch wenn Orte ‘sakralisiert’ werden), sondern Grenzen zum Unerreichbaren nicht nur außerhalb, sondern auch innerhalb der Gesellschaft, von der man ausgeht.” Compare Esler, Effortless Spontaneity, 39: “Space is used in our Dzogchen commentaries as a vector-term that points to a process of transcending; what is particularly important about the metaphor of space is that it conveys a situation that is limitless and open-ended, just like the transcending process it signifies. We are not dealing with an enclosed space, which by definition is limited, but with the unfathomable expanse of the sky, such as it presents itself on the Tibetan plateau with its vivid skyscapes.”
Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” Daedalus 104 (1975): 3. Schwartz further explores the question of Transcendence in: Benjamin I. Schwartz, “Transcendence in Ancient China,” Daedalus 104 (1975).
See Slingerland’s notion of xin as conscious reflection being qualitatively distinct, i.e. “not at all on par with perception and digestion.” Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China, 121.
Heiner Roetz, “Tradition, Universality, and the Time Paradigm of Zhou Philosophy,” The Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39, no. 3 (2009): 363. Compare, regarding Xunzi, Slingerland, Body and Mind in Early China, 112: “What is special about people is that they can transcend their natures through conscious reasoning and individual acts of will, aided by the accumulation of wisdom from the past embodied in the Confucian way.” To Jaspers, and, in his wake, Shmuel Eisenstadt, the ‘axial age’ is decisively characterized by the ‘discovery of transcendence’ in the form of a ‘transcendental breakthrough’, thus allowing for comparison between distant cultures and theorizing a general type of human rationality. The axial age theorem has been repeatedly discussed in the meetings of the KHK. For me, Guy Stroumas’s stance towards the idea of the axial age seems to be most valid and should be quoted in length: “The fascination with the axial age reflects the similarity of intellectual and spiritual trends and culture heroes, across civilizations seemingly unrelated. This concept is a perfect antidote to accusations of Eurocentrism in an age of globalization. The problem is that the axial age seems to be a fata morgana. The riddle of synchrony, as Jan Assmann has argued, evaporates at the mention of Akhenaten, Jesus, or Muhammad, who should obviously belong to the club of ‘axial’ figures together with Socrates, Isaiah, or Zarathustra. While it sometimes happens that different cultures reach a similar turning point at approximately the same point in time, what really counts, in each case, is the cause (or causes) of this turning point. Moreover, the obvious possibility of diffusionism should be entertained: if chariots and goods could move so easily, ideas could too. But religious change can also be brought about by new technologies. The clearest case is probably that of the emergence and diffusion of script systems. The development of writing, which is directly related to the establishment of empires and huge, centralized societies, entailed the need, for the literate elites, to educate and train new generations of scribes, and eventually the redaction of books, and hence of holy texts, which often remained esoteric, not to be divulged to all and sundry. Religion inscribed in a book has become a portable religion, one that can and will travel. On various occasions in his book, Bellah points to the crucial importance of writing in the evolution of cultures, but fails to grant the topic all the focused attention it requires. The concept of the axial age, then, is misleading. Rather than focusing on one epoch when everything, everywhere, tipped over, it is probably wiser to identify major cultural changes, whenever they happen. New configurations of culture and their social consequences are just as interesting as new configurations of society and their cultural consequences. We are the recipients of the double legacy of Greece and Israel. This may very well be the case, but it is only through the major intellectual remodeling effected by the church fathers (and before them by Philo of Alexandria) and of the medieval Scholastic theologians (who could read Aristotle mostly thanks to the Arabs!) that these two legacies were integrated.” Guy G. Stroumsa, The Making of Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 25–26.
Roetz, “Tradition, Universality, and the Time Paradigm of Zhou Philosophy,” 365.
Schwartz hints at the relationship of formal transcendence to “the whole realm we call religion.” (Schwartz, “Transcendence in Ancient China,” 64) Compare also Guy Stroumsa’s characterization of Philo of Alexandria as the decisive point of religion at which becomes self-reflexive, see Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice. Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 9.
See Kleine, “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft,” 74.
This might explain the phenomenon of what Jonathan Z. Smith calls “one of the fundamental building blocks of religion: its capacity for rationalization.” See Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” in Imagining Religion. Form Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 57. Precisely because self-reflecting behavior (critique) and religious (specified transcendence) emerge from the same level of religioid formal transcending, the former capacity is always present in what later develops as specified transcendence.
For a formal description of specified transcendence, see Volkhard Krech, “Theory and Empiricism of Religious Evolution (THERE): Foundation of a Research Program. Part 1,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 26 (2018): 27: “[R]eligion has to deal with the question of how to designate transcendence, which, in principal, cannot be represented in normal experience, with immanent means—i.e. how the absent can be transformed into the present, the unavailable into the available, the not depictable into the depictable or, by means of the theory of communication, the unspeakable into the speakable. […] Hence, the religion-specific distinction transcendent/immanent is systematically tied to the societal function of ultimately coping with undetermined contingency.”
See Krech, “Theory and Empiricism of Religious Evolution,” 26: “Both societal communication and religion are a matter of transcending—not just, and indeed with regard to the history of religions, generally not at all in the sense of the Christian Western temporal and spatial symbolization of transcendence, but in a universal, modal-theoretical and epistemological sense, namely as the reference to something not in the sphere of experience of here and now. This is due to the transcending character of language as the elementary medium of communication. […] Based on this general conceptualization, there are many ways of transcending apart from religion: sign processes in general, history, sociality (the consciousness of alter ego), ideal perception of order, future, dreams, surprising events, the arts, etc.”
Slingerland hints toward this point in his refutation of the characterization of Chinese culture as holistic and purely immanent: “[W]e should avoid the mistake of thinking that anything short of radical difference, or Cartesian ontological dualism, counts as ‘holistic’ or ‘immanent’. One could certainly argue that spirits and other supernatural beings in early China were not conceived of as completely immaterial: spirits are invisible and freed of physical bodies, but—especially as views of qi as a force permeating the cosmos become more prevalent—might be seen as merely very tenuous or diffuse forms of matter. Nonetheless, this spectrum of tangibility/visibility is not continuous: there is a qualitative leap between the mundane world of physical bodies and other concrete, visible objects and the ‘numinous’ […] realm of ghost-demons […] and various spiritual beings and gods.” Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China, 94.
See Georg Simmel, Die Religion, in Gesamtausgabe Band 10: Philosophie der Mode (1905), Die Religion (1906/1912), Kant und Goethe (1906/1916), Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, eds. Michael Behr, Volkhard Krech, and Gert Schmidt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 61–62: “Ich erinnere an das religiöse—oder, wenn das Wortmonstrum gestattet ist: religioide— Moment, das für ein tieferes Empfinden vielleicht in allem Hingeben und Annehmen liegt. Natürlich hat es als rein soziologisches Ereignis mit der Religion als differenziertem Gebiet nichts zu tun. Dennoch liegt in seiner inneren Struktur eine schwer bezeichenbare ideelle Verwandtschaft mit einem Zuge des religiösen Wesens, der aus diesem in den fertig ausgestalteten Religionen als das Opfermoment auskristallisiert ist.” Later on in his Die Religion, he examines “Religionen, die in der angedeuteten Weise Mischgebilde sind, in denen die Religiosität noch nicht in der Form der Gegenständlichkeit rein zu sich selbst gekommen ist” (ibid., 114).
