Transcendence and truth

a response to D.Z. Phillips

pp. 95-112

in: John Hick, Dialogues in the philosophy of religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Dewi Phillips¹ has asked me to write about Transcendence and Truth. "Transcendence", as indicating beyondness, is a very general idea which waits to be given specific meanings in specific contexts. It is perhaps most commonly used in contrast to immanence. However, I am not here focusing upon that polarity but am using the term to refer to the characteristic in virtue of which the divine, the ultimate reality, is said to be other and "greater" (in an Anselmic rather than a spatial sense) than the physical universe. The area of discourse is thus that occupied by the debate between naturalistic and what we can, for want of a better term, call transcendental understandings of the universe. The medievals used the term 'supernatural" here, but that word has today shrivelled in meaning to indicate the occult, ghosts, spirits, magic spells and the like. And so I shall speak of transcendence, and of the Transcendent as that which, according to the religions, transcends the multiple forms of discharging energy constituting the natural or physical universe.