Part 3: Signals of Transcendence

Believe it or not, I initially planned just one article covering the whole of James Sire’s visit and presentations, starting with my general impressions and culminating with analysis of the two bits of rhetoric I’ll (finally) cover in this article. Of course, I also planned to write this particular article right on the temporal heels of the other two, but papers intervened. In any case, my coursework and grading are both done for the quarter, so I can now pick up where I left off.

As you’ll recall, Sire’s recent reformulation of “worldview” heavily emphasizes emotional commitments, at the cost (in my opinion) of a rational and workable concept. Be that as it may, his primary application of these ideas does maintain the intellectual integrity and logical structure typical of much of his writing. A worldview, Sire argues, is “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, [one] that can be expressed as a story and/or in a set of presuppositions” (Naming the Elephant 122). For the second part of his Saturday seminar (as well as a brief part of his Friday CGSA talk) Sire linked this frame with the notion of “signals of transcendence,” and gave both a history of major views on these signals and his own thoughts on the matter.

For those familiar with Sire’s previous work, it may be helpful to think of this change as more methodological than strictly philosophical. For instance, in How to Read Slowly Sire presents a method for “reading for comprehension”—or more precisely, reading for worldview. In the chapter there on reading nonfiction, Sire’s analysis follows in the footsteps of the New Critics—hurrah for close reading! After reproducing a short essay originally printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Major street cred there, Jimmy. Major.), Sire first seeks to “clarify the vocabulary” (31) and track down the primary text’s allusions. Only then, he contends, can we ask questions about genre, thesis, evidence, and possible objections (hmm, sounds like my freshman comp class!), and eventually about the author’s particular worldview. While close reading as an analytical practice may not necessarily require a rational approach (cf. Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, if you must), I would argue that it is wholly consistent with Sire’s then-current view of worldview as “a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic makeup of our world” (Universe 1997, p. 16). Although Sire models his reading method narratively rather than simply listing his conclusions, he follows the same logic in How to Read Slowly as in his early editions of Universe.

Within this context, Sire’s new emphasis on “signals of transcendence” (yes, yes, we’ll get to the actual definition eventually) can be seen as a similar demonstration of irrational (or more kindly, suprarational) worldview formation. Simply put, a signal of transcendence (not to be confused with singles of transcendence, which one may find on New Age dating sites) is a human impulse or reaction that can only be satisfactorily accounted for under a transcendent system. Generally, these signals appear in discourses not explicitly marked as “Christian” or even “religious,” though they interact with such discourses in significant ways. More importantly, they are equally outside rationalism or logic per se: they constitute evidence without being proof. Confused yet? Just wait—it gets, well, longer.

The actual term “signals of transcendence” originates not with Sire, actually, but with Peter Berger, a non-Christian sociologist. Interestingly, Berger denies the possibility of special revelation (personal, direct communication from a transcendent God), but views these signals as a type of natural revelation. In a book whose title I, alas, did not write in my notes, Berger thus proposes four arguments for transcendence. The “argument from ordering,” at least in Sire’s explanation, significantly highlights the irrationality of comfort: a mother, for instance, will tell her frightened or hurt child that “everything will be all right.” In the short term, perhaps, this simply means that, say, Gargamel (of The Smurfs) won’t actually jump out of the TV and chase you around, despite last night’s rather vivid nightmare. But no human mother, however well-meaning, can override or prevent real calamities: life, actually, is not all right. To claim the opposite, in both Berger’s and Sire’s view, indicates another world of permanent comfort.

Berger’s second example, the “argument from play,” likewise draws on childhood experience, but from the child’s perspective. Play, whether in the guise of make-believe, dress up, or online RPGs, creates a secondary world with its own rules and temporality. When my brother and I were kids, for instance, most of our backyard fantasies fell under the rubric of “The Adventures of Traagar and M’giah.” To this day I have no earthly idea where we got those names, but they seemed quite natural then. Of course, the bulk of our play concepts consisted of thinly veiled adaptations (or blatant plagiarisms; our liturgy for entering the play world was “It’s Morphin’ Time!”) of various TV shows and computer games, but the creative impulse fits in Berger’s model just the same. If our universe were a closed system, he argues, then serious play (no, it’s not a contradiction in terms) could not so readily—and so creatively—break the rules. For a more academic approach to this concept, Sire recommends Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Tales.” To this I would add Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907), which though from a different viewpoint covers much of the same ground.