On Simmel’s notion, see Hartmann Tyrell, “Das Religioide und der Glaube. Drei Überlegungen zu einer Religionssoziologie der Zeit um 1900,” in Georg Simmel und das Leben in der Gegenwart, eds. Rüdiger Lautmann and Hanns Wienold (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018).
On Simmel’s motivation to introduce the notion, see Tyrell, “Das Religioide und der Glaube,” 354: “Simmels Befassung mit der Religion ist nicht von der im 19. Jahrhundert üblichen Art der Suche nach der evolutionär ursprünglichen Religion—sprich Animismus, Ahnenkult, Totemismus u. ä. Simmels soziologische Idee ist es stattdessen, Religion nicht auf (ursprünglichere) Religion zurückzuführen, sondern ihr dort auf die Spur zu kommen, wo sie noch nicht Religion ist.”
See Tyrell, “Das Religioide und der Glaube”: “Die Genealogie sieht das Religioide als das der Religion Vorangehende, sie in bestimmter Hinsicht Ermöglichende, auf ihre Inhalte Hinführende; sie nimmt das Soziale als multiple Quellregion des Religiösen, ja setzt auf die Selbststeigerung des (jeweiligen) Religioiden ins Religiöse. Auch wenn Simmel dieser Prozessualität ‘historisch’ nicht nachgehen will: der in gewisser Weise unsichereren und minder deutlich bestimmten, abgeleiteten Seite ist damit das kausale Prius zugesprochen. Ich mache keinen Hehl daraus, dass die Simmel’schen Idee den Religionssoziologen zu faszinieren vermag. Aber kostenfrei ist sie nicht.”
See Georg Simmel, “Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel,” in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, eds. Gregor Fitzi and Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 228.
Compare Volkhard Krech “Immanent Transcendence as Sacralization,” (Paper for the KHK-Workshop “Immanent Transcendence as a Transcultural Problem,” July 2011), 1.
While Opitz follows the right intuition in considering (formal) transcendence as a precondition for the possibility of (political) critique, it is premature to identify this (religioid) level as a ‘religious framework’ for political thought in ancient China: “Erst aus dieser Perspektive wird die These deutlich, die im Titel dieses Buches anklingt und dem Buch selbst zugrundeliegt: daß sich das politische Denken des alten China— und damit auch der chinesischen ‘Achsenzeit’—in der Mehrzahl der Schulen vor einem metaphysisch-religiösen Horizont vollzieht. Gegen diese These spricht auch nicht, daß die Konturen dieses Horizontes in China weniger scharf ausgeprägt sind—bzw. aus heutiger Sicht erscheinen—als in anderen kosmologischen Reichen, etwa denen Ägyptens und Assyriens, bzw. in den postkosmologischen Gesellschaften, wie sie sich in Israel nach dem Exodus aus Ägypten oder in Hellas nach dem Bruch mit dem homerischen Mythos entwickelt haben. Denn auch den chinesischen Denkern dient die Transzendenz nicht nur als Maßstab zur Kritik der politischen Realität, sondern wird gleichzeitig auch als Ursprung jener Normen in Anspruch genommen, die aus der geistigen und politischen Krise führen sollen.” Peter J. Opitz, Der Weg des Himmels. Zum Geist und zur Gestalt des politischen Denkens im klassischen China (München: Fink, 2000), 11.
This follows Tomasello’s hypothesis that the beginnings of human communication lie in pointing and pantomiming; pointing being the primordial form of uniquely human communication. See Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2008), 2–3.
See Raymond Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (London: Atlantic, 2010), XVII–XX. Also compare Hubert Knoblauch, Populäre Religion. Auf dem Weg in eine spirituelle Gesellschaft, (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2009), 69–70.
Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, XX. Later on in his book, Tallis qualifies the shared world further as a commonly shared horizon of possibilities or, perhaps, propensities: “[A]n individual who points dwells in a world rather than being located in a mere environment. A world is a boundless sphere of explicitly shared possibility, not merely an array of material objects encircling the material object that I an organism.” (ibid., 118–119). See chapter on Attraction.
This shared world is different from the immanent world (of the ‘here’), see Dalferth, “The Idea of Transcendence,” 153–154, as it consists of the transcendence/immanence distinction that is in effect. If one cannot use one side of the distinction without the other, as Dalferth argues, it makes no sense to reduce the standpoint (‘here’) to the purely immanent. Thus, the distinction is not drawn in the realm of the immanent; but rather, the distinction is drawn and the realm of the immanent and the transcendent in a basic manner emerge.
As an example see the interplay of upward and downward movement in the Meditation on Vajravārāhī as analyzed by Carmen Meinert, “Beyond Spatial and Temporal Contingencies,” 347–351.
See Josef Simon, Philosophie des Zeichens (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 28.
“Pointing not only exposes one to an especially visible gaze, it is a gesture that invites others to gaze and so to co-opt their self-consciousness to a reductive account of one’s own self.” Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, 94.
“Pointing (to pick up on one of an endless number of puns waiting in the wings) points to something that goes very deep in us; and it is subject, as so many things in human life are, to a multitude of transformations.” Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, XXI. Tallis even claims that pointing has indeed played an important part in the elaboration of human consciousness (ibid., 3).
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 220.
Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, 76.
Thus, as Carmen Meinert put it, it might be, for instance, possible to detect and “identify palimpsests of religious meaning attributed to physical space and material objects.” Meinert, “Beyond Spatial and Temporal Contingencies,” 335.
Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, 12. See the turning point as identified by Carmen Meinert, “Beyond Spatial and Temporal Contingencies,” 362.
I owe the following example and reference material to Licia Di Giacinto.
Schwartz argues for the presence of formally transcendent elements, such as wisdom and doubt, at a very early time in Chinese history (see Schwartz, “Transcendence in Ancient China,” 57, 61). Slingerland in questioning ideas about Abrahamic religions as ‘transcendent’ and Chinese culture being ‘immanent’ even goes so far to juxtapose these ascriptions: “Jesus even goes so far as to continue to make himself materially present (to be drunk and eaten!) in the Eucharist offering. This all seems to me about as ‘immanent’ as you can get. In contrast, the Chinese ancestor spirits and silent Heaven seem positively standoffish. This should give pause to anyone claiming that transcendence from this world is some unique feature of the Abrahamic faiths. It also serves as an excellent illustration of how deeply entrenched cultural myths—in this case, of the ‘immanent’ Chinese worldview and ‘transcendent’ Abrahamic one—continue to be maintained in the face of flagrant counterevidence.” Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China, 98.
See Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth. A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2002), 3: “This term is often translated as ‘immortal,’ but, strictly speaking, the texts promised neither a once and-for-all immortality nor an escape from time and change into an eternal stasis, as can immediately be seen from the fact that there were distinct degrees or levels of xian-hood as well as from the fact that texts sometimes distinguish xian from those who have ‘merely’ managed not to die […].”
Robert Ford Campany, Making Transcendents. Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 34. As the notion of ‘transcendent’ may have a Kantian ring, Campany also suggests ‘ascendent’ as an accurate translation. On ascension literature in the early Han period, see also Michael J. Puett, To Become a God. Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press 2002), 223: “The ascension literature proliferated by appropriating and radicalizing these divinization practices in order to assert the ability of individuals to transcend their roles, the political order, and the word of forms itself.”
See Campany, Making Transcendents, XIII.
See Campany, Making Transcendents, XVI–XVII.
See Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth, 5: “In translating xian as ‘transcen-dent(s)’ when it denotes one or more transformed persons, as ‘transcendence’ when it names their exalted status, as ‘transcend’ when it names what they do (the Chinese term is used in all of these ways), I do not mean to suggest an absolute metaphysical difference between xian and lesser beings but rather to capture the essential fact about xian as portrayed in texts and images: they have ascended to links in the chain higher than those occupied by even the best human beings.”
Campany, Making Transcendents, 33.
Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth, 5.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 37–38.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 4.
See Campany, Making Transcendents, 34.
See Campany, Making Transcendents, 34.
On mountains as a paramount part of Chinese religious landscape, see Thomas H. Hahn, “The Standard Taoist Mountain and Related Features of Religious Geography,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 4 (1988): 147. Campany characterizes mountains correspondingly “as sites of religious opportunity.” Robert Ford Campany, “Secrecy and Display in the Quest for Transcendence in China, ca. 220 BCE–350 CE,” History of Religions 45 (2006): 314. Perhaps it is also possible to describe mountains in this sense as spatial opportunities for something to become religious (or, at least, religioid).
Campany, Making Transcendents, 43.
Lun-Hêng, Part 1. Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch’ung, translated from the Chinese and annotated by Alfred Forke, Leipzig: Harrassowitz 1907, 333.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Quoted in the following edition: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II, trans. Burton Watson (Hong Kong/New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 3.
Cahill characterizes the (at least for T’ang Chinese) as such already larger-than-life-figure (transcending normal rulers) of Emperor Wu as follows: “During the Han, no reign outshone that of Han Wu-ti for military conquest, new government institutions, and religious innovations.” Cahill, Transcendence & Divine Passion, 143. His self-transcending political achievements, thus, seem to claim for religious continuation, though, as one T’ang poet put it: “Han Wu-ti is a great hero of Chinese history and the model of a successful monarch; yet he failed in Taoist terms because he did not achieve the proper balance between political and religious concerns” (ibid., 156).
See Dorothee Schaab-Hanke, “The Power of an Alleged Tradition: A Prophecy Flattering Han Emperor Wu and its relation to the Sima Clan,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 74 (2002): 25.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 24.
See Campany, Making Transcendents, 199–201.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 202.
As it seems, the Feng ritual was always performed on the Taishan, whereas the place of the Shan ritual differs, see Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 9.
Schaab-Hanke, “The Power of an Alleged Tradition,” 246.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 203.
Hans van Ess here points at the fact that the original meaning of Feng was ‘to pile up a hill’: “Das im Titel des Traktates an erster Stelle stehende Wort feng heißt in seiner Grundbedeutung ‘einen Hügel aufhäufen’, von welchem sich dann die bekanntere Bedeutung ‘belehnen’ ableitet. In unserem Zusammenhang steht es für das heiligste Himmelsopfer am Gipfel des Berges T’ai, zu dessen Zweck aus Erde ein Altar oder eben eine Erderhöhung errichtet wird. Ein neuer Herrscher erhält dann vom Himmel seinen Auftrag—seine Belehnung.” Hans van Ess, “Der Sinn des Opfertraktats feng-shan shu des Ssu-ma Ch’ein,” Archiv orientální. Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies 70 (2002): 126.
Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires. Qin and Han (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap 2007), 186. Both interpretations were to a certain extent interconnected, as “[…] the acquisition of land and the pursuit of immortality were closely linked, for immortals lived at the edges of the earth or on the peaks of mountains, which only a world-ruling monarch could bring within his realm” (ibid., 21).
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 41.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 3.
“[…] the emperor had ordered his high ministers and court scholars to discuss the question of the Feng and Shan, but since these sacrifices were so seldom performed and since the last performance had been so long ago, no one knew the proper ceremony to be followed.” Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 41.
As the Shiji relates, “the emperor had thought over the various recommendations which the Confucian scholars and the magicians had made concerning the Feng and Shan sacrifices, but he was troubled by the fact that each said something different and that many of their recommendations were absurd or almost impossible to put into practice.” (Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 43) There is also a pragmatic explanation for this: “The rituals employed in the worship of these places, therefore, were often changed and varied from age to age. It is consequently impossible to give a detailed description of them all here.” Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 16.
Compare Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 51.
On the fangshi (also translated as ‘man of techniques’ or even ‘outsiders’), see Isabelle Robinet, Taoism. Growth of a Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 37–39, 42–45.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 25. See Schaab-Hanke, “The Power of an Alleged Tradition,” 246.
The fangshi can be interpreted as important figures in the process of the emergence of Daoism as a religion, as they contributed to the particular imaginaires from which the religion emerged. See Hans van Ess, Der Daoismus. Von Laozi bis heute (München: Beck, 2011), 42. On the relation of the fangshi and Daoists see Robinet, Taoism, 43: “The affinity of the subjects studied by the fangshi and those of interest to the Taoists was so great and lasted for so long that the distinction between these thinkers and the Taoists is not easy to make—to the point that many treatises on geomancy and divination that derive from fangshi practices have been incorporated into the Daozang, the Taoist canon.”
Translation by Licia Di Giacinto.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 26.
Wolfgang Ommerborn has highlighted the fact that the Emperor Wu is described as being particularly fond of travelling, connecting his cultic reform agenda with spatial movement, thus both using travels as an instrument for increasing his power and implicitly referring to spiritual travels of shamans, see Ommerborn, Zwischen Sakralem und Säkularem, 293.
As Campany explains, mountains, and, significantly, their geographical counterpart, marshes “were understood as antihuman, extracivilizational, liminal, and hence dangerous zones but also, for those very reasons, as sites of religious opportunity.” Campany, Making Transcendents, 107.
Li Shaojun’s speech as documented in the Shiji is “the first recognized record of Chinese alchemy.” Robinet, Taoism, 43.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 14.
“The idea that strange locals in the distant horizons of the known world habor longevity- or transcendence-inducing substances is as old in China as the goal of transcendence itself. We find numerous references to the hope of finding these mysterious realms, penetrating their veil of mystery and ingesting their marvelous, potent products.” Campany, Making Transcendents, 82.
