This sense of transcendence is a most peculiar thing. It is at once terribly vague and terrifyingly vivid: perhaps axiomatically impossible to fathom or classify, it nonetheless makes itself and its identity pointedly and forcefully known in human experience, welcome or not. It breeds its own wonders in the human soul and transfigures all it touches. Many might go so far as to say it lies at the very heart of the human experience, and one can say at the very least that without a sense of the transcendent the collective of human creativity, if it existed in any form worth speaking of at all, would be merely an etiolated fragment of what it actually is.
Beyond this I should say little for fear of constriction, trivialization, or sacrilege. But I will venture a few coarse and certainly non-exhaustive descriptors to aid the following discussion. The longing for transcendence makes us thrive on the sense of the infinite: running unconstrained through the open countryside, flying, pursuing a craft of endless possibility, or simply looking out over rolling hills as far as the eye can see—the thrill of all of these, if we were to try to articulate it, seems to lie in the intimation that the world might just be infinite after all. 

Moreover, this longing for transcendence transfigures what would otherwise appear to be survival-oriented impulses. The various facets of the desire for personal relationship—to be known, loved, and (quite apart from being loved) approved of by the one(s) before whom one lives and works—are easily attributable by the naturalist to various necessities for the preservation of human individuals and basic society. But touched by a longing for transcendence, they assume a life of their own which many will testify cannot be satiated by at least pragmatic fulfillment of the biologically- or socially-oriented inclinations, leaving one to sense that “there must be more than this.” 

A second example is the yearning for meaning: the desire for intelligibility is likely enough to the naturalist (ostensibly, at least—though I must say that the very fact of consciousness and intelligibility seems to me to be quite mysterious and wonderful beyond at least our present ability to explain); but touched by the desire for the transcendent, this yearning for meaning becomes a longing to know at deeper and deeper levels the meaning of life and of the world, and to be caught up in a cosmic narrative that validates us with a purpose resonating with this world-meaning itself, this logos. 

Similarly, the desire not to lose what by nature is temporary could be surmised to have origins in life- or society-preserving impulses, and these could conceivably account for the sense of longing one feels in the face of the inevitable tendency to decay. But touched by the sense of the transcendent, this desire-impulse yields to some form or degree of hope, by which I do not mean optimism or wishful thinking but rather a reorientation (sometimes subtle, sometimes manifestly radical) of the vantage point of our worldview to a perspective that would have to be called redemption-oriented, whether we acknowledge it as such or not. It is in light of this hope that we perceive what strikes us as the brokenness of the world, and therefore it is in light of hope that we long in the face of present reality. Longing and despair may be a lack of hopefulness, but they are certainly not a lack of hope; to the contrary, longing and despair only exist as such because they fly in the face of an underlying hope that appears confounded or deferred: despair proves, not disproves, the fact of hope. This hope is the very life-blood of the sense of transcendence and its expression: apart from the question of whether hope in fact underpins all that strikes us as meaningful, the most unanimously poignant and stirring moments in all of art, so far as I can see, consist either in the explicit evocation of hope or else the conveyance of something so distinctly tragic that the it evokes a powerful sense of what can only be called hope deferred. In either case, it seems clear that, for whatever reason, the concept of hope resonates with unique power in the human spirit, turning outward to permeate the world as we see it: it is through hope that we sense creation groaning, the winter longing for something that is not spring; and, I think, it is because this groaning betrays the gravitation of the invisible star of hope that generation after generation has turned to nature for solace.

Scientific and artistic pursuit, too, can touch on this sense of transcendent hope in various ways. Science evokes the thrill of the infinite through the sense that the vast and wild world beckons us to a quest of inexhaustible discovery. Thus it lends the pursuer a great sense of purpose, so far as its domain extends: but its domain falls short of those points at which we long most: the personal, the teleological, the redemptive. The arts, in their varying degrees of abstraction, can indeed touch on these issues powerfully, albeit only by representation. Yet we long for something actual, something realized. Some might say that perhaps this is not so; perhaps we long only to long. But if that were so, we would have difficulty explaining why the wonder of many childhood stories consists in the fantastic being found to be actual; we would be hard-pressed to account for the despair that sets in whenever any hope (not necessarily with a “transcendent” object) begins to feel false or even distant, and which would seem to exceed mere non-fulfillment of a wish or desire-impulse. The greater the perceived desirability of what is hoped for, the greater the despair of disillusionment when sensing that, for all one’s desire to be strong, all of one’s strength is powerless to effect what is sought, even if what is sought is comprehended. We long, in other words, for a hope that is made perfect in our weakness, a hope that is not merely illusory but powerful to save us objectively from despair and its sources.

Read Part 1 of this series here.