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Transcendental arguments about the conditions for the possibility of human experience are less about the use of rational ‘force’ and more properly explorations of limits. And when used in Catholic theology, especially in reaction to the ‘turn to the subject’ that is rooted not only in modern philosophy but also in Renaissance humanism’s ‘revival of the classical ideal subsumed under the biblical ideal of Man as the image of God’,20 _{it is an exploration of human limit-experiences and the possibility}

of divine revelation precisely as mediated by those limit-experiences, as well as an attempt to begin with a publically available and discussable argument about ultimacy. David Tracy’s argument for the necessity of the transcen- dental perspective, part of his larger argument for a revised method of critical correlation, is as valid today as it was when he first made it in 1989:

That some form of transcendental reflection is needed by theology seems as clear now as it was 20 years ago, and that for the same reason: if one understands the logic of the claim Jews, Christians, and Muslims make when they affirm their belief in a radically monothe- istic God, transcendental reflection is that mode of rational inquiry appropriate to considering that claim.21

He argues further that ‘the strictly transcendental question of the nature of ultimate reality’ is a question that theological reflection cannot avoid asking ‘if theologians are faithful to the logic of the subject matter they presume to study’.22

This kind of theological reflection is especially necessary in the current context, in light of recent vital discussions about the limits – indeed, the closure – of human experience and the relation of religion to the secular- ization that dominates the West. I cite here only two examples. First, Eyal Chowers, in his book The Modern Self in the Labyrinth, argues that since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a rift between the self and the social institutions that the self creates. Rather than promoting

20 _{Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, The Cambridge History of Political}

Thought 1450–1700 (ed. James Henderson Burns and Mark Goldie; repr., Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 95–131 (105). See also the classic work on this theme: Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity

in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Cf.

Anthony J. Godzieba, ‘“Refuge of Sinners, Pray for Us”: Augustine, Aquinas, and the Salvation of Modernity’, Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance

against Modernity? (ed. Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts and Maarten Wisse;

BETL, 219; Leuven: Peeters, 2009), pp. 147–65.

21 _{David Tracy, ‘The Uneasy Alliance Reconceived: Catholic Theological Method,}

Modernity and Postmodernity’, Theological Studies 50 (1989), pp. 548–70 (559).

humanization, these institutions instead are seen by many to promote a sense of ‘entrapment’ that ‘sap moderns of their distinct identities’. A more optimistic nineteenth century believed it could alleviate this condition, but by the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century it was considered to be an inescapable threat (especially in the thought of Weber, Freud, and Foucault, all of whom are Chowers’ main examples). The limits to human ability, then, become symbols of the loss of human identity:

This rift leads the self to experience itself as under threat of subjection – not to any specific person or transcendental entity – but to collective institutions, the self’s ‘great double’. Moreover ... entrapment involves a sense that the source of dehumanization is human inventiveness itself. ... [Entrapment] is the notion that human action is not answerable to nor harnessed by any natural or divine scheme that haunts the modern imagination: entrapment occurs in a world experi- enced as self-fabricated. ... 23

Chowers’s solution is to reimagine the self, but the scope of that reimag- ining is constricted and even lifeless in the face of an amorphous and all-too-powerful social world: ‘The main option left for the self in resisting this predicament is one of coping, of an individualistic-agnostic response that does not aspire to devise an encompassing vision of emancipation.’24

This discussion of human life collapsed inwards behind its limits is inten- sified by Charles Taylor’s recent analysis of secularization and its effects. For Taylor, the hallmark of Western culture after modernity is the bounded and disenchanted ‘buffered’ self that results from the ‘exclusive humanism’ of the modern secular order. Unlike the pre-modern ‘porous self’ that was open to transcendent influences and forces (the chief of which were acts of God), the buffered self is ‘disengaged’ from any possible transcendence that lies ‘beyond the boundary’, and rather ‘giv[es] its own autonomous order to its life’.25 _{This modern moral order infiltrates what Taylor terms the}

‘social imaginary’, that is, ‘the ways in which [people] imagine their social

23 _{Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment}

Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) pp. 2–3. He notes

that:

Weber, Freud, and Foucault reject the belief that human beings are the authors of history, able to stand above current events, rationally deliberating about their aims and needs and steering the future in desirable directions. In the entrapment vista, history is a train careening out of control, and we can neither willfully divert it to a new track nor simply pull the emergency brake and step off. Instead of piloting history, the best we can do is to cope with its dehumanizing effects, mostly through individual projects (p. 181).

24 _{Chowers, The Modern Self, p. 8.}

25 _{Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University}

existence, how they fit together with others, how things go in between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations’.26 _The

social imaginary that we inherit is thus rooted in the Enlightenment’s legacy, a ‘powerful humanism’ that presupposes and affirms, among other things, ‘an eclipse/denial of transcendence which tends to make this humanism an exclusive one’.27 _{The narrow, immanent frame of reference of this disen-}

chanted autonomy, however, does not produce the sense of human ‘fullness’ which is at the heart of what we desire. This overall yearning, while not unambiguous, is that which a flattened-out secularization ultimately will fail to satisfy. And so we must look beyond framing life as pure immanence to the possibility of spiritual ascent ‘beyond the boundaries’.28

Each of these diagnoses wrestles with the limits of human subjectivity and with it, the realization that occurs at those limits. In Chowers’ account, the limits crush us; change will come only if the ‘self’ is radically re-imagined. In Taylor’s account, the re-imagining takes the form of a counter-narrative to the dominant narrative of exclusive humanism and the ‘immanent frame’ within which it is practiced, a counter-narrative that appears primarily Catholic and sacramental.29 _{He thus emphasizes specifically the issue of}

transcendence as essential to human meaning and fullness, and does not shy away from arguing for what Schillebeeckx expressly forbids, namely, the fundamental human need for God’s presence.

It is that sacramental imagination which is the key element – the way of envisioning reality through the eyes of faith that recognizes the presence of transcendence within immanence, the infinite mediated by the finite, the mediation of grace by created being. The force of this theological claim, in turn, depends on recognizing the fundamental possibility of immanence intentionally opening out into transcendence. However, especially today when the productive power of the imagination is constrained and even sapped by a tight network of images constructed by consumer and media cultures, it is theology’s crucial task to emphasize the fundamental human yearning for God’s presence and to make a publically-accessible argument for the dynamic intentionality of embodied subjectivity and especially of the imagination. This is precisely what any transcendental argument does, by revealing the double-sidedness of the limits of subjectivity: such

26 _{Traylor, A Secular Age, p. 171. In another definition of the ‘social imaginary’, Taylor}

says that ‘it consists of the generally shared background understandings of society, which make it possible for it to function as it does’ (p. 323).

27 _{Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 371.}

28 _{Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 770–72. See also Taylor’s argument (pp. 768–71) that}

the ‘modes of fullness’ recognized by exclusive humanisms indeed respond to transcendent reality but ‘misrecognize it’.

29 _{See Taylor’s acknowledgment of this in his chapter on ‘Conversions’ (pp. 728–72,}

arguments describe our inescapable finitude while revealing a hint of what exceeds the limit, a hint that makes finitude both conceivable and frustrating. This glance beyond experience’s limits toward its intentional goal is what Fergus Kerr has called our ‘immortal longings’: ‘We do not have to choose between the leap in the dark of radical transcendence and hiding in the pure immanence of the familiar world.’30 _{A transcendental}

argument, then, renders the mediated immediacy of the supernatural plausible, without reducing transcendence to immanence. It articulates, in Maurice Blondel’s famous phrase, how the supernatural is ‘indispensable and at the same time ... inaccessible for man’.31 _{God’s gracious presence}

can still be portrayed as ‘gift’, as Schillebeeckx argues. But without this kind of ‘method of immanence’, theology will fail to make plausible to those dominated by the ‘immanent frame’ how the reality of God intersects with human experience. Transcendence, then, would remain extrinsic to human experience – how, then, could salvation be a salvation which fulfills my personal identity and my historically-situated life with others? Despite Schillebeeckx’s intentions and assertions, in jettisoning the need for any transcendental argumentation he ends up espousing an extrinsicist position where secular history and the history of salvation proceed on parallel tracks or parallel planes, with ultimately no philosophical-anthropological way to discern their connection.32