Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry

8. Intimations of Transcendence: Praise and Compassion

151 eight Intimations of Transcendence Praise and Compassion Sallie McFague I would like to make a modest suggestion: That we look at two characteristic activities of religious people—their habit of praising God and their attempts to love others—as hints or traces of transcendence. Postmodernism has privileged the second of these activities, the ethical, and in fact has helped to return much of western theology to its primacy. This is a great gift. To a lesser extent, postmodern hermeneutics has also encouraged the other characteristic activity of religious people—praise. However, it has done so in a somewhat parsimonious , minimalist way; I suggest praise should be exuberant and exorbitant. Compassion and praise are related, I believe, for it is the aesthetic appreciation for the Other—God and our neighbors—that prompts the ethical response. We look and say: ‘‘It is good’’; we can then (sometimes) act in love toward the Other. I have found that one fruitful way to bring these two activities—the aesthetic and the ethical—together is to imagine the world as God’s body. Attempting to live within this model allows us to see the beauty of God through the bodies of creation and to realize that the greatest need of these lovely bodies is to be fed. Thus beauty and need, aesthetics and ethics, God and the world, join at the place where people praise God and serve the basic needs of others. Sallie McFague 152 Praising God and Loving Neighbor Humility is the only permitted form of self-love. Praise for God, compassion for creatures, humility for oneself. —Simone Weil∞ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. —1 Corinthians 13:13 The two most distinctive activities of religious people are gratitude toward God and compassion toward others. The most prevalent religious emotion does not appear to be fear, but thanksgiving. A sense of gratitude seems to well up in us, even in those who are not ‘‘religious.’’ We nod in agreement when Annie Dillard writes: ‘‘I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’ ’’; or when Rilke exclaims, ‘‘Being here is magnificent.’’≤ Indeed it is. It is also horrible and horrifying beyond all our imaginings, from the reckless waste and bloody violence of nature’s ways to the even more shocking perversion of human greed and hatred. We live in a terrifying, wonderful world and in the midst of it some people, many people, end up full of praise, feeling blessed and wanting to bless. People as various as Job and Francis of Assisi do; so do the writer of Psalm 104 (‘‘I will sing to the Lord as long as I live’’) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’’); as well as two non-believing biologists, E. O. Wilson, who wrote that ‘‘biophilia ’’ was a natural human emotion, and Stephen Jay Gould, who used a gloss on the Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life for the title of his book on evolution.≥ Dillard puts it this way: ‘‘The canary . . . sings on the skull.’’∂ It seems that in all religious traditions and outside them as well, gratitude and delight emerge from human beings, spilling out from us in exorbitant words of praise. Is this phenomenon an intimation of transcendence? I do not know, but all this language cannot simply be ignored or rejected. Both JeanLuc Marion and Jacques Derrida acknowledge this language in their discussions of the ‘‘gift’’ as the impossible possibility—what we most desire—but can never have short of idolatry.∑ They acknowledge it, however, in a minimalist way (and for good reason, as they have argued). But is this sufficient to account for the depth and breadth of the language of exorbitant praise? Whether one looks at the writings of mystics of all traditions, the Islamic poets, the Hindu sacred scriptures, the psalms of the Hebrew scriptures, the religious ceremonies of First Nations peoples—and even the theologies of such Christians as Irenæus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teilhard de Chardin, and Elizabeth Johnson—we find a huge discourse of thanksgiving. Even many so-called nonbelievers who are aware that they did not create themselves and are grateful to whatever did, use such language. One way of describing this discourse is with Intimations of Transcendence 153 the ancient term via positiva, the way of...