The third of Berger’s examples, the “argument from hope,” offers (alas) no such opportunity for random childhood anecdotes. As in the argument from ordering, Berger locates in hope an impulse contradictory to a mechanistic (i.e. naturalistic) universe. Here, though, the force seems to be more in ambiguity and even agnosticism, rather than in reassurance against all odds. For example, I may make any of these three statements: (1) I hope I get an A on my paper, (2) I hope the weather is nice for my drive home, and (3) I hope I get to talk more to that pretty flute major I met at CGSA. Granted, the syntax won’t always be strictly in the same form—or necessarily use the word “hope”—but the sentiment is. However, in each of these scenarios “hope” (I should say “Hope,” waxing Platonic, but that seems a bit too formal.) takes on a slightly different meaning. For the first, I may in flights of fancy and/or bribery think I can influence my profs’ respective grading processes, but realistically I’ve done all I can. Similarly, the weather ought to be (save any still-standing suns) determined already, whether by the proverbial chaotic butterfly wing (I blame Nabokov) or an old-fashioned cold front. But the third sentence, I think, brings out Berger’s notion more clearly: while certain empirical situations, such as riding the same bus home, certainly contribute to the stated goal, this type of hope actually transcends logical calculation. This same usage, for instance, appears in Thomas Paine’s Deistic Age of Reason: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”

Finally, after three appeals to fond memories and vain future hopes, we reach Berger’s starkly realistic fourth signal: the argument from damnation. This one is particularly appropriate within the context of Christian apologetics, as many non-Christian detractors cite damnation as evidence against God’s goodness. Here as before, however, Berger is more concerned with human behavior: some particularly heinous agents of evil (Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Jack the Ripper, Barak Obama, et al) garner wishes of damnation even outside specifically theological contexts. Or, as Paul Laurence Dunbar puts it a bit more waggishly in “Theology” (1896):

There is a heaven, for ever, day by day,
The upward longing of my soul doth tell me so.
There is a hell, I’m quite as sure; for pray,
If there were not, where would my neighbors go?

Because this argument builds on a negative principle, which is to say it specifically prescribes punishment, Sire argues that it implies a converse positive principle: if we can recognize and condemn evil, then we should also be able to recognize and praise good. On a side note, C.S. Lewis uses a similar rhetorical structure in the early chapters of Mere Christianity, though he assumes an already-established moral law to do so.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Sire applies Berger’s general observations to argue specifically for Christian theism, rather than a vague—and impersonal—“transcendence.” To do this, he draws in part on Calvin’s (the French theologian, not the Greatest Cartoon Character Ever™) sensus divinitatus thesis: that there is “an awareness or sense of God implanted in all people by nature.” However, while Calvin argues that this belief is universal, at the same time it is “rather minimal: there is a God, He is the Creator, and He ought to be worshipped.” Now, the term universal, particularly when spoken by a WASP or other dastardly Westerner, carries some rather unpleasant connotations these days in the proverbial ivory tower. What Calvin (or at least the commentary on him that Sire quotes) seems to mean, though, is not that every culture conceptualizes a personal God, but rather that they retain the concept of an all-powerful being—even by denying its actual existence. I’m not particularly fond of that last bit of logic, myself, but will let it stand for the moment.

The rest of Sire’s observations on this topic primarily deal with specific signals of transcendence in human knowledge and experience. Significantly, while in a previous talk Sire noted that reasons for belief are often formulated after the fact, signals of transcendence often appear before belief. For example, Sire cites a passage from Stephen Weinberg (a thoroughgoing atheist), which states among other things that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents…but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.” Weinberg, like his fellow naturalists Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan (and Harold Bloom, after a fashion), of course believes that such a belief is ultimately self-deceiving. But Sire’s point, which I think is a good one, is that even the impulse to regret that alleged delusion speaks to a reality not dreamed of in Weinberg’s philosophy.

Based on this structure, Sire spent the rest of his talk identifying strands of thought—and occasionally specific texts—that signal transcendence in a whole range of fields: biology, astronomy, math, physics, philosophy, ethics, social sciences, and of course aesthetics. I won’t get into the details of his argument for the sciences, but I do want to spend a little time on his examples from art before moving to my own two case studies. On this point the problem of universalism re-enters the picture: though Calvin dodges the diversity-enforcing bullet by weakening his claim to account for extreme cultural ranges, Sire does not. While Sire did not fully endorse Peter Kreeft’s syllogism (“There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. You either see this or you don’t.”), he located transcendence in equally narrow circles: Bach, some paintings, Shakespeare, and poets such as G.M. Hopkins. Now, we obviously cannot expect Sire to identify transcendence in styles or genres with which he is not familiar—or perhaps more simply, those he doesn’t like—but here again I find his formulation problematic. Much as I rage, rage, against the dying of aesthetic and stylistic standards for literature, the question here is not what is aesthetically pleasing but what is emotionally effective. Sire, perhaps, would run screaming from the room (mentally, if not physically) if I cranked Stryper or Alice Cooper up to eleven. Likewise, I daresay certain fans of those two bands would groan at the prospect of sitting through all four Brandenburg Concertos. But who’s to say, aside perhaps from a few writers about two houseplants, which signal is genuine? This seems to me the biggest weakness in Sire’s argument, and an ironic one: if a signal of transcendence, well, transcends cultural specificity (as Sire and I both believe God does), how then can we limit it to one set of cultural tastes? More to the point, how might we read (as Sire suggests!!) explicitly anti-Christian texts, like Weinberg’s above, for signposts to an “unknown God”? The world, Hopkins writes, is “charged with the grandeur of God”—not just a few galleries, novels, or radio stations.

