On the Meaning of Transcendence & Authenticity

Several of my friends have pointed out that a number of the frequently-used terms on the Existential Cosmopolite are a bit mysterious, and I agree with them. I believe many so-called philosophers of our day are really little naked emperors walking around, flaunting their newly-acquired expensive garments. In order to protect authentic children, I will periodically check in with some definitions or explanations of the notions I work with in my writings, throwing on a pair of socks here, an undergarment there. Our instructor today will be Bernard Lonergan, my own master teacher, in order to make explicit my own primary understanding of the notion of transcendence:

"Question: Why do you use the word 'transcendence'?

Response (Lonergan): In general, transcendence means going beyond, going across and beyond. It is opposed to immanence. There have been philosophies of immanence, particularly since Kant: the impossibility of knowing anything besides your thoughts. You can know what pleases you, what satisfies you, what you like, what you dislike, but you can't know what is good objectively. That is the doctrine of immanence: a relativism with regard to morals, a relativism with regard to value, a relativism with regard to knowledge; not simply a relativism, but there is no such thing as arriving at what is independent of the self, of the subject.

That is the doctrine of immanence; the opposite to it is the doctrine of transcendence, when you assert the possibility of getting beyond yourself. Your horizon is not simply what you can imagine. In other words, you think of persons as being out of their minds if all they can know is what they can imagine. To account for getting beyond oneself is, of course, quite a tricky problem in cognitional theory. But the phrase ['transcendence,' 'self-transcendence'] is meant to reject any doctrine of immanence. A doctrine of immanence says all I know is what seems to me, all I know is phenomena, what appears to be good, what appears to be true. To deny that is to say that we know what really is independent of us, what is so whether we say so or not. That is a doctrine of transcendence.

And I divide transcendence into two types: the intentional self-transcendence, namely, knowing what is real, knowing what is so; and real self-transcendence, getting beyond oneself, attending to what is good, not merely what is good for me but to what is good in itself. If you love a person you do what is good for him or her, not what is good for yourself....

Question: You mention self-transcendence and somehow equated it with authenticity, and I'm associating authenticity with really being oneself, so I'm getting muggy when I put it next to self-transcendence.

Response (Lonergan): Well, your real self, in that sense of really being oneself, is the self-transcending self. Your real self is not backing into childhood narcissism but going beyond yourself, apprehending a world not of fantasy but as it is, apprehending what is worth while objectively, and living according to those apprehensions."

[From Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan Volume 17: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980. "Horizons." UTP: 2004, 23-24.]

The Official Fruit of Heaven

Enjoying the mass at San Juan Capistrano’s Mission Basilica, I have often wondered at the rich retablo that frames the sacred liturgy that enacts the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Just behind the solemn and life-imparting business of celebrating the Lord ’s Supper, the retablo portrays millennia-old church doctrines, doctrines that the early church fathers struggled to understand and articulate as they moved forward with Christ’s teaching and sought to protect the integrity of what God had revealed to humanity. Christ set the foundation, and ever since that time we who believe have been working out our faith in fear and trembling. On the retablo, the trinity breaks through the dome of the world into the affairs of humanity, and at the center the hypostatic Christ (fully God and fully human) is portrayed, bearing what Christians interpret as the greatest act of love ever to visit our world, an act so profound as to traverse, by way of a transcending, a profound and hopelessly irreparable wound in the soul of Creation. This transcending is believed by Christians not to be one of Nature as such, nor even over the limits of human insight (although he certainly did do just that), but a rising above human wickedness. The Christian claim is that Christ’s will remained at one with the Father’s will for the duration of his life, even as his death on the cross caused the Father to turn away. He could have thrown himself from the mountain or turned the stones into loaves of bread. He did not.

The retablo at the parish portrays other luminous theological mysteries, but the Spanish designers of our retablo chose something I find fascinating to frame these windows into other-worldly mysteries: Bunches of grapes on vine. Hundreds of them. All shimmering gold. These grapes would be just right for harvest— not too big for distracting you from your subject matter, nor too small to be unappealing. I want to pick them. I would eat them, were my teeth hard enough. The sort of Côte d'Or that would come from those vines, I can only fantasize about.

But why grapes next to images of sacred truths? Why the placement of something so simple and universal next to realities so divine? Because grapes are the official fruit of heaven. That’s my theory anyhow, and the following outlines why.