See Campany, Making Transcendents, 124. On the relation of secrets and (the ascension to) mountains as a place and way to gain transcending knowledge in Gnostic teachings see Gedaliahu G.A. Stroumsa, Another Seed—Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden: Brill 1984), 115–123.
See chapter on Secret.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 15.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 35.
On Gongsun Qing and his dubious reputation within the Shiji see Schaab-Hanke, “The Power of an Alleged Tradition,” 245. On his relation to the fangshi, see Ommerborn, Zwischen Sakralem und Säkularem, 300–301.
“The ruler, his advisers, and contemporary readers of the Shi ji narrative would have recognized the name An Qi as that of a reputedly long-lived master of esoterica who was honored by the founding emperor of Qin and who helped inspire eastward sea excursions seeking methods of immortality during that ruler’s reign.” Campany, Making Transcendents, 118.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 36.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 36–37.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 37.
See Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 43–44.
See Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, 202.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 37. This is a striking example for the reason why “[p]roponents of the goal of transcendence felt compelled to defend it against the charge that adapts were unfilial.” Campany, Making Transcendents, 54. “In early medieval China,” Campany explains further, “dying was an event that set off a chain of specific social and ritual processes. Not dying, therefore, amounted to absenting oneself from those processes and from the larger systems that sustained them” (ibid., 57).
Campany, Making Transcendents, 57.
Puett, To Become a God, 214.
Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 39.
“[The emperor] had been told by Gongsun Qing and the other magicians, however, that when the Yellow Emperor and the rulers before him had performed the Feng and Shan, they had all succeeded in summoning forth supernatural beings and communing with the spirits. He therefore wished to imitate the example of these rulers by getting into touch with the spirits and the immortals of Penglai and achieving fame in the world so that his virtue might be compared to that of the Nine Bright Ones of antiquity.” Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 41.
The account of Li Shaojun, for example, and his own claim of immortality is juxtaposed with the laconic mention of his death (“After some time, Li Shaojun fell ill and died.” Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty II, 26). Gongsun Qing’s later endeavors are described as utter failures: “[T]he reader will get the general impression that Gongsun Qing was nothing but an ignorant and esoteric charlatan who by winning and abusing the emperor’s trust and confidence merely served his own ends.” Schaab-Hanke, “The Power of an Alleged Tradition,” 248, 253–254. Hans van Ess explicitly reads the passages on the Feng and Shan rituals as an outspoken critique on the emperor’s cult of immortality, see van Ess, “Der Sinn des Opfertraktats feng-shan shu des Ssu-ma Ch’ien,” 132.
On the relationships between Chinese temples and mountains, see Shawn Arthur, “Wafting Incense and Heavenly Foods: The Importance of Smell in Chinese Religion,” in Sensual Religion. Religion and the Five Senses, eds. Graham Harvey and Jessica Hughes (Sheffield/Bristol: Equinox, 2018), 44–45: “[M]any Chinese temples are built to symbolize a sacred mountain. The visitor starts at the bottom of the mountain and works their way up each peak and valley until they reach the summit, which houses the most important deity statue. These temples also have a variety of natural elements such as foliage, fragrant flowers and trees, which together bring in other mountain elements. Why mountains? Because their peaks are in the clouds (almost like clouds of incense), where immortals live and where one could be physically closer to the gods who live in the heavens (the stars).”
As Hahn with reference to the ‘ideal’ Taoist mountain points out, the directed movement involved is not restricted to the ‘up/down’ relation, but may also refer to the relation of being ‘outside’ the Mountain and being ‘inside’ (a cave), see Hahn, “The Standard Taoist Mountain and Related Features of Religious Geography,” 148.
On the role of primary metaphors of vertical height in human cognition see Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser, “Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends,” in Sensuous Cognition. Explorations into Human Sentience: Imagination, (E)motion and Perception (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 272–273.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 257.
See chapter on Model Forms.
Puett, To Become a God, 221.
Compare Jan Bremmer, “Contextualizing Heaven in Third-Century North Africa,” in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, eds. R.S. Boustan and A.Y. Reed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See Ommerborn, Zwischen Sakralem und Säkularem, 378.
See Robinet, Taoism, 43. Roth translates the notion of fangshi as ‘Formula-Scholars’ (Harold D. Roth, Original Tao. Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 22).
Compare chapter on Retrospection.
See Robinet, Taoism, 44.
See chapter on Tradition.
See Alexandra Cuffel, “From Geographical Migration to Transmigration of Souls: Negotiating Religious Differences between Space among Jews in Early Modern Safed,” in Locating Religions. Contact, Diversity and Translocality, eds. Reinhold F. Glei and Nikolas Jaspert (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017), 74–75.
I owe the reference to this example to a presentation given by Magnus Schlette at the KHK.
Alan B. Howard, “Art and History in Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971): 238.
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, (New York: Renaissance Classics 2012).
David Laurence assumes that Bradford “[…] mobilized a rhetorical strategy whose energy arranges a structure of transcendence normally associated with Romanticism.” David Laurence, “William Bradford’s American Sublime,” PMLA 102 (1987): 65.
On the relationship between the historical, theological and literary aspects within Bradford’s narrative, see Ursula Brumme, “Did the Pilgrim Fathers Fall upon Their Knees when They Arrived in the New World? Art and History in the Ninth Chapter, Book One, of Bradford’s History ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’,” Early American Literature 12 (1977).
On Bradford’s dubious claims of monarchical persecution, see Sandra Goodall, Beyond Bradford’s Journal: The Scrooby Puritans in Context (PhD Diss., Arizona State University, 2015), 116–117: “Prior to 1980, the scholarly view of religious attitudes about late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England was based on the accepted notion of the period as a persecuting society. What does it take to be a persecuting society? R.I. Moore, Peter Grell, and Robert Scribner argue that persecuting societies develop in three stages: classification, stigmatization, and persecution. While we have seen evidence of classification in early modern England, with the labeling of some Protestants as Puritans, Brownists, and Anabaptists, we have not seen evidence of widespread stigmatization of Puritans in this period. Quite the opposite is true. Puritans were integrated into society at every level, including James’ court. Puritan and Puritan supporters occupied key positions in the bishoprics. And there is no evidence of widespread Puritan persecution in lay society. There is very little evidence that any of these groups, with the exception of the Anabaptists, experienced the final stage of persecution, which is marked by the ‘pursuit, denunciation, and interrogation, exclusion from the community, deprivation of civil rights, and the loss of property, liberty, and on occasion, life itself.’”
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 7.
On the physical or bodily effects of the Pilgrim’s journey, see Kathleen Donegan, “‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’: Catastrophe and Interiority in Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’,” Early American Literature 37 (2002).
For example, see Bradford’s foreshadowing lines in the first chapter of his book: “But after these things they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted & persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them.” (Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 8 (I)).