But all is not lost, even in my severely under-caffeinated curmudgeon of a universe. Just as Sire’s definition of a worldview works better as a comparatively minimal frame (as in Lewis’ hallway image in Mere Christianity) for purposes of classification and discussion, his signals of transcendence thesis functions best at the more basic level Berger describes. Specifically, I would argue, we can more usefully trace such signals as signposts at the basic levels of language and cognition, rather than as specific cultural expressions. Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and literary critic, argues correctly that all human language is a dialogue: none of us speaks completely autonomously, but rather we all reflect and refract previous discourse (conversation) to carve out our own speaking identities. For instance, my phrase “a few writers about two houseplants” in the previous paragraph alludes to “The Houseplant Song” by Audio Adrenaline, which in turn pokes fun at the idea that certain genres of music by definition cannot be Christian: “It doesn’t really matter if it’s ‘Christian’ or not/ If it’s syncopated rhythm then your soul is gonna rot.” While both references in this case are intentional and conscious, however, Bakhtin locates the dialogic impulse on a precognitive (not to be confused with Agatha the Pre-Cog) level—or more precisely, in the unconscious. In other words, while I may dialogue (yes, Virginia, verbing does weird language) with Audio Adrenaline to be clever or aesthetically interesting, I enter into dialogue in the first place precisely because I have no other choice.

Now, to my knowledge, Bakhtin and his intellectual descendents explicitly limit this dialogue to the human domain: the Underground Man may chat with his actuarial (if not actual) “gentlemen,” but not with God. However, to apply dialogism to signals of transcendence we must necessarily break down that barrier. To that end, I suggest that the processes Berger, Sire, and Calvin describe all assume and indeed rely on a God-breathed—and perhaps physically implanted—awareness of a transcendent prime reality. Now, I do not wish to minimize the specifically human intertextuality dominant in religious discourse. James Baldwin, for instance, weaves much “Christianese” into his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, even though he denies the final transcendent step from “Our Father, who art in heaven” to God. But as a counterbalance, consider these words from Flannery O’Connor’s 1962 preface to Wise Blood:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ [the novel’s main character] integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to (5).

I move now to analysis of two recent quotes whose respective speakers have much in common with the readers O’Connor describes. Neither, perhaps, points tidily to a linguistic “God gene,” but both, I will argue, share a cognitive affinity with what Sire calls “God-haunted poetry.” The first quote comes from Dr. H., my theory professor this past quarter. In the midst of a lecture—appropriately—on cognitive aspects of narrative expectations, he remarked that a certain narrative style was jarring because “that’s not how we’re designed…evolutionarily.” As this was a spoken lecture the ellipses here represent an actual pause, not elided words. In fact, the presence and timing of this pause is as much a signal of transcendence as the rather striking connotative disjunction between “designed” and “evolutionarily.”

Let us first consider this sentence from the audience’s standpoint, specifically in terms of chronology. Since the pause comes after “designed,” and since the words to that point represent a logically complete English construction, we can distinguish two interpretive units—and thus two possible interpretations—in the whole utterance. The first, “that’s not how we’re designed,” does not necessarily conjure up a personal (let alone loving) Designer, but it does identify a method in our otherwise maddening (and maddened, if you ask Freud) minds. More to the point, it identifies two distinct models for this design: the incorrect model associated with the narrative style Dr. H. was describing, and the correct model separate from it. Granted, this conversational snippet does not speculate on the character of this correct model, but implies its existence (ala Berger) nonetheless.

To add “evolutionarily,” however, creates a new interpretive unit that affects both how we read/hear our initial interpretation and the sentence as a whole. In fact, I would argue, the logical completeness of “that’s not how we’re designed,” and perhaps also some uneasiness with the epistemological foundations of such a statement, motivated the supplementary adverb. “Evolutionarily,” then, does double duty—it sanitizes the potential political unpleasantness stemming from “designed,” and simultaneously transforms the statement from metaphysical speculation to confirmation of accepted “scientific fact.” If we view this interpretive duality as a conflict between theism and naturalism, as Sire perhaps would, then Dr. H’s attempt to make one statement of two handily weakens his naturalistic bias. We’ve seen this before, actually, in Stephen Weinberg’s epistemologically similar statements recorded above. Weinberg’s prefatory disclaimer that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe [theism],” though syntactically smoother (it comes from a written text) than Dr. H’s “evolutionarily,” aims at the same goal: to subsume what one cannot believe under the banner of what one may safely say.