To begin with, of all Christ’s miracles, which one first led the disciples to believe he just might be who he said he was? If a restaurant runs out of wine for a wedding and the guests are thirsty, where does the host turn to for more vino? Picture the scene: A server brings the sommelier a ladle of red. The sommelier takes a whiff, examines the rim for color variation. A cork is nowhere to be seen, but the guests are thirsty, the occasion is once in a lifetime. The sommelier intrepidly takes a sip and a quirky smile grows out of the corner of his mouth. The server looks skeptical for some reason, but the sommelier is delighted. He turns to the bridegroom. “Usually the best wine is drunk first so the alcohol dulls the palate for the main wine’s alternate. You have reserved the best wine for the later hours,” he proclaims. “Serve the guests.” The server leans over to the sommelier and discreetly points out that the wine has come from the ceremonial wash jars. The server explains that he himself had filled the jars with Cana’s finest, good ol’ Galilee water. He’d followed that Jesus fellow’s instructions in a state of panic, and now the Chateau Du Margaux. John 2:11 reports that it is here his disciples began to believe in him.

When first approached by his mother with the request for wine, Jesus seems distracted. He tells her that his time has not yet come. He finally acquiesces, indicating that he is not impervious to the festivities, but his mind is elsewhere. Ecce homo— Behold, the man!— reverberates deep somewhere in his spirit. This joyful juice will have a new meaning, a meaning that will mark the incredible sacrifice that God’s plan for humanity’s redemption will require. The wine will become spilled blood, bread will become pierced flesh. Christians will enact this cannibalistic meal everywhere the Eucharist is celebrated, millions of times a day, 365 days a year, for thousands of years.

After the sorrow the wine and the bread promise a return to joy. The blood and flesh will once again unite in the person of Christ (as it has already in truth), and there will be another meal, a meal that lasts the term of forever. Christ invites each of us to the table, but many of the King’s guests are too busy to accept. Another round of invitations is sent. The deeper meaning of the blood and flesh is revealed: Fellowship between the human family and the Living God. The guests arrive. Bread is broken and a period of peace between Creator and created embarks unbroken. The wounds of Christ are scars on his blazing hands for eternity, but John’s vision of him on the Isle of Patmos reads, “His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters” (Revelation 1: 14-15).

Alas, we are on this side of time. For some of us, these Christian beliefs are nursemaids stories, “wide acres on the moon” to quote Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. For others who believe, myself included, all we can do is imagine what is must be like. Even John’s vision on Patmos is full of allegory and symbolism and anachronisms. What of the mix is literal and what is figurative? I can’t be too sure. But I am sure of grapes. I look at the retablo and I know— know from intimate experience— that grapes signify abundance. What I perceive when I see the Holy Trinity surrounded by the pregnant vine is a God of abundance, a God who comes with overwhelming completeness of being, completeness of righteousness, completeness of goodness. He gives himself in the sacramental wine, and we are made one with him in the Eucharistic meal.

I took the photograph above on one of the most meaningful days of my life. During the tail end of my time in Vienna, a friend of mine and I rented a car and drove down to Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera. Coming from glamorous (insert not-so-veiled sarcasm here) Orange County, I had never seen an unlabeled jar of fresh pesto on a market shelf, authentic gaggles of beautifully-leathered elderly Italian folk on quant village porches, nor olive tree groves that once heard Latin being spoken during harvest time. Another thing I had never seen was, embarrassingly, a real vineyard. I had never seen gorgeous grapes pulling down on a vine before. Here I would drink the fresh wine of Corniglia and eat the fresh seafood of Riomaggiore. My friend and I walked the five villages in a day, and by the end of it I was saturated with the lavish wealth of a world not too far off the mark. If you had never left Cinque Terre, you might have had a hard time believing the old story about getting ejected from the garden.

I had a psychological shift that day. I never understood the grace that the sacraments entail until I saw a part of myself restored that day by my experience of overwhelming kindness in fellowship with the natural world around me. A subtle ability to trust Nature and God’s plan for His redemption of Nature came upon me like never before or since. Since I am inextricably part of Nature while I am living in this world, a part of myself was given back to me that day. God’s plan for my own redemption, enacted through his death on the cross and my acceptance of his sacrifice in the Eucharist, has come to me in a very real and tangible way. I am still struggling to adequately grasp many of the mysteries discovered by Christian theologians and the Church at large, but I understand grapes. When my Lord offers me a cup of wine and says “take and drink, this is my blood spilled for you,” I know that I am a man who is ill who is being offered a cup of medicine. I am a poor, estranged son who is being offered a cup from his Father’s finest cellar. I am a beggar who is welcomed as an esteemed guest by the most capable host. Thank God grapes are the official fruit of Heaven.

In the Sea of Shining Light

The other day I was running on the treadmill at the gym, searching for inspiration to continue springing my lumbering legs, when suddenly Mike Shiver & Aruna’s Everywhere You Are from Above & Beyond’s Anjunabeats 7 (Disc 2) began cascading over my cochlea, tickling my brain and lifting my soul. This shimmering trance track speaks of the songwriter’s experience of transcendence in a human relationship, one that marks a person so deeply that he experiences his beloved’s presence in some way wherever he goes. The song speaks of presence in the moment of togetherness, surrendered defenses, and the indelible nature of being born anew by such a renewing experience. It is the stuff of really terrible new-wave jazz cuts, of fifties soda-pop ballads, top-forty teenie-bopper fodder, the swooning achievements of Seal and Maxwell, the eighties canon of Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, or the foggy longing of Dave Matthews and his band. Transcendence in the cradle of romantic relationships spans the gamut in pop music, from mere freshman limerence to noble star-crossed lovers. Simply writing about this strange and much sought-after phenomenon is not enough to make a great song though— something greater is required.