“[…] the grave mistris Experience haveing taught them many things, those prudent governours with sundrie of ye sagest members begane both deeply to apprehend their present dangers, & wisely to forsee ye future, & thinke of timly remedy. In ye agitation of their thoughts, and much discours of things hear aboute, at length they began to incline to this conclusion, of remoovall to some other place. Not out of any newfanglednes, or other such like giddie humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt & danger, but for sundrie weightie & solid reasons […].” William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 21 (IV).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1 (I). Howard, however, rediscovers the more basic motivation of employing a religious interpretation of events (in Luhmannian terms): “Complexity, not Satan, is the real antagonist in the drama of Plymouth Plantation.” Howard, “Art and History in Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” 249.
In her dissertation Beyond Bradford’s Journal: The Scrooby Puritans in Context, Sandra Goodall concludes that “[…] the Scrooby Puritans may not have been fleeing from authorities trying to confine them for their religious beliefs, but from the corruption of their very souls, had they remained in England and under the theological influences of the Church of England.” Goodall argues that to Bradford, physical persecution, is an inevitable element in a certain narrative, elaborated from “rare, individual experiences informed by a separatist theology into a tale of deep and wide spread persecution.” Summarizing her findings, Goodall claims: “Had historians examined the history of persecution in England and the ecclesiastical and court records for evidence of actual instances of persecution suffered by the Scrooby Puritans, they would have found the record to be lacking any evidence of persecution or prosecution in the traditional sense. It is only through a close reading of the theological record do we find that the persecution suffered by the Scrooby Puritans was not actually persecution, but a narrative form of persecution they felt necessary to elevate them to sainthood.” Goodall, Beyond Bradford’s Journal, I and 195.
See Michael Modarelli, “William Bradford and His Anglo-Saxon Influences,” American Studies in Scandinavia 46 (2014): 40–41: “Bradford […] serves as the first instance of Anglo-Saxon themes in early American literature, placing the Saxon Christendom model squarely on New World shores with a purposeful social crossing. […] Buttressed by themes translated by John Foxe, Bradford’s mission served as the link to a glorious ancient past, an authoritative voice of Anglo-Saxon vision and a religious connection to Christian Saxon liberties free from the constraint of a dominant power.”
José María Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals in Christopher Columbus and William Bradford,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 28 (2002): 75.
Braford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 8 (I).
On the sojourn of the group in Leiden, see Jeremy Dupertuis, Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA: The General Society of Mayflower Decedents, 2009).
Compare Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals,” 88.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 23 (IV).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 57 (VII).
“By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.”
“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”
See Walter Wenska’s remark on the transient existential condition of the Puritan: “Assurance and spiritual repose were fugitive, sometime things for the Puritan; his spiritual case, like the roads taken by our fictional heroes, remained open. Movement, restlessness, change, metamorphosis: if these are not touchstones of salvation, at least they are signs that neither Puritan nor hero has damned himself through a commitment to a corrupt or unsatisfactory reality.” Walter P. Wenska, “Bradford’s Two Histories: Pattern and Paradigm in ‘Of Plymouth Plantation,” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 161.
See Hebrews 11,10: “For he [Abraham] looked for a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” The transient status of pilgrims according to the Letter to the Hebrews, therefore, does not mean that they are on a journey into the vague and unknown. Their directedness towards God, here, makes the transcending journey spiritually reliable and well-led—as it is expressed in Bradford’s confidence in the God-guided status of the Pilgrim Fathers (compare Erich Grässer, An die Hebräer (Hebr 10,19–13,25), (EKK XVII/3) (Zürich: Benziger/Neukirchener Verlag, 1997), 137). On the pilgrims and God as necessary partners in a providential history see Donegan, “‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’,” 13.
Rodríguez García stresses: “A crucial point to make here is that Bradford was from the outset more concerned with the Separatist’s possible escape from the bondage of body and conscience represented by European Catholicism and Lutheranism than he was with their arrival at the Promised Land […].” Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals,” 80.
On the ambiguity of the English term ‘crossing’ that plays a significant role here as indication (marking), crossing and recrossing see Johann Hafner, “Die Codierung des Christentums. Versuch einer formlogischen Entfaltung,” in Interdisziplinäre Traditionstheorie. Motive und Dimensionen, eds. Blahoslav Fajmon and Jaroslav Vokoun (Wien: Lit, 2016), 151.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 57/58 (VII).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 68 (VIII).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 73 (IX).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 74 (IX).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 74 (IX).
See Brumme, “Did the Pilgrim Fathers Fall upon Their Knees when They Arrived in the New World?,” 29: “The young man’s near death by water and his rescue and rebirth adds the implicit interpretation to the group’s experience: surviving the mortal dangers of the ocean crossing means to have died to the Old World and to be reborn for the New, and the almost fatal immersion into the sea suggests an extreme and violent baptism which initiates them to their new status in their new commonwealth.”
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 75 (IX).
See Brumme, “Did the Pilgrim Fathers Fall upon Their Knees when They Arrived in the New World?,” 32.
On the geographical advantages of the later settlement of the Pilgrims see Darrett B. Rutman, “The Pilgrims and Their Harbor,” The William and Mary Quarterly 17 (1960), 166, 181.
Donegan, “‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’,” 22.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 75 (IX).
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 76 (IX). Compare on the term ‘to separate’ in these lines Laurence, William “Bradford’s American Sublime,” 62.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 75–76 (IX).
Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals,” 89.
See chapter on Model Forms.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 76 (IX).
Modarelli considers Of Plymouth Plantation to be “the textual expression of the community in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.” Compare 49: “Where in Smith we see the individual working on a level that will move the community through individual heroes, in Braford we witness more the reshaping of a social ethnie to fit in and carry forward the message of Christendom.” (Modarelli, “William Bradford and His Anglo-Saxon Influences”) Compare also Hovey’s observation that the only emotions Bradford presents in his account are, in fact, group sorrow and joy. Kenneth Alan Hovey, “The Theology of History in ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ and Its Predecessors,” Early American Literature 19 (1975): 50.
Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals,” 89.
“[…] Bradford emphasizes community over individual. As much as Smith’s True Relation highlighted the heroic actions of the individual, Of Plymouth resounds with collective action. Bradford punctuates the text with the communual ‘we’ as a literary trope.” Modarelli, “William Bradford and His Anglo-Saxon Influences,” 50.
Rodríguez García, “Exiles and Arrivals,” 78–79, 92.
“The composition that began with ragged bodies facing a world of absolute lack ends with the paradoxical claim that the process of the journey, arrival, and settlement both sundered them irrevocably from the civilized world and allowed them to remain exactly who they had always been. Bradford moves anxiously from the stopped time of the shocked colonial, through a disjointed survey of bodies and land, finally to a projected fantasy of the grateful descendant in order to substantiate the hope that, despite all appearances, such extreme geographical and temporal dislocation did not permanently fracture the ability to connect the present to a past and to a future.” Donegan, “‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’,” 27.
