“What has happened to the transcendent ground in [this] connection? It has become, let us say, immanentized. We still have, of course, the quest of the ground, we want to know where things come from. But since God (in revelatory language) or transcendent divine being (in philosophical language) is prohibited for agnostics, they must put their ground elsewhere.
“In Search of the Ground,” in Conversations with Eric Voegelin, 13–16
Let us reflect and begin with a fundamental question: what is man? As Gabriel Marcel so eloquently explains, man is that being with ontological capacities (the capacity to ask) and ontological concerns. He is that being who raises the question: who am I? It is fundamentally the desire to understand the self (hence the dictum, know thy self) and one’s place in the cosmos (was this not the question that caused Oedipus anguish?). This desire is part and parcel of a desire, Marcel explains, to participate in some form of transcendence.
The fundamental problem of secularism, in stripping the world of any relationship to the divine, is that it conjures an image of the world as a sealed-off totality stripped of any relationship to divine and, in turn, alienates man from that desire to participate in transcendence and meaningfully poses the question: who am I? But does this mean that secularism does away with our desire for meaning? No. It cannot. The human condition, in its intrinsic capacities and desires, does not allow so. And so, secularism misplaces those capacities and desires. The secular order cannot do away with the desire to sacralize or participate in transcendence. The secular order sacralizes the immanent, which is to say, it immanentizes the transcendent (e.g., by reducing the transcendent to what is immanent: the nation, the libido, etc.). In other words, it reduces the transcendent to a lower-order, an immanent order, which it treats as transcendent (e.g., think of martyrdom as dying for one’s nation). To think about this from a Qur’anic perspective, it is to reduce the transcendent (and the participation therein) to an immanent dunyā, which becomes a pantheon of idols. These reductions amount to a two-fold alienation: the alienation of the world from the uniquely transcendent (reducing the cosmos to a mundane dunyā) and an alienation of man from participating in that transcendence.
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