What caused me to stop and consider Everywhere You Are wasn’t solely the beauty of unmet longing in the lyrics. Pop music wouldn’t be pop music if it wasn’t smattered with musings about the merits (and costs) of love and interpersonal connection. What fascinated me was my total psycho-physical response to the song as it invigorated my tired body and enlivened my weary spirit. It was the collective harmony between every dimension of the song that carried me through. Trance as a genre tends towards an experience of the transcendent by the very substance of its mode of existence. Generally speaking, trance tracks are produced in keys that tend to be naturally emotive and uplifting. I don’t think it’s a mistake that the greatest trance artists of the day hail from Scandinavia, sometimes slightly south. There is high, structured drama in the music, like a good epic legend. There is continuity in storytelling, as trance records are mixed together, overlapping beginning and end. Just as each individual record reveals its own contribution to the drama, so does the whole mix meander through forests and seas and mountain crags. There is drama and achievement, tumbling back into continued drama. There is much to be discovered in a well-executed mix, if you are patient enough to listen to the whole story being told.

My good friend Taylor Black recently turned me on to the trance-trio Above & Beyond, and I was very pleased to discover that they double as my long-time favorite trance producers Oceanlab, in the company of the luminous Justine Suissa on vocals. Above & Beyond have nearly forty-thousand followers on Facebook. They offer a free Podcast on iTunes that Mr. Black clued me in on, called Trance Around the World (TATW). What impresses me so much about artists like A&B has to do with what I am getting at in this post. For those of us who love music deeply (and I suspect especially so for genres like trance, progressive house, etc), I believe it is the experience of transcendence in music that draws us in so profoundly. Just like an enchanted encounter with one’s beloved, brilliantly written music can touch one’s heart in a lasting manner. Such trance music envelops and overwhelms the listener, and it does so within the bounds of a building, metered order. It is wild and big, yet particular and elegant. The structure is bright and phosphorescent, spilling out of the quantitative and into the qualitative. Both are necessary for its success, neither can adequately hold its bounds alone.

Sometimes both melody and lyric aim at something higher; other times the lyrics or the music or both fall short. Some DJ’s blow it big time here, especially in the dimension of lyrics. They lose the light, instead steering the listener towards what Frankl calls in The Will to Meaning a “biochemical detour” to an experience of happiness or joy. Cheap sex or the siren-song of chemical cocktails comes between the listener and the true object of beauty, the object of remembrance that the listener consciously, or, more commonly, subconsciously searches for. One is invited to Pleasure Island instead, to squander whatever wages one had garnered in a more innocent stage of the experience. Pig & Dan’s Addiction from a few years ago drones repeatedly “Women, drugs, and rock n’ roll: Addiction.” Whether or not the record states it with such succinct brevity, you know what you are getting when such a record submits to needle: you want more than what you now have. A state of excited dissatisfaction sets in, and the listener is driven to the cheap thrill of adrenaline in whatever escapades ensue.

In contrast, the listener gets a record like Taxi Girl’s High Glow, or DJ Shah featuring Adrina Thorpe’s Who Will Find Me? Pure, pulsating beauty in a song produced for a serious sound system. It’s not difficult to picture the refrains in these tracks as solid stone archways pointed toward heaven, or fiery stained-glass windows emblazoned by sunlight. The arabesque four-and-four beat designs provide an adequate structure for lyrics about dancing in morning light in the sea of shining light or omniscient benevolence couched in “high glow.” The music is large enough to support the weighty lyrics, and something of a glittering Chinese dragon festooned in a number of unexpected charms meanders past you at 140 beats per minute.

The best trance music points the listener to joy, and the best study of joy that I have read is in CS Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Before I mentioned the phenomenon of the conscious or subconscious search for a remembered object. Lewis’ definition of joy is Sehnsucht, unmet longing, and it is the object of that unmet longing that such music provides a taste of. This aim could never acquire a total view of what it intends, but a small, absurdly potent corner of a robe is revealed to share its glory. The greatest DJs tease the listener, repeatedly ushering the listener to a peek at flaming brilliance just beyond the veil of the limited, allowing a brief glimpse of this shining beauty. The properly-oriented listener who is looking for the moment is touched and inspired and something that wasn’t formerly present in the soul is born afresh. The dim grayness of the mundane is penetrated by a bright ray here and there, and one who is able to navigate around the doom inherent in the siren call of the inauthentic in the club world’s seedier elements may just find him or herself marked by an experience of radiant joy.