ABSTRACT
Writing about transcendence today, as the twentieth century has come to a close, I cannot escape the thought that I will be suspected as the rear guard of an already vanquished troop defending an already forgotten cause. It seems that this task, to write on transcendence, runs counter to every dominant movement and voice of twentieth-century culture. I remind myself that we, the inhabitants of the century that has just ended, have witnessed the progressive realization of what Max Weber, at the beginning of the century, called the “disenchantment of the world.” With this phrase, Weber described the world view upon which modern culture was premised: the assumption that the world is fully knowable, fully calculable, fully open to the probing of the scientific mind and reason. In such a world where all is potentially if not yet actually available for man, what place is left for transcendence, for something, or something that is not at all a thing, which might transcend the grasping mind or hand of modern man? The fact that fewer and fewer authors and scholars today even think or discuss “disenchantment” only indicates how illuminating Weber’s vision has proven to be; for to forget that the world is disenchanted is precisely the spell cast by disenchantment. Transcendence is so far lost that we don’t even know it is gone.