See chapter on Model Forms. On other biblical model forms involved in the Puritan colonization of the New World see Heike Brandt, Invented Traditions. Die Puritaner und das amerikanische Sendungsbewußtsein (Passau: Stutz, 2011), 36–64.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 76–77 (IX). Brumme comments accordingly: “The children here envisioned do not even exists at the time. In order to define this moment in its world-historic proportions, Bradford opened the door to the future. Only from this vantage point could the participants of this great undertaking be evaluated and celebrated.” Brumme, “Did the Pilgrim Fathers Fall upon Their Knees when They Arrived in the New World?,” 29–30.
Robert Daly, “William Bradford’s Vision of History,” American Literature 44 (1973): 557.
Parts of the following subchapter were presented at the KHK workshop on ‘Analogy in the Abrahamitic Religions’, organized by Damien Janos, on 4 and 5 February 2010.
On the diverse suggestions Nicolas makes for the name of God in the course of his thinking, see Luis Martínez Gómez, “From the Names of God to the Name of God,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1965). At some points, Nicolas even congratulates himself as having found the best name, but these moments of triumph are only momentary. In later work, he nevertheless starts his efforts over and again. Ibid., 84 and 92.
Nicolai de Cusa, De Pace Fidei cum Epistola ad Ioannem de Segobia, eds. Raymund Klibansky and Hildebrand Bascour. Opera Omnia VII (Hamburg: Meiner, 1970), h VII, p. 6, 5, 14–17. (Translation: Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei, 635.) “Tu ergo, qui es dator vitae et esse, es ille qui in diversis ritibus differenter quaeri videris et in diversis nominibus nominaris, quoniam uti es manes omnibus incognitus et ineffabilis.” Compare Nicolai de Cusa, Sermones I (1430–1441), ed. Rudolf Haubst. Opera Omnia XVI (Hamburg: Meiner, 1991), h XVI, p. 4, 3, 3–6. “Nominatur humanis diversis vocibus, diversis linguis diversarum nationum, licet nomen suum sit unicum, summum, infinitum, ineffabile et ignotum.”
See William J. Hoye, “Die Unerkennbarkeit Gottes als die letzte Erkenntnis nach Thomas von Aquin,” in Thomas von Aquin, ed. Albert Zimmermann. Miscellanea Mediaevalia XIX (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 123.
William J. Hoye, “The Idea of Truth as the Basis for Religious Tolerance According to Nicholas of Cusa with Comparisons to Thomas Aquinas,” in Conflicts and Reconciliation. Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa, ed. Inigo Bocken (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 168.
See Hoye, “The Idea of Truth,” 165.
On the relation of the human propensity towards God and the possibility of dialogue in Cusanus’ thinking see Markus Riedenauer, Pluralität und Rationalität, Die Herausforde- rung der Vernunft durch religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt nach Nikolaus Cusanus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 286: “Religiöse Rede ist dadurch nicht nur in ihrem Vollzug, in der Analogie von göttlich-schöpferischem Sprechen und menschlich-schöpferischem Sprechen, gewürdigt, sondern enthält die Möglichkeit, diese analoge Struktur selbst zu formulieren und eine Antwort auf den Anspruch, der im ursprünglichen göttlichen Anspruch ergeht, zu sein. Diese Antwort kann aber an anderen Versuchen menschlicher explicatio nicht vorübergehen, deren Vielfalt wird selbst zur Herausforderung einer Integration, weshalb der Dialog zur Religion gehört.”
Nicolai de Cusa, De Coniecturis, eds. Josef Koch and Karl Bormann. Opera Omnia III (Hamburg: Meiner, 1972), h III, p. 25, I/5, 20–21.
Nicolai de Cusa, De Deo Abscondito, in: Opuscula I. Opera Omnia IV, ed. Paul Wilpert, Hamburg: Meiner 1959 (h IV, p. 8, 10, 13–17). “Quod neque nominatur neque non nominatur, neque nominatur et non nominator, sed omnia, quae dici possunt disiunctive et copulative per consensum vel contradictionem, sibi non conveniunt propter excellentiam infinitatis eius, ut sit unum principium ante omnem cogitationem de eo formabilem.” Translation: Hopkins, A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa, 303.
Nicolai de Cusa, De Visione Dei (h VI, p. 34/35, 37, 5–12). “Et animasti me, domine, qui es cibus grandium, ut vim mihi ipsi faciam, quia impossibilitas coincidet cum necessitate. Et repperi locum, in quo revelate reperieris, cinctum contradictoriorum coincidentia. Et iste est murus paradisi, in quo habitas, cuius portam custodit spiritus altissimus rationis, qui nisi vincatur non patebit ingressus. Ultra igitur coincidentiam contradictoriorum videri poteris et nequaquam citra.” Translation: Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism, 697. On the intellectual debate in which De Visione Dei emerged (with special regard on the interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius) see Meredith Ziebart, “Laying Siege to the Walls of Paradise: The Fifteenth-Century Tegernsee Dispute over Mystical Theology and Nicholas of Cusa’s Strong Defense of Reason,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 41 (2015).
On the importance of the concept of vis in Cusanus’ reformation of metaphysics, see Thomas Leinkauf, “Renovatio und unitas. Nicolaus Cusanus zwischen Tradition und Innovation—Die ‘Reformation’ des Möglichkeitsbegriffs,” in Renovatio et unitas—Nikolaus von Kues als Reformer. Theorie und Praxis der Reformatio im 15. Jahrhundert, eds. Thomas Frank and Norbert Winkler (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2012), 97.
On the image of the wall of paradise in Cusanus see Tilman Borsche, “Nikolaus von Kues (1401–1464),” in Klassiker der Religionsphilosophie. Von Platon bis Kierkegaard, ed. Friedrich Niewöhner (München: Beck, 1995), 248. Compare also Rudolf Haubst, “Die erkenntnistheoretische und mystische Bedeutung der ‘Mauer der Koinzidenz’,” Mitteilungen und Forschungen der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 18 (1989).
On the question of silence in religious language see the chapter on Secrets.
“Eine Mauer schließt den Bereich der Gottheit ein, unüberschreitbar für uns. Aber das Jenseits der Mauer ist wirksam, alles begründend gegenwärtig. Wir scheitern an der Mauer, wenn wir sie durchbrechen möchten, aber wir erfahren die Mauer als das Zeichen der Gottheit, die uns hält.” Karl Jaspers, Nikolaus Cusanus (München: dtv, 1968), 24.
Most of Cusanus’ excerpts refer to Llull’s teachings about God, see Ulli Roth, “Einleitung,” in Die Exzerptensammlung aus Schriften des Raimundus Lullus im Codex Cusanus 83, ed. Ulli Roth (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999), 18.
See William J. Hoye, “Wahrnehmung als Glückseligkeit nach Nikolaus von Kues,” in Aisthesis. Die Wahrnehmung des Menschen: Gottessinn, Menschensinn, Kunstsinn, eds. H. Schwaetzer and H. Stahl-Schwaezter (Regensburg: Roderer, 1999), 35.