On this point Dr. H’s pause proves particularly interesting. I, of course, cannot say with certainty just went through his mind during that pause, but as we’ve learned from Berger one may broadcast signals of transcendence without even knowing the radio’s on. Just such a process is at work in Dr. H’s pause. If evolution were really akin to natural law, as his adverbial band-aid tries hard to convince us, then the phrase “that’s not how we’re designed” would be both nonsensical and ultimately superfluous. In other words, if design did not exist—only random complexity that we haven’t figured out yet, as Richard Dawkins argues—then Dr. H’s line would likely have been something like “we haven’t evolved that way.” That he, like Hazel Motes, tries to shrug “designed” off as a linguistic remnant of an unenlightened past ironically requires the very designer he doesn’t want to meet. Men of Athens, it seems, still build altars.

My second quote, while not so linguistically complex as Dr. H’s declaration, still demonstrates an important and widespread linguistic signal: euphemistic substitution. This one appears in a freshman composition paper; the author, A., was one of my students last quarter. In this paper, A. looks at the role of humor in several spoof advertisements and speculates a bit on the rhetoric of humor in the ads. To conclude, he remarks that “[the ads] play upon one of our most natural responses in life, humor, which in turn responds to itself as laughter. Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” The syntax of the first sentence is admittedly rather awkward—a peril, alas, of being 18 and trying to write—but I’ve included it here to heighten the irony of the culminating claim. Indeed, this tension runs throughout A’s paper: on one hand, he argues that spoofs appeal to “a basic intuitive hilarity” in their audience; on the other, he swerves away from identifying this intuition with anything but happenstance.

Just as Dr. H’s “evolutionarily” blinds the Deistic clockmaker, A’s repeated use of “natural” here and throughout his paper locates humor in a closed, naturalistic universe. Within the context of the paper, of course, this move allows A. (or so he thinks) to sidestep questions of rhetorical audience: if humor is natural, then it need not be explained. But even this impulse puts an interesting spin on his final sentence. Frankly, the naturalistic sociology that A. attempts in this paper has no coherent definition for the “human nature” to which he appeals. At best, it claims that certain elements of human behavior “keep us sane,” but does not—indeed, cannot—explain any extra-societal source of those elements. And yet, it retains the unifying idea of “nature,” even if not as baldly as A. does here. In my previous article (yea verily, heap big moons ago) about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, I explored a similar move: an abstracted “nature,” like the Divine Butler and/or Cosmic Therapist, offers agency and—dare I say it?—design without human responsibility. Incidentally, this same student later wrote a term paper arguing for illegal drug use on the basis of personal choice, so I somehow doubt he invests this nature with any significant degree of transcendent morality.

The height of the ironic substitution—and also, it seems to me, the height of the signal strength—lies in the conclusion: “Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” Sire’s method of analysis once again proves helpful here. While the terms of A’s syllogism do not precisely match up (long life does not follow from sanity), they do reveal an embedded worldview. While earlier in the paper A. primarily argued (however dubiously) for humor’s rhetorical effectiveness as a means to an economic end. Here, though, he steps outside the economic context: humor in itself is valuable because it prolongs human life. Moreover, this consequence forms the sole motivation for the creative agent-that-is-not-one he calls “nature” here. Anthropomorphism as a stylistic practice may not be terribly popular with certain elements of the high school English teacher population, but here it makes an important—and I would argue strategic—statement about naturalism and transcendence. One aspect of prime reality, according to Sire’s model in Universe, is being the “prime existent,” (23) beyond which we need not trace morality, truth, beauty, etc. At first glance, it may seem that A. has simply substituted “nature” for “God.” However, I don’t think his statement is quite that simple. Just as Dr. H’s remark substitutes the naturalistic reading (i.e. adding “evolutionarily”) for the potentially theistic one, A’s first privileges laughter as an inborn and practically created characteristic, then tries to backpedal by crediting nature (ala Emerson) for that creativity. But neither cover-up fully does the job: each reveals what it so desperately wants to forget. To return to O’Connor’s metaphor, the “ragged figure” may well stay in the rhetorical shadows, but he never fully disappears. And that, it seems to me, is the real point of any signal of transcendence: to show substance by shadow, even when we’re unwilling to look straight on.

Well, folks, that’s all I have for you—thanks for reading! I hope you have enjoyed my comments and profited from them. Now don’t just sit there: go to your local library, bookshelf, Amazon.com, or IV staff worker and buy/read James Sire’s books. Then come back here and argue with me, or even fill another blog with equally expansive comments. And if you happen to be the aforementioned pretty flute major, I’ll be on the 8AM shuttle. Hope to see you there.