Dr. Lawler asks, in a question re: my previous post, "Are today’s sophisticated Western individuals the first people to ever have lost all contact with any sense of transcendence of their biological existence?"
To be intellectually sophisticated there must be a knowledge that we exist within a tension whose poles are immanence and transcendence, and to destroy either pole, or to claim dominance of one over the other, is to destroy the reality of who we are as existent, created beings.
Here the pervasive problem of gnosis, with its rejection of transcendence and its ideology of "immanentist self-redemption," give credence to Lawler’s query. The loss of the sense of transcendence of which Lawler speaks is related to the breakdown of apocalyptic Christian symbolism following the rise of another form of "messiansim" symbolized as the philosophy of history , expounded by Hegel, Comte, Marx, and others. This philosophy of history and gnosis may be one in the same or they may be separate elements of the messianism complex but they represent the anti-thesis of Christianity.
In the on going conflict Christianity (transcendence) experiences a certain disadvantage. Voegelin (see The Decline of Messianism? CW, Vol. 33, The Drama of Humanity . . . , 89-93, Univ. of Missouri Press.) writes that when modern man’s inquiry into his spiritual existence reaches "a certain degree of differentiation one is struck by the uncertainty of the transcendental relationship." I think Voegelin was speaking from personal experience.
This phenomenon may be the cause of numerous mental and spiritual disorders, that is to say this "uncertainty" becomes "unbearable" and results in a turning toward (egophanic revolt) any number of distorted ideologies (Obama’s Afro-centric Marxism, or McCain’s globalist neo-conservatism are contemporary political examples). It also goes a long way in explaining why the classical Greeks thought that philosophizing would not be popular among the ruck of mankind and why it would be best if philosophers ran things.
The West began to lose transcendence, which we can define in philosophical terms as a belief in an "open existence (Bergson)," as a result of the above mentioned philosophy of history-gnostic immanenist movements. Never-the-less, there remains a remnant, and there is always hope.