See Kurt Flasch, Nikolaus von Kues in seiner Zeit (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), 37. Also compare Karl Jaspers: “Aber sein Denken führt ihn dorthin, wo das Denken selber nicht weitergeht, sondern sich in dialektischen Kreisen, sich in unendlichen Abwandlungen wiederholend, bewegt, den Abflug ins Undenkbare und Unsagbare ständig versuchend, immer wieder stürzend, immer wieder sich aufschwingend zu neuem Versuch.” Jaspers, Cusanus, 49.
Nicolai de Cusa, De Deo Abscondito, h IV, p. 7, 10, 4–7. “Gentilis: Est autem ineffabilis? Christianus: Non est ineffabilis sed supra omnia effabilis, cum sit omnium nominabilium causa. Qui igitur aliis nomen dat, quomodo ipse sine nomine?” Translation: Hopkins, A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa, 303.
See Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de sapientia/Idiota de mente, ed. R. Steiger. Opera omnia V (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983), h V, p. 67, 34, 12–14: “Nam absolutus conceptus aliud esse nequit quam idealis forma omnium, quae concipi possunt, quae est omnium formabilium aequalitas.”
On Cusanus’ linguistic quest see Hans Gerhard Senger’s summarizing assertion: “Es kann also nur darum gehen, verbesserte Aussageweisen zu suchen, d.h. nach einer neuen Sprache mit anderen Begriffen, Wörtern, Denk- und Grammatikstrukturen zu suchen, durch die das Unnennbare nennbarer werden könnte.” Hans Gerhard Senger, “Die Sprache der Metaphysik,” in Nikolaus von Kues. Einführung in sein philosophisches Denken, ed. Klaus Jacobi (Freiburg/München: Alber, 1979), 86.
The claim for (peaceful) competition is even the final word in the religious multilogue De pace fidei, see Nicolai de Cusa, De Pace Fidei, h VII, p. 62, 67, 3–8: “Ubi non potest conformitas in modo reperiri, permittantur nationes—salva fide et pace—in suis devotionibus et ceremonialibus. Augebitur etiam fortassis devotio ex quadam diversitate, quando quaelibet natio conabitur ritum suum studio et diligentia splendidiorem efficere, ut aliam in hoc vincat et sic meritum maius assequatur apud Deum et laudem in mundo.”
Flasch, Nikolaus Cusanus, 122.
Compare Nicolai de Cusa, De Beryllo, eds. Hans Gerhard Senger and Karl Bormann. Opera Omnia XI/1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), h XI/1, p. 9, 7, 2.
See Flasch, Nikolaus Cusanus, 87.
Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de Sapientia, h V, p. 66, 34, 5.
See Flasch, Nicolaus Cusanus, 42.
Flasch, Nicolaus Cusanus, 93.
Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de Mente, h V, p. 109, 72, 6–7. Compare Flasch, Nicolaus Cusanus, 77.
See Senger, “Die Sprache der Metaphysik,” 99–100. “So faßt man beide Sprachebenen in ihrer Realisierung durch die Normalsprache vielleicht besser als Verweissprachen auf wegen ihres Verweisungscharakters auf das nicht rational Erkennbare und Benennbare.”
Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de Sapientia, h V, p. 66, 33, 5–8. “Nam si tibi de deo conceptum, quem habeo, pandere debeo, necesse est, quod locutio mea, si tibi servire debet, talis sit, cuius vocabula sint significativa, ut sic te ducere queam in vi vocabuli, quae est nobis communiter nota, ad quaesitum.” Translation: Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge, 514.
Compare Jan Bernd Elpert, Loqui est relevare—verbum ostensio mentis. Die sprachphilosophischen Jagdzüge des Nikolaus Cusanus (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002), 140–141: “Vom Wort, vom ewigen Wort, dem Logos, geht alles aus. Aus ihm entströmt alles. Hier liegt, wie schon öfters bemerkt, der Grund, die Basis für jegliches Wort, sei es gesprochen oder nur im Geiste gedacht. Im Wort selber liegt also eine Kraft verborgen. Cusanus nennt sie die ‘vis vocabuli’. Die ‘vis vocabuli’ aber ist allen bekannt (‘communiter nota’), d.h. die ‘vis vocabuli’ ist eine universelle Größe. Zu ihr haben alle in gleicher Weise Zugang. Über die ‘vis vocabuli’ ist es möglich, einen Weg zurück zum Logos zu gehen. Dieser Weg jedoch führt ins Schweigen, in die Dunkelheit, ohne daß aber Cusanus das mystische Schweigen einseitig glorifizieren würde. Denn dieser Weg ins Schweigen findet seine Grundlage darin, daß die menschliche Rede, die auf diesen Weg führt, eine signifikative Rede ist. […] Das Motto, so können wir sagen, lautet also ‘ad deum per vim vocabuli’.”
Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de Sapientia, h V, p. 66, 33, 9–11.
On the vis vocabuli see also Christian Ströbele, Performanz und Diskurs, Religiöse Sprache und negative Theologie bei Cusanus (Münster: Aschendorff, 2015), 235.
nominati perfecta innotescendi ratio esse, quae ad eius notitiam deducat Sermon XXIII Domine in lumine vultus tui, in: Nicolai de Cusa, Sermones I (1430–1441), h XVI, p. 374, 28, 3–5.
See Nicolai de Cusa, Sermones I (1430–1441), h XVI, p. 375, 31, 1–11.
In his last writing, titled De apice theoriae, Cusanus meditates on this point: “Veritas quanto clarior tanto facilior. Putebam ego aliquando ipsam in obscuro melius reperiri. Magnae potentiae veritas est, in qua posse ipsum valde lucet. Clamitat enim in plateis, sicut in libello De idiota legisti. Valde certe se undique facilem repertu ostendit.” Nicolai de Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae/De Apice Theoriae, ed. Raymund Klibansky and Hans Gerhard Senger. Opera Omnia XII (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982), h XII, p. 120, 5, 9–13.
“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead […].”
Nicolai de Cusa, De Deo Abscondito, h IV, p. 9, 13, 4–8. “Non enim dicimus verum quod hoc sit nomen eius nec dicimus falsum, quia hoc non est falsum quod sit nomen eius. Neque dicimus verum et falsum, cum eius simplicitas omnia tam nominabilia quam non-nominabilia antecedat.” Translation: Hopkins, A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa, 304.
See Nicolai de Cusa, De Deo Abscondito, h IV, p. 9, 14, 1–5.
Nicolai de Cusa, Directio speculantis seu de li non aliud, eds. L. Bauer and P. Wilpert (Hamburg: Meiner, 1944), h XIII, p. 12, 18.
Nicolai de Cusa, De li non aliud, h XIII, p. 12, 18, 19–23. “[…] idem triniter repetitum si est primi definitio, ut vides, ipsum profecto est unitrinum et non alia ratione, quam quia se ipsum definit; non enim foret primum, si se ipsum minime definiret; se autem quando definit, trinum ostendit. Ex perfectione igitur vides resultare trinitatem […].” Translation: Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not-Other, 1117.
See chapter on Tradition.
Jaspers explains the process of formal transcending as follows: “Die Begrifflichkeit formalen Transzendierens gilt manchem als ein sich in den Windungen des Gedankens ständig wiederholender mühsamer und pompöser Unsinn. Für den spekulativ Philosophierenden liegt die Anziehungskraft darin, daß dieses Denken das Tor öffnet zur Unendlichkeit. Aber diese Anziehungskraft wird erst dadurch mächtig gesteigert, daß die Unendlichkeit selber den Denkenden ergreift. Dann hört er gleichsam ihre Sprache.” Jaspers, Cusanus, 54.
On the notion of semiosis see Volkhard Krech, Die Evolution der Religion. Ein soziologi- scher Grundriß (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021), 45–58.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
See the subtitle of his book: Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger.
See chapter on Space.
Tallis, Michaelangelo’s Finger, 36.
See also Stolz, “Transzendenz,” 525.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 239–240.
See the Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead as recorded by Lucian Price (Boston: Godine, 2001), 131.
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, 132.
See Hovey, “The Theology of History in ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ and Its Predecessors,” 64.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 228.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 22. A ‘prehension’ is, according to Cobb possibly “the single most important and original concept in Whitehead’s philosophy. A ‘prehension’ consists in an objective datum as well as a subjective form. The objective datum is what it prehends. The subjective form is how it prehends it.” John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book. A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (Claremont: P&F Press, 2008,) 31. A prehension, thus, is essentially bipolar.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 22.
See Hubert Knoblauch’s critique on the ‘binary transcendence’ he finds in Luhmann’s theory, compare Knoblauch, Populäre Religion, 55.
This idea is the Whiteheadian equivalent of what Licia Di Giacinto in one of her presentations to the KHK termed the ‘Matryoshka Principle’ of the TID. Forms (Levels) of transcendence are connected in the manner of nesting of Russian dolls. The concept is further elaborated in Di Giacinto’s forthcoming monograph ‘Laozi in Context’. Compare also the particular interrelation of contrasts as elaborated by Reinhard Schulze: “Wie schon angesprochen erfolgt die Interpretation einer vorgängigen Unterscheidung meist erst nach einem oder mehreren späteren Differenzierungsprozessen. So wurde die Sakral-Profan-Unterscheidung erst in dem Moment begrifflich, als sich das Feld des Sakralen in eine neue, zwischen Transzendenz und Immanenz unterscheidende Ordnung ausdif- ferenziert hatte. Das Gleiche gilt auch für die Transzendenz-Immanenz-Unterscheidung. Auch sie wurde erst begrifflich, als sich die Transzendenzordnung in eine Religion-Säkularität-Ordnung differenzierte. Das Paar Transzendenz und Immanenz interpretiert also aus einer späteren Zeit die Verfassung der Ordnung, die sich aus einer Differenzierung des Sakralen ergeben hat. Daher sind die Abstrakta Transzendenz (transcendentia) und Immanenz (immanentia) erst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert belegt.” Reinhard Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam (Basel: Schwabe, 2015), 135.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 95. Whitehead’s idea finds some resemblance in Georg Simmel’s anthropological idea about the human being that is that man is a differentiating creature, see Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, eds. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt, Otthein Rammstedt. Gesamtausgabe 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 116. See also Georg Simmel, “Über sociale Differenzierung,” in Aufsätze 1887–1890. Über sociale Differenzierung. Das Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie, ed. Heinz-Jürgen Dahme. Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 137: “Der Mensch ist ein Unterschiedswesen; wie wir nie die absolute Größe eines Reizes, sondern nur seinen Unterschied gegen den bisherigen Empfindungszustand wahrnehmen, so haftet auch unser Interesse nicht an denjenigen Lebensinhalten, die von jeher und überall die verbreiteten und allgemeinen sind, sondern an denen, durch die sich jeder von jedem unterscheidet.”
See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 22.
Shils, Tradition, 196.
See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 278, also compare Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, 74.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 31.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 279.
Compare Peter Slater, The Dynamics of Religion. Continuity and Change in Patterns of Faith (London: SCM Press, 1979), 43: “The contrasts between patterns reflect differences of emphasis rather than irreconcilable oppositions.” See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 279.
Stephen Berkwitz stressed this point with regard to the South Asian contact situations between Buddhists and Christians as follows: “Contact situations marked by interreligious encounters gave new energy to self-referential moves to systematize Buddhism and delineate acceptable sources from which one could get knowledge of it.” Berkwitz, “Dynamics and Stability,” 37.
See Jürgen Frese, “Sozialprozesstheorie im Anschluß an Whitehead. Whiteheads Metaphysik als methodenkritisches und kategoriales Orientierungmodell für soziologische Theorien,” in Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff/Whitehead and the Idea of Process, edited by Ernest Wolf-Gazo (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 1981), 92.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 348.
Regarding object language terminology, Johann Hafner notes a corresponding phenomenon: salvation means the blurring of distinctions (“Erlösung ist das Verwischen von Unterschieden”). Hafner, “Die Codierung des Christentums,” 174.
See Kleine, “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft,” 66: “Im ostasiatischen Buddhismus würde man den Sachverhalt folgendermaßen formulieren: die beiden Pole sind vom (transzendenten!) Standpunkt eines Buddha aus betrachtet ‘nicht zwei und doch zwei; zwei und doch nicht zwei’. In der Luhmann‘schen Diktion: Transzendenz verweist auf die Einheit der Differenz—aber eben auf einer höheren Ebene!.”
The KHK yearly September Conference in 2017 (6–8 September) was devoted to the subject ‘The Transcendence/Immanence Distinction in the Study of Religious Contacts between Asia and Europe’, summarizing the results of the research carried out in the KHK during the academic year 2016/2017 on the topic of the transcendence/immanence distinction.
See Magnus Schlette, “Commentary. The Transcendence/Immanence Distinction (TID) as a tertium comparationis in the Study of Religious Contacts” (unpublished manuscript, 2017), 1.
Schlette, “Commentary,” 4.
Schlette, “Commentary,” 5.
Schlette, “Commentary,” 6 (with reference to Dalferth, “The Idea of Transcendence,” 155). On a critique on Dalferth’s idea that is, it basically using the logics of Dialectical Theology see Hafner, “Die Codierung des Christentums,” 184. After all, Dalferth’s approach from the very beginning starts with a specified form of the transcendence-immanence distinction, as the idea of absolute transcendence is presupposed as the unconditioned/absolute (das Unbedingte).
See chapter on Attraction.
See chapter on More Than Semantics.
On the relationship between God and demons Daniel Barbu, “Idolatry and the History of Religions,” Studi e Materiali de Storia delle Religioni 82 (2016): 548–550.
See chapter on Object Language and Metalanguage.
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 87–88.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
Campany, Making Transcendents, 3.
See chapter on Dynamics and Stability.
See chapter on Concepts and Contact.
See chapter on Tradition.