The Interpreter Foundation Podcast

“Signals of Transcendence”


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Abstract: Hints of a different and better world — sometimes dimly remembered, often intuited, and commonly hoped for — and of a glorious, mighty power behind the world in which we currently live, are all around us. They are not so powerful that they cannot be missed or even ignored, but they have been and remain present for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel. As he always does, God has not left us without witnesses but he does not seek to compel. He loves us, but he also respects our agency.


It seems to have been the French Protestant Reformer John Calvin who coined the term sensus divinitatis. By it, he intended an innate sense of the existence of, and to at least some degree, the nature of God.
That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity [sensus divinitatis], we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead… this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget.2
This instinctual sense of the divine is not to be confused with explicit revelation, although it might, in a Latter-day Saint view, be regarded as a particular type of revelation given to all. It is certainly distinct from a conclusion that one might reach as the result of an argument or as [Page viii]a reasoned deduction from a series of propositions. Instead, it is, in a sense, an immediate perception, unreasoned, even pre-rational.3
The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth is an especially good representative of this intuitive sense of the divine, and he often alludes to the theme. In his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” for example, he writes:
The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colours and their forms, were then to meAn appetite: a feeling and a love. . . .And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.4
Still, although Wordsworth is an eloquent spokesman for a sensus divinitatis, he is far from alone. Consider, for example, these characteristically simple words from the American poet Emily Dickinson:
I never saw a moor,I never saw the sea;Yet know I how the heather looks,And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,Nor visited in heaven;[Page ix]Yet certain am I of the spotAs if the chart were given.
Or these breathless lines from a very different poet, e. e. cummings:
i thank You God for most this amazingday: for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky; and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